It’s an Airsoft shop, with guns, pistols and accesories. For those of you who don’t know what Airsoft is, it’s the future of military simulations. Think Paintball multiplied by 10 + military realism.

Read the Airsoft article on Wikipedia, and this video on YouTube (one of the largest game matches in the world: Irene).

Nevertheless, I’m waiting for bugs and problems with the website :)

Congrats team, and thanks Rares (for your ex tenuous work on the PHP) and Alex (for your countless hours of QA on the website).

Since the position is available only in Bucharest, and only full-time, the job announcement below is in Romanian :)

CANDIDATUL IDEAL:

- Experienta medie in domeniul SEO
- Cunostinte de baza in domeniul PPC
- Experienta in auditari de website-uri se considera un plus (SEO, uzabilitate, accesibilitate)
- Cunoasterea limbii Engleze la nivel cel putin mediu
- Pasiune si sensibilitate pentru domeniul marketing online
- Capacitatea de a se adapta la timpi de raspuns foarte mici si deadline-uri foarte stricte
- Spirit de echipa
- Persoana foarte organizata, stie sa-si estimeze durata diverselor proiecte

RESPONSABILITATI

- Auditarea de website-uri, la nivel mediu SEO, sub indrumarea leader-ului de echipa.
- Cu indrumarea leader-ului de echipa, auditarea website-urilor la nivel de accesibilitate si uzabilitate
- Actioneaza ca project manager pentru proiectele asignate, isi organizeaza account-urile si se asigura ca deadline-urile si calitatea lucrarilor sunt respectate strict.
- Realizeaza mentenanta lunara a website-urilor clientilor companiei, optimizand constant indicii website-ului, monitorizand traficul si descoperind noi oportunitati sau semnale de alarma, facand research-uri de cuvinte cheie, gasind constant oportunitati gratuite/platite de link building.
- Lucreaza impreuna cu alti colegi responsabil de proiectul clientului, in cadrul intalnirilor saptamanale/bi-lunare, si constata ce obiective s-au realizat, stabileste planul de lucru pe perioada imediat viitoare, afla noutati de la client samd.

Toate responsabilitatile de mai sus sunt descrise pentru un nivel avansat, insa persoana cautata de noi nu trebuie sa fie neaparat la acest nivel. Cu experienta / indrumarea echipei si cu dorinta candidatului de a avansa si de a se ridica odata cu firma, va creste si experienta acestuia.

BENEFICII

- Salariul pe masura abilitatilor
- Bonusuri la proiecte si/sau pentru realizari remarcabile (dedicatie / dezvoltare personala samd)
- Lucrul impreuna cu cei mai buni din domeniu
- Activarea intr-o companie strict dedicata domeniului marketing online

Sell yourself at the email address present in the header of my blog, on the business card.

A very healthy boy, 2,8 KG in weight, with an APGAR score of 10 :)

I’m the happiest man alive. I can’t even express in words how I feel (it’s our first child).

PS: Although most people say babies are not so good looking right after birth, mine is more like Brad Pitt.

The fine was 1000 RON, roughly 330 Euro:

ANRCTI enforced the first fine for sending unrequested commercial messages, following an inquiry which revealed that the subject had not obtained the addressees’ consent for sending such a communication (spam). The inquiry was initiated upon receiving a complaint, at the end of 2007, the first one submitted to ANRCTI after the take over of relevant attributions.

The complaint showed that, starting from September 2007, the plaintiff had been receiving a number of unrequested commercial messages that promoted a newsletter and a company. Following the inquiry conducted by the ANRCTI control personnel, the sender of these unrequested commercial messages (without the plaintiff’s prior consent) was found to be the company Urban & Asociaţii. This company was imposed a contravention fine amounting to RON 1000.

I had a lot of cars and I’ve been driving for a long time, but is the first time I’ve had this happen to me. I live in a select neighborhood and stuff, in downtown Bucharest.

The funny thing out of all this is that this thief must have been one of those dental freaks. He must care a lot about his teeth and didn’t had any money to buy some gums because all he stole were my Orbit chewing gums.

That’s right. He broke my windows, scratched my upholstery, damaged the car, and stole only my Orbits. He could’ve taken at least my GPS window holder. How funny is that ?

Moreover, the police came, told me to go with them at the station to take fingerprints. What’s weird about this is that at the station, the investigators (two 20 years old chicks), took fingerprints without any protection gloves on. That’s right, bear handed.

I’m a fan of CSI. Even I know that you can not contaminate a scene that way. After they took fingerprints (they did NOT took my fingerprints, so they could exclude them), they told me that all taken fingerprints were partial.

Now, there were about 10 different surfaces down there, including high gloss papers (you could not want a better surface for fingerprinting), so how the heck couldn’t they extract at least a full thumb fingerprint from over 15 objects which were tempered with in the car. This was not a professional job anyway, so I doubt that the guy had gloves.

After this happened (I saw it at 9 AM), I spent the whole day looking for replacement windows and other parts, because Toyota told me that the minimum time required to bring the parts was 2 weeks. I fixed my car until the evening. Screw insurance, screw the thief, life goes on.

PS: My first personal post on my blog, ever, because I’m pretty pissed.

What are Sitelinks ? They are a collection of links, automatically chosen by Google’s algorithm, to appear below the result of website, linking to main pages of your website. They are randomly chosen, although you can block any link from appearing. We will discuss more about Sitelinks in the Google Sitelinks FAQ section below.

Recently, some of my websites got Sitelinks whilst I tried different ways of reaching this milestone.

Some time ago, Vanessa Fox, from the Webmaster’s Central blog, wrote that the page from the Google Help describing these Sitelinks, has been updated to reflect “information on how Google generates these links”. That’s crap to say the least, because that Google Help page about Sitelinks, just states that they exist, are automatically generated and nothing more.

Although no official explanation except this very basic page is offered by Google, I will try and write down a few of my own ideas, about when and how to get these Sitelinks for your website. Whilst I can’t promise you guys that ALL of the procedures below are involved in the process of making Sitelinks appear for your website, I can definitely guarantee you that SOME are.

The above are true mainly because I have always (during months / years) tried 4 to 6 procedures at a time so I can’t really know which one had the most important contribution to the appearance of Sitelinks.

1. The number of links pointing to your website’s index page, using the several main keywords of your website as anchor. For example, for my blog, the two main keywords are “Cristian Mezei”, my name, and “SeoPedia” the name of my blog. Sitelinks appear only for a few main keywords, not for every keyword your website ranks for.
2. The number of searches and SERP clicks for the main keywords I described above. you have to have a certain number of clicks for that keyword, to be able to reach a minimum requirement for the appearance of Sitelinks. This makes keywords which are not searched enough, to never have Sitelinks. Although some of my coleagues have mentioned that traffic has nothing to do or has everything to do with Sitelinks, I firmly believe that traffic for a particular keyword or keyphrase is very important.
3. The number of indexed pages for the keyword you are targeting is also important. Please keep in mind that I am not discussing about the number of indexed pages for your website, but for the number of results shown in Google for that particular keyword.
4. The age of the website is definitely an aspect when deciding how and when Sitelinks appear. As far as my tests go, and using a naturally and organically built website (no extensive or forced SEO), you can NOT have Sitelinks if the website is younger than 18-24 months, varying from case to case.
5. You have to rank #1 for that particular keyword (and the ranking has to be stable) to be able to have any Sitelinks at all. This is very important and it has been proven true in 100% of times.

Whilst many other specialists and/or bloggers from the industry around the Internet have tried to help you figure out some ways to get Sitelinks, I will try to contradict them because some of those advices might not have a contribution to your effort, mainly because they are just too general and my experience says that they could be just loose-ends. Some of these advices might be:

• Making your website W3C valid. This is not a bad thing, but I highly doubt that it will make your website more prone to get Sitelinks. A lot of people have reported building their website with erratic code from 1992, and still having Sitelinks.
• Having links from powerful websites. I doubt that this aspect will help you in getting Sitelinks at all. Have a look at how I see inbound links having an effect, above (in the Procedures section).
• Having a lot of links (generally). I doubt that having tens of thousands of any links will move you up to the ladder, regarding Sitelinks. Whilst links will help I have explained above (in the Procedures section), specifically, in what way they will help.
• Some advices were really something like : “Make the website useful” or “Add Meta tags”. Whilst these are surely helpful for any website, they may have nothing to do with your website getting Sitelinks.
• Having a very well designed navigation menu. There were websites which had erratic or very well designed navigation menus and links within the website and still they all got Sitelinks.
• Pagerank has nothing to do with Sitelinks. There are PR7 and PR2 websites that got Sitelinks.

Although I don’t want to contradict (I just did that, but well .. ) my fellow colleagues, the above are my personal opinions and I wanted to stress them out. The reason I didn’t named names is obvious.

And as the title of my post says, below you’ll get the FAQ section, where I tried to answer most, if not all the questions that poped up in the past year, from all kinds of readers or people:

Q: When are Sitelinks generated ? Is there some kind of Pagerank-alike update ?
A: I do want to stress out that about 4 of my websites got Sitelinks in exactly the same 1-2 day period, although the websites are very different one from another. One is 2 years old, another is 3,5. One has 1000 links, the other has 40.000 links. One is in the auto domain one is my blog. They are not linked in-between them. So all of this makes me think that there is some kind of general update of the Sitelinks, much like the updates for Pagerank, Inbound links or Google Images. Since QOT got their Sitelinks on exactly the same day (6th Feb.) as many of my other websites, I am positive that there is a general Sitelinks update.

Q: I can’t see any Sitelinks generated within my Sitemaps account, although they appear in Google!
A: Sitelinks take anywhere from 2 weeks to 1 month to appear within your Sitemaps account, after they first appeared in the SERPs. Then you will have better control over some of the links.

Q: Why doesn’t my very important “Clients” page get in the Sitelinks section ?
A: This may have to do with the fact that Sitelinks are usually generated from the first level links only. This means that if you have a page reachable by two clicks, it will never be included in the Sitelinks section. On rare occasions, deeplinks will be chosen, but I am not sure as to how these websites are chosen. Also make sure that you have pure HTML links. No Javascript or Flash.

Q: My website doesn’t have too much text links. Does this mean I’m doomed ?
A: Google will generate Sitelinks from image links too, as long as the image has the ALT tag. As other people have found too, it seems that the Sitelinks algorithm may chose a Sitelink even if you have no link towards it from your website, but in exchange, the page has a large number of links from other websites.

Q: What’s the point of having these stupid Sitelinks ?
A: One simple and huge reason: Trust and brand. Sitelinks have began to resemble trust lately in the eyes of the normal surfer (not to us SEMs, simply because we know there are heavily penalized websites who still got Sitelinks), so any website who has them is more prone to get clicks from the SERPs, from the search terms that show Sitelinks.

Q: What’s the minimum and maximum number of Sitelinks I’ll get ?
A: Minimum 2, maximum 8. Nevertheless I still can’t figure it out how Google assigns the number of Sitelinks to each website, except popularity. Most of my popular websites have 8. Most of my not-so-popular websites have 2 to 4.

