marți, 28 iunie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


A Look Inside Will Smith’s $1.8M Mobile Home

Posted: 28 Jun 2011 11:31 AM PDT

Movie buffs probably already know that Will Smith is in New York filming Men in Black III, and how he brought along a two-floor luxury trailer to relax in as well. At 55-feet long, it has a marble staircase, "100-inch HDTV, a lounge, a master bedroom, personalized gym and granite bathroom."


























Funny Prank Pictures

Posted: 28 Jun 2011 11:21 AM PDT

Pranks are little tricks that we play on other people to make them fool; it is a type of practical joke. If they are not much offensive, they could make anyone laugh. The key to success in doing funny pranks is to amaze your victim without making them too angry or frightened, but be careful this kind of unpleasant joke can hurt someone's feelings, and bad or dangerous prank can result in bodily injury or losing a close friend. Choose the prank that is funny and safe as well that you can use on your buddy. This post presents 30 funny pranks to do at home, work, or school.






































































Credit Ratings by Country

Posted: 28 Jun 2011 11:01 AM PDT

As you know, every country is given a credit note by Standard&Poor according to their economic situation. But these ratings are relative opinions only. According to this rating system every country is being given a credit note, so the highest note is AAA and the lowest credit note CCC. This infographic lists down the credit notes of each country very nicely. Lets have a look.

Click to Enlarge.

Source: mint


How to Avoid Getting Hit by a Train

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 10:47 PM PDT



Black Moon Studios shows us how not to get hit by a train. Please learn this trick and never get hit by a train again!


Burned Portraits Of Soldiers Of WWII

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 09:43 PM PDT

t-radya made these impressive portraits of fallen Russian WWII soldiers. The faces were made of bandages on wooden boards and were then burned to create this particular look. Afterwards, the portraits were put up on the walls of an abandoned WWII hospital ( which at that time took the wounded soldiers from the front ) in Yekaterinburg, Russia.



























During the Second World War (1941-1945) this building housed Hospital No. 1705 for the wounded soldiers of the Soviet Army.




































Cats Birthday Parties

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 05:45 PM PDT

Just like humans, cats love to have fun at their birthdays, they notice the attention and enjoy it more or less. They celebrate it in many ways but you know the drill, no matter what you do some things are required to mark that day. There're no many of those, just like a couple of friends, a cake, some music and here we go!

































Wait, did we mention alchohol?


























SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


Answers to 4 Excellent SEO Questions

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 03:12 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Last week, I visited San Francisco for a number of meetings and got a chance to film some video content for Market Motive with an old friend, Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl). Todd also collected and curated a number of questions from Market Motive folks across Twitter, and, rather than answer in the unacceptably short, 140-character format, I figured I'd do so here on the blog.

Question 1

I'd always bias to taking the website over the social media presence. It's not that a great Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare or LinkedIn account aren't great, it's just that the flexibility, power, branding and measurability of a website has yet to be matched on any platform. With a website, you can custom build virtually any form of analytics, leverage any type of web technology to display/deliver content and control your own destiny. Even if Facebook or some other new, wholly flexible platform allowed for all of these features, you would still never truly own your home on the web.

I'm a huge supporter of and advocate for social media marketing, but I don't think I could ever endorse having your primary base of marketing and acquisition happen anywhere but on a site you fully own and control.

Question 2

Unfortunately, this is an issue that's fluctuated so much over the past 5 years that I don't feel entirely comfortable giving a solid answer and feeling secure it will be the right one long term.

The current situation is that for Google, most of the time this isn't a problem. You can set up a site in Spanish targeting Spain, another in Mexico and a third in Peru, many with overlapping content pages and so long as the country TLDs are unique (e.g. .es, .com.mx, .pe, etc.) and/or you've separately targeted the sites through Google Webmaster Tools ( more on that topic here), you're relatively safe from duplicate content filtering.

That said, Bing is not nearly as sophisticated on this front (usually), though they are getting better. I don't know how search engines like Baidu, Yandex or Naver might handle this situation, currently - if anyone in the comments has expertise here, please do chip in. Given this, it's often wise to choose either a globally-targeted site OR biuld very customized sites to specific regions (even if there is language overlap). You can always use the cross domain rel=canonical if you want to "share" content between/across sites and self-select which one Google returns.

Question 3

It depends whether you mean directly or indirectly?

Directly, it will likely be Twitter. Google's ongoing animosity with all things Facebook shows no sign of shifting and thus I'd say it's unlikely Google will start using Facebook signals directly in the results. However... as we showed with correlation data, things that do well on Facebook tend to do quite well on Google, too. Indirectly, the ability to influence a wide network on Facebook, earn lots of shares, comments, likes and activity may indeed lead to very positive and influential second-order effects (links, tweets, positive content analysis signals, etc).

With Twitter, it remains to be seen whether they achieve ubiquity in a wider world. The service is a clear leader in many fields - marketing, politics, technology, investing, media and more - but it's not yet a service everyone's using (~100 million actives vs. Facebook's 750 million). If it sees growth spikes, engagement increases and they become more ingrained in the fabric of "normal" society, then they may indeed be competitive with Facebook for influencing the results, on both first and second-order levels.

Question 4

The honest answer is that no one really knows. However, I'd strongly suspect the .whatever TLDs(see Mashable's article on the subject for more) will have far more impact on the branding landscape of the web than it will directly in search results, for searchers or for organic marketers. I do have some guesses:

  • The new TLDs will become commoditized quickly - $180K is not a big financial hurdle for many medium+ businesses
  • The "cool" factor is likely to exist in the tech startup and web-savvy worlds (like a Quora or NameSake), but your cousin in Michigan won't have heard of them and will have trouble using them or believing they work (if they see them in offline advertising)
  • They may actually increase the desirability of .com domains as the gold standard everyone's used to and comfortable with
  • A few might earn enough brand recognition (as .ly and .us have in the web 2.0 runup) to get some escape velocity and be on par with .info or even .net... But, I wouldn't put money on that :-)

Normally, I'm a huge fan of early adoption in new marketing tactics, but this doesn't feel ROI positive for enough folks to make it a strong recommendation from me, personally. Like everyone else, though, I'll be watching with anticipation to see how it's adopted and used.


Looking forward to your opinions as well, particularly if you have more information to add or feel my answers are mistaken in some way!

p.s. I keep tweeting that I'll put up my blog post on SEO 101 for Travel Bloggers. That post is intense, big and requires a lot of time, so I've had to delay a few times. My new target is next weekend - sorry about that!


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Open for Questions: Live Chat Today on the Way Forward in Afghanistan

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
 

Open for Questions: Live Chat on the Way Forward in Afghanistan

Join us for a live chat today, Tuesday, June 28th, at 4:00 PM EDT with Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, and Brian Deese, Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, on President Obama’s strategy to draw down troops in Afghanistan and our plan to focus on investments here at home.

Here's how you can participate:

Photo of the Day


President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are briefed by senior advisors in the Oval Office, June 27, 2011. Participating in the briefing, from left, are: Senior Advisor David Plouffe, Gene Sperling, National Economic Council Director; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Rob Nabors, Assistant to the President and Director of Legislative Affairs; and Jack Lew, Office of Management and Budget Director. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Announcing the Stop. Think. Connect. PSA Challenge Winners
Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt announces the winners of the Stop.Think.Connect. Campaign’s Public Service Announcement Challenge which called on the public to create short videos encouraging their fellow citizens to be safe and secure online. Check out the winning PSAs.

Our Energy Independence: Join the Live Chat
On Wednesday, June 29th, at 2:00 pm ET, please join Dr. Arun Majumdar at Energy.gov for a frank, two-way discussion about the investments the federal government is making in innovative research and technology today that will move us off of foreign oil and toward the clean energy infrastructure of the future.

Broadband and the Latino Community: Let's Keep the Momentum Going!
Ms. Anna M. Gomez is one of the highest ranking Latinas in the administration on telecommunications and information issues participated in the annual National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference in San Antonio. 


Today's Schedule

10:00 AM: The President and the Vice President meet with Secretary of State Clinton

10:35 AM: The President departs the South Lawn en route Joint Base Andrews

10:45 AM: The Vice President meets with His Royal Highness Prince Philippe of Belgium

10:50 AM: The President departs Joint Base Andrews en route Moline, Illinois

12:55 PM: The President arrives Moline, Illinois

1:45 PM: The President tours Alcoa Davenport Works

2:05 PM: The President delivers remarks on the critical role the manufacturing sector plays in the American economy WhiteHouse.gov/live

3:45 PM: The President departs Moline, Illinois

5:40 PM: The President arrives at Joint Base Andrews

5:55 PM: The President arrives at the White House

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates event that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.Gov/Live

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President Obama Launches the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership

The White House Tuesday, June 28, 2011
 

Good morning,

Last week, President Obama visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he toured Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and delivered remarks announcing the launch of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), a $550 million dollar project to bring together industry, government, and higher education.

Today, the President travels to Bettendorf, Iowa, to visit the Davenport Works factory of AMP participant Alcoa. The factory is a state-of-the-art aluminum rolling mill that serves as the manufacturing hub for Alcoa's $3 billion aerospace business. You can watch the event live at 2:05 PM EST on Whitehouse.gov/live.



President Barack Obama delivers remarks following a tour of the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., June 24, 2011. The President spoke on the need to focus on cross-cutting technologies that will enhance the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing and speed up ideas from the drawing board to the manufacturing floor. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

 

The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) is a national effort that brings together industry, universities and the federal government to invest in emerging technologies that will create high quality manufacturing jobs and enhance our global competitiveness. As President Obama remarked in Pittsburgh:

We’ve launched an all-hands-on-deck effort between our brightest academic minds, some of our boldest business leaders, and our most dedicated public servants from science and technology agencies, all with one big goal, and that is a renaissance of American manufacturing. Throughout our history, our greatest breakthroughs have often come from partnerships just like this one.

American innovation has always been sparked by individual scientists and entrepreneurs, often at universities like Carnegie Mellon or Georgia Tech or Berkeley or Stanford. But a lot of companies don’t invest in early ideas because it won’t pay off right away. And that’s where government can step in. That’s how we ended up with some of the world-changing innovations that fueled our growth and prosperity and created countless jobs -- the mobile phone, the Internet, GPS, more than 150 drugs and vaccines over the last 40 years was all because we were able to, in strategic ways, bring people together and make some critical investments.

The President’s plan, which leverages existing programs and proposals, will invest more than $500 million to jumpstart this effort. These investments will build domestic manufacturing capabilities in critical national security industries and reduce the time needed to make advanced materials used in manufacturing products. Additionally, we will invest in next-generation robotics, increase energy-efficiency in the manufacturing process and develop new technologies that will dramatically reduce the time required to design, build, and test manufactured goods.

Read more about the President's visit and AMP.

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SEOptimise

SEOptimise


30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 06:05 AM PDT

ranking me ranking you*

SEO is a fast changing discipline.

What worked 5 or 10 years ago might be completely unnecessary these days or even bad for your site’s ranking.

Thus leading search industry publications publish the most probable Google ranking factors each year. Nonetheless many webmasters prefer to stick to the past or follow wrong advice from bloggers who just repeat SEO myths.

In recent years, Google has not only included lots of new media types into Universal search results; it has also added numerous ranking factors while rethinking many old ones.

I made a list of new or current ranking factors that get underestimated by webmasters and neglected because of this. At the same time, I included those often old school ranking factors webmasters tend to overestimate the power of. These may not work anymore, or may even hurt your site in Google’s search results.

 

 

These ranking factors are gaining importance or haven’t been as popularly accepted as they deserve

Site Speed – site speed is an official ranking factor that Google has been pushing quite hard for a while. Despite this, I still see plenty of sites that don’t seem to care. They load huge images where you don’t need any or are cluttered with widgets and rich media that take too long to load. Especially on mobile phones, Google prefers sites that load quickly.

Social Signals – Twitter, Quora and even Friendfeed get used by Google Social search to populate your social search results, but these services also influence regular results. Hundreds of tweets by real accounts with some authority can push your site significantly. A few tweets by authority accounts or even one Google Buzz mention can get you indexed. Google just acquired social media analytics tool PostRank so they can measure this even better.

Usability – with the Google ”Panda” high quality update, user experience as chekecd by human quality raters and automatically measured by algorithms have been introduced as a direct ranking factor.

Outgoing Links – it has already been two years since Matt Cutts disclosed that outgoing links to authority sites are a positive ranking factor like bad neighborhoods are a negative one. These days some of the most renowned SEOs advise linking out not just for direct ranking benefit, and link out a lot themselves.

Google +1 – with the launch of Google +1 it has been announced that +1 votes will count as a ranking factor. There are still penalty of sites who don’t seem to care. Inserting a +1 button is easier than a Facebook-like widget.

Branding – over the years, branding has seemingly become one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Make sure that people know your name and link to you using it. This way you ensure that you will be created as a brand while generic sites get downranked. It’s even feasible that Google counts the number of mentions of your name or brand that do not link to you. The more you get talked about the better, of course.

SERP CTR – Google can measure how many people actually click your site in search results. You can even see the numbers in Google Webmaster Tools. The less people do click, the less valuable it must be is the logic I’m afraid. Make sure you sport an enticing meta description and title tag. Don’t just stuff keywords in there like 10 years ago.

Readability – Google is also measuring the readability level of a text. For instance, most of my blog posts don’t require a university degree to get understood. That might be an advantage in many cases, unless someone needs scientific advice of course.

Ads to content-ratio – too many ads on your site may mean bad karma as your site might get considered to be a thin content site with more ad than actual text. If you use Adsense, this might be even easier to determine.

Site topic – what is a page about? Increasingly, search engines try to understand the meaning of a query to return the best results. Google is still at a very early stage of this, but it already matters what the page linking to you deals with. So placing an SEO article on a gardening site may not work in the future.

Page age (not domain age) – Google is increasingly keen on displaying dates on your articles and posts. While it’s not yet clear whether it’s a direct ranking factor as well, it will surely impact your click-through rate. The older the date, the less likely people are to click.

Link velocity – by link velocity, we describe the actual number of links a site gets in a particular time frame. If you get links too fast, you may end up in a Google filter. On the other hand, a good viral campaign with a large number of links in a matter of hours or days can propel you to the top accordingly.

Link decay – as content gets older, many links in it end up being broken. Or even worse, some of them redirect to bad neighbourhoods. So link decay may hurt in two ways, by either showing that your content is now obsolete or by hurting it directly by linking to spammy or rogue sites.

Internal link anchor text – the actual anchor text your internal links have can be a major ranking factor. So don’t link ”services” in the menu but ”seo services”.

Alt text – in 2009 it seemed that alt text, the text you add in the alt attribute on images, may be one of the most important ranking factors on page. I admit that I still neglect this ranking factor, sometimes due to sheer haste and laziness. Blind users are only aware of the alt descriptions so you may want to think twice and add them.

On page link position – over the years, Google has been stepping up its efforts to identify where a particular link is on a webpage, in the footer, sidebar or the editorial part of the content. These days editorial links are best, of course.

Natural link profile – a natural link profile consists of all kinds of links:  branded ones, deep links, nofollow links, even links from low quality scraper sites. By now it’s quite sure that Google has to look at the overall link profile of a site. If your site has only links from one geographical area, sites on one specific topic or specific links (e.g. blog comments), for example, this may mean that you will be ranked accordingly.

Deep link ratio – with the new Panda algorithm, sites with many pages that have no external incoming links have suffered. Until now it was enough to have enough authority from the homepage to push thousands of pages down in the hierarchy. From now, deep links get even more important for so called long tail content.

Link geography – as noted above, UK-based links are good for UK sites that want to rank in the UK. If you want to also rank well in the US, you want to make sure you publish and promote your posts while most US citizens are awake (not in the morning UK time). This also works for tweets, as some tests have already shown.

Backlink diversity – links from a lot of different sites are important not only for the natural link profile. Backlink diversity is similar to domain popularity and ultimately part of a natural link profile. This ranking factor has been around for ages, and some people have seemingly forgotten about it.

Just consider this:  a new site is buying links from a few high PageRank sites and has barely any other links from domains with no Google authority. Doesn’t it look suspicious?

 

These ranking factors are losing ground or are even negative ranking factors

Facebook likes – in recent days there’s been a lot of news coming in that Facebook likes do not count as much or at all for Google rankings. Until now, after a disclosure a few months ago, it was assumed that Google counts public likes from profiles that are visible to everyone (like mine is for example).

Exact match domains – for years, so-called exact match domains e.g. seo.com for the query [seo] have been the best bet to rank quickly and stay on top. The good times seem to be over, however; branding gets more important, and even an exact match generic keyword domain is no guarantee of ranking these days.

Backlink anchor text – when every link to your site from the Web has the same anchor text, such as “seo agency”, this will be easily detected by Google. The anchor text of incoming links gets monitored more closely, so using it in an over-optimised way might even hurt you.

h1 headlines – some already old studies suggest that the h1 tag has lost much of the impact it once might have had on Google results. h2 and even smaller headlines most probably counted for more until now. Other specialists tend to dismiss h-tag altogether these days. I’m not sure here, but headlines are not a place to stuff keywords in anymore.

Top level domain – the TLD, that is the .com .co.uk or .fr ending of your domain, doesn’t count that much these days. Sites with .ly,  .me, .is and other similarly exotic top level domains can rank well now without major disadvantages. Just look at Good.is – it even outranks Good.com.

Server location – my own SEO blog over at SEO 2.0 has been ranking for years in the US, despite being hosted in Germany. So while hosting locally is a good thing, it won’t stop you from ranking when you get your SEO strategy right and earn links from your target market. I considered moving it, but I decided that the change would not be significant enough to justify the risks of moving.

Content length - I remember when one of the most common pieces of SEO advice was to write content that is at least 200 words long. Also, over the years, pages with very long on-site copy have traditionally ranked better than short ones. Now that Google has cracked down on content farms that focused on size not quality, it would seem that content length is not a signal of utmost importance anymore.

Backlink number – I also remember a time when you looked at the sheer number of links a site had. Soon the number turned completely useless because of thousands of footer links from ”partners” many websites got. With the appearance of widely used CMS systems like WordPress and Drupal, Google has taken measures to curb the footer link game.

Keyword density – the higher the keyword density, the more likely you get penalised by Google for keyword stuffing. Keyword density is not a metric most serious SEO practicioners use in 2011. While it’s good to mention your actual keywords on page, any suggested density of several per cent is nonsense and barely readable.

Meta keywords tag – no major search engine uses the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor these days, yet some blogs still advise you to use it for SEO. Some SEO experts assume that it’s even a negative ranking factor. Google might be checking whether the keywords mentioned in it are also found on page, and if they aren’t, you might get downranked.

 

Of course, ranking by itself is not the only thing important in SEO, but if your SEO strategy is based on outdated ranking signals that do not matter anymore, while you ignore the most important current ones, you may be heading in the wrong direction.

Make sure you stay on top of developments. On the other hand, you may have to focus on the actions that work in search due to the fact that they are popular. This way, you are ahead of Google in many cases.

 

Read more about ranking factors:

* Image by Peter Gerdes

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate

Related posts:

  1. 40 Title Tag SEO for Google Ranking Factors & Optimization Techniques + Resources
  2. Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes & Tweets?
  3. A Natural Link Profile and Nofollow as a Ranking Factor or Signal

Seth's Blog : Are you wow blind?

Are you wow blind?

Kevin asked me: "Do 'great ideas' possess universally some sort of Wow Factor?"

The problems with this question: What does 'great' mean? And who decides what 'wow' is?

The challenge is this: lots of people think they know what both words mean in their area of endeavor, and many of them are wrong.

Consider the case of web 2.0 companies. People like Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are brilliant at understanding what wow means from the point of view of an investor. They have great taste about what's going to pay off. They have a sense for which teams and which ideas will actually turn into great businesses.

The peanut gallery at tech sites, though, don't have such great abilities (if they did, they'd be Brad, not anonymous voters). As a result, they mistake consumer wow for investor wow, and often focus on the wrong attributes when they're criticizing or congratulating a company.

This is endemic in the book business, which resolutely refuses to understand the actual P&L of most of the books it publishes. As a result, there are plenty of editors who continue to overpay for the wrong books, because their wow isn't the market's wow.

In his book Money Ball, Michael Lewis wrote about how virtually every single scout and manager in baseball was wrong about what makes a great baseball player. They had the wrong radar, the wrong wow. When statistics taught a few teams what the real wow was, the balance of power shifted.

By definition, just about every great idea resonates early with those that have better radar than those that don't. The skill, then, is to expose yourself often enough, learn enough and fail enough that you get to say wow before the competition does.

 

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