This past week, Yahoo pulled a fast one. After quickly turning down Microsoft’s bid to purchase the company, Yahoo launched a new advertising platform called Apex.  In a second announcement, Yahoo also launched a new site similar to Digg called Yahoo Buzz found at http://www.buzz.yahoo.com.

I have not had the time to personally look into these new Yahoo services, but figured it would be nice to let you all know what has been going on.

Kentucky Lawmaker Wants to Make Anonymous Internet Posting Illegal

“Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.” Full article… New article (last broke)

This is sad if this bill gains any traction. Agree? Why would this be a really bad thing?

When you have your own website there are a couple of things that are important for your website ranking. One of the most important things in declaring this is how many links you have coming to your site.

The first type of link you can get that would is the cheapest and easiest are directory links. These links are free to submit and they will put you in your database for free in order to link back to your site.

The second type of link would be more expensive but just as easy to get. The second type of link I am talking about is a link that you pay for as a website owner. If you pay for someone to link to you it is expensive but you can get good links if you have a relevant site linking to you.

Another type of link that a lot of people are willing to do is a reciprocal link. In doing this you put a link on your site and then you get one in return. These links are not as good for you on Google ranking but they still help.

Lastly, the hardest and the best links are the websites that link to you for free. These links are very important because they are relevant sites that are linking to your site because your site is a good site. So the key to getting these links is having good content on your site and lots of visitors so more people can see your good content.

A lot of people think that the only purpose of links is to get more traffic directly to your site. This can be true but the biggest key to links is that you can be rank higher on Google. I currently was submitting my site to databases and doing reciprocal links the other day and my site increased 3-5 spots on Google depending on the keyword. So all in all the way to be successful is to get as many links as you can to your site.

I recently read an article about user-generated Digg.com being up for sale again (after nearly selling to Yahoo! back in 2006) and this time hiring influential investment bankers at Allen & Co. to search out prospective buyers. They would be aiming for nearly $300 million dollars, although speculation shows that they may now be contemplating selling for somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 million. Rumor has it that there are four “prospective” buyers in Murdoch’s News Corp (which owns MySpace), Google, Microsoft, and a fourth unknown.

Whether or not this decision to sell was affected by the potential sale of Yahoo! to Microsoft as a merger with MSN is unknown; If MSN were to merge with Yahoo!, Google may be more motivated to raise bids with regards to Digg and also to increase their involvement in the world of social media.

(Info on digg: Digg.com is an entirely web 2.0 user-driven site. One can submit videos, podcasts, articles etc. which others on the site can then browse. For more in depth information – the site describes itself well.)