Informational Sites Archives

Blogger Mathew Ingram reports that the Associated Press has gone after a news blog for infringing upon copyrights. In summary, the AP has gone after a blog that posts short excerpts pointing to original AP articles, claiming that "fair use" does not permit this practice.

What's the rationale? Some people think that they're not willing to let go of old practices.

The AP is pissed that their antiquated business model no longer exists. The AP is behaving more and more like a bully

Others believe that the AP is being fair but people are simply not abiding by their policies. In an AP statement, they say:

We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.

Not many people buy it, though. One forum member says that he'll stop quoting AP stories and quote a competitor (or a source that quotes the AP). I guess that most feel that AP really didn't do its due diligence in this matter.

More discussion on this topic is written on the SEOmoz blog and in The Lisa's wonderful summary. Even more discussion is on Techmeme.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

What began as a thread at WebmasterWorld on Google AdSense turned out to be applicable to all different areas of content creation.

The question posed is as follows:

The best AdSense sites, and those that usually make best money, are those that rely on user created content. But still there are many successful AdSense web sites whose content is written entirely by their creators.

For those who are creating content rich web sites, how many words per day in average can you produce?

This is a great question. I start to think about Jennifer Laycock, since I asked her in San Jose about how she's writing so much in so little time. People do exceed expectations, after all.

Food for thought: write a bit a day. The more you write, the better you get.

Great writers both highbrow (Graham Greene) and lowbrow (Stephen King) recommend a constant production rate of at least 1000 words a day. Writing is a bit like sport, in that (a) it requires fitness obtained through daily practice, and (b) the more you do, the better you get.

It seems that most content providers will write between 500-2000 words a day from the discussion.

But then there are others who take a creative spin:

I make pictures

picture = 1,000 words

3,000

(That made me smile too.)

Some people who don't write on a daily basis will still try to pump out new content ever few days which comes out much less than 500 words per day. Nothing wrong with that!

I wonder how many words I write per day. Oh, and Barry too. :)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

While some people think that governmental websites have higher authority than a .com or other TLD, the debate is still ongoing. This question, now, is whether .gov sites should automatically be indexed in Google, of if they should wait until the trust is passed to the domain. A Cre8asite Forums thread points to a Google Groups thread about why a particular .gov site, which has been submitted to Google, has not yet been indexed.

In the Google Groups thread, the .gov webmaster is having a tough time understanding the Google policies about how the number and quality of inbound links helps sites get discovered.

For a small state gov't. program site directed at a small percentage of the population with few inbound links currently, that can be a problem. So, people who need to find this program must wait for "good" links? Functionality dictates service to citizens?

JohnMu puts it in perspective for the webmaster. It does need numerous quality links so that Google (and its users) understand its importance.

If the program is good, it will get links and then it will get indexed. If it does not get links, chances are nobody is interested in finding it either :-)

Over at Cre8asite Forums, the discussion continues. Moderator joedolson believes that giving preference could mean spam, spam, and more spam.

If .gov sites could also be given free (and foolproof) security checks to verify against hacking and spamming, sure - give 'em preference. Otherwise, I think you're just opening up for problems.

Similarly, moderator EGOL believes that everyone needs to earn their rankings and that having a .gov TLD does not automatically mean that they deserve preferential treatment by the search engines:

I spent one of my careers as a manager at a government agency... if they want visibility they need to earn it just like anyone else. If they want newspaper or TV or radio exposure they figure it out and pay the freight... why should the web be any different?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Google Groups.

A Threadwatch thread points to an Australian Search Marketing website that is seemingly indexing content from many SEO/SEM informational websites.

Todd Mintz, who discovered this, says that this site is creating confusion as Google is indexing the content as if it's located on this website rather than the original sources (Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, etc.):

But, this isn't a passive directory that's passing high PR links to us...they are allowing my / our stories to be indexed in Google as being on their website (my story in question was viewed over 400 times).

I find it a bit curious that a government agency has created a splog-like database directory with little value and no original content. I find it a bit offensive that they are indexing my / our content as theirs. Some of the links redirect automatically to the proper page and some of the links take you to the government site from which you have to click thru to the original story.

What do you suggest should be done?

Forum discussion at Threadwatch.

At Cre8asite Forums, moderator Barry Welford shares a pretty cool domain popularity tool with us. I wasn't able to get it to produce data yesterday, but today I tried again and it worked rather nicely. I have included a screenshot below:

Be patient when running this tool. It processes data for awhile (and you'll see the Loading screen when it does). If you come up emptyhanded as I did when I first ran the tool, try again later.

This is a pretty good backlink checking tool for sure, as member earlpearl says:

I love tools like this. bls are so important and its tough to really get a handle on the bls and what you really have.

I'd love to see a tool that differentiates between static and dynamic urls.

