SEOPittfall

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

The DMOZ Blog Opens
2007-09-26 00:00:00
Can the Open Directory be back? Just yesterday I posted on the fact that the index page of the open directory, also known as DMOZ, had fallen from Google search results and I mused about the idea that the directory may have died or at least in the eyes of Google. No dice! It reminds me of the baseball season that is coming to a close this week and as it comes down to the wire, my beloved Chicago Cubs have an opportunity to keep playing into October. The Cubs have been fighting under new management this season and have been on the move against what seemed like an insurmountable lead by the Brewers, but they have their post season hopes in their hands. Similarly, the Open Directory that has appeared by many as being past it’s prime has it’s own future in the palm of the editor’s hands. Well, if there haven’t been many indications (which there really hasn’t been any in a long, long time), there may be a glimmer of hope on the horizon as DMOZ opens a blog t...
More About: Blog , Dmoz , The D

Did Google Drop the Open Directory
2007-09-26 00:00:00
Just about four weeks ago I posted about the plight of a fellow blogger named Shoemoney and an alleged extortion attempt by a proclaimed editor of the directory. Now, I have not been exactly defending the open directory in its value with the major search engines like Ask, Googl e , MSN and Yahoo (in alphabetical order as not to offend anyone who prefers one over another). Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land noted that DMOZ.com was not listed in Google for the query “DMOZ” The Open Directory ’s home page appears to have gone missing from Google’s search results. For example, a search on dmoz (the Open Directory’s nickname) does not return the home page in the search results. This fact was also covered by David Naylor and Marketing Pilgrim. I too have verified that the index page is not listed in Google for any query. Can this remain? I have been very vocal about my disappointment in the Open Directory Project, however, I still do admire the intention and s...
More About: Tory

Google Wants You to Be Social and Share Your Stuff
2007-09-22 00:00:00
Google has launched a social bookmarking service aptly named Share d Stuff quietly. But the news is out: Google Shared Stuff - Google Blogscoped Google Launches Google Shared Stuff - Search Engine Land Google Shared Stuff is Delicious - Marketing Pilgrim Google Wants You To Share Stuff - TechCrunch Google and Being Social - John Battelle’s Searchblog Here is the best description of the new product (from TechCrunch): Shared Stuff is simple enough; users drag a ?email/ share? button into their browser, and click it when they want to add pages to their Shared Stuff profile. Links can include an image, text extract, and/ or a user comment. The results can then be viewed directly, via iGoogle or RSS. An interesting addition is the option to use Shared Stuff to post links to other social booking sites as well, including Facebook Furl, Delicious, Reddit and Digg. Friend can be invited by email, and bookmarks made by Gmail contacts using the service can be viewed as well. Other aspect...
More About: Google , Googl

BlogRush - MLM for Traffic
2007-09-18 00:00:00
BlogRush is a new portal with a widget to drive traffic from to your blog from other blogs that are in the same vertical as yours. BlogRush (still in beta) is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their #1 need: More Readers For Their Blog. By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs. here is a look at the widget Basically, for every impression you provide the widget, your posts will be added to other blogs within the same related subject. Get a referral (someone signs up from your prompting) then you get a “credit” for all of their impressions and yours too. You will get referral points for up to 10 referrals that you bring to the service. Just a viral, or multi-level, marketing technique to draw more and more to their database service. There are many who are commenting about the new service: ShoeMoney - Great New System to Get Free Traffic Build ...

Can a Marketing Message be Social?
2007-09-17 00:00:00
I got into a very engaging conversation yesterday with a web developer at work on the topic of social aspects of the web. So, what does social really mean? According to Answers.com it is defined as: Living together in organized groups or similar close aggregates. So what does social mean on the Internet (also known as a social network)? According to Wikipedia it is defined as: A map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. The discussion started with an assumption that blogs are social entities on the Internet, whereas other (traditional) websites are not. So, this led to a very specific question, are blogs inherently social? I think not. A blog is actually short for web log as know as an online journal. This is not anything that implies social. in fact a journal is not a conversation, rather a form of communication that has a single path....
More About: Marketing , Social , Message , Mess

Mash - Yahoo!?s Answer to MySpace and Facebook
2007-09-17 00:00:00
Yahoo has released an online social portal into beta, Yahoo! Mash. As you can see from the photo of my profile (above), it has some of the same look and feel of MySpace, without all of the advertisements (for now at least). Here are the basic components of a Yahoo Mash profile page: Basic info - Photo - Name - Quote - Profile Revision History About Me - simple standardized questions My Stuff - area to add links (opportunity) Blurt - area to add a “blurt” (removable) Guestbook - Sorry, I’m not available, leave a message in the box for everyone to see. (removable) Style this Profile - adjust the look of your profile - five easy adjustments - advanced css available Customize by adding modules - this includes widgets like flickr, rss feeds and more Friends Tags Can this give Yahoo an edge in the social market that many consider they have owned since taking it from AOL until MySpace and Facebook came showed on the scene a few years back? If you would like to experien...
More About: Yahoo , Myspace , Answer

