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09.03.2009 Uncategorized Comments Off on Two New SEO Contests for 2009!

Two New SEO Contests for 2009!

The crew at NetBuilders decided to kick off a SEO Contest.

It turns out that we’re not alone.  The folks at forums.seo.com are planning to start SEO Contest 2009 if they receive enough entries by 30 April.

Entry into the NetBuilders contest is free; there is a $50 entry fee to join the forums.seo.com contest.

The NetBuilders contest has announced prizes of $1,000, $500, and $250 — but those prizes may increase as sponsors sign up.  The forums.seo.com contest has announced a $500 prize — but that prize may increase if more participants sign up.

The NetBuilders contest runs from 15 March to 15 August.  The forums.seo.com contest runs from 1 April to 31 December.

Both of these contests should be great learning experiences for everyone involved.  Here’s a big good luck to the participants in both contests! 🙂

01.02.2009 Uncategorized Comments Off on Google’s Politics

Google’s Politics

In addition to the sites which drive revenue here at Free Internet Media, we also operate a number of sites primarily for the purpose of making the world a better place.

Some of these sites are apolitical, such as Make Happiness, but many are very political in nature, such as People’s Democracy.

Unfortunately, our experience with political web sites has introduced us to a very disturbing phenomena: Google often penalizes web sites which do not support Google’s fascist liberal agenda.

People’s Democracy receives plenty of search engine traffic from Yahoo and MSN — but Google has chosen to completely deindex the site. Google has repeatedly ignored Reconsideration Requests and has refused to discuss the issue with us. Yahoo Site Explorer shows 42,134 inbound links for the site. Google Webmaster Tools shows zero. Google has quite effectively silenced the voice of People’s Democracy.

Of course, not all penalties are that complete, which make those much more difficult to detect. Google dropped our political blog, Fort Liberty, in the SERPS so far that Google referrer traffic fell over 90%. Fort Liberty is still indexed by Google and still shows a PageRank of 5, but is now unable to rank for any competitive search terms in Google’s search engine. Shortly thereafter, Google kicked Fort Liberty out of the AdSense program.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama. That’s his right as an American. However, Google should not be using it’s considerable corporate muscle to make it difficult for other Americans to express their political views. That is an affront to the American concept of liberty and it is a great disservice to Google’s shareholders.

Google’s stock has fallen over 50% from it’s high of 711.25 on 2 November of 2007, prompting Google to initiate it’s first round of layoffs. Perhaps Schmidt should quit focusing on politics and start focusing on creating value for Google’s struggling shareholders. Instead, Schmidt used Google’s corporate funds to throw an inaugural party for President Obama. Every Google shareholder, willingly or not, contributed to paying for that party.

So what can we do?

  • We refuse to purchase Google stock.
  • We refuse to spend money with Google AdWords.
  • We spread the word about Google’s politically tainted search engine results and convince searchers to use alternate search engines like Yahoo.

Today, Google is the 900lb gorilla in both Internet search and Internet advertising. Nothing we do will affect them overnight — or even in the next few years. Eventually, however, Google will be forced to deliver unbiased search results or it will lose it’s place as the preeminent search engine on the net.

27.01.2009 Uncategorized Comments Off on Blog Stew – It’s What’s for Dinner!

Blog Stew – It’s What’s for Dinner!

Blog Stew is an interesting “How I am doing it” blog from a relatively new but clearly up-and-coming web entrepreneur.

If you’re wanting to get started in the web business, these are the people to read — people who are in the same situation as you and building their way up.

Tom is filling the blog with lots of practical information about achieving success in the online world.  A lot of the “big name” SEO bloggers spend all of their time writing about SEO gossip and none of it sharing techniques and information you can really use.

Tom is also building resource pages to serve as reference guides for web entrepreneurs of all experience levels, such as his Link Building Database and List of Blog Directories.

Tom is a great writer; this is definitely a blog you’ll want to subscribe to.