Internet Marketing & SEO

Facebook Plans to User Ad Targeting Program

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, Internet News | No Comments

Facebook is planning a new advertising system that will target ad delivery based on profile information added by Facebook users.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the new system will “let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves” with future development that is aiming to (in true Orwellian style…or should that Minority Report style) “predict what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.”

Monetizing social networking platforms through advertising has been a hard task for a long time now. For example, although News Corp may be reaping revenues from MySpace today, most of those revenues comes indirectly, such as through the Google search deal. MySpace rates have previously been reported to be a small fraction of 1 cent CPM.

Facebook seems to be experiencing stronger advertising rates, with recent reports indicating that Facebook charges around $10 CPM. There is always scope to improve, and certainly the more upmarket demographic of Facebook should provide high paying advertising opportunities if and when the ad delivery is sorted out and well targeted.

There will be some who will question Facebook’s moves. Google has previously come under fire for delivering contextual advertising in Gmail based on the content of emails a user had received. Facebook is not only going to use user data and networking activities to deliver targeted advertising, they are going past that and trying to produce preemptive targeted advertising based on what they think you might want in the future.

If Facebook can create a system that accurately preempts user desires, it’s not unreasonable to consider that Facebook could easily become the next Adwords as well; not even Googlecan currently predict the future.

Tafiti.com Experimental Site by Microsoft

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Microsoft & MSN, Search Industry | No Comments

Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.

http://www.tafiti.com

Note: You’ll need to install Silverlight

Google improves its Robots.txt tools

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Google, SEO, Search Industry | No Comments

We’ve improved Webmaster Central’s robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren’t aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your sitemap’s URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing.

Reporting is better, too. You’ll now be told of multiple problems per line if they exist, unlike earlier versions which only reported the first problem encountered. And we’ve made other general improvements to analysis and validation.

Imagine that you’re responsible for the domain www.example.com and you want search engines to index everything on your site, except for your /images folder. You also want to make sure your sitemap gets noticed, so you save the following as your robots.txt file:

disalow images

user-agent: *
Disallow:

sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

You visit Webmaster Central to test your site against the robots.txtanalysis tool using these two test URLs:

http://www.example.com
/archives

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Google Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center for Combat Click Fraud

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, Google Adsense & Adwords | No Comments

Over the past couple of years, the Click Quality team has launched many new initiatives and shared a great deal of information about how they combat click fraud. To help keep track of their various presentations, blog posts, articles, and more, they’ve created a new website to serve as the single source for all click fraud and ad traffic quality related information. The new site is called the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center and can be found at http://www.google.com/adtrafficquality

Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center To Combat Click Fraud

Google Makes Search Easier in 14 Indian & South Asian Languages

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Google, Internet News | No Comments

Google Labs add on-screen keyboard to aid search in 14 additional langauges.

Keeping up with the spirit and celebrations of India’s 60th year of Independence, we present to you a new platform that showcases our favourite ideas for Indian users: Google India Labs. Enthusiastic bloggers noted our initial announcement on 15th August; now here’s the full story.

Though 60 years young, India has a history dating back to the dawn of civilization. The incredible diversity of this great nation is the kind of challenge Google loves. And in line with our mission of making information universally accessible, we’re now offering an easier way to search in 14 Indian and South Asian languages. You don’t need a special keyboard or software; all you need is a web browser, a mouse, and a Unicode font for your language. So whether you speak অসমীয়া (Assamese), বাংলা (Bengali), ગુજરાતી (Gujarati), हिंदी (Hindi), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada), മലയാളം (Malayalam), मराठी (Marathi), नेपाली (Nepali), ଓଡ଼ିଆ (Oriya), ਪੰਜਾਬੀ (Punjabi), संस्कृतम् (Sanskrit), සිංහල (Sinhala), தமிழ் (Tamil), or తెలుగు (Telugu), we can help you find content on the web in your language. To get started, add one or more of these iGoogle gadgets to your personalized iGoogle home page. You can use these gadgets to compose queries, and ask Google to search the vast Internet in your very own language

More on Official Google Blog…

also Visit

http://labs.google.co.in/

Microsoft Content Ads Beta Launched in U.S.

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, MSN adCenter | No Comments

Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta
We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads.

Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network—connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We’re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers.

What does this mean for you?
More reach. With Content Ads, you can access the valued MSN audience on high-quality Microsoft content network pages, starting with day one, MSN® Tech & Gadgets, Money, Real Estate, and Windows Marketplace. Over time, we will introduce the rest of MSN, other Microsoft-owned properties, and premium partner sites. Until now, this premium inventory has been available directly only through the MSN sales team and has commanded premium pricing. Today, we are making it available to everyone at a price you will decide.
Automatic Expansion. At the time of the upgrade, your campaigns will be automatically expanded to include content distribution.
Key Controls. After the upgrade, you’ll be able to select where your ads distribute (search pages or content pages) and how much you pay per click.
We realize that some of you may not yet be ready for content distribution. If you would like to upgrade without expansion (maintaining search-only distribution) please fill out this online form by August 26, or contact your adCenter representative.

More at AdCenter Blog

Monster Attacked, Security Breached, User Data Stolen

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Internet News, Security | 1 Comment

US job website Monster.com has suffered an online attack with the personal data of hundreds of thousands of users stolen, says a security firm.

A computer program was used to access the employers’ section of website using stolen log-in credentials.

Symantec said the log-ins were used to harvest user names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, which were uploaded to a remote web server.

Symantec said it had seen reports of phishing e-mails sent out to Monster.com users which were “very realistic, containing personal information of the victims”.

The e-mail encouraged users to download a Monster Job Seeker Tool, which was in fact a program that encrypted files in their computer and left a ransom note demanding money for their decryption.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is not a hack of Monster’s security, rather, legitimate customer credentials are being used to log in to the database,” said Patrick W. Manzo, vice president of compliance and fraud prevention at Monster.

More on Monster Attacked, Security Breached, User Data Stolen…..

Kids Site Sold for $350 Million USD by Disney

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 | Domain Names, Internet Marketing, Internet News | No Comments

Racing to solidify its dominant position in children’s entertainment on the Internet, the Walt Disney Company said Wednesday that it had acquired a subscription Web site aimed at preteenagers, Club Penguin, in a deal that could total $700 million.

Disney said it would pay $350 million for Club Penguin, a virtual community that has soared in popularity since its founding in late 2005. More than 700,000 users now pay $5.95 a month to customize penguin characters and then chat and play games with other “penguins.”
› Continue reading

PDFs Can’t Always Be Trusted : Security

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 | Internet News | No Comments

Security vendors have warned e-mail users to be as vigilant about PDF attachments as they would for other documents, after seeing a sharp rise in spam embedded within PDF documents.

E-mail security vendor Messagelabs reports that PDF’s made up 20 percent of image-based spam messages in July, up 10 percent on the month prior. Image-based spam makes up around 22 percent of total spam, the company said.

The security company believes attackers are using the PDF format due the fact that it more easily bypasses antivirus and anti-spam filters, and that users tend to trust the authenticity of a PDF over other types of documents, even if they don’t recognise the sender.

“People have a mindset that the PDF is a locked document,” said Andrew Antal, marketing director for MessageLabs. “Anybody can open and make changes to a Word or PowerPoint document sent over e-mail. With a PDF there is a little more assurance that the file in unchangeable, and is thus in a safe state to receive.”

Marshal Software CEO Ed McNair says PDF spam is more difficult for an organisation to detect.

In a recent interview with ZDNet Australia, McNair said PDF spam tends to arrive as an attachment in a PDF file. “Once opened it displays the spam message, whether that’s a stock trading or an advert for some bogus health product.”

“Organisations are finding it very hard to detect PDF spam at the moment, because it doesn’t behave in a normal fashion,” he said.

Antal said most security software solutions rely on detecting spam by searching for patterns within a message.

“The filtering engines are far smarter when it comes to looking for patterns within Word, PowerPoint on Excel documents than PDFs,” he said. “The algorithms are different.”

While it is very difficult for an attacker to embed any malware within a PDF file, the spam nonetheless can present a malware risk.

On most PDF spam captured so far, the malware doesn’t sit within the PDF and can’t be executed by merely opening the PDF, but tends to be hidden in Web links within the document.

A victim would have to not only open the PDF but also click a link within it to risk infection.

“These links are often pointing to Web sites in which malware resides,” Antal said.

He said the PDF spam once again shows that organisations need a layered defence to better arm themselves against such threats — with security software deployed at the gateway, at the client and at the server.

Google Apps Now goes Globally

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 | Google | No Comments

Our mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Note that twice in this eleven-word mission statement, we mention that this is a global effort, not just a problem we’re solving only for English-speaking users in the U.S. That global focus is critical, because fully 65% of Internet users around the world speak a language other than English. In fact, the Internet’s top 10 languages still only account for around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200 million people.

As part of our broader effort to make Google › Continue reading