February 10, 2005 Archives

In one of Seth Godin's maddening blog posts about the SEO industry he wrote,

"Just a short time ago, SEO was seen as a shortcut by marketers unwilling to do the hard work of actually making a product and a site that mattered. In that era, SEO was the quick way to get cheap traffic—cheap so you could afford to waste it."

What's infuriating to me is that he must've had a very bad date with a dishonest SEO/SEM company, because it was no "short time ago" in my book. As far as I could see, way back in the late 1990's when I was an SEO, there was trouble. I made no guarantee's to clients about how rich and famous they'd get when I was done because in many cases, their sites were in bad shape.

No amount of SEO hoola hoop manuvers was going to help them as long as their business requirements didn't have "Design it so customers can use it" written in there somewhere.

I'm not the only one who recognized the disconnect between marketing for search engines and design that sells. Nestled inside more and more companies are usability specialists working alongside web designers and SEO's. This trend is booming.

When my blog was selected by usability and web design tools software developers, TechSmith, as their Blog of the Month for February, they wondered if I'd write about this very topic.

Which I did, in Why Search Engine Marketing Has A Passion for Web Site Usability

It's not that I expect Seth Godin will read it. But it sure feels to pull out my pom poms once in awhile and cheer you all on.

One day, recently, Google became a registrar and then we scratched our heads about the possibility that they would use it for advanced link mapping. But that was ruled down by an email sent t me by Nick Wilsdon from e3Internet that said Google can not use registrar data.

But now a thread at SearchGuild that quotes a NY Times article saying:

Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokeswoman, hardly quelled the speculation by explaining that the whole thing was really a learning opportunity for the company. Google "has become a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet's domain name system," she said recently in an e-mail message. "While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results."

Huge hat tip to TopRank Blog.

The toolbars keep coming, right now, my firefox browser has about a inch of web page realestate and the remaining 12 inches are allocated to toolbars (kidding).

Yahoo released a Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox. Danny and Gary both blogged about it at the Search Engine Watch Blog. Yahoo Blogged on it as well.

Forum chatter at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at WebmasterWorld has a post where a member said he spoke with an Ask Jeeves engineer and they told him that they might be adding a parameter to tell the teoma spiders how "hard" to crawl. Now this is supposedly different then the Yahoo! Crawl Delay where, "You can add a "Crawl-delay: xx" instruction, where "xx" is the minimum delay in seconds between successive crawler accesses. If the crawler rate is a problem for your server, you can set the delay up to 60 or 300 or whatever value is comfortable for your server."

I am trying to find out more information about the validity of this WebmasterWorld thread and what it really means. In the thread, the member said the Ask Jeeves representative said that this is not a Crawl Delay. At this point, I do not see how a hard crawl would be anything else but a time delay.

The folks over at WebmasterWorld are reporting major Yahoo! changes over the past few days. I have seen some major changes with some keywords but not many.

Speaking about Librarians, Gary Price wrote an excellent, detailed and analytical blog entry at Search Engine Watch Blog named A Few Minutes With Google Maps.

It notes some of the comments left in my Google Maps entry.

He also pointed out that to me that when you "try searching Google Maps for the Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale", you won't find it. Try it out, http://maps.google.com/maps?q=yahoo%20in%20sunnyvale%20california.

Within the major Google update thread taking place at Search Engine Watch forums, Danny Sullivan posted a gem. Basically, he defends the argument that searchers are always happy with the results and the only ones to be bitter are SEOs.

Danny continues to explain by saying that most average searchers who are unhappy do not know of a forum to go to and express their dissatisfaction. And often, Danny explains, that the searcher "blame themselves" for searching wrong, when in fact, it is not necessarily the searcher's fault.

He goes on to explain that often the best people to find faults and weaknesses in the results are (1) Librarians and (2) SEOs. "Librarians, because they are often experts in areas, use search regularly and understand if something seems wrong." and SEOs because most know what it takes to get in the top results (when they keep emotions off the radar).

Not exactly SEO/SEM related but this is major enough to mention here. ThreadWatch.org reports on a Major Security Breach - WHOIS DB: Passwords Revealed over at Network Solutions. Basically, if you use NetSol as you register you are/were at risk. Nick Wilson confirmed it:

Confirmed - got sent a few whois queries to try and have seen a whole bunch of user passwords on NetSol - You can Try a Query Here - if your site is registered with NetSol then you may see your passord revealed in the results....