Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me

Ok, Pierre and Joe both tagged me. Now I got to share 5 things about myself, please don’t laugh! 🙂

So, let’s see:

1. I got into SEO by chance. On the last year of my Bachelor degree in France (a year ago, in 2005), I had to do a final four-month internship. I always wanted to go to California, so I decided to try to do this internship over-there while my classmates would freeze their ass in France. So how did I manage to get my ass 6000 miles from my home? Well, I kinda spam over 1000 companies in California with emails that I’ve found on craiglist. I used an emailing software and within a few hours, I had sent 1000 emails to companies from San Diego, L.A. and San Francisco. The next day I had a few companies that were ok to hire me, I chose the one that was the closest to the beach. It was a SEO company located in Carlsbad, CA. So I basically learned SEO from scratch in Carlsbad, in the San Diego area, and from that day, I fell in love with both California and SEO 🙂

2. I love Rap. Mostly old school stuff such as Public Enemy, KRS One, A Tribe Called Quest, Slick Rick, Bone Thugs N Harmony or N.W.A (West Coast!)… My favorite rapper is 2pac, then comes Eazy-E.

3. I didn’t know how to swim until the age of 16, I’ve always been scared of the water, even if my sun sign is Pisces.

4. I was a born in France but my parents are Algerian (Kabyles) immigrants.

5. I’m a heavy weekend drinker, I really started to drink when I was in Dublin, and now even in Paris, I’m still drinking Guinness even if my friends keep making fun of me.

Ok, now I need to tag 5 people. So, let’s see. Wow!, everyone has already been tagged. Alright, so let’s pick 2 french guys: Arnaud, and Sébastien Billard. Let’s see what my friend Earl Grey has to say. I don’t know her personally, but let’s choose Natasha Robinson to add a girl to the list. And Mashhoor.

Take That Google! Yahoo and IBM to Offer Free Enterprise Search

How can you differentiate from a competitor in order to gain more market share? Sometimes, a company can take a pricing decision that can boost its sales but also generate a positive response amongst their customers.

A good example is Yahoo and IBM who just announced that they teamed up in order to provide a free enterprise search tool.  Their goal was to develop an enterprise search tool for companies that don’t have the budget to buy a solution such as Google’s Enterprise Solutions (with Mini for small businesses, and Google Search Appliance for medium and large ones), Fast, or any other paid search tool.

Besides being free, Yahoo and IBM solution, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition has got some excellent features:

• Indexes up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages.

• Customizable search results interface

• Add new synonyms.

• Create your own featured links.

You couldn’t even get those features for $1995 with Google Mini 🙂 More information about IMB Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (maybe they should get a shorter name…) can be found here.

What Really Happened to DMOZ

As some of you may have noticed, submitting a site to DMOZ has been impossible for almost a month, apparently since October 23rd. The world’s biggest human-edited directory’s servers crashed, and all the pages that you’re able to see right now are static pages coming from their backup.

There’s also another reason behind DMOZ outage. Jean Manco, who is a DMOZ editor and also a member of Cre8asiteforums revealed something interesting in this thread:

There was a crash. The public side was recovered fairly easily. (It’s just a static copy though.) The real problem has been with the innards – the editing side. Don’t ask me what exactly went wrong. But it was catastrophic. Editors haven’t been able to edit at all since it happened.

The silver lining is that the new set-up that AOL has been working on in the wake of the crash should be an improvement. And we hope to see it in action fairly soon. I can’t give an estimated time for lift-off though. Nor can I promise that submissions will be switched back on as soon as editors can get back to work. There may be technical reasons for a time-lag on that.

Well, it’s good to hear that there is a serious reason behind this outage, but even if DMOZ goes back up tomorrow, we will still have to wait a year or two before seeing our sites listed! 🙂

The End of Microsoft bCentral Directory

If you try to submit your website to Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory, you’ll get a message that may disappoint you:

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services. These services, previously marketed under the bCentral™ brand, include Appointment Manager, Banner Network Ads, Commerce Manager, Customer Manager, FastCounter Pro, List Builder, Sales Leads, SharePoint®, Submit it!, Traffic Builder, and Web Hosting Packages.

Unfortunately, they no longer accept submissions to their directory. As Andy Beal rightly noticed, the new home for Microsoft Small Business Services doesn’t appear to have a directory.

In the mean time, DMOZ has been unavailable for more than a month now… Could it be the end of human edited directories?

Danny Sullivan To Launch New SEO Blog

I just heard that Danny Sullivan is about to launch his own SEO Blog called Search Engine Land. He’ll team up with his buddies Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz to provide information about the search marketing industry. The blog will officially launch december 11th and you can already know what you’ll get once it’s up and running:

  • Original content covering developments in the search space.
  • Daily blog posts covering search news from across the web.
  • SearchCap: A daily email newsletter recapping search news from Search Engine Land and across the web. Also available by feed.
  • SearchCap Monthly: A monthly email newsletter recapping search news over the past month. Also available by feed.
  • A fresh, clean look — complete with logo. What you see here is NOT how the site will look December 11!

I look forward to reading his new blog and I’m sure him, Barry, and Chris will keep us entertained.

Text Link Ads Acquired by MediaWhiz, Offering New Services

Today, the famous text link advertising company Text Link Ads announced that it has been acquired by MediaWhiz. According to TLA owner, Patrick Gavin, this change will allow advertisers to have new ways to drive traffic and sales thanks to email marketing, CPA offers, CPM displays ads etc.

For happy publishers like me :), it means more potential advertisers and new ways to make money!

I’ve been providing text links through this blog and I’m quite happy with the revenue I got. If you have a website and want an easy and quick way to make money, you should check out their offers.

Research Beyond Google

Many people don’t really realize it, but only a small part of the world information is indexed in Google. Furthermore, people start realizing that some of the results displayed in the search engines’ results do not always satisfy them.

For those of you who want to go deeper when searching, the Online Education Database (OEDb) has gathered a list of 119 of specialty search engines to search Art, Businesses, Jobs, Politics, Science or Health information. The list includes useful and comprehensive resources that you might have used in the past but that you stopped using since Google came up.

Awesome Web Design for Less Than $1400

Would you like to have your website re-designed by a top-notch web designer for less than $1400? Would you also like to have your website seen by half a million people for free?

Ben Hunt from Web Design From Scratch is currently working on a project called “50 redesigns from scratch”. The project consists of redesigning 50 existing websites and then publish the work done in a book. The redesigned wesbsites will serve as examples of “web design mistakes” and illustrate several principles of web design.

Check out this example of a redesign done on www.sunhome.biz. The result is just stunning.
To be part of the project and submit your website, you need to contact WDFS and pay a one-off fee of £725 (or $1350):

We can only include a limited number of sites in the book. If you would like your site to be included, we’d love to hear from you.

A one-off fee of just £725 (around US$1,350) gets you:

  • A professional redesign of your site’s home page by Ben Hunt
  • Your site included in the book, and featured on this site, where it will be seen by like half a million people – guaranteeing great exposure
  • All graphics files of the new design you need to help you implement your new design

Web Design From Scratch being quite popular, this project will reach the ears of many people and the websites featured on the book will naturally be seen by thousands of people. That’s quite a low price for a great web 2.0 style redesign and free publicity.

If you want to be part of the project, check out this page (I hope Ben is still accepting websites).