« May 2004 | Main | July 2004 »

June 30, 2004

Yahoo! Overture Launches Local Match

The expected launch of Local match by Yahoo! / Overture is here. The new service allows advertisers to promote their business within a specified geographical region (ranging from 0.5 to 100 miles around a specific location).

The resulting page offers a map along with the information of the advertsiser and focuses mainly on getting the customers to the shop insuead of selling via the web.

The new addition is definitely good news for the targeting of PPC campaigns and opens up the doors for a new set of businesses which can now advertise on PPC without the fear that the cost of their marketing campaign will reach the Andromeda galaxy.

Naturally optimizing the campaigns for LocalMatch is a different kettle of fish...

Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 06:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Pop-up Program Reads Keystrokes, Steals Passwords

More on the word of spyware today although this one does not have anything to do with search engines. Cnet reports on a new spyware that takes advantage of an IE flaw and 'steals' passwords and financial information through a Trojan.

At this stage there is no real solution to this serious spyware so the only solution is to use maximum security settings on your browser.

Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 05:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 29, 2004

Search Engines and Spyware

A very interesting article in ZDNet on the effect of some - relatively new - type of spyware on search engines.

According to the artcle:

as new strains of spyware attempt to profit from the highly popular search engine and its lucrative pay-per-click advertising program by altering search results pages or delivering pop-up windows with their own lists of text ads.

Yahoo!, as we reported in the past, is already experimenting with an anti-spyware tool and Google will be forced to follow in one way or another. The main (only) source of income for Google at this stage is advertsising through the SERPages or through the Adsense program. Under no circumstances will Google feel happy if the credibility of the search results is altered through spyware or other techniques.

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 05:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2004

Internet Marketing Webinar II

As we mentioned in the past in July we will host a series of series of webinars on web marketing and promoting your website in the most ethical and organic ways.

The webinars will cover matters like:

If you are interested in taking part in the webinars email us at webinars@rugles.com. We are actually open to suggestions on the issues we will cover.

Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 06:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2004

Comments

Apologies for the temporary removal of the comments in our postings but we were just hit by a f***ing spammer that infected more than 400 of our posts with filthy links. All will return to normal as soon as the comments are deleted (Hooray to the MT blacklist)

Posted by Basileios at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2004

'Out of Touch Management' II

From today our Rugles weblog is a proud holder of the 1st spot for the search of 'Out of touch Management'

Google still holds the first spot in Yahoo!

Posted by Basileios at 11:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Word on 'Submissions'

I had this discussion with a customer and I think it is worth mentioning here as well:

Many companies offer hundreds, thousands, millions of submissions to search engines and directories around the world. I do not want to talk about the fact that all these search engines will bring zero traffic to your website. There is another inherent danger in this which is often overlooked.

These submissions are usually done automatically by pressing a couple of buttons and the plain truth is the fact that noone can guarrantee the category and setup in which your website will go.

In other words the inbound links that are offered from these submissions (to directories mainly) may cause a serious defocusing in your website, which is something that is very important today in the 'thematic PageRank' world that we live in.

The moral of the story is - again - that the hundreds and millions of submissions offer more trouble than we bargain for. The best way to optimize your search engine positioning is to provide useful and quality content and to organize your link strategy in order for it to offer you traffic and not just links.

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 03:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2004

Hotmail Upgrades

The news of the day is about a leak from Microsoft suggesting that there will be a - not surprising - upgrade to the Hotmail services (to follow the expected Google Gmail and the Yahoo! upgrade). According to the report Hotmail will offer 250Mb to free users and 2Gb to paid users.

Good news of course, but.... who wants 250Mb full of spam?

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 05:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 23, 2004

Internet Advertising to Increase by 16%

The report from TNS Media Intelligence/CMR (nicely pointed by Andy Beal's Search Engine News) indicates that spending in internet advertising will increase by 16%. Increases in TV and Radio advertsising spending are 14% and 11% only.

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 22, 2004

'Out of Touch Management'

The New York Times report on the new Googlebomb: Searching in Google for 'out of touch management' gives you the Google Corporate Information as a first site.

