Organic SEO Blog

Wikia Search, the open-source search engine launched sometime back by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will begin letting public participate in building its index by adding, deleting and rating Web pages. Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don’t like the results, you’ll be able to change them. Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

During its “alpha” period, which started in January, Wikia Search has drawn about 20,000 registered users who have in turn made about 60,000 edits to search results and written about 25,000 mini articles.

The editing you can do on Wikia Search is extensive. If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it. You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones. You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result.

Web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) will be one of the biggest investment areas for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), new research has found.

According to a survey of 800 SMEs by Register.com, 53 per cent intend to make additional investments in web design. Some 43 per cent claimed that they would increase investment in SEO while 41 per cent are set to increase email marketing investment.

Other Key findings include:

* 55% of respondents have registered more than one domain name for their business
* 41% saw more than a quarter of their total revenue from web sales
* 20% don’t know how much revenue they are getting through their site
* Approximately 70% of the respondents don’t expect their web revenue to decline despite economic conditions. (34.6% expect more revenue / 34.5% expect about the same revenue)
* When asked, “What area of technology are you most likely to invest in over the next year?” The top there answers were: website design (53%), SEO (43%), and email marketing (41%).

I’d be interested to find out how many of the SMEs investing in seo web design tweaks think a scientific approach is the way to go - it sounds a good idea to me.

My blog was down for more than a month, and I’ve lost all the comments in my blog while moving from rediff hosting to dotster. Being an seo pro, I wished to host my blog on an Indian server, and choose Rediff. It was quiet okay, but they haven’t updated their php and mysql versions and are still continuing with 3.x, which deprecated years back…. I couldn’t update to the latest wordpress, and the server goes down often.

I couldn’t tolerate this, and was looking for a few seo friendly hosting solutions in India, but it seems that there is no proper hosting solution in India, that is affordable and stable. I decided to go with dotster’s U.S hosting, as I already had an account with them. The fact that my domain is .in should help me retain my current rankings.

Hope to stay in touch with my readers often… from now on.

Websites which are selling paid links in footers and sidebars have largely come under Google’s ‘attack’, especially if those links are not relevant to the content of the site, and this is a major threat to the entire text link selling industry… I have been selling links on a few of my sites, and have been into these kind of PR drop issues; but surprisingly one of my site’s PR went up I quickly contacted my link selling agent to request for a hike in the payout per link for this PR increase, and got this interesting reply…

We will not be adjusting the PR of sites in our inventory at this time for 2 reasons.

1. PageRank is becoming less valuable and will only be a small part of our new rating system due to be ready within the next few weeks. Only large PR fluctuations like PR3 to PR7 will affect the pricing of links.

2. The current PR update is not considered complete. We are still seeing fluctuations.

And it seems that text link selling companies are moving towards some new kind of metrics, that doesn’t rely upon pagerank as a major factor in buying and selling links. This should be a major blow to Google’s Pagerank, as PR is nowadays only relevant while buying and selling links.

I’m a Google Adwords Professional, and I often get emails from google requesting qualified professionals like me to take part in some kind of google adwords related surveys. I got a similar mail from Lewis Lin of Google, who by mistake copied the email address of 312 adwords professionals in the “To” column and sent it across It is indeed a privacy policy breach on part of Google…

Later on he mailed once again;

Dear Google Advertising Professionals,

I apologize for sending out the below survey with everyone’s e-mail address in the To: line.  It was a complete oversight on my part.  Given this, I do ask that everyone be respectful of one another’s privacy and do not use each other’s e-mails for unintended purposes.

My mistake aside, Google wants to make the Google Advertising Professionals program better for you, and we’d like to hear your feedback.  If you can take a moment to fill out the survey, we’d really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Lewis

But, some of the folks who got those email id’s started sending emails to everyone, and there were a few interesting emails, which I would like to share with you…

Email1: $100 Commission for Your Referrals

t appears as if we were all part of an e-mail for a Google AdWords Professional survey but were not blind carbon-copied.

Nonetheless, please forgive me for sending you this one-time e-mail.  We may never have this type of transparency to each other again in the future.

My name is Dave Nathan, and I’m the owner of a Chicago-based search marketing agency called SearchGain.

I imagine that many of you get inquiries from prospective clients who simply aren’t suitable for your firm.

* Some of you may charge a percentage of monthly ad spend but require clients to have a certain minimum monthly spend.
* Some of you may be over-burdened and unable to handle additional clients.
* And, finally, some of you may not take on clients from certain verticals.

If any of these apply to you, I may have an opportunity for you to generate some additional revenue for yourselves (or your firms) once you determine that a prospect is no longer a good fit for your agency.

SearchGain’s “Expert on Demand” package is priced at $999 and includes 5 hours of one-on-one consulting.  As my services are completely “on demand,” I consider this offering to be affordable for any advertiser who is serious about AdWords but can’t afford to pay a firm a monthly management fee.

So, please allow me to extend this business development opportunity to you.  For any client that you send to me who enrolls in the Expert on Demand package, I will provide you with a $100 commission for your referral.  If you think you might be interested in sending some referrals to SearchGain, please contact me if you have any questions about how this would work.

Here are two links about the Expert on Demand package.

For New PPC Advertisers: http://www.searchgain.com/expert-on-demand-promo.html

For Existing PPC Advertisers: http://www.searchgain.com/expert-on-demand-promo2.html

Email2: SEO & PPC Partnerships

Dear All,

Let me introduce myself and take advantage of the great contact mailing list that we were provided with. Please excuse the form of this e-mail, but wasn’t it the purpose of the survey to help us get new Clients?

My name is Wojciech Jakoniuk and I represent Performance Media - Search Engine Marketing Company located in Warsaw, Poland. Our Company is currently the biggest SEM agency in the Central European Region.

::: SEO :::
We are currently looking for more projects in the US & Western European Markets and are seeking new partnerships especially in the SEO area. On request we can provide you with more information on who we are and examples of how we work and what we achieved. Our ideal model of cooperation is to become an outsourcing company for Agencies having the sales force in the foreign market. We can offer competitive rates thanks to cheaper labor force keeping high quality of work at the same time. Currently we have 45 people working for us.

Our preferred partner is on of the below:
An Agency / Media house which does not have an in house team of people doing SEO
An Agency which does only big projects (we do projects from
400$-10000$+ a month) Company which hasn’t achieved expected results and wants to try a new partner Agency that wants to outsource SEO work and white label it as it’s own service

We are working on monthly fee but also on a Performance basis. We can be paid once we achieve agreed results (We are prepared to work for up to 12 months without payment, taking the risks as we believe in the quality of our work).

::: Pay Per Click :::
Our Company has signed partnerships with European & US agencies offering their Clients all kind of PPC services (setting up, running, optimising, daily management for CPC / CPA campaigns) in all Europan languages & in Russian. We are a professional company managing
campaigns (from 100$ to 100000$+) for you or your Clients and are looking for more opportunities as above.

If you find our offer interesting & you feel there is a chance to start a new partnership we could provide you with more information that you may need.

Please do not hesitate to contact me - phone contact available on request.

Regards,

Wojciech Jakoniuk
CEO - Performance Media

Email3: Fellow Adworders

Good Afternoon.

How are you doing? Like Dave Nathan said, we are unlikely to have this happen again so I wanted to introduce you guys to TRON Media. We are a fast growing PPC management company working with clients spending between £50.00-£40,000.00 a month on Google, Yahoo and MSN. We have been going for 7 months.

The first thing I wanted to put out there is that I am looking for a SEO company to be able to send some leads to, and work on a white label basis or not, depending on what you want. If you don’t do SEO at all, but know a company that has a proven track record, again, I would really appreciate a name, number, website, to help my clients out. I have seen so many companies offering a service with Black Hat Optimisation, and am looking for a good company, with good morals, who can really provide a sound service.

Secondly, and lastly, I am aware that there are various reasons why certain companies can’t take on clients. We work on rolling 30 day contracts, work with clients that spend as much or as little on the search engines as possible but have a minimum fee of £75.00 per month.

Any referral sent through to TRON Media that signs up will get you the first month’s fee (worked out at 10-15% of expenditure) or minimum fee of £75. This will be paid by cheque or BACS at the end of the clients’ first month with TRON Media.

I hope this makes sense and sorry if this cause’s offence in any way. It is not meant to.

Good luck over this last year with the BPF!

Kind regards,
Simon Kelly

It is quiet interesting to read these offers, and I’m sure, I can expect a lot more… BTW, I’m also thinking about a way to monetize with these email id’s… May be, I should auction it in ebay… “Email id’s of 312 Adwords Professionals” It should be quiet interesting to see how much money I could make with that

Just came across this post on Email from Spammers, and I couldn’t understand as to why those third-rated link exchange guys keep blasting spam emailers, and am not clear about what they achieve for their clients by doing this. I’ve even had people instant messaging me asking if I’m interested in any link exchanges.

In general, all major search engines can identify exchanged links from natural links, and in these days of Search2.0, I don’t understand why people often exchange links with pages like these…

It is better that they read more about linkbaiting, understand what back links is all about and start working towards building natural links, which can have a significant effect in the site’s search ranking in the long run.

Sometime back, Yahoo raised its minimum bid from $0.05 to $.10, and those current bids under 5 and 10 cents, which its users had been using earlier were called Grandfather Bids and so on. And now, they are trying to follow Google’s policy of no minimum bids….. Following is the official notification from Y!

Starting in the next several weeks(we are not sure about ourselves), the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10(why so? and who used them?).

This update is intended to align your minimum bids with the value and quality of your keywords(just like google, we used to follow them always). It also is designed to help improve the overall search user experience by rewarding advertisers for better quality with lower entry points into keyword markets.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as(blah blah blah):

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them)
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

A keyword term becomes “active” — switched “on” in the system (again we are copying google as such) and eligible for display — when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. If your bid falls below your minimum, your keyword will not be displayed. You’ll be notified of such changes and will have some time to adjust your bid.

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. Google Sites marginally extended its share of core searches to 58.5 percent. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.2 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.8 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.5 percent).

comScore Core Search Report* - January 2008
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0Share of Searches (%)

Core Search Entity              Dec-07          Jan-08            Change
Total Core Search                  100.0%          100.0%            0.0
Google Sites                        58.4%           58.5%            0.1
Yahoo! Sites                        22.9%           22.2%           -0.7
Microsoft Sites                      9.8%            9.8%            0.0
AOL LLC**                            4.6%            4.9%            0.3
Ask Network                          4.3%            4.5%            0.2

*  Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
cross-channel searches.  Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
** In January 2008, Time Warner Network was split into two distinct
properties: AOL LLC and Time Warner Network excluding AOL, with AOL LLC
representing the core search business.

Global giants including Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are believed to be considering rival bids for the internet company Yahoo, which has received a $44.6bn (£22.6bn) offer from Microsoft.

The conglomerate InterActiveCorp was another company named as a potential bidder for Yahoo, which is said to be unwilling to give in to Microsoft without a fight.

After Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer made the offer in a letter on Thursday, it emerged that Yahoo had rejected a similar takeover attempt by Ballmer’s organisation a year before.

Yahoo chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang is understood not to be Microsoft’s greatest fan, and would be prepared to line up another ‘white knight’ rather than concede to Ballmer.

It is believed he would be particularly open to a rescue bid from Steve Jobs’ Apple Corp, having openly expressed his admiration for the firm in the past.

Although Microsoft is still the leading technology company in the world, it is believed its position could soon be threatened if it doesn’t turn around its loss-making internet arm and increase its share of the online advertising market.

Recent figures show that Google dominates 66% of the global web search market. Yahoo and Microsoft are leagues behind with just 13% and 4% of the market respectively.

Yahoo is testing the integration of data from their Delicious social bookmarking site within its search results. A search in Yahoo will now show whether a page listed in its results is also in Delicious and how it has been tagged.

For the time being, some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which indicates the number of people who have bookmarked those pages along with the tags people have supplied.

Delicious search was always popular for searching when there is no response from other standard search engines. With the new features, it will surely maintain its popularity. During 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious, the social bookmarking service created by Joshua Schachter.