Without a doubt, Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortener service out there. And without question, what made them so popular is this one social network called… mmm..

what is it called again?.. Oh yeah, TWITTER.

Users who like to share links can really use services such as Bit.ly so that they can keep their messages under the 140 character limit. So it’s good news to know that Bit.ly just announced (on Monday) their new partnerships with Verisign, Websense and Sophos.

The goal of these new partners is to ensure that spam and other types of malicious software stay off the Bit.ly network. The presence of spammy and malicious links is a major problem that Bit.ly is hoping to solve. That grey area of not knowing where you’ll end up after clicking on a link shared through Twitter is just where spammers, phishers and scammers like to be.

Bit.ly’s new parterns are planning to solve that problem in three different ways:

Verisign’s iDefense service will screen IP addresses, domains and URLs based on its reputation database, to find those that “host exploits, malicious code, command and control servers, drop sites and other nefarious activity,” according to Bit.ly general manager Andrew Cohen.

WebSense’s ThreatSeeker Cloud will analyze the content on pages linked to through Bit.ly in real-time to identify and block “spammy URLs, malicious content and phishing sites.”

Meanwhile, Sophos rounds out the equation by analyzing the behavior of potential spammers to “go[] beyond blacklists, to proactively detect spam and malware.”

All I can say is YAY!

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URL Shorteners and SPAM

Google Wave is Google’s new pet project that according to them will do nothing less than revolutionize the way people communicate online. It will go out to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow (Wednesday, September 30th, 2009).

Google Wave is unique because its platform is combining elements from many different online communication tools into one place. Things such as blogs, photo/video sharing, chats, email, documents, etc, will be all streaming in one fluid conversation, or a “wave” as Google likes to call it.

This web application was displayed at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, back in May. If you have a spare 1 hour and 20 minutes, you can watch it here.

The Google team in charge of this project see this as something that will become as main stream as Google itself. To quote one of the creators Jens Rasmussen:

“This should be something everybody uses and something everybody knows”

If you read tech blogs, you noticed the hustle and bustle around this topic today. Many of us want to be part of this beta group but trust me, it is a tight and sealed group at this point. If you’re not in yet forget about it, maybe next time!

Wave has been described as “dripping with ambition” and as a “new communication platform for a new Web.” from places such as TechCrunch.

More to come on this… Are you a beta tester? Tell us what you think!

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Google Wave’s big day

My Pandora activity widget. I was playing around with it under my Pandora profile. They actually posted this here straight from there, and it was scheduled to be posted 8 hours from now. Kinda weird, but interesting at the same time..

Anyway, here’s my Pandora widget activity… Maybe someday it will make its way to my sidebar, we’ll see. (maybe when they stop advertising ATT on it!)

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Pandora Widget

At last Yelp has rolled out a new feature, highly anticipated I might add, that lets business owners comment on their reviews publicly. This has been a long time coming, and I’m curious to see what it does to the dynamic of Yelp.com. It just rolled out last night.

The problem with not having such feature is that business owners would create fake Yelp accounts and review their own businesses to detract from what someone real said about them. The thing with that is that they almost always do such a sloppy job at it that you can tell the fakes from the real ones just by reading the reviews.

Now business owners have a serious and legitimate way to come back around. I feel that if a one star review were to be followed up with properly, there would be a good chance that the reviewer would update their review and maybe even increase their star rating.

It’s amazing how some business really do depend on having a good reputation on Yelp, so this is a great feature.

Many businesses have already started taking advantage of this. To get started, they just need to go to biz.yelp.com and claim their account page. Yelp has also put together a Business Owner’s Guide, a document worth skimming through if you’re in this boat.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Yelp launches comment for Business Owners

I ran across something on the web today that I can only describe as being top notch viral content. This thing is already “on fire”, but it’s only going to get more and more attention.

A comedian called Toby Jones has put together this hilarious website and video — a delicious juicy bite of goodness for all social networks out there. People will love to share this because they know the people they are sharing it with will enjoy receiving it. If you like this and you’ll be in Chicago for New Years, you can party out with Toby at the Jones Big Ass Truck Rental and Storage New Year’s Eve Bash!

I can’t really explain why it’s so great, you have to experience it for yourself. Before you watch the video and visit the website, keep a few things in mind about creating viral content — this is a good example to learn from:

• It’s a simple concept.
• The video is short enough that most people will watch it through the end.
• The website follows the same pattern, it is simple, to the point.
• The follow up is great, the phone number works and everything (and he sells t-shirts!)
• It is FUNNY!

Without further due, here’s the video:

.. and site: http://jonesbigasstruckrentalandstorage.com/

What did you think? Leave a comment

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Top Notch Viral Content

Good morning, it’s Monday and time to roll up the sleeves and get back to work. Having said that, I’ll also point out that it’s important to keep the mind working, the wheels turning if you will. The last thing you want is to let your mind run loose amidst the daily challenges..

Why? – you ask.

Because if you don’t, your mind will kick your ass! – I respond.

We can get into how that happens later, but you get the point. In order to help you keep your mind thinking about something interesting, intriguing, and for all us geeks even inspiring, I’ll share a video with you this Monday morning.

This well crafted video, created by Michael Wesch, from the Kansas State University, which was actually debuted early 2007, is a fascinating look at how Web 2.0 is an era where the Machines is Us/ing Us. That’s right, the machine IS us and it is USING us.

The concept that this organic, and yet machine like organism is acting in synchrony with us, and it represents who we are, was also introduced in John Battelle’s The Search. This book is a great read, and even though it isn’t really the newest publication by any means, it still is a must read for anyone intrigued by the web. In it, Battelle refers a lot to the “Database of Intentions”. This is the knowledge that powerhouse search engines such as Google and Yahoo have of the human race. What are humans desiring? What do they want to know more of? What are we searching for? Quite interesting… Tools like Google Zeitgeist (now Google Trends) and Yahoo! Buzz will give you a glimpse, have you cared to take a look lately?

Make sure you comment if you have anything to add, and enjoy the video!
if you’re receiving this post through an email subscription or other form of syndication, click here to see the video.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

We are the MACHINE

Well, the weekend has been great so far! I had a mellow, productive and super fun time with my daughter, girlfriend and friends, Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate, and I decided to write a quick post about Favtape.

You see, I don’t want to be regurgitating things you already saw somewhere else, so this is something new to me even though it may have been around for a while. Have you heard of FavTape? I like it!

FavTape is ridiculously easy to use and a cool resource to have if you use Pandora (or Last.fm), and bookmark your favorite songs. I never really cared much for Pandora until my iPhone came along. Now I’m all about it, it’s just awesome to have it available wherever I go. FavTape works with Pandora, and it creates a playlist for your bookmarked songs from Pandora. There’s no account to create or anything. All you do is go to FavTape.com, type in your username and click on “Submit”. It spits something like this back to you:

It’s a playlist that you can share with your friends or just use it for easy access to ringtones, videos, lyrics, more info, iTunes, and more. It’s a really cool tool and if you haven’t heard of it make sure you check it out.

Here’s my feed: http://favtape.com/pandora/cadaum

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Favtape Is Cool!

Over a month ago a friend sent me an email asking if his Link strategy was up to par with Google’s policies. He wanted to make sure that his site wouldn’t end up being penalized by Google.

It’s also important to determine if all the work you’re doing will actually bring you the “Link Power” you’re seeking. I often encounter business owners who still spend a lot of money and energy into builing link exchanges with other sites, and in the opinion of this humble SEO Consultant that’s the biggest waste of time! To have a relevant link exchange is one thing, but to blindly create reciprocal links from buried pages on a site about tires going back and forth to a site about candles won’t help. That’s just a ficticious example by the way.

Anyway, back to my buddy’s question… He asked if it would be ok to own 4 different websites, all using different hosting servers, then create links from three of them going to the main one. The thinking behind the different server is so they can have different IP addresses. The purpose behind that is so that it looks natural, not like you’re manipulating Google, even though that’s exactly what you’re doing.

That’s smart thinking and all, but there’s something else we need to consider, the Registrar information. If you’re buying all domain names as the same entity, then you end up having the same registrar information under your WHOIS record. Can Google look into that? You would be surprised with what they have access to! In February of 2005 Google became a registrar. What does it mean to become a registrar?

Registrars are resellers, any entity can become one and sell domains. There are different tiers of registrars. You could be a “middle man”, between the source and the client. You could even be the “middle man” between the original middle man and the client and so on. It only costs a few thousand dollars to sign up to different tiers, and for Google that’s small insignificant ash tray change. Do you think they acquired that so they could let you buy domain names from them? ——- No.

Disclosure: now we enter the area of speculation and SEO Survivor’s opinions

Google made this move so they could have greater access to domain information. That doesn’t mean that now Google has information to all domain names purchased. They would only have the information to the domain names registered under them, but now they have the edge they needed to get into the registrar databases. They may not get into the black and white information, but as registrars, they get benefits such as being able to carry out high volume of automated queries and many others. I won’t get too techincal here since there’s more information about Google as a registrar if you want.

If Google can reset the Search Engine Authority from domain names that expire, you can be sure that they can find that your domain names are owned by the same entity even if they are hosted in different servers. This remains to be tested though, so if you are currently doing this, let me know how it’s going. It could work out for a while, just keep in mind that it is a huge pain in the ass to get out of Google’s supplemental index, and that’s where you go when you do something naughty in Google’s eyes.

The best way to build links is to be active in the Social Media community, share and help others out. To have original and useful content on your site, to have an SEO friendly and user friendly site navigation. To personally contact other site owners that have relevant content to yours and offer to write something for them to post on their site and link to you, as well as other practices along those lines. Organic strategies may not produce results as fast as robotic strategies, but be sure that they are well worth the time and effort, and provide super valuable links to you. Also don’t be affraid to link to other relevant sites since you have to give if you want to receive. And remember, don’t panic if it’s organic.

I hope this helps out a bit! Stay tuned for more and don’t be affraid to comment people! Peace out…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Link Strategies and Google

Buenas tardes everyone,

It’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:

1. imnotadoctor exposed Big Local today. As he was doing the geek’s version of the daily muscle flexing in front of the mirror, which is googling keywords your site ranks well for, he found some major spamming going on. Not only that, but they have a fishy 302 redirect in place taking visitors from the target url (www.clovers.com) to their main site (www.BigLocal.com). You should read up on that story on Search Engine Land.
2. A Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
3. Google’s Porn problem seems to be far from over. In the last month there have been at least two instances where Google was spotted displaying explicit porno pictures in the universal search results box. When searching for “knuckles” and “Hot Celebrities” on regular search, with the “adult filter” on, you’d get a big old explicit image right there on the top of the results. Not cool Google, not cool at all. Granted, it’s freaking hard to keep those spamming porn sites out of the way.



4. Linda Phan, from eVisibility, wrote an awesome post about helping searchers find their way with local business ads. Amongst other things, Linda talks about how advertisers don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the plusbox, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice for all adwords users out there. A good read if your business is local and you use PPC.
5. The SEM industry still rocks! Danny DeMichele wrote a post on his blog talking about some recent studies showing that the Internet Marketing Industry is far from declining, it’s actually gaining more momentum! That’s a good thing to know for all those of us who are immersed in it 24/7.

I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Geek gossip

It came to my mind that I may have gone a bit overboard with the multitude of social media profiles I have created. I’m writing this post to make it easier for you to add me to your network on any of the mentioned social media sites we may have in common. Plus, next time someone asks me for my profile URL to a certain site, I’ll just send them this post instead of looking up the URL

Contrary to popular belief, I do have a life outside work and the internet. Because of that, a lot of my profiles are just sitting there. I may use them sparingly, and I may not use some of them at all, but they are there should I choose to become more involved. I’m very much active within some, and you’ll find me constantly updating content and participating. Either way, hit me up so we can network, share interesting stuff and contribute to a more relevant, semantic web.

reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/seo-survivor/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/seosurvivor/

StumbleUpon: http://seosurvivor.stumbleupon.com/

Sphinn: http://sphinn.com/user/view/profile/seosurvivor

Mixx: http://www.mixx.com/users/seosurvivor

digg: http://digg.com/users/seosurvivor

del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/seosurvivor

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrricardofigueiredo

Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/seosurvivor

Twitter: http://twitter.com/seosurvivor

Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/seosurvivor

Propeller: http://www.propeller.com/member/seosurvivor/

Google Blog (Shared Articles): seosurvivor shared items

Bumpzee: http://www.bumpzee.com/users/view/seosurvivor

MyBlogLog: seosurvivor mybloglog profile

Mahalo: http://mahalo.com/member/Seosurvivor

Sproose: http://sproose.com/user/seosurvivor

Technorati: SEO Survivor Blog page

Yelp: http://seosurvivor.yelp.com/

Digital Point: seosurvivor profile (must be logged in)

Search Engine Watch: seosurvivor profile (must be logged in)

cre8asite: seosurvivor Cre8asite profile

LifeHacker: http://lifehacker.com/commenter/seosurvivor/

Search Engine Roundtable Forum: seosurvivor profile (must be logged in)

High Rankings Forum: seosurvivor profile (must be logged in)

WebmasterWorld: seosurvivor profile (must be logged in)

… there are probably a few more, but that’s all that comes to mind now. I’ll update this list if I remember other places where I can be found.

Peace and Happiness!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Forget Online Privacy, I Want You To Find Me