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Stephen Wolfram, an undeniable genius when it comes to probably anything science, is said to have built an online masterpiece said to rival Google. Wolfram Alpha, is an ambitious online “answer engine”.

There’s a definite buzz for Wolfram Alpha’s nearing launch (available to the public come May 2009). Checking Wolfram Alpha’s traffic details, for a site that’s not even launched yet, it has a pretty decent number of visitors. Alexa shows that Wolframalpha.com is near the top 600k mark. Now I know Alexa is far from being accurate but it just gives you a ball park to gauge it.

But what does it mean, being an “answer engine”, and what is Wolfram Alpha’s real purpose?

A lot of people scoff at the idea, whenever they hear from other industry insiders that Wolfram Alpha is considered a threat to Google. Some people are actually cynical. What people should really, know is that Wolfram Alpha is not meant to just search for keywords, like other giant search engines.

In a nutshell, what is Wolfram Alpha? And how is it different to Wikipedia?

Stephen Wolfram wants Wolfram Alpha to be a “smart engine”, where people can ask questions, and can actually get factual answers. It is programmed to be totally different to Wikipedia, since it is not just an enormous database of articles.

How will Wolfram Alpha be different from Google?

Google mostly rely their results on the set of words that you enter. Most of the time, people get keywords rich results, and most of the higher ranking links might not contain answers to their queries. This is ok for people who are searching for products and services, but not so good for those who want to get straight-up answers.

For example, if you want to know the answer to “how many times has a Boeing 747 crashed?“, “what is the annual income of a middle class American?”, or “how much gas does a 1979 Piper model PA-28-236 need to orbit the world 14 times?”

Wolfram Alpha understands

The main difference between Google and Wolfram Alpha is that is understands. The computation that will happen in Wolfram Alpha queries is said to be much more sophisticated. We’re not saying that the Google algorithm is anywhere near simple and easy, but it lacks the certain real life, dynamic functions that Wolfram Alpha wants to reach.

Stephen Wolfram wants users to be able to “talk” to Wolfram Alpha, not just order it around, so to speak. Of course, Wolfram Alpha will never evolve to the EQ level of intelligence. It is meant to be a tool when it was being developed, and will definitely stay that way.

So to the big one, will Wolfram Alpha kill Google?

Well, it is way too early to tell. Only a few lucky individuals were able to talk Stephen Wolfram into showing them a special peak of Wolfram Alpha.

In terms of commercial supremacy, of course no one, and nothing, can surpass Google that fast.

But is Wolfram Alpha a threat to Google? If it performs anywhere close to what its developers are aiming for, I would say it’s definitely one to watch out for.

The following review of Linkumate was written over 2 years ago now and it may now be better or even worse. From the recent research I’ve done on Linkumate it’s seems to be good for Yahoo and Bing rankings. So if that’s your bag, then check it out.

Here’s the original review………..

Well as promised here’s my brutally honest review of Linkumate after using it for 6 weeks.  I’m always on the lookout for good linking services and when Linkumate was launched, I’ve got to be honest I was a bit dubious after buying into the whole MSN loophole thing and it failing miserably.

However, I thought for $37 a month for 5 sites I’ll give it a shot.

My first impression wasn’t very good to be honest. I applied as soon as it launched and there was quite a few problems getting registered. The servers didn’t hold up very well and I ended up applying twice as I didn’t get any confirmation email. Further to that none of the emails I registered with ended up with accounts that I could login to. So after a few emails backwards and forwards to their support I ended up gaining access.

Inside you get presented with a webpage that asks you to enter your URL, Anchor Text and whether it’s a money site or blog. It looked very basic but hey it’s the links we’re after so I wasn’t too bothered.

So I entered my two test websites URLs etc and then that was it.

The Results!

2 weeks passed by, no extra links appeared.

3 weeks passed by still no links.

4 weeks passed by, still no links.

By this time I thought sod this, so I contacted support and asked why I can’t see any links yet and their reply was that you have to wait 4 weeks for your links to appear. Hmmmm, my first thought was….. Why wasn’t this stated in the sales letter?  (ed.  I think I already know the answer to that)

Anyway, I thought I’d give it a few more weeks. So at the end of week 6 (yesterday) how many extra links do you think I had………….. a big fat zero.

The Conclusion

So in conclusion I wouldn’t waste your money. You’d be better of going over to the warriorforum and hiring someone to do a link building campaign for you. The forums full of excellent link building services and there’s loads of feedback for them so at least you can see what you’re going to get.

Now I may be wrong about Linkumate and you may well get results but please be prepared to wait and wait and wait…..

Another option that I’ve come across is to join Commission Blueprint’s membership program. This month Tim and Steve from Commission Blueprint, have added a free membership to their new http://www.3waylinkblueprint.com service as part of your Commission Blueprint membership (ed. 3waylinkblueprint.com isn’t available to the public yet by the way).

This has already had some amazing results for its users. I can’t comment yet as I’m literally going to start my first campaign this weekend, but going of feedback from blogs i.e. http://blogwam.com/664 I’m going to give it a try and as ever I’ll report back here with exactly what I think about it.

Till next time.

PS. I just missed the payment date to by 1 day so it’s just cost me another $37 – gutted! On the plus side they said I can use it until 3rd April due to automatically paying for another month, so if anything changes I’ll report back here

Arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO is building incoming links to your website.  Search engines have worked off this principal since they were first conceived. If a lot of people are linking to a website then it must be important – right, therefore it will rank higher than a site with less links. Well fortunately for surfers but unfortunately for us SEO consultants, there’s a bit more to SEO these days.

You see back in the day (ed. that phrase still makes the laugh), you used to be able to put your targeted keywords in your meta tags, buy a load of somewhat dubious links and voila, page 1 in Alta Vista. Well not anymore! However, one-way incoming links still play a huge part in your website search engine rankings.

These days though, it’s more about the quality of the links or the link reputation, as its more commonly known, not the quantity.   If you’ve been reading my blog lately then you’ll know that I’m currently writing a series of articles about how to generate 1000′s of incoming links. This article isn’t part of that series, I’ve only just come across this service and I just had to tell you about it.

Now there are a few link building services around like Linkvana.com and Lunkumate.com to name but two. However Linkvana.com will set you back $147 per month and Linkumate.com $47 per month.

Linkvana.com is way out of reach for most people and Linkumate.com is a very new product that I’m currently testing. I only purchased this just over a week ago so I need some time too evaluate the service properly. As soon as I have some solid numbers to work with I’ll be letting you know what I think of it here on my blog.

How much are these links then?

Well I’ve found a service that gives you 30 high PR links every month for $5. Yeah you heard me $5! I was going to wait until I’ve tested it before I told you about it, but for less than the price of a skinny late from your local over priced coffe shop – just try it yourself

These links vary from PR4 to PR9! I’ve checked the service out in the warrior forum too and it’s getting rave reviews. Now for any eager newbies that are reading this who’ve never heard of the Warrior Forum before , do yourself a favour and before you buy any Internet Marketing product (and I mean any) head on over to the Warrior Forum and check out what people are saying about it.

The Warrior Forum is a superb community of people to hang out online with and over time that forum has saved me so much money because it’s helped stop me  buying over hyped up crap products that unfortunately flood this industry these days. The Warrior Forum IMHO is the best Internet Marketing forum that I’ve visited.

When you sign up for your massive $5 subscription you get an email packet (as they call them) every month with 30 high PR links in, plus instructions on exactly how to leave your link there without spamming! If you decide to leave, you don’t lose any links, they just don’t send you any more packets. How good is that

Where can I sign up?

Anyway, click on the link below and try the service out. This really is a service that spreads by word of mouth because no affiliate is going to promote a $5 per month product even is they get 100% commission

http://angelasdiscountmarket.com/backlink_builder1.html

Let me know how you get on with it and I’ll report back myself in the next few weeks.

