July 2004 Archives

No real time to expand, so forum coverage at Search Engine Watch, here is a quote:

The page went live the other day stating that details were coming soon.

They're now available.
https://www.ipo.google.com/

and

https://www.ipo.google.com/welcome

Part of the page is a transcript/slides of a presentation by Schmidt, Brin, and Page.
https://www.ipo.google.com/data/transcript.html

With all this discussion abut the problems with PageRank and HITS, Microsoft released a paper recently discussing its solution for the faults in PageRank and HITS. The basic premise of the article, which can be downloaded here, is that the faults are that all links on a single page are not equal. By breaking up the page into "blocks" or "passages" (as Orion likes to call them in the thread at Search Engine Watch), you can semantically understand what sections of the page is about what. And then based on the mathematical location of links, determine the weight and relevancy of that link.

Very interesting idea, of course this can be abused as well. I for one would love to see this working at MSN Search. For discussion, please join the Search Engine Watch thread. Here is a passage:

Link Analysis has shown great potential in improving the per-formance of web search. PageRank and HITS are two of the most popular algorithms. Most of the existing link analysis algorithms treat a web page as a single node in the web graph. However, in most cases, a web page contains multiple semantics and hence the web page might not be considered as the atomic node. In this paper, the web page is partitioned into blocks using the vision-based page segmentation algorithm. By extracting the page-to-block, block-to-page relationships from link structure and page layout analysis, we can construct a semantic graph over the WWW such that each node exactly represents a single semantic topic. This graph can better describe the semantic structure of the web. Based on block-level link analysis, we proposed two new algorithms, Block Level PageRank and Block Level HITS, whose performances we study extensively using web data.

Seems like Google, ~9 hours later, is beginning to recover from its temporary ban it set for itself. If you didn't hear about it, read Google Bans Itself - PR 0 and Not Listed.

At about 2AM (EST) this morning, results for Google.com started to be seen by searchers. Reports come from WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch around that time. Reports later on come from SEO Chat AND HighRankings.

The SEMPO people have asked Danny to post a response to the scandal started by Mike Grehan. I'll just quote from the post and follow up more when I attend the SEMPO meeting this Monday night.

Barbara's stipend was approved on May 15 and she began drawing it on that date. She began taking it because she also assumed a second hat, that of acting executive director, in addition to her role as president.

I'm told that this was going to be announced at the meeting Monday even before Mike's article raised the issue. In addition, I'm told these are other points that were planned to be discussed, of items that have been in the works already:

* A search for an experienced executive director is to begin with the goal of having them onboard by December 2004. Barbara will then step down as president and acting executive director and just be chair of the board.

* There were already plans to have the membership nominate and elect a board member by December 2004 - this will be done faster if the board can determine a way to do this.

* The entire board is up for renewal in March 2005 - at that point, the plan is to stagger elections of new board members.

* Financials for the SEMPO year end were posted on the member-only website in April.

* Minutes of all board meetings are available to anyone who asks and SEMPO's seeking a way to put them online in the members area.

New items that were not already on the agenda that have been added in the wake of the article and various forum discussions will include:

* budget spend to date
* income
* future budgets
* accomplishments
* admission of shortcomings with member communication and steps being taken to correct this
* update on a current research project
* update on an upcoming SEM advertising campaign

That's what I've got. I'm sure people have follow up questions. If so, I'd say the most constructive thing is to list what else you'd like to hear, know or have expanded at the meeting Monday night.

Looks like Google has a PageRank 0 and Google.com is not found in the Google index. Nor will a search on Google.com at Google bring up results.

Here are screen shots of Google.com with a PR 0, from my Mac and PCs.

Forum coverage:
- Search Engine Watch
- WebmasterWorld
- SEO Chat

More too come...

Sharon and Roy, well known for their contributions to the forums, posted a new Google find today. They found that "Google Adds "Retrieved Date" To Its Cache Pages". The example given is:

Google Cache version of forums.searchenginewatch.com. At the top it reads: "This is G o o g l e's cache of http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/ as retrieved on Jul 28, 2004 01:13:04 GMT."

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There is so much talk about how important it is to put your sites on separate servers at data centers far, far away from each other. Link builders who have huge networks of sites do it all the time. They have huge lists of reseller packages with dozens if not hundreds of hosting companies. The question is what do we know about how Google devalues links?

A topic over at Search Engine Watch Forums named Links from Same IP Blocks, mentions "we lack evidence" that having a network of sites on the same C IP block (i.e. 192.168.1.x) will devalue or have a negative impact on ones linking campaign. I have selected a few posts by recognized link experts to help clarify.

rcjordan writes "if I were doing, say, 3 unique content sites for a company and the content warranted each having its own domain I wouldn't hesitate putting them on the same server and c-class."

Ammon Johns writes "Google were known to aggressively penalize cross-linked domains before LocalRank was ever discussed."

GoogleGuy in msg # 7 writes, "Virtual hosting means that innocent sites and spam sites can be on the same Class C block--or even on the same IP address."

It is to my understanding, that Google will not automatically devalue the links from cross-linked sites based on an IP address or C Class. However, Google will, to my understanding, devalue links from sites where you have 20 or more links on a domain name pointing to the same page. For example; if you have a site named www.cars.com and on the footer of this 5,000 page site is a link to www.mysite.com/page1.html. Google will count up to about 20 of those links and devalue the remaining 4,980. So if you have five, ten, thirty huge content sites, all on different C blocks the links can still be devalued based on the number of them pointing to a site from the same domain name. I believe this has little to do with IP addresses but more to do with the volume of links within the same domain name.

This post is based on discussions with a wide range of SEOs and non SEOs, and from hundreds of forum posts. As I said here, this is not based on scientific data.

Have you seen any of the AdSense image ads? By now, I am sure you have seen a few. The ones you might see most often at SEO/SEM related sites are from Did-It.com. But have you seen the Google Ads within the AdSense network? They basically come up 99% of the time at DigitalPoint's AdSense & AdWords Forum. It looks like the ad below, oh, I made the ad link to http://services.google.com/marketing/links/US-HA-CMBFIRST/ because that is where it links to, but no AdSense account is being funded by you clicking on the Ad (so Google, please don't cancel my AdSense account :)).

This topic has really started some interesting chatter around the industry. It can only make us wonder what the people over at SEMPO are talking about. My personal feeling is that SEMPO needs someone to step in that has experience in running a professional non-profit organization. If they can find someone good, its worth $78,000+ to get the person on board. Maybe its best if SEOs and SEMs are not the people trying to make this organization have an impact, maybe its best coming from an outsider who understands the importance of the SEM industry but yet doesn't have much of a stake. Obviously, the individual will need to be fueled with goals, such as taking SEMPO to the next level. The next level?

Here are some very interesting threads at the forums on this topic:
- Cre8asite Forums
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- HighRankings Forum
- WebmasterWorld
- IHelpYou Forums

Over at Search Engine Watch Forums, the Google AdWordsRep is asking for feedback in a thread named Your top five feature/tool requests?. He says:

What are the top five features and/or tools that you'd like to see included in future refinements of the AdWords program?

Post away, and I'll pass your feedback along later in the week. I usually forward feedback late on Fridays. but I'll be out of the office this coming Friday. So I'll pass on whatever comes in on Thursday evening - say about 7:30 pm California time.

Don't miss this opportunity to be heard!

Mike Grehan, one of the most respected figures in the industry, released an article today named Who needs SEMPO?. I found this by way of Andy Beal's blog, where Andy does an excellent job of summarizing the article. I'll pull out some quotes and then bring in forum posts by Barbara Coll (founder of SEMPO), to show how things just don't click.

Mike's article: "SEMPO has approved a $1,500 per week stipend to Ms Coll. This amounts to a salary of $78,000, to fund a part time effort from someone who already has a full time job running a SEM business."
Barbara's Cre8asite post: "The Board of Directors have received no financial compensation for their volunteer position on the board of SEMPO."

Mike's article: "There appears at this stage to be no appointment of a board member for the UK. This, despite the fact that the UK is the second largest market outside the US."
Barbara's Cre8asite post: "and we don't official launch SEMPO in UK/Europe until June!"

Interesting post in light of this article.

The 8 of us that are the current Board of Directors started SEMPO. It was formed from a group of people who attended Danny's Roundtable discussions at SES. We had been talking about forming an organization like SEMPO for over two years and finally I stepped up to lead the crowd. From the group of people who signed up to get involved in forming the organization, a few emerged as people who were willing to put some effort, time and money into it to get things started. That group became the Board of Directors.

We have by-laws that spell out the term of a Director and how they are to be replaced and/or elected. We will be opening a new Board member position up for members to nominate and then vote in. This will happen in 2004. Another Board member will be added from UK/Europe by London SES in June. This person will be appointed by the current Board based on their ability to mobilize volunteers to carry out the SEMPO mission in Europe.

The by-laws will be available to all members by the end of April (the SEMPO, Inc. year end) but will not be posted electronically. Not sure yet how we will handle requests for seeing the by-laws but we will figure it out by April 30, 2004.

Current forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

I am the type of person that refuses to sell anything where there is not a 100% guarantee on deliverables. That is why I keep telling people that I do not offer pure SEO services. If someone wants a site that will rank well in search engines for a broad range of keywords, if someone wants a site that will convert visitors to buyers, is someone wants a site that is easy to maintain - then they can call me. But if they want to rank well for a specific keyword phrase, just for the purpose of ranking well for that keyword phrase, then call AdWords or Overture. Can I, or other SEOs, rank a site well in the natural results for a specific and competitive keyword? Of course. But will it last? Probably but not guaranteed.

I play my own games, have my own challenges to rank my site well for extremely competitive keywords. I do fairly well. But what I get a kick out is giving clients (and myself) the ability to rank well for any keyword phrase they might think of in the middle of the night. The client can login to his or her backend, create a new page and possibly in a few days, the site will rank well for that new page. This blog received traffic from over 4,000 different keyword terms this month. Why target one term when you can target very specific and actionable keyword phrases. As I said above, I do play my games and I do rank well for some very competitive terms.

Anyway, enough about me. This post is all about a thread over at HighRankings, where a member asked this question. "I have a prospect who would like a proposal for SEO. They want to be on page one of Google for outdoor furniture (4.5 million) and casual furniture (1.9 million)."

