Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Sphinn opened it’s doors on July 12, 2007 to the general public. It is a social networking site geared towards the search engine and internet marketing crowd. Like Digg, Bumpzee, PlugIM you can vote on a story that you like. We can add it to the long list of social media sites that are already out there. Danny Sullivan is behind the creation of Sphinn so I expect this to take off like everything else. His company has simply created a new alternative for search engine marketers to come to besides some of the other powerhouse social sites. There have been a few debates over the site being good or bad, I can care less however since I wasn’t going to judge it until trying it out. Before making any judgments or stating opinions from what you have read, I urge you to take sphinn for a spin! Anyhow, I signed up for an account last week and have some mixed reviews.

Ciaran posted over at SEOmoz that Sphinn is nothing more then a popularity contest. I do agree with him on this one, there will be writers who will get sphunn just because of who they are. I bet there are people who do not even read the post and just sphinn it. People in the search industry like Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Venessa Fox will of course get more “sphinns” then anyone else, but to some extent I expect that. These people have there followers who will stick to them like glue no matter what they write about. Advice I have for everyone else is to just ignore it and write your own posts for the rest of the sphinn community to read. Downside the speed of the site, loading time seems slow for such a new site that doesn’t have as much traffic as it will in the coming months. I sure hope they fix the speed issue, loading is slower then most sites.

The good thing about Sphinn though is it is only for search and online marketing. This makes the website a great source for news from around the industry. You can see what is the “popular” topics of the day and week so you do not miss out on anything. Yes I am sure you can get the same news from a forum you read or other blogs like this one, but sphinn makes it just as easy. It is still in beta phase so bugs will get worked out. So far though the past week has been good and I expect to rub elbows with the rest of the search marketing world and introduce myself. This site just needs to get it’s feet wet with the rest of the industry. Anyhow I wish Danny and Sphinn the best of luck with this new project.

If you haven’t already noticed, I added the sphinn plugin to the blog to see how it goes. You can get the plugin from Michelle MacPhearson’s blog, and it is very easy to install.

As reported by Jill Whalen at Highrankings.com Google is coming out with a new tag, “Unavailable_after” which is similar to the “Expires” meta tag. The new tag by google will simply tell them that after this date to no longer crawl the page and no longer index it in there SERP’s. I personally do not see a good reason for this tag as it results in a page no longer being indexed by Google. If I am offering a promotion and I know the page will not be any good after a certain date I will just make a redirect to an offer, service, product that is similar. You do not want to lose the traffic from that promotional page, try and keep the visitor there because they could be interested in something else you have to offer.

Ok so I see Mahalo.com is the creation of Jason Calacanis, who is well known in the industry. He has come up with the concept of having a human edited search engine. I understand it is still in a very early development stage “Alpha”, but please tell me how this will be better then other search engines? It is uses people to edit the listings and who the results in order. It isn’t a search engine, it’s a mix between a directory and search engine. Lets call it a SEARECTORY! I personally do not see this going very far at all. The DMOZ project was a human edited directory that turned out to be one big load of crap. Submit your website, and wait an eternity for an editor to review it. Well now we have this so called search engine that is human edited for better results. Currently there are no advanced search features, you can only see what the editors put into the system and the results can be manipulated by the editors at any time.

Mahalo will have to hire a lot of employee’s to keep this site running and up to date on the latest search trends. Which will cost a good amount of money to keep going. I don’t think Jason is looking to take over as the new Google or Yahoo but give viewers another means of finding quick answer to there question. Good luck on the endeavor Jason, I support the effort and hope the service is a success for you.

June 1^st the death of Google Arbitrage?

Do any of you buy into this? Yea I thought so, neither do I. Here is the thing, there are sites out there that are specifically made for Google adsense (MFA Sites). I believe Google is trying to find ways to basically shut these sites down. The MFA sites are bad for the publisher’s who are paying for the advertising and Google is trying to weed these out of there system. I have not received an email in regards to my account being shut down. It reminds me of the “Can Spam Act” that was put into law years ago to try and stop email spam. Yea ok that worked out real well. Basically you can still send out emails to “Opt-in” subscribers, on a legitimate network, not hiding your IP, using a real from address, (keep in mind a legit network, real from address = greater chance of the email being delivered) offering a removal option and displaying your contact information in the email. In my opinion it is just a way for them to keep tabs on who is bulking and who isn’t. It took the bulk emailer’s who were using out of country proxy’s, smtp relay’s or setting up servers in china to mail through DNS. For the most part it did shut down some of the spam, but it sure as hell didn’t stop it. Companies saw the profits that could still be made, the price of email leads went even higher and companies continued to buy them from the bulkers.

Now Google is shutting down accounts in hopes to clean up the content for its advertisers. I believe it is just there way of doing a little summer cleaning and trying to push the little people out of the business of trying to make money through adsense arbitrage. It’s the same thing the Can Spam Act did, just cleaned up the email spammer’s and put the little people out of business. The big players will still be there, the ones that spend a lot of money on adwords in return make a lot of money on adsense. With accounts being shut down/banned this opens the doors for others to take over and profit more with Google arbitrage. Less competition can make for higher profits if the correct niche is found. Yes I know its always that way, but with thousands of people now banned you can find it without as much competition.

I do not feel this will be the end all for Google arbitrage, its impossible to stop it. Your taking a business practice that has been around for centuries and trying to stop it? Buy a keyword for $0.10 and sell the traffic you hope it generates for a higher profit. Ok, buy a piece of property for $20,000 and sell it for $35,000 a month later if you can. Does that mean your going to get banned for trying to make a profit? Yea I didn’t think so, the concept is still there for Google arbitrage, just the way you go about doing is going to change a little bit.

It has been said several times that Microsoft will purchase Yahoo! and together they will try and take over the search engine world from Google. Right now Google dominates the search engine market, in the past Yahoo! has tried to play catch up as has MSN when they launched there MSN Live. The only way I see anyone able to catch and drag Google back to reality is for them to join forces. Yahoo! has already announced it is canceling services like Yahoo Photo and Yahoo Auctions. Are they down scaling and cutting off dead weight to make a company move easier? Maybe there cutting out the dead weight to make themselves look better for Microsoft to just buy them.

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