Posts Tagged ‘google’

This guest blog comes to us from Distil.it, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Distil is the first content protection network that helps companies identify and block malicious content scraping and data theft. In this video we talk to Distil CEO Rami Essaid about how the company developed, their participation in the TechStars program and most importantly, how they can help you!

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Read the rest of Distil’s blog about content scrapers and Google’s Panda update »

This guest blog features Fruition, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Fruition’s SEO and SEM reporting web app provides highly accurate reports on search engine rankings and onsite signals that impact your Google and Bing rankings. In the video below, learn a little more about Fruition (and a few key SEO/SEM tips for small businesses) from Fruition’s Brad Anderson, and scroll down to read about SEO Goals and Key Indicators.

SEO Goals and Key Indicators

Google’s Feb 2012 Update

Between February 25-28th Google rolled out another big set of changes to their algorithm. These changes knocked down a lot of short cuts that SEO companies were using, including blog networks. The red flags have been there for a long time. Blog networks are easy to uncover simply because of the complexity of trying to setup a truly diverse hosting environment. It is not just separate C-class IP addresses it is also registrars, DNS, admin login IP addresses, plug-in profiles, etc. There are so many easy ways to group sites as being related or identical that it is not worth the effort of trying to take short cuts with your linking. Instead focus on what is going to have a lasting impact on your SEO:

• Page Speed – Improve your code, increase your hardware, etc.
• Better Onsite Content
• Usability

These three factors will have a lasting impact on your SEO during 2012 and beyond.

Get Your Strategy Together

Successful internet marketing campaigns have one thing in common: Comprehensive strategies. Today’s marketplace makes it extremely difficult to compete in one area of internet marketing without complimenting that work in several other areas. For example, why invest in search engine optimization if you don’t have a quality website to convert the traffic to leads or sales? Why invest in a mobile app if you aren’t going to optimize the listing to generate a high volume of downloads? These examples show how a comprehensive strategy to internet marketing is the best approach for future success.

Fruition.net has been successful in this comprehensive approach by staying at the forefront of each individual strategy. At the core of these strategies is a collection of goals and key indicators we use to monitor, adjust, and track performance. Below you will find a few of the most important goals for each area of internet marketing.

Comprehensive Internet Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the end goal of improving your ranking on the major search engines. Here are the goals and key indicators you should be tracking to evaluate the success of your SEO campaign:

Read Frution’s Tips for SEO/SEM Domination »

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Eli Feldblum, CTO and Founder of RankAbove. RankAbove is a leader in search engine optimization (SEO) technologies and data management that helps solve complex SEO challenges for enterprise-sized organizations’ websites via a combination of proprietary technology, innovation and creativity.

The New Number One Spot: Planning for the Future of SEO

You run a successful business, or at least the IT for a successful business — that’s why you’re on SoftLayer. And, chances are, you’ve already spent lots of time and effort optimizing your site for search engines. You’ve built backlinks; you’ve ensured the structure of your site allows the search engine spiders to see every page of the site and prevents the creation of duplicate content; you’ve carefully written titles, friendly URLs and header tags; and you’ve continuously tweaked your on-page content to get to the number one spot in Google, Bing and other search engines.

Unfortunately, that apical spot is quickly becoming an apocryphal one; being number one isn’t what is used to be. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has undergone dramatic changes in the past few years, and even if you optimize perfectly and grab the top spot, you might be pushed down (even below the fold) by a variety of other Google products:

• Ads & Comparison Ads
• Local Results
• Image Results
• Video Results
• Shopping Results

In today’s SEO market, you need to optimize not only for regular web results, but for every other Google product too. Luckily, there are a few tips you can use to make sure you appear in those products, and get the new and improved global number one spot—and lots of traffic too.

Read RankAbove’s Tips for Local, Images and Video! »

So much of our life has been moved to digital devices these days. Smart phones are one of many devices that have made an impression on our lives. Smart phones these days have become a must for most, whether it is for business or personal use, almost everyone has one.

On the plus side, smart phones enable users to conduct business from just about anywhere in the world. Access to email accounts, VPNs and other tools that make business move on a daily basis have become accessible from the palm of your hand. You can even administer your web server from your smart phone with the right application setup.

You’re carrying a small computer around in your pocket. It’ll be interesting to see what new devices will emerge in the market in the next few years. Tablets are becoming wildly popular, and mainstream consumers are starting to keep an eye on the newest innovations, joining the “tech geeks” in the “early adopter” line.

There are several players in this market with Google, RIM and Apple leading the pack, and dedicated fans rally behind each. With smart phones becoming so increasingly common, I’ve started wondering if it’s really for the best. Do we really need to check our e-mail every 10 minutes? If we’re not on Twitter, Facebook or one of our other social networks, will they be there when we get to our computer?

Being digitally connected all the time give us a false sense of “socializing” in the old school face-to-face sense, and that pull us away from those IRL (in real life) encounters. Numerous crashes have been caused by people texting or updating their statuses while driving, and there have been cases of people walking into a busy street while being distracted by their phones.

When it comes to technology like smart phones, how do you keep those devices from becoming a dependency? How do you keep yourself from letting them take the place of direct human contact rather? It’s something to think about as technology continues to evolve and permeate our lives.

-James

The SoftLayer Mobile application allows customers to work with support tickets, examine and control servers, monitor bandwidth information and more. The application is available on two platform: Apple iOS – supporting iPhones and iPads, and the Google Android operating system – supporting mobile phones and devices from a variety of vendors.

The SoftLayer Mobile application is quickly approaching its first birthday. The application was first introduced to the world in June of 2010. Frequent visitors to this blog may remember when we introduced the iPhone application right here in the SoftLayer blog. We got back with you again when the Android application reached the milestone of 100 downloads. Our success with the application continues to this day with the both the iOS and Android versions sporting impressive download statistics which multiply those of a year ago many dozens of times over.

In the course of the past year, we’ve gotten some great suggestions for improvements from our customers. The first request was for the application to store account passwords a feature which we implemented quickly. From those humble beginnings we added some larger, more complex functionality based on your feedback like two-factor authentication using VeriSign Identity Protection, bandwidth charting, and the ability to check account balances and make one-time payments against those balances from your phone.

We’d love to continue that trend and hope to tap into the experience of the thousands of you who are working with the application. In the coming year, we hope to expand our existing functionality, include new features, and support both new operating systems and new devices. We’d love to hear about your ideas on how we can best improve the SoftLayer Mobile application to make it an even more valuable tool for you.

Would you like improved tracking of your bandwidth? Can we offer greater control over your server’s network ports? Do you need to monitor your server’s CPU usage even while you’re in line at the bank? Is there one particular task that compels you to visit the SoftLayer Customer Portal time and again? If so, and if it would be convenient for you to have that information on the phone in your pocket rather than on the computer at your desk, please let us know!

To offer your suggestions, please create a support ticket in your SoftLayer account detailing your needs. Alternatively, if you are already using the SoftLayer Mobile application, drop us a line through the feedback links built into the Support section.

If you haven’t been using the SoftLayer Mobile application, then we’d like to invite you to download it and explore its features. For more information, and for links and information about downloading and installing the application, visit our Mobile Application resource page.

Keep watching that page over the coming months as well. We have some exciting projects in the works and hope to share them with you very soon!

-Scott

You know how it works – a casual conversation leads to a Google search the next day. This in turn leads to enlightenment. Or something along those lines.

Last Tuesday morning, a PDF version of the January 30, 1983(!) issue of ‘Arcade Express – The Bi-weekly Electronic Games Newsletter’ arrived in my inbox. It made for good reading and brought me back to the days of my youth when I burned numerous hours and brain cells playing Intellivision, Atari and Commodore machines. I had access to two devices – one that sat in my family room (an Intellivision) and one that sat in a pal’s basement (an Atari 2600). My kids have access to much more – there are numerous devices at their fingertips; including a PS3, Nintendo DS, a MAC mini and my wife’s iPhone. Most of their friends are in similar circumstances.

A quick comparison is in order:

Processing power aside, I think that the more important thing to consider is the fact that we are approaching ubiquity for a number of devices in North America. Most people have access to the internet, most people have access to mobile phones (and more and more of them have access to smartphone like the iPhone or an Android device) and most people have access to a dedicated game device. Western Europe and parts of Asia (Japan and Korea) are the same and the rest of Asia is soon to follow, and will be the beneficiary of the tremendous innovation that is happening today. There is a lot of room for growth and maybe not a whole lot of clarity around what that next generation of devices and games will look like (I predict 3D, AI driven games played with a dedicated gaming chip implanted in your cortex).

The last page of the ‘Arcade Express’ newsletter detailed the honor roll of ‘The Nation’s Highest Scores’. Softlayer’s own Jeff Reinis was the top Arcade Game player for Pac-Man. His record was 15,676,420. I wonder how many hours of continuous game playing that is?

-@quigleymar

So for those of you who have been following SoftLayer’s recent push into the mobile application space, you might be aware that we recently released a native application for devices running Google’s Android operating system. As the principal software engineer of the application, one of the exciting parts of my job post launch is monitoring the number of times the application gets downloaded, the ratings it gets in the market place, and of course, reading the user submitted comments.

