It’s true that there are sites out there that get tons of natural links. Mostly these are more entertainment oriented sites like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc. but even smaller non-commercial sites are more link friendly. The real challenge is getting natural links for a smaller commercial site. While it’s true that a well designed, user friendly site with a solid product line can still get natural, unsolicited links it will be months before you see natural links, and even then you aren’t going to see that many. I can build the world’s best site for garden tools, but I probably won’t see many links since those most likely to link are webmasters, and not you average customer. Customers are likely to send you lots of great testimonials, feedback, or even refer their friends which is all great, but don’t count on too many links. Granted, some may link to you from their personal blogs, but unless their blogs are fairly popular they won’t get you very far.

The problem with relying on natural links it that in most industries there’s already a lot of link exchange and link buying taking place. Granted many of these links may be worthless, or less than relevant, but you’ll find many that are relevant quality links and that don’t appear to be bought. How is this possible? The new trend in link buying is much more subtle than in the past. The preferred method now is to either buy or exchange links directly from the site you want to receive links from. By buying links from sites that don’t openly sell links webmasters can get lots of quality, SEO friendly links much faster than if they waited for them to just come in naturally.

Does Google approve? Of course not but as they say where there’s a will there’s a way, and most sites are willing to do whatever it takes to appear in the top of the rankings.

Organizing the web is not simple, just ask Google, and while there are plenty of ways to organize and index information the most popular amongst social sites are tags. Social sites like to use them because they’re incredibly easy to implement and search, and even with clustering algorithms tag implementation is still fairly simple and cheap. The users like them because they can choose whatever keywords, or phrases they deem important. Adding tags, which are basically descriptors, to content seems like the ideal way to explain what it’s about and let users know if they’d be interested in the content. The problem with letting users tag items with whatever they want is that there will always be a population interested in gaming the system. These users have, unfortunately, contributed to the spamming and abuse of the social bookmarking system resulting in the exodus of many former users.

The other way that most social networks organize their content is through some kind of voting system. The peer voting system does keep some spammers at bay, but only the lazy ones. All it takes is a few forum posts, or some cheap labor to game the voting system.

The reason people generally prefer to use sites like Google and Wikipedia (which admittedly have their own problems) is that there is some supervision and quality control in effect. Whereas most the bookmark sites are a free for all, and even if some of them did clean up the users have already moved on to the next big thing. Frankly I like the idea of social bookmarks (i love StumbleUpon!) but they’re going to have to evolve in order to survive the spammers.

It’s funny that Google’s own search engine technology can’t sort out the copyrighted material from free user generated content.

Boehm said the group’s intention is to raise awareness of piracy. “We realize that this is probably a drop in the bucket in ferreting out copyrighted content among the millions of videos posted on Google Video, YouTube and other popular video sites,” he said. “But we hope that our efforts serve as a resource for copyright owners to check if their content is on the sites without their knowledge or approval.”

Google’s claim is that the responsibility lies with studios, filmmakers and others involved in the pirated material. Google will remove any copyrighted content once the copyright owner informs them, but rather understandably doesn’t seem interested in policing the videos themseleves.

The NLPC, however, is far from satisfied with the company’s efforts. “Google has been dragging its feet for months in coming up with a solution to pirated content,” Boehm said. “(It) still requires copyright owners to go through the laborious process of issuing DMCA take-down notices before the content is removed, while smaller companies are beginning to show real leadership on this issue.”

Picturehouse president Bob Berney, whose company distributed the Oscar-winning “Labyrinth,” seemed resigned to some leaks online. “We have programs to prevent (piracy), but you can’t stop it all,” he said when informed of the NLPC report.

The list is available at the group’s Web site, http://www.nlpc.org.

There was also a stir about the addition of a news feed which shows what changes users have made to their profiles, and comments left on other user’s walls. While there were concerns about privacy the feeds do allow you to “hide” items which means that they won’t be seen on your profile or by other users.

The most recent changes though have been the addition of a Facebook marketplace, a sort of Craigslist type board within Facebook itself, where users can buy/sell items, or look for work. Creating an easy way for people to make money using the site. In the last week Facebook has also activated and added dozens of applications which allow users to listen to clips from the favorite songs (iLike), let others know which movies they like to see (Flixter), share files (Box), etc.

While there’s already a variety of applications there’s still plenty of room for innovation, and saavy companies would do well to create applications now while users are still exploring the offerings, and before they’ve had time to become loyal to any in particular. Creating a Facebook application is a GREAT way to get traffic to your site, and introduce yourself to a young tech saavy market.

Musicovery is one of the simplest music sites to use, but it also has a nice variety of options. You simply check the genres you’re interested in and click on the grid (indicating the tempo and moods of songs) and you can even drill down by year. To see it action direct your browser to Musicovery.com and have fun!

This isn’t Google’s first attempt to encroach on Microsoft’s territory though. Google has had an engineering office in Kirkland, a Seattle suburb, for the past two years already. “In the next couple of years we expect to grow substantially and continue to invest in the Pacific Northwest,” Scott Silver, technical manager for Google’s Website Optimiser, said in a recent interview. At the time, he wouldn’t say how much the company planned to increase its presence in the region. Google already has a “few hundred” engineers in Kirkland, he said.

In addition to Website Optimiser, Google engineers in Kirkland have worked on Google Talk, Google Maps and Google Video. They also do a lot of work on advertising optimisation, Silver said.

The newly leased building is close to downtown Seattle and near an existing Google sales office.

Google will compete with Microsoft, which employs more than 35,000 people in the Seattle region, to hire workers.

Local analysts disagree on whether Google specifically decided to open operations in Seattle to poach Microsoft workers. Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft seems to doubt it though. “Google recruits from around the world, and if a Microsoft employee wanted to work at Google, I don’t think location would be a huge part of the equation,” he says.
Google’s website currently lists 19 openings for engineers in Seattle and Kirkland.

I guess it’ll remain to be seen whether or not Google’s added presence in Seattle will lure Microsoft employees away.

Running a search on Google now results in their self-dubbed ‘Universal’ results. This is fancy-speak for getting a blend of results containing not only traditional website links but also pictures, videos, books, news stories, and maps.

In reality most of this functionality has been around for a while, its just that you may or may not have noticed as Google is notorious for testing features one second then taking them down the next.

More significant to me is the Google Toolbar now featured at the top of their sites. While I don’t think it’s the most visually pleasing feature (to me it kind of looks like a top-nav with the CSS turned-off), it is very nice for those of us who use the majority of Google’s services daily.

This too has been around in different variations for a while, but it was always fairly limited in terms of the services it included. Now, thanks to drop-down, it has just about everything you need just one (or two if it’s in the drop down) click away.

I do hope they plan on making this toolbar blend in with their iGoogle skins as it’s really quite ugly now and looked much better before.

Growth projections for mobile advertising in the coming years vary widely, but it’s clear that marketers and carriers are chafing at the bit to expose the world’s 2.2 billion cell phone subscribers to a torrent of advertising messages, and in December of 2006, cell phone giant Verizon began to test such ads on the decks of its subscribers phones.

There are tens of billions of dollars in play here, lots of deep-pocketed players, including the search engines, and a gaggle of competing business models that include ad-subsidized content, ad-supported subscription discounts and others. And yet it’s clear that this nascent medium has more hurdles ahead of it than face an Olympic track team.

Of course, just because people don’t want to experience advertising on their cell phones won’t stop marketers and carriers from trying to foist ads upon them anyway, and it seems that the best bet for getting consumers to opt in is to offer incentives, in the form of discounts on their bill, free phones and other subsidies. Google’s Eric Schmidt has gone so far as to say that mobile phones should be free, with all charges paid for with advertising dollars.

But while the availability of free, ad-subsidized cell phone service might induce many to sign up for such a network, opting into any mobile ad network will expose cell phone users not just to annoyances they don’t need, but to risks which they’ve never had to deal with before, including exposure to spammers, spoofers, phishers and other miscreants disguising themselves as bona fide marketers. As the FBI’s Internet Crime Complain Center notes, “spammers and hackers have recently realized that there are new opportunities with cell phones… presenting a whole new area of concern and potential vulnerability for cell phone users.” Once commercial messages becomes a normal part of the mobile message traffic, it will be much easier for the bad guys to add their trash to the flow, using their time-honored tricks of deception and disguise to ensnare the unwary.

Cell phone spam is illegal in the United States, and Verizon has, in the past few years, aggressively pursued several unsavory marketers that have blitzed users of its network with hundreds of thousands of messages. Of course, traditional e-mail spam is also illegal (I’ll bet that upwards of 90 percent of the unsolicited e-mails now clogging your inbox likely don’t comply with the CAN-SPAM Act), but that didn’t impede the creeps who send spam. In parts of the world such as Asia, where text-messaging is used more frequently in the United States, SMS-based spam has become a plague, and is only starting to hit this country and Europe now. Historically, it has been too expensive for such criminals to exploit cell phone users because of tariffs on data. But these tariffs, both in Europe and Asia, are increasingly moving to the flat-rate model, removing the disincentive that has kept the miscreants at bay.

The big problem for legitimate advertisers pondering an entry into mobile phone advertising is that most users will quite understandably tend to lump them into the same lot as the spammers. This creates high potential for negative brand equity: I can guarantee you that anyone clicking on a spoofed ad from Coca-Cola that winds up connecting them to a Nigerian 419 scammer will be drinking Pepsi before very long. And while the mobile carriers will certainly make efforts to police their ad-based networks, it’s unlikely (I’d say impossible) for them to stay on top of the hundreds of thousands of SMS messages passing through their gateways every few minutes.

It’s possible that Eric Schmidt’s dream of free, ad-supported cell phone service may come true, but I’d lay odds that the real money to be made in cell phones isn’t in advertising, but in security systems that can remove all forms of advertising from cell phones. At any rate it’ll be interesting to see how the whole mobile spam problem plays out.

The program will launch at the end of May on several IAC-owned properties, such as Match.com, Ticketmaster, Evite and Citysearch. Ads will also appear on a few trusted publisher sites, most likely starting with some of the 90 publishers that syndicate Ask.com search results and search ads. Mid-sized publishers are able to sign up for the program now, and a self-service platform for smaller publishers is expected later this year.

Ask.com is trying to differentiate its offering from AdSense by offering more control and transparency to both advertisers and publishers. For example, Ask.com will provide publishers with tools to tweak ads displayed on their sites to find a balance between ad relevance and page yield. On the advertiser side, that comes in the form of separate bids for contextual ads and site blocking capabilities.

“We’re trying to solve the full equation for advertisers and publishers. Advertisers can expand their existing Ask Sponsored Listings campaigns with the same features, function, and control when they target the content network. For publishers, we’ve tried to differentiate it from what’s out there,” said Paul Vallez, head of Ask.com’s search marketing product division. “We’re going to offer a lot more levers to let publishers manage the monetization of their sites.”

The ASL program launched in 2005, and was expanded last fall. It now includes more than 90 publisher partners showing ads from more than 30,000 advertisers. Ads are distributed in search results for sites like Lycos, Infospace, Mamma, Hakia and Eons.

If you’re thoroughly confused by the previous paragraph don’t worry you aren’t alone. The aforementioned quotes are from a series of billboards rapidly springing up across the United States. So what are they all about?

The billboards are an effort by Ask.com to gain some market share, and further distance themselves from their previous incarnation as AskJeeves. The campaign is yet another example of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s peculiar sense of humor. They’re the ad agency responsible for the truth commercials (the effective but fairly offbeat antismoking campaign) and the creepy albeit memorable silent plastic headed Burger King ads.

Here’s what Ask.com’s CEO Jim Lanzone had to say about the new campaign:

“Ask.com has launched an advertising campaign focused on ‘The Algorithm.’ The goal is to incite a consumer conversation around the importance of a search engine’s algorithm and its integral role in making one engine different from another, Lanzone said.

‘The Algorithm’ is the single most important ingredient that determines the relevance of search results, yet its impact on the overall search experience is taken for granted by most consumers. At Ask.com, we feel that in order to drive consumer awareness and use of our engine, it is important to highlight the uniqueness of our algorithm, which takes a different approach to ranking than our competitors. The Ask.com algorithm’s relevance methodology goes beyond the popularity focus of Google, Yahoo and MSN’s, and is the only one to break the Web down into topic clusters and determine community-based relevance in real time.”

So while the billboards have started to get people’s attention the question remains will Ask.com be boosted by a clever offline campaign, or will “the Algorithm” meet the same fate as Jeeves?

The biggest problem the campaign faces so far is that even if someone searches for the campaign Ask.com has almost nothing linking them to the campaign. The ad’s are amusing once you know what they’re talking about but unfortunately most commuters out there don’t even know what an algorithm is, and those who do would associate it with Google not Ask.