Posts from — January 2008

According to Matt Cutts blog, Google has penalized sites that used the service traffic power to optimize and seo their sites:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week – although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.

Seems that many people have the impression that google shows backlinks of 4 PR sites only and not others, or in general those are the ones that count. Not so. We note that we have backlinks from sites that have PR3 and some other sites are not mentioned that are PR4 plus. It’s mish moshing when it comes to Google. While you can certainly open up a webmaster account on Google and look at what is really happening, it should be noted that what you see from the Google toolbar is not the end all of what you are getting.  Google is certainly counting links to your site, unless of course they are filtering out some, of course, and unless you work at Google it’s not likely that you’ll crack their algo. So keep on making links to relevant sites and don’t pay attention to those little rules that people are making up in SEO land.

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

The latest in eBay Store design, something we do everyday, along with website design, is….

1. About 150 designers became “certified” by eBay on store design, many years late, but okay. It’s all good.

2. of course we were one of them. Check out our eBay Store Design Page
3. Not too long ago ebay implemented a “makeover” for eBay Stores making it easier to find things, (or not).

4. Featured stores were renamed Premium – and more features are added, for example from what I’m hearing soon they will provide 24 hour support.

Now let’s talk. The new featured store functionality is great. eBay is now realizing that they are competing with some other big guys, like Amazon Webstores who, like Pepsi took Coke early on, could be an issue without some improvements to the functionality of eBay Stores. Basically the playing field is getting very competitive for merchant sites and all the players are offering many things to attempt to attract and retain sellers.

See you next time.