Tom Pitts Dot Org

Google and Yahoo search pages now often include maps and local business information into their results. Search engines often act as yellow pages for people so verifying your local contact information should help customers find and contact you.

Many businesses are already in Google and Yahoo because they take information from Yellow Pages, other telecom databases and directories. But, verification allows you to add some more information and be ready to edit this information if it ever changes.

You can verify your local addresses and business information with both companies by creating accounts, inputting your information and verifying via a phone call or snail mail.

Google Local Business Center – Help page

Yahoo Local Listings

It’s a good idea to include targeted words in your entry, so that more people can find your listing if they search for generics.

Other places you can get free local listings include:

CitySearch.com – MSN partners with Citysearch for local search information, and CitySearch has a free basic listing.

AskCity – Ask.com’s map/local search, if your company is now showing up you have to e-mail their customer service to get added.

YellowPages.com – Large online local directory site that also includes city guides and advertising solutions. Basic listings are free.

Local.com – Online yellow pages and search engine that offers a free listing for businesses.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is considered a very controversial piece of legislation. While I do not personally support some of the law, I have taken advantage of sending DMCA takedown notices when one of my other blogs had posts lifted verbatim and republished without my permission.

When someone steals content and publishes on it on a free publishing system such as Google’s blogger, you can contact the hosting company to have them remove the infringing materials.

Here is a sample DMCA takedown notice I put together by seeing some other examples on the web.

Subject: DMCA/Copyright Infringement Notice

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to you as an agent of your company or website sole owner of copyright to articles written on your website.

A website hosted by your company on publishing system having the host name “hostname“ and the IP address , infringes upon our exclusive rights in a number of copyrighted works. The copyrighted work at issue is the text/video/audio/etc that appears where you publish and has been published without authorization at the URL and IP address indicated.

url of offending site

The above referenced URLs provide, without authorization, partial text of copyrighted works produced and owned by . Below, please find details regarding the infringing URL, and original URL for each of these copyrighted works.

offending URL
Owner’s (Our) URL: your URL
(repeat..)

All of the listed infringements were observed between timestamp and timestamp

Please remove the referenced material from your service at once, and take other appropriate action against the account holder to prevent future infringement.

Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this letter serves as actual notice of infringement in the event of legal proceedings. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Please contact me promptly to confirm the action you have taken.

Regards,
your details

If you are sending your DMCA notice to Blogger, as I did, Google makes you fax your notice instead of using e-mail. I’m not sure why this is as Yahoo, MS and others accept e-mailed DMCA takedown notices.

This LCD I bought in December has improved my quality of life probably more than any other purchase I’ve made in recent memory. I have to use an old CRT sometimes at one of my job sites, and it is driving me mad.

You can check out the specs here.

I know I don’t post enough, but I try to have unique posts. I was holding off on this to better take advantage of it myself, but since SEOmoz is posting about Pligg sites, I better post this now before my content is less than unique.

Everyone knows the use of the social bookmarking sites to drive traffic, but I also think they are good because many of them give out direct links that are indexed by the search engines. Some of the smaller bookmarking sites only give out redirect links, but it looks like almost none of them are using link condoms, and many give out direct links.

In the spirit of the holidays here is my list English-language social bookmarking sites that give out direct links. I omitted the bigger known sites and ones with primarily adult related content.

I grouped them by my quick notes about their niche, but they are basically in random order.

http://www.apbnews.com/ Crime
http://crimene.ws/ Crime and Law Enforcement

http://www.digstock.com/ Stocks, Investing
http://www.business-planet.net/ Business news
http://news.fatpitchfinancials.com/ Investing and Finance
http://www.commercebucket.com/ Economics, Retail, Commerce
http://www.valueinvestingnews.com/ Investing, Markets, Stocks
http://www.2centsnews.com/ Markets, Economics
http://www.marketpicks.net/ Stock and Market News
http://www.bizzbites.com/ Business, Management

http://www.braindigg.com/ Psychology, Neurology, Cognitive Science
http://www.hitsmit.com/ Health care, technology
http://www.medical-articles.net/ Medical
http://paramedic.org.uk/ Paramedics, EMS, Health Care, UK

http://www.podolicious.com/ Podcasts
http://pixelgroovy.com/ Tutorials, Graphics, Development
http://www.thelitlist.com/ Online Fiction
http://bad.webpagesthatsuck.com/ Badly Designed Webpages

http://www.barksbookmarks.com/engine/ Culture, Music, Art (Videos and photos)
http://shakk.us/ General Videos
http://mootion.com/ Videos
http://www.thatschillin.com/ Videos, Entertainment Gen Interest
http://www.coolfunnycandy.com/ Cool, Funny or (eye)Candy
http://www.meme-stream.com/ General, Videos

http://riggd.com/ Politics
http://politipop.com/ Political News
http://www.indianaseesee.com/ Local Indiana News, U.S. Politics

http://www.motorpulse.com/ Cars
http://www.autospies.com/ Auto Shows, Cars

http://www.ravemyspace.com/ MySpace, Profile Pages, Music
http://wink.com/ Profile Pages, Myspace
http://www.nooz.com/ General, Myspace?

http://www.afgnews.com/ Afghanistan, Current Events, General
http://www.news2.ca/ Canadians, General
http://www.news.articlesphere.com/ General
http://www.blogreporter.biz/ General
http://wobblog.com/ General
http://www.indianbytes.com/ India, Technology, General
http://www.spymy.com/ South East Asia General
http://kick.ie/ Irish, Gen interest
http://www.qoolsqool.com/ Education General
http://hubpages.com/ Long Informative Articles
http://www.topkix.com/ General
http://www.buzzjapan.com/ Japan, General
http://www.shoutwire.com/ General
http://www.inboxnews.com/ General News
http://www.clicktator.com/ General
http://www.bythemasses.com/ New York City, General
http://www.blogmemes.net/ General
http://muti.co.za/ General
http://www.humsurfer.com/ Indian General
http://www.italknews.com/ General
http://www.livelocker.com/ General
http://www.getgui.com/ General
http://www.yunar.com/ General
http://www.newsgarbage.com/ General
http://www.contentpop.com/ General
http://www.scooop.net/ General
http://forumsofindia.com/articles/ General
http://quadriot.com/ College General (need a .edu email to join)
http://popcurrent.com/ Online Media, Entertainment

http://www.binarylaw.com/ Technology Law
http://dotnetkicks.com/ .NET, ASP, MS
http://www.betamarker.com/ Software releases
http://wetogether.info/ Gadgets, Tech
http://www.bitchabouttech.com/bitchabouttech/ Technology
http://forumfads.com/ Web Forums, Tech
http://www.techtagg.com/ Tech
http://sharepointkicks.com/ Microsoft Sharepoint
http://www.appslist.com/ Linux, Mac, Windows, Software
http://www.mobilitybeat.com/ Phones, PDA, Mobile, Gadget

http://hahahollywood.com/ Celebrities, Gossip
http://hollywoodlowdown.com/ Celebrities, Gossip
http://www.hypediss.com/ Trends, Fashion, General
http://www.bestweekever.tv/ble/ Celebrity, Gossip
http://www.culturepopp.com/ Celebrity Gossip
http://www.scoopity.com/ Hollywood, Fashion
http://thelosthub.com/ The TV Show Lost

http://mp3rama.com/ Digital Music, mp3s
http://news.thetrc.net/ Music, Bands
http://www.theplugg.com/ Entertainment, Music
http://www.soundtrakk.com/ Music
http://undistortion.com/ Music stories and reviews
http://britney.starfrosch.ch/ Music

http://cruisinaltitude.com/news/ Aviation
http://www.hugg.com/ Green, Environmental
http://www.hrsalad.com/ Human Resources, Workplace
http://www.newvoyagenews.com/ Space Tourism
http://www.theadreview.com/ TV / Video Ads
http://www.voteanime.com/ Anime
http://www.winelifetoday.com/ Wine Snobs

http://www.gamelemons.com/squeeze/ Video Games
http://www.pixelmo.com/ Video Games
http://www.leetdaily.com/ Video Games
http://www.gamerbytes.com/ Video Games
http://www.strobe.org/ MMORPGs
http://devbump.com/ Video Game Development, Mods

http://www.sustaind.org/ LDS Religion
http://www.inbreaking.com/ Christianity, Missionaries, Church

http://battellemedia.com/searchmob/ Search
http://www.plugim.com/ SEO, SEM, Web
http://searchenginepress.com/ SEO, SEM, Search
http://www.wrigg.net/ Web Content, Articles
http://www.marktd.com/ Marketing, Advertising
http://adveracio.us/ Advertising
http://www.kablogs.com/ Blogging, Blogosphere
http://www.ordinarii.com/ Advertising, Search Marketing

http://sportsflip.com/ Sports
http://www.wedigsports.com/ Sports
http://www.thumbsupfootball.co.uk/ Football / Soccer
http://run.trihound.com/ Triathlons

Now I am not suggesting you spam these sites (some already have been in my cursory glance), but rather adopt a site if they are in your niche and start building their community… with your posts of course.

Deep links are links to internal pages on a site rather than the index page for a site. The index pages for websites generally acts as hubs and receive most of the inbound links from sites especially directories.

Smaller businesses often only have backlinks to their domain root, and have no deep links to internal pages. Blogs, news and content sites often have many deep links referencing interesting content from other blogs and websites.

We will use Yahoo and MSN Search to compute the deep link percentage in this example, because Google does not support the correct queries.

In this example I compute slashdot.org’s deep link percentage. We ignore internal links.

[link:http://slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] Yahoo
“about 1,910,000” results.

[linkdomain:slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] Yahoo
“about 3,980,000” results

Deep Link Percentage using Yahoo: 52.01%

[link:http://slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] MSN
1,741,451 results

[linkdomain:slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] MSN
2,571,492 results

Percentage of Deep Links using MSN: 32.28%

Now we will use a smaller site, Threadwatch.org.

[linkdomain:threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] Yahoo
about 124,000

[link:http://www.threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] Yahoo
about 90,900

Yahoo Deep Link Percentage 26.69%

[linkdomain:threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] MSN
120,891

[link:http://www.threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] MSN
94,387

MSN Deep Link Percentage 21.92%

Not quite sure how long this has been happening but today is the first time I have ever seen it. As I was searching today I noticed quite a bit of Google Base results finding their way onto search results pages. Have a look yourself.

[house for sale] Google Search
[apartment for rent] Google Search
[villa rental] Google Search

Marketers definitely have to take a look closely at Google Base now and start leveraging the service.

When building links for various sites, I often find myself hand-typing and submitting the same contact information to many different directories and comment forms. When you are serious about getting links, this repetitive action gets tiresome.

Now you can get rid of your typing with the InFormEnter Firefox extension. The extension adds a small clickable icon next to every input field in a web form. When the icon is clicked, you can select pre-configured text to be inserted. You can configure it to display the most frequently used information such as your name, email, address, keywords, url, etc.

I generally store a varations of link anchor text and site descriptions, and sometimes edit them a little so each directory entry I submit is unique.

InFormEnter is not a true password manager such as RoboForm, but it is a free Mozilla Firefox extension, and I use it.

Do private domains hurt your ability to rank in search engines? This is a question that I have not seen asked, but I think it deserves consideration. Search engines use many factors to determine whether to trust a website and the links to a website, and I believe whether or not a domain is registered privately contributes to these factors.

1and1 the popular web host and domain registrar has been offering private registrations with their $5.99 domains for quite a while and I have been taking them up on the offer with a few of my domains. In reality domain names are not very private, but the registrations force someone need to a reason to discover the domain owner. Spammers of every fashion have an obvious reason to use private domain registrations.

Because of the number of domains registered with the same data and the percentage of domains that are spam with that registration data, could all private domains be taking a hit in the rankings?

