Vexcom SEO Atlanta Blog

Special SEO deals

2010-06-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Getting ready to launch some new low price SEO specials - watch site for details.

Have you registered on the new SEO directory at www.vxseo.com ?

SEO Free Backlink Building Tool

2009-04-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

I found a tool that webconfs.com offers that is useful in researching sites for link exchange and backlink partners. Several sites across the web recommends this tool as being much easier than manually searching and filtering links on your own. Just click here for the back building tool

Boosting You SEO With Images

2009-03-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

Jenny Field with the Denver Internet Business Examiner shares some interesting tips on how images can actually help with SEO. Many of us has been taught otherwise when it comes to image use and SEO. For interesting tips on how images can boost your SEO efforts read below:

"Images often get a bad rap in the SEO world, as SEO experts mostly give a brief explanation of their common hindrance in website ranking. The fact of the matter is that images, when used properly on your website, can actually help your site's ranking. Images, after all, are important, as our human eyes are naturally drawn to images before any text." for more SEO tip #2

On Point Strides Towards SEO Success

2009-03-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

Many businesses put more effort into the aesthetics of their website and when they don’t get the business or traffic they were anticipating, turn to SEO as a last resort. In actuality Search Engine Optimization needs to be established from the beginning of a websites development project. Like many businesses, who learn the hard way; are left with an astonishing site to look at with few visitors. A site that is nearly impossible to locate via top search engines. This is where SEO comes in to save the day.

Often SEO professionals find their work cut out for them. Trying to optimize a site already built is quite difficult. It’s like trying to improve a home whose foundation was done all wrong to begin with. It often leaves businesses at a point where they are better of re-doing the entire site. Re-designing a site and creating one that has SEO success on the forefront instead of the back end. He are just a few beginning SEO thoughts to consider:

~A company area of expertise should be the basis of the text and keywords on the landing page of the site.

~Words used to describe the service you provide should also be included in your contents and tags.

~Select titles of site pages that are unique and contain frequently searched keywords.

~Select titles that are rich descriptive keywords to ensure increased hits and traffic.

~Due to the importance of keywords, knowing what your target keywords are from the beginning is best. Do so by researching the best keywords for your site.

~Search engine spiders crawls a site page and seeks Meta tags. This is where titles are obtained and used in search engines, examples are keywords and the description for each page.

15 Reasons to Take a Further Look at Video Optimization

2009-02-19T14:17:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in a previous post…. “Video Submissions” is a great way to advertise your URL by uploading videos content that is product related with the goal of attracting more clients. Reel SEO discusses the top 15 tips for SEO for Video Optimization:

1. Create Relevant, Unique, Informative Videos
2. Video thumbnails
3. Videos <5 min.
4. Sitemaps
5. Surrounding HTML
6. Descriptive Meta Data
7. Title
8. Tags
9. Optimize URLs
10. Branding
11. Inbound Linking
12. Syndicate
13. Upload to Video Sharing Sites
14. Allow Embed Code
Encourage Ratings and Reviews

For a closer look into these 15 tips visit Reel SEO

SEO Secrets to Success

2009-01-28T16:39:00.000-08:00

Ideally a SEO Professional’s goal is to increase their client’s rankings in the top search results. Have greater visibility in leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Knowledge is always key. Many SEO Professionals attended the Internet Retailer Web Design “09” Conference in Miami Beach, FL to gain some better insights on how to achieve those goals. SEO experts Stephan Spencer and Marion Sharkey offered some vital tips to reach those top rankings. Spencer and Sharkey provided a review of both strengths and weaknesses of websites of those in attendance during a session titled “Top Design Tips to Boost SEO Rankings.” Here are some of the key points mentioned:

-Every page should feature a title that includes few keywords the client ultimately wants to rank high on. Limiting the title to three keywords is best.

-The header on each page should have a H1 tag that contains the keyword, for instance a given brand or product. Your H1 tag should have in sync with the focus keyword of the page.

-Be sure to title each page. The keywords the Client prefers to rank high in should appear at the top of the page in the browser frame.

-If your industry is designer shoes then it would be best to list the names of top brand names of designer shoes. So as customers search for these items they find you in their search. Listing them in the title tag will improve your client’s rankings.

During the session there were some common errors mentioned to avoid. Avoid using an extended block of text containing keywords towards the bottom of the home page. Often this is done to have the site’s search terms appear more relevant to search engines. Apparently such actions causes search engines to consider this as “keyword stuffing” and will generally end in a penalty. So it's clear that just by practicing these key tips SEO Professionals will be well on their way to success.

Beware the emails requesting a link exchange

2009-01-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here is one along with my response: (scroll to the bottom for my reply, i have edited their email request for easier reading, you get the point of what they are asking...

This is something to consider when receiving these email link exchange request.

-----Original Message-----
From: Daisy [mailto:links (at) realestatewebsitesmarketing.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 11:10 AM
To: XXXXXX
Subject: House Repair Related Link Exchange Request

Dear owner of http://www.precisionatlanta.com/,

I'm the webmaster of http://kimberlypainting.net/cumming-painting.htm.
We came across your site on the Internet and feel that it would fit perfectly into our collection of quality industry related partners at http://kimberlypainting.net/cumming-painting.htm.

The Google PR of this site is currently 2.

We've already placed a link to your site on the page http://www.kimberlypainting.net/links-guter-repair10.html , We'd appreciate it if you place a link back to our site using the following HTML code (just copy and paste it into your links page):

(blah blah blah...)
Best regards,
Daisy
Webmaster, KimberlyPainting.net

Note: This is not spam -- this is a one-time link exchange request. To ensure that you will not receive any more emails from us in the future, please reply to this email with ‘not interested’ in the subject line. Thank you.
-----------------------------------

My Response:

Daisy,

I would be interested except for the fact that the page you put our link on is not even indexed by Google, nor is the main links page http://www.kimberlypainting.net/links.html and there is no way for any spiders to even find those pages.

You do not even link your main "links page" anywhere on the site for Google or any other Search Engine to index. The link you have placed is invisible and worthless - if you want me to link back to you on a page that will never be indexed by Google I suppose I could do that but that would just be wasting both of our time wouldn't it?

------------------------

I love the email disclaimer that its not spam, I guess everyone's definition of spam is different. From what I can recall spam is an unsoliceted email with a sales pitch in it. Now, I myswelf have sent unsolicted emails to websites asking if they want to exchange links, but its never a form letter and its never one of the "I already placed your link here, here is the HTML code for my link" - but nevertheless, it is technically spam, oh well. Daisy seems to think spam means your on a mailing list. Whatever

The point is these bulk link exchange programs are pretty much worthless, 10 good solid links are worth 100 of these crappy link exchanges where you end up on a page with 50 or 100 otherlinks and its on one of 50 link pages... its spam garbage - work on building quality links, not junk links.

Some SEO Predictions for 2009

2009-01-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all! With a New Year we often wonder what the year will actually bring. When it comes to SEO trends and practices it would be great to get a prediction of what to expect in 2009.

Well William Flaiz discuses on Search Engine Watch what some of his predictions for 2009.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3632258 We welcome anyone else to share their SEO predictions for 2009.

The SEO Advantage

2008-12-22T10:16:00.000-08:00

SEO Marketing can bring you a host of benefits. So in case you want to know some immediate results that SEO can bring let me briefly touch on them here.

E-marketing: The key to e-marketing is knowing who your target base audience is. This will aide in compiling target audience and ensure a successful e-marketing campaign. There is an array of options that you can take in your marketing endeavors. Viral marketing such as message boards, blogs, social book marking sites and YouTube.

Online Entries: Posting blog content to your content related blog and making sure you make frequent yet interesting entries for your followers to read.
Social Networking Sites: Understand your niche market. Brand yourself and make others aware of your presence on the web by joining online social networking sites.

Copywriting Skills: Hire a Copywriter also known as a Content Writer. This is ideal if writing is not your forte. This is beneficial because good content sells and represents your brand. The content on your website and your blog is what allures others and keep them coming back for more.

Just doing these few steps in your SEO Marketing campaign will definitely ensure success.

SEO Search Techniques

2008-12-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

Found an article regarding On-Page Search Engine Optimization Techniques that can enhance your SEO efforts.

Are you doing all you can when it comes to on-page search engine optimization? I recently found that the title attributes of my "Home" links contained the text "Home". The Home link goes back to the main page of SEOLogs.com. Is "Home" the best way to describe...
On-Page Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search Engines Growth Provides an Even Greater SEO Outlook

2008-11-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

When formulating an SEO strategy it’s essential to know what search engines are being frequented the most by web users. Nielsen Online surveyed what search engines yielded the most searches. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's Live Search came in at the top three in US queries.Just two months ago Nielsen Online company research showed that Google searches increased by roughly 20%, Yahoo searches increased by almost 2% and Microsoft Live Search queries also increased by 7%.Within U.S. alone Americans increased their online search uses by 9.4% compared to last year. It’s numbers like these that forces SEO Industry to take note. So when liking at the whole picture you have Google holding in at almost 60% of the market share while Yahoo has 18.1 % and Microsoft live Search has 11.8 per cent. In the top ten there were other search engines to take note of such as AOL, Ask.com, My Web, Comcast and AT&T Worldnet.

