Google is handing out a Halloween treat to Web developers today by making its OpenSocial common API available. With OpenSocial, developers will be able to write one application that can be distributed in multiple Web sites and social networks, if they go along with it of course.
Posted by rebeccaHappy Halloween, everyone! We here at SEOmoz are all dressed as internet marketers! Wheee! Did you adequately prepare for the holiday? Have your costume picked out and ready to go? Pumpkins carved into spooky jack-o-lanterns? Decorations put up? Candy purchased (none of those healthy granola bars, or your house’ll get egged)? Site optimized for all that lovely holiday traffic? No? Uh oh…
Internet fraudsters have taken aim at the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that’s waged campaigns to help people avoid e-mail scams.
Posted by rebeccaLet me walk you through my morning thus far. I come into the office, log on to Trillian, and start working. I receive an IM from an SEO who makes some small talk before getting to the point: he wants me to digg/reddit about four stories. I click on the links and (pay attention here) vote for the ones I thought were interesting. I keep working. I notice that I get several email notifications from Digg, that "so and so has sent you a shout!" I click on them and see that I received several shouts from two users for the same story. And the shouts keep coming, about thirty minutes apart (about as frequent and pleasant as a pregnant woman’s contractions, I bet). At this point, I’m getting a bit irritated and disable the shout feature on my Digg profile.
Posted by Dr. PeteRecently, I made the difficult decision to change the domain name of my blog and consulting website. It had to be done; the old name just didn’t make sense anymore. No one could spell it, and it was terrible for SEO. Of course, I knew all of the rules of successful 301 redirection in theory, but when it came to putting theory into practice, I found myself dreading pulling the switch.
There have been plenty of good articles on SEOmoz and elsewhere about the technical aspects of 301 redirection, but I felt a lot of uncertainty about the timeline of re-establishing my presence on Google (inbound links, PR, etc.). So, I decided to track my progress daily, mostly to calm my own paranoia, but also as a bit of a case study in what a 301 redirection process looks like. I finally finished collecting data when my PageRank was established over the weekend, and this article is a recap of my experience.
Posted by Mel GrayJust a brief update to let everyone know that we now have a Premium Content RSS Feed available.
This feed will alert you when new premium content becomes available.
Posted by rebeccaTo cap off this gray, dreary Monday (in Seattle, anyway), I thought I’d share a hodgepodge of news, tidbits, and other things that have been brought to my attention by bloggers and colleagues lately:
Posted by JaneCoplandSeattle-based wiki website Wetpaint has always done things a little differently to most wiki providers. With a highly user-friendly interface, Wetpaint lets even the most technically-uninclined people create websites. The sites, which are of course all wikis, can either be hosted at Wetpaint or on a separate domain. While the company doesn’t appear to have any plans to take its marketing campaigns to television yet, it has released seven videos on YouTube that fall into a relatively new breed of viral marketing. These videos use professional studios and teams, just like made-for-television commercials. However, they’re meant for online eyes only.
Posted by randfishFirst things first - go watch this video of Amanda Camp explaining her job at Google’s Webmaster Central. There’s a critical lesson in her 90 seconds on tape that’s incredibly revealing. If you listen carefully, what Amanda’s saying is, "yes, we read your comments, we read your questions, we look at all your spam reports, but we don’t try to help you - at least not you,the individual. We try to take all that data and create a product, a tool, an algorithm, a system that can help everyone who has that problem." I’d urge you to think about this paradigm inside Google next time you’re wondering why no one there is banning your competitor for the spammy links you reported.
Oh yeah, we’re also featured in the Seattle Times this morning - very exciting stuff 
OK - on to the questions! Last week, I was overwhelmed to see how many questions folks had for me. I think realistically, I’ll do 2-3 posts to try to tackle them all. I put together the first set on my just completed flight from Seattle to Stockholm:
Are you earning your money only by SEO for customers? Or you have other sites with advertising to make money online? If yes, what sites?
Alleged spyware purveyor Direct Revenue is kaput. Notices on the firm’s sites, direct-revenue.com and bestoffersnetworks.com, state, “Best Offers and Direct Revenue have ceased operations.”