Checks to curb latest SEO tricks

Unethical tactics employed by companies utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics such as link farms and loading Web pages filled with irrelevant keywords, are not welcomed by search engine operators. This declaration was issued by two market players.
Asked if organizations such as content farms are outsmarting its system by flooding the Web with low-quality content to earn high-click rates, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company "prefers quality over quantity" to manage its Bing search engine.
"Backlinks, also known as 'inbound links', should be relevant to the page being linked to, or relevant to an SEO's domain if they are being linked to the homepage," he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. He pointed out that backlinks from sites considered to be authoritative in their field are rated to be of higher value than those from "junk sites".
Bing does prevent Web sites from appearing in its search results if they use techniques such as using hidden text or links within their Web page or create link farms to artificially increase the number of links, the Microsoft executive added. However, he did not elaborate on how the checks were implemented and executed.
Google adopts a similar stance, according to a company spokesperson. He explained that a site's ranking in its search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms that incorporate hundreds of parameters. "Our algorithms are effectively designed to prevent people from manipulating the rankings of competitors in our search results," he added.
Yahoo, also a major player in the search market, declined to comment when contacted.
Farming for content
Both companies' response might be deemed timely, especially following reports that some sites are turning into content farms to improve their SEO standing.
In a blog post on ReadWriteWeb, Demand Media and Answers.com are quickly blazing up the chart of top Web properties in the United States. Citing September 2009 figures from research firm ComScore, Answers.com climbed from 26th to 13th position over just two months, while Demand Media spiked from 24th to 15th over the same period.
According to ReadWriteWeb, Answers.com has 38 million pages of content on its site--much of which is user generated--while Demand Media churns out 4,000 new pieces of content a day. It further noted that the swift climb by the two sites suggests that "to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump hundreds of pages of content every day, preferably thousands".
Blog site TechCrunch described the phenomenon simply as: "The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it's going to get ugly."
Wired magazine also published a report noting that Demand Media created three specialized search algorithms to pick out the most sought-after subject matters and keywords that Web users are searching for at any given moment. It then uses the results, and assigns these keywords to a dedicated pool of freelance writers who would rush out content, written around the keywords, to be published online.
"Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort--because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work," Wired said.
Disputing allegations that the company was a "low-paying content mill", Demand Media's senior vice president of content,Jeremy Reed, said: "In this day-and-age of publishing, where so many decisions are driven by the need to cut or eliminate costs, we've gone to great lengths to develop a community of really qualified writers and put them in a position and environment to create quality articles."
All content has value
According to an industry analyst, there will always be users who appreciate online content regardless of its quality.
Chris Perrine, COO and executive vice president of Springboard Research, said in the field his company plays in, "more is more" with regard to information.
Unfiltered search results provide its researchers with the most details and information they need for their jobs. "For the research field, you would want a wealth of information, and sometimes even a sub-par article can lead a researcher to a new piece of information or insight," Perrine told ZDNet Asia.
He noted, however, that other industries' requirements may differ. For instance, a marketing manager looking for media coverage may be hindered by the mass of information he would have to sort through on the Web. There is also a "difference in value" between the Wall Street Journal's content, for instance, and those aggregated by a random site, Perrine added.

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Mobile fragmentation challenges Facebook

Facebook needs to "beef up" both its mobile Web site and mobile products as fragmentation is a major challenge on the mobile platform, according to director of Facebook Mobile.
Henri Moissinac, director of Facebook Mobile, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that his team's key goal is to "enable any user, in any country, language, phone, data plan, to be able to access Facebook via mobile when they are away from their desktop".
In mobile, fragmentation is a major challenge, said Moissinac. "Should we invest our energy on building applications for smartphones for sophisticated users? Or should we invest our energy in deploying a simple, fast, cheap SMS (short messaging service)?"
Moissinac said the team tries to "carefully balance" its priorities between Facebook's browser-accessible mobile Web site and availing smartphone apps and SMS notifications, to cater to the fragmented mobile ecosystem.
"We think we have a great set of apps, but we will do even more in 2010," he noted. According to Moissinac, the mobile site has been "considerably improved" to be faster and easier to use.
Moissinac also talked about Facebook's recently-launched iPhone and Android apps. He said that both versions feature "deep integration" of users' ondevice address books. The iPhone version syncs the profile pictures of a user's friends with local profiles, while the Android version copies contacts' phone numbers and profile pictures into the device's address book.
In addition, the company is "aggressively deploying" its SMS service globally, he said.
On whether Facebook Mobile would overtake the Web version in usage, Moissinac said both services would co-exist as users tend to use both together.
In a report released Tuesday by Opera, Facebook overtook Russian-language social networking site VKontakte as the top social networking site visited through Opera's mobile browser in 2009. VKontakte ranks high on the list because of a high adoption rate of Opera Mini in Russian-speaking countries, the report noted.
Opera's report said unique users of Facebook on Opera's mobile browser grew more than sixfold over 2009.

