Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 9:30 AM
Google shares are at a considerable low today. They opened with a value of $420 and by 12:26pm ET, had dropped below the $400 mark to $396.29 (according to a Google search for "goog")
At one point the stock had reached a new 52 week low of $395.34 - a far cry from the 52 week high of $747.24 set in November of last year. That’s a drop of more than $350 since the peak which is a lot of coin for all serious Google shareholders.
With this considerable low, perhaps now is the time to buy, but I have been thinking that for a few months now, and it seems to keep dropping. The last time Google shares were below $400 was back in Sept of 2006 according to Google Finance. With all the troubles over on Wall Street I am curious to see how much impact this will have on Google shares. I am no finance expert, in fact, far from it, but I see shares dropping further in the coming months.
UPDATE(Only minutes after original post)
I find it rather interesting how Google finance seems to be wrong. When I took the screenshot above it said the 52 week low was $395.34 - that was at 12:26pm ET on Sept 29, 2008. Take a look at the screen shot below, taken only 8 minutes later - it shows a 52 week low of $397.27. Guess it goes to show that Google Finance is a little off on their numbers.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 7:45 AM
Funding to the tune of $28.7 Million, led by Highland Capital Partners, will be used over at Digg to incorporate a number of changes, Jay Adelson announced in the official Digg blog Wednesday.
Changes will include improvements in infrastructure, new feature development, international expansion, and hiring new employees to make the whole thing happen. New features will include personalizing the "Digg Experience" and incorporating a number of user suggestions from over the years.
Adelson notes that nearly half of their 30 million monthly users are from outside of the US, so making adjustments for localized tastes and languages are on the forefront for their growth strategy for 2009.
He also notes that they will be hiring, so if you are a techie in need of a job, you may want to take a look at their jobs page!
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 4:19 PM
Yahoo has opened up another location, this time with a research center in Grenoble France. This follows shortly after news that Yahoo may also be opening up a location in La Vista Nebraska creating at least 50 news jobs.
Layoff notices for more than 1000 employees were also handed out near the start of the year, and Yahoo's shares have just hit a 52 week low - interesting that they are expanding in all this turmoil.
Regardless, it looks like the new facility will employee 220 engineers and be Yahoo's biggest center in France. The French minister of economy is offering sizable tax credits for research based operations, which helps to explain the choice of location.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 2:16 PM
How would you like to have Google cut you a check for a few million dollars? Well, if you have the right ideas that could help change the world you just might get some cash from Google. There is of course a catch.
If your idea to help make the world a better place is chosen by Google, you will get a share of $10 million, but the money you get must go directly towards putting your idea into action. Google is putting up $10 million which will be divided up among the top five submissions to be used for project funding.
Submissions must be made by Oct 20, 2008. In late January 2009 Google will select 100 of the ideas and leave it up to the public to narrow down the list to 20 semifinalists. The five winners will be chosen and announced in February by a Google-sponsored advisory board.
To submit your project ideas or for more information, visit Google's project10tothe100.com.
Yesterday Google Webmaster Central posted a video response to numerous questions the department had received from webmasters. The following video addresses duplicate content, search engine friendly web design, spider blocking, and more.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 4:29 PM
The latest search market share figures are in at Nielsen, ComScore, and HitWise, and, for the most part, Google continues to rise.
Depending on which provider you prefer, Google saw yet another increase in market share in August as did Yahoo. MSN has dropped according to all three providers.
Over at Comscore Google has seen an increase of 1.1% to 63%, Yahoo is down 0.9% to 19.6%, and MSN is also down 0.6% to 8.3%. Nielsen Netratings reports Google down 0.2% to 60%, Yahoo up 0.7% to 18.1%, and MSN down 1.2% to 10.7%. Finally, Hitwise is showing Google up 0.3% to 71.07%, with Yahoo and MSN both down slightly to 18.26% and 5.32% respectively.
While the numbers between these providers range a fair bit, there is no denying that Google’s strong hold is not going anywhere.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 9:50 AM
So, you have finally decided to build yourself a website, but really have no idea where to start. The following 10 steps will give you some insight into what you need to address when creating a search friendly website from the ground up.
While this article is not an exhaustive list of everything you need to know, it does touch base on many of the important aspects of creating a new website.
Step 1 - Keyword Research Even before you choose your domain name, you should put a little time into some keyword research. Research all the possible keywords that will fit your industry and the website you plan on building. Having a clear idea of what your end targets are will make the rest of your job much easier and help things to just fall into place. Take a look at Keyword Research for SEO, written earlier this summer, for more help on this.
Step 2 - Domain Selection If you already have an established brick and mortar business and the website will be an extension of that business, using your company name as the domain name is in most cases the best idea. If your company name is either irrelevant, or simply unavailable, you may want to consider a domain that has your target phrase listed as part of the domain.
A great example of this is if your site is focused geographically. Using the location as part of the domain when possible will give you a little extra juice with the search engines and help draw people to your site as they instantly can see the relevance in the domain.
Let's say that you are building a website focused on your home town, "Somewhere USA". A domain you may consider could be "Somewhere.com"; however, this would probably be already taken. Other options such as "SomewhereInfo.com" or "SomewhereGuide.com" may be good alternatives. The same goes for retail stores. "SomewhereCameras".com or "SomewhereBakery".com would also be good choices.
Avoid excessive use of hyphens; sometimes it is appropriate to use one, but if you can help it, avoid more than that as it can appear messy and even spammy in some cases.
Step 3 - System Back End If you plan on having a large scale website that will grow and change constantly then you may want to consider a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla. If you decide to go this route you want to ensure that whichever CMS you choose is search engine friendly and offers items such as unique title tags, custom URL's, and full control over content, heading tags, image alt tags, etc.
Starting a website using a non-friendly CMS is like buying a car without an engine. Sure it may look great, but it won't get you anywhere.
Step 4 - Site Structure & Navigation This is really one of the most fundamental aspects of your site creation. If the structure of your site does not work well, then your site may be doomed from the very beginning.
Take a look back at your keyword research and brainstorm all the areas of your site that you may want to develop content for. In some cases you may find valuable keywords that would fit perfectly into a few pages of content for your site. If the phrase and the content would be a good match for the theme of your site, go ahead and note them as pages to create. Get a list, or flowchart, of all the content you plan on adding and sort those pages into relevant categories. Be sure your site files are saved in a way that makes sense - this includes both the file name, and the complete path to the file. Save files including similar content in a relevant subdirectory, with simply file names representing each. Let's take an example of an informational site dedicated to a specific geographic location. If you have a series of pages dedicated to recreation you may save them as:
Keeping your URL structure clean and tidy can not only help with search engine rankings, but it will give a good visual impression to the site visitor as well. Often, using each of these categories as main points for your primary site navigation may make the most sense.
Also be sure to keep your site relatively flat, with as few layers as possible. Don't make the search engines follow a dozen links to get to the deepest levels of your site. Unless the site is literally tens of thousands of pages, there is no need to click more than 2 or 3 links to get to any deep content. The shorter the path to an internal page, the more credit by the search engines.
Step 5 - Navigation When developing the end site, you also want to make sure that your site navigation is search engine friendly - this is critical if you ever want free organic listings.
If possible use a text based form of navigation. You can use CSS to style the text links to fit into your graphical design. Text links are the best method, however, image based navigation and even some forms of drop down menus are search engine friendly.
If you choose to use image based navigation be sure to include image alt text relevant to the link to give something for Google to associate with the linked page. If you absolutely must use Flash, or any form of navigation not friendly for search engine spiders, be sure to supplement this with text based links on another location of the page.
Step 6 - Analytics It's never too early to start thinking about your stats. Before your site goes live you must have some form of accurate analytics in place so you can measure your site's traffic and progress.
There is an endless supply of analytics options out there to choose from. You can simply use the stats software that comes free with your web hosting, however, more often than not, they tend to be very basic with no flexibility. Advanced choices such as ClickTracks can give you rather in-depth statistics, but for a very small mom and pop operation it may be too expensive. Google Analytics, is a free option that can give you most, if not all the data you will need and does not require access to your raw log files.
If you do opt for an option such as ClickTracks, check with your host to ensure that you will have the raw log files you require. StepForth can also help you with your statistical analysis and offers a number of inexpensive ClickTracks service packages.
Step 7 - Content Creation Now is the time to get that new, fresh content posted to your site with the SEO in mind. Make sure that the content you write reflects your industry and target keywords. You don't need to flood the content with your target keywords, but make sure they are in there a few times. When it makes sense to do so, also include some acronyms to help Google establish the overall relevance.
If you perform a search in Google for "~keyword", any words that Google bolds in the search results will be acronyms that Google deems relevant. Include some of these where possible.
Step 8 - Basic SEO Ensure that ALL pages of your site include unique Title and Meta Description tags. This is one of the core fundamental aspects of an optimized size and it does play a significant role in your search rankings. Make sure that these tags are not only unique but are accurate representations of each page. Also be sure to place your target phrase in heading as well as image alt tags where applicable.
Step 9 - Initial Promotion / Launch Now that you have your new site all up and ready to go, you want to give it that kick start to help drive some traffic. It will be a while before the search engines fully index your site and even longer before you start to see organic rankings for your target search phrases. It is important to start off right away to get the ball rolling.
Start off by issuing a press release to announce the launch of your new business website. Press releases are a great way to get some traffic and a rather valuable first link into your site. Submitting your press release using a company such as PRWeb will get your link in the engine's path and should help your site to be initially indexed by Google right away.
Next submit your site to some relevant directories starting with DMOZ. It can take months, even years, to have your site listed in DMOZ, so it is important to get it submitted right away. Consider submitting to other industry relevant directories. For some information on how to select the right directories take a look at Building Links with Directory Submissions.
Work on getting as many links from relevant industry websites as possible. The more links you can get from reputable sources, the better the overall performance of your site.
Step 10 - Ongoing Promotion Once you have completed the site, the content looks great, and all appears finished, you've still got work to do. For long term success, especially for a brand new site, you need to continually promote your site. You should always be looking at ways to increase your inbound links, and increase your relevant content.
Consider creating accounts with various social media platforms to help promote your site. These can not only give you a link back to your site, but they can help you drive traffic and raise awareness about your business and product.
A site that is always growing, and always getting new links, has the best chance of getting a stable top 10 listing in Google.
24/7 Wall Street wrote a fascinating article today describing how Microsoft could quite easily buy its way on to far more computer screens for much less than buying Yahoo; there are powerful search engines that represent many of the Chinese, Russian and Czech viewers. It is a great short read and the economics appear to make sense. Read the article here.
At Search Engine Strategies San Jose I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and mentor Dr. Ralph Wilson. Ralph is one of those amazing people who always seems to stay on top of his formidable workload while managing writers and his well known web site Web Marketing Today.
In this interview I asked Ralph how he keeps on top of his enormous workload while still writing ebooks and articles and as I expected he had some great tips to share.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 2:46 PM
When poking into twitter earlier today I saw a post from Matt Cutts who had linked to an interesting TechCrunch article.
It seems that Kristin Armstrong used a GPS and Google Earth to help her train for her Gold Medal performance in Beijing last month.
During a trial in December of '07, Armstrong brought along her husband's GPS to capture elevation along the cycling route. She then took this information home and after exporting the GPS data into Google Earth was able to plot out a similar route in her home town of Boise. Having a close match to the course in terms of elevation and distance, gave Armstrong the ideal method of training, which, in the end allowed her to grasp that coveted Olympic gold medal!
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 8:45 AM
For those of you out there who use WebPosition Gold, you will be happy to know that it is now properly reporting on Google results. While news had circulated all over the forums and various SE News sites that WebPosition had been banned by Google, apparently this simply was not true.
Supposedly Google had changed the way in which they display results within the HTML of the site, a change not visible on the site when performing a search. As a result of this change, it essentially broke WebPosition, and the software then required some updating to correct the issue. Back in August Google posted to the official GoogleBlog that they were testing a number of items within the search results. One test included creating slightly more whitespace between the first and second listings. It is some of the small HTML changes like these that are likely the culprit to the temporary down time experienced by WebPosition.
As of earlier this month, the leader in reporting software did in fact complete the update and now reported results do appear to be correct. While there is much speculation as to how long reporting software will continue to work without being permanently banned by Google, for now, things are working once again.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 2:30 PM
Like most websites Google keeps a log of IP addresses in order to track visitor behavior, and to help serve up more useful ad targeting. Previously they held onto this non-identifying information for 18 months following your visit to their site.
Over the past couple of years regulators and policymakers have had privacy concerns over the storage of this data, and as a result Google has cut the time it holds onto this information by half, down to 9 months.
Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel was noted as saying:
"Finding the right balance between data retention and privacy is a tough issue for policymakers, Google and our industry. There is great utility in data, but we also believe that limiting the amount and types of data we keep can improve privacy while continuing to provide a strong user experience. Anonymizing the data earlier will have costs, particularly in terms of future search quality improvements. But our engineers are working hard to minimize those losses."
