So how far would you to to win a prize you could buy yourself if you really wanted it?

And what about if you offered a range of prizes to encourage people to link back to you? Do you think all the links you got would benefit you over time? I’m sure they would, which is why I’m happy to offer a link to Gobala’s Wordpress blog, in the hope of winning the USB memory watch.

But there’s more to it than that: Gobala’s blog is well frequented and he’s offering a link back to the blogs that link to him – that’s not to be sneezed at and it’s probably worth more than the watch.

Here’s the thing: as an example of giving value for value this competition shows a great way of doing it. Everyone gets something out of it. If you can offer value in return for value it makes it so much easier for your customers (in this case bloggers) to make the decision to buy (in this case make a post). Money doesn’t always have to change hands for the exchange of services and this kind of creative thinking shows why Gobala’s name crops up regularly.

So, do you have a blog and would like a shot at winning something? Visit the competition page here and take your shot – good luck!

As a personal experiment, just for fun, I’m seeing how this content gets treated by the search engines. Originally I was going to change it to make it unique because I’ve used it once already on one of my blogs, but then I decided as a test it would be very interesting to see how Google treat it. Will they treat it the way they say they will in their post? For details of that post, read on:

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen some overly excited expert proclaim just how bad duplicate content is – and how you’ll disappear forever from Google’s index if you have any.

Seems a bit odd when you consider how many sites syndicate content these days, from the BBC and CNN to ma and pa sites, everyone’s getting their content out there as much as possible.

Ezine articles wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t hordes of webmasters all wanting to take the duplicate content and publish it!

So, will duplicate content really get you penalized? Who should we ask? There are any number of self-proclaimed experts hanging out a various webmaster and internet marketing forums. Just spend more than a day at any one of them and watch the same discussion take place many times.

We can’t ask them, so who do we ask?

How about Google?

Here’s what I read from Google

The most important things to know about duplicate content are:

• Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

If you’d like to read Google’s full post you can do so here.

So, does this mean it’s safe to just put up any old scraped content then? Well, no not really. You still need good content and their own advice makes it clear that unique content is always likely to do better than duplicate content, so it’s worth the effort to be unique. You just don’t have to spend sleepless nights that you’ll disappear from the search engine if you have some content that also exists elsewhere.

Of course, if your whole site is nothing but scraped content you might still have problems, but that’s a whole other post.

Ok, apologies for a slight play on words in the title, but it’s actually a very accurate question to do with the subject of this post.

I just watched a video over at Google Webmaster Central and Matt Cutts explains why the alt attribute for an image is so beneficial to Google and therefore beneficial to web browsers.

Don’t really want to repeat their post here so if you want to see it you can use the link above, but I will say that it’s something a lot of us are probably guilty of. When we add an image to a page it can be hard to think of good alt text sometimes. And keyword stuffing the alt text is likely to get you into trouble eventually so it’s best avoided.

I know from personal experience, having seen the source code to tons of sites, that webmasters don’t use the alt attribute anything like as much as they should. Doesn’t have to be anything clever eve, just a simple text of what the image is. Combined with a good image name that could translate into better search engine results and more visitors.

Do watch the video and then read the comments. Seems even Google gets it wrong about whether something is a tag or an attribute!

We all know, whatever we think of them, that Paypal is one of the internet’s great success stories.

Whether you love them or hate them they have made it possible for a lot of ‘normal’ people to make some money on the internet. If you don’t believe it, just try applying for a ‘real’ merchant account for internet usage and see how complex and expensive it can get – not exactly easy for Mr ‘Average’.

But Paypal need to keep up with changing trends and opportunities, as any good business does So they’ve now created a widget for your blog. Its purpose is to enable you to sell your products easily.

The widget allows you to have multiple products, good descriptions and images and the payment is all handled by Paypal.

Sounds Wonderful.

But why on earth would they set up a site for the widget that looks like it’s a phishing site? Wouldn’t it make sense to have it within the main Paypal interface? Or at the very least have it on the Paypal domain name?

As it is, those who are security conscious may well steer clear of the links to the site for this widget. The url www.storefront.paypallabs.com doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, not to me anyway? The Paypal login button on that site looks like a scam artist’s attempt to get your details!

I suspect it’s genuinely Paypal (but I’m too chicken to try it) and I think it may very well prove to be a useful widget, but it seems odd that they’ve done it this way, even if they’re wanting to create some kind of new branding.

The passage of time will obviously tell of course and we’ll see how many blogs suddenly appear with this widget. It’s only in beta at the moment so no doubt lots will change before it’s released properly.

Tags: Paypal,blog,wordpress+widget,blog+widget,ecommerce

Well, I finally took down Blog Rush. It’s not really giving me much by way of visitors so in this competitive marketplace I can’t really justify the screen real estate it takes across all my blogs, so down it’s come.

I still think it’s a great idea, but it just doesn’t seem to have quite worked out yet. Some things are worth trying because it’s the only way to know, for sure, whether they’ll actually work out ok. This certainly seemed like a good idea at the time and I shall miss discovering new blogs. But let’s be honest, it’s not difficult to discover new blogs to read every day, is it? What’s difficult is finding the time to read them!

Some people seem to have taken the whole Blog Rush thing a bit personally and when you read some of the vitriole that’s being written you’d think we were talking about a cure for cancer that was promised and never delivered.

Other strategies are available for publicizing your blog that seem to give better ROI so it’s worth looking for something that suits your own needs.