saga of the Yahoo-Google (Make Microsoft Go Away) Advertising Deal

The continuing saga of the Yahoo-Google (Make Microsoft Go Away) Advertising Deal

Is anyone else besides me bored with this? Yahoo, in their search for survival ...uh, relevance and respect, just seems to be hanging on by their toenails—willing to compromise their sovereignty in exchange for perpetuating the Yahoo name a while longer.

Regardless, we feel obligated to document their demise, uh ...cover Yahoo out of habit. After all, we've been reporting their misadventures since the beginning of time. Therefore, in spite of the fact that hardly anyone even asks a question about them in today's Google-centric searchscape, here's the rest of our obligatory monthly 'what's up' with Yahoo lately.

Google is planning to move forward with its deal to provide search ads to Yahoo, despite the possibility that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust division may file a lawsuit to prevent it. The deal, expected to take place around mid-October 2008, would provide Yahoo a revenue stream that it badly needs, because apparently they're not real good at figuring out how to make money on their own.

Unfortunately for Yahoo, this deal also greatly increases Google's already-dominant position in the search advertising business. And, that is the main reason why the DOJ has serious anti-competitive concerns about a potentially monopolistic Goohoo—especially now that Google controls more than 70% of the US search ad market.

Regardless, the deal provides Yahoo with an expectation that revenues will increase by about $800 million in the first year, perhaps giving them the cash flow they need to continue fending off the much publicized hostile takeover attempts by Microsoft and shareholder Carl Icahn. It may also provide dry powder for consummating a relationship with (Internet loser) AOL. That's in light of the recent approval by Yahoo board members to enter negotiations with Time Warner over acquiring bits and pieces of the tired old online has been.

Anyway, the Goohoo deal stipulates that Yahoo will select the search terms that Google can show ads for. Yahoo plans to show Google ads for less-common (aka, long tail) search terms for which Yahoo doesn't have ad inventory. Neither Yahoo nor Google can see the other's bid prices for the ads being shown. This safeguard is supposed to prevent Yahoo from cherry-picking Google's best ads.

So far, we're unaware of any way for advertisers to opt out of having their AdWords ads shown on Yahoo—except, perhaps, to avoid bidding on long-tail search queries (ouch!).

It remains to be seen how this move will impact overall PPC costs. Stay Tuned.

—Stephen Mahaney, CEO Planet Ocean | Head Researcher, Esoos Bob

Google debunks the myth of the duplicate content penalty

Google debunks the myth of the duplicate content penalty

I read this somewhere and I cannot remember where....

Ok, this is kind of a "so what, big deal" because it never really was a duplicate content penalty. It has always been more of a duplicate content problem. Regardless, Google has now officially confirmed that the duplicate content penalty doesn't exist. You're not actually penalized by Google for having duplicate content on your site.

Rather, the issue is that duplicate content causes problems for you in lots of other ways. For instance, if you have different URLs pointing at the same content, Google will only show one of the those URLs in the search results. The other URLs aren't banned or penalized, they just don't get shown. Google does this to avoid displaying redundant listings in the search results.

The problem is that Google might not choose the URL you want them to use. Also, the more time that Google's spider spends crawling and filtering out redundant URLs, the less time it's likely to spend indexing your important pages.

Anyway, here's how to entice Google to always index the "correct" URL without wasting time dealing with duplicate content:

• Solve your site's canonical problems with a 301 redirect.
• Be consistent in your internal linking. Link to the version of URL you want indexed, and be consistent in how you format your links.
• When creating a Google Sitemap, make sure the URLs in your sitemap are the ones you want indexed.
• Block duplicate versions of your URLs using your robots.txt file

Remember, duplicate content won't cause your site to be banned or penalized—but it certainly can cause your site to perform badly in the rankings. Obviously, it's a problem you'll want to avoid. For more information, see our in-depth report: The SEO's Guide to Preventing Duplicate Content.

Of course, if you're operating on the dark side and stealing content from other sites on a large scale in order to spam the search engines (such as with scraper sites), then all bets are off. In such cases you can certainly expect a penalty and possibly a ban. But short of content scraping (and scrapers tend to be fully aware of the risks involved), dup-content penalties aren't your worry.

A more realistic concern is duplicate content produced when you share content with other websites. In such cases when multiple sites display the same content, Google will only list one of these pages in the search results while filtering out the rest of them.

