Global Google Server Down

Earlier today Google was down for 15 minutes. While their company spokesman said it was a DNS issue

"It was not a hacking or a security issue," said Krane. He said the problem was related to the DNS, or Domain Name System, though Krane did not elaborate. The DNS translates domain names for computers.

"Google's global properties were unavailable for a short period of time," Krane said. "We've remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide."

others have screen shots of SoGo Search and the WhoIs info might not have been matching up for a while.

Recently Google AdWords and AdSense stats were not updating.

Wonder how much money the down time cost them.

Google Web Accelerator Privacy Problems, Google AdSense Channel Blocking, Yahoo! Audio Search

Privacy:
Google Web Accelerator takes your data, and shares it with others?

Block Google Accelerator:
courtesy Fantomaster

Click Fraud:
search engines leave advertisers in the cold lurch. Lurch is a cool word.

Block that Channel:
Google AdSense allows channel blocking

Stop:
Collaborate and listen, Ice is back with his brand new edition SEO Inc, being cool like Vanilla Ice, sends out a cease and desist letter.

New SEO Tool:
SEO Browser

Audio Search:Sounds like Yahoo! may be first to market

Hosting Content Articles... ____ Business Model

Recently Andy Baio noticed another powerful site hosting off topic high margin content.

It looks as though Google has already banned Syndic8. The comments are looking like they might be somewhat interesting.

Selling Content Articles...Smart Business Model

A while ago someone shot me an email about Constant Content and I forgot to post about it. I just remembered it again and thought to post on it.

From their site:

Constant Content is exactly what the name implies: A website where you will be able to find text to complete your website or project. This is a place to locate high-quality content at affordable prices. We will assist you in delivering the whole package, ensuring that the clients you service will be receiving a polished piece of perfection.

I have not bought or tested the content quality, but with the wide range of authors there is likely to be some real gems and some real duds in the mix.

Business model:
Constant Content is a database which keeps 50% of the funds received when people purchase the content created by authors who submit their articles to the site.

Some of the articles are free, while others are available for sale to use exclusively or to buy an individual license for. Constant Content also runs AdSense on some of their article abstracts to help create another revenue channel.

They already have over 600 writers, and it seems like it would be a fairly scalable business model, and is a rather untapped market.

Economics of Link Buying VS Submitting Articles:
If you buy them, even crap links can usually cost $5 to $50 each. You could likely buy one of these exclusive articles and submit it to a few sites to build a dozen or so links for the cost of one link.

Economics of Buying Ads VS Buying Content & Selling Ads:
To further appreciate the economics of this idea, a single click from Google AdWords on legal, health, insurance, and other high margin subjects can cost $2-$50, while you can buy the rights to an article for about $5 - $10 (usage) and $50 for exclusive rights.

As this and other related business models develop it sure can put another spin on the AdSense business model. With some of these articles you could buy them, place AdSense ads on them to get a 30% CTR, and after a few dozen visitors you would pay for the usage cost and be into the pure profit zone.

Similar Competing Business Models:
I believe the people at Traffic Logic / Article Insider also sell content. I doubt they could compete on the price aspect with how cheap some of the articles at Constant Content are. I also have found much of the Article Insider content to be a bit less than impressive.

Some auctions such as Elance allow you to bid on similar projects, but its hard to be certain of quality. The nice thing about Constant Content is you can request articles and bid without obligation to buy, even if a half dozen people make articles for you.

Disclaimer:
I don't think I know who is behind Constant Content. The post was fairly positive because it sounds like a cool idea. Whether or not it pans out, the business model seems smart to me.

HitWise Launches Keyword Intelligence - a New Keyword Research Tool

HitWise launches a new keyword research tool by the name of Keyword Intelligence.

Keyword Intelligence data is based on Hitwise’s sample of over 25 million home, work and educational Internet users worldwide and how these people use specific search terms across all search engines to find products and services online.

HitWise has partnerships with various ISPs and search services to track search and clickthrough data. Some of their products are a bit pricey for small webmasters (I believe starting at around $25,000 a year). The Keyword Intelligence offering looks like an attempt to break into the mid to lower market.

Keyword Intelligence has two different subscription plans starting at $90 and $190 a month. It allows you to subscribe to geographic markets and categories and do keyword research from there.

Thanks to Warren Duff for pointing me at Keyword Intelligence.

Link Harvester - Free & Deep Access to Link Information

Tool from Last Month:
None of the major text link analysis tools for sale allow you to check co-citation, or pages which link to multiple related resources.

Last month I had a friend create Hub Finder, which is a free on topic link analysis tool which looks for co-citation. I have not got much feedback on the tool yet, but a few people have said they found it to be useful.

New SEO tool for this month:
Another common problem with most link analysis tools is that they do not make it quick, easy, and convenient for you to be able to search past the 1,000 backlink barrier set by most search engines. What is the point of being slow to give you more details than you need, only to survey a small portion of the inbound links?

A friend of mine is a decent programmer, and I had him whip up a tool I call Link Harvester, which has a ton of cool features:

  • uses the Yahoo! API, so it is in compliance with their TOS.

  • free
  • makes saving and exporting data in CSV as simple as a click of the mouse
  • does not require any software downloading
  • quickly grabs the number of .gov, .edu, & .ac.uk inbound links while also listing each individual link.
  • quickly grabs the number of unique linking domains while listing them
  • quickly grabs the number of unique linking C block IP addresses while listing the C block next to each domain
  • allows you to check links pointing at a page or at a domain
  • displays the total number of links showed by Yahoo!
  • displays the total number of pages indexed by Yahoo!
  • links next to each domain that point at its WhoIs source information and Wayback Machine information.
  • if a site links at your site more than 5 times then it is bolded in the results and a checkbox is autochecked, which allows you to filter out that site and spider deeper through the link database. This harvesting action is how you can spider deeper than 1,000 backlinks and where the tool got its name from.
  • Link Harvester is open source. If you like the tool & find it useful you can add it to your site. Also if you can think of ways to make it better you can modify it however you please.

Why Not Look at Anchor Text?

  • I did not want this tool to spider websites.

  • I wanted this tool to be faster than anything on the market.
  • It is important to understand what anchor text variations people are using, but usually you can figure out how stiff the competition is just by quickly glancing through their backlink profile without necissarily looking too deeply into anchor text. The current off the shelf tools that monitor the anchor text only give you a small sample of backlink data.
  • This tool was not designed to be the comprehensive show all link analysis tool, but just something that was useful and quick and easy to use.

After you see enough linkage data you become aware of how competitive a site is and how you should go about promoting it. It is kinda like the thin slicing concept Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Blink.

Feedback:
Please let me know what you think about Link Harvester in the comments below.

Want to Host Link Harvester? Want to make it better?
grab the source code here.

Elance & SEO Service Auction Websites...

and why they a waste of time...

out of 50 or so SEO requests over the course of a year...

  1. at least 50% of them were other SEO companies looking to see what the industry pricing was (IE: Abuse of the system).

  2. 25% of them were looking for the cheapist price in the world... like SEO for 100 bucks a month type thing...
  3. 20% of them were people that were looking for detailed SEO proposals so they could do the work themselves..
  4. 5% of them were real... and each of them had at least 30 Responses to their RFQ for a 500 buck a month or more project.

    With the time it takes to answer an RFQ (few hours per RFQ).. I could of done better just talking to people I know would need SEO work done IE: any site that collects money on the internet

Another Article by Orion

If you are a search geek you may like Fractals, L-Systems and Semantics

Xan questions the paper a bit at the SEW forums.

You guys as you say find inspiration in Orion's theories, even if they have not been proved, and it gives you the motivation to improve your content. This is sufficient enough to see the use of them.

