| LED Digest 1788: The Search Engine Spamdexing Problem |
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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 ................................................ April 22, 2004 Issue #1788 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= <Moderator Comment> --== Reciprocal Linking: Dead or Alive? ==-- ~ Mark Whitman "...search engines...put little effort into actually controlling [spamdexing]." ~ Bob Wakfer "...it takes a lot of work and constant attention to build and maintain enough links..." --== Why People aren't Buying Online ==-- ~ Thomas Yoon "I fully agree with the thought that you must have a unique product..." --== HTML Editors? ==-- ~ Erik Perkins "...I think that the choice...should ultimately come down to cost / benefit analysis..." ~ Michael Linehan "There's a good reason that Dreamweaver has a huge market share..." --== Keeping it in Perspective ==-- ~ Shari Thurow "So I am not in favor of lumping traditional marketers and Internet marketers..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Patent Attorney Needed ==-- ~ Bob Huntsman --== Monkey Encoding Emails ==-- ~ Brad Waller <Moderator Comment> ===== CONTINUING ================================= <Moderator Comment> A couple good responses on the new 'monkey encoding' method for email addresses (if you missed it in the last issue, email addresses are now being published as: adam, led-digest.com). Brad Waller has an interesting response I've placed on the Billboard, check it out. Also just a quick reminder to keep things professional here. This Reciprocal Linking thread has the potential to span over into the personal arena -- and that's not productive. Thanks :-) Best wishes, Adam ------------------------ From: Mark Whitman Subject: Reciprocal linking > People are using yesterday's Google-optimizing technique > (boosting link popularity) under the misguided belief that the > people at Google are too stupid or lazy to have caught on to > the trick after four years. - Michael Martinez, LED 1785 > Apparently the people at Google are indeed too stupid or lazy > to have caught on, because from where I'm sitting, link farms > and worse continue to propel sites to the top of the rankings. - Jill Whalen, LED 1787 I agree, and have noticed the same at Yahoo. For example, I have a customer who paid a SEO company a pretty hefty price and all they did was cram zillions of keywords into meta tags, did the link farm thing, and created full-on spamdex pages that even got picked up by Yahoo. These pages have top 5 positions in the Yahoo index for really tough keywords to get good placement on. I've been suspecting for years that the search engines use scare tactics to dissuade spamdexing but in fact put little effort into actually controlling it. Mark Whitman ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Bob Wakfer Subject: Reciprocal linking > At some point [spamdexing] may stop working and you'll > have to start from scratch, but it'll work nicely for you at the > moment as evidenced by many of the top-ranking sites > being shown at Google at this very moment. - Jill Whalen, LED 1787 Wow! That is a hell of an admission from you Jill. You've been telling everyone that you get all your pages to the top ten via content only. You know "Content is King", the Jill Whalen mantra. Yes I agree there are some pages with low quality inbound links. And yes some people even buy links -- I think you call that advertising. But how is that more spammy that keyword stuffing of page content? You yourself admit that you have put information on a page as an image just to preserve your keyword density. How artificial is that? But no matter what link building scheme one adopts, with the possible exception of a straight buy, it takes a lot of work and constant attention to build and maintain enough links to keep a site at the top of the SERPs. On-page content tends to be a one shot deal. In my opinion Complete SEO includes both, informative, optimized, user friendly content and a comprehensive aggressive link building strategy. Your constant whine about Google, sounds to me like you just don't want to spend the time to do the hard part of the job. Regards, Bob Wakfer Computer Partners http://www.compar.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Thomas Yoon Subject: Buying Online > I never buy clothes without first feeling the material. > I never bought from catalogues and I don't by online. - Ian Dickson, LED 1785 On the internet, we have to compete very hard with the friendly neighbourhood store. I fully agree with the thought that you must have a unique product, something you cannot get anywhere else. Now, with that thought in mind I started to think about it, and I found that creating my own e-books can make my product very unique. If I can find some information that I and only I can produce, there I will have a unique product. Of course, not everybody has that type of skill or liking for writing and editing, but I have a strong feeling that many readers in this forum do write serious works sometimes. I create e-books targeted for seafarers and people who love the sea. Once I have found a certain direction to take, there is nothing to stop me from inserting other types of e-books into the page. It's like a shopping mall. Once you can get somebody interested enough to step in, you can dazzle him with other offers too good to be missed. Thomas Yoon Marine Engineer World http://www.free-marine.