SEO WORLD NEWS

You know the situation: you hear a song that you’ve loved for a long time and finally get the name and band so you can download it. This happened to me recently when I heard the song “Seven Nation Army” from White Stripe and finally got someone to tell me the name. I searched for the song on isohunt and found this Gem:

Top 600 Modern Rock Songs

It’s an absolutely brilliant compilation that includes tons of songs that I always liked, but either forgot about or never knew the song’s name / artist.

Later in the day I noticed a new Search Engine for mp3s, beemp3.com making the social media rounds. While I was testing the new MP3 Search at beemp3.com (which works pretty well) I remembered there was a house remix from a few years back that I wanted to get a hold of.

I couldn’t find the version I wanted on torrent search or on beemp3, but did find it on youtube. So what do you need to know when you find something you like on YouTube?

How to report Copyright infringement to YouTube

How To Download and Convert Youtube Videos

With a little searching I found this nifty little web app that will convert Youtube movie to, among other things, mp3s. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get it to work, but it is a free hosted app that does the trick. Enjoy!

Google recruits some of the best and the Brightest from around the world; something like 99.9% of their Job Applicants are rejected.

So it’s something to take notice of when a member of the Google Family leaves for something other than more money:

My name is Vijay Boyapati and I’m an Engineer at Google. Some of you may remember me from the interview with Dr Paul at Google (skip to 42:31 in the interview - that’s me). I’m the fellow that flew down from Seattle to hear Dr Paul talk and to write him a check. Seattle’s local newspaper, The Stranger, wrote an article about my visit to Mountain View to see Dr Paul.

I’m organizing Operation Live Free or Die because I believe we have a chance, a real chance, of restoring our Republic to the principles on which it was founded. We have a chance to end the undeclared, unconstitutional, murderous War in Iraq and bring our troops home — immediately. A chance of ending the government’s theft of the fruits of our labor via the IRS. A chance to run our lives as we see fit without a bureaucrat in Washington telling us what we can and cannot do. For these reasons I want to do everything I can to restore freedom to our great country by electing Dr Ron Paul as President. I hope you will join me.

 

Vijay is looking for a few hundred volunteers to go to New Hampshire to help rock the vote. They need more people This week for old fashion canvassing which is still the most effective way to get the message out. It might be worth it to do the canvassing just so you can pick the brain of a Google Engineer.

If I still lived in the U.S., I would Go.

Vijay is also raising money to pay to house any volunteers. I see where to donate, I see the Paypal button; but I’m not seeing any Google Check out button. . .

This quote got me thinking:

The eye-popping reality of the situation is this: No longer can it be said that Ron Paul is running for President. Amazingly enough, his candidacy has been hijacked, and it appears now that the people are running for President. . . through Ron Paul! That’s the true revolution about which your neighbors are speaking.

 

if “the People” are Google’s people, does that mean Google is hijacking the Presidency? (cue scary music!)

I think we’ll have to explore this Ron Paul - Google Connection a little deeper.

The war on Paid links is in full gear. Buying and selling links without the nofollow tag is now officially a black hat SEO practice that is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Google has and will continue to penalize sites that flagrantly buy and sell links. If you are buying or selling links: do it covertly & do it under the radar.

However, in many instances there may be a better option that trying to buy a link from a site: buy the site outright. While this won’t work for a large newspaper site, those links have long been void of link juice anyway. In fact, anyone who is openly selling may already have their link juice passing privileges revoked.

So who does that leave? Generally, the sites you can still buy links from that can pass link juice (help you site rank in the SERPs) will be small to medium sites with a single owner or decision maker. In those instances, where you’ve already gone through the bother of finding out who owns the site and getting in contact with them, why offer to buy a link for a few thousand a year? Wouldn’t you be better served by just making an offer on the entire site?

If you bought the site you’d get any revenue it was producing, any potential appreciation from the domain name, and total editorial control (you could link to some or all of your other sites). Sites aren’t as cheap as they were a few years ago, but you’d be surprised how many people will jump at $10 or $15k. Hell, even monsters like Adult Friend Finder are only selling for only 3X EBITDA.

So if you are going to ask someone to buy a link, perhaps the first question you ask them shouldn’t be “Would you sell me a link on this page for X/year?” but rather “Can I buy your site ____ from you for $XYZ?”.

If you buy the entire site then you’re no longer violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by changing where it links. It’s not like we actually give a shit, but . . . ya know . . .

As we pass through some turbulence on the plane I’m quietly reflecting on the last few months spent in Europe. At the beginning of the trip, I was still trying to make it a working trip. By the end. I was only spending about 4 hours a week total on the Net; it was a much-needed vacation.

Over the next 2 weeks I’ll be getting situated in Brazil and ramping back into full-time work mode. That means all those unanswered emails and dangling correspondences will soon be revisited and this blog will soon be back in full swing.

Not all traffic is created equal. Certain types of traffic is much more likely to convert to a sale than others. It’s all about catching the right surfer in the right mindset to make a purchase. In the adult space, the colloquialism for the best kind of traffic is a guy with “his dick in one hand and his credit card in the other.”

Some types of traffic are notorious for having low CTR and conversion rates including traffic from torrent sites, pop-up ads and from poor and third world countries.

But now the new king of poor conversion and click through rates has emerged; and that crown goes to facebook traffic. Ad click through rates of 3-7 per 10,000 pageviews are not uncommon; a truly abhorrent figure. Wouldn’t you think that someone would just ACCIDENTLY click an advert more frequently than that? It turns out not.

The problem is that when people are on Facebook, they are not in the mindset to purchase anything. One session from an average Facebook Whore might produce 200 page views to various groups, widgets, photos and messages; but that suffer is just not interested in buying anything; their mind is elsewhere.

