All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
MyBlogLog has been taking the blogosphere by storm the past few months, even before the acquisition by Yahoo. However, MyBlogLog is not a recent phenomena, it started out as a blog statistics service by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in March of 2005.
I’m a fan of MyBlogLog (TopRank Community) and despite some of the infrastructure issues related to their increased popularity, am very optimistic about what the resources brought on by Yahoo will do for the community.
Thanks to Amie for helping with this list of blogs we’ve been collecting and reviewing this week (and some from last week). This latest round of blogs have also been added to the big list of search engine marketing blogs.
It’s time for this week’s update on search marketing blogs. Again, there has been a large number of requests and also quite a few new blogs discovered by trolling blogrolls and MyBlogLog.
Not all the new blogs we learned about this week will be added today. There are just too many. We’ll try to moderate the number of new blogs posted to about 30 per week.
Please note: While we wait until Friday to post all the new blogs reviewed for the week, the RSS feeds for new blogs are added throughout the week. ie, the OPML file is updated just about daily.
Randy Morin ran his KBCafe Blog Awards again for 2006. In the SEO Blog category, Barry kicked ass again (while on vacation no less) as predicted. Thank you to everyone who voted for Online Marketing Blog, which was the underdog in every way. Of course, there should have been about 100 or more other blogs in this category besides ours.
Surprisingly, Matt Cutts lagged way behind in the SEO category, but he did win best Google blog over the corporate Google blog. Jeremy Zawodny also beat out the Yahoo Search blog. Hmmm, do you think there might be a message there?
A few days ago, 901am.com got the scoop that Blogsmith was going to be released to the public early in 2007. It’s aimed at taking on blogging sites like Wordpress.com, Blogger and TypePad. Details are still sketchy, but Blogsmith already has a good start.
Blogsmith is is owned by AOL / Time Warner and it powers some of the largest blogs on the net including Engadget, TV Squad, Download Squad and my favorite TUAW. With Blogsmith powering these blogs, they’ve had time to work out the bugs, optimize the code and make sure that everything runs at peek permanence for tons of visitors. Even with all that testing though, giving any service to the general public will render issues.
Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal has published the final lists of nominees for the 2006 Search Blog Awards. You can preview the lists at Search Engine Journal and you can vote here. (Hopefully for TopRank!)
Categories include:
SEO Blog of the Year
Search News Blog
Best Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
Best Link Building Blog
Best Search Agency Resource Blog
Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006
Best Social Media Optimization Blog
Best Black Hat SEO Blogs
Best Local Search Blog
Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
Best Web 2.0 Blog
I bumped into Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal in the press room here at SES Chicago and he mentioned something about updating the SEJ design. By the looks of the screen capture above, it’s a pretty nice upgrade. Loren mentioned that the design was by Chris Pearson, the same fellow who worked on SEOBook.com and Text Link Ads.
Nice job Chris and Loren!
With the conference last week, I missed posting my weekly list of SEO, social media and online PR blog links, so let’s start off the week with a nice list. As a reminder, these are blogs that I’ve either recently discovered or recently “re-discovered”.
It only took 5 years, but Andy Beal has finally come over to the world of WordPress for his blog, MarketingPilgrim. Previously, Andy ran SearchEngineLowdown.com on Google’s Blogger platform, building it up to one of the top SEO blogs on the Internet. Then after going out on his own, started MarketingPilgrim.com using the same tools.
Recently Google added links to blog search in Google News and now Google Alerts has been updated to include blogs. The Google Alert options now include:  News, Web, Blogs, Groups or Comprehensive. Time intervals of notification are: as it happens, once a day or once a week.
Google Alerts are very useful to see who is writing about you or your cliens. It’s also use for identifying when optimized press releases or articles are getting indexed.
It’s good to see blogs getting more play in the mix of Google search functions. What’s next?
As blogs become more important sources of information and competition for users’ time and attention against mainstream media, many marketers and public relations practitioners continue to stumble about the blogosphere like a bull in a china shop.
Online Marketing Blog gets about 5-10 pitches per week on average, which provides more than enough of a sample on how blogs are getting pitched these days. What’s the verdict? It doesn’t look good.
A few of these pitches are right on or just lucky. Many are simply crap. Some come from friends but never make it to a post. Some are from complete strangers, but are very relevant and get in. Some are borderline where I’m interested, yet I never hear from that company again.
For the past week I’ve been beta-testing a new product from Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads called Feedvertising. Other beta testers include Jim Boykin, Phillip Lessen, Brian Clark and several others. This is a service that allows you to monetize your RSS feeds with ads. Text Link Ads will sell the ads for you, or in my case, I just put in ads for some things I’m doing with Marketing Sherpa. You can do it either way or both.
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