It appears the last time they tested this was back in 05′

Here is a screencast:

If you have no idea what I am talking about check out the video below:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Blog Writers Ubiquity:

One idea I have so far is an auto inner linking command to alleviate that nasty chore of finding the right page to link to on your site. Imagine if you are typing a blog post in your wysiwyg editor and you need to interlink a phrase. You simply highlight it, and open up Ubiquity via ctrl-space. You type in inner-link and boom. That phrase is linked to the most relevant page on your site. How might this work? Honestly, not sure how the api’s work right now, but if you could get Ubiquity to query site:www.domain.com “highlighted phrase” in Google and return the #1 result as the page to link to then this might just be a time saver.

Link Builders Ubiquity:

This one is a no brainier, but being able to type in link-count, and it takes you to the yahoo site explorer page, defining the number of links for that page. Also, being able to quickly see the total number of links for the domain would be nice.

Social Bookmarkers Ubiquity:

It would be extremely handy if there was a command line prompt for say, bookmark, and it opened up 3 new tabs. They could be something like Digg, Stumble-Upon and Reddit. Each site would have the URL of the page you came from already preloaded, as well as embedded description content if you highlighted text on the old page.

Competitive Analysis Ubiquity:

Lets say you want to do some quick competitive analysis on a specific domain. The newly launched Quarkbase.com is a great place to ping. Open up Ubiquity and query site-stats and off you go to -> http://www.quarkbase.com/show/”site-name”

Jerk-Off Commenter Ubiquity:

Perhaps you find some jack face leaving an abusive low blow comment, and want to find out potentially if they have commented other places across the web. Open up Ubiquity and type in comment-finder “name” and it queries http://www.backtype.com/people?q=lex.

Rob, Aaron, Shady let me know when this is done.

Thanks,

Brian

Google Knol recently launched. If you have not started writing articles for it, well then, hurry the heck up before you get passed by all the other folks who understand the need to get an early start. My latest post was on Increasing Conversions, I started off with 68+ tips and tricks to do so and I fully welcome others to add there thoughts to the article.Now you might have noticed, after writing an article, you could not find it or others. It appeared the “search feature” was not working. The only way to see your article through searching was by being logged in.In fact, a gentlemen for the LA times thought nobody was even writing articles, which obviously was not the case. Turns out it takes “time” for Knols to be searchable, according to a Google representative.Now that we know Google knows how to search, the remaining question is how well are the articles going to rank? I have a strong feeling these pages are going to rank well. In fact they have already starting do just that.

Now I know these are somewhat “long tail terms” but this is a brand new subdomain. It has not been live but for about a week. Give Knol some time to build up backlinks and age and you can start to understand the ramifications of all of this.

Read More on this topic:

Google Knol Review

It is worth noting Google wasn’t even included on the list, funny stuff. Here is the excerpt if you cannot read the image:

“Publicizing your page in the major search services helps Web surfers find your site. You should try and get your page listed in as many search services as possible.

The following table describes how to add your site to several of the popular Web Search services. To list your Web Site in the search service, go to the URL and click the link indicated in the last column of the table.”

• Altavista
• Excite
• InfoSeek
• Lycos
• MSN Web Search
• Yahoo!
• WhoWhere?

“You can save yourself some time by submitting your Web site to a submission service called Submit It at www.submit-it.com (which is owned by Microsoft now for something completely unrelated). This service can submit your Web site to more than 400 search engines for a modest fee of 59$.”

I don’t really care much for the idea Google can tell you where you can and cannot buy advertising. However, it is their index and they can do what they want.

From what I have seen so far, as far as the penalizations go they are not across the board. I still feel like it is a manual handcheck and perhaps with some level of algorithmic manipulation.

The following are 9 reasons you should be worried if you are buying links:

1. You are buying links through a network

2. You are buying links in chunks, 3-5 at a time on one page.

3. You are buying all your links on sidebar, footer locations.

4. Your entire niche buys links.

5. Your site sucks, as in no one in there right mind would naturally link to you.

6. All of your links have perfectly, articulated anchor text that simply looks fake.

7. You are not a 300+ Million dollar brand name.

8. You are doing really, really well in the SERPS, and rank in the top spot for a majority of the money terms.

9. 70+ % of your sites traffic comes from Google organic results

The bottom line is if you are buying links you really have to be under the radar. I know this has been said for a while but more so then ever. If your entire niche is buying links then there is a much greater chance your site is going to get checked out in my opinion.