This appears on the same day as the drop of Merrill Lynch from the bankers list that overseing Google's IPO. Aleggedly, Merrill Lynch dropped out because it thought that the fees were too low.

Google, on the other hand continues to try and persuade investors on the fact that they are (really!) a good company and are idealists interested in the long term results and support to the public.

Things are not easy for Google at this stage and the 'out of touch' managers have a lot to persuade us (users and investors) about in not just words but in actions. Who wouldn't celebrate and hail gloriously in the news that Gmail will drop the mail scanning for example...

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing Services

Posted by Basileios at 04:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 21, 2004

First Impressions of Gmail

I was fortunate enough to receive a Gmail Invitation recently (after a lonf wait) and I have to say that I was pretty impressed by the web application. It is certainly fast, it is certainly a new 'paradigm' in the world of email and the overall look seems very good on a usability point of view (although I would certainly make some suggestions on improving some points).

However, I do find that the weakest point in this is the fact that the application is purely javascript. This apart from the fact that it produces serious accesibility provblems has a disadvantage for Google itself: Gmail is subject to the javascript standard that is supported by browsers at any moment. Web developers that have coded in javascript for cross browser support know very well that this is a rather sore point in browsers support.

Does this mean that Microsoft can turn things upside down for Google with a new version of Internet Explorer? I dont think that matters can go so bad that this will ever happen, but I am a bit surprised with the unconditional relying of Google on the javascript technology.

Posted by Basileios at 05:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2004

Adsense Update

Google has sent an email to Adsense publishers today announcing an update on teh Adsense program. According to the email the additions to Adsense are the following:

There are also two smaller additions in the number of channels that one can set in adwords and in a new ad format.

Adsense is a big asset for Google and they are definitely taking good care of it by making small updates every 1-2 months. I am sure we will see more additions in Adsense within the next couple of months.

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing Consultants

Posted by Basileios at 05:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

We All Knew There Was Something In It...

This is just so funny I have to share it with you.... Its Friday after all, so some fun can't possibly do us harm...

Posted by Basileios at 04:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2004

Recovering From A Tarnished Brand

Seth Godin played an excelent experiment based on Bill Clinton as an brand icon for viral marketing. The lessons summarized by Seth himself:

1. viral stuff is often obvious, isn't it? In other words, if you're too clever, some people don't get it and it doesn't spread well. On the other hand, be too obvious and it'll just sit there. It's the fine line (sort of like the Tom Bihn launder tag) that makes something go. Obviously, I misoverestimated some readers.

2. brands don't guarantee a virus, but they sure can get in the way. Clinton's brand is so tarnished for a portion of the population that they'd likely refuse a cash gift from him. They certainly didn't bother to read the post until the end... they just decided they hated him, it, and by extension, me. Worth thinking about when you decide to trade in a little brand equity to move people to, say, an opt out spam program...

Posted by Basileios at 07:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 16, 2004

Will You Reply to a Gmail Mail?

As we reported before Google offers us the option to chose wether we want to use Gmail or not if we are worrying *that* much about our privacy. Of course what Google forgot to mention was the fact that our friends and colleague's mails will also be scanned by Gmail and they certainly haven't chosen to be part of the Google data mining...

A crusade has started by the Gmail-is-too-creepy website in trying to persuade people not to send mail to Gmail mails. Will it have any effect? I doubt it. Still an interesting move.

Posted by Basileios at 04:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google Celebrates Bloomsday

Google is celebrating the centenial of Bloomsday today:

bloomsday.jpg

The Bloomsday events refer to June 16th 1904 as described in the clasic epic Ulysses by James Joyce. In the book Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin through the day, like a modern 20th century Ulysses, searching for truth, hapiness, lost memories, a son, freedom (and more). Parable for the Google searches? Maybe...

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing Services

Posted by Basileios at 12:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 15, 2004

I See your 1Gb and I raise you 1...

Yahoo! is about to announce that they wil lincrease the size limit of their (paid) email service to 2Gb in order to come to terms with the forthcoming (free) 1Gb mail from Gmail. Yahoo! will also increase the size of their free email service to 200Mb.

This is good news for all of us. It is a well known fact that healthy competition is the best way to achieve quality of service and this is just what is happening here with the email services.

Google will invest their marketing on trying to persuade people that Gmail is based on their 'Google serach technologies' and yahoo! will try and benefit from the inertia of users to change their email addresses to Gmail by offering them 'enough space' to play with. I am not a betting man, but in the short term I would put my money on the Google tactics.

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing Consultants

Posted by Basileios at 01:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 14, 2004

The Power of the Back Button II

In the same principle as our post last Friday on the 'power of the back button' a case study by the Pre-commerce blog (again today...) of an example of this effect in action.

Posted by Basileios at 04:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google and Evil

A very good post on the Pre-Commerce blog on Google and their interpretation of Evil.

It is certainly in line with our thinking and former posts in the Rugles blog. I am waiting for the next 'wrong step' that Google will make in this and I am sure there are a lot of people waiting for it as well. Not just from the world of journalism but mostly from Google's competitors. Will Bill Gates (and MSN) laugh all the way to the bank again?

Posted by Basileios at 02:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 11, 2004

Usability and the Power of The Back Button

I often find I have to explain to my customers something I consider self evident: It is not enough to get your website listed high in search engines or to get prominence through thousand dollar worth marketing campaigns or even to get hundreds of visitors. Your website, the centerpiece of your business, should be able to engage your visitors in a set of processes that will guide them to your goal (like the purchase of your products, or the download of your software).

Creating a website and letting all else go to chance is definitely not the right approach on this problem. A website should be considered like a dynamic entity, an organism, that has the power to manipulate your visitors, to guide them from one place to the other to achieve small or large goals.

However, the difficulty in this is the fact that the website does not have the autonomy to act on its own based on the visitor behavior in order to optimize itself and and turn the visitor to where it wants. (Such a self-organization is lacking from the web as a whole and is a matter worth discussing in the future.) It falls in the hands and analyisis of the site owner to get and understand the visitor feedback and modify the website appropriately in order to get the most out of his/her visitors.

Do not under any circumstances assume that the visitor is free to move in any way he wants in a website. Visitors are as free in websites as they are in super markets Website zoology and visitor behavior falls somewhere between the realms of art and rocket science at the moment but there are some definite and well structured rules in this.

The most common action on the web these days is the pressing of the Back button in the browser, a matter indicating the immense power of this behavior and the lack of understanding of this effect by web owners (I once had to give up on trying to reason this with a well educated web owner / customer since he did not even want to believe in the data, but was trying to find clever possible biases for the back button effect. Sometimes prejudice lies in incredible places)

Getting your visitor to act the minute he lands on your website requires special analysis and understanding of various matters (like where the visitor actually came in from) but is usually assigned to usability optimization of the website. In brief one must watch things like (there is A LOT more to this, we are just being telegraphically brief):

Again I must stress that it is stupid to fight so much to get visitors on your website only to lose them after they land on it. It is unfortunate that sometimes usability is harder to reconcile than search engine optimization. Do not trust yourself for any of the usability matters that were mentioned here. Ask a friend, a colleague (who hasnt been involved in the project) or a professional for assistance.

Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Internet Consultants

Posted by Basileios at 04:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 10, 2004

Goodbye Google News...

Rugles was - probably - the first Movable Type weblog to appear in Google news. It looks like we had our 15 minutes of fame and Google announced us yesterday that we will not be part of their Google News any more (since they do not accept weblogs...).

Oh well, goodbye Google news, we will rememeber you till we meet again. I am sure that eventually Google news will grow to a service similar to Yahoo! news.

Naturally we will continue our postings with the same spirit as before (We didnt start the weblog for Google News...). Maybe we will even get less spam out of this ;)

Posted by Basileios at 03:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Web Marketing Webinar

We will soon organize a series of webinars on web marketing and promoting your website in the most ethical and organic ways.

The webinars will cover matters like:

If you are interested in taking part in the webinars email us at webinars@rugles.com. We are actually open to suggestions on the issues we will cover.

Posted by Basileios at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 09, 2004

Ask Jeeves on your Desktop

Ask Jeeves announced today that they have purchased Tukaroo a company specializing on desktop search technologies.

It seems that Jeevey is moving in the steps of Google since there is rumour that Google is preparing a similar desktop search application based on their own technology.

Yahoo! to follow suit?

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Internet Consultants

Posted by Basileios at 09:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google back on RSS?

Cnet reports today on the possibility that Google may stop 'taking sides' in the Atom vs. RSS race that started about one year ago.

Google, as the owner of Blogger, took sides by adopting Atom as the standard feed in Blogger a couple of months ago, only to cause a stir in the world of online publishing.

According to the report Google has been investigating the RSS 2.0 standards and is targeting a treatment of RSS in equal terms with Atom. We believe that if the rumors end up correct this is an excellent development in the online publishing sector.

Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Internet Consultants (and not Astronomy!)

Posted by Basileios at 05:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 08, 2004

Rugles and the Transit of Venus

Ok, I know this has nothing to do with SEO or web marketing, but this is such a rare astronomical phenomenon that - as a former astronomer - I believe it deserves a mention here.

The transit of venus is a 'once in a lifetime' phenomenon in which Venus passes in front of the disk of the Sun. venus transits happen 'in pairs' every about 100 years. The partner of today's transit will happen on 2012 (and the one after that is on 2117). The first Transit of Venus to have been observed was the one predicted by Kepler (but not observed by him since he had died a few years earlier) in 1639. Astronomers have used the Transit of Venus in the past as a way to calculate the distance to the Sun (with very good accuracy).

venusun2.jpeg

The literary among you will remember the Transit of Venus events described by Thomas Pynchon in Mason & Dixon.

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Astronomy ;)

Posted by Basileios at 01:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 07, 2004

On Google Link Strategy

I often find in customers, web designers and SEO professionals, the idea that a website owner should be careful in the outbound links that his/her website has, since 'too many' outbound links to other websites will reduce the website's PageRank and eventually cause a drop in the rankings of the site (this applying particularly in Google...).

Such an obsession with getting high PageRank values is actually unjustified. A random search experiment will show you that it is common for smaller PageRank sites will beat high PageRank for any keyword. This is simply a represantation of the fact that there are many degrees of freedom acting on the ranking and a simple PageRank parameter is not enough to justify the search engine order.

At the moment the essence of PageRank is totally different than it was a few years ago, and it is definitely something that only the Google people know exactly its function. A few Google experiments have shown over the past 6 months the actual PageRank parameter is more than a single 'scalar' but is more like a vector at the moment, having a number of dimensions depending on the types of keywords that are 'scanned' in the page's content.

To go back to outbound links, it appears that relevant and targeted outbound links work towards enhancing this vector PageRank and may even act as a boost of your websites rank. For example a website that has links to various websites that deal with 'blue widgets' automatically gets a value for the 'widgets' 'category' in the PageRank vector so it may get a some sort of algorithm boost in the rankings for the search of 'blue widgets'.

Unfortunately the number of degrees of freedom and the hidden variables in the equation make this simple speculation. As I mentioned before only Google knows exactly what is happening, but for us in Rugles it appears that this is a rather important part of the equation.

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 06:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 04, 2004

Gmail Enhancement

The Search Engine Journal reports on a new enhancement of Gmail that allows users to be 'constantly logged in' for two weeks:

gmailpass.gif

Gmail seems to be aiming to become a 'desktop-like' web application. It is really the natural way forward though, so nothing surprising there. Just don't delete the cookies of your browser too often...

Harry @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 05:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 03, 2004

Seth Godin on the Curse of Benchmarking

This is such a fantastic post by Seth Godin on bechmarking that I will copy it all here. This is a wonderful Seneca-like approach that I can simply applaud Seth Godin's opinions and decisions. This is more than a blog post. It is a way of life manifesto.

I can benchmark everything now.

I can benchmark my morning workout. The rowing machine tells me if todays workout was a personal best. Even better, I can go online and compare my workout to the efforts of thousands of other people.

On my way to work, I can track my mileage. (My record is 89 mpg). Once there, I can watch the status of my books on Amazon, comparing their sales to every other book published in the English language and then go check out JungleScan.com, where I can track the books performance over the last 90 days.

The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much. Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time? What entrepreneur wants to embrace the fact that the wait time at her new restaurant franchise is 20% behind the leaderand theres no obvious way to improve it?

Our interconnected, 500-channel world lets us be picky. We can want a husband who is as tall as that guy, as rich as this guy and as loyal as my brother-in-law. We can ask for an apartment that is in just the right location, with just the right view and just the right rentand then reject it because the carpeting in the hallway isnt as nice as the one in the building next door. Monster lets us see 5,000 resumes for every job opening and imagine that we can find someone with this guys education and that womans professional experiencewho works as cheap as this person and is as local as that one.

In the old days, data was a lot harder to come by. You didnt know everything about everyone. All the options werent right there, laid out in Froogle and compared by epinions.com. We didnt have reality TV shows where each and every component of a singers presentation or a bridal prospects shtick were painstakingly compared.

Yes, benchmarking is terrific. Benchmarking is the reason that cars got so much better over the last twenty years. Benchmarking has the inexorable ability to make the mediocre better than average, and it pushes us to always outperform.

But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. Its hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.

Of course, the boomers have this problem even worse (and were all boomers, arent we? Even if youre not, we dont careits all about us). Boomers are getting older. We can benchmark our eyesight, our rowing speed, our memory or even our ability to come up with great ideas at a moments notice. As a result, we benchmark ourselves into a funk. We get stressed because we have to acknowledge that nothing is as good as it was.

In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didnt benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING.

So, Im officially letting go. Im going to stop comparing everything to my all time best, to your all time best, to everyones all time best. Instead of benchmarking everything, perhaps we win when we accept that the best we can do is the best we can doand then try to find the guts to do one thing thats remarkable.

Was this my best blog entry ever, or what?

Posted by Basileios at 06:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yahoo! Japan Drops Google

This is really something we have been waiting for some time and it is now official: Yahoo! Japan has dropped Google and is also using the Yahoo! search technology for its search results.

Google has a lot on its mind at the moment to worry about such a 'small' incident.

Posted by Basileios at 06:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 02, 2004

Yahoo! Gas Prices

(I have to admit I came very close to posting my Beef with Sauce Bernaise recipe instead of this today...)

Yahoo! teams up with GasPriceWatch.com and GasBuddy.com in order to provide localized gas prices through the Yahoo! shortcuts.

You simply need to enter 'gas (area)' and it will offer you the appropriate links and gas prices from the two sites. Check for example the search for our area.

To be frank I would prefer it if this was more integrated with Yahoo! maps but still I like the idea.

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 07:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 01, 2004

Google Gmail Privacy Issues

Google Gmail has a new page with a rather large analysis on the privacy issues that have been raised ever since Gmail was announced two months ago. To be frank, the page has very little that we did not know before, but it is a good reference point on the Google state of mind concerning privacy matters.

I actually find quite interesting the following paragraph from this analysis:

'We understand that not everyone supports our position on advertising. It's harder to see why you shouldn't be allowed to make your own decisions about it. You should be able to choose for yourself how you read your email. You should have the right to decide whether or not to become a Gmail user.'

Well, if Google is such a 'nice company' as they want to persuade us about in their IPO why don't they simply give us the freedom to chose whether we want ur (G)mails scanned? (Totaly rhetorical question, so please do not answer it since we all know what the situation is).

In any case Google seems that they are definitely taking matters seriously and they view Gmail as a great step forward not simply because it will increase their revenues but because it will allow them to play a completely different role than the one they were playing so far.

As John Batttelle says in his Searchblog this seems to be a good move on Google's part, and a sign the company recognizes some of the larger issues at play.

Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing

Posted by Basileios at 05:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack