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Jobs: “Don’t be Evil Mantra is Bullshit”

Written on January 31, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: blackhat, seo

From wired:

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars

Fake Steve Jobs had a great writeup too, a few weeks ago in a similar vein:

I’m like, Dude, do you not remember all that stuff you told me about not making a phone, back when you were still not recusing yourself from iPhone discussions during board meetings? You swore, and I mean you looked me in the eye and swore, that you would never make a phone. He says, We’re not making a phone. HTC is making it.

I was talking to Phil Schiller about this and he pointed out that even Microsoft never was brazen enough to pull something like this. Even Microsoft had some tiny bit of shame. Google is a different beast altogether. They’re like nothing anyone has ever seen in our business. Not only are they not ashamed — they think they’re the good guys!

It boggles the mind. They’re pure sociopaths.

All this stuff about not being evil? And being open, and transparent? All this crap about how they think everyone should just share all the information in the world? Yeah. Except you don’t see them sharing their search algorithms, do you? You don’t see them sharing the stuff they’ve done to Linux in their data center.

They’re pure sociopaths. So well put!

The other day i needed to upgrade my flash plugin (so I could watch porn, obviously). What did I see when I went to install? A fucking PRE CHECKED Google Chrome Spyware kit. Why is Adobe pushing it? Well it probably has something to do with the $2++ spiff they get for each install.

Why the fuck would I want Chrome if I’m updating a flash plugin? That makes 0 sense. Chrome is the ultimate in spyware. It’s fucking evil to the core.

Any other company does half the spying or is half as intrusive as chrome is would get WAY more heat that Google’s taken on it. But Google just gets a pass. Imagine if Microsoft tried to pull that shit. They’re be public fucking hearings about it!

I think this is the year the worm turns. This is the year that both FSJ and the real SJ told the world that: The fact of the mater is, Google is full of shit – and I think the world just might listen.

Go here to read the rest:
Jobs: “Don’t be Evil Mantra is Bullshit”

Readers Hit New York Newsday Paywall Then Turn Around and Walk Away

Written on January 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

All of the talk of paywalls for online content that gets the bulk of the attention by the ‘press’ is focused mainly on large publications like the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. These publications have international readership and have significant influence when it comes to coverage of the major events in the world as well as in the business arena. Because of this significant influence many believe that the paywall discussion is valid because people need these sources to stay informed.

What about paywalls on the local level though? How will more localized papers fare when it comes to asking people who do not subscribe to the publication to pay to see the content online? If the results at New York Newsday are any indication its not a pretty picture.
Crain’s New York Business tells us just how bad it is

Here is one paid model for online journalism that isn’t exactly setting the world on fire: Nearly three months after Newsday put its Web site behind a pay wall, Newsday.com has attracted only 35 subscribers.

In addition, traffic to the Long Island daily’s site has dropped by half, according to Nielsen.

Newsday is the local paper for all of Long Island and a good portion of the NYC borough of Queens. Not exactly a small place. In other words, if there are this many people in the area and there are only 35 of them in three months willing to fork out a few bucks a week to access the information online this has to be viewed as a failure. Here’s what readers who do not subscribe elsewhere see when they try to get information from the website

To be fair it’s not like only 35 people read the online content for the paper since the content is literally available to a large portion of the population.

Newsday.com can be accessed free by the paper’s home subscribers, as well as by Cablevision customers and subscribers to the cable operator’s Optimum Online broadband service.

According to the paper, that means about 75% of Long Island households just have to register to have access. Anyone else who wants to read the paper online has to pay $5 per week.

Still, the number of online subscribers shocked members of Newsday’s union—Local 406 of the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—which is in a bitter fight with the paper’s management over a proposed contract offer that would cut pay by 10%.

What this outcome may be telling the industry is that paywalls may very well limit the reach of your publication. Long Island is of particular interest considering just how many people have relocated from the area to parts all around the country. Now, if these people want to keep up with current events from ‘home’ they would have to pay and it looks like those folks are saying to Newsday “Forgetta about it!”.

So if this tactic isn’t working to generate more revenue what is the point of doing it? Maybe Newsday doesn’t want to be one of the first major local newspapers to try this and then be one of the first to drop it all in the span of a few short months.

Whatever the reasons this experiment looks to be a huge bust thus far. Not exactly the success story you parade out to other publications considering the same tactic. So what do you think? Will local publications be able to enact a paywall and have success or is this just a desperate move by an industry that decided to change as a means of survival rather than doing it as part of their ongoing business plan to move into the future?

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Readers Hit New York Newsday Paywall Then Turn Around and Walk Away

Chinese Govt Denies Involvement in Hacking; Did US Govt Help Instead?

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, marketing

China has officially, adamantly denied that the government played any role in the recent hack attack against Google and dozens of other firms (with the objective of account info for human rights activists in China). However, another government may have played a part in the attack—the US.

From their first official statement on the matter, China has denied their involvement and condemned the attack. As Agence France-Presse reports, the government is also none too pleased with Google’s accusations:

The “accusation that the Chinese government participated in (any) cyberattack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China,” an unnamed spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua.

“We are firmly opposed to that,” the spokesman said.

(LOL, when I first read that, I thought they were saying they were opposed to denigrating China, kind of a duh. But they mean they’re opposed to cyberattacks.)

The issue has continued to grow over the month, especially since US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address on Internet freedom last week, where she urged China to investigate the attacks. China called the address harmful to the countries’ bilateral relations.

Google has not yet stopped censoring its search results. But CEO Eric Schmidt said, “in a reasonably short time from now we will be making some changes there” last Thursday.

Meanwhile, another government definitely played a role in the attack—the US government. No, they didn’t hack into Gmail accounts, but a US law allowed the hackers to get in.

According to Bruce Schneier, Google created a back door to Gmail to allow LEOs access in accordance with search warrants. The hackers took advantage of this back door to access Gmail themselves.

What do you think? Is China protesting too much—or is it possible that a low-level employee might have helped the hackers? Is the US more culpable for creating the weakness in the first place?

Read the original here:
Chinese Govt Denies Involvement in Hacking; Did US Govt Help Instead?

Gmail: Now Serving Ads Based on Other Emails

Written on January 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

If you’ve used Gmail, you’ve probably noticed the ads running along the right-hand side of the screen when viewing an email. And you’ve probably noticed that these ads . . . well, sometimes they’re not to relevant to you, the email, or . . . pretty much anything else.

Gmail is admitting their shortcoming—and they’re working to make this better. Now, instead of serving only marginally relevant ads beside your emails, they’ll go back and look at the last email you viewed and use those ads again. (Because they worked so well the first time, when you were actually thinking about that topic?)

On the Gmail blog, Google explains:

[S]ometimes, there aren’t any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you’ll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren’t any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead.

Of course, Google is also quick to reassure: this process is fully automated, and no humans are ever reading your email to match up ads. No advertisers are ever given your information. You’re safe.

As always, for visual learners, Google has a video:

In all, I suppose ads that are more relevant to users are always a good thing. I don’t really expect click through rates to go up, though, since it seems like most Gmail users are probably already pretty ad blind (and it’s only the truly irrelevant ones that catch my attention in the first place, ).

What do you think? Will this net more revenue for Google?

Go here to see the original:
Gmail: Now Serving Ads Based on Other Emails

SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) - Part 2

Written on January 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide, seo

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

On-Page Optimization

A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you’ll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.

So where do we start? SEO can be so broad and vast that we often don’t know where we should begin, what will give us the greatest impact, and how to move forward. That’s what I hope to answer here.

Building Good Title Tags

The title tag is the single most important piece of SEO real estate on your site. A title tag can be as long as you want, but you only have about 63 characters before the search engines cut it off. So use it wisely.

Since the title appears as the clickable link in the SERPs pages it has to be able to meet a couple of different demands.

Keyword rich

Searchers type in specific words into the search engines and they expect the engines to provide results that match their original query. We know that the search engines look at over 200 different signals to determine the relevance of any page against the keyword searched. The title tag one of them, but a very key one at that. You don’t necessarily need your keyword in the title tag for it to come up in the search results, but it helps a great deal.

But what about the visitor? What does the searcher see? Let say a searcher types “how to be beautiful” into the search engine and two results are displayed. One reads “How to Look Good and Feel Great” and another reads “How to Look Beautiful Even When you Don’t Feel Like It.” Which of these two is more likely to be clicked by the visitor?

It’s entirely likely both pages address the same concerns, but only one uses the searched keyword. More than likely, the second result will get far more clicks than the first, even if it is in a lower position in the results (which isn’t likely, but lets pretend anyway.)

Compelling

The next thing your title tag needs to be is compelling. We looked out how to make it more likely to be clicked simply by putting keywords in it, but that itself is only part of the issue. Going back to our example above if we put the first non-keyword using headline up against a third keyword rich headline of “Sexy and Beautiful, Today’s Hottest Stars.” which do you think will gain more clicks? My guess is the first one that doesn’t use keywords because it is far more compelling and speaks more toward the searcher’s intent. So in this situation the third headline is likely to rank higher but will receive fewer clicks.

