SEO Werkt!

It’s back. And it’s bigger than ever. I’m talking about Google’s monthly announcement of search quality/algorithm changes — an announcement that the company skipped in July, making the one that they posted late Friday afternoon the biggest ever, with a reported 86…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Emma Axelrod, Sammi Siegel, and Elena Tsemberis of Montclair High School started a campaign on the political action site Change.org after learning that a woman hadn’t moderated the U.S. presidential debates since 1992. More than 120,000 people signed the petition. With their help, CNN’s Candy Crowley will moderate the second presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on October 16.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Huffington Post is making a high-profile jump into the world of video streaming today with the launch of HuffPost Live.

The site will be Huffington Post’s answer to news networks like CNN — but with a major twist. Unlike the major news networks, HuffPost Live was created around viewer engagement. This is clear from the site’s design, which prominently features options for users to submit comments, tweets, and video.

HuffPost Live will also prominently feature viewers in its programming, offering them the ability to talk back to hosts and guest in real-time.

In short, it’s network news made created with the Internet generation in mind.

HuffPost Live will initially stream content 12 hours a day, five days a week, though Huffington promises that the site will offer 16 hours of daily content as soon as next year. Eventually, the operation hopes to broadcast twenty-four hours a day — though that day is probably a long way off.

But while the site hopes to herald the next generation of video news, its backend struggled to keep up. Video streaming was spotty during the site’s introductory broadcast, oftentimes dropping out multiple times per minute. Hopefully, these sorts of performance issues get ironed out as time goes on.

Filed under: media

Late Friday, Google tried to quietly announce, in a transparent way, a new factor to be added to Google’s search quality signals. The new factor is DMCA requests, where Google will look to lower the rankings of sites with many many valid DMCA takedown requests in the search results.

I posted about this on Friday at Search Engine Land and Danny renamed the update to The Emanuel update as a tribute to how Google is trying to hve goodwill with Hollywood.

In any event, from my understanding of this new factor, it will only impact the top top violators and not impact those with just a few or even hundreds. It really seems to be targeting the top tier of sites that get these notifications. The algorithm has not yet launched yet, so it is hard to tell if that will be in fact true, but that is the impression I am getting from Google.

Google said:

We will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily – whether itâs a song previewed on NPRâs music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

Danny has written about this extensively since the topic of how with this impact YouTube or Blogger has been brought up. Yes, Google owns both and both would receive tons of DMCA requests because of the nature of the web site. Danny spoke with Google about that concern and he wrote Google: Many Popular Sites Will Escape Pirate Penalty, Not Just YouTube.

Of course, SEOs and webmasters are concerned. Whenever a new algorithm is pushed out, there is reason for concern. If you want to join those asking questions and express your concern, hit the forums. But I honestly believe most webmasters won’t see anything from this. I’d be surprised if this impacted more than 1,000 web sites on the web.

I would not be surprised if this lead to a new SEO service for reporting DMCA takedowns at a high high level.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google+ and Google Webmaster Help.

The social network for reading, sharing, and recommending books now boasts 10 million members, who have collectively shelved more than 360 million books since the site launched in January 2007. Goodreads announced the milestone on August 13, 2012 in a post on the company blog.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A comedian who’s tagline is “I can’t really tell if he’s being serious or not,” has posted a video about his experience with Reddit, and explains how he infiltrated the network and discovered the easy way to win the adulation of Redditors. Through reading, commenting and posting on various sections of the site, Robbie Sherrard figured out the Redditor code, and opens Pandora’s box in his tell-all video. Alright, it’s not actually that much of a reveal, but we definitely laughed at the office when we read it.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Social sans commerce: here we come.

The new social utility that serial entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell started in response to being, in his words, screwed by Facebook, is live. App.net, which Caldwell ran a Kickstarter-ish campaign to fund, blew through its $500,000 goal and currently sits at $595,150.

And counting, with 31 hours left.

Caldwell announced the success on his own site, taking pains to state that third-party verification of the funding process will follow. App.net’s home page has the current results: 8,894 backers who contributed the almost $600,000, including 58 who signed up for the Pro tier at $1000, which includes developer access, phone support, and a personal meeting with Caldwell.

