Smile & Move

List of Article Directories

Google Reader Gets Sociable

Google Reader popularly known for reading RSS Feeds has added "Follow" & "Like" to it. This will allow to follow specific users and to like articles. By adding these two features besides their "Friends trends tool" Google is now getting more sociable.

Google Blog Search adds few Features - Hot Queries, Feeds, Latest Posts

Google Blog Search added few features like "Hot Queries","Feeds", "Latest Posts"

If you click on the subscribe button on the left side of the Google Blog Search you can subscribe to any topic and get the feeds in any feed reader.

To know more, Visit Google WebMaster Blog

Business Search Engines and Directories

Alibaba.com
Bpubs.com
BizEurope
SmallBizSearch.com
Business.com
HongKong Business Directory
World Trade Search
jayde
AardvarkBusiness.net
Cyber TradeZone
Zibb
Made-in-China.com
MasterSeek
BusinessSeek
KellySearch.com
BusinessCrawler
BizAhead

YouTube Search Goes Visual With the Wonder Wheel

Source: mashable.com

An interesting new YouTube (YouTube) feature, however, shows that they have been experimenting with it behind closed doors, and – more importantly – they’re ready to use it on one of the biggest search engines out there, the YouTube search. It’s called the Wonder Wheel, and it’s a way to browse videos through association; similar to how another cool visual discovery engine, Liveplasma, lets you discover new artists through connection with the artists you know and like.

Wonder Wheel appears in the top right corner of your search results, but it’s present only when you get a lot of results. For searches with less results YouTube will not suggest other searches, and the Wonder Wheel option will be absent, too.

To read the full story, click here

Import your Google Analytics Goals into Adwords

It's Official!!!- Source: Google Analytics Blog

Google Analytics goals can now be imported into your adwords account. This will help track campaign ROI and to optimize directly inside Adwords interface.

The added benefit is you can use them with Conversion Optimizer(conversion tracking tool).

For more information, Visit Google's Inside Adwords Blog

Google VS Bing

Google recently added a link to remind its search services and the link is placed below the logo leading to "Discovering the web: Explore the world of Google search."

The page explains 16 different Google search features. The page has a link to meet its search engineers to help with search challenges and a link to success stories. The page has also social media buttons to share the link.

Let's wait and watch for more interesting search engine war updates.

Why SEO Is Necessary During Recession?

Whatever is your type of business selling products or services, having a website to promote your business will help increase your popularity and profit.

Online Website recieves traffic from the search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. To be successful your website has to be placed atleast in the top 10 results of the search engine listings.

The top 10 ranking is necessary because Internet users are more likely to review only the first few results when they search for a particular product/service.

I could guess the question you have..

What Should I do to increase my website popularity and to gain top position in search engines for the search term.

Search Engine Optimization is the cost-effective solution to gain top rankings and to increase popularity. If your website is optimized well you can rank ahead of your competitors be more visible on search engines and gain more prospects and convert more customers than your competitors.

So start investing in SEO to make your website popular and gain better rankings in Search Engines.

Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

SEOmoz | Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

Shared via AddThis

I'm back

Hello people I'm back...was away for a long time for personal reasons. What can I say..Continue visiting my blog for fresh tips and updates on SEO/PPC

Yahoo! Sets 90-Day Data Retention

Source: Yahoo! Press Release

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) announced a new global data retention policy that sets an industry-leading approach to user data privacy.

Under the new policy, Yahoo! will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo! will also expand the policy to apply not only to search log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks.

"In our world of customized online services, responsible use of data is critical to establishing and maintaining user trust," said Anne Toth, Yahoo!'s Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy. "We know that our users expect relevant and compelling content and advertising when they visit Yahoo!, but they also want assurances that we are focused on protecting their privacy."

To read the full story, Visit Yahoo! Press Release

Live Search will be testing a New Crawler - msnbot/2.0b

Source: Live Search Webmaster Blog

Live Search team is likely to test a new crawler - msnbot/2.01b. However the new crawler will follow the current robots.txt protocol set for MSN. Here goes the post from the Live Search Webmaster Blog....

Live Search is committed to continuing to improve how we discover and crawl your content. In the coming weeks, we will be testing an update to MSNBot, which may show up as a new crawler name in your referrer logs. The new crawler user agent string will appear as:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

You’ll still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent. We intend to ensure that any robots exclusion protocol you are using is respected. As such, you don’t need to update your Robots.txt file. We plan on crawling at a slow speed during the tests with the updated version.

When the new crawler replaces our current crawler, we will keep you up-to-date here on the Webmaster Center blog. If you have any questions about the Live Search web crawlers, you can post them in our forums.

