If you don’t know what sanctioned brand bidding is, it is where merchants allow you to bid on their brand terms. eg :

Next

What is different about closed groups is the old school network aproach where a merchant invites closed groups only to bid on brand type terms. The argument is that people in these groups will only do the basics, why bother doing any more there is no competition (never minid the affiliates with decent sites who are now having their cookies overwritten even though they built real traffic).

Anyway to cut a long story short, i got an email of DGM today about Icebuyer

“Icebuyer will be giving one affiliate the rights to bid on the brand name ‘Icebuyer’, and on this term and generic terms link directly through to the Icebuyer website, using the domain name www.icebuyer.co.uk. This privilege will be awarded to the affiliate that drives the most valid sales over the period from launch until 30 June 2008.”

That last line is a step in the right direction. So now an affiliate who drives traffic will be rewarded, not just part of the old boys network.

I am still on the fence on this one, but that’s because it wont shaft anything I do really.

Good work Icubuyer for going this route you will piss off less people this way.

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There is a blog that I read, and I urge more of you to read it too.

It is the Hacker Webzine

Recently two posts have really caught my eye. Normally I try to preach good practice in code sanitasation and generally protecting yourself when it come to Google but the Hacker Webzine have recently covered checking for update / hacked files and more recently using htaccess as a webapplication firewall.

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This is an interesting result especially in the hotting up sector of reputation management.

“Thus, the Panel concludes that a domain name is ‘identical or confusingly similar’ to a trademark for purposes of the Policy when the domain name includes the trademark, or a confusingly similar approximation, regardless of the other terms in the domain name. In other words, the issue under the first factor is not whether the domain name causes confusion as to source (a factor more appropriately considered in connection with the legitimacy of interest and bad faith factors), but instead whether the mark and domain name, when directly compared, have confusing similarity,”

To read where the story broke try Out Law

To view the full WIPO ruling click this that link WIPO Ruling

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Take a look at the options available from only including certain tags in the mix and adding your own stopwords.

It does not look the prettiest in terms of columns, but it is a fine bit of programming. A fine bit of programming I cannot take credit for. For that you will have to look to Brotherhood of Lan.

Try it here >> KWDA

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Google could flip the whole web for the better simply by including the part that make sites rank well in Google Accessible Search

Why should you give a damn?

Well there are organisations that are taking to the fight to the large corporates , where Target got targeted and the court ruled that:

“The court has ruled that “clicks” as well as “bricks”, are covered by the US Americans Disability Act (ADA) and E- commerce is now a “place of public accommodation”.

Now you may be an SEO for a company as large as Target and I fell that in that role it is your duty to point out potential pit falls of discriminating. If you can’t get it past the committee get it noted on recored becasue someone will get the bullet one day, or if you can do something about it, do it. It is not a fruitless task, a massive proportion accessibility is indeed top level on page SEO. Plus don’t forget you can shout about it.

The point is, and if you have not worked this out yet, when cases of website discrimination get to court you don’t want it to be your bad press and problem. So how about this:

Open dare to Google: I dare you Google to include website accessibility and web standards into the main search algo and publicly say so.

Open dare to SEO’s: I dare you not to do anything about accessibility when Google bring in the algo changes!

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Go on, kill five minutes…..

Play Debris AKA Log Jam

If you want to find out more about Peg then take a look at Mobobo

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As the title of this post says, at this point I think Michael Gray is talking shite when he says that bloggers, unless uber big names, should quit blogging as they are just regurgitating the already over blogged about news.

Maybe it is rather nice bit of linkbait, but like every man in the known world, if you see a sign that says “wet paint” you have to touch it, or “hot surface” you have to try it to see if it really is hot.

Well GW says that seo bloggers should step away from the keyboard, here’s why you should not (quick thoughts):

1. It’s your right to blog, to do whatever you like.
2. You should not be put off by a killjoy.
3. You have to start somewhere, if you are serious and passionate about something then don’t let anyone turn you off.
4. People write in different styles and have different hooks, find your hook and write (if you can be arsed), and some people will prefer your coverage of the same old news. I have canned people from my feed readers because they simply bore me!
5. Stick to your guns, all the successful people I know have focus and have not deviated from what they wanted to do, even in the face of the nay sayers.
6. Have fun!
7. If they don’t like you they can turn your feed off or read somewhere else, so screw em!

Now here is a disclaimer, I may have just fallen for the link bait, and the reason I have bitten is that I respect GW immensely, always have, so when someone you respect talks poo you need to prod them.

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When I say questionable I mean it can be picked to bits in minutes (well maybe 10’s of minutes)

Imagine my surprise when a mate showed me an email that he had received as part of his alerts system that showed a page with lots of lovely text links to different high profile sites. Well on it’s own not really that harsh, but couple that with another alert about a rather large company, lets call them vacationautos signing up with a fictitious search agency, let’s call them bluelight. Add into the mix how the vacactionautos has recently been seen in a highly prized search space, one it has never been seen in before.

How do we know the links were placed there by the agency? Well the links to all the other client sites is teeny weeny clue, plus a little digging.
The moral of this story if you are a search agency try not to get greedy by thinking you can link to clients in bulk from the same network. If you truly value your clients I think you should NOT shout about having them, if you are good you wont need to say you do SEO for XYZ. There have been a number of mates who have had clients that a handful of people have been able to rip apart their SEO.

If you are a person/org looking for an SEO, then ask lots of questions, make sure they are doing nothing and will admit to it. True enough you cannot control Google so you really have no cast iron guarantees, but you can get some cast iron assurances.

Above all, remember the saying, loose lips sink ships!

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SEO Roadshow 2008

If you don’t know what it is all about take a peek at SEO Roadshow Copenhagen

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If he can get past the boredom his blog will be a good place to get some good opinions on what is going on the aff/merchant and business world.

Take a look …Doug’s Mouthpiece

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