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Google acquires Web-calling service GrandCentral

2007-07-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

Google Inc has acquired GrandCentral Communications, a start-up that lets users manage their existing phones and voice mailboxes over the Web as if they were a single account, the company said on Monday.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Grand Central of Fremont, California is one of dozens of innovative companies that are taking advantage of Web-based software to allow consumers and businesses to make voice calls over the Internet while also working with regular phones. GrandCentral was founded in late 2005 by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, who worked together while running Web-calling pioneer Dialpad Communications. Google's biggest rival, Yahoo Inc, acquired Dialpad in June 2005.

"You get a single phone number that forwards to all of your phones, giving you one number for life," Walker and Paquet said in a statement on GrandCentral's Web site confirming the deal. EBay Inc unit Skype, a pioneer in the Internet phone market, has signed up more than 200 million users for its free or low-cost phone services globally. Newer names in the field include venture-backed firms Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr and Rebtel, which together have signed up millions of users in just the past year.

The idea for GrandCentral was borne out of Walker's frustration upon landing at a local airport and realizing he needed to check three voicemail mail boxes--one for his cell phone, another for work and one for his Blackberry phone. "If you have multiple phone numbers (eg., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones," Wesley Chan, a Google product manager, said in a blog post on his company's Web site.

"This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job," he said.

Rather than competing directly with the likes of Vodafone Plc or China Telecom Corp Ltd, many of these newer Web-based calling services are focused on incorporating phone-like talk features into Internet services on blogs or social network sites like MySpace or Facebook. Konstantin Guericke, the co-founder of Silicon Valley-based business networking site LinkedIn took over as the chief executive of Web-calling service Jangl late last year.

"The way I see it, social networks and blogs are about communication and the phone hasn't been really in the mix," Guericke said following news of Google's acquisition. GrandCentral has been holding public tests of its service for several months. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted service, Google said. However, one feature that allowed users to upload their own audio tracks to create ringtones now will be limited to licensed music, GrandCentral said on its own site.

A limited number of invitations to receive GrandCentral unified numbers will be available for users who sign up at http://www.grandcentral.com, it said. "We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users," Chan said. Google did not disclose future products plans it has in the area. But voice-calling features will quickly be built into many popular Web sites over the next three months to a year, Guericke said. "We think there is a billion-dollar business to be built, so we have no plans to get acquired any time soon."

In the last five weeks, Jangl has seen the number of registered users of its service on sites like Facebook grow to 300,000 users from 100,000 on May 25, he said.

Source: expressindia

Yahoo introduces robots-nocontent for page sections

2007-05-12T23:33:00.000-07:00

"Webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a 'robots-nocontent' tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors.

We won't use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results

Addressing some comments and questions, with regards to links, the 'robots-nocontent' does not in any way affect how links are treated.

All links will continue to be used to find targets and will carry attribution to the target if they do not have the 'rel=nofollow' tag on them, whether or not they are inside a 'robots-nocontent' section."

Courtesy: ysearchblog

Google PageRank Update on April 28

2007-04-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Google is updating the Pagerank. Last Page Rank update was on January.
After two months google has again updated its page rank.

Google testing TV ads in California

2007-04-08T01:18:00.000-07:00

The WSJ is reporting (behind paywall) that Google is conducting a small scale test of television advertisements in the Northern California town of Concord (east of San Francsicso), and there are additional rumors that Google is close to signing a deal with Dish Network, a satellite television provider, to supply advertising to its television subscribers.

The article also notes that the total size of the television advertising market in the U.S. is $54 billion annually, which is much larger than Google’s current $20 billion/year playground, online advertising.

There is no information on how much Google is planning on assisting advertisers in creating the ads. Their audio advertising product, also still in testing, contains basic creation tools and access to voice professionals.

Spotrunner, an online startup that assists advertisers with ad creation and buying, has gained a lot of momentum in the last year. Rumors are always circulating that Google or someone else will acquire the company. These tests do nothing to suggest an acquisition is more or less likely - only that Google is definitely looking at the space. Spotrunner has raised $60 million in financing.

Source: techcrunch.com

What Google could do if they were evil

2007-04-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

You probably know Google's informal company motto "Don't be evil". Google is a very successful company that knows a lot about its advertisers and users. In addition, Google has a market share that would allow them do certain things.

What could Google do if they were evil? Note that the following is only hypothetical:

Google could favor its own products and websites

Google could prefer websites from its own services in the search results: websites that run Google ads, websites that use Google's payment service, Blogger sites, Google Base, etc.

All websites that pay Google in some way could be preferred in the search results while others are downranked.

Google could punish websites at discretion

If Google doesn't like your website or if someone tells Google that you're a bad boy then Google can ban your website from the search results without any reason given.

You can find a lot of articles on the web that discuss the problem that Google removed web sites from the index. The main problem with these removals is that Google usually doesn't explain why a web site has been removed so that webmasters often are complete and utterly at Google's mercy.

Google could use your data against you

Most Google products now use a single account. That means that Google knows a lot about you if you use their services: your address, your credit card number, the web pages that you visit, the web sites that you own, how much you earn with your web site (if you use Google's analytics product), etc.

Google could sell this information to other companies, the government or any other person that pays for it. If one of your web sites causes a problem with Google, they could ban all of your sites. There's a lot that Google could do with the information they have about you.

Google could force webmasters to advertise

Google could decide that web sites that advertise on Google get better rankings in the search results. They could also decide that companies with big wallets don't get high rankings so that they have to advertise more.

Companies that use Google's analytics software to track their sales tell Google how much they earn. That allows Google to raise the advertising costs based on the revenue of the company.

Google could do most of the things above and it would be very difficult to prove that they actually do it because Google doesn't reveal the ranking algorithm. Maybe you know the saying "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Let's hope that Google can resist the temptations of their power.

Inside AdWords: Pay-per-action beta test

2007-03-27T04:47:00.000-07:00

Inside AdWords: Pay-per-action beta test

Google accepting applications for AdSense referrals beta

2007-03-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

Google launched Adsense referral beta where users can select products and services from AdWords advertisers.

You can select which ads to display on your site by either choosing relevant ads or letting Google do the work for you.

You can simply provide a few keywords to describe your site and your users' interests, and you'll see ads automatically displayed that perform best for your site.

With referrals, you'll be paid when visitors click through to an advertiser's site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign up.

This feature is currently available on a limited basis as part of Google's beta test.

Source: ISEDB.COM

Finally! Google Shows us the Backlinks

2007-02-10T06:32:00.000-08:00

If you’ve ever compared Google’s link: command to that of Yahoo or MSN, you probably know how useless it is. For some reason, at some point, some one at Google decided to filter, and only show a small selection of all links to a site. Well, that has all changed now. You can now log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account, and find a plethora of link data.

I logged in and checked it out a few minutes ago, and I must say, I’m thoroughly impressed. Links are divided into 2 groups: internal and external. If you have several links from one site, each page is listed individually. It would be nice to have the option to show only domains, and not every single page, since it can be sort of overwhelming to have to dig through hundreds of links from one site, like (http://site.com/?pid=323, http://site.com/?pid=325, http://site.com/?pid=329, etc…). They did add the ability to search for specific pages, but don’t allow you do wildcard searches. I guess the ability to export a spreadsheet of every single link sort of makes up for that though.

Here’s a link to the official announcement from Google.

Source: seologs.com

Yahoo goes ‘desi’ with 7 Indian languages

2007-02-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

Internet brand Yahoo on Thursday announced that Yahoo India portal is now available in seven Indian languages -- Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi and Gujarati.

It also announced that Yahoo Messenger 8.0 now allows users to chat in nine Indian languages -- Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati.

Managing Director of Yahoo India George Zacharias said the localization of the Yahoo India portal will revolutionize user experience and invite more users to access information on a daily basis for news, reviews and events happening around them.

