sâmbătă, 5 mai 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Fun at illegal Water Slide in Australia

Posted: 04 May 2012 11:26 PM PDT



The blonde dude seemed hot at first...then he kept talking and making weird ass faces. Plus the music. WTF?

Fun: climbing over a barbed wire fence in rural Australia to coast down an illegal water slide.

Less fun: water sliding head first into a concrete wall.


Land Diving in Vanuatu

Posted: 04 May 2012 10:13 PM PDT

Land diving (Nagol or N'gol) is a special tribal ritual that looks like bungee jumping performed by the men of the southern part of Pentecost Island, Vanuatu. Men jump off of wooden towers around 20 to 30 metres (66 to 98 ft) high, with two tree vines wrapped around the ankles. Land diving is done without any safety equipment. The land diver's objective or at least one of the requirements of the land dive is that he must hit his head on the ground. The tradition has developed into a tourist attraction.

It is believed that the ritual of the N'gol began centuries, perhaps millennia ago, when a beaten woman ran away from her husband, Tamale. He found her hiding in a tall tree and called to her that if she came down he might beat her.

Local residents believe he climbed the tree and as he made his final grab, she leaped. In anguish at her death (or anger that he had missed her) Tamale jumped after her, not realising his wife had tied liana vines around her ankles and survived the fall.








































Wake Up Call: The Truth Behind Success With Mobile Apps [Infographic]

Posted: 04 May 2012 10:07 PM PDT

With over a million applications in app stores across platform, app developers are finding it increasingly challenging to cut through the noise and get their app discovered and downloaded. So what does it take to succeed in this marketplace?

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via: App-promo


Seth's Blog : Mother's day is May 13

Mother's day is May 13

Mothers with daughters adore this bestselling book by Sarah Kay. It's a little piece of magic.

I published it because every time I saw the video, it made me cry. But you can't give your mom a video link for Mother's Day, can you?

Check out these reviews:

"Give this lovely little book to any parent in your life who is trying to instill the values of self-love, adventurousness and intelligent defiance in their children.

Give this book to any parent who questions themselves all too often, even when they are one of the best parents you know.

Give this book to any parent who needs a little reassurance that their love is more than enough."

"I highly recommend this book for new moms, old moms, one day want to be moms, or to anyone that needs to be reminded that they're loved. "

"I bought six copies of this book, keeping one and giving the remaining five to my mom, my aunt, and some dear friends (and mothers)"

"I found this book and decided to purchase 2 copies: one for my daughter and one for myself. It is wonderful and well worth buying for gifts."

"This is a precious gift to share if you are a daughter or have a daughter of any age."

"Some books should still be in print for years to come and this is one of them. Great gift idea! "



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How To Survive Google's Unnatural Links Warnings & Avoid Over-optimisation

How To Survive Google's Unnatural Links Warnings & Avoid Over-optimisation


How To Survive Google's Unnatural Links Warnings & Avoid Over-optimisation

Posted: 04 May 2012 03:00 AM PDT

Posted by Modesto Siotos

Google’s actions against “overoptimised” sites have been intensified and it seems that the recent updates are able to detect various links-related overoptimisation violations that can result in short or long-term positional drops, with or without warnings. Even though Google announced the Penguin update on the 24th if April 2012, changes on Google’s link evaluation system have been noticeable several weeks before the public announcement.

It appears that in some cases Google has been overzealous, hitting (temporarily) even websites with rather natural link profiles. In other cases, Google admitted algorithmic classification mistakes, publishing apologetic messages like this one Matt Cutts posted on Google+.

According to Patrick Altoft (branded3) the sites that have received unnatural links notifications fall under five main categories, and they are not just the ones participating in link exchanges or other types of link networks. Rand made a Whiteboard Friday video about 6 changes every SEO should make before the overoptimisation penalty hits. Now that Google has rolled out the Penguin update against "black web spam," making sure that your website's backlink profile does not violate Google's quality guidelines is quite essential, especially if your traffic has gone down.

This is a follow up to the post ‘How to Monitor Your Website For Link Equity Loss’, which can be used to identify backlinks from low quality or penalised/deindexed websites. However, this post intends to cover the following links related overoptimisation cases:

A) Excessive Link Acquisition

B) Site-wide links detection

C) Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

D) Unnatural Spread of Links Authority

A. Excessive Link Acquisition Check

Acquiring a high number of links over a short period of time has never been a good practice and webmasters need to keep an eye on the levels of acquired links, especially these days that negative SEO seems to become more of an issue. Phrases like the following one from Dan Thies, seem to be heard more often lately:

"Both sites have received “unnatural links” messages in Webmaster Tools. Neither site has had a “link building” campaign ever. By using 3rd party tools (e.g. Majestic) I can see a lot of unnatural links pointing at both sites, but I didn’t put those links there"

There are two quick ways to check your site's link acquisition velocity, using Ahrefs or Majestic SEO.