Q: I don’t have a Google Sitemaps account. Will I still get Sitelinks ?
A: Definitely. The only drawback is that you will not have any control over them.

Q: How are the Sitelinks calculated ? Which links get in and which not ?
A: There are all kinds of opinions. After closely studying all my websites, I myself will still believe that they are chosen randomly. Not after traffic, not after inbound links. There’s an interesting thread at SEW which you might want to read to get some speculation.

Q: I have a page in the Sitelinks section that doesn’t exist anymore. What should I do ?
A: It appears that the crawl delay of the Sitelinks is at least one month. So if you have a page that doesn’t exist anymore, try to 301 redirect it to the new one. The Sitelinks will then work ok.

Q: In my Sitemaps account I can remove Sitelinks if I don’t like them ?
A: Indeed you can. But please be careful when you do that, because if you remove a Sitelink it will not get replaced by another. This means that if you had 6 Sitelinks, and you block one because it’s not appropiate, you will be left with 5 Sitelinks in the Google SERPs. The 6th one will not be replaced with a new Sitelinks.

The title is just a teaser for Vanessa. She’s had that Nude thing like forever :)

For you guys who don’t know Vanessa, she’s been the women who lead the Google Webmasters Central team until she moved to Zillow.

In this section I’ll analyze the post she made on her blog right after she left Google. I’m actually amazed to see how I can’t any reactions to this post, since IMHO it’s the most important post about Sitelinks ever. More important than what Google has released and certainly more important then I or my colleagues speculate, simply because she’s been involved in the process of releasing the Sitelinks. Block quotes are quotes from Vanessa’s post:

For instance, if I do a Google search for [duke’s chower house seattle], am I looking for directions? Hours? A menu? Google doesn’t know, so they offer up several suggestions. (Quality aside: a link to the menu shows up in the sitelinks, but if you do a search for [duke’s chowder house seattle menu], that same link doesn’t show up on the first page. In fact, no pages from the Duke’s site show up.)

Basically, what Vanessa is telling us is that Sitelinks will NEVER appear for specific search terms. So that’s why we get Sitelinks for “Computers” or “Cristian Mezei” or “HP” or generally, company names as well as very general industry terms.

Google autogenerates the list of sitelinks at least in part from internal links from the home page. You’ll notice in the Duke’s example that one of the sitelinks is “five great locations” which also appears as primary navigation on the Duke’s home page. If you want to influence the sitelinks that appear for your site, make sure that your home page includes the links you want and that those links are easy to crawl (in HTML rather than Flash or Javascript, for instance) and have short anchor text that’ll fit in a sitelinks listing. They’ll also have to be relevant links. You can’t just put your Buy Cheap Viagra now link on the home page of your elementary school site and hope for the best.

In the above, Vanessa confirms me what I already told you in the FAQ section above. Sitelinks will be chosen from links present in the homepage only. I still firmly believe that some websites have Sitelinks from deeplinks within the website. How and when these websites are chosen, is still a mystery.

One more important thing we learn is that Sitelinks are chosen from relevant links in the homepage. Instead of repeating what Vanessa said about relevance, read the above quote.

There is a lot of other useful information inside Vanessa’s post, but since I already tackled those points in my previous sections, I left them aside.

I asked a colleague of mine involved in SEM too, what he thinks about Sitemaps. I thought to put his answer here as well:

Marius Mailat
www.submitsuite.com

Cristian asked me about my opinion regarding Sitelinks. Breaking this question in small parts, here are my thoughts.

The sitelink option in the Google results are similar with the siteinfo.xml provided for the Alexa toolbar, a simple option for a webmaster to provide most important direct links to his website structure. Google version of Siteinfo is different because you cannot specify WHICH link in your website is a Sitelink. You can only ask remove one link from the Sitelinks (Google Webmaster panel option).

Why are the Sitelinks appearing, when and under which algorithm? The algorithm used is totally automated and is taking in consideration the following criteria’s:

• Old powerful website.
• The sitelinks are pages which are coming on first position in SERPs.
• The sitelinks are most of the time associated with top results related words: “domain”, “domain download”, “domain demo” etc.
• The sitelinks are probably not influenced by PageRank.

• Matt Cutts video about Sitelinks (recommended)
• Google information about Sitelinks
• Search Engine Watch Forum thread about Sitelinks
• Vanessa Fox post about Sitelinks
• WebmasterWorld forum thread about Sitelinks
• Michael Nguyen (SocialPatterns) on Sitelinks
• Wayne Smallman (BlahBlahTech) about Sitelinks
• Jonathan Hochman’s writings about Sitelinks
• Problogger post about Sitelinks
• QuickOnlineTips writes about getting Sitelinks

Have fun with Sitelinks. If you have any questions, suggestions or rectifications, write a comment.

I have been using the previous home for some of these tools for some time now, mainly because almost all the tools had tens of datacenters on which you could’ve searched for information, including indexed pages, backlinks and cache times.

Since most of the multiple datacenters tools are restricted to Pagerank and (very few) to indexed pages, Ciprian’s tools were a Godsend.

There a lot of basic tools in the collection. Nevertheless the ones that really help me are the SEO strength (a complete package of the basic stats like backlinks, indexed pages and PR), indexed pages, inbound links, Google keyword ranking and the Google cache.

I think Ciprian should work on the keyword research tool a little bit more. It gives me some wierd results.

Leaving that aside, Ciprian, I think you should also put a link to the Google SERPs, on all the datacenters in the results pages of the SEO tools, so that users can check that result in real time too.

