Wasiq Ansari’s World

Analysts keep bringing it up. Reporters do, too. How much money is Google losing on YouTube? And can they afford it? The lingering question that affects Internet marketers the most is what happens if Google decides they can’t afford it. If you are using YouTube for marketing, should you be worried? First off, no one knows how much YouTube costs Google, nor how much revenue it brings in.

Given the cost of servers, storage, and bandwidth for streaming so much video over the Web, it’s certainly true that it costs them a bundle–far more than they ever expected.

It’s likely that YouTube has become as popular with video watchers as Google expected, but they miscalculated its appeal to the advertisers whose money offsets the costs. Advertisers have not yet flocked to be shown side-by-side with amateur content, while services that show Hollywood videos, such as Hulu, have flourished in comparison.

Google continues to tweak its offering, but admits that the right formula has not appeared yet. The question is whether Google can afford to lose this much money, with it ever increasing as long as that formula remains elusive.

It probably can afford it for the foreseeable future. The question is whether it will decide to, which might depend more on attitude than data.

YouTube was expected to be a huge advertising success. I mean, how could it miss? Videos are the most popular form of media and YouTube’s model created the content for free, so how could advertisers resist all those eyeballs? But somehow, they have, making YouTube an immense disappointment for Google.

On the other hand, listing off the other free content plays, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and the forthcoming Google Wave, which one of those is profitable? I’d bet that none of them are. And, they were never expected to be, at least not by now.

If Google can pay the freight, and if Google can change its attitude about YouTube, so that it’s a long-term play, just like those other user-brings-the-content initiatives, Google can emerge as a leader in video and will eventually figure out the advertising plays for all of them (or figure another way to make money). If Google succumbs to a disappointment in YouTube not shown in Gmail, for example, it might miss out on a big market down the road.

So, if you use YouTube for your marketing, I wouldn’t be terribly concerned about what you hear. Yes, I’d be posting my videos on Vimeo and other sites, too, just as a backup, but I wouldn’t be worried that YouTube will disappear any time soon. If anyone has the deep pockets to suffer through YouTube’s expensive adolescence, its Google.

Source: searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20090728GoogleLosingMoneywithYouTube.html

PASADENA, California (Reuters) – Twitter plans a marketing campaign starting in the next few days to educate users, individual and corporate, about ways to make money off the popular microblogging site.

Co-founder Biz Stone also told Reuters the company is not interested in acquisition talks with Google or any other company.

Documents that were posted on TechCrunch revealed that Twitter had been in discussions with Google, the largest Internet search engine in the United States and a behemoth in online advertising, about some form of search tie-up.

“We have ongoing discussions with a lot of companies. One of the ways we look at Twitter, and the landscape in general, is not as a zero-sum game but how we can reduce a lot of friction between a lot of companies,” Stone said in an interview at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.

“In other words, we see ourselves as complementary to big social networks, to search engines, to big commercial sites,” he said.

The documents included a company forecast Twitter would take in $4 million by the fourth quarter of 2009, and grow to 5,200 employees and 1 billion users by the end of 2013.

Stone called the documents notes from meetings, out of date and not necessarily accurate.

“The key takeaway there is that we’re thinking big and we’re in it for the long haul,” Stone said.

While the site has skyrocketed in usage and prominence, Stone said it had yet to make any significant revenue.

Stone said Twitter is in it for “the long haul,” which is why it is developing ways to generate revenue, creating a company culture and doing other things internally that “you just don’t do if you’re interested in being acquired.”

Twitter — which lets users from celebrities to businesses to politicians and protesters post “tweets” of up to 140 characters — was co-founded by Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, and is backed by VCs Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

As early as Thursday or Friday, Stone said, the company is rolling out the first phase — an educational push — of an effort to generate revenue through various add-on tools and services for the business and professional users of Twitter.

Stone said the company will work to educate companies, including mom and pop shops, on how they can use Twitter for their business.

The company expects that the second phase with the add-on services, which could include account certification, will come later this year, likely in the fall. Another possible way to generate revenue would be through the data that Twitter collects about its users, Stone said.

In general, the company will work to position the product as a communication network and less of a social network.

“We started out by creating this very simple status updating system. And that’s not what Twitter is. It evolved into something else,” Stone said.

(Reporting by Laura Isensee; Editing by Gary Hill)

Source: reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE56N4J220090724

One of the strategies in search engine optimization is directory submission.  This is a process of submitting a internet site to an net directory.  In that technique, SE rankings can be multiplied and is a great procedure of making connects.  However, it should be observed that directory entries be exercised accordingly.  This means that internet sites should be submitted to directories that are associated to the websites.  Precaution must be absorbed in giving in to directories because there have been several do-nothing submissions that have been detected lately.  Few of the directory submissions performed are totally out of tune.  When this takes place the submissions exercised would actually bulge un-needed because they cannot be applied in the uneven directory that they have been passed on to.  Many SEO service providers bid directory submissions.

In directory entries, there are several things that someone should be known with in order to make a victorious directory submission.  One of the most standard elements that would take exception one’s decision in directory submissions includes the choice of putting in to free or paid directories.  Experts says, for long term plans, it is fine to do entries in compensated directories because they remain more far than the free directories.  The most point that costless directories stay online is about a year, such that it would be totally impractical to repeat the same entry after a twelvemonth is over.  Many compensated directories stay longer than one year.  Furthermore, it is critical for the directory to have resisted the test of time.  In other words, these directories should have based themselves already in the World Wide Web.  Some other crucial decision that one will have to attain concerning directory submissions is opting between niche and universal directories.    For possible reasons, submitting to some niche and general directory is effective.  In putting in to niche directories, it is better to search for them applying the SEs.  It is deserving noticing that those that appears in the first pages of the result are the most likely ones to apply.   Since a niche directory is one which bears single topic and only bears websites which obtain about alike contents or nature of that topic, it would be cushier to constitute connects to referred websites.  On the other hand, a universal directory takes websites with distinct forms of contents.  Thus, it would be easier to perform directory submissions to universal directories because these directories immediately accept all submissions irrespective of the subject or issue.

Truly, directory submissions can be very good techniques for search engine optimization if and only if, one would be capable to recognize the exact and effective methods of making the submission including the option of directories to put in to.

Source: articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/the-perfect-technique-of-directory-submission-1034462.html

You have come across number of links more than a dozen times whenever you surf net. Many people out there do not understand the basic functions behind such links but there are people for them these links are very important, as they understand the essentiality of link building. Now what is link and how does the process work? Before going deep into the process you should understand that link is nothing but a way that points to your website from other websites on the internet. An activity that involves placing links on other websites to increase the popularity of your site. It is also important for the webmaster to see that they contact a relevant site.

Link building is a very simple process that involves searching the relevant site that matches the theme of the client’s site and then contacting the website for a possible link exchange. The link building services comprises of two types of links and they are one way link and reciprocal link building. One way link building is a process involves obtaining a link from other webmaster without providing any link in exchange. It is more beneficial than the other method of link as one do not have to give a link in exchange and thus creating a good impression to popular search engine like Google. Another way of link building is through reciprocal link building process that involves “give and take” relationship between the websites. A webmaster has to offer a link in return of a link from other webmaster and is less effective than compared to the one way link building process in creating impression but on the other hand it enjoys the benefit of obtaining unlimited links in a month. Comparatively high volume of one-way links brings more popularity to a site.

Link building services is so important to SEO that one can say that even 60% contribution to search engine rankings is of link building services that too followed with proper guidelines. Unethical way of link building can bring harm like being banned to your websites. Link building is considered the driving force for any website along with other factors. Therefore, care should be taken that the quality of a back links should be good. The largest search engine Google gives a lot of importance to the quality of back links that further relates the quality of the content on the site where the link is placed.

How important is link building over page rank? Well, many pages that are found on Google have zero Page Rank but top the list on certain keywords. So you can now realize that High Page Rank does not guarantee high search engine rankings. It does not mean that page ranks are good for nothing but they are also important but their importances are felt with the relevancy of a link that is more important. Therefore, it can be concluded that a quality link building is simply the most important activity that you can carry out to get higher search engine rankings thus increasing the popularity of websites and generates revenue for you.

Source: articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/importance-of-link-building-956963.html

Search engine optimization is the very process by which you can improve the traffic to a website from search engines. It can be improving the volume or improving the quality of traffic. Organic or algorithmic search results can be there. Generally the targeted site will appear in the search results list and the more visitors or the traffic it will get from the search engine, the more good SEO service it has. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. In this world of Internet marketing SEO is very much important. So the strategy of a good SEO man is always to consider how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The term SEO also refers search engine optimizers. It is adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. These search engine optimizers may offer SEO services as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Effective SEO services are comprised of web development and web designs. It may require changing of HTML code of a site. In another term search engine friendly may be applied to website designs, menus, content management and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

There is another type of technique and that is known as black hat SEO or spamdexing. This type of SEO services use methods like link farms and keyword stuffing. But these kinds of things degrade both the relevance of search engine results and the user -experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices. So these types of techniques are not good for your site in order to gain their position on the search results.

From our discussion it is very clear that there is a relationship between search engines and SEO. At first when it was taking its place that time search engines recognized that webmasters and web designers are making lots of efforts to secure their websites place well on the search engine result. And it was also seen that some webmasters even manipulating their ranking by stuffing pages with unnecessary, excessive and irrelevant keywords in search engine results. That time which was the starting of SEO, search engines like Infoseek made their algorithms in a way that can prevent these types of manipulation of ranking of webmasters.

In this world of advertising and marketing SEO and search engines share a unique and potential relationship. Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

Source: articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/linkage-between-seo-and-search-engine-1032795.html

By now, anyone who has dabbled in internet marketing or SEO for their website knows the best way to rank in the search engines is to link build for the keywords they wish to target.  While the search engines use many different factors to determine site rankings, most experts agree that link building is one of the biggest.  However, not all link building techniques are created equal.

As any true link building expert can tell you, there is a big difference between amateur link building and quality link building.  True experts know that any link building campaign should be a balance of several different techniques which can include targeting less authoritative links through article marketing and forum participation as well as going after the big links, which typically include contextual and one way link building from high authority sites.

The goal of the search engines is relevant results – the number one result for a search should be a website that has the best chance of fulfilling the need of the searcher.  If the search engines had their way, nobody would be actively seeking links – it would happen naturally based on relevance, usefulness and popularity of a site.  Luckily, that’s not the case.

Thanks to search engine optimization, we now know that we can engage in certain link building services and activities and actively help our sites to rank for our popular keyword phrases.  Since the search engines call for ethical link building, the most powerful form of link building tends to be one way contextual links on relevant, high authority sites for keyword phrases you’re targeting.  Not only are they powerful links, but they look more natural to the search engines.

Contextual link building is one of the toughest, most time intensive link building techniques you can engage in – but the results are worth it.   Not only do the links help your rankings, but you should also receive traffic from people clicking on those links.  Contextual link building is finding sites that use your target keywords in their content, and persuading them to link to your site using those keywords as anchor text.  To the search engines, this looks like an authority site is actually recommending you as a resource for that keyword topic – the more of these you can get, the faster you’ll climb in the search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Here are a few link building tips on how to find highly relevant and trusted sites to request contextual or one way links from:

1. Search your target keyword on Google and look at the top 100 sites.  You want to get as many links from these sites as possible.  To find the page on a site that is most relevant to your keyword, search Google with “site:domain.com keyword”.
2. Use a tool like Hub Finder (from Aaron Wall’s SEOBook) or similar software to run an analysis of these top 100 sites and find additional sites that link back to two or more of your top 100 – then get links from as many of these sites as well, preferably right within content.
3. If you can’t get links from some of the top 100 (and it’s tough, since many will be your competitors) examine their backlinks and try and get links from those sites.  You can utilize Yahoo’s “link:domain.com” search for this.  Use the Google search mentioned above to find the page on the site that is most relevant to your keyword.

These three link building techniques are some of the most powerful tactics you can employ when link building for your site.  By mixing these highly relevant and authoritative links with lower level links from article marketing, blog writing and forum/blog participation, you can create a long term link building campaign that is sure to boost your rankings.

Keep in mind that link building is a long term process – rankings don’t happen overnight (in most cases).  But by engaging in ethical and quality link building, you will eventually see your site ranking for the keywords you’ve targeted.  In the end, until the search engines drastically change their ranking methods, the site with the most links (and most POWERFUL links) will win the rankings race.

