Download FeedBurner FeedSmith 301 Redux

Hope you enjoy!

I have noticed a recent trend with in the SEO community to push Google to take action in several areas that I believe have an adverse effect on SEO. In many cases I see very well respected SEOs pushing Google to in effect make their jobs (and everyone else’s) harder. Here are two examples:

Exact Match Domains So you are upset that some domain that has exact match, ranks higher than you. I get that. What I don’t get is pushing Google to do something about it. Buying exact match domains has to be one of the best ways to aggressively take over a niche. But guess what? If you keep complaining about it, they will do something about it! So shut up already and buy your own!

Content Farms This one completely boggles my mind. Content farms exist because they are highly lucrative. I know that you are tired of seeing them out rank you at every turn. But how about instead of complaining publicly about it, you build your own! I am not saying that you need to spam the results with low quality content. But you can learn a lot about content development, content monetization, and syndication by mimicking content farms. And the greatest thing is that they are cheap to get started, and maintain. Google will even help you monetize them!

There are a whole host of other things SEOs complain publicly about that I wish they would just shut up about. I understand the desire to hold Google to a higher standard, and make sure they deliver on what they promise. But why do that at the expense of making your job/income harder to achieve?? Just shut up already!

As you can see from the screen shot, Ask.com is buying ad space for the term “equal housing logo requirements”. When I saw this I thought, I wonder if Ask is getting into the real estate design business. But, I was curious, so I clicked the ad and found that it points to an Ask.com SERP.

Sure, I have seen ads in Google to other search engines, but never to another SERP. Google has always had a long standing policy about including other SERP’s in their organic listings, even if Ask.com has found a way around that as well. So is this something new? Or is Ask.com’s dieing effort to stay relevant?

I have only posted one question and that will probably be my last. Here’s why: Earlier today I posted: “Is Quora an appropriate place to ask silly questions for comedic value?” I then posted it to Twitter and one of my twitter followers responded. Then a few minutes later I get a status message that says someone has redirected my question to “Is Quora only for ‘serious’ questions?” At first I was thinking, Well that’s cool they are trying to help by pointing out an already existing thread.

But then I realized that no, they are actually 301ing my original question thread! Meaning that if you go to my original question you will now be redirected to another user’s question instead.

So here we have a site that completely thrives off of user submitted content and they think its OK to highjack that content whenever they want.

I know what many of you are thinking, But, Joe, its the same question. They are trying to help. I don’t care if its the same question. Its not the question that I even care about, its the answers. Just because someone else has posted the same question, doesn’t mean we are going to have the same dialog as well.

So why do I think this means the end of Quora? Because, users don’t like to have their conversations high jacked, and Quora killing their own content mill.

Can you imagine a moderator at Twitter redirecting similar tweets from different users, completely derailing their user’s dialog? I was looking forward to continuing my dialog with my twitter follower that posted a question, but that conversation was cut short (or off rather).

If you ask any web entrepreneur what’s the biggest value in question and answer sites they will tell you, content generation. These types of sites churn out very high quality content that works very well in search engines. But, if your content is riddled with 301′s and redirects then you can kiss that value goodbye. I know what you are thinking, what about duplicate content? aren’t they doing the right thing cutting down on duplicate content? This isn’t duplicate content, because it would take nothing less than a miracle for similar questions to create identical answers and dialog!

Which is where the real value is to begin with! In the dialog! Which in my case no longer exist.

In short, Rae uses Firefox’s Bookmarks in conjunction with custom URLs to turn your address bar into a souped up search machine! Here’s a quick example of how Rae works her magic.

Rae finds a service that uses dynamic URLs such as WhosTalkin.com She then runs a query through the service. As a result we get a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=sugarrae

Next Rae will replace the query in the URL with %s to act as a place holder. So the URL now looks like:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=%s

In Firefox Rae will go to Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks, then right click on Bookmarks Menu>New Bookmark

So now when Rae goes to her address bar and types “who sugarrae”, she will get a fresh set of results from WhosTalkin.com

Rae takes things a step further by using this hack to run analysis on pages and sites by using the URL in place of a query. For example if she wants to run a Whois check her setup might look like this:

Now when Rae types whois whostalkin.com into her search bar a Whois report from DomainTools.com appears.

Are you starting to see the magic here? If not here are a few of my favorite examples to get you started. Just copy and paste them into the method above.

Bookmarks with URLs:

Shorten URL’s
kl.am
http://kl.am/api/shorten/?url=%s&format=text
TinyURL
http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=%s

Social Bookmarking

StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=%s

del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/post?url=%s

FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/?url=%s

Digg
http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=%s

Sphinn
http://sphinn.com/submit.php?url=%s

View a Site as Text at SEO-Browser.com

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?user_agent=1&address=%s&action=Parse+URL

On Page Keyword Analysis

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml?url=%s

Translate any web page into English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=%s&sl=auto&tl=en&history_state0=

Bookmarks with Search Queries:

Google News Search

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%s&cf=all&scoring=n (sorted by date)

Google Blog Search

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%s&scoring=d (sorted by date)

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

Get Yahoo results as a RSS feed:

http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=%s


Update Twitter

http://twitter.com/home?status=%s

Have fun playing with these bookmarks and feel free to leave some of your favorites in the comments! Stay tuned for my next post where I kick things up a notch with this bookmark hack and JavaScript!

Here’s the secret: Give the charity of your choice a page on your web site. The vast majority of work that we do at jozsoft is web development for non-profits. From my experience there are LOTS of small non-profits and local charities that could greatly benefit from a web presence, however lack the funds required to make that presence a reality. If I could I would give away all my services for free to non-profits, but then I would be out of work and never finish with the TONS of them that need web help. Trust me they are out there, just start looking.

Did you say something about links??

Yes, I did. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t get something out of being such a great guy or girl, right? Here’s how the links work: when you add the charity’s page to your site you are effectively extending your web presence into their organization. This is extremely powerful because, every member, volunteer, staff person, constituent, and supporter will automatically become your domain advocate and hopefully link builder.

I have done this several times and have seen huge success with each. But there are a few things to keep in mind that work best.

One Page – Why just one? It’s allot easier to do just one page and it will be easier to focus link juice to other parts of your site if you have fewer pages. All their information on one page means all links pointing to one place, you get the idea. Many don’t care putting all there info on one page when its free.

http://www.yoursite.com/non-profit-name.html

Linkable Content – Encourage the organization to provide content for the page that people want to tell others about or link to. Examples are: monthly calendars, fund raising messages, information about upcoming events, resources for their members, or even embeddable content like videos or slideshows from different events.

Active Orgs. – Organizations that stay active are the ones that will build the most links, because they are the ones that have the most to talk about. Examples of active groups would be church youth groups, boy and girl scouts, School PTAs, and others.

The Right Org. – Its important to pick an organization that you don’t have any fundamental disagreements with, otherwise you might have a problem if you have to remove their page in the future.

PageRank Sculpting – Ok I don’t want to advise that everyone does this because it is more on the grayer/black side of SEO. However, if you really want to send the most link juice possible to the rest of your site then at the very least you should include one or two links to your home page on the non-profit’s page. This can be done by including a link at the bottom that says something like, “this page is sponsored by jozsoft”. Then, “nofollow” the rest of the links except the one to your home page. Only do this in moderation because all of the authenticity that you have just received by helping a charity will be gone if caught.

I hope this is helpful and encourages you to help out a local non-profit or charity this holiday season. Remember, the links are the added bonus, and the better your free service to the charity is, the more links you will receive, people like talking about good things!

Am I dreaming here??