Category Archives: SEO

Outsourcing Your Documents to Scribd and Gaining Exposure

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Web 2.0 is about sharing stuff. No need to repeat that any more than it’s already been said. But for many “Web 2.0″ sites/services out there, sharing is really the only thing they do. For instance, when you don’t really get anything by uploading a video to Metacafe or YouTube – you just share. But Scribd, the Web 2.0 “startup” (It’s been there for a while now…) for sharing text is a bit more than that. When you post content to Scribd, you tend to benefit in exchange.

When you upload a document to Scribd (which accepts almost all popular formats like OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and more), it’s automatically converted to .doc, .pdf, and .txt – and it comes with a converted-to-audio MP3 version as well. But most importantly – it’s a hell of a lot more convenient for your readers.

While you can embed a self-hosted video in your blog and have it streamed to your readers with little to no effort, inline and all, it’s a lot more complicated (rather, impossible) to embed a binary-encoded text file in a post or article. With Scribd, you can instantly embed a document like this:

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Wikia’s Outrageous Exploitation of the Human Race

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It’s official, Jimmy Wales has gone too far. The founder of Wikipedia is famous for tapping into users to generate content and traffic, building the internet’s largest chain/web of user-generated content and information. From the million+ articles written by users to the billions of incoming links that have given Wikipedia its super-human search result rankings, Wales has clearly mastered the art of human exploitation more than anyone ever has.

Most people are content with things the way they are: after all, it’s for a good cause! Go ahead and exploit humans, we agree, if the end result brings as much benefit and knowledge to the world as Wikipedia did and does. However, earlier this year, Wikipedia did a couple of things that created an outrage in the online community, by banning contributing sources to Wikipedia from getting the credit they deserve.

Now Wales is at it again, this time though, it’s not the greater good that’ll be benefiting: Jimmy Wales is now using end-users to bring in the cash!

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Using Bad Word Filters to Boost SEO & Productivity

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If you’re a webmaster, administrator, or moderator of any large blog, forum, or other community site, you’ll find that a lot of time is wasted spelling out URIs to various useful links, whether they’re to guides, reviews, downloads, or forms. On a big website with lots of members (especially that kind that don’t use the search feature), you’ll find that dozens of hours or more are wasted looking up and writing these URIs for your readers/members to follow.

Compare [url=http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP]Windows XP dual-boot guide[/url] to XP dboot — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which is easier, quicker, and simpler to use. But of course, your readers have no idea what “dboot guide” is or where they can find it – that’s where the “bad word filters” come in.

Most forums, blogs, wikis, and just about any other “web platform engines” have a plugin, module, or admin center feature to enable the filtering of swear words and their ilk. Simply create a new entry that replaces a quick and easy-to-remember “keyword” with a fully-formatted link of your choice. You can replace “qwerty” with “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or (much more usefully) replace things like “gsearch ” with “http://www.google.com/search?q=” which lets you type things like “gsearch EasyBCD” and have them automagically replaced with the appropriate link.

You can use this to boost productivity (by speeding up the process of finding, posting, and formatting links) and to increase SEO (by converting keywords to internal links to the respective pages). For instance, replacing all instances of “NeoSmart Technologies” with NeoSmart Technologies:[sourcecode language='java']NeoSmart Technologies[/sourcecode]

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Ask: The Algorithm Sucks

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Aks.com, the “new” (reborn) search engine poised to take over the world. Champions of personal privacy. Protectors data. Finders of answers, and the future of the web. Or at least, that’s what they’d have you believe. But don’t buy it, it’s all crap.

Ask.com always sucked. From when Jeeves the butler was still young and had a spring to his step, their results were never on-par with MSN, Yahoo, or fledgeling Google. They preyed on the new-comers to the web, giving them a corny man in a pinstriped suit and coattails bobbing on their screen, pointing them in the direction all the time. Ask claims their new algorithm is awesome – God only knows how much money went into the advertisement campaign alone.

We’re sorry to break it to you though: Ask.com’s search results are just as terrible – if not worse – than they ever were.

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Does Net-non-Neutrality Already Exist?

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Net-Neutrality is without a doubt the biggest techno-political debate of the year. The entire issue has spun out of control since mid-2006, and here on the eve of 2007 it has yet to be resolved. The only question is, has net-neutrality already been destroyed and hacked-to-pieces to a greater extent than anyone thought already existed?

Earlier today, Slashdot featured a story on EarthLink’s “random” dropping of email messages. We just concluded a test of our own, and we find the results may not be as random as they seem. In fact, the results point directly to a big spider of sorts, sitting in the middle of all the tubes and picking what goes through and what doesn’t.

According to EarthLink themselves, “EarthLink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail.” But what they don’t mention is, it isn’t random. As a matter of fact, our tests lead us to believe that EarthLink is indeed prioritizing not only message delivery time but also whether the messages ever get there or not.

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