Flattening Effect of Page Rank Iterations - explains the “sandbox”?

When MySpace Members Die

There’s an article over at New York Times about how social networking sites like MySpace.com create a new form of grieving when a MySpace.com member dies.

It’s impossible to know how many people with pages on social networking sites have died; 74 million people have registered with MySpace alone, according to the company, which said it does not delete pages for inactivity. But a glib and sometimes macabre site called MyDeathSpace.com has documented at least 116 people with profiles on MySpace who have died. There are additions to the list nearly every day.

Read more: Rituals of Grief Go Online

How to Juice Up Your Site’s rank in Google

There’s an interesting article over at WashingtonPost.com about how Google ranks a website in its SEPRs (Search Engine Page Results). There’s nothing specific in terms of SEO technique but worth a read if you want to learn more about the integrity of Web search results and the value of links.

The article covers the “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” contest, a Google SEO contest where webmasters compete to secure the number one spot for the phrase “v7ndotcom elursrebmem.”

From the article:

I asked several consultants what, if anything, the contest shows about the integrity of Web search results and the value of links.

How to get a #1 ranking in Google

So you want to get the number one position in Google search page results (Who doesn’t’)? Memwg.com has posted some tips to help you achieve this goal.

The tips include:

• Keywords in URL somewhere, ideally separated by hyphens
• Keywords in title, near or at the beginning
• Keywords in headings
• Keywords near the top of the page

While the tips themselves are quite basic, they can still offer some useful guidelines especially if you are a newbie in search engine optimization (SEO).

Google is going to alert some site owners of penalizations

You read that right; Google has taken the relationship with webmasters into another level by starting a trial program to notify some webmasters if their sites have been penalized.

Only catch is that you’ll need to sign up for Google Sitemaps service. But I wouldn’t call that a catch. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend you to sign up with Google Sitemaps service.

Matt Cuff writes in his blog:

Technorati Banned in China?

Apparently there’s unconfirmed reports that Technorati, the search engine that focus on the weblogs on the Internet, is banned in China.

This snippet from Technorati’s own blog:

We’ve received a number of reports today that users in China can’t get access to the Technorati site. Of course, we’re taking these reports very seriously, and we’re trying to get more accurate information. We’ll let you know when we know more.

Are Google Results More Relevant?

Have you ever wondered why you always end up finding the most relevant results to your queries from Google search results?

There’s an interesting article over at InternetNews.com discussing about why Google results seem more relevant:

According to a new study, a big part of Google’s relevancy isn’t actually directly related to what searchers see in the search results but rather to the Google brand itself.

Lance Jones, director of competitive intelligence at Keynote Systems, discussed a study he did where users were asked to rate satisfaction of their search experience using the normal Google site and using Google without the Google brand identifiers (logo, etc.).

Microsoft launches a new website to promote IE Add-ons

In an attempt to compete with Mozilla Corps long running site that specializes in extensions for the Firefox browser, Microsoft has on Tuesday launched a site to promote Internet Explorer add-ons.

The Add-Ons for Internet Explorer page offers both free and for-a-fee add-ons to IE 6 and IE 7 Beta 2, and is organized in security, time saving, browsing, and entertainment categories.

IE 7 Beta 2 users can access the site from the browser’s Tools menu (Tools > Manage Add-Ons > Find More Add-ons).

Will they be able to counter the popularity of the Mozilla Firefox which already has an extensive list of extensions?

Please spam us and we’ll buy from you

According to a study conducted by CiperTrust, an email filtering firm, while Viagra and pharmacy drugs continue to bring in small punters, as many as 5 per cent recipients visit porno websites after receiving lewd come-ons by email

Response rate, which is the percentage of end users who actually click through and buy products promoted from spam for pharmacy drugs is 0.02 per cent. Rolex watch offers (0.0075 per cent) are miniscule by comparison. The sales to click-through ratio for pharmacy drugs is one to 150 (0.67 percent).

Google referrals code generation wizard

Nothing terribly exciting here but I’d just like to let you know about the introduction of code generation wizard for Adsense, Adwords and Firefox referrals by Google. The wizard will guide you through the process of, well, generating your referral codes.

To get started, just select Referrals from the Adsense Setup page of your account and select the product of your choice.

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