Like most other similar services on the web, Ciprian’s tools have their share of downtime, slow response times and timeouts, but the team is working hard to improve these problems every day.

None of the tools require any user account and they are all free for unlimited use. Have fun.

My presentation will revolve around reputation management for companies and individuals as well as how companies can communicate internally and externally, efficiently, Web 2.0 style.

Will upload my presentation in this post, after the event is finished.

More information about this event can be found in the official website. Registrations can be made online.

This event will be starting tomorrow.

Update: This was my presentation (PPT).

The mail souns like :

We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account Is Currently INACTIVE.

Your blog(s) did not pass our Quality Review criteria. You will find instructions below for making your account active again.

You will notice that the widget no longer loads on your pages — please remove the BlogRush code from your blog for now.

We recently reviewed your blog(s) located at:
[www.seopedia.org]

We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality guidelines. Please do not take this personally, but realize that we must abide by a very strict set of quality guidelines. (They are listed below.)

If you feel you have made the necessary changes to your blog(s) to meet our guidelines, you can resubmit your blog(s) for review after this date:
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

The quality guidelines are :

BlogRush Quality Guidelines:

- The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

- The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

- The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

- The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

So if Seopedia is not within these guidelines, which blog is ?

I had more then 30 referrals, more then 50.000 credits.

John Reese, you have developed a crappy product with a crappy team. Nevermind waiting 30 days for a product that’s not finished right ?

Important PS: An anomymous tipper just sent me this e-mail that John Reese has sent to a LOT of guys. So the people that edit the quality guidelines of BLogrush are “a bunch of people that would like to earn some extra cash”. Way to go Reese:

Just got an email from good ole john reese he wants to pay you 12 bucks an hour to wipe blogrushes arse hahahahahahahah

I’m looking to hire several people that want to make some quick cash. (Read on for all the details.)

As you probably know by now, Income.com launched it’s first major ‘network’ piece two weeks ago…

BlogRush.

In only its first two weeks, BlogRush has been extremely successful. But it has also been quite challenging.
We experienced a few problems that we are working to solve as quickly as possible.

One of these problems was having users add spammy or low quality blogs to our network — and we also had many users ignore our “English blogs only”
warning and submit foreign blogs as well.

We are moving to a 100% Manual Review Process for all the current blogs in our network and any new blogs from here on out.

We are very serious about protecting the INTEGRITY and QUALITY of our network.

Because of this… WE NEED HELP! :-)

We’re looking to hire a bunch of people that would like to earn some extra cash. If you or someone you know might be interested, please forward this message to them. This would be perfect for a stay-at-home mom, college student, or anyone else looking to make some extra money.

All that’s required is sitting in front of their computer and doing the following…

Login to our Review System with an account we will setup for them. There will be a top “frame” control strip that has a few buttons:

“Approve” “Reject” and “Not Sure.”

The bottom frame will automatically load a blog that needs to be reviewed. After reviewing the blog, just press the appropriate button. That’s it.

* We have created a little training video to teach reviewers what to look for and how to decide what gets approved or rejected. It’s very simple.

After pushing one of the buttons the next blog to be reviewed automatically loads in that bottom frame. It’s as simple as that.

Here’s The Deal…

We’re paying USD $12.00/hour for this review work. It’s not a fortune, but it’s a pretty simple task. Heck, just put on some music and sit back and review some blogs. Pretty easy work. :-)

* All reviewers will be paid DAILY via PayPal for that day’s work. All reviewers will also be independent contractors and responsible for their own taxes, etc. PayPal payments will be made via the “Mass Pay” function so reviewers will not have any fees taken out of their earnings - we will pay for all transaction fees.

We will have several hours of work for
each new reviewer initially. Those that
do a good job will be given the opportunity for ongoing work — as we will be reviewing new blogs everyday.

* The best reviewers will probably also
receive some of our products as an
additional bonus for a job well done.

** Special Note: We are looking to
hire some of our own customers
or email subscribers, ideally. We
are not interested in outsourcing
this work to some low wage workers
in a foreign country. This work
is to be done by applicants
only — NOT by those brokering
the work to others.

Here Are The Requirements:

1. Must have a broadband (fast)
Internet connection. i.e. cable modem,
DSL, etc.

2. Must already know what a blog
is and what a typical blog looks like.

3. Must know the difference in a
quality blog and one that was solely
created to try and game the search
engines and/or just run a bunch of
ads — and/or what a “scraper”
blog is that contains no original
content and simply uses content
taken from other sites with some
sort of software program.

* Our training video gives guidelines
and tips for determining what is a
quality blog and what should be
rejected from our network — including
examples of “good” and “bad” blogs.

4. Must be able to start IMMEDIATELY.
(As in TODAY, if possible.) And be
able to put in at least 2-3 hours a day.

5. Must have an active PayPal account.

If you or someone you know meets
all of these requirements and is interested here’s what to do next:

Send An Email To:
kevincolon@gmail.com
Use Subject Line: “Ready To Start Reviewing!”
and include the following:

- Full Name
- Email Address
- Phone Number
- Location (City, State, Country, etc.)
- Estimate Of Work Availability
(i.e. how many hours a day you can work.)
- Brief Description Of Why You Would
Make A Good Blog Reviewer
- Blog URL (if you have a blog.)

That’s it!

If we accept your email application we
will be immediately emailing you the
full instructions so you can get started ASAP.

* Due to the heavy volume of requests
we expect to receive, we may not be able to respond to every application. If you do not receive an email reply within
24 hours then we have probably decided
not to use you at this time. We will keep your application on file and may reconsider you at another time.
(Thanks for your understanding.)

More News Coming Soon!

