Link Development - good, bad and ugly. Part 1.

Thinking of SEO in retrospective, how it was a few years ago it's funny thing to do. Well, at that time I seriously believed that paid inclusion in Yahoo Directory, Dmoz, submission to directories will always be around BUT...


Yahoo has officially stated that they gonna close their paid inclusion program till the end of this year and, quite frankly, it is about time. Knowing that having your site included in Yahoo dir does not influence neither your site ranking on Google nor your traffic as it used to be would you invest $299 / year? I wouldn't.


Dmoz. Phew...what can I say?! The idea was great but its implementation faced with a human factor. I'm not telling that it's completely corrupted but when you have a suspicious that your site hasn't been included after 6+ Universe knows how many months is because the editor has its own interest is quite often way more than just a suspicion. It happens and A LOT.


Directories. What directories? Dmoz - see the previous paragraph. Local vertical directories may help but they aren't free and they won't help your ranking on Google as you may expect. 


When I think about running Link Development campaign I think about what authority resources I can find for a particular site. We know that the Internet is huge but in reality it has divided on certain types of sites - social sites, blogs, vertical directories, review sites, product sites, personal pages, portals. But there are lots of sites for which it seems like it's impossible to find such authority sites to get a link from.


Of course if there is a white hat in SEO there should be a black one too. Right - buying links from resources with either big traffic or lots of pages in Google Index or high PageRank. The matter fact it's a tricky question - if this technique belongs to black or white hat. Of course Google against this practice and I completely agree with its point of view on it. But....there is always 'but', many online projects either don't have time to grow its traffic naturally or desperately have to bring profit in a short term or struggle financially and their owners go into all methods of a traffic increasing they can think of and all ethic, moral criteria go out of the window.


There is sad, rarely spoken loudly true - Google simply can't make happy all site owners by giving them high ranking in their Search Results, there is always a competition and we don't know for sure if the best products / services, so to speak, go up in Search Results. There is no a simple correlation between a service or product quality and its ranking on Google. Obviously pointing links do not work, this criteria has been abused So Many Times. And I can't see any new way on a horizon, which people who want to win the race for Google Top 10/20 will not abuse. Period. 


Microsoft people talk about understanding people's intent on Web 2.0 Summit as a way to provide the most relevant search results possible, but lots of people can't themselves understand their own intent :-) To be continue....

Quick post about Snow Leopard. Process | Fan | Battery

Even if you aren't a tech geek when you hear your Macbook fan you realize that your battery is been draining fast at this moment. The beauty of Snow Leopard is that it much quicker pass your notebook resources - processor and memory in a moment when they don't need for resource consuming tasks anymore. The best example would be video file converting, big image editing in Photoshop and that sort of tasks.


It means your fan doesn't have to cool down your processor and motherboard that much and as a result it doesn't require energy at this moment. Bottom line - as less you hear your fan as longer your battery lasts without recharge and Snow Leopard is great in helping you with it.

Twitter updates on Google

Ok, I've been waiting for this since Twitter became a news information source plus to its original function and finally it has happened. If you use Twitter as a tool to communicate with your customers / prospects / just your site audience in general having your Twits on Google SERPs is the crucial thing! From now your twits will be exposed to much broader audience and in real time, just like you've already loved it happens on Twitter itself. The source - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html

Bing's Growth Slows, Google Recoups Losses in comScore September 2009 Report

Just as I thought I will be :-)

Bing's Growth Slows, Google Recoups Losses in comScore September 2009 Report: "

comScore has released their search engine share report for September 2009 and we're seeing yet another twist in the 'Can Bing catch up with Google?' saga. You may remember that Bing has been on quite a roll since launch gaining over 1 percentage point, with Google and Yahoo! trading off the losses.

Well, the tides began to turn last month, with Google regaining 0.3% of its loss and Bing gaining another 0.1% in share, which is not the rate of growth they have been experiencing. This time, Yahoo! suffered the losses with a 0.5% decline. Ask.com and AOL held steady.

Another interesting tidbit is YouTube's continued growth and how it compares to search. Greg Jarboe already provided you with the scoop on how more YouTube videos were watched in August than searches conducted in September. Be sure to read his post because this is a phenomenon to watch for sure.

Also, read up on Promoted Videos, which is essentially paid search for YouTube. You can now purchase Promoted Videos in AdWords, which will appear in the search results over at YouTube.

Will or do social sites kill email?

One function email has certainly lost or rather keep loosing is keeping people up to date about your life - personal or professional. I mean before social media came into the play I used to write long emails about certain things which had happened in my life, now I can broadcast my personal events via FaceBook or Twitter daily / hourly. But there is other thing which social network sites simply can't kill - taking time. When you type a message on Twitter you unconsciously try to do it fast, of course - it's Twitter, it's about your life up to a second, you gotta to deliver your news fast :-) At least you think so. And there is other thing which is subjective, but in my opinion, prevents email from fading away near soon - an affection to your favorite email client, I simply love to compose emails in my Mail app on Mac OS! And finally - for now none of social sites allows you compose/edit/delete your messages offline, it's simply against their nature - they suppose to keep your messages in a cloud. I can't see the way how FaceBook or Twitter will get its own Gears app like Gmail has.

A personal question 'hm...do you twit?'

I guess these days instead of asking 'Do you want a people's attention?' you can just ask 'Do you twit?' Forget about the original idea - to be able to update your relatives, friends, colleagues. Right now Twitter is your way to get people's attention to your ideas, comments, products, services, you name it. 


After you spend on Twitter more then couple month you begin to realize that people basically twit in two different fashions. Number one - shameless, bold, unstoppable promotion, people who follow this pattern consider Twitter as the next trumpet they've grabbed to scream the world about their product or services. Number two - people who have realized that Twitter is the ecosystem where they can communicate with their audience but not just push their stuff. The second way is so much harder and this is not about to be always cool in your posts or showing your superb sense of humor, it's about being a human being which is has something to tell people he cares about.


At this point the number of Twitter users has stopped growing exponentially and goes up rather gradually. I believe it suggests to the fact that it seems like the majority of people who wants to speak to the whole world has already joined 'the conversation' on Twitter.


You either don't have to join nor have to, this is your choice. If you twit it doesn't mean that you have automatically become a marketing guru or a person with a million followers. If you twit about your job and tell your potential customers about your product / service plus give them a sense that you aren't a T800 but a real human being you'll see their response. They will appreciate it. Twitter is not a silver bullet to give your business 100% success on a market, if you don't know your customers Twitter won't help to do that as you need a basic amount of information to begin with.


See you on Twitter :-)

Snow Leopard - little things that make difference.

I bet you've heard a lot about the fact that Snow Leopard is rather a big update than a new operation system. But why should we invent a new wheel if people like to drive using the one they've got used to, what they really want is just to make it more efficient. A huge percentage of people who switched from Mac OS 10.4 to 10.5 speaks for itself - people loved Tiger but Leopard showed lots of new useful stuff people found useful. At this point improving Leopard  means  bringing lots of small improvements that as a whole makes a Big Difference. That's what Snow Leopard is about.


Let's review top 5 improvements I've noticed since they turned out to be really helpful, at least for me :-)

1. Language switching. People who are fine with English as a single language on the Mac can simply skip this paragraph, but people who use 2 or more languages on their Mac and quite often have to switch between  will find a new language switching indicator extremely helpful. Where do you watch as you're switching a language using a shortcut? Right - on the right upper corner of your screen but would you prefer to keep watching on a text you're writing? The new switcher will allow you to do just that. It is a small improvement but I just love how it's been implemented and actually help me to stay focus on what I'm typing.
2. Expose built-in Dock. I love Dock and Expose as tools without which I can't imagine using Mac OS. What happens when you combine these tools? Exactly - once again it helps you to stay focus on your work.
3. Grab in Preview. I love Grab application but I found it a bit of a hassle that I can't save a captured image in any other format as TIFF, of course I wouldn't mind to save it in JPEG as it's the major format I and many of you keep our images. And so now Preview allows you to take screen shoot in a similar way as we do it in Grab. Now I predict eventually Grab will fade away as Preview starts to obtain its function.
4. Thumbnail resizing in Finder. I guess this function was pretty obvious to add as before Snow Leopard you could adjust distance between icons and icon size it a folder properties and so adding this function right to a window was a really logical step to take.
5. Separating Safari and its plugins in different processes. Right, now you can not only complain about Flash viewer bad coding for Mac OS but you can actually see how this process eats up your CPU and memory :-) Well, seriously - this separation allows you to close a certain plugin or force it to quite without crashing / closing Safari.