"Innovation is key driver for our product development, in order to make Yahoo relevant to the next 200 million Indians that will come online in the next few years," Zacharias told reporters.

Courtesy: expressindia.com

A Brand New Site Monetization Alternative

2007-02-04T03:47:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are looking to try out a new monetization method, there’s a brand new alternative. It’s called AdVolcano. I haven’t actually tried it yet. I thought I’d mention it here first, and see if I get any good reviews in the comments.

AdVolcano is similar to companies like Google ads and Text Link Ads, in that they act as a middle man to bring advertisers and publishers together, but promises to bring some extra added value:

With AdVolcano, you won’t have to worry about being stuck in box of having to try to find an ad format/ size that you can fit somewhere in the design of your site, without making the page look like an ad with some content. They allow you to fully customize ad formats and sizes. I know this would definitely be a bonus for me.

Unlike other programs that evaluate your site with their own secret algorithm that may or may not change from day to day, AdVolcano allows you to set your own prices. Seems like a fair system. Want an ad on my site? It’ll cost you $300/ week for a 10×10 pixel ad in the footer.

AdVolcano pays publishers 75% of the take on advertising. Unlike some other ads that no one (except for the guys in white coats) knows.

Source: SEOLOGS.COM

Dogpile ranks highest among search engines

2006-10-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

"Included in the study for the first time, Dogpile ranks highest among search engines, with top ratings from Internet service subscribers in all three factors that determine overall satisfaction within the segment: ease of use, functionality and results. Ask.com and Google, respectively, follow Dogpile in the segment rankings.

To read more click here

Press Release Power

2006-10-14T23:14:00.000-07:00

I'm sure by now you've heard about how Press Releases can help your marketing campaigns on the Internet. But besides from people telling you, do you have any quantitative evidence that it's worth the time to craft a newsworthy release?

From a search marketing perspective, this is one of the best ways of killing two birds with one stone. Besides getting exposure for your site, you are also creating web saturation. By having the possibility of your release getting picked up by multiple media outlets, you quickly and cheaply get eyeballs looking at your product or service, and ultimately, traffic to your site.

Being that the Internet has grown to being a social environment with the ultimate goal of personalization for each user, how can anyone get their message out?

With blogs, RSS readers and news aggregators becoming more popular, the user is becoming more selective to what they want to see. This is something every marketer should embrace.

Now, instead of spending thousands to blast an add that may only be relevant to 10 percent of your audience, you can now selectively target your audience and deliver your message.

Since the majority of us do not have Google's bankroll, we are left to find less expensive ways to drive visitors to your site. This is where one can get onto a level playing field with the big spenders.

To demonstrate the power of the press release, take a moment to review some stats on a campaign that was conducted in early December.

PR Service: PRWeb.com, Price: $80.00 USD ( (Note: - you can submit free press releases, but you won't have access to any tracking stats, and you lose some services.)

For the above mentioned fee, the $80.00 includes: Properly Optimized, RSS/XML Feed, Next Day Distribution, ability to attach files, featured, listing appears on: Google News, Overture, eMediaWire, Yahoo News, Excite News, DogPile, MetaCrawler, Inktomi, MSN News, Lycos News, AskJeeves News, Feedster and Topix News.

Quite the bang for your buck, eh?

The Press Release in question was for a free service, and it was geared for Christmas use, so keep that in mind as you review the information.

Estimated Pickup: 3,908 (This number estimates the number of times the press release was picked up by a media outlet. This does not indicate how many times the story appeared in the media. It simply attempts to estimate media interest in the release.)

Now how many places on the Internet can give you those type of numbers for getting traffic to your site?

To try and get an accurate number for a "typical" Press Release, another release was submitted in March of 2005, for a new paid-for service.

Reads: 80,375 Estimated Pickup: 1,362

Still pretty impressive, even if it's just to get some traffic, or brand name exposure.

If you're serious about your business, $80.00 is easily worth the investment for this type of return.

-To your online success!
Paul Bliss
SEOforGoogle.com

Hollywood vs Google

2006-10-14T22:59:00.000-07:00

It's on.

Everyone knows the impact Google has had on both the Internet world and the real world. With Google trying to actively list and maintain all the touch points to any piece of information, it only makes sense that Hollywood would have issues with Google and the other search engines.

People want information and access to anything instantly. Google feeds this desire by returning blazingly fast results anytime someone enters a query into the site. It's from this ability to be only one click away from a competitor is what frightens Hollywood so much.

With the click of a mouse, I could download the latest movie in the theaters - with minimal chance of getting caught - and while the quality and convenience is not to the same level as a dvd release, if I am looking for free entertainment, it's easily available.

Hollywood needs to embrace the new technology and it's ability to deliver what the people want. Imagine walking out of a theater with a fantastic movie you just watched, and waiting for you was a representative from the studio with that exact movie you just watched available on dvd. $20 on the spot, and you have a top-quality version of the movie.

There is a delicate balance that must be determined because currently, dvd sales are what can turn a clunker in the theaters to a money maker in post release.

Hollywood also needs to figure out a way to let the consumer order a movie over the Internet via streaming, or even if I wanted to order a movie through my TiVo. They need to create an encryption technology that allows for only 1 copy to be made, and even have something that subtly alerts a viewer that the product they are watching has been copied. This marking technology is already in place for dvd screeners that the studio releases.

At a certain interval, there is a specific series of lights (that usually form a letter or number) which identifies to whom the screener was released to. This way if that copy gets on the Internet, they not only have a quick reference point, but can also have a starting point as to how that movie got pirated.

Another thing that Hollywood needs to consider is the technology used to display it's products: Film and a silver screen as seen through a dusty projector. While the film enthusiast in me absolutely loves the look and feel of seeing a movie in the theater, there is a huge segment of customers who purposely wait until the movie comes out on dvd simply because they have a better looking and better sounding system at home to watch the movie with!

Hollywood had really begun to reach it's commercial end by allowing for traditional advertising before a movie plays. While I fully understand and recognize why it's being done (Tom Cruise ain't cheap!), it REALLY takes away from the movie experience. I fully expect to see trailers for upcoming movies - but not commercials. That's what television is for.

By including commercials before a movie gets played, they have connected the movie experience to that of watching the boob tube.

It's in all of this that Hollywood and Google should get together and create a solution that is amicable to everyone involved. There will always be bootleggers - that is a given. But if you can reduce the number of illegal downloads and copies being marketed, the studio can keep more of it's money used to get people to see their films in the first place.

The search engines provide value, and Hollywood provides the experience. Marrying the two would create an instantaneous feeling of overwhelming satisfaction for the new age user.

Remember, "It's All About ME".

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss
SEOforGoogle.com

SEO MASTERS INDIA, an India based SEO Company hits the Net

2006-10-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

Did you know that 90% of unique internet traffic to a website originates from a search engine. So you can not ignore search engine optimization or search engine marketing!

SEO trend in India is fast catching up. Many SEO companies in India have set up their services. These SEO firms in India have become successful in a short period of time as the service that they provide is needed by everyone who wishes to achieve success in web marketing.

SEO Masters India doesn’t stand different but are different is all aspects of their service. For them what stands more important is their worldwide clients who made their site worth visiting in such a vast IT industry. SEO Masters India strongly believes in them, know capabilities and limitations and work accordingly on any given project. SEO Masters India makes sure that whatever they do is client and quality centric.

Their team consists of experienced SEO / Internet Marketing Experts who can offer expertise in the areas like Web Promotion, Internet Marketing, PPC Campaign and Top Search Engine Positioning. With focused nature to place our client's website prominently in the search engines and further retain the search engine rank positions, their professional and expert SEO team has developed successful and ethical web marketing and Natural SEO techniques over the years and have a proven track record of excellent results and a plethora of satisfied clients.

SEO Masters India has a budget for every type of business and with affordable options to suit your marketing goals; they will certainly increase your online presence!

Feel free to circulate and share out this press release as you wish - if you can post it on your own site or email it to your friends then please do. It’s real time to reproduce the word far and wide amongst the all community across the world.

SEO MASTERS INDIA is truly a MASTER of these elements.

Google Code Jam 2006

2006-08-15T02:34:00.000-07:00

Programmers Worldwide invited to participate in Google's Fourth Annual Global Coding Competition.

You could win $10,000 in the grand prize.
2nd - 10th place: $5,000 each
11th - 25th place: $2,500 each
26th - 50th place: $1,000 each
51st - 100th place: $750 each

More information just log into: http://www.google.com/codejam2006

Google Launches "The Google Calendar (BETA)"

2006-04-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

Google has released its long-rumored calendar service, offering an appealing set of features that makes it easy to keep track of your own schedule and share calendars with others.

It's an impressive new service, though not without rough edges. It should appeal to anyone who's been frustrated by the current generation of calendar applications that all seem to be lacking in one crucial aspect or another.

"We wanted to address the challenges that we found in other calendaring products," said Carl Sjogreen, product manager, Google calendar.

The new Google Calendar is available to anyone who has a free Google account. To access the calendar, visit http://www.google.com/calendar and sign in, or register for a free Google account if you don't have one. If you have a Gmail account, you'll now also see a link to your Calendar in the upper left corner of the screen.

Like most Google services, the Google Calendar sports a clean, uncluttered interface. A small "mini-calendar" on the left side of the screen shows the current month, and a larger view to the right shows either the current day, week or month view, the "next 4 days," or an "agenda," a linear list of all of your scheduled events.

There are a number of ways to add events to your calendar. You can simply click on an area of the calendar where you want to place an event and a pop-up window appears with a form that lets you enter the event (the date and time are automatically filled in). Click the "edit event details" link if you need to add additional information, such as location, description, a reminder and so on.

Alternately, you can use the "quick add" link that opens a form that lets you type natural language sentences like "dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow," interprets them, and makes an appropriate entry on the calendar. This feature is a big time-saver, especially for people who hate filling in forms. If your entry is ambiguous (e.g. "call Mom on Mother's Day) an entry form is created allowing you to complete the entry with more precise information.

Gmail users will find a new feature that recognizes events in mail messages and gives you an opportunity to add the event to your Google Calendar. Google is also offering a "remind me with Google Calendar" button that lets you add events from web sites that display the button with just a couple of clicks.

One of the nice features of the programs is that you're not limited to a single calendar. It's easy to create multiple calendars for specific functions, to track things like family or work events, though figuring out how to create a new calendar takes some unnecessary work (click the "manage calendars" link, then the "calendars" tab on the Calendar setting page, and only then you'll finally see a "create new calendar" button).

You can also import calendars that use the common iCal or CSV formats—for example, an Outlook calendar. I wish Google had made this easier. Rather than simply locating common calendar files and importing them directly, Google Calendar makes you go through the process of exporting and then importing calendar data. You can learn more how to do this with common calendar formats at www.google.com/support/calendar.

Each individual calendar you create is listed in your list of calendars, and is color-coded so its events are clearly distinguished from events in other calendars. To see events in a specific calendar, simply tick the check box next to its name. You can view events from as many different calendars as you like. Being able to manage multiple calendars within this relatively simple, straightforward interface is one of the most powerful features of the program.

By default, your calendar is private, but Google has created a number of features that make sharing calendar information with others quite easy. "We realized that managing your own events is only one small part of what's going on," said Sjogreen.

You can share calendars with other Google Calendar users, or publish your calendar events so that anyone can view them, whether they are a Google Calendar user or not. More on this feature in a moment.

Options give you quite a bit of control over how your calendars are shared. You can make a calendar completely public (be careful with this—public calendars are easily searchable by anyone who has a Google Calendar), or share only your "busy/free" information, hiding the details of your calendar.

You can also share your calendar with specific people, and even give them permission to make changes and manage the sharing of the calendar, though they must also be Google Calendar users to do this.

Sharing events with others who aren't Google Calendar users is straightforward. In essence, every event on calendar has a web page associated with it—Sjogreen calls it a sort of "mini-blog associated with an event," where people can leave comments, respond to others and so on. To enable this interactivity, simply add "guests" to an event by including their email addresses in the event details section.

Google hasn't neglected search capabilities with Google Calendar. You can search across your own calendars, and if you click the "search options" link next to the search form, you'll see fields that allow you to limit your search to "what," "who" "where," "doesn't have," or a date range. There's also a drop-down menu that allows you to limit your search to all calendars, your calendars or other calendars.

There's also a search form beneath your list of calendars that searches all public Google Calendars, helpful if you're searching for public events that others have included on their calendars. This ability to search for other events, combined with adding your own events, makes it easy to create very comprehensive calendars. "We tried really hard to make it easy to get calendaring information from any source so you have a complete picture of events in your life," said Sjogreen.

What about privacy? As with all online services, there's a tradeoff between utility and the security of your personal information. By default, your calendar entries are private—you must explicitly share them to make them public. But as we've seen recently, government agencies have requested what's considered private information from Google and other online services, so it's prudent to think carefully before using Google Calendar. Be sure to read the Google Calendar Privacy Policy for more information.

Bottom Line:

Google Calendar is a very strong initial release, with a good balance between powerful features and ease of use. The ability to easily work with multiple calendars and the sharing features are particularly appealing, especially for people who are dissatisfied with their current calendar application.

Trying the Google Calendar is low-risk—if you don't like it, you can simply export your information and import it back into your current calendar app.

The most significant downside of Google Calendar is that it requires you to be online and logged in to your Google account to use it. For someone who spends a lot of time on airplanes and in countries with limited net access, that's a significant pain factor for me. Sure, you can make printed copies of your calendar, but you lose most of the functionality in doing that.

It'd be great if Google would offer an option to work with your calendar while working offline. If they do, I won't look back at Outlook again.

Google buys search algorithm invented by Israeli student

2006-04-09T23:13:00.000-07:00

Search engine giant Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student. Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science.

Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that "Ori Alon works at Google's Mountain View, California offices."

The University acknowledged that Yahoo and Microsoft had conducted negotiations with its business development company.

Alon told TheMarker in an interview six months ago that the university had registered a patent on the invention.

Orion, as it is called, which Alon developed with faculty, relates only to the most relevant textual results. In addition the software, which currently operates only in English, offers a list of topics directly related to the original source.

"For example, if you search information on the War of Independence, you'll receive a list of related words, like Etzel, Palmach, Ben-Gurion," he explained. The text will only appear on the results page if enough words relevant to the search and the link between them is reasonable. Orion also rates the texts by quality of the site in which they appear.

Source: haaretzdaily.com

Google aims to track users with wi-fi

2006-04-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

Google aims to be able to track its users to within 100-200 feet of their location through new wireless networks in order to serve them with relevant advertising from local businesses.

The leading internet search company, which depends on advertising for 99 per cent of its revenues, was selected on Wednesday by San Francisco as its preferred bidder to provide a basic free wi-fi internet service covering the entire city.

It had partnered in its bid with the internet service provider Earthlink, which intends to charge a fee for a faster internet connection.

Google and Earthlink will now enter final contract negotiations with the city. There were five other bidders including a non-profit group backed by Cisco Systems and IBM.

The company hopes to defray the costs of offering a free service through contextual advertising. Analysts have speculated that the San Francisco bid could be a prelude to Google seeking to extend its reach into localities nationwide.

It is already planning a free wi-fi network by the summer covering the city of Mountain View, where its headquarters is based, and the San Francisco service may be up and running by the end of the year.

Google says users linking up with wi-fi transmitters placed around cities can be located to within a couple of blocks. This would open up a new level of advertising opportunities for the company, allowing it to serve tightly focused ads on its web pages from small businesses in the immediate area.

The bid to blanket-cover San Francisco with cheap internet access is part of a broader move towards municipal wireless networks by big US cities.

Philadelphia became the first major US city to begin construction of a citywide wireless network when it signed a deal with Earthlink earlier this year.

Other big cities such as Chicago, Boston and Austin have announced their own wireless network plans.

Experts have warned, however, that the free wireless model remains unproven and may not offer the best solution for smaller cities and towns addressing the "digital divide" to promote economic development.

In a separate development, Google has launched a local listings service for real estate.

Typing "real estate" or "homes for sale" in its search box prompts users to enter their postal codes and see a map showing properties and their details in their area. The "mash-up" combines Google Maps with its Google Base classifieds service.

By The Financial Times Ltd

AOL Enhances Mobile Search

2006-04-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

AOL has added several new features to its mobile search service, and has also released the findings of a recent mobile lifestyle survey.

AOL launched mobile search services in July 2005, offering web, local and shopping search services that were similar to those available at search.aol.com. Today, AOL has added a new "Surf the Web" option to its mobile search that makes it easy to both locate and view just about any web page without the aggravating scrolling that's often necessary using many web-enabled mobile devices.

The new AOL "Surf the Web" search allows you to type in keywords and automatically navigates to a web page that you're interested in. Better still, rather than simply rendering the page as found on your mobile device's tiny screen, the page is automatically and intelligently reformatted for your device.

"One size doesn't fit all for the mobile internet—we have to resize for the phone that's in your hand," said Raine Bergstrom, director of Emerging Technologies for AOL's wireless group.

Intelligent reformatting means that the most important content is identified and displayed first, regardless of its location on the web page. Graphics are resized to fit your screen. Most importantly, the main navigation for a site is identified and incorporated in a single "Quick Nav" link, rather than taking up important real-estate on your mobile device.

This means you see the most important content but also have access to all navigation on a site with a single, additional click. This is all done automatically for any site that you visit. It's a slick, intelligent way to view web content on a mobile device.

AOL has also enhanced its local search and mapping services for GIS enabled devices. Simply use the "locate me" function and from that point on all of your searches for AOL's mobile Cityguide, Moviefone and Mapquest Maps will automatically offer results based on your current location without any additional input.

A history of the phone's location and previous searches is also kept, and is accessible both via the mobile device and the web. This makes it easy to revisit favorite places—and also keep tabs on where a phone has been (of interest to some parents wanting to know where their teens have been, for example).

The new services are available to any web enabled phone at mobile.aolsearch.com/ (you can also view this on a computer to see what gets displayed on a mobile device).

Mobile Lifestyle Survey Results

AOL, in conjunction with the Associated Press and the Pew Research Center, has released results of a survey showing that Americans are becoming increasingly dependent on their mobile phones, and that the use of online mobile services is increasing. Some highlights:

52 percent of adults keep their cell phone turned on all day, everyday
40 percent of those aged 18-29 are likely to drop their landline
30 percent of adults want to browse the Web from their cell phone
47 percent say that mobile maps and driving directions are a "must have" on the next phone they buy.

Source: searchenginewatch.com

Google Romance launches, Gates buys OpenOffice--not

2006-04-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

A couple April Fool's Day jokes got us smiling this morning.

Seems Google is coming out with new features all the time, so the search giant got us--for a very quick moment anyway--with its Google Romance beta and pitch, "When you think about it, love is just another search problem."

Some of the spoof features include a Soulmate Search and Contextual Date "which we'll pay for while delivering to you relevant ads that we and our advertising partners think will help produce the dating results you're looking for."

Slashdot then pointed us to OpenOffice.org's announcement that it was bought by Microsoft's Bill Gates, who "was sick and tired of open-source eating away at his profits." In case you didn't immediately get the joke, a press release link brings you to the April Fool's Day message.

Neither prank, however, beats Slashdot's revamped pink site, an attempt to reach beyond its predominantly male readership.

Happy April Fool's Day, everyone!!!!

Posted by Michelle Meyers
For more information: http://news.com.com

Google Has Multimedia on Its Mind...

2006-04-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

Internet search provider Google appears more serious than ever about preparing features for home electronics.

In the past few weeks, the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm has begun looking for employees to make Google TV and radio products compatible with televisions, stereos, radios and cell phones.

As for TV, Google appears to be preparing an on-demand service that would serve up videos and games. The company is asking for software engineers with experience in Internet-based, interactive TV, personal video recorders, video-on-demand and some unspecified features offered by cable operators.

There are now at least three TV-related job openings at Google: a product manager, and two television technology engineers, one based in Mountain View, Calif., the other in Kirkland, Wash.

Google's radio efforts are getting at least two more employees, both based in Newport Beach, Calif. The job descriptions suggest Google is now more seriously meshing its Internet search and ad features with the systems of dMarc Broadcasting.

In January, Google announced that it purchased dMarc of Newport, Calif., which places advertisements on more than 4,500 radio broadcasts, including 40 percent of the top 50 radio groups.

Google benefits from such an expansion of its features because, to a large degree, its Internet search, messaging and mapping are restricted to personal computers.

In a way, Google has merely scratched the surface when taking into account how the number of TVs, stereos, radios and cell phones now in circulation vastly outnumber personal computers.

By extending features to televisions and radios, Google would also have a much more competitive advertising package to offer companies, which it needs.

When it comes to getting off the PC, Google lags behind chief rival, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, the Time Warner Inc. company.

The moves may also be in response to the pressure from Google investors worried the firm isn't preparing for the inevitable time when annual Internet ad sales level out.

"There are a million ways in which Google could fail," writes Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr. "But the upside, both in inherent potential and in the potential to outflank their competitors, is enormous.

A Google spokeswoman shed very little insight into what's going on when asked for comment for this story.

The representative wrote, in an e-mail, that, "Google is always looking for talented individuals worldwide to join the company. Unfortunately, there's nothing more beyond the job description that we can share at this time.

Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine

2006-04-03T01:16:00.000-07:00

After months of speculation and two "preview" releases, Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its new MSN search engine, the first major competitor to join the big leagues of web search in nearly a year.

The new engine, available at beta.search.msn.com is an algorithmic search engine built from scratch by Microsoft engineers. "This is our new engine that we've built from the ground up," said Justin Osmer, product manager for MSN Search. Released in beta form, it's expected to replace Yahoo search results still in place at MSN sometime later this year or early next year.

Supported by an index of 5 billion pages, the new engine is comparable to Google and Yahoo! in scope, and for most of my initial tests, in relevancy as well. Microsoft has acknowledged that being "as good as" its competitors is merely the price of entry to the web search game these days.

The interface is clean and sparse, as are search result pages. MSN Search is now offering cached links to the copies of pages that its crawler fetched. Notably, for some pages, a date is also displayed next to the "cache" link. Microsoft says that this date is an estimate of when the page last changed. In many cases, this is also the date the page was crawled. You can see the crawl date for all pages by clicking through to the cached version of the page.

Osmer says that a comprehensive crawling effort is central to the success of MSN Search. MSN's crawling some pages daily, some weekly and some monthly, "which we believe is more frequently than some of our competitors out there," says Osmer.

New and Different Features

To set itself apart from the pack, the new MSN Search includes some features that differ from those found on Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. The most prominent difference is the "Near Me" button appearing next to the "Search" button. Clicking the Near Me button effectively runs a local search for your query. In this release, the Near Me feature works only for searchers located in the U.S.

By default, your browser's IP address is used to determine your location. You can override this by explicitly entering your current location using the Settings command. The "Near Me" function works quite well, primarily because Microsoft has tagged every web page in its index that has geographic information, using what the company calls an "overlapping tiles model," starting with zip code, then including neighborhood, region, city, state and country information if available.

MSN Search also now incorporates additional non-web sources of information in results on a query-specific basis. For example, queries for factual information get "direct answers" from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia. For music-related queries, inline results from MSN Music are included, with a link to further information, downloads and so on.

Microsoft is also offering an interesting hybrid approach to customization and advanced search. Clicking the Search Builder link opens up a window beneath the search form that provides explicit controls over many of your query variables. Most of these controls are similar to those hidden away on the advanced search page of other search engines. Having them available from any search form is a nice touch that should encourage more use of these refinement tools.

"The point is trying to allow the average person to be able to build relatively complex queries relatively easily," said Osmer.

The first allows you to easily modify your query by adding terms or an exact phrase, or excluding terms from the search. You can also limit your search by domain, country or region or language, or to pages that link to a particular URL. Search Builder automatically formats your query with the appropriate syntax, even nesting queries in parenthesis when appropriate.

The final refinement tool is the coolest feature of the new MSN Search, allowing you to control result ranking using sliders. There are three sliders available. One lets you select the degree of match between your search terms and result pages, from an exact match to an approximate match. The second lets you specify page popularity, from very popular to less popular. The final slider controls freshness of results, from updated recently to static pages.

Using all three sliders in combination produces a remarkably wide range of results for the same query, and for some types of searches can be extremely useful. In other cases, results become, well, just bizarre. I love the idea of giving searchers more control over results, and I like the idea of using sliders, but this particular feature will need refinement before it catches on in a big way.

Image search is also new, but not unique. MSN Search has partnered with Picsearch to provide access to over 400 million images. Osmer says that MSN Search starts with the Picsearch database and adds its own tweaks, but at this point results from MSN Search and Picsearch are almost identical for the test queries I ran.

The quality of image search results is reasonably high, especially when compared to an image search in Google, which seems to have faltered lately. Among the majors, Yahoo's recently enhanced Image search database seems to be the clear leader in this area, at least for now.

Customization Options

Through the "Settings" link, you can set several preferences for search results. In addition to English, the MSN Search interface is available in ten other, mostly European languages. You can also specify which languages are to be included in results.

Other settings allow you to change the number of search results from the default of 10 to 15, 30, 50 or 100 per page.

Safe search is new. Moderate filtering is the default setting, screening out sexually explicit images only. Strict will eliminate both explicit images and text. You can also turn the safe search filter off.

You also have the ability to influence the number of results displayed from a particular site. Search results from the same site are grouped together, with a maximum of two displayed by default. You can change this to display one, two or three results.

Desktop Search: Missing, but Coming Soon

Contrary to what's been widely reported in the press, Microsoft will be releasing a desktop search application before the end of the year. It won't be the application that's part of the Longhorn upgrade to Windows, but rather a separate application that will integrate with MSN Search. I've seen a demo of the desktop search application and am impressed with its capabilities, but a non-disclosure agreement prohibits me from writing anything more about it until it's actually released.

Microsoft has a number of other planned enhancements that will be released before the end of the year, covering a wide range of both web and desktop content, including a blog search feature—something no major search engine has yet done, despite Google's purchase of Blogger and Yahoo's major push toward indexing RSS feeds and making them easily available via My Yahoo.

These enhancements will almost certainly strengthen the appeal of the initial MSN Search application.

A Google Killer? Not

Over the past few days as rumors of the launch of MSN search have been widely reported, speculation has focused on whether this entry by Microsoft signals the end of Google's web search domination. Not likely, and not because MSN's search engine doesn't have the technical chops to compete with Google. It does, and Microsoft seems to truly have "got religion" when it comes to web search.

But Google isn't going to stand still, as we saw with last night's stealth increase in Google's index to a reported 8 billion plus pages, which means Google is likely working with a full index of more than 10 billion items—roughly twice the size of Microsoft's web index.

Google also has a seeming lock on searchers' mental shelf space—at least for now. Rightly or wrongly, many people automatically turn to Google for search, and Microsoft will have to do much more than simply launch this initial highly laudable foray to change the searching behavior of the masses.

I think they will, both by improving this initial beta version of MSN search and gradually folding some of the seriously cool research projects cooking in Microsoft Research labs into the search engine over the next couple of years. But let's not forget Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, who are also diligently laboring away on improving their own search engines.

The bottom line for searchers is that we've now got four world class "voices," as Danny Sullivan likes to call them, who are working to outdo not only their competitors but themselves. We've also got dozens of smaller players who are developing innovative new tools and approaches that will likely be absorbed or copied by the big guys.

Far from being a Google killer, MSN Search is instead a welcome new alternative for searchers, and a catalyst for sparking further improvements and innovations at other services. It's going to be a fun couple of years.

What Makes the Perfect SEO Firm

2006-03-31T21:00:00.000-08:00

SEO companies come in all shapes and sizes. You've got your solo SEOs that either a) do everything themselves and/or b) sub-contract out many aspects of each campaign while maintaining a tight control on the quality and results of the project.

Then you have your big SEO firms that employ 20+ employees that handle various aspects of your account. These firms can often turn into SEO factories and can lack the ability to treat each client individually, because everything is done in bulk.

A third SEO firm is a smaller firm that employs a small handful of employees and may also sub-out a few various aspects of the campaign, but overall each client is treated with a personal hands-on approach with most of the campaign handled in-house with strict quality control measures.

The perfect SEM firm must have most, if not all of the following:

Project Manager

The project manager is responsible for overseeing every aspect of the SEM campaign. Their job is to ensure that each aspect of the project is given to the appropriate person to complete and double checks all work to ensure that the highest standards are met before it is passed on to the client. The Project Manager is the primary contact with the client and bears the responsibility of ensuring that the client knows that their campaign is a top priority.

Lead Search Engine Optimizer

The Lead SEO spends much of their time doing nothing but research. Researching SEO trends, search engine functionality, patents, white papers, etc. Their job is to ensure that they stay on the cutting edge of the technological changes that are coming down the pike. It is also their job to take this knowledge and apply it to each and every optimization campaign. From keyword research and organization to implementation of the on-page optimization factors. The lead SEO also overseas any optimization techniques implemented by sub-seos, link builders, etc. that may be managing the day-to-day tracking and tweaking of any site.

Search Engine Optimizer

All other SEOs work directly under the lead SEO and work to implement his "vision" of the perfectly optimized page. Each should do their own research and knowledge building but any implementations should follow the outline presented by the lead SEO. These SEOs should be responsible for the day-to-day optimization changes, as well as continuous research to ensure that any client's site's are free from potential currently unknown search engine roadblocks.

Coder/Programmer

While all SEOs must have a significant knowledge of HTML, XHTML and CSS coding, it is helpful to have an additional person who is primarily responsible for the code optimization aspects. Optimizing and streamlining code can be a significantly time-consuming process, especially when ensuring each optimized page has full cross-browser compatibility. When not working on the optimization code, such a person would be working on developing and improving in-house tools, reporting systems, as well as publicly available tools.

Copywriter

The importance of a professional copywriter cannot be understated. SEO methods that simply take your keywords and try to place them into text are becoming less and less effective, not only for search engine placement, but for ensuring a quality user experience. Each optimized page should have its content re-written by a professional copywriter following project-specific keyword guidelines established by the lead SEO. SEO copywriter should have a marketing background and experience with ad testing and writing press releases, as well as general article content.

Link Researchers

This may be controversial to some, but it is increasingly important to have full-time link researchers continuously working on each campaign. Link researchers are responsible for seeking out other quality and related sites to do one or more of the following: Link to important sites, request links from important and/or related sites and submitting links to quality relevant directories.

