Interesting article at Webpronews.com today discussing a recent ban imposed on Netvertise, Inc. by the FTC. Apparently:

The FTC alleges the company violated federal law by selling franchises for Website design, promotion services, and SEO software under false claims.

In addition to the ban, Netvertise will have to return $160,000 to its customers, as part of a settlement, which is not technically an admission of guilt.

The FTC claims the company inflated the earnings customers would make with their services and Netspace SEO software to lure franchise buyers.

The FTC says Krasnow’s company misrepresented franchise incomes with unsubstantiated earnings claims, overstated the value of the Netspace software, and that the Netvertise provided consumers with “defective” disclosure documents.

Interesting…I’d never heard of them before. If they’re scamming innocent clients out of cash then this can only be a good thing.

Facebook.com is set to make a big announcement this Thursday, May 24th.   The Wall Street Journal and Cnet speculate that this announcement will bring another level of social media to the networking giant.

“On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.”

One quote in particular gives me the feeling that Facebook would like to become more of a content aggregator and/or publisher instead of a social networking website:

“Mr. Zuckerberg in the past has acknowledged he has greater ambitions for Facebook. He has bristled at Facebook’s “social networking” tag, instead calling the site a “social utility” that helps people share information, with their personal connections with each other as a backdrop. If others build services to take advantage of those connections, Facebook can become more useful for its users, he said in the March interview.”

Sound familar to Myspace News?  Hopefully not….as far as I know, Myspace News hasn’t really taken off since its launch.

Steve O’Hear at ZDNet.com and Paidcontent.org discuss how Facebook.com will become a platform on which companies can provide services within the Facebook pages.   Using this platform a company, or entertainer, or individual may be able to leverage their network to share content, or a product, or an offer, etc.  Of course this is all speculation at this point.

One of these options does seem like a reasonable next step for Facebook.com.  They are growing at an incredible rate, but if you don’t continue to improve your site and evolve you’ll eventually fade away.

On a seperate but related issue, what do you think of them rejecting acquisition offers and opting to stay private?  Do you think they have what it takes to go the distance?  They just seem so ripe for a buyout by a huge media company or Google.

I was doing some research to prepare for another post, but to my surprise I found something even juicier. Yahoo! is cloaking their (fixed typo for the professor) Autos pages, serving keyword stuffed pages to the SE crawlers and regular pages to the average users. I was browsing as Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler and therefore was able to see this.

Below are two screenshots. The first thumbnail on the left is what you will see on this page, http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/forsale.html, if you are crawling as Slurp. The second thumbnail on the right is what you will see on the same page if you are surfing as a normal user.

So, they are clearly serving different content to their users and to the search engines. The pages they’re serving to the bots are heavily keyword stuffed. I honestly don’t know where they could cram the word “used cars” on the page again. It’s everywhere.

If you look on Yahoo!’s “Search Content Quality Guidelines” it states:

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted
Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo! does not want include:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

I’d say the page in question above falls into all of those items I highlighted above. Yahoo! is repeating the keyword “used cars” over and over to inflate their search engine rankings. The text is hidden from the user. It is giving the search engines different content than what the end-user sees. And lastly, this page is built primarily for the search engines.

Normally, I could care less if someone is spamming or using shady techniques. You do what you have to do to rank, and as long as you don’t take a shot at me, all the power to ya. I don’t believe in spam reports and I don’t believe in snitching on competitors. BUT, I don’t feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the “quality guidelines”, penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they’ve made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Yahoo! is doing above. How is that fair? With one hand you’re going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.

We built a widget in-house and released it to our consumers earlier this year.  This was our first widget so we pushed it as much as possible with a small level of apprehension due it being our first voyage in the world of widgets.

Since we developed the widget in-house we were able to add a static backlink at the bottom of the widget that would help our SEO efforts.  Users and webmasters are able to edit the code and remove the link if they choose to, but it appears as though most are leaving the link with the widget.  Each page online that shows the widget will also display a backlink to our site.

Today I checked the big three, Google / Yahoo / MSN, to see how many pages displaying our widget are indexed.

• Google = 4 pages indexed
• Yahoo = 20,600 pages indexed
• MSN = 2,047 pages indexed

What the hell is going on with Google?  A knee jerk reaction from some would be to ask if the widget was placed on low PR, low authority (in other words crap) pages, but that isn’t the case.  Due to the helpful nature of the widgets they’re being picked up and display on sites like MSNBC.com and a lot of local news station websites from around the country.

I got the numbers above by checking the string “powered by domain.com” in each, with quotes.  What’s interesting is that if I search for “powered by” domain.com, with the domain portion outside of the quotes, there are thousands of additional sites displaying the widget that show up in Google.  If Google has the pages indexed why wouldn’t it return them for the direct query?

Just finished reading some speculation and rumors floating around at Mashable.com and Telegraph.co.uk regarding a possible takeover of social networking site Bebo.com by Yahoo!.  It’s not coming cheap either.  Yahoo is reported to be in discussing a $1 billion acquisition.  Telegraph.co.uk reports that Bebo has an estimated 25 million users worldwide, compared with MySpace.com’s 100 million users.  Yahoo! has attempted to buy its way into the social networking scene before when they offered a large amount of money for Facebook.com, only to have their offer rejected.

Why would you care?  What would Yahoo! want Bebo? Mashable suggests:

Why would Yahoo buy Bebo? Possibly because without MySpace, Facebook or YouTube, they don’t have a major stake in the social networking realm. Flickr is fairly big, and they have lots of smaller social sites, but nothing generic that lets them integrate all their other services.

The big three, Yahoo! / MSN / Google, are all about expanding their empire as far as possible.  Increasing their piece of the search market (multi-million dollar ad campaigns).  Buying advertising and marketing firms (DoubleClick and aQuantive being purchased for billion dollar figures).  Acquiring social networking sites where users congregate (Youtube purchased for $1.65 billion).  I’m surprised it wasn’t MSN or Yahooo that bought Myspace.  I wonder if MSN will come in with the big dollars to buy Facebook?

DaveN’s got some solid advice on building links. Check out the full post here:

3 step plan on links

1) 1st batch of links: You need to gain your authority to play in that market place, but don’t over do it, being way too authoritative for an industry is sometimes worse than no authority at all. Try and get some links from press releases and on sites that don’t normally sell links.

2) 2nd batch of links: Once you have authority status get some blog love, but avoid Pay Per Post blogs for now. Take GetClicky.com: I’m not getting paid for that review or link, I did put my affiliate code in so I could see how many people I passed into getclicky.com and signed up… I’m geeky like that.

I think I have sent 180 people to date, 23 people signed up via my link, and only 13 people had balls to comment on my blog lol, but I will have passed a little of my authority onto GetClicky. Once you have enough blogs that have gained authority status linking to you, you’re set for stage 3.

3) 3rd batch is a free-for-all, you have gained authority and your stage 2 links should be pulling in the search terms. This means you will get scraper sites linking to you, so buy text link ads on lower grade sites, PPP and review-style sites. Your authority should pull you though.

Sometimes you’ve got to start slowly from step 1 with a new site or campaign.  Other times you’ll be lucky enough to inherit an authoritative site and you can skip right ahead to step 2 and/or 3 and start attacking the main keywords.

Caught this post about Thriving Office at TechCrunch.com. Basically they’re hawking recordings of office noises for small business owners.

Here’s the pitch:

Small businesses know they must seem successful to become successful. So they play Thriving Office while they’re on the phone. This valuable CD is filled with the sounds people expect to hear from an established company, providing instant credibility.

Reminds me of Boiler Room when Ben Affleck gave his big speech to the trainees telling them to “Act As If”. Classic.

One portion of this article/interview at Searchenginejournal.com about Hewlett Packard’s in-house SEO team caught my interest. About halfway into the article Jessica and Tanya discuss the utilization of external SEO resources to augment your in-house team and resources.

Jessica: I always tell in-house search marketers that you need outside council, just like a corporate attorney has outside council to discuss issues and an accountant has an auditor that ensures everything is accurate. HP is a company that has an in-house SEO, and still engages an SEO firm for both outside council and to do SEO work. What do you use the SEO firm for and how do you decide which tasks go to the SEO firm vs. doing yourself.

Tanya: I rely on my SEO firm to answer or find the answer to any questions I can’t. They also have some more technical resources that can consult on code development to our developers when they’re trying to make certain sites more search engine friendly. They also get on calls with me to IT when I need a little more backing. I also rely on them for bandwidth. They’re my extended team so a lot of what I need done gets done by them because I know I can tell them what I need and they’ll deliver. There are some things I prefer to do myself. One is to consult with other teams that are just getting up to speed on SEO. Then once they get excited and ready to do some serious SEO projects, I hook them up with our SEO vendor. But if they’re only going to optimize a page or two and have a really short turn-around, I walk them through some of the basics and provide guidance or specific recommendations myself. I also do some of the ad-hoc reporting myself (regular reporting I leave to the agency) and I manage the intranet SEO Program site and all communications regarding SEO (not to mention the standard company stuff you get to participate in as an employee!)

I can see needing advice from time to time, but I don’t agree with them nor do I think the analogies apply.

I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable outsourcing any portion of our SEO or consulting with an outside firm. Some of the old school guys have trained me to keep everything as close to the chest as possible.

Most SEOs have strong tech skills and you’ll obviously know the goals of the campaign. If you need to make code more search engine friendly within a language you are familar then you make suggestions directly, or you can assign it to one of your team members. As I discussed in this post, in a large company you should have a team of SEOs. That said, if you aren’t familiar with the language, your developers should be! Arrange a meeting, or series of meetings, with the developers and their managers. Clearly explain the goals and brainstorm available techniques and steps to achieve those goals.

If these deep IT issues are a recurring them then you can justify hiring a tech SEO for your team to work with the rest of the IT team.

Do you outsource of any your internal work? Do you utilize any outside consultants?

Sexywidget.com has an absolutely excellent post “Anatomy of a Widget” from today regarding their recently released widget. They take us through each part of the widget, how it functions, what purpose it serves, and how it benefits the user and the company.

In part of the post he states:

“I think an important first step for anybody working on their widget strategy is to try and get their brain around the value exchange that will take place when a blogger or profile owner places your widget on their site. What problem is your widget solving, and what do you expect to get back for solving this problem? Is it a fair exchange?”

We’ve been working through these excercises as we are developing and releasing our widgets. I think we’ll end up releasing the widgets in phases, and my feeling is that the Phase II widgets will differ greatly from the Phase I widgets. I think they will require more personalization, customization, and features to satisfy some of these questions and requirements.

Pop over to Sexywidget.com and read the post..it is well worth the time.

If Guy Kawasaki’s blog isn’t in your subscription list, you’re missing out.  He consistently has great material.  Today’s post
was “Ten Questions with Penelope Trunk: Career Guidance for this Century“.  It’s a really good read and I agree with all of Penelope’s points.  Here’s a breakdown:

Question: How much money does it take to be happy?
Answer: “….. So as long as you have enough money for food and shelter, your optimism level kicks in to dictate how happy you are.”

Absolutely true.  You can be making $200K a year, but if you work in a negative and stiffling environment, it will be pretty difficult to be consistently happy considering you’ll be at the office for at last 8 to 10 hours a day.  And thinking about work when you’re not there.  Our jobs consume us.  And a negative environment can spread like a disease and stay with us even when we’re not in the office.

Question: Is it more important to be competent or likable?
Answer: People would actually rather work with someone who is incompetent and likeable than competent and unlikable. At work, if you are unlikable, people start thinking you are less competent.

I love this point and it is 110% true.   Co-workers that are negative, arrogant, bullish, have poor social skills, poor political skills, etc, will be avoided.

It isn’t enough to be book smart or tech savvy.  You need to know how to interact with co-workers and work the system.

Question: Should I sue a boss who is sexually harassing me?
Answer: In most cases, you will destroy your career if you report sexual harassment. So unless you are in physical danger, you should not report harassment.

Question: When should I ask for a promotion?
Answer:  “…never”

I had an employee come into my office one day, plop down his resume, and ask for a promotion.   It took me a few seconds to gather my thoughts and give the correct managerial response.  It was difficult for me to fathom why this person thought they would get a promotion that they didn’t deserve or earn.  They had been with the company for less than 6 months and had yet to achieve any of the goals set forth for them or the team they were a part of.

It’s difficult for me to envision walking into the CEO’s office and asking for a promotion.  I’m a believer that you have to earn your way in business and the world.  If you bust your ass, hit your goals, and excel in all that you do, you’ll be rewarded professionally and financially.  If you do all of these things and nothing happens then there may be a problem with the company and/or boss you’re working for.

Question: Is being a generalist or a specialist the path to the executive suite?
Answer: “…. To move up you need to be great at something, and you have to let people know what you don’t do.”

As a specialist in the SEO field it is reassuring to hear this.  I had actually recently been thinking about it.

Question: What do I do about the gaps in my resume when I traveled or couldn’t find a job?
Answer: “Talk about them well….”

Question: Will getting an MBA or any other type of advanced degree be a good use of time and money since I can’t find a job?
Answer: “No….”

I covered this briefly in the “Top 10 Reasons I didn’t Hire You” post.  Work experience in the SEO field, and most other Internet fields, is far more imporant.

Question: What’s the ideal length of a resume in a world where every resume is electronic and not viewed printed out on paper?
Answer: “A page….”

Question: How should I prepare for an interview?
Answer: “…memorize answers to the fifty most common questions…Another way to prepare is to go to the gym right before the interview….You should go right before an interview because people judge you first on your appearance, and if do heavy lifting with your back and stomach muscles you will stand up much straighter in the interview. This will make you look more confident, which is half the battle in being judged by appearance.”

Question: What’s the right strategy for the search for a first job out of college?
Answer: “So give yourself the latitude to try a lot. And don’t get hung up on a big soul search. To land a great job, you don’t need to know the meaning of life, just the meaning of hard work.”

Question: What should I do if I work for a jerk?
Answer: “Leave…”

Yes and no.  Try to answer this question first and answer it honestly.  Is the boss a jerk to everyone or just you?   If it’s just you, then maybe you and/or your work performance is the problem and it is affecting their attitude towards you.