SeoAlchemist

When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you.

Now you have a third choice. Andy Beal, who specializes in online reputation management, has launched a site called Trackur that enables you to set up monitoring across a variety of sites on a set of keywords at a much lower price than reputation management firms generally charge.

Click to continue reading…

After some discussions at SMX last week with other members of the search marketing industry (community) I was quite surprised to find that I am one of the only people I know who works in search that actually likes the Mahalo project and really do feel that the overall opinion of Mahalo by various members of the search marketing crowd has to do with a negative association with Jason Calacanis, after his various much published opinions on search marketing.

I am also a bit troubled as to why so many people seem to be hoping for the failure of Mahalo. There seems to be a bit of jealousy that Mahalo is more or less a simple idea, paying guides a small salary to classify the Internet and build pages of information based upon popular search terms and trends … but no one else has put together a project like this themselves, with so much fanfare.

Personally, I do not look at Mahalo as a search engine. I would not use the service to search on a day to day basis, but I have found some of its coverage of current events and classifications of informational sources, product reviews and recommended links quite useful to the beginner or novice web user. I consider Mahalo as the love child of Wikipedia, About.com and DMOZ, with a social spin that happens to have a search box (like most sites do) and also rank very well in Google and other search queries because of its freshness value.

I do however question the reasoning behind using the Hawaiian term for Thank You which is commonly associated with trash cans all over Hawaii, but perhaps that can be overlooked by the average non-Hawaiian web user.

Is Mahalo an informative and cutting edge section of the web, or an overstuffed bin of trash?

So, here are some reasons why I like Mahalo (no testing, just my opinion):

• Mahalo is a smart and needed service, reflective of the changes in not only the search engine climate but also the overall morphing of common day to day Internet usage. Not many of the old school human powered web informational categorization services like the Yahoo Directory, About.com, DMOZ or Wikipedia have actually changed much since their popularity peaked. Mahalo is malleable. Mahalo is up to date. Mahalo is today.
• The speed of which Mahalo covers current events and news stories is pretty impressive and seems to be the ideal meeting of current blogging and identifying the core news stories from trusted news stories and also other views by bloggers. I find that news search from Google or Yahoo depends too much on wire coverage from various services reporting the same exact story from one source. Mahalo does a very good job of mixing these up. As an example, I find this page to be quite informative : Bush Tax Cuts 2008
• Mahalo has done an excellent job of branding itself via its Mahalo flower logo, its hawaiian style fonts, and its Mahalo Daily which brings high quality informational video about social projects. The Mahalo team also does a ruthless job of promoting its stories on Facebook, Twitter and other social venues. As a web publisher, I think I can learn a good amount from their branding and promotion.
• The advertising on Mahalo is inobtrusive and very basic, with Google AdWords text ads (not sure if this is considered AdSense or AdWords since the ads are in search results, but those results are not always the end product of searches) integrated into the pages using the same font as the rest of the site
• Although Mahalo Follow, the Mahalo Toolbar, may be quite reminiscent of the toolbars of yesterday which follow and track pages visited, I do like the recommendation and voting feature which reminds me of StumbleUpon and again, I like the clever branding and positioning.. it’s not a toolbar, it’s Mahalo Follow.

So, what do you really think about Mahalo? Do you like the service or dislike it, from either a user, search marketing or social web perspective and why?

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

From Search Engine Land:

