Highlight of the Week #1

Alexa Attempts to Crush Statsaholic After Copying Its Advances

Amazon's bullying tactics make my blood pressure rise. Alexa (owned by Amazon) has chosen to file a lawsuit against Statsaholic.com for "stealing Alexa's proprietary data by disregarding the rules for Alexa's Web Services–through which Alexa makes certain proprietary data available in exchange for a fee–and instead simply taking the data and graphs he wants without permission." (source: PDF legal filings)

Statsaholic.com which was originally Alexaholic.com had been operating for over a year without issue and, in fact, Geoffrey Mack (Product Manager at Alexa) posted on the Alexaholic corporate blog that the latest enhancements to Alexa "may not be as cool as Alexaholic, but they are a significant improvement." Furthermore, Alan Graham of ZD Net noted "in the meantime, Alexa continued to make improvements to their site, many of which were seen to be directly copied from Alexaholic."

Well now that the improvements are complete and even though Geoffrey Mack changed his domain from Alexaholic to Statsaholic to avoide trademark issues, it seems Alexa has had enough of him and have filed a lawsuit to crush this enterprising web 2.0 developer. Alexa claims Statsaholic's "conduct has caused and will continue to cause damage to Alexa and an illicit gain of profit to Defendant, and is causing irreparable harm to Alexa for which there is no adequate remedy under the law."

Unbelievable! I salute Alan Graham for his well worded response to this backhanded move by Alexa:

"Excuse me? Little Ron Hornbaker…is causing giant Alexa irreparable harm? And the question that really begs to be asked is that why all of a sudden, over a year later, when Alexa had ample opportunity to address this issue, did they decide to do it now? The simple fact of the matter is that Ron Hornbaker built a better Alexa and as soon as it started to gain traction, and Alexa had already borrowed all the ideas it wanted from Alexaholic, they no longer needed it. Essentially, what Alexa wants from the lawsuit is to take ownership of the Alexaholic domain, stop Ron Hornbaker from accessing their site without written permission, damages which will go well into the hundreds of thousands, pay their legal fees, and crawl into a hole somewhere and never show his head again. ... Is this how we work together in this shiny new world of Web 2.0?"

Apparently Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of Alexa was a bit flabbergasted when the Alexaholic dispute was raised by Tim O'Reilly during a interview in front of a crowd of Web 2.0 companies (the interview will be here soon). In response to Tim's request that Alexa and Alexaholic find a way to get along (because they are both great websites) Jeff seemed to uncertainly stumble through a list of arguments about trademark rights and intellectual property.

All-in-all, I find it beyond sad that Alexa would target a great site like Statsaholic.com for infringement when it plainly compliments their own website. In fact, as was noted in other articles on this topic, Alexa's data (its lifeblood) is compiled entirely thanks to the kindness of volunteers who install their toolbar. So where does Alexa get off torturing a small website that has done nothing but provide improved (and very popular) access to this data? I am sure they could have worked with Statsaholic.com to create an amicable solution. I hope the Alexa staff involved in this suit have some sleepless nights as a result of the inevitable public backlash of their foolhardy bullying.

Related Articles and Sources on the Amazon (Alexa) vs. Alexaholic Story

• Om Malik calls this case a part of the "End of Innocence" of Web 2.0 as companies like Google and Amazon begin to reaffirm control over their information after letting Web 2.0 API users innovate for them.
• "Amazon's War on Statsaholic" by Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch
• Alan Graham's excellent coverage "Amazon sues Alexaholic... everyone loses!"

by Ross Dunn, CEO/Founder
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Highlight of the Week #2

Rescuing Pages from Google's Supplemental Index

I found this interesting post from "Dr. Pete" at SEOmoz.org discussing his experience rescuing a client's website from the vastness of Google's supplemental index. Pete provided a great deal of detail on how he succeeded with his particular client. In this case the client was definitely in a bad state beforehand where even the most basic SEO strategies were not in place. The most basic fixes he implemented consisted of creating unique Titles and Meta Description Tags which in my opinion would definitely reduce supplemental results.

The gist of his posting is that the following changes seemed to have the most positive results:

• Shortening and increasing the search engine friendliness of the site's URLs
  
  
• Apparently when a 404 page was discovered it provided search engines with an improper response - essentially that the page was "A-okay" (a 200 server response). They fixed this issue which allowed many 'bad' pages to be removed from Google's index.
  
  On a personal note I noticed this same issue with another client of mine recently by reviewing the client's Google Webmaster Central profile... lots of valuable information can be found within that toolset - be sure to use it!
  
  
• He implemented a robots.txt file to block various parts of the site that provided duplicate content (such as print versions of articles, etc.). The impact on supplemental results appeared to be profound from his standpoint which makes sense. You see supplemental results will often occur when Google notices repetitive content within a website. After all, the supplemental results is by nature meant for results that are already found elsewhere or for pages that offer little or no value to Google.

by Ross Dunn, CEO/Founder
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Ross Dunn will answer your questions - FREE!

Just visit our questions page and submit your question.

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The Major Player

Google and Microsoft Neck in Neck

In the world of search, Google has been number one for several years now, but when it comes to overall site traffic, until recently Google was number two. Now that the latest numbers are out, we see Microsoft has dropped into the second spot as Google takes the prize of the most visited site on the internet. While the two are separated by only a million unique visits (or roughly one fifth of one percent), it is expected that this gap will continue to widen.

Based on figures taken from comScore, while Microsoft enjoyed a staggering 527 million unique visits for the month of March, Google was a hair ahead at 528 million. Yahoo takes third spot with 476 million followed by Time Warner at 272 million, and eBay rounds off the top 5 at 256 million.

Interestingly enough, while Google has a few more unique visitors, the average user spends less time at Google, an average of 4.6 minutes, compared to Microsoft’s 12.8 minutes.

While Google may only have a lead of less than 1 percent over Microsoft, in the world of search the gap is much larger. According to comScore, figures released last week for March 2007 US online searches by engine, Google had 48.3 percent, followed by Yahoo at 27.5, with Microsoft brining up the rear at 10.9. Microsoft and Google saw increases over February’s numbers of 0.4% and 0.2% respectively, with Yahoo showing a decline of 0.6%.

In March, Americans conducted approximately 7.3 billion searches. Of those Google saw 3.5 billion, Yahoo had 2 billion, and Microsoft saw 798 million.

by Scott Van Achte, Senior SEO

Optimizing AJAX for Rankings

In New York recently I was upset to have missed a seminar on optimizing AJAX websites for rankings. Fortunately Liz Camps of the Big Green Blog took some fantastic notes and summarized the seminar. I highly recommend the read for those who anticipate they will be implementing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript & XML). I know, it sounds awfully fancy but I expect to see a dramatic increase in use of AJAX by StepForth's clients over the next 2 years.

Here is an excerpt from Liz's synopsis:
"If you're planning to use AJAX on your site, or if your web site already contains AJAX, you'll need to take some extra steps to protect your natural rankings in major search engines. As long as you follow a few guidelines, you can make AJAX work without any impact on your SEO. But if you don't follow these guidelines, your search rank can suffer."

As it turns out the search engine un-friendliness of AJAX mirrors many of the disadvantages of FLASH. As a result, the solution to search engine friendly design with AJAX is not to use it as the basis for the entire website but to (much like FLASH) integrate it within spiderable content such as text content and links or other JavaScript-free content.

I highly doubt FLASH and AJAX will always pose such a barrier to search engines but for now and the near future you will need to utilize this technology carefully to allow search engines to access content on your site.

by Ross Dunn, CEO/Founder

Net Reality

Beware: The New US Border Check Tool

An article from The Tyee which covers how Canadian psychotherapist Andre Feldmar was denied entry in to the United States after being pulled aside during a border crossing for a random check just crossed my desk. The border guard Googled Feldmar’s name and found he had written an article about an LSD acid trip he had taken almost 40 years ago.

It brings to mind how; many years ago a friend of mine was crossing the border and went through a similar experience.  She did apply for and received a waiver.  I am sure most of you know or have heard such stories at not being able to gain access to the US for whatever reason although that person had been to the US with no issue many, many times before.

But using a Search Engine such as Google to key in a person’s name as far as I am concerned is ludicrous.  Google should not be the authoritative source in such matters. Sure, protect our borders but please, use more appropriate means in denying someone access to cross the border to the US.

by Anita Sperrer, Office Administrator

Don't Forget To...
I left in this net reality from last week because I feel so strongly about it. Please help save Internet Radio. - Ross Dunn

Help Save Internet Radio

Yesterday, I received an email from Tim Westergren, the founder of the popular internet radio station Pandora.The Copyright Royalty Board has reaffirmed its decision to enforce a nearly three-fold increase in license fees to those offering music streaming services. This increase was proposed by SoundExchange, the music industry’s collection service. Further, the fees will be retroactive from 2006 and as a result most smaller internet radio stations will be unable to continue.

The following are excerpts from his email:

“I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio.”

Further on he states, “Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.”

by Bill Stroll, Sales Manager