December 2004 Archives

I wanted to wish everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2005. Be safe this New Years and enjoy the parties.

I would also like to wish the underdog, Ask Jeeves a successful 05. And thank you for providing a Butler that is all set and ready to go.

Sorry for not posting today more then once, excluding this entry. It has been a busy day in terms of rustybrick work, plus I think the forums were very slow today.

Happy 05!

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld named What is your greatest Adsense advice?. In that thread there are many great tips; including:

- Put the ads in prominent places
- Blend the ads into your copy, as if they were part of your copy
- Read the program policies and the terms and conditions
- Don't bury it at the bottom of the page like it's an apology or footnote
- Let the visitors do the clicking
- Do well with site content, high traffic and repeat visitors
- Experiment with banner styles, placement and various pages within the site
- Don't sit and watch your AdSense stats, they will tend to fluctuate from day to day, so think long term
- Have good SEO'd pages (that is what helps serve up relevant ads)
- Use the earnings to invest onto your site

As Gmail rounds out the 2004 year, I will be giving out 12 free gmail invites to those who leave a comment with their full name and valid email address. If the email address is invalid then you will not get the invite. Invites are sent via email, and can be blocked by spam filters. Here is the Gmail 2004 recap from the Gmail home page.

2004 was quite a year for us! Here's a quick recap:

April 1st: Gmail launches. Some thought it was a joke, but we were serious about our gig of free space. (The real April Fool's jokers wanted to give people the moon.)

July 10th: Users can import contacts. Suddenly, keeping in touch with faraway friends becomes a lot easier.

October 9th: We finally add 'Save Drafts.' No one is more excited than we are about never again having to answer "Why don't you have a way for users to save drafts?"

November 7th: Ideas POP into mind. Why not offer POP and auto-forwarding for free? Sure. Why not?

And of course, there's the one thing that we've been doing every day... trying to build a great email service for you. After all, it's all about you. We read the blogs, the forums, and every testimonial. We appreciate all the nice things you say. There are so many ways for you to contact us, but so few for us to speak to you. So as we start the new year, we just want to say: "Thanks."

We hope you enjoy our approach to email in 2005!

Isn't this sweet of Google to say; "After all, it's all about you. We read the blogs, the forums, and every testimonial. We appreciate all the nice things you say." Kind of tears you up, doesn't it. ;) We love you to Google.

Ask Jeeves does it well, so now who is playing follow the leader? There is a thread at SEO Chat named Google Image Suggestion which describes a member (who has been at SEO Chat for as long as I can remember) who sees Google Image results at the top of the normal search results. He conducted a search on charles manson and saw the following screen.

I personally do not see it, but the screen capture is proof. Of course, Ask Jeeves has been doing this for a while now. Go ahead, and do a web search at Ask Jeeves on charles manson.

Ever wonder what SEM's listen to while doing their black magic? There is a thread at Cre8asite that discusses just that. So far the list has; Michael Cretu, Arthea Franklin, Tower of Power, Blues Brothers, Jamiroquai, Dire Straits, The Eagles, Embrace, Counting Crows, Chicane, Melissa Etheridge, Stevie Nicks, Vivaldi to Howlin' Wolf, Professor Longhair to the Ramones, Pavement to the Beach Boys, Sinatra to Sonic Youth. A splash of Mozart, a little Led Zeppelen, some Public Enemy, Jamiroquai, Enigma, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, David Gray, Starsailor, Kosheen, Placebo, Nickleback, Sterophonics & POD, Meatloaf and Simon & Garfunkle, Phil Collins, Joe Cocker, Chris Rea, Coldplay, Train, Dandy Warhols and Doves, Electric Soft Parade, Six By Seven, The Coral, Nirvana, Our Lady Peace, Coldplay and Leaves, Muse, Garbage, Blur, Minuteman, Supergrass, Stereophonics, My Vitriol, REM, Kula Shaker, X, Dead Kennedy's, Flipper, the Bongos, Tom Verlaine, Ramones, husker du, Nirvana, the Replacements, Debbie Harry, Black Flag, REM, the Beastie Boys, the Sisters of Mercy. Ween, New Order, Cream, Jeff Beck, Yardbirds, Zeppelin, Stones, Skynard, Allman Brothers, Phish, Crosby, Still and Nash, Jethro Tull, Steve Miller, Eric Clapton and my favorite Neil Young.

I actually had a gmail contest once based on a concert I attended.

Yesterday, I ask for help to start of a thread on Ask Jeeves named The Little Engine That Could. I could not have received a better response, and thank you all who have participated.

The thread is about exploring Ask Jeeves weaknesses from the SEM's perspective. We are not talking about spam issues, although Mike Grehan did show one example. We are talking about, what will it take to encourage Ask Jeeves to really take Teoma to the battle lines and stand face to face with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Let me first summarize some of the responses by those who kicked off the thread and then note some of the points in Jim Lanzone (Senior Vice President, Ask Search Properties) reply.

Andrew Goodman was the first to reply to the thread, and a single quote can sum up his point.

If Ask Jeeves doesn't do anything related to the natural-language question-answering they promised to pioneer when they launched, then the whole enterprise degenerates into a debate amongst top management and a succession of ad agencies about the relative importance of the butler.

Ammon Johns who goes under the name "Black_Knight" at the forums was next up. Just to note, Ammon is one of those SEO individuals that I deeply respect and look up to. Ammon feels that they are the "The saddest waste I've ever seen in search."

But, the desperation for cash that hit so many dot-com boomers hit this. Rather than let Teoma grow as it should, Ask insisted on tethering it by trying to turn into a pay-for-indexing engine. This was an unforgivable error of judgement, and in my opinion, is definitely responsible for Teoma not taking Google's place as the top engine in 2001/2002. Teoma had the technology, but had no pilot with the faith and vision.

Danny Sullivan followed, he played the devil's advocate by saying they have done great things with shortcuts. In addition he put things a bit in perspective with this little comment.

Let's play "Where's Lycos" to see what they've avoided.

Ian McAnerin noted that he was getting fed up with the Teoma results that seemed to be getting worse and worse as time goes by. He said;

unless they make some significant changes soon, starting with increasing their index of real sites and throwing out duplicates, they are in serious trouble.

Mike Grehan an other SEO individual I deeply respect (I respect the others as well), added some of his personal discussion with the Ask Jeeves people as well as some criticism.

There's a whole lot of stuff going on technology wise at Teoma. In my opinion Apostolos Gerasoulis, the brain behind the Teoma algorithm took their search technology to a point where Google was following them for a while. Not the other way around...
Having said that, they are quite susceptible to being knocked sideways every now and again as they get their somewhat smaller indexed pummelled with millions of spammy networks.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen who is one of the most well known SEM specialists in the International community adds his frustration with Teoma and its lack of support for international languages.

I have never personally used Teoma/Ask Jeves much because it has been so english focused. I work in several languages and need an engine that can return good results in them all - Google does that, Inktomi does that to some degree and we expect MSN to do that too. Teomo/AskJeves dosn't.

Nacho Hernandez the leading SEM expert for the Hispanic marketplace chimes in as well. Nacho notes how Ask is targeting the younger (K - 12) crowd with creative tools, and that will make the difference in the long run.

The Big 3 have grown due to popularity, features from its portal or even being driving traffic from the default homepage on just about every new computer with IE as the browser of choice. HOWEVER, creative concepts

Then we have Jim Lanzone the Senior Vice President, Ask Search Properties post a reply. In his reply he addresses many of the points addressed in the thread. I believe he left out the language support issues, sorry Mikkel and I,Brian. However he does explain that Teoma has been Ask Jeeves's "biggest investment". I pulled that slightly out of context, here is the full context; "Since then, our company’s biggest investment in new people has, by far, been in those working directly on the engine, which is now well into triple digits."

He ends off asking for advice, so lets give it to him and Ask. I for one, really do want to see Ask Jeeves step up and stare down Google, Yahoo and MSN. Teoma is unique, we all talk about it, Ask presents on it at every SES conference. Now its time for them to step up to the plate and make a statement to the SEM community that they are serious about Teoma. Jim does say in his reply that he is aware of the cannibalization of the Teoma results at Ask Jeeves by Google AdWords. He goes on to explain that Ask is a public company and he can't talk publicly about it, but he drops one line that gives us hope.

Give us some time and we'll find the right balance here.

Yesterday I wrote on the topic of URL Normalization: Is a Trailing Slash the Same Page, discussing how search engines normalize a URL and what are the SEO implications.

Today I found an interesting real life case of the issues with URL normalization with our friendly search engine Yahoo. The Yahoo Festive Bowties search brings up www.smarttuxedo.com/Festive-Bowties-15 with no trailing slash. I can tell you, that my developers have verified that all links internally use the trailing slash for those pages. So all traffic to those pages from Yahoo went to a 404 page. We will fix that on our side, that it maps to the correct page, not a big deal for us to do.

So you see, Yahoo normalized the URL and stripped off the trailing slash. This had a major impact, not on rankings, but on click throughs going to a 404 page. That reminds me, I should make a custom 404 for smart tuxedo.

I am pretty sure this was not an issue Monday. I remember conducting searches and matching up this with some of my client's sites. This issue was non existent. So this Yahoo issue seems to have recently cropped up, possibly sometime today. I have not seen any other reports of this at the forums as of yet.

Earlier today I wrote a summarization of specialized search engines. Gary over at SEW blog posted a new search engine that search the National Geographic Magazine for free. This way, people like my Dad, who has been collecting National Geographic magazines since 1888 (just kidding on the date), can quickly find out which magazine to find the content in. Nice find Gary, how do you always find these things!

There is an interesting and unique theory on the Sandbox over at WebmasterWorld. The basic premise of the theory is that Google is having a capacity problem. The sandbox is unintentional, and that is the reason Google won't say a word about this theory. You ask a Google representative, they will deny it. The reason they deny it is because of the IPO, the soon to launch MSN search and the other recent entries in the search market.

The theory states that we can possibly see a 'fix' for this sandbox issue before MSN new search engine comes out of beta. I personally do not agree about having a "capacity" problem, because I agree with bakedjack's response on the second page that this is not an indexing issue but rather a ranking issue. However, even if it is a ranking issue that Google can not admit, that would be fine by me.

Unfortunately, the thread seems to be steering a bit off the initial topic at hand. But It makes for an interesting read, at least for first page and some of the posts on the second page.

Here is a nice thread at Search Engine Watch Forums based on an article by Mary Ellen Bates named Searching for Quick Answers To Odd Questions. I'm just going to list the Specialty Search Engines below as a reference:

Refdesk: good for answering factual questions
InfoPlease: good quick fact database
Statistical Abstract
of the United States: US Census Data
HowStuffWorks: this is great when you want to know how to build a toaster or something
Internet Movie Database: Movies
Quotations Page: quotes
Librarians' Index to the Internet: what it says
Snopes: Urban Legend References
Scirus: The Science Search Engine
Internet Archive: archive of historical websites
FindLaw.com: Legal Information Resource
SingingFish: Owned by AOL (i think) streaming audio or video search engine
Find Articles: Article Search Engine
eBizSearch: By IBM academic and commercially e-biz articles search engine
Search Systems: Free Public Records Directory
Cite Seer: Computer and Information Science Papers

Today I posted a thread in the Ask Jeeves forum at Search Engine Watch named The Little Engine That Could. I'll repost it here, but I would love it if you can provide feedback to your thoughts on the engine at the thread or here (preferably at the thread). Here is its:

For me, Ask Jeeves, is a search engine that has so much potential, that it kills me to see them sit back and follow the leaders.

But Ask has been through hard times, only to establish itself as Apple Computer of the search business. Chris Sherman was quoted in an article by Chris Gaither named Which Search Engine Firm Is Coming Back? as saying; "They have very small share, but it's a very dedicated group of people who use them."

Ask Jeeves' condition grew dire as rival Google rose to fame across the San Francisco Bay in Mountain View. After signing the 10-year, $80-million lease to move its rapidly expanding staff to Oakland, Ask Jeeves posted a loss of $189 million, laid off more than half its employees and paid $16 million to get out of the lease.

So when I asked in the Meet the Crawlers session in the Q & A session:
Q: I asked Ask Jeeves why they bury the Teoma results way under the Google AdWords results at Ask Jeeves?
A: Michael answered that is was not about not being more relevant, they feel Teoma is more relevant than AdWords. But it is set up that way from a monetization standspoint only. Fair answer.

The answer is because Google saved them from their financial distress, as the article says:

In 2002, Google and Ask Jeeves inked a three-year deal to place $100 million worth of ads on Ask.com. The two companies shared the money advertisers paid whenever people clicked on those ads, known as sponsored links. The alliance has since been extended to 2007.

With that money, they made some major advancements to Teoma.

Loyalty comes from what? Brand? Quality?

Can Ask Jeeves get beyond their current market share? Do they want to or are they happy with their current position?

This might come as a bold statement, but of the major search engines (Google and Yahoo, even MSN), Ask Jeeves plays the smallest role in communication with our industry (SEM). Yes they go to the conferences but it is the little things they miss. Yahoo and Google read the SEM blogs, participate (or better yet, read) the forums. Ask, I think does less in that way.

What will it take? Is it possible? Will it happen? Does it matter? :)

There is a very interesting thread brewing at Search Engine Watch Forums named Is A Trailing / On A Directory Seen As A Differnet File By Google?. In this thread a member lists an example of the same page, different URLs due to the trailing slash, have different PageRank values. His example is:

http://www.avismauritius.com/en/locations/ PR=3
http://www.avismauritius.com/en/locations PR=0

In the thread, Orion, the resident search technology guru at SEW forums, discusses how search engines normalize the URLs in order to give each URL a unique identifier. I hope that I explain this correctly. It is my understanding that the unique identifier is a hash string, possibly a 64 or 128 bit hash string. In order to assign a unique identifier, the URL needs to be stripped down and normalized. The process is a bit like Orion stated:

Removal of the protocol prefix (http://) if present Removal of a :80 port number specification if present (However, non-standard port number specifications are retained) Conversion of the server name to lower case Removal of all trailing slashes ("/")

However, this does not really explain if Google does all or some or none of this. Moderator Chris_D referenced an old WebmasterWorld thread where GoogleGuy sheds some more light on this topic. He talks a lot about http responses and URL requests, but the important line to get out of the thread is "I would always recommend the trailing slash. If you know the exact right url, it's often best to give it directly and save everyone that extra redirect." You also might want to check out msg # 6 in that thread.

PageOneResults from the SEO Consultants Directory explains that this is more of a matter of "content negotiation". He goes on to explains;

The W3C and other large website structures are now utilizing content negotiation. That means that this...

www.example.com/sub

...could be different than this...

www.example.com/sub/

With the use of content negotiation, there are no file extensions. Basically you are cleaning the URI of all underlying identifying technologies.

Bottom line, the same URL with and without a trailing slash can and is considered different to most search engines. Most are weeded out through the use of duplicate content filters, and most sites do not have this problem because of the built in way the server handles these URL requests.

As mentioned earlier, Barry Welford has posted a concept of "Originality Factor" or the "OR Scale". His idea is nobel, to have those who write content at blogs, label the content on a scale from 1 to 10. An OR=10 would represent that the content is 100% unique and original, and that would be very rare. So this entry would probably get a OR=2 for summarizing the content within a post at Cre8asite Forums. Of course everyone would be on the honor system, and I am sure the scales would differ greatly in terms of the subjectivity persuasion.

There are comments in the thread on using search technology to determine the originality of a blog entry. However, you and I know that linkage data can be very skewed when it comes to "originality". Let's take a typical scenario, and to confirm this, ask other bloggers like Andy or whomever. We find interesting news, occurrences, or ideas through internal resources, day dreaming, forums, conversation and other avenues. Then we collect our thoughts in a blog entry for those to read. Often, other bloggers in the circle pick up on the content and comment on it. If the idea is good enough to hit the mainstream, it might get slashdotted. Slashdot often links to the original source, however, if it is really mainstream news, it will get picked up by C|Net or similar content sites. They rarely ever give credit to the main source, for whatever reasons. More people read the information, as if it was originally posted for the first time at C|Net, more bloggers link to the C|Net article. Then when you look at the linkage data, the majority of it points to the C|Net version, so thus, the C|Net version is the original.

Did I just get side tracked? Anyway, I like the OR factor more on the honor system, then on a linkage system. :)

Over at SEO Chat a member is complaining about Yahoo! including a relevant result to a Yahoo property at the top. Do a search on Beatles at Yahoo and you will see under the sponsored ad, a Yahoo Shortcut. The Yahoo Shortcut for this result leads you to either the Beatles page on Yahoo! Launch or if you prefer to buy a CD, it will lead you to Yahoo! Shopping with Beatles CDs.

How is this any different then what Ask Jeeves is doing with that result? They are probably doing a better job. Of course Google is too pure to shove you commercial results unless you specifically ask for it. But I personally would like to see Froogle results included in the Web results at the top Beatles CDs for sale when I search for Beatles CDs.

Is Yahoo! stealing results? I don't think so. I think they are using their large network of content and quality information to make for a better user search experience.

There is a thread at Cre8asite named 10 Things Your Web Site Should Be Doing, which brings up several interesting topics based on an article by Nick Finck. Now the thread gets into several interesting concepts, I will summarize the topic of Credibility Content and Trust Building Icons in this entry and then summarize Barry Welford's "OR Factor" in an other entry.

When it comes to "credibility content", content used to build up the credibility of your company, product and services - there are several avenues to take. One such avenue discussed in the thread is "testimonials", basically letters written by customers, showing their satisfaction with your company. James in the thread says "My personal view is that unless you are given enough information to contact the person providing the testimonial to check its authenticity, they hold little credibility." It is true, I have some clients that often write testimonials on their clients behalf. I personally have never read a testimonials page before making a purchase decision. In my proposals, I do provide a list of references that my prospects can contact with their credibility and trust questions. Testimonials without a method to contact those giving the testimonial holds little weight.

But is that true?

Let's look at some "trust building icons". I have recently decided to put Better Business Bureau's BBBOnLine Reliability Program Icon on my corporate site. So far I had 126 clicks on the icon, probably 20 of those clicks was me or someone at my office. I also have the Verisign Secure Site Seal icon on my corporate site, simply because I do have a secure login area. Do I know if it builds credibility for my company? I am not sure. Yesterday, one of my employees said that the BBB is a hoax, they do nothing to benefit you or the customer. I responded that maybe you and I know that as business owners, but does it mean anything to the prospect?

Of course you would think that all the trust building icon sellers have data on this. But it is all skewed. I have a client that uses HackerSafe, to build trust during the checkout process. My client is convinced that it has done nothing to improve sales and is not worth the investment, because there is zero or negative ROI. But yet, HackerSafe has data that proves otherwise. Interesting topic.

Members at WebmasterWorld are reporting an increase in referrers from Google. The traffic these members lost with a Sept. 23 occurrence at Google, seems to be coming back for these members. I have coverage of what I named on September 27th as Google Referrers Drop Drastically for Many with information and links to threads on that event.

