Microsoft and Yahoo announce partnership

Microsoft and Yahoo logos

Microsoft and Yahoo logos

It has recently been announced that Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed on a 10 year business plan in an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance for online search. Confirmation on the deal has been long awaited, and it was finally agreed earlier today. Yahoo! is going to integrated into Microsoft technology platforms, and Bing (Microsoft’s most recent Search Engine) is going to power Yahoo! search. Yahoo! will also be able to sell premium advertising on both Bing and Yahoo! search.

It will be very interesting to find out more about the partnership deal, and exactly what their plans are to try and capture the market share which they have slowly been losing out to Google over the past few years.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said the partnership will:

… Create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company

Hopefully this will be good news for everyone all round!

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SPAM emails offering content writing services

One of the negative points of being easy to find in search engines, is that it leaves you open to more SPAM emails! We regularly get emails from companies offering link building services, cheap web design and many other potential outsourcing opportunities that we would never use! Before you say it, we do use some protection such as Captcha forms etc, however we like to make sure they are as a few barriers as possible to prevent potential clients from getting in touch!

The most recent one I received really made me laugh. It was a content writing service, where they offered very low cost content writing at something like $2 per blog post! Usually these types of companies are international, and the quality of grammar isn’t going to be great. Lets face it, for $2 per post you get what you pay for! Content is one of the most important parts of your online campaign, and if it’s not up to scratch then in one way or another, your campaign will fail! So the fact that the title to the SPAM email I received was ‘content writting’ (where writing was spelled incorrectly) really made me chuckle!

Remember, there is no substitute for good SEO content writing!

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Google penalises spammy page titles

As a regular user of Twitter, I noticed a tweet from Shaun Anderson (aka the hobo) that caught my attention. He had written a blog post about a case where a client had contacted him saying that had dropped in the rankings. On analysis of their site, he discovered that Google had heavily penalised the website for using ’spammy’ page titles. Now, a recommended maximum length for a title is approx 60-70 characters, and if your title extends this then it is normally ‘chopped’ off at the character limit when the results are displayed in Google SERPS. We would recommend adhering to his limit to avoid a ’spammy’ looking title in the eyes of both users and the search engines, and also because some browsers won’t actually display more than this character limit either.

In the case of Shaun Anderson, the clients title was long but not malformed, but was packed full of relevant keywords totalling around 500 characters!! Crazy, I know! When he performed a search for the website, Google actually didn’t display the title at all, only a full stop where the title should be. To anyone that does not know the website, that would appear extremely untrustworthy! Not only has the site been knocked down the rankings, but it now also looks ‘dodgy’ which will no doubt reduce the organic traffic even further.

There are a lot of people still trying to manipulate the search engine rankings through clever techniques, and it appears that as ever, Google is slowly cracking down on all of this kind of behaviour. If you’re using some page titles that aren’t properly optimised, we would recommend updating them accordingly now or risk facing the wrath of Google!

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What is a link bait?

link_bait1After writing a previous blog post on our top link building techniques, we have had a lot of people asking about link baiting. So just what exactly is a link bait?  Previously we described it as:

A link bait normally involves creating something on your website that is either useful, humorous, or unique in such a way that people will link to it (a bit like an online viral).

Link baiting can be a very powerful tool for creating links to your website, and although it was once considered a bad practice, it is now a completely legitimate way of naturally building links to your site. Most link baits are normally topical, for example, I’m sure there are many link baits based on Michael Jackson right now as people try to cash in. The window of opportunity for topical link baits can be small, so whatever you decide to do, you need to plan it carefully.  Here are 2 great examples of link baits that I thought were very clever:

1 - George Bush Flash game

There was an incident about 9 months ago where a news reporter took off his shoes and threw them at George Bush during a press conference. Less than 12 hours later, a Flash game had a appeared on the internet where you had to try and hit an animated George Bush by throwing shoes at him, at a cleverly named domain of sock and awe (http://www.sockandawe.com). When I viewed the game, it said that approx 5 million shoes had successfully hit George in the face. The highest possible score you can get is seemingly 99, but most people get an average of 10.  This gives you a good idea about how many visitors the site had in a short amount of time. Checking it today, there have been nearly 97 million hits to George! Looking at the site, I can see that there are 33,000 websites linking to the domain, and it has a Page Rank of 6!  This Page Rank strength is being passed onto the developer websites at the bottom of the page.

2 - Fight Night Round 4 fight prediction

The next example that I liked was by EA Games. EA produce the Fight Night boxing games for XBox 360 and PS3, and there latest game (Fight Night Round 4) was given an extra boost in PR prior to it’s release using a clever link bait on their website, and posted on video sites like YouTube. The developers simulated the fight between Ricky Hatton and Manny Pacquiao one week before the superfight, and posted it online for boxing fans to see. The fight ended with an 11th round KO of Hatton, which was very controversial for British fans. The link was sent around like wildfire which built up a lot of links, but also served to demo the game to many people that hadn’t heard of it before, showcasing the graphics and improved realistic game play.

Hopefully this post has explained what a link bait is, why it is so powerful, and the examples will give you some ideas for possible link baits of your own! To find out more about link baiting, other link building techniques or more about Elevator SEO, simply get in touch!

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Are Yahoo! mail hacking rumours true?

yahooI have had a Yahoo! mail account since 1999 - it was one of my very first email accounts & I still use it today even though it now gets bombarded by SPAM emails.  I heard a while back that there was a way of being able to hack into a Yahoo! account, by basically ‘tricking’ the system into giving you your login details by using the ‘forgotten password’ options. I don’t know the full details of the rumour, and if I did I wouldn’t re-post it on this site (so don’t ask!).  Anyway, I later dismissed this as nothing more than just another rumour / scare mongering that we see and hear on a daily basis.

However, I recently tried to login into my Yahoo! account, and it would not let me progress until I provided a secondary email account which they can use in the instance that I have forgotten my password. I managed to click in and out of the site, and could access my email without having to provide this information. I don’t know why, but I simply did not want to give them any more information about me, and I’m not going to forget my password - I’ve been using it for 10 years!  Anyway, I’ve been avoiding entering this information and I’m now completely locked out of my account unless I enter in this secondary email.

This suggests to me that perhaps there may be more to the rumours than I originally thought. Sending the information to a secondary email address would resolve the issue. However, I don’t want to give them that information. Perhaps I’m just being difficult, but what if this was my only email account? Would I have to create a new account just so that I could continue using it?  The other thing I found annoying, is that there is no way to refuse to enter it or to contact Yahoo! about it. Has anyone else experienced similar issues, or can you shed some light on the issue?

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