The AP is of the belief that the repackaging of their stories and the use of their stories by news aggregators online is something that needs to be paid for. I am not against anyone trying to make money on their business. We are a capitalistic society for now at least. It’s the vilifying of people who use these stories that is the trouble here. The Internet is an open forum of sorts and the ability to have so many more people see your work is part of the appeal. By closing the door to those who will not pay for the right to use AP ‘stories’ they are certainly drawing a line in the sand.

I like Larry Dignan’s take over at ZDNet. He contends that the AP is actually running the risk of exposing their shortcomings rather than solidifying their perceived leadership position in the journalistic food chain. Dignan says

So the Associated Press is mad and isn’t going to take it anymore. It’s eyeing news aggregators who are stealing a few paragraphs and failing to link to it as an authoritative source.

Be careful what you wish for AP. Bloggers and news aggregators are a smart bunch and if AP isn’t careful the whole world will soon know about its dirty little secret: Much of it is rehash from statements of some sort.

What else can you say to that? Sounds to me as if the AP may be crying wolf to some degree. If they are literally doing what they accuse bloggers and the search engines of doing then it may be best to let sleeping dogs lie. Of course, if you are a blogger and you are not linking to your sources please stop it. While I realize that my sources rarely if ever go to the AP I always include the story source for my posts. It’s a courtesy that is part of the Internet culture. You would want the same from someone else.

Comments

All of this stems from a case where a Dunkin Donuts franchise received some non-complimentary anonymous comments about its bathroom cleanliness on the online forum NewsZap.com run by Independent Newspapers. The store is in Centreville, MD and having never been there I, Frank Reed, have no comment as to the cleanliness of their facilities. I will say though that I have encountered a few Dunkin’ Donut restrooms that could be introduced to some disinfectant and air freshener for sure but I digress.

The franchise owner claims that the anonymous posters on this forum defamed his store. This is where this ruling gets pretty unclear as to whether anonymity is actually being protected. Apparently the plaintiff misidentified the actual posts in his complaint. In other words, this guy screwed up. The appeals court is acting on a technicality of sorts because this franchise owner was sloppy. If he had identified the posts correctly (how in the world did that not happen in the first place?) would this have been overturned?

The court says that it is trying to balance the right of anonymous speech on the Internet with the right for a target of any defamatory remarks to seek protection from those kind of remarks.

A CNET blurb on this subject continues

In a defamation case involving anonymous speakers, the ruling said, courts should first require the plaintiff to try to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena. That notification could come in the form of a message posted to the online forum in question, and the posters must be given sufficient time to respond.

The plaintiff must then hand over the exact statements in question, so the court can decide whether the comments are obviously defamatory. Finally, the ruling says, the court must weigh the anonymous poster’s right to free speech against the strength of the defamation case and the necessity of disclosing the poster’s identity.

That’s interesting. First, if you have any stones whatsoever don’t post anonymously. It’s just a cowardly act and any thinking Internet user would hopefully discount any type of remark that comes from someone who can’t use their name to take credit for the comments. Second, with a little due diligence this case may have looked a lot different because remember the crux of the ruling was about the misidentification of these anonymous posts. Lastly, I wonder how many people even saw these comments? I know for sure that one of the first things I do when I research which Dunkin’ Donuts I will visit I HAVE to read someone’s opinion.  C’mon, I just need a coffee and couple of donuts then I’m gone.

Expect this kind of story to be more frequent as the economy continues to suffer because the courts may be the new way for people to generate income. Boy oh boy I can’t wait!

Comments

1. The site now concentrates on making affiliate marketing "simple". A lot of people talk about making money through affiliate marketing, but newbies have a hard time understanding how this is possible. With the new AffiliatePrograms.com, they solve this problem by creating an education section that explains how you can make money though affiliate programs.
2. Good affiliate programs are hard to come buy. Some pay out well while others don’t. Some convert well, and some don’t. Through the new AffiliatePrograms.com directory, they breakdown some of the best programs out there and provide details on things like payment structure, commissions, program reviews, affiliate manager’s email address, and even payment cycle. This makes it much more easier to find great programs.
3. If you have questions about affiliate marketing, now you can get them answered on the AffiliatePrograms.com forum. Through their new forum the affiliate community as well as experts are there to answer all of your questions.

Overall AffiliatePrograms.com has made some major improvements and is definitely worth checking out. They are doing tons of cool things such as throwing contests where you could win $4,000 by sharing a picture of your computer setup.

Comments

 The Satellite tab in the meantime received a checkbox which allows you to toggle off the display of labels on the map.

Anders, who discovered this change and shared it in the forum, notes that the new Terrain view “is mostly interesting to those of us who love geospatial data. The elevation looks like shadows.”

Anders notes another amendment to Google Maps, saying “search for a location and in the pop-up bubble, a Street View still image appears if there is Street View available for that location.” To reproduce this, you can search for e.g. N North Park Ave, Chicago, IL. Google Maps Street View allows you to view (pan and zoomable) panoramic photos of a limited number of US cities.

I can see this change live for other country’s Google Maps versions as well, like German maps.google.de, though as is often the case the map tiles don’t load properly here. Google Maps China on the other hand doesn’t have any satellite or terrain view, likely due to Google following censorship instructions from Chinese authorities.

[Thanks Anders!]

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Tag:

“I know that some of you have been experiencing problems loading accounts and are redirected to basic HTML view,” wrote the Guide on a Google Groups forum.  “We need your help to resolve this!”

That’s a little disconcerting, although, all in all, probably fair enough – better a public effort to fix things than a behind-the-scenes, we’re-screwed nervous breakdown.  Of greater concern is the empty inbox issue.  This doesn’t appear to be widespread – and “this,” by the way, is exactly what you’d imagine judging by the name of “empty inbox issue” – but it’s becoming a sort of scary tale.

All the more so because Google hasn’t acknowledged the existence of a problem on its end.  Of course, the company will be hard-pressed to prove a negative, and there may be nothing to admit.  Still, the reports were enough to make Tamar Weinberg write, “Thankfully, that’s not happening to me or any other forum members for that matter,” and I have to echo her sentiment.

Stay tuned – Google seems ready to discuss one of the two problems, anyway, so we’ll hopefully hear when it gets fixed.

Forums in Webmaster World and Digital Point Forum report a new November PageRank update. Most webmasters complain of Page Ranks that ave dropped, once again. As it is in similar fashion to the previous PR downgrade, many think its the newest PR update.

Andy beard has more information and even an image (look below) of the latest update.

On the other hand, there is also report that some webmasters have recovered from their low pagerank, after removing paid links and filing a reinclusion request.

Thread continues in Webmaster World and Digital Point Forum.

Comment …

Is the audience for this conference the more advanced veterans, or is it for the new audiences (and, well, corporations) that are trying to figure out (still) what to do in all this new media, including the NewTeeVee world?

The post, in essence, was written for the Valley bloggers and vidcasters, but not the rest of the country. This past week was the Forrest Consumer Forum in Chicago – almost every new media person should have been there (including PR firms and advertising firms) and see what is understood and what is not understood by companies that are trying to get social and new media. If you want a better take, check out the Forrester Blog for the conference, Jeremiah Owyang’ blog, what or even my posts – it showcases what is and is not clicking out there, and how companies are and are not getting it, but still trying.

We can sometimes forget that when we are in the Valley (or, well, why I am in Chicago right now, and looking beyond the Valley community to others).

For me, the NewTeeVee conference schedule looks great. When I was at a firm, I’d recommend it to clients that are trying to get a handle on what is going on out there, as well as clients that tangentially touch upon online video.

But, before we rush off to commend a company like Kyte.tv – a UGC channel that speaks very little to me, as I primarily love my television programming. And, before the Valley goes nuts over that one … read your own Twitters on Heroes or Battlestar Gallactica or any other hot show right now. We can all pretend to be too cool for old media … but are still there for certain instances of appointment television.

