Pay Per Post Smackdown?

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Insuremeblog reports in a post entitled Pay-Per-Post Reviews Targeted By Google โ€“ More Carnage to Come that blogs in the PPP network have had their PR zeroed. A few blogs I see in this PPP directory show PR but some of them mention a lower PR than they used to have. The post references a post in the Izea blog, Google Goes after the Everyday Blogger, which clarifies that only some of their bloggers were affected. Curiously, the PPP home page is fluctuating PR between a grey bar and PR6. A PR correction could be on its way.

Andy Beard’s blog has a few posts and comments on this topic.

I don’t buy or sell links, so the situation is of curiosity value to me, but I can empathise with business advertisers who could find it difficult to get quality links without any help. I don’t recommend buying links because Google is clearly out to penalise any page that gives the impression of selling paid links.

Live Search better than DomainTools.com?

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If you have used DomainTools (formerly whois.sc), you may have appreciated its Reverse IP tool, which shows all the websites hosted at a given IP address. For a shared webhost machine, this can be several thousand sites but you need a paid account to see more than a sample.

Live Search IP: Operator

I could not find any discussion about the IP: search operator at Live Search, so it might beLive Search IP operator new. Live Search has rolled out quite a few enhancements and this could be one of them. Give it a try, e.g.

ip:64.22.96.42

I have a few sites hosted there (asmallorange.com) under one account. I am not sure if there are really 161,000 sites hosted there, but it is not out of the question, particularly when the server is displaying pages very slowly.

Such information is useful for SEOs who need to check if a competitor using similar keyphrases is also hosted. I have not had the chance to test that theory, but it would be impossible to go through 161,000 sites manually to find out. Fortunately, you can add a search term to the IP: operator, e.g.

ip:64.22.96.42 amazon

This shows if any sites are featuring Amazon content. This returns a much more manageable number that can be checked manually.

You could also use it to see if any other sites hosted there have adult or gambling content, using appropriate search terms.

For such a purpose, Live Search is better than DomainTools.com’s Reverse IP tool.

Link Bait or Spam Bait

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Wired magazine’s “Editor in Chief” is someone named Chris Anderson. Chris hates spam. Chris shames spammers — well, public relations spammers to be exact. As a big Chief, he is entitled to hate spammers because those lazy buggers send him press release spam that is better directed to his underlings. Thankfully, I am not a PR flack.

Two days ago, Chris spat the dummy and named names. He blogged:

Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play. There is no getting off this list.

He then listed a few dozen email addresses, presumably for spam harvesters. Boldly, he also posted his own address — what the hell, he has an Outlook filter, so he’s safe. Yes?

That’s spam bait, but it’s also link bait. I expect that a lot of sites are going to link to his post. I found out about it through a journo mailing list and you are finding out through this post. It’s an interesting way to get backlinks.

Google PageRank Finally Trickles Down Under

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All good SEOs know that the Google toolbar PR means nothing — it is, after all, a frozen value of PageRank that could be four months out of date. But one could be excused for getting nervous if their site is greybarred for a looooong time. Not good for the street cred. Certainly not good for attracting links. Makes you look like a banned site unless you check for indexed files.

NetMagellan had no toolbar PR for 8-9 months since it was launched and I had not come across such a long delay before. In my experience, a new site gets a measly PR-zero (really means PR <1 rather than null) within a couple of months and a handful of ordinary links. There was no ranking concern here, as more than 60% of the traffic is from organic search results. I wasn’t losing any sleep, but more than one SEO had commented on the grey bar, so it was a minor irritation at best.

A new ranking update is in progress and the home page now shows PR4. Of course that means “nothing”, but at least I won’t have to make much ado about nothing. ๐Ÿ˜†

Indian SEOs again under the microscope

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Edward Lewis, who posts as pageoneresults, a moderator on Webmasterworld, is a man after my heart. We have similar high ideals about quality in the SEO profession. Entry into his SEO Consultants directory is very difficult and anyone who does not meet his high standards is removed immediately, if not sooner. I have a high regard for his SEO knowledge and follow his writings on WW. (At present, he is very close to the California bush fires so let’s wish they are put out very soon.)

Anyway, this is not about Edward, but about his sense of humour. Check out his Clueless SEO page, which is aimed at link requestors who send link requests to inappropriate websites. All the simians on that page have Indian names, so it seems that he has received one link request too many from someone with an Indian name. See also the SEO Link Exchange link which lists many SEO companies from various countries who made the mistake of spamming him.

I can’t say I blame him. I have an Australia and New Zealand directory where my registration acknowledgment email reminds the new member that I only want websites that are in or about Australia or New Zealand. Then I place a new paragraph below telling Indian SEOs to read the previous paragraph.ย  It seems to be working, as I see a lot of applications that are not followed by link submissions. Before I did that, I had a daily chore of deleting non-AU/NZ submissions submitted by people with Indian names or whose IP addresses resolved to India.

Regardless of your nationality, if you have linkers on your staff, please beat them with a clue stick if they send link requests to inappropriate sites. Perhaps they don’t care if their submission is deleted, but this isn’t a long-term customer retention tactic. It doesn’t take much more time to check the suitability of a potential link partner, so why not get it right the first time?

AP sues Moreover (Verisign) for snippeting

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Rich Ord of WebProNews has reported a bizarre lawsuit that could make us check if we have been transported back in time to 1999. Read it and contemplate what harm Associated Press (AP) could do to the Internet if it wins this lawsuit.

This post and millions of other blog posts are linked to and snippeted by syndication mechanisms every day. AP is suing because Moreover aggregates news and sells the aggregation to subscribers (I am not one of them); unfortunately, the case goes beyond AP’s need for recompense. A win could cause others to sue, for example, Google for crawling their website and reproducing snippets in search results. AP’s lawyers used this language:

6. Defendants are also trespassing on AP’s chattel by using search robots or “crawlers” to retrieve information from AP’s computer servers in order to display, archive, cache, store, and/or distribute AP’s proprietary works.

That sounds exactly like Google, Live Search, Yahoo and many other search engines.

View a copy of the lawsuit here.

I posted a comment below the WebProNews article suggesting that a passive boycott of all email domains owned and used by AP staff, as well as their IP address range might be an interesting thought.

Those destinations should be blocked by network administrators within their own network — not suggesting any illegal action here. It is like adding ap.com to one’s email spam filters. Such a boycott is not likely to happen, but if it did, it would take AP reporters back to the pre-Internet days when they had to dial directly into the office or use intermediary sites to file their stories. This wouldn’t stop them from working, but a daily inconvenience might be a lasting reminder.

What do you think?

Yahoo! India’s English

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About a year ago iPrash blogged about Yahoo! India’s Pune pages, which feature the set of eight Ganpati temples known as Ashtavinayak (eight Vinayak — Vinayak being another name for Ganpati). As a child I visited seven of the eight temples, hence my interest in the subject. He wrote:

Then there is Ashtavinayak Darshan, which has all the facts & figures. The content was Not directly Copy-Pasted from any other existing websitesโ€ฆ However, the content writer has done a good job of altering the original content, sentence by sentence. No harm in that, because, Yahoo India is doing a good job of having all this information online.

AV articleI don’t know what he saw then or why he made that observation, but a page I see today is worth plugging into Copyscape. A whole bunch of sites seem to have copied bits of the Yahoo content.

Not that it is worth copying.

The quality of English in India has gone downhill since I left it 34 years ago. Mine was also less than perfect, but I had the good fortune to land a job as Senior Editor at Unisys that filled in the gaps. Unisys had a great Product Information department that produced shelves full of style guides and other editorial aids.

Thanks to the returned H1B visa holders, the outsourcing industry, the call centres and the influence of the Internet, many young Indians don’t know whether they are using American English or the mutated British English that is passed off as Indian English. Have you noticed that Indian mums have become moms?

Anyway, back to Yahoo! India. Witness this paragraph from this page (bolding mine):

Ultimately he undertook a sever penance at the site of the temple and attained the blessings of Lord Ganesha, owing to which he attained success in his endeavor. As a token of appreciation Lord Vishnu built a temple in Ganesha honor at the sight where he had offered his obeisance. Over the yugas the temple went to ruins and was reconstructed when a shepard found the lords idol lying among the debris. The temple received the patronage of

AV article(We won’t find out whose patronage it was, as the sentence ends there, leaving us in suspense. The rest of the Ashtavinayak pages are replete with similar errors.)

Frankly, those pages do an injustice to Yahoo!, the English language and the deity they seek to honour. I don’t mind the Indian Yahoos pleasing their American masters with the use of American English, but get it right, one way or the other. Yahoo! has some fine editors in the US office — use their guidance.

Which SEO conference?

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This coming December there are two overlapping SEO conferences of note:

Which one is better?

That depends on who you are. I have never been to any SES but from what I hear they (the US-based events) are great for SEOs to connect with potential customers, not to learn anything of value from an SEO knowledge perspective. SES targets:

  • Online marketers
  • Executives
  • Business owners
  • SEM/SEO professionals
  • Media planners/buyers
  • Webmasters
  • Direct marketers
  • Agency professionals
  • E-commerce managers

Webmasterworld targets a smaller set of the above and draws its audience from its forum, which is mainly populated by affilliate marketers and SEOs. The main feature of the latter is that the participants are doers — the hands-on experimenters, experts, algorithm-speculators, and note-comparers. In short, you get useful knowledge there, provided you know enough to recognise the experts from the speculators.

I know many people who attend both SES and Webmasterworld, but SES happens many times a year across North America, so they have other opportunities. If they ran one after the other, I could have attended both. ๐Ÿ˜€ Which one do you prefer?

I received an SEO lead, twice. Did you?

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I received two copies of the following email at two email addresses:

Your profile was visited on topseos.com by someone who is interested in making contact with you. Please sign up for our leads program to uncover this potential lead.
Please contact postmaster@topseos.com for further details.

Thanks
topseos.com

If you are an SEO, you might have received one of these emails too. Isn’t it exciting! (Sorry, I am in a mischievous mood)ย ย ๐Ÿ˜ˆ

Overture tool now shows May results

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The previous post contained a count for the word “seo” done a few hours ago, when January results were being shown. Now I see May 2007 counts:

Searches done in May 2007
Count Search Term
8585 seo
3105 seo sydney
2128 engine optimization search seo
1572 australia seo
930 seo services
745 analysis seo
701 design seo web
490 expert seo
469 company seo
464 seo software
450 consultant seo
430 firm seo
430 organic seo
399 seo tool
382 melbourne seo
379 australian seo
355 seo service
352 free seo tool
336 company seo uk
328 accessible design melbourne seo site web
317 professional seo
308 seo specialist
307 design seo site web
302 east north seo
296 audit seo
294 company seo services
289 accessible australia design seo site web
284 consulting seo
283 seo services uk
276 brisbane company seo
263 cost low melbourne seo
254 affordable design melbourne seo site web
250 brisbane seo services
250 melbourne organic seo
246 affordable melbourne seo
243 cumulus seo
241 affordable melbourne organic seo
238 affordable seo werribee
238 bay byron seo
237 design melbourne seo site web
235 affordable seo
231 budget melbourne seo
226 australia organic seo
219 affordable organic seo
210 brisbane seo
199 affordable australia organic seo
183 australia budget seo
183 cost low seo
183 optimization seo
179 affordable australia seo
178 affordable design seo site web
178 michigan seo
177 accessible design seo site web
175 organic seo werribee
171 budget seo
168 design seo site web werribee
162 affordable australia design seo site web
160 internet marketing seo
157 australia design seo site web
156 seo smart
154 marketing seo
150 affordable seo services
150 australia expert seo
148 seo werribee
137 company professional seo
135 business seo small
133 cheap seo
127 analysis audit seo site web
127 consultancy seo
121 company marketing seo
113 elite seo
111 dynamic seo
108 company design seo web
104 engine search seo
104 nashville seo web
100 dw23 seo
99 development seo site web
97 promotion seo
93 australia seo services
91 consultant seo sydney
91 seo training
90 expert michigan seo
85 company seo sydney
85 design seo sydney web
78 pakistan seo
75 adelaide seo
73 seo tip
71 hosting seo
69 new seo zealand
68 australia cost low seo
65 learn seo
59 positioning seo services
56 ask expert seo
56 optimisation seo
55 agency seo
54 seo suite
52 joomla seo
51 consultant online secure seo
49 link news.com seo www.free
48 sem seo

Overture keyword suggestion tool returns

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SEOs everywhere can unslash their wrists. I thought I’d blog this as not many people seem to have noticed that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (known as Keyword Assistant in Australia) has limped back to some semblance of normality. I say “limped back” because most searches I tried still show the search counts from January 2007, whereas they normally show the previous month’s figures.

This tool is widely used by SEOs and PPC bid managers to find search volumes or related search terms. It only counts searches done on Yahoo! properties, so the total search count across Google, Live Search and lesser engines is anyone’s guess. In Australia, Yahoo’s search share is about 15%, so multiplying the count by 6 is near enough of a guesstimate.

The second flaw with the tool is that it combines singular and plurals, which can make a difference in many cases when trying to establish which form is more popular. (Of course, one can run a short PPC campaign and look at the impression counts.)

The third flaw is that some phrases are rearranged in alphabetical order, e.g. “estate real sydney” — which is easy to spot, but “melbourne seo” isn’t right. When I last tested this in Google, “seo melbourne” received more impressions.

Here are (some of) the results for “seo” using the tool:

Searches done in January 2007

(The dingo ate the entries above… ๐Ÿ™ )

The fourth flaw is that it combines Australian/British spellings with US spellings. So, in countries such as Australia, where US English spellings are used by the ignorant, one needs to cater for this in the SEO sense. Unfortunately, the tool would have you think that nobody in the UK or Australia searches for “jewellery” but they do search for “jewelry”.

A better tool is supposedly on the way but, in the meantime, use it while you can. Thanks, Yahoo! for the tool!

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