August 2004 Archives

This one is easy, but maybe you'll get it wrong. You don't need to know anything about SEO for this.

Guess a number between 1 & 10.

The first 3 people to email me the right answer at barry.schwartz@gmail.com, gets an invite.

Of course, you need to trust me. But I have the number written down on paper in front of me.

Good Luck!

Updated: Only one try per person (please don't use multiple email addresses, I run these contest all the time) and I will announce the winner as soon as I get 3 correct answers. But you need to be the first three, if I get four correct answers, the 4th does not win.

***CONTEST IS OVER***
The answer was 5. If I have time, I'll post a summary of the attempts.

In the past we discussed the possibility of Google starting an IM service, maybe named gIM, maybe not. It seems like there is more speculation going on at InternetNews a JupiterMedia help news site. Gary posted this over at Search Engine Watch Forums, an other JupiterMedia held site.

I had to share this with you. I was over at Verizon DSL to check out any new services and products that might help my business and found this button:

So I put up some tracking code using Urchin's campaign tracking module goal conversion. I'll report back how many people clicked on this above. No artificial clicking, (thinking to self, like that is possible).

If you are fortunate enough these days, you have more clients than you can handle. For some the task of starting a new business in SEO/SEM starts with getting new clients and getting those clients to pass on a good word of your good graces. A good and ongoing thread over at SEOchat asks members how they go about getting new clients and keep the stream of clients going. I know from personal experience that I have never done much advertising at all for my services. Most clients come in via word of mouth, recommedations from other clients, or from the occasional fun dabbling of working with PPC. Some of the members detail the top ways they go about getting new business that might be of interest to some. Here are some of the preferred ways SEO's or any business can find new clients.

1. High rankings in the search engines!
2. Word of Mouth
3. Connecting in the forums
4. Article Writing
5. Referrals from Web Designers or other online businesses
6. Establish a newsletter
7. Purchased advertising on other related sites
8. Sales Calls (Telemarketing)
9. Print Advertising
10. Using PPC to attract potential clients
11. Affiliate Marketing
12. Giving away free software or information
13. Public Speaking
14. Give away free SEO services to other business, charities, non-profits
15. Direct Marketing to target businesses
16. Writing excellent winning copy
17. Just being one cool and savvy businessman

As you can see there are more ways to gain new business than probably most people have time for. Its seem that by far one of the best ways to gain new clients is to treat your present clients VERY WELL. Its makes sense, that if the clients you worked so hard to get, love your work, then they will start talking. Results speak for themselves.

Check the the thread How to Get New Business over at SEOchat.

Forget the debate about cloaking, I am a bit tired of that anyway. How does one detect some of the cloaking going on around the Web. Follow these instructions:

(1) Download the Firefox Browser
(2) Install it
(3) Download the User Agent Switcher for Firefox/Mozilla while using firefox
(4) Restart the browser
(5) Under Tools --> User Agent Switcher --> Options --> Options (that will open a dialog box)
(6) Click Add Under User Agents section
(7) In the description add "Googlebot" and in the user agent add "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
(8) Repeat this process for all the spiders you want to test. Updated comprehensive list of user agents.
(9) Under Tools --> User Agent Switcher --> select the user agent
(10) Then navigate to the pages that you want to test for cloaking.

Hope this helps some people be Googlebot. :)

WebmasterWorld does it again, provides answers by reputable sources to questions that plague search engine marketers. So we have about three "local" products by Yahoo!, Yahoo! Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local and Overture Local Match. What does what, who offers what and how does it help me?

OvertureRep's second post at WMW provides a clear answer:

Yahoo! Yellow Pages consists of a comprehensive database of listings licensed from InfoUSA plus a section of paid listings in the Sponsored Businesses section. The Sponsored Businesses section consists of paid listings from our reseller partners, self-service, and Overture. The Overture products are geographically targeted Local Match and Precision Match listings.

Yahoo! Local also includes a comprehensive database of listings licensed from InfoUSA, several other data sources, and web content. Yahoo! Local also has a sponsored business section which solely consists of geographically targeted Overture Local Match and Precision Match listings.

Overture Local Match is a product for advertisers that have a physical storefront or service a specific geographic region. Advertisers provide a description and details about their business and do not need a website to participate. The advertiser chooses the relevant keywords and defines the geographic region to target their listing.

Here are a couple of links you can go to for more info:

Yahoo! Local: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/local/index.html
Overture Local Match: http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/lm.jhtml

Here we go again, but the importance becomes less and less every month. :)

You can easily check the backlink fluctuations over at http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php. Just make sure to use the link:www.domain.com syntax and horizontal window view.

Forum coverage:

• DigitalPoint
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• SEO Chat
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• HighRankings
  
• Cre8asite
  
• V7
  
• IHelpYou
  
• WebProWorld
  
• SEO Guy
  

Google seems to have released a new button found at the bottom of the SERPs page. The new button is to the right of the normal "search" button but says "search harder". I have not seen this myself, it might be one of those things Google is rolling out to some people. A thread at WebmasterWorld has several people who have seen this.

Basically, if you do a search on a very general keyword, such as cars. It asks you if you want to "search harder", if you click that search harder button, it takes you to a different SERPs page for cars found here. When you click on the link, see the URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=cars&btnmeta%3Dtha%3D1%26seen%3D7d8882011a9da6f0%2CpaQUq1
BgsA8J%2CRVuszxD0ZLYJ%2CKWbRZb06QI8J%2CRsWGZdkk_oUJ%2CEItB
6rHmy6YJ%2C4DBTRhlVuqUJ%2C8pAZTckoaBMJ%2CDk2ynlAPOA0J%2C8uB
J_n5AyTYJ%2CXY7ep7ykeoAJ%2C=Search+Harder

Very interesting...As more information comes my way, I will post it.

Here is an other chance to win Gmail invites.

- Correctly answer the question below by emailing the address below
- First Three Correct Answers Win
- Email barry.schwartz@gmail.com the correct answers

Question is:
What date in Month, Day, Year format was "Black Monday"? Hint, it applied to the AltaVista search engine.

*** CONTEST OVER ***

Answer is Monday, October 25, 1999, see http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/14042.htm.

Thank you Marcia for helping with the question.

I just wanted to point you folks over to two threads that Alan Webb (a colleague and respected SEO based in Germany) started on the topic of major search results changes in terms of rankings. I'll quote the post and then link to them below.

Many webmasters in the thread above are reporting significant drops in traffic, up to 80% in some cases within the last 24 hours. In contrast others are reporting significant rises in the SERPs which indicates a big change (which imo is not sandbox related).

Rather than having a "I've dropped/risen too" thread, perhaps it is a good idea to attempt to work out what has been happening. I personally have seen big changes on numerous travel booking related sites. One of the theories appears to be too high keyword density. This may have some merit, as on some sites ranking drops are not across the board on all themes/phrases. So it could be that templates focusing on one term have a much higher density than others. I'll certainly be looking into this. I'm also wondering if this is somehow theme related as as I've mentioned it defintely has affected the travel theme. or perhaps it is based on just highly competitive terms as a whole.

It would also be interesting to see if there is a concensus from those sites that have lost traffic on..

1. Are they affiliate sites with many links to the affilate host.
2. Do they have satelite domains which they cross link/one way link with sites particularly on the same ip c-block.
3. Are the drop in serps keyword specific or site wide.
4. Are some inbound links on mass from single domains. For example, a great number links from a footer link on a major site.
5. Have changes been made to keyword density recently.
6. Is there a distinction in ranking between major and minor terms.
7. Has there been any PR changes or backward link changes.

Google isnt likely to give us the direct answer, but maybe they wont need to if we work together in cracking this change.

If your site has been affected from wednesdays update, it would be helpful for all, if you could perhaps answer the 7 points above relating to your own site.

Discussion over at WebmasterWorld and at SEO Chat.

One of the reasons behind SiteMatch is to ensure your deep pages are indexed by Yahoo. But if your pages are search engine friendly and the navigation is not prohibitive to the natural spiders, then SiteMatch is not needed for that purpose.

A thread at HighRankings named Out Of Sitematch & Bump In Y! Ranksings discusses one person's story with SiteMatch. This individual did not renew his SiteMatch subscription and soon after saw his rankings improve. From my understanding of the post, it seems like the site's homepage was not included in the SiteMatch results. So he wasn't ranking for his most important keywords (important is subjective here). I am not so clear as to why, neither is he, his vendors or YahooMike. It seems like he did not submit his homepage URL, and thus the page was not included.

I was under the impression that the natural crawl would pick up other pages (if search engine friendly) even if they were not submitted to SiteMatch. Speculation? I rather not, but you see where I am going with this.

Time to throw out your external backup drives, you can now use Gmail to store your files remotely. Jeremy Zawodny was the first I've seen to mention the concept of Web E-Mail: The New Hard Disk. As he mentions in a recent entry named Internet Hard Disk with GmailFS, its becoming a reality. How cool.

Richard Jones provides the following information on the GmailFS - Gmail Filesystem:

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

Two days before the official 2nd year anniversary of Cre8asite, I wrote a short entry to mention the special occasion. The official press release is due to go out tomorrow, but I could not help but to post a link to it today. The press release can be found at PRWeb.com and it is named Cre8asiteForums Breaks Out the Champagne for its Two-Year Anniversary. Congrats again!

I've been waiting for a thread to pop up on this topic in the past few weeks, and finally one sprung up that caught my attention over at HighRankings. The thread is about a small SEO firm who needs to provides his client with an answer to "Why Should Customer Renew?"

Pretty much all of the on-page search engine optimization (seo) efforts are done or should be done right up front. So let's say you have a client with a five page site. You optimize each page for the client and then sit back. If your not providing any link building services, then in reality your work is done. Of course, you might want to see if the keywords are a good fit for the site. You might need to make some tweaks here and there. But after, lets say, three months, what else is there? Reports. :)

Many of the SEO professionals in the thread agree, that they should only charge for actual work performed. To tell a client that they would drop in the rankings if they don't renew a contract is wrong. Again, this only applies to the on-page seo efforts. I do understand that keeping links up to a site, will require additional money and time.

I prefer to take this one step further. As many of you know, I am big-time into building dynamically driven Web sites. That means, empowering the customer to manage the site themselves. By building a search engine friendly site that can be easily maintained by the customer, he/she can add/edit/delete pages as they see fit. Can all clients write well for search engines? Maybe not, but I want them to try. If I can properly educate the client on the basics of SEO copy-writing, then we have a winner. So there is no reason to even pay a monthly fee or hourly fee to have an SEO review your copy.

Let's say Google makes a major change to its ranking algorithm, they now put a ton of weight on the meta keywords tag (not true). Then, a programmer can make a single change to a template file in a matter of minutes. The site will automatically pull data from a data-source in the database and build keywords for the meta-keywords field. There you go, you can charge for 6 minutes of work. :)

I personally believe that most on-page seo firms should not charge a monthly fee. They should base prices on work performed and not to base prices on reading forums or go to conferences. Man hours = billable.

The more I conduct usability evaluations for clients and my business Partners' clients, the more I realize how little people understand what usability is, how it applies to them, and why they need it.

A lot of people live on this planet. Web sites are trying to meet the needs of these people. SEO’s and marketers sometimes have limited knowledge about who will use a web site and what words people might type into a search enigne to find a web site. There is simply not enough thought and research conducted for the long haul. (And sadly, some SEO companies never bother to ask enough questions.)

Is the person who typed in “disability health insurance” over 65 years old, fumbling over the local library’s old computer with a dial-up modem (libraries in some cities are badly in need of funds.) Is this something someone from China or Australia would be looking for? Who searches more for this type of information, men, women or insurance brokers? If it’s men, at least 8 percent of them are colorblind. Many can’t see the color red used for that little “Required Field” asterisk. If there’s somebody else waiting behind the guy in the library, he doesn’t have time to read a lot of content when he first arrives at a homepage. He needs to quickly learn the navigation scheme and be directed within seconds to where his information is about signing up or customer service.

I now think that sending off all my old SEO clients back into the world with a wave was more like sending them off to Kindergarten. There was so much more we needed to know to give them a fighting chance in the world.

I’m not alone in my fascination for what happens after the click from search engines. Recently someone joined Cre8asiteForums, who began to post around the place, including the usability section. His name is Derek Chew (aka “Mugshot”). He’s launched a web site called OrganicRankings.com.

What’s special about Derek is his devotion to the relationship of SEO and usability. A visit to his site shows he’s rounding up some popular writers from related industries. One area of interest to some of you may be his SEO Experiments section. I've learned he's considering more ideas that will be beneficial to folks in the SEO/SEM fields too.

In the coming months I’ll be writing more articles about what usability really is (it’s not just about design and its not a one-size-fits all approach). I’ll also try to explain why it’s important in our work. The key to usability is that it’s always evolving because it’s about people and how we use the technology and products we create. Someday, search engine robots will embrace FLASH and people will wonder how we ever lived without it.

RSS is revolutionizing the industry, Jeremy Zawodny discusses the difference between Feed Search vs. Web Search. In this entry, Jeremy discusses the challenges the Web search engines have with (1) Structured vs. Unstructured Data, (2) Frequent Updates & (3) Real-Time Pings. He ends his entry with the words "The model of "search and find" or "browse and read" will turn into "search, find, and subscribe"."

I find myself slowly switching to this model myself. I use RSS and Web Search very differently. Subscribing to a search phrase is a lot different conceptually then searching for something on the Web. A Web search normally is done, not to find information on topics that are "news related" or of daily interest to yourself. I use Web search to research topics in the past, find product information, locate company information and find specific information on a need to basis.

My RSS feeds (by the way, I use Yahoo as my RSS aggregator) is a place I go a few times throughout the day, to learn about what is new in my topics of interest. I subscribe to Jeremy's blog, I also subscribe to VersionTrack - but the "real kicker" is that I subscribe to the search phrase "search engine". Anything found that matches "search engine" in the RSS networks are found. Expanding this feature of structured data, with frequent updates will be critical.

My thoughts are that Web and Feed Search are different. They are used for different reasons and both are good on their own.

This is probably one of the best examples of a properly executed thread. A new member asks a question about a tag name the meta rating. The member finds this tag on a page with a pagerank of 8, and asks the question if there is some type of correlation. Then two moderators quickly respond explaining that the search engines do not use this tag for any real purposes, especially ranking purposes. I think its best for me to quote Bill Slawski, from the thread named Meta Rating Tag.

Since the days when that might have been a way to indicate to some software that a site was safe for children or not, there has developed a whole standard way of creating ratings. The W3C pages describe it, though it's actually thrid parties that issue the ratings.

Some of them issue their own labels and decide which ones are appropriate for your site. Some of them allow you to make that determination. One of the best ways to get one of these labels is through one of the links on this page:

http://www.w3.org/PICS/raters.htm

This is one of the ones linked there that I've seen labels used from a number of times:

http://www.icra.org/

Search engines do some filtering, but I don't believe that meta tags determine how that is done.

They can help you create a rating label specifically for you site

Bill adds more later to the thread, so check it out.

Toogle, a funny application that uses Google's Image Search, queries Google's image search for the first result matching your keyword phrase. Then it reads the image and translates it into text, the same text you used to enter the query box. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out at Toogle Image Search.

Here is an example of a search on rustybrick logo gif.

Looking to go to a conference or an event where a bunch of search engine people gather? Well here is your chance. Check out the thread at the SEW Forums named List all the groups that hold SEO conferances. Here is a list, in no particular order, that is found in the thread:

• http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/
  
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/
  
• http://www.seoroadshow.com/
  
• http://www.ad-tech.com/
  
• http://www.i-adworld.com/
  
• http://www.internetmarketingconference.com/
  
• http://www.highrankings.com/seminar
  
• http://www.the-dma.org/
  
• http://webmastersinthesun.com/
  
• http://www.emarketingassociation.com/
  

Since I just received some new gmail invites, I thought it would be a good idea to start up the gmail invite contests again. If you want the chance to win a gmail invite please follow the instructions below:

- Correctly name the search engine marketers shown below
- You must name them in the fashion of: A = First Name Last Name, B = First Name Last Name and C = First Name Last Name.
- First Three Correct Answers Win
- Email barry.schwartz@gmail.com the correct answers

*** CONTEST IS OVER ***

Answers are: A = Danny Sullivan, B = Mike Grehan, C = Jill Whalen

Doug from Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting just tipped me off on something not well known to the Overture customer, at least I have not hear of it until today. A term known as "Godzooky" at Overture!

Overture has a broad match technology named Godzooky. Doug has sent an email to Overture asking for more information about "irrelvant clicks" coming from the Overture PPC campaigns he was running. In a response back from Overture, they mentioned something named "Godzooky". And I will quote from his response from Overture's International Client Services department; "We have a tool called Godzooky that is used when there is no match in Match Driver?. Godzooky uses the first 60% of the listings in the Index (search terms, titles and descriptions) and attempts to find an algorithm."

Overture has deactivated "Godzooky" for Doug. By the way, a search at Google or Yahoo on "godzooky overture" brings up nothing. But Godzooky brings up this friendly Godzilla at http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/godzooky.htm.

Doug has also posted this over at WebmasterWorld.

As reported over at WebmasterWorld, Gmail invites have been halted by Google. Meaning, Google has not been giving out Gmail invites for about a month or two. That drought has been fixed with a nice shower of invites found in many gmail account users inbox. Invites are back and I am sure they are selling on eBay now. :)

I thought I would wait until two days before the two year anniversary of Cre8asite Forums to wish them a happy Two Year Anniversary! I have often used Cre8asite as a place to base most of my entries at the search engine roundtable. The members, the moderators and all the readers have done such a fine job over at Cre8asite. Kim Krause is the admin over at Cre8asite, she is not only a very professional and smart person, she is also a very caring and extremely giving individual. The forum is run by the most talented and giving people out there. I am personally proud to be a member at Cre8asite.

To join the celebration visit the Cre8asiteForums Celebrates its Two Year Anniversary thread or click on the Cre8asite Two Year Anniversary Logo below.

For those that know me, I am a firm believer that going the dynamic route, when it comes to site development and maintenance, is the best and most efficient method. Many web designers and seos don't share my passion. However, this is a dynamic web site issues forum, so I thought I share a challenge I came across.

