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The U.S. is considering sanctions against the Eastern European nation if does not reduce the number of unsolicited offers for Viagra and replica handbags it sends.

Breaking News: Matt Cutts Explains “Canonical Tag” from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. The three major search engines came together to allow users to point out their preferred version of a url. As Matt Cutts explains in this video, this format offers users more control.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Also, be sure to look for the rest of our video interview with Matt Cutts that includes his take on Google penalizing Google Japan, top security issues for 2009, and Google’s continued efforts with personalized search. The extended version will be available very soon.

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Revenue-Generating Products In the Mix for Twitter

By Chris Crum

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced some big news today about the company accepting an offer it couldn't refuse. Twitter has not been actively seeking funding, but due to its enormous growth, some parties just couldn't resist courting them.

"Last night, we closed on funding with our friends Peter Fenton from Benchmark and Todd Chaffee from Institutional Venture Partners," Stone explains. "When Ev [CEO Evan Williams] and I visited IVP we were very impressed and Benchmark's approach regarding teamwork was equally inspiring—every partner is invested in each others success."

With this new funding comes big plans for Twitter. Exactly what those plans are have not been revealed, but Twitter enthusiasts can rest assured that there will be some monetization involved.

"We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products," says Stone. "Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead."

Word is that this round of funding amounted to $35 million. Stone also noted that they still have money left from investments made last year by Spark.

Improving Google Maps Search Rankings

The fact that the average person doesn’t go beyond the first page of search results is well known, and when it comes to Google Maps listings, it’s important for a business’s name to be prominent, too. KeyRelevance’s director of optimization strategies, Chris Silver Smith, gave some tips on this issue at SMX West.

Smith began by naming four factors that can influence search rankings in Google Maps. The first is how close a company’s address is to a city center. He admits that this is hard to control, of course, and luckily for far-flung firms, Google has been deemphasizing it lately.

The second factor is how many ratings a business has received and how positive the ratings are. Then, there are regular SEO factors like how well a business’s website ranks, and finally, more specific matters of keyword relevance.

But what’s one business to do if it serves several different cities? Smith suggested creating targeted content on the main website and listing the cities. There’s also the less conventional approach of obtaining a mailing address in each city, but Smith warned that Google may regard this as spam.

As for whether businesses should give up on advertising in traditional printed yellow page books to focus on Google Maps, Smith doesn’t recommend making hasty decisions. Look at the question on an “is it working for you?” basis, since the answer will depend on the industry, and any move should be results-based.

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Up Close with YouTube at SMX West 2009

We spoke with Matt Liu, the YouTube Product Manager at Google who had some interesting things to say about the popular video site. He presented at the “Up Close with YouTube” session at SMX West, and shared a little more with us separately.

He talks about ways that content partners, advertisers, and every day users can take advantage of YouTube. He discussed optimizing titles, descriptions, and tags for videos, and mentions YouTube’s paid service.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so it stands to reason that rankings play a factor in YouTube just like they would with Google Search. Matt breaks it down into 2 main buckets:

Basic stuff like making sure your titles, descriptions, and tags are consistent, using complete sentences when appropriate, adding the location and date of your video, etc.

Analytics - Once you get some viewership on the video, use YouTube’s analytics tool YouTube Insight to see who’s watching your video. Are your views coming from a certain audience? A certain geography? Find the video’s hot spots. You can figure out search terms from the analytics data.

He then talks in more detail about YouTube Insight, which he compares to Google Analytics but specifically for video.

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Top 3 Reasons Why Article Submission Services Drive More Traffic To Your Website

By B Hopkins in Writing

In today’s world of Internet marketing, it is necessary to have multiple means of getting traffic to your website. Not just any traffic, but targeted traffic, which will more likely result in the desired action you wish your readers to make. Article Internet marketing is a great way to get this targeted traffic to your website. There are many ways to market your articles however the most effective way is to maximize the use of your time when marketing these articles. If you market your articles efficiently, you can write more and get even more traffic to your website. Article submission services are one of the most efficient ways to get traffic to your website from your articles. Article submission services are services that automatically submit your articles to article directories and publishers for you. Some of them may have their own submission requirements to be able to submit to the maximum number of directories, so it is important to follow their submission guidelines. If you don’t follow the guidelines, you are only hurting yourself.

1) Instead of spending time submitting articles to directories, you are writing articles.

Let’s say there are over 500 article directories and publishers out there that you could be submitting your articles to. If you are submitting your articles to all these directories by hand and it takes you about 10 minutes to submit an article to a directory, then that is 5000 minutes, or about 3 ½ days. You can write a lot of articles in 3 /12 days! The amount of time you may spend submitting an article to an article submission service may be 30 minutes at most. 1 submission vs. over 500; how much is your time worth?

2) Additional exposure for your article.

Many times, article submission services have their own directories and lists that only members of their submission service have their articles on. These services also spend time getting traffic to their websites as well as provide ways that you can use to market your articles easily, such as RSS feeds, article directories and other tools. You get the benefit of the traffic that is on their article directory already because that traffic can stumble across your article.

3) Data you can use to more powerfully market your products/services through your articles.

Most of the good article submission services will keep statistics about who looks at your article, who downloads your article and who uses your article feed. This is valuable information that gives you insight into what kinds of articles your target market finds interesting and what kinds of titles draw them in. You can look over time which kinds of articles are out-performing the other articles and from there you can tailor the kind of articles you would write to produce even better results in terms of getting more traffic to your website. This is free marketing information that is very powerful feedback in being able to enhance your marketing message through your articles.

These are the top 3 methods of why article submission services will help you to drive more traffic to your website. However, there are other benefits as well of article submission services that will really enhance your results of driving hungry visitors to your website. When authors take all of these into account, then they will put themselves out in front of their competition on the Internet. A well-developed strategy is the key to success.

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Now all those hours spent pleasuring yourself can be traded in for valuable gaming experience: The DIY Joydick

by John Biggs

This is pretty much the craziest thing I’ve seen all day (except for Stephen King - homeboy looks weird). This is a ring that you place over your penis that allows you to move your wang in four directions to control the on-screen Atari 2600 action. Strokes shoot your missiles on screen and gameplay continues until issue.

The makers at the SF Media Labs note that there is really a philosophy behind this process of build-up and release.

Our impetus to win can be seen as a drive towards transcendence. A transcendence that is both over death and, in a sense, a metaphorical death. Winning a video game is much like what Martin Heidegger referred to as becoming a “being towards death.” That is a self-realized individual who has overcome uncertainty in life, reconciled their place in the universe and has acknowledged death within their life.

This simultaneity of both transcendence in life and the acknowledgment of death is also encountered during what the French like to call “la petite morte” or in English, “the little death.” This is the refractory period following sexual climax in which a person can achieve no further orgasm and is filled both with pleasure and melancholy.

It would be reasonable to assert that the tension that builds during gameplay and the release achieved through victory are similar to the events leading up and through a sexual orgasm.

Got that? Good. Now all they have to do is connect this to World of Warcraft - say linking the orgasm to a level up - and a generation of men will never have sex, even unto death. Full instructions are available at the SF Media Labs website.

Just think: what if you could connect this to Twitter?

Twitter To Start Charging Companies For Having An Account?

by Robin Wauters



Companies using Twitter for commercial purposes may soon start getting charged for that activity, according to an interview British trade magazine Marketing (part of BrandRepublic) held with co-founder Biz Stone.

This is what Stone reportedly said:

“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

No big surprises there, as this is often cited as one of the most obvious moves Twitter could make to start generating revenue, although many are expecting more from the startup who has become notorious for its lack of an apparent business model even after nearly 3 years of existence. Stone also said they will not start charging individual users, and that the move could “create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.”

Stone did not give any details regarding pricing or the specific way Twitter would go about charging users and for what exactly. As a reminder: the startup has raised $20 million in venture capital to date and recently turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook.

One of the most recent examples of companies using Twitter for commercial purposes is Dell, who reportedly made $1 million in sales during the holidays via the micro-sharing utility, and recently started giving discounts exclusively to its followers.

We’ll see more of this type of behavior in the future beyond any shred of doubt, but I’m wondering what exactly is considered as ‘commercial usage’ by Twitter management: does it mean any way of promoting a product or service or only when there’s sales activity connected to the corporate accounts? And will companies be prepared to pay up for use of the service at all?

Marketing got in touch with Bob Pearson, VP of communities and conversations at Dell, with that exact question and got a telling response: “If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.”

Update: as Peter Kafka points out in comments, there was good article two days ago in New York Magazine which reveals a little more of where Twitter is headed.

(Picture from Profy, hat tip to Matt from Made by Many)

Why Facebook Isn’t Poised to Steal Twitter’s Thunder

by Mark Hendrickson

Last night, Facebook announced a set of changes to its platform that make it easier for third-party applications to exchange data about users’ status messages, notes, shared links, and videos.

The more open Facebook’s platform gets, the more powerful it becomes for developers to build fun and useful applications with Facebook’s data, either onsite or off. However, several pundits have already jumped to the conclusion that greater openness with concern to status updates in particular spells trouble for Twitter, the bourgeoning microblog service that Facebook itself recently courted without success.

