Quality content writing – an elusive beast

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This headline made me smile and I wondered if the writer can see the irony in his post:

New Indian Generation Loosing Quality??

Well in my case its true. New generation of designers and writers which is coming in the market are becoming money minded and just want MONEY with no Quality return. In last few months I am facing this issue with my regular writers and designers. I used to believe them so much that I add stuff which they have given with a simple go through and without confirming the details. I think why should I check with so much detail when I am paying them! BUT BUT BEWARE! never believe anyone in the market. These people out there are are doing nothing but NO QUALITY WORK.

The rest of the post laments the lack of quality in outsourced written content and programming and is equally amusing to read. It begs the question, “Who is fit to judge quality?”.

I found the post via a comment on a post by Amit Patel entitled, “Stay Away from [company name] Content Writers”. It too is full of ironic prose such as:

Getting work done by freelancers is not always the best thing because there are always negative factors of the same. Recently i was in need of some huge content and i was referred to a content writer who was running a company from New Delhi on the name of [company name and URL] and this lady who added me on Yahoo took my first articles order and then came back with the articles set after a huge amount of time, though i was in a idea that she ran away.

The writers didnt knew the spelling of ‘Chennai’, ‘beautiful’ kind of simple words and called themselves real professions, which may be in their dream.

It is not my intention to critique bloggers who are seeking quality written content, as I support their call for better quality control from freelancers, particularly content writers.

In the West, the consensus among SEOs is that one cannot expect good writing from the Third World, even though the price might be cheap. I am pleased to say that all rules have exceptions and that I have found such a quality supplier in India. They have provided hundreds of articles for some of Australia’s well-known SEO companies and others. I am about to send them a large order, so I am not ready to share their identity yet.

In the meantime, I recommend that content writers take some of the following advice, which should not add a lot to their workload:

  • Offer a free written sample to the customer before taking the order, as this offers a level of comfort that the supplied content will be at least of the same quality.
  • Offer money back on any content that is rejected.
  • Write the content in Microsoft Word or a similar word processor and set the language to the locale of the customer, e.g. Australian English. Run the spelling and grammar checker and follow its recommendations carefully but not blindly.
  • The writer should famililarise himself with the style of English used in the target country in that particular industry. Trust me, English isn’t always the same the world over.
  • Before delivering the content to the client, check unusual sentences with a Google search, to satisfy yourself that the writer didn’t copy something from another website.
  • Check everything on your own website and your emails for writing excellence. You are not credible if your own website contains spelling and grammatical errors.

Thought-provoking SEO quiz at SEOmoz

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SEO QuizI have to admire Rand Fishkin – he seems to be doing everything right in SEO-land, no matter where I look. His latest link bait is a fairly difficult SEO quiz. It has something for everyone – quality, controversy, content. There are 75 questions, which I think few SEOs will get 100% right, even if they know their stuff. That’s what makes it controversial.

QuizThere are questions with borderline answers — there is one about Alexa, where the correct response would have been correct until Alexa announced last week that it is changing its data collection methodology. Many questions have been asked in the negative, so you need to slow down and read the question carefully.

I wish the test had been loaded with 500 questions, so that no two people could get the same set of questions. Then the responses would not enable them to raise their score by taking the test many times.

But Rand is a genius. I have seen him and his lovely mum at Pubcon but have never spoken to him or exchanged an email, so I can only go by the genius exemplified on his websites. Yes, Rand would want the link bait benefit and no more than two visits per person who took the quiz. Any more would be a waste of bandwidth. Give it a go.

Alexa changes measurement methodology

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SEO conversations won’t be the same again. Everyone who knows about Alexa’s ranking system has an opinion about it. Most are not complimentary, because Alexa relied on traffic measurement based on people who had installed its toolbar, or others like me, who use a third-party tool such as the SearchStatus extension for Firefox, which sends usage data to Alexa. Toolbars tend to be installed by advanced computer users and the Alexa toolbar has a large North American following, so it might not show reliable traffic trends for a site with an Australian focus.

Alexa has just announced that it will now use a new measurement technique rather than rely entirely on the toolbar. Without giving anything away, it said, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

Until Alexa is ready to share details of those multiple sources, we can only speculate that some of it will come from major ISPs, either directly or through other services that already have such an arrangement and are permitted to share it with Alexa.

For the time being, you can only see six months’ worth of historic data. Alexa says that soon the older data will be available, with better normalisation of non-USA data.

AdWords phishing email from Brazil

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This isn’t new, but new to me. I got my first phishing email that purported to be from Google AdWords. It came to one of my accounts at a US non-profit I am involved with, so I didn’t even need to think if it was genuine.

Subject: Submit your payment information
———————————————————————————
Dear Google Adwords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information. To activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.

In order to activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information. Please sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing information.

Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed, any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

———————————————————————————-
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

———————————————————————————-

Google Adwords Team

The real URL beneath the one in the email points to www.adwords.google.com.3ppi3o.cn/select/Login – even when you hover on the link, your eyes will notice the left part of the URL (shown in green), but the domain name is further to the right (shown in red). It hosts a realistic copy of the AdWords login page, but Firefox knows it is a phishing site and blocks it. So does Internet Explorer 8.

The email was apparently sent via a Yahoo account from 189.59.233.22, which is allocated to Brazil. I didn’t bother to investigate if it was spoofed, sent via an open proxy or whatever. If you get one of these, don’t get caught out.

SpeedPPC 3 secret feature revealed

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I don’t know why this had to be a secret, but the RTM version of SpeedPPC3 adds support for a raft of other PPC ad networks. (For those of you in the advertising industry but who never actually use the damn technology, substitute “SEM” for “PPC” and it will make more sense).

Click to enlargeJay Stockwell’s SpeedPPC 3 now supports 11 known ad networks (I can’t call the additional eight “well-known”.):

  • ABCSearch
  • Affiliate Radar
  • Ask
  • Enhance
  • GoClick
  • Google AdWords
  • LookSmart
  • Miva
  • MSN adCenter
  • Yahoo! Search Marketing
  • Search123
  • ValidClick

Actually, SpeedPPC 3 now handles 12 or more ad networks – It will support any other service that can accept a file upload. Now there is a fourth tab marked “Custom”, which covers the minor 8 players plus any Custom ones you want to process.

For example, I created one for Sensis BidSmart and the settings were saved for future use. Such configuration details are appended at the end of the CustomOutputs.xml file. Get your copy of SpeedPPC here.

PR7 for $18? Suckers born every minute.

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Latest gem from somewhere in South Asia:

Click to enlargeGrab your own Permanent Pr4, Pr5, PR6 & PR7 Text Links!

I am going to offer you 20,000 High PR Links Resource Package in $18 only.

Geting your site in to the top 10 results on Google, Yahoo & MSN search engines
relies heavily on getting good quality high Pagerank (PR) links back to your site.

Your site will get top position in all search engines with in 2 months. Even If
your site is new. Only 20 spots available.

At his website you will learn that there are “only” six spots left. Take a close look at the bottom of the image if you can appreciate irony. I think he should save one spot for his own website. Stay away from such offers.

Old WordPress may be vulnerable to spammers

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A friend of mine who runs some quality sites got this email from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of example.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from example.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days. Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages: * The following hidden text on example.com: e.g. payday loan (several more spammy links) […]

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please visit: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en to learn more and request a reconsideration request.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

This is enough to send a shiver down the proverbial. My friend suspected WordPress to be the culprit, as it is present on his sites and it is out of date. But he could not find the problem in the templates. I took a quick look.

First I suspected a proxy hijack. I searched for inurl:example.com in Google and among a few results, there was this:

blah.com/blah/nph-search.pl/010110A/http/www.example.com/blog/

Turns out to be a proxy script with just a form on the home page. It was likely to be another site that contained a link to the above URL. The latter site was probably crawled and therefore the link was indexed.

Then I searched for his domain name with some of the spammy words and found a single article. In a single location in the first paragraph there was a long string of linked URLs whose HTML code looked like this (spaces deliberately inserted below):

<u style="display:none"><a href="http://www.spammysite .com/wp-content/1/ payday-loan-in-georgia.html"><font style="color:black; background-color:99ff99">payday</font> loan in georgia</a> (more than 100 similar links followed)</u>

My friend has cleaned out this code and upgraded WordPress to the latest version. I am waiting for Fantastico to catch up, as I am only one version behind, and will follow suit. Suggest that you check your version soon.

Was Skype abused as a child?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

When you try to pay for a Skype service, you will soon discover it is paranoid beyond belief, suggesting some deep-seated childhood trauma. Perhaps it was bullied in the school playground?

Click to enlargeMy SkypeIn service expires in a month, so I thought I should extend it. I am attracted by some other offerings, such as SkypeOut and SkypePro, so I try to upgrade and proceed to PayPal. This is where the fun begins. You will discover the following gems, which defy business logic:

  • You cannot pay for two Skype accounts with one credit card. Imagine walking into a department store and being told, “Sorry, sir, your card was used to buy one pair of jeans in 1986. You will need to use a different credit card to buy one more pair of jeans from our store and you will need a new credit card for every additional item.” Well, it is true if the department store is called Skype. At their forum an ex-Skype customer posted the contents of the explanation:

    === Why was my payment cancelled? ===
    To protect both ourselves and you from fraud, restrictions apply when using your debit or credit card to purchase Skype products. In this instance your payment failed because we don’t allow you to purchase Skype products with a credit or debit card that is already used by another Skype account.