My company has built dozens of e-commerce sites, all very dynamic. We empower the customer by allowing them to manage the whole site. So if they want to add a category, they can do it. If they want to add product, pictures, new sections, brands, and so on - they can do it without calling us. Actually, I recently and finally finished an article I named Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs which discusses many of the basics. Here I would like to touch on one area of the dynamic e-commerce site, the URL.

Our e-commerce sites use mod_rewrite to make search engine friendly and keyword rich URLs (not that I feel keywords in the URL make a big/any difference in rankings, but I feel they can be helpful with usability and click-through rates). So what we do is dynamically build the URL based on the name of the product. Let me give you a real life example; look at: http://www.smarttuxedo.com/Tuxedos-1/Sutton100-Wool-Single-Breasted-Tuxedo-1-Button-Shawl-Lapel-Available-1-Button-Notch-and-Peak-Lapels-45.html.

That URL is way long! Right? Well look at the product name in the h1 tag or the title of the page. My client gave that product a 17 word title! Now that is not good for usability, not good for seo and not good to look at. So I told my client to go into the products and shorten them to about 5 words. he said ok.

The problem is, when you would change the product name, the old URL (the one the search engines indexed) would work and the new URL would work. So the search engines would re-crawl and find the new URL, but also see that the old URL worked. My client would have two pages with exactly the same content on them. Not the best idea.

Solution: We built a dynamic 301 redirect which automatically redirected one from an old URL to the new URL. How does it work? Simple... If the URL does not match the title of the page, redirect (301 style) to a URL that matches the title of the page. For example try; http://www.smarttuxedo.com/OLD-CATEGORY-URL-1/OLD-PRODUCT-URL-45.html

I have posted this at Search Engine Watch, sorry for pointing out the threads I have started, but I really think it will be helpful for others.

As noted at SEO Chat Forums, software was developed by a group of hackers to hit gmail accounts. I am not sure of the validity of this, see the short mentioning at http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/hac080904.cfm.

I have had the honor of exchanging several emails with Mike Grehan about some of the theories spreading around the forums and found in many articles at SEO sites. One such theory we discussed was the concept of "themed sites" and how you need a site within a specific theme to stay within that theme in order to rank above your competitors (keeping every other variable as equal). So people were taking the extreme action of buying a new domain name for each theme. Then only having information about that theme on that new domain.

Now Mike is about to release his 3rd edition of his search engine book and he has been researching some of these concepts in great detail. With his permission, I will try to convey what his thoughts are on this topic, but not take away the deepness of the "why" found in his book.

Mike asked Daniel Dulitz from Google this question on 'theming' (is that a new word?). ""Utility" and "depth" really should be measured by a
site's users." What I understand this to mean, based on the examples given by Daniel, is that a site will not hurt in rankings if it contains pages off topic to the real essence of the site.

Example; I have a site on the Smurfs (why did I pick the smurfs, I have no idea) but on that site, I have a page or two on how I block spam with spamassassin, will that hurt my site for ranking well with Smurfs? Not at all, according to Daniel.

Now, will a site with detailed information on spamassassin rank better then the page found at the Smurfs site? Of course, at least that is the goal of the search engines.

So when people discuss themed sites and how they are the only way to rank well, it is believed that some are misunderstanding the concept of what a "theme" is. The search engines think of it as the "utility" and the "depth" of the site (in pages and content).

Disclaimer: I hope I did justice to what Mike has graciously communicated to me. Also, I do not have a page on smurfs, nor do I have a page on spamassasin.

I posted this over at Search Engine Watch as well.

DigitalPoint does it again, a new, cool, and useful feature was just added to his forum. Basically, if you run a blog (currently only supports MovableType and Blogger) you can automatically add your latest blog entry to your title. I have attached a screen image of my latest post at DigitalPoint Forum, you will see my latest blog posting as a link between my name and my forum status (or is that the title?).

So if you are a member at DigitalPoint's Forum go to your User Control Panel and then click on "Edit Options". At the bottom at your XML feed URL to the "Blog XML Feed URL" box. Then click update. Its that easy. Nice work Shawn!

Forum coverage, of course, at DigitalPoint.

Google News, as Chris Sherman points out in his post, adds an international filter option. In the image capture below, you will see the drop down menu. Neat little ad on by Google.

Here is some good news for those that use the hosted version of Blogger. You can now add, BlogSense, better known as AdSense to your blog entries. Here is more information on how to add blogsense to your blogger blog.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

I am a Mac user and today I downloaded this new tool named Inquisitor. Basically, it is this little program that is out of the way. You can begin typing in the little search box and as you type it the search is refined. You can search Google, News, Images, Shopping, Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Seems like a neat tool so far. Let's see if its something I continue to use. Check out the images below. Top right image, is when I types "search engin" and the bottom right image is when I completed typing the last letter "search engine".

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

John Battelle's Searchblog, very popular search related news and opinion blog, asked the question in his entry named This Is Odd; why was Feedster and Blinx taken out of Google's results?

Soon after, GoogleGuy shows up with a comment, see the 6th comment down. Not bad. :) The bottom line is "Given that the issues appears to be on Feedster's side in this case, if they'll start serving Google a normal page again instead of a 404, I would expect their root page to be back right as rain in a few days."

Disclaimer (before even writing this entry): These are my personal views, I understand some client's don't have the budget, and I am sorry if I offend anyone.

I have just went through two long meetings the past two days (yes on Sunday, as well). These meetings were about how to properly build search engine friendly e-commerce sites. A lot of what my company does is build Web sites that empower the customer to build SE Friendly pages (much like how this blog works, but a tad more sophisticated :)).

To my amazement, one of these companies used a fairly well known SEO Firm that, in my opinion, built the site wrong. When building an e-commerce site from scratch, why would you not ensure that the pages are search engine friendly. Each and every one. By search engine friendly I mean, that each individual page is optimized for a unique keyword. So each category landing page, is optimized for that category. Each product or brand page, is optimized for the product or brand.

I can understand where an SEO firm will take an existing site and make tweaks to it in order to optimize some of the pages. That makes sense to me. But to build a site from ground up and then only apply the the principles of SEO and dynamic content to a few hand selected pages, that in my opinion is wrong.

I will of course not mention the company here. It leads me to believe that many other SEO firms are practicing SEO in this manner. I feel its wrong to pitch a search engine friendly e-commerce site that in reality has to be maintained through manual intervention by an SEO.

Automation! Build a system that allows your customer to build pages. They really don't need to know much about SEO. All they need to know is about their product, and if they know their product, they can write very good copy for their product pages.

Empower the customer through simple to use web tools, educate the customer about search engines, and let the customer be in control!

Well, it has been around two plus months since the last PageRank update (or at least is feels that way). People are getting really antsy, patiently awaiting the next PageRank update. Over at SEO Chat there is a thread named Will there be a PR update... EVER?, which has a poll. The poll already as 43 responses, so post your opinion.

The question: Will there be a PR update... EVER?
The answers: (1) No! PR is gone... Forever! (2) Yes! there will be a PR update before mid Sep. and (3) Yes! there will be a PR update after mid Sep.

How not to conduct link exchanges? Do not send out hundreds of unsolicited emails with the same link exchange message. A thread named Ticked Off By Cryptic Link Requests over a HighRankings discusses this. I personally delete these emails as soon as I see them, most of them don't even get into my inbox (thanks to spamassassin).

As noted several times on this site, most recently here, SEMPO has been under the gun by many high profile members and industry representatives. In response to the long and (IMO) exhausting threads at the various forums, it was suggested that a forum open a pre-moderated thread to discuss the issues with SEMPO. How does this help? Well, it gives SEMPO the ability to quickly review the main concerns without all the chatter in the regular forums.

Jill from HighRankings has opened not just a thread but a forum dedicated to, as Jill puts it, "SEMPO Questions and (hopefully) Answers". The forum has a long description which states, and I quote:

This is a moderated forum with the purpose of communicating with SEMPO board members. Increased communication with SEMPO members is on SEMPO's agenda, and we at HighRankings support that mission. This forum is moderated, meaning that all posts will have to "pass the muster" before being posted to the public. We hope that SEMPO board members will appreciate our efforts to make communication to the members just a little bit faster and easier, and we hope that one or more SEMPO representatives will take some time to answer the questions being put forth to them.

The first post in this forum is named Questions About Sempo Aug. 18th Newsletter, where Jill asks a list of questions, she hopes will be answered. Time will tell.

I have been emailed by a dedicated reader of this blog, Umit Yoruk, that he is seeing Google results with related searches at the top. I personally do not see them for any of the keyword searches I have done, but if you have - feel free to add a comment. Here are some screen shots from Umit's computer, he promised that he doesn't have any adware or spyware on his machine. :)

The past month or so has been filled with controversy not from outside of the SEM industry, but rather within. SEMPO has been the talk of the forums. You can see from my first entry on the SEMPO scandal, and from responses in the forums, my sempo meeting coverage and mike's follow up that things were hot.

On the top of that list was member communication. Wednesday night, SEMPO sent out their first actionable member communication memo. It outlined the actions they have taken and will be taking to overhaul the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. However, some SEMPO members are not yet satisfied. Jill Whalen posts at the Search Engine Watch Forums saying "was kinda like the boring meeting, only shorter." I personally feel that this was a huge step, but enough about my personal feelings. Over at HighRankings, Greg Jarboe, the PR volunteer for SEMPO, posts a response to Jill's comments.

For some reason, people are under the impression that link buying is a SEO practice that one should not participate. I am not sure why some people think this way but they do. It might be because of all the chatter on reciprocal link exchanges, or building dozens of pages to build link popularity, or maybe all the news about how some SEO firms interlink all their clients and even worse, hide links from their client's sites to their own. So I can see why people might shy away from the link buying side of SEO.

A thread at HighRankings named How About Purchasing Text Links?, has a post by a relatively new member who asks the question; "Is it legitimate to purchase inbounds?" Now, HighRankings is known (IMO) to be one of the most "white hat" and conservative SEO forums out there (I may be wrong). The bottom line from the responses to this question in the forum are that there is nothing wrong with purchasing inbound links.

Doug over at IHelpYou announced today that he released a new search engine chart. Bruce Clay has one of the most popular search engine charts, but there are several out there, I think. Since IHelpYou just releases his, its probably the most up to date version today.

Here is a screen capture:

By way of blog.outer-court.com, Google released Gmail Notifier, a tool that allows you to check your Gmail messages without opening your browser on a PC.

So now you do not need to login and check to see if you have Gmail email.

The Gmail Notifier is a downloadable Windows application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser.

I posted this over at WebmasterWorld and SEO Chat, normally Gary posts this type of stuff at SEW forums, so I'll wait for him to do so.

Did you ever want to get honest feedback from Google on the 'on-page' optimization of your Web pages? Well now you can! Since Google released Google AdSense, you can determine, on some level, if your on page optimization efforts are focused on the proper keywords.

So if you targeting the keyword "search engine optimization" you should see ads on that page pointing towards search engine optimization services. Simple concept.

As an administrator, DaveAtIFG. over at WebmasterWorld said, "What makes this is handy is that your ads will change within a few hours of making changes to your page. If the ads are better targeted, you're done! If not, try again and review your ads in a few hours. You can (and should!) confirm your click through ratio within 24 hours."

Starting price for this new stock under the ticker symbol GOOG rose 20% so far since its IPO this morning. Check out this 1 day chart provided by CBS MarketWatch.

Forum coverage I am sure is wide spread, here are a few SEM forums talking about it:

• Search Engine Watch
  
• SEO Chat
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• V7 Forums
  
• SitePoint
  
• WebProWorld
  
• DigitalPoint
  

The Big Boys Are Messing It Up, How Do you compete with the Fortune 500s is the name of a thread at HighRankings. The story the thread creator tells, is one that you hear more and more often these days. The large companies are discovering the PPC arena and they are spending enormous amounts of money. So where a click used to cost 15 cents, now costs $2 per click. Do these big budget companies look at ROI? Do they care? Is it part of their plan to weed out the small mom and pops? I am not sure, anyone work for these big spenders want to shed some light?

So how do the smaller budgets, that look at ROI, compete with those big budget shops? The thread at HighRankings offers some advice:

- Put more efforts towards natural search
- Bid on more specific, less competitive keywords
- Do you have a unique selling proposition?
- "Sell via the trust and credibility you gain from the detailed reviews, uses and testimonials of your product."
- Advertise offline on local TV spots
- Cross sell or offer incentives to increase the average order size.
- Improve conversion rates
- Look at the customer lifetime value and not a single order
- Go with some of the smaller PPC engines

And to end this entry with a quote from Andrew Goodman; "Is SEO / SEM supposed to be some kind of free lunch? I thought we were past those days."

Great thread.

A thread at HighRankings named To B Or Not To B...central, Should I join bcentral?, asked the question - should I submit my site to http://sbd.bcentral.com/ or not?

The only issue people seemed to have with this program was that they recommended using an automated submission program. Most SEOs say this is one of the classic no-nos. Other's hate this program because it's by Microsoft and they require you to sign up for their "Microsoft .NET Passport" - ehh.

One post I would like to quote in its entirety, by mcanerin:

For what it's worth, I run linking campaigns for clients for both a standard SEO package and as a standalone service, so I'm very, very careful about the directories I link to.

I have a 15 point checklist for them and unless it passes all 15 points I don't go with them (actual list is confidential, but common sense - no black magic)

Anyway, I originally passed on this directory for the very reason that everyone else is concerned with - the automatic submissions issue. The directory passed every other test, but failed my "supports spammers" test

Recently I had a client ask me about it, and I told him why I had not automatically submitted to it, and he agreed, but felt that it still might be worth it. We discussed it for some time. This client is very web and business savvy, has a lot of traffic and conversions and I respect both his ethics and interest in his websites.

At the end of the day, we agreed that we should submit to the SBD IN SPITE of the automatic submissions. The directory has enough value that for him and many others it's worth it.

It's pretty bad when something that is clearly a trademark Microsoft "lets hold your hand" policy is considered good reason to avoid using the product.

Worse, they are teaching inexperienced website owners that automatic submissions are "ok", which is incredibly naive behavior for a company that wishes to take a lead in search. I know these are different departments, but geeze, this doesn't look good.

Currently I DO recommend submission, but only after I've educated the client as to what the issues are. I wish I could make a better recommendation based on the value of the directory itself, but I can't in good faith based on it's submission policy.

Maybe they don't get the concept that I would happily pay the same amount and skip the automatic submissions.

mcanerin, Ian, in fact started a new topic on this today at Search Engine Watch and named it MS Small Business Directory - SBD.

Yahoo announced today a new blog for their Yahoo! Search division. The blog can be found at http://www.ysearchblog.com/. Currently they are accepting comments and trackbacks at the first entry by Jeff Weiner named The Engine of Possibility. Jeremy Zawodny was instrumental in helping his company launch this blog. Of course they are using the MovableType "publishing platform", smart move - in my opinion. Unlike the the Offical Google Blog, Yahoo actually has links to "Industry Sources" such as Search Engine Watch, WebmasterWorld, many other news resources and blogs (including this one).

Forum coverage will pick up on this topic, but currently the following forums are discussing the announcement of the Yahoo! Search Blog.

• Search Engine Watch
  
• SEO Chat
  
• V7 Forums
  
• more threads to come... (feel free to email me or post comments with threads on this topic)

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday after the close of trading that Google's (GOOG) IPO registration statement to list its shares on the Nasdaq has been declared effective. The company's shares can now trade as soon as Thursday morning.

Update: GOOG priced at $85 per share.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

A thread over at HighRankings inspired this post. The thread was about how a company's name is very generic, in this case the company name is "Don Better Audio", and the company currently ranks # 4 for that keyword phrase.

Often you find domain names with very generic keywords in them, such as "High Rankings". Many SEOs go this route in order to ensure people link to their pages with the keyword text of their choice, in Jill Whalen's case "High Rankings". And Jill does rank in the number one position for High Rankings.

But if your not a professional SEO, or you do not know much about link building, like in the Don Better Audio case, you will not rank #1. Why? Because Jill (SEOs) are smart, they are proactive in obtaining links, either by writing articles, speaking, starting a forum and the like. Don Better Audio and non-SEOs do not do these things. They might throw up a 10 page Web site to talk about the company and possibly submit to DMOZ and Yahoo's Directory but that is it.

My point? Well there is not win-win solution here. If you do not know about SEO and you have a generic name as your brand, then you probably won't rank well for your own name. If you do know about SEO, then great but only those who have these issues either don't know about it or don't know how to solve it. Kind of circular logic here, sorry.

This seems very un-Google like, to be showing a little thumbnail of the pages in the search results page. It slows down the pages, its a graphic and its not so clean. One member at Cre8asite posted a topic named New Google SERP Display!, where he posts a screen image of what he is seeing at Google from his home on his Firefox browser. Could it be adware? Or is it Google really testing this out on some computers?

Can you make link building cool? According to a thread at SEW named Slickest Link Building Tricks you can. Link building strategies are often posted over at the forums, basically on a daily basis. Now, a new twist to link building is being formulated. The goal of the thread mentioned above is to define each link building method and then sort them in order of "slickness". If you have interesting ways to build links, please post your comment here or at the forum.

One of the slickest methods I have seen posted in this thread so far goes like. "Pissing people off using graphics and obscure phrases, (usually taken out of context), so that when the pisseee, (or their cronies), wants to discuss it, they have little choice but to link to the page. Do it correctly and the anchor text is built in."

The PPC company Atlas OnePoint (no link on purpose), messed with the blog king, Jeremy Zawodny. Not smart, if there is one person you don't want to mess with when your a PPC company is Jeremy. :) Basically, since Jeremy was on the panel at the SES conference, he some how got on Atlas OnePoint's email list (I did too). He got a spam email and he is not happy. Jeremy wrote about this in his entry named Atlas OnePoint: Spammers, where he posted a very interesting piece of art work.

Danny Sullivan, the face behind the SES conferences commented "I've asked Jupitermedia to look into this. My understanding was that attendee names were not given to third parties. It's not been an issue that I've ever seen come up like this before. So if something's changed, I'll work on my end to change it back."

