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

I’ve just added a new search for Russian results, choosing .ru as the Google extension. The plugin allows you to save your favourite regional or city searches, for example, you can set up a new search for Moscow using the regional code of RU-MOW or city code of 1011969. RedFly have provided a tool for Google Regional Codes and Google City Codes.

Download The Google Global Firefox Plugin

A tool like this would be very useful for Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, as they have been working hard make their SERPs region-specific. E-commerce is popular in Moscow and St. Petersburg so it makes sense to concentrate your SEO and PPC work for the audience there.

Technorati Tags: Firefox Plugins, Google Global Firefox Plugin, International SEM

“It’s just sad because we were documenting young people’s music from all around the globe,” Guillaume Decouflet, co-founder of Masala said. “For a lot of people, it was music they wouldn’t have been able to discover elsewhere.” Decouflet is now trying to “salvage” the Masala archive, using Google’s own Reader tool to dig up old posts. Other banished blogs have taken similar steps. Living Ears, It’s a Rap and Pop Tarts have relaunched at new URLs, generally without any older material.

It’s noticable that the blogs concerned have re-launched using their own hosted copies of WordPress. They have learnt a hard lesson about content ownership.

If you place your content on someone else’s platform then you have given them control over that content. It doesn’t matter if this is Blogger, FaceBook, Ning or Twitter, you must always realise that there is a risk involved.

Of course there are advantages to handing off control to a third party; convenience and cost, especially in high volume sites. There may just be a marketing advantage, using FaceBook to host your group opens it up to a larger audience. Twitter offers a unique channel that rewards your time. But always weigh up the pros/cons in making this strategic decision. If your business is based on this model, as was the case for these music blogs, then I’d argue the risk is too great.

If these music blogs had been banned by Google for DMCA abuse the worse they could expect would be exclusion from the index. In time they could have resolved the problem and recovered from the position. As it stands they have been hit too hard, losing years of content, links and branding. Make sure you don’t learn this lesson the hard way too.

** Evicted by malias one of the artists who make their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!

For example, ICANN has already launched regional extensions, such as .eu and .asia. Unfortunately these domains have not been supported by Google. There is no Google.eu or Google.asia portal. That has left these domains with little advantage over other available TLDs such as .com, .net or .org.

At the moment Google ties domains, subdomains or site sections to one particular country. This is done with key indicators such as extension, hosting location, link profile, webmaster portal settings or language. While you can search in Google.it for Italian language pages you can not determine if those sites are geographically based within Europe. The SERPs include Italian language pages from businesses around the world or those from within Italy. This reality for .eu seems to run contrary to the branding on the EuroID site, as seen here on the right. An .eu domain does not give access to all European countries anymore than a .com would.

As a European address is required for .eu registration the searcher could find regional businesses by adding the site:*.eu parameter to their query, but this is unlikely to enter mainstream use. But again, without the search space being supported by the search engines there will be less movement towards the .eu in the first place. Orders now are largely due to cheap .eu prices compared to local country extensions or defensive registrations against cyber-squatting.

There are good reasons for searchers to shop by region, rather than ordering internationally. Europeans don’t have to pay import tax on their items and would benefit from the European Union’s consumer protections laws. There are environmental benefits in reducing transit times. In fact, launching creating a virtual search engine based limited by .eu domains may have been a better brand idea for the Europeans than their dubious Quaero project.

You can see the conflict between Google and ICANN again on the matter of .us domains. ICANN envisioned General Top Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .com, .org and .net to be a shared space for all countries. However Americans have adopted .com as their own extension. This no doubt has an effect on the sales of the lesser branded .us domain. Google has certainly had their hand in this development by refusing to support the .us extension with its own portal (Google.us).

The question is, will Google support any of the new TLDs that ICANN is planning to launch on the market? Will we see Google.hotel or Google.shoes in the future? Without a search space, these extensions have less chance of becoming viable businesses. On the bright side, these new TLDs create exciting opportunities for virtual search. Hopefully ICANN and the companies backing these new domains will start taking these points into consideration.

After all, countries already hire PR firms to raise their profile abroad. The Russian government hired U.S.-based PR agency Ketchum in 2006 to spruce up its image in the West for the remainder of its G8 presidency. They indicate that they were also working on the Internet.

Russia is fairly thinly resourced on the communications side, so they need a whole range of support: advice on how the Western media operates, logistical support, technical support, drafting materials, web materials, and things like that.

There’s certainly a lot of work to do for the team handling French online reputation. Not only this latest event but looks like they have barely touched the ‘French cowards‘ SERPs.

Technorati Tags: French, Henry Thierry, ORM, WorldCup

Hosting infrastructure in the US is large-scale, reliable and often cheaper than local providers in developing countries. The Planet states that 42% of their customers are located in international markets. On the other hand local servers are often faster for local users and have less chance of network interruption.

Will Google’s move towards site speed as a ranking factor push international SEOs to ask for local hosting? Patricio Robles over at eConsultancy seems to agree,

The location of your host could also be a consideration. An offshore host, for instance, might be at a disadvantage here, especially if it doesn’t have good peering.

However Richard Hearne at RedCardinal makes some good points against this argument on Twitter.

RedCardinal: @nickwilsdon You’re assuming they’ll test locally, but that’s not how this will work from my understanding. (status link)

RedCardinal: @nickwilsdon I think 2 things worth looking at: Page Speed (likely they’ll use these metrics), and Adwords QS page speed. (status link)

RedCardinal: @nickwilsdon server location will probably be normalised – otherwise this would never work (status link)

I think Richard’s right and he’s backed up by the notes Google has released on how site speed is tested in regard to Adwords Quality Score.

We evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.

There is still an advantage in good local hosting if you can get hold of this, especially if it out-performs the average in the region. As Matt Cutts suggests, users don’t want slow websites. However the emphasis for this new ranking factor will likely be on the page speed metric rather than loading time and the physical location of the server.

** High Speed train by lrargerich one of the artists who make their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!

Underneath each submission there is an add button, as you see below. Click this to add this person to your network.

Then turn network filtering on, using the option at the top of the ‘Hot or Not’ or front page.

You then have your news filtered according to the submitters you want to follow. Less noise, more signal. You can also see this view of the site by default in the My Network tab. Here you can see who is in your network and who has placed you in their network (i.e. following you).

Here are 20 top-quality submitters from my network that you may want to follow. You can also do this from the link on their profiles.

1. Sebastian X
2. ViperChill (Glen Allsopp)
3. Matt McGee
4. Ruud Hein
5. Chris Winfield
6. Hugo Gill
7. Tamar
8. JillWhalen
9. Danny Sullivan
10. Onreact (AKA Tadeusz Szewczyk)
11. Everett Sizemore
12. graywolf (Michael Gray)
13. Brian Chappell
14. richardbaxterseo (Richard Baxter)
15. Matt Siltala
16. Dave Davis
17. incrediblehelp (Jaan Kanellis)
18. St0n3y (Stoney deGeyter)
19. kevgibbo (Kevin Gibbons)
20. AgentA (Alec Green)

Free free to add me to your network also (Nick Wilsdon)

If you’re submitting great material on Sphinn, please add a link to your profile in the comments below. I’m always on the look out for quality submitters to follow, especially outside the usual circles.

It may help you too. Getting yourself onto the network of regular Sphinn members raises your visibility within the platform. It shouldn’t guarantee votes but it will get your submissions read by more users.

You have to wonder if they checked the mailing without the images being shown (default usually). Writing out the full word “Bullet” in the ALT tags is going to take a few seconds longer – but trust me – you give the reader a whole different perspective on the information.

Technorati Tags: email, Email Marketing

AFAIK this is a first time Twitter has appeared in the world of Dilbert. Goes to show how far the service is progressing into the mainstream. A recent report by eMarketer suggests that Twitter user numbers could exceed 26m in the US alone. Global estimates have been put at 35-45m current users. Even with the hype, the platform has gone from a niche social site to a global player.

Coming back down to earth though, Dilbert is probably closer to the reality for most bosses who jump on the Twitter bandwagon. If you’re not already getting Scott Adam’s masterpiece through your email each morning, then sign up here.

Technorati Tags: Twitter