In our recent discussions of branding for startups and entrepreneurs, we’ve mentioned that marketing and branding is always harder to do when what you’re trying to sell isn’t a quality product. Successful startup products tend to fit into an equation involving the ideas and the people who are executing those ideas. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and previously Flickr, says that it wasn’t just the idea that attracted her to Hunch; the people behind it were just as important.

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“The idea is just the starting point, just the first step. You also have to find the right people to help you do it,” writes Fake in BusinessWeek’s Entrepreneur’s Journal. “No successful company has have ever been the product of just one person.”

As Fake describes, a great idea is nothing without the right team to make it a reality. In the hands of the wrong team, an amazing idea for a startup can fail, whereas the right team with the right idea will ultimately have a higher chance of success. An example for this is the rush of online video startups in the last several years, a great idea that only the best teams, at YouTube and Vimeo among others, have succeeded with.

“The entrepreneurs [at YouTube] were able to raise the capital they needed to build and scale it,” says Fake. “Obviously, it was a good idea, but the combination decided who the winner was.”

Often the most successful startups aren’t the first players in their field, they just had the right people who could execute the idea the right way. At Hunch, Fake says the dichotomy of the MIT grads’ engineering prowess and her knowledge of communities from Flickr created a perfect ying and yang combination, and a successful product.

“When they decided they were going into the user-generated content direction, they knew it was not their strong suit. That’s what I do,” says Fake. “I had a lot of experience with building, designing, social software, getting a product integrated in other pieces of software–that kind of thing. It was a great combination of our two skill sets.”

There is certainly more to a successful startup than the right people and a good idea, but Fake believes these are the two most important factors. What else is important for startups apart from the ideas and the people behind them? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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A while back, Google launched an extensions gallery for its Chrome web browser. Ad-blocking add-ons are among the most popular for Mozilla’s Firefox, so it stands to reason that they will be for Chrome as well. With Google’s primary source of revenue being its ads, a lot of talk has surfaced about Google letting people block its own ads with its own product.

Is Google was smart to allow ad-blocking extensions for Chrome? Discuss here.

A recent article from the New York Times has elevated the discussion, calling the allowance of ad blockers a "test" for Google.

Google wants people to use Chrome. For that to happen, it has to give people what they want. One point of view would be that the people who are most likely to block ads would just as use another browser that allowed them to do so if Chrome didn’t.

Google doesn’t think that ad blockers will have much of an impact on advertising anyway. In December, Google Engineering Director Linus Upson participated in a panel discussion about the subject. He, Charles McCathieNevile of Opera, and Mike Shaver of Mozilla discuss it in the following clip:

Upson says it’s "unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying." He thinks the market will sort it out. The others appear to take similar stances.

The real question is how many people are really going to make the effort to block ads? As Wladimir Palant, who runs Adblock Plus on Firefox, told the NYT, ad blockers are still used by a "tiny proportion of the Internet population, and these aren’t the kind of people susceptible to ads anyway."

Based on what Upton had to say in the panel discussion, Google is pretty confident that it can deliver ads people actually want, and that people (for the most part) will not want to block them if they see that relevance.

What could hurt Google more is if Microsoft or Firefox implemented their own ad blocking capabilities by default. This would lead to average users browsing an ad-less web, because just as most people don’t go out of their way to download ad-blocking add-ons, they are unlikely to go out of their way to allow ads in such a scenario. However, it is pretty unlikely that this will happen, particularly on Microsoft’s end. They of course have their own ads to worry about.

If ad-blocking from the browser actually did become a big problem for Google, one would have to wonder if the company woulnd’t find some kind of work-around. For example, what would stop them from serving ads directly in the Chrome Browser itself (in a toolbar area for example)? One could envision sponsored link-style ads like those served via Gmail. With Google’s interest-based advertising, relevance would still be at the forefront. But it probably won’t come to that anytime soon (at least not as a solution to the perceived issue).

Wondering how many people actually use Chrome anyway? Ad-blocking from the browser does after all only matter if people are using that browser. Well, the latest numbers from Net Applications have Chrome’s market share surpassing that of Apple’s Safari browser. It’s worth noting that Google just released Chrome for Mac last month as well.

As Doug Caverly  mentioned, "Chrome’s only been around for about 16 months, after all, and Safari’s had something like six years to make friends."

Google’s Chrome OS is set to make things interesting later this year, as well. Chrome use is growing and will continue to do. Ad campaigns from Google may ease that growth along.

