This is an box for a short bio to be edited in the header.php file. Of course you can try to persuade people to Yahoo Improves Search Market Share in December »
With all that shopping going on in December, it should come as no surprise that Search Engine traffic was down slightly (-3.9%) across the board during the month. After all, who can find time to goof around on the Internet when they are too busy doing last minute shopping?
Despite that drop, Yahoo! search traffic was actually up. In fact, according to a comScore report, they were the big winner for the month with a 0.5% increase in use and, since they dipped 0.4% in November, that basically put them back where they were in October with a 22.9% overall market share. However, Google is still the big dog with 58.4% share of the Search market. That translates to more than 5.5 billion (yes, billion) searches per month using Google. That number does not include searches performed on YouTube and other Google owned properties, which tracked an additional 1.5 billion results in December alone.
As you can imagine, search traffic on shopping sites climbed quite a bit in December. For example, Amazon sites logged 215 million searches, which was a better than 20% increase over their numbers in November. eBay was up 3.9% and Craigslist was up 6.3%.
Social networking sites saw a decline in use in December. My guess would be the fact that people were actually networking the old fashioned way - fact-to-face at parties. That means they were not spending as much time searching on Facebook (-14.3%) and MySpace (-19.9%). Plus, in many cases, people are accessing those sites while they are at work and, since most workers are using up their vacation time before the end of the year, they were not logging in each day.
At any rate, the numbers should be back to normal starting this month, but Google is still going to be on top.
Check out our Flash graphic in the far right column for a visual 
.
Google Lenoir NC Data Center »
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Last year on our tech blog, I posted about Google’s new $600 million data center in Lenoir, NC. The new datacenter supposed to bring about 200 jobs to an area of North Carolina that has traditionally relied on the furniture and textile industries to employ its residents. Here is an update on the progress.
The data center is located about a mile away from downtown Lenoir and currently, there are around 500 workers building the complex. This is great news for Lenoir because these workers are eating at local restaurants, shopping in local stores and staying in local hotels and all of that is a big boost to Lenoir’s economy, which has been impacted by slowdowns and layoffs by the area’s furniture industry employers.
As far as what Google is looking in the way of employees, they want a wide range of workers from entry-level technology assistants which will keep the hardware running 24/7/365 to Linux administrators and programmers to experienced data center managers. Google has very extensive list posted in the jobs section of their site. So if you live near Caldwell or Catawba County NC or if you would not mind relocating to the foothills of North Carolina, you should definitely check it out. My wife and I used to live in Statesville, which is about 30 minutes away from Lenoir, and I can honestly say that it is a great area in which to live.
Google has setup an email address whereby people can send suggestions on how they can make their Lenoir data center an even better impact on the community. Send your suggestions to lenoirproject@google.com.
Google: Do as I Say, Not as I Do »
When Google comes down on everyone else for not using “nofollow” on external links, one would think that they would make sure they they were in compliance themselves. However, there are some examples of Google’s failure to follow their own policy and, therefore, are themselves contributing to the pollution of the Google Index.
To rehash, here is what Matt Cutts said on how a webmaster should treat a paid link:
If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.
And here is why that disclosure is so important to Google
As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google.
So, now that we have a better idea of how strongly Google feels about paid links, how are they doing? When they link out to someone who has paid them or entered into a partnership with them, are they using “nofollow” on those links? Let’s check a few.
Michael Gray has a great post that illustrates Google’s failure to follow their own policy about using “nofollow” on external links.
Golfballs.com gets a sweet PR6 backlink after using Google Product Search:
If you check out that article on Google’s blog, you will even see that further down the page, Golfballs.com gets a super-sweet deep backlink from Google for the keyphrase “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls”. If you view source on that page, notice - no “nofollow”.
Here is another one:
Google press release gives Motorola a nice little backlink
Again, view source on that page - no “nofollow” applied to that link either.