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Is eBay facing seller revolt?

eBay's latest move, some of the auction site's devotees say, is straight out of the Ministry of Truth's playbook.
The company made an announcement last week about lowering the listing fees for items--even though, in many cases, final value fees will be raised. The company's discussion forums simmered with outrage over the executive decision, and frustration over the lack of other options for auction-style e-commerce.
"What a joke," commented one person on the eBay Seller Central forum, asking for advice about transferring the items from an eBay "store" to another auction site. Another suggested putting together an April Fool's Day protest.
eBay representatives say that these opinions come from the minority. "A lot of the sellers that we're talking to are very, very happy with these changes," said Todd Lutwak, eBay's senior director of seller experience. He said it gives a better array of options for different kinds of sellers. "What we've done with these price changes is, we've segmented the seller population and then we've provided those segments with what we feel are better options to meet their needs."
Here's the math: Individual eBay items with a starting price of 99 cents or less no longer have a listing fee, and if they don't sell, the seller pays nothing; but if they do sell, the final value fee is 9 percent with a maximum of US$50. Previously, it had been 8.75 percent for the first US$25, and 3.75 percent after that. For more serious eBay sellers who purchase subscriptions to run "stores", final value fees have been altered so that they start at a lower threshold, but in some cases can ultimately get higher. eBay piloted these changes in some European markets starting in 2008 (with success, representatives say), and later added some U.S.-based beta testers whom it's showcased in a new promotional site explaining it all, called "The Best Place To Sell".
"People who have store subscriptions, who sell thousands of items a month, are being advantaged," explained Alan Lewis, who worked at eBay as a product manager for five years and now serves as the platform manager for Auctiva, a site that makes tools for eBay sellers. "(This) continues the direction that they've been going for the past couple years, which is catering more and more to large sellers...It's something that makes sense for eBay. They just have to deal with the consequences. If they are bringing on larger sellers, there will be consequences for smaller sellers."
An eBay pundit who goes by the handle "AuctionWally" wrote a blog post in which he speculated that the fee changes "will benefit the savvy consumer of collectibles, antique and unique items as this plan brings a lot more product to the marketplace with low starting bids," and that "this stuff can be more like reading tea leaves than a flow chart, but it looks pretty good from an auction seller's perspective, and just as nice for most store sellers." Still, many of Wally's own commenters disagreed with him--some with extremely strong language.
Granted, when a company makes a product change announcement, it's the ticked-off ones who are the most vocal. But those dissatisfied sellers sure want to be heard.
"The lower announced listing fee decreases are absurdly trivial to the extreme, and will cause eBay to become more cluttered than ever with overpriced, worthless stuff that people will put purely on speculation that some fool will bite," an Alexandria, Virginia-based antiques dealer related to CNET in an e-mail. "I have been selling on eBay since 1997 and I know eBay like the back of my hand. It is a true love-hate relationship."
Any community site--particularly one where members may be making a profit by participating in that community--is sure to experience some dissent when changes are made. For eBay, however, the uproar from some sellers about this week's fee changes was more vociferous than usual. It amounted to Orwellian doublespeak, some claimed; and the "Best Place To Sell" microsite was little more than propaganda.
"Maybe eBay thinks a simple and transparent 'spin' that they are trying to offer will work--dropping their listing fees, which are small, and then upping the final sale fees from 3.5 percent to 9 percent--and just slip by all their sellers," said Northville, Mich.-based eBay seller Bill Wever, who says he has used the site for over a decade and owned eBay stock since its initial public offering in 1998, in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET.
"After reading (this week's) announcement, I will be expanding my presence on other sites and will be significantly reducing my presence on eBay," another seller e-mailed to CNET on the same day the fee changes were announced. "It never ceases to amaze me that eBay management seems to dismiss or disregard how constant change negatively affects their fee-paying sellers. Last year, there were two major change announcements. This year there will be three."
At the center of the mayhem, really, is a problem that eBay has had a rough time with in recent years: It obviously wants to make a profit. That profit comes from commission fees, and those commission fees are biggest coming from the sales of relatively expensive goods by well-established sellers--many of whom pay a subscription to operate "stores". Hiking up listing fees has had a noticeable impact on eBay's quarterly earnings in the past.
"All the things that they've done in the past couple years have been to bring more large sellers onto the site and bring them the economic incentives to do so, and they really haven't done anything for small sellers," said Alan Lewis of Auctiva, which targets smaller-scale sellers.
And eBay has been feeling the pressure for years. It made some arguably poor acquisition choices in the past half-decade that ultimately resulted in the selling off of properties like Skype and StumbleUpon, all of which dealt a blow to shareholder confidence. Plus, online auctions are no longer the hub of deals that they used to be: An increasingly diverse cornucopia of e-commerce innovations has emerged in recent years, from handmade-goods emporium Etsy to fire-sale deal-a-day outlets like Woot and Gilt.
But the flip side of this is that eBay still has a lock on auctions. It smoked out much of its would-be competition years ago, and many of its sellers deal in niches that are better off operating as auctions rather than flat-fee sales that could be handled over Amazon or Craigslist. eBay can make many of these controversial descisions and rest assured that it still owns the market.
"All of us have been hoping for someone else, perhaps Google or Amazon, to step in and provide true competition, but that has not happened," said the antiques dealer from Alexandria. "It would require a huge investment to do a proper worldwide advertising campaign to get something going."
eBay admits that the most recent changes will make the auction process more expensive for some sellers, but stands by its decision.
"There are cases in which this new fee structure is actually more expensive than what they were paying before," admitted eBay's Lutwak, "but the fact is, what (the sellers) asked us for is they want the lower risk associated with lower fees on the front end, and that they were willing to pay the final fees."
eBay hopes to extend an olive branch in the form of new buyer-protection coverage that it says will make buyers more comfortable spending money on eBay, particularly in large amounts--and that sellers will make more money as a result. "Coupling these two messages not only shows that we're making some adjustments to the fee structure but that we're also making major investments as a company to ensure that our customers are coming back more," said Kellie Cobaugh, manager of the buyer protection program.
eBay, after all, has seen this sort of mutiny before. Two years ago, after eBay raised seller fees and chose to prohibit sellers from leaving feedback about buyers, sellers organized a weeklong boycott The company ultimately weathered the storm. Around the same time, it attempted to mandate the use of its PayPal payment system for Australian customers--and then backed down amid protest.
Todd Lutwak suggests that sellers protesting the new regulations take a look at their own tactics for profit. "If you see that these changes do not have the impact on your business that you want, I would re-look at your eBay strategy," he said, pointing out that the new "Best Place To Sell" site has a listing fee caluculator for members to try. "There could be another selling approach that might be more beneficial to you."
Some sellers agreed. Rhonda Shrader, a San Francisco-based eBay seller who has "a half-time job" selling primarily women's clothing on the auction site, thinks she'll ultimately benefit from the listing fee changes and thinks that other sellers should figure out how they can, too. "I think for any small business person, any change in your macro and micro environment is going to cause you to react. I'd rather spend time doing that than complaining," she said.
"Sellers with strong business acumen will adapt to new (rules) and find ways to thrive," an eBay seller who goes by "Compulsive Collector" announced on Twitter. "As for others? Survival of the fittest, and all that."
But frustrated sellers scoffed at that thought.
"Given the current announced changes, coupled with eBay's history of revisions after changes roll out, it is impossible for a seller to build a business strategy that lasts longer than a few months," one said via e-mail.

