TNA: PRE-LOCKDOWN RESULT
Prior to TNA Lockdown going live on pay-per-view last night, Voodoo Kin Mafia beat Serotonin after Kip James pinned Havoc. As mentioned yesterday, Serotonin seemed a likely choice since TNA weren't bringing a team in from outside of the company. We'll have a full recap from last night's Lockdown PPV available in ... (Read on Source)
Blender and Soulforce Equality Rider Matt Hill Comer arrested at Michigan's Cornerstone University
The Soulforce Equality Ride has wrapped up, but I didn't get a chance to post about one of the last stops on the journey -- conservative Christian Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. PrideSource : Shortly before noon riders Matt Hill Comer and Stephen Krebs descended a grassy hill separating the public roadway and the University ... (Read on Source)
Departures Shrink Kirkland's L.A. Office
Chicago-based juggernaut Kirkland & Ellis has continued to increase head count, revenue and profits firmwide. But in Los Angeles, key rainmakers are making less rain, and departures in the last six months have brought the 115-lawyer office to about 90 attorneys. With some of its leading lawyers reaching a stage where they're choosing to slow down, around 20 attorneys -- half of them partners -- have left the L.A. office over the last half year, some for top competitors.
Zillow Adds Social Features to Keep Ahead of Realtors
It seems real estate appraisal service Zillow is preparing to take on real estate agents by offering what they’ve so far failed to. While realtors might be making life a little difficult for Zillow, the company has decided to tap into social networks and offer services that I’ve not seen elsewhere. Here’s what’s been added: Neighborhood [...]
Media Motion: For the Record (08/24/07)
... Gold Awards from the Spring 2007 Millennium Awards Competition in the category of Overall Web Design. Brittany Lawson is an editorial intern, iMediaConnection. ...
Chinese Ambassador Briefed On Benefits of Fractional Ownership of U.S. Low-Volume Manufacturing Asse
U.S. Delegation of business executives meet in Portland, Oregon to share a new vision for cooperative manufacturing providing innovative solutions to address the Sino-U.S. trade imbalance. (PRWeb Sep 6, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/WmV0YS1DcmFzLVpldGEtSW5zZS1UaGlyLVplcm8=
Davies Shot Leads to Draw at Solheim Cup
HALMSTAD, Sweden -- Tromping through the bushes, Laura Davies looked as lost as she'd ever been on a golf course. Then, she made two shots that will go down in Solheim Cup lore to win the hole, save her match and turn a rough opening day for the Europeans into something much better. (Read on Source)
Why the Vast Majority of SEOs No Longer Target Individual Search Engines
Posted by randfish
A long time ago (at least, in web years), search engine optimization required specific targeting practices for each of the engines. For Hotbot, you'd need to place two repetitions of every keyword side-by-side in your meta keywords tag, while for Northern Light, a picture of at least one dancing baby in the bottom right-hand corner made all the difference 
Nowadays, most SEO is done with the same set of search-friendliness and search targeting standards in mind. Using keywords intelligently without stuffing, making static, easily crawlable URLs, building content that people are likely to link to, and promoting sites through social, viral, and directory marketing are relatively consistent across the SEO field. And yet... many people still have questions and concerns about which engines they should target and why they perform better at some engines than others. With this post I want to answer some of these common concerns.
Which Search Engines Should I Target in My SEO Campaigns?
To figure out the answer, let's take a look at the current leading search engines (via SearchEngineLand):
With the big 3 (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft) garnering a combined 95.5% of all searches in the US and the big 4 (with the addition of Ask.com) pulling in 99.4% of all searches, it's easy to see why virtually no effort is paid to smaller players. If you're receiving 1,000 visits each day from Google, spending time and effort on that 0.6% of small players has the potential to bring you maybe 10 extra daily visits.
As cut and dry as the answers here seem, there are exceptions. Certainly, in markets outside the US, the answers are different. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, most of Central & South America, Africa, & the Mid-East are all heavily Google-centric (with smaller inroads from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Ask.com). In Asia, the story's a bit different, as in Russia. Here are some of the search share leaders in these other markets:
- China - Baidu (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all had share here, but were re-directed to Baidu by the government on multiple occasions, helping to keep Baidu the leader)
- Korea - Naver
- Japan - Yahoo! (though Google is also highly relevant)
- Russia - Yandex
Beyond the geographical markets, there are some valuable vertical search properties that aren't owned/controlled by the search giants in arenas like travel, shopping, and video. Newcomers have attempted to make inroads in blog search, news search, financial, and local search as well. SEO for these sites, however, is typically significantly different from the traditional practices for web search engines, so don't expect the same rules to apply.
