"Search Engine Journal" - 7 new articles
- Yahoo Acquires Freelance Content Site, Associated Content
- Weekly Search & Social News: 05/18/2010
- Get your Facebook Privacy Under Control
- Google Offers to Buy VOIP Provider Global IP Solutions
- Why Traditional PR Should be Part of Your SEO Strategy
- How to Turn Black Hat SEO into a White Hat Approach
- How to Manage Your SEO Team Work with SEJ Tools' Tasks
- More Recent Articles
- Search Search Engine Journal
Yahoo Acquires Freelance Content Site, Associated Content
So while Google is busy trying to buy a VOIP solutions provider, Yahoo on the other was busy signing a definitive agreement to acquire Associated Content. Associated Content is a freelance content generation site powered by around 380,000 freelance contributors.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz calls the deal as a game changer.
"Together, we'll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network. These are important aspects of building engaging consumer experiences on Yahoo!, and one of the reasons why we're one of the most visited destinations online."
In addition Yahoo hopes to enhance its social, mobile, local and media offerings by acquiring Associated Content and its rich and varied content on various topics.
Of course, looking at a different angle, this would mean more advertising space for Yahoo advertisers offering advertisers more opportunities to engage groups of consumers through contents that will appeal to their interest.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Yahoo Acquires Freelance Content Site, Associated Content
Weekly Search & Social News: 05/18/2010
Hello world, how are we now? Yup it's that time, another '7 Days of Search and Social' – enough reading to choke the geeks and phreaks alike. The week that was had a nice variety of goodiness to keep me happy. And once more, no real drama to speak of (aghast!). That's not to say there wasn't some ranting going on, oh we sure have that covered. But nothing that had the gang up in arms let's say. For the hard core folks, there was a few interesting awards on the patent side of things, be sure to check it out. Anyway, let's roll shall we?
Lead Story
Don't over do the interlinking
Or for that matter, the mass attack satellite site approach. Sure, that really is a subjective advisory since I ain't a fan o' that approach, but having considerably more eggs in fewer baskets is a wise things these days when it comes to search marketing.
Point and case being some commentary from Matt (Cutts o' Googly) last week on a few locales which got into the world of nofollow and interlinked sites. Essentially my read was that clean links on mass networks (that don't have authority… hehe) can get nailed with a false positive for spam signals.
Don't freak out – this is for rather larger networks. If you have 5-10 sites, distinct in content and concepts, with content, not just boilerplate, you should be fine. But it you have some legitimate reasons for having dozens of sites, it might be worth looking at any linkage between sites and nofollow where appropriate.
On the other hand, why not just consolidate into a single, likely more powerful, offering? Ya know?
And away we go!
Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents -
Talk of the town
- SEO is a Zero Sum Game - Aaron released another rant against the machine that touches on everything from behavioural data to flux and verticals. Only thing missing was some TV targeting… next time I 'spose.
- Internal Linking Versus RSS & XML Sitemaps – Shaun (@Hobo) looked at some internal linking issues and approaches. While all are quite useful, it is important to always have them as a consideration in the greater scheme of things.
- Simple Yet Effective Charts For Helping New SEO Clients Understand Their Current Keywords - for those that like infographics, this post has some handy ones for getting non-SEO savvy clients up to speed early on.
- Google Organic Click Through Rate (CTR) – this was an interesting and well developed post which seemed to fly under the radar. While I've yet to formally test out the theory on some varied data sets, it's worth sharing so you can do your own.
- Google went belly-up: SERPs sneakily redirect to FPAs - Sebastian is back and like Aaron, has the proverbial bee in zee bonnet! Please do go and fill the spam report too… just for fun
- Hosting With GoDaddy? Might Want To Rethink That Decision. - oh and speaking of losing it, Micheal was also on the war path (wow, lively bunch this week). I had been hearing a lot about this over the week, great job of laying it out
- If It's Too Good To Be Fricking Link True… - Ok, seriously, did someone spike the collective water cooler or what? More ranting? Well, at least from (mild mannered Debra) this would qualify. Another fun read… erm.. or am I getting a little perverse at this all? Meh..
- SEO Myths Reloaded: Clarifcations, Consensus And Controversy- back due to popular demand, Stephan Spencer makes some corrections to his original offering and then serves up 36 More SEO Myths That Won't Die But Need To that came to light alone the way.
- How Not to Move a URL: Lessons From the Google AdWords Keyword Tool Revamp Was a kinda cheeky post by Vanessa (over at Nine By Blue) that highlights some SEO Ooops by the Google gang (I thought they learned their lesson after the self assessment?)
- 5 Questions to ask before starting a Retargeting Campaign – sure, I'll admit it, this one isn't exactly SEO, but it was interesting enough that I really felt I'd include it. While not a new art form, it has risen up with the AdWords connection and can be useful to creative SEOs ;0)
Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents - Search Geek Central
Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents -
Search Patents
Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data
Variable personalization of search results in a search engine
Document ranking based on semantic distance between terms in a document
Microsoft
System and method for facilitating full text searching utilizing inverted keyword indices
Ranking search results using feature extraction
Yahoo
Phonetic self-improving search engine
Database search system and method of determining a value of a keyword in a search
/end SOSG session
Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents - Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Weekly Search & Social News: 05/18/2010
Get your Facebook Privacy Under Control
Because Facebook privacy is such a hot topic lately, I thought I might write something so you know where you can check your privacy settings, or at least get a laugh out of what other people aren't making private. With the amazing (that's right, I said A-M-A-Z-I-N-G) capabilities of open graph and all the changes that came with it, we all want to make sure we are keeping our personal lives under wraps. After all, no one REALLY wants to know your bathroom habits via status message unless they're purposely friends with you. And even at that… really?
Open Book- remember the aforementioned website where you can laugh at other people's expenses due to what they are displaying publicly? Yep. This is it. This uses the Facebook API available to developers. All you have to do is type in something to search, and it will bring you random updates with that word. I won't even get into what you COULD look up but…go try it out. It might make you double check your settings.
Facebook on Zesty.ca- This is pretty simple. You need to know your user ID…and if you don't know it, there's a little search box on the right where you can find it. Once you find your ID you can see what is visible from your events, posts, groups, pages etc. It's simple and straight to the point.
ReclaimPrivacy- This is a pretty awesome service. Go to the homepage and follow the instructions. Drag the little button into your toolbar and click it when you get into Facebook. It will show you what's connected, what's not connected, and give you the option to fix it. I had instant personalization turned on and it gave me the ability to turn it off right from the results, but I think there must be an error because it didn't fully deactivate. I bet Facebook is blocking it. ReclaimPrivacy is quick to fix errors so full functionality for that one option will most likely return ASAP. There is also a small disclaimers saying that ReclaimPrivacy is not held accountable for any troubles we might run into with Facebook due to use of this. Hmmmmm.
I hope these few sites will give you some confidence (and laughs) about privacy settings. After all, Open Graph is our future; we should embrace it. What you choose to share, and not share, can be controlled by you. Even though Facebook is shady-like and automatically opts you in to their changes (ask me how I feel about that. I dare you), you do have the option to opt-out.
Move over Nike. New public saying of 2010- "Just opt-out!"
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Get your Facebook Privacy Under Control
Google Offers to Buy VOIP Provider Global IP Solutions
Google is on to its usual company shopping again. This time, it is eyeing Global IP Solutions, a company that provides technology used for delivering voice and video over IP networks. Google has reportedly made an offer of $68.2 million to acquire the said company which has Google and Yahoo as two of its long-time customers. Global IP Solutions powers up Yahoo Messenger voice chat facility.
Just to remind you, this is the second time that Google is investing on VOIP-related company. Previously Google has also bought Gizmo5, another VOIP solutions provider.
According to the Google Engineering Director, Rian Liebenberg:
"GIPS's technology provides high quality, real-time audio and video over an IP network, and we're looking forward to working with the GIPS team at Google to continue innovating for the Web platform."
Of course, the GIPS folks are more than happy with what Google is offering them. Emerick Woods, Global IP Solutions CEO tells us:
"With Google's global reach, scale and widely recognized leadership, we are confident that our existing customers will continue to be fully supported while we continue to enhance and extend our products and technology at Google."
Any idea how this acquisition will play up into Google's products and services? VOIP calls via 3G on Android phones perhaps?
In a release, Global IP Solutions says it expects to continue to support its current customers but doesn't offer specific details about where it will fit at Google, saying simply that it will "continue to enhance and extend our products and technology."
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Offers to Buy VOIP Provider Global IP Solutions
Why Traditional PR Should be Part of Your SEO Strategy
You can get links by producing great content which people social bookmark or mention on their sites. But you only get those links from your followers and a few others that happen to stumble upon your content. Sometimes you need to push with Public Relations outreaches to get links because sitting around with only a pull strategy for link building is silly.
Links from large media outlets, big online publications, and influential bloggers can really give your search ranking a power boost. In addition to the fact that the links you receive from big media come from a high pagerank domain, they also cause a big snowball effect with linking.
Let's say you get mentioned or featured in the New York Times. Since they are such a big media outlet with high readership, the article itself will probably receive a ton of external links, which gives you more SEO juice since you are linked to within the article. If you are lucky, you might even get direct links from other websites since they'll have found you on the New York Times and will consider you a credible source for the thing you were mentioned about.
Also, since you are linked to by the New York Times, you will receive a TON of referral traffic from the mention and lots of direct traffic if the article goes out in print too. Traffic is an important factor is SEO too because your higher visibility tells search engines that you are a 'more relevant search result' for the time being because more people are hearing, reading or searching for you.
More thoughts on how the link snowball effect and aggregate traffic benefit you are in my last post, Factoring Time into SEO.
Traditional PR increases your external link portfolio because you can get a ton of links from domains that may have never found your content. How likely is it that a Forbes editor will find your website or blog and want to link to you without you reaching out to them first? But if you can get linked to, you must be a pretty reliable source since such a big publication is mentioning you, and that will be picked up by the search engines.
Run a PR campaign and see how those power links can help you!
If you are looking for advice on PR, here are some Media Relations tips in a post I wrote for ReadWriteWeb.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Why Traditional PR Should be Part of Your SEO Strategy
How to Turn Black Hat SEO into a White Hat Approach
The SEO industry has seen its share of horrendous grey and black hat approaches for many years. It is truly amazing to me that I still see these spammy approaches being implemented by so called white hat SEO firms. For those of you that don't know what I am referring to when I say a black hat SEO, here is a link that contains some good information, here. Simply put, white hat SEO is "by the book" or closely following the webmaster guidelines of the major search engines. Black hat SEO is any technique that games or tricks the "system" or search engines to make ranking pages and generating visitors from organic search move faster.
My philosophy is and always has been white hat. I personally believe that is you are building business then it is always good to play it safe and stay white hat. Black hat is a different philosophy (that I do not agree with) but still none the less a different type of philosophy. Some great white hat SEO sources of information that I recommend are: Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, SEO Journal and Search Engine Guide.
SEO is a form of inbound marketing and it is important to stress "marketing" is a main ingredient. Search engine optimization is not about (or should not be about) tricks or the latest "thing" it is about creating good quality content, targeting the right relevant keywords for this well written content and driving relevant links to your website over time.
There are hundreds of black hat SEO techniques (many of which I did not cover in this blog post) but these are some of the black hat techniques that I have recently seen and how to change them over to a white hat SEO approach:
- Hidden Text (also known as cloaking): Believe it or not, I saw this on a website recently…this is so ineffective! If you are still hiding text on your website for search spiders to read you need a crash course in modern SEO and what it is to really use marketing to build a websites brand online. Hiding text the same color as your website background is a guaranteed way to either receive a nice little penalty or just a natural distaste in your web audience's mouth if they should find the hidden text.
Make This White Hat by: Not adding ANY hidden text to ANY page of your website!
- Massive Submissions: What I mean by massive submissions is that paying someone to write 5,000 articles and submit them into directories is not marketing or effective link building. The is like throwing a can of paint and hoping it paints the room, all it's going to do is make a mess you have to clean up. This was a popular (not too effective) approach many moons ago ago but the search engines are smarter than they once where and these types of efforts just won't have the impact that you are looking for.
Make This White Hat by: Writing good quality articles about topics that are relevant to your business and the audiences of your products and services. Distribute your article to individual good quality article directories (only ones that people might read). Over time guest write for industry specific blogs or websites. Beyond getting a link these types of links generate visitors to your website.
- Oversized Websites: Reduce the useless content bloat! If you own a business that truly requires having 1,000 pages filled with useful content than that is fine because it is a part of your business and you need it. If you are a local dentist there is most likely no reason why you should have 1,000 pages on your website. Chances are you are just trying it manipulate the search results which will really not help anyone. I always say if you want to target visitors within 20 different local towns, target the local major cities first, then use other forms of search marketing (such as PPC) to target the 18 other variations on your site. There is no need to create a page for every town with tons of links at the bottom of each page, unless you have a good reason to do so!
Make This White Hat by: Only having content that is needed to educate your potential visitors on your website. Enhance the visitor experience of your website, don't confuse your visitors.
The white hat or black hat SEO approaches that were used 5 years ago do not work today. If you are an SEO professional, marketer or business owner, spend the time to re-educate yourself into the best SEO approach (white hat hopefully!) for you and your business.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
How to Turn Black Hat SEO into a White Hat Approach
How to Manage Your SEO Team Work with SEJ Tools' Tasks
Task manager built-in with SEJ tools is a handy feature that lets you effectively distribute tasks and monitor the whole process. It can be used as a standalone utility but it is also heavily integrated with other internal tools like Link Manger where you can create a task while adding a link prospect.
While I have mentioned the task managing feature while reviewing other tools that have it integrated, this post focuses on the standalone tool.
Task manager can be found in the very top bar of SEJ tools:
Clicking the link takes you to your task dashboard. There you can see all the tasks, the type of each one and the corresponding website and the due date. You can filter that table by any of the columns. You can filter the table to see only tasks assigned to you or by a website profile. You can also filter the task by status (to see only completed or all open tasks).
Task types include:
- High Priority (high, medium or low)
- Overdue task
- Link task
- Scheduled task
To add a new task, click New Task link. There you will need to provide the following details:
- The Title of a task is required and can also be used as the task description. However, if you need to include more details, you can enter them in the Description textarea.
- All tasks are related to a website. You will need to choose the website that the task is related to. By default, it will automatically select the website you're currently managing.
- Next set the Due Date and the Priority of the task. Additionally, if you have Task Administration rights, you will be able to assign tasks to other team members on your account.
Tasks that happen in the future or are reoccurring, can be scheduled. To schedule a task, click on the Scheduled link. You will be taken to the Scheduled Tasks page. Click on the Schedule a Task link to create a new scheduled task.
You'll be taken to the form which is very similar to the above one with only one difference that it allows to set the task frequency. There you can adjust the Frequency, Day of the Month, and the Due settings. For example, you could set a task to appear monthly, on the first day of the month, and have it be due in 7 days.
You thus have a complete productivity toolset to manage and monitor SEO tasks and distribute them among your team members.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
How to Manage Your SEO Team Work with SEJ Tools' Tasks
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