May 2004 Archives

I personally do not see the new design but some are reporting that Yahoo is testing out a new home page design for its portal. Over at HighRankings there is a thread that discusses this topic, someone uploaded a preview of the new design.

It looks something like this:

View Large Image

It has been a long time since the last backlink and pagerank update.

It is finally happening.

Check out your backlinks at these servers:
http://216.239.41.104/
http://216.239.41.99/

Forum coverage at:

• SEO Chat Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Webmaster Forum
  
• IHelpYou Forums
  

I am sure the other popular forums will start threads on this update soon.

Good luck all!

You think people are going to die if they don't get a Gmail invite! Take a look at some of the email requests for Gmail invites that I have seen.

Subject: Need help please thanks Body: Hi Im currently deploy in Iraq need help. Hi work in the military and currently deploy in Iraq and my email its getting too full with email from frieds and family I can't really check my email just about every 2 or 3 days or when I have a chance some times it can be about month so when I do its full or about can you help me with a Gmail account so i can have all my email and not worry about loosing any email. Thanks for looking and if you could help me please email me at ozz0006@yahoo.com Thank you very much.

If you have any? please email me Im with these Unit
5th Special Forces Group
out of Fort Cambell Ky Thaks.

I have a healthy child that I’m prepared to put up for a G-mail invite. & I’ll throw in a goat too.

I visit John Battelle's Searchblog daily and it hurts me to see the amount of spam that is submitted through his commenting system. This blog uses several tactics to block comment spam but I often find myself using the spam at John Battelle's blog as a method of proactively preventing spam here.

I visit his blog, look at the recent spam he gets and copy and paste those URLs into the MT-Blacklist. It really helps but each time I do that, I feel a little guilty. The guilt comes from me benefiting in a little way from the comment spam at his blog. Just needed to get that off my chest.

I guess Memorial Day does not warrant a special Google logo or Ask Jeeves logo.

Anyway, I thought it would be appropriate to point out the top 3 results from the major search engines. Most of the results overlap between Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN.

Google on Memorial Day:
US Memorial Day
Memorial Day at David's Virtual Market
jeannepasero.com's Memorial Day page

Yahoo on Memorial Day:
US Memorial Day
jeannepasero.com's Memorial Day page
History Channel on Memorial Day

Ask Jeeves on Memorial Day:
US Memorial Day
jeannepasero.com's Memorial Day page
Roots Web on Memorial Day

MSN on Memorial Day:
US Memorial Day
jeannepasero.com's Memorial Day page
American Experience on Memorial Day

A post by Bernard, a moderator at IHelpYou Forums, at DigitalPoint's Forum, which lead to a thread at IHelpYou Forums discussed Yahoo!'s troubles with handling 301 redirects. Here is the story...

Normally when you take down a page at one URL and then put it back up at an other URL, you use a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that the page has been permanently moved to a new address. A 301 redirect as defined by the W3.org is just that, a permanent redirect. Google and other popular search engines tell all Webmasters to use this technique when moving pages.

Yahoo! on the other hand tells people to create a page that says, this page has been moved here. What Yahoo is telling you to do is create a "doorway" page. Most of us know that doorway pages are SEO No Nos. So for Yahoo! to tell its SiteMatch customer to generate doorway pages instead of using a 301 redirect, is just not right. Those doorway pages can run the site owner the risk of getting penalized by Google and other search engines.

This leaves the Webmaster in a tight position. If they stick with the 301 redirect, Yahoo will treat it as duplicate content. If they switch to the doorway page all the other engines will treat it as a doorway page.

The standard for page relocation notification has been 301 redirects. Yahoo!, like all other search engines, need to support this standard.

Cloaking is out there and is practiced by thousands of Web sites out there. Where does Google and the other engines draw the line between acceptable cloaking or non acceptable cloaking?

A few weeks ago, Ben Edelman released information on WhenU and how they are using cloaking to beat the engines. Soon after, Google and Yahoo manually did something about it.

Today, Danny Sullivan reports on NPR is using cloaking. Will Google and Yahoo do something about this case? How does it differ?

Well NPR is using cloaking to provide contextual information to the search engines on audio files. The audio files, that otherwise would not be indexable by the search engines, are transformed into text transcripts and served to Google only. Google reads the text version of the audio files and when someone does a search on a related topic to the audio file, NPR comes up in the results. The results look like the following, notice "And with us now to discuss Google's financial standing is ..."

View Large Image

But when you click on the result, it takes you to a page with the ability to download the audio file and contains no such text version of the transcript.

Danny gets into the pros and cons of this method of cloaking. I won't tell you exactly what he said, but if you are a paid subscriber to SearchEngineWatch, it makes for a nice read.

Andy Beal also spoke on this matter, "He [Danny Sullivan] comes to the conclusion that NPR is effectively using the spam technique, cloaking. But, I [Andy Beal] would argue that perhaps NPR converting its audio into text is no different that including ALT tags on images or tagging Flash content."

Either way, we need the search engines to come up with a clear acceptable cloaking policy. There is no doubt that cloaking can benefit the end user, the legendary SEO named fantomaster was a huge advocate for the use of cloaking to benefit the searcher. This is my call out to the search engines to make a stand and come out with a clear, defined policy. This does not have to be a war between the Search Engine Marketer and the Search Engine Provider, we can work together. Can't we?

Back around mid March, it was reported that Big sites were suffering from no title / no snippet in SERPS, was it true that big sites were being penalized? Basically, sites with lots of pages in Google were beginning to lose them.

Recently in a newer thread at WebmasterWorld a site owner reports his experience with his Amazon affiliate site, Google has lost almost 70% of his site, that is 55,000 pages.

A senior member responds with:

I've been tracking this for a while with the G Query: "bbc site:bbc.co.uk" (*)

- Oct 12, 2003: 3,100,000 pages (msg #6)
- Apr 09, 2004: 1,350,000 pages (msg #5)
- May 26, 2004: 660,000 pages

- so, basically, you're not the only one, and it's not something new. Not commercial either, just plain size.

Can it be that the duplicate content filter is working much harder these days?

I can't believe no one has posted on this yet. Its absolutely hilarious, and at the same time quite interesting that someone could hack, or engineer a link to captialize on some PR 10 links. In any case its worth checking out for a laugh or to figure out how they did it. Basically some smart fellow found a way to include a link for about 11 months in a spot on the Google Default Browser Options page. The result the linked page gained a PR9 and started selling advertising to various drug related sites. Ekk!

Forum coverage over at SEOchat - Googles Secret Directory

Stock Quotes in Google!! I got asked how to get a stock ticker symbol included in the google results of a website today and while I knew the answer I didn't know the exact email to contact Google. In any case if you company is publicly traded openly and has a ticker symbol then you might be wise to check this out if Google automatically doesn't display the symbol like the following Microsoft example:

www.microsoft.com/ - 39k - May 25, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages - Stock quotes: MSFT

"Google's financial information providers have been selected and ordered solely on the basis of their quality, based on factors including download speed, user interface, and functionality. Please note that Google is not affiliated with the financial information providers that are used. If you have a provider that you'd like to suggest we include, please email us at suggestions@google.com."

For more information on this please visit the Google page here about getting your symbol included.

http://forums.seochat.com/t11104/s.html yet another when will the update happen, thread yawn! With it becoming common knowlege that a PR update is absolutley useless as far as ranking benefit goes and those rank credit being given on a per site basis based on when backlinks acquired are let out of the sandbox, isnt it time we all put the PR/IBL thread to bed, its hurting my head hehe I rhymed.

I guess there are a lot of anxious PR dealers out there who can't wait to see how many more artificial PR 7's their efforts have created to sell on this month but really guys, PR doesnt help your rankings, its the credit from the backlink, stop watching that green bar!

It's bad enough that I never understood why the US Department of Health and Human Resources produces such a useful site about user centered design, but now I've discovered that the Australian Government has gone and done the same thing.

For usable web design, the US site, Usability.gov is a fantastic resource. They cover accessibility, traffic log analysis, market research, usability guidelines, web design checklists, and more.

In Australia, you can find the same in the Australian Government Information Management Office's Best Practices section.

Their Better Practice #15 Information Architecture for Websites is a real gem. They offer checklists on navigation, user testing, implementing website search and information architecture.

Though offered by government entities, any Webmaster can find valuable help at these web sites. If you're learning the basics, or refining web site guidelines and standards, these two web sites offer a wealth of knowledge, and are easy to use as well.

I will not be posting this Wednesday or Thursday here. I have asked the other authors to step up these two days. Please expect posts from our other authors these two days.

Change is good right?

See you all Friday.

A post at SEO Chat lead me to this hilarious cartoon. It depicts a slick guy in a "I got Gmail" shirt, with two girls wrapped around both his arms. A fellow guy asks this slick fellow, "What's your secret with the babes? Money? Power? Some kind of pheromone?" His response, "Nope, something even more enticing then those...I have an invitation to a Gmail account to give out."

How funny!

Why not? Why shouldn't the AdSense publisher who serves up PSAs involuntarily be rewarded with a tax benefit.

That is what this post at DigitalPoint Forum gets into.

- You have 1000 visitors to my site per day.

- You make $10 per day on Adsense.

- $10/$1000 = Each visitor is worth .01 to your bottom line.

- On a given day, you show 100 public service ads. This means that I should be able to write $1.00 on my taxes due to my charitable contributions that I have made by allowing the public service ads of the non-profits be shown. It is similar to donating services.

This tax benefit could ad up on a site that show hundreds of thousands or millions of ad impressions per year.

A member over at WebmasterWorld conducted a very interesting test on the channeling of PageRank to domain names and URLs that do not exist yet. What he did, in short, was find domain names that were available, he did not buy the domain names. Then he pointed one of his pages, that was already indexed by Google, towards these new domain names. He then waited six weeks and for a PR update to take place, then purchased the domain names and presto, instant PageRank. All of the domain names had a PR3 to a PR5.

