On-Line Marketing - Saturday, March 11, 2006

Google Base


Google Base
http://www.kvcindia.com/blog Google today announced the launch of Google Base, a free online resource for the selling of products and services online (and a whole lot more). While the service itself is provided to increase the types of information the can be made available through Google including information that is otherwise not available online it also stands potentially to take a big bite out of eBay over time. Combine this with the largely anticipated launch of Google Wallet and voila - eBay & PayPal vs. Google Base & Google Wallet. Hmmmm .... I wonder who'll be left standing 3 years from now. ;) There's not much in there yet but I'd highly recommend checking out Google Base at http://base.google.com/ and become familiar with how it all works. If you sell a product or service then this free tool stands to be a fantasitc addition to your marketing arsenal. It currently has many limitationsbut it's sure to be improved over time.

On-Line Marketing - Friday, March 10, 2006

Google Calendar Long Way Off


Google Calendar Long Way Off
Screenshots of Google's forthcoming calendar application have been leaked, according to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. There's still no word on when the application, currently in closed beta, will be released, but Arrington says it's a "long way from launch."

On-Line Marketing - Thursday, March 09, 2006

Advanced Use of Robots.txt


Advanced Use of Robots.txt
http://www.kvcindia.com/blog Advanced Robots.txt Commands and Features While the basic commands that make up a robots.txt file are two types of information, there are some commands and features that can be used. I should let you know, however, that not all search engine spiders understand these commands. It?s important to know which ones do and which do not. Crawl Delay Some robots have been known to crawl web pages at lightening speeds, forcing web servers to ban ip addresses from the robots, or disallowing them to crawl the websites. Some web servers have automatic flood triggers implemented, with automatic ip-banning software in place. If a search engine spider crawls too quickly, it can trigger these ip-bans, blocking the subsequent crawling activities of the search engine. While some of these robots would do well with a ban, there are others more likely that you do not wish banned. Instead of the following example, which subsequently bans the robot from crawling any of your pages, another solution was offered to this problem. The crawl delay command. User-agent: MSNbot Disallow: / MSNbot was probably the most notorious offender. In an SEO forum, ?msndude? gave some insight into this: ?With regards to aggressiveness of the crawl: we are definitely learning and improving. We take politeness very seriously and we work hard to make sure that we are fixing issues as they come up? I also want to make folks aware of a feature that MSNbot supports?what we call a crawl delay. Basically it allows you to specify via robots.txt an amount of time (in seconds) that MSNbot should wait before retrieving another page from that host. The syntax in your robots.txt file would look something like: User-Agent: MSNbot Crawl-Delay: 20 ?This instructs MSNbot to wait 20 seconds before retrieving another page from that host. If you think that MSNbot is being a bit aggressive this is a way to have it slow down on your host while still making sure that your pages are indexed.? Other search engine spiders that support this command are Slurp, Ocelli, Teoma/AskJeeves, Spiderline and many others. Googlebot does not officially support this command, however it is usually fairly well-mannered and doesn?t need it. If you are not sure which robots understand this command, a simple question presented to the search engine?s support team could easily help you with this. There is a good list of search engine robots at RobotsTxt.org with contact information if you are unsure how to reach them. It?s not always easy to know which website the robot belongs to. You may not know, for example, that Slurp belongs to Yahoo, or that Scooter belonged to AltaVista.

On-Line Marketing - Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Thousands Protest Against WTO in Hong Kong


Thousands Protest Against WTO in Hong Kong
http://www.kvcindia.com HONG KONG -- About 4,000 anti-globalization activists _ some carrying a giant spider and others wheeling statues of emaciated people _ marched Sunday in the first mass protest against the World Trade Organization's summit in Hong Kong. The 149-member WTO, which set rules for global commerce, is a champion of free trade, which it says brings global economic prosperity. But many protesters say globalization favors the rich and robs workers of their jobs. Anti-globalization activists march with huge effigy of a WTO monster towards the Government Headquarters Sunday, Dec. 11, 2005 in the first mass protest two days before the opening ceremony of the World Trade Organization summit in Hong Kong. The activists view the WTO as favoring the interests of major corporations and rich nations. They claim the global economic system benefits rich nations at the expense of poor ones. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez) (AP) The demonstrators, who have been flooding into Hong Kong from around the world ahead of the meeting on Dec. 13-18, marched from Hong Kong's downtown Victoria Park to the government's main office. [...] Read more!

On-Line Marketing - Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Internal Link architecture - link Weigh & Page Rank


Internal Link architecture - link Weigh & Page Rank
http://www.kvcindia.com/blog Link Weight In order to understand the ideal internal linking strategy, we must consider the concept of Link Weight. The Importance of Link Weight As we demonstrated in the article entitled Anchor Text & Inbound Links, on-page elements often have no sway over your search engine ranking. In fact, I often find myself quoting explaining thus: The simple fact is - and even a child can understand this - you could put the words "search engine optimization" in your page titles, in your H1 tags, in your ALT text and a hundred times in text of the page and it would not get you into the top ten for that search term. This is because some search engines place more weight on how other pages refer to your pages, instead of what your page says about itself. This is why Monster.com is #1 for the search term Jobs, even without the word Jobs anywhere on the page. As you can see, Link Weight used properly can be much more powerful than page-elements SEO. Link Weight = PageRank? Link Weight is not to be confused with Google's PageRank. PageRank adheres to pages; Link Weight adheres to links. [...] Read more!

The Rundown on 301 and 302 Redirects
http://www.kvcindia.com/blog When to redirect, and why The critical subject of redirecting a domain name to another has always generated a lot of controversy and has been the center of debate for many webmasters for almost as long as the Internet has existed. The need for having a site redirected to another URL can be based on many factors. One valid reason for doing this could be if you have a website and if your company name happens to be the domain name for your site. In order to make your site more ?keyword-rich? in the search engines, you might want to seriously consider changing your domain name to another one. With the price of domain names falling almost constantly, the cost factor isn?t as much an issue as it was a few years ago. If your company sells flowers online, you make a search for ?onlineflowers.com? and you might notice the domain name is available. You can register that domain name, and have it ?point? to your other URL, effectively making both domain names functional. [...] Read more!