February 2004 Archives

"We believe the desktop represents a rapidly growing opportunity for paid listings and targeted contextual advertising," said Craig Pisaris-Henderson FindWhat's chairman and chief executive.

FindWhat.com agreed to acquire closely held software provider Comet Systems Inc. for as much as $33.5 million in cash and stock.

Wall Street Journal reported today.

I received an email the other day from Jeff Kang, the person who created Queryster. This search engine tool allows you to enter in a query and then click on the search engine that you want to request results back from. It then takes you to that search engine results page. The ability to jump to an other search engine is at the top right corner of each page.

It is a nifty and fun tool.

Check it out at http://www.queryster.com/.

Tim Mayer started a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing the new Yahoo! inclusion program. The thread can be found here.

The week of March 1, Yahoo will be allowing you to submit for free. The submit page can be found here.

There has been ton of talk about search engine market share over at the forums and search engine related blogs. All saying that Yahoo has a ~30% share and Google has about a ~39% share. But what really matters is your traffic patterns.

Why is it that most of of the sites out there have 70% of their traffic from Google and 10% from Yahoo? Are the SEOs only optimizing for Google? Does search engine friendly design only apply to Google?

There can be many reasons why one site gets more of its traffic from Google over Yahoo. (1) Keywords rank better for a site in Google vs Yahoo. (2) Your site appeals more to the Google type of Web user. or (3) Google just really does have a better market share, over the estimated 39%.

There is a thread on this at SEO Chat, visit the Yahoo! Traffic today!

This is one of the coolest tools I've seen...

http://www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html?q=seo

It's a very nice graphical way to see how the top 100 results between Google and Yahoo compare.

The Urchin Web analytics review I promised you guys is now ready for reading at http://www.rustybrick.com/seo_articles_8.php.

The bottom line for any marketing endeavor is return on investment (ROI). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has its place within a company's marketing department's online advertising budget. Most SEO campaign's aim is to have a positive impact on ROI and not only to rank number one for specific keyword phrases. Web analytics software gives you the necessary data to make informed decisions regarding your online marketing efforts. Ultimately, this affects the keywords you select and the pages you optimize.

This article will discuss Urchin's Web analytics software and how it can benefit a Search Engine Optimizer and their client's bottom-line.

- Overview of Important Web Analytic Features for the SEO
- Detailed Review of Urchin 5.5 and Campaign Tracking Module
   - Administrative Configuration
   - Reporting Review
   - Campaign Tracking Module
- SEO's Wish List to Urchin Developers & Web Analytics Companies
- Concept of Goal Based Funnel Analysis
- Web Analytics Article Wrap Up
- Back to SEO Articles

Overview of Important Web Analytic Features for the SEO »

Interesting thread over at SEO Chat...

To sum it up, if you want a site that shows up in the regional searches for a specific country, make sure you have a domain with that country's suffix, or a .com, .net, .org that is physically located in that country.

A couple examples:

guiden.tv is on an IP address physically located in Norway, and is a Norwegian language site. It shows up in a country specific search for the country of Tuvalu, but *not* Norway:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.guiden.tv&meta=cr%3DcountryTV
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.guiden.tv&meta=cr%3DcountryNO

dict.cc if a German site (in English) that is physically located on an IP address in Germany. it shows up in a country specific search for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, but *not* Germany:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.dict.cc&meta=cr%3DcountryCC
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.dict.cc&meta=cr%3DcountryDE

There has been a ton of talk on authorities and hubs. I tend to think all search engines should follow this path of Teoma's Subject Specific Popularity. However, is Google really following this authority concept?

Maybe it has in the past, things today seem to be turning around.

I asked one of the more well known Link Builders his thoughts on the weight factor from subject specific web pages to non subject specific web pages. Check John's post out here.

I was going to post my comments on each article written in this month's Wired magazine but then they came out and posted it online for all to read for free. Don't get me wrong, that is a good thing. I just wanted to share the URL with you and then I hope to comment on a some of them.

Visit the Complete Guide to Googlemania!

While working on a little project that made a site completely database driven, I realized that Yahoo and MSN incorrectly strip off trailing slashes in URLs (because I started seeing 404 page not found errors in my web logs).

For example, the URL http://www.domain.com/directory/ is linked to as http://www.domain.com/directory from both MSN and Yahoo.

This is bad for two reasons... first of all, it's just plain wrong, the two URLs could in theory be separate documents. Second, it's a waste of bandwidth. Most web servers are configured to add a slash to the end of a URL if there is no file that matches the name, and there *is* a directory with that name via a HTTP redirect. So now, the end user's browser needs to make two requests to the server to get one document.

The reason I figured it out is I *had* directories at one point, but moved to dynamic, database driven content. So the web server wasn't redirecting them with the wrong URL because there was not a directory with that name any longer.

Bad MSN, bad Yahoo... Naughty, boys.

There are a few topics I will be covering beyond the forum coverage that is currently reported on here.

The new Wired Magazine (one of my favorite magazines) was released today, I got my March 2004 edition right here. Guess what the cover reads? You got it GOOGLEMANIA!. There are 13 articles written in this Magazine that relate to Google, I will comment on each one over this week. The articles cover Google from the expected IPO to the technology, its so rich! So make sure to visit here daily.

Next week is the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC. You can expect live coverage on each track attended by the blog authors here, including Phoenix and myself. Check back next week for live coverage.

Also, I should be releasing my Urchin review article, its like 40 pages with pictures. I am in the process of editing it. Really good information from an SEOs perspective.

I know Andy Beal reported this, but I think its important to mention on as many sites as possible.

Bottom Line: Unique Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions for each page of your Web site.

At WebmasterWorld, Tim Mayor from Yahoo says "Yahoo Search uses the Metakeywords tag . We did not use them at FAST or Altavista. It is important that you make the keywords and description different (targeted) on every page. Exactly what the page is about. ie. the right specificity. Having all the pages have the same keywords and description is not helpful to the SE." This thread can be found at WebmasterWorld.

Thanks Andy for pointing it out.

There is an active thread which beats up on Google Guy and Google for how they are handling the representation of their engine to SEOs at some forums.

I will stay out of the debate and let the readers pick sides.

Its an interesting thread and dives into Google, its employees, the spam debate and more.

Dive in at http://forums.seochat.com/t8413/s.html.

From the Best Practices Search Engine Forums, aka "IHelpYou," the following threads caught my eye this week.

An author came in looking for advice on publishing his book online
on "how to search," but the thread goes over a lot of different issues in self-publishing.

Doug Heil's entry into the search engine chart wars represents the most up to date chart currently online.
Finally, someone has made a chart without copying Bruce Clay's mistakes - hopefully this will encourage others to check the facts and realize that Looksmart's secondary search is really powered by Wisenut (not Inktomi), that Overture's ads have been replaced by Lycos Insite in more than one place, etc.

Last but not least, a discussion of click-through rates on organic listings, in which the notion that "any top ten listing will do" is tried, convicted, and sent away for a long time.

There is an interesting thread brewing over at SEO Chat Forums that discusses how to optimize your product feed and your Web pages to rank well in Froogle results.

The basic premise is that Froogle pulls from the top matches for the three price ranges. According to Syragon, this means that they are looking at the low, medium and high price brackets and pulling one from each bracket. The ones selected from each bracket are the ones that are froogle optimized.

So how do I conduct Froogle optimization?
Both Egol and Syragon from SEO Chat discuss what they have seen that works for their Web sites. Egol says, "If you submit a datafeed the content of your site does not factor into your ranking. Instead your ranking is determined by the content of your data feed. The title of your listing and the exact text of your item description are the important things." And Syragon adds, "They select a low, middle, and high range for the top 3. When I say low middle and high I mean price range. They pick the "best match" from these 3 ranges and display them in order of lowest price to highest price."

This thread is just getting started, so if your interested join in and learn Froogle Optimization.

An excellent post by projectPHP at Cre8asiteforum, discusses what style of text links are most useful for the end user. The post was first discussing the forums own use of navigational internal linking but then broadens in scope on what actually makes a useful link.

The basic conclusion is never to use a click here style of linking but rather use descriptive words to what you would be linking to. For example, take a look at the discussion named Making Links Useful aka Where Does That Link Go??.

Well it seems webmasters are going to have some more possible costs to consider in the next few months if they are planning to stay in Yahoo. On April 15, 2004 all sites that are included through the Inktomi index will be dropped unless renewed into Yahoo special inclusion program, that most of Inktomi's resellers will be selling soon. So don't go spending the babys milk money yet, wait until April to submit to Ink or Yahoo. And its probably best to start considering the Yahoo Directory at that time as well, if you can chuck down the 299. Lots of new changes afoot, be sure to check out the discussion at SEOchat.com, read it here: Yahoo Pay for Inclusion

Well Google's Friendster, Orkut released some real time demographics on its member base. Its available for any member, so I decided to post the results here. :)

Age Demographics

Country Demographics

Relationship Status Demographics

Interestes Demographics

Within In United States Demographics

Well it is official Yahoo dumps Google search technology. But its not pure Inktomi results as we were expecting. It seems to be more of a mix of a bunch of results including some of the Yahoo directory. But I am not 100% sure yet.

Does this make the Yahoo! Directory submission fee more attractive to its customer? Duh!

"Yahoo replaced Google's results with its own Yahoo Search Technology, which combines an array of recently acquired search technologies, such as Inktomi and commercial search provider Overture Services."

Make sure to keep an eye out for Yahoo Slurp, the new Yahoo Spider.

SEO/SEM Forum coverage at:
SEO Chat: 1 | 2 | 3

Cre8asiteforum: 1 | 2

WebmasterWorld: 1

JimWorld: 1

HighRankings: 1

IHelpYou: 1 | 2

WebProWorld: 1

Webmasters Forums was down this morning.

People at WebmasterWorld have been reporting this morning that Yahoo has finally made the switch from Google's Search to Inktomi's Search. It looks like Yahoo switched back to Google soon after. Lets keep watching Yahoo! Search.

WebmasterWorld's thread on this can be found here, if your a paid subscriber click here.

SEO Chat thread covering this can be found here.

update: 3PM (EST) - Looks like Inktomi results are back in Yahoo Search. They don't match Inktomi exactly but they are not Google either.

Check out Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry, the Yahoo! engineer, a few days back on this.

update: 4:30PM (EST) - Google Results Back. Getting a bit dizzy here.

Being that Orkut is rising in popularity, and its exclusive members only club status even sells on eBay for the right price, I thought I would play devil's advocate here, and post on the other side of orkut bandwagon, while still keeping my fan card in my back pocket. Now as a networker myself, Orkut is quite an awesome place to hang up the coat, and explore the networks of other people. I was searching Jill Whalen's SEO network the other day, and was amazed at all the faces of people I was seeing for the first time, I only recognized through the forums. Pretty neat. But then something else hit me, as I remembered to how many people where already using the site, and to how much information I gave out in the first place when I registered. I think sometimes we can put on blinders and aimlessly fill out forms and information as if it our natural duty to do so. Bad idea. While I love orkut, I don't like all the information it has about me. Shot, I am a member of Friendster too, and I would take that membership over Orkut anyday if you shoved a terms of use policy in front of me, and said sign. Friendster would definately win, but I would miss Orkut a lot. So anyhow, whats the scoop Phoenix? Well here is a collection of orkut unfriendly news articles published recently, that most often you will not read in the daily seonews column. So, in an effort to be correctly informed on both sides of the social networking issues here you are, I have done the research for you:

The Orkut Privacy Policy...with very tiny tiny text

Hype comes before the Fall

Orkut-strating the internet

Danny Sullivan wrote a famous article back about three months ago on Searching With Invisible Tabs. This article details the problem that is slowly happening to the Google search engine, where Google keeps adding tabs for users to specify if they are searching for web, images, products, news and other types of searches. Danny predicts that if Google keeps going at this rate you can expect to see dozens of tabs that turn the simple search engine query box into a complicated set of tabs.

I visited Yahoo's search homepage which I just noticed had this "Add or Remove Tabs" link on the left bottom portion of the last tab. So I clicked on it to find the ability to add a total of 9 tabs!

Yahoo! does this with class, they don't require you to have tabs but they give you the option of adding tabs if you desire. They must figure that more advanced users will opt for the tabs and there is no loss on anyones part.

Did Yahoo! miss Danny's point of "invisible tabs", the ability for a search engine to predict which tab the user wants based solely on what query is entered into the search box? Or is this just an intermediate stage until search technology can supply meaningful and accurate results based on the 'style' of how a query is entered?

Laura Thieme of Bizresearch recently posted a comment to the Froogle integration into SERPS posting on December 13, 2003.

This post just 'WOWed' me enough to give the comment its own blog entry, so here it is:

"February 15, 2004: An update on Froogle. We learned why we were not included in the Froogle database, thanks to Craig Neville Mannings team at Google. Our client, Board Games Express, has a url www.boardgamesexpress.com that has a word that adult filters would limit content from coming through. See the word in the middle of the URL? What a surprise this was! In fact, it turns out that many of our clients' corporate customers have also been unable to visit their web site. This has been fixed by working with various search engines and filters to consider our client's web site "safe". We've now been able to have several clients indexed by Froogle, all of which are performing well. Once Froogle results show up all the time, as they are now inconsistently showing up at the top of Google results, we are likely to have far better performance. Average sales are typically higher from Froogle than other search engine referral sales. We do not, however, have significant traffic from Froogle. That should change in the future."

This was posted by Laura Thieme of Bizresearch.

Don't know about you guys, but I have jumped on the Orkut bandwagon and I am getting kind of addicted. Yea, Orkut is the company Google purchased - why? who knows. It basically is this new concept that allows for you to grow an online community of friends. To join one person must invite you and then you can invite others to be your friends. So it has this viral type of pattern where there member base must be growing exponentially. I have worked with this concept of Viral Marketing in the past but this might be the most promising efforts of this marketing tactic that I have ever seen. You see, the blog title was "Orkut Down Briefly at 8:25AM (EST)" and I got off on a tangent.

Anyway, I have attached a screen shot of Orkut being down at 8:25AM. I login a few times per day and I caught them. :) Later - decided to change blog title a bit.

Looks like Lycos is officially closing up it's search engine business, and instead becoming a dating service (and a few others things)...

http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3311971

Pk_Synths at SEO Chat posted a thread with a very funny link. FARK.com posted a poll and contest for designers to "Photoshop a Google logo for a ficticious holiday". Some really funny ones there, check them out by Clicking Here. The thread at SEO Chat can be found here.

Some of my favorites (no I did not look through them all):

Thanks Brette Tabke from WMW

I have just found out that if you would like to check your rankings in the new inktomi powered Yahoo you can go to http://search.yahoo.com/ and type in your keyword: I am using "online phramacy" because I am on the first page lol
Normally you would see the google powered: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=online+pharmacy&ei=UTF-8&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

However if you go to the address bar and at the end of your kw portion of the url add: &tmpl=E088

Like so: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=online+pharmacy&tmpl=E088

This gives you the results for the new Ink powered yahoo :-)
Try it out!

I found an interesting thread over at the old Cre8aSiteForum named the -noblog option or blog tab: can it be done?. This post brings up the question as to whether Google will had a filter option to exclude blog pages from the results.

Most of you reading this blog already know that Google happens to treat blog-like Web sites very well, often ranking blogs very well in the SERP. People who have ordinary content sites are upset by this, whereas those with blogs are thrilled. So rumors are spreading that Google might be adding a filter.