Google made a bold move when it opened up its extensions gallery, allowing for ad-blocking extensions. Could this turn out to be a huge mistake on the company’s part or is Google’s confidence completely justified? Only time will tell for certain, but Google has long stood behind the promise of trying to deliver the best user experience. If users want to block ads, Google is going to let them. Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> Chrome Cruises By Safari

> Chrome Ad Campaign Nets Positive Results

> Google Pushes Chrome With Newspaper Ads

Once the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free “Micro” service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than Wordpress or Typepad’s original product. ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad’s Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts:

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TypePad Micro: In addition to being able to blog via email, iPhone app, “Blog It” bookmarklet and the general WYSIWYG dashboard, this tool also allows users to cross post to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. My only complaint with TypePad is that there are only 2 design themes to choose from. For someone like me with very little design sense, it’s a long process to find something right. As well, if you’d like to add another blog or add new design themes you are required to pay for a monthly subscription service.

Tumblr: This service offers users publishing via iPhone app, desktop widget, the Tumblr bookmarklet, text message, email, AIM and even via audio call-in. Tumblr’s theme gallery offers hundreds of options for design. Users can also add their posts to Facebook and Twitter via the free customization. Tumblr allows users to create more than one blog and add more than one contributor for free; however, all edits show up in the same dashboard in chronological order. This means you may have to dig to revise an older post.

Posterous: Posterous is the original email publishing microblog. Users can email posts, publish them via the web editor or upload them from the PicPosterous iPhone app. The service allows users to set up auto posting to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and Xanga. You can also choose to post to just one service in addition to your Posterous account by emailing flickr@posterous.com to specify Flickr or twitter@posterous.com to post to Twitter. Of the three services, Posterous offers an advantage in its ease-of-use and while it’s lacked design abilities in the past, the company recently launched themes and theme import from Tumblr.

Other notable light blogging services include Soup.io, Vox and Noovo. If we’ve missed your favorite service let us know in the comments below.

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If you’ve ever created your own podcasts or home videos then you’ve probably got content sprinkled across YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv. As better video services arise, there’s always that familiar debate: do you take the time to migrate your archives to a new service or do you embed multiple files into your site? Dutch video site Yubby creates a seamless solution for video display across 3rd party services. Rather than forcing users to embed multiple videos or links, the company lets users drag and drop videos from a variety of sites into a single embeddable player widget.

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While Yubby only really launched in the Netherlands in January, co-founders Vincent Everts, Remco Bron and Ronald van Woensel have been working together for more than 4 years. In 2005, the three were working on a Boxee-style web television software solution. After struggling with federal product requirements and deals with device manufacturers, the group took the best parts what was expected to be a set top box software and transformed it into a web-widget platform. While they remain in the entertainment content space, Yubby launches in the US as a great solution for video publishers, bloggers and artists.

The company’s American debut is timed with this year’s Blog World Expo. Those familiar with the Blog World Expo site have unknowingly seen Yubby in action. The widgets are already attached to homepage content featuring more than 65 tech and social media powerhouses like Guy Kawasaki, Kara Swisher and Chris Brogan. The company lets users search video from the top 30 uploading services, create specialized channels and republish these channels to the page, sidebar or social media profile of their choice. While the widgets can be placed anywhere you can embed code, the company has already built WordPress integration for even faster video publishing. The product is currently free to general users and offers a premium service where publishers can integrate the site directly into their content management systems. To test Yubby visit Yubby.

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PandaLabs has identified over a million spam links used to target Google searchers looking for information about automotive parts from Ford and Nissan especially. Panda calls it “a major Blackhat SEO attack” designed to dupe searchers into downloading spyware or purchasing phony security software.

Searching for the keyphrase “Diagram Of A 1998 Nissan Pathfinder Blower Motor,” for example leads to a Google results page packed with spammy sites. A savvy user can identify them by their unusual URLs starting with an arbitrary number, followed by nonsensical combinations of letters and resolving to Polish domains.

These types of URLs went on for ten pages before I stopped looking—ten pages of weird Polish results for an English query, all mentioning different Nissan Pathfinder parts diagrams. This is a series error in Google relevance: wrong language, wrong country, wrong parts (bringing back a door handle diagram isn’t the intent of the searcher in this instance), wrong sites, all of them likely created very recently.

Clicking on any of the links is likely to lead to a webpage prompting the searcher to download a codec that is actually malware designed to present bogus security warnings. The malicious program then prompts the user to spend as much as $80 to download the security program to get rid of the viruses. This type of malware is called “scareware” or “rogueware” and has become so popular among the underground lately probably because it works.

Sean-Paul Correll, a security analyst for PandaLabs provides a partial list of the keywords and phrases targeted in this highly organized attack and provides a video to show illustrate how it works. Though many of the examples target Nissan, Panda says over a million target Ford alone.

Targeted Blackhat SEO Attack against Ford Motor Co. from Panda Security on Vimeo.

“This case is especially interesting because it’s one of the few SEO attacks that we have seen targeting a single, specific brand,” said Correll.