I have found out from a source of mine how it would be possible for Atlas OnePoint to have received the list of names from JupiterMedia. I heard from
another sponsor that they inadvertently gotten the email addresses and
that it appears to have been an accident on Jupiter's part. So someone slipped up at Jupiter, it happens I guess. (removed some detail as per the request of a few people)

I do not remember every seeing Google swapping out their inner page logo before. Of course they mess around with the logo on the homepage often, but I don't remember seeing them swap out the inside page logo.

Here is a screen capture of the inside page search result:

Here is today's Olympics Logo:

Ad Microsoft promised, the Tech Preview has been taken down and is no longer accepting feedback. As posted on their Web site, "Thank you very much to all of those that tried our service and sent us feedback. We will make improvements based on the suggestions we received. Once we are ready, we will release another preview of our new algorithmic search engine."

Forum Coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Cre8asite Forums constantly is producing top notch forum threads that hit the SEM industry problems on the head. A recent post by Adrian (mod at cre8asite) named SES slammed by designers links to a two blog entries by two hard core designers, one at Eric Meyer's blog named Silly Expert Opinions which links to the blog entry that started this heated debate at compooter.org.

In summary, compooter was at the conference and attended the Advanced Design Issues: CSS, Javascript & Frames session moderated by Chris Sherman, with speakers named Matthew Bailey, Dan Stone, and Shari Thurow. I personally did not attend this session, so I can not offer my opinion on it. As you can imagine, this session talks about how search engines dislike JavaScript, Flash, Frames and the like. The speakers most probably spoke on how to cope with this technologies if you want your pages to rank well. I can understand why designers are frustrated with the engines, but this compooter blogger went over the line. Check out the various links above for more information, you will see that the bridge is being built between the SEM community and the design community.

Also, I have deep respect to Danny Sullivan for going all out here. He has several comments at the links above. He has a true and deep affection for the SEM industry. Danny is doing everything in his power, IMO, to help the industries reputation and he should be commended.

Google, under the stock ticker GOOG should be available to bid starting "Tuesday, August 17, 2004 at 4:00 p.m." according to the email I received last night. So I guess Wednesday is the day you can actually bid. Not sure if I will yet but I do have a bidder number.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

Currently, it seems as if Google AdWord's contextual relevancy matching systems are offline. All (most) AdSense publishers are displaying PSAs or also known as Public Service Ads. These PSAs show when Google can not find a relevant ad based on the context of your page either because their is no ad for it or Google does not yet know what your page is about. It seems like Google AdWords is having a temporary problem and it forgot what all pages are about.

Anyway, forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

Nothing like a forum thread on white hats versus black hats to stir up hot debate. Instead, why don't you just joke around about it and set up a poll. That is what one member did at Search Engine Watch. So far 57% answered the hat color question as "Who cares? It's all just posturing anyways...." What about you?

Sid Yadav from HoverScore Inc. asked me to post this here, if you have several minutes, please take the survey. I recently launched a survey called "NextSearchSurvey" (www.nextsearchsurvey.com). It's a survey designed for internet searchers and researchers asking them questions on their searching preferences/habits.

Some of the questions and answers could have been worded better. I found myself not answering the questions to the best of my ability. I know its hard writing a survey.

The logos at Google.com are creative and fun. So far, we have seen two variations, as they continue to post new logos, you can discuss them at Search Engine Watch.

Just two weeks ago, I heard Scott Rafer the president and CEO of Feedster say that sponsored ads will be coming to RSS soon. According eWeek, it looks like its underway. Currently the only official page on advertising at Feedster can be found here. More supply to come, just what the SEM industry has been asking for - more inventory. Will this prove to return the ROI companies are looking for?

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

I am - I am sorry. There are so many great forum topics that turn into cat fights between members. Its tiring. If you read this blog, please do your best not to fight. As they say somewhere, "can't we all just get along", even us in the forums.

I get deep inside a thread and begin preparing to write about it here and then I am forced to stop. Why? Mostly because there are not one but dozens of personal arguments between members.

Ok sorry for complaining, back to SEM forum coverage.

I have been hearing about this for several months now, and its not going away. People are reporting (and they are right) that their index pages (home pages) are missing from the Google index. So when you check them out, you see that the index page has a PR0, can not be found in the index, but the internal pages are indexed and have PageRank. This first began happening around the July 2004 Google Update. Things have not gotten any better for these missing index pages. People have actually called me pleading with me to help them, I said I could not. I am doing my best to bring my attention to these forum threads now.

Some history that I believe have nothing to do with this missing index page issue. Reported in May, Microsoft.com & Adobe.com Missing and reported in July, Google Bans Itself.

There is currently forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld.

I have been so consumed with the Google IPO, SEMPO Scandals and general forum coverage that I missed the reported Yahoo Update. A thread at WebmasterWorld was created August 13th in reaction to the "significant updates in serps" over at Yahoo! Search. Others have coincidentally reported major MSN Search the same day. MSN is currently powered by Inktomi, which is owned by Yahoo - see any relationship there?

An update over at Yahoo and MSN at the same day. Gets one thinking...

A few members over at SEO Chat report that their rankings for competitive keywords have greatly improved today on MSN Search. Did yours?

This thread is in the WebmasterWorld Supporters Forum, so you need to have a paid subscription to read it (go pay!). :) Brett named it MSN Goes after Blog Spam. Basically, MSN's way to block blog spam is to moderate each and every comment submitted. Now that is a lot of work. I use the all powerful MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse. More info here.

Got to go.

On purpose, I don't know, but according to a thread at WebmasterWorld, Adsense login - IE broken, Mozilla working?, members on a PC using IE can not get to the AdSense Login Page. It seems to also be occurring on some other platforms, but it works fine for me in Apple Safari.

I am all for this - if you promise top rankings then you must deliver. A promise is a promise, so make sure to be upfront with your clients and promise only what you can deliver.

Chris Sherman posted a thread at SEW forums named SEO Firm Ordered to Refund Fees, Pay Fine, that quotes the article at the Seattle Times.

"The [Washington] state attorney general said yesterday Redmond-based Internet Advancement must pay penalties for failing to get its customers top placement on major search engines. Internet Advancement, which also goes by 4GreatBuys.com, must refund customers, pay $24,432 to the state for costs incurred and a civil penalty of $25,000.

"The company had promised to get its customers ranked in the top 10 to 20 results on the search engines for $980 to $1,500 in set-up fees and monthly fees of $79.80 to $89.95."

I find this funny, Gary Price points out that A9 is ranked the number one search engine "...if you list them alphabetically".

I find it funny that a search engine guy, Udi Manber, throws out the directory ranking default (not Google directory but alphabetical ranking) as a joke to show how they would be ranked the number one engine.

Just funny.

Oh, I hope to post a couple more times tonight, tomorrow will be a crazy day for me - a little like today was. :)

Its finally available at http://www.google.com/googledance2004/!!! Lots of pictures out there, but this is the official place.

An interesting detail was presented to me by way of a thread at DigitalPoint Forums named Bolding doesn't work in the search results. The distinction here is that when Google finds a match between a keyword and the text in the URL, it will bold the URL in the SERPs. But when the URL is capitalized, the keyword will not match and will not be bolded in the SERPs.

As mentioned in the thread a search on allinurl:Test at Google will bring back results, some with bolded keywords in the URL. A picture will help. Does this have anything to do with rankings? I doubt it.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Psychic Google? discusses Google's physic ability to locate newly registered domain names soon after they are registered. For example, if you buy a new domain name today, you might find the "coming soon" page in the index without you linking to it. I am of the belief that Google is finding it via a link from some page.

People are speculating that if you have the toolbar installed, Google can find new pages. I doubt they do that. And an other theory is the the domain name registrars are selling these names to Google. Come on!

There has been discussion at SEO Chat forums in a thread named Algo Merry Go Round??, where members discuss the large deviations between rankings for the same keywords among different keyword sets. For example, a standard keyword checked at Google's various data centers (using Datacenter Quick Check tool) can rank between position 57 and 132. In the past, this was not really normal. There was flux between the datacenters, but there seems to be a much greater flux these days, on a more frequent basis then before.

So the theories are:
(A) AdWare is causing the problems
(B) Google is testing different algorithms at different datacenters
(C) There is nothing wrong at all.

My question to you, which one you think is right? A, B, C or None of the Above?

Mike Grehan released an article today he named Who needs SEMPO? - Part deux!, in follow up with his last article. I wrote on the first article and named it SEMPO Scandal - Mike Grehan Gives a Thumbs Down. The thread at Search Engine Watch named Mike Grehan Stirs Up SEMPO Controversy is currently the thread leader in the top rated list. Since then several new threads have been created, to make it easier to follow. In addition, many other forums are covering this topic.

For a list of SEW threads on the SEMPO topic, please visit the Search Industry Growth & Trends forum.

This is a self-promotional post, but I think it will be useful to most of the readers. Back on July 12th, I announced the Free Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool we made available at my corporate site. Then I decided, wouldn't it be useful if this data could be stored and then looked at later. In addition, wouldn't cool graphs with link data be cool to be charted? I thought so. So I built a new product to my SEO Count Web site. So now there is a Google Keyword Reporting Tool, which I use almost every day AND a Google Link Analysis & Popularity Tool which is wild.

Some of the cool features include:
- detailed link analysis (anchor texts, page ranks, ip look ups, and much more)
- link comparison graphs
- filtering options (by pagerank, anchor text, domains, and more)
- i can go on forever.

Anyway, if your interested, check out the paid version at http://www.seocount.com/link-tool.php. It uses the Google API and here is a cool example graph.

There is forum discussion at a thread named AdWords Starting to Rock!, where people are talking about the overall improvements in the traffic they are getting from the ads. Moderator, SkiBum says "There is less traffic and in some cases sales or leads are down but the associated cost is down farther so the campaigns are performing better."

jp_css said "I have noticed a drastic change in Adwords conversions. Also, my Adsense CTR has gone up a few points on all of my sites thus making me more money all around."

There is also discussion about changes in Google's broad matching technology.

A post over at WebmasterWorld reminded me why Google likes fresh pages. According the an active page at Google named Sign up for the Google Newsletter, so I signed up and it worked. Currently there are 54,216 members and the group was founded on Apr 29, 1998. There hasn't been a message posted there for ages. So sign up now! :)

Sergey Brin and Larry Page will be interviewed in the September issue of Playboy. No, they will not be bearing it all - just an interview. Now you know Google is mainstream.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Earlier today I reported on the Google Backlink August update but I noted that PageRank has not been updated. There has been chatter in some of the forums on PageRank updating at the Google Directory.

Let me clarify. It is of the opinion of some people that Google is now showing a more recent PageRank value in the Google directory then what the Google Toolbar is showing. Based on a post by DigitalPoint, where he says "Google directory has this forum at PR7 and all my tools (deeplinks) at PR7 (all up from PR6). www.digitalpoint.com still PR7 though."

The DigitalPoint forums was never a PR7 and is current a PR6, but the directory shows them as a PR 7.

Fresh new images are now available at Google Images according to a WebmasterWorld thread. I confirmed this by finding an image of my old Sunbeam Water Cooler that actually gets a lot of traffic from other disgruntled Sunbeam customers.

A very detailed oriented thread is going on at Cre8asite Forums named After SEMPO: Should we Start a Trade Association?. With over a 146 replies so far, this can be the real thing. So join the discussion and have a say. If all the issues and goals are detailed in this thread, maybe it will work.

Who knows. :)

Backlinks are/have been updated but PageRank values for all sites have remained constant. Can this mean an end for PageRank as we know it? Or is this just a temporary thing? Google has updated its directory. Anyway, best of luck with the backlink update.

Forum discussion:

• SEO Chat
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• HighRankings
  
• V7 Forums
  
• IHelpYou
  
• SitePoint
  
• SEO Guy
  
• DigitalPoint
  
• ABAKUS
  
• LilEngine

We have been hearing about local search over the past year or two. The search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and even MSN have been promising and providing enhanced local search options. The next revolution in local is by a new shopping search engine named StepUp.com. You enter in a zip code and then conduct a search on the product you are looking for. It takes a few seconds and then products start coming up. Not only does this site provide detailed information on the products (provided by the merchant) but it also shows you the closest places with driving directions to the store. In addition, they have fields such as "Quantity On Hand", "Product Listed", and "Product Updated" to help with your purchase decision.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Ok, I am still in the SES mode. Tomorrow I should be back 100%. Over at HighRankings there is a thread that discusses the postings of photos from the conference. HighRankings has given people the ability to upload their images.

You can view them at SES San Jose 2004 Photos. Keep checking it out, people are uploading as we speak.

An excellent post by Orion on the topic he named Who bombs Whom?, which he admits he should of named "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Queries". Here is does some queries on keyword phrases at the various search engines.

A search for "bad search engine" without quotes shows that
1. In Google, Yahoo.com is #2 out of 4,650,000 results
2. In Yahoo!, MSN.com is #1 out of 6,330,000 results
3. In MSN, MSN.com is #1 out of 1,323,674 results.
4. In Teoma, GO.com is #2 and Search.com is #3 out of 3,178,000 results.

A search for "good search engine" without quotes shows that
1. In Google, DogPile.com (a metaengine) is #1 out of 8,520,000 results.
2. In Yahoo!, DogPile.com (a metaengine) is #1 out of 15,000,000 results
3. In MSN, DogPile.com (a metaengine) is #1 out of 3,112,205 results.
4. In Teoma, Yahoo.com is #1 and Teoma is #3 out of 9,448,000 results.

Check out the thread.

If you login and logout of your gmail accounts too quickly then you should be prompted to enter in an image access code. This is the first time I have seen this asked of me, so I took a screen shot of it.

I am still getting out of the SES conference mode. Tomorrow, I will get back to the SEM forum coverage. Just one news item that caught my eye, in light of this past week. Yahoo's, this week, has repeatedly talked about how its anti-spy toolbar was one of his latest and greatest applications. Even at the "executive roundtable" session, when asked about the top features released by their engines, the Yahoo! rep brought up the toolbar.

Now, I see an article at C|Net named Yahoo's Anti-Spy toolbar feature buggy. What a shame, and I quote, "Yahoo on Friday confirmed that its recently released toolbar has mistakenly linked an alleged spyware program with a product that has nothing to do with the application in question."

For those who went or read about the Google Dance 2004 you would have noticed they ran out of beer early within the party. What is really funny is that Yahoo! did something to mock that at their search engine. Conduct a search at Yahoo on the keyword phrase ses party rule #1 and you will find the following results:

How funny, can you imagine - having a search battle like this? Musician's did it in their songs, why not search engines through search?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

This afternoon at the Advanced Search Term Research Issues SES session, Trellian was asked to step up to the podium and speak about its new keyword research tool they named Priority Submit. It looked impressive. It is the only tool of its kind for this price, free. Dan Thies had great things to say about this in the forums and to me at the conference (he by the way is coming out with a neat tool as well - more on that in a week or so). Andy Beal said the tool is great as well but he said it looks like there are some minor flaws in it (but still a great tool for what it does). So here are some screen shots and my thoughts on the tool.

I did a search on the keyword "web development" and it shows number of searches and suggested alternatives to that keyword. The cool thing is that they have been collecting 12 months of search data. So you can see the number of search over the past 12 months. Great for seasonal search words, like they demoed on "valentines". But I did a search on "web development" not a seasonal term, I think (Dan or Andy can you verify?). Why in May would there only be only be 5,000 searches but in February there would be almost 20,000 more searches on "web development". Seem to me to be a bit wild. A similar historical chart came up for "web design". Well actually, I just tried the keyword "tuxedos" and there was a similar pattern. I guess May data was lost? :)

Anyway, it has other features and seems to be a neat tool.

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Try it out, it is free at http://www.prioritysubmit.com/.

Amanda Watlington was up first. Why should SEMs should look at blogs? 4.12 million hosted blogs, 10.3 million hosted blogs estimated by end of year. 2.72 million are currently semi-abandoned. 51.5% created by teens, 56% created by women and 44% by men (Perseus 2004 Survey). 69.3% og blogs readers are 25-50 years old, 40% have households incomes > 90k, 79.7% like blogs because they provide news they can't get elsewhere. Blogs get nice traffic. She then showed some theoretical benefits of blogs. Blogs and linking are all about related linking strategies. Spiders like blogs because, (1) fresh content, (2) keyword rich, (3) themed, (4)lots of links and (5)spider friendly templates. She shows Seth Godin's blog which is framed and is bad for engines. Use keywords in your blog (example adverblog.com). She then brought up ABAKUS blog, said you should add more categories. She then brings up the JupiterSearch blog as a thought leadership blog, jupiter has links to the main site (she recommends this of course). When should you syndicate your blog? Commit to blogging before electing to syndicate, it is easy technology to use.

Scott Rafer from Feedster is up now, he started Feedster about a year ago. He says syndicate everything, its a main stream media. He says the whole Web is changing, XML joining HTML as volume web-pulishing format. He said Google hates blogs, they took off all the feeds. That is why Feedster came about, to build a blog search engines. SEM differs vastly between the two. XML is machine readable, not human readable, versus HTML is both human and computer readable. They provide a very precise turn around. Once you do your search, you add it to an RSS reader, what to expect soon are ads in RSS readers.

Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo was up next, one of the blog kings. He is here to talk about what Yahoo is doing with RSS and search. RSS is changing the ways information is bring bought in, its structured data (no h1 tags here needed), a new ecology (all the different styles of linking), there is a lot of link spam (comment spam), and there are lots of integration opportunities here. My Yahoo and Yahoo Search are integrated. He showed an example of search on new york times, with a link to "add to my yahoo." He showed you how it works in My Yahoo!.

Mark Fletcher from bloglines was next up. Bloglines allows searching, subscribe, publishing and sharing rss information. He goes over these functions in more detail but stuff you can find out by trying out bloglines.com.

Chris Tolles from Topix.net helped create ODP and now Topix.net. They are largest producer of non blog rss information (over 7,000 sources). What feeds seem to be to him is a better way to do content management for an individual. NY Times have machine readable content. For Topix, they can aggregate information. He says what is different about Topix is categorization.

Q & A:

Q: How do you combat submission spam?
A: Blog/RSS feeds are opt in, you ask for it. Topix only allows non-blogs.

Q: When, where, how are we going to get ads in feeds?
A: Feedster said they are putting out themed ads.

Q: How is RSS being used for product feeds specifically?
A: Jeremy said he wants to see anything he routinely visits as RSS so he can add it to his reader.

Q: Jason from KeywordsRanking asked the panel their thoughts on how companies handle lawsuits for employees who blog?
A: The companies make sure the bloggers have non-disclosure guidelines. He says you see that bigger bloggers are starting to take on journalistic approaches over time.

Taking the simple, basic session and discussing the advanced parts. Danny introduced Andy Beal.

Andy Beal said he will talk about 10 minutes on advanced topics. Andy does some company bio stuff, etc. He started off with inside the searchers mind. We (as owners) focus on the solution rather then the needs of the searcher. Search on "one hour photo" not "on site processing". The higher the cost of the product or service the more searches a potential customer conducts before making a decision. If you can position your products based on the searcher's problem rather then on your own idea of the solution, you can convert better. There are four different stages of an online buyer and he will discuss this in more detail later.

The Buying Cycle: (1) The awareness stage; provide info pages to educate, target phrases in the "i need" format, built trust with the searcher, and 8.7% of potential customers use search for this phrase. (2) The research stage; offer comparisons, target competitors search terms, and 68.3% of potential customers use search for this phrase. (3) Decision phase; write your product reviews/articles, license content from review sites, list customer testimonials, target search terms that aid in the decision process, and 42.6% of people use search for this phase. (4) Buying phase; focus on model numbers, make sure the product page content matches those phrases, add buzzwords "free shipping", and 28.2% of potential customers use search for this phrase.

Low Cost Products have fewer searches, less need for multiple search terms, and lower the costs the higher the likelihood of an online conversion. There are fewer instances for research types (comparison reviews) for these low cost keywords.

High cost products have increased number of searches per day, target all the phases of the buying process, and anticipate where the conversions will take place.

The number of keywords searched from July 2004:
2 word phrases reduced 2.5% since 01/04
3 word phrases increased 1.22%
He gave more detail but ran out of time, couldn't write all the information from the slide down.

Dan Thies starts off saying he is from Texas, and he is working on the accent part. He will talk about "keyword mining" and VERY briefly discusses his company. He talks about prioritysubmit.com. Semi automated keyword discovery, what if you can automate the keyword discovery phases, quicker and cheaper. He discussed how he used to do it, get search results, spider top ranked sites and analyzes the keywords from those pages using (ranks.nl). Dan talked about some of Orion's posts and he discovered the EF Ratio, which is the the ratio of results form an exact phrase search and a final all search. You can easily identify what is a language phrase versus non language. He gave some easy to understand examples. This allows Dan to sort out what phrases are real and not real. Term frequency; common words vs. uncommon words. It is helpful in sorting 1 - 2 word search terms. Adding relevance involves the "c-index", co-occurrence; term 1 appears with term 2 in a document. This kind of bridges which terms are relevant semantically allowed. So Dan built/building a tool named STAT (for now) where you can input a keyword, queries google, fetches cached page, extract's candidate search terms, and sorts by c-index and ef ratios and term frequencies and then gives you search terms to add to a project. Can't wait to see it! Should be available for free in a week or so, check out seoresearchlabs.com and sign up for his newsletter. This is going to really revolutionize this keyword business (WordTracker on steroids.)

Bill Tancer from Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service. I saw their demo in NY, very expensive but powerful tools. Traffic interception; find your closest competitor, identify what search terms are driving traffic to their site, identify which search engines are driving traffic to your competitors, and use this data as a base point to launch your search campaign. He came up with a case study for a site. He typed in backpacks and found ebags, analyzed ebags traffic with this tool. It showed you everything. GAP analysis; identify additional competitors, perform a gap analysis; what keywords are driving traffic to my competitors? He pulled his own data showing the number of words per search query in the shopping and classified category; cool stuff. He was able to show the distribution of number of keywords entered into search engines based on very specific categories (like automotive, etc.). With this data you can determine if you should target 1 word phrases or 2, or 3 or both. This program also has a search term phrases. You can understand the psychographics profile's of your searchers per industry (again, very cool).

James Lamberti from comScore qSearch is going to talk about his tool. They use passive tracking of actual consumer search activities. Its an opt in panel, they know exactly what they are doing through a proxy. The tool track everything the people are doing online. Step 1: Share of voice reporting, what are the keywords my competitors are buying? Step 2: Source of search traffic by term, what keywords are driving traffic to my competitor sites? Step 3: Source of conversion by term, what keywords are driving direct sales? Step 4: Sizing the market; detailed keyword reporting. Step 5: Profiling the consumer. They can look at the offline impact, latent impact and branding impact. A "reverse conversion" analysis, buy-cycle/research cycle, and custom studies as required.

Trellian was next to talk about http://www.PrioritySumbit.com/, a last minute presentation. They have collected searches from 37 different engines, and have about 9 billion records right now. Just type in your term, and it will come up with the top searches that incorporate those keywords. In addition, it shows you an historical graph of search for a specific keyword over the past 12 or so months. You can also type in a URL and it can extract the keywords from the entire page.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Haven't been to one of these sessions in about a year so I decided to check it out again. These sessions are always filled, I think that is why its on the last day (if it was my conference, I would put it on the last day). That is also why I am here, because people want to hear about this session but you normally won't find any 'experts' in this room (besides for the people on the panel - hope I don't insult anyone). Danny Sullivan is moderating this session. Most of the people are first time SES attendees in the room.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves is up first to present. He starts off about the number of properties they own, which they purchased over the year. This seems to be their way of saying we are different. They are the number 5 overall search engine out there. He then gives an overview of how search engines work, I'll spare the readers here that part of the presentation (you already know how spiders dig around and eat up all your bandwidth). He then gets into their "subject specific popularity" and "communities." Check out the Ask Jeeves and Teoma forum for my post on this, if your interested. He goes into the problems with crawling the Internet... He then gives up secret sauce on how to rank well; (1) content of page, (2) meta tags, and (3) links. :) He said use a date stamp as to when the site was updated, this helps users and the bot.

Jen Fitzpatrick from Google was next up, she is the director of engineering. She starts off with PageRank and explains it in a theoretical sense. She then talks about text analysis and then how the crawlers work. First looking at news, then fresh content and then the rest of the Web. Then she goes over the Webmaster guidelines, the Google's do's and don'ts. Do make sites content relevant, do submit to directories, do let others link to you, and read google.com/webmasters/. Don't cloak, don't send automated queries to Google, dont hide text and links and don't do other things... She discusses the 301 redirect, using the HTTP If-Modified-Since header: respond 304 Not Modified. and use the robot.txt file. She then gets into AdWords and AdSense a bit. She then adds the Google Search appliance, its a combined hardware and software solution that is meant for corporate America (I thought that product wasn't doing to well). She then talks very briefly about the other Google products; gmail, toolbar, etc. She says Google is very active with Webmasters, i.e. GoogleGuy.

Ken Moss from MSN Search, first time on this panel. He says he is very excited to be here. He brings up a live MSN search page (search.msn.com). He did a search on search engine strategies conference, and he said these results are not MSNBot, they are provided by Inktomi. So why are they developing a new engine? He said because there is a lot of innovation still left in this technology, and in 2 years the industry will be very different. He also showed how ads differ now on the search site, compared to before. He did a search on flowers and it came up with good results but the third result had those >> that Google disallows but Inktomi allows for. He told you to go to snadbox.msn.com, and then skips down to the MSN Search Technology Preview. He does a search on search engine strategies again and you see a ton of duplicate results from the same site (he doesn't say that of course), he says please provide feedback so we can improve it. They want as much feedback as possible, that is how they will achieve. They have a feedback link at the top of the page, they have a little bar next to each result so you can give feedback on the specific result, and you can also email them at msnbot@microsoft.com. This site will be taken down August 8th and then come back later improved. So provide feedback soon please.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! Search was up next, nice guy - we chatted a bit in the speaker room. They took their search technologies that they purchased and made their own. They power half of all us web searches. Yahoo! has 260+million users. They want to discover all the content on the Web, 99% of the index is free crawled, the other 1% is PFI. Yahoo! has grown significantly, focusing on freshness and volume. They look at freshness in two ways, updated content and new pages. They have CAP. They have a crawl-delay which can tell the bots to not crawl until x seconds. What if I unsubscribe from PFI, and I dropped? If you were in before, then you will be in after - as long as they can get to you through a natural crawl. Yahoo has a RSS support, they recommend adding your RSS feed to My Yahoo!. They support ATOM in My Yahoo! but the bots do not support it.

Q & A:
Q: Font sizes and CSS???
A: Google doesn't look at CSS files right now. Yahoo doesn't either. Other engines dido it.

Q: Anyone using click data from ISPs to rank sites?
A: Google said we don't comment on the rankings algorithms. Google does not purchase ISP data for who clicks on what sites. MSN said privacy is a big concern with them but they do have an opt in data analysis. Yahoo and Ask does the same thing.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman looks at his watch, looks up at the audience, looks back at his watch. The room is basically empty, could the Overture party last night have kept everyone sleeping this morning? Anyway, its 9am here and the show has to get started.

Chris introduced the speakers. Doug Cutting the senior engineer from Excite, Steve Kirsch the founder of InfoSeek, Louis Monier the primary 'instigator' of AltaVista. He then threw up that gimmick where someone typed out the Google homepage on a type writer and wrote it was up in 1960, by fury.com. He said its hard to know the exact dates of the new technologies. Steve Kirsh made an announcement on July 18, 1994 saying that InfoSeek is using Python. Steve said in his post that he is giving out 5,000 FREE accounts. So then Steve began speaking.

The original concept of InfoSeek came from a computer library (on a disk). He used it daily and then decided to make it available to more people at a lower price. He wanted to make this available at a very aggressive price for these 150 periodicals. He worked out a deal where he can give this away to 5,000 people for free. Then beyond that would be $10 per month for this information. They then added as an additional resource such as a Web index. Kind of moved from there. He wrote excite in Python, he likes Python (most people don't),

In September 27, 1995, there was a post to toutell.com on the announcement of Excite.com. They said its a free Web search with 1.3 million web pages. He clarified he was not an original founder, he came on a few months after this date. He said the original founders were roommates in college. He said that they were looking to work together so they decided to go into this text search software. They brought a crawler and demoed it off one PC to a VC. The VC pointed them in the direction of Web search. Excite did both Web search and Web directory. Excite is arguably the first portal. Doug started in January 1996. Then soon after AltaVista was started up, which launched with 16 million Web pages indexed and it was fast! So one of the VPs at Excite said, lets crawl 50 million. 4 - 5 months they relaunched with 50 indexed pages. They were the largest search engine for a period of time and soon were surpassed by many others. It was a good time.

AltaVista posted on December 15th 1995. This was the internet's first "super spider". Talked about the volume covered and the speed of the search. The one thing that really never came through from the press was that there was no support. AV was about 6 people, locked inside a dying software company. Louis convinced his company to invest (in one server) to let them do this and get good PR. He said AV is a story against all odds. He said how the company was like, "Digital planned this big thing out", when in fact it was Louis's idea one day. Louis's wife designed the logo, etc. He said AV never had any business development. Yahoo came to AV and AV didn't know what to do. He said it was a great technical rush but a business disaster.

Chris then asked them to touch on some of the new pioneering features they came up with.

Doug from Excite started off by saying they didn't necessarily invent them but made them popular. They said they used "discrimination analysis" or a big thesaurus. Like, words you would add to a query to refine the search. It was very popular and then it was not used later on. They also had a feature named "channelized search", basically if yo u typed in San Francisco baseball and it knew there was only one team. It would show you the score of the game in process, and a link to the site. It had maps, etc. A lot like what everyone is trying to do today. It died out at Excite but is now popular.

Steve from InfoSeek said they were one of the first to put up banner ads on search results pages. They were the first to come up with the CPM model (he believes). They had enhanced relevance because they looked at the links to your Web pages, much like Google today (poor man's google). One of the firs to have phrase search and then soon added a syntax (+, -, etc). The last innovation he is proud of is AltraSeek, which was a corporate search tool. Steve had a ton of opposition with this in his company, but he did it anyway. AltraSeek was sold to Inktomi and you can still find this feature in some companies.

Louis from AV said people wanted to make AV into a portal. Every attempt to make AV a portal was a disaster. He seems really ticked off about AV's business division (which makes a ton of sense to me). On the search side he feels pretty good, it was all about speed, simple GUI - you can see these blueprints at Google today. Universal access, he spent a week trying to work out a bug with a very small browser (used by 0.00023% of the Internet population). he made sure it worked on every single browser. He used to joke that AV would work on a washing machine. The languages worked well across some countries. He then went to a unicode index (Russian, Chinese, etc). He said the business took us down again. An other really good thing was the babelfish translation service. (I personally loved this service and I use it today when reading some non US SEM forums). AV launched something that was once called "Life Topics" that was a super techie thing, it was cluster your results a major refinement search. He said, when he left AV, they unplugged it.

Chris then asks them to look into the future and touch on what you feel are miss opportunities for their company. Chris read off an article where he said InfoSeek missed the opp to buy Yahoo! for 20 million because he felt it was over valued. Also he turned down eBay as well.

Larry Page came to Steve from InfoSeek, asking them if they want to license PageRank. So did Doug and Louis claimed he was impressed with PageRank but didn't have the power to sign the check. They all believe that was a big mistake. 1997 Google was asking to license it, then in 1998 -99 they had their own site and began taking on all the users. Doug said that there was little innovation since 1998.

Steve really regrets not just focusing on search. He said he was the only one pushing the search size index. The business people said that people don't want so much, they just want the top pages. The management and VCs wanted to move it to a portal. He gets credit for turning down Larry, and help inventing Google.

Louis said he missed the Google opportunity as well, but he had no power to do anything. His own personal regret, a few days after they launched AV, Excite called him. He turned down a job opportunity at InfoSeek, where he could of had purchased two jets. AV missed the aspect of link popularity to improve the relevancy of the Web. AV used it to map the Web in size but not to improve relevancy.

Doug adds that Google also innovated the ability to search on one word queries. Everyone else had the default operator was OR. But Google used AND as the default (which was simple but genius). Focusing on precision and recall was also an area where Excite did not focus on.

Louis said Google built a system that scales very easily, the hardware at Google is very impressive. He bets Google can double its index with no problem, because of their hardware architecture. Doug adds that he was talking to Larry Page, and Doug told Larry that Google has an excellent brand but the search quality will not always be best. Larry said that people do not use Google because of its brand but because of its operations. He said just like with Coke, Coke's brand is because of its operations. Louis said Google does their stuff on the cheapest possible platform they can.

Chris then gets into valuation and they all start laughing at the dollar signs. Chris asks if we are going through an other bubble or???

Doug said he wont comment and won't speculate on the market.
Steve said the difference here is that Google has real revenue and real profits. The other companies did not have this.
Louis agrees with Steve but he is not buying any stock.
Doug adds he feels that the IPO is a bad thing for Google and they were smart to push it off so far.

Chris then asked them to look into the future.

Doug started talking about his Nutch, an open source Google. People find it useful to build and search niche search engines. He said its hard to know where it will go. Its open source, good enough quality and major commercial search engines will use. That is predicated on that search technology is becoming a commodity and is not getting much better.

Steve doesn't like to predict in the future, but if an other Stamford student comes to him, he will listen.

Louis said search is not sticky. Google is now adding elements to keep people there (gmail, photos, etc.).

Great session!!!

Q & A:

Q: Mike Grehan asks what they think of PageRank, Teoma's (HITS) answer and when did you realize spam is an issue?
A: Doug said spam was thought of as search quality, improve the quality. You can also build spam filters as well. Google probably does both. He feels PageRank is overrated.
Steve said PageRank is underrated, if it wasnt really that important then why is Google where they are? The fundamental difference was PageRank. If you don't have the precision that Google has, then none of that matters. Steve doesn't know much about Teoma.
Louis said pure PageRank is a joke, Google clearly uses a mix of things. Teoma he feels is a good idea, looking at subjects but it will be great to see it bigger, faster, personalized, etc. Louis said spam in Av was a nightmare. He said one day they turned something on where you can add pages to the index in real time. Louis was so excited because the Web index will increase. He didn't think for a second about spam. One guy wrote a script to pound spam into the index and break the system. AV tried everything and they never had a good answer. They tried using a duplicate content filter and keyword frequency. He said he feels for Google.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Jeffery Rohrs from Optiem discusses how this is going to work. This will not be a true "moot court" argument, not arguing a specific fact pattern, rather they will debate the general issues that are popular, and this is for non lawyers and lawyers. The people on the panel are "role playing" and does not mean they believe in what they are saying, they can be playing devils advocate. Scott Schwartz will be making the case for the trademark owners. Deborah Wilcox will be making the case for the search engines. Danny Sullivan, Barry Felder (playboy vs. netscape case), Eric Goldman (epinions counsel) will be on the board. Jeff will be the moderator.

He briefly describes trademark and what is it. A word, name, symbol, color, scent or sound used in commerce to distinguish good or services. Stronger marks might get stronger protection. Arbitrary marks like Google, Pepsi, RustyBrick all get stronger protection then would a generic word. Trademark law protects against "confusion" and "dilution." I did a review on this at the NY conference, do a search on trademark at this site and you can read more about the legalese of trademark and search. To see Google's current trademark policy visit google.com/tm_complaint.html, it says that in the US you can not have trademarks in the copy of the ad but you can bid on it (outside US it differs). Overture has a policy as well, trademarks can be used for several fair use reasons, read their policy (URL too long to type). And here we go.

Scott Schwartz begins represents the case for the trademark owners. TM owners spend enormous amounts of money establishing, promoting them. Search engines make a lot of money selling them. He then showed some obvious examples of trademark issues on tangible items. So why is this ok on Google? You type in "Klennex" in Google, and the sponsored results have non-Klennex company pages. TMs being sold in paid search is causing consumer confusion and having a negative effect on TM owners. Do a search for elmopalooza, you see an ad to sing up your kids for talent agencies. Search on dunkin Donuts, in the sponsored links you see franchise opportunities.com available to click on, are they part of dunkin Donuts? I am confused, and that is the test for trademark confusion.

