We Do Search Engine Optimization.

After deep reservations of the MySpace generation getting their collective american idol voting mentality in the world I have to admit I’m impressed at the news stories. Myspace News currently has real news stories!

Im absolutely stunned that the organization that is organizing the world’s preteen blogs, drunken photos and pop music has engaging and thought provoking content. These are the current homepage articles:

• google’s new look
• solar energy in austrailia
• Nigeria’s sock puppet election catastrophe
• Boris Yeltsin’s passing
• world book day

Books? This is the generation of kids that are supposed to have replaced their bookshelves with playstaions and xboxes.

This looks like excellent editorializing to me, with exponentially higher quality than Digg. John Furrier has an interesting outlook, Rand on the other hand has a different opinion. As do others in the search engine optimization community.

Rupert old dude, please keep this up. You are using your influence over millions of young people to promote positive messages and inspire change, please don’t sell out.

Its like the horror movie the reanimator where a mad scientist wants to get even with the world and prove their ideas to a disinterested public.

Richard Rosenblatt is MySpace founder who sold his web 2.0 empire to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million and immediately regretted it bigtime. His company Demand Media purchased Enom & Bulk Register, making him one of the top 4 domain name owners and brokers online. What does he want to do with this new portfolio of parked domain names sitting in purgatory collecting millions of dollars from hapless Adwords advertisers? Make a social media site! Yes, now when you type in undeveloped names such as handbrake.com or baseballplayer.com you can actually join a social network! Yes! I can’t wait to join myspace for parked names, it has to be more interesting than simply stare mindlessly at advertisements.

I talked to some domainers, and they said, ‘We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.’ I thought, ‘If you can make that much doing nothing, what if we added some Web 2.0 sprinkle so that people would come back – user publishing tools, social networking? What if we built a platform where we could snap that into as many domains as we wanted?’ That’s when the lightning bolt hit me: You’d have a company that generates its own traffic, generates its own content, and monetizes itself. It would be the perfect lazy-man’s media company!”

Mr. Rosenblatt is a shrewd businessman, so im sure he will make money out of this deal. The small players, as usual, will get nothing and perhaps loose money on worthless advertising.

More from Tropical & the Daily Domainer.

Successful websites have a lot of links pointing to them. People link to websites they like and sites that make their life easier. Encouraging linking is done by creating linkbait. Here is a great post about linkbaiting that includes interviews with top line link builders Eric Ward, Rand Fishkin, Roger Montti, Todd Malicoat and Rae Hoffman.

Question: What are the factors you would take into
account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link
broker or seller)?

Answers: It is 100% dependent on the outcome I’m expecting that link will cause, and the signal of intent that link may send to the search engines.

1. Rank for the target search term(s) at the major engines
2. Relevance to the site/page in question from a human perspective, i.e. would people on that page be likely to click-through and convert?
3. How well do pages at the site generally rank against their competition?

Take a look at the backlinks then note any from the same site. Remove those similar sites and search again. So if you’re in Yahoo and you’re doing this:

1. linkdomain:linkseller.com -site:linkseller.com
2. And find they have a bunch of inbounds from anotherlinkseller.com, do this:
3. linkdomain:linkseller.com -site:linkseller.com -site:anotherlinkseller.com

When checking the backlinks, screen out links from .info domains.

Test the value of a link – you need to know the type of link popularity that is going to be passed to determine a value to associate with the link.

Page testing tools:

1. page strength tool
2. Text Link Ads Link calculator
3. 10 tips to determine the value of a link

All linkers agreed visible toolbar PageRank is highly overrated, and they do not use this as a quality indicator.

Cornwall has a huge list of linking resources written by top SEO’s and link baiters.

Read more about linking in the full article on Sugar rae.

The W3 Schools has an in depth report of user browser stats. This is an important read for all web designers.

The statistics show that Internet Explorer 6 is the most common browser, XP is the most dominating operating system, and most users are using a display with 1024×768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.

However, 14% of users still use 800×600 monitor resolution where the maximum width of a web page would be 760 pixels. Also, many users do not surf with desktop windows maximized, so your design could still be unintentionall cutoff horizontally requiring the user to maximize their browser.

What should you do? Research your specific audience then design the width of your website accordingly.

I read an interesting post about Hiro, a software program to force feed users ads. The technology allows broadcast networks to send television programs digitally with advertisements that cannot be skipped or fast forwarded.

The day after an internet video player appears that disables fast forwarding through specific pieces of content (glorious advertisements) a hack will appear to circumvent this feature.

What would really be interesting is if the web based media viewer was tied to a user account activated by a credit card. Imagine a Google User Account that had a valid credit card attached. In order to have a credit card you need to be over 18, so the media viewer could not allow you to watch certain R rated programs if you didn’t have a credit card.

The day after an internet video player appears that disables fast forwarding through specific pieces of content (glorious advertisements) a hack will appear to circumvent this feature.

What would really be interesting is if the web based media viewer was tied to a user account activated by a credit card. Imagine a Google User Account that had a valid credit card attached. In order to have a credit card you need to be over 18, so the media viewer could not allow you to watch certain R rated programs if you didn’t have a credit card.

Taking this one step further, a Google Account contains all your browsing and ad clicking history. Google knows all the searches you have done and all the ads you have clicked on, so it would be easy for them to give you specific targeted ads. Google Television could be free internet video, similar to broadcast TV with ads that take more effort to screen out than its worth.

When viewing American Idol on Google TV you could see an advertisement for a local auto repair shop to fix your car that broke down earlier that day.

Now thats Orwellian.

It appears that Stumbleupon.com will be acquired by Ebay and not Google. In response, Google is launching a similar feature in their toolbar that suggests potentially interesting websites based on your browsing history.

Man I would love  to see what some other peoples’ browsing history is, wouldn’t you? This would give you keen insight into what their next purchases could be. Speaking of purchases, Google is relaunching Froogle as Google Product Search. No Google will be able to take the known history of your internet activities and match it up with ads and product suggestions.

SEOMoz has created a list of the top current Search Engine Ranking Factors as defined by 37 top search engine optimization specialists, including Search Engine Watch/Land founder Danny Sullivan. Below are the main on and offsite factors examined.

Top 10 Positive Factors
1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

Top 5 Negative Factors
1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Lets look at Google Ranking Questions. It is immediately apparent that there is total disagreement in the importance of each specific element. While they all disagree, it is interesting to note they

Which of the following algorithmic components do you believe to be most important Google’s rankings?

• 56% the authority & trust of a domain
• 35% the external links pointing to an individual page
• 9% keyword based relevance of an individual page

Wow! Ask different SEO’s the same question and you get a different answer! A fair difference of opinion here. Lets look at another question.

What is your opinion of Google’s sandbox – the effect whereby newly registered websites (or those that have recently changed ownership) experience a period of low recognition and rankings in Google’s SERP’s?

• 38% the effect is more prevalent than it was 6-12 months ago
• 32% the effect never existed
• 21% the effect is less prevalent than it was 6-12 months ago
• 9% the effect appears to have changed little over the last 6-12 months

Holy Smokes! 1/3 of the top SEO’s believe a Google sandbox doesn’t exist and the remaining have different opinions on its intensity over the last year.

What impresses me about this data is that all the people reporting are successful in promoting websites and have a thorough understanding search engine algorithms. So if these skilled folk all do well with different methods what should you do?

Follow the instructions in ranking factors article, write good content and get lots of good sites to link to you. Yes it’s that simple.

Read more with Paul Wolbers, SEO Logs, Hongkiat, Yugatech, SEO Scoop, Biz Report, Marketing Pilgrim, Kiss SEO & Connected Internet.

If you are trying to artificially boost your link popularity in Google, watch out – they are watching you. Many webmasters, including Reality Wired have received friendly notices from San Jose that their sites are violating SEO best practices. This follows an update on spam reporting on how google is trying to provide SEO’s and webmasters with more direct feedback on why their sites are penalized.

Here is an interesting quote from the affected site:

The interesting part was, when the indexes vanished it wasn’t gradual, they were just gone. When they said 30 days they meant 30 days because 30 days to the day, and almost to the hour I noticed they were first gone, they came back. All of them, in the same position they were.

If your website disappears from its normal ranking it is most likely due to the natural flux of Google’s ranking algorithm, and there is nothing to worry about. However if your site does not return to its past location, you can contact Google and usually receive a helpful answer with tips on getting your site reincluded. See others who have had problems.

Matt Cutts has a post detailing how to get your site reincluded in Google:

Now where should you send a reinclusion request? http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py . You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking.” Click Continue, and on the page that shows up, make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form. Upper- or lower-case doesn’t matter, but make sure you use the words “reinclusion request” in the subject line so it gets routed to the right place.

Another way to file a reinclusion request is through Google Webmaster Tools. It is in the Tools box & clicking the “+” reveals a link to submit a reinclusion request.

Hopefully none of you have had this problem.

Periodically I write about companies I have had positive and negative experiences with. Today it is Radtech, makers of computer accessories and bluetooth wireless mice. I bought a BT500 wireless mouse for my Mac laptop from them about 2 years ago, and the battery contacts broke making the mouse inoperable. I called their toll free phone number and talked with an english speaking support technician who was very kind and helpful. He told me to send the bluetooth mouse back for a free repair! Amazing, offering to fix a 2 year old computer accessory product and they shipped it back to me for absolutely no cost.

My next wireless computer mouse will be from Radtech, and so should yours. Buy the BlueTake BT500 for only $59.95. This is a great deal on a portable Mac bluetooth mouse.

Google just announced they have purchased the original banner ad network for 3.1 billion. Started in 1996, doubleclick has been serving up annoying banner ads to web users on major websites. Originally given up for dead, the company was taken private in 2005 by Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity for $1.1 billion. Now 2 years later they sold it for over 3 billion in cash, not stock. NY Times estimates DoubleClick’s revenues are about $300 million/year making the purchase 10x its revenue.

Wow. This private equity firm made the deal of a lifetime. A lot of people are talking about this deal – it will make waves in the advertising industry as Google is looking like the only player in town.