Catalin Ionescu: The Blog

What the heck is NOODP, you ask? In this article I’m going to show you a little known meta tag, recently introduced by major search engines, that allows you to control exactly what they display in the search results for your website. This can make all the difference between customers clicking on to your website or your competitors.
But first, a bit of backgound information that lead to the need of having the NOODP tag in the first place.

ODP, the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ. One of the largest human built directories. Some webmasters praise it, others say it’s crap, and even some more don’t really care about it. Should YOU care?

ODP is perhaps one of the most controversial sites when it comes to your SEO linking strategy. Packed with high PR categories, it’s strength was even more emphasized when Google decided to use it as a base for their directory.

Not to mention that countless other websites copy parts of it for their own directories.

So, what does all this mean? It means than IF you manage to get one of your websites into ODP you’re almost guaranteed a large number of links all pointing back to your site automatically.

But Google also uses ODP for another purpose other than for filling his own directory. It pulls the title and the description used by ODP to describe your site and sometimes uses it when displaying search results.

Even if you do have filled the meta description tags for your website, there are cases when Google’s algorithm decides the ODP data is more relevant and will display it.

Now this is all fine and dandy if somehow you managed to have a great description there.

Unfortunately most often than not ODP editors edit what you’ve submitted in the first place so you end up with an anost description that doesn’t fit the bill. Or perhaps you’ve slightly changed your website focus, say instead of dog training you now do dog breeding.

Anyone who tried changing the ODP description can tell for sure it’s a bit of a pain. Not only you’re usually stuck for months until your category editor bumps into your request, but also you run the risk of having your website completely dumped from DMOZ if the editor happens to dislike what he sees.

Luckily search engines now offer an alternate route where you’re back in control. Simply insert one little meta tag in your page header and 2 out of the major 3 search engines guarantee they’ll list your meta description instead of ODP’s.

This tag was first introduced by MSN Search and little ago Google decided to support it too.

Welcome to the NOODP tag.

The way this tag works is it tells the search engines to dump whatever description your site has in ODP and use whatever your meta description tag says. Now this may sound complicated at first, so here’s an example to let you know what I mean.
Let’s say you have a website about dog training that you somehow managed to get into ODP. Let’s say the ODP description says something like “Site that attempts to teach you 3 ways to train your dog but fails miserably.” Perhaps the category editor also owns a dog training website, or perhaps he didn’t like yours. The reasons don’t actually matter but the fact is you’re stuck with a boring description that, let’s face it, kinda’ sucks. What do you do now?

Well, thanks to the NOODP tag, all you have to do is enter 2 lines of text on your pages. First one is the meta description tag, where you write your super cool description. For our above example we could use something like “The best dog training on Earth. How to teach your dog to obey your commands in 5 days or less.” This sounds better, doesn’t it?

Now all is left is tell Google (and MSN) to use your meta description instead of ODPs. To do so, simply add a second meta tag, that is the NOODP tag. Just copy the following line, paste it in your web page in the head section and you should be all set.

Just wait until Google refreshes it’s index, typically between a couple days and a couple weeks, and you should begin to see your description being served in the search results.

Have fun playing with the NOODP tag, you’re now in control. And don’t forget to report back how it went for you.

Hot Points – A blog by Go Daddy CEO and founder Bob Parsons
The add/drop scheme. How millions of .COM names are used but never paid for.

Makes for a darn good reading. Mind you, compare ($500K+) with what an average guy is able/willing to invest into making his online living…

DoFollow (WP Plugin) - Kimmo Suominen
"This is a plugin for WordPress. It will disable the automatic rel="nofollow" attributes added to external links. You may want to do this if you have good spam filtering for your comments, or if your blog is moderated. Optionally you can also set a comment age limit for adding the attributes."

This seems perfect for awarding people who take time from their busy schedule and write a line or two on your blog. They'll get back a bit of Page Rank from your blog through the back link, which may be enough motivation for many to start typing.

Mind you, the NoFollow attribute was introduced by Google et al. as a means to fight spam comments. But it may have done more harm than good, as blog spammers have always found ways to elude it. And it ended up penalizing honest bloggers who happened to like one of your posts, took the time and efforts to contribute and now would like a little something back - a link to their blog perhaps?

