(Explore To) WebLog

A blog... what else?

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Baidu Rocks!

We recently sent an email to Baidu about crawl activity being particularly aggressive given that we are an english language site and are seeing no benefit of that crawl activity translating into traffic.

The response is below and well, we think it's absolutely unique from a search engine in the level of detail and the crafting of the response, (Ever tried emailing Google or Bing? Good luck!).

Firstly, our email:

Hi Baidu,

We've tried to signal that we don't wish to be crawled by Baidu, (Aggressive crawling seen but not benefit, (No traffic down-streaming)).

Unfortunately, you appear to ignore robots.txt? 

See: http://www.explore.to/robots.txt

# Baidu [zai hui] User-agent: Baiduspider Disallow: /

Anyway, we feel forced to direct the Baidu crawler to our 404 pages as the only way we know how to potentially halt the crawl.

Any further guidance would be appreciated.

The response from Baidu:

Dear Simon,

Thank you for your email.

Our spider do honor robots file. However, the DNS setting updates in a certain rate that your robots.txt might not be activated immediately. And we are sorry about the delay.

During the lag, it seems that you have redirected our spider to crawl 404 pages, making our spider unable to report back your robots file and explaining why our spider has yet stopped, (Dope! My fault)

The team has discussed your case. Baidu cherishes the opportunity to present every best website and endeavors to offer excellent user experience to  hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Therefore, we would like to have your website and hereby ask your permission on setting a proper crawling frequency.

According to our crawling log, we maintain about X thousand hits per day, would it be ok if we scale it back to about X thousand daily?

Or could you inform us a proper crawling frequency so that we could make special adjustment for your site?

Please write to tell us your opinion on the proposal. If you still not happy about the access of baidu spider, we would set our spider DISFOLLOW your website then, as requested.

We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

X, X

Baidu Spider Team

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Hacking local. Exciting changes coming soon...

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Three Celebrity Owned Businesses on Explore.To

1. Named after baseball players who've hit 40 home runs and stolen 40 bases in one season, 40/40 draws attractive professionals with a love of sports and Jay-Z. Success, however, has not been a constant for Jay-Z, selling off a failed Las Vegas branch in 2008.

http://www.explore.to/listing/3261364/40-40-club.html

2. Investors such as Celine Dion & Andre Agassi have ensured this Caesar’s Palace nightclub is one of the hottest in town.

http://www.explore.to/listing/12574961/pure-nightclub.html

3. Justin Timberlake's Memphis roots-tracing barbeque joint. The singer/actor/restauranteur/investor is bringing sexy back, baby back…ribs, that is...

http://www.explore.to/listing/8229144/southern-hospitality.html

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What a year so far in 2012 for Google

This has to be the worst year for Google so far. Here's a brief review of the top stories from around the web.

Chrome paid links scandal

In summary: Paying Bloggers to write posts about the Chrome browser. In direct violation of it's own policies.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/02/chrome-sponsored-posts/

Google+ Outcry, (Google + force feeding = Search Plus Your World)

In summary: Recommendations from people within your circles, or people you might know, now appear front and center in SERPs, (Search engine results pages). Autosuggest skewing towards G+ pages and in perhaps the worst abuse I've seen, looping content from third parties into G+ in can what only be described as, "Brand Arbitrage". See an example query for the, "New York Times".

See: http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+times&adtest=on&hl=en&gl=US&pws=0

Is it really what users want when they click what appears to be an article link to be fed into G+? Hard to defend.

Twitter is the most vocal of all opponents:

http://techland.time.com/2012/01/12/is-googles-social-search-anti-competitive-ftc-complaint-looms/

Caught stealing unauthorized third party data for sales calls, (Too much Kenyan coffee)

In summary: Google allegedly selling services into a customer base of Kenyas largest business directory without authorization in a, "Scrape & Sell" operation. Scrape is a little harsh though as it does appear to be a team of humans.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/01/13/busted-google-gets-caught-scraping-kenyas-biggest-business-listings-database/

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/

It shouldn't be news to readers that Google are known within the IYP, (Internet Yellow Pages) industry to scrape and seed, (Create places pages from citation data and then seed this above the fold to get business owners to claim)... at least I hope not, it's been going on for years... allegedly.

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Mashup of the day @ programmableweb.com :-)

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3 top core digital predictions for local SMBs in 2012

1. You'll embrace Facebook, (With open arms coming from Facebook).

Facebook currently doesn’t have a good product for SMBs though there is a desire to become a “soup to nuts” platform for small merchants and advertisers. Facebook will aggressively push credits to SMBs for Facebook ads in the hope that SMBs understand the relationship between ads and fans.

2. Sales calls will increase, (Your going to spend a lot more time fielding sales calls)

That's right... more marketing towards your business from online lead providers. The aggressive competition between lead resellers/providers or/and daily deal offerings for your advertising dollars will be fierce. Having a marketing plan and budget will help you to avoid temptations to spend without a clear ROI on, "flavor of the month".