And, that’s what we need to remember in the Bay – those cheesy flyover states have a lot of power and a lot of pull. And, they are the hardcore communities we are trying to reach and get to use our stuff.

Comments

Solution 1: Write to them

You could locate an email address or look up their domain whois information and contact them directly to remove the link to the file on your webhost. If they’re linking to copyrighted content, you might get your legal department to send them the appropriate legal response.

This generally takes some time.

Solution 2: Remove/Delete the file

If you remove the file from your server, the file they’re linking to will show up as a broken link (generally a “404 Error – File Not Found”). This means you’ll need to put up another version of your file and link to that instead.

-

The disadvantage of these solutions are either:

• Can take time and the owners might drag their feet about taking action
• Causes inconvenience because your tech support will need to take time out to fix it

I like Solution 3 – Use the opportunity to generate traffic to your site.

Here’s one of my original posts “WhoIsAndrewWee forum launched”

(Click to view larger images)

Here’s an image hotlinker:

How do I know they’re hotlinking?

The address for the image points to my blog.

So to deal with the hotlinker, I can create a file with the same filename and create a link to my blog.

Take a look at:

And once it’s uploaded to my server, the hotlinker will still grab the file and…

You can then track your stats and see how many visitors flow over to your site.

It’s a simple and elegant solution. (and can bring decent social traffic too).

Comments

Moderator:

• Danny Sullivan, Conference Co-Chair, Search Engine Strategies San Jose

Speakers:

• Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
• David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
• Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media
• Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
• Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
• Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

The Organic Listings Forum session started sharp at 9 am and Greg Boser and Dave Naylor were both seen wearing sunglasses.

Here is the Q & A

Q: I was just curious about proximity of content and the source code being weighted heavier based on perceived importance. Do you think it really matters anymore? Do you think the engines can determine where the content is from the source codes?

Bruce: I’ve run experiments on my own site and moved code up and moved code down. I haven’t seen it impact rankings at all. But if you repeat the same stuff on the top of the page, we recommend that you take it off or reposition it. The table trick is something you can implement it (search for it on Google).

Followup: Can you expand upon externalizing scripts and its ability to

Greg: If your content is not towards the top, you’ve probably built a crappy website.

Dave: If you keep it really simple, keep in mind that spiders are stupid things. Don’t put a gazillion links there.

Q: I have a text driven site and I have dynamic pages that I need to optimize to get into the top 10 in most of them. I was wondering if there’s significant advantage of CSS over tables and if I should take that fight to my IT department.

Greg: Yes, you should, only because that’s how the web progressive and that’s how we roll these days. I don’t think there’s an SEO benefit but I think it’s important to follow and maintain some of those standards. If your website is using the font tag, that’s bad becasue it’s deprecated. Can you make an argument that you can rank way better? Not really. I wish that search engines did reward valid code but they don’t.

Dave: Way back, if you had a lot of elements inside of your table, the page wouldn’t render until everything loaded. It’s about user experience too.

Jill: The bottom line is that it’s not going to affect your SEO. If it’s a big deal to revamp your site, don’t do it.

Bruce: When I redid my site, I switched from tables entirely to CSS. I also made it W3C compliant. That may be something that emerges. I was moderating a panel at adTech and Google said that the cleaner the code, chances are the search engines will get a better idea of what your site is about. From that point of view, go to CSS because it’s simpler.

Q: I work for a medical publisher and we’re trying to make as much money as we can off our content. We put scientific articles up and try to sell them. We want to get indexed. I’m facing a problem with duplicate content because we cater to different environments (hospitals, education, etc.) and want that audience to see it in the results. How do you convince the indexers that they want to get it more than one time?

Todd: That’s going to be problematic.

Greg: Here’s the thing: it won’t work. I want things like that too. In the big picture, the engines are really good at duplicate detection. An example is the AP publishes the same story on hundreds of websites verbatim. When you do a search, only one of those websites show up in the results. That’s based on trust. If you see the same article over and over, it’s poor user experience. The question is: can you leverage the experience in other ways? We do something called conditional redirection (robots.txt file on steroids). We can redirect pages to one central location and you get the benefit of all random links to pages that won’t rank anyway.

