It is my pleasure to introduce to you Scott Smith, partner at CopyWriting.Net and copy writing guru. Before you read any further, however, I want to give you a heads up that this is not a normal article from StepForth. This is an unedited interview written in a very personal style. In other words, this is not the normal condensed knowledge that my staff and I try to put out every week. That said, I really wanted to introduce you to Scott because I feel his copywriting skills are top of the line and either his services or his tips may help you shore up your bottom line. If you want to get in touch with Scott Smith he is best contacted by email. Read more…
An interesting, albeit controversial, set of statistics was provided by Compete.com last week outlining the top 20 online properties that a pool of 2,000,000 people spent the most time on in December 2006.
Hello all, I wanted to clear up a significant issue with my recent article “The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication“. It was edited closely but apparently not quite close enough. Please note the following change in a question within the article: Read more…
Yesterday Google’s official webmaster blog announced that Googlebombing will be soon a way of the past thanks to some targeted attention from the search results team. Here is the gist of the posting:
We wanted to give a quick update about “Googlebombs.” By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs), but if you’d like to get more details about this topic, read on.
Ultimately they admit these algorithm changes will not catch every Googlebomb but they expect the changes will clear out the majority.
Repeatedly my sales and consulting staff find themselves explaining that using duplicate content can and will negatively affect search engine rankings and it is heartbreaking to see clients having to rebuild rankings due to such a simple mistake. As a result, I felt it was time to write this article and hopefully dispel many misled website owners.
Why write an entire article on something as simple as duplicate content? Well probably because it is not as simple as it sounds and many website owners find themselves in the grey area of duplication; where they don’t know for sure whether they are risking rankings or not. Read more…
As reported in Search Engine Journal, in an attempt to eliminate spamming to Wikipedia, effective immediately all outbound links from the internet giant will have the “nofollow” tag appended. The “nofollow” tag was introduced a while back for webmasters to tell the major search engines to ignore the specific link. When Google sees this tag, the outbound link is passed by as if it were regular text.
What does this mean for site owners? If you have links pointing in from Wikipedia they will be lost, at least in terms of helping with your SEO campaigns. Links come and go all the time, but to lose a Wikipedia link is a big deal as it is a highly regarded site in the eyes of the search engines and its credibility with Google would mean the link would have a significant ranking value. For small sites with few links and good rankings, a loss of a Wikipedia link could have significant impact on rankings.
Internet marketing consultant and blogger Andy Beal is not going to take this sitting down and has launched a campaign in an attempt to reduce Wikipedia’s Page Rank down to zero. He suggests that to dispute the decision that all webmasters who have links directed at Wikipedia append the “nofollow” tag themselves to give Wikipedia a taste of their own medicine. Beal does go on to mention that his site does not have any incoming links from Wikipedia and that this campaign is based entirely on principle.
Wikipedia was made popular due to the vast numbers of incoming links it has gained over the years and if enough linking webmasters adding the “nofollow” tag it would certainly cause it to ultimately drop. Currently Wikipedia’s English home page has more than 1.5 million incoming links noted by Google. It would take an incredible feat to have their popularity decline as a result of “nofollow” tags, but it is still within the realm of possibility.
We’ve known it was coming as Yahoo has been talking about it for a while now, but the new ranking model will be officially unleashed on February 5, 2007, according to Yahoo’s mass mail out news letter.
In the good old days things were very simple. If you wanted your ad to rank well, you simply bid more money than the next guy. That was it. This did cause the occasional bidding war for advertisers resulting in a skyrocketing per click price, but the concept was simple.
Following in Google’s footsteps, as of early next month, rankings will be determined by more than just your bid. Rankings will continue to be reflective of your bid amount, but only to a degree. Now they will also incorporate the ad quality which is determined by the historical click through rate (CTR) combined with a number of other algorithmic factors which examine items such as your actual ad copy and competitor’s ad copy. This combination of items will result in the “quality index” which will be used to help sort out the ads.
Of importance to note is how this will affect your cost per click charges. Historically you only paid one cent more than your next closest competitor. Under the new system you will pay one cent more than the amount required to hold your current position in the search results. (This is based on a combination of your bid amount and your quality index score). Ultimately increasing your quality index score can result in a lower cost per click while maintaining the same ranking position. There is now a greater chance that you could end up paying closer to your maximum bid, so be sure you are comfortable with whatever figures you enter. For more information on the effects of your maximum bid, visit Yahoo Search Marketing Help.
According to IBN live, German online news service, Heise, reported an unfinished website belonging to a client of a small hosting company, Goneo, in Western Germany “crashed quickly after an avalanche of Web surfers”.
It seems another Goneo client had used an automated ordering process to gain control of the Google.de domain Monday evening resulting in the redirect of searchers. Google.de was redirected for around 12 hours before the issue was resolved.
Goneo’s chief executive, Marc Keilwerth, apologized and said all applications in the future would be checked.
On the 16th of January Wired Magazine published an article called “How Yahoo Blew It” which was a scathing review of the company’s drop in popularity and profitability. The article makes a strong case that “Yahoo fumbled, bungled, and mishandled its execution at every step” while trying to compete with Google.
The Wired article is an excellent essay on the trials and tribulations of Yahoo!’s growth and the potential reasons for its fall from grace; essentially concluding that there was not enough technological leadership. I highly recommend the 5 page read but do not forget Yahoo!’s rebuttal which tends to look positively on its situation: Read more…
“If at first you do not succeed, try and buy your market share.” Okay, admittedly this is a bad example of the mantra I am trying to get across but it does fairly represent the enticements a couple of search engines are using to attract users; Blingo and AGLOCO. Read more…