No one knows just where Facebook is heading with its platform or whether it’s serious about crushing novel new social networking services like Twitter or FriendFeed. It’s easy for bloggers to speculate that every incremental change to its platform or feature set is a devious plan to do just this. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, especially when there’s a lot to suggest that Facebook has a long way to go before putting any kind of dent in Twitter’s growing popularity.

Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch UK has outlined four particular ways in which he thinks Facebook “won’t kill Twitter”. First off, Facebook has a fundamentally different relationship model than Twitter. On Facebook, you create a simple two-way friendship with someone. On Twitter, you can choose to follow someone and you can be followed, but the following relationship doesn’t have to be bidirectional.

Butcher also suggests that Facebook is more interested in preserving ownership over its social graph than Twitter is over its own. And he points out that the replies Twitter users make to each other are usually public.

These are all fine points to make, and the technical differences he spells out certainly make it more difficult for Facebook to recreate the appeal of Twitter. But when it comes down to it, Facebook fails to challenge Twitter with this new platform upgrade because the two companies ultimately serve substantially different behavioral paradigms.

While Twitter and Facebook prompt users with eerily similar questions — Twitter asks “What are you doing?” and Facebook asks “What are you doing right now?” — their users don’t answer in the same way. By and large, Facebook users answer the question more faithfully than Twitter users. They actually provide information about what they’re currently doing, perhaps because they are prompted with a field that starts with something like “Mark is”. And the news feed lists their entries as action items (”Mark is having a bike ride” or at least “Mike likes biking outside”) under a tab called Status Updates.

Meanwhile, Twitter users have (by and large) decided to ignore the questioned posed for them. Instead of using the service to post real status updates — i.e. descriptions of what they’re currently doing — they use it as a public broadcasting system of sorts. It’s an efficient way for them to send out thought trinkets to an often ambiguous crowd of friends and strangers. And with @replies, Twitter morphs into a conversational medium, a big cocktail party where everybody is constantly eavesdropping on everybody else’s impromptu conversations.

There are, of course, exceptions to these generalizations. Facebook users do enter random thoughts in lieu of real status updates, and Twitter users do actually say what they’re currently doing. But the overlap is rather small, and it’s this smallness that undermines any attempt (real or imaginary) on Facebook’s part to steal Twitter’s thunder. Something behavioral about Facebook’s users would have to change, and it’s unlikely that these users — who are largely mainstream — are inclined to pick up the tweeting habits of a crowd that consists mostly of early adopters.

Twitter is a Cash Cow in the Making

by Joe Hall

We have been talking a great deal lately about how Twitter should be monetizing their service. Most of this talk comes after news that Twitter secured $20 million in venture capital, to push its total valuation to $250 million. It wasn’t long ago that Twitter started looking for a product manager to define a revenue stream. This is a smart move for a company that has relied solely on venture capital from day one.

Andy recently wrote a post detailing his thoughts for a Twitter subscription program. This is an idea that even Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams has spoken about in the past.

We’ve though about it. We had to do some thinking about that to raise a bunch of money, but it’s not actively in development right now. The broad strokes on the matter are obviously Twitter is being used for a lot of commercial purposes right now, in addition to social purposes. We think that works pretty well. We think there’s a lot of companies that we’ve talked to that seem to be getting a lot of value out of it. If that continues, if that becomes a rich world for users and the companies, we think we can extract some revenue from that.

While I think that a subscription based program of some kind would be a good idea (one I would probably subscribe to), I think that implementing that alone would miss Twitter’s full potential completely.

Twitter’s Full Potential

As Seth Godin states, Twitter is a protocol. What’s a protocol? A protocol is a set of “rules determining the format and transmission of data.” The Twitter Protocol is made possible through Twitter’s overwhelmingly open API. Because of it we can integrate Twitter into just about anything.

So, Twitter is a protocol, whats the big deal? Protocols control the flow of information. Those that have become masters at information control have built insurmountable wealth as a result.

Here’s two real world examples at how the Twitter Protocol could bring on lots of wealth.

URL Control: Many Twitter users use some type of URL shortening service to make their URLs more manageable with in 140 characters. At the moment Twitter is integrated with the infamous TinyURL. If Twitter brought URL shortening in house they could not only brand out going URLs, but they could also control them. Think about every link that leaves Twitter to places like Amazon.com or eBay.com, now think about those links all of the sudden turning into affiliate links. Or how about all of the links that point towards Google SERPs, now think what it would mean if they changed into links that integrated the AdSense for Search program. Are you seeing were I am going with this?

Twitter as a payment gateway: Back in June of last year, Nate Westheimer proposed the idea of Twitter becoming the next big payment processor, by monopolizing on the mobile communications industry’s need for a mobile payment processor like PayPal. I still think this is a solid idea and I am shocked that not many have talked much more about this. Westheimer tells us that combining Twitter’s carrier free social messaging service with a payment processor could put the company in a position to define the mobile standard for payment processing.

The true power behind popular protocols can almost never be predicted, mostly because they are defined by how they are used. This means that as Twitter grows it will have to remain observant of emerging trends of its users, so that they can wield their protocol in ways that allow them to prosper with the aide of their users. For myself, I am excited to see the future.

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Social Media Mistakes

By Jennifer Horowitz in Featured

With so much talk about social media these days, everyone is jumping on board and trying it out. We are seeing some common mistakes out there and I thought it was important to address these mistakes to help eradicate them in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, there will be a learning curve - we all went through it (and I met some great people that helped me, and that I helped along the way) but the key is to learn up front to minimize errors!

So, here we go…

Mistake One: Completely Ignoring Social Media

Believe it or not there are still some people out there that are ignoring social media. They may be unsure of how to participate or maybe they just don’t have time to get involved. No matter what the reason, this is a big mistake. Social media continues to grow in popularity and in importance to internet users - the exact users you are trying to reach.

Mistake Two: Bare Profiles

If you don’t bother completing your profile people won’t be able to get to know you. It is also a sign to other users that you aren’t serious about participating on that site. Many spammers don’t bother to complete their profile and a blank profile has become a red flag.

Your profile should include a custom background when possible, a photo, contact information, and a list of interests to help people get to know you better.

Don’t be afraid to show some personality and let people really get to know you and your company and what you stand for.

Mistake Three: Faking It

We’ve all seen companies being ripped apart for trying to fake it in the social media world. They either hire someone to pretend to be them (it’s OK if staff, colleagues or team members participate, but to hire an unknown to play you, not cool!), or they make up personas or even fake customers posting positive feedback.

The truth is if you can’t invest the time to create an authentic social media profile, you shouldn’t bother creating one at all.

Mistake Four: Trying to Sell Users Instead of Listening

Social media isn’t about you selling, selling, selling. You are here to network, build trust, listen to what customers and prospects have to say. You want to hear customer concerns, to learn about them, to find out what gets them excited, what they like about your product, what they still want, etc.

Remember to be a good social media participant, which means listen before you speak. If you don’t, you risk being written off as yet another company that doesn’t know how to use social media and who is only interested in promoting themselves. Remember, you always have to add value to the communities you’re participating in - just remember its value for your customers, not yourself.

Mistake Five: Recycling

Don’t recycle old content and marketing materials on social media sites. Start new conversations, create new information to share. Granted, you’ll have some content that falls in the “oldie but goodie” category and that’s OK to share. Just try to keep things fresh.

Mistake Six: Launching, then Ignoring

Social media is similar to search engine optimization in that you can’t just set it and forget it. You need to participate and remain active, otherwise you have wasted your time initially setting things up.

If you want your customers to stay engaged, you have to keep producing great content yourself. Keep writing Blog posts, creating widgets and being active in the community. Social media is real work but when done properly it’s worth the effort.

So review your social media practices and make sure you aren’t making any of these mistakes. If you are, change course quickly and get yourself back on track.

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Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. Since 1998 Jennifer’s expertise in marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer is the editor of the popular Spotlight on Success: SEO and Marketing newsletter. Follow Jennifer and stay current on SEO, marketing, social media and more. http://twitter.com/EcomBuffet

140it: Condense Ur Text For Twitter When It Won’t All Fit

by Jason Kincaid on January 26, 2009

While Internet slang and abbreviations have become second nature for some technophiles, many of us have trouble converting our words into the pseudo-gibberish sometimes required to make long messages fit into the 140 character limit set by Twitter. 140it, a new service put together over the weekend by the guys behind Yipit, is looking to help. The site will instantly convert whole sentences into condensed text, making common substitutions (like ‘r’ instead of ‘are’), using bit.ly to shorten links, and swapping company names for their StockTwits symbol. The service does its best to retain coherence, cutting extra spaces first and only cutting vowels as a last resort, according to one of its founders.

While there are a few other services like TweetShrink and Twonvert that do the same thing, those sites require you to visit their homepages - something that is easy to forget and usually more trouble than it’s worth. 140it offers a bookmarklet that will immediately make the conversion as you enter your Tweet on the Twitter homepage (see the video below for a demo).

I personally detest using abbreviations unless they’re absolutely necessary (they make my head hurt). But in those cases when I just can’t make everything fit, 140it will come in handy.

140it Demo from Vinicius Vacanti on Vimeo.

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