SAN FRANCISCO - Social networking pioneer and inadvertent spammer Plaxo has been sold to cable and broadband company Comcast for between $145m and $175m.

Plaxo launched in 2001 as an address-book synching tool before anyone had heard of social media.

Last year, it launched its own social networking site Plaxo Pulse as a rival to Linkedin, although the site is more like Facebook in style.

However, the relaunch still presented Plaxo with an uphill challenge because of its lingering negative reputation for being a prolific, if accidental, spammer.

When first launched, Plaxo included a feature that would spam a users entire address book with offers to sign up to Plaxo. This “feature” was later turned off, but not before it had done a lot damage to the firm’s reputation.

It is thought that Comcast will use Plaxo to build its own social networking offering to bring together its various online, email and mobile services. These include its video entertainment site Fancast, movie site Fandango and video publishing company thePlatform.

Sam Schwartz, executive vice-president of Comcast Interactive Media, said: “Every social network is better the more end points you can connect with.

“Plaxo will offer users the ability to share with friends on all Comcast screens going forward.”

Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo, said: “We intend to deliver on a vision of making social media a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters.”

Google and Facebook have been linked to Plaxo as potential suitors, but in the end both firms declined to make a bid when the social media firm touted itself around Silicon Valley.

Like Google, Plaxo was founded by two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring. Also on board early was Napster co-founder Sean Parker, but he was forced out only to re-emerge as the founding president of Facebook.

Plaxo is a supporter of the cross-platform social media alliance OpenSocial founded by Google and MySpace, and latterly joined by Yahoo!.

It has also forged partnerships with other online firms, including Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Yahoo!, as it strived to synch address books and calendars.

Plaxo now claims to have 20m members, a rise of 5m from three years ago, in part because of a partnership with AOL.

The two companies estimate that tying Plaxo with Comcast could create another 30m users. If true, it would represent a remarkable turnaround for Plaxo and make the $175m maximum price tag seem relatively cheap.

Source: brandrepublic.com

Google has surpassed Yahoo to become the most popular website in the United States, according to comScore’s rankings by the number of unique monthly visitors.

Google has long been the internet’s leader in search, but its audience has trailed Yahoo’s when counting other services such as email and photo sharing.

April’s numbers, which internet tracking firm comScore plans to formally release on Thursday, show Google on top for the first time.

The lead is tiny - 466,000 visitors out of about 141 million apiece. And while such measures are good as a gauge, they aren’t known for precision. In fact, rival rankings from Nielsen Online already had Google as the top web brand.

Still, comScore’s finding is one more hint of Google’s dominance over internet pioneer Yahoo.

Jack Flanagan, comScore’s executive vice president, said Google’s dominance in search creates “a halo effect” that can boost its other services.

Google now has the Picasa online photo-sharing service, competing with Flickr from Yahoo. Google also has launched a site on finance, while its Gmail email service keeps growing - and competing with Yahoo.

Google’s $US1.76 billion purchase of YouTube in November 2006 gave it the leading video-sharing website.

According to comScore, Google’s unique U.S. audience in April was 141.1 million, an 18 per cent increase from the same month in 2007. Yahoo’s audience grew 7 per cent, to 140.6 million. Microsoft was third at about 121 million.

That said, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

The comScore data come from its Media Metrix panel, recruited primarily using random phone-based techniques.

ComScore recently took heat for its data on paid search clicks, which come from a larger panel that relies heavily on online recruitment techniques dismissed by many more traditional pollsters.

In that case, however, Wall Street concerns that the faltering U.S. economy could bog down Google resulted largely from investors and analysts ignoring comScore’s advice on how to interpret the paid-click data. Google wound up surpassing the analysts’ predictions in producing a first-quarter profit of 30 per cent.

Source: www.smh.com.au

Google PageRank or PR for short is numeric value assigned by Google to pages that represents how important a page is. The more important and known your pages are, the better PR they will get. PR is a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is an unknown page for Google and 10 is the highest PR that can be assigned.

PageRank provides the basis for all of web search tools. It is always updated by Google in order to improve it and optimize it.

How is PageRank Calculated?
No one knows for sure how PageRank is currently calculated by Google (except Google itself). Some speculations about the algorithm are made by webmasters all of them are based on the original PageRank published by Google.
In essence, Google interprets a link for page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. This means that page A is considered important (at least by page B).
The more votes (more links) page A gets the higher its PR will be.

Going into more details
As stated above, the main factor in PR is links (or backlinks as they are called). But no all links weight the same when it comes to PR. So an ‘important’ page linking to you gives you more PR than a ‘less important’ one.
There for you should always try to get backlinks from pages that have a high PR. These will benefit your page the most.
Another factor in PR propagation is the number of out-links the ‘voting’ page have. So a PR4 page with only one out-link on it might give you more weight than a PR5 page with 100 out-links on it.
An typical example here would be the famous milliondollarhomepage. This page is PR7 page with hunderds of out-links therefore its weight is would contribute very little to your page PR.

How to increase my PageRank?
Well as you would have probably guessed, PR can be increased by getting more backlinks for your page. The more backlinks and the higher quality they are the more your PR will be.
Here are some tips:

- Submit your site to directories.
- Write important content to your site that would make people link to you.
- Write articles and distribute them.
- Although I don’t recommend it but some people recommend it: Do link exchanges.
- Participate in forums (while adding your signature which includes a link to your site).
- Buy some links on high PR pages.

When does Google calculate PRs?
Google calculates pages PRs once every few months, this is called PR update. After a PR update is done, all pages are assigned a new PR by Google and you will have this PR until a new PR update is done.
New sites that were just launched will have a PR of 0 until an update is done by Google so that they are assigned an appropriate PR.

Other ‘possible’ factors considered
The following are some other factors might be considered by Google for calculating the PR lately:
- Site age: The older the better, Google seems to like old sites.
- Backlink relevancy: Googles seems to be taking into account how relevant is the page linking to you, if it is not that relevant, the link won’t weight much.
- Backlink duration: How long was the backlink up? The more the better.

Tools of the trade
Google Page rank: http://www.googlepagerankchecker.com/
Use this tool to discover your Google Page Rank (PR).

Source:
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=95221

that I see people making. By avoiding these mistakes, you can avoid a lot of anguish and frustration in the long run.1) Optimizing your site for the wrong keywords

The first step in any search engine optimization campaign is to choose the keywords for which you should optimize your site.

If you initially choose the wrong keywords, all the time and effort that you devote in trying to get your site a high ranking will go down the drain.

If you choose keywords which no one search for, or if you choose keywords which won’t bring in targeted traffic to your site, what good will the top rankings do?

In order to learn how you can choose the correct keywords for which you should optimize your site, see my article on this topic.

Search Engine Positioning Mistakes explained here by Sumantra Roy

2) Putting too many keywords in the Meta Keywords tag

I often see sites which have hundreds of keywords listed in the Meta Keywords tag, in the hope that by listing the keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, they will be able to get a high ranking for those keywords.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to popular opinion, the Meta Keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned.

Hence, just by listing keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, you will never be able to get a high ranking. To get a high ranking for those keywords, you need to put the keywords in the actual body content of your site.

3) Repeating the same keyword too many times

Another

common mistake

that people make is to endlessly repeat their target keywords in the body of their pages and in their Meta Keywords tags.Because so many people have used this tactic in the past (and continue to use it), the search engines keep a sharp lookout for this, and may penalize a site which repeats keywords in this fashion. Sure, you do need to repeat the keywords a number of times.

But, the way you place the keywords in your pages needs to make grammatical sense. Simply repeating the keywords endlessly no longer works. Furthermore, a particular keyword should ideally not be present more than thrice in your Meta Keywords tag.

Search Engine Positioning Mistakes explained here by Sumantra Roy

4) Creating lots of similar doorway pages

Another myth prevalent among people is that since the algorithm of each search engine is different, they need to create different pages for different search engines. While this is great in theory, it is counter-productive in practice.

If you use this tactic, you will soon end up with hundreds of pages, which can quickly become an administrative nightmare. Also, just imagine the amount of time you will need to spend constantly updating the pages in response to the changes that the search engines make to their algorithms.

