Here’s a nice incentive to start learning about search engine optimization: the PHP130,000 Philippine SEO Contest.

For the uninitiated, search engine optimization or SEO is:

a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites.

Interesting takes on US surfing habits while at work.

…the seventh annual “Web@Work” study from Websense, conducted by Harris Interactive, found that employees spend time at work accessing non-work-related sites. Some 61% of respondents with a work-owned internet connection admitted that they spend at least some time surfing non-work-related Web sites during the workday.

What’s more interesting is the disparity between what employees report and what company proxy server cops report.

Do we have the same surfing habits? If I were to make an informal list of sites frequented by Filipino workers while at the office, these sites come to mind:

1. Friendster.com
2. INQ7.net
3. YouTube.com
4. PinoyTechBlog
   

And no, I’m not talking from experience

Camera trigger-happy Filipinos out vacationing in the boondocks would love to have something like this in their camera bag. The GorillaPod from JOBY looks something right out of a sci-fi flick but I can see how Filipinos will benefit from this hybrid camera tripod.

Via Cool Hunting.

This is what the Windows Live homepage looked like in February 11, 1998.

This is what it looks like now:

How much did Microsoft pay for the domain? Considering the attention Microsoft is devoting to Windows Live these days, I’m guessing Ross Finlayson, the original Live.com domain owner must be one happy man

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Samsung is releasing what it hopes will be, the portable MP3 player that will slay the Goliath that is the iPod: the YP-Z5.

You have to give it to this baby. In tries to match everything the iPod Nano offers…everything but the scroll wheel.

• Same size (3.5 by 1.6 inches)
• Similar choices of colors (silver or black)
• Same storage capacity (2GB or 4GB)
• Similar SRPs ($200 and $250)

It even hired Paul Mercer, a former Apple employee to add that Apple flavor to the software running the Samsung YP-Z5. Samsung and a host of other portable MP3 player manufacturers understand the values people love about the iPod. Almost all competitors have tried to dissect and replicate these values, to no avail.

At least six factors make the iPod such a hit: cool-looking hardware; a fun-to-use, variable-speed scroll wheel; an ultrasimple software menu; effortless song synchronization with Mac or Windows; seamless, rock-solid integration with an online music store (iTunes); and a universe of accessories. Mess up any aspect of the formula, and your iPod killer is doomed to market-share crumbs.

Two weeks after being kicked out of Google’s index, MyAyala.com is back.

MyAyala.com was extra careful to clean up all pages in the site after Google engineer Matt Cutts publicly listed other remaining spammy pages in the site.

In part 1 of our SEO Companies in the Philippines series, the spotlight is on a link building-focused SEO company based in Cagayan de Oro City. In this installment, I interview Michael Turner, CEO of Harvest SEO. The inteview gives a glimpse of how the Florida-based company came to set up shop in the City of Golden Friendship.

How did Harvest SEO come to be? Can you give us a historical profile of the company and its founders?
About 3.5 years ago I was hired to webmaster a group of sites. I examined the competitive space for that industry and saw that it was wide open, but the amount of work required was more than I could do on my own. The owner of the sites had limited faith in the Internet and would not allocate enough funds for me to hire anyone, so I ended up hiring some people from The Philippines to do the work for me and just paid them out of my paycheck. That’s how it all started.

Actually, it started back in 1996, when I read an article in Wired Magazine (Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson). To write the article he had traveled around the world to see some techie events that were well off the beaten path, and watched fiber optics cables being dragged ashore by scuba divers in The Philippines. Much of the cost of laying fiber optics is in burying it. The Philippines’ volcanic origin over a deep see floor makes it easy to bring fiber to many points in the islands, since not much of the cable needs to be buried.

This meant that the Philippines would quickly become one of the most wired nations on the planet, and that it would be prime location to roll out wireless services to millions of people. The wireless Philippines is not here yet, but it’s coming rapidly.

In addition, to me, it meant it was the dawning of a new age in which intellectual value can be delivered over the Internet, and that it could be of the same quality as that of American made intellectual value. By “intellectual value” I mean a lot of things, but most easily, I mean that traditionally countries have exported raw materials and finished good, by ship. Expensive stuff might go by plane, but most stuff is sent by cargo ship. In the digital age it is now possible to export services that are more abstract than oil and textiles. Accounting services started being outsourced some years back and a lot of programming services went to India. Call-centers are a good example of intellectual value that can be exported over the fiber.

So, for me, I was already seeded with this idea, but it wasn’t until several years later that I started webmastering and doing SEO.

The main thing I needed too was to build links and write content. The first person I hired was Marisyl “Syl” Castillon, a 25 year old grad student, who I met online, at www.filipinofriendfinder.com. She had asked me for a job. Most of the Filipinas I had made contact with by then had all asked for money. Syl was the first one to ask for a job.

So, I hired her and her first instructions were to find me a programmer and a writer. It took her a long time to find them, because we didn’t have an office or anything. They were Gus Rodano and Jeedo Aquino, writer and programmer, respectively. I had Syl and Gus working from net cafes, and fortunately, Jeedo had a PC at home.

Gus previously worked as a reporter for the local CdO paper there, the Sun Star. Jeedo was an instructor at Informatics Computer Institute. Both are still with us, and the four of us together are “the founders” of Harvest SEO.

Can you give us a rundown of the services being offered by HarvestSEO?
We started out mainly doing link building and creating pages for hundreds of keyterms. Our first clients were for link campaigns. We still do link campaigns for those same clients. For some reason they keep coming back. However, I really don’t recommend our link campaigns to new clients anymore, rather I recommend they hire a couple of dedicated linkers, who have been trained via our linking campaigns and understand the whole process. I believe a dedicated linker provides a much more natural link growth profile. I don’t mean to imply that our link campaigns don’t work, they do, very well, but I just think that dedicated linkers hired for a long period bring the best value to the client.

We are not a regular SEO company, and would never advertise something like “we submit your site to 301 search engines for $29 per month” and provide you monthly ranking reports. We are not looking for retail SEO clients. We cater to the needs of SEO companies that are thriving and who are interested in being competitively priced, while maintaining high quality services.

I would say we are SEO wholesalers. I prefer the client that says, “I need 2500 links across 3 domains and 90 different pages, here’s the breakdown with anchors, descriptions, and URLs”. That’s an order I can fill. While I have the SEO knowledge to prescribe plans for sites to rank, I try to steer clear of doing so completely. The main reasons for this is conflict of interest. As a wholesale provider, I don’t care what industry you are in, if you need links or content I want to be able to provide it to you. An analogy would be if I sold fuel to airlines or sold racing fuel at a race track. I am going to sell this fuel to your competitors, the same fuel.

There an idea that an SEO should only represent a single company in any particular industry because it could create a conflict of interest otherwise. If I took clients under my wing and prescribed a treatment for their site to get them to #1, then there would likely be a conflict of interest if I got a 2nd client in the same industry, competing for the same terms.

Our best service is the dedicated outsourcing, and we provide various clients with with writers, web designers, programmers, project managers, bloggers, linkers, editors, and we’ll be adding some graphic designers and editors soon.

The dedicated outsourcing is where we provide a client with 40 hours of productive output for each employee, 5 days per week, 8 hours per day. We do require our employees to work 6 days per week, but Saturdays are reserved for self-improvement, team building, leadership training, sport fests, classes in HTML, SEO, effective communications, and things like that.

While we hire the best people we find, we also prefer to hire from our existing pool of employees to higher rated positions, and thus we need our pool of employees to continue to improve their stills and qualifications.

What are the company’s main strengths as far as outsourced SEO goes?
We can pore on a bunch of links. It is pure delight to watch the changes in the SERPs from a robust link campaign, if that kind of thing turns you on.

Our main strength is our focus on quality. A lot of people try to automate tasks that shouldn’t be automated. We recognize that, and we are not afraid to throw brain power and man power at a project to make sure it is done right. We can do this because of the low labor rates in The Philippines. That’s why we’re here, to be able to do just that. We do the dirty work, the grunt work that nobody else wants to do.

Your company’s focus is on link building which is considered central to any successful SEO campaign. What sets HarvestSEO’s link building service apart?
The individual review of each and every site is what sets us apart. We don’t email spam for links.

I get the impression that not too many people in the Philippines are “into” SEO, in fact it’s only now that SEO is entering the mainstream. Did you have a hard time “transferring” knowledge to your people?

Yes, and no. I mean, of course, but it really wasn’t so bad.

In devising this plan to do SEO in The Philippines, I set out to inform just my core people of how to do things and then had them pass that knowledge on. I do spend a lot of time IM’ing staff.

What were the initial challenges encountered by you and the other founders?
The challenge is the same as it always has been. By providing a discounted service, by taking low margins on what we do, which is what makes us so attractive and brings us the work, is that it doesn’t allow for a lot of extra capital to expand. Managing growth still is our biggest challenge.

Do you think the Philippines has what it takes to compete globally in the SEO outsourcing realm?
Absolutely, and we intend to lead the way.

As far as SEO goes, what specific areas do you think Filipinos have a distinct advantage in?
Their distinct advantage is that they speak English, and the American version of English, not the Commonwealth or Queen’s English of India, Australia, and South Africa. In addition, I would say that Filipinos are very open minded to the Internet, and hungry for it. Plus, the country is wired to the teeth with fiber.

MyAyala.com has removed the hidden text pointed out in the MyAyala.com Does a BMW.de post earlier.

Bon Moya, general manager of MyAyala.com had this to say:

Yes there was a hidden text there for some time. But when we found out, we took it out immediately. We have written Google and Google has acknowledged our compliance and told us that we will be brought back in the Google index.

But Senior Google engineer Matt Cutts has picked up the story and posted a rather interesting reply on his blog:

I was interested to see an article about a site in the Philippines that is removing hidden text from its front page. Kudos to myayala.com for taking that action. A quick check still shows some hidden text though, e.g. http://sureseats.myayala.com/ has some white-on-white text that I highlighted:

If you’re doing a reinclusion request, my advice is to make sure that all of the hidden text is gone from the site before requesting reinclusion. It may just be an oversight, but doing a full clean-up on a site before doing a reinclusion request really improves the chances of everything going smoothly.

I think it’s safe to say that MyAyala.com needs to send a second reinclusion request after they’ve done a thorough “house cleaning”.

A few weeks ago, the German country site of BMW (BMW.de) was removed from the Google Index after getting a public SEO spam review courtesy of Matt Cutts, senior Google engineer and anti-spam czar. By using a combination of keyword stuffed redirecting doorway pages, the site was deemed spammy and in violation of Google’s webmaster quality guidelines.

Last February 16, Dennis Agulo a member of the SEO Philippines mailing list reported that MyAyala.com too has been removed from the Google Index. A site:domain check over at both Google.com and Google.com.ph showed zero results. MyAyala.com could have been caught stuffing keyword-rich hidden text at the footer of its pages, a clear violation of the Google webmaster guidelines.

MyAyala.com is one of the most recognized sites in the Philippine Internet scene and is one of the flagship online properties of the Ayala Group of Companies.

John Scott and the folks over at V7n.com have officially launched their v7ndotcom elursrebmem SEO contest. If you can rank #1 in Google for the term [v7ndotcom elursrebmem] on May 15, 2006, John Scott and co. will give you $4,000 and a 30 GB iPod.

Wait I thought you said $7,000. I did. And this is where it gets interesting.

A few shakers in the SEO industry banded together to do their own contest. The total prize for their version of the contest is $3,000, which brings the total pot to $7,000.

But be careful, both contests have strict requirements which if not followed, will invalidate your contest entry or entries.

V7N SEO Contest
Last update: January 16, 2006

• Target Keyword Phrase: v7ndotcom elursrebmem
• Search Engine Target: Google
• Total Prize at Stake: $4,800 + 30 GB Apple iPod
• Top Prize: $4,000 + 30 GB Apple iPod ($1,000 from V7N + $1,000 from Sporge and Skaffe directories + $2000 from Jeremy Schoemaker + iPod from Dan Freakley)
• Other Prizes at Stake: 2nd – $500, 3rd to 5th – $100 each
• Start Date: January 15, 2006
• End Date: May 15, 2006
• Requirements: must have at least one of the following: link back to www.v7n.com (nofollow is ok), official contest banner (no href is ok) or “We support V7n.com” text on the contest page
• Mechanics: click here

Greg Boser aka WebGuerilla, Oilman and Mike Grehan‘s SEO Contest
Last update: January 16, 2006

• Target Keyword Phrase: v7ndotcom elursrebmem
• Search Engine Target: Google
• Total Prize at Stake: $4,600
• Top Prize: $3,000
• Other Prizes at Stake: 2nd – $1000, 3rd to 5th – $200 each
• Start Date: January 15, 2006
• End Date: May 15, 2006
• Link Requirements: all entries should link to “http://mattcutts.com/” and not link to V7N.com;
• Mechanics: click here, here and here.

Any Pinoys interested in this contest? PhP 378,000 (P54 = $1) is a lot of money.