Review Me Joins Paid Blog Posts

Okay here is a new blog review site where bloggers can make money reviewing various products - including this one (I am getting paid to write this - more than my usual posts make me!!!).

The site allows advertisers to buy reviews - with prices set by traffic and page rank. An advertiser comes in an offers X dollars and then lists which blogs they would like to review them - obviously a sliding scale and people agreeing or denying to review impacts how many people get the chance to make money from any offer.

Since these become permanent links it seems a reasonable exchange of cash for impact.

I spoke with one of the guys involved and it seems like they are going to make a real go of this business model...

I will tell you how it works out when I get my first payment. Hey read up guys I really want to give them their $20 worth... which should be up to the 200 words minimum.

Live Search Has Major Hack

Seems you can dump your competitors out of the MSN search results. According to this blog entry.

Hopefully someone gets this fixed soon... I don't have the time or the desire but I am sure there are a load of people trying this out right now.

Microsoft Playing Viral Games With Search

Ms Dewey - the fun, viral experiment Microsoft is playing with its search engine is proving to have some legs - even if you don't see the ones of the woman fronting this Flash driven interface.

She has generated 2.8 million search queries in 9 days, over 300,000 a day and has been linked to by over 2,700 blogs - add another here!

What is interesting about this test is there was no push of the info through the people at Microsoft - the people I work with there heard about it from me. This was a completely viral test and one I think has been sucessful.

Though I was asked by a few women where was Mr Dewey!!!

The Villagers Are Coming For The Search Monsters

I really get annoyed by certain action groups who profess to be watching out for us - but in reality are forcing through their own agendas. An article from Adotas gives the details of two such groups trying to regulate online advertising.

The FTC is being asked by "consumer action groups" - CDD, the Center for Digital Democracy (I love how many controling groups use democracy in their name) and US PIRG, the US Public Interest Research Group - to monitor and control online advertising.

While I tyhink we may need some general standards I don't think we have to be too concerned about privacy issues as most people can see who the 'pretenders' are and while a handful of unsavy users may be drawn in - the companies do not last long when they cannot deliver any substantial audience.

The market place can police itself and has done so for quite some time. Making laws is a scary way of doing business.

Great Color Grading For SEO From Yahoo

Great find by the guys over at ThreadWatch.org, Yahoo!'s Tim Converse using a little comedy to color grade the various SEO activities.

The blog post uses the SNL parady of Homeland Security color codes and gives new meaning to Black Hat and White Hat.

I am posting it in full on the off chance Tim is made to pull his down... if theree is a problem just let me know and I will drop it. His can be found here.

Here's my attempt to give SEO's more than just two or three colors.

Background: A naive (non-SEO) webmaster or content producer simply makes a site, without a thought or a care to the world of search engines. Or if there's a thought it's a thought of hopeful trust: if I make a useful interesting site on topic X, then the search engine will figure that out and deliver users who care about X to my site. SEOs and SEO-aware content creators construct sites instead with an eye to how search engines work, and make content that is designed to be retrieved. The white-hat/black-hat continuum is about the extent to which SEOs are working with search engines or against them. Black-hat SEOs are also known as search-engine spammers.

Dark inky black: The SEO's (or in this case the spammer's) interests are totally divergent from both the engines and the users - the SEO wants to trick the search engine into handing over users who are ripe to be tricked themselves into a situation of malicious harm. For example, the SEO might name his domain just one typo-character away from a famous domain name, then install spyware on the computer of any user careless enough to visit, or attempt to impersonate a major portal's login page to collect logins and passwords.

Charcoal: The SEO tries to trick the engine into showing the user something totally unrelated to the query, and possibly offensive, but doesn't actually commit any illegal or fraudulent acts within five seconds of the first user click. Example: a (heinous) pornspammer who stuffs the page with irrelevant non-porn keywords targeting innocent queries, maybe via invisible text. 99.9% of searchers will be searching for something else and will be put off; 0.1% will be searching for something else, but will, um, flexibly and opportunistically reorient their interests.

