Heh, Google accidently deleted it’s official blog earlier this week:

Check it out here: http://www.infoworld.com

Oops

We all know about Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Overture), but how many of you are using some of the smaller pay-per-click search engines?

Kanoodle, Mamma and Miva (formally Findwhat) for example are all good resources and you can generally get traffic at a low cost-per-click.

There are hundreds of small PPC companies out there, and while you may not get a lot of traffic compared to Adwords or Overture, you’re generally going to be paying a lot less.

It can be worthwhile if you’re willing to spend the time to manage it.

I recently interviewed Doug Perlson from Kanoodle on SEO Radio where he filled us in on some of the great things they are doing. Click here to check it out.

Have you been using any of the smaller PPC engines? Did you receive a lot of traffic or was it not worth your time?

Announcing the launch of My Wedding Favors.tv an online streaming video show — all about wedding favors.

This show was shot in Athens, Georgia with Jennifer and a local actress, Eaddy Mays. If you check it out, come back here and leave a comment and tell me what you think. If you run into Jen, tell her that you can’t even tell she’s pregnant in the video. We’re expecting twin girls in August!

Check out MyWeddingFavors.tv and let me know what you think.

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In this week’s issue:

1. Video for e-commerce?

2. Part Two of our Four-Part Blogging Course

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Hi all,

I’m back with another installment in the four-part blogging course we started in the last newsletter. Have begun blogging yet? I hope you’re having as much fun with it as I am. Blogging is much more than a trend, it’s a great way to increase your site ranking while you establish a trustworthy rapport with your customers.

This month I was quoted in The Economist magazine and a small local newspaper — both from reporters calling me from the blog. Whatever your business, it’s time to step up the blogging efforts . . . so on with Part II of our e-course.

But first I want to show you the new video site we did for My Wedding Favors.

It seems like everyone interested in internet marketing is talking about video right now — and I wanted to show you what we’re doing with video to complement e-commerce and the sale of physical products.

Check out www.myweddingfavors.tv – we shot the video for this streaming video site a few weeks ago and just launched it today. Visit bradfallon.com to leave a comment and tell me what you think! Later on, I’ll be talking about how we did it, sharing the results, etc.

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The Second in a Four-Part Course on Blogging

Last week we armed you with basic blogging terminology. By now you should know your trackbacks from your comment spam and how an RSS feed has absolutely nothing to do with dinner.
So I thought now we’d move past blogging definitions and onto tools. There’s an abundance of blogging tools out there, but I’ve narrowed it down to a few which really help you manage and build your place in the ‘blogosphere.’

Google - One of the best ways to find blogs on your particular subject is to just use Google and other search engines to look for popular keywords in your market plus the word blog. Also pay attention to the advertisers for this search too: it’s possible one or more of them will have competitive blogs in your space!

There’s even a Google Blogsearch that’s finally out of beta. It’s Google’s search engine just for blogs, and even better, they do a pretty good job of weeding out all the ’spam blogs’ that can pollute other sites.

Google News - When you’re in search of others writing about the topic you’re interesting in blogging about yourself, Google News can’t be beat. Google News has the impressive ability to search thousands of news sources for specific keywords or products. It’s like having a newsclipping service at your disposal – for free! With Google News you can literally track all the newspapers in the world and instantly find out whenever your topic or company is mentioned!

Technorati - The Google of Blogs. This is a specialized site and search engine that references blogs only. Run a search on Technorati for your subject of interest and it will come back with results from all the blogs talking about that subject…even if someone just posted minutes before! There’s a lot of results worth skimming over, but also a lot of good stuff in there if you dig a little. Technorati is the undeniable one-stop shop for blog search.

Digg - There’s a new trend called ’social bookmarks’, where thousands of users bookmark sites and then automatically zeroes in on the most popular. Digg is one such site, and though it references a lot more than just blogs, it’s still an interesting place to check out.

MSN Search - They’ve recently added a very useful RSS feed to their custom search. This makes for an even easier way to keep track of your market, mentions of your site, your competitors sites, etc. Here’s some direction on how to do this: MSN Search via RSS

Ice Rocket – Similar to Technorati, this is another site specifically designed to help you find weblog posts about specific topics.

Next edition . . . SEO for your blog.

That’s it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox for the next edition and as always . . .

Keep on Stomping!

Brad Fallon

www.BradFallon.com

If you’ve ever had your website rank high in Google and then drop way down in the rankings, you know it can be extremely frustrating (if not devastating to your business).

But if Google drops your website, and that hurts your business, whose fault is that? Is Google responsible?

Well it turns out one company thinks Google’s to blame, and they’re taking it to court. Google is being sued by a parental advice website that claims Google is violating its right to free speech by blocking certain search engine results.

They are charging that Google “unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.”

