Central Perk

miercuri, 11 ianuarie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 06:20 PM PST

We here at Damn Cool Pics are computer geeks, and proud of it. None of us have any geeky vanity plates on our cars, though. But others have, and we love those.

If you've always wanted to get a custom plate for your car, but can never think of something good enough, here are 20 plates for your inspiration.

The Tale of the New Years Fail [Infographic]

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 06:12 PM PST

This New Year, around 50% of American adults will resolve to kick a bad habit or develop a good one; to get healthy either physically, mentally or financially. And while the thrill of a fresh start carries many throughout the month of January, maintaining resolutions throughout the year is a feat that most never accomplish. Heck, only 39% of resolvers make it to day 35!

More Infographics.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source: nexercise

Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets

Posted: 10 Jan 2012 12:53 PM PST

Posted by TastyPlacement

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.

Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don't simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you'll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less. There are several shrewd approaches you can employ to side-step your less-vigilant competitors. We've learned a few valuable tricks that can earn you valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices. The techniques begin with carefully monitoring PPC activity throughout the day to discover low-competition time slots in the PPC bidding and striking while your competition snoozes.

Getting Started

The types of campaigns for which these techniques will work will be high bid environments with smaller but determined competitors. You want to look for competitors bidding for terms in the $20-and-up range, but whose campaigns are not fully budgeted to run at the maximum number of available clicks. Specifically, we want to look for competitors' ads that don't appear consistently or whose ads disappear later in the day. Smaller competitors tend to fit this model fairly often. An illustrative keyword example we see in our local market of Austin Texas is "Personal Injury Lawyer". We know the bids in that space are $24 to $30 depending on the time of the day--but we see some advertisers drop out at various times of the day. For illustration, we'll examine Google's Adwords system, but these principles will apply to any PPC program.

Identify Your Competitor's Ad Schedule

Google's Adwords system has a scheduling feature that allows advertisers to run ads during particular times of the day, and even enter positive or negative bid adjustments based on times of the day.

Here's the catch: the Adwords system only allows the scheduling to be made in increments of 15 minutes, as shown in the screenshot below.

Adwords Scheduler in Action

So, if your PPC competition is employing the ad scheduler, it become fairly easy to identify when they stop running ads by running test searches throughout the day at 15-minute intervals. Once you've identified a competitor using the ad scheduler, you've just found a soft spot--your bid competition will be lower during the times of the day when that competitor isn't bidding on ads. If you can identify more than one competitor, then you've found and even more favorable environment.

Identifying Competitors' Under-Budgeted Campaigns

There is another way to determine soft spots in PPC bidding: look for under-budgeted campaigns. You can identify your competition's under-budgeted campaigns fairly easily. An under-budgeted campaign is one where the advertisers daily budget will not supply the maximum number of clicks available to that advertiser. So, say a competitor is paying an average of $20 per click for a particular keyword; assume further that their daily budget is only $60--yet there are ten clicks available to that advertiser.

That advertiser has only budgeted enough to purchase three clicks, so Google is forced to economize ad delivery--and it gives advertisers only two choices: standard delivery and accelerated delivery.

Adwords Delivery Method

Standard delivery means that Google will spread the ads throughout the day. In practice, Google might show an ad every third time a keyword is searched. Accelerated delivery means that Google will simply show an advertiser's ads every time they are triggered by a search query until the advertiser's daily budget is exhausted.

There lies the opportunity: if your competitor is employing the accelerated delivery method with an under-budgeted campaign, that means their ads will eventually stop running at some point during the day. You'll know that your competitors are employing accelerated ad delivery if their ads show consistently in the morning (in 99% of cases, advertisers set their time zone correctly so a Google Adwords "day" begins in the morning) but their ads disappear at random times in the afternoon from day to day.

Outsmarting the Under-Budgeted Competitor

So, how can you capitalize on a competitor that employs accelerated ad delivery? Say your competitor is fighting hard for position one for a particular query and will not yield on their bid price in order to stay on top (that's a fool's approach, as we'll see). You can force your competitor to exhaust their budget more quickly by simply raising your bid as high as you can without dislodging the competitor from position one. Google's bid price calculation system takes care of the rest: Google adjusts the actual cost-per-click to be based on the dollar amount needed to exceed the "next ranked ad." If the next ranked ad (you) has a higher bid then the ad that got the click (your aggressive-bidding competitor) costs more. Thus, you can knock your competitor out earlier in the day while at the same time increasing their cost-per-click. Be warned though, you will, of course, be raising your bid, so you could potentially wind up paying more for clicks you do get.

Now to Enjoy the Lighter Competition

With your competitor's budget exhausted in the later hours of the day, the competitive bidding for a particular keyword/keywords thins significantly. If circumstances line up properly, you can lower your bids in the afternoon hours and enjoy far less expensive clicks, and better click-through rates (and, ultimately, higher quality scores). There are two ways to approach lowering your bids in the later part of the day.

The first approach employs the advanced "bid adjustment" feature in the Adwords ad scheduler described above. To use the bid adjustment feature, log in to your Adwords account, click on a campaign, and then click the "Settings" tab. From there, scroll down to the Advanced Settings section and select "Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling" and then click on "Edit" in the "Ad scheduling" subsection. This will reveal the ad schedule pop-up window (shown below). At the top of the pop-up window, you want to click "Bid adjustment" mode. You can then set specific time periods on specific days and apply a percentage multiplier to lower your bid. In the screenshot below, we've adjusted our campaign from 4pm to 7:30pm to adjust our bids to 72% of the standard bid. At all other times, our bid prices stay at the standard bid prices we've selected. There it is, we've just adjusted our bids downward to enjoy the lighter competitive market we've identified that takes place during later hours of the day.

Bid Adjustment

There's a second approach to lowering bids later in the day that is a bit less elegant, but still effective. The second approach involves simply creating two ad campaigns: a first campaign scheduled to run during the earlier, more competitive hours of the day, and a second campaign with lower bid prices that is scheduled to run from say, 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The advantage to this approach is that you'll have separate analytic data for the separate campaigns. We prefer this second technique for specifically this reason.

We hope you've learned a bit from this article. While a bit Machiavellian, the techniques we've outline can help in competitive markets, and certainly the lessons here can be transposed into your daily PPC activities.

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Universal Search Results in PRO - Part 1: Local Results

Posted: 10 Jan 2012 12:58 AM PST

Posted by adamf

Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which includes data about local (a.k.a. places) results in Google search results. Whether it's a 7-pack or a blended result, if you care about local SERP results, it's often a pain to find out where you stand. We aim to help.

If you're not sure why visibility in blended or enhanced results are important, I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's eye tracking study. His experiments nicely show that universal results that break up the page or results with enhanced elements can draw people's focus, even from strong organic results at the top of the page.

As I noted, this first phase rolls out local results for Google. In the coming weeks we plan to add other types of results, including video, images, shopping, news. We are also looking to incorporate site links (1-box results) at some point. We debated whether to wait until we had the other types of universal results in place before launching, but decided to ship in this limited fashion so we can get some feedback from all of you to help us make it better as we build more capabilities.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we've added:

See Which of Your Keywords Contain Local Results in the SERP

The first change you may notice is on the Ranking Overview page. If we saw a 7-pack or blended local result in the SERP for one of your keywords, you'll now see a small pushpin icons just below your ranking for that engine. There are two different states of the icon. If you are not in the universal result, you will just see the pushpin, but if you are included in the result, it will appear with happy little lines above it:

Ranking Overview with local results

If you are in the competitive rankings view, you will see the vertical result show up in the column with your site's ranking.

A Quick Look at the Details

While in the overview, you can learn more about what is contained in the local result by hovering over the icon. This will offer up information including where the vertical is on the page, how many results it contains, and also a list of the results shown in the order presented:

Ranking Overview Local Tooltip

More Information on the Rankings Detail Page

To see even more detail, click on the keyword or the "view ranking history for more details" link in the tooltip. Here, on the ranking details page, you will see universal results added to the ranking history graph, so you can see where universal results have been included over time and in which position (sorry, I don't yet have historical data for this sample campaign):

Local Universal Result on Ranking History Graph

If you scroll further down, you will find the SERP overview, which includes blended and enhanced results alongside the organic results we saw in the SERP. As with organic results, your and your competitors' results will also be highlighted in color, so it's easy to get a feel for the overall visibility of you and your competitors on a search engine results page.

Here you can see a result where the local 7-pack pushes down what would normally look like a really strong #3 organic result below the fold:

Local 7-Pack in Ranking Detail SERP Detail

Conversely, you can also see when you are dominant at the top of a SERP, which is common for branded terms:

Local Results in Branded SERP Detail

For reference, here's what this looked like in the original SERP:

Pagliacci Seattle SERP

What's Up Next?