The DoFollow plugin helps you take back control of your blog, by removing the NoFollow attribute that is automatically added to all outgoing links in comments. It's common sense to pair it with an automated comment spam filtering solution (Warning to wanna be spammers: I prefer the manual way though, brain is harder to fool than a Bayesian filter).

The comment age limit option in the DoFollow plugin helps you make sure that no spammer who happens to slip through the filters will be rewarded a back link by the time you notice and clean up.

It's a win-win situation for both. Viral. Content building.

Do you think the DoFollow plugin should be enabled by default on the entire blog? 

Coming straight from the Google HQ, this is actually a gem about what PageRank really is worth for these days. 

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO advice: url canonicalization
"Normally if you don’t see crawled snippets and only see urls, it usually means that it would help to have more links to your site. More PageRank helps to get more crawling."

Now, this isn't exactly hot news, as many people knew about - and have actively used - inbound links from high PageRank pages to ensure timely spidering. During my experiments I've been able to get brand new websites noticed and indexed by search engines, especially Google and MSN, in 12 hours or less with just two or three inbound links from PR 3 - 5 pages.

But it's somewhat comforting to know PageRank is still used for something other than a distraction, if you know what I mean

A few days ago I mentioned what looks like a good way to make lots of money by buying expired domains. Some of them may come with a bit of traffic, a few may even have a good Google PR.

After watching the undergoing auctions at a popular expired domain broker, I can tell you people are jumping on them like crazy. And some are paying top money for good web real estate.

Deciding to get my feet wet on the expired domain auctioning, I placed two bids of $60 each - the minimum bid one should place to be eligible to move on to phase 2 - on two domains that were just about to be deleted in a few days.

A day later I received an email letting me know both were successfully acquired by the expired domain broker. Both had at least 20 people interested in purchasing them, so we moved into phase 2. The auction.

Any hope I had of landing on any one of these two domains was shortly dismissed. It was quite exciting to see the auction unfold from the initial bid of $60 to reach hundreds within hours. But at the same time it was soon more than I was willing to pay for any of them.

Three days later, when both auctions ended, first domain was sold for $1,000. And the second one for $10,001. Yep, that's right, ten thousand and one US dollars for a single expired domain!

Well, so far we've all heard rumors about domains being auctioned and sold at fabulous prices, but now I witnessed it first hand. If this domain will be sold back for a million in a few years, I could tell my children I had the opportunity to become a millionaire but decided to pass.

In case you're curious, the $1,000 domain was adn.net. The $10,000 domain was vpn.net. Agreed, both are short, nice, catchy. And I wouldn't have minded paying 6 times the price of a new domain name to get any of these. But $10,000? No sir, thank you.

And I wonder… besides the "readability" of a short domain like these two when - and if - they're spelled out, is there really another benefit that is so big and that may be worth paying a premium just to grab one of these?

If you think about it, the amount of work one should put into creating and promoting any website, be it on a premium domain like vpn.net or on the much longer how-to-create-the-best-vpn.net, is roughly the same. One still has to write (or buy) good and attractive content. One still has to submit the website to directories. Even the link exchange process is the same, no matter how many characters are there in the domain name. So unless you plan to read it loud quite often or can afford to pay a premium just for the privilege of having an email address that looks like coolguy@vpn.net, your 3 letter domain looks as good as any other more affordable 10+ letter domain.

I mean, it's not even a very popular brand that you're buying now and hope to sell it to the brand owner for an even bigger price next month. It's just a sleek looking domain.

If you come and think about it, for the very same $10,001 one paid for the privilege of owning vpn.net you could easily get 1,020 other new domain names of your choice each priced at $9.8. If you're really cheap and go for the lowest possible price, you can get even more. Think about how many keywords you can target with 1,000 websites, each on it's own domain. Even you were to invest only $1,000 in domain names - and that's over 100 brand new you would get - you could use the remaining $9,000 to buy good content, to manage and to promote all 100 websites. In a few weeks you could end up with 100 money making websites, versus just one.

Heck, just stop and think for a second. Owning over a thousand websites or a single one, for the exact same cost. What would you choose? Even if each one would be making just $1 per day, that's $30,000 per month! You would get your initial investment back in just 10 days!

And what do you think is more easily reachable: one website making you $1000 per day, or 1000 each making you $1?

So, what's the gain? Just the prestige of writing a short email address on your business card?

It may be just me being blindsided, but I fail to see the whole point of this. Agreed, it can be looked at as an investment, and domains such as this are almost as good as real estate property. They can be sold in the years to come, and for even bigger prices, but to whom? If you place yourself in the position of someone looking to buy a new domain, would you be willing to pay $100,000 for a domain like vpn.net?

If your answer was a yes, I'd like to know why. If your answer was a no, I'd like to know why.

What's your take on it? 

Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios?

Read all about it in a very well documented article: Masters of their Domains.

It makes a pretty good reading, so I won’t spoil your pleasure by dissecting it here. Just one key phrase to keep in mind: “type-in”. Or was it cash-in?

Technorati : buy domain name, domain name, online opportunity, speculation, web real estate

Stephan Spencer's Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog

Stephan's blog is a pure gold mine for those that are used to reading between the lines. Needless to say, if you're in the online business train a visit to his blog should become part of your daily habits. Others charge heaps of money for the kind of advice and insight information he gives for free. 

Heck, even if you don't sell anything online - yet - most of his posts make a good reading.

Relevant incoming links are the lifeblood of SEO. Thus it is very important when you do maintenance tasks on your website - such as changing the Permalink structure in your WordPress blog - to make sure old URLs still work. 

There are a lot of techniques that help users access old URLs, but only one of them is pretty effective for preserving whatever link gain you've accumulated. And that is the use of 301 redirects. This technique can be applied to any kind of website, not just blogs.

To make sure your PR isn't lost when you restructure old links, stick a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. And the easiest way to do that is by using rewrite rules in your .htaccess.

TIP: Since 301 redirects pass the accumulated link gain, think what will happen if you use them for 2 or more old URLs and set the redirect target from all of them to the same destination URL. This technique can be used as a quick and effective way to boost a new page Rank to the sum of the link popularity of all old pages that now redirect to it.

As with any SEO technique, over-doing it can hurt your website. But used responsibly it can provide the extra advantage in front of your competitors.

For those of you who don’t know the whole story, Tom read about a flaw in Google’s News service in a blog here.

In a split second, he decides to try a prank on his teenager friends and fakes a press release claiming he was the youngest Google employee, in charge of GMail’s security. Oddly enough, one hour later his story hit on Google News and other major news websites.

Fact is, the power of press releases - fake or not - has been consistently exploited by smart marketers and various individuals for ages. And for good profits too…

This is all fine and dandy, except I-Newswire lost. Let me explain.

Google automated news bot pulls it’s data from approximately 1,500 different news sources. I-Newswire, a specialized PR Internet company, was amongst them.

When Tom’s prank was revealed, Google removed I-Newswire from the trusted sources for news. PR distribution is their primary business, so I believe this will be a major hit and a major loss of revenue for them.

Agreed, PR distribution sites should do some kind of pre-screening regarding what they distribute or not. And I-Newswire was the black sheep this time. But with the popular free package, each PR Internet agency is receiving thousands - if not more - news releases per day. It would require a tremendous man-powered team to verify each and every one of them for accuracy. How will they pay them? By cutting out the free option and increasing the cost per submission, that’s how.
Look. This whole story is intensely mediated. I-Newswire was hit. Bad. But I believe this is only the first ripple and the effects will be seen in the weeks and months to come.

Will the free PR submission service change in some ways? Probably, as most PR sites that are suffering from the same problems I-Newswire had are now searching for options. It is one of the (very few) possible avenues PR sites may have to consider if they want to keep their credibility and good standing towards Google. Heck, I wouldn’t be too surprised if all big PR distribution sites will decide to discontinue their free submissions, or diminish their distribution by keeping them local.

This will definitely leave some small honest guys on the wrong side of the fence as they won’t know, or afford, or both, to pay a premium for their PR to be distributed.
The good part of it? We probably won’t be seeing as many news spammers in the near future as we had in the past. Look at the whole issue as a noise filter if you like. By decreasing the news volume, those that will go through will definitely have more visibility and exposure and thus more value for the buck.
What’s your take?

There are three kinds of people.

1. Those who do.
2. Those who watch them doing.
3. … and those who have no idea what the heck happened.

Which one are you?