Funding Interests in Cuill
2007-09-13 00:00:00
From TechCrunch: We got (at least) one thing wrong when we wrote about super-stealth search startup Cuill last week. We said we believed the company self funded after searching for venture capital. But we now have it from two solid sources that they actually raised a $4 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, with partner David Strohm taking a board seat. Greylock is behind some of the biggest success stories of the new Internet, including Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and others. Most of those investments are led by David Sze, however. Strohm only rarely seems to invest in the consumer sector. This is very interesting since most of the research that I have found have stated that this is a “stealth” project. While much of the information being written around the company being relatively the same, it will be interesting to see what will come of this. Is this another piece of monetary fodder for Google to gobble up from ex-Googlers like a prodigal son? If you missed the...
More About: Funding , Interests , Eres

Cuill - Have We Found a Google Killer?
2007-09-13 00:00:00
Cuill Inc. (pronounced [kool]) is a startup company that is pioneering a new approach to Search. What’s so special? Cuill, the secretive search start-up ? This is the latest start-up, started by two Googl e folks and two Stanford folks. Co-founders include Tom Costello, of Stanford, and Anna Patterson, formerly at Stanford and now at Google (described as a search wizard). They?re raising a VC round for the company. We?re told they claim they can crawl the Web at a tenth of the cost Google can. We?ve contacted Costello to find out more. We?re open to tips if you hear of anything. from Venture Beat, Feb 12, 2007 The company?s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can - Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google?s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual an...
More About: Killer

Google Searches Your Subscriptions - Finally!
2007-09-08 00:00:00
Today, Googl e announced a new feature for their reader service: That’s right, search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you’d like to search for “ipod” so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today’s announcements. More information from the Official Google Blog: The fundamental problem with information is that there’s too much of it, and this is probably why we all go to our trusted sources to learn what we really need to know. Your sources filter out the noise and present the most interesting bits to you in a useful way. For many of us, these sources include newspapers, magazines, and of course blogs. We built Google Reader as a way for you to see all of your online sources in one place. They have also done some minor tweaks to other aspects of Reader: Along for the ride in the search release are a few ...
More About: Finally , Fina , Ally

Labor Day 2007
2007-09-06 00:00:00
Happy Labor Day Everyone! Wow, what a wild weekend this has been! I got a chance to catch up with some reading over the past few days, visited with my wife’s parents, my blog went down (the first time I didn’t have my laptop to get everything rolling)… OK, I am ready for the weekend to end (not really). If you are like me, in-house marketing director, including online (SEO, SEM, SMO, mobile and others) and offline (print and others) to drive conversions across the Internet and over the phone, then you probably have some of the same aggravation of tracking metrics in these very different medias. I would like to encourage you to read “Offline Maneuvers: Improving ROI by Tracking Offline Conversions” by Natalia Vinokhodova in the Fall issue of Search Marketing Standard. If you don’t currently have a subscription to this publication, I highly recommend it! I am not going to say that I subscribe to all that has been covered in the magazine, but the app...

Insight into MSN Webmaster Portal
2007-09-06 00:00:00
Last week MSN announced Webmaster Portal should be available in late fall and offered a chance to apply to test out the beta and provide feedback. I am not aware that the beta has actually started, however, I was sent an email to register for the beta. It was a simple form requesting information about me, the websites that I would include in the beta and some interesting questions about the tools and information that I would like to see. This included some insight into what they are planning to offer (they even categorized them): Troubleshooting - Site crawling Sitemaps - Ping Stats - Inbound links to other sites Troubleshooting - Site Indexing Stats - Top search terms for your domain Stats - Outbound links from your site Troubleshooting - Robots.txt Stats - Top search terms for other domains Stats - Outbound links from other sites Troubleshooting - Sitemaps Stats - Top keywords on your site Stats - Perceived site quality score Sitemaps - Creation Stats - Inbound links to your site...
More About: Insight , Mast , Aster

SquidWhat? - Squidoo Builds People Search SquidWho
2007-09-06 00:00:00
Squidoo has launched a new portal called SquidWho “A people-powered Who’s Who on the Web.” Here is the basic info: SquidWho is the first people-built who’s who. It’s an easy way to find out what’s what (and where) about famous (and not so famous) people around the world. If you’re a fan of someone, build a page about them. Point to their books, their blog, their wikipedia entry and their videos. Share your opinions but most of all, make it easy for people to discover the really good stuff. Unlike traditional Who’s Who directories, SquidWho is open. Everyone gets a chance to share her opinion without worrying about what some committee of anonymous people have to say. So, if you like Norah Jones, built a page about her. Hate Mick Jagger? Go for it. It’s up to you. So, what is it really? Just another way to repackage content already online including: online poll at a glance (aka Wikipedia article) flickr photos Amazon products You...
More About: People , Search , Squidoo , Builds

MSN is ?STICKIN? IT TO THE MAN!? little guy
2007-08-31 00:00:00
Microsoft AdCenter has updated it’s trademark policy, wait… in an email sent out today they state that their trademark policy remains the same, however, how they enforce the policy will change dramatically: Microsoft adCenter is changing the way we manage our trademark policy starting September 10, 2007. While no change will be made to the trademark policy itself, this update aligns better with marketplace practices, speeds up editorial review to get your ads live faster, and ensures consumers see relevant ads. Microsoft adCenter’s Trademark Policy As stated above, we are not changing the trademark policy itself. You may still use trademarked terms in your ads when you, as the advertiser, are the owner of the trademark, an affiliate or reseller of trademarked products or services, or a site that uses the trademarked term in an informational, descriptive, or non-competitive manner. Infringing use of trademark terms by direct competitors remains a violation of Micro...
More About: Litt , The Man , Tick

GWC - Revival of the Penalty Notifications
2007-08-30 00:00:00
Google Webmaster Central is a very valuable resource and looks to continue to give us important information regarding our websites in the Google index and actually gives us insight into how the Googlebot interacts with our websites and their contents. In 2005 Google began sending notifications to webmasters to notify them that their websites were outside the published webmaster guidelines and because of this, some/all of their pages were removed from the index. Of course, this was used by others to spoof the notifications and get webmasters in a tizzy, so they stopped sending them and looked for a better way. Back to the drawing board. In July 2006 they launched Message Center to help get the notifications to website owners without the threat of others sending “false notifications.” So today they announced the new plan to help those not verified: …we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emai...
More About: Penalty , Pena , Viva , Revival

GMail Fun
2007-08-30 00:00:00
I wanted to share this great little video from GMail.
More About: Gmail

DMOZ - Still Sucks and Now with Extortion!
2007-08-30 00:00:00
In one of my most popular posts in the short existence of SEOpittfall.com “Why DMOZ Sucks and Wikipedia is Nothing More Than a Blog”, I had some very direct comments regarding the Open Directory Project: DMOZ is a wonderful idea, however, it is inherently flawed. I must say that I would have to rephrase some of the remarks I made (changes highlighted with deletions with new responses bold): Wikipedia and DMOZ are not the most valuable resource for research on the Internet, search engines are. I am not implying that the results returned are more relevant, however, there is much more information from other sources that is not included in Wikipedia and DMOZ, however, because the editors of Wikipedia and DMOZ choose what is, and more importantly, what is not contained in the listing, it should not be valued any higher than any other website on the given topic (or any blog for that matter)! I am not saying that you should immediately request your listing from either be remove...
More About: Dmoz , Extortion

Must Have for Social Optimization
2007-08-30 00:00:00
Wow, that’s pretty absolute, isn’t it? What makes something a “must have?“ I don’t mean this: Must Have Find Must Have Online. Shop & Save at Target.com Today. www.Target.com (actual Google sponsored results for “must have”) pittfall’s definition of must have: n. “a valuable resource that should not be dismissed.” OK, so what is this “valuable resource,” this “must have” for social optimization? Social Media Daily - “a blueprint for marketing your website with social media, social bookmarking, social networking and other Web 2.0 fun.” So, if you are looking for the traffic that can be leveraged through social marketing, then you should read this valuable report that includes: Tools Link Building Software Checklists Conclusion (overview) This is the down and dirty guide to building a social campaign for your website. I don’t think that I can do it any justice by regurgitating...
More About: Optimization

MSN Live Search Building Webmaster Portal
2007-08-26 00:00:00
MSN Live Search has joined the race to provide webmasters with the tools and features that we expect with the announcement of Webmaster Portal . According to the announcement, the new service will be started in “private beta” and will test out some of the tools and commands that they intend on bringing to the public starting in late fall: Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the ?link:? operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get ?link:? back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we?re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we?ll support these scenarios: Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools Statistics about your websi...
More About: Building

