A Nevada District Court case has ruled in favor of Chanel, allowing the company to take down over 800 domain names that sell counterfeit products. The ruling also mandated that Google and others de-index the suspect properties.

The Chanel v Defendants Case

In a November 14 order, Kent J. Dawson (United States District Judge in Nevada) gave Chanel permission to seize 228 domains that, Chanel claimed, were selling counterfeit goods. Further, Dawson gave Chanel permission to change redirects and other settings via Google Webmaster Tools or other online utilities.

But control of the domains isnt all that Chanel won. Dawson ruled that Subject Domain Names shall immediately be de-indexed and/or removed from any search results pages of all Internet search engines including, but not limited to, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and all social media websites including, but not limited to, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Beyond standard de-indexing, this implies that social media sites will have to censor user-posted links.

The 228 domains are just the most recent; Chanel previously received permission to seize more than 600 domains.

After seizure, the original webmasters retain the rights to the content and can hypothetically re-post to a new domain, and at least some webmasters who registered their domains in a foreign country havent had their domains seized. Visitors who attempt to go to a seized domain are now redirected to a page showing details of the Chanel case ruling.

The hundreds of webmasters whose domains were pulled werent given notice until after the domains had already been seized. The judge who made the ruling allowed Chanels evaluation, which for the most part involved examination of sites by a Chanel counterfeit expert; less than 2 percent of the most recent batch of sites had their products evaluated in the non-virtual world.

Is the Ruling Crazy?

Reactions to the story are varied. Some feel this judge was extending well beyond his jurisdiction for a District Court ruling by handing control of hundreds of sites (owned by webmasters across the globe) and a chunk of the Google index (property of a California-based business) over to Chanel (a New Yorkbased company). Others feel that the companies whose domains were seized needed to be given a more full and fair evaluation. Still others are deeply concerned about the idea of sites being censored at all.

While there are plenty of legitimate worries to bring up here, I want to remind you that youre probably not as unilaterally opposed to censorship as you think; youre probably just opposed to certain types of censorship. For example, an email spam filter is a form of private censorship, as is the SERP positioning for any given query. Even pulling certain sites down completely isnt a terrible tragedy to most of us; my guess is youre fine with a legal ruling stopping a child pornography site.

Yet the problem of counterfeit products is still very real, so what should be done?

Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko, believes the solution lies in new web technology, including ideas of expert search curation (as presented by Blekko search), social vetting (as with Facebook), and user-driven responses to questions (as with Quora). Skrenta also notes that Bing admits it is using its own editors to curate results, so there are some potential in-house solutions as well.

But the problem with the legal ruling is also about effectiveness. Having a federal judge curating a multibillion-page search index is a little like putting a finger in the hole of the dam without realizing there are 100 more holes draining the same lake, says Skrenta. But he doesnt deny that something needs to be done: If we need spam filters to protect us from malicious email attacks, then we also need something to protect us from getting ripped off by phony web sites or having our computers trashed because we click on a malicious link in search results.

What do you think? Whose rights are at stake here, and whose should be prioritized? Should the government be doing more to protect users from online scams? What additional countermeasures should Google be implementing? What should be legally mandatory? Sound off in the comments.

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

Now that the holidays are upon us, we all probably could use some cheering up. So I thought Id have some fun with our favorite search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, and Blekko.

At Nine By Blue, I have been developing software that automatically checks sites for technical SEO best practices. Normally we run it on our clientss sites to quickly check for issues and monitor them for any future problems.

But I was curious to see what I would find if I pointed the software at some typical pages on the search enginess sites and then compare their implementations with the technical SEO best practices that we typically recommend.

Below is a list of some of the issues that I found in no particular order.

Disclaimer #1: This list is intended to point out how difficult it is to fully optimize a site for SEO, especially large-scale enterprise sites. Im not claiming that I could have done any better, even if I had full control of these sites.

Disclaimer #2: Yes, Im aware of Googles SEO report card, but I have never read it because it is too long. Also, I didnt want to be influenced by it.

Use a Link Rel=Canonical Tag On The Homepage

Most of the sites that I reviewed had many different URLs that lead to the home page. This can be because of tracking parameters (ie http://www.site.com/?ref=affilliate1) or default file names (ie http://www.site.com/index.php), or even duplicate subdomains (http://www1.site.com/).

