This week the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google made a clear statement saying that any type of paid or exchanged link is almost as good as no link.

Their general advice:

Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

They mention that tactics like linkbait and good content should be some of the primary things that you focus on instead.  Anything that helps improve the content on your site such that it contributes something to the greater community should give others a reason to link to you.  Obviously any links you earn are still important, it’s just paid or exchanged links that are not really useful.

One thing that users should keep in mind, however… All search engines are not created equal. What doesn’t work in Google, sometimes works in Yahoo.

Happy SEOing.

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Well we’re definitely in the home stretch of the e-commerce super-bowl season right now. It’s starting to become a well known e-commerce fact that Monday’s are typically the busiest e-commerce day of the week. An interesting commentary on society I’m sure - rather than facing the doldrums of another week at work, we go to the office, log on and…start shopping! This year is especially interesting, as the last Monday of the season falls a full week away from Christmas - just enough time to get that Playstation 3 by ground shipping. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers take that risk on Monday and break some e-commerce records.

Anyway, as promised in my last post, today I thought I’d talk a little about security, specifically as it applies to our Merchant and Pro products. I’m not going to pull a CNN here and broadcast exact specifics (”as you can see here, the 3rd cavalry is going to launch their surprise attack on this position in exactly 10 minutes…”), but there is a high level discussion we can have here that doesn’t give away the secret sauce.

First of all, let me stress that security of our data is something we take very seriously here at CA. Is any system foolproof? Of course not, we’d be fools to think otherwise. We do however use well established industry practices to secure your data, and have subjected ourselves to numerous internal and external security audits to validate our practices. With that said, we are always working to get even better.

Physical Security
First and foremost, there are the servers themselves. Our servers aren’t hanging out in a garage or under Marshall Smith’s desk, they live in a dedicated data center. If you’ve never seen a datacenter, they look a lot like this. If there’s a part a part of reality that’s straight out of a sci-fi movie, it’s a data center. Walking into one you could easily convince yourself that computers have taken over the world and you are the last human on earth. Time to wakeup and feed your master.

Here’s a picture of a Google Data Center I found on, well Google:

(more…)

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eBay’s Trust and Safety team is charged with ensuring a safe, global trading marketplace and keeping the bad guys (fraudsters, spammers, counterfeiters) at bay. Seems like the holidays are putting TnS into a fighting spirit with several new initiatives under way.

Earlier this month, as announced by eBay’s Rob Chestnut, eBay began rolling out its Safeguarding Member IDs project (”Buyer Anonymizer Ray Gun” as a project name came in as a close second) on eBay Motors for listings with a bid of $200 or higher (with plans to extend this to eBay.com in early 2007). Anyone but the seller will now only see anonymized bidder information, making it impossible for phishers to scam user IDs from unsuspecting eBay buyers (most prominently through fake Second Chance Offers).

1. On the bid history page for each listing we’ll replace User IDs with aliases (such as Bidder 1, Bidder 2 and Bidder 3) in the order that bidders place their first bid.
2. In My eBay, members will no longer have access to the high-bidder column from bid and watch tables.
3. On the item page, you’ll only be able to see the high-bidder ID if you are the signed-in seller of the item or the signed-in high bidder.
4. Through the Advanced Search by Bidder link, we’ll only show completed listings within the last 30 days.

Now there are signs that eBay is moving to the next frontier of consumer concern: counterfeiting. Our very own Scot Wingo reports that eBay is planning some significant changes possibly this week to make selling of counterfeit goods much more difficult:

1. Paypal verification will be required to list more than one item that is often counterfeited – don’t have to accept paypal, just have to be verified. This will give ebay a higher level of knowledge of the seller (presumably allowing them to track bad guys better and stop them from opening account after account with different basic info).
2. Seller review – sellers will be limited to listing a small number of items until the sellers account has undergone an initial review. Once you list an item, you will go under review (by TnS I’m guessing - they are going to look for past issues I’m betting to gauge the seller’s trustable).
3. 1-3 day listings done - Elimination of 1 and 3 day listings of these items that are often counterfeited by all sellers.
4. Restricting of cross-border trade - HK/china specifically (e.g. won’t be able to sell to china from Europe, from China to Europe, etc. (China is the source of lots of counterfeits from what I’ve heard).

All very good steps towards building a better, safer and stronger marketplace.

Quick update (11/29): Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes has a good write-up of these changes and also comments from eBay staff on why these changes are being made.

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eBay is holding a 15p insertion day on the 28th of November.  This is an interesting longer pre-announcement for a listing promotion than I’ve ever seen before.  CA UK customers, this should give you plenty of time to really schedule up some big listings.

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Over on eBay strategies we have details and reviews of the new eBay TV ads.

CA customers - what’s your most/least favorite ad and do you think they will impact your holiday sales?

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