The trick is to make sure that the title tag is both keyword rich and compelling. This will help move your site to the top of the rankings, but also ensure that visitors are more likely to click on it into your site.

Common mistakes

Implementing your title tags properly is crucial to ensuring they are effective. There are a number of easy mistakes that you can make if you don’t take the time to do it right. It’s easy to want to blast through your title tags, especially if you have a lot of pages. But because the title tag is so important, you want to take care in developing them properly. Here are a few common issues:

Same on Every Page: Each page in your site is unique, or at least it should be. This means your title tags should be unique on each page as well. On a lot of sites you’ll see the same title tag across all the pages “Welcome to My Site, or something like that. That hardly describes the page at all. And show that in the search results, you’re not likely to get any clicks. Go through the site and customize each title, ensuring it uniquely and accurately describes the content of the page.

Leading with Business Name: There are good reasons to have your business name present in your title tag, but that should not be by default. If you use your business name be sure to think through the reasoning and make sure it’s sound. The limitations of the title tag make using your business name something you do only with great care and consideration. I’ll discuss this more in a bit.

List of Keywords: Wanting to get your keywords in the title tag makes it tempting to just try to throw as many in there as you possible can. “Beauty | Makeup | Makeovers | Diet | Healthy Skin.” Sure that gets all your keywords in there but does nothing to make someone want to click on the result. This means that (gasp!) you have to use keywords sparingly so you can also make the title something worth clicking on.

Lack of Description: Aside from getting your primary keywords in the title, and making it compelling, you also have to make sure the title tag provides enough of a description of the content to ensure it gets a targeted click. No sense having someone click into the site only to find the information on the page isn’t what they expected. Make sure that the title describes the content in a compelling and keyword friendly way.

Branded titles

So let’s address using your business name in your title tags. As I said earlier, sometimes its wise but that shouldn’t be the default position.

In general, you can place your business name either at the front or the rear of the title tag. My rule of thumb is that you don’t want to put your business name at the front of your title tag unless you have a highly recognizable brand name that the visitor will know and will likely be a click-generator from the search results. If that’s not the case then you simply don’t want to give up that real estate.

Branding at the rear of the title tag is a far better solution for most businesses. This helps moderately known or even unknown companies build brand name recognition. The downside of branding your title tags this way is you are still using up valuable real estate that might otherwise be used making a keyword rich and compelling headline. Also note, that if the title goes too long, your business name will be cut off in the search results.

Most of the time you don’t need your business name in your title tags at all, however there is one time when I would suggest leaving it off almost 90% of the time. This is on product pages. It’s so crucial to get important product data into the title tag that there often simply isn’t room enough for your business name. Again, I might make an exception for well-known business names, but default to showing product info first and foremost.

Missed a part of this series?
Why SEO is important
SEO: All About Title Tags

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See the rest here:
SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) - Part 2

44% of Google News Visitors Don’t Click Through

Written on January 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

The third annual News Users report from research firm Outsell has some interesting findings. While more and more people are going online for their news, and fewer people are getting their information from newspapers, it seems that many online news consumers are more like . . . well, “grazers.” And this might actually be good news for Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers.

TechCrunch reports that 44% of US visitors to Google News do not click on any headlines, preferring instead to skim article snippets. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is becoming an ever more popular source for news, especially what Outsell calls “news right now,” with 56% of consumers turning to online news sources (up from 33% a few years ago).

Google News and other aggregators are a more likely destination than a single paper’s website, as well, with 31% going for the aggregator and only 8% picking a news site. (18% chose other. I guess, with rounding errors, that adds up to the 56ish% turning to online news sources?)

Of course, the numbers on the Internet eroding newspapers’ subscriber base aren’t surprising. Two months ago, we saw that American consumers were will to pay as much as $3 a month for their news (which I thought was kind of crappy, though many disagreed). Turns out it’s even crappier than I thought—according to Outsell, 75% would turn to a different source if their local newspaper sites put up a pay wall, and only 10% are willing to pay for a newspaper subscription to get online access. (Cough, NY Times, cough.)

The more interesting concept here, however, is that Outsell sees Google News becoming a destination for news instead of a starting point, like Google Search is. That might actually bode well for at least one competitor—Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers. As we saw yesterday, the publishers are suing Google News as a monopoly for displaying snippets from their stories. (Robots.txt. Srsly.) If it turns out that many consumers are only reading the snippets and German newspapers aren’t seeing the downstream traffic, their case may have a little more merit.

