Webstractions - Web Development & Design News

For those of you who missed Aaron Wall's Interview on Search Engine Radio on June 15th, the archive is now up at the website for you to listen to.

The show entitled "Blogging and Other SEO Techniques" is guest hosted by Andy Jenkins in which Aaron explained some of his techniques for using blogs for SEO purposes as well as his strategy for using a blog to sell his ebook, which is a departure from the standard 'sales letter only' approach which is very popular. Aaron also discussed other blog spam, other SEO techniques, so-called 'black hat' SEO, and more.

Aaron often has a unique tongue-in-cheek attitude toward SEO, with this classic line from the Interview which was in regards to his Fatty Weight Loss blog:

"My goal is to lose 30 pounds and to rank number one for 'weight loss' in two months. Both are very difficult to do."

GoogleGuy recently broke his silence (and so does Mark Carey) to confirm that Google has taken action against an SEO firm and it's clients for spammy techniques. The SEO company convinced some its clients to use javascript redirects and place hidden links to doorway pages created by the firm. GoogleGuy explains:

I believe that one SEO had convinced clients either to put spammy Javascript mouseover redirects, doorway pages that link to other sites, or both on their clients' sites. That can lead to clients' sites being flagged as spam in addition to the doorway domains that the SEO set up.

GoogleGuy later reassured webmasters that those who use javascript mousover to place text in the status bar do not need to worry about beeing banned.

Mark continues:

While the SEO company was not named in the thread, discussions in other forums reveal that the company in question was Traffic Power. I think it is important to mention the company name, so that others can learn to stay away from them. There have been numerous reports of people losing their job for hiring this firm to do their SEO, and rumors are brewing about a lawsuit in the works.

Thanks to Jan Willamowius for pointing me to this thread. I have been quite busy lately, without much time to scan the discussion threads looking for GoogleGuy's comments, which have been few and far between, and mostly insignificant.

A commenter named Johnny confirms the suspicions about a class-action lawsuit against Traffic Power with this link http://www.girardgibbs.com/traffic-power.html

If you notice any significant posts by Google, please send Mark an email at googleguysays at markcarey.com. He is apparantly pretty busy. Thanks.

Just released by Price Media - Cascade DTP is a new kind of web page composition tool that harnesses the powerful features of cascading style sheet (CSS) layout and formatting commands.

Until recently, web designers were forced to use HTML tables as a means of controlling the position of page elements. But since the launch of IE5, Netscape 6 and later browsers, over 95% of web users can now view pages written using CSS.

Unfortunately, most of the major web editing packages still incorporate CSS tools as an add-on, which causes confusion and discourages a break with the compromises of the past.

Cascade DTP is different. Nearly all its functions are based entirely on the CSS layout model. The result is far cleaner code and much enhanced control over positioning and typography. This typically means pages download quicker because it is no longer necessary to convert text to images in order to give headings and logos the desired look.

If you want to see what can be achieved with this ground breaking application - look no further. The Price Media website was built entirely using Cascade DTP.

Features:

• Complete freedom to position text and images anywhere on the page


• Custom file format (.cas4) enables you to save layouts and text for further editing


• Precise control of colour for all text and page elements (borders, backgrounds and fonts)


• Numerous typographic settings for font type, size, text justification, letter and line spacing


• Work with embedded or linked cascading style sheets


• Images used as page backgrounds may be set to repeat vertically, horizontally or both


• Full control of scrollbar colour scheme


• Unique 'live' preview of text box appearance enables you to see the affect of changes instantly


• Fully integrated body text and cascading style sheet editors

Labels: css, repub

In a MercuryNews.com article, a Web infection may be aimed at stealing financial data. A computer virus designed to steal valuable information like passwords spread Friday through a new technique that converted popular Web sites into virus transmitters.

Though the impact of the "Scob" outbreak was mild compared with recent infections like "Sasser" and "Blaster," security experts worried about its method of delivery.

With Scob, virus writers have discovered yet another way -- beyond e-mail and network techniques -- of distributing their malicious code.

Now that the exploit is out, it won't be long before others adapt it for spamming and for launching broad attacks to cripple the Internet, said Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering at security company Symantec Corp.

It is recommended to get the latest security updates from Microsoft, as well as updates for your anti-virus and firewall programs. Turning off the JavaScript function will lower your risk in the meantime. This exploitable flaw only affects MicroSoft Internet Explorer for Windows, the Mac version is not affected nor are other browsers such as Mozilla and Opera.

Users can search their computers for the files "Kk32.dll" or "Surf.dat" to see if they are infected. Removal tools are available from major anti-virus vendors.

More in the Band of Gonzos Virus Warnings Forum.

An announcement by Dave Winer in the Scripting News:

"An announcement. After giving it much thought, I've decided to resign from the RSS Advisory Board, effective July 1. I feel that the process for clarifying the spec is now well-understood by the existing members, and we have started a positive working relationship with several leading aggregator developers. Frankly, most of the time I was spending on the board has been in avoiding and dealing with flamers, which as others have noted is not a good use of my time. Now that I'm leaving Harvard, I want to spend much of my technical work time on the open source release of the Frontier kernel and other forward-looking projects. I want to be out of the business of avoiding flames, if possible. I wish the continuing members of the board the very best, and of course I will continue to be a huge booster of RSS and syndication technology, and I will offer my opinion, through this blog, naturally, as always."

As a result of the SimpleBits Great Book Giveaway Contest, 485 comments were collected, each with a link to a favorite article, web site or weblog entry relating to web standards. Steve Smith formatted these comments into a nice, neat, easily digestible list of links, complete with titles. Look for a similar list being compiled by Shaun Inman which will list every URL posted, along with a tally of how many folks shared the same article.

This is a great collection of links. Although there are some that you may already be aware of, you will be pleasantly surprised of what other resources are out there.

Labels: repub

I recently posted about the Gmail importer from your web-based email accounts, check this out E-Eeasy.Com - GetMail Hotmail Forwarding Made Easy.

GetMail is a mail forwarding program that started life because of the lack of POP3 availability for Hotmail. From these humble beginnings it has evolved into a flexible Hotmail/MSN/Pop mail directing forwarding program.

Features include:

• HotMail Forwarding
• MSN Forwarding
• Read your hotmail on your e-mail enabled mobile phone
• Optionally forward on Bulk Mail
• Make managing multiple mail accounts on multiple servers easy
• Pop forwarding via smtp
• Unlimited number of accounts
• Mark forwarded mail as read OR delete
• Pre-defined pop settings
• Forward mail through (effective) spam filtered accounts
• Forward legacy mail to web enabled accounts
• Discreet (Tray icon) existence
• ... and it is FREE!

Looking for free webpage counters or scripts? Try CounterGuide.Com for a list of web counting and traffic analysis resources.

Counter reviews include free hosted counters, paid hosted counters, counters for auction sites such as Ebay, CGI counters which you install on your own server, some PHP counters also, and log analysis tools that converts your server's log files into pretty graphs.

Labels: repub

Found on ReachCustomersOnline.com

Gadgetopia, a website that covers programming and personal technology, has an engaging article called My Corbis Nightmare that includes a number of good sources for stock photos.

Some of the stock photo resources mentioned are FreeFoto, iStockPhoto, iStockPro, links to public domain photos, stock.b-man.dk, Image100, Zefa, and MorgueFile. The sites that Tim uses with success are Eyewire, GettyImages, and Photos.com (somewhat).

Labels: repub

Learn the pros and cons of syndication with javascript in JavaScript Syndication: How to Easily Syndicate Your Web Content over at BarelyFitz Designs.

If you are syndicating to websites that are not under your control, you don't know that the webmaster will have the expertise to implement a syndication strategy using XML. You might be syndicating to a small company that used FrontPage to make the website; they certainly can't set up a dynamic process to fetch an XML feed from your site, cache it, and integrate the data into their site.

Using JavaScript has benefits for the target website, in that the implementation is simple ... just add one line of HTML to the target page. The only caveat is that the browser supports or has javascript enabled. When you update the content, changes are immediately reflected on the syndicated sites. Cached solutions such as RSS there is typically a self-imposed delay of up to an hour.

The article will walk you down step by step through all of the ins and outs, and follow up with some commonplace examples of how you can implement syndication thru javascript.

Labels: repub

Over at vbrush.tmp.layout you will find a brush for every occasion, mood, and then some. A talented artist, known as Vered, has over 160+ original brush sets, plus a brush search engine for locating just the right brush.

While you are looking around, check out some of the art he has created with the brushes. A very exceptional site to view. Enjoy!

Labels: repub

If you have a Gmail account and were wondering how to import your existing email into it, then Mark Lyon's GMail Loader (GML) might be the trick.

"I recently was invited to use Google's GMail service by a friend. As you certainly know, Google included an entire gigabyte of storage space with the account, which is wonderful for email packrats like me. I, for instance, have all my email dating back from 1994 stored in Netscape. When I realized the benefit of having all my email easily searched and managed through GMail, I looked for an option to import my existing messages. No such feature exists.
To remedy this problem, I've created the Mbox & Maildir to Gmail Loader (GML)."

The utility is a simple command line application that will load your email and send it to your Gmail account. The loader sends one message every 2 seconds to GMail's servers. The delay between messages is to reduce the load sending so many messages will certainly create. Start it running, go to bed, and see the results in the morning. Alternatively, you can sort your messages as they come in.

If you're using a Microsoft product like Outlook or Outlook Express that stores mail in .pst files, you'll likely have better luck importing your mail into Mozilla first, and then using Mbox & Maildir to Gmail Loader (GML) to transfer your mail from Mozilla to Gmail.

Greg over at The Talent Show writes Yahoo Is Censoring My Mail

"Like I mentioned (before), I've got a new email address using Google's new Gmail service. Since the service is only in beta testing right now, the only way to join is to receive an invitation. Since a competing free email service can potentially cut into Yahoo's business, they've set up filters to make it more difficult for Gmail invitations to get to their users (or at least, that's the way it appears). As far as Yahoo is concerned, Gmail invites are spam.

Since the Gmail invitations come from an email address that ends in @gmail.com, I figured I would send a few emails to myself and see if I can nail down what kind of filtering they've got in place. I figured they were just blocking all emails for gmail.com or scanning the subject lines, but it turns out that they're actually searching for the message body itself.

The amusing thing about this is that any email that contains this in the body of the message will get thrown into the 'bulk mail' folder :"

And the funny thing is ... he is right. Greg shows the body of the text that comes with a standard Gmail invite. I pasted that text into some mail on four different mail accounts that I have and sent them to my Yahoo mail account. All came from non-Gmail mail accounts and all had different subject lines. All four got tossed into my Bulk folder.

I then reported all four as not being spam, and resent the mail messages one more time as I had did before. All four got tossed into my Bulk folder once again. And once again, I reported them as not being spam.

It was not until that I added my email addresses to my Yahoo Contacts that I was able to receive this mail in my regular Inbox. But after I deleted those addresses from my Contacts folder, once again, that mail was tossed into the Bulk folder.

It is clear that Yahoo Mail is targeting the text body of the mail to toss Gmail invites into the Bulk folder. Further testing also revealed that the text had to appear in it's entirety. If you placed snippets of the message (say a couple paragraphs or so including links) the mail went through just fine. It is only the full text of a normal Gmail invite that sets off the trigger.

NewsFactor reports that Sprint and SUNET, a Swedish research group, have broken the Internet speed record, sending data 10,000 miles at 4.23 Gigabits per second -- nearly three times faster than the previous highest speed. Significantly, they made the accomplishment using commercial networks and readily available hardware. The feat offers a glimpse of the future for enterprises migrating toward Web-based networking.