All in all, the right answer is - the search engines that send valuable traffic. For now, that means Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, & Ask.com. What's more surprising for many newcomers is that SEO for each of these properties is remarkably similar in tactics and execution. Let's take a deeper look with the questions below.
What Do I Need to Do Differently to Reach Google vs. Yahoo! vs. MSN/Live?
Not much, honestly. The major engines are all, at this point, largely playing catch-up to Google's algorithm and optimizing for on-site search friendliness (spiderability, good keyword targeting, semantic markup, clean URLs, no duplicate content, etc.) is virtually identical for every engine. Even keyword usage, once the big differentiator (you used to hear "Yahoo! likes 3X as many keyword repetitions as Google" all the time on SEO forums), has largely fallen by the wayside, with the singular exception that MSN/Live does seem to love keyword-rich URLs and domain names.
From a targeting perspective, just concentrate on building great content, marketing it effectively to link savvy audiences, crafting a search-friendly website, and attracting as many links from as many diverse properties as possible. The engines are all chasing the same goals of relevance, so think like a search engineer and build the kind of site they'd be thrilled to see ranking in their indices, then market the hell out of it :-)
Why am I Ranking Well at Google, but Not at Yahoo! or MSN?
I think this is probably the most common of the questions in this post, and to be perfectly honest, no one can say for certain. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN/Live all utilize different indices of the web and different ranking algorithms. This means that results between the three will, necessarily, have variance.
However, I'd be a pretty mean guy if I didn't at least provide some guidance, so here's my honest opinions on the subject. If you're ranking well at Google, but not at Yahoo! or MSN/Live, one of these may be to blame:
- Google relies heavily on a trust and domain authority based algorithm, meaning that a barely optimized, poorly linked-to URL on a heavily trusted, powerful domain will probably do much better in Google than the other engines. If your content isn't highly targeted (lots of keyword usage and many external links), but it's sitting on a powerful domain, this could be why you're seeing over-representation in Google.
- Google has the freshest index and the best ability to find new links quickly and count them. If you've released content recently or if many pages have recently linked to yours, this could be a big reason why you're outperforming Yahoo! and MSN/Live with your rankings at Google.
- Google rewards a few very high quality, trusted links over many lower value links and thus, you'll frequently see pages and sites in Google's rankings because they've won out through the value Google places in their sparse but more trusted link profile.
Why am I Ranking Well at Yahoo! or MSN, But Not at Google?
As with the above, it's impossible to say for certain, but once again, I'll give my personal opinions:
- Yahoo! is not as good as Google is at identifying and discounting so-called "manipulative" linking. Paid links, link farms, reciprocal links, and even FFA links (like blog comment spam and guestbook spam) will still sometimes provide value in Yahoo!, but rarely do in Google.
- MSN/Live is still way behind even Yahoo! at catching manipulative links and thus, many of their more commercially focused results (and plenty of non-commercial results) are filled with sites and pages propped up by links that Google simply won't count.
- Google still employs a series of algorithmic effects that mimic a "sandbox" of sorts. This means that new domains launched at Google or old domains moving their content to new sites often run into trouble ranking for what they "deserve" under the normal Google algorithm. This effect is much less strong than it was 2-3 years ago, but is certainly still around. In fact, last week, a good friend's site just "broke out of the box" in one of the best recent examples I've seen of the sandbox effect lifting.
- Google's the most "suspicious" of the engines, so if you've been overly aggressive in link growth, even through no fault of your own, Google will sometimes penalize or devalue your links, at least temporarily. I see this most often with anchor text issues, where a particular site's backlinks all share the exact same anchor text, but other "patterns" can also trigger Google's raised eyebrow.
Why Doesn't My Site Rank at Ask.com?
Ask.com employs a very different algorithm to the other major search engines. While Google, Yahoo!, & MSN/Live all use global popularity (the link equity built to a site by all the other sites that link to it on the web), Ask.com relies on local popularity, which only counts link equity from other topically-relevant sites in that site's niche.
If you imagine the Internet as a model of the Earth, Google, Yahoo!, & MSN/Live are essentially saying that votes from anywhere on the planet count towards a page's ranking. Ask.com takes a different view and feels that only votes coming from your local town or county count towards your rankings.
This means that with Ask.com, you'll need a very different set of links to rank well than at Google, Yahoo!, or MSN/Live.
Aren't There Any Other Engines I Should Worry About?
Other than the aforementioned market leaders in other geographies and any relevant vertical search engines, the answer is "not really." Altavista, Dogpile, Hotbot, Lycos, and the like simply don't provide traffic levels that make them worthy of a lot of effort, and their algorithms tend to mimic the major engines anyway.
However, in the future, this may change. Startup engines like Wikia, Cuill, Powerset, and even Mahalo are trying to chip into the market leaders and 2-4 years from now, there may be several Ask.com or even MSN/Live sized competitors worthy of more attention.