Yours For Online Profits,

John Reese

The only drawback is that on rightclick, the affiliate URL still appears.

Igor blogs mostly about PPC, because that’s what his expertise is.

From the index, I was just a click away from 17 Most Common PPC Mistakes Web Marketers Make. I read the article top to bottom. It clearly shows that Igor paid a lot of attention when he wrote the article. Almost all the advices he written, are practical ones, although not all are for advanced PPC account managers.

Apart from the fact that if you do not involve yourself in the industry and start commenting on blogs, websites and communities that are related to your field, you won’t get much coverage for your content website (may it be a blog or a news website), from this single, quality, passionate and helpful article Ivan wrote and I read, I’m positive that Igor deserves a link from my blogroll. And I’ll be reading more in the future.

That’s how well written content brings you natural links from quality and related websites.

I laughed my ass of. Who sends these kind of e-mails ?

Mr. Christian, you the guru, the fish, the snake of SEM, you the greatest bear of them all.

Could you, Oh COULD you great Zen master of SEM, give me a link from your blog ?

Whilst previously representing the interests of the Walt Disney Company, William has moved to the financial and investing market, where the big bucks are.

Amongst Clearstone’s assets there are: PayPal, Overture, Mp3.com and others.

So if you are new to entrepreneurship and want to get your mind ready for some action, or might want to find out how to even get referred to a VC, listen to this short interview (22 minutes).

Hit Play below:

That means every Romanian citizen can now accept website payments (through PayPal funds, or through Credit Card payments) and can withdraw the money to a Romanian debit or credit card (not a bank account).

Read more in SeoPedia (the largest Romanian SEM community), again, the first source in Romania who unrevealed this braking news.

China (Mainland)
Malaysia
Pakistan
Romania
Philippines
Argentina
Chile
Peru
Colombia

The comissions for the Quick Cash service are NOT the same as for the normal Western Union money transfer (hundreds of USD).

In Romania, at least, the commisions are this way (these comissions are NOT present or stated anywhere within the Google Website, nor the Western Union website):

$15 for any sum up to $3000 USD
$25 for any sum exceeding $3000 USD

The maximum payment through this service is $5000. If your payment exceeds $5000, the payment method will automatically convert to the standard check.

You can search valid Western Union agents in your city, that allow QuickCash payments, through Payment Solutions.

When will you receive a payment ? Next day :)

Read more about it in SeoPedia forum (romanian).

See Xrumer in action.

What’s interesting to see in the video above, from the point of view, is how the program works. The procedures, the checklists, the options, so you can build your own anti-spam blockade.

Some of you guys, will be amazed to see how captchas and/or math spam questions are like so … 1945.

Important: Please be aware that I do NOT endorse, NOR do I recommend the use of such spamming software, except for your own, personal and private use, to see how the program functions. As one user says in this WP article about Xrumer, you have to know the enemy and the weapons used by the enemy before you can defend against them.

BlogRush is your average pyramidal (meaning you can have sub-affiliates and sub-sub-affiliate and … you get the idea) banner / link exchange network, just that it’s presented in a Web 2.0 form: a widget, which you can put in your blog’s sidebar, or in your website’s utility spot.

BlogRush works by providing you with 1 credit, for each display of the widget in your website. With that 1 credit, your ad text will be displayed once in other widgets, present in other websites.

You can have a 10 level deep referral network, each of them working for you like this:

• Level 1 referral: 1:1 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each of his widget display.
• Level 2 referral: 1:1 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each of his widget display.
• Level 3 referral: 1:4 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 4 displays of his widget.
• Level 4 referral: 1:4 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 4 displays of his widget.
• Level 5 referral: 1:4 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 4 displays of his widget.
• Level 6 referral: 1:4 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 4 displays of his widget.
• Level 7 referral: 1:8 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 8 displays of his widget.
• Level 8 referral: 1:8 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 8 displays of his widget.
• Level 9 referral: 1:8 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 8 displays of his widget.
• Level 10 referral: 1:8 ratio. That means that you will gain 1 credit, for each 8 displays of his widget.

The possibilities are endless. Do the math yourself, or watch the presentation video.

During this test of mine, that’s lasting for about 50 hours now, I have these stats:

1. Not beeing able to consume your ad views. For example I now make 10 times more then the system can consume for me. In 48 hours I made 10.000 credits, and the system consumed 1.000. It’s useless to have 2.000.000 credits if you have nowhere to show them, right ?
2. As other colleagues pointed out, users might just put this widget in all kinds of inaccessible locations inside the website (even in the footer), so it’s no use to have 2.000.000 ad displays, if there will be a 0,01% CTR, right ?

If you like the ideea, register your account now. Don’t come crying to me if it doesn’t provide results though :)

var s1 = new SWFObject(” [media.income.com]
s1.addParam(”allowfullscreen”,”true”);
s1.addVariable(”width”, “411″);
s1.addVariable(”height”, “289″);
s1.addVariable(”file”,” [media.income.com]
s1.addVariable(”image”,” [media.income.com]
s1.write(”video_1″);

Any ideas for my problem guys ?

Update: The guy keep on doing it (now using Romanian IPs, USA IPs etc):

I guess it’s the price to pay when you have “admirers”.

Now a lot of web directories have affiliate programs, but most of them convert very poorly. As far as I am concerned, I tried about all of them, and the best converting one was the V7N Directory.

What I want to mention is that although John Scott and myself know each other, this is not a “pay per post”, a “friendly recommendation” or neither of these kind of scenarios. It’s just my own experience with web directory affiliate programs.