The responses are, dare I say it, ethical. Ethical in terms of showing the client that targeting one or two keyword phrases might not be the best avenue for long term success. Of course one can give a money back guarantee - which works well. But why not include those two competitive phrases plus 4,000 other phrases for the client?

One member brings up the analogy of a doctor's services:

You walk into a doctor's office, say to him, 'Doc I am in real pain, I mean REAL pain. I have seen 3 pain specialists, and they have all charged me lots and failed. Can you guarantee that I will not feel this pain anymore?'

Doc says yep, $50,000 in cash in advance.

Jill Whalen chimes in with her advice, and I agree completely, "you should never take on a campaign where they only want a couple of phrases."

According to the folks over at WebmasterWorld MSN is advertising the "new look" for the old search technology at http://search.msn.com/. I wonder if Google will do the same with gmail. I logged into my hotmail account but it was overflowed with junk mail that did not allow me to receive new mail since (who knows when). I did not see the ad in my hotmail account because there was no room. But Andy Beal posted a copy of the html ad in his blog.

They call MSNBC Newsbot "a new way to find news", doesn't Google have something called Google News. Anyway, forum coverage at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

The MSNBC Newsbot (beta), powered by MSN Search Technology, is an experimental, automated news service. Newsbot gathers news from over 4,800 sources on the Internet to speed your discovery of the information you care about most. Enter a topic, interest, or news story you want to learn more about and MSNBC Newsbot will bring you up-to-the-minute coverage from around the Internet. Newsbot is built on advanced computer algorithms to determine which stories and photos are most relevant, most popular, and to recommend stories to individual readers based on their interests.

I was doing my normal forum browsing and this caught my eye. A post at Cre8asite Forums had this neat little affect on this word. When you mouse over it, it tells you that there is a link from the word to the Cre8asite glossary. Nice usability touch, guys.

At first, I thought gmail took away my last invite (I am saving it for a special someone). But then Marcia, in this thread at Search Engine Watch pointed out that the invites were still there, but just available as a link within the email.

GmailRep at Search Engine Watch then added, "Now the invite a friend link is on the left side, underneath your labels in blue. This link will also appear in red at the bottom of a message from a non-Gmail address next to the reply links."

This was first reported to me by one of the major forum owners. He told me that it seemed that Google was sending him 3 - 4 times the amount of traffic then what was of the norm. Later on he found the source was a virus:

The latest version of MyDoom, which started arriving in peoples mail boxes in force today, uses search eninges to find more recipients for its message.

Once the virus is started, it searched the users files for domain names. Once it spotted a domain name (e.g. '@example.com', or in '(Link: (Link: www.example.com')www.example.com')(Link: www.example.com')www.example.com'), it will search various search engines for valid e-mail addresses within these domains. These search engines include Lycos, Google, Altavista, Yahoo and possibly others. Some of the search strings used:

GET /default.asp?lpv=1&loc=searchhp&tab=web&query=e-mail+example.com

Some search engines report performance issues.

Antivirus vendors are currently publishing updated signature files. Please update ASAP. Infected machines can be identified by looking for excessive traffic to search engines and smtp traffic.

Search engines, such as Google, were reported to have been down. Articles by ZDNet were posted, Andy Beal posted a screen shot, and the folks over at SlashDot are discussing.

Forum coverage:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• SEO Chat
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• JimWorld
  
• V7 Forums
  
• HighRankings
  
• IHelpYou
  
• DigitalPoint Forum
  
• SEO Guys Forum
  

Experienced SEO forum members see it all the time. New posters who are new to the SEO world often join forums based on the fear of something that turns out to be the "Google Flux." A Webmaster launches a new Web site on day 1. On day 5, you can find the site in the Google index. On day 6, the site is gone. The Webmaster runs to the forums looking for advice and answers to why his/her new site was banned from Google. The common answer by a warm friendly and experienced SEO forum member:

Please do not panic. What you are experiencing is something known as the Google Flux. Often new sites and pages are included in the Google index and then dropped soon after. Don't worry, the pages will start to reappear soon.

And they do. Here is one of a thousand cases at WebamsterWorld.

Before calling a prospect that I never spoke with before, I look up to see where this person is located geographically. Normally, the leads I get are from the United States, so I look up the area code of the phone number to find out what time zone they are in. I do this ever now and then, but this time I tried to go with the invisible tabs approach.

I knew Yahoo! improved this just recently, so I did a search on the area code 507 at Yahoo!.

Now that was easy, I gave the prospect a call. Unfortunately, they are closed on Mondays. :)

So then I travelled over to Google to see what they are in the form of zip code look up. Keep in mind, I am just searching on 507 with no special prefix or special tab.

Not as pretty, but Google also gave me the information I was looking for without jumping through hoops.

Ok, now for my buddy Ask Jeeves. I thought it was a no brainer. Ask Jeeves is the leader in this type of stuff. Conducting a search at Ask on 507 did not, I repeat, did not, give me the information I wanted right on the search page. What happened to Ask Jeeves Search Smarter motto?

Question A. Ever do a search in Google with the default 10 results shown on a page, and then switch the default to something else? If yes, then move to question B.

Question B. Did you ever notice that ones rankings can change a few placements from depending on the requested number of results per page?

A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses just that. valeyard in msg # 3 sums this up perfectly, and GoogleGuy in msg # 5 backs these statements up.

Example: let's say you do a search with "num=10". The results on page one are:

Site A
Site B
Site C - page 1
...Site C - page 2
Site D - page 1
...Site D - page 2
Site E
Site F
YOUR SITE
Site G

So your site is #9.

Now imagine setting num=5. The first page is now:

Site A
Site B
Site C - page 1
...Site C - page 2
Site D - page 1

It makes no sense to have the second page from site D indented at the top of page two, so page 2 is:

Site E
Site F
YOUR SITE
Site G
Site H

Hey presto! Your site has jumped to position 8.

The lower the value of "num" the more chance of indented pages being cut off like this - which seems to fit what you're seeing.

You know what I am talking about, those emails you get throughout the day, the pop ups you see, and the big flashing banners ads found across the Web. they are all shouting the same message; "Submit your site to 1,000 search engines!"

A member over at Search Engine Watch asked if these submissions are worthwhile. The response. Absolutely not.

Besides for the fact that most automated submission services are in violation of the search engine's terms of service, the search engines prefer to crawl the natural Web and find new pages naturally. I personally never submit sites to search engines. I just place a link on a page that is already indexed well, and presto, soon after the new site and its pages are also found in the search engine. This process is faster, more effective and more ethically sound then the automated submission services.

One more thing, as Marcia points out in this thread. "Besides, submission won't do anything for a site unless it's properly optimized - which is not rocket science, it just takes spending some time learning."

Google's legal staff basically has a revolving door to and from the court room. Two more widely discussed legal events are unfolding for Google. The first is the case of Age Discrimination at Google and the second is Google's Challenge of 'Froogles' Rejected (which was kind of expected). Now for the forum coverage:

Age Discrimination:
- WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Watch
- Cre8asite Forums

Froogle Versus Froogles:
- WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Watch

This was to funny not to mention here, although I do not like to cover the same thing andy mentions. There is forum discussion on it at search engine watch.

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I promised I would write on this for a reader. So here it is. Looks interesting, but I did not have time to play with it.

Spurl.net is a kind of "search engine meets bookmarking" application - where users can store, search and share their online findings.

Spurl.net allows users to keep track of all the interesting and useful content they find online and then - at any time - do a full text search in all the marked content. This helps users find again information they've previously searched for and quickly becomes a great productivity tool for its users.

While this is the main function of the application, it also serves as a fully featured online bookmarking application, making a users bookmarks (and thereby the searching ability) available from any internet connected computer.

Spurl.net also makes use of the fact that thousands of users are using the system and can recommend pages by matching user profiles, point to related pages and show everybody what's hot within the Spurl community at any time.

Marking a page (or "spurling" it, as it is called), is done with a single click of a button, popping up a window where users can optionally categorize the page and enter a range of information about it to later help them find it again.

As so many people spend much of their time in work and play online, Spurl.net helps users manage their media consumption and keep track of the useful bits in the information overload.

A thread at Cre8asite Forums named How do you prepare clients for reality of SEO? discusses the challenges associated with the education and reality of achieving success with a Web site venture. The topic creator says "They launched their site which is in a very competitive market, and wondered why they weren't on the top page."

The responses can in quick from some top notch search engine marketers.

Ammon Johns said: "I never assume that a client will know anything that I don't tell them. Even if they do know some of the things, a refresher is always useful so long as it is kept informative and interesting." That is probably the first mistake some SEO companies make.

Barry Weldford: "I always find it useful to look at how the competition is doing. Are there particular competitors who are doing better in the SERP's? If so how are they stronger than your client? One proviso before you do a lot of work is to remember that it takes a month or two for even Google, which is the fastest of the majors, to find and index your website." Without a competitive analysis how do you know what is needed to achieve success in your rankings? You need to set targets and do your best to meet them. Without targets that are reachable, there will always be problems.

As one member said "Educating the consumer can be a daunting task - especially when there are some uneducated website designers that still believe in Field of Dreams web site marketing - "If you build it, they will come"."

Most of us reading this spend a lot of time in the forums, reading, posting and occasionally joking around. As more and more forums spring up on the topic of SEM and SEO, it becomes more challenging to find good threads. This entry is a plea to those who post threads, to make sure to post in the right forum and with a full and descriptive title. Here are some guidelines I follow when posting and I hope you do as well.

(1) Post in the relevant forum: There are some forums where everyone posts any topic in the Google forum. So even if it is on how MSN is a growing star, the poster will place it in the Google forum so it can be seen by more eyes. Please don't! Please post the topic in the most relevant forum possible.

(2) Use descriptive titles: How often do you see threads with the title "Read This!" or "Click Here...". I can tell you, I never read those threads, do you? Please be descriptive in your title. If its a good topic and the description is well written, you will not only get a lot of clicks from forum readers but Google will rank the thread well in a few weeks.

(3) Be specific: Some forums do not allow specific examples and some do. If possible, try to post specific examples of a case that you have seen. If your not allowed to do so, then post generic examples in a detailed manner so that one can follow your theory or questions.

(4) Discuss the topic, not the person posting: By focusing on the subject, and not the personality of the person behind the words, it keeps the discussion from blowing up into a personal fight. Plus, if the discussion is a big cat fight, I can not reference it here.

This is turning into a good post, I intend on updating this over time. If you follow the guidelines above, I believe, your posts will be read more often and receive better feedback and coverage.

