There is a growing trend within the SEO community to advertise yourself or your company as an “ethical” White Hat, denouncing Black Hat SEO as “illegal” and “immoral”. Such behaviour seems to be encouraged by the search engines; but what really is Black Hat and why is it considered a seemingly criminal practice?
Almost one year on since Yahoo Answers launched in December 2005, we’re taking a look back at how it has grown and where the future lies for the Q&A website model.For those of you yet to hear of, or experience Yahoo Answers, it is essentially a platform enabling registered users to pose questions to others within an online community. Each response can be rated, and a single answer can be chosen as the best. A merit system deducts points from a user for asking a question and rewards them for answering others.Having just re-launched a handful of major youth brands online, the time has come to start traffic building.Obviously there is the usual affiliate, banner swap, newsletters and PPC routes – all of which are underway.� But MySpace is still meant to be the best place to steal eyeballs from when targeting the 16-30 demographic.� With this is mind I have just set up my first branded MySpace profile.
A colleague in the industry has recently launched a product and is magnificently gaining 10,000 impressions a day from their 6 week old MySpace profile, so it can be ignored no longer.
I will report back in a few weeks time with details of any increase in traffic…
Now that Google Video has been operational for several months, it’s a perfect time to review the progress of Mountain View’s hottest BETA service. Some may view me as a Google skeptic, so perhaps I’m in the best position to evaluate the real value in Video’s offering. Although it pains me to say this, I am actually very impressed with the web application. I do not think that it’s perfect just yet however, its lack of a sub-category structure (made famous by the DMOZ directory) and a cumbersome desire to push people into searching the archive makes Video a little frustrating at times. It’s also a service which only broadband users can effectively use, so there’s no need to keep such a basic visual design – other then to re-iterate that its made by Google.
On a dull and wet day in May, I sat down with a Hot Chocolate and proceeded to read a recently purchased book entitled “How to Break Web Software“. Having performed some software testing in the past, a lot of the information was old news to me – except one worrying fact:
It is often noted that there is currently an on/off switch for websites perceived as spam, with little grey area or notification. This could soon change however, with an added feature being tested for the users of Google Sitemaps. To recap, Google Sitemaps is not the same as a HTML written web page sitemap which many sites use like a book index or navigation page for visitors. Google’s Sitemaps service uses a language called XML in order to help Googlebot (the crawler that indexes your site) find every web page which you have published. This is particularly helpful for dynamic pages which are sometimes ignored by Googlebot, or content which is hidden behind an online form or search facility.