We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Straight from Google webmaster central, the search engineers claim that they correctly identify duplicate content and scraped text 99% of the time.

Sven of the Search Quality Team post about the underlying concerns detailing how Google handles scraped content.

1. Duplicate content within your domain can be controlled & recommends that you require a link back from the syndicated content site. To make sure your site is identified as the original source, ensure a backlink is present.
2. Cross Domain / Scraped duplicate content – Ensure your site is following all Google guidelines. If scraped content ranks higher than your site, the problem may be a technical issue on your end. check that the content is not blocked by robots.txt, examine your sitemap file & check if the site has any errors or warning flags in Google Webmaster Central.

They post this rather un-assuring paragraph:

When encountering such duplicate content on different sites, we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.

So Google will correctly identify cross domain content problems with a 99% success rate, but the real problem is when the Google algorithm fails.

Graywolf & GWC have more about the search engine’s continues battle with an overflowing array of content.

I create, design & implement websites, more importantly get good search engine placement and resuscitate dying websites. Lots of people can make a website, few can make a website pay dividends.

~10,000 new websites every day. How in the heck can you beat everyone.

A top 10 placement in google can turn a business around.

Google drives 61% of all website searches, but seems like more – more purchasers and serious searchers use google, so Google has a higher percentage of valuable purchase ready users compared to MSN, Yahoo & Ask.

Additional resources: social news sites. We are in web 2.0 which is full interaction. Internet users want to vote on news and have influence in articles others see.

Awesome Traffic Drivers

1. Digg.com – social news voting site, users vote on individual stories homepage placement can bring ~60k visitors in 12 hours, traffic quickly dies. Traffic is less sophisticated less affluent. Stories are generally technology related.
2. Reddit.com – similar to digg, more politically active and socially aware. More educated user, homepage placement brings ~10k visitors
3. buzz.yahoo.com – same as above focus is pop culture, sports, general news
4. Stumbleupon.com – toolbar install provides custom browsing and voting on websites. Wisdom of the crowd filters out bad sites. Remarkably effective. popular bookmarked sites can bring 400 visitors/day sustained
5. Delicious.com – social bookmarking, public favorites. Brings increased search engine placement and dozens of direct daily visits

How to get your site on a social media property

Create unique, interesting, valuable content. Anything can be interesting.

Example – dog washing business. Write an article describing the 10 favorite hunting dogs of the kings of france. Show the top 10 breeds favored by royalty for stately leisure.

If someone sees the title of this article, they will be enticed to click through to your site. You created a need they didn’t realize they had. Once on your site it is an easy sell.

JCP has a huge amount of money (1.4 billion specifically) to throw at their website. This spells bad news for smaller e-commerce store owners. Not even a webstore optimized for the top of Google can battle 1.4 billion of viral marketing and high tech distribution.

Their main site, jcp.com, did $1.5 billion in sales last year, making it the 15th largest online retailer.

Thats a lot of clothes from a 1970′s style department store. Remember when people laughed at Pennys for being an outdated retailer? Now Penny’s is laughing all the way to their online bank account.

jcp.com is the top priority of J. C. Penney. A huge percentage of their sales online come from obscure SKUs that they would not sell in their stores—extended sizes, outdated fashions etc.

The J.C. Penny product selection is far greater online than offline, and they can make tons of money selling items that are to difficult to ship to individual stores. Amazon.com claims 50% of their book revenue comes from obscure titles that no one else stocks.

A search engine optimization report for jcp.com shows huge room for improvement. Yahoo site explorer reports only 3620 links and the site has no unique title tags. The site is image heavy with little indexable text. JCP would make some SEO a ton of money for a relatively easy job – it would not be hard to double their search engine traffic.

Read more from Andy about big box retailers taking it to the web.

If you were wondering what web 2.0 means to the future of the internet, it is all celebrity sex stories all the time. The Wall Street Journal traditionally has reported on things that happen in Wall Street, but now they are trying to broaden their focus to the Red Light District.
Thanks WSJ, we don’t have enough celebrity gossip sites and style blogs online. See the new BFF Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones at www.genniferandpaula.com.*

Read below as the Wall Street Journal editor tries to justify this gossip on an industry leading business magazine:

But despite the publicity, it appears that Ms. Flowers (pictured above at right) and Ms. Jones (at left) aren’t positioned to capitalize on all the attention. The e-commerce experience at the site is lacking, as Buzzwatch found when we made a test purchase. For starters, some work in search-engine optimization is called for. Some would-be shoppers–presumably having learned about the site in media coverage–may attempt to find it via a Web search. But all those Googlers typing in “gennifer flowers,” as mentioned above, will have a difficult time finding the right site. Ms. Flowers’ personal site, www.genniferflowers.com, appears within the first few results, but the new site created for the videos, www.genniferandpaula.com, does not.

See the WSJ blogger try to mask a sex story by using a site review and useless search engine optimization tip as bait an switch.

For the record, genniferandpaula.com could likely rank in the top 10 for their names by including important keywords in the title tags of their site.

Here is a free page title for gennifer and paula that won’t even cost them $1.99: “Women from President Clinton’s Former Affairs Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones”

Linkbait was born with Made-For-Adsense sites, but has now grown into the mainstream.

I would consider linking to this site if it had an affiliate program. The WSJ is right that this primitive e-commerce system is not optimized to take advantage of the temporary surge in traffic.

I got a pleasant visit from the past in my inbox this morning and a reminder that the web changes, but cannot get rid of its past. Failed business and empty handed CEO’s may hibernate, but they will always try to reinvent themselves with each technology paradigm shift. This morning I saw the attempted rebirth of searchking.com

I remember the searchking controversy well, and followed the birth of brokering pagerank first hand. in 2002 Bob Massa, searchking.com CEO was the first person to publiclly sell links. The result – total annhilation. His site, including thousands of users, forum members, and commenters were dropped from the Google index.

Mr. Massa then sued to get back into Google’s index and was rejected.

Read a post about Bob Massa’s brilliant idea to harness the power of pagerank

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165111

This case is notable for 2 reasons. It was the first public acknowledgement that link manipulation can greatly influence search engine results pages.

The second result is that the courts threw out Searchking’s case, effectively saying Google has the right to include or reject any website it wants. http://www.pandia.com/sw-2003/21-searchking.html

Google holds a grudge, the website name is not in their search results: http://www.google.com/search?q=searchking

Now the original pagerank broker is back in business, outsourcing social media to India. Same dish, different sauce.

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/344

Below is an email I received from Mr. Massa’s website scrapers and email harvesters:

Hi Cvos,

My name is Shrenik Vora with Techndu and I just wanted to tell you that I have been a recent reader of www.seomoz.org and I have got your contact details from http://www.seomoz.org/users . I’ve have also gone through your company website www.netpaths.net . I think you show real insight into the issue of social media marketing.

Cvos, Techndu is a division of SearchKing Techno Labs and is owned by Bob Massa. You may be familiar with Bob as he has been a leader in the SEO community for well over a decade. Bob has put together a team in India that specializes in doing the tasks that are so important to any SEO campaign yet are the most labor intensive parts. We specialize in ultra white hat, strictly manual link building and high quality, original content creation for wholesale SEO clients.

The two parts of SEO that everyone needs and very few enjoy doing. We do the hard work you don’t like doing and that frees up your time to do the things you are best at and do enjoy doing! I would love the opportunity to prove how I could be a help to you and show you how we could make more profits by working together. If you have any interest in top quality link building that is guaranteed to move even your most challenging clients, or if you have a need for excellent quality, original content at a price that just can not be beaten by anyone, then I would love the chance to gain your business.

We are working with some of the best known SEO firms in the world now and are providing links and content to some 200 domains a month. With a staff of 18, we are generating over 4,000 ON THEME links each week. We are growing so fast because we treat our clients business like it was ours, because in a way, it is. We need you more than you need us and that is why our commitment to excellence is second to none and if you give me the chance, I’ll prove it to you! If nothing else, at least let me show you the reports we generate each week on your behalf.

