September 2004 Archives

Ok, well not literally the first digital pictures, but images taken from brand new digital cameras. This is a fun Google Hack, that you can do in a variety of ways. Basically most camera manufacturers program digital cameras to name files from the first picture as “DSC00001.JPG” or "MVC00001.JPG" or "IMG_0001.JPG. What ends up happening is that some of these pictures end up on the web, and spidered by Google. What we are able to see if basically a log of all the "FIRST" pictures people have taken. Check all the first pictures people have taken with their new cameras here. Or how about seeing all the first pictures people have taken on the beach. Or even more interesting, how about the someone taking their first picture on September 11th!

Could be a tough question depending on how you look at it. For the most part if you are doing keyword and phrase research in languages different than English, you might find it a tad bit difficult to get some good data about specific terms. How they are used, who searches for them, what is there popularity, are all information you might want to know. So when the Overture Suggestion Tool doesn't live up to its name, what do you do? Get creative and search deeper! This question was asked at Highrankings today, and thought it would be helpful if I pointed out some resources and possibly ways for people conducting these searches to find the best keywords.

Here are some of the following tools that will enable you to search for country specific or foreign language terms (organized by country or language):

1. Talk to someone using the specific language you are looking for. Ask them about how the words or phrases are used in everyday conversation. Get them to compare two phrases, and ask them which is more relevant in the local market. Get the lowdown on recent trends in that specific language or country.

2. Research terms in Google. Find other websites using specific phrases and how often. Look for offical sources of information, such as university websites or newspapers.

3. Research your Competitors. See if your competitors are as fluent as you think they are.

4. Use a tool to conduct popularity research:

Digitalpoint Keyword Suggestion Tool.
-United States, Austria, Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Overture Suggestion Tool
-Spain
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=es
-Japan
http://inventory.jp.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
-Korea
http://inventory.kr.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
-Australia
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=au/
-Norway
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=no/
-France
http://inventory.fr.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
-Germany
http://inventory.de.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Google Sandbox - AdWords Suggestions - one of the most complete
Everything from English to Urkrainian
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Scandinavian Keywords
http://www.keywordmaker.com/free.asp
Germany Der MetaGer-Web-Assoziator
http://metager.de/asso.html

Spain: Espotting
http://es.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp

Italy Keyword Suggestion
http://www.godado.it/k_lookup.vep

Good Directory of Suggestions Tools
http://www.dwoz.com/default.asp?Pr=123

5. Repeat Steps 1-4 again. Compile list of research and start to select the best phrases for your pages.

I will not be around to write Thursday or Friday. I have asked some of the Guest Authors to step in and Ben will be back tomorrow to continue the forum coverage.

Next week, Thursday & Friday, will be the same story. Sorry about this.

I after next week, I see no future 'vacations' from this site in the near future.

An article over at MediaPost named Pay-Per-Trick: Half Of All Ad Clicks Deemed Fraud reads, "According to research released by Web analytics provider Clicklab, fraudulent clicks can account for more than 50 percent of all advertising fees attributable to certain categories." Can you believe that? You hear of companies paying people in India to sit by a computer and click on ads, but 50% of all clicks are fraud, WOW.

Forum discussion on this topic at Search Engine Watch. Other threads of interest include the click fraud software that helps you detect fraudulent clicks. Some of the software you can purchase to help you with that include; Who's Clicking Who and Click Auditor.

In addition, in the past archives you can find my notes on the Auditing Paid Listings & Click-fraud Issues session at the past San Jose SES show.

A press released was announced today from SEMPO that they have elected three new board members. "The new SEMPO Advisory Board members are Chris LaSala, the Search Engine Marketing Channel Manager at Google; Neg Norton, the President of the Yellow Pages Integrated Media Association, and Safa Rashtchy; a managing director of Piper Jaffray and well known industry analyst." In the press release it discusses Danny Sullivan's and Chris Sherman's resignation from sempo and then goes into more detail on the new board members.

SEMPO has made from some widespread discussion in many of the forums. Many of the posts I covered here in the past. One such thread I did not mention as of yet is a thread named SEMPO Gone To The Dogs? over at SEW forums. This thread was instrumental in the creation of a mock SEMPO site named SEMPO TAHOE. The forum members are having a blast with this new site. I then started a thread named Will SEMPO Survive? with a poll that asks the question (not to SEMPO members but to individuals in this industry) "How Long Will SEMPO Survive?". So far over 50% voted SEMPO Will Close within a Year, 17% said SEMPO Will Close within 3 Years and an other 17% said SEMPO Will Close within 90 days, only 11% so far said SEMPO Will Survive Forever.

This entry comes of way of an entry by Danny at the SEW blog named SEMPO Gets New Advisors & Parody Site.

I must of missed this when this first came out but it looks like more rumors and buzz is starting up again on the topic of "AdWords Automator". Basically, this program will allow advertisers to feed its pages to AdWords, then AdWords will dynamically create and display AdWord ads based on the content of those page. There is a more detailed article on this at ClickZ named Google Tests New Keyword Tool released back on May 10, 2004.

So I did some searching based on the recent thread I found named Using Froogle To Generate AdWords Ads, which discusses this concept from the Froogle side of things. I found an other thread at WebmasterWorld named Google Ads Automator, which has several posts on this topic. In addition, I found a thread at Search Engine Watch forums that brings up this topic named Search Firms Fear Client Poaching and references an article at MediaPost.

This is the first thread I have seen that asks the question, Why does the Sandbox exist? Other threads talk about how can one beat the sandbox, what does the sandbox affect, what is the sandbox doing, etc?

Some believe it exists just to ensure that new sites use Google AdWords and thus pay Google to rank well. But Google's Do No Evil motto would then be completely sacrificed.

Others feel it is a technical issue, where Google simply has no more room in the main index and they need to create brand new indexes, which takes longer.

One of the most popular beliefs is that this is to combat link spam, by placing all sites in a holding cell until X months, an intense link building campaign for new sites can be fruitless for a long time.

Interesting thread if you can weed through some of the poor posts that go a bit off topic. These theories are then argued and new ones arise.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Gbot running hard has driven up lots of interest, its on its 9th page now. In addition, this thread has been referenced at other forums, including Cre8asite, under the thread name Raid of the Googlebots. The thread basically discusses people seeing an abnormally high level of GoogleBot hits. I personally do not see much out of the norm with my sites but many are.

In the WMW thread Brett mentions "panic" based spidering, which he describes as "if an index needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a short time period (aka: the old index didn't work)." Now, I didn't yet read the whole thread but looking over at Barry Welford's post at Cre8asite where he mentions a possibility that Google might be working some relaunch of its engine to counter any of Microsofts future attempts to encroach on its market share.

Some interesting concepts, if true, I wonder what we will be getting from Google.

Google added this great feature that helps AdWords customers figure out an estimated level of traffic that they should expect to see based on the CPC value and keyword phrase. But ad features are added, it adds an additional level of complexity for the end user. A thread at Search Engine Watch brought in a response from an official AdWords representative. I'll highlight some points in his post, that I hope will add more insight into how Traffic Estimator works.

Of course AdWordsRep starts off by saying that this is just an estimate and the data should be used as such. Do not think that an estimate of 10 clicks will actually be 10 clicks.

He then explains that the reason for the traffic estimator is not 100% right, is because there are just too many variables. These variables include; number of competitors, ad reach and impressions, keyword selection, daily (hourly) budgets, match options selected, current CPC as well as max CPC and other factors. This just touches on some of the many variables that must be used in the traffic estimator.

In addition, Nacho, a mod at SEW, asked if AdWords can add an impression estimation to the tool. AdWordsRep said he would ask, but he said it would be a logical assumption to say that "The number of estimated 'clicks per day' is based on a CTR in the neighborhood of 2%. This means that if you are estimated to get 2 click per day, the system is predicting 100 impressions."

If you have questions, comments or suggestions check out the thread named New Adwords Traffic Estimator.

All this talk in the forums on hubs and authorities, but yet no one really has built a search engine that searches exclusively the hubs and authorities. Of course, limiting the index to just include hubs and authorities would make for a less broad search engine. However, Kozoru, is looking to build a search service that searches hubs and authorities. Below you will find a quote being pulled from Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld.

"We're going for a niche," said Kozuru Chief Executive John Flowers." We're specifically focusing on providing answers to specifically tailored questions.

"If you're asking a question about what car in 2003 had the highest safety rating, or how do I change the oil in my Acura, you can get those results in a regular search engine. But you'll have to sift through a lot of answers."

"We are trying to determine who the most authoritative sources are," he said.

Its amazing, its been less then I year since I started this site. The traffic is great, comments posted are excellent and I seriously enjoy writing from the forums perspective.

I often get requests from people to advertise on the site. I started with putting sponsored links at the bottom left of these pages. I have also added Google Ads (Image and Text) to the individual pages. Now I am about to take one more step by putting an ad, very small, at the top header, to the right of the logo.

I will not allow this site to get to flashy, it is important that the readers come first. Feel free to leave your comments, either before or after you see the ads up. Your feedback is important to me.

Thanks!

The recent addition of MyJeeves was very popular amongst many people who are in the SEM industry. I know MyJeeves doesn't work on all browsers, including Safari - which is acceptable to me. But there are reports that MyJeeves doesn't work with AOL's browser. Not good, if this is the case.

Froogle announced last week (or around that time) that they are now offering its shopping search engine to the UK market. If your a UK merchant and you would like to sign up, check out the Froogle UK Welcome Page. To know if you qualify visit the Programme Policies (I love how they spell that), here is the FAQs page.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

Yahoo is now allowing My Yahoo users to test out the new My Yahoo layout. Yahoo! lists the new features to be found at the new My Yahoo here. Jeremy Zawodny has some great information on this in his entry named New My Yahoo Beta, Featuring RSS and Atom. Anyway, I was smart enough to compare the old with the new before switching directly to the new design. Here are my first impressions of the new my yahoo design.

(1) Much more screen real estate. I was able to see two more RSS feeds I subscribed to with the new design. Reduces all the scrolling I do daily, I subscribe to tons of RSS feeds, so it helps.

(2) Search at the top but more features. Instead of a simple, Yahoo! Search box, there is the full Yahoo Search box that allows you to search Web, Images, Yellow Pages, News, and Products.

(3) Compact Design; this adds more room for more stock quotes - which I faded out from you below. More, more content. Good stuff.

I did not get into all the features yet, but it looks like a nice improvement so far.

Below are two screen shots of the My Yahoo pages, old and new.

OLD DESIGN: View Large Image

NEW DESIGN: View Large Image

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

This was a tad bit disturbing, and not surprising. For all people in large offices, I would run and hide (ok, not really). A little news clip, has stated that hackers are now using Google to watch people make copies on networked photocopiers. You can physically sit there and watch as Sally photocopies the companies financial information for a meeting to potential investors, while at the same time leaking it to a few watchful eyes. Looks like they need a more secure way to prevent this, or a better way to not leak information into Google in the first place.

This past weekend was the High Rankings Search Engine Marketing Seminar in Boston. HighRankings has a bit of a history in the forums. Jill Whalen, the owner of HighRankings, used to be a moderator over at Cre8asiteForums back in the day. But Jill saw a need from her advisor newsletter and other areas to start her own forum, which has become extremely popular. Jill also has a seminar that she puts together, I am not sure how many she had in the past but I am sure that information is readily available.

Anyway, there are reviews on this event at HighRankings Forum and Cre8site Forums.

Seems that there are wide reports that traffic driven by Google on a constant basis have suddenly and dramatically dropped since September 22nd and 23rd. Forum reports at WebmasterWorld account for many people who have seen a significant loss in the traffic delivered to them by way of Google.

Here are some quotes from the thread:
- Traffic dropped from 2000 to 350
- We have been getting about 2000 hits per day for the last 1.5 year. Sept 23 hits are down to about 350-400.
- Yep, me too! 4500 to 700.

Not only is this making major news at the press, according to Andy, the censorship placed on Google News over at China is causing some forum noise at Cre8asiteForums and WebmasterWorld. I like the quote pulled by Ruud at Cre8asite "Google's recently launched news service in China doesn't display results from Web sites blocked by that country's authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to "do no evil.""

Its China, they have rules, Google is complying by those rules, why do we care? If I lived in China, then I might have an opinion. :)

This is funny, or just extremely annoying to some members. Remember all the rumors in the past two weeks about the Google Browser? Well now, there are some people starting rumors that the Google Browser, like Gmail, is invite only.

That means that the only way for you to see and use the rumored Google Browser is to get an invite from someone who has it. A member at SEO Chat posts that he has invites. So why don't you all send this guy a PM and ask him for an invite? :)

It is only logical to think that Google would by the ww.wgoogle.com variation, just in case someone hit that period key one step to early. In fact, if you take a look at the whois record for WGOOGLE.COM, you will see that the physical address and email address match that of Google's headquarters. So what is the problem?

I dare you to check out wgoogle.com, you will notice that is basically a cheap doorway page, promoting mysportsbook.com. Mikkel from SEW forums, was kind enough to strip the JavaScript from the page and put it up on his server for us to take a look at http://www.geekbrowser.com/test/index.html.

The main question here is. Google would not be participating in doorway pages. So why would this company register the information using the email address dns-admin@google.com? Only Google or a Google employee would have access to this.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch, great find Marcia!

Remember Orkut? All that hype and all just for something, I personally, rarely ever log into anymore. To my surprise, when I was logging in, I got this error.

"Bad, bad server. No donut for you." That is Google being funny. Anyway, wanted to share this with you if you haven't seen it yourself.

This subject has been discussed before in length, but solutions have remained personal opinion. A thread over at Highrankings addresses some interesting issues regarding whether or not a search engine spider can extract links from a javascript menu. If the javascript is external, then it can not read past it, but what about a menu that is completely in the code? Will a <noscript> tag work well as a solution to a javascript menu? I have played around with the <noscript> tag when using a javascript menu, and as one member points out its may not be the most aesthetic solution in the serps. What you get is a long list of urls in the snippet instead of a description.

So what happens if you have 200 urls in a javascript menu. It would make it really cumbersome to include all 200 urls in a <noscript> tag. Some of the member discuss solutions to this. I can imagine if your site is structured correctly, or includes a site map, then you might be able to get away with only several urls in the <noscript> tag.

Additionally today, there is a great thread at Digitalpoint about a new Googlebot lurking around that is HTTP 1.1, and spidering many levels deep in a single pass. This is interesting because as one of the members points out this is a test of Google's at spidering Javascript urls. So maybe there is better solution to a JS menu than a <noscript> tag and the search engines are finally able to do it all successfully. Check out and discuss the thread about Googlebot 2.1 and Javascript

There is a new theory floating around, which I found by way of a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums. The theory is that you can get indexed quickly by placing AdSense ads on your pages. Here is a quote from the original poster "So now you can get into their "index" within 24 hours, free. Just add a little Adsense spider bait to your site."

I personally tested this out on a site. I put up a new site, made sure not to put any links to it. Then I put up AdSense ads and waited. Months later it was still not included in the Google index. Only recently has it been indexed, and I believe that is because someone, somewhere put a link to it. I strongly feel that this theory, although logical, is not correct.

In addition, Google has said that AdSense ads do not affect your listings in Google. They use a totally separate spider to index the site for its AdWords network and a different index. They are separate engines, separate indexes and do not improve or increase your chances of getting indexed in my opinion.

Danny Sullivan posted a thread at SEW forums named News Search & Biases, where he points to an article written at OJR.org named Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories. This blew my mind.

The article discusses how Google News seems to be favoring the conservative papers over the more left-wing, liberal papers. The logic is as follows: Do a search at Google News on Kerry and your likely to see articles that are in opposition to Kerry. Now do a search on Bush at Google News and you will find news that favors Bush. How is it that Google News, an algorithmic search technology, can be a conservative over a liberal?

The article gives an excellent theory as to the answer to this question. They quote Ethan Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who offers a possible answer to this question. Basically, he says that the main stream (conservative) papers often, when discussing Kerry, put "Kerry" in the title of the article. Whereas, the liberal papers do not. In addition, the liberal papers often use Kerry's full name in the article content and if you do a search on John Kerry as opposed to just Kerry in Google News, you will find more liberal papers discussing Kerry.

There are some really great books on seo available today, but there are not many on the single topic of Froogle. Froogle is Google's search shopping engine, it allows you to find products for free and list products for free. Froogle is not the most popular shopping search engines but its an important one to be a part of because of Google's current grasp of the search market and because Google has been featuring Froogle on many of its pages.

I had the opportunity to review an e-book named Froogle Maximizer. This is the first e-book, that I have seen, that discusses Froogle exclusively. Let me tell you that this e-book is a very comprehensive but easy to read book. It takes you through what Froogle is and is not and it then tells you what you need to sign up to Froogle. After you sign up, it takes you through the steps of setting up a feed and ensuring that feed works correctly - I learned a few things here that I did not know before reading this book. It even gives you detailed tips on how to optimize your feeds to rank in the top positions in Froogle, which is very important. If you can achieve on of the top three positions, you will most likely see a lot more traffic and transactions then from position four. This is because Google features the top three products from Froogle in the Google search results page when it matches a Froogle like search query.

I recommend taking a serious look at this e-book if your in the shopping search field. Find the e-book at http://www.frooglemaximizer.com/.

Search Engine Marketing industry leader, Danny Sullivan, celebrates his birthday today. The SEW Forums has put up a little birthday surprise for Danny at the Happy Birthday Danny Sullivan!!!! thread.

I am pretty sure that everyone in this industry agrees that Danny is an outstanding role model. We could not ask for a better person to be the face of the industry. He is respected and liked by all side of the industry; yes the white-hats and the black-hats both like Danny.

Below is a picture created by two of the mods at SEW forums. Basically, the heads pasted onto the bodies of the people are the moderators at the Search Engine Watch forums.

This was way too funny for me not to mention here. Let me warn you, that this site will use language that, 5 years ago, would not be suitable for your kids. Give Aks Jeeves a spin.

Forum chatter at Search Engine Watch.

To be honest, when the thread How Fair is the Link Popularity Algorithm? was first started, I thought it would turn out to be a poor quality thread. I was wrong.

The thread asks the question, is the link popularity component of the algorithms deployed at the major search engines fair to Web pages? I know what your thinking? Life isn't fair, business isn't fair, what is fair?

But it is actually bringing in some serious players, such as Eric Ward, one of the most well respected link building speakers.

Is it fair that companies with the most money can use their budgets to build up a level of links that would be virtually unbeatable? Is it fair that these same companies can purchase huge ad space in Time Square, or a TV spot during the Super Bowl? These questions are not fair to ask. :)

So, let's move on and delve into what would be the optimal link popularity algorithm, something that can not be manipulated to benefit the rich or smart. Can it be Microsoft's concept of Block Level Link Analysis? Nah, I am sure even something as sophisticated as that can be manipulated. So what is the solution? If I knew, I would be inventing the next Google.

Might be a good day to pull out the old vinyl records or CD's of Ray Charles. Google celebrates his birthday today with the logo below. To the man that brought us the genius to shape rhythm and blues with his voice and a piano: Ray Charles.

A couple days after the rumored WMW 5 year b-day, DaveAtIFG, WMW Administrator, has decided to take it easy and kick back. In a thread he started named It's tme I kicked back!, he posts his resignation as a moderator. He does however say that he will be "lurking" the forums.

Other well respected moderators and administrators that recently resigned from WebmasterWorld include:

• 4eyes
  
• JamesR
  
• Jeremy_Goodrich
  
• Littleman
  
• Marcia
  
• Mivox
  
• MrMackin
  
• NFFC
  
• NickW
  
• RCJordan
  
• Toolman
  

Many are still active at WMW and other forums.

Of course you can base the amount you spend on links based on an ROI figure. But what do links cost? A thread at WebmasterWorld named Is this a reasonable amount to pay for links, discusses just that.

It is obvious that link development in the US will cost at least 4x as much as link development in India. :)

update: Looks like the thread I linked to above, has been warped into a different thread. No I am not crazy.

There is speculation that the new MSN search will be going live before the date of July 1st, 2005. This comes by way of a post by "msndude", supposedly a MSN official representative at WebmasterWorld in message # 8 in this thread posted on Sept. 19th.

The message read; "We have stated publicly that we will release our own algorithmic search engine within one year of our Technology Preview which launched July 1st, 2004."

This topic is now being discussed at WebmasterWorld.

There is some confusion as to if the 5th year anniversary of WebmasterWorld was this past Tuesday, September 21st. By looking at Brett_Tabke User Profile, you will see his join date was Sept 21, 1999. Brett owns, built and runs WebmasterWorld. A post named Half a decade of WebmasterWorld, is where this first propped up.

In that thread, Brett outlines the history of his forum/bbs community development:

- 84-88 single line commodore based bbs's.
- 88-89 2 line commercial bbs.
- 90-91 single line bbs again.
- 92-96 sysop of 64 line support bbs for major computer manufacturer.
- 96 first "web bbs" went up on old isp site.
- 97 first bbs went up on searchengineworld.com
- late 98 lost domain after registrar failed to auto renew domain.
- 99 started registered webmasterworld.
- 99 got searchengineworld back and started with this software base.
- 2000 moved the rebuilt forums (called WebmasterWorld, over to this domain).

"The customer is always right - just not right for you", quoted from Ammon Johns at Cre8site Forums. I do have agree on this, you definately can have customers that are not right for you. But how do you deal with this? What are ways to find the RIGHT customers. Whose best interest are your considering? As this thread points out it was your responsibility for taking the client. In my words, learn to say no sometimes. A very worthwhile thread for all those currently growing your business.

Continue reading and discussing about Are Clients Expendable?

