June 13th, 2006
eBay.com, auction giant, has acquired Skype, popular telephony service, last year. Now eBay announces the integration of Skype technology into the auctions.
Already this June the sellers will be able to make use of Skype technology: based eBay sellers can add a button ‘SkypeMe’ and their prospect buyers will contact them by voice or instant messenger. The new feature will be accessible for US based sellers and in 14 selected categories (I wonder how those categories were selected):
• Automotive GPS devices
• Camera and photo lenses and filters
• Wired networking routers
• Skype devices
• VoIP / Internet telephony
• Diamond solitaire rings
• Real estate
• Manufacturing and metalworking
• Beds
• NBA basketball cards
• Silver coins
• Lost in Space collectibles
• Radio control toys
• Cars and trucks
The new option should result in more sales for sellers and in better service for buyers – the communication process will be much easier, but it is hard to predict if the sellers will like and use this new feature. Also it is not clear how much eBay will charge for this option.
There is one important observation that the members communicating via Skype can easily arrange transactions and complete them outside eBay. Why to incur extra expenses on eBay fees?
Summary: eBay searches for the ways to justify enormous investment into Skype last year. The idea to integrate it with auction is obvious, but the time will show if it is successful and beneficial to all parties involved: eBay sellers, buyers and company itself.
[tags]ebay, skype, online auctions, home business, work from home, internet, business opportunity[/tags]
Posted in Home-based business | No Comments »
June 13th, 2006
Top rankings – sweet dreams. Any site owner dreams to see his website on top of three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The latter operate in the same way, but have a few differences that make any website owner dream unreal.
Aaron Wall, the author of the well known SEO manual, has just released a great article where he explores all top search engines (+ Ask) in detail. It is not a secret that Google provides most traffic to any established website (Googlejuice), but its competitors improve with every passing day. Added to that, if you are an owner of a new website you are likely to be ‘sandboxed’, so it would be wise to focus on top rankings in MSN and Yahoo! you will find a deep insight into every search engine. Here comes the short version of the article (quoted). Below you will find the link to the full version of this great piece of work.
The Short Version
Yahoo!
- been in the search game for many years.
- is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
- has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
- things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!
MSN Search
- new to the search game
- is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
- due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
- their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
- likes bursty recent links
- new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
- things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search
Google
- has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much cleaner than the current web graph
- is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
- looks for natural link growth over time
- heavily biases search results toward informational resources
- trusts old sites way too much
- a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
- they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
- if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
- crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
- things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost
Ask
- looks at topical communities
- due to their heavy emphasis on topical communities they are slow to rank sites until they are heavily cited from within their topical community
- due to their limited market share they probably are not worth paying much attention to unless you are in a vertical where they have a strong brand that drives significant search traffic
The long version…
Summary: the article is no doubt a good and up-to-date manual for all website owners – what you should take into account targeting top rankings in this or that search engine. I think every individual will discover new facts and SEO tips about search engines.
[tags]search engines, google, msn, yahoo, guaranteed top rankings, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing[/tags]
Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Home-based business | No Comments »
June 13th, 2006
No doubt, thousand of businesses and millions of individuals depend on the operation and efficiency of Google.com, top search engine. Every type of online business – no matter if it is an online store or informational portal or online service – follows every piece of news from Google (we are no exception: for instance, the recent news are posted here and here). Every online marketer expects – with a hope and fear – every Google algorithm update.
Another side of the story – what is going on inside the company? Who is running the company? Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, or Sergey Brin, the co-founder, or Larry Page, the other co-founder or the employees who are allowed to spend 20% of the work time on the projects they are passionate about? Read the story, kind of investigation, published by Forbes on this topic.
Summary: every company has its own corporate culture, but Google try to breeds its own, unique and highly efficient corporate culture to become and last as world IT company #1. Will they succeed? They do fine.
[tags]google, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Forbes[/tags]
Posted in General Business | No Comments »