Updated: Check out the forum thread at Cre8asite based on this post named Forum Posting Guidelines :: Some useful tips for you, a must read!

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Still using GMail? has posts by gmail users that talk about whether or not gmail is still as hot as it was when it was first release. The thread creator said "Now that the hype around gmail has died down, are we still using GMail? I used it for a while, sent out some invites to friends, now i don't use it at all anymore."

Here are some of the responses:

Gmail is refreshing. It's just like chat window.

I'm still using it at the moment.

I think i'll be using it for a long time.

Gmail beats any other service hands down IMO (and it's in beta!).

Got the invite but never used it.

I redirect all my email from several other email accounts for storage and lightning fast search.

I personally use it for spam or communication about gmail invites. Since I use a laptop and my pop server has a Web based mail version (if needed), and since I have unlimited space at my domain name, I do not use gmail that often.

Okay, the Earth may only be shaking quietly right now, but just wait. This is the biggest news in SEO all year. If anyone wants to argue with that, tough.

Trellian has just released the beta version of their keyword research database / tool. Their database includes over 9 billion search terms, and a full year's worth of history.

Yes, a full year's worth of history, so you can see how many people searched for "chocolate bunny rabbit" in March, or "college football picks" in September. Seasonality is finally, at long last, no longer the biggest problem in keyword research.

Everyone wave your hands in the air and say, "Thanks, Trellian!" Currently, access to the tool is free, but you do have to register (free) for a PrioritySubmit account. I'm so happy I might even pay to have a URL included somewhere!

Since the last Google update on July 16th, SEOs have been scrambling to understand what is going on with the weird link: query results. We now have a little more insight into what is going on over at Google. As the title of this entry reads, Google has defused the ability to Google Bomb a site. Well, in some cases. Here is how it works.

Danny Sullivan provided some really great detail on this theory at a thread he named Change To Link Bomb Sign Of New Link Analysis Shift?, where he discusses an email he received from Daniel Brandt of Google Watch.

The basic premise of Danny's post, to my understanding, is that a Google Bomb is only effective when one of the words within the anchor text is found on the page copy. For example, 100 pages with the keyword text "Google Bomb" point to www.abc.com/page1.html. If the page does not contain the text "Google" or "Bomb" in the page copy, then the Google Bomb will be ineffective. But if one of the two keywords are present in the copy, then the Google Bomb would work. Before the Google update of July 16th, the keywords did not have to be found within the page copy to successfully rank well.

Check out the thread at the Search Engine Watch Forums for more detail and history.

Do you find yourself unsatisfied with Yahoo!? Is Yahoo! underperforming for you? While other search partners like Google have put smiles on your face, Yahoo! has been holding back.

Many webmasters are complaining that Yahoo! Search is only bringing in a small fraction of their search traffic. This site on average obtains less then 10% of its organic search traffic from Yahoo!, which is nothing compared to Google which provides over 70%. A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses just that. People are feeling betrayed by the large search engine.

So what can you do to spice up your relationship with Yahoo! Search? Well, maybe you should buy Yahoo! little gifts; bring home roses, maybe take Yahoo! out to dinner, or take a walk on the beach. As one member said "Yahoo does a terrible job crawling. They want you to pay them for inclusion instead."

Yea, that is right, you read the title correctly. Support services for the free, natural, organic results. Not that many search engines have strong support for natural search, but if they did, what would you like to see improved. That is the question Danny Sullivan is asking in his thread named What Organic Search Support Services Would You Want?.

Danny Sullivan said, any "other ideas on support services you'd like to see? I have a series of search engine visits next week, so I'd like to float a bunch of ideas." Some of the ideas already covered include:

• Notification as to when algorithms change
  
• Inform the Webmaster of what the search engine do not use in the ranking algorithm
  
• "Express Spam Report"
  

Today I had the privilege to ask Kim Krause, the owner of Cre8asite Forums and founder of Cre8pc, a few questions. Kim runs a popular and well-respected forum at Creasiteforums.com. The forum is often referenced in this site and Kim stops by on occasion to share some of her thoughts on SEO and usability. Kim's current focus in the search engine-marketing world is bridging the gap between the seo world and the usability world. She is a known advocate to improve search visibility in order to convert that searcher to a buyer (or a desired action). So if we may, let's get to the interview.

[Roundtable:] Kim, I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions about your forum, your services and your professional goals. Since this site is about forum coverage, can you give us some insight into why you started cre8asiteforums?

[Kim Krause:] Thank you, Barry, for considering me as an interviewee, and for your coverage of happenings at Cre8asiteForums. All of us at the forums appreciate your efforts and kind support.

Cre8asiteForums was once known as the Cre8pc Web Site Promotion club, which I launched in 1998 using the free club access provided by Yahoo!. Back then, I was working in web design and freelancing from home in search engine optimization. My target market was home and small business owners. I have a strong passion for them because many have little or no budget, but deserved a chance to get into search engines without being ripped off. Whatever I learned from my work, or from testing methods for the companies I worked for, I shared in that club.

When Yahoo! bought E-Groups (or whatever they were called) and changed their format from Clubs to Groups, we club owners lost certain control. For example, the unwanted advertisements that now interfered with posts. I also co-moderated a Home and Small Business Club, owned by Carol Daly of Creative Enterprises as well. Her group is flourishing and I'm still a contributor there because the needs of small businesses interest me.

In addition to the Yahoo! Group involvement, I frequented other SEO or marketing forums, and got to know people and the forum owners. From my Cre8pc Club, I met Bill Slawski (aka bragadocchio), now an Administrator for Cre8asite Forums. Mick Hansen (aka Mick), now a Moderator for Cre8asite, was also a member. At the time he joined, he was still living in Denmark and was about 15 years old. Adrian Lee (aka Adrian), also a Moderator at Cre8asite, was a long-time member of the Cre8pc club too. Those guys, plus a woman who was a member and later became a Cre8asite Moderator (no longer with Cre8asite), essentially kept things going when I needed a break and were keen to expand the forums when it was finally rolled into a Php based forum in August 2002. By this time Jill Whalen was contributing the Club. It was no longer Kim's little SEO club, but was ready for prime time. Club member Phil Craven (who now has his own forum), had the skills necessary to pull it off, and suggested taking the Club to true a forums format. We said we'd give it a try. Our beginnings were quite humble and there was no plan in place.

[Roundtable:] Looking down the list of forum moderators and administrators, I see that you have successfully enlisted a talented and well-known set of professionals in the SEM/SEO field. How did you get such great volunteers to help out in the forums? Did you have to reach out and ask them or did they come on their own?

Continue reading "Interview with Kim Krause, Usability and SEO Legend & Expert of Cre8PC.com"

I recently had the privilege of welcoming the Gmail Rep to the Search Engine Watch Forums. In my Welcome GmailRep thread, I decided to ask the question; how do Gmail invites work? Specifically, how does Google decide the 'who, when and how many' in sending gmail invites to gmail account users and non gmail account users.

As expected, the answer had to be somewhat vague (don't get me wrong, I do not blame Mr. GmailRep). The answer from the official Gmail representative was (and I quote) "invitations are provided to Gmail users on a random basis. Some users may receive more invitations than others and the invitation process sort of ebbs and flows."

If anyone has more information or has seen any pattern to this "random basis", I would be interested. I have a feeling the invite algorithm is fairly simple at the present time, but for some reason, I want to know. :)

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Early in my interests in SEO I learned something about the "popularity component" that is built into most search engines. Within the "popularity component" was, of course, the number and quality of links pointing to your site but in addition, there was the idea that CTR (click-through rates) was a metric used by the search engines to rank pages naturally in the free results.

A thread at HighRankings brings this memory back to me. Since then, I have not considered that Google or other popular engines use CTR to rank sites in the free results. Pretty much all the well known search engine optimization figures say that no major search engines uses such a factor in ranking. However, some speculate that some of the smaller engines use it.

Interesting how we remember things like this, if I am correct, the book that had this was Shari Thurow's Search Engine Visibility.

Have you ever run a campaign and let a keyword perform so badly that the keyword was disabled? Many people who deal with AdWords had this happen to them at least one time. So what can you do to re-enable a disabled keyword in the Google AdWords program? This was the topic of a forum thread at Search Engine Watch.

The Google AdWordsRep at SEW Forums had this advice:

* First delete the keyword everywhere it occurs in your account. If it is disabled in one place, it will be disabled everywhere it occurs. And if you don't delete them all, then it is still disabled - and you won't have success re-using it.

* Re-use the keyword in a new Ad Group. Consider following Mikkel deMib Svendsen's advice about making it a "phrase match" or [exact match] if was broad matched before.

* Ideally, your 'problem keyword' would be the only keyword in the new Ad Group (other than negatives).

* If the keyword is broad matched or "phrase matched" then use negative keywords to your advantage, to prevent your ad from showing for searches that are not relevant to what you offer.

* Shop for negative keywords in the first 100 or so search results for that keyword. (Or more, if you have the time and patience. )

* Write the best possible ad that is about exactly the same thing as the keyword.

* Consider putting the keyword in the ad's headline, while keeping in mind Mikkel deMib Svendsen's advice. At the very least, make sure the headline is clearly about the same thing as the keyword.

Using these tips, and Mikkel deMib Svendsen's, you'll have your best shot at recovering a problem keyword.

For Mikkel deMib Svendsen's post, please click here.

If your in the SEO world, you are bound to know the name "Digital Point". Digital Point, the company, has built several tools that have helped revolutionize the SEO World. All of these tools are free and available at Digital Point's SEO Tools page. The founder of Digital Point is Shawn Hogan, an honest, good and giving person. I am pretty sure his first SEO tool was his Keyword Tracker tool that is used by almost every SEO I know. Shawn has also set up a forum based on supporting these tools.

Shawn was kind enough to allow me to ask him a few questions about his tools, his forum and himself. We hope to be interviewing more well known forum leaders, tool builders and SEO specialists in the near future. Continue reading to see the interview...

Continue reading "Interview with Shawn Hogan of Digital Point"

In a thread at WebmasterWorld created by an official Yahoo! representative named Yahoo_Mike, he says:

I’m not certain if folks here have seen Forrester’s recent Consumer Technographics Survey, but it cites some interesting stats on Yahoo! vs. Google search. According to the survey, Yahoo! Search and Google are at a draw – personalization, presentation and quality of service are considered the big differentiators now, with the nod ultimately going to Yahoo! Search. PC World cites the survey’s findings. While this is great validation, I think we also recognize the fact that we still have a lot to accomplish and we’re working really hard to make improvements to our services and more important, address the issues and concerns identified on this forum and others. Much more to come in the weeks and months ahead.

Surprised? So are most the WebmasterWorld members. In fact, the report is not yet available as Yahoo_Mike states, "at the moment the Forrester research is for Forrester clients, but hopefully they'll release something on this publicly soon."

So we will have to wait and see.

Why do some Google AdWords ads show at the top of the Google search results and some show only on the right? This question was the first question asked and answered to the AdWordsRep at the Search Engine Watch forums.

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The AdWordsRep further clarifies:

Ads on the right are positioned by virtue of two factors, measured equally. These factors are Maximum CPC and CTR. Max CPC x CTR = your rank number. And it is your rank number as compared to your competitors rank numbers that determines position.

Ads going to the top, however, weigh CTR (which is a measure of the relevance of your ads to users) more heavily than CPC. And rather than Maximum CPC, it is the actual CPC that matters.

More abnormal events arising from this past Google update. I have heard several reports in the forums and via email on sites where the home page's PageRank value has been knocked down to zero but the inner page PageRank values of the same site have remained constant.

There is some forum coverage on this currently taking place at SearchEngineWatch Forums, I will try to find out more information over this week.

[added]Here is a new thread at SEO Chat on this exact topic.[/added]

As the SEO field grows, more and more people are fascinated by link building strategies. I sometimes dream of complex linking strategies (just kidding). Link building and how search engines look at the links pointing to a page is an exciting and mystical topic of discussion.

For this reason, I have decided to start an interviewing process, where I select fairly well known link specialists to interview. Jim Boykin, of We Build Pages, is the first link building specialist I have asked for an Interview. So, let's get right into it.

[Roundtable]: Jim, I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions about link building strategies. Shall we proceed?

[Jim Boykin]: Go ahead Barry, I'm Feeling Lucky!

[Roundtable]: Ha ha... So Jim, let us first tell the public about yourself. How did you get into this business? Tell us a little bit about your history and what led you to where you are today.

[Jim Boykin]: I was always a computer geek. I was the first kid in elementary school to touch our school's first computer (thinking around 1978). In college I worked as a consultant in the computer lab. I left college in 1993, and traveled around the country (USA) for five years - never seeing a computer from 1993 until early 1999.

Early in 1999 I purchased a computer, and my world has never been the same again!!! My first thought was, "What's this language?, I gotta do this!" I learned basic HTML in a few days. About a week later I purchased webuildpages.com and within a few days I had my first website live. Two weeks later, I received a call from a company in Atlanta Georgia (I'm from Northern New York), asking if I could build them a web site. I asked how they had found me, and the response was they searched in AltaVista for "Build Web Pages" where I had ranked high (by accident because of my company name). That is what started me thinking about optimization, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since!

When I started my business I attended every local networking meeting, and praised the values of having a website and internet marketing, and I picked up some local clients along the way. During 2001 and 2002 I worked for a few local design firms as their "Internet Marketing Specialist".

I wanted to work for a company that made internet marketing priority 1, so, I decided to go "solo", and back to my own business of We Build Pages. I specifically targeted the phrase "Internet Marketing", and 3 months later, with a little luck, I had achieved a #4 ranking in Google, and was lucky enough to stay in the top 10 for a year and a half.

When we hit #4 my life again changed forever. We Build Pages had grown from 1 to around 10 employees within a year, and my job role had transformed into being "Sales Manager", "Team Leader", "Lead Researcher", "Business Planner", "Idea Guy", "Trainer" along with a handful of other roles.

[Roundtable]: Jim, as you know, there are dozens of link exchange and brokerage Web sites out there. What are your feelings about link exchanges and these type of Web sites? Would you ever participate in one of these programs? What would you tell a novice link builder to watch out for when participating in these programs?

[Jim Boykin]: In the past we've been heavily involved in trading links, and have managed link exchange programs on over 150 PR7+ sites. Our programs and pages have gone through a few changes. There is a value to link exchange, but it may not be much today. I also believe in finding one way links. It's one thing to get 200 link trades, and another thing to get 50 one way links to your sites from 50 sites. I believe one way links are much more valuable than link trades.

A few years ago link trading was the "in" thing. The ole "You link to me, I link to you, and we both benefit" was a game that got overplayed, and Google seemed to react to it. I know many pages where links out seemed not to count on pages named "links.html" or had the word "links" in the title tag of a page, or if a page had the word "links" in a text link linking to a page. It wasn't and isn't always the case that those links wouldn't count.....but I'm guessing that Google sees what percent of your links are reciprocal, and if it is above a certain percentage, then a filter might go into effect.

Link Brokers...

Well, there's certainly a market for high value advertising on other sites. Some brokers hold auctions that are a bit of a gamble, because often the exact URL's are kept secret and only given to the paid winning bidder. Another danger is if you win an auction, you may find your link sandwiched between links for Viagra and online gambling, and it seems like things like this may throw red flags when found on sites that are completely non-related, and often have their PR blocked from passing. If your link is found on a site like this, then you could find the eyes of engines reviewing Your site as well. Link Brokers can be good...but there can be risks with buying what you don't know what link you're buying. PR is not everything.

If you have a good relationship with a broker, you can often hear of new opportunities or totally relevant opportunities and know the URL before paying. If you use your broker right, they can be a good friend to those with a competitive market.

Much of the brokered links are "site wide" links, and these may cause attention....again, like link trades, I think it's a Ratio that may throw filters. A site with only 10 links, but from 10 different sites, will often do better than the site with 1000 links but only from 5 sites. Buying a bunch of site-wide links isn't always the answer.

In my opinion the guy with 10 "really relevant" links to a site can beat the guy with 100 non relevant links, and I see this often in search results today.

Many SEO's, including myself, are very cautious in their linking actions. Once you've been hit, or seen others hit, you tend to treat your sites with more care, and that often means "going underground", even if your intentions are "white hat". I think that just recently the SEO world is starting to admit that link advertising is real, and being aggressive on links is not in itself "black hat".

Still, everyone sees sites that have been penalized, either by gray bars or by not passing PageRank. Many of the best SEO's are very quiet about how they get links for the fear of being considered "overly aggressive" by Google.

We've changed our linking techniques a few times over the years, and are constantly experimenting with different tools, and expanding our repertoire of techniques. We have seen the ups and downs of linking campaigns. We've been know to be aggressive about our linking campaigns, but today we're trying to get it down to a "science". I've seen the hand of Google come down on sites before, so a lot of what we do today is geared towards making linking appear to be as natural as possible. In today's changing SEO world, the engines are getting smarter at analyzing links, and are sure to continue to improve their analysis of back links.

[Roundtable]: There has been a lot of discussion lately about how links from related Web pages are more valuable than links from Web pages off topic to your page. Do you find this to be true from strictly a link building standpoint?

[Jim Boykin]: I do believe that links from related places help more than links from non-related places. That's not to say that links from non-related places hurt you, or don't help, just that sites that link to you that Google finds relevant to your site, may count for more.

In the papers that were filed with the Securities and Exchange for Google's Public offering, on one page, there is an interesting line: "Many other aspects of a page's content are factored into the equation, as is the content of pages that link to the page in question." I believe Google is moving more towards that goal every day.

[Roundtable]: Not too long ago, I wrote a small entry on Pyramid Linking Strategies, and how linking from page A to page B and then from page B and page A is not recommended on a large scale. Would you be able to expand on that theory from an application stand point? In other words, has your experience shown to prove this theory right and what is the limit of direct link swaps that you feel comfortable with?

[Jim Boykin]: I found that an interesting read. I don't agree with everything that person seems to be doing, but I can understand some of the reasoning behind it. There are creative ways to go about link exchanging. This seems to be one creative method.

Creating directories for each client's site also seems like a lot of work. Perhaps he should look more at making sure his clients' sites link out to related sites in related "neighborhoods", as opposed to creating other sites that do that.

[Roundtable]: An other popular topic in the link building realm of SEO is something nicknamed "hoarding one's PageRank". In layman's terms, there is the belief that not linking out from one's page can't hurt your rankings. What are your thoughts on this theory?

[Jim Boykin]: I think that linking out to other sites is one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO. I really believe that "dead end" sites don't perform nearly as well as sites that link out to other related sites. Linking out to non-related sites might put you in the wrong neighborhoods, but, I believe, that linking to authority sites, or related sites can help your rankings. I'm sure that places like Google not only take into account "who links to you", but also "who you link to". In the "olden days" there was a trick to ranking high in Inktomi by linking out to the authority sites in your industry...that even counted more than who linked to you...I think this still plays a small factor in ranking, but most seem to ignore this aspect. I say: "Link out, and link out related "hoarding one's PageRank" is just not wise in my opinion.

[Roundtable]: In your opinion, which sites are the best for one to get links from? What I mean by best is; what are the easiest links to obtain, the most important links to obtain and the most basic links to obtain?

[Jim Boykin]: I believe that getting links from related sites are the best links to get. I won't say sites with the higher PR are better. I'd take a link from a relevant PR6 page over a huge PR8 link that has nothing in common with my site.

[Roundtable]: Since this site is mostly about forum coverage, let me ask you about your feelings on the different forums out there? I would expect that you spend some time reading the forums, which ones do you like the best and why? Also, why don't you post often at these forums?

[Jim Boykin]: I'm probably guilty of spending too much time in the forums when I should be doing other things. I probably stop in a forum every few hours, and probably read forums for about 2 hours total each day.

I started in Jim's World, at the ole www.searchengineforums.com site. Jim Wilson was the true pioneer of SEO Forums. Many of the best in the industry owe their start to this man. I owe a great part of my early learning to this forum.

At some point I moved over to Webmasterworld, and I would hang out in the GoogleForum (3) all the time. Back when Google Dances meant huge ranking shifts, there'd be threads that were so many pages, and getting updated so often that it would be humanly impossible to read every single post. I've since shifted over to hanging out almost exclusively in the "Supporters Forum" to get away from the "noise" of "me too" posts. Brett's Webmasterworld Conferences are a favorite of mine as well. I've never been to better "meeting of the minds" than at these conferences.