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Erik Perkins Subject: HTML editors > It's amazing to me that people use HTML > editors at all, *especially* FrontPage... - Mark Whitman, LED 1786 I agree with everyone that has advised against using FrontPage, for the reasons specified in this thread and the browser compatibility thread. HOWEVER, I think that the choice to build pages with WYSIWYG, or "drag and drop", editors should ultimately come down to cost / benefit analysis rather than a question of code purity and cleanliness. It's an analogy that will fall apart under very little scrutiny, but I liken HTML purists to PostScript purists. Do you, or anyone you know, have any working knowledge of postscript code now? I only know a few basic error codes. End-user demand for more features in web sites is increasing. Client demand for more exacting creative control over appearance and function also grows with the technology that allows for it. Even the cleanest code becomes more complex and time-consuming to hand code. I personally use a combination of a bare bones drag-and-drop (PageSpinner for MacOS x) and plain text (BBEdit) editing. I find it much easier to let repetitive code be automatically generated. I do go back and clean up the code a bit, and use pages I've made in WYSIWYG as templates that can then be altered by hand or with "find and replace" in the file or across an entire directory. Erik Perkins Liberty Graphics, Inc, http://www.lgtees.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: HTML editors There's a good reason that Dreamweaver has a huge market share, followed by GoLive for a big part of the rest --- they're powerful, fast, and easy to use. And as for the purity of hand-coding (I don't meant tweaking, I mean building the whole thing by raw coding) I respect those that can do it - but I don't want to learn that much programming. Look at just a moderate page. Imagine doing all of that in a text editor! Sorry, but for most people that seems about as likely, useful and economically viable as hand-coding our Photoshop filters. :) Michael Linehan www.marketing-alchemy.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Shari Thurow Subject: Keeping it in Perspective Hi all - This is in response to Lennart Svanberg's post in LED #1786 regarding branding ourselves as "marketers" and not "Internet marketers." I would like to contribute some personal experiences on the topic. First, many of the people at our firm began in what I like to call traditional marketing. Some of our design staff learned to do print design in school and work experience. They had no formal training in the various aspects of Web design and had to learn as the field evolved. Same with the marketing people. They learned traditional marketing in school. This is what has happened since we went online in 1995. We tend not to hire people who have traditional graphic design or marketing degrees? Reason? We spend more time training our staff to unlearn all of the behavior they learned in school, especially the branding types. It takes us far less time to train a person who has no formal education because they do not enter the field with preconceived notions. Second, I have to share my recent experience with a traditional advertising agency. This worldwide agency specializes in branding, so we knew we were in for a little resistance. They contracted us for search engine marketing services, specifically. After we signed their "partnership" contract, we had them sign our "partnership" contract. You see, many search engine marketers have intellectual property that ad agencies would not hesitate to use for their benefit. We also have a retainer fee for all new clients. We don't care if a company is a small business or a well-recognized brand. If you are a new client, you pay us a retainer fee before we begin work. Back to this agency. They never paid us the retainer fee. As an act of good faith, we did some keyword and site architecture research with a follow-up phone consultation. They asked for the consultation in writing. And when I told them that they were not getting anything in writing from us without payment of the retainer fee? They decided to cancel the partnership. The arrogance of this company is astounding. They ordered us to send them an invoice for their specified amount. Hoo boy. Are we glad we have a signed contract with them. Our contract. But that's not the funny part. We don't need this agency's business. They thought that we should kiss their behinds to have the privilege of working with them. When in fact, they called us for assistance. We don't need their business - but they sure need ours. Now, what do you think would have happened had we given them anything in writing? If agencies and traditional marketers want our knowledge, they have to pay for it. They are going to make millions of dollars off of Internet marketers. They should pay us accordingly. Don't get me wrong. I am just giving you a single case study. We have great partnerships with other agencies. This is one example. So I am not in favor of lumping traditional marketers and Internet marketers together, at least not yet. There needs to be a much better degree of mutual respect. Best wishes, Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director ~ Search Engine Visibility book now available http://www.searchenginesbook.com/ ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Bob Huntsman Subject: Patent attorney > For a small company owning a patent can be a > waste of time / money unless it is absolutely solid. - Ian Dickson, LED 1786 I agree with the first part that in many cases, a small company owning a patent and spending scarce startup money can be a waste of time and money, but for a different reason Software related technology of course usually has a short "shelf life" and the patent process works at a snail's pace. However, the thing you need to consider is not so much "is it (the idea) absolutely solid", but whether the technology has decent potential commercial value. Patent protection doesn't create commercial value but it can be a huge negotiating tool if you have a commercially viable technology and you are interested in partnering with a bigger company. I am a former HP Engineer (B.S. in Computer Science), a web entrepreneur, and a patent attorney. One important relatively new tool is the provisional patent application, available since 1995. As a patent attorney, I initially disliked provisional patent applications because at the end of the day, in order to get patent protection, you still have eventually to file a full blown utility patent (usually a $3000 to $5000 venture), so my reasoning (and the reasoning of many patent attorneys) is "why incur the extra expense?" I have since changed my mind. Provisional patent applications do buy you a year of time inexpensively ($80 filing fee), and that year of limited protection can be exceedingly valuable in some cases. A very successful strategy for many small web companies is to file a provisional patent application, and then use the year to try to make a deal with a bigger company or launch or expand a web business if appropriate. If you are successful, you often can either get the partner to help pay for the utility patent or you are successful enough to bite the $5000 bullet then. If you are unsuccessful, you have only lost a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand. Most small enterprises are in position to speculate $80-$400 to seek some patent protection as opposed to $5000. In order for this strategy to work, the small company has to prepare most or all of the disclosure themselves for the simple reason if you hire a patent attorney, you quickly find yourself in the $5000 world, which, in my mind, undermines the value of the provisional application. A popular variation of this strategy is to have the inventor take his or her best shot at a disclosure and then have a patent attorney review it for obvious fatal flaws and help with the filing. You obviously don't have the same application you would have if you hired a patent attorney, but you have something - notably "patent pending" technology. Another benefit is that this approach is "financially scalable" in the sense you can decide how much you want to spend up front on patent protection and file a provisional application for exactly that amount. A huge help for those of us comfortable with the web is that issued patents and pending applications are now on the web for inspection for free. (See http://www.uspto.gov ). Looking at related patent applications filed by both patent attorneys and lone inventors gives you a big clue on how to write a decent patent disclosure. Keep in mind that the hardest part of a patent application -- the claims and formal patent drawings -- need not be included in a provisional patent application (informal drawings are a good idea, however). Provisional patent applications do have severe limitations. You only have patent rights in subject matter you adequately describe and you have ZERO patent protection after a year if your don't file a corresponding utility patent application. Still, like most tools, if the tradeoffs are understand, provisional patent applications can be used effectively to help launch and promote small web-related businesses and to protect clever and novel ideas and implementations. Bob Huntsman Registered Software Patent Attorney led, bobhuntsman.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Brad Waller Subject: Monkey encoding I say forget about it and use the old @ sign. With various filters and services to keep out unwanted email being available for free, I have no problem leaving my email address exposed and available. Over all the years I've been on the LED, I can't think of any problem emails from it. I don't see the risk being all that high compared to the efforts to do all this work. Why not let those who want their email address exposed use them in their signature, and those who do not want it exposed not place it into the post anywhere? If you are concerned about your address, add a character to it just before the @ sign, so instead of adam,led-digest.com, you could use This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it - remove the "r" before the "@" before emailing, or even This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Either of these lets you use a global find and replace for the "@". This should be far simpler, and just as effective. Just like with car thieves, if the bad guys really want it, they can get it. You are only trying to stop the amateurs. Brad Waller www.ep.com <Moderator Comment> One thing to keep in mind is our archives -- that's the main reason I don't want to publish email addresses without some sort of encoding. But I really like the idea of having emails back in the LED for those who elect to have them published. Thanks for your input -- I'd like to keep exploring this topic. Any more views? ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If you realise that you have enough, you are truly rich. If you stay in the centre and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever." - Tao Te Ching |