Extremely  High Link Acquisition Velocity (Ahrefs) 

Unnatural Link Acquisition Velocity (Majestic SEO historic index, cumulative view)

B. How To Check For Site-wide Links

A high number of blog-roll, header, footer or sidebar links can trigger Google’s “overoptimisation” wrath and keeping them to a minimum would be a rather reasonable thing to do. Certainly some site-wide links may have occurred naturally but the less "overoptimisation" signals you site sends out, the better. There are a few ways to quickly check your website against site-wide links with the quickest one being Webmaster Tools.

Under 'Your site on the web' -> Links to your site WMT list the domains that link the most to your site. The ones that link several times should be flagged as potential site-wide links and be manually checked.

Using Webmaster Tools to detect site-wide links is a rather easy and quick way. However, because WMT don't report all backlinks Google actually see, for a more thorough investigation a third party link intelligence service should be used such as Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs etc. One thing to bear in mind using any 3d party service, is that their crawlers do not try to replicate Google's behaviour, therefore in some cases the data can be significantly skewed. This is particularly the case for links from web sites that Google has removed from its index but the 3d party services will still report as normal links. 

A section in the Ahrefs FAQ page reads: “Having the full information at hand you may decide on subjective estimates of links and figure out real situation with the given website or page”. In a similar manner a Majestic SEO rep commented that:

 "Our index is independent of Google and will remain so. If Google has banned a site, it does not mean there are no longer links to that site. We map the link graph – not Google’s interpretation of it."

C. How To Check For Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

Overoptimised anchor text seems like a ticking bomb, especially after Google made public the following two messages:

"Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust."

"Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website."

This task is quite more complicated because, ideally, you need as much data as possible. Exporting anchor text data from as many different data sources as possible is strongly recommended e.g. Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Sistrix, Blekko. 

Next you would need to filter the data removing the following:

  • Dead links - These are sites that no longer link to your site but used to link in the past. Filtering out the dead links is absolutely necessary and some 3d party services offer such tools. Otherwise, proprietary link checkers can be used like the one we use at iCrossing UK - Alex Ovsianikov's creation. Counting dead links into a backlinks audit can result in wrong conclusions.
  • Deindexed linking root domains - It's rather pointless carrying out a backlinks audit for Google including links from sites that Google has deindexed. NetPeak Checker, makes this task quite easy as it is explained on this post.
  • No follow links - These are unlikely to cause any overoptimisation issues and could be discounted
  • Site-wide links - These should be counted once, otherwise the anchor text distribution will be greatly skewed. Different services treat site-wides differently; hence you need to pay extra attention at how each service treats them.

After having applied the above filters, the remaining backlinks data could be analysed for different anchor text types such as:

  • Exact match targeted keywords e.g. hr software
  • Broad match keywords e.g. online hr software system
  • Brand terms e.g. BreatheHR, www.breatheHR.com
  • Keyword + brand terms e.g. Breathe HR software system
  • Image links
  • Other e.g. 'click here', 'this site' and other natural anchor text that doesn't fall under any of the above categories.

Having classified all different anchor text variations, it is now relatively easy to spot weaknesses - pay particular attention for spikes on exact match keywords as in the following graph:

D. How To Check For Unnatural Link Authority Spread

Another area where overoptimisation can occur is when backlinks are consistently gained from authoritative domains. Tom Anthony created a handy link profile tool to detect such anomalies.
 
In the following example the links authority of the site represented by the blue line seems quite unnatural compared to the backlinks authority spread of the other 4 sites, which seems far more natural. Any high spikes towards the middle of the graph could potentially be flagged by Google as suspicious attempts of PageRank maninpulation. 
Proactively carrying out the above checks will help identify weaknesses on a site's backlink profile and be better prepared for Google's current and forthcoming "overoptimisation" updates.
 

Don’t Let The Penguin Leave You In the Cold

As with any new algorithmic update there will be winners and losers. Google have acknowledged that and there is a feedback form for web masters who feel that their site should not have been affected by the Penguin update.
If all the above fails, then try this petition where site owners are urging Google to kill the penguin update.
 