Barry Feldman jumped in and asked Scott a question: He asked if he put up a brand named "new sauce" and put it in the same isle as ragu, would that violate TM? Scott said absolutely not, because on search, someone is searching on "ragu" not on "sauce".
Eric Goldman asked for the difference between online and offline, in terms of not being able to visually see the package.
After more probing by Barry and Danny, Scott said that the language used by search engines "Sponsored" it kind of means that dunkin Donuts is sponsoring these results.
Then as he began to conclude with this concept, Eric asks an other question by asking about the elmopalooza case, the sole case is to ride the elmo brand to find new talented kids.

Scott says its the SEs responsibility, and they need to change things. They profit from it and they bare the responsibility for it. They need to change the visibility of these ads, call them "paid" and not "sponsored". They should alert the trademark owners when their trademarks are being purchased. Advertisers must say they are not infringing, advertisers need to provide accurate contact information, and require buyers to indemnify search engines.

Deborah is representing the search engines, she starts off saying where is the trademark problem, where is the confusion? (1) There must be some kind of use of the trademarks. Use in the legal sense, you must have some type of branding going on. The search engines are using the trademarks to brand their engines nor are the advertisers using it to boost their brand of their brands. (2) Where is the confusion? TM law is meant to protect the consumers, it is not misleading the consumer's purchase decision. If there is no confusion then where it the problem. Sponsored links do not confuse the user, they are clearly separated on in Google, Overture and Yahoo. This is in compliance with what the FTC requires. (3) The searcher's objective is not know when they search. The searcher might not be looking for the "official site". They might want to learn about reviews, competition, and more. So I might type in a product name to look for reviews.

About 5 minutes of questions by the board were thrown in to Deborah, all which were handled well. Hard to cover this because there is very little structure to the presentation, it was meant to be in this fashion. But it was a great presentation.

Now they each have five minutes of rebuttal.

Scott said search engines are literally nickel and dimeing the trademark owners to death (people clapped). He shows more example of confusion. He said he would like to see the search results on a different page. That made everyone laugh.

Deborah offers her rebuttal, she says that this is not illegal. People always use others brands to boost their own brands legally. Is Network Solutions held accountable when someone buys your trademark name? No but the person who buys it is.

The board walks out for 10 minutes to discuss, we can ask for councils questions.

The board now comes back in and they each speak.

Barry Feldman is up first. He said a balance approach is appropriate. Was there confusion? There are things the SEs can do to help make sure this does not happen. The visuals are important to help reduce the confusion.

Danny said that he dislikes that people can buy other people's brands but its not illegal. He would like to see the sponsored listing label to change to "paid advertisement." In the end, the beef is with the advertisers not the search engines.

Eric Goldman said we need to separate our emotional response and the legal response. He agrees that the beef is with the advertisers. Plus there needs to be confusion with the ad, plus the landing page.

That is all. We had some Q & A but most were like, look at my example.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman moderated.

David Weinrot from BizRate sees shopping search as a specialized vertical in search. One of the highlights of shopping search is the product level comparison. He began going through screen shots of bizrate's shopping search engine. In the past 15th months online consumer behavior has shifted 17% to shopping search sites. BizRate attracts 20 million unique users per month and direct that traffic to merchants. He says its basically risk free, no set up fees, etc. The business services site has listing, bidding and other tools. They have a customer rating system (which is very popular out there).

Rob Solomon from Yahoo! Shopping was next up. He started with a quiz to give away hats. He said apparel and home and garden products are 60% of search. His point, people are now using this for that. He asked a few more questions and flung out a few hats. Search is the foundation for shopping. Uniquely combines search and compare functionality. Focused on ensuring search results are highly relevant and comprehensive. Search on mp3 player, you will see you can narrow it down by attribute, they are improving on this today. He said comparison shopping is a "killer app." They have a program named "product submit" to help you manage your feed. High quality product images, include data about products, product names and description, updated info, total price are all very important areas to rank well on Yahoo! Shopping.

Sean Behr from Shopping.com will try to point out things shopping does differently and how to succeed with shopping.com. Shopping.com is the largest online comparison shopping services, and the 4th largest online retail destination, 20 million uniques per month, and more then 6,000 merchants. They originally started out as dealtime.com and focused on tech related products, not they are wide spread and sell mostly apparel and home & garden like the others. The sort area is defaulted to "trust" which is ratings by customers. Price is important but ratings are more important. Smart Buy gets about 3x more visibility. An other tool they have is the CDI (customer demand index) found at shopping.com/cdi/. Merchant ratings are hard to get, there is traditionally a negative bias (which is logical). Merchants with a 4.0+ rating have a 34% higher conversion rate then others. Trusted Stores have a 49% higher and a smart buy has a 110% higher conversion rate figure. Take advantage of all the product listing features, use the shopping surveys to boost ratings, partner with SEM firms and watch the cdi to see what is hot.

Marissa Mayer from Google was up next to talk about Froogle. History was how she started, in 2002, people were querying on product related items but Google wasn't providing what they needed (they wanted to buy). They decided to develop Froogle. Froogle is Free - that got some claps. Process: Merchant -> Feed via FTP -> Froogle Results Page. Another way to get into Froogle, they also use the Google index to find products for sale and they call these "fall-through" results. Feed results always appear before the fall-through results. Feeds are very easy to set up, they have a great merchant center, and you can update the information at any time. Free advertising is infinite ROI. Features can sort by price, filter price, search by category as well and the price and picture are visible in search (unlike Google.com). They want more feedback, feel free to respond.

Last up was Mark Bradley from NextTag, which is the second largest shopping site (shopping.com is the largest). NextTag focuses on selection, ROI, volume, and efficiency. 50% is tech product, the rest go to other industries. He didn't want to repeat what most the others said, they are very similar to the others. He said they give a marketing message to place in his engine that help with CTR and conversion. They also show a "price history" chart, which shows how the price decreases or increases over time and they have a price alert feature (like stocks). Its very easy to list products; (1) send feed or (2) automatic crawl.

When I buy, I go to Google do my search on sku or product name, click on the ads of the shopping search engines and then look for the lowest costs with shipping. Loyalty for me is not there amongst which engine I choose. But I think I buy more from Shopping.com, they have more merchants, which normally means lower prices merchants.

Q & A:

Q: Nacho got the first question and he asked about how does he handle selling the same exact product but in different size, or different colors, etc?
A: BizRate recommends that the SKU values be unique among the product sizes and colors. So each product would require a different sku. NextTag recommends you see what others are doing. Yahoo! tries to allow you to include a "sales rank" and if you say this product is more popular then it would rank higher. Shopping.com said you don't want to have a person click on each listed size, so see which one you prefer to list. Froogle lists one and has a link to more.

Q: How do you recommend new sites to rank well based on customer reviews?
A: Shopping.com recommends using the survey option and in 2 to 3 weeks you can rank well. Yahoo says everyone has the opportunity to be rated well, but they are coming up with a grace period factor being implemented.

Q: What is your biggest business challenge in the coming years?
A: BizRate said providing attributes for every category. Yahoo said differentiation is the biggest challenge, personalization is a big focus for Yahoo and then scale. NextTag's biggest challenge is higher people but seriously he said there is a 20% overlap between these engines (besides Google). Froogle's biggest challenge is taking the feedback and improving.

Q: Pricing is very competitive, do you allow special pricing?
A: NextTag said no, you have to have the same price on nexttag and on the site, but its hard to monitor.

Q: How do people buy, price or brand or reviews?
A: NextTag said 50% buy based on merchant brand and 50% buy based on lowest price. BizRate provided this information earlier. Shopping.com said price is a huge factor, its their secondary sort. Froogle sees a lot of interest in price as well.

Q: Do web search algorithms overlap with shopping algorithm search?
A: Google said no but they do include the top three Froogle results in Google. Yahoo said something interesting, he said Inktomi is powering Yahoo! Search (he must of not meant that). Missed the other part, because this shocked me.

Forum Coverage at Search Engine Watch.

In light of recent publicity and events surrounding SEMPO, an outpouring of concerns hit many of the top Search Engine Marketing forums, including IHelpYou, HighRankings, Cre8asiteForums, and SearchEngineWatch. Beneath the dissatisfaction or allegiance towards the still-developing SEMPO, crept in some thoughtful posts, led by Bill Slawski, an Administrator at Cre8asite.

His research and detailed insights into how organizations are run, aided by other forum posters who picked up the on the positive vibe, helped launched a new thread. In it, people are asking questions, making clear statements on their needs, and requesting a “Show of hands” for support for what could be a new phase of growth or recognition for the SEO/SEM industry.

The most exciting aspect is the idea that everyone be represented.

In After SEMPO: Should We Start a Trade Association? Bill asks,

     "What are the things that you would look for in an organization that actually represented the industry?

     What would its purpose be?

     How would people communicate with each other? Is it something that could be done, not in a conference room during SES seminars, but on the web?"

The forum thread opened discussions including whether an organization should set standards and provide rates that anyone could afford, including students learning the trade.

Bill also wrote:

     “I don't think we should go quite go so far as to lay out the groundwork for a new organization. Exploring all of the options is a good starting point. Any group that might be created would definitely benefit from a clear statement of purpose, and a clear understanding of who the members should be.

Let's get a sense of what that clear statement of purpose might be.”

Continue reading "Back To The Drawing Board?"

Chris Sherman welcomes everyone to this panel and describes it as more hands on, how do we make money with what we are doing.

Chris Bowler from itraffic (Agency.com) and he will provide a case study of a client named "Barrie Pace". Barrie Pace sells upscale women's clothing online. Sold 15.8 million in apparel online in 2003. itraffic does customer email marketing, search engine advertising, online advertising/direct marketing and shopping search engines. Why go into shopping search engines? Because people are going to shopping search engines in buy mode, and those engines have a much higher reach then barriepace.com. In 2003 they partnered with five engines. Pricing models differ between the engines, there are three types. (1) Commission based (i.e. Amazon, Altura), (2) Referral Fees (AOL Shopping, Shopping.com), (3) No Charge Inclusion (Froogle). They all have in common that you need to feed your data to the engines, typically flat files, either daily or weekly, and each engine has their own templates.

Shopping.com is the easiest to set up in his opinion (I agree), it has a simple CPC model, they also provide adverting to increase visibility on top of your product feed. Amazon is the most difficult to set up, but it has the largest reach - so its worth setting up. Its complex because of the commissions and all transactions are done at Amazon, returns are a bit complicated as well and there is a monthly fee. You have to review 29 documents to review and submit back, could take up to 4 months. They need merchant profile, merchant help pages, storefront layout, images and content, shipping tables, and tax rules and tax codes. Then you need to set up the Amazon Product feed. Then you need to download orders for fulfillment on a daily basis. You need to provide back the order shipping info for the customer and then you need someone to handle returns/adjustments. AOL is much like shopping.com, the CPC is a bit higher and there is an annual fee. Altura/Catalog City is similar to Amaazon, commission based pricing and fixed set up fee and they will distribute catalogs to their users. They also syndicate to Yahoo shopping. Froogle is free, small but free.

There are click rates of 3 - 5% because they are searching for Barrie Pace. Conversion rates are between .4 - 4%, the lower number is because Barrie Pace is an unfamiliar site to them. ROI is $6, for every dollar they spend, they get back $6.

Tips: (1) Aggressively monitor your listings, (2) Track results at the product level, (3) Take advantage of operational and customer service emails, (4) shopping sites will buy your brand keywords in search - beware and (5) monitor and respond to customer feedback.

Misty Locke from Range Online will talk about Yahoo and MSN. MSN and Yahoo! Shopping are search. MSN versus Yahoo: MSN gets 4 stars and Yahoo gets 1.5 stars. If you type in "bestbuy" you will see Yahoo brings up nothing from bestbuy.com, MSN doesn't sell besybuy. She then types in JP Penny in Yahoo and JC Penny shoes came up, in MSN the store comes up, with featured offerings and information on the store. Then she types in "soccer" in MSN shopping, it breaks down results by category (movies, books, sports, etc.), Yahoo doesn't do this. She then goes to Yahoo and types in "airfare chicago" but the results are not relevant, with MSN they send her back to the normal search page and bring up Orbitz as a top result. Why didn't they bring them to Expedia (MSN owned) and TraveloCity (Yahoo partner)?

She then typed in "laptop" in MSN, they have a nice page layout. The featured products on the bottom are based on CPC prices. Dell is in the top three listings, they spend the most. Then type in "director chairs", MSN breaks out categories, she clicks on "kitchen and furniture" and Pier 1 is listed every where. Target is paying more but Pier 1 is higher because the results are more relevant. Yahoo, doesn't come close (try "sheets" in Yahoo versus MSN). She doesn't really know what makes product a come before product b, she gets different answers from different people in Yahoo. Yahoo is changing, but its coming way of optimization (optimize your Yahoo feeds). She feels Yahoo is working on it and they are making changes, she upgraded them to 2 stars.

Laura Thieme from BizResearch was next up. Two retail case studies, one with a 2.6% conversion and one with a .4% conversion rate. In 2003 he brought in Christmas 2003 741 orders from shopping.com. Then in 2004 they got about 214 from shopping, 81 from yahoo and froogle 21. Yahoo dropped, she believes because of Overture's sponsored ads. They dropped out of Yahoo because of this drop. Conversion rates were displayed, and shopping.com consistently had good conversion rates. Shopping.com had the best ROI compared to Froogle and Yahoo! (including developer time).

Retailer # 2 didnt do as well, bizrate performed better then shopping.com. Bizrate requires manufacturers id and shopping.com does not require. Froogle was the best conversions, but overall this had a poor ROI. Why is it not performing? Sometimes you need to go through the experience to figure it out. She showed screen shots of her travels. She basically says there can be a ton of reasons...

Q & A:

Q: How do you optimize against the affiliates in the shopping.com arena?
A: You can prohibit your affiliate from cannibalizing your sales.

Q: What affect do product reviews have on clicks and sales?
A: Reviews help ranking and help conversions. Its a combo of relevancy and reviews.

Q: Can you send traffic to category or gallery pages?
A: I don't think so, but you can technically map your results to any page. But why not optimize your product pages to say, here are more products from this category.

Q: Are there tools to manage Amazon feeds?
A: Amazon has tool for "gold merchants" but they are very expensive. Nothing really for the mid to low range merchants. Its best to build your own tool for this, its easy enough.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Danny said these panelists are all very brave since he just gave them the questions 10 minutes ago.

Jerry Campbell from AOL said that we are all trying to solve the same problems, but they have different ways of solving these problems. AOL search fits within its subscription base via Google results (the web search) and, on top of that, AOL takes their content (Time Warner) to bring out the search. If you search on pumpkin recipe you will get recipes pulled from Time Warner's food channel. AOL delivers a great "content experience."

Jeff Weiner from Yahoo! said Yahoo! wants to understand the intent of each user when searching. Search is to provide the means to the end, but they want to also provide the "end." They feel the most important thing is personalization. They also have a huge register base. They now own their own proprietary search technology which gives them a lot of flexibility. They are also able to integrate their content from their partners. He began to give a live demo from Yahoo.com. His first search was "san jose traffic", "san jose airport", "american 123", "new york city weather", "new york hotels". These are examples of how Yahoo uses content within the search. A hidden shortcut is "shopping!", if you add an ! after the name of the Yahoo section, you will be taken to that property. So we went over to the shopping section of Yahoo and you type in "camera." Yesterday Yahoo! announced Yahoo! Local at http://local.yahoo.com/. Search for "restaurants" and you can then narrow it down from there. I did this last night, but I used SmartView - which is neat. He then moved over to SmartView.

Paul Gardi from Ask Jeeves decided to use his presentation, Danny (i think) asked them not to. Ask says "one size" does not fit all. They have 8 brands, each brand provides a different experience. He started talking about how the industry is growing... He believes we are just at the beginning of understanding searchers. In one year they jumped from the 32nd ranked property to the 7th. They have a 25% domestic reach compared to 10% last year. In the future they will continue to innovate. Improve relevancy, leverage the Teoma technology, further differentiate Ask's distinct search experience, and expand local strategy. He then showed a demo on typing in "weather in san jose" and it shows you the weather right there, with more options, right in the search - he said we should try it on our phones now.

Christopher Payne from MSN Search, he said he is the new kids on the block. He feels the end user is going to win in the coming years. Some of you know my thoughts on this, back to coverage... Microsoft is undergoing a transition, they have been in the search space since 1998. They outsourced the technology until now, and now they are investing in building their own technology. In the next 12 months they hope to release these technologies. They will giving you the ability to not only search the Web but also their desktop (email, files, etc.). He feels this desktop search will be the major area of search in the next few years. They announced changes to their live site in July, they made decreased the weight of the pages (much faster now), they pulled the ads and labeled them more clearly, eliminated their paid inclusion (because customers want separation between paid and natural). They just announced their recent "newsbot" at sandbox.msn.com in the US. It is based on their search technology, its MSN's first personalization example. "Implicit personalization", they look at what your reading and then serve up more of that type of news, this will be transparent to you. This "implicit personalization" will migrate over to Web search. The last thing he would like to talk about is the tech preview, he said its the beginning. Its not great, its there to provide feedback in order to develop a road map to build a better search provided by MSN.

Google is not here, because of the IPO, I am sure they will be here next time. Danny will talk for Google (people laughed).

Questions Now:
Question: How do you bring in the searcher from other properties?
Answers:
MSN said by providing a better technology, people will switch.
AOL said by providing the most relevant result right away, by providing an emotional experience that 'wows' people, sample people and get it right each and every time. Search evolved from providing results to helping navigate the content on the Web.
Yahoo said a way to provide search always, maybe a toolbar. How do you get them to download it? They provide an anti-spy bot in their toolbar. Search is completely stateless, we don't know them, no relation, etc. He said as we get to know the user better, we can get them to stay.
Ask said we look at the world that every person in this room is unique. He asked how many people in the room ate an egg in the last month? Then said he bets some of you had it scrambled, some had it easy over, etc. You need to customize it for each users needs. Not a "one-size fits all."

Question: What is the next big vertical for your engines?
Answers:
AOL said they break it down into revenue and user experience. People looking for values with product, looking to make a transaction. Value added content will be a focus for improving your vertical experience.
Yahoo said where is user demand, he said local is about 20% of all queries. How can they differentiate this content and then value creation (monetize and product quality). Going forward you can start to see travel, music (lyrics, downloads), and careers.
Ask said its based on the search, local is huge (he said about 10% on his site). See more of reviews, opinions, local markets, and more. Its about combining structured and unstructured data. Also desktop search.
MSN's next vertical is search :). News, desktop search are other verticals.

Question: Do you view SEMs as the enemy or what?
Answers:
Ask said they see SEMs as a very valuable aspect of their Web search experience. He likes the fact that people optimize, not spam, but optimize - as long as they are doing it for the right reasons.
Yahoo said that bad irrelevant results are the enemy not SEMs.
AOL said advertising equals content. SEMs are the best thing that happened to the industry.
MSN thinks our interests should be aligned in the long run. If we degrade results with spam, then it hurts our industry and our assets.

Question: What is your best search feature is?
Answer:
AOL said that the best feature that people don't know that AOL has is search (people laughed). His favorite feature is that everything is locked inside the AOL client.
ASK said that its not a feature, people don't look for features. He said its the unfeature, "smart search" - give them the result right away.
Yahoo said he has a shortcuts page, and brought it up. They try making it easier for people to find these features. His favorite features include; he searched on "Florence" and he showed off the "also try" refine your search option. He loves the anti-spy feature as well.
MSN said his feature is "lookout" which helps you search your outlook email. It will change the way you use email.

Question: What will continue to grow search revenue?
Answers:
MSN said the number one thing they can do is increase the supply, get more people to search.
Yahoo said the same thing.
ASK said people are seeing a complete shift in the advertising landscape, we are getting better at measuring that. As we do that more, its becoming a better experience and more and more people will enter. Advertising is a $300 billion industry, and search is a tiny fraction of that.
AOL, traffic needs to increase and he agrees with the others. He also adds that we have one answer (web search), how do we give more answers in other ways?

Question: Google is going public, what impact will Google going public have on you?
Answers:
MSN said they don't think about it much. He said it won't affect the industry to much.
ASK said they are excited about it because it brings the industry more credibility.
Yahoo! wishes them well and welcomes to the club.
AOL said it brings a focus to the industry, AOL likes seeing good friends succeed.

Question: What surprises you the most about searchers?
Answers:
MSN said the search diversity about what people are looking for. There is so much more potential to answer a searchers questions better.
ASK said searchers are unique, the same keyword search done by person A can have a different meaning if searched for by person B.
Yahoo said the number of people who use the search box instead of typing in the company name into the browser URL box. I said before, I was at a client and he wanted to go to the Google homepage, so he searched on "google.com" at Google.com. :)
AOL said emotion is what they look at.

Question: If you had to describe your search engine as a person, how would you do it?
AOL is Cal Ripkin, AOL always shows up and always delivers.
Yahoo, did you see the movie "Good Will Hunting" and he said we are incredibly smart.
ASK said we are at your service to meet your needs, he said we are "data" from star trek, we know everything you might need.
MSN said instead of coming up a name, he said he will describe the attribute; passion and innovation.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Of course I decided to pull out my Apple PowerBook at the Google Dance to write on this excellent event. The sun has set and you see these neon green, pink and green objects moving through the crowd of people. I can't get over how nice it is to see SEMs and the SEs together, let alone at the Google Plex.

People I had time to chat with:
- Matt Cutt from Google (rumored to be the GoogleGuy, but he would not provide a confirmation).
- Kevin Lee (did-it.com, we talked SEMPO scandal)
- Brett Tabke (WebmasterWorld, talked SEMPO, forums and the WMW Pub Conference)
- Bruce Clay (he thought I moved or pruned his post at SEW forums on the honestseo.com site, I did not)
- Danny Sullivan (we talked SEMPO and forum)
- Elisabeth (we talked forum)
- Nacho (we talked a bunch, fun and good guy)
- Jim from WeBuildPages (talked a lot as well)
- Joseph Morien (sew forums), David Wallace (sew forums), EGOL (seo chat forum), SEO Guy (seo chat forum)

So what did I get from my conversations with Kevin Lee, Brett Tabke and Danny Sullivan on SEMPO. It seems like most of the board want to stay out of "industry standards" but Danny is pushing SEMPO to get involved. In addition, Kevin strongly believes that Google and the engines should set the standards, not the SEOs. He then said that he is happy he is out of the SEO industry.

I had some forum lurkers and posters stop me to say hello. No one yet checked me into a wall, like I requested in my blog post earlier, but there are a couple more days left in the conference. I'll be posting pictures at my blog (seroundtable.com) because for some reason I am having problems posting images here (I know how to, believe me - I spend a ton of time in forums).

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Want more? Visit the pictures section of the Google Dance 2004 here.

Continue reading "Google Dance 2004"

Chris Sherman starts off by saying that there is life outside of Google and Overture. He says that this panel will focus on the opportunities outside of Google and Overture

Peter Hershberg from RepriseMedia was up first, he is here to talk about the other types of engines. Paid listings distribution across the Web is covered by Google (53%) and Overture (45%). So the other 2% is about 2 million searches and the prices on Google and Overture keep climbing. The inventory of search ads is shrinking. So we have Tier II Search (FindWhat, Enhance, LookSmart, Kanoodle, Search 123) and Verticals (Business.com, Industry Crains, TravelZooo, Gamblling.com) and the Shopping Engines (Shopping.com, bizrate and pricegrabber).

The value of working with the alternative PPC engines are:
- More volume
- Lower minimum CPCs (as low as a penny) a good way to test
- Less competition
- Hands-on customer service (Tier I can not handle the customer service requests but Tier II's can)

You need to be cautious of the following areas with Tier IIs:
- Distribution can be poor quality
- Relevancy can be sub-par
- Search behavior might differ from Tier I to Tier II
- Lack of tools compared with Tier Is
- Fraudulent clicks (he went into a lot of detail on this, but I covered click fraud in this mornings session).

Chris Churchill from Fathom Online was next up. He asked who is concerned about the rising price of clicks on the Internet. Pretty much everyone rose their hands, not me, I am typing. Two Ways to Increase ROI (1) better buying and (2) increasing conversions. He briefly discusses the "power of conversion rates" with a 'what if scenario' slide. This session is about "better buying", and he complied data from the first half of 2004, 218 campaigns and 6.8 million clicks. They divided up the universe into tier I and tier II. He broke down conversion rates by Tier. He left out the names of which Tiers were and were not converting. The conversions ranged from 2.92% from a tier II, then a 1.98% from a II, and 1.58% from a II, then two tier Is at 1.37% and 1.12%. He also broke the tiers down based on conversions by industry. For some reason the financial industry performed better on a tier II then on a tier I. If Tier I's have 98% reach, why would Fathom have 18% volume from Tier IIs? Because Fathom leverages both, unlike many SEM companies.

Frank Watson from FXCM stood up without slides. He spends about $200,000 and $150,000 on Google and Overture respectively. He said that is all that is available, so he looks elsewhere. You should utilize the Tier IIs before your competitors do. Use analytics, use verticals, use international engines and test. Short presentation but he made his point - work hard.

Next up was Dan Ballister from FindWhat.com. He describes who is FindWhat.com is. They get 1.5 M clicks/day from 300+ affiliate sites, Espotting in 9 countries, premium private label partners such as lycos and verizon, and they offer merchant services such as miva drive traffic. Advertisers work with FindWhat because they reach a "different footprint," reach ROI goals through efficient bidding and two tiered customer support level. They see the space becoming more and more vertical, cross border marketing (i.e. espotting, mitsui, miva), fully monetizing every paid click (online, on phone, and on premise). They are encouraging you enter a phone number for you to track the on phone "pay per call".

Damien Smith from LookSmart didn't bring a presentation as well (not sure why). Can I reach my volume targets and my requested ROI? He says that is the important question. LookSmart wants to be able to help you by focusing on three things (1) quality traffic (traffic quality is not good enough in the industry today, they are working harder on it now) (2) prices low (3) robust tools. He gave out his personal number so you can speak directly with him if you not happy with LookSmart's services.

Q & A:

Q: Someone why do people participate or conduct clicl fraud?
A: :)

Q: What is the ideal time to test a campaign on these Tier IIs?
A: FindWhat asks for 90 days, Peter said he agrees but tailors it on the clients needs, Frank adds that there are many variables to take into consideration.

Q: How will FindWhat manage the Pay Per Call campaign?
A: FindWhat said there will be a separate area to manage Pay Per Call. Reporting will include pay per call with an 800# and not a hyperlink.

Q: Does LookSmart have plans to do pay per call?
A: They haven't looked at it yet, but its possible.

Q: Dana Todd asked Damian if he can go more into how CTR has an impact on listings?
A: Damian said its relatively similar to Google, just think of it at CTR x CPC.

No more questions for the panel...So we are just waiting for more questions. I am going to leave and post this. Off to the Google Dance in a couple of hours.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman introduces the session with a quick summary and welcomes Massimo Burgio from Ad Maiora.

Massimo starts speaking in some foreign language, to make a point (which I expect he will get to). European market consists of 25 countries, where there are 20 official EC languages. Europe is an active and major portion of the internet population. Search queries with european languages are 1/3 of all searches. Searches per search engine users are the highest in the UK. Europe is a very complicated market. In Europe there are some major local search properties; such as Virgilio, Wanadoo, T-Online, Terra Network, Spray and more. If you are doing SEM in Europe, you must look at the local engines. The UK is the most active market in terms of SEM/SEO services, search adverting spending is 33% (average is 10%), rising stars in the European area are Poland and Scandinavian countries. IAB/EIAA, Jupiter, and SEMPO are all very active in Europe. Many independent search events are also taking place (funny, there was a typo on the slide but that is ok, its a European session, not US session). He did not want to get into the technical side.

He then gives us a little case study on Wyndham hotels. The target countries include; Italy, France, Germany, Spain. But the .com Web site was only in English. PPC networks such as Google, Overture and Espotting were used. They saw that only traffic was coming from Google. The ad editors' specs change over time and are not the same from country to country. So they began building specific ads and landing pages for each specific country. They are in the process of building vertical micro site for his country. He collected some nice data on what types of locations people from Europe (broken down by country) would like to travel to.

Bill Hunt from IBM was next up. He manages IBM's worldwide strategy for search. IBM has 83 localized language versions of its site representing 31 countries. He has developed a clear management system for SEM, this way they make sure to apply the same things in every market (just fined tuned for each market). Common problems with international SEM include; (1) all the problems faced in the US in English, (2) Not thinking like the consumer in the market, (3) Poor quality translations typically not optimized, (4) Lack of centralized approach, vision and support, (5) Lack of resources - people and money, (6) faulty or no keyword research in local language, (7) multiple simultaneous campaigns - partners & affiliates, and (8) poor or inefficient navigation to and from country sites.

The Global SEM process:
Market Research -> E-commerce Strategy -> Strategy -> Conduct keyword Research -> Localization -> Optimization -> Measure

Barrier # 1: Local market search engines restrict pages to those with local languages or local top level domain, 90% of Europeans use the local languages version of the search engines.

The US centric Google.com brings up IBM as the first result for "ibm thinkpad", the second tab they picked (i think german language) brought up the wrong german page, the third tab was german located pages only which requires you to have a site that lives in germany or the domain suffix must be .de.

Removing Location & Language Barriers:
- Use correct meta language tags (html lang="de") and (meta http-equiv="Content...)
- Use local domains (i.e. .de, .fr, .co.uk), they can be hosted in the US and at least a few pages on the local market domain

Barrier # 2: Getting crawled is a major problem. Example, pop up or pull down country/office maps are not being crawled. Restrictive JavaScript language detects pushes hurt as well.

Barrier # 3: Cheap translation is just that...cheap. Translators are not good optimizers (mostly). Many translators do not use the internet often. Few translators don't understand keyword research. Translation tools typically kill current optimization efforts. And None of the major localization firms currently use keyword research as part of their glossary development or translation process.

Barrier # 4: Keyword variations and mapping.

Harrison Magun from eONmedia was up first and will be focusing on PPC in Europe. Why do Americans go to Europe? (1) Drink Beer, (2) Take Pictures, (3) To Be with other Americans who like to take pictures and drink beer. :) But really: (1) increase distribution, (2) competitive advantages, (3) first mover opps, (4) leverage foreign exchange and regional pricing advantages. Two main goals to increase sales and profits.

190 Million US internet users versus about 170 European internet users. Market growth in Europe is much higher then in the US.

What kinds of companies should market in Europe? (1) Downloadable applications do not require shipping, (2) Hotel and air, (3) Fragrance and Beauty, (4) Media, and (5) B2B/Wholesale. Who should not? (1) Restricted products, (2) Consumer electronics, (3) Automotive, (4) Online/Offline education, (5) Leads for US based services (credit cards, mortgages, etc.).

Linguistic and regional elements are huge. (1) Make sure the ads are relevant, (2) the landing pages as well, (3) translation site (merchandising and pricing, fulfillment and CRM), (4) Competitive strength and weakness versus regional.

Effective AdWords listings from a foreign company in the US, "russian souvenirs" brought up "Russian Unique Doll" with the description on a Russian Doll Bottle Holder. Brought up a funny product which had nothing to do with the search, (or did it?). Effective site for the US work the same way, he brought up a very funny example of a European company's language into English.

Q & A:

They had special Q & A people on the panel: (1) Peter Celeste from Overture and he is into launching new markets, to work with the current markets to help accelerate revenue, and they have a new team to help US based companies go Europe. (2) Tor Crockatt from Espotting was on the panel to help the SEMs get to Europe by helping you localize your marketing efforts. And (3) Derek Preston from Marago the European search engine.

Q: How do you work around having multiple languages on a single page?
A: Bill responded they have a rule that they do not put more then one languages. But the search engines do put weight to the dominate language on the page and the tag. A problem IBM has is with support content in China where the customers do not want translated support content because they are not 100% confident in the accuracy, so ranking those pages are hard.

Q: Question is to Peter from Overture, he was wondering how many US companies are going Europe.
A: Peter said many are. Bill adds that many large companies are moving in that direction. Sessions like these keep getting larger and larger.

Q: How is it best to manage content?
A: IBM uses 14 different CMSs in its organization. Depends on the organization side and needs...

Q: Do you have keyword research tools for this industry?
A: Espotting has a few tools that allow you to do this over multiple networks on the languages. IBM said there isn't any tool that does it, they use Overture, Espotting, WordTracker and other tools and do their best. Espotting added that the UK had the most "comparative searches" but Germany and Scandinavia has more "product specific searches".

Q: What if you don't have the resources to do this?
A: Well, if you don't do it and your competitors are then you can not compete. People normally won't transact from a site they don't understand, its scary.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Andrew Goodman moderated this session. He introduced Jessie Stricchiola from AlchemistMedia. The room is pretty pretty much filled up, I think I attended this session in NY and it was not as filled (maybe it was the clinic). CPC Ads are Not All Alike she said. If one thing is for sure, everyone is talking about how search ads are very different then contextual ads. You can not control/select/analyze contextual ad distribution, cost, etc. You can do certain things to optimize your campaigns by testing ad copy with contextual only (like Andrew discusses in yesterday's morning session). Moving forward we should tell the CPC companies to provide more separation between search and contextual, ability to view this data, and we need more data on the users and patterns.

Jessie tells us about the "bracket trick", which she told the audience in NY. (1) {KeyWord:Long Beach} = All words with initial caps (2) {Keyword:Long beach} = First word capitalized (3) {keyword:long beach} = All words in lower case. This allows you to dynamically put the keyword the searcher used in the engine in the title of your ad with these brackets "{keyword}'.

To keep your CTR high, turn off ads at times where the CTRs are low. Day parts tracking help with this. She says "test, test test..." your elements (call to actions, text, graphics, forms, links, navigation), characteristics (positioning, color scheme, form usability, and word content). Test and fine tune. She mentioned this tool named optimost.com which is a 3rd part dynamic landing page optimization service (sounds very interesting).

Misty Locke from Range Online Media is up now. How does the ad meet the conversion? She talks about her 6 key reminders. (1) Who are you targeting? Know your audience. (2) Conversions can vary depending on keyword and landing pages AND on CPC engine. (3) Landing pages should directly correlate to keyword and placement. (4) Remember the convenience of the online shopper. (5) Take a deep breath - use the 2 to 3 click rule, don't make the user to click too much. (6) Think conversion not traffic when selecting search terms for interior or product pages.

Determine most relevant search terms, consider the product inventory (how much you have in stock), which products have the highest profit margin? Then identify your biggest competitors, what are they ranking for? are they buying on those words? Where are those landing pages? And what sets you apart from them. She then goes over some basics which you all know, since your reading this. :)

Pier 1 Case Study:
High CTR but low conversion rates, which was not great. They wanted to increase conversions, and ROI. They improved user experience (landing pages), detailed more keywords and targeted only the pier 1 shopper. She wrote creative that was targeting the Pier 1 customer only. The CTR was about 20%, which was excellent. They then added more 'feeling' to the ad, the CTR increased about 10% (to 30%), but where they buying? Problem was that the customer didn't know how to navigate from the home page to the product. So they took them directly to the product or category pages. Site conversions increased 4 - 6 %. Keyword conversions increased from .37% to 1.79%

Lee Mills from BeyondClicks is up next. He said include keyword in ad creative always. You also want to include the keyword in the ad landing page and a strong call to action (offer free stuff if you have to). One of his clients is anonymizer. The landing page must have multiple call to actions, multiple ways to buy (top and bottom of the page). He said its also good to put price in your ads (if you are a low cost provider). They are more likely to buy if they know the cost. He stresses, like the other speakers, test continuously!

They did some A/B testing on landing pages. B2B example: Page A had a 3% conversion rate. So they made Page B which was simplified, and its conversion rate was 18%. That is huge! B2C example: Page A had a 3.2% conversion, they made a longer page with multiple offers on Page B and the conversion rate was 9.6%. He said if you have scrolling pages, then put an additional offer (call to action) at the bottom of the page. Do not use pages that do not allow for navigation to your other pages, I see this often with landing pages - he says it doesn't work (causes lack of credibility).

