SEO Update

Copyscape

You can call Copyscape a ‘content theft search engine’. All you have to do is go to the site and type in your blog’s URL, and it scours the internet for websites and blogs that have either stolen or quoted your blog’s content. You can then decide on further course of action by contacting the plagiarist or the web host. Copyscape also provides a premium account using which you can do unlimited searches, copy and paste a block of text to look for its copies on the web, etc.

Visit Copyscape

Fair Share

Most of blog content theft these days happens using automated RSS Feed scraping. You can go to Fair Share and type in your blog feed URL. Their engine searches for plagiarised content and provides you with an RSS feed that links to the scrapers’ sites, so that you can keep an eye on the plagiarists from your feed reader itself.

Visit Fair Share

Tracer

Tracer is a pretty aggressive way to track content theft and it works only after you install its gadget or code in your blog. It then tracks user activity just like an analytics program, looking for copy paste activities on your blog. When somebody copies your content and pastes it, the pasted text is automatically accompanied by a link to your blog. Have a look at the screenshot above for an instance where the pasted text is followed by the source link.

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Buying Expired Domains: Don’t Expect Credit

Have you picked up a domain that was once owned by someone, not through buying it directly from them but because it had expired and went back into the common pool of domains for purchase by anyone? That’s an expired domain – and chances are, the backlinks aren’t going to pass credit according to Matt’s statement.

Buying Domains & Redirecting Links: Probably No Credit

Did you see a tasty domain and think it would be nice to get it, in order to obtain its links for a different site, such a redirecting them? Sounds like there’s a good chance that Google is going to notice the purchase date, take note of the redirection as well and decide those “historic” links shouldn’t count. What about if you just paid someone to keep the domain going under their name but closed down any existing content and point to another location? Might work; then again, Google might note the change, the oddity of one site to completely point at another, and it might be that the links won’t count.

Buying Domain & Running Web Site As Usual: Credit Likely

Did you buy a web site from someone else and are maintaining the business on that site as normal? Despite the fact that your domain name registration will have changed, since the site is carrying on as usual, there seems to be a good chance that link credit will continue as normal.

Getting Domains Through Acquisition: Credit Likely

Have a domain that changes hands, due to a company acquisition – company A buys company B? You should be OK, thought it’s unclear how Google tells the difference here from an ordinary transfer. And no, Google wouldn’t share more on how they can tell the difference.

A staple of successful internet marketing is a quality link building campaign. There are many resources on the web on link building and I will not bother going into those details here.

As social media has grown and evolved over the past few years, it has become a new avenue for marketers and webmasters to execute link building campaigns.

This blog post is an attempt to list the social media sites that allow “do follow” links; which should have the potential to contribute to the search rank of the page being linked.

Contribute To This List

I am sure this list is far from being thorough and accurate. The landscape of the social web will always be changing. So, I invite everyone to leave comments recommending any “Social Media” websites that I have left off the list. Some sites will be removed from time to time as well, as suggested by the comments. Page Rank of the sites on the list will fluctuate over time. They are meant to be a guide.

via 70 Do Follow Social Media Sites | Design And Marketing Blog.

Robots.txt syntax

* User-Agent: the robot the following rule applies to (e.g. “Googlebot,” etc.)

* Disallow: the pages you want to block the bots from accessing (as many disallow lines as needed)

* Noindex: the pages you want a search engine to block AND not index (or de-index if previously indexed). Unofficially supported by Google; unsupported by Yahoo and Live Search.

* Each User-Agent/Disallow group should be separated by a blank line; however no blank lines should exist within a group (between the User-agent line and the last Disallow).

* The hash symbol (#) may be used for comments within a robots.txt file, where everything after # on that line will be ignored. May be used either for whole lines or end of lines.

* Directories and filenames are case-sensitive: “private”, “Private”, and “PRIVATE” are all uniquely different to search engines.

Let’s look at an example robots.txt file. The example below includes:

* The robot called “Googlebot” has nothing disallowed and may go anywhere

* The entire site is closed off to the robot called “msnbot”;

* All robots (other than Googlebot) should not visit the /tmp/ directory or directories or files called /logs, as explained with comments, e.g., tmp.htm, /logs or logs.php.

via A Deeper Look At Robots.txt.

First, just a heads-up that if you don’t analyze your own traffic logs, use Urchin web analytics software, or develop web analytics software, you probably don’t need to read this post. We’re writing this for the most geeky among us, because Google Analytics will not be affected by this information. On the other hand, we do want to let you know about some changes to Google search that are coming down the pike, before you start seeing (potentially) alarming headlines.

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term “flowers”, for example, would be something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

via Google Analytics Blog: Web Analytics Tips & Tricks: An upcoming change to Google.com search referrals; Google Analytics unaffected.

Last week I gave a presentation at SES NY and included a list of 35 niche social media sites that we participate in regularly. Lots of people have asked me for this list so I decided to put it here. The following 35 sites are broken down into 8 different categories and each site has an active community and can help you get exposure. These sites aren’t going to send you 50,000 visitors but they will send you targeted traffic & links (if you’re content is good).

via The Best Niche Social Media News Sites Right Now | 10e20 Blog.