eBay Canada bowed down to CRA

Bad news for eBayers in Canada, as eBay Canada announced that they received a court-authorized requirement from Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that requires the account information and sales data of Canadian resident eBay members who meet the following criteria:

• Sales of more than $20,000 and at least 24 sales transactions in any of the calendar years 2006, 2007 or 2008, (irrespective of membership in eBay’s PowerSeller program); OR
• Sales of more than $100,000 in any of the calendar years 2006, 2007 or 2008, regardless of the number of sales transactions.

So if you have received a letter from eBay titled as “eBay to comply with Canada Revenue Agency request”, congratulation, you finally have made yourself to the CRA’s list.

Oh, what about privacy? Forget it! When it comes to Government and Money, who cares about privacy!!

You better check here if you are a serious eBayer or a serious eBayer wanna-be.

Keyword Meta Tags don’t mean a thing, at all

If you heard a so-called SEOer telling you that you should use Keyword meta tags to gain higher rank in your niche, you can tell them to shut up. Because Google now confirms firmly that Google does not use keywords meta tag in its web search ranking, at all. No matter how many keywords you put on and no matter how good they are, they don’t mean a thing, at all.

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, NO.

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: Unlikely.

Nice, thanks Matt. You just cleared up another area that confuses people a lot.

Steps to get your site back in Google if it’s been penalized or worse banned

BAM, you woke up one day and only realized that your money-making site went straight to the hell and was completed removed, de-indexed, and banned from Google. It’s complete a worst nightmare to anyone involved on doing business online.

First, you should find out whether or not your site is banned on Google.

Second, clam down and check what to do if your site is banned.

And follow these steps recommended by John, the guy who was banned on Google over 3 years ago and got back in just a few month back.

Finally, pray and hope thing will turn around.

To recap, here are the steps in order.

1. Follow the webmaster guidelines and correct what you think you did wrong.
2. Fire a reconsideration request with very detailed information, and pray.
3. If still no luck after waiting a while, your last hope is contacting directly to the Googlers, Matt Cutts if you are lucky.

Are duplicate content allowed in Google

There is a popular myth about duplicate content, basically saying that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. Well, it is just a non-proof myth that now has been cleared up by Greg Gothaus of the Search Quality Team in Google from his blog post on Google Webmaster Central Blog along with a 15 minute video and presentation slide.

In short, the truth is that this not the case. Google won’t penalize sites for having duplicate content. However, that’s also not saying that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings. There are actually a lot more covered in his video, so I highly suggest you take your time watching it through.

Are paid links implemented in JavaScript safe?

If you haven’t realized, Google now can crawl links buried in the JavaScript code, which means the old trick no longer applies. If you are the guy who uses this trick hiding those links that Google don’t like in the JavaScript code you probably should revisit them again to make sure they are Google compliance before the nightmare happens.

That also doesn’t mean you can’t have the paid links on your site. As the Matt guy says in the video below, you definitely can have them on your site, as long as they don’t affect the search engine. And there are a number of ways doing that. For example,

1. Make the link as no-follow by adding rel=”nofollow” to every single paid link.

2. Block them in the robots.txt file, if you are using link cloaking technique.

W3C validation does not factor Google ranking

Surprised? Yes, Video below from Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, finally confirms and sets the record straight.

In short, that’s because majority web pages on the internet aren’t validate. Making it factor in Google’s ranking would effect search results. Well, make sense. But don’t put wrong that you shouldn’t care about the W3C validation. In fact, you still should, because it’s much easier maintaining a web page that’s W3C validated than a page that isn’t.

Does mass un-follow all your twitter friends make sense?

It looks like a trend that all of sudden a lot of big players on Twitter started unfollowing all their friends and rebuilt a list that is much smaller and meaningful. Does that make sense at all?

I first saw Scobleizer done that. He even blogged two posts that explained “how can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” and claimed “you are SO unfollowed”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate both posts on his blog anymore. But I can tell you that the tone in these two posts sounds so arrogant that I personally can’t take it at all. But that’s not the only reason why I don’t agree with him and his action that unfollowed everyone on his following list.

Then, my role model on Internet Marketing John Chow have done the same lately and explained number of reasons why he did that on his blog. While I agree most of the point he made in this blog, I still don’t see the strong needs that make him to take this extreme action.

I am not going to comment on those reasons one by one to against them but what I really want to say in this post is that don’t do it, especially when you are an ordinary user like me.

Those who did mass unfollow are the big guys who usually have more than half million followers. With that large user base, they basically can do and experiment whatever they want without worrying about too much losing the followers. They have the enough influence that can still make people to follow them no matter what. Besides, having the much smaller ratio of the number of following and the number of follower actually makes them look much better.

We, as the ordinary user in other hand, can’t really do that. If we did the same we would never be able to grow and gain larger followers. We still need to take the routine path and follow the make-sense steps to build our list. This mass unfollow thing just doesn’t make any sense and not belong to a regular user, like you and me.

By the time I am writing this post, I took the action in my twitter account and unfollowed all users who didn’t follow me. Hence, bye bye big guys, I am not following you anymore. What I want more is a two-way communication that not only makes me to hear what you say but also makes you to hear what I say.