Our plans going forward are to push out support for more universal search types. Our order of priority at the moment is:

Video
Images
Shopping
News
Site Links

We'd love to hear from you if you think this is out of order, or if there is a different type of result that you think is more important than the rest of these.

I’ll publish a quick follow-up post when new result types are added.

Please Let Us Know What You Think

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have thoughts about how this could be better, please share a comment in the post or add a request in our feature request forum.

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By the Numbers: 170,000 Jobs

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, January 11, 2012

By the Numbers: 170,000 Jobs

Since Chrysler and GM emerged from bankruptcy in June of 2009, the auto industry has added 170,000 jobs--the best period of job growth for the industry in more than a decade.

Find out more about the resurgence of the American auto industry.

SEOptimise

How we Identified and Rectified Malicious Linking

Posted: 10 Jan 2012 06:06 AM PST

Last year, during a chat with one of the @seoptimise twitter followers, they mentioned a post on SEJ about how it is a myth that bad links can get your site penalised (a position that the author later changed after feedback) and asked my opinion on it. The strange thing was that a few months earlier I had to sort out the exact issue for one of our clients. So I thought it would be an idea to write a post it.

The background

We had been working with our client for about a year and, through a sensible link building campaign, had just managed to achieve decent rankings for some of the most competitive and highest converting terms in their industry. Then within a week their previously consistent bottom of page one/top of page two rankings (doesn't sound great until you see their competitors) dropped to page three and four, at the same time as their link count experiencing a large and very unnatural spike.

Upon investigation of their back links we identified over 80 sites each linking back from ten different pages with exactly the same title tags (which were the same as some pages on our client site), random URLs and the same anchor text. They were remarkably easy to spot.

When we checked the sites it appeared some were adult or other spammy sites, but most of the sites were hacked WordPress sites. They had ten or so pages added that used the HTML code and content from our clients' site. To make matters worse they had replaced some of the content with links to Viagra, casino and adult sites – not really neighbourhoods we wanted them to be associated with.

So the scale of our problem was 800+ pages linking multiple times to our client, as well as various low quality/spammy/malware sites, using large parts of our clients' content, effectively creating duplicate content issues.

So if you have a similar problem here is what I suggest doing next…

Step 1 – Identify you have a problem

This is probably step minus one, and it is usually quite easy, but you have to be looking (if you don't check your own backlinks regularly you should). You do not want your client to find out before you!

Just to show you how easy it can be sometimes, check out the anchor text report for one of our clients competitors – anyone would think they were an online pharmacy!

As a side note – if you have a forum or profile pages make sure they are moderated!!

So the things to look for are:
1. Your rankings take a dive but nobody else's do
2. You have loads of extra links all of sudden
3. Analytics shows traffic to pages you never knew you had or traffic from odd sites
4. You have an identical number of links for lots of different anchor text variations, especially if you haven't been link building with those terms
5. There are odd repeating patterns in anchor text and titles of sites linking in
6. Your linked to from sites which have random URLs
7. Probably the most obvious – you have a load of anchor text links for drugs/porn/fake watches but you're a University

Step 2 – Gather intelligence

The next step is to gather all of the information you can on the links. Ideally you want to end up with a list of all the pages linking to you, at least two ways of contacting the site (email, contact form or telephone number) as well as the whois information for their hosting or domain registrar.

There are a few ways to do this, with the most basic being putting a block of text into Google and then visiting each site individually. But as always there are tools you can use, Open Site Explorer or other back link analysis tools are good to get a list of URLs. If you are feeling particularly techie you can build your own SERP scraper using Google Docs or the Excel SEO Tools extension.

At this point you can start to look for patterns – do they all run the same CMS (e.g. WordPress sites) or are they all owned by the same people. This should give you an indication of if the site owner is aware the links are there or not and if someone has done it deliberately or not.

Step 3 – Tell your client

Now is a good time to sit down with your client and talk about what you have found. This is best done in person or at least on the telephone. This is the time when you need to know your stuff. And by this I don't just mean having it written down, but actually know the details off by hart to. Now is the time you are going to have to show that you are on top of the situation, and fumbling around for the answer to a question isn't going to help that.

Try to avoid getting involved in the who's and why's and instead just focus on what you have found and what you are going to do – and make sure you have a plan in place before you go.

