SEO Blog

Far from being the sincerest form of flattery, imitation is often a big waste of time.

Two days ago I was performing a rather dull set of SEO experiments when I noticed something very disturbing. While testing Google’s SERPs against keyword phrases inserted into the Metamend Facebook profile, I found a Chinese SEO company had completely stolen the Metamend source-code, images and all. The Chinese firm, Okwoo.com had slightly altered and translated the site-text into a Chinese language but had left blog postings (many of which I wrote) in the English language they were originally written in. It’s called site jacking and it happens more often than a reasonable person might realize.

The discovery posed deep problems on many levels, the least of which was the series of phone calls that overtook the better part of the afternoon. It’s never much fun to tell the president that you’ve found a problem, even when you are not the one at fault. The way these things inevitably turn out, when you find and report it, you get charged with fixing it.

This Sunday, eight or nine teams from Victoria’s tech community face off against each other to raise money for the Mustard Seed Food Bank. Organized by Metamend Account Manager Matthew Bowes, the first of what looks like a quarterly Metamend Floor Hockey Challenge easily reached its goal of raising a quick $5K for our local food bank.

The concept is fairly simple. Each team puts up a $500 entry fee, the entirety of which is donated to the Food Bank via VIATeC. The addition of a ninth team allows the sale of a by (or free pass) to a later round of playoffs and an additional opportunity to give to charity.

The event is being held at the Boys and Girls’ Club at 1240 Yates St. (beside the fire hall) starting at 10:00am.

Each game is made up of three nine-minute periods with a 90-second break between. Each team will have a minimum of $175 donated to the Food Bank in their company name with the winning team getting a $3600 donation made in their name.
The teams in the tournament come from:
Metamend / Enquisite | Osler Systems | ParetoLogic Inc | Schneider Electric | Reliable Controls Corporation | SEASTAR CHEMICALS Inc. | Telus Communications | Contech Inc

An incident earlier this morning has taught me a bit more about advertising through Facebook.

In case you’re interested, Chris Chan from Vancouver BC is selling his World of Warcraft account for a mere $900. I found out about it because his ad appeared against my Facebook profile which was weird considering I do not know Chris Chan and do not participate in WoW.

Consisting of, “70 mage BT/MH attuned,70 druid w/ rare kara mount!”, the sale of Chan’s WoW account has been broadcast to his friends and to the friends of his friends as well as being displayed in the Vancouver BC network marketplace. Though I have never played or even seen the multiplayer universe known as World of Warcraft, Chan’s advertisement was displayed to my Facebook account because a close friend of mine is an avid WoW gamer.

While it was sort of cool to see how the Marketplace system filtered an ad to my account, the PartyPoker pop-under that appeared after clicking Chan’s ad wasn’t so cool. It’s worth monitoring pop-under activity to see if Facebook relies on this type of advertising or if the folks working for PartyPoker have found a creative but spammy method of inserting their content-calls into the link-strings of Facebook profiles. (A third, more sinister scenario has PartyPoker adware on my computer but that is less likely as I use several adware scrubbers and virus scanners)

2008 will be a difficult year for large sections of the mainstream or traditional media.  As noted by Michele Gershberg her GlobeandMail.com Technology column today, (U.S. media face troubling 2008) the shift in ad budgets from traditional mass broadcasts to the behavioural and referential targeting of search poses a deeper threat to the mainstream media in 2008.

Already hit hard by declines in classified advertising revenues, the print media is preparing to take even heavier losses as advertisers move their money to opportunities found in organic and paid search.

quote:

Leading media executives and sports commissioners will discuss their strategies at the Reuters Media Summit in New York from Nov. 26 through Nov. 29.

Experts say advertisers need to remain competitive in a tightening market while keeping costs down, making them likely to boost spending in areas more directly linked to commerce, such as Web search queries.

That would benefit companies like Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. But television networks like CBS or NBC and Web companies like Yahoo Inc. that rely on brand advertising could suffer.

“We see continued strength in paid search and continued strength in retail e-commerce, and possibly an acceleration of online video,” said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay.