Google Bowled

Was reading about this trick today.

Assumption: Google can penalise a site upon the quality of its inbound links.
you site is judged upon who is linking to - if you have got only spam sites referring to your site, a search engine will figure out that your site is a spam one.

But if you have got quality links, you are not going to be penalised for them - I have never seen that hapening anyway.

Issue
If you assume that the assmption is true, you can start thinking: well, I have just to buy nasty links and point them to my competitor to get him banned.

If your competitor hasn't got any good link, it's true, you'll get him banned. but instead of spending your resources on buying the nasty links, why don't you use them to build good links to yourself? If you can get him banned, it simply means that you can easily take him on his linking strategy

Advice from the poster.
Google should not penalise for income links, but just reduce to null the wight of outbound links from spam websites.

That's what it does already. The weight of a link is calculated according the quality of the link.

Conclusion: I don't think that "google bowling" is a real issue - but I may be wrong - and happy to check that out if someone can give me a real example of site concerned by this issue.

http://base.google.com

Google has just released a new tool - what is that - well not sure yet, I'll have to check it out first.

Peter Sealey's Ten Trends

People who thought that the internet was the only to track accurately consumers behaviour should check this article out. TV channels, and retailers are catching up on cutumers behaviour targeting.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7047.asp

Tag words: Ad-ID and RFID

%20 - duplicated content

If you don't redirect http://mywebsite.com to http://www.mywebsite.com, you may find yourself penalised for duplication by google.

Some nasty competitors may think that it is a good idea to point to the first URL, just to get you penalised.

An other thing to watch out is %20 in your urls. Let say that I am pointing to "http:// www.yoursite.com", the page http://%20www.yoursite.com will be crawled by search engines.

They may then think that it is a duplicate of http://www.yoursite.com.

to avoid this situation, you need to do a bit of url rewriting...eerr.. "I have tried but it doesn't work". that's right, url rewriting is in this case not the solution. what to do?

If you are running an apache server, solution is simple: activated mod_security.c

Splogs

Splogs are blogs created in order to increase linking - also called blogs spamming..

Instead of spamming other blogs, you just create 10s of blogs, interconnected together, to increase artificially your popularity. It works, and blog spanmming is a technique still widely in SEO.

it is estimated that between 2% and 8% of the 70 000 daily blogs created out there are splogs. scary.

PageRank 2 for MSN

Funny - Google is playing with PageRank for MSN.com, which now displays a PageRank 2 - sounds like a bug with the way Google handles canonical urls (main url for your site: if you have got mydomain.com for instance, you may want to redirect all http://mydomain.com requests to http://www.mydomain.com) -

This is what seems to happen here - http://msn.com has got a PR=8 and is probably considered as the canonical url (google bug?), whereas it is redirecting to www.msn.com.

Google Bombing - still working well

I have got a few nice french examples:
1) "gros balourd" links to the former French Prime (J.P raffarin)minister bio:
2) "Iznogoud" links to Sarcozy's bio.

Which means that themed inbound links have still got a huge impact on ranking.

top 10 web design mistakes - 2005

Useit.com has released the list:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html


1. Legibility Problems
2. Non-Standard Links
3. Flash
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
5. Bad Search
6. Browser Incompatibility
7. Cumbersome Forms
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

Most of these issues should automatically be addressed if you use a good content management system.

Geek's dinner

Went to Geek's dinner tonight, and met Tim o'reilly - who made a speech about Web 2.0. didn't know what it was all about :-o so checked out -here si a picture summarizing it all :

accessibility tool

A nice little tool to test your page - I wonder how many websites can boast to be 100% compliant with all guidelines ...

http://webxact.watchfire.com/

online shopping new figures

About 50% of US web users see the internet as their main source of shopping information. But then half of them admit that it is mainly for products/price comparison. they would then prefer to go to the brick & mortar shop to finalise the purchase. what prevents them to shop directly online.
Main areas of concern are:

• security fears appear to be taking on more importance. Sixty percent of respondents said they were concerned about whether their credit card information would be secure, up from 52 percent last year.
  
• privacy (cited by 50 percent)
  
• shipping charges (41 percent)
  
• product quality (37 percent)
  
• return policies (28 percent).

If you are setting up an e-commerce site, these are the points you need to address, and focus your communication on. To get a good conversion rate, make sure that you reinsure the client about security & privacy, make shipping charges and return policies easily accessible, and spend a bit of your time writing nice description & provide nice photos...and then you can start tackling merchandising, branding, etc ..

Open Source: the Ecosystem

businessWeek reports that investors are picking up on open source applications.

The open-source movement is making another big thrust forward. Entrepreneurs,
investors, and many analysts say they're confident that all of a company's
business software -- representing hundreds of millions in sales -- will soon be
available as open source.

$400M have beem pumped in 50 open source companies by venture capitalists in only 18 months - born with Linux in 1991, the open source trend has become an unstoppable wave threatening companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc .. whose business model relies on licence sales.

What is surprising is that most of open source companies are already profitable - MySQL is expected to make $ 40M in revenue this year.

An other interesting part of the article is an illustration of new business models such as Compiere:

THREE REQUIREMENTS. But Compiere makes money on only a small percentage of
its customer base. It relies on a network of some 60 independent resellers to do
a lot of the customization its software requires. Some implementations reach the
$50,000 range, but Compiere takes just a small cut of that. But with very low
overhead, the company has been profitable since 2003 and is doubling revenue
every year, Janke says. "Our business model isn't to conquer the world or to be
super-profitable," he says. "We just want to have a sustainable business."

You can find the rest of the article here: businessweek.com

Free wireless Access

Google has offered free wireless access to San francisco! (article here)

this is great news - Voip is introducing free telephone calls, and my telephone bills have never been so healthy - now google is paving the way for free internet access, which will lead us soon to free communication!

I cannot wait to have the world covered by WiMax for free. I may then be able to blog and work from anywhere in the world...free of charge (except hotel & plane fares obviously... until Google offers free planes tickets & hotel accomadation.. mhhh not quite there yet).

checking emails

You have got a site hosted on a shared server - you may be blacklisted.

If you want to run serious email camapigns, it is always a good idea to go for third party services. Specially if your site is hosted on a shared server, you may quickly find out that your IP is registered as SPAM.

Check this website out:
http://www.mxtoolbox.com

Enter you domain name, and the site will look up for you - results may be a bad surprise.