10 Great SEO Tips

2008-11-12T14:26:00.000-08:00

1) Create unique individual HTML pages for each section page of the site.

2) Create unique Titles, Meta keywords and Meta description for every page in the site.

3) Implement valid HTML 4.01 (or XHTML) and valid CSS 2.0

Read the entire list of 10 great SEO tips at vxSEO.com

Free SEO Analysis

2008-11-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

Get your site graded with a free seo analysis

Atlanta SEO Marketing Wave Brings Promise to Worried Businesses

2008-11-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

For Immediate Release

Vexcom's SEO clients thrive, even in this difficult economy. SEO delivers incredible Return on Investment and can become the 24 hour driving sales force for growth.

Atlanta, Georgia- November 8, 2008
Many Companies are experiencing financial losses and cutbacks due to the downturn in the economy. With all the recent cutbacks it appears to be an perfect time to invest in SEO web marketing for increased brand awareness. In times such as these it is even more important for companies to increase their web presence.

"Our natural organic SEO methods allow us to move our clients and portals into top search positions for several of the most competitive search terms on the web." - Joe Sado, Client Relations Manager, Vexcom

Increased web traffic, more targeted leads and a higher ROI for your advertising dollars are the proven reasons for investing your marketing budget in SEO. Over seventyfive percent of consumers and companies rely on search to find their suppliers and vendors. It is due to this trend and demand that Vexcom, Inc. has increased its service offerings to include high-end SEO.

Vexcom has expanded their SEO staff and has added several new clients over the past few months. Vexcom welcomes several new SEO clients, here are a few:

Hawthorn Inc. A high-end Atlanta remodeling and building company based in Decatur, Georgia. During this slow economy Hawthorn hired Vexcom to increase their web presence and build their client base. While Hawthorn is a small firm that takes only a handful of clients annually, they have not previously utilized the web as a marketing tool. In order to launch their new division Laurel Projects and give them a larger selection of clients, they sought out the best SEO company in Atlanta to increase their sales leads.

Vexcom has recently added staff and expanded its offices to accommodate its rapid growth. This expansion comes at a time when major companies in other industries have had to downsize or shut its doors. Vexcom has enjoyed a sudden high demand for their unbeatable SEO services.

"SEO Marketing is vital in helping businesses to get the most sales with the least amount of cost. For the price of running a magazine advertisement, a business can use that money to see an immediate increase in leads by positioning themselves at the top of search pages. Organic SEO Marketing is keeping many businesses alive as well providing growth." said Wesley Warren, CEO of Vexcom, Inc.

"It's demand and growth such as this that has warranted us to expand our offices and hire additional programmers, and Public Relations and Writing experts. In a tense economy, we've decided to give our SEO clients survival tools, which as a result has added to both their growth as well as ours" Patrick Green, Director of Sales for Vexcom.

Colorwise decided to expand its market from traditional commercial color printing to include short run book printing. They looked at the internet marketing companies in metro Atlanta and settled on the premier SEO company. Vexcom has a proven track record for successful SEO campaigns.

Vexcom increased The Right Angle Inc.'s window boxes sales by 400% over last year. They had to hire additional staff to keep up with the demand. Vexcom, Inc. looks forward to further expanding their client base in the near future as many companies turn to the internet to achieve rapid growth with an affordable budget. Vexcom was established in 1995 and offers a wide range of web-based business solutions for their clients nationwide. Vexcom, Inc. specializes in developing interactive web sites, custom database driven web applications, Internet technology, content management , Atlanta web design and Atlanta SEO search engine optimization.

For more information contact:
Vexcom, Inc
9755 Dogwood Road
Suite 150
Roswell, GA 30075
(678) 238-2300
http://www.vexcom.net/

Yahoo SEO news - US NEWS Guide

Best and Worst practices for designing a good SEO website

2008-11-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

Here is a great tutorial on the best and worst practices for SEO.

A few highlights from the extensive list:

Keywords in title tag
This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the title tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning.
+3

Keywords in URL
Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - http://domainname.com/seo-services.html, where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.
+3

Keyword density in document text
Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.
+3

Keywords in anchor text
Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.
+3

Keywords in headings (h1, h2, etc. tags)
One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.

Learn more http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

PR Highlights SEO Benefits to Internet Marketers

2008-10-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

3rd October 2008 8:54 pm

A leading 24-7 Press Release distrubution has today produced a report highlighting the benefits of a Search EngineOptimised (SEO) press release. Internet marketers now regard a SEO press release as an integral component for an effective Internet marketing strategy.
It is commonly known that search engine rankings play a significant role for a website’s visibility.
The majority of Internet users will only looks at the first few sites listed from a search. For this reason, developing an effective SEO strategy by incorporating an Optimised press release is not only a necessity but vital in keeping up with the competition and winning the search engine game.
“We have seen remarkable growth in customers using our premium service for that very reason,” said Michael Iwasaki, co-founder of 24-7 Press Release. “Marketing on the Internet has only become more and more difficult over time and we see more astute customers who understand the value of a SEO press release.”

Source: http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/news/9991473/

Is Your SEO Site User Friendly

2008-10-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

So you have your site SEO ready and now you need to be sure your site is user-friendly. I found this great article with some great tips.

Creating SEO-Friendly Websites
SEO is one of the most important online marketing trends available right now. Almost everyone knows that you need good quality text, keywords and links combined with lots of popularity and a good reputation to make it big. But it’s also important to take a holistic view of your online business pages. Your website is a valuable SEO tool in itself. By building (or remodeling,) your website so that it’s more easily accessible to spiders, you can boost your search engine score astronomically. It’s also important to have the “SEO-friendly website” conversation with your website design company and/or SEO firm if you have one to make sure that they on the same page as you. So with out further ado, here are some things that you should keep in mind when building or redesigning your website:

....for more click link below:
http://blog.loveclients.com/2008/09/29/creating-seo-friendly-websites/
source: Colleen with loveclients

Spend More on Marketing in a Recession, SEO Expert Urges

2008-09-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

Spend More on Marketing in a Recession, SEO Expert Urges
Businesses should spend more on marketing and particularly search engine optimisation during the current downturn in the economy rather than less, says a SEO expert.
(PRWEB) September 22, 2008 -- Daniel Robinson, of Bolton-based Vizcom Design Limited, says: “Despite the credit crunch and downturn in the economy, now is not the time for businesses to reduce their marketing budget and particularly their expenditure on search engine optimisation because research suggests that 75% of businesses use search engines in order to find their suppliers.”
“If anything, marketing spend should rise in an economic down turn because companies have to fight harder for a slice of the business that is available. Marketing and SEO can be key to helping some businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors during a recession and win vital work to keep them going or even grow.” “Admittedly, convincing clients to maintain their marketing spend or even increase it during a recession is not usually easy though!”

Daniel, who advises a wide range of small and medium-sized businesses across the North West of England on SEO, added: “We all know that there is a lead-in time between investment in marketing and its results, so pulling back in expenditure can often lead to a loss in momentum in getting across key marketing messages and can, in turn, lead to a consequent loss in customers and market share. Winning new customers and market share after the economy has picked up can take a long time.”
He says that search engine optimisation has shown to be more cost effective for many businesses than a pay-per-click approach.
“Businesses that invest in search engine optimisation will generally get a much better return on their investment than pay-per-click and certainly much better than spending money on some traditional forms of marketing like an ad in a telephone directory.”
For those businesses that are prepared to invest in search engine optimisation, he says, that good SEO can cost less a month than a full tank of fuel.
Interestingly, he counsels clients to avoid designing their website purely to pander to search engines.
“We tell clients that they should design their website for users, primarily, and then for search engines. For example, this means that businesses should not get obsessed with scattering lots of keywords throughout the website.”
“Good design means visitors visit the more important pages of a site - pages that can lead to more sales or to pages with products and services providing the most profitable margins,” said Daniel.
“Businesses that invest in good SEO can often see increased traffic to their sites and increased sales within weeks if not days.”
“I am a great believer in a famous remark by Peter Drucker, the late and great father of modern management, that marketing and innovation are investments and everything else in a business is a cost.
“Those that invest in SEO stand a much better chance of riding out the economic storm, whilst those that don’t will be left with having to play catch up when the economic upturn comes about in a couple of years.”
For more information please visit Search Engine Optimisation Manchester
###

Source/original story at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1347674.htm

Growth for PPC and SEO

2008-09-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

Pay per click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) will see growth this year and in 2009, according to a report by an investment bank.

for more information:
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.21599

Top SEO Methods

2008-09-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

Your main goal is to market your site. One great way to market your site is to get your website listed first on search engines. The first step in doing so is to consult with an SEO company that uses top SEO techniques.

Here are some of the techniques used to improve the client’s traffic:

Directory Submissions increases traffic by submitting your URL in the most suitable category listing.

Social book Marking one of the best methods to generate immediate traffic for your URL is by submitting your URL to related social communities online.

Blogs & Forum Postings posting on blogs frequently is a great way to boost your SEO rankings and get your site ranked more rapidly. Posting on forum related sites is also another great way to promote your URL

Article Submission gets your site or company mentioned in content links from authority websites. This brings direct traffic to your site and improves search engine rankings.

Press Releases are an excellent way to get the advertising and let your audience know about upcoming events, company changes or updates. This is a great means of driving traffic to your website.

Video submission is a great way to advertise your URL by uploading videos content that is product related with the goal of attracting more clients.

Seo Tip of the Week:Getting basics right improves SEO

2008-09-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

Businesses can see increased traffic to their websites by getting the basics of SEO web design right, according to an industry commentator.Chris Lake, the editor-in-chief of E-consultancy.com, thinks that while there are many ways to attract traffic, for businesses with a limited marketing budget it's the basics that are most important.He said: 'Read up on how to make your site search-engine friendly, and if you can afford it, look at employing a search agency or a search expert in-house.'Mr Lake also believes that businesses should embrace Web 2.0 technologies to make sure there are as many links back to their site as possible.'There are lots of examples of companies attracting large numbers of visitors by producing videos or blogs that end up being picked up on the licks of YouTube, Digg and Yahoo Buzz,' he said.One such example is the 'Will it Blend?' campaign by the makers of Blendtec Total Blender.A series of adverts featuring items being dropped in the company's industrial strength blender (to find out if they will blend) became a huge hit on YouTube and in turn gave the company's brand more exposure.

source:
BCS News
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.21078

SEO Success

2008-08-25T14:03:00.001-07:00

DesignQuote.net is #1 on alexa for Graphic Design Employment and FreelanceDesigners is #2

Measuring a SEO Success

2008-08-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

SEO success shouldn't ultimately be measured by rankings but by conversions. High rankings don't always mean that the client's website will benefit from such results. Ranking should not be the end goal of any marketing campaign. The reason being is that rankings can move up and down so naturally this fluctuation can be difficult to keep track of. In actuality traffic doesn't always equate to more sales or customers if the quality of the traffic is poor. Ultimately the in the end, each clients ideal aim is to improve sales or convert it into clicks or subscriptions and so forth. This goal can easily be achieved by delivering full service SEO, PPC, and functionality tests.

The principle goal of conversions is to get people to buy products and services or subscribe to a blog. The mission of a SEO or online marketing campaign should consist of conversion which equates to money changing hands or bloggers increasing their subscribers or newsletter list. Some cases customers aren’t selling a product or service and are more interested in searches for branding purposes. They may then want to consider measuring the success of the campaign by the additional search traffic. This can be measured by the bounce rate and average time spent on site. Again rankings should not be the ultimate focus, but a means to an end. So keep in mind:

Conversion/profit
Cost per click - advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advertisement
Bounce Rate - the average percentage of initial visitors to a site
Pages viewed - each time a visitor views a webpage on a site, how many hits are generated
Click thru rate - measuring success of an online advertising campaign
Impressions - measuring the worth and cost of a specific e-marketing campaign

Top Five SEO Design Mistakes

2008-08-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Web is overflowing with sites search engines can't index. The problem is largely due to URL structure, back-end programming, and poor design choices. I could fill a book with the search-friendly design mistakes I've seen. For starters, here are the top five mistakes I typically encounter:

Design First, Optimize Second
Splash Pages
Lack of Focused Content
Balance HTML-Formatted Text and Graphics
Lack of Customer Focus

For more please click link: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3412591
source: Shari Thurow

Introduction to Online Search Engine Marketing SEO

2008-08-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

by Wesley E. Warren

Build it and they will come. That might work in the movies, and it may have worked in the early 1990's but with the amount of pages on the internet today, estimated in the billions, just building a site is not enough. You may have head the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization, this is the method of increasing a web sites position in search results pages in order to drive more traffic to a website.

Since almost everytime a person begins to look for something on the internet, they begin at a search engine. Google has become the 800 lb. gorillia in this arena but there are also several other smaller contenders (albeit with a much smaller market share) such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask and many other smaller specialized engines and directories.

It is critical to be listed on the first page, as most users (estimated at 90%) will not click past the first page of results. In order to reach these positions the site must be optimized.

There are two ways to get a site listed on the first page of a search engine. The first way is to purchase pay-per-click advertising that will be listed under sponsored links on Google. This can be a great way to quickly get listed on the first page of Google. With Googles pay-per-click ads (called Adwords) you create text links that appear to the right and sometimes above the natural or organic search results. The amount you are willing to pay for each click determines the position your ad appears. You bid against other advertisers for higher posiion on the page. Depending on the competition you can pay from a few cents to up several dollars for each click. If you are in a very competative business, this can get very expensive. A moderately priced keyword that cost $4 per click can quickly add up to hundreds of dllars per day. This is only for the click, so the visitor may or may not actually make a purchase from your website.

The key to having a successful web site, bringing in a consistent flow of users is to make sure your web site is regularly checked by search engines (this is known as indexing). Additionally a site should rank well for search terms (eg. keywords), ranking refers to the position a site appears in the search results. For example, if you search the term "widgets" in google, the top position, or number 1 spot is currently occupied by widgets.yahoo.com, the default format for most search engines, including Google is to show 10 listings per page.

Stay tune for Part 2

Exactly What Is a SEO and What It Means To You

2008-07-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

For those you who are just getting the hang of internet marketing may find the information a bit foreign or overwhelming. What you do understand is that there are certain things that need to be in place in order to get noticed and get business to flourish. That is where SEO comes in. Some may ask what an SEO is. A SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Many website owners are maybe wondering if hiring a company that specializes in search optimization services is the way to go. The first thing to do is to look into the possible advantages of having SEO added to your site. SEO’s can provide useful services for website owners such as:

Website development & SEO training
Keyword research
Full site review and possible recommendations for your site content
Assistance with hosting, redirects, error pages & use of JavaScript
Content development
Management of online business development campaigns

If your considering a search for a company that provides SEO services it would be to you advantage to consider Vexcom. If your considering a simple site redesign, or your planning to launch a new site then that definitely would be the way to go. Vexcom will ensure that your site will be designed search engine-friendly and improve your existing site. Vexcom has been in the web development business since 1995 and have developed high-end web applications for fortune 500 companies. Vexcom continues to work with Leading National organizations to implement cutting-edge web technology.

Vexcom Quadruples Site Traffic for Atlanta Custom PVC Home Parts Manufacturer with Internet Marketing

2008-06-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

Vexcom SEO helped The Right Angle increase their sales revenue dramatically, in less than six months. The marketing efforts led to being featured nationally on NBC. Their formally "slow-season" now brings in more business than the previous busy season.

Vexcom professional SEO services helped The Right Angle score record setting revenue and ROI for the 2008 season.

"You guys have really brought us to market and there's just not enough wonderful things we could say to express our gratitude. Business has been great in these trying times. We have been able to grow at an astonishing rate. In light of the times and of hearing about so many businesses like ours having to close there doors. We truly believe that if it wasn't for you and everyone at Vexcom we would not have had the growth we are experiencing. Not being a savy web site person it definately pays to spend the money on a great company like Vexcom. We look forward to moving and growing in the future with the assistance of Vexcom. Thank you for all your hard work." - Kim Bristow - The Right Products

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) June 23, 2008 -- In January of 2008, Kurt Buchwald, owner of The Right Angle, approached Vexcom in hopes to gear up marketing efforts for the coming spring season. As a manufacturer of PVC window boxes and shutters, they relied heavily on distributors to sell their product.

VexcomThey had a small staff and a large off-season and were struggling to turn a considerable profit like most small businesses. Vexcom was able to identify the key terms for their market and optimize their site to leverage those terms in searches. The result was nothing short of amazing for The Right Products.

"Before Vexcom, we struggled to bring in enough business to compete with the market. Now we do more business in our off season than we were doing in our busy season before." - Kurt Buchwald, Owner, The Right Angle

They had a basic website that had previously used some amateur SEO work, but they were not achieving high rankings in the major search engines, especially Google. They were relying primarily on pay-per-click ads to bring in traffic.

Vexcom helped The Right Products reach a new level of success by increasing their organic visibility in the search engines. Vexcom's efforts more than quadrupled the amount of traffic to their website by moving them up in the natural search positions dramatically. This marketing exposure led to being featured on NBC's national Today Show in a segment with Al Roker on increasing your homes curb appeal.

