I doubt that there is any professional copywriter who has never heard yet about such a service as Copyscape.com The matter is here about plagiarizm and defending your rights online. In two words this service helps to identify the duplicate content in the Internet - pages, that already have the “same content”.

How does it work?
You insert the definite web-address (it can be the root URL or a concrete page) and push the “Go!” button. The system start global scanning and can provide you with the number of urls that have the same content or that have quoted you. Great, isn’t it?!

In reality everything is much more commonplace as you might think: the system just uses the command that is called “exact match” when you type something in Google, like, for example, “web development company in Europe” - you will get results exactly for this very phrase. No wonder, this is invaluable for copywriters.

By and large, what we’ve got?
The tool that queries Google (and Google only!) to find the pages that have the same or practically the same content. Is it perfect? Absolutely not! I will write down a list of disadvantages of Copyscape (sorry, if I criticize it sharp - I would like to see the more powerful tool in the nearest future):

1) Limited free queries per IP address (20 at the moment);

2) Google indexed pages scanning only (this means that Yahoo! Live.com and other search engines are ignored and this is really in vain as it has been long ago noticed that other Search Engines index pages more often and faster);

3) The system is often mistaken (for duplicate content it can take absolutely different information though some connectors, parenthesis or other cohesive elements that can be used absolutely everywhere on different web-sites);

4) It scans only those pages that are in the main index in Google (the pages that are in Supplemental Index - a very common practice nowadays - are excluded from scanning. Why? No idea!).

Once again, I’m not paying tribute to this Tool just for the disadvantages mentioned above. They are enough to ruin (100% the right word) a copywriter’s job! Even the following picture won’t save you 100% from stealing your content.

P.S. Ready for a big discussion! Please, leave comments.

Our corporate blog has been populated by SEO topics recently. The posts are getting too long - so here we go with the small and easy one. (Sorry guys, no SEO science in this one).
I’m not really sure if you already seen a pretty girl Ms Dewey integrated with Live Search - if not it’s worth checking out!

The first thing I did as a marketer after playing with the web site - I checked it’s Alexa rankings (it’s now ranked as a 13k web site in terms of visitors) and yes - the traffic was exactly the same I had pictured in mind: the popularity of the web site skyrocketed in the first week when it was introduced (looks like it was in top 1k of the web sites) and then started decreasing gradually… I think the late posts like that and the users that haven’t seen it yet are keeping the web site on 13k position.

The important lesson that can be learned: the web site is amazing and fan, however it brings no real value or importance (why should someone wait for this girl smiling and thinking while when he needs). That’s the reason for super popularity which lasted a week (the number of visitors was really huge, however few of those returned).

In January 2005 there was a post in Official Google Blog that I would linke to qote here:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In a few weeks other search engines, like Yahoo and MSN, agreed to take into consideration the nofollow attribute of the links their spiders find while crawling. Originally this attribute was introduced to prevent people spam other people’s blogs with comments that contain nothing but links to some sites. If you have a blog yourself, you of course saw such comments linking to sites promoting viagra and texas holdem poker. Later other techniques of link spam appeared, including mass-submission of links to social bookmarking sites. Thus, most social bookmarking sites also introduced nofollow attribute for all the links that are bookmarked by the people. Some sites, like blogmarks.net and netvouz.com have not yet done so, but one can expect them to join the rest pretty soon.

However, the top social bookmarking sites I listed in my previous post can influence search engine results and traffic to the sites you promote even while using the nofollow attribute on all of their pages.

1. The first site most of you have already heard about is del.icio.us. It is the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites and it’s popularity became it’s power. Some people would use del.icio.us instead of a common search engine if the amount of irrelevant data in SERPs for their query seems overwhelming. Lots of other sites all over the web like tagvy.com, travelicio.us, tagcentral.net and many, many others would syndicate data from del.icio.us for some of the tags people use to describe their links at del.icio.us. The sites I’ve listed publish links for many tags, but it’s not a rare practice that some blog writing, for example, about SEO, would contain somewhere in the blog sidebar several latest links that people tagged as relevant to SEO. And the features I like most about del.icio.us is their export and import. Because all the links you have added to del.icio.us can be exported together with all tags and descriptions in several various formats and del.icio.us seems to be the only place where you can collect bookmarks and then import them from there to loads of other sites and applications that work with bookmarks. Even browsers offer less functionality than del.icio.us.
2. Once you have added several sites to del.icio.us, you can export the links and add them to Yahoo MyWeb. The peculiarity of this service is that it’s integrated in Yahoo and once the page you submitted to this service appears on any SERP in Yahoo, it will stand out on the page and look different from all the other results in the SERP. Yahoo will indicate how many people have saved this very page into Yahoo MyWeb, and as so far very few pages are saved there, this really makes a difference.
3. The last service from this top 3 I want to talk about, is not just a site, the most important feature with Stumbleupon is their toolbar. Once the toolbar installed you can vote for or against any page on the web. Or, if you feel bored, click on Stumble! button on the toolbar and the service will forward you to a random site according to your interests and the chances you land on some particular site are as high as the number of positive votes from the toolbar users. Of course, this would not help you if you are promoting something dull and something that only a small audience would understand, but once your site sells or offers something interesting, you should try Stumbleupon. So far we had very nice results with it for several sites.