It is probably worth double checking at this point to see if your client has accidentally done something while trying to "help" with SEO. It is unlikely, but worth asking all the same.

Step 4 – Change your content

If you suffer a similar fate to us and someone has scraped your site and is using your content, I would strongly consider if you can change your on-site content (even just temporarily). This will help with the duplicate content in the short term and will also help you identify if it is an on-going issue (i.e. does the new content get scraped as well). If they are pages with no or few other links you could even consider changing the URLs and then 301 redirect the link target URLs to another domain completely.

Make sure you have screenshots of the old content and can restore it if you need to.

Step 5 – First contact

The next thing to do is to try and get the links removed completely. There will be different approaches to take depending on if the site owner is likely to be aware of the links or not.

As the sites that were linking to our client had obviously been hacked, I started with a polite email to the site owner (to both contact methods) informing them that they had been hacked and asking them to remove the pages as it would be doing neither site any good. I also provided a list of the URLs in question just to help them find them all. This method got about a 40% response rate and all of the site owners removed the pages (always go back and check).

For those who don't respond to the first email, try again a couple of days later and keep a record of when you emailed. This will be important when you move on to some of the later steps. At this point you can be more insistent that they remove the link, especially if they have used your content as well (copyright is your friend and don't be afraid to mention it). Again, give the site owner a couple of days to get back to you.

Step 6 – Take the matter further if you can

At this point you will be fairly sure you aren't going to get a response, so the next step is to bypass the site owner and go higher up the chain.

Most hosts or registrars have terms and conditions and a procedure for reporting site owners who are breaking them. If a site is using your content without permission you can ask the hosting company to take down the site due to breach of copyright. They usually require you to fill in a form with proof and give them URLs to check (but you will have this information in your spreadsheet). It is always good to mention you have already tried to contact the site a couple of times already. They will contact the site and ask for an explanation, but failing good justification most will be taken down. In our case this was obvious as all the pages had our clients copyright information on the bottom.

Another good route to take if sites have obviously been hacked is to point this out to the hosting company. They will then try and contact the site owner and a lot of the time they suspend the site in the meantime.

The very least that will happen is that they will try and contact site owners on your behalf.

By this point hopefully you'll have got rid of at least 80% of the links.

Step 7 – Contact Google

After exhausting all possible methods of contact, if the links are still there, it's time to report them to Google via Web Master Tools. Most people think that these reports are ignored, and they very well could be, but it is more so if you have to submit a reconsideration request it shows you have tried to draw their attention to the issue.

Step 8 – Reconsideration Request

If removing the links hasn't resulted in your rankings starting to move back up, the final step is to send a reconsideration request. There are plenty of resources about how to do this, so I will not go into detail here. But make sure that you draw to their attention that you identified the issue (and that it definitely had nothing to do with you), that you took steps to remove the links and that you reported the links yourself (a good way of showing that you were being completely up front).

So those are the steps that we went through with our client, which did repair some of the damage done, but we are still playing catch up to a certain extent.

It would be good to hear if others have gone through similar stuff and if anyone has any additional steps to add.

[Fast Blog Finder] Blog commenting ideas -- think outside of the box

So, how is your blog commenting going? I hope all is well.

A good link building is sometimes just a good marketing. Success of a link building campaign often depends on your creativity, quick wit, and ability to think outside of the box.

Just click the link below for new link building ideas and inspiration:

fastblogfinder.com/blog-commenting-ideas-think-outside-of-the-box/

You know some blogs require that you create an account or login to your existing account to be able to post comments. If you don't want to do this, the GOLD edition of Fast Blog Finder allows you skip such blogs during the search. Just check the "Skip blogs where you must login or register to post comments" in the Settings. Big time saver!

Julia Gulevich
G-Lock Software
julia@glocksoft.com

P.S If you want to learn about advanced search tactics [not widely used yet quite effective], don't miss my next email

Company info:

G-Lock Software, Level 5, 369 Queen Street, Auckland, NZ.

You can modify/cancel your subscription via the link below:
http://glockdb.com/u?xemail=ZTBuc3RhcjEuYmxvZ0BnbWFpbC5jb20

miercuri, 11 ianuarie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets

Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets

Getting Started

Identify Your Competitor's Ad Schedule

Identifying Competitors' Under-Budgeted Campaigns

Outsmarting the Under-Budgeted Competitor