Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Imagine being lost and almost out of gas, you get off at the next exit in hopes of finding an open gas station to ask for directions. The only gas station open is a self serve with no attendant inside to ask for directions. You begin to fill up on gas so you can find a nearest store to ask for help, low and behold you see the Google icon on the touch screen. First thought is damn I need to spend less time thinking about how I am going to increase my SERP’s with Google. Your second thought being why in the hell am I seeing there logo at a gas station. You pause, expecting to hear Matt Cutts voice come out and start talking to you about the nofollow tag and why hasn’t Danny or Barry told me about this damn gas pump before? I want to rank #1 at this gas pump now, this could be my chance!

The pump stops as your car is now full on fuel and the gas fumes fade away. Your mind returns from the quick day dream and you press the screen to see what it is. Low and behold it gives you driving directions! Yes you can now find your away back home and start to work on ranking #1 at the gas pump…oh wait, that was that stupid day dream. The gas pump does not offer the full scale search engine, and it does not allow you any custom direction searches. It simply gives you directions to local hotels, restaurants, shopping, entertainment, etc. The other neat thing about the system is it will NOT carry any Google advertisements, I mean why in the hell would I care about mortgage or viagra crap while pumping gas? Instead the system will allow you to include your own coupons to offer to the user. The coupons, along with your driving directions can be printed out right from the gas pump.

Gilbarco Veeder-Root is the company behind this new gas pump system and they are scheduled to start with 3,500 of these Google Gas Pumps as stated by CNN. No date has been made public as to when the first Google gas pumps will be introduced to the public, but I bet some black hatters will try and figure out how to coupon cloak now! bwaahhahahaaahaaa…

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Today we were witness to a major shift made by Google and there PR. As you have now probably read, several high profile websites have had there PR reduced drastically overnight without any warning. I first read about it this morning on Andy Beard’s site where he has a small list of compiled sites and there effected PR numbers. It has been all over Sphinn today as well, with everyone trying to decipher why the sudden change by Google. Jill Whalen wrote a nice article over at High Rankings that makes for a good read. However I do not feel that this sudden change is just over paid links, I also feel it deals with inter linking with other sites. I believe these changes were also made manually. There is no new algorithm out that has made these changes. If that was the case, then why didn’t everyone else’s websites see a drop in there PR? It isn’t the case, so we can put a nail in the coffin on the idea that it is a network wide change by Google and all sites are now on a new PR system.

So I am sure we can all agree that this deals with sites selling links that do not use the nofollow tag. There are the obvious sites that have there sponsored links section somewhere on the front page. What about sites that say they have never sold a link, but were still penalized? I believe they fall into the realm of inter linking with other sites, or what I will just call the Google Fog List. GFL for short, which we could also interpret as “Good F’ing Luck” getting your PR back. You can get on there fog list by simply linking to other sites that have been hit with a penalty for selling links. If your site links enough times to them then that would cause Google to start looking at you.

Right now Google is on the top of the world looking down through the fog clouds at everyone else like a puppet master. Well when they start looking at how many times you have linked to these other sites that sell links, they bend down into the fog and start penalizing you as well. Almost like a link farm system where sites are all connected somehow with a lot of links. Popular blogs like SERoundtable, Problogger, Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Any Beard, and Copyblogger have all seen there PR drop. Some of these sites obviously sell links, and others do not. However the sites that do not sell links might have enough links pointing back to another site that was penalized, thus they to are now being flagged by Google. It goes back to watching who you link to, if you link to bad sites then you are running the risk of being penalized yourself. Also a lot of these sites penalized sell quit a few ad spaces, some even for text-link-ads so does that play a role in the mix? It could be part of it, in order to demand higher dollar for your advertising space the higher the PR the more people will pay for that ad space. I do not work for Google so I can say these are the definite reasons, just my opinions.

I personally feel that right now this change is just in PR alone. So far none of the sites have mentioned a drop in there SERP’s or there traffic. It is a warning shot from Google, either clean up your act up, or the next time we will drop you in the SERP’s. I could be wrong, maybe this is just phase 1 and in the coming days phase 2 kicks in and we start to see these sites drop all of a sudden. So I would love to have some type of answer from Matt Cutts in regards to this pretty big shuffle today, question is, we he make one? As Jill said, let’s get the popcorn and get ready to watch the show. I personally can care less about the green bar and what it has labeled for PR. I will continue to optimize my clients sites for the results they are looking for, last I checked increasing there PR was not on the to do list.

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Most people have heard of these two names in one way or another and what they do online to make money.  It is all about marketing, you market the right product to the right people you will make money online.  Well the two of them are having a friendly battle of RSS subscription wars.  Whoever has the most subscribers by the end of the month will be declared the winner.  Only thing at stake would be there pride and ego’s, oh and the loser will have to link on there site stating why the winner is better then me.  Shoemoney has posted his John Chow VS ShoeMoney - Rss Subscription Challenge article and John has post his John Chow VS ShoeMoney - Rss Subscription Challenge article, John added a twist though by throwing in competition for his readers.   

Now some people are probably thinking either this is a waste of time for them both, or that these to are stroking there online ego’s.  I don’t think it is either of the two, I think it is marketing genius at work.  Let’s go ahead and look at a few things first shall we.  Neither of them will probably spend that much money on this challenge, shoemoney has even said he does not spend any money advertising his blog.  Any publicity they get out of this weather it is good or bad will result in more subscribers which is what they are both after anyhow.  Since they have both posted this on there blog, they will end up getting new subscribers from each other.  In the end it will be a win win situation for them both because there RSS subscription count will go up. 

There are a few things I have already seen with comments on both sides in regards to creating multiple email accounts and signing them all up for one feed.  Who is to say those Google account makers can’t whip out a few thousand accounts to slowly subscribe to a feed.  I do not think that either of these two guys would do that, they probably do not have the time and don’t care.  Remember in the end they both just want more subscribers to market there ads to and make more money. 

John has already started a contest to basically see who can do the work for him, which is smart marketing.  Work smarter and not harder is a phrase we have all heard, John is just putting it to more use.  He is giving away prizes if you sign up to his RSS feed, you have a chance at winning a book.  If you blog about him and tell your readers to signup to his feed your site has a chance at winning free RSS text ads for a month.  The final prize being an iPod nano and a free John Chow review goes to whoever gives him the most creative way to get more subscribers.  In the end John is trying to have his readers do all the marketing for him by giving away a few free things. Jermy on the other hand has remained someone quit so far, but I will not put anything past him by any means.  We will just have to wait and see if what tactics he uses, if he makes them public.

All in all neither of these two will be loser’s, yea so one will end up with more subscribers in the next 30 days then the other but who cares.  They both will see a big jump in traffic to there site, which in return gives them more people to throw there ads at and  make them more money.  I am not sure how big this will get, it might get huge and make a wave or it might just stay a swell and disappear.  Who knows, all I know is to me it is a great marketing tactic.  Take a friend or even contact a competitor and stir up a contest to generate some more juice to your website.  After all we want traffic to our site and creative thinking, crazy marketing tactics, buzz around the blogosphere are ways to get it.

 

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.  If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Yesterday I was playing around with MSN and some of the new features the site has to offer with the results page. The screen shot above is from a video search I did for the term sports cars. Instead of just showing an image from the video, go ahead and put your mouse over the thumbnail and the video will begin to play for you. This way you have the option to preview the video first before enlarging the view and having to load the next page.

My daughter had fun searching for her favorite TV show and cartoon characters, it was easy for her to navigate through and watch what she wanted to without clicking on to many things and getting lost. I personally like the new style that have implemented into the results pages for not only the video, but the images as well. You have the option to check the feedback on the picture and also add it to your scratchpad if you like. Is this the new sign of MSN coming back to life, I highly doubt it, but they sure are going to try to catch up to Yahoo and Google.

For those of you just now crawling out of your cave to hear about Webmaster Radio, then now is as good as time as any then. Webmaster radio is headed up by Daron Babin, his wife Brandy and associates which over the years has brought us a great online radio station. There new website was released and the look and feel is so much better in my opinion. To go with the new layout, they have now included paid membership for only $28.73/month. Kind of a strange figure to charge each month, but hey whatever works for them to help pay the bills. In the past everything on the site was free, including the ability to download a lot of the previously recorded shows. By adding this monthly fee, it allows them to expand and offer better services as well as pay there hosts for the shows. In the past all the live shows that were done, the host or hosts were never paid because the funds were not there.

You can see the show line up here, as well as participate in the chatroom or join there online community. I have listened to webmaster radio for almost a year now and have learned a lot in this short amount of time. I was sadden to see the old website go for I did have a small (very small) hand with that site. Ok so all I did was help make a little flash button for Daron a while back, no big deal. I must say though I think the new website has a much cleaner and professional look to it then the dark purple and black from before. I also encourage anyone who has never tuned into some of the programs to check out there lineup and catch some of the live shows. Now on a different note with that monthly fee, when will see an affiliate program any time soon Daron?

Visit Webmaster Radio today or download there desktop application.

Today a client who uses 1and1 hosting called in complaining that they could not send any email to a Hotmail account and wanted to know why. I confirmed there outgoing mail server with them, had them send me test messages to other accounts, (not MSN or Hotmail) and there mail was delivered fine. So I had them forward over the returned mail and it said the following:

SMTP error from remote server after MAIL command:
host mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.245.72]:
550 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. We recommend enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail lists. For enrollment instructions, please refer to:
http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx#JMRPP. For additional information about Microsoft’s technical guidelines, please refer to:
http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx

At first I thought well there IP address on there network is being blocked by hotmai, for security reasons I will not list that information here. I went to spamhaus and did not see there network IP on the list, then I remember though that MSN/Hotmail does not use spamhaus to block out IP addresses. They have there own “in house” spam filter system that they use. So my next thing was to check and see what other websites are on the same IP as my clients, a simple check at MyIPneighbors.com will do just fine. There were only two other websites that is on the same shared IP, so I was now going to call 1and1 and see about moving my clients website to another shared server so they would receive a different IP address. I figured moving it to a different server and changing the IP of the domain name would do the trick, boy was I wrong.

1and1 makes you use there mail servers to send and receive your email, so by default you have to use smtp.1and1.com as your outgoing mail server. Most of the time hosting companies allow you to use mail.yourdomain.com or smtp.yourdomain.com as the mail server. This was not the case, so moving the domain to another server/IP would not solve the problem. After speaking with a manger there, I was told that mail server is blocked completely by MSN/Hotmail and at this time the only way to send mail to those people was to use the mail server of your ISP. I was speechless for a moment, this big of a hosting company has there entire network blocked by MSN…WOW! They have known about this issue for several weeks and I was told they are working with MSN to get this problem resolved. There was no time frame giving for when the problem might be resolved, I just hope soon.

So how would this effect any marketing you are doing with a website. Well for starters if you use 1and1 hosting for any of your websites, you will not be able to email to MSN/Hotmail. There could be other domains, but currently I am still trying to figure out who else is blocked. If you run an auto responder, using 1and1 could put a dent in your marketing efforts due to the fact your auto response will not get delivered. If you run a forum, any passwords, confirmation letters, etc. will not be delivered to a MSN/Hotmail account. Who will stay at the forum if they cannot receive any emails from you in regards to changing there password or even worse when they sign up they never hear back from you. I am in no way saying not to use them as your hosting company, I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention that they are currently experiencing problems getting mail delivered to MSN/Hotmail. If you know of other web hosting companies that have a similar problem please post them here so all are aware of it.

So you have always wanted to try Yahoo search marketing, but never wanted to spend more money on advertising that you think would not work for you. Are you stuck on Google like glue to paper? Well here is your chance to try out Yahoo’s search network for free. I am not sure how long this offer will be around for, but you can try it out now if you like. If you have tried Yahoo out before in the past without success, then here is your chance to try again without it costing you anything. More so a way to have Yahoo try and get Google customers, but $199 free is a great way to start.

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/choose.php?o=US1893

As of this post, the overture keyword suggestion tool no longer shows results for any keyword you type in.  The last update to the database was done in January of 2007, so it was only a matter of time before the service would be stop working all together.  I know this tool was used by a lot of people in the SEM industry when it was being updated every month, I know I did.  Now that the tool no longer displays any results, I hope this is a true wake up call to those doing there keyword research.  Up until last week I continued to see posts of people telling others to use the overture keyword tool for there keyword research, why though?  The data was nine months old, to me that is far to long to use and consider accurate in most markets.  Now the sad day has come and the tool is dead, lets hope that Yahoo has something in the works for a new keyword tool, it was a blessing to any SEM to have in there bag of tools.

I would like to congratulate both Shoemoney and Dillsmack on the successful sale of AuctionAds. It was confirmed on Shoemoney’s site today that Media Whiz had bought them out. It was one hell of an idea from the start in my opinion to have Ebay auction ads displayed since it had never been done before. It originally started out as Shoemoneyads and that system was later transformed into what we see as AuctionAds. Jeremy has a pretty big following on the internet, so it was a sure bet that this project would succeed. The sale price had not been disclosed, but I am sure it was a good amount which was well deserved. I can’t wait to see what future projects the two of them are working on.

There have been good and bad things said about auctionads, but then again how often do you ever hear 100% positive feedback on something?  Between Auctionads going down from time to time and the stats not being fully accurate for some people, they still managed to pull in over 25,000 members in only a 5 or 6 month time frame.  I knew though when I first read that Jeremy was starting AuctionAds it would grow fast because he is such a well known figure in this industry and the blogging world.  To start out, AuctionAds was paying 100% to it’s advertisers, so who in the hell wouldn’t take that deal?  I know on his talk show Jeremy mentioned about not making money off of the site really, however the goal was to get as many members as possible and hope for a buyout.  That was the end result today, so once again congratulations guys on the successful sale.

Yes you read the subject title correctly, however Digg did not just come out and say it. Digg announced this morning on the Digg blog by Kevin Rose that they have signed on with Microsoft as there new partner to sell and serve the ads on digg. It is similar to the deal Facebook signed with Microsoft last year. It goes on to mention this deal will give them a better technology platform to keep up with the growth of Digg. That tells me that Microsoft will be buying Digg here soon, which will bring in a good chunk of change for the user data and traffic.

From the Digg Blog:

Hey everyone – I wanted to give you a heads-up before the official announcement is made later today. We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year.

This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth. Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development. Federated Media, which has been an awesome partner for the last year and a half, will continue working with Digg focusing on integrated sponsorships and custom programs like the Arc project in labs.

It’s important to say that we’re as focused as ever on a great user experience. So, no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered.

New (big) features coming soon…

Kevin

So how much do you think Microsoft will pay for Digg.com?