Communication is the key to success with any client and our comprehensive reports make that task easier, faster and more clear. Just looking at the reports may give you some ideas of how you could better serve your clients even if you never do business with Techndu. it doesn’t cost anything to just look and there is no obligation whatsoever. While Bob has been in this business for a long time, Techndu is new, we are hungry and we WANT your business. We will work very hard to get it but even harder to keep it. But I can’t prove that to you until you give me the chance. Just reply, ask me, (or Bob), ANYTHING and we’ll respond within 24 hours!

Shrenik, Vora
Business Development Specialist Techndu
Shrenik@techndu.com

Skype: ShrenikVora

Many professional search engine optimization consultants choose to have a solo practice. Noteworty solo SEO’s are Graywolf, Stuntdbl, & SEObook. There are also a lot of excellent firms who provide search engine optimization services including SEOmoz, Acsseo, and Rustybrick.

The benefits of being a solo consultant are freedom to set your own rates, schedule and choose clients. Decisions are lightning fast with no meetings required. There is no one to get in the way of implementing an SEO strategy on a website, and no one to blame if things don’t work properly.

Disadvantages to being an individual SEO consultant include a lack of new information and difficulty working on multiple projects. One person can only multitask so much, and if you aren’t working there are no billable hours so revenue is at a standstill.
Working as a group also produces synergy, an intangible factor that can often drastically influence the end result. Cooperation of 3 great minds should produce better results than 1 excellent mind.

Sting is an great musician, but the Police is an amazing and irreplaceable band.

Fox news does a short story on the domain name aftermarket, and as usual offers marginal entertainment and little information. Not surprisingly this media company tells us that sex sells, specifically sex.com sold for 12 million dollars.

See the video clip of 2 women talking about purchasing valuable domain names, wishing they got into this market 10 years ago. Don’t we all?

My tips on buying domain names:

* Get a .com – these are like real estate, are scarce and will only increase in value long term
* Be prepared to spend money for good names. If your business is named Mega Yachts then be prepared to spend several thousand dollars to get MegaYachts.com
* Do not buy domains for Page Rank. PR is virtually useless on transferred domain names if they are setup on a website with a different theme.

Kontera is a contextual advertising product that transforms text into ad links. Using the Kontera javascript will produce relevant text links that generate pay per click revenue. Sometimes the ads are well targeted, and sometimes they aren’t.

Below is a screenshot of a Kontera ContentLink ad gone wild

Sweet, Kontera tells us how we can get coupons for our heroin addiction at CouponMountain.com. I don’t this would qualify under Google’s terms of service, as they disallow advertising for all illegal substances.

The Click Through Rate for this ad may be high so CouponMountain.com could be experiencing increased clicks on their ads. The traffic quality is most likely very low and probably results in a high bounce rate.

I love this image of Cookie Monster sitting in front of a computer. Cookie Monster is a loveable, innocent figure that can do no wrong. Everyone has a vice and his is a weakness for cookies.

Cookie Monster as a figure in the popular Sesame Street children’s show is a complete success and demonstrates a generally harmless OCD disorder by gorging on sugary sweets.

This shows how you can use a simple children’s character and a funny caption to get your message across. Most web users only have a vague idea that cookies enable online tracking, but no one will forget the message to delete cookies once Cookie Monster has provided instructions.

The marketing message here is to use humor and simple concepts to present ideas, and you will always be remembered.

I love Cookie Monster.

Cookie monster drawing by Fernander

Feature article in Hot Boat Magazine by Publisher/Editor in Chief Darrin Davidson

We have lowered the amount of communication in our website and are not a social networking website (emphasis his)
we want to create a site that has a positive environment for boat manufacturers, dealers, owners and enthusiasts.

I paraphrased the above quote, but the idea of trying to stifle your online community is the antithesis of the internet. Businesses that try to exert full control over their users and discourage online collaboration are doomed.

HotBoat has a very active forum, with over 1.5 million posts in over 100,000 threads. This is an online social network that should be nurtured at all costs. You have the full attention of boat enthusiasts ready to purchase your recommended products – this is a gold mine sitting dormant.

Interesting, they said the HotBoat.com site was just redesigned. It opens with cheesy audio, overpowering colors, incessant animation and a screensaver like background. I hope their users like to be heavily sold, and prefer to purchase a hard copy of the magazine instead of reading and engaging on the HotBoat.com boating website.