This thread discusses people's thoughts on the rumor, brings some history (including the Google Bombing) and more. Add your thoughts to this thread at http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=6294.

It looks like the user agent for AlltheWeb.com has changed. Noticed this in my web logs today (I did a trace route on the IP to make sure it wasn't a spoofed user agent, and it traces back to overture.com)...

Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler

I would like to welcome Dan Thies, from SEO Research Labs, who will be helping the Search Engine Roundtable Weblog cover an additional SEO/SEM forum on the Internet named IHelpYou Forum.

Dan has one of the better names on the SEO community and will be not only be providing coverage of IHelpYou but also giving us some insight to the latest and greatest in the SEO/SEM industry. We would like to welcome Dan Thies to the blog author board and we are very excited to start reading his posts.

Thank you Dan!

Most of the talk today is about having "authority" or "expert" pages link to your site in order to help your "themed" pagerank.

There is a lot of discussion about what is an "Authority" and I feel it is important to clarify the differences of authorities and hubs, plus show you how a search engine will use both concepts to rank a page.

Authority: What makes a page an authority? There is strong belief that an authority is determined by the value of their InDegree (an InDegree in our terms is the number of pages linking from page A to page B). The larger the number, the more authoritative that page is in terms of the types of themed pages that are linked to that page. A page within a theme is stronger based on the number of times a query term is found within the page.

This works just fine by itself for ranking pages if we did not have words with double or even triples meanings (windows, java, etc.). To make up for this factor we need something called "hubs" to help determine the best possible returned results for a keyword phrase.

Hubs: What makes up a hub? A hub can be defined as a site or page that has many links from pages that have the same links. So page A links to page B and page C, page B links to page A and page C, page C links to page A and page B and so on. The more similar and related links, the larger the hub is.

By looking at the authority of a page (InDegree) plus the hub or hubs the page is within (the similarity), the search engine can provide a better results page then just by looking at authority.

Most this information is from an article published by Jon Kleinberg while he as at Cornell. I tried to summarize to help us all understand the importance of what we are calling "authority sites".

Search Engine Watch released the results of the 4th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards. You can check out the results here.

I'll briefly go through my picks:
Outstanding Search Service - Google for 1st place and AskJeeves for 2nd place
Best Meta Search Engine - I selected Vivisimo for 1st place
Best News Search Engine - I agree with the posted results
Best Image Search Engine - Google 1st, and AskJeeves 2nd
Best Shopping Search Engine - I agree
Best Design - Forgot what I voted
Most Webmaster Friendly Search Provider - Google and Teoma
Best Paid Placement Service - Overture then Google
Best Search Toolbar - Agree
Best Search Feature - Agree
Best Specialty Search Engine - Google Groups

Google launched a program named AdSense, which allows Web site owners to place Google AdWords ads on their site. "Google AdSense is for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality. AdSense delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to what your readers see on your pages — and Google pays you." Many SEO's built great Web sites that provide excellent content relevant to specialized areas. These SEO's took advantage of the AdSense program as an alternative to selling normal ad space. The program has been a huge success.

Recently, people have been posting their concerns about the Google AdSense program. Specific threads of interest include the fact that Google has been paying these AdSense payments late. People take this to mean that Google is having some financial trouble.

Read more about this at Late Payment Again and Google Payments.

Hi Everyone,

I'm honored to be a part of the SEOroundtable, and look forward to sharing the top discussions from WebProWorld.

How fitting that our hottest debate is one that started with a post I found here...

The content vs. link SEO debate continues, and as the debaters defend and attack they expose and test the fundamentals of search optimization. And they're mostly keeping their tempers.

From Ken McGaffin's post:
• You absolutely must have great content (and should never be afraid to link out to great content)
• A linking strategy, targeted at top sites can produce tremendous results
• Those results will be greatly enhanced through SEO
• Keep adding content.

SEO take away:
Content and links are king.

Garrett French is the editor of WebProNews and author of the Search Engine Insider Report, where you'll find unique coverage of the search industry through interviews with leading SEO experts and companies like Google, Yahoo!, Overture, and Kanoodle.

Garrett will be covering topics at the WebProNews forum and site by reporting back here as to the most interesting and exciting threads at his forum.

We look forward to his contributions to the Search Engine Roundtable and the SEO/SEM community.

I was able to get all SEO Chat members a discount at the up and coming Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York that will be taking place March 1 - 4, 2004.

If you are not an SEO Chat member, then this is a good reason to join.

Check at the thread at http://forums.seochat.com/t7761/s.html for more information on how to get the discount.

I found it quite interesting today about reading the below article in SEOchat.com, that the web analytics firm, Onestat.com decided to release information about the nature of keywords in which most people use to search. While I wasn't surprised in the least bit that two word phrases took the cake, does anyone think this news was a day late and a dollar short. If you are active in optimizing for two word phrases you know its where they most competitive sites are battling for those number one positions, and if you can't make it in the top 10 for a two word phrases, then you will most likely go after another two word phrases or better yet start to target some 3-4 word phrases, which work wonders when completely optimized on sub-pages. I believe this has been observable methods for some time that parallels with how users search to begin with, we are always looking for the best way to search and capitalize on those searches. The engines can shape this, but if we are really looking for something we will do deeper into the rift. So does the increase in three word phrase searching mean there is just too much information presented in two word searches to allow us to find what we really need? Onestat.com reported three-word searches rose by 1.3 percent, while one-word searches decreased 5.7 percent.

Check out the thread here.

This evening, api.google.com was removed from Google's DNS which made me panic a little bit (our keyword tracker and search engine script which are both based on the Google API have many thousands of users).

So I did a little poking around, and realized that if you use www.google.com for the API queries, it works now. So apparently Google did some shuffling.

Maybe it means the Google API is finally coming out of beta... or maybe it just means there are no longer any specific servers for the Google API (which would be nice, since the API servers are not as stable as Google's main servers).

Update: The api.google.com was inserted back into the Google name servers, but API queries to www.google.com continue to work.

As many of you know, Webby (Alan Webb) is one of the famous SEO Chat moderators. He actually was a moderator at SEO Chat's forum before I became a moderator there. Webby later built his own German speaking SEO forum which is extremely popular. He has found some time to write up his thoughts on the latest Google Update, nicknamed Austin.

Alan believes that the Austin updates is based on a series of new computations, including the old pagerank and something named localrank. For those aware of some of the theories for the Florida update, localrank is similar to hilltop and topic sensitive page rank. Webby believes that localrank is a factor because he feels that to rank well you need to be an "authority site" which is based on expert sites in your page's theme linking to your page.

Alan explains he whole theory in detail in a post at SEO Chat with the name Becoming an authority & recovering from Austin part1.

I feel it is worth while reading and feel free to post your thoughts.

There was an interesting post on SEOchat.com, regarding what it takes for the Slurp robot (which is the main Inktomi spider) to grab most of the pages on someone's website. If you check your logs, you might find Slurp only grab a few pages, but at other times grab many more pages all for free. Folks, this bot has a mind of its own sometimes. Its well behaved, but quite selective. While Inktomi is primarly a Pay For Inclusion based engine. Where you have to pay for each page you would like to get indexed. If your website has achieved a certain age, plus high quality inbound links, quality content, and a smile from Inktomi, then its likely your page will eventually make it into Inktomi for free. Usually its takes a number of years (possibly less) in order to get this type indexing, its worth noting that new sites will not always get spidered completely by Inktomi. So don't fret if you submit the homepage, and it the only thing that is found in Inktomi. Time is all it takes (which little of us has these days). So its recommended that if you can't wait, submit those pages your have optimized for Inktomi and you feel would be best suited, and worth the money for indexing in Inktomi.

Visit this thread at Inktomi Indexing....