Are You Being Scraped? Should You Care?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

You've seen 'em. The scraper sites that are stealing your content. They're a big pain in the you-know-what. You know it, I know it, they know it. But does it matter? It might. Scraper sites exist to make money. But how do they make money off of your content? It depends. Some scraper sites will steal your content and place AdSense ads on those pages to gain the revenue from people clicking on those ads. Other scraper sites will sell advertising. But how do they get your content? How Content Scrapers Operate There are bots that will crawl your site looking for specific keywords. When they find them they scrape that content and place it on the blog or website of the person who programmed the bot. This is CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...

January 3, 2008
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Content Development

News Community Founder Challenges Google

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

Rich Skrenta did so well with news portal Topix that he thinks he can topple Google from king of the search engine mountain. Now you can laugh. Here's a news flash for all you netpreneurs: Just because you were successful at building X doesn't mean you'll be successful at Y. Look at Microsoft. Off line - second only to God. Online, not even close. Third place in the search engine wars and not even gaining ground. I wish Skrenta luck. I sympathize with those who think Google has too much clout. But haven't they earned it? They gave searchers and advertisers what they wanted. That's what markets do. Have they provided a perfect search service? No. Not by a long shot. But they've CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...

Digg Outranks Wikipedia? Naaaaaah, Say It Isn’t So

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

WebPro News is reporting that Digg outranks Wikipedia for the search term "January 1 TCP/IP." You know what that means? It may mean that inbound links from authority sites may not be worth as much as they used to. Should webmasters be concerned? I'm not willing to say for sure just yet, but according to this video featuring Kara Ratliff, that is a possibility. Ratliff says, "Throw away everything you know about Google's way of archiving and ranking things. The incoming authority links are basically useless." Maybe she's right. If Digg does outrank Wikipedia for important search terms then it does show that more recent information can rank higher than historical information, and that has been a problem for all of the search engines. How many CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...

Ghostwriters, SEO, And The Vast Right Conspiracy

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

I can't say that ghostwriters are all bad. I can't say they're all good either. But if you're going to use a ghostwriter then I'd suggest that you do three things before you let your ghostwriter start writing your blog or website content for you: Interview your potential ghostwriter extensively. Don't let any ghostwriter touch your stuff until you are absolutely sure that your ghostwriter understands the basic principles of ghostwriting - he or she should be in the background while you are in the front (otherwise, why hire a ghostwriter?) - and make sure that your potential ghostwriter understands your business. Make your any ghostwriter you hire to write online content for you understands SEO. If they don't understand SEO better than you do then they CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...