As SEO becomes more marketing oriented, many more positions must be added for a firm to properly service their client’s needs. Speaking strictly from an SEO aspect, these jobs are each an important aspect of achieving success with your optimization campaign.

Working With the Robots.txt File

2006-03-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

Topics :

What is the robots.txt file?
Working with the robots.txt file
Advantages of robots.txt
Disadvantages of the robots.txt file
Optimization of the robots.txt file
Using the robots.txt file

What is the robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is an ASCII text file that has specific instructions for search engine robots about specific content that they are not allowed to index. These instructions are the deciding factor of how a search engine indexes your website's pages. The universal address of the robots.txt file is: www.example.com/robots.txt . This is the first file that a robot visits. It picks up instructions for indexing the site content and follows them. This file contains two text fields.

Lets study this example:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The User-agent field is for specifying robot name for which the access policy follows in the Disallow field. Disallow field specifies URLs which the specified robots have no access to. An example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Here "*" means all robots and "/ " means all URLs. This is read as, "No access for any search engine to any URL". Since all URLs are preceded by "/ " so it bans access to all URLs when nothing follows after "/ ". If partial access has to be given, only the banned URL is specified in the Disallow field. Lets consider this example:

# Research access for Googlebot.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/new/

Here we see that both the fields have been repeated. Multiple commands can be given for different user agents in different lines. The above commands mean that all user agents are banned access to /concepts/new/ except Googlebot which has full access. Characters following # are ignored up to the line termination as they are considered to be comments.

Working with the robots.txt file

1. The robots.txt file is always named in all lowercase ( e.g. Robots.txt or robots.Txt is incorrect)

2. Wildcards are not supported in both the fields. Only * can be used in the User-agent fields' command syntax because it is a special character denoting "all". Googlebot is the only robot that now supports some wildcard file extensions.

Ref : http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html

3. The robots.txt file is an exclusion file meant for search engine robot reference and not obligatory for a website to function. An empty or absent file simply means that all robots are welcome to index any part of the website.

4. Only one file can be maintained per domain.

5. Website owners who do not have administrative rights cannot sometimes make a robots.txt file. In such situations, the Robots Meta Tag can be configured to serve the same purpose. Here we must keep in mind that lately, questions have been raised about robot behavior regarding the Robot Meta Tag. Some robots might skip it altogether. Protocol makes it obligatory for all robots to start with the robots.txt thereby making it the default starting point for all robots.

6. Separate lines are required for specifying access to different user agents and Disallow field should not carry more than one command in a line in the robots.txt file. There is no limit to the number of lines though i.e. both the User-agent and Disallow fields can be repeated with different commands any number of times. Blank lines will also not work within a single record set of both the commands.

7. Use lower-case for all robots.txt file content. Please also note that filenames on Unix systems are case sensitive. Be careful about case sensitivity when defining directory or files for Unix hosted domains.

Advantages of the robots.txt file

1. Protocol demands that all search engine robots start with the robots.txt file. This is the default entry point for robots if the file is present. Specific instructions can be placed on this file to help index your site on the web. Major search engines will never violate the Standard for Robots Exclusion.

2. The robots.txt file can be used to keep out unwanted robots like email retrievers, image strippers etc.

3. The robots.txt file can be used to specify the directories on your server that you don't want robots to access and/or index e.g. temporary, cgi, and private/back-end directories.

4. An absent robots.txt file could generate a 404 error and redirect the robot to your default 404 error page. Here it was noticed after careful research that sites that do not have a robots.txt file present and had a customized 404-error page, would serve the same to the robots. The robot is bound to treat it as the robots.txt file, which can confuse its indexing.

5. The robots.txt file is used to direct select robots to relevant pages to be indexed. This especially comes in handy where the site has multilingual content or where the robot is searching for only specific content.

6. The need for the robots.txt file was also necessary to stop robots from deluging servers with rapid-fire requests or re-indexing the same files repeatedly. If you have duplicate content on your site for any reason, the same can be prevented from getting indexed. This will help you avoid any duplicate content penalties.

Disadvantages of the robots.txt file

Careless handling of directory and filenames can lead hackers to snoop around your site by studying the robots.txt file, as you sometimes may also list filenames and directories that have classified content. This is not a serious issue as deploying some effective security checks to the content in question can take care of it. For example, if you have your traffic log on your site on a URL such as www.example.com/stats/index.htm which you do not want robots to index, then you would have to add a command to your robots.txt file. As an example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /stats/

However, it is easy for a snooper to guess what you are trying to hide and simply typing the URL www.example.com/stats in his browser would enable access to the same. This calls for one of the following remedies -

1. Change file names :

Change the stats filename from index.htm to something different, such as stats-new.htm so that your stats URL now becomes www.example.com/stats/stats-new.htm
Place a simple text file containing the text, "Sorry you are not authorized to view this page", and save it as index.htm in your /stats/directory.

This way the snooper cannot guess your actual filename and get to your banned content.

2. Use login passwords :

Password-protect the sensitive content listed in your robots.txt file.

Optimization of the robots.txt file :

1. The right commands: Use correct commands. Most common errors include - putting the command meant for "User-agent" field in the "Disallow field" and vice-versa.

lease note that there is no "Allow" command in the standard robots.txt protocol. Content not blocked in the "Disallow" field is considered allowed. Currently, only two fields are recognized: "The User-agent field" and the "Disallow field". Experts are considering the addition of more robot recognizable commands to make the robots.txt file more Webmaster and robot friendly.
Please also note that Google is the only search engine, which is experimenting with certain new robots.txt commands. There are indications that Google now recognizes the "Allow" command. Please refer to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html.

2. Bad Syntax : Do not put multiple file URLs in one Disallow line in the robots.txt file. Use a new Disallow line for every directory that you want to block access to. Incorrect example :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/ /links/ /images/

Correct example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/
Disallow: /links/
Disallow: /images/

3. Files and directories : If a specific file has to be disallowed, end it with the file extension and without a forward slash at the end. Study the following example :

For file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /hilltop.html

For Directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/

Remember, if you have to block access to all files in the directory, you don't have to specify each and every file in robots.txt . You can simply block the directory as shown above. Another common error is leaving out the slashes altogether. This would leave a very different message than intended.

4. The right location : No robot will access a badly placed robots.txt file. Make sure that the location is http://www.example.com/robots.txt.

5. Capitalization : Never capitalize your syntax commands. Directory and filenames are case sensitive in Unix platforms. The only capitals used per standard are: "User-agent " and "Disallow "

6. Correct Order : If you want to block access to all but one or more than one robot, then the specific ones should be mentioned first. Lets study this example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow:

In the above case, MSNBot would simply leave the site without indexing after reading the first command. Correct syntax is:

User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

7. Presence : Not having a robots.txt file at all could generate a 404 error for search engine robots, which could redirect the robot to the default 404-error page or your customized 404-error page. If this happens seamlessly, it is up to the robot to decide if the target file is a robots.txt file or an html file. Typically it would not cause many problems but you may not want to risk it. It's always a better idea to put the standard robots.txt file in the root directory, than not having it at all.

The standard robots.txt file for allowing all robots to index all pages is:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

8. Using # carefully in the robots.txt file: Adding comments after the syntax commands is not a good idea using "#". Some robots might misinterpret the line although it is acceptable as per the robots exclusion standard. New lines are always preferred for comments.

Using the robots.txt file

1. Robots are configured to read text. Too much graphic content could render your pages invisible to the search engine. Use the robots.txt file to block irrelevant and graphic-only content.

2. Indiscriminate access to all files, it is believed, can dilute relevance to your site content after being indexed by robots. This could seriously affect your site's ranking with search engines. Use the robots.txt file to direct robots to content relevant to your site's theme by blocking the irrelevant files or directories.

3. The file can be used for multilingual websites to direct robots to relevant content for relevant topics for different languages. It ultimately helps the search engines to present relevant results for specific languages. It also helps the search engine in its advanced search options where language is a variable.

4. Some robots could cause severe server loading problems by rapid firing too many requests at peak hours. This could affect your business. By excluding some robots that might be irrelevant to your site, in the robots.txt file, this problem can be taken care of. It is really not a good idea to let malevolent robots use up precious bandwidth to harvest your emails, images etc.

5. Use the robots.txt file to block out folders with sensitive information, text content, demo areas or content yet to be approved by your editors before it goes live.

The robots.txt file is an effective tool to address certain issues regarding website ranking. Used in conjunction with other SEO strategies, it can significantly enhance a website's presence on the net.

SEO Link Building With Web Content Secrets

2006-03-23T21:41:00.002-08:00

It's the timeless question: how do you get other sites to link to you? The most commonly discussed ways are reciprocal linking (swapping links) and buying links. Yet there's another important tool for building links that should be a part of your toolbox: distributing content in exchange for one-way inbound links.

Comparison with Other Linking Methods

Reciprocal Linking: The big advantage of content distribution over swapping links is that the links built are one-way, and therefore presumably more valuable. Of course, reciprocal links still have value, but relying primarily on them might hamper your SEO efforts.
Indirect Reciprocal Links: I link my site A to your site, so you link your site to my site B. The problems are that this can be a lot of work, and also, Google can detect indirect links if you do it more than once with the same group of sites, which might make your linking arrangements look like a link farm.
Paid Links: The problem with paid links is 1) the costs add up; 2) search engines are getting better and better at discounting paid links. According to Matt Cutts' blog, "I wouldn't be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future...link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)."

Kinds of Content to Distribute

Articles: This is the essential kind of content distribution, to the point that many people consider content distribution simply as "article marketing." However, you're missing out on a few other sources of links if you only do articles.
News blurbs: A lot of news-style sites will only reprint pieces of a couple of paragraphs. The good news is that often enough the whole point of these news blurbs is to include links to other sites, in a sort of "look what we've found" kind of way, a la Slashdot.org
Press Releases: There are some sites that aggressively reprint press releases. A press release is like an article, only in a very specific press release format, and frankly that's not that enjoyable to read. I don't know why some sites are so head-over-heels over press releases, but, hey, that's their business. The good news is that even if you can't write and don't want to hire a writer, press releases (at least basic ones) are pretty easy to do.
Tools, games and other webware: Sites with popular tools, software, Flash games and other webware often let other sites use it in exchange for a link. The big potential downside is technical support.
Images: Images, especially charts and photographs, are important forms of content on the web. If you have great images on your site and people ask you to use them on their sites, require a backlink in exchange. The problem with images is that they are so easily stolen. Stolen words can be uncovered with a web search. You could try to watermark images with a copyright symbol, URL, and the link requirement. But in the process you'd make the image much less desirable.
Web Design Templates: These have been freely distributed for a long time. Yet they are even more easily stolen than images. Also, if you embed a link in the footer of a web template, what you'll get back are sitewide links, which are often thought to be filtered out in search engines.

Maximizing Content Distribution

Links' Effectiveness: Anchor Text

You need optimized anchor text to rank high for any competitive keyword. That means you need your target keyword in the anchor text, and very importantly, variants of the target keyword (too many links with the exact same anchor text may be filtered). The problem is that some sites by default don't let you choose the anchor text of the link to your site. So you need to: 1) look for sites that do reprint content with optimized anchor text; 2) specifically ask for your target anchor text to be used. Also, do keep in mind that a true natural linking structure will require you to have a number of links that are not anchor-text-optimized, typically with the URL as the anchor text.

How to Find Sites

Finding sites to submit content is the biggest challenge. You can start by asking around to any other webmasters you already have a relationship with. Next, web-search. The classic method is "submit article" + [keyword]. Most of the sites you find this way won't be good candidates, which is why this can be a bit labor-intensive. I use offshore labor for this step, as well as a program that will sort and store all the search results into a spreadsheet; otherwise it might not be worth it. Then again, the same would be true for finding reciprocal linking partners.

Ethical Issues & Best Practices

Golden rule: remember that there's a human being who has to approve your article for submission.

Read and adhere to all submission guidelines.
Avoid automation. There's almost always some detail of submission that requires a human eye: a multitude of html formatting requirements, changing site themes, etc.
Don't submit by email unless specifically instructed. Using a contact form prevents possible sp@m accusations.
Only approach websites that request content submissions.
Don't misrepresent reprint content as original
Don't submit the same content too often. After about two hundred reprints, a lot of people will be seeing the same thing over and over again and possibly complaining.

In short, as SEO gets more competitive, having more and more linking methods at your disposal gets more and more important. Don't overlook this important tool.

SEO for Traffic with Content vs. Ranking with Links

2006-03-23T21:41:00.001-08:00

http://seo-gujarat-india.blogspot.com/2006/03/seo-for-traffic-with-content-vs.htmlHow do you grow your search engine traffic without adding a single new link or making any changes to your existing webpages?

It's simple. Just add content.

Simply having keyword-optimized pages of content on your site won't rank you high for competitive search engine keywords – that's a fact of life. But keyword-optimized content can really bring in the traffic for low-competition and unique keywords. The low-competition and unique keywords are typically longer multi-word variants of the keyword. For instance, instead of "search engine ranking," "ranking for search engine traffic niche keywords."

If you have lots of pages of optimized content–and you optimize well – all the search engine traffic from these low-competition keywords will really add up. Plus, you'll usually get more repeat visitors and type-in traffic, too.

Just picture this realistic example of traffic-building with content vs. ranking-building with links. Company A invests $5,000 for link-building in order to rank for a competitive keyword. Company B invests the same amount, only in content. Company A and Company B: each start out on equal SEO footing: equally old websites with the same amount and quality of content, same content management systems, the same PageRank and quantity, quality, and relevance of inbound links.

Company A's research reveals that $5000 is just the amount needed to get on the first page of Google for a target keyword that should deliver 100 unique visitors per day if the site ends up in the first position. They dutifully get inbound links optimized for that keyword, following all SEO best practices. Three months and $5,000 later, the site is stuck somewhere toward the bottom of the second page of Google search results for the target keyword. Six months later, they've actually sunk a bit lower in the SERPs. The good news is that the site is getting some traffic from the links built and from the lowly search engine position, but nowhere near the 100 visitors/day they were hoping for from search results.

Company B, meanwhile, had content written around a long list of keywords with little or no competition in the search engines, using up-to-date search engine copywriting techniques. They've been enjoying a growing stream of visitors to their site almost since the first page of content was added. Three months later, the site's search engine traffic has grown by a hundred unique visitors per day, or 3,000 per month. Moreover, Company B's repeat visitor traffic has also jumped. Type-in traffic has increased, presumably as visitors forward the URLs of useful pages to their friends. Page views are up, too, not only from more repeat visitors and type-in visitors, but also from first-time search visitors staying longer and browsing more pages. Six months later, the website's content has built a loyal following on the net, generating even more repeat visitors. The search engine traffic is as good as it ever was.

What happened?