We know that Google has started using a number of domain factors including the length of domain registration, nameserver, and whois data as factors in their algorithm.

Search engines use heuristic pre-processing of links to adjust the recommendation values for each link. This reduces the weight of internal links, reciprocal links, site wide links, and links which are likely to be advertisements or otherwise nepotistic.

At this point the search engine compares the domain name, IP address, dns server and other whois data of the pages linking and being linked, which helps determine if they have a relationship. While thousands of unrelated websites are often hosted on the same machine or use the same nameservers, whois data is particularly indicative of a relationship because of the uniqueness of legitimate mailing addresses.

Two unrelated pages on websites of private domains could end up with very similar whois data and the same registrant mailing address.

This report about the ad revenue of different political sites running BlogAds is an interesting read. The study did not address ad placement, just the ad count, and it found that most of the weblogs would make more money if they placed additional ads on their site. Political blogs have stayed cutting edge and are good examples of what is possible with other types of weblogs. I have noticed certain political blogs are now using a 3 column layout with the highlighted center column being an ad column.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

1. Traffic Is King. Page views are the strongest of the three predictors tested: it explains at least twice the variation in ad revenue that either the number of inbound linking sites, the number ads, or the political orientation do. Taken together, page views, the number of ads, and political orientation explain over 80% of the variation in the ad revenue, a very substantial amount. This indicates that the statistical model predicts ad revenue with a high degree of accuracy. Doubling the weekly page views results in a 50% increase in ad revenues.

1. Space Matters, Even in Cyberspace.Holding page views constant, the average effect of adding one more ad is a 20% decrease in price and a 40% increase in revenue. Interestingly, the number of ads on most blogs is well below the number where returns to revenues become negative, i.e. the point where

increasing the number of ads results in less, rather than more, revenue.
2. Partisanship Pays, But Unequally. When controlling for both the number of weekly page views and the number of ads, politically-oriented blogs generate no higher ad revenue and command no higher ad prices than other blogs. However, revenues from ads on left-of-center (LOC) blogs are 40% higher than average while their right-of-center (ROC) counterparts’ revenues are 23% less. There are notable exceptions to this general trend, however. While LOC blogs dominate at both the lower (below 100,000) and the upper (above 1 million) ends of the weekly page views continuum, ROC blogs earn much more in the middle territory.

One of my current clients promotes vacation rentals, so I have become quite familiar with the online travel industry. As the web has evolved, the travel industry has quickly adapted to the changing technology. The use of comparison shopping when booking hotels and flights is now widespread. Vacation rentals in many ways are unique because they are often owned by private individuals, their features, amenities and services are often unique, and their guests may be travelers from all over the world. By some accounts vacation rentals represent as much as a $30 billion market.

To accommodate the need for travelers to find deluxe private accommodation, paid listing web directories have become increasingly popular. Many luxury vacation rentals have their own domains and sites, but because the sites are usually just for one home and not very large, the have difficulty competing for popular travel related search phrases.

WVR Group headquartered in Austin, Texas has recently acquired five of the world’s leading vacation rental listing companies:

• A1Vacations.com (VA)
• CyberRentals.com (VT)
• GreatRentals.com (MI/FL)
• Holiday-Rentals.co.uk (UK)

• Rent101.com (NY)

WVR Group raised $50 million dollars and the acquired companies already have 50,000+ properties listings together.

Rent101.com has announced, after being purchased, a change in their web service. Instead of selling subscriptions for listings, listing vacation rentals will require no up front costs, but each inquiry from a traveler will have a cost. The property advertiser will pay for each interested traveler who contacts them through the site.

WVR’s new pay-for-performance website for vacation homes is TripHomes.com. It will be interesting to see their service evolve, considering their vacation listings are stored in multiple systems each with their own domain and display code. Will all of the listings end up on TripHomes?

Other players in the vacation rental market include, Rentalo, which lets travelers make custom offers on properties, Ebay Travel which uses auction methods, and other big players such as Yahoo Travel which if you look hard enough, has a vacation rental section.