| LED Digest 1860: Has Your Site Been Stolen? |
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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 ================================================== Guest Moderator: Published by: Veronica Yuill LED Digest post,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ August 25, 2004 Issue #1860 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Has Your Site Been "Stolen"? ==-- ~ Chris Nielsen "...this site...is actually displaying the content of sites as if it was it's own..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ David Yancey "Site owners need to be realistic about just how much new prospect or visitor traffic they can plan on capturing..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Web Browser Hijackers ==-- ~ Kathy Wilson Anderson ======= NEW ====================================== From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Has Your Site Been "Stolen"? I won't go into the technical details, but I discovered that this site, http://directory.hostnetwork.org which appears to be a directory, is actually displaying the content of sites as if it was it's own. When you click on a listing, it takes you to the site, but the domain remains that of hostnetwork.org! This is NOT done with frames, but some kind of server-side method that has the effect that it looks like your content in on their site. Here is the link to the page that has led-digest.com listed: http://directory.hostnetwork.org/page_l_263_list.html Is this a problem? Yes, it is theft of content and I have heard that if your site and this "copy" are both found by the search engines, one of them is going to suffer and that may be yours. Note: I understand that some people are getting a message saying "This Site has been Suspended!". I think it's a fake. The reason I say that is that I can still see it, so it appears they are "blocking" some parts of the country from seeing the site. I think they are just blocking areas from which complaints come in, which is not hard to do. I use Road Runner here in Minneapolis and I can still see the site with no problem. Plus, configuring a web server to block these two IP addresses: 216.144.233.205 216.144.233.206 will keep a site from showing up on their system. I was able to confirm this yesterday. Thanks, Chris Nielsen Nielsen Technical Services http://www.pcb-search.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: David Yancey Subject: The Future of SEO In LED # 1857, Pat McCarthy, for whom I have enormous respect as a business builder and online entrepreneur, takes issue with my general prediction that crawled search engines will diminish in *relative* importance over the coming years, and that more traffic will be coming from directories. Readers will remember that my main argument is that, if "natural" search is less important, then their efforts to use SEO to generate new visitor traffic will not pay off very well. Readers with commercial sites, therefore, will need to focus on the dozen or more other ways of finding and generating prospects. No one has clearly measured how many searches there are each day. We honestly do not know, because the numbers cited for Google and the others do not include perhaps half or more of the true traffic, namely all the searches conducted in special interest sites and directories. Pat's own (great) www.paloalto.com site for example has a built-in directory for those searching specifically for info on business planning. (See http://www.bplan.com/rs/.) Another huge chunk of "searches" ignored by the numbers are the printed Yellow Page searches. Any forecast of five years out *must* include the Yellow Pages, since a huge portion of those searches will be moving online by then. Similarly, we need to add in the city guide traffic, a big part of local newspaper sites’ traffic, a large portion of travel sites traffic, all the "shopping sites" traffic, and, well, you get the idea: "search" is *much* bigger than the portion represented by the crawlers. But my prediction was not about the *total quantity of searches*, or even about what kind of search tool will be the "best" one. There are some 20-30 million heavy web users who made their mind up on that already, as Pat has. Five years from now these same users will probably have migrated to the next big thing in crawled search. The point is that *this pool of searchers will not increase very much* - - most of the world’s technically-savvy elite is online already. A normal business needs to be concerned at least equally with the roughly 95% of the world’s population of consumers that cannot (or will not try to) construct successful (measured in terms of the number of truly relevant matches produced) keyword search expressions. If their search needs make up, say, 90% of the total, then that traffic is never going to pass through Google or the other crawlers. In my posts, I am concerned with helping owners of commercial sites decide how to allocate their scarce time and marketing budgets to build traffic. Therefore, what I focused on are the searches that are *potentially* "commercial" in nature, IE, where the searcher may spend money as a result of the search process. I am only concerned with how many *leads* a site owner can realistically expect from each type of search site, and the central idea of the thread is that, within a few years, I predict that at least 90% of *commercially useful* click- outs from *all* types of search tools will *not* be coming from the crawler engines. My basic argument is economic and quantitative, having nothing to do with the alleged quality of any particular search tool. But let’s put aside the (to me) compelling statistical arguments for a moment, and evaluate the directory format as a competitor for searcher loyalty. Why do I think directories will tend to produce the lion’s share of total search traffic circa 2008? Pat, like many, has a low opinion of web directories in general, especially the paid ones. We can debate her reasons in another thread - - as a directory designer, I for one would welcome such a discussion. But before we do that, consider why directories - as a *group* - will tend to take search traffic away from the search engines over time. In her post, Pat raises the fundamental issue of content inclusion. Crawled search databases include billions of pages, while directories are limited to those web pages individually registered with the search platform. This allows Google to claim they have indexed 4 billion or more pages, while the very largest directories may have only 5 million or so listings. On the surface, as Pat suggests, it seems obvious that anyone would go for the bigger database, right? Yes, if they are truly "searching" in general, as a student or writer or researcher does. Conventional search engines can also be useful for news-based queries (as they learn how to incorporate RSS feeds). So, yes, generalized search tools are very handy, and will certainly continue to be used by millions, and this portion of web searching will be with us forever. But I am not talking about this kind of searching, Pat. A very large proportion of users are usually looking for: - product info - professional expertise - local services including “city guide” info - travel-related destinations info, or bookings and reservations planning info - consumption-related leisure info such as for gardening, cooking, crafts - entertainment-related information such as movie times, restaurant choices, - health, parenting, education and family info (where a great deal of useful content comes from “commercial” sites such as online publishers). The search process and user expectations can be *different* for each of these kinds of search. Without debating the details here, it simply is easier to tailor the search process in a directory-type format. I share Pat's annoyance with the fixed level-by-level categories of traditional directories. That's why newer directories like our www.Vivante.com have sophisticated keyword lookup tools in addition to user-friendly hierarchies. In our platform, a user can, for example, select a favorite directory-type topic and then easily combine it with as many keyword combinations as she can dream up, one after another. Other search tools will follow this direction in time, making it easier for users to quickly home in on their desired query matches. The name of the game is relevance. Relevance is not so simple as looking for links based on keywords, as most technical folks seem to think. Users define relevance in a much broader, and much more personalized, context. Depending on the user, it can include geographic relevance, timeliness of content, language, cultural bias, even the source of the content: many users *want* information from "commercial" sites to be included in their general searches, especially product details, FAQs, prices, related books, etc. The point is that if, over repeated usage, searchers perceive that the specialized directories are easier to use and tend to have more relevant (to their needs) results in the first 100 or so listings, then these directories will tend to get their “repeat” traffic, and that traffic will be lost to the crawlers. As to why site owners will prefer to work with directories where possible rather than take their chances with the crawlers' roller-coaster rankings systems: 1 Those selling services or related goods in special- interest categories will be only too happy to help the search tool get their pages properly indexed and ranked. 2 Let’s also understand that "commercial" sites include all the hundreds of thousands of "free" content providers who make their money from advertising. These (many of whom are LED readers) are anxious to get each relevant page of their site indexed fairly, accurately, and above all, *quickly*. 3 RSS and other new "feed" techniques are simplifying the process of adding new or updated pages to directories, thus making it easier for their range and depth of content to increase without so much hassle (as Pat correctly speaks of with DMOZ, for example.) The conclusion? Conventional search engines are and will remain a vital part of the online "finding equation". The coming war between MSN, Yahoo and Google for a share of crawler type, “natural search” traffic is therefore hot stuff in the tech press. But site owners need to be realistic about just how much new prospect or visitor traffic they can plan on capturing in the next few years from the crawlers. If you have a website that is intended to generate revenue, you need to consider *all* the sources of potential traffic. All potential sources of leads need to be understood, and then compared in terms of their potential ROI. As much as she evidently prefers Google personally, I feel sure that Pat McCarthy, as a true expert in smaller business and marketing planning, would agree with this realistic approach to online traffic-building. David Yancey http://www.vivante.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Kathy Wilson Anderson Subject: Web Browser Hijackers You may be the victim of spyware or malware. If you haven't already done so, install a program that specifically addresses these buggers. I experienced some oddities, also, with IE and Google. When I typed a search term into Google, a pop-up ad would appear. At first I thought it was some new advertising scheme that Google had cooked up. Then I downloaded Xoftspy and found that I had over 200 spyware and malware installations on my computer. After I cleaned them up, the pop-up ads disappeared. And yes, I had virus protection in the form of McAfee, but it doesn't seem to do as good a job as the specific programs design to go after spyware. I run Xoftspy a couple of times a week to clean up the files the McAfee misses. You may also need to reset your default page in IE to whatever you normally use. Hope this helps. Love, Kathy Wilson Anderson http://www.under-one-roof.net Life Purpose Coaching ~ Website Solutions ~ Vibrational Healing ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ------------------------------------------------------------ "Justice without power is useless; power without justice is tyranny." - Blaise Pascal |