Dave: If I just take your content and put it on my higher ranking website, whose website are they going to choose?

Followup: All my stuff is copyrighted.

Todd: That doesn’t mean anything! (Sad truth.) Having multiple copies and rank one version for one market and one for another market won’t work.

Followup: Can you tell my boss that?

Dave: They are all about most relevant.

Bruce: How many here syndicate content? This is the exact problem syndicators have. Some people get their content ripped off by affiliates. Your content is going to be indexed on the page that is most relevant to the query. The site that ranks highest is the one that has the highest authority. I had a client (Edmunds.com, the car guys) who would write their content and AOL would copy it. AOL would rank and not Edmunds. This took a lot of effort to straighten out.

Jill: The simple rule is one URL for any piece of content. That’s your best bet.

Q: We have an e-commerce site in the states and we want to launch in Europe. We want to host the sites in the US. Is there an issue with that?

Todd: The domain extension will do well for you. If it was sitting on a .com, then you need to start playing around with Ips.

Mike: You do have to have TLDs for a particular country but I’ve found that being hosted there helps as well.

Greg: The difference is also duplicate content in the US, UK, South Africa, and Australia. Be careful. Also, Google Local favors mobile content more than in the past. If at all possible, use the TLD or the IP that tracks to that country.

Mike: We’ve had a number of issues where it’s not possible for the client to host in their countries. But the best advice is to host in the other countries. Sometimes this isn’t feasible financially. I’ve said to Matt in the past that it would be a great idea to add a tool into Webmaster Central to put in an option where you can specify which country you’re targeting.

Greg: You should set up a reverse proxy. You can also do multiview DNS which is cloaking from a DNS level: you give a different IP based on who is trying to resolve the DNS. That can make the engine believe you’re in a different country that you’re not in.

Q: I am doing a good job at getting ranked on Google, MSN, and Yahoo, but I can’t figure out why I don’t rank on Ask.

Dave: Ask is a bit weird. Ask looks at communities and themes and areas, so you need to make sure that the authoritive sites in your industry are linking to you.

Todd: In the paid link panel, the big argument was that paid links are all bad because they cannot determine their relevancy. So people bought thousands of links on blog networks. It didn’t make sense. Ask really understands this; they really understand the relationship of different communities. I wouldn’t worry about it though. Let’s wait for them to come out with a new algorithm.

Mike: The original algorithm is subject specific and creating communities. There’s an algorithm based on PageRank that is keyword independent. There’s a keyword dependent algorithm as well. But I tend to find that the subject matter is really important.

Greg: Their search doesn’t scale. Several years ago, someone asked us – "How do you spam our engine?" And I said to them, "I’ll tell you as soon as you bring traffic."

Jill: They don’t bring traffic, so don’t worry.

Danny: Ask’s big thing was "when you do a search with us, we’re going to take a collection of documents that match the query you look for and we’re going to look at keyword relevance and look at the linkings within the documents to get relevance." To me, Ask gets funky because of the way their ranking algorithm.

Dave: Ask prioritizes the way that they spider – if you don’t have a robots.txt file, you go to the bottom of the list. Even if it’s empty, you’re at the bottom of the list.

Q: Our website is teardown.com and we disassemble electronics and we write competitive intelligence reports. We rank well for teardown, assembly, etc., but when we come out with a new report, we don’t rank highly that quickly after we publish a report.

Greg: The biggest threat to SEO is the CEO. I suggest you log into his account early in the morning and personalize the results so that he sees the rankings very highly.

Followup: I can’t do that because he stays up all night.

Greg: You should implement an RSS feed because it will attract Google’s bot for blogs and that has a lot to do with news search. It helps get you spidered a lot quicker.

Dave: Just put a blog up there with a blog footprint. It will rank you much quicker: an hour, within a day. If your CEO wants to see a new report and ranks immediately, ranks will help.

Mike: I read a whitepaper a few weeks ago about how search engines are able to rank news results faster from looking at RSS feeds. I think that generally speaking, if you have newsworthy content, you need an RSS feed.

