Mediaboss Marketing

By Georgina Prodhan

LONDON (Reuters) - A project to allow companies to set up a website with almost any address has relaunched after a software glitch exposed sensitive details of applications last month, forcing it to shut down.

In the most ambitious expansion of the Internet so far, the body that oversees domain names has now given organisations until May 30 to apply for their own Web address endings - for example .london, .eco or .canon - provided they have a legitimate claim to the domain name and can pay a hefty fee.

The new suffixes should allow companies or communities more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to part of their sites.

But the process was dogged by controversy even before the embarrassing software bug: many brand owners have felt forced to take part in the expensive project or risk rivals bagging domains that could be mistaken for their own.

It has also raised questions of corporate governance at Icann, the non-profit body that manages the Internet's naming system, since some current and former directors of the body stand to make money out of the explosion of new names.

Chief Executive Rod Beckstrom said Icann now hoped to be ready to publish details of who had applied for what before the U.S. organisation's next major meeting in Prague, which will be his last before he hands over to a new CEO.

"I think the team has done a very professional job of dealing with the situation," he told Reuters by telephone. "Now we're able to move on to the next phase."

The new generic top-level domains will expand the variety of possible Web addresses beyond those currently available, which end in a limited number of suffixes such as .com, .org or .edu. The stated goal is to encourage innovation on the Internet.

Many desirable Web addresses, for example toys.com or sex.com, were sold long ago - sometimes to parties who acquired them for their real-estate value but put no content on the sites - and now sell at auction for millions of dollars.

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Internet domain name project relaunches after software bug

Googles Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing something thats probably on a lot of webmasters minds these days: what if you linked to a good piece of content, but at some point, that content turned spammy, and your site is still linking to it?

In light of all the link warnings Google has been sending out, and the Penguin update, a lot of webmasters are freaking out about their link profiles, and want to eliminate any questionable links that might be sending Google signals that could lead to lower rankings.

A user submitted the following question to Cutts:

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site As end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site Bs content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case?

OK, so lets make it concrete, says Cutts. Suppose I link to a great site. I love it, and so I link to it. I think its good for my users. Google finds that page. Everybodys happy. Users are happy. Life is good. Except now, that site that I linked to went away. It didnt pay its domain registration or whatever, and now becomes maybe an expired domain porn site, and its doing some really nasty stuff. Am I going to be penalized for that? In general, no.

Its not the sort of thing where just having a few stale links that happen to link to spam are going to get you into problems, he continues. But if a vast majority of your site just happens to link to a whole bunch of really spammy porn or off-topic stuff, then that can start to affect your sites reputation. We look at the overall nature of the web, and certain amount of links are always going stale, going 404, pointing to information that can change or that can become spammy.

And so its not the case that just because you have one link that happens to go to bad content because the content has changed since you made that link, that youre going to run into an issue, he concludes. At the same time, we are able to suss out in a lot of ways when people are trying to link to abusive or manipulative or deceptive or malicious sites. So in the general case, I wouldnt worry about it at all. If you are trying to hide a whole bunch of spammy links, then that might be the sort of thing that you need to worry about, but just a particular site that happened to go bad, and you dont know about every single site, and you dont re-check every single link on your site, thats not the sort of thing that I would worry about.

Of course, a lot more people are worried about negative SEO practices, and inbound links, rather than the sites theyre linking to themselves.

More Penguin coverage here.

Excerpt from:
Matt Cutts Shares Something You Should Know About Old Links

Googles Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing how to alert Google when your competitors are engaging in webspam and black hat SEO techniques. The video was in response to the following user-submitted question:

White hat search marketers read and follow Google Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques (such as using doorway pages) and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?

So first and foremost, I would say do a spam report, because if youre violating Googles guidelines in terms of cloaking or sneaky JavaScript redirects, buying links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, all those kinds of things, we do want to know about it, he says. So you can do a spam report. Thats private. You can also stop by Googles Webmaster forum, and thats more public, but you can do a spam report there. You can sort of say, hey, I saw this content. It seems like its ranking higher than it should be ranking. Heres a real business, and its being outranked by this spammerthose kinds of things.

He notes that are both Google employees and super users who keep an eye on the forum, and can alert Google about issues.

The other thing that I would say is if you look at the history of which businesses have done well over time, youll find the sorts of sites and the sorts of businesses that are built to stand the test of time, says Cutts. If someone is using a technique that is a gimmick or something thats like the SEO fad of the day, thats a little less likely to really work well a few years from now. So a lot of the times, youll see people just chasing after, OK, Im going to use guest books, or iIm going to use link wheels or whatever. And then they find, Oh, that stopped working as well. And sometimes its because of broad algorithmic changes like Panda. Sometimes its because of specific web spam targeted algorithms.

Im sure youve heard of Penguin.

He references the JC Penney and Overstock.com incidents, in which Google took manual action. For some reason, he didnt bring up the Google Chrome incident.

This is actually a pretty timely video from Cutts, as another big paid linking controversy was uncovered by Josh Davis today (which Cutts acknowledged on Twitter).

So my short answer is go ahead and do a spam report, Cutts continues. You can also report it in the forums. But its definitely the case that if youre taking those higher risks, that can come back and bite you. And that can have a material impact.

Hes not joking about that. Overstock blamed Google for an ugly year when its revenue plummeted. Even Googles own Chrome penalty led to some questions about the browsers market share.

Go here to see the original:
Matt Cutts: Here’s How To Expose Your Competitors’ Black Hat SEO Practices

Google just announced on its Small Business Blog a new platform to help small business owners build their Google sites, called Webmaster Academy. In a 19-step process, users can:

- Learn how Google works - Make sure Google knows about your site - Influence your sites listing in search - Create great content - Images and video - Connect with Google+ - Access extra resources

Webmaster Academy better explains how Google search operates, and how website owners can better optimize their content for search. Information on how to better utilize Googles Webmaster Tools is offered, as well as general web design tips. Below is a clip describing Google Search:

Impending posts from the Webmaster Academy will include topics like:

- An explanation of how Google Search works - How best to represent a brick and mortar business online - An introduction to Search Engine Optimization

In March, Google announced free small business websites for Californian users. Those online merchants now have more tools to optimize their online storefronts.

Go here to see the original:
Google Small Business Introduces Webmaster Academy

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