Q & A:

Q: With the "bracket trick", now people are using 3 to 4 keyword searches, how much longer will this trick work?
A: Jessie said it works well in some cases and not in all cases. Ideally, any CPC source that allows this, you can bet they will expand it. With Google, they only allow 6 keywords - so its a product fault. But sometimes you should break them down into static ads.

Q: How do you work with companies to change their navigation?
A: Start slowly and show how it works.

The same guy made a comment about how nice it was to see a female panelists. The panelists liked that, thought it was funny.

Q: My clients are dumb, they want to my "town real estate" keywords but he said they don't convert.
A: Test different styles of ads; personal ads versus corporate like ads. "Meet Mrs. Real Estate Agent" versus "Meet Company Real Estate". The individual, personal ads seem to do better, because its like a word of mouth referral. Do what you can to capture that lead, maybe a white paper, maybe something else. Then after you get the lead, have your sales people jump on them.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Jessie Stricchiola starts off with a brief history of how she got into click-fraud. She had her tech team build a program to monitor click-fraud. Then identified two of the client's competitors who were clicking on the ads. The average costs were $1,500 per day! The company that was doing this fraud was ironically a law firm that worked on Internet fraud. Then GoTo.com (2002) gave the client a refund.

Fraudulent clicks come from:
- Competitors clicks; often manually, sometimes via automated 'hitbots'.
- CPC affiliate clicks; often via 'hitbots' and is generated by PPC partners from various locations. Its hard to detect these things and the CPC engines are also working on identifying and blocking it.
- Impression Fraud is an other concern. One of the criteria of ranking well in Google AdWords is your CTR. The higher the impressions but the lower the clicks, this can ultimately lead for your ad to be removed.

Auditing Click Fraud:
- Set up tracking URLs
- Data you need to collect is the URL request and the Visitor behavior data (after the click). She mentions three Web analytics tools (Urchin, WebTrends, ClickTracks) and Bid Management (did it, atlasone and keywordmax).
- Configure your reports to store as much information as possible (ip, os, browser, keywords, source, etc.)
- Then you do analysis of these reports by compiling click data per keyword and per cpc engine.
> average daily clicks
> average page views per click
> average conversion rate per keyword per click
> PPC network partner sources (international referrers)
> hourly click trends, etc.
- What are click fraud indicators
> abnormal spikes
> abnormal clicks increases plus atypical visitor behavior
> more than one competitor dropping out of contention
> non converting cpc network partners
- Presenting the Information to your CPC Engine
> be thorough
> document your analysis
> record all data
> take screen shots

She said Google is not as helpful as Overture when it comes to this stuff.

- Action Items
> contact your competitors if possible, see if they are experiencing the same issue.
> contact your cpc account representative
> continue to monitor your click activity

She adds that she feels one day they will be able to sue people and take them to court for click-fraud.

Lori Weiman from KeywordMax is giving a case study as I type. She started off describing how click fraud happens. They might click on your ad manually, or use a bot with a way to mask their IP. Then you have the stupid click-frauders that just click without masking IP. The affiliates are the smartest click-frauders, they mask IP, break the referral url and break your own tracking URLs.

How do you catch it? Use a tracking system that captures IP addresses, use a tracking system that captures the referrers. Audit your bills and what for click spikes, also watch for clicks from irrelevant geographic regions.

Case Study A:
Client A notices an ongoing spending increase of $30,000 per month on Tier 1 engines. It was detected by receiving threatening email from a disgruntled ex-employee, using keywordmax they saw 0% increase in conversions. The fraudster went to jail! This client had to ask for refunds, and it took a lot of time. The CPCs should have been more helpful.

Case Study B:
Client B had an affiliate fraud problem. He notices click spikes of 5x coming form a tier 2 engine, it was tracked and reported. The CPC engine refunded the money and they booted that affiliate. CPCs need preventive measures in place to stop this from happening in the future.

How to file a complaint?
- 60 days to file a complaint in writing
- Very thorough documentation and proof (keywords, date ranges, etc.)
- You will need to follow up with emails and phone calls.

What can the engines do to be more proactive:
- Detailed billing just like your phone bill. We want an itemized click bill.
- Set up Fraud Departments to handle this
- Communication and Willingness to work with customers

Danielle Leitch from MoreVisibility was up next.

Case # 1:
She saw normal traffic based on her Web analytics but when she looked at the AdWords report reported 5x more. She noticed a huge increase in clicks from the same keyword phrase, will a zero conversion rate. She basically had the same thing to say as the other two speakers (but she made a point to say that she never spoke with the other two speakers before today).

Case # 2:
Overture reported a 10x increase in overall clicks on a single day. Since there are no daily limits set, it could be very costly. Red flags were raised all over the place based on traffic, conversions, clicks and more. They looked at the server logs and found a pattern, they also looked at tracking URLs. She called Overture and reported the information to Overture. 1 week later she got her refund, which was good. They reviewed the previous weeks as well and credited for previous history as well.

Remember if you do get a refund, you must adjust your reports accordingly. Update your Web analytics and report data.

Q & A:

Q: Why are there no search engines on the panel?
A: The search engines declined to join.

Q: Do you think if you did not report this click fraud to the engines, you would have received a refund?
A: No. Jessie said Overture has done a lot to increase the comprehensiveness of the analytics and increased the support staff to support this. They can't disclose what they are doing because if they do, the spammers can work around it. She still says they should disclose it to the advertisers. If you are getting a refund, you should know exactly what you are being refunded for (which keyword, times, etc.), Lori adds. Danielle does not fault the engines, she said its up to us to report it to the engines. But Jessie does fault the engines. She points out the overture reps in the room.

Q: How do you contact the click fraudster? What is the best way to do it?
A: You must have evidence. If you do, then contact them.

Q: What percentage of overall traffic is click-fraud?
A: Jessie said its nearly impossible to figure that out because click-fraud is dollar, niche and keyword specific. She said there are probably verticals that don't have this problem, some keywords are hit more then others. She said "within competitive keyword phrases ($2 - $3+ per click), based on her opinion, about 10 - 20% are fraudulent.

Q: Did you ever make a case where you reported fraud and not get a refund?
A: Yes, and the CPCs were right in the case that they were not fraudulent. Sometimes there are partial or no refunds based on looking deeper in the details.

Q: Do CPC engines block IPs?
A: They handed the mic to Overture to answer the question. They sometimes do it but they rarely block IPs, they write filters to increase their fraud algorithms.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Danny Sullivan begins to say that his past keynotes were all about telling the audience who owns who and which engine powers which search. But ironically he quickly goes over the "who powers who" diagram.

SEM Threats:
- Contextual Pollution;
Results only come up for a keyword search I desire. This works differently then viewing ads on a Web page based on browse mode versus "quest mode." Danny said "contextual ads" are not "search". Just because an ad is CPC-based doesn't make it search. Lumping the two together pollutes the data. Are you a performance marketer or a search marketer? Its important to separate these two types of marketing tactics out. One is search and one is contextual. Just because the search engines are providing this technology, doesn't mean they should be looked as - as one.
- Agency Money / Branding Buck;
There is branding value here based on the GoTo's 2001 study and IAB's study in 2004. He says the pie of a company's marketing budget isn't bigger, but you need to get a larger piece of that pie. The search companies are providing support for this primarily on the PPC (ad side). But SEM is not only ads its also SEO, which is Public Relations. The support on the SEO side is an issue, other then PFI, there is no support.

SEO Lives:
- SEO should have died
- Google has kept SEO alive and revived it (he notes a thread at WMW that discusses how 3 bots revived SEO.
- You can sell ads but people want the PR (SEO) too

He then goes into a case study, a funny example of his 3 and 5 year old boys. His children call flash lights "flash torches" because Danny is American (flash light) and his wife is English (torches). So his kids are not hitting either market with the name "flash torch". So they can buy ads but they get nothing on the SEO side.

What is Needed for SEO Support:
Danny basically pulled the info from an SEW thread (t=197);
- Algorithm shift warning
- More authoritative info
- Express Spam Report
- Public spam reporting and checking
- Paid support program
- Search query stats
- Complete crawls
- Partnership in attitude on both ad and free side
- Commissions? Protection from direct sales? Certification?

What's the incentive for search engines to do this?
- Helping to win the ad spend but can't be ad-only shop
- It's not exactly like newspapers. You do need PR support and can do it without violating the church/state divide.

SEM Reputation Problem?
To get more support, we need to deal with the reputation problem in our industry (reference the SEW thread in the forums). He also quotes the marketing guru, Seth's blog entry. He pleads that SEO is not a black art. He discusses the SEO contest and how link bombing worked. The customers when shopping for an SEM firm are afraid. Fast Company releases an article about the Google Dance 2003 with the title "Shmoozing with the Enemy."

He goes through some spam examples on the Web, with tons of links at the footers of pages. The search example was "san jose radio flyer" in Google. Then he did the same search in Ask Jeeves. The text is not hidden, but pages are filled with text that mean nothing to the searcher.

He says there are good SEM firms and good stories.

What do customers want?
- Traffic that converts (not just top rankings), check references
- Not to be scammed (maybe someone should start a public forum telling people about these companies)
- Not to be banned

Solution:
- Code of Conduct? "I will do nothing to harm search engine relevancy" but this is all very subjective.
- Enforcement/Review
> seopros.org
> seoconsultants.com
> any standards are open to debate

One thing Danny thinks will help is if the search engines themsevles get involved.
- We need something, not sure what.
- Search engine involvement in proactive way would greatly help (goes both ways)
- Will it lock some out? Some people will be locked out but they will have to deal with it. Its not just a white hat versus black hat. He said there is a lot of gray in the industry, because its a very complicated area. I wonder if the audience understood "White versus Black"

He now gives the audience a peep talk about all we have done. SES will be giving out marketing awards in the future to reward us.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

First, they checked everyone who walked in to make sure they are a SEMPO member - this was not done at the Chicago meeting. They locked and closed the doors right when they started. The room is packed, a lot more members since the last meeting I attended in Chicago in December 2003.

Dana Todd said we are going to be very formal but hold all questions until the end. Lots of tension in the air. She introduced Barbara Coll as our fearless leader. Coll started off stating that she has looked back and SEMPO accomplishments and she is proud of what is done.

- Formed a 501c(6)
- 249 members
- 9 press releases (half a million impressions from this)
- numerous mentions online and offline
- sempo site referenced often as a resource.

She says UK is the second largest member base. She talks about how to improve international awareness. Raise awareness of SEM is a goal of year two. They launched an advertising campaign today which they will go into later. Lobbying for SEM panels at advertising and marketing conferences to get SEMPO mentioned (example AdTech had one SEM panel and next time they will have 5 panels). Press campaigns. The new SEMPO tag line is "Top of Search = Top of Mind." SEMPO has 50+ volunteers, 9 subcommittees (they want someone in the UK, they need someone to stand up and do it), interim executive director role established, new committees and new chairs and they still need more resources. They promised to clean up their act in member communications. They said it was an oversight and they apologize. In March they looked at the budget and saw they can afford an executive director. She said that in March they decided to hire an interim executive director. The board offered to pay Barbara for 2 hours per day ($300/hour) because she was really spending 5 hours per day. They are going to bring someone new in but she is just temporary. They are going to ask us who we want to have as our board. She said, "there was no reason for not telling you (sempo members), they were sloppy." Barbara doesn't want to be in this role, they want someone with experience with non-profits to run it. But they can not afford a $350,000 salary but they will do their best.

They raised $266,830 to date. Members bring in 77% of the income and sponsors only bring in 23%. They admit they are not good at creating value for their members.

Year One Accomplishments:
- They established themselves
- Research started
- Marketing plan and campaign outlines
- Formal budget for 04-05
- Press and visibility worldwide
- SEMPO public site
- Member site with job listings, RFP postings and restricted content
- Discounts on tools, research and conferences.

Year Two Goals:
- Better membership communications
- Executive Director hire no later then December 04
- Public elections
- Staggered replacement/election for BOD in 2005
- Offline ads
- Heavy press activities
- Defining Best Business Practices
- Increase membership by 100%
- Increase sponsorship by 200%

That covers Barbara's speech, she introduces Dan Boberg from Overture.

Dan Boberg from Overture: He discussed overture's network and product suite. They support SEM (were the first to support SEMs) and they support SEMPO. Overture has an "Ambassador Program", and about ten of the reps stood up to show they are here. He introduced them all and told us how to work with them for more info.

Darrin Rayner from Verizon SuperPages was next up, they are a new SEMPO sponsor. I personally don't have a good history with Verizon SuperPages or AOL Yellow Pages, they just did not perform for me. But that doesn't mean it won't perform for you. They joined SEMPO to get feedback from us and they know they are far from where they need to be to make it worthwhile for SEMs. They want to develop a communication with us to build a better product. Verizon says they power local search (i.e. MSN local). In March 2004 they launched a new site with natural search, category taxonomy and more. They clapped him off the stage because we all want to hear from SEMPO more, not Verizon.

Dana Todd now is discussing the marketing committee. They created a creative platform and marketing strategy. They defined their target audience as marketing decision makers and budget controllers. They built a new tag line. The 2004 budget for marketing is $110,000. They advertising flight schedule is Aug. 1 - Sept. 30 for first wave tests and Sept. 1 - Nove. 15 for second wave ads. the venues are AdWeek/Brandweek/MediaWeek, ClickZ Network, CoolNews, Other considerations such as fortune and others. They showed us their banner ads for AdWeek and other areas. They developed quite a few creatives, all from volunteers. They need (1) more money, (2) print ads, direct mail, (3) need more volunteers, (4) need new content for site, (5) make banners for members to put on their site, (6) members to do "booth duty", and (7) an international campaign "desired" in 2005.

Research Committee discussion from Rick Bruner (Executive Summary Consulting). We pay this guy to do our research, he does research for Amex, Gillette, MSN, etc. Key research objectives include size the search marketing section, distribution of industry spending, key industry trends, and key industry issues SEMPO should address.

SEMPO Japan, they call him 'K' (Koichiro Fukasawa) from Wasabi communications. He is launching the SEMPO Japan committee. She discussed the size of the Japan market (in 2004 $300 million so far and growing). Internet popularity is growing as well. Japan needs SEMPO because they are lacking information. http://www.sempo.jp/ to be launched the 19th of this month.

Barbara is going to complete the session with a finance discussion. Financials will posted through March 30, 04 on the Web site. Budget Q3 and Q4 will be broken out mostly to infrastructure and marketing. Three board members will be elected by members and we will be emailed next week. They want people to step up and elect themselves.

Q & A Now managed by Noel:

Q: What are members getting in return from the membership fees?
A: Noel responded saying that if your asking what is in it for me, then your missing the point of SEMPO. What you put into SEMPO is what you get. Dana Todd said that you are posting in forums but tell us what you want. Coll asked how many of you feel we did something, she asked for applause and she got them.

Q: Is SEMPO thinking about "collaborative marketing"?
A: It seemed to me that the panel were surprised, they said "they loved it". They now welcome it.

Some more statements were made to support sempo but nothing too interesting to note on.

Q: Barry Lloyd was given the mic. Does SEMPO have a constitution or by-laws? Do the members have a say in that?
A: SEMPO does have by-laws that were signed off in March. They couldn't afford an attorney so they are not so professional. They want to improve them.

Barbara is going to close the meeting. She said she admits she was nervous. Give us feedback she says, it will make for a better organization.

Forum news on this topic: I have closed the old thread (the most replied to thread at SEW so far) and started a new thread named SEMPO Meeting at SES San Jose 2004 where this discussion will be continued.

Ken Norton from Yahoo was up first and said he did not like the name of this session and rather call it "Shortcuts." The goals of search integration are; to get the user to the answer faster without distracting from the Web search, provide something more useful than the web results themselves and leverage the features and functionality of the Yahoo! network. Shortcut examples by Yahoo!: search on "united airlines 63", "jfk airport" will bring up a map, weather, flight info and more. "red sox scores" is an other example of "shortcuts" and these results are complimentary to the Web results. Category integration examples include "democratic national convention" will bring up news, "Starbucks san jose" will bring up yellow pages, "150 w san carlos st, san jose, ca" will bring up a map, "yhoo" will bring up a stock quote, and "boston weather" will bring up weather. Active refinement integration examples include the tabs at the top of the engines, "also try" (related searches) which help refine your search and Yahoo! shopping's narrow down by price or by categories, brand or attributes. Future objectives for Yahoo! is to understand how context and personalization improve the experience.

Daniel Read from Ask Jeeves was next up. What do users want from search engines? They want you or expect you to read their mind. He said "10 blue links is a limited paradigm." Ask Jeeves created "Smart Search" which was created in April 2003 and goes beyond the traditional search experience. 1st Smart Search was on picture search and combines structured and unstructured data. There are over 150 smart search features now live on ask.com. He then shows examples of what ask users see. They recently allowed you to search on "map of san jose" and it will bring up a map, he mentioned that only Gary Price picked this up in the industry. They added a viral marketing component where they can email results to a friend. Future developments include a better prediction of user intent, better structured data (maps), better integration with web results, personalization, and users learn the value of structured search data.

Next up is Andrew Cohen from AOL Search. He starts off with something he calls "programmed searches" and says its like Danny's "invisible tabs" concept. By bringing the searcher into a more specialized database (structured data in Ask's mind), they can provide a "shortcut" for the user. AOL is looking to provide an immediate answer to a question they have, as opposed to a detour or shortcut. With Time Warner they are able to provide these specialized databases with greater and better content.

Marissa Mayer from Google is now up. She puts up a maze and shows Yahoo and MSN going through a maze, whereas Google jumps over the maze, right to the destination. She also talks about naming it shortcuts over detours (thats what she was told from the PR department). Google's most popular shortcut is Google Images and has over 800 millions images in the database. She explains how you can answer questions with Image search, what color is turquoise, what does poison ivy look like. Google News is an other shortcut, which continuously updates, from over 10,000 sources in a clustered environment. Google Groups 2 is a system for groups and communities to discuss. But this really means that there is a real dialog with real people. Technical questions are answered in detail in groups, so are reviews and historical information. Froogle is the newest tab, its where people go when they are ready to buy. They pride themselves as being the most comprehensive. You can sort in a number of ways. Google local is an other shortcut and is the newest property. It allows you to search for services in your neighborhood and it is more comprehensive then yellow pages. It puts related pages next to your results (does it put competitors?).

Q & A:

Our very own moderator, Nacho, asks if they are implementing this internationality? Most the answers were yes we do provide these "shortcuts" if you search outside of the US. But I think Nacho's question was can I search in the US in a Spanish language, will the results come up with the shortcuts? I am sitting right next to Nacho and he will follow up with greater detail on how "shortcuts" are and are not implemented with these search properties.

I left mid way in the Q & A session in order to make sure I can post this and catch SEMPO's meeting that follows.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This topic was the hottest thing in search before the SEMPO scandal (just kidding), and I look forward to hearing what some of the panelists have to say, specifically Eurekster. Danny starts asking who hear feels that personalized search will be the next big wave in search. Hands went up in the audience. Danny says that this might be one avenue towards this area.

Grant Ryan from Eurekster was up first, he has an European accent (Irish maybe?). He began with the evolution of search, and he said he believes that the next step search is going is to tell you what you want as an individual. He then went into this concept of "Information Nation", which he describes as a global view of the internet. To extend this global view into a focused information nations that segment information from different perspectives. With Eurekster, the end users define the "information nations".

Eurekster allows you to create a nation and then define where to pull the information from (currently you have a choice between Yahoo and Feedster). Then you add more information for Eurekster to help create this nation for you. Then you have a search box that pulls from that new information nation.

How does it work? Eurekster learns from user behavior, so if they type something in and then click around, it picks that up and changes the next search based on that behavior. When people create these nations, they can look at what 'policies' were set up when creating this nation.

In the future, they feel that there will be 10,000+ information nations with lots of different ways of viewing the internet. I guess people will navigate to these nations via links from community sites. Advertisers can buy into keywords AND into keywords targeted to specific information nations. At the end, he even mentioned his accent :).

Michael Strickman from ChoiceStream was next. They work on narrowing choices to the few that matter (with search and other methods). They look at content, user tastes and more. What is personalized search? Any method that applies an understanding of a users preferences or behavior to improve their search results. Do people want personalizes search? 81% say they want personalized content and 64% were willing to provide personal data to get it. Types of personalized Web search are; (1) search history, (2) subject-based personalization (see Google beta), (3) collaborative filtering (correlated affinities), (4) disambiguation (the jaguar example - if I know about the user, I can show you the car). Newer focuses, social networking (Eurekster) and attribute based personalization.

Attribute Based Personalization automatically looks at categories, type of site, and style of the person (hip, upscale, etc.). Then it it looks at users' preferences, either they ask or watch the user to get this information. Then the algorithm takes into account individual relevance ranking, including general relevance and user preferences. And finally they continue to learn from user specific actions and at group level actions. Attribute based search works well with broad searches and is not so good with "navigational" search.

Jan Pedersen (chief scientist) from Yahoo is our last speaker on this topic. Customization is brought by explicit feedback from the user, and that implies your storing this information. An other form of personalization is contextualization, task specific meaning and inferred from the environment. Yahoo has "My Yahoo" is the "grand-daddy of personalization". You can customize the look, colors, add rss feeds, mail, news, weather and more. He pulled up an RSS feed from My Yahoo, Search Engine Watch was selected and so was Andy's blog, mine was visible but the last one in the 5 or so listed. He then shows personalization in Yahoo! Shopping where he shows a "save my products" link, this is the storage component. Moving towards "contextualization" he showed "Smartview" by Yahoo! maps. So you type in a location and then you can select food, then narrow it down and it shows you on the map, local restaurants (you get the idea).

Possible Search Future, but he is not talking about Yahoo's plans but concepts that are possibilities. Within customization you can store results (information management), an other form is by making an explicit statement of an interest and then results follow based on that statement (type in Eagles and then narrow it down to classic rock). Within the realm of contextualization, you can apply a location bias based on the location you are searching from.

Q & A:

There is a huge barrier to enter to personalized search, how would a company get beyond that? With Eurekster, one person creates the "information nation" the others just use the search box at the community Web site. Michael adds that as long as the barriers are very small, the users will give up some information for the better quality of results.

Why will personalized search succeed? Amazon uses personalized search well but will a Google.com or Yahoo Search succeed if they used the personalized approach? They all say yes but it will be hard to get there.

Is Eurekster worried about creating thousands of results full of spam? No, they won't be used because they won't be trust. All Eurekster is doing is allowing them to create these information nations. In the long run, they are looking to do a revenue share with large partners with Eurekster information nations.

When is personalized search going to hit mainstream? Yahoo said its very hard to predict these types of things. Yahoo said, he thinks soon. Danny Sullivan said 6 months to a year you will see a bigger push towards personalization (like we saw with local search).

Why do you think that a click equals relevance? Eurekster said that if they click and come back, they don't count it. But these things are based on inferences. Both Michael and Yahoo add to the click question that you can't look at them in an individual basis but rather an aggregate basis.

I was thinking about bringing up a statement made at a SES conference in the past by Google. Where Google said its more confusing to the user to change the results based on which computer you are using. This was a reply by Google based on a question about personalization. It would be an unfair question to bring up because (1) Google wasn't on the panel and (2) these companies are personalization engines. However, I do believe Google would have a different response today then it did a year or so ago.

Discuss this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This session is moderated by Danny Sullivan with some of the most recognized SEM individuals in the industry. Danny says he has been looking forward to this session for a while, so have I.

Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro was up first. He started off saying he is hoping to make history. This session talks about the big picture, "users". We are talking about behavior of the searcher, what is going through the mind of the searcher. Ultimately search is a channel, connecting your business to your target audience. We need to understand the customer and how they react to your business. He said, "we" as SEMs do not do enough of this. Ask you customers these 10 questions; (1) Which engine they use (2) where do they look in the search results page, (3) looking for product or service (4) when do you look at search during your buying process?, (5) why would you use it? etc...

What an actual search is? Based on a person's search, they might change the search phrases used. Search is circular. The "Search Funnel" was explained through a focus group. Person one was looking to go on a cruise. She searched for "cruise" first. Then she refined her search to "Caribbean cruise" to narrow down the search. She then sees a "Panama Canal Cruise" in one of the pages that interests her. So she goes back to Google and searches on "Panama Canal Cruise" and is now looking for 3rd party reviews. Now she learns she likes the Princess cruise line and then does a search on "Princess Pananma Cruise" and obtains information. Then she purchases offline. That is the "Search Funnel." As you get closer to the bottom of the search funnel, conversion rates will increase. "Cruise" has 1.3m searches per day but very low conversions, as you go deeper the conversions but reach is lower.

People search differently based on hundreds of variables. So you need to review these diverse population and you start segmenting out your consumers based on search. Segmentation is marketing 101.

The "Anonymity Threshold", anonymity appeals to the searcher and your Web visitor. Once you step over that threshold of giving up your information, you are closer to the buying process. So do not ask to step over that line (of anonymity) if they are no ready for the purchase or close to it. The buy cycle is very correlated to when you can obtain information. Consumer always must be in control, when they feel they are losing control - they will leave you in the dust.

Fredrick Marckini from iProspect talks about the Search Engine Users Attitude Study conducted by iProspect. They had 4 partners; iProspect, WebSurveyor, Strategm, Survery sampling International. They were able to serve people a screen capture and see where the user clicked on the screen. The findings said; 77% use search engines to find what they are looking for, 55% say they use it daily, 57% say they are loyal to same engine, Internet users rarely go beyond the 3rd page of search results. Females don't dig as deep into search results as men. Older people also don't go as deep as well. Unemployed search less deep as well.

This leads us to data driven search engine marketing. 72% of all clicks occurred in natural results, not the paid results on Google. 60% of clicks on Yahoo occurred on natural. AOL was 50/50, and MSN 29% of clicks were natural. Add these up, 60% of clicks were natural and 40% were paid clicks. Yahoo recently changed the search results page, so you expect more clicks on natural results. An SEM campaign has to include both paid and natural search results.

The tech team at iProspect put 5 years of data into a data mine. Expected monthly traffic that Google can provide based on position. Position 1 brings in 80k, 2 and 3 are 20k. If you can move a position 2 or 3 position to a position one, that is huge. 2nd and 3rd page listings provide traffic. MSN outperformed Google last holiday season for number of traffic driven to his client base.

Liz Edison from Vividence will provide interesting studies they have collected over the years. They evaluated the top search sites, sampled 2,000, 400 panelists in the US age 18+ between April 10 - 16 2004. Tasks performed (1) open Web search, (2) General site search, (3) local search, (4) product search, (5) complex search.

Google is the number one engine, then Yahoo, AskJeeves, Lycos and then MSN. Google led in brand preference, then Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and then Lycos. Ask and Lycos lead in sponsored paid clickthrough. But user's self-intent desire to click on paid ads were higher on Google then other engines (they make it very clear).

Internet users are not exclusive to one engine, 3 in 4 have a primary engine, 1 in 2 will use another engine and 1 in 3 search with different engines depending on what they are looking for. Overall, over 85% of searches on Google and Yahoo lead to a success rate for "general searches". But with complex search were not as high but they still loved Google (on a percentage level) more then other engines even though they were not successful with the complex results.

Key Finding; (1) top sites are not top performers when it comes to sponsored link clickthough, (2) there is a trade off between generating a high number of cickthroguhs and maintaining long term user satisfaction, (3) search engines are at performance parity, when success is measured objectively, (4) sorry, i missed the last two - couldn't keep up. :(

Marissa Mayer from Google. Users early on didn't know what to do with Google's homepage, it was too blank. Very funny presentation... She searched on "the born supremacy" but the results came up as irrelevant. Google has at the top "Did you mean: the bourne supremacy". Most people complained about the results because they spelled it wrong, so Google made the "did you mean" more noticeable. Google says the search doesn't notice the news result at the top, they don't notice the sponsored links, the tabs at the top and the notice about the stop words. They just look at those blue links in the middle of the page. She then added to her search "trailer" to find the trailer on this movie name. People get more specific. She also talked a bit about Danny's invisible tabs concept (but didn't talk about it too much).

Q & A:
Google: Do people retype the keyword search or add on to the search keyword phrase? More people add on but the data isn't great to support that.

Google: Is the "I am Feeling Lucky" button used? Not really but they don't know what it does. They asked the user, should we take it away? The user said no way! Its fun and they keep it there for that reasons.

Google: How popular is Google Images? They don't release that information, but its the second most recent used Google property.

Google: Are searcher getting more specific? Yes. People are quick to learn how to use a search engine. Google is for the "expert searchers", because the Google users learn very quickly how to be more specific. Gordon adds to that, talking about his search funnel.

Fredrick: How do you balance paid versus natural? You need both, 30 - 40% of search results are from paid results. But as long as there is a positive ROI with paid, do both.

Google: Generally you see higher clickthrough rates on Froogle then Google. The majority of Froogle traffic comes from Google.com froogle results inclusion.

Google: Clustering search technology, how does it help searchers? Google said that clustering is not as useful as when people use refine the searches. Example; jaguar (animal or car?).

What are kids searching on? Google responds that kids pick the engines and the parents follow suit. People liked that, they laughed.

So far, I have only good things to say about the conference. The suggested hotel is nice (Marriott), the convention center is nice and now being officially part of the "press", I have access to a room where I can write and post. I have to ask some of the Jupiter people if I can gain access to the wireless lan here, seems to be locked down. Once I get access to that, I will hopefully post more frequently.

Dealing With Contextual & Other Non- Search Ads

Joshua Stylman from Reprise Media starts off stating that the demand for search advertising is higher then the supply. A larger audience is reached through contextual ads. Types of Non-search ads are: behavioral targeting, directory driven advertising, and contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising is keyword based targeted adverting on non-search pages (i.e. overture, google, kanoodle, quigo). He then shows an example of a search done on Google for "hotels in New York" and explains how it is very pre-qualified. Then he shows how xontextual advertising works by going to a weather.com site and finds ads to expedia.com leading to hotels in new york. He says this is bad, because he lives in new york and doesn't need a hotel. He explains that contextual ads should not be using the same algorithms that AdWords uses. A search ad is different then a contextual ad search. He says you to "message to mindset", the people reading content sites are reading the content and not requesting your ads. So he says, you need to be more intrusive, like with TV or paper ads. You need to get them into the mindset of buying.

He aggregated 10 different campaigns of 3 months of data and 6 million clicks. Search out performed contextual by 3 times. The conversion percentages were like 6 times more effective on search versus contextual. When does contextual ads work? He said if you run broad targeting often (general interest topics), low commitment from users required (content, free email registration and free download, etc).

He said all the negative thoughts on contextual ads are because they are looked at too similarly as search ads. Very good presentation.

Brad Byrd from NewGate (also a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums) brought up his Apple PowerBook to give his presentation (smart guy). He prepared two case studies, one from a retailer and one from a non retailer.

The non-retail's goal was to get the customer to ask for information from the site. Google's CPC between AdWords vs. AdSense were basically the same. Overture's pricing were slightly different, but more so in Overture. Google now allows for SmartPricing, which allows for prices to be adjusted automatically. AdSense distribution is closer to the AdWords distribution then the Overture network (well, you see AdSense all over the place, Overture doesn't allow anyone to sign up). The average CTR for this non-retail customer was higher on AdSense then on AdWords but less on the Overture Content side then on the Overture Search side. Conversion rates were higher on search ads on both Overture and Google, but the Google AdSense conversion rate was pretty good. The Cost per Action (CPA) was higher on the content side then on the search side, but both content and search ads made sense based on ROI for this non-retail customer.

Second case study was an online retailer (he said a famous retailer but said he couldn't give up the name). The CPC were similar in AdWords and AdSense and also fairly similar on Overture's ads. Search ads brought a much higher reach. The CTR was higher on search ads versus contextual ads. The conversion rates were higher on the search platform but the contextual side did not look to bad, so the contextual ads are getting in front of the right customers. The CPA were much higher on the contextual side then the search side but it made sense to continue based on the overall requirements of the customer.

The takeaway is that the mileage may vary based on the networks (overture, google, etc.), so experimentation is needed. The opportunity is there. Contextual has lower CTR, CPA varies by channel and by advertisers, contextual's limited distribution network = lower traffic potential and contextual seems to garner better results for non retail customers (because there is a lower barrier to action - no purchase wanted on these sites).

Andrew Goodman from Page Zero and also a moderator ad SEW forums. He entitled his presentation "Squeezing ROI out of Contextual Inventory". He first goes over why people are attending this session; PPC campaigns are paying off, campaign metrics stabilizing in good ranges, there is not enough distribution and revenue (give me more). So that can lead to problems, where you say, "give me more" and you click of the "contextual ad" option.

Andrew is going to give you tips on how to big lower with Google AdSense (Overture already allows you to do so). (1) Target best converting keyword groups. (2) Leave bids high, turn "content targeting" off. (3) Copy this campaign and put it into a new campaign (4) Bid lower, (5) turn "contextual on".

Case study #1 was a subscription client and it worked well for the client who tried this workaround. CTR was 8% higher on search then on content. Conversion rates were 30% lower on contextual versus search but he was able to bid lower. So the CPA was cheaper on content and revenue increased 21% and additional profit was 29% based on this content work around. His client also put some AdSense ads on his side to get on the "sell side".

Case # 2 was a tech related client. CTR was lower, the CPA was much lower on the content based on the workaround. The success was highly dependent on the "low bid" technique. As long as you can get your price then go for it.

Patrick Keane from Google was up next, he is based in NY. General content consumption is much higher then search consumption, there is not infinite inventory in search. They are doing their best to get more publishers based on increasing relevancy and ultimately leading to more clicks. He wants to hear from us how to improve the program, very short speech.

Paul Volen from Overture was up next. They had to expand beyond search, like Google (95% of Web consumption come from outside search). They separated out search from content to make it easier for advertisers to manage those ads. They said its a learning process and they are learning from these sessions and feedback. They also launched conversion counter to track this information better. Short as well, but now we go to Q & A.

Q & A:
Why is there virtually no traffic if your not in the top three listings of contextual ads on Overture Content Match? Overture answered that most ads show three ads and its totally dependent on the amount you spend and the number of ads displayed in an ad (based on the publisher's request).

Why doesn't Google show the expected impressions based on search versus contextual? They are looking into it and they just don't know the reach yet but they are working on it. They are going to try to do this at the page level at some point, because its about the pages and not the site level. Joshua added that you need to believe in your ad distribution network, if Overture sees that a distribution network is not working, then they will and do drop them.

Does Overture have plans to allow graphic ads in their network? He has no announcement to make on this but they are hearing feedback from advertisers on this and he wouldn't rule it out. This question brought up some jokes about how some graphic ads look like text ads. Then one said that its not about text versus graphics when it comes to higher CTR but rather about the relevancy of those ads to the Web user.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

I am leaving soon to San Jose for the Search Engine Strategies conference. You can expect live coverage to be posted here with my notes on the sessions I attend. I will try to stay away from the basic sessions for you pros out there. I will also be going to the Google Dance 2004, where I hope to speak to some interesting people. The SEMPO controversy is hot right now, and Monday night I will be attending the members only session, so expect coverage of that as well. I hope to post pictures, and if allowed some audio.

If you will be attending the SES San Jose conference and you see me in the hall, feel free to check me into the wall and then say hello. Only legal hockey checks, none of that cheap stuff :).

I hope the wifi is strong, if its not, then I will do my best to run back and forth to my room to post the live coverage. Never been to this hotel or convention center, so I am not sure about its wifi and distance from hotel to convention center. Speak to you all soon.

Bruce Clay recently announced in the forum thread named An SEM Code of Conduct? that he has released a new service found at http://www.seotoolset.com/. The tag line on the Web site's homepage reads "We provide comprehensive, easy to learn and use, Search Engine Optimization tools, training, and certification to help you succeed." As part of that Web site, Bruce Clay also has a page named SEOToolSetTM Code of Conduct, where he sets his standards and hopes other SEOs follow them.

Forum discussion is a bit heated as one would imagine, check it out here.