I've also been reading SEO Chat on a daily basis since its inception. I was the second member of SEO Chat, (Darin Ward being the first). For several months I was trying to get Darin to work at We Build Pages (And bring his Google Dance Tool and SEO Chat to We Build Pages), but the traveling itch got to him, and next thing I knew he was offering me a deal to buy the Dance Tool and SEO Chat from him. At the time, I was saving up to adopt a baby, so I couldn't afford his nice offer, and the following week he sold it to DevShed.

Also, at least once a week I pop into other forums to see what's being discussed there. Some of my other favorites are John Scott's forum (now at V7N.com). There's not much noise, just good posts by some very knowledgeable people. Some of the top minds in the field are "hiding out" there. Every now and then I also check out Jill Whalen's forum, and I keep my eye on Seo-Guy's Forum as well. Darrin Ward just started another forum at www.seotown.com where I think there is great potential as well.

I think the big forum to keep our eyes on is the new Search Engine Watch Forum. Already I've picked up some great internet marketing news, found here first. No ones got connections and insight like Danny Sullivan. I think I saw that you were a Mod there as well Barry, Congrats!

Ah, and why don't I post often???? .....I guess I'm not good at forum communication. I tend to have IM chats each day with many forum moderators, and seem to be much better one on one, rather than being part of a larger conversation. I also try to say under the radar, and to be honest, often don't have much to add. I'm a better listener than a talker sometimes. I did post the other day to announce that the PR and backlinks were updating :)

[Roundtable]: Jim, I would like to thank you for being so gracious in answering my questions. Before you go, can you spend a minute just describing your current business offerings and what makes you feel that link building is the most important area in SEO (if not the most important, then one of the most important)?

[Jim Boykin]: Well, I'm pretty sure that most people realize that link building is the most important aspect of any optimization campaign. I don't even consider that debatable. At We Build Pages, we usually start with a complete analysis of keywords and competition. We then perform on-page optimization, and follow that up with an aggressive link building campaign. After the first month, 95% of the work we perform for clients is involved in getting links, links, and more links.

Jim Boykin
CEO, We Build Pages
www.webuildpages.com

I'll warn you, it is a long post, but its worth reading every word. The post can be found in post #23 in a thread named An SEM Code Of Conduct? where the industry discusses forming a new code of conduct to comply with. Bruce Clay was one of the first to come out with a "personal" SEO Code of Ethics which was published a long time ago on his Web site. Now its time to move forward, please take the time to read the whole post here, I will quote a few passages from the post below.

The web is emerging from the "wild west" stage into a period of accountability, and with that comes the dissenting vocal minority that want to argue against change.

We need action by a group that has contributors and supporters not afraid of loud dissenters. Many people see the need for change, yet many leaders are hesitant to incur the potential wrath of the underworld.

The basic theme of my personal Code of Conduct is to avoid deceptive practices at all costs.

Google has been using geotargetting technology for awhile now, but today I noticed that the AdWords ads being displayed when you search Google, will sometimes have an extra line that shows the city and state (or sometimes just the state). A search of western union shows the following for me (notice the last line on the ad since I'm in California):

Also, a generic search of web deisgn yields the following ads.

Blah, blah about it over here.

The July 2004 Google update has brought up a new myth that needs to be squashed right now. First let me start with a brief background on why this came out.

Google updated the backlinks a few days ago, those backlinks seem to be missing a page's most "valued" links (i.e. Yahoo Directory, DMOZ and others). Many page's backlinks jumped to two or three times the number, some remained constant and some were lower. People are upset, afraid, nervous and confused. The only valid emotional response for this update would be confused. There is no reason to be upset, afraid or nervous because most rankings have remained constant.

Its critical to point out that the rankings have, for the most part, remained where they are for most keyword phrases. Because the link query in Google is showing weird (spammy) backlinks, this does not mean that your link popularity is better or worse off. It, for sure, DOES NOT mean that Google is less relevant.

Google's results for ordinary keyword searches have been unaffected (as far as I have seen). The only real difference are the results returned for the link query, which does not (and should not) define relevancy.

Ever build a new site with hundreds of pages and come to notice that Google found a few hundred pages one day and the next, all those pages are missing from Google? Well, if you have, your not alone. A forum thread at WebmasterWorld is discussing just that.

As one forum member explains:

I waited months for my 3000 plus product pages to be indexed. Almost all were finally indexed about three months ago. Business was good. Now, google has dropped all but 414. Business is down. 100 of them dropped out today. Anyone else with this problem lately?

Supportive members ease the mind of this member:

Don't be too quick to panic. I had something similar happen a few weeks ago, but it had a happy ending. Over a period of a few days, hundreds of pages simply vanished from Google's index. I was busy with other things and didn't have time to try any tweaking. Two or three weeks later, with no action on my part, the pages began appearing in the SERPs again, and since then things have seemed normal.

Looking to build links the easy way? Submit yourself to directories. That is normally the first step in ones link building campaign. Then comes the other more advanced methods. So to get you started, visit DigitalPoint Forums on the directories (mostly free) that you can submit to and SEO Guys Forum.

The list includes:
http://www.dmoz.org/ (base page PR9)
http://dir.yahoo.com/ (base page PR9)
http://www.earthstation9.com (base page PR6, it uses frames, but it is SE friendly)
http://www.geniusfind.com/ (base page PR6)
http://www.re-quest.net/ (base PR6)
http://www.qango.com/ (base page PR6)
http://www.wowdirectory.com/ (base page PR6)
http://www.directoryarchives.com/ (base page PR6)
http://www.gimpsy.com/ (base page PR6)
http://www.smartlinks.org (base PR5)
http://www.josh.nu/ (base PR5)
http://www.blakkat.com/ (base PR5)
http://www.webworldindex.com/ (base page PR5)
http://www.yeandi.com/ (base page PR5)
http://www.turnpike.net/directory.phtml (base page PR5)
http://www.websavvy.cc/ (base page PR5)
http://www.webworldindex.com/ (base page PR5)
http://www.worldwidewub.org/ (base page PR4)
http://www.thedirectorysite.com/ (base page PR4)
http://www.seekon.com/ (base page PR3)

Sites from the mid 1990's that are rarely updated but seen as a resource at believed to have "grandfathered" the organic results. As of now, most of these pages are still valid, although not frequently update. The concern going forward, as mentioned in the WebmasterWorld thread named The Google age-factor is that these sites (in 10 or so years) will be inaccurate and have dozens of broken links. The member points out "there are many many "forgotten" pages ranking high in Google and they're holding back new sites and pages that aren't in the old loop of links, nor have the benefit of the educational site PageRank."

So what shall a search engine do? With PageRank and link popularity being so important, how do these pages that are so well established sift to the bottom of the results? One member responds, "Surely Google is thinking ahead and not simply reacting to complaints?" His reasoning, "I often get emails from a site that monitors millions of sites for broken links, so it can't be too hard for Google to do likewise (if they don't already)."

As new sites pop up and link equity for those pages increase, why can't those replace the old, outdated pages over time? Especially with the growth of the Internet and Web pages these days - I believe it would be achievable. In addition, as long as the pages linking to other pages are up and current, this problem should not continue. One thing is for certain, Google and the other search engine PhDs are thinking about this.

Have you seen July 16th's backlink update? Have you read any of the forum posts? Let me sum up what is going on by quoting a few forum posts and then outlining the theories. Don't you love these theories?

Post # 90 at WebmasterWorld: "Perhaps what we are seeing is the inverse backlink command. It's showing all the links you have that DON'T count."

Post # 5 at SEO Chat: ""Plus my overture ads that are running in Yahoo and on other sites are counted as BL. No kidding!"

Post # 12 at Search Engine Watch: "It appears to me that, for whatever reason, Google has flipped what it's showing. These are the backlinks that Google was not displaying before. I'm guessing that it doesn't represent a change in whatever backlinks Google is counting, but I've been wrong before."

Post # 83525 at HighRankings: "Stop looking and get on with your business. Who gives a how many links google shows in their link command? It doesn't mean a darn thing! Who cares what your PR is? It also doesn't mean anything"

About two weeks ago GoogleGuy posted at WebmasterWorld saying something to the affect that soon, Google will be displaying a more representative sample of a page's backlinks. This post was available at WebmasterWorld until just a few hours ago. The thread has been removed. See post # 122 at WMW.

So what is going on? Is it a glitch? Is Google showing a more representative sampling of a page's backlinks? Is Google irrelevant again? Is Google messing with us?

This past week was the first time I received an email by someone who was upset that I removed their comment from this blog. Plus earlier this week, one of the blog elite had set up his own weblog comment policy. So I thought I would follow suit and set one up for this blog. Keep in mind the commenting policy can change over time and will be updated here.

DO NOT:

1. post off-topic.
   
2. engage in personal attacks.
   
3. provide a URL to a non-topic-related Web page.
   
4. spam will be deleted

If a comment is posted that falls into any of the above categories (or close to them), I will delete them. If you repeat your comments, I will block you from posting comments at this blog. I have to protect myself, the authors and all those reading this blog.

Thank you for your cooperation.

The Google July backlink and PageRank update is complete. Hope you are happy with the update. Forum coverage roundup at:

• SearchEngineWatch
  
• SEO Chat
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• JimWorld
  
• HighRankings
  
• V7n
  
• IHelpYou
  
• SitePoint
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• SEO Guy Forums
  
• WebProWorld
  
• SEO Town
  
• LilEngine
  

I think that is enough forums for now. :)

I am writing this entry for one of my clients that tends to be a fairly novice Web user. Basically, I told him that he has to go out and ask his vendors and other sites to link to his Web site. But the client did not understand what a link means. I showed him by clicking on external sites that had a link to my Web site, he understood that. What he did not understand was how he asks people to get links. So I decided to write up a little thing on what is a Web link from a really non-techy point. I will then send a link to this write up, to my client's email address (kind of ironic).

First, lets look at the Google Dictionary definition of a Web link. "Clickable reference attached to highlighted words or an image that contains the URL (address) of a web document. Click the links to jump from page to page on the Internet."

The picture below shows four Web pages; page A in blue, page B in red, page C in green and page ME in black. Pages A, B and C are my client's friends, vendors or external sites that he will ask to link to his Web page named "ME" (the black box). He will email, call or fax these people who have Web sites, politely asking them to put a link on their pages to his Web page at http://www.mysite.com/.

The message you give to your friends, vendors or external sites who are willing to link to you is as follows. "Please place a link on your Web page or Web pages that have a link with keyword abc to my site at http://www.mysite.com/." Replace "keyword abc" with your sites main keyword phrase and replace "http://www.mysite.com/" with your Web page's address.