Then, if that surfer finally does get the inclination to buy something, they just type Google in the address bar and start their search anew with something like “buy cheap [keyword]“ or even directly to Amazon.com.

That’s why much of this facebook hype may be overblown. Traffic is surging and millions more users join every month (much like Myspace was just 18 months ago). But two questions need to be answered before we take that $15 billion valuation too seriously:

1. Is facebook a fad like every other social networking site has been? Will everyone abandon it when the next best thing comes along? And more importantly:
2. How do you get a facebook user in the mindset to purchase? If you can’t, how do you monitize that traffic long term?

This isn’t a cut on Facebook or on Mark Zuckerberg; that guy’s a Genius. But when you’re sporting the least valuable traffic on the Net and you have a valuation of several thousand times earnings: it may just be time to get out while the gettin’s good.

Garrett Lisi has come come up with a new basis for a TOE (Theory of Everything) that’s explained in this telegraph article (white paper here).

Lisi’s inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8’s 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

 

This movie may help a little.

Interesting . . . but how great is it gonna be when the theory proves that the answer to life, the universe and everything really is 42?

In SEO, sometimes you can get bogged down with coming up with the perfect theory of exactly how Google ranks sites - an SEO ToE. Everyone wants that slight edge that they think will get them over the hump . . . when in fact, the answer (for making money) is so much simpler.

My SEO ToE breaks down something like this:

1. Get lots of Links
2. To trusted sites
3. With SEOed content
4. That converts and makes money
5. Build
6. Test
7. Refine
8. GOTO 5

It’s not perfect but it works.

The dearth of posting here lately correlates to my spending much more time offline in this place called “reality”. It’s really pretty amazing - you should try visiting it some time . . .

My adventures the past few weeks include crazy tales featuring 2 groups of German High School seniors visiting Vienna, being bounced from a club for wreaking too much havoc, ice cold models in Sarajevo, acquiring the nickname “King”, and this fight on the streets of Florence Italy I caught on video:

Paris and Budapest were also jumping hot spots for nightlife and adventure. I’ve met hundreds of “normal” people who don’t do the same Geeky shit that I do: most of them 18-26 years old; it’s nice to not talk bits and bytes for a change.

This week we’re back to work in London for a few days looking at how Google completely and almost laughably fucked up the adult SERPs in the past week (post forthcoming), forging new partnerships, and getting some work done for the first time in weeks.

Then it’s back on sabbatical for stops in Barcalona, Madrid, and Lisbon before jumping back to Brazil.

Potential Webmaster Ski Trip January 2007

We’ve booked suites at the Palms in Vegas for Internex (Jan 13th-16th) and I’m thinking about organizing an “SEO Geeks” Snowboarding / Skiing adventure in Lake Tahoe from January 9th to the 13th (4 nights lodging, 3 day lift pass).

If it were around $1000 for lodging, lift tickets and organization would you be interested in going?

The dollar is getting killed no matter how you measure it. While this may suck for Americans traveling and living overseas, it’s great news for all you non Americans who want to buy products and services that are measured in US Dollars.

Take, for Example, the SEO Black Hat Private forum membership which has been priced at US$100 per month since it launched more than a year ago. Since the dollar is steadily aiming for par value with toilet paper, it now costs considerably less for you non Americans than it did just one year ago.

So . . . while the SEO Black Hat Forum membership cost 78 Euros per month last year, it now costs only 69 Euros per month; that’s an 11%+ discount. It’s even better if you’re a Brazilian: 215 Reals per month last year vs. 175 this year. That’s a whopping 18%+ discount vs last years prices.

You pot smoking hockey lovers are seeing a fantastic 16% discount vs. last years prices; while it cost 112 Canadian Dollars per month last year for a membership, it now cost less than C$94 per month. That’s a savings of almost 2 dime bags per month!

It’s not all that much for you tea sipping wankers. The price per month of our forum has only dropped from 52 Pounds per month to 48 . . . and you really can’t buy shit in London for 4 pounds. Then again, what the hell can you buy there for 48 pounds? A decent meal without alcohol?

But our friends down under gotta be loving the new prices on US Goods And Services. The forum would have cost you 126 kangaroo pelts per month last year, but now will run you only 108. I guess you can use the money you save to pay the new VAT tax that your Prime Minister promised he wouldn’t impose when he ran for reelection.

Take advantage of our misfortune . . . and buy our stuff, please!

From the heart of Silicon Valley, The Pamela Anderson Google Picture:

Now that’s branding.

Via slashdot, we see another brilliant patent awarded by the US Patent office:

Search engine system supporting inclusion of unformatted search string after domain name portion of URL

Abstract

A web site system provides functionality for searching a repository of information, such as the World Wide Web, by including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting. In one embodiment, when the system receives a request for a URL of the form www.domain_name/char_string, where char_string is a character string that may include spaces and non-alphabetic characters, the system initially determines whether the character string includes a prefix that identifies the URL as a non-search-request URL. If no such prefix is present, the character string is used in its entirely as a search string to execute a search, and the results of the search are returned to the user.

 

You ask: How in the world was this ever even submitted?!

eln notes:

I think the flowchart makes that obvious.

During the course of the business day, most people will jot down notes about various things discussed during meetings or at informal cubicle conversations or whatever. Usually, these notes are kept for some period of time until they become no longer relevant, at which time they’re either thrown out or shredded.

At my office, we throw such notes into little blue bins under our desks. The contents of these bins are then taken by a company who shreds them. In Amazon’s case, the contents of the blue bins are apparently sent to the patent office.

So there you have it.

 

Are we ever going to fix our broken patent system?