Because of this, I always recommend putting a link rel=canonical tag on the home page. This ensures that links to these different home page URLs all get counted as pointing to the same URL. I also recommend adding this tag for any other pages that might have similar issues.

I was surprised to find that Bing was the only site that had a proper link rel=canonical tag on the home page.

YouTube also has a link rel=canonical tag, but it was pointing to an improper URL / instead of the full URL http://www.youtube.com/.

Avoid Duplicate Subdomains amp; 301 Redirect Them To The Main Subdomain

With a few exceptions, I have been able to find a duplicate copy of the sites that I review.

I have a list of typical subdomains like www1, dev, api, m, etc. that will generally turn up a copy of the site. Other duplicate copies of a site can be found at the IP address (ie http://192.168.1.1/ instead of http://www.site.com/) and by probing DNS for additional hostnames or domains.

These duplicate subdomains or duplicate sites have a negative effect on SEO because they make the search engines crawl multiple copies of your site just to get one copy. It can also cause links intended for a particular page to be spread out among multiple copies, reducing the pages authority.

The best way to fix this is to use a permanent (301) redirect to canonical subdomains version of that URL. If that isnt possible, then a link rel=canonical tag pointing to the canonical subdomain page will work almost as well.

For example, an entire duplicate copy of Bing.com is available at http://www1.bing.com/. Compounding this is the fact that the page has a link rel=canonical tag also pointing to http://www1.bing.com/ and all the links on the page point to www1 as well.

Other subdomains, such as www2 through www5 and www01, all properly redirect to www.bing.com with a 301.

Blekko has an old, pre-launch copy of its site at http://api.blekko.com/. (Here is their old executive page.) Fortunately, this subdomain has a robots.txt file that is preventing it from being crawled. But these pages, like the old executive page at http://api.blekko.com/mgmt.html is also available at http://dev.blekko.com/mgmt.html and the main subdomain at http://blekko.com/mgmt.html.

It would be better to 301 redirect these URLs to the current management page at http://blekko.com/ws/+/management than to leave multiple copies of them on different subdomains.

YouTube redirects its duplicate subdomains www1 through www5 to www.youtube.com, which is in line with best practices. Unfortunately, it redirects with a 302 (temporary) redirect rather than a recommended 301 (permanent) redirect.

Use Permanent Redirects From https: URLs To http: URLs IF They Dont Require SSL

Another type of duplicate copy of a site that I usually find is the SSL/https version of the site. https is appropriate for pages that require security, like a login page or a page for editing a user profile, but for pages that dont require security, it is a source of duplicate content causing crawl inefficiency and link diffusion.

The recommended solution for this is to redirect pages from https to http whenever possible.

Our software detected duplicate https copies of most pages, including Microsofts help pages, the YouTube about pages, Googles corporate page, and even the Google webmaster guidelines.

The duplicate content issue with the Google webmaster guidelines page (and the other Google help pages) is compounded by a link rel=canonical tag that points to either the http or https version of the URL, depending on URL is requested.

It is important to make sure that the link rel=canonical tag always points to the intended canonical version of the page, so be careful when dynamically generating this element.

A request for https://www.bing.com/ results in a security warning (shown below) due to a mismatched SSL certificate. This is common for sites using Akamai for global server load balancing.

It even pops up for https://www.whitehouse.gov/. Im not aware of a way to get around this issue, though I would love to talk with something at Akamai about this.

Use Robots.txt File To Prevent URLs From Being Crawled

Sites generally have different types of pages that they dont want to have search engines index. This could be because these pages are unlikely to convert or arent a good experience for users to land on, like a create an account or leave a comment page. Or it could be because the page is not intended for Web browsers, like an XML response to an API call.

Bings search API calls, which are made to URLs starting with http://api.bing.com/ or http://api.bing.net/ can be crawled by spiders according to the robots.txt file. This can be devastating to crawl efficiency because search engines will continue to crawl these XML results even though they are useless to browsers.

A search on Google for [site:api.bing.net OR site:api.bing.com] currently returns about 260 results, but based on analysis I have done on clients Web access log files, it is many times more URLs than these have been crawled and rejected.

Use ALT Attributes In Images

Images should always be given alternate text via the ALT attribute (not TITLE or NAME as I have seen on some sites). This is good for accessibility issues like screen readers, and it provides additional context about a page to search engines.

Though many images on the pages that were checked had appropriate alternate text, I couldnt help but notice that Duane Forresters image on his profile page didnt. But he is in good company because Larry, Sergey, Eric, and the rest of the Google executive team dont either.

Avoid Use Of Rel=Nofollow Attributes On Links To sculpt PageRank

A rel=nofollow attribute on a link tells search engines not to consider the link as part of its link graph. Occasionally, I will review a site that attempts to use this fact to control the way that PageRank flows through a site.

This technique is generally considered to be ineffective and actually counterproductive, and I always recommend against it. (There are still valid uses for rel=nofollow attributes on internal links, such as link to pages that are excluded from being crawled by robots.txt.)

None of the search engine pages I checked were using rel=nofollow attributes in this way with the exception of the YouTube home page.

In the image below, nofollowed links are highlighted in red. Links to the most viewed and top favorited are being shown to search engines but general music, entertainment, and sports videos are not.

Return Response Codes Directly

A URL that doesnt lead to a valid page should return a 404 (page not found) response code directly.

If an invalid URL is sent to Bings community blog site, it will redirect to a 404 page. Here is the chain:

1. The URL http://www.bing.com/community/b/nopagehere.aspx returns a 302 (temporary) redirect to
2. the URL http://www.bing.com/community/error-notfound.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/community/b/nopagehere.asp, which returns a 404 (page not found) response.

The recommended best practice would be for the first URL to return a 404 directly. If that isnt possible, then the redirect should be changed to a 301 (permanent) redirect.

Yahoos corporate information pages do something interesting when they get an invalid URL.

A request to http://info.yahoo.com/center/us/yahoo/anypage.html, which is not a valid URL, correctly returns a 404 (page not found) response.

But the 404 page contains an old school meta refresh with a time of one second that redirects to http://info.yahoo.com/center/us/yahoo/.

A 301 redirect to this page is the recommended way to handle these types of invalid URLs.

Support If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified Conditional GETs

I am a big fan of using cache control headers to increase crawl efficiency and decrease page speed. (My article on this topic is here.)

I found it interesting that out of all the URLs that were checked only a few Google URLs supported If-Modified-Since requests and none of the URLs supported If-None-Match.

Periodically Check Your DNS Configuration

As part of a site review, I like to use on-line resources like http://intodns.com/ and http://robtex.com/ to check the DNS configuration.

DNS is an important part of technical SEO because if something breaks with DNS, then the site will go down and it isnt going to get crawled. Fortunately, this rarely happens.

However, I have reviewed sites that had their crawling affected by DNS changes. And I have reviewed several large sites that had their DNS servers on the same subnet, essentially creating a single point of failure for their entire business.

As expected, all the search engines had no serious DNS issues. I was surprised to see that two of them had recursion enabled on their name servers because in some rare instances that can be a security risk.

My recommended best practice is to run these types of checks at least once a quarter.

Conclusion

These are a few of the issues that were found that I commonly see or think are important. There were others, but they were relatively minor or subtle things like short titles, duplicate/missing meta descriptions, missing headers, and too many static resources per page.

Normally, I would have access to Web access log files and webmaster tools, which allows our software to check a lot more things.

I hope this gives you some ideas for things to check on your own site. And I hope that when you find something that you realize that even the search engines have their own technical SEO issues from time to time.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO

Denver, Colorado (PRWEB) December 04, 2011

MemeBridge, a leading web publish company, is offering a portion of its automobile-related domains for sale to the public.

The majority of these sports-related domains are exact match domains. Exact match domains are exceptionally valuable because they receive a significant ranking bonus from the major search engines, including Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo. These bonuses lead to improved search engine rankings, which lead to more traffic, which leads to greater revenue.

As an example, the domain HowToDriveACar.net will be much easier to rank for the search phrase how to drive a car than a domain called DrivingACar.net.

The exact match domain bonus applies only to top level domains with the com, net, and org extensions. For example, the domain SportRim.net will be much easier to rank for the search phrase sport rim than the domain SportRim.biz.

This exact match bonus gives the owner of the domains an unfair advantage in the search engine rankings and makes these domains extremely valuable for receiving traffic from the major search engines. Investing in an exact match domain can pay for itself many times over by reducing the amounts that much be spent on search engine marketing.

These domains do not have set prices. Interested parties should contact MemeBridge with serious offers.

Corporate Summary

MemeBridge is a company with a mission: Spread Good Ideas. A meme is the smallest unit of thought and the job of MemeBridge is to build bridges which help good memes overcome obstacles. MemeBridge has extensive experience creating and managing web publications, including iHowd.com and Tech-FAQ.com. MemeBridge web sites serve millions of visitors per month and provide information and guidance to people from all over the globe.

# # #

Everyone knows what search engines are. But relatively few know how to use them effectively. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are critically important to online businesses. You can spend every penny you have on a website, but it will all be for nothing if nobody knows your site is there.

My next few blog posts will break down some of the fundamentals of search engines, help you better understand how they work, and tell you how you can make them work for you.

Its important to know what you dont know. Its okay if you dont know directly what to do with this information. The important thing is to know that its important, and then find someone (either in-house staff, or a consultant) who specializes in these matters to get your website search-engine optimized.

How the search engines really work
Search engines use electronic devices (called spiders, bots, or robots) to scan the Internet for information from all public websites. After the search engine has cataloged this information, someone entering a word or phrase (a query) can call up a ranked list of all the relevant search results.

Relevance is a search engines holy grail. People want results that are closely connected to their queries. Different search engines use different criteria and rules to determine relevance. For example, some engines use the number of links pointing to a particular website as a gauge of its popularity. Others use the domain name. For example, CuffLinks.com would be more popular than abcufflinks.com.

Every search engine has developed formulas – and the formulas are constantly changing – to evaluate the relevance of any web pages content to a search query. Search engine companies tend to keep their formulas for this process secret. Heres an explanation of this from Google. Stop reading if you get a headache:

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, were able to put
the most relevant and reliable results first. (Corporate Information, Google)

Organic Search
Most Internet users are not inclined to wade through pages and pages of search results. So the goal for businesses is not merely to be listed, but to place in the first few pages of results – ideally, on the first page.

In the past, you could pay for higher placements in query results that applied to your site. There are still a few search engines that will do this. But Google changed the playing field when it designed an egalitarian model that produced ranked, relevant results from all available sites, not just those that paid for the privilege. As a result, search engine optimization and search engine marketing soon became critical areas businesses needed to address to improve visibility and drive traffic.

At the present time search results come in two flavors: organic and paid. Paid results appear in a pale-colored box across the top and run partway down the right side of the page. Organic results fill the majority of the page, usually include more description and have a link near the end of the text.

When you optimize your pages for organic search, your goal is to move your pages higher in the list of search results. Search engine optimization should be a part of your marketing program. It does take time to achieve improved rankings this way, but the work will pay off in the long run. Basic optimization strategies include cultivating incoming links and presenting quality content (especially text) that incorporates important Keywords. While its difficult to track how much website owners are making from organic search engine marketing, many people are making a living from the business leads they get through organic results. There are many companies that offer optimization services, and it can definitely be worth your while to invest in their expertise.

On-Page and Off-Page Factors That Affect Ranking
Many factors contribute to getting higher search-engine rankings. On-page factors are those associated with your sites web pages. Off-page factors are ways to affect your ranking that dont appear on an actual web page.

On-page factors include:

1. Strong Keywords. Determine the best Keywords and Keyword phrases for
your market, products and the people searching for your products and services.

2. Design. Know how to design a page that is search-engine friendly. This is part art, part science and extremely important. I recall an entire website that was designed in a type of software that makes website design easy. The site looked great, but the search engines couldnt read any words on the page. The result: the beautiful site was invisible to the search engines.

3. Create words. Put words on your page that are the exact same as the top
search engine queries people type into the search engines when they are looking for what you provide. Its also a good idea to use synonyms for these words.

4. Each page on the site must be original content. Dont copy text from a supplier. If you take the product description directly from a supplier, your page will be the same as every other firm that uses the same text. You wont place any higher in the rankings, and the duplication may work against you.

5. Freshness of the content. Keep your content up-to-date. Be on top of your market so you can continually revise Keywords and copy.

6. Usability. Make certain your site is user-friendly. Categorization schemes based on hyperlinked text are excellent ways to improve rankings and help your visitors quickly find what they are looking for.