About the author
Modesto Siotos (@macmodi) works as a Senior Natural Search Analyst for iCrossing UK, where he focuses on technical SEO issues, link tactics and content strategy. Modesto is happy to share his experiences with others and posts regularly on digital marketing blog Connect.


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Weekly Address: A New Chapter in Afghanistan

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Saturday, May 5, 2012

 

Weekly Address: A New Chapter in Afghanistan

President Obama calls on Congress to take the money we are no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the other half to rebuild America.

Watch the President's weekly address:

Weekly Address May 5, 2012

President Barack Obama tapes the weekly address in the Map Room of the White House, May 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Weekly Wrap Up

Your quick look at this week on WhiteHouse.gov:

Correspondents' Dinner: At the annual Correspondents' Dinner, which has been held since 1920, President Obama joked about himself and the coverage he has received from the reporters in attendance. In case you missed it -- or if you want to watch it again -- you watch President Obama's speech here.

U.S.-Japan Friendship: On Monday, President Obama met with Prime Minister Noda of Japan at the White House to reaffirm the U.S.-Japan Alliance, a 60-year old partnership and friendship that was exemplified in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the tsunami and nuclear crisis that followed. After a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, the two leaders laid out a new joint vision to guide their alliance for decades to come.

Rebuilding America: Speaking to 3,000 attendees of the Building and Construction Trades Department conference in Washington, D.C. Monday, President Obama made an argument for investing in rebuilding America and urged Congress to get construction workers on the job by passing a bipartisan bill that could guarantee work for millions of construction workers.

2012 Warrior Games: The First Lady joined Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Warrior Games Monday -- an event that enables men and women who suffered injuries during a tour of duty to compete in a variety of athletic events. "No matter how seriously you're injured, no matter what obstacles or setbacks you face, you just keep moving forward," the First Lady remarked. "You just keep pushing yourselves to succeed in ways that just mystify and leave us all in awe."

Surprise Trip: President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday, where he signed an historic agreement -- the Strategic Partnership Agreement -- between the United States and Afghanistan that defines how the partnership between the two countries will be normalized as we look beyond a responsible end to the war. After his meeting with President Karzai, President Obama met with U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base, and took the opportunity to thank them for the sacrifices that they and their families have made over the past decade of war.

Cinco de Mayo: President Obama hosted a Cinco de Mayo reception Thursday -- a few days early -- at the White House. Speaking from the Rose Garden, President Obama remarked, "Right now, there are more than 50 million Americans of Latino descent -- one sixth of our population. You're our neighbors, our coworkers, our family, our friends. You're starting businesses. You're teaching in classrooms. You're defending this country. You're driving America forward."

West Wing Week: Your video guide to everything that's happening this week at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Watch here.

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Seth's Blog : A simple antidote to a corporatized, unfeeling, profit-maximizing world

A simple antidote to a corporatized, unfeeling, profit-maximizing world

Care.

Care more than you need to, more often than expected, more completely than the other guy.

No one reports liking Steve Jobs very much, yet he was as embraced as any businessperson since Walt Disney. Because he cared. He cared deeply about what he was making and how it would be used. Of course, he didn't just care in a general, amorphous, whiny way, he cared and then actually delivered.

Politicians are held in astonishingly low esteem. Congress in particular is setting record lows, but it's an endemic problem. The reason? They consistenly act as if they don't care. They don't care about their peers, certainly, and by their actions, apparently, they don't care about us. Money first.

Many salespeople face a similar problem--perhaps because for years they've used a shallow version of caring as a marketing technique to boost their commissions. One report by the National Association of Realtors found that more than 90% of all homeowners are never again contacted by their real estate agent after the contracts for the home are signed. Why bother... there's no money in it, just the possibility of complaints. Well, the reason is obvious--you'd come by with cookies and intros to the neighbors if you cared.

Economists tell us that the reason to care is that it increases customer retention, profitability and brand value. For me, though, that's beside the point (and even counter to the real goal). Caring gives you a compass, a direction to head and most of all, a reason to do the work you do in the first place.

Care More.

It's only two words, but it's hard to think of a better mantra for the organization that is smart enough to understand the core underpinning of their business, as well as one in search of a reason for being. No need to get all tied up in subcycles of this leads to this which leads to that so therefore I care... Instead, there's the opportunity to follow the direct and difficult road of someone who truly cares about what's being made and who it is for.



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