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Youth Olympics: Major IT milestones to date 'met'

IT plans for the inaugural Youth Olympic Games (YOG) to be held here this year have made progress and on track with scheduled deadlines, according to Atos Origin, the company responsible for building and operating IT infrastructure and systems at the Games.
The team has, to date, met major milestones outlined in the project, Yan Noblot, program manager at Atos Origin, declared in an interview with ZDNet Asia. The 34-year-old is the YOG chief integrator and has been involved in several Olympics such as the Athens 2004 Olympics, 2006 Winter Games in Torino and the initial phases of Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
A veteran Worldwide Olympic Partner, Atos Origin was appointed the overall IT lead by the Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC) in December 2008 and is also responsible for building the Games Management System (GMS) and the Information Diffusion System (IDS). It currently has 34 employees dedicated to the YOG, with manpower ramping up closer to the event.
The IT services vendor, Noblot said, has since put into "production" several modules under the GMS to support preparation for the Games. It also launched in December 2009 an integration lab to work more closely with other participating sponsors. YOG technology systems are now hosted in a data center in the eastern part of the island-state.
In the near term, disaster recovery plans that include the identification of a redundant data center will also be finalized, he added. The Technology Operations Center (TOC), which serves as the IT command center during the YOG, will also be ready. The games will run over eight days from Aug. 14 to 26.
Compared to Beijing 2008's TOC, the Singapore center will be smaller, Noblot said.
Tapping social media
But while the YOG is generally acknowledged to run on a smaller scale than the summer and winter Olympic events, it has its unique differences.
Due to the lower median age of YOG participants, Noblot noted, there is significant emphasis on new media such as social networking and mobile applications. "Atos Origin as the primary integrator not only has to provide real-time information to those new applications, but we also have to support them," he said.
One example is the "Digital Concierge for Singapore 2010" app, which will be pre-loaded on Samsung's Omnia Lite B7300 smartphones for athletes and selected team officials to use during the Games. As a result of enhancements to the IDS, real-time schedule updates and results will be pushed to the phone via the Digital Concierge app, he said.
The Games will also introduce new events in some sports, as well as a new competition format, he added. In soccer, for instance, teams can comprise players of different nationalities and this creates additional requirements on the IT infrastructure, he explained.
According to Noblot, Atos is currently working with Omega, SingTel and Samsung to prepare the IT deployments needed for the YOG.
The PC vendor is expected to be Acer, which is the appointed sponsor for both the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 games, and the company's logo is already visible on the official YOG Web site.
Noblot acknowledged that Atos Origin has been using computing equipment from a particular vendor, but the sponsor has not yet been identified by the SYOGOC.

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