End of last week did Google acquire a large amount of domains around the phrases: “Claim Your Content”, “Claim My Content” and ”Claim Our Content”

CLAIMYOURCONTENT
CLAIM-YOUR-CONTENT
CLAIMMYCONTENT
CLAIM-MY-CONTENT
CLAIMOURCONTENT
CLAIM-OUR-CONTENT

Registered TLDs: .COM, .NET, .ORG
Country specific TLDs: .FR, .DE, .CH, .CO.UK etc.

WWWCLAIMYOURCONTENT
WWWCLAIM-YOUR-CONTENT

Registered TLDs: .COM, .ORG, .NET

Not registered were domains for:

WWWCLAIMMYCONTENT
WWWCLAIM-MY-CONTENT
WWWCLAIMOURCONTENT
WWWCLAIM-OUR-CONTENT

This implies that ClaimYourContent.* will be used as the primary domain. 

Garrett Rogers from Googling Google Blog speculates that the domains could be used to offer webmasters a tool to fight scrapers and others that steal content from your website.

Sam Harrelson from CostPerNews.com speculates that this might be an attempt to allow for users to claim (and thereby easily monetize) content from the wide variety of content producing platforms.

An effective system to fight content theft and scraping would be great.

Webmasters fight today an uphill battle against content theft, especially against scrapers. Scraper sites are literally sites that show “scraped” content from other sources, like SERPS, RSS Feeds, Blogs and other Web Sites.

The scraper “mashes up” and “scrambles” the content as good as he can to circumvent the search engines duplicate content filters. Only as much as absolutely necessary is done on the site which consists usually of thousands and more auto-generated pages. Nothing is done by hand, because the poor converting pages that litter all engines indexes are only profitable if you generate a lot of them.

While using tools like CopyScape to find duplicate content can be helpful and vehicles like the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) might be working to fight single cases of content theft by other webmasters with a real website, are those methods pretty much worthless against scrapers who produce websites using your content faster than you can act on them, not to mention the problem of finding out the identity of the scrapers to send out a DMCA notice to them.

You can also send a DMCA notice to the search engines every time a scraper site with your content appears in the SERPs, but that can turn into a full time job doing every day nothing else than that.

The most effective tool available to webmasters against scrapers that get the content right from your website today is to identify their scraper scripts and block them from accessing your website.

Those scripts are basically “bad robots” that ignore the robots.txt exclusion protocol and robots meta tags. David Naylor provided information and also source code how to identify and block bad robots at his blog.

This method does not help you if scrapers use the content of your RSS feed. The only thing you can do there is not to make full articles available in your feeds, but only a brief summary or the first 100-200 characters of the post with a “more link” to the full article on your website.

Anything Google would come up with to solve or at least reduce those problems would be helpful, but if that is what those domains might be used for, I would like to know how they would solve problems like:

• Verify that sites that claims content as their own are actually the rightful owner of the content
• Prevent scrapers or rouge webmasters that steal content to claim content from others as their own
• Allow content owners to white-list sites that do have permission to re-purpose some of their content (press releases, free to re-print articles etc.)

This is a very complicated subject and hot at the same time. I think it would already be a good start if webmasters would have a way to tell the search engines if their sites content gets suppressed or removed from the SERPs due to a duplicate content penalty or filter caused by content theft. This would help especially new domains that are most likely to become a victim of this, because of the lag of trust compared to domains that are older (Google Sandbox Effect).

A scraper who acquires an old domain to put up somebody else’s content will most likely be considered the content owner by the search engines and the original content owner gets penalized or filtered out.

I guess we will have to wait a bit more to see what Google will be using the newly registered domains for. But that does not stop people from speculating. Google might gets some new and useful ideas from what people speculate.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Cumbrowski.com internet marketing resources like duplicate content issue and legal resources and much more.

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Yahoo teams up with PayPal. About time.

Oxford University Press has a posse .. I mean a blog .

Mozilla fans, Thunderbird 2 is now available . But more important than that — at least to me — there’s now a Penelope extension available. It’s version Alpha 16, so don’t try unless you’re adventurous.

Gary Price on tour. Next time I see him I’m going to stick a lighter in his face and yell “FREEBIRD!”

DMOZ now has a subcategory for sitemaps at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_Engines/Sitemaps/ .

Montana launches online access to driver and vehicle histories at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070420/20070420005612.html?.v=1 .

Newswise has created A Guns and Violence channel in response to the Virginia Tech shootings.

New online museum of Scottish architecture.

I can’t think of anything else to call it. Whitepages.com has launched a new part of their site that allows you to enter a name and get a breakdown of how that name is represented across the United States. You can check it out at http://names.whitepages.com .

Enter a first and/or last name, and a state you want to search (you can also choose all states.) I did a search for John Doe in all states. And then I got a page full of John Doe information.

I got a table of where Doe is ranked in the phone book (6,161 of 6,843,982), where John is ranked (1 of 2,634,850) and the next rankings for first and last names. I got the ranking of the full name — 14,095 of 47,613,506 — which puts John Doe between John Emery and John Hendrickson in popularity.

Whitepages.com also has listings for the most popular states containing that name, and at the end of the page, a map of the US with states color-coded by how many people have that name. Lots of John Does in New York and Georgia, for some reason.

This will be a great tool for genealogists, and for the rest of us, a very weird timesink.

• Gmail


• Picasa


• Picasa Web Albums


• Google Talk


• Google Calendar


• Google Apps


• Google Groups


• Google Pack


• Google Desktop

Amazon, I love ya. Amazon Prime is a fantastic program. Once you’ve paid your Amazon Prime fee, two-day shipping is free for a year. Not having to worry about shipping fees means that I buy a ton more stuff. What’s that? Tara Calashain has a new book on Information Trapping? I just buy it on impulse now.

Amazon, my affection for you means that I’ll give you some feedback for the low, low price of free!

1. I like certain authors (William Gibson, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, etc.). I’ll basically buy every new book from about 7-10 different authors. Give me a better way to track new books from a favorite author. At one point in the past I created Amazon email alerts for new books from a few specific authors, but then you started sending me emails for “related” authors. As far as I could tell, there was no way to get alerts about new books without getting the unwanted “you might also like this author” emails. If you let me watch specific authors, I’d buy the new John Brockman book from Amazon instead of stumbling across the book in a bookstore.
2. While you’re at it, provide an RSS feed for that “new books by this author” info instead of as an email. C’mon, I can get an RSS feed for that funky Gold box feature but not for my favorite authors?
3. My bank just sent me a new credit card because “security lapses have occurred involving … a retail merchant where you recently used your card.” Never mind that my bank doesn’t tell me which retail merchant had the security lapse; that’s a whinge for another time. But now I’m doing the “go to places that have my credit card and change the credit card number” dance. To make a long story short, I click on “My account” and the first thing I see is “Change payment method” so I click it, but it takes me to the “Open and recently shipped orders” screen. That link is quite poor/annoying. I’d 1) change it to say “Change payment method for an order”, or 2) change the UI of the page to make it clear that “Change payment method” and the “Where’s My Stuff?” section is visually different from the global payment settings, or 3) make the link go to the right place. The right place is a screen to actually change the payment method for an order. In fact, out of the 14 links in the “Where’s My Stuff?” section, eight of them take me to the exact same page. Fix that.
4. Deputize an Amazon blogger to stop by and give some feedback on posts like this.
5. Okay, leave aside the UI advice from point #3. I can delete a credit card, but can’t add a credit card without ordering something? From an Amazon page:
   

   Note: if you’d like to add a completely new credit or debit card or update a debit card issue number, you need to wait until the next time you place an order. On the “pay” page, select the radio button below “Or enter a new card” and enter the full card details. You can then use Your Account to delete any out-of-date cards.

   Paypal and Google Checkout let me add a new card in seconds, but I have to go and find something to buy before Amazon will let me add a new card? That’s really bad. Let me add a new credit card without ordering a book. Can any Amazon person explain to me why this is?

If this stuff annoyed me, it probably annoys other people too. I’m an Amazon fan, so someone stopping by and saying “we’ll looking into it” is half the battle, but fixing some of this stuff would make me happier with Amazon and let me spend more money at Amazon. Heck, I’m thinking of trying out Amazon’s S3 storage service to make an offsite back-up of my blog database, so if someone at Amazon would let me know that they’re listening and responding, it’s more likely that I’ll try other Amazon services. That leads me to my bonus feedback, which is:

6. Make Amazon’s S3 storage service compatible with scp from a Unix command-line. It’s a storage service. Why should I need to study code samples in Python or Ruby? If you make it “just work” on port 22 where ssh/scp hangs out, backups would be so much easier. Lots more people would use it, not just smart, technical people who are willing to code neat hacks.

The S3 team already did a smart thing by making it possible to host public web images on Amazon’s S3 service. Not offering scp effectively hampers the growth/uptake of the system. Why would Amazon want to do that? The only reason that I can think of not to allow scp uploads is maybe Amazon wants to host higher-value data, e.g. data belonging to startups, not become the mass backup for the world. But if that’s the issue, Amazon could still offer scp-upload storage at a slightly higher cost. Anyway, I’m thinking out loud now. C’mon S3 team, add scp support. Amazon, lemme know if I’m wrong about anything or if any of these suggested tweaks come true.

Anyone have other suggested tweaks for Amazon?

John Battelle did a nice interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Web 2.0 Expo conference some days ago. Topics include Google office, the announcement of Google’s presentation software, how Google can afford the huge expenses to buy companies like DoubleClick, what Google will do with SEO company Performics, and more.

[Via Google Operating System.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Hmmm. Google Base guidelines state that links of your uploaded product data “should not forward to another URL” and “must point directly to the target page.” Yet a search for mediaplex returns over 39 million hits, many (all?) of which include forwards from the domain adfarm.mediaplex.com to cgi.ebay.com. I wonder if this means it’s safe to ignore this Base guideline for bulk uploading for now? [Thanks Colin C.!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Search Engine Journal’s Ahmed Bilal has an article at Marketing niche SEO and how the industry will change in the next two months. It’s part of the scholarship contest, and an excellent read, as well as a launching point for this article, which looks at some organic linkbuilding activities.

Recently, one of my clients that I mostly write for said they’d like to rank #1 for two keyphrases for which they are #2 in Google. (Now who doesn’t want to rank #1, right?) For NDA reasons, I can’t disclose the industry or their domain nor what type of service they perform. However, I can say that earn money offline based on their online efforts, and that they are outranked in Google by a competitor who does have a primary keyword in their domain name.

This is isn’t going to be any easy task, and it’ll possibly take a fair bit of time. I do have some experience in the broader niche that they are part of, but I’ve never done any sub-niche optimization. Part of my suggestion to them is as follows:

1. Forget about going from #2 to #1 right now, since the effort to move up one spot in the top 10 is probably exponentially increasing. Number 2 is a respectable position for now, but we’ll have a long-term effort in place.
2. Focus on the desired phrase and one more, which they’ve overlooked.
3. Focus on one search engine, in this case Google, since most of their traffic is from there, and for the regular reasons.
4. Start creating fresh content at least a few times per week, to give other relevant sites something to link to.

Part of the problem is that they are a very small startup business in a small niche that suddenly gained several competitors. Their budget is tiny. They cannot actually afford any SEO services, let alone much additional copywriting. What do you do in such a situation? I’m accepting a minimal monthly stipend in payment, and the rest of the payment will be in the future, in the form of services they offer that I’m interested in, as well as future joint opportunities. I’m thinking long-term here, because this market is going to be huge and the whitepapers I’ll be able to write in 2 years will payoff handsomely. If I succeed in this campaign, we all win: myself, the client, the industry, the customers. So I’m very motivated.

The good news is that even the broader niche is relatively small, so link building is easier than for bigger niches. There are few active websites and blogs, and the bulk of keyword domains are parked. That means the client stands a fighting chance to rank for closely related terms. [Remember: #2 position is nothing to be ashamed about. Nor is anything in the top 10 of the SERPs, as far as I’m concerned.]

Let’s use a point of reference. Each keyphrase starts with the same word, indicated in the diagram below as “P”. The second word differs in each, and is indicated below as S1, S2, or S3. The keyphrase that uses P and S1 concatenated is the one that they rank as #2 for in Google. Here’s an example. P=”dog”. S1=”tag”, S2=”house”, S3=”fur”. So that means they rank well for “dog tag” but not “dog house” nor “dog fur”.

Keeping in mind that I’m working with a limited budget and my own personal time constraints, here is my long-term (1 year) strategy:

1. Keyword domains.
   Register several keyword domains that are variations of the “P+Sn” compound key phrases mentioned above. I’ve registered a bunch, and some use a desired keyphrase plus a verb such as “get” or “find”. E.g., “getdogtags.net”, “finddoghouses.com”. There are even a couple of compound domain names similar to “finddogtagsandtoys”. These use both the primary keyword, two secondary keywords, and some sort of connecting word such as “find” or “and”, etc.

2. Mini-sites.
   Create 4-6 page mini-sites on some, redirect others (in hopes of getting type in traffic). These will be very similar, but optimized for each keyword domain.

3. Controlled outbound links.
   Link out from each mini-site but only to the client’s primary site and a select few competitors. The motivation is that if the visitor wants to learn more about the topic at hand.

4. Neutral content.
   Note that the sites are being maintained by me, not the client. Even with neutral sites, I can still find ways to give the client link prominence without appearing to do so. Being neutral increases the chances of being linked to from elsewhere, even from competitors of my client.

5. Updates.
   Content will be updated from time to time using relevant industry statistics, suitable diagrams, and short linkbait. (Everyone loves diagrams and lists.)

6. Additional spider bait.
   A mashed up web feed of industry sites and blogs, created in Yahoo Pipes, will be burned in Feedburner. I’ll then use their BuzzBoost feature to create an HTML badge of headlines and excerpts. This content will be embedded on each mini-site, in the navigation bar. This gives each site fresh content daily

I wasn’t able to get all .com domains. Some are .net, .biz, .info, but they are valuable keyword domains nevertheless. Unfortunately, some keyphrases have very low search traffic. There might be some type-in traffic, but I have to create interest in the topics elsewhere, in non-industry mediums - somewhere where readers fit the profile of the people who will be purchasing my client’s services but not necessarily participating. This might be blogs or possibly even print articles in CEO/CIO/CTO magazines.

Another phase of the niche link building strategy is as follows:

1. Utilize press releases.
   They already use web press releases regularly, so these could be utilized to link to the new domains.

2. Industry sites.
   Sites in the industry run by neutral organizations are eager for relevant content. If we offer up short, neutral, “voice of the industry” articles that link to the new sites, other websites will publish them. Even if there is more than one site publishing these articles (i.e., duplicate content), there will be the benefit of targeted traffic.

3. Bloggers.
   Industry bloggers seem to be willing to either republish press releases or link to relevant information. Building a niche blogger contact list will be helpful in the promotional effort.

The entire strategy, thankfully, is long-term, as the industry in question is still tiny. The success of this client - and their competitors - offline is actually an indicator of the health of the industry. A long-term strategy fits in nicely, since they don’t have the personnel to handle any sudden success. Finding and training future personnel is actually one part of the promotional effort.

It may not be possible to get them very high in the SEs quickly, considering they don’t have the writers or much of a marketing budget. However, my feeling is that they can make it between #5-10 with a bit of planning, promotion, and linkbuilding, and a long-term strategy.

I can’t give away too much at present. However, I will test out my “green/ organic” budget link building theories using keyword domains and mini-sites, then report back every 3 months on the progress.

Advertisement: Text Link Brokers Sell or Buy Text Links

Digg is probably the only company which got loads of online buzz when it hit the one million user mark. Come to think of it, there is even a story on the Digg.com homepage today about Digg hitting a million users even when the date they announced their millionth user was a month and a half ago.

Funny thing is, if you look at Digg’s competition, especially Del.ico.us and StumbleUpon, the competition have much larger registered user bases, each more than doubling the amount of registered Digg users.

As an example, let’s compare the user base and incoming web links for Digg.com and Del.icio.us.

User Base

• Digg has a million users.
• Del.icio.us has over 2 million users.

Inbound Links (tracked by Yahoo!)

• Digg has 1,473,685 inbound links to Digg.com.
• There are 2,544,257 inbound links pointing to Del.ico.us.

Mentions of Each Brand (tracked by Google)

• Digg: 178,000,000
• Del.icio.us : 317,000,000

Even though Del.icio.us has more active users and is more popular in terms of incoming links, Digg gets much more buzz amongst webmasters and bloggers.

If you look at the Digg vs. Del.icio.us Alexa ranking, even though Del.icio.us has more users, Alexa is still ranking Digg much higher than Del.icio.us. This is because Alexa rankings are skewed towards sites which attract web marketers and webmasters.

Alexa Ranking

• Digg.com has a Alexa traffic ranking of 86.
• Del.icio.us has an Alexa traffic ranking of 181.

I have heard stats however that only 5% of Digg’s traffic is registered. And Del.icio.us attracts a good number of bloggers and webmasters themselves, so it’s probably safe to say that Digg does get equal or a bit more traffic than Del.icio.us.

Furthermore, since this traffic is consisted of bloggers and webmasters, getting a story on the Digg homepage is even more valuable as these opinion leaders who use Digg may blog about those stories.

Stories which make it to the Digg homepage can also send much more traffic than Del.icio.us popular. Why?

Probably because more Del.icio.us members use the service to bookmark the sites and references they find, not just clicking on those links which make it to the Del.icio.us homepage.

But there is another reason Digg is more popular than Del.icio.us; Rock Stardom.

Kevin Rose is a Rockstar

If you search for occurrences of the names of the founders of Digg vs. Del.icio.us on Google, you’ll find that there is a huge discrepiency between Digg’s Kevin Rose and Del.icio.us’s Joshua Schachter.

• Kevin Rose : 994,000
• Joshua Schachter : 310,000

Why? There are many reasons for this, besides Digg still being somewhat independently owned and operated:

• Kevin Rose takes full advantage of the Internet’s Cult of Personality by throwing himself in the media spotlight while Joshua is more of a behind the scenes master of technology.
• Kevin Rose was a quasi-celebrity before Digg because of his past at TechTV.
• Digg users connect to Kevin and the other Diggers, via the videocast “TV show” Diggnation.
• Digg fills its remnant ad space with links and promotions for Diggnation, which reenforces Kevin’s popularity.
• Digg throws huge parties like their Million User Celebration (1.5 months after the announcement) complete with Digg DJ’s, which makes the Del.icio.us parties seem quite tame and overshadowed by Yahoo! branding.

So, if Del.icio.us stands for Bookmarking, Sharing and Discovery, and Digg stands for Buzz, Partying and Traffic, which service will have a longterm appeal?

Kevin Newcomb reported earlier on Google's earnings announcement, adding to the never ending string of news from the Googleverse - most recently including the massive DoubleClick acquisition, and the Clear Channel radio ad distribution deal.

It's interesting to note how Google continues to invest in extending its advertising reach to include more formats and mediums. It clearly wants to become a one stop shop for advertisers of all sizes and in all mediums.

The vast majority of its revenues still come from search and the company has received some scrutiny for its forays into these other media, as Kevin Newcomb pointed out (not to mention the antitrust scrutiny it is starting to face for its level of control in the advertising world).

Stephen Colbert's viewers, who have already been banned by Wikipedia, have now mastered the art of googlebombing. If you conduct a search on Google for giant brass balls, The Colbert Nation ranks #1. If you search for the greatest living American, ColbertNation.com ranks #1. And if you search for truthiness, Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia ranks #5.

For now, I’m just going to say “hot damn.” The smart folks on the webmaster console team have migrated Google’s url removal tool into the webmaster console. Along the way, it’s picking up a *lot* of nice new functionality. I’ll talk about it more pretty soon, because I have a fun story to tell, but in the mean time you can read more about it from the official webmaster blog or on Search Engine Land.

Yah!