Something I have noticed at this blog was a drop in referral traffic over the past week, a large decrease. Time for me to start my own post asking if other blog owners noticed this. :)

There has been a lot of debate out there on the black hat and white hat side of things. One thing you will rarely find is a black hat tell on an other black hat. However, there are some white hat firms that are starting to add "spam reporting" to their SEO package. A thread over at HighRankings named Spam Reporting 2, Obligations and Issues details some of Scottie Claiborne's issues with spam results:

1) Relevant spam is often not removed
2) Algorithmic penalties do exist
3) Some sites do well despite spam techniques, but probably not because of them

It is going to make for a very interesting thread.

There is an excellent thread over at WebmasterWorld that is not getting enough attention. The thread is named From an SEM Perspective: Local Search is just Hype, where moderator Chicago (the local, local expert at WebmasterWorld) plays devils advocate and says;

Given what WE know, and in this marketplace, there are much better things to be doing with our time than chasing, selling, and servicing SMEs.

His argument that, when it comes down to it, there is $250 a month per small business to spend in the online advertising world. Of course, as Chicago expected, there was a loud outcry of those who disagreed with this.

But as someone who really loves statistics and the numbers behind them, I find the whole thread great. In the statistics world, you can turn any number any which way you want. That is the beauty of statistics, it is a math like no other.

Besides for Google five holiday logos including the one below, other search engines and search forums have dressed up their logos for the season.

Just wanted to wish you all a happy holidays! We made a card for our clients and those on the RustyBrick mailing list. Wanted to share it with the readers. FYI - Ronnie on the card is my partner at RustyBrick.

		Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season! Ronnie, Barry and the entire RustyBrick Crew www.rustybrick.com

The question of "when is a page really considered indexed by a search engine" came up when I wrote an entry named Google Not Obeying the NoIndex NoFollow Meta Tag. Basically, Google was crawling and listing the page when doing a site: command. The listing did not include page information outside of the URL.

In my mind, Google must have "indexed" a portion of the page, i.e. the URL. How else can Google display the URL when doing a site: command? The URL must be in the Google database (index) for it to show up in any of the search results.

There are those that argue that the definition of being in the index, requires that other information, outside of the URL must be displayed in the URL. I have started a thread that is building up on the topic over at Search Engine Watch named When Does Google Really Index a Page?

I wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays! Thank you for reading every day and thanks for your kind and thought provoking comments.

I have 15 gmail invites to give out, so the first 15 of you to leave me your Full Name and email address in the comment area of this entry will get a free gmail invite. Important, I need a real email address or else the gmail invite will never get to you.

Happy Holidays!

I have been looking for the classic Classic Hampster Dance page for a while now. I finally found it, thanks to someone I chatted with today. Of course, now it is easy to find, but when I looked 6 months, it was not in Google. Of course, the hampsters have a new, high tech look these days. But the classics are preserved. The site is at http://www.hampsterdance.com/.

For those that don't know the story behind this site, it was a little gimmick that a person put up one day. I think it was hosted at one of those member AOL sites. Anyway, the individual put up the Classic Hampster Dance page (which was at a different URL) and then emailed a friend or two about it. Those friends email other friends, and so on. It was one of the first reported viral marketing tactics ever on the Web. In addition, it was unintentional.

Danny beat me to it with his Google, Yahoo Post 2004 Most Popular Search Terms entry, however, I will link to the top search reports by the search engines here anyway.

- Google Top 2004 Search
- Yahoo Top 2004 Search
- Ask Jeeves Top 2004 Search
- AOL Top 2004 Search
- Lycos Top 2004 Search

Did you get the cool Mood Light AM/FM Radio from Google for Christmas? If you did, join the discussion at WebmasterWorld on the present. One member put up a picture to what it looks like. Supposedly, this is the office site for the Mood Radio.

Set your Google Preferences to display 100 results on a page. Then go ahead and do a search on "ipod", or just use this link http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=ipod. I counted over 90 Google AdWords ads on the right hand side. Pretty cool.

I first spotted this at WebmasterWorld from a post this past Sunday. Makes holiday shopping easier. :)

The sandbox has been hampering SEO efforts as far back as before April of 2004. Our first official coverage of what was later to be termed as the "sandbox effect" was on April 17th in an entry named New Sites = Poor Results in Google which linked to the first large thread on the topic at WebmasterWorld. Since then we mentioned sandbox here over 25 times.

A forum individual who pretty much has been dedicating most of his time towards uncovering the sandbox theory has developed a tool named Sandbox Detection Tool which does its best to "calculate factors commonly associated with being under Google's "sandbox" penalty." The inventor of the tool, randfish, removed the link to this tool temporarily while he makes some minor modification based on the feedback at an SEO Chat Thread.

There is this thread at SEO Chat named Email Addresses Count as Backlinks which discusses someone's case of finding email addresses being counted as backlinks. The member did not provide any example, but the topic is different.

Members that are skeptical of such a theory state that the @ symbol is being turned into a ? by Google. Then Google is doing a match on the part after the ?, which happens to be the domain name.

Anyway, I guess this theory can be tested. Just put a new domain, make sure no one links to it, and then link to an email with the domain name of the new domain. Only problem with this is that many newly registered domain names are picked up by search engines because someone is out there linking to them for one reason or an other.

Wanted to highlight a recent find today on what a member on SEOchat discovered as his MSN homepage yesterday. Appears that MSN is testing their new search engine integrated into the current homepage layout. It appears to be just served only to a limited number of people. Its not as flashy as the current MSN layout, but its basically the same information without all the graphics or CSS elements. Maybe they are going for more of a simple easy on the eyes design, like well you know who. Its worth a look to see what the new search engine will look like on the homepage. It could be just another early test and not reflective of the roll out next year.

Before hand you could only see the single search field with several options if you visited the location of the MSN beta.

Check out how MSN will look (possibly) when they finally roll out of beta: http://www.msn.com/defaultpf.armx

Have you ever noticed the little "more" text link under the Google Sponsored Links (AdWords) on the right side of the search results page at Google. For example, do a search on canada travel at Google and look at the bottom right, you will see a "more" link that goes to a URL in the format of http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=.

I have attached an image of what you should see, click on it for the full screen version.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

Normally an SEO is looking to reverse engineer the Google algorithm. In a thread at SEO Chat named Is it time to Reverse Engineer our Methods? a member posts a thread about Google reverse engineering the SEO. Some of the suggestions in the thread, I find to be comical. For example; "You [SEO] target your keyword in the title - they [Google] ignore the title" and "You [SEO] collect inbound links BUT they [Google] put more weight on outbound links!!!!"

SPAM is a problem for any search engine, reverse engineering how most SEOs work, will not make for a better search engine. Think about it, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and now MSN all come to the search engine optimization conferences telling SEOs to put keywords in the title of the page, to have good descriptive anchor text and to be careful not to get involved with spam.

The search engines need to reverse engineer the SPAM tactics out there, not the SEO.

Why is Google not obeying the <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> line in this site's pages? Take a look at http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.seroundtable.com&num=100, you will see that all of these redirect URLs, which are used to discourage comment spam at this blog, are being indexed. For example, this page www.seroundtable.com/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red&id=1879, redirects to Nacho, who left a comment at this blog.

If you look at the header information for www.seroundtable.com/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red&id=1879 you will see:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head><title>Redirecting...</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() { document.location = document.links[0].href; };
</script></head>
<body>
<p><a href="http://www.ihispanic.com">Click here</a> if you are not redirected</p>
</body>
</html>

So why is Google indexing these pages?

Peter Da Vanzo, a moderator at Cre8asite Forums and author of a funny reading Search Engine Blog said he is tired of waiting for dmoz and started his own directory named RubberStamped.org.

In a thread at Cre8asite, started by Peter, which he so elegantly named Blatant Self Promotion he asks the Cre8asite people for feedback. The basic information in the thread includes:
-$25.00 review fee
-two day turn-around
-anchor text friendly
-much promotion planned for 2005

Which he then adds to by explaining that the structure or layout isn't going to be much different then the competitors but:
-The content makes the difference. That will come. Already started, in fact.
-Ontology is a wonderful science. Often overlooked.
-The presence in the market is different. Some directories are able to market more effectively than others. It's not just about form, it's also about delivering real value to stakeholders, and building effective relationships. Anyone can open a shop. Not everyone can open a successful shop on the high street.

I have been disliking Orkut for a while now. They have actually said to a member that this network, which is here to "expand the circumference of your social circle", is not allowing him to expand his social circle beyond 1,000 friends. Joi Ito asks, "What do I do with my Orkut network now that I'm "done"?"

Hat tip to Searchblog.

Picture yourself standing blindfolded, in a meeting with department heads, stakeholders, programmers, user interface engineers, quality assurance software testing engineers, project manager and you.

Someone is spinning you around and around, asking you questions about everything from information architecture, to user testing, to what the user habits of every 12th visitor to page 3, hub 5 will be. The stakeholder is demanding to meet his deadline and the department head will fire you if conversions don't meet 2nd quarter sales projections.

Your job title is ???.

You're important because of ????.

The only person who can possibly give you any sort of compassion is the company SEO/SEM, who meanwhile is handcuffed to their cubicle until Google ranks the site in the top position for 300 keywords and stays in that spot without budging. Ever. Or the SEO dies.

Continue reading "Pin The Tail on The Usability Donkey"

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Having trouble believing in crosslinking penalties really got me thinking about intentions as a relevancy tool. First, let me summarize the thread so you can get some perspective. The thread discusses a members doubts when it comes to "cross-linking penalties". The member has a handful of sites all somewhat on different topics; apple mac forum, volvo forum, photography site, Garageband news site and an education news blog. The member interlinked each one because of the simple fact he owned each one. In addition, each site is hosted on the same domain name, same server and same IP address. So you can see his doubts.

Other members who are fairly well known around the SEO forum community came in to offer some support. One member explained how a network of jewelry sites that all focus on a niche of jewelry interlinked with each other. The network of sites ranked very well for about a year, until Google basically banned the sites. So this member's advice was be careful.

An other well known member came in to give examples of sites such as Jupiter Media, Developer Shed and even network of hotel sites in my Stockholm SES Coverage. Those types of sites link on all of the pages within their networks, using the same anchor text either at the header or footer of every single page. In addition, most of these sites are on the same C Class, some are on the same IP and some are even residing on the same server (as with the case of the stockholm coverage).

Now we have two examples, the network of jewelry sites and the network of content sites.

The topic of user intent has been discussed time and time again. In the case of the network of content sites, the intent was to build a brand. JupiterMedia, DeveloperShed and the Stockholm example are all proud of the content they have built up and want to build up a brand. My SEO side says, hey, these guys are doing crazy interlinking. But to an average user, it just shows them how many sites and Internet properties Jupiter and DevShed manages. This is often like when you go to a building in the city and they have a sign with the owners name on it. Trump Towers, Trump Casinos, Trump Resorts and so on - just take a look at the property portfolio at http://www.trump.com/.

User intent is critical in defining relevancy when it comes to these gray areas. If your intent includes other intentions outside of ranking number one for Blue Widget, when building these network of sites, then great. If not, or if much of the intent has to do with rankings, then you need to sit down and rethink your strategy. The example of the member above with the apple mac forum, volvo forum, photography site, Garageband news site and an education news blog, is an example of someone who is proud to have built up five sites. I doubt he has a goal to rank number one for "garageband" in Google.