Scraping for bls takes a lot of time. This one was relatively quick.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

In a Cre8asite Forums post, a user asks an important question for a link building campaign: how do you get links from .edu sites? As you know, .edu sites have a higher inherent trust and as such can help boost your rankings if you can get that coveted link.

A lot of good ideas were thrown out by members and moderators, including:

• "One of the easiest ways is to create content that fills an informational void that an edu site might be interested in linking to." (Bill Slawski, administrator)
• "Another way is to search for student blogs and see if you can connect with one." (yannis, member)
• "If you see a competititor with .edu links go to those .edu pages and see what they are linking to." (EGOL, administrator)

These are good tips, and we've already written a bit about getting .edu links in the past but I'm sure you have more tips. If so, please contribute to the Cre8asite Forums post.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks how can one prevent scraping of his site's content by a non-authorized spider, while not hurting his rankings in search engines?

This is a serious issue, serious enough that there was a session about this named The Bot Obedience Course at SES San Jose 2006. In that session, Bill Atchison from CrawlWall.com gave an excellent presentation.

Robert Charlton at the thread notes that Bill will be releasing a software tool that helps do just that. He said there is a "Beta version coming soon." The crawlwall.com/technology.html page has details of the technology developed by CrawlWall.com.

CrawlWall uses the following technology to secure your website and protect your content. All of the various methods are designed to work together in harmony to make sure that all of the spiders with permission and legitimate visitors get into your website without issue and all of the rogue crawlers get stopped and never gain admission.

Tactics such as dynamic robots.txt files, whitelist opt-in permissions, "second pass filters," ip banning or/and address banning, proxy blocking, creating certain obstacles, and a quarantine list for those uncertain IPs.

I am looking forward to seeing how it works in the real world.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In the fast-paced, "maybe-I'll-breathe-tomorrow" world of Internet search technology, one old friend has returned. Towing along a familiar format of no-spam, no-flames discussion, Detlev Johnson has brought back what was once known as I-Search.

Today, he calls it the SearchReturn Digest. This free subscription publication arrives via email every Tuesday and Thursday. Contained within are topics that interest anyone involved with promoting web sites, search engines, web site development, and search engine optimization.

As it was in its earlier incarnation, SearchReturn's format offers a sane, intelligent, pleasant reading experience. Discussions are broken up into sections and each one has its own email address that allows subscribers to respond directly to a specific discussion topic.

Detlev also picks out news items and presents an opportunity to discuss them. This moderated list avoids the pitfalls of larger forums, such as endless threads, banter and personal attacks. In SearchReturn, as it was in I-Search, there's an air of professionalism and respect that has made the return of the digest a much-welcomed industry resource.

Still getting its toes wet, Archives are starting to be placed online. In today's issue there is discussion of a question posted by Debra Mastaler, where she asked "So, what motivates you to link to another site?" The answers may surprise you. And if not, who cares? You'll still feel good (and better informed) after reading them.

I switched RSS readers three times this year so far, the last one I used was Bloglines and I still think its great. But Apple came out with Safari RSS which has some awesome browser based RSS reader functionality. I am not limited at all by switching, so I decided to make the switch.

I have been using it for the past hour or so and I am enjoying. I have posted a quick video of some of the features here. Sorry if it is a bit choppy. I have also posted a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I want to thank Gary Price for posting Feedster Publishes RSS Tutorial For Safari Users which helped the process.

Press releases have been a very popular strategy in the search engine optimization industry for a couple years now. If you wanted immediate top rankings in the news portals of the engines plus some additional quick anchor text links, you send out a press release. Here at the Search Engine Roundtable, we even did our own, I wrote up the results under the entry Press Releases & Search Engine Optimization. A new forum thread at Search Engine Watch named Press Release Spam discusses how easy it is to write a press release on about anything and get it widely syndicated. The example the thread creator (mod mcanerin) used was named SEO Firm Raise My Rank Announces New Client and Search Marketing Experiments which is a 154 word release. In the release, if you read it, it is basically mocking the PR system available to us. "Experiments for the week included an attempt to determine the efficacy of the use of search engine submission forms and a study of the attention spans of editors working for online press release services."

In the thread Mikkel deMib Svendsen says that this is not spam. He said, "The offender in my mind is the stupid editors and algos that accept such bad press releases and the sites that agrees to show them." So if the press release distribution methodology is not yet abused enough to be an issue, how much longer until strict guidelines are issued?

It's incredible to know that "According to recent surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 32 million Americans, or 27% of Internet users."

In effort to continue finding domination for press release visibility, PRWeb increased into over 15,000 new pre-defined RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. The news says, "These RSS feeds are fully compatible with all newsreaders and web browsers that support RSS, including PRWeb favorites Apple OS X Tiger's Safari RSS , Opera and Mozilla"s Firefox." Interesting to see that there was even a feed for SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization).