X SEO

When we first began building Market Samurai, one of our less sexy (but more ambitious) goals was to streamline the workflow of an internet marketer.

From keyword research at the beginning, to tracking rankings and results over time – all of this is available inside one streamlined workflow inside Market Samurai.

Well – except maybe one piece…

The one step that’s missing is checking and purchasing domains – a vital step in setting up your site.

While Domain Samurai fills the domains gap, it still means you need to swap from one software application to another – and it’s a time-consuming hassle that many Market Samurai users want to see gone!

Since the release of Domain Samurai, we’ve had countless people contact us via support requesting that we add Domain Samurai as a module to Market Samurai.

So today, we’re doing just that.

From today, the Domains module will be included inside your copy of Market Samurai.

With the Domains module now available within Market Samurai, the entire internet marketing process – from website creation to monitoring – is streamlined again.

This means a faster workflow – no need to move between two separate applications when creating your website.

And The Domains Module is Free!

Just like the Keyword Research module inside Market Samurai, the Domains module is completely free – meaning you can continue to use it even after your Market Samurai trial runs out.

If you’ve already got a copy of Market Samurai, the latest update will give you access to the Domains module.

If you don’t have a copy of Market Samurai, you can get your free trial (and free access to the Domains Module) here.

So What Happens With Domain Samurai?

Domain Samurai (our purpose-built domain name research software) was designed to find high-value New and Aged Domains.

The tens-of-thousands of domainers and internet marketers who are using it already for this purpose prove there is a need for a tool that focusses solely on domains.

So we will continue to promote and support Domain Samurai as THE tool for anyone searching for high-value New or Aged Domains that are perfect for SEO. (In fact – if you don’t already have a copy of Domain Samurai, you can get it free here.)

But for people who are doing SEO daily, and want a suite of streamlined SEO software tools that speed up their research, analysis, tracking, publishing and targeted link building – for this role, Market Samurai is the right tool for the job.

We hope you enjoy using the Domains module inside Market Samurai!

Alex Green

Most webmasters and SEOs know by now that Google tends to typically use the title tag of the page as the blue, clickable link in the search results. But that may change based on query or other things. But what if you are missing a title tag in your page source, what would Google use?

I spotted a thread in the Google Custom Search Help forum discussing this. I should note, Google Custom Search is not the same as Google web search, but they do pass over similar algorithms and techniques, as one would imagine.

Googler, Prathap Reddy said in that thread:

Google uses the title of the document from file properties as title of the search results. If no title is found, the first found large font is used as title for the document, with some exceptions.

Now, again, I am sure this can be easily verified with some SEO testing but as far as Google Custom Search goes, if the title tag is not there, Google may use the first large font found on the page as the title (clickable link) from the search results.

Forum discussion at Google Custom Search Help.

On Friday, Google’s JohnMu tweeted an important tip. Let’s say you block a directory from being crawled in your robots.txt file. Let’s say you want to add content in that directory to be crawled by Google. John explained that since Google caches your robots.txt, you want to update the robots.txt file at least 24 hours prior to update content within that directory.

Here is JohnMu’s tweet:

Tedster in WebmasterWorldposted this tip and added:

I never thought about this before, but we certainly know that googlebot works off a cache of the robots.txt most of the time. Otherwise it would need to ping robots.txt right before each URL request, and that would get nasty pretty fast.

So apparently, 24 hours is what John is saying is the length of the cache time. Good to know. When Disallowed content gets place online, this is one precaution I never thought about.

The discussion goes off on to if you should use the robots.txt protocol to block content or not. But I won’t get into that debate in this post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week, Google announced that AdWords advertisers who take part of the content network can now say they just want their ads on the top 1,000 sites on Google’s content network.

Google released a public, updated monthly, list of the 1,000 most visited sites. The list does not contain adult sites or Google sites, but it includes mostly all the other sites that have AdSense ads on them, including Facebook which is number one on that list.

Do you think as an advertiser you would select only the top 1,000 or do you want any site Google deems relevant, based on the content of the web site, to show your ad? I can see pros and cons to both.

To only show your ads on the top 1,000 sites select ‘non Ad Planner 1000′ within the ‘category filters’ section of your AdWords account.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Apple has just announced that sales of its tablet computer iPad have now topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. That’s a whole lot of iPads in under two months, and the company only started shipping units to customers in countries outside the United States last weekend.

The news comes almost a month after Apple announced that it had sold 1 million units.

As previously announced, the iPad will be available in nine more – but still unnamed – countries in July and additional countries later this year.

And they’re still clinging on to the ‘magic’ rhetoric, apparently:

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

Apple in a statement said developers have created over 5,000 new apps for iPad to date.

In a week, Jobs will be front and center at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco – the man’s keynote starts on Monday 7 June at 10 AM PST.

About a week ago, word started getting out that Facebook is beta testing a new “killer app” called Facebook Questions. For beta testers, the Questions feature appears in the left-hand column just below Events and Photos. It lets you ask and answer questions to and from your extended circle of friends.

A few days ago, Facebook opened up the private beta further and is now taking applications for anyone who wants to enter the beta. Facebook is taking its Questions product very seriously. “Help us build the future of Facebook,” reads the title of the page.

It puts the Questions product on par with Photos and Events.

As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.

All you have to do to become a beta tester is submit three sample questions, such as

• What are the main differences between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer?
• What are women looking for in a relationship?
• What methods has BP tried to clean up the oil spill?

In one fell swoop, Facebook is about to take on Yahoo Answers, Google (via recently acquired Aardvark), LinkedIn (notice the reference to job recruiters?), and Quora.  Q&A sites drive massive pageviews. It is an area Facebook can no longer ignore.  People already use Facebook informally to ask questions across their social network from time to time.  It is a type of status update, if you think about it.  The Questions feature will bucket all of these together, spread them across your friends and their friends, and make them searchable.

The advantage Facebook could have in the Q&A space is that to the extent that you find answers from your extended social network, questions can become the start of deeper conversations and spur new relationships. But breaking it out as a separate feature raises some new questions. Will every major type of status update now become its own feature on Facebook (like Photo and Event updates do)? And, if so, what’s next?

On June 11, it will be exactly five years since Michael Arrington hit the ‘Publish’ button and introduced the Interwebz to the very first TechCrunch post (which was a brief profile of blog search engine Technorati, which Mike apparently labeled a real-time search engine at the time – what’s old is new again, right?).

We want to celebrate our fifth anniversary with as many people as we can, across the globe. So we are using the new Meetup Everywhere platform that Scott Heiferman announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week to organize TechCrunch Meetups on June 11 all around the world.

We’re not only celebrating TechCrunch, but the last five years of the Web in general. A lot has happened since June 2005, but the wheel keeps on turning, faster than ever. Sometimes, it’s good to take a breather, look back and celebrate, and then move on.

Either way, we were pleasantly surprised to see how many people jumped on this. On May 28, we counted nearly 150 meetups planned in places like New York City, San Francisco, London, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Jakarta and Sophia.

Just three days later, another 100 were organized by readers and fans all over the world, so we’re at 252 and counting. We see meetups are being organized from ad Dasma’, Kuwait to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil and St. Petersburg, Russia. Amazing, and humbling.

Yes, we realize you probably just needed yet another excuse to party, but we’re all in awe that you’re willing to do under our banner anyway.

Have fun on our fifth birthday bash for us, will you? And don’t forget to send in pictures.

Memorial Day is being celebrated and commemorated today in the United States. Since it is a holiday, please expect lighter coverage here today than on a normal day. Below are the logos, themes and the Google ribbon for the special day:
Google’s Ribbon/Badge:

Yahoo (animated):

Bing:

Ask.com:

DogPile:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable:



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When Google distributed its first-quarter earnings report, many people were struck by one particular fact: the search giant had $26.5 billion in "cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities" as of March 31st.  But Google’s going out of its way to make sure that money doesn’t just collect dust in a vault.

Google’s aiming to earn a proper return on its money, and is forming a team with its own special space to this end.  Douglas MacMillan explained in a feature article, "Google’s trading room opened in January. . . .  The investment team has grown to more than 30 people, up from six three years ago.  Many of the new arrivals are former Wall Streeters who left lucrative careers at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and other banks."

Don’t take this to mean that Google will be tying everything up in long-term investments or chasing hot stock tips like an ordinary investor, of course – two key concerns are keeping a lot of the money accessible in case a good acquisition opportunity appears, and, as you might expect, not losing it.

Still, MacMillan wrote, "[A]nalyst Aaron Kessler of ThinkEquity estimates the company’s 2010 return (including interest income and realized and unrealized gains before tax) at around 2.5 percent.  That’s a higher return than some other large Internet outfits, such as Yahoo! and Amazon . . ."

And if you’re curious, 2.5 percent of $26.5 billion amounts to $662.5 million.

Are you still arguing with your management about whether you should buy your brand keywords or not? Good news for you: I’m here to make sure you have two more good reasons to go ahead and buy that brand and feel good about it.
A few months ago I wrote about how advertisers should think about [...]



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