05/23 /// 8 Apps Every Writer Should Have
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
Out of my Gord - By Gord Hotchkiss
GrokDotCom - By Brian Eisenberg
Link Building Best Practices Blog
SEM Hints: Search Engine Marketing Hints, Tips & Tools For Online Businesses
Search Engine Land - by Danny Sullivan
Virtual Marketing Blog: Internet Marketing News, Reviews and Insights
SEMPO Global Search Marketing Blog
SEMPO Canada Search Marketing Blog
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Better Not Link to Google News Hosted Articles
From: feedburner.com
Ever Since 2007, Google hosts stories by some news agencies like Associated Press as part of Google News. While many other news sites (e.g. CNN) carry stories by news agencies too, linking to Google News hosted stories seemed like a good idea if you like to point readers to an uncluttered version of the report. However, as Digital Inspiration points out and as Google explains in their help, these Google News articles disappear after 30 days “ compare this article which is currently live (also see screenshot) with this one which is gone by now*. Digital Inspiration suggests to link to CNN, NYT and other websites instead to create more permanent links for your visitors.
Tag: Google, Articles, SEO
Add to
Del.icio.us | 
Digg | 
Reddit | 
Furl Have a bookmark! -
Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/399814187/sn-4-20080922BetterNotLinktoGoogleNewsHostedArticles.html
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Play Music Right From Yahoo Results
From: feedburner.com
Yahoo now lets you playback songs for some artists right from the search results page. Search for nada surf, for instance, and youll see an artist box on top, listing a couple of songs along with play buttons. Hitting play opens a little Flash-based player (called FoxyPlayer by Yahoo) at the bottom of the page . You can listen to the full song, in partnership with music service Rhapsody, though your number of playbacks is somewhat restricted (Im not sure how serious the restriction of 25 playbacks is; its not a cookie-based barrier, and if its IP-based it might be relatively easy to route around).
Google also has a music onebox with info only, and they offer music playback in China, but they dont have any music playback integrated into their results which would work globally.
CommentsTag: Yahoo, Music, SEO
Add to
Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Have a bookmark! -
Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/396250030/sn-4-20080918PlayMusicRightFromYahooResults.html
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
How It’s Feasible to Manually Review All Domains
From: feedburner.com
Posted by Nick Gerner
After watching Nate Buggia a few weeks ago speak about Live’s Webmaster Tools, I was struck by his statistic about the number of domains on the web. He suggested that there are 78 million domains. There’s certainly room for disagreement about this number—don’t forget Google has one trillion web pages
—but I bet he’s in the right ballpark. If that’s right, could we manually review all of them?Sure, 78 million domains is big. But not that big. A few months ago while investigating spam, Danny reviewed a fairly randomly chosen 500 domains in a matter of hours. And I think he did a great job of it, too. That’s a good foundation, but could we scale that up, and review millions of domains?
I see a few challenges here. Probably the biggest challenge I see is just getting this list of Live’s 78 million domains. Next you’re going to need a lot of manual reviewers. But if you’re Live (or some other search engine) you’ve already got that list, and a large contract labor force. Too bad for the rest of us.
I suppose if you’re clever you might be able to do this through Alexa’s Web Information Service and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Taking a look at the Mechanical Turk pricing, it looks like you could charge one cent for every domain (or maybe each block of a few dozen domains). So we’re probably talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that’s pocket change for Google. And Google has plenty of remote offices with lots of search quality engineers. In fact, they say, “Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways.”
So let’s say a single person can review 1000 domains in a single day. And let’s say you’ve got 1000 reviewers working on this problem. That tells me that 78 days later you’ve got all the relevant domains on the internet reviewed. That’s less than 10% of Google’s workforce, less than 2% of Microsoft’s Workforce. Of course you could do it with less if you pre-filtered some of those domains, or took longer than three months to do it. If Google, Yahoo!, and Live haven’t already done this… well I can’t imagine that they haven’t done at least part of this by now.
Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/seomoz/~3/408868900/its-feasible-to-manually-review-all-domains
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
An Ethical Debate On Which We Can All (Maybe) Agree: The Average Webmaster And Dodgy SEO
From: feedburner.com
Posted by Jane Copland
Yesterday afternoon, as I was at home recovering from a form of black death known as the common head cold, I came across Danny Sullivan’s piece on Search Engine Land about his dealings with a lazy link broker. I recommend reading Danny’s post, which details how he questioned a person who wanted a link on the Sphinn.com homepage with the anchor text “search engine optimisation.” The person represented a UK-based SEO firm. I’m not saying that reading or even acknowledging the status of Sphinn is necessary for success in our industry, but one should probably avoid trying to buy links from a site SEOs and search engine employees read with regularity.Link requests are nothing new, of course, but the person with whom Danny was emailing did more than just propose link acquisition. This particular link broker attempted, with some not-very-clever smooth-talking, to convince Danny that the followed, non-redirected, non-javascripted, PageRank-passing purchased links would be within Google’s guidelines.
Danny was knowledgeable enough to mess with this person for a while and ended up revealing how much he actually knows about the issue, at which point the person stopped emailing him back. To quote:
I’d love to think there was an “oh shit” moment when this arrived in their email box…
My Dad has a blog that gets about one link exchange / directory submission / link acquisition email per week. In the beginning, he didn’t know what was “legit” and what wasn’t (it turns out that 99% of it wasn’t). He used to forward me the emails and ask me what I thought, but after the fifth or sixth installation of “nope Dad, don’t email them back,” he just started ignoring them. Out of all the emails he ever received, only three suggested that the sender had looked at the website past checking its toolbar PageRank, and just one site dealt with a related subject matter (despite all claiming to be within the same “theme"). The problem, as I said on the Sphinn thread, is that not every person who runs a small website has a daughter working at an SEO company with whom they can discuss the issue. The person who emailed Danny could have sounded quite legitimate to an uneducated website owner.
And I think we often forget about uneducated website owners. Even people who know a lot about web development and marketing don’t necessarily know the fine-print of Google’s guidelines. They aren’t necessarily idiots because they fall for these tactics (although I agree that the people pitching at Danny were idiots for not simply Googling him, especially when he began to sound like he knew what he was talking about).
The Sphinn thread, and yesterday’s discussions on Twitter, debated whether webmasters should report truly deceitful practices like this to search engines. The arguments tend to fall into a range of categories:
- No, why do Google’s job for them?
- No, the web is a free-for-all and if they fall for it, they fall for it.
- Yes, it cleans up Google’s SERPs and that benefits all of us.
- Yes, it slowly eating away at the problem and will result in less of these annoying emails.
- Yes, these people are scum and deserve nothing less.
Danny’s example is pretty clear: the representative went out of his or her way to lie about Google’s guidelines. But what of link acquisition emails that simply don’t mention potential guideline violations? What if the webmaster who receives the email doesn’t ask? Does the link broker have a responsibility to disclose potential risks of selling PageRank? Or is this mostly a non-issue because the best paid links can’t be detected?
Personally, I recognise that cold-emailing still happens and I don’t forward regular paid link requests to anyone. That doesn’t sit well with me. Paid linking is a daily part of SEO and I am neither against it nor actively participating in it. Pretending it doesn’t exist or willing it to stop is naive. However, I don’t see how anyone can gladly accept a company that is willing to exchange multiple emails in which they lie about whether their business proprosition could spell the end for another company or individual’s website.
I am honeslty curious as to what the community here thinks about paid link requests. If you are going to contact a website and offer them the option of selling a link, surely it’s only ethical to make sure they know the risks? Or is that not your responsibility? Yes, I’m tired of the “e” word: it’s taken up a lot of time in the SEO world lately. What someone does to his or her own sites is none of my business and strikes me as fair game, as long as everyone involved in the site understands the risks. However, I definitely don’t see anything wrong with calling people out who put others at risk by capitalising on their ignorance and deliberately lying to get what they want.
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
30 Days Blueprint To Be A Instant Expert In Your Network Marketing Business
From: sitepronews.com
Network Marketing leadership is all about standing out from the crowd. If you want to be a leader, you can not be content with just being ordinary, you’ve got to step into the limelight and become a leader.
But how does one become a network marketing leader? Actually, it is not hard [...]
Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/10/01/30-days-blueprint-to-be-a-âinstantâ-expert-in-your-network-marketing-business/
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
30 Days Blueprint To Be A “Instant” Expert In Your Network Marketing Business
From: sitepronews.com
Network Marketing leadership is all about standing out from the crowd. If you want to be a leader, you can not be content with just being ordinary, you’ve got to step into the limelight and become a leader.
But how does one become a network marketing leader? Actually, it is not hard [...]
Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/10/01/30-days-blueprint-to-be-a-âinstantâ-expert-in-your-network-marketing-business/
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Gas Shortages Lead to Increased Web and Audio Conferencing
From: searchenginewatch.com
Since Hurricanes Gustav and especially Ike, a slowdown in Gulf Coast refineries have created gas shortages in the southeast. The gas station near my house runs out every other day, it seems.
But in tough times come rare opportunities. Web and audio conferencing companies are being looked to for increased communications when travel by car has literally been brought to a halt.
Copper Conferencing is one such company.
“Our phones are busier than ever as current and new customers ask for help in setting up telecommuting practices and expanding their use of conferencing as a best practice for smart business, but in particular among workers who are in the affected areas,” said Kathleen Thompson, Manager of Customer Care for Copper Conferencing.
Search engine marketers should watch out for these unique opportunities, especially during these volatile economic times. Do you have a client that can extend services such as these in the wake of natural disaster and in the midst of an economic crisis?
In an expert column today, Kevin Ryan encouraged search marketers to not spend less but to spend smart. I couldn’t agree more. Search remains quite affordable compared to traditional marketing efforts and takes the cake in ROI compared to some methods, especially branding ones.
So, while the water in the glass may have dropped with the stock market on Monday, it’s not completely dry. What can you do with what remains? Share your inspiration in the comments.
Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/408300242/081001-100308
/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, October 01, 2008
YouTube Insight Now Shows Which Part of Videos are Hottest
From: searchenginewatch.com
YouTube has introduced a new feature to its Insight analytics. The feature is called Hot Spots (not to be confused with Live Search’s “hotspots”) and it shows which part of a YouTube video are the most engaging.
YouTube says that the information can help users edit or annotate their videos in order to help audiences stay engaged.
Here’s a screenshot of the new feature:
Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/408250133/081001-091645
