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.

For those of you that have been reading this site for a while now, you will know the name Digital Point. In fact, back in July I interviewed Shawn Hogan of Digital Point, because, whether he admits it or not, he has been instrumental in helping the SEO community grow with his onslaught of free SEO tools. Keep in mind, that Shawn doesn't build tools that are already out there, like most of us. He is an inventive individual, coming up with new ideas that solve problems.

In early July of 2004, I announced the Digital Point Ad Network with a quote from Shawn. The goal was simple, to do something with the "ton of unused advertising space out there on the Internet." Webmasters can serve up none JavaScript required ads to a wide spread of Internet surfers. At first the network was small, under 100 sites, under 500 sites, and even under 1,000 sites. But then the network starting taking off, and there were those who tried to take advantage of it to rank well for keywords in the "PPC" category (Porn, Pills and Casinos). Of course, Shawn does his best to make sure the links within the network are all from sites that are not associated with "bad neighborhoods" but the job is getting bigger.

A thread (I am not sure what to call it, a blog) at ThreadWatch has been the location of much chatter on this network. You have those who are worried about the network being mapped by Google and then anyone involved would be banned from Google. But if you look at the network carefully, you will notice some things.
(1) The network uses the Google API to determine if the pages with the ads on them are spam free. If Google has them in the index, they will be allowed in. Thus and pages that are spam, as defined by Google, will not be allowed in the network.
(2) Shawn personally reviews all the ads requested. Of course this job gets harder every day, as the network grows. He will be signing on volunteers to help review ads.
(3) People do the bait and switch tactic, and Shawn has caught a few and banned them from the network. Again, as the network grows, this will be more of a resource challenge. Part of the volunteers jobs will be to review existing ads on a continual basis. I would think Shawn will add a "report spam" page.
(4) Contextual based ads. Relevancy of the ads are important to those advertising and the publishers. At the beginning, it was a small group of individuals participating in the ad network, so relevancy was kind of there just do to the small network of people involved. As the network grows, Shawn will be adding contextual based algorithms to serve up ads that are related to the site. It was the natural next step for the ad network and it is going that way, soon.

GoogleGuy commented early during that thread saying:

But I'm saying that participation in a program that leads one to link to a site with pages (or the hidden text links I mentioned earlier) can directly impact the reputation of one's own site. If people realize that and want to take that risk, that's their choice of course.

I thought it was very smart of Shawn to use the Google index (API) to determine what ads and sites are allowed in the index. That is not enough, and I agree with GoogleGuy. If bad neighborhoods and hidden text links get into the network, then the network will die. But I am eager and excited to see what Shawn comes up with next in order to reduce the risk of being associated with such a network. He is a bright man, so this does intrigue me.

I have asked Paul Forster to provide a summary of a new search vertical for the job market named, Indeed.com.

Indeed is a search engine for jobs; a window to search all jobs on the web. Indeed enables you to search millions of jobs across all career fields - jobs that are listed on job boards, newspaper sites, and niche sites. In one simple search, you can find the very latest job listings throughout the web. You may save your searches and have jobs delivered to you by email alert or RSS. For example, here are results for a Search Engine Marketing job search.

Indeed's unique technology combines a simple interface, precision search and comprehensive coverage. Launched in November, 2004, Indeed.com is currently in Beta. The founders of the company, Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, also founded the leading finance job site, Jobsinthemoney, in 1998. Having run Jobsinthemoney for six years, they are applying their knowledge and experience to Indeed. They aim to change the way people search for jobs; to make job searching much easier, faster and more accurate.

I find it interesting when the smaller engines release keyword data. Today Ask Jeeves released their 2004 top keyword list. I am posting this just so I have the link to compare these top searches to Google's and Yahoo!'s at a later date.

As Aaron Wall noted "Jim at WeBuildPages created a tool which shows the unique linking inboud domains." The tool checks unique linking domains, ip addresses and the age of those domain names. It can be found at http://www.555webtemplates.com/backlinks-tool.asp.

Doug, the administrator over at I Help You Forums posted a new thread named "The LinkBox Affect", his way of interpreting the sandbox theory. In short he gives a punch list of items that I will re-summarize here, make sure to check out the thread.

There are tons of threads out there on major changes taking place over at Google. People's SERPs are up and down, left and right and in and out. Personally, I have seen very little abnormal movements on the keyword phrases I track. So I thought I lead you to some threads that are discussing theses topics. But before doing so a post at DigitalPoint adds one tidbit I thought would be interesting.

1. adding &filter=0 brings back my sites 2. Firefox adds a bunch of gobbledygook to the url when i search and it shows new results without my sites. IE does not add the gobbledygook and it shows the old results with my sites back in place. See http://forums.seochat.com/showthrea...5839#post145839 for the details.

Basically, this is just one screwed up update that will hopefully fix itself in time.

Forum Coverage:
- Digital Point
- WebmasterWorld
- SEO Chat
- JimWorld
- V7 Forums

Tim Mayer of Yahoo mentioned it in the meet the crawlers session as SES Chicago. He said, "they launched a new index Tuesday night, so you might see some changes." And you bet, people have been noticing some serious changes. Quick guess, I think they are putting a bit more weight towards linkage data then they did a week ago.

For forum discussion check out:
- WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Watch
- DigitalPoint
- SEO Chat
- Cre8asite
- HighRankings

About two weeks ago was the one year anniversary of the search engine roundtable and I decided to give the much spoken about PR Web a try. As many of you know, PRWeb is known as the "backdoor to search engine optimization", so I wanted to give it a try.

Last week, the press release for the 1 year anniversary went up under the title of Reporting Search Engine Marketing Topics for One Year on Search Engine Roundtable. That very same day, doing a search at Google News or Yahoo News for search engine marketing or search engine, brought this news-release to the top spot. Continuing reading the entry below for the screen captures for proof, click on them for larger images.

The folks over at PR Web were very helpful, and so were some friends that know how to optimize press releases. That is key, the optimization of press releases. In the SERPs, if you see the images in the extended entry, you will notice a picture included. Of course, if someone sees a picture, they are more likely to click through to the article. Great tip. In addition, the article itself, I wanted to rank for "search engine marketing" and it did, in addition it ranked for search engine and other keywords. Also, I was able to give certain pages, long lasting, relevant and powerful anchor text. All part of the optimization tactics when making a press release. If you are a large or small business and you do press releases the anchor text can be instrumental in ranking your pages over time. Be smart and utilize that option. Also, even if your not doing press releases, you probably should start thinking about doing them. This press release cost $350 because I paid for all the bells and whistles, I find it well worth while.

Here are some statistics:
139,145 reads; 494 estimated number of media outlets to pick it up, and 13 print outs. They also broke down who visited the release by location, 54% being from the US. Break down by referral chart. Here are the top search terms; search engine marketing, search engine, marketing news, marketing topics, marketing, what is a search engine, seo, "search engine". They also break down the top search terms by referrals.

So what did it do for me? Well, I really didn't have any call to action that I wanted them to take. A big mistake I made was not to give them a reason to click through. If I was a business, I could have said, we have this new service and as an introductory offer, get 10% off. Something to that affect, would have brought more traffic to the site. I did get 15 referrals from eMediaWire and several referrals from PR Web to this site. But I blame myself for not being more "salesy" in order to get more click throughs.

Overall, I am going to recommend my clients use this when announcing new products, services and information. The SEO side alone is worthwhile, but the potential of click throughs from the reads, with a call to action, can be enormous.

Continue reading "Press Releases & Search Engine Optimization"

While I was at the SES Conference (which I really need to make sub categories for, I'll get to it one day) Jeremy Zawodny blogged about the new Yahoo Video Beta Search. In a later blog entry at the YSearchBlog, says that they made a number of improvements to the Video index as well as telling us that we can expect RSS support. Yahoo is really embracing RSS, good stuff.

I did not have much time to find forum threads on it at the time, so I let it sit. WebmasterWorld recently Featured a Thread on the topic. I did have some time while at the conference to mess around with the results. I did a search on basketball, I am a white short guy, but I love playing basketball. What I found was three of the same result (video) (same movie) on four of the first pages for that search. See the second result on the first page "basketball.mpg" at www.texastechie.com/HTML/fun/BasketBallGotGame.htm (I did not watch it, but it has the same caption). Then click to the second page and the first result named "basketball_1.mpg" at www.badchristian.com/funny.htm. And also on the fourth page the 4th result named "basketball.mpg" at www.thelissners.com/WebPages/Comedy.html was the same movie.

Now to build a technology that watches the movie to make sure that even if the location and file name are different, if the movie is the same, do not show it twice - then that will be cool. Or they can hire me to review all movies indexed, just need a big couch.

Reports are that Google is doing a major update on backlinks and SERPs. I see new backlinks at 216.239.59.105 and 216.239.59.104. Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just got back to NY, so I didn't have time to check the other forums. Thank you Max for the heads up while I was away.

Q: Nacho asks; How do you fix SEMPO?
A: Danny said no SEMPO questions.

Q: When should I start seeing conversion metrics on my paid search?
A: Danny said right away for the paid. Jill said, on the organic you should see it a good month or so after the page is indexed.

Q: Is it challenge to Overture in having people sign up for Overture's Conversion Tracking service, because of the data privacy issues?
A: Jonathan Glick from Yahoo said having that data opens up new pricing models such as CPA. But they won't ever use that data to increase your prices because its an auction system and the market decides the price.

Q: Someone asked if reciprocal links are bad?
A: Jill said reciprocal links in themselves are not bad. Link to who you think is good to link to. Yahoo agrees.

Yahoo also says that links in general to a domain name is looked at, not just on a page to page basis.

Yahoo also said it is not OK to trade links inside the industry if they are done to just bring up your rankings.

Q: This whole discussion on "themed" content.
A: Danny then asked Jon, do you look at all the pages in a site to figure out what your site is talking about? Jon said no.
Danny continued to talk about that this was a theory that went off. He doesn't believe in it. Basically he explained it worked because you now have 10 sites with super home pages on a specific topic, each targeting different topics. So now you increase the odds of getting hit on your homepage.
Jill agrees.
Jon agrees.

Q: I have stores in many of the major cities. Is it ok if I insert city name into a template system and repeat the content over on every page, would that be ok?
A: It depends if you have real reason for you to have those pages. They look for unique content, if that content is too similar, then you will have a problem. Yahoo is doing more work on local, and if you can add an address, hours of operation, phone, etc. to the page that will help with the local technologies being built today by the engines.

Martin Laetsch from Intel is in charge of all public search over at Intel. About 2 years ago he took a look at Intel's search marketing efforts and he was surprised about how distributed his SEM was. Each division was doing their own thing at a wide spread level. 19% of the keyword they were purchasing were in as many as 9 different campaigns, they were bidding against each other. This not only cost a ton of money but made for a bad user experience. It took about a year to centralize, he controls every campaign. Click through rates doubled, cost per click went down 50%, so things are going well these days.

Joe Morin works for AutoByTel had similar issues that Martin was having, in the sense of bidding on keywords and sending those keywords to the wrong landing pages. But he primarily works on SEO, and does ton of that fun mod_rewriting with his huge dynamic sites. He got 600,000 pages indexed and then when Google doubled their index, so did AutoByTel.

Marshall Simmonds from About.com talked about About.com's major issues in 1999. He was there to establish and SEO Strategy. They had a 573% increase in search engine referrals since 1999, with very minimal changes for low costs. SEO Strategy includes two people, his boss to manage internal search and himself to manage external search. The SEO Strategy (1) Communication (2) Design (3) Relevance (4) Visibility (5) Metrics. COMMUNICATION: Get them moving in the same direction, they had to teach the editors how to write for search engines. They repeat the message over and over again. And they continue to research and locate their new markets through log files and various keyword suggestion tools. They communicate with management with staff through; newsletters, search center, seo discussion board, dedicated email addresses, chats, frequent reports, and onsite training. DESIGN: The technical fixes. Standardize the HTML with templates; Check lists for IT people (dos and donts); Global search and replace of meta keyword tags, global search and replace on meta description, leave branding to the web site?, mininco.com and TQN redirected 301 style, and then cleaned up the code with CSS, JavaScript, SSI, etc. RELEVANCE: SEO Basics. No Quick fixes with small budget; focus on essentials, turn pagerank off, rules and regulations. VISIBILITY: Knowing your engines. He showed some screen shots of layouts and design and links and abstracts. METRICS: Establish Baselines. They run web positions reports, log files, index counts, link pop reports, google alert, spiders, referrals, talk to it, and more.

Bill Hunt from IBM has 83 localized language versions representing 31 countries. Millions of pages across 100+ brand sites. Numerous SEM programs centrally managed w/ local execution. He explains big sites are slow moving, multiple content and technology owners, site changes all the time, strict and complex development cycles, cant use the latest trick to rank better. But small changes have significant impact, can leverage internal assists, link building tends to be easier and more valuable, and many other advantages. Enterprise SEO takes the bottom up approach. They first start with the infrastructure (get more pages indexed), then coding (get more pages ranked highly), and content (more clicks and higher ranking). They have a step by step process to SEO on enterprise sites. They also do SEM Training and certification; they have 21 specialized training programs. The benefits to him is that so many people now at IBM are involved in this. (1) Remove Infrastructure Problems (2) Coding and Content Infrastructure; optimized those html templates (3) Keyword & Page Optimization, they built a tool to manage which division is bidding on keywords. He has to skip over the other steps, but I covered it in my past coverage of his discussions of this model.

John Tawadros from iProspect is focusing on how you get what you need from the organization. Challenges includes; expectations, big brands think they should always be number one. Competition includes; you have traditional and online competitors, partners who are authorized to use your brand, and simply be honest. Participation; there are many stakeholders , internal politics, personalities and just other types of things to delay you. Its important you set deadlines, be creative. Regiment and Process; "that's the way we do things". Understand why that is and then be creative. There is also opportunity; capitalize on your brand. Most organization has many vendors, integration of that is an opportunity. Execution and Flexibility.

Ethan Giffin from Allegis Group only has 20,000 pages indexed, so he is the small guy. They increased their SE traffic tremendously.

Jen Fitzpatrick from Google first explained the insides and out of PageRank, but it can obviously not be published here. :) They say their main index is composed of three main indexes; the news index, the fresh index, and the main index. She then talks about some basic guidelines for webmasters, you know the dos the don'ts. Some more basics on 301s, header commands, and robot.txt slides. She explains that Google prides themselves on telling the user what is paid versus unpaid results, and she explicitly says they do not do paid inclusion for that reason. Detlev sped her up and she had to run through some of the newer technology.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves gets right to the relevancy speech, the link community discussion and the other structured data components. :)

Tim Mayer from Yahoo Search starts off with next.yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com. He announced that they launched a new index Tuesday night, so you might see some changes. He goes over same deal as everyone else, but adds in the redirect information which I posted in that session. He explains that paid inclusion has no impact on the free crawl content.

Ken Moss from MSN Search starts off explaining that they use Inktomi for their current search (the Yahoo guys in front of me commented to each other - who owns Inktomi). He then explained that they have MSN Beta and wants our feedback. In addition they have a new beta tool bar for desktop search. They have a 150kb page size limit. MSN has a feature called "near me", that looks for local content and suggests it to the user.

See my past coverage of these sessions, they are pretty much all the same.

Q & A:

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.

To be honest, the reason I asked was to some how bring Teoma out. It is way to hidden and I find that to be a shame.

Lots of basic questions being asked, I think I will leave and see how Elisabeth is doing in the Site Clinic.

Ben Wills from KeywordRanking asked the audience how many of their clients have 10 or more sites, most raised their hands. A particular client of his operated in multiple global locations. So they looked at the internal org structure, the opportunities and abilities are available with the systems currently in place, who will implement the changes and most importantly what are the marketing goals of the domain restructuring. They have three divisions; corp, govt, consumer. They are divided in five regions in the world, working in 50+ countries. Each region has their own marketing and technology departments responsible for each country's web site. And each region would promote different products to their region. they had 21 sites with their own domain name. 28 of those sites run as a subsection of client.com, (i.e. subdomain.client.com/dir/country/home.asp?var=val. 5 sites run as a subsection of a different subdomain. Some country sites redirect to another country's web site. They recommended to move each country subdomain web site to a country specific tld (i.e. co.uk). Improves rankings in country specific search engines. Improves branding of client's division to consumer. Improves URL memorization for "mental bookmarking". What about other businesses? Companies with/wanting company brand recognition, product.company.com i.e. msdn.microsoft.com. Companies with/wanting product brand recognition, product.com, i.e. aim.com. International business operations. company.countryTLD or product.company.countryTLD, ex. google.co.uk.

Bruce Clay from BruceClay.com explains that there is never a one size fits all solution here. Different Products Confusion: Mixing different themes confuse the search engines, content does not make sense to a person. He showed an example of mixing white marbles with black marbles, so you are no longer about only about white marbles anymore. Linking / Navigation Issues: Very easy to have excessive navigation making it confusing for the user and the engine. 100 domains, same whois, same IP, same anchor text, etc. Those are two big issues. He then gives his "Jeff Foxworthy" line; "you might be a redneck", simple put - it stands out.IP Funneling; multiiple domains pointing at the same content, using DNS to map the site will result in duplicate content penalty, instead use a feeder site to have multiple domains go to a single production site. Basically map your dns records to one of your parked domain names and then point that one via a 301 redirect to the main production site. He said he has a dental association as a client that builds sites for over 2,500 sites. They went through all the sites, changed all the whois info and the IP addresses. Now they rank very well, before they did not.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves put up an example of a site, he did not have a presentation, only on the board for the Q&A. He showed an example of www.seneca.newsiowa.com, he shows off the content, and clicks on an article. He then flips over www.napoleon.newsalabama.com, which has pretty much the exact same information. So the same news in Alabama and Iowa... And then pulls up www.islandton.newssouthcarolina.com, same news here as well. Michael said this is domain spam, and search engines hate it.

Q & A:
Q: Why wouldn't you just filter out the rest of those domain names and put up the most relevant result?
A: Michael said that in this case, this was done as domain spam. Some sites do it unintentionally, and in that case, they will keep the most relevant system.

The evening session with Danny Sullivan started off with a discussion about what categories would you want Search Engine Watch to use in determining the number and types of search marketing awards to give out. So basically, Danny Sullivan, in conjunction with Search Engine Watch and Jupiter Media will be holding a search marketing awards, just like the Webby Awards but focused on search marketing.

There is no name for the awards show yet. The categories are still being defined. There will be a small fee to enter, just to have a small barrier to entry. You will self-nominate yourself or nominate others. SEMs will probably judge the awards (not those that participate).

This is all very early in the planning stages. One of the purposes is to drive more recognition to the industry but getting big and small brands to talk about their company's search marketing success.

This is just for fun, but I was able to spend some time today talking with many different companies in the Expo hall. I wanted to highlight some of the ones that definately had a lot of offer and would recommend to others to check them out. I will have to do a full report later as I am about out of laptop battery.

For fun, the award for best exhibiter at the SES Chicago goes to too (drum roll). MSN Search for their HUGE tower of search. It was the beacon of the expo hall to come test out the new search engine, walk on the plush carpet to rest your feet, get a wonderful display of their technology and desktop search which as I found out packs some really excellent features, in a single search I can find flight information from Seattle to New York on Expedia. I have to wonder what was in the huge tower?

Several hours ago a federal judge ruled that the search engine's advertising policy does not violate federal trademark laws. Score one for the consumer. It appears that if you are interested you can successfully bid on the term "Geico" in Adwords and display ads for it, even though they may not like it.

Here is a brief summary of the news:

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected a claim by auto insurance giant Geico Corp., which argued that Google should not be allowed to sell ads to rival insurance companies that appear whenever Geico's name is typed into the Google search box.

Geico, claimed that Google's AdWords program, which displays the rival ads under a "Sponsored Links" heading next to a user's search results, confuses consumers and illegally exploits Geico's investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in its brand.

Apparently the court did not agree saying that "There is no evidence that that activity alone causes confusion". The ruling occured just three days after the trial had begun. Google is standing by the ruling saying that it "confirms that [their] policy complies with the law, particularly the use of trademarks as keywords." They are also claiming this as a victory for the consumer.

Read the full article here.

Bruce Clay was first up to the podium. What is a redirect? To display another web page for the web address that you are visiting. Why do people use redirects? If you rename or move a page, if you move a domain, if you have multiple domains pointing to the same content. Types of redirects include (1) JavaScript (2) Meta Refresh (3) 302: Found Elsewhere (Temporary Redirect) (4) 301: Permanently moved. webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webapge.php has more information. How do I know if im using a 301 or 302 redirect? Bruce has a tool at bruceclay.com/checkwerver/htm and an other tool at searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/servercheck.cgi. How to implement a permanent redirect? On an apache server you modify the .htaccess or apache config file, use the redirect directive or mod_rewrite. On an IIS server; configure the IIS Web service properties or modify it through the program. IP Funneling works by taking all your domain names, you point to one of those IPs (not the production domain name) and that parked domain name 301 redirects to the production domain name. How to make dynamic URLs indexable? Rewrite URLs with query strings to appear as static URLs. On Apache use mod_rewrite on IIS server use an ISAPI filter product such as Qwerksoft IISRewrite.

Matt Bailey from the Karcher Group. He says which should i do? Redirect or Rewrite? Rewrite when you want to make an html to dynamic, rewriting content, user bookmarks. Redirect when you change the URL, also when your changing the index page to a deeper level page, changing pages within a domain name. Should I use a 301 or 301? depends on marketing objectives, not the same for every site and every situation. Case study #1, basic asp site, limited rankings for product terms, read for redirect was because the company had to go to a parent company's domain name. They made a custom 404 page, and then did a link campaign. In month one they had 2,000 visitors, in month 2 the new domain came in and then dived under 1,000 visitors, in month 4 they started link building and traffic was back to 2,000, in month 6 the traffic then doubled. Case study #2, they had a basic html site, #1 ranking for product terms, reason for redesign (CMS, ecommerce, increase conversions). Created a new site in .NET, created new keyword based URL and did rewrite for the old page URLs so that they got to the new page. Case # 3, existing site in Java, needed new site for increased conversions, had over 3,000 URLs linked in their PPC ads. they created a new site in PHP and created static looking URLs, used mod_rewrite to maintain the old PPC links, and added robot.txt for old PPC URLs and new PPC URLs were converted over time.

Jake Baillie from True Local (BakedJake) he said he will go through this very quickly, Ill try to keep up and it will be very technical. what are rewrite rules? Regular expression based statement that tells a web server to do something, most common use is to map a virtual URL to a physical resource, essentially provides a fast and consistent way to address URL issues of any type. Dangers of using rewrite URLs include; duplicate content, infinite loops and you actually have to do work. When not to use rewrite rules? If you site is fully indexed, then you do not need to rewrite. If you have a relatively small site, you don't need them. If you have an architecture problem to solve, try and solve the architecture problem first in the code. Installing rewrite rules he skimmed over, its very technical. He showed some really neat ways to use mod_rewrite for many purposes.

Rob Sullivan from Enquiro basically showed four case studies. Tiring out and I personally dislike case studies. One thing the studies showed was that (1) soon after the new URLs were indexed the traffic spiked up and then shot back down, and then soon after the traffic went back up again and (2) the number of indexed pages doesn't necessarily have to increase, the relevancy and uniqueness of those pages do.

Jon Glick from Yahoo was the last speaker, who will share the policies of Yahoo in terms of redirects. 301 is permanent and 302 is a temp move. A meta refresh that is less then 1 sec as a 301 and longer then 1 sec then its a temp move. I couldn't get the Yahoo! Redirect handling rules cheat sheet, but I will ask Danny to send me the slide so we can post it. He then goes into why rewriting URLs help.

Update: Aaron Ferstman, the outstanding PR guy over at Yahoo, sent me the slide. I saved it as a PDF for you to download; Download Yahoo Redirect Slide by Jon Glick

To introduce us to the space of contextual advertising is Joshua Stylman, from Reprise Media. He begins by talking about the value proposition of search. The goal is to connect consumers when they’re interested and engaged. He gave the example of a search for “hotels in Chicago” that within 2 clicks he was at an Expedia page for information on hotels in Chicago. He illustrates the reality of search marketing. Google and Yahoo only over about 5-8% of the targeting, where there are many many other sites that have a more targeted audience which enables contextual advertising to be a growing and huge market.

He goes into the directory driven advertising, these are such places like City Search. There is no technology in there to determine what is the most relevant. Its about navigating categorical content and drilling down to find what your looking for. Josh said that many of these companies realized the contextual ads were not scalable. The problem selling the ads and dealing with the people, it wasn’t working so well. About 2 years ago Overture and Google started to look at how to solve this problem. He mentions several other 2nd tier engines that have jumped into the landscape. He then gives an example of the non contextual ads, such as the weather channel. He did a query for weather in New York. Most of the results are for travel in New York for people that are outside traveling to New York. Not useful for someone in New York looking for weather information. He doesn’t think all the engines are there in terms of providing a broader effort to match the person with the content.

Big channels in 2005, in-content advertising, such as those found on Vibrant Media. One of the major SEO forums uses this same type of advertising. It is basically advertising or links inside the content. If you roll over the ads in the content you get a box with the ad information. The next big channel is in-feed RSS advertising. People can pull these feeds in from a variety of sources, such as Search Engine Roundtable. Bloglines for examples is one program you can use to read and gather RSS feeds together. He mentions that spam can be a problem in this channel. He ends with positive notes on the whole space.

Up next is Brad Byrd, from NewGate Internet, to talk in more depth about contextual advertising. Last time I heard Brad speak he was very good, I imagine it will be the same this time. He starts with some case studies in contextual advertising.

First case study, is looking at traffic numbers from major pharmaceutical company. He looks at % of content traffic, % of all paid traffic, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. He compares the following engines: Google Adsense, Overture Content, Quigo AdSonar, and Vibrant Intelltxt. What is shown is that Google return about 75% of content traffic. The conversion rate is better on Overture for paid search, where Quigo is higher as well with 6.1% conversion. The cost per conversion varies in this case study, it seems for the client Overture is return the best cost per acquisition.

He moves on to his next case study for a web technology company. What is found is that content traffic costs more, but its can be a better vehicle for conversions. They see this and want to reduce the costs the client is paying in the content network. So you discover that content totals are a problem, what do you do? You need to find the problem keywords, but you can’t get rid of just the high cost keywords. He says the solution is web analytics. They find in the analytics that keyword 1 and keyword 2 are generating a good amount of traffic. These will need to be tested.

Key points to consider in Google. You can receive Google URL reports attribute all content traffic to the default URL for an AdGroup, NOT to the URL assigned to the given keyword. Google SENDS traffic to the URL assigned to the keyword. This makes Google reports useless for tracking content performance, and requires tracking tools specifically to track this.

Brad says they find this by studying the target keywords. So what they do is created a parallel campaign, pull out the keywords. You create the new group, add keywords, and make sure the pricing is the same. Content wise they cut the pricing in half.

Some key points from this. Adsense matches content against AdGroup titles, descriptions, and keywords. Smaller AdGroups are better for targeting hot ideas. Adsense fundamentally matches and targets against individual keywords (eg. Dynamic keyword insertion). If building single-keyword AdGroups for content is impractical consider strategies to identify top “content keywords” and break those out into their own AdGroups.

Andrew Goodman was up to present an overview how effective the ads are going and where the space may be going. Andrew says we like search engine marketing because can you really afford to annoy 20 million people? He gives the example of a remote shower spy camera, that no one needs but you could probably sell it online with popups. It’s a terrible type of advertising. The clear results of say Google results are way more effective and clear. He gives an example of a search “portulace seeds”. Contextual ads are not really search, so why is Google and Overture going after this inventory. He says that for awhile there was not enough ads to buy. In the beginning CTR for contextual ads is much lower, but that’s no problem. Conversion rates were the same said the search engines, but what if they are not for you. Someone else conversion rates is NOT for you.

Take home from this: Bid lower for content networks. Leave bids on, but turn off “content targeting”. You may have to create another AdGroup but its worth it. What they found was that the content targeting workaround, worked great. It cost less but conversions stay the same. Significant savings by doing low bids for content targeting. Try it.

Andrew also mentions that they tested image ads contextually in Google Adsense, and they performed terribly. The end he says, they turn them off.. Interesting, there has been good talk about whether these would work or not. He also found that content ads began performing poorly for core words. There is some continued to work well for “tail” (lower volume) words.

He presents some painful truths to end, they are: Contextual ads don’t perform well if you sit on your heels. You must bid carefully! You must track them separately.

Two of the search engines Google and Overture had 3 minutes to briefly talk. Emily White from Google said they had one slide. She puts up a huge slide with Google on it to engrain the brand even further in our heads. ; ) She says that she is seeing an increase of about 50% with conversions since Adsense inception. Advertiser ROI has been steadily improving throughout the year as we have launched targeting improvements and, an automatic CPC discounting mechanism.

Barry Chu from Overture was up next. He works as senior manager of Content Match. He says that Overture is investing heavily in content match in the next few years. Content match is apparently a completely different product than search. Its not the same and Overture quickly noticed this. They want to make sure distribution is appropriate and you can get the leads that you want.

Danny explains that the idea behind this session is to turn your $1 into $2 and your $2 into $4.

Kevin Lee from DidIt explained the concept of self funding. As long as your spend is lower then your cost, you have a self funding strategy. Where it gets complicated is when you look at the different definitions of profit. Self funding is not ROI maximization, but rather you want (1) find highest converting keywords (2) use highest converting copy (3) use the best landing page and so on. Self funding campaigns are all about profit maximization. In paid search you are trading off your volume for conversions. You can spend more, more visibility, higher traffic, more costs, but more revenue, so higher profits. So it depends on your budget. It is also important to find your break even point, you do not want to loose money on every order but make sure you understand if you get orders over phone or via store how those play a part. It is also important to understand where people are in during the buying cycle. Generally the longer the query string the deeper they are into the buying cycle. So, for early stage keywords, you may want to use different metrics to define a goal, because you might loose the cookie over a lag period. He then explains other types of success metrics outside of buying including, registrations, lagged orders, multi channel retailer store lookup, phone order and order taken through reseller. Bidding on keywords is a zero sum game, your always bidding too high or too low, rarely do you have the perfect bid.

Next up was Cheryle Pingel from Range Search Marketing. She says its almost impossible to satiate the search marketing beast, there is never enough to feed it. Growing search funds organically. Problem; annual budgets do not account for great return. Solution; reinvest a portion of the profits back into search. Finding Your Sweet Spot: $30,000 to be tested over 90 days. $10,000 seed money, money taken from other budgets. For 10k they would get 200k returned. So they asked the client to reinvest a portion of that profit back into the search. By reinvesting 13% of the revenue they can generate a ton of revenue. They also reinvested the profit into other media areas.

Q & A:

Kevin added something of value beyond what I have heard before. Someone asked about how do you measure the metrics when you do not sell something on your site. So Cheryle said you need to assign a dollar value to each goal accomplishment. Kevin then added, why not try to score the lead based on the form they fill out. So if they answer A instead of B to a certain question, that might be worth more. So score a weight system to those leads.

Q: How do you make money of bidding on brands?
A: Cheryle said that with her, in this case, she targeted brands because they were her biggest conversions. The generic terms were less converting then the brand terms.

Danny jokes on a measuring offline conversions question that Google and Yahoo will have credit cards that collect this data automatically.

Rebecca Lieb opened up the session to introduce the panelists and explain that this would be an informal and fast paced session.

Measuring success according to Bizresearch, Laura Thieme opened up the presentation telling us that there are always ways to improve. Success comes in many forms and that with her clients online retail sales are up a minimum of 40% each year. She says small biz retailer acquires over 22,000 customers in two year period from search engine marketing (organic, paid, shopping search). She gave some more client examples, on how a law firm increased leads by 700% with one month of the newly optimized site (how many leads though?).

According to Bizresearch there are only 19% of online retailers that conduct ROI analysis. There are some lesions to be learned from this. Organic rankings outperformed paid search, where organic search sent over 70% of monthly sales. They also determined that Google Adwords outperformed organic search in terms of lead generation.

There is some good search engine visibility tools out there, such as WebPosition Gold and Ranking Manager. Laura says you should look at when a spider/robot comes to your site and how often. There are a good number of web analytical tools such as CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Hitbox, Netbox, NetTracker, Urchin, and Click Tracks. As a general suggestion you might check with you ISP or hosting company to see if they provide one of the web analytic tools. For example I asked one of the hosting companies I use to put Urchin on the servers I used, and they had no problem doing so. I just had to ask.

Laura asks, Who tracks ROI? Mostly its small businesses that seem to track it first, because every dollar counts. They need fast ROI and are more likely to stop ad campaign if ROI is not proven quickly. Are we selling? is a question business owners will have to ask. If not, then why, what is impacting our ROI negatively. She goes on to give some examples where price and keyword choices were influential in impacting the amount of sales that came in. Lowering the price helped one retailer compete with other retailers. Bad keyword choices can negatively impact the campaign.

She made some good ending points. There is no tracking tool that will do everything. You may need 2-3 tracking tools. Make sure your tracking tool is accurately collecting the data (good point). Great search engine marketers may not be great research analysts. Might need to hire someone else to interrupt the data.

Dave Cadoff from Future Now Inc. got up to show what these web analytic tools can actually show you. Visitors on the web leave a trail, and part of that trail can be analyzed, and it will. He says CLICKS are PEOPLE. Remember that. You can also take any piece of data and interrupt it anyway you want, you can mold that data into whatever you want it to say.

You have to plan, and know what success is, but not in a general way. Its looking at every page you have and figuring out what its supposed to do. You need to know this. You will need to plan scenarios intentionally on the site, and if its not working you can correct it. Recognize a problem on the site, do an information search to fix it, evaluate of alternative and purchase decision. Also, start backwards from the sale. Try to see if you can get back to the homepage. These are things that will help you manage. Web analytic software takes raw data and turns it into structured information in the form of reports. Once we understand the inter-relations of the data. You need to make sure the data is actionable. Look at the trends, because nothing happens in a vacuum. The relative value is more important that the static value.

Dave gives a very good presentation and none of the examples are directed towards a particular product, he remains unbiased, which is good to see. He is probably one of the best speakers in a session today in my opinion. He gives good advice that squeezing the efficientcy out of the site is what you will have to do. He asks how many people track their ROI in spreadsheets, from ISP, or with software? More people in the room use software to track their ROI. He says on these pages ones like what is given in WebTrends will not give you the answerd but give you the questions. So ask them. He says its very important to understand that. Dave said the homepage was the worst thing ever created or as mentioned in another session. People focus too heavily on these pages when they should be focusing on the inner pages.

He puts up a full list of content and commerce metrics. Excellent list. Here is sample of what can be tracked:

Take rates: newsletter, bookmarks, downloads
Repeat visitor rate
Heavy user rate
Committed visitor share
Committed visitor index
Committed visitor volume
Visitor engagement index
Reject page: Home Page
Reject page: Sub Page

Things to remember about web analytics. Use the metrics to provide action items and things you can improve on for your website. He ended by presenting a matrix of all the analytic tool landscape, and where certain tools fell in there.

Rebecca then asked all the presenters from the 4 major analytic companies to do a 60 second overview of their software. They are Jason Palmer from WebTrends, Akin Arikan from Nettracker, John Marshall from Clicktracks, Brett Crosby from Urchin.

Side Note from the Blog Room: Avoid the potato salad at SES Chicago, three days of it, is way to much!

Danny Sullivan explained the reason he started Search Engine Watch was because people were building web pages that worked for IE and Netscape but not for the search engines, which he called the 3rd browser.

