Nordic eMarketing study done this year has yielded that it’s better to use short female names when growing link equity through link requesting or asking for link exchange. Over the past 8 months we have been doing tests with female and male names when link requesting and found that when using names like Elisa Turner or Joanne Willow we getter better acceptance than using names like Charlie Houlton or Chris Arne.
Same tests have also told us that using localized names works better when focusing on none English speaking countries. The difference can dramatic but also seems to fluctuate between sectors/verticals as we have found short manly names work better in the B2B steel industry. Bottom line, if you are going in as a link requestor use short female names and localize them if you are leaving the comfort zone of English. Word of caution don’t overdo it Erin Cock for example did not work well.
One of my favourite SEM tools through the years has been the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, it's provided insight into sites of the past, content, look and feel and I have even been able to retrieve content from crashed sites using their services. Now this great tool has got a well due make-over and is looking good. The GUI and the way that they have made it more simple to use is fantastic, I have however experienced some data collection problems with the screens only showing me the word "soon..." with three dots behind it.
Matt Cutts says "Nooooooo" and wishes he could come through the screen and press your ESC key and Ctrl C and Break, funny guy :-) (he actually is).
What I how ever heard was that they are using other means that the Googlebot to look at sites and evaluate the page speed, what he does not say. I also believe that when Google comes in it's not downloading all the images and javascripts, CSS and so on, Googlebot looks at the content so having good HTML might actually be more important than cloaking content.
According to Mr. Cutts the bottom line is that if you do serve Google one type of content and the user other, it's cloaking and the "Noooooo" was for that reason. So don't serve Googlebot content-only (cloak) pages optimized for load speed.
Found this really good article called "SEO as a Marketing Discipline" written by Rishi Lakhani. It illustrates in a very good way the problems the search marketing industry is going through and what it is that is holding back the upper management. It's a reccomended read for those wanting to understand how we can make this industry more professional.
"I don’t mean ignorance in a negative way – I mean people genuinely don’t understand the work involved behind SEO – especially at the top level of any organisation. Most people use search engines – but most assume their existence and the results pages as part of life."
Are marketers closing the database of human intention and reaching the holy grail of marketing, with 100% transparency of the users, the people they are targeting? This evolution can be traced back to 2001 when Google opened Google Zeitgest and with that we could see and understand better the searcher and use that data to help us get better results. Microsoft opened their MSN AdLab tool and with that the dimension of age and gender was added to the equation.
Then entered the world of social media and the applications and tools that came with it and now with opt in “Check-in” applications so now the gap has been closed from the purchase and onsite analytics, to the query, from there to the social graph like who I am and who I know. From there we have the status update though micro-blogging , what am I doing and now with the help mobile phones “where am I”.
The “Check-in” is a statement of “here I am what do you have to offer?”
Just came from a session at the SES called Black hat/White hat “Unconferenced” hosted by Matt McGowan, Publisher & head of U.S. Incisive Media and Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES/Search Engine Watch and ClickZ (believe they are merging). Everyone that came to this session was offered a white hat or a black hat to wear, in my case I got the black.
Not that I am a black hat in the sense that I use under the radar none ethical tactics when marketing online, nobe more because that the size of the black hat fitted my head better. Great session that taught me black hats have bigger heads than white hats or that Matt and Mike did not order enough hats for people with big heads, either way fantastic session and great fun!
I was recently traveling on the US, speaking at the SES in NY. My eight year old daughter asked me to buy her a pair of shoes, to be exact Apple Bottoms. As I went to Footlocker to buy them I realized that they did not carry them anymore so I decided to Google and see what came up.
First when I searched Footlockers internal search nothing came up and as I have learned through the years Internal search on big sites can by quite faulty so I tested if Google found something but no results. But what happened was that JD Sports came up as a PPC result. JD was most likely not targeting me as I was in the US at the time with my Icelandic keyboard. But as I was searching on Google UK JD came up, with a nice ad saying
Apple Bottom at JD
Get the new line of Apple Bottoms
Women’s ware quick and easy at JD!
When I saw the add I tough to myself well if I cannot buy it in the US I might as well when I am next over to London. But when I clicked on the ad I got nothing, that is I got a page saying “Sorry, we have not been able match anything to your search” it was not a 404 page it was a search result page with no results. Still not sure where to buy the Apple Bottoms for my daughter.
According to the blog search engine Technorati, around 77% of active Internet users read blogs; ComScore claims this figure to be around 346 million people. However, if Internet World Stats makes any sense this figure should be close to 1.3 billion and the percentage of active users should be closer to 20% rather than 77% if ComScore is correct.
Either way it’s a big number! The bottom line is that everything is being talked about and companies deciding not to take part in the talk need to at least listen and react.