The member base then discusses how this test can be applied in real life.

1. If you regularly add new content to predefined URLs (i.e. page1.html, page2.html, etc.) then you can send links to pages before they have been created. Then the chances of these pages being indexed and rank well will occur at a more rapid pace then if the page did not have PageRank.
   
2. Fighting back against the SandBox Theory, you have a client that purchased domain name X. You begin the work on his site, but at the same time, send a link to his site. Then 6 weeks later when the site is ready to be deployed you go live with it. And presto, instant PageRank with a great shot at ranking well quickly.
   
3. Possibly send keyword rich anchor text links to nonexistent sites, so when they go live, they rank well.
   

A thread in the private forums at WebmasterWorld discusses how to get a company's press release into Google News.

As mention in this thread, the trick is to give the release to a source that is syndicated by Google News. For example, if you get your press release into PR Newswire, then you can expect your press release to be found in Google News, since Google syndicates PR Newswire. The thread goes into the various sites to submit to and the costs involved. I won't give all the details away, it is a private forum for a reason. But costs can range from $5 to $600 for a single press release.

But how does one get their news site in Google News? Basically all you need to do is email Google News at source-suggestions@google.com with the suggested site and they will review it. As long as the site has an RSS feed of some type, Google can (if they choose to) syndicate your content. I tried this with this site, but I was rejected. They said:

Thank you for your note. We reviewed this site, but cannot add it to Google News because we currently only include sites that report on recent events. We appreciate your suggestion and will log the site for consideration should our guidelines change in the future.

Regards,
The Google Team

I have argued this claim, stating that this site is in fact "recent news." There are actually several news related sites that use this site as a resource to build articles on and those are syndicated by Google News. So I am hoping for a response shortly, that says something to the affect of, "we have accepted your site into Google News".

We will see.

I am not making this up!

The last time I checked, there were three (3) Adwords listings on the "nigritude ultramarine" SERP:

• One peddling home mortgages
  
• One with some jibba-jabba about Hilltop and a form allowing you to burn another email address on the "trust me we don't need a privacy policy" plan.
  
• One doorway page generator, no doubt guaranteed to give you #1 rankings for every keyword on every search engine instantly, then somehow give the same result to the next chump who buys it.
  

Still, since the contest will still be going on when our new site launches 6/1, it's awfully tempting to toss a few more nickels on the branding fire.

I found a very interesting thread at HighRankings named The Q-factor where a new member said "I recently got a reply from a search engine, after having submitted my page. Amongst other info it stated a Q of 5 for my site."

Now what the heck is a "Q factor"? No one in the forum seems to know. I do not know. Some guesses were made, such as "More than likely the SE that reported a Q Factor was refering to their *quality rating* and terming it the *Q Factor*."

But this makes no sense to most. Does the search engine optimization industry have a new phrase? "Q Factor" sounds like something cool to tell a client.

Anyone know?

The META REVISIT-AFTER Tag is worthless based on a thread over at HighRankings.

Sorry, busy day. Will try to get a few more posts in this afternoon.

The problem I have with some forums is that they don't give specific examples, but one such forum has enough of a member base to take "hear say" as almost factual. I personally hate reporting on threads that I can not verify or do not verify with my own tests but here is one of those times that I will.

A thread named How can cloaked sites be ranking well at Google? over at WebmasterWorld discusses how recently people have been seeing cloaked sites 'polluting' the Google results.

The thread begins as follows:

What I don't understand is, that if their algorithm is so brilliant how come cloaked sites (the pages which are fed to the crawlers) have poor inbound links, low quality content, almost non-existent internal linking structure and yet they rank at the top? In my opinion, the pages that the cloaks feed to crawlers shouldn't rank highly even if they WERE the actual pages users were seeing!

To me it sounds like either these sites are ranking for non-competitive keywords, or they have inbound links with rich keyword anchor text from other cloaked backs, or Google doesn't care about anchor text. Which one sounds best to you?

Google's recently published a set of "software principles" under the title of "a proposal to help fight deceptive Internet software".

Not only is this a great statement of the problem and a very clear outline of how software should behave, it's also a clear shot at the questionable partnerships (Claria/Gator, etc.) of other pay-per-click providers like Yahoo/Overture.

I love it! Discussion starts here at the Best Practices Forum, home of the world's foremost Gator haters.

A thread at Cre8asite asks Which SEO Ebook Would You Buy? Respected SEO professionals such as Peter Da Vanzo and Ammon Jones suggested two books but explained the differences between the two.

The first book is named Winning the Search Engine Wars by Planet Ocean. Ammon Jones said this book is great "if you simply intend to tinker with your rankings as a webmaster, then "Winning the Search Engine War" is a good book with many instantly applicable ideas."

However Ammon strongly recommends Mike Grehen's Books Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide. He recommends it because "Mike Grehan went and actually interviewed the people who researched and wrote the actual search algorithms. As the quote goes: they didn't tell him the algorithm, but they talked happily, and in detail, about the ingredients. You'll be very unlikely to find this info anywhere else." He continues to say, "Mike Grehan's book takes the other approach, and the one I myself work to. It doesn't just look at what works, it looks at why. It tracks the trajectory of the search algorithms so that you can predict its probable position in a month, or three, or six."

A thread over at HighRankings discusses a possible bug with Yahoo! Search and MSN Search in the way they handle the 301 redirect.

The issue is as follows:

Conducting a search on Google for hyatt regency dearborn brings back the URL "dearborn.hyatt.com".

However, conducting a search on the same keyword phrase at Yahoo! Search and MSN Search both bring up the wrong version of the site, "highlands-inn.com".

One member says "I believe I heard something about this issue on Yahoo where they haven't implemented (bug?) the 301 properly, meaning they don't take the original out of the listings like they should. I'd imagine you'll just have to wait until they fix that or contact them and pester them to make it happen faster." And a moderator and frequent SES conference goer states "Yahoo admitted that was a bug they were working on at SES. I'd wait it out if possible."

Have you ever noticed that the number of posts about a "Google Dance" or "Google Update" start to increase as we get closer to the time period of about 30 days after the last "Google Update"? Well, yea, I guess you noticed because most forums are flooded with posts about this topic.

Post such as... "When do you think the next dance will take place?" "I think Google is dancing, I see changes in the SERPS." "Is Google Dancing?" "When will Google update again?" "I saw the PageRank value in the Google Toolbar fluctuate, there must be a PR update going on!" "When will the next back link update occur?"

We have all seen them, in fact, we see them too often. I am sorry if I offend anyone, that is not my intention. The purpose of this post is to plead with the forum goer to please be calm about the updates. I know everyone wants to be the first to spot the update and post about it in their respective forums but to venture a guess when the update will occur is simply that, a guess.

I have been involved with SEO/SEM forums for a long time, so maybe I am burned out. So please be more careful before posting about the Google Updates and Dances. We all love when they happen but let them happen before posting on them.

There is a Gmail community at Orkut with currently 899 members. Over there I found a way to check if a Gmail account username was in use or if it was available.

You simply went to a URL and it would tell you.

The URL was: https://www.google.com/accounts/CheckAvailability?Email=YourUserName

You simply replace "YourUserName" with the name you want to check the availability of.

A couple of days ago this URL was no longer reporting back the availability of the Gmail usernames. There is belief that Google added an "encryption key to the checker now so people can't take advantage of their system."

Back in March at the NYC SES conference, Yahoo! announced their new SiteMatch program. The program was a hot topic and angered many site owners. Now a few months later we have pretty much all accepted SiteMatch for what it is. However, this paid for inclusion and pay for click plan is not all what it lives up to be. A thread over at WebmasterWorld named SiteMatch Approval Won't Remove Penalty... Don't Waste Your Money discusses people's dissatisfaction with Yahoo!'s customer service.

It seems as if sites received a penalty a while back when Inktomi was running the program. Then Yahoo! said that if you sign up again, this time with Yahoo!'s program then the penalty will be reviewed and removed. This was not the case, Yahoo! did not yet review these penalized sites and they are still ranking extremely poorly in the Yahoo! search engine.

Read the thread for more details, but it seems as if Yahoo! is not handling this program too well.

About a week before the Florida update (November 2003) I began conducting tests to determine the weight given to sites hosted in a specific country and the likelihood of that specific site coming up higher in the results when conducting a search from within that country. What sprung my interest in this topic was the complaints I was getting from overseas (outside the US) SEO Count customers. This tool is US centric because the results are driven by the Google API, so if you conduct a search with it, it will bring back US centric results. Those who used this application from outside the US (including most of Canada) received different results then what was listed in the Google API.

So I began gathering data by coming up with several keyword phrases, both very competitive and not so competitive, and looked up the site's server geographic location. After determining the site's physical location, I asked colleagues around the world to send me the top 30 results for those searches. What I found was that based on what country your searching from, you will more likely see site's that rank higher based on the location of the server the site is on.

For example, if Site A is located in Germany and I am conducting a search on a keyword related to Site A in a pub in Germany, then Site A is likely to rank higher then sites with a physical location in America. There are obviously other considerations but the results I have found were really revealing.

Unfortunately, I stopped the data gathering process due to the Florida update. At that time the results were all over the place. I have not continued the research but I hope to soon.

Two days ago I posted a teaser on this topic where I said "So what does one do to prevent ones "network of sites" from being stripped of its link passing rights? Well, be smart about how you link and why you link. Think about how most sites naturally obtain links and go from it from that angle. ". (I wonder if it is appropriate to quote myself?...) Unfortunately I won't be able to disclose the name person I met with this past Monday, the individual seems to be a little worried that Google is reading this site and will devalue his linking methods manually. Having said that, this person's daily focus and energy goes towards link building strategies.

