Oct 31

Unreliable access to one’s website when spiders come crawling could result in being dropped from a search engine’s index.

Downtime can be scarier than any Halloween spookiness for a site publisher. While search engines like Google will send their indexing spiders around multiple times to a site, too many inaccessible results due to downtime could be interpreted as a site that no longer exists.

Getting dropped from Google could make that non-existence very real. A recent post at Royal Pingdom cited the danger of downtime, with the corresponding effect of vanishing from Google’s index, ruining whatever SEO work has been done until the spiders come back for a return visit.

They cited Matt Cutts on a previous comment about downtime, where he noted that Google does try to go back and recrawl pages it has dropped previously, in case the site has returned. Rather than relying on Google’s return after dropping pages, webmasters need to keep an eye on their sites for downtime issues.

Pingdom modestly suggests its service as one of any number of options for monitoring a service. Site publishers will also want to check out Google’s Webmaster Central and the site tools they make available.

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Oct 31

Posted by rebecca

Happy Halloween, everyone! We here at SEOmoz are all dressed as internet marketers! Wheee! Did you adequately prepare for the holiday? Have your costume picked out and ready to go? Pumpkins carved into spooky jack-o-lanterns? Decorations put up? Candy purchased (none of those healthy granola bars, or your house’ll get egged)? Site optimized for all that lovely holiday traffic? No? Uh oh…

If your site offers some sort of holiday product (Halloween costumes, gifts ideal for Christmas, Valentine’s stuff) or if you just want to write holiday-related content, it’s pretty important to have your site visible in the SERPs for those search queries so you’ll get optimum traffic for those terms. And, as we all know, it can take a little bit of time to get high rankings. How do you know when to start SEOing for that holiday rush of search queries? Well, a little research never hurt anyone.

Here’s Google Trends data from the past twelve months for the search term "halloween costume ideas."

As you can see, searches start gaining traction towards the end of August and into the fall; thus, if you’re doing SEO for Halloween-related terms, you would want to start building content and links towards the end of the summer so you’re more visible to searchers when they think to start doing research.

The same goes for Christmas-related searches. Here I looked at "christmas gift ideas":

Searches start consistently increasing towards the end of September.

With Valentine’s Day, the searches start in mid-December:

In each case, searches started about 2-3 months before the holiday, so it’s important to acknowledge that and start crafting your content and targeting those keywords with ample time before the searches start gaining traction.

KeywordDiscovery, by the way, also graphs search trends, so if you have a membership I highly recommend analyzing their graphs if you’re looking to craft a holiday campaign:

If you mouse over each bar, you’ll see KWD’s search count for the provided term during that time period (for example, the first September count shows 426 searches, then 741, then 917, then 2,085 as the month progresses). The chart can also be sorted by historical data (how many searches in the past year), monthly data (number of searches broken down into each month), trend (a graph of the search trends over the past year), combination (a graph of global vs. premium search data), and market share (a breakdown of which search engines were used to search for the query).

KeywordDiscovery’s monthly data chart:

By market share:

Don’t take your cue from when the drugstore starts selling bags of Halloween candy–do some research and find out what last year’s trends were so you’re prepared this year. If you start early enough, you’ll be basking in glorious search traffic while your competitors are scrambling with last minute link building campaigns three weeks before the holiday.

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Oct 31

Hakia, a natural language search engine, has just added a new spin to search: social networking. Their new Meet Others feature lets you connect with others who are searching for the same things you are.

Since Hakia processes queries differently than old school search engines such as Google, you aren’t just matched up with people who typed in the exact query you did — but you’re matched with a larger set of searchers that Hakia thinks are looking for the same things you are based on natural language processing. For instance, if you’re searching for “what drug treats a headache”, Hakia processes the semantic relationships between words and may deduce that someone searching for “what medicine relieves migraines” is a match. And that type of processing is the crux of how Hakia wants to differentiate itself.

Click to continue reading…

Oct 31

Unless Google can make it smoother than a bucket of AstroGlide to get all of a person’s Facebook contacts over to its OpenSocial platform, they could find audience-building an uphill battle.

Ever since Facebook opened itself to anyone who wanted to join, plenty of people have done so. Upon arrival, they have added their friends, who added friends of their own, in an ongoing accumulation of contacts all nestled within the Facebook contact list.

Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer thinks tying together Google’s partners - LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster, and Hi5 - with Orkut and the OpenSocial development platform merits attention to one important task upfront if they want to challenge Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft on the social networking fields:

As far as the future, as we’ve learned in the 2.0 space category leadership can change in a matter of weeks. Facebook’s clear defense is the entrenchment of users and the pain of switching. If Google’s new group can build an app to port-over all my Facebook friends it would go a long way towards breaking down barriers-to-entry.

Even if they make it easy to move to the OpenSocial platform, we wonder if people will want to do so. Google and its partners have to offer some truly compelling reasons to do so.

They may think the openness of the platform and the creativity of developers working on applications for it will be the carrot to lead people to OpenSocial’s destinations, but people found Facebook a must-visit destination long before Facebook’s development platform arrived.

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Oct 31

When it comes to green search companies, you might think of Google as the winner, and Yahoo, as (almost) always, as the runner-up.  But with the launch of a new site called MSN Green, Microsoft’s trying to keep up with the pack.

“Green,” in this case, might be the color of envy, not a healthy environment; a website’s existence doesn’t really outdo Google’s $10 million contribution towards sustainable transportation or Yahoo’s connections to a hydropower project in Brazil.  Microsoft gets points for trying, though - one section of the site is titled “Take action now!”

Elsewhere, you’ll find articles about climate change, Daylight Saving Time, and some sort of ratio between trees and baseball bats.  There are “green facts,” photo galleries, and environmentally relevant news, as well.

At this point, you may remain on the fence - MSN Green is well put together, but doesn’t seem to offer anything revolutionary, or even special.  But the site is more than a PR stunt - National Geographic, Conservation International, and Grist are all partners in the effort.

Microsoft’s still got a long ways to go.  It’s nice to see the corporation trying, though, and hopefully those partners can lead it in a productive direction.

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Oct 31

In October there were 4,161,700 online job vacancies advertised, a decrease of 108,300 or -2.5 percent from September, according to The Conference Board Help-Wanted Online Data Series out today.

Nationally online advertised job vacancies were up 8.6 percent over the year. There were 2.71 advertised online vacancies for every 100 persons in the labor pool in October.

Online Advertised Jobs Decrease

"The year on year growth rate of online advertised vacancies, while still positive, has slowed in recent months, and the 8.6% increase (October’06-October’07) is the smallest since this series began in May 2005," said Gad Levanon, Economist at The Conference Board.

"These data suggest that the slow pace in the labor market will continue in the months ahead and is likely to extend into the early months of 2008. We are getting the same signal from The Conference Board Consumer Confidence survey released yesterday, which showed further weakness in the labor market and the U.S. economy as a whole."

Over the last three months advertised job vacancies dropped in eight of the nine U.S. regions. The largest declines happened in New England which fell -12.0 percent followed by East North Central dropping -10.8 percent, West North Central falling -10.5 percent and the South Atlantic regions also declining -10.5 percent.

Ken Goldstein, labor economist at The Conference Board said the latest numbers on the job market indicate it was slower this summer than earlier this year but it is not losing ground heading into the fall and winter months.

Oct 31

My friend Jennifer Laycock suggested an article that I am glad I checked out called "Twitter Guide Part #1" written by a blogging newcomer by the name of Caroline Middlebrook.

It is a useful guide for an increasingly popular social property located at www.twitter.com.

Twitter has become so popular that it has, by its own nature, become a verb; "twittering" or "tweeting" is the act of ‘telling’ the world what you are doing at any given moment via instant messaging, mobile texting, or emailing.

When I first heard of Twitter I had much the same reaction as many of my friends and colleagues… "why would I want to send meaningless notes about my daily activities on a regular basis? It seems not only invasive but a waste of time and energy." Well I have to say that my reaction was more likely the result of social media startup overload than having put much thought into the marketing aspects of such a utility. The fact is that Twitter has become quite a marketing tool that is worth using if you are up to the task; I started using it today.

So how is Twitter a marketing tool? Well Jennifer Laycock noted a great example - CNN. CNN uses Twitter to publish news stories as they occur so that their Twitter community can be in touch with the latest events; a powerful tool for building and maintaining credibility. From my standpoint I plan on using Twitter to tell all which articles I find most interesting throughout my day and to perhaps post quick tips or links to articles we just posted on our blog. The trick to remember is that Twitter only allows 140 characters per ‘tweet’ so you have to be short and sweet; tweeting or twittering is aptly described as micro-blogging.

If you would like to learn more about Twitter then check out Caroline’s Twitter Guide - it is a great introduction.

If you happen to signup for Twitter find me and join my community if you wish. I plan on having a lot of fun with it from now on :-)

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Oct 31

Anyone remember Friendster? It was an early entrant into the social networking scene. If they had done their work right they SHOULD have been a much bigger player than they are now.

Why aren’t they?

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.

2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.

3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Last night I was at a dinner for Hugh Macleod and Owen Michaels. There was talk of an earthquake. No, not the 5.6 one centered near San Jose. The fact that Google is about to jump into the social networking world. TechCrunch caused the shockwave of the year with that one.

One name that’s on the Google announcement, Plaxo, tells me that Google is looking to build a “social graph” that’s open and doesn’t have walls keeping developers from playing. They are looking to “Friendster” Facebook.

Add into this last week’s little “Vic Gundotra” dinner and I’m already seeing a trend: Google is going full bore after influentials, bloggers, and other “new media” developers who need a social network as part of their efforts to remain competitive.

Think about it. Nearly every cool Web property lately has a social network. Upcoming.org, Flickr, Yelp, Channel 9, etc. All have their own proprietary social networks.

Look at MySpace and Facebook. Both don’t solve that problem.

Will Google? And, by helping out Web 2.0 developers and other influentials (Facebook calls them “whales”) will Google cut off Facebook’s PR air supply (which is proving quite lucrative)?

Those are things I’m going to focus on for the next few days.

Some things we still need answers on:

1. Is this new Google social network really fun to use like Facebook is?

2. Does it beat Facebook’s aesthetics?

3. Can the social graph be componetized so that I could add a social network to my blog, for instance?

4. Does the development platform beat Facebook’s? (Can I see which apps my friends have loaded, is the key question).

5. Does it build a really open social graph?

6. If Google does match Facebook’s utility (really easy: just clone the hell out of it but give the “whales” more than 5,000 friends. I’ve talked with many celebrities and businesses and they say 5,000 simply isn’t enough which is why many of them are forced to stay on MySpace) do they allow new kinds of social ads?

It’s going to be an interesting next month getting around to all these companies again and seeing what they plan to do.

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Oct 31

A recent lawsuit judgment provided evidence for two things: a blogger may qualify as a journalist; and just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t mean you have to act like one. Advice: being mean is no way to get through court.

Blogger (and now, journalist) Philip Smith decided he didn’t like the way eBay listing company BidZirk did business* and decided to blog about it. BidZirk and its lawyer decided they didn’t like what Smith said and sued him for trademark dilution, defamation, and invasion of privacy.

Trademark dilution for using the BidZirk logo; defamation for calling BidZirk owner Daniel Schmidt "a yes man"; and invasion of privacy for linking to a picture of Schmidt and his wife.

Smith – though not a lawyer, Smith represented himself – argued use of the logo was protected by his status as a journalist (and by extension, I believe, fair use) and that he had linked to a public site. Calling Schmidt "a yes man," is also protected speech, as it is a statement of opinion, not fact.

You could call him an "assbag," for example, and he would have no cause for damages of any kind. Or, for another example, you could say his lawyer seemed "rather mean and prickish," based on his actions in court, and be okay because that’s an opinion.

As reported several places like Ars Technica, Technology & Marketing Law Blog, or from Smith’s own blog, Schmidt’s lawyer tried some underhanded tactics to pressure Smith into folding. (You might argue that the whole suit was an expensive attempt at silencing a critic, but that’s rather moot now.)


BidZirk’s attorney filed a lis pendens on Smith’s condo, which made it appear the property was tied up in legal proceedings, thus making it difficult to sell. Smith says BidZirk also tried to force him to answer private questions without cause.

The judge agreed and said the questions appeared "to have been made for no other purpose than to antagonize and embarrass the defendant," and called the attorney’s actions "grossly improper."

That landed the attorney with a $1,000 sanction, payable to Mr. Smith. He obviously scored a dismissal, a fine, public embarrassment for the plaintiffs, and a victory for the little guy, but he scored something else much bigger: a ruling that classifies bloggers as journalists.

Judge Henry Hurlong, Jr. decided it is the content, not the format, that makes a journalist. " The fact that Smith reports negatively about his experience with BidZirk does not dictate that the article’s function or intent was not news reporting or news commentary." And yes, some bloggers are most certainly journalists.

But I like Technology & Marketing Law blog author Eric Goldman’s words the best, so we’ll leave it at that:

I see this ruling as a redemption of sorts – it takes a lot of courage to blog, and it takes even more courage for bloggers to stand behind their words when challenged, but we have a responsibility to make sure we can’t be bullied on either front. On behalf of bloggers everywhere, we applaud Philip Smith’s courage and determination to defeat this case.

*Ironically, a lot more people know about the situation than did previously. If they’d left it alone, how bad could it have gotten?

Oct 31

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:


  • Yahoo Search Updates Algorithm, Index & Crawl
    The Yahoo Search Blog has posted that they are currently undergoing an index, crawl and algorithm update. Priyank Garg of Yahoo said: Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as…

  • GOOG Cracks The $700 Threshold, Partly On Mobile Speculation
    Propelled by strong quarterly earnings and rampant speculation (and coverage) about its mobile plans, Google stock earlier today crossed the $700 price target many Wall Street analysts had set for the company. It’s down slightly right now. Once Google provides more visibility about its mobile plans, investors could become more…

  • Ask Introduces New Maps & Directions For UK
    The mapping upgrades and improvements are coming so fast now from Google, Microsoft, MapQuest and Yahoo that it’s difficult to keep track of all the changes. But luckily the Ask Blog walks us through all the features of the new and improved Ask Maps UK, which includes multi-point routing, walking…

  • Ask.com Helps IAC Earn 40% Increase In Q3 2007 Media Revenue
    IAC Reports Q3 Results from CNNMoney reports that IAC saw a 4.2% decline in net income year over year. Here is IAC’s press release for the third-quarter numbers this year. But if you pull out Ask.com, IAC’s search engine, which is part of IAC’s Media & Advertising group, you will…

  • Google AdWords Lets Advertise Choose Date & Number Preferences
    Kevin Gibbons spotted a couple new features in Google AdWords for advertisers, including a convenient way for advertisers who are not based in the United States ito now change the format of numbers, times, and dates within their accounts….

  • Want To Opt Out Of Behavioral Ads? AOL Says It Is Your Choice
    AOL Will Let Consumers Opt Out of Targeted Ads from the Wall Street Journal reports that AOL will announce today a new tool that will enable AOL users to opt out of targeted or personalized ads. (NOTE: The AOL announcement is now live). AOL has behavioral ad technology that stores…

  • Lead Management: When Conversion Is Not Enough
    Let’s listen in on a call between a sales rep and a new lead generated by a paid search campaign: Hello Sarah, my name is Brian, and I’m your sales rep from Widgets Inc. I noticed you recently clicked one of our ads and registered to download our paper…

  • Google, Yahoo, Ask.com Do Halloween Logos & Themes
    Google doesn’t always do special logos for every holiday, but in the case of Halloween, it’s pretty consistent. Up today on the Google home page is the ninth consecutive Halloween logo it has run since 1999. Below, a look back at the past years, as well as this year’s…

  • Truveo Launches Big International Expansion
    After relaunching this August as a video search engine and consumer destination, AOL’s Truveo is aggressively expanding on a global basis. By the end of the year, Truveo intends to be in 15 countries including Russia and Turkey. Starting today it will be available outside the U.S. in France, Germany,…

  • OpenSocial: Led By Google, Social Networks Band To Take On Facebook
    As expected, the much-discussed Google social play turns out to be an alliance with other companies to "open up" social networks and their data to developers. TechCrunch and the New York Times both have early news of an expected announcement tomorrow on how Google, along with partners like Ning,…

  • Let Google Know The Geographic Location of Your Site
    For years, webmasters have wished for a way to tell search engines the country that should be associated with their sites. Starting today, Google Webmaster Central is offering a solution for those geographic woes….

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