Is Digg.com for sale? Rumours suggest that the social media giant may be hitting the market very soon. If so, what will it sell for? Who will buy it? What is it really worth?

This is not the first time that rumours of Digg being sold have surfaced, but VentureBeat recently claimed that Digg is getting serious about a possible sale, and what’s more, they have hired Allen & Company to sell the site for $300 million.

The curious thing about this company is that it doesn’t seem to like publicity, so much so that it doesn’t even have a websites. Weird!

Anyway, the million dollar question is: what will Digg sell for?

According to industry gossip, this is in fact a $300 million dollar question. Yes, you heard correctly, Digg is being valued by some at $300 million. Not a bad chunk of change.

We expect to hear a lot more about this over the coming weeks and months.

MidasCode

Let’s continue with our SEO myth busting campaign.

Today we move to part two of our SEO myths guide and our focus is on submitting to the search engines.

From what I have seen on many forums it seems that many webmasters still believe that you have to submit your site to Google etc to be ranked in the search engines.

What is worse is that some people seem to think that you have to re-submit regularly.

So let’s sort this once and for all… You do not need to submit your site to any of the search engines.

To get indexed in the search engines simply gain some respectable backlinks. It is that easy!

What is even worse than all of the above is the fact that many SEO companies charge to submit you to the search engines. I have seen adverts saying they will submit you to 50,000 search engines for $800. However, in reality there are only three search engines that are going to bring quality traffic, and there is no cost of any of them.

So next time you see a company charging for submission to search engines, send them this article.

Written by Dean

SEO Myths Part One – Guaranteed Rankings

There are hundreds of myths and theories regarding SEO. I once heard someone say that “being an SEO consultant is a far less honourable trade than a prostitute”. Whilst I have nothing against the fair buxom merchants of the night, I dare say that this shows a complete lack of understanding of what SEO actually is.

This leads us perfectly to SEO Myth number 1: SEO is a dark and seedy practice.

People are often afraid of something they don’t understand! it is much easier to dismiss or insult something than to actually do some research.

It doesn’t help that there actually is a dark side to the SEO world known as “Black Hat SEO”. But generally we don’t go around slaying virgins to gain rankings.

So why does the search engine optimisation business have this reputation with the general public?

Partly it is due to a lack of understanding, but it is mainly because of a handful of SEO companies that give a bad name to the industry. I have seen companies charge $500 to submit a site to Google, Yahoo and Msn. Yet simply gaining a couple of free backlinks would automatically get you indexed in all the major search engines for FREE.

There are also many SEO firms that make false promises that they simply can’t keep. Anyone in the SEO industry will have heard of at least one site that has claimed to guarantee a top 3 ranking etc…. but let me straighten this out once and for all….. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GUARANTEE ANY RANKINGS.

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or how good your SEO expert claims to be, it is simply impossible to guarantee any form of rankings in the search engines!

For a start only a handful of people know the ACTUAL algorithms, and these people work for Google. So to guarantee any sort of ranking would be wrong and a lie.

Also, the search engines change the goal posts on an almost daily basis, so even if you are number 1 today, you may not even be top 10 tomorrow.

So to all the SEO “experts” and SEO companies who claim to guarantee a top 10 position, you are the dirt on the shoe of the SEO world and are causing the general public to lose trust for SEO as an effective and honourable practice.

Right, I am off to slay some virgins 😉

Written by Dean (SEO Consultant)

As a webmaster there will be many times when you will need to research backlinks.

*Looking at your own links
*Researching competitors backlinks
*Considering buying a website

However, most people just look at the PR, some look at PR and the amount of backlinks, but only a handful actually look at the quality of those links.

In a future article I will discuss the different types of links to be aware of (comment spam, buying links, topsites, links pages etc), but today I am going to focus on one area where most webmasters make a crucial error.

Quality v Quantity

Personally I would rather have a link on Google.com than on a million blogs. So you can’t go off PR and quantity of links alone.

The easiest way for the numbers to be dramatically altered is via sitewide or blogroll links.

What is a sitewide link = A link that is placed on a template of a website (often in the footer) and therefore features on EVERY page of a website.

Blogroll link = A link that is often placed in the sidebar/side menu of a blog and is shown on EVERY page of a blog.

So why do you need to be wary of these types of links?

Well mainly because the search engines only count a handful of links from a certain url. So if you have a link on 2,000 pages of a blog, then perhaps 1,500 of those links will show in the Yahoo backlink search (Linkdomain:yourdomain.com)
However, out of those 1,500 links that Yahoo has found, only a handful will actually count towards your rankings and pagerank.

From my research it is capped at roughly 5 pages.
Therefore approx 1,495 of those links are not of any benefit to you.

The same can apply to numerous links from the same C Class, but we will come to that another time.

Please note that some webmasters believe that sitewide links actually HARM your rankings. Personally I think that as long as you don’t go overboard you will be ok.

So why do you have to be aware of sitewide links when doing backlink research?

Well lets take an example:

Site A has 10,000 links according to Yahoo.com

Site B has 100 links

However, Site A has 5 sitewide links on 3 forums and 2 blogs. Site B has 100 main page links on unique URLS.

In this case site B would severely outrank site A. But most webmasters would think that site A is actually more powerful.

So next time you do some research on yours or competitiors sites, make sure you pay attention to the quality of the links, and don’t simply be dazzled by the big numbers.

Dean