By Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc.

Repeatedly my salës and consulting staff find themselves explaining that using duplicate content can and will negatively affect search engine rankings and it is heartbreaking to see clients having to rebuild rankings due to such a simple mistake. As a result, I felt it was time to write this article and hopefully dispel many misled website owners.
Why write an entire article on something as simple as duplicate content? Well probably because it is not as simple as it sounds and many website owners find themselves in the grey area of duplication; where they don’t know for sure whether they are risking rankings or not.

Targeting your key demographic online is getting harder and harder. While new portals that offer information to niche markets spring up like summer weeds, it is hard to decipher the legitimacy of not only their readership, but the depth and significance of their content, the source of their traffic, and the accuracy of their traffic reporting. The reasons for this lie in not only the increasing popularity of the internet for all ages, but the costs and low expected results now associated with “targeted” marketing campaigns.

Recently, the Washington Post received a letter, on paper, hand-addressed, and in the mail, from Google attorneys asking the newspaper to avoid using Google as a verb. Perhaps paper makes a demand seem more serious than email. The Post responded, only slightly mocking in tone, snickering at the legal use of the word “hottie.”

From the article:

Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.

Inappropriate: He googles himself.

But this one’s our favorite:

Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.

Like most web developers, I’ve heard a lot about the importance of valid html recently. I’ve read about how it makes it easier for people with disabilities to access your site, how it’s more stable for browsers, and how it will make your site easier to be indexed by the search engines.

So when I set out to design my most recent site, I made sure that I validated each and every page of the site. But then I got to thinking – while it may make my site easier to index, does that mean that it will improve my search engine rankings? How many of the top sites have valid html?

Written by David Utter for WebProNews.com

A dozen high-powered companies inside and outside of the technology industry jointly requested Congress pass a law to protect the privacy of consumers, while insulating them from being “brought to their knees” by class-action lawsuits.

Efforts by Google and other technology companies to drum up support for federal privacy legislation appear to be motivated by a desire for protection from civil actions in the event of a privacy breach as much as ensuring Internet users keep using the Web for commerce.

Written by Michael Pedone for WebProNews

Have you heard about the latest “sport” in dirty online business?
It’s called Google Bowling and it represents a gaping flaw in
Google’s system that allows your competitors to sabotage your
site to the point of getting it banned or penalized.

This can’t happen, right? I mean, Google would have us believe
their algorithms are not easily manipulated and that your rankings
are safely under your (and their) control. But in fact there’s a
chink in Google’s armor that can have massive consequences for
any web business unfortunate enough to have aggressive and
unethical competitors.

Written by Jim Hedger for SiteProNews

Google is working on its most ambitious project to date, the creation of a global data transfer network that could effectively serve as a private Internet. Since the introduction of AdWords three years ago, Google has become the world’s largest media company and advertising vehicle. It has grown to rival Microsoft in scope and scale. The process has made it a fully globalized corporation.

Written by Jason Lee Miller for WebProNews

Though copyright law predates the Internet, case law has been established regarding the indexing of copyrighted material, and it has come out in favor of the indexer. Publishers who have issues with Google’s Print for Libraries project may end up with little more than hurt feelings.

Late in 2004, Google made a surprise announcement about an incredibly ambitious project to digitize and index millions of published works, with the aid of Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library. The project was/is expected to cost upwards of $200 million over at least 10 years.

This article was written by Jason Lee Miller for WebProNews

Google’s standard rule of not telling anybody anything until its
too late has caused worldwide speculation as to what on Earth they
plan to do with all that new money. A recent New York
invitation-only meeting with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin did
little to change that silent trend.

In fact, the information coming out of that meeting isn’t exactly
flowing, leading some to speculation that Schmidt and Brin
exercised some version of the Jedi mind trick.

Written by Jason Lee Miller for WebProBusiness

Who owns Gmail? According to Benjamin Cohen, nobody yet-well, one guy in Germany, but he doesn’t count for much-and a British company is claiming the intellectual property rights to the Gmail trademark, even if the patent office hasn’t awarded anyone that credit.

The first battle for the claim to Gmail was brought by Daniel Giersch, a German entrepreneur, who actually does own Gmail, but only in Germany. Giersch recently blocked Google’s web mail service in the Land of Eternal Oktoberfest. But in the rest of the world, Gmail is still in dispute.