"I have never seen so many orders come through the door in such a short time. I was answering the phones before, now they've got me helping with production because we are so busy. We will have to increase our production staff thanks to all the new business brought in as a result of Vexcom's internet marketing." - Kim Bristow, The Right Angle

The right Products was able to reduce the money spent on pay per click advertising while increasing the traffic to their site with organic search engine optimization.
At the start, only one of the 16 key terms was in the top five of Google; half were not in the top ten. The six most searched terms were not even in the top 50. Almost 90% of people will not click to the second page of search results, so getting to the first page for your targeted terms is crucial.

Within the first 3 months, they had 14 terms in the top 5, with an incredible 7 of them sitting at number 1 in natural organic search results. Since January, TheRightAngle has moved into an expanded 6000 sq ft. manufacturing facility in order to accommodate a 3 to 4 fold anticipated increase in business.

"At the end of the six month contract, there were 13 terms in the top 3 with 10 of those being at number 1. They are doing record setting business, even in the off-season and have had to hire extra help just to meet the demands of their growing client base." - Patrick Green, Director of Sales, Vexcom

Vexcom has been in the web development business since 1995. They run several high-traffic portals that generate millions of page impressions each month. They have developed high-end web applications for fortune 500 companies and work with National organizations to implement sophisticated web technology. Vexcom specializes in Adobe ColdFusion, MySQL, .NET and PHP database programming for a wide range of business clients.

Vexcom has achieved top 5 rankings for some of the most competitive SEO terms on the internet.

Here are just a few of our most successful results:
Google Results:

Terms: web design, web designers, web site design
Positions: Top 5
Site: Web Design Directory

Terms: Graphic Design, Graphic Designers, Freelance, Freelance Photographers
Positions: Top 5
Site: Freelance Designers

Vexcom runs several high-traffic web portals including Design Quote , EventPlanners-Directory.com , My City guide

Generally it takes aboout 6-9 weeks to see an increase in traffic. The work must be done over time, you can not just do 100 hours of SEO work in 2 weeks and then see great results in 3 months. As the saying goes "Nine women can't make a baby in a month" - The hours must be applied properly in a linear organic fashion. For this reason, we have a minimum 6 month contract.

The amount of time required each month depends on the amount of work needed to rise above your competition. This can roughly be deduced by looking at the search terms you are targeting and analyzing the sites that rank higher than you as well as the total number of results. The lower the number of results, the less competiton, the less time needs to be spent working on optimizing for that keyword.

Their success story is not the exception, it is the rule. Vexcom SEO really works wonders. Just ask The Right Products. Vexcom only takes on a limited number of SEO clients at any given time. To see of we can help your business achieve success with internet marketing, contact Vexcom today.

Contact Vexcom - Atlanta HeadquartersPatrick Green - Director of Sales9755 Dogwood Rd Suite 150 Roswell, Georgia 30075(678) 338-2300 vexcom.comvexcom.net

Contact The Right AngleThe Right Angle, Inc.225 Curie Dr, Suite 600Alpharetta, GA 30005therightproducts.com

Vexcom is launching a new designer sunglasses e-store called efrogz.com this summer! Watch for news.

Atlanta's premier manufacturer of PVC "No rot" window boxes expands

2008-05-30T14:38:00.000-07:00

The Right Angle, Atlanta PVC Window Boxes and Exterior Shutter Manufacturer, Expands into New Facility

Atlanta's premier manufacturer of PVC "No rot" window boxes, exterior shutters and cedar wood brackets expands to a new 6000 sq ft. manufacturing facility. They are ramping up for the Spring 2008 season.

Alpharetta, GA (PRWEB) February 29, 2008 -- Kurt Buchwald, President and CEO of The Right Angle, Inc., has announced plans to expand into a new facility in March 2008. While their current production of innovative PVC Window Boxes is in the Windward Business Center, Kurt's start-up of his company began modestly in 2003 in his basement. He estimates that the new 6000 sq ft. facility will be big enough to accommodate a 3-to-4-fold increase in current business. It will be located at 2208 McFarland 400 Blvd., Alpharetta, GA 30004
Custom Window Boxes
Helvetica, sans-serif; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.therightproducts.com/" alt="Link to website">Almost all of our products are custom made, that is where we thrive, being a manufacturer we often get those requests Buchwald states that he built his first, experimental window box for a builder friend who loved the product. According to reporter, Crystal Ledford, of the FORSYTH COUNTY NEWS on June 30, 2005, "entrepreneur Kurt Buchwald is quite literally changing the face of homes in the Atlanta area with innovative products."

During his extensive years of experience in the building business, Kurt noticed that the typical wooden window boxes on newly built homes were rotting less than two years after the homes were built. Often this occurred while builders were still finishing the neighborhood. Instead of traditional wood, Buchwald experimented with a high-density cellular PVC material in the place of wood to build rot-proof Window Boxes. The material had been used for years for home trim boards, but never for any decorative pieces such as the window boxes.

From that point, Buchwald said word of the PVC shutters and window boxes just "spread like wild-fire." More and more of premier home builders wanted to try them out. Buchwald believed AZEK brand PVC would be ideal for just such an application. He ascertained that the PVC would be "100% rot and moisture resistant". He turned his idea into a conceptual reality and his business boomed. Later, he introduced the idea of making a no-rot shutter for many of the same reasons.

Before launching The Right Products, Inc. in 2004, Kurt Buchwald was President and CEO of Buchwald Builders, Inc., building custom-built homes in the $200,000 to $900,000 price range. Prior to founding his own company, Buchwald was a builder for John Wieland Homes, where he won many awards including numerous consecutive "Plaque Homes" and "Awards in Excellence. Buchwald attended Southern Polytechnic State University in Atlanta, where he studied Architectural Engineering.

About The Right Products:Manufacturing CapabilitiesAll of their shutters are machine cut with a CNC machine using a patents-pending method that allows us to quickly and affordably make custom sized shutters.

The Right Angle sold over 500 window boxes last year over the internet.
The unique manufacturing facility allows them to turn out custom brackets that meet architectural blueprints in under a week. In fact all of their products for the last 6 months have been shipped out in under a week and usually in less than 3 working days.
"Almost all of our products are custom made, that is where we thrive, being a manufacturer we often get those requests," said Matt Buquoi. "We have made custom window boxes and planters over 14 feet long and faux shutters that were 4 feet wide before also."
Products

Custom PVC Window Boxes
Exterior Shutters (patent pending)
Cedar Wood Architectural Brackets
Outdoor "No Rot" PVC Planters
Custom Flower BoxesThe Right Angle, Inc.225 Curie Dr, Suite 600Alpharetta, GA 30005
The Right Angle is gearing up for the 2008 spring system. They are working with Vexcom internet marketing to help promote their website as a major sales channel.

Creative Commons Has updated their license

2008-03-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

CC Creative Commons Attribution is in version 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Useful Design has added some free CSS templates to their background and wallpaper library

http://www.usefuldesign.org/

http://www.usefuldesign.org/templates/clay/

http://www.usefuldesign.org/templates/lush/

http://www.usefuldesign.org/templates/water/

All the templates are valid XHTML and CSS 2.1 and licensed under CC Attribution.

The Super Bowl Ad That Almost Was...

2008-02-06T08:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by great scott!

With the Super Bowl fast approaching, Rand looks back on his legendary proposal shenanigans of last year. Finally, all the details of the saga are revealed. Watch, comment and enjoy. If you'd like to see the original proposal reaction video, go check it out.

UPDATE: I thought I'd add in a few more details about this post, since it's a bit personal. You can obviously see in the video that I'm a bit uncomfortable and nervous talking about it, even to this day, and I think a lot of that has to do with those old feelings from last year popping up. Hiding something from a spouse or partner, especially something this big, is hard, and it made for one of the most stressful times in my life. I honestly think it was worth it, though - just watching Mystery Guest putting the ring on her finger again makes it all worthwhile, and having a great story to tell about our engagement is a lot of fun (although, admittedly, I don't talk about it very much).

As far as the sponsor goes, I really don't harbor any bad feelings. I think Joe Morin from Storybids did an amazing job putting all of this together. In the video, I don't give him nearly the credit he deserves. Very frankly - there never would have been any media, any sponsor or any chance of succeeding without Joe's brilliant work. I'm eternally grateful and he knows it. I'm not upset with the sponsor, either, although I hope one day they can find the courage to let me show the video we made to my fiancée - I think they're very paranoid about it getting leaked onto the web, but it would be great fun to let her see it.

As for the aftermath - we had raised about $10,000 through MySuperProposal.com in donations, and that money was given away to the Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. The very kind folks from the Veronica Mars show not only called us on the night of the proposal (as they had heard about it), they sent flowers and a signed copy of the script. An article ran the next morning in the local paper, but despite a short media blitz, there was no big circus, and I think that's just how we both preferred it. For those cynics who worried that we'd never set a date, we have - the wedding will be in the middle of September of this year, so expect my blogging to be non-existent at the end of the summer :)

A few relevant links:

Tonight I Proposed to Mystery Guest - my original post on SEOmoz just after she accepted
Her Reaction to the Proposal - I guess iFilm was purchased by Spike.com :)
MySuperProposal - the website that started it all
His TV Ad Works: Yes, She'll Marry Him - the article from the Seattle PI

Enjoy the SuperBowl, everyone - maybe there will even be some great commercials on this year. I'll let you know if we end up on the Oprah show for Valentine's Day...

