January 2005 Archives

Based on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers's most recent list of domain registrars, Google is a licensed domain registrar (see number 895). NickW mentions that it is one of the ways to get out of the sandbox, buy a domain name from Google.

I doubt this is recent, they have probably been licensed for a while. But still is funny..."Get out of sandbox with a GOOG domain name buy?"

This has been /. and forum discussion at DigitalPoint.

BakedJake posted a link to a new anonymous interview at the Register named Interview with a link spammer. I bet BakedJack knows the name of this anonymous link spammer. :) Anyway, it makes for a nice read. Here are some quick quotes; because I need to run.

So how and why do "link spammers" - as they generically call themselves - do it? Are they the same as the email spammers? What do they think of what they do, ethically? And what can stop them? If you're affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it's nothing personal. They're not targeting you personally. They're just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge "link farms" of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others' ranking.

Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow" links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" - we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this, they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just be trackback spamming."

Back in last August there was some forum buzzing going on about a "Search Harder" Button At Google?. Now there is a new forum thread on this topic at SEO Chat Forums and we now have a screen capture for you.

View Large Image

Type in a keyword phrase in Google, such as php and you'll see a little hyper-linked word in blue at the top right named "definition". When clicked on, it used to take you to Dictionary.com, but On January 28th Danny Sullivan said, Google Completes Definition Move To Answers.com.

However, a post at WebmasterWorld shows that one person noticed this about two days prior to Danny's posting. Now the definition link for PHP takes you to Answers.com.

Sexually explicit sites are sensitive topics. You have a site, it ranks well for specific keywords, but there are sexually explicit content and/or images on the pages. It is preferred to have an entry page for a first time session on the site. But that doesn't really sit well with search engines. One member at Cre8asite forums started a thread named SEO'ing past 'sexual content' disclaimer. In this thread he asks about putting a disclaimer on each page or redirecting all first time visitors to an entry page with the disclaimer.

Forum admin Grumpus recommends that he add an ICRA Label to his site. He warns that this label will most probably exclude the site from the default results, with safe searching on. Black_Knight says a disclaimer has no legal strength, but a "PICS label or ICRA label are the best legal defences right now." Ammon Johns PMed me with a response, "Those online disclaimers really aren't worth a thing when the whole focus of search engines is to deliver you direct to the content, not the disclaimer." Yup, yup.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Yahoo fixes 1bu "bug", Google still MIA discusses how Yahoo! is much quicker to act on a particular, and popular case of content spam.

If you do a Google site command on site:1bu.com you will see that Google is swamped with 86,700 or so results that have the following sub-domain patter: www.lasvegasmercury.com.1bu.com, www.religioustolerance.org.1bu.com and so on.

The specific case is all over the Web, as you can see by a Google search on 1bu.com google.

But take a look at Yahoo!, all clean. Someone is working harder to prevent content spam. :)

One of the topics often discussed behind the scenes at forums, in the moderation rooms, are those of legal issues concerning pulling threads. Some forums have strict policy that anything that might resemble an legal issue, will be pulled. For example; the discussion of companies, specifically how bad company ABC is. Often a PM or email will be sent to the moderators or the administrators to have the thread pulled. It is then up to the administrators (forum owners) to decide on what to do. Some forums have a policy of free speech, and they will not pull anything from the forums except for outright spam.

There are also concerns with reprinting articles, documents and essays online. Over at WebmasterWorld, there is a thread named Liability Issues Return Concerning Online Posts, started by the owner of WebmasterWorld, who is all too familiar with these cases. The main problem is, Internet law is still very immature, let alone forum topics.

Brett quotes from Techdirt:

...a libel lawsuit against a business professor who posted a student's essay to the web to start a discussion. The problem was that the essay detailed the story from one of his students talking about how a company, Ben-Tech, had allegedly pushed him to take confidential materials from Siemens, where he was employed at the time. While posting the paper to the internet was mainly for class discussion only, Google found it, and that helped Ben-Tech find it, and decide that it was libelous.

And then posts his thoughts on the topic:

So we have three parties at risk here:
- the students for making strong statements that may or may not be slanderous or libelous.
- the professor for is potentially illegal actions.
- the search engine for publishing the paper without permission.

This is 2005. My bet, is the kid gets the shaft and the college absolves itslef of the incident.

If Ben-Tech were smart, they would drop:
a) the legal action.
b) make a large donation to the college.
c) ask for rebuttal time in front of the class by their attorney.
d) ask that the rebuttal be published on the web.
e) apologize to the college for dragging it into court.
f) walk away with a masterful gain in Public relations.

As promised about two weeks ago, I have went through all 1,400+ entries at this site and have reorganized them. The new category archive structure was done pretty well, I think. It was actually nice to go back, and rethink how to categorize the entries at this blog. There is a very nice distribution of the entries associated with categories, of course the Google categories have the most entries, but everything else seems to be a normal distribution.

The best part might be the fact that I reorganized the Search Engine Conferences category as the parent category of the following conferences:
- SES Chicago 2003
- SES New York 2004
- SES London 2004
- SES San Jose 2004
- SES Sweden 2004
- WebmasterWorld Las Vegas 2004
- SES Chicago 2004

Coming soon SES New York 2005.

A few days ago, Jean Veronis informed me of a blog posting of his named Web: Googlean logic [en], which describes in great details the issues brought up in a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Impossible Counts. Basic idea is that the Google Count provided in the form of "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,000,000 for keyword phrase. (0.10 seconds)", the 5,000,000 or whatever number is there, is simply impossible. I strongly recommend reading the entry and discussing this at the thread.

Back last August, Sid Yadav asked us to post a link to a survey he was running. Well, he sent me an email last night that the results are now available at http://www.nextsearchsurvey.com/results/. In Sid Yadav's personal blog posting on these results, he discusses what he finds surprising about the results. Thanks so much for the study, it is very interesting!

A poll at Search Engine Watch Forums asks, Do you care about PageRank? I am not going to tell you how I voted. But its a tie right now at 3 Yes and 3 No.

In beta, of course and as mentioned before, the Google AdWords API is now available. I did not mention earlier, that Overture has an API, not sure if its free. This opens up a lot of possibilities for the tech savvy PPC advertiser. There are several blogs covering this, including; AdWords API Blog, Google Blog, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Lowdown, BattelleMedia, Traffick, SEO Book, Search Engine Blog, ThreadWatch, Inside Google, and Yahoo! News.

Forum coverage at:
- Google Groups Official AdWords API Forum
- Search Engine Watch
- WebmasterWorld
- HighRankings

It seems as if some people are disturbed that Yahoo! ranks its directory pages fairly high in the Yahoo! Search natural results. I have noticed this as well, but I can't seem to pull up any results (at the moment) where the a Yahoo! directory category is ranking in the top 10. I am sure I will find an example in the next day or two. In the thread, there are those that feel that the directory pages do not need to be listed in the Yahoo! results. I agree.

(1) If the results are relevant, those results with Yahoo! listing have a little link under them that reads "Category: [Yahoo! Directory Category Name Link]"
(2) The directory tab is at the top of every page, if the searcher wants directory results, they can click on it.
(3) They should clearly label Yahoo! Directory results as they do with Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! News, etc at the top of the page. In fact, I would find that useful.

Do you think Yahoo! has a little clause in the code that assigns a tad more weight towards the Yahoo! Directory categories? It would be unethical, dishonest and a conflict of interest if they did. Do any of you see ODP listings next to those Yahoo! Directory listings?

There are several threads out there discussing how Google has shifted the results of certain niche industry searches. In these searches, members are complaining that (1) their clients are no longer to be found, after several years of top rankings and (2) the results look to be spammy, irrelevant and not useful. Some believe it has to do with the recent acceptance of many blogs and wikis of the nofollow tag. I think it might be too early for that.

Forum discussion at:
- WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Watch
- V7 Forums
- SEO Guy Forums

There is a member at the forums named seomike, he often comes to Search Engine Watch and gives some very clear and useful tips on how to improve a dynamic site's search visibility. Recently he posted 3 mod rewrite tips and tricks, and clearly explains how and what they do.

In his first tip, he details how to rewrite a dynamic URL with exact variables in the URL to a static looking URL. His example dynamic URL is: www.somesite.com/catalog.php?cat=widgets&product_id=1234. The new example static URL is: www.somesite.com/catalog/widgets-1234.html

The code used to make this possible:

#start .htaccess code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^cat\=([^&]+)\&product_id\=([^&]+)$
RewriteRule ^$ /catalog/%1-%2.html [R=301,L]

In tip two he explains how to "Change a product name or change a mispelling and you've just lost all page scores to the static mod rewritten url."

And in tip three he explains how to "Make the unormalized, normalized for Yahoo!'s sake."

It is worth checking out this thread if you have a dynamic site and you can utilize mod_rewrite rules.

Hecklers are those individuals that look to ruffle some feathers. Many forums have them. One writes a post, the thread gets interesting and then a heckler comes in. Hecklers walk the fine line between providing a quality reply and a reply that is simply there to provoke. Its very subtle but yet, those intimately involved in the thread, know the individuals prime objective. In reality, the heckler might not consider himself or herself to be a heckler. They just might think that they know better and demand to be proven wrong or outsmarted.

Bottom-line, hecklers run their course.

The rumors are that a Google employee was talking to freely about Google, Inc. at his blog named ninetyninezeros. The employee has a little self-bio:

hi, my name is mark jen. i used to work for microsoft, and now i work for google. this is a blog of my personal experience as a new google employee. everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved by google before it is posted. no warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here. enjoy!

Danny Sullivan, John Battelle via Google Blogoscoped, via Roger Federer is causing a viral blogging on this topic.

The blog's contents can still be found at Bloglines, very nice find by Danny Sullivan. Interesting read, I am sure we will hear more about this later.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Many of you know how the Google AdWords ranking process works. Google looks at your bid and click through rate and multiplies them to get a "rank number". They use the rank number to determine the location of the ad in relation to other ads on that network for that keyword phase.

At WebmasterWorld, a member asked How often is CTR re-evaluated for bidding purposes?. Based on my understanding of AdWordsAdvisor's response, it seems as if this is a continuous and almost real time number. Someone then goes on to ask, if Google just looks at the CTR of the last 1,000 impressions. AdWordsAdvisor responds that they do not, they do weigh the last 1,000 impressions higher then the past impressions, but they look at "all-time CTR for the keyword."

If this happened with Google, people would be all over it. Basically, there are reports that MSN's cache view is having or had some past difficulties. Clicking on the cache link brings you (sometimes) to a page that reads:

Internal Server Error - Read
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

This is reported to occur with sites that only have the url listed in the results. To me that means that MSN didn't index the page yet, and has nothing to show in the local MSN cache, as of yet. Give it some time, I am suspecting.

Forum thread at WebmasterWorld.

A while back we had a method of checking a site's ranking in a "pre-'sandboxed'" state. When Google added support for 32 character search, it has open up the ability to conduct this search again. All you need to do is end your search with "-sdfsdfq -ddsf -dsfsqdf -dqdfqsdf -dqfsdfqsd -sqdfqsd -sdfsdqfqsdf -sqdfqsdfqs -qsdfqsdf -sdfsqdfqsdf -sqfqsdfqsd -sdfqsdfsq -sdfqsdfsdf -qsdfqsdf" or some variation of it. For example; rustybrick -sdfsdfq -ddsf -dsfsqdf -dqdfqsdf -dqfsdfqsd -sqdfqsd -sdfsdqfqsdf -sqdfqsdfqs -qsdfqsdf -sdfsqdfqsdf -sqfqsdfqsd -sdfqsdfsq -sdfqsdfsdf -qsdfqsdf would show a pre-sandboxed state.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

I am really getting tired of all the snow we are having in the New York area, really. We didn't have enough this weekend? Anyway, I woke up this morning to see the streets covered, and my car covered. I went over to Ask Jeeves and asked for the weather 10901. So it looks like it should be stopped around this afternoon time. Much faster then going to weather.com.

There has been lots of speculation over the past few months on Google creating the Google Browser, yesterday Ben Goodger, the lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox, has announced that he will be joining Google, Inc.. Of course, in his blog entry he doesn't disclose the nature of his job at Google.

For all questions regarding Google, I ask that you contact Google directly, rather than myself.

In a thread at WebmasterWorld Brett Tabke set the record straight, that we should not continue to speculate on a Google Browser. Brett said, "this is not the first browser guy Google has hired." He then lists three things that Google can use Ben for, instead of building a browser;

- The complete elimination of hidden text from *any* code based source.
- The interpretation of div's and css with 100% accuracy.
- Key word 'spamming' could all but be eliminated in all it's form.

This is pretty cool, Google is beta testing the functionality to allow Web visitors to change the ads served up by Google AdSense. For example, you see an ad and it reads "Change to Ads About:" with a listing of related ad topics. When you click on a different topic, it then allows you to "Enter a different topic" and search on it. Here is an example site, look at the left hand skyscraper ads, scroll down to under the Google Ad and then click on that "Change to Ads About" option. You will see what I am talking about, if not, here is an image that will clarify.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint.

In order not to fall behind Yahoo's release of Video Search, Google announced its own Google Video Beta at the Google Labs last night. Google Video Search forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

Added (8:15am): Google Video Search differs from Yahoo's in that Google is using a content provider for the video selection. When doing a Google Video search "you'll find programs only from a limited number of channels, which we've been indexing since late December 2004." Yahoo! seems to take the normal Google approach, by just spidering the Web to find video. Google is taking more of the AOL, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo approach with forming partnerships with programs to syndicate the video. It does make for a higher quality listing of results when comparing Yahoo and Google.

As expected, Yahoo added the "Video" search link (tab) to the main tabs in Yahoo! Search. I did a search on basketball video and also video basketball but the main Web results did not show a shortcut, instead it showed the news shortcut. I guess they are working on it.

This is a major step. Google is right on their tail with their own Video Search, announced last night as well.

Today I was skimming some http log files for a particular page of mine. In the last hour, I received 50 visitors (unique IP addresses), but only 5 had referring data. Looking a little closer, the ones without the referring data were all using Internet Explorer on Windows and had "FunWebProducts" within their user agent.

So I did some Googling and FunWebProducts is another one of the million or so hijackware/adware/spyware toolbars that users unknowingly install on their computer. The interesting thing about these guys is they infected a very large percentage of the Internet's users very quickly. And now that I know what they are, I recall seeing their banner ads all over the place (including yahoo.com).

It doesn't seem to do a complete block of referral URL, just external ones (you will see image requests have a referral URL of your page for example). But then again, external referrals is the more important ones. I probably would have never cared or noticed how widespread the infection is if they didn't block the referral data. In truth, it's probably not blocking referrals directly, and instead does not show the referral URL of people using the search function it installs. I'm not going to install it to confirm though, sorry. :)

So now the assignment for all the readers... check your web logs and see what percentage of your visitors are not giving you referral data. You might be surprised how many of them have FunWebProducts within their user agent.

Become, Inc. is a venture-funded start-up that is building the next generation search engine for shopping. We are developing an innovative new search engine technology that will significantly improve the online shopping experience.

Jason Dowdell notified me this morning that he posted an exclusive interview with Michael Yang, the CEO of Become.com and founder of mySimon.com in April of 1998. The interview can be found at Jason's blog marketingshift.com.

There was a story in a Romanian tabloid about a baby that was given the name "Yahoo!" by its parents. The story was that the parents selected the name Yahoo! "as a sign of gratitude for meeting over the Internet." "If it were real, it would have been a good story indeed," Ionescu said. Duh!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a thread brewing over at WebmasterWorld named Google to start VoIP phone service. Guess what, there are rumors that Google plans free Net phone service but other articles say that Google plays it cool on VoIP rumours. The last article says "This is pure speculation and we do not comment on rumour," said a representative of Google UK. "We are not aware of any moves to enter this arena."

All these rumors sprung up due to a rumor about Google Planning to Build A Global Fiber Optic Network.

Cre8asite Forum added a new forum (or changed the name of an old forum, I forget) - Large-scale* Web Directories. The * stands for, This forum is for the discussion of large-scale web directories, such as DMOZ, Zeal, and similar. *A large-scale directory is one with more than 10 full-time (paid) editors, or more than 100 part-time or volunteer editors (note: self-submittors do not count as editors).

So you can expect directories such as Yahoo (paid), DMOZ (more then 100 volunteers) and other directories like those to be discussed in that forum.

Its not only Pew Internet & American Life that understands searchers are getting smarter. Google obviously must think so as well, by raising their 10 word limit to 32 words. The blogs are buzzing about this, here is a listing of some blogs:

• Google Blogoscoped
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• Inside Google
  
• ThreadWatch
  

And forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask Jeeves posted a special logo where Gary Price says it shows off a Smart Search feature, ski conditions for Squaw Valley, California. It just happens to be that Google is on their annual Ski trip at Squaw Valley, California. So Ask pokes fun at Google, its nice to see. The image is actually named "snowboard-dreams" and you will notice that the Butler is sitting, working at his desk, dreaming about going off skiing. Instead the butler is at work, building a better engine.

To celebrate the historic event of the 20,000th registered user for DigitalPoint's Keyword Tracker, he integrated a geeky product named Ambient Orb with the keyword tracking tool. I just bought an orb, its damn cool for a geek like me, but it has a programming defect, I need to ship it back to Ambient to get fixed.

So how does it work with the keyword tracker?

The manufacturers offer a developer kit/API to control any orb that has been setup for developer access. So, for pure geek factor, we've setup an option in the keyword tracker to automatically update your orb based on your ranking movements for the day. The greener the better your rankings are doing. The redder the orb, the worse they are doing. After you run a "Check All" for your keywords, the keyword tracker sends an update signal to your orb with the appropriate color.

Forum thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

I personally will be having this programmed with my internal custom project management system as an employee motivational tool.

This might be one of the biggest announcements for the PPC community in a while. SiliconValleyWatcher.com reports that Google [is] to provide AdWords API to Advertisers. The report discusses that this will probably only be available to larger advertisers at first, as well as 3rd party companies (none named in report) such as Did-It and Atlas One Point. What this will allow is the greater flexibility in managing ones AdWords campaigns, allowing advertisers to write very customized applications to control an infinite number of possibilities with price fluctuations. The possibilities are endless with this, competition, creativity, technological wits and PPC smarts will all come into play. It should make for an interesting future for the PPC industry.

I posted a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums and it is also being discussed ThreadWatch.

A while back I wrote a little entry here named Comparing Web Traffic Between Different Web Analytictical Tools, where I compared Urchin 3 versus Urchin 5.5. A new thread sprung up at Cre8asite Forums named Log analysis consistancy, where Moderator Adrian discusses his experience with Weblog Expert with Net Tracker. Will there every be consistency? Only when they all merge into one company, and everyone uses the exact same analytics program and version of that program. :)

Someone create a search tool that uses Google's engine for results but the catch is, it pairs up those who search on similar topics and lets you initiate a Web chat with them. I guess the concept behind this is that those who are searching on the same topic, might want to discuss those concepts interactively.

This tool is named Chat'N Search.

Forum discussion and poll at Search Engine Watch Forums.

SMA-UK, EU, NA are all about democracy, they want all to have a say in what decisions are made with the organization. On that note; leading the force behind SMA-NA, Ian McAnerin, posts the suggested membership fees. He asks for your opinion on this fee structure.

Corporate: $1000
Member: $250
Student: $50
Guest: $0 - Paid member of another SMA

Other SMA's have the following structure:
SMA-UK Levels:

Individual (£250)
Corporate (£1000)
Associate (on application) - Ian's note: basically sponsors
Junior (£125) - Ian's note: Students

With a 10% discount to members of SEMPO

SMA-EU Levels:

Corporate member (one vote – promotional benefits) 1500 Euros
Member (one vote) 375 Euros
Junior Member (no vote) 75 Euros
Guest (no vote – member of other SMA) 0

In addition, the SMA-NA Web site is currently in development at http://www.sma-na.org/.

PrioritySubmit announced last night the launch of a new forum for its customer base. The reasons behind the new forum include:

• better respond and address feedback and suggestions left in the forum.
  
• quickly and easily reply to any support questions that you may have in regards any of our services.
  

There are 3 main forum sections covering:
- Prioritysubmit.com
- Keyworddiscovery.com
- Overture Site Match

The forum can be found at http://www.prioritysubmit.com/forum/.

Check out NickW's post named LinkCondom - Stop the Spread of NoFollow Viral Link Skank!. He found or created a new site at http://www.linkcondom.com/, to mock the new nofollow attribute by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Extremely funny!

Romping in the snow of Tahoe of course. A thread on WebmasterWorld discuss the event and what the Google employees are doing on their mandatory vacation. In case your adwords rep is MIA this week, it may because they are skiing the slopes, enjoying spa treatments, or taking part in the many activities Google has planned for its employees. Lucky them. :)

This morning, it looks like Yahoo! updated the Yahoo! Search home page; adding news items, stock information, mail notification, and even a small text advertisement at the top. I hear that they did this in order to differentiate themselves from the competitors; i.e. Google and MSN. The text ad at the top, seems a bit shady from a search engines perspective, wonder how much it costs to buy a static link? :)

Here is the portion they added under the search box. It seems useful. I like it.
Currently, My Yahoo! is my home page, otherwise, I can see myself switching to Yaho