Some of the criteria that Google uses to measure which page deserves being displayed in the search results include:

• The site where Google first indexed the page.
• The authority of the site hosting the page.
• Whether the various copies link back to an original source.

If you let other sites reprint content, make sure they link back to you. That should ensure you'll be credited as the original source. We also suggest you embed links back to your site within your articles. By doing so you're making it clear to Google which site is the originator, even if people steal your content without permission. And, if content-theft is a problem, be sure to read our report: What To Do When Someone Steals Your Content.

Also take note that filtering of duplicate pages is a big reason why traditional article marketing doesn't work very well anymore. If you syndicate a single article to dozens of article directories, you'll only get credit for a single link because all of the other copies of your article are filtered out of the search results. Be sure to read our report on article marketing done right where we show you how to get around this issue and get credit for your article marketing links.

Finally, keep in mind that if you've had duplicate content problems on your site, you don't need to file a reconsideration request because you haven't actually been penalized. All you'll need to do is solve the problems by taking appropriate actions.

For more information on how Google handles duplicate content, see the Google help files.

55 Do-follow Social Networks

I wanted to give Frank credit for his hard work on these Do-follow Social Networks. To get the word out use these Social sites.

55 Do-follow Social Networks

08 Sep

Posted by: Frank Levert in: Link Building, Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Social Networking

Last month I was discussing one-way link building using social bookmarks and mentioned that I would soon publish a list of “do-follow” social networks so here it is…my “Top 55 Do-Follow Social Networks”!

The list was updated today and I personally verified the source code of each social network to make sure there were no rel=”nofollow” tags being used on their links. Note that some networks would only use do-follow links with their most popular articles while other ones would only use do-follow links when showing the full URL of the news source. You will find those in gray at the bottom of the page while there is still an impressive list of 41 “true” do-follow social networks to start with.

Enjoy and please take the time to vote for this if you find it useful.

PR	Social Network	Do-Follow
9	www.slashdot.org	Yes
8	www.2collab.com	Yes
8	www.digg.com	Yes
7	www.mixx.com	Yes
7	www.hugg.com	Yes
7	www.folkd.com	Yes
7	www.dzone.com	Yes
6	www.searchles.com	Yes
6	www.bibsonomy.org	Yes
6	www.swik.net	Yes
6	www.plime.com	Yes
5	www.myvmarks.com	Yes
5	www.kwoff.com	Yes
5	www.jeqq.com	Yes
5	www.bringr.com	Yes
5	www.web2list.com	Yes
5	www.quadriot.com	Yes
5	www.unalog.com	Yes
5	www.linkatopia.com	Yes
4	www.oyax.com	Yes
4	www.memestreams.net	Yes
4	www.bookmarksync.com	Yes
4	www.bmaccess.net	Yes
4	www.ausculture.com	Yes
4	www.1topix.com	Yes
4	www.blogmarks.net	Yes
3	www.th3scoop.com	Yes
3	www.megite.com	Yes
3	www.earthfrisk.com	Yes
3	www.contentpop.com	Yes
3	www.actualtopics.com	Yes
3	www.postonfire.com	Yes
2	www.stuffs4u.com	Yes
2	www.givealink.org	Yes
2	www.dekut.com	Yes
2	www.diggdirect.com	Yes
2	www.oopza.com	Yes
0	www.i89.us	Yes
0	www.bookmark-tag.com	Yes
0	www.under-link.com	Yes
0	mystuff.ask.com	Yes
7	www.reddit.com	In Main Categories
7	www.spurl.net	On Main Page
5	www.mylinkvault.com	On Main Page
6	www.sphinn.com	25+ Votes Articles
8	www.stumbleupon.com	URL Only
7	www.current.com	URL Only
6	www.kaboodle.com	URL Only
4	www.urlex.info	URL Only
4	www.highvibeit.com	URL Only
3	www.wobblog.com	URL Only
3	www.plugim.com	URL Only
3	www.kez6.com	URL Only
2	www.shareddish.com	URL Only
0	www.your-bookmark.com	URL Only

Celebrate Google's 10th Birthday Try a Search From the Early Days

Celebrate Google's 10th birthday: try a search from their early days.

In honor of our 10th birthday, we've brought back our oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001.

This logo is great....Same colors different design.