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Yahoo Board, Sans Semel, to Consider Microsoft Bid

2008-02-05T08:00:00.002-08:00

Yahoo's board of directors has issued a statement saying it will evaluate Microsoft's unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Not surprisingly, the board will be doing so without the input of former CEO and chairman Terry Semel, who stepped down as chairman last night. He was replaced as CEO by founder Jerry Yang back in June, and has been busy staffing up his old Windsor Media venture, though it remains to be seen what form that former investment firm will take. Roy Bostock, who has sat on Yahoo's board since May 2003, was elected to serve as non-executive chairman.

Semel's departure may bode well for a potential Microsoft deal, since he's been vocal in his disdain for such a merger. It also won't hurt that Yahoo's been shedding executives for the past year, so at least some of the potential redundancies are already dealt with.

On a conference call this morning to discuss the acquisition, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, suggested that Microsoft's offer would be the only one Yahoo could get, given anti-trust concerns that would prevent Google from making an offer. he played on the underdog theme, saying, "The fact is the industry will be better served by having a more credible alternative" in search and advertising.

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Vote for the SMX West Search Bowl Competitors

2008-02-05T08:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by randfish

First off, a quick apology. I had posted this on Monday night without first checking with our nominees to ensure they could attend. I've now done so and thus, have a list of potential competitors who will be present if called upon! Sadly, favorites like Dave Naylor, Aaron Wall and a few others will not be in attendance, but the vast majority of nominees are attending!

For those who may be confused, next month at the inaugural SMX West search marketing conference, two intrepid search marketers will take on teams from Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live & Ask.com in the first ever Search Bowl! Search Bowl is a trivia game, wherein the teams of two will be asked questions related to search and search marketing and those with the greatest knowledge of all things "search" will take home eternal glory! Or, at least, a 1994 Chrysler LeBaron (that's the prize, right Danny?).

For this voting, I've asked each of our nominees to prepare a short statement indicating why they would be best qualified to represent search marketers on the trivia field of battle. Here are their responses:

Heather Lloyd Martin (of SuccessWorks):

Sure, Why Not. Sounds like fun! :)

Michael Gray (of Wolf-Howl):

The man who bought a text link from Matt Cutts.

Hamlet Batista (of HamletBatista.com)

Kowing and doing what everybody else does is not a competitive advantage.

Andy Beal (of Marketing Pilgrim):

I've probably read 100,000+ search industry news items over the past five years, if I don't release the pressure by regurgitating them, my head will explode.

Ian Lurie (of Portent Interactive):

Er, what is a Search Bowl? Should I wear protective clothing?

Todd Friesen (Oilman and now part of Visible Technologies - congrats, Todd, and welcome to Seattle):

I'll bring my cup....

Greg Boser (of WebGuerrilla):

I am coming, but I'm really hoping I don't win.

Matt McGee (of SmallBusinessSEM):

Every vote for me is an entry in next year's SEMMY Awards! (Not really, sorry.)

Loren Baker (of SearchEngineJournal):

I (nominate) Bill (Slawski) just as long as we can limit his answers to under 60 seconds and insist that he wear an eye patch :)

Andrew Goodman (of Traffick):

I feel that I'll fare better if we add an egg race, real Super Bowl trivia, or "best impression of Bugs Bunny" to the mix, but anyway, count me as "game" to be humiliated in some shape or form.

Jill Whalen (of HighRankings):

I'm the one who made Altavista rank first for "search engine" at Google. Why? Because I can.

Congrats to all our nominees. Now please help your industry select its finest for the battle ahead:

Thanks for voting - we'll announce a winner next week (along with some other very cool stuff about SEOmoz's participation in SMX West).

p.s. That's not actually Jill's quote. I just made it up because she didn't get back to me with the requested one-liner. I'm sure if she had, it would be something far more clever and vote inducing.

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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO: Rewriting, Server & Hosting Issues

2008-02-04T08:00:00.003-08:00

Posted by randfish

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

Redirecting Pages for Users & Search Engines

On the web, as in life, the only constant rule is that nothing is constant and all things must change. However, on the web, when things need to change, or, in our case, move, specifically from one URL to another, there are critical best practices to observe.

Let's first assume that you have a simple scenario - a URL that needs to re-point to another address permanently.

There are multiple options for accomplishing this feat, but in general, a single one, the 301-redirect, is preferrable for both users and search engines. Serving a 301 indicates to both browsers and bots that the page has moved permanently. Search engines interpret this to mean that not only has the page changed location, but that the content, or an updated version of it, can be found at the new URL. The engines will carry any link weighting from the original page to the new URL, as below:

Be aware that when moving a page from one URL to another, the search engines will take some time to discover the 301, recognize it and credit the new page with the rankings and weight of its predecessor. This process can be lengthier if your page hasn't changed in a long time and the spiders rarely visit it, or if the new URL doesn't properly resolve.

Other options for redirection, like 302s (temporary redirects), meta refreshes, or Javascript are poor substitues, as they generally will not pass the rankings and search engine value like the 301.

Transferring content becomes more complex when an entire site changes its domain or when content moves from one domain to another. Due to abuse by spammers and suspicion by the search engines, 301s between domains sometimes require more time to be properly spidered and counted. For more on moving sites, see Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain.

Server & Hosting Issues

There are thankfully few server or web hosting dilemmas that affect the practice of search engine optimization. However, when overlooked, they can spiral into massive problems, and so are worthy of our review. The following are server and hosting issues that can negatively impact search engine rankings:

Server Timeouts - If a search engine makes a page request that isn't served within the bot's time limit (or that produces a server timeout response), your pages may not make it into the index at all, and will almost certainly rank very poorly (as no indexable text content has been found).
Slow Response Times - Although this is not as damaging as server timeouts, above, it still presents a potential issue. Not only will crawlers be less likely to wait for your pages to load, but surfers and potential linkers may choose to visit and link-to other resources because accessing your site becomes a problem.
Shared IP Addresses - Lisa Barone wrote an excellent post on the topic of shared IP Adresses back in March of 2007. Basic concerns include speed, the potential for having spammy or untrusted neighbors sharing your IP address and potential concerns about receiving the full benefit of links to your IP address (discussed in more detail here).
Blocked IP Addresses - As search engines crawl the web, they frequently find entire blocks of IP addresses filled with nothing but egregious web spam. Rather than blocking each individual site, engines do occassionally take the added measure of blocking an IP address or even an IP range. If you're concerned, search for your IP address at MSN/Live using the IP:address query (or SEOmoz's Who Else is Hosted on My IP Tool).
Bot Detection and Handling - Some SysAdmins will go a bit overboard with protection and restrict access to files to any single visitor making over a certain number of requests in a given timeframe. This can be disastrous for search engine traffic, as it will constantly limit the crawling ability of the spiders.
Bandwidth & Transfer Limitations - Many servers have set limitations on the amount of traffic that can run through to the site. This can be potentially disastrous when content on your site becomes very popular and your host shuts off access. Not only are potential linkers prevented from seeing (and thus, linking to) your work, but search engines are also cut off from spidering.
Server Geography - This isn't necessarily a problem, but it is good to be aware that search engines do use the location of the web server when determining where a site's content is relevant to from a local search perspective. Since local search is a major part of many sites' campaigns and it is estimated that close to 40% of all queries have some local search intent, it's very wise to host in the country (it's not neccessary to get more granular) where your content is most relevant.

I'm actually really excited to have this section finished, as it means I can start diving into some less dry, more fun material with the next few chapters :)

BTW - If you haven't yet taken our survey, please do! And yes, expect to see me post this at the bottom of every blog post for the next few days to help encourage participation. We're hoping to get 3,000 or more responses, which would dwarf the sample size of something like the SEMPO report (which garnered 587 responses for 2006).

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CrazyEgg: New Free SEM/SEO Analytics Tool Blows My Mind

2008-02-04T08:00:00.001-08:00

I'm constantly on the lookout for software tools and services that help us serve our clients better. Since I've been a closet geek and software junkie my entire life, I get a mild kick when I come across software that's well-designed and provides value and features that really stand out. Yesterday I was tipped off to one that almost literally knocked me out of my chair.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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Vote for the SMX West Search Bowl Contestants

2008-02-03T08:00:00.002-08:00

Posted by randfish

Last week, we asked for your help in nominating candidates for SMX West's inaugural Search Bowl - a game of trivia that pits two intrepid search marketers against teams of two from each of the four major engines. Due to the writer's strike, there won't be a televised black tie, red carpet event. Instead, without further ado, here are the nominees:

Voting will run through to next Tuesday, when we'll announce the two winners. If any winners cannot make it, the selection will pass to the person with the next most votes.

