In past SEM 101 articles, we've talked about the importance of inbound links to successful ranking (see "Links: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" - ). We've already discussed many issues surrounding them, but we haven't done a dedicated post on how to be successful at link building from a search engine's perspective. Let's finally address that .. more »

I have never been one to wake up the morning after Thanksgiving to go and wait in a line at the mall for those crazy holiday shopping deals. As much as I have thought about it, the idea of sitting outside at 2AM in the freezing cold still trying to wake up from my Thanksgiving dinner food coma never really sounded that pleasing. Well things have .. more »

Theres been some buzz today based on a by Nicholas D. Kristof at the New York Times suggesting that Bing filters results for searches conducted outside of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) using Simplified Chinese characters for their query. over the summer, we did fix a bug in web search that addressed this issue. There are some queries that .. more »

I am sitting here in the office wondering why the hallways are so quiet and it dawns on me.Stefan is not here. Which means two things, I can work without listening to him rock out to early 90s greatest hits and that he is not here for me to film him for #FTF. So sadly all you get today is a short post from me. Which is actually not all that bad .. more »

By David Bowermaster Administrator, Microsoft on the Issues North Carolina Governor Bev Purdue announced yesterday that North Carolina will partner with Microsoft to implement Elevate America , an initiative designed to help get people back to work by...(read more).. more »

mount saint helen over the cloudsI just flew back from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC09) in Los Angeles. What a week, with a lot of announcements, surprises and achievements on multiple fronts. From the interoperability perspective, a lot happened too. This PDC09 further demonstrates how Microsoft is making interoperability a .. more »

Last week we participated in the DII workshop that took place in Brussels.  Attendees included a variety of document-format experts from the ODF and Open XML worlds, including members of SC34 working groups, the OASIS ODF and OIC TCs, ODF and Open XML implementers, public-sector experts in interoperability and archiving, and others. .. more »

As Rob Bernard mentioned in his have made an upgrade to the global observatory for climate change, and as part of that upgrade is a move to the platform, Microsofts new internet-scale cloud computing services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. Azure enables the EEA to quickly and easily build, deploy, scale, and manage incremental updates .. more »

To prevent the inadvertent disclosure of High Business Impact (HBI) information, Microsoft IT designed and implemented a system using Microsoft technologies in conjunction with a third-party solution that automatically identifies and classifies HBI information at risk, and then starts the remediation proccess... more »

With Thanksgiving less than a week away and one week until Black Friday brands, local businesses and non-profits can use their Facebook pages to get shoppers ready for the holiday season, promote Thanksgiving dinners, recipes and ideas, and even help feed their communities. With the economy still struggling, many national brands, retailers and .. more »

app_1_188471218973_1014While a number of games have graduated from our up-and-comers list to become apps with more than 1 million users, there are quite a few more to take their places. , a simple snowball-throwing app that encourages people to throw snowballs at each other to move up the rankings of snowball-throwers. It gained a big 637,000 to .. more »

In the past I have talked about the different configuration options when running . One of the more interesting configurations I discussed then was having a Hyper-V server joined to a domain where the domain controller was a virtual machine running on the same instance of Hyper-V. This is actually a configuration I use all of the time when I am .. more »

Thank you for participating in the webinar yesterday and for providing your feedback . We heard from you that the content was great and we look forward to bringing more content for topics that you have asked for. Those who registered but could not make the Webinar- we missed having you and answering your questions. Nevertheless we are making the .. more »

Episode 47 dated November 20th, 2009 of the Zune Insider Podcast is now live and is hosted by Matt Akers (skipdeez) and Jessica Zahn (jetherealz). : (2:00 17:30); Twitter and Facebook on Zune HD : (17:31 18:30); Speaking of booyah, an original song from Ryan Xristopher sampling Jessicas voice: (18:31 24:20); Music, video, user shout outs and use.. more »

http://www.dealsvista.com/deal/55152Besides the whole turkey and family thing, one of our holiday traditions is flipping through all the black Friday ads to come up with a game plan for the next morning. If you end up making lists and compare the best deals, you are going to love the spreadsheet they've put together over at DealVista. Currently .. more »

Regular readers may remember that we review the add-in for Windows Home Server earlier this year. Well, version 3.2 has just been announced. KeepVault from Proxure is an online backup solution add-in for your important files that your store on your Windows Home Server. Were happy to announce the latest version of KeepVault version 3.2 as well as .. more »

I am now in my second week with my new CableCARD ATI Digital Cable Tuner and I will explain how the unit is working with Windows Media Center 7. In addition, I will show you the new Cisco STA1520 Tuning Adapter that my cable company installed today. Now that Windows 7 has the Digital Cable Advisor, anyone who passes the test can get a CableCARD and .. more »

A little over a week ago, we reported about the impending release of Diskeeper 2010 for Windows Home Server Well, now its available! The cost is $59.95 and you can buy it by clicking or you can download a 30 day trial version by clicking For those of you who are interested, here is the press release: Diskeeper Corporation today launched Diskeeper .. more »

This new edition from Diskeeper looks pretty good, I have to be honest I have never been a big fan of Diskeeper, I have always felt O&O Defrag has always had something more to offer. The initial install is very standard apart from the fact you have to install the initial software from the WHS console and then do a second install for the WHS console .. more »

Small Business Specialist Pete Cullen has a mini review of the CloudBerry Backup for Windows Home Server add-in. My personal favourite feature of the product is that it allows your to select and backup files on network drives, not just locally on the WHS itself.  This is a small limitation of Carbonite, which can only backup files that are stored o.. more »