If they ask you for the code, use the following: <a href="http://www.mysite.com/">keyword abc</a>.

A few days ago, Google added a Browse by Name feature to its Google Toolbar. The feature basically allows you to enter in a name of a site and instead of taking you to the Web results, it does its best job to take you directly to the Web page. I have not tested it out, nor will I, but its out there and the forums are discussing at:

• HighRankings
• SearchEngineWatch
• WebmasterWorld

Lookout Software was purchased by Microsoft. This is what they do... "Built on top of a powerful search engine, Lookout is the only personal search engine that can search all of your email from directly within Outlook - in seconds..."

So Ask Jeeves purchased desktop search company Tukaroo, we know Google is working on something. So here we go.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

I was asked why Google does not display all of ones backlinks when doing the link: query on the SEO Radio show last Tuesday. I really did not have an answer, but it makes for a good topic. I did some forum searching and scavenging and found an interesting post.

At WebmasterWorld, GoogleGuy in msg # 10 says:

What I was trying to say earlier was that it would be good for smaller web sites (e.g. Mom and Pop sites that might not have tons of backlinks with a PageRank of 4 or higher) to be able to see some of their backlinks. There's a lot of interesting ways to show summary stats from a graph like web linkage, and I can see where a site that has backlinks with lower PageRank might want to see a few of their links as well.

In my experience, folks make two main mistakes about the backlinks we export. First, when they don't see a backlink in response to link: queries, they assume that link isn't counting. The fact is that internally we have complete copies of links we saw, but just don't show them all. The other mistake is to assume that just because we show a link in response to link: queries that it somehow counts more. Honestly, I wouldn't read that much into whether a particular link shows up in response to a link: command.

So why do they show link from page A but not from page B? Still no answer. But as I ventured to guess on the SEO Radio show, maybe Google doesn't want you to know some much about your "natural link" count. I'll stop there, you get my point.

Simple works best, so no complex numbers here. Just a picture and words.

PageRank is a number. If you put a link from page A to page B, page A will distribute PageRank to page B. Page A's PageRank does not get diluted by linking out, but the links are worth less, in terms of the value of the PageRank, when there are more links on the page A. In other words, the PageRank to the pages page A links to does get diluted but not the PageRank of page A itself.

For example, page A has 5 links and page B has 50 links. Both page A and B have the same PageRank value. The pages receiving links from page A, will get a higher PageRank value then pages receiving links from page B. Why? Because the PageRank of a page can only give off a distributed fraction of its own PageRank. So pages with less links on them, are more profitable in terms of PageRank building.

The picture below is from a Google Image search on "dilution". Its not meant to explain how PageRank is diluted from page to page (it was meant to explain bacterial growth dilution), but I think it works in our case of PageRank dilution.

On the left is the most concentrated form of a colored liquid. Then you see the concentration is diluted as you pan across to the right of the image. Think of these test tubes as pages and the colored liquid as PageRank. As links develop from page A to page B to page C and so on, the PageRank value of those links dilute from the original numeric value. Kind of similar to how dilution works with the image below.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Sorry to bring this up again, since its been beaten to death. However, I wanted to add something to this. Let's take a step back and look at what SEM firms do.

SEM firms take Web sites that are not ranking well in search engines and help them rank well. How they do it and the ethics behind that is covered in those other topics in the previous entry. What about the Web design and development firms? Are they to blame for not building a search engine friendly site?

My firm does not charge for SEO services. When we take on a job, we make sure to get the job done right. One of the job requirements for any publicly available site is to ensure the pages of the site are search engine friendly. We then empower the client to target any desired term they wish. Of course for the more competitive terms, link building is required, but that would be included as well.

We do not like to build out e-commerce sites that do not have the following:

• clear navigation
  
• search engine friendly design
  
• self maintainable backend solution
  
• order management
  
• 3rd party integration (accounting, shipping, credit cards, etc.)
  
• customer relationship management
  
• and more...

My point is, the SEM firms clean up the mess. Some do it better then others. But a problem in our industry (the web design and development industry) is that people build and sell poorly designed sites.

The topic of the past two weeks has been how to improve this industry's bar reputation. I have five different entries here covering subsets of this topic, they include:

• Is SEO a "Black Art"?
  
• Danny Sullivan's Response to Seth Godin
  
• The SEM Industry is Getting a Bad Rap
  
• SEO is Fake According to Google
  
• Spam Checking Tool

Jill Whalen last night came out with her High Rankings Advisor newsletter named "The Art of SEO - Issue No. 105" (will be available shortly here.) In this newsletter, Jill sums up her feelings on what needs to be done. Basically she says the SEOs must live up to a higher standard. Letting the customer know their are risks involved to achieve high rankings for a competitive keyword phrase is not acceptable. SEOs, professional SEOs, must achieve high rankings through the upmost ethical manner. Jill is proposing a set up standards that if accepted will form a group of SEOs, that I will call, SEO Angels.

I personally commend her passion for the industry and her efforts to improve the industry's reputation. Is this the solution? Discuss this at the SEW Forums.

Can you believe how much SEO Chat Forums has grown just over a couple of years? Over 6,000 members! There are not many SEM/SEO forums with 6,000 plus members. Great achievement SEO Chat.

Discuss this landmark at the SEO Chat Forums.

In the past if you did a search in Yahoo on "domain.com", for example seroundtable.com, it would bring up sites that include text with "seroundtable.com". Now it works more like the site:www.domain.com command, where it brings up all your pages for your site.

But if you miss the old way of looking up sites that have "mydomain.com" on the page copy, all you need to do is type domain.com -11111, for example: seroundtable.com -11111. Quotes work well too, i.e. "seroundtable.com".

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

Google has updated their privacy policy on the first of this month. The old privacy policy can be found in the privacy policy archive.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Imagine that, an army of bots that crawl the Web for pages that look to be spamming the search engines. This kind of makes me scratch my head and want to build this myself.

Some of the downsides or challenges:
- Would these bots need to comply with the robot.txt file? So if someone excludes "spam bot" can it crawl anyway?
- How is spam defined? I guess we can have some sort of level of spam and chart it from green to red. That can work (thinking out loud).
- If the search bots can't pick up the spam, then how can my army of spam bots pick them up? Do the spam bots need to wear camouflage? :)

This topic is currently being discussed over at the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last Tuesday on I was as a guest at SEO Radio. I had a good time and the host really knows his stuff. If you happened to have missed the show, you can hear the archives by clicking on the segments below:

• Segment One: RustyBrick, Industry and Tools
• Segment Two: MSN's Future, SEO Forums and SERoundtable
• Segment Three: Link Building, Teoma and other

During my daily blog reading, I noticed Andy Beal posted on the topic of Google not recognizing SEOs. Andy reluctantly went to the AD:TECH conference where someone asked "Patrick Keane [Google Rep] about whether SEO companies can really help a company to get better positioning on Google and the search engines."

"Patrick basically replied that there is no way to improve your rankings on Google and that any claims by a SEO company were false."

BAMB! OUCH! Just like the Batman cartoon had when they socked it to the evil predators. Is the SEO industry evil? Are they looked at as the villain? I guess so.

But as Andy rightfully pointed out, isn't Google sponsoring the upcoming SES Conference? Go figure???

Did you know that there are 598 different ways people spell Britney Spears? Respree (Garrick) posted a topic over at Cre8asite Forums that discussed this and had a link to a unusual page over at Google. Google named this page the Britney Spears spelling correction page and it can be found at http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html.

View Large Image

Do all URLs pass PageRank? No. Many affiliate URLs go through several redirects in order to get to the destination page. For example, you sell a product and start an affiliate program. People who sign up on the affiliate program want to do their tracking, where you want to do your own tracking.

So when they put a link on their Web site, they might use a URL such as http://www.affiliatesite.com/affiliate.php?referralid=232, which then might get passed through a 3rd party affiliate tracking system, so the URL changes to www.thirdpartyaffiliatetracking.com/affiliate.asp?affiliateid=234&referrurl=5832. Now you want to track the click coming in and if there is a sale, so you set up your own URL you asked them to link to, such as www.mysite.com/affiliate.jsp?affiliateid=232.

So the chances of PageRank being distributed to the main site (i.e. www.mysite.com) is unlikely. There are too many redirects.

Quick one, as there isn't much to say about it, but I was bored today and threw together a PageRank Toolbar widget for Mac...

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/

CONTEST OVER

Please email your answers to barry.schwartz@gmail.com, the first THREE CORRECT responses will win a free gmail invite. Good luck!

What month and year (format should look like Month Year) did Excite go online?

Feel free to provide a link to your source.

I wanted a tool to analyze my links and the value of those links to a specific page. So I built one. I named it the Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool. This tool basically looks at all your links for a specific page (the links are determined based on the link command in Google) and analyzes them for anchor text, pagerank and more. Why Google? Well, they are the only one that offers a free API to "ethically" obtain the data. Of course that limits you to 1,000 queries per day (or 10,000 backlinks) but we are going to make a paid version that allows you to run a single report over multiple days.

The free reports show PageRank data, internal and external link counts, anchor text weights, class C IP reporting and much more.

Check out the Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool today, please leave your comments below on the tool. Thank you.

Oh, if you have a lot of backlinks, the analysis can take a while to run.

This was kinda interesting. Someone brought to my attention this morning a unique big billboard by Google in California, highlighting a rather difficult mathmatical puzzle. Basically you need to decrypt the message to arrive at the correct answer. If you are smart enough or have enough time to figure it out, then you will find the answer is actually a domain .com to which you are supposed to go to find out what Google is up too.

Here is the puzzle:

{ First 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e }.com

The correct answer:

http://www.7427466391.com, which forwards to: http://www.google.com/labjobs/index.html

"Congratulations. You've made it to level 2. Go to www.Linux.org and enter Bobsyouruncle as the login and the answer to this equation as the password."

f(1)= 7182818284
f(2)= 8182845904
f(3)= 8747135266
f(4)= 7427466391
f(5)= __________

Hmmm... anybody got the answer?

Probably one of the most thought-provoking threads published in a really long time just came out. The name of this thread is Improving The Reputation Of The SEM Industry and the thread creator was Danny Sullivan. Why is this an interesting thread?

Our main challenge for the SEM industry was publicity, getting people to first recognize that search engine marketing is a professional industry. I think its a safe bet to say that the SEM field is recognized and people are aware of it. But now that people know of us [SEM], they are getting the wrong impression.

SEM and SEO is being compared to as black magic or trickery and slimy spamming. This thread discusses how to improve the reputation of the SEM industry. If your reading this, you care to some extent, so make sure to join in.

An excellent thread over at Search Engine Watch discusses what are the major threats and opportunities in the search engine marketing industry.

Here is an outline of some of the responses:

Threats:
- Unscrupulous SEO firms hurting the name of the industry
- PPC Click-Fraud

Opportunities:
- Personalization
- Localization

Join the thread to discuss.

A former Alta Vista employee has been accused of stealing the source code of the Alta Vista engine. The funny thing is that this employee now works at MSN.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

At what point do you give up on a site which has been banned by a popular search engine? That is the topic of one thread over at WebmasterWorld. Many sites have been reported to have been banned or penalized by Yahoo! Search. The unusual thing is that the site owners honestly do not know why the site was banned. In fact, the site does well in other search engines like Google, Ask Jeeves and MSN. So now what?

Several individuals feel that leaving the old site up but excluding Yahoo!'s bots in the robot.txt file AND putting up a new site specifically for Yahoo! but excluding that site from the other bots in the robot.txt file is the solution. This way, the site continues to rank well in the other search engines and you get to start from scratch with Yahoo!.

Do ditch the old site and start from scratch with Yahoo! Search only.

Several days ago, Kim Krause wrote here on the topic of Is SEO a "Black Art"? where she links to a blog entry by guru marketer Seth Godin. Since then a lot of discussion has been taking place in the SEO/SEM forums. Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch shot off an email to Seth Godin.

After receiving Seth Godin's response, Danny's reaction was "Personally, I'm rather tired of the entire SEM industry being tarred with the same brush. I'm giving a lot of thought to what I'll say about this in my keynote for the next SES show. My feeling is that something needs to happen to clean our image up. We can reopen the whole "ethical/white hat" debate, but I don't see that as the solution."

Danny has been discussing this topic at Cre8asite Forum and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Is link building getting harder? Nah, as more and more people become aware of how links and the anchor text in those links can benefit ones rankings, those people are freely exchanging links with each other. But that also means that the links are not being created for the right purposes, at least in the eyes of the search engines or the searchers. Like all things that get abused, the search engines will eventually take the abuse into account and change the value of links or types of links. So what can you do?

Besides for some of the tactics I already discussed in the link building category, lets discuss one relatively new concept that has been floating around the forums. The concept is to trade articles and content, not necessarily links.

In a post over at the Search Engine Watch Forums, one member discusses how they are using this new strategy:

Here is what we are doing. Instead of trading links we trade new and unique content. That content is placed on a new page linked from a master "Industry Articles" page which is linked into the primary navigation. Within the content are two links, one internal, back to the home page of the main site and one external link to the linked site.

If the article pages are link as they should be those pages would soon be spidered by the SE's and develop a PR of their own. The PR does not have to be great because instead of sharing the link value with 20, 50, or 100 other links, you are getting the total outgoing PR value. On top of that the web is being populated not with junk link pages but unique valuable content.

A new tool, hasn't been done before, unique, great idea and also free. Guess who made this tool? Yup, DigitalPoint. What is it? "The ad network is a network of site owners that offer ad space to the network. In return, the ads they define are displayed across the entire network."

In fact, I am running it on this site right now. See the 3rd sponsored link on the left navigation bar? Well, that is from this network. You can do graphical ads, banner text ads or simple plain text ads.

Benefits of this program? "Because there is a ton of unused advertising space out there on the Internet, and I have not seen anyone else doing anything like this. It's easy to put 50,000 of your own ads on your own site, but there is much more value if you put your ad 50 times on 1,000 sites."

Alright, you want more information?

- Sign Up (please use this link, I get referral credit :) )
- FAQs
- Forum Discussion

Somewhere in the German Abakus Forum (I can't read German, so hard for me to track down), there is this funny avatar that I had to show you all.

Give it a second to load and you will notice this smily is trying to figure out what is wrong with the broken image above it. Give it a second more and oops.

Kind of stupid, but made me laugh. :)

Just wanted to drop you a note that Mark Carey of SEO Radio has asked to interview me about SEO/SEM topics, including forum dynamics.

This is to take place at http://www.seoradio.com/ this Tuesday, July 13th, at 12 (noon) (EST).

One thread at SearchEngineWatch is discussing the theory of PageRank no longer being used in Google's ranking algorithm as it used to be. Of course many have noticed that over the past year or so, PageRank has been less and less important in the eyes of search engine optimization specialists. So what is going on?

People have been abusing PageRank, so Google has to put less weight towards that part of the overall ranking algorithm. Join the thread to share your thoughts.

Well, at least one person feels that it is getting harder to rank well in Google. A discussion over at WebmasterWorld discusses just that. Is it more competition or have things simply changed. If your not happy with your rankings and want to vent, in a polite manner, just the discussion.

Confused? Yahoo profit doubles; shares tumble, so am I. "Yahoo's stock fell in after-hours trading, down 14 percent to $28 a share shortly after the company reported earnings." "Yahoo on Wednesday reported earnings that met Wall Street analyst expectations, thanks to continued strength in its commercial search business."

Good thing I am not a day trader. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

You think Google has to worry about Yahoo or Microsoft? That is nothing! Google is being sued by Googles.com, a children's site. As reported by the WallStreetJournal (subscription required), "Closely held Stelor Productions Inc., which operates a children's Web site called googles.com, is trying to block Google, the Internet search-engine giant, from expanding into new businesses aimed at children."

Meet Google's New Fierce Enemy:

Are you a keyword copywriter that has writer's block? If so, join the KWBA (keyword writers block anonymous) group over at HighRankings. You can learn things such as:
- project mode at WordTracker
- Source code for your competitors' home pages
- Digital Point keyword tool

Ever notice that the same page ranked in Google & Yahoo sometimes have a different title listed in the search results pages? You know, the blue link that shows the title of the site... One member at HighRankings brought up this question, otherwise I would never have thought to write about it here.

Steps for example:
1) Search at Google on rustybrick
2) Search at Yahoo on rustybrick
3) Look at Google's title for RustyBrick "Web Design, Web Development & Web Services New York, NY"

That is right, since RustyBrick is included in the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Search uses the title listed in the directory instead of the title in the source code of rustybrick.com, which is what Google uses. Plus Yahoo! also used the description in the directory and not the meta description of the contents of the page.

This is only the case when the page is listed in the directory, inner pages that are not listed in the Yahoo! directory will come up with the title found in the page source.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

A thread at WebmasterWorld brought this to my attention.

Conduct a search on overture at Google.com (click on the bold link), and you won't find overture's Web site in the main search results. In fact, Brett_Tabke says that Overture "bans all indexing via robots.txt" and Google just obeys the robot.txt file. Why does Overture disallow all indexing by the robots? Brett suggests "Don't you think that having your competitors bot crawling all over your website is a bit creepy?" I feel Brett is joking with this response, let me try to give my own opinion on why they are disallowing organic robots.

Overture is an advertising company based on mostly the pay per click revenue model. What do they have to lose by allowing Google or other engines from indexing their site? I don't see anything. Can it be a matter of principle? A PPC company should show its customers that organic (free/natural) results are not as effective as PPC/Paid results? By them disallowing organic robots from crawling and indexing its site, they are making a strong statement that PPC is where it is at!

Oh, but Yahoo! owns Overture, and Yahoo! has their own organic search engine. Well still, they are separate divisions with unique missions. In fact, if you do a search on overtue in Yahoo! you will find overture.com listed. Well, if you look closely, that is a form of Overture's Site Match - overture's pay for inclusion and cost per click program that works with Yahoo. So it is a form of paid advertising, which overture supports.

Remember back in the early days of SEO Chat, when it was only a forum and when Darrin Ward was the single admin? Well, then your going to love this.

Darrin has started a new forum named SEO Town. The name is to convey a community like atmosphere - much like SE Chat was when Darrin was the admin.

Here is Darrin's announcement post:

I originally started "SeoChat", which is another SEO & Web Marketing forum.

In the summer of 2003, I sold SeoChat to the DevShed Network. At the time, I was new to the USA, and I needed some money to go touring. The sale seemed right at the time, and I am glad that I have used a lot of that money to travel this great country.

One year later, and with much gained knowledge, I have decided to start "SeoTown". I have never lost my love for the SEO & Web Marketing arena... hence why I'm back.

I have asked some of the original moderators (rustybrick & phoenix) to get on-board, and they we're all happy to be a part of it.

This time, I'm not selling anything, although you may find some Google Adsens boxes on here in order to help cover the cost of a dedicated server and the bandwidth.

I hope you join, if you haven't already, and I encourage you to get involved as much as possible with the forum. If we all pull together, this can be a really great place with a less commericla feel that SeoChat.

Thank you for visiting - I hope we will be your new home!

Darrin Ward
SeoTown Admin

Do search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves respect, recognize and like search engine optimization companies? This topic is created at one forum or an other on almost a monthly basis. I do not think I ever discussed it here, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Let me first start with an historical perspective (at least my understanding of how it was early on). Early on search engine companies did not know that there were SEO companies out there. Actually, "SEO" was not even an acronym used back then. Then as the search engine caught on to people abusing the meta tags and white text tricks, search engines and SEO companies were at odds. The search engines at first did not recognize the SEO company. They pitched them as scam artists that did not benefit the industry. Over time and thanks to the popularization of the industry, search engines began to come face to face with SEO firms.

Now we have a level of understanding. There are basic guidelines issued by search engines as to acceptable practices. Search engines in fact now request SEOs to encourage common practice amongst their client sites. Search engines want to find good content and SEOs help. If a site is in Flash and an SEO is onboard, the SEO might create an HTML alternative. That is good for the searcher, which is good for the search engines.

Since the channels of communication between search engines and SEOs are more open (thanks to sites like WebmasterWorld and SearchEngineWatch), there is a better understanding of each other's goals and objectives. Both make compromises and share information. We are heading from the "respect" phase (some might argue we are not there yet) to the "like" phase. I believe there is a common and understood respect between the search engine companies and search engine optimization professionals. We are now moving towards a deep gratitude and liking of each other's objectives.

Current forum discussion at SearchEngineWatch Forums.

Jakob Nielsen came out with a new one just a few days ago named Time for a Redesign where one area he discusses that his problems with search and where part of the fault lies with "[The content] does not explicitly say what you want to know."

There is currently a dialog taking place at the Search Engine Watch Forums where Associate Editor, Chris Sherman explains this quote as follows: "If information is missing, there's no way a search engine can manufacture it to help solve the need of the user. That's the fault of the content creator, not the search engine."

Ron Carnell then accurately points out "I think Nielsen's example of a hotel web site not providing more information on off-site parking exemplifies his own lack of understanding of real world business practice."

The scenario is that Dr. Nielsen conducted a search on a hotel, to find information on that hotel. Then Dr. Nielsen wanted to learn about the hotel's parking accommodations but was surprised to see that pricing was not available at the hotel's Web site. Ron points out that for the hotel to manage 3rd party pricing on their own Web site would be inefficient. As Ron said its a "lack of understanding of real world business practice." If you want to know about parking at the hotel, conduct a new search on parking in the area of the hotel. Most probably you will find what you are looking for.

Of course search has a long way to go but to blame it on content providers is not always accurate. Why? To get more general, when I write on a topic here, I make sure to answer the readers anticipated questions when they read the title of the entry. So with this entry, titled "Content Providers - Provide the Content Already", I expect you to think something to the affect of "What are content providers not doing? "What should they be doing?" I am not going to be covering topics such as where to post content, how much it costs to post content and why I post content. I might start a new topic on such a question, but that topic probably wont cover the answers to What content providers should be doing.

Get my point. The content is out there. The searcher can't expect one search to act as a catchall for all their questions to be answered.

Several of the search engines got dressed up to help celebrate July 4th. Let's take a look. Happy July 4th!

Seth Godin in his The problem with search engine optimization could not, in good faith, recommend an SEO.

"Because it's a black art, it's really hard to tell who's good and who's not. Andrew Goodman is good, there are people who are less reputable... no matter what, it's hard to guarantee you'll get your money's worth."

Ouch!

Cre8asiteForums discusses, in Seth Godin interrogates SEO

Is he right in his assessment of search engine optimization?

Google is the number one search engine because of its search results. Google's search results (to the most part) are more relevant then all the other search engines. Every competing engine talks about how and why their search algorithms are better at bringing back more relevant search results then the next. Most say, that is why Google is the leader in the industry, they have more relevant results then the rest.

My question is, will relevancy make a difference when Microsoft enters the search race?

I am not questioning whether or not Microsoft can build a more relevant engine then Google or Teoma. What I am questioning is if Microsoft needs to build a more relevant or equally relevant engine.

Let's take two areas where Microsoft monopolizes on. The first is the operating system market. Is Windows a better and more user friendly operating system then Apple's OS X or Linux? I don't think so. How often do I hear people complaining about how stupid Windows is. All the complaints on computer crashes and issues with viruses or spyware make me sick. Why do you Windows people accept these issues? Why don't you switch to an Apple computer? Second example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In reality it is a poor example of a Web browser. All the IE exploits where a hacker can take over your computer and destroy all your files, simply because of a single exploit in IE. IE doesn't have tabbed browsing or other basic functions one can find in Firefox and other popular, non Microsoft, browsers. Why do you use IE?

The answers to these questions is that you use Microsoft products because you always had. Computers came out, it was easier and cheaper to buy a PC running Windows on it then to buy a PC with Linux or an Apple computer. Now that you have Windows pre-installed on your PC, hey, Internet Explorer is on it, so its easy and cheaper to use IE then an other browser.

I can see the same logic being used for MSN Search. There is no doubt in my mind that MSN Search one day will be built into the Windows OS. It will be easier and cheaper to use the built in and pre-installed MSN Search then to use Google, Ask or Yahoo. You'll "live with" less relevant results, because its easier and cheaper to use something that is pre-installed. And as MSN Search gains market share, the results will get worse and worse. Just like IE keeps getting worse and worse, as compared to the newer browsers available today. Why? Because Microsoft has captured the market and the searcher has no where else to go. Because its too hard to type in google.com into my browser, I have MSN Search built into my OS.

I am afraid for the future of search, a future where relevancy does not matter as much.

It seems everytime I am turning around these days, someone new has the newest, greatest, and most POWERFUL search engine on the planet. I just wish someone would make a search engine to find my lost car keys. I and every other internet user has lots of choices these days when it comes to search. You've got: MSN...the new new search engine. Yahoo...the once upon a time new search engine (while back), Google...we still have the best search engine in the universe. Ask...our search engine answers questions, and now Apple...the search engine with the user in mind. I like it. Barry will be excited too. ;-)

Apple is taking on Microsoft and the major engines in a battle for the best desktop search and eventually web search capability. Apples plans to release Mac OS 10.4 Tiger next year to the excitement of many mac users. Integrated with the ability to let users search their hard drives and the Web using a single tool. Microsoft is taking on this challenge as well with the release of its Longhorn OS. Apple delivers Tiger in the first half of '05, it's possible it will have quite a lead on Longhorn which will be released sometime early 2006 (est).

Steve Jobs puts it well, in that it is "easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk."

Check out the new article here: Apple-MS search engine battle begins

Reports on Yahoo!'s new design has been released as far back as late May with the rumors of Yahoo!'s new home page and inside pages. Now Yahoo! is publically asking people to test out the new design. In fact, do a search at Yahoo! Search on the term search engine and you will see this message to use try out the new design. Here, give it a try below.

The major difference in the design is the top portion of the page. Its cleaner, the tabs are less tabular, results are shown up higher on the page, the related search is cleaner and the definitions is at the top of the page. Overall, I like the new layout.

Forum coverage at:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• JimWorld

I was raised to be concerned about things.

First it was the ants, which marched one by one to get out of the rain, but one of them always stopped to do something, which held up the whole parade. Or, it was the sheep and whether or not it had enough wool, which my father sang to me in Swedish, as his mother did to him.

While a little girl, I not only learned to spell B.I.N.G.O., the name of a dog, but I became a bit confused and surely scared singing about ears hanging low and eyes popping out.

Now grown up, things haven't improved much.

With web sites, there's danger lurking at every turn (and click). At Cre8asiteForums, members and moderators feast daily on subjects ranging from usability to starting an online business. And, of course, figuring out what makes search engines tick. We worry about spelling, keyword placement and whether our web sites have enough wool to cover our expenses, or even better, earn a profit.

Sadly, sooner or later, it seems as though everyone's meatball falls off their plate of spaghetti and they chase down logs, analyze click paths, question their SEO/SEM and camp outside the nearest persuasive architecture guru's door, hoping for a miracle cure to raise traffic, sales and rank.

I thought, therefore, it was time to write a song.

Continue reading "Your Web Site is Not a Meatball"

Looks like Wallstreet feels that Microsoft's MSN search is going to cause major problems for the other search players. Of course, Google is not public yet but Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and LookSmart are all public companies. So a graphed their stock performance between June 1st and July 1st. Each search company had a down day based on MSN's news. Take a look for yourself:

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

I normally do not like to post the same information as Andy Beal but I felt this was important. Google has now updated their Gmail terms to forbid the sale of gmail invites.

Mr. Beal links to an article over at the Inquirer, a news source which is known not to be so reputable. That article links directly to the Gmail Program Policies, but then when you look, it was updated June 28th, but what was updated? Take a look at the changes here.

Based on that information, Google never allowed for the "Sell, trade, resell or otherwise exploit for any unauthorized commercial purpose or transfer any Gmail account" within its Gmail program policies.

So what is really up?

A post over at HighRanking's Forum got me thinking. First, let me clarify that once you click on a result in Google or an other search engine, the engine knows nothing more.

Some people think that since you clicked from Google to page A, that Google knows how long you spent there, and if you made a purchase. Actually, my own dad was under the impression that Google knew if someone placed an order on a site if they came from the Google search engine. Sorry dad if your reading this but this really blew my mind.

In general, once you leave a search engine, they no longer know anything about your travels or actions. Now that that is out of the way, lets move on.

So the user gets to your site, you know where they came from and what they are doing on your site. Right? I'll assume you know this information, if not, then get yourself a decent Web analytics package. It is really a shame how ill-informed many of the smaller e-commerce site owners are about their sites traffic and conversion rates. If they tracked their traffic correctly, then making informed decisions on site changes become less guess-work and more metric based decisions. I keep getting to this, so I am sorry. Feel free to read my past entries on analytics.

Oh, and one more note, Scottie is right on.

Alright, this contest can be won by anyone. It is meant for the searcher. So get ready, get set and use your favorite search engine to find the answer to the question.

Last night I went to an Eric Clapton concert in New York's Madison Square Garden, he rocked! Please use the search engine to find the June 30th, 2004, Wednesday night Eric Clapton set list at MSG for last night.

Please email your answers to barry.schwartz@gmail.com, the first THREE CORRECT responses will win a free gmail invite. Good luck!

UPDATE: Contest is over! Three happy winners. Yes, the concert was great. The set list can be found at whereseric.com.

A popular SEM/SEO forum has changed its name and strategy once again.

Jazzee, a site admin at the forum explained this news as follows:

v7n started out on the Internet as Webmaster-Forum.net, a friendly place to discuss search engine optimization, graphics, coding and Internet marketing. As the community grew, we developed a personality. We realized that we shared certain principles, and we wanted to better promote these principles. To that end, we relocated to a new URL, Internet-Marketing-Research.net, and we archived the old forum.

As the community grew even more, the focus on "Internet Marketing" suggested by the domain seemed a bit restrictive in scope, and long. To avoid losing members to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, we decided on a shorter domain: v7n.com

"V7" because the site is owned by V7 Inc, and "n" because it's less typing than "network".

It looks like they are aiming to become a portal for Webmasters, for more information on the new features and services, please visit the forum announcement here.

I think the title of the entry says it all. Some extra notes from Danny Sullivan's post:

1. MSN Search has a new look in keeping with the promises Microsoft said would happen earlier this year. Sponsored results are in sponsored areas.
   
2. MSN Search has dropped all paid inclusion listings, according to Microsoft.
   
3. Microsoft has also released their new search technology via here, but this is NOT being used at MSN Search. That remains Yahoo powered. As Lex said, a separate thread talks about this new technology more.

They also publically announced a sneak peek of MSN's new search technology, which in fact we released at the roundtable back in May under the title MSN Search Preview Live for Some.

Alright, time for forum coverage:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• SEO Chat Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• JimWorld Forums
  
• HighRankings Forum
  
• SitePoint Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums