First of these was VerifiedSEO, who attempted to establish a system to verify SEO providers for a $99 fee. With a record 130 comments on Sphinn, the outrage from the community surprised many. It was hard not to draw the conclusion that Rhea’s activism had shamed many into action that day.

The campaign, led by Edward Lewis was successful, with the VerifiedSEO project closing it’s doors in the evening. The owner was shocked by the responses but admitted it had been a learning process.

Next against the wall has been TOPSEOs.com, who claim to be “The Independent Authority on Search Vendors”. I won’t go over the numerous complaints in this post but feel free to follow these links to understand the back story.

TopSEOs.com – A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service
TOPSEOs – Independent Authority on Search Vendors
Complaints and Discussion About TOPSEOS®

Particularly worrying was the insight given by Arnie Kuenn, President of Vertical Measures in this post on TopSEOs by Alan Bleiweiss and Mark Jackson at VIZION Interactive. Both previous customers of TopSEOs.

It’s easy to understand why these schemes upset so many in the online marketing industry. Especially when these operators have little or no interaction with the community they claim to police.

Any long-term marketer knows that standards are a common discussion topic in this industry. We circle through the same arguments every couple of years. It would be great if this current wave of activism could be directed into moving this debate forward.

However much the community dislikes TopSEOs and other companies profiteering from the lack of standards, they are fueled by the poor, ineffective or downright shady online marketing companies out there. For years these companies, big or small, have been a blight on the industry and hammered the reputation of professional SEO/SEMs.

If 2010 is the year to clean up the industry, we can’t ignore this elephant in the room.

There is a demand from clients for honest reviews of potential SEO/SEM suppliers. If the allegations of “Pay to Play” are true then TopSEOs has now become part of the problem not the solution. It’s unlikely they will be the last to respond to this need, as Edward Lewis has pointed out, the business model seems too profitable.

For the next group to try, take note. Standards can only be introduced by a group respected within the community. Their motivation, practices and business model must be completely transparent. Anything less will quickly place the proponents up against the wall – to face the wrath of the SEO revolutionaries.

** Afterwards Tom and Eric weren’t exactly sure at which point during their discussion the elephant had entered the room by David Blackwell, one of the artists who release their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!

Technorati Tags: SEM, SEO, Standards, TopSEOs, TopSEOs.com

News International, the newspapers’ parent company, announced that readers will be offered a day’s use for £1, or £2 for a week’s subscription. Readers who have a seven-day subscription to the print editions will not be charged extra for access to the websites. International pricing has been set at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for a week.

In total that means UK users will pay £104/per year to view the site. Interestingly International users will pay an increased $208 (£140) per year for the same service, a fact that hasn’t gone down well with the US audience.

So far the reaction on this website has been fairly negative, as you can see from the screenshot below. It is unusual for the top comments to have this many votes in such a short period (1533 3574 to the leading comment).

The Financial Times seems to have been reasonably successful introducing a paywall to their content. Subscription is set at $4.69 per week or $244 per year with free access to 10 articles per month for registered users. However as some contributors have pointed out, FT content is targeting a community that needs specialist, accurate and reliable business news.

The audience at Times Online are consuming more general news that can be sourced elsewhere. It will be very interesting to see how well this gamble plays out.

Articles at The TimesOnline are well syndicated and linked to across the Internet. Take the article today “Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama ‘dumped him for dinner‘”. We can already see over 1400 quotes from this article in Google.. Will these links and references start to dry up once the paywall is erected?

Aside from the distribution, The Times has built up a successful and vocal community. These days, much of the new is sourced from the same few facts and quotes. An informed community adds insight and value to the articles.

Google News has enhanced this need for added value on news articles. When you’re presented with 5000 similar articles, you’re going to look for the factors that make articles unique and add to your knowledge. Opinion and commentary play a key role here.

Looking through the responses of regular contributors to the site, you’re left wondering if Murdoch has just killed off the very thing that made The Times Online special.

After all, if the comments offer unique value to the website then shouldn’t Murdoch be paying these people for their content, or at least letting them have free access. You can bet the successful paid model for online news will be one that rewards all the content producers involved.

Update 26/03/2010: 11pm The user backlash towards this move seems to have taken The Times by surprise. An impromptu live Q&A with James Harding was “inundated with questions” and seemed to struggle under the demand. Only 5 questions were answered before the editor sped away.

They have now launched a Q&A article on the changes. Considering this was released late on a Friday, it doesn’t seem planned.

As other commentators have noted, this maybe the first time we’ll see the effects of a paywall in action on such a scale. We can end the hypothetical discussions and see if this model can work in the mainstream.

Update 29/03/2010: A great critique of the Times / STimes paywall plans by eConsultancy’s Ashley Friedlein

Technorati Tags: journalism, Paywall, Sunday Times, The Times, Times Online

1. Ensure Your Domains Have Accurate WHOIS records

Sounds simple but you wouldn’t believe how many domain registrations have been made using the wrong details. Too often the domain vendor would slip their own details into the owner or administrative details. The person who dealt with the “internet” would register company domains with their personal email then move onto a new job a few months later.

Incorrect records can cause a nightmare when you come to update or transfer the domain in the future. The owner/admin email holder can transfer the domain away.

Ensure that your details and email are on the administrative and owner contact fields of the domain. Running a WHOIS check will help but the contact email addresses can only be seen through the private panels of your domain provider.

2. Make Sure You Own Your Domains Legally

It may come as a surprise but WHOIS records are not proof of domain name ownership. Make sure you have access to the account with the domain registrar and have printed off invoice receipts for your registration.

3. Setup Your Own Domain Expiry Reminders

Don’t put all your trust in your domain provider. They may drop the ball or fail to contact you for the renewal. Registries have little sympathy once you have lost your domain, nor does the domain speculator who snapped it up.

Setup expiry reminders on your chosen calender application, use a birthday reminder service like HipCal or a dedicated domain tool like URLPad. Make sure you have reminders on 2 different email accounts, in case one fails.

4. Backup Your Sites – Regularly!

Again many rely 100% on their hosts for this. For WordPress sites you can backup the whole blog or just the database on regular periods and send it to a newly created Gmail account. Cpanel, Plesk and other control panel systems usually provide backup facilities for your whole site – use them. Software like SyncBackSE (Windows) or Filezilla (Windows, Mac and Linux) will help you maintain a synchronized copy of your files on your local computer.

Make sure you keep a few copies of your backup. An external Icy Box and a few old hard disks is an effective & low cost solution.

5. Invest In Decent DNS

Too many low grade hosts have their name servers placed on the same box as their hosted sites. If the server goes down, so do the name servers which can result in many hours of downtime, even after the server itself has come back online. That downtime is expensive for your business.

For a small fee you can buy a high quality DNS service or you may find the DNS at your registrar is sufficient. These name servers should update very fast across the internet, be backed up and have a fallover system.

This move will give your sites some security against long periods of downtime. In situations where your host has failed completely you can also switch the traffic to another provider.

6. Own Your RSS Feeds

Service at Feedburner has been rocky in recent months. Alternative services such as FeedBlitz and PostRank are waiting in the wings. Other services may come in the future. The lesson here is to make sure your RSS feed is delivered on a URL you control. That will let you change providers without loosing valuable subscribers.

Make sure you use a service which lets you create a CNAME record to point their branded URL towards your domain. Both FeedBurner and FeedBlitz allow you to use your own domain name.

7. Buy Your Vanity and Brand Domains

It makes sense to grab the COM/ORG/INFO/NET versions of your company domain name and any key brands you have developed. If you have plans internationally then also grab these extensions in your target countries. Domain registration fees are nothing compared to the legal fees you run up reclaiming these.

On a personal level, register your name domain (firstname+surname.com). Keyword domains have a natural advantage in ranking for these terms – ensure they are under your control.

8. Start Filling Your Vanity or Brand Results

Defend against online reputation attacks by filling these SERPs with your own entries. These results will defend you against low level ORM attacks and targeted link building can make them even more powerful.

Finding good sites for this is not hard, look for authority sites where you can place your profile. Here’s a couple of good site lists to start your efforts.

9. Control Your Short URLs

The recent death of the Zi.ma service was a wake up call for everyone using a shortening URLs service. If the service fails, then all those links fail, leaving you with no way to redirect that lost traffic. If you using short links in link building efforts or for affiliate marketing then you need to roll your own solution.

These are many URL shortening scripts on the market, for a small fee GentleSource ($29), PlusPHP Short URL Script ($59) or for free, e.g. Shorty

10. Use Your Own Domains For Email

Defensible email means using your own domain rather than a branded service. If you use Gmail then use your own domain name with them or sign up to Google Apps. Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Live Mail also offer services using your own domain.

Like your RSS feeds, this approach would allow you to switch providers without loosing your email address.

11. Keep Your Content On Your Own Domains

Always build content on your own domains, otherwise you’re at the mercy of the service provider. They may offer to export your data but that often means loosing links, traffic and historical trust that you’ve built up over the years.

So roll your own blog installation rather than using a hosted blog solution like WordPress.com or Blogger. Also keep it in mind when using third party sites like Squidoo, Google Knol or Twitter. These sites are useful but never forget that this material is most strongly defended on your own domains.

12. Set Up Malware Alerts

If Google, Firefox or IE flags your site as containing malware they will stop their users viewing your site. This can be as devastating as a hosting failure. The sooner you know about this the better.

Make sure you get early alerts on Google’s blacklist from Google Webmaster Center or SerpGuard.com. You can also set up Google Alerts for known malware keywords, as detailed here by Patrick Altoft.

** Hurricane Ike Prep by Cayobo one of the artists who make their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!

Alamo Rent A Car and their sister company’s, National Car Rental and Enterprise Rent-A-Car will not let me hire a car from them. I fill out their form, explaining that I live in Russia, using their locator to select Los Angeles Intl Airport (LAX) as both the pick up and drop off point. What do I get told? That they have “sold out” of available vehicles and a suggestion that I try the same search with their one of their partner companies. Searches which all return the same result.

First I thought it must be the dates. It’s almost understandable that Alamo, National and Enterprise have all their cars booked at that time. I try another date. Any dates. Turns out they don’t have a car for me anytime. My suspicions are confirmed when I change the form to tell them I live in the UK. Suddenly the page is flooded with results. I feel like Bruce Lee, in the famous scene from “Fist of Fury” when he’s told No Dogs or Chinese are allowed into the park. Grrrrr.

So why do these company’s not wish to do business with Russians? Was it the Georgian invasion? Are they secret Republicans that approve of McCain’s hardline attitude towards Russia? Enquiring minds wish to know?

Seriously though it shows that Alamo, National and Enterprise need to take a good look at user experiences on their sites. It maybe a bug or maybe by the question “Where do you live?” they really want to know which country you want the car in. Either way, they have blocked any Russian tourists from renting their cars.

So what’s the lesson here? Testing is everything. If you are serving a global audience then always check your system from the perspective of that user. Use a Proxy IP from that country too, just in case the company’s server admins have blocked access and not told anyone. Resolving an issue like this can bring in significant revenue for the company, for example 12m Russian tourists travelled abroad this year alone. I wonder how many of them had the same experience as me?

Update 03/11/08: I’ve been contacted by National Rent a Car. They agree that their computer system has a bug at the moment but they promise it will be fixed shortly. I’m glad this post helped. They also offered to take my rental order over the telephone which was nice, so +1 on their ORM monitoring and customer response.

Technorati Tags: Alamo, Alamo Rent A Car, Enterprise, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National, National Car Rental, Russia

There are 169 granted patents in all, with 10 in there for Exaflop. A little more than one third focus primarily upon search indexing algorithms, and almost two thirds were developed in-house rather than acquired.

Advertising Patents (15)
Design Patents (11)
Duplicate Content Patents (4)
Email and Messaging Patents (6)
Event Modeling Patents (3)
Game Patents (1)
Hardware Patents (10)
Image and Video Patents (14)
Large File Space Indexing Patents (8)
Medical Patents (1)
Modeling and Mapping Patents (11)
Multiple Database Indexing (3)
Phrase-Based Indexing Patents (3)
Radio Patents (7)
Search Indexing Patents (48)
Security Patents (3)
Social Networking (1)
Software Patents (1)
Voice Search Patents (2)
Voting Patents (1)
Wireless and Mobile Patents (6)
Total (159)

Although there is no guarantee that these factors are currently implimented at Google, they are a factual source of information and can point to future updates or even just areas which Google are interested in. Bill “Patent King” Slawski regularly breaks down these patents into bite-sized chunks over at his blog, so keep an eye on his site.

Key Relevance

Key Relevance has assembled an impressive team of experienced search engine marketers. Key Relevance is unique in the industry in that their search experts have an average of over TEN years online marketing experience. Read here for more information.

Technorati Tags: Bill Slawski, Key Relevance, KeyRelevance, Patent, Patents

The URL in our sitemap is in the format:

http://www.domain.com/index.html?whatever=value

The problem with Googlebot is that even though that is the URL we put in the sitemap, it doesn’t use that URL to make the request – it contracts it down to:

http://www.domain.com/?whatever=value

So our server sees this ‘incorrect’ URL, issues a 301 with the ‘correct’ URL (that has the index.html bit in it), but then Googlebot doesn’t follow that URL faithfully and again tries to request the URL without index.html in the path. So our server again issues a 301 redirect, with the correct URL and here we go off on our infinite loop. So no wonder we get the error message:

URLs not followed.... [sitemap] contained too many redirects.

John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Zürich replies:

In this case it actually is something that we’re doing — we strip “/index.html” from URLs because that’s generally irrelevant and only makes the URL longer and look more complicated to the user. We do this when processing the URLs in your Sitemap file so if you *need* to have “/index.html” in the URLs, they generally won’t work like that. At the moment, there is no solution for using these URLs in Sitemap files if you need to have “/index.html” in them. I would generally recommend dropping the “/index.html” part, but I realize that this is sometimes not easily done.

That said, we will still crawl the website normally, so if those URLs are reachable through a normal web crawl, we’ll still find and index them normally.

Useful advice there for anyone putting together a sitemap and wondering why Google was throwing an error on URLs requiring a default filename. I assume this would also apply to the other “default” page names such as index.html index.htm index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml, index.asp and perhaps default.html etc.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Webmaster Groups, JohnMu, Sitemaps

I don’t know if this is official Google policy but it seems an excellent idea to me and a novel way to reach out to webmasters and SEO/SEMs who follow John’s updates. If nothing else, it’s a notable use of Twitter as a company brand building tool and an interesting experiment in 140 character Q&A sessions.

Questions & Answers

I’ll be updating this post as more questions and answers appear. John’s offer is open to everyone so grab the opportunity and head over to Twitter

Pierre Far: What’s the value of a nofollowed link in the eyes of Google’s algorithm? (status link)

JohnMu: Nofollow is for “ignorable” links. Recent ex: site with many URLs blocked with meta robots, nofollows help us to crawl better. (status link)

NickWilsdon: What is an acceptable number of IBLs to get from the “wrong” geographic area or language? i.e. UK/English site + Chinese links? (status link)

JohnMu: An old site of mine got many Chinese links – no problem. Within reason, they’re just links. Perhaps put a translation up? (status link)

PatrickAltoft: Will you be removing these urls, people are concerned their feeds are being indexed (I know robots.txt blocks) http://bit.ly/1b6Dyu (status link)

JohnMu: I’ll pass that on, thanks for bringing it up! (status link)

AndyBeard: Can an old, out of date XML sitemap prevent a site from being fully indexed? (status link)

JohnMu: If you know that the XML Sitemap is outdated, then fix it :). We use the Sitemap for hints, but we still crawl normally. (status link)

NickWilsdon: Beyond the user experience issue, can having broken links and 404’s negatively impact a site’s overall ranking in Google? (status link)

JohnMu: Having 404s should not affect ranking, but it can affect crawling (wasted crawls trying to reach 404s instead of good content) (status link)

mvandemar: Not too long ago Matt announced that a bunch of penalties had expired in Google… do all penalties expire? (status link)

JohnMu: For some penalties it makes sense to expire (eg when the things really have no impact anymore). Fixing issues is faster though:) (status link)

Not that many questions this week but John seems happy to do this again next Friday. Make sure you’re following his account here before then.

John’s welcome to clarify in the comments but I’d assume he’s looking for more practical questions on sites and indexing issues. I’m not sure how fair it is to throw Google policy questions at him, especially in a rapid-fire environment like Twitter. This is a useful opportunity to question a Google employee who answers literally hundreds of webmaster questions each week.

I look forward to seeing how this develops.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Webmaster Help, John Mueller, JohnMu, Twitter

What are Google’s Safe Browsing Blacklists?

If Google detects malware or phishing attacks coming from your website they will put the URLs onto their blacklists and take steps to warn their users. They will place a message next to your results listing, an interstitial warning page when the user clicks the result and a pop-up alert if the Google Toolbar is installed. You can view examples of these warnings here..

This is a useful initiative to stop innocent users infecting their computers but being listed by Google in this way can have a serious effect on an online business. Users will be worried about the warnings shown to them and rankings/traffic can drop noticeably. The quicker you deal with this situation the better so early alerts are essential.

Introducing SERPGuard

SERPGuard is a Ruby on Rails project using the new Safe Browsing API that Google has helpfully made available. We built this application as part of our in-house client suite but decided to release it publicly.

Why would I use this tool?

Google has made their API available for exactly this kind of real-time reporting. Although they are already sending emails out from Webmaster Central you may want an additional checking mechanism. When it comes to something as serious as lost rankings, clicks or sales; you can never have enough alerts.

This tool will also be useful for webmasters who did not want to link up their entire portfolio within Google Webmaster Central. Our tool provides an independent and relatively anonymous way of checking all your sites in one place.

SERPGuard is RSS-powered. You will have a unique RSS feed which will update should any of your sites become infected. This gives you more choices in how to be alerted. One suggestion would be to create a new account at Twitter and feed the SERPGuard RSS stream to that account via Twitterfeed. Just follow that new account to receive instant updates by RSS or SMS to your mobile.

Technorati Tags: API, Google, Google Toolbar, malware, phishing, safe browsing

Strangely enough there is a much easier link opportunity on the system. Although Twitter has carefully applied nofollow to your Web entry in the your profile, you can slip a handful of URLs into the Bio fields (see here). The key is putting “www” in front of each one and a comma between entries, i.e. www.domain1.com, www.domain2.com

For some reason that converts the URL into a link. My guess is that Twitter forgot to remove some RoR formatting on this input field. This is almost the same behavior you see in tweets when you enter a web address.

Although profile pages have no TBPR (marked unranked) by default, some have built up a visible score and all are indexed by the search engines. I’ve not tested the link juice but considering that 90% of the page content is nofollowed it looks tasty. So get your signature links in there while it lasts.

03/09/08 Update: Twitter Makes Bio Link Non-Active

Well we knew this day would come. Especially after DaveN blogged about the technique and caught Google Engineer Matt Cutt’s attention. He sent a message to @ev (Evan Williams, a twitter founder) to alert him and a few weeks on, the links have been made non-active. Don’t blame Dave though. First, he’s a great guy and second – if your SEO success depends on loopholes in Web 2.0 apps you have bigger problems than Twitter altering their code.

Still, this saga has created a new controversy of its own. SEOs are wondering what right Google has to intervene in other websites and their ever evolving application of nofollow. The tag was first introduced to control spam within UGC, such as user comments but that initiative was soon declared a failure. However Google has increasingly pressured webmasters to use the tag on any link that might affect their results. To keep following the story as it develops, follow the posts by Rae Hoffman or Kevin Gibbons, or these two Sphinn posts.

1. Make Your Feed Links More Visible

OK, hardly a new point but have we really taken it in? Apparently not. During the testing of SocialBlogroll we often struggled to find the RSS feed for some blogs. For most users, that means not signing up and walking away. Make the icons larger and stick links at the foot on every post. After all, when is a user most likely to think about subscribing? You got it.

Worse offenders were blogspot and forum owners. This is quite surprising as vBulletin, the software behind most of the forums, already provides RSS support. You can find this feed link by viewing the code and doing a search for ‘RSS’. It’s in the head of the web document, before the closing </head> tag. Someone tell v7n, WickedFire and IHelpYou for a start. Even your most dedicated user isn’t going to start hunting through source code for an RSS link!

It’s also a good idea to add an alternative email subscription link. Everyone understands email and even in technical niches, we have picked up a number of extra subscribers by adding this feature. Setting email subscriptions up is easy if you already use the FeedBurner service. Go to the Publicize section of the feed settings and you can find the code to insert on your pages. This gives you email subscriber statistics and conveniently leaves FeedBurner to deal with delivery and spam issues.

2. Make Use of RSS Auto-Discovery

As I previously mentioned, there’s a method of linking your RSS feed in the head section of a web document. You’ve probably seen this technique used to link external style sheets. Here’s the code you need if you have a standard RSS 2.0. feed (most of you):


<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://your-rss-feed-address" />

Jeremy Zawodny was writing about this back in 2003 but the concept hasn’t really been taken on board. Many online applications and services, like SocialBlogroll are programmed to search for this link when collecting your RSS feed.

All the search engines use auto-discovery to indicate if the page you are visiting has an RSS feed available. If you are reading this in a browser, check the top right corner of the address bar. Netvibes or other RSS readers search for this link by default. Auto-Discovery is catching on, especially in automated Web 2.0 mashups and applications.

Let’s take Matt Cutts blog as an example. He’s installed WordPress into a directory on his domain (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/). Although this RSS discovery link appears in the blog section, there is no copy of this link on the main index page of the domain. This means people who enter his well branded and memorable domain name into their RSS reader, will receive an error (seen below).

They need to specifically add the exact RSS feed address or http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. This doesn’t take advantage of the auto-discovery system or the branding Matt has built up for his domain. If he had linked the RSS on his index page, this user would have successfully subscribed to his blog.

Add your RSS discovery link across all your site pages, not just your blog sections. This will allow your feed to get picked up by more services, give your feed option greater visibility and make life easy for potential readers who can’t remember your exact feed address.

3. Consolidate your RSS feed addresses

Now you understand about auto-discovery you may also have realised there is a glaring hole in your plan to track your RSS subscriptions. Although you carefully placed the FeedReader or tracking code onto your pages, did you also change the auto-discovery link? Even if you did change this, could copies of your old link have been cached in the past by other users and web services?

To solve this, consolidate or redirect all your feeds to one URL. If you are using WordPress, then the easiest method is to install the FeedSmith plugin. This lets you enter the FeedBurner or other tracking URL into the admin section and all variations of your feed URL will be redirected here.

However if you want more control or are using another platform, set up 301 redirects yourself. Create or open up your .htaccess file, in the root of your site and copy in the following:

# BEGIN Consolidate Feeds
Redirect 301 /wp-rss.php http://www.mydomain.com/wp-rss2.php
Redirect 301 /wp-rdf.php http://www.mydomain.com /wp-rss2.php
Redirect 301 /wp-atom.php http://www.mydomain.com/wp-rss2.php
Redirect 301 /feed http://www.mydomain.com/wp-rss2.php
Redirect 301 /wp-rss2.php http://your-feedburner-url/
# END Consolidate Feeds

As you see, we redirect all the main feed variations (in this case WordPress) to our wp-rss2.php page. On the last line we redirect this to our tracking URL. If we ever want to change this tracking URL, you simply replace the one line at the end.

Of course, consolidating your feeds can result in a nice jump in subscriber numbers. Let me know how it goes in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Blogging Tips, Feeds, FeedSmith, RSS, Tips, WordPress