Hey guys, Have you heard about the most recent update on Google’s algorithm? Yes! Another update again! While less than one year ago google launched the Google Panda update, Now, At April 2012, they have rolled out the new one. This update is called “Penguin”. I’m not sure abot the next update, maybe it will be the “Google Dunky” or something like it! Just kidding! Based on what I have seen in the doodle above, I guess the next  update on google’s algorithm would be “Google Lion” or “Google Koala”. Should wait and see!

As a reminder, take a look at the major update Google has rolled out since past 10 years:

Actually I do not want to go into details. If you are interested to know more and also learn a SEO crises management plan, read this link.

Read more about Google Panda

Some Common Mistakes in writing academic papers based on IEEE  are as bellow:

• The word “data” is plural, not singular.
• The subscript for the permeability of vacuum μ₀ and other common scientific constants, is zero with subscript formatting, not a lowercase letter “o”.
• In American English, commas, semi-/colons, periods, question and exclamation marks are located within quotation marks only when a complete thought or name is cited, such as a title or full quotation. When quotation marks are used, instead of a bold or italic typeface, to highlight a word or phrase, punctuation should appear outside of the quotation marks. A parenthetical phrase or statement at the end of a sentence is punctuated outside of the closing parenthesis (like this). (A parenthetical sentence is punctuated within the parentheses.)
• A graph within a graph is an “inset”, not an “insert”. The word alternatively is preferred to the word “alternately” (unless you really mean something that alternates).
• Do not use the word “essentially” to mean “approximately” or “effectively”.
• In your paper title, if the words “that uses” can accurately replace the word “using”, capitalize the “u”; if not, keep using lower-cased.
• Be aware of the different meanings of the homophones “affect” and “effect”, “complement” and “compliment”, “discreet” and “discrete”, “principal” and “principle”.
• Do not confuse “imply” and “infer”.
• The prefix “non” is not a word; it should be joined to the word it modifies, usually without a hyphen.
• There is no period after the “et” in the Latin abbreviation “et al.”.
• The abbreviation “i.e.” means “that is”, and the abbreviation “e.g.” means “for example”.

Reference

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Me and Gantt chart!

If you asked anyone involved with SEO and SEM what is the biggest SEO update at 2011, the Google Panda update would be no doubt on top of the list. It has raised a lot of debate and quite a few headaches along the way. Soon after the Panda rollout, many websites, including Google’s webmaster forum, became filled with complaints of scrapers/copyright infringers getting better rankings than sites with original content.

Google Panda is a change to the Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was introduced in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. There is a surge in the rankings of news websites and social networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising. This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results.

To help affected publishers, Google published an advisory on its blog, thus giving some direction for self-evaluation of a website’s quality.

The panda process

Google Panda was built through an algorithm update that used artificial intelligence in a more complicated and scalable way than previously possible. Human quality testers rated thousands of websites based on measures of quality, including design, trustworthiness and speed.

Many new ranking factors have been introduced to the Google algorithm as a result, while older ranking factors like PageRank have been downgraded in importance. Google Panda is updated from time to time and the algorithm is run by Google on a regular basis.

Google Panda affects a whole site’s ranking or particular section rather than just the individual pages on a site.

In addition to other changes, Panda seems to focus on the date of a web page. Some experts think this has adversely impacted sites with lots of “evergreen content”. Because evergreen content usually has an older publication date, Panda seems to reduce its visibility in search results. For searchers looking for in-depth information, many of these evergreen posts are great sources of knowledge on a topic. If these evergreen web pages happen to be on a blog they also often contain a long comment thread with lots of additional, valuable information. In the future Google has not addressed how evergreen pages are listed in search results.

Google Panda v3.2 was released January 14th, 2012 and v3.3 was released in February 29th, 2012. According to the Google these updates were just a “data refresh”, meaning if site was not punished previously just by mistake it will be punished now and if a site was punished wrongly punishment will be removed.

What is Panda targeting?

It would be quite easy to paint a picture of Panda’s main targets. In summary, the Panda update is designed to:

1. Reduce spam
2. Combat sites such as ‘content farms’
3. Improve scraper detection
4. Filter low quality content
5. Close vulnerabilities in its algorithm

The main factors that are being considered, and are clearly important are:

1. Low quality content
2. Excessive advertisements
3. Branding
4. User signals

Who has been affected by Google Panda?

Based on different stories through World Wide Web, the following sorts of websites have been the clear losers:

• Free classified websites
• Advertising websites designed to host ‘Ad-sense’
• Price comparison websites with lean content
• Travel websites with poor or duplicated reviews
• E-commerce websites with poor product pages
• Article websites with low quality or reproduced content
• Websites with poor usability and branding

It is obvious that the Panda update has not affected the bigger brands, because they are rich and should be safe!

Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam Team explains why you should tweak your titles and descriptions to improve your CTR.

This tag is one of the most important ranking factors in the search engines ranking algorithms, so populating your most important keywords in this tag will dramatically increase the search engine rankings of the page.He also explains Google doing away with the use of the meta description.

This Meta tag doesn’t offer any SEO advantage, but simply provides a brief description of a web page. It is important that the description clearly describes the purpose of the page, because it’s not just for the search engines results snippets, but primarily for humans to read.

He explains why Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web rankings.

This Meta tag provides a list of words or phrases about the contents of the Web page. This tag provides some additional text for crawler-based search engines. However because of frequent attempts to abuse their system, most search engines ignore this tag.

In 2006, Google came up with a new algorithm called “Phrase Rank“, which is a process of indexing including identification of phrases and/or related phrases.That system analyzes the sequences of words and evaluates them as good or bad phrases. Good phrases are the ones that occur quite frequently across the indexed documents or have a distinguished appearance.

This coming Tuesday (20^th March 2012) will be the first day of Iranian New Year. We call it Norouz or Norooz and also Nowrooz. In the Persian language, Norouz means “new day”. We will enter:

• 7034 based on Mitrai Arian calendar.
• 3750 based on Zoroastrian calendar.
• 2571 based on unification of Persian Empire by Cyrus the great.
• 1391 based on Islamic calendar.

Listen to a very nice soundtrack about Persian New Year here.

Nowruz marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the year in Iranian calendar. It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox, which usually occurs on March 21 or the previous/following day depending on where it is observed. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday and having significance amongst the Zoroastrian ancestors of modern Iranians, the same time is celebrated in parts of the South Asian sub-continent as the new year. The moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator and equalizes night and day is calculated exactly every year and Iranian families gather together to observe the rituals.

***

THE HAFT SEEN

A few weeks before the New Year, Iranians clean and rearrange their homes. They make new clothes, bake pastries and germinate seeds as sign of renewal.

Commonly Norouz is celebrated by spreading a “Haft seen”. “Haft” is the number seven in Persian and “Seen” is the letter S in the Persian alphabet. The elements in Haft Seen have symbolic meanings and represent life-rebirth, health, happiness, prosperity, joy, patience and beauty.

The seven articles are Seer (garlic), Senjed (lotus tree fruit), Serkeh (vinegar), Seeb (apple), Somaq (sumac berries), Sabzeh (grown wheat or lentil), and samanu (Iranian sweet pudding).

World's biggest search engine, Google, placed the Norouz logo, which includes all the seven elements of the Haft Seen table, on its Persian section to mark the Nowrooz.

These seven articles are spread on the table with a copy of Quran. These Iranian customs symbolise the triumph of good over evil. It is the focal point of the celebration and as such Iranians take great care and pride in putting together a lavish and elaborate spread to signify all that they want in the New Year.

***

The UN’s General Assembly in 2010 recognized the International Day of Nowrooz, describing it a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over 3,000 years. During the meeting of The Inter-governmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of the United Nations in 2009, Nowrooz was officially registered on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Read more
My post about Nowruz 1390
My post about Nowruz 1389
Reference

Internationally renowned photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand makes his feature directorial debut with this environmentally conscious documentary produced by Luc Besson, and narrated by Glenn Close. Shot in 54 countries and 120 locations over 217 days, Home presents the many wonders of planet Earth from an entirely aerial perspective. As such, we are afforded the unique opportunity to witness our changing environment from an entirely new vantage point. In our 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has hopelessly upset Mother Nature’s delicate balance. Some experts claim that we have less than ten years to change our patterns of consumption and reverse the trend before the damage is irreversible. Produced to inspire action and encourage thoughtful debate, Home poses the prospect that unless we act quickly, we risk losing the only home we may ever have.

Produced by:

Luc Besson
Denis CAROT

Written by:

Isabelle DELANNOY
Yann ARTHUS-BERTRAND
Denis CAROT
Yen LE VAN
Tewfik FARES

License:

Standard YouTube License

One of the main barriers in pursuing advanced research in the fields related to e-commerce and e-marketing is the ambiguous way of dealing with the concept and definition of E-Marketing. The majority of researchers within the field misuse the term E-Marketing for E-business, E-Commerce and Internet Marketing as the synonym which is incorrect since these terms have different connotations (Eid & El-Gohary, 2011). For instance, E-Marketing is wider in scope than Internet Marketing (IM) since it refers not only to digital media such as the Web, e-mail and wireless media, Intranets, Extranets and mobile phones but also includes electronic customer relationship management systems and the management of digital customer data, etc. In contrast with that,      E-commerce and E-business have a wider and broader scope than E-Marketing.

It is difficult to find an accepted definition of E-Commerce (Duffy & Dale, 2002), since its definitions vary according to interpretation and use. For example Kim and Moon, 1998 define Electronic Commerce (EC) as: “The delivery of information, products and services, or payments via telephone lines, computer networks or any other electronic means” (Kim & Moon, 1998). Baourakis defines it as: “The trading of goods and information through the Internet”(Baourakis, Kourgiantakis, & Migdalas, 2002) . On the other hand, Chaffey (2007) interpret E-Commerce as a means to exchange information: “All electronically mediated information exchanges between an organization and its external stakeholders”(Chaffey, 2006). In addition, according to some scholars, E Commerce can take a variety of forms which include electronic data exchange (EDI), mobile telephone, direct links-up with suppliers, Internet, Intranet, Extranet, electronic catalogue ordering, and e-mail (Quayle, 2002).

E-Business as a term is broader than E-Commerce since it does not refer only to buying and selling (as in E-Commerce) but also refers to servicing customers and collaborating with business partners. This is in line with the roots of the concept of E-Business (Chesher, Kaura, & Linton, 2003).

Based on the various definitions for E-Commerce and E-Business, mentioned above, the concept of E-Business goes beyond the narrow understanding associated with the term E-Commerce. Within this context, E-Commerce characteristically relates to the process of buying and selling products, services and information through the use of the Internet and/or computer networks (Chaffey, 2007; Lesjak and Vehovar, 2005; Greenstein and Feinman, 2000 and Turban et al., 2004). Moreover, according to Rodgers (Rodgers, Yen, & Chou, 2002),  E-Commerce principally focuses on the organisation customers while E-Business expands the connectivity of the organisation to include not only its customers but also the organisation suppliers, employees and business partners.

Based on the above discussion, it is clear that E-Business, E-Marketing, E-Commerce and Internet Marketing are not equivalents or a different wording for the same meaning as observed in the literature, where there is a blurring of the distinction between the terms. These differences and relationship can be illustrated in figure bellow.

Part 1

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Finally I completed my MBA final thesis which took me more than six months hard working and studying. Its title was “Exploring the impact of E-Marketing adoption by SMEs on marketing performance”. I had chosen the topic based on my field of interest which is “E-marketing and E-commerce”. However during these six months, the entire work has changed a lot (based on my supervisor’s opinion and also limitations of study that force unwanted changes) so that became something which is quite new for me myself! In overall I’m happy with the final result and learnt so much from the whole process.

My deepest, most sincere thanks are to my parents who endured days of my life being away from them, supported me, and brought me enough courage to carry on through my whole life. Without their continual supports, patience and understanding, the completion of this work would have never been possible.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to my beloved wife, for her supporting me throughout and tolerating my long hours on campus. I also owe special thanks, to all who participated in this study and took time for the interviews.

You see some stats about my thesis at figure below: