New Marketing

Microsoft announced today that it is spending $6 billion to acquire online advertising company aQuantive Inc.  This is surely a response to Google’s purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick for a little over $3 billion in April.

Google and Microsoft have been rubbing elbows on the internet more frequently.  Both companies run similar services, including pay-per-click advertising, free online email, and office software.

Furthermore, Microsoft may well see Google as a threat to their ability to control user experience, since Google’s offerings are cross-platform and operating system independent.  For example, Google’s spreadsheets, word processors, and other office programs can be accessed online from any computer.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer mentioned as part of his announcement of this merger that more and more software services were turning to internet hosted platforms.  Microsoft is going to have to ape Google, a company that was once insignificant in comparison, and make the transition to online services if they want to stay competitive in the future.

Many webmasters fear that having content duplicated in different locations on the internet will cause their website to receive a penalty, or even be blacklisted from Google.  Duplicate content can have legitimate reasons – for example, offering a separate version of a page that is formatted for easy printing – or it can happen when another site strips your content and publishes it themselves.

The good news is that there is no Google penalty for duplicate content.  However, Google does try to prevent the exact same content from appearing over and over again in its search results.  After all, it doesn’t do the user much good to show 20 results that lead to nothing but the exact same article.  Therefore, Google spiders will attempt to find the most relevant copy to index.

For that reason, it’s a good idea to help Google’s spiders find the exact pages that you’d like to index.  You can do this by using 301 redirects instead of duplicating your website pages, by judiciously using the robots.Txt file to block spiders from the copied pages you don’t want indexed, and by using a consistent linking theme.  For example, instead of linking to both http://www.Yoursite.Com and http://www.Yoursite.Com/index.Html, pick one and stick to it.

Other than that, don’t worry too much about duplicate content, but rather on creating the best and most informative website for your visitors.

A balance between quality articles and keyword rich contents is a must for all sites. Webmasters must see to it no contents contributed by the users will cause any negative effect on the pages optimized contents. This includes blogs, forums, wiki and other related sites where primary source of contents are those contributed by users. The feedbacks or comments the users posts, the bigger is the possible that the pages keywords will go astray unless the posts contain the enough keywords to compensate for the added contents. Several ways can be done in order to ensure that a page’s keywords are protected from accidental abuse. Dominate the first part of your page with keyword rich contents Since major keywords are best placed at the beginning of the page, as much as possible, posted articles must be kept at an acceptable minimum length. Length must not be less than 150 to 200 words depending on the amount of anticipated responses from the users. This will ensure that the first part of the page is occupied by the article you wrote containing the proper keyword density you are targeting. Encourage friends with good knowledge in SEO post the first replies If you have friends who are knowledgeable both on the subject matter of your articles and in SEO, let them post their comments first before other users do. Since usual comments from users are just questions and passing comments, it is most beneficial to get a more meaningful and keyword-safe responses from someone who knows how to protect your contents. Perhaps an additional to what you have already discussed or an elaboration of a major point in your post will do. This way, discussions flow naturally without sacrificing your SEO efforts. Reply to comments with keywords Do answer comments with phrases or sentences like “Yes, that will do.” or “I’m sleepy now. Let’s talk about this tomorrow.” if your topic is about revolutionary vacuum cleaners. Those words will be irrelevant to search engines and will only add trash to your page. Instead of saying so, you can answer with this, “Yes, you can use C3PO vacuum cleaners on your pet’s purr” or “I will be answering your questions on C3PO vacuum cleaners tomorrow.”

Wikipedia is an open and free online dictionary under the GNU Free Documentation License. It has an extensive collection of articles on almost all topics thinkable to man. It is also one of the most linkbacked sites in world, in fact, the Wikipedia English section alone has a Page Rank of 9 under Google standards. Since anyone can edit the contents of its pages, many webmasters seek an opportunity to cut a little piece from its ranking by posting their links into related Wikipedia pages. As a common SEO rule, if a high ranked page links to your site, the higher your site’s rank becomes.

This is not true with Wikipedia.

While Wikipedia allows almost all types of contents to be posted on their pages including outbound links to another site, the target’s benefit would be close to nothing. This is because Wikipedia uses a special “nofollow” tag on all user-defined links. The “nofollow“ tag within links prevent search engines, particularly Google, from crawling it and counting the link as a valid linkout.

Recent controversy, however, came up when several links appeared on Wikipedia bearing no “nofollow” attributes pointing to pro-profit sites which gives great suspicion to everyone whether Wikipedia gives equal regard to all contributors in terms of link building and rank sharing. But still, Wikipedia’s policy on outbound links apply, no sharing for those who can’t afford their high price of link placement.