I just mentioned that the the V7N Directory affiliate program converted best for me, so any other affiliate programs I tried, do not worth a mention since they didn’t rised to even 30% of V7N’s earnings (with the same stats, visitors sent etc).

To start and show you some stats of mine, from August:

And from 2007:

What I want to mention is that although the 76 clicks per conversion (which means roughly a 1.31% conversion rate) is pretty low, I didn’t invested a single minute or cent to improve the conversion rate. It was just a plug in and forget project.

I bet your ass that if I spend a few hours on the situation I can improve the conversion rate to 5%.

For example, BOTW gave me a conversion rate of exactly 0%. And it will always give me that, simply because they have too higher prices, and the conversions have to suffer because of the 3rd party (and not you).

V7N Directory on the other hand, has the lowest possible price from all the quality directories out there: $50. And for every sale you generate, you earn 50%. That’s $25 for each sale. If you refer 100 persons that submit 1 listing each, you get $2500. If you refer 1 person that submits 100 listings, you get $2500.

What’s the most important aspect of the V7N Directory affiliate program is the ONE YEAR cookie. What does that mean ? Any visitor who enters the V7N Directory through your affiliate id link, will generate you money, even if he doesn’t buy at that present time, and returns after 10 months to purchase a listing. How cool is that?

The other mentionable bonus is the second/third/fourth… tier payouts. Watch this. I already have 30 sub-affiliates earning money for me, without me lifting a single needle:

For each listing (that worth’s $25) your sub-affiliates submit, you will earn $5.

As another bonus, you can group your campaigns in several groups:

One last mention. I promoted this affiliate program (and all the other ones, that didn’t paid any buck AT ALL), on two web directories and my blog. The conversion rate you have depends on the visitor sources as well (my case is fortunate).

So for all directory owners, use a directory affiliate program instead of AdSense (the worst mistake ever, for web directories), or other NOT business wise solutions.

If you liked this post, you might want to try my previous post on directory affiliate programs.

Beeing at only the 19th spot, offcourse I’m dissapointed :)

Offer open to new Sponsored Search advertisers only. (A new advertiser is one who has not advertised with Yahoo! Search Marketing for the past 13 months). Each account requires a nonrefundable $5 initial deposit. Advertisers signing up for Self Serve will receive a $0 credit into the account. Advertisers signing up for the Assisted Setup service will receive $0 off the $199 service charge. In each case, initial credits are nonrefundable and will be applied to click charges. There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.10 per click-through. Limit one offer per customer, and one use per customer on a single account. Sellers of certain legally restricted products may require third party certification at extra cost. Search listings subject to editorial review. Offer may not be combined with any other offers or discounts, separated, redeemed for cash, or transferred. Other terms and conditions may apply; see Advertiser Terms and Conditions when you sign up.

I wonder how the development of the most used paid forum in the world will go on from now on… especially since it has been aquired by the leading operator of media and e-commerce websites for large ticket consumer purchases in cars, mortgage, real estate & travel, which has nothing to do with what Jelsoft has been developing until now.

Will the prices increase ? Will there be a much poorer support ? That always happens in a bigger company.

Official announcement at the Vbulletin Forums.

If some of you guys don’t know American Experience, the company was created in 2002, as an agency of personnel recruitment from Eastern Europe for seasonal or permanent jobs abroad (Work and Travel, H2B, Au Pair, High School Exchange and Career Training). The company has 14 branches, at the present time.

Georgeta is the coolest person to work with, BUT, you won’t be that lucky, sunshine. You will report to the Executive Director, which is almost as cool :)

Company: American Experience East Central Europe: Romania, Ukraine, Russia
Position: Regional Marketing Director Eastern Europe
Reports to: Executive Director

Company Description

American Experience is market leader and the fastest growing company in Eastern Europe for International Staffing and Youth Travel Programs, and is employing a strong and aggressive communication Strategy. AE is expanding on new markets coming fall and is targeting a growth of 200%.

Role

Direct company’s overall marketing and strategic planning programs, and corporate communications at national and regional level. Facilitate client development through marketing and client services programs.

Main responsibilities

• Design, implement, and facilitate annual marketing plan for the company - developing marketing strategy
• Plan and administer the firm’s Marketing Operation and advertisement budget; support development of regional marketing budgets.
• Organize and implement client relations.
• Researching and analyzing market trends. Identifying target markets and how best to reach them; Issuing proposals for new business;
• Participate in planning and presentation sessions, when assigned.
• Oversee business development activities.
• Manage brand identity and consumer research data.
• Manage the use of American Experience and related trademarks. Approve brand usage in advertising initiatives.
• Manage outside agencies to ensure efficient use of resources.
• Analyze and report the success/effectiveness of targeted advertising campaigns, special events/promotions. Assist with special projects as needed.

Benefits

• Attractive salary package
• Pleasant and friendly work environment
• Bonuses for achieving objectives
• Young and dynamic team

Requirements

Education: College degree required. Concentration in Marketing, Business, or Communications preferred.
Experience: At least two years experience in Marketing Director role within professional services environment. Strong leadership and consensus building skills; marketing management and strategic planning experience; a proven track record in developing and administering a marketing program.
Required Skills: Must be a self-starter, highly organized, and able to work well with employees at all levels in the organization. Must possess top level business management, interpersonal, and facilitation skills. Needs good knowledge of Microsoft Office, Windows-based computer applications & Graphic design software.
Special Skills: Knowledge of Eastern European Market is a plus.

Important: Please send CV’s at georgeta.teodorescu[at]americanexperience.ro (replace [at] with @)

Tags: American Experience, Marketing Director, Regional Marketing Director, Marketing Jobs

With just a $25 monthly “donation” you will get your own .EDU blog as long as you respect the blog rules.

The webmaster of Adison University is Preston White. He manages the Blog network and the whole Adison website.

Minimum monthly wage: very rewarding (depends on experience).

Bonuses:

• Dinner checks
• The 13th wage
• Wage increase, every year, with minimum 10-20%.

Please send your CV to alin.salcu@intrasoft-intl.com.

PS: Location: Bucharest (only).

Get it from BugMeNot.

Don’t ask me, what is it good for. Try: Anti-spam ? Registering to spam-sending websites ? etc.

The awards (the same as in the first edition, on 8 June 2006) are classified is 3 categories:

1. Awards based on statistics offered by RomCard (Credit Card processing company)
2. Awards based on the Jury votes (not disclosed until launch day)
3. Awards proprietary to Link2eCommerce

ePravalie (online IT&C shop) is already subscribed, so hurry and reserve your spot.

As the first comment shows, I just don’t know if a week’s reading time can cover all that content.

From the article:

• What is Linkbaiting?
• Profound Rules of Linkbaiting
• Writing-related Principles of Successful Linkbaiting
• Tactics and Strategies of Linkbaiting
• Linkbaiting Hooks
• Copywriting: Improve Your Writing Skills
• Copywriting Books
• Sources, Resources

PS: My blog is mentioned :)

He also mentions what are the most important aspects of a story, before he clicks to read it.

The top was compiled starting from 15 May and continues till the day I posted this article (23 May).

The Hot Trends top is compiled only from US based searches (for now …).

If you click on any of the searches (eg. fleet week), you will be presented with additional information about that particular search:

• 5 Levels of Hotness (how searched the word is): Low, Medium, Spicy, On Fire, Volcanic
• Related searches (pretty obvious)
• The top search hour for that word (Pacific Daylight Time)
• The top geo location
• News articles for the searched phrase (linked to Google News)
• Blog posts for the searched phrase (linked to Google Blog search)
• Web results for the searched phrase (linked to Google search)

There is a Google Hot Trends Group if you want to participate.

More info at the Google Blog.

Ionut and Philipp wrote about this search too, including it’s up’s and down’s. It appears to have a lot of success amongst Google users that don’t want to see ads and the extra features that Google offers for it’s search results:

• no links for Images, Maps, Groups, News, Video
• no links for account settings, account history
• no ads
• no Google Oneboxes
• no spelling suggestions
• no related queries
• no number of results
• no definitions
• no cached links
• no advanced search, preferences
• no tracking: the URLs of the search results are direct links, not redirects

Guys, I bring you the coolest, cleanest Google search in the world :)

PS: I doubt that this domain will be online a month from now on, so get the most of it :)

What was the reason you say ?

Your account was banned for the rate of Digging activity you’ve engaged in. We’ve determined that the time in which your Diggs happen, it isn’t possible to actually read the stories. Please read each and every story before you Digg or bury a story. Once you agree that you will Digg/bury more responsibly and read the stories, we will unban your account.

Recently, the Digg staff, trough their automated algorithms, is watching if a user is reading a story, by counting the time the user stays on that particular page, and the time it takes him to press the Digg button.

As another member in the discussion list said :

That’s funny. I have a feeling this is going to bite them in the ass.

I agree … This algorithm tweaking and fear of SPAM is going way to far … I mean, come on guys, banning users for voting stories too often ?

I would really love a response from someone at Digg.

PS: Noupsell has a really good personal explanation and clarification for this situation, at the Digg page.

PS2: Apparently, the Digg community catalogues this post of mine, as SPAM :)

“dig_count”:”31″,”area”:”Upcoming”}, {”type”:”report”,”itemid”:”2071615″,”date”:”2007-05-23 13:41:42″,”timestamp”:”1179927702″,”reason”:”Spam”,

Dreamhost representatives are also guiding their clients to make all their websites “unsearchable and uncrawlable by search engine robots”, because they cause “high memory usage and load on the server”.

PS: This is NOT a rumor. Multiple people are already complaining about Dreamhost asking clients to block search engine spiders. A post in QuickOnlineTips confirms this too.

Initial news bit via Zoso.

Now it’s settled with the tabs in the upper left part :

They also enhanced the bar that displays the number of searches and other information, to make it more appealing, with a gradient.

That way you get Wedding Favors and Lord of the Rings Online Guides and Exploits and not :

H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology — they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

But wait there’s more : Dirspace directory (no offense intended to the owner, but that’s how directories “get” that SeoMoz PageStrength ?) and Viagra (of course through ezinearticles.com).

And this on top of my other posts about .edu spam:

• How to get unlimited links and content on a .edu domain
• .EDU Directory Spam - web.gcu.edu

If you like what I write go ahead and give me a vote on the Best Marketing Blog, Best Blog Design, Best Business Blog and Best Geek Blog without breaking the rules :)

There are only 106 more votes to go guys.

So what’s up with this contest ? Not only can you nominate your favorite blogs within a slew of unique categories but you can also vote and comment on others that have already been submitted. In turn, others can also vote and comment on the blogs you’ve nominated.

Votes will be displayed on the site in real-time, so you can see who’s leading within each category at any moment!

The voting for Blogger’s Choice Awards 2007 will end at 11:55pm on October 19. Winners in each respective category will be recognized at a one-of-a-kind awards ceremony on November 10, 2007, at PostieCon in Las Vegas, NV. After the ceremony, the results will be posted at BloggersChoiceAwards.com.

