Healthy Blog Reviews

Imagine you live in Philadelphia and you have a blog. You are like about 99.9 percent of the world’s bloggers so you make no money and the blog is a labor of love. Now imagine that you are going to be charged $300 for the privilege of having your blog start from the City of Brotherly Love. Yup, that’s right, Philly is hitting bloggers with a this and other measures. If you haven’t had enough of the government on every level getting into everyone’s business this may put you over the top. This comes from NBC Philadelphia’s web site : Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet. This $300 “business privilege license” is for all local bloggers – even the ones that make no money off their words. The city doesn’t stop there. In addition to the $300 for the license to write on the World Wide Web, bloggers must pay city wage taxes, business privilege taxes and taxes on any net profits — on top of state and federal taxes — even if the blogger only made $11 over two years, reports the City Paper. Blogger Marilyn Bess, whose Ms. Philly Organic Blog has made her a whopping $50 over the past few years, went to the city’s tax amnesty program to explain that she makes pennies on her hobby. They told her to hire an accountant, she told the City Paper. I know of more than a few bloggers that call Philadelphia home and I wonder what they are thinking about this approach. I just want to go on record as saying that this is completely ridiculous. I get that things are bad. I get that the government provides services (how well they provide them is a completely different matter for a different place). I get that it takes money to do things but taking this action? My hope is that other regions are not as desperate or ignorant to do this as well. Although I live in North Carolina where our governor thought it was a great idea to tax all Amazon affiliate sales in the state and Amazon basically said “Screw you!” . That eseentially closed that door on people who were just trying to bring more money into the state that would be spent in the state. What is your take on this action by the city of Philadelphia? I think you already know mine.

Tags: action, city, federal-taxes, government, governor, internet, organic, Philadelphia, privilege, state, words
Posted August 23, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

A great bot army has descended on the Internet. Tirelessly performing the bidding of its masters, this ravenous horde is invading our websites, taking our content, clicking on our ads and becoming our friends. Most of the time we don’t even know they are there, but they are and at one point or another you need to come to terms with bots. A bot is an automated software application which typically performs tasks over the Internet. There is virtually an unlimited number of bots performing a dizzying array of tasks. In the world of online marketing, we see bots used to crawl websites, scrape content, check search rankings, automate social media and much more. In some cases bots are good things offering automation which enables huge advances in access to information (think search engine bots). In other cases bots can be “evil” by stealing content, breaking websites and costing business owners a ton of money. To be fair to our fellow netizens, the bots, I want to explore the good and bad side to bot usage. I do not endorse the use of any of the bots listed below and I strongly recommend that if you wish you use any bot that you confirm you are not violating your target website’s terms of service, acceptable use policy or any applicable laws. It is always best to have permission before using any bot on a website other than your own. Twitter Bots Automatically follow, un-follow, retweet, gather IDs and more. The Good: Build a following fast and automatically generate content for your tweets (or retweets). The Bad: If your followers realize they’ve followed a bot you’re not likely to make many friends. Excessive bot usage can get you banned from Twitter. Examples: tweet adder , InjekTwit Website Scrapers Identify and download specific strings of text or images from a website. The Good: Save marketing admins countless hours of copy and paste work by scraping website content yourself. The Bad: Scraping is normally associated with taking other people’s content to use as your own or scraping a website without permission or in violation of the website’s TOS or AUP. Examples: Website Content Extractor , Fetch.com , Automation Anywhere , Mozenda Website Crawlers / Scrapers – Search Engines (indexing software) Bots sent by search engines to browse and store content from your website. This content is then used to help rank your website on said search engine. The Good: Search engine’s exist, and I’m guessing you get a good percentage of your traffic from search engines. The Bad: You have to learn how this little bot works to make sure your site is accessible and easily navigated by the various bots. Think linking structure and indexability. Examples: 80legs Search Rank Checkers Used to check the position of your organic and paid listings on search engines. The Good: Learn how you’re ranking across a variety of search engines, countries, languages and more. When used appropriately with an API you will not have to worry about TOS/AUP violations. The Bad: When not used appropriately, or without an API, search rank checkers may get your IP banned or worse, your website. Be nice to search engines and try to play by the rules. Examples: Rank Tracker , Rank Reporter , Web Position Reporter Facebook Bots Mass friend requests, messaging, wall posting, poking, status updates and more. The Good: Build your friend / fan lists quickly and automatically update your status, images and more. The Bad: Everything else. Automated mass friend requesting is a good way to get your account banned and automated pokes just sounds painful. Example: Facebook Blaster Pro Comment Spam Bots Used to post comment spam on blogs, forums and news websites for the purpose of link building. The Good: None. The Bad: Your blog is taken over by comments like “I really like your article. You should check out my website about Cialis www.cialisisawesome.com.”. Also, if you get caught using a comment spam spot Matt Cutts is likely to ban you from Google and flame you on his blog. Comment spam that blog post in retort. Examples: No examples provided. PPC Bots Click on your competitor’s ad, influence bounce rates, and generally cause havoc with Adwords accounts. The Good: None The Bad: Not only are people who use PPC bots defrauding advertisers, they are also at great risk of being banned by search engines. If you are using a PPC bot, slap yourself on the hand and stand in the corner for 15 minutes. Examples: No examples provided. Link Building Bots Find websites and automatically email webmasters requesting back links. The Good: Build links automatically. The Bad: You’ll end up annoying countless webmasters who may end up posting negative information about your website. Couple this with the fact that you’ll be a low rate spammer a hair’s breadth away from being banned by most search engines and link building bots are better left alone. Examples: No examples provided. Bots offer a powerful way for you to automate repetitive tasks; however, think long and hard about using bots with third party websites or services. As mentioned before, check the terms of service, Acceptable Use Policy and any applicable laws. It is always best to have permission before using a bot on any website other than your own.

