Facebook bring back captcha’s for messaging

I was just sending my friend some driving directions to my house though the Facebook messaging system, and was surprised to see that when i hit send i was asked to put in a Captcha. I know that Facebook used to make you put in a captcha for adding friends until you registered your mobile phone. Obviously i have been fully registered on the site for a while now and haven’t seen a captcha on the site for ages.

There has been a lot of messaging spam flying about Facebook recently so it doesn’t surprise me that they have brought back captcha’s, and you don’t have to put on in for every message it sends. I tried sending 10 different messages to 10 different people and was only asked to input the captcha three times so its not that bad.

Although it is a annoying to have to put in a captcha, it should cut the spam sending down dramatically, so i think i can live with it 🙂

SEO is not a real job…

…or so a (tsk) .net development blog would have you believe.

I have just read the above linked post on reddit which is from a .net development blog. At first i was very frustrated about how someone could be so ignorant about an industry that they obviously don’t understand, but then at the same time i started to think about how people do view the SEO/SEM industry in a negative light. I know it has been discussed to death about how some SEO’s come across as snake oil salesmen but i feel that this post deserves some attention, especially due to the negativity of some of the reddit comments that people have left. Before i even get started on my views though i will present you with the opening paragraph of the enlightened post…

Let’s face it: SEO is a joke, not a job.
Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strength of contents or services offered. A little bit of social bookmarking, a little bit of fuss on major social or professional networks, a little bit of impression exchange, a little bit of back-links here and there: it doesn’t seem to me as a big deal.

Pretty convincing stuff huh? Well not entirely. It seem like this guy has absolutely no idea what real SEO involves. In fact he seems to think that if you just develop a website to standards then you are going to automatically rank for your chosen terms. He even goes on to say that “getting noticed on the web is extremely easy, just with a little reading and even less intelligence.”

Now anyone who has tried to create a site and get it to rank for anything which is remotely competitive will certainly find that getting noticed on the web is far from easy. You obviously have to get the site architecture right, get your pages linking to each other correctly, make sure that you title tags and meta descriptions line up with the page content, ensure that there is no duplication of content, actually right decent content and get it up and indexed by the big G. Now that’s just the on page side of things, we all know how hard it can be to get free links hence why linkbait and creative viral is so effective, and usually not cheap. Lets not even get into link buying which can cost a lot of money for a small site to break into a competitive area.

So its quite obvious that SEO is a job, because if not it wouldnt be a multi million pound industry. However i do see why people look at us so bad. There are so many stories of companies ripping people off and saying how they will submit your site to a gazillion search engines, but it is so frustrating when uneducated fools make comments and posts like the one above. I know some people have bounced around the ideas of having academic standards in the world of SEO, and whilst i am against it, it could help solve some of the negativity that surrounds us all?

Oh, and don’t even get me started about the post author disabling the right click on his website! 1999 called, it wants its javascript back 🙂

Using quote pages to get (sort of) contextual links

Look ma, Hookers

Look ma, Hookers

I was being all geeky and looking up some movie quotes to send to a friend, one’s that would help him sort out his messed up life (Hey Danny *waves*). And thought of a little idea which might be helpful in trying to score some links back to your site.

You can get moderately contextual links from pages which list quotes from favourite shows, lyrics or movies.

Let me explain. Lets say you run a small cell phone wallpapers/ringtones website and you are struggling to get people to link to you without paying through the nose for advertising. You could negotiate for a while to try and get the price down, or you could contact the many millions of sites out there which have a page on the movie ‘Phone booth’. Crap movie, but somewhat related to ‘telephones’ no? Now, the site owners probably have site wide ad’s on their quote site but are probably not to bothered about the actual content of their quote pages.

You could just hit them a quick email asking for a link to your site in the quote that you like, e.g

The Caller: Think about it. Why would a guy with a cell phone call a women everyday from a phone booth.
Pamela McFadden: He said it was quiet.
The Caller: Pam, that’s just stupid.

So then you could ask the site owner, if (s)he could link to you with the anchor text of “Cell phone“. Now even though the movie quotes site isn’t about phones, there is a lot of contextual references to phone/phones in that one page.

Since the site owner doesn’t have to write unique content or mess about trying to slip your link into the page, then your more than likely going to be able to get this link quite cheap. Unfortunately most quote pages are low page ranks such as 1 but can certainly aid a new site in a niche market.

So next time your thinking of where to buy links from, make a list of all the shows, movies, songs that you think are in anyway related to your search terms and hunt around quote pages, you’ll be surprised what you find 🙂

Matt Cutts really is whiter than white :)

I have just come across a story which tells us of a feature that YouTube implemented after it was ‘joked’ about on the popular webcomic XKCD.

XKCD originally ‘joked’ about YouTube commenter’s realising they are morons after having the comments they type read back to them before they posts. It seems Google have noticed this and implemented it into YouTube as a sort of homage to the popular comic.

http://xkcd.com/481/

A snippet of the comic from http://xkcd.com/481/

Ok, so you probably knew/have seen that already? Maybe your a speed Digger though and didn’t realise that the Digg submission actually linked to Matt Cutt’s blog post about the subject, a nice bit of link juice passing through to your site right? Well the man at the head of spam… (team) decided to take his blog down and just leave a link to the original XKCD post.

It’s such a nice thing to do… whilst linkbaiters and viral marketers dream of getting links from the front page of Digg, Matt Cutts does the exact opposite and just stops short of 301’n his entire blog to the original story (we wouldn’t want to pass any authority now would we 🙂 ). He is probably the only person on this earth who would do such a thing.

I just thought it was a rare sight to see someone not take the juice, then again this is the emperor of spam fighting, and just goes to show that he seriously does practise what he preaches… or perhaps he just couldn’t handle the traffic? I’d like to think it is the first 🙂

Turns out he couldn’t handle the traffic, dammit.

Yahoo gearing up to launch Google Analytics rival?

Earlier this year (the 9th of April to be exact) Yahoo issued a press release which explained that they had acquired the web analytics and tracking company IndexTools. Now 6 months later it seems that they might be looking to roll out that acquisition to the general public with Yahoo Web Analytics.

Whilst the Yahoo Web Analytics site is still plastered with ‘Coming Soon’ under almost every category it does show some promise to be a genuine rival to Google’s own analytics reporting. According to Yahoo…

From the acquisition of IndexTools, Yahoo! Web Analytics is born!

Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.

Obviously there is ton’s of other marketing spiel on the website but the part that caught my eye in particular is the ability to make custom designed reports to drill down on information that you want to specifically monitor. I have used GA for many a presentation to many a graph hungry CEO, but i have always found that it can lack in some areas such as complete custom reports, hopefully Yahoo can fill this void.

At the moment there isn’t a great deal to go on because only previous IndexTool’s users can access the system, but could we be seeing a serious rival to Google Analytics? I guess time will tell (probably 2009 to be honest), and when it becomes open to the general public then i’ll do a full review.