Don’t go overboard, actually buy links that will get you traffic and conversions.

PS. If your link profile is made up of 1/2 to 3/4 paid links you might as well stop now, and start building defensible traffic.

The idea is to get together and share ideas, tactics and tricks that are working in the world of organic search optimization and paid optimization. SEO/SEM 101 is left at the door. This is the place to share in depth tactics that are working, and working well.

Feel free to signup over at spongecell for the Raleigh SEO Meeting. http://spongecell.com/event_page/view/594997

UPDATE:

After further notice it appears to be somewhat algorithmic in nature, and somewhat manual. Some sites I have noticed have gotten completely docked, and some sites have only had penalizations at the page level. Will keep an eye on this as it unfolds.

I talked to Matt Cutts, and he explained that if you are trying to recoup some of your lost rankings, then the best course of action is to get the paid links removed by contacting the site owners and telling them to take them down. Once you have made a good faith effort of removing the links then they might consider the reconsideration request.

Not sure how feasible it is to get this done, but this is what he said none the less.

It looks like Google has finally started pushing, what appears to be in typical “scalable” fashion, a paid link algorithm that is completely knocking out pages (not entire sites) that it feels have been heavily gamed via paid links.

This is going to open up a whole new can of worms, and will be interesting to watch how it unfolds in the coming weeks and months. Competitor sabotage here we come?

It appears I have been tagged by Taylor Pratt in a meme. Between starting a new job at Ignite Social Media, buying a townhome, and starting some new client work I have been completely strapped as of late. I have been so busy, the blog has suffered a lot, and I feel this is partially why Talyor tagged me!!

Anyways, I know everyone out there has always been itching to know all about Brian Chappell, well not really Here are 8 off the wall things you might not have known about me:

• I scored 11 goals in my first soccer game I ever played in at the age of 5.
• I went to Virginia Tech for undergrad. GO HOKIES!
• I am an Armin Van Burren fanatic, and have been ever since I came across DI.FM about 2 years ago.
• I love to ride my mtn. bike and hike. Cary is a great town with many hidden trails and parks around. I just discovered this route the other day.
• I don’t like to follow the crowd, creating my own path is so much more exciting!
• I proposed to my Fiancé over winter break last year at the top of the London Eye.
• I am predicting my eyesight will be gone in under 5 years due to the fact I look at a computer monitor from 9am – 1am, 5 days a week.
• I eat Spicey, Smokey, Peach Salsa from Trader Joes every single day.

I tried to track the beginning of this meme and failed miserably. I am sure it goes back very far, way into 2007.

With that said, I have decided to single handedly put an end to this meme trail. This is the end of the line, no one else is getting tagged.

If you think Social Media is all about getting on the homepage of Digg and only that, then you are wrong. Keep digging, there is a LOT more underneath the surface to be discovered. Most SEO’s get stuck on instantaneous traffic sources. The fact of the matter is that you need to take a holistic approach when implementing tactics in todays market for clients.

If you sell Social Media as a service on your SEO consulting site, you better be able to back it up with other tangible explanations vs. simply submitting content through power accounts, getting traffic (that wont convert for crap) and obtaining 25 backlinks from the linkerati and calling it Social Media.

There is more to reputation monitoring than subscribing to RSS feeds and other glorified RSS reader tools…

This space is growing as rapidly as any right now. Simply typing in a brand term and seeing results that come up from the major engines, blogs and websites just does not give you the whole picture. Aside from your key terms and brands you are monitoring, are you looking into trends around that phrase, are you looking into key influencers that you want to put on your radar around that term? There is no one solution here atm that does it all. However, understanding there is more to Reputation Management then exact match keyphrase monitoring, will help you going forward.

There is more to Social Media than Facebook and MySpace…

Facebook and MySapce to a degree got this all started. It really got marketers thinking about engagement beyond one sided conversations, and how to use it for business, outside of the daily personal ongoings that Facebook and MySpace facilitated. In reality that is exactly what Social Media is, leveraging two sided conversations in any form or fashion possible.

With all that said, I have decided to make a move. 3 years of in house, hyper competitive SEO poo slinging with theMadHat has taught me a lot (personal side note: look who’s ahead, your shady link tactics have been foiled! ). However, as of late things have started to get dull. Learning and connecting is the name of the game at this point so Ignite Social Media made sense. I am really looking forward to building out my Social Media skills and knowledge base over the coming years. I think Ignite Social Media Agency is a great place, and is going to be doing some fantastic things in the space. Keep an eye out.