October 2004 Archives

A Happy Halloween from Search Engine Roundtable too. A collection of some of the fun graphics from the search engines.

Seems to be an odd occurence happening in Google today. A member on the SEW forums, reported results for filetype:pdf searches are limited to a very few listings. So much so, that only about 1-30 documents only show up up for result sets of over 5 million. The particular query used was: car filetype:pdf, which showed Results 1 - 17 (total) of about 5,740,000 for car filetype:pdf. (1.78 seconds). I went ahead and test this from my location in the US, and were only able to view 11 of the results. I then tested this with some other keywords, such as: education filetype:pdf - resulting in 4 results out of 4,740,000. Just tried the search again, and guess what Google found 5 results this time, and 5,000,000 results! Out of 100,000 servers est. and a nice fault tolerant filesystem, they can only provide 5 results??Something tells me its not quite a screw up.

So what is going on here? Not exactly sure, but one guess would be that Google might be testing filtering of PDF documents for the sake of catching spam in the results. There has been rising indications that more and more people are using PDF's to spam the search engines. Basically they are trying to pervert another means of electronic media on the web. If it is true, its a good step for Google, in order to stifle this before it even starts. Anyone got any other ideas?

Additional discussion over at Digitalpoint - Google PDF Anomalies

Ok, not a cheat sheet for ranking in Google, but an nice short page released today on various search operators that can be used in Google. There are many well known operators included on the page such as: "site: link: info:" including some that you may not know about. Forget what a "related:" search does, check out the info Google has on it. It also includes operator examples for proper use in a search. What to search for a dvd player with the price range of 100 to 150 dollars. Try: DVD player $100...150. Or looking to search safely without adult content, try using the following: safesearch:britney spears.

Check out the Google Help: Cheat Sheet

A thread over at Highrankings, details whether or not too much content could be detrimental to page or or website. For the most part it should not be a problem, content can be beneficial but is it useful? Thinkweb, a member at Highrankings, addresses some good points "you can have gigabytes of content, and yet miss the whole point of having a website". Additionally, another good question to consider: Have you ever grabbed a 5 inch instuction manual, when a 1/4 inch book would have done the trick?

Continuing reading and discussing Is Too Much Content Possible?

Just a little interesting news from the forum. It appears Googleguy has resurfaced on the forums. Made an appearance yesterday on the SEW forums. Of those that are interested check it out, he might make SEW a more permanant home. Why the lack of participation lately? Who knows, but as he puts it he is "busier and busier these days, so I don't know how often I'll be able to post."

Found this way of a good thread at SEW forums. According to a JupiterResearch search engine marketing survey, marketers are widely "unsophisticated" when it comes to marketing campaigns. Don't know if I really follow all of what they findings say, like how do you really qualify an "unsophisticated marketer"? Some of what they said does appear to be true. The survey goes on to say that "Most search marketers aren't doing their homework", which should be good news for those that do. Their homework relates to the marketers ability to research keywords, bid, track, and report campaigns, a big part of measuring the success of the campaign. Many just put campaigns on auto-pilot, or pay someone to do the work for them. The article did mention that what was found was that "sophisticates have total marketing budgets that exceed $1 million", and tend to be larger companies. Well, probably common sense since they probably have the funds to hire someone to watch these campaigns daily.

Another interesting part I wanted to bring up, was that possibly search engines could use this "unsophistication" to help sell SEM to their prospective clients. Recently I was contacted by a Google Adwords rep about increasing my campaign and using a service called Jumpstart. The basis of jumpstart is for moderate to larger spending advertisers who will have their campaigns created for them and all ad groups written and organized neatly. Pretty nice huh? Give Google the links and they do it all for you with the promise you will spend a lot (base is $200-$300 a day), not exactly heavy spending, but not necessarily affordable for every "unsophisticate" out there. So Google appears to be targeting the "unsophisticate" crowd, and if the article is correct there sure is 3/4 more of a chance of finding one.

The Advanced Link Building Forum was the next session I attended. Dixon Jones from Receptional Internet Marketing (I think also a WMW moderator). He started off by answering a question asked in the basic session. How important is internal link structure? He feels internal link building is very important, including the anchor text. He explained an example of how links internally with specific anchor text can help your rankings for a keyword. The next question he answered was should you buy or sell links? He said, no, think of it as buying or selling traffic. Because, you will only buy "relevant" traffic as opposed to buying any type of link. He said not all links are treated equal, some links cant be read, some dont pass pagerank, some pass less pagerank then others, etc. How can you create incentives for people to link to a site? He put up a chart with a list of incentives one can offer, a few being; money, giving content, free downloads, etc. Is buying links wrong from a search engine's point of view? He said this is not the best question, buying PPC links is an example of buying links and directory listings is not wrong. But if you get irrelevant links, then that is wrong. You can get links from different 'channel' web sites, I think he means different communities. By that, he means that a link from a site sites that both talk about your topic can be good. Well, maybe you can consider that one big community but sub communities within that big community. How far is too far in link building your internal link structure? If you get de-listed, the more competitive a search phrase the more likely there is a filter, be careful with over optimization. Always look at internal link data, who clicks where on your site? Can natural interlinking be perceived as link spam? Yes, but its difficult to know for sure he says. "Tribal Linking" is how he named his summary slide.

Next up was Warren Cowan from Greenlight, whos first slide is named the "Wheat vs shaft." He discusses how links are no equal, just like the previous speaker. He says its important to look at the page relevance that is linking to you. The placement of the link on the page is important as well - he brings up the "block level analysis" topic. Anchor text is very important. And the document's authority level or expertise is important. He goes over which pages link to that page and is it the homepage or sub pages, he looks at the links of the pages that links to him. He then pulls up a "Radar Link Graph" where he plots the links to a page based on the types of characteristics of the link.

Paddy Bolger from Top-Pile says you should buy links, even Yahoo! directory, be choosy but buy. He is strongly against reciprocal links, not that he might hurt today but it will hurt in the future.

Google and Ask Jeeves gives the diplomatic speech on links.

Q & A:

Q: I asked Google (Magnus, new Google speaker and engineer at Google), why do you bother updating the link command if its not really statistically sound?
A: Google pretty much avoids the question, sorry. But then Danny backs me up and says, if you have the command, it should be 100% accurate - otherwise do not give it. Thanks Danny.

Once again, the backlinks over at Google are being updated, but does it matter? I don't think so.

See these servers:
216.239.57.105
216.239.57.104
216.239.57.99
216.239.57.98

And forum coverage at:

• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld Msg # 128
  
• SEO Chat
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• and others...
  

The next session I decided to attend is Search Term Research & Targeting, normally you would find Andy Beal and Dan Theis on this panel, but I bet this will be focused on European search term research.

First up was Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance, she is an admin over at Jill's HighRanking forum. She began to discuss what keyword research is and then described how too generic words are hard to compete on, and too specific words might not be searched on. She explained that logs files provide a good source of keywords for you to begin optimizing for. Instead of using company terms, try to think about how searchers will query your products, it often differs. She listed the adwords, overture and wordtracker tools as how she does keyword research, she cautions the audience that these numbers are inflated. She also recommends testing these keywords in a PPC campaign, its quick, and budgeted. SEO differs from PPC in that she targets more focused keywords for SEO whereas with PPC she goes broader.

Next up was Tomas Axelsson from Trellian to discuss there tool. I spoke with Tomas last night, he is an SEO who partnered with Trellian to resell the tool and represent them in Sweden. The tool he will discuss is Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com). He shows the keyword discover tool, then shows the KEI analysis, which was popularized by WordTracker. He then shows the real goodies within this tool, the season trend graphs - Trellian uses 12 months of historical data to graph this. In addition, they have a common misspelling tool, related terms tool, a keyword density report. He showed the regional breakdowns of searches based on country specific search, very useful here.

Tor Crockatt from Espotting was up next, who will focus on "user intent" as it relates to keyword research. She said, "always see keywords as question" - understanding the motivation behind the question. Multiple audience, meanings change over time, synonyms with differing user intent (vacation/holiday), related in theme but not in vertical (car/car insurance). Break down the meanings of the keywords you want to target. for example, "cheap web hosting" is 3 words with two meanings (cheap + web hosting). "Gebrauchtwagenleasing" is one German word with three meanings (used car leasing). Seven elements for keyword research; (1) Comparison/quality, (2) Adjective (price/product qualifiers), (3) intended use (4) product type (5) vendor (6) location and (7) action request.

Ola Svensson from Overture Nordics. Paid placement works because they drive traffic, quality traffic and converting traffic. He discusses the concept of "tail terms" with the overture keyword suggestion tool. He recommends segmenting through the buying cycle (information, shop, or purchase). Explore new opportunities/terms, experiment with new titles and descriptions, and optimize your efforts.

Q & A:
Q: Why not show search terms with 0 searches in the keyword research database?
A: They sometimes do, but often its not helpful for the Overture user. This happens with seasonality searches. They are moving to gathering more data towards storage of seasonal data. Espotting tries to predict search patterns before they hit main stream, most of it is seasonality but they change from year to year.

Q: Mike Grehan asks how skewed is the data based on the automated ranking tools being run 24/7 by SEO/SEMs?
A: Espotting said they are not too bad, Overture kind of agrees, Christine agrees with Mike and says you need to look at the keywords on a conversion/roi level. Trellian said every keyword is some what equally inflated, so it balances out.

Again, I have some time - so why not talk about my trip here and my thoughts on Sweden. I left NY via Newark to Copenhagen, then the Copenhagen to Sweden (Arlanda). The Copenhagen to Sweden flight was interesting, the pilot said he was late because he thought the flight was to leave 35 minutes after he planned. So he apologized and promised to make the time up in the air. I don't think you would hear an American pilot admit to that. The pilot's comment, about making the time up in the air, reminded me about a Seinfeld episode where he joked about how there are no cops in the sky. So why don't pilots go as fast as they can always? If they can "make the time up in the air" that means that they can always go faster. Anyway...

I took this clean "train" I would call it a subway, named Arlanda Express to Stockholm from Arlanda airport. Very convenient, thanks for the tip on that Chris Sherman. Saw some horses during the 20 minute trip to Stockholm. I will post them at a later date. I then got to the nice hotel, went to my room and hooked up to the net. I had 30 minutes until the second session began. Read the sessions for reports on that...

After the sessions, I had a discussion with Mikkel and Danny about some search related topics. Said hello to Mike Grehan, Heather Lloyd Martin, Shari Thurow, Chris Sherman, Joseph Morin, Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Bill Hunt from IBM, a guy from Trillian and others - it was nice because the conference was relatively small compared to the US shows. Then I went outside the hotel and walked around to check out some of the scenery of the city. Maybe it was the location of the hotel, but there was very few people walking around. I am from New York, and its almost impossible to walk down the street and not be brushed up against by a two or three people within a 5 second interval. It was peaceful, nice weather and the air felt clean. The hotel often had a stench of cigaret smoke, a European thing I guess - NYC hotels never smell like that (no one is allowed to smoke in NYC anymore anyway).

From a dress code perspective, I was the only one wearing a baseball like hat. It seems like corduroy sports jackets are popular here as well. If you're not wearing a corduroy sports jacket, then you must wear some sort of jacket. The US conference seem much more less formal, but maybe I am wrong.

I will be leaving Stockholm for a 6pm flight to London, to connect to my next destination. I might update this entry tomorrow with pictures and more information.

I have a few minutes between sessions and since its 4:30AM in New York, I can blog on this. First is a thread I started named New MSN Search Look???, which discusses Gary's post named Is This the New Look of MSN Search? which hints at what the new MSN search will look like when its released.

And, by way of email, a person sent me this link http://comcast.myway.com/ which is owned by Ask. Makes you think, what are these guys working on? And why did ASKJ drop so much!

The first session of the morning I have attended was a basic one, but I wanted to hear some of the speakers, the session is named Successful Site Architecture.

Alan Perkins was first up and he went through many of the common issues with Web sites that are not search friendly. Navigation issues, URL issues, domain issues, JavaScript and others. Very good summary.

