Source:selfseo.com

Searchers would never say no to something that would make their work a lot easier. With the coming of Sphere – the latest blog search engine, it promises to help users discover high-quality, relevant and timely blog posts with the use of its advanced search algorithm. It aims to deliver results far better than other existing blog search services.

The People behind Sphere

Sphere was founded by Tony Conrad, Martin Remy, Steve Nieker and Toni Schneider to assist readers in their discovery of relevant blog content as well as encourage more people to read blogs or be bloggers themselves. Investors who helped Sphere get started include Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winston, Phil Black, Vince Vanelli and Will Hearst. Its partners and capitalists, on the other hand include Darcy Bentley of Hearst Publishing and Venetia Kontogouris of Trident Capital.

This blog search engine had a very successful first private beta release in late 2005. Its success can be attributed to Martin Remy and Steve Nieker who have worked on blog and content matching technology for a long time. It also has for its advisors the likes of Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automatic/WordPress and a blog content tool leader; Mary Hodder, founder/CEO of Dabble and a blog user experience expert; and Scott Kurnit, founder and former CEO of http://About.com who was instrumental in creating a work community there.

The feedback gained from the well received private beta was used to add some advanced and intuitive features. Sphere is based in San Francisco but members of the team work virtually from other places like Seattle, Denver, Vancouver, New York, Phoenix and the Bay Area. It highly recommends its own Sphere Blog for information regarding ongoing updates.

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By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

For those of you who have been following the story of the rather odd message posted on the Google Blog Friday evening which read;

Google Click-to-Call project cancelled

10/07/2006 05:07:34 PM
After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.

This message has been translated using Google language tools.

The post appeared on the Official Google Blog, then was quickly deleted, leading to suspicion that a flaw in Blogger led to the hoax.

Google has now confirmed that this is the case, from the (real) Official Google Blog:

About that fake post

10/08/2006 01:52:00 PM
Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog last night, claiming that we’ve discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we’re pleased with the results thus far.

Spread the word:bookmark it/ readit

Source: sitepronews.com

Many website owners and SEOs (search engine optimizers) believe that trading links is the most effective way to build the hundreds of links necessary for good search-engine ranking. But there’s another way to build links that deserves your attention: content distribution. A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the backlink is included in an "author’s resource box," which is a brief "about the author" paragraph promoting the author’s site.

Content distribution has usually been thought of as a website promotion strategy rather than an SEO or link-building strategy. But there are good reasons for adding content distribution to your SEO toolkit.

SEO Benefits of Distributing Content vs. Reciprocal Linking Alone

• Links come faster. You send an email with your article to a relevant website owner. That’s it. No adding links to your site and then checking and re-checking for compliance. That means you can get more links from the time and resources you spend on link-building.
• Links are not always available through reciprocal linking. Many website owners simply refuse to do reciprocal linking. Content distribution is one way to reach this large segment of website owners.
• Links are one-way. Many SEO experts believe that reciprocal links may be "dampened" by the search engines; i.e., they will not help you rank as high as one-way links. Of course, reciprocal links are still valuable, there’s a just a question of how valuable they really are.
• Links per page are fewer. Many SEO experts believe that the higher the number of links per page, the less SEO value each link has. When a website publishes an article, the author’s backlink is often the only live link to another website on that page.

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