Hello from New Zealand
I’m in New Zealand for this week and the next, working with our fantastic Kiwi development team at our Netconcepts offices in Browns Bay, at the northernly end of Auckland’s metro area. (We’re working on more innovative SEO features for our GravityStream product, but Shhhhhhh)
I’m still adjusting to the radical time zone twist from over here — it’s currently about 2:20 pm Tuesday here at the office, while it’s about 7:20 pm Monday back in the Central time zone in the US. So, I’m responding to emails and such a bit later in the day than I normally do.
If you want to see some of the beautiful sites I’ve been seeing while over here, keep checking back at my Flickr New Zealand Photos album which I’ll be updating consistently.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/11/2008
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Filed under: General Auckland, GravityStream, Netconcepts, New Zealand
Biz Profile Article Awarded the SEMMY for Local Search
My article, “Anatomy & Optimization of a Local Business Profile” was just awarded a SEMMY in the Local Search category for 2008.
Many thanks to all of you who voted for it! (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/01/2008
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, General, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Yellow Pages Blog Awards, Search Engine Marketing Awards, SEMMYs
Vote for the SEMMYs
We’ve been nominated for a few SEMMYs it seems, and made it into the finals. The SEMMY awards are a new annual awards event invented by Matt McGee to highlight the year’s best articles and blog posts for search engine marketing.
Stephan Spencer has been nominated for two articles he wrote, and I’ve been nominated for one as well:
I hope you’ll take a few moments to vote. There are a whole lot of great articles listed there that are well worth reading.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/25/2008
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Filed under: General Blog Awards, Search Engine Marketing Awards, SEMMYs
Hello 2008 @ Natural Search Blog!
Hi, all! As you may have noticed, I’ve been quite silent of late due to taking a lengthy time off for the holidays. I spent Xmas in Central Texas with my family, and then went down to Galveston to a vacation rental for the annual New Years reunion with a bunch of old friends from college (we choose a different location every year, with most being far away from Texas).
Even before the holiday vacation hit for me, I’d gone pretty silent/infrequent with my postings since I was heavily focused upon helping our major online retailer clients get shipshape for all the Cyber Mondays and we made little tweaks to help them maintain their juice as needed. (Oh, yeah — we were also targeted here by some malicious hacker, but that proved to be mostly an annoyance and it’s not really why I’d slowed down postings. Thanks to all of you who sent us notes of encouragement and offers to assist with that, btw!)
While the business sections of the newspapers have subsequently reported a mediocre-to-bad holiday season for retail sales at the end of 2007, it looked quite different from the stats that we watched pouring through our many servers for our GravityStream clients.
I’m pleased to report that this holiday season was very sunny for the majority of our GravityStream installations, and our automated SEO service made a significant difference for the retailers using us, resulting in many millions of dollars in sales. I’ll check and see if I can later circle back and share some actual performance figures.
I’m looking forward to this new year, and I’m now revving back up to blogging and article writing and such along with the usual analytic/consulting work I do behind the scenes at Netconcepts along with fantastic teams of other pros within our company. In the near term here on Natural Search Blog, I expect to write a bit about future developments I foresee happening in the search space — my little contribution to the many 2008 predictions that are globbing about in the blogosphere.
Stay tuned!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/03/2008
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Filed under: General Cyber Monday, GravityStream, Holiday Season
Recent Google Improvements Fail To Halt Massive Malware Attack
Various news sites are reporting that a malware attack was deployed in the last couple of days, apparently based entirely upon black hat SEO tactics.
Software security company Sunbelt blogged about how the attack was generated: a network of spambots apparently added links into blog comments and forums pointing to the bad sites over a period of months in some cases, enabling those sites to achieve fair rankings in search engine result pages for a great many potential keyword search combinations. The pages either contained iframes which attempted to load malware onto visitors machines or perhaps they began redirecting to the sites containing malware at some point after achieving rankings. Sunbelt provided interesting screenshots of the SERPs in Google:
And also showed some screenshots of some of the keyword-stuffed pages which apparently got indexed:
I think it’s not at all a coincidence (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/28/2007
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Filed under: General, Google, News, Tricks, Worst Practices black-hat-seo, blackhat-seo, Google, Malware, spam, Sunbelt
Google Presentation App: Presently
The Inquirer reports that Google may soon deploy slideshow presentation creation and display software which they’ll call “Presently”. This application was apparently developed out of code that Google got with their acquisition of Zenter and Tonic Systems earlier this year. The new presentation software will join the other Google Apps suite of products which include Google Spreadsheets, Google Write, and Gmail.
This is an interesting development… (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/14/2007
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Filed under: General, Tools Google, MicroSoft, PowerPoint, Presently
New Breed of People Search Engine Launches: Spock.com
A little startup called Spock.com has moved into public beta today for their official public launch – previously they were only available to a handful of invite-only beta-testers. Spock is to white pages what Google Maps was to yellow pages – Spock is a sort of people search engine that pulls data from many different sites together to automatically form personal profiles of individuals. The service also allows one to search for people who match up with certain criteria like celebrities, kidnapped children, billionaires, sudoku fans, “journalists killed in Iraq”, “Baptist women who love to travel”, etc.
Spock is one of a new breed of people search engines which pulls data in from a variety of online sources including MySpace, LinkedIn, My Yahoo!, Wikipedia, company websites, blogs, and other sources to compose these composite profiles which include photos, descriptions, links to people related to the person in question, and tag lists of common keywords. Check out this search I did for “Danny Sullivan”:
And, here’s the profile Spock generated for the search engine marketing “Danny Sullivan”:
This automatic generation of profiles from other data sources, similar to a meta search engine, is not all that new, of course – ZabaSearch has been touted for doing similar stuff to compose info on people out of various public records, sort of like a poor man’s background search. And, ZoomInfo has worked to build a directory of searchable business profiles of individuals. IceRocket also used to have a metasearch engine that pulled in data from a handful of various singles/personals sites.
What makes Spock a bit different is how they’re actively composing these profiles from sources that really haven’t been associated with one another previously, and making them publicly available, for “free” (eventually paid for by ad revenue, of course). While the general public likely hasn’t been aware of it, the CIA or NSA has actually also been working on a similar sort of search engine system which automatically composes secret dossiers of information on individuals from a multitude of sources including credit card information, criminal databases, as well as many of the same online sources used by these web services like ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and Spock.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/08/2007
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Filed under: General, Research and Development, Searching people-search, privacy, privacy-concerns, spock, white-pages
Not a Stumble – eBay to Acquire StumbleUpon
In yet another social media acquisition move, eBay has announced today that they’re acquiring StumbleUpon for approximately $75 million.
This closely follows Fox Interactive Media’s acquisition of Photobucket and Flektor along with CBS Interactive’s purchase of Wallstrip.com and fm.com. If you recall, Google has purchased YouTube while MySpace is already owned by Fox. Yahoo! has been buying social media types of sites for quite some time now, what with their earlier purchases of Flickr, del.icio.us, and such.
All the exuberance and hefty valuations seem to smack a bit of the over-valuation and acquisition craze just prior to the dot-bomb i-apocolypse. Purchasing a social media web 2.0 site or two just seems so trendy at the moment. These sites have some undeniable amounts of traffic and associated marketshare, but won’t there eventually have to be a bit of fallout? Won’t users eventually migrate over to a primary dominator in any given type of site?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/30/2007
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Filed under: General, News eBay, Mergers-&-Acquisitions, Social-Media, StumbleUpon
The Internet is Killing Independent Bookstores
In all the good done by the internet and technological innovation, it’s easy to sometimes overlook that some changes haven’t been for the better. On Monday, the news everywhere was mentioning the odd and sensational story of the bookstore owner in Kansas City, Missouri, who has started burning books on his doorstep to dramatize his perspective that people are not reading books nearly as much anymore. While I’m afraid his belief that people are reading less is faulty, his observation of the trend in people shopping less at stores like his is correct. I’ve personally witnessed the closing of hundreds of indie bookstores all across America, and there’s no question that the rare book shops and independent book dealers have been under siege and endangered as a species for about ten years. The internet has been killing them.
Burning book – photo used by express permission
of the photographer at Prospero’s Books.
There are worse crimes than burning books,
one is not reading them. ~ Joseph Brodskey
A few weeks ago, I was in New York attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference, and I took a few minutes to walk a few blocks south to the grand old Gotham Book Mart to get a friend back home a birthday present. I knew that the Gotham had moved a couple of blocks over in 2004 from its original home on West 47th (in Manhattan’s famous “Diamond Way”), to East 46th. The Gotham was always a place that gave me the warm fuzzies — it’s been around since the 1920s and was the sort of commercial home to one of my favorite author/illustrators, Edward Gorey, and it was a long-running meeting place for the Finnegans Wake Society and the James Joyce Society. Every spring, I tried to make a point of visiting their annual exhibit of rare old Goreyanna books and illustrations, and I’d typically be enchanted into buying something.
 
“Wise Men Fish Here”, sign over Gotham Book Mart (Left)
Chained door with author’s reflection (Right)
The shop was famed in the book world for its appreciation of humor with its “Wise Men Fish Here” sign above the door, its love of books, and its support of book collectors. It was with extreme shock that I found the Gotham locked up tight and the lights out. There was a terribly tragic air about it, because there were a number of cute stuffed Gorey characters still sitting in the window in their little rocking chairs. With a sinking feeling in my heart, I knew that store was dead, and that this was the end of an era.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/29/2007
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Filed under: General, Marketing books, bookstores, cultural-extinction, independent-bookstores, internet-bookstores, internet-economics, search-marketing
I joined the Dark Side, or This In-House SEO went to the Out-House!
So, as many of you noticed in my online profiles or heard about at the recent SES Conference, shortly ago I resigned from my post as Head of the Technology & Advanced Development Department for Idearc’s Superpages.com (Idearc was spun off from Verizon in November of 2006).
Yes, I’ve moved over to the “Dark Side” and become an external agency Search Engine Optimization consultant! 😉
Read on for more juicy details!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/16/2007
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