App.net is a different kind of social platform, as Caldwell is fond of saying. Users can’t join for free; they pay $50/year for the privilege. Like Twitter, users post status updates and follow friends and contacts. But they get a generous 256 characters instead of Twitter’s more parsimonious 140. And the social network itself, the place where all the connection happens, is not the point. Rather, the point is services built on top of the system.

Oh, and there’s no advertising.

In other words, if you remember that Mark Zuckerberg used to talk about Facebook as a “social utility,” Caldwell is really serious about simply providing electricity, or water, or maybe, more aptly, a dial tone. Most of the cool stuff with bells and whistles and cute puppies in pink will come from the apps that developers build on top of the infrastructure.

Hence the name: App.net. Not very sexy, not very friendly, and not something that reeks of Next Cool Thing for Consumers, exactly. But very developer-friendly, and very protective of consumer/user rights.

The service is already in alpha, and has received a positive nod from John Gruber. Others appreciate the chutzpah but doubt the odds.

Personally, I think the odds are high that App.net will be the next Diaspora. But it also has a good chance of being the exclusive private social network for the digerati.

Image credit: Harris Shiffman/ShutterStock

Filed under: deals, dev, social

Google says that YouTube isn’t going to somehow solely escape its new “pirate penalty.” Any popular site may be OK, as the penalty works off of more than pure copyright infringement reports. Nuances in calculating the penalty should save popular user-generated content sites, the…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

YouTube is likely to be saved from the Google’s latest search alteration that punishes websites in its search results for having too many DMCA take-down requests. Why? The video-sharing site may not actually have that many DMCA notices, says SearchEngineLand.

Yesterday, Google announced that it is tweaking its search algorithm to take into account the amount of DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) take-down notices a website has received. These notices are used to tell a website that there is copyrighted material that is being infringed somewhere on the site and that the copyright owner would like it taken off. So where does Google come into play? The company, whose highly-ranked search engine results drive tons of traffic to websites every day, will push websites with too many DMCA take-down noticed lower in that rank.

You can see which sites have the most DMCA take-down requests in Google’s Transparency Report.

Google told SearchEngineLand that the new algorithm will take YouTube into account just like any other website saying:

“We’re treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings. That said, we don’t expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites.”

The difference is in the take-down notice system. YouTube has its own request form that is not connected to DMCA requests. If your content was stolen and posted to YouTube, you can go to this link and YouTube Copyright Center, choose whether you are a content owner or a regular YouTube user and file a complaint there. The center also provides copyright educational materials.

Because this exists, the number of DMCA requests associated with YouTube are skewed. Google is more than likely not taking into consideration the number of take-down requests it receives internally, thus YouTube narrowly escapes taking a beating from this new rule.

via SearchEngineLand, hat tip Gizmodo; YouTube image via Rego – d4u.hu/Flickr

Filed under: search

This guest post is by Diggy of Flawlessconfidence.com.

As a blogger or website owner you know how important traffic is—and how difficult it can be to obtain.

Traffic is especially difficult to obtain when you are a small fish in the pond, when your site is relatively new and not many people know about you. And waiting for one or two or three years to build your blog before you can get substantial traffic is something that I’m sure you’re way too impatient for. So how do you get more traffic to your website, fast? And without spending money on PPC or solo ads?

Besides SEO, blog commenting, guest posting, Youtube and social media, there is another way.

I recently launched a new blog about how to be confident and my traffic was hovering under 100 visitors per day. Then I implemented my secret strategy for a single post, and traffic surged to over 1000 visits in a matter of hours. It continued into the high hundreds of visits for the next day too!

I’m about to share with you my secret strategy to send surges of traffic to your website, pretty much whenever you want. It’s a strategy that I haven’t seen many people use, but I think that will start to change soon. The few people who I have shared this strategy with love it and have started implementing it already.

Content is king

You’ve probably read that phrase a million times. Bloggers always tell you that content is king, and to a large extent that is true. But in addition to having engaging, unique and fantastic content, you need to have people who are going to read your content and share it with others. If you have no traffic, you can have the best content on the web, but nobody is going to read it and share it, and it’s not going to bring you any benefit.