Furthermore, although the pages are meant for different engines, they will actually end up being pretty similar to each other. The search engines are often able to detect when a site has created such similar pages, and may penalize or even ban this site from their index.

Hence, instead of creating different pages for different search engines, create one page which is optimized for one keyword for all the search engines. In order to learn how to create such pages, see my article on this topic.

5) Using Hidden Text

Hidden text is text with the same color as the background color of your page. For example, if the background color of your page is white and you have added some white text to that page, that is considered as hidden text.

Many webmasters, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their pages as keyword rich as possible. However, there is a limit to the number of keywords you can repeat in a page without making it sound odd to your human visitors. Thus, in order to ensure that the human visitors to a page don’t perceive the text to be odd, but that the page is still keyword rich, many webmasters add text (containing the keywords) with the same color as the background color.

This ensures that while the search engines can see the keywords, the human visitors cannot. The search engines have long since caught up with this technique, and ignore or penalize the pages which contain such text. They may also penalize the entire site if even one of the pages in that site contain such hidden text.

However, the problem with this is that the search engines may often end up penalizing sites which did not intend to use hidden text. For instance, suppose you have a page with a white background and a table in that page with a black background.

Search Engine Positioning Mistakes explained here by Sumantra Roy

Further suppose that you have added some white text in that table. This text will, in fact, be visible to your human visitors, i.e. this shouldn’t be called hidden text. However, the search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they may often ignore the fact that the background of the table is black.

Hence, in order to ensure that your site is not penalized because of this, you should go through all the pages in your site and see whether you have inadvertently made any such mistake.

6) Creating Pages Containing Only Graphics

The search engines only understand text - they don’t understand graphics. Hence, if your site contains lots of graphics but little text, it is unlikely to get a high ranking in the search engines.

For improving your rankings, you need to replace the graphics by keyword rich text for the search engine spiders to feed on.

7) Not using the NOFRAMES tag in case your site uses frames

Many search engines don’t understand frames. For sites which have used frames, these search engines only consider what is present in the NOFRAMES tag. Yet, many webmasters make the mistake of adding something like this to the NOFRAMES tag: “This site uses frames, but your browser doesn’t support them”.

For the search engines which don’t understand frames, this is all the text that they ever get to see in this site, which means that the chances of this site getting a good ranking in these search engines are non-existent. Hence, if your site uses frames, you need to add a lot of keyword rich text to the NOFRAMES tag. For more information on the different issues that arise when you use frames in your site, see my article on this topic.

Search Engine Positioning Mistakes explained here by Sumantra Roy

Using Page Cloaking

Page cloaking is a technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. People generally use page cloaking for two reasons:

In order to hide the source code of their search engine optimized pages from their competitors and ii) in order to prevent human visitors from having to see a page which looks good to the search engines but does not necessarily look good to humans.

The problem with this is that when a site uses cloaking, it prevents the search engines from being able to spider the same page that their users are going to see. And if the search engines can’t do this, they can no longer be confident of providing relevant results to their users.

Thus, if a search engine discovers that a site has used cloaking, it will probably ban the site forever from their index. Hence, my advice is that you should not even think about using cloaking in your site. For more information on what page cloaking is, how it is implemented, and why you should not use cloaking, see my article on this topic.

9) Using Automatic Submission Tools

In order to save time, many people use an automatic submission software or service to submit their sites to the major search engines. It is true that submitting your site manually to the search engines takes a lot of time and that an automatic submission tool can help you save a lot of time.

However, the search engines don’t like automatic submission tools and may ignore your pages if you use them. In my opinion, the major search engines are simply too important for you not to spend the time to submit your site manually to them.

In order to speed up the process of submitting your site, you can use our free submission tool which allows you to submit your site manually to all the search engines, without having to go to the “ADD URL” pages of the individual engines. It is available here.

10) Submitting too many pages per day

People often make the mistake of submitting too many pages per day to the search engines.

This often results in the search engines simply ignoring many of the pages which have been submitted from that site.

Ideally, you should submit no more than 1 page per day to the search engines. While many search engines accept more than 1 page per day from a particular domain, there are some which only accept 1 page per day. Hence, by limiting yourself to a maximum of one page per day, you ensure that you stay within the limits of all the search engines.

11) Devoting too much time to

search engine positioning

Yes - I lied. There’s another common mistake that people make when it comes to search engine optimization - they spend too much time over it.

Search Engine Positioning Mistakes explained here by Sumantra Roy

Sure, search engine placement is the most cost effective way of driving traffic to your site and you do need to spend some time every day learning how the search engines work and in optimizing your site for the search engines.

However, you must remember that search engine optimization is a means to an end for you - it’s not the end in itself. The end is to increase the sales of your products and services. Hence, apart from trying to improve your

site’s position in the search engines

, you also need to spend time on all the other factors which determine the success or the failure of your web site - the quality of the products and services that you are selling, the quality of your customer service, and so on. You may have excellent rankings in the search engines, but if the quality of your products and services are poor, or if your customer service leaves a lot to be desired, those high rankings aren’t going to do much good.

Source:
http://www.goarticles.com

Sandboxes and Google

Sandboxes are used to “quarantine” things in the real world (you keep all the sand in one place that way, in theory, but then again have you seen the trail from a kids sandbox?, still I digress), the term being also used with computers in relation to “dangerous things” like Active X controls etc.

Google on the other hand are using it to “quarantine” nothing more harmless than new websites. Why are they doing this? They would say because so many new websites are (a) awful and will soon wither, so why bother with them, or (b) that they are the “creatures” on SEM companies whose sole aim is to artificially increase the rankings of another website through interlinking, and that therefore we are going to ignore them too.

The Sandbox Effect

Websites can linger in this Sandbox for 3 - 6 months and whilst you can reduce the detention period, it’s difficult to break a website out. Worst still, there is it appears a Sandbox Effect that lasts for up to 2 years! The effects here are mostly seen for high value (most searched for) keywords, where again research has shown that “new” sites (built after 2003) have little chance of good rankings on the Google engine.

The Power of the Lesser used Keyword

So what does this mean for businesses that want to get the most out of the internet and the promise that it offers? Simple, (a) don’t rely on Google alone (there are other engines out there) and (b) target the lesser keywords. You’ll be amazed just how many variations there in the words that people use when searching. Sure there are some that are used more often, but access to these is in effect barred to all new websites on Google (and can be hard to get for new websites anyway until they build up some momentum ) and besides all that, the number of searches for these “lesser” keywords is, when added together HUGE (just like your shopping receipt at Tescos - “How the hell did it add up to that, individually everything was so cheap?” being a thought that many must have had when reaching for the wallet/purse).

So, if you are interested in getting the best out of your shiny new website, remember those “lesser sought after keywords” they could well be the answer to your problems for the first few years of your websites life.

Graham Baylis Internet Marketing and Promotion Specialists www.TheWebIsTheWay.com “Making sure your needle is found in the Internet Haystack”

Source:
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=94364

Top search engines do their best to provide the most relevant information, and it’s really interesting to find out which of them are most popular. One of investigations of 2006 year gives such result of usage top search Engines in USA:

1. Google—42.7%.
2. Yahoo!—28%.
3. MSN—13.2%.
4. AOL—7.6%.
5. Ask—5.9%.

Other search engines together possess 2.6% of all searching requests.
This rate of top search engines doesn’t correlate to activities of other countries’ or the world’s searches at all, but it could have something in common with them.

Submitting to directories

This article describes the basics of submitting to the human-edited Internet directories such as Yahoo!, dmoz.org, (the Open Directory Project) and Zeal. (For more information on submitting specifically to Zeal, please read: Submitting to LookSmart for Free Through Zeal)

To get listed on a directory, you submit your front page URL using the directory’s submission (add URL) form. Your submission is then reviewed by an editor and ranked according to the description provided on the form. Reviewers check every submission to decide if it belongs in the directory, and if it was submitted to the most appropriate category.

Only Human

When submitting to any directory, be sure to keep your reviewer in mind and treat your submission with kid gloves. Always read the submission guidelines before submitting, and follow them closely.

As with everything in life, being polite and following the rules will get you far. Being rude and arrogant will most likely result in unfavorable alteration of your description — or a completely ignored submission. Reviewers can change the content of submissions at will, so think about your Web site as objectively as possible and prepare accordingly.

Choosing the best category must be done judiciously. One good method involves doing a search using the most relevant keyword phrases for your site, and noting which categories pop up. Look for the most appropriate category, analyzing your site as an outside observer would.

Choose the category your site truly belongs in, not the one where you’d prefer to see it.

Choose subcategories over top-level categories. If you submit to a top-level category even though appropriate subcategories are available, there’s a good chance your submission will be denied. Similarly, if your site is local in nature, be sure to submit it to the appropriate geographic region.

Once you’ve decided upon the most appropriate category, find and click the “add a site” (or submit URL) link. Now you’re ready to begin the submission process.

Submitting to directories explained here by Jill Whalen

Steps to Success

In choosing a title, most directories do not allow you much leeway. To be safe, a good rule of thumb is to use your company name or the official name of your Web site. Adherence to this rule varies by directory, however. Yahoo! is very strict and allows company or Web site names only. Zeal and dmoz are more lenient, but they are beginning to crack down.

Occasionally, these directories will allow you to slip some keywords into the title, but do so at your own risk. This practice could raise a red flag for your submission and subject it to additional scrutiny.

The Web site description posted with your URL is a big factor in how your site will rank once it’s listed in the directory. It is very important to do this right the first time. If you put too much promotional jargon in your description or make it too long, for example, the editors are sure to change it. When they do, you can bet your keywords won’t appear in the final listing. Be concise, be sensible, and, most of all, include your most important keywords whenever possible.

If you’ve created a good meta description tag for your site, start with that. Copy and paste it into the submission form, then start deleting extraneous words. Move words around until you have the shortest yet most descriptive sentence possible. If you do this correctly, chances are the editors won’t change it. They’ll appreciate the fact that you saved them editing time.

Be sure the words you’re using in your description appear on the pages of your Web site. If they don’t, and the site appears to be about subjects other than what you described in your form, your description might be

edited. If you don’t have a good grasp on how to do this, you might want to have a professional do it for you. I say this only because it’s very difficult to change a site description once it’s listed in most Internet directories.

Once you’ve taken the steps I’ve described, your submission should be successful. Each directory has its unique procedure, but the basics of choosing the most appropriate category and creating the best description apply across the board.

Source:
http://www.highrankings.com

Google, Yahoo and MSN. Most webmasters and online marketers spend a lot of their time trying to get listed in the big three search engines. But trying to figure out the algorithms and robot visits for these SE’s can mean changing your site for the search engines and not for your customers.

As an example, our partner site HostingGoodies.com has an extremely hard time ranking with Google and Yahoo becuase the keywords are so competitive. Without spending money on PPC campaigns and other advertising, they could never be found on Google.

While we did manage to get this site ranked on the first page for some very specific keyword phrases, getting it ranked for general keywords is next to impossible.

One solution we have been using is targeting the smaller search engines for this highly competitive site. By doing this we have increased traffic and sales. Now while most of the search engines follow the same guidelines such as , keywords, content, linking etc. the smaller engines tend to rank sites on a fairer playing field.

I have found less “sponsored links” on top of search results and more relevant results for what I typed in the search box. I would try this yourself. Check your results for keywords in Google and they will different in ExactSeek and even Yahoo.

The point I am trying to make is not to spend all your time trying to please Google, but to spend some time pleasing the smaller guys. Think of it this way. If you rank on page 7 for your keyword on Google and rank on page one or two for a few of the smaller engines, which do you think will bring more targeted FREE traffic?

So, give it a try. Visit Exactseek.com, SearchBliss.com, dogpile.com or Looksmart.com just to name a few. Check out your rankings on these engines and visit their SEO Guidelines to find out how to better make your site friendly for their spiders to visit. Then tweek your site a bit and resubmit it or just let the spiders find it on their own.

Within a month or so or even a few weeks, you may start to see results you only dreamed of with Google.

Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=76664

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together to create a superfast search engine.

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