This morning when I came into work and pulled up Google’s Android Developer Console, I saw that we had just passed 100 downloads of the application. Not too shabby considering the formal press release has not yet been made so those 100 lucky Android owners who found the application heard about it via word of mouth, following SoftLayer on Facebook, or reading our forums.

As the developer of the application even more thrilling than seeing the number of downloads, was for me to see that two users had rated the application—five out of five stars. And one of those users even left a comment. Does everything I need it to do. That’s what the post said. Then I scrolled down to see which of our customers was so pleased with the initial feature set of the app.

What I found caused me to burst out laughing (and get a few strange looks from the guy who sits in the cube across from mine). The comment, does everything I need it to do, was left by my eleven year old son. True, he does have an Android phone, and apparently it’s also true that he downloaded the app. What he doesn’t have is an account with SoftLayer, so the only thing the app can do for him is show him a title screen and direct him to the SoftLayer corporate website for help. Apparently that’s everything he needs it to do!

At any rate, while I am tickled to see my son being so supportive, I’d love to hear comments from users who need the application for something other than to show their friends at band camp their dad has written a program that can be installed on a phone. While I’m admittedly biased, I think the app is pretty cool. Browsing tickets on the phone works particularly well and checking bandwidth and rebooting servers on the go is pretty darn handy.

Alright, its back to work for me. I’m looking forward to hearing from all you Android owners out there though. Download the app. Tell us what you think. And most of all, let us know what you’d like to see in future releases. At SoftLayer, we are all about making things that make your life easier. Help us build an app that does everything YOU need it to do!

After purchasing my new Droid phone, I started to dive further into its uses. I initially liked the open source operating system (Google’s Android OS) and the features available. Now I have found that I can do almost anything with this ‘pocket computer’, from work to play.

I’m sure the iPhone fans are saying ‘yeah my phone does that’, but I didn’t buy an iPhone for a reason. I can do all the regular stuff, find a restaurant or movie without even opening Google. I can play games, update facebook, take pictures and post them online or email, etc. etc. etc.

Can you talk to your phone? Let’s say I need to find a product for my home computer:

Me: Droid, locate ‘firewire card Dallas’.

Droid: Micro Warehouse, Phone Number, Address – Would you like to call? Do you need driving directions with GPS tracking?

Me: Dial for me please. ‘Do you guys carry firewire cards for…..blahblah.’

When I get into the store, the guy doesn’t know if the firewire card has windows 7 drivers. Hmm… Droid scans the barcode and takes me to the manufacturer’s product page where I can see that drivers are downloadable. Thanks Droid!

I can connect to a VPN, RDP to my workstation or SSH to my server! I can write text messages with my voice, read emails while talking on the phone, even translate by voice into other languages (never getting lost in Spain again)! I still have so much to learn about the abilities of this device, but it does point to our ‘futuristic’ intentions in having a computer in our palm that allows us to interact with the world.

Oops, did I forget to turn off the coffee pot at home? ‘Droid….?’ I don’t think they are on speaking terms yet. I’ll have to get the coffee maker control application. Droid says no results…

So there I was after work today, sitting in my favorite watering hole drinking my Jagerbomb, when Caira, my bartender asked what was on my mind. I told her that I had been working with clouds and elephants all day at work and neither of those things are little. She laughed and asked if I had stopped anywhere to get a drink prior to her bar. I replied no, I’m serious I had to make some large clouds and a stampede of elephants work together. I then explained to her what Hadoop was. Hadoop is a popular open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce. It allows transformation and extensive analysis of large data sets using thousands of nodes while processing peta-bytes of data. It is used by websites such as Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, and China’s best search engine Baidu. I explained to her what cloud computing was (multiple computing nodes working together) hence my reference to the clouds, and how Hadoop was named after the stuffed elephant that belonged to one of the founders – Doug Cutting – child. Now she doesn’t think I am as crazy.

I’ve always been a sucker for geography and statistics. That’s why I was immediately interested in seeing how our customer-base was spread out when I started using Google Maps last week. For the first map I’m releasing here, I wanted to pin a point on the map for every city represented by a customer, but after making the map I realized there was a problem – The United States.

There were over 2,000 cities represented by customers in the US alone, and it was just too slow. For that reason, The United States have only one point for each state. Those pins each have a popup which will tell you how many cities were represented by that state. For all other countries, there is a point on the map for each city for which we have a customer. Click on the image to launch the map.

My initial Observations:

• There are more than 111 countries covered by our customers
• At least one customer lists a residence somewhere in the Amazon Rainforest
• We have at least 1 customer for every state in the USA
• The southernmost city is Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
• The Northernmost city is Lakselv, Norway
• We don’t have a customer who lists a residence in Antarctica yet.

Consider this one a warm-up. My next map will show this same data, but broken out by our data center locations. (Dallas, Seattle and Washington D.C.)

-Jason