Getting a PR0 is Not Fun and It's Bad Business

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Be suspicious. Be very suspicious. Particularly if it comes with no caveats and is marketed to the general population.

SEO Companies:
Techniques that can negatively affect your client if not done properly should never be on your rate card.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

httpwebwitch (Ian Ring) on Validating Your Site for w3c Compliance

No.

Next question?

Webmaster World post thanks to Ian Ring aka httpwebwitch

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Webroot-Says-Hackers-Exploit-Google-Trends-With-Malware/

This article from eWeek (again, I use mainstream loosely) explains how hackers use Google Trends to figure out what is a timely news article people might search for, then monopolize on the search terms by writing fake blogs.

Is there any reason to mention Google in this article, other than making it worth reading? You could replace “google trends” with “reading the newspaper” and it’s just as plausible. The mere mention of Google is the only reason this article is interesting. Get a clue eWeek.

Oh wait… they have one. They write an article about Google, put GOOG in it and it comes up during a google finance search… remind me to….

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Using Google Alerts to Piggyback on Your Competitors Marketing

One of my favorite tools for link development is Google Alerts. Google alerts allows you to enter in a keyword and whenever Googlebot comes across that keyword in a new page it will send you an email. It’s an invaluable service on it’s own, and an extremely powerful tool for link development.

We use it to build links in the following way:

1. Compile a list of our clients competitors
2. Add a Google alert for those terms
3. When we receive an alert, find the blog owner, site owner, or reporter who wrote about the competitor and write an informal friendly email to them letting them know about our client.

We have found this to be tremendously effective for a lot of our clients. Authors and reporters love to reuse material, and catching them while your product or industry is fresh in their minds is invaluable.

Some words of warning: don’t try to automate the emails unless you are well versed in CANSPAM and the perils of automated emails. Make the communication as personal as possible, and send them on behalf a person high up in the company (CEO, etc). Be prepared to exchange emails with them, and make sure the person communicating is knowledgeable about your company, not some outsourced link monkey.

Happy link building.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

PubCon Search Marketing Conference

If you can go to just one conference this year, this is the one.

You can get a discount of 20% by using the following code: co-94120

I get a kickback for this, but that’s not my reason for posting. All proceeds will go towards a round on me.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Web Designers

If you allow your web design company to put a link back to their website on the bottom of yours, you are paying them TWICE.   Even worse, it’s recurring billing.

Because Google’s pagerank algorithm uses incoming links to a website to determine it’s importance, there is an entire industry that has developed around buying and selling links.  Links can help a design firm rank for search terms that then bring them more business or revenue.  When you let your web designer put a link at the bottom of the website YOU paid for, you are paying them in link equity.   The value of this link on the open market can vary from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month!

Are you a well known retailer?   A very active person in your community?  That link at the bottom may actually be worth what you paid for your website EVERY YEAR.   The problem is that web design companies often take advantage of your ignorance or add it to the bottom of your page.

Sometimes this is acceptable.  For example, if your web design company links to you from their site, you are benefiting from their link popularity and it may be an even swap.  Other times people get free services that link back to the creator.  If you use a free blog template, for example, it is fair and equitable to give the designer credit.   The bottom of this blog links to WordPress.org for this reason — they gave me free blog software, and I return the favor with a link.

Buyer beware.  If you are paying for a service, you shouldn’t have to link back to the person who created it unless it was fully disclosed as part of the deal.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

While googling myself this morning, I discovered a very strange thing. It seems that netflix pages were coming up very high on the ranking. I took a look at the cached version of these pages and noticed that Netflix was showing MY LOGIN in the cached page. The only way to do this would be to show Googlebot my login area. Checking further, I notice that it’s not just me, there are a large collection of Netflix customer’s private data exposed including names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and even recent movies rented! The problem is not restricted to Google, but also cached pages in Yahoo! as well.

It seems user data from Netflix customers can be retrieved by the popular search engines Google and Yahoo by performing special queries reveiling a cached version of the page. This was discovered by OnlineMarketer.com on Friday. Judging by the cached date,the pages have been available as early as March 22nd.

The problem is not restricted to Google, but also cached pages in Yahoo! as well.

On some of the exposed pages see the users email and mailing address, as well as see what movies they have recently returned.

Cloaking Gone Bad
It appears that Netflix has been cloaking, serving different pages to search engine spiders than to users, and some error in their setup has exposed this data. Many popular sites cloak, including Google themselves, but normally to target geographically targeted pages to users such as their international versions. Whether this is a cloaking expiriment to try to game the search engines, or if this was just a mistake I’m not sure.

I’ve just returned “Run Lola Run”
That’s a page that I found in Yahoo. Indeed I did, and I liked it. Very good movie, but why is this available to Google and Yahoo?! Boy am I glad I don’t rent ADULT movies from netflix. The privacy violations are amazing at this point.

Mysterious Items in my Queue
Is Googlebot picking movies for me? My wife has been complaining about movies we’ve recently received and I thought nothing of them until now. From what I knew we had a near empty Queue, and now it is filled with a lot of random stuff. This is just speculation, but is in need of more invstigation.

One movie I see in Google’s cached version of my que, is “The Butterfly Effect”. Now I KNOW I didn’t put that there. For one, I have already rented it, and for another, the movie is one of the worst I’ve seen in a long time.

Ok, it seems this will turn up some of the Movies that Googlebot recommends and is adding to peoples’ queue.:

http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:netflix+queue+add+site:netflix.com

- John

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.