I received an email this morning announcing new features in the KeywordDiscovery keyword research tool by Trellian. These additions include eBay Shopping Keywords , Data Quality & Skew, News Search and Market Share Analysis.
I have seen it happen time and time again. The decision is made to redesign the company web site. There could be a variety of reasons for this – the site needs a fresh design to bring it up to date, the company is looking to create a more user friendly experience, a new content management system (CMS) is being added or some other reason. However, in he process regard for search engine visibility is not included in the overall plan. The new site is launched and everyone waits for the traffic to pour in but for some reason it doesn’t. In fact, traffic declines. Sales drop. The CEO is demanding answers. What happened and who’s fault is it?
A bill amending the Communications Act of 1934 was passed by the House yesterday as reported by ClickZ. The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), H. R. 5319, was introduced in an attempt to protect school kids from online sexual predators as well as obscene and pornographic imagery. According to the bill, sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Michael Fitzpatrick, schools and libraries receiving federal funding would be required to bar minors from visiting commercial social networking sites and chat rooms, unless they were under adult supervision. Adults would be able to access such sites in those settings, however.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Business.com’s practice of using “nofollow” attributes on editorial listings within their directory but did not use them on the paid listings, a backwards procedure for what the attribute was originally intended for. Today they have decided to stop using the attribute altogether.
Via Threadwatch, it appears that Business.com has attached the rel=”nofollow” attribute to its editorial listings. At the same time, paid listings (the ones that have four additional links underneath them) do not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. A bit of a controversial move on Business.com’s part seeing that this attribute was originally intended for paid links and not editorial type of links.
A new extension is available for the Firefox browser called SEO For Firefox. It has been developed by Aaron Wall, famous for his SEOBook e-book publication and also his half ownership of Threadwatch, a popular blog style forum. According to Jason Lee Miller of Web Pro News, The tool pulls data from a number of sources to offer search engine marketers “a more holistic view of the competitive landscape.”
On Friday, Google will try to convince a judge to dismiss a lawsuit that challenges the heart of the company’s business: its methods for indexing and ranking Web pages. KinderStart.com originally filed suit against Google in March alleging that it suffered crippling financial harm after its Web site got dropped from the search engine’s index. This is not the first lawsuit of its kind as I recently wrote about another similar lawsuit filed over positioning in Google’s index.
I have been practically living on Craigslist and eBay for the last couple of days searching for a couple of vehicles for my son and daughter. This experience has lead me to ask the question over and over again, “Do people really want to sell this?”. They either do not provide enough information or do not include a way to contact them. If you are able to contact them, they don’t follow through.
Google has fended off a lawsuit filed by a California man who claimed his Web site rankings precipitously and unfairly dropped. The plaintiff, Mark Roberts, who runs two protein drink sites (including MrProtein.com), sued Google for breach of contract. Huh? What contract?
Many webmasters have noticed that since the full implementation of the Big Daddy software update to the Google algorithm, that fewer and fewer of their pages have been finding their way into the index. What could be causing this? Is Google finally cleaning up the quality factor of their index, riding it of pages and even sites that don’t meet new quality standards?
