Section 2-Around the Net in Search: Microsoft Launches SEM Blog Series

By Laurie Sullivan , April 30, 2009 Subscribe | Back Issues | Reply to Editor | MediaPost Home

Google Lands Water-based Data Center Patent SEO by the Sea Google has been awarded a U.S. patent for water-based data center powered by waves and cooled by sea water. The offshore data centers would sit three to seven miles offshore and float in about 50 to 70 meters of water. Cool! William Slawski notes that land-based data centers could tap into energy from the floating platform, and that data centers might be contained in modules. - Read the whole story... How SEO Played Into A Failed Startup Venture Beat Among the lessons Mark Goldenson learned from his failed startup -- PlayCafe, an Internet TV network for games -- were useful tips on how to buy keywords: "The ideal terms have a decent number of monthly searches (10,000+), low number of competing advertisers (3 or less), and strong relevance to your site." But that's just a small part of this insightful post, which runs through the dos and don'ts of getting a fledgling off the ground, and ruefully concludes, "Knowing isn't enough... I think advisers should more often say, 'You probably won't get what I'm saying until you screw it up.' Expertise takes time, and pithiness comes with a cost." - Read the whole story... Microsoft Launches SEM Blog Series Live Search Webmaster Center Blog Microsoft has started a new series titled "Search Engine Marketing 101." Rick DeJarnette will head efforts. The posts will cover the importance of SEM, steps to take to improve Web site structure and content, and discuss technical details to help gain rankings in queries. DeJarnette also will cover pay-per-click advertising campaigns, and touch on concerns about "over-zealous optimization techniques" and how they become more detrimental than helpful. - Read the whole story... Live Search Cloaking Crawler Turned Off LiveSide A thread at WebMaster World offers some disturbing behavior from MSNbot, the crawler Live Search relies on to find and index information on the Web, according to Kip Kniskern. He encapsulates a forum thread that Search Engine Roundtable has been following. The behavior is part of an attempt to detect cloaking, according to Kniskern. He points to Wikipedia for a definition: Cloaking, "a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser." - Read the whole story... Tying Contest Incentives To SEO Linkbait Search Engine Land Michael Gray believes contests and incentives can become powerful link-building tools that help improve organic search engine rankings. Gray writes that typically links become worth more to the company than the cost of the prize, due to the rankings they can generate. URLS should also be another consideration that can improve rankings tied to contest incentives. But don't make the mistake of leaving up old content on the page after the contest ends. Gray suggests leaving the page in place and replacing the information with different content. - Read the whole story...

Search Insider - Around the Net for Thursday, April 30, 2009 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showEdition&art_send_date=2009-4-30&art_type=44

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