Do a search on your favorite search engine for your company name. Look at the results. Hopefully your company web site is at the top of the pile. But what about the other 9 results in the top 10? What do they say about you?

People searching for your company name will often look at all of these results - not just those relating to your homepage. When their eyes skim down the results page what does this say about your company? Is it all good, relevant, up-to-date information? Are there any flame (bad) sites saying bad things about you or your company? Is there old information listed? What are people saying about you on forums and blogs? All this information can be scanned by people looking for your company.

Drawing into question the safety of Google’s indexing system, the Web site all-in-one-business.com managed to “hijack” Google’s position in its search results with a 302 server redirect. Following the redirect, a query for “Google AdSense” returned results pointing to the unrelated site, rather than Google itself.

This type of incident can happen because of the way that Google implements the W3 HTTP specification. 302 redirects temporarily swap one domain name with another using rudimentary scripting. The spirit and letter of the specification requires Google to infer that content hosted by the 302 target is owned by the party doing the redirect.

Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Copy - The Down and Dirty Details
By Jon Wuebben Professional Website Copywriter

Well, not really. But Google Sitemaps does employ XML technology in order to provide its program members the opportunity to have their site crawled after they make updates or alterations.
Before we get ahead of ourselves and in case you haven’t heard, yesterday, Google launched Sitemaps, a “collaborative crawling” service designed to keep Google informed of modifications to your web site so their search index can reflect these changes… or as Rusty calls it, a free pay-for-inclusion program.

Bill Gates is blowing smoke at Google again. Twice this week Gates has said nasty things about Google. Yesterday he was sounding sort of high-school churlish with his statement, “Google is still perfect; the bubble is floating, and they can do everything. You should buy their stöck at any price. We had a 10-year period just like that.” Earlier today, he and his buddy, lil’ Stevie Ballmer, sounded like they were playing king-of-the-castle at recess when he predicted that Google was going to be dethroned because the other kids will want to play with new-tech toys that Microsoft has, but Google doesn’t.

Need Help? You Might Want to Consider Outsourcing By Merle, MCPromotionsPress.com

Running your own online business can take a lot of your time. You have to wear many hats and perform many tasks: including accounting, web design,marketing and promotion. This is not to mention constantly coming up with new content for your site or to distribute it in article format for frëe publicity.
There are only so many hours in the day and to be honest, one person can only do so much. So what’s the answer? I have one word for you: “outsourcing.” This is where you hire someone else to perform a specific job or task for you. Outsourcing frees up time you can spend on more valuable aspects of your web business.

A Business Model For Podcasting By Neville Hobson

Software veteran Dan Bricklin (remember VisiCalc?) started podcasting last week…

I’ve finally started my own podcast, “Dan Bricklin’s Software Licensing Podcast“. It will be a series of interviews and perhaps other material that should be of interest to people who care about the legal and managerial aspects of software licensing in general, Open Source licenses in particular, and who knows what else.

As I’m doing more frequently these days, I find and listen to new podcasts as part of learning what others are doing and how they’re doing it. I listened to Dan’s second podcast, a phone conversation with Joel Spolsky, author, blogger, Windows developer and co-founder of Fog Creek Software, recorded last Thursday.

Get Better Search Engine Rankings with RSS by Satyajeet Hattangadi

RSS is the latest craze in online publishing. But what exactly is RSS?

RSS or Rich Site Syndication is a file format similar to XML, and is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be universally understood.
RSS allows publishers to “syndicate” their content through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks.
It has actually been around for a while, but with the advent of spam filters and online blogging, it is fast becoming the choice of ezine publishers who want to get their message across to their subscribers.
However, not much attention has been given to the advantages RSS provides for search engine optimization.

With its new personalised home pages and its email service, the Internet firm is clearly moving away from search, but it’s anyone’s guess where it’s going

In plotting its future, is Google following its rivals too closely?

The last several months have been marked by the addition of several new features as the search-engine leader attempts to realise its widening ambitions. The latest, introduced last Thursday, is a feature that lets people set up personalised home pages a direct answer to Yahoo’s My Yahoo portal. But in doing so, Google’s online face to the world increasingly resembles those of its Web portal rivals.

Screwed: Is This An Inevitability Of The Search Engine World? by Courtney Heard

By about 2pm everyday, each of my team members has spoken to a good handful of clients and potential clients who have been speaking with other SEO firms. This an absolutely wonderful thing to see, as in the past in our industry, not enough of our consumers were questioning what they were purchasing. It is a sign that accountability will come and the bad guys will be weeded out.
While this is a good sign, it’s the cause of my having to answer the same questïons over and over. The consumers in the SEO world are being fed out and out lies by some of the people who call themselves experts in the area of Search Engine Optimization. They hear these lies and while comparing prices, contact us at Abalone Designs. They then proceed to tell me everything that all of these other companies promised them and I am utterly astonished. Below are some of the most asinine claims I hear through the grapevine.