Back From Vacation

I’m back from vacation and just settling in. Look for posts again most likely next week. I’ve been at Yellowstone National Park with my family. What a super great place to visit. I’ll have a free screen saver out for free download in the next day or so. I’ll keep you posted.

Back From Vacation

I’m B-a-a-ck! I have been on vacation with my family in Yellowstone National Park. In just a day or so, I will have available for free download a screen saver with beautiful photos of the country out there.

I long for the mountains. The country there is really beautiful and we actually even had snow there one day.

I am just now getting back in the saddle so look for the screen saver in the next day or so.

Improving Web Visibility with Comments on Blogs

Have you searched for your own business on the Web lately? If you are an online entrepreneur in the tech industry, it is important to monitor what appears about you and your business online.

I did a search yesterday and found it highly interesting that posts to blogs and forums that I had made this past year actually ranked on queries for my name and business. That being said, it is important to stay on top in your industry and keep your name in front.

What I do is follow some of the top blogs and forums in my industry and when I see a topic that I like, I do take time to create an interesting and thoughtful response. Make sure if you are using this strategy that you only post and take time on the sites that will really help you, like Matt Cutts blog, The MSN Search Blog, Search Engine Watch, or even SearchEngine Land blogs. But remember what you write lasts forever.

Even if I disagree with an author, my policy has always been to not flame someone but to honor their point of view and then to layout my own. You can read my comments to the privacy issue on Google on this Matt Cutts post or our comments at Search Engine Land here as well.

Once you start to monitor your own business and name placement on Google, you will see the real value for taking time to comment on high profile posts and always point back to your own site as this is the perk for leaving your comment on top sites. Not only will you learn something and stay abreast of what is happening in your industry, but you will create quality inbound links to your website from authoritative and popular websites.

Sharing My OPML

Want to know what sites and blogs I watch in the industry. Click the post title to grab my OPML file and then set up a My Live account.

For our review on My Live visit our sister blog here no need to repeat that info. Some of the sites that I have found on blogging are really great resources. I like the Blog Herald and Blog Tutorials. They are well written and have an interesting point of view. If you have an OPML that you’d like to share, post it on your blog and then send me a link.

Check to See If Someone Has Snatched Your Blog Content

A blog reader at my other blog Web-World Watch, left this link http://www.copyscape.com/ on a post that spoke about Google dinging sites for showing duplicate content.

I entered my own blog address in this tool, and found that there were sites that had actually snatched my own blog content verbatim and had not supplied a link back or even had identified me as the author. In fact they had passed the content off as their own, and had selected some of my hottest traffic posts!

I have notified them of copyright infringement! You should check your own content to see if you have a similar problem. If you are like me, you don’t mind if others quote you, even show one or two paragraphs of your post and link back to read the full content, or even contact you for approval, but to simply snatch content and provide no links back and pass the content off as their own intellectual property? Very bad form!

The issue on duplicate content that Google is particularly targeting in one of their most recent patent disclosures is simply this case in point. Who should get the credit for duplicate content? Google is developing a way to identify the author of content just in a case like this. I would imagine that this will revolve around the initial post date recorded by the web server and a factor of a match to other content and writing style on the site. Eventually I am looking to the development of a trust certification for site owner to embed on their page that tags their content for Google.

In the meantime, if you are scraping someone else’s content from their blog, please stop! It’s time to create your own, and if you aren’t then check to see if someone is at Copyscape.com.