April 2004 Archives

Please excuse our appearance while we upgrade the design.

We will be adding functionality to detect a screen resolution equal to or less then 800x600. If there is a match to this rule, then we will not be showing the right side box with the Google Ad and notifications. Currently about 10% of the sites traffic falls within the category, so we feel it is important.

Thank you.

A member over at IHelpYou Forums started a thread named fraudulent clicks today where he discusses how his clicks on his AdSense reports skyrocketed in a single day. Someone was fraudulently clicking on those banner ads and he decided to report it to Google.

Pay Per Click advertisers take click-fraud into account when factoring ROI (return on investment) of the overall campaign. Besides for the obvious cons involved with click fraud, the thread discusses some of the, not so obvious, pros.

"Fortunately on AdWords, it can actually increase your position if it happens on a small scale." Google AdWords looks at two factors when deciding how to position ads. (1) The bid placed by the advertiser and (2) the CTR (click through rate) of that particular ad. So if a bid is lower then an other ad but the CTR of that lower priced ad is much higher, the lower priced ad can come up before the higher priced ad with the lower CTR. So that benefits the advertiser who is paying less for the ad.

Could it have been that the advertiser was the 'fraudster'?

Have you noticed that since mid April, Yahoo! Search has been using the Yahoo! directories description, if available? Here is a sample of what it looks like in the SERPs for my corporate site.

People at WebmasterWorld find this to be a tad unfair. As one member says, "The ordinary "new Yahoo" search description is much more complete and helpful, and substantially more likely to provide the searcher with a complete sense of the site's focus and content."

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! responds to that with "From my perspective as a searcher I agree with you. Some people's view is that it is query dependant. From a content providers perspective I have heard many times that they do not like the directory T&D. We had the same problem with the Looksmart directory listings in the Inktomi Index. People unsubscribed from Looksmart just to get rid of the T&D in Inktomi."

"Yahoo_Mike" an other Yahoo! representative responded 4 days ago with "We are reviewing this process to provide additional ways for sites to be listed rather than always using the directory information."

I agree, the Yahoo! directory description is not as good as the Yahoo! Search description. Let's see if they respond quickly to the SEMs feedback at WebmasterWorld.

Like all wise people, I use Mozilla Firefox as my default browser.

Cool plug-ins like "Live HTTP Headers," "Nuke Anything," "User Agent Switcher," and the "Web Developer Toolbar" make Firefox the best web browser for anyone doing SEO work.

Unfortunately, the new layout for this blog seems to be unfriendly to anything but IE.

Doug from aderit.com brought this to my attention. He felt this was a funny ad to find next to the Google Files IPO Papers entry on this site.

It reads "Buy & Sell SEO" from harrisdirect.com.

At first one would think that harrisdirect.com is buying the keyword "Google IPO" which would have made for a nice catchy news flash "Harris Direct tries to ride the coattails of the Google IPO frenzy by engineering IPOs of SEOs... In an advertising campaign launched today, Harris Direct announces that they are buying and selling SEOs..." (thanks Doug for the quote).

In reality this ad is just an inevitable result with an undesirable outcome.

AdWords must of matched the keywords "stock" and "ipo" with "seo". Harris Direct must of purchased the keywords stock and ipo and ran an add in the format of "Buy & Sell [keyword]". In this case the major keyword was SEO, hence "Buy & Sell SEO". SEO's stock price is at an affordable price. Should we listen and buy some SEO stock?

Ever notice the date next to a URL listed in the Google search engine results page? If not, I have attached a picture below of an example.

You see the first result, the home page, has a date. The other page, an inner single page, does not have a date next to the URL. What is that date and why do some results have it and some results do not?

A thread over at WebmasterWorld named Date in Google search results discusses just that. The famous GoogleGuy chimes in with the answer to this question.

He discusses that, in the past, Google used to conduct a 'deep crawl' about once a month and 'freshbot' went to pages on a more frequent basis on pages that were updated on a more regular basis, like this blog's homepage. The date was much more noticeable back then, which really wasn't that long ago - remember the Google Dance days? Today, Google's 'freshbot' is much more advanced and is basically able to do deepcrawls on a more frequent basis.

Anyway, the date next to the URL is only shown if:

a) the page was seen in the minty fresh crawl, and b) the current date is within N days of the crawl date, where N is a small integer such as 2 or 3.

Check the thread out here.

If you don't know already, now you do. Google has finally filed with SEC. Here is an article on it.

Some forums are taking polls on if you will buy Google's stock or not. Join the discussion at your favorite forum:

• SEO Chat Forums
• WebmasterWorld Private Forums
• WebmasterWorld Public Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• JimWorld
• HighRankings Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

Do you have a non-profit informational site, like this one, that you want to be listed in the Yahoo! Directory for free? If so, you can get listed for free. A thread at SEO Chat named free yahoo directory listing discusses just that.

I have discussed Web analytics and Urchin several times on this site. I am a huge fan of Urchin, and if you do a search on Urchin within this site, you can find all my posts on it. These entry is to discuss some of the new features added to the 5.6 versus, an upgrade from version 5.5.

You can view all the changes here, but I will highlight some of the cool enhancements that I noticed right off the bat.

First is a new view called "Bounce Rate" "report that shows how frequently visitors entered and immediately exited a site, by landing page." Take a look at this graph, click on the graph to see more detail.

We all know this is a very important statistic, that most of us try to get to by creating our own spreadsheets and working out the numbers. Urchin now made it very easy to view these bounce rates with a click of a button. Definitions of fields on enlarged view are: "Bounces" is the number of times visitors exited from the page without visiting any other pages on the site. "Entrances" is the total number of entrances on the page. "Bounce Rate" is the percentage of entrances on the page that resulted in exits without viewing any other page on the site. It is calculated as Bounces divided by Entrances.

Some other enhancements to note include:

- Wizard that allows the manual entry of cost and impression data for any campaign data point. This includes email campaigns.
- A much needed 'View by" feature on the date range setting interface that allows the user to view data on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis
- And more.

Keep in mind, I do not work for Urchin, I am just a very satisfied customer that loves tools to help manage a sites marketing efforts. Also the bounce rates on this site tend to be high, but I will assume that most people come to the homepage and then jump off. My other sites, the bounce rates are much lower dependent (dependent on the page).

Thanks to a thread over at SEO Chat named Google Images merges with Google News, by forum member pk_synths, I am able to report this news to you.

Conduct an Google Image search on any news related single term. It can not be a two terms or three terms, it must be a single word.

An example of this is when you conduct a Google image search on apple. You will see the news information on Apple Computer in a gray box at the top, which they name "Images from Google News about apple".

Other example try these image searches:

• bush
  
• israel
  
• google
  
• iraq
  
• nba
  

The list goes on, remember, it seems to only work with single terms.

With AdSense such a huge money making machine for Google, I would think other search engines would start rolling out similar programs. Did a little poking around (well Rustybrick pointed me actually), and found out that Overture does have a context sensitive ad program, but it's only open to sites with 30 million page views or more. Seems strange to me to put those sorts of restrictions on it, as it's an automated system (at least if it's done like AdSense).

Yup that is right, A9, is today's Alexa's number one mover and shaker. A9's traffic increased 2,100% from an Alexa 13,194 ranking of to a proud ranking of 490.

How are Movers & Shakers Calculated?

The movers and shakers list is based on changes in average reach (numbers of users). For each site on the net, we compute the average weekly reach and compare it with the average reach during previous weeks. The more significant the change, the higher the site will be on the list. The percent change shown on the Movers & Shakers list is based on the change in reach. It is important to note that the traffic rankings shown on the Movers & Shakers page are weekly traffic rankings; they are not the same as the three-month average traffic rankings shown in the other Alexa services and are not the same as the reach numbers used to generate the list.

Please don't be upset by an other Google IPO post, this is really my second time posting on the IPO topic, and even in this post I will be talking more about Google the people then Google the company.

An article at Wired named Quirky Google Culture Endangered? discusses the thought process Google's founders, Page and Brin, are going through.

On one hand, the founders can greatly benefit financially by taking the company public. They "are believed to own roughly one-third of Google, which is expected to be worth between $15 billion and $25 billion after its stock market debut." Not only will they benefit personally, the company and the employees will be better off financially.

However, on the other hand, Google might not be able to maintain the "freewheeling approach" after the "hard-nosed investors" are keeping their eyes on the company. They might have to say goodbye to "colorful office toys, roller-hockey games, free meals prepared by the Grateful Dead's former chef and a business mandate requiring workers to devote one day per week to their own pet projects."

I am a die hard Apple user, that means I use all Apple gear. This includes Apple PowerBook G4, Cinema Display, Airport, iSight, iPod, iTunes, iChat and the list goes on.