Hopefully, this post will help you and your nervous clients to get some closure on these pesky issues. As always, comments are greatly appreciated!
UPDATE: Nick Wilsdon pointed out in the Sphinn thread on this post that there are many other countries (like Iceland, the Czech Republic, and Estonia) where other search engines are dominant market players. The global search report from 2007 (warning - PDF) covers these in-depth.
Firefox 3 Slated For June 17 Release
The Mozilla Foundation will shoot for a world record when they make their latest browser, Firefox 3, available for download.
LAN Airlines launches Business Class Airpass
LAN Airlines launches Business Class Airpass.
SEO Chat Forums - Google Terns : Term "SEO" now outstripping "PPC" in searches
Date: July 11th, 2008 01:09 PM - Pacific Monk - Untitled Post: Great post by EGOL. I've heard that Seo's a common Japanese name too, so I wouldn't bet a dime on those numbers. Realistically, I think PPC has got much bigger reach than SEO. To a lot of people, SEO = work, and that's their biggest...
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Sharpest Measurement Of Ice Crystals In Clouds Ever Will Help In Climate Modeling
Scientists have created an instrument designed to help determine the shapes and sizes of tiny ice crystals typical of those found in high-altitude clouds, down to the micron level (comparable to the tiniest cells in the human body), according to a new study. The data produced using this instrument likely will help improve computer models used to predict climate change.
Off The Web, Onto the... Phone?
Shopping search engine TheFind.com is taking its local search capabilities to the mobile deck with a mobile shopping application for the Apple iPhone. The application will enables users to leverage TheFind's local shopping search and local inventory search capabilities which are designed to ultimately merge online and in-store shopping for ... (Read on Source)
Converting troff to HTML
Linux Journal: "This is another from my "rusty scripts" collection which was written for a specific task long ago. In this case, we were converting some internal documentation from troff using the mm macros into HTML."
Photos: How the Victorians did gadgets
What clever, handy devices came out of the 19th-century imagination? Self-pouring teapots, periscope glasses, fire grenades, and more.
YourEcommerce Shopping Cart Software Promises to Change the way Small Businesses Sell Online
The company's new shopping cart software is the first of its kind that allows merchants to quickly adapt to customer demands. Merchants deal with smarter shoppers by creating and maintaining a website that resonates with visitors to turn them into paying customers. (PRWeb Aug 17, 2008)
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/ecommerce/shopping-cart-software/prweb1215214.htm
Virus Infects Space Station Laptops (Again)
A password-stealing virus infected laptops on the international space station, though NASA says no mission critical equipment was affected. It's also not the first time a computer virus has made its way into space.
Zihotch Retro Phone Watch is craziest Japanese Watch ever
Our Wristwatch news site Wrist Dreams reports about a crazy watch from Japan. The Zihotch Retro Phone Watch features as dial a working retro phone dial. You have to actually dial a number to get the time told via the speaker integrated in the watch. T...
EU Parliament calls for telecom regulatory group (AP)
AP - The European Parliament called Wednesday for a new independent telecom regulator group to help open up competition for Internet and phone services across Europe.
Web traffic jam as people search for financial news (AFP)
AFP - The financial crisis has people flocking to the Internet for the latest money news along with tips on how to salvage investments and save on the routine costs of living.
SBA's 8(a) Program Can Help Some Companies Compete
Q: A friend told me that as a woman of Native American descent I might be eligible for a special SBA program that will help me start a small business. He said I could compete for government contracts through this program. Can you tell me what SBA program he's referring to?
-- Clara P.
A: Your friend is probably referring to the Small Business Administration's (SBA) 8(a) Business Development (BD) Program. The 8(a) Program (named after the section of the Small Business Act from which it comes) is an SBA program created to help small disadvantaged businesses better compete in the U.S. marketplace and within the arena of government procurement. The SBA provides business development, technical assistance and other services to the small businesses that are accepted into the 8(a) program.
The 8(a) program is reserved for what the SBA calls "socially disadvantaged individuals." Socially disadvantaged individuals are defined as those who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias because of their membership in a disadvantaged group.
The SBA has designated the following groups as socially disadvantaged:
· Black Americans · Hispanic Americans · Native Americans (Native American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Native Hawaiians) · Certain Asian Pacific Americans · Other individuals who can prove that they meet the SBA's criteria to be considered socially disadvantaged
One point where your friend is incorrect is that the 8(a) program is for new companies. The 8(a) program is primarily for companies that have been in business for a minimum of two years, though that rule may be waived if your company is able to meet some pretty strict management, financial, and performance criteria.