Tags: api, article, friends, online-marketing, organic, position, reporter, Search, search-engines, Social Media, website-content
Posted August 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Yahoo has emailed advertisers to let them know that they should expect a full transition to Bing’s search results as early as August… …or maybe 2011. That’s a heck of a window! I mean, August is just around the corner and the busy holiday season is starts in just a few months. Either you’re ready to make the transition or you are not. Why have marketers go through the process of prepping for the transition, if you’re not entirely sure if it will happen now, or after the holidays? Still, the fact that Yahoo is emailing advertisers AND warning them to prepare not just for a switch in paid search results but organic too, suggests that the switch will take place in August/September. Yahoo suggests marketers follow these steps if they wish to be prepared for the eventual switch-over: Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, to help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Bing crawler, as Bing results will be displayed for approximately 30%* of overall search query market share after this change Oh, and Yahoo is testing some Bing results in July. Yes, this month! Have you spotted Bing in your Yahoo results yet? (email link via SER )

Tags: Bing, Business, full-transition, help-determine, holidays, organic, overall-search, review-the-bing, Search, search rankings, search-results, traffic, transition, Yahoo
Posted July 16, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Sometimes in search you are alerted to something that is a bit dramatic in its presentation. Google has been experimenting with their positioning of the most critical elements of a local search SERP and it makes for some interesting “What if?” questions. This new look SERP was brought to my attention from Mike Blumenthal’s blog . If you want to be on top of local search information Mike will certainly help you do that (or one of his readers in this case). I was able to replicate the result so here it is The changes are pretty stark. The map moves to the top of the right hand column and actually scrolls down as you scroll down the page. The Place Page snippet is so integrated with the organic search results that it looks very much like an organic search result but with the map ID icon giving it a prominent place in the searcher’s eye. Also, rather than the usual “more info” link the anchor text is Place Page. One of the images shown on Blumenthal’s blog actually shows these local results occurring before any other organic results. So what might this mean? It means that the Place Page is uber significant to Google. It also means that Google is telling the directories of the world that their run in the organic SERP’s for local searches may be coming to an end. I think that is a GREAT thing because most directories are simply not that good. I would much rather get an actual local result right away when I am looking for local information. This kind of result set also makes more sense in a mobile SERP so Google may be trying to make these results commonplace so people can expect a certain result whether on a desktop / laptop or mobile device (preferably an Android device ) So keep an eye on this if you are interested in local search. Oh, if you are not interested in local search then you are just not paying attention.

Tags: attention, blumenthal, cloud-computing, cloud-hosting, images, local-search, Local/Mobile, organic, place, positioning, prominent-place, serp
Posted July 5, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Back in March, we told you that Google’s Ad Sitelinks were a huge success for…Google. OK, maybe advertisers liked them as well, but if you weren’t careful, you could find your ads see a 30% increase in click-throughs. That all sounds great, as long as you were prepared to cover the cost of those increased clicks. Anyway, Google would like more of your paid search spend and is rolling out Ad Sitelinks to all advertisers and throwing in a new one-line format to boot! When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad. Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format. As a reminder, Sitelinks look similar to the algorithmically displayed Sitelinks found in the organic results. The new one-line format will look something like this: So, who’s happy with SiteLinks? Who’s not?

Tags: addition, algorithmically, all-advertisers, cover-the-cost, look-something, new-one-line, organic, quality, Search, show-the-two
Posted June 25, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media