And then they could just block Google News.

What do you think? Is Google News (along with other aggregators) becoming a destination for online news? Will this US data help out the German newspaper publishers’ case?

The rest is here:
44% of Google News Visitors Don’t Click Through

Facebook Gets the Attention of the FTC

Written on January 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing

For those of you who have ever been in sales or were trained to sell you may have heard the expression that it is “better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission”. Nice pithy little saying that simply means, go ahead and do what you want to do to get the job done and if there are any issues they will be worked out. While that is something that produces chuckles amongst the rebel sales force, in practice it often ends up in bad business and forcing people to change things that don’t need to be changed.

It appears that Facebook is subscribing to the same policy as it relates to their privacy policies since they made privacy an after thought by opening up the Facebook world to the everyone else in the world by default. As one might expect, privacy advocates like EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) don’t like the direction this is heading so they wrote a complaint to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and MediaPost tells us the result:

In a letter dated Jan. 14, David Vladeck, head of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the Electronic Privacy Information Center that its complaint about recent privacy changes at Facebook “raises issues of particular interest for us at this time.”

Vladeck added that he has asked an official to arrange a followup meeting with EPIC, but also said he can’t currently confirm or deny whether the FTC has opened an investigation. FTC investigations are not public until the agency either issues a complaint or closes the matter.

The FTC’s consumer protection chief also said in his letter to EPIC that the commission plans to focus on privacy issues raised by social networks at the next roundtable, scheduled to be held in Berkeley, Calif. on Jan. 28.

“As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows, and the number of third parties and advertising networks with access to such information grows, it is important that consumers understand how their data is being shared and what privacy rules apply,” Vladeck wrote. “The Commission staff believes it is critical that companies provide transparency about how this data is being handled, maintained, shared, and protected, and what steps consumers may take to control the use of their information.”

While these things often are a lot of bluster and noise from government agencies one has to suspect that with the current administration’s desire to control every aspect of everything for everybody this will get some attention for sure. One thing most companies like to avoid is being investigated by the Feds but it could very well be a part of Facebook’s future. They have already capitulated to the demands of the Canadian government so the precedent is in place for Facebook to have to do something different if there is significant pressure and the right threats coming from Washington.

To get the ball rolling a complaint was filed.

Last month, EPIC and nine other groups filed a complaint alleging that Facebook’s new privacy settings constitute an unfair and deceptive change in terms.

This is in addition to Mark Zuckerberg’s redefinition of privacy in the online world, in which he essentially said that everyone now knows that there is not much privacy on the Internet and as a result the once super private Facebook should open it’s policies so that everyone can “share”. (I am SO glad that I have someone like Mark Zuckerberg who is so wise and all knowing to make that decision for me. How about you?). The net result is being arrogant enough to attract the attention and potential ire of the Feds. Oh well.

Lastly there has been an alleged Facebook anonymous employee who puts words to what those in the know likely assumed but those who have no clue would not be too thrilled with by saying

In addition, a Facebook employee allegedly said recently that users’ messages are stored in a database regardless of whether users attempt to delete them. “We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth,” the employee allegedly added.

Facebook’s response?

Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes said that EPIC’s latest filing “offers little or no new information to substantiate the claims they make.”

So will 2010 be Facebook’s year of privacy? If it is, it is off to a bit of a rocky start.

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Facebook Gets the Attention of the FTC

Q & A About Using Q & A Sites to Build Your Business & Reputation

Written on January 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: seo

Posted by Gil Reich

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation.

How many people use Q&A sites?

• In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. The 49% doesn’t even include the many who get info from Q&A sites by Googling or Binging.
• Answers.com (where I work) is now ranked (by comScore) as the 17th most visited site in the US. The vast majority of Answers.com’s traffic is to user generated Q&A pages. Yahoo! Answers gets even more traffic. Much of your potential market is already getting their answers from these sites.

Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com, December 14, 2009, http://www.business.com/info/social-media-best-practices-q-and-a

What’s in it for me?

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help you in the following ways:

• Direct your customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
• Connect with people in your market, build your reputation, and generate leads.
• Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

How do I use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

1. Help others
2. Build relationships
3. Push your products and services when they answer somebody’s question or request.

Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions. When I blog I hope my posts address questions that my readers want answered, but they may not. In Q&A sites, your starting point is that somebody asked the queston that you’re answering.

Specifically:

• Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.
• Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.
• Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites’ message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.
• Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.

In the example below, notice how the user provided a quality answer (much of which follows a template he uses in other answers as well) and adds a relevant link to his site.