If you aren’t using Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) on your blog, it’s time to get on it! Everyday Akismet blocks about 100 spam postings by linkers.

Why so many?

Spammers are trying to get links to their website by posting comments on Blogs to increase their link popularity. Whether the search engines actually pay attention and count the links from blogs is highly questionable. Almost certainly Google excludes these links, but MSN may count them and Yahoo probably counts a few of them.

Why do they keep doing it if they all get blocked?
Obviously nobody is checking or they would see right away their comments aren’t being posted. If they aren’t checking that probably means they aren’t doing it themselves and they can’t be paying whoever they have making the posts very much.

Looks like freelancers in China, Russia or India.

Content sites are a great way to soft sell your way to high conversion. I keep producing content for my own sites and client sites and watching the traffice increase slowly but steadily.

Something I have been noticing recently is sites jump in and out of the rankings for no apparent reason. Reading one of my favorities blogs recently BlueHatSEO, I found an article which goes into all the gory details of how Google handles fresh content.
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Clients and browsers frequently ask me for information on promoting their website, what they can do, and how the search engines work. So here is a quick primer on what the search engines do, what they want for small business owners with a brand new website.
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If you are a small business owner with a brochure type site, and have heard about web2.0 (Web2 isn’t stopping), then you are probably wondering what you can do to update your site.

Even if you aren’t prepared to ‘go web2′ completely there are a few things you can do that will start the ball rolling and modernize your site. Here are some suggestions:
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Three times this week I have talked to clients about how critical specialization is, so I thought I would do a quick re-cap on specialization and getting a niche.

One person had a brick and mortar bookstore with a shopping cart website with a huge number of titles. A top ranking for the single keyword “books” is not an option for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is cost. Out of curiousity, I did a search for “books” on Google just to see. 804 Million results, and the heavy hitters you would expect on the first page:

#1 book.google.com
#2 onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
#3 www.nytimes.com/pages/books/
#4 www.amazon.com
#5 www.barnesandnoble.com
#6 www.abebooks.com

Now that is some very serious competition!
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Related Website: Effective search engine optimization - at Page1Promotion, we focus on providing professional SEO services that will bring your website qualified traffic. Contact us for a custom quote.

Anyone that hasn’t heard of outsourcing by now must be either hiding in a cave or not working in the service industry. Call Centers are front and center but it seems outsourcing is spreading to every nook and crannie of the economy. On a recent trip to Manila in the Philippines, a job fair for Call Center employees was held for 65,000 vacancies in Call Centers. Other statistics are just as shocking. India is set to emerge as a $17 billion knowledge outsourcing destination by 2010, states a new industry study. (Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) May 2005 ) Three-quarters of U.S. companies outsourced some or all of their information technology activities in 2004, and that percentage is likely to increase this year according to Global Outsourcing Report March 2005.
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Article submissions used to be the silver bullet of SEO. Hire freelancers in India to produce articles, submit to a zillion distribution sites with keyword rich links in the footer, wait patiently, and voila! Top 10 or top 5 every time!

Great fun while it lasted! A little bit like the early days when running sites through Webposition and stuffing keywords was all it took for a #1 ranking. Not so much anymore. Google has already cracked down on article submission sites, just like they did on directories. Do they still work? Sure, but not as much and the water is trickier to navigate.
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