Dark gray: The SEO collects (aka steals) random text from other sites, and uses it to create thousands (or millions) of pages targeting particular queries. The pages have nothing original of value, but do have ads.

Slate gray: The SEO creates thousands (or millions of pages), all of which point (by linkage, or framing, or redirection) to the same content, which might actually be interesting to the searcher.

Gray: The SEO reads the guidelines of search engines, and tries to juice up their sites just enough to fly under the radar on all dimensions - artificial linkfarms that remain small, automatic content duplication that is arguably not too abusive, etc. The goal is to get enough referral traffic as possible, without too much reference to whether it is interested traffic.

Light gray: The SEO creates "original" content in bulk the old-fashioned way, thinking first of all of search engine rules, secondly of duplicate detection algorithms, and lastly of whether the text makes sense to human beings and is something anyone would ever want to read. Then the SEO experiments with all the parameters (keyword density, internal linkage) trying to move up for the queries of interest.

Off-white: The SEO ensures crawlability of the site, restructures it if necessary for size of pages and internal linkage, and then injects terms to specifically target the important keywords and queries. He doesn't create linkfarms, but friends and allies are importuned to link with specific text and phrases.

White: The SEO starts (if lucky) with a site full of content you can't find anywhere else, and that answers a need that searchers actually have. Then the SEO makes sure the site is crawlable, and that titles and internal links make sense and are descriptive. Then the SEO thinks hard about the queries that really should pull up this content, and tries to discover if the right terms are present. Then (the hard, artful part), he or she rewrites content with a dual consciousness of the infovorous human reader and the termnivorous spider, making sure that the most important terms and phrases for the spider are present (in all their forms) and forefronted for the spider, without degrading the quality for the reader.

Luminescent pearly white: This would be a case where the SEO designs a site to show up for relevant queries and not to show up for irrelevant queries. Do luminescent SEOs exist? Well, Jon Udell is one anyway.

MSN Analytics Coming Soon

It has been in the works for a while now but it seems they are getting closer. Here is some recent info:

Microsoft recently acquired DeepMetrix to provide site traffic measurement and analysis to adCenter customers.
Planning integration into adCenter during the second ½ of FY07.
DeepMetrix is not currently accepting new accounts at this time.
Reporting to include page views, referrals, conversions, paid search ROI, advanced charts, site overlays, path reporting and more.
Plan is to offer an analytics product to all adCenter customers at no additional cost.

And another from yesterday:
First, the adCenter Blog has moved to Microsoft Live Spaces, so please update your favorites and blogrolls. The new URL is http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/.

Live Spaces has more flexibility, nicer layouts, and we think it’s just, well, better! What do you think? Tell us at blogadcr@microsoft.com.

Secondly, the Microsoft adCenter Labs team is launching some new and updated demos:

Search Funnel 1.5: This demo will be updated with over 4 million keywords added to the database.

Keyword Forecast: This new demo will display a search term’s impression count forecast and demographic predictions in any format: flash, picture or text.

Check out these demos (they’ll be live tomorrow afternoon!) as well as others, including Forecasting Search Volume Seasonality and Keyword Mutation Detection, on the demo page.

Finally, today we launched two new forums on Microsoft Communities: one for adCenter discussion and one for adCenter Labs discussion. These forums will provide you the opportunity to ask questions directly of the adCenter and adCenter Labs teams and get answers right from the source. You’ll also be able to discuss adCenter and adCenter labs with other customers and learn more about new and existing features.

We know it’s a lot to digest (especially if you already have a belly full of candy!) so please feel free to ask any questions/share feedback with us at blogadcr@microsoft.com.

CIA Recruits Google

Seems some former CIA higher up let slip that Google was working with the CIA. A Threadwatch article by KidMercury gives some good links and overview.

Nothing like a good conspiracy theory. I would have thought it much more interesting if Sergei was a former Russian spy who was planted here to bring about the fall of capitalism....