The Sprint/SUNET team in April sent nearly 840 gigabytes of data from a PC in San Jose, California to associates at another computer at the University of Lulea in northern Sweden in under 27 minutes. The data traveled some 10,000 miles, or nearly halfway around the globe, using the SprintLink Internet backbone and the GigaSUNET IP system at 4.23 Gigabits per second (Gbps).

In a Rick Klau weblog entry E-mail as a platform - Why Gmail Will Win he ponders over where Gmail will be heading. Interesting perspective.

"... all it's going to take is for Google to add an RSS/ATOM reader to Gmail. Just like that, they'll create a killer app for e-mail, enhance their searching algorithms (think of all the rich data they'll have by aggregating feed reading behavior with search behavior), and start to seamlessly blend the web, messaging and syndication. And if they integrate Blogger into Gmail? Well then you've round-tripped searching, browsing, reading, writing - - and further added to the volume of content Google can index.

One last note on Gmail -- the invite-only approach to a beta roll-out was brilliant. Not only did it create a feeling of exclusivity, but it is also creating a wonderfully-rich map of connections between the thousands of netizens who are now Gmail users. Think of what that can tell Google, and how they might use it."

In Steve Gillmor article from last month: Gmail has Potential as Enterprise Platform --

"Even better would be a link between Gmail’s Conversation View, where threaded messages are collected and stacked together, and related RSS affinity groups.

In fact, Gmail would make a great container for an RSS information router. In the same way you can print a conversation in Gmail, I suggested to Brin, you could also print to RSS. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s a very interesting idea.”

Damn that would be something! Can't wait. I have my Gmail and Blogger accounts sitting here waiting to get tied together. Hey? If anyone is reading this and wants a Gmail account, first one to email me (webstractions at gmail.com) with the words "gmail, blogger, and newsreader would be a kick ass combination" will get an invite from me. The mail has to include those words, got it?

In an eWeek Opinion article, Larry Seltzer suggests that ISPs need to start putting a cap on the number of e-mail messages sent by users -- a policy that would leave nearly all users unaffected but would be a powerful deterrent for spammers.

"There are a number of reasons why I'm not so worried about this. One of them is that ISPs, at least consumer ISPs, will need to begin limiting the number of e-mail messages sent by users. This is one of those policies that will leave 99-something percent of all users unaffected but generate extreme rage among the others."

"(ISP's should) set a rate limit for outbound mail for consumer accounts. There are systems available to enforce it. And it would be yet another sign to users whose computers have been taken over that they need to clean them out."

I happen to agree with this philosophy. It cuts the spam off at the source, the head as you will, and you don't have to chase the tail all over hell and back with numerous spam detection filters and complicated algorithms. It is simplistic and easy to detect, and just as easy to shut down.

Basicly put, if a person allows their machine to get infected and send this spam out ... they should clean their machine up. Why should the rest of us have to suffer for their stupidity (or ignorance).

Now the trick is to get all the ISP's to adopt such an action -- unanimously.

The purpose of The Big List O' Quality Software is to help you get useful stuff done with your Windows PC. Windows users face the opposite problem from users of alternate OSes; those folks look far and wide for software that does what they want, so when they find good stuff, word travels fast. In the Windows world, however, there is just so darn much software floating around that it's possible for even very good stuff to get lost in the clutter. So Jason Lefkowitz decided to throw together this little guide, to share with you some things that he had found very useful in the past.

The list is comprised of software ranging from webpage editors (Html-Kit) to graphics editors (PhotoPlus 5.5). The list is arranged by task. It is, what Jason refers to it as, a living document. It will evolve with time, so you may want to bookmark this for future reference.

Another is Dave Pollard's list of essential links and free tools which was put together with some inspiration from Jason's Quality Software List. Look in the comments area of this post for a few suggestions that were added by Robin Good as well.