However, a big part of this secret strategy to send surges of traffic to your website is to create really killer content. Just one post will do, but it has to be something unique. Something that people really want to read. Like a super-long list post, or a very in-depth analysis, or a very heated debatable topic. Something that grabs people’s attention.

The post that I’m using as an example is titled 100 Ways How To Build Confidence. It’s about exactly what the title states: 100 different ways to build confidence. It’s a very long list post of just over 10,000 words and it took about eight hours to write, edit and format.

There are multiple reasons why an article like this is very effective is drawing mass traffic to your site. Not only is the title something that makes people want to click through to it, when the visitor reads the article he or she can see that it contains useful information and that someone took a long time to create it. That reader is much more likely to leave positive feedback and share the post with friends, which in turn creates even more traffic for your site.

I also used two other articles to test this strategy on separate occasions. The result was the same: mass traffic spikes to my blog within hours.

The other articles I used were Going out alone—here’s how to do it and
10 Things to say to girls.

The secret strategy

Here it is: the actual secret strategy I used to drive over 1000 visits to my blog within hours, with a single post, all while my blog was only averaging around 100 unique visits per day. And the strategy worked again and again on the two other posts I mentioned.

That strategy involves forums. A very simple promotion of a good article on a popular forum will send you boat-loads of traffic. The more related the forum is to the topic of your article, the more traffic you will get, and the better that traffic will convert.

Every day, there are hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who are super-bored and have no desire to work, and who spend hours on their favorite forums. These people are all eager to be entertained, learn something, or to discover something new. They are ready to click on new links to new sites, and spend a lot of time if they like what they see.

To go back to the importance of a catchy title and unique, useful content, you can see why this is so important for this secret strategy. The catchier your title, the more people will view and click your thread and through to your link. If your article is unique, members will leave feedback in the forum. This feedback does two things:

1. In most forums, when a user comments on a thread, that thread is “bumped” to the top of the forum thread topics. This means that everybody logging on to the forum at that point will see your thread first and click on it.
2. In forums, people love to look at popular threads that have lots of views or comments or high star-ratings. This is because it is assumed that when a thread in a forum has many views, comments, or ratings, that thread is valuable and needs to be clicked on.

So, with a catchy title and useful content, you’ll get people to click through to your site, leave feedback, bump the thread, and allow more users to do the same.

If you’re wondering what kind of message you need to post in your forum thread to get the ball rolling, it’s very simple. All I posted was this:

Finding popular forums

Now that you know the secret strategy, you’ll want to know how to find popular forums worth posting on. Fortunately this is very easy because all you really need to do is head over to Google and type in “[YOUR NICHE] forum”. You’ll end up with many results for forums in your niche.

A quick way to tell if a forum is popular is to check the amount of registered users and the amount of users currently online. This is usually displayed on the home page of any forum, towards the bottom of the page. The screenshot below is an example of what a popular forum’s membership would be—this is one worth promoting your post on!

Secret no more!

Let me just sum up the secret strategy in a few simple-to-follow points:

1. Create a high quality post with a catchy title.
2. Find forums related to your niche.
3. Make a simple thread with a catchy title and link to your post.

Note that there is such a thing as forum etiquette or proper conduct. You may need to post regularly in certain forums and build up a bit of a reputation before you are allowed to post links or start threads or begin self-promoting. Even then, don’t do it too often, or you’ll risk being banned.

Be sure to reply and respond to any comments or feedback that you receive in your threads, and participate in the forum generally—after all, if it’s a focal point for your niche, it’ll be a great place to engage with potential readers, build authority, make new connections, and more.

Diggy is a confident, successful young man who is his own boss, travels the world and has fantastic friends and relationships. He enjoys teaching people how to be confident and even has a section with confidence tips for women. If you want to become more confident,happier or successful, it’s highly recommended to subscribe to Diggy’s Flawless Confidence newsletter.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

My Secret Strategy to Send Surges of Traffic to Your Blog