The most used Apple software I use is Apple's browser named Safari. Safari, is currently not supported by Google's email, GMail. A thread over at WebmasterWorld discusses a rumor at MacWorld's MacCentral that says:

Brin noted that he was "embarrassed" that Gmail's beta doesn't support Safari, but said that they will add Safari support before its public release. "We're going to make it work with Safari and that's one of the high priority things," Brin told MacCentral. "I’ve heard that you can sort of get it to work if you're desperate. I want to fix that, and I want to make it work really well."

A thread over at SEO Chat named, Anybody wanna buy a classic search engine? discusses the advertised sale of Lycos for $200 million.

Instead of buying real estate or investing in the Google IPO, why not buy your own search engine?

At JimWorld, there is a discussion being lead by Barry Lloyd, a.k.a. MakeMeTop, on the topic of Site Match, pay-for-inclusion. The thread is named Experience with Yahoo Site Match?

Barry Lloyd, an experienced SEM, discussed his experience with Site Match. He said on average you need to wait 4 business days for editorial review. He points out that the reviewers do not always review the pages submitted, they often look at other pages that were not submitted including a contact information page. So the reviewer is looking for the "integrity of the site as a whole."

After the pages are accepted, you will normally see them included within 12 hours. MSN/HotBot results vary from Yahoo! Search's results, in fact Barry has noticed a 5 - 7 day period of time where positions in Yahoo! are much lower then in MSN/HotBot. After the 5 - 7 day period the results improve "dramatically."

Barry and an other JimGuide make a point to watch out for "spam-like" pages. If the reviewer finds anything that resembles such pages, you will likely not get listed.

Good luck with your PFI campaigns and Overture's Site Match.

This past week was all about the anticipated Google IPO, which we are still waiting to happen. But I tried not to discuss the financial aspects of Google and the industry, not that I am not following it. A major event occurring with Google is something known as the Sandbox Effect where new sites seem to be put on a hold before ranking well for any keyword combination. There was a bit of speculation on why this is happening, some of which is in the topic of purchasing expired domain names but that theory does not seem to be consistent with the reports at the forums. Other speculation was that these sites were seeded with Ghost PageRank, but I do not believe that to be true either. Theories are springing up daily, one thing that seems to be fairly consistent is that this hold period lasts for about 90 days.

It has been an exciting week for Google's AdWords department. Besides for the new Pay Per Click's Trademark Policies, where Google began allowing US competitors to buy trademarked names but those names can not be used in the ad text. Maybe that is why the Google AdSense and AdWords server had some technical difficulties, speak up who ever you were that hacked in. There was some good news this week on PPC, spending on PPC is up compared to other online or offline advertising media. That is what influenced my post named, Organic and PPC Are Friends not Enemies.

Continuing with Google, yea I know it was a big week for them, Google gave props to the earth. Soon after, Google gave back to the SEOs with a PageRank and backlink update. Some people reported that Yahoo! search was back to using Google's index, but that was rejected. We tried to figure out how to manipulate the description for ones site in the SERP but instead found Google was doing a heck of a job indexing Flash. Finally with Google, new look for Israel Google, "I am Feeling Lucky" Has no Referrer, and we tested hyphens and underscores in url and title.

On a more general search engine optimization we discussed the pros and cons of multiple sites with same database and linking between multiple sites on the same IP address.

Forum specific topics included Dan's post on his dissatisfaction with some forum threads. But I was able to find some of the more hot threads on the Internet. And we even talked about how AskJeeves is growing so quickly. If you think that is wild, to top it off we even had a thread on a Famous Subservient Chicken.

Looking forward to next week!

A member at SEO Chat posted his test results for measuring the underscores versus hyphens both in the URL and in the title of the page. Does Google consider them to be the same? Well based on his early tests, the answer is NO.

The SEO Chat thread is is found at google underscore test results. You can view the test page here.

Notice the filename structure is (I italicized the text within the URL Google can read) chalcakloopy-cganveeeing_doreaivnically_phreanatoindment-bafdiadiiafy.html

Notice the title of the page is worded as (I italicized the text within the title tag that Google can read) teawufloppafomper-flevalitettaeilanvincely_capamafiandhfollicruxzst_audfivatrdatalnmafluzs-ahgonnvohunnytion

Now lets check Google results for those keyword phrases that match the URL structure:
chalcakloopy is a match!
cganveeeing is not a match.
doreaivnically is not a match.
phreanatoindment is not a match.
bafdiadiiafy is a match!

Now lets check Google results for those keyword phrases that match the title structure:
teawufloppafomper is a match!
flevalitettaeilanvincely is not a match.
capamafiandhfollicruxzst is not a match.
audfivatrdatalnmafluzs is not a match.
ahgonnvohunnytion is a match!

Nice test.

How do I get my description in the Google SERPs looking pretty? That is the topic of discussion at one thread named Google Descriptions Revisited over at HighRankings forum.

Google will most likely not use your META description within its SERPs. For example, lets take my corporate site, http://www.rustybrick.com/. Conducting a search on rustybrick, brings back the description "Web design, web development, web programming, e-commerce, .Net technologies and more Web technologies in New York (NY) by RustyBrick." View the source of the rustybrick homepage and you will see the description is being pulled from the content within the <noscript> tag.

Next example is when I conducted a search on rustybrick web design, trying to trigger a new description. What I received back was "RustyBrick Quick Service Overview: Web services; web design, web development, web programming, e-commerce, search engine optimization, .NET technologies web." That content is being pulled from the bottom of the rustybrick homepage.

So the META description is not often used by Google in the SERPs.

In a thread over at SEO Chat named Am I dreaming or yahoo shows google serps again? a forum member discusses his encounter with Google results in the Yahoo! Search search engine results page. Just like old times?

The conclusion was that it was exactly like "old times" thanks to some old cookies. What the people had to do, to stop this from occurring, was to delete their cookies, specifically the "google cookie" from Yahoo.

That got time to come back to 2004 for Yahoo! Search.

A topic over at HighRankings named, Expired Domains is where a member asked "I came across a website selling expired domains... what are your thoughts on buying them for the traffic they may still generate?"

The first two or so replies suggest that if the domain name is related to your prior business then it is a worthwhile purchase. The reason being is that you should be able to bring in direct traffic from the old competitors URL and any backlinks will be on topic, so the backlink provider might keep those links and not delete them.

But each expired domain name should be carefully reviewed from a historical perspective. In addition, when purchasing new domain names, it is important to learn if the domain name was ever used in the past. If it was, it might have been penalized by the search engines, you would not want to pass that penalty to your new site, would you?

A thread over at Cre8asite proved to me that Google is doing a much better job with Flash files then it has in the past. In the past, Google was able to recognize a flash file and the links within them. Now it seems Google can actually read the flash binary code. The thread is named Google - Flash now indexed by Google. Where a member asked me to search for Kingdom Ceramics enter, in position number five you will see the site (keep in mind the position might change, so look for the URL in the SERP), [FLASH] descriptor and the url www.artareas.com/ArtAreas/home.nsf/Profiles/ Kingdom+Ceramics/$file/intro.swf. If you go to that URL, you will see it takes you directly to the Flash SWF. Google read the following contents from that SQF file.

0% LOADING 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 50% 55% 60% 65% 70% ... Enter Virtual Tour Enter Exhibition (Exit Virtual Tour) "Welcome to the Kingdom Ceramics Virtual Tour!" "How may I help you today?" "Please show me the... ...

Other forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Do Google Search on rustybrick, my trademark. If it does not come up, refresh a few times and you will see the following ad by a competitor I never heard of. They call themselves "superior" to RustyBrick, I doubt that. But to stay on topic...

Is there a way to contact Google about this? Will it matter? Google now allows for competitors to bid on trademarked names, however they will not allow one to place the trademarked name in the ad copy. Fair? It is extremely hard for Google to police this, so they try to make their policies as easy going as possible unless otherwise forced to change them.

Three past posts on this subject can be found at:

• Pay Per Click's Trademark Policies
  
• Trademarked Names & Google AdWords Hits Home
  
• Trademarked Names No Longer Blocked by Google AdWords?
  

In a thread named Links from the same IP? at JimWorld a member asked the following question.

We are hearing rumors that Google will no longer count links-in from sites with the same IP address, i.e. links between virtual sites on the same server.

This conversation goes deep into virtual servers that share the same IP address. It also gets into ethics and concepts such as hilltop.

Nice thread, so check it out.

Over at Peabody's Cre8tive Flow Ammon posted a topic on bookmarklets. I have been dying to mess with them but it wasn't until his post, which followed Dan Thies email to me about how he loves these bookmarklets as well. So after some searching in Google (actually, the first result in Google for "bookmarklets on safari"), I found my answer at a fellow blog.

I was unable to get the default bookmarklets working on Apple's Safari browser. But this blog entry named Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari now allows me to post my first blog entry here using the MT Bookmarklet with Safari.

I remember when Ask Jeeves was just born, so small, so cute and was so eager to start its life. Now, a few years later, our Ask Jeeves has grown so big.