Labels: repub

Some disturbing news came out in a TechWeb article that Internet service provider EarthLink and Webroot, a message security software maker, scanned over 420,000 PCs during April, and found nearly 134,000 Trojans or systems monitors.

"So far this year, the SpyAudit has detected over 500,000 Trojans and system monitors out of the roughly 1.5 million machines scanned. The revised numbers also showed a slight decrease in the average number of pieces of spyware per system from March to April. Scans done in April detected 26.9 spyware programs or components per machine, while March's scans found 29.9 on average. The year-to-date average is 27.5 pieces per system."

EarthLink-Webroot definition of spyware: Any application or software that's placed on the user's machine without his or her authorization, said an EarthLink spokesman, including adware, adware cookies -- typically planted to track your surfing habits for marketing and advertising purposes -- Trojans, and system monitors. The best-known monitors are 'key loggers,' software that traps every keystroke, including usernames, passwords, and critical financial information like credit card numbers, then passes them along to hackers.

"Spyware has been attracting attention primarily because of the risk of identity theft and subsequent online fraud. Earlier this week, Gartner released a report that estimated total checking account fraud -- much of it due to a combination of spyware and phishing attacks -- took cost American banks and consumers $2.4 billion in the last 12 months."

300 Images From 1800 Sites is a collection compiled by Ro London who started gathering little, iconesque web images for himself so that he could compare, contrast, and study the techniques used by other graphic artists on the web. His initial pool of images looked so interesting that he decided to continue methodically hunting and capturing the icons for a public display piece.

"The purpose of this document is not to copy the intellectual property of others, but rather as a jumping-off point for your own unique web graphic projects. It's for Brainstorming, if you will."

He roughly estimates that for every six web sites he scoured, he was able to acquire one graphic image. He visited only Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, and the very largest online news publishers. Approximately 1800 web sites later, he had this collection of 300 of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display.

The collection covers arrows, posts, mail, comments, bullets, print, carts and bags.

Labels: repub

A unique forum that I ran across, The Forum Zone, is an online community dedicated to building and managing online communities. If you own your own forum or moderate at someone else's, The Forum Zone is a great place to exchange ideas and make connections with people with similar interests.

The Forum Zone includes forums for discussion about forum software, hosting companies, acquiring traffic, generating revenue, post exchanging and much more. The Forum Zone provides you with a single location to discuss your forum related troubles and triumphs with other members of the forum building community.

ChoiceMail is different. It's a permission based spam blocker that customizes itself to you. Permission-based means ChoiceMail assumes email is spam unless it knows otherwise. Only approved email gets into your inbox.

ChoiceMail automatically approves email from people you know and trust. It lets you create simple rules to approve email that is important to you. And it lets automatically query unknown senders to find out who they are and what they want before their email gets into your inbox. Then you get to decide if this is someone you want to hear from. Legitimate senders respond to this query, but spammers never do.

There is also a free version of ChoiceMail that is available.

Keep your code secure against intruders. In an article in WWWCoder, they provide examples of SQL injection attacks and how you can write code to prevent them. Stop people from getting information from your database.

SQL injection attacks take advantage of code that does not filter input that is being entered directly into a form. Susceptible applications are applications that take direct user input and then generate dynamic SQL that is executed via back-end code. For example say you have a logon form that accepts a user name and password. Once authenticated against the database, the application then sets a session value, or some other token for allowing the user to access the protected data.

Labels: repub

If you are an Html-kit user and like to write a little javascript from time to time, then you may want to check out how you can install a local JavaScript syntax checker. Mark Anderson describes how to combine Douglas Crockford's JS Lint with the hkShowInTemplate plug-in to enable you to check your syntax easily and with no fuss.

The folks at Html-Kit have obtained the author's consent to install a local copy of JS Lint for use with the plug-in. The JS Lint page is a free service kindly provided by Douglas Crockford. The main JS Lint page has a link to supporting documentation. JS Lint is a syntax checker - which will help you spot errors in your syntax, such as unmatched pairs of '{}' braces, missing ';' at line ends, etc.