And I would not recommend you the following websites for your SEO efforts: lilisto.com, linkagogo.com, unalog.com, igooi.com, hyperlinkomatic.com, zurpy.com and looklater.com. I’m not saying that these sites a bad or useless, but for me they were not worth the time I spent trying to figure out how they work and testing them for the sites I’m promoting. However, you might have a different experience.

Social bookmarking seems to be the web 2.0 version of what catalogues and directories were originally created for back when the web was born – sites that contain useful links. Or trusted links. Or categorized links. All kinds of links.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.

All the sources enumerated below are not a kind of advertisement for them; this list was compiled in order to help our copywriters and everyone who wants to publish his/her original ideas on any topic. I ask my colleagues to expand this list if the information above is not complete.

1.) http://www.ezinearticles.com

The leader in collecting articles and ezines from anyone in the Internet. The biggest articles-share system that has a number of opportunities for professional copywriters and for the beginners and SEO-specialists as well. You can try your skills in copywriting by becoming a member of this community and you have 10 articles submissions for free but that is not all! If your articles appear to be an outstanding source for the people – you have a chance to win a Platinum status that allows you to publish an unlimited number of articles. You are allowed to use external links from your article to other resources and even the site you want to promote. The use of special html-tags is restricted. After you publish an article, the site-editor has to check it whether it complies with the rules. Usually it takes 3 or 4 days. Recently approved articles are seen on the index page with a PR of 6 but do not delude yourself as your article won’t be there for a long time, though the categories where your articles will appear also have a high PR. You can then always upgrade your membership by paying a fixed price. The interesting feature is that you can always be aware of the visitors activity and their transfer to your web-site from all of your articles.

2.) http://www.articlehub.net

An interesting resource that allows publishers submit their articles for free that will appear in a special related category. Moreover, there are 5 last submitted articles + 5 most viewed articles on the index page that has a PR of 4. One link from an article is permissible. Worth considering if the article is a unique source of information. Then you can purchase permanent links under the articles. The example can be viewed here: http://www.articlehub.net/article9890.html

The last issue is not very interesting as you are to pay 50$ for this step and at the same time your links won’t be probably counted as there can be unlimited number of the links and you won’t get any PR after the update.

3.) http://www.prweb.com/

The most “serious” resource on the Web that is targeted mostly at press-releases rather than articles and ezines. The main page has PR7 and if you apply for a paid membership most likely your press-release will appear on the fist page and will stay there for a long time – pretty enough to get indexed for the web search engines crawlers. Easy and intuitively clear registration. RSS feeds are supported and ease the life of the clients in searching of a particular press-release. This is what this service gives you:

“We will show you how to get the most out of what has become the most advanced and robust system for distributing news releases to reporters, search engines and thousands of web sites that download news via our daily XML/RSS feeds.”

There is also such option as PRWeb Direct™:

WHY USE PRWEB DIRECT™?

• Same Day Distribution
• Streamlined Submission Process
• Personalized Service
• Advanced Distribution Options
• Increased Search Engine Visibility
• PRNewswire Distribution Options
• Press Release Writing and Editing Service

This is not a complete number of services provided to you by this extremely popular company!

4.) http://www.submityourarticle.com

An interesting source that allows you to submit your articles to thousands of publishers and web sites with just one click! Your articles will be definitely and instantly published on multiple major web sites that increase your link popularity. Personal RSS feed for your articles - add to your own site to keep your site automatically updated. The service will help you to boost traffic to your web-site that results in increasing sales. You can even make money from copywriting here: you are to sign up for a free course that will show you how to write articles better and more concise. A huge number of topics to choose from.

5.) http://www.articlegeek.com/

Another reputable source to submit your articles and ezines. There is a huge number of benefits that you can acquire from them:

“We, the editors, will be aggressively marketing and building the ArticleGeek.com brand. We will optimize all of our pages and build links to our website as much as possible. For you, this means that you will get increased exposure and the increased chance of getting picked up by more websites or publications. This, in turn, will lead to the all important one way links and traffic to your website.”

They just require a one simple link to their resource to keep it alive – that is their only requirement and a way of donation. Yes, it is fair just one link from you and 10 links from them from 10 of your articles. Only useful and unique content is allowed.

Just creating a web-commerce site for a store is not enough to start a successful business and get subsequent revenue. To manage this site is one of very important steps if the owner wants to beat the market. There is a huge number of businesses that run off the track only because of the management system negligence.