Well if you’ve not been on the moon for the last week or two you’ve probably heard of the new software by Brad Callen called PPC Web Spy. If you have been on the moon for the last few weeks you need to read on to find out what all the hype is about.

PPC Web Spy is the latest in an ever growing arsenal of internet marketing products that Brad Callen has released. I’ve bought 3 of them in the past; Keyword Elite, SEO Elite and Affiliate Elite. The first two were excellent products in their own right and I still currently use SEO Elite for all my seo projects. The only gripe for me was that I ended up having a lot of problems (and still do) with  Affiliate Elite, but I’ll save that for another post.

Anyway PPC Web Spy is primarily a tool that allows you to spy on what keywords your competitors are bidding on in Adwords. Now there’s a few of these tools around like Affiliate Elite, SpyFu, KeywordSpy etc. But the main difference with this initially is that it’s a plugin for Firefox and not a stand-alone pc application.

Now with the nightmare that I’ve had with Affiliate Elite, I was intrigued to know what Brad’s new keyword spy tool was all about. After all, that was the main reason I bought Affiliate Elite last year when it launched, so I could be a super sleuth on my competitors

So what data can you spy on?

The plugin looks cool and isn’t too intrusive on your browser space. The first thing you’ll notice is that it puts a nice green button under the Adwords Ad that you click to get your data. Ok your thinking, that’s neat so what data can I spy on? Well PPC Web Spy shows you the following data for up to 10 keywords per ad:

-          Position

-          Avg. CPC

-          Max. CPC

-          Clicks/Day

-          Cost/Day

Now you might think wow that some useful data. But the problem I’ve found with a few of these tools is that they don’t tell you how long the ad has been running for with them keywords. This is crucial because you might be seeing keywords that have only just been initiated today. You need to know the history of an Ad to get the proper metrics and make your decision if the ad is profitable.

There are some other features that let you paste the info straight into Google’s keyword tool so you can get more keywords and also PPC Web Spy will show if certain ads are Amazon or Clickbank affiliates. A really cool feature I found is that it also shows you what other keywords the affiliate is bidding on for different products.

Where’s the catch?

Now obviously with a free product, there is a one- time offer up-sell and this is what put me off.

It was after I signed up, on the up-sell page the second video then explained that PPC Web Spy wasn’t just a keyword spy tool, but it was also a MLM tool. Now for those who don’t know what MLM is, it’s basically Pyramid Selling.  Now I’ve had my fingers burned with MLM in the past so it’s a bit of a sore point and really put me off.

Basically, if you send someone a link to download this software, when they activate the plugin to spy on their competitors, just above the top position in Google, affiliate links are placed for certain related products with your affiliate link in. Everytime they search, whatever they search for. I don’t know what it is but I just don’t feel combatable with this at all. Maybe it’s just me.

So feel free to go and checkout the salespage, you can find it at www.ppcwebspy.com Don’t worry that’s not one of the affiliate links I was telling you about. I told you I hate MLM stuff. If you don’t believe me no worries just type the address in your URL J Let me know what you think.

Till next time.

Using Top 10 Lists As Link Bait

People just love lists. Top 10, top 7, top 5 whatever the number, our minds are trained to just love a list. You might of come across 101 lists quite often; Affiliate Marketing 101, SEO 101 etc. These lists, especially when they’re kept up-to-date are fantastic link bait for your website and tent to get Dugg quite a lot too, hint hint : ) I’ve even seen some of them turned into authority pages.

What’s also great about these is that you don’t need to write a great deal of content on each. Just a few sentences should suffice and you could also maybe include links to products your affiliated with to monetize it.

Top X Lists can also be written for seasonal markets like Top 10 best Christmas Gifts; Top Ten best valentines Gifts for your loved one. You get the drift. The more specific you can make your list, the more you’re going to stand out.

So put it on your to do list for your website today to create a Top 10 list for your chosen niche.

Here’s an excellent example of the types of lists people are creating:

http://fresh-perspectives.net/2007/11/best-101-lists.html