7. Direct navigation. How much direct navigation traffic does the site get? A domain name built on one of your primary Keywords is like gold.

8. Metatags. Each page of your site needs a unique metatag to tell the search engines about that page. Make sure you understand how to use metatags properly.

9. Stickiness. Look at website metrics that let you know how long a visitor stays on a page and on your site overall. Do people stay on your site for 8 seconds or 15 minutes? If users stay on a site longer, the site is generally doing a better job meeting their needs. Sites that arent sticky generally fail to present targeted, persuasive copy (and copy does affect your ranking). When visitors stay on a page longer, search engines give the page a higher importance rating.

10. Site submissions. In general, you are better off waiting until the spiders naturally crawl your site. There are techniques to speed up the process. When search engines do allow you to submit your site, the process can take time. Submitting your site may make sense if you have made major changes to your site, but be very careful not to submit frequently. Understand the specific requirements of each search engine and submit your web address accordingly.

Off-page factors include:

1. Links. Frequently reevaluate the inbound and outbound links to your site
and answer these questions:

• How many links point to your site?
• Are they quality links?
• How old are the links?
• What is the content at the other end of those links?
• Were they free links or did you pay for them?
• Do you reciprocate these links?
• Do the links take the prospect directly to the page they want or to the homepage?

2. Directory listings. Services such as Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and
Yahoo! are respected directory listings. When these directories include a link to your site, it has a bearing on how the search engines rank your site. Submitting each page on your site separately (each with its own set of Keywords) to a directory can also help raise your rankings.

Paid Search
Internet users submit hundreds of millions of inquiries into search engines and dont pay a dime – but the search industry takes those free searches and turns them into gold. They do it by offering advertising to those who want to reach targeted buyers.

Heres how it works. Businesses enroll in a search engines advertising program and create Pay-Per-Click ads that are Keyword-driven. They choose words or phrases that are relevant to their businesses. An auto repair shop in Chicago might choose Chicago car mechanic. The ads appear when search engine users type in those words. When someone clicks on the ad, the business pays the search engine for that click, whether the prospect buys anything or not. Advertisers dont pay a flat fee for ad placement. Instead, they bid how much they are willing to pay when a search engine user clicks on one of their ads. The highest bid wins placement at the top of the Pay-Per-Click list. Advertisers pay the per-click amount they bid only when a user clicks on the ad.

This is a revolution in marketing. This model puts advertisers in closer touch with the people who are predisposed to purchase their products or services. Those people have expressed their interest (and their intent) through the Keywords they entered in their search query. As a result, businesses waste fewer advertising dollars. Search-based advertising has attracted thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs that havent spent money on advertising in the past.

Stay tuned for future posts in my Search Engines 101 series, to include more on search-engine advertising, keywords, and direct navigation traffic.

New research involving popular search engines Google and Bing reveal that Google is not as biased in favor of its own sites as Bing. According to Search Engine Land, Bing serves Microsoft-related results Far more often than Google provides links to its own services in search results.

The research was done by Josh Wright, a professor of law and economics at George Mason University. Wright entered a large, random array of search queries into both Google and Bing and found that Bing favors Microsoft content more frequently and prominently than Google favors its own content. Specifically, Google references itself in its first results position in 6.7 percent of the queries, while Bing showcases Microsoft in the top spot in 14.3 percent of queries. Thats more than twice as often.

Wright believes his research will help dispel the challenges Google has faced regarding anti-competitive behavior. According to Search Engine Land, the popular site has been served with an FTC inquiry over its business practices, antitrust complaints and Senate hearings.

Earlier this year, however, a study conducted by Harvard professor Ben Edelman reached the opposite conclusion. His research, which involved a wide array of search engines, came to the conclusion that Google intentionally places its results first.

Edelmans results may need to be taken with a grain of salt. Search Engine Land noted that Edelman has been a longtime paid consultant to Microsoft, while Wrights research was sponsored by the International Center for Law amp; Economics.

Search engines use machine learning for pattern detection. While its impossible to explain in one short article how machine learning influences our lives, understanding the basics of machine learning can give you some insight into search algorithm updates, such as Googles Panda update.

Correlation Between Variables

To predict the outcome of future tests, scripts can use supervised learning on past outcomes to define a hypothetical prediction line. The three images below show how plotted examples define averages. These averages are more likely to represent some truth as the training set grows.