If you want your web-site become popular and your business prosper – do not abandon the management of the web-site. You are to follow all the trends in the sphere of hi-tech and implement them on your web-site even if doesn’t relate to technology and web-development. The efficient issue is to draw potential visitors to your web-site and in order to achieve this one should not neglect such marvelous marketing steps like creating a blog, for example, a successful corporative blog that presents its visitors with detailed information about modern furniture trends on the market; making some press-releases about the new products and services provided by a concrete web-site; organizing meetings and broadcasting them online again with definite details about a web-site; leading Google AdWords campaign and come out first in the Sponsored Search results; taking part in affiliate programs and so on and so forth.

One should not forget the that a Sale is an issue of enormous importance. Nevermind how great a sale is (-10%, -30% or more) this produces a psychological effect of the end customers. The table “Currently on sale” affects the customers as a magical artifact. Special events and occasions are the best sources of marketing strategy. Let’s say “Christmas Sale”, “Independence Day Sale”, “Thanksgiving Day Sale” and other. Well, this is a great marketing step in order to attract visitors reminding them of the pleasant things that they want to hear at the same time showing that shop owners as well as shop-assistants are caring about the end customers and show their “equal relation” or “we-group” (psych.) in relation to the buyers. Decoration here places by no means the last role. An ideal instance can be this online-shop: Ductless air conditioners & heat pumps store.

Summarizing this post one should restate the fact that there is always a huge scope of substantial improvement that a webmaster can put into practice if the ultimate objective is to benefit on-line!

I might be late with this link (solid part of experienced internet users already use this tool) however I couldn’t post a notice about it for those of you who still have no idea about it. It’s really hard to find the information that has real value to you, because there are tons of the web sites cached by Search Engine’s clawlers (hey - our guys at SEO dpt promote a lot of web sites resulting at TOP10 positions while they might not be a kind of resources that have value for end customers in the specified period of time).
Fortunately, you don’t have it to do all the searching yourself. Check out del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool that lets you see the latest Web resources to be “discovered” by other users who are searching for the same topics you are.

I just tried “project management” search and found the open source clon of basecamp I was hunting for couple of weeks. Hopefully we will integrate it into our project management process for some teams that use Agile methodology soon.

The interview with Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos showed that Microsoft is holding far-reaching plans to come top in the Search Engine World. Here are some lines from the interview:

Asked whether Microsoft missed the boat in the field of search technology, Mr Gates admitted that he had to take the blame for losing out to Google.

“We took an approach that I now realise was wrong,” he said.

“Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80% of common queries and ignore the other stuff.”

Other stuff?? Dear Mr.Gates, do you mean the greatest S.Brin’s creature called “Unbeatable Google Algo”? Well, nothing personal, but the Google algo contains more than 150 intellectual techniques to determine who is the chosen one – who has the rights to be in the TOP of SERPs. Sure, MSN is working out their “algo” independently and let’s see what progress it has made:

1) The relevance has gone down up to 80%!!!

2) Spam sites with doorway pages are coming up in TOP10 results! (Good job, MSN!

3) Duel listing for same doorway page above.

4) Unrelated sites that contain ONE keyword in the meta-data. (No comments, either)

5) 3 pages site appears that has the search term in the url.

6) Blogs are valued greater than 5 years’ old quality sites!

Well, the picture of search queries is grey, deep grey… We couldn’t stand this: loosing top positions practically for all our keywords for a night is awful. The only way out was to join the angry webmasters community & contact MSN directly through their feedback form in the bottom of the site. Perfectly realizing that our “strong disagreement”, to put it mildly, with the SERPs results would not be taken in account, we tried all the same. Surprisingly, the situation has changed to the better – we are back again in the TOP! Respects to MSN!

Spam has always been underestimated by the G3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and billions of “day-fly” web-sites have been in the SERPs. But the situation is changing and taking MSN as an example, one can predict that sooner or later the Algos will clear out these scraper web-sites and those that are under work of black-hat search engine optimizers.

Seo-guys have been waiting long for the Google PR Update… More than 3 months are gone already. Till yesterday – no signs at any datacenter. But today the figures of “green meter” on the toolbar are bouncing and two DCs (66.102.11.99; 66.102.11.104) are showing some changes. The results are not stable and the numbers change at the velocity of sound. But gaining a PR4 on the site that is only half a year old is great, anyway.

I wonder, Matt Cutts is not giving us any info until the PR update is over… Awkward but logical to the Google engineers’ conception. Mentioned above DC’s began showing new back links that the algo likes so much. All our projects have a favorable position regarding this, so, there’s no time to panic.

Three months over, no stable PR figures but this is temporarily and hopefully in some days we’ll be able to take care of business and continue our reciprocal links building campaign in the long run.