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May 30th, 2008
Another guest post on the trail - from my brother from down under and fellow Sphinn-a-holic James Duthie
If you became ill would your blog go into suspended animation? Or are you future proofed?
27 Vote(s)
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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May 30th, 2008
Google Webmaster Tools seems to have a new bug which does not allow you to delete or remove your sitemaps file from your profile.
Several reports came from Google Groups starting on May 27th. All have reported that no matter what they do, the delete function does not actually remove the sitemap from the associate site.
The first report said:
I’ve tried to delete the RSS feed “sitemap” from webmaster tools, but it doesn’t seem to go - te page reloads - but both sitemaps are still showing?
Googler, Susan Moskwa, replied saying they are looking into the issue:
Thanks for reporting this issue. Our team is looking into it.
FYI no need to worry, since those extra Sitemaps shouldn’t cause you any problems.
On a similar note, a WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google seemed to have merged two of his sitemaps files into the same domain. I.e. He set up profiles for subfolders, so he can manage each subfolder, which Google recommends. Google seemed to have automatically merged those two sitemaps under a single site. Which begs the question, how do you delete part of your site using Webmaster Tools?
Finally, a DigitalPoint Forums thread is reporting a backlink update in the link tool within Google Webmaster Tools. As an FYI, that tool does update every few weeks.
Forum discussion at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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May 12th, 2008
Posted by rebecca
I’ve been shout-neutered, folks, and it ain’t cool.
Let me explain. Yesterday I submitted a story to Digg. I didn’t expect it to get on the home page, but I had an "Oh well, what the hell" mentality about it. My plan was to do the usual–shout it once and call it a day. After I submit a link to Digg, I typically shout the story to my friends in about three waves. You can only send a shout to about 100 friends at a time, so if you have 300 friends, you have to break the list up into thirds and shout the story 3 separate times. Also, Digg prevents you from sending the shouts immediately back to back–you have to send a shout, wait a while, then send it again. This is to prevent spamming and abuse.
Anyway, back to my story. Continue to gather around as if I’m telling you the tale of how John Henry was a steel drivin’ man. I submitted my story and hit the "Share" button. When you click on "Share," it typically pulls up your list of friends who are able to receive shouts, and you can click on whoever you want to send your story to.
This time, however, instead of pulling up my friends list, I saw this message:
What? "Crikey"? What the hell is this? The box never loaded my friends list–the circle just perpetually turned. I tried typing in some friends’ names to filter the list down, but nothing happened. I was effectively shout-blocked.
I pinged some colleagues on IM and asked them if they’ve ever had this happen to them before. One of my friends said, "How many friends do you have on Digg?" I looked:
I was a bit surprised to see that I had racked up over 550 friends, but still, not a huge deal, right? My friend responded with, "I don’t have nearly that many friends." I asked around. Sure enough, I have a ton of friends on Digg. Most of the folks I talked to have less than 200.
Okay, so I have a lot of friends on Digg. That’s not so bad, right? I mean, all I do is befriend people who become fans of me. The whole point on having friends on Digg is so that you can share stories with each other, and the Shout feature allows you to share stories with a large number of friends vs. having to contact them all one-by-one. Why then would Digg penalize me for having too many friends? Did I hit some mysterious "max number," like once you get to 500, it’s too many? If that’s the case, why don’t they make it clear that you can only have a certain number of friends?
I don’t see how they could think I’m a spammer. Here are my stats:
I’ve averaged less than one submit a month since I’ve joined (March 28, 2006), and none have made it to the home page. Of those submits, I’ve shouted probably about 5 of them. When I do shout, I send my shouts out exactly once. None of my friends receives the same shout from me more than one time. So, what the hell is going on here?
I filled out a bug report and emailed feedback@digg.com with the subject "You guys shout-blocked me! I thought we were bros…" I haven’t received a response from Digg yet save for a stupid automatic response regarding my bug report:
Hi -
Sorry for the inconvenience. Try clearing your cache/cookies and restart your browser. If you’re still having problems, please email us back and we’ll do our best to help you.
Thanks.
- Digg Support Team
Yeah, of course, clearing my cookies will magically fix the ridiculous "Crikey!" message and let me send shouts again. (FYI, I humored them and tried it to no avail.) I currently still can’t send shouts to people via the "Share" feature. Someone suggested that I start deleting friends because I look like a spammer with so many, but I really think that’s unfair. If Digg wants you to have only a certain number of friends, they should put a cap on the number of friends you can have. Plus, as I said earlier, the whole frickin’ point of befriending people on Digg is so you can check out stuff that they like, have dugg or commented on, and so you can send and receive stories. It’s like the cable company turning off your cable access once you’ve bought HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. That’s one channel too many, so you can’t see any of them now. Harumph.
So, there you have it. I can’t send shouts to people because I happen to have a large number of friends. Even though my stats prove that I’m not a spammer, Digg seems content to penalize me, anyway. I’ll let you know if I ever receive an actual useful response from anyone at Digg (though one of my friends online pinged some of his buddies who work at Digg about the issue, and their response was a "We’ll look into it" in an eye-rolling, whatever tone). Until then, however, I’ll be surfing Digg with a cone around my neck like a neutered dog:
Bastards.
Postscript: Thanks a bunch to Lorna (check out the comments below) for helping me figure out how to pull up my buddies list letter by letter (it’s a bit tedious, but it works). Looks like I’m not quite shout-blocked, I’m just slowed down a bit, but for crying out loud, you’d think that Digg could, you know, explain how to pull up lists of friends once you hit a certain number and need to start filtering the list in order to have it displayed at all. Instead of "Start typing to filter your friends list," the message could say "Type a letter to pull up the appropriate friends," or something to that effect. Digg, you suck. Lorna, you rock.
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May 12th, 2008
Recently I wrote about my new iPhone and how that Yelp was well positioned to take advantage of the mobile component of social networks. eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.
Some of the early mobile social numbers are pretty impressive. MySpace […]
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
May 12th, 2008
Ever get tired of people stealing your bandwidth because they hotlink your images? I used to have Myspacer’s sucking my bandwidth dry because their pages got so much traffic, and they were using my images for their backgrounds, etc. There are several ways of dealing with this issue, one of which is showing a different image to them than they bargained for, but there’s a new widget script available now that is even better - it gets the thieving hotlinkers to give you a backlink! Woot!
LinkMyPics is subtitled The Hotlink Advantage Maximizer. By using this script on the images you want…
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Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
May 5th, 2008
ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.
“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales. Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent.
The two logical options from there are
- set a floor price on house content and show fewer ads to offer a better user experience
- look at currently hot stories, key markets in the weeks and months ahead, and market positions where you are close to leading but do not yet dominate and advertise your own products and services
- Advertise branded widgets that go on third party networks which help get your brand exposure on those as well. ESPN should have made an official NCAA bracket gadget rather than letting that traffic and branding and traffic go to Google
- add interactive features to your own site which increase brand loyalty and reduce content creation costs…which end up making the ad networks a more viable offering for back-fill content
- If the ad networks are too cheap buy out inventory on competing sites to further distance yourself from them as the market leader.
All of those strategies allow you to buy market-share in your vertical on the cheap. The more of your market you own the better you will be able to sell ads for. If ESPN was 60% of the sports market Nike would be required to buy ads with them, largely based on ESPN’s terms. Part of being remarkable is about creating featured content, but an equally important piece is making sure you are branded as the leading source. There is no better place to market your content and ideas than your own site.
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
Please visit one of our great sponsors:
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May 5th, 2008
Search Engine Journal - The tale uses metaphors and comparisons, but else completely fictitious. It is in part meant to entertain and in part to provide a different perspective on old and known issues. Who knows, it might triggers new ideas and a ch
28 Vote(s)
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
Please visit one of our great sponsors:
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Rosetta Stone Lanuage Software
May 5th, 2008
With the SearchMe beta announced last week, and my invitation to participate arriving today, SearchMe.com has arrived to change up the playing field of Search Engines. Will it be successful? I think its new and fresh search engine interface will make a lot of heads turn. Here are 3 areas where SearchMe has broken the traditional mold of a search engine, and may add some new areas of emphasis in the SEO industry.
1) Site design, not page title
For most users, the page title that Google et al. display in the search engine results page (SERPs) is the first “eye-catcher” to draw in a reader and attract attention. Second comes the “description” which is pulled either from the meta tag or content on the page around the search term.
SearchMe.com makes your site the number one focus. Emphasis in terms of search engine optimization now has a design element.
Pages that are spammy (lots of ads), have little content, or an overwhelming menu structure will most likely be skipped. Optimizing your page for SearchMe might include making important text (like a heading) readable at that size to garner attention.
I found myself considering the following: (1) my first impression (good or bad), (2) is the content type what I expected based on my search (lots of product images, lots of content, a video, etc.), and (3) from what I can read does it address what I am looking for (including the page title when that pops open at the bottom of the screenshot).
2) No more Page 1
Instead of having a next page button, you can keep on scrolling for forever (I didn’t get to any end of results after 2 minutes of scrolling, so that’s assumed). This seems inconsequential, but it no longer gives us a “top 10″ results. Obviously the first listings will be seen more, but there is no more defined line.
3) Assumed verticals
Google et al. have different verticals like web search, images, blogs, maps, shopping, books, finance, etc. SearchMe also has verticals, but automatically generate what verticals they assume you are searching for if you would like to narrow your search. When I type in “pizza, st george ut” (a local search type of query), for example, I get “Lodging & Hotels”, then “Restaurants”, “Sales & Bargains”, “Skiing”, and “Dentistry”. Of course they have more verticals than this, and each set is based on what you are typing. Very slick. The other thing I might mention too is that the verticals are actually centered on what I am actively seeking, rather than just having a defined set of verticals that you have to make a decision of relevance on.
I think SearchMe has a great product, and I’m looking forward to the refining of the algorithm, speed, and total index.
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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May 5th, 2008
Forums have been buzzing and buzzing about the possibility of a competitor being able to hurt your Google ranking for the past few years now. We have covered this topic time and time again, just see here for some of the many times we covered it. In fact, we even covered a thread that listed how to penalize your competitors in Google.
I thought it would be fun to see if you guys believe it. Do you think it is possible for someone to hurt a competitors by using links as ammunition. I am not talking about hacking into someone’s site. I am talking about just using external links, that a webmaster cannot control, as a method of hurting one’s Google rankings. Here is the poll:
There is discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld now. Most feel that, yes, you can hurt someone’s ranking in Google with external links.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Tags: blogs blogger wordpress seo sem social media delishio
Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
Please visit one of our great sponsors:
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Rosetta Stone Lanuage Software
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