The problem of the ideas as a whole as they do not take into account the big picture but focus down on a very specific are which is the content on the page, when what you should be looking at is the content you share with your peers, and how this all links in together. Starting to look at the various different dimensions your content has in relation to the rest of the world around it may tell you some more. Demo's I've seen do include the use of clustering but in the sense of topic classification. Each site or even each part will belong to 1 or many different spheres of belonging if you like. I've seen demo's that spit out the "topic sphere" if you like and enable the user to visually manipulate this or textually manipulate this to get the results they want.

Never forget the big picture!

I think Xan's point is valid in that by following rules or focusing on specific things sometimes we miss out on the big picture or create artificial machine identifiable patterns. With that being said I find lots of the stuff Orion posts interesting.

Off topic, but Orion the Hunter is my favorite constellation. I have been exploring the universe a bit recently, watching some Cosmos :)

Google Web Accelerator / Data Gobbeler

Google gobbles more data by releasing Google Web Accelerator.

Thought I doubt the tool has much use, I love how smart the marketing is. They show a time meter of how much time the tool saved to make it seem as though it is providing an exceptionally useful service for users. To me it just looks like an excuse for Google to try to collect more data.

In my last post there was the following comment

I agree with the premises of privacy, and of not giving people too much information, I just don't know how Google would hurt any individual smart search marketer's business model.

There are many ways Google can hurt many people. One thing you have to worry about with some of these helpful plugins is how often will you see screens like this?
Google Web Accelerator.

If you rely on internet marketing and do not have a strong brand you can count on Google swallowing more and more of your margins as their network will allow the richest & most socially active businesses to learn from and control the search results.

Lots of people were talking about their TrustRank algorithm over the weekend. What I find interesting is just how positively people spin the concept. Just look at this post title:
Future PageRank Helps Reputation And Trustworthiness Shine Over Artificially Inflated Search Results: Google TrustRank
and see how much many people still trust Google.

Fantomaster has a good post about the bigger picture, and the potential end goal of Google:

Most people, even in SEO / SEM, don't seem to be entirely clear about what data mining actually is about. A lot of fuzzy concepts abound, but only a few people seem to realize the commercial potential inherent in owning the world's largest database of trackable and verifiable user behavior.

Take AdWords: a great revenue stream for Google, true; but offhand I'd estimate that the overall value of the data generated from that venture alone probably beats the AdWords revenues by factor 6 or more if properly processed, analyzed, calibrated and marketed.

Google AdWords Relevancy Change, SEW Forums Live Conference

Google AdWords Relevancy Changes:

The difference is that now, the CTR of the ad copy itself is factored in, instead of it being solely the CTR of the keyword. Which only makes sense, IMO, given that it is the quality of the keyword and the particular ad it brings up that defines relevance, for a given search. source

Thomson:
sells Google AdWords ads

SearchEngineWatch Forums Live:
mini conference to hit Atlanta Tuesday, June 28th, 8:00am - 1:00pm.

I always like smaller conferences because when they get too big you (as in me) feel lost in the shuffle. It only costs $100 to attend this one. Smart move by JupiterMedia, as this will surely prevent others from having an easy entry into this market space.

Urchin Discount:
Google discounts Urchin price

The $199 per month Urchin On Demand also now includes report profiles for up to fifty individual websites (Urchin's previous offering included reporting for only one site). The price includes up to 100,000 pageviews per month. Users can add one million more pageviews for only $99 more per month.

In addition to the reduced price and increased number of profiles, Urchin On Demand is now able to import -pay--per-click costs directly from Google AdWords accounts.

Many smart search marketers probably are not willing to be paid to give Google all their data. As time passes you can be sure that Google will drop their costs further as they try to kill off the business models of everthing between them and ad dollars.

Stocks:
Look, Fwht, & Mama are dropping like it's not hot. InfoSpace (which does search & mobile technology) recently lost about 30% of their market value as well

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