Archive for March, 2008

Google Slamming Social Network Site Links

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Google announced recently that it would be discounting links for social networking sites in an apparent effort to negate those grey hat tactics by internet marketers to boost their page rankings by opening numerous account on social bookmarking sites and linking to their websites.

After reading this I googled my name to see if all my articles were showing up – surprisingly, I noticed about an 80 percent decrease in results for my name and all my article links AND all my legitimate social networking links no longer show up in search results.

Have Google over-stepped, and as a result have obliterated legitimate links.

I have not engaged in sly social networking practices, and had legitimate social network accounts for my internet business as well as my consulting practice – these have now all disappeared from search results.

Also, any profile I built around legitimate articles have also faded into ether.

You have gone way too far Google – most companies now use Google Search as a standard business practice to search profiles of prospective employees, consultants, product vendors and service providers.

You have effectively invalidated that option – good move – or what?

Your thoughts!

Esmart

Posted in Google, Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Internet Marketing Holding Ground During Recession

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Like most business people, you have probably been wondering how you will fare if the USA [and the rest of the world] slip into a deep depression.
Certainly some industries are more recession proof that others, some even perform better during such times.

A few days ago, Media Week published some welcoming news for Internet Marketers. Their forecasts for e-commerce business for 2008 predict e-commerce sales in 2008 will increase by 23 percent in the United States.

Reports from eMarketer project similar growth, based on a global increase in e-commerce of11.8 percent. This is typical of almost any other publication you can find on fact doing business on the internet. There seems to be no sign that e-commerce will slow down any time soon.

In amongst tough economic times, with most industries forecasting significant decline, IM appears to be one of the only industries demonstrating growth today.

So can you consider the internet businesses to be recession-proof?

A lot of that depends upon how well you manage your business, and which of the many streams of making money online you are involved in. Like any share portfolio – diversification is the key.

The recession is likely to hit employment before too long – and that means an increase in the numbers of people looking to make money from other avenues – and online is one of them.

This is going to be a time of sorting out for may Internet business owners – you need to work smarter than the next guy to retain your market share. That makes it a good time to revisit all the basics of Internet Marketing, and tidy up any loose areas of your strategy or operations.

Remember – you don’t have to be brilliant or perfect, you just have to be better than the next guy [or gal!]

Esmart

Posted in Business Systems, Internet Marketing, Stragegy, eCommerce | No Comments »