Shari Thurow was next up and she will go through specific examples, as opposed to overall conceptual issues. She then discusses what she will discuss; your Web site directory, site nav, URL, types of pages, the page and some linkage. She then goes over what is the root level of a site, the search spiders look for your homepage or robot.txt file first. Exclude test pages in your robot.txt file, exclude scripts (cgi, java, etc.) and pop up windows, exclude redundant content pages. She then gets into the basics of the URL, and defines which URLs are the most search friendly and which are the least. She then goes over which pages are the most important to optimize, i.e. no need to optimize a privacy page but it is important to optimize category pages and product pages. She goes over the 404 page and discusses why Apple's 404 page, she loves it from a usability purpose. Then moves on to why a site map is so important and tells the audience that having short descriptions about what is found within each section under the link, as oppose to just having a link. Now she is discussing the breadcrumb trail, but keep in mind, she is showing screen shots of real sites - so this information is being communicated clearly (I think). Cross linking pages internally is very important, and using the correct anchor text relevant to the page is as important, she shows examples of a good way and bad way to do this.

Ask Jeeves, Michael Palka gives his quick presentation about the basics. And then Magnus Sandburg said hello and said will answer some Q & A.

Q & A:
Q: Any good tools for keywords?
A: Action Outline is what Chris Sherman uses.

We got off on a dynamic content question string of question, but that is covered in a different session.

Then moved onto a discussion about optimizing pages versus optimizing sites. Any questions on that, feel free to ask below.

Q: Tables versus CSS?
A: Google said tables are not better then CSS for ranking purposes. Shari Thurow agrees, but she takes the usability spin on it.

Heather Lloyd-Martin was up first, her grandparents were from Sweden. What is successful SEO copywriting? (1) Boosts rankings, (2) increases conversion rates and (3) increases site ROI. She finds that most prospects are missing a focus on a specific keyword phrase for an individual page. Heather also finds lots of short and stubby copy, which is bad for many reasons. An other common downfall of many pages is that the pages do not convert, due to the content on the page. An other issue found often are pages filled with links, just too overwhelming. The most common problem are pages without text, flash pages, or pages with text but in an image.

Heather's three tips, (1) picking good keywords, (2) longer text, and (3) smart writing strategy. In addition, the bonus tip on how to control the description found in Google's SERPs, as much as you can.

Jill Whalen was next up and starts off with some basics about how to do keyword research. She then goes into why each page needs to target a specific keyword phrase. Don't use text in graphics, users come first, be descriptive, location is important, keyword phrases (not just words), plural and past tense, and bonus phrases. Search engines dont read graphics, alt attribute can help, html editors stink (might turn all text into a graphic), flash is not too readable, comment tags is not helpful and PDFs are indexable.

Michael Palka was first up in the Link Building Basics session. Michael is from Ask Jeeves and he begins with a bit of stats on how well Ask is doing. He goes over the Subject Specific Popularity and Community concept, this was discussed in my blog and in this forum several times. Read more on that here.

Magnus Sandberg from Google was next up. Again, this is pretty much same old, same old. Good content and everything else will come.

Mike Grehan was next up, fashioning his new company Smart Interactive. He starts off stating that Danny, Chris nor himself are the leading experts in this industry. He then puts up a picture of a cartoon like person, and compare its propeller hat with those of the people at the engines, who tell you to spin your wheels. Mike, I guess its safe to reuse some jokes, is it the first SES conference in Sweden? Anyway...

He then moves into how triangular linking works, and how a search engine can spot it. Ammon Johns and I had a thread about this at Cre8asite. Then Mike brings up his "GAS" Google Anxiety Syndrome to describe Florida. He then brings up that people in the forums feel like its going to happen again. Basically, he said, get links within communities. And gives us his ten essentials about linkage, I have this noted in a previous session, I will link to it shortly. He then says, from a link building perspective, its best to not break up articles on multiple pages. Throughout the speech, he comes right out and says to get links, you buy them (see his article). He ends off with a plug to the new orgs SMA-UK, etc.

Thomas Bindl from Optop was next up, after Mike hitting him with a joke or two about how he sells links (or not). Thomas goes through the process of asking for links. Use a search engine to find links, relevant to your site, based on the query you want to rank well for. Use directories, newsgroups, magazines, forums, adwords, help charities and look at your competitors. What are "Swedish Reindeer Food", I think Thomas has a client that sells packaged Swedish Reindeers. Ok, he recommends not sending automated emails or using terms like "cross-linking", "link exchange", etc. He then gets into (and I quote) "the dark side of the industry" or buying links. Directory links, ad links and "sponsored links" aka high PR links. What are the link building risks? Bad neighborhoods, too many links in a short period of time (sandboxing - he stares down the Google rep) and a penalty for buying links.

Q & A:

Q: How are internal links weighted?
A: Google says that it wont get you more "PageRank" but that doesn't mean its not useful, he says. Google said its good because people can navigate to your site, and more accessible to the pages.

Q: What is up with the Google link: command?
A: Google says they are not reporting all your links back to your site. So think before using it.

The next session I thought would be interesting to report on was Search Engine Marketing: Outsource or In House?. Chris Sherman is moderating this panel, which includes Drew Graham from Kelkoo, Bill Hunt from IBM, Joseph Morin from Autobytel (SEW Forum Mod) and Jan Rencke from Destination Stockholm (former WMW Mod).

Jan Rencke was first up, he described what he does and how competitive his industry is (he compared hotel reservations to porn, and gambling). Its pretty amazing, Marcia (our new mod at SEW) told me about a post that Jan placed at WMW and he actually referred to it on his first slide. He created 20 web sites, with 150 pages each, rich cross linked content in 19 languages, translated from english, self loading frameset for easy maintenance, simple no frills homespun coding, external style sheets, and optimized only for Google (not others).

He then said, only 8% of the world's population understand english, 28% if all Europeans understand english, and 41% in western-europe understand english. He then listed the 20 sites, with the domain names he created, its in his slide but some were stockholm.at, stockholm.be, etc. He said he has good keywords in the domain name, and this was what he wanted to illustrate. Each page on the sites, printed to about 1 - 2 full pages. They linked the content richly, if you look at one of his sites, you will see a listing of flags across the top. If you click on the flags, you will be taken to an other site, for that country. So instead of just requesting the language request on the index page, they did it on a page by page basis.

He then displayed some source code from the page and discusses how using Frontpage and other editors can tarnish you code. Then he went into how to reduce duplication, i.e. pulling same images, using relative links, giving access to translators, etc. Simple SEO for Google; (1) keywords in URL (2) keywords in title, (3) different title descriptions, etc. (4) h1 tags, p tags h2 tags, etc. (5) use external style sheets, (6) all pages crossed linked not just top level, (7) keywords in link text, (8) no links in scripts and (9) ODP submission. In addition, he performed SEO and PPC together.

Bill Hunt from IBM was next up, he is a well known speaker in this niche topic. His task was to optimize ibm.com for specific language search marketing, not an easy task. They developed a methodology, which he will now go through. First thing they did was develop a search marketing committee, which started out at 5 people and now is up to 150 people involved in ibm. They first analyze the site, they first remove crawl barriers, then educate the players, they fix templates (optimize templates), keyword management, then create scorecards, then page audits based on scorecard, train the PR teams (for link building purposes, blogs, news sites, and where they link and how they link (anchor text, specific pages), develop partner links and monitor & promote search metrics.

He said, he first targets infrastructure and then coding and then content. Most SEOs start with content, then code and then build infrastructure. I am a big fan of Bill's methodology here. They hold training sessions for each stage in the methodology. He showed how he pulled the product name in the title, h1 tag, description area, and meta information. Then he reviewed the scorecard he developed, its way to detailed (but also simple to look at) for me to write about here. Maybe we can convince Bill to discuss this scorecard in the forums. :)

Be on the look out for Bill's book to be released soon, to be named "". If he writes as well as he speaks, this book is going to be well worth it. His presentation is at www.globalstrategies.com/stockholm/.

Joseph Morin, SEW Forum moderator and is the SEO master for Autobytel. They do offline ads (they did a superbowl ad), affiliate marketing, PPC and SEO (which is Joseph's area). Before the SEM campaign they had 800 pages listed in Google. He discussed the challenges he had, politically, optimizing big company sites. Now the site has 300,000 pages indexed and traffic is way up. He discussed the "value of a visitor" and discussed how a search visitor might be worth more then an affiliate visitor. Shopping sites, high number of SKUs, constantly evolving (adding), heavy content sites and location factors all make for good candidates for in house SEM. In house advantages include; better knowledge of product/industry, industry contacts, day to day operations is easier and typically bigger budgets. Advantages to outsourcing include; pay for SEM as you go, your agency might be more up to date with the latest SEO news, SEM industry contacts are in different industries (so it helps take strategies from other industries to yours).

Drew Graham represents Kelkoo, the largest shopping search engine in Europe. He focuses mostly on the PPC side and not on the SEO side. They are active in 10 European countries, including Sweden. Kelkoo's business model is to make money on the margin between the spend and the sale of PPC ads. They keep SEM in house, it works well for them. He feels that pretty much anyone managing many keywords should do it in house, and not outsource. They built some internal tools to manage spend (KOBO, keyword optimization back office). The program (at least the way I understand it) automatically logs into Google or Overture and acts as a human, in other words - a bot sophisticated. This KOBO system basically puts all the data into one place to help manage the keywords across all advertisers and logins.

Q: To Jan, what are your thoughts on having your sites on a different server?
A: Jan says he has all his 20+ sites on one server in London on the same IP address for over two years. He has not had a problem yet with rankings. He thinks people discussing this is and putting sites on multiple servers are paranoid.

Q: About keywords in the URL, how important?
A: Bill explained it as it helps people link to you with those keywords. The main benefit is that they will link to you with the URL. Jan disagrees with Bill and says that having the keywords URL helps. He quotes Brett Tabke as agreeing with Bill. Jan says its one of the most argued topics, and its a religion.

Q: Do SEM firms know what they are doing?
A: Joseph says it depends on the firm.

I was a bit late getting to the conference, but I made it here for the second track. I decided to attend a new session named European Search Landscape. Here are my notes, please excuse any typos, this was done in real time.

Stefan Forsberg discussed some statistics relevant to the European market.
- 77.4 million users of search engines per month in Europe
- 2003 to 2004 you will see a 19% growth in search usage
- Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the major engines in the UK, but Yahoo is number 8 in Sweden
- Sweden is also lacking behind in search usage compared to the European market.
- Sweden is growing faster then france, Italy and the other European countries
- 57% of Sweden search users are male (expect an increase in female usage soon)
- A popular local search is named enrio
- 90% of search users are satisfied with the results (yahoo, google, msn) measured in the US market
- 77% of users in the UK use sponsored links

Massimo Burgio from ad maiora was up next. He spoke at the San Jose conference in 2004. He discusses the pros and cons of Europe being a growing market. The cons included unethical practices and bad business practices. But there is a lot of push towards paid search, not really on the organic side. He said that Google and Overture (and others) are staffing the paid search departments with local people who speak the local language. Big brands in the European market are "fully aware of the potential of our industry", not so in the US market. The local competitive market varies, some countries you find friendly collaborative business environments and in some countries you find fierce competition. He briefly then touched on the different cultures in Europe and how it affects how SEO firms operate.

Per Koch from Pandia Search was next up, he started off in some language (maybe Swedish?) but then went to english. He discusses the difference between "search sites" and the companies that power the search sites. His first slide started off reading "Search engine optimisation with an "s"". He says the major search engines that power the search are Google and Yahoo and in Britain add Ask Jeeves. He then moves into the language component; selecting keywords, colors used on the pages, letters differ, etc. He then goes into some search usage based on France data. An other search engine that you do not see in the US is Voila, which powers 6% of the French market. Poland is growing, and Google is taking over the market that was once held by Onet.ol (not at 22%).

Steven Taylor the European Overture representative here. He echo's everyone else's claims about the European market growing. (1) Scale; Overture is the largest internet advertising business in the world. This enables Overture to innovate and role out new products quickly. Overture has a large reach, he said "like 80%" to this market. They are also able to see the differences of search usage between the different sites, "diversity of search traffic" (yahoo vs. AV vs. MSN, etc.) (2) Management Structure; they have people here in 12 European markets to work with the local community. (3) Putting them all together (i.e. #1 and #2).

Fabio Selmoni from Google said he will cut his short, since most of what he was suppose to say, was said by the people before him. He started off saying that Google is first most a search engine, a technology company. Google is only successful if their end users are happy. Google has over 55 million unique users. They have 12 physical offices in Europe and they are in the process of making a Scandinavian office shortly. He discusses the Google network, T-Online, Ask Jeeves in the UK and an other 100+. He then gives a few simple rules; (1) make sure the campaign is relevant, (2) take advantage of the targeting opportunities (local, regional, etc,) and (3) keep in mind, no one gets it right the first time.

Q & A:
Q: When will Overture & Google allow for geo-targeting in the European market?
A: Early 2005 for Overture, Google says the same but they have been beta testing it.

Q: The next question went into the trademark issue with bidding on trademark names. A person from Hilton asked how do we control the usage of these words?
A: Google said is has been a challenge, they ask trademark owners to let them know. Google needs the direct involvement from the trademark owners. Overture said that they operate a lot like Google with this in the European market.

Microsoft partnering with Google? Well sort of, an article released yesterday details the relationship between the two, and the use of Google Deskbar in Microsoft's Partner Pack for Windows, "a collection of Microsoft and third-party products released last week that Microsoft describes on its Web site as "the ultimate application package" for a Windows XP PC." Interesting that these companies can partner with Microsoft's large Windows group while at the same time remain a rival to MSN. Unfortunately the article doesn't mention exactly why, but Joe Wilcox at Jupiter Research says "MSN Search folks may be in hot competition with Google, for the Windows platform but Google is a valuable partner". Any hopes of the two working together with Windows further? Possibly, and it is probably a good thing. Collaboration is still ongoing between the two, as for how close, we may not know.

Another blurb released today mentioned that Google has opened a new office in Kirkland Washington, incidentially right next door to Microsoft's Redmond Headquarters. Google hiring more Microsoft employees? Maybe.

Well Barry is on a plane bound for Sweden, lucky guy, I wanted to highlight an excellent post here started on SEW forums relating to designing search engine friendly e-commerce websites. Its an excellent must read for those that are considering opening an e-commerce site, or deciding to redesign there current site. Many of the tips and points mentioned apply to a wide range of websites, and Barry presents a case study from one of his clients with the things he thinks are "critical in the development of a search engine friendly, but at the same time, easy to use e-commerce site". He goes on to say that: "Arguably many e-commerce sites often overlook the most important and fundamental area to any Web site, the navigation." This is very true, and if you are struggling to discern a coherent navigation, then reading up on information architecture would be a good place to start. Check out: Card sorting a defintive guide for building categories and taxonomies for websites. (I recently did this myself, and found it an excellent exercise.) You might also check out Information Architecture for Everyone in order to familiarize yourself with the concept first. Without overloading the subject too much more, here is one diagram I had to post to give you an idea of the steps required to design a site from start to finish, where information architecture comes in, content inventory for building navigation, discovery & user research, interaction design, and finally visual design.

Now, the other option if you decide to skip some of these steps might result in what a member at Cre8asite forums today joked about, If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers. Funny post, befitting to the topic.

There are reports that MSN Tech Preview Search is sometimes missing the "Next" button, to go to the second page of the results. This seems to be an intermittent issue, I personally have not seen it myself, yet.

You ever see "supplemental result" tagged on to a result found within the Google index? What it means is that this version of the page is no longer found on the Web, and only once existed in the past, which Google has captured and stored in its index. A thread at WebmasterWorld leads into what really is a supplemental result, and if you look at msg #13 you will see an excellent observation. In short, supplemental results can occur on the keyword phrase level. For example, if page A is listed in Google, it can be found with and without the supplemental result line in the SERPs, depending on the keyword search.

I probably could not word it any better then the original post, so here it is:

I had a page with a spelling mistake on it, and the word was only used once, so there was no right version on the page, only the wrong version.

Searching for the right spelling, the page did not appear to be indexed, at all; which led me to wonder why... until I spotted the spelling mistake. The page ranked as a normal result for this incorrect spelling.

I corrected the error and the page ranked for the correct spelling within a few days. It was a normal result. The cache is updated daily and when searching using the correct spelling the snippet shows the correct spelling too.

If you search for the incorrect spelling, then the page is still shown in the SERPs, and the snippet shows the content with the WRONG spelling too. That is, the snippet does not reflect either the real page content, nor does it reflect the cached page either! The "wrong spelling" result does have a title and snippet and it has been a supplemental result for at least a month now.

The page is a normal result if you search for anything else to do with that page. It is only a supplemental result for a search using the spelling mistake.

When looking at the cache, when clicked from the spelling mistake search, the cache shows the very latest page content; but it says about the keywords "these terms only appear in pages linking to this page". Well, that is not true (unless you want to bend the truth a little). The spelling mistake only appeared on that page in the past, and is not there now. The spelling mistake is not on any page that links to the page in question (unless you count the Google search as being a page that links to it!).

The only way to get to that place is via: http://www.google.com/search?q=keywordspeltwrong

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Image Results For "your search" reports that Google was messing around with some of its user interface for a few minutes. The member reports that when conducting a normal search at Google, at the top of the page, you would find a line of text that read IMAGE RESULTS FOR "KEYWORD PHRASE". When you click on that link, it would take you to where you would go if you would click on the "image" tab.

GoogleGuy kind of admits it by saying "You know us; we're always testing out different little UI changes.."

This is relatively old news, I was saving it for a good day. There are reports that Norton products are blocking AdSense ads from displaying. In this thread, AdWordsRep says;

the problem you're experiencing is almost certainly due to Internet Security software that you've recently installed on your machine (or which has been recently updated).

Norton Internet Security 2004 comes to mind as one that has caused this issue in the past, for others. You should be able to re-set parameters to stop this blocking.

Early this afternoon, I will be leaving for Sweden to report on the sessions and after sessions events at the SES Conference. I hope to have wireless access and be able to report in real time, wish me luck. I will be missing the first session, sorry about that.

During my SES coverage, I won't have much time for forum coverage. I will do my best to find some good threads and I am sure Ben will be posting here more often. Nick recently started a blog that finds good search related threads, as well. Just don't take everything Nick says too literally, he often is sarcastic. Nick does do a good job finding neat threads. :)

So I log into my Orkut account, which has turned into a waste of time for me, and I find that my friends are missing. Where did they go?

Anyone else notice this?

A few refreshes and they are back.

Smart move, Yahoo! has partnered with Adobe, the popular Acrobat reader software "is used by more than 500 million people and has become a common format for viewing documents over the Web and in e-mail attachments." The official press release can be found at Adobe's Press site and also check out the CNN article which says:

Under the deal, Adobe will first introduce a co-branded Yahoo browser toolbar that users can choose to install on their computers when prompted to download an update of Acrobat Reader.

The toolbar -- an increasingly popular method of online search engines to stay constantly visible on a user's Internet browser -- will feature links to Yahoo products and services as well as Adobe's Web-based subscription service that lets people convert documents into the Adobe PDF file format.

Later, the companies said, the toolbar will add features such as the ability to quickly convert Web-based content into Adobe PDF files.

Yahoo search will also be built into a future version of the Acrobat Reader, allowing users to search for more information from within the document without going through the extra steps of launching a Web browser.

Current forum coverage at Cre8asite Forums.

There were rumors about the Google Browser for a couple months now, but the rumors are put to rest by an interview with Mr Schmidt.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Schmidt said Google would not seek to turn its website into a broader internet portal, a move that would take it into more direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo.

Gary blogged on this Financial Times article yesterday. Forum discussion taking place at WebmasterWorld.

Click4Choice offers a virtual, dynamic, person that talks to your directory visitor, when they hit your listing in the Click4Choice's directory. Here is an example of CW3 Web Hosting's Directory Landing Page.

The press release at PR Web reads "Click4Choice has chosen Oddcast, Inc to employ a virtual person to greet visitors as they browse the listings. Click4Choice is the first Directory to offer audio/visual listings which is extremely effective in getting a message out." Found by way of Cre8asite Forums.

Dr. Garcia (aka Orion) over at Search Engine Watch forums created a thread named Temporal Link Analysis, which discusses a paper presented by IBM researcher Einat Amitay. This paper discusses the difference between how journal citation and Web IR citation. The basic premise is that the more often AND the more recent those citations are, the more important the journal is.

If we apply the concept of temporal link analysis to the much manipulated linkage structure of the current Web index, then we can possibly provide more relevant pages to the search user. To achieve this, the search engines would have to accurately capture time data in both the last update of the document as well as the last update of the link found within the document. Capturing this data is no easy task, nor is processing this information. But if it can be done, then the search engines can assign higher weights to more recent links as opposed to older links.

Why would you want newer links to be worth more? There are (generalizing here) two types of Web pages; (1) a page that is updated on a constant basis (be it daily, weekly, monthly) and (2) a page that is put up once and left there forever. Page number two, the one that is written once and left alone for ever, is by its very nature, outdated and irrelevant. The information, the links and the citations from this page launched in 1996 are most probably gone, misplaced or outdated. However if a page that was launched in 1996, but is updated on a monthly basis, contains links (i.e. citations), it can be assumed that this page is a "timely authority" and thus can be assigned a higher weight.

I was in the process of developing a small excel worksheet with the appropriate weights I feel should be associated with pages based on this paper, but I stopped. Instead let me just give you my thoughts in words, and you can argue. :) Pages that are old, but are not updated ever should be assigned a very low weight (possibly close to 0 weight). Pages that are new, and not updated (within a year or few months), should be given a higher weight then the old page that is not updated, however, this page is still not an authority, so it should be a relatively low weight (possibly close to .1). Now, pages that are new but updated often, relative to the data the page was first created (or found), should be given a higher weight then the above (possibly close to .2). And pages that are old and updated on a frequent basis relative to the date the page was first created, should be given the highest link weight (possibly close to .4).

Keep in mind, there are of course other factors. In the paper it discusses, DIPs (Dated Inline Profiles) where you associate a profile or community. You look at the dated inlink of a page, associated with a topic/concept/community to determine its value. Ok, I am stopping there. :)

Have been reading reports on this for quite a good while, and figured it would make a good entry about what may be occuring. It seems that many people are complaining that Yahoo is dropping sites at a relatively odd rate. Some people are experiencing seeing their sites ranking in the top position only to be dropped the next day, and then back again the next day. What strikes me as odd is that two things seem to be happening to people.
1. The site or entire ip address range gets dropped permanently.
2. The site is in a state of flux, where they rank one day the next they don't.

While some of this can be attributed to test Yahoo is doing, such as Yahoo Local and Geo Targeting. There are many unanswered questions regarding this. There is a thread over at SEW forums where the member bbott, has observed Yahoo dropping his site one day and the next bringing it back. As well as an another member saying he has observed "clusters of sites drop and re-appear", and another report about an entire ISP having all 1500 urls dropped from the index for no reason.

There is another thread followed up at WebmasterWorld with some good discussion about people experiencing the same thing. There is discussion about this at Cre8site Forums here and here, SEOchat here and here, Highrankings here, Digitalpoint here. Some ideas that have been considered:

1. Yahoo uses more than One Index, maybe Two?
2. Harsh Penalties for Duplicate Content or another factor
3. Algorithm Changes
4. Local Search and Geo Targeting
5. Sketchy Guidelines

From the research conducted above, its seems one thing that most people are observing is that once a site is gone from yahoo, it might come back in a matter of a couple weeks, and that very small thing set off the Yahoo Filter.

These can be everything from link in the bottom nav, spammy content, to one that is very common interlinking between sites (big no no!). Things webmasters may not even be aware that could affect their rankings in Yahoo, often do. If you are concerned about why your site may have been dropped for a particular reason, I recommend giving it some patience. Look over your content, particularly the homepage for anything that might look potentially threatening to Yahoo, as well your linking network. Change it, if your site does not return. Second, send Yahoo some feedback about this. Locate the "feedback" link at the bottom of a search page. Secondly run ranking reports for Yahoo and look for patterns. Look at the details.

If anyone has any more feedback or suggestions regarding this, please post in the comments.

A London-based group of search engine marketing professionals has formed Search Marketing Association UK (SMA-UK), a trade association to promote the SEM industry in the UK and other parts of Europe. The group formed as an alternative to the U.S.-based Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO).

The quote above is from a Clickz article named UK Search Marketers Form SEMPO Alternative.

