Reviewer of Sites

Looking for a fun way to find others with similar interests on Twitter? You should check out Twiends, built by Dave Sumter of Webcandy fame.  He developed Twiends as a great way to build your Twitter community.  As he says, they “focus on making the introduction, and you focus on deciding who you want to be friends with in the long run. You get to choose who you friend and they get to do the same.  In saying that though, you will find that a lot people will follow you because you are on [Twiends]“.

So, if you are looking for more potential followers, sign up for Twiends!

Tags: Internet, Marketing, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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You may be familiar with the owners of SEO.com reportedly paying $5 Million for the domain. Yes, that’s a lot of money. As it turns out, Mike Mann, the owner of SEO.com did not pay quite that much. However, he is still a really wealthy individual from his days in the domain industry.

News report from the time of the announcement:

Mike Mann is a prominent internet entrepreneur who sold BuyDomains company a few years ago for more than $65 million. His latest tech venture is just that, a venture capital firm based in Washington D.C. which goes by the name of WashingtonVC.

Yesterday Mann announced the purchase of SEO.com by WashingtonVC for $5 million as well as the formation of an SEO firm led by Dave Bascom. The company is formerly known as Web Targeted, search engine optimization company located in Utah. Jay mentions this new domain will give them a huge advantage over the fierce competition of Search Engine Optimizers.

Just the same, as far as SEO is concerned, it has the perfect domain name, is owned by one of the wealthiest people in the domain and SEO industries, and has a quickly growing forum.

So, if you are thinking about joining, this is the time to do it while it’s still young!

Please click the logo to join

 

Tags: Domains, Internet, SEO by reviews
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Google seems to be growing exponentially. During the month of August alone they were reported to have had 31 billion queries throughout the world. In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites. Second on the list was Yahoo!, which had a paltry 8.5 billion searches recorded during the month. Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Search do not come anywhere near being as used or have the level of usage. Although there was a poll conducted recently showing that Yahoo! had a slight lead for users in terms of being a favored search engine. These users still seem to be using Google anyway.

The Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.

Since Google has such dominance, as far as search engines are go, they also can greatly influence the way websites are designed, how people market their sites, and to that end, which websites people visit. They can also pretty much dictate the cost of advertising as well. This level of control over something so pervasive, being the internet itself, makes one think that they have more influence now than Microsoft ever had during its hayday.

I believe they are bordering on monopoly control of the internet. I wonder if they will be eventually targeted for regulation or some sort of government instituted penalties, such as being broken up.

Tags: Advertising, Internet, Marketing, SEO by reviews
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Interested in a new internet business startup idea? Here’s an idea straight from a Google employee!

Matt Cutts, the well known Google employee that blogs about all things internet, has come up with his own internet money making venture. Realizing that most people have a ton of their favorite songs in an mp3 format, only not necessarily legally downloaded. His idea is that people may like to have a higher quality, legal format and would go for the opportunity to upload a list of all their favorite titles and have them converted. The mp3 conversion internet business would charge the customer to cover the cost of making the songs legal, etc

Here’s how he thinks it could work for you:

- offer people ringtones of songs on their hard drive
- charge a penny or two for each song that is converted to “legitimate.”
- run some banner ads or AdSense
- anonymize the data and license the anonymized data to various businesses
- get people to sign up with Pandora, Last.fm, or Rhapsody.
- don’t make any money on it. Use it as a way to build brand recognition or positive karma.

I actually could see how this could work! However, the biggest incentive for people would be a huge assault by the RIAA with lawsuits and other penalties. Also, if they offered higher quality sound and a full catalog of data, since many mp3 downloads don’t include much information and have incorrect spellings.

So, all you audiophile, internet entrepreneurs better get a jump on the competition and do it now!

As a sidenote, Matt Cutts has hinted before that Google would not be a lifelong pursuit when he said “I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say ‘Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?’” Maybe he’s considering finally doing one of his ideas.

Tags: Business, Internet by reviews
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302

Found – The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.

304

Not Modified – If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code.

307

Temporary Redirect – The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.

400

Bad Request – The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications.

401

Unauthorized – The request requires user authentication. The response MUST include a WWW-Authenticate header field containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource.

403

Forbidden – The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.

404

Not Found – The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

410

Gone – The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent.

500

Internal Server Error – The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.

501

Not Implemented – The server does not support the functionality required to fulfill the request. This is the appropriate response when the server does not recognize the request method and is not capable of supporting it for any resource.

Adsense

Algorithm

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:

< a href=”http://www.reviewerofsites.com/” >This is the anchor text< /a >
ATW

AlltheWeb (search engine)

Authority

A website that is considered by Google or other search engines to be trusted and usually given a high PageRank.

BackLink
A web page that has a hyperlink to one of your pages, usually the home page.
B2B

Business to Business

Blog

BOT

Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

BOTW

Best Of The Web (Directory)

Cache

CAPTCHA

Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Canonicalization

Click Fraud

Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.

Content

Context

Relevance of one element of a web page’s content to other elements of web page’s content.

CPL

Cost Per Lead

CPM

Cost Per Thousand

CPS

Cost Per Sale

CPC

Cost Per Click (Google’s PPC Program)

CTA

Content Targeted Adverstising – It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.

CTR

Click Through Rate

CVC | CVC2

Card Verification Code

Data Center

Dedicated Server

Deep Link
A hyperlink from another website that is pointing to one of your website pages, other than the home page.
Directory
A web directory lists web sites by category and subcategory.

DMOZ

Directory MOZilla (a directory)

DNS

Domain Name System

Domain Name Doorway Page
A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Duplicate Content

Dynamic IP

EPC

Earnings Per Click

FFA
Free For All – FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.

GAP

Google Advertising Professionals

GOOGLE

Google (a search engine)

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol

HTTPS

HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure

IBL

Inbound Link (see Back Link)

KDA

Keyword Density Analyzer

KEI

Keyword Effectiveness Index

Keyword/Keyphrase

Keywords are words or terms which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are phrases consisting of multiple words that are used in search engine queries.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding (many) keywords to a web page for the benefit of influencing how a search engine ‘perceives’ the page. This is not for the benefit of human visitors.

Link Building
The process of finding or acquiring backlinks to your website or sites.
Link Farm

A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.

Link Juice

Link Popularity

Long Tail

LS

LookSmart (a PPC Directory)

LSA

Latent Semantic Analysis

LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing

Matt Cutts
Google Employee in charge of preventing or limiting SPAM in the Google search engine results pages. His blog.

Monetize

Nofollow

Noindex

OBL

Outbound Link

Organic Results

Page Rank (or PageRank)
PageRank is a numerical weighting (0 to 10, 10 being the highest) based upon the Google link analysis algorithm.
PFI

Pay For Inclusion

PPC

Pay Per Click

PPR

Pay Per Rank

PPV

Pay Per Visitor

PR

Google PageRank™ is a numerical weighting (0 to 10, 10 being the highest) based upon the Google link analysis algorithm.

PR0

PageRank Zero – the lowest actual PageRank given by Google.

Proxy

PSA

Public Service Ad

PubCon

Reciprocal Link

A two way hyperlink between websites.
Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

SEM

Search Engine Marketeer
Search Engine Marketer
Search Engine Marketing

SEMPO

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization

SEO

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimizer

SEP

Search Engine Placement
Search Engine Positioning
Search Engine Promotion

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages

SEs

Search Engines

SES

Search Engine Strategies (a conference)

SEU

Search Engine Usability

Sitemap

Shared Server

SMM

Social Media Marketing

SMO

Social Media Optimization

Snap shot

SPAM

Sites Positioned Above Me

Spamdexing
Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine’s index.

Spider

Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that can scan the web, normally following hyperlinks (links) throughout a website (via internal links) and to other websites (via external links). They have many different purposes, including indexing web pages for search engines to finding e-mail addresses for email spammers.

SSL

Secure Socket Layer

Static IP
An IP address that does not change.
Subdomain

Text Link

TLD

Top Level Domain

TOS

Terms of Service

URI
Uniform Resource Identifier
URL
Uniform Resource Locater
W3C

World Wide Web Consortium

Webmaster Tools

Wikipedia

A is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. It is the largest, most extensive and fastest growing encyclopedia currently available on the Internet.

Y!

Yahoo! (a directory)

Tags: Adsense, Internet, Link Building, SEO by reviews
3 Comments »

According to a recent poll by Penn State, web surfers do not trust search engine sponsored links.  Print Goes Wireless published an article recently, stating that “consumers are distrustful of search engine sponsored listings and click on such links fewer than twice in every 10 searches, new research has revealed.”  Those are some horrible statistics!  This only shows that Adsense website owners need to be always changing with the consumer mindset.  If it means tweaking their website layout to flow better with the ads or improving their content so the visitor will more likely trust, or even appreciate, the link, then the webmaster must keep working on imaginative ways of developing their sites.

Further, the article states, “in that study, participants clicked on the results identified as ‘organic’ on more than 80 per cent of their searches rather than sponsored links even though many of the organic results were actually rewritten sponsored links.  So his goal was to determine whether integrating sponsored links into organic results would increase the click-through rate, but this did not happen.”  This is very interesting and goes against much of the thinking of Adsense webmasters.  Instead of using block ads, perhaps the better method is to integrate the ads into the content itself, such as having keywords link to an ad.  We’ve seen this on some websites and forums, but they don’t seem well integrated and usually have a double line under the word.  This seems to be very annoying for the reader if they happen to roll their cursor over the word, which would then display an ad image or more ad text.

The other unavoidable problem is with the advertisers themselves.  If their advertisement leads the visitor to a page loaded with eye-popping, bold print that seems like a poorly designed web page, at best, or a horribly conceived ad, at worst, then the the visitor will be more annoyed than happy with the result of their click.   Advertisers must take the time to make visiting their site worth it.

As web surfers become more savvy and discerning in what constitutes a worthwhile site, including those of advertisers, then the pressure falls back on the Adsense site and the advertisers to offer up something better.

Tags: Adsense, Internet by reviews
2 Comments »

As Dan Thies points out in his blog entry on his SEOFastStart.com site, it is possible for the Google spiders to crawl “your” site’s pages through a proxy. The problem is that Google will then no longer see the real url as the correct url, but instead view the proxy’s url as valid. Your url will then be de-indexed by Google (and possibly other search engines). Imagine how many visitors could be lost because your site is no longer coming up in the SERPs (search engine results page)! Imagine also, how this could effect other areas of income if your PageRank drops to zero because of this!

They did notify Google about this over a year ago, but to date Google has done nothing. As time has passed, more advanced proxies have come into existence. These advanced proxies no longer pass the user-agent and other valuable information, making it even more difficult to prevent this from occurring.

How Can I Tell if I’ve been Proxified?

A simple test is to do a search for a keyword or phrase (or combination of phrases) that are unique to the page on your site that you are testing. If you find a duplicate page via the search engine then you may have been proxy hacked. A typical proxy url may look something like: www.example.com/nph-proxy.pl/655486/http/www.yoursite.com/

An Implementation Guide is available on Jaime Sirovich’s blog to walk you through some possible preventative measures.

Hopefully Google and the like take this seriously and fix it soon!

Tags: Internet by reviews
4 Comments »