BusinessWeek published an article named Piper Jaffray Ups Ask Jeeves to Outperform, where I quote "as his analysis of search traffic suggests that Ask Jeeves, with 19% sequential growth from the fourth quarter, grew faster than Yahoo's 13%."

Over at WebmasterWorld a senior member makes sure to point out,

Comparing rates of growth doesn't tell the whole story. AJ is coming from the basement in terms of market share, while Yahoo has a much larger audience. 19% of a small number is smaller growth (expressed as actual numbers) than 13% of a significantly larger number.

http://forums.seochat.com/t9919/s.html,

This post at that other forum, a long time ago stuck in my head, considering the source was “G man” himself.
“I heard that at PubCon, DaveN suggested that Google should only update the visible PR and link: data once a quarter or so...
thatotherforum/forum3/22566.htm“

Now I hadn’t given it much thought until recently when a few clients of mine went out and purchased thousands of back links, and within 1-2 months were at a PR 8 for a new domain 2-3 months old.

Continue reading "The sandbox effect"

I am showing a backlink from http://www.subblue.com/images/logo.swf in the new datacenter and when I view that page in mozilla there is in fact a link to my site in it, where It came from I have no idea lol. Anyways I wanted to get some comments on it as it is a very strange occurence

Posted at http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?p=67326#post67326

Perhaps Google has gotten smarter with its reading of flash objects, no?

Posting this for my own notes but it can't hurt to share. Policies at major search engines on allowing bidding for trademarked keywords range widely, with at least one having no stated policy. Here's a rundown:

Google Inc.
Policy: Had limited the bidding on trademarked keywords upon request of trademark holder; within next several weeks, will no longer do so, but won't allow the use of trademarked terms within the ad itself. Also bans critical ads.
Comment: Says it is changing its policy to better serve users with relevant ads; observers say the move will generate more revenue for the search engine

Yahoo Inc.
Policy: Allows bidding, but screens for editorial relevance
Comment: Will investigate complaints from trademark holders, but allows bidding if ad makes clear what the company does

MSN
Policy: Sells retail brands (e.g. Sears) only to the retailer; sells manufacturer brands, like Sony, to the manufacturer or to retailers. Policy differs for brand names that are also generic terms; for instance, would sell "amazon" to Amazon.com but also to an online travel site selling trips to the Amazon region.
Comment: Yahoo supplies some of MSN's paid listings, but MSN also sells some listings directly.

FindWhat.com
Policy: Allows bidding, but screens for editorial relevance
Comment: "Pepsi is allowed to bid on Coke, just as Pepsi uses Coke's trademark in its TV commercials," says Phillip Thune, chief operating officer and chief financial officer.

Lycos Inc.
Policy: Reviews ads for relevance and generally doesn't allow bidding on a competitor's trademark
Comment: Competitors typically "don't have content relevant to that trademark," says Adam Soroca, who runs the ad-bidding system for searches on lycos.com, hotbot.com and other sites

Kanoodle Inc.
Policy: Doesn't allow advertisers to bid on trademarked terms they don't own
Comment: "An advertiser bidding on listings through Kanoodle must either sell, or provide substantive information on, products linked to that listing on their Web sites," says Lance Podell, president of Kanoodle.

My Source: WSJ.com, WSJ Source: the companies

All of the SEO forums struggle with "signal to noise" ratio. They all try to solve it in different ways. Some are frighteningly hostile to newbies. Others create an extensive set of "super double secret" chat areas available by invitation only, or by paying a fee for the right to annoy the anointed. Lately, I've detected a rise in three forms of noise, across several forums.

1. The "gibberish tennis match," where 2-3 posters go back and forth with 1-line posts that amount to a private conversation, ignoring anyone who attempts to contribute.
2. The same old tired circular arguments and bad ideas, recycled again and again just for kicks. Even an innocent question can be redirected to the same old tired debates.
3. Outright hostility. Many forums are dealing with an unprecedented level of trolling and personal attacks. Personally, I think hostile foreign powers must be to blame for the tension, but I could be wrong.

Even moderated discussions like LED Digest and I-Search have been allowed to turn personal. There must not be anything new happening on SEO Island, because the natives have turned to fighting over "links vs. content" again, ignoring or misrepresenting each others' positions as it suits.

Can't we all just get along and discuss this stuff rationally? I think I can remember when this was still fun. For all of you who are stirring things up with personal attacks, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong on the facts, because what you're doing is wrong.

There is a relatively new resource on the Web named Blocked PR List, which gathers information on which popular sites do not funnel PageRank to external sites.