3. Your going to begin to or demand more mobile marketing

Your aware of the need to market your business to mobile users, all the consumer trends tell you this. But it's a confusing landscape. Solution providers for mobile marketing will attempt to cut through the noise for you and we expect a couple of leaders to arise from simplifying the landscape. Though, for you, it will be another fragmentation of what is already a noisy and confusing space to manage, (Mobile, Social, Local).

As always at Explore To, we'll focus on lead generation for our business owners with a multipronged approach from wherever delivers value so we can keep our barriers of entry low.

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Reach...

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New product feature, "Who links to this page" has gone live on Explore To, implemented using the Google Analytics API.

We think sites that link to business profile pages should be recognized, as well as providing useful links to users.

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Three business ideas we love on Explore.To

Three hand picked business ideas from Explore To

1. Tiger Time Lawn Care

Get your lawn mowed via horticulturalists in bikinis...

http://www.explore.to/listing/3569245/tiger-time-lawn-care.html

2. Aphrodisiac Ice Cream

Yep - South Beach Bikinis serving ice cream from a truck, (Complete with stripper poles)

http://www.explore.to/listing/13985462/aphrodisiac-ice-cream.html

3. Prairie Tumbleweed Farm

(We've added this third one in to show we aren't just attracted to business ideas involving gratuitous partial nudity)

Yes - You can purchase Tumbleweed from this farm.

Giant Tumbleweed pictured below, (Prices starting at $15.00 + Shipping)

http://www.explore.to/listing/13985463/prairie-tumbleweed-farm.html

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We are currently in the process of enriching data on Explore.To and shortly we'll be publishing related Tweets plus a Flickr image gallery as part of a phased enrichment release process, (Yes, lots more exciting third party data will be pulled in over time).

Thanks to the geo function of both APIs and some logic to reduce the amount of off-topic Tweets and images, we really hope these both prove to be a useful feature for users.

Sneek Peek here...

Live here

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Google & Facebook Comments

Google now has the ability to crawl & index Facebook comments. So, if you've been against implementing Facebook comments because you wouldn't have previously seen the SEO benefit, time for a review.

Via http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-indexes-facebook-comments/20295/

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Coming soon...

ERI, (Explore Rank Influencer). Explore To will be the first local search engine to use Facebook, "Likes" as a ranking factor for it's organic results.

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Padfone! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

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Facebook Comments for SEO, (Making them visible to search engines)

Updated: See http://exploreto.tumblr.com/post/12237648363/google-facebook-comments

I recently commented over at Dragon Blogger about the ability site owners have of making Facebook Comments visible to SEs via the OGP with an invisible DIV layer.

We've done the development work and will release it live on Explore To within the next month or so.

The question raised was is there a Wordpress plugin for this? As far as I know, no. However, we are happy to do this if there's a reasonable amount of demand for it.

Hence this post.

If you'd like to see a Wordpress plugin to make Facebook comments SEO friendly, comment on or tweet this post and if we see 10+ of either... we build...

(Before anyone comments on this being, "Blackhat" no, it's not, it's exactly the same content presented to users. Period.).

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Google is Doping the Horses

“You run the racetrack, own the racetrack, you didn’t have horses for a while but now you do and your horses seem to be winning.”

- Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., comparing Google to a horse race

Antitrust Senate hearing on Capitol Hill, (Sept. 2011).

In the above screenshot Google Plus ranks number seven for a high volume, "Who" query, "Guy Kawasaki". There is no algorithmic justification for this positioning that I'm aware of excepting, "Doping".

The LinkedIn page, pushed to position 8, has 52 quality inbound linking domains and the Plus profile 0. From what we can gather, apart from an XML sitemap, there is no crawlable structure for Google +, (The XML sitemap on it's own isn't enough to achieve this kind of ranking).

Thin content is also something we are acutely aware of as being disliked by Google. Not so here:

Search for Mark Zuckerburg

(His G+ profile has almost no content...)

Suspiciously visible...

Larry Page

Sergey Brin

Well searched for, well aged tech somebodys, (With lots of aged and well linked first and second page results, but why the new kid Google+ ranking on first page?)

Pete Cashmore (Cute Guy, founder of Mashable)

Robert Scoble (Famous for...what?)

Arianna Huffington (Editor of a news spam site)

I've seen hundreds of other examples, but I think these high profile ones are a good demonstration of doping.

Comments please. Discussion happening here as well.

[exploreto-blog]

Maps Ping Pong, (New product feature at http://www.explore.to).

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Huffingtonpost.com 188 articles on Steve Jobs Death

Abominable editorial frenzy from the Huffington Post. Almost 200 articles is not a tribute, it's about profiteering from death by pumping out articles for SEO and Google News.