links for 2009-02-17

Most webmasters are intimately familiar with the process of trading links with other websites. Chances are, if you own or administer a site, you get requests to exchange links many times each week. While annoying and usually automated, those requests represent one of the oldest methods of SEO there is: Reciprocal linking.

Jaws dropped last week upon the news Google penalized its own Japanese site in Google search results after discovering Google Japan participated in a pay-per-post blogging scheme. WebProNews Video caught up with Google’s anti-spam-team captain, Matt Cutts, who offers his apologies.

People of Earth: there is no need to panic. Facebook changed it’s terms of service recently. Yes, that’s true. But what it suggests is that most folks don’t really know what they’ve signed on for when using a free service out on the web.

When people hear about social media marketing, many tend to think about popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube. YouTube has about 258 million users, and more than 50 percent of them log in weekly. Facebook has about 101 million users with more than 50 percent who log in daily.

If you haven't spent any time on these sites, I highly recommend setting up an account and jumping into a conversation or community. It's one thing to talk about social media marketing and another to experience it firsthand. You'll be a more effective social media marketer if you're already a participant.

An article in a major publication last week disparaged SEO, calling it "snake oil" once again. How did the columnist decide SEO doesn't work, and that its practitioners are a bunch of snake oil salesmen? Well, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (I hasten to give him any attention, as that's what he and his editor are after) had rewritten his URLs to make them search engine friendly, but lost traffic in his efforts.

More than ever, clients have been asking us about foreign language sites and international markets. Asia Pacific and Australia have also started making big strides in SEO. By this time next year, I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the world is catching up, or has caught up completely, to the level of formalized sophistication of the American search market.

On an otherwise placid holiday weekend, one blog's commentary on a change to Facebook's terms of service created a firestorm of banter on the Web: does the social network claim ownership to any user content on the site, even if the user deletes it?

As I have been researching ways to optimize my B2B clients’ performance, I have found many helpful articles. Below is a summary of the articles that I have bookmarked over time. For those of you who are doing some B2B soul searching, hopefully this list will help you achieve successful PPC campaigns with many more conversions to come.

While many bloggers are monetizing blogs with direct methods like advertising and affiliate programs another method that more and more bloggers are making good money by selling their own e-books. Today Jade Craven of The Prolific Writer reviews a new resource that is written to help bloggers wanting to do exactly that – How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook.

And so we move forward into the next challenge on my quest of eventually giving up on e-mail at work. Yesterday, February 15th, it marked the first anniversary of that original entry where I was mentioning how it was time for me to take things in the next level with regards to my own adoption of social software, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall. And from there onwards, it surely has been quite a ride! Over the last few months most of you folks have been following the weekly progress reports I have been sharing and although I am not very much in favour here are a couple of statistics you may be interested from the final yearly report:

Lots of personal information about you is available online, and it’s often up to you to find it. Whether it’s public records or your home telephone number, there are lots of tools that you have at your disposal to find this information. Here, we’ll take a look at 25 tools that can help you track down the information that’s available about you online.

A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I'd like to address those here. I'll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people's information.

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Obama Administration’s first diplomatic mission abroad, in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is traveling to four Asian countries to discuss international cooperation on climate change, is a clear signal that Washington has entered a new era of leadership on the climate crisis, said World Wildlife Fund officials.

Clinton, who is being joined by U.S. Climate Change Special Envoy Todd Stern, is traveling to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China. The four countries are considered key players in the effort to secure a new global climate treaty this December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Never before in history has it been easier to glean from the knowledge of others who will give it away to you for free. It’s equivalent to getting higher education. I’m talking about Masters level stuff. And it’s all available right there on Twitter. I call the people I follow who contribute above and beyond the basic answer to “what are you doing?” my professors of Twitter.

In the realm of e-commerce, one of the top marketing tools a company has is a Google ranking. The difference between a page 1 or page 2 search engine ranking can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for a company.

Make changes to the structure and presentation and watch them appear as you type. Think of it as a web monkey sandbox.