Back in January, digitalpoint posted a entry here named Google Blocking Domains From Passing Page Rank?. This entry discusses a PR10 site's, phpbb.com, inability to pass its PR10 to the pages it links to. Too bad for those that purchased text ads on the site for the sole purpose of increasing PageRank on an external page.

Blocked PR List is a simple Web page that lists out these types of sites. The owner told me:

We fully expect that Google will penalize both the BlockedPR.com and Textlinkbrokers.com site. We get emails fairly often from people telling us how we're going to get banned for putting up such information. I think its interesting how alot of people assume that we did not think of that possibility. I would however like to assure everyone that we take every possible precaution to insure the safety of both our link clients and link partners. We have learned from mistakes of the past and mistakes of others and beleive that we have the safest linking network out there.

Currently the site is up and running. The list of sites is still short, I would guess, when the list grows so will its interest.

Traveling through dozens of sites with AdSense ads on them, you'll notice ads that look like the one directily below.

These are called "PSA"s, or public server ads and are served up in place of Google AdSense contextual ads when Google has no more ads to serve up. This normally occurs towards the end of the month when AdWords customers run out of funds in their accounts. But this seems to be a little different, because it seems some very competitive keywords - where budgets do not 'run out' - are serving up these PSAs.

There is forum discussion about this level of PSAs being served up. Speculation is that the main Google AdSense server is having technical difficulty and PSAs are taking its place temporarily. We will see how it folds out.

Forum coverage at:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat
  
• WebProWorld
  
• IHelpYou
  
• HighRankings
  

Also Andy Beal reported AdWords missing in the main Google SERPs. Updated 5:10pm Doug Bates posted a comment here stating WebmasterWorld is also discussing the AdWords problem here.

Oh, I just added alternative ads to this site so I won't server up those PSAs.

One of the cool things about having a Mac is that I can see Hebrew, Japanese, and other languages that are frequently not supported on a PC by default. Google came out with a new look for http://www.google.co.il/.

Forum coverage at ABAKUS Forum.

Here are some screen shots:

Google is to go public within the next few days, possibly by the end of today.

According to the WallStreetJournal's recent article Google Is Expected to Announce Plans for Initial Public Offering, where it reads:

Internet-search pioneer Google Inc. plans to announce within days that it will push forward with an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter....

Rumors around the Mountain View, Calif., company's IPO have swirled through markets since October. Based on early chatter among bankers, the offering could value Google at as much as $25 billion, and spread nearly $100 million in fees across Wall Street. Last fall, some of Google's prospective advisers estimated the valuation of the company could be in line with other Internet leaders. Those include Yahoo Inc., valued at $38 billion, Amazon.com Inc. at $20 billion and eBay Inc. at $54 billion.

Forum Coverage:

• IHelpYou Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat Forums
  

New update at Google seems to be taking place.

Forum Coverage:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat
  
• SitePoint
  
• WebProWorld
  

Did you ever get a referral from Google with it being blank? This is the first time I have seen a thread on this topic over at WebmasterWorld. Several people chime in that the answer is that the searcher used the "I am feeling lucky" button to be referred to that page. Even GoogleGuy:

"I would guess an I'm Feeling Lucky search as well. I suppose you could always try it out by constructing a search that would return you at #1, and then checking your server log. Let us know what you find out. :)"

Ukgimp's tests proved this theory to be fact.

Yesterday, Jill Whalen released her weekly HighRankings Advisor Newsletter. This newsletter generated quite a bit of conversation over at the IHelpYou Forum. Jill stated:

www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com (Obviously substituting yoursite.com for your actual site.)

This command will show you all the pages linking to yours, minus the pages from your own site. If you want to see your own site links too, just remove the -site:www.yoursite.com part, as that's the syntax for excluding them.

So of course, when someone as well known as Jill in this industry writes something and gives it out to hundreds of people, some have to critique each and every word. It is funny, because Jill clearly stated she wrote the newsletter really quickly because of her upcoming Chicago show. Any how, people do have a right to be upset.

It can easily be construed that one should not use the link: command in Google to find a site's backlink. Jill says, instead you should use www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com syntax. This however does not give an "accurate" representation of all of a site's backlinks. It does not take into account links to ones sites which are not in the visible body text of the page.

This does however, very accurately bring back the number of links and non links on pages Google has indexed that contain the text www.yoursite.com on a page's visible content only. Again, based on my tests - it does not bring back other type of anchor text, such as <a href="www.mysite.com">keyword phrase</a>. Join the discussion