The most general definition of the word meme is:

A meme consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation.

Blog meme trackers (or memetrackers) monitor what is most actively passed from blog to blog (”If the thing is actively passed around, that must be hot“). In a word, meme tracking is all about identifying, collecting and arranging most talked-about news in blogosphere. (more…)

This year’s conference was held in a hazy Nanjing, 2.5 hours by fast train from Shanghai, and organized by Timev and SMX.There were three conferences going on at the same time in the new Nanjing Expo Centre. (more…)

According to a Yahoo spokesman, the deal was delayed a bit to pursue their ongoing discussion with the Justice Department, awaiting further questions from the regulating bodies relating to the specifics of the search ad deal. Although Yahoo might be affected by the delay, the company has no choice but to wait for the regulators’ decisionto avoid possible scrutiny and perhaps legal sanction later on. (more…)

They’re not talking about their own domain names or web properties either. They’re now worried about sites like RipOffReport, ComplaintsBoard and the dozens of other consumer advocacy sites created to give consumers a voice.

You may even work with your clients, helping to improve their online reputation by pushing these negative sites out of the mix.

And suddenly, your client’s interest wanes.

It’s an unfortunate situation on a number of levels, but increasingly common.  Your client has seen their targets removed. They no longer see detrimental sites ranking prominently so their train of thought is that you and leave well enough alone and move on.

But that is simply is not true.

Rather than challenge your clients in an aggressive manner that could be perceived as a sales pitch for your services…

Consider the following. (more…)

Bill Slawski did a great job of summarizing the patent with help of two examples:

The Constitution of the United States is an old document, but it’s not stale. A news article about the “World Series” from 1918 may not be what a baseball fan wants to see when searching for “World Series” this October.

According to Google itself:

Stale content refers to documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data (documents that are “no longer updated, diminished in importance, superceded by another document“).
(more…)

These categories then cluster the blog posts indexed by Google according to their subject contents. So when you view the Technology category, you’ll see the list of blog articles written on specific news or events grouped together, similar to how Google News presents news stories. When you click on a particular blog items, you will be brought to a new page where all the blogs covering the particular item are listed. Within the new page, you’ll also see a graph which tells you how many blogs are covering the news or events over a particular timeline. (more…)

Highlights of the night included Marcus Tandler winning a Neil Patel and proceeding to sell him to Frank Watson for a beer and Carolyn Shelby getting every available dollar donated during the raffle. (more…)

From their structure, to the way that we let them interact with the search engine bots, a full understanding of our Information Environments is the basis of a strong SEO approach. No matter what changes in search algorithms a strong Information Environment Design will help your usability as well as assist in classifying your data.

In a recent post, I broke down the basic website levels in terms of Information Environments from shallowest to deepest, Domain>Sections>Categories>Pages>Media.

There are several ways to help make the connection between these levels, and thus help classify the information held within. The most granular connection takes place on the link level, with anchor text passing classification. More advanced classification concepts include SEO Siloing.

One way to help classify your data is through the use of RSS. Most sites today use Really Simple Syndication to get their content out to readers and search engines alike. Fresh content is key to timely crawls, and RSS feeds play right into this basic SEO concept. However, most sites only have an RSS feed on the domain level of their Information Environment structure. (more…)

1. Creating/ joining a Facebook group;
2. Creating/ joining a Facebook fan page.

While the major differences become evident only after you try out them first, we decided to create and promote both for Search Engine Journal:

• Search Engine Journal Group;
• Search Engine Journal Fan Page.

Now what we have found from this experiment..

First and foremost the 2 major differences include:

1. Unlike groups, fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for reputaion management, for example);
2. Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invite” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.

(more…)