BTW - Scott will be officially announcing it soon, but it's looking like SEOmoz will have a sponsored session on using premium membership at SMX West, open to all attendees (full conference and networking pass attendees). More to come!

p.s. Anyone notice that PollDaddy has gone to a freemium business model? Can I just say again how much I like that model :)

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Microsoft adCenter Partnering With WSJDN

2008-02-03T08:00:00.001-08:00

Microsoft has announced it will provide the advertising for the Wall Street Journal Digital Network (WSJDN), which includes Barrons and marketWatch as well as WSJ.com.

Microsoft signed a deal to be the exclusive third-party provider of contextual and paid search advertising on their sites. WSJDN is a leading provider of business and financial information news and analysis on sites such as WSJ.com, Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, allthingsD.com and more. WSJDN reaches a savvy worldwide audience of over 20 million unique users and serves over 330 million page views per month on its sites specific to the highly sought-after financial services audience for advertisers. In addition to being a traffic leader in the Business & Finance verticals, the WSJDN reaches a highly qualified audience:

â€¢ A larger concentration of C-level Executives than any other original financial news sites
â€¢ A higher concentration of affluent males than any online network
â€¢ More Business Decision Makers and Technology Decision Makers than any other online publisher of original financial news
â€¢ A high number of active investors, both institutional/professional and self-directed
â€¢ 983,000 WSJ.com subscribers
â€¢ 723,000 C-levels
â€¢ Average age: 48 years
â€¢ 67% male

The Microsoft press release noted:

â€œRelevant and targeted digital advertising is important to our business and to the quality of the experience that we deliver to our users,â€? said Gordon McLeod, president of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. â€œMicrosoftâ€™s state-of-the-art advertising platform will enable us to dramatically improve our revenues from this key sector, and we look forward to working together.â€?

â€œThis deal is a significant win for Microsoft for two key reasons. First, it makes the extended Microsoft advertising network the premier destination for advertisers interested in reaching financially minded users, as it complements our offering in this vertical through MSN Money and other syndication partners,â€? said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Microsoft. â€œSecond, this deal is a strong indicator that weâ€™re gaining significant traction with our advertising platform. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is one of the largest financial services publishers in a very dynamic vertical segment, and weâ€™re delighted to add it to our portfolio.â€?

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Search Marketers' Wish Lists

2008-02-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

We've collected the "wish lists" of several search engine marketers, sharing what they want most from search engines in the coming year.

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Search Marketers' Wish Lists, Part 2

2008-02-02T08:00:00.003-08:00

We've collected more "wish lists" of several search engine marketers, sharing what they want most from search engines in the coming year.

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Measuring PR in cold, hard cash

2008-02-02T08:00:00.002-08:00

If you haven't read Mike Grehan's ClickZ article, "Search and the changing face of public relations," read it now. Among the many pithy and insightful comments within his article is this one: "I think traditional PR firms may be on their way out." Go, read it now. This will be on the mid-term exam.

When you're done reading that, read Sally Falkow's post in the Search Engine Watch Blog, entitled, "Search not understood and used in PR campaigns." Do we begin to see a trend yet?

Now, go back and read my article in Search Engine Watch, entitled, "Blogs Are the New Trade Press." Yep, the experts agree. "The world of public relations has changed dramatically over the past five to 10 years â€" or, at least it should have."

But it often seems like the folks over in PR didn't get the memo.

Well, they're not the only ones who didn't notice that the world was changing. On March 27, 2007, The Project for Excellence in Journalism noted in The State of the News Media 2007, "The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows. Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role. Their companies failed to see 'search' as a kind of journalism."

And many (but not all) people failed to see "blogging" as a kind of journalism. Or, at least some percentage of blogging. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported on July 19, 2006, in a report entitled, "Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers, "34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism" and "56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post."

Now, that's a couple of paradigm shifts at the same time. So, don't blame your public relations people if they didn't connect the dots.

Who do I blame? Well, it's the Chief Marketing Officer in some companies or the Vice President of Marketing in others who is responsible for measuring the results of various elements of the marketing mix. And if the CMO or VP of Marketing is still content with a getting a stack of press clippings at the end of each month, can you blame his or her PR people from thinking that they've done their job?

Okay, so counting press clips has been a bogus PR metric for more than 20 years. I've told the story in "Measuring PR in Cold, Hard Cash" of my first month as Director of Corporate Communications at Lotus Development Corp. -- way, way back in 1986.

After my first month on the job, I took a very thick book of about 700 magazine and newspaper clippings that weâ€™d received, walked down the hall to CEO Jim Manziâ€™s office, and casually dropped it on his desk. Manzi took a quick look and said, "Jarboe, if I could deposit these in a bank, Iâ€™d know what they were worth. But, until you can measure the impact of PR in cold, hard cash, donâ€™t waste my time with these so-called reports."

And, I have to admit, Manzi was right.

So, what are the right PR metrics?

In MarketingSherpaâ€™s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008, you'll find more than half a dozen, including:
-- Press mentions,
-- Blog mentions,
-- Ranking of a press release in news search engines,
-- Click through rate (CTR) from links in a press release,
-- Rise in site traffic around launch, and
-- Track leads from click through conversion.

That's the memo that most CMOs and Marketing VPs haven't received. They can measure public relations in both PR outputs and business outcomes. And they had better get the memo before the CEO does.

And, trust me on this: When the big boss starts asking for "real" measures of success, then the traditional PR people will start learning about SEO, blogs and web analytics.

One last note: There are other PR people of who this. Sally Falkow is one. Lee Odden, the founder of TopRankResults.com, is another. And Katie Paine, my predecessor at Lotus, is a third. She writes The Measurement Standard Blog.

She and I both started looking for ways to measure PR in cold, hard cash -- before search, blogs, and web analytics -- but after the big boss started asking for "real" measures of success.

See the trend?

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RipOff Report Responds: You Be the Judge

2008-02-02T08:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It please the Mozzers,

Welcome to another edition of Legal Monday! Some of you may recall my post from last week, The Anatomy of A RipOff Report Lawsuit, in which I attempted to illuminate the legal issues surrounding the controversial site RipOffReport.com.

I invited Mr. Thomas B. Duffy, one of RipOff Report's attorneys, to contact me regarding last week's post with any corrections, feedback, documents, or missed cases that he thought might be helpful. I am very grateful to him for taking me up on my offer and contacting me last week. The phone call lasted for more than an hour. For today's Legal Monday, I want to summarize five of Mr. Duffy's responses:

The Post Contained A Factual Error.
The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because Many People Who Write RipOff Reports Understand SEO.
The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because That Is How Uneducated People Write When They Are Really Upset.
RipOff Report's Technical People Indicate That The Site Is Not Violating Google's Guidelines.
Ed Magedson Proved His Innocence When He Stated He Could Not Have Authored The RipOff Reports Because He Lives In Arizona And the Alleged Defamatory Reports Have IP Addresses From All Over the Country.

RipOff Report has been much discussed lately and some may feel that the topic is tired. Regardless, I felt I would be remiss if I did not share some of RipOff Report's counter-arguments and comments. For those of you who are utterly bored of RipOff Report, I promise to move on next week.

1. The Post Contained A Factual Error.

First things first. I want to thank Mr. Duffy for informing me of a factual error in my post. I had inadvertently referred someone as a former RipOff Report employee. In fact, the person was a former employee of the plaintiff in one of the cases. Immediately after our conversation, I corrected this inaccuracy.

While I strive for complete accuracy, I do make mistakes. I appreciate being corrected and I apologize for facilitating misapprehension.

2. The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because Many People Who Write RipOff Reports Understand SEO.

During our conversation, Mr. Duffy spontaneously brought up the issue of keyword-stuffed titles. (For examples of seemingly keyword stuffed title tags, look here and here.) He explained that the reason it appears that the titles have been optimized is because they are, but not by RipOff Report. Instead, Duffy claimed that many people understand SEO and purposefully used SEO techniques in their titles to improve rankings.

I'm not sure what to say about this. Really? Are there hundreds of SEOs completing RipOff Reports? Do we buy this as a community?

3. The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because That Is How Uneducated People Write When They Are Really Upset.

At other points in the conversation and without prompting, Mr. Duffy suggested an alternate explanation for the seemingly keyword stuffed title tags: That is just how uneducated people write when they are very upset. According to Duffy, these "poorly educated" people get so upset that they "can't put a sentence together."