Some of the current members include:

• Barry Lloyd
  
• Andy Atkins-Kruger
  
• Paddy Bolger
  
• Richard Gregory
  
• Edward Cowell
  
• Colin Irwin
  
• Simon Collingridge
  
• Jason Cartwright
  
• Ammon Johns
  
• Mike Grehan

The new organization can be found online at http://www.sma-uk.org/.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch and Chris Sherman mentions it at the SEW Blog.

Found a interesting discussion today over at Cre8asite Forums, about keeping in mind usability for senior citizens. While it may be something that we don't necessary consider in the usability for our sites, it may be good to do so. We all age, and I know that sometimes when thinking about usability we often look at it from our age range. If you are a senior citizen and you are designing a page for them, then you will most likely provide information that may interest them. But what if they can't access the information? What is the font size is too small for them to read? This is the first article I have come across as of recent that details specific strategies for working with an older age group, not necessary those with disabilities.

The article goes on to talk about "nice summary on how our vision changes as we age along with design guidelines on how to compensate somewhat for these changes". As well as how our hearing changes as we age. What was interesting in the article was how for those that are older, the experience may be the opposite of what someone younger might experience. This fact corresponds to how our cognitive processing changes and how we respond to visual stimuli.

Worth a good read for those that factoring in an older demographic into their sites.

Read Designing for the Elderly

Discuss Usabilty for the Elderly at Cre8asite Forums.

I normally do not pick out individual members at forums but one such member deserves a special mentioning. This member, now an SEW Forum Moderator, goes by the user name Orion, but is formally known as Dr. E. Garcia. SEW Forums, in my opinion, is lucky to have such a unique individual participating daily in the forum.

Lets just take a look at a selected number of Dr. Garcia's threads:

• Orion's first post named Keywords Co-occurrence and Semantic Connectivity has over 23,900 thread views!
  
• He followed up the previous thread with an other outstanding thread named Term Vector Theory and Keyword Weights.
  
• and On-Topic Analysis
  
• also Local Context Analysis
  
• and Block Analysis 101 really started a rumble of future thinking in the SEM community
  
• his most recent thread, Temporal Link Analysis is going to be one to watch.
  

All of these posts have impacted my views on my understanding of search technology. This one individual deserves or thanks.

Thank you Dr. Garcia, a.k.a. Orion.

Have you been trying to register for a Google API license key? I bet you couldn't register a key in the past week or so. According to a thread over at Google Groups named Cannot recieve my API licence key, PLEASE HELP!, this has been a problem for at least five days.

I have noticed, as well as DigitalPoint, a drop in sign ups for our tools that require an API key. Interesting find, thanks to DP for the heads up.

Every industry has those that are considered the "bad boys" within their respective industry. Who are our bad boys, the bad boys of search marketing?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

As reported over at the BBC news under the title of Google 'saved' Australian hostage and currently being discussed at many forums, but in the most depth at WebmasterWorld, Google has become a super hero.

This is some rather big news from the other day, AOL Drops Yahoo's Overture for Google in Europe, and it is currently being discussed over at WebmasterWorld. In the forum thread, they are trying to figure out who decided to leave who. I'll take the simplistic approach that Google was offering a better deal.

Do you ever exchange links with other Web sites? I am sure most of you that do this, look to see if your links are actually on the pages that you exchanged with. In addition, I assume that you check to make sure that the links do not go through redirects.

Links, as most the readers here know, are incredibly valuable. The anchor text of your links can make or break your page's search ranking. There are dozens of reasons why a link exchange would be turned down. (1) Obvious, they do not link to your page. (2) The link goes through a redirect and does not pass PageRank or any value whatsoever. (3) There are way too many links on that page, do the value of all links are diluted. (4) They hide links with white text on white background (dangerous). The list goes on.

A thread at SEO Chat discusses this and wether or not it is the responsibility of the link exchange scammee to notify the others. There is a list of links on a page, all of those links were exchanges. The members plan is to contact each link owner and notify them that the links from this scammer are not passing any value. Is this member being a Good Samaritan?

It's times like these that I really empathize with web designers struggling to meet the demands of "How to build a web site that will do such and such and nobody will get lost or confused doing that such and such."

I can also understand why they shriek in horror when someone mentions the word "usability".

To think that a study on breadcrumb navigation required TEACHING participants on how to use navigation...well, read this from the article I mentioned earlier this week, called Do you hear what I hear? ... or why it may not matter that users still ignore breadcrumbs

  "A recent paper by Hull, Chaparro and Halcomb (2004) builds on this approach, seeking to identify how much instruction is necessary to teach users to see and use breadcrumbs. Within their study, they asked participants to find and select a list of items (related to a camping trip) on a major retail site. Before setting a participant loose on the site, they presented her one of 3 levels of instruction about navigation:

No instruction
Modeled exposure to breadcrumb navigation with no verbal instruction (what they refer to as "mere exposure" a la Zojanc (1968)1
Modeled Exposure to breadcrumb navigation accompanied by explicit instructions to use breadcrumb navigation
The explicit instructions group used breadcrumb to navigate approximately 1/3 more than other groups. This seemingly small increase in use of breadcrumbs to move around resulted in significantly faster task completion, fewer visited pages and less reliance on the back button.

Hull and colleagues conclude that minimal training may be sufficient to get users to increase their use of breadcrumbs, and as such increase their task efficiency. Specifically, they argue that training makes sense in Intranet environments, where the ROI for the training would be more than offset by increased productivity.

Compare this to a common usability "rule of thumb" that essentially says, "If you have to show them how to use your web site, it's not built right." This is similar to its cousin, "You should never rely on a FAQ or Help section. The answers should be built into the site."

The research paper does inject this - "Still, the idea that users need to be trained should be a red flag. And the idea of providing training to public Web site users is not viable. Maybe these users are telling us something about breadcrumbs."

Which brings me to the mountain. Can you believe that so much research has been done on breadcrumb navigation and still so many everyday folks don't know what they are?

Continue reading "Making a Mountain Out of a Breadcrumb Trail"

What would it be? What in your mind can a search engine announce to the public and have such a drastic impact on the SEO community? I asked this question in a thread over at Search Engine Watch.

So what did people say?
(1) The announcement by Google of a pay for inclusion service.
(2) Google Desktop now utilizes the contents of your computer to give you customized search results.
(3) Microsoft buys both Yahoo and Google (MicroYahoogle).
(4) Google releases a 64-bit operating system that is backwards compatible with all Windows software.
(5) Google announces new open source algo.

My personal favorite would be number five, "Google announces new open source algo."

We discussed the idea of Google coming up with an instant messaging application in the past, even talked about the possibilities of contextual ads based on your chat session topic. But now, there is some evidence (???) as to signs that Google might truly be releasing an instant messaging client.

Besides for the purchase of Picaso, which has an instant messaging tool under its belt (see WMW) an article was released named Google code hides IM secrets. In that article, it says "Smith ran a string utility search on the binary files in the desktop application, found the protocol "googlemail://" and next to it "google_im://." He speculated that the Google email protocol could eventually help the desktop application interact with the company's free web-based search service, Gmail."

However a Google representative, according to the article says "the protocol flagged by Smith does not hint at a pending Google IM product; rather, it is merely a component used to capture IM data from AOL Instant Messenger and make it searchable on the desktop."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So if it was up to the search engines to decide who would win the Presidential election, would you agree? Found an interesting press release today that I thought could provide some insight into how our favorite candidates are doing in the search engines. I reported back in September on some stats regarding the popularity of the Bush and Kerry daughters. A marketer named Matt Williams at Prominent Placement, published some findings today about what the candidates are doing in terms of search. For the most part it appears that both of the candidates never considered search as an effective means in which to reach voters. Given the amount of people that use search on a daily basis and even more so than in 2000, you would think this slip up would have been avoided. The main problem lies in the ability for interested voters to actually FIND information about them. They have most of the other areas covered, but when it comes to a simple natural search. Nada.

The release goes on to provide some research detailing the specifics of Pay Per Click on Google. Who bids on the candidates names, What they are promoting, How many people, and so on. One funny observation appears to be that Democrats are promoting an online dating website for single Democrats for a searches on "John Kerry", but Republicans don't do so for "George W. Bush". Meaningful, not exactly, but somewhat entertaining. Additionally, there are some findings in terms of searches in natural search:

•Searches on the key phrase “John Kerry” outnumber searches done on the key phrase “George Bush” by a 4-to-1 margin. If you also account for those searching on key phrase “George W. Bush,” “John Kerry” is ahead by a 2-to-1 ratio.

•Internet searchterms “Republican Party” and “Democratic Party” are even, but searchterm “RNC” shows up one-and-a-half more times than searchterm “DNC.”

Now I did some research myself to validate the findings. For the first part, John Kerry 20,267.7 /day and Bush W. George 15,388.0 /day, close to the 2 to 1 ratio. However one thing I did note was that while most people searched for "John Kerry" more often, the way they searched for information about him differed than those that searched for George W. Bush. Kerry searches leaned towards more generic information such as "john kerry cartoon", "john kerry douche bag", while those that searched for Bush leaded towards more "issue" related searches such as "george w. bush healthcare" "george w. bush national security", and "george w. bush miserable failure" just to name a few. Results probably indicative of W being President for the last four years, or a number of things you can decide on.

Read about the findings here.

Ever had a client change their mind in the middle of a project and decide to use someone else for their SEO services, and not you? Sometimes without knowing clients can get better or wilder ideas on who can help best serve them. Sometimes they are right, and this hindsight can help reward them for more successful results. Yet, getting this news can seem like a kick in the face should you work your butt off to get them top rankings. Is it right for another SEO company to approach a client, even if they currently already have a consultant? What's the best way to deal with this?

There is a thread over at Highrankings, that details this situation. One of the members had this happen to him. While the member had provided excellent service and several top rankings for the client, they decided someone else could help the situation better. Informative thread, that newer small business owners should probably read. One of the questions raised, was if can you optimize for more than 80 phrases on one site? Jill Whalen concluded that yes you can, and there was no reason why you wouldn't in the first place. Having done so myself on many occasions, a lot of times this is really the value of a good SEO. Are they able to achieve a large number of relevant rankings for keyphrases on your site? Is 4 top placements better than 80 top placements?Ultimately the answer is 80, and without knowing the client could have helped make themselves more successful in the long run deciding to change providers. Luckily the member she is still involved and understands the situation. But some additional good point were raised.

Chirshirst, point out "what's wrong with 25 targeted visitors every day if many of those turn out to be buyers/clients." Very true, I once worked with a website that was catering exclusively to investors with over 1 million dollars in capital to use towards elite investments. Slim market? Yes, but if successful they could convert just one visitor a month and be a very happy firm. Chris also continues to say "vast numbers of sites/businesses don't need dozens of sales a day to be profitable and many small business ventures couldn't care less about the volume of visitor traffic." This is true, but one side of the coin. What if you are selling .50 cent party supplies and favors, then volume is a factor.

Check out the discussion at Highranking on When To Admit Defeat

Not long ago I realized I'd taken it for granted that everyone knows what "breadcrumb" navigation is, and I was wrong.

Sometimes when the subject of using breadcrumb navigation comes up in web design discussions at Cre8asiteForums, we're gently reminded by courageous members that not everyone knows what we're referring to.

At a recent Usability Workshop conducted by Scottie Claiborne (I assisted) at Jill Whalen's High Rankings SEO Seminar in Boston, some sites that were reviewed could have implemented breadcrumb navigation to help their visitors drill down inside sections. But when we suggested this, attendees asked "What is breadcrumb navigation?"

I've written about them in a few articles, such as How To Impress Search Engines and Users - Focus: Web Site Navigation. I wrote, "Breadcrumbs are used in conjunction with regular navigation. They don't replace it. They're nearly always text links, in a smaller font."

An example of them in use is in Scottie's Successful-Sites newsletter web site, in her contributing authors section.

Studies have been conducted on their use by Human Factors International, and another paper has just been released, which you may be interested in reading. Kath Straub, Ph.D., CUA, Chief Scientist of HFI, and Dr. Eric Schaffer, Ph.D., CPE, founder and CEO of HFI cover the topic in
Do you hear what I hear? ... or why it may not matter that users still ignore breadcrumbs

"In the last decade, we have seen some important changes in the way that users behave on the Web. We know now that on information pages, users will scroll. We also know that 3 clicks to service is not required, as long as the navigation path accurately reflects and reinforces the users information model. We have learned that if designed from the interaction perspective, rollover menus can be usable. (Designers still struggle with this last one.) This evolution may reflect the fact that users now have more exposure to the web and are more familiar with how it works. Alternatively, this could reflect that descriptions of user behavior in the browser environment is becoming more sophisticated. Or maybe it's a bit of both.

There are some things, however, that user's simply do not seem prepared to learn on their own. Multiple-select interactions is one of those things. Breadcrumb navigation is another."

What it all boils down is what usability usually does boil down to, sooner or later. Design choices and elements are dictated by site requirements and even more so on who will use it and how they will use the web site.

This means discovering who uses the site and watching how they interact with it.

Continue reading "Latest Breadcrumb Navigation Research"

According to an eWeek article it seems as if Microsoft has launched a Shopping Search Service. Some believe the shopping search engine is at Windows Market Place, according to a thread at WebmasterWorld. I am sure the thread will develop over time.

On Sunday I wrote a quick entry named Google Finds Pages with Google Toolbar which was really news to me. I know that this was not news to other people, but I felt if I didn't know this to be 100% true, then others did not as well. Brett the founder of WebmasterWorld was kind enough to dig up an old post at his forum named GoogleBot visits what you visit if you have the toolbar, this thread was started on May 7, 2002. Now that is a long time ago in search engine years. Thanks Brett.

Seems like no one got the last one right, if you think you know which search engine uses/d click data answer that entry and win a gmail.

Otherwise:

First three correct answers emailed to barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Question is:

Which company uses this image as marketing material?

Good luck!

!!!CONTEST OVER!!!

To be honest, this is a childish thread, in my opinion. The thread discussing this is at DigitalPoint Forums. I did not read the whole thread but from what I hear, it was started by a teenager who was banned from AdSense. The reason he/she was banned was because (1) he was clicking his own ads, (2) creating a site just to run ads and (3) having multiple AdSense accounts. All three are against the Google AdSense TOS that the person has agreed to before signing up. So if you're looking for a laugh, check out the thread. Oh, notice the user's reputation point level is red.

Do You Yahoo? You do if you go to http://e.my.yahoo.com/. That is what that page reads, here is the source code. Stupid find of the day...

<html><head><title>do you yahoo?</title></head>
<body>
<h1>do you yahoo?</h1>
</body></html>

<!-- e18.my.dcn.yahoo.com compressed/chunked Mon Oct 18 08:47:53 PDT 2004 -->

You know Google purchased Blogger not so long ago. Blogger is a free service to set up a Weblog to manage your personal content. This site is a form of blog, but I opted for Movable Type over blogger for numerous reasons. What is kind of ironic, is that people are using Google's Blogger to set up dozens of free blogs and then setting up hundreds of keyword rich anchor text links to point to pages. This is being discussed at two forums, I'll just give you a link to the HighRankings thread.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Starting a large OV account tells a tale of a new but very large budgeted PPC customer's tale with starting a new Overture account. The PPC customer has a Google AdWords campaign running and gets about 30k clicks/day. This customer thought that Overture would welcome his account and do whatever they possibly can to streamline the process of bringing over his keyword list. However, the customer reports

Because we haven't advertised with Overture previously, we don't meet the standard for their higher level of service (spend of >6k/yr). We spend about this much in 2-3 days on AdWords. When I told the customer service rep this, she just said "well that's Google, not us." Wow, what top notch support. :-/

Yahoo! Search has received a slight face lift, making it more Google-like. People are discussing the new look at Search Engine Watch Forums. This was first found by Gary Price.

The non-spoke about 'art' of cloaking is being opening discusses over at the Search Engine Watch forums. In fact, one of the most recognized leaders in the cloaking industry, fantomaster, has agreed to answer questions on the topic of cloaking. The threads name is Cloaking 101 and I have taken this opportunity to get some of my questions answered. Let me take you through a summary of the highlighted points in the thread, many are basic, hence the name of the thread.

• Very hard to get quality links to cloaked pages with Shadow Domains, because these pages are invisible to the Web user.
• The first thing that caught my eye was that fantomaster said that Google uses the Google Toolbar to find new pages, the link goes to an enter I wrote just on that topic.
• When using Shadow Domains, it is smart to have the name related to the product, in order not to annoy the redirected Web visitor.
• There is a big difference between IP delivery and User Agent redirection.
• Reasons to deploy cloaking is mostly to retain 'control'; layout, rankings, dynamic page issues, flash problems, multimedia, session ids and so on.

Moving outside the basics, the thread moved onto to a topic I discusses here a couple times, most recently over here. Read this before reading the rest of this entry. So you see, that search engines (IMO) will be using a form of image retrieval to see what content is located in which 'blocks' on a page. How does this relate to cloaking? Well, if you read the thread, I discuss how dynamic content delivery can be utilized in conjunction with dynamic IP delivery. So if a search engine is visiting a page, the text ad links will be found within the blocks that are worth something as opposed to the blocks that are worth nothing or next to nothing.

But as you can see by one of my posts, I am stuck trying to determine if redirection or dynamic content delivery is the right way to go for this.

Disclaimer: I have never deployed cloaking in any form, I do not personally know the risks involved. Search engines clearly frown upon any form of cloaking. This entry was inspired by the Search Engine Watch thread named Cloaking 101 - Questions and Answers.

I have never believed it to be true that Google used data retrieved from the Google Toolbar to find new pages. However, a post by fantomaster at SEW forums, says that Google does do this. Fantomaster knows his stuff, now is he said Google found new sites with AdSense, I would not believe that.

Here is the quote in the post that addresses this specifically. Note that "enhanced" mode must be on.

Another good trick is installing the Google toolbar in spy, er, "enhanced" mode (i. e. activate PageRank) and surfing your SDs: this will send information to the Google servers and they'll send a spider along to check it out. While technically this approach doesn't give you any incoming links, we've seen pages getting ranked that way nevertheless. Don't hold your breath, though: getting good linkage is always a smart move so don't rely solely on this technique in lieu of it!

A weekend treat for many Google enthusiasts. Forum coverage:

• Search Engine Watch
• SEO Chat
• Cre8asite
• WebmasterWorld
• JimWorld
• HighRankings
• V7 Forums
• IHelpYou
• SitePoint
• WebProWorld
• DigitalPoint
• LilEngine
• SEO Guy

Seems like the same guy posted this at half of the forums listed above. :)

There has been a lot of discussion on the use of alt attributes in images to improve rankings. The concensus is that for the most part these only factor in when used in an image that is linked to an internal page or possibly another site. While this post is not intended to bore the more experienced experts, it does discuss the limitations of these attributes, something novice and expert could review a like. A little different spin on a long debated topic being discussed over at Highrankings. Worth a quick read.

Check out Alt and Title Attribute Limitations

Here is a good thread on the legalities and ethics behind deleting posts at a thread. It is called Who owns a Post?

If you are looking for a nice story to read check out Kim's story of some of the people who she met through her online travels. Kim Krause, the founder of Cre8asite Forums, has met many people, she describes some of these encounters over at her blog entry named Discoveries in User Centered Design and Small Business Support. Just shows how closely tied this SEM industry truly is.

Do a search at Google. Now look at the source code of the page and you will see code that is missing a few HTML characters. It looks like <td bgcolor=#e5ecf9 align=right nowrap><font size=-1 color=>Results <b>. Yesterday it was fine, and the color attribute read <td bgcolor=#e5ecf9 align=right nowrap><font size=-1 color=#000000>Results <b>.

Caught you Google. Now that is watching Google like a hawk. ;)

Most forum veterans know which forums the search representatives visit often. Some use this knowledge, to cut through the red tape when it comes to reporting spam to the engines. Why do they do this? Well, because when you use the spam form the engines provide, normally it can take a while to see any changes if any (so I hear in the forums). But I also hear, that by posting threads in the fashion of "Look how this site is spamming...", the search reps at the forums turn around and tell the engineers to do something about it ASAP. Why? Because now the spam is public knowledge and embarrassing to the search engines.

This happens at a few forums, and most veterans are either for it or against it. A thread on this topic has been started at SEW Forums and the thread is named Reporting "Spammers" at SEW. There is also a poll associated with this thread that asks "Should we Report Spam at SEW?". The Majority of votes say "No: It will ultimately harm the forums - I dont like it." The actual thread discusses if its ethical to do so.

That is my factual entry for today, as you can see, it is not opinionated at all. :) I will be in meetings most the day, I hope to sneak out and write a few more today.

Interested in learning more about SEO/SEM, but don't know where to start? An excellent must read discovered over at SEW Forums, relating to what you should know when you get into search engine marketing. Nacho, a moderator at SEW forums, goes into detail about covering the basics first and move on to specific places and articles you should check out. Without revealing to much, I thought the following was very appropriate recommendation from Nacho:

1) The Golden Rule of SEO: DON’T OVER OPTIMIZE, BE NATURAL. 2) Don’t SPAM or use techniques that the risks are high enough that you might loose it all one day – perhaps overnight. 3) Think what is best for your users first, the search engines will adapt. 4) Stay up to date, search engines change, users change, businesses can change for the better or worse if not up to date.

One more thing I would like to add to those reading. If you are concerned with the breath and over-whelming amount of information, as Nacho points out "read, read, read until your eyes hurt". Additionally as a side note of my own, don't believe everything you read! Test it for yourself.

Begin (or brush up) your education and learning on Search Engine Marketing

I am sure you know by now that Google released Google Desktop Search, this obviously impacts Microsoft's Desktop Search but not yet Apple.

For a comprehensive review (more comprehensive if your a subscriber) see Danny's article for more resources please see Danny's blog entry on this topic. Now for a forum roll discussing this topic.

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• Cre8asite Forums
• ABAKUS Forum
• IHelpYou Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• WebProWorld Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• SEO Chat Forumss.html

What are some of the methods to combat the issues with linkage data, that search engines often depend upon for ranking one page over the next? If you're reading this blog, you most probably know all too well about how sites exchange links with each other, how people buy text links and all the spam found in blogs and other open sites. So how does a search engine weed out the 'meaningless' or 'less important' links from a Web page?

One answer is something called "block analysis' and there is an excellent thread going on at SEW Forums named Block Analysis 101. I will warn you, it gets a bit technical. Let me pull one concept out of the thread, and hopefully come back to this thread at a later time to discuss the rest.

How does a search engine look at the "blocks", "passages" or location of the content on the page as would a human? With the use of CSS, it can be very hard for an engine to understand which content goes with which links. The goal is for the engines to look at a page, understand the blocks within the page and then assign appropriate weights to the content and links based on which 'block' the content and links are found.

For example, take a look at the image below of a typical content site. You will see how I separated out the major components of a page's layout. Removing all the fluff, when a human finds the page he or she is looking for, they want to simply focus on the middle portion of the page, "content area". And one would expect that the links and content within the 'content area' is the most relevant to what this page is discussing. If a link is found within that section, it is sometimes (we are now finding contextual based ads within the content of the pages, dynamically changing words in passages, based on a keyword match, to link to an advertisers site) good to assume that the link is important, in fact, it is probably one of the most important links on the whole page. Search engines know that.

Some search engines are experimenting with a form of image retrieval. Where the engine will capture an image of the page, break the image out into blocks of passages (as would a human) and then assign the appropriate weights to the various blocks of content. So now the "text ads" on the bottom left will be worth a lot less then the links found within the left nav, and even less then the links found within the content area.

To be honest, I was one of the first to sign up with the online yellow page giant, SuperPages.com. My experience...Very little transparency as to impressions, click throughs and leads captured. Why? Maybe because I was one of the first to sign up. Reports only came my way if I called and asked for them, there was no advertiser center for me to login to and view real time or even static reports. I based my data from my Web analytics reports that showed very little click throughs if any. Plus I maybe received two or three phone calls, all leading to nothing, over a year/year and a half time period. In addition, those phone calls did not convert, because I was not able to target specific keywords like you can with Overture, Google and natural search. This experience was very upsetting and had a negative ROI.

But, I am just one person, three other's reviewed SuperPages.com at a thread over at SEO Chat. One member claims "listings took 2 weeks to get approved and no traffic has been generated." An other member says "conversion rate is poor, cpc is a bit high, but we do pull sales. each sale has had a higher avg. ticket than other PPC sales as well." So there are always two or more sides to each story.

There is an interesting discussion at Cre8asite forums, I hadn't seen before in a search engine related forum about the number of companies that are buying up expired domains and putting Google adsense ads them. Google has a page for domain parking on their Adsense FAQ. Mike521, a member at Cre8asite, seems to have several examples where Google (or a company owned by google) is buying up expired domains and putting up search portals on the pages. The unique part of this discussion relates to what Google did over a year ago, in that it stopped expired domains from receiving PageRank. The domains were basically reset to the status of a new site. Now I was lucky enough to have bought some good domains years back that got "grandfathered" in so to say before Google initialized this process of reseting domains. It was two domains that eventually became sites later on, but for over a year they continued to hold any backlinks to the site. One site happened to be a blog I did for photography I do. To this day, I am still getting clicks and a few "unimportant" links to the site. Now the value obviously is not the links, but the traffic that comes with the domains for those companies buying the domains. While not a new thing in anyway, it is interesting to observe one of Googles companies doing this. Mike goes on to say "if a domain expires, you'd rather see something there, even just a little search page, instead of a "page not found" error". I'll agree with that.

Continued discussion at Cre8asite forums on Who's Buying Up Expired Domains?

It has been a while since I gave out Gmail Invites, so here is a new contest.

First three correct answers emailed to barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Question is:

Which search engine uses or used click data as a factor to determine the rank for a page in the search results?

Good luck!

Found this by way of a post at SEW forums named Only 12 out of the 100 retail sites were well optimized. This post links to an article named Making It to Page One, which discusses how pages rank in Google and Yahoo based on a categorization of how well a page is optimized. Here is the chart from the article.

At the bottom of the article it says "Oneupweb finds that only 12 out of the 100 retail sites were well optimized, while 23 were moderately optimized, 29 nominally optimized and 36 had no optimization at all." I find these numbers to be very generous, but that is just an opinion, I have no data.

You are required to move your .com domain name to a .co.uk or an other country specific TLD (top level domain). How will this impact your rankings in the short and long term over at the #1 search engine, Google? Good question. A thread at WebmasterWorld named .com -> .co.uk site transition discusses this topic.

The basic steps one should take is the classic 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages. Do your best to ask people who have linked to you to link to the new URLs. Make sure all your directory listings have been updated correctly. And wait it out.

One member gives reassuring words "I have done exactly the same in the past and it has worked perfectly."

My firm specializes in custom Web based applications, so I know a thing or two on what it takes to build advanced Web based solutions. I have seen the final results, when outsourcing advanced and custom web application work to India, and they are not good. Too often, the business logic is not there, the intelligence in the application is missing key components and the usability is simply wrong. Why does this happen? Communication and culture is key in building these advanced Web solutions. One loses a lot of that when going overseas, of course this is my opinion. :)

Google has said that India will be "one of our [Google's] larger operations". I do not know if this will be a good or bad move. I know the web application development cycle, I have never worked in the technical department at a search engine company. I wish them luck!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I do not follow WiseNut, the index that powers LookSmart on a daily basis, but there was a report at Search Engine Watch Forums that they have updated the index. This of course sprung my interest to do some searches with WiseNut.

If you do a search on seroundtable.com at wisenut.com you will see a gray box at the top that says "WiseGuide categories for "seroundtable.com"". Now for this search, it comes up with two categories; search engines and others. I was disappointed when I clicked on Others, because it has many pages related to the search engine category listed. Oh well, it is not perfect.

Call it "interactive design", "interactivity", "user experience" or "usability", the word may contour up a different experience for each of us. You may view the web as a hostile environment where the only solution is to test a user experience to make that environment more "usable" for those concerned. Or vice versa. Which ever way you look at it, usability is becoming a larger part of how the web works. I came across an interesting thread on Cre&site forums, about the nature of this word and how it has changed over time. I had not thought about the term in this way and its relation to other words similar to it. Barry Welford, a member at Cre8site, posted a poll asking if people call it "usability" or something else. The overall vote leaned towards "usability" with some people voting for "interaction design."

There were some interesting points made about the use of the words. Cre8pc said "usability is a common term and understood immediately...even the kids know what I mean". Scratch another member argued that "Interaction design isn't just "making things interactive" -- It's the discipline of designing, or architecting, interactive systems."

For those interested in "usability/interactivity" it's a worthwhile thread to check out. Continuing reading Usability - I say Interactivity, what do you say?

Jeremy announced that he will be moving over to the search team at Yahoo!. I have been looking for clues in how Yahoo! will utilize RSS technology in order to build a break through technology to take search to the next level. Those who read Jeremy's blog know that he knows a lot of things, two of those things include search and RSS.

RSS is something Yahoo! is pursuing big time, the question is, how will they use it to revolutionize the search industry. I have so many ideas going through my head, I just wish I had more clues. I posted a thread about this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Also see Danny's blog post named Jeremy Zawodny: Yahoo Search Blogvangelist.

A few days ago JimWorld had a face lift. New, brighter image, I like it. Forum discussion in the JimWorld Members Lounge.

At the bottom of every page, you'll be able to see which of your fellow members are online. Additionally, if any of them happen to be looking at the same topic as you, it'll tell you that as well.

Enhanced Profile Editor
If you click the "My Profile" link at the top of the page, you'll have your inbox, your contact information, and some new forum preference settings all available from a simple page.

New Options
You'll be able to, from the profile page, change the width of the forum screen, the number of topics to display on the topic list, and the number of posts to display on thread pages. If you're a Premium member, you can also manage your spotlight ad campaign from this page.

Local Time
The forums will now detect your current local time, relative to UTC, and will display all post times in YOUR Time, not ours. Note that this will only activate itself once you have been to, and saved your "Forum Preferences" from the Profile page.

There are reports at WebmasterWorld that they can not add more then 200,000 products to Froogle. "We have been successful in uploading up to 200,000 items. We have tried to increase it to a full 700,000 but it always seems to stop at 199,998 - 200,000 items," one member says. The thread says that Froogle says you can upload a maximum of 1,000,000 products, but it seems like these members are not able to go beyond the 200,000 mark.

A thread over at Cre8asite named exit page statistics query discusses a statistic named bounce rates. This statistic is a very useful metric when trying to understand a page's strengths and weaknesses. It basically tells you percentage of entrances on the page that resulted in exits without viewing any other page on the site.

In the thread, Ammon discusses why sometimes, a high bounce rate is something positive for the the site. Why? Well if they sell ads on a CPC basis, each click to exist the site is money in the owners pocket. But for many other sites, high bounce rates are not preferred.

This blog has a very high bounce rate from the home page, 72.05% for the month of September. But it is expected, most people come to this site daily, read the entries on the index page and leave. There is no reason to click deeper most of the time. Compare that to my corporate site, it is a small fraction of what the bounce rate is on the search engine roundtable. I make an effort to encourage the Web visitor to click deeper for more information.

It is also important to look at a users click path but that is for a different article.

Catch it while its live! Check out the MSN Search Preview up probably for the night. This time around appears to be some slight changes, and some very fresh results. From some testing I have done in the last 30 minutes, we found that post made this past Friday are already in the index. Screen shot below in case you missed the preview. Some things of note in this preview. Web site with keywords in the domain seem to help, but in comparison to the last preview as reported on SEW forums, not as much. The cache is still fresh from what I can see, but not as fast as it can pick up pages. An example search for "web development" or some of my own terms returns up to 221,313,454 results. Pretty impressive.

Check out the 3rd MSN Search Preview

Update: Check out Nacho's initial observations at SEW Forums.

Please expect a lot of chatter over at SEW forums at the thread I started named SEMPO Launches Members Only Forum. This is what I wrote:

No official announcement yet, but I logged into my SEMPO account and found a link to the SEMPO Members Only Forum. They are using the same forum type as Jill's High Rankings Forum, I just love those smilies.

Anyway, its nice how it logs you in automatically from the SEMPO member site. Good work. Nothing really in the forums yet. Not sure what more I can say, because I know nothing else at the present time.

So Google released a handy tool that notifies you when you have Gmail, without having to login manually, its called Gmail Notifer. I use a Mac, so for us Apple users, we were out of luck. Now there is a solution for Apple Macintosh users, actually two options.

The two options I am aware of are:
GmailStatus 0.9 which is free. It basically adds a little menu item to the finder menu at the top. Here is a screen capture of what it looks like.

gCount v0.4 which free as well and looks to have a nicer interface. Here are screen captures from the Web site.

For those of you that are algorithmic junkies, there is a thread over at WebmasterWorld named Current Academic Link Analysis Research, which lists two relatively new research papers on link analysis. Although, I did not have time to read these papers, I believe one we discussed a while back named block level link analysis. The other is named "Link Analysis Ranking" and both can be downloaded via the following links:
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/maps-poster.pdf
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/JASIST-04.pdf

How often do you find different search theories being discussed at the forums or at conferences? If I knew better, I would have made a category at this site just for search theories. A post by Mikkel deMib Svendsen in a thread discussing the Florida theories, Mikkel writes "It kind of reminds me of the way people used to look at our universe back in the middle ages - with the earth as the center."

I never thought about these search theories from that perspective. In fact, as we learn more and find more clues from research and studies - we can better understand which theories were right and wrong. I thought I would share my own analogy, because I always found the whole Sea Monster theory in the old ages interesting. It is always funny looking at the theories now and saying, how could they have thought something so crazy?

That picture was taken from the book named The Book of Sea Monsters. People once thought that the fish and creatures in the sea were monsters. I can see how people thought that, but as we research and conduct studies to those fish, we learned the truth.

Anyway, I just never thought of the SEO theories in this way.

More reading on Sea Monsters at The Shadow Lands and MSNBC.

This is an interesting find, try searching on the keyword web and you should see 435 million results found. Now add the parameter &client=firefox to the Web search and you will find 185 million results. I am sure you get slightly different results then what I reported, but the fact of the matter is, by adding &client=firefox to the search URL, you will get less results then by not having it. It works the same by putting anything in the parameter, its not just a firefox deal.

The best theory, so far, IMO, as to why this happens is:

The obvious theory is that "client=" is a flag Google uses for something other than a browser type.

At a quick look, adding "client=1" seems to return approximately the same number of results as using Safesearch.

Guess: perhaps "client=whatever" refers to queries coming from third parties using Google as a back-end? Google is filtering the results to avoid offending their user base.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Nice thread over at SEO Chat named Is Google really totally automated?, which asks the question "Is Google totally automated?". There is a poll set up and currently 80% responded "Google is mostly automated, say 98%, but some human tweaks have to be added", 11.5% responded "Absolutely! Google Algorithm is 100% automated! No human factors are involved at all!" and the remaining 7.5% responded "Google is just 60% to 70% automated".

Mike Grehan's search engine book has a wealth of information in it. One of the interviews in the back of the book, I believe, contains an interview with some search engine representatives. In one, I believe, Mike asks this question. Do the search engines ever tweak the results to push a very popular site to the top manually. The response, I believe, was yes they do but not often. Google did not admit to this, but it would not surprise me if Google has some Q&A people do this on occasion.

NickW over at Search Engine Watch has an excellent post on how to make your Web browsing invisible, he named the post 007 Stealth Browsing with FireFox/Moz. He explains there are many reasons why one would want to browse the Web in invisible mode, including; SERPS check paranoia, Inventive marketing (which he links to a post that discusses spam marketing for the most part), Competition scoping, or just plain paranoia. I am just going to copy and paste the how to portion of his post here, for more information, visit the thread.

1) Grab FireBird or Mozilla 2) Get an account with a decent proxy provider (search for it and click the adwords ads - the free ones are monkey #£@!,) More on proxies in the kung fu link above. 3) Set up a profile (tools - profiles - manage profiles and call it kung fu or whatever you want. Switch to that profile. 4) Download the exellent Switch Proxy and User Agent Switcher extensions and install them. With the proxy one, i suggest that you use the text file of proxies option, it allows you to specify unlimited amounts of proxies and switch proxy every X seconds. Even better if they come form different countries... 5) Then type this in the browser address bar 'about:config' - no quotes - thanks to NFFC for that... 6) Find the line 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' and set it to 0 to stop people seeing where you've come from - you might also want to set the 'network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferer' to false. I've no idea what that does but it looks naughty to me.. 7) Then go to Edit - Prefs - Privacy and disable JS and Cookies 8) Go to Edit - Prefs - Advanced and disable Java - if you have java enabled your proxies are useless. 9) Once you've done all that, you'll need to configure the switch proxy and user agent switcher extensions, they're dead easy, just read the help text...

In a special event to "celebrate 10yrs of the internet in the UK", E-consultancy.com released a list of the top 100 most influential individuals in the "development and growth of e-commerce and the internet" in the UK. Two individuals to note include Danny Sullivan and Mike Grehan. Two excellent individuals to represent the search engine marketing industry in the list of the most influential individuals in the past decade.

Forums discussion at Search Engine Watch.

I've met Kim Krause, the founder of Cre8asite Forums about a year ago. Ever since I have known her, she has been the SEO advocate for usability. In fact, recently she has written an article that was sent to the E-Marketing News mailing list named Do Not Drop Your Web Site Off the Search Engine Cliff, it might have been overlooked due to Mike's new article on the whole true fairness of Google's PageRank discussed in the entry below this one named Filthy Linking Rich - Popular Sites Get More Popular.

But that short article contains just a fraction of what you can find in Kim's first (not sure if it is her first) e-book named How to Quench Your Web Site Visitors' Thirst. This book contains a wealth of knowledge that can that be used as a checklist for any SEM/SEO/Web Designer quench their visitor’s thirst. Most of the SEMs I know are not usability experts, in fact, with this document, you do not need to be a usability guru. The information contained here can be used over and over again to help make your sites user friendly. Well worth the fifteen dollar investment.

Great work Kim.

Received this morning the e-marketing newsletter from Mike Grehan detailing a new article released today entitled "Filthy Linking Rich and Getting Richer". No, its not a synopsis for a MTV story on the a filthy rich spoiled celebrity, it's about those that are rich in links, and why they will continue to be so. He "highlights how great the bias is for high ranking pages which are fundamentally ordered on link based algorithms, to attract more links." The article is a wealth of information in regards to current trends going on. Mike backs up the article with plenty of research data obtained from the last 7 months.

He describes the metholodology as "an experiment carried out covered data collected over a seven month period. And from that experimental data, they observed that the top 20% of the pages with the highest number of incoming links obtained 70% of the new links after seven months, while the bottom 60% of the pages obtained virtually no incoming links at all during that period.

I believe Mike's article is very accurate, and I do agree as its something I have seen myself for quite sometime without the complicated theories involved. I was telling someone Monday, that its now 5x harder to start a new website than it was 8 months ago and be successful at it. It doesn't mean its not possible, but the stakes are higher. Mike puts it in terms we can understand and quantifies the results to make it valid. Interesting and very worthwhile read.

There is a continued discussion on this article at SEW forums - Filthy Linking Rich

We reported last September on a fasinating experiment underway named the "Online Discovery of Secondary Terms Associated to a Theme Experiment". The study was being conducted by Orion, a member at SEW forums, who released the details of the experiment today on the SEW forums. There is a nice discussion going on relating to details from the study and questions resulting from it. About the experiment:

His study is a most recent study on competitive queries submitted by professional SEOs. It introduces a methodology and procedure called on-topic analysis, which allows users to discover top, broader, narrower, and optimum terms.

The experiment introduces methodology that Orion explains "is a valuable tool for enabling users to enhance the semantics of theme sites and concept-focused documents". In a nutshell this means the information is very useful for people and professionals wanting to discriminate between on and off topic terms by identifying top, broader, narrower and optimum terms. Which can be very useful in search engine marketing campaigns, and for developing theme sites and documents on the web. Excellent read.

For a link directly to the article, please continue reading the study by E. Garcia, On-Topic Analysis - Online Discovery of On-Topic Terms

So you have just taken over a new clients site, you have got all the details situated, and you know they have doorway pages infecting some area of the site. First step, is to get rid of those bad boys. Step 2 is to make sure the search engine knows there are no more pages in that location. So, what do you do to best remedy the situation, without doing your client or website any harm in the search engines?

Additional Important Questions:
Do I use a 301 redirect or a 404 page not found in place of these pages?
Do I need to conserve the pagerank of the original page by passing it on?
What happens if I use a 404?
What if the search engine have already spidered these pages?

There is a good thread over at Cre8asite Forums that details this very case. The member Mike521, dealt with a situation just like this, he got rid of the doorway pages generated from a previous company, and recommend a 404 page not found to be put in place. Basically removing the page completely. Ammon Johns goes on to say that "Search engines should always drop any correctly formed 404 error URL. The only times a search engine retains a 404 page is when the custom 404 page has been poorly done". Additionally if there is no real value on the doorway pages in terms of pagerank it would seem pointless in doing a 301 or 302 redirect to another page.

Check out the thread on Fixing Doorway Pages

So if I bid on your name, will you bid on mine? What if I promote myself by biding on the name of a popular expert, is that ok? How about targeting Donald Trump to sell spray on hair? Cartoon characters to sell vitamins? ;-) Some of the questions addressed in this thread, relating to creative ways to spread your own name and befriend or (anger) an expert. Fun thread this early afternoon to read. I am glad someone brought up the subject up, becauses its relevant to the industry, and its a polarized issue for some people. Ultimately I am to the opinion that if someone is not spreading ill repute for my name - Ben Pfeiffer, then its not going to be an issue, I would applaud them for being smart. However, in a sign of respect I think it comes down its just best to ask them before you go bidding on their name.
Check our the ongoing discussion at SEW - Targeting Personal Names in Adwords

Now you can take Google everywhere your mobile phone can travel! This is pretty cool of Google to adapt in this way. The basis of this services lies in Google Short Message Service, that allows "you to easily get precise answers to specialized queries from your mobile phone or device". Hope that its applicable to our everyday lives though, it kinda seems like one more thing we can add to our roster of "need to figure out newfangaled gadget" list. Found this tidbit actually on John Battelle's blog in my musings around looking for news in the forums.

Here is the explanation provided by Google of their new services:

Send your query as a text message and get phone book listings, dictionary definitions, product prices and more. Just text. No links. No web pages. Simply the answers you're looking to find. For example, to find a pizza joint in a specific neighborhood, users can send a text message to the 5-digit U.S. shortcode 46645 (also GOOGL on most mobile phones) with the query and city or query and zip code, i.e. [pizza 94043], and immediately receive the name, address, and phone number of local pizzerias in that area. This type of concise information can help mobile users find exactly what they're looking for anywhere and any time.

As a follow up to Barry's post last night, wanted to post the forums covering the quarterly PR update. Seems DP forum broke it first from most indications. Some good threads going on, and of course some wild theories.

SEOchat
V7N Forums
Highrankings
SEW Forums
Digitalpoint Forums
Cre8asite Forums
Webmasterworld

There hasn't been one for four months or so and now its currently happening. DigitalPoint's forum is discussing this now in a thread titled Google toolbar Update. Proof, see the SEO Chat PR tool for a new page at DigitalPoint that just received PageRank.

I had to get this one in before I split for the remainder of the week. Good luck all, oh and I am sure there will be some deeper thoughts into this update over the weekend.

Do content thieves keep you up at night, tossing and turning in your bed, worrying that someone evil person might steal you content and you may never know about it. This is a problem for some people, and especially those that write articles and post them freely on their sites. Sometimes a copyright notice just doesn't cut it. There is a good thread over at Highrankings, asking about how to protect your copy, but still allow spiders to get access to it. The member who started the thread said they had considered cloaking as an option, but quickly decided other measures were better suited for this. There are some gems of advice in there that I will highlight below.

Ways to Protect Your Content & Allow Search Engine Spiders

1. Monitor Your Competitors. Send out notices should you see they are the midnight bandits that ran off with your content with permission.

2. Use a Copyright Notice. At the end of all your pages.

3. Try Putting a Transparent Layer Over the Area. This will prevent the text from being copy and pasted outside the site.

4. Use CSS or a Liquid CSS Layout to prevent copy and pasting. Due to how CSS arranges content sections, it prevents most people from copy and pasting sections. If they try they usually end up with highlighting the stuff they don't want, or the entire page.

5. Use a Disable Right Mouse Click Script. or similar script. This is one I have used in the past and continue to like mainly just for images on my blog. Basically it prevents people from viewing your source, lifting your images off the sites, or stealing your webpages. You can find a version of the disable right mouse script here.

6. Lock Down Your PDF documents. Not sure exactly how this is done, but it was mentioned as one way to prevent downloading or copying.

7. Your Own Research. Stopping those that steal your content is best served if your do it yourself.

Its seems to be rather difficult line between protecting your copy and still providing spiders with all the stuff they need. As one member, chrishirst, pointed out, who is to stop competitors from looking at the Google cache, even thought you have done all these things to protect it? If anyone has any more suggestions on protecting your content, please post them in the comments section. If I get enough I will update the article with them for a more comprehensive list.

Sorry, this is the last time for a while where I will be taking off from writing here. I have asked the guest authors to help out and I am sure Ben will do some writing over the next two days. Have a good weekend all and sorry about this.

Interesting thread at SEW Forums named Ethics on Spam Reporting. This thread is interesting because it talks about ethics from the other side of the coin. Most of the time, threads discussing ethics are on the topic of using "black-hat seo" techniques. But what if you find a site that is using these black hat techniques, is it ethical to report them to the search engines?

Just a different twist to the classical debate between black hats and white hats. Make sure to check out the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

So have you bought, exchanged, or received any sandboxed links lately? Yesterday, I posed a question on SEOchat, relating to the value of links that come from sites supposedly in the sandbox. Do links placed from sites that appear to be sandboxed actually contributed to ranking improvements in the serps? Would these links contribute to the PR of the site? Is the sandbox only about links and nothing else? Their is an ongoing discussion on the topic with members raising questions to how this would impact links or sites, what it would mean for clients, and the testing methodology I used to test this, and why it would matter at all.

My main inquiry came from the fact that that I wanted to investigate links that I had established from sandboxed sites to more established sites. In order to get a solid answer I tested this hypothesis several times. What I did was establish several outgoing links from "sandboxed" sites to established sites already ranking in Google for keyphrases that would allow simple deductions to be drawn from improvements in the serps (aside from algo changes etc..). Keyphrases were competition was moderate and some terms that were locally specific to had variation to the set. Simple structured test. I monitored with each backlink update that the link were indeed getting picked up. What happened was normal, new backlinks picked up, but different terms I used to increase rankings (anchor text), didn't move at all. For regular terms nor sandboxed terms. I also looked at several other issues as well. But to read the full report please continue reading on SEOchat.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Has anybody listed Affiliate site in Yahoo directory? confirms that people have successfully listed affiliate sites in the Yahoo! directory. Senior Member Patrick Deese said:

If you have an affiliate site just make sure that you have lots of unique content that other sites in the same cat/directory don't offer.

If you have a ton of "template" content from the merchant you are not likely to be listed.

For $299 per year, why shouldn't they list your affiliate site? Of course, pure spam pages should not be listed.

Link building is very important if you want to rank well for competitive keywords. Back in July I mentioned a new resource that DigitalPoint came up with, in an entry I named Free Coop Advertising Network. This network has really taken off and I have done many test cases with it. Bottom line is that this network works well. Let me explain.

You set up the ads to run on your site and based on several criteria, including the number of your pages found in the Google index, you will get a fair number of ads pointing back to your site. This network works off of a weight system, the higher your weight points, the more ads you have pointing to your site with any desired link text or image banner ad you want.

DP recently added the ability to add up to five banners on one page, that means more weight for those who participate in this network. Of course he limited the number of ads to 5 and each additional ad is worth less. So if you have 3 ads, each worth 1 point, then you will have a total sum of 2.4 points for that page, it diminishes as you add banners to your pages. More on how this works at the forum post named Multiple Ads Per Page.

If you want to sign up for this network, please use my affiliate link, you see, he even programmed in referral weight. Cool, ehh? Sign Up for the Coop Advertising Network >>

In a thread posted at many of the forums (yes duplicate posts at different SEM forums) under the title of Why selling SEO is cheating, I used SEO Chat's forum to link to because they are very colorful over there.

Now the thread starter's point is that most small businesses (1) target B2B then (2)target local B2C. In the first case of B2B, he feels that small businesses "are not looking to attract large numbers of Internet users but small, specialized groups of potential clients to their "Venus-Fly Trap"." He explains the "Venus-Fly Trap" as a "marketing tool to develop additional business through online marketing". In the second case of B2C, he argues that "by the very nature that they are small or medium, almost invariably within a restricted geographic area."

I understand this person, and to be honest, most of the leads I get from the SEO marketing side of my business I turn away. But I have landed several large contracts from my SEO efforts. I run a small business that is very focused in a specific niche (custom Web based application development). SEO efforts, for me, is very very cheap. The ROI make extreme sense for my small business and I am sure it makes sense for your small business.

I can see how it can be discouraging for a small service oriented firm. 95% of the leads I retrieve from my SEO efforts are not a perfect match for my company. But there is so much potential for small business B2C efforts. Set up an e-commerce shop and you will see.

Found this new search service by way of a post a SEW forums named Google To Snap?. The search engine is named Snap and it describes "Why we built Snap", the three main reasons being (1) user control (2) user feedback and (3) transparency.

This engine has a very interesting interface that helps you narrow down your results in seconds. Snap has a nice list of technology partners including X1 a desktop/email search search company, LookSmart, Smarter an online comparison shopping network, Gigablast and the ODP. More about Snap here.

Check out Snap when you have a free moment.

To be honest, I feel I am one of the luckiest people in this industry, to have the opportunity to interview Mike Grehan. Everyone has several people that make an impact in one's life. Mr. Grehan did that for me with search engine marketing. His deep understanding of the workings of the search engines and his eloquent method of illustrating the information to us all is super natural. And without further ado, my interview with Mike Grehan, the author of "Search Engine Marketing Book: The essential best practice guide".

Barry: Hi Mike! I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions.

Mike: The fact the you're paying me a huge sum of money for it helps Barry.

Continue reading "Interview With Mike Grehan: Author of Search Engine Marketing Book"

No forums are really talking about this, maybe it's too new or people aren't interested. Kanoodle launched a competing product to Google's AdSense. I signed up for it at 4:02PM (EST) and was approved 7 minutes later. So I am able to now test this ad and see how relevant it is to this post. Here is the ad, I do not think I can ask you to click on it, so don't, unless the ad is of interest to you. :)



Until Kanoodle's BrighAd's spider crawls this page and serve relevant results, read up on this service at http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool and feel free to sign up. Blogs discussing this that I found include SEW Blog, BattelleMedia and Search Engine Journal. I also posted this information at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Discussion going over at V7N forums today about Adsense ads not showing up on people's sites. There is also a similar thread going on over at WMW about PSA's not showing up like they should. There have also been some recent reports about adsense impressions dropping in the last several days. Member reported not seeing Adsense ads on his site, including other people reporting the same thing. Appears it could be related to a browser issue in IE, but apparantly it works for some and not for others. If you are experiencing the same issues, its might be worth checking out.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Google Cache Date: Dec 31, 1969 is proof that Google uses Unix time stamps for the cache database. Dec 31, 1969 is the default value for a time stamp in Unix. For many operating systems, it is the earliest time you can set a clock back to. It is the second before the epoch, the date used as the "beginning of time" for timestamps. Time values in Unix systems are represented as seconds since the epoch, with library functions available for converting these values into standard date and time formats. The epoch on Unix and POSIX systems is 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.

Interesting find, wonder what went wrong at Google.

The folks over DigitalPoint forums have a thread named Anyone noticed something wrong with the "site:" command?, where members are reporting the lose of pages in drastic numbers.

One member reports, "Some missing pages have PR6 for almost a year." An other member reported "Our count has gone dow 15,000 pages (21,000 to 6,000)."

Of course the rumors and speculation about a major update starts up in this thread.

A thread over at WebmasterWorld named Could Google Be Having a Revolution?, discussed the possibility that Google might be using some sort of clustering technology to provide relevant results. Can they be? I would think on some level, behind the scenes they are. But will they go as far as Clusty or even Teoma in terms of refining results? I doubt it.

As search grows and more features like clustering, personalization, local and the like continue to spring up, do you think the simple Google box will go away? I don't think anyone does. This thread is interesting and worthwhile reading, IMO. What if Google did deploy a high level of clustering to its algorithm?

Few day old post at SEW Forums named Updated Yahoo! Search Limiting Parameters discusses a blog posting over at SearchEngineShowdown about some newly discovered search parameters that can be used over at Yahoo! Search.

These limit parameters include: stem:, domain:, feature:homepage, feature:index, feature:meta, and the region: limiters.

I was going to wait to mention this until NickW, the creator of ThreadWatch, gave me the OK, but I see its out already by way of seobook and then SEW Blog.

ThreadWatch is a blog devoted to finding the good threads at the forums, much like this one. NickW, a SEW forum member and old time WMW Mod, PMed me about this a day ago. He said the site is "less of a blog and more of an alert system". I personally feel this is a good thing, because he will be focusing on link drops to forum threads with some dry humor (which I personally love) and this site will continue to focus on locating, summarizing and writing a formal opinion on the best SEM forum threads out there.

I am excited to read ThreadWatch on a daily basis.

MyJeeves from Ask was released not so long ago, many of the search engines have a flavor of personalized search - now Yahoo! jumped into the game with the release of My Yahoo! Search. Jeremey discusses a little bit about My Yahoo Search and Yahoo Next at his blog.

Forum coverage only at Search Engine Watch for now. Discussion also at HighRankings.

I have never seen this before "In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results." Well, I never really did a search on sex and go to the last page of the results. In fact, the only reason I did this was because I found a referral from Google on one of my sites for that keyword (I did not find my site in the results by the way :/).

The text reads like this with the links pointing as Google has them pointed as I see it now. "In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results."

The first paragraph of the complaint reads:

As you may recall, our office represents [private] (and others) and his website, removed. In response to our firm's May 28, 2004, and June 7, 2004, letters Google seems to have temporarily removed some infringing websites from Google's "Sponsored Links." However, Google's remedial action was short lived. Remarkably, less than one month later, many previously identified infringing sites remain listed in Google's regular search term returns section. In addition to these previously identified infringing sites, several more unlawful infringers (see below) have appeared as "Sponsored Links" on Google. Please take the necessary steps to immediately remove the previously identified infringing sites (which should have already been done), and the newly identified sites (see below) from your search engine and confirm the removal with me as soon as possible.

Milan Kryl sent me an email about a new Gmail feature he found. Basically, he is seeing a new contacts tab on the left hand side of Gmail, I am not seeing this yet. In addition, he said he saw (but now does not) ATOM export feature. While writing this, I did some quick blog reading via my RSS aggregator and found a write up on this at insidegoogle.blogspot.com.

Here are two screen captures from each respective blog mentioned above:

A Cre8asite thread named Google threat to eBay discusses an article which was recently published at Yeald.com named eBay snipered by Google-Amazon comparison shopping threat.

The real reason [that eBay wants to restrict Adwords customers from purchasing the eBay trademark] appears to be that Google matches ads with listings generated by relevant keywords. This makes it possible for searchers looking for a specific product to compare prices on eBay with prices elsewhere on the Web. It also significantly extends the reach and potential of merchants to sell their goods well beyond the relatively limited confines of the eBay marketplace.

Bill Slawski, forum administrator, makes excellent points about the article. Besides for some of the deeper ideas by Bill, "I do find it pretty odd that this article doesn't mention Froogle" Bill says.

I participate at dozens of forums and I am a lurker at many others, I am also a moderator at a few forums. Something sad has occurred over at a forum known as WebProWorld, they are the news site that goes under the name of WebProNews, where Garrett used to write before joining Andy and KeywordRanking. Anyway, WebProWorld is a business, they should have a clear separation between the admins and the moderators like many forums do that have businesses behind them. It seems as if the moderators over at WebProWorld are unhappy and they spoke out about it.

In a thread started by fathom, a person I respect in this in industry, named WebProWorld Thoughts to Consider, he discusses why he has stepped down from the moderator position at WebProWorld. Those who don't know, there is a private forum where moderators and administrators interact behind the scenes. If there are disputes between the two, they normally take it out in that private forum over via personal communication. Of course people do not always agree, but fathom moderators at other forums, including SEO Chat which is very similar in the structure of the forum to WebProWorld.

It is always a shame seeing these types of disputes aired out in the public. As part of my forum coverage, I am covering this.

While I was away, MSN launched MSN Search Preview II for a little bit. In the forums, they were comparing I to II and guessing when MSN will go live with this technology. Everyone believes that this will occur before the end of the year. At Search Engine Watch Forum, Nacho lists out his observations about the differences between I and II.

• Keyword-in-domain continues being strong, but not as much as Round 1.
  
• Cache is as fresh as your grocery store around the corner.
  
• Improved navigation and nicer looks.
  
• The index seems to have been growing nicely.
  
• link:www.domain.com is working well too.
  
• Big authority websites carry weight in ranking. Seems like mom & pop will continue to struggle.
  
• On page factors and content weigh in heavily.
  
• Results for other languages are not coming up well (I tried Spanish).

Forum coverage also at WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums and JimWorld.

One of the many perks about visiting Cre8asite Forums, is that you can basically have a one on one conversation (visible to the public) with people who have a deep understanding of how search engines work from the inside. One such person, and I know he will hate me for saying so, is Ammon Johns, and in this thread named One-way links?, we got into the discussion of how search engines view the link map of the Web. I plan on writing a short article on the topic, with pictures to better explain the thread, but for now, I'll give a quick overview - the thread is worth checking out.

In the thread we discussed the idea of not linking from site a to site b, because it is very easy to detect. Ammon adds that even Pyramid / Triangular Linking Strategies are also easy to detect, if you think of how search engines look at the link map of the Web. Ammon explains that search engines look at the link structure of the Web from a 'six degrees of separation' type of manner. He then compares it to a graphical illustration of a traceroute, where you can see how the nodes of the Internet interconnect. If you can visualize a search engines link index and then map all the links between the sites, by grouping them into small communities. Use different colors to link major hubs and authorities to smaller sites. If you see an unusual level of linkage outside of a specific community, or even something that visually looks wrong, then you can find an unnatural linking scheme.

Take a look at the thread, it is not rocket science, but it is something that is often overlooked.

This morning, while driving to work, I heard a radio commercial for Yahoo! Local. They simply said, go to Yahoo and click on the local link. Unfortunately, it took me several seconds to scan the Yahoo home page to locate the Local link, buried with the other links. Local has been in "beta" for around two months, and they have officially released local to the public. I thought beta was just a reason to not field complaints about the issues with the SERPs when conducting a search.

Obviously, Yahoo and the industry find local to be a major area in search engine development. Many smart SEMs have been targeting local, their own ways, for years now. Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch, also Chris Sherman blogged about it, which was then picked up by John Battelle.

The USC Annenberg School produces an annual report on online trends etc., the latest is available now. Mostly relevant for B2C sites, but it's chock full of stats, trends, and facts that anyone doing business online will find interesting.

Download as PDF.

MSN has recently done a second preview of their new search technology today. It was up so briefly, it made me laugh a bit, hence the title. This was first reported by Danny Sullivan, on the forums. MSN said that it is testing various specific countries, as well as some new features that include a larger database, 2 results per domain, unnumbered results. Continue discussing and hearing people who witnessed this sighting of the MSN Preview.

What's worse than Traffic Power? An SEO forum actually recommending Traffic Power to members. As well as spreading misinformation about SEO and the industry as far as it can. Ekkk! There is a recent thread in SEW that highlights some of the recent "Bogus" forums spreading around. So at this blog in an effort to post upon the daily happens of the most "Relevant" SEO forums around the internet, it can help to sometimes point out the "Bogus" ones too, so the lines are clear.

Online privacy... yep, we all value it, but do we really know if we have it? For those out there that are really concerned about their privacy or live in a constant state of "anonymity" when doing research. An online privacy thread at SEW by Nick W is one to definately check out. He goes into how he had "an overwhelming desire to protect my online anonymity whilst doing backlink checks, site: checks and scoping out KW's". He list ways he protects his information, and secures his online privacy. Pretty cool.