Todd: You should also consider press releases.

Jill: How do you link to it when you put it out there? Is it easily accessible from your main navigation?

Followup: We put it on our main page and then put it on the content page.

Jill: That should help.

Bruce: We blog the conference and we actually do it in a pretty much live mode. Every one of our blog posts are spiderable within 15 minutes of being posted. (Hi Lisa!)

Q: I wanted to find out if DMOZ is a player anymore.

Jill: Submit and forget.

Followup: How do you get your listings out of there?

Greg: Just ignore it.

Jill: You can use your noodp tag to get your description out of it.

Followup: Why is Google still using it?

Danny: Google is using their directory but nobody goes to it. They aren’t dropping it because if they did, there’d be anger about how Google is dropping open source. So they have it. But the noodp metatag lets you stop using the title in your Google results.

Mike: The main reason why they use those directories is because it’s a directory with a human element. But nobody outside the SEO community knows what DMOZ is.

Bruce: Don’t worry too much about directories. Last year, I had a half a million unique visitors and last year only one visited me from the Yahoo directory.

Q: I have a client who has tens of thousands of pages on their website and they publish fresh content every day and they didn’t do a good job with sitemaps or 301s. The problem is that Google is removing some of these old listings, but Yahoo doesn’t flush out this old content. Do you have any tips for removing the old content?

Todd: Within SiteExplorer, they have a facility where you can instantly pull URLs out of the index.

Greg: Buy Tim Mayer something and ask him to fix your stuff.

Q: I’m a jewelry seller. I have very unique content and the site is optimized fairly well. I can’t figure out why I’m not ranked. I think that I’m being buried now because sites like Amazon are duplicating my content. What do I do?

Greg: That’s it. When you syndicate stuff, that’s a risk you’re taking. Amazon will always win over your site because it’s more trusted. They’re the only e-commerce site left in the world that ranks. That’s the downside of syndication.

Todd: If you’re going to syndicate content on that level, syndicate a different version of your content.

Q: We’re trying to protect our copyrighted material and we’re trying to put information in our PDF that says we’re the authoritative owner of the site. Does the search engine care?

Todd: No, that’s just a link.

Greg: Googlebot is very stupid. They take the content and throw it in a pile with the rest of the data on the Internet. They don’t rely on any input on you, the webmaster, because we all lie, cheat, and steal. They try to use as little signals as possible provided by you so they focus on authority, PageRank, etc.

Dave: When you think about it, Google doesn’t know that you’re lying or not.

Bruce: There’s an actual tag in HTML called the quote tag. It’s supposed to specify the authority of the source for a specific quote. We’ve been ramping sources in quote tags to point to the original content. Even though there’s no proof that anyone pays attention to that HTML, but as part as an overall project, that seems to have helped me. The only assumption here is that the people who duplicate your content actually points to you and uses that tag.

Danny: Your pain is well understood and shared by many people. It’s frustrating. We’ve waited many years for this but they’re focused on video copyright theft right now. All those issues on YouTube now are applicable to webpages. Aaron Wall had a good rant where he poked at Google and said they don’t care about copyright. The good news is that a lot more people are being vocal about duplicate content, so maybe we’ll get better tools in the future to verify the original source of the information.

Q: Bruce, you talked earlier about experimenting on your site with techniques, and I think that most of us do this. But do you recommend setting up a really clean test environment? If so, are there any tips?

Dave: There’s no such thing as a really clean test environment. If you’re going to do it, put it on a domain that isn’t worth keeping. Don’t do it on a quality domain ever.

Jill: If you’re not trying to push the envelope, use any blog and test how many keywords are indexed in meta descriptions, etc. You won’t get in trouble for that and you can learn a lot. That’s what I do.

Mike: You can reduce the risk by dealing with an affiliate (webmarketingnow.com)

Greg: The hardest thing is replicating the factors. When you do research and development, you can’t replicate authority and trust. You have to test specific theories. In the old days, we can rip government sites and do numerical find and replaces for common words (we’d replace the word census with 19427) and then we can find numeric combinations to find keyword density, etc. because there were no competing pages. We looked at thousands of factors. But you can’t draw conclusions from what you see anymore.

Todd: We run SEO for about 28 different brands and we get to look across 28-29 different types of websites in different verticals, but it’s very hard to do tests.

Bruce: We did simple tests. I own a lot of URLs. Nobody links to many of these and I have to put in content and then test it, and then I have to take the site down and wait for the data to be de-indexed so I can test again. You don’t want the first test to bias the second test or the third test.
Dave: In different industries, there are different quality signals in these industries. Consider the pharmaceutical industry. One test may work well for one industry but not for another.

Q: I’m looking for a tool to understand the optimization of my site. Do you have any tools that you’d like to share with us?

Todd: WebmasterCentral helps. You can use tools to find broken links.

Bruce: If you search for "free SEO tools," you can get 132 free tools. I think most of us have proprietary tools that we’ve written.

Q: I have worries about pages being scraped over the years to the point where snippets of your page are all over the web.

Greg: I apologize for that.

Followup: We always beat somebody who scrapes the whole page. But I’m beginning to see that it’s almost as though we’re being treated occasionally badly. Have you seen that?

Greg: Some industries are powered almost 100% by scrapers. Most of them will leave your links intact. You can build backlinks from this.

Followup: Most of these people are not taking everything. They’re taking snippets. Using a tool like Copyscape helps us find them, but they’re not in Google.

Greg: Google is doing a pretty good job. They’ll let you put AdSense on it though (laughter).

Dave: That’s actually changed. (Yay!) Google has gotten really clever about scraping data.

Q: We’re considering using a content management system and I’m worried about using iframes. Is that a problem?

Todd: There are many CMSes: you want to have good URL structure and no iframes.

Dave: Most SEOs use WordPress for their blogs. Check how to optimize WordPress.

Jill: You want to be able to customize your title tags and meta descriptions as well.

Dave: Does it use session variables? Those should be crossed off the list.

Todd: Look at people who use these CMSes and see how they’re being crawled to see if they are good. We have a client who pays about $500k a year to license the CMS and it propagates the same title over the entire site, so price isn’t a good indicator.

Q: We’re finding that we’re getting a lot of referrals from Google but Yahoo and MSN are not close. Do you find that there are issues with those engines?

Greg: There are demographic differences in the engines. It’s not always about volume. Benchmark if it’s a ranking issue or if it’s just because nobody uses it. The Yahoo index indexes everything really well but doesn’t rank it very well.

Bruce: It’s very specific to industry on Yahoo. Equally optimized sites may rank differently in different engines. There’s no real way of getting a site to rank everywhere without putting in a fair amount of effort.

Todd: MSN does have deep crawl issues. They admit to that.

Dave: I see that all the time. With Google, the amount of backlinks will determine how deep they let you index it. But in Microsoft, there’s no indicator to determine how deep they should go. Yahoo is a weird one because they can go crazy and end up with 10x the amount of pages in Google. I don’t know.

SOURCE: SEARCH ENGINE ROUND TABLE

Comments

“We’ve had an amazing response, with over 1,300 Australian schools registering,” writes Ashley Gorringe of the Doodle 4 Google Team.  And procrastinators haven’t even weighed in yet, as “[r]egistrations close in a little over a week.”

Gorringe goes on to point out the media attention this contest has received; B&T, iTWire, The Sydney Morning Herald, Softpedia, Frontiering Talk, the Art Forum, the Arts Hub, and Googlified have all made note of it, as have two departments of education.

Gorringe also notes an article appearing in the Brisbane Times, and it’s a duplicate of the SMH piece, but that’s still a pretty impressive collection.

Wondering what all the fuss is about?  You can read our old coverage, or, to summarize, Doodle 4 Google is a chance for Australian children to win prizes for themselves and their schools.  They just need to design a “Google doodle” that represents the Australian way of life.  It’s a nice idea, and as it turns out, it’s pretty popular.