He has even more readers then Darren Rowse:

Matt Cutts:

or Brian Clark:

Congrats Ionut, once again. Seeing that you have been blogging out of passion (and not the desire to make money), and you’ve been doing that for a little over an year, you should receive the award of the year for the best “natural marketing”.

This post’s ideea started from Alex.

Update: I think Ionut is actually in the Top 10 bloggers worldwide, with close to 40K subscribers. I’m not talking about news websites like TechCrunch or GigaOM, but individual blogs, written by only one author.

In a few words, RobotReplay is what I reckon, the most convenient accessibility and usability workshop in the world, for free, anytime, anywhere. Basically, RobotReplay records all the sessions of your visitors, and shows you what every visitor did on your websites, from scrolling, clicks, completing of forms and selecting text.

The most important thing is that the end result / report is NOT a video but the page itself, and a little bit of javascript, so the bandwidth you save is from 1000% to 5000% perhaps. All you have to do to start monitoring your users, is to put a simple one line of javascript in every page of your website.

The guys from Nitobi Inc, the creators of RobotReplay, were happy enough to answer a few questions for me, clearing up a lot of aspects about RobotReplay but not only.

The interview:

Nitobi is a boutique web user interface development company. Our focus is on helping developers build more usable web interfaces. Complete UI, our suite of Ajax based user interface components, are use by some of the worlds largest enterprises such as Bank of America, Motorola, Siemens, NASA and more.

We have 10 employees (mostly hybrid coders/designers) and have been operating in Vancouver, Canada since 1998. We’re really excited to be working at the forefront rich internet applications and helping developers and designers kick ass! We’re also publishing a book called “Enterprise Ajax” this summer with Prentice Hall.

On the face of it, RR is about helping web designers and developers improve user experience. By enabling them to record and watch user sessions, they can make life better for their users. That might be as simple as improving site search, or making the ‘Products’ button easier to click. One big differentiator compared with other remote usability tools is that there’s nothing for the end user to install, which a big barrier to usage.

There’s one site I use regularly (I’m kind of reluctant to name them), and the ‘customer login’ button is directly below a navigation bar which
features dropdown menus. So, if you approach the button from above with your mouse cursor, the menu hides the login. Presumably if you watched 5 or 10 users do that on RR, you might move the login.

Well RobotReplay came out of a Nitobi “skunkworks” type project while we are actually trying to build an entirely different product, which we’re still going to do;-) But when we saw how powerful of tool it could be for remote usability testing we knew we had to get this out in the hands of web developers ASAP. We also wanted a tool for using on sites and projects and that could quickly and easily give us a sense for what our users were doing, and where they were running into problems.

There were many. We spent several months just getting the JavaScript to record user interactions and events properly. Then figuring out how make the playback appear smooth and natural was another major hurdle, which we’re still working on improving. It’s not feasible to capture every data point and mouse position so we had to balance playback fidelity against data transmission and server load constraints. However, some other significant challenges cropped after we got it working and launched…

Yeah, I guess we’re guilty of humility…we figured signing up even a few dozen users would be awesome. After we demo’d at the Web 2.0 Expo in April in San Francisco we signed up over 4000 users and tracked over 2 million user sessions in the first couple of weeks. We could barely keep the servers up the first couple days.

We’ve been faced with the same Ruby scaling problems most high traffic sites face. But we’ve managed to move a bunch of the server side stuff into a Java Servlet and the actual JavaScript is now hosted on Amazon’s S3 service which has been _huge_ help! We’re learning fast and trying also sorts of new things about how to scale a service like this very quickly.

The two competitors that we’re aware of are TapeFailure and ClickTale. They both render the user sessions as movies, while RobotReplay uses
Ajax and javascript to enable users to watch visitor sessions on their live site. It’s a huge savings in bandwidth and processor time for us, and it means there’s almost no delay involved in rendering each visit. They also store sessions in video format which will get expensive on disk space.

We definitely see RR as complimentary to existing tools like Google Analytics or ClickTracks. We’re really hoping one of them open up an API soon so we can integrate with the typical web analytics data. One way we think about the comparison is that Google Analytics provides the empirical data, but RobotReplay provides anecdotal information about your users.

RobotReplay is really for any site publisher, developer or designer. It’s just 10 KB of javascript, so it’s pretty easy for any site owner to implement, just like Google Analytics or Adwords. I mentioned improving user experience earlier, and that means different things to different sites. For a blogger, they might want to verify that users were reading to the end of their posts, or that users were able to sign up to their RSS feed easily, or that users are actually checking out their precious text ads:)

For eCommerce sites, on the other hand, they can use the tool to determine whether their shopping cart is positioned in the right spot, or whether their users are finding the products they’re searching for.

We have a list a mile-long of features we want to add. Right now we’re working with our users and prioritizing based on what they need:

• SSL and authentication support
• Better reporting and filtering
• API that allows developers to wire up custom events
• Visualization tools (you can get idea here)

During the beta it’s entirely free. We haven’t finalized the exact pricing yet. One thing I can say is that we will ALWAYS have a free version that isn’t needlessly crippled and will be valuable to our users. Pricing will be based on the number of sessions in a given time frame. Likely the packages will start at around $20 per month and scale up from there.

Thanks for the interview Andre, and the rest of the team. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for updates of the software in your blog.

Tags: Nitobi, RobotReplay, Web Analytics, Track Users, Record User Sessions

Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager at Google “contacted the VW team” and asked questions. Now how many times will a Google representative kindly ask you some questions whenever someone else spams ? Let me tell you: never :)

Tags: VW Spam, Volkswagen Spam, BMW Spam

41 categories, 25 judges, over 200 websites, a must see.

Via Manafu.

Tags: SEOmoz, SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards