How to highlight author comments in WordPress

A while ago I was looking around for how to make my own comments a different color on my blog. Most of the advice was along the lines of “Add code to check if the commenter’s email is the same as the email address of the blog’s author.” Can you spot the flaw in that logic? If a commenter knows the email address of the blog author, she could use the blog owner’s email address in her comment and get her own comment highlighted. Worse yet, someone could try to discover the blog owner’s email address by trying lots of email addresses until they saw their comments change to a different color.

So I dug a little deeper and found a good answer on this support thread. The trick is simple: instead of checking the author’s email address, check their user id to see if it’s the user id of the blog owner. Pretty smart. After that, it was a simple matter of

1. Changing my theme to add an “authcomment” style

I edited style.css and near the bottom added these lines:

.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

2. Editing my comments.php file to add a little code

My comments.php file had a line that looked like this:

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment…

and I changed it to more or less look like this:

<li class=”<?php
/* Only use the authcomment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = “authcomment”;
echo $oddcomment;
?>” id=”comment…

That’s about it. Now I have a distinctive color for my own comments, so you can quickly scan a thread to see when I circle back around to leave a comment.

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Whiteboard Friday - How Search Engines Work

Posted by great scott!

This week, Rand takes it back to basics and discusses how search engines deal with the COLOSSAL amounts of data they have to sift through for every single search query. Sometimes it's actually quite helpful to step back and remember how everything works.

And just because I like to keep it real (it's how I roll), an old friend makes a cameo in this video. He's poppin', lockin' and bustin' the freshest moves this side of the Mississippi. Caaaan youuuuuu dig it?!!

Happy Friday, Gang.

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Facebook Drops Another Hurdle

Still looking for some attention from the social networks? Facebook delivered a new client library on Friday afternoon, which makes your widgets easier to launch in their ecosystem. While this library isn’t exactly the second coming, it’s welcome news.

According to Facebook developer Wei Zu, “This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML.�

Facebook also encourages developers to install applications outside its domain, which I understand was possible (if more difficult) before this release anyway. Blogger Nick O’Neill is ebullient about the social connections to be made across the web, if you place these applications on your site.

My reaction is just more measured, that's all. When someone arrives on your site, they can connect with others only if they are signed into Facebook. Will you attract people or turn them off? This entirely depends on your business and whether joining up is an important attribute right now.

Here's a gameplan for your Facebook interactions. Since the widget hurdle has been virtually dropped, it's worth thinking about what kind of traffic (or links) you might get from Facebook overall. Like any social network, it's not under your control -- but you should try to become more available and present there. Consider the following approaches for engagement.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight: January 25, 2008

Found in the search marketing forums: > AdWords 101; Site Search; Jobs in SEO; and more.

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(Belated) Thursday Roundup for the Week of 1/20/08

Posted by rebecca

Sorry for the delay in getting this out out to you all, but today was pretty hectic for both me and Rand. Technically it's still Thursday on the west coast, so at least I squeaked by and hit my deadline...

OH, and I just realized that I totally blog blocked Scott and his Whiteboard Friday post, so everyone stop reading this, go watch the video, then come back and read this. It's only fair.


Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Two star links (that's right, the inaugural one!):

• A study unsurprisingly shows that what a boss looks like determines how he performs. Isn't this the "dress for success" mentality?
  

Three star links:

• SEO-Chick Stephanie gives 10 reasons why you should still be using Facebook. It's a nice, optimistic read that stands out among the increasing "Facebook has jumped the shark" posts that have been hitting the web lately.
• The SEMMY finalists have been announced. I think you can vote. Or something. Oh, who am I kidding, I'm more geared up for the Oscars. Juno got four nominations!
• Tamar Weinberg follows the uproar over the announced algorithm changes on Digg. The poor girl was up until the wee hours live blogging the webcast interview between Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson and some top diggers. She does a good job of outlining everything for us lazy schmucks.
• ReadWriteWeb identifies pros and cons of the "work from home" generation. I personally prefer to work in an office--I enjoy interacting with my coworkers and there are fewer distractions (no Wii, Rock Band, or DVR at work!).
• SEO Wrench created desktop icons for his iphone bookmarks, and he made one for SEOmoz. Aw, shucks...
• Wall Street Journal, have you learned nothing from the New York Times? They plan on keeping a significant portion of its content behind its paid subscription wall. Notice the graph of top newspaper websites--hmm, wonder why the NYT is so high...

Four star links:

• Continuing on with the Wall Street Journal's unwise decision, last year a record number of readers visited U.S. online newspaper sites. This is especially interesting because it really poses a growing problem for print newspapers. Subscriptions decrease every year, and fewer and fewer younger demographics are bothering to subscribe to print newspapers. It's fascinating to see how the Internet is altering this traditional news medium.
• Domain tasting should be fresh in your memories if you read Sarah's post. It is rumored that Google will stop monetizing any domains that are less than five days old, which should effectively kill domain tasting.
  
• Tropical SEO and Sugarrae write counter posts to Rand's post about advice for startup CEOs. It's great to have different viewpoints from other CEOs/entrepreneurs, and they both make valid points.

Five star links:

• Neither Rand nor I were terribly wowed by any big news or stories this week, so I'll just leave you with some babie care do's and don'ts instead.

YOUmoz entries:

• Updating Site = Lost Rankings? Agco asks the moz community if updating your site will cause a temporary loss in rankings.
  
• Track Your Keyword Ranking Results. Fdep reviews a keyword ranking program called Advanced Web Ranking.
• The "Link Monster" Lives Inside All SEOs. Carfeu talks about how all SEOs have a little link monster growing inside them, and that we all love a good opportunity to gain links.
• Bait and Switch - with FAST FOOD? JustFred eases his love of Del Taco into his discussion about how a bait ad switch strategy on your website could ruin the trust you've built and the credibility you've established.
• How to Write for the Web. Nabha gives some great tips on how to capture your reader's attention and engage him/her online.
  
• Humour - Does it Help or Hinder SEOmoz? SiteMosts ponders to the masses whether SEOmoz's penchant for humor in our posts and throughout our site helps or harms our business and community. (The consensus seems to be "helps.")
• Who Loves Ya, Baby? Lorisa authors yet another well-written post that posits whether we choose our audience or our audience chooses us.
• Using Subdomains Ad-Naseum Still Works?! Surely Not... RichardBaxterSEO finds that Google hasn't truly effectively tackled that pesky subdomains ranking issue.
  
• SEO Contract Template:  A Verbal Contract Isn't Worth the Paper it's Written On. Crash provides us with a thorough sample SEO contract.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Yes Dear, There is Porn in SEO, and We Can Learn a Lot From It from XMCP is a thumb-attracting post (28 and counting!) that discusses how we can actually learn a lot about Internet marketing by studying SEO for porn sites. It's very well fleshed out (no pun intended--well, maybe a little) and intriguing post.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new upcoming events.


New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO expert for contract in Foothill Ranch, CA
• Director of search marketing for Seniors for Living in New York, NY
• Search engine marketing specialist for Spur Digital in Houston, TX
• Director of sales for Search Mojo in Charlottesville, VA
• Internet marketing manager in Waltham, MA
• Senior project manager for SEO and Senior manager of software development for Amazon.com in Seattle, WA
• SEO manager for Classmates.com in Renton, WA

Featured companies:

United States:

• Tangent Executive Search in Denver, CO
• Net Smart Media in Nevada
• ROI.works Search Marketing in San Francisco, CA
• Amazon.com in Seattle, WA
• Visual Data Systems in the U.S.

United Kingdom/Europe:

• Vertical Leap in Portsmouth, Hamps, UK
• Zyas in the UK
• Gravytrain in London, UK
• Zen Web Solutions in the UK

Asia:

• Brainpulse in India
• Website Business Solution in Bangalore, India
• Design with CSS in Delhi, India

Featured resumes:

• Aaron Hunter is an SEO/online marketer who is looking for an SEO position, preferably in the politics, government, or fund raising niche.
  
• Bhumika Parikh is an Internet marketer with over 5 years' experience and a specialization in user-interface.
• Travis Cannell is an Internet marketer who loves figuring out ways to increase conversions through creative means.
• Adam Carson is a web manager and the owner/operator of CarsonBiz.
  
• Julie Schmitt is an e-business development manager with extensive Internet marketing and e-commerce experience.

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Highlights from the SEW Blog: January 21-25, 2008

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

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11 Power Tips for Gmail

Wow, I can’t believe how many people commented on my late-Friday night post about desired features for Gmail. If you want to suggest something for Gmail, that thread is the better place to do it. But looking through the comments, I saw a few requests that can already be done today. Considering that real Gmail users didn’t know about these options, I’m going to call them power tips.

1. Wayne Schulz said “I want to be able to paste images into the email.” Wayne, it’s not quite the same as pasting images into emails, but one thing that makes image attachments easier is the dragdropupload Firefox extension. You know how you can click “Attach a file” and then you’ll see the familiar “enter a file location or Browse..” form appear? With dragdropupload, you can drag any file (e.g. from your Desktop) and drop it in that text box. It’s a fantastic extension that makes it much faster to include attachments or upload files, and I use it all the time.
2. Jason Bartholme asked about “A sort that would allow for my unread messages to be at the top.” Jason, trying doing a search for label:unread label:inbox . That should show only unread messages that are currently in your inbox. By the way, did you like how I shared a search with you? That was a tip from the Gmail blog. There are other cool labels you can use as well.
3. Julian says
   

   I would like to have a feature for inserting prepared text blocks, so I dont have to write some things over and over again.

   Julian, if you use Firefox, check out the Signature firefox extension to insert text macros. That might work for you.

4. Daniel asked
   

   Crazy feature: I’d like to be able to have an easy way to migrate my entire Google account to a different gmail address, because I can’t find a step-by-step guide or anything to help me switch emails without losing various things.

   According to this post you can enable POP on your old account (look under Settings, then “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”), then import the emails (also using POP) into the new account. I think you could use Gmail’s Mail Fetcher utility to do this. To configure Mail Fetcher on the newer account, click on Gmail’s Settings link, then “Accounts” and then “Add another mail account.” Google Operating System (an unofficial blog that discusses Google often) has a couple relevant posts with a walkthough of using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher and a write-up on how to back up your Google account.

5. Sankarananad asked a related question:
   

   I would love to integrate my google apps account with my default gmail account. Although right now google allows to associate email address there is no way to integrate or link two google accounts (say one @gmail.com and another yourdomain.com powered by google apps).

   Right now the only solution is to forward mails from one box to another! If google makes integration possible we can use a single inbox to check mails from all those email address

   I’m not as familiar with the interaction of regular Gmail versus Gmail on Google Apps. This post described a scary-looking way that might work. If there’s a better way, maybe someone will stop by and let me know?

6. Search Engines Web asked:
   

   The ability to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF without going to another page and using another software

   S.E.W, this post from Lifehacker mentions that Gmail can offer HTML view or Google Doc options for Word and Excel.

7. Easton Ellsworth mentioned
   

   I’d love to be able to resize the email composition box on the default page - so instead of having to click the icon to open the whole draft in a new resizable window, I’d be able to click and drag to make the draft box bigger (especially vertically).

   Easton, check out the Resizeable text area extension for Firefox. It lets you click on the border of any form textarea and drag the border so the textarea expands. I haven’t checked how it works on the latest version of Gmail though.

8. 1001 noisy cameras said “I think the ability to open emails in new windows would be great - it would help those users who are always multi-tasking.” If you’re looking at an email look at the top-right of the page and click on “New window” to open that email in a separate email.
9. Diego asked
   

   I don’t know if this would be possible, but how about, when clicking on the compose link (or reply etc) if I hold some key as I click on Compose, it opens the new email in its own window? Same thing could go for Replies etc.

   Diego, instead of using ‘c’ to compose a new email, type ‘C’ and you’ll open a new window to compose your email. It looks like using ‘R’ instead of ‘r’ to reply will open a new email for replies too.

10. jonathon asked “Is it me or does the pop3 server sometimes stop working when downloading email from gmail?” I’ve been using getmail to back up my Gmail, and I’ve noticed that Google will only let you download a few hundred emails in one batch. If you fetch again, you’ll often catch up. So usually it’s just a matter of being patient.

I heard a lot of great suggestions that I wouldn’t even have thought of. For example, I liked the idea of a “bounce” option for unwanted emails to make it look as if your email address didn’t exist. Oh, and since so many people asked for cool features, let me add one more feature I want: let me set a different vacation message for co-workers compared to people outside Google. Maybe in Google Apps for Gmail, if you are managing example.com, let people on example.com set a different vacation message for people on example.com vs. other domains?

By the way, what was the funniest suggestion I saw? Jeff Hall won with “A USB breathalyzer kit for a friend who forgets how embarrassing her e-mails are when she gets drunk. The e-mails could be delayed until she provides a negative sample.”

And here’s your bonus tip. If you’re a Gmail power user, three links to check out are the Gmail tag on Lifehacker, the official Gmail blog, and Google Operating System. Lifehacker does so many posts per day that limiting to the Gmail tag will narrow down the posts you see. The Gmail blog is the best place to get official Gmail news first. And Google OS seems to have Gmail-related posts pretty often.

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Souljah Boy to TellMe: Search, Listen and Obey

Machine translation from voice to text promises to be the grail of local mobile search. Michael Fitzgerald in The New York Times today highlights voice search and voice recognition software in gadgets that "Listen and Obey."

For example, with the new Vlingo app (Microsoft TellMe competitor), searchers can speak into their mobile phones send SMS messages to find and download Souljah Boy Tellem songs. Instead of texting a friend to decide on a sushi restaurant, Vlingo Find (integrated with Yahoo Maps) lets you talk it over and pinpoint the restaurant of choice.

Listen and obey? That's optimistic. Voice recognition still can't guess users intentions easily. Om Malik discussed Vlingo way back in August 2007, but we're glad the Times is highlighting innovations in mobile search and local search.

Plus, voice search won't achieve ubiquity until it's faster to talk than type.

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SMX Search Bowl - Nominate Who Should Represent the Search Marketers

Posted by randfish

You probably all know that SMX West is coming up - Feb 26-28 in Santa Clara, CA. You probably even know that there's a hundred great reasons to attend. But, what you may not know is that SMX West features the inaugural edition of the search industry's first trivia contest, free-for-all battle of wits - SMX Search Bowl!

What is Search Bowl?

It's Search Marketers vs. Search Engines in a fierce trivia competition! Teams of two from each of the major engines - MSN/Live, Yahoo!, Google & Ask as well as two search marketers will face off. The losers must slave endlessly for the evil Calcanis - building obscure Mahalo pages until they gain 5% market share (read - the end of time), while the winner is granted all of Marissa Mayer's outstanding Google shares!

<OOPS>This just in: I'm being told those are not the actual prizes and penalties... too bad</OOPS>

Here's the pickle - the search engines get to internally choose their representatives, but we, as an industry, must select from amidst our most talented brethren, two champions of all things search. Thus, it's up to you to nominate your fellow SEOs & SEMs. Remember that the trivia game is based around all types of search marketing questions (past & present), so while a specialist in one area might fare well, generalists might be a good bet, too.

The Nomination Process:

1. Leave a comment below with the full name of the individual you'd like to nominate
2. Nominations must be seconded to be accepted into the final voting (you can second a nomination by simply replying to the comment thread with the name of the search marketer and the word "seconded" or "second")
3. You may nominate or second yourself!
4. All nominations must be submitted by 12:00am midnight on Monday, January 28th (late Sunday night)

If you're not already planning to go to West, why not?! I've already written about how I expect it to be one of the best shows the search industry has seen. They still have the $200 off promotion, SEOmoz premium members save another 20% and if you're low on budget but desperately want to come, go for the networking-only pass (you can still attend Search Bowl using this).

UPDATE: Danny's made a post about this at SELand noting that SEOmoz employees can't participate either (excluding the 11 folks here at the mozplex) and giving you another spot to leave nominations. Sphinn his post here.

p.s. Nominations for anyone and everyone are acceptable (except employees of Third Door Media, who will probably have access to the questions). We'll get in touch with those who are seconded and make sure they're attending before putting their name up for a final vote next week.

p.p.s. I know my blogging's a little slow this week - SEOmoz had its first official board meeting and our first, post-investment performance reviews, so it's been a tad crazy.

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Google Position 6 Smack-Down: Filter, Penalty, or Bunk?

Since late December, best-of-breed search marketers have been chattering about a supposed and creepy “Position 6� Google SERPs punishment pattern where pages which, by all indications, should dominate the organic SERPs somehow place at lowly #6. Google’s Matt Cutts has previously dismissed the notion that Position 6 is real.

Yesterday the debate amongst search marketers flared to full blown public jamming in major SEM blogs and virulent comment threads. Aaron Wall, venerable blogger-purveyor of SEOBOOK, restarted the conversation with his post, “How I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed.� The post was bookmarked in Sphinn and SEO scientists argued about Position 6 throughout the day, resulting in passionate posts (and even arguments) in trade publications.

Is Position 6 real?

Respected SEM technician Sebastian reflected the position of many SEM pros and noted a lack of studies that that provide �proof instead of weird assumptions based on claims of webmasters jumping on today’s popular band wagon that aren't plausible nor verifiable...such beasts don't exist.�

Danny Sullivan joined the fracas with an SEL post and his impression that Position 6 is real. “Well, I've personally seen this weirdness. Pages that I absolutely thought ‘what on earth is that doing at six’ rather than at the top of the page. Not four, not seven -- six. It was freaking weird for several different searches. Nothing competitive, either.�

Is Position 6 an actual Google penalty or fodder for SEMs who are imagining patterns where none exist? Have you experienced Position 6? Real or imagined, it’s certainly generating a lot of attention and links amongst search marketers and webmasters. Stay tuned and watch your Google organic SERPs.

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Local Atlanta Blog

We just launched a new blog so we can write about our friends events and stuff. We have a lot of friends and clients with local businesses, so we decided to make a blog about local atlanta businesses.

Search Results Improve With Social Media Eliminations

Posted by Jane Copland

If you've ever had a small website have an incredibly popular outing at Digg, the following story is probably quite familiar. Many months later - seven, in this case - the referrals from Digg, whilst having dwindled to very few, keep rolling in on a somewhat regular basis. You didn't think much of it because you'd become accustomed to seeing that page or those pages get Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and other social media traffic. At some point, however, you wonder if the traffic from Digg will ever really stop... and then you wonder how people get from within Digg's dungeon of never-ending archives to your site. How on earth were people finding my linkbait from a page like this, whose content constantly changes. Do people really click back through 273 slow-loading archives, see my dugg item and then click through?

I don't think that the majority of this archive-wandering Digg traffic was truthfully coming from Digg itself. I believe that a lot of these people started at search engines. Initially, I blamed Google entirely for this, as I'd always see Digg pages ranking for certain phrases. I don't feel that including Digg results in SERPs is much different to including search results pages from within existing websites. Why on earth would I prefer to see something's Digg submission rather than the page itself? I can get my fix of derogatory comments, badly-worded puns and blatant misunderstandings from a variety of sources; however, if I search for a specific phrase and that phrase relates to some sweet linkbait, I'll probably be happiest if a search engine just lists the URL that was dugg.

Google used to be terrible at this. While it doesn't really matter much to me as a searcher (despite my complaints in the previous paragraph), being usurped in favour of Digg is very annoying to a webmaster or author who put some work into a site and received social media love. I'm assuming that Digg gets its archives indexed and ranked more frequently than Reddit simply due to its structure, and I don't often see Reddit results in the SERPs.

Digg pages still show up in Google searches, but I'm of the opinion that the problem has improved. I don't use Yahoo as much as I should (although I'm making a concerted effort to give equal time to the three main engines because I think it makes me a better SEO), but I've noticed that one of my pieces of linkbait won't rank at all at Yahoo, while its Digg page gets significantly better treatment. Why, Yahoo? All you've done is add one extra click for users who want to see pictures of interesting things in rear / side view mirrors.

In contrast, Google just lists the URL of my page, as if it knows that no one needs to see an old Digg entry. Live wasn't impressed with either Digg nor my site, which I found oddly okay, since I'd almost rather not be included at all than see Digg receiving rankings for my silly photograph. As an aside, I know that I could have actively built far more links to my linkbait; however, I think the amateur "for-fun" aspect of this particular piece of bait is important in terms of this on-going experiment. With no linkbuilding effort, it's impressive to me that Google still recognises my page as the being more important than a Digg URL, given Digg's strength and authority. Also note that I've since abandoned the Digg account I used to submit the piece. Very odd Diggers started to address me by name, so it appeared to be time to break out one of the sock-puppets for commercial use.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this change, but I definitely see fewer Digg results at Google now than I did a couple of months ago. Various web stats seem to confirm this, as the number of referring URLs like http://www.digg.com/all/popular/achives/insanelylongtimeago/popularstories/212/ has gone down significantly. Traffic from Google, surfing in on keywords relating to linkbait, has replaced those referrals... and gone up a bit, since I'm sure many people clicked through to Digg and never to my site.

I believe this highlights a fantastic improvement in the way Google looks at the Internet and its understanding of what we want when we search. It must be far easier just to crawl Digg and bring up its archives when someone enters a longtail query that matches some obscure piece of bait, but "things that are easy" and "things that are worthwhile" aren't usually the same. And, as I mentioned above, "it's just one extra click." However, remaining the premier search engine comes down to providing the best results. If Google (or anyone else) can eliminate those extra clicks, whether they be back through SERPs or within other websites, their uses will recognise the improved searching experience. And my content will continue to rank higher than Digg, which will make me a happy linkbaiter.

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Google AdWords Beta Testing Demographic Bidding

Seems Google is taking advantage of some of the DoubleClick features already. Demographic bidding is now being beta tested, according to the latest entry at Inside AdWords.

"Demographic bidding is a way to help your ads reach audiences of a certain age or gender. If you want your ads to be seen by women aged 18-24, or people over 55, demographic bidding can help," the AdWords Help Center states on the page you can sign up for the beat test.

This will prove to be an interesting addition - though the MSN offering has not proven outstanding as yet - given the amount of traffic Google has to sort in to age demographics.

Have a product that is particularly of interest to women between the ages of 21-35 - give it a shot. Why pitch to a male searcher when they would not be interested.

We will follow this addition with interest. A thread to discuss it has been set up here (thanks beu for bringing this late breaking news).

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Google Turns to Publicis to Increase its Madison Avenue Savvy

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in Paris this week to visit Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of ad agency holding company Publicis. The two shared few details, but said that Google and Publicis were more than a year into a relationship where Google's technology smarts and Publicis' media planning expertise are being shared to the benefit of both companies, according to a Reuters report.

"This collaboration, underway for over one year, is based on a shared vision of how new technologies can be used to improve advertising," reads a cryptic statement from Publicis.

According to an AdAge report, the relationship includes an exchange of talent between the two companies, with plans to "embed" employees at each others' company for months at a time. Publicis will also use Google staff and materials for training programs, and the two companies will work together on new products, platforms and tools. Google has also reportedly established a dedicated global account team for Publicis Groupe.

Google has been looking for inroads to big brand marketers for years. It opened a 300,000-square-foot New York Googleplex in October 2006, primarily to have a base of operations near the media companies and Madison Avenue agencies that control the media budgets of large brand advertisers.

"Our main wish is that we're able to leverage Madison Avenue combined with Silicon Valley to create the largest advertising platform in the world," Ad Sales President Tim Armstrong told ClickZ at the time.

Armstrong, Penry Price, Google's director of North American sales, and David Kenny, chairman and CEO of Publicis' Digitas unit, are reportedly leading the current initiative. Publicis acquired Digitas for $1.3 billion in December 2006. The digital shop brought with it an extensive Fortune 500 client base and relationships with the top players online, including Google.

To better serve these advertisers, Google has created industry-specific teams in verticals like automotive, retail, financial services, entertainment & media, and healthcare. These teams conduct research and work closely with top advertisers in each sector, and "letting customers into your meetings," or using customer insight to drive marketing decisions instead of making decisions in a closed boardroom, according to Armstrong.

Google has also been is poaching from the top ranks of agency creative talent, such as hiring Ogilvy & Mather co-President Andy Berndt as managing director of its Creative Lab.

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The Anatomy of a RipOff Report Lawsuit

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

Last week, there were several excellent posts elucidating the many ways RipOff Report violates Google’s Terms of Service, and yet manages to stay on top of the Google search results pages. Rand, Chris Bennet, Will Critchlow and Andy Beal did a great job of bringing RipOff Report out in the open for a serious discussion. 

It is no secret that RipOff Report has been widely and universally accused of promulgating defamatory content and then extorting money from the victims of the very libel it publishes. This business model has made RipOff Report the subject of many lawsuits. In fact, I have at least seventeen listed in the Appendix at the end of this post.
 
Despite the ubiquitous outcry against RipOff Report, it appears to have survived most of the legal challenges unscathed, leaving it free to carry on business as usual. RipOff Report claims never to have lost a lawsuit.

Is it true that RipOff Report has never lost a lawsuit? Is this a failure of the legal system? Are the allegations unfounded? If there is truth in the allegations, then how is the system going wrong? Why can’t RipOff Report be held responsible for its conduct?

As promised, I want to spend Legal Monday digging into these issues. In order to accomplish this, we must take a trip together through RipOff Report’s sordid legal history. In doing so, we will gain a basic understanding of

•    Defamation
•    The Communications Decency Act (42 USC Section 230)
•    The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization’s Act (“RICO Act”)
•    Extortion

Let’s get started!

---

I.    Is It True That RipOff Report Has Never Lost a Lawsuit?

Yes and no. It’s true that none of the cases against RipOff Report has gone to trial. I have created an appendix of cases at the end of this post that indicates the status of each case. There are a lot of reasons for why RipOff Report has "never lost a case."

First, RipOff Report has had pretty good success in getting cases alleging mere defamation dismissed immediately. We’ll see why this is so below.

Second, RipOff Report sometimes has failed to appear to defend a lawsuit against them. When this happens, a default judgment is entered against RipOff Report. For example, RipOff Report failed to respond to a lawsuit in Canada and another one in the Caribbean. Thus, it ‘lost’ those cases, but it doesn’t really count because RipOff Report just gave up and no one ever had to hold a trial.

Third, RipOff Report, like most civil defendants, has settled many cases. When a case settles, the terms of the settlement are not public and it never goes to trial. Thus, it’s very difficult to determine who “won” when the parties settled.

Finally, there are several cases still pending. It is too early to tell how these cases will come out.

II.    Why Does RipOff Report Continually “Get Off the Hook” for Spreading Lies?

First, we do not know if RipOff Report has ”gotten off the hook.” Many cases have settled and the terms of those settlement agreements are unknown. It’s entirely possible that significant amounts of cash changed hands and we may never know about.

For example, Hy Cite Corporation settled its lawsuit with RipOff Report and its negative reports are now out of the title tag and below the fold. (I won’t link to the page, but you know where to find it.) Thus, RipOff Report clearly compromised on that issue.

⇒ Isn't It Illegal To Spread Lies About Someone? What Exactly Is Defamation?

In its most general form, defamation is a false statement of fact that is harmful to a person’s reputation. Defamation is defined by each state individually, so your local jurisdiction will have slight variations, but this is a pretty good general definition. For more information about defamation, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Many, many plaintiffs in the cases against RipOff Report below made the mistake of accusing RipOff Report of posting defamatory content.

⇒ How is bringing a defamation case a mistake? Isn’t that exactly what RipOff Report is accused of doing?

Well, yes. But thanks to a law known as The Communications Decency Act (“CDA,” 47 USC 230), RipOff Report cannot be sued for posting defamatory content written solely by its users. It's a different story for content that it creates.

⇒ Is RipOff Report Exploiting Some Kind of Loop Hole?

Nope. Most of us benefit from the Communications Decency Act. It makes the Search Engines and Web 2.0 function. We want users to interact with our sites without having to worry about being sued over something a user did. Sooner or later, some crazy person is going to write something on your site and you are going to be so happy for the Communications Decency Act because you’re not responsible for the crazy person’s conduct.

⇒ Why I Love The Communications Decency Act: Don’t Blame the CDA for RipOff Report’s Success.

I’m going to be honest here. As someone who is in charge of handling the legal issues for a website with vibrant conversations driven by user contributions, I am relieved that the CDA exists. Without the CDA, SEOmoz would either have to independently review and investigate the accuracy of every comment posted to the site, or simply refuse to have any third party content altogether. Goodbye comments! Goodbye member profiles! See you later Youmoz! SEOmoz as we know it would not exist if it weren’t for the CDA.

⇒ Website Owners Are 100% Responsible for Content that They Have Created.

I am an employee and I am posting this content. Thus, SEOmoz is responsible for everything contained in this post. However, SEOmoz is not responsible for your comments. (phew!) 

⇒ Website Owners Risk Losing Immunity When They Alter, Develop, Collaborate, or  Change User Generated Content.

It makes intuitive sense that when a website owner starts to change user generated content, he should no longer be allowed to throw up his hands and claim no responsibility for the content.

The unresolved question for courts is where the line is between creating and editing. A certain amount of editing (for spelling, grammar), would not cause a website owner to lose immunity. However, substantial edits that affect the meaning of the user generated content may cause the website owner to lose immunity. Thus, SEOmoz could lose immunity from suit by soliciting, creating, developing, and over-zealously editing your comments.

Similarly, RipOff Report cannot be held liable for content created by its users. Strangers can write just about whatever they want on RipOff Report and so long as Magedson (the owner of RipOff Report) does not interfere, he cannot be liable. However, what if he substantially alters user-generated complaints? Is he responsible for titles containing defamatory language?

⇒ How Much Does a Website Owner Have to Change a Third Party’s Content Before He Can Be Held Liable?

No one knows right now. The statute creates very broad protection for website owners. However, if a website owner does enough editing to change the meaning of user generated content, then immunity may be lost. There are several big cases in the pipeline that may help define this boundary in the next year or two. In the meantime, if you want to know more, you can check out the CDA immunity provisions here.

⇒ If RipOff Report Writes the Negative, Defamatory Titles and Stuffs Them With Keywords, Is That Enough To Make Them Liable For Defamation?

Arguably, yes. There is no agreement on this right now. Several courts have stated that if the plaintiffs can get evidence that RipOff Report is drafting defamatory titles, then there is a viable defamation claim and no immunity. Thus, if you’re going to sue RipOff Report, it is very important to allege that the website created and/or substantially altered the meaning of the content. You need to allege facts that get you around the CDA immunity provisions in order to avoid being thrown out of Court.

There is more than just speculation that Magedson was involved in altering reports. The Declaration of Dickson Earl Woodard Deposition contains the sworn testimony of a former RipOff Report employee and states repeatedly that Magedson drafted fake complaints and manipulated search engines:

Attorney: So what I've gathered from all of your testimony, Dickson,
is that Ed Magedson has indirectly told you that he is responsible for
making posts about companies. He will make these posts.
Mr. Woodard: Yes.
Attorney: And then he will manipulate the search engines; is that
true?
Mr. Woodard: No question about the search engines. That's where the money is made.

In his Response to Woodard's testimony, Magedson  blames Woodard for making the fake complaints.

Magedson’s deposition also throws his credibility into doubt. Read excerpts of his testimony and determine for yourself whether he’s telling the truth when he states that he did not write the email asking a disgruntled employee to write an inflammatory post about his employer.

III.    The New [old] Approach: Next Generation Plaintiffs Are Focusing On RICO Act Claims Based On Extortion, Rather Than Defamation.

Because the CDA bars RipOff Report from liability for many civil suits, attorneys are shifting their focus. In addition to defamation, attorneys are suing RipOff Report for violations of the RICO Act. These next generation plaintiffs allege that RipOff Report’s conduct is extortion and amounts to racketeering.

⇒ What is The RICO Act?

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was designed to bust up organized crime like the mob. The Godfather, as everybody knows, never did his own dirty work. He had people to take care of his unlawful business. Thus, it was not easy for law enforcement to pin him with money laundering and murder because he wasn’t doing it himself. After years of mafia domination, the legislature wised up and finally made a law that made it illegal to be the head of an organization that conducts a pattern of unlawful activity. It didn’t matter anymore if the Godfather didn’t pull the trigger. Because he was in charge of the organization that made the murder happen, he could be found liable for a RICO Act violation.

Plaintiffs are now applying this same strategy to RipOff Report litigation.

 ⇒ The RICO Act Is A Favorite With Plaintiffs Because It Allows for Punitive Damages.

There is another brilliant thing about RICO Act claims that make them a very attractive avenue to plaintiffs’ attorneys: Punitive or treble damages. If you are found liable of a RICO Act claim and you extorted $50,000.00, the Judge can order you to pay three times that amount! Most civil lawsuits (like defamation, for example) only allow plaintiffs to recover the amount that they were actually damaged. The ability to recover punitive damages is what makes RICO so suave my friend.

⇒ What Does a Plaintiff Have to Prove To Hold RipOff Report Liable For a RICO Act Violation?

The most common RICO claim makes it unlawful for a person to manipulate an enterprise for purposes of engaging in, concealing, or benefiting from a pattern of racketeering activity. In order to prove a “racketeering activity,” you must essentially prove a crime within a crime. Extortion can serve as a “racketeering activity” under the statute.

In the case of RipOff Report, a plaintiff must demonstrate that Magedson manipulated an enterprise (RipOffReport.com) for the purpose of engaging in a pattern of extortion.

Note: If you want to learn more about the RICO Act, I commend to your attention Mr. Jeffrey Ernest Grell’s RICO Act in at Nutshell. It’s a thorough review and will tell you everything you want to know and more about RICO.

⇒ What is Extortion: When Is It Wrong To Ask Someone For Money?

RipOff Report expressly states on its site that it is not engaging in extortionate conduct. This begs the question, what is extortion? Is paying someone tens of thousands of dollars in addition to a monthly fee to help you communicate with your angry clients the price of good PR, or extortion? 

Generally, the term "extortion" means the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right. In other words, you are committing extortion if you are wrongfully threatening someone to give you money or property. But it’s not always easy to determine whether the use of force is “wrongful.”

The good news is that the courts have already determined that taking money from a person in order to prevent him from being defamed is extortion. It’s a kooky and highly entertaining case involving the criminal underbelly of the Church of Scientology, but it’s surprisingly on point.

Further, several courts have ruled that the facts alleged against RipOff Report could amount to extortion. The courts in Hy Cite and Cambridge Who’s Who ruled that the allegations in the plaintiffs’ Complaints could result in a finding of extortion against RipOff Report.
 
⇒ Does the CDA Grant Immunity from A RICO Act Claim As Well As A Defamation Claim?

The CDA grants immunity against more claims than just defamation. For example, the CDA has granted immunity from suits involving negligent misrepresentation, interference with business expectancy, breach of contract, intentional nuisance, violations of federal civil rights, and emotional distress. However, the CDA does not grant immunity for federal criminal law, intellectual property law, and electronic communications privacy law.

The issue over whether the CDA grants immunity from RICO Act claims has not been addressed by a court yet. So, far none of the RipOff Report rulings state that the CDA grants immunity from RICO charges. However, none of the courts have found that the CDA does not grant immunity either.

The Hy Cite Court ruled, “Here, Defendants operate a website. Plaintiff alleges that Defendants create and solicit false and defamatory complaints against businesses, but will cease this conduct for a $50,000 fee and $1,500 monthly retainer. Remedying the publication of false and defamatory complaints, which Defendants allegedly created and solicited, does not give Defendant’s the right to collect fees. Plaintiff has properly alleged threatened extortion.”

Thus, so far, courts are not bothered by the implications of the CDA on the RICO Act. I for one, hope it stays this way.

IV.    Where RipOff Report Litigation Should Go From Here

The steady stream of lawsuits against RipOff Report have not slowed down and there is no indication that they will. Plaintiffs have become more sophisticated in order to avoid being kicked out of Court by the Communication Decency Act’s broad immunity provisions. Plaintiffs are being sure to plead that RipOff report was directly responsible for creating defamatory content, not just publishing it.

Because a lot of us have much to gain from a strong CDA, I hope that plaintiffs will continue to press the RICO/Extortion combo. This will direct the conversation away from the CDA and focus it on the extortion elements of the case. This is appropriate because this is what makes RipOff Report’s alleged conduct so reprehensible. If RipOff report was just providing a neutral and organic platform to publish good and bad comments about businesses, no one would be complaining.

What transforms this site from a consumer advocacy site to a menace (allegedly) is its aggressive violations of Google’s terms of service to increase its rankings, and concomitant demands for exorbitant fees to write a few rebuttal posts. It is not the defamatory nature of the posts that are the problem. After all, those are all over the web and probably always will be. The problem here is the apparent intent to damage a person or business’s reputation without regard to the truth of the matter, only to re-victimize the person or business by charging them exorbitant fees.

The legal theories have come a long way. A lot of cases are in aggressive investigation phases right now. I’m hoping that some plaintiff out there will take this case “all the way” so that the public can finally have full access to the evidence and testimony necessary to make a fair decision. If the allegations against RipOff Report are true, I believe the RICO Act is the best method for holding RipOff Report accountable.

Thank you for taking the time to read this Anatomy of a RipOff Report lawsuit. I hope you have found it interesting and useful. As always, I welcome your questions and comments. In particular, please let me know if you know of any cases that are not included in my Appendix below.

Very truly yours,
Sarah

Appendix of Cases

I thought it might be useful to list the cases involving RipOff Report that I have located so far and indicate their status. If anyone knows of others, please let me know so I can add it to my list. For example, I know there is a Canadian case that I’ve left out here. For your information, Xcentric Ventures, Badbusinessbureau.com, RipOffReport.com, and Edward Mageson are all the same party.

Ottis v. Magedson—Filed October 18, 2007 in the Nebraska District Court under cause number 4:2007cv03251. Mr. Ottis is asserting both libel and RICO Claims. Case Pending.

Children of America v. Magedson—Filed February 2007 in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona under cause number CV 2007-003720. The Court ruled that CofA may have a claim against Magedson for creating and developing complaints and/or titles to complaints. The case is still pending. If anyone has further information about this case, please let me know.

Xcentric Ventures v. Stanley—Filed May 20, 2007 in Arizona’s District Court under cause number 2:2007cv00954. This is an unusual case because ROR is the Plaintiff. Further, one of the named defendants is The Defamation Action League. How cool does that sound? There are some very interesting documents in the docket here. My favorite is a police report filed by Magedson regarding threatening letters that he received. He drops the complaint once the police begin investigating. You be the judge: Does it sound like Magedson made the whole thing up? The case is still pending with discovery (disputes) active.

Global Royalties v Xcentric—Filed May 10, 2007 in Arizona’s District Court under cause number 2:2007cv00956. The case is still active and pending a decision by the 9th Circuit ruling on the Roommates case (which will interpret the CDA).

GW Equity v. Xcentric—Filed June 1, 2007 in Texas Northern District Court under cause number 3:2007cv00976. This one is the source of some great declarations by a former employee who throws Magedson under the proverbial bus. Magedson’s only retort is that the employee was lying and that it was actually the employee inventing these stories. The case includes a RICO claim. The case is still pending and discovery is active.

RSA v. Rip-OffReport.com—Filed April 23, 2007 in the New Jersey District Court under cause number 2:07cv01882-HAA-ES.  RSA also sued Google in this case. That was a mistake. Case voluntarily Dismissed in August 2007. The report is still online and there is a rebuttal from the owner.

IGIA v. Xcentric—Filed January 2007 in the Southern District Court of New York under cause number 1:07-cv-00222-SAS-KNF. Complaint alleges RICO Act and Defamation claims. Default Judgment entered on December 20, 2007. The Defendant did not appear and defend the lawsuit.

Manchanda Law Offices v. Xcentric--Filed July 25, 2007 New York Southern District Court under cause number 1:2007cv06708. Originally failed to plead RICO, but amended the Complaint in October 2007 to include a RICO claim. The lawsuit was never served and was withdrawn by the Plaintiff in November 2007. The negative “reports” are still on Ripoff Report.

Magedson v. Sharp—Filed February 2007 in Maricopa County Arizona State Court under cause number CV2007-001968. The case is still pending. If anyone has further information about this case, please let me know.

Energy Automation Systems v. Xcentric Ventures—Filed November 2, 2006 in Tennessee’s Middle District Court under cause number 3:2006cv01079. Recently Settled.

Cambridge Who’s Who Publishing v. Xcentric—Filed December 11, 2006 in New York’s District Court under cause number 2:2006cv06590. Settled January 16, 2008.

Magedson v. Federated Financial Services—Filed October 2005 in Maricopa County Arizona under cause number CV2005-015552. Case dismissed December 2005. If anyone has further information about this case, please pass it on.

Hy Cite v. Badbusinessbureau.com—Filed December 11, 2004 in Arizona District Court under cause number 2:2004cv02856. The plaintiff amended its Complaint to include defamation, RICO Act claims, and trademark infringement. The Court dismissed the trademark associated claims, but ruled that the RICO Act claims and the claims that Magedson authored and/or edited defamatory statements can go forward. The case includes a thoughtful and well-written Order authored by Judge Earl H. Carroll going through the legal arguments and defenses. Surely, this well-reasoned order created the impetus necessary for the parties to settle in May 2007. Interestingly, Hy Cite is still listed on RipOffReport.com, but unlike other rebuttals to complaints, the rebuttal appears in the title and above the Complaint. I speculate that this could have been part of the settlement terms. [Note: Hy Cite originally filed in Wisconsin. However, that case was dismissed because the Wisconsin ruled that it didn’t have jurisdiction over RipOffReport.com et al.]

Whitney Information Network v. Xcentric—Filed January 27, 2004 in Florida’s Middle District Court under cause number 2:2004cv00047. This case is helpful for providing evidence that Magedson solicited reports designed to harass businesses. See document 158-2 which is an excerpt from a deposition with Magedson in which he discusses an email where he invites a disgruntled employee to “post something or part of the e-mail below? This would be great, and it would definitely piss them off!” This case is still pending.


George S. May Intl v. Xcentric—Filed September 15, 2004 in Illinois District Court under cause number 1:2004cv06018. Agreed dismissal in February 2007.

Pritchard v. Magedson—Filed April 14, 2004 in the Western District of Pennsylvania under cause number 2:04-cv-00567-JFC.  Case closed on Plaintiff’s Motion on May 2004.

Leavenbaum v. Xcentric—Filed October 2004 in Maricopa County Superior Court for the State of Arizona under cause number CV2004-020368. Case closed on October 2005 by an Order on Dismissal. If anyone has further information about this case, I am curious.

Alyon Technologies v Badbusinessbureau.com—Filed 2003 in the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court In the High Court of Justice Federation of Saint Christopher and Nevis Saint Christopher Circuit under claim number SKBHCV2003/052. Default Judgment entered on July 4, 2003 for $27,100,932.00 because the defendants failed to appear and defend themselves in the suit.

MCW v Badbusinessbureau.com—Filed December 2002 in the Northern District of Texas District Court under cause number 3:06cv0179. There is a valuable opinion form this unpublished case that state Magedson is not entitled CDA immunity to the extent that he is developing and creating “report titles, headings, and some of the defamatory messages posted on the websites.” Case closed and the report is still online with no rebuttal.

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What Gmail feature do you want the most?

I really like Gmail because it makes email much less annoying. But I’ve been thinking about a feature that I really want in Gmail: I want the ability to delay sending replies/emails until a certain time or date. As a computer science person, here’s how I’d turn that one feature into three features:

• The “Oops” filter. Have you ever hit send on an email at the exact same time that you noticed a typo? Or did you ever get “emailer’s regret” because you sent a snarky or angry email instead of polite one? The “oops” filter would let you delay sending email for a short while (two minutes if you suffer from typo-itis, longer if you tend to flame in emails) until you’re sure you want to send that email.
• Slow down a conversation. If you’re like me, you treat your inbox as a to-do list. And if I can deal with an email in a minute or two, I often do. Then the other person writes back quickly. Then I write back quickly. Before you know it, you’ve traded several emails that you didn’t need to. If someone emails me a non-critical email, sometimes it would be nice to write a reply immediately, but set the email to wait for a few hours before heading to the other person.
• Periodic events. If I know that I’m going to need to collect data from someone at the end of the week or quarter, why can’t I write the email now and set it to ping them when the time is up? If someone says “this bug will be fixed in three weeks,” it would be great to write a “Hey, how’s that bug going?” email and set it to tickle or ping them in three weeks.

Part of me wonders whether the Greasemonkey API for Gmail could do something like this, maybe by storing the date to send an email as some sort of special tag. Part of me wonders whether someone has already created something like this for Gmail.

And part of me wonders: what feature would you like to see in Gmail? Now that Gmail has free POP, IMAP, and an iPhone version, what do you want to see next from Gmail?

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SEW Experts: SEO Millionaire: Who Wants to Be One?

What separates the winners from the search engine losers? That's the one question you need to ask SEOs who give you the standard advice you hear again and again. In today's au Natural column, "SEO Millionaire: Who Wants to Be One?," Mark Jackson brings you an SEO quiz show. By the end, you'll understand two overlooked factors in SEO: size and depth of site.

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Advice for Startup CEOs

Posted by randfish

In honor of Monday's holiday, I thought I'd change up the subject and talk a little bit about leadership in a small business startup. This is a subject that I don't have nearly the authority or experience to speak about in the same way as SEO. After all, I've worked on dozens of successful search marketing projects, but only one startup - SEOmoz. Despite this limitation, I've had the privilege of working with and meeting dozens of other successful (and not so successful) CEOs and entrepreneurs from startups around the world.

Rather than attempt to dictate what all startup CEOs should do or what separates the good from the bad, I'd like to simply share my personal experience - where I went right and where I've gone wrong. Hopefully, by seeing the strengths and weaknesses of another CEO, you can begin your own self examination (or an examination of your company's CEO).

Traits that Have Helped Me to Be a Better CEO

• A Voracious Appetite for Knowledge
  Particularly in the world of web startups, an all-consuming need to have information has been a boon. It means that I'm not only ahead of the curve in seeing trends or being able to blog about what's coming, but also that I've helped to make SEOmoz a source for those seeking to learn more. It's also a positive for when the press comes calling and needs a comment on the latest algorithm change or vertical search inclusion at Google.
• An Addiction to Multi-Tasking
  As frustrating as this can be for anyone who's got tough deadlines, it's generally a positive for a CEO. I find that I can read & respond to email, chat with employees over IM, edit a document and browse the news all while composing a blog entry. It's certainly not the most efficient way to get things done, but it means that very little slips by unnoticed and the most pressing issue can take priority.
• Seeing the Good in Everyone
  As with the above, it's a double-edged sword, but I think it makes for a great culture around SEOmoz and internally with the team. My sometimes naive optimism has also been a great olive branch to making friends and connections in the industry, although I've occasionally been duped by a client who was never going to pay or given up valuable time trying to smooth thing over a non-issue.
• Caring About More than Money
  If you're always pursuing the fastest way to high profits, you could be missing sight of the bigger picture. Succesful management means thinking more broadly and creatively about where there's a need waiting to be fulfilled and how to fill that niche. I've also found that personally, it's easy to spot someone who's just in the business for the money vs. those who really care and want something great for the industry. It might be the optimism speaking, but I feel that the latter group usually produces the brightest innovations (and eventually, profit, too).
• The Ability to Communicate in Multiple Mediums
  Writing, orating & speaking on the phone are essential to building a business. For me, they've helped tobuild a profile in the industry, create lasting relationships wih companies and people in the field and, of course, market SEOmoz through the blog. Don't underestimate the power of great email composition either - since it's so often the first point of contact outsiders have with the CEO, crafting great emails makes for memorably, positive brand experiences.
• A Background in Usability
  Not every CEO needs this, but I've found that in a web-based market, having watched dozens of people navigate (or try to navigate) websites has given me an extra edge in empathizing with the user and trying to understand what they need. Even to this day, if you meet me and we're hanging out at a conference, I'll probably be watching someone browse the web on their computer - seeing where they go and how they follow links. If you catch me doing this, I promise, it's just the usability guy in me - nothing creepy.

Areas Where I've Struggled

• Inconsistent in Recognizing Talent
  Not only have I made a few mistakes in hiring the wrong folks, I've also struggled to find the best fit for the talented people we do bring on board. I'm deeply envious of CEOs who can magically size up a person's strengths and weaknesses and put them in a position to leverage the former and minimize the latter.
• Trouble Giving Negative Feedback
  This is probably my toughest issue. I'm great at telling people when they've done a good job, but awful at criticizing any effort. In order to overcome, I've started hiring only those folks who have a deep, internal need for perfectionism. If you are your own harshest critic, it helps me to work around this pervasive flaw.
• Not Cultivating a Strong Culture of Analytics
  I knew a CEO of a venture-backed company who swore by measuring, testing and improving everything so rigidly, he literally told a conference of other CEOs to "fire anyone who doesn't love analytics with every fiber of their being." At SEOmoz, we do a mediocre job of measuring our own success (though things have gotten much better in the last 3 months), despite the great work we've done tracking stats and analyzing the work we do for our clients.
• Taking Things Personally
  I constantly have to remind myself that even when the criticism comes hot and heavy, it's just the Internet and people are bound to be far bolder and braver than they would be offline. I've gotten better at ignoring critics of myself and SEOmoz, but I still find my heart racing and blood pounding in my ears when I see my friends taking heat - I need to keep working on that.
• Admitting that a Company is Not a Democracy
  It's a dictatorship. When tough decisions come up, they're my responsibility. I've noticed that even with little things, when we take a company vote, dissent and discomfort abound. If you want to run a company with a pseudo-democracy, take everyone's opinion and input, then make the decision. You need to be able to take the blame when something goes awry, and bowing to internal pressure is no excuse. 

Stereotypes & Myths About Leadership that I've Found

• A Leader Never Follows
  Not true at all - leaders can follow trends, they can follow other industry notables and they can even follow their employees. Part of building a great team and being a great leader means recognizing ability and taking inspiration from the work of others. Don't discount an idea just because someone else thought of it or refuse to follow a course just because it's been done before. Innovation is important, but excluding options out of pride is a deadly mistake.
• Only Strong Personalities can Lead
  I've met some very understated leaders in the past 5 years, and I think that I often end up having more respect for the deep intellectual than the boisterous go-getter. Maybe it's just in the geek world of web startups, but a brash personality doesn't always make for the best leadership.
• You Have to be Tall
  I must have seen dozens of studies about how most CEOs are exceptionally tall - usually more than 6'2". However, other than Bill Gurley from Benchmark (who's not even technically a CEO), I've yet to meet these gigantic CEOs in the web startup world.

Some Important Lessons

• Don't Get Too Far Removed
  There have been a few instances I've seen of CEOs who got too far away from the day-to-day operations of their company and suffered for it. If you can't empathize with what your employees do, what your customers use and what it's like to be in someone else's shoes, you might be in danger of losing your ability to lead effectively. Book your own travel sometimes and definitely take a few customer services phone calls or emails every month.
• Don't Be Afraid to Change
  Just because somes skill, ability or product got you where you are today doesn't mean you should never give it up. I learned this lesson when SEOmoz struggled to choose between many large, lucrative consulting projects and the premium content model. While we still do a small amount of the former, it's clear that premium was an excellent business decision.
• Delegation is Your Greatest Ally
  Don't ignore the power of others to do your work for you. If you're good at hiring and inspiring the best from your staff, delgating even the tough, important jobs is a wise decision. Many times, you'll see the true value of an employee when times are tough.
• Sometimes, It's Just a Tempest in a Teapot
  I can remember dozens of times when I felt like the world was crashing down around me - that I could barely hold up another day. I think all CEOs probably need to have those experiences a few times before they start to recognize that nothing is as bad as it seems, the sun's coming up tomorrow and time heals more than you think it could. That employee who's struggled the last few months may indeed turn things around. The client who hasn't paid might just need a little extra contact. The product that's not taking off yet could, with a few tiny fixes, soar.

For those interested, I received an email from Richard Durnall that an interview he conducted with me last week is up on his site. I actually thought that although broad in subject matter, it turned into a good piece.

p.s. Happy MLK Day, everyone. Here's an old post with some good links to help commemorate.

p.p.s. Couldn't help but submit to YCombinator News - currently my favorite social news source.

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Search Marketing Predictions for 2008, Part 2

We've collected the 2008 predictions of several search engine marketers, sharing their best guesses about the direction of the industry in the coming year.

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Search Marketing Predictions for 2008

We've collected the 2008 predictions of several search engine marketers, sharing their best guesses about the direction of the industry in the coming year.

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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide Part IV Continued - Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content

Posted by randfish

I'm currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

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Canonical & Duplicate Versions of Content

 

Why Canonical Versions of Content are Critical to SEO

Canonicalization can be a challenging concept to understand (and hard to pronounce - "ca-non-ick-cal-eye-zay-shun"), but it's essential to creating an optimized website. The fundamental problems stem from multiple uses for a single piece of writing - a paragraph or, more often, an entire page of content will appear in multiple locations on a website, or even on multiple websites. For search engines, this presents a conundrum - which version of this content should they show to searchers? In SEO circles, this issue often referred to as duplicate content - described in greater detail here.

The engines are picky about duplicate versions of a single piece of material. To provide the best searcher experience, they will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original (or best).

Canonicalization is the practice of organizing your content in such a way that every unique piece has one and only one URL. By following this process, you can ensure that the search engines will find a singular version of your content and assign it the highest achievable rankings based on your domain strength, trust, relevance and other factors. If you leave multiple versions of content on a website (or websites), you might end up with a scenario like this:

If, instead, the site owner took those three pages and 301-redirected them (you can read more about how to use 301s here), the search engines would have only one, stronger page to show in the listings from that site:

When multiple pages with the potential to rank well are combined into a single page, they not only no longer compete with one another, but create a stronger relevancy and popularity signal overall. This will positively impact their ability to rank well in the search engines.

As an example, SEOmoz has worked on several campaigns where two versions of every content page existed in both a standard, web version and a print-friendly version. In one instance, the publisher's own site linked to both versions, and many external links pointed to both as well (this is a common phenomenon as bloggers & social media types like to link to print-friendly versions to avoid advertising). We worked to individually 301 re-direct all of the print-friendly versions of the content back to the originals and created a CSS option to show the page in printer-friendly format (on the same URL). This resulted in a boost of more than 20% in search engine traffic within 60 days. Not bad for a project that only required an hour to identify and a few clever rules in the htaccess file to fix.

Defending Your Rankings Against Scrapers & Spammers

Unfortunately, the web is filled with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of unscrupulous websites whose business and traffic models depend on plucking the content of other sites and re-using them (sometimes in strangely modified ways) on their own domains. This practice of fetching your content and re-publishing is called "scraping" and the scrapers make remarkably good earnings by outranking sites for their own content and displaying ads (ironically, often Google's own AdSense program).

Preventing the scraping itself is often next to impossible, but there are good ways to protect yourself from losing out to these copycats.

First off, when you publish content in any type of feed format - RSS/XML/etc - make sure to ping the major blogging/tracking services (like Google, Technorati, Yahoo!, etc.). You can find instructions for how to ping services like Google and Technorati directly from their sites, or use a service like Pingomatic to automate the process. If your publishing software is custom-built, it's typically wise for the developer(s) to include auto-pinging upon publishing.

Next, you can use the scrapers' laziness against them. Most of the scrapers on the web will re-publish content without editing, and thus, by including links back to your site, and the specific post you've authored, you can ensure that the search engines see most of the copies linking back to you (indicating that your source is probably the originator). To do this, you'll need to use absolute, rather that relative links in your internal linking structure. Thus, rather than linking to your home page using:

<a href="../>Home</a>

You would instead use:

<a href="http://www.seomoz.org">Home</a>

This way, when a scraper picks up and copies the content, the link remains pointing to your site.

There are more advanced ways to protect against scraping, but none of them are entirely foolproof. You should expect that the more popular and visible your site gets, the more often you'll find your content scraped and re-published. Many times, you can ignore this problem, but if it gets very severe, and you find the scrapers taking away your rankings and traffic, you may consider using a legal process called a DMCA takedown. Luckily, SEOmoz's own in-house counsel, Sarah Bird, has authored a brilliant piece to help solve just this problem - Four Ways to Enforce Your Copyright: What to Do When Your Online Content is Being Stolen.

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As always, comments, corrections and suggestions are greatly appreciated! I'll try to speed up the guide in the next few days and weeks, so look for a little more "back to basics" blogging. I'll rely on Rebecca, Jane & the YOUmozzers to keep adding diversity to the mix. :)

p.s. Oh jeez... 3:50am. I really need to start sleeping more.

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SEMDirector Rebrands as Covario In Race for Interactive Advertising Platform

Search engine marketing technology firm SEMDirector today rebranded as Covario to reflect the depth and breadth of its performance management technologies. Covario's platform enables global brands to manage not only search advertising but other interactive media, including display advertising. For the search industry, it's a wakeup call that "SEM" as a specialized service faces increasing competition from interactive advertising.

The race for a comprehensive online marketing platform includes the search engine platforms that will likely incorporate elements of recent technology acquisitions. Microsoft, for example, will leverage its investment in Aquantive's Atlas technology to improve the capabilities of MSN AdCenter. Google's recent acquisition of DoubleClick gives the search giant the ability to close the marketing loop with DART, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics in an enterprise marketing platform.

Covario enables advertisers to understand the relative effectiveness of paid search advertising, natural search optimization, and interactive advertising in a single dashboard.

“Covario,� a play on the word “covariance,� a measure of the strength of the correlation between two or more sets of random variables, reflects one of SEMDirector's competitive advantages: proprietary technology that enables marketers to make intelligent decisions in 24-7 search auctions with myriad variables. Those decisions are based on actual performance in the search engines, rather than media buyers' intuition.

Last week Russ Mann, Covario CEO, told me too many prospective clients and executives thought "SEM" referred only to paid search or PPC. Covario, along with a handful of leading search firms, offers a window into organic search performance too.

Covario focuses on designing products and solutions which bring unity and order into the interactive marketing management process. “Today interactive marketing is a fragmented discipline in which marketers work with many different vendors to develop and execute marketing programs," said Suresh Vittal, Forrester Research senior analyst. "But as the number of channels and programs grow, this situation becomes untenable.�

Click to read the rest of this post...

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What should I do with my draft posts?

Over the last 2+ years, I’ve written a lot of draft blog posts that I never published. Most of them are pretty sucky/rough, but not all of them. At this point, I’ve published ~584 posts and I’ve got about ~219 draft posts. After WordPress had a recent security hole that could expose draft posts, I’m planning on clearing out most of my draft posts. The question is: should I delete them all, or should I push some of them live, even though they’re mostly low-quality?

Anyone have strong opinions either way? Should I unload some of these leftover posts onto my blog, or try to keep my blog mostly higher-quality and just delete all those old/junky drafts?

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Highlights from the SEW Blog: January 14-18, 2008

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

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Blackle Is the New Google, Plus Greener Gadgets

Blackle is the new Green Google. Last year ecoIron blog reported Google would save mega megawatts by converting its famous whitespace to a black background. With the advent of Google Custom Search Engine, Mark Ontkush's brilliant idea became a reality. Blackle was born.

Joining the black is the new green search revolution: Blackoogle.

Core77 design network blogger Jeannie Chloe named Heap Media's Blackle one of the industrial design highlights of the year. Now Core77 is teaming up with Greener Gadgets to hold the Greener Gadgets competition (enter here by Jan 27, 2008) culminating in the Greener Gadgets conference on February 1st in NYC.

You can read more about Blackle and Blackoogle on some great blogs here, here, and here.

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Whiteboard Friday - Creating Marketing Personas

Posted by great scott!

Hey Gang,

This week we've got a special guest in Whiteboard Studios, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive.  Ian and Rand discuss the marketing tactic of creating "personas." If you've ever seen "Shaun of the Dead" (and if you haven't, you should), you'll remember the scene where Shaun and Ed are sitting in the pub making up personal histories for the other bar patrons.

Turns out this is not just a fun way to kill time over a few pints--it can also be an important tactic in evaluating your customer base for both marketing efforts and product development.  Personas are essentially imaginary friends, or clients, to be more precise.  You invent entire back stories, personalities, quirks, and needs for all of them, then evaluate how each of them would likely react to your products or campaigns. 

While it may seem a little far-fetched at first, Ian makes a compelling case both in this video and in several posts on Portent Interactive's blog, for the use of Persona modeling.  The video is a bit long (~20 minutes) but definitely worth checking out if you're interested in a new and valuable strategy for helping to direct your campaigns.

Due to the length of the video and size of the file, I'm testing out Google Video this week in order to avoid having to serialize this installment, like I've had to do with YouTube in the past.  Let me know if you experience any problems with display or download of the video. Enjoy!

Note: If you'd just like to see Ian describe the personas of the SEOmoz readership - YOU! (well... maybe), jump to 12:05 in the video.

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 UPDATE from Rand: Don't miss Ian's 4-part blog post series on Personas:

• Part I: Creating Great Personas
• Part II: The 4 Rules of Personas
• Part III: 3 Rules for Applying Personas to Email Marketing
• Part IV: Search Marketing & Personas: Opening Your Customers Heads

You might also be interested in Grokdotcom's blog post on the topic - Use of Personas Boosts Conversion by 400% - and 37Signals' post, arguing why they don't use them.

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$100,000 First Prize: Universal Search Engine Survivor Singapore

Universal Search will reach an inflection point when video and audio files are fully searchable. The best and brightest minds in the search industry will one day solve the problem of multimedia meta tag "hit-and-miss."

Until then, Meta Tag, you're it.

Singapore is offering a $100,000 grand prize as an incentive to promote the opening of Fusionopolis. Enter here.

The Star Challenge 2008 pits teams and individuals "in a global competition to complete search engine challenges with the ultimate goal: develop a "universal search" engine that goes beyond universal search to get inside rich media.

The race: a total of 4 Challenges and 3 Knockout rounds.

The searchable media? Available to search teams in July-August 2008. Finalists will be announced on August 23, 2008.

I saw the story first in Channel News Asia (via Yahoo News), but the lede didn't quite capture the concept of universal search, multimedia search, or even who wants to be a billionaire:

If you have an idea for the next YouTube or Facebook, you could win US$100,000.

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12 Popular Browser Toolbars Reviewed - The Worthwhile and the Worthless

Posted by randfish

Tonight I wanted to look at one of the least-discussed, but most popular set of tools on the web - the browser toolbar. Although toolbars have been around since the mid-1990's, their most dominant era (from the late '90's-early 2000's) has been interpreted as a sign of the toolbar's demise. But rumors of the toolbar's death are, in my opinion, premature. While they may not have the penetration rates they once did, the number of toolbars on the market and the re-surgence of open-source and non-search-based toolbars is breathing new life into the old (at least by web standards) medium.

Obviously, web developers and Internet marketers of all stripes are still heavily invested in toolbar usage, particularly with the development of independent toolbars for Firefox. But, that doesn't necessarily mean we should ignore the rest. Below, I've tried to give a rough overview of the most popular toolbars on the web and their features; I've also given my personal opinions about the value of the plug-ins for both regular users and Internet professionals:

The Google Toolbar - http://toolbar.google.com

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Features:

• Search bar with suggestions & history
• Links to news and other vertical search options at Google
• Ability to save pages to Google favorites
• PageRank indicator (optional at install)
• Pop-up blocker
• Spell check for forms (and auto-correction features)
• Autofill for forms (to automatically insert common personal information)
• Send-to feature (used to email, post to Google's Blogger platform or send an SMS with a URL)
• Search highlighting of referral keywords
• Optional features also include the ability to use translate, vote on pages (unclear what Google does with this data) and add other vertical search and custom buttons.

Value to Ordinary Users: Medium

I'm guessing the Google toolbar was much more valuable to the average user before the advent of built-in-browser search bars, but it still has some redeeming qualities. Certainly the popup blocker (though already built-in to most modern browsers), spell-check, auto-fill-in for forms and translation functions are engaging. The ability to highlight search phrases may be useful to some, but this feature, along with autolink, Google bookmarks and

Value to Web Professionals: Low

Simple - the Google PageRank data can be an interesting signal if you know how to interpret it properly (and ignore it when necessary). However, with Firefox toolbars offering the same data alongside far more valuable features, it's unlikely to garner much interest from serious marketers or developers.

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The Yahoo! Toolbar - http://toolbar.yahoo.com

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Features:

• Search bar with suggestions & vertical search options
• Yahoo! Bookmarking
• Connection to Yahoo! Mail & My Yahoo!
• Direct Links to Yahoo! Answers & Yahoo! Games
• Anti-Spy Optional Plug-in

Value to Ordinary Users: Low

For those users who are heavy devotees of Yahoo!'s other services, the toolbar provides some fair value. For the majority, however, the features simply don't deliver. Yahoo! could almost certainly be more creative and innovative with the options in the toolbar, but it's barely changed since the late '90's. Plugins to Yahoo! properties like Del.icio.us, Upcoming & Flickr aren't here, even in basic link format, and with no website or URL rating system (like Google's PageRank), it seems Yahoo! in content to let the toolbar stagnate.

Value to Web Professionals: Low

It's unlikely that any developer or web marketer is going to use the Yahoo! toolbar, unless they're heavily tied in to Yahoo!'s other services like Mail, My Yahoo!, Answers, etc. Even in this latter case, the buttons on the toolbar are little more than links, so a bookmark sidebar is probably more convenient. The only truly interesting piece of data is the search suggest information, but that can be found through Yahoo! search as well. I'm dissapointed also to see no options for web marketers that would give a more plug-and-play data experience with Yahoo! Site Explorer - that's a big missed opportunity, IMO.

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The Microsoft Live Search Toolbar - http://live.toolbar.com

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Features:

• Search bar with suggestions and vertical search options (including some external properties)
• Direct news links to MSNBC sources
• Link to gallery for additional buttons and options
• Direct links to MSN portal content
• Search term highlighting and snapshot highlighting
• Maps links for addresses on a page
• Hotmail/Microsoft/Outlook Email link and sending options
• Windows Live Spaces blog/publish options
• Direct links to Live Messenger

Value to Ordinary Users: Medium

If you're a heavy user of Microsoft's online offerings, the Live toolbar offers a bit more than Yahoo! and interacts quite well with the browser and web pages. I was impressed not only with the aesthetic fit (and low impact on the browser itself), but the relative usability of the various buttons (which could simply be personal preference). Once again, however, the primary features of the toolbar interact primarily with Microsoft products and Microsoft properties on the web. There's nothing revolutionary here, nor is there anything one can't live without.

Value to Web Professionals: Low

The toolbar is nearly useless to web professionals, who are very unlikely to be consumers of a majority of Microsoft's online offerings and services (with the possible exception of their popular email). There's no interfacing with Live.com's webmaster tools or data either, dissapointingly.

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The Ask.com Toolbar - http://toolbar.ask.com

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Features:

• Search bar (no suggest tools, though)
• Search term highlighting
• News Search & News Links
• Resize content
• Weather link
• Pop-up blocker
• Maps links
• Shopping links
• Links to "MyStuff" at Ask.com
• Addtional buttons available with customization

Value to Ordinary Users: Medium

This might actually be my favorite of the search toolbars if it only had a strong search suggest function. I think that for ordinary users (I'm envisioning people like my father and grandparents), the links are relevant, useful and functional. I'm a big fan of the resize button in particular, and the direct link to weather, maps and news, though available in other toolbars (weather can be added as a custom button in Google, Yahoo! and Live) is a nice feature. Ask's web interface for the toolbar is also the best designed of the bunch, with a better user experience than even Google's (at least from a simplicity perspective).

Value to Web Professionals: Low

As with Live, there's virtually nothing here that would interest developers or marketers. Interfacing with Bloglines, webmaster commands or offering PageRank-like data (after all, what does Ask realistically have to lose) would certainly make it more appealing.

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The AOL Toolbar - http://toolbar.aol.com

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Features:

• Search bar with vertical search options
• Direct links to AOL mail, Instant Messenger (AIM), AOL Games & Weather
• MapQuest address and directions plug-and-play feature
• Customizable buttons links
• My Favorite - the Surfometer!

Value to Ordinary Users: Medium

I went in expecting to be dissapointed and was pleasantly surprised. If you're an AOL user, the toolbar is probably a very good fit (tying in AIM & AOL Mail directly) and the interface with MapQuest, weather, news and other links is solid, too. Surprisingly, there's a ton of button options and an easy-to-use gallery for setting them up. Of course, my favorite part is the built-in "Surfometer" which monitors your web page views over time and reports them to you - even offering ranks as your surfing grows. Honestly, if they added the ability to compare yourself against other surfers and charted your visit habits by the sites and verticals you browse, I think I'd be in love, but then again, I'm a total geek :)

Value to Web Professionals: Low

If, like me, you really like the idea of the Surfometer, Google's desktop software actually does a better job. There's nothing else here that would particularly appeal to web pros, though the ease of customization options might make it slightly more attractive than some of the others.

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The Alexa Toolbar - http://toolbar.alexa.com

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Features:

• Search options with the major engines (and Alexa's internal search)
• Info bar on sites visited (as shown above - note that the information for SEOmoz is now 3 years old)
• Traffic rank and trend data (as indicated by the number and arrow direction)
• Related sites list
• Popup Manager
• Direct links to Amazon & Archive.org
• Print Button

Value to Ordinary Users: Low

The Alexa toolbar is designed to be a competitive information tool, and as such, offers virtually no functionality, other than the ability to get (highly inaccurate) website popularity data and contact information (which is also spurious) for the sites a user visits. It's too bad, because the value of Alexa's data lies in the number of people they can get to adopt their toolbar. The more ordinary and "average" those users are, the better Alexa's data will be, yet they really fail to serve this market effectively.

Value to Web Professionals: Medium to High

It's not for everyone, but for most web professionals, using the Alexa toolbar (and feeding data back to them through your usage) is valuable. This is true simply because very little usage of a website on a regular basis by just a few Alexa toolbar users is enough to propel its rankings. There are enough uninformed decision makers at businesses, ratings services, investment funds and competitive firms who still trust Alexa data to make it worthwhile to game the system. In addition, the related sites data and site info can be useful for competitive intelligence (so long as they're taken with a relative grain of salt).

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The Compete.com Toolbar - http://tools.compete.com

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Features:

• Search options with major engines
• Direct links to Compete and MyCompete Panel
• Trust Rating
• Competitive Data on the Website(s) Being Browsed
• Pop-up of Traffic Profile for Sites
• Direct Link to Any "Deals" Available on the Site

Value to Ordinary Users: Low to Medium

The most compelling part of the Compete toolbar for ordinary users are the twofold offer of a highlighted "deals" button if special offers are available on the site (which worked well for me on sites like Amazon & Gap) and the "trust" stamp. It's probably not enough to get thousands of regular surfers flocking, but it's better than what Alexa's offering by a long shot.

Value to Web Professionals: Medium to High

Compete's data isn't fantastic, but in some cases it's a good deal better than Alexa (in others, it's just as bad or worse). However, since Compete's fast becoming a darling in the tech and media startup world, influencing the rankings even a little (and seeing what the competition is up to) isn't a bad choice. If Compete took the additional step that Alexa takes and listed related sites, it might be a bit more valuable, and certainly as their data pool grows, it's possible they'll improve in usefulness.

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The NetCraft Toolbar - http://toolbar.netcraft.com

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Features:

• Ability to report Phishing sites
• Trust/Risk rating metric
• Domain and business investigation links
• Competitive data (age, rank, site info, etc.)
• Direct links to Netcraft pages and services

Value to Ordinary Users: Low to Medium

Although the toolbar does offer some information designed to protect consumers, the phishing notification appears limited to financial sites. I visited a few domains that carry some nasty malware, pop-unders, etc. and they had high trust ratings from Netcraft. The ability to report phishing might be valuable, but unless you're consistently under the threat, Netcraft's probably not that useful and the lack of a built-in search bar seriously hampers it (though since Firefox and IE both have them now, it's not as important).

Value to Web Professionals: Low to Medium

The competitive intelligence data from Netcraft isn't terrific, but it's not completely useless. More valuable than the ranks and numbers are the links to investigate host data and site information.

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The StumbleUpon Toolbar - http://www.stumbleupon.com

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Features:

• Click "Stumble" to be taken to a random webpage that others have liked
• Choose verticals (images, videos, topics) to stumble exclusively through these
• Thumb Up/Down - share your opinion of a page with other stumblers
• Tag, review and read reviews of pages
• Stumble through a single website (in case you want to find all the cool stuff on NPR or YouTube)

Value to Ordinary Users: Medium to High

StumbleUpon is some of the most fun you can have on the web, and the process of discovery, ability to rate and possibility of finding amazing new stuff is irresistable. It could just be the curious cat in me, but everyone I've ever shown StumbleUpon to loves it. From concept to execution, it's one of the best applications around. No surprise, then, that SU has built an audience of 4+ million users and is one of the top traffic drivers for many social sites, blogs and news domains.

Value to Web Professionals: High

If you're a marketer, developer or designer, using StumbleUpon to submit your best content and to see what your peers have produced is essential. The traffic SU sends, and the ability to get in front of some very savvy, potentially target-demographic eyeballs makes it a must-have.

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Search Status for Firefox Toolbar - http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

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Features:

• Actively displays PageRank & Alexa Rank in graphical format
• Shows Compete data (in the newer version)
• Enables highlighting of nofollow links
• Direct links to link reports, archive.org, whois and other search reporting data (indexing & links)
• Pops up meta tags, robots.txt and keyword density & repetition information
• Highlights keywords

Value to Ordinary Users: Low 

Unless you know how to use the tools in the plug-in, it's virtually useless. Average web surfers aren't going to find SearchStatus, and they won't be inclined to use it - there's simply no value.

Value to Web Professionals: High

Anyone in SEO, design, development or website creation can benefit tremendously from this plugin. Not only are the Alexa, Compete & PageRank data handy (though no always particularly useful), the quick links and nofollow highlighting are essential. You'll save yourself a considerable amount of time with this toolbar (note - it's only compatible on Firefox and leverages GreaseMonkey - there's no IE version).

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Microsoft Developer Toolbar - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en

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Features:

• View & Modify HTMl Elements on the Fly
• Enable/Disable Code and Images
• Inspect CSS Properties
• Validate & Cache Code & Pages

Value to Ordinary Users: Low 

Almost none. 99% of users won't have any idea what they're even looking at.

Value to Web Professionals: Low to High

If you're a .NET developer, or work largely in Internet Explorer (or simply need to bug check a lot of code in IE), this toolbar can be pretty useful. Otherwise, it's not great. From a search marketing perspective, Firefox's GreaseMonkey plug-ins (like SearchStatus, above) are probably going to be friendlier and more accessible.

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Whew! We're all though. Well, except for the big finale - and what you've all been waiting for - one of the ugliest screenshots in history:

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Oh My God, It's Hideous!
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My questions would be:

• Which are your favorites?
• What would you want to see in an ideal toolbar (that noone currently offers)?
• Do you have privacy concerns about toolbar data (as nearly all of the toolbars above, with just a couple extensions) send data back to the issuing company (though many allow you to turn that partially or completely off)?

p.s. Technically, this is only a smattering of the more popular toolbars on the web - there are hundreds, if not thousands of others for everything from Dogpile to Wikipedia to Web2.0/Social Media toolbars.

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What’s the best NAS right now?

As I mentioned earlier, my current network-attached storage (NAS) box took a hit in a power outage. This is what it looked like after I took it apart to swap in a new hard drive.

So I’m looking for a new NAS. Price isn’t really a concern at all, but here’s stuff that I require:

• Ability to hot-swap drives. My current NAS requires 22 screws (!) to replace a hard drive.
• Gigabit ethernet
• Anything can reach it (Linux/Mac/Windows)
• Lots of drive bays (four at least)
• Quiet and fast

Some stuff that would be nice:

• Ability to accept hard drives of different sizes
• Ability to work with a uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
• Ability to email if there are issues
• Lots of server potential (Sonos, Squeezebox, iTunes, DLNA, FTP server, printserver)
• Ability to run linux or otherwise ssh in

Do you have a NAS that you’d recommend?

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Yahoo Search Spotlight Awards Live in New York

Do you want to hear search engine strategies from four of the best search marketing campaigns from 2007?

Yahoo hosts the 3rd Annual Yahoo! Searchlight Award showcase on February 12th in New York City. It's a "winner take-all" competition. There's only one 2008 Searchlight Award. Past winners include AvenueA/Razorfish and RPA.

To attend: register here.

The judges:

Kevin Ryan, Global Content Director, SES and Search Engine Watch
Abbey Klaassen, Digital Editor, Advertising Age
Brian Morrissey, Senior Reporter, Adweek
Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

The keynote:

Rob Norman, CEO of Group M Interaction: what’s hot in global search in 2008 and beyond.

Click here for details from Ron Belanger, Yahoo's VP, Agency Development.

2007 Yahoo Spotlight Award recap here.

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Robots Exclusion Protocol 101

Posted by Sebastian

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is a conglomerate of standards that regulate Web robot behavior and search engine indexing. Despite the "Exclusion" in its name, the REP covers mechanisms for inclusion too. The REP consists of the following:

1. The original REP from 1994, extended 1997, that defines crawler directives for robots.txt. Some search engines support extensions like URI patterns (wild cards).
2. Its extension from 1996 that defines indexer directives (REP tags) for use in the robots meta element, also known as "robots meta tag." Meanwhile, search engines support additional REP tags with an X-Robots-Tag. Webmasters can apply REP tags in the HTTP header of non-HTML resources like PDF documents or images.
3. The sitemaps protocol from 2005 that defines a procedure to mass submit content to search engines via (XML) Sitemaps.
4. The Microformat rel-nofollow from 2005 that defines how search engines should handle links where the A Element's REL attribute contains the value "nofollow." Also known as a link condom.

It is important to understand the difference between crawler directives and indexer directives. Crawlers don't index or even rank content. Crawlers just fetch files and script outputs from Web servers, feeding a data pool from which indexers pull their fodder.

Crawler directives (robots.txt, sitemaps) suggest to crawlers what they should crawl and must not crawl. All major search engines respect those suggestions, but might interpret the directives slightly differently and/or support home-brewed proprietary syntax. All crawler directives imply an "indexing is allowed," which means that search indexes can and do list uncrawlable URLs on their SERPs, often with titles and snippets pulled from 3rd party references.

All indexer directives (REP tags, microformats) require crawling. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as an indexer directive on the site level (yet). That means that in order to comply to an indexer directive, search engines must be allowed to crawl the resource that provides the indexer directive.

Other than robots.txt directives that can be assigned to groups of URIs, indexer directives affect individual resources (URIs) or parts of pages like (spanning) HTML elements. That means that each and every indexer directive is strictly bound to a page or other web object; respectively, a part of a particular resource (e.g., an HTML element).

Because REP directives relevant to search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking are defined on different levels, search engines have to follow a kind of command hierarchy:

Robots.txt  Located at the web server's root level, that's the gatekeeper for the entire site. In other words, if any other directive conflicts with a statement in robots.txt, robots.txt overrules it. Usually search engines fetch /robots.txt daily and cache its contents. That means that changes don't affect crawling instantly. Submissions of sitemaps might clear and refresh the robots.txt cache, which means the search engine should fetch the newest version of this file.

(XML) sitemaps  Sitemaps are machine readable URL submission lists in various formats, e.g., XML or plain text. XML sitemaps offer the opportunity to set a couple of URL specific crawler directives, or better hints for crawlers, such as desired crawling priority or "last modified" timestamps. With video sitemaps in XML format, it's possible to provide search engines with metadata like titles, transcripts, or textual summaries, and so on. Search engines don't crawl sitemap submissions restricted by robots.txt statements.

REP tags  Applied to an URI, REP tags (noindex, nofollow, unavailable_after) steer particular tasks of indexers, and in some cases (nosnippet, noarchive, noodp) even query engines at runtime of a search query. Other than with crawler directives, each search engine interprets REP tags differently. For example, Google wipes out even URL-only listings and ODP references on their SERPs when a resource is tagged with "noindex," but Yahoo and MSN sometimes list such external references to forbidden URLs on their SERPs. Since REP tags can be supplied in META elements of X/HTML contents as well as in HTTP headers of any web object, the consensus is that contents of X-Robots-Tags should overrule conflicting directives found in META elements.

Microformats  Indexer directives put as microformats overrule page settings for particular HTML elements. For example, when a page's X-Robots-Tag states "follow" (there's no "nofollow" value), the rel-nofollow directive of a particular A element (link) wins.

Although robots.txt lacks indexer directives, it is possible to set indexer directives for groups of URIs with server sided scripts acting on site level that apply X-Robots-Tags to requested resources. This method requires programming skills and good understanding of web servers and the HTTP protocol.

For more information, syntax explanations, code examples, tips and tricks, etc., please refer to these links:

• Crawler/indexer directives
• robots.txt
• robots.txt 101
• REP tags in META elements
• X-Robots-Tags
• Microformats
• URL removal / deindexing
• Sitemaps

Sebastian, January/15/2008

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Why cloud services rock

Earlier this month I went away for a week. Two big things broke while I was gone:

• WordPress had a hole that could expose drafts of posts
• Our home had a power outage, which caused serious issues with my network attached storage (NAS) box.

In each case, software or hardware that I maintain went badly off the rails. I try pretty hard to lock down my WordPress. I protect my /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. But this was a weird vulnerability. If I had hosted my blog with WordPress as a web service, I wouldn’t have had to patch things up myself. And I’m pretty sure that at least a few of my draft blog posts leaked to folks who exploited the security hole on my blog.

My NAS box was even more painful. I have a Buffalo TeraStation, and it’s worked well for over a year. But they don’t always cope well with power outages. And the version that I have required me to undo 22 screws to replace the bad hard drive. Then I had to wait for five nervous hours to see whether the NAS could repair my RAID array. No data was lost, but suffice it to say that I’ve got much better backups now, plus an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) as well. Again, if I had storage somewhere in the cloud, it would probably be more reliable than my ham-handed attempts at backing up my data.

So there you go: I went on vacation for a week and came back to two scary reminders why hosted services and storing data “in the cloud” (on someone else’s servers) can be better than doing it yourself. In general, a well-run cloud service is going to be much more reliable than any average person would be.

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Window Boxes

New Vexcom Client Blog

Since 2002, The Right Angle, Inc. has been provided the Atlanta area with affordable composite exterior shutters, window boxes, and architectural brackets made from PVC or cedar. With the expansion of our new location, we would like to not only expand our services, but also expand out knowledge.

Chris Bennet on Rip Off Report

Posted by randfish

One of the most interesting stories to catch my eyes in the last few months was this exposé from Chris Bennet at 97th Floor - Google, Your Honeymoon with Rip Off Report Has to Stop. Looking through Chris' detailed research into the practices of the website and perusing some of the appalling accusations made about the business and its founder, it's shocking that the domain continues to retain its authority.

Here's the basic gist of Chris' arguments:

1. The website - Rip Off Report - essentially earns a living through extortion of businesses based on the search results (almost like a reverse reputation management campaign).
2. Because the site ranks well at Google (Yahoo!, Live and Ask appear not to give it as much weight), companies whose profiles appear on the site must pay the owner to have the information removed or have administrative comments added that an issue was resolved or the complaint was found to be false.
3. It would appear that content creators unfamiliar with the English language, yet very familiar with keyword stuffing, create many of the negative profiles on the site (ostensibly to help them rank better in the search engines so they will have a greater negative impact on the businesses they list).
4. The site even features bizarre allegations (supposedly from a 16 year old girl) that Google's founders propositioned her and another underage girl.

Certainly, if you visit the site (which I won't link to directly), you'll note the exagerrated style and tone of the content suggests a less-than-professional organization. The site proudly claims not to investigate the comments left by its visitors, and one is forced to wonder if Rip Off Report will truly investigate once a business pays them (or whether they simply remove the listing or add their "all's well" commentary).

Beyond the ethics, I have to say that it's a fascinating business model from an SEO perspective - integrating the negative linkbait pull of trashing a business or person as a link acquisition technique, using the link weight to rank well for company names, then forcing them to pay in order to "mitigate" their bad publicity through search engines. Honestly, I'm surprised that someone like Matt Cutts hasn't taken action against the site - it would seem to fit well within his usual definition of manipulating Google.

I think more investigation of the site might be warranted - just a few quick searches led me down a fascinating tale of dodged court appearances, paranoia, default judgements and violent threats. Here's a few gems:

• The Phoenix Sun Times - The Real Rip Off Report - the reporter's meeting with ROR's owner is almost hard to believe and the number of businesses paying thousands each month (if accurate) make this one of the most profitable black/gray hat SEO concepts I've ever heard.
• Eric Goldman - Rip Off Report Gets Mixed Ruling - it would appear that the site does have the ability to operate legally, though Chris' blog post certainly suggests that the owners themselves are behind much of the content (and thus would have to answer for it). That portion of the case (suggesting that the owners created the libelous content) is still proceeding in Arizona.
• A video from Florida - WSVN on Rip-Off Report - showing fairly compelling evidence that the site does indeed extort businesses by offering to turn bad reports into positive ones for a fee.

BTW - I'm not sure why Chris didn't mention it, but as far as Google's TOS violations go, it would appear that they're also selling paid link advertising and passing link juice (the banners in the top right corners don't have nofollows).

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Measure Blog Success without Spending a Fortune

Search Marketers reach for blog style content management systems more and more these days for marketing applications. Free open source blogging software like WordPress make publishing viral content and interacting with social communities turnkey and easy. That said, measuring the success of the effort can be an expensive and daunting task. Making things more complicated, Google Analytics web stats is not always the most useful package for on-site blog metrics.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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12 Ways to Keep Your Content Hidden from the Search Engines

Posted by randfish

Here at SEOmoz, we're usually talking about how to make your content more visible to the search engines. Today, we're taking a different direction. It may seem unusual, but there are plenty of times when content on your website needs to be protected from search indexing and caching. Why?

• Privacy
  There are thousands of reasons to desire protection of your content from direct search traffic, from private correspondance to alpha products and registration or credential requirements.
• Duplicate Content Issues
  If you serve up content in multiple formats (print friendly pages, Adobe PDF versions, etc.), it's typically preferrable to have only a single version showing to the search engines.
• Keyword Cannibalization
  We've written a detailed post about how to solve keyword cannibalization, but in some cases, blocking spiders from accessing certain pages or types of pages can be valuable to help the process and ensure the most relevant and highest converting pages are ranking for the query terms.
• Extraneous Page Creation
  There are inherent problems with creating large numbers of pages with little to no content for the search engines. I've covered this before, talking about the page bloat disease and why you should eliminate extraneous pages. Si's post on PageRank also does a good job of showing why low value pages in the index might cause problems. In many cases, the best practice with purely navigation or very thin content pages is to block indexing, but allow crawling, which we'll discuss below.
• Bandwidth Consumption
  Concerns about overuse of bandwidth can inspire some site owners to block search engine activity. This can hamper search traffic unless you're cautious about how it's used, but for those extra large files that wouldn't pull in search traffic anyway, it can make good sense.

So, if you're trying to keep your material away from those pesky spiders, how do you do it? Actually, there are many, many ways. I've listed a dozen of the most popular below, but there are certainly more.

1. Robots.txt
   Possibly the simplest and most direct way to block spiders from accessing a page, the Robots.txt file resides at the root of any domain (e.g. www.nytimes.com/robots.txt) and can be used to disable spider access to pages. More details on the specifics of how to construct a robots.txt file and the elements within can be found in this Google Sitemaps blog post - Using a Robots.txt File and Ian McAnerin's Robots.txt Generator Tool can be very useful to save yourself the work of creating the file manually.
2. Meta Robots Tag
   The Meta Robots tag also enables blocking of spider access on a page level. By employing "noindex," your meta robots tag will tell search engines to keep that page's content out of the index. A useful side note - the meta robots tag can be particularly useful on pages where you'd like search engines to spider and follow the links on the page, but refrain from indexing its content - simply use the syntax - <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"> - and the engines will follow the links while excluding the content.
3. Iframes
   Sometimes, there's a certain piece of content on a webpage (or a persistent piece of content throughout a site) that you'd prefer search engines didn't see. In this event, clever use of iframes can come in handy, as the diagram below illustrates:
   
   
   The concept is simple - by using iframes, you can embed content from another URL onto any page of your choosing. By then blocking spider access to the iframe with robots.txt, you ensure that the search engines won't "see" this content on your page. Websites may do this for many reasons, including avoiding duplicate content problems, lessening the page size for search engines, lowering the number of crawlable links on a page (to help control the flow of link juice) and others.
4. Text in Images
   The major search engines still have very little capacity to read text in images (and the processing power required makes for a severe barrier). Thus, even after this post has been spidered by Google, Yahoo! and Live, the word below will have 0 results:
   
   
   Hiding content inside images isn't generally advisable, as it can be impractical for alternative devices (mobile in particular) and inaccessible to others (such as screen readers).
5. Java Applets
   As with text in images, the content inside java applets is not easily parsed by the search engines, though using them as a tool to hide text would certainly be a strange choice.
6. Forcing Form Submission
   Search engines will not submit HTML forms to attempt an access of the information retrieved from a search or submission. Thus, if you keep conten behind a forced-form submission and never link to it externally, your content will remain out of the engines (as the illustration below demonstrates)
   
   
   The problem, of course, is when content behind forms earns links outside your control, as when bloggers, journalists or researchers decide to link to the pages in your archives without your knowledge. Thus, while form submission may keep the engines at bay, I'd recommend that anything truly sensitive have additional protection (through robots.txt or meta robots, for example).
7. Login/Password Protection
   Password protection of any kind will effectively prevent any search engines from accessing content, as will any form of human-verification requirements like CAPTCHAS (the boxes that request the copying of letter/number combinations to gain access). The major engines won't try to guess passwords or bypass these systems.
8. Blocking/Cloaking by User-Agent
   At the server level, it's possible to detect user agents and restrict their access to pages or websites based on their declaration of identity. As an example, if a website detected a rogue bot called twiceler, you might double check its identity before allowing access.
9. Blocking/Cloaking by IP Address Range
   Similarly, IP addresses or ranges can be customized to block particular bots. Most of the major engines crawl from a limited number of IP ranges, making it possible to identify them and restrict access. This technique is, ironically, popular with webmasters who mistakenly assume that search engine spiders are spammers attempting to steal their content, and thus block the IP ranges to restrict access and save bandwidth.
10. URL Removal
    A secondary, post-indexing tactic, URL removal is possible at most of the major search engines through verification of your site and the use of the engines' tools. For example, Yahoo! allows you to remove URLs through their Site Explorer system, and Google offers a similar service through Webmaster Central.
11. Nofollow Tag
    Just barely more useful than the twelfth method listed here, using nofollow techinically tells the engines to ignore a particular link. However, as we've shown with several of the other methods, problems can arise if external links point to the URLs in question, exposing them to search engines. My personal recommendation is never to use the nofollow tag as a method to keep spiders away from content - the liklihood is too high that they'll find another way in.
12. Writing in Pig Latin
    It may come as a surprise to learn that none of the major engines have a Pig Latin translator. Thus, if you'd like to keep some of your content from being seen in a search query, simply encode and publish :) For example, try searching for the English version of the following phrase and you'll see no results "Elcomeway otay Eomozsay Istermay Orgelsprockenmay!" (at least, until someone translates it in the comments below).

Hopefully these tactics can help you understand the best ways to hide content from the engines effectively. As always, feel free to chime in with comments, questions or opinions.

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Experienced InHouse SEM Getting the Big Bucks

SEMPO published an interesting report about average salaries for inhouse search marketers, with experienced SEMs getting mid-to-high $100,000 salaries, as reported in SEW SearchDay.

The SEMPO report said that mid-to-high $100K to the $200K salaries usually go to those with 5-7 years’ experience. The survey the report came from was a "cross-section of global entry-level, mid- and upper-level in-house managers and in-house analysts completed the online survey during the fall of 2007," SEMPO noted.

The actual report can be read here.

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Search Marketing "Resolutions" for 2008, Part 2

We've collected more New Years resolutions from search engine marketers, sharing their priorities and plans for 2008.

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Google Pet Video, LOLCats and SES New York Mystery

If you're a Matt Cutts Gadgets Google and SEO blog reader, you know the feline Amy Cutts, his pet video co-star. To see her, click here.

To get SEW Expert Eric Enge's description of Amy and the vid, click here.

Sure, Amy can act, but can she learn search marketing?

At SES New York, apparently Amy can in this mystery Super Session.

Search for LOLCats?

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Four Ways to Enforce Your Copyright: What to Do When Your Online Content Is Being Stolen

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

It's just another manic Monday at the Mozzplex. You know what that means. Legal Monday!

One of the most common problems facing anyone who publishes content online is copyright infringement. It's happened to me. It's happened to you. And it'll probably happen to this post too. (Oh, the irony!)

What can you do when your copyright is being infringed? Don't get sad. Get letter-writing mad!

There are four ways to stop someone from stealing your content. Before we dive into each of those methods, I want to preemptively address some caveats, complicating factors, and limitations of the "four methods" approach.

1. Make sure the website is actually unlawfully infringing your copyright and not making "fair use" of your content. You won't make any friends if you're throwing around unfounded nastygrams and issuing unwarranted DMCA take-down notices. The people at Chillingeffects.org will certainly not be pleased. Also, there is a possibility that you could be forced to pay attorneys' fees and costs to the website if you send an improper DMCA Take-Down Notice.
   
2. Many of the steps below are designed to take advantage of the U.S.'s Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). Because this law is only enforceable within the U.S., some of the steps below will not be effective outside of the U.S.
3. The effectiveness of the steps below also depends heavily on the accuracy of WhoIs information. Unfortunately, bad actors sometimes do not use accurate contact information to register their domains. Thus, some of the steps below will not be possible.

Without further ado, here are Four Ways to Stop People From Stealing Your Online Content.

---

1. Contact the website owner

Always start by simply asking the website owner to remove the infringing content.

I know that this sounds naïve. In most cases the people who are scraping your site know exactly what they are doing. They are trying to make some quick cash off of your genius. Regardless, I do think it is important treat others the way you want to be treated. Thus, we have a policy at SEOmoz of notifying the website owner of the infringing content before we take any further steps. If it is an innocent infringer, then the person will take it down right away. If it’s a spam farm in Russia, then you probably won’t get any response at all.

⇒ How do I contact the website owner?

The contact information is often on the site itself. If it’s not there (another hint that you’re dealing with dark forces), then go to your preferred WhoIs service and type in the domain name. This returns all kinds of useful information for combating plagiarism. It indicates the contact information, including an email, for the site owner.

⇒ What do I do if the WhoIs information is inaccurate?

If the WhoIs information is not correct, then you can try digging for more information by using a reverse IP search. Sometimes this reveals more information than a domain search. As a last ditch effort you can send an email to webmaster@infringingsite.com.

⇒ Can I have an example of working with WhoIs information?

Let's use SEOmoz.org as an example. Suspend your disbelief and imagine for a moment that SEOmoz has ripped off some of your content. Assume further that we didn't post our contact information on the site. You could find out whom to contact by looking up SEOmoz's WhoIs information. I like to use whois.domaintools.com, but there are other WhoIs services around.

If you looked up SEOmoz.org on Whois.domaintools.com, here is what you would see after scrolling just below the fold of the page:

As you can see, our WhoIs information indicates quite clearly that the point of contact for our site is Gillian@seomoz.org. If you wanted to contact SEOmoz with complaints about content, start by sending a polite, but firm email to Gillian requesting SEOmoz to take the offending content down.

If this first method doesn’t work, then move on to method two. Again, don't be surprised if this step doesn't solve your problem. You should still go through the process of doing it. That’s manners, and ultimately good business.

Best Practice: If you get a response from the website owner and she is resisting removing the content, it may be worth considering whether you can turn the infringer into an affiliate. Since it’s your content that’s driving ad sales, you may convince the infringer to give you a share of the ad revenue.

2. Send a Take-Down Notice to the Online Service Provider (“OSP”)

The next step is to contact to the company hosting the site (aka the "online service provider" or "OSP") and ask it to disable the infringing site. The DMCA provides incentives for OSPs to disable infringing sites by offering them immunity from lawsuits if they respond quickly to take-down notices.

⇒ How Do I Find Out Who Is Hosting the Infringing Site?

In order to find the OSP, go back to your WhoIs results from Step One. Before you were looking for the contact information of the owner. Now you are looking for the server or who hosts the site. To find the OSP, scroll down until you see the “Server Data” box. Note: Not all WhoIs services provide this information so don't get frustrated if you can't find it on the page. It might not be there. In our example, I've used WhoIs.domain.tools.com which usually includes information about a site's server.

For example, take a look at the server information for SEOmoz.org:

As you can see, next to IP Location, it indicates that our server is operating out of Washington and that HopOne Internet Corporation is our Server. Now that you have found out the identity of the OSP, you still need to know how to contact the OSP.

⇒ How Do I Find the Contact Information For the OSP?

Often, you can find the OSP's contact information by searching for its website and getting the information directly from the OSP's site. For example, the fine folks at HopOne.net make it extremely easy to get a hold of them to report abuse. It's on the "contact us" page under "report abuse."

However, it won't always be so easy. Let's assume for a minute that you couldn't contact information for HopOne on its site. The  DMCA has statutory incentives to encourage OSPs to register with the U.S. Copyright office. Thus, to locate the contact information for your OSP, go to the U.S. Copyright office list of designated agents for OSPs. Look on that list under the letter "H" for Hop One.



Click on the OSP's name to view a pdf of the contact information for the OSP's designated agent. HopOne's information is below:



Now you should be able to contact the OSP.

⇒ What do I say in my letter to the OSP?

Sometimes OSPs have special instructions on their websites about the information they need from you before they take action. Generally, OSPs want to know the following:

1. You own the copyrighted material;
2. A description of the infringing material and the URL where it can be found;
3. You did not give the infringer permission to use the material;
4. You swear under penalty of perjury that all of the information contained in your letter is true and that you are acting in good faith.
5. Your contact information.

The notice should also contain either your physical or electronic signature. Here is a sample SEOmoz DMCA Take-Down Notice. If you would like other examples, take a look at the Chillingeffects.org database. They maintain a database of actual take-down notices.

Best Practice: Always keep a copy of your communications and make sure they are professional. They could end up being used as evidence in court.

⇒ What if the OSP is located outside of the U.S.?

If the OSP is located outside of the U.S., then it is not subject to the laws of the United States and has no legal imperative to take down the site. That is why a lot of questionable U.S. based companies (and companies that know they are going to be operating on the boundaries of fair use) select ‘off-shore’ OSPs.

Best Practice: Because it costs very little to do it and it is possible that the foreign jurisdiction will have a DMCA-like law of its own, always send a letter to the foreign OSP.

If Step 2 Doesn't get you anywhere, you can still contact the domain's registrar. This brings us to Step 3.

3. Send a Take-Down Notice to the Company that Registers the URL

Many registrars also disable domains that engage in copyright infringement. Thus, once you determine who it is, you can send the registrar a DMCA Take-Down Notice as well.

⇒ How Do I Find Out Who the Domain's Registrar Is?

The registrar information is also included in the WhoIs information. For example, according to the WhoIs information for SEOmoz above, our registrar is Enom.com. From Enom's website, it is easy to find their copyright infringement policy. Enom wants essentially the same information as the server  in order to suspend the infringing site's domain. Thus, you can modify your letter to serve as notice to both the hosting company and the registrar by simply addressing the notice to both parties.

If the registrar is outside of the U.S., it may not have a copyright policy. Thus, this Step might not be useful.

Don't give up yet if you haven't seen results! One of the most effective remedies is still available!

4. Send a Take-Down Notice to the Search Engines.

The final step is to notify the search engines of the infringing content so that they can scrub them out of their search results. Each search engine has a policy on where to send copyright infringement notices and what to put in it. Quite frankly, most people only trouble themselves with Google. You can find Google's Copyright Infringement Policy here. Yahoo's policy is here. Look for information about Live's policy here. The search engines need to know the same basic information as the server and the registrar above.

Often, given the difficulty in tracking down a server and registrar that is beholden to U.S. copyright laws, contacting Google is the most effective step towards protecting your online content.

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Conclusion

The great thing about each of the above steps is that they don’t necessarily require an attorney. However, if you’re getting some flack from any of the above parties, a strongly worded nastygram from an attorney with fancy letterhead may set things right.

Obviously, a lawsuit is last resort. Regardless, remember that you may be eligible for attorneys’ fees and statutory damages if your content was registered with the U.S. copyright office. For more information about registering your copyright, please read this post.

Once again, I thank you for your readership. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Very truly yours,

Sarah

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Search Marketing "Resolutions" for 2008

We've collected the New Years resolutions of several search engine marketers, sharing their priorities and plans for 2008.

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Three tips to protect your WordPress installation

Here are three easy but important ways to protect yourself if you run a WordPress blog:

1. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory. What I’ve done is lock down /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. I use an .htaccess file, which you can place directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . This is what mine looks like:
   

   AuthUserFile /dev/null
   AuthGroupFile /dev/null
   AuthName “Access Control”
   AuthType Basic
   <LIMIT GET>
   order deny,allow
   deny from all
   # whitelist home IP address
   allow from 64.233.169.99
   # whitelist work IP address
   allow from 69.147.114.210
   allow from 199.239.136.200
   # IP while in Kentucky; delete when back
   allow from 128.163.2.27
   </LIMIT>

   I’ve changed the IP addresses, but otherwise that’s what I use. This file says that the IP address 64.233.169.99 (and the other IP addresses that I’ve whitelisted) are allowed to access /wp-admin/, but all other IP addresses are denied access. Has this saved me from being hacked before? Yes.

2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file. Otherwise you leak information on which plug-ins you run. If someone wanted to hack your blog, they might be able to do it by discovering that you run an out-of-date plugin on your blog and then they could exploit that.
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ . When WordPress patches a security hole or releases a new version, they announce it on that blog. If you see a security patch released, you need to upgrade or apply the patch. You leave yourself open to being hacked if you don’t upgrade.

And here’s a bonus tip: in the header.php file for your theme, you might want to check for a line like

<meta name=â€?generatorâ€? content=â€?WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>â€? /> <!-â€" leave this for stats please -->


I’d just go ahead and delete that line or at least the bloginfo(’version’). If you’re running an older version of WordPress, anyone can view source to see what attacks might work against your blog.

Hat tip to Reuben Yau and Shoe.

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Everything Is Judged By Its Cover: Classified Ads and "Title Tags"

Posted by Jane Copland

Every time I research something using classified sites, I'm surprised at two things: Firstly, very few people understand the first rule about writing what amounts to title tags, which is getting people to click on the link. Secondly, it surprises me that even though I know some of the ads might contain great content, I rarely click on ads that are badly worded. Surely I've been doing this for long enough now to know that a horribly-worded Craigslist ad may contain the thing I'm looking for! As it turns out, I'm as fickle as every other Internet user who judges ads by their covers.

I'm looking for a new place to live today. When I moved into this apartment, the rent was relatively low and although it's not stellar, it's better than my old one. However, the management company have upped the rent incrementally until it occurred to me that I should be living in palace by now. In typical Internet fashion, I went straight to Craigslist to find my next residence.

I find everything on Craigslist, including every place I've ever lived, and this job. I love the site's bland, simplistic layout. There are no distractions or confusions and there is no chance of a page taking more than a fraction of a second to load. There is a lot of clutter and junk listed on the site's white pages, but there are gems hidden in there as well. When I was looking for a job, I searched through hundreds of ads with titles like, "Junior copywriter in Kent WA", "Asst. Editor Downtown Seattle", "Writer / Editor Needed" and "Entry-level Coffee Machine Assistant." A listing with the title, "Do You Use Your Powers for Good... Or for Awesome?" was far more intriguing. As a fun piece of trivia, I submitted cover letters and resumes to at least thirty places and SEOmoz was the only company who called me back. When I returned from Pubcon Las Vegas in mid-November 2006, I found a letter in my mailbox from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, telling me how they weren't going to hire me. I'd submitted my resume to them in August. Old media is hilarious.

Today, the badly worded residential ads are not getting my clicks. There are just so many of them and I've developed a pretty good method of sorting through the mess. First, I look for location. I'm pretty well-versed in the geography of the Seattle area and I can tell if a location fits my needs. If there is no location specified, I don't want to click on the ad. I know I should take a look: the listing could be perfect and I'd have missed a fantastic opportunity. Sometimes, I make myself take a look, but I guarantee that most people have a good idea as to where in the city they'd like to live. They are probably also hesitant to waste time on listings that mightn't be in their desired locations.

Secondly, I look at the rent. Most people are smart enough to include the cost of rent in their ad. A small number don't. After that, I'll look at the description. Too many words in all-caps and too many exclamation points turn me away very quickly, but that's quite an obvious turn-off. The more subtle things that make my eyes skip to the next listing are a lack of a good description of what makes the house or apartment interesting; however, an incredibly dull ad doesn't attract me, either. I want to see some of the place's features (such as number of rooms), combined with a good reason why I'd like to live there (fantastic view!).

 

I don't know what goes through people's heads when they think it's a good idea to advertise their property as the one that "finally allows pets." I'd already narrowed my search to include places that welcomed dogs; the list is still incredibly long. That seems a bit like advertising your social networking site as one that "finally allows you to upload a profile picture."

Similarly, I'm rather horrified by the "Love, Kisses, Teddy Cody warming Bear @ Hunt Club" listing. Someone please tell me what on earth that means. Clicking through to the listing itself doesn't enlighten me as to what constitutes a Teddy Cody warming Bear. Even Google doesn't know.

People stand to make a lot of money out of rental properties, especially in a city like Seattle. I'll be handing over lots of money to the landlord or company whose apartment, townhouse or condo I choose to rent. Listing after listing loses business because of carelessly worded entries. While I clicked on just about every listing when I was looking for a job, I can be a bit more choosy with my search for housing. Admittedly, SEOmoz takes a bit of a risk when we post "inventive" job openings, because we get quite a few applications from people who seem to think we aren't particularly serious about our job requirements, simply because of our creative "title tag." However, we definitely make sure that our ads don't go unnoticed and don't get skipped over.

Craigslist is no different to a search engine when someone is using it in the way I am, aside from the fact that listing are ordered according to time. Perhaps it is more like a blog search, as ordered by date. A lot of what we know about attracting attention within search engine results pages applies to classified ads and I'm surprised that more people haven't thought of their all-important CTR when advertising their properties, products, services and job openings.

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SEMMYS Awards - Best Posts in Search Engine Marketing

Matt McGee has spent a lot of time and effort to build a pretty cool awards program for the best posts in search engine marketing - the SEMMY’s. I’m honored to be a part of it, and can only hope that one day we’ll have an awesome black tie, red carpet event to commemorate the greatness of our industry. I will be judging the Small Business category along with Andrew Shotland and Rae Hoffman.

I’m honored to be a nominee in several categories as well (including my favorite - the rant category).

Once 3-6 finalists in each category are selected, then they will be posted to the SEMMY site Friday January 18th for open public voting to decide the winners.

The 25 Judges

• Aaron Wall
• Andrew Shotland
• Andy Beal
• Andy Beard
• Barry Schwartz
• Bill Slawski
• Brad Geddes
• Chris Winfield
• Christine Churchill
• David Mihm
• Deb Mastaler
• Eric Enge
• Jeff Quipp
• Jennifer Laycock
• John Andrews
• Lee Odden
• Lisa Barone
• Logoworks
• Loren Baker
• Matt McGee
• Michael Gray
• Rand Fishkin
• Simon Heseltine
• Stoney deGeyter
• Sugarrae
• Tamar Weinberg
• Todd Malicoat
• Vanessa Fox

Thanks to Andy Beard for the list

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SEW Experts: How To Use Google Site Exclusion Tool to Increase ROI

All Google AdWords content campaigns have dead wood. Google Content Network sites that display your ads but deliver few clicks or conversions rob you of profits. In today's Content Advertising column, "How To Use Google Site Exclusion Tool to Increase ROI," David Szetela shows you how to use Google's Site Exclusion to increase ROI.

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How to subscribe to just my Google/SEO posts

I’ve got some pent-up techie/gadget blogging in me, and I know that not everyone wants to read that. I’ve mentioned before how to get just my Google/SEO posts, but I’ll repeat in case you didn’t see it the first time.

The short answer is to subscribe to

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/feed/

instead of my main blog feed at

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feed/

This trick works with any category, so you could (for example) subscribe to my Movies/Videos category by clicking on the “Movies/Videos” category over on the right-hand side of my blog and then adding “feed” to get http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/movies/feed/ . (This trick works with lots of WordPress blogs, by the way. Ain’t WordPress great?)

Now that you know how to get only the SEO/Google posts, I refuse to be guilt-tripped about doing some non-SEO posts, especially when my top-two traffic posts in 2007 were geek/Linux/iPhone posts instead of SEO posts.

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Google Gives Me Special Treatment

Posted by rebecca

I don't know if you're aware of this, but I get special perks for working for SEOmoz. For example, I get to park my sweet '91 Passat station wagon in one of the building's parking spaces while the rest of my coworkers have to park in the lot across the street. Also, I flash the company card at lunch when it's time to pay for that hefty $45 tab. Yeah, it's pretty sweet to get special treatment for being a mozzer, and lately Google has caught onto this for it, too, has given me the hook up.

Recently I've been meaning to study up and become a Certified Adwords Professional. I logged in to receive more details:



When I logged in, I received this message:



That's right. And I didn't have to study or nothin'.

(FYI, this post is facetiously written and the above screenshot was an error on Google's part. I contacted Google about it and yes, I have to take the test to be certified like everyone else.)

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Q&A with Nick Carr, Author of The Big Switch

Author and SES London keynote speaker Nick Carr says that cheap computing, like cheap electric power did 100 years ago, cheap computing power is revolutionizing the way we do business.

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Not Just Link Ninjas…Internet Marketing Ninjas Training- Why YOU should pay the $3k for SEO SEM Training

I’ve been procrastinating far too long on this post - and unfortunately, it’s going to come out a bit rushed. Part of the reason for that, it’s hard to justify the ROI on blogging now because I actually WORK on projects that make me money, instead of just writing about how smart I am. While I miss blogging often quite a bit sometimes (it’s really fun to write about things you enjoy), I really like making money on fun and profitable projects a whole lot more. One of the best testimonials I can give for Jim Boykin and the Internet Marketing Ninjas Program (*yes, this is an affiliate link - please see below) is that after studying with him in the Ninja dojo in Troy, NY - I was much better equipped to work on the projects that I do now. The time I spent in the dojo has given me a skillset to earn an income for my lifetime. $3k is a WHOLE lot cheaper than the hundred thousand or so I dropped on college and business school. I’m not saying that IMN is the ONLY thing you’re going to need to make a boatload of cash, but it is at least worth a freshman and sophomore year at a MUCH cheaper price. There IS no college for this stuff - only the ninja underground.

The number one reason why this program is worth it - the TOOLS. These tools make me drool. These Tools are SICK. I could tell you about them here, but just go play with them. Many were in house tools that I LOVED while at WBP. Jim’s proficiency for writing incredible seo tools is part of what brought me to We Build Pages in the first place when I worked there. In addition to the tools, you get videos from some of the best in the business. I could probably carry on here for quite a while, but you can read all the promotional sales copy on the site. Having been a part of the program from the onset - and receiving no compensation UNLESS you signup through my link - I can unequivocally say that this is worth it. I know they will only continue to add incredible information to the program.

*while I don’t often use affiliate links on my site - it is pretty foolish not too. I would definitely suggest this program whether I get a cut on it or not - because the program and tools are definitely worth it. I also have an additional $500 off coupon - if you’re interested, drop me an email, and I’ll send over the code (not allowed to be published online).

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Facebook: Not Where To Search For All Lost Buddies

During last night’s 60 Minutes segment on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg set up Lesley Stahl’s profile -- and an old colleague reached out quickly to her delight. Thus one of the major benefits cited was finding all your lost buddies or colleagues.

Yet I don’t believe that people-search is the key strength of Facebook, until critical mass is reached. This has happened for College students, because Facebook’s the place where you literally declare your existence on campus. However business people are still joining up -- and you can actually find more people (and their news) through Google or LinkedIn instead.

As a contender to Google, there are other advantages worth noting about Facebook. The segment mentioned that staying in touch is a main differentiator. Other types of connections can be made here, by learning about and joining other groups/affiliations you discover through friends. You also can meet friends-of-friends with common interests, and expand your social network. Plus it really doesn’t take very much time or effort to check into the network.

The fact that social networking has become mainstream news is significant -- whether on Facebook, MySpace or other social sites. To me, social networking is already valuable but searching elements remain more rudimentary at this stage. I’m expecting more over time.

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Is the AdWords Competitor-bidding Party Over?

1-800-Contacts is trying to force a legal ruling that could put a chill on the widespread practice of PPC advertisers bidding on competitors' trademarks.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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Highlights from the SEW Blog: January 7-11, 2008

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

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Whiteboard Friday - Content Categorization for SEO

Posted by great scott!

This week, Rand discusses various methods of Content Categorization. Placing some time and effort into your info architecture can make a huge difference in both rankings and user experience. As we've said many, many times, a flat site architecture (four clicks max!) is one of the keys to getting spidered and indexed properly.  Perhaps more importantly, a well-planned content layout will better enable you to control the flow of internal link juice, thereby helping to avoid keyword cannibalization and make sure your strongest pages rank for your highest value keywords.

We had a little fun with this video, hopefully you'll find our antics amusing.

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Formatting USB hard drives for Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon)

Recently my home Network Attached Storage (NAS) started acting flaky, so I wanted to back up my data. I picked up a 750 gigabyte Seagate Free Agent Pro drive. Here’s how I fixed a couple annoyances:

1. The drive is formatted with ntfs.

That’s great for Windows computers, but I preferred to format into a native Linux filesystem like ext3 or ext2. Rather than typing commands like mk2efs myself, I installed a wonderful utility called gparted. GParted lets you format and partition hard drives. Type the following:

sudo apt-get install gparted
sudo gparted

GParted is pretty intuitive. If you’ve just plugged your drive into the computer, unmount the drive by selecting the external drive (under GParted->Devices) and then doing Partition->Unmount. Then make sure the correct drive is selected (under GParted->Devices again). Once the right device is selected, click on the partition you want to format and select Partition->Format to . I recommend “ext3″ because it’s a very stable file system. Finally, click “Apply” on the menu bar and just wait 3-4 minutes. GParted will do all the formatting for you.

2. Give the partition a label

It’s nice if you plug in an external hard drive and you see something more descriptive than “disk” or “usbdisk”. If you formatted the drive as ext3 in step 1, you can use e2label (from the e2fsprogs set of utilities) to give your drive a persistent name. Each time you plug in that drive, you’ll see the same label for that drive. Attach the USB drive to the computer and use the “mount” command to identify the partition to add a label to. Normally you’ll see something like “/media/disk” mapping to a device like “/dev/sdX” where X is a letter like a, b, or c. Suppose the disk partition that you want to label is /dev/sdf1 and you want to call the hard drive “M1″. Here’s how to do it:

mount
sudo apt-get install e2fsprogs
sudo e2label /dev/sdf1
sudo e2label /dev/sdf1 “M1″
sudo e2label /dev/sdf1

The command “sudo e2label /dev/sdf1″ will query /dev/sdf1 to see what label it has. If there is no label, you will get back a blank line. The above command makes the label be “M1″. The final command reads the label back. If everything worked correctly, the final command should return the word “M1″. I’d stick with a short and simple label (under 16 characters, and nothing fancy schmancy like punctuation/spaces).

3. The Seagate Free Agent Pro drive can spin down under Linux when you don’t want it to.

There’s a setting in the hard drive that you can easily modify with the “sdparm” program. Install sdparm with “sudo apt-get install sdparm”. Then imagine that your device is /dev/sdX (again, X will normally be a letter like ‘b’ or ‘c’). Here’s what I typed to see the setting and modify it:

mount
sdparm -al /dev/sdX
sudo sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX
sdparm -al /dev/sdX


You should see a line that looks like “STANDBY 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1] Standby timer active” change to “STANDBY 0 [cha: n, def: 1, sav: 0] Standby timer active“. If the drive has already spun down, you can unplug it, reboot everything, and plug it back in. Or the handy command “sudo sdparm --command=start /dev/sdX” might also wake it up.

The “-6″ is a fallback for some older types of drives and I think it’s pretty safe to include on sdparm commands.

Further reading on how the Seagate Free Agent Pro spins down:
http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/0651200

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Google Conversion Optimizer Out of Beta

Google has expanded its Conversion Optimizer bid management feature to make it available to all advertisers whose campaigns have enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking and accrued at least 200 conversions in the past 30 days.

Advertisers specify a maximum CPA bid, and then the tool will use historical information about the campaign to automatically generate an optimal CPC bid for each auction. Advertisers still pay per click, but no longer have to manually adjust their bids to reach CPA goals. The product launched in beta in September.

There are some limitations to campaigns using Conversion Optimizer. According to the AdWords Help Center, the features that are not compatible with Conversion Optimizer include position preference, budget optimizer, placement targeting, advanced ad scheduling, preferred cost bidding, and separate content bids. Also, Conversion Optimizer campaigns may not be modified using the AdWords Editor or the AdWords API.

For campaigns meeting these criteria, the product can be a real time-saver, doing the heavy lifting to ensure ads are shown when they are most likely to convert. Conversion Optimizer takes into account factors like the conversion history of a given search query, location of the user, and conversion history of particular sites in the Content Network.

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The Secret Value of Attending Conferences - and Why SMX West is a Must-Attend

Posted by randfish

I know how tough it can be to justify the expense of attending an industry conference. I also know how easy it can be :) In the world of search marketing, ROI is often based on traffic and conversions (or page views if advertising is the primary revenue model) and despite the fact that attending a conference won't always bring you tons of traffic and conversions (at least not directly), there's far more value to them than most managers, or even attendees realize.

1. Hiring & Scouting
   You may not even realize you're doing it, but at every conference, you're meeting potential employees, co-workers, clients and business partners. This is different from the standard "networking," which for many has lost its appeal due to a lack of obvious value. The hiring & scouting that you conduct at conferences doesn't require any face-to-face interaction - you can do it purely observationally. When I attend conferences nowadays, I'm always keeping an eye open for talent - not just for myself, but of any kind whatsoever. Knowing who the brilliant minds on any given topic are has infinite benefits as a business owner AND an employee.
2. Competitive Analysis
   There's no environment like a conference to check out your competitors (direct and indirect) and learn the ins and outs of their success. I can't tell you how many people openly share their traffic stats, marketing tactics and business plans - I know I personally do it all the time (though I'm also prone to doing so on this blog, which is considerably rarer in the business world). Even if you don't directly interrogate your competitors, simply attending site clinics and panels (especially for Q+A, when folks bring up their specific sites) will give you a wealth of insight.
3. Tactical Brainstorming
   I often hear folks complain that they didn't get much out of a particular speaker or session, but the beauty of conferences is that if you approach them with the right mindset, you don't need to learn something earth-shattering in the seminars to come away a winner (not that it doesn't help, and as speakers, we certainly try to make sure you do). The trick is to use the time you're at the conference to think about your business and your website and apply everything you hear to the creative brainstorming process. For every trick that you've seen a dozen times on blogs or forums, heraing it again in context can trigger the creative spark you need to have a brilliant application for it. I've found that time and again, I'll hear speakers or audience members or participate in conversations and lie awake that night jam-packed with new ideas (some that don't even correspond remotely to the concepts discussed that day). Conferences are a brainstorming paradise and a terrific opportunity for new ideas to come bubbling to the surface.
4. Elevator Pitch Testing
   No matter what you do and who you do it for, you need to have an elevator pitch and there's no testing ground like a conference to refine and perfect it. Whether you're selling something or just yourself, you'll be asked dozens of times every day - "what do you do?" The next 20 seconds is a golden opportunity to shine and if you can perfect your technique and shine every time, the future will be assuredly bright.
5. Goal Setting & Self Analysis
   There is perhaps, no better time or place for a marketer or business person to do a little introspective thinking than on the plane ride back from a conference. You've seen the competition, the speakers, the industry luminaries, the trade show booths and the backroom deals and now you can being to look inward and identify the traits about yourself that are valuable, those that need improvement and where to go from here. If you've been lost and can't see the forest for the trees, the conference is your chance to float 1,000 feet above the canopy and really examine what you've built and how it fits into the broader ecosphere.
6. One Good Tip = Incredible ROI
   Finally, from a pure SEO perspective, learning the right tip or how to apply a piece of knowledge in the right way could save you thousands or even bring you millions. I've seen and participated in so many examples where a business owner or in-house marketer suddenly awoke from a fog of ignorance on a specific topic and was able to apply that singular tactic to the tune of untold new revenue. I think those are my favorite emails - the ones that start "Rand, it was great meeting you at SMX Advanced - I took your advice and we've seen our traffic double in the last week and a half. I'm up for a promotion next month and I think, thanks to your advice, I'm sure to get it!" I promise you that if I'm getting a couple of these, Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman must get hundreds. That's the beauty of SEO - once you realize that your menu wasn't spiderable or your content was in iFrames, you can clean it up to the tune of drastic improvement.

So why SMX West? What's so amazing about that show - actually, a lot. It's the first big show from the SMX conference series and the organizers are going all out to make it the best conference experience possible. That means:

• Great Food - if you've been to SMX Advanced, Social or Stockholm (mmm... Stockholm - just thinking about it makes me hungry), you know that SMX really prides themselves on making sure you're well nourished and well cared-for.
• Great People - with Danny Sullivan, Vanessa Fox & Chris Sherman choosing the speakers, you're getting the very best of the best. I had heard that there were more than 50 applications for some of the panels, so you can be assured that the cream of the crop is going to be contributing. That doesn't just mean better content, it also means better presentations and better
• New Sessions - SMX has seriously re-programmed the lineup for SMX West, taking advantage of many new trends in the industry and also re-formulating some of the old standards. This forces speakers to bring new material and high quality stuff as well - if anyone gives a presentation you've seen before, I'll make sure to have Rebecca crucify them in the coverage :)
• The Right Timing - Not only is February a month when most of us northerners desperately need some sun, it's also a perfect break from work - and a time when no other holidays or deadlines are looming (tax season's months away & New Year's is far behind)
• The Right Length - I know Danny debated furiously with himself before deciding on three days and I think it's the perfect decision. Four day conferences are just barely too much and two day shows feel a little too insubstantial (at least when they're not on a singular, specific topic).
• The Right Location - Silicon Valley is the hub for search activity in the world and by having the show there, SMX is ensuring that a ton of great minds from VCs to founders to engineers to product managers and search marketing luminaries will all be in attendance. That, and it's sunny and warm, which sounds so nice compared to the usual February/March trek to New York (not that I don't love New York).
• Holy Crap; They Have Free WiFi! - Yep, the conference actually features completely free wifi (that works) for all the attendees. I know because SEOmoz is sponsoring it :)
• Built-in After-Hours Parties - Although they have yet to be announced, my understanding is that there will be events that everyone can attend, every night of the show.
• Breakthrough Content from Everyone - Chris & Danny have built up a lot of terrific relationships over their 12+ years in the industry (each) and now, they get to call on many of their friends and contacts at the engines, from startups (Louis Monier from Cuill sounds like he may actually have something truly revolutionary in search - unlike Mahalo or Wikia), in companies and independents to help give back. I have very high expectations.

Am I biased? Yeah, somewhat - Danny, Chris, Michelle, Karen (& other Chris) aren't just people I respect and work with; they're friends. Does that make any of this less true - no. I believe you'll be truly impressed by what SMX West has in store.

BTW - I'm telling you this now, because there's only 2 more days to get $400 off the $1,595 registration fee. All the registration information is here - SMX West Registration. You'll also note that you can get a hefty discount on SEOmoz premium membership

FULL DISCLOSURE: No! We don't make any money if you attend SMX West and those aren't affiliate links. However, SEOmoz does have a partnership with Third Door Media for which we run banners for their shows and offer discounts to our premium members (20% off the already discounted early bird rate - which means you only pay $956 to attend!). We're also running a booth at SMX West, which is our first time doing so - more on that in a future blog post :)

Also - apologies in advance for the somewhat promotional nature of the latter half of this post. I'm honestly just really excited about the show and hope that everyone in the industry turns out for it. That, and I really want to see SMX do well - I think they deserve it. So go register!

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How to dynamically adjust an iframe’s height

Suppose you want to include a child iframe on your page. You’d like to resize the height of the child iframe so that it doesn’t show a scrollbar. That is, you want something that looks like this:

Here’s one way you can do it. First, make the iframe that you want to include. I made a file “child-frame.html” that looks like this:

<html>
<head> <title>Child frame</title> </head>
<body bgcolor=”#000000″>

<font color=”#ffffff”>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
<p>Child frame.</p>
</font>

</body>
</html>

Now in the parent frame, you can make code like this:

<html>
<head> <title>Parent frame</title> </head>

<body onload=”resizeFrame(document.getElementById(’childframe’))” bgcolor=”#cccccc”>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
// Firefox worked fine. Internet Explorer shows scrollbar because of frameborder
function resizeFrame(f) {
f.style.height = f.contentWindow.document.body.scrollHeight + “px”;
}
</script>

<p>Parent frame.</p>
<p>Parent frame.</p>
<p>Parent frame.</p>
<p>Parent frame.</p>

<p>
<iframe frameborder=0 border=0 src=”./child-frame.html” name=”childframe” id=”childframe”>
</iframe>
</p>

</body>
</html>

You can also see a live example of resizing an iframe height dynamically.

What does this code do? When the body of the parent frame loads, it looks up the document element “childframe” which corresponds to the iframe. Then the page calls a function resizeFrame(). The function sets the height of the frame to be the scrollHeight, which effectively removes the scrollbar.

The only tricky bit is the “frameborder=0 border=0″ attributes on the frame. If you leave off the frameborder attribute, Internet Explorer will assume that the frame should have a nonzero border, but it won’t include the frame border in the value it returns for scrollHeight. The net effect is that IE will show a scrollbar unless you add “frameborder=0″.

It always annoys me to dive into cross-browser development when it feels like things should be standardized. Looks like it annoys other people too.

Anyway, feel free to rip on my code in the comments, but I was looking for a simple, working example of setting an iframe’s height so that the iframe wouldn’t have a scrollbar.

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It's Gonna Blow! The Critical Mass of Web 2.0

Posted by Jane Copland

Initially, I was going to wade through all of the nominations for 2008's Web 2.0 Awards (last year's results here) before writing about them. Currently, I've only made it through two thirds of the entrants and I can't take any more, at least for a little while. Over a year ago, people were predicting the imminent death of "web 2.0" companies and yet the companies soldiered on. I do not think that I have become all that much more cynical in the past twelve months, but I now simply cannot see many of these websites lasting for very much longer. Over the past two days, I have looked at literally hundreds of websites that do absolutely nothing.

Not all of the nominations have made me want to put down my coffee mug and smash my face against the keyboard: there have been some absolute gems in there as well. However, my patience has worn incredibly thin after two days of playing with hopelessly badly-designed websites and reading the drivel that currently passes for business plans. Something that should be enjoyable - investigating innovative online startups - has become an exercise in trying not to cringe so hard that I give myself a headache. Where does the money come from to sustain a business based upon badly copying a theme that has been done so many times before?

Of course, I am not talking about Flickr, Upcoming, Yelp, Last.fm or Zoho. I'm not citing any of those smart, well-designed, useful services, or their smart, well-designed, useful competitors. What I've been faced with in the last forty-eight hours are their painful copies. The most painful are those that attempt to copy Ning, "allowing users to create their own social networks." I have lost count of how many sites I've seen that want us to create our own social network on their hallowed servers. The only conclusion I can draw is that these companies can't create anything worthwhile, but know enough web development (but only just) to create a platform so that other people can create content for them. While all sites that include user participation stand to profit off the contribution of others, I've been simply astounded at how many of these sites provide virtually nothing other than a way for the public to build up the companies' link profiles and PageRanks.

How they do this is pretty simple. These sites have acquired funding using the hot air that keeps the web 2.0 bubble full and floating. You've seen the words they use; most of us were rolling our eyes at terms like "creating synergy" a long time ago. Now, every second sentence looks like a massive cliché. The latest phrase that makes me want to start drinking whiskey at work is "allows users." Every second nomination has been telling me the incredible things it "allows users" to do. One of them allows users to submit menus! Christ, imagine that! Another is very excited about how it "allows users to define the important information they need, while on the go!" I've probably used the phrase in the past to describe the functions of a website. I'll never use it again. To me, it now reeks of the tired and the overused.

I don't understand how people can create and promote these sites with straight faces. Social news sites - both niche and generic - pile up on top of each other, each "story" sitting dormant with one vote. Social networks boast their "featured profiles", most of which have no picture, no personal information and whose owners will never visit the site again. Every tagging and bookmarking site is astounded by its own ingenuity, as it studiously does the same things as its peers. Scores of websites want to hear your travel stories, see your videos and know which music you like to hear. Visiting some of these domains is like looking at the empty main street of a boring town.

We made jokes about rounded corners over a year ago, but it seems that people still believe that if their site looks like an iPod, it will be an unbridled success.

In addition to the fantastic finds and the abysmal failures, I have come across a few sites that have interested me. What is problematic is that most of the "interesting" sites caught my attention for the wrong reasons. FoxiFly, which promised to let me "see which of my friends are online, chat to them through my browser and see where they are browsing around the web at the moment" managed to put the fear of teh internetz into me by making me think that it already knew who I was, let alone which websites my friends were looking at.

How damn web 2.0 is that? FoxiFly looks like it's setting up to ask me out! I always knew the Internet was creepy, but that's quite the application. Half a second later, I re-realised how much I dislike having the name that people pick when they stop to think of "the most generic name I can possibly imagine."

I assume that FoxiFly has a following of some sort and that people actually use the service, but the idea that my friends should know which sites I'm looking at doesn't appeal to me. In regards to their other web-based applications, I already have instant messengers and a telephone. I'm quite sure that I could get in touch with almost everyone I know at any time of the day without this site. FoxiFly promises to let me check multiple email accounts from anywhere on the web... which is exactly the system I already have, using Gmail and Gtalk. As an aside, these sites that promise to let us do things "from anywhere on the web" apparently have not yet discovered that Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus most browsers, now support tabs, whereby we can have our email accounts open while we're out there in the tubes. I already have very efficient versions of most of its other features as well, such as bookmarking, content aggregation and social browsing.

The site, which is actually pretty great in terms of what I've been looking at, promises to let me spy on my friends' Internet activity, add yet another instant messaging application to list instant messaging applications I've been amassing since 1999, check my emails in more than one window and have my friends know when I'm snooping the Livejournal page of a girl I knew when I was 18 and no longer like. So basically, it combines redundancy with epic undesirability. This holds true across the board of so many web 2.0 sites: even if they're well-developed, the vast majority of their functions are useless.

Given that I am reviewing sites for a set of awards, there was another thing that occurred to me today: when you're submitting your site for an award, it's not a good move to piss off the person who reviews submissions. Probably aiming to copy a young Facebook, U of Info bills itself as a "free informational website designed for college students." The site asks you to enter your school in order to gain access. Still wielding a university email address, I begin typing the name of my college. Things go well for about ten characters.

Then they come to a grinding halt.

As it turns out, the site doesn't work for schools that are in its database, either. Inserting acceptable email addresses brought me to that generic 404 page which handily suggests I may be the owner of the website and have uploaded my site incorrectly.

Two examples of weird, broken or pointless websites. Reduce the quality and multiple that by one-hundred and fifty and you'll see why I'm having a tough time retaining my composure.

Acknowledging the irony of this next section, I have an announcement to make: The deadline for submitting sites to the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards is this Friday. As I say above, buried within the caffeine-fueled rage, I've come across a couple of really awesome websites during the last two days. I implore you all to add to the "best of" list, rather than create for me some more misery. Once I'm done with the nominations list, I'll be seriously trawling the net for these good sites (as will Danny: I love assigning tasks to the intern). Do let us know which sites you guys think are deserving of recognition!

To end this fun, I present you with a quiz. Below are five descriptions of web 2.0 sites. Four of the options are slight modifications of real websites' descriptions. The modifications simply cut out factors that would identify the site in question. One of the descriptions, I made up five minutes ago in an attempt to create a nasty web 2.0 cliché. Please don't cheat. That way, it's more fun for everyone. See if you can pick which one is mine!

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Ask Shuffles Management

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com since April 2006, has left the company to serve as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm.

Lanzone will be replaced by former Math.com CEO Jim Safka, who has been leading IAC's venture capital arm, Primal Ventures, since April. He will retain that role as well.

Lanzone had been VP of product management at Ask.com since 2001, and was promoted to CEO in 2006 when previous CEO Steve Berkowitz jumped ship to join Microsoft.

Ask.com also named a new president, Scott Garell. Since 2005, Garell has been CEO of IAC's consumer applications and portals business, which includes Fun Web Products, IAC's portals, Evite and Pronto. He joined IAC Search & Media in April 2004 as SVP of marketing. He's also served as EVP of domestic sites and search, where he managed Ask.com, iWon, and My Way. John Park will replace Garell as president of IAC Consumer Applications and Portals.

Ask parent IAC is in the midst of splitting into five separate companies.

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What's Next for Terry Semel?

When Terry Semel joined Yahoo as chairman and CEO in May 2001, he left behind the investment firm he started, Windsor Media. According to a report from paidContent.org, Semel is reviving that company, after losing his job as CEO in June 2007. Semel still sits on Yahoo's board of directors as non-executive chairman.

He's reportedly taking a couple of Yahoo execs with him: Drew Buckley, who headed Yahoo Originals, and Jeff Karish, head of media strategy. It remains to be seen how Windsor Media will take shape, either as an investment firm or media company.

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Problems with Web Survey Design & An Example from the SEJournal Blog Awards

Posted by randfish

I love SearchEngineJournal's Annual Awards. I think it's terrific that even a small community like search marketing can have its own mini-version of the Oscars each year :) It's fun, it builds friendly competition and it inspires those of us who compete to work harder and earn our keep.

However, this year I noticed some particular problems that plague many web surveys and figured it would be worthwhile to point them out. The following are some important guidelines to keep in mind while designing web-based surveys and contests.

Use a Definitive System to Establish Nominations

Some complaints at the SEJ awards centered around the nomination process, which consisted of comments posted to a blog entry. This can be avoided a number of ways, so long as a systemic, established process is worked out. For example, when Jane puts together the Web 2.0 Awards, she accepts 3-500 nominations, then runs through a few dozen lists of "Web 2.0" sites and IDs those that have an established presence, a certain level of popularity and fit the criteria.

My suggestion for SEJ might be to attempt to find all blogs that fulfill certain category-specific criteria, whether that be topical focus, subscriber size, PageRank, monthly visits, etc. SEJ could, for example set the bar for "best link building blog" to be a blog that:

• Produced at least 3 posts in each of the 12 months of 2007
• At least 30% of all blog posts were on the specific subject of link building
• Has in excess of 100 blog subscribers (according to Google or Bloglines subscriber numbers)
• Has no fewer than 5,000 external links according to Yahoo! Site Explorer (or a homepage PageRank of 4/10)

These aren't perfect criteria (just examples), but they at least create standards that would give the nomination process a more fair and even distribution. Applying this same type of systemic control to nominations for any awards or survey will produce better results in the end (and certainly end much of the complaining that plagues this type of content on the web).

Don't Ask Partisan Fans to Rate on a Sliding Scale

This was almost certainly the SEJ Awards' biggest mistake. In any kind of survey environment that asks for popularity ratings and offers an incentive for inaccuracy (favoring one blog or site over all others), the use of a sliding scale voting system is going to produce badly skewed results.

Here's an example of how SEJ's Awards were laid out:

In the above sample (which I've re-created from memory as the survey itself is no longer accessible), I've illustrated how the survey was laid out. Although participants could leave any line blank (if, for example, they had never read that blog), this wasn't clear in the initial instructions and did end up causing some confusion.

As you might imagine, this system creates the antithesis of a positive rating system, because of how partisan voters will contribute. If, for example, I wrote a post on SEOmoz asking our readers to vote for us at the awards, you might expect that rabid SEOmoz fans would see how the survey is constructed, rate SEOmoz a "5" and give all the others a "1" to help boost our chances of winning while simultaneously damaging everyone else (I've illustrated this using TropicalSEO as an example).

In the blog post on the subject of the "best SEO blog", for example, you'll see that 55 voters gave SEOmoz a score of "1," 47 gave that score to SEOBook and 27 gave a "1" to SEO By the Sea. I have a hard time believing that this many people truly felt that these sites were of such low quality (particularly SEOBook, which is consistently excellent). The more likely scenario is the one I've described above, where partisan voters wanted to help the blogs they cared about through any means possible.

As a survey designer you cannot throw up your hands and simply say "Well, the Internet's full of @ssholes." You have to become smarter than the partisan voters and create a system that finds the signal amongst the politics. A good move for this particular survey would have been to use a ranking order - forcing users to rank the blog listed in order from most to least favorite. With a system like this, little room is left to negatively influence the results:

 

In the example above, the options should ideally be randomized for each different visitor. Participants then fill in the red text areas themselves, ordering the sites from 1-8, which prevents the high-low partisan voting problem presented above.

Craft Clear, Concise, Unimpeachably Exact Questions

This is probably the hardest thing to do when creating a survey (as SEOmoz certainly learned during our SEO Quiz process). Nearly every question is going to have some room for interpretation, but by taking care and using an unhealthy degree of paranoia about potential interpretation problems, you can prevent squabbles like those taking place at Sphinn and SEJ.

For that specific example, rather than saying "Who is the Most Giving Search Blogger," I might seek to involve the criteria Loren noted into the question itself, perhaps crafting something like "Which of the Following Bloggers Provided the Most Overall Value in Posts through Research, Influence, Coverage and Openness?"

Questions, in general, should also be goal-oriented, so if the goal is to discover which blogger is most popular, the question should be framed in that way. If the goal is to find out which blogger voters think provides the best content quality overall, then a different approach (and a different question) is needed.

Don't Declare a Winner with Tiny Margins

The number of survey participants will dictate your margin of error, and in a small survey (with less than a thousand total voters), it's a given that a substantive margin of error will exist. Thus, unless you're considering the survey participants to truly be the entire universe of judges on the subject (which some contests, like the AP News College Sports Polls or the Oscars in fact, do), I would be hesitant to declare a singular winner unless you have stats showing a victory by well beyond the margin of error.

For example, In the SEJournal awards, I was given the award for "most giving blogger". While I certainly appreciate the sentiment, when I look at the voting and see that 2 other bloggers had 4 and 5 fewer votes than myself, I'd probably suggest a shared title between the top three candidates (Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz & myself).

Be Wary of Referral Sources & Biasing

Online survey software needs to be savvy, needs to track referrals and needs to map them to entries. While I strongly suspect that the voting at the SEJournal awards was actually fairly balanced, when you're building a web-based survey, being able to pull out data showing the skews based on referral source is incredibly valuable. If I were running the SEJournal awards, I think one of the most interesting numbers to see would be the votes of non-partisan referrers (e.g. those voters whose referral source to the blog post or voting page did not include any of the mentioned websites). Comparing that data to the final results might show some fairly serious skewing that one could systematically remove (by not counting votes in categories where the referring site was nominated, for example). After all, in a perfect world, the awards shouldn't be a measure of who can get the highest numbers of their readers to vote for them, but an actual measure of what the average indutry insider thinks is best.

---

Now a sharp rebuke of myself. Posting something like this after the survey's already complete is easy and it's even somewhat reprehensible. After all, if I really knew all this ahead of time, shouldn't I have alerted Loren and the SEJournal crew when the survey first launched? As is clear from this post, he responds to and accepts criticism quite well! Shame on me for my late timing. I do apologize for that. Nonetheless, I hope it's still valuable and interesting and will help everyone who's working in the realm of survey design think carefully about the process.

ADDENDUM: SEOmoz is (no surprise) launching its own survey of search marketing industry demographics (not an awards or contest) next week. Hopefully, we can take some of our own advice to heart! I've personally been working with a professional survey design company over the last month learning tons of interesting things about the process (and please realize that what I'm sharing here is only the tip of iceberg when it comes to survey design). In fact, I think the following resources might provide even greater insight for survey crafters:

• Questionairre Design & Survey Sampling - Professor Hossein Arsham from the Univ. of Baltimore offers insight into survey crafting and interpretation techniques.
• Writing Good Survey Questions: Examples - from the Berman Blog, some great advice on crafting good survey questions to minimize biases and errors.
• Violin Duel a Draw for Antique Stradivarius - although it's not a web survey, note the great care taken to produce solid results, testing blind and visible, with trained musicians and amateurs alike. Yet, even with all the evidence, no firm conclusion was drawn due to the proximity of the scores.

BTW - No insult or fault is intended towards Loren Baker, who's generous donation of time organizing and promoting the contest is fantastic (as is his sharing of the data reports, without which, this post would have been impossible to write). I'm merely trying to illustrate missteps that I myself have taken in the past, and hope that it can help to bring awareness for the future.

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight: January 11, 2008

Found in the search marketing forums: Future of YPN?; Link Exchanges and Google's Opinion; Most Improved PPC Program; and more.

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Google Inks PPC Deal with ReachLocal for SMBs

Google's local reach rarely exceeds its grasp. Google signed a new partner that raises the stakes in local search and puts IYPs on alert.

ReachLocal, a provider of local online marketing solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), will announce a strategic alliance with Google today to become an authorized reseller of Google’s AdWords PPC advertising program.

The deal gives ReachLocal a leg up on competitors in local search who won't benefit from the same status in the Google ecosystem. There's a long track record of authorized resellers of search engine advertising products succeeding in the hyper-competitve PPC channel.

While ReachLocal, like many SEMs offers customer service and AdWords account set-up, management, and optimization, the firm's competitive advantage in the marketplace is a dedicated direct sales force. Many companies in the highly-fragmented local search space -- including the search engines -- cannot market to local search prospects cost-effectively.

Small and medium-sized enterprises enabled Google AdWords to leapfrog past Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing) as the leading pay-per-click (PPC).

AdWords user-friendly interface and self-serve model gave local businesses a national platform to market their products and generate leads.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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Dell Whines About Tasting and Accuses Domain Churners of Destroying Evidence

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

Wecome to Legal Monday! I wanted to kick off 2008 by discussing an exciting, developing case on domain tasting. This case has three things that I think make for a sexy case. (1) It involves at least one well known party. (2) It exposes a cunning money-making scheme or business plan. (3) Finally, It’s obvious that this scheme should be illegal, but it’s not obvious which law is being broken.

Dell has stepped in where I-CANN and Verisign have feared to tread by filing suit against  one of the largest domain tasting networks. Dell did everything right to put itself in a good position for this lawsuit. Unfortunately, documents filed with the court last Friday, January 5, 2008 indicate that Dell may lose the case despite its efforts.

Part I of this post talks about Dell v BelgiumDomains, LLC.
Part II of this post asks a few questions about domain tasting.

Part I
Dell v. BelgiumDomains et al., 1:07-cv-22674-AJ (SD Fla. 2007)

Let’s recap the facts for those of you who haven’t been following this case over the past two months:

In the Southern District of Florida, Dell filed suit against three domain registrars, ten John Does, and a gentleman who goes by the name of JP Vasquez. Dell alleges that these defendants were involved in a domain tasting network that registered and used over sixty-four million domain names. According to John Levine and Jay Westerdal, these three registrars have been responsible for about 72.5% of the 255 million domains tasted in the past six months and have the most egregious history of domain churning.

According to Dell's Complaint filed in October 2007, the registrars acted in concert with several shell corporations scattered around exotic locations with liberal banking laws, such as the West Indies, the Caribbean, Mauritius, Panama, and Argentina. Dell cannot yet identify who owns these registrars and shell companies (hence the John Doe defendants), but it does know that Mr. JP Vasquez managed the registrars out of Florida. Like smaller scale domain-tasting rackets, the network passed around profitable domain names like a hot potato in order to take advantage of I-CANN’s five-day refund policy. If you keep passing around your domain names in an endless loop, you never have to pay for the privilege of owning and using the web addresses. Meanwhile, the profitable sites bring in pay-per click dollars. If you want more information about how the scheme works, I commend to your attention the Washington Post article outlining the facts more fully.

No One Knows Who the Man Behind the Curtain Is.

Vasquez, a man of simple means, does not appear to be the mastermind behind this international scheme. All that is certain is that the Dr. Evil orchestrating this plot must have extremely deep pockets. Keeping millions upon millions of domain names registered, even if only for brief, temporary intervals, takes substantial amounts of cash.

Dell v. BelgiumDomains, LLC et al was originally filed “under seal” (that's a term of art meaning "in secret") so that Dell could swoop in with its forensic experts, image the hard drives, and freeze the defendants' U.S. assets before they even realized they had been nailed. Dell needed this information to build its case and find out who is behind the domain-tasting network.

While Vasquez originally claimed that he would cooperate by preserving and turning over valuable evidence, it appears that Vasquez changed his mind.

Dell Accuses Defendants of Destroying Evidence

Dell filed a request for sanctions last Friday, January 5, 2008, accusing the defendants of willfully and in bad faith erasing information from nine out of twenty-two servers. Allegedly, the defendants began erasing data only three days after they were instructed by the Judge to preserve evidence and hand it over to Dell. The defendants, who had remote access to the servers, used BCWipe to permanently and selectively delete information on at least five of the servers.

Dell is Seeking a Default Order Against the Defendants for Spoliation of Evidence.

In response, Dell is asking the Court to enter a default judgment (in other words, to give them an automatic win) as punishment for spoiling the evidence. You can read the Motion for Sanctions and the supporting declarations of the forensic experts here and here.

Granting a default judgment for spoliation of evidence is an extraordinary remedy and the chances of it being granted are slim. However, the defendants’ conduct is certain to inspire rancour in the judge hearing the case. It is more likely the court will award monetary sanctions than hand Dell a freebie win.

Dell’s claims may not survive without the missing evidence. There is solid evidence that the registrars are involved. However, without proof that the registrars and the foreign shell companies were acting in concert and owned by the same person/s, Dell’s case weakens.

Dell May Encounter Collection Problems Even if the Court Grants its Request for Default Judgment.

Further, even if the Court does award a default judgment or monetary sanctions, it is not clear whether Dell will be able to collect on the judgment. Having a slip of paper signed by a judge that states someone owes you money doesn’t put the cash in your bank account. You’ve got to chase it down. Dell probably doesn’t have much of a chance of getting to Dr. Evil’s assets.

The Defendants are Seeking to Dismiss the Case, including Dell's Big-Money Trademark Counterfeit Claim.

In addition to destroying evidence, the defendants are also trying to use legal means to avoid responsibility in this case. They have requested dismissal of Dell’s claims. They claim that Dell’s claims are inapplicable and improperly pleaded. Most of Dell’s claims against the defendants are what you would expect in a domain tasting case: trademark infringement, trademark dilution, unfair business practices, etc. However, one of Dell’s claims, trademark counterfeit, is considered by many to be a novel claim that would expand the purview of trademark law. The U.S. law on trademark counterfeit can be found at 15 U.S. Section 1114(1).

Dell Has the Chance to Win Multi-Millions in Damages if the Court Allows the Counterfeit Claims to Go Forward.

Why bring in a counterfeit claim at all, you may be asking? The difference between a counterfeit claim and a regular infringement claim is hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Check out this math: If Dell proves its infringement claims, it can “win” up to $100,000 per domain. That sounds substantial, but it’s nothing compared to the damages for trademark counterfeit. If Dell proves its counterfeit claims, it can earn up to 1 million dollars per violation.

The defendants argue in their Motion to Dismiss that there is no such claim as trademark counterfeit in the domain tasting context. Hosting ads on an infringing domain name, the defendants argue, is not like selling fake Gucci bags on the street. Instead, it is a bona fide business model. The defendants claim they are offering a search service. Well, that’s one way to look at keyword advertising, I suppose.

Dell, on the other hand, argues that counterfeit is not limited to mislabeled physical products. Rather, trademark counterfeit should be defined broadly as occurring whenever a deceptive commercial practice involves an “identical or substantially indistinguishable” mark.

These are very different visions of counterfeit. It will be interesting to see whether the court will be willing to expand the law and hold that mass cyber- and typo-squatting amounts to counterfeit. There hasn't been a ruling on either the request for sanctions or the request for dismissal. I'll keep you posted as those decisions come in.

Part II
The Domain Tasting Debate

People have divergent, passionate views on domain tasting. Most people agree that registering and using web addresses that include trademark infringements or typographical errors, such as many of those in the Dell case, should be off limits. No one except Dell should be allowed toe use DellFinancialServices.com.

 However, people disagree passionately about domain tasting purely descriptive, non-infringing sites, such as icecream.com.

Domain tasting is not illegal or against I-CANN policy so long as there are no trademark issues. Regardless, some people believe that I-CANN should take immediate action to curtail domain tasting. They believe it stresses the registries’ resources and harms legitimate businesses by hoarding all of the good domain names. Further, small business owners, lacking the resources to do any medium to large scale tasting of their own, are disproportionately shut out from valuable web addresses. The big fish keep getting bigger and it doesn't trickle down from those off-shore banks.

The Public Interest Registry (PIR) that registers dot-org web addresses has eliminated free trial periods for some registrars in order to discourage domain tasting. David Marher, PIR’s Senior Vice President, told The Washington Post that PIR was “being hit by a few registrars that were tasting millions of domains but literally deleting 99.9 percent of their domains so they wouldn't have to pay for them.” PIR decided to take action because domain tasters were straining the automated systems and hoarding domain names from ‘legitimate’ users. In June 2006, PIR instituted a five cent surcharge for registrars that deleted 90% or more of their domains within the five-day grace period. The policy was successful. Almost overnight domain tasters abandoned dot-org domains.

Despite PIR’s success, there is no similar policy for companies managing other top level domains. Verisign, for example, has no current plans to institute a similar program. There is speculation that Verisign refuses to take action because it makes money off the domain tasters [gasp]. However, Verisign claims that it is waiting for ICANN to issue a universal policy for all registries. [Don't hold your breath.]

Jay Westerdal has started an excellent post listing some pros and cons of domain tasting. There is also a good thread with well-made points on both sides of the domain tasting debate at webmasterworld.com.

As always, thanks for your attention. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Very truly yours,
Sarah

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Search Marketing: A Rewarding Career Path

A new study by SEMPO of in-house search marketers finds no quick path to riches, but a solid career path.

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Data portability for your email, searches, calendar, …

Marshall over at ReadWriteWeb notes that in addition to Google, more sites are joining the Data Portability Working Group, which is cool. Data portability is a Good Thing in my book, and I’ve written about general data portability and Google before. So I left this comment:

“Check this out, LinkedIn even posted about the Data Portability issue on their blog today - wouldn’t it be great if Google did that?”

Hey Marshall, I wrote almost a year ago about all the ways that you can take your data out of Google if you want: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/not-trapping-users-data-good/

That includes your searches on Google as well, if you’ve signed up for Web History. I think Eric Schmidt’s comment in 2006 at Web 2.0 that “We would never trap user data” has been borne out. See also this great post by Google OS about backing up your data from Google: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for-your-google-account.html

Making identity portable is interesting and a Good Thing, but personally I’m more interested in making sure that I can get copies of my email, searches, calendar data, docs, feed subscriptions, etc.

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The Right Angle

Vexcom would like to welcome The Right Angle to our client list.

The Right Angle manufactures, distributes and sells home improvement products such as PVC window boxes, custom decorative cedar architectural brackets, planters and exterior shutters.

The Right Angle, Inc. is a manufacturer of affordable composite exterior shutters, window boxes, and architectural brackets made from PVC or cedar. No rot PVC exterior shutters, PVC window boxes, and PVC architectural brackets are setting the new standard in the Atlanta and national market. All of our PVC window boxes, exterior shutters, and architectural brackets are available in custom sizes.

Wikia Search Requires Your Help

After midnight on the West Coast, Wikia made its alpha search available. Our heightened interest stems from the early pronouncements by Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia. This time, his plan is to apply collaborative tools to build a better search engine than Google.

Right now, Wikia is more concept than reality. Undaunted, I conducted the classic “java� search. While the results were only about technology, there was a mini-article listing multiple meanings for java. In addition, there were people who matched this search. I clicked on a profile, and discovered a Wikia team member who had been hard at work.

After a few hours live, very few people have signed up or shared anything. You see skimpy search results, along with empty mini-article and discussion features for each search. There are few profiles, and thus almost no people who searched before you.

The overall concept is interesting, as relevant search results will ultimately come from the Wikia searchers. I’m curious about what will motivate us to slow down, and take the time to share our rankings or write down our opinions. Most of us want to search and then get over to the destinations quickly. Will that behavior change for most of us?

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My 2007 traffic stats

Time to post my stats from 2007. I did a similar stats post last year. In 2006, I had 1.7M visits and about 2.9M pageviews. In 2007, I had about 2.3M visits and 4.8M pageviews:

My top five posts in terms of traffic were:

• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/unboxing-the-everex-200-linux-computer/
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hack-your-iphone-install-applications-with-installerapp-and-apptapp/
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-googles-search/
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

My RSS subscriber stats look like this:

What else can I easily check as far as stats? I’ve done 580 posts since I started my blog with 38,990 comments, or about 67 comments per post, on average. Oh, and my browser breakdown in 2007 was 48% Firefox and 44% Internet Explorer.

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Diagrams That Can Help You Define the Proper Anchor Text of Internal Links

Posted by MariaSEO

Last month I was working on a new project, and since it wasn’t a start up project, I needed to get familiar with all of the pages and the website's architecture. On the other hand, it was necessary to select the keywords that were going to be used to optimize each page. In order to do that, I made a diagram that helped me be consistent when matching those keywords with:  internal links, anchor text, meta tags, and body text for every page that was part of the website.

Two posts from Rand helped me understand the importance of being consistent when working on internal links, anchor text, and keywords. One of those was “My Personal Opinion: 90 % of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors," and the other one was “Best Practices for Targeting Generic & Specific Terms & Phrases." If you didn’t read those, I highly recommend them.

Example and Diagram

Suppose you are working on a website that has 3 subpages (more than 3 pages were complicated to diagram on Powerpoint, so I tried to make as simple as possible). I use “KW” for the word “keyword,” and numbers to specify the different keywords.

Suppose the company sells toys (with "toys" being the most generic word for the company’s products), and the company’s website is toysabc.com. Let's say that we select 4 keywords to focus on (you certainly can work on more than 1 keyword per page, but for this example I use only 1 on each page).

• KW 1= toys (on homepage, in color blue)
• KW 2= dolls (on a subpage, in color pink)
• KW 3= balls (on another subpage, in color green)
• KW 4= games (on another subpage, in color red) 

Once you established the list of keywords to be optimized on each page:

• You can decide the URL you are going to use per each page
• You can optimize the use of those keywords on different pages on the website
• You can write down the different meta tags (meta title, meta description, H1….)
• You can optimize your body text considering those keywords
• If you have an image on the homepage, you can include the keyword on the Alt attribute of that image
• You can include internal links from the homepage to other subpages with the proper anchor text

On the body text of subpages you should include links to other pages (if they are related and relevant), and even more importantly, include the link back to the home page with the proper anchor text.

It is very important to have internal links within the body text on each page, even if they are on the navigation bar. Why? Both for user experience (usability issues) and search engine (indexing issues):

• Based on Jacob Nielsen’s usability studies, people expend considerably more time looking at the content area than looking at other sections such as the header, the right bar, and the left bar (where navigation links usually are).
• Search engines will crawl links within content, giving you the opportunity to improve the chances of all pages being indexed. On the other hand, you have the power of assigning the anchor text that you consider best for each page, which for inbound links is very difficult to achieve because in most cases, you don’t have control on the edited content.

The final diagram helped me be consistent when matching each keyword with:

• URLs and pages
• meta tags (such as title, description, and H1)
• internal links on body copy
• proper anchor text on links pointing to other subpages
  
• alt attributes for images on different subpages

I hope some of you will find this diagram helpful when deciding the proper anchor text of internal links.

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It's "Horses for Courses" at SES London

By sending a team to SES London, your organization will be able to put different "horses" on different "courses."

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How google calculates a sites position in the SERPs

Much speculation goes on about how Google determines the value, and therefore position of a web site in search results. Here are a few thoeries.

inertia posted this on WebProworld
I would say Google is:

In Bound Links: 45%
Site Content: 30%
Optimization (title tags, keyword density, internal linking etc, meta): 20%
Trust / Domain Age: 5%
Other aspects / Validation: negligible %

You can read peoples various responses to this theory.

SEOmoz post this speculation:

Google Score = (Keyword Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) - (Automated & Manual Penalties)

Keyword Usage Factors:
KW in title tag
KW in header tags
KW in document text
KW in internal links pointing to the page
KW in domain and/or URL

Domain Strength
Registration history
Domain age
Strength of links pointing to the domain
Topical neighborhood of domain based on inlinks & outlinks
Historical use & links pattern to domain
Inbound Link Score

Age of links
Quality of domains sending links
Quality of pages sending links
Anchor text of links
Link quantity/weight metric (Pagerank or a variation)
Subject matter of linking pages/sites
User Data

Historical CTR to page in SERPs
Time users spend on page
Search requests for URL/domain
Historical visits/use of URL/domain by users GG can monitor (toolbar, wifi, analytics, etc.)
Content Quality Score

Potentially given by hand for popular queries/pages
Provided by Google raters (remember Henk?)
Machine-algos for rating text quality/readability/etc

This is a more complete breakdown of the formula, of course all this is speculation. Pagerank is the approximate value of links (eg votes) pointing at a site based on the value of those sites.

According to Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, Co-founders of Google, the PR of a webpage is calculated using this formula:

PR(A) = (1 - d) + d * SUM ((PR(I->A)/C(I))
Where:
PR(A) is the PageRank of your page A.
d is the damping factor, usually set to 0,85.
PR(I->A) is the PageRank of page I containing a link to page A.
C(I) is the number of links off page I.
PR(I->A)/C(I) is a PR-value page A receives from page I.
SUM (PR(I->A)/C(I)) is the sum of all PR-values page A receives from pages with links to page A..
In other words: The PR of a page is determined by the PR of every page I that has a link to page A. For every page I that points to page A, the PR of page I is devided by the number of links from page I. These values are cumulated and multiplied by 0,85. Finally 0,15 is added to this result, and this number represents the PR of page A.

Although pagerank does not determine SERP position.

How Will Wikia Grow The Index?

When Wikia Search was released last night, Jimmy Wales explained they used a "placeholder index" for the search. While this may be appropriate for the alpha release, I'd like to ask Jimmy exactly how Wikia plans to crawl and index a significant portion of the web.

When the Grub distributed crawler was acquired from LookSmart, that appeared to provide most of the solution. At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Wales announced that he would immediately release the crawler to the open source community.

By downloading the client, Grub allows “the site owners the option of crawling their own data, with their own bandwidth. The client...is designed to connect to a central coordinating server, grab a batch of URLs, and then proceed to crawl them.� It claims 20:1 savings in bandwidth for both Wikia and the hosting website.

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A Special Thanks from SEOmoz

Posted by randfish

Without doubt, 2007 was our best year ever, and it's all your fault! Thanks so much to all our members, readers and contributors, and everyone in the Internet Marketing field. Without you, we'd be a sad, surly bunch.

Click for Larger Version

Looking at the people who make up SEOmoz, I'm humbled and amazed at the company we've become. I hope that you can all be as lucky as I am to spend time with each of them. My personal thanks goes out to you, team - you've made even the hardest days ten times better. Thank you.

p.s. Yes, we're late in posting a holiday greeting, but we have a good excuse! With so many mozzers out of town in December, we decided to throw a late party this year, cleverly titled (by, who else, Rebecca), the "Because the Holidays Aren't Over Until We Say They Are, Dammit!" party.

p.p.s. Photo credit to Carlos Del Rio (thanks Carlos!)

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Traffic Power CEO in jail

Here’s something I missed while I was offline last week. It looks like Matt Marlon, who served as CEO of Traffic Power, has landed himself in jail. I have mixed feelings about this, but the mixed feelings are mostly satisfaction, curiosity, and just a smidge of glee. In my opinion, the stuff that TrafficPower was doing was just bad news.

I think the search engine optimization industry has made a lot of progress in the last few years. It’s a little less common to get cold calls from SEOs that guarantee #1 rankings but won’t tell you how they try to do it. And if a large SEO company wants to try something high-risk with a client, they’re more likely to explain the potential risks to that client first. There are still issues, of course, but I was looking over a list of 20+ blackhat SEO companies that I compiled back in 2002. The majority either went out of business or have transformed into white-hat SEO companies.

For a while now, I’ve had a slight hunch that clients that embrace blackhat SEO on their site are willing to cut corners in other areas of business as well. Earlier today I was reviewing an email from 2001 (!) where Google removed a very large company’s website from our index for hidden GIF links, machine-generated doorway pages, and cloaking. It’s interesting to look back with the benefit of hindsight now. Later on, the company:

- had 10+ employees convicted for inflating revenue
- the CEO was sentenced to 10+ years in jail
- another executive was sentenced to 2+ years in jail

Can I definitively claim that there’s a connection between a willingness to embrace blackhat SEO and a willingness to cut corners in other areas of business? No, of course not. But I have seen several examples like the one I mention above. That’s why I’m glad that as more site owners learn about SEO, the long-term odds of blatent SEO scams going undetected go down.

Hat tip to Aaron Wall for mentioning Matt Marlon’s new location (jail) to me. Aaron and I have had differences, but I give him major points for fighting Traffic Power when they sued him. That led to one of the first times that Google confirmed a webspam penalty in public in order to dispute one of the lawsuit’s claims:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index.

Ah, good times.

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Highlights from the SEW Blog: January 1-4, 2008

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

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The Best of the SEOmoz Blog 2004-2007

Posted by Danny Dover

For those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Danny and I am SEOmoz's intern. I have spent the last several weeks reading and categorizing all the blog posts written over the years on this site. It has been quite the project and has let me really experience how this company and the SEO industry as a whole have evolved. I, like the other mozzers, am a stat junkie and kept notes on notable trends, stats and general quality as I read through the posts. Below I have listed what I believe to be the most successful, funny, and best posts ever written on SEOmoz. Enjoy!

Most Successful Posts

I defined the most successful posts as those that most successfully exemplified SEOmoz purpose and style. Specifically, I looked for posts that I felt excelled at teaching SEO, interacting with the community and sharing sought-after information.

7.    In Web 2.0, Fostering Community Creates Value
YouMoz Post – With the emergence of Web 2.0 we have seen an unprecedented boom in social online communities. Many resources have emerged that enable anyone to build the technical framework for a community but fail to provide a human touch. This post goes the extra mile by teaching the values and human elements required to create a successful online community.

6.    A Simple Explanation for Why MySpace is So Successful
Myspace is the quintessential example of 'Why didn't I think of that?'. This post attempts to describe why this social network took off and while other seemingly good communities did not. The discussion that that starts in the comments really supplements the post and provides great additional views.

5.    Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg's HomePage Content
This post is a perfect example of creating unique viral content out of publicly available information. By analyzing the percent of power diggers' stories that went on the homepage, the post uncovered the lack of true democracy that is expressed at social news portals. I believe this really opened many peoples eyes to the politics that affect Digg and similar communities.

4.    The SEO Routine
What does every new SEO want to know? They all want to know how to become
a successful SEO of course. This post lays it out honestly and with all the important details. It provides accurate information in an understandable and concise manner.

3.    Dispelling The "Get Rich Quick" Myth
YouMoz Post – Many first time SEOs dream that they can find secret tricks that will instantly make them riches from crafty pages and hidden text. Many people prey on this human desire by selling bad information at high prices. This post attempts to explain why these so called tricks don't exist and provides valuable alternatives.

2.    My Personal Opinion - 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors
This is the second most successful post ever written on this blog. It describes SEO to the layman in a nutshell. (The description is in a nutshell, not the layman. (-; ) The quality information is complemented by intelligent comments. This post successfully gives the answers many people are searching for without any BS and free of cost.

1.    Anatomy of a Super Digg
YouMoz Post - I really love this post and believe it is the most successful post ever posted on SEOmoz. It chronicles the journey of creating content and experiencing the rush of watching the content go truly viral. It contains valuable information, detailed stats and a human voice. It teaches great SEO techniques, appeals to a large community and shares valuable information in a interesting manner. Next time you  need to explain why being an SEO is thrilling and a work of love, find this post.

Funniest Posts

My first indication that SEOmoz was better than its competition was its frequency of funny posts. While choosing the posts, I defined the funniest ones as those that made me laugh the most (duh!) while serving some purpose. Since humor is so subjective I tried to take other users perspectives and opinions into account as much as possible.

I only included blog posts so I left out much of the site. However I think Rebecca's comics are worth mentioning. They are sure to make you giggle like a little girl at least once.

6.    Top Eleven Social Media Startups I'd Give My First Born For
YouMoz Post - Web 2.0 is known for company names that contain mispelings, acronyms, foreign references and sometimes just plain dumb words. Combine the popularity of American stupidity and social networks and you've got yourself a funny blog post.

5.    One Reason You Shouldn't Go to the SEOmoz Premium Training Seminar
YouMoz Post - This article is well written and funny by itself. However, the addition of the pictures is what made it stand out among the rest. Apparently, Kevin from Blue Acorn is an exact replica of Rand. He even has Rand's strange attraction to canary yellow shirts. No word on Mystery Guest clones yet, although it should be noted that upon seeing the Rand clone, MG instantly decided what she wanted for her birthday.

4.    SEOmoz's Unusual Search Terms from the Month of November
“Titties, Mud Wrestling, Hot Young Things, Freebasing Coke, Weird Thumb Porn, Scantily Clad Interns Named Danny”. Nothing out of the ordinary. This post really has something for everyone. If you read this without laughing please go outside and talk to someone.

3.    We Add Words to AdWords... Google Subtracts them.
Compilation of the funniest Adsense Ads. This post is great because the humor is appreciated by almost anyone and it is all original content. Bonus points to Matt Cutts for trying to plant the idea of using Google Adsense as a drinking game. His amiable attempt to boost Google's Ad Revenue should be noted by Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.

2.    Porn Filters Taking the Ogle out of Google
Undisputed winner of funniest title. This post is one of the funniest things I have ever read online. I show it to my friends when they ask what I do at work. I then determine the importance of our friendship on their reaction. A must read.

1.    How to See Paris in Seven Hours
This post is clever, funny, informative, and universally understood. This is one of the rare pieces of content that will make my grandmother, my little sister and I laugh all for the same reasons. Rebecca's writing combined with Scott's facial expressions make this the funniest posts ever to make it onto the blog.

Best of the Best

Choosing the best of the best was an agonizing process. The difference between a great post and an excellent post is not always immediately evident. The difference, I found, comes several days later when a post I read would creep back into my mind. These posts are the ones that truly inspired me and changed how I view the industry.

The qualities I used to rank the best of the best are as follows:

    Human Connection – Did I feel like I was listening to the teacher from Charlie Brown ("whaa-whaa-whaa" trombone effect) or a friend sharing a memorable experience?
    Relevance – Does the audience care? Was the post on topic? What was the noise vs signal ratio of the piece?
    Completeness – Did the author answer all of my questions in the article and more importantly did the author    continue the conversation in the comments?
    Unique – format, style, and content.

8.    SEOmoz Has a Pen Pal!
This is one of my favorite fan contributions to the site. An entrepreneur at a federal correctional institution sent a handwritten note to our offices asking for SEO advice. Be sure to read both of the hand written notes that are attached. They will brighten your day.

7.    SEOmoz's 2006 Financial Statements
Many companies claim to be transparent. They share advice, inside information and resources. They generally are well respected and become an important resource. This is all fine and dandy until someone asks for financial information. It is generally understood that businesses don't publicly release valuable financial information for any reason. In the true fashion of mozism, these figures were released first in this post in 2006 and every subsequent year.

6.    Helping to Build the Web: A Day in the Life of a Web Developer
Traditionally the web developers at SEOmoz have rarely posted on the blog. In the rare instances that they did blog, it was always on a technical topic. This post was different. Jeff, our CTO, detailed the day in the life of a web developer. It was a side of his profession that is rarely seen. In addition to the post, other web developers shared their thoughts in the comments.

5.    Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes
Generally the posts on here sing of the joy of being an SEO. Although being an SEO can be a fun and prosperous job, it is not without its difficult times. This post uniquely focuses on the latter. It is full of voice and proved to be more of a conversation than a declaration.

4.     Dear Digg.com: I'm going to save you a million dollars with three lines of code
This is one of the most well written posts on this blog. It has the perfect mix of all the requirements of a successful SEO post. It provides a modest suggestion to Digg.com on how it could fix a simple canonical issue. It is well researched, understandable, and a good read. I really think we should have more posts that have this tone and present information in this way.

3.    Apparently I Work for Google
I think this is Rebecca's best post. It explains how she deals with the fundamental problem of our industry, explaining our job to our families. This post is funny, full of voice and a genuine day brightener. A must read for anyone in the industry.

2.    Snippets from 30,000 Feet
I believe that this is the best post Rand has ever written. It is the perfect mix of all the best of the best criteria. This “day in the life” style post is not only humble and thought provoking but also poetic. It interesting and a good read for people involved in SEO as well as those who are not. If you have not read this post before please treat yourself and read it.

1.    Good to Great: Gillian Responds to Rand's Answers to Hard Questions
I think it is very fitting that the best post ever written on the SEOmoz blog was authored by our least vocal staff member. Gillian, president of SEOmoz, shares her experience of running a successful company while maintaining a healthy relationship with her son/CEO. I think her own words describe the general sentiment of this post better than I can.

“As I see it, the job of the president and/or CEO is to climb the tallest tree on the highest mountain and shout to the team hacking at breakneck speed through the forest below, Wrong mountain! Go that way!”

This blog has improved by leaps and bounds since its inaugural post over three years ago. If the gems listed above are any indication of the things to come, then I warmly look forward to this blog's bright future.

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China Limits Video, Audio Podcasts To State Run Sites

The Chinese government will restrict all video and audio content on sites starting next month, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

"From next month, only state websites will be allowed to carry film or radio programs, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said," they reported.

In an effort to control video sharing programs, the government makes the operator remove uploaded content.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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Back online, and my Davos answer

I’m back online. My email isn’t quite as out of control as last year, but it will take me a few days to catch up on things. Going offline for a week was nice, and I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you have a wonderful companion to help you savor the time off.

Here’s my answer to the Davos question (”What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”). I want people to explore how to measure where money can be spent most productively to tackle problems. That is, on issues where there is disagreement (take drugs: prevention? prisons? treatment? interdiction?), try to agree on a set of metrics to measure success. Or at least agree on a methodology to determine the metrics.

I enjoyed Scott Adams’ 9 point economic plan that distills a bunch of economic advice into ~200 words. I’d love to read a “9 point plan” that distills down the most likely ways to live longer (stuff like: don’t smoke, drink no more than one glass of wine a day), as long as the “9 point health plan” is based on solid research. I’d really like to read a paper where someone took a bunch of important issues and looked at the potential impact a single person could make on each issue.

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SEW Experts: Google AdWords 101

The Internet is overflowing with high-level discussion of how to plan a search advertising campaign. But sometimes, a new advertiser needs to know the actual steps of setting up an AdWords campaign and look into the methodology of setting up ads and A/B testing. In today's debut SEM Crossfire column, "Google AdWords 101," Frank Watson, aka AussieWebmaster, gives new advertisers a lesson on how to launch their first ever Google AdWords campaigns.

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Separating the Linkbait Wheat from the Chaff

Posted by randfish

Last week in Whiteboard Friday: Why Your Viral Content Isn't Working, I covered the importance of creating content that goes beyond just reaching the top of social media portals into the realm of attracting coveted high value links as well. Today, as promised, I'll share the big separations between the two and some tactics to implement when launching viral content with the intention of link acquisition.

First off, a Venn Diagram (credit to Mystery Guest for the concept on this):

You can see in the purple section, at the intersection of viral success (from reaching the top of Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) and link attraction, I've placed the desired result - a successful linkbait campaign. In the Fall of 2006, SEOmoz conducted some research analyzing the amount of links earned by content that went popular on the major social media portals (everything from Digg to Slashdot to TechCrunch). Unsurprisingly, we saw that a significant amount of the successful content on those sites attracted only a small number of legitimate links (a few dozen to a couple hundred) while a smaller group would attract thousands, or even tens of thousands.

Common Characteristics of Content that Earns Social Media Votes, But Doesn't Get Links:

• Shallow Humor
  Funny can definitely get you to the top of Digg, but it often won't carry you much further, particularly if the laugh is only enough for a "ha" (think Edna Krabappel) and not enough to inspire sharing. 
• Simplistic Observations
  Even with an insightful bit of writing it can be hard to attract links if the content is surface-level and carries no depth.
• Re-Inforcing Stereotypes or Beliefs
  It's fun and easy to create content that re-inforces what everyone else is saying. Another comic making fun of Microsoft might hit the Digg popular page, but it's unlikely to draw the links you might want unless it has some other standout qualities.
• Low Value Lists & Amalgamation Posts
  These are probably the most common kinds of posts I see on the social media sites, especially Sphinn (in the SEO field) and Del.icio.us/Popular (in the developer world). Grab a few friends, get a little boost, and everyone will vote up your CSS Rounded Corners technique. Whether you'll get long term value and links is another matter.
• Niche-Pandering
  If you're aware that a particular sect of followers has a powerful influence on a site's content (Wii-fanboys at Digg or Ron Paulites at Reddit), you can take advantage of that by authoring materials geared towards those audiences. Unfortunately, even if you do get on the front page, you might not earn the links you're hoping for unless you've authored something truly new or brilliant on the subject.
• Weak Signal to Noise Ratio
  Plenty of the content on social news sites has great shock value, and drives clicks, but once it's time to convert those views into links, you'll need substance over pure style and rhetoric.
• Drive-By Images/Video
  As with the weak signal-to-noise ratio, many pictures and videos that find their way into the popular content have little to no chance of attracting additional interest after that first view.
• Market Saturation
  If the social portal(s) you're targeting have users that already read 99% of the material you write, you might not be getting any additional value from having one more story make the frontpage.
• Extremely Short-Form Content
  While there's a decent amount of short-form content that makes it on the portals, much of it gets passed over when it comes time for links. Linkers need something they want to share or something that's incited passion or critical thinking - short-form content is often consumed fast, browsed away from quickly and forgotten before they've clicked the next item.
• Highly Negative/Inflammatory Content
  This can go either way, as some negative material gets an inordinate amount of attention. However, be cautious about how you do it - if you're negative and pandering and shallow, there's a good chance your linkbait won't earn you much besides a high bandwidth cost.
• Beating the Dead Horse
  Some content has been seen one too many times. Repeating the same tired list or showing a collection of images, videos, links, or other material that's already made its way around the web might get you a few more page views, but the Linkerati are a smart bunch, and they've often been around the web more than the average reader.
• Extremely Temporal News
  News items can attract lots of links, but if the material's old within 12-24 hours, don't expect the links to come racing in. This is why coverage of emerging events can be dangerous, as the post that only tells part of the story as fast as possible could be passed over when the whole story comes out.
• Inaccurate or Misleading Material
  If a piece is obviously incorrect, readers and voters might not catch it, but most linkerati are smarter and will investigate before they post (and even if they do link to it, will frequently use nofollow to indicate their distaste).
• Lost in the Echo Chamber
  If a blog post or content piece is simply writing the same story that's been bandied about dozens of times or covering a subject that everyone in the niche thinks they've covered already (or covered better), linkers may be particularly stingy.

Recent Examples:

• Tech Solutions Your Small Biz Can't Use - Not only is it a low value list, it's also obviously inaccurate and misleading. As of today, Yahoo! only reports 6 links (3 are spam, the other 3 are nofollowed).
• SEOmoz's 2007 Site Stats - Considering how big our previous reporting on stats have been, you might expect that we'd once again earn lots of links with this release, but no. Yahoo! reports 17 links, of which more than half are spam (and several other are nofollowed). What happened? We're lost in the echo chamber and we're saturating the market - even though the post reached the top of Sphinn, SEOmoz has such an overlap with the linkerati who read Sphinn that it probably attracted very few new readers.
• List of Social Networking Sites in Education - Although this list of great value (I even put it in the premium tips section here at SEOmoz), the cotent is very long-form, very niche and, for most readers, is going to have low value. Thus, Yahoo! shows it's only got 29 links (many of which are low quality or nofollowed).
• Photo of Digg Accuracy - It's funny, but it's niche-pandering and very forgettable content, so even though it was on top of several social portals and even on the most Dugg list for the past 30 days, Yahoo! only shows 65 links (and not many of those are followed).

Common Characteristics of Content that Earns Links, But Doesn't Always Make It on Social Portals:

• Duplicate Content
  When posting material that's already been released elsewhere, you can have some success earning links from the population who hasn't previously seen it, but it can be tough to get onto the major social portals where savvy bury-ers will shout "dup" from the top of their keyboards.
• In-Depth Research
  A terrific source of links, complex research is also tough to consume quickly, and therefore isn't well suited to the "don't Digg it if you can't understand it in 4 seconds" crowds.
• Interviews
  They're good sources of information and insight, but they rarely appear on the social portals these days. Summaries or "important" quotes can help an interview stand out to the social crowds, but those votes can be tough to come by.
• Complex News Analysis
  As with in-depth research, a complex look at the news will, tragically, often earn fewer links than a shorter, punchier piece of coverage. Anyone who watches the major news outlets in the US can see this phenomenon in action on a daily basis - Tragic? Yes. Avoidable? Not really.
• Segments of a Larger Content Piece
  When content gets broken into multiple pages and pieces, linkers may find the relvant portion and reference it, but social voters don't have the attention span to focus and will frequently abandon prior to finding the value.
• Community-Focused Material
  If you're pandering or even speaking to an audience that doesn't consistently participate at the portal you're targeting, you'll have a very tough time earning the necessary votes.

Recent Examples:

• Comparing Search Popularity Services - this post from Danny brilliantly covered the differences in the major services showing serach market share percentages, and while it didn't make the social news sites (probably due to being so in-depth and targeted), it earned 450+ links.
• How to Order Wine Without Looking Like an Asshole - I suspect this actually did get some good social traffic through StumbleUpon, but it perfectly exemplifies an in-depth, niche-focused (but broadly interesting) post. The subject matter isn't social crowd-focused enough, but the list format is near perfect and it's earned those 5,000+ links. Maybe I should submit it to Digg... (UPDATE: Oops! It did make Digg a couple years back, although it wasn't very popular there)
• Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Paul Graham has very community-focused and in-depth material and although some of his essays do make it onto sites like Techmeme (and of course, they all go to Hacker News), this one earned its 2200 links without the benefit of a major social media push.
• Interview with Sep Jemvar on Personalization - A perfect example of how even though the material's great, the interview format somehow prohibits social media success. Thankfully, it still managed to earn several hundred links.

Armed with this knowledge you should be able to dodge a good number of pitfalls in your viral marketing campaigns and, I suspect that will give you a big leg up in your quest for simultaneous social media and link-earning success.

As a next installment, I'll cover why the search engines will have a vested interest in continuing to reward viral marketing campaigns (as there's been some debate around this subject in the recent past).

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Wikia launches

Ah, who am I kidding. You don’t want to hear me talk about the Davos question. I know that webmasters and search engine optimizers alike are all over at Wikia taking it for a test drive. I’m sure that SEOs are trying to figure out how this scoring:

means that a site ranks highly for viagra. That’s cool. I’m over on Wikia testing it out tonight as well. Maybe I’ll see you over there:

Wikia is catching some initial negative reactions, but I think this is one of those projects where it will take time to see how Wikia’s search experience develops. So my reaction is pretty simple: congrats to the Wikia crew on your public launch, and welcome to the search industry! I’m glad that you’re jumping into the search space.

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InfoSpace Seeks Search Engine Market Share

Now that InfoSpace has cleared away other business lines and staff, they just re-committed to online search. The company aims to grow through white-label distribution, which includes over 100 partners so far. In addition, they seek growth through through consumer traffic -- and that strikes me as quixotic at best.

Remember Dogpile? Last summer, this InfoSpace search destination garnered about 0.3% share or under 26 million searches (per Nielsen, July 2007). The company also reported 6.7 million unique monthly visitors worldwide (per comScore, December 2006).

InfoSpace embraces the current search ecosystem, from both organic and paid perspectives. Dogpile has garnered J.D. Power’s top satisfaction award for two years running. It’s a nice interface that fetches results from Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask engines simultaneously. Beyond the organic search results, InfoSpace has ensured both Google and Yahoo ad sources through 2011.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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SEW Experts: Search Engine Marketing 21st Century Manifesto

As Web marketers, our time has come. We must stand up to our clients and demand they build sites worth linking to. In today's Link Love column, "Search Engine Marketing 21st Century Manifesto," Sage Lewis explains how to recover from a link building strategy that has been obsessed with the links and completely ignores what we're asking people to link to.

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Politicians: Four Years Late to the SEO Party

Posted by Jane Copland

It's the third of January and those of us in the United States are already pretty tired of hearing about November's Presidential Election. I'm sure the rest of you are, too. The world of social media is already flooded with stories about the U.S.'s political dramas and I can only imagine that if you're in any other country, today's offerings at Reddit might not interest you all that much. Currently, seven of the top 10 Reddit stories focus on the U.S. elections. But this really isn't my point.

We're tired of it already and it won't be truly over for another year and two weeks. Yes, it's a Wikipedia link, but it's nofollowed. Do you know how hard it is to find an impartial result for searches like "2009 inauguration day?" Hopefully, a year is enough time for politicians across America to get their web campaigns together. No, I am not going to rehash Herndon Hasty's Search Engine Watch post, SEO for President. Herndon does a great job highlighting how these national campaigns, armed with more money and resources than God, have implemented absolutely no SEO and only rank well due to a large number of inbound links. However, the presidential race is not the only thing Americans will vote on this year: thousands of positions are up for grabs all over the country and thousands of people are campaigning to fill them.

Over the Christmas break, I took a look at the online campaigns of candidates in a Washington State race. The seat itself is a local one which won't attract any publicity outside of a certain Washington town. However, the race for this seat has been fantastically tight during the last two elections (2000 and 2004). Candidates spent a lot of time, money and effort on their campaigns, as I'm sure similar people in similar positions did all across the U.S. However, right as Election Fever hits America, only one candidate appears to have started an online campaign. The candidate has a surprisingly good Facebook fan page, a Myspace account and a YouTube channel. While this candidate's old website, which still ranks first for his name, is the most atrocious thing I've ever laid eyes on, his new campaign has some social media know-how behind it. It's not all that fantastic, but his competitors stand to lose a lot in the coming months if they don't step it up. I'm not linking to these Washington candidates' properties for personal reasons. Don't get excited; my reasons are far from interesting.

The most striking thing about this person's campaign is that this candidate didn't even make it past the primaries in 2004. For anyone who's unsure what that means, candidates from the same party compete against each other in order to obtain their party's nomination. Once they have taken care of everyone from their own party, they get to compete against candidates from other parties. This person lost to a fellow party member. Four years later, he has not only cleaned up his image, but he's attempting to usurp his competitors online.

This said, the SEO behind this candidate - both in terms of on-page optimisation and overall strategy - is still pretty poor. Presumably, he owns http://www.hisname.com/ (which ranks first for his name and eighth for "(position) (area)"), and yet his website for the 2008 campaign is http://www.votehisname.com/. This new website ranks twentieth for the "(position) (area)" query, which is still about one-hundred positions higher than his competitors, but could be a lot better.

The site is badly optimised, with no H1 or H2 tags, no meta description and images used in place of text (with questionable alternative text). It has a title tag, which is a giant victory over all of his competitors. I am seriously considering revising the title of this post, because these political websites aren't four years behind the times: they would have been unacceptable in 2000, let alone 2004. In the Search Engine Watch article, Herndon Hasty says, "Holes this big would sink normal sites and create e-commerce job openings by the dozens," and he is correct. The astounding thing about this is that these holes and mistakes are easy to fix.  For local races such as this one, the competition for rankings is remarkably minimal. Often, the candidates aren't even competing against .gov sites!

Imagine ranking highly for queries such as "(area) (pressing local issue)." At best, the general public still only has a fleeting understanding of how search engines work; immediately, the candidate will earn a certain amount of trust and credibility when his or her site appears for searches like these, even if that trust isn't deserved. Another thing to keep in mind is that visibility is half the battle in smaller political races: unless people have decided to vote "down party lines", they will often simply vote for the person whose name they have seen in more television commercials, billboards and newspaper articles. Something about being visible seems to translate into being reputable, hence the reason why the person who raises the most money often wins the race.

Controlling relevant SERPs is also an exercise in reputation management if you are running for office. Local politics can be as mean and nasty as it is on the national scene: This year, I am quite certain that people will head to search engines to research political rumours. Again, it won't take much social media or SEO work to push a controlled message to the top of the search engines, but few are currently taking advantage of the easy public relations opportunity.

The awful job politicians are doing online this year surprises me. The Internet plays a far bigger role in our day-to-day lives than it did in 2004, even though most of us were quite well-attached to our computers back then. Politicians should realise the importance of search engines, social media and Internet marketing. While I wouldn't expect people outside of the technology world to inherently know these things, I would at least expect them to do a bit of research. With the amount of money these people spend on their campaigns, it would be a shame to lose based upon easily fixed SEO problems.

UPDATE from Scott:  Due to the subject of this post I thought some of you may be interested to see how the campaign searchscape has changed since I posted about political campaign SEO back in May.  Below you'll find the chart comparing candidates search presence from May '07 and a new updated version as of Jan 3, '08 (Iowa Caucus Day).  I've substituted Democratic candidate, Mike Gravel (who has all but vanished), with upstart Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, to try and keep things relevant.

Candidate Search Comparison May '07:



Candidate Search Comparison January '08:



As you can see, there's been a bit of shuffling. People with semi-functional eyes will notice the huge surge in Ron Paul's Alexa Traffic Rank. For more on what the hell that's all about, you can check out my article on the Ron Paul Effect.

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight: January 4, 2008

Found in the search marketing forums: AdWords Predictions for 2008; Concerns Over Links In Articles; Reporting Automation; and more.

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Thursday Roundup for the Week of 12/31/07

Posted by rebecca

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had fun ringing in 2008. In Seattle, we had a lovely non-fireworks display at the Space Needle (looks like someone will be jobless in '08), and I brought in the new year by rocking out with my friends to Rock Band and by kicking some tail in Wii tennis...I'm such a nerd.

Anyway, onto this week's worth of additions to SEOmoz and stories throughout that great big Internet sea.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• CMS developer for Let's Make It Awesome (nice company name, Bob!) in Boston, MA
• An SEO with many hats and an SEO with a small but smart hat for NVI in Montreal, Quebec
• SEO guru in Hatboro, PA
• SEO contractor in Dayton, Ohio

Featured companies:

• Braveheart Design Inc. (I wonder if their CEO's name is William Wallace)
• TP1
• TopSpot
• IMASEO
• Ki Media
• Resonate
• SDH Interactive

Featured resumes: none this week. Be sure to add your resumes to our Marketplace, folks!


New events added to the Events Calendar: none this week. Frowny face. There are lots of industry events coming up, so be sure to add them to the Events Calendar to increase visibility and awareness!


Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• SEOmoz has been nominated and is competing in the 4th International Blog Cup competition. First round voting is still open, so vote for us so we can advance to Round 2!
  
• The Economist brings us a brief history of the origins of spam, as well as an introspective about technology etiquette (cell phones, email, etc).
  
• The International Herald Tribune talks about how bloggers are starting to earn the big bucks off advertising on their sites. It's a pretty basic write-up, but interesting to see this topic get a bit of mainstream exposure.
  
• On the other side of the spectrum, The Guardian talks about how "the big switch may turn off jobs," meaning that bigger companies trying to compete with the small employee, virtual location Internet powerhouses (YouTube, Skype, etc) may have to downsize (employees, locations, or both) in order to keep up.
  
• Seth Godin offers wise words about how people talking about you is more effective than talking about yourself. Amen to that, brutha! I know quite a few vanity bloggers to whom I'd love to send that gem of information.
  
• The lovely Danielle Winfield over at 10e20 has a good post about the benefits of participating in forums and some advice on how to create a strong profile presence in forums.
  
• Technology Review has an exceptionally well-written piece from the perspective of a journalist who used to work at Dateline NBC. It chronicles the deterioration of television journalism and is a compelling, frustrating, and often sad read.
  
• Psychology Today has an incredible article about new developments that could explain why we dream. In a nutshell, it's to practice for combat, which is supremely badass.
  
• This one comes courtesy of our favorite overzealous NBA team owner, Mark Cuban. He wrote a succinct but to the point post on his blog about how your effort is the one thing you can control. Pretty smart stuff there, Mark! Now, if you could only talk to Dirk Nowitzki about his admiration for David Hasselhoff...
  
• And finally, though this is way off-topic, the best show on television has started its fifth and final season. Watch it. Now. (And if you haven't ever watched the show, shame on you. Go buy or rent them now, lest I judge you forever.)
  

That's it for this week, folks! Have a great rest of the week, and be sure to check out tomorrow's Whiteboard Friday video, where Scott unveils a snazzy new format (dual camera angles, a microphone, and a ginormous whiteboard). No green screen yet, but we'll try to get that up and running by next week's video...

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