The plaintiffs are also complaining because Google doesn’t let web site owners know if they’ve been penalized. That would be great, wouldn’t it? Then again, I don’t know that I want Google telling my competition why they aren’t ranking as well
But suing Google for a drop in your rankings?

What do you think? Does Google owe an explanation to web site owners if they make an algorithm change that negatively affects your site?

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In this week’s issue:

1. Part I of our Four-Part Blogging Course

2. MyWeddingFavors.com & Google or ‘A Ranking Rollercoaster’

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Thursday March 9, 2006

Hey Gang,

It’s been a while! If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that things are ramping up in an amazing, busy way at our company, including MyWeddingFavors.com. So forgive the delay between newsletters. (And if this is your first Stomper Update, hello! You joined up at a really exciting time.)

The Stomper Update is back this week — with a vengeance. This edition has some really great stuff, starting with . . . .

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—> The First in a Four-Part Course on Blogging

It’s really fun . . . it seems like everyone’s doing it . . . even the ‘traditional’ marketers are jumping in the game . . . it’s blogging for business!

One of the best ways to attain excellent search results while establishing a better rapport with your customers is to launch a blog. Starting a blog is easier than you think – and the rewards are endless. So I thought I’d give a few pointers over the next few newsletters on how to get your blog up and running and, most important, working for you.

To start out with, I want to make sure you’re familiar with the basic blogging terminology. With the way the blogosphere changes daily, it’s good to make sure we’re all working with up-to-date definitions:

1. Blog — Don’t make the mistake of considering a blog to be simply an online diary. While it can be that, it can be a whole lot more. A blog is a content management tool as well as a place to build communities, learning and discussion.

2. Blogroll — You know when you go to someone’s blog and see a list of links to ‘Blogs I like?’ That’s a blogroll. Basically it’s list of other blogs that particular blogger likes to read or just link to, for other business purposes. If you’re on one, it means you’re getting a link from every page on that very Google-friendly site.

3. Captchas — Those bothersome but necessary graphics that look like warped words or numerals which you are prompted to type into a field underneath it. ‘Captchas’ prove that you are a human being actually reading (and commenting) on a blog. And not some spambot.

4. Comment Spam — Comment spam is when comments are left on a blog that are essentially worthless, and just a means for people to post incoming links to their sites. Comment spam can be hand typed by spammers but more often than not, it’s left by the aforementioned – and dreaded - spambots.

4.5 Comment Spammer — One who propogates comment spam. For these people, capital punishment is appropriate.
5. Pings — When a blog is updated, it can be set to automatically ‘ping’ various sites, such as Yahoo and Technorati, which lets them know the blog has been updated.

6. RSS Feeds — Readers of a blog often subscribe to an RSS feed (RSS is an acronym for ‘Rich Site Summary’ or ‘Really Simple Syndication,’ depending on who you ask.) Then, whenever the blog is updated, that reader can read the blog posts in an RSS reader without having to go the blog itself.

7. Trackbacks & Trackback Spam — Whenever someone links to your blog, you get a link from whatever site is linking TO your blog. That incoming link from someone else’s site is called a ‘trackback.’ Unfortunately, like most things that involve incoming links, trackbacks are susceptible to spam. Trackback Spam is when someone says they posted an article mentioning your blog and give you a link to it, but when you click on it – surprise! – it’s actually a link to some irrelevant, shady site.

Next edition . . . what are the best blogging tools for beginning and advanced business blogging?

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—> MyWeddingFavors.com & Google or ‘A Ranking Rollercoaster’

As you can imagine, I’m constantly getting questions
about MyWeddingFavors.com and how it went from #1 in
Google, to completely gone, to partially back, and finally back to #1.

I love all the people who have emailed me to help, ‘Hey Brad, did you
know your site’s off Google?’

‘Really, naaaahhhh hadn’t noticed.’ Right.

Anyway, this is one of the busiest times of the year, and
we’ve been slammed with orders, so I haven’t had the time
to sit down and write a long explanation. Until now, that is.

Since last summer, we’ve had to triple our warehouse
size, and we’ve gone from a staff of a dozen or so, to
around 50 (and growing).

That’s right — even when we were dropped from Google, we
continued to have record months, because Google traffic
is only a fraction of where the traffic comes from.

Which drives home an important lesson - the need to
diversify.

You can’t rely solely on being on the first page of
Google, or you could be in trouble if your rankings
drop.

There are plenty of ways to do this, and over the next
few months, I’ll share some of the things you can do to
get more traffic outside of the search engines.

As for Google and SEO in general, we’ve learned a
number of things.

The search engines are always evolving, so rankings can
come and go, and certain things will lose their
effectiveness. But if you follow the basic principles
of SEO, like we taught in Stomping the Search Engines, you
will do well over time.

So anyway, what happened to MyWeddingFavors?

Several months ago, MWF dropped out of Google
completely. For a while, it wasn’t even being cached.

If you did a search for site:myweddingfavors.com, you
would have only seen some of the links, with no
description. A few days later, not even the links
showed up.

