Internet Marketing & SEO

Daily Blog Tips just made a Top25 with SEO Blogs worldwide, based on Pagerank, Alexa rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. Each factor has a score from 0 to 10, and the maximum score for each blog is 40. Details about the algorithm can be found below the table.

Beeing at only the 19th spot, offcourse I’m dissapointed :)

Sign-up today for Yahoo! Search Marketing, and you get a $50 free PPC credit:

Offer open to new Sponsored Search advertisers only. (A new advertiser is one who has not advertised with Yahoo! Search Marketing for the past 13 months). Each account requires a nonrefundable $5 initial deposit. Advertisers signing up for Self Serve will receive a $0 credit into the account. Advertisers signing up for the Assisted Setup service will receive $0 off the $199 service charge. In each case, initial credits are nonrefundable and will be applied to click charges. There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.10 per click-through. Limit one offer per customer, and one use per customer on a single account. Sellers of certain legally restricted products may require third party certification at extra cost. Search listings subject to editorial review. Offer may not be combined with any other offers or discounts, separated, redeemed for cash, or transferred. Other terms and conditions may apply; see Advertiser Terms and Conditions when you sign up.

More info at Vbulletin Faq.

I wonder how the development of the most used paid forum in the world will go on from now on… especially since it has been aquired by the leading operator of media and e-commerce websites for large ticket consumer purchases in cars, mortgage, real estate & travel, which has nothing to do with what Jelsoft has been developing until now.

Will the prices increase ? Will there be a much poorer support ? That always happens in a bigger company.

Official announcement at the Vbulletin Forums.

Step right up … Get your Wordpress MU powered .EDU blog from Adison University.

With just a $25 monthly “donation” you will get your own .EDU blog as long as you respect the blog rules.

The webmaster of Adison University is Preston White. He manages the Blog network and the whole Adison website.

Want a free, disposable, 24 hours lifetime email ?

Get it from BugMeNot.

Don’t ask me, what is it good for. Try: Anti-spam ? Registering to spam-sending websites ? etc.

Smashing Magazine just published the Golden Rules of Linkbaiting.

As the first comment shows, I just don’t know if a week’s reading time can cover all that content.

From the article:

• What is Linkbaiting?
• Profound Rules of Linkbaiting
• Writing-related Principles of Successful Linkbaiting
• Tactics and Strategies of Linkbaiting
• Linkbaiting Hooks
• Copywriting: Improve Your Writing Skills
• Copywriting Books
• Sources, Resources

PS: My blog is mentioned :)

Yes, it’s quite true. DreamHost representatives are asking their clients to block GoogleBot trough the .htaccess file, because their websites were “hammered by GoogleBot”.

Dreamhost representatives are also guiding their clients to make all their websites “unsearchable and uncrawlable by search engine robots”, because they cause “high memory usage and load on the server”.

PS: This is NOT a rumor. Multiple people are already complaining about Dreamhost asking clients to block search engine spiders. A post in QuickOnlineTips confirms this too.

Initial news bit via Zoso.

Just go to the Harvard H2O Playlist Beta project, register an account and make a “Playlist”. Then point a link towards that page.

That way you get Wedding Favors and Lord of the Rings Online Guides and Exploits and not :

H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology — they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

But wait there’s more : Dirspace directory (no offense intended to the owner, but that’s how directories “get” that SeoMoz PageStrength ?) and Viagra (of course through ezinearticles.com).

And this on top of my other posts about .edu spam:

• How to get unlimited links and content on a .edu domain
• .EDU Directory Spam - web.gcu.edu

A few weeks ago, RobotReplay was created, one of the most useful analytics tool in the web today.

In a few words, RobotReplay is what I reckon, the most convenient accessibility and usability workshop in the world, for free, anytime, anywhere. Basically, RobotReplay records all the sessions of your visitors, and shows you what every visitor did on your websites, from scrolling, clicks, completing of forms and selecting text.

The most important thing is that the end result / report is NOT a video but the page itself, and a little bit of javascript, so the bandwidth you save is from 1000% to 5000% perhaps. All you have to do to start monitoring your users, is to put a simple one line of javascript in every page of your website.

The guys from Nitobi Inc, the creators of RobotReplay, were happy enough to answer a few questions for me, clearing up a lot of aspects about RobotReplay but not only.

Read more

Jeff has just written what I consider an excellent post about 99 ways to brand and market a web startup.

Jeff is the owner of Aviva Directory.

Read it and learn. Then head over to my 101 Web Marketing Tips. Combine the knowledge, and you’re one step ahead.

David (Bio) has just finished his new book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR (Amazon buy link, without any affiliate code), featuring the foreword by Robert Scoble.

Apparently, I’m in it, and I will receive a copy of it from David as soon as possible. I will post a review of the book after I read it :)

What made me really happy, were a few words which reflect a state of mind that so many people in the publishing world either do not know, don’t want to know or refuse to believe it:

In the blog world, when someone writes a great post, you link to it. It’s a virtual pat on the back and acknowledgement that the effort was worthwhile. And it recognizes the original idea.

The best reward available today for a blogger or a publisher owning his own piece of real estate on the web, is a natural link.

Read more

PayPal now allows users from Romania to register an send only account (Personal / Premiere / Business). That means you can only send money trough Paypal, with funds fueled from a Credit Card.

If you want to receive money (or to have any other type of Paypal merchant services) you will have to wait.

Via Sandossu (with an additional check by me, just to be sure).

Update: The official PayPal Press Release about the expansion to 190 markets worldwide. From it, we learn that PayPal currently has 143 million accounts globally. In the first quarter of 2007, PayPal’s total payment volume was over $11 billion. So we can estimate an aproximate total of $45 billion sales for 2007.

Update 2: Everyone can see what are the services supported for his country, in this very easy to use interface.

A friend of mine has had his AdSense account banned for click fraud.

He sent a reply to the AdSense Team, explaining that he didn’t do any fraud, or if fraud was the case there, he had no knowledge of it. Part of his reply was :

Considering that I can’t create a new AdSense account, will you allow me to rent the space in my website, to other AdSense publishers ?

Read more

A few days ago, I installed a plugin called search meter, to monitor what my visitors are searching for.

Read more

Just point a link towards their results, and Google will give a nice and juicy backlink.

The cache is new :

This is G o o g l e’s cache of (URL above) as retrieved on 18 Apr 2007 23:45:09 GMT.

Ask.co.uk doesn’t have a valid robots.txt file, and the search results from Ask.co.uk don’t have a nofollow (not that they should’ve).

Enjoy!

Update: Here’s another indexed page from Ask.co.uk, and guess what ? It’s cache is from yesterday :)