Pitfalls of Link-Building for Search Engine Ranking

Company A thought it had a fairly sure thing: build enough optimized links for the keyword, taking care not to trigger search engine penalties. Yet as they've discovered, there is no sure thing when it comes to search engine rankings:

Over-optimization penalty minefield. The search engines, particularly Google and Yahoo!, are very risk-averse when it comes to ranking sites well for competitive keywords. On the whole, they are perfectly willing to risk dropping several good sites from top rankings in order to try to keep one bad site out. They are constantly tweaking their algorithms to identify sites whose link structures are not indicative of a quality site. In the process, plenty of good sites with good SEO also get swept up. This risk of failure is the inherent risk of SEO. True, most of the time, a good site with good SEO does move to the top. But in a large minority of cases, quality goes unrewarded.
Competition and the moving target. As Site A was moving up the search engine results for its competitive target keyword, so were the other sites. There is no rest for the victorious when it comes for SEO. The top sites for highly competitive keywords are constantly building new optimized links. That's why any SEO effort has to aim to do at least ten percent better than the site currently in the position it's targeting.
Lack of keyword diversity. Too often, websites with modest SEO budgets (and $5,000 is modest when it comes to a competitive keyword) aim for just a few keywords. Given all the potential pitfalls of an SEO campaign, you need to be going after ten or more target competitive keywords, and at least another ten related but less competitive keywords. That way, failure for a few keywords won't scuttle the whole project. Meanwhile, search engines look for diversity in targeted keywords, so you get much more out of targeting a larger group of keywords. If you can't afford to do this, you're really better off not going after competitive keywords. Sure, you might get those rankings. But what happens if you've spent your budget and still have little to show for it?

Meanwhile, the fundamental advantage of pursuing low-competition keywords is that, by definition, it's much closer to being a sure thing.

Advantages of Web Content SEO

Greater certainty. Not only is a page of content extremely likely to bring in search engine traffic—unlike the similar investment in links — it won't suddenly disappear. The sites linking to you might stop anytime, or do something to stop links' passing search engine value (such as adding the "nofollow" tag or switching to a search-engine-unfriendly content management system).
Cost. Traditionally, copywriting has been more expensive than link-building. But that's changed. As "nofollow" link-Scrooge-ry becomes more and more common, and as paid and reciprocal links get downgraded, the real cost of obtaining quality links increases. Meanwhile, the copywriting market has increasingly adapted to the needs of search engine marketing. To get a search engine visitor, you don't need a Pulitzer-prize winning essay or a killer sales letter. You simply need highly focused, readable, keyword-optimized, information-packed pages of around 250 words each — and more and more copywriting and SEO firms are delivering this service cost-effectively. Blogs, meanwhile, let you and your employees add content easily. Bulletin boards (modified to be search-engine-friendly) let site visitors add content, too. In fact, "natural content" from blogs and bulletin boards is now much more viable than natural link building.

In conclusion, when you look at SEO, don't forget that your number-one goal is not to rank high for a certain keyword, but to get more search engine traffic. In some less competitive sectors, high rankings may still be a realistic and effective proposition. But increasingly, ranking high for competitive keywords is no longer the best way to get traffic.

Predicting Search Engine Algorithm Changes

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With moderate search engine optimization knowledge, some common sense, and a resourceful and imaginative mind, one can keep his or her web site in good standing with search engines even through the most significant algorithm changes. The recent Google update of October/November 2005, dubbed "Jagger", is what inspired me to write this, as I saw some web sites that previously ranked in the top 20 results for extremely competitive keywords suddenly drop down to the 70th page. Yes, the ebb and flow of search engine rankings is nothing to write home about, but when a web site doesn't regain many ranking spots after such a drop it can tell us that the SEO done on the site may have had some long-term flaws. In this case, the SEO team had not done a good job predicting the direction a search engine would take with its algorithm.

Impossible to predict, you say? Not quite. The ideas behind Google's algorithm come from the minds of fellow humans, not supercomputers. I'm not suggesting that it's easy to "crack the code" so to speak because the actual math behind it is extremely complicated. However, it is possible to understand the general direction that a search engine algorithm will take by keeping in mind that any component of SEO which is possible to manipulate to an abnormal extent will eventually be weighted less and finally rendered obsolete.

One of the first such areas of a web site that started to get abused by webmasters trying to raise their rankings was the keywords meta tag. The tag allows a webmaster to list the web site's most important keywords so the search engine knows when to display that site as a result for a matching search. It was only a matter of time until people started stuffing the tag with irrelevant words that were searched for more frequently than relevant words in an attempt to fool the algorithm. And they did fool it, but not for long. The keywords meta tag was identified as an area that was too susceptible to misuse and was subsequently de-valued to the point where the Google algorithm today doesn't even recognize it when scanning a web page.

Another early tactic which is all but obsolete is repeating keywords at the bottom of a web page and hiding them by changing the color of the text to match the background color. Search engines noticed that this text was not relevant to the visitor and red-flagged sites that employed this method of SEO.

This information is quite basic, but the idea behind the aforementioned algorithm shifts several years ago is still relevant today. With the Jagger update in full swing, people in the SEO world are taking notice that reciprocal links may very well be going the way of the keywords meta tag. (i.e. extinct) Webmasters across the world have long been obsessed with link exchanges and many profitable web sites exist offering services that help webmasters swap links with ease. But with a little foresight, one can see that link trading has its days numbered, as web sites have obtained thousands of incoming links from webmasters who may have never even viewed the web site they are trading with. In other words, web site popularity is being manipulated by excessively and unnaturally using an SEO method.

So with keyword meta tags, keyword stuffing within content, and now link exchanges simply a part of SEO history, what will be targeted in the future? Well, let's start with what search engines currently look at when ranking a web site and go from there:

On-page Textual Content

In the future, look for search engines to utilize ontological analysis of text. In other words, not only your main keywords will play a factor in your rankings, but also words that relate to them. For example, someone trying to sell NFL jerseys online would naturally mention the names of teams and star players. In the past, algorithms might have skipped over those names, deemed them irrelevant to a search for "NFL jerseys." But in the future, search engines will reward those web sites with a higher ranking than those that excessively repeat just "NFL jerseys." With ontological analysis, web sites that speak of not only the main keywords but other relevant words can expect higher rankings.

The Conclusion: Write your web site content for your visitors, not search engines. The more naturally written sites can expect to see better results in the future.

Offering Large Amounts of Content

This can frequently take the form of dynamic pages. Even now, search engines can have a difficult time with dynamic content on web sites. These pages usually have lengthy URLs consisting of numbers and characters such as &, =, and ? The common problem is that the content changes so frequently on these dynamic pages that the page becomes "old" in the search engine's database, thus leaving searchers seeing results that contain old information. Since many dynamic pages are created by web sites displaying hundreds or thousands of products they sell, and the number of people selling items on the Internet will obviously increase in the coming years, you can expect that search engines will improve their technology and do a better job indexing dynamic content in the future.

The Conclusion: Put yourself ahead of the game if you are selling products online and invest in database and shopping cart software that is SEO-friendly.

Incoming Links

Once thought to be a very difficult thing to manipulate, incoming links to one's web site have been abused by crafty SEOs and webmasters the world over. It is finally at a point where Google is doing a revamp of what constitutes a "vote from [one site to another]" as they explain it in their webmaster resources section. Link exchanges are worth significantly less now than ever to the point where the only real value in obtaining them is to make sure a new web site gets crawled by search engine spiders.

Over the years, many web sites reached top spot for competitive keywords by flexing their financial muscle and buying thousands of text links pointing to their site with keywords in the anchor text. Usually these links would appear like advertisements along sidebars or navigation areas of web sites. Essentially this was an indirect way of paying for high Google rankings, something which Google is no doubt trying to combat with each passing algorithm update. One idea of thought is that different areas of a web page from a visual point of view will be weighted differently. For example, if a web site adds a link to your site within the middle of their page text, that link should count for more than one at the bottom of the site near the copyright information.

This brings up the value of content distribution. By writing articles, giving away free resources, or offering something else of value to people, you can create a significant amount of content on other web sites that will include a link back to your own.

The Conclusion: It all starts with useful content. If you are providing your web site visitors with useful information, chances are many other sites will want to do the same. SEO doesn't start with trying to cheat the algorithm; it starts with an understanding of what search engines look for in a quality web site.