• 
  SEMPO Announces New 2008 Board of Directors
  SEMPO has announced the 2008 Board of Directors that will take office on March 12, 2008. The board of directors includes:…
• 
  Ask.com Adds More Sponsored Ads, Pushing Organic Results Below Fold
  I was messing around with the Ask.com interface on my Mac and decided to compare some results between my Mac browser and Internet Explorer for PC. I noticed that Ask.com is now displaying five sponsored results for many keyword searches. The organic results are now below the fold, like they…
• 
  SEOs Want The NOINDEX Tag To Not Show A Page In The Index
  Matt Cutts of Google posted a blog entry asking SEOs how they want Google to handle the NOINDEX meta tag. If you use the NOINDEX meta tag now, Google won’t show the page in any way in the Google index — not even a “link only” listing. Matt asks SEOs…
• 
  Yahoo, You’re Not Off The Hook Over The Chinese Dissidents Case Says New Lawsuit
  Yahoo Sued Again for Assisting the Persecution of Chinese Dissidents from the Epoch Times reports Yahoo is being sued once again for allegedly leaking personal information and aiding the Chinese Communist Party in Internet censorship and the persecution of dissidents. The China Democratic Party, China Social Democratic Party and the…
• 
  Pakistan YouTube Ban Propagates Worldwide Causing Major YouTube Outage
  Yesterday, I kept noticing Twitters of YouTube problems. Soon after, the BBC reported YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan. It appears that the recent Pakistan ban of YouTube not only caused Pakistan ISPs to block YouTube but also spread worldwide and stopped users from even the United States from accessing YouTube….
• 
  Survey Says: Google Top Brand In UK
  Google takes UK’s top brand spot from the BBC reports Google took the BBC’s top spot in a Superbrands survey of the top brand in the UK. In fact, Google is the only company established after 1990 that is found within the top 50 brands in this survey. Microsoft secured…
• 
  Hackers Launch Goolag: A Google Vulnerability Scanner
  Hackers turn Google into vulnerability scanner from Techworld reports a group of hackers named Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) launched a search tool powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. The tool is named Goolag and by typing in a domain…
• 
  The Secret Of Large Term Lists (It’s All In The Bidding)
  Last Monday, in a SEL post discussing the click quality by engine, I mentioned in passing an 89% drop-off between ‘phrases tested’ and ‘phrases actively generating good clicks’. Specifically, we posted 176,903 terms en route to discovering 20,152 active good terms for a client. Today I’ll revisit that drop-off…
• 
  24 Meets SMX West: Mike McDonald’s Funny Trailer At WebProNews
  In a few hours, I’m jumping on a plane and heading out to our SMX West search marketing conference, which hits Silicon Valley from Feb. 26-28. My journey will hopefully be much easier than Mike McDonald’s. To kick off his WebProNews video coverage of the show, he’s got a spoof…
• 
  Microsoft’s Johnson: “Once Yahoo And Microsoft Agree On A Transaction”
  This afternoon, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft Platforms & Services Division, issued an email to Microsoft employees (that was released via its PR firm). The letter has a tone of confidence that assumes a deal with Yahoo will ultimately take place. It reiterates what Microsoft believes to be the benefits…
• 
  Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards?
  Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude. Albeit, we’ve seen some standardization steps taken by…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Get GrandCentral Invites, Google Operating System
• iGoogle Animated Video, SEOish
• Invisible Mode in Gmail Chat, Google Operating System
• Bloglines Suffers Major Outage, TechCrunch
• The Personalized Homepage War: Who Matters, TechCrunch

Business Issues

• Deadline in Viacom, Google copyright suit extended, Reuters
• Google and Facebook founders at TED, Telegraph
• Google manager joining Mountain View school board, Mercury News
• EBay moves Shopping.com CEO to head Skype, Yahoo! News
• Fox Said To Be Exploring Termination Of Google Advertising Deal, TechCrunch
• Mixx, social news competitor to Digg, raises another $2 million, VentureBeat
• Revolutionizing the online advertising market, Yodel Anecdotal
• Techland Internet portals losing ad dollars to search, FORTUNE
• Why Google Buys Companies, Google Blogoscoped

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Maps User Survey, Mike Blumenthal
• Putting Google Earth to the test (Answers), Google LatLong
• The art of science and engineering, Google LatLong
• The changing nature of Local Search, Mike Blumenthal
• Announcing LinkedIn Mobile (includes an iPhone version), The LinkedIn Blog
• NOAA Weather Data in Google Earth, Google Earth Blog

Link Building

• Nofollow still means don’t follow, and how to instruct Google to crawl nofollow’ed links nevertheless, Sebastians Pamphlets
• Google Webmaster Tools Links Not Being Update & Yahoo Site Explorer Up and Down, Search Engine Roundtable

Microhoo

• Maybe Microsoft Should Stalk Different Prey, New York Times
• Microsoft addresses Yahoo worries, Seattle Times Newspaper
• Microsoft President on Micro-Hoo: We Can Do It, New York Times
• Microsoft says jobs aplenty even after Yahoo deal, Reuters
• More Yahoo shareholders sue over Microsoft bid, News.com
• Yahoo sale gets a big boohoo, Times Online
• Yahoo sued for spurning Microsoft, Yahoo News
• Jerry Yang Calls on Sue Decker to Bolster Pitch, New York Times
• LiveBlogging Jerry Yang and Sue Decker At IAB Conference, John Battelle’s Searchblog
• Yahoo Holders Losing Patience With Fighting Microsoft, Bloomberg

Paid Search & Contextual

• Adwords’ New "Automatic Matching" - Don’t Fall For This!, SEO Fast Start
• Are You Flying Blind With Google Placement Targeting?, SEM Geek
• Forbes.com Doing Some Google Referral Action, Wolf Howl
• Optimizing for Relevancy, Yahoo Publisher Network Blog
• Tracking Bogus Google AdWords Conversions, SEO Book
• Game-Ad Boom Looms as Sony Opens Up PS3, Ad Age
• Google AdWords Contextual Advertising Mystery Solved, Search Engine Watch
• Google Releases Online Marketing Guides for Google AdWords, Search Engine Roundtable
• Microsoft Announces New Reporting Standard for Digital Campaign Performance, Microsoft
• Microsoft Leads Advertisers Into This Decade, BruceClay.com
• PPC, Trademark Laws, and Copyright Laws: How to Play Fair and Still Win, PPC Hero
• With Great Knowledge Comes Great PPC Performance, PPC Hero

