SEO Marketing Secrets

PandaLabs has identified over a million spam links used to target Google searchers looking for information about automotive parts from Ford and Nissan especially. Panda calls it “a major Blackhat SEO attack” designed to dupe searchers into downloading spyware or purchasing phony security software.

Searching for the keyphrase “Diagram Of A 1998 Nissan Pathfinder Blower Motor,” for example leads to a Google results page packed with spammy sites. A savvy user can identify them by their unusual URLs starting with an arbitrary number, followed by nonsensical combinations of letters and resolving to Polish domains.

These types of URLs went on for ten pages before I stopped looking—ten pages of weird Polish results for an English query, all mentioning different Nissan Pathfinder parts diagrams. This is a serious error in Google relevance: wrong language, wrong country, wrong parts (bringing back a door handle diagram isn’t the intent of the searcher in this instance), wrong sites, all of them likely created very recently.

Clicking on any of the links is likely to lead to a webpage prompting the searcher to download a codec that is actually malware designed to present bogus security warnings. The malicious program then prompts the user to spend as much as $80 to download the security program to get rid of the viruses. This type of malware is called “scareware” or “rogueware” and has become so popular among the underground lately probably because it works.

Sean-Paul Correll, a security analyst for PandaLabs provides a partial list of the keywords and phrases targeted in this highly organized attack and provides a video to illustrate how it works. Though many of the examples target Nissan, Panda says over a million target Ford alone.

Targeted Blackhat SEO Attack against Ford Motor Co. from Panda Security on Vimeo.

“This case is especially interesting because it’s one of the few SEO attacks that we have seen targeting a single, specific brand,” said Correll.

How are cybercrooks accomplishing such search engine dominance? Well, there are a number of blackhat SEO tactics, and it would be hard to identify exactly which ones. But one obvious tactic is fooling Google’s trust algorithm by slipping in links to target sites on trusted sites. In a Web 2.0 era defined by reader commentary and user-generated content, this becomes especially easy to accomplish.

Running a quick link check of some of the results Google was returning show spammers have made use of a comments section on Beerinator.com, a North Carolina-based beer enthusiast community, and also of the comments section on Logrithmic.com, a music blog. Ever seen a bunch of nonsensical text or irrelevant “nice site” comments with a link?

These appear to be the main tactics. The spammers also take advantage of forums—one link showed up on this South African paramedics forum, the commentary section of which is a veritable spam bonanza. Beyond that, all these strange Polish sites seem to link to each other.

Correll said Google could (and presumably does) monitor these attacks in house, but the company also has the option of outsourcing security to other companies to combat them. “They could also try to modify their algorithm, but that is not really a viable option given the expense and the high likelihood of technical issues (i.e. negative impact on their core search IP and capabilities).”

Google did not return request for comment about what Google is doing about a spate of similar attacks or whether recent tweaks to their algorithm have allowed it.

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Links are what make up the web. They drive traffic to sites. They add value to articles. While some content providers may prefer not to have a lot of links to their content, most strive to get as many as possible.

There are plenty of reasons to want your content to be linked to: search engine algorithms, visibility, credit, the sharing of valuable information, traffic to monetize you site, etc. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable discusses how link building was popular even before Google came out and spawned the link-building craze as we still know it today. He writes:

Eric Ward (ericward.com) was one of the first, if not the first, person in the link building business pre-Google. Eric has told his story at many SEM conferences. The most remember part of his history is that he did link building as a way to promote Amazon, in the early days. He said that Amazon offered him shares in the company, but he turned it down - that is his legacy. Seriously, he was using links to market companies online before Google and he still uses links in the same fashion. He believes that those types of links are the links that mean the most to Google because they worked pre-Google for pre-Google reasons.

Ward recently offered his wisdom about obtaining links with Twitter, which just happens to be the latest of many Internet crazes. There is plenty of link potential there despite the nofollow/shortened URL obstacles. Twitter is just one of many paths that can lead to inbound links for your site. WebProWorld member Zonked started an insightful thread saying:

Too often nowadays I see guys spending way too much time focusing on on-page factors. By this I mean, worry about you title tags, meta-tags, keyword density, anchor text and so on.

Don’t get me wrong, on-page factors are important. But even more important nowadays are the sites that link to you. Call it your circle of friends. The less sites that link to you, the harder it will be to rank on search engines.

And don’t just get any site to link to you. Google will look at your “circle of friends” and if they consist of spammy sites like article directories, FFA link sites, and so on, then it aint gonna do you a whole lot of good.

Other posters seem to generally agree, and the discussion is an interesting one (join it here).

Melanie Nathan at Search Engine Journal has a helpful article up providing (and elaborating upon) the following tips for getting more out of your backlinks:

1. Control what you can
2. Optimize your existing backlinks
3. Lend a helping hand
4. Strengthen your site’s inner linking structure
5. Be link worthy

She also links to some other great articles about getting more out of links. I’d also like to suggest doing a little digging through the archive for the “Link” tag content on WebProNews (a great way to find content on about any subject we cover btw). You will find a ton of useful tips and other knowledge that will contribute to the better understanding of getting the most out of links to increase your site’s traffic and success.

Have linking tips of your own? Let’s hear them. Share your knowledge with other WebProNews readers.

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When you’re working on your optimization programs, are you thinking ahead? Do you watch industry trends to see what may be on the horizon? If not, then it’s time you did. Business planning is all about not only today, but tomorrow as well. Search engine optimization programs are no different – they need to be future-proofed.

Future proofing your SEO means that you operate with one eye on where the industry is going as to ensure your efforts hold up over time. This is a wise move not only from stability reasoning but from a financial one as well. That is to say, there is a cost consideration when we have to go back and adapt entire websites with new tactics that we really should have seen coming. Your SEO efforts should always stand the test of time.

 

Two main types of future-proof SEO approaches;

The safety element - this means we use tactics that we’re fairly certain will work tomorrow and tread lightly on the ones that aren’t. One thing is certain in SEO is that there are fine lines that we cross from what is an acceptable practice, to those we know could get us in hot water. What is border-line today is often against the TOS tomorrow.

This means that tactics you’re employing now might actually harm a website in the near future. Stay well away from the edge my friends… it’s a long we down.

Some common areas include;

• Widget links – we’ve seen an increasing disdain for these and it’s only a matter of time before they are devalued to a point where the exercise has a low ROI on resources invested.

• Tag stuffing – if you’re stuffing image tags, video or even meta-tags… stop it. It really isn’t worth doing and search engines (much like the KW tag) are likely to continue to de-value the weight given these. It will be a waste of time ultimately (IMHO of course).

• Sponsored Templates – another link building tactic that, like widgets, is likely to go the way of the Dodo as search engines crack down on link spam.

• Keyword density (stuffing) – if you’re still doing this, it might be time to give it a rest. Search engine understand people search in 2-3 word phrases. They also understand page themes and concepts are better than linear KW approaches.

• Site-wide links – as search engines get better at page segmentation, links in the footer, header and even side panel positions are likely to be devalued further

• Reciprocal links – while these are still acceptable within reason, the ultimate value given these signals is likely to continue to deteriorate. I wouldn’t actively pursue these, at least in the traditional sense (think content promotion instead).
• Java-script spamming – if you’re using JS to circumvent spam detection, your days are numbered. Search engines are (finally) processing java-script these days.. you have been warned.

… and so forth, you get the idea.

The predictive element– this means having a keen understanding of the search industry and capitalizing on trends before they happen. This means you use your keen sense fortune-telling to try and establish where search engines are going and make sure your optimization programs are positioned for best effect.

Some current areas of interest at the moment are;

• Personalization – we all know that personalization is going to increase in importance which means you need to understand how it works, who’s doing what and how much it affects search rankings.

• Page segmentation – search engine are getting better at page segmentation which means new implications for content creation/organization and link building as well.
• Phrase relations and semantics – understanding how to develop strong themes for pages (onsite and offsite) will be more and more important in SEO moving forward.

• Behavioural – (implicit and explicit) – from explicit signals such as voting buttons and favourites to implicit signals such as behavioural, geographic and demographic targeting will also increase in importance and should be understood.
• Geo-targeting – from personalized search to universal and mobile, geo-targeting is going to be a must for the SEOs of the future.

• Universal (vertical) search – having content creation programs that best utilize the various types of vertical search (images, video, blog search etc..) is another area that you should be considering today – it’s only going to become more ubiquitous in the years ahead.

• Google Suggest – search engines are getting more and more inclined to various recommendations engine elements. A strong understanding of how this works is something every search optimizer should have.

• Common hacking points – an important area of SEO these days is ensuring you don’t get hacked and have nasty links added to your site. In the future, security audits will be an integral part of SEO. Start working with the developers to ensure there is a plan in place.

Once more, it requires that we’re paying attention to what’s going on out there. It doesn’t mean heavily modifying your tactics as much as thinking ahead as to how each will hold up. Planning for a strong ROI on your activities doesn’t end at the end of each month… there is long term ROI to be considered as well. Money invested in borderline tactics could mean a total loss in a a year from now on that investment – or at east a devaluation.

Become a fortune teller

We all know that Gypsies know all about fortune telling so we’d be the place to start. How does one go about future proofing their SEO? Ultimately it will take a more intrinsic sense of where things are headed and we can put ourselves in this mindset by;

1. Staying on top industry news
2. Follow closely statements from the major engines
3. Patents from the big 3 (at very least)
4. Test things so that you understand signal weights (and changes)
5. Stay abreast of the latest research papers from the IR community

Truly, the main point here is that you should always be thinking about strategies that will stand the test of time. This will ultimately save resources (time and money) that could be expended cleaning up problems or wasted on now ineffective link building.The next time you stumble on a new ‘trick’ and think, “I can’t believe this actually works” it would be wise to consider the future.
At very least it may be nullified, at worse penalized.

Playing it safe may not be sexy, but we’re here for the long term. Viability and ROI on search optimization efforts requires forward thinking… will you be ready?

/end

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Links on Twitter are already nofollowed and most are shortened anyway by a shortener. What use can Twiitter be for link building? Link building Eric Ward says the site is perfect for finding niche experts.

It’s not about huge amounts of followers or traffic spikes. You can get that kind of traffic from Digg. But the advantage of Twitter, says Ward, is that people specific to an industry are out there, findable on Twitter.

So if you specialize in little plastic doohickeys they put on shoestrings, irrelevant traffic is not what you’re after. At Search Engine Land, Ward explains how a message that begins as a tweet ends up as a link from a highly trusted website:

 

A few weeks ago I announced a new site via URLwire, and whenever I do this I set up several alerts/trackers to see where mentions/links show up.  I also set up a Twitter search for that new URL….the new site I announced has been tweeted or re-tweeted by seven people…I discovered all of them were health experts in one form or another.  Also, all of them had several hundred followers (one had 780), and a quick check of a few dozen of those showed some overlap (expected) as well as frequent health URL tweets.  In other words, I’d found a loose community of several thousand collective Twitterer’s who had shared news about a new web site URL.

 

One of those re-tweets came from a librarian at a med school web site, who did one more thing with that URL. She added a link to it from the med school web site she’s in charge of editing.  What started to her as a tweet ended as a permanent link from her high trust web page.

 

What’s even better about that is that earned link was a free, organic one, the best kind. No manipulation, no buying, no trading. And that one very trusted link is likely to outweigh many links (however they’re gotten) from not-so-trusted websites.

 

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It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

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Which engines besides web search do you see big traffic from? Comment.

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Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.

1. Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that - descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags

- Avoid keyword stuffing

More WebProNews Videos

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:

- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags

- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.

- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.

- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.

 - Encourage participation by enabling everything.

- use meta data

- use captions and subtitles

- use watermarks

- use Google Maps integration

There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.

More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.

2. Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":

-  Add images to your Google Local Business profile

- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

- Add images to local business citation sources.

- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:

More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.

3. Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

- Only indexes articles three days old or less

- Only indexes it once

- Read Google News Help for Publishers

- Google News XML Sitemap and monitor it

- Section names (keywords in News XML Sitemaps)

- Host "most popular" and "breaking news" sections on your site

- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.

More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.

4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords. 

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less

- Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

- have pages, mentioning your area of service

- your phone number

- your physical address

- directions on how to reach your office

- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)

- have links pointing to you from local websites and directories

- have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)

- have ccTLD (country-specific domain - google.ca, for instance)

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.

More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.

5. Ranking in Google Blog Search

Back in ‘07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.

More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.

Wrap Up

It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.

Which of these do you see the most traffic from? Tell WPN Readers.

Got more tips for ranking with these engines? Share your knowledge.

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During a discussion on Sphinn, SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan poses an interesting question: Does Google give automatic credit to A-list ventures in the search results?

Earlier this week, big media (New York Times, Disney, BusinessWeek, Hearst) lodged a bit of a tantrum because they felt Google wasn’t treating them special enough and was giving too much credit to scrapers and aggregators. Sullivan strides to the other, more populist side, saying Google seems to dote on Web-celebs like Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, and Jason Calacanis.

Sullivan’s main target was Kawasaki’s new Alltop venture, which is essentially a categorized news aggregator. (Kawasaki calls it an “online magazine rack.”) Users can select categories of interest that lead to lists of subdomains where articles on those topics are brought together. It’s not exactly a new idea, but it does have Kawasaki’s former Apple evangelist weight behind it.

We were unable to duplicate what Sullivan was seeing in his Google search results for keywords like “economic news,” “food news,” etc., but Sullivan’s good reputation precedes him, and we have no reason to doubt what he saw. Google may have corrected, or it could be a regional result variance—from here, older Topix.com, with subfolders instead of subdomains, appears high up the list. (Subfolders, unless I’m mistaken, have been traditionally more SEO friendly.)

We know that in its effort to produce fresher results, a slight tweak to the algorithm was allowing cybercrooks to follow Google Trends, parasite host on trusted sites, and gain high rankings redirecting to scareware (bogus alerts warning a user’s computer is infected to scare them into buying fake anti-virus phishing programs). That glitch appears to have been addressed, and it may have affected Alltop. 

But it still leaves the question about whether in Google’s pursuit of fast, relevant, recent, and trustworthy search results they company has unduly weighted new ventures of star players. Sullivan presents the classic class struggle flipside:

“If Joe Schmoe SEO dude came along and rolled out hundreds of domains like this, worked it on Twitter, who wants to say Google wouldn’t be down on them like a ton of bricks?”

He then brings up Chris Pirillo’s ill-fated Gada.be, whose subdomains got the site banned in Google. The site was eventually unbanned. Meanwhile, Sullivan suggests Godin’s Squidoo received a spam-pass from Google until Calacanis torpedoed it. To top it off, Calacanis’ Mahalo, despite Google’s decree it would drop search engine results from other search engines in its index, still gets quite a bit of Google love.

“You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe,” writes Sullivan. “Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

”Alltop, Mahalo, Squidoo — none of them dominate Google. But seriously, Squidoo has a PR8 home page? Alltop has a PR7? Search Engine Land, which actually produces original content, sits with a PR6 — but these guys that simply compile content from others get a big fat PR kiss on the lips?”

It seems likely those who’ve been used as examples already know the online marketing game very well and also carry with them loyal armies willing to link to any new venture they launch, which gives them an automatic advantage over Joe Schmoe. But it could also be that Google’s constant struggle to balance trust and relevance could also be a player.

 

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A study published recently by Conductor, Inc. and reported in MediaPost today gives some interesting insights into the world of big business and organic search. It seems as if they either haven’t been introduced completely or they simply don’t get along.

The report can be highlighted by this finding alone: Fortune 500 companies spend $51 million per day in aggregate on 88,792 keywords–yet only 20.82% rank in the top 100 of natural search results.

The company did a similar study in November of 2008 but looked at a much smaller subset of keywords. The findings were broken out based on company sector using the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System). While the findings of the report spoke to the overall lack of real success for these biggest of the big firms there were some winners including MGM Mirage (accommodations & food services); Whirlpool (manufacturing); Viacom (information); Amazon (retail trade) and IBM (professional, scientific & technical services).

Seth Besmertnik, Conductor CEO said,

“It remains alarming that although we included branded keywords in the study for the Fortune 500, more than the lion’s share are not showing up anywhere in search results for their most important keywords, including their own names.”

Some other highlights (or low lights depending on your point of view)

• Only 1.41% of the domains surveyed show significant number of their terms in the top results

• 10.14% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid-to-strong presence for their most advertised keywords, and 41.69% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence. Visibility decreased as search queries grew in length

• Fortune 500 companies did worse as keyword searches became more complex and longer.

So what’s the takeaway here? If you have ever worked on one of these campaigns from the agency side you are probably all too well aware that the pace of change and implementation for big companies is often slow or non-existent. In addition, there are so many people / departments that have some ownership stake in the company site that it can take a committee meeting to decide the next time the committee meets to set a committee meeting. These big companies are still not moving at Internet speed and getting hurt in the process.

Also, with a significant push toward developing in house teams at many companies, not just the Fortune 500’s, the question begs if this is working?  It’s not fair at all to make any blanket statements based on this study but it is interesting to consider the implications for those more nimble and flexible than the big boys. What better place than the search engines can a smaller player both look bigger and, in essence, clean the clock of the industry behemoths? Goliath meet David and look out for that slingshot!

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Google’s seemingly automatic trust of popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia make all of them—and by default, you, the end game—a target of spammers, scammers, and hackers. Combine that trust with Twittter’s foray into realtime search, and you’ve got yourself some spammer’s delight.

No doubt the type of realtime search Twitter is very recently touting is useful. My DVR cut off the last two selections of American Idol last night and Google couldn’t help me find the answer right away. But Twitter could, and I learned Ricky Braddy was robbed by the selection of Anoop, hence to be known as the Butcher of Brown.

Now Google, for all its speedy entire-web indexing, wasn’t fast enough to find that answer, but I was reminded of a Firefox addon script that recently came to light that drops Twitter results right into Google search results. It was apparent quickly, especially if Google were to do the same overall, that Twitter could be abused by spammers to get into the trusted search results.

Because of its popularity and because Google seems to like user-generated content sites, Twitter tweets tend to rank highly in the search results already.

We know from recent events, too, that spammers and hackers are getting much more adept at search engine optimization and are taking advantage of popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to dupe people into visiting malicious and spoof sites.

And now we have explicit instructions from SEOBlackhat.com about how to take advantage of Twitter for purposes of “parasite hosting,” which is a method of leveraging the trust of “an over trusted domain” to rank one’s own site or sites well in the search results and drive traffic to a specific landing page.

“…as long as twitter pages continue to rank in Google for everything under the sun, you’re a fool if you’re not using twitter accounts for parasite hosting,” the author writes, before explaining that the deed is done via keywords in the Twitter user name and linking to the profile externally. Google’s algorithm uses external links as a measure of how trusted and popular a URL is.

Commentators in that post express surprise at how many “hot” Twitter names are still available, and they advise others to find trusted sites that allow users to post content with little moderation for parasite hosting.

“I’ve been using my_twitter.php which I got right from Twitter’s API page,” writes one commentator. “I just modified it a bit so that I can do a search for a given term, then grab all the people who’ve tweated about that term and then I add those people to my account - and about 20% or so add me back. Then I remove all the non-followers, rinse and repeat. I set it on a cronjob so it’s easy as hell and it’s working pretty well for many of my blogs.”

Twitter has been criticized recently for not verifying emails of those who sign up, adding to the phony account numbers. The necessity of URL shorteners for using microblogging and SMS services compounds the risk of exposure to malicious sites because users can’t tell where a link is pointing them. This was the driving development behind the “Rickroll” Internet meme, the practice of tricking friends into clicking a link that redirected to a Rick Astley music video, a practice now taken up by real scammers pointing to other places.

Fortunately, according to reports, Twitter does not allow these redirected links to pass Google PageRank to destination sites. But Twitter itself is trusted enough to be an unwitting accomplice.

We contacted Twitter cofounder Biz Stone to ask what Twitter is doing to control for realtime spam and authentication now that the site is hitting critical mass. Stone did not respond.
 

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Video SEO firm EveryZing has launched what it’s referring to as "the Internet’s first cloud-based metadata service" called MediaCloud. As online video plays a bigger role in marketing, lots of businesses are looking for better ways to get their videos found.

MeidaCloud could prove to be an interesting starting point. It allows companies to post live or archived video, audio, or text content feeds and receive back a rich set of metadata such as speech transcripts, time-stamped tags, categories/topics, named entities, geo-location and tagged thumbnails.

“MediaCloud is a logical next product offering for EveryZing,” said Tom Wilde, EveryZing’s CEO.  “Our award-winning ezSEO, ezSEARCH and MetaPlayer products are all based on our core patented metadata capabilities, and MediaCloud now further opens these capabilities and allows our customers to more deeply integrate metadata into their workflow.  Quite simply, MediaCloud has the unique capability to receive raw data, and quickly return back to customers the valuable information on which their businesses rely.”

Included in MediaCloud is:

- Real-time processing of live audio and video feeds

- Support for both broadcast and telephony metadata models

- Geo tagging

- Support for over 100 files formats across text, video, audio, and image

- Automatic text alignment for time stamping of closed captioning data

- Dynamic thumbnailing of video assets to create automatic “storyboards”

- English (US, UK) and Spanish language support for audio and video

EveryZing says it has already signed up a significant list of customers for MediaCloud, utilzing it for applications in contextual ad targeting, universal search, video archives, media monitoring, closed captioning, and voicemail-to-text. Customers don’t have to buy any software and only pay for the processing needed.

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Twitter has adjusted the title tags for member pages. Where they used to go "Twitter / username" they now go "User’s Real Name (username) on Twitter"

According to Robin Wauters at TechCrunch, Twitter just implemented this change this week. As he also points out, this could have an impact on how Twitter pages are ranked in search engines. He notes that his page ranks as the very first result on Google for a search of his name. For my name, it is not even on the first page. As a matter of fact, it’s not even the first result for a search for "Chris Crum, Twitter."

Actually, for the query "Chris Crum" a Twitterholic page for me ranks higher than my Twitter page. After a fair amount of digging, I can finally find my Twitter page on the fifth SERP.

Still, if Twitter pages are ranking that high for a lot of people, it’s nothing to be ignored. Wauters makes an interesting point. "The implications are not to be underestimated. Being the top result for a name search means business, just ask all those venture-backed startups building people search engines who are vying for the sweet spots on the first page," he says.

Perhaps I just don’t have enough followers (aka links to my Twitter page) to get my page ranked that high. If people weren’t already begging for followers, they certainly will be now.

Looks like Twitter might carry even more of an SEO incentive now. For more on where social networks like Twitter and Facebook fit into the SEO equation, read my discussion with Todd Malicoat, Joe Whyte, Joe Griffin, and Stephen Pitts.

Of course there is also the question of whether or not people want their Twitter pages ranked as the first result for their name. This might not be the best thing for online reputation management. If these pages are ranking well, people are really going to have to watch what they say even more. The whole "think before you Tweet" mentality will be that much more important.

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