Labels: repub

Hot damn ... I am taking the Internet by storm, one reader at a time. My newsfeed exposure just doubled yesterday when Mike Lainge over at FactorOne started to carry my feed. I was kind of amazed to see my feed show up at Binary Circus a couple of weeks ago, so it is only a matter of time before everyone and their dog will be carrying it now. Yeah right!

It has been a while since I have seen a good article come out of A List Apart and this one is a doozy Dynamic Text Replacement in which the author Stewart Rosenberger describes how to create static heading images from text on the fly using any font of your choosing. What you say? Read on.

Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings - short, attention-grabbing blocks of text - it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We've become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

Most sites that replace text with images do so using hand-made images, which isn't so terrible when there are a set number of headings, but it quickly becomes unmanageable on a site that is updated several times per day. However the replacement is performed, each image needs to be bound to the text it is replacing. That binding usually manifests itself as an <img> tag, an embedded style sheet, or a custom id attribute. And over time, through layout changes and redesigns, that binding needs to be managed by someone.

We can forget all that nonsense. No more <img> or <span> tags, no more id attributes or wasted time in Photoshop, and no more messy CSS hacks. Using JavaScript and PHP, we can generate accessible image-headings using any font we like. And we don�t have to change the structure of our HTML or CSS at all.

View the demo to see Dynamic Text Replacement in action. Then read on to find out how you can add the same functionality to your site.

The process does require a javascript enabled browser and PHP enabled server, although the server side scripting can be accomplished in Perl, Coldfusion, ASP or any other flavor of scripting. The scripts are designed to be "flicker free" which is a nice touch.

Labels: css, repub

The Band of Gonzos Forum will be announcing a new contest for members and prospective members. We are looking for talented and imaginative individuals to create a basic re-design with navigation for a Web Hosting Company website.

The winning design must include navigation and must utilize one or all of the existing logos and the general site theme as defined by the domain name and the logos. Beyond that, creativity and originality are encouraged.

We are offering not just one prize the winner, but three! The winner will receive free hosting, a Gmail account, website promotion links from the Band of Gonzos Forum, and much more. Additional prizes will be awarded to the second and third place runners-up.

For complete details concerning contest rules and deadlines, please visit us at www.bandofgonzos.com . If you are not an existing member, consider registering today to enter our exciting new Website Design Contest.

Not much in the news lately about any new viral attack. But that does not mean that it cannot happen tomorrow. Do you know the difference between viruses, worms, and trojans?

Viruses, worms, and Trojan Horses are malicious programs that can cause damage to your computer and information on your computer, slow down the Internet, and use your computer to spread themselves to your friends, family, co-workers, and the rest of the web. The good news is that with an ounce of prevention and some good common sense you are less likely to fall victim to these threats. Think of it as locking your front door to protect your entire family.

Read the definitions, ways to find out if you've been victimized, and solutions you can use to help make your computer safer in an Introduction to viruses, worms, and trojan horses.

First there was GoogleGuy, then Tim, now MSNdude has made an appearance at WebMasterWorld Forums. After making an introductory comment about the politeness of their spiders to many users experiencing a pounding of their bandwidth from msnbot, MSNdude created his first post.

"I also want to make folks aware of a feature that MSNBot supports, but which is not yet documented. We do support what we call a crawl delay. Basically it allows you to specify via robots.txt an amount of time (in seconds) that MSNBot should wait before retrieving another page from that host. The syntax in your robots.txt file would look something like:

User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-Delay: 20

This instructs MSNBot to wait 20 seconds before retrieving another page from that host. If you think that MSNBot is being a bit aggresive this is a way to have it slow down on your host while still making sure that your pages are indexed. "

My lord, talk about an opening post. Think about it, they are suggesting changing the robots.txt file to suit their bot. With Alexa for instance, you are able to pass certain website information by leaving a text file in the root of you domain for retrieval. Grub is the same way.

Google is considering renewing support for the popular RSS Web publishing format in some of its services, CNET News.com has learned, marking the latest twist in a burgeoning standards war over technology that could change how people read the news.

According to an internal Google e-mail seen by CNET News.com, the company has been considering the change and last month assigned at least one staffer to write a memo summarizing technical details relating to RSS. The request came amid a broader discussion touching on extending RSS support for new Blogger subscribers and Google Groups, which supports Atom but not RSS in a test version of the service.

"I did ask (a Google product manager) to develop a summary...about RSS feeds, including the ways they are produced and consumed, which platforms/devices they run on, and information on the various formats (RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom)," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, wrote on May 22. The message was part of a thread addressed to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and others.

Were Google to support both RSS and Atom equally, it might help ease growing pains for a swiftly rising movement of Web publishing. It would also restore Google to the status of a neutral party in the midst of a bitter fight between backers of RSS and Atom, who have been divided since last summer when critics of RSS banded together to create the alternative format. Since then, many blog sites and individuals have rallied behind Atom.

Read the entire article at CNET News.com

Looking for some kewl Blogger templates? Take a look at Blogger Templates, a blog for what else ... blogger templates. Here you can find original skins to personalize your own weblog with.

Excerpt from a very nice article Nigritude Ultramarine: What We Will Learn by Mark Daoust of Site-Reference. (I apologize to Mark in advance for plagerizing part of his article)

Recently DarkBlue.com initiated a competition to see who could rank #1 for the keyword nigritude ultramarine. The idea of the competition is to see what works and what does not work in search engine optimization of websites. To aid in creating useful findings, the competition has two winners. The first winner will be announced in early June and the second winner will be announced in July. The idea is to see who can get to the #1 position in a short amount of time as well as to see who can optimize the best for the long term.

But what will we really learn from Nigritude Ultramarine? Will there be a great epiphany among SEO experts which show us how to obtain that coveted #1 ranking with Google?

Although the nigritude ultramarine competition is good in theory, it has inherent flaws. Unfortunately these flaws are big enough to discredit any findings from the entire competition.

Spam is the Answer?

I must admit that when this contest first started, I thought it would be interesting and we may learn a lot from it. How wrong could I ever be?

We are witnessing children in the Wiki Sandboxes, and second-rate hacks lifting pages from the Google Cache and claiming them as their own -- and if that was not enough, the thief had the nerve to tell his victims to use the NOARCHIVE robot directive to prevent it from happening.

Now there is a late-comer to the game, a blogger of no SEO training or background who amassed something short of a miracle in the last hours of the contest and is now at the top of the pack. All of this was done in the blink of an eye for he is very popular on the blog scene and he may remain there for the duration.

He is already getting the jeers from the spammers currently in the top of the pack in his comment boxes, basicly telling him that he is not an expert and he using the influence of his blog mates to unfair advantage. Talk about poor sports, eh? What is good for the goose is good for the gander in my book, and this guy has every right to ride the Ultramarine tide. If I remember the rules right ... there are no rules. At least he has a pleasant site to look at when you actually visit it, and there is something worth reading rather than Nigritude Ultramarine written a hundred times across your pages.

Good luck Anil !!!

And cheers to Tom Coates:

I just thought I should add that I think Anil should post some other links through to the other articles about this SEO stuff - particularly the ones that told us to be aware of the liklihood of an influx of wiki spam links because of this contest. I think once you have this floor, it's worth using it to educate SEO people about the damage they have on the web community at large.

Worried about the ads Google serves into its Gmail email service? That could be the least of your problems.

Yes, you could find a competitor's ad right next to your customer's order confirmation, your company email newsletter or a solo ad mailing.

But, Gmail also currently blocks all of your ads and images on download. Senders may not be able to track opens and click rates properly. And, Gmail could deliver a body blow to viral marketing, not to mention disappearing permission mailers' messages without a trace in the spam folder.

Google's free, Web-based Gmail service is still in beta testing right now, with an estimated few thousand users; so, its effect right now on your email operation should be minimal. However, if it launches essentially as-is within a few months, it will be one bulk-email-unfriendly service.

Read the MarketingSherpa article By EmailSherpa Editor Janet Roberts quickly, it is on a time limit.

Useful links related to this story are Screenshots of how email newsletters from the Washington Post, MarketingSherpa, FlowGo, and MarketingVOX appear in Gmail. The Gmail and Privacy FAQ. And another MarketingSherpa article, Text-Only Email Design Pitfalls & Guidelines: More Critical Than Ever.

Chami.com, the makers of Html-Kit, has an online JPEG compressor. JPEG compression can help you to make your pages load faster by reducing the size of your JPEG files. The online tool will display multiple versions of a given image compressed at different levels for you to pick the smallest image at the best possible image quality you require.

Labels: repub

MarketingSherpa announced their Readers' Choice Best Blog Awards for 2004. The nominees were whittled down from a list of nominees provided by over 179,000 of MarketingSherpa's readers by 826 judges who carefully evaluated 29 blogs to choose from.

Best individual's blog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
Steve Hall's Adrants

Best group weblog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
Ad-rag.com's AdLand

Best PR-topic blog
Colin McKay's CanuckFlack

Best b-to-b marketing-topic blog
Dana VanDen Heuvel's Dana's Blog

Best blog on small business marketing
John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing

Best blog on online marketing
Andy Beals' Search Engine Lowdown

Top readers' choice write-in vote
Kevin Dugan's Strategic Public Relations

I can see that I only have one of these in my news reader, which I might have to correct now.

It is important to note that they did not win an Apple iPod or some fancy flat screen gizmo ... these are people dedicated to their work for the love of it. So a hardy Congratulations to all the winners of 2004!

In a John Battelle Searchblog entry today, some interesting notes on Bill Gates and the future of Search. Gates, the featured speaker at a dinner mentioned that MSFT will clean up their act in regards to search practices, but he seemed to hint things would go a bit further than that.

"They (Google) have a way of formatting things that has had some appeal," Gates said. "It will be matched."

"Web search is a incredible business," he continued. "(But) If you want to find things that are local...it's terrible today. If you want to find things that are of particular interest to you, it is quite terrible today."

John added, (that) Gates blamed search's shortcomings on its keyword-based approach, and argued that natural language and contextual semantic approaches will be the next leap forward.

Good Keywords is a free Windows software for finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages. Knowing the right keywords to target is very important because your site should provide what people are searching for.

In this software there are no nag screens, no registrations, no advertisements and no payments. They don't ask for your email address.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch said, "I'm not easily impressed with promotion software, but this one's a keeper."

Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like the Overture Search Suggestion Tool, Search Engines Like Lycos, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Please note that you can manually do most of the tasks performed by Good Keywords. However using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward.

You can also use Good Keywords as a meta tag creation tool. Keep adding the keywords you need into the Keyword Pad available within the software. Once you are done, a simple click will get you the required keyword meta tag... ready to be pasted into your HTML file.

Good Keywords includes other tools

Good Keywords is not limited to keyword tools alone. In addition it also includes a site popularity meter and a link popularity meter.

The site popularity meter allows you to measure your success by comparing your traffic with that of your competitors.

The link popularity meter is for checking how many sites link to you. The results are obtained from search engines like Altavista, Lycos, MSN and Google.

Labels: repub

A talented programmer by the name of Nick Stallman has came up with a hack to the MozDev Googlebar that extends the functionality of the tool to show Google PageRank. The Googlebar PR hack will work for Netscape 7 and Mozilla browsers on both a PC and -- yes, the Macintosh platforms too.

During the editting of this post, I was checking my links and finding that this site is unreachable. Oh boy. It appears that possibly Nick's site may be over it's quota on bandwidth maybe? I would not rule that out, for t