Searching

• How’s discovery different from search?, Alt Search Engines
• United Nations Data Access System (UNdata), Alt Search Engines
• TV-SEO - Samsung Brings Search to Live Television, Reality SEO
• Blogged.com launches blog directory and reviews, Webware
• Rethinking Recommendation Engines, Read/Write Web

SEM Industry

• Celebrity Fame? Prove You’re The Real Deal, Cre8PC
• Final Update from Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, Search Marketing Standard
• IM-NY SES NY Charity Party Sponsored by BOTW, Wolf Howl
• SMX West 2008 WebProNews Videos, WebProNews
• Yahoo! Weighs in at SMX West, Yahoo Search Blog
• 1:1 Interview With Search Marketing Authority and Visionary Hamlet Batista, SEOmoz
• Hiding the Sphinn Button When a Post Fails to Go Hot, All Things SEM
• SES London 2008: The Wrap Up, Search Marketing Gurus
• We’re on our way to SMX West - Are You?, Live Search Webmaster Center Blog

SEO & SEM

• AdSense Still Useful for Getting Indexed, Irishwonder
• How To Grow Your Online Business 4X Overnight, PatrickGavin.com
• More on SEO Pricing and Costs, Marketmou
• New Google Process for Detecting Near Duplicate Content, SEO By The Sea
• Newbie Guide to SEO - Where Do I Start?, eVisibility.com
• Google Reconsideration Request Language Modified Again, Smackdown
• Google Webmaster Help Group Highlights Contributing Members, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s duplicate content filter is broken, BlogStorm
• Google’s Matt Cutts Replies to -60 Penalty Thread at Google, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Search Marketing Slays Seasonality in Travel, Search Engine Watch
• How to Market Your Search Engine Agency - Part 2, Search Engine Watch
• MSRBot Bot, Microsoft Bot Causing Havoc on Some Servers?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Quick, Cheap, & Easy Strategies to Dominate Google’s Search Results, SEO Book
• Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide - Part V: Keyword Research, SEOmoz

Social Media

• SEO Shenanigans Pose a Clear and Present Danger to Social Media, Micro Persuasion
• Facebook Targets FriendFeed; Opening Up The News Feed, TechCrunch
• How To Take a Seasonal Chart And Get a TechMeme Headline and Digg Traffic, CenterNetworks
• It’s Not Just Words: The Importance of Empowering Your Audience, DoshDosh
• Three Minutes With Google’s OpenSocial Director, Washington Post
• Yahoo Buzz Launching Soon, TechCrunch
• CrowdFound : Social Discovery Engine, Search Engine Journal
• Selling Social Media (Drug Dealer Style), SEOCO Blog
• Twitter Trivia - New Happy Fun Game!, danperry.com
• Group Social Media Interview with 4 Experts, ViperChill
• Exclusive: Leaked screenshots of Tumblr’s new front page, Valleywag
• Facebook’s Future: Why It’s Here to Stay, Rev2.org
• Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls, RussellBeattie.com
• Plants that Twitter when they need to be watered, Webware

Video, Music & Image Search

• YouTube Offline, Stepforth
• HBO Launches Official YouTube Channel, SmartMoney.com
• MySpace founder targets YouTube generation, Vnunet.com
• Swedish Playaudiovideo indexes movies, music and images, Pandia

Other Items

• Google TiSP For Real?, Google Blogoscoped
• iPhone, Wii guests on stage at this year’s Oscars, Engadget
• Our secret sauce, Official Google Blog

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• POOF! CopyBlogger Was “Disappeared” by Technorati
• @ALL: Give Google your feedback on NOINDEX, but read this pamphlet beforehand!
• Going for SEO Celebrity Fame? Prove You’re The Real Deal
• What should NOINDEX do?
• A guide to SEO Canonicalization and URL Normalization
• New Google Process for Detecting Near Duplicate Content
• Why Saying No Can Mean More People Saying Yes
• Brian Wallace Wants to know if …”He Can Has Interview?”
• Search Engine Marketing Job Boards
• It’s Not Just Words: The Importance of Empowering Your Audience
• How Search Really Works: “The” Index (1)
• How to SEO a Newspaper’s Web Site
• 1:1 Interview With Search Marketing Authority and Visionary Hamlet Batista
• The Tao of Crafting Strategic SEM Partnerships
• SocialBlade - Digg Tool That Shows Amazing Stats
• Why SEO Pundits Can’t Explain Search Algorithms
• The Diary of a PPC Newbie, and Why You Should Expand
• 15 Simple Ways to Refresh a Marketing Campaign
• Social Blade: A Tool That Dissects the Front Page of Digg
• Link condoms with juicy taste, or how to instruct Google to crawl nofollow’ed links
• Google Reconsideration Request Language Modified Again
• Banned From Sphinn? No Worries, Your Vote Counts Either Way
• Kidnapped: The SMX West 2008 Trailer
• Reputation Management is More Than Just Spamming Squidoo
• How to Use LinkedIn to Create Authoritative Content

SEMPO has announced the 2008 Board of Directors that will take office on March 12, 2008. The board of directors includes:

Click to continue reading…

Yahoo Inc. has been sued by a group of Chinese political activists who claim that the company aided the Chinese government in tracking the online activities of political dissidents.  This marks the second such lawsuit against Yahoo in recent years.

Yahoo was sued last year by two Chinese journalists who claimed that Yahoo provided the Chinese government with information that ultimately led to their capture, imprisonment, and subsequent torture.  This case was settled in November 2007.  However, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was summoned before the U.S. Foreign Affairs Committee, where he was reprimanded for Yahoo’s role in the journalists’ imprisonment.

The new lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by a group of plaintiffs that include Li Zhi, Guo Quan, Zheng Cunzhu, and a group known as Chinese Democracy Party West American Foundation.  In their filing, they claim that Yahoo “willing provided Chinese officials with access to private e-mail records… and other identifying information about the Plaintiffs.”  Furthermore, they claim that this information was used as “the basis for the acts of persecution and torture that occurred and are occurring.”   They are seeking unspecified punitive damages, as well as “assistance in obtaining the plaintiffs’ release from prison.”

The suit also claims to have “identified at least 60 individuals  arbitrarily imprisoned in China for  expressing their support for free elections” whose arrests may have been connected to unspecified actions taken by Yahoo.

I was messing around with the Ask.com interface on my Mac and decided to compare some results between my Mac browser and Internet Explorer for PC. I noticed that Ask.com is now displaying five sponsored results for many keyword searches. The organic results are now below the fold, like they once were before dropping Jeeves.

Click to continue reading…

On Wednesday in the company’s annual report, Yahoo admitted that its executives have been distracted by Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid, and indicated the possibility that advertisers might cut and run in light of the uncertainty. The unwelcome bid, which was ultimately rejected, might not just cause advertisers to leave, but perhaps even employees.

Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover bid which was rejected two weeks ago, has caused the company to shift their focus and may have considerable impact on the company. According to Yahoo, at minimum they’ve spent considerable time and effort evaluating the proposal, and at most advertisers and publishers, as well as key employees, might not stick around to find out the company’s fate.

“Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition proposal has created a distraction for our management and uncertainty that may adversely affect our business,” said Yahoo in the annual report.

Adding even more distraction is the filing of seven lawsuits against Yahoo in connection with the Microsoft bid rejection. Four suits were filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, and three more in Delaware Chancery Court. The majority of these lawsuits have alleged that in rejecting Microsoft’s bid, Yahoo failed to look out for shareholders’ interests. Some have also claimed that Yahoo board members failed to negotiate properly in an attempt to get Microsoft to up their bid.

The Microsoft bid was listed amongst the routine risks that the company faces, and although it doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know, it confirms what many investors had already suspected.

Matt Cutts of Google posted a blog entry asking SEOs how they want Google to handle the NOINDEX meta tag. If you use the NOINDEX meta tag now, Google won’t show the page in any way in the Google index — not even a “link only” listing.

Matt asks SEOs if this is what they want and the poll currently shows us that yes, SEOs want it this way. Here are the current results, but the results may change over the course of the week:

Click to continue reading…

Can you rank a new site in Yahoo! for terms like insurance without getting it nuked in Google? What makes Yahoo! so much slower at ranking new sites than the other major search engines?

In trying to help webmaster’s life easier, at least the three top search engines could agree on something. As announced in their respective webmasters’ blogs, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are unison in adhering to the cross-submission of sitemaps to the three search engines.

With the simultaneous announcement of the three search engines, webmasters who are managing several websites, each with its own sitemap hosted on the sites URL, can now make these sitemaps hosted in just one site. Previously, the search engines requires that sitemaps have the same host and path as the URLs they contain. But with this addition to the sitemap protocol, all that webmasters need to do is to reference the sitemaps URLs and path in the robot.txt where the URLs it contain are hosted. (more…)