Now, if one webmaster A entered into some type of financial partnership with webmaster B and, during an announcement of that partnership, webmaster A placed a backlink to webmaster B, webmaster A would be required to use “nofollow” on that link or run the risk of having PR removed. I filled out a “paid links report” on these pages, so maybe they will have their PR stripped along with the rest of us who did not use “nofollow” correctly.
Of course, I am sure that this is just an oversight. As Michael points out, Google intends on fixing it and this is certainly a relatively small issue. But why would they not make sure they are in compliance with their own policy before implementing a sweeping change that negatively impacted so many sites?
Kudos to Michael for finding these and he has several more examples listed on his blog.
Newest Domain Squatters: Network Solutions »
If you search for a domain name on Network Solution’s web site, be warned that you are setting yourself up. Once Network Solutions is alerted to the fact that you are interested in a particular domain name, that is their signal to grab it themselves. Here is how Network Solutions domain name squatting practice works:
- You visit their site to search and see if a particular domain name is available
- You type the domain name into their search (I searched for “networksolutionsnorthcarolina.com“).
- You see that it is available and proceed through their lengthy checkout process.
- In the end, you decide you do not want to pay Network Solutions outrageously high domain name registration fee - $34.99 for one year.
- You then go to another domain name registrar that has reasonable prices and check their rates, let’s say GoDaddy. However, when you search for that very same domain name, you are surprised to see that the domain name is already taken! How can that be? Network Solutions just said a few minutes ago that it was available and you were getting ready to purchase it until you decided they were charging too much.
It appears that Network Solutions registered the domain name immediately after they were alerted to the fact that I was interested in that particular domain name. What? Surely you can’t be serious. Yes, I am serious and stop calling me Surely (movie quote - what is the movie?).
I first read about this yesterday on Aaron Wall’s SEO Blog and I was quite amazed. Several other bloggers are also talking about it:
Search For Domains At Network solutions, Face Extortion
Network Solutions + Unethical go hand and hand
NSI Registers Every Domain Checked
Network Solutions’ Defensive Measure for Whois Searches
Network Solutions Front Running
Network Solutions Faces PR Nightmare Over Domain FrontRunning
NetworkSolutions Scandal: Hijacking User Domain Searches
They have even hijacked Bill Hartzer’s personal name. It is absolutely crazy that Network Solutions would do this and amounts to domain name hijacking. So, steer clear of Network Solutions. We don’t like dealing with them anyway and this is just another example of their “strong-arm” tactics that have negatively impacted numerous unsuspecting people.
Free Web Development Software »
Everyone loves FREE. So, here is a list of some of the best free software we have found with regards to web design and development. We personally use or have used the software listed here and none of these software makers paid us to get listed here. We did it because we are just so darn nice .
Web Graphics
- Top Pick for Screen Capture Software - Faststone
- Top Pick for Screen recording software - CamStudio
- Top Pick for Graphics Editing - Gimp
Web Development
- Top Pick for FTP Client - WinSCP
- Top Pick for Text Editor - Notepad ++ (Text editor and much more - way better than Microsoft Notepad).
- Top Pick for ActionScript editor - SEPY actionscript editor - Edit or create Actionscript without even opening Flash.
- Top Pick for Free Dreamweaver replacement -Nvu Web Authoring System - Works on Linux Desktop, Windows or Mac.
Web Browsing
- Top Pick for Web Browsing - Firefox - no explanation needed
- VERY close second - Opera - Web browser that has plenty of benefits
Web Safety
- Top Pick for Anti-virus - AVG anti-virus
- Top Pick #1 for Anti-spyware - AVG anti-spyware
- Top Pick #2 for Anti-spyware (because you can’t have too many options in this department) - Spybot Search and Destroy
This concludes our list of the best free software related to web design and development. I am sure there will be some differing of opinions, so if you have ones that you are particularly fond of, feel free to speak up. As I mentioned in the introduction, we either use or have used all of the software on this list, so we recommend from experience .
Faststone Screen Capture is an absolute "can't do without" piece of software. Capture screenshots in a fixed window or with the scrolling window feature. It even has a screen color-picker that will tell you the code for any color that is displayed on your screen. Love it. Oh, its free too! 
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