WebProNews » Seven

Senate: No Internet Tax For Seven Years

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:15:19 +0000

The moratorium on taxing Internet access will continue for another seven years, as the Senate reached a compromise days before the existing ban expired.

State governments who are salivating at the prospect of smacking Americans with Internet access taxes will have to get back to trying that old, boring task of balancing budgets, something their constituents have to do all the time.

A Reuters report said Senate members who wanted a shorter ban, and those who wanted to make it permanent, reached the agreement ahead of the November 1st expiration of the 1998 ban.

The House of Representatives had already agreed on a compromise, but only for a four-year ban. Congress will have to reconcile its differences and send something along to the White House for President Bush to sign.

Without a ban in place, state would likely look to the millions of Internet-using people and businesses as a ready stream of new revenue to exploit. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) praised the extension, saying it “has helped the Internet expand and has protected entrepreneurs from burdensome taxes.”

Seven Reasons Why Your Website Exploded

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:49:22 +0000

Several common website errors may give webmasters fits, not to mention site visitors when seeing them appear online.

It’s easy to tell when a website isn’t working. The browser usually displays some kind of error message. Though it is 2007, some people may not know how to interpret these best.

Royal Pingdom posted the top seven problems webmasters and site visitors alike may have encountered. Pingdom’s data comes from their monitoring of thousands of websites; this particular sample comes from 160 million test results over a 30-day period leading up to October 19.

‘Unable to connect to server’ occurred 62.4 percent of the time, where visitors simply could not reach the online resource. That was the most common problem, which Pingdom noted could happen due to network outages, server downtime, or possibly firewall issues.

‘DNS lookup problems’ only popped up about 9.71 percent of the time. Problematic DNS configuration usually causes this error, but in the case of the CA.gov domain, Federal domain admins at GSA in Washington inflicted the DNS problems for that domain.

Following these two top errors were ‘connection refused by server’, ‘timeout while trying to load the web page’, ’503 Service unavailable’, ’500 Internal server error’, and ’502 Bad gateway’. As Pingdom noted, some 80 percent of webserver problems were unreachable servers, DNS errors, and server load conditions.

Seven More Questions About SEO

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:06:36 +0000

Rand Fishkin followed up his original ten questions (plus bonus) on SEO knowledge with the answers, and some new questions from Danny Sullivan for everyone’s perusal.

Seven More Questions About SEO

If you knew about the big four search engines, the concept of the ‘long tail’, and Alexa’s fatal flaw, you got through the easy questions without a problem.

Rand provided a follow-up as promised to his original SEO quiz. He answered the original questions, like listing the three most important elements in the section of a typical HTML document (and listing one that really isn’t that important):

Title, Meta Description and Meta Robots are the big 3. Although Meta Robots isn’t essential to have, it’s certainly able to control spider and search activity. Meta keywords is another common answer, but it would rank as a distant 4th, as our experiments show that none of the major engines will rank a page for a keyword that is listed only in the meta keywords tag.

Danny offered some suggestions for another quiz. His seven questions proved taxing enough to drive Rand to the Internet to find a couple of answers. Here’s the seven questions Danny posed to the audience:

How do you seize control of a local listing on Google? On Yahoo? What fields can you change? How do you add a picture?

What elements are important to ranking well in Google Video and YouTube?
How do you get into Google News? In particular, what unique structure do your URLs need to reflect to even be considered?
Google Blog Search — full text or indexing off whatever you put out in feeds?
How do you submit to Google Product Search? Yahoo Product Search?
Do you have to have a mobile web site to be in Google Mobile? Yahoo Mobile?
How do you know if Google is personalizing your web results?

Think of it as a warmup to SES San Jose coming up this month.

Seven Ways To Manage Your Wiki-Rep

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:36:09 +0000

Because of its high ranking in the search engine results, Wikipedia has become as necessary a place to be listed as the phone book. But a user-edited source can backfire when unfavorable information pops up in those same results, especially if the information is untrue.

And so, we have a new beast to tackle: Wikipedia reputation management. For all that’s been said about the site, for all the colleges that have banned it, it’s a powerful, powerful presence.

Wikipedia administrator (more like fact cop) Duvora, who makes a habit of confronting naughty editors, has put together what might be considered the canon of Wiki-rep management.

Those who feel they have been the victim of malicious vandalism aren’t helpless, there are numerous ways to go about fixing the problem. The obvious answer is edit the entry yourself, but that can be, potentially, problematic, as it can get you flamed by users or land you in an edit war.

Duvora, in two lengthy posts at SearchEngineLand detailing cases where editing and counter-editing were both necessary, explains that there are numerous channels that those with online reputation concerns can go through.

The first line of defense, she says, is to email the Wikimedia Foundation directly or via the Open Ticket Request System.

After that, here are seven options search marketers and reputation managers should keep handy:

1.    Put the article on the Watchlist
2.    Notify the appropriate WikiProject
3.    Notify the Counter-Vandalism Unit
4.    Request Page Protection
5.    Contact Administrator Intervention Against Vandalism
6.    Refer to Biographies of Living Persons Noticeboard
7.    For urgent problems, notify Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents

Duvora goes into great detail in both her posts at SearchEngineLand.

Yahoo Image Search Incorporates Flickr Photos

Doug Caverly — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:38:28 +0000

Flickr is owned by Yahoo, and now the two operations are closer than ever- photos from Flickr have been integrated into Yahoo Image Search.

“Yahoo Image Search is serving over 300 million Flickr photos in its query results via a live feed from Flickr,” reports Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker, “so once an image is uploaded to a Flickr account, it’s available via Yahoo Image Search too.” Baker compares that to just 3.7 million Flickr photos that are available through Google Image Search.

An added bit of niftiness in this new development: “The Flickr photos in Yahoo Search will be marked by Flickr account name, and searchers can click on the name to view and search all photos by that Flickr user.”

For example, the first result for “Csaba Csere” (the editor-in-chief of Car and Driver) is a photo from the user “dck47.” Now, click on that name, and I’ll give you a moment to peruse dck47’s photos of a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera . . .

Right. Back on topic. Yahoo appears to have put a lot of effort into Flickr lately – in the past month, the photo-sharing site has added support for seven languages, addressed issues of censorship, and been named heir to Yahoo Photos’s throne. The results are impressive.

There’s still room for improvement, however. “Ideally, it would also be nice to also be able to search or rank images via tags and other attributes in Yahoo Image Search,” writes Baker. And in a perfect world, that Lambo would be silver, not orange.

PPC Traffic; International YouTube; Safer Results

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:46:24 +0000

SERoundtable looks at a WebmasterWorld thread to find out What Type of Traffic Can You Expect from Yahoo Ads Compared to Google Ads.

The results are pretty surprising: for identical campaigns, with higher bids at Yahoo, Google still sent 30 times the traffic that Yahoo sent. The anecdote is most likely an anomaly. Other commenters on the thread note that they would expect to see Google sending 4-5 times the amount of traffic that Yahoo does.

paidContent is covering Google’s Press Day in Europe with YouTube Launching Nine Country Sites; UK, Brazil, Japan Included. The other six countries are France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Poland and Holland.

paidContent described the country-specific pages as having unique content on them for now, but they later will evolve to include “narrowing ratings and comments, as well as the main video, channel, categories and community sections, down to a country-specific level.” Several of the countries, most notably France, have home-grown movie sites which may prove to be stiff competition for YouTube.

Interestingly, this comes exactly one week after Flickr announced its expansion into seven new languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, overlapping with YouTube’s expansion this week (Flickr is also rumored to launch a Japanese site soon). Picture vs. movies–who will win?

Finally, eMarketer reports on McAfee’s latest search engine report card: Search Engine Results Getting Safer. We’ve covered the same survey’s previous results in May 2006 and December 2006. The improvement has mainly been in the sponsored results, but paid listings are still 2.4 times more “dangerous” (likely to lead to adware, malware, viruses, etc.) than organic results. Four out of 100 search results link to dangerous sites.

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Seven Good PPC Habits Has One Surprise

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:57:07 +0000

John Ellis’ list of the Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertisers includes one that runs counter to the promises made by many SEMs.

Seven Good PPC Habits Has One Surprise

The list Ellis published on Memorial Day may have been missed by some people, even though it is showing up on quite a few blogs.

He talks about controlling spending on campaigns by adjusting bid amounts instead of the daily budget, and the need to have a negative keyword list to eliminate customers who are likely to be non-converting.

Point number five may draw a lot of confused looks from search marketers:

5.- Avoid #1 Bottom line: The number one position is a bad ROI. Often times that can also be said about the #2 and #3 position. The traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers, they are just researching. Serious buyers WILL go to the 3, 4, 5 position. When the consumers are ready to buy, they will be back. Be patient.

Ellis doesn’t think the effort and expense to grab that top spot will payoff well for marketers. Sites like Google aren’t going to welcome that kind of thinking; what if people started settling for top five placement for ads instead of bidding hard for the top spot?

Add your thoughts below the article. Is it time to stop playing Google’s money game, as Ellis indirectly hinted?

Top 7 Lists Lead The Pack On Digg

Doug Caverly — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:47:20 +0000

Lists are good, but if they become too long, readers are liable to lose interest. Too short, and no one will think your 25-word post is worth reading. Top 10 lists have become the norm – but why? Russ Jones of the Google Cache combed through over 2,500 Digg stories to see if lists with more (or fewer) points do better.

The result: if you can’t think of ten different things to say, it’s not a problem. “7 is the magic number, it seems the most comfortable – not exhausting but not incomplete,” writes Jones. “Perhaps our attention span is shorter than ever?”

“Top 7” lists actually scored a 59% success rate, as measured by Jones, compared to 39% for the traditional Top 10 compilations. Marketing Pilgrim’s Jordan McCollum, who noticed Jones’s experiment long before I did, also points out that “success” was defined as making the front page of Digg.

Top 12 lists were fairly high achievers, then, registering at a 47% success rate. “Perhaps 12 feels ‘comprehensive’ and ‘complete,’” suggested Jones. Top 12 lists were also the longest lists he measured, which leaves me wondering how a 13- or 14-item list would have performed.

How did some other, lower numbers fare? Well, a Top 3 or Top 4 barely qualifies as a list – don’t bother unless you’re happy with less than a 10% rate of success. Top 8 lists did even worse, for some reason. Top 5 and Top 11 lists achieved an equal success rate of 29%.

These statistics could become very useful to Digg users – after all, with 2,500 different pieces in the running, it’s unlikely that one extra-interesting Top 7 list could have skewed Jones’s data set. But there’s also the theory that measuring something changes it . . . If a flood of Top 7 lists ensues, don’t expect to see their success continue for long.

Improving Your Blog’s Stickiness

Jordan McCollum — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:56:35 +0000

Blogs are a unique challenge for site stickiness. Even your most loyal readers may only spend one or two minutes skimming your home page and “bounce.” How sticky is your blog? Nate Whitehill offers seven tips to improve your blog’s stickiness. A couple of my favorites:

Offer full RSS feeds (my latest pet cause)

Visible feed button

Use the Related Posts plugin

There are also a few good suggestions in the comments: a top posts page and offer the option to subscribe by e-mail.

It looks to me like Marketing Pilgrim is doing all of the things on Nate’s list! What do you think is an appropriate goal for blog stickiness? How do you work on your blog’s stickiness?

via ProBlogger

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Must Reads in Search Marketing for This Week

Manoj Jasra — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:49:38 +0000

Tomorrow is Good Friday and therefore a stat holiday so I am wrapping up this short work week with the most interesting stories I have read in the Industry:

– Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss writes about: Google’s Gargantuan Footprint

- SE Round Table looks at the age old question: How Important to Search Engines is Site Age?

- Technorati showing off their growth in the last few months, but is Technorati Looking to Sell?

- You should write an ebook by Seth Godin (his explanation using his squidoo page)

- Matt Cutts talks about More April Foolishness

- Is Jeremy Zawodny saying goodbye to Bloglines? Check out: My Dearest Bloglines

- Seven free resources to get started with Google Web Site Optimizer on Web Analytics Demystified

- John Chow explains how to Make Money On The Internet – March 2007

- Podcast: Compete Releases New Features (Visitor Attention metrics)

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