What was the problem?

Well there are a couple things that we think caused the
problem, both relating to the same thing . . . .

Duplicate content.

First of all, since we also run a wholesale wedding
favors company, when other sites carry our products,
they almost always use the stock description.

That means there are dozens of wedding favor sites that
have the same products with the same descriptions.

We think Google, for whatever reason, decided that it
was only going to cache and rank the products on one
site. And that site was not us
Also, shortly after that, we found a file on our domain
called ‘upload.html’. What is upload.html, you ask?

We wondered the same thing!

When we did a search for site:myweddingfavors.com,
that was the only page that was coming up.

Turns out, it was a file that was created by a Yahoo Store
programmer working on our site — for a project when we
exported all of our data once several months prior, and
somehow Google found that page.

Upload.html was a file that had the information,
including titles and product descriptions for EVERY
product on our site — all on one single (very large)
web page.

Google may have seen that page and thought, ‘Hey look,
they have all of the product descriptions here in one
place . . . Let’s just use this instead, that way we don’t
have to cache all those other product pages that are
just saying the same thing.’

So we removed the upload.html file and redid a good
amount of our product descriptions.

A couple weeks after that, we started to get our pages
back into the cache, and some of our rankings started
to re-appear.

It took a while for our rankings to all show back up,
but now we are back at #1 across all of the
datacenters.

I even sent an email to Google, and sure enough,
3-4 days later, our site reappeared at the top with
a special ‘tracking URL’ that was certainly placed
there by Google for some reason.

Later, the tracking URL disappeared and my site was
showing up #1 in all the datacenters whenever 12, 16
or 19 million results were displayed for the keyword
‘wedding favors.’

It was also showing up #1 in Google’s Big Daddy datacenters.
(For a discussion of Big Daddy, see:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/)

But whenever only 5 million results were displayed, it was
nowhere to be found.

I sent another email to Google, and sure enough, 3-4 days
later it was back to #1 in all the search results, this time
with no tracking code.

To wrap up, here are some lessons we learned from this
experience:

- If you are using the manufacturer’s descriptions for
products on your site, modify them or re-write them so
they aren’t identical.

- If you use duplicate content, for example for product
descriptions, try to have a good chunk of non-duplicate
content on all your pages as well. (You can tell if Google
is recognizing your content as non-duplicate if a site:
search for all your pages displays both titles AND
descriptions for all of your pages.

And to those people that have asked if we have been
using ‘black hat’ techniques - the answer is no.

In my opinion, black hat sites tend to do worse — over
time. Good content sites tend to do better over time.
So rather than fighting an uphill battle, I like to keep
building sites that you get to keep, year after year.

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That’s it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox and Part II
of the Business Blogging course, and as always –

Keep on Stomping!

Best,

Brad Fallon
www.BradFallon.com

What’s been going on with MyWeddingFavors.com, you ask?

Great question!

Tomorrow I’ll be sending out a newsletter to the Stomper email list that will explain what happened, why it dropped from Google, and how we fixed it.

Also, I’ll be sending out Part One of a Four part series on building your business by blogging.

You can sign up for the newsletter by entering your first name and email address in the boxes in the left column (below all of the “Subscribe to Bradfallon.com” options).

I finally got around to checking out the new version of the Google Toolbar, and I have to admit - it’s got some cool features.

What’s different?

- The "PageRank" button replaces the old blue "Info" button

- If you have a gmail account, you can click on the
"Gmail" button to go directly to your account. Or if you are logged in already, you can click on the arrow next to it and it will display the subject lines from your unread mail.

- If you highlight some text and click on the "Send to" button, you can email it through gmail, send it to a blogger account, or send through SMS. If you don’t highlight anything, you can send the entire page.

- Server-side bookmarks allow you to keep bookmarks in the toolbar so you can access them anywhere that has the latest toolbar.

You can also add buttons, which are basically RSS/XML feeds put into button form.

The "Local Weather" button is also kind of cool, shown here:

But the best part is the custom buttons. To test this out, I made a custom button for BradFallon.com :

As I’m surfing the net, I can click on the arrow next to the button and it will show me all of the latest posts for BradFallon.com, so I can see if there are any new posts without having to leave the page I’m on. Or I can click on the button and it will take me directly to the blog.

So if my favorite blogs all offered custom buttons, I could check them all for new posts without having to navigate to all of them. It’s basically just a new way to display RSS feeds.

I’ve also found the "Whois" button very useful, and you can find the details on what exactly that does and the link to add the button at Matt Cutt’s blog .

If you have the latest toolbar, click here to add the BradFallon.com custom button.

Want to add a custom button to your blog? Here are the instructions.

It took some digging to find this link, but here’s how to convert an image into the correct format.

If you’re using the latest toolbar, what do you think? Is it better? What features do you like and which features would you not use?