At some point, most people have had some sort of encounter with internet scams, viruses, spyware or other security problems. Hackers and scam artists are a pervasive reality in today's world and making assumptions about security is unwise. A pay per click account makes an attractive target to a technically savvy criminal and gaining access to someone's account allows them to promote their schemes at someone else's expense.
Originally trained in Network Security, I have always taken such precautions very seriously and now even more so, since a recent fraudulent act affected one of our client's accounts.
Early this summer I arrived at the office on a Monday morning and proceeded to check my weekend mail. Two emails caught my attention right away. The first from AdWords, informing us that the client's credit card was declined and the second, from the client asking " What is the campaign "Qwasde" - Campaign #1"?
Upon reading that came the realization that this account had been hacked. This was further confirmed by a review of the account's recent activity. I discovered that on the previous Friday someone had created this new, innocuously named Campaign #1 with a daily budget of $7000. It contained only the single "Qwasde" ad group, with a single ad:
No doubt this was intended to phish for bank account details of anyone unwisely clicking on this ad.
This hacker was pretty slick. The whole scam was set up late in the day on Friday, when it was less likely to be detected. The domain the ad was directed at was registered in Australia to a "resident" of New Jersey. The website was put up on Friday and gone by Monday morning and in 2 days the ad generated $13,000 in click charges.
I immediately called Google and an investigation was initiated. They agreed this looked like fraudulent activity and promised to contact us with their investigation results within a few days.
Concerned about the means by which this person gained access, I checked my security for any indications of a breach. Finding nothing unusual in my own logs, I then contacted the client with instructions for locking down and cleaning his computer system, advising him to change any sensitive passwords in case his system was infected.
Google got back to us a couple of days later confirming the results and promising to refund the client's money. This was good news, as it appeared the fallout from this would be limited to a loss of only a week or so in the client's Google marketing initiative. In reality though, this had a far greater impact.
According to Google, the account needs to remain inactive until the refund process reaches completion. This took place nearly 2 months ago and still there is no sign of the refund. The account is still frozen. Google has no ETA on completion of this process; apparently their refund department has a huge backlog, due to the numerous email phishing scams that keep cropping up.
We still haven't figured out how the breach occurred. For my part, I think it's possible the client inadvertently became a victim of the phishing scam.
This scam is similar in some respects to the Paypal phishing scam of 2 years ago. It's pretty slick and can easily fool the uninformed. In fact, another of our clients with an AdWords account received an email some months ago asking me what to do with it and I had them forward a copy of the email to me. Thankfully, they hadn't clicked on the link, as it was indeed one of these scams.
Here is the email they had received:
-----Original Message-----
From: Google AdWords [mailto:adwords-noreply@google.com] Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 4:49 PM
To: xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Google AdWords Account Verification Email
Dear Google AdWords customer!
In order to confirm your contact details, please click the link below:
Google AdWords Form
This should take you directly to the Google AdWords Form.
Thank you for choosing AdWords. We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.
Sincerely, The Google AdWords Team ------------------------
This particular scam differs from most emails of its kind because it looks like a legitimate AdWords support email. Also it lacks the spelling and grammatical errors common to spam n' scam emails.
There is a tell tale flaw though:
In the original email if you mouse over the link, you would see it is not actually pointing to google.com but rather to google.com.adwdl.org.uk, a completely different domain and unrelated to Google.
Other email variations report imminent account closure unless account details are verified. Even if you don't provide account details, just following the link can expose your system to malicious software.
Tips to Protect your account
Here are some guidelines to help keep your account secure. Bear in mind this is best practice for security of any sensitive financial, business or personal information, not just AdWords.
1. Google will NEVER ask for your account information by email; they won't even ask for your password on the phone. All they ever ask for whenever I phone them is the 10 digit account number. They don't need any other information to open up the account for viewing. Most legitimate enterprises don't need your login details, so if someone requests them, be very cautious.
If you receive notification about something you didn't initiate, likely this is about something not to your benefit. i.e.: receiving a confirmation of a password change when you didn't change your password, etc.
Always use security solutions and keep them up to date. Virus protection, firewall and spyware protection are vital for any system that connects to the internet.
Use strong passwords. Weak passwords, while easy to remember, are also very easy for password cracking programs. A strong password contains both alphabetical and numeric characters and utilizes capitalization, length and special characters. As well, stronger passwords don't use recognizable or easy to guess words.
Examples: lame password = your name, password (the actual word) or 123456; weak password = date of birth, newgirl22, ItsaSecret, p@$$word; strong password = tP%m34!pX
Use different passwords. If you use the same password because it's easier to remember, then everything you do becomes compromised if any forums or sites you use become breached. I have hundreds of logins and passwords, so I use RoboForm to securely store them. This type of program can also reduce vulnerability to keylogger type spyware.
Keep the number of account users with administrative access to the minimum necessary. The more people who have access, the greater the chance of an information leak.
Turning your computer off or disconnecting from the internet when you are done using it greatly reduces the chance of bad things happening unnoticed.
Don't send login or password information by insecure means such as email or instant messaging. Generally if I have to pass on that sort of info, I always do it by phone.
Monitor your account regularly; particularly at the end of the week and take random peeks on the weekends. It only takes a minute to log on and check for abnormal account activity.
The most important thing to remember is that there are people out there who will rob you blind if you leave yourself open, so a modicum of paranoia along with a bit of common sense will go a long way to saving yourself some real hassle.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 12:00 PM
In an effort to help out Yahoo with its revenue problems, Yahoo has hired Joanne Bradford, a former Microsoft Corp. Executive.
Yahoo announced the recent hire in a press release Tuesday. Bradford was Microsoft's head of their Media Network and resigned back in March after a 7 year stint with the software giant. She then joined Spot Runner Inc as their Executive Vice President of National Advertising Services before being swept up by Yahoo.
"My decision to come to Yahoo! was simple because there is no other company that combines one of the world's most recognizable brands with unparalleled reach, industry-leading products and programming, and a full spectrum of advertising offerings for marketers," said Bradford. "I am convinced that the very best days for this company are ahead, and I want to leverage my experience in programming, distribution, and selling to help Yahoo! take this business to the next level."
Bradford will be assigned the title of Senior Vice President of U.S. Revenue and Market Department. A rather large title probably compensated with an equally large pay check.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 12:05 PM
According to Reuters, MySpace saw more advertiser ad views in June than Yahoo! Yahoo may be the second biggest search engine on the planet, but when it comes to advertising it saw 34.7 billion ad views compared to MySpace which saw 51 billion views. (figures are from a press release issued by ComScore last week).
Yahoo does have the power to draw more revenue out of their ads and still leads MySpace in terms of revenue. Typically in the realm of social media, ad impressions do not necessarily equal dollars.
"Social media gets all these ad impressions but not necessarily get the dollars," said Colin Gillis, analyst at Canaccord Adams. "MySpace's cost per thousand (CPM) page views are significantly lower than that of Yahoo".
Back in June MySpace unveiled a redesign of their home page which has opened to doors to larger sponsors such as Wendy's and Sprint. While it is too soon to say that MySpace has overtaken Yahoo in the ad wars, this definitely shows that at this rate, they aren't far from it. Look out Yahoo!
Blink
Del.icio.us
Digg
Furl
Google
Simpy
Spurl
Y! MyWeb
Funding to the tune of $28.7 Million, led by Highland Capital Partners, will be used over at Digg to incorporate a number of changes, Jay Adelson announced in the official 
How would you like to have Google cut you a check for a few million dollars? Well, if you have the right ideas that could help change the world you just might get some cash from Google. There is of course a catch.
So, you have finally decided to build yourself a website, but really have no idea where to start. The following 10 steps will give you some insight into what you need to address when creating a search friendly website from the ground up.
When poking into twitter earlier today I saw a post from Matt Cutts who had linked to an interesting 
For those of you out there who use WebPosition Gold, you will be happy to know that it is now properly reporting on Google results. While news had circulated all over the forums and various SE News sites that WebPosition had been banned by Google, apparently this simply was not true.
Like most websites Google keeps a log of IP addresses in order to track visitor behavior, and to help serve up more useful ad targeting. Previously they held onto this non-identifying information for 18 months following your visit to their site.
pervasive reality in today's world and making assumptions about security is unwise. A pay per click account makes an attractive target to a technically savvy criminal and gaining access to someone's account allows them to promote their schemes at someone else's expense.
In an effort to help out Yahoo with its revenue problems, Yahoo has hired Joanne Bradford, a former Microsoft Corp. Executive.
According to