Who ever wants a free gmail invite, no contest, just email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com and the first 6 responses get a free invite.

I will update this when there are no more invites left.

***NO MORE INVITES AVAILABLE***

Check Back Later Please.

Yes, site rankings can be literally highjacked by your competitors by (1) stealing your content and (2) using a 302 redirect. How does it work? GoodSite.com ranks in the number three slot at Google. EvilSite.com comes along and copies the content directly from GoodSite.com. Then EvilSite.com puts a 302 redirect from EvilSite.com to GoodSite.com.

Many believe that Google looks at this as EvilSite.com as the new page for GoodSite.com. Why? (1) Same content and (2) the 302 redirect gives it a spin. So Google will go ahead and remove the GoodSite.com page from the listings with its duplicate content filter and replace the listing with EvilSite.com.

Now of course, you got the 302 redirect sending all the traffic from EvilSite.com to GoodSite.com, right? Well, not if they are only giving this 302 redirect to Google through IP Delivery. What this does is effectively allow searchers to go to EvilSite.com, because the 302 redirect will not redirect the actual users.

The bate and switch worked.

A huge thread on this topic is over at WebmasterWorld.

I would like to thank Max Chirkov for giving me the details for some of this entry.

How many of you, have seen SEO copy like this lately?

Our California web design firm, is the best web design firm in California for your website design needs. We specialize in California web design and development, with an emphasis on placing creativity and innovation in all your california web design. Trust us for your California web design.

Came up with that myself...hehe. Anyway, I am sure some of you have seen this on multiple occasions. I get about half way through something like that and realize its no use finishing, and that I should move on to the next company. Maybe they will have a little more [creativity] in their SEO copy. Who are we trying to talk to here, the prospective client or the search engines. Or both!?

I just bought, the Robert Collier, Letter Book from Amazon this week, its like an essential must have if you are interested in copywriting. While on my kick to find out more, I came across an short article this morning by Karon Thackston, who I thought did a great job touching upon suggestions to improve the flow of your SEO copy, and avoid situations like above. She mentions:

1. Vary your terms to avoid absolutely bombarding the reader (and the engines) with the same keyphrases.
2. That *may* mean the need for longer copy *if* your target audience is one that would respond well to longer copy.
3. Breaking up that phrase will help you retain your appeal to the engines and your site visitors.
4. So, is the flow of your current copy destroyed by keywords? Are you scaring off both the engines and your visitors? One quick check can help you decide. Read your copy out loud.

Check out the article on SEO Copy and Improving the Natural Flow of It

Yesterday, I had interviewed Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads Inc., a link popularity and traffic generating ad firm. Patrick has a detailed background in SEO and is now currently focusing on the link building component. This interview makes for some interesting reading. Make sure to click on the entry to read the full interview.

Roundtable: Hi Patrick, Thank you for taking the time with me for this interview. I thought it would be nice to chat with a link building SEO at this time because of all the talk going on about PageRank, or lack there of, and the SandBox effect. Of course, I would like to get into your service found at www.text-link-ads.com during this interview, but let's first get into link building. Sound good?
Patrick Gavin: Yes Barry, thanks for the opportunity.

Roundtable: Thanks. To start off, let me ask you about how you go about creating new sites and at what point does the link building process begin for you? Do you have any process, in which you stick with, during the link building campaign? Can you give the readers at the Search Engine Roundtable and idea on how they should manage the link building aspect of SEO during the overall SEO and site development plan?
Patrick Gavin: It is best to start the link building as soon as possible. Our strategy for all sites, new and old is two fold:

Continue reading "Interview with Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads Inc."

This email was sent out to Overture customers last night with the details:

When Overture advertisers speak, we listen. In response to advertiser feedback, we've simplified our match types.

Phrase and Broad match types will be streamlined into one match type: Advanced. Now it will be easier than ever to manage your account, put your business in more relevant searches and drive more qualified traffic to your site.

Simpler is better with Advanced match type:
- Advanced will encompass both Phrase and Broad match types-You will no longer designate one or the other. Your current Phrase and/or Broad match type listings will become Advanced match type listings at the time of launch.
- Advanced will leverage your existing keywords-You won't have to add keywords or receive additional editorial review.
- Advanced will use the same bid as Standard-One bid means no more managing multiple bids.
- Advanced will offer excluded words at the account level-You will be able to select excluded words across your entire account or for each individual listing.

You won't have to do anything to change your current Phrase and Broad keywords to Advanced. They will be switched automatically as early as October 2. If your Phrase or Broad bids differ from your Standard bids, they will default to the Standard bid amount when the Advanced match type launches.

You may opt out of Phrase and Broad match types at any time before the Advanced match type launch. You can also opt in and out of the Advanced match type at any time after the launch using the Match Types option within the DirecTraffic Center®.

Overture's new Advanced match type provides simplified bidding, easier account management and the opportunity to drive more traffic. It launches as early as October 2, so watch for it.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

Excellent post by seomike over at Search Engine Watch forums on how to make your framed site search engine friendly. seomike, in this post, gives both the unix and windows method of converting a framed site into something the search engines will eat up and spit out to the searcher.

The thread started with a member who asked about creating doorway pages, in order to help his site, which uses frames, to rank well in the search engines. For the technical details, on how to convert the site into something that can be easily crawled by the engines, please check out this post.

In light of other news today, thought this would be quite helpful for those that are doing keyword research for their sites or clients. A thread over at Highrankings, offers some insight into how to select keywords, where to conduct keyword research, how to format the data that you collect to deduct the best and highest ranking keywords. As well as ideas about brainstorming keywords and phrases, where to start, and what to do once your done. Many of the members share their specific techniques for this process. Excellent thread, continuing reading and discussing about the best methods for finding keywords over at Highrankings.

Rumors are all over the place based on a NY Post article and Slashdot publicizing that article. Basically, the logic that Google is really making a browser is that Google purchased the domain name Gbrowser.com, based on the whois record you can see they purchased the name on 2004-Apr-26, pretty good logic here.

Anyway, forum coverage at: Cre8asite Forums

And here is my lame attempt to turn the Mac IE browser into a Mac Google browser:

The sandbox thread has been plaguing SEO firms, I am pretty sure this site was the first to report on this theory back in April. A thread at WebmasterWorld named Telling Customers about Time it takes to Rank discusses how SEO firms are handling the task of explaining why its taking so long for their new sites to rank well. The first post is kind of funny, so I will quote a piece of it below. The thread then goes into people's experience with the sandbox, so it goes way off topic as to the original post, but the first post is worth reading if you want to get an idea of what SEO firms are saying.

Here are a few comments I have made to customers recently:

1) "Honestly, it is going to be at least a year for you to see any decent results unless you purchase Google Adwords. Google is pretty much a Pay Per Click search engine now, unless you've been around for a year or more."
2) "I realize it has been 6 months and you have spent over $20,000 on your site. Unfortunately, no amount of money is going to make you rank in the "pure" results. I sincerely apologize for telling you that I thought it would be 2-3 months. I was wrong."
3) "You are asking when your site will start making money? I have no clue, because there is this mysterious "sandbox effect" going on at Google. I know my answer sounds like "smoke and mirrors", but I mean this sincerely, and I don't know how long it will take for things to change."
4) "I'm very disappointed that you have decided to stop using my services and instead are now using spamtheseachengines.com. I've tried to market your site using knowledge I've gained with over 6 years of experience, and unfortunately there is a major delay in seeing the results that I expected. I still believe you are going to benefit, even though spamthesearchengines.com is going to get all the credit."

I bet many of the readers here have the Google Toolbar installed. I found a thread named Toolbar scripting vulnerability, which links to two articles about a Google Toolbar Exploit. Article one at SecurityTracker.com and article two at SecurityFocus.com.

Very interesting thread caught my attention at Cre8asite forums named What Does Pagerank Mean in 2004?. This thread, kind of suggests what I hinted to on 9/03 and have been thinking about for a while before that. What is PageRank worth these days? As noted in the thread, the last time there was a PR update was over three months ago. Everyman, accurately describes the blatant selling of pagerank that has been taking place for a while. Google has been turning its head to this practice as opposed to how they dealt SearchKing (classified as one of the hottest debated SEO topics).

So where will PageRank take us by the end of 2004? In an other thread at WebmasterWorld named How Google can avoid Google checksum algorithm crack?, it discusses the past and most recent time the checksum have been hacked. Brett Tabke believes that this is all in preparation for a big Google update, which he has already pre-named to be "Vegas". My thoughts, well, its been three months, three months! I don't remember there not being a PageRank update for three months before.

Is this the end of PageRank, I am not sure. Why would Google spend the time to create a new checksum algorithm? Of course a week later, this checksum algorithm has been hacked. Do they just scratch the whole thing and not display the true PageRank value as Everyman believes they have been doing since April 2003? I would, but I am not Google.

This will make for a very interesting 4th Quarter.

Yesterday, the news about MyJeeves Beta was leaked out, some sites/blogs were asked to removed the news, Andy Beal & Danny Sullivan, others were not. Anyway, its official now. Here is a quick summary of what was taking place over the last few months (or however long it took).

First, and most importantly Mr. Jeeves got a makeover. He is now, cleaner, wiser and ready for 2004. Here is a cute small article on that small topic. The image is from the article:

Second, MyJeeves Beta was officially announced. As I said above, it was illegally released yesterday (I think DM News will be banned from Ask now). Anyway, MyJeeves allows you to save search results in neat little folders, print those results and email them. In addition, it remembers your search history. The interface, I find, to be very clean, easy and intuitive, but I am bad with that - I pick up on these things quickly. Here are some screen captures of the MyJeeves features, for addition questions visit the MyJeeves FAQs:

Here you will see a normal Web search, I have highlighted in red a new link which reads "save". If you click on that "save" link, it changes and then reads "saving..." and then changes to "saved". That click, places the result in your "Saved Results" section of the MyJeeves "My Searches".

After you save the result, you can go to "MyJeeves" and then organize the results that you have saved into folders. The screen capture below, shows an example of me performing this task.

View Large Image

Finally, and what I find to be the most important change, is the release of Teoma 3.0. I started a thread on Teoma 3.0 at Search Engine Watch hoping to get some more details from the AskJeevesRep. This is what we know so far:
- enhanced relevance for query results
- an increased crawling frequency to refresh more often the index of general sites and news stories
- an expanded index that now has about 2 billion English-language Web documents, up from about 1.5 billion six months ago.
- The index is expected to grow to about 2.5 billion documents by the end of 2004.
- supports double-byte Asian languages and features a Japanese-language index, which currently has about 100 million Web documents.
- Enhancements to Teoma 3.0 expected in the fourth quarter include a page cache feature and a related search feature.
- ability for users to search only for Flash or PDF files.
- plans to launch a desktop search product

Make sure to drop by the AskJeeves and Teoma forums at:

• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat
  
• and the other forums

Google is now able to index certain 3D file formats. These file formats include:
- filetyp:dwg for AutoCAD files - Google even parses the file and gives descriptions derived from the content!
- filetype:3ds for 3D-Studio files - again, then content is parsed
- filetype:c4d gives you Cinema 4D files - but no content parsed
- filetype:lwo finds LightWave files with descriptions
- filetype:obj well, you have to hand-pick the 3D files from many non-3D-results...

