| LED Digest 1755: Google Bombing, Unwanted Links and Macs |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ February 25, 2004 Issue #1755 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Unrelated, Unsavory & Unwanted Links ==-- ~ Evan Lesser "...your website will not be penalized in any way..." ~ Dirk Johnson "It is now known that 'Google-bombing' is possible..." --== Mozilla vs Internet Explorer ==-- ~ Charles Oertel "My strategy is to design with Mozilla, and then build in the hacks to get it to show on IE." ~ Paul J. Kulhavy "Windows platforms make up about 99% for my visitors so far this month..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Mac Users & Mac Browsers ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill ~ Hal Cohen --== Change in PayPal Policies ==-- ~ Dave McClure ~ Dudley Dix ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Evan Lesser Subject: Unsavory links > Is it possible that links from unsavory sites influence > Google's algorithm? Is it possible to get Google not > to include or consider them as legit links when spidering > and evaluating my site? - William Ernest Waites, LED 1754 William: The search engines look more at what websites YOU are linking to, not what websites are displaying links back to your own website. Furthermore, your website will not be penalized in any way for having some other "unsavory" website displaying links to zunilink.com. If the search engines did penalize you when some other junk website links to you, it would mean that your competition could easily harm you by creating a few dozen junk websites and linking to you hundreds of times from those websites. The search engines do not work that way. The nature of the internet is linking. Any website can link to any other website, and there is not really anything that can be done about it. To get your links removed from those unsavory sites, you can email and phone them, but that's really about it. In short, you need not worry about outside links causing your own website harm with regards to the search engines. Furthermore, most remotely savvy web surfers know that just because a link is posted on a website does not imply any type of endorsement. Regards, Evan Lesser Creative NetVentures, Inc. http://www.cnvi.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Unsavory links > Is it possible that links from unsavory > sites influence Google's algorithm? - William Ernest Waites, LED 1754 Fortunately, Google has addressed this. They claim that nothing that you don't control should influence your rankings. Otherwise, rampant sabotage among competitive sites would result. More specifically, though, I think this policy applies more to the application of penalties. When it comes to actual index results, the influence of a few links might be quite negligible, or loom large, depending upon how many other links you have back to your site. It is now known that "Google-bombing" is possible, whereby the establishment of links with specific anchor text can force the underlying URL to the top index position for those anchor text keywords. This is relatively easy to do when the keywords are not at all competitive, simply by posting in blogs, guestbooks, forums, and link farms, using the link and anchor text that you want to force. The most infamous example is "miserable failure", in which a concerted Google-bombing campaign forced a particular page of the White House website to the top index result for that term. The publicity that surrounded this juvenile stunt exposed Google-bombing to the world. The Google computers were not making a political statement. They were just "doing their job", according to their indexing rules. Google-bombing using these "trash link" techniques is much more difficult to force when the keywords are competitive. In a competitive environment, the more traditional linking methods, like linked editorial citations and directory-to-directory linking with relevant sites yields far more stable results. But it's also takes a more concerted, organized effort. Actually, all sites that have a lot of link popularity tend to attract unwanted links of some kind, as other sites will link to them in the hope that they'll get a link back. Many gambling, viagra and "ringtone" sites are notorious for linking to any site, anywhere. All you can really do is ignore them, and overwhelm them. The dirty little secret is that these unsolicited links do enhance the indexing of a site, especially if the specific link page that they come from is itself keyword-relevant. You just may not want to link back to them, though. For your purposes, you can negate unwanted, off-topic links by overwhelming them with links that you establish on your own behalf. In a sense, it is a numbers game. My suggestion is that you pursue links with as many fetish collectible sites as possible, as well as Native American and Southwestern-themed sites. You probably know of most of them firsthand. In a larger realm, you could also pursue home decor, art, and other collectible-related sites. Further to your advantage, for a site like your's, you are not doing this just for the search engines. You'll get valuable traffic from the links themselves, and maybe some additional publicity or citations along the way. The best defense in linking is to establish a proactive linking program. In this way, you establish your site focus in the way you want it, where you want it. A few unwanted, off-topic links will not shake that foundation. Thanks. Dirk Johnson, Owner LinkStrategy.com http://www.linkstrategy.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Charles Oertel Subject: Mozilla Kerry Branham (LED 1752) stopped using Mozilla / Netscape when s/he started using stylesheets and found that Mozilla browsers would not display them properly. All the reference sites I use when designing with CSS indicate that Mozilla is more standards compliant than IE, and that IE is particularly hard to design for, because IE 5, 5.5 and 6 follow different conventions and interpretations of the same CSS standard. In fact, the way CSS designers get around the problems is to use tricks that IE cannot follow to fool it into doing the right thing. Have a look at www.alistapart.com for more information. I downloaded Kerry's page and examined it, because the problem is certainly not with Firefox. The stylesheet does not work at all in FireFox (and probably many other browsers too), because the CSS in the file is enclosed in a <.script> tag. This tag is HTML and does not belong in the CSS file. Take it out and your problems will be solved. Quite correctly though, most people use IE and so your CSS design should cater for them. My strategy is to design with Mozilla, and then build in the hacks to get it to show on IE. Alistapart.com is very helpful with this, and www.csszengarden.com is my inspiration. If sites displayed more beautifully in non-IE browsers, maybe people would take the effort to download a decent browser and we could move away from the shoddy, non-compliant, unfriendly and insecure IE that is ruining the internet. HTH regards Charles Oertel FineBushPeople.net ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Paul Kulhavy Subject: Mozilla Great newsletter. Top discussions. ;-) For all the lyrical prose about the wonders of Linux and Mozilla and the assertions that they are becoming the standard... I just don't see it being reflected in the stats. Attached below are my visitor details for the month of February... by OS and browser... as broken down by my stats counter at addfreestats.com. Windows platforms (XP, NT, 2000, 98 and 95) make up about 98.8% for my visitors so far this month... around 140,000. Compare that to Mac users with 615 visits, Linux just 192... (slightly above 119 poor people who still use Win 3.1 !!!) It's a similar story on the browser side... MSIE (of various flavours) at 139,000 (96.71%), with Mozilla second at 2,970 (2.06%) and then Opera, Netscape (officially dead?) and something called KDE ?? Now - I'm not a web designer (obviously when you see the poor state of my site)... I'm just an IT literate self-employed web site owner battling along hand coding... but those numbers are extremely telling in my opinion. I think that I'll stick to simply testing for MSIE on Windows platforms in the meantime. Good luck with your internet ventures ... Paul J. Kulhavy http://goonersguide.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Mac users > ... I was informed by a Mac user that the links on > a Coolpage designed site did not work for them... > Does anyone have a solution for this issue? - Frank Haggard, LED 1754 I don't know what Coolpage does exactly, Frank, but you can't get much simpler than links -- the raison d'etre of the web! If your links are coded in the standard way, i.e. <.a href="http://www.somedomain.com/somepage.html>My link<./a> they will work in every browser on the planet. If Coolpage codes them in some other way, there's something badly wrong with it ... maybe you should stick with Front Page! NB in the interests of open source and alternative browsers, Mozilla / Netscape comes with an excellent free WYSIWYG HTML editor, Composer. For basic pages, it works a treat and produces nice clean HTML code. HTH Veronica Yuill, Moderator I-Design http://www.marketingwonk.com/lists/idesign/35363/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Hal Cohen Subject: Mac users Hi Frank - I am primarily a Mac user but have done a lot of work on PCs as well. Though you profess to be an amateur, you ARE designing sites for others, so sooner or later, you will probably want to call yourself a pro. IMO, the sooner you switch to a professional strength web design tool, the better. My personal preference is Macromedia Dreamweaver. In addition to writing the cleanest code out there, it has built-in features that allow you to check your results across various platforms. It also plays well with other programs such as Adobe's Photoshop or it's own graphics and animation apps like Flash and Fireworks. As for learning how to use them, also a simple answer. Any book by Lynda Wienman ( www.lynda.com ). Her H.O.T. (Hands On Training) series books are unbeatable. Hal Cohen Fantastech Memories http://www.fantastech.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Dave McClure Subject: PayPal > It would be nice to know, seeing as you are talking globally > about services, when you intend opening up PayPal shops > again for non US businesses. - Simon McArdle, LED 1752 hi Simon - re: non-US shops in PayPal Shops directory, my understanding is we are currently a bit backlogged on Shops submissions to our directory. we may have to prioritize US submissions for a period of time until we have local country staff available to manage additional submissions. apologies for the delay; it's been a very popular program -- we're looking into ways we can streamline and expand the Shops submission process. regards, Dave McClure The PayPal Developer Network -- Making E-Commerce Easy developer [at] paypal [dot] com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Dudley Dix Subject: PayPal I moved my business to USA from South Africa last month. Securing credit card merchant facilities has been arduous because most US banks and other businesses are not interested in credit references from abroad. Despite that problem, I would not consider Paypal as my card processing option. South Africa and many other countries are excluded from doing business through Paypal, either as buyers or sellers. I tried to buy software from a Paypal vendor a few months ago from South Africa and was told by Paypal that they had no arrangements in place for South Africa. I managed to buy the software through a 3rd party at a much higher price. I looked through the list of countries that were acceptable and more than half of those with which I successfully do business are not on their list. Working through them would have seriously cut my customer base. For the interest of the readers, I am a US Resident, with Permanent Residence Status, but I am not a US Citizen. I cannot even apply for Citizen status until I have lived here 5 years. Most of the banks will not look at an application for merchant facilities unless the business owner is a US Citizen. Even one of the regular contributors to this forum, who told me the middle of last year that there would be no problem for him to get me merchant facilities in my situation, turned me down flat when I called him to discuss an account. This rejection was on the basis that I am not a US Citizen but he knew that when he told me that there would be no problem. USA is a country built and populated by immigrants. I can understand that there needs to be protection from money laundering for financing of terrorist groups but the financial viability and livelihood of new immigrants must not be taken away in the process. I have been able to work my way around the problems but many others are in a less fortunate financial position than me and may not be able to access the solutions. Dudley Dix http://dixdesign.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "On the road to Mandalay Where the flyin' fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay." - Rudyard Kipling |
