Google to go beyond print ads?

PPC 1 Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Kaywa QR barcode Barcode for netmagellan.com Dan Frommer reports in Alley Insider that Google is testing 2D barcodes in its Google Print Ads for newspapers. This makes a lot of sense, because the URL can be as long as you wish within reason – but long enough to accommodate tracking tags as happens in AdSense ads. Google is using the Kaywa QR format seen on the left (correction and more information in the comment). Nokia uses a different format (right) and my N95 phone can read such code. Both images show the URL of this website. This enables my mobile phone to store a URL very easily and it helps Google and the advertiser to track the success of their campaigns. The QR format seems to better facilitate vertical identification, which might be important when reading a barcode stuck to some object such as a parcel. Vertical orientation would not seem as important in a print ad, which I expect to be oriented correctly.

Would Google want a barcode that can be read easily, regardless of image orientation? Nokia’s site shows T-shirts with barcodes. Where else might Google print ads? On pub coasters? On candy wrappers? Milk cartons?

NotchUp opens up to the world

28 January 2008

Other 1 Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

NotchUp Good news. A couple of days after I rubbished NotchUp for blocking my access when I mentioned the difficulty of entering a non-US address, they have fixed things. Not just for me, but for all comers outside the US. You no longer need an invitation – just go to www.notchup.com and sign up. It is still in beta.

trainsem.gooruze.com

SEO Certification – What Is Your View?

26 January 2008

SEO 19 Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I wrote this initially as a new forum post after I saw someone being disparaged for saying he is a “Certified SEO Professional”. I don’t believe we should poke fun at someone who claims to be a “certified SEO” or asks about certification offerings.

I see opportunistic charlatans through to some respected names in the industry who offer a certification. Just as a car driver’s licence is a certification but is not an endorsement of expertise, there is a case for SEO certification.

The Need

As a hiring manager, I know that in Melbourne it is next to impossible to advertise for an SEO and get more than one resume from someone who has real SEO experience, that is an in-house SEO role or an SEO agency background.

As a recipient of spam, I know there are numerous individuals and companies who claim to be SEO experts, but their websites show little evidence of this expertise. There are so-called SEO Certification companies who will sell you a certification badge, but again their own website shows little evidence of such knowledge.

There are people who ask about SEO certification, suggesting there is a need.

The Challenge

The usual question is “Who will certify the certifiers?” I don’t think there is a perfect answer, but the history of every profession might reveal a similar dilemma at the beginning. Are we happy to let the SEO profession remain an amorphous cloud?

If you asked within a given context, e.g. Webmasterworld members, who is an expert SEO, you might get a dozen names from anyone you ask and many of the answers would have a common core, say, five individuals.

Do we want a situation where the world has just five experts, certified by acclamation? Are they experts because they have time to display their logical reasoning at length — given that we cannot often see their work in practice?

Then there are other islands of expertise, such as other SEO forums, training companies, and SEM industry associations, who have their own list of experts, certified and otherwise.

What I see happening is similar to a university comparison. There is the Ivy League and then there is the rest, including the School of Hard Knocks. The putative certifying bodies will not go away just because some of us pooh-pooh their product. The self-trained experts will quietly continue to succeed by dint of their own effort. Some of these certifying entities will do a great job of marketing their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval stamps and employers will begin to look for this Seal in resumes.

The Barriers

The main barrier is ego. Look at any person who rubbishes SEO certification. Has he positioned himself as an expert, say, by operating an SEO business? Has he convinced himself that he is really good because his projects have all been resounding successes? Therefore, he may feel no need to be certified. Is he threatened by a growing number of newbies clutching their certifications?

The other barrier is a lack of cohesion. Relatively few SEOs join SEO associations – for a variety of valid reasons, particularly when they work for their own websites and not for clients. While they do not need a certification, are they saying that they do not need formal SEO training, where the certificate is merely an outcome? If they were starting today, would they prefer the trial-and-error path that most of us have endured in our early days, until we found Webmasterworld?

Is there anything we can do to influence this outcome? Please comment.

NotchUp – Get Paid $630 for a Job Interview – Yeah, right

24 January 2008

Other 1 Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

NotchUp is a new recruitment site that is currently in beta, but you need to be invited to get in. You supposedly get paid to be interviewed. How much? You supply your current salary into a calculator, e.g. $150,000 works out to $630. Yeah, right.

I got an invite and imported my LinkedIn profile and connections. Great idea, but NotchUp isn’t the first to do this. The first hiccup for me is that it wouldn’t take a 4-digit postcode and there was no field for the country. Typical American form design, I thought, so I added a zero, giving myself a location perhaps in New England, except that 03030 doesn’t exist.

Helpfully, I wrote to NotchUp and suggested that they should open up to international applicants given the LinkedIn import facility and to fix the form. I invited about 200 of my LinkedIn connections, as I will supposedly get 10% of their first year’s salary if they find a new job through NotchUp. Sweet. I can imagine that some of the LinkedIn stalwarts may never need to work again.

I heard back from Customer Support:

Thank you for your interest in NotchUp. We are currently accepting registrations from the United States only. We are looking forward to expanding our site worldwide, and we expect that to happen during the first half of 2008. We hope you will check back with us.

To add insult to injury, my login has now been disabled. What a waste of time for me and others who may meet the same fate! 😥

LinkedIn has a very powerful recruitment backend that isn’t well-known to ordinary mortals and I get the occasional enquiry from recruiters owing to this. USAns, do you think NotchUp’s model will work? With the exception of some highly specialised occupations, I can’t see this model working for the bulk of the population.

The LinkedIn profile import facility is a double-edged sword. If I were an employer who liked a profile in NotchUp and didn’t want to pay to proceed, I would simply use Google to search for a unique sentence and find the person’s LinkedIn profile.

Unlocked iPhone in India?

20 January 2008

Hardware No Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Recently, while I was in the US, an Indian friend asked me to buy him an iPhone because they can be unlocked in India (or elsewhere, if you know how). I did some hunting and found out that this is quite a hot topic. There is a lot of speculation online and quite a few Made-for-Adsense sites with nothing other than the iPhone name in an article, but there are some gems in there.

iPhone India Edition – Hidden Features is quite a funny read. It has a PhotoShopped picture of an iPhone with features such as “GPMS – Gutter and Pothole Management System”.

There are some posts that allege to show how to unlock an iPhone – take them all with a pinch of salt, as you could end up with an expensive paperweight if something goes wrong:

Buying an Unlocked iPhone

If I were lusting after an unlocked iPhone, I’d be looking at Apple Germany or France, where Apple has been forced to sell unlocked units. T-Mobile has them for €399 on a plan, and unlocked units were selling for about $1480 for a while until the courts gave T-Mobile the right to sell only locked ones. In France, you can still get unlocked models for €749. But if you are in India, your current options are:

Palika Bazaar or Sarojini Nagar in Delhi
Heera Panna in Mumbai

The going grey-market price is about $650 (Rs 30,000).

Will an iPhone Work in India?

Locked or unlocked, the iPhone will work in India because it has four GSM bands, two of which work in India (900 and 1800 MHz). All you have to do is ensure that your carrier supports roaming in India. Unlocking also depends on the firmware supplied with the phone – the latest version apparently cannot be unlocked, so don’t upgrade an unlocked phone. Here is someone who got his phone working in India:

iPhone Unlocking Jargon

iPhone Elite = A set of tools that can brick your iPhone if you don’t know what you are doing.
iPhone SimFree = A GUI-based unlocking tool that worked with firmware 1.1.2 but the site hasn’t been updated since November 20.
iBrickr = A ringtone management tool for older firmware – don’t try it on 1.1.1 or later.
Unlocking = Allowing the phone to use a SIM from any carrier, not just the one that sold you the phone on a contract.
Jailbreaking = Allowing you to access all parts of the SIM’s file system.
Activating = Conversely, this means bypassing the activation step via iTunes.
Re-virginizing = Restoring the iPhone’s lock table if damaged by an anySIM 1.0x unlocker.
Turbo SIM = Czech company Bladox sells this SIM-sized chip that slips in with your SIM and does amazing things, including unlocking the iPhone (acc to Wikipedia, but contradicted by the website). Their site says that as of 17 December 2007, a tsunami hit their shop, so they are closed. This probably means that most of Western Europe is under water by now… 😕

Unlocking Just Got Harder

Firmware 1.1.3 was confirmed at Macworld 2008. It can’t be unlocked with AnySIM, so life for users of unlocked iPhones just got harder.

Pubcon 2007: Coffee with Matt Cutts

20 January 2008

Reading Time: 2 minutes

On Day 3, there was an early session with Matt Cutts in the hot chair. Matt said that when he was at university (in 1999) in North Carolina, he took a course on search engines and after applying to Google, he asked how much they would pay him. He then thought he might not hear from them, but they did, and the rest is history. Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2007, Las Vegas

Matt was asked to explain about linking to a bad neighbourhood when you don’t know if it is bad. He said you needed to trust your instinct and if in doubt, use a nofollow link.

On paid links, Matt gave the example of a site with an article about Alzheimer’s Disease that linked to some organisation that wanted money from you instead of giving you information. This was a flag for a paid link, whereas the expected link should have gone to some authority information site. This is why all the search engines are clamping down on paid links and paid blog posts.

Google recently bought g.cn as it is short and easy to type for Chinese who cannot remember the word “Google”. He sees a lot of English-language spam on .cn domains where the backlinks come from Japan. This is clearly unnatural and flags a paid-link alert. You can buy a .cn domain for as little as 15 cents, so spammers are flocking there and getting backlinks from almost every country, which is also unnatural.

Matt was asked about sites sharing the same IP address, such as on a virtual private server (VPS). He said that spammers drop an IP address when it has been banned, but the new occupant need not worry. When a whole subnet in a C class is doing strange things, only then do innocent sites have something to worry about.

What about ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) used by newspapers to make articles available only to subscribers after a certain period? This is a very recent initiative that extends the robots exclusion protocol, so Matt is still studying it and doesn’t anticipate any issues for SEO.

How many 301 redirects can a site have? There is no limit. You can change them after two weeks if you wish, with no harmful effect, but don’t chain 301s in a loop.

Not surprisingly, someone asked about paid links and what was the borderline. Matt replied that if a link passes PageRank, it can come under suspicion. If a link manipulates search results, it is suspicious. But aren’t AdWords paid links? No – they do not pass PageRank, so they are not.

What is the best way to migrate a site to a new IP address?

1. Lower your DNS time-to-live (TTL) to something like 5 minutes and leave it like this for a day.

2. Bring up the site on the new IP address and wait a day or two.

3. Drop the files on the old IP address once you see Googlebot crawling the new address.

How can we report a scraper? This happens with AdSense sites. You should use the link in “Ads by Google” to report such a publisher by filling out a spam report.

How about directories that charge for a link? There is a detailed Googlewebmastercentral blog post about paid directories. Signs of a directory to avoid? No contact information, private registration, poor data in whois, expired domain redirected to the directory site, uncustomised phpLD script, requires a reciprocal list or takes only paid submissions, no quality links.

Should we buy a site with existing (good) links? No, they will not help with ranking.

Pubcon 2007: Link Building

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Pubcon audience Jim Boykin said that natural links always work and presented a “1000 day linking plan”:

Day 1: Submit to good directories, such as Best of the Web, Yahoo and industry verticals.
Day 2: Submit comments on blogs and write forum posts.
Day 3: Buy ads in industry portals.
Days 4-20: Write linkbait articles, give away tools, widgets.
Days 21-31: Analyse competitors’ backlinks and solicit for your site. Use tools such as Hubfinder by Aaron Wall, or manually using Yahoo. Check the site’s PR, check the Google cache and decide if it is a good link.
Days 32-1000: Search for related web pages. Prove you are a human – phone the other site’s owner or email with something more than a link request. Why is a link beneficial to them?

Jim then spoke about Link Value, which includes:

Relevance
Age of site
Number of backlinks
Site’s trust (how many links from .gov/.edu?)
Interlinks within this site to and from the page in question
Blogs do not give good backlinks
Other sites should also link to the link-providing page
Who else is getting a link from that page?
Where is your link on the page – do you have to write content for that page?

Greg Hartnett from BOTW spoke about Link Building Via Directories. They are not “paid links” but are “reviews”. He described “good directories” as follows:

They have an history
They are great resources
Their categories are populated (not empty stubs)
They are designed for the user
They add unpaid submissions if they are good resources

Traffic to directories is low volume but targeted.

Some directories will take multiple submissions from a site. CNN is mentioned 745 times in the ODP.

Are the Yahoo Directory, BOTW worth the expense? Yes. Will my site get included? Not if it fails the review.

The best directories are:

Yahoo
ODP
BOTW
Business.com

Rae Hoffman of sugarrae.com spoke about Delegating Link Development.

Rae prefers to do linking in-house than to outsource it. If you have to outsource, create a training document for their staff. It would contain material including:

A list of your competitors
Guidelines for reciprocal links
Sample emails to send on your behalf

Train your linkers to be traffic developers and marketers, not link developers. Give them a low-value site to begin with and observe them.

Roger Montti of martinibuster.net spoke about Alternative Link Building.

Roger has a linking team in India and one in the US. He is Bcc’d on each link request they send out, so that he can monitor their work and make suggestions.

One source is buying an ad in an emailed newsletter, if the newsletter is also archived online – you get a permanent link!

He suggested finding complementary (relevant) blogs via BOTW and other listings and then contacting the owner asking if they sold advertising (not links). Some of them don’t mention this but they might have AdSense blocks halfway down the page, so they want to make money. Good sources are ones that make no mention of PageRank, do not have ads for irrelevant websites, and offer a year-long deal.

You can try to sponsor small nonprofits, especially .org sites. YouTube videos can contain links and may send human traffic.

To find such sites, try the following searches:

“advertise with us” [your keyphrase] -cpm
“rate card” -“cpm advertising”
allintitle:sponsors -cpm site:.org [your keyphrase]

Another option is to buy a neglected, under-performing site that you can improve. You could build a site for a charity in return for links, but they tend to be demanding customers because you work for free.

If your site is a software company that makes shareware, then there are numerous download sites where you can submit PAD files.

Pubcon 2007: Monetising Social Media

SEO Social Media No Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Michael Gray (Graywolf) offered some tips on what works for Social Media.

Selling should have a low focus
Products do better than services
Consumer goods do better than business goods
Target impulse buyers
Offer doorbuster prices
Let the customer get the content any way they want, such as an RSS feed or Twitter. e.g. Southwest Airlines gives airfare deals, Carnival Cruise, JetBlue.

Example sites: thisnext.com, techdiva.com

There are some pitfalls:

Mention if there are restrictions or goods in short supply
Anticipate demand – Microsoft was embarrassed when it promised a USB key to all survey participants but only made 1000 keys.

Alexander Barbara spoke about Monetising Digg Traffic

He mentioned a new site about health and wellness – not your typical Digg candidate because Digg is dominated by 16-year-old geeks – but it got good exposure through a targeted campaign. A site has just 24 hours to stay on the Digg home page, so it needs to be compelling.

Some points to consider if your site cannot withstand the load of Digg traffic:

Consider making flat pages and serve them, which will reduce the load on MySQL.
Provide a 302 redirect to the Google cache of your page.
Use Coral Cache (http://www.coralcdn.org/), a free service that will provide peer-to-peer caching of your content.

Other observations:

Digg users do not click ads.
50% of Digg users will unsubscribe from your RSS feed within two days.
Monetise directly with CPM ads, not AdSense.
Monetise indirectly by buildign long-term, loyal readers.

Laura Fitton of pistachioconsulting.com started using Twitter in March 2007 and offered the following tips:

Build lasting value.
Ads are ailing – you can make more money by helping others to buy.
Listen: markets are conversations, but conversations suck if you don’t listen.
Watch what others are saying about your company. Set up alerts. Buy the negative domain names such as [yourcompany]sucks.com before a disgruntled ex-employee or customer does.
You cannot game the market. Facebook Beacon got it wrong.

Pubcon 2007: Keynote by Craig Newmark of craigslist.com

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Craig Newmark was the keynote speaker at the Webmasterworld Conference. Craig is a modest man who started Craigslist while he worked for Charles Schwab in 1994. By 1995, it was a Unix Pine based cc mailing list about San Francisco. It started with restaurant recommendations, then classifieds and job ads. At this stage, Craig wore a pocket protector and had tape on his glasses – he is a self-confessed nerd. The list moved to the Majordomo platform and when it came to giving it a name, he chose the informal name that its users were already calling it – Craig’s List.

In 1998 he tried forming a non-profit structure and tried charging for ads. This was a failure. By now the system was running Sun Solaris.

In 1999 he started the incorporation of Craigslist and hired Jim Buckmaster, the current CEO. The code was re-written in Perl and moved to Linux servers. Email harvesters started stealing addresses, so he wrote the current email options (hide or reveal) code in two days.

Today, Craigslist has a paid model in 11 cities for job ads and apartment ads in New York city. Each month, 9 million pages are served by 120 generic Linux servers that run Apache, MySQL and Perl. 80 more servers will be added soon and the site will be split over two hosting locations. The email still uses Pine.

Craig realised that his people skills are not the best, so he only handles customer service today and is not part of the management team. In spite of many offers, Craig has no intention of selling. Only 1% of the site generates revenue. His philosopy is simple: if you trust your community, they will respond in a trusting way.

Pubcon 2007: SEO 101 – The Timeless and Classic Hits