Source : articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/seo-link-building-tips-101-the-power-of-contextual-link-building-1033893.html

It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens – you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it’s previous position and the move is not in the right direction. We’ve all faced it and the longer you’ve been an SEO or website owner the more times you’ve seen it happen. But still … what do you do? To quote the immortal Douglas Adams, “Don’t panic.”

Believe me – I know how hard it is sometimes. It’s easy for me to say this to clients when I see an engine fluctuating or a site has dropped only a position or two and we’re working to react but it’s a completely different thing when it happens to you and (might I add) a good reminder to SEO’s as to what our clients go through. But I still haven’t answered the question have I? What do you do? What … do … you … do?

There are five basic steps one must take when their site drops (I like to keep things simple and a 5 step check-list is a great way to do that). These steps assume that to start with you had a well-optimized website with good SEO practices followed. If you don’t then the reasons you dropped are pretty clear but if you’ve got a well-optimized site and your site has fallen – then this is for you. You should:

1. Build Links:
   It’s very difficult for people to not want to do something proactive when they notice their site drop. I know – I’ve been there. One of the easiest things to do to keep yourself busy while working on the other 4 steps below is to build links. Building good, solid links to your site will never hurt and will only help you out so even if one of the later steps might show you other actions you need to take (or not take) you’ll never go wrong with some solid link building and if nothing else – it’ll make you feel like you’re doing something and stop you from doing other things that might do you more harm than good.

   I’m not going to go into all the different types of links you could build or what the anatomy of a good link is. Many articles, forums and blog posts have been written in the past and are easily found online. I’m sure if you monitor a few good SEO forums you’ll find more being written every day. If you can – find articles by Eric Enge. While he doesn’t give it all away (who does?) – you won’t go wrong taking his advice and even seasoned SEO’s are likely to learn a thing or two from reading his work.

2. Relax For A Couple Days:
   Before you rush to your favorite site editing tool – relax. Slight tweaks in content are unlikely to make much of a difference (if any) to your rankings. If you’ve got solid, well-optimized content and suddenly your site’s fluctuating – cramming in a few more instances of your targeted phrase will likely do more harm than good.

   Now – when I say relax I basically mean, don’t touch your site. There are steps (such as link building) that you can work on including the analytical work noted below. Just don’t go editing all your copy to try to chase some tweak in Google’s algorithm. Relax.

3. And
4. Analyze The Sites That Have Out-Ranked You (Onsite And Offsite):
   One of the best things you can do is to take a look at the sites that are out-ranking you to find out what they’ve done. This will tell you two things: One – are there some good tactics that you’re missing, and Two – are these rankings likely to hold or are they flawed? There are two areas you’ll want to look at and those are the onsite optimization and the backlinks.

   When you’re looking at the onsite optimization you need to only briefly look at their keyword densities, H1 and title tags, internal linking structure, number of indexed pages and the amount of content on the page. Remember: I’m assuming that (as you were ranking previously) you have a solidly optimized website with some good SEO practices and content guidelines followed. If you look at these and compare the newly ranking sites with your site and with other sites that have held their positions and dropped you’ll get a feel for whether there are trends. If there are common traits among the sites that have moved up then you may be on to something. Remember the common trends among the sites that have climbed and held and also remember what they have that the sites that have dropped do not. Remember: there may be no common trends or nothing you can find out with this small a sample. Once this step is complete it’s time to move on to backlink analysis.

   Backlink analysis is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you’re dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you. Depending on the competition level this can be a brutal task in that it’s not just about numbers. You should use Yahoo!’s link:www.domain.com command and visit many of the sites in your comeptitors backlinks. What you’re trying to do is get a full view of what their links look like. You’ll also want to download SEO Link Analysis (A Firefox extension you’ll find at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505/). When you’re doing a backlink check it automatically displays the PageRank and anchor text of the backlinks though I’d still HIGHLY recommend visiting a good many of the sites to see what kind of links they are.

   Once again you’re going to be looking for the architecture of the backlinks of the sites that are moving up. What tactics they’re using, what their links look like on the page, what anchor text distribution they’ve got. Once again you’re going to compare that with other sites on the rise, your site and other stable sites to see what is common between those that are climbing and holding their grown vs those that have fallen.