During our conversation we discussed how he goes about building links for his clients. He tends not to go the paid route, but he said he had done so many times in the past and will do so in the future. His real reason for meeting me, I think, was to exchange links (please dont email me to exchange links, I do not participate in any link exchanges).

We then got into how he has been developing a network of portals of which contain links to many quality sites and his clients sites. None of these sites directly link to each other, they all link in a triangular fashion. For example, one might create Site A, B and C. Site A will link to Site B, Site B will link to Site C and site C will link to site A. You will never find Site A link to Site B AND Site B link to Site A.

To effectively implement such a strategy, this person has created and is creating "portal sites." The portal sites will be on specific topics and contain links to high-level ODP and Yahoo! directory sites, you won't normally find deep-level sites listed in the portal sites. He then adds links from the portal to his clients sites that relate to that topic. So a portal on computers will have links to the top computer sites in ODP and Yahoo! directories and also to his client's sites.

He then tries to get free and paid links to the portal sites that are on-topic to those sites. As you can imagine, it is much easier getting links to a portal site then it would be to an e-commerce type of site.

Now he has these portal sites with quality links from on topic sites. He then links out to his on-topic client sites from the portal. He might link a portal to an other portal but never link a client site back to the same portal. This way he starts to build this complex pyramid linking structure.

The only complaint I have about the way he is doing this is that it is currently not all managed in some type of unified linking database application. As the portals and linking schemes grow, it will continue to become more complex. He is managing now but I wonder for how long. I tend to be bias, because anything I do, is done with efficiency in mind through the use of Web technologies.

I came across a message board named http://www.googlegmails.com/. A whole message board dedicated to Google's Gmail service! Are people going mad! What do we need a single message board dedicated to Gmail for? Most of the message board is about "general discussion". I just do not see the point.

For now, I will stick with WebmasterWorld's Google Gmail Forum.

I have a business blog that we rarely update but is there for my employees to post at. I want them to post daily but I offer no incentive to do so. Anyway the blog is at http://technology.rustybrick.com/ and its about the daily life at my company.

Anyway, I posted an entry on how my office's Sunbeam Water Cooler Sprung a Leak. Since then I have been getting many visitors to the site who type in Sunbeam Water Cooler into Google. They find the blog and added comments.

Today, I see that a representative from the Sunbeam Water Cooler Customer Support Team left a comment stating:

Dear All~

We have recently discovered this wonderful website. We believe that consumer feedback is an incredible tool in helping our consumers find answers to their problems.

May we suggest a better method, that of using OUR email contact information to contact us with your problems/challenges should you have trouble getting through on the telephone lines. We may have better suggestions for resolutions.

In regards to our water dispensers, we have since added extra email addresses in order for our consumers to contact us with ease.

Please note that to order parts, please use email address: parts@elitegroupinc.ca. For any technical questions, simply use support@elitegroupinc.ca as we will not be checking this site on a regular basis.

Looking forward to resolving challenges,
Sincerely yours,

Customer Support Team

How funny. See all the comments here.

Seems like Microsoft is testing out their new MSN Search technology at http://techpreview.search.msn.com/. As DigitalPoint points out, "Of course, no one can get to it because it's restricted by IP address, but still shows they are at least at the point of being able to test it."

From the screen below you can see "HTTP 403.6 - Forbidden: IP address rejected", now can someone get through this little IP problem? :)

A new Web site was launched that facilitates the trading of goods and services in exchange for Gmail accounts. You can still buy a Gmail account at eBay if you like. But if you don't have the $200 or more dollars needed and you want the account now, try this service out.

gmail swap uses an extremely simple system for coordinating Swaps. That is, we leave it completely up to you. Click on a message to read more, and if the Swap sounds good to you, reply to their post on the Swap Board, then click on their name to send them an email and work out the details.

For more information visit http://www.gmailswap.com/.

Forum coverage at SEO Chat.

It looks like some special Gmail users received a surprise by having their Gmail account storage bumped up from 1,000MB to 1,000,000MB. Elliot Lee's blog reported this yesterday, so did this blog. C|Net reported on this later on that day, stating "That's four times the typical capacity of a new high-end PC's hard drive."

Current forum coverage at SEO Chat Forums.

Pay Per Clicks and trademark lawyers are spending a lot of time together these days. I have posted several times on the trademark topic and brought several cases in the past. The latest news is that Geico sues Google, Overture over trademarks.

The insurer charged the two companies with infringing on its trademarks when they sold them as keywords to Geico's rivals, so that the protected terms could appear in sponsored search results. According to the suit, that practice causes consumer confusion, in violation of the Lanham Act, the primary federal law covering trademark registration and protection.

But

Previously, Google had granted requests from advertisers, including 1-800 Contacts and eBay, to bar competitors from bidding on their trademarked names. Google will now only review trademark complaints that relate to text appearing in sponsored listings on its Web site and those of its partners.

According to Geico's complaint, the insurer considered Google's policy change before pursuing legal action: "Google's recent change in trademark policy constitutes a deliberate decision to use the registered trademarks of other companies, including Geico, for the financial benefit of Google and to the detriment of (others)."

Don't you just love this stuff. We need a legal ruling already. Trademarks need to be protected and I personally do not thing Google's current policy is going to cut it.

Forum coverage at:

• HighRankings Forum
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  

Thank you Doug from Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting for the tip.

Since this SEO Challenge contest began, I have been getting tons of comment spam from fellow SEOers. Come on, don't you think I have set up methods to block that type of spam?

Before you try to comment spam here note the following:
(1) All comment URLs are redirected and will not pass PageRank or link popularity
(2) If I see you added comment spam, I will ban the whole URL from adding comments in the future.
(3) If you repeat this action, I will ban your IP address from visiting this site.

Please be considerate. I do not charge for this site. This site is a resource for the SEO/SEM professional and costs nothing for you. Please do not cause unnecessary work on my side. I can use that time posting more information for you instead of deleting and blocking comment spam.

Thank you.

I found this funny, SEO Chat happens to rank in the number one spot for "Nigritude Ultramarine" in Froogle, Google's Shopping Search Engine.

Do a search on Nigritude Ultramarine, and you can buy an SEO Chat thread for only $2.99! It seems like Froogle has crawled SEO Chat forums as if it was a shopping site and indexed most of its pages. The results below were automatically extracted from web pages. Price and category information are uncertain. [details]

In fact it seems Froogle has indexed 349 pages of seochat.

Good find SEO Chat member.

So you run an search engine marketing or search engine optimization company and you are looking to offer an incentive plan to your employees. You want to establish goals and bonus areas for them to reach. If the employees reach the bonus areas then you give them a reward, if they under perform, you know you need to replace them.

How does one set up these goals and measurements for an SEO/SEM firm? A thread over at Cre8asite discusses just that.

Ammon Jones starts off by detailing that it depends on your firms goals. If your only about top 10 rankings then your goals for your employees should be to achieve those. But if your goals are more about ROI, then those are your measurements.

Several measurements are suggested including:
(1) Rankings
(2) Return on Investment
(3) Traffic Increases
(4) Cost Per Lead
(5) Cost Per Acquisition

Again, this obviously depends on your firms services. I know they vary over the hundreds or thousands of SEM firms. I wonder what SEMPO or KeywordRankings would have to say about this?

Looks like Lycos is following Google's lead with Gmail by providing 1GB of storage to its users. Yahoo! then recently announced it will be providing "virtually unlimited storage" for its paid email customers. Now Lycos will offer 1GB of storage to its paid customer.

Lycos announced Tuesday that it is upgrading its service to give consumers 1GB of e-mail storage. But unlike some rival services being developed, the Lycos service is not free. Users will have to pay a monthly fee of 3.4 pounds ($6.01).

Forum Coverage at:

• HighRankings
  
• WebmasterWorld
  

This post is probably best coming from Kim Krause, our usability expert here, but I thought I give this a shot. A thread over at WebmasterWorld, interestingly enough named New way to manipulate my google traffic..., discusses one person experience with increasing traffic to his site by simply adding pages. The thread goes deeper into what to do in order to "manipulate" that traffic. What he is really asking for is how can he monitor that traffic and learn what changes to make on his pages in order to drive a desired response from his Web visitor.

So, what is the answer? Without Web analytics tools, you are kind of throwing darts with blindfolds on (always wanted to use that phrase). You need to add what is commonly known as "call to actions" to one site, those call to actions are graphics, text boxes or other visual elements that try to drive a certain response. Then after adding those call to actions throughout your pages, you need to monitor the click-through rates and the bounce rates of those pages. Then constantly tweak those pages in order to increase your CTR and decrease your bounce rates.

On my corporate site, after seeking Kim's services (thank you Kim), I made several adjustments. Looking at my Urchin Web Analytics Software I was then able to track the effectiveness of the changes I made throughout my site. For example, my top three entrance pages are my homepage, the RustyBrick Web definitions page and the PageRank Predicition Tool. My homepage has a fairly low bounce rate at 48% for this month, my definitions page has a very high bounce rate at almost 90%, and the PageRank prediction tool has an extremely low bounce rate at 12%. Over the months I have been reducing the bounce rate on my homepage by adding call to actions and more visible links. The definitions page needs some work and I hope to get to that soon. My site drives a lot of traffic from Google Definitions, I have some ideas on how to leverage that traffic in a more optimized manner.

Those are just some ways I review my site's traffic and "manipulate my Google traffic".

Today I had a meeting with an individual who focuses almost all of his time and resources in linking strategies, I hope to tell you more on the details of that meeting tomorrow. We got on the topic of the problems of cross linking many sites within the same network. Later today, I found this new thread at WebmasterWorld named Cross Linking With On Topic Sites, which was exactly on topic of one of the subject areas we discussed.

Basically what is being reported at the thread at WebmasterWorld is a person's encounter with something we can call the "Network Filter." This filter looks at a site's external linking structure and puts together this pattern where the linking between sites seem to be unnatural. For example, if you have 20 Web sites and all 20 link to each other on every page, this can trigger a "network filter" to be placed on the links on your site. Passing of PageRank and link popularity, even when on topic, can be blocked.

This is not the first time such events have been reported. In fact there is a Web site that tries to report on sites that no longer pass PageRank to other sites, please see this article for more on that.

So what does one do to prevent ones "network of sites" from being stripped of its link passing rights? Well, be smart about how you link and why you link. Think about how most sites naturally obtain links and go from it from that angle. I hope to get into this topic a little more tomorrow.

From one of the nigritude ultramarine threads at High Rankings:
Nigritude Ultramarine is Google's secret plan to find all the amateur SEOs in the world so they can apply "double secret probation Adwords over-optimization Hilltop Sandbox bad-dog-no-bone" penalties.

Seriously, though, I think it's safe to assume that search engines will study this competition. Why wouldn't they - every pathetic spam technique imaginable is in evidence here.

It's amazing - incompetent Black Hats are revealing their ultra-expensive link farms just to win an iPod... and so far, "quality links" are holding their own anyway. Watch out for that double-secret probation, guys.

White Hats, don't forget to stop by and get your free nigritude ultramarine links from my Webmaster Resources Directory. Submissions will only be accepted if I can't find your link farm.

As many of you already know, Google, in an effort to offer more appeal to its AdWords program launched a program named Jumpstart. Jumpstart is a service offered to new advertisers to get them enrolled and set up to use AdWords. They promise to:
- Write compelling ads promoting your product or service.
- Choose relevant keywords to trigger your ads.
- Set cost-per-click amounts (within your budget) to maximize your ad exposure.

I hope to test out this program in the next week with a new client.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

In a thread over at SEO Chat named the Hyphen Filter, members discuss the likelihood of a site not ranking well (or being filtered out) based on one's domain name having too many hyphens. An example of a domain name having hyphens in it can be www.domain-domain-domain.com.

Although there is no evidence of a domain name with two or more hyphens being filtered out in any results, it would be a safe bet that those types of URLs can raise a red flag. By having more then two hyphens in a URL a search engine can flag the domain name for review easily.

Who else would put two more more hyphens in a URL? I am of the opinion that having hyphens in a URL is horrible marketing practice. Visit my site at widget hyphen blue hyphen small dot com. The user will never remember to place the hyphens in the URL and most likely go to your competitor.

Currently, I see no evidence of any search engine filtering out hyphenated domain names. But I can see the search engines using this as an easy way to spot and flag some sites.

Ben Edelman, the individual who brought the whole WhenU's case to light, has posted a very interesting comment at this site. He said:

A few people have asked me which SEO WhenU used. After all, it would seem to be perfectly natural for WhenU to name the SEO, and to let the SEO confirm WhenU's statement of what happened here. But all the news coverage to date is silent as to which SEO did the work -- even news publications that directly interviewed WhenU's Avi Naider on this subject.

So, this seemed like a subject ripe for some technical examination. I've taken a look, examing IP sharing and HTTP responses. All signs point to Synergy6. See my new addition to the site:

Which SEO Did WhenU Use? The Best Inference: Synergy6
http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-spam/seo.html

Ben Edelman
benedelman.org

Thank you Ben for sharing this information.

DigitalPoint's popular Keyword Tracker Tool hit the 10,000 user mark this morning. As many of you know, this tool helps SEOs track their success in terms of how well one is ranking in the Google search engine. The tool utilizes the Google API to make all keyword tracking safe in accordance with the Google TOS.

I would like to wish Shawn a congratulations on this landmark event. I hear he is throwing a party at his house for all 10,000 registered users of the tool. See you all there. :)

For more information on the party, please visit the thread on this topic.

Proogle (click here to learn what Proogle is) is currently being blocked by Google. The developer of Proogle is currently making a version 2 that will use the Google API to obtain results. See more at SEO Chat forums.

Try it out, give it a request and you should see the following screen:

View Large Image

Thanks for the tip at SEO Chat Forums.

I was at a prospect last Wednesday and we were going through some examples of sites and why they rank well in search engines. So I had the prospect take the seat and asked him to perform a search on a keyword phrase. The page currently up was Google but the prospect typed "google.com" into the Google query field.

He Googled Google. :)

It seems like many people type in google.com into a search engine based on Wordtracker, but I wonder how many people actually Google Google.

This particular thread hit home this week. One of the forum members asks whether or not its part of the SEO's responsiblities to just obtain high rankings or help clients improve their business. One my favorite parts of being an SEO is the different hats ( and I don't mean colored ones) that we can wear to allow us to have a diversity of skills and knowledge to assist in the clients business growth, whatever needs they may be. Are you concerned with success of the business after the optimization? After talking with several clients and multiple friends this week I tried to explain that high rankings don't always mean high profits for their websites. I explained to them ways they need to change the layout or structure in order to accomodate the visitors behaviors better, obtain a great web analytic tool, and some visitor feedback. Because just sticking a website up and directing traffic to it, doesn't mean its not always going to convert! I have found affiliate sites in particular are quite good at converting visitors, and likely so they usually have to be experts in the area to capitalize on all the free traffic (while it lasts). If you find yourself with loads of free search engine traffic, but are not pulling more than a couple of sales today or none. It might be worth it to check out this thread at High Rankings.

Forum coverage on Rankings Vs Conversions, The real debate

Yesterday, when I announced a thread at WebmasterWorld on a bug on Google where people were able to remove Web site's homepages, I later received many unfriendly responses. I won't name the people who gave me a really hard time about releasing this information, instead I will prove that the information at WebmasterWorld and the evidence I provided were indeed accurate.

According to Danny Sullivan's article released today, Google said this news was TRUE.

"We can confirm that less than 10 websites were inadvertently removed from Google's index for several hours [Thursday]. All of these sites have been restored and are accessible through a Google search. The removal occurred as the result of an outside attempt to abuse Google's automated web page removal tool -- a free service we provide webmasters who would like to remove web pages they own from Google's index. Upon discovering this bug, we fixed it immediately. We will also perform a thorough analysis to ensure additional web pages were not inappropriately removed."

Danny, thank you for posting this information.

Over at WebmasterWorld there is a thread discussing changes being observed in the Google results. Some members believe Google is throwing a lot more weight towards the anchor text, others disagree. There seems to be question as to which data-center this is occurring on. Join the discussion here.

The news is all over the forums and the Web. This is really the first public and manual manipulation of the search engine results made by Google and Yahoo for "cloaking." (updated: used wrong language here, sorry been a crazy day - please see Danny Sullivan's comment)

Yahoo and Google have disabled links to controversial adware maker WhenU after the company was accused of engaging in unauthorized practices aimed at boosting its search rankings, WhenU's top executive confirmed Thursday.

The blocking of this Adware company, WhenU, is a major step in the search engine industry and I look forward to see what will transpire.

Forum Coverage (sorry if I missed any):

• Cre8asite Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• HighRankings Forum
  
• SEO Chat Forums
  
• IHelpYou Forums
  

Yesterday Yahoo! announced that it will be offering 100MB of free mail storage to its free user base. Currently Yahoo! is offering 4MB, but recently Google came out with Gmail, a free Web based email service with 1GB (1000MB) of storage. In an attempt for Yahoo! to keep their users, Yahoo! announced that they will be bumping up the free storage from 4MB to 100MB.

I personally believe that this courtesy on Yahoo!'s behalf will make a huge difference with keeping their user base. In addition, Yahoo! will be offering "virtually unlimited storage" for its paid e-mail customers. "Virtually unlimited storage" is going to be limited in some sense, but as the CNET article points out, Yahoo! is trying to "make storage quotas irrelevant to users."

I think the 4MB to 100MB upgrade will make an impact on the Yahoo! mail users. Google still has this whole privacy debate going on and they are still only on invite only terms. Yahoo! is established and the 4MB user is really going to love the extra 96MB. Personally, I do not know how anyone can live on 4MB, but that is for an other story.

If you want to read a funny story on this whole matter visit Jeremy Zawodny's blog. To discuss this in the forums, visit WebmasterWorld.

The people over at WebmasterWorld has opened up a new forum on the topic of building online communities. The forum name is Community Building. So if your ready to start building your own community or if you have in the past, visit WebmasterWorld.

Folding together search engine optimization, web site marketing and user centered design has been my mantra for the past few years. Many top SEO's in the industry have heard the drum beat and brought usability into their services, or opened up their blogs and newsletters to include usability oriented themes and news.

This Blog is one of the wise ones!

Now, Kalena Jordan and her company, WebRank Ltd, have launched an Online Search Engine College. In addition to the many SEO courses offered, content copywriting and usability will be featured courses as well.

Press Release Quote:

     "Search Engine College courses are aimed at a wide target audience, including marketing executives responsible for promoting their company's web site via search engines, small business owners wanting to learn how to market their own web sites via search engines and students or unemployed persons wanting to learn how to optimize web sites for search engines in preparation for starting their own search engine optimization business or applying for a job in the lucrative search engine marketing industry."

Continue reading "Online Search Engine College, And then Some"

Garrett from WebProNews has become the new face behind reporting on Search Engine related news in our industry. He frequently throws plugs to this site and many of my colleagues sites and blogs. Time for a link back.

If you want to know what Garrett really looks like. He went on an eating binge last night and gained a few pounds.

Just kidding, Garrett wishes he looked like that. :) He really looks like this:

Thanks Garrett and WebProNews for such fine coverage.

There has been complaints during the past week of missing homepages from the Google index. It seems someone found the loophole and posted it at WebmasterWorld. Here is the story.

(1) Do a search on www.microsoft.com. No results found! See picture, if for proof.

(2) Ok, how did someone remove Microsoft.com's homepage? They went to this URL: http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller?cmd=reload&lastcmd=fullStatus&cmd=fullStatus, which looks to me in some Asian script (so I can understand it), here is a picture. New english version picture.

(3) Enter the URL in there, not sure where and click submit and presto:

2004-05-05 07:36:19 GMT :
removal of http://www.microsoft.com/index.html
complete

(4) Google then responds to you via automated email with the following short but sweet message:

**********************
The following urls/messages have been removed:

www.adobe.com/index.htmlNOINDEX
www.microsoft.com/index.htmlNOINDEX
**********************

(5) Microsoft.com and Adobe.com both have PR0!

View Large Image

View Large Image

This amazes me, such a huge loophole!

Over at WebmasterWorld and I am sure many other forums, they are discussing how long it took or will take for a site to get out of this "sandbox." One user accounts "This week I find those sandboxed keywords appear in the serps and most of them have very nice positions. I have noticed many webmasters have found their sandboxed keywords come back or appear in the serps."

But the best way to tell if your pages are out of the sandbox is to compare your keyword search with the keyword search plus -fddsffsd -fsdsfdfsdf -fsdfssdff -fsdsdfds -fsdfsdsdf -sdffsdfds -ffffsd. If your rankings are the same, then you are out of the sandbox. In addition, what also seems to be working is typing in the keyword phrase three times, so "keyword phrase keyword phrase keyword phrase" and the results should match "keyword phrase -fddsffsd -fsdsfdfsdf -fsdfssdff -fsdsdfds -fsdfsdsdf -sdffsdfds -ffffsd". This new method of tracking the sandbox effect was found at this post at Cre8asite.

This is an interesting Web site, where prattboy@gmail.com asks people to spam him and then calculates the Gmail spam filter accuracy. Some very nice statistics, check the results out at Spam My Gmail Account (prattboy@gmail.com).

The weekly recap takes me the longest to write, but I appreciate this part the most. I am able to take a look back at the past week or two and categorize my posts into a concise post. It is just amazing how much takes place over a week or two in this industry. So let's take a look back from May 1st 2004 until today the 12th.

Continue reading "May 1 - May 12 Roundtable Summary"

"Google is introducing an exciting new feature to its advertising program. Now you can use the power of images to drive clickthrough from your web visitors. Image ads allow AdWords advertisers to place graphical ads - in addition to text ads - and uses existing AdWords technology to target images based on keywords and phrases. Google uses AdSense contextual advertising technology to match the image ads to the content of your web pages."

As long as this is an option, then why not!

Google Links:
• Google Announcement
• AdSense Image Ads FAQs
• Google AdWords Image Ad Formats
• AdWords Support on Creating AdSense Images

What happened with Google being the text god?

Forum Coverage at:
• WebmasterWorld
• SEO Chat

Thank you Doug from Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting for the tip.

I frequently use both Yahoo! People Search and Yahoo! Yellow Pages throughout the day. Today I noticed that Yahoo! People Search has a new layout. Not sure when this layout was changed, but I like it.

First thing I noticed was the ability to search the "Entire USA" in the state field, something I have wanted in the past. Additionally, they have the people search bar at the top of the page of your results. So if you make a typo, you do not need to click that back button and reenter the information. You just go to the search box at the top of the screen and adjust the query there.

View Large Image

Today I had someone email me about purchasing pop-unders for this site. I said no way, I am not going to do that to my users. But then I saw this thread at Cre8asite named Do adverts and pop-ups affect ranking?.

In the thread, someone asks the question, "do you think adverts can restrict a site ranking well from a search engine perspective?"

Ammon Jones answer "No."

But you see how careful he was with the question? He asked, before replying with an answer, do you mean "do they" or "can they". :)

This topic was brought up about 3 months ago. The theory is that Google is no longer counting links from pages that have the file name links.html, links.html, links.php, links.asp, links.cfm and the like.

But there looks to be some debate between one moderator at HighRankings who says "You are correct in that Google is not counting backlinks from any file names "links" whether it be "links.htm," "links.html," "links.asp," etc., etc." And another moderator at JimWorld, who says "Google does not count links from pages named "links.html" is just hogwash, in my opinion."

I know an author here who's whole profession revolves around linking strategies replaced his links page with a 404 page a couple months ago. The suggestion given at HighRankings is to change the file name from links.html to resources.html.

It seems as if Google is now offering beta Gmail accounts to its AdWords customers. As Doug from Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting points out at HighRankings forum, "Google appears to have launched a program of offering Gmail to it Adwords advertisers. I've received a bunch today offering Gmail to my various Adwords-using clients, starting with the biggest Adwords spenders."

Want a Gmail account? Become a big spending AdWords customer. Just kidding. ;)

A thread over at WebmasterWorld discusses AdSense publishers fear of being dropped as an AdSense publisher by Google. As one member tells:

My site pushes in excess of $XX,XXX.xx per month. I live in this perpetual fear like you cannot believe. The way adsense has taken off on my site blew my mind. We do roughly 750k - 1M hits per month, and I have considered quiting my job and living off of adsense, but its that fear... at any time Google can say *cya*...

The dilemma is as follows; if I do very well with AdSense on site A is it worth the risk of putting AdSense on site B? You are probably asking, "what risk?" Well, many AdSense publishers are being declined and booted after they were accepted as publishers. The reasons for them being declined can vary, but Google has full right to decline anyone at any time based on their TOS. Should a person who makes a nice amount of money risk adding AdSense to a new site with the chance that site B can raise a "flag" and cancel his or her whole account? For example, let's say site B generate low clicks and one day a trigger happy clicker stops by your site and clicks away, making it look like click fraud. Google looks at site B and then sees the low impressions and decides your not worth the time. But Google missed site A, under the same account or Google doesn't care and they boot you anyway.

What a dilemma....

DigitalPoint does it again! He built a nifty little tool that graphs the top 10 competitors for the SEO Challenge.

The results can be found here.

I have included the real time stats below, when there are more then 2 days of data, the graph will look a bit more detailed:

So you want to rank high in the Google Images search engine results? This has been the topic of discussion in two popular forums, JimWorld and SEO Chat. So how does one rank well for images?

As both threads point out, its important that your alt tag (alternative attribute) is descriptive. Also, it helps to name the file with the keywords in them, example given at JimWorld "a picture of a car should be nissan-maxima.gif with the lat tag being Nissan Maxima."

At SEO Chat some members believe that "putting each image in a specifically optimized html page" also helps.

Do you really want traffic from Google Images? Will they convert? That is your call. Just make sure you don't get hit with high bandwidth bills that make the ROI in the red.

Sorry, this entry was damaged, the Google blog can be found at http://www.google.com/googleblog/.

We added a new feature to this site, to allow the right column where the ads are to disappear.

So if you click on "collapse", the right menu will be tucked away. This is important for you who have 800x600 resolution.

If you click "expand", the right bar will reappear.

Please let me know if there are any problems or suggestions with this added feature.

Thank you.

Once upon a time, Google's spider ran rampant on the web, and webmasters all over took extreme measures in response.

According to a recent post at Best Practices, it seems that MSN's spider is having similar growing pains. Yikes - if I were getting hammered like that, I wouldn't rely on robots.txt, I'd block every known MSNbot IP address.

Can you have it both ways? Can a site that ranks well in the search engines also have a high conversion rate? How many first placed results have you seen that have the worst user interface? As an SEO or SEM consultant, is it your responsibility to provide both high rankings and high conversions? There is no doubt that a site needs both, high visibility and high conversion rates but as an SEO or SEM, is it your responsibility?

I say yes. A business decision is almost always about ROI. If you drive traffic to the site and your conversion rates are not high enough to make for a position ROI then the decision was bad. If you have an incredibly easy to use site and high conversion rates but no one sees your site, then it is a bad business decision.

If someone contracts your company and you only focus on rankings then you should have a partner that focuses on usability. This goes both way and it doesn't end with rankings and conversion rates. What about after the order. You need a good back-end management system to manage the thousands of orders your site is processing. Your customers need to be kept in the loop, they will account for most your business (repeat business). Good back-end tools and customer service systems enable this.

Managing your orders, customers and products efficiently, achieving high ranking and having high conversion rates leads to a good business decision.

Inspired by a post at highrankings forum.

The idea was brought up at WebmasterWorld. The next logical step for Google to compete with the other public companies is to start an instant messaging service. Team up with AOL, like Apple did with its iChat? Start its own service like Yahoo and MSN did? Either way, it would catch on.

As one member pointed out, the Google IM service would probably be text based, similar to IRC. But, if they would launch such a service would they throw in those text based Ads by Google AdWords?

AOL has ads. I don't use MSN or Yahoo's service, do they have ads? I love iChat, because there are no ads.

Can you imagine typing a message to a buddy, asking them if they know of a good place to buy a new laptop. Then suddenly something pos up on your screen, this little text ad by Google recommending laptop stores for you to purchase that laptop.

The post of the day, I know it is early still, is at WebmasterWorld.

Everyone knows how to add a suffix or use a thesaurus, but that is only the beginning. How do we find words that Google knows relate to our target term?

Currently, the tilde search operator is my weapon of choice. Let's see if Google sees any relationships for the ubiquitous widget. Notice that GUI is bolded in the SERPs. We now know Google sees a relationship between those two words. In theory, including GUI on your widgets page will increase your ranking for widget but not vice versa.

Too find all of the terms related to widget, we could simply browse the listings looking for bolded terms. But I'm too lazy for that, so I begin excluding words from my query, starting w/ my main term. Be sure to collect all your traditional stemmed words( widgeters, widgeting, etc) before excluding your main search term. Each new match is added to my exclusions until no results are found. You end up w/ a nice list of related words that can be copied out of the search box.

One downside to this strategy is the chance of missing out on potential matches that only appear on pages you've excluded from your search. However, the time savings is worth it when working with thousands of pages.

Give it a go with a less generic term, and you'll begin to see how much more natural "keyword stuffing" can look now. Anybody else working on a personal Google thesaurus?

Which document do you think was the first to ever be crawled by the Google spider?

• http://www.stanford.edu/
• http://localhost/test.html
• http://www.yahoo.com/
• http://www.dmoz.org/
• http://info.cern.ch/
• http://www.google.com/
• IP address 000.000.000.001

Best answer I saw "And probably it has caused an infinte loop so they had to kill the process, modify it, and start over again."

Check out this link.

Thanks to WebmasterWorld.

Thanks to a friend of mine, I got myself a gmail account. The individual who invited me for the Gmail account will remain nameless, all I will say is that this person is an author at this very site.

So now its time to fill up this free 1000MB account with junk mail.

Please spam me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com, tell your friend spammers to spam me there as well.

Thank you. :)

Most professional search engine optimizers know how to obtain high rankings in Google using tricks that break Googles inclusion guidelines. Testing methods is important and ‘throwaway’ domains are often used for testing purposes. If a professional search engine optimizer does not know how far he/she can go before occurring a penalty, they are not going to be able to optimize a website to the maximum possible. There are terms like ‘black hat seo’ that you see being referred to on various forums and articles which describe search engine spamming methodology. It is not however a clear black and white (hat) issue and I personally don’t like the term black or white hat as to often the definitions are no where near clear cut or even agreed upon amongst the SEO community.

There are many legitimate uses for much of the SEO methodology listed as ‘no-nos’ on the Google guidelines.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
This is probably why Google calls them guidelines and not conditions for inclusion.

There are many so called gray methods of optimization which many webmasters, having read the Google guidelines, automatically discount trying for fear of penalization. Of course, most bending and out-and-out breaking of the Google guidelines are carried out with the sole purpose to manipulate Google, often in a crass manner such as literally thousands of doorway pages that automatically redirect or hiding text through one of the many different methods.

There are some forms of cloaking (providing the Google spider with different highly optimized content than a human with a browser would see) that Google would & do encourage (if it wasn’t so open to abuse). Other methods involve manipulation of HTML tags with css, javascript redirection, url rewriting, creating near identical pages, using css layers etc.
I have used most of the above on MY OWN website and do not fear penalization. Why am I not worried I might be penalized by Google? The reason is because my content is exactly the same for a human visitor as it would be for a search engine spider and no attempt to dupe Google through hidden content or redirection takes place. Also, there may be a legitimate design reason for example. I actually HELP Google by providing new pages for indexation and make my own (and clients) sites much more spiderable/indexable.

One search engines optimizers 'advanced techniques', is another's spam. There is unlikely to ever be a full consensus on what is or is not an acceptable search engine optimization technique. What you need to do is simply to ask yourself, am I trying to dupe Google here? If a competitor reported my page for spamming could I sleep at night in the knowledge that the sit would not be penalized? The important part is intent. Are you helping the search engines or manipulating them?

Below are some examples which would make some webmasters cringe, yet are at least in my opinion and research, perfectly acceptable.

1. Removing session Id’s from online shops / forums (in my own case) and other dynamic websites. This could be considered a form of cloaking as it often involves a referrer check (user_agent/IP). If it is Googlebot, drop the session id. If it is a human with a browser, generate a session id. Session ids are a definite way to make your site invisible on the search engine results pages. Word still hasn’t got round yet to some major corporation webmasters about the real damage session ids can do to a ranking. “We need to know the full click paths of our visitors” is a common statement. “You aren’t going to get many visitors if you don’t do something about the session ids” is my usual reply. A little programming could solve the majority of problems online shops for example have at getting deep crawled and indexed. Google has officially said it regards the removal of session ids as valid search engine optimization.

2. URL rewriting through php/asp programming can also be used in the removal of session ids or flattening urls (removing multiple parameters form a url ‘?’, ‘&’ etc.). With php you can rewrite the url to hide a session id. This you could say provides Google with a url which is not the real one. They will be happy though if you have a quality site which now makes it possible or their spider to crawl and index it!

3. Re-definition of heading tags (H1 etc) through the use of CSS.
The H1-H3 tags are commonly either too big or just do not fit in with your design or look and feel. It is perfectly acceptable to redefine the size of these tags from their default through CSS. It is known that heading tags (h1-h3) can help strengthen a pages relevance in the eyes of a search engine and therefore help its ranking. Not as much as a few months ago arguably, but still a good thing to have. An h1 tag in its default state is an eye-sore. With css you can make it fit your sites look and feel and resize it, colour it, underline it etc. What you most definitely do not want to do is make it invisible, use it where you wouldn’t normally use a heading or make it tiny for example. An example code for a redefined H1 tag may look something like…

H1 {
FONT-WEIGHT: FONT-SIZE: medium; COLOR: #990000; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
}

4. There are also legitimate uses for JavaScript redirection. One example is calling framesets for framed pages that end up being a landing page due to a click on a search engine result. Without the framesets they often lack navigation and are of course not seen as they should be in the context of other frames. A simple JavaScript redirection can solve the problem of framed pages becoming landing pages without a frameset. An example of a very basic redirection script which solves this problem is:

<SCRIPT language=Javascript>

<!--

if(top.frames.length <= 0)

top.location = "http://www.your-frameset-page.com";

//-->

</SCRIPT>

The above code on all framed pages solves the problem of pages being loaded without their framesets. The above is the quick and dirty way to do it. Of course the best solution is to drop framesets altogether but that’s not for this article. There are several ways to skin this particular cat though. Netmechanic.com has some good info on more advanced ways to do the above.

5. Sometimes for technical reasons, or more commonly, a webmaster lacks the programming know how, dynamic pages can not be spidered by search engine robots and therefore there needs to be a way to get these dynamic content pages spidered and indexed. Multiple doorway pages that automatically redirect is a way many would go about solving this problem. Many a website has flown out of Google because of just this practice! Do not be tempted.

So what can you do that provides a legitimate reason to create static indexable content that is very similar to your dynamic (non-indexable) pages? How about creating a ‘printer version’ of your pages? Some dynamic forums such as vBulletin do this automatically through archiving threads. There is also software that can create static html pages from dynamic ones, but it can be costly. One way is simply to save your most important pages using save-as in your browser (not the whole website, just the page.) Make the page printer friendly by say removing colourful backgrounds and changing to printer friendly fonts and graphics. There should be no issues of content duplication as of course the dynamic pages for whatever reason couldn’t be indexed. This method is clearly open to abuse and you should never have automatic redirection and should be used only if your dynamic pages are completely unable to be spidered or indexed. It goes without saying that the content should be the same as the dynamic page.

6. The use of the apache mod_rewrite module, or for Windows servers, ISAPI filters to cut down the number of parameters on dynamic urls (Google has problems over 3 parameters and deepcrawling with long urls full of parameters (‘?’ and ‘&’) is not cloaking and is perfectly acceptable. I mention this as many think flattening out urls through server side technology must be some form of spam. I use it on my own forum and it works very well. The user sees the same url as a search engine spider and therefore it is not a form of cloaking. All I am doing is helping Google index my pages.

7. Text links in the footer area (at the bottom of visible page) as alternative navigation to a traditional top left or top horizontal navigation not only can help spiders find internal pages, but it is also an excellent workaround for main navigation which uses say imagemaps, java or javascript menus, the links of which would not otherwise for the most part be able to be followed. It is also good design practice to have navigation below as well as above the ‘fold’. Don’t feel you are spamming just because you add additional text links at the footer of your page.

The above represents seven forms of legitimate optimization which works and does not involve spamming the search engines. They should be used in moderation and whatever you are going to do, do not hide content, attempt to dupe the search engines through redirection where there exists no valid reason to do so. Some of the above methods can also be used to spam search engines.
Believe me, it is not worth the risk. If you overdo any of the above and your site gets removed do not point the finger at this article or myself. I use the above to help the search engines, not to abuse them!

If you are unsure if what you are doing is over the top or not, the likelihood is it is. Always err on the side of caution but also don’t be afraid to use the tips above in moderation. Common sense is really is really the best way to evaluate whether or not you are abusing or helping a search engine.

Alan Webb
ABAKUS Internet Marketing

Well the SEO challenge is on and the keyword to rank #1 for in Google is nigritude ultramarine. Currently the number one spot is held by an SEO Chat member named relaxzoolander. This member has the backing of the whole SEO Chat forum, check out some of the threads on helping this member win. Also, you might notice many of the members signatures have this keyword phrase in it pointing to relaxzoolander's site. How tight is this forum! ;)

I'll drop this member a clean keyword rich text here, nigritude ultramarine. Good luck relaxzoolander!

Happy Mother's Day from the Search Engine Community:

That is all so far.

Excellent new thread over at WebmasterWorld on the topic of the five most important search engine optimization techniques to avoid when optimizing for Google.

1. Don't keyword stuff anchor text repetitively, either inbound or internal. Keep it down to a certain percentage of the total anchor text per page; use variations. Variety is the spice of life!

2. Don't go hyphen-happy in URLs, stuffing directory and file names with keyword phrases.

3. Don't presume to think that what we see the competition doing that's obvious is the thing that's causing their sites to rank well.

4. Don't assume it's one "algo" that's the answer. Extract the sensible academic principles behind each of them out there and apply the solid principles they teach to sensible site and page construction.

5. Try not to think like an SEO. ;)

Number five is my favorite, "Try not to think like an SEO."

Check out the responses here.

Are the comment tags in the HTML worthless? A comment tag is a tag that is used by programmers to make notes to themselves as to the code they have written in a certain area of a page. For HTML a comment can be written between <!-- comment here -->.

Of course SEOs try to take advantage of anything they can in the source code to improve rankings. So if you put keywords within the comment tags, i.e. <!-- keywords here -->, will that improve rankings?

Most of you reading this know the answer is NO, but I thought I post this here for a newbie who might do a search on "Comment Tags". Be careful and don't make this mistake, it might lead your site to be banned from the search engine's index.

Proof of this concept was found at SEO Chat Forums. A member made a simple test page with a comment in the source that looks like <!-- geeknelectricboy lowwiopkinder hicsintires googleguyeatscows -->. Conduction a search "A simple test page." edsolutions shows you the page was fully indexed by Google. Conduction a search on any of the key-phrases in the comment tags brings up no results.

Many of my hours each week revolve around speaking to prospects and giving presentations for my company. Often during these presentations and conversations I get into SEO/SEM topics and explain the fundamentals of SEO (a little presentation). I have given one real seminar that took place over a 3 day span on several topics including SEM, the SEM topic filled up about one full day.

Why do I bring this up? Well, there is a thread over at HighRanking's named Making Speeches and many SEM/SEO professionals who speak publicly discuss the challenges and rewards involved in public speaking. Check out the thread here.

Over at HighRankings Forum, a member brought up a comical example of his confrontation with Flash. He tried to click on a link from Macromedia's Web site (company that owns Flash) and received the following message "Macromedia Flash Player version 7,0,19,0 was detected. To view the Edge, you need the latest version, Macromedia Flash Player 6,0,47,0. You can download the free Macromedia Flash Player now."

But this is the comical part...On that page, there was a link to Jakob Nielsen's 117 design guidelines for Flash developers and presto, I got the following.

But this is a search engine related site, so what does this have to search engine besides for most hating flash? Search engines love text. Having said that, let me quote from Peter Da Vanzo.

Flash can be good for branding, in so much that someone looking at it might be impressed with your brand. But I don't think anyone visits a website simply to be impressed with the brand.

The site needs to inform. A flash website can inform, but most flash sites seem to have so little to say. I don't know why that is, but I suspect it is because too much emphasis is placed on form. This suits brochureware, of course.

A thread over at SEO Chat forums named <h1> - how many times ?, discusses how to properly utilize these tags to improve your page structure for search engine ranking purposes.

I'll quote one post from one of my favorite members there, thewatcher:

Lets have a good look at this... HTML is structured so that the Header tag (h1,h2,h3 etc) gives a specified amount of importance to the surrounding text on a page. So in theory you should have as many h1 tags as necessary as long as you have the same amount of important sections on your page.

Usually one h1 tag is enough for the search engine to see that the page is about "widgets", I like to use just one h1 tag on any website but I do use h2, h3 and h4 extensively throughout a website.

One of the most important questions I would be asking is, how much influence on a paragraph does a h1 tag have?

Multiple H1 tags on a website can trigger a penalty if you have other spamming techiniques on your page.

I knew about this a few days ago but promised to hold off on the news (not sure why). Anyway, now that it is mentioned in this months Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Report's Search Engine Resources section, I think its a safe bet to mention it here.

Proogle was released this week and is basically a replica of Google but shows the PageRank of a site (much like the DMOZ listing) under each result. The PageRank is real time and this looks to be the tool of the month. Here is a snapshot of a result:

View Large Image

Also, Proogle made it clear on the homepage that they do not want to be sued by Google stating, "Google, Please don't sue! If you want me to take this down, just say." I find this funny, but downright honest.

Forum coverage will be developed over time, current forum coverage at:

• Webmaster Forum
  
• WebRankInfo (French)
  

The use of two title tags on a single page was something that was used by old school SEOs back in the old days. However, it was reported at WebmasterWorld just a two days ago that Google has ranked and used the title of either title tag depending on the keyword query entered into Google.

For example the title tags might look like the following in the source code:
<title>Keyword Phrase One</title>
<title>Keyword Phrase Two</title>

If someone typed in "Keyword Phrase One" in Google it would display "Keyword Phrase One" in the hypertext link in the search engine results page. If someone typed in "Keyword Phrase Two" in Google it would display "Keyword Phrase Two" in the hypertext link in the search engine results page.

Get get your hopes up yet, it seems as if Google fixed the loop hole the following day.

An excellent thread is currently underway at SEO Chat forums on the topic of how to find and manage those cream of the crop affiliates of yours.

People discuss that they like to focus their energy on their 'top affiliates.' The classification of 'top affiliates' range from 95% of your revenue is 5% of your affiliates to 80% of your revenue is 20% of your affiliates. Which one is for you? The 95/5, the 90/10, 85/15 or the 80/20 ratio?

The thread also gets into how some recruit affiliates:

1. Direct emails to top ranking high quality sites
2. Referrals from existing affiliates
3. PPC ads on PPC engines
4. Participation on the forums
5. Recently an Ad in Revenue Magazine
6. Affiliate Dirrectories
7. Partnerships with other non-competing affiliate programs

Over at WebmasterWorld they have two threads discussing the URLs Yahoo! uses in its organic search results (thread: 1 - 2).

The URL formats tend to mostly be in the following formats:

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=#######/K=keyword+goes+here/v=#/SID=e/l=WS1/R=#/SS=########/H=#/*-http://www.domain.com/

http://rds.yahoo.com/S= =#######//K=keyword+goes+here/v=#/SID=w/l=WS1/R=#/H=#/*-http://www.domain.com/

Sites includes in the Yahoo! directory get the SS= string added to the URL. Some sites have this OCS= string instead of the SS= string. The question is why? Still trying to figure it out...

Lately it seems there has been an increase in datafeed driven/affiliate content sites out there. I myself have made quite a few. How search engines are going to eventually treat these sites is an important issue that should be discussed.

We all know Google says that duplicate content is a "don't" and as such you risk being banned or penalized for doing it. But what exactly is duplicate content? It isn't just affiliate datafeed sites, such as those using Amazon AWS, that have duplicate content. People often create sites using feeds from Wikipedia and DMOZ, is this duplicate content? You could find a press release from Tivo on thousands of news, financial, or electronics websites. Is that duplicate content? What about game cheat sites that all list the same cheats? How is Google going to figure out what types of duplicate content to ban or punish while leaving other types alone? Other than with manual review, is it even possible? Datafeed driven sites are only going to increase in number., search engines will have to do something.

UJIKO is this new search engine that uses the Yahoo! search technology but gives you a completely new interface with customized or personalized options.

delete result ******************** love result

"When you click on one of the results, the page is stored by UJIKO and will instantly appear in the first results next time you search. Choose which site will be first with the heart-grade or, on the contrary, filter the one you dislike. All sites you find can be modified: title, description and heart grade will be memorized and displayed during another query. Finally, you can create filters to mark or delete some results depending on their addresses (URL) or description."

View Large Image

Are you ready for the next major breakthrough in search advertising? Well its being tested right now and should be available this summer.

The concept is to combine the contextual advertising methodology currently deployed by Google in its AdWords program and combine that with profile-based target ads. "Advertisers will be able to pay to reach a certain demographic of people (for example, high-income men aged 30 to 40 who have expressed an interest in buying a sports car) through sponsored text links that appear on Tacoda partner Web sites."

Tacoda Systems, Inc. is a New York-based application software and services provider, enabling marketing driven businesses to optimize a persistent consumer dialogue across multiple channels for maximum profitability.

Read the full article at CNET News.com.

With this post by John Scott at Cre8asite, we now have a new and deeper insight into what this "sandbox" theory is all about.

To give credit to his testimony, John Scott provides a source who happens to be a fellow worker of Krishna Bharat at a company other then Google.

John says, "The probation does not apply to new sites. It applies to links. When the algorithm was deployed certain older links were grandfathered in. After that, links will be (are being) given partial credit, and be essentially on "probation"."

John continues to explain:

It applies to links, not sites. And the age of the link is not the only factor. The IP range of the links and other considerations are made, and the person who I discussed this with said that Krishna Bharat is at Google primary to develop and implement this new algorithm. It is supposed to radically change the way links are evaluated.

I thought I have seen it all. DigitalPoint's Forum is now splitting its AdSense banners 50/50 with those who start the threads at the forum. If you don't know the owner of DigitalPoint, he is a very talented programmer and comes up with many creative ideas. This latest idea is to allow register members to share in the revenue generated at the forums by enabling them to enter in their AdSense publisher IDs. All threads you start will have a 50/50 chance of being your AdSense ad. You can even enter in a channel id to track the revenue separately.

I tested it out, you will need at least 50 posts to qualify and all past threads will be retroactively instated the day of post number 50. Below is a screen shot where I highlighted my publishers ID in the status bar. Click on the image for a larger view.

View Large Image

I asked Shawn Hogan, the owner of DigitalPoint, what was it that made him want to work on this task. He said simply, "because it was a fun programming project." But I think the real reason is because no one did it before.

For more information visit the thread.

AdSense publishers always wondered what piece of the pie they were getting versus Google. Some smart people over at WebmasterWorld figured it out based on the the financial data Google released last week.

Here is the information as quoted from WebmasterWorld's Forum:

Year end 2002 it was 88% to AdSense publisher (12% to Google)

Quarter end, march/2003 it was 82% to AdSense publisher (18% to Google)

Year end 2003 it was 77% to AdSense publisher (23% to Google)

Quarter end, march/2004 it was 76% to AdSense publisher (24% to Google)

This is assuming a payout of 91M, 69M, 504M, 262M and a pocketing of 12M, 15M, 144M, 82M respectively to the dates above.

And I always thought Google was getting the higher percentage, but you will see that the figures are declining every quarter for the benefit of Google.

I just received an email from a reader that they found that Google is now able to index and read ISO formated file types, you know the CD images. Jon, the reader gave several examples:

To view an example click the following link: http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Aiso+knoppix the results page shows not only CD images with the word Knoppix in their name but manages to find instances of the word within the image itself. I used the filetype parameter so the results page would only display ISO images for simplicity. However Google searches for instances of words within CD images whether or not you specify file type restraints as you should be able to see here: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22@echo+Lade+%22index.html%22...%22. In that example Google finds the query within a batch file (.bat) that is in each of the CD images.

Take a look at the Google Cache of an ISO formated file, pretty huh? As Jon said at his blog, "This leads me to wonder what else Google could have up its sleeve... Indexing ZIP or RAR files?"

In a thread started by Shari Thurow at HighRankings forum, she asks a question that many, many SEO shops run into.

After you conduct a big search engine optimization job on a client's site, the client wants the site back to maintain on their own. Problem is, the client has the potential to 'undo' all the optimization work you implemented without knowing. Besides for the contractual details, how can you make this possibility crystal clear to the client?

projectphp, a moderator at HighRankings, offers what he would do:

1. As soon as any client makes waves about making changes, send a detailed email outlining what errors can occur, why you prefer to maintain sites, and the expected costs to fix things if they are broken. This can be a standard, generic email to save time. If this doesn't persuade them to let you keep maintaining the site, then...
2. Let them maintain the site. If they stuff up, and want to know what happened, refer to your previous email, and point out the costs associated with fixing any errors / problems, and the benefits of continuing to use your services to avoid just these circumstances.

Said very well projectphp.

Some hot news with this "sandbox effect theory" where new sites equal poor results.

We have found that by adding seven exclusion parameters to the search query, the pre-sandbox results are displayed. Remember the Florida update? If not see these three links, 1 - 2 - 3. The same deal applied then, at a certain period in time, you were able to use the syntax -sssss -sssss (two exclusion parameters) to see the pre-florida update.

In this case, you can use the keyword phrase followed by 7 exclusion parameters to find the pre-sandbox results. This information is a step in the right direction. My own personal example is a client who used to rank well for a non-competitive keyword phrase Negative Pressure Isolation Rooms and no longer ranks number one. This is an example of a new site that was put into this "sandbox". But by doing a search on Negative Pressure Isolation Rooms -dfsdgsdsd -sdfgsdgsdfg -sdfgsdgsdg -sdfgsdfgsdfg -dsfgsdgsdg -sdfgsdfgsdfg -sdgsdfgdsfg it brings up the pre-'sandboxed' results with the site airmontinc.com ranking number one.

Thanks to cre8asite for the information.

There is a new contest taking place for SEOs where one can win an iPod. The contest is named SEO Challenge and the goal it to rank #1 for the term that will be announced on the 7th of May at 9am GMT. Who is the best SEO out there, soon we will all know (excluding those who don't want to bother).

I think this is a great idea and excellent PR stunt; PageRank and Public Relations.

Credit to a thread over at SEO Chat by a long time member, thewatcher.

There has been a report at WebmasterWorld that GoogleBot is now able to initiate a LivePerson Web chat with a customer service representative on the other side.

LivePerson is a technology that allows for people to click a bottom on a Web site and it initiates a Web based chat session with a service representative from that Web site.

It is probably recommended to exclude such files in your robot.txt file, so those Web chats do not occur and do not disturb your support staff.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Only homepage removed from google reports on sites losing their homepage from the Google index. Some people are reporting emails from the email address url-remove@google.com that read:

The following urls/messages have been removed. Please contact googlebot@google.com if you do not approve:

www.yourdomain.com/index.htm NOINDEX

Seems like a scam to me. Check the thread and look out for this.

Side note: Very busy day for me, so if I misquote or do not post enough today, please don't be mad. :)

There is an interactive discussion taking place at WebmasterWorld on the new Google Personalized Search. The thread at WebmasterWorld is named Google Personalized searches and people are providing feedback, suggestions and concerns over the service.

I tested it out a bit by setting my profile as:
Internet, 1960s, 1970s, Rock, New York

Then in hope to find music on the Internet from a local new york store that focused on rock from the 60s and 70s, I did a search on music.

The first result contained the copy "If you've tired of the music scenes in Seattle and New York's East Village, the only place to turn is a Web server in Finland." New York is in the copy, but this site is explicitly about being tired of the NY music scene, plus its on all genres.

Try it out yourself, it has this cool sliding bar that you can use to minimize or maximize your personal settings. The color balls on the left mean "The balls indicate which results Google thought were more relevant to your search, based on the interests you entered in your profile. As you move the slider to the right to increase the degree of personalization, these results move closer to the top."

I have been observing that for new sites, links to the site and/or sites even mentioning another site are outranking that site for its keywords (New sites only) Especially when its reputable forums. For instance a search for Atlanta Realtor you will see that both SEO Chat and Digital point where a links client of mine posted about his site now rank #1 and #2 respectively for "Atlanta Realtor" Im intentionally loading this "Atlanta" post to consolidate my proof even farther as in 3-5 days I guarantee that this thread will rank tops for the term too!
Started a thread at SEO Chat lets see if we get any bites
http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?p=70021#post70021

There was an interesting discussion on the use of tables on a website and how they could inversely effect the weight of links or content contained within. How many tables is too much? What is better? It might be useful for those considering a redesign or with questions whether it might be better to use CSS to format the sections instead of lots of tables.

Forum coverage at Highrankings - Tables vs. CSS

I have not seen this posted in any of the SEO/SEM forums, conduct a search on construction new york in Yahoo! Search. You see Yahoo! brings up local yellow page results at the top, very much like Google.

click on image for larger version

Is this on purpose? Well, Google serves up the same local results for both construction new york and new york construction.

At a thread over at WebmastersWorld named Google Could Change the Web For the Better: If they could be bothered, the members discuss why Google does not give 'points' to sites that are fully accessibility in terms of Web standards.

A senior member says

Here is how I see it, get their own house in order (valid code, at least some level of accessibility) and then start to reward webmasters with valid and accessible websites. The vast majority would do it in a flash. Of course people would moan, so what, they moan when there is an update, they moan when their site is not #1, it would just be a little extra moaning :).

However, a post followed shortly stating Google is not out to police or enforce the the Web, "we are not the internet standards police".

Not in the Google SERP (search engine results page) but as a lead manager for its planned $2.7 billion initial public offering.

But when Google learned Goldman Sachs' chairman and chief executive Henry Paulson had contacted one of the search engine's big investors, Kleiner Perkins, it deemed this as breaking the rules and bumped them from contention, Newsweek said.

Forum coverage at SEO Chat Forums.

Most forums are known for guessing the date and time of the next "Google Dance", now called the "update". Over at WebmasterWorld there is a thread where the members are trying to predict the open and close price of the Google stock on day one.

Think about it, this type of thread can really help other investors get an idea of what their bid should be at the IPO auction. But in reality, is this the best place to discuss finances? Will the prices here be the same at a stock related forum? Know of any forums that are stock related and doing the same type of thing? If so, please post a comment.

I am a relatively new ODP editor. Getting elected was fun and joining the group of hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteer editors was very respectable. My category was filled with about a 150 sites waiting to be reviewed, so I began tackling the task at hand. Going through each request and trying to determine if the site's content is unique, useful and relevant to my category.

Some sites were a perfect match, all I had to do was clean up the title and description and click add. Other sites are just pure junk and are submitted by people seeking ODP links to boost an other page's PageRank, those are easy to detect and delete as well. However, there were many and still are many sites that are border line spam. Sites that look pretty, have nice information but in reality are just affiliate sites. To tell you the truth, I built one or two myself, but I would never dream of listing it in the Open Directory Project (ODP).

There is a thread over at HighRankings that discusses a thread over at the ODP's public forum Resource Zone. It covers a topic just like this, where a "Meta Editor" (those are ODP Kings) can spot these types of sites in a glance. I guess over time and with more edits, I too will be able to spot these types of sites. Until then, the spammers will continue to solicit links from ODPs.

Ask Jeeves needs to take that next step in order to become a major player in the search engine industry. Ask Jeeves recently purchased Interactive Search Holdings, which had a great impact on its stock. Ask Jeeves doubled its market share with that purchase, giving them a total of "about 7% market share of the web search space", according to Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch. 7% is a respectable share of the market, but you and I know that Ask Jeeves wants a larger piece of the pie.

With the recent Google IPO, Yahoo!'s launch of Yahoo! Search, MSN Search expected to launch in the near future, and Amazon's A9 Search; Ask Jeeves has a lot to worry about. There is speculation that Ask Jeeves's next big move is to buy Terra Lycos, which has a market share of about 0.5%.

It will be a long road for Ask Jeeves but I am of the belief that Ask Jeeves will be the Apple Computers of the Search Engines Industry.

Read the forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld and SEO Chat Forums.

Those with Gmail accounts were able to invite friends, colleagues and those who paid the most to get their own Gmail accounts.

Most of those who were able to invite others to sign up for a Gmail account, invited friends and professional acquaintances but some were not so giving. Currently, if you do a search on gmail in eBay you will come up with a listing of those selling and bidding Gmail accounts. Some are selling for over $250, like this one.

Forum coverage over at WebmasterWorld.

No one ever talks about misspellings on forums or in articles anymore but they are still a very viable source of traffic. And synonyms are a whole new realm of traffic potential that many of us are aware of but I'll be honest I slack a bit when doing my research for anything below 2000 searches on the overture search tool.

When ADOBE the software giant called me and said "Hey SEO Guy we need your help finding all the misspellings and synonyms for our products" obviously my first response was "ADOBE! No problem" but after I hung up the phone I realized that other then wordtracker and inventory overture there werent any decent resources I knew of to start hunting! So naturally I head out to forums in an attempt to learn what I should have in my pocket over the weekend posting thread such as http://forums.seochat.com/t10149/s.html at SEO Chat but it really hit home that I wasnt offering a complete service if my keyword research doesn't exhaustively involve the likely hundreds of keyword phrases that bring only 50-200 hits per month. I know most clients only have the budget for their top 10 to start but even to put together a package for them to follow to be able to take advantage of them on their own will only put more dollars in our clients pockets and mean then have more dollars to spend on us at the end of the day.