SearchEngineZ - News and Ideas

These are the new guidelines from Google.

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.

And if you see someone breaking the rules (ie your competitor), you can snitch.

Labels: paid links

If you are one clued-up, web-savvy, marketing-oriented chappy (or chappess) - there are several ways to make your mark on the world, and million$ in the process

1) Go alone
2) Go alone but hire others
3) Work for others

It seems to be that, if you are full of beans and talent, and a potential employer is on the verge, then a relationship is quite likely. And, when hired, you and a bunch of similar young studs (or studettes), are the factor that makes your company a success, well:

a) You will hopefuly have made lots of money from shares & options
b) You will have seen how it all works at corporate level
c) You'll have become cocky enough to go solo

The folk behind these sites all started out at PayPal:

Facebook
Slide
Yelp
Digg
YouTube

Read about the PayPal Mafia at CNN

In a "me too" move, AOL has purchased question and answer site Yedda for an undisclosed amount.

"Incorporating Yedda's unique technology into AOL enables us to bring together our traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to questions," AOL President Ron Grant said.

(in other words, "bolt on).

Hopefully one day there will be a meta-interface for all this knowledge, rather than the many Q&A sites that exist. This is something Jimmy Wales should be focusing on, not search.

With the new partnership, Go Daddy hosting customers will have easy access to Google Webmaster Tools and Go Daddy will automatically submit sitemaps to Google on behalf of customers.

I do not expect GoDaddy's hosting service to be better than I can get elsewhere, but for their many customers this is pretty cool. Sitemaps are a pain-in-the-butt, and it's about time that someone automated the procedure - kudos to GoogleDaddy

Only in the US though, which rules me out. Otherwise, Chumby is a great device for those that want to keep an eye on the web during while relaxing at home.

Widgets bring info for free (no subscription req.), and about the only negative is that it does not run on batteries.

- traffic reports
- picture gallery
- email notifications
- eBay tracking

and so on... basically any widget you currently use should be possible for the Chumby - unless it requires interaction

Over at Distilled is a great idea of creating unique, stimulating, linkbait - without too much effort:

1. Find a forum with a decent traffic level in your niche
2. Spend some time contributing to the community, get your name respected and ensure the mods don’t see you as a spammer (having a trusted profile in your niche community/forum is worth it’s weight in gold - treat this as a serious investment and don’t ruin it for a one-shot chance at linkbait)
3. Start a post on the forum with the seed of an idea, and a couple of examples from you
4. Let the forum community chip in their own ideas and funny comments and let them grow the idea for you
5. Wait for the thread to die down and compile all the best bits from it
6. Write this up into a piece of linkbait for your site
7. Social media success!

Labels: linkbait