How are cybercrooks accomplishing such search engine dominance? Well, there are a number of blackhat SEO tactics, and it would be hard to identify exactly which ones. But one obvious tactic is fooling Google’s trust algorithm by slipping in links to target sites on trusted sites. In a Web 2.0 era defined by reader commentary and user-generated content, this becomes especially easy to accomplish.

Running a quick link check of some of the results Google was returning show spammers have made use of a comments section on Beerinator.com, a North Carolina-based beer enthusiast community, and also of the comments section on Logrithmic.com, a music blog. Ever seen a bunch of nonsensical text or irrelevant “nice site” comments with a link?

These appear to be the main tactics. The spammers also take advantage of forums—one link showed up on this South African paramedics forum, the commentary section of which is a veritable spam bonanza. Beyond that, all these strange Polish sites seem to link to each other.

Correll said Google could (and presumably does) monitor these attacks in house, but the company also has the option of outsourcing security to other companies to combat them. “They could also try to modify their algorithm, but that is not really a viable option given the expense and the high likelihood of technical issues (i.e. negative impact on their core search IP and capabilities).”

Google did not return request for comment about what Google is doing about a spate of similar attacks or whether recent tweaks to their algorithm have allowed it.
 

Last week, Digg released the DiggBar, a toolbar that sits at the top of your browser as you view content from Digg. It frames the content not only with the bar itself, but with a custom Digg URL. The following clip demonstrates what it does if you have not encountered it yet.

Since the DiggBar was introduced, there has been a great amount of concern that Digg has started hoarding all of the traffic for itself. Some experts have come out and played down the concern. Brent Csutoras for example noted it would only increase traffic. He pointed out the additional sharing features (via Twiter, Facebook, and email) and that content would still receive page views, proper clicks for ads, etc.

Such reasoning has still not been enough to convince some people. Digg has now addressed the issue officially in a company blog post. Digg’s John Quinn writes:

Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

Quinn says Digg has already launched additional updates this week to further address "search engine juice" concerns. He adds:

We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Will this information set some minds at ease, or will Digg’s word about its practices not be good enough? One thing’s for certain – Digg is going to keep a lot of eyeballs on it’s own site with the DiggBar as it focuses users’ attention on what else they can find on Digg.

Posted by great scott!

We here at SEOmoz have been fortunate enough to work with some incredible consulting clients over the years. We’ve achieved some amazing results and built some wonderful relationships with many of them. We’re often asked about what it takes to really develop a standout SEO consulting brand and, since it’s an oft overlooked topic, that’s exactly what we’ll cover in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.  We’ll look at some of the key elements that we feel are truly important to building and solidifying a consultancy’s brand, reputation, and client loyalty.

And as Rand mentions in the video, if you’re an SEO consultant you definitely need to list your company in our SEO Services Marketplace. It’s completely free and it’s a great place to gain exposure, find contracts, and look for talent.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Differentiating Your SEO Services from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

I’ve also migrated all of the legacy videos into the new PRO Video Tips area. There are now over two dozen exclusive, PRO-only video tips available, and we’ve already got more planned out.

Even if you’re not PRO, you can visit the page and read short descriptions of the videos to get an idea of what’s available to PRO Members.

PS–I’m sure most of you have noticed that it’s Tuesday, not Friday. Some may even have noticed that this post went up and came down a couple of times on Friday. Unfortunately, Vimeo had some technical issues with the first two attempts at uploading the video which caused it to be unwatchable, so it had to come down. Then I had some technical issues with the plague that kept me unable from getting it re-uploaded and live until today. Sincere apologies to all Whiteboard Friday fans for the delay. The video should be working just fine now and, in my opinion, it’s worth the wait.

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Last week, Digg released the DiggBar, a toolbar that sits at the top of your browser as you view content from Digg. It frames the content not only with the bar itself, but with a custom Digg URL. The following clip demonstrates what it does if you have not encountered it yet.

Since the DiggBar was introduced, there has been a great amount of concern that Digg has started hoarding all of the traffic for itself. Some experts have come out and played down the concern. Brent Csutoras for example noted it would only increase traffic. He pointed out the additional sharing features (via Twiter, Facebook, and email) and that content would still receive page views, proper clicks for ads, etc.

Such reasoning has still not been enough to convince some people. Digg has now addressed the issue officially in a company blog post. Digg’s John Quinn writes:

Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

Quinn says Digg has already launched additional updates this week to further address "search engine juice" concerns. He adds:

We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Will this information set some minds at ease, or will Digg’s word about its practices not be good enough? One thing’s for certain – Digg is going to keep a lot of eyeballs on it’s own site with the DiggBar as it focuses users’ attention on what else they can find on Digg.