   Once we’ve collected this data it’s time to act. Collect all the common traits that the climbing and holding sites have and …

5. Take Action:
   You’re done waiting around preforming the tedious task of link building. You’ve got your data and you’re ready to launch into action and get some stuff done. But wait (oh no – did he say wait again?) is action really the best thing?

   When you’ve pooled your data you need to decide what it means. Let’s take for example a situation where the newly ranking sites have very low word counts and tons of footer links (looks paid to me). Do you REALLY want to follow their lead? The question you need to ask yourself in this case is do the factors that are apparently working RIGHT NOW overall going to provide better or worse results? Is less content more or less likely to results in a satisfied visitor? Do paid footer links help Google deliver quality results over the whole of the Internet? In these cases the answer is easily “no” but your findings might be more subtle such as an extremely disproportionate use of targeted anchor text among the ranking sites or sp@mmy copy with keyword densities at 8 or 10%.

What you’re in a position to do now is figure out a moving-forward strategy. If the common trends among the top and improving sites are bad or sp@mmy then you know the algorithm will correct itself eventually and you shouldn’t chase it. If you need to do something – build some additional links and look for new phrases to rank for on other pages to help stabilize your traffic when individual phrases decline.

If you find that the factors that have created the new results are legitimate and will lead to better results overall you know you need to make some changes to what you’re doing and fortunately – with the research you’ve just done you’ve got a great starting spot in that you can probably get some great resources and tactics from the lists of backlinks and onsite optimization you’ve just collected.

It may take hours or even days to properly perform this research but then – you needed something to do while your rankings are down. It might as well be productive.

Source: webpronews.com/expertarticles/2009/07/10/what-to-do-when-your-site-drops

Please be warned: While there is talk of Yahoo and Microsoft getting close to coming to terms on a search ad deal this is not done. People in the Internet space love to see some information then make assumptions and turn it into a reality. Over at All Things Digital, Kara Swisher is reporting on the this deal and there is plenty of cautionary talk about the deal despite it being close to done.

The most recent talks have been unusually close to the vest at both companies, and spokespeople for both Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) declined to comment on the issue.

And, of course, they should not, since there is no certainty any deal will be struck at all, especially since the pair have been down this road before, unsuccessfully.

In those cases, both sides have thought they were close, too, with fingers quickly pointing at each other for the failure of the discussions.

Apparently there are plenty of variations on the same theme for this deal but the consistent note struck is that Microsoft will take over the search ad business of Yahoo with an upfront payment in the billions of dollars and some ongoing pay arrangements.

There is no doubt that something needs to happen to further shake up the search industry. Microsofts bing has created some buzz for sure but the impact early on is not huge and the long term success in the search space will need some, well, time to tell.

So how does this deal help each side?

• The possible pluses are clear: Huge technology cost-savings and cash for Yahoo and another weapon to fight archrival Google for Microsoft.
• It needs as much firepower as it can get. A recent comScore (SCOR) report for June showed Google with a 65 percent share, Yahoo at 19.5 percent and Microsoft at just 8.4 percent.
• The deal, if struck, could give a big boost to shares of both companies, which have been up a lot since the beginning of the year.

So since the details are thin at this point well leave the speculation to those who like that. If this deal were to happen it certainly would be a change. If it ends up denting Googles search dominance will only show in performance and not conjecture. Honestly, while it may be interesting to have Microsoft and Yahoo working their search ad business in some form of a union it will only matter if advertisers believe that their money would be better spent there or with Google. Thats a tough hurdle to overcome no matter how you approach it.

Source:  searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20090717MicrosoftYahooDealClosingIn.html

Large Internet companies spend millions on consultants and technology trying to get their sites to rank among the highest results on Google. Everyone else has to rely on the poor man’s search-engine optimization: the link exchange.

If you’ve ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you’ve probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: “Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links.”

We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what we do or few moral qualms about spam.

The idea is that if you can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site’s worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics, thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old, dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the Web’s dominant search engine.

But does it still work? And at what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation designed to game the system?

Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank of another site he owns using techniques that don’t run afoul of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he said. “To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling.”

PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google’s novel approach to site indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account the worthiness of the sites passing along the links.

This meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.

But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.” That, of course, sounds like something your mother would say.

In a Web as vast as this one, getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other’s work and help each other build up a following, but if you’re selling a product or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search results for things like “day-trading software” when you’re starting from scratch.

So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about search-engine optimization for Search Engine Land, says “if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

Duffield says he’s very careful to only solicit links from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the ancient game of go.

That was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.

“It’s not about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries,” Duffield said. “When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see the top three positions have this much page rank and this many positions, and try to beat that out.”

As long as people like Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they’re following the spirit of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“Where it tends to get into tricky issues is where people are doing it primarily for payment,” Sullivan said. “Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that people would simply be buying links to do better.

While paid links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in general, saying it does not allow “excessive link exchanging” but failing to define exactly what constitutes “excessive.”

Other practices that are verboten include links to “bad neighborhoods” on the Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually identify.

For the most part, however, the practice is rampant enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. “If you start thinking too much about not getting caught, you’re probably doing things you shouldn’t be doing,” Sullivan said.

In an era where SEO is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over Google’s search index are those like Duffield trying to make something out of literally nothing.

While he needs to build PageRank equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link exchanges only work to get one’s name out there: the real boost needed to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites.

That’s when your search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said. “If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all over the Internet, what choice do they have?”

Source: cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/14/cnet.google.link.exchange/index.html

In what could be a positive sign for online advertising, Google said on Thursday that its second-quarter revenue rose from a year ago as ad spending in certain areas recovered and the company did well at managing expenses.

In what it termed “a very good quarter,” Google posted revenue of $4.07 billion for the second quarter, excluding commissions paid to advertisers, up from a year ago and a smidge higher than analyst estimates.

In a conference call, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said he was very pleased with the results the company posted as the economy struggles to recover. “It demonstrates our resilience in what continues to be a very difficult environment,” he said. “Google’s business appears to have stabilized,” as consumers turned to the Web to find the best deals and ad sales were strong.

Schmidt said he couldn’t forecast when the economy would improve.

“It’s too early for us to tell when the recovery will materialize…A quarter ago, we had no idea where the bottom was,” he said. “It became clear starting roughly at Christmas that people were spending more time searching and when they were purchasing products they were purchasing products of less value.”

Ad spending, meanwhile, is returning, particularly in verticals such as shopping and travel, but not for financial companies yet. “We’re not, at the moment, looking at the downward spiral we thought we would see six months ago,” he said.

Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was $5.52 billion, including traffic acquisition costs, up 3 percent from a year go. Traffic acquisition costs paid to advertisers were $1.45 billion, representing 27 percent of ad revenues. Excluding those commission, net revenue was $4.1 billion.

Net income was $1.48 billion, or earnings per share of $4.66, compared to $1.25 billion and $3.92 a share, a year ago. Excluding certain items, Google’s earnings were $5.36 a share.

On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected revenue excluding commissions to be $4.06 billion and earnings per share of $5.09.

“It demonstrates our resilience in what continues to be a very difficult environment…Google’s business appears to have stabilized,”
–Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

The second quarter is typically a slower quarter because of reduced business activity during the summer, said Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette.

Aggregate paid clicks on ads served by Google rose 15 percent from a year ago, but were down 2 percent from the first quarter, while the average cost-per-click dropped 13 percent from a year ago and rose 5 percent from the first quarter. Traffic acquisition costs, or advertiser commissions, were down from a year ago.

The company has 65 percent of the search market, according to ComScore, followed by Yahoo with 19.6 percent, and Microsoft with 8.4 percent.

YouTube is starting to pay off, according to Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development. Google is making money off billions of videos every month, with monetizable views tripling from a year ago, he said.

“We’re really pleased with the trajectory” and revenue growth (for YouTube), he said. “And in the (near) future, we see profitable business.”

Google has about 20,000 full-time employees, down 375 from the end of the first quarter, mostly from a reduction in sales and marketing positions that was announced last quarter, Pichette said.

Google’s revenue figures apparently didn’t please Wall Street–Google’s shares were down nearly 3 percent in after-hours trade, to $429.65.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10288808-93.html