While I agree that the U.S. education system has its faults, I can't bring myself to agree with Mr. Duffy here. "Russ Whitey [sic] Education Group Scam Rip Off Fraud Misrepresentation Deceptive trade practices Securities and Exchange Russ Whitney Foreclosure Wealth Intelligence Academy Law Suit/ Focus On Foreclosure Cape Coral Florida" doesn't look to me like a poorly educated person who is so upset they can't form a sentence. "Misrepresentation" is a rather large word for the uneducated masses. Also, I find the different spellings of "Whitney" to be highly suspect.

Before this goes any further, I also want to be clear that none of the Complaints I have seen suggest that RipOff Report employees generate all the reports. In fact, I think it is safe to assume even those who are suing RipOff Reort agree that most reports are written by the masses. Thus, there are certainly many, many counter-examples of perfectly reasonable, albeit inarticulately phrased title tags.

And then there are those that repeat the company name and the word "internet." Is this what they're teaching in our public schools? To repeat words for emphasis when angry? To repeat words for emphasis when angry?

(Okay. That was a wee little joke. Couldn't resist.)

4. RipOff Report's Technical People Indicate That The Site Is Not Violating Google's Guidelines.

Again spontaneously, Mr. Duffy volunteered the fact that RipOff Report's "technical people" had determined that the site was not violating Google's webmaster guidelines. As proof of RipOff Report's compliance, he offers the fact that "We're [RipOff Report] still on top."

I am a not an expert in technology. I just work in a community with more than its fair share of technology experts. Is RipOff Report violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines? According to people that I trust about this kind of thing, the answer is "yes."

I linked to his post last week because Chris Bennett did an excellent job of demonstrating the ways RipOff Report fails to comply with Google's guidelines. In summary, Mr. Bennett points directly to:

the aforementioned use of keyword stuffing
the site's failure to use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines;
the multiple domains and subdomains (w3.ripoffreport.com and badbusinessbureau.com) with substantially duplicate content;
the pages loaded with irrelevant keywords.

Your very own Mr. Rand Fishkin also identified a few doozies:

It appears that the URL - www.ripoffreport.com/lists/ - is being cloaked (though it doesn't seem to necessarily be malicious cloaking). Try searching for Rip Off Report at Google and that's the second result, but unless you change your user agent to Googlebot, it forwards you to http://www.ripoffreport.com/lists/1/default1442.htm (or something similar).
The site also sells paid link advertising and fails to nofollow the links.
MSN/Live has clearly banned the site and will no longer index it, while Yahoo! has simply severely limited its ranking ability (when 2/3 engines think a site's spamming, that's a pretty good signal something's wrong).

5. Ed Magedson Proved His Innocence When He Stated He Could Not Have Authored The RipOff Reports Because He Lives In Arizona And the Alleged Defamatory Reports Have IP Addresses From All Over the Country.

Mr. Duffy stated repeatedly that Mr. Magedson had 'proven' he was not the author of any RipOff Reports, Titles or Rebuttals. There is a sworn statement, according to Mr. Duffy, in which Mr. Magedson proves he couldn't have authored certain RipOff Reports because the author's IP address was in Texas and Ed lives in Arizona.

I did not find a statement by Ed Magedson that said this exactly. I did, however, find a couple statements in which RipOff Report attempts to prove its innocence by revealing the author's IP address and then swearing that it doesn't match the IP addresses belong to the company or to Mr. Magedson. Ergo, RipOff Report did not author or change the Reports. One is a sworn statement by Ed Magedson. The other is a sworn statement by a long-time technology consultant for RipOff Report, Ben Smith.

There is nothing inviolate about an IP address. I am concerned that Judges and perhaps most attorneys, might give this evidence more than its proper weight. Thus, for any non-techies who may be reading, I asked our CTO, Jeff Pollard, to explain to me how IP Addresses work and how easy it would be to get an alternate IP address for your home or business computer. Here is Jeff's response:

An IP address identifies a network connection to the internet - but it does not identify a specific computer. For instance, as far as the internet is concerned all actions taken from our office internet connection - no matter which individual computer did it - are from the same IP address. So even though Jane's computer could be commenting on SEOmoz and my laptop is browsing cnn.com, both are making requests under the same IP address.

And that isn't to say that IPs can't be changed or spoofed. You can use a proxy or VPN to mask your IP address and make it look like it's coming from somewhere else, or if your ISP assigns you a dynamic IP (like our office currently has), vs a static IP, your IP address changes as often as you restart your router (or you ISP feels like it).

So in general, for the casual internet browser, their IP address does an OK job identifying them. But if you want to spoof your IP or just use one not associated with your home or office, it's not that hard at all. It can be as simple as restarting your router, using any number of proxy services or even just go down to your nearest Tully's and use the free WiFi.

I am an attorney and not a technologist. That's why I rely on geniuses like Mr. Pollard. You, my readers, are much more tech savvy than I am. Thus, you are more than capable of exercising your independent judgment regarding how effectively the "Not-Our-IP-Address Defense" exonerates RipOff Report.

Conclusion

I don't know if Mr. Duffy was representing his own views or RipOff Report's views when he told me these things on the phone. I make no assumptions.

I do know that on several occasions during the course of the phone call, Duffy informed me that Magedson was upset, talking to his "litigators," and thinking about suing the SEO community for "ganging up" on him. While he did not go into detail, Duffy hinted that Magedson may try and bring some kind of antitrust lawsuit against everyone who has participated in the recent online discussions about RipOff Report.

I sincerely hope that this was just bluster. An antitrust suit would be ill conceived and frivolous. The SEO community has not called for a boycott, shared confidential information, refused to deal or engaged in monopolizing behavior. Most importantly, because SEOs do not compete with RipOff Report, antitrust laws are inapplicable. To the contrary, I suspect that RipOff Report generates a great deal of business for SEOs by creating negative rankings that require reputation management services. Thus, the collective outcry of the community could be viewed as altruism at its finest.

As always, I thank you for your readership. I hope that the threat of a lawsuit will not have a chilling effect on comments.

Very truly yours,
Sarah

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Duplicate content question

2008-02-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

Someone recently asked me

I read this overview of what you said at an SES conference:

Matt Cutts â€" Google Not prepared, but informal remarks. High order nits: what do people worry about? He often finds that honest webmasters worry about dupe content when they donâ€™t need to. G tries to always return the â€œbestâ€? version of a page. Some people are less conscious. The person claimed he was having problems with dupe content and not appearing in both G and Y. Turns out he had 2500 domains. A lot of people ask about articles split into parts and then printable versions. Do not worry about G penalizing for this. Different top level domains: if you own a .com and a.fr, for example, donâ€™t worry about dupe content in this case. General rule of thumb: think of SEâ€™s as a sort of a hyperactive 4 year old kid that is smart in some ways and not so in others: use KISS rule and keep it simple. Pick a preferred host and stick with itâ€¦such as domain.com or www.domain.com.

From http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html

If this is an accurate summary, and I’m reading what you’re saying, then there’s no need to worry about duplicate content issues when submitting articles. Is that correct?

My response:

What I was saying was: I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

We use additional heuristics of course, but I figured other people might want to hear that take.

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Using SEO for Reputation Management

2008-02-01T08:00:00.003-08:00

SEO has a pivotal role in reputation management, as it can push down negative results and enhance positives in search results.

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Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective)

2008-02-01T08:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by randfish

The Question:

I'm starting a new site and have no idea what I should do for software. Do I need to use a content management system, and if so, how do I make sure it's SEO-friendly?

The Answer: It depends...

I want to try taking a new tact with this blog post and give some direction about how to approach this issue. There's no way to tackle the question from every angle in every possible way (at least, not without 100 pages of content), but hopefully, when you refer your friend who's launching a website or your new startup's VP of Engineering to this page, they'll find some helpful starting points. NOTE - This post isn't going to cover specific CMS platforms. There's some great web resources already out there like www.opensourcecms.com and www.cmsmatrix.org to help manage this task. Instead, this blog post will help you determine the essential questions to ask of your stakeholders before embarking on a web development project.

The first part of the question determines your need for a Content Management System (CMS) and I've made a handy flowchart to guide you through the process:

Nowadays, it's exceptionally rare for a company or even a private site owner to select a static site, even when a content management system isn't required due to the inexpensiveness of customizing free platforms like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress or Mambo.

On to the second portion of our query - how to ensure that a CMS will be search-engine friendly. Below are 12 basic SEO issues that frequently plague content management systems (both pre-built and custom-made). By dealing with these, you'll ensure a relatively smooth platform for content delivery:

Title Tag Customization & Rules
A search-engine friendly CMS must allow for title tags to not only be customized on a page-specific level, but also enable rules for particular sections of a website. For example, if your site offered a blog, several static pages and a forum, you might want to create a rule that all blog pages would begin with "Yoursite Blog > " while forum pages used "title of post > Yoursite Forum."
Static, Keyword-Rich URLs
URLs have historically been the most problematic SEO issue for CMS platforms. Nowadays, search-friendly content management systems should feature custom URL creation. Here's an example from SEOmoz's custom-built CMS:
_

_
Notice how the first line allows me to create the title of the post, while the second enables manual sculpting of the URL structure (and an automatic "generate" button if I'd prefer to simply use the post title)
Meta Tag Customization
The meta description and robots tags are the two critical ones (mentioned in detail here). Enabling editorial control is essential for a good CMS.
Enabling Custom HTML Tags
A good CMS has to offer extra functionality on HTML tags for things like "nofollow" on links, or <hx> tags for headlines and subheadlines. These can be built-in features accessible through menu options or the CMS can simply allow a manual editing of HTML in the text editor window when required.
Internal Anchor Text Flexibility
In order to be "optimized," rather than simply search-friendly, customizing the anchor text on internal links is critical. Rather than simply making all links in a site's architecture the page's title, a great CMS should be flexible enough to handle custom input from the admins as to the anchor text of category-level or global navigation links.
Intelligent Categorization Structure
A close second to poor URLs is poor category structure. When designing an information architecture for a website, there should be no limits placed on how pages are accessible due to the CMS' inflexibility. CMS' that offer customizable navigation panels will be most successful in this respect.
Pagination Controls
As pagination can be the bane of a website's search rankings (see here and here), controlling it through careful use of nofollows and meta noindex tags will make your important content get more link juice and crawl attention.
301-Redirect Functionality
Many CMS' sadly lack this critical feature, disallowing the proper re-direction of content when necessary. 301s are valuable for expired content, pages that have a newer version and dodging keyword cannibalization issues.
XML/RSS Pinging
Although it's primarily useful for blogs, any content, from articles to press releases can be issued in a feed, and by utilizing quick, accurate pinging of the major feed services, you limit some of your exposure to duplicate content spammers who pick up your feeds and ping the major services quickly in the hopes of beating you to the punch.
Image-Handling & Alt Tags
Alt tags are a clear must-have from an SEO perspective, serving as the "anchor text" when an image links and providing relevant, indexable content for the search engines. Images in a CMS' navigational elements should, preferrably use CSS-Image Replacement, rather than mere alt tags, though the difference in our testing has been fairly small.
CSS Exceptions
The application of CSS styles in a proper CMS should allow for manual exceptions so a user can modify how a strong, headline or list element appears visually. If they don't, writers may opt out of using proper semantic markup for presentation purposes.
Static Caching Options
Many CMS' currently offer caching options, which are a particular boon if a page is receiving a high level of traffic from social media portals or news sites. Bulky CMS' often make dozens of extraneous database connections, which can overwhelm a server if caching is not in place, killing potential inlinks and media attention.

I'd love to hear more in the comments about particular struggles you've had with CMS from an SEO perspective and what other features you think are important for a good CMS to offer. I'd also be interested to know more about anyone's specific experience with the various CMS platforms available (free and paid) and if you've got a favorite.

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Facebook Ads & Applications: Critical SEM Learning Curve

2008-02-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Facebook Social Advertising Event Nov. 6, 2007 introduction from boy-wonder Mark Zuckerberg was a millennial harbinger of marketing-things-to-come. If your business or agencyâ€™s search marketing department has dismissed Facebook applications & paid ads, as outside of your productâ€™s demographic, think again. Though advertisers are making millions now on the Facebook platform, the revolution is far more important than Facebook.

Not Your Fatherâ€™s PPC
The SEM concepts employed on Facebookâ€™s fledgling paid ad platform embody a methodology which will be likely be embraced by mainstream search engines and communities. Keyword research has always been the staple of classic â€œpullâ€? search marketing. When configuring Facebook paid campaigns, marketers research and target buzz pockets of user interests, as expressed by their dealings with friends. Itâ€™s called the â€œsocial graph.â€?

As an example, now itâ€™s possible to target ads to â€œWoman between 24-29 years old, interested in gardening, organic food, wine, cooking, live in Minnesota or Wisconsin, and are in a relationship.â€?

Last week Google responded by (re)announcing beta-testing of an enhanced AdWords feature, called demographic bidding. Advertisers will target gender and age groups on some sites within the Google content network. The feature is being tested over the next few weeks with a select group of advertisers in the U.S. and the U.K.

There has been industry debate regarding the long-term value of demographic targeting. MSN has had similarly rudimentary demographic targeting features for quite some time.

Facebook Applications: Fad or Future?
INC Magazine recently published a celebrated case study about quick scores. Whether you believe in Facebook apps or not, Google has already responded with Open Social developersâ€™ platform, "a set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites,â€? and inked deals with prominent social sites. These next-gen social apps and widgets are coming. Early adopters, who figure things out now, will clearly have the advantage.

â€œFacebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online,â€? Zuckerberg imparted to more than 250 advertising and marketing executives on that day in New York. â€œFor the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And theyâ€™re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.â€?

Facebook ads and applications represent marketing early adoptersâ€™ first opportunity to dapple in, what will clearly be, a significant wave of future viral techniques and media buys. Study Facebook and practice marketing to points on the social graph in order to prepare for a future which is already here.

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How to highlight author comments in WordPress

2008-01-31T08:00:00.005-08:00

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

2008-01-31T08:00:00.003-08:00

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

2008-01-31T08:00:00.001-08:00

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 isnâ€™t exactly the second coming, itâ€™s welcome news.

According to Facebook developer Wei Zu, â€œThis 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.â€?

Facebook also encourages developers to install applications outside its domain, which I understand was possible (if more difficult) before this release anyway. Blogger Nick Oâ€™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

2008-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-30T08:00:00.005-08:00

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

2008-01-30T08:00:00.003-08:00

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

2008-01-30T08:00:00.001-08:00

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.

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.
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.
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.
Daniel asked

Crazy feature: Iâ€™d like to be able to have an easy way to migrate my entire Google account to a different gmail address, because I canâ€™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.
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?
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.
Easton Ellsworth mentioned

Iâ€™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, Iâ€™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.
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.
Diego asked

I donâ€™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.
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

2008-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-29T08:00:00.002-08:00

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:

Leave a comment below with the full name of the individual you'd like to nominate
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")
You may nominate or second yourself!
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?

2008-01-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

Since late December, best-of-breed search marketers have been chattering about a supposed and creepy â€œPosition 6â€? Google SERPs punishment pattern where pages which, by all indications, should dominate the organic SERPs somehow place at lowly #6. Googleâ€™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, â€œHow I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed.â€? 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 â€?proof instead of weird assumptions based on claims of webmasters jumping on todayâ€™s popular band wagon that aren't plausible nor verifiable...such beasts don't exist.â€?

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

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, itâ€™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

2008-01-28T13:29:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-28T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-27T08:00:00.002-08:00

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

2008-01-27T08:00:00.001-08:00

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?

2008-01-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-01-26T08:00:00.002-08:00

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

2008-01-26T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-25T08:00:00.003-08:00

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

2008-01-25T08:00:00.002-08:00

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.

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.

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

2008-01-25T08:00:00.001-08:00

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.

â€œCovario,â€? a play on the word â€œcovariance,â€? 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. â€œToday 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.â€?

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What should I do with my draft posts?

2008-01-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T08:00:00.002-08:00

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

2008-01-24T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2008-01-23T08:00:00.002-08:00

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

2008-01-23T08:00:00.001-08:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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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Whatâ€™s the best NAS right now?

2008-01-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-22T08:00:00.002-08:00

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: whatâ€™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

2008-01-22T08:00:00.001-08:00

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:

The original REP from 1994, extended 1997, that defines crawler directives for robots.txt. Some search engines support extensions like URI patterns (wild cards).
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.
The sitemaps protocol from 2005 that defines a procedure to mass submit content to search engines via (XML) Sitemaps.
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:

Sebastian, January/15/2008

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Why cloud services rock

2008-01-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-21T08:00:00.001-08:00

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:

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).
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.
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).
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

2008-01-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-20T08:00:00.002-08:00

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.

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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

2008-01-20T08:00:00.001-08:00

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 yearsâ€™ 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

2008-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-19T08:00:00.003-08:00

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

2008-01-19T08:00:00.002-08:00

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.

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.
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.
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:

You own the copyrighted material;
A description of the infringing material and the URL where it can be found;
You did not give the infringer permission to use the material;
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.
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.

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

2008-01-19T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

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.
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.
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(â€™versionâ€™); ?>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"

2008-01-18T08:00:00.003-08:00

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

2008-01-18T08:00:00.002-08:00

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

Thanks to Andy Beard for the list

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

2008-01-18T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T08:00:00.003-08:00

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

2008-01-17T08:00:00.002-08:00

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

2008-01-17T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

During last nightâ€™s 60 Minutes segment on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg set up Lesley Stahlâ€™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 donâ€™t believe that people-search is the key strength of Facebook, until critical mass is reached. This has happened for College students, because Facebookâ€™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 doesnâ€™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. Iâ€™m expecting more over time.

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Is the AdWords Competitor-bidding Party Over?

2008-01-16T08:00:00.003-08:00

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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