Looks like Sol Trujillo and the Sensis team have finally realised that their flagship product - everyone’s favourite impromptu monitor-stand - “Yellow“, might not be worth its (singificant) weight in dead trees unless it’s open to search engine indexing.

From B&T Magazine (Australia)

YELLOW.COM.AU OPENS UP
Sensis has opened the door of www.yellow.com.au, to search engines for the
first time. The move enables search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live
Search to index the 2 million-plus listings on www.yellow.com.au and make
them available to people using search engines to find local businesses.

Now the big search-marketing question will be: what link-juice will a keyword-rich inbound link from Yellow.com.au direct to its customers?

How Yellow Pages manages outbound links

Link text: Domain printed out its entirety only, no description of services at all, just http://www.jcandsonsplumbing.com

Anchor url: Convuluted. The server code Yellow.com.au use to redirect and track outbound links to their customers would probably confuse, or simply annoy, the Googlebot. At least it’s no longer “NOFOLLOW”

PageRank of Yellow.com.au: PR7. This puts it amongst the big hitters, which opens opportunities for them to start up-selling their (I assume) declining customer-base with offers of paid link inclusion. Craftily disguised of course as some kind of editorial business-directory , so as not to attract the wrathful attention of G’s web-spam team.

Overall: I’ll be interested to see how Yellow.com.au upgrade their offering to leverage their PageRank and offer value-added inbound links to customers with websites.

Save your money, create a $200 website and SEO it

The move to open up Yellow’s walled-garden to Google et al might be seen as an acknowledgement that a growing proportion of Australian consumers now turns to the Big White Page rather than the Old Yellow Pages for their commercial search requirements. I often get asked by clients whether they should place an ad in the Yellow Pages, and increasingly I tell them: “Pay some kid with half a clue to make you a one-page website, organise some good inbound links and you’ll get more inbound phonecalls.”

Oh *SNAP* - Google don’t list in Yellow Pages

Search for “Google” in the Yellow Pages. Go on, I’ll wait. … … HAHHHAHA funny, no?

Comment bait - Do you *ever* use the Yellow Pages?

Print version? Or yellow.com.au ? I’m curious who actually uses this service anymore?

One of the tactics employed by Search Engine Optimisation Marketers is to create their own link network of niche sites that contain pages that rank well for certain keywords. All these sites are operated by the same marketer, and are used to boost the inbound link popularity of other pages within their network. These sites still need to maintain strong rankings in their own right, but owning your own link network can give you some extra inbounds for a little boost, and every little boost counts.

Networked sites on the same webhost

Being the paranoid bunch they are, SEO Marketers speculate that Google’s algorithm takes the webhosting location of sites in a link network into account. Basically, if sites are on the same C-block IP, there’s a chance they’re on the same hosting account, and being managed by the same person. Google may view this relationship with suspicion.

Whether google checks C-block IPs is debated. Whether google penalises for it, or not, is also contested.

SEO Marketers trick Google by hosting on different C-Block IPs

Regardless, there are webhosting companies sprouting up capitalising on this speculation, offering hosting packages with different C-blocks. This way you can manage all your networked sites via the same provider, but Google won’t know it’s you.

But don’t use the same Google Analytics account

Putting on my aluminium foil hat, I wonder whether tracking your link network sites with the same google analytics account is a dead giveaway to the omniscient one?? Does Analytics data be fed into Google’s algorithm. Or are the index, ranking and analytics dbs totally silo’d??

What do you think? Am I just being paranoid, or is google able to take advantage of owning the world’s data to reduce the effectiveness of sneaky seo marketing tactics?

Your conspiracy theories, hearsay and rank speculation are all welcome.

Clear, instructional copy can still have personality.

Peerless Faucets sell taps. As such, they probably sell taps to a lot of D.I.Y home handypeople, some of whom might not be accredited plumbers. They’ve scored 2 FTWs with this set of instructions:

• Identify the real user need - Installing the new tap is easy, removing the old one is hard.
• Create a set of brilliantly written, clear instructions detailing how to remove the old tap (so you can install a new one of theirs, natch)

>> Read the whole, gorgeous set of faucet-removal instructions here

Via: Viget Labs Design Blog. If you have room for more blogs, i heavily recommend all of theirs, for their design, content and approach. Amongst the best group of company blogs I’ve seen.

I have a massive hard-on for crowdsourcing. I talk about it to anyone who will listen, and there’s at least one or two slides in any Powerpoint deck I present dedicated to it.

It’s saved me time and made me money, and continues to do so.

Jeff Howe, who coined the term “Crowdsourcing” in a Wired magazine article in 2006, has a new book out. He’s pimping it out in this cute video.

Crowdsourcing: The Trailer.

READ: Human Mirror at Improv Everywhere

This graph is pretty interesting - demonstrating the rise in popularity of P2P traffic online. That’s years down the bottom, as you can see by ‘94 - when FTP porn was KING.

P4P is a distribution protocol that seeks to lessen the impact of loads of legal, semi-legal and illegal P2P downloading on ISP bandwidth.

P4P Will Make 4 a Speedier Net, Profs Say - MarketingVOX

Sometimes we are presented with a little moral test when we walk along the road each day.

Sarcasm is not the lowest form of humour. Not by a long shot. There exists a far baser, even sub-terranean level of low humour, and it’s rising fast to the surface this Olympic season. I speak of the racially themed stereotype pun. Working in and around advertising, I run afoul of the pun (verbal, written and visusal) almost every day. The wounds will probably never heal.

I’m yet to see a “Me so solly!” reference, so the most heinous variants has to be the Chinese food pun. But there’s WEEKs of opportunity left for someone to bust out a “Me So Solly!” and just make my brain explode.

My observed current medal tally stands at:

CURRENT GOLD WINNER: TAB betting point of sale signage for Beijing olympic betting

Beijing Olympics Chinese Food Pun - TAB Sportsbet

SILVER MEDAL WINNER: Basically anything to do with Stephanie Rice. As well as being fairly easy to look at, the name is worth it’s weight in well… you know. Overheard or observed on Channel 7 in the past 3 days:

• “Special Fly Rice”
• “Rice will take away gold in China”
• “Rice steams through the competition”

BRONZE MEDAL WINNER: [TBC, Check back for updatres]

Fascinating 2D/3D pen art animation of a bootlegged reel-to-reel recored interview with John Lennon.

In 1969, a 14 year-old fane named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview “about peace”. 38 years later, Jerry produced a film about it using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, and featuring some amazing artwork and 2D/3D animation.

Inspiring content, and presentation.

I Know Tom on jjprojects’ TwitPic