We Do Search Engine Optimization.

I just received a very convincing email that pretends to be a subpoena from the US District Court. This is an extremely crafty email and the most realistic scam I have seen yet. However the poor souls who visit the court site will receive a nasty surprise.

This is a phishing site that will attempt to steal your personal information DO NOT VISIT THIS SITE:

http://www.casd-uscourts.com

Using Internet explorer, this site will download spyware and malware into your computer.

The correct link to the US District court is:
http://www.casd.uscourts.gov

Below is a copy of the US court phishing email. One thing that gives them away is the atrocious spelling:

AO 88(Rev.11/94) Subpoena in a Civil Case
United States District Court Federal Seal Issued by the
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
Issued to: ———-
————–
—————-

SUBPOENA IN A CIVIL CASE

Case number: 45-616-RRE
United States District Court

YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED to appear and testify before the Grand Jury of the United States District Court at the place, date, and time specifiied below.
Place: United States Courthouse
880 Front Street
San Diego, California 92101

Room: Grand Jury Room
room 5217

Date and Time: May 9,2008
9:00 a.m. PST

Issuing officers name and address: O’Mevely & Meyers LLP; 400 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071

Please download the entire document on this matter(follow this link) and print it for your record.

http://www.casd-uscourts.com/ViewCase.php?case=34-92-RFW

This subpoena shall remain in effect until you are granted leave to depart by the court or by an officer on behalf of the court.

Any organisation not a party to this suit thas is subponaed for the taking of a deposition shall designate one or more offcers, directors, or managing agents, or other persons to testify on its behalf, and may set forth, for each person designated, the matters on wich the person will testify. Federal Rules of Civil Procedures,20(b)(6).

Failure to appear at the time and place indicated may result in a contempt of court citation. Bring this subpoena with you to the courtroom and oresent it to the bailiff. Direct any questions to the person requesting you to appear: City Prosecutor.

If you see this email, immediately report it as spam.

Read more from the NY Times and Ed Moed.

Business.com is one of the few directories worth paying to be listed in. Having a Business.com directory listing will help your website in the natural search engine results pages.
Currently the fee for a Business.com standard listing is $199 /yr but this will be going up to $299 per year may first.

Make sure you get your Business website listed before 5/1/08 to take advantage of the $100 savings.

The auctionads team won the ebay developers contest in 2007 and they got to have lunch with e-bay CEO John Donahue.

During this lunch Shoemoney pointed out that the CJ affiliate system was convoluted and unnecessary, and suggested that Ebay.com move their program in-house. On April 1 Ebay did this, and began managing their own affiliate network that likely includes millions of members.

Commission Junction’s parent company ValueClick had been managing Ebay’s affiliate program since its inception and estimated revenue is 10 million per year. If they had a new 10 year contract, this represents 100 million in lost revenue (this is an educated guess only).

The latest press release from Commission Junction’s PR team remains upbeat after loosing their largest client:

ValueClick commemorates its tenth anniversary today, representing a decade of performance and leadership in online advertising. On behalf of ValueClick employees worldwide, I would like to take this opportunity to say a sincere “thank you” for the contribution you have made to our success.

From our humble beginning in 1998 as a cost-per-click ad network, to our position today as one of the world’s largest online marketing services companies, ValueClick has always focused on delivering cost-effective customer acquisition for advertisers and robust revenue streams for publishers. Along with our dedicated team, it has been a commitment to performance by you, our advertiser and publisher clients, that has driven the phenomenal growth and success of ValueClick.

Today ValueClick operates in all major online marketing channels and some traditional marketing channels, including affiliate and search marketing, display advertising, lead generation, ad serving and e-mail technology, agency management software and comparison shopping. ValueClick brands include Commission Junction, ValueClick Media, Mediaplex, PriceRunner, Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com.

Together we have built a strong and diverse organization designed to help propel you into the future. Thanks again for your business. We’re excited about the opportunity our relationship represents and look forward to growing with you in the years ahead.

This was sent to me by a colleague frustrated with writing for the search engines. He was trained in the style of Strunk & White and hates adding more keywords to prose when it is unnecessary. In practice, we must write to make sure keyword phrases are highlighted in the page content, and should not lazily stuff keywords in all corners of our copy.

Re: SEO writing: making things bigger for bigger’s sake.

It seems the SEO commandments are:

THY GOD SHALL NOT BE THE READER

THY GOD SHALL BE GOOGLE

THOU SHALT BE VERBOSE

THOU SHALT BE REPETITIVE

THOU SHALT BE REDUNDANT

THOU SHALT BE LOQUATIOUS

BLESSED BE THY NAME, OH GOOGLE.

AMEN

(and alas)

I find it difficult to give up concern for the reader. That is why I write paragraphs with a bold first line that holds the key information.

That way the reader can get more essential info and skip some of the palaver.

Here’s an idea– why not make a big, fat website that search engines will love— and on the first page a well-noted link to a Reader’s Digest version –lean & clean.

Interesting idea, as long as it is not duplicate content.

Yahoo is beginning to look a lot like Google, they are going for an ad free text only homepage. This is what I see on the Yahoo.com homepage today:

Actually Yahoo still has ads on their homepage, I just don’t see them as I use the adblock extension for firefox. Whoever redesigned this needs to seriously consider users who use ad blocking software. For those of you who miss the advertising heavy Yahoo homepage you can still see it here.

The questions all upcoming webmasters and SEO’s ask themselves: Should I ask for links or not? Can I get targeted paid ads/reviews? Are relevant reciprocal links worth the effort?

The short answer is: anything you do to your website that benefits your users will also help you in the search engines. If this means getting links to your electronics site from manufacturers, get these links. If it means getting reviews on blawgs for your law firm site do it. It may mean sending out articles and press releases for your fashion news site.

Different websites have different search engine optimization requirements and need to be promoted uniquely. It is probably not a good idea to try to get lots of .gov and .edu links for your home improvement website.

video http://www.youtube.com/v/B4aVSlnFITM

Matt Cutts acknowledged that Webmasters are free to do whatever they please with their Web sites and Google is free to do whatever it wishes with its index. Read more from Esoteric.

I just got back from the Tech Crunch 12 function at the Vanguard in Hollywood and boy are my ears tired. I feel sorry for all the presenting company employees who had to endure thundering music for almost 6 hours. Interestingly, the music I heard was all mainstream artists, mostly dance/hip hop/rap, not the myspace independent artists.

Web 2.0 companies i had a chance to visit

Artist Force is a web based management system that allows managers to book venues, musicians to get gigs, and record labels to screw over recognize new talent. Here is an example Jonathan Romley showed: a band can list their performance fee for $10000 and promoters can submit bids to this band auction style. A promoter can offer $5000 for a show and the band can accept or reject this offer, depending on how successful they are. I’m shocked this wasn’t created in 1995. If Artist Force had an affiliate program I would write more about them.
Doc Stoc is a document hosting company that could be compared to an article directory. They want your content, and love hosting your work. The benefit to you is a central location to share work & projects, but the real benefit is to DocStoc who has a super high search engine ranking with about 600,000 pages of indexed content. This gives them some nice traffic. Users can get their articles/documents to the homepage for more exposure. They have a proprietary ranking algorithm that handles this, but Kateriena said she may be able to hook you up with a page 1 listing, which would be worth signing up for to test. For some reason this guy has the most popular blog, which is his hosted blog displayed in an iframe.

This Next is a social shopping site where users sign up to write reviews about products. The site is well done and has excellent product photos. My favorite portion is the voyeuristic map that lets you see real time shopping by geographical location. I have no idea why people would spend time writing about products on this site for no reward, but to each their own. They make money by sending users to e-commerce stores to purchase reviewed items using shopping.com and other affiliate links. They claim to have 4 million users (I think thats what Tyson said, as I said it was extremely loud). Reviews are very popular, and I think it’s only a matter of time before retailers will start adding product reviews to their own sites a la Amazon.com. ThisNext should think of other ways to monetize their 4 mm users. How do they get all these free reviews again?

Rubicon Project is an ad optimization network. Previously I didn’t see a need to give a percentage of your precious ad budget away to yet another middle man, but I will be testing out this advertising network. Basically you replace adsense with these ads and since they have a larger inventory they can serve more targeted ads. I find adsense text ads perform worse than spot on targeted graphical ads. Ryan and Veronica patiently explained their system, and said they had a 14% acceptance rate – rejecting nearly 90% of all applicants! They plan on opening up the system to more website publishers in the near future, and if you contact them directly they may make a spot for you. Bonus points, it appears they use drupal.

Shop It To Me is less of a website and more an email service. You fill out your body size, clothing style and brand preference and they email you when these products go on sale. They claim 100,000 members and make money on affiliate sales. I do not know if they list clothing items that are not attached to an affiliate program. The main flaw seems to be a single point of monetization. Relying on email is dangerous, how do you keep out of the spam folder? I would add products and deals to the site and add lots of RSS feeds to get better search engine rankings. They could easily double their revenue with some hardcore search engine optimization hint hint.

MT is a hosting company that offers affordable clustering technology to keep maintain high traffic websites. They use grid technology to handle scalable traffic in a tier 4 datacenter. How do I know this? I read it from their website. No one was staffing their booth, but they did have nice t-shirts which I grabbed. Many companies to web hosting including yours truly, but if they had an affiliate program I would signup.

Pop Sugar is a social media network with 17 different sugar blog sites similar to Jason Calacanis weblogs inc. The difference is these cater to young hip women while Calacanis’s audience is internet addicted geeks/tech heads. I came to this table at the end of the evening and all the booth babes & dudes were having drinks so I didn’t disturb them.

I had a great time, talked with interesting people and was glad to see what other tech companies are inventing online. I recommend signing up for the next event from Techcrunch
you may even get to see a celebrity or 2.

Google has created a new set of rules for their adwords program, which bring them 98% of their revenue.

The rule is displayed in adwords help

When you create your ad, you’ll also specify a destination URL, which is the exact URL within your website you want to send users to from your ad.

This is translated below

If your adwords spend < $10000/mo the display URL must exactly match the destination URL.
If your adwords spend > $10000/mo you can use any URL you wish

So these rules indicate you cannot have a website www.my-site.com and a display URL www.mysite.com

Here is one example of the Google Adwords display policy in effect

Disney is using the display URL: www.DisneyVacationClub.com which redirects to www.dvc.disney.go.com

See the query here
http://www.google.com/search?q=disney+vacation+club

Collection of links and blog posts for April. This may seem like April fools, but unfortunately these are all legitimate stories.

New kids on the block reunion tour – this is just a bad idea. My generation’s favorite band to hate as a teenager is touring again, I cannot see how this will work for them. For any of you who have 80′s boy band nostalgia and hang tough with the near middle aged rockers, download some New Kids musak.

Americans prefer cheap gas to cancer cure – yes it appears our lovely citizens would rather pay less money to drive around than be free of a disease that kills a million people a year. A positive way to spin this is that people prefer cleaner energy and cleaner air to monolithic big oil, but in reality people would be just as happy using old school polluting oil technology if it was 1/2 price.
With high gas prices there are options such as taking the bus, biking or even walking (!) With Cancer there is the certainty that soon you will not have to worry about paying high gas prices (or taxes, or anything).

Apple #1 in Music – The music industry is officially transmorgrified, and the record labels are as relevant as typewriters. Downloaded music, specifically music from Apple iTunes is now tops in the United States. Apple beat out Wal Mart to become the top rated destination for music.

1. iTunes 19%
2. Wal Mart 15%
3. Best Buy 13%
4. Amazon 6%
5. Target 6%
6. FYE/Coconuts (what the heck is this) 3%
7. Borders 3%
8. Barnes & Noble 2%
9. Circuit City 2%
10. Rhapsody Real Audio 1%

Quote from the article

The NPD Group has been tracking a “sharp increase” in digital downloads over the past several months as physical sales dry up. According to NPD’s research, 48 percent of US teens didn’t buy a single CD in 2007

Wow, back when my peers were listening to the New Kids it seems like friends were buying music (cassette tapes) every week.