Most average SEOs shudder at the mere mention of “Blackhat SEO”. The major concensus is that it will get your website banned by Google Almighty and company. But what if you have played all your whitehat cards and yet your rankings are “stucked” at a certain position? Or you happen to be in a popular niche like health and finance, where many Internet Marketers are also vying for the top spots to make a couple of bucks from Adsense? (more…)

Apparently, even American Idol judge Simon Cowell uses SEO …to demote negative content about himself in Google’s search results. Known as Online Reputation Management (ORM), an increasingly popular service using SEO to manage bad PR on search engine results, the NYDailyNews article claims that you now have to wade through 20 pages on Google before seeing any “adverse” comments about Cowell. (more…)

Having been disappointed with a number of Windows Mobile devices since my first HP clamshell (ran on WindowsCE back then) in 1999, I took the plunge anyway and picked up an Android-powered HTC Desire to see what the fuss was all about. I mean, with 160,000 Android phones being activated everyday, it can’t be that bad, right?! (more…)

Here’s a round-up of recent developments in Google that I found interesting: 

1. Analyze Competition Feature In Adwords
Adwords will have a new Analyze Competition feature under the Opportunities tab. This allows you to compare your campaign performance to those of your competitors, based on your account’s activity in the last 2 weeks.  Depending on your chosen metric, you’ll be shown a bar graph comparing yours to the competition averages (see sample). The data is anonymous and you’ll be able to export this information to a .csv file for further analysis. The Analyze Competition feature is now available only to a small number of advertisers - I don’t see it in my account yet. (more…)

As a MAS Facebook fan, I was notified of their new marketing campaign, which aims to make customers think about the value they’re getting when flying with Malaysia Airlines. Judging from the response on the Facebook page, it looks like the campaign (sorta) backfired - a case of customers not always thinking at the same frequency as the marketers. (more…)

Here’s an interesting compilation that shows Google Facts and Figures in a single file, from historical timeline to search statistics and business data. The numbers were compiled by Pingdom, which provides website uptime and performance services, based on information from Google, Comscore, Wikipedia and Google’s SEC filings, amongst others. Image available after the jump. (more…)

Twitter have announced that they’ll be rolling out their own URL shortener this summer. So instead of the common bit.ly, you’re going to see your links wrapped with a t.co URL like http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMSes and maybe a descriptive anchortext like amazon.com/Delivering for web users. (more…)

Did you know that a website that ranks #1 on Google receives more traffic than the websites on positions #2 to #4 combined? Chitika, an advertising network that I used to use back in 2006, recently did a study on the effect of Google rankings on organic traffic, which re-affirms past findings about heat maps, etc. (more…)

Do you have Google Adsense on your blog or website? It may interest you to know that Google revealed yesterday, that the payout to publishers are 68% for Adsense for Content and 51% for Adsense for Search respectively. (more…)

I’m writing this article in response to clickTRUE’s blog post on article spinning being bad and their advice for people to NOT do it. clickTRUE is an online marketing company and subsidiary of SPH Magazines, that was started by the wonderful guys who founded Hardwarezone. (more…)