Is your site search engine friendly?

I found a useful piece of free software to check whether your pages - or those of a potential linking partner - are search engine friendly. It looks for broken links, can re-check broken links and provides reports in a simple format that can also be e-mailed. The executable file is smaller than 1MB, the software is free.

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Wiki Search Engine Challenge to Google

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari. He’s clearly aiming for Google. He says:
“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

The new company will be the third business division of Wikia, the for profit company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product.

Wikia has raised over $4 million in capital, including a recent round by Amazon. Despite the fact that the original article reported that Amazon is involved in the project, Wikia is making it clear on the site that they are not involved in any way (other than as a shareholder of Wikia).
From Techcrunch
Tags: blogging, internet+marketing,

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SEO - do not get banned (part 1)

If you are using search engine optimisation you will probably have heard the terms 'white hat'- within the rules - and 'black hat' - frowned by the search engines.

All the major search engines can and do penalize sites if they find black hat methods being used. The penalty can be a drop in page rank or removing the site from the search engine's listing, often known as banning. If you are banned, clearly you will receive no organic search engine traffic. Pay Per Click will be your only option to get visitors to your site.

It is easy to fall into the trap of using some of the black hat methods if you are not fully versed in what is acceptable and what is not.

1. Doorway pages these are pages designed to attract the search engines but they contain very little material for the human reader. Doorway pages were one of BMW's mistakes when the car giant was banned from Google. One of its pages appeared at first to contain a sparse amount of javascript, but when javascript was disabled the page content was revealed. It was simply stuffed with the desired keywords, making no sense at all for the audience.

Tags:blogging, internet+marketing,

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Paid to Search - Free PPC Advertising Credits

If you have not heard, Search BigDaddy is a powerful new search engine, a potential Google competitor. If you want to get website traffic or readers to your blog, you can join for free, get $50 free Pay Per Click advertising credits, and earn Pay Per Click Money every time you search on BigDaddy. To repeat - Search BigDaddy is free to join, free credits for joining, and more credits for every search you make. Can you see any reason not to join Search BigDaddy?

Tags:blogging, search engines,

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