Microsoft Releases oxite - Open Source Blogging Platform

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Today, Microsoft released an alpha version of its own open source content management system, Oxite. The source code for the software is available under the Microsoft Public License. While Microsoft mostly describes Oxite as a blogging platform, the Oxite team also points out that you could use it as a content management system to develop more or less any type of site. Oxite currently powers Microsoft's own Mix Online and also uses some recycled parts from Channel 9 . Some of the major features of the software include support for Gravatars, pingbacks, trackbacks, RSS feeds, commenting, and the MetaWebLog API (so you can use your favorite blogging client to post to your Oxite blog directly).

Search Ranking Algorithm

Source: seobook.com

British ISPs filtering Wikipedia

clipped from news.cnet.com Internet service providers in the U.K. have begun filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist. The following notice appeared on Wikipedia on Saturday when many UK users attempted to edit content: Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.

Google WebMaster Tools Update: One Place for changing your Site's settings

Google Webmaster team has blogged on Dec 4th about adjusting settings for the website, such as crawl rate or georaphic target.

By adding a new settings link in webmaster tools google consolidated few features in a single page.

The settings that have been moved to the new Settings page are:

1. Geographic Target
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search
4. Crawl rate control

To know more , Visit Google Webmaster Central Blog

Google Releases Free SEO Guide

Google has released the Search Engine Optimization Guide for beginners...

Here goes the link - Download Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Brand New Search Engine - http://www.quintura.com/

This morning I got a free SEO Tip. The tip was about a new search engine "Quintura". Yet to test the features...Thought of sharing..The tip must be useful for professionals who are interested in the study of "semantics".

Here goes the tip..

For those of you interested in the study of "semantics" or Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) as it relates to which keywords have close contextual relationships to other keywords....here is an interesting experience.

Check out a brand new Search Engine called http://www.quintura.com

Not only does it use LSI but it even displays the evidence of how your search words have other words relating to them. Unlike keyword-based search, that returns too many "irrelevant results," Quintura often finds what your looking for with one merely one click.

Enter your search term. It displays a "cloud" of results. The size of a word shows its significance in relation to the query. The larger a word is, the stronger the contextual relationship with your query. The smaller the words appear the less related they are. Now place you mouse over each keyword in the cloud and see how your SERPs change. You may find what you're looking for visually with just one click. Click on any word in the cloud to change your query and get relevant results that will comply with your new query.

Visit http://www.quintura.com and give it a try.

Google Image Search - To Steal or Not to Steal

I read this article titled "Google Image Search - To Steal or Not to Steal" posted by Jason following the newsletter link from SiteProNews.com.

Here goes the article..

It's a graphic designer's dirty little secret. A plethora of images of anything you can think of, all for free! That's right, good old Google Image Search. Well, if you're thinking of pulling an image from some random site via Google images, think again my friend. Though it is a useful resource, just because an image appears in a Google image search does not make it free for the taking.

According to Google:

The images identified by the Google Image Search service may be protected by copyrights. Although you can locate and access the images through our service, we cannot grant you any rights to use them for any purpose other than viewing them on the web. Accordingly, if you would like to use any images you have found through our service, we advise you to contact the site owner to obtain the requisite permissions.

In other words, the original creators of the images own the copyrights. When you click on an image and are redirected to their website, it will hopefully provide more information on the image's copyright (or the lack thereof). Specifically, look for a copyright statement somewhere (usually on the bottom) or a Terms of Use section.

Images published in the U.S. are automatically copyrighted by their owners, even if they do not explicitly carry a copyright warning. Therefore, you may not reproduce copyright images without their owner's permission, except in fair use cases, or you could risk running into a lawyer's warnings, cease-and-desist letters, and copyright suits.

Recently in Germany, Google has learned that there is "kein fairer gebrauch" or "no fair use". The internet search giant lost two German copyright decisions, as the courts ruled that the thumbnail images that appear in Google Image Search violate German copyright law. The company said in an email that it believes "that services like Google Image Search are entirely legal and provide great value and critical information to Internet users." "Today's decision is very bad for Internet users in Germany," Google added.

What does this mean for U.S. citizens who use Google Images? Nothing different yet, but many sources say this will most likely start a chain reaction and could possibly spread to the U.S.

There are millions of pictures on the internet, and the odds are pretty good that no one will care if you use one for non-commercial purposes (like a personal blog). If someone does end up caring, they will most likely ask you nicely to take it down before taking any kind of legal action... hopefully.

For more information about copyright as it stands in the United States, be sure to check out: Copyright.gov

Hope this article will be useful for Web Masters and Web Developers.