A new social search site called ChaCha.com will pay people to answer questions online. CNet reports that ChaCha.com will pay what they call “guides” up to $10 per hour as they search for Web sites that contain answers to user questions. Additionally guides can invite other guides to the site and earn 10 percent of what the invited guides earn.
It is a question I pondered a while back – does a link from the MySpace.com domain hold any special link juice powers? In other words, if one has a link with specific anchor text pointing to a web site, will that link alone help them to rank well for the same phrase? The answer is yes… and no.
Rand has done it again with his recent post “21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic”, a list of some of the most common pieces of advice on driving traffic to blogs. Honestly, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz is one of the best I know in the business of attracting link bait. I’m going to start calling him The Link Bait King. Here he not only provides sound advice on increasing blog traffic, but has created another reason to link to his own site.
Frivolous lawsuits are more comical then anything else. It is sad that they waste taxpayer money, paper, people’s time, etc. but at least they are worth a chuckle… well most of them. The latest is a former AdSense publisher who is suing Google because she was removed from the AdSense program after clicking on her own ads, a definate no-no.
With the news of Danny Sullivan’s soon to be departure from Search Engine Watch, many of us in the industry are now beginning to ponder what the future may hold for the Search Engine Watch site as well as its conferences – Search Engine Strategies. Will it all continue to grow as it has for so many years now or will it die a slow death?
I couldn’t believe the headline as I was going through my RSS feeds this morning, “Leaving Search Engine Watch” found at Danny Sullivan’s personal blog, Daggle. Not only will Danny be departing Search Engine Watch but most certainly Search Engine Strategies as well. After 10 plus years, Danny is leaving because Incisive Media (the company that owns SEW and SES) has failed to renegotiate an acceptable contract to keep Danny at the helm.
Are you an Alexa data junkie? If so there is a new tool for you that is called what else – Alexaholic. From their site, “Alexaholic blends Alexa website traffic graphs with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core Alexa traffic chart junkies – aka Alexaholics. Webmasters, SEO/SEM specialists, and domain owners can compare and measure website statistics for up to five domains at once, switch traffic chart types and ranges without page loads, and generate report pages that are easily bookmarked and shared.”
Last week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose was the best yet. It is my third SES in San Jose and fourth total. I spoke on the Retaining Traffic After Moving Or Redesign session, a new one for this year that was very well attended. Along with me, Paul Bruemmer, Scott Orth and Navneet Virk presented while Jennifer Laycock moderated. Jennifer I have known for a few years now but it was the first time I have had the opportunity to meet the other three although I have seen Paul Bruemmer’s articles floating around throughout the years.
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?
