Bebo Goes European

Bebo is launching local-language versions of its social networking site in five European countries, offering premium video content via media partners, the company said Monday.

Image via CrunchBase

Bebo will offer sites in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as it seeks to enlarge its user base. It also plans to leverage its Open Media technology, which allows media companies to distribute content on Bebo's network.

Bebo was bought by AOL in March 2008 for US$850 million as part of AOL's plan to move away from being an ISP and more of an advertising-focused content provider.

Bebo has been strongest in the U.K. market and has about 22 million unique visitors per month, according to January figures from ComScore, However, Bebo lags in user numbers behind social networking giants Facebook and MySpace.


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Thief Uses Google Earth To Nick Lead Roofs

In an incident which further sparked concerns over the misuse of Google Earth application for felonious purposes, a thief stole lead worth a whopping £100,000 from the roofs of the buildings, by using the application to get the detailed view of these listed buildings.

Image via CrunchBase

Berge used the application to figure out lead roofs with their darker colours, and made £44,500 by selling around 44.6-tonnes of lead during his six months long spree, which started from September to February.

The roofs of Sutton High School for Girls, Croydon Parish Church, and Honeywood Museum in Carshalton were all looted. Berge is sentenced to eight months in jail, suspended for a couple of years, after he confessed involvement in as many as 30 offences.

The court was told that Berge, along with his accomplices, meticulously planned the thefts, as he went to site equipped with the necessary equipment, such as ladders and abseiling ropes, to plunder the roofs, and even stole a car to make a speedy escape.

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Using SEO to Manage Your Online Reputation

Is there a page you don't like about your company on the web? The best way to "take care" of undesirable material with a high organic ranking is through search engine optimization, writes SEOmoz.

Image via CrunchBase

Google has posted advice on how to remove unwanted pages, but its strategy is mostly to contact the person who put up the unwanted webpage and trying to convince them to modify and maybe remove it, with the option of taking the request to court if the page contains something illegal.

But there is a third method – left wanting in Google's response - that involves using SEO to help with reputation management. Unfortunately, it is neither easy nor cheap.

The three main components of an SEO-fueled reputation management campaign:

1. Identify which keywords produce prominently listed and undesirable results.
Create content on multiple sites that will outrank the negative content, keeping in mind that Google generally only lists a maximum of two pages from a single domain on a given results page.

2. Optimize those pages with content & links to achieve rankings higher than the negative content, thus "pushing it down" to the 2nd page of results (or further).

3. To create content with the aim of outranking a negative result, leverage as many positive "pre-existing" conditions as possible.



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Ask.com Joins Canonical Trio

It looks like the precedence has been set and Ask.com has opted to follow Google, Yahoo, and MSN in their quest to make issues raised by content duplication a thing of the past.

I recently wrote a post showing how website owners can take advantage of the new 'Canonical Links' to extract maximum value out of duplicated content.


Yesterday Ask.com announced their intention to join the big three through their official blog, in which Yufan Hu of Ask.com says: "The 'canonical' feature represents a timely, relevant, and positive partnership between major search engines. It is a step to ensuring more consistency with regard to treatment of duplicates among all of the engines. It will also put more control into the hands of site designers over how their sites are represented within the search indexes.

You can read the full announcement in their blog post entitled 'Ask is Going Canonical'

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Canonical Links and Content Duplication

For a long time now, search engines have been implementing stringent measures to stop website owners manipulating rankings through content duplication. The way the Internet has evolved over the recent years however, has meant that some sites have been running the risk of being unfairly penalised for content duplication caused more by the technology they are using rather than their intent.

In an effort to address this, the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) decided last week to support a common standard which aims to eradicate duplicate URLs within a site.

Image via CrunchBase

The standard being introduced is very simple, and consists of no more than nominating a single URL (or "canonical" location if you're a search engine) and defining this on all other URLs where the same content is replicated.

Take the following URLs as an example:

http://www.my-company.com/my-products/product-details.aspx?id=0101&source=google
http://www.my-company.com/my-products/product-details.aspx?id=0101&source=yahoo
http://www.my-company.com/my-products/sun-glasses.aspx

These three URLs will display exactly the same content even though the page has three very distinct URL locations based on the origin of the visit and its optimisation.

The agreed standard requires no more than the following syntax being implemented within the <HEAD> section of the two dynamic URLs.

<link href="http://www.my-company.com/my-products/sun-glasses.aspx" rel="canonical"/>

Doing this, will make search engines aware of the preferred URL and pass on any PageRank and link equity the dynamic URLs may have gained across to the chosen URL.

Google guru Matt Cutts explains Canonical Linking on an interview for WebProNews. You can also find out more directly from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

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And the Brit Award goes to... Twitter!

Having spent last night sat in front of the TV watching the Brits, I begun to wonder how many people would be forming their own opinions based on what we liked and what we didn't.

With the help of Twitter, it didn't take long this morning for me to find out what my friends through of it, and I was intrigued by the mixed views on the event.

Image via CrunchBase

Having drawn my own conclusions last night, I wondered if the mix reaction was only based on my friends or whether this was in fact a true representation of the public in general.

Having sent myself on a quest to find this out, Twitter itself proved to be the answer to my question.

To get a full picture of what people using Twitter (even those you're not yet following) thought about the show, type "brits" in the Twitter Search box or alternatively see the results here.


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Is Google Chrome In Need of a Polish?

I don't know about you, but after becoming used to Google's highly useful and free tools, I've been left feeling somewhat disappointed with Google Chrome, their new browser.

Image via Wikipedia

I've been an advocate for all things Google, since the brands infancy, and right up to now I have always been wowed by their tools and they have always found their way into my shortcuts.

Google Chrome however, has left me wondering what the fuss has been all about. Most of the functionality we've all become used to of basic browser seem to have been missed by their developers, and there isn't any additional ground breaking functionality which could make up for the loss.

After eagerly awaiting what could have been one of their biggest products to date, I've ended up going back to my original default browser, at least until the guys have had a chance to give Google Chrome a good polish.

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