Archive for October, 2007
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 10/22 – 10/26
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including in light of emerging competition from Facebook, MySpace plans an extreme expansion of their workforce and global coverage, Verizon announces a super-fast Internet service that offers 20 Mbps download and upload speeds, Google slaps text link selling sites with PageRank reduction, Microsoft beats Google in battle for Facebook’s advertising hand, CNet sells Webshots photo sharing site to American Greetings for $45 million, and finally, in the next couple of weeks, Digg will roll out a new Images category in addition to News, Video and Podcasts.
Sites Selling Text Links Get Google-Slapped, Should They Worry?
It is all over the blogosphere – sites known for selling text link ads or Google PageRank have been slapped with a PageRank reduction for their own sites by the almighty Google itself. Is this a worldwide PR update with a possible algorithm change or is it more along the line of a hand job? Seeing that a couple of sites we launched several months ago are still at a “0″ PageRank, even though they have a good amount of links pointing to them, I’d have to say the latter. The question that remains to be answered is, “should publishers and those buying links be worried?”
Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation
In today’s socially connected online world, reputation management is becoming more and more a concern for any business. Sure, most companies are able to secure the number one spot in the organic search results for their brand via their company web site. However, what about the remaining first page real estate and even that of the second and third pages? What is an effective means for companies, especially small to medium sized business to control that real estate without necessarily deploying multiple company web sites? The answer – social media.
Guidelines for Link Building With Blog Reviews
Loren Baker has put together some guidelines in using blog reviews as an effective link building tactic. What I like best about Loren’s post is that he provides sound advice without revealing any specifics such as blogs that sell reviews or even companies that actually provide this as a service. With the war that Google has waged against paid links, it is comforting to see posts such as these that provide useful information without helping Google to identify those who are buying or selling the reviews. It fits right in with my previous plea for the entire paid links industry to go underground.
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 10/15 – 10/19
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including three .mobi domain sold for six figures at recent Moniker auction, Superpages roils out video advertising nationwide, old Yahoo! founder ad new boss, Jerry Yang, outlines the search engine’s future, MySpace will open its platform to outside developers., and finally, Michael Gray tells Jason Calacanis to shut up… well not those words exactly but pretty much to the point. Have a great weekend!
Another Social Networking Site for Marketers – GooRuze
Do we really need another social networking site to keep up with? We already have Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Sphinn, Small Business Brief, Digg, MyBlogLog, … shall I go on? But wait, Gooruze plays a slightly different role. In fact this new social networking site exists to save us from information overload by combining the functions of forums, blogs and social bookmarking sites, all into one place. I just signed up and am currently working on building out my profile which includes adding this blog’s feed so posts are syndicated there.
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 10/8 – 10/12
Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, Google acquires Twitter-like service, Jaiku, for an undisclosed amount, The Associated press sues Moreover for linking to their stories, the House Judiciary Committee supports the Internet Freedom Act and extends the ban on Internet access tax for four more years, and finally, Yahoo! Site Explorer now requires that you authenticate a site before receiving full information on data.
Irma Wallace Interviewed For Women of Internet Marketing Series
Li Evans has been after Irma, my wife and half owner of our company, for some time now to do an interview for the Women of Internet Marketing series. Well, Irma finally obliged and the interview is included in issue number 23 in an ongoing series Li has been publishing for some time now.
Small Business Brief Re-Invents Itself
Small Business Brief, a site devoted to all aspects of small business, which is produced by Robert Clough and company, the same folks who also bring us
Search Engine Guide, has re-invented themselves by converting into a Digg type of site where anyone can submit stories, vote them up or down and of course comment. Built off the same platform as Search Engine Land’s Sphinn, Small Business Brief is now a lot like Sphinn however, not strictly limited to the topic of search engines and search marketing.
The Paid Links Industry Needs To Go Underground
If Danny Sullivan’s report over the weekend that Google is in fact reducing the PageRank for sites that are suspected of selling paid links isn’t enough to send the entire paid links industry underground, then I don’t know what is. Add to this the storm of controversy that recently occurred over Rand Fishkin outing sites that sell paid links. Now I don’t sell paid links for the sake of ranking better in the organic search results, however, as one who buys paid links for client sites, I have been a proponent for some time now of the entire industry, those who buy links, those who sell them and everyone in between, working to make it more difficult for Google and other search engines to identify paid link strategies. Currently we are making their job way to easy.
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 10/1 – 10/5
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Yahoo! Search Marketing now provides the ability for advertisers to block domains, Microsoft agrees to acquire Jellyfish.com – a discount shopping site, Performance Pricing sues AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo over their competitive bidding patent, Alaska Airlines the first U.S. airline to test in-flight Internet access, and finally, an individual that stood up to record companies demanding settlements for illegally downloaded music lose her court case and is ordered to pay $222,000.
SEO Myth: All Reciprocal Links Are Bad
We are having a discussion over at Small Business Ideas Forum where Dale King starts things of by questioning the effectiveness of reciprocal linking tactics. He basically says that once upon a time, reciprocal links were one of the number one ways webmasters acquired links from other sites. However, in current times, reciprocal links have been greatly devalued by the search engines, at least as far as helping a SEO effort. So are reciprocal links a thing of the past? Should webmasters avoid them like the plague? I would say that it really depends on the “type” of reciprocal link.