Microsoft Offers Content Ads for AdCenter in Beta
2007-08-24 00:00:00
In an attempt to provide additional traffic from their AdCenter platform, MSN AdCenter will offer start showing your ads (if you are an adCenter advertiser) on “content-based pages on website owned by publishing partners such as MSN” beginning August 29, 2007. Here is more information from the announcement: Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads. Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network?connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We?re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers. We realize that some of you may not yet be ready for content distribution. If you would like to upgrade without expansion (maintaining search-only distribution) please fill out this online form by August 26, or conta...
More About: Offers , Tent

Update Complete
2007-08-20 00:00:00
Well, I have made the jump to WordPress 2.2 and everything seems to be running smoothly. If you find that any part of my site is not functioning properly, please let me know through either comment or e-mail. Thanks
More About: Update , Complete

PeekYou.com - Online Reputation Management
2007-08-20 00:00:00
PeekYou.com is a new way for you to manage and control your reputation online: PeekYou is a new kind of online white pages. A PeekYou profile helps other people find your websites, social-networking pages, photos, or anything else about you online. You can also create a profile for friends or relatives to ensure that they may also be easily found online. What’s the point? Well, the importance of online reputation management is becoming more important as potential employers are looking to online presence to find out more about potential candidates. So, this means that you need to be aware of what is online about you, or someone that caries the same name. Having a unique name, does not mean that you are the only one out there. Case in point, my name is pretty unique (more my last name), but there are others out there with the same or similar names. A political cartoonist, a programmer, a labor policy specialist at UC Berkeley, TV actor, an artist, chess master, another programme...
More About: Management , Online , Manage , Reputation

Social Bookmarking 101
2007-08-20 00:00:00
The CommonCraft Show has released another useful video, this one is about Social Bookmarking and highlights del.icio.us. This isn’t just about bookmarking but rather the integration of bookmarking as a social event. Feel free to share with others or let me know what you think!
More About: Social Bookmarking

New Version of SEOpittfall.com
2007-08-18 00:00:00
Hello everyone, thank you for your patience, SEOpittfall.com is in the midst of an upgrade... new machine and new version of WordPress.
More About: Fall , Version

A Word About Usability
2007-08-18 00:00:00
It is really remarkable that something that appears to make some sense could be overlooked... but it sometimes does. As we can plainly see from the example outlined above, what is perceived by you may not be the same as your users/visitors. We might be laughing or just chuckling inside about ...
More About: Word , Usability , Sabi

Things I Learned at SES Travel 2007
2007-08-12 00:00:00
There were many things that were shared at the conference, however, there is one that is of great importance that really struck a cord with me. Yes, it is extremely important for the travel vertical, however, it has importance for all websites. It really brings all of the aspects of ...
More About: Travel , Things , Learned

Been Lookin? for More?
2007-08-12 00:00:00
Over the last few weeks I haven't been publishing much information. By no means is this because I have been lazy (maybe just a bit), rather, I have been doing work in the background. I have reached some limitations and because of consistent growth in readers and additional exposure in ...
More About: Look , Been

Microsoft and Google Compete to Deliver Online Storage Solutions
2007-08-12 00:00:00
Windows Live SkyDrive is now in beta from Microsoft . Here are some of the details of this new service: 500 MB of free online storage Create personal, shared, and public folders Windows Live SkyDrive works on Windows or Macintosh with both FireFox or Internet Explorer Unlike the new Microsoft product, Google is offering ...
More About: Storage , Online , Online storage

Balanced Link Building
2007-08-04 00:00:00
A link is not just a link, they are much more than just a simple way to move from one page to another. Rather, Link s are the glue of the Internet! Yeah, yeah, yeah... you've heard this before, haven't you? Then, in the next breathe, you will hear, "content is king!" ...
More About: Building , Link Building , Balan

Search Marketing Spotlight - The Other Engines
2007-08-04 00:00:00
I will not lie to you, if you are looking for quality traffic in large amounts, you will find it on the major search engines (Google, MSN Live, Yahoo! and Ask.com), but finding targeted traffic on these engines can require a larger budget than many have to invest. However, you ...
More About: Marketing , Search , Spotlight , Engines , The Other

Catching the Sights in Seattle
2007-07-28 00:00:00
Today was the first of two days in the Search Engine Strategies Travel Conference in Seattle , WA. I will be sharing more from the conference, but I wanted to share an opportunity that I had in Seattle, that some will enjoy… a Kwik E Mart. More will come regarding the conference, I am just wondering if ...
More About: Sights , Sigh , Sight