Manage your footprint online - Thanks Google!

Just in time for Data Privacy Day, Robert Mitchell at Computerworld posted 12 good tips for managing your information footprint online. A consistent theme: protecting your personal information offline is as important to maintaining your privacy as protecting it online. Mitchell offers a number of useful tips to keep in mind whenever you share personal information, and suggests tools that can help you manage your privacy.

Perhaps most important is his advice to "know what's out there about you" - you can only take steps to protect your data privacy if you know what data is already out there!

Todd from spiritshop.com

Todd from spiritshop.com, please contact me at marketinggurl@gmail.com. I would love to do a short evaluation of some of the things I see for SEO improvement on your site. I see many opportunities for your store and based on your market I think you can have a large impact on your seo efforts. I would love to send you a note directly. I saw your comment and would love to chat more!

5 Google SEO Myths Exposed! Learn Real Search Engine Optimization5 Google SEO Myths Exposed! Learn Real Search Engine Optimization

The internet is full of myths and everyone knows that no topic is safe from some “professional’s” speculation. Most of them start by people thinking they know what they are doing, or not getting results they desire with their search engine optimization campaigns. Whatever the reason for the SEO Myths, we’ve set out to debunk and expose 5 of the most common SEO Myths.

1. That pagerank rank is a value based solely off the number of incoming links to your site.

This is at least some what close. While PR does factor in the number of incoming links, its not the sole deciding factor. Pagerank algorithms take many factors into consideration when updating and distributing pagerank.

It takes, the content into consideration probably more than anything, after that it takes the quality of links coming back to your site. These don’t have to be one way links, or anything like that. A quality link is defined as any link which points to your site, that is from a trusted, related source, that appears to have been obtained in a natural safe way.

2. The Google Toolbar, shows the accurate and latest pagerank

Pagerank is updated almost daily in the Google search index. The toolbar will only get an update about once every 3 months. The pagerank bar is also susceptible to “blackhatters”. They can easily trick the toolbar into displaying a rank from another site, and passing it off as their own.

Never trust the Google Toolbar completely, its usually about 3 months behind!

3. Being listed in Yahoo! will give a special pagerank bonus!

This one started since Yahoo! uses Google to power some supplemental results, that Google must use Yahoo! as well. But the reality of it is, that this is just another SEO myth. Google doesn’t use any other results but their own, and being listed in Yahoo gives no bonus points, sorry!

4. Google will not index dynamic pages.

This is probably one of the oldest, most absurd SEO myths there is. Older search engines had some problems when crawling sites with these dynamic urls (ex: http://seotips4.com/page.php?id=4) but technology and advances in how spiders crawl have destroyed this one time problem.

So you don’t need the search engine friendly URLS, and you won’t receive any extra benefits from them if you’re page is properly optimized. However, its easier for humans to read, and it also can help hide all the ugly server side stuff.

5. Being listed in DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory will give you instant pagerank bonus.

While Google may use DMOZ to power its very own directory, simply being listed in the directory gets you no special bonus (it does count as a link back however).

Also since, there are a lot of other, smaller sites that use DMOZ to power them, you’ll be getting tons more smaller, less powerful link backs to your site. The problem is, that these sites don’t have much PR passing power, however each one does count as a backlink, and once you start adding hundreds and thousands of smaller, lighter PR passing sites, it’ll start to add up.

*Update Since writing this article, DMOZ has almost died completely, and directory submissions of any sorts are highly lack luster.