SEO Blog

Well it took me awhile by I finally bit the bullet and paid for a proper logo design and got some Quality Business Cards. Let me know what you think of my business cards below. I have letterhead, envelope, PowerPoint template, CD/DVD label and a brochure on the way. I also have some one working on a new design for the website which I hope to have out in the next month or so.

I know I am way behind on all this but I have been so busy with client work and expanding my services and web properties that I have not taken the time I should have to have a quality design on this site.

If you want to check to see if some one is copying your content from your WeBsite you can use Copyscape. The same company also offers Copysentry a product that will detect the plagiarism automatically and email you. This service is $4.95/mon for 10 pages and $0.25/mon per extra page for weekly checks. If you want daily checks the price is $19.95/mon for 10 page with the extra pages $1.00/mon.

When you find a Website that is displaying your copyrighted material there are a number of ways you can deal with it. You can contact the Website that has your material on their site and ask them to kindly take it down. You can contact the hosting company that is hosting the site and ask them to such the side down. I have found the latter to work the best.

Listen to Googles Audio Copyright Claims Procedure or view the Writen Copyright Claims Procedure to have the copyrighted material removed from their index.

For Google to investigate claims of alleged copyright infringement, the copyright owner must provide the following information in a signed letter on company stationery:

1. Identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work that you believe has been infringed. For example, ‘The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on www.google.com/ads.’
2. Identify the material that you claim is infringing the copyrighted work listed in item #1 above. This requires you to provide the search query that you used and the URL for each allegedly infringing ad.
3. Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred.)
4. Provide information, if possible, sufficient to permit Google to notify the owner or administrator of the web page that allegedly contains infringing material (email address is also preferred.)
5. Include the following statement: ‘I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.’
6. Include the following statement: ‘I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
7. Your signature.

If some one incorrectly reports your content as a copyright infringement and Google removes your content from their index there is a process where you can sent Google a Counter Notification requesting the material in questions be reinstated.

The administrator of an affected site may make a counter notification. When we receive a counter notification, we will reinstate the material in question. To file a counter notification with us, you must provide a written communication that sets forth the items specified below.

1. Identify the specific URLs of material that Google has removed or to which Google has disabled access. For Google Groups, identify the sender, date, newsgroup, and subject matter of all the material in question.
2. Provide your name, address, telephone number, email address, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or Santa Clara County, California if your address is outside of the United States), and that you will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
3. Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred.)
4. Provide information, if possible sufficient to permit Google to notify the owner or administrator of the web page that allegedly contains infringing material (email address is preferred.)
5. Include the following statement: “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that each search result or message identified above was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.”
6. Your signature.

Copyright compaints and counter norifications can be sent by post mail or by fax. See the below address and fax numbers.

Address:
Google, Inc.
Attn: Google AdWords, Copyright Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

Fax:
+1-650-618-1499
Attn: Google Copyright Complaints

Eric Ward is publishing a monthly how-to report on the art of link building and publicity for web content. The first issue is free and after that the price is $149 a year for 12 issues. You can sign up for the Free Trial and you will get a taste from what can be had for $12.50 a month. For Webmasters and SEO/M types this is one of the best deals I’ve seen. Well… next to Aaron Walls eBook on SEO.

Here is the contents of the free report.

1. Linking Fact, Fiction and Your Inbound Link Profile (INLP)
2. Social Linking and Tagging
3. Linking for Search Rank
4. Linking and Publicity Opportunity Watch
5. RSS To The Rescue

Considering that Eric bills out for $500/hr I would have to say this is a super deal. This is like having Eric spending an hour with you ever month giving you his top tips for $12.50/hr ($149 / 12 months) — I am feeling guilty already.

MordComm Inc. is publishing a quarterly search marketing print magazine with a subscription price of $15 a year for US and $20 for international subscribers. The Fall Issue was out in August and covered “pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, web analytics, click fraud, local and contextual search, and other search-related topics.” While your on their site doing up a subscription take some time to read a few posts from their marketing blog.

Their site describes the magazine as “devoted completely to the world of search marketing. It covers pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, web analytics, click fraud, local and contextual search, and other search-related topics. Each publication features articles and advice from leading experts in the field, interviews with the who’s-who of the industry, reviews of the most popular tools and services, latest news and trends, and much more.”

The magazine’s publishers Boris & Eugene Mordkovich are well known in the search world for their popular book on PPC and search engine marketing which can be purchased on their site for $49.97 with a 42 page white paper on Online Advertising and a $125 worth of PPC credits tossed in for free. Their site also provides a free download of chapter 6 on Click Fraud in PPC Ads And How To Counteract It.

Or if you like you can opt to purchase the Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook at Amazon for $22.95. Then go to Boris’ Pay Per Click Universe site and pick up a $300 PPC bonus for a list of sites that includes Yahoo, $300 free PPC credits for niche search engines, and over to the MordComm.com site to download the white paper on Online Advertising.

The higher price at PPCBook.info reflects their no questions asked unconditional 90-day money back guarantee and their commitment to provide a free updated book to all client that purchase through their website. This is not mentioned on the website but is noted in the material when the book is shipped to you.

I opted to get the book via their website.

Find a verse & play it on an audio player

There are lots of Bible software packages available that provide the ability to search the Bible, compare different versions, and consult Bible dictionaries and commentaries. There are even a good number of these types of programs for free.

But Bible software package that will read the bible to you verse by verse are not very common. Theophilos Bible software is the first Bible software package (free or otherwise) that I have seen where you can have your computer speak the verse you are reading on an audio player. I don’t mean have your computer read it with some reading software that sounds like a robot but where it plays the verse on the multimedia player like RealPlayer.

While the Theophilos Bible software is free you will have to pay $49.95 for the Theophilos Audio Bible CD which is narrated by Alexander Scourby.

This product is great for people that don’t know English well or don’t know how to pronounce all the different Bible names. I have downloaded the software and am in the process of ordering the Audio Bible. I will update this post when I get my Audio CD.

If you like the free version you will may want to consider the Theophilos Library CD Edition. This package will give you up to 43 Bibles and 57 reference and study titles and starts at the price of $19.95.

To get started you can Get your FREE Theophilos Bible Software HERE!

Is the Inbound Link Quality (ILQ) Tool — which calculates a rating for websites according to their number and type of inbound links — based on factors that Google uses?

Aviva Directory has posted a list of what they consider the Strongest Directories based off of the Page Strength tool over at SEOMoz.org.

On the same page the Aviva Directory writer notes that in their opinion SEO Company’s ILQ system of “measurement of directories based on .edu and .gov links falls short” due to “ILQ measures the number of inbound links a directory has from dir.yahoo.com, dmoz, .edu and .gov sites.”

They say the reason for their position is “What good is it to rank a directory based mainly on factors that a Google representative specifically states that Google doesn’t use?” Aviva Directory uses comments from a Matt Cutts video to support their position.

Matt Cutts from Google’s anti spam department released a Lightning Round 5 min video on August 1st 2006 where he discusses whether inbound links from DMOZ.ORG, .GOV, or .EDU are given a special ranking boost based on the domain name or top level domain name they come from. In dealing with a question whether blogs are ranked differently that regular sites Matt notes that “we don’t really have much in the way of saying oh this is a link from the ODP or from .gov or .edu so give that some sort of special boost.”

The context of that statement and the full question is as follows:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1756437348670651505
4:06 - 5:02
And Thomas writes in and says does Google index or rank blog sites differently than regular web sites. That’s a good question, not really. Some one else asked about links from gov’s and edu’s and whether links from two levels deep gov’s and edu’s, like gov.pl are worth the same as .gov, and the fact is that we don’t really have much in the way of saying oh this is a link from the ODP or from .gov or .edu so give that some sort of special boost. It’s just those sites tend to have higher Pagerank because more people link to them and reputable people link to them.
So, blog sites there’s not really any distinction unless you go off to blog search of course and then it is all constrained to blogs. So in theory we could rank them different but for the most part just the general search the way that it falls out ends up working okay. Alright thanks.

The question “What good is it to rank a directory based mainly on factors that a Google representative specifically states that Google doesn’t use?” is a good question and one that I would have been happy to answer if some one from Aviva Directory had contacted me. Before we deal with their question let me explain to those who are not familiar with ILQ how the rating system works.

The ILQ tools access Yahoo’s API and determines the number of yahoo.dir, dmoz.org, .edu and .gov inbound links a site has. It then calculates the ILQ value based on the preset values given to each of the 4 types of inbound links. Links from dir.yahoo are given 1 point each (a paid submission to dir.yahoo gets an average of 15 links), links from dmoz.org are given 30 points, links from .edu sites are given 45 points and links from .gov sites are given 67 points.

Here is a sample of the ILQ value for CNN.COM
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/ilqtool.html?ilqtool=cnn.com

Here is a sample of the ILQ value for SEOMOZ.ORG
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/ilqtool.html?ilqtool=seomoz.org

Back now to Aviva Directory’s question on why rank directory’s based on the above factors.
Matt Cutts gives us a hint to this very question in his Lightning Round video. After noting that Google doesn’t “really have much in the way of saying oh this is a link from the ODP or from .gov or .edu so give that some sort of special boost” he goes on to say that these type of sites tend to have “higher Pagerank because more people link to them and reputable people link to them.”

While Google may not give more ranking weight to a link from a ODP, .gov, or .edu inbound link based on the domain name (dmoz.org) or the domain extension (.gov or .edu) it is generally held that a link from a site that has many reputable sites linking to it is going to provide more ranking weight than a site that doesn’t have many reputable sites linking to it.

This is the main reason the ILQ ranking tool and SEO Company’s list of dirctories ranked by ILQ was produced. It is not so much that the domain DMOZ.ORG or the top level domains EDU and GOV have a special boost in and of themselves but that generally there are “more people link[ing] to them and [there are] reputable people linking to them”.

The different point values that were given to each of the different domains or top level domains were based on the difficulty to get links from these types of sites. These link values reflect the quality of the website that is going to be given these types of links.

Most sites can get accepted in Yahoo directory for $299 a year so Yahoo inbound links were only given 1 point (a paid sub gives you an average of 15 links or 15 points). While getting into DMOZ is not easy, for a site with quality originial content it is quite doable. So links from DMOZ were given 30 points, twice the value of a paid Yahoo submission. Edu links are more difficult to get and in most cases these links are given on quality of content. These links are given 45 points or 1.5 times the value of a DMOZ link. The gov links are very difficult to get and are given strictly on the value of your content. These links were given 67 points or 1.5 times the value of an edu link.

So to sum up, the ILQ system is based on number of inbound links from sites that are know to have reputable inbound links. The point system values given to the 4 different types of links is based on the difficulty of a website obtaining inbound links from these types of sites.

While ILQ is not a perfect system the method used is based on factors that are generally held that Google uses to rank sites. This factor is that Google recognized the value of inbound links from reputable sites.

Josh Wickander from Kendal Howard (check out their quad monitor stand) tipped me off to this good deal.

TigerDirect.com is selling a Acer AL2017BMD 20″ LCD for $199. It’s fast at 8ms, has DVI-D and VGA connectors and the unit has build in speakers. Can you say LCD prices are dropping.

Now if you are in Canada eh, and want this 20″ monitor you have to pay $319 CDN for it.

SEOCompany.ca’s email got shut down today by BlueHost.com your friendly hosting company. Spamcopy.net reported me to BlueHost and they closed down my email no questions asked.

Spamcop.net sent the following abuse report. “Thank you for responding to this spam report. This is a report regarding http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/page-rank-update-list.html. It was sent to you because you have been identified as “Administrator of network hosting website referenced in spam.”

The report asks the hosting company to “choose the most appropriate optoin from the menu.”

URL used without permission (Stop sending reports).
This website has been disabled.
This issue is under investigation.
I am not the right person to contact about this.
This message is not spam.
Add a note to this issue.

Of course BlueHost didn’t respond they just shut my email down and send me an email to my bob@bobmutch.com account. So my spam filter Cloudmark on MS Outlook filtered the email out as spam and all the emails that were sent to our SEOCOMPANY.CA domain were bounced — great for business!

Ended up that some gmail account has been sending out spammy email with a link to my Pagerank update page.

So I logged into the abuse report that Bluehost kindly forwarded to me and selected “URL used without permission (Stop sending reports).”

So what this tells me is if you want to get a hosting company to shut down someones email all you have to do is send out a bunch of spam emails with a link to there site. People will report the spam to their ISP and the ISP reports it to spamcop. Seems like a pretty lame system to me but such is the Internet.

Website Services Magazine August issue is out and it is available in digital form.

Starting with his issue Website Services magazine is now available in NXTbook media which is a Macromedia Flash Player app. The Website Services mag look pretty slick in this new format!

Here is a list of the main articles.

Defining Deliverability:
How does meail deliverability affect your bottom line? More than you may think. Marketers should be paying close attention to both reputation and infrastructure to get messages delivered.

DIY Affiliate Programs:
Having a thrid part manage y our affiliate program can be costly, taking away from your take-away pay. Fortunately, there is another way.

The Power of Web Partnerships:
More businesses are taking advantage of strategic alliances. There are some real benefits if you go about it the right way.

Website Monitoring - Ping & Traceroute:
Is your website or application downtime costing you money? Here are some common problems and simple solutions.

Affiliate Strategies:
The competition is fierce, but combining old-school Sales practices with new technologies can help your business excel.

Keeping Tabs on Your Affiliates:
Affiliate managers need to know how to keep their people in check — after all, they are promoting your brank.

There is some confusion as to what hits, pageviews, visits and unique visits are. At least there was in the blog I just came from.

Hits are the number of files that are accessed during a pageview and can be any where from 1 to easily 25 or more. One hit for accessing the CSS file, one hit for each JS file, one hit for each image file, one hit from each template file, and the list goes on. Hits are a useless statistic.

Pageviews are the number of times any page on your site is accessed. If you divide your pageviews by your visitors you will get the average number of pages a visitors is looking at.

Visits are the number connects that request pages from your site. One person could come and go to your site 100 times a day. If fact if you look at your visits by IP you will probley find your own IP address at the top of the list.

Uniques are unique visits and usually it means unique visits in one month not first time visitors.

What are these stats good for?

Hits are useless except to impress people that don’t know better. Pageviews tell you the number of impressions a site wide banner will get. Visits can be used to give you your conversion rate by dividing your site conversions by your site visits. This is an very important number to monitor.

Anyway that is my daily rant. I just came from a blog that posted that hits are the same as pageviews so I got inspired to post this.