    === What can I do? ===
    Try again with another card or one of our other payment methods such as Moneybookers, regular bank transfer or retail vouchers. View the different ways to pay for Skype products at http://www.skype.com/go/waystopay .

    Or why not ask one of your friends on Skype to buy a Gift Certificate for you? Find out more about Gift Certificates at https://secure.skype.com/store/buy/giftcertificates.html

  • You cannot pay with Paypal credit, even if you had a zillion $ in your account. Skype’s knowledgebase has these gems:

    Your Skype account is not linked to a PayPal account.

    A Skype account will become linked to a PayPal account if it has successfully received money from a Skype contact. (Ash: Skype means, “Unless you can get your family and friends to pay you money via PayPal, we don’t trust you.” Does the average Joe receive money via PayPal?)

    I have a PayPal account but I cannot use Send Money, why is this the case?

    Send Money is not currently available in all PayPal supported countries. Please continue to check the PayPal website for updates.

    Alternatively, you can Send Money directly from PayPal. (Ash: What do you mean “alternatively”? You just said it isn’t available in all PayPal supported countries… Click that link. There is a picture of “Send Money” on the Australian site.)

    To send money using your PayPal account, follow these steps:

    1. Log in to your PayPal account on www.paypal.com.

    2. Click the Send Money tab.

    3. Fill out the form.

    4. Click Continue.

    5. Review the details of the payment.

    6. Click Send Money to send the payment.

Click to enlargeSkype was definitely traumatised as a child. Or perhaps it was a an incident involving a hoodlum from Eastern Europe.

Paypal has an office in Australia, which is very much a “supported” country and currency (AU$). My PayPal account has plenty of funds in it. It has received PayPal payments from another Skype user for years (this is another of Skype’s crazy security requirements). Yet I cannot pay from my existing credit. PayPal is telling me to add a second credit card. What is wrong with the existing one? It has a zero balance (It has funds). Yet, if I try to pay some other website with PayPal, it is happy to take my PayPal balance.

Click to enlargeWhile it doesn’t apply to me, I couldn’t buy a Skype account for my family members unless I had four credit cards – and I don’t. Help me out here – does buying a new account with an existing card linked to a Skype account imply that it is stolen or somehow fraudulent? Wouldn’t a stolen card be cancelled by its owner?

I get it – someone steals my wallet and before I have a chance to cancel all my cards, the thief rushes to an Internet cafe and opens a Skype account with it! Perhaps this is the MO of terrorists who are about to discuss their next plot over Skype using a stolen card. Yeah, right.

PayPal payments to Skype are a hot topic in the Sype forum. Clearly, Skype’s management prefers to annoy its customers than risk some fraud (and I’d love to know what type of fraud occurs in this case). How do other companies survive in the e-commerce world? Comments?

Google does not want to be in the SEM business

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Recently I blogged that Google is an SEO agency because its purchase of DoubleClick also included the latter’s SEO service, Performics.

Tom Phillips, Director, DoubleClick Integration has announced in the official Google blog that Performics Search Marketing will be sold. He said,

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.

What? The company that hijacked the term “search engine marketing” (SEM) and coyly restricted its meaning to what the rest of us know as “pay-per-click” (PPC) advertising is getting out of SEM?

Actually, no. There is no need to dump your GOOG stock. I think Tom meant “search marketing” the first time, as he said in the next breath. He was, of course, referring to Performics – its SEO arm. I don’t think anyone is surprised that Google couldn’t be in the PPC business and the SEO business. At least the Performics staff have a sporting chance of having a job when someone buys this arm, unlike the 300 DoubleClickers who are being laid off. Perhaps they can still have Google on their resumes.

Added: Link to Matt Cutts’ post about this.

Comic Book Creator 2 – Review

Reading Time: 2 minutes

By Keith Nallawalla

Click to enlargeDid you ever wish you could draw comics? Now it’s easy, in the form of Comic Book Creator 2 by Planetwide Media. This is a design package that has all the features you would expect for making a comic book, such as pre-set page layout templates, speech bubbles, caption boxes, separate pages and cover art. Not surprisingly for this web-savvy generation, it comes with non-traditional features such as sound and video for online comics.

The program is compatible with JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG and TIF image files; AVI, MPG, MPEG, and WMV video files and MP3, WAV and WMA audio files.

The basic program includes

• 12,000 Art Assets including clip art, word balloons and animated GIFs
• 190+ sound effects
• Over 100 templates
• PD Particles (paint and drawing software)
• Audacity (audio editor)
• Video controller to zoom, cut and loop video
• Image size and rotation controls
• Comic book fonts
• Text and colour editing
• Step-by-step instructions

You can also buy dozens of picture packs and customised comic creators such as:

• Marvel Heroes
• Speed Racer
• National Geographic Kids Silly Pets
• TOKYOPOP Manga Creator
• Charlotte’s Web Storybook Creator

getting started

When installing the program, make sure that you install the Art Assets packs or else you won’t have much to work with. These extras give you many more speech bubbles, caption boxes and clip art. The clip art is not necessarily useful, as many pictures may not work well with your drawing style, but the huge range of text boxes should cover most of your needs.
The program was initially a little tricky to work out how to use it. Fortunately, there are online tutorials, but they seem to be from the previous version of Comic Book Creator, as the interface looks a little different – but the principles are still the same. I found the tutorials a little slow to load, but once I got the hang of it, the program was easy to use. I also found that my projects took a while to load; however, my computer is four years old and in need of an upgrade.

in the frame

When I was in high school a couple of years ago, I used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator to make comics. Comic Book Creator comes with some cool templates to frame your page, which saves time compared to the Adobe programs. Each frame panel hides the edges of the picture, so you don’t have to worry about cropping your images or making a clipping mask the way you would in other programs. The images are made to fit within the predetermined box sizes that you have chosen in your layout. You can choose the size of your page so you can print your book on various sizes of paper.

This program seems to work best in conjunction with other image-editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. You wouldn’t want to try making a comic using only what is available within this program.

It is possible to have animations and videos in your comic book for publishing and viewing your comic online. You can share comics you have created with the rest of the comic creator community on their social network www.hypercomics.com, on YouTube, or Facebook. I’m having fun using this program.

Buy from: www.amazon.com
Price US$49.99

Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico – Review

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Now your computer can think outside the box, says Ash Nallawalla

Your PC has an intrinsic weakness that makes it easy for hostile files such as viruses or spyware to get past your defences. There is no need to be alarmed, as this is true for most PCs on the planet. In spite of installing the usual protection, such as a software firewall, an anti-virus program, your PC might be safe, but it is losing as much as 30 percent of its usable power. This power consists of CPU time and RAM.

Click to enlargeYes, it is quite normal for a PC to lose (actually, “use” is a more accurate word) its resources temporarily for every additional task it performs, which is why you should buy as much additional RAM as you can afford. I have 2 GB RAM and could buy more, but I cannot add more CPUs to my home PC. So what do I need to get?

I need a mini-computer. Yes, you read correctly. No, not those boat anchors from the 1970s, but a Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico to be exact. It is about the size of a thick USB flash drive. It can clip to a shirt pocket and comes with a spare cap in case you tend to lose the caps of USB drives.

Israeli company Yoggie Security Systems has come up with the classic “outside the box” solution by placing a complete Linux-based computer inside a USB flash drive. This mini-computer (is it a micro-computer?) acts literally as a gatekeeper by routing all incoming and outgoing traffic through itself and blocks all the nasty stuff.

Yes, the tiny computer has 128 MB RAM and runs at 520 MHz – those specs are good enough for its limited role. The memory is split so that the operating system cannot be reached from the part that processes the data stream.

The Pico acts as a firewall, like your hardware firewall at home (you do have one, right?), but you can’t take it with your laptop computer to a wireless hotspot. Many of those hotspots are usually wide open, so as not to cause problems for users who cannot configure WEP keys or type passwords. Your laptop is then visible to others who are sharing the same hotspot and one of them may have malicious intentions. Gamers remove unnecessary programs to get the most from their PC, so this little device is very relevant to their cause.

The Pico also protects against new virus threats for which a signature file has not been supplied by your anti-virus maker. If any part of a file looks suspicious, it is blocked. Yoggie has three pending patents in this area, so the smarts go beyond a basic heuristics scanner.

You can also use it for parental control on a child’s PC. It will block access to inappropriate sites, phishing emails, and stop spyware in its tracks.

You get a Kaspersky anti-virus CD that installs on your computer, not on the Pico. This is to clean your PC before you use the Pico, which comes with its integrated Kaspersky anti-virus engine. You can also use the software to scan a floppy disk or USB drive.

In Use

Installing and using the Gatekeeper Pico is easy. You plug it in and then install the drivers and Yoggie software. Next, you register it at the Yoggie website and you are ready to go. Unlike its corporate big brother device the Gatekeeper Pro, which works with the Yoggie Management Server, it works in stand-alone mode.

The device gets quite warm. The Pico is a computer, so this is normal and it is stated on the website. Come to think of it, some of my USB flash drives get warm to hot as well.

I have been running the Pico on my Windows Vista desktop for a couple of months and no nasty programs or spyware have been detected, so it is doing its job. I pulled out the device and instantly lost my Internet connection, so that feature works as claimed. All in all, the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico is a clever device that does its job silently and keeps your PC protected. You may find it available for as little as US$95 (plus postage) from online discount outlets.

Vendor: Yoggie

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