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02 May 2011 13:08

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Tech: Protip: Be careful when searching for anything Bin Laden-related

  • cause Whenever a story comes out of nowhere to be a major news story — say, Japan’s earthquake or Osama bin Laden’s death — it tends to draw a lot of search traffic overnight to new terms that come up based on the story.
  • effect Now that anything Bin Laden-related is SEO platinum, malware creators are using the opportunity to load your computer with a virus — using such mechanisms as Google Image Search. Be careful out there, guys. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

27 Apr 2011 20:47

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Tech: Zephoria: A SEO company piggybacking off a researcher’s success?

  • It also looks like [Zephoria] is calling up other social media services to try to take over my account. I’m still investigating all of this but not at all surprised. Apparently, they’re a SEO company. And apparently my social media usage affects their SEO. Le sigh.
  • Danah Boyd • Getting at the key problem here with her whole Tumblr username takeover. While there’s reason for Tumblr to get a little bit of the stinkeye over this issue (although they’re working like crazy to make amends in this case, with Tumblr CEO David Karp himself doing customer service), Zephoria the company appears to be doing really sketchy things in an attempt to usurp Boyd’s longstanding online identity. Because, you know, Boyd has a Twitter account with many users, a YouTube account since 2006, a Flickr account since 2004, a Last.fm account since 2004 … you get the idea. So, instead of  going after Tumblr, we think the Zephoria company itself deserves scrutiny, based on their apparent piggyback on Boyd’s name. While they may have an A+ Better Business Bureau rating, if Boyd’s right, that should probably go down to a B-minus. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

17 Feb 2011 19:27

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Tech: Huffington Post uses word “Google” 103 times in single article

  • The article of the moment on HuffPo: Personally, we prefer to Bing Google on Bing. What an obvious grab for SEO! The article says Google 103 times (by our count)! But seriously, folks, we Lycos this article and think it’s pretty Cuil. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Dec 2010 10:32

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Tech: Google handles DecorMyEyes problem swiftly, brusquely

  • evil An online store called DecorMyEyes.com used negative feedback about itself to boost its own SEO rankings on Google. It encouraged it, even.
  • dumb The site agrees to talk to The New York Times, creating such bad PR that we can ensure nobody will ever shop there ever again. Great work, NYT.
  • smart Google then changed its algorithm, saying “being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

05 Oct 2010 14:17

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Politics: Conundrum: Howard Kurtz hates SEO, likes The Daily Beast

  • Howard Kurtz, about a month ago Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz puts up a rant complaining about how he has to do SEO to get people to read his articles: “Our mission – and we have no choice but to accept it – is to grab some of that traffic that could otherwise end up at hundreds of other places, even blogs riffing off the reporting that your own publication has done.”
  • Howard Kurtz, right about now His dislike of SEO isn’t enough to make him pass up The Daily Beast: “I’ve wanted to work with Tina Brown forever—well, for a long time—and I’m incredibly impressed by the energy and creativity of The Daily Beast staff. After a lifetime in newspapers, I’m ready for the challenge of fast-paced online journalism.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Sep 2010 22:18

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Tech: Demand Media IPO: Crap content may be massive cash cow

  • $1.5
    billion     the potential market cap for Demand Media’s upcoming IPO
  • $1.2
    billion     the current market cap of the New York Times Company source
  • » To understand how crazy that is, let’s point out what the two companies make. The New York Times (minus the Jayson Blair saga) has been known for creating some of the best journalism known to man. Demand Media, through sites like eHow and Cracked.com, is far more known for shoveling as much SEO-friendly content onto the Web as they can. Yet, they could be worth more in an IPO. What is our world coming to?
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Sep 2010 21:04

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Tech: Google Instant Search looks awesome but has downsides

  • Google’s Instant Search is pretty darn cool, yes, but it has some possible downsides. A lot of businesses have built their models around Google’s SEO and paid search benefits, which could be harder to grab using this model. (If people aren’t misspelling words, for example …) Search Engine Land is particularly concerned about the effects on “long tail” searches: “With our example, starting the query with “Las”, shows ads for Las Vegas. Some of those ads are for hotels. Why would a user continue typing if they see hotel ads already?” Gawker, on the other hand, is more concerned with finding unfortunate word combinations that come up, such as the one above. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

17 Jul 2010 16:15

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Politics: Thanks SEO: Gene Weingarten laments the lost art of headlines

  • Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian.
  • Washington Post supercolumnist Gene Weingarten • Explaining how newspapers have had to suck the life out of their headlines in pursuit of eyeballs. “Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers,” he writes. Personally, we write our headlines with some focus on SEO, but we’re totally willing to get out of the way of a good joke. One paper that does a good job of mixing SEO and classic headline art is The New York Times, probably because they can afford to. And SEO doesn’t mean you can’t be clever. See the headline Weingarten put on his story: “Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

24 May 2010 15:10

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Politics: Scandal for SEO? Why the Nikki Haley thing feels weird to us

  • one It was announced on a blog which covers South Carolina politics, by the guy who founded the blog.
  • two The blog is getting a lot of attention as a result of the whole thing, which boosts their advertising revenue and SEO.
  • three They’ve posted multiple times about a scandal that THEY created; seems weird to us, y’know. source
  • » We have an announcement to make, guys: We had a politically damaging (Nikki Haley) scandal fall into our lap (Nikki Haley) for the purposes of increasing our SEO. Doesn’t matter what it was (Nikki Haley) but we’re really sorry (Nikki Haley) that it happened. This is our last statement (Nikki Haley) but only our first post about it. We’re going to do as much coverage (Nikki Haley) as we possibly can.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

16 Dec 2009 10:35

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Tech: SEO experts made uncomfortable by the rise of real-time search

  • It’s like we’re back to Infoseek in 1997. If you want to rank #1, don’t worry about quality content, relevance or popularity, just be the last person to Tweet about a topic and you’ll come out on top (at least, for a few seconds).
  • SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin • In a post discussing (among other things) the sudden desire by Google (and Bing!) to be on top of the real-time search game. It’s all part of a list of his predictions for 2010. He’s not alone – apparently a lot of SEO experts are with him. He calls it the worst implementation of a new product he’s seen from Google so far, and suggests that it won’t last in its current form more than a couple of weeks. He’s probably nervous that it’s gonna cost him money because his entire business model is based on a search engine optimization model Google just broke. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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