One of our clients recently had their website completely ripped off by a company which offers similar services in another state. When confronted by phone, they admitted guilt and took the site down right away. So at least in the end they did the right thing.
If we didn't find this content, the client could have lost a year's worth of organic search work and some amazing ranking because Google could have placed the page in the supplemental results due to duplicate content.
How do you find out if portions of your site are being plagiarized? Check out tools such as
Copyscape. They have a free tool which lets you check for duplicated content from your site.
I'd be interested in finding additional applications which do the same thing.
Thanks to Andrew at
YourSearchAdvisor for his help with this.
Labels: copyscape, duplicate content, filtering, link building for SEO, organic search, SEM, web copyright, web theives
Could wireless internet service really improve a rural community? Other than the Apple PR in the photo, this is not marketing-related, but I could not resist posting it.
Check out the great story of how empowering and caring about kids is improving poverty-stricken Greene County, NC.
Check out
Twittearth to see who is tweeting around the world.
While some of you may consider this mindless time wasting, it's fascinating to think of the possibilities. What if everyone in your span of interest shows up on a Twittearth? What if you can see who is subscribing to particular services, which company just signed a deal, which customers are "talking"?
Labels: permission marketing, twittearth, twitter
Cisco and Facebook? Yes, folks they have a relationship. B2B Marketing recently reported on
Cisco's use of social networking and Web 2.0 tactics to launch their Aggregation Services Router 1000 series. Usually stoic Cisco even has a Second Life property.
Research firm Universal McCann has a
detailed report out with social media statistics. One of the more interesting stats is 36% of survey respondents thought more positively about companies with blogs. It's interesting blogging is becoming part of branding and corporate validation.
So does your company have a Facebook group,
Squidoo site or
Twitter page? In this new landscape the daring companies which try it will come out ahead I believe. We already see fabulous search engine ranking pages for Squidoo sites on niche topics and Twitter tweet pickup. So dive in...the water's fine.
Labels: b2bmarketing, better marketing presentations, cisco, facebook, Internet marketing, social media, social networking, squidoo, twitter, universal mccann, web 2.0
About 6 months ago, I got this crazy notion that it was time for a website upgrade. Our company's website simply did not reflect the quality of work in our client portfolio. However, I was scared to death of losing our great Google and Yahoo! SERP rankings especially since we needed to upgrade from ASP to ASP.NET which involved a URL name change (gulp). About 50% of our leads come from the web, so this was a big deal.
With our Seattle .NET expert, Promolab, we were able to maintain or improve our SERP rankings. Thanks to Jim and Cari Drake for providing the following steps in how we went about upgrading from ASP to ASP.NET.
Our first step was to plan out the page structure for the new site. Not only is this an absolute must to determine the navigation structure but it helps define the needed content as well. This plan was also what we used to plan our 301 redirects. Our goal was not only to never have a broken link on the site but to direct search engines to crawl the appropriate pages for indexing and never come up short on a page that no longer exists. We mapped out each existing .asp page to its new corresponding .aspx page. We then built the site from the plan using the new page names.
Once the site was complete our final checklist before going live was threefold.
First, using backup copies of all the old .asp pages, we replaced the content of each .asp page with a 301 redirect going to its corresponding new .aspx page. If an older page was being retired, we simply set the redirect to the home page or a page with similar content. See http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php for 301 redirect examples. You can test your code by visiting one of many free tools like the redirect checker at http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php.
Second, we took the time to build a Google-compliant sitemap.xml page containing each new page on the site. For help with sitemaps, see http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php. The sitemap can then be registered with Google. See http://www.google.com/webmasters/
And last, we added the appropriate robots.txt containing the location of our sitemap.xml file to the site to ensure that the search engines are crawling what we want them to crawl. see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/speaking-language-of-robots.html for more information.
Happy upgrading!
Labels: 301 redirect, asp, asp.net, google, links, SERP, upgrade, website development
I was fed up that Basecamp does not provide Gantt charts, so I searched for options. I found Viewpath - a fee beta up with up to 25MB. It's pretty user friendly and just has the basics. It also has a time tracking module.
I especially like the export to PDF and Excel options. Labels: basecamp, free, gantt, project management, viewpath
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