JaneCopland discusses the unexpected downside of successful link baiting in her post “The Unexpected Downside to Link Bait Success.” Reaching sudden popularity on a social media website (she references digg and reddit) can inundate your website with views from these one-time social media followers and consequently flood your server logs. Your site’s regular traffic can be easily lost in the flood, but it’s the regular traffic that you want to monitor, not the one timers.

She cautions that Read more »

“SEO tip: Avoid keyword stuffing” is the innocent title of Matt Cutt’s blog post which contains a brutal example of a website’s exuberant keyword stuffing and Google’s consequent strike against that site.

Initially reading, I thought the inundation of “Alex Chiu” in the depicted pictures was the keyword stuffing; who wouldn’t think that if you read his name SEVEN times in one paragraph? (No, the paragraph was not an “About Me” or “About Alex” page; it was a sepculation-filled “why Google has banned me” page.)

However, there’s still more. Read more »

Berghausen, a representative of Google, clarified Google’s intent about hidden text in his post in Google Groups. Google’s guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are meant to ensure that the Googlebot and users receive the same information so that Google can provide the most relevant results for users.

Hidden text is frowned upon when it’s used with malicious intent as webspam for aims such as tricking the search engine into increasing rankings; it is “allowed” when the webmaster’s intent is to clarify non-HTML content so long as the contents are identical. To clarify, hidden text that repeats the content in a Flash video that covers it (the hidden text) is allowed because the content is identical; if the two were not identical, the hidden text would be considered black-hat SEO.

I think Berghausen’s clarification is important for China Internet Marketing. Read more »

ghoti from SEOmoz wrote an article about four changes Google has made to AdWords “without a lot of fanfare.” As the changes have been made to American Google AdWords, it’s reasonable to expect these changes have or will be released to Chinese AdWords as well.

The first change ghoti recaps is the Content Network Placement Report which now allows AdWords user a very indepth look at the stats for their content network ads. You can now see the webpages your ads are shown on, impressions, clicks, CPC, and conversion data. Read more »

Google Webmasters Chinese blog (in English) has recently released a post about duplicate content, translated, I believe, from the article by Adam Lasnik published on Google Webmaster Central blog. (Unfortunately, the Google Webmaster Central blog won’t load right now, so I can’t check.) Read more »

Rand from SEOmoz introduces the newest social network for SEOers in his blog post “Sphinn - The Social News Site Every Search Marketer Should Be Using.”

Sphinn is the newest social news and networking site launched late last week by Danny Sullivan. Already, its popularity among SEO-ers is evident by the growing member list which already includes some of the top name SEOers such as Matt Cutts and Aaron Wall. Read more »

David Berkowitz introduces a new product, Tazti, by Voice Tech Group (VTG) in his blog post “Vocal Support For Search“. Tazti is a voice activated search usable on both the desktop and on the Web. With it, you can orally command web searches or open programs on your computer (such as the calculator). Read more »

Mark Simon examines Yahoo!’s new Smart Ads in his blog post “They’re Smart Ads — But Are They Efficient?“. These Smart Ads are built off of the search history of a user so as to better match a person’s interests. The explanation of Smart Ads provides the following example: “If I regularly play poker on Yahoo Games, the demo tells me, and I run a search for ‘Las Vegas deals,’ the system assumes I��d like to fly out to Las Vegas. The next time I��m reading Yahoo News, Smart Ads will show me an ad for flight deals to Las Vegas” (Qtd. in Simon). Read more »

Jack Ma is like a rock star for the internet in China. Like any icon, people you speak to either love him or hate him but they always feel strongly about him. And true to his bigger than life image, he was easily the biggest star on the stage at SES China.

In my opinion, Search Engine Strategies (SES) Nanjing was definitely a success from the standpoint of attendees as there must have been around 300 attendees at the Keynote Session for Jack Ma of Alibaba and Google but yet again, we have to wonder where in the world was Baidu?