Eric A. Meyer started us off with Web standards, he is from Complex Spiral Consulting. I think he was the guy who posted in his blog a whole big stink about the last SES conference, (meyerweb.com). Ahh, he confirmed this to be true by admitting why he was on the panel. He basically blew off the people on the panel, and then realized it was a miscommunication, he actually apologized to the panel. Web standards means no proprietary lock in and a wider support base. Page weights can be reduced by at least half or more when using standards. You can support multiple media and more accessibility comes through Web standards. And how do search engines like standards (he says he would like to know). He then lists out some big corporations are using standards, and talks about small sites deploying it. What about browser incompatibilities? Some problems do exist, but they are far less a problem than they were three years ago. The biggest stumbling block is Internet Explorer, but its only biggest by comparison. Various approaches to get around this such as "transitional design" (mixing tables and CSS). How do standards help your users? Page weights are lower, the number one factor in page response time is page load time. Users really dont care about your markup, they only care about is page load time. Reduced server load, bandwidth consumption and for example ESPN. ESPN in March 2003 moved to Web standards. ESPN at 2003 was getting one billion page views per month. Initial page weight reduction was 50kb, which turned out to be 720TB of bandwidth each year. They can not server more users per server (reduce the number of servers need). How do standards help you? Makes your life easier in creating and maintaining the site. Are standards always appropriate? Theoretically, yes. More practically, it depends on the situation. Always weigh costs against benefits. Look at your log files to determine if you should move. You can give certain functionality to different browsers. Webstandards.org, maccaws.org, w3.org are all good resources.

Matt Bailey from the Karcher Group thanks Eric for presenting with them. He comes form a company that has designers on one side of the room and seos on the other side of the room. How W3C helps a design company; - knowledge base, reference for building a common structure, training new programmers and checks and testing. How W3C helps an SEO company; interoperability (limited), semantic web and validation checks on new clients. Section 50a, from the Web accessibility standards. People with blindness need user access to style sheets, and so on. Low Vision complications; loss of central vision, loss of peripheral vision, blurry vision, any combination of the above and other. He showed some examples of what someone might see or not see. He listed some screen reading programmers such as JAWS, Window-Eyes, OutSpoken and Hal. How does Good SEO help standards and accessibility? alt tags, unique title pages, title attributes in links, text navigation, descriptive text links, reduce javascript dependence, reduce CSS dependency, create contingencies for user agents without flash, etc. He showed examples of some bad sites. How does good SEO help standards? WAI 508 priority checklist, 65 point check list and others. SEO that conflicts with standards? keyword stuffing in the alt text, title attribute, etc. He then showed how a screen reader reads one of these keyword stuffed pages, kind of funny. He said you have to look at the bigger picture, not just rankings.

Shari Thurow from Grantastic Designs was next up. Shari is a big fan of Eric Meyer. Goals of the presentation, she will define a good web site, css vs. graphic images, myths and misconceptions (web standards, SEMs, usability professionals). A good web site is a user friendly, search friendly and persuasive site that converts visitors to buyers. She explains that your site needs goals and goes through some text book examples, then she explains how search integration into those goals are key. Potential issues: Both SEMs and Web standards advocates advice against using graphic images. There are many advantages to using CSS; search engines love it, faster download time, time saver when maintaining site and for usability reasons. CSS problems include; end users must have font and typeface installed on their computers, text link navigation can dominate the content of a page, usability testing and focus groups might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers. Graphic images are better in terms of usability, remembered better, make a site more appealing and other advantages. If your users prefer graphic navigation, then use it. It depends on your users. She then brought up some case studies, which I will not mention here. There is a difference between actual download time and perceived download time. The perceived download time is reduced when a user accomplishes a goal. She said adding a title attribute to your links will not help your rankings, she said this is confirmed by the search engines BUT use it for accessibility.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo had a few comments to add. Speed is a major concern at Yahoo. Yahoo does focus on creating fast loading pages. Yahoo doesn't care about download speed on the crawling site, of course they prefer fast sites. In addition, Yahoo's crawlers do not care about validation. They have not seen a correlation between validated sites and good quality sites. The search technology will enhance over time to handle these new technologies.

Q: Using CSS to replace graphic headers with h1 tags, is that ok?
A: Tim said Google goes about it in a white and black attitude. Yahoo said it is primarily ok. Shari said that particular case might be crossing over the site.

They took down the sign about not being allowed to blog in the Press Room, which I am now call the "Blog Room".

Thanks Guys.

Bruce Clay had two minutes to talk. His view on organic is straightforward, the role of SEO is to reengineer the Web site to do well in search engines. Technical components, Copywriting, Expertness (linking).

Todd Friese, oilman, he said sometimes they don't reengineer the site but make the site work right away (i.e. cloaking). If they can, they like to rebuild the site from scratch. He said again, you do not want to stand out with your SEO tactics.

Mike Grehan said there is a fine balance between a site that is doing well with technical problems, and a site that has tons of links anyway. He said there is a balance, and it depends on your competitive environment.

Q: They are new to the SEO game but have been doing a lot of PPC campaigns. He asked if the panel can help define an allocation of resources towards the SEO campaign.
A: Todd said its very difficult to give a number, it can vary greatly depending on the industry. He said, you probably have a number in your head, probably double it.
Mike added, take a look at how you figured out the PPC and apply that logic to the SEO side. Take some out of PPC and move it to SEO.
Todd then added that there are many SEO companies that do a revenue share plan. Todd says he does it a lot and he loves it.
Bruce added that you will probably get different prices from all the different exhibitors. It is virtually impossible to have a one size fits all. Bruce said mostly on new sites, they pay him to just tell them what is wrong. And if they want to move on, they can.
Mike added he wrote an article last week, he said it is strange that people who come from the technical side, they can spend hours, days, weeks, months fixing things. But if you look at everything in your competitive environment, it might just be that you need more linkage.

Q: I came to this conference last year, and I am on the first page for most my keywords. I want to be on the top of the results, move me up higher. I have sites on the same IP address, what is the threshold of the number of links pointing to a site from the same IP address?
A: Bruce is not a fan of having tons of links from the same IP address, it will make you stand out more. It must look natural.
Mike added if it looks unnatural in a link connectivity map, those links will jump out at you.

Q: Can outbound links hurt or help you?
A: Bruce said there is a bow tie affect where quality sites link to quality sites. Bruce says he finds it important to link outbound resources.
Detlev Johnson said everything else being equal, if you link to quality sites it will help a little.
Mike said you need to think philosophically, you are in control who you link to, not who links to you. He explains the linkage within the community are very important.
Todd said in his jibrish pages, they always linked to the Yahoo Directory and top sites in those cloaked pages. He said do away with reciprocal linking as best as you can.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the Google Sandbox?
A: Mike said from a purely scientific approach, new sites have very little links.
Todd said a friend and him do a radio show and he spent a whole hour ago. He said he feels a lot of this goes with temporal link analysis. One way around it is a by doing a 301 from an established domain name. He said he puts out links a bit slower. He said he was talking about it with Mike, and one example of a new book that is released, if its not read that often then it wont be on the new release shelf anymore. So a new theory is, try doing a site: match and then click on it a few times. Mike then added, he knows search engines to click tracking.

Todd said what he is doing is putting the content on a subdomain of an existing site. He then throws links to the subdomain. After that gets rankings, a few weeks later, he will 301 that subdomain to the new domain name.

Q: How do you deal with directory listings such as DMOZ?
A: Todd doesn't submit there anymore. Bruce said he is really fed up with them. Mike said it is taking so much energy to submit to this one place, just go somewhere else with your time. Detlev said an ODP link does benefit your site, but it is not as important as it once was before. Bruce added that they had success submitting to local city.

Q: Whats the best url structure?
A: Mike said hyphen is a separator and underscore is not. Mike said he here no more then three. Todd adds that this is true. He tries to keep any hyphen out of the domain name, the page name he puts hyphens in those.

Q: Someone asked, besides for linking, what else would you recommend?
A: Todd and Mike said, nothing comes to mind. :) Detlev said there are things on the page that do have an affect. He said the title of the document. Mike added the meta tag is back for yahoo, not sure how much it helps, then add that. Bruce said do everything you do the best you can do it, so do on all the page stuff (meta, title, h1, etc.). Todd said sometimes you scroll for days in the source code, clean up the code, use style sheets externally, use javascript externally, etc.

Q: Some attendee has a problem with a CMS program.
A: Go to CMSMartix.com for information on that.

Q: I have a site with multiple tld's for country specific sites. The technical components are all in english, will that cause a duplicate content issue?
A: Yes.

Q: My PageRank dropped to 0 yesterday.
A: Todd and Mike said, drop the toolbar today. The toolbar information is not "precise". So stop looking at it.

Q: Plurals vs. Singular.
A: Todd said he just targets plural and doesn't worry about the singular. Mike explains that plural is great because it takes the engine to the Nth degree. Bruce said he uses both on the page, what ever is naturally used, he uses it in the content.

Allan Dick from Vintage Tub and Bath was first to present his presentation. He starts off by asking why you would want to check on your competitors? I think the number of people in the room answer that, because they are curious. They want to know what they are selling, marketing, and use it to their advantage.

His first tip is to take a look at Alexa.com. You can compare your site against the competition. You input your competitor and your url into the traffic data section to compare the traffic rank for each of you. Another site that is very helpful is Faganfinder.com that includes many little tools to do research on the web. He recommended checking in the Internet Archive to look at yours and your competitors sites over the past few years.

Pay per clicks can communicate information about your competitors. Look at what keywords your competitors are buying ads with. If they are buying ads on them they are important to their campaign (or they just bought bad keywords). Consider taking a lot at Marketleap.com to find out the backlinks of your competitors. Find the links from each of the search engines and discover where these links are coming from. He also covers how news articles and distributor information are good ways to learn more about your competitors. Often times you can find these in the backlinks of a website. Pulled up an example of a competitor of his that outsourced his linking building to a company in India. This information tells them how sophisticated they are.

Next tip to find more information is to do the following search: intitle:”manufacturer” + “product”, searching by phone number with and without parentheses, search by someones name such as “allan dick” +vintage tub and bath. I wonder how often Allan Dick checks his name and if this report will show up when he searches. : )

Ebay is the search engine that’s not a search engine. It offers a great place to find information on competitors that might be entering the marketplace. Its an instant store. You can find out who is entering, what they are selling, for how much, and what kind of feedback they may have. The feedback is valuable, learn how to use it. Allan recommends you find out what customers like, such as great price, beautiful faucet, and other information that customers will include in their feedback.

Copyrighted content are becoming a problem. There are pages on your site that are more likely to be stolen if they offer content that is valuable to them. These pages tend to be those pages no one else wants to write (such as history, info) and affiliates or competitors could lift the content easily. Check on copyscape.com to find out who is copying your content.

David Williams from 360i was up next. He starts off to go through the various thing he uses to do competitor research. He asks:

Who are your competitors? Where are people going to make there purchase? Is you site designed for success? Is you site designed to rank well in the search engines? What can you learn from links?

David offers up a good resource for checking links at http://www.linksecrets.com/optisite/ which spiders the entire site, looks at PageRank, keyword count, backlinks.

How competitive are the search results? Consider the number of competitors, diversity of competitors, keyword cost estimates, keyword difficultly, algorithmic ranks, paid listings ranks, paid listin cost per click cost, Hitwise keyword report, and tracking systems.

David displays how they look at competitors and presents a spreadsheet organized into what information they need to obtain. He looks at three sets of terms “Awareness, Shop, and Purchase Terms. So for example an awareness term is “tub”, shop term is “clawfoot tub”, and a purchase term is “acrylic clawfoot tub”. They also look at who is in the product results in Froogle, ads, and organic results to see how competitors are using these terms.

Next slide shows a list of helpful paid tools that you can use to check on your competitors, and then a page with free tools (that includes no links to these tools??).

I left the session a bit early to go to the Organic Listings forum which Barry should be reporting on shortly.

The other day it was MSN, Google already has desktop search, Yahoo plans on it and now Ask Jeeves releases a desktop search appliance. It should be ready for download shortly at Ask Jeeves Download Center. Key features; Fresh, Full-Text Index, Fast, Flexible Search, and User-Centric Design. For the full press release go to PR News Wire.

I posted a thread about this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

GooHoo!...

This room is very empty, I am surprised.

GooHoo! is our fictional search engine, Google and Yahoo! merged to form GooHoo. Greg Boser VP of editorial quality, Andrew Goodman VP of advertising and programs, Dana Todd VP of Revenue enhancements and Noel McMichael VP of content acquisition. Working the audience is Jeffery Rohrs. The modo of the company is "don't be too evil".

Statement: You got a religious organization and you send a cease and desist order and they want you to stop allowing your competitors from bidding on your trademark name.
Response: Andrew Goodman said they started to build technology to automate this decision. We are concerned about GooHoo's rights to publish what they wish. GooHoo opts to fight it in court between the parties. Trademark cases are led to the courts unless their lawyers say that if its illegal, they will be proactive to remove it.

Statement: Danny says he was doing a search the other day for toys and a bunch of sex toys came up. Also, he found results leading to illegal items where he can buy.
Response: Dana said if your doing a competitive analysis you want to be able to type in a company name and see the competitive sphere. Greg said he would look how and why is that site ranking well organically, and if they are doing something outside of the TOS then they would pull it. If it was whitehat, then it would leave it.

Statement: What would get you pulled.
Response: Greg would pull out all blog spammers and Google bombers from the engine. It would be largely human based de-listings.

Statement: One company was going to pull offensive listings and the other was going to leave it. Now that you merged, which way will you go?
Response: Dana said they would explore that culture and if it does not impact revenue too greatly, then they would comply.

Statement: Will you keep PFI?
Response: Noel said that they will keep PFI, because it is there, people are buying it, so why not keep it. It is making money, so why not keep it. Noel explains that people are looking to only buy something not learn about something when using a search engine. Greg has a very small office not even with a window. The real money is in Andrew's division. Greg wants to show the PFI symbol in the organic results. Dana explains the pricing model is a CPC model. Dana explains that if they call them out as PFI results, it will generated more clicks. They are also thinking about a toolbar that only shows all ads, all the time. They explain they are labeled because the PFI results go through extensive, extensive, extensive editorial review by Greg and his children.

Statement: Clickfraud, how are you going to handle it. He said that Dana calls click fraud as "non converting clicks".
Response: Dana said that "We have very sophisticated technology, I cant talk about the technology publicly but its very advanced." They have not really issued any refunds but when they looked into them it was never due to click fraud.

Statement: What percentage of your resources are you investing in organic?
Response: Greg says he feels he is the least important person here. He feels that he finds it very frustrating to not bring in money. He said there is this ongoing conflict about building better organic search software versus revenue generating programs.

Statement: Mikkel asks if GooHoo would like to partner with his undetectable click bot software.
Response: Greg said to combat click fraud they would like to move to a CPA model, after Andrew said a CPM model. Dana was prompted to respond to the CPA model, she said it is a much more time consuming model to operate. There is just too much risk and time put into CPA models, they will be investigating it but they will be splitting their network into two networks. One will remain at the CPC and the good portion will go at CPM. They want to leverage the graphic ad network, because that made more money in the old days.

Statement: Do the Non Converting Clicks (NCC) come from a bot or a Indian people?
Response: Greg says most is software driven.

Statement: Cloaking...
Response: Noel says if you use his patented XML cloaking technology (i.e. PFI) you will be included. Greg says its all about user experience. We wont say that cloaking it allowed, but if we find a case that does it for a good reason, then it will probably be ok. They monitor high volume keywords and highly hyphenated domain names. Greg adds they are ditching the spam report page. Dana said they are building a new tool to really "personalize" your results based on "behavior patterns".

Statement: Are you doing hand selected search result pages?
Response: Greg said that "hand jobs are part of the business." He said in certain areas it makes sense.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! just walked in.

Statement: Will the GooHoo Directory be around?
Response: Noel said it will be gone shortly.

Statement: If I took the advertising certification programmer, will that flag me as a spammer?
Response: Dana said that there is a chinese curtain between the ad and organic department. They might go to your clients directly, if they have big budgets. In addition that advertising certification programmers they use this as a method to study you and your customers.

By not have a CPA model, it encourages the web site owner to make sure their sites are good for their users. If they adopted a CPA model it would make the advertisers lazy.

Statement: Put on your thinking caps, what is the one change you make to make GooHoo better.
Response: Greg said pure artificial intelligence to know what you are thinking even with one word searches. They can use the toolbar data, cookie data, history, refinement searches. Andrew said lets look 5 years to where we are headed. He said right now we are relatively small in revenue dollars. He said if you look at a billboard, GooHoo will run that ad, TV ads will be run by GooHoo's bid network, most of traditional ads will move to GooHoo. Noel said besides for the paid inclusion disclosure, he would like to get the GooHoo search appliance more exposure by slashing the price. That same appliance can "phone home" to the main index to increase exposure. Dana said she would like to embed GooHoo in your hand, sell it to the end user as an optional implant. It will change your life for ever. if they can possibly send out small electric shocks, it can stimulate certain brand awareness that will be positive to GooHoo.

Statement: How do you protect your user's privacy?
Response: They have a motto "dont be too evil". Advertisers and searches dont need to use us, they can go somewhere else. So its a give and take. Greg says you can search anonymously but you need cookies and you need to login.

Statement: Tim Mayer from Yahoo was put on the spot to make a statement. He said, he submits to GooHoo Shopping and GooHoo Local, what would be a good way to drive traffic to those other areas of the GooHoo engine?
Response: Andrew said that it used to be word of mouth, they still believe in limited marketing. Dana added its a matter of trust. Greg said its about choice, we cant force people to click on it. Its a learned behavior.

There is a new sign that just went up on the wall of the press room. It reads...

Internet connections for checking presentations and filing storing only.

Please use the email center and refrain from blogging here.

Thank you for your cooperation.

hmm...

Chris Sherman, from Search Engine Watch offered some insight into how pay per call had changed since it was first thought up several years ago. Then it was dismissed as it would never happen.

Chris introduced Marc Barach, from Ingenio, who expressed how pay per call and other pricing alternatives offer more value to advertisers in the long run. He says that the SME market these days as segmented, it competitive and it depends on many different variables. He goes into how SME companies are segmented into several others. He describes that the type of business vertical, size, location, price point, customer value varies which in segments of the market. He then showed a graph of that showed the percentage of people that are buying advertising from companies like Google and Overture, these are all business with websites. Outside this market are businesses with brochure ware business website, and then about 9.8 million business without websites.

So what is Pay Per Call Advertising? It is performance based advertising that extends reach of a company through the purchasing of calls. Chris goes describing how product innovation drives industry growth. He says there are barriers in online advertising. One of the prime issues is ROI, or tracking. Also, a website that excepts transactions or is usable. He says one of the ways that pay per call is largely more beneficial is that ability to track and know the conversion rate. The phone has been around for 100 years, people are very comfortable using it. He makes a good point. Taking out the website eliminates some of the complexity of determining the ROI. \

He describes how his company takes pay per call orders. Customers can select the categories for which to display there ads. They can then set the amount they wish to pay per call, base rate appears to be $2.00 per click. He says some companies are willing to pay up to $35 per lead with average sales of $2500 per call. He says it works very well for many industry from auto to travel to industry.

Next up is Dan Ballister from Findwhat who will be describing how FindWhat is doing to integrate the pay per call option into their system. He starts with some history such as the first banner in 1994, then to 1997 that the yellow pages are dead, or if you’re not on the web then your competitors will be, or even better you need to reinvent your company on the web. Was its that bizarre that long ago? Times have changed as Dan just said. The lesson learned from the mid-90’s – Instead of helping advertisers to use the web to augment their existing business, we told them they needed to reinvent their business online. Now its 2005, we know what’s in front us. He says that most business are not ready to compete for or buy PPC yet. They all have phones though. Conversions improve from online to on-phone to on-premise. Some services and products require live consultation. Channel-agnostic marketers will leverage any worthy conversion vehicle they can find. Where was pay per call in 1997?

Pay per call is surprisingly uncomplicated product. All it requires is title, phone number and description. Findwhat gets there database of 1-800 from Ingenio apparently. Bizjournals.com is an example of one of the sites that has ads that use pay per sale ads in their search results. I see opportunity for this in a variety of areas, this session is pretty encouraging for the future of this product. He then goes into some websites that are early adopters of this technology. Such as web designers, career trainers, business, industry, and several others. He also goes to explain how the advertisers are seeing increased conversions for pay per call. They are renewing the advertising and are coming back for more. Findwhat says it’s working very well.

Some take aways from the session. Many of the largest internet advertisers already buy ONLY on a CPA basis. Isn’t that good enough for you too?

Companies to check out doing pay per sale marketing:

FindWhat.com
InsiderPages.com
ThomasB2B.com
Snap

Barry is going to be reporting on the Black Hat view point, and I will be covering White Hat. The room seems rather packed, and it looks like it will turn out to be a good session.

The queen of the White Hats, Jill Whalen, of HighRankings starts off with a presentation she has prepared. She is wearing a white cowboy hat. :) She says its rather simple the whole debate. White hats are good, black hats are bad. Unfortunately it’s not that simple she says. She asks: Who is better? Better person? Better at not getting banned?

Who are big time spammers? Jill says they are into the affiliate marketing stuff. She says if you get it in your inbox it’s probably spam you can find on the search engines. She says spam is not for most people, don’t do it, there are plenty of white hat methods that are great for you. Don’t feel you need to dive into black hat methods to be successful.

Alan Perkins, from Silver Disc Limited was up next. He said he had to think hard about covering this session. He puts up a slide that compares the white hat vs. black hat. You have to look at content and links. Black hats do it for the search engines, and white for humans. Likewise, black hats like information to remain hidden from the search engines, while whites prefer to keep it visible. He says a white hat is just as capable of doing a bad job. He says black hat seems to see search engines as enemies. He tries to treat search engines as they don’t exist.

More on White Hat comparisons

White Hats

• Content and Links are visible to humans


• Information is visible to both search engines and humans


• The quality of work is visible


• Search engines are friends


• Site relevance is actually improved with white hat techniques


• Results are for the long term


• White hats use ethical techniques


• Go by legal quidelines

Mikkel Svenden did some funny research into hats. You have paper hats, innocent hats, offensive hats, warrior hats, and a great hat for rainy days, fools hat.

He says SEO is not about hats. He holds up a book called Marketing Warfare. It’s a war out there. “There are many wars to fight, many ways to fight them and many positions to win.” He asks how “creative” is your bookkeeping. Do you always play by the rules in every business you do. How aggressive are your other sales and marketing activities. He gives the example of Enron, they would not do Black hat techniques, yet they had some shady accounting. Doesn’t make sense to him these companies.

Todd Friesen was up next, I have seen him speak before and gives a good presentation. He is representing the Black hats. He talks about referral log spamming and the problem is causes. The take away from this is lock your stats folder, don’t make your log available. More Black hat techniques, he uses auto generated gibberish. They would hide this in frame sets, and load up a nice page using cloaking. This is IP based content delivery, or cloaking. There is a good amount of screen scraping and repacking, put gibberish under a less optimized page, flash sites, and laundering your visitors via IP. If you are doing cloaking, you have to do IP based, not bot based. Google will bust your butt if you are just scanning for googlebot/2.l. There is also cloak busting, or white hats that are busting black hats. He says search engines do cloaking to.

Todd talks about how things have changed. Used to you would be able to buy links and it was considered black hat, now it’s the norm. Some example of buying site and PR. You can buy sites to pass PR onto another site. Buy expired domains.

He highly recommends you investigate to your competitors to see if they are doing black hat. If they are doing it, find out what they are doing.

Greg Boser, from WebGuerrilla spoke next. He says there is not enough honesty in our business about what we do. He says SEM stands for Search Engine Manipulation. We are all here to learn how to become better at manipulating search engines. He says that the sites in the top ten are those that are the ones that are best at manipulating the top 10 results.

Greg defines level of Search Engine Optimization. For white hat he defines as:

White – (TOS SEO) Content manipulation. Rewriting text, titles, and tags so that they include far more occurrences of your desired keywords than would ever come out of your mouth during a conversation with a potential client/customer.

He asks is aggressive search engine optimization bad for your brand?

No, he displays about 15 major companies that are using cloaking and a variety of techniques, such as eBay, eToys, Compaq, Kraft, British Airways, Fedex, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. Interesting. He says none of those companies had issues that were bad for the brand.

He asks who is evil? He says it’s any SEO company that does not tell their clients on what they are doing, or those companies that are not upfront with their tactics and strategies they use to get sites ranked. He recommends be honest with your clients and full disclosure is a must.

Karen Breen Vogel from B2BWorks was first up, but I was 10 minutes late.

Paul Slack from WebDex was next up to discuss how to target business to business traffic. When developing an internet marketing strategy you need to define goals and objectives, target audience, conversion activities, budget and resources. It is also important to measure goals, cost per lead, and cost per acquisition. And then refine to make changes for improvement and create new objectives. How will you measure success? Performance improvement goals; increase in site traffic, increase visitors, reduce site abandonment, and increase conversion rates. And also Comparative Analysis. When they sit down with a customer they figure out cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and then did a break-even analysis. CPC X (Lead Sale Radio) = CPA. Then Online marketing budget / CPA.
B2B Sales Cycle: (1) Uncover the need (2) Research possible solution for business problem (3) short list of vendors (4) go to bid and (5) make a decision. SEM comes into play with numbers 2 and 3 above. Influencers and Decisions Makers both use search engines. Influencers are early in the cycle, they search specific searches, and they are more likely to respond to a call to action. You need to think about how you can make the influencers job easier. Decision Makers are a little different, they do more high level, less specific searches. They are less likely to respond to call to actions. They want to go to your site to validate your for real. He then showed a case study on a wholesale apparel company. Most apparel buying in the wholesale market are done through sales reps, but by tapping into the Web they were able to bring in new customers at a lower commission rate.

Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro explained that he had a 22 minute presentation and had to cut that in half. They did a big study with Marketing Sherpa, the results of the study can be found on a white paper at enquiro.com/research.asp. They looked at usage patterns by analyzing the data. On the eye scan they divided the page into four sections. Top Ad space in A, the froogle feeds in B the organic in C and the right side AdWords in D. 62% C, 20% B, A 14%, D 4%. They noticed that the correlation between eye scan and link clicked on were very highly related. They looked at rank, page position, keywords in title, and a ton of other factors. They noticed a disjoint between what people say and actually do when it comes to clicking on a search result link. High confidence searches VS. Low confidence searches. High confidence searches; getting top rankings is vital, pop the relevant words in a title if possible, top is better than side in sponsored, the right landing pages are critical, little qualification done on the SERP, generally capturing higher in the buying funnel. Low confidence searches; ranks are a little less important, more qualification done on the SERP, relevant titles become more important, well written descriptions become more important, generally capturing the lower buying cycle.

Jeff Ramminger from KnowledgeStrom focuses only on the tech industry and they only want to develop leads, not clicks. Industry Example - IT; wide variety of industry segments (consumer vs business, SMB vs. Enterprise, SW, HW, & Services); Variety of "Searchers" (influencers, decision makers, it vs business); complex, multi part buy cycle, vision plan, evaluate, and select. The Knowledge Storm Model: (1) IT Directory; aggregate content from thousands of vendors, structured format easy access and comparison, product and service listing as well as white papers, demos and seminars. (2) Vertical Search (3) User Registration, higher conversions and leads not clicks (3) Campaign and Advertising Programs.

Todd Sims from Business.com which is a search engine that focuses only on businesses. For example, if you do a search on RAM, business.com will only return business related results for the same search. They use a CPC model. They have a directory approach to their business, with a 100,000 categories across 26 main verticals. Then behind that is their keyword library, advertisers buys a keyword category and not keywords. They power the search on many other business oriented sites like forbes.com.

Dan Savage CEO from ThomasB2B.com, they are connected Thomas Publishing and half owned by FindWhat.com. They are an advertising network, they are not the Google of the business world. They built a highly automated ad system that lowers the cost of advertising in the B2B world. They use standard categories, with about 11,000 categories in english, it was designed to be multilingual from the start. They are going the opposite way from local search, they believe most businesses are looking to go outside local.

Martin Laestch from Intel is telling you can use search marketing to bring in new business leads. He is running campaigns in more then 22 languages, and getting tons and tons of traffic. He said it is working for us, Intel, and it is working very very well. They are going to increase their multimillion dollar budget significantly.

Danny kicks off the session, wearing a tan cowboy hat. He said that they do not know if they have the answers to these questions, but they will begin talking about it.

Jill Whalen was first up representing the white hats. She posted a picture of Scottie and herself with halos over their heads and Greg and Todd with devil horns. Very funny. So who is better? She wouldn't and couldn't say. Big time spammers are in affiliate marketing, viarga and gambling are where the black hats are found. If its in your email as spam they do it. Black hats are not for most, real businesses with real sites should not use it. That was it from Jill.

Alan Perkins, an other white hatter was up, Danny says the white knight of the white hatters. He put up a chart to show the difference between white and black has.
- Black hats deploy content and links from search engines to see versus humans to see.
- Visibility to humans for black hats, its hidden, white hats its visible.
- Quality of Work for black hats are hidden, and white hats are visible.
- Search engines are black hats enemies and white hats friends.
- Domains and Brands are disposable for black hats and cherished by white hats.
- Site and relevance apparently not improved for black hats, and what hats they are approved (this is from his slide).
- Results are more short term for black hatters and long term for white hatters.
- Ethical techniques are not used by black hats, only white hats. :)
- Legal, Alan say "no?" for black hats and "yes?" for white hats.

Alan said he feels some tactics are illegal such as not having a site that is accessible to all (disabled) and deceptive advertising.

Mikkel Svendsen was next up, he is representing the gray hat. He showed some hysterical hats, just too funny. Mikkel, hook those slides up please. Mikkel quoted "It's a war out there". He said there are many ways to win a war. You do not have to be number one for a search on casino to be a successful casino company. Keep things in perspective, what kind of risk do you take with your brand today. Would Enron deploy black hat methods? :) Are you on the right path? He said more bigger brands should use black hat techniques and smaller companies white hats. Then Mikkel showed a picture of dark vander.

Todd Friesen, Oliman, was introduced as the black hat. He said there are very few black hats that are 100% black hats. He first explained a bit about referral log spamming. If you see that you have referrals from adult sites, that means your log files are wide open. Make sure to lock your stats folder or else he (or other black hats) will use it to link spam. Auto generated gibberish, a very good tool to generate content targeting content. They would take these content sets and cloak the content. They would screen scrap the content and repackage it. Then deliver different pages to the search engine and human. Flash sites is one area where the black hats travel into the white hat area. Laundering your visitors via IP, sending your visitors to the right page based on the IP referral. If your going to cloak, do the IP based method. An other good place to cloak is a member's access forum, and they did this with the supporters forum for WebmasterWorld. He then said the search engines cloak as well. Buying sites, PR and Link is no longer black hat only. Buying sites for PR to pass to your network. Buying off topic links for the PR the link will pass. Buying bulk links in large networks for the anchor text boost. At the end of the day be aware of the tactics competitors are using in your space, also be prepared to use those same tactics to compete. You must use SEO tactics (black or white) to a degree that is relative to your search space.

Greg Boser was the final speaker, to talk about the black hat side of things. His slides sport a black background. He said this is a long going debate, something he dislikes getting into. He said that there needs to be more honesty. SEM = Search Engine Manipulation. He said it is upsetting that our industry wont admit it. We are all here to learn here to learn how to be better at manipulating the results. My site or my client site isnt really the most relevant. the site sin the top 10 arent the most relevant always. After he is done with his job, he convinced the search engines that the pages are more relevant - but they are not. White hat SEO in Greg's opinion is content manipulation (if you write a way that differs from how you talk, then it is content manipulation). Gray Hat; technical solutions to overcome obstacles put in place by incompetent web designers. Corporate America does this all the time to make their sites more visible. Black Hat; full algorithmic assault. Finding and exploiting all possible algorithmic holes. SE guidelines play no role in determining course of action. He explains that he might not go full force black hat for a corporate client. Is aggressive SEM bad for your brand? He posted some logos of very famous companies that got caught spamming. He said a lot of people in the white hat spectrum use fear talk because they are afraid to get into the market. He said probably more white hat content has gotten banned, then IP based cloaked pages. Who is really Evil? The SEO companies that dont tell the client what they are doing and how they are doing it. He explains that you need to be transparent with your client about the risks and rewards. Full disclosure is a must!

Alan disagrees with Mikkel's war analogy because you can have lots of winners in business. He won't get into the "good or evil" debate.

Q & A:

Q: How is affiliate marketing black hat?
A: Jill says its because many affiliate marketing sites are extremely competitive. Jill won't take on sites that are extremely competitive. Greg says PPC, pills porn casinos. Greg says that affiliate marketing is not evil in itself, but it happens to be a very competitive area on search. He said eBay has a tons of spammers on the pay roll, meaning they provide tools for the affiliate marketers to spam. Danny adds that AdSense is not helping the cause with creating bad content.

Q: How do you know when you have been banned? And how do you correct it?
A: Do a site command at Google to see and watch your log files. If your banned, clean it up and email Google and the search engines for re-inclusion. Or create a new domain name. Also speak with the search reps at this conference.

Q: Can you differentiate between Yahoo and Google with black hat?
A: Greg said the person with the most links wins. Google now takes a bit longer with newer sites. The new MSN has new opportunities for you.

Q: Text links brokerage are in the exhibit hall, is that black?
A: He said it depends on where you buy your links, relevant versus non relevant links.

Greg said he has so little tolerance for those companies that do low class redirection and then call it ethical, high standards. Be honest!

Greg says that the search engines don't owe him anything, he has an AdWords budget waiting to be used for when they change the search algorithms. Jill says that Florida did not change the rules of the game. Mikkel responds to that saying Google in 2001 added the nocache option, so stupid cloakers used it and a few months later, Google delisted all sites that used the nocache tag. Todd also says that the search engines owe us nothing in terms of the organic listings.

I missed all of Greg Jarboe's presentation, this is really upsetting. Please check out PR Web, I also hope to have a write up about their service next week. I apologize.

Next up was Nan Dawkins from RedBoots Consulting. She explained that some of her clients are unique in that they want to target problems and not products. They reach unique target audience, the influencers. Who influences the influencers? Journalists and before them Bloggers. Blogs are an early warning system for news stories and often shape the coverage of big media outlets. So how does one use a search engine to research journalists and bloggers? She says you start with the basic SEO principles, optimize your press releases. You can use paid search to combat negative press , ugly blog rumors and message boards. Also use paid search to take advantage of breaking news. You must be willing to create/repackage content based on what is capturing the imagination of influencers at the moment (i.e. fahrenheit 9/11 and the day after tomorrow). News sites attract news junkies and contextual ads allow you to do that. You must also learn RSS, not how it works but how to set it up. Step 1: Distribute your press releases. The traffic does not go to your Web site, but to the PR Web or news site. Step 2. Create a blog, post to a blog and monitor blog chatter with Pub Sub or Blog Post. Step 3. Add a feed to your own site. Step 4. Advertise on Feeds, like on Feedster or other RSS news aggregators.

Ron Key from Converseon is now up. He started up to say that we are just beginning to scrap the surface of the potential of PR and SEO together as a tool. The missing element to what you are able to track with search engines is reputation. He asks how many people have Googled their company? Most raised their hand. Search Engines Impact corporate and brand reputation. Remember my "sunbeam water cooler" blog entry, with the customer service impact? A case in point includes; "home depot" and the 3rd result down is homedepotsucks.com (at least on the slide it was). There are about 4.1 million people searching on "home depot" each month, so this is major. An other example is "delta airlines" the number 6 results is boycottdelta.com. Today search engines have helped change the rules of the game by allowing a small player with a small site really make an impact on a large company's brand. The term being used for this is called "reputation attacks" with over 12,000 flames sites and growing. "Google has become the first page of corporate websites." David Weinberg quote.

Conduct a SERMA test (Search Engine Reputation Management) Go to the search engine and type in your company name. Review top listings. Ask yourself is there accurate and complete info, does it accurately reflect your company, are the descriptors coherent, is there false or misleading info. What can you do if you have a bad rep out there? You can go to litigation but that is hard. Direct outreach to the company directly, but it can end up worse or there can be no one there to contact. And some companies actually act like they are normal people and praise the company, we see it often in the forums. You can also build your own pages to knock off the bad press off the results. How do you do it? (1) Create a chasm in your org (2) Understand how your company and brands are searched on (3) Conduct an analysis to determine what keywords are leading to what kind of info (4) Once you got that, review your current pages and look at the full assets of company. (5) Also recruit partners and other 3rd parties to optimize for your brand. (6) Make full use of your domain names, use a minimum 5 domains. (7) Analyze the flame sites more closely, are they cloaking, etc.? If so, report them. (8) Fully optimize your content site wide and cross link. Avoid duplicate content, it wont help. (9) Continue to publish more content, i.e. press release (10) Stay vigilant.

Q & A:

Greg explains that you need to do more with your press release. If you send something out there and people read it and say, ok now what, then it does nothing. But with an airline service, he optimized a press release and said this is the first time they are flying to ABC and you get a special introductory offer at $X if you act within Y days. That press release exploded.

He then explained that Kevin Lee was skeptical about this. So he tried it out by optimizing a release for his wife's business. Within 24 hours Kevin's wife got a phone call from CNN to interview her for her speciality.

Black Hat, White Hat & Lots of Gray Preview
Both Ben and I will be covering this session. Ben is going to be reporting with a slant of white bias. I will report on the session with a tint of black bias. This is our strategy, I hope it works out to be a fun and comprehensive read.

Compelling your visitors to click through to your website can be a challenge. The speakers in this session intend to tackle the issue and address what you can do to improve your ads and landing pages for maximum effectiveness on any search engine marketing campaign you may undertake.

Misty Locke, from Range Online Media was up first to discuss her presentation. She is going to start with the creative on site and in the ads. There are 6 key reminder she recommends

• Who are you targeting? Know you audience!
• Conversion can vary dramatically for the same keyword depending on the landing pages
• Landing pages should directly correlate to keyword and placement
• Convenience of the online shopper
• Take a deep breath – Use 203 click rule. For every click it takes the visitor, you loose 30% of your business

Misty goes on to explain that you need to understand how it all works before you can use it. Determine the most relevant search terms. What do you do with them next? Consider the following:

Is the search term relevant to the page?
Does your page mention your desired search term in the content?
Is this a product search or a category search? If it’s a product, send them to a product!

There are many key things to consider when creating a good landing page. Remember to evoke emotion to create the sale. Misty talks pretty fast, so I am trying to catch everything. She quickly goes into a next example, and gives the example of the Wyndham Miami Airport Hotel. They went about by contacting the user to see what they were looking for. What they figured out was that they needed to target the customer. You don’t have a dream getaway at an airport hotel. They realized this, and reworded the description to reflect benefits, such as cheap rates, internet access, near the airport, etc..

Also, be sure to focus on the user. There are check point you should consider regarding the title of your landing page. Add the keyword in the title, add “official site” when relevant. For the description be sure to add a call to action, including benefit statements.
There is a interesting things that happens with the example she gave. Apparently cross selling is very successful. I have heard this on multiple occasions as well. Basically what was happening was those people that were searching for something like “Wyndham Puerto Rico Hotel” where actually booking a room in say a Chicago hotel. Why this happens? Not sure, but its effective to cross sell on the same page.

Misty is concluding with some final points. She recommend considering your target audience, and that conversions can vary dramatically. Build trust, and reduce the amount of clicks the visitor has to take.

Joe Agliozzo, from BetterPPC, was up and he asks the crowd how often they test there copy? He says that 2 seconds is the time that takes a searcher to click on something in the search results. In 2 seconds you need to stand out. Example, try to get terms bolded in your ads. You can also add credibility words to your ads. Example: guaranteed, lowest price.

Interrupters are something you should consider. He gives the example of an Apple ads, with a boxer that has nothing to do with computers, but it works. Joe goes on to give an example of his client Team America. They added wild card {KeyWord: Team America} to the ads and some compelling reasons to get to click, such as emphasizing from parts of the movie. He goes into a good number of examples of clients where improvements were made. He recommends to vary your ad copy a lot. Joe says that his company offers some software to help you test this at www.betterppc.com. I would like to check out what software his company is offering.

Matt Spiegel, from Resolution Media was up to present next. He goes into a brief company history and information about his background. He starts the presentation with an example client, Socrates who offers information about obtaining various documents and lease agreements. His example relates to real estate keywords, specificially real estate lease agreements. He explains that to improve the click through rates was to remove the cost of the product from the ad. They got more clicks when removing the price. They worked with the click on both the ads and the landing pages.

Landing pages are important, you need to consider where you are sending the visitor and if there are better pages for which could offer them more. Things he recommends make a good landing page. Highlight hot or good products at the top. Change some of the copy so that it speaks to the consumer, say “this is why you need the product”. They made sure the copy express a call to action and communicated with the consumer.

He goes on to give an example from a company that marketed to golf shop pros. They created a merchandising strategy to target these people. They created a holiday sale landing page, and also looked at the purchase pattern. He says its more than the landing page, and you can consider the purchase pattern several levels deep into the site.

He ends with some recommendations. Different copy recommendations for different situations. Landing page must deliver on promise of title and description.

Very good and helpful session, however it was quite rushed in my opinion. Slow down with the examples and explanations.

Question and Answer from the audience.
Q: How do you translate you Google test results over to Overture. Second, how do you test on Overture?

A: Overture has editorial policies, and its easy to test on Google, and have ads rotate evenly. From what many of our customers tell us that what works on Google also workings on Overture. You can also try to use different tracking url’s to test the various engines.

Q: We don’t do direct sales, and do lead generation? How do we test that?
A: Have a specific landing page per page or product, and work with the leads and see how many of those have converted to sale. Measure it by a cost per lead basis. Try a specific phone number, gather leads online with a tracking url. Its hard to track this, so no exact answer.

SES 2006 Schedule He starts of by saying they are going to have SES in December in Alaska and in August in a really hot place.

Paid Inclusion Turnaround:
- Every one was doing Paid Inclusion except Google
- Now it is just Yahoo and they still are doing it
- Yellow Pages, Audio/Visual and Shopping also offer PFI
- In vertical searches, Danny believes that paid inclusion will stick around but not in other areas.

Lawsuites:
- Trademark issue is still unresolved; Google is in court now about this.
- Even the meta tag law suit is coming back
- Click-fraud is a rising concern, even Google says it is
- Censorship, copyright, and so on. The industry is still growing and maturing.

Personal Search Arrives:
- Eurekster started
- But how's that search

Getting Personal
- Personal generally meant results reshaped by what you clicked on
- Eurekster joined forces with Friendster, that will be interesting
- Also there is Search Memory, Search History

Surviving Personal Search
- Great Content
- Great title tags and descriptions
- Grassroots? watching and seeing, multiple fronts will open

Google Dance Syndrome
- Last year's Florida largely hasn't repeated but everything is in the sandbox
- The dance is gone
- Will no doubt continue to have shifts in results

Share of US Searches
- Google has shrunk to 45%, Yahoo has grown to 32%, MSN has 15% (they will use their own soon), Ask jumped to 6% and other accounts for 3%.

Shortcuts & Direct Display
- Invisible tabs moving forward, with introduction or expansion of "detours" or "shortcuts" (AOL Snapshots, Ask Smart Search, Google OneBox Results, Yahoo Shortcuts)
- Web results wont be the only and premier item on the results page, how often do you see Google News, Yellow Pages, Froogle, Definitions at the top. The other day, I saw Google Books.

Surviving Shortcuts
- Watch the verticals
- Focus on the ones getting promoted
- Learn, prepare, aim to do well in those.

Battle of the Desktop
- October: Google Desktop Comes out
- Yesterday: MSN
- Tomorrow: Ask
- Jan: Yahoo
- AOL Beta

Desktop Search Impact on SEM
- They see you again and again and again
- Can you measure this impact on the bottom line?

SEM Firms Channel Money
- SEM Firms handle 1.3 billion - 50% of est. 2004 spending on paid search (jupiter research)
- Search advertising overall recognized as a major industry, especially "media owners"
- SEM firms now should get same recognition aren't a "Cottage industry
- Danny says Google is a Media company, I heard Google say they do not want to be thought of a media company but rather a technology company. Danny says no, you are a media company.

Evolution of Firms
- SEMPO says 74% firms flat fee based
- Jupiter says 50% flat-fee based
- But what about non paid because SEM firms do both (sempo says)

SEO is Huge - At Least to Firms
- SEO = PR; Search Ads = Ads; SEO + Ads = SEM
- Outsourced SEM is $380 million (9% of total $4.1 billion industry in 2004 est - sempo)
- Money they keep from running paid or organic (47% from SEO, 43% from paid search)
- He showed some more SEMPO statistics from last nights data

Search Not Paid Search
- Have to understand search is not paid search
- Failure to do so means
- possible misreading of where SEM firms will go
- upsetting firms but not providing support needed on the non paid side

What's Needed
- Algorithmic warnings
- etc. same slide from San Jose Keynote

He then discusses whats coming up today...

Last year's Chicago SES was bad, with no wifi. This year, again no wifi. But to make it worse, the Internet in the rooms are out. So I have to come down to the business center, that has room for 2.5 people to share two computers and an extra ethernet line.

According to the comments over at Andy's Blog, Rebecca Lieb said "The Wi-Fi problem is a union issue, I'm afraid. At least, that's what I'm hearing from our conference staff. More ethernet cables are promised in the press/speaker room tomorrow."

Andy is right, this is a SEM conference, the most dynamic niche in the Internet industry. How can we not have wifi, let alone not have 24/7 Internet access in our rooms. Don't take this as putting blame on Search Engine Watch. But maybe for a suggestion, we move SES Chicago to SES Florida next year. Who needs Chicago's Union laws?

Like to send Danny's blog a ping on this topic.

Barbara Coll welcomed us, well there are not too many of us here. She started with SFO Regions (Search/Find/Obtain) is just starting, search is really early in the stage. She explains that Search marketing, to be taken to the next level requires education of corporations, consumers and channels. SEMPO has educated the media publishers, the press, the members, and the advertisers. SEMPO does it providing a "huge" amount of materials on the site. Recognition for search marketing this year was huge; Google IPO, MSN Investment, Large Agency Adoption, Advertisers expected to spend 39% more on search marketing in 2005. SEMPO Recognition; large membership, worldwide participation, representation at key industry events, elite SEMPO Advisory Board, volunteer activism, partnerships with associations, key sponsorships, key partnerships, relationship with key industry analysts. Future of SEMPO in 2005, expanded influence, SEMPO.org the destination for selling material for search, more interaction between members and sponsors, expanded member communications & Support, and a more mature stable SEMPO.

Rick Bruner and his primary research report. The objectives of the project were; understand the size of the search marketing industry, understand where marketer spending is going, identify key industry trends, and identify key industry issues SEMPO should address. The research methodology included extensive secondary research, conducted detailed interviews with 31 leading industry experts and did a very detailed survey filled out by 288 people. 2/3rds were agencies. 69% were US based, 8% UK. The bottom line is that over 4 billion dollars was the $ amount of spend by advertisers. (this is live at SEMPO's Web site). He broke out the figures by paid placement, paid inclusion, organize and SEM technology. Nacho tells me the data looks a bit skewed, I agree and so does Greg Jarobe who is nodding his head in front of me based on Nacho's statement. Key Research Highlights include brand awareness is advertiser's top objective, ROI is outpacing inflation, SEM is poaching budget, Senior executives consider SEM a high business priority, Advertisers plan to increase their SEM spending 39% and most advertisers plan to manage the majority of their SEM spending in house. Some really good slides were shown next, but I can't type that fast, if your a member, I guess you can get those reports (should be a 122 page report). Key research conclusions include; inventory of keywords is not yet a critical problem, most advertisers are replying on both paid and organic search, and SEO abuse seen as more of a problem then click fraud.

Dana Todd was next up, she is discussing the committee reports. Marketing committee goals; drive industry growth overall, increase market demand for professional SEM services, increase SEMPO membership base. Education Committee Goals; provide support materials for site visitors, and education of general public via web site, press release, research and events. Marketing Committee; 1st phase of ad campaign completed, SEMPO event activity with ad tech, WMW, SES and Kelsey Group, Promotions, and New ad campaign will kick off in Q1. Education Committee; web site gets 4,000 uniques a week, new materials posted weekly, great new research and case studies, and need more business support documents.

Next up was Neg Norton, President of Yellow Pages Association a non profit member based organization and represents a 14 billion dollar industry and a SEMPO Advisory Board Member. He spoke shortly and I have the press release in my email if your interested. There is a free directory in the www.localsearchguide.org Web site.

New management team is coming in, Virtual Inc will be taking over the company. This company manages 15 other non profit organizations. So this company will take over the management of SEMPO. They updated lots of governance documents on the site. Member communication and benefits. Only 55% open the emails they sent. They have member benefits; growing in numbers and subscriptions, tools, events, and papers. Board elections are up, and 5 of the current board members are on the list and she listed other people up for election. 13 open positions, you vote probably in January and by proxy (email). She then thanked those board members who are stepping down.

Mike Grehan asked for his SEMPO calculator, he was denied, sorry Mike. Dan Theis asked who took the survey, we do not know for sure. Mike then asked, "should I tell my customer that they spend for branding?" The results of the report showed that most people show that brand building was the most important thing. Of course, you and I would think that lead generation and sales were the most important areas. But again, the sample collected is not certain.

Laura asked why are the leads on the SEMPO web site so poor. Why should she rejoin at the $2,000 level if these are the types of leads? Barbara said the membership levels need to be redefined and Virtual will do that. You really signed up to contribute, and lead generation is secondary. But as the Web site improves, you can expect more leads for you. Noel adds that promoting SEMPO as a lead generation tool is against the law, for a non profit organization.

Gary Stein, the moderator of the session, told a quick story to kick of the session. He used to work an an agency, and they were hired to do the advertising for a movie for a super hero. They had to come up with an interactive experience on the Web for this movie, where the script has not been even written yet. They went through all the discussion forums to download people's opinion on the marketing they have done. They used online forums to measure their success with that campaign. He then showed an example of cruftbox.com, a site dedicated to reviewing products. He did a review of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, and it was an extremely long write up with about 30 comments on his entry. People are now looking more and more for "trust agents", they use people as authorities (consumer reviews) and also brand as authorities. Online research is deep and thorough; "I like to research all available products, price, and store options before I buy something online." To that statement, 26% strongly agree, 33% somewhat agree. Consumers pointed toward informal sources via searches. 26% of the results found for a search on a product point to a consumer review. If you do a search for "starbucks" in Google, ihatestarbucks.com comes up as number two. He then showed this outstanding mini iPod commercial and he explained that it was done by a school teacher who simply loved his mini ipod. The ad looked very professional and it fooled me. "Dynamic Attitude Analysis Flow", is a way to keep track of how consumers are reacting to products. He explains, what if someone built a spider to crawl the Web and figure out what people are writing about the product. Not only capturing words, but adding to that, the attitude of the language used in the post. Then you can plot the information and compare it over history. Very interesting concept which should be explained in more detail by the panel.

Pete Blackshaw from Intelliseek explains that much of what Gary described is coined as "consumer generated media". They used the word "media" because the consumers are generating this media. He explains that the majority of your consumers are going to "other content". What Intelliseek is doing is listening in real time about what consumers are saying about brands on the Internet. They only listen to the untarnished comments, how consumers really feel. He explains that this can be measured over time.

Jonathan Carson from Buzzmetrics explains that when people are searching, a large portion of what searches are finding is consumer generated content. That is why they are here, to measure that with a digital footprint.

Bob Wyman from PubSub, I discussed this in my blog a while back. This is a form of link analysis through time based link analysis. He explained that a "prospective search" is a search that shows results based on the most popular queries search on recently. An important part of this is attitude management and this shows you the buzz. They recently added www.pubsub.com/linkranks_detail.php, which shows you the linkrank for a site over the past month. It shows you the domains that linked to a site in the last 10 days. This tool is not linked outside as of yet, this looks real interesting.

Gary asks how do you validate or ensure the data you collect is valid and representative? Jonathan said they do both automated and manual data collection. They try to segment based on behavior and that helps build a perfect representation of the sample.

Gary asks how do you figure out attitude in posts? I.E. someone who cuts and pastes information and then says, I disagree with this. Pete said the technology is now smart enough to parse out that emotion.

Bob then discusses how at the Web 2.0 conference, Snapz.com released their new search engine, during the announcement, several bloggers were in the room writing about it. By the time the announcement was done, consumer buzz was wide spread and documented in these tools. Soon after, some other blogger noticed the terms and conditions posted on the site were silly (it was actually a mistake and fixed within an hour), but other bloggers picked it up and the consumer buzz was now on the negative side. Then the same bloggers noticed it was fixed and they were elated, and consumer perception was back to being positive. Where else can you get such a quick response?

I would like to see Bob from PubSub.com reply to this entry as a test. :) His service allows one to get into an interactive discussion with any announcement they make, instead of the communication going one way.

This session was led by Niki Scevak, who was on the panel earlier about the online advertising and search forecasts. He went into explaining that ROI is very important to a search marketer. Sixty nine percent of search marketers plan to spend more money on search engine marketing then in 2003. Niki explained that only one of four search marketers bids and measures intelligently. They are look more at profit contribution, but not sales. The differences between unsophisticated and sophisticated search marketers are quite large. Sophisticated search marketers annually on average can spend $100,000 on a search marketing for the year. They are able to do this because they have systems in place that will enable them to spend rationally and with results.

Niki describes how search advertising took off from initial banner advertising, in terms of cost per impressions and cost per click. Sophisticates he says are happier with SEM, and because so will increase spending by more each year. He relates that sophisticates have systems in place that enable them to do this. There levels of spending depend upon what they know.

There is a life cycle for search marketers. On the first level is the one that entered in as unsophisticated and have opened an account and bid on a few terms, for example 20. He may have looked at looked at his log files and seen how much search marketing contributes to his traffic. The next level is the person that builds confidence in search marketing, and they go the next step by investing in more web analytics to track the campaigns. They see the potential and are now able to somewhat track the process. However do they know what they should be advertising on? Should I be on both Google and Yahoo, or just one? Additionally they may wonder how broad match or some of the tools offered by the search engines can help them. Niki mentions that search distribution of search marketers depends on how quickly they can measure the effectiveness of these engines. Using more advanced web analytics will help them decide whether they want to use both Overture and Google, and go into second and third tier engine space. The next level of the search marketer is more sophisticated but realizes that there is a fork in the road. They are realizing that spending is increasing and CPC rates are going up in more competitive areas, it will be necessary to analyze other means for which to optimize the campaign. This includes landing pages, and how the website that is being used. As the search marketer becomes more intelligent in their spending and management, they will grow more in the current market then they will increase in more spending or more search engines. It’s about optimizing the current situation before moving on to the next. Additional factors in the development of a search marketer include the adoption of new technologies.

Niki states the obvious in my opinion, but he goes on to say the bidding on more engines increases search clicks. There appears to be a certain testing time in which unsophisticated search marketers test one search engine before moving on to the next. He gaves some interesting stats in that sophisticates use Google 96% and Overture 91% of the time, as compared to Findwhat 44% percent of the time. Sophisticated search marketers use the second tier search engines way more than unsophisticated. So this means if you are considering using Findwhat or similar search engines, you are giving up more clicks to those that that are more sophisticated than you.

Niki concluded with some key points that marketers must achieve sophistication in bid strategy and measurement to survive. They will need to concentrate on improving web site efficiency to thrive.

Good session, the room is pretty packed for a session right after lunch. Some last points, they mentioned that there is estimated to be about 100,000 search marketers in the US. This number is based on a 538,000 people survey. They did fail to mention the variations of search marketing, such as one that works as an affiliate marketer. However someone in the audience brought it up and Gary Stein did talk a bit on some of the early results from an affiliate survey they are just finishing. He mentions that to create a successful affiliate program requires two things; one is to create a competitive commission structure, and two to offer a data feed of products. I really look forward to seeing some results from

There are many decisions that will affect you bottom line, this session dealt with those decisions that effect smaller to moderately sized SEO companies. Both of the speakers explained in more detail on how they run their companies and the wide variation among SEO firms.

John Lustina, from Intrapromote was up first to talk about the large side of the SEO industry. He explained that the larger side of the industry often means only 30 employees. He explains that his firm deals exclusively with white techniques, and that has enabled his firm to attract and get larger brands. Basically they do not want anything that will harm their URL.

He goes on to say that he only uses full time employee, as there is a high margin, and he realizes that he will invest a good amount of time into teaching them about SEO and the industry. He doesn’t think it’s worth it to hire a contractor and invest that time. There seems to a good number of people that have gotten started with SEO in the last 6 months. I think the industry veterans decided to sit in the back.

John puts up a slide about the emerging cash flow management issues for SEM in 2005.
They are in circular fashion.

SEO High Margin -> PPC Single Digit -> Sequential Liability -> Terms -> Cash Reserves ->

He goes into more detail about sequential liability, a think that most SEO companies understand. Where the profit comes in and right back out the door, and its need to be the responsibility of the firm to make sure that clients pay on time. You do not want to turn your business into money out, money out, money out. I agree completely, he makes a good point. John stresses the importance of being very tight on terms. He says that Intrapromote has 10% of revenue in cash reserves. He says that it helps him sleep at night and allows him to take some extra risks. He explains that the way he came up with that number is he started with a certain amount of funds in the bank and they need funds to cover expenses for several months.

The next speaker was Laura Thieme from Bizresearch. She explains her story of how she got into the business. She said she started in 98, and her company grew out of her apartment. She says they gradually went to an office space, and got rid of any employees that would rather have remained home based. They used a book keeper a couple times a week, now as opposed to several times a month when she started out. She hired other people such as data entry, graphic designers, accountants, lawyers, temp staff.

She explains the benefits she offer employees. Such as 1 week vacation, offering a 401K, and other medical fees such as dental, training, travel, and 10% bonuses. One interesting and helpful way she mentioned to keep employees accountable was set an expectation of them to make 2-3X there annual income from the company. This worked.

Bizresearch has not been in the red. She has never hired a CFO, and doesn’t think she will need one currently. She had trouble getting the business a line of credit. They ended up financing software and equipment they had already bought.

She said they switched to a hourly model to charge clients in 2004. Prior to 2004, all clients were on retainers, and they realized that they were spending way more time than before, and thus needed to charge for it. Laura talked about contracts in that they are one year, and auto renew, and hire a part time corporate contract lawyer at $25 and hour as opposed to one that goes for $200 an hour. You can use DMB’s collection service to collect on money that is owed under a few thousands dollars. She concluded that her outlook for the future in 2005 is reducing the amount of outsourcing and to use technology to save time.

Jim Boykin, was up next. I am fond of Jim’s work, he is rather private in the forums, but is in my opinion one of those guys you should watch. He is a defining leader in his field. Jim’s presentation was extremely simple outline. He explains how he got started in 99, worked as a consultant, built We Build Pages, eventually moved out of home office, and eventually started to target “internet marketing”.

He explains that when Florida hit in November that several of his clients left. They realized they needed to change there offerings so if in the event that Google had another Florida then the client would still be receiving a good deal of promotion from other areas. His early goals for 2004 included consulting, on page optimization, link building, website design, website templates, pay per click, and shopping feeds.

Jim related that they experienced quite a few challenges. They needed to be more organized, organize billing, obtain and office manager, define roles, set contract. They are one of the only companies that publishes there contract online. Jims says he doesn’t have a business plan. One thing I know myself have rarely done as well. Things change daily in terms of the search engines, its hard to set that in writing. He also recommends that you can get insurance from the Chamber of Commerce for small businesses. Additionally he related that his contract style is monthly. If the client pays the contract renews. Plain and simple way of doing, but it works for them.

Overall the session was very good from a small business prospective, while the session was not the most exciting, I did notice a lot of note taking as there were many people there representing SEO companies that were looking for good ideas to increase the success of their own business. One of the interesting questions that was left in my mind at the end was if the era of high margin SEO was over?

This session is about how to outsource, hire people out.

Jill Whalen was up first, she has been doing SEO work for almost 10 years. If you are running your own SEM company you can do it all, get employees or outsource pieces. If you do it yourself you will find that there is not enough time in the day, you will never be as good as an expert in that niche, you will probably notice lower quality of work and bad client relations, and there is overall less money to be made. If you specialize and become an expert you will do what you like, you will learn your niche inside and out and outsource everything else. If you do outsource, you must be able to be a project manager, see the big picture, find good people you like, communicate your needs well, let go and trust those you outsource, and "be Donald Trump if necessary" (meaning, 'your fired" to those bad vendors). Benefits include; get to do what you like, higher quality of work, more clients, more work, have a network of colleagues, and no real payroll and no office. (Jill admits she works in her PJs; she said it but she said it with a ton of humor). Aspects Jill outsources, KR, Copywriting, proof reading link building and PPC management.

Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement was up next. She will go over how to handle the logistics of this, people, system and resources.
> People: Dealing with clients ; option 1, be a control freak as the bottleneck; option 2, trained account manager working directly with clients. She prefers to higher account managers and train them SEM to work with hers clients. She prefers to higher as sub contractors over employees. Full time vs. part time: SAHMs (Stay At Home Moms). She says that there are many women out there that are smart, experiences and eager to work from home. They make the most grateful and loyal workers. She recently outsourced SEO Research Labs (Dan Theis's company) for a really low cost. Training through online courses, books and on the job. You need to track time well; she says QuickBooks has a time module and you can use TimeFox or some other tool.
> Systems: Process manual, you need to document every step in the process, this is a must. This becomes a company asset, and it ensures consistency and standards. This is also part of the on job training process. Minimizes problems and saves time in the long run. All her vendors have her company email address (@mycompany.com), and they looked into the phone services and selected the local phone company with extensions with voice mail options, with conferencing and efax. Sharing data with people remotely is an other challenge. They tried to set up a VPN but they didnt want to make sure the network was up 24/7, so they opted out of that. They also didnt want to do colocation because of the price. So they decided to go with a 3rd party ASP solution named MarketingCentral.
> Resources to save your business and your sanity: The E Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Dont Work and What to Do About It. The Small Business Development Center (sba.gov/sbdc) to they can help you write a business plan.

Scottie Claiborne from Right Click Web Consulting and works for Kascher Group. Scottie will talk about it from the other side of the coin, being the specialist. Why Specialize; Humans tend to feel they need to be good at everything, but in reality you should focus on what your good at. Maximize your Talents, do what is natural to you and focus on becoming the very best at what you do. Minimize your Weakness, find other solutions. SEO Specialties Broken Down: Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis; Copywriting; Technical and Programming, Link Building, Usability and marketing; Statistical Analysis and Other Value Added Services. Reselling to pros and not the clients, so price your services at the wholesale cost (like Dan Theis), if you market direct to public then dont undercut your partners, should be a value to partners (save time, economics, quality of work). Marketing yourself; find the companies you want to work with, get them hooked, and let them find you (articles, speaking and forums). As you become an expert in your speciality you do not need to do it all.

Finally Ani Kortikar from NetraMind was up, he is at a bit of a disadvantage, since I got a cold call from one of his sales reps in India. He starts off describing his company, they have 45 people across the world. Pros of being small include nimble, personal service, personal relations. Cons; lack of scalability (lack of standardized quality process, lack of repeatable delivery process, lack of standardized HR) and unpredictable cash flow (lack of cost analysis and pricing power). Wrong reasons to outsource include; reducing costs and 24 x 7 operations. Right reasons; focus on core competencies, cost management, scalability, control over delivery, explore new profitable customer segments, etc. People, Process and Technology was pretty much covered already. There is a culture challenge, the "Us vs. Them". Also is there a local presence. Communication is hard. Time differences. Overall good presentation.

Q: How do you find these stay at home moms?
A: She sends out an email to her friends and it spreads virally and then she screens them with exercises. You can also go to the PTA or parenting forums.

Q: How do you get business early on?
A: Scottie said she got a lot of new business from forums by giving out free advice. Whenever Stacy competes against a big player, she says "do you want to be a little fish in a big pond?" Then for all, word of mouth takes control.

Q: How do you address the challenges from working in India?
A: His big challenge is conveying that they can get the job done. The second challenge was there needed to be a process. Trust fact was a big factor as well.

MSN Beta Tool Bar was the big announcement for Microsoft today. Spoke with Andy Beal this morning, he predicted it before they announced it. Anyway, I got to run to the next session, forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

Dan Boberg from Overture, Jamie Crouthamel from Performics, James Hering from T:M Advertising, and Allan Dick from Vintage Tub & Bath were those on the panel, moderated by Niki Scevak. They all discussed their view points from their perspective objectives.

Dan Boberg discusses how important it is to share and build trust between the publishers and the advertisers. The more that Overture can optimize over time, the better off everyone is - so its not just the upfront work. A deep dive into the keywords on a quarterly basis. They always try to make it easier for the advertiser.

Niki then asked James to talk about the typical relationships formed over time with clients. James sees that its about building a relationship, one way is to bring them to a conference like this. It is important not to set absolute goals, but rather set ranges to help alleviate false expectations. Jaimie added, the way they look at it as an SEM is that for a typical "buy" there is a lot of upfront planning work. He said, they are just building out keywords, and then you focus on the execution phase. He said your almost doing your analysis on the fly.

How do you define expectations? Jaime said it has a lot to do after you start getting into it. You try things, until you get in and try it, you do not know for sure. James said he has seen a very different strategy when it comes to offline and online marketing. With search you can do it in almost real time. You can manage expectations as you go. Allan agreed. When Allan started he could not afford an agency, so they decided to do it in house. Once they started growing they hired an agency, they were good, but they did not fit his particular company. They then brought it back in house and it has been much better. He said he was disappointed with the follow through. (1) He likes to be educated, (2) he wants you to understand his product, how else can you spend his money on keywords? (3) and then set expectations. Managing expectations was the biggest issue he has with agencies.

Niki then asks the agencies how they set expectations. Jaime says that his first set of clients were direct marketers and did affiliate marketing. He took the direct marketing metrics and applied it to affiliate marketing. The cost per click, ROI dropped but it was still effective compared to other methods. Then more traditional advertisers came in and they explained branded concepts with search marketing. Education was key for them to manage expectations. James added that it boggles his mind how agencies mix the two (TV ad and search), when you do TV ads, you need to make sure that search is integrated with that.

Niki asks if you ever reject a client. James says they typically take 1 out of 3 clients. James said they turned down many clients because they were not willing to make changes to their sites. He says there is no sense is spending money when it will have a negative ROI, it will just make the client think search is bad and waste money. Before Allan modifies his site, he needs to know why it must be done. It is about education he says. He said he is willing to make changes, but you need to convince him. Dan explains that one side of the overture triangle is (1) driving leads (2) fine tuning to qualified leads and (3) sending traffic to pages that convert.

Niki asks how do you see pricing models change over time? James said its a bit like the wild west out there. He said he is shocked to see that there are those charging 20 - 30%, he doesn't know how there is a positive ROI on that. James approaches it as a retainer or consultancy fee. Jaime says he does use a percentage of media and they sometimes charge a consultation fee, but this works for them at this point. Allan explains that its all about value to him; its not only about what it costs. He said he doesn't like when you charge both a percentage of the spend AND a labor fee; don't do both. The more Allan thinks you know (the agency) what you are doing, the more value, the less price matters to him. Dan explains that if it was his choice he would have a small percentage of spend and then price tied in with objectives.

Q & A:

Q: Nacho asks where do you draw the line as to which services you should or should not provide? How far should overture go to help the advertiser?
A: Dan explains that search has grown tremendously, and increased complexity. The tool side, he explained, is great, both on the 3rd party side and Overture's own tools. They will continue to make it easier. The other speakers say that as long as they don't have a core competency in an area, they will not offer it directly.

Q: Does Overture have plans to offer SEO services, like Ask and Lycos both recently released?
A: Overture does not have plans to do so. Niki says that Ask Jeeves acquired a company, so they do not necessarily offer SEO Services directly.

Q: BakedJake I believe asked the next question, about using the engine's tools to track ROI.
A: James said they do not use those tools to track ROI. They had to build tools to summarize all the ad spends in a dashboard affect. Niki adds that this will come as analytics tools get more sophisticated. Allan explains that it is so easy to bid up a term, but he is not worried about it because the other company will go out of business and then he will be back in the number one slot.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink was first up to discuss profitable models. She starts off explaining that search is hot, so hot that is distracting. There is just so much money, but not enough employees and time. Traditional pricing models; PR 3x cost, Advertising; 15% of media, etc. They charge a retainer for SEO, a per keyword fee by PPC, they outsourced services they markup and consulting by hour. The more you charge, the more business they get. They have a 2 level SEO plan; (1) 60 - 90 day startup and maintenance and (2) Jumpstart, priced per page. Beyond Ink Algorithm; annual cost total/available hours = per hour cost. Market rate - per hour cost = margin. Total job hours x hourly rate - outside cost = profit.

Next up was Matt Trimmer from ivantage.co.uk. The first five minutes or so he discussed his company, his person experience and how things have changed in the industry. He said he even hired Danny Sullivan back in the day. He discussed how there is tons of misinformation; register your site with a 100 search engines for $99 and selling SEO as PPC. There is a lot of risky tactics out there and for those that dont know what they are doing, need to be very careful. They focus on measurements using web analytics and checking positions. They protect themselves with a contract and price everything based on time. They have an SEO Express, which is SEO on a CPC basis, a product that helps them do this is Your Amigo. They have an SEO Consult which is advice and training. They do SEO Implement where they do the work. PPC Management. Web analytics. Best model for pricing. Consultancy 950 pounds, account management is 500 pounds and I missed the last one. He then goes over the time based pricing and its advantages. Main advantage is that its easy to explain to the customer, easy to justify and easy to avoid a discount. Things that worry him include that he has no real control over customers leaving, PPC commissions and fees worry him, getting good people worry him and one day agencies might build SE Friendly sites.

Andy Beal from Keyword Rankings was next up. When they first started his first goal was to keep the lights on, and used a typical SEO pricing model (i.e. pay us $10,000 for the first 90 days and then $500 per month there after and we will get you top rankings). A lot of those companies left after 90 days, so they needed to figure how to keep the customers on. They kept on bringing on new clients but they needed to make more from the existing clients whom kept on leaving. They needed to remove the cost of entry (i.e. 10k to get in). They needed a pricing model to encourage a long term client. They changed their pricing model to a flat rate per month ($2,000 per month), and then Keyword Rankings knew what to expect month after month. They also did not have to pay a high commission as they used to with the lower monthly rates. No set up costs and easier to get approved. Removed the $XX,XXX for the first 90 days. Low cost monthly payment with 6 and 12 month terms. Clients see it as a long term campaign, and they see a very high retention rate (up towards 90%). The downside to switching to this pricing model is that they have sapped cash reserves for 2 - 4 months. Annual revenue per client increases. Higher retention rates allows them to increase service staff. They started off with about 800k, then 1.8m, then 4m, then 7m, and then 15m. It takes 6 months for Keyword Rankings to become profitable.

The forum was led by Gary Stein, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. He thanked everyone for coming to the conference. He introduced Niki Scevak, another analyst who would be discussing the forecast models that are driving the number presented in the session.

Things are going to surge. He displayed a graph detailing in billions how search has grown since 1997, which started with a projection of $0.9 billion for search, display, and classifieds. It will grow to be about 19 billion by the year 2009 and flatten out slowly after that. He explains that in 2002-2003 the bottom did not fall out of the internet. Internet services grew and so did resources. What fell out was the business idea, companies that were not built on a lot of solid ground. Over the last three years advertising flatted out, so there was no need to build it back up.

They are currently looking to see search to flatten out.

Questions from audience. What are the definitions of display? Gary explained that its anything that is paid to a third party, so its not search engine optimization. Contextual advertising is included in the "display" category. The classified session includes the
listing fees paid by people to get included in the pages. This does not include eBay.

Gary pulled up another slide and explained that online advertising is an excellent way to build branding. It does have a lot of room to grow. He goes on to explain that online advertising will be larger that magazine advertising. I find that quite interesting. He explains that magazine advertising has been suffering in the last few years. Its not a huge surprise that magazine advertising will be taken over. They will need to look at how they sell advertising in magazines. It will not work anymore to sell just the opening spread.

Gary explained that rich and steaming media will quadruple by 2009. Its projected to be a
3.8 billion dollar industry by the year 2009. 2009 seems to be a magic number in this session, and I am not exactly sure why. He explains that rich media will make the user experience better. Gary gave a good example, that a banner ad has yet to make someone cry. The creative palate will expand, and there is growth that will happen in many areas.

We just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the banner. Before, just having a banner on the internet means you have arrived. This is not the case in any more. The internet there is a myth of perfect measurement. CTR rates can fall through the fall, and as we get away from this we will understand how to better measure the effectiveness. A rising CPM is really a rise in value.

Paid search growth remains strong, but slow in the beginning. It is broken into to sections, paid listings and paid inclusion. Where paid inclusion is what you pay to get into a search engine. Gary says that paid inclusion will morph and change. He says some SEO companies like paid inclusion, by listing the in Site Match first to get an idea of how the spider reacts to the site, before they do any optimization. I do agree with this, its a good idea.

There will be increasing cost per click driving spend up. As more Fortune 500 companies get into this space the CPC will go up gradually. Conversion may go down because of this. People will need to understand the value of your keyword. If you understand this it will help you compete in the market. First thing you need to do is get your metrics in order. Second, identify the costs involved in order to get an idea of cost. Gary gave an example of a lightening company (which I have heard before) that has a better ROI than there competitors. They have optimized there landing pages.

I have heard a good deal about local search, and many are seeing a value proposition contained within this segment. Gary goes into what he believes will keep this segment growing. He explains though that local search will grow more slowing than other areas.

Paid search will experiences strong near-term growth before slowing with market maturity. There will be issues stifling growth for paid search, such as language barriers and currencies. Gary said that with any given technology it can only expand up to 20%. The reason, as more people adopt the technology it will become easier for more people to see the value, or if its within arms reach. As the internet becomes more of a resource, we will see more growth but for now its not there yet.

There are many people who use the internet daily to avoid information lapses. He explains how we look at the internet, as something we go into a room and use. Its transforming. Look at college students and teens. Its engrained in to their lives. Google has become a default behavior. Why should I know what a fathom is? I can just look it up on Google. In general people feel that the information is getting better in the search engines (?). Gary, explains a Harvard study to see how satisfied people are with search. They are, but is a LOT of work. There are latent needs for improvement. What they want is better returns, not sliders, dials and rankings. Good example, remember DOS, great tool, but a LOT of work.

Google has a fantastic market share, I have heard 47%, Gary says its around 45-60%. He believes that people do not need personalization in search. Interesting. He gives an example of Ask Jeeves that who has taken this on, and looks forward to see what the search engines will do relating to this. Danny Sullivan has a great article on search personalization on Search Engine Watch. Check that out if interesting in more information on personalization. Gary goes into more detail about the results from Harvard. He says that people will expand their keyword lists to get more out of their experience.

Things to pay attention to in 2005, consumer edition.

• Look at vertical search, there will be a good deal of data intensive jobs (doctors, architects, engineers). It will be interesting to see how search engines integrate this into their mix.


• Watch out for a search interfaces. It may be important to put an interface everywhere and an index to go with it. I don't see how this will make things better however


• Also look at audio and video search, a market that is growing. (link to article).

Additional things to pay attention to in 2005, business edition.

• Market compression, especially for contextual ads


• Fraud as a primary underminer of confidence. Google has stated this is a threat to there business model as stated at a recent investor conference


• Big players missteps, capitalized upon by small players. Just look at other companies
  that have adopted similar services as Yahoo and Google.


• The data market may be getting some controls

There were some questions from the audience. One was about the percentage of people that click on organic listings as compared to paid listings. Out of every 7 queries in a search engine, 6 people click on algorithm listings as opposed to paid search listings. I am not sure where this number is coming from. But Niki Scevak, explains they look at records of companies and define where the amount of sales is coming from. It depends
on a variety of factors. Some from the audience mentions that presentation of the ads (such as those that look like organic listings I assume) can increase click through rates for paid listings. I know one example in general is how Ask Jeeves uses advertising above the fold of their search engine results. There is a good deal of ads, and we know they are ads.

Side Note: Internet access is pretty limited. Its seems Barry and I are going to have to make due in the press room. Push away a few computers, contend for DSL ports. Its rough. :-) WIFI would make this facility world class.

Several months ago must have been the last time Ammon Johns, the 'Technical Director' of Propellernet Search Engine Marketing and an Admin at the Cre8asite Forums, and I have chatted over the phone. Ammon and I touched based Thursday night to just catch up and, of course, talk search engine marketing. One of the best parts of writing at the Search Engine Roundtable is having these opportunities, to talk with the leading SEM experts in the world.

Ammon was gracious enough to give me a call, all the way from his home town, Hove, in East Sussex, on the South coast of the UK. We must have talked for over an hour but of course it felt much less. I asked Ammon after our call was over, if it would be alright if I shared some of our conversation with the public, he kindly accepted. I write this entry three days after our conversation, so I hope I do honor to the detail of our discussion.

Continue reading "Shooting the Breeze with Ammon Johns - Worldwide Leading SEM Expert"

I have landed a couple of hours ago and I am not at the hotel. Ben (phoenix) should have landed just about now, I expect he should get to the hotel shortly.

If you have requests as to which sessions you would like Ben and I to cover, please post a comment here. There is a session list at the conference at a glance page. We will do our best to accommodate all requests.

This is the first time we are providing double coverage of the SES events. Last year was the first time I providing coverage of the SES events, here are the past archives (you can see we upped our standard of coverage since then).
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 9th – Day One
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 10th – Day Two (Part I)
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 10th – Day Two (Part II)
- Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 11th – Day Three

And for my article recap: Search Engine Strategies Conference Chicago 2003 Reviewed

This year, the Chicago SES Conference will be four days, instead of three. There are many new sessions, some that are a bit spicy. :) You will see. Get set for tomorrow!

Brett and Erika (HG) of WebmasterWorld are getting married tomorrow, check out the WebmasterWorld thread. You will notice the logo at the top has Wedding Bells added to it, if you think they are Christmas bells you are wrong, the file name is "weddingbells.gif". I would like to publicly wish the soon to be couple a happy and healthy life together.

It seems to be the season where SEM forum owners get married. Recently Kim Krause Tied the Knot, oh they also did put up a revised logo to celebrate at Cre8asite. She is with good company.

Congrats Brett, Erika!

MSN Beta is still serving up results that make any SEO jump for joy. It is very easy for many SEOs to rank well in the new Beta Search engine by MSN. A thread at SEO Chat asks the question, How long will MSN SEO Heaven Last?.

To address the question, I personally do not know. I would think for them to become a serious engine that competes (in terms of relevancy) with Google, Yahoo and Teoma on relevancy, they will need to make some major changes. This doesn't necessarily need to be the day they go live, but as soon as they want to compete in terms of relevancy.

I am not a fan of theories but I thought I mention a theory in the thread. Jasontnyc, one of the newest moderators at SEO Chat feels that MSN is offering results that the SEO's want to see. His reasoning is that most normal users have no idea that MSN has a beta engine, but most SEOs do know this fact. By providing results that are attractive to the SEO community, MSN can start a nice little marketing frenzy amongst the SEO community. This marketing tactic might dribble down to those in the mass search market.

I have noticed Yahoo! especially, and Google appeasing the SEO industry more and more these days. The public relations departments at these companies are aware of the SEM industry and might see it as an avenue to do some grassroots promotion.

Google released Google Suggest, a search feature that basically shows suggestions as you begin to type in the search box. It is very neat, check out the FAQs at Google Labs on Google Suggest. A reader, Max, notified me of this new service. WebmasterWorld just featured a thread on this topic. Below is a screen capture of how it works, when I typed in "web de".

Some important notes from the FAQs;
- Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.
- Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.
- Google can see what you type as you type it, but Google has a privacy policy

I am very impressed.

In a partnership with X1, Yahoo has decided to enter the desktop search marketplace, with its own branded X1 desktop search client. The news is spreading the Web, already found at ClickZ, Mercury News, ABC News, InternetNews and others. Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on the story at his blog entry he named Yahoo Details Desktop Search Plans; Ask Jeeves & MSN Launch This Month, where he predicts the winner of the desktop search war will be the "Searchers".

Forum discussion currently at Search Engine Watch.

Reason I mention this is because it is the first time I have seen Google Print results within the actual SERPs, like you would find news, froogle and definitions. I did a search on Dietary Supplements to trigger the Google Book result. It looks nice, don't you think?

Google Print has launched back in December of 2003 and this is the first time I am seeing the Google Print in the main Google Web results.

I have been following this topic for sometime now, as its relatively new area in the last year with several lawsuits popping up now and again of companies filing suit on the use of trademarked terms in meta-tags. Cre8asite Forums has some discussion on this, and its probably coincidence but SEW Blog had a little spot today on it as well for a case back in August I believe.

One of the members on Cre8asite was trying to determine what exactly applied to trademark infringement in the meta-tags. I guess first you must define a trademark before you can understand how its could be infringement upon. According to a post back in March Barry did it is:

Trademark infringement is use of another's mark that is likely to cause consumer confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to source, affiliation, sponsorship, origin or approval.

There have been some conflicting cases this last year that I will reference in regards to what the courts have decided was technically how the use was indeed infringing upon a particular trademark. Its also interesting to notice that these court cases can over run over a million dollars in court costs. So these suits are often taken at the expense of plaintiff or defendant, or both.

In November, a US district court judge has ordered a web site to remove references from its homepage to a competitor site, which included orders that concerned the abuse of meta tags. The use was skewing search engine results as the court had said.

The first UK case on trademark law and meta tag abuse was to look at the issue of trademark infringement by way of using meta tags in the case of Road Tech Computer Systems v. Mandata.

The court summarized in its decisions "that trademark is a trademark even if it can only be read by a computer."

However, another court in the UK had some different opinions in terms of what classified as a trademark infringement. They decided to consider the scope for which the term considering the use of the term in invoices, press releases and in advertising as compared to the use in a meta tag. Additionally the term of concern in the case was "Reed" and they also went on to say that the companies being sued used the term in a reserved fashion, along with other words such as “jobs” or “recruitment”. Which caused the company website to arrive at higher rankings, apparently above the company that sued them. The Court found no infringement in this case. Original case recorded can be found here.

Finally, one of the more recent cases this year was a biopharmaceutical firm that distributes plasma derivatives sueing its rival, alleging that it used the trade marked name “BDI Blood Diagnostics" in its meta tags. They found that there were revealing that trade marked terms relating to Blood Diagnostics in the source code and meta tags. There has not been a ruling on the case yet, but the company suing is seeking damages. The defendent is also wanting to get this case thrown out.

It seems based on the research I did above that the main cause for which most of these sometimes silly lawsuits get filed related to rankings in the search engines. In every article I reviewed they cited something to the same example "a new lawsuit was filed after Blood Diagnostics discovered that search engines were listing Florida-based Health Coalition’s web site in the top 10 of search results for Blood Diagnostics". Now I am not a legal expert in any way, but doesn't this sound a bit silly? I outrank you in a search engine, you sue me for using part of your name or some other industry specific term. I can understand the part of trademark use in terms of companies wanting to protect their name. But personally I think this is handled incorrectly. Its going to cost a good deal to take this to the courts, where instead they could spend it on hiring an SEO consultant or buying some text links to out rank their competitor. Shot, I could solve the ranking problem in an hour, and definately be way less expensive.

Sometimes what happens when a competitor beats you in the search engine rankings is you mount a counter effort to outrank him again! Its part of doing business on the internet, no body said you had to like it. Its cheaper, more cost effective, you can learn a lot along the way, you stay out of the courts, you don't make it public, and you ultimately win if you are determined.

Danny Sullivan wrote a blog entry today about a session that will take place at SES Chicago named What Would You Do?. The session description reads;

In this panel, a group of search marketers are put in charge of a fictional search engine and asked to make policies about spam, ads and trademarks, controversial ads and other tricky issues. Come watch them try to please all parties while under pressure.

As Danny points out, so far the panelist include:
- Greg Boser - VP, Editorial Quality, GooHoo!
- Andrew Goodman - VP, Advertising Programs, GooHoo!
- Noel McMichael - VP, Content Acquisition, GooHoo!
- Dana Todd - VP, Revenue Enhancement & Partner Relations, GooHoo!

They all are acting as if they are running a new search engine with "97 percent share of the search audience." That really should make it interesting. Some background on where I think the panelists will differ in opinion. Greg is known for his hard SEO tactics, I can see him taking the opposite approach and beating out all spam. Andrew Goodman is one of the PPC kings in the industry, I am sure he will talk about all the things that tick him off with AdWords and Overture. Noel, well he is one of the visionaries of the industry - he can go any way, but with the title of content acquisition, I suspect he will talk about PFI and trusted feed topics. Dana Todd has been the individual holding SEMPO together in these hard times, she has been leading the marketing side and the behind the scenes support (as far as I know). I suspect to hear Dana talk about how to leverage the existing market place to make GooHoo a money generating power house.

This will be a really fun session, trust me, I will be covering it. Danny is giving you the opportunity to ask the panel questions, just go to the Questions for GooHoo thread.

You got to love a thread that is titled, How many manual link exchanges can you request within an hour?. It is a shame the thread went off topic into the debate about should you try to send out as many link exchange requests as possible or just go after a very few, but highly relevant exchanges. I would have loved to see the numbers of "manual" link exchanges a single individual can send out within an hour. And even more so the conversion rates on those attempts.

On that note, martinibuster has a good line in msg #23, "The way I see it, it's a balancing act between quality AND quantity because imo the algo judges you against both criteria." But if you can, join the thread and share the numbers on the original topic. That would be nice to see.

SEGuru, also known as Daron, started a thought provoking but yet, too agreeably speechless, post at Search Engine Watch forums named An Oldtimers Perspective.... In that post, SEGuru discusses how it was for him in the older days of the industry; "It was the days of the spider and the algorithm in full force and rapid evident evolution, which has only made search a better place."

"Good times it was," Daron said, and it was and still is. SEGuru describes in the thread the new opportunities facing the industry with the barriers between SEO and Search Engine have been broken with the help of Danny Sullivan. He welcomes Microsoft into "to the [search] space".

Ironically, he discusses his thoughts on both sides of the SEM industry coin, which I will just pull out this quote, "Win/Win/Win = EndUser/SE/SEO". To then end with a word of wisdom for old and new people to join the industry; "the politics...is BS. Do not get caught up in it."

That last line is a good line to end with, so I will quote it again.

the politics...is BS. Do not get caught up in it.

It looks like Google is caving on the policy of not allowed animated images within its AdSense program. According to an article over at DM News named Google Plans Flashier Image Ads said, "A test group will run animated GIF files, though Google said it would keep its maximum file size for image ad units at 50 kilobytes."

At Jensense.com, Jen writes;

While animated image ads must still adhere to the 50KB rule of non-animated ads, it will be interesting to see just how "animated" they are. Will advertisers be allowed to use a "punch the monkey" annoying style of animation? Or will it be limited to two or three slow-moving frames?

Forum coverage at:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• DigitalPoint
  
• Search Engine Watch
  

The Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference is taking place next week, December 13 - 16, 2004. Last year this conference was a three day event, this year it will be a four day event. There are many new sessions that I am looking forward to attending. Please expect live coverage of the sessions, if wireless, we will post these reports as they happen, otherwise there might be an hour delay. Both Ben (aka phoenix) and I will be providing detailed coverage of the sessions, so you are going to get double coverage. Alan Webb might be able to help out, and if he does, that means you will be getting triple coverage. There are about 3 to 4 sessions happening at the same time, we will do our best not to cover the same ones.

If you will be attending the conference, feel free to say hi. I look forward to seeing you there.

Some more SEMPO news for you. Christine Churchill of Key Relevance is an outstanding individual, losing her as a decision maker on the SEMPO Board will be a great lose for the fragile SEM organization. Christine Churchill does clarify that she is not leaving due to political issues that *might* be hovering over the organization, but in order to "place a high priority on my family and friends," as her official public statement declares.

On a personal note; I am sure we all wish you much happiness in the future with your family and friends. May you, your family and friends have a healthy and successful new year.

Search Engine Watch forum member, I, Brian, posted an excellent thread named Link Building with Landing Pages: a basic guide this morning. In that thread he explains why landing pages are crucial in the link building campaign process. Brian then goes on to explain what landing pages are, how they can be set up and his "secrets" of landing pages. The thread gives a good overview of landing pages success with link building strategies.

There's an interesting thread brewing at SEW on the competitiveness of search terms. Member randfish has posted some information on a tool he's developing to provide competition metrics, and of course I can't resist a good conversation on keyword metrics!

References:

SEW thread - Competitiveness of a Search Term
Randfish's keyword difficulty tool.
My take on keyword and search term competition metrics.

Continue reading "Determining the Competitiveness Value of a Keyword Phrase"

A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses how every time you click from a search result in Google, the result opens in a new window. The member describes the code being used as;

Google inserts this piece of code:
---------------------//---------------------------
<script><!--
if (window.name == 'nw') { window.name = '';}
//-->
</script>
...
<a href="http://www.foo.com/" target="nw"><b>Foo</b>
---------------------//------------------------

You do know that Google has an option to "Open search results in a new browser window" in the Google Preferences page.

There are reports at WebmasterWorld of a Google Directory update. SteveB, a senior member at WebmasterWorld says;

Google directory seems to finally have been updated correctly.

Given the large amount of moving around that the serps are doing, with some of the main datacenters offline does this mean they might actually be......

Shawn Hogan from DigitalPoint actually started filtering his various corporate email accounts through the gmail mail server. Shawn used many types of spam detection and filtering systems, including Spam Assassin, which I am happy with, to block unwanted email. But for some reason 2,000 spam emails seemed to slip through his filters on a daily basis. Shawn decided to to use gmail to filter his email address and it worked.

How did he do it?

Forward all email to gmail, access the gmail email via POP in his client side email program, and send email from his corporate email addresses like he normally would. He doesn't touch gmail.

Some great news for those stressing over whether Google will be able to spider their very long dynamic urls. Appears in the last couple weeks Google has been pushing the envelope in terms of spidering urls that contain more than 5 variables and up to 6 variables in most cases. Who's to say search engines don't like dynamic websites? A trend that may be changing from what we originally thought Google could spider. There is a good discussion at Highrankings, where projectphp notices that some pages are now being picked up.

To illustrate here is an example of what Google is now picking up:

www.domain.com.au/Start.aspx?PageID=10150& ProductID=137474&menuId=0&MM=&icp=0&sti=1

There was some more reports of Google spidering 5 urls variables recently, and this week Google adds 6 url variables to the list. I am hoping its gets up to 7 variables, but here is hoping, and if they can do 6, it means they are close to 7 or more.

I Help You Forums recently added a Live Chat feature to the site, see the thread for more details. Not sure how man operators are on the other side and if any forum can sustain the free live chat advice. Neat feature anyway, if its live.

Last summer, during the San Jose SES conference, Trellian announced a keyword research tool at Priority Submit, it now goes under the name of Keyword Discover.com. Many keyword research specialists, including Dan Thies.

Recently, Trellian announced a Keyword Discovery API. I am sure you crazy coders and search enthusiasts will love this flexibility. Personally, I am thinking up ideas on how I can use this to provide fun and useful tools for the community. Forum discussion on this topic at High Rankings.

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Let's talk about shopping cart conversion discusses real people's experience with shopping cart abandonment rates. As mentioned in the thread, on average, the "75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts". What is even more shocking is that "47% of ebusinesses do not know their shopping cart abandonment rate." I have reviewed some of my e-commerce customer's cart abandonment rates and they seem to be below the average on a whole. Some are higher then others, but overall they are lower.

Over the years, we have stopped requiring online shoppers to sign up for an account before buying online. We try to keep the checkout process as clear as possible. (1) Add item to cart, (2) Hit Checkout (which has all the costs on this page, tax, shipping, etc.), (3) Fill out the bill to, ship to, and payment information and (4) Hit Buy Now. In reality, most of our checkout systems seem like a two step process. Between the cart and checkout screen, I see on average lower then 70% abandonment. But between the checkout screen and the invoice page I see less then 50% abandonment.

On some of our other sites, where we can do more personalized tracking. We will send follow up emails to the customer, saying something to the affect of, "Save $X if you buy within the next 48 hours. Click here to retrieve your special discount." Or something like that. Plus we pre-fill any information that is possible, make those buttons you want to click stand out (buy now, check out, add to cart), and ensure costs and discounts are clearly visible on the site. Just make sure the shopper is comfortable.

I had someone call me yesterday about his online store, thanks Kim. And this person's site even confused me. Granted he sells a very customizable product, but you must clearly tell the user what action to take next. My firm has built far more complicated products that allow far more customizability, and I can not stress how important it is to ensure the 'personalization steps' are clear, easy, defined, and worry free.

You know something, good thing this site is not my wife, because I would be dead now! I can't believe I forgot that December 2nd was the one year anniversary of this site. It is really amazing how much has been covered here, how it has grown and most importantly, how much has changed in our industry within a year.

This entry would make for the 1153 entry posted on this site in 369 days (365 + 4), 1380 comments (I block about 100 comments per day, most spam but if I blocked yours I am sorry, false negatives do happen) and many great authors.

Traffic has been wonderful as well, its because of you that I continue to put so much of my effort towards this site. Again, if you have suggestions, comments or want to add your thoughts to this site, please email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com or leave a comment.

I will try to think something up special for the anniversary. If you have ideas, please let me know. Next week is the SES Chicago conference and we will have a special treat for the readers for that event. Stay tuned...

For those of you who felt restricted with the AdSense limit of 10 channels, Google has not increased that number to 60. In addition, they have launched 5 additional languages that they support. The biggest announcement is the ability to set up channels the lazy man way, URL based. So now you can "track individual pages, or to track groups of pages based on the directory structure of your site."

For more information see the AdSense Support documentation on How do I create URL channels? and also check out the WebmasterWorld thread.

Moderator, AussieWebmaster at Search Engine Watch forums reports that Google will be changing the AdWords policy to only allow "Google is going to restrict the number of affiliates that can send traffic to the same place (tracking/affiliate code not counted)." What this means is that if you are an affiliate for amazon and you send traffic to amazon.com, then the only way for me to send affiliate traffic from AdWords to amazon.com would be to outbid you. Only one Adwords customer can own a page or URL (not including the tracking code) at a time. AussieWebmaster continues, "The criteria for who gets the ad will be based on rank (CTR and CPC)... though back-ups will be in place for when the spend is gone for one so another can come in etc."

Very important information for you affiliates that use AdWords. These changes are expected to take place after the holiday season.

There is a very interesting post over at HighRankings on an issue found where Google is highlighting some of the words in the Google Cache results but not others. For example, this Google Cache with the keyword "Cedar Chest" highlighted shows most of the words with "cedar" and "chest" highlighted but not all. If you look in the middle lower section of the page, you will notice that the same words are not highlighted. For a clearer representation of what I mean, click here for an image.

One possible reason mentioned in the thread is that the content found within the noscript tags are not highlighted. When you view the source of that page in the Google cache, you should notice that the middle content is found within the noscript tag. Do a find on noscript and the prices within the page, so they are surrounded by the tag. But yet, the Google Cache shows the contents of the information within the tag. In addition, I thought the information between the noscript tag only displays when JavaScript is turned off. Any ideas on how help the person, join the thread.

To be honest, I do not know if the Google Toolbar Tour page ever had information on PageRank, but according to a long time SEO Chat member in a thread named Google Toolbar and Pagerank, it did. This information coincides with the recent rumors that an official Google rep claimed the PageRank value was for entertainment purposes only. In that case, members at Search Engine Watch Forums discuss how Google should change the information on the various toolbar pages not to discuss PageRank or to claim what it truly means today.

Can white hat search engine optimization efforts be looked at as spam? I'll try to define what I think "White Hat Content Spamming" is. White hat content spamming is the creation of pages that are constructed to do well in the search engines. They do not deploy methods of screen scraping other pages for content, they do not conduct link spam methods to rank those pages high and they do not do any form of page hi-jacking. But what they do deploy is the use of highly content rich pages, focused around one to three keyword phrases.

In a post by Marcia at SEW Forums named Confessions of a White Hat Content Spammer: What I've Learned by Ignoring Google, she goes through her examples of what led her to where she is today. In her mind, she is a "white hat content spammer".

The questions Marcia asks at the end of her post were thought provoking, to say the least.

Are white hat content spammers in any way stealing from other webmasters, just because they know how to do it, or concentrate their efforts on doing it? Are they/those among us "spamming the engines", or just listening to the advice they give us to create pages relevant to users?

How *do* we decide what's despicable and what's just plain old spam, or what's ethically acceptable? Are white hat content spammers sinners or saints? Are they/we gaming the engines, or just doing what they advise us to do by creating "relevant" sites and pages?

In which Jill Whalen responds to as; "It can't be. It won't ever be....It's not."

To me, I think its more about the purpose behind those white hat optimized pages then the tactics deployed to achieve top results.

About one and half weeks ago we discussed the topic of Search Engines to Provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services. Today, Shari Thurow wrote an excellent article recapping all the issues and topics related to this story in a ClickZ article named Search Engines and the SEO Business.

Very interesting report from Jensense.com, that I couldn't help but highlight before I hit the hay for the night. Appears that according to Versign in their Domain Name Industry Brief domain registrations have taken a historic high rate in the last several quarters and the third quarter marked the highest to date. To most this could not be big news, its progress and evitable that as more people come online the more people will want to set up shop. More business for SEO/SEM companies too on another angle.

It appears that renewal rates are part of the reason that registrations have continued to climb. The article indicates that programs like Google's Adsense has spured many recent registrations in surprising rates. PPC contextual advertising is becoming quite popular by the masses and contributing to extra revenue for many webmasters. PPC advertising in general as indicated by Jupiter research could reach 5.5 billion by 2009. I know several people that go to great lengths to secure domains for the sole purpose of putting Google adsense contextual ads on them, its their sole source of income. Last year that might have not been the case, but this year there is stopping them. I don't put adsense on all my sites, because I would make less money if I did, but for those with idle domains, content sites, and so many more, Adsense and its cousins are a no brainer that has helped change an industry.

Continue reading on Jensense about her thoughts on the release.

Something is going on at WebmasterWorld and I don't know what it is exactly. Of course I have my suspicions, but I am not the type to air them out over here. Oilman, today quit WebmasterWorld, and I just saw him give his all to the WMW conference, he loved WMW. Anyway, this week Webguerrilla, MacGuru, and Shak all resigned. For more information on this, check out ThreadWatch.

I assume this can be released, it is publicly available at Search Guild Forum. They call it a "forum for SEO forum mods and admins", and the name of the forum is Forum Speak. Basically, it is a private forum for moderators and administrators of SEM forums to come and discuss moderating and administrating issues at the collective forums.

As mentioned a Search Guild, here is the purpose as stated by the forums creator, Chris Ridings.

We've been thinking about seo forums working collaboratively to help each other out. We figure that we could give the mods and admins of other forums useful information and they could possibly notify us about a thing or too. In short we've been thinking "how can the mods and admins of the different forums discuss issues in order to resolve issues that apply to all the forums". Say "John Smith" is a forum spamming robot, shouldn't there be somewhere mods can warn the mods of other forums?

If you are an admin or mod at a forum, then check out the thread for more details.

As Danny Sullivan said at his blog entry, "Search engines have generally disliked rank checking tools, so what a surprise to read on the official MSN Search Blog a tip about one." After all the heat I got from Google for using their API to make a rank checking tool, MSN search comes out and publicly tells people about these wonderful tools that screen scrap their beta msn search engine. I like their attitude. :)

In an effort to see what others think about this topic, I posted a thread at SEW forums named MSN Loves Screen Scraping Applications. Or feel free to drop a comment, if it gets through the spam filter checking.

There are reports over at WebmasterWorld that MSN Beta's home page is seen at the old MSN Search, including the new beta results. First reports came in Yesterday evening (EST) and others have seen it as well, I personally do not.

I see a completely new MSN home page? For what I can see beta search being implemented in it. To me it is new..don't know if it is...anybody?

I see new MSN look with MSN beta search implemented too. I'm located in Russia.

beta.search.msn.com is just redirecting for me to normal msn/yahoo search. Nothing interesting.

I'm seeing identical results from http://search.msn.com/ and http://beta.search.msn.com/ here in Spain.

And so on...

As expected, MSN launches their own blog service name MSN Spaces. Following the leader is a good way to categorize Microsoft's behavior with the search engine, search blog, browser, and now a blog service. Will they become the leader that others follow or just the leader that us, helpless customers shell money to. Anyway, Danny Sullivan has an interesting blog posting on this subject, which was then followed up by, the much respected, Gary Price. Nick has a threadwatch entry on the topic, linking to his test msn blog where he posts three test entries and several comment tests. In addition, there is a thread discussing this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Found a good thread on WebmasterWorld today where several people are doing some more extensive research on the sandbox. The nice part is they not looking at specific search engine result pages to obtain data nor or they focusing on a particular data set (such as age or links etc only) instead they are covering many different areas where potential reason could apply. Now while the aggregate data presented is not really clear its a nice to look over and I will list the variables they are using to obtain the data. One weakness I see is that sites are not required to fill in all the information for each variable as well as how do you classify a backlink "agressive". It could be up for interpretation.

Here is what they are looking at currently:

Month Domain Registered
Month Uploaded
Month Indexed
Number of Pages
Number of Backlinks
Method of Backlinks
Anchor Text
Adsense
Adwords
Content
Level of SEO
Pages are Static / Dynamic?
Dmoz?

I am not exactly sure if this will result in a reason for the sandbox, nor intended to entirely but more or less identify areas that be used in further study.

One of the members mentions that outgoing links could also be a cause for concern.
Here claims to quote Google policy here:

you cannot be damaged by incoming links only by dubious outgoing links.

However I don't follow this interpretation, as I can NOT find anywhere on the google website that says that exact phrasing.

However I did find the following in their Quality Guidelines section:

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Additionally, they go on to say:

Google listings are based in part on our ability to find your site by following links from other web pages.

So I don't know if I follow the outgoing links will hurt you idea, but I do know from cleaning up many Google penalizations in recently, they can and will temporary penalize your rankings for links that do look of fishy nature. One in particular were footer links on image pages that got a site penalized. When the link were removed the rankings came back. I guess its up for interpretation, but I wanted to make clear of what was in those posts on WMW.

This entry is in response to an article named Google Sandbox: Solved? by Brian Turner. Of course, by the name of the title, he is representing that he is not sure that his theory of solving the sandbox is correct or not. I am here to tell you that it is not correct.

The basic theory, to my understanding, is the by utilizing the Free Coop Ad Network by DigitalPoint, you will be able to get your site out of the sandbox. The reason behind it is that because the text ads that you set up, are found on a wide range of diverse sites, most with a respected level of PageRank. Brian compares his link selling service to the coop network in an effort to explain why his service is not working as much as he would like. He says that since his link service does not allow you to place links on higher PageRank'ed pages, your links remain in the Sandbox. Whereas, DigitalPoints free network, does allow your ads to be found on high PageRank'ed pages.

I was the first person to sign up with DigitalPoint's network, besides for DigitalPoint himself. I have a lot of experience with the network, are strongly recommend it. If you have an existing site that is a year or more aged, then the network can do wonders for you. I rank for keywords I would have dreamed to link for. I have tested brand new pages on old domain names. I have tested extremely competitive keywords as well. It is possible to achieve the rankings you want with this network, if you have a site or two that has its own weight.

I do not believe that the Sandbox has to do with links, themselves. People feel a new link is sandboxed. Also people think that a new URL is sandboxed. I think the sandbox goes on the domain name. I have tested the other variables and strongly believe its a new domain name issue.

I have sent links to new domain names with the DigitalPoint network and did not rank well for those keywords. Then I created similar pages, targeted the same keyword, but on an existing domain name (unsandboxed name) and I achieved top rankings for that keyword. The network will not get your site out of the sandbox, but it will help get your unsandboxed site in the top results.

Side note: Sorry for the quick entries today, I am out at meetings all day. I have a 30 minute break, where I wrote these past entries. Expect more later, thanks.

Microsoft is looking for ways, in its BETA Search Product, to increase usability and features. Recently MSN launched this drop down search button that looks like this:

Most usability experts, I think, dislike drop down menus, I personally do not mind them. However, this does not work in IE for Mac or Safari. This is a screen sample from Safari.

There is forum discussion on the new button at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday I reported on a SEW Forum thread that discussed a quote from a supposed Google representing saying that PageRank is for Entertainment Purposes Only. GoogleGuy has commented on this forum post at this site and others saying:

I'd strongly disagree with the statement that the toolbar PageRank is for "entertainment purposes only"--millions of toolbar users use the PageRank display to judge the quality of pages. I think it's also a little irresponsible to quote JohnGalt claiming to talk to some random person at Google, and then for you to quote it as a reponse from Google, which makes it sound more official. I'm happy to refute that this is any sort of official stance.

Search in Digital Video from last 50 years. Imagine It. Within seconds you could not only find and watch clips from store houses of internet video clips to it also working as a TV-searchable database on the Web. Google TV people are calling it. Its been tried before for other media such as MPEG Avi Quicktime files and some of done it successfully. So this isn't brand new, but for Google it is and so is their technology. Its just how they plan to market its uses and uniqueness. I am curious as to lengths one would have to go to develop such a spider to enable intelligent spidering of digital video. How would it search and bring you results? According to one member they way they do this is by search closed captioning text. Interesting, makes sense. Where there is text, there is (can be) something to search for it.

Apparently this week Google gave a media presentations to a handful of major TV broadcasters demonstrating the technology and hopefully planning to partner with them in the future for use this technology in their offices. If I was executive at a major broadcaster, this would definately be up for consideration. Its quite a breakthrough and the retrieval of video for all sorts of uses.

There is discussion on this topic on a couple forums, namely SEOchat and WMW.

According to the original zdnet article:

Google's effort, until now secret, is arguably the most ambitious of the three. According to sources familiar with the plan, the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows.

There seem to be some members on the forums that are downplaying the usefulness this could have for an average user. They raise a good point, as its mainly going to be reserved for broadcasting companies. While this may be the case, many of these broadcasting companies such as ABC already offer a form of video search on their site, where people can view and look at video from particular times. So if this helps them catalog their many piles of video, it could reach the website and ultimately make the user experience a lot better. It could also help people to watch and learn about news faster that matters to them. Search: What Would You Like to Watch.