YouTube growing up

Mark Cuban recently prognosticated that youtube would soon be “sued into oblivion.” User generated content is, of course, a legal liability that must be measured along with other business risks. Are the high flying days of youtube over? Hardly. Youtube is rumored to be in talks with major content license holders as we speak, offering up ways to share the advertising wealth – based on how many times the content is viewed.

Moving toward the semantic web

Site Reference has a new article on Google’s new semantic indexing in it’s algorithm. While search engines have traditionally focused on keyword density and link popularity, the semantic web promises relevancy based on natural language. The article is a great introduction to the concepts of semantic indexing.

How are you handling 404 pages?

Yahoo has incorporated a new feature in it’s slurp bot to find how your website is handling missing pages. Yahoo occasionally may be requesting random gibberish URLs on your server – usually with slurpconfirm404 in them – to see how missing pages are being handled on your server. Understanding how Search Engine robots are crawling and responding to your site is vital in communicating the accessibility and relevancy of your content.

What is a 404 error?
A 404 error is a low level code that is supposed to be sent by a webserver when the page that has been requested is not found on the server. It communicates to the web browser (or search engine robot) that the content couldn’t be found. Even a missing graphic should return a 404 error. Don’t worry, your site correctly returns a 404 error unless you (or your “web guy”) has intentionally manipulated it to do otherwise.

What should be returned when an item is missing?
It makes sense to stick with predictable behaviors when dealing with both users and search engines alike. Some sites may have gotten away from sending 404 errors because that is ALL they were sending. It isn’t very user-friendly to send a page that simply says “404 error”, but with a little tweaking a sitemap and branded page can be sent to your user. This simple step will help you keep more visitors, and communicate to search engines when they have requested missing content.

See more about Yahoo and slurpconfirm404.

Yahoo Warns Growth of Internet Advertising Sales slowing in key sectors

Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo warned that ad sales were growing in two key sectors, but not growing as quickly as they had hoped. Semel’s warning was about the Auto and Financial services sectors. He added: “But Yahoo was careful to note that it cannot tell whether the current slowdown is a sign of broader trouble or is limited to ads from the auto and financial sectors.“

Brand your site with a Favicon

Favicons are the small icons you might see for sites in your favorites  / web bookmarks. While they have been around a while, some browsers show them to you more prominently than others. IE 7, due out any time now, uses the tabbed browsing features that have made Firefox, Flock and Safari such popular browsers. IE7′s tabs will show your favicon (if you have one), and give your site a boost in professionalism among your visitors.

If your site was developed by Hyper Dog Media, rest assured your site already has a favicon: We make it standard issue of the sites we develop. If you need a favicon, you may find this free favicon generator tool to be helpful.

How to go after a competitive niche: Top 10 Cameras on Flickr

A new article titled Top Ten Cameras on Flickr is a brilliant idea. The article has already been featured on Slashdot.org. The website it resides on will receive both excellent exposure(from a great demographic!), and tremendous page relevancy for the keywords “Top Ten Cameras”. It is hard for me to think this happened by accident, of course!

What makes the article much more compelling than other articles circulating on the internet with that topic? Well, this article uses info from Flickr to automatically generate the list. Without that nugget, this list would be the same as every other “Top Ten Cameras” on every other Camera review blog. With such an interesting twist, this article is a coup for a very competitive keyphrase.

How could you create such a list for your website? What unique twist would captivate your audience?

Keeping track of multiple passwords

RSA Security’s newest password management survey found that one of the greatest threats to corporate security is the weak password. Employees that change their too often, or have to juggle too many passwords for login to various services, are likely to choose weak passwords or even write them on a scrap of paper near their station. I am a little suspicious a survey that highlights RSA security as the solution to this problem, but it is valuable to stop and ask yourself “Do I have too many passwords to keep track of?”.
Sure, too many passwords lead to “irresponsible password behavior”. A single login and password for every service is usually a bad idea, too. Once an intruder has access, they could wreak tremendous havoc.

A sensible alternative is to choose Four passwords that you can actually remember. Make each password incrementally more random, if possible. Choose the weakest password, and use it to sign up for services that only need a password for the most rudimentary of tasks. Use the “second level” password for sites that may have some personal information – your name, address, etc. Save the “third level” password for sites that have your credit card on file. The final password is to be used only in online banking and/or paypal.

Gee, so simple. But who can keep track of Four passwords, anyway?! Good luck out there – no one ever said good security was easy!

(More information on the password survey)

Targeting the AdSense bot

Some page content can give Google’s AdSense the wrong impression of what your page may be about. On a page with multiple topics, your AdSense ads can come up with ads that are neither relevant nor profitable. To get around this problem, Google AdSense has a little known feature called “Section Targeting”.

To particularly emphasize a section, enclose the text in these tags:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
The text to be emphasized is here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

To have a section of text ignored, use this variation:
<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
Text to ignore goes here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
There is currently no limit as to how often you can use these tags. However, it may take one or two weeks before you see any changes. It is important to give AdSense big chunks of text to work with – avoid giving sections of text that are too small.

Electronic Voting Machines: More troubles

In Maryland, the electronic voting machines were inoperable when polling places opened. It was human error, though: Plastic wallet sized cards needed ro operate the machines were forgotten and a scramble ensued. By the end of the day, election workers had voters casting on scraps of paper, sealed inside envelopes purchased at the local pharmacy. Despite the cases of security issues(once hacked by a monkey?!), electronic voting is here to stay. Unfortunately, it seems the machines are being phased in too quickly – without the necessary fallbacks to paper balloting systems when needed. Track the latest issues during the primaries at www.blackboxvoting.org.

PPC Advertisers are tolerant of some fraud

A couple of high profile lawsuits against Google and Yahoo Search Marketing have made smaller advertisers stop and think about how much fraud might be happening in their PPC campaigns. After stopping and thinking, however, many search advertisers are willing to live with click fraud.

How to investigate click fraud
Several AdWords consultants we work with will not even investigate click fraud for clients without a certain minimum of AdWords business (think thousands per month). It just isn’t worth the effort, unfortunately.

To investigate, precise traffic measurements and testing procedures must be enacted. This is beyond most AdWords consultants, as it is more of a technical process than a marketing one.

Who are these PPC clickers / fraudsters?
A few reports have appeared in the news the last few years highlighting houswives in India making $300/month extra income by clicking ads.

A Black Hat SEO technique is to click your competitor’s ads until their daily budget is expended. While Google and Yahoo Search Marketing do make efforts to prevent click fraud, obviously more could be done.

As long as money is to be made in Google Adwords, most advertisers are going to be too busy honing their campaigns instead of focusing on click fraud.