I should be in bed but I blame Edward Lewis for posting what must be the biggest expose since the Washington Post exposed Watergate:

The Sphinn Exposé

In brief, Sphinn terminated his account for what appears to be his investigative work about Sphinn. I know very little about the daily operations of this search marketing industry counterpart to Digg, but I think they made a mistake in terminating his account. My reputation or livelihood does not depend on stories I sphinn or desphinn, but I visit it regularly to see what stories have received sufficient votes to be deemed really new and interesting.

Apparently there are a few individuals who game the system and spam it. Edward exposed some of them and exposed other chinks in the armour. I will read the long post later but I have seen enough to feel thoroughly entertained, but sad that Sphinn terminated his account. After reading it fully I will be in a better position to judge Sphinn, but my gut feeling is that they made a big mistake that will polarise the SEO community and affect Sphinn’s reputation.

I have a lot of respect for Edward although I have never met him. He is a long-standing moderator at Webmasterworld and makes very knowledgeable posts. Take the time to read the Exposé.

Popularity: 3% [?]

WebProNews writer Chris Crum has responded to an earlier post about the eBusiness Directory. Thanks, all understood and best wishes, like I originally said. We do need good directories.

An update on my experience: I received six, yes, six acknowledgments for my two submissions (or was it for just one of them - can’t tell from the generic response). No, I did not make multiple submissions, so there must have been a glitch somewhere.

Thank you for confirming your recent submission to webpronews.

If approved, your listing will be live within 3 to 5 business days.

Either my sites did not make the grade, or there is a dmoz-like queue of sites waiting to be approved. I’ll try submitting some top-tier sites (that I do not own) and see if they show up. You should do likewise and help make it a terrific directory!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Google is testing new fonts for some publishers in its AdSense ads. The image at right shows Microsoft’s Comic Sans font, which accompanies Microsoft Office (or Windows). I didn’t alter the JavaScript for the ad, but I came to the ad from a Google Search, so I suspect that was where Google noted in my environment variables that I have Office and Windows loaded.

I checked Webmasterworld and found that I was not alone. Others have noted fonts such as Times New Roman and Georgia, but I was not able to replicate such fonts by reloading the page. I don’t use the Comic Sans font anywhere and I agree that it makes a professional page look amateurish - I belong to a nonprofit organisation where another volunteer keeps using it in conference flyers.

Nevertheless, many AdSense publishers have blended these ads into their pages so well that a visitor might accidentally click an ad that looks like a menu selection. By changing the font at random, Google can reduce this possibility. While it may seem that Google is reducing its income from such accidental clicks, the advertiser will appreciate getting a higher conversion rate because the clicks will come from people who intended to click the ad.

“AdSense Advisor” in another Webmasterworld thread confirmed that this is a test and they are monitoring the results. I hope that Google retains the random fonts but omits Comic Sans from the repertoire.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Google Trends has been with us for a couple of years and it remains (for me) an interesting curiosity to be revisited from time to time. After all, it is still in the Google Labs and has enough disclaimers surrounding the validity of its data that it might as well be Alexa. I have access to actual traffic data for some large sites and I know that Google’s data is as flawed as any other third party’s can be. All the same, for many people, such a resource is better than none. As long as you don’t use traffic numbers but only look at the trend, you will be fine.

On Saturday (US Friday), Google Labs released Google Trends for Websites, which enables us to compare the traffic to one or more domain names, separated with a comma. You also get geographical breakdowns such as countries and states, a list of similar sites, and related keyphrases. Not surprisingly, you can’t get data for any Google-owned properties such as Google.com (click the image on the right), Orkut, etc, but you can for Google’s competitors.  Some people are irked by this, but you can always look for such data at Alexa, Comscore, Hitwise, etc.

Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineLand is happy to see Google Trends for Websites. He relates Matt Cutts’ experience of looking for a file sharing service similar to yousendit.com. He was able to discover other companies such as sendthisfile.com, mailbigfile.com, etc.

Buggy

I noticed that such a search doesn’t work when looking at data from Australia, as the results were quite off-topic. For a larger country such as the UK, the results are barely useful, as they included just mailbigfile.com. Even for the United States, most of the sites were off-topic. You should sign in to see and export additional Trends data. At the bottom of the page you will notice an option to export the data as a CSV file.

Popularity: 17% [?]

This just landed in my inbox.

Located in an elite business centre in New Delhi, India, <company name> is a professionally managed Content Writing Company specializing in online copywriting and optimized content writing. Over the years we are successful in building reputation for us as a quality content management solution provider meeting high quality standards and executing all projects as per specified deadline.

We have a team of unmatched copywriters holding years of expertise in writing impressively for varied business sectors with a key knowledge of online content writing and keyword rich writing.

We also undertake outsourced content writing jobs meeting the clients’ requirements and delivering projects in specified time.

To test our expertise, we can provide with sample writing too on any topic as asked by you.

To know more about our services, visit us at <URL>

Would you use this company to write for you? I wouldn’t. While there are a few Indian content writers who write grammatically correct English, there are many more wannabes who don’t know their own shortcomings.

The quality of English found in India is atrocious and there is no kind way of saying it. The majority of English-speaking Indians did not go to elite schools where they might have had a gifted and dedicated English teacher. These days, they are likely to speak a mix of English and a local language — this can be seen in the Indian versions of American TV shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? When I saw an episode I could not tell if the show was meant to be in Hindi with some English thrown in, or the other way round.

There seems to be a shift from British English towards American English and this can be seen in the “iz” spellings in the email. A tip to content writers: don’t pitch to Australians, New Zealanders or the British (please lose “Britishers”) in American English. University-educated Americans usually have a very strong command of their language and will not be fooled by sloppy writing samples.

Common tools such as Microsoft Word are not good at detecting sloppy writing. New tools such as WhiteSmoke 2008 Extended Edition are trying to cover this market but it too has its work cut out.

So what is the solution for the company that needs cheap content? I suggest outsourcing from the best writer you can find but hire a local editor to polish the material.

Popularity: 20% [?]

In what must be an unintended way to piss off readers who happen to own directories or other websites, WebProNews has launched its own eBusiness Directory. In a newsletter article entitled, “Some Directories Are Still Useful”, writer Chris Crum opines,

A web directory should be just that. A directory. A directory is meant to be helpful for finding information. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case with many of the directories that are out there on the web. The vast majority are just endless pits of links with maybe some good ones, but they are usually thrown in with less than stellar ones, which tend to be quite prevalent.

Human-edited directories tend to be more useful, but are still usually aimed more at the submitter promoting their business than they really are towards the user who is there to find information. Often times these directories offer paid links, further proving that they are really there for promotional purposes.

Take a moment to explore the nascent WebProNews eBusiness Directory. What do you think of the sites in it? These are early days, so we don’t know if the humans at WebProNews will list “only sites that we feel will be truly beneficial to you - the user”. For good measure, Crum adds, “We are dedicated to keeping this thing as useful as possible, and not cluttered with a bunch of junk.”

I submitted two sites: this blog and my SEO Training site. I looked for accepted submissions and found one for my friend’s company. The description reads

Search engine optimization company based in New York & India. 24 hours Support. Cost $11 - $15 / Hour. Get a Free SEO report worth US $150. Apply now. Our SEO work is resold by more than 100 agencies across United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia…

(A link to a screenshot in case the text gets edited) Good on my friend for being accepted, but is this the type of description you expect to see in a quality directory that has no paid links? That should not surprise anyone, as human editors are human. Crum continues, “Some directories, like the old Yahoo! Directory for example, are often useful at first, but become less useful as they are bombarded with submissions”.

Useful: It is a loaded word. Like beauty, usefulness is in the eye of the beholder (or user, in this case). The eBusiness Directory has quite a few entries in it, so try some searches using the search box that invites you to search the directory:

• “seo” = no matches found
• “search engine optimization” = 110 results found
• “search specialist” = three results - see image below

The description for Jaankanellis.com is precious (screenshot link):

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server. An invalid request was received from your browser. This may be caused by a malfunctioning proxy server or browser privacy software. Your technical support key is: 421c-8b5f-1756-6707

Is this something you’d see in a quality, human-edited directory?

In my day job at a multi-billion-dollar directory company I am privileged to work with usability experts and others who are part of UX (user experience). In the mid 1990s my work at Unisys included what was then known as “human factors”. I video-taped typical users of our software while they tried out one of our software prototypes. We do this at my current employer all the time. We analyse this feedback and use it to improve our directories. Asking real users for feedback eliminates guesswork and personal bias in determining what is “useful”. WebProNews asks for feedback, so you should give it.

We should applaud WebProNews for launching a directory that they hope will be “better” than others. I don’t think it will be any better or worse than the hundreds of other directories they disparage. Why? The existing submissions include some great sites, but the examples here suggest that it won’t be much different.

This “directory” begins with a directory metaphor. There are 18 categories that you can browse to a second sub-category level. So far, so good. If you hit a category that is split over many pages, you could be turning pages where the listings seem to be in submission order. Sooner or later you will try the search box, as I did.

The search function is limited. Numerous SEO listings exist, but they can’t be found when you type “seo” or “SEO” but you get them when you spell the acronym in full. The earlier example of searching for a search specialist gives one unexpected result - of a software download service that has “Specialist” in its title. This is not useful to end users.

SEOs will submit to this directory over the next few weeks and I also expect to see no Toolbar PR on these pages in due course, as the links are clean. If you look closer at the links, many end in /index.php. Any good SEO will tell you that this is bad linking practice as it dilutes the link love for the recipient. Therefore, I don’t think this directory is particularly useful for search engine optimising purposes. On the other hand, the Yahoo directory is still very good value for link love. I don’t have an account at Yahoo, but I have seen some backlink experiments where the test sites with a Yahoo backlink did better than equivalent sites that did not.

It is early days for WebProNews’ directory. I wish it well.

Popularity: 27% [?]