Obtaining 8(a) status is no guarantee that a company will be successful in obtaining government or other contracts, but it certainly doesn't hurt. The Small Business Act mandates that all small businesses have the opportunity to provide goods and services to the U.S. government. To help ensure that mandate, the SBA negotiates annual procurement preference goals with every Federal agency and reviews each agency's results to make sure the goals were met.
The statutory goals are: 23 percent of all prime contracts go to small businesses; 5 percent of prime and subcontracts for small disadvantaged businesses; 5 percent of prime and subcontracts for women-owned small businesses; 3 percent of prime contracts for HUBZone small businesses; and 3 percent of prime and subcontracts for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses.
A HUBZone (Historically Underutilized Business Zone) is a designated area within urban and rural communities that has been given preferential contract award consideration in an effort to stimulate economic development. A company may qualify for HUBZone status if it is owned or controlled by one or more U.S. citizens, has at least 35 percent of employees who live within the designated zone, and has a principal office located there. HUBZones are a whole 'nother topic that we can discuss at another time. Suffice it to say that a company that obtains both 8(a) and HUBZone status may be entitled to double dip in the government procurement trough, that's why you often find a number of 8(a) companies specifically moving into HUBZone areas to take advantage of the perks both programs offer.
The U.S. government purchases billions of dollars in goods and services every year, everything from staples to those wonderfully expensive toilet seats. Obtaining 8(a) status allows small businesses to compete for a portion of that business.
The basic requirements for applying for 8(a) status are your company must be a small business as defined by the SBA, must be owned and controlled by one or more socially and economically disadvantaged individuals who are U.S. citizens, and must show a potential for success. The SBA defines a small business as "one that is independently owned and operated, is organized for profit, and is not dominant in its field."
As expected, the 8(a) program has its fans and its detractors. It's fans are those companies that obtain 8(a) status and thereby get preferential treatment when competing for government procurement contracts.
The program's detractors are typically those companies that fail to obtain 8(a) status or that do not meet the definition of socially disadvantaged, i.e. businesses owned my white American males (that's a can of worms we won't open this week).
You can learn more at the SBA's website (sba.gov) or by calling your local SBA office.
Here's to your success!
Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net, an online organization dedicated to the success of online and eBay entrepreneurs <a href="http://www.prosperityandprofits.com" target="_blank">http://www.prosperityandprofits.com</a> <a href="http://www.dropshipwholesale.net" target="_blank">http://www.dropshipwholesale.net</a> <a href="http://www.30dayblueprint.com" target="_blank">http://www.30dayblueprint.com</a>
Today's Alternative Energy; and November Issue Topics, Including Computer-Brain Interfaces and
Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites ... (Read on Source)
ESPN.com has launched many new hockey widgets that offer scores, stats, and news
ESPN Widgets are portable applications that you can place almost anywhere! You can put them on your blog, your iGoogle home page, your Facebook profile, and many of the other most popular sites on the internet. These ESPN Widgets are updated frequently, so you can keep up-to-date with breaking stories and the latest scores and stats. Add an ESPN ... (Read on Source)
PDC 2008: Live blog of the Windows 7 keynote
... certainly got a lot of feedback about Windows Vista at RTM," Sinofsky joked, mentioning they got ... do more things." You can navigate in Internet Explorer using flicks of the finger. Explorer has ... 9:02am PT: A new lightweight version of Windows Media Player in Windows 7 allows for quickly ...
New Drug Target In Obesity: Fat Cells Make Lots Of Melanin
As millions of Americans gear up for the Thanksgiving holiday, a new report may provide some relief for those leery second helpings. Researchers describe a discovery that may allow some obese people avoid common obesity-related metabolic problems without losing weight: they make a common antioxidant, melanin, in excess. Even more promising is that some of the antioxidant drugs that can mimic the melanin effect are FDA-approved and available.
When should you worry about your baby's fever?
Unfortunately, there is no clear answer in those only a few months old. Pediatrician Perri Klass writes about the gray zone in infants between 1 and 3 months old having fevers right around 100.4 Fahrenheit. There are no strict guidelines in these borderline cases, as both conservative and more aggressive interventions are defensible. Studies aren' ... (Read on Source)
Chip group sees first decline since 2001
The Semiconductor Industry Association is projecting the first decline in chip sales since 2001.
30 Things I Learned From Blogging Heroes Part 2
This is part two in the series of tips and tricks I have learned by reading the book, Blogging Heroes. After reading the things I learned, stick around for my take aways I've garnered through completeing the book. Brian Lam 16. High-quality writing and editing will attract and keep readers, as will surprising them. Kristin Darguzas 17. Working ... (Read on Source)
Zoho opens up SQL access to its services
Zoho on Tuesday is rolling out CloudSQL, a layer of code that allows corporate developers to access their Zoho application data through a number of different dialects of the SQL database access language. (Read on Source)
name: MAGPIE