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 Yahoo! Search simply for this change. Seriously, I am interested in checking out the latest news before I do a search.

Next you will see a screen capture of the small text ad at the top right portion of the Yahoo! Search index page. It caught my eye, so a subtle, small, little ad can work. Its the opposite of an 'in your face' ad, maybe that can be a new strategy. Tiny little ads, that are barely visible. :)

Forum Coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Not that you haven't had enough already, but here is a little more discussion and commentary on the subject. Its actually a pretty good thread from SEW forums and is worth a quick read. Thread starts with a simple search for the Google Sandbox, and details the interesting and possibly disturbing results that are played out in the results.

Some of the SEO's go into detail describing the rankings of some of the results, their particular age, and linkage data. Some are pissed at the silly filtering that is going on, and other comments that non-english language sites don't have a problem with the sandbox. Others care to comment that the sandbox is a figment of our imagination and created only to stifle the hurt that our egos could receive. There are those that notice that sites created for users do better than those that are created just for SEO. Some look at the ways Google sees a particular keyword or query, relating to how it search query volume, speed, pages referencing that keyword, and so on. It's very real for some people, and you couldn't convince them otherwise. This Sandbox nonsense needs to stop immediately. When it comes down to it, some claim its just Google raising the bar.

Continue with the overall good discussion at SEW Forums - SEO World Obsessed with Sandbox

Just got back from the meeting where we discussed how Out-Ranking Negative Reputation Sites. Want to thank Lee Odden and Patrick Gavin for their advice and comments, both were presented and both should be implemented shortly. They will also be starting blogs, adding sub sites but no forum.

The best part of the meeting was that I was able to get the concept that PPC and Natural Search is an area of advertising that they should take seriously. The major players in the room agreed that it is important to move some of its offline budget towards online. In that; link building, site development (including a new product catalog, which is something my firm will do), PPC, and more. So it is really exciting to see those engrossed with "old school" marketing ideas, look towards the Web to revitalize things in that area.

Got to catch up with work, check back later for more posts.

Tomorrow I go to visit a client of mine that has enough success to have many dissatisfied customers. Don't get me wrong, it is very hard to run a national chain of retail stores (I think over 250 stores in the US) and not have any negative complaint sites out there. The sole purpose of this meeting is to come up with a cost effective strategy to fill up the 1st page of the search results page when searching on the company name.

Some of my ideas include:

• Company Blog (Maybe Two)
  
• "Unofficial" Company Forum
  
• Support Services Site
  
• Company Divisions Sites
  
• E-Commerce Site vs. Corporate Site
  
• Press Releases (from Lee Odden at TopRank)
  

Those are just some of my ideas. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow when I return. Please expect a slow morning, in terms of entries. This client is about 1.5 hours away.

This morning we covered the reaction around the forums of the nofollow attribute. In that entry, I noted that Ask Jeeves was the lone engine of the major 4 to not join in on this announcement. So I took the liberty to email Jim Lanzone, a VP over at Ask Jeeves, to ask why. He said;

We talked with Matt Cutts yesterday about it and wished them well. It's a good idea and we wholeheartedly support the fight against spam. (I believe in the past Mr. Gardi has threatened to track spammers down personally to deliver that message. :)) And it's good to see the engines collaborating on something positive. On the other hand, when it comes to our particular engine, we didn't need to make a snap decision here. The nofollow idea is more urgent for Google (and those with similar approaches) than for Ask because they use global popularity (PageRank) while we use the local popularity approach pioneered by Teoma. I'm sure we'll add support for the new tag at some point in the near future if it makes sense. Blogs are a great source of authoritative information, regardless of their global pop ranking, which is what we pride ourselves on finding for our users.

I will go add this bit of information to the SEW Forum thread and see how people chew on that.

Enough talk on how to prevent link spam, now lets talk about how to write content in order to get quality links. Jenstar wrote an excellent post in a new thread she named How to come up with ideas for new quality content.

The first piece of advice she gives is "Don’t get too overwhelmed". She says that your articles do not have to be 3,000 words, she says "stick with 250 - 500 word articles." But if you do go with the 3,000 word article method, Jenstar recommends to "split it up into multiple pages."

Then go to your customers and ask them what are the questions they have about your business. I wrote several articles just because I get the same question over and over again. I now send people over to the articles, instead of giving them the long speech on why this does that and why you should or should not do it. Of course, most are too lazy to read the articles, but at least it is there. :)

Don't be afraid to answer or write about the "dumb question," Jenstar said. They make for excellent articles and someone can be helped by them. So start a basics guide to your product, simple questions and answers for the beginners. After you have those basics, write new articles that expand on them.

Jenstar recommends using a message board to get ideas. Sounds familiar to me...Pretty much everything written at this site has been sprung off a forum topic, that the author finds interesting. Over 1,300 articles written here...Works well, don't you think?

Check out the thread and learn and add to it.

Yesterday we found out the nofollow attribute was coming to a search engine near you. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all announced this news yesterday at their respective blogs. I assume if Ask Jeeves had a blog, they would have been part of this announcement. Major blog development supporters include SixPart - MovableType, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, Blojsom, Blosxom, and MSN Spaces.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on what this is all about at his entry named Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links. Personally, I think I might add the tag to the comments here. But I am not yet sure. Since adding the image security code, I have had two comments that were spam. So I am thinking about just opening it up and linking directly. Why? Because people who comment here are on topic to the entries and provide insight. This tag is to prevent comment link spam, or any link spam - if you do not have a link spam problem, then you should be fine. I think this should be a default option in all blog software, all guest books and some forums - because many people just let their sites go to hell. It is an excellent way to prevent linkage spam in that case.

I know we are discussing implementing such a tag at SEW forums. But the question is where should it be implemented. So what about the SEO forums, what are they thinking?

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• SEO Chat Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• WebmasterWorld Forums
• HighRankings Forum
• V7 Forums
• IHelpYou Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• WebProNews Forums
• SEO Guy Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• WebWorkShop Forums
• Google Blogoscoped ThreadWatch (Blog/Forum)

I slightly criticized a solution to prevent link spam by using a nofollow tag, and then posts that Google will indeed be announcing this as a plan today at the Official Google Blog. News of this comes way of scobleizer.

Danny Sullivan is a on a blogging role today, he posted on two topics that I felt might interest you.

