March 2004 Archives

When Google released their new design this week, one thing we noticed is the Google now highlights keyword phrases even when they are not separated with a hyphen or space. For example, I did a search on mens shirts in Google and look at how Google was able to decipher "mensshirts.htm" as "mens" plus "shirts".

First time I mentioned this at the roundtable was during my coverage of the Search Engines & Web Server Issues during the SES NYC conference. When one of the speakers was complaining that he couldn't get the new design (this was before the new design was out) off his screen and he noticed that Google was able to pick up keywords in a single string.

Jill Whalen in here High Rankings Advisor: Contextual Search - Issue No. 092 email, she does this Q&A thing. One of the questions asked, and I quote:

I just noticed that Google search results now highlight the searched criteria in the file/document name. Does this mean they are giving more weight to this than in the past? I always use relevant file names as a part of my optimization process, but understood it only carried weight at a few places.

Jill's response was:

Nobody really knows what it means except for Google. However, it's my
opinion that it doesn't mean anything other than the fact that their
new highlighter sees all the search words on the page, even words that
are not parsed by a hyphen, etc.

It's doubtful that this has anything to do with Google's algorithm.
They recently changed their look, and this is just a manifestation of
that.

I am doubtful that Google would put any additional weight on file
names or domain names in their ranking algorithm. If anything, I
would imagine they'd be moving further and further away from giving
those fields any weight.

This is a perfectly honest answer. In fact, one person at the SES said it is way to easy for Google to raise a red flag on a site if the URLs were stuffed with keywords and hyphens. However, I personally use the mod_rewrite to change the extensions of the URLs to keyword rich text. When it comes to the domain name, I would not go beyond two hyphens.

I could not find much forum coverage on this topic, so I used a newsletter. :)

There has always been news on companies/people suing others for documents and information they found on search engines. Today, I received a phone call from Symantec (I would link to their site but I am mad at them so, no PR for you). Before I go into the nature of the call, let me give you some historical background.

We purchased the Symantec VPN 200R device, I have been very happy with it. Problem was that the VPN was not supported by Symantec. So some of my guys at my company put their heads together and figured out a solution. We worked with Symantec a bit over the phone but then ultimately got the VaporSec software working with the Symantec VPN 200R device. So I published the method at the RustyBrick Technology Blog (which I admit needs to be updated more often) for all those to see. I then sent my findings to the technician who gave us a hand early on at Symantec. Who then wrote back to us with a more formal method of setting it up. What I posted at the blog is under the title of Setting up Symantec VPN 200R On Mac OS 10.3 with VaporSec. It was my original verbiage. I even had images with screen shots of how to set up the screens. He used my screen shots in his document and then added more content, above of what I had.

I get a phone call today from that technician saying that Symantec might sue me for copyright infringement. He said someone at Symantec 'Googled' and found this information. I told him - I wrote it and not you. I showed him the text and said this is my copy. I then said, I linked to your document. So I told him I would remove the link to his document. He didn't care either way, he just said he wanted to warn me that its a possibility.

This is the thanks I get from Symantec. Now they can support Apple platforms and they want to sue me. Google, you did it again! ;)

Interesting thread over at IHelpYou Forums. The thread discusses an individual's findings based on action he took. The scenario... His site was not ranking well. He linked to "expert" sites from his page. His site began to rank well.

The question this thread tries to answer is wether linking to "expert" sites played the role of the site beginning to rank well OR is it just by adding external links on the page itself that played the role of the site beginning to rank well. It is obviously hard to determine the real answer to the question without more detail and history on the page, nevertheless, it is still an interesting topic.

Visit Linking to 'expert' documents?

Yesterday Google launched a new design, part of that new design was the removal of the "directory tab". DigitalPoint's forum, which has been doing just great, discussed Google's new design. That thread went off on a slight tangent, delving into the usefulness of the ODP or other directories.

I gave an example of its use when buying a new sign for my office. I think I first tried search at Google for the right company, but I couldn't find much for this niche. So I went to ODP's Signage Listings and Yahoo's Signage Listings. I then browsed a few dozen sites listed and sent an email with a spec to those I thought were up to the job.

Let me tell you, I am really happy with the final product. I would have never been able to find this company with a search engine.

Update: Just found out they made AskJeeves Sign.

New tool for analyzing a page's keywords has been released by McDar.net.

They are discussing it at SEO Chat.

One of the newest blogs to hit the net that is sure to take on quickly is the Peabody's Cre8tive Flow Blog. The Peabody blog is here to cover a wide spectrum of topics including web design, development, site promotion, industry news. There will be some Cre8asite forum coverage but a lot of original thought over at this blog.

They have asked me to contribute a weekly entry to summarize the activities over here, at the Search Engine Roundtable. Its just amazing how much we cover here at the Roundtable, check out Week In Review: Search Engine Shuffle over at the Peabody blog.

This article fell into my little world today and it's a keeper. It's about the high cost of NOT finding information.

The high cost of not finding information by Susan Feldman of International Data Corporation (IDC)

     "We know that roughly 50% of most Web searches are abandoned. That translates into 50% fewer online sales, 50% more frustrated customers trying to solve a problem or get information, and 50% more phone calls that must be handled by a person rather than by automatic systems. At an average cost of $5 per phone call as opposed to less than $1 per automated call or mere pennies for finding an answer online, that is expensive."

This is just scary.

     "Finally, there is the increasing problem of too much information. In the case of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant disaster, for instance, operators had so many error messages thrown at them that they couldn’t identify the main cause of the problem. With disastrous results. One wonders whether the recent Northeast blackout can also be attributed to that cause.

Some search companies are mentioned in the article and it discusses intranet usage.

     "Information disasters are caused not by lack of information, but rather by not connecting the right information to the right people at the right time. People use information within the context of what they are doing. They need to have access to the right information, but only when they need it. And they need to be assured that the access is guaranteed, easy, fast and reliable."

The real kick in the pants is nowhere in the entire article does it mention Google.

Many SEO's try to get as many links from the ODP as possible in an effort to increase a site's PR. How much are ODP worth?

The question was raised at WebmasterWorld and GoogleGuy responded. "We can process the RDF file and count the number of listings just as well as someone's CGI script can. I'd concentrate more on getting quality links and not obsess about trying to lots and lots of ODP links."

If you've been by the Cre8asite Forums over the past couple of days, you probably noticed how unbelievably slowwwwww it's been over there. I just wanted to give folks a quick heads up because of the fact that the forums are so slow, folks might not be able to even get in there to see that we've put up a status page at this location.

We hope to have the situation resolved soon and the link above will let you know how our progress is going. Thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding in this matter.

Google released at http://labs.google.com/personalized its first real attempt at personalized search results. I strongly believe they will not bring this feature into the main stream engine, it is something they will continue to offer as an option but not as a requirement.

Check out the Google Personalized Web Search: Frequently Asked Questions.

Forum coverage at:
SitePoint Forum
ABAKUS Forum
IHelpYou

Last night Google launched a new design. The design contains everything from a new slimmer bar, distracting "new!" text near the Froogle tab (we all know about Danny Sullivan's invisible tabs), a static definitions tab at the top right of the keyword, news snuggled in at the top and the sponsored listing pushed off to the right side.

Forum coverage at:
WebmasterWorld
SEO Chat
IHelpYou
HighRankings
JimWorld
Cre8asite Forum
Webmaster Forum
ABAKUS Forum

Excellent thread was started over at WebmasterWorld on AdSense's new channels. Webmaster's there discuss what they were able to learn with the added reporting functionality. Some of the results are surprising.

Join in the discussion on What have you learned from your channels?

Comparing ones Web traffic to an other's Web traffic when those two sites/servers run different Web analytical tools is like comparing Apples to Oranges. It is just not possible to accurately compare the two.

For example, around November and December of 2003 I upgraded to Urchin 5.5 Web analytics from Urchin 3 Web analytics. The way those two software looked at traffic was drastically different. My traffic server wide dropped about 75% due to the enhanced technology in the new Urchin 5.5 to more accurately track a visitor. See the chart below. The traffic on the left was from Urchin 3.0 versus the traffic on the right which is when the new Urchin 5.5 was installed on my server.

From the SEMPO homepage:

SEMPO today issued two new press releases announcing the availability of new search engine briefings from two leading research firms.

CEO of eMarketer Presents Latest Search Engine Research to SEMPO

Jupiter Analyst Discusses Search Engine Industry with SEMPO

We all know about Digital Points Keyword Tracking Tool, the one that competes with my Keyword Tracking Tool. Well, it was recently reported at his forum that the Google API account set up system has been down.

Based on Shawn's estimations, he feels that the API account set up has been down for at least three to four full days. Shawn emailed Google's API team as soon as he found the problem and 15 minutes later it was fixed. Was it his email that brought Google to realize the problem? We won't know.

"Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer conceded Thursday that one big Microsoft misstep over the past few years is that the company did not put resources toward in-house research and development of search technology." This article by CNN tells the story well.

Discuss this topic at Digital Point's Forum.

I have been meaning to discuss the power of the Google dictionary and how it can help your rankings. I simply have been putting it off until now. Everyone knows about the method of entering in Google "define: term" or "definition of term" and it brings back an entry at the top of Google SERPs with a definition pulled from an other site. It can look as follows:

What not everyone knows about (only those that rank well for popular definitions) is that Google brings a single definition back when you use the query "what is google", or what is term. So if your in the first slot for this definition, you will get a nice amount of traffic to your site.

At the SES conference in NY, I told everyone about this operator in the Q&A session of What is Content?. Or I think it was that session, I forgot - I jumped into that session only for the Q&A part. I was surprised to find out that only a few people in that room really knew about the "what is XYZ" query back then.

Now the secret is out, the news hit a forum based on viggin's careful eye. It might have been covered in other forums as well, but I now expect the news to hit the mainstream. But I did make sure to tell the SEO chatters back in November.

In Yahoo!'s last act, it striped AllTheWeb of its search technology and assimilated its own search technology into the core of the AllTheWeb search query box. Can we expect the same for Inktomi?

Forum coverage at:
WebmasterWorld
SEO Chat
ABAKUS Forum

After readings Kim's Cre8pc Blog, I found Andy Beal's blog entry MSN Launches New Look in July, Not New Search Engine. Andy's blog lead me to Danny Sullivan's article at Search Engine Watch, which explained "The change being implemented on July 1 will not coincide with the launch of MSN's own search technology. A crawler-based MSN search engine has been in development since last year, but there remains no announced launch date for this."

Then I see this article at Yahoo named Microsoft Set to Launch Web Search Engine. Which says "Speaking at an online advertiser conference sponsored by Microsoft's MSN Internet division, Ballmer said the Redmond, Washington-based software giant will begin rolling out its own Internet search technology within 12 months."

So this is what they mean by the World Wide Web. My travels through the Web in just minutes. See you soon MSN search.

I have come up with a tool that estimates your future PageRank and it can be found at Future Google PageRank Predictor page.

:)

Shawn helped out with some of the formulas, props to DigitalPoint.

There were whispers at the recent search engine strategies conference on possible penalities Inktomi has been issuing in the past few months. Yes, there have been outbreaks too. One in particular was the penalization of sites that contained footer navigation with a certain amount of cross-linking going on between sites and also internally. Now, while footer navigation is a good method for search engines, Inktomi seems persistant on the "pages need to be designed for the users, not the engines" ideology. What interests me, is if this particular penalty is a manual editorial review or incorporated into the algo as a temporary ranking penalty. If you have been penalized by Inktomi, this might be worth checking out. Several members of SEOchat have also posted other penalities that have arisen recently, and their thoughts about this possible reasons.

Check out Inktomi Penalizing Footer Navigation here.

I was chatting with one of the blog authors here, not sure if I should mention which one, about how to add AdSense ads to emails. I am not sure if it is in accordance with the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions. So please read that and obtain approval from Google before trying this out. This is just for educational purposes.

In theory, you can do some form of AdSense cloaking, whereby you serve content from an HTML page and dynamically include the ads generated based on the content of that HTML page within the emails.

So if you have HTML emails on computer manufacturing, you might want to create static pages with the exact copy of the email. Then serve up those Google AdSense ads as if they were from the Web but in the email.

Very simple to do, but again, not sure if its in accordance with the AdSense terms. I personally won't be giving this one a shot. If you want to chat with others on the legalities of serving AdSense ads in your email, please visit DigitalPoints Forum - AdSense In Email.

How long should I make my domain name? Common answer from a usability expert is, the shorter the better. Make sure the site name is easy to remember and can easily be related to your services. Some SEO's want to take that one step further by putting keyword text in the domain name itself. To what extent should keyword rich text with hyphens be used. A thread was started on this topic at HighRankings but it has not yet been fully developed.

The rule of thumb when it comes to using keyword text in the domain name is to not go beyond two hyphens. For example a site selling blue small widgets does not want to have a domain name that looks like www.cheap-blue-small-widgets.com. Many would say not to even go with a domain name in the format of www.blue-small-widgets.com.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference, the question was brought up and some of the expert panelists said that this is something that search engine can pick up on very easily. If your whole page is focused on selling blue small widgets and your domain name has that name in it clearly to the extent as above, then this looks a tad "spammy".

The search engines (in the future) pick up on this and serve up a penalty. They currently do not, as far as I know but they can.

There is an interesting thread over at WebmasterWorld on the topic of link building. One of the members there said he has totally stopped obtaining inbound links due to believing they will not benefit his site.

In response to that some senior members over at WMW responded:

The general rule is to link for the benefit of users, not for the benefit of PR.

I don't believe that the restrictions are as tight as some imply.

Basically, an inbound link in and of itself cannot hurt you. Once the inbound is reciprocated, issues can arise, depending upon the nature of the other site/page, and the nature of your site/page.

Check out the thread for more detail.

I have been finding YAhoo is really eating up backlinks "themed by anchor only" as a ranking source. Recently I added a few thousand backlinks with the KW "SEO" in it and what do you know, Im ranking #1 for SEO and didnt do any real onpage modification at all. With webrank coming out, I think the link mongers are going to destroy all that is left of the copywriting SEO dinosaurs

Given the popularity of Googlerankings I decided to program a ranking tool that reported ranks in Yahoo, right now I guess I'll call it the Yahoo Ranking tool anyways this should tide us over until such time as we get a Yahoo API thats free, just like googles, and why not? The beta toolbar I ahve of theirs looks "just like googles"
Enjoy

There are a couple threads at the forums that discuss how Yahoo differs from Google. Some of those threads point out that it is easier to "spam" Yahoo with simple "on-page seo elements" then it is to with Google.

Check out both these threads:
--> Yahoo Is More Spammable Then Google?
--> A Yahoo! Search Ranking Observation...

The adult only version of Yahoo! Search, Yasexhoo.com, has been closed. The message on the site reads:

Site Closed for Lacking Sense of Humour from certain individuals.
Mr Dill Dough Will Be Back, but without ANY SHOUTING! :-)
I was given an ultimatum by yours truly and instead of making my great great grand kids
pay long after I have gone, I gave in to HUGE Corporate pressure.
Anyhow, my point was proven and my school thesis can now be completed.
"You" can keep the yasexhoo.com domain as you politely requested.
Thanks, DD
If you reached here by mistake go here for the best site in the world!!!!!

I guess someone had a problem with the site.

Forum coverage at SEO Chat.

Fathom (Rodney Brown) Spherica, President/CEO, is an eMarketing Consultant, and accomplished strategic planner who brings 24-years of experience in information technology and data analysis interpretation. fathom has 14 years experience in the fields of project management, electronics, adult facilitation, and marketing in tourism and culture, forestry and agriculture and education sectors.

• Active member of the discussion forum WebProWorld and forum moderator (the fastest growing eBusiness forum – username: fathom
• Active member of the discussion forum SEOChat and forum moderator ( dedicated SEO discussion forum – username: fathom
• Active member of the discussion forum WebmasterWorld (the world’s largest aggregation of web professionals – username: fathom
• Active member of the discussion forum Digital Enterprise (an eLearning forum at North Carolina State University for BComm students entering the digital divide – username: fathom
• Active member in numerous other discussion forums including SEO World, SEO Forum, Web Lamp, High Rankings, Cre&asite, Digital Point, WebWorkshop, and WebWorldGeeks - username: fathom

Fathom will be acting as the WebProNews Author at the Search Engine Roundtable by bringing you the hot topics over there.

For those of you following the Orkut fanfare and network, it seems that Orkut's popularity and evident following has raised a few more eyebrows over at Google. Google's Eric Schmidt, made a statement saying that they "'absolutely'" have plans to integrate Orkut into Google's search engine". It appears that Google is trying to target "people search" more effectively, and if you are in Orkut you may find yourself appearing in the Google results for you name. Forget "Googling" someone, you might able in the future to "Orkuting" information on that special someone, blind date, competitor, boss, or favorite cartoon character. Now I realized that this technology opens up more possibilities for integration into Google search...there might be a "People" tab coming soon, something like "News, Images, and so on." Pretty neat stuff, and a big advantage in comparison to other social networks out there.

Check out the article on Google including Orkut into search here.

Some of you know I am a moderator over at the SEO Chat forums. Since all authors here are moderators at the various forums on the Internet, I wanted to post my course of action when deleting and editing a thread.

In the past, when I deleted a thread, I always took the time to send a PM (private message) to the individual who posted the thread. This way I can explain the problems with the post and the reason it was deleted. I can honestly say that I have never received a response back that was angry in nature. Most were understanding and the ones that did not respond, knew that they were wrong in posting whatever they posted.

Now SEO Chat allows moderators to delete or edit threads and publicly detail the reason behind the modification to the post. So no more PMs needed.

If your a moderator, please let me know what you do in these cases?

I would just like to clarify an article published at WebProNews that is named Jewish Groups Concerned Over Google Results. It falsely states that "the search engine has now plans to manually change the listing." I think "now" was a typo and should say "no".

The Jewish Journal, which WebProNews links to, states "that Google has no plans to manually alter the results of their ranking system to knock Jew Watch from its top spot." Google responded saying "No, we don’t do that. Google merely reflects what is on the Web and does its best to algorithmically rank pages. Unless [a Web page] violates a country or local law, we don’t make any tweaks."

I have started a thread at SEO Chat on this topic.

This is not about privacy issues. This is about how to make the most of your traffic. In a recent blog entry by Kim (Cre8pc) at Cre8asite's New Blog, she discusses Fredrick Marckini most recent article. I am not going to get into the details of the article, if you haven't read it - I will tell you its worth while reading.

Bill Slawski, from the Cre8asite Network, added a nice comment to Kim's post. Which inspired this post about why it is important to gather data on how and where your Web visitors are traveling through your site. Then making the necessary usability and navigational adjustments to your site to get them to where they (you) want them to go. This of course brought me back to my most recent article, which was a review on Urchin's Web Analytics software and how funnel based goal analysis would be the dream analytic for SEMs.

Pop-up ads are now somewhat accepted by Web users. In an article released today at AdWeek.com, mentions a study that finds "that two-thirds of consumers are willing to tolerate two intrusive ads per hour in exchange for free content."

But still 70% of those surveyed "believe there are too many intrusive ads on the Web."

And we thought Search Engine Marketing with text based ads was the only way to go...

Not much else to say about this one, but it's pretty funny if you ask me...

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5176670.html

I even saw the guy posting in forums offering to sell the software...

Quote: Google even called me to thier office, I flew up, met with them, and lets just say, they are scared and don't want this software to get out, bottom line, I don't care anymore.

Hey dummy, too bad they called you there because they wanted to get the extortion attempt on tape. hehe

Of course, his website www.myhq.info is down now.

Situation is as follows; company A is involved in lawsuit. Lawsuit is publicized on law firms Web site. Few weeks later, when you do a search on Company A's name, law suit information comes up in rankings.

The topic was brought up at WebmasterWorld with the thread name Client wants record of old lawsuit moved down in rank.

I have had large clients that asked me to do the same because of Web sites by customers who are dissatisfied with their product/services.

This is an interesting thread. Two courses of action. First thing one can try is to call Google, but they will only take pages down that are illegal in some fashion. Second, rank multiple site's above the site you want to move down in the rankings. That is a big task and would take a lot of resources.

SEO Guy put out a very nice tool for everyone that obsesses with PageRank (unfortunately that includes myself)...

http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/google-pr.php

You enter a phrase, and it shows you the PageRank (with the ability to set a minimum PageRank) for the results returned by Google (up to the top 100).

During my visit to Wired.com, I saw this banner ad at the top of the page.

The banner ad was served up by DoubleClick. Are these small, text like banners more appealing to advertisers then the large, flashy, annoying banners?

Yesterday I received an invitation to be someone's Orkut friend. That invitation persuaded me to spend some time in the Orkut network. While doing so, I saw some familiar faces at the forums I attend on a regular basis. So I went to add a few as a friend. However, back in early March Orkut upgraded their friend's module to allow for five categories of friends.

- haven't met - acquaintance - friend - good friend - best friend -

Now, this might be considered a good upgrade but to me, it makes things a bit more confusing. Most my "orkut friends" I have never met in real life. Would they go under the "haven't met" category of friends? If I put those friend's under the haven't met category, will they be insulted? For now, everyone goes under "friend" - in order to be neutral. The "best friend" category will probably not be used by me for a long time. None of my real best friends would join this network, or not at least within a years time.

This just adds more to the dynamics of social communication on the Internet. All those that are in the Orkut network know about the other methods of categorizing friends (with stars, hearts, cool, etc.). Those are just my thoughts on this complex social community technology.

Fredrick Marckini, from iProspect, publishes article on his presentation at the SES NYC conference. At the Future of SEM track, he shared his thoughts on how an SEM company should work. Great angle and it needed to be said.

Read the article here.

I personally think this is crazy, just like many of the lawsuits out there today in the US Court district. However, keeping personal issues aside, WebmasterWorld reported this news.

Specifically, the search results falsely represent that plaintiffs Maughan and/or Brown & Maughan have been disciplined for gross negligence, for failing to timely submit a client's claim for refund of overpayment of taxes, and for practicing as a CPA without a permit," according to the proposed class action filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Article found here.

Newsweek released an article this week named All Eyes on Google. It makes for good reading.

Also make sure to check out the survey that asks Do other search engines stand a chance against Google?.

Remember Google-Watch.org? Well, the same people that brought you that site has brought us Yahoo-Watch.org. This all comes to the big stink on whether or not site match paid inclusion get priority over free included pages.

Greetings everyone! Some of you may know me from around some of the various forums and I'd just like to say I'm happy to be asked to pop on here and offer some of my thoughts from time to time. For the most part, I'll be pointing folks toward interesting topics and discussions going on at Cre8asite Forums, but you can find me kicking around or lurking at many of the other places on the web, so if something strikes my interest, you can be assured that I'll blather on about that stuff too!

For my first entry here, I thought I'd bring your attention to some stuff going on over at Cre8asite in respects to the DMOZ. We always hear about how difficult it is to get into the directory over there. Most of the time it's because someone decided that the site wasn't good enough, or didn't have enough content. So, just what types of sites is the DMOZ looking for?

Cre8asite Moderator Jean Manco has been working on a, now, very long and interesting thread entitled New In DMOZ in which she chronicles her life as a DMOZ editor. Over the course of this thread, you can read as she describes the types of things that she includes in her categories, her thoughts on what makes for a good site (in respects to getting listed in the DMOZ), and just generally shows us what is good and what's not.

If you are considering getting your site listed in the DMOZ, or are wondering why your site got rejected, then this thread will surely be something that you can learn from. It's set up in a way that you can "play at home" and have a look at the category being worked on, the descriptions that were chosen, and - most importantly - get a look into what's going on in an editor's mind when they are doing their job.

One Important Note: Though Cre8asite forums has a fairly strong body of members who are editors at the DMOZ and the DMOZ Forum is becoming a great resource for learning about how the DMOZ works and such, it is not a place where you can seek specific advice about your own specific case. Policy forbids editors from dealing with specific cases and that's just the way it is.

Cheers! And Happy Submitting!
G.

The news of Microsoft's (MSN) search to launch early July is a few days old. I saw this news break at a small SEM forum named LilEngine. Today, someone finally posted it at one of the larger forums, known as WebmasterWorld. I think it is big news, not sure why the other forums have not yet picked up on it. So I decided to make a thread on this topic at SEO Chat.

The main article can be found at http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040319/tech_microsoft_search_1.html.

SEATTLE, March 19 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Friday that a new engine for its MSN Search service will start up in July, another step in its plan to challenge Google Inc.'s pole position as the Web's top search destination.

I would like to formally welcome Grumpus, Stockbridge Truslow, who will be representing the Cre8asite Network here at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Grumpus is an administrator over at Cre8asite and has a strong technical background in Web development and search engine mechanics. Stock is an incredibly giving individual who has posted almost 4,000 times at the Cre8asite Forum. He has also been instrumental in building the new Cre8asite Network, which includes a large Resource Library, Peabody Blog and of course the Cre8asite Forum.

Thank you Stock for joining the Search Engine Roundtable!

The grandfather of search engines, AltaVista and the "new Google", AllTheWeb close up the add url shop.

AltaVista Add URL:

Search results on AltaVista will soon be powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search Technology index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.

AllTheWeb Add URL:

Search results on AlltheWeb will soon be powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search Technology index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.

The ABAKUS forum is currently the only one discussing this.

I have added a neat feature to the blog that pulls the latest threads from the most popular SEM/SEO forums that provide RSS feeds. The threads are updated every thirty minutes on the 00 and 30. I will be adding more forums as they provide the feeds.

The threads can be found on the left side bar with the title "SEM Forum Threads". By clicking on the thread title, it will open a new window and take you to the thread.

Hope this is a convenient feature for you all.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld that discusses a flaw in the adword budget allocation system that affects mostly European sites. As cline said in his post:

Here's the problem: Adwords allocates daily budget on an hourly basis using PST.

If you're running a European-targeted campaign, and especially if that campaign is B2B with the vast bulk of the traffic coming during business hours rather than the evening, you're going to quickly blow your hourly budget.

Doug Bates of Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting brought this to my attention.

I was just talking with someone last night about how Yahoo is trying to be more like Google (i.e. cache, news, etc.) and Google is trying to be more like Yahoo (i.e. local results). I was kind of exaggerating but if anything Yahoo now made it clear that they want to be Google.

Yahoo yesterday released its Yahoo! Companion Toolbar - BETA (version 5.4.9) with WebRank. WebRank versus PageRank, this will be fun for us SEOs. ;)

Yahoo! Web Rank is the name that Yahoo! has given to a technical measurement of a particular URL's popularity. If you choose to enable the Yahoo! Web Rank feature on the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar, a toolbar icon will display the Yahoo! Web Rank value of each URL that you visit. The Yahoo! Web Rank values range from 1 to 10. This feature is currently in Beta release.

Forum coverage at:
SEO Chat
WebmasterWorld

Well lookie what we have here. It's about time. :) If you want to talk about it, you can do so here, but you may want to go right to your AdSense Account, and check it out for yourself.

You can now use "Channels" within your AdSense account to isolate reporting per domain (or anything else you want to isolate on).

It's been rumored for awhile, but it looks like Google is actually testing it now. I have been seeing hits from "Googlebot/Test" for external JavaScript files across multiple domains and from multiple IP addresses. The IP address being used for the request appears to be a new class-c for Googlebot, but is very similar to the existing IP addresses that Googlebot already uses.

You can read more about it here.

Yesterday I posted a entry named Questions for Yahoo? Ask At WebmasterWorld. If you want the answers to the questions you or others have asked please see the WebmasterWorld thread named Answers from Yahoo!, by Mike from Yahoo! Search.

The people over at Cre8asite has developed a huge resource portal for web design, development, site promotion and industry news. It is packed with all sorts of goodies.

Check it out at http://www.cre8asite.net/

Also, join in the discussion on the new resource at Cre8asite Forum.

Ammon Johns at Cre8asiteforum posted an interesting topic named Google to target PR hoarders, where he discusses that Google might start looking to see if your not sharing your PR with other sites.

Most SEOs know that you can prevent PageRank from being passed to an other site by using a link that Google can not follow (JavaScript links). If Google can't follow the link then Google won't pass the PageRank, thus leaving more PageRank to be passed around to the pages you want.

Ammon quotes an old post by GoogleGuy at WebmasterWorld and then brings up current events that back this as a possibility for the future.

Check out the thread for more information.

This is a blog and all blogs with comments enabled are valid targets for "comment spam". So how does one protect their blogs from "comment spam"?

What is comments spam? If you ever heard of Google Bombing, then you already know what comment spam is. But if you don't know, comment spam is when one manually or automatically adds comments to the blog entries with links to their Web sites in an effort to increase the external links to that site and increase the sites PageRank/Popularity in the eyes of the Search Engines.

This webblog is powered by Movable Type, a very popular and free Weblog platform. MovableType has added several patches to reduce the likelihood of this blog getting hit by a comment SPAM bot. The first thing they added was "ThrottleSeconds", this allows the blog administrator to set the number of seconds between comment posts before the individual can post an other comment. So if someone from the same IP address tries posting in 60 seconds after he/she posted again, it will not allow for it. This attempt gets logged in the configuration and you can later ban that IP address from entering your site. The second prevention method they have added was to enforce a redirect link for any comment author URLs. This is to discourage people for posting repeatedly for the sole purpose of increase PageRank. For more information on this, please visit here.

Finally, what I just added last night to this blog was a new blacklist method of spam protection. This is similar to how SpamAssassin combats email spam but for a Weblog. This plugin is called MT-Blacklist and is "a Movable Type plugin to eradicate comment and trackback spam".

This morning it prevented the first attempt:
Time: 2004.03.18 07:38:38
IP Address: 208.233.33.11
Information: MT-Blacklist comment denial on Search Engine Roundtable Weblog: (levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}

Shall I ban this IP address? :)

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this or not (I haven't been able to even see it on a site outside of digitalpoint.com yet), but today there are faint background images on the Google AdSense ads (for all formats).

You can find a thread about it here.

Here's some examples I've happen to see:

The folks over at WebmasterWorld were able to get some of the Yahoo reps to stop by an answer your questions about the new Yahoo! Search and Overture - SiteMatch.

WebGuerrilla, a WMW Admin, posted the following:
Here’s how it will work:

Questions will be posted in this thread. We will let this thread run for the next few days. Once we have a solid list of quality questions, this thread will be locked. If/when someone from Yahoo Search decides to respond to a question from this thread, we will split off that particular Q&A into its own thread. Any follow-up questions or discussions will take place in the new thread. Doing this will help us keep everything on-topic.

With that in mind, here are some ground rules:

1. Keep the questions focused on Yahoo Search’s products and services. (No asking Tim what his favorite color is)

2. Keep the questions short and sweet. (You will have the opportunity to get long-winded in any follow-up discussions).

3. No specific site information. (We are not the Yahoo help desk or spam police)

4. Keep the tone positive and professional. (All rants will be nuked)

5. Read the other questions before you post yours. (I hate spending time deleting duplicates).

Visit the thread at WebmasterWorld's Questions for Yahoo!.

This is the first time I am seeing this for a keyword like "new york web design". Google is actually doing an unbelievable job! They are using the Yellow Page approach to the city + service keyword. This has been talked about and expected for a while. But I have never seen it for this keyword combination.

cropped out sponsored listings and news

Update [9:02AM]:
Did some looking around to verify this is a new thing that Google put out this morning. And it is.

Coverage at:
SEO Chat
WebmasterWorld
Search Engine Watch
Cre8asiteforums
I am sure the other forums will cover it as well soon.

Another update: Wired writes Think Globally, Search Locally. We know whenever Wired covers Search, that its big news.

Well, its what many have been waiting for. The next PageRank update by Google. Wow, its been a while! But it is finally back. Its significance? Probably less then ever before.

Check out what the forums are saying:
Cre8asiteforums
HighRankings Forums
IHelpYou Forums
JimWorld Forums
SEO Chat Forums
Webmaster Forums
WebmasterWorld Forums
ABAKUS Forum - German

From the Search Engines that serve us each day:

Nice find Andy of Search Engine Lowdown! Remember Booble, which I mentioned back in the Leggo My Trademark: A Search Engine Legal Update Review. Well, now there is a Yahoo counterpart named YasexHOO.

I posted a thread at SEO Chat to discuss this, since I did not find it in any forum.

Thanks to Fathom's posts at WMW on External Link Development and Internal Link Development, I was able to learn about a new tool. Not to downplay those two posts, both excellent posts and on par with all fathom's posts.

The new tool monitors your status of domains submitted to the DMOZ directory. Its free, unlike my SEO Count Google Rank Checker, and does an excellent job. I assume it just queries the dmoz application with the domain name in it. But it keeps everything in one place. Excellent tool.

Check out Seotie today! (nice ad huh?)

I found this at Wired, a site/tool that allows you to enter in a long URL like http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62637,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 and convert it to a shorter URL like http://tinyurl.com/yuq6b.

You simply go to http://tinyurl.com/, enter the URL you would like to make shorter and click go. It will then create a URL that can fit in emails without wrapping and when triggered it will redirect the user to the correct page. See above example...

Think this helps their PageRank? :)

Ready for a new way to make your site search engine friendly? If you are, you must check out this thread by Grumpus at High Rankings.

Here is a little teaser:
Search engines should now be able to tell the site structure of a site and determine based on that how to rank a site. What does this mean?

I will not take away from the thread itself, so check out Learn From A Forum's Structural Design, Concept Flow and Refinement Examples. Definitely a top rated post, its been a while since I read one a thread of this stature. Thanks G.!

I reported this thread earlier but today the thread got real interesting. Skip to page 3. Ammon Johns said midway through the page "we've yet to see a single representative or even member of SEMPO answer any of those questions." I decided to throw Dana Todd an email to ask someone at SEMPO to join in. Dana got Barbara Coll, Webmama, to stop by.

I think the thread is worth a second look. Check the So What Does SEMPO Mean To You? thread out today. (sounds like an ad :) )

I was having a i-chat conversation with the famous DigitalPoint (Shawn Hogan) and we were discussing how we check the number of pages we have listed in Google for a specific site. We both use the allinurl:www.domain.com site:www.domain.com command. However, most people use the site:www.domain.com www.domain.com command or the new popular site:www.domain.com com command. As you can see, all return slightly different results - however the site:www.domain.com www.domain.com and the allinurl:www.domain.com site:www.domain.com are very similar.

In regards to DigitalPoint's and my conversation, we noted how the allinurl command tends to rank the pages in some order of importance. It might be a PageRank ranking, so I put together the listings of three major sites and the backlinks for those URLs. You will see they seem like popular pages and most have a high number of backlinks. I listed out the URL followed by the number of backlinks.

Continue reading "How Should I Check My Pages in Google?"

MSN is advertising how they created user personas to represent how people use their products like MSN Hotmail, IM, MSN Money, MSN Search and more.

(See MSN Personas)

Baloney.

The problem I have with how MSN is promoting this is that they're using user personas as a promotional tool based on marketing data compiled AFTER the launch of their products.

The real beauty of Cooper user personas, (the company that first introduced user personas) is they are research-based for the purpose of giving web designers and business stakeholders someone to design for.

A user persona can be based on marketing and Internet usage data and used to trace back and measure usability and tasks, for example, for an existing site. But, for this to work, the site or software application is already designed. Marketing and Sales are pulling folks in for focus group testing or web survey analysis is conducted.

MSN has offered several composite users to reflect usage and are then promoting this to the public as though their products were made just for them.

But chances are they weren't. (They have yet to design anything for people like my Dad, who can't stand Windows OS or anything Microsoft. Period.)

Cooper user personas are best created before any code is started or even before any storyboard development is done. They create several people, and write up a complete scenerio on who they are, their marital status, educational background, kids, employed or not, what type of employment, and even their mental and emotional state. They include what type of computers they use and where they use them.

How would a working mom with a half hour lunch break, on a budget, with kids to run to sports, dinner to make when she gets home and yoga class in the evening going to find and comparison shop for a new birthday present gadget for her computer geek husband who can't live without his cell phone and palm pilot? Whoever has designed their website and shopping cart FOR HER, and nailed it in search engines so she could find it, gets the sale.

Continue reading "MSN User Personas. I'm Not Buying It."

Google has said they don't give any extra weight for a link coming from DMOZ. That may be true, but a single listing in DMOZ can net hundreds of links from other websites, so indirectly it does have more value.

This thread shows how a single DMOZ link can give you 250+ links from different web sites.

After explaining for the umpteenth time this week why KEI (Sumantra Roy's "keyword effectiveness index") is not a reliable guideline for selecting the right keywords, I was relieved to see some new action in the keyword research forum at High Rankings.

I'm supposed to the be "IHelpYou" representative here, but I also moderate the keyword research talk over at High Rankings. "Measuring Keyword Competition" stirred up a lively discussion, but we're still shy of a good keyword metric to replace KEI.

My question, though, is whether a single metric can do the job. Any metric that ignores relevance (like KEI) is bound to fail, and my best advice these days is to target the best relevant search terms, regardless of how competitive.

But I can see that ignoring the competition (or measuring it as poorly as Wordtracker does) will not get us to a better keyword metric. Nowdays, though, what does competition mean anyway?

For all of you optimists who say "you're only competing against 10 sites," I get your point, but wake up already - everyone else can optimize their pages just as well as you can.

You may be competing against hundreds of optimizers, and what you see in the rankings has very little to do with what they put on the page. I'm sorry, but it's true - 99% of websites could use a trained monkey to do their optimization, if all you care about is rankings, and it seems that there are a lot of little monkeys banging on keyboards out there.

So where does that put us in terms of competition? Has the "real competition" moved off site now? Are inbound links, link text, link relevance, and (god forbid) themes the new battleground? If so, how in the world will we measure that?

Okay, rant's over... on to forum news. Doug Heil of the Best Practices search engine forums (formerly known as IHelpYou) has announced private SEO forums for donors, which should be an interesting experiment.

The private forums at Webmaster World are attractive because of all the noise in the public forums, and the (false) belief that Googleguy is in there. IHY/Best Practices doesn't have a Googleguy. They don't have a lot of noise either (in fact, their public forums are less noisy than WMW's private area), so I wonder if there will be enough interest.

There was a great article in Software Development Magazine on how to build Web based applications that are easy to use. The article is named Ease-of-Use Equals Use, it requires you to register to read the whole article (this takes less then a minute to do).

"Picture this scene: 20 people are gathered around a conference table for a two-day meeting. Three groups, with their respective managers—developers, line-of-business staff and system users—are jockeying for proximity to the power-people, as well as time to speak."

"What’s wrong with this picture? Unless professional user-interface developers are present, several things will probably go awry, as I’ve witnessed in such pow-wows:"

I think this is a must read for those that build any applications or Web sites that are more application oriented. This is for you Kim. :)

New pay-for-listing by Yahoo sparks debate over search discusses some of the concerns amongst the industry. Chris Sherman is quoted in the article.

Sorry about the lack of forum coverage, nothing really that interesting (that I have found) over the past few days. If you see anything, please let me know.

Wall Street Journal Today published an article named More Web Sites Plan Ads Based on What Users Read. This article discusses the ability for advertiser buyer to say, I want to target this type audience and the Web site owner can say, you can target this type of audience on this section of this site. There is more of a human touch involved with this compared to contextual ads but the concept remains the same. Deliver targeted ads to likely consumers.

"We look at [behavioral targeting] as just one more piece of the overall marketing pie," says Scot McLernon, executive vice president of sales and marketing for MarketWatch.com Inc.

At WebmasterWorld, there is an excellent thread that describes some of the reasons why a site might be banned by Yahoo! Search. These reasons include a "demotion penalty", "linking penalty" and more. Good thread, Tim Mayer from Yahoo! and his team are working hard to be responsive to the SEO/SEM community.

So what do you do if you think you have been penalized? Visit The WMW Thread Named: Yahoo What gives? How do you tell if your penalized? and then if your still not sure email webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com.

The thread is a must read for you affiliate marketers out there.

I found this news first at Webby's forum, posted by Viggen - if it is at other forums too, please add a comment.

MSN´s New Search Engine in Testing Phase.

How far are we from MSN's own search engine? I still think 1 year...

Jim Rapoza from eWeek in his latest article named Pop-up Ads: Bad for Business gives Web-based advertising a bad rap.

For those that know me, you know I am not an overly sensitive person when it comes to opinion based articles. You know I do not look for faults in articles. But with this latest article, I feel that the author has unfairly coined Web-based advertising as pop up ads.

Read the article and judge for yourself. Maybe I am wrong.

Do you guarantee your work? Some companies do and some companies don't. During my travels at one of my favorite forums I found a thread where a SEO client felt he got stiffed by a SEO company. The members reviewed the site and what he should and should not do about it. But what was real interesting is that a representative from that SEO company came to the forum to give their side of the story. Check out the thread at Cre8asite Forums on Bowmac Internet.

One of the first big advocates for cloaking and other forms of IP based delivery methods is due an entry at this blog. I have never spoken or contacted Ralph Tegtmeier (a.k.a. Fantomaster) but I have heard a lot about him.

I wanted to just highlight a few captions from Peter Da Vanzo's Search Engine Blog Interview with Ralph Tegtmeier. I will answer personal questions I have received with Fantomaster's Interview. Let me stress, these are NOT the questions asked to Ralph Tegtmeier by Peter Da Vanzo. Click on the link directly above if you want that.

Why did I not attend the "Meet the Crawlers" Session at the last Search Engine Strategies Conference? You can see it ever and again at search engine conferences all those search engine reps admonishing the participants not to do this, not to do that, to stick to this, to only do that, "be a good boy/girl across the board, do what daddy tells you, and we just might be a wee bit nice to you", wagging their index fingers and threatening SEMs with dirty looks - just like a bloomin' nursery! (laughs) And here are all these adult people, webmasters and marketing officers alike, gobbling it all up in awe like gospel. More often than not, it's a pretty pathetic spectacle.

I have done everything I could to make my site search engine friendly. I rank well for specific keywords and I am happy. However, I want to take my site to the next level but I don't want to cross any lines - how can you help me? There's a pervading myth in the search engine marketing and optimization industry that if you're a good boy, the engines will pat your head and will reward you with fine rankings, even if it may take an incarnation or two. That's unfortunate because not only does it fuzz up the hardcore technological issues involved, it also attracts all sorts of gut level thinkers to the SEM world, flogging their gut level advice ("content is king" being just one pervasive popular myth in question) and confusing each other and everybody else. This is a basically religious, moralistic attitude, and quite an inadequate one when dealing with technological issues.

So search engines are not our friends? But if you set out to use search engine generated traffic for your business model, you ought to realize that there's a generic conflict of interest being installed: you may want good rankings to achieve good returns, while the search engines couldn't care less about your turnover. All they ever want your content for is to expand their database to become more attractive to surfers. It's a number game, and as an individual webmaster you're always being shortchanged: if your business goes belly up, the search engines will simply feature someone else on their SERPs without wasting one thought on you. After all, they have billions of other pages to choose from.

Final quote: "Take your risks if you must - and don't complain if you happen to lose. Rather, pick up the shards and try anew. And if you should really find this business too nerve racking, maybe you'd be better off doing something else in the first place."

Credits to Peter Da Vanzo's Search Engine Blog Interview with Ralph Tegtmeier.

I get pleasantly surprised when Yahoo annouces a new product, or service. They always seem like they just can't wait to show up their new shiny object. It's fun for us, cause before they ever do we start to pick out what they will launch, annouce, or morph next. So I found this new article enlightening, because yahoo said exactly one week ago that it would be focuses on "localization and personalization" with enhanced forms of media for future search. So yesterday, Yahoo launched SmartView, a new local Web search tool, that use Yahoo Maps in order to allow users to search for restuarants, theatres, and other places by a single address. Looking for General Tso Chicken at 2am, in Chinatown, insert you address and it will find the closest chinese places.

Check out Yahoo SmartView here.

One of my favorite non-search engine related (well it might be search engine related) blogs is Jeremy Zawodny's blog, the Yahoo engineer. I try to go their every day. He had a post today named Orkut takes a step toward being meaningful.... Check it out.

It discusses how now when you add a friend, you can now say what type of "friend" this person is. Options include; haven't met, acquaintance, friend (default) , good friend, best friend.

Andy Beal posted at his blog English Courts Rule Using Trademarks in Meta Tags Legal, which has a link to the ruling.

Last week I attended an interesting session at the SES conference named Leggo My Trademark: A Search Engine Legal Update, which discusses these issues. To sum up that session, "Trademark infringement is use of another's mark that is likely to cause consumer confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to source, affiliation, sponsorship, origin or approval."

I am happy to say that the session at SES was right on the mark with the ruling in the UK court. Not only was the reason behind the ruling right, the definition of trademark infringement remains the same in Europe as it does in the US. Check out the ruling here

Several Search Engine Professional Organizations have started to become mainstream in the SEM/SEO industry. There are many individuals who are still skeptical of these organizations. I however am not.

SEMPO is one of the first full supported SEM organizations today. They have a large member base and some major supporters. I covered SEMPO's First Official Meeting in this blog this past December. I am a proud member of SEMPO.

SEO Consultants is an other organization that provides one of the most exclusive but free directories of SEM/SEO firms. They have strict guidelines to enter, some say too strict, but nevertheless they are a organization in our industry. I am also a proud member of SEO Consultants.

SEOPros is an other organization that caught my attention. As opposed to SEMPO that is more focused on awareness, SEOPros provides certification and training. They offer many of the services SEO Consultants provides but adds to it the certification, training and objective views. Check out their certification section at http://www.seopros.org/org/certification.htm.

Search Engine Marketing is now all about conversion rates, if you can increase that conversion rate by a small percentage then you are making progress. If the one thing SES conference in NYC wanted to drive home was that driving traffic to your site can be worthless, if you do not drive quality and actionable traffic. That being said...

I was visiting one of my daily sites VersionTracker (yes I use a Mac) and I saw an eye catching banner at the top. So I clicked, not because it was eye catching, but because I was interested in the product. It took me to this page. Find it yet? The "Add to Cart" button? Scroll down, yea all the way, scroll down until you can't scroll anymore. There it is, on the bottom right. Now, what was I adding to my cart? Scroll back up, there it is - ok now how do I add it to my cart? See my point?

You need to convert this sale right away! I am not going to buy it now.

FYI - I have a huge monitor with a lot of screen real-estate.

Alan Webb, one of the moderators at SEO Chat and owner of ABAKUS Internet Marketing contributes with a huge post named New Google algo checklist/todos.

It starts off as The following is based on my and others observations of the algorithm since Florida and how to become an authority. Below a 6 point checklist which be warned, in most cases is going to require a lot of work, in no particular order below...

1. Have you increased your total site size?
Check the top 5 rankings for your target main keyword/phrase with the 'site:' search function on Google. For example site:www.competitor-domain.com
This provides how many pages they have indexed. nine times out of 10 they will have more than your own which if you have been hit by florida/austin/brandy will very likely be a lower number of indexed pages. If not read the next point. Solution: Start thinking more content. Glossary, fAQ, more product details, articles, forum...
Size matters! Thats why amazon, major portals, hubs and professional dwp spam are ranking so highly. They are commonly huge in site with thousands of indexed pages. Get your website to around about the same number of indexed pages as those ranking top 10 (average). The less competitive the term the most likely you will not need too much new content.

2. Have you made a big effort since Update Florida to obtain more incoming links with ideal link text?
Those sites coming up top are seen to have either a whole lot of indexed pages (point 1) or, a whole lot of thematic and unthematic inbound links. Most at the very top have both. Thematic links to your site are crucial. get to the directories and get working on link exchange. Remember it doesnt have to be exactly reciprocal, suggest you will link to another of their domains so the links arent exactly reciprocated (if they have another domain.) see my article here on effective link pop building. Try and get on a par or naturally more links than those ranking currently at or near the top.

Visit the thread here for the full checklist.

About a year ago, AllTheWeb was one of those promising search engines. Sometimes referred to as the new Google has now lost its edge. In a post at WebmasterWorld named Is AllTheWeb On Death Row?, markd brings up his concerns with AllTheWeb in light of the latest industry trends and relevancy results.

I admit, I provoked the question but I thought it would be interesting.

Some of the SEO's before they were known as SEO's talk about the Search Engine Industry and Community back before Google.

Check out the thread by clicking here.

Cre8asite Forums has a thread that discusses who is the ultimate SEO, Who is da' MAN!!!!!?????. Names such as Danny Sullivan, Ammon Johns, Detlev Johnson, and Jim Wilson (who past away but will always be remembered). Ammon Johns from what I have heard around the industry is today's leader in search engine optimization. He will probably kill me for saying so in such a public area, but I do hear wonderful things.

I spoke with Ammon on the phone a month or so ago. He is not only a great SEO, he is a giving person. Besides for the 4,163 posts at Cre8asite Forums under the screen name Black_Knight (you see he didn't even use a hyphen in his name - he is so humble), he has helped dozens of experts learn more. In addition, he won't ever say he is the best and won't ever say anything bad on an other person. He is someone to look up to in this industry.

Here is to the best!

There has been reported Google Datacenter movements on www2 and www3. I found threads on this at WebmasterWorld and SEOChat. I did not find any threads at the other forums, yet.

Check out the threads at:
- WebmasterWorld
- SEO Chat

[update] false alarm, see WMW thread above or see the 4th page at bottom

Nice new interface for the powerful search engine aggregator Queryster was launched today.

One of the cleanest ways to search multiple search engines.

Check it out.

I spent the week in NYC for the Search Engine Strategies conference, as a speaker on the "Search Term Research & Targeting" panel on day one, and as a freeloader for the rest of the show.

Internet access at SES was spotty, and I was barely able to read my email all week. I returned to find a number of excellent threads going at IHY:

The pick of the week is Alan Perkins of e-Brand Management posting some excellent information on "Referrer Spam - Why you shouldn't publish your Web logs." Added bonus: instructions on using .htaccess to block access from specific IP addresses.

Yahoo's new paid-inclusion-plus-we-want-to-be-paid-by-the-click program stirred up a lot of criticism. Still to be determined is how Yahoo will manage to label/disclose the paid listings without running afoul of the FTC. Expect Commercial Alert to watch their actions with interest.

I was going to post this yesterday but by the time I got to my office, it was all over the place. So instead of posting a news item on it directly from the AskJeeves Web site like I planned, I will talk about the "what if".

Most of you who read this blog know what a big fan I am of Ask Jeeves and the Teoma Technology. I have been writing and praising Ask Jeeves since December 2003 when I begain writing Teoma - The Superior Search Engine? and my blog posting named Teoma Link Popularity: The Better PageRank?.

So why did I not think to buy the stock! I can tell you it was not because of monetary concerns. I was so into the technology and what it can do for improving relevancy that I did not think of investing in the stock. I did not think of taking advantage of the information I had at hand for financial purposes. I know the relevancy factor was not the sole reason for the stock price almost doubling but who cares.

Anyway, I am a bit bitter now. Less than last night when I heard the news in my car. So I will get over it.

Since this blog is really about forum coverage, here the forums that are discussing it:
- SEO Chat
- WebmasterWorld - Free Version
- IHelpYou
- JimWorld

I heard this from one of the speakers at the SES Conference but there was nothing to show you guys. The speaker said it was on his computer but did not see it on anyone else's computer, nor was he able to get rid of it.

What am I talking about?

Google is developing a new user interface for its SERP. Now, thanks to cline's post at HighRankings, I now have a URL to post showing what it might look like when (if) it is released.

The new Google Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Several forums have announced that Google AdSense will be coming out with improved AdSense statistics.

Some of the rumors spreading around are adding CTR, EPC, Projections, Breakdown by Site/Page and more.

Please visit for forums at:
WebmasterWorld
SEO Chat

While I was gone at the SES conference, it looks like SEO Chat has done a site wide redesign.

Its a fresh look for the site.

Take a look at http://www.seochat.com/ or http://forums.seochat.com/.

Paid Inclusion & Trusted Feeds - BAM!

Dennis Buchheim, Director of Search Marketing Solutions, Yahoo! was up first. He discussed he new content acquisition program which includes free web crawl, site match for commercial sites and the public site match for non-commercial sites. Overture is the brand that will be used for SiteMatch, the program with the flat fee and CPC. Existing programs are closed (Inktomi, AV and FAST), they will last until they expire but no new customers. There is a customer migration plan that you can contact them about.

Michael Palka, Director of Search, Ask Jeeves announced that they have made some changes to the program. Site Submit allows users to submit URLs for a flat fee. The second program, trusted feed program, they decided to eliminate. The most important thing to them is relevancy and they feel everything else will fall into place based on that.

David Turner, Director of European Operations, Position Tech compared yesterday's spam as today's trusted feed. He gave some basic information on what a trusted feed is. I think his presentation should have preceded the two previous ones. He summed up saying trusted feed is not spam, its normal algorithmic search.

Gour Lentell, Search Director, Decide Interactive who discussed optimization tactics for trusted feeds. You need to decide which content to include, then group and organize that content, then implement optimization strategies, deploy good creative messages, create landing pages, utilize geo-targeting, keep seasonality in mind and always conform to editorial guidelines.

Eric Neuner, Marketing Manager, Medscape/WebMD. They have a deal directly with Inktomi. They have multiple types of content distribution areas, some free some paid. WebMD was built a long time ago and was not search engine friendly. When they first talked to Inktomi they had only 10 pages indexed organically. They came up with some paid inclusion pricing solutions would be $x CPC. PFI was an excellent avenue for WebMD based on this information. They jumped from 10 to 65,000 URLs. The recent Inktomi migration with Yahoo increased WebMDs traffic 70%. He would like to see a maximum monthly spend with the CPC model. WebMD also ranks #1 for "animal porn", not bad.

Adam Jewell, Search Engine Marketing Manager, NetPlus Marketing Inc. presented a case study on Toll Brothers.

That wraps up the New York City 2004 Search Engine Strategies Conference. I hope to have an article written to summarize the conference. I hope you enjoyed my notes on the conference.

Measuring Offline Conversion seemed to have an interesting title, so I attended the session.

Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing was up first. No one is arguing that online, influences offline marketing. The major question is, how much does online influence offline. She took us through two case studies. Case Study One: They sell goods online, and they wanted to understand where the sales came from. So they created a unique 800# for each search ad they made. They found 27% of the orders came over the phone and the remainder were online orders. So you are now able to track those offline orders and you can better understand the cost-per-conversion. Case Study Two: Childcare company. They tracked what a searcher did after they got to the site. They can now say, they sent X people to site, they went to a page, then made an assumption on how many people actually called (like 25%). Based on this assumption, this was the lowest cost-per-conversion methodology. Its not an exact science, its based on assumptions and guestimation.

Steve Schepke, VP of Marketing Services, Meandaur is going to highlight cases where he is managing offline conversions for his clients. Great Expectations is a dating service, the only way to sign up is in person at a center. How do they measure these leads? They built a custom lead tracking system that manages all online and offline leads. Next example is LA Weight Loss. This case is all about inbound calls, so it was a bit less sophisticated the Great Expectations.

Glenn Alsup, President, Viewmark was the only one that i have seen do a full Flash presentation at this SES conference, very fancy stuff. He works with a lot of companies that can not change the content on their pages nor tag pages. He takes this three axis graph (campaign, customers and content) and looks at it in a sales funnel way. Then they link up the offline information much like the others do.

I will throw my company a plug here, RustyBrick does this for several clients. Its truly not a huge deal, you really need to set up policies and procedures. When it comes down to figuring out who, what and where the sale came from, if you set up strict rules in your application and guidelines, you will be able to get the data.

In Mike Grehan's latest article published at SearchEngineWatch.com named Google PageRank Lunacy, he discusses his experience with link building through spamming other sites (blogs and guest books).

I recommend reading it. Most of you know that Mike is one of the leading authoritative figures in link building and strategies.

The Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic, which was an interactive session where people called out their site name and it was critiqued in real-time.

They started off by collecting business cards for them to be able to randomly go through sites and talk about their pros and cons.

A1Vacations.com: They clicked on the internal page for Colorado, this is the landing page for PPC Colorado campaign. Its just confusing to look at, you need to peak interest. Use images and add some call to actions to encourage a click deeper. In to break this down more into cities. Its a very hard page to look at. Misty Locke recommended bidding on individual property names, no one else seems to agree. I believe organically he should rank well for those very specific terms anyway, so if thats working then do PPC - if its not working on the organic level leave it alone.

motivational-celebrity-speakers.com: Type in baseball speakers in Google you will see the ad on the right. DO NOT CLICK ON IT. Anyway, on the homepage - Lee Mills first recommendation was to bring up the featured celebrities and make the phone number larger.

Jessie Stricchiola gave us a Google AdWords trick. Use {keyword} and it will automatically fill in the search phrase dynamically in the place of {keyword}. This helps increase click through rates, because it serves up the exact keyword the person is typing in. This hint was given to Jessie by Dana Todd, who learnt this from a Google AdWords representative.

sandals.com: Put pricing and booking information at the top and not all the way at the bottom. Win a free honeymooon, make it higher and more noticeable.

gunbroker.com: The EBay for guns site. People can't find the help section at the top. Add a pop up to encourage people to register.

ABCLeads.com: Lee Mills said spread out top navigation more, make sign up now in middle of page a lot bigger. Put a phone number out there.

WhaleCommunications: keyword "ssl vpn". Goal is to download VPN white paper for free. Suggestions: Change it to "Download Free SSL White Paper" on the landing page.

jitpackaging.com: Type in Boxes. Its like $5 per click. What was extremely effective was to put "Boxes Save 50% vs. the "U". That helped increase the CTR dramatically. On that landing page, put pricing. The referral URL is excellent.

As some of you know, I am a huge fan of Web analytics tools and how they can help one achieve an increase in ROI on the Web. That is why I attended the Measuring Success Case Studies session. There were very few people who attended this session, which is one of the reasons I made sure to write on this session. Must be because the popular "Meet the Crawlers" session is now. :)

Jarid Lukin, E-Commerce Manager, from LEGO Group discussed LEGO's Web site and PPC campaigns. They use WebSideStory's HBX product for Web analytics, formally known as HitBox. They use special tracking URLs to track LEGOs campaigns. They have some nice looking campaign conversion reports. They have a plugin that allows you to export to Microsoft Excel (not a big deal, most do). He said that its important to look at vendor data (Google and Overture) with your own Web statistics.

Rob Gaudio, Director of Client Services, MEA Digital, presenting St. Bernard Software Case Study is presenting a case study on Urchin. This company does not sell online, they focus on lead capture. Reasons for choosing Urchin; (1) accuracy, (2) granular level measurement, (3) cost efficient, (4) high level of support, and (5) Useful reports and extremely easy to use. With Urchin you can track a sale or lead conversion over repeat visits. He then showed some reports, I love Urchin's reports. They can see the visitor to the lead to the sale.

Dan Noyes, President of Zephoria spoke next and they use many tools. WebTrends, HitBox, FunnelWeb and ClickTracks. ClickTracks advantage is the ability to merge in usability with SEM intelligence. It is a client environment. Ability to convert complex information and data into graphical and easy to understand information. ClickTracks does a nice job of digging deep into the results. They selected ClickTracks because (1) ability to graphically display information, (2) cost-effectively address diverse site configuration, (3) increased opportunities and (4) helped manage PPC.

Jeff Cram, Web Marketing Manager, NetIQ Corporation, presenting a company case study (WebTrends). He gave a case study on the same site as last time, so check that review at the Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 11th – Day Three.

As posted at SEO Chat by dazzlindonna, "Login to Yahoo and go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request".

What does the Future of SEM behold? This session delves into where SEO/SEM professionals feel SEM will be beyond 2004.

Fredrick Marckini, CEO and Founder, iProspect was up first. He sais this is the year of the Paid Search Marketing. 2004 will be defined by PPC, PFI, SEO, Analytics, Conversion Enhancements (this should go in reverse order of importance by this he means start with Conversion Enhancements, then Analytics, etc.). Paid Inclusion is going to increase in all fashions including specialized feeds in terms of PR and news related items. PPC expectations will continue to evolve, for example 1996-2000 SEO was it, 2001- 2002 SEO+ Metrics, 2003 SEO + PFI + Metrics, 2004 PPC + Inclusion + SEO + Analytics are all now expected. SEM firms will all be building or choosing a PPC bid management tool. Campaign Optimization: (1) Traffic Optimization, (2) Scenario Optimization, optimize based on Web logs. SEM is here to stay and will not be going away.

Cheryle Pingel, Chairman & Co-Founder, Range Online Media feels the future is that there is more money available. They no longer have to say I am spending X for get Y. They are now saying I can spend X but the return is beyond conversion numbers. Now you are seeing a niche within this niche of Search Engine Marketing. For example, just local search will hit 2.8 billion dollars within the SEM market. SEM was a niche of Marketing, she feels its amazing.

Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media Inc. For the immediate future, it comes down to 3 principles (1) better targeting, (2) non intrusive advertising method, and (3) control of the details on how they run their campaigns. Advertisers want more distribution. Consolidation of the industry versus innovation (convenience is going to be more important - feature sets will be removed). You will see better customer service from your PPC representatives.

Michael Sack, SVP and Chief Product Officer, Inceptor, Inc. He believes that advertisers desires this year will affect SEM. SEM industry will also be changed by technology, for example RSS, embedded contextual links. Also market behavior and response will make an impact on this industry. Currently, the big guys compete directly with the mom and pop shops. Expect the big guys to completely knock off the little guys like they do on TV. Think about natural language and speech technology - as to how they will apply to search. SEMs will need to learn how to control the users click-paths. Figuring out how to connect online and offline marketing and transactions.

Jill Whalen, Owner, HighRankings.com talks on the future of SEM. Jill is going to look at it from the tactical SEO perspective. Jill said SEO tricks are on the way out this year. SEO is not just about page optimization or link building, its going to me also about conversion rates. Jill feels that its not going to be all about paid search, there is plenty of room in organic results. She said about a month ago you saw in Google that you saw a lot of directory information on left and paid on the right. She said if you can get that right, then you might see more of that. Partnerships will be huge for the small SEOs.

Q & A component:

I have no doubt that the legal arena in the SEM field will begin to grow rapidly over 2004. That is why I have selected to attend the Leggo My Trademark: A Search Engine Legal Update session. Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Director of Account Management, Optiem moderated this forum. Jeffrey was a lawyer but now is in SEM.

What is a trademark? A word or symbol or slogan used in trade to distinguish goods or services. It should always be a noun and not a verb. With a trademark, there should be little source confusion. ® is a registered trademark, TM or SM is an unregistered trademark. Trademarks are not global, only federal or state protection.

Trademarks in search can be found anywhere you would put it in your on page seo elements.

"Trademark infringement is use of another's mark that is likely to cause consumer confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to source, affiliation, sponsorship, origin or approval." Trademark litigation can run in the ballpark of 1 million dollars. Generic terms are not up for trademark. Example, Apple (big apple, apple macintosh, apple pie). International law is similar, but the consequences differ.

Example: Google versus Booble. This case is going to court.

They took us through a case, American Blind. When doing a search on American Blind you will see the results. Notice the organic and paid results at top and right of page. This sprung a law suite "American Blind versus Google". American Blind sells blinds, they spent over 50 Million dollars to build their brand name. Initially Google said they would not sell American Blind 5 trademarked names on AdWords. Google refused to the bidding on "American Blind(s)", etc. saying its a generic term. AmericanBlind believes there is consumer confusion and is taking Google to court. They will probably sue the people who purchased the keywords later. Overture is not selling those keywords, so they are not being sold.

Danny put on an Ad for American Blind Lawsuit, no problem with that because he does not sell blinds. BUT, when he tried to put "Google" in the ad copy and it would not allow him because of trademark issues. So he published it with Gogle, instead. The ad went up right away and no human review.

FYI - there is someone on the board representing the International Legal community who gave examples of the same things happening in France and Germany.

The moderator then gave an example of the Google Sandbox where he put the word "faucet" and the results were shocking. The suggested terms included, Delta Moen Kohler Faucets, all of those are trademarked names. Keep in mind there is zero human interaction here, and Overture's suggestion tool does the same. He then did a search on Danny Sullivan and people are paying for his names in AdWords.

What should an SEM company do to avoid this?
- Avoid using Broad Match blindly (use negative terms, exact match and other options)
- Overture has a Trademark Fair Use Exceptions policy

First example is a search on "Yahoo Store" an Ad should come up that says "Alternative to Yahoo! Stores. Which takes you to a comparison page of the alternatives to Yahoo store. The argument is that since it clearly states that this is an alternative. Legally it is allowed but business ethically it is not nice to allow someone else to use someone else's brand and picky-bag off of it.

Very informative session, glad I attended.

When people talk about rumors of a future Microsoft search engine, often times it crops up discussion about how if such a search engine was integrated within the operating system, end users would take that convenience over relevancy (Google).

Anyway, I ran across a thread on a non-search engine related forum about rumors of Apple replacing the Google search box in their Safari browser with a Yahoo search box.

And after skimming the thread, it makes me think that end users actually do care about "taking away their Google".

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=61782

The next session I attended was the Competitive Research. I was getting a little tired of all SEM and SEO related topics, so why did I attend this conference? :) Anyway this topic seems to be on how to use the search engines to learn information on your competition. Curious as to what they might say that is worthy of its own session.

First speaker up was Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath to speak on competitive research. He covered, (1) who is your competitors online (2) links (3) Google searches and (4) EBay information. He looks first at alexa.com. He then looks at PPC ads, Organic listings and Froogle results to see who is out there. DMOZ or Yahoo directories provide this information as well. Once he finds his competitors he goes to market leap and uses the tools there to compare his competitors versus him. He then jumps over the competitors Web site and reads up on their corporate information and other pages. He also looks up newspaper articles and the company's distributors information. Find out who supplies your competition. 4 Quick Google searches, he selected these search queries to really narrow down his searches. (1) insite (use this to search the content within your competitors site), intitle (this restricts just to see what your competitors are putting in their titles), phone number search and by name. Now Ebay, he called it the forgotten search engine. His company started on EBay, so he researched what his other competitors were doing on EBay. The most interesting part of information is the feedback section. You can see what time and day people left feedback. His rule is about 30% of people leave feedback, so multiple that percentage to figure out the number of sales. So you can then see which items were being sold, and why they are buying it.

Next up, David Williams, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder, 360i - the company that does SEM for Vintage Tub & Bath. Allan came to 360i after the Florida update, he was affected. He then critiqued his clients site. They do very comprehensive keyword research and then optimized the pages to help increase rankings. They then looked at the internal and external links. On topic links and the anchor text in the links. He looks at who is linking to the competitor, which URLs and which IP addresses. Its important to see the anchor text that these external links have as well. He also looks at what it costs to rank well for certain paid listings.

Cam Balzer, Director of Search Strategy, Performics, Inc. focused on the PPC method of learning about your competitors. First thing you need to do is identify the search savvy competitors. Expropriate their keywords from your competitors pages, look at the titles and anchor text (etc). Do the same for PPC and look at the links they are actually using (the link will show you the exact keyword they are bidding for). Based on this information, you can guess how much they are spending on PPC. Then estimate Google CPC. Then you need to figure out how well they are doing in terms of conversion rates and average order value, which gives you an estimate on their ROi. This information gives you data on if they are a savvy competitor, are they focused on ROI. You can then see what it will take to compete.

Bill Tancer, VP Research, of Hitwise went through his product, they monitor the largest worldwide sample of the Internet. They do online competitive intelligence service. I am not going to pitch the product, just check it out at http://www.hitwise.com/. He did a case study on Vintage Tub, so it was interesting. This tool is extremely powerful, data on your competitors that you thought you can never obtain is not obtainable.

Roundtable: The Future of Search

Gerry Campbell, Vice President and General Manager of AOL Search and Navigation was first up and he went into how they have 23 Million members at 85% of those use AOL search (which is really Google now). They have grown 73% in terms of search activity whereas the whole industry only increased by 40%. AOL feels the future search is going towards: (1) localization and personalization (2) Content Integration (when you do a search, real paid content comes up) and (3) Broadband, people who search with broadband, search differently. AOL delivers a client named SmartBox, which is a navigation related search tool. Nothing too exciting here but lets see what others have to say.

Paul Gardi, SVP of Search, Ask Jeeves was next to discuss the future of search. He believes the needs of the users and the needs of the searcher will converge over time. From the user perspective you will see personalization increase and privacy increase (contradictory?). They will have to find new ways of access more and better information. And content is going to be huge. Technology front, Teoma is able to look through a lot more information faster and the user wants the answer faster. Information delivery will be any where and any time. The real future of search is understanding the intent of the user and give them what they really want. The last thing is personality from the user's perspective. On the commerce side, Teoma has not even scratched the surface of hitting all the advertisers. Dayparts to nanoparts, instead of the part of the day - they will feed up results based on the nano part of the day.

Tim Cadogan, Vice President, Yahoo! Search. Mission is to provide the best most relevant results. Understand what the user want and then how do we better deliver to better to the user and how do we extend this to all users. Personalization is going to be huge, tons of those people have signed up with Yahoo! so they have a lot of information to provide this personalized search. They feel it is critical to show the user, here are the results based on your preferences but if you want to step outside of this box, you can. Second area is how do we get more content? He first said that 99% of their 7 billion pages were captured for free BUT...They want to partner with content providers, that is why they made this new PFI program that everyone is going 'Yahoo!' about. Third area is to have multiple types of search engines and integrate those engines and deliver that information when relevant. Yahoo! Yellow pages, do a search in Yahoo! search for map or something. They utilize all their engines and will be working hard to deliver the most relevant answers through their network at Yahoo! search.

Craig Nevill-Manning, Senior Research Scientist, Google. He discussed the history of search 300 years ago, that you used a Bible to search or something. Now we know how silly that view was. He proposes the future of search would be 'search pets'. Why did he say this? Because pets understand emotion and how people work. So if Google can understand the user emotion, then they got it. Examples, Search engines of the future should be able to figure out diplomatic sayings versus straight fact. Search engines need to infer more. An other example, you ask your wife "What is wrong, Honey?" and she says "Nothing". Here the search pet would help with the answer. That got a few chuckles in the room. User interface is also going to be very important - usability. Thats all for him on this.

Continue reading "Roundtable: The Future of Search"

Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology from Google, started off the Advanced Link Building Forum. Same slides as last December, just a different person behind the podium. He basically discussed how PageRank works, and all of you reading this knows how it works.

Paul Gardi from Ask Jeeves, the man who inspired me to write my Teoma - The Superior Search Engine? article. He said they currently power about 25% of the Web (no source provided). Read the article for what he basically discussed... Subject Specific Popularity and Community Hubs. The concept is beautiful!

Debra Mastaler, Owner, Alliance-Link.com spoke about the power of anchor text and links. "If you want to rank well...you need to incorporate solid anchor text in your linking campaign and partner with authoritative sites." in addition, you must deploy marketing savvy terminology in those links. She then explained what anchor text is. She states you can rank well without content, :). She discusses the OOP (over optimization penalty) that some believe in, I don't believe in that. She said to use the keywords in your title tag in your anchor text to link to that page. Having keywords in the domain name helps, an other bold statement for a hotly disputed subject. Be consistent with the URLs you give to people to link to you, i.e. www versus no www. She said that anchor text does best when on authoritative sites, this goes somewhat against what John Scott said here (scroll down to John's second post on the thread).

Eric Ward was next and he quoted the Google guy on his new term "Link Skank". He came with new material. Discussed the issues with people losing their links because they change domain names or url structures. He outlined some steps on what to do (not going down the path of 301 redirects), he said capture 30 days of data in raw form - this way you can really check your real backlinks. Order by the highest referrals. Also if you already have the problem then look at the highest 404 error pages and relaunch the pages. Make a database of the old versus new url structure.

Greg Boser was next and he discussed how he does link building. First goal, do whatever it takes not to do reciprocal linking. The next thing he does is build an internal link structure that will help impact the SERPs. The other thing is to do something that lets links grow on their own (i assume a blog or something like that). Content syndication is an easy way to generate links, like this blog. If you get published in a press release, ask for a link to your site in the article. Develop RSS feeds, people will link to you. Web tool distribution, like some of digitalpoints free tools and have a "powered by ...". Desktop applications help build links. Buy links from non profits, they will sell and they are good links. The dark side of building links include guest book spamming, log file spamming and blog spamming (if your a site owner, watch out for them).

The Dynamic Web Sites session was pretty much the same as the other Dynamic session. All presenters were excellent, they all clearly illustrated the real problems with dynamic sites. Its funny, Laura Theme went through a to-do like list of what to do for a dynamic site that is not optimized. Let me tell you, it was almost a duplicate copy of this 7 page report consultation i wrote for this client. She went through the home pages, category pages, sub category pages and product pages. She explained how to use the database to serve up unique copy for each page. She was not big into URL rewriting but she was clear in stating, 3 or more variables in the URL will kill you.

This is the first time I heard Mikkel deMib Svendsen speak, you know the guy who always wears that red suit :). He is also the VP of Marketing Technology at Marketleap. He was very good and discussed many of the issues and solutions with dynamic sites.

Jake Baillie from Priva did a great job as well. He went over the how to re-write your URLs and the major issues with dynamic sites from a technical standpoint.

But Laura Thieme from Bizresearch gets props for bringing up a solution I did not think of. Program into your CMS a method of over riding the dynamic generation of the title and meta information. She said something that is so true, give the flexibility because it will come up. I have some clients that would benefit from this and will get my developers to begin work on that.

Good job!

I have had quite spotty internet access the past few days, otherwise I would have gotten this information up sooner. This is some of the highlights from one of the first sessions from yesterday. I will get the rest of the sessions up, the ones Barry didn't attend hopefully later today, or the next few days. Overall the conference has been excellent, its been quite a packed house especially today. Meeting Barry finally was also a highlight, great to put a face to a name.

Contextual advertising is taking off. The speakers of this session dealt with the issues of contextual advertising to a targeted audience, the success in doing so, the challenges faced, and overall the goals that advertisers should consider in the new contextual ad marketplace.

Overture - Paul Volen of Overture was the first speaker, and while he gave a good presentation, I felt it left off the specifics of why contextual advertising would be useful in the first place. It felt more like a sales presentation. Other speakers addressed this topic, but Paul went over the benefits of content matching in using Overture. Basically the Overture technology through quality mappings and editorial results places listings in highly relevant content pages.

Google - The next speaker was Google, and Tim Armstrong emphasized that Google is a highly scalable and large network of contextual advertising, that reaches more than 80% of internet users. Very impressive, the reach of this technology seems almost ready to reach its full potential. Google has also taken precautions to prevent such keyword problems such as knowing the difference between location Java and the Java the coffee drink.

Kanoodle - Lance Podell, presented the Kanoodle technology, and they call themselves the "sponsored links innovator", while I am not to knowledgeable about the Kanoodle company as a whole there presentation did look very promising, and I would recommend serious context ads advertisers to check them out. The boost several specialized tools the other engines didn't have. But I couldn't help but wonder who their "premier" partners where and where the ads appeared in the beta of the "premier" distribution.

Case Studies - By far Brad Byrd of NewGate, gave the best presentation. I learned more in this session than all them combined. Brad did know his stuff, and was very knowledgeable about the market and nature of contextual ads. He presented case studies from several clients of his company, and the stats from large campaigns of both natural search listings, and listing on related content pages. His finding where interesting, which I will summarize here.

Adsense - Higher CPC rate, in comparison to Overture You will ultimately pay more in Google, but will get more qualified leads Cost per conversion MORE when contextual advertising is using context matching to the ads On average, context matching of ads, results lower average clickthrough rates, and lower conversion rates when compared to standard search listings.

The Search Engines & Web Server Issues was a session I wanted to attend at SES Chicago but did not. So here I am.

Shari Thurow:
- Pay your hosting bill
- Renew domain name
- Do not password protect key pages
- Check your robot.txt file
- Add a site map
- URL structure, simpler is better. She said that the domain extension (i.e. cfm, php, asp) do make a difference. She knows the Search Engines say they do not treat them differently, but she believes they do. I am on the side of the search engines here.
- Use 301 and 302 redirects when you redo your URL structure
- When moving a site to a new server, keep both servers up and running
- Get a quick server

Went into Q&A for the board, see the speakers at the above link.

Greg Boser is "a huge fan of mod_rewrite".

For those of you really into PR, stop it! PR is old, outdated and doesn't even update when there is a back link update.

We had a little discussion on cloaking, the people on the board do it to "help the search engines". Do it when you need to, but do not abuse it.

Bruce Clay makes sure all his clients have their own IP address. He said its worth the $2/month.

Domain names with more than 2 hyphens in it, you are considered skeptical. They are not sure about the file extensions, its only the domain name parts. They expect the new Google to consider underscores the same as hyphens.

Many basic SEO and server related questions...

The next session I attended was the Organic Listings Forum. They just added in Tim Mayer from Yahoo to the session, so this should be good. Other interesting people are Mike Grehan and Brett Tabke. This room is so packed and really hot.

Tim: started up with his free crawl and said it will be available this week. They are targeting the "hidden web". And third, re-launching the paid inclusion. They feel the paid inclusion is going to be Yahoo's competitive advantage. Paid inclusion is there to give the SEMs more of a say. He basically reiterated his post at WMW.

Paddy Bolger said now you can be hurt from links. For example, if your site is linked to by a major authority, Google might remove your site because there is no need for you to be there, since you have a link from the authority site. Its not a penalty but more of a filter. This was a bold statement, what do you think?

Some woman took off at Tim Mayer about the CPC plus PFI concept. So you pay to be included AND you pay per click. But you do not bid, you just pay if someone clicks on you. Everyone clapped when she said this and Tim blushed. ;)

Then we had a lot of discussion of themeing and authority sites. The agreement is that Google is practicing this. So links from non-relevant sites are less important then links from relevant sites.

Regarding Geo-filtering, they said they look at language, domain name and links. Yahoo said they do not look at IP address, but I find this hard to believe. Google looks at the IP addresses - or at least based on my last study in December they did.

Yahoo differs from Google by utilizing the keyword meta tags. On page factors are very important. Yahoo also does not have stemming on by default like Google does. Google will index only 101k of your page, Yahoo does 500k of your page.

Danny Sullivan, in his Opening Keynote discusses the Search Engine Industry and what he expects to happen in the future. He discusses the current state of the industry and says we had Google, Ask Jeeves. Gained Yahoo, lost MSN for now and we will lose AllTheWeb.

Danny feels the major search players will be like the major TV networks. He feels there will be few players with a broad reach. Ups and downs of each engine are:

Google: Brand
Yahoo: Brand and portal lock in
MSN: Browser and portal lock in
AOL: Browser and portal lock in
Ask Jeeves: Brand

He does not believe you can simply buy an engine to build a brand. Word of mouth is the best method and it was the only thing that worked in the past. What else is important is that your search engine is damn good. 52% say relevant information is most important, 34% credibility is important.

Microsoft will be spending a ton of resources developing their own search and Danny is not so confident they will succeed.

He feels Google's "monopoly" is over but they will continue to succeed. He discusses some of the problems people are having with the current Google. He said that Google has been trying out new algorithms over these months.

Answers are:
- Buy PPC to supplement
- Do what is best for the human, not the engine. Do not worry.

Yahoo released a CPC model only. This can be a major problem, look at what happened with LookSmart. But Yahoo is still going to list free listings, so it is kind of different. He would like to see Yahoo show which links are pay for inclusion by adding a symbol next to the link or something.

Danny feels that the future of PPC will be...I want to target people who want to buy sofas. Google and Overture will say, ok we sell you a bucket of these search terms for $X per click and you will be covered.

Google is getting personal (look at Eurekster for what this means). They run Orkut.com, Yahoo will and AOL knows it all.

Lots of information in 30 minutes.

I first wanted to attend Writing For Search Engines but after sitting for a while, I left. Its a great beginner course but I am not a beginner, so I had to leave. Heather Lloyd Martin and Jill Whalen give great presentations. I think Phoenix was there, so he might give you some detail on it.

I am in a Q & A at Cashing Out: The Preparation and Implications, this is the only room the Internet works in. I'll post a recap later.

Check back for more and also check back tomorrow for the new sessions. Any requests, post a comment.

Thanks.

I just got out of the Broad Matching & Other Ad Targeting Options which discusses when to use the new Broad Match options given by Google and Overture and when to go for the standard options.

Broad match, for those of you who dont know what it is, is the ability to type in a broad keyword and let the technology match more specific keywords for you. For example, if you want to rank well for "cheap", it will figure to rank you well for "discount", "low cost" and "not expensive" as well. Saves you huge amounts of time when managing your PPC campaigns.

John Slade from Overture spoke first on how it works and showed it off on Overture. Richard Holden did the same, but he did it for Google. He went into the different match types (broad, exact, phrase, negative, negative exact). He also discussed how Google's Broad match is smarter b/c they utilize their Google search to match up broad matches on a daily basis. (not much time so skipping a bit).

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch gave a two case studies on how Broad Search helped her clients. One point is that broad search for both Google and Overture do not work globally across their distribution network. Also overture always lists broad match under exact matches.

Matt Van Wagner from Find Me Faster gave a nice presentation on the differences between Google and Overture. Basics are: Google ranks based on Bid X CTR; Overture ranks based on Exact -> Phrase -> Broad and then bid. Important to keep in mind. He went into more topics but again, not much time - so i am only giving you the take aways.

Finally Kevin Lee from Did-It said the same thing everyone else did but added. It is a good idea to use broad match to see what you can use for your exact matches. You do a broad match and then you look at your referrals logs and see the full query, then optimize your campaigns for the best keyword phrases. Google rewards you for high CTR (remember, Google ranks based on bid X CTR).

Nice session for you PPC heads.

The session I just attended was Search Term Research & Targeting. The presentors were Andy Beal, Dan Thies and John Slade (overture).

I was a little disappointed in the presentation because it was pretty much exactly the same presentation as last December in Chicago. Andy's slides were exactly the same, I do not remember any new examples. But, the room was packed and he does explain basic SEO concepts well. He did state a few things which I will make a point to mention here. (1) 58% of people use 2 or 3 word search terms. (2) When describing which tools are available for keyword research, he did not throw DigitalPoint a plug :) (3) He said you should target 5 - 8 keywords for your homepage, but then said he prefers 5. I think 5 is a bit too much, but its doable.

Dan Thies was up next. Funny guy. Oh and he posts here on occasions. He introduced himself and one of the points he made on that introduction was that he was the guy "who wrote that report on Florida". I found that funny as well. Here are some keepers from his presentation. (1) How do you know a keyword is competitive? Do a search in Google on the term, then do the same search in google but narrow it to the title only search and then narrow it to title and links. The first thing that is done when optimizing is putting those keywords in a title of the page. You know a keyword phrase is competitive when its in a lot of page titles. (2) Dan was stressing relevancy and what a keyword phrase in a search really means. Funny example is Paris Hilton - the girl or the hotel? Check out Danny's site this week for some free spreadsheets to help determine competitiveness of a keyword at http://www.seoresearchlabs.com. (3) And Dan publically admitted that he can not compete with Yahoo and Google on the keyword phrase "top keywords", just because Yahoo and Google come out with their top keywords on a yearly basis and those pages rank better then his pages. I'm just messing... His point was, if its really really competitive, it might make more sense to utilize the PPC - sometimes optimizing costs more then PPC.

One night, back in 1995, a neighbor invited me over to see where he could go with AOL because he knew I had a strong interest in computers and wanted to get on the Internet. Within minutes of dialing up, listening to the familiar high pitched modem scream, there I was standing with the whole world in front of me. All I had to do was click here and there on a keyboard.

From that day on, I knew I wanted to build websites. More than that, I yearned to participate with the planet in a positive way. One of my first online friends lives in Norway. He wanted to learn more about my country (the USA). For several years, I eagerly looked forward to booting up my PC to see what "JM" would send from his home on top of the world. I told some of his stories to my kids. What an amazing opportunity to connect with people! What a glorious opportunity to do my part in creating peace by reaching out to people and talking to them. Even better, I learned to listen.

I like to find other people who feel the Internet can be a tool to bring people together in positive, constructive ways. So, it was such a thrill to find this interview by Dirk Knemeyer of InformationDesign.org on Nathan Shedroff, a pioneer in experience design.

Continue reading "Creating Websites with Passion & Social Values"

SEM companies discuss how they handle there business and growth.

John Lustina from IntraPromote is the first guy up. He is discussing how its important for his company to hire the brightest people. He said they can work where ever they want, as long as they are the best and get their work done. His employees need to have skills in either keyword research, seo coding, seo copywriting, technology, stats and reporting skills.

Cheryle Pingel is now up. She simply discussed that business used to be more fun, now its more like a real business where lots of money is involved, making it more serious. The industry is growing and its great.

Fredrick Marckini from IProspect. Stage one, your working out the the home. Stage two, you hire some people. Stage three you are the senior manager, stagge 4 hiring success and growth, stage 5 you cant be the top guy anymore, stage 6 is growth. He said "Employees Quit Managers, Not Companies". He basically discussed the principles of growing any business.

Continue reading "Coping with Growth: What's Keeping You Up At Night?"

I have arrived at the search engine strategies conference. Wireless Internet is working and its free (not sure if it is suppose to be free).

I am at the Coping with Growth: What's Keeping You Up At Night? session.

I will post during and after its done on this session.

FYI SEO Chatters, I met up with Phoenix just a minute ago. He is at the Contextual Ads session.