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Google filetype goes 3D! discusses this topic. The thread then delves into how well Google does this. Answer is, not all that well, in terms of relevancy.

Great little thread over at Highrankings, about what it takes to get above the 5 placement in the search results, on your way to being #1. Its definately a critical area if you are focusing on some tough keywords. Most likely if you are in the top 5 already, you are steps away from success. Members express opinions relating ways your can overcome the top 5 commatose, and successfully rise to the number #1 slot. I would recommend focusing on specific anchor text, and increasing the amount, adjusting the repetition of the keyword on the page, and many more solutions discussed here.

Well, not really. But they did go with this new green look. Take a look at the new green look of the Digital Point Forums and discuss this new color at the thread. I am a bit under the weather today, I think its due to the change of the seasons. Maybe DP's forum caught my cold?

Can alcoholics recover and drink normally again? Leading Internet search engines say yes, they can!

Try a search in a major search engine for the following "can alcoholics recover and drink normally again", it appears the search engines have an answer. The search results people are getting for issues dealing with alcoholism are very relevant to what people are needing to recover from alcoholism, apparantly. It's not just AA that is helping, search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo, are listing in the top results websites from people that have recovered and offering their advice on what works and what doesn't. As one of the website owners put it in the article, their website is not "treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause." I found this article a bit enlightening that what is being served in the top results is indeed helping people, and sites like the couple mentioned in the article are getting noticed for their effectiveness. Its not just traditional solutions, big companies, and government information sites taking up the top slots, its also the little guys.

Check out the article on Leading Search Engines Helping Alcoholics

A thread over at Search Engine Watch named Huge Google delisting of the SEO leaders in Europe discusses the banning of several large European SEO firms from the Google index. If you know French, you can read the forum discussion over at a French forum at Webmaster Hub. These firms feel that Google is picking particularly on French SEO firms for their use of doorway pages.

Evil! Dishonest! Downright Wrong! This is not just an issue with SEO firms, but this is the first reported case I have seen in the forums. The case was brought up by Elisabeth, a Super Moderator over at the Search Engine Watch Forums. She said that she found an other SEO firm taking credit for her firm's work. She will be contacting the SEO Firm to take down this false case study immediately.

Please be on the look out for these scams.

For more information on the details, visit the thread at Search Engine Watch.

In a post by NFFC, old admin at WMW, over at Search Engine Watch Forums, he reveals that Microsoft is deploying these easy to detect cloaked or doorway pages. Want to see?.

This news seems to be taking off. A thread at Cre8asite Forums, started by Webby, named Microsoft using doorway pages delves deeper into this topic. As noted in the thread, if you turn off your JavaScript function in your browser and visit this page, you will see a page that reads "Welcome to our company. This page has been designed to help our visitors finding directly the information, product or service they are searching in our websites." First thing, this sentence doesn't even read well and secondly this is a search engine "no-no". If you want to see a screen image of the page, click here.

Make sure to check out the thread.

I really wanted to attend the SEO Roadshow but I was unable to make it. Now, does it make it better to see all those that attended had a blast? Yea, but I admit, I am a bit envious. :)

For those in withdrawal, you can visit the SEO Roadshow Review thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums. Mike has a great and funny recap.

Maybe that explains the mystery behind the sudden disappearance of Mr. Jeeves. Ask, one of my favorite search engines, has recently acquired CitySearch, and has already put this asset to use. In an article released this morning at DM News, Ask will be launching "My Jeeves" today or tomorrow. As Danny Sullivan says at the new SEW blog "Officially, the news wasn't supposed to come out until tomorrow."

Take a look at My Jeeves at http://myjeeves.ask.com/. I ran some tests, but seems to be still in beta. I'll keep you posted...The help documentation should be up shortly over here.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

One more reason to love Firefox. You can now combine Google backlink data, PR, alexa data all in one toolbar for Firefox. I have been using Firefox for the past several months, and am enjoying it, except for the fact that I haven't found a simple solution or replacement to the Google toolbar. There are some solutions granted, but ones that always seems way to time intensive for what I needed. This just might be easy enough for most people to use, and install, plus darn useful. Continuing discussing about the Firefox toolbar.

GOOG is up a quarter of a percent this morning. Hadn't really seen an update on the Google Stock symbol recently. While we are far off from being the finance roundtable, I thought I would bring it here and show you guys what the trends are for the day. So far its been up, about 15% since we last reported back in August. Here is whats going on currently:

If anyone is going to the SEO Roadshow in London (I wish I was), thought I would point them to a good place to discuss it. Seems to be pretty lively talk and banter over there kinda like the kind you get in a smoky pub in England somewhere. Good stuff, and be warned they aren't discussing meta-tags and search tips, its real stuff. Check out the discussion at SEW, SEO Road Show, September 18th.

So where do you plan to travel next? Ask a travel search engine to pull up a destination, plane tickets, excursions, transportation. Forget a retailer, search is more effective for research. This particular article is chock full of information about travel specific search engines and why people are using them more regularly and to what rate. Which could be declining in some cases. Search engines are playing a part in planning peoples travel it says, and the travel specific search engines are on the rise.

Do I agree with this article? Most of it, but not all. One reason I decided to post this article, was my recent experience in planning a trip to Scotland via the internet and some of the trouble I ran into. I found the backpacking company, hostels, airline information, tickets to comedy shows, researched the areas I was traveling, and so on. But I didn't use a search engine to find a travel planner. I already had one, and I think this is where this article is missing out, in that these real people are way more effective in helping with your plans. While services like Expedia, Travelocity, or Orbitz are rising in popularity, mainly because you get to skip the step of using a travel planner, and a website to book the flight. This is great. But have you ever tried to book a very extensive trip on Expedia to different countries? It can be a nightmare, and a long process, I would rather forgo. So for those trips I use a travel planner, a real person. For everything else I use a search engine. :-)

Check out Yahoo's new travel search engine, and the article on Search Leads Travelers to Destinations.

This might not seem like a big deal, and most people won't even notice a difference, but Googlebot seems to be using a slightly different user agent that supports HTTP/1.1 (including support for server-side compression of documents), so it's about a 5x bandwidth saving for servers that have it turned on.

They are still running the old spiders as well, so it might just be a test phase or something. Either way, it's something I've been wishing for, and seem to have now. There is some discussion on it over here.

So consider this possibility. What if the website you owned and promoted in Google Adwords sold exclusively Epson related products and accessories, and you received a letter saying you could no longer use Epson in the ad copy. Ekkk! That would make it a little more difficult to promote and sell Epson related products in a PPC campaign for sure. It would be like trying to find a way to say the name without even saying it. Supposedly a member over at SEOchat received an email from Google, telling him that his ads were suspended due to a brand name being used (Epson).

One suggestion I liked was that he could contact Epson themselves, and call to make sure that ads placed where no problem for the company. He could provide Google with information that he is a approved Epson reseller, with full rights to do so (if he does indeed). He could also email Google asking about what prompted such an action whether it was a decision based on information received from Epson or an independent decision on its own. Or maybe he just can't advertise specific products, such as an Epson c900. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Either way its stinks for the company placing ads, but it just might be something that is going to happen eventually.

The one thing I could see help recover some of the business lost from the adwords, would be to submit a data feed to Froogle. This way he try to compete for those searching for epson printers on Google in a different way, or try Overture, they don't seem to mind.

Well, first its just smart and probably a bit easier for the staff over at SEW to keep blogging about important topics covering the search engine marketing industry. Second, they use a Moveable Type blogging system (just like the one seroundtable uses), its robust, categorizes well, and a brilliant choice for publishing content for the search engines and users (Read why they decided to use moveable type in the first place). Third, its going to be kept up by Gary Price, Chris Sherman, and Danny Sullivan

Danny mentions the following about the new blog, and the reasoning behind it:

The blog isn't going to replace what Search Engine Watch already does. Instead, it's going to let us better publish some items that may not come to your attention.

Check out the new search engine watch blog.

Google started deploying a new toolbar update with an updated PageRank checksum algorithm (see this entry), but it didn't take them long to crack the new algorithm this time around (Google hasn't even shut off the old algorithm yet).

The PHP source code is available here, or you can blah, blah about it over here.

Nothing really too ground breaking here, but someone posted a thread mentioning that they see Yahoo search results giving 10 results instead of 20 now (which I can confirm).

If anyone should know directories, it's definately the people over at v7n forums. One of the members wanted to know what the best search engine friendly directory scripts were, out of other people's experiences. I thought the specific "needs" addressed of a good directory where applicable to quite a number of things. Picking the right directory to use is an important factor in its success. Nandini listed a must-have list of items needed by in a good directory script:

1. Multi-level category system
2. Search engine friendly pages. Can generate plain HTML or atleast staic URL pages .
3. Apache search engine friendly URL rewriting. No .php extensions catgories should be like "directory.com/travel" like DMOZ listing.
4. Integration with Paypal or 2checkout. (although not a very important point)
5. A good control panel (This is one thing, on ething which is common in all scripts).
6. Cross-references.
7. No tracking of clicks on links. like which is done in Sezza.com . All link should be static in nature.
8. Not too expensive.

Continue discussing Best Directory Scripts at v7n.

I will not be posting for the next two days, Thursday and Friday. I am confident that Ben will do a fine job here, while I am gone. Just wanted to drop a note. Have a nice, rest of the week.

Now this thread confuses me. A member posted a thread named Overture And Spidering, where he reports findings of Yahoo's Crawler, Slurp, has been clicking on his overture ads.

In response to this post, YahooMike says;

This might be happening as part of an ongoing test. If you're using a tracking URL, the crawler visits may appear to be clicks on your listings. If this occurs you won't be charged for these clicks.

Thanks,

Yahoo! Mike

This is just so strange to me. Any ideas as to why Yahoo would want its crawler to click on its own Overture ads? I don't see any purpose to it. Alright, I am done trying to figure this one out - this is just too funny.

With a cleaned up look, and a host of new features, this is one engine that deserves some head turns. The BETA stage for Amazon's A9 search engine is now over, and in place Amazon has scaled down the homepage a little with some new colors, and host of new features. Search results are conducted normally but with the added "Image, Movie, and Reference" search. You can know conduct searches on the following:

Web - provided by Google
Books - Amazon
Images - provided by Google
Movies - provided by IMBD.com
Reference - provided by GuruNet
History
Bookmarks
Diary

The best things about the new features is in my opinion the layout. I am using a 1680x1050 screen, it very handy to be able to switch back in forth with vertical windows in the same site. A single search can return results for over 8 different things, and with the push of a tab on the right hand side you can easily find the images corresponding to that search. Similar to how Google does it with invisible tabs. See a search for the road less travelled. Now try to click on the buttons on the right. Pretty easy huh.

Check out the new A9 for some fun today, www.a9.com

A big thanks to PK, from SEOchat for breaking the news on there, continue to discuss A9.

How often do you see Adobe PDF documents ranking in the top results for a very specific keyword search? I see them often enough. Why do PDFs rank better then other files (word documents, flash, etc.)? Of course they don't rank as well as some HTML files, but the search results are saturated with PDFs. So how does one optimize a PDF document to rank well in the search engines? That was the topic over at a HighRankings forum thread named How To Optimize Pdfs.

I remember reading Shari Thurow's book, Search Engine Visibility a long time ago. In that book she had a section on PDFs. I don't remember all the information off the top of my head, but I believe she recommended putting an abstract of the contents of the PDF document in HTML and link to the PDF with the keywords in the link. That is the basic stuff. Now let's jump into the HighRankings thread.

Members recommend setting the title of the PDF document, within the actual PDF settings. This can be done by clicking on File > Document Info > General within Acrobat 4.0. You can then verify this information within Acrobat reader by clicking on File > Document Properties > Summary.

Randy, a mod at HighRankings, adds with his own tests, saying "If you're using Acrobat to create your PDFs, or something else that allows you to set the Document Properties, whatever you put in the Title field will show up as the title in Google. Even if there is other text in the pdf file."

I recommend keeping an eye on this thread, there are more PDF tests underway and it will make for interesting reading.

What does this Revisit Meta Tag do for a site? Not much. A thread at SEW Forums named revisit meta tag usefull to keep bots from vitising too often?, quickly dismisses the tag. The thread links to a well written SEO Consultants Article on this topic. bragadocchio, an admin over at Cre8asite, also known as Bill Slawski, comments: "As far as I know, the only other search engine that has ever supported the tag, and still does, is netinsert."

Nice find by Viggen over at the ABAKUS Blog, Alan Webb's site. He read the fine print over at the About Gmail page and found this line.

"Automatic forwarding and POP3 access: Not available yet, but will be in the future for free or at a nominal fee." You'll see this under the "" portion of the page. Good find.

Benjamin Pfeiffer, known here and at the forums as Phoenix, has graciously accepted the responsibility of helping me provide you with top notch SEM forum threads. With this role, Ben will be the first associate editor of the Search Engine Roundtable. Ben is a moderator over at SEO Chat, he has tons of experience in the SEO and PPC field, as well as affiliate marketing and general SEM topics.

The goal of this site is to provide a quick and easy way for you to find the best threads out there. As you know, reading threads at all the SEM forums can be a daunting task. We, here, aim to make these threads available to you on a daily basis (weekdays). Ben has agreed to help me with this task.

I will continue to write on average three to six entries per day. Ben will aim for one to three entries per day. We will try to cover different forums, this way our forum coverage can be more diverse. We hope that these efforts make for a more comprehensive and informative online resource.

Thank you for reading every day - without you, this would not be possible.

Came across a specific question today, regarding Google News sources. The member was asking about where Google received its sources and how someone could get their site included in the regular news results. Google scans around 4,500-5000 sites a day to gather articles to supply its results. I decided it might be helpful if I answer the questions to those with sites that publish news on a daily basis. From my experience in advising clients on submitting their site, Google is rather specific in regards to who they include in the news index. They look at how often the news is published, quality of the news releases, including the site itself. The nice thing is that Google will review all suggestions to the index.

Here is what Google has to say on it:

"Please mail your ideas for news sources to news-feedback@google.com. While we can't guarantee that we will add all sources that are recommended, we will review all the suggestions we recieve."

So give it a shoot if you think your site has what it takes. Check out Google News, or discuss it over at Digitalpoint, Google News Sources

Back at the SES San Jose conference in the Search Ads Beyond Google & Overture session, Dan Ballister from FindWhat.com introduced the concept of "pay per call". Today, they announced this, for more information on this service visithere. Elisabeth, super admin at SEW forums, started on thread on this topic named FindWhat Announces Pay-Per-Call Ad Option.

Cute, fun and great marketing ploy?

Mr. Jeeves has left the Ask Jeeves front lawn. Take a look at Ask.com, he is missing. :)

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Will google ban portals with rotating content? caught my eye. It asks the question, will it hurt or help my rankings if I change content on a page dynamically. Let me explain. I have a page about a particular vacation spot. On this page, I might want to include; weather that is pulled from weather.com, updated movie listings, hotel information, useful resources that rotate in and out based on page reload. Will this hurt your rankings for this page?

There are two ways to look at it. If the page is targeting a competitive keyword phrase, then changing all the content on the page might prove to be detrimental to the successful and long term ranking of that page. One of the major factors of a page ranking well, when speaking about the 'on-page optimization side', is the content on the page. So if you change the content, the keyword phrase mix might not be optimal.

What is recommended, is to leave fairly static content on the page and then bring in dynamic portions of content, to support the other content. Hand write a two paragraph blurb on the page, optimize those paragraphs for the keyword phrase of that page. Then include helpful resources, such as weather, news, movies, bars and your favorite search engine and you should be set. Fresh content is rumored to be loved by the engines, I have my own theory on that - but that is for a different entry.

Readers have expressed interest in learning about new search engines that prop up here and there. The developers of iZiTO sent me an email with a press release. I'll attach the press release below in the extended entry part. But first let me show you what I found cool about this meta engine.

I'll start saying that this search service is a bit slow, which is expected since it requires flash. But it has its pros.

They allow you to "park" results, so if your browsing the search results page, you can click on a little P and that will store the result in your parked results section. In addition, when you click on any result, you can easily get back to the SERPs page without clicking the back button. The interface allows you to "X" out of the results, you can also skip to the next or previous result and park the page. This does facilitate some of the areas where a searcher wants to gather a dozen or so pages on a specific topic and then read them all at a later point in time. Here are some screen images.

search results page: View Large Image

More images on the detailed page...

Continue reading "iZiTO - Personalized Human Intelligence Search"

Search engine marketers that run their own businesses are looking to tap into areas that can increase sales volume. Some SEMs are thinking global. Nacho, a moderator over at SEW forums and also a really nice guy, started a thread named Is anyone doing SEO in Asia?

In this thread, they begin to discuss PPC strategies for Asia, the all so important - translation services, and SEO tactics. Looks like this one is going to be an interesting thread.

Doesn't really interest me, but AOL has released a beta URL to view the redesigned AOL homepage. The beta site redesign can be found at http://betasp.web.aol.com/. Here is a screen capture for you:

I remember the days when I used to hang out in the tech support rooms at AOL, because they didn't charge you per minute if you were in the tech support area. Forgot what they called those rooms back then. Oh, the days when the Internet was not unlimited. I actually got my dad's AOL subscription terminated because I was one of those stupid kids who highjacked those tech rooms. I didn't spend my whole life in front of a computer screen, just seems that way. :)

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

I received an email last night with a question that asked about HTML entities and how they are treated by search engines. For what are HTML entities are, please see html-help, they look like © ® ™.

Anyway, the person asked me if it was true that having trademark or copyright symbol on a page can hurt ones rankings. Of course my response was, no way! I made sure to ask the question, "where did you hear this from?"

She responded that she heard it from some person who attended the SES Toronto show. It is amazing how messages get distorted as they go through a chain of communication. Person A hears from original source that using a company name or trademark name in the title of your pages is key problem that people do, (i.e. no one searches on a company name, unless your rustybrick ;)). Person A tells Person B that he heard that having trademarks in the title is bad for search engine purposes. Well, its fine for SEO purposes if you want to rank well for your trademark. Person B tells Person C that having trademark or other HTML entities in the body of your content can hurt your rankings. See where this is going? :)

There was a very good question proposed by a member over at Digitalpoint forum. He asked about which Adsense ads made more money, the text or image ads? Its one that I think has already been considered but not fully investigated enough yet, due to the fact that images ads are still a bit new. You also only have selected sizes for images ads such as: Leaderboard (728 x 90), Banner (468 x 60), Skyscraper (120x600), and Medium Rectangle (300 x 250). Additionally Image Ads come and go. Some in the thread mentioned that the more broad use of keywords you have on the page, the more likely a broad matched Image Ad will show up eventually.

I am thinking based on observations of my own that possible Image Ads do in fact bring better revenue to publishers of adsense. They cost more from what I can tell, they appear to a wider audience, they are more visual, attract select groups, and Google can ultimately target this ads at particular audiences and sites, giving them the ability to fine tune the ad network, resulting in higher CTR's and more money for adsense publishers. But thats just a theory.

Check out the thread over at Digitalpoint: Image Ads vs. Text Ads

Some people are reporting sporadic PageRank updates over at WebmasterWorld. I am personally not in the mood to investigate further, but the title of the thread looks interesting. :)

Sorry about the 'shorty'.

The more the merrier. We have so many shopping search engines so why not launch an other. As Gary points out in the thread he started over at Search Engine Watch, AOL is going to release a new shopping search engine.

The engine will be named In-Store.com and should be live by next week. The current service can be found at PinpointShopping.com.

Last night I received a gmail email from Gmail Team with the subject, "More Gmail invites." I found this email very weird. It continued to read "The Gmail Team is proud to announce that we are offering Gmail free invitation packages to the existing Gmail account holders. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations."

Now, normally Gmail gives you invites directly in the top console and does not ask you to fill out information. This email looks really valid, plus it got through Gmail's spam filter. So is it real? I doubt it. But it looks so real. Anyway, it asks you for your current gmail account and password. That is a direct tip that someone is phishing for passwords. Be Careful and look out for this email!

Update: Well, I received two emails from Gmail. One from the GmailRep over at SEW forums and the other from someone from Gmail because of this entry here, both asking me for the original source of the email. Google obviously is taking this seriously. Let me stress, I did not notify Google directly. They picked it up from reading forums and finding this entry. Good work Google.

Yet an other backlink update. Hope your happy. :)

Forum coverage:

• SEO Chat
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• V7 Forums
  
• IHelpYou
  
• WebProWorld
  
• Digital Point
  
• SEO Guy
  
• LilEngine

So what if, hypothetically speaking, Google decided to release its code, make it open source, and let millions of seos, marketers, hackers, webmasters, soccer moms, ex-presidents, and NBA super stars do with it as they please? Would the world be a better place, would it be possible to even consider? I don't know, but the things all these people could create would be interesting. I am guessing though open source will have to start small and work its way up to the bigger players. For Google, open source is a bad idea, for other niches and directories its a great idea.

Found a neat little post over at SEOchat, about open source search engines and the possibility they would hit mainstream.

Check it out, Open Source Search Engines

I promised you more was to come after I wrote the entry here named Danny Sullivan & Chris Sherman Resign from SEMPO, and it came in the way of more posts over at HighRankings. In a thread started by Jill from HighRankings named Discuss Sempo's Sept. Newsletter, where she posts a thread discussing the latest SEMPO newsletter sent out this September (or yesterday). In the thread you will find more negative posts about SEMPO. You will find well reasoned complaints about SEMPO. You will find more unhappy SEMPO members.

Can SEMPO Win? They try to communicate and then get blasted for what is found in the communication. The thread at HighRankings talks mostly about the UK committee member who was elected. In addition, Mike Grehan points out that some of the committee members, do not even know they were committee members. I can relate to that. Early on, I offered my assistance, but I received no response. Only later did I find out that was was listed on the committee Web site as part of the education committee. I was not notified by someone at SEMPO, I found out by way of looking at my Web statistics. I found people clicking from the committee's page to my corporate site. I thought it was an oversight, maybe they told me and I forgot, or maybe they emailed me and it was caught by my spam filters. Now I am not too sure.

I still want the best for SEMPO and the SEM Industry. Don't get me wrong. :)

Last night I tried accessing AdWords from my home, I was unable to. From my office it worked fine. Not sure if this is related but many people over at the forums are reporting that AdWords is down. Seems like this has been a persistent issue for the AdWords team. Reports of the AdWords system being down date back to August 10th, where a post at WebmasterWorld sprung back to life after this most recent incident. Forum coverage also at Search Engine Watch.

Might be too early for me to mention this but it seems like the Yahoo! Search bloggers at The Yahoo! Search Blog are on a roll. They have published an entry each work day this week, Monday was Labor day. Not bad compared to their search blog rivals over at the Google Blog.

Good work Yahoo Search! SEOs love frequent updates. :)

Looks like Google's Gmail servers are filling up too quickly, or am I making a silly assumption. An assumption based on a new warning found in the Gmail Spam box that reads "Warning: Spam messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted".

Here is what it looks like:

Back in June I reported on how Google's Checksum algorithm was backwards engineered. Since then, dozens of PageRank tools became available. There has been a few backlink updates at Google since the checksum was available, but PageRank has not been changed in about three months. In fact, Google has been slowly taking away hints for the SEOs to learn if they are improving in link popularity.

There is a post over at SEO Chat named New Google checksum algorithm where PRWeaver posts the fact that Google is releasing a new toolbar version. When you download the new toolbar, and then find the checksum figure, you will notice that it doesn't match the old toolbar checksum figure, nor does it match the checksum algorithm that was available for free.

Does this mean we can expect to see future PR updates? Sounds likely to me.

Does this mean that all the tools that have the PR checking algorithm will be useless? Sounds likely to me.

Depending on who you ask, the answer could go either way. 10,000 links is definately better in quantity but what about the quality of the links? Will Google or another engine treat these as the same as if it were 100 links each from a different site? There is an interesting thread over at SEW forums, about which would be better 10,000 or 100 links. The member, iamrussell, quotes the company offering such services for the 10,000 links:

"The difference is simply that Google can devalue links from one IP after a certain number (I've seen suggestions of 50) - but this doesn't at all mean that multiple links from any site are in the least bit bad, simply that links from as many C class IP blocks as possible are much more preferable - which is precisely what our Link Network provides."

I think that the real answer to this question comes down to how you plan to use the links. The culmative nature of how the links are obtained and how often the links are picked up by Google in particular. You can stress over C class blocks all day, but unless a link is spidered by a search engine it carries no value for your website, other than assist a user to a useful resource. So you can have 10,000 links, but possibly Google will only know of 100.

Most likely obtaining 10,000 links on over 100 sites is an attractive service. I would try it to test it out. It not only can help you increase your backlinks, but it can improve your search engine rankings. However, getting 10,000 links in one month, doesn't mean that you will see results from these links within one month. The reason because 10,000 links from even 100 different IP's will ultimately take several months in order to get picked up by the search engines. If they are lower pagerank links, then it might even take longer for you to see an impact. To illustrate, consider blog spamming. I get spammed regularly by "unmentionable" websites almost every other day. You may too, and its a constant battle to keep blogs clean and outbound links pure.

But why do blog spammers go after blogs not use a services like obtaining 10,000 in a month? The answer lies in the ability for a spammed blog link to get picked up by the search engines at a rapid rate. Instead of waiting months for your links to get spidered, you obtain a quicker benefit from blogs, because their content changes rapidly, daily, weekly, and hourly in some cases. Google can pick up this though Googlebot, and will make sure your new content is quickly found by a searcher, and hence the spammed links on your blog. If you do a search for any of the drug related keywords, or even "mesothelioma" you will find websites that rank in the top 10, that use blogs, questbooks, and other content publishing systems for the base of their backlinks. They want an instant benefit (that may not last), not one that will grow over time, like using service mentioned above.

Check out the thread over at SEW, 10,000 links or 100 links

Thought I would mention two tools that help Web designers select colors for a site's theme. Because, as mentioned often at this site - if you get traffic but can not convert the user, its just a waste of bandwidth. Of course, a nasty color scheme might influence a search referral to hit that back button.

Tool number one is named Color Schemes Generator and it is the newer version of tool number two which is now named Color Schemes Generator Old. I wish I could remember exactly where I found this. I am pretty sure it came from Cre8asite Forums and I think the member that posted this was using the username cline (help me out if you know the source).

A reader has asked me to share some information on a meta search engine named IceRocket. So what I did was compare the results for a single search phrase, web design, between the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves). I have attached the results in this ice rocket comparison excel file. Funny how very few of the top results match across any of those engines. So you know IceRocket uses results from WiseNut, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, Altavista, Alltheweb, Lycos and others.

Where IceRocket differentiates itself from the other meta engines is its interface. The most noticeable option is the "snapshots" view, defaulted on, where you can see a small snapshot of the page indexed - I believe this is from Alexa's database. IceRocket has placed very useful links that pertain those specific pages, including an "Archives" link that jumps you off to the Way Back Machine for that result, here is an example of OSWD's archives. In addition, it allows you to get a "QuickView", similar to how Ask's Binoculars Preview worked. Here is an example screen image of the QuickView for OSWD. Also make sure to catch the "related searches" on the right of the page and the "blog results" directly under the related searches. There is no doubt that blog results are going to be a major component of search in the future. On some of the results, you will also see Directory listings by Yahoo! and Lycos, more on that in my email interview with Blake Rhodes from IceRocket.

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Interview:

Roundtable: Please tell me about your background and why you developed IceRocket.com?
Blake Rhodes: I developed it last year when I was in college. I felt there were some things that I could do that would make searching the web easier and more fun, so I did them. At the time I was living in Fort Worth, TX and I was a senior at TCU, since I have moved to Dallas where IceRocket is located. There are still many things we feel the other engines aren't doing and we will be constantly adding features to our site.

Roundtable: Can you tell us a little bit about what features you have added to the engine that other search engines are not doing?
Blake Rhodes: Snapshots, quick view, Alexa Info, Archives. We have a "find a friend feature" . We use some different image sources that other don't use. We want to give our users every tool we can that will make finding where they want to go easier.

Roundtable: I tend to like some of those options. May I ask which engine powers the main results? I assume you pull the snapshots from Alexa? I like how you put category listings at the bottom to both Yahoo and Lycos, why not the ODP?
Blake Rhodes: We have several engines that power our main search. The directory categories is something we have just recently been working on, like in the last day or so, we are doing a lot of testing and we won't know exactly what direction we are going with that for a week or so.

Roundtable: When you say you have several engines power your results. Do you then have an algorithm above those results that you use to combine and present the IceRocket.com results? Can you give us any detail on those results and why you feel that they are more relevant?
Blake Rhodes: Yes we have our own algorithm that sorts the results.

Roundtable: A couple more questions for you...Your About us page (http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=about) says "is a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet." Would you say that your trying to focus on the commercial side of search? What I mean by that, do you want to have more results containing services then information? Example, search on a "camera" - do you want sites that sell cameras to come up or sites that have camera reviews/how to build cameras to come up?
Blake Rhodes: In the long run, I want both. There will be people looking both to buy things such as cameras and also those looking to gather information. We want to be able to accommodate both types of users. We are a work in progress Barry, we aren't perfect but we are getting better every day:)

Roundtable: Thank you very much for your time.
Blake Rhodes: Thanks Barry. I took a look at your site and I like it. You have a new reader!!

A question for the readers:

Do you like that all links in the articles of this site to open up in a new window by default? Or do you not want this action to be taken by default?

The answers to this question will dictate what is done in the future.

If you do not want to post a comment here, please email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com. Oh and as an incentive to answer the question, I will randomly select 6 responses that contain the answer to my question above AND "please enter me in gmail contest" in the email or comment left below.

Thanks for your help!

Ever look underneath the pillows of your sofa and find nice goodies? Yea, well you also find things you do not necessarily want to find. ;) A forum thread at Search Engine Watch questions the accuracy of the number of pages found within the Google index.

In summary the issue is as follows.

Go to Google's home page and you will see it read "Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages". That means Google has 4,285,199,774 web pages in its index. So if you do a search on any keyword, one should never find more results then 4,285,199,774, right? Well, wrong. Do a search on the at Google, and you will find 5,800,000,000 results found. How can there be a difference of 1,514,800,226 pages?

Some of the answers include;
(1) Google's home page does not show a real time value for the number of pages indexed by Google. I find it hard to believe that Google wouldn't update that figure after breaking 1,000,000,000 pages.
(2) Google can not break the "unsigned long integer in ANSI C to assign a unique ID" to every page indexed by Google. In that case, there are ways around breaking the four bytes long limit of 4,294,967,295.
(3) Google has a supplemental index, does the 4,285,199,774 web pages include pages in the supplemental index?

I have started a new thread at Search Engine Watch named How Do the Search Indexes Work?. I am hoping to get a better understanding of the various indexes at the search engines. What they include in each index, and which numbers they use to give the users a count on the number of pages indexed.

Yesterday, Danny Sullivan released a fairly detailed article named Reflections On SEMPO. The article eloquently summarizes the challenges presented to the organization over the past year. I am not going to summarize Danny's article, if you have time and your looking for an outstanding recap of what took place, please click on the link to his article above.

The article ended with the subtitle "Departing The Advisory Board". Where Danny announces that Chris Sherman and himself will be stepping down from the SEMPO Advisory Board. I personally believe that this is a good thing for Danny, Chris and the Search Engine Watch readership. This is however a major blow to SEMPO's credibility, which is mentioned at the Search Engine Watch thread named Danny Sullivan leaves SEMPO started by Mike Grehan, who was instrumental in pointing out SEMPOs problematic areas.

The article is being talked about all over the Internet. Here are some blogs that are 'blogging' on the topic; John Battelle, Andy Beal, Kim Krause, and others. The forums are also buzzing with chatter on this topic, including Search Engine Watch, Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld, JimWorld, I am sure you can expect some posts over at HighRankings, IHelpYou and others shortly.

My thoughts? I totally understand why Danny and Chris needed to leave. I also feel that people might take this the wrong way. I am sure both Danny and Chris want the best for SEMPO but being in their position, they could not stay onboard in an "official capacity". Will SEMPO succeed and live on? Seems highly unlikely now. This does sadden me, I feel there was a lot of potential for an organization like SEMPO in the SEM community. In addition, the failure of SEMPO does not look to good for the industry and will add to the reputation problem in the SEM industry. Danny and Chris being such a large part of the SEM industry would not want to see the the SEM reputation get even worse then it is.

I am sure there will be a few more entries from me in the coming days on this topic.

I am not a frequent AdWords users, but I believe Google was always pretty quick, even sometimes instantaneous, at putting up new ads. Anyway, a member over at Search Engine Watch Forums posted a thread named Immediate AD Check in Adwords and AdWordsRep replied "Hey, thanks for noticing".

Anyone have more information on this?

He is not the only one, but I thought AdSense has been loosening its grip on the AdSense publishers. John, a famous search blogger, recently added AdSense to his blog. He titled where it currently reads "Sponsored Links" as "Paying the Bills."

I actually found that funny, but I did not click on his those ads. Google's AdSense team feels that since it read "Paying the Bills", that it would encourage users to click on the ads and "which can artificially inflate AdWords advertiser costs." My thoughts? I see Google's side, and I also know that I did not click on the ads. You know what, now that this whole thing is so publicized, I can see people going to that entry and clicking on the ad, in spite. Not that I think it is right, but since Google made such a big stink over such a small matter, I can see people taking this action. Jeremy Zawodny also noted about this.

According to a thread at SEW forum started by AussieWebmaster (a mod there), the AdWords ads at Google's search engine has been dropping out the title of the ad text. It seems to be an issue caused by some adware or spyware. Check out the thread at Search Engine Watch.

Recently Google announced that Google AdSense Now Allows 3 Ads Per Page. Great news, right?

The folks over at WebmasterWorld have been testing to see the impact of adding multiple ad units to a page. Check out some of the feedback at the thread. I will list some feedback below if you do not want to click through.

I was surprised to get a very very nice click through rate on the 2nd ad units at the very bottom of the article. At least it tells me that our visitors are actually reading to the end of the articles.

compared to same period in August, my EPC decreased ever so slightly by 3.98% But I attribute the decrease more from the long holiday rather than the addition of the multiple ads last Sept 1. My CTR also very slightly increased by 0.71%.

I setup 3 different channels for 3 groups to be used on a related set of pages (within one site). Not sure if it's the weekend, but the results are so bad I'm pulling one of the groups now (I'll give two a try for a couple days).

Group 1 CTR - 100% (during testing period)
Group 2 CTR - 7% of group 1
Group 3 CTR - 11% of group 1

Group 1 CMP - 100% (during testing period)
Group 2 CMP - 4% of group 1
Group 3 CMP - 4% of group 1

Prior Month CTR with only one group - 102% of group 1
Prior Month CMP with only one group - 151% of group 1

Group 3 is only on a few pages with groups 1 and 2. Groups 1 and 2 are on about 40 pages. I'm going to remove group 2 and test for 1-2 days.

Excellent thread started by respree, a forum moderator at Cre8asite, where he posts a thread at SEW forums named SEO :: How do you separate truth from speculation?.

This thread discusses how to, in a sense, weed out the truth from forum posts. As you can imagine, and have seen, there are thousands of new threads started everyday at the various SEM forums. How does one know which SEO "facts" are true and which ones are false? In the thread linked to above, members discuss how they go about this complex task.

Jill Whalen (owner of HighRankings) says "If stuff that certain people say sounds reasonable and plausible, then try it out for yourself and see what happens."

RCJordan (really long time mod/admin at WMW) says "As for whom to believe, this often falls into 'specialist' categories now. I know guys who can tell me more than I want to know about every conceivable type of redirect but wouldn't know a css file if it bit him."

projectPHP (covers many forums and mod at HighRankings) says "The same way you do in real life: trust your instincts."

Nick W (an other WMW legend) says "Personally, i have a little 'set' of forum posters i regularly watch becuase over the years i've grown to trust what they say, i dont have a written down list, but I know who they are..."

From my perspective, I also have my own list of people I watch. Like respree, who must have started several posts that I covered here. Besides for knowing which members are experts in which areas, I also try, when I can, to find evidence of any kind to validate any theory. Often when I can not, I won't write about it - or I will say that this is an unproven theory but sounds interesting.

Today is Google's 6th Birthday, in celebration they put up a revised Google logo at their homepage.

Forum coverage at SearchEngineWatch.

During my forum travels, I stumbled across a thread started by John Scott named Engineering a SE Algorithm. As many of you know, John recently launched a new directory named BlueFind, which I discuss here. Now John is on his way to release a new hybrid directory and search engine named SevenSeek.

If your interested in seeing what goes on in building a engineering a search engine algorithm, visit the thread at V7 Forums.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Google's response to: Redirected URL discusses one members experience with a backlink, that she believes, was responsible for de-listing here site in Google.

She was listed in a directory that was using a bunch of redirects. I am not sure which directory it was, and why she would believe that her exclusion from Google would be from a directory listing but she does. Obviously, she knew something was a bit sketchy with the directory. :)

The reason I note this thread is because of jdMorgan post (moderator at WMW) msg # 8. I'll quote some of his post here:

To clear up some points here, the first thing you need to do when considering a listing in a given directory is to use the server headers checker to see what kind of redirect(s) the directory uses on its links. Examine the output of that utility, and look for the server response code. A 301-Moved Permanently is acceptable. A 200-OK or a 302-Found (Moved Temporarily) is not acceptable. You will get a 200-OK response for pages which contain a meta-refresh (not good). Multiple redirects are not good, but could be acceptable (I don't know - see final pp below), but starting with the listed URL, follow each redirect manually with the headers checker, and note the response code and the URL being redirected to, entering each URL into the headers checker in succession to "follow" the redirect path.

An other common question asked by a person new to the Internet. What is a backlink? What is an inbound link (IBL)? In my attempt to explain what a Web link is in my entry named Web Links Explained - Beginner Guide, I have decided to continue to write on an other basic but fundamental concept, the backlink. Why, because I am often asked this question. And because there is a thread on this at HighRankings named What Is Back Link?.

As OWG says in that thread "Backlinks are link that point back to your site". They are links pointing inwards to your pages. Here is a picture to explain.

MINE = Your Page
NOT MINE = Pages that are not yours.

While doing my image search to find a pineapple chair for my big blue pineapple chair entry below, I found this big ad at the bottom of the page, see my big blue pineapple chair Google image search and look at the bottom, you will see this:

The most competitive keyword on the planet, the big blue pineapple chair. Of course I am being sarcastic. Besides, the closest place I saw that sells big blue pineapple chairs is this one, but its not really blue. I guess I can paint them, and resell them at this page. :)

What is my point?

Again, I had a client who was contacted by an 'SEO Firm'. They drew up this huge guarantee, top rankings or your money back. My client was wise enough to send me the email exchanges, between the seo firm and himself. From what started as nicely targeted keyword phrases turned into very obscure, none relevant keyword phrases. Just like me ranking for the big blue pineapple chair. Which I am sure this page will rank number one at Google in a weeks time (I guarantee it). )

Jim, from WeBuildPages, has released a tool named Top 10 Google Analysis. This tool "will fetch the top 10 sites for that phrase and show you analysis of statistics for that search phrase, as well as for the URL (if you entered one)."

Make sure to check it out!

Here is an other chance to win a Gmail account, I still have an open contest here that only one person got right so far. :)

So here is the question.

According to Overture, how many searches were there on "labor day" during the month of July 2004?

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

I am basing this number on Overture's data as of 11:10AM (EST) 09/06/2004.

Good Luck!

Looks like Ask Jeeves wins this contest. Ask is the only large search engine 'smart enough' to give me some information right off the bat when conducting a search on "labor day".

Searches on "Labor Day" at:

• Google
  
• Yahoo
  
• Ask Jeeves
  
• MSN
  

Oh, I probably won't be posting much today. But you can expect at least one more entry here throughout the day.

Orion, a member at SEW forums, has decided to allow some of the SEW Forum members participate in an experiment named "Online Discovery of Secondary Terms Associated to a Theme Experiment". The thread named Call for five SEOs, is where Orion explains the study and asks for 5 volunteer SEOs to submit a keyword phrase that meets the experiments guidelines. I am pretty sure all the slots are filled, but maybe he can squeeze in a few.

Orion explains, this experiment pretends to discover secondary keywords associated to a theme represented by an initial key phrase.

Two keywords need to be submitted that have a c-index of 25 points or higher. If your interested check out the thread here.

This comes from the new Yahoo Blog. Thought it was kinda interesting to see the spike in popularity the media has caused for the daughters of the Bush and Kerry. The Bush daughters are a bit infamous from their college days around the part of Texas I live in, and now they are in search too! Jenna seems to be leading the squad followed closely by Alexandra. I do have to say Erik Gunther at Yahoo does have a pretty cool job watching the trends in search on a daily basis. The trends seem to be predictable in some aspects, some not, so every day the data is never the same, and neither is the job.

Google's infamous www2.google.com & www3.google.com addresses are now being redirected to good old www.google.com. So we have not had a PageRank update in, how long as it been, 3 months. And Google's link command has been virtually taken away from us. Now Google redirects www2 & www3 to www.

What is going on here? Or is that apparent? :)

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

A thread I started over at SEW forums named How Do I Spot Cloaked Sites? began to take on a civilized and professional discussion on detecting cloaking. The thread did not, and should not, go into the realm of ethics, but rather it will remain on the 'how to".

Half way into the thread, there was need for someone who would be considered an expert in cloaking. Danny Sullivan was able to encourage fantomaster (Ralph Tegtmeier), one of the most well known experts in the cloaking field, to participate in the thread. And at post #43, fantomaster joins the thread. He then goes on to post three additional times, post #56, post #68, and post #71.

This is the second time to my knowledge that Google has moved the location of the gmail invite notification. The first time they did this can be found here. Take a look at where they are putting it now. Oh, I still have 2 more invites for available to those who want to participate in this gmail contest, I can't believe only 1 out of about 40 responses were correct. :)

I am extremely excited to get my hands around the latest version of Urchin named Urchin 6.0 On Demand. It looks like they are listening to us search engine marketers. A few things I am extremely excited impatient to try out are the following features:
- Funnel Optimization
- Advanced Visitor Segmentation
- Comparing Detailed Data Based on Date Ranges
- full feature list.

I would just like to expand on the "Funnel Optimization" feature that I have been patiently waiting for ever since I finished my review of Urchin 5.5. It was in my review that I discussed the concept of Goal Based Funnel Analysis. It looks like they nailed it on the head, and with the style, as Urchin so often does. Take a look at some of the screen images below of Urchin's Funnel Optimization. I also recommend taking a look at the flash demo. As soon as I get my hands around this product, I will make sure to write a review on this product.

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I am just going to name a handful of the conference coming up that relate to this industry. I am sorry if I leave any out.

SEO Roadshow - September 18th at 12 noon - London
This seems to be a pretty exclusive get together, where only 'invited' people can attend. "This ain't no agenda kind of gig! All we have is free admission, free bar and no "sponsors" to spoil the fun."

High Rankings Search Engine Marketing Seminar - September 23 & 24 - Boston
This event, to my understanding, is tailored for people who need to learn SEO with personal attention. This is a small seminar, with some excellent speakers. They are also accepting registration just for the dinner, Thursday night.

Search Engine Strategies - October 27 & 28 - Stockholm, Sweden
This is the grand daddy of all search engine conferences. SES conferences take place several times a year throughout the US and the rest of the world. I expect the Sweden event to be pretty small compared to the others. These conferences are more about learning, network building and exhibitors. I hope to attend this one, always wanted to visit Sweden, but who knows.

WebmasterWorld's Conference - November 16, 17, 18 - Las Vegas, Nevada
Not as large as most the SES conferences, but they are expecting 1,500-2500
attendees for this upcoming event. I will be attending and covering this conference at this blog. Never been to Vegas, so it should be fun.

See these ads?

It reads "Ads by Goooooooooooogle". I thought maybe Google was messing with only my two blogs; this one and my company's technology blog. But nope, this is also found at many other sites, including DigitalPoint and all others that I have seen.

I then decided to check out WebmasterWorld, and you bet it, they have a thread on this topic already. I guess someone at Google left his/her finger on the "o" key too long. :)

See the AdSense What's New page and you will see:

We're currently running a test with new branding features on Google ads. You may notice some of your pages displaying 'Ads by Goooooogle' ad units. We welcome your feedback on this new look, and we'll be analyzing the results of this test over the next while.

A thread over at Cre8asite named Deciding What Not To Track / Measure discusses an interesting question. What metrics should be tracked and which ones should not? The thread creator, who I respect, says "what you choose not to track can play as great a role in creating a successful online presence as what you choose to measure."

I agree with that statement, but only if you look at that statement the other way around. Its like the story of the ostridge bird hiding its head in the sand when its scared. The ostridge feels that what it doesn't see can't hurt him, but in reality, the environment around the bird can be very dangerous even though one is unaware of ones surroundings. Thought it would be cool to include a picture of an ostridge now, brought to you by terra.com.

I am of the opinion that one should track every metric possible for a particular site. Of course, if your tracking tools have a negative affect on site performance (speed) then be smart about it. Even if you do not want to look at a particular metric today, you might want to look at it in a week or a month. This way, if need be, you can be prepared for the environment around you.

As to which metrics you should track? All of them. :) Here is a quick list, but I am sure I will be missing many:
- Traffic including sessions, pageviews, hits, bytes
- Visitors including visitors by day, sessions by day, unique visitors, unique sessions, visitor loyalty, and session frequency.
- Pages & Files including; requested pages, downloads, page query terms, posted forms, statuses and errors and even deeper
- Navigation including entrance pages, exit pages, bounce rates, click paths, length of page view, depth of sessions, length of session
- Referrals including search terms, search engines, errors...
- Location f users by domain, countries, ip address
- Browser and Robots visiting you
- Screen resolution, screen colors, languages, Java versions, JavaScript versions, time zones
- Of course all the e-commerce information
- And then even better, tracking the details of your site by goal or transaction completion through lead source, keywords, campaigns, a/b testing, latency reports, day parts and click fraud.

Danny Sullivan reports in a thread at SEW forums named Overture Going Broad Match that Overture is to be moving over "to an all broad match system". He explains that this will be the default option for all advertisers, and those advertisers will need to turn off this option if they do not want to utilize it. Danny gives an example of broad match as follows; "bidding on a term like "shoes" will match any search that contains that word -- not just the single word itself."

In the past, I must have reported on at least two different design changes over at Yahoo. Once again, a reader from Turkey, sends me a screen capture of yet, an other new design being pushed to him by the folks over at Yahoo!.

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This article is for all those valiant souls out their still optimizing sites for clients. It's obviously getting tougher each day. I recently got a call the other day from a gentleman that was in need of some SEO services, yet was literally fed up with the search engines, SEO, and the amount of horrible sites in the results. He sounded like he wanted to hold a group of SEO's hostage and demand that they give him top rankings, threaten them with hidden text, cloaking, and popups. If they didn't do what he said he would turn to the black art of search engine spamming! Oh the horror! In his mind spam worked better than anything that a current day SEO could provide for him, and gave him instant results and traffic. I reasoned with him a bit and tried to explain WHY spamming a search engine was not a good idea.
In any case if you feel like you would like to hold a group of us SEO's hostage. Please don't. We are in the same boat as you most of time, except we have more than one website to look after.

There is an excellent thread started at Highrankings, detailing how one particular member was "utterly disillusioned with SEO", many felt his pain.
He and some of my biggest concerns are the following:

1. Poor sites did well in the search engines.
2. Terrible site design and architecture. No usability considerations.
3. Markets which are terribly over-optimized
4. Little control over the process of submitting to a directory
5. Pay For Inclusion as a gamble then, and in its altered form now still a gamble (SiteMatch ?).
6. Feedback and responsiveness from the search engines

It most cases it hard to decipher what in the world is going on. I believe it has a lot to do with human nature, and that accepting search engines are perfect informational creatures is a pipe dream. It's like living in New York City, you eventually get acquainted to all the advertising and large lights, and learn to find quality among a sea of concrete. Which as "BungleBob" related to that search would center around hubs of "quality". It sounds like some biology terms I use in the field, "natural selection" among search results and sites.

I do believe like many in the below thread that search results and the nuisances that come with them will get better with time. Which as history has shown, new innovations will get replaced by even better new innovations. I also believe that SEO's are part to blame for some of the trouble people feel and part of it may be indirect mistakes committed during the optimization. When it comes down it to it though, there is a lot of responsibility associated with working with the search engines. Its your responsibility to know for example that an offensive and poor design will result in a poor website. Usability is a responsibility that you will need to learn. Learning to build link popularity is something that you are responsible for learning to rank effectively in the search engines. All this information is the responsibility of the SEO or webmaster, and even the search engines to know this. So with that being said, it kinda looks like search engine results are really one big test bed of people all trying to be responsible for their websites either correctly or incorrectly. What happens is that since we can't know all the information we need, we get varied results. Hence the junk, quality hubs, great or poor content sites, and sites that can't sell anything.

Check out the thread over at Highrankings: Utterly Disillusioned with SEO

That's right, from the Google AdSense: What's New page:

To provide even more value to your users, and to help you further monetize your web pages, we're allowing publishers to place up to three ad units on every web page. Our system will automatically recognize the additional ad units, and will serve unique ads to each. Your ad units can each have different color palettes, formats, and alternate ad URLs, providing you with the flexibility you need to incorporate Google ads into your site design. Please read the Multiple Ad Units section of our FAQ for the full details.

Forum coverage at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

I admit, I am a novice when it comes to running PPC campaigns. I can set u fancy tools to track your PPC efforts, make dynamic landing pages, and probably even dynamically adjust prices based on the average CPC prices (hmm, new idea for a product). But when it comes to setting these campaigns up within the AdWords framework and understanding how to effectively choose between the different match types (broad, exact, phrase) makes me a bit confused.

Let me first explain what each match type does, to the best of my knowledge:
Broad Match: The default option for all keywords, if you enter "widget" into your keywords box, then you should come up for all sorts of widgets. You would probably come up for "blue widgets", "red widgets", "widget" without the s, and probably keywords that are like widget. So you need to be careful with this for two reasons. First reason is, if you don't sell "blue widgets", you will be paying for clicks when you don't have that product to sell. Second, sometimes if your keyword is strongly associated with a brand name that is trademarked, you might find yourself bidding on someone's trademark.
Phrase Match: If you select this option with a keyword phrase in the format of "blue widget" then you will only come up for blue widget. The order and spelling is how phrase match works. It will also look for broad matched combinations of "widget" but only if it includes "blue". Hope that makes sense. :)
Exact Match: This is probably the most tight form of the matches. So if you use [blue widget] then you will only come up for blue widget, and no other permutations of widget or blue.
Negative Keywords: This match type is helpful by excluding trademarks or styles/colors of product that you don't sell. -blue would stop you from ranking for the keyword blue widgets.

There is currently an interesting thread discussing the benefits of using the different match types. In that thread, you can find some neat ad copy tricks. Please find the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

It's Wacky Wednesday, and I would only be befitting to highlight one of this weeks wacky and funny articles. For all you SEO/SEM people this means a little history too. Meet Michael Brin, father of Sergery Brin the co-founder of Google and internet billionaire. If it wasn't for Sergey's father emigrating over from Russia oh so many years ago then we might not have had a Google or our favorite the Google Update. While Mr. Brin Sr. says his life hasn't changed much as a result of his son's success, he does offer some insight into how Sergey came to become one of the internet's richest people.

At Stanford, Sergey Brin took classes such as gymnastics and sailing, his father said.

"I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses one semester," Michael Brin said. "He said 'Yes, advanced swimming.'"

Go Sergey! I am taking advanced outdoor recreation this semester myself. :-)

Full article on Michael Brin.

For some reason, people assume that the "other search engines" like Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. are not used. A thread over at JimWorld named Do people still use Yahoo? discusses just that.

A member asks "Everyone seems to use google and I was wondering if it was really worth it to optimize a site for Yahoo?"

Some of the quick responses include:
thejenn (JimWorld Admin) said: "Yahoo! currently captures about a third of the search engine market." She then adds, "Also, it's important to remember that until MSN launches their own search engine, they are using the results from Yahoo!'s engine. So, add another 15%-20% marketershare on there for MSN and Yahoo! is covering almost half of the search engine market."

I was pretty sure I wrote about this in the past, but either my search function is not working properly or I am going senile. Anyway, what does one do when they find that someone ripped off their content and is now ranking in the search engines from your hard work?

It happens all the time for content writers. I personally have stopped looking to see if people were ripping my stuff off, it is just too time consuming. But if I stumble across one of these content thieves, I handle it in the following fashion.

(1) Take screen captures of the pages
(2) Download Google/Yahoo/SE cache as proof (if available)
(3) Document whois information and figure out who the ISP is
(4) Call or Email the number (if any) listed on the contact us page
(5) If no response in a few days, send an email to the ISP with the subject Digital Millennium Copyright Act Copyright Infringement with the proof listed above. I ask them to take down the pages that were stolen, providing the file names and paths.
(6) Send email/fax to the search engines
- Google's DMCA
- Yahoo's Copyright Infringement & Yahoo's Page Deletion Process
- Ask Jeeves TOS, scroll down and you will see "Copyrights and Copyright Agent" section with a form.

Actually, just found this excellent page on sending dmca notifications to search engines.

There is this new tool that actually is in beta right now. It's named Article Guard and its purpose is to seek out these content thieves. When the final product is live, I will make sure to post about it. Seems like a great tool.