Author Archives: Corey Rab

Google and Bing have been fighting for search supremacy and market share since Bing’s inception in 2009. Actually, it has always been more of Bing playing catch up than anything else. It is big brother, little brother scenario where Bing has been fighting to get search engine user’s, and Google’s, attention with the releases new features and partnerships.

Most have postulated that Google will remain in the driver’s seat unless they make a huge misstep with their search products. With the recent changes to the Google Places and Bing adding a partnership with Yelp to boost its local search, this certainly looks like it could be the start of something along those lines.

Google’s Changes

Google has decided to ax the Places pages and replace them with Google+ Local Pages. This is in effort to tie in the local listings with the Google+ suite of products.  This is not entirely a bad thing.

The added social layer could increase business to customer communication and could reduce some of the anonymity involved with current system. Also, it will allow businesses to control all of their Google products from one central hub.

There are certainly some negatives as well. There has been a lot of confusion over whether businesses should switch over to the new Google+ Local Page, or wait until Google consolidates the two themselves.

We all know that one of the main benefits of using WordPress is that it has a fantastic community of developers and a vast amount of plugins to fit every need. With the total number of plugins eeking ever closer to twenty-thousand, there is sure to be a plugin or sidebar widget to out there to do what is it that you want done.

However, sometimes you want more features, more flair, and something a little more unique in your site’s sidebar.  That is why I have put together this list of great premium sidebar widgets. The are all relatively inexpensive and can add a more custom feel to your website or blog. As always, please feel free to share any other widgets that I may have overlooked in the comments sections. 

Who’s Online?

Who’s online is a great sidebar widget to display to your readers exactly how many other people are on the site. Many popular blogs like Business Insider use similar tools to show the same information. You can also use it on your admin section for a quick current traffic reference. It is basically a much cheaper, with less features albiet, option to ChartBeat.

Cost: $5

Google, through its recent updates, has taken a definitive stance against poor quality search engine optimization techniques. Tactics such as forum profile links, blog comment links, and links from low quality ‘link farms’ have been getting many sites penalized and subsequently dropped in the search engine page results. Funny enough, even after these update and deliberate outreach by Google to make it known that these link will, in fact, hurt and not help their sites, many SEOs are still recommending using these search engine optimization techniques.

Nonetheless, some internet marketers have used this knowledge of Google’s link preferences and created a growing trend of web warfare against their competing sites. Instead of looking to building links to their sites, they are using negative SEO to bombard their competition’s link profiles with SPAMy links.

By doing this, they are hoping to push the competitors site down in the search rankings, which will make them one step closer to the top. This is a troublesome notion seeing as it will most likely be difficult for Google and other search engines to determine who posted certain links and the intent of the postings. Check out the infographic below regarding an interesting negative SEO study:

One of the first things that a person that you have a meeting with is going to do after talking with you is search your name online. You may not think that you have very much control over the search results, but you actually can control a lot of what people see when searching for your name. Below are some quick tips and tools to take control of your name online.

Take Control of Facebook

If you are in the midst of a job search or are out in the field trying to make a sale, you definitely want to make sure that your Facebook is under control. You want to ensure that you completely understand your current privacy settings and know exactly who has access to your photos, news feed, and other personal info.