NZS.com Newsletter October 2008

October is here, which means we are tiptoeing even closer to the end of another year, before you know it you'll be lying on a beach enjoying your Christmas break!

There are some exciting things going on in the ever-improving New Zealand web at the moment, this month we take a look at social bookmarking, understanding duplicate content on your site, made-for-the-net TV shows and Kiwi students succeeding in entrepreneurial excellence.

Contents:

• Top Ten Sites
• Social Sharing
• Worried about Duplicate Content for SEO?
• Webisode-Mania
• Online Alerts from Kiwi Students

Now we're on the lighter side of Daylight Savings, the holiday season is just around the corner. Labour Day at the end of the month (October 27), is the first stat holiday after the winter haul of five day working weeks - and Kiwis can now start planning for the many public holidays to come over the warmer months!

Start with booking your accommodation by checking out NZS.com's Top 10 travel and accommodation websites for the month:

Top 10 Accommodation Directory Websites:

Rank	Site Name	URL
1.	Wotif.com Accommodation	www.wotif.com
2.	Baches & Holiday Homes To Rent	www.holidayhomes.co.nz
3.	Hotel Club	www.hotelclub.net
4.	Cottages of Nelson	www.cottagesofnelson.co.nz
5.	Great New Zealand Kiwi Bach Company	www.nzbaches.co.nz
6.	Family Parks New Zealand	www.familyparks.co.nz
7.	Caravan Parkfinder NZ	www.caravan-parkfinder.co.nz
8.	Bed & Breakfast Site	www.babs.co.nz
9.	Pet Property	www.petproperty.co.nz
10.	New Zealand Stays	www.newzealandstays.co.nz

Social networks are increasingly a part of our web-orientated lives. They keep us in contact with friends and family, and reconnect us with old contacts from the past. Sharing is a key term to social networking, whether it be photos, videos, quizzes or messages.

If you've got a personal social networking page (or several) you'll know that there are a lot unnecessary add-ons out there. Your friends may send you dozens of posts, programs and features every day, and sometimes it all becomes a bit much. If there is one feature you should be aware of however, social bookmarking is it. It's a convenient way to share the things you find while surfing the web with those you think may find them interesting.

During your day, you probably frequent NZS.com for your New Zealand-related website searches. Found something you'd like to share with colleagues, friends, or the world? A great new article, a search for an SEO company, or even the October newsletter? Use the new social bookmarking buttons, now available at the bottom of every NZS.com page. Whether it's Facebook or del.icio.us, Digg or Scoopit, NZS.com has the social bookmarking tools to share useful pages with all of your favourite networking sites.

Having unique content on your site, unpublished anywhere else on the web, is a valuable search engine optimisation technique for improving rankings. This month we take a look into how content duplication can affect your SEO, and how to deal with it.

For the best search engine optimisation, ideally every update, news piece and article on your website will be exclusive to your site, not published elsewhere on the web. Copying content from other websites and republishing it on your site can prevent your search engine ranks from increasing, because search engines like to present searchers with unique content from the original source. Have you got some information from another web source that you'd like to share on your website, but are afraid that republishing it might harm your ranks? You can use a piece of information from another site and republish it when you're adding additional value to that text on your site, and your ranks won't suffer. Just make sure you are crediting the original source - most commonly done in the form of quoting. Search engines do understand what you are doing here, and won't penalise you for it if you're not maliciously copying content.

What about duplicating content from within your own site, on different pages on one domain? As a general rule, duplicate content, while not preferable for SEO, will not be frowned upon unless the content intends to be deceptive or manipulative of search engine results. Search engines do a good job of choosing a version of your content to show in their search results, and will not fault you for having a little repetitive content within the pages in your website.

You might also be worrying about continually linking to the same URL within one page, as there is often talk around the web that search engines see repetitive linking within a single page to one destination to be link stuffing. This talk is not a myth, but there are ways around it.

Search engines are determined to provide users with a level of variety, they try to filter pages with duplicate URL linking so that users experience less redundancy when searching - so the search engines will select what they think the 'best' version of that link is in their results. However, a search engine's idea of the best link and your idea of the most important one within your page might be different. To get around this, you can simply let search engines know which URL is most important to add weight to in your Sitemap. Alternatively, use 'no follow' links, which don't hold any search engine weight, but will still be useful for your users to get them to the URLs you want to repetitively link them to.

Duplicated linking, if for no other reason, will deter search engines from effectively crawling your actual content. If their bots are spending a lot of time crawling multiple URL links within your page, eventually determining that they lead to the same place, they will have less time to get to the rest of your content because of your site's bandwidth.

Duplicate content can affect your site's SEO in several ways, but as long as you're not deliberately copying from other sources and you link smartly, it's unlikely that you'll see your web pages penalised in their search engine rankings.

One of our recently archived newsletters featured an article about streaming 'on demand' television, and this month we look into the popularity of internet-only television.

A "webisode" is the common name for a show filmed purely for internet audiences, one never to be shown on broadcast television. This doesn't mean camcorder YouTube videos, but fully-fledged productions from television companies aiming to capture a unique online market.

New Zealand has not yet seen any blockbuster Kiwi productions made specifically for the web; yet international webisodes are slowly being offered by New Zealand television networks. Currently C4's Battlestar Galactica is being offered as a net-only program, posting weekly episodes for all Kiwis to view that they won't see on the channel itself. There are also several smaller channels which offer web only TV programs from New Zealand, particularly in Asian languages.

Overseas, webisodes are taking off. In the US, NBC Universal has just begun screening the high-budget series Gemini Division, starring actress Rosario Dawson. The series will be 50 episodes long, with four new 4-5 minutes episodes posted each week, culminating to all episodes being shown together at the end of the week as a full 22-minute show.

While webisodes are often only popular in the sci-fi genre, social networking website Bebo (which happens to be the number one in its field in New Zealand) launched the reality web series Model.Live in late August, following three models in search for fame and fortune, America's Next Top Model style. The webisodes, made in partnership with Vogue are designed to create an interactive world of reality television - in true Bebo style viewers can sift through video diaries, message posts, text messages and photos from the cast, and even ask them questions.

NZS.com loves sharing success stories from Kiwis making their mark globally in online business. The Canterbury University Entrepreneurship competition is an annual event for University students, whereby they pitch an idea and supplementing business plan Dragon's Den-style to a panel, in hopes of winning $40,000 to start their venture.

The 2008 winners were drawn in mid September: three engineering management students who have come up with a concept for a customised online alerts system. Mark Leersnyder, Daniel McCallum and Richard Stephenson have developed the concept 'My Alerts', enabling customised alerts by text message, e-mail and desktop pop-ups.

While not yet revealing too much information to the press about how the concept works, the trio have revealed that My Alerts will ask you to fill out a profile which would generate alerts specifically for you. For example, if you'd indicated surfing as a hobby, when the surf at your local beach reached a certain height, My Alerts would let you know when to grab your board and head towards the waves.

The three students still seek another $400,000 to fully develop My Alerts. They have announced that it will be available as freeware, supplemented by targeted advertising relevant to the user. While there are paid alert programs on the market, the trio seek to make My Alerts the most customisable, while keeping it free for all to use. Leersnyder, McCallum and Stephenson aim to have their concept up and running within six to twelve months, and they hope to have their first 50,000 users in the first six months of availability.

We're interested in your opinion, if you have anything you'd like to hear about in the newsletter, let us know.

Images from Flickr: DC EMA Alert, Laptop Screen, OLPC GrassCon.