In this case the correlation between a number for duplicate content and a number based on negative reviews by manual quality raters is plotted. As the learning set grows the prediction becomes more certain.

Anomalies can initially have a huge impact on the hypothesis, but their effect diminishes in areas with a lot of reference material. This also indicates that not every part of the hypothesis line is equally rigid and the level of certainly can play a separate role in computer learning.

The hypothesis in the previous example is based on a formula that produces a straight line. Other formulas with incremental steps or curves could in some cases represent the given data much closer.

In advanced learning problems there are additional learning scripts that compare various formula types and automatically select which one to use for the closest approximation. Below are two examples of different prediction formulas.

Combining Variables

The previous forecast shows a likely correlation between duplicate content and a bad user experience. But is it a causal issue or do sites with a lot of duplicate content also often have old-fashioned web designs, a bad brand reputation, or excessive advertising? And where do you draw the line between good and bad?

The example below shows that combining the forecast graphs of positive and negative often provides the optimum middle. This distinction is required for decision learning with multiple variables.

Decision learning is best done with only two or three possible outcomes at each step. A decision tree can look like this. This is nothing like the real Panda tree, so dont look at these fictive numbers.

To automatically generate such a tree, a script can try multiple variables to find out which has the most distinct difference between two groups. Where certain variables might not be the best way to divide the entire dataset, they might show a great distinction within an already divided subset. At each step the script can choose which next variable and which threshold provide the best division.

Forest Models

Google doesnt only use its human quality raters to create decision trees. It can use numerous indicators like bounce rate, social signals, links, and visitor data. These can be used as a desired or undesired outcome and create their own trees.

Mixing different formulas of prediction and division has the possibility to create many trees. Each addition to the dataset is also likely to alter it slightly. Scripts can even use unsupervised learning without teaching it any outcome.

In these automated trees a script keeps dividing into groups on all available variables including quality indicators. It is then afterwards possible to see what all branches with undesirable quality have in common.

With all these trees and possibilities it isnt smart to choose just the best tree. The best way is finding recurring patterns in all trees and their respective outcome certainty. Combined these patterns are the best bamboo forests to feed your Panda (forests represent combinations of trees).

The Details of Machine Learning

Machine learning is very geeky stuff and even this extremely simplified explanation might seem mind boggling. If you are however a mathematician, the next step is following the free Stanford video lectures on the topic.

The material has been hard to simplify without leaving out certain details. Comment if you see any important inaccuracies.

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

Internet Explorer gives you options to select a default search engine, also called search provider, during the initial setup on first start. You find a list of search providers that are currently installed in the browser under Manage Add-ons. Please note that this guide uses Internet Explorer 9 to walk you through the steps of setting up a search provider, and that it may differ if you are using a different version of Microsofts Internet browser.

Internet Explorer 9 users click on the Tools icon in the upper right corner of their browser and select Manage Add-ons from the context menu. This opens the add-on manager that displays all toolbars, extensions and search providers installed in the browser. Switch to search providers to see a list of search engines currently available in the browser.

One of the search providers is listed as the default search engine under Status. If you are lucky enough, the new search provider that you want to use is already in the list. If that is the case select the new provider and click on the Set as default button afterwards to switch the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

It is furthermore possible to select a specific search provider manually for a search query that you enter into Internet Explorers address bar.

But what can you do if the search provider is not in the list? Easy; You visit the Internet Explorer add-ons gallery and use the available categories, like travel, search or news, or the built-in search to find the provider you are looking for. Please note that everything is mixed up in the beginning. You can use the pulldown menu at the bottom right to filter for search providers so that all other add-on types are not displayed anymore.

You add a new search provider with a click on the add-ons icon on the add-ons website and the selection of Add to Internet Explorer on the next page.

This opens a small confirmation window. You need to click on Add to install the new search provider. Options are available to make that provider the default search provider of the browser.

The new search provider is available right after it has been added to the web browser.

Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article
with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.

Internet Marketing Company, an experienced leader in search engine internet marketing, announced today an increase in the search for the keyword Top SEO Companies. The search engine marketing firm keeps track of searchable keywords related to the site, and this term has had a 10% increase in searches in the last three consecutive quarters. This has, in turn, showed an increase in clients who are looking to find affordable marketing for their websites. The company is involved in search engine internet marketing, search engine marketing, and online marketing services. The search engine optimization specialists of Internet Marketing Company deliver measurable results and maximum return on investment (ROI).

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of making a website appear higher in the search results of online search engines without paying for it. The easier it is for people to find a website through search engines, the more chance that they will visit the website. Internet Marketing Company knows what the search engines are looking for, and will optimize the website so that it will appear higher in the search results

It is great that people are coming to our site by searching for the top SEO companies, said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of the Internet Marketing Company.

Internet Marketing Company delivers effective and cost-effective SEO services that help companies compete and attract new customers driven by listings among the top search engine results. Our professionals have the expertise and experience to enhance exposure of a business on major search engines. And the better a brands exposure, the better the companys message can reach the customers and prospects who rely on search engines every day to research, find and buy new products and services. With SEO from Internet Marketing Company, a brand will see resultsfast, easy and guaranteed!

Fore more information, please contact http://www.internetmarketingcompany.biz

Oh my God, hold on! Its the very last session of PubCon and they are ROCKIN the music. I just sauntered up to the front of the room like my paycheck depended on it. My own personal catwalk. Look alive at home, folks, because the energy is PUMPING here in Vegas.

Were not wasting time on banter. Up first is Rick Skrenta from Blekko.

Blekkos mission is to deliver an alternative editorial voice in search. We have two major search engines in the market and search is too important to only have two voices.  Options are good for the consumers. They want to take a different editorial take on Web search for the Web.  Web is editorial, even when its written by algorithms because people write the algorithms. Blekko wants to inject humans into the mix.

Google and Bing are both great, but theyre similar products.  Steve Ballmer said himself that 70 percent of the time they deliver the same results. Blekko wants to deliver 10 different results.

Blekkos Editorial Voice

1. Spam free
2. Open and transparent
3. Human-curated
4. Quality over quantity
5. Authoritative sources

Algorithms + People = Better Search

Theyre using the Wikipedia model to curate searches. No spam, all high quality. Most of the Web is junk. The Web has grown a thousand fold over the past 10 years. You dont need 50 million chicken recipes, you need three good ones. A lot of the spam is coming from Mechanical Turk. He says that 50 percent of the job listings on Mechanical Turk are spam generation (!). Thats quite a claim. Its human-authorized spam.

Spam is in the eyes of the beholder. Some people love pizza fliers, to others its spam. Blekko is improving queries in 110 categories. Theyre the autoboost categories. And it works.

A few months ago they put a game on their home page and asked people to pick the search engine they liked best, stripping the branding off. 68 percent of the time people picked Blekko.

Theyre also doing curation partnerships. They did one with Stack Overflow. They did one with SB Nation. They have pools of experts who are passionate about their topic.

They have other cool features like Date Sort where you can sort results by day. They have open, free SEO data. You can get all the SEO information Blekko knows about a site how many links you have, how many pages, etc.

Blekko launched about a year ago and theyve had steady growth since then. They just closed on 30 million of funding. Theyre going to use it expand computing infrastructure, make the index bigger and update it more often.

Next is Duane Forrester from Bing.

He asks people to raise their hands if they want 50 dollars. Then 100 dollars. 200. He has coupons for 50 dollars in AdCenter. People seem less excited about that. He also asks if everyone knows about Movember. Thats why he has a fuzzy lip. Its not because hes lazy and doesnt respect us. Its because, like most men, he cant actually grow facial hair.

Before we get started:

• Last week Bing released expanded crawl details.
• Active email alerts: If they find malware on your site, theyll ping you. If they see you blocking content, theyll ping to make sure you dont want it crawled. Basically, Bing is Santa and can see you when youre sleeping and when youre awakeand then ask if you wanted to be that way.
• URL Normalization: Canonicalize more of those pesky URL parameters. Now up to 50 parameters.
• Deeper data in Index Explorer: See more, do more.
• DNS verification
• AdCenter data integration

He wants to talk about the overlap between social and search. Its something people need to pay attention to. SEO is not going to be dead in the next six months like Leo Laporte said on Tuesday.

He shows a graph about what search engines value most. In order:

1. Content
2. Social
3. User Experience
4. Link Building
5. SEO

Top 5 SEO Investment Areas

1. Crawlability
2. Site Structure
3. Content Hierarchy
4. On Page Factors/Content Production
5. Link Building

Search and Social

When optimizing your site for search, you invest in these major areas:

• Quality: Content, links, appearance
• Trust: Authority, Usefulness, Resource
• Popularity: Traffic, Repeat, Visits, Links
• Timeliness: Current, Fresh, Relevant

How social impacts search he shows all the ways that Bing integrates social into the search results to show trusted resources and user votes of confidence.

Qamp;A

Both of you seems like youve spent more time talking about social media should I be pumping social media more in the next year?

Rich: I definitely would. When you talk about the value of a social signal its like what links were a few years ago. Thats how someone is vouching for a site these days tweets, Facebook comments, +1s.

Duane: Yes. Get active on social. Theres a reason they have a partnership with Facebook. Thats where the future is going and its worth investing in.

Duane, you guys have done a good job partnering with Facebook with Twitter, what about Google+? Will you incorporate it and will you be as in-depth as with Facebook and Twitter?

Duane: Are you kidding? [everyone laughs]  He doesnt think its on their radar. At some point, theyll have to, but not immediately.

Duane, Im curious if the data inside the Bing Webmaster Tools is a full or sample data set.

Duane: Whole.

I love that in the SEO Tools, you expose how many sites you found duplicate content on. Id love if youd show what sites those are so I can go get them.

Rich: That seems to have dropped out when we added a new feature. Well bring that back and add more capabilities.

Bing, there was some talk about the use of authors as a way for qualifying content. Is something Bing will do?

Duane: That is not something Im aware of but its a scenario that plays out like this we have schema.org to say heres a way to mark up your content. As people adopt these things, they become greater and more valuable signals to us. Rel=Author is the same thing.

Theres a lot of attention into link building and social media, but Mechanical Turk is very busy generating link and social media so these signals can be artificially created. The one thing that cant be is high quality content.  At some point, will links be phased out in importance and the actual content would become King (or Queen).

Duane: No. Links are not going to go away. Not any time soon. Good links are built by people sharing content. That happens all the time, you just dont get the anchor text.  He mentions how Like farms are forming and how they create very obvious footprints.

Whats the health of the Yahoo/Bing relationship?

Duane: Very healthy. They know power their results world-wide, except Korea.

And we are done. Thanks so much for hanging out with us all of PubCon. Hope you enjoyed it. Ill see you back in Troy.

Read more posts on Outspoken Media »

For most SEOs, search engine optimization means ranking in the top three on Google, no matter what. There are many different approach this usually involves creative link building, SEO consulting, and keeping up with the latest trends to optimize sites for various keywords. A simple algorithm update can ruin all of your hard work. So, unfortunately some tactics can include could include spammy links, scaling up content, reusing content, and many more tactics are used in place of White Hat SEO that tend to keep websites afloat for a little while. Most of the time this leaves SEOs scrambling to manipulate sites and return their sites to the top. It seems like the SEO industry is turning into a panic driven business with a never ending shadow on the future. Dominate search engine Google, can turn a successful business and livelihood into an over night failure, seemingly at the flip of a switch. Then those that manage to rebuild find themselves hit again by the next Panda Update.

What Google doesnt understand is that making extreme changes overnight isnt exactly the best alternative. At times updates inadvertently affects great websites, that have been putting hard work in day in and day out. And for Black hats this leaves a wide open door to figure out the next best tactic to make a quick battle. Its like the ongoing battle between cops and robbers. Changing dramatically overnight isnt going to eliminate spam, and more and more legitimate workers are becoming disgruntled.

I am not advocated using spammy tactics whatsoever. First and foremost to rank high in the search engines I always think you should start by building a great website, and most of the SEO Services you want, will happen in a more natural approach. I wish I could say the same for Google. Now Googles search is obviously the best as of right now, but in no way is Google just a search engine. They are a money making company driven by profits. Ever notice searching for videos, how almost every single video is a Youtube video? Not really a coincidence there, not to mention, Youtube is by far the biggest Content Farm on the web. I mean you can essentially find anything on Youtube, especially spam. If you ad that to the extremely oversized paid advertisements, and some form of Google ranking below, you have a limited chance of being seen by your potential traffic.