Blog
(New Information Almost Daily)
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"Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clark, 1972
The Rank Magic BlogGoogle Site Links
This is only done for the #1 listings, and seems to be limited to searches on a company name or brand name. Search Marketing Gurus has more on this. What a great way to get the top 4-6 listings on Google instead of just #1!
August 23, 2006 ::: Good old YaGoohoogle.com is gone, and up steps GahooYoogle! Like YaGoohoogle before it, GahooYoogle pits both of the major search engine results, displaying them side by side for comparison. Some of the search results were shocking. For instance, with a search of "Google", you may be shocked at some of the differences. For instance, Yahoo directs you to search using Yahoo as the first result, while searching for "Yahoo" in both browsers displayed proper search results in Google. In the image search category, Yahoo displayed no images for the recently unveiled "blackberry pearl 8100", while Google images were overloaded with them.
Ask the Small Business ProfessorAugust 17, 2006 ::: On July 26, Ask The Small Business Professor, a column which is syndicated through the Scripps Howard News Service to hundreds of newspapers nationally, answered a small business owner's question about helping customers to find his web site. The column was entitled "Tips on driving customers to your Web site", and as part of the Bruce Freeman's (the Small Business Professor's) explanation, he included some quotes from Bill Treloar, owner of Rank Magic.
Are You Paying Per Click Fraud?August 16, 2006 ::: Click fraud has become the greatest threat to the rapid growth of the paid search marketing sector. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates that 20 to 35 percent of ad clicks are fraudulent. According to SiteProNews, click fraud threatens an entire business model: one that generates billions of dollars every year. At this point, it's hard to tell whether pay-per-click advertising will stand the test of time, or line up for the chopping block. Just today I received an official legal notice that I'm part of a class action suit against Yahoo over click fraud. Many of the search engines are actively -- should I say frantically? -- looking for solutions.
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August
28, 2006 ::: You may have recently noticed a difference in how
the first result in the search engine results pages look on Google. In
addition to the normal listing information, there appears a listing of 3-5
other links within the website - with a snippet about each item in the list.
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Appropriate: He ego-surfs
on the Google search engine to see if he's listed in the results. |
Funny Letterman Spoof on Bill Gates
August
12, 2006 ::: After Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced he'd be
leaving the software giant in the next two years, night-time talk show host
David Letterman created a "farewell video" of the famous übergeek.
The video didn't go entirely smoothly, though. It has a few problems, known
to one and all as Windows. The show aired a few weeks ago, but the clip is
still hilarious.
Watch the video.
Phishing Filter Prevents E-mail Identity Theft
August
10, 2006 ::: Scientists at
Carnegie Mellon University
have figured out a way to almost entirely detect and filter out phishing
e-mails. These findings have a tremendous potential to reduce identity
thefts.
Phishing is the practice of sending emails that look like they come from a familiar financial institution and direct you to confirm your user name, password, or PIN. In fact, these emails direct you to a phoney site that harvests the information you type in in order to steal your identity.
Brian Livingston has an interesting column on the in Datamation.
Click Fraud Continues to Grow
August 8, 2006 ::: According to ZDnet, the publishers of PC Magazine, "The amount of click fraud taking place on search giants such as Yahoo and Google has increased since the beginning of the year, despite efforts to curb the practice."
"The greatest percentage of click fraud, over 88 percent, originated from North America. Unwanted click activity originating from India increased by 26 percent between April and June 2006."
Click fraud has been growing rapidly and is a serious source of concern for those using Pay per Click ads. We've discussed it numerous times in our blog: starting way back in May, 2005, but also in March, 2006 (twice), May, 2006, June 2006, and July, 2006.
Why Have Internet Directories Become So Popular?
August 5, 2006 ::: Inbound links can greatly
increase the search engine rankings of a web site if the links contain the right
keywords and if the links come from related web pages.
Usually, the category pages on an Internet directory like
The Open Directory or
Go Guides or
Skaffe are considered
related web pages if your web site fits in the selected category. That means
that links from Internet directories can have a very positive effect on the
search engine rankings of your web site. They're one of the first places we work
on for inbound links to our clients.
Google Now Supports the NOODP Attribute
August 2, 2006 ::: In our June blog, we discussed some search engines using old, outdated Open Directory Project (ODP) descriptions. Since descriptions in the Open Directory are difficult to get changed, people needed a way to tell other search engines not to use those descriptions.
Now, Google has joined the others, saying "Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we're happy to let you all know we've added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages."
In addition to the coding mentioned in our June blog, you can use this Google-specific code:
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">
August
2006
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