(1) Googlefone: Fast Way To Use Google's Phone Book
(2) Google Releases Picasa 2 Photo Software

In regards to number one, I wanted to see if anyone with the last name "schwartz" was in the Beverly Hills 90210 area. So I did a Google search on schwartz, beverly hills, 90210 and it told me. Plus I was able to get Map Quest or Yahoo Maps within a click of a button. Works well with locating companies as well. There are many ways to use the Google Phonebook, see here for help. In addition, Danny mentions Googlefone which makes it easy to use such a feature, he spotted this at Google Blogoscoped.

On item number two, Google owned Picasa released version two. I am an Apple guy, so I use iPhoto, so no comments from me, instead just a graphic.

When conducting your keyword research, some of the criteria one looks at is WordTracker data (or overture keyword suggestion tool) to determine the number of people searching on a specific keyword term. Often when looking at a very specific keyword, such as Big Blue Pineapple Chair, you will find that both WordTracker and Overture report that no one searches on that. But that does not mean you should not target that keyword phrase. If I sell Big Blue Pineapple Chairs and there is a person looking to buy a Big Blue Pineapple Chair, then that having a page on Big Blue Pineapple Chairs is a great way to easily find a new customer.

One thing the Keyword Research experts have taught me (Dan Thies & Andy Beal to name a few), is that you should not be afraid to think outside the box. Be specific, be creative, and think like your potential buyer would.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

Ammon Johns in a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Referral ID strings and referrer info, discusses his thoughts on the ongoing and future issues with capturing referral data. He says that due to spyware, other "applications and plug-ins strip referrer info from HTTP headers sent by browsers, making the HTTP referrer less accurate by the day." Many web analytics applications now resort to the use of both log files and JavaScript to capture this information, but "even this is sometimes blocked, and JavaScript is more often turned off than ever." Ammon said "It's [JavaScript Tracking] less reliable than HTTP referrer info."

In Ammons post, he discusses risky and safe methods to go about improving the tracking of referral information. But he then gets into some theory with the statement;

We might all decide that we'd use a refID=somevalue; query string parameter, which the engines can then look at to see if they'd teach the spider to automatically strip out that one variable, or perhaps even change the value - refID=Google; or refID=Yahoo for instance.

I am confident, this thread will turn out to be exceptional.

There are many people who actually watch Google "like a hawk". They monitor the various Google Datacenters, looking for fluctuations in results and linkage data. It is actually both interesting and humorous to read the threads that discuss this type of analysis. Take a look at a thread named Drastic changes at 216.239.37.104 at SEO Chat Forums as an example.

Danny Sullivan is on a mission to do something about link spam (comment, guest book, trackback, forum, and so on). In a recent entry at the SEW Blog, Danny wrote on the topic of Google To Add "Nofollow" Tagging Of Links To Fight Spam? The proposal is to use the following within your links; <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

By adding rel="nofollow" it would instruct the search engines to not string along any "vote" "weight" "importance factor" to the page it is linking to.

My thoughts are that the same can be done through JavaScript redirect tags. If the search engines can not find the links, then they will not count. This blog ensures that all comments go through a redirect script, but it does not stop the spammers from spamming this blog. So a simple "nofollow" tag might not do much either. In theory, it makes sense.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

To follow up on an old entry with a List of Mostly Free PageRank Passing Directories to Submit To, SEO Chat has an old thread that started back up again with an other list of directories, mostly free.

- joeant.com
- gimpsy.com
- jayde.com
- dmoz.org
- theallineed.com
- vlib.com
- illumirate.com
- xoron.com
- webworldindex.com
- aardvarkbusiness.com
- netinsert.com
- capterra.com
- thesoftwarenetwork.com
- buzzle.com
- qango.com
- bizweb.com
- chiff.com
- dc2net.com
- mavicanet.com
- searchtheweb.com
- turnpike.net
- websavvy.cc
- worldhot.com
- skaffe.com
- goguides.org
- qango.com
- linkopedia.com
- allestra.com
- americasbest.com
- azoos.com
- biz-directory.org
- mastersite.com
- pharos-search.com
- webworldindex.com
- business.com
- isedb.com
- seosites.com
- directory-pages.com
- spheri.ca
- directoryarchives.com
- lecktronix.com
- globalproducer.com
- wowdirectory.com
- berberber.com
- splendes.com
- ibsteam.net
- realestateabc.com
- redirectories.com
- reloproinc.com
- agentpreview.com
- reguideusa.com

Also see the Web Directories and Other Web Directories archives here (they should be fully populated in 1 week or so.

Please email your answers to barry.schwartz@gmail.com, the first THREE CORRECT responses will win a free gmail invite. Good luck!

Which search engine did Disney acquire?

Feel free to provide a link to your source, your name and email.

Could be, as reported today on SEOchat and ZDnet they are on the hunt for 'dark fiber'. Known in the industy as fiber optic cable that's already been laid, but is not yet in use. Apparently there is a large amount of dark fiber cable in the United States, and the possiblity of Google jumping into the telecommuications front is not to far out of reach. Appears the conditions are right, and including such valuable expertise would be a natural fit for them.

According to Google's Job Oppourtunities section:

"Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network"

Continued discussion on SEOchat

A HighRankings thread asks the question, what is the ideal word count for a home page. And a quick and witty reply by a forum moderator read;

Copy should be like a woman's skirt, long enough to cover the essentials, short enough to be interesting.

How funny...

Google, Yahoo, MSN, & Teoma have compiled a huge link graph of all the sites on the Web that are accessible by their spiders. I can barely fathom the depth of such a link map. I tried to build something that really does a job of uncovering the link structure around a specific domain name, I named this free tool Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool. But it is limited, it only looks at the Google link command and then branches out from there. The limitation is annoying, it doesn't let me get the complete picture of the linkage data around a particular domain.

I would love for Yahoo to open an API, which I can use to make it possible to really get a picture of the true linkage structure of a site. I probably would want to combine Yahoo, Google, MSN, & Teoma - but the likelihood of anyone outside of Google opening a free API is small (within 2005). Now, would I pay? I think I would, but I know many would not even talk to me about licensing such data. But I would strongly consider paying a per 1,000 query limit fee to get at such data. Others at WebmasterWorld are discussing this topic.

From last week, Froogle/Gmail Hack Warning.

An Israeli hacker has uncovered a flaw in Froogle, Google's price-comparison service, which could allow access to users' Gmail accounts. Nir Goldshlager, who discovered the flaw, warned that URL-embedded Javascript could end up causing personal information to be revealed.

If users execute the script by clicking a link, they would be redirected to a malicious website. From there, hackers can read a user's cookie. It may contain personal information, such as purchase histories, or the username and password used to access Google services - such as Gmail.

Goldshlager warned that even if the user chooses not to save the cookie, the hacker can still discover the username and password for other services such as Google Alerts and Groups because of the way that data is stored.

Brett from WebmasterWorld, in the thread discussing this topic points to the Hebrew version of the news. And it was Slashdotted here.

Appears there are more and more people catching on to how effective search marketing is as an effective advertising medium. Some later than others. Seth Godin just discovered this today. My guess is that Seth woke up today and took the red pill. For those of us that remember last year, Seth came out declaring that SEO was a black art on his blog. Barry posted on this here. There is no doubt that Seth has a good fan base who are SEO/SEM's and other advertising types working in the industry. For him to say this was a kick in the groin. Today he changed his beat and asked Is there a "search engine industry"?. Apparently there is one now, otherwise I don't think we would be here blogging on it.

There is continued discussion on the SEW Blog.

This has been discussed in length on a number of forums lately and results in some interesting arguments whether or not validated HTML goes to help boost your rankings in Google. HTML Validation is conducted to check for errors using a tool such as the W3C Validator. For the most part I am believer in validated xhtml/html and the benefits it mainly has from a good design point of view. Once I changed over to XHTML I never looked back. It's good technique in my opinion of a professional website. Has it helped in boosting my rankings? Well I can't say for sure, but I would argue that it has aided in the success of obtaining top rankings. However is it necessary? Not completely. Often times an unvalidated page can outrank a validated page and vice versa. But consider this, Google will spider a page regardless even if it has bad HTML, but bad HTML can cause the page to be displayed incorrectly. If this is the case then Google may not get the correct interpretation of the pages meaning. It also has side effects that can affect users who visit the site. I think its just common sense that if you create a page to rank in the search engines, you also make sure that others can view it as well.

One of the members Brian I, gives a good example that you can "Try [testing] it by deleting the tag from a page, or the end quotes from a URL in an anchor". What happens is not going to give any search engine a good impression about the page. But when talking about specific bad HTML we are often talking about minor errors that can occur in the code, such as not closing a bold tag, or forgetting to close an element. You might also code an "a href" tag in correctly, and so on.

Another member Shor goes into more detail about this answering some questions that I would agree with:

Will it validation count towards higher rankings in the future? No, as search engine technologies are inclined not towards 'studying' code but towards document semantics and a document's relevant domain. In other words, search engines are being engineered to follow more natural human thinking processes and patterns, Which I find a little ironic as SEOs are trying to figure out how to best assimilate themselves closer to SEs (and their algos) while the SEs themselves are trying to evolve towards human user search patterns! Sounds like a Benny Hill chase scene.

So what's the point of validation?
Chris_D's analogy is succinctly appropriate. Should you have validated XHTML to boost rankings? No. Should you have validated XHTML? Damn straight you should - the standardisation that validated XHTML offers is a vital ingredient of professional web development.

Continue discussing HTML Validation on SEW Forums

Most of you know about the Google Mini Search Appliance by now. I have been waiting for threads to start on the topic. Basically, the same day Apple introduced the Apple Mini (which is really cool by the way), Google introduced the Google Mini. Basically, its a miniature version (in processing power) of the Google Search Appliance. Google wrote a blog entry on this yesterday, under the title of Honey, we shrunk the Google, funny people but look how spammy those blog URLs look. :) And if you like to own one of these puppies, You can pick one up at the Google Store & Apple Store.

Forum chatter at WebmasterWorld.

Ben (Phoenix) and I were messing around with a slogan for this site. Ben came up with

::: THE PULSE OF THE SEARCH MARKETING COMMUNITY :::

I think it really represents this site well.

"community" = the forums
"pulse" = the live action, where the real goods are

If you have time, and you do not mind the image access code when posting a comment, please let us know your thoughts on the slogan. If you prefer not to comment here, feel free to drop me an email at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Thanks.

A day or so ago, Ben wrote an entry summarizing a thread at SEW Forums named Duplicate Content Penalty Timespan, where a member told others that he believes that there is a set time span dependent on the number of offenses for the length your pages will be penalized for duplicate content. Danny Sullivan just responded in the thread stating that he got word back from Matt Cutts of Google that this is not exactly the case. The exact words of the email was; "I mentioned concrete numbers, but as a "for example" illustration. It's not a 30-60-90 day thing."

It seems as if Google AdWords is allowing (unknowingly) for companies such as eBay to purchase ads (unknowingly) for the "sale of women". Do a search in Google on Women for Sale and look towards the ads on the right. You should see the following ad:

A member at Search Engine Watch Forums is very disturbed by this. This member did a search on women and anger, I believe in the UK, and received an ad that read "Women For Sale Low Priced Women. Big Selection! (aff) - ebay.co.uk". The member asks several questions:

Continue reading "Google AdWords Allows the Sale of "Low Priced Women""

A thread on Highrankings today asked about available SEO project management applications that can help manage a wide variety SEO clients and projects. I had spent 6 months last year developing a web-based SEO project management tool that is currently being used internally by an SEO company. Unfortunately it's not currently available to the public. However there are some available tools out there that could help SEO's better manage their clients and ongoing projects.

One of the members Bernard, goes into detail about the various project management systems out there. He recommends that you need to "define the features that you require and then search for the package that addresses those needs". Now considering the following to define the type of application you need:

Critical Path / Critical Chain Scheduling - These are designed to define logic networks for planned tasks and produce time phased schedules for organizing/prioritizing the work. MS Project falls in this group.
Calendar Based Systems - These are calendar based task organizers like electronic versions of a Franklin Planner.
Collaboration Based Systems - These often resemble a mix of calendar based systems, a forum and a document management system. They are designed to allow a project team to coordinate projects where the scope of work is more fluid.

Once you define your type of software, try searching some of the available project management applications and directories with lists of those available.

http://www.web-based-software.com/ - Directory of Web-Based Project Management Software
http://home.houston.rr.com/interplan/ - Comprehensive directory of windows based project management software
http://www.basecamphq.com - Specific recommended web-based project management software

Reports at SEO Chat Forums that the Google Directory has been updated. Hard to know exactly which ODP index they are using. PageRank has reportedly updated in the index as well.

The title attribute is used by SEOs to try to do anything to rank higher and more importantly as a method to describe to a disabled person what a link is about. But some people over use them. Take a look at the image below. You will notice I mouse over a title of a thread and a second later, the title attribute is activated, blocking the thread titles underneath it. If you click on the image below, it will show you my frustration in a QuickTime movie.

According to a Moderator at Search Engine Watch, MSN Search Out of Beta Feb. 1. He said he "was told by a high level Microsoft employee that the beta search will go live on Feb 1." We will see, I guess. Just thought that I would note it.

Chris Sherman wrote an interesting article on how Yahoo & MSN Closing the Google Gap based on a study was conducted by Keynote. "A new study says that Yahoo and MSN Search have made significant improvements in user satisfaction, narrowing the gap Google has traditionally enjoyed. The study also says that this could be troublesome for Google, as more than 50% of all searchers are more than willing to try an alternative engine if they don't get satisfactory results from their primary engine."

Chris started a thread on this topic, where we can all comment. Ask Jeeves closing in as well? "Ask Jeeves also received improved ratings, though not to the same degree as Yahoo and MSN."

A while back, Google surpassed the 8 billion mark, and Gigablast Broke 1k the other day. John Battellle reported; Exalead, a company that powers AOL France's search (I was introduced to its founder by Alta Vista founder Louis Monier - yup, he's French) announced today that its stand alone search engine has surpassed the 1-billion-pages-indexed mark. (The engine launched in October)." Louis Monier was on the panel at SES on the search memories session, you can see his picture there, smart, visionary and funny guy.

Gary Price reports that Exalead's Paris-based CEO, Francois Bourdoncle, said "that the company plans to have a two billion page web index online in the near future. He also said that his company is about just ready to introduce a desktop search tool."

And if you want to see, for fun, how I got acquainted with Exalead, I made a short (50 second) QuickTime Movie file. The download size is 2.4MB, I saved it as a zip file here.

As I said here, I hope to have the categories association to all entries completed within the next two weeks. You can view the proposed structure of the categories at the category archives page. You will also notice that most entries have a link to the primary category for the entry, next to the authors name. I hope to go through a 100 old entries each day and re-associate them to the new categories. So it should take about 15 or so days.

redzone, a member at WebmasterWorld received an announcement from Shopping.com and soon after, Bizrate - about CPC price increases due out the 1st of February. In his post he said:

The most notable subcat increases are:

Electronics -> Flat Panel TV's - $.40 to $1.00
Health & Beauty -> All SubCat's - $.15 to $.50
Home & Garden -> Small Appliances - $.30 to $.50
Jewelry -> Watches - $.40 to $1.00
Kids & Family -> Strollers, Car Seats, Cribs & Carriers - $.30 to $.75
Office - MultiMedia Projectors - $.40 to $1.00

He also believes this is happening because merchants are using the free conversion tracking utilities provided by Shopping.com. His logic; now shopping.com knows how much your ROI really is and can rationalize taking a larger piece of your pie. He also adds that soon after Shopping.com's announcement, BizRate followed suit with an increase in CPC prices.

Which is better, being at the bottom of the first page or at the top of the second page? That is the question being asked in a thread in the WebmasterWorld Supporters Forum (paid registration required). The thread seems to lean on having the top result on the second page is much better then having the last or second to last results on the first page. The reasoning is that as a person scrolls down the page, that user is already in the mood of clicking the next button. The user is in skim mode already, but when they click that next button they are back in click mode. So the top results on each page, the user is in click mode - but when viewing the bottom results, they user is in skim mode.

I know people who say otherwise, and would pay big buck to have position 10 over 11. Their Web analytics show a higher click through when they are in position 10 versus 11. They have more sales when they are in position 10 versus 11. I wish I personally had more experience with that 10 versus 11 spot.

Search Engine Watch Forums this week surpassed the 3,000 member mark. Man this forum is growing fast. Just thought I would note that.

Other news, it climbed from a PR3 to a PR7 over the last PageRank update.

Well I was locked in a research lab for 10 years doing usability testing with monkeys. The monkey's were paid, and I wasn't. Apparently bananas are cheaper. The company just couldn't figure out how to qualify the expense of proper user testing. Then I found SEO, and my life has changed ever since. :-)

A really fun thread on SEO Chat asks members what they did before they started to even consider SEO for their websites. Or even those that decided to do it full time. Quite a few responses, and worth a quick peek.

So what did SEO's do before doing SEO? Some of the highlights:

Ballroom Dance Instructor
PhD Scientist
Four Season Funhog (?)
Eagle Scout
Entrepreneur
PC Repair Person
Advisor to International Telephone Monopolies
Student
Farming
Web Designer/Programmer
Oceanographer
Jewel Thief
Devoted Husband and Father
Born Again Christian
Janitor
Worm Farmer
Tasteful Adult Art Films Star
Professional Poker player
Emerald Buyer/Seller

Barry said he did Web Based Application Development, and I was involved in Real Estate and Designing Websites.

For those that are worried about duplicate content issues and getting penalized for them this information might serve useful to you. There is a thread on SEW forums detailing a situation where one of the members had several pages 302 redirected to pages on his site. This caused problems for Google. Fathom, a member on SEW forums posts information about duplicate penalty timeframes for offenses based on first, second and third time offenses. He mentions that:

A dup penalty timespan is based on your offense.

1st Offense: 30 days

2nd Offense: 60 days

3rd Offense: 90 days

So 'if' [for example] you had a 1st Offense and change something and Google detected that and then later found other dup content - you would go to a 2nd Offense timespan.

I emailed fathom to get some verification on where he obtained this information. He posted back in the forums that Matt Cutts of Google at a recent WMW PubCon mentioned it.

Continue discussing on SEW Forums

Its a question that was brought up at HighRankings Forum, "If most of the sites competing to be in the top 20 google listings for my keyword are directories, do I need bigger guns than if they were not directories?" The thread gets into PageRank, link building and normal optimization. But let's really think about it.

A directory is a "hub". Hubs are important, and search engines know that - and rank them well. Authorities are possibly more important then hubs and tend to rank above hubs, on many occasions. For this individual to rank above a hub (directory) for a search term that is very hub centric, he would have to become an authority. Becoming an authority can happen a dozen of ways, right now links are fairly important.

I question the search term this individual is trying to rank well for. If the first 20 results are all directories, maybe he is trying to rank well for the wrong keyword phrase. Just a hunch, without knowing the specific keyword or site in question.

Don't titles rule! 'Extremely Critical' Flaw Threatens Internet Explorer Users was announced a few days ago. In that article, it tells users that "Microsoft is recommending that users turn off the "Drag and drop or copy and paste files" option in Internet Explorer and set security levels to high for the Internet zone."

A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses how this "security fix" recommendation by Microsoft, will make Google AdSense ads invisible to those who take this route. Of course, the rumors begin that Microsoft did this to try to hamper Google's AdSense revenue. :)

I was listening to the radio on the way to work yesterday, and they were talking about the "Big Unit", Randy Johnson. I am not a Yankee fan, I am from the other side, being a Met fan. However, they said something that did interest me. The radio guy said he was reading some of the titles of the news reports in the papers that morning about Randy Johnson's big stink with the camera man. The titles included some very funny ones, but the one that topped it all off was "Lanky Yankee Gets Cranky."

--- Lanky Yankee Gets Cranky ---

Pretty funny. Of course I thought to myself, these guys are not thinking about ranking their news report well. It makes for a very funny, yet thoughtful title. Too bad SEO copywriters can't leverage their artistic side and rank news releases well with titles that are witty and fun. Can't win them all - or can we?

Daniel Brandt released a Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results script for free to the public. What is really interesting, is that at the same time, Orion posted a theoretical thread named Fractal Spam, which discusses a pattern he has seen from the top N results. Also, pretty much at the same time, an other thread named Meta Search Legal Question was started. So we have all these topics about scrapping Google, ad free results, ranking your site higher through search results and meta search engines - the legality of it.

Interesting occurrences, dont you think? Daniel from Scroogle, once again caused a major blog and news frenzy over his work. Coverage can be found at Inside Google, BattleMedia, Outer-Court, Brad Hill, TechDirt, The Register, ThreadWatch, and TopRank.

The server crash gives me the opportunity to rework how I have been using the category system so far. Since the crash caused the lost of the association of all categories to entries, I will need to go through each of the 1,400+ entries on this site and re-associate them to a category. So why not rethink the categories now?

First question; do you think it would be useful to have a method of associating each entry with a forum. This would act as a secondary category system allowing me to keep track of which forums were covered here more often.

Second, this is the new category structure I was thinking. Notice the addition of sub categories. Any feedback would be nice.

Ask Jeeves / Teoma
Blog Administration
Google Search Engine
- Google PageRank/SERP Updates
- Google News & Press
- Google Optimization
- Other Google Topics
Interviews
Search Engine Optimization
- Keyword Research
- Link Building
- SEO Copywriting
- Dynamic Site Topics
Microsoft MSN Search
Miscellaneous
Other Search Engines
Pay Per Click Engines
- Google AdWords
- Google AdSense
- Overture Precision Match
- Overture Site Match
- Overture Content Match
- Contextual Ads
- Second Tier PPC Engines
SEM / SEO Companies
SEO Forum News
Search Engine Conferences
- SES Chicago 03
- SES ...
- WMW Vegas 04...
Search Engine Industry News
Search Engine Tools
Search Technology
Search Theory
Shopping Search Engines
Spam
Tracking & Conversion Measurements
Usability
Web Promotion
Web Directories
- Yahoo! Directory
- Open Directory Project - ODP
- Other Web Directories
Weekly Email Updates
Yahoo! / Overture
- Yahoo! Search Optimization
- Yahoo! News
- Other Yahoo! Topics

Thank you.

There is a very interesting thread in the Online Marketing & Promotion forum at Cre8asite Forums named The 5th P in Marketing, which discusses a blog entry named Weblogs and the Power of the Fifth P. I began writing up an entry on it, based on a recommendation, but then noticed that everything I was writing was from what my father has been preaching for as long as I have known him. My father, Leon Schwartz currently teaches in the MBA Program at Fordham University. Before that he spent most of his time preaching his "Customer First!" approach at Pitney Bowes (where he had tons of different titles) and at seminars & conferences. After leaving Pitney Bowes, he started his own consulting group named Informed Decisions Group, where he stressed that the focus should be on your customer. So I asked my father to comment on this thread and the blog entry noted above. This is what he had to say:

The 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) are being replaced by the 4 Cs (Customer solution, Customer cost, Convenience, Communication). The Internet is key to this change. By making more information more readily available to the customer, power has moved from the seller to the buyer (see pdf 1). This is not all that new; but it takes a long time to change the culture in many sales organizations.

The 4 Ps focus on Pushing product through the traditional value chain, using a variety of selling and promotion tactics that are well known to all of us. The 4 Cs turn that value chain on end by focusing first on Customer needs and then communicated BOTH ways (see chart 2). This is more of a buyer/seller partnership, and requires empowered People throughout the selling organization. This is still very scary to most sales departments, who will try to control customer contact. Don't forget that in most traditional corporate environments the 3 Ps that really matter are Processes, People (of Power), and Politics.

Key to empowering customer facing People is providing these "partners" with critical Customer information through Integrated systems. Then give them clearly defined decision making authority to satisfy the Customer. Weblogs run by employees could actually produce considerable Customer dissatisfaction if the employee does not have the information needed nor the authority to truly serve the Customer. We've all had our fill of platitudes from inept Customer "service" reps.

May the Customer be with you...Leon Schwartz

The Search Marketing Association - North America is requesting you to voice your opinion on what you want it to do for the members (small and large) and the industry. Thread started today on SEW Forums detailing some ideas and requesting suggestions from anyone on that they feel as important for this association to accomplish. Mcanerin made some initial suggestions to start things off:

Joining the W3C?
Definitions of good SEO/M business practices?
Negotiated discounts?
Political action?
Purchasing shares in key search engine companies in order to have a shareholder vote?

Voice your suggestions and feedback for the SMA-NA over at SEW Forums.

Philipp Lenssen always finds great stuff at Google. The latest thing he found was that a search done on _,.-~*'`'*~-.,_ brings back only Oriental results in Google. He asks why in his forum thread. One individual notes that a search on just _*_ brings back very similar results. Andreas said; "_*_ is sufficient – Google recognizes only underscores and wildcards."

Interesting to note that Yahoo, MSN Beta and Teoma all bring back zero results for _,.-~*'`'*~-.,_.

Spurl, where search engine meets bookmarking, hit the 1 million 'spurl' count on December 23rd. Here is the announcement posted at the Spurl Help Forums:

On December 23rd Spurl.net passed the 1 million spurl mark. One million pages, hand picked by you - the users - to share with each other. Pretty good, and probably makes Spurl.net one of the largest user edited web site collections / directories in the world - and we're just getting started!

Coincidentally December 23rd also marks Spurl.net's 11 month anneversary, as Spurl.net was originally launched on January 23rd, 2004 (named "I like!" for about 2 weeks), you can read the original announcement here: http://wetware.hjalli.com/000126.shtml

A lot of things has happened since. The service has matured - largely based on excellent feedback from users from all over the world. A lot of functionality and features has been added and Spurl.net is now set up to be able to go through an even faster rate of growth than we saw in 2004.

A lot of good things are coming this year. Among them:
- Finally: A search engine, using the human information from the Spurl.net library.
- A new and improved Spurl bar
- More ways to "dig into" the ever growing collection.
- A new group mechanism for collaboration
- And an API so that you can build Spurl.net into your own applications.

...and this is just in the next couple of months.

Anyway - happy new year, thanks for your great support in 2004 and happy spurling in 2005!

Have you ever noticed that Cache date in Google revert back to an older date, from a newer date?

Yea, me neither. But some do notice these things and talk about it. Bottom line, no need to panic about such an occurrence. It just means Google is doing its normal Google flux.

As expected, Yahoo announced a Desktop Search of their own. There are some nice screen captures here. Chris Sherman authored the Search Engine Watch article on this, named Yahoo Launches Desktop Search. Gary Price blogged on it, so did John Battelle, Andy Beal, Zawodny & Horowitz @ YSearchBlog, and Nick W. I guess Google and MSN won't blog on this one. :)

For the Forum Round Up Check:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- WebmasterWorld

Last night I added a new preventive measure for comment spam at this site. Its a very simple image security access code, that is required before submitting a comment. I tried to stay away from using this as a preventive measure, but the comment spammers are just too much to deal with. I apologize for any inconvenience when commenting...

All you need to do is type in the code, into the box provided and then click submit. It should go through just fine. Any comments, feel free. :)

Today a ClickZ article helped get the word out about a new division of SMA-UK for the North American region, named SMA-NA. The article's name is SMA-NA Set to Launch, and has quotes from Ian McAnerin, who will be the individual leading the North American division. Dana Todd and Barbara Coll from SEMPO both commented on the release of SMA-NA in the article.

The article sets the stage for something many of us who knew about SMA-NA, since December 2004, expected to happen. You can be sure that this will cause a major political issue amongst those who are involved with either organization and those who have a public face in the industry.

One individual who is still very upset about not getting his SEMPO calculator (kidding), has already posted a response to the article at Search Engine Watch Forums. Mike Grehan has major visibility in this industry and he is one of the hardest on SEMPO. Anyway, this should make for a very interesting first quarter for the search engine marketing industry.

In a recent post over at the MSN Search Blog named Beta Ramp-Up, Oshoma Momoh, General Manager, MSN Search Program Management tells us that MSN will "begin turning up the dial and direct more of our users to the Beta." Some have been reporting MSN Beta results on the main MSN Search site (currently powered by Inktomi). Soon you will see many more reporting such occurrences, the complete switch from Ink results to MSN's results is unknown at the moment. Oshoma says, "You’ll continue to see us doing this on occasion for the forseeable future.  As before, the service remains in beta status and we will officially launch it when it’s ready."

This is being discussed at WebmasterWorld.

There are those reporting that sites that were banned from Yahoo! Search are now reappearing in the Yahoo search results. I can not verify this information, but I did notice new pages being picked up by Yahoo recently. So maybe they are related. Forum chatter at WebmasterWorld.

An article at the Register named Google exposes web surveillance cams, blames Google for providing access to over "1,000 unprotected surveillance cameras around the world." There is information on what exactly was done to locate these unprotected Web cams at BoingBoing. In addition, this is now being discussed at WebmasterWorld Forums.

The title attribute, title="Keywords">, are one of those topics that are debated in the SEO world. Some SEOs say it does have an impact on rankings, others say it does not. Fathom, a guest author here, posted a thread documenting this study. The threads name is Title Attribute Control Test, where he clearly details the control groups and hypothesis. The study is not done yet, but it should be done soon. So make sure to check out the thread for updated information on this topic.

Appears Gigablast has joined the billion page index club today with a press release indicating they have 1,014,363,952 pages indexed. An excellent milestone to achieve for a smaller engine, moving them further along in the search space of the major players. There is some forum discussion over at WMW at this, detailing the new index and some new features added making them even better before. One of the members details that they have added a site search, custom search options, and better and faster searching abilities. According to Gigablast:

Among these are Dedicated Site Search (DSS) and Custom Topic
Search (CTS). DSS gives webmasters the ability to provide their website's
viewers with search capability for the specific website being viewed. CTS was announced on December 20, 2004 and allows webmasters to tailor
their website's search feature to a custom topic.

Nice job guys!

About an hour ago I am sitting at my desk, all my employees are gone for the weekend, except one that is on the phone. The phone rings, and I answer and this guy named [name removed] introduces himself. He says he is from [name removed] and he is friends with some of my SEO friends. Ok, so he caught my attention. [name removed] then tells me about how he reads this blog often and is a big fan. Hmm..... He then goes on, about wanting me to link to him from this blog. He said that he has a mentioning of the blog on his site, but its not an active link. I then followed up, asking to look at his site. I go to it and see an ordinary SEO Company's Web site. I then ask [name removed] , do you have any tools or sections of interest on your site that would interest you guys (the reader)? He said yea but he wants a link of his choice. I said, that I do not do link exchanges - I said that if you think this site will be of value to your Web site visitor then link to it. I said if [name removed] or [name removed] has something of interest to the Search engine Roundtable reader, then I will link to it. He then said that "I do not work that way" and abruptly hung up the phone.

I then strongly thought about the call. It made me angry. This is the ONE reason why SEOs have a bad name. This SEO is not interested in his Web site visitor. He is only interested in traffic. When I link out, I do so with the intent that it is of use to the reader. You know, I frequently link out from here - simply because it makes it easier for you guys to get to what I am talking about. Of course we all want to rank well for particular keywords, but there is a professional method to do it.

I wrote many times on creative ways to get links, see:
- One-Way Link Building - How To Guide
- Slick Links - Building Links the Cool Way
- Proactive Linking - WMW Conf 7
- Link Building and Referral Tracking - WMW Conf 7
- or do a search this site

For some reason, I think I can rank fairly high for [name removed]. Question is, how upset am I in a few days from now. This is probably the worst rant I ever did publicly, and I might just delete this soon. I am sorry if you feel this is uncalled for, but I really spent time thinking about this before posting.

Well truth be told, you can't obtain a PR10 for real. I came across a site yesterday from SEOchat that was claiming to have a PR10 on one of its pages. Interesting right? Actually more funny than anything, and its interesting to see such a public display of it. This is not an new redirect trick honestly. This was pretty used for a while with site buyers who bought and sold websites. Know a few people that fell prey to this.

Apparently there are more ways to get a PR10 then using a silly redirect. Any one care to comment? A group called the Dark SEO team apparently is using the redirect and other methods to test google for various ways to hack it as I gather. Teams have been assigned a subdomain in order to test various problems. The website is actually a blog by search engine hackers, with some pretty good posts. Now I have been cruising the site in the last hour (its in FRENCH) and for the most part the site is pretty harmless. I couldn't find anything exposing any "dark" SEO secrets.

I do hope they post more up on the testing of penalizations in Google. One area myself I like to study. They also have a very neat little google tool that you should check out. You can search google using the daterange tool for pages that have been spidered say in the last several days. There may be other options for the tool but didn't look to much into it.

I wonder what the Yahoo folks feel about this, I bet Tim is laughing his head off. Yesterday, Gary Price reported at the Search Engine Watch Blog that Howard Stern is a Yahoo! Guy. Basically Stern said he has been using Yahoo! forever and he thinks he will stick with it, commenting on the 60 Minutes Show with Google. They have posted a recap of the radio show's discussion on this segment at Howard Stern's Site, please be advised that there might be revealing images on the site - your notified.

For those who do not want to click over, here is the summary quoted word for word.

TO YAHOO! OR GOOGLE, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Howard talked about the "60 Minutes" piece on Google that ran the other night. Howard said he didn't understand why Google is such a huge deal because there are a lot of search engines out there. Howard said he's been using Yahoo! for years and is perfectly happy with it. Howard said the "60 Minutes" story on Google was practically an infomercial. It made Google Headquarters look like the coolest place on earth to work. He thought it was odd though that most of the guys who work at Google are now millionaires since the stock went public, yet they go out of their way to pretend they aren't rich. They all drive old, beat up cars and don't buy anything new or flashy. Howard said it's like they're all under the same paranoid delusion that if they enjoy their money, it will all go away. They also have some weird rule at Google where everyone promises to "Do No Evil." Everyone in the studio thought that was kind of bizarre. Artie said all he knows is that one time someone did a search for his name on Yahoo! and it came back will all these negative websites about him, mainly ones calling him fat and predicting his death.

You have a page that is in the top ten or top three results in the major search engines. You are delighted, but you feel that if you changed some of the on page copy and dropped some text, it will increase conversion rates. However, you are concerned that your rankings will be affected by making this onpage changed to your page's content. What do you do?

That was the case mentioned in a thread at Cre8asite Forums. Of course, Ammon Johns gives some sage advise about looking at the conversion metrics, and if those go up, then stick with it. Its all about sales and return on investment these days. :)

When I make changes to sites, we document the change. We use an old school, Unix based versioning system, which we spruced up so that it is fully integrated into our task management and time tracking custom software. The versioning system we use is freely available at CVS Home. With this we can track changes and see how they affect rankings, conversions and usability. Of course it has its other benefits, finding bugs, restoring from an older copy and proving clarity and visibility in group code development.

The big two; Overture and Google AdWords. Then we have many of the smaller PPC companies, many that offer a good ROI. Microsoft has been following the leaders for a while now, ultimately destroying them. So MSN is entering the organic side of things. What about the paid side of search? Makes logical sense.

According to Andy Beal, that just might be the case, he says MSN Search Staffs-up for PPC Product. There is a thread at SEW forums discussing Andy's post, the thread is named MSN Gearing Up To Launch Paid Search Advertising?.

It's official, we mentioned it yesterday in the entry named One Affiliate Per AdWords Keyword TBA Tomorrow and now its official. The official email has been sent out, one of the first lines read, "we will only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL." The thread at Search Engine Watch Forums has the complete email, and I quote:

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we will only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches.

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.co.uk or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we will display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you are an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimise your ads as needed to ensure that they are bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimisation Tips page for more information.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

During all this buzz on desktop search over the past 3 - 6 months, there was no one who came out with a solution for the poor, unknown Apple Macintosh user. I admit, I am a Mac user - never really use a search function to find things on my computer, I keep everything pretty organized. Andy Beal reports on a report by C|Net that Blinkx is to launch a Mac desktop search appliance. Blinkx has on their Web site a little message that reads "blinkx is currently not available for Macintosh, but due to your requests, we're working on it!" But as the article says, Google also said they are working on it.

Anyway, I probably will download it to test it out and then never use it again. However, when Tiger is released, I am sure I will test out spotlight and use it maybe once every two months. Who knows, maybe I will become disorganized like the Web and need to search to find where I put a client's contract or a specification I wrote several months ago.

Dan Thies, a guest author here, and owner of SEO Research Labs, has announced a new program this morning. The program is named SEO Coaching Program, and is given personally by Dan Thies.

I spoke with Dan about this program at SES Chicago 04', he was very excited about it. To me it sounds like an awesome opportunity for many to get to speak with him one on one about SEO topics. I just received his email newsletter with the details. Here is an excerpt:

The first of these is a very exciting new coaching and training program for site designers and SEO/SEM consultants, to help you grow your business in 2005. About half of the program will focus on SEO and pay-per-click specifically, to help you deliver better results, and the other half will dig deep into how you can supercharge your SEO business in 2005.

More details on the coaching program are available at http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-course.php - space is limited so if you think you might want to participate please take a look today. I would hate for any of you to be left out, but we do need to open up enrollment pretty quickly.

So you made loads and loads of money with your spammy content sites. Or you really have good unique content that drives good traffic with an unusually high CTR. Now it is time for Uncle Sam to collect. For those of you who registered under your personal names, you will need to file a 1099. For those of you who have companies, then it can go under the company. For those of you who have no idea what is going on, join the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Exactly a month ago, we reported on One AdWords Advertiser Per Landing Page. This basically means that only one adwords advertiser can have ads showing for the same affiliate site (landing page). There are threads and buzz at the forums that Google will announce this tomorrow. For more information on that buzz check out WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Recently there was a blog entry that came out named What Search Engines Do Search Engine Companies Use? over at Inside Google. It was that blog entry that sprung a topic of discussion over at Search Engine Watch forums named Should Yahoo employees search elsewhere?.

The extreme point in the entry was this quote;

Finally, at Yahoo, 68.9% of employees use Yahoo, but a still-strong 29.8% use Google (compare that to Google's 100% loyalty).

Jeremy Zawodny said I don't believe the search numbers.... First off, Jeremy questions the data collection page which reads; "There is some data that we do not aggregate. For example, we do not collect information on search terms used. We also do not aggregate information on what specific pages or websites people visit." And second, he makes a nice point with this remark; "Anyway, the next problem I see is what that 100% Google figure. That seems to imply that Google never bothers to check out the competition. Is that really true? I know for a fact that it's not."

The author of the original blog entry then commented on Jeremy's entry saying;

Well, VisitorVille compiles the data through visitors to the websites who contract it for user data. That means all of the data is based on sites visited through search engines. In turn, that means that only successful searches are counted, not test searches, because test searches rarely result in a click through. This means that Google employees who search for websites all use Google, and they only use other engines for testing, while Yahoo employees do use Google to find stuff.

This morning I was thinking about how kids are always told to finish the food on their plates. So of course, that leads me to think of how that relates to search. The search engines normally give us a 1,000 results when conducting a query. Most people do not go beyond the first page, and for sure not past the third page.

What type of manners are we teaching our children by leaving over 990 to 970 search results. These search results are free, donated by our friendly engines, and we just take a quick peak at the first 10 - 30 results and dump the rest in the trash?

We live in a life of extreme convenience. Cell phones, email, Web browsers, GPS, home delivery of anything, and search. This entry is a bit of an exaggeration, however, think about it. Will this attitude of having 990 leftovers roll into a more social issue for humanity. :)

The wonderful and patient people over at Conversion Chronicles has given me permission to post their e-book named Learn Before You Spend. I have read most of the e-book and it is incredibly comprehensive. I would be interested in your feedback and I know they would love to hear some feedback on it.

So feel free to download Learn Before You Spend as a gift for you from Conversion Chronicles.

It looks like the server crash corrupted the files and even the backup badly enough that all the past comments are corrupt. So I will not be able to get them back. I do have a text backup of the comments throughout 07/16/04. I will try to get those back in. I am sorry about this. We will have to move on from this. Live and learn. Now everything is stored in a MySQL database and backed up frequently. We are setting up two replicated machines next to the main machine, just in case this happens again.

Back to forum and SEM coverage...

Sorry for the short posts today. Still recovering from the server crash.

There is a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Do Men and Women Search Differently? which discusses that topic. In addition, a poll is set up where you can vote:

Question: Does gender matter in search?
Answers:
(1) Yes - Viva La Difference!
(2) No - any differences are due to practice, etc
(3) Yes, but not enough to matter

Comment spam is a huge problem, I had to set up several methods of spam protection in the past and still people still try to spam this blog. I am personally tired of cleaning my blog from comment and trackback spam, but it is part of the blog experience I guess. Of course I can shut off comments or make it really hard to comment at this blog, but I rather not.

Danny Sullivan wants to start an indexing summit in order to do something about it. You can provide your feedback in the Time For An Indexing Summit? thread.

Determining what is relevant can be an incredible task. It is the goal of all search engines to figure out what is the most relevant Web pages for that particular searcher based on the one, two, three or four words they type into the query box. It is not easy because of the subjectivity involved in the query process.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named What is Relevancy discusses just that. Orion, the resident search technologists, gives the text book scientific definition, "A judgment which relies heavily on semantics." But then he goes deeper into how someone in the information retrieval field would determine such a thing. He says you set a hypothesis, such as "If a document and a query have a (key)word in common, the document is likely to be relevant." And then you try to disprove it, he adds, "Some IR systems precisely are designed for the sole purpose of disproving this hypothesis."

Mel then goes into the subjectivity of such a question asking; "Relevancy to the words searched for in a search engine? Relevancy to the topic searched for in a search engine? Relevancy regarding links? Relvancy for the searcher?" and so on. There are others the chime in to the thread, such as ProjectPHP. And then Danny Sullivan gives a great recap at this post.

I guess you know that this site was down yesterday. Of all my sites on the server, this one was the worst hit. We have recovered all the entries on the site. We are now working on comments and mapping the entries to the appropriate categories.

This has been a huge inconvenience and we hope to get things rolling again shortly.

Thank you for your support.

Both sites do the same thing to determine the winner. You type in two keyword phrases, the one that returns the most results is the winner. So when you peg Google against Yahoo, Yahoo wins. Its simple, but it seems as if people are really sticking to the GoogleBattle.com version over the GoogleWar.com version. Why? Better user interface. The GoogleBattle.com discussion is taking place at this thread and the GoogleWar.com topic is being discussed at this thread at Cre8asite forums.

Last night Google was on the second 30 minute slot of CBS's 60 Minutes. You can pretty much read the transcript at the previous link. In the show, I saw Matt Cutts, Marissa Mayer and of course the Google founders along with Eric Schmidt, whom you can see in the second picture from the top. In addition, it looks like John Battelle wrote up the text version of the show for CBS.

One of the cool things they showed that Google was working on this technology that showed any location in the world in 3D. So they typed in an address and is smoothly zoomed in to the location entered in, in this case, the location of the GooglePlex. In addition, they showed this 3D globe that shows bars of dots and colored lights, that represented the number of searches conducted around the blog at any given time. Further more, they said that they are working on translating any page into any language (um, babelfish is how old?).

Enough about my thoughts, what did others have to say? There is forum coverage at:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat
  
• IHelpYou Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  

Different views on the interview at the different forums. Keep in mind, it seems as if this interview was aimed at beginners. CBS had to target the mainstream during a prime time TV spot.

After writing this, and waiting for my server to come back online I found that Gary Price over at SEW Blog wrote on this not once but twice.

Conduct a search at Google on the keyword yahoo and then click to the fourth page, you should see "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 35 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." Normally when you see that, Google is using its duplicate content filter to take out all excess and redundant search results.

There is an old thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

You see, I am looking for ways to make the Google PageRank update more exciting. Tagging on "first of..." kind of makes it more upbeat. :)

It seems like this update is taking a while to propagate throughout all the datacenters. If you like to check your PageRank at all the different datacenters that SEO Chat knows about, please visit the SEO Chat PageRank Checker. For backlink update checking, I recommend Mcdar's BackLink Checker. Or manually go to 216.239.53.99 and check it at that datacenter.

Forum Coverage:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat Forums
  
• JimWorld
  
• V7 Forums
  
• IHelpYou Forums
  
• SitePoint Forums
  
• WebProWorld
  
• SEO Guy Forum
  
• Digital Point Forums
  
• LilEngine Forums
  
• WebWorkShop Forums
  

To name a few... :)