April 2005 Archives

There are two basic components to how an AdWords ad is ranked in the sponsored section of the search results page. Cost per click (the bid) and click through rate, those two numbers make up your "rank number" or the position of your PPC ad.

A well moderated WebmasterWorld thread named Changes in Ranking Formula discusses a change made to the CTR (Click Through Rate). Basically, the thread reports that Google now looks at each individual ad copy's CTR. So instead of simply looking at an overall keywords CTR, they break down the keyword into your ad copy groups and use the CTR x the CPC to rank that specific AdWords ad.

There are some strong reactions to this change at the WebmasterWorld thread. As you can imagine, some like it and some dont.

Google is not the only one starting to add support for image ads to the marketing offerings. According to an eWeek article, Yahoo to Test Search-Based Banner Ads. Matt Hicks writes;

The company's search marketing division gets ready to display pay-per-click ads in a graphical format, joining its chief competitor Google in expanding the role of search advertising.

Forum discussion on this topic is taking place over at WebmasterWorld.

14 Days Ago I wrote a quick preview of Apple's Spotlight Search feature in its new OS named Tiger. Last night I received an email that my order has shipped and I will be expected delivery day is for May 2nd, this Monday. I can not remember every being so excited to upgrade to a new operating system. But with the 200+ features, including the single new feature I am most excited about, Spotlight - it does make me want to be an early adopter.

Last night, the Wall Street Journal released an article (hope link works) named Tiger Leaps Out in Front: Apple Operating System Offers New Approach to Searching, Smart Folders, Better Browser. The article starts off with;

Despite all the advances in personal computing, one problem has remained constant: It often is really hard to find a file months or years after it was created. To have any hope of doing so, users have to create a logical, structured system of folders, and take care to give consistent, descriptive names to their files. But few have the patience to do that.

The author continues to say that "Spotlight, is the first universal, integrated search system ever offered as part of a mainstream consumer PC operating system. In seconds, Spotlight can peer inside e-mail, office documents of all kinds, photos, songs, address books, calendars, and all manner of other files to see which ones match a search term you type in."

He continues by saying;

This is a big deal. Along with a similar built-in search capability Microsoft is working on for its next version of Windows, Spotlight could spark a major change in the way people use computers.

Midway down the article the author gives a detailed overview of how Spotlight works. No wonder I am so excited.

The popular SEO Inc. search engine optimization company who recently had their site penalized in Google and went through some controversy at SES NYC has been up to new things.

SEO Inc has announced the SEO Inc. Forums, it seems as if the first post was by "CEO SEO Inc." on April 5, 2005 about the Acquisition of Urchin by Google. In addition, it seems the first registered member registered on March 25, 2005. So it is a fairly new forums.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat under the thread title SEOInc ... they have forums!

A thread at Cre8asite Forums named Ranking Check Depth discusses the topic of how deep should one go when checking their rankings. Many people I know check their rankings either with a tool or manually. Either way, how deep do most people go when they check their rankings and how deep should they go?

I personally do not go beyond the 100th result, or 10th page of the search engine results. Honestly, anything beyond the 5th page, might not be worth checking. But a 100 results is a good number because (1) most engines let you show 100 results on a single page and (2) most search engines provide 1 - 10 links to the results pages.

Check out the thread to see what others do and why they do it.

Gary Price is now one of those people I talk to on a daily basis, one way or an other, and I am learning a lot. Today he showed me a site named Paid2Google.com which is a form of pyramid scheme to encourage click fraud. One basically gets paid per search you make that triggers a paid result. The program is called Netbux and it is explain here.

You will earn $0.02 for every search you make for up to 40 paid searches per day, therefore the maximum pay per day for your individual searching is $0.80.

The about us page then goes on to explain how the pyramid scheme part works.

You will also earn $0.02 for every search that your referrals make for up to 40 searches a day as well! Therefore the maximum pay per day for each referral is $0.80. The more referrals, the more money!

The graphic they use to depict the money you can make is even in a pyramid shape. How fun.

DigitalPoint's popular and free Coop Advertising Network has under gone a major change.

(1) Everyone's "weight" number has been substantially reduced. It does not mean that you are losing the number of ad impressions, but rather that the actual "weight" number displayed is lower. Impressions will change, but not at the scale of the "weight" number.

Everyone's weight is a LOT lower (weight is relative to everyone else, so it won't affect what counts... ad impressions). The total weight of the system was reduced by more than 6x, so the sky is not falling or any other doomsday scenarios.

(2) There used to be a weight cap, where large sites were unable to benefit from normal sites. For example, "with the cap removed, you are saying that above 4,500 pages (or whatever it was) there will be more weight given...just at a lower marginal rate."

Weight caps have been removed, so there is no upper limit on the amount of weight a single account can have from a single site. I've been tinkering with the formula for a few weeks, and I think it's pretty good right now. It's a logarithmic (not linear) scale, so enormous sites (there are some with 1M+ pages of content in the network) aren't going to take an absurd percentage of total impressions.

Just in case you were freaking out about your lowered weight, you do not need to anymore. Forum discussion at DigitalPoint under the title Weight Formula Changed.

Gary Price does it again, he posted a blog entry named Ask Jeeves Reports Earnings; CEO Comments on Improving User Experience By Reducing Number of Ads on Results Pages, which encouraged me to post a thread at both Cre8asite Forums as well as Search Engine Watch Forums. Basically, Ask Jeeves is publicly saying that they can and will reduce the number of ads shown in the SERPs because they feel that it will better improve user experience. I know the folks at Ask Jeeves have been feeling this way for a while now, but since Google Ads bring in a whopping 70% of their ad revenue, to drop them off, would be huge.

Ask Jeeves CEO is quoted in this article as saying:

Berkowitz said that, in a bid to improve the user experience with the search engine, the company began to implement a program in early April to reduce by 31% the number of ads it shows at the top of its results pages. The company's tests show that a smaller number of ads boosts the frequency with which people use the site and aids user retention. As such, Jeeves expects the change to help lift query volumes and ad revenue later in the year.

Ask Jeeves believe that by reducing the number of PPC ads, user experience will improve. When that happens, more repeat visitors, more new visitors, less ads per user but more ad impressions overall, more clicks, more money. At least, that is the hope. Major move!

Being actively involved in many SEM/SEO forums, I see all kinds of questions, from very basic to very advanced. Often, if people really want to learn about a subject, a book can be a great place to start. I have read and reviewed many SEO/SEM books over the years. This past month, I have received four new books that people would like me to review, and I assume, blog about. So what do I recommend?

If you are starting out with SEO and you are clueless about the basics, I strongly recommend you buy and read Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow. It is an outstanding book for beginners, it lays down pretty much all the basics and explains the core principle concepts of search engine optimization in a manner where virtually anyone can understand. Shari Thurow is one of the most well known SEOs out there, she has been on the Search Engine Strategies conference ticket since its inception (I believe). Of course she is a "white hat" and some would disagree with aspect of the book. However, I still strongly feel everyone serious about getting into the SEO industry, should read this book.

After you finish that book, you are not done. Dan Thies has just released a new book with SitePoint named the Search Engine Marketing Kit. I strongly recommend you read this book as soon as you finish Shari Thurow's book. This book gets deeper into the aspects of SEO and PPC, allowing you to take the core principles you learned from Shari's book and apply them in expert fashion on your site. I have read the bulk of the Search Engine Marketing Kit (skipped over the resources section) and I can honestly say that Dan Thies is way more then a keyword research expert. He not only goes over intermediate SEO tactics, he also discusses the PPC aspect of SEM. But even more so, he has a whole chapter on "Running a Search Engine Marketing Business." This kit also has a detailed CD with Sample SEM Proposal, Client Assessment Form, Keyword Analysis Worksheet, Directory Planning Worksheet, Sample SEO Presentation, Process Flowchart, Sample SEM Services Agreement, and Site Review Checklist. The book has immense value and can easily make you a qualified search engine marketing professional.

Finally, if you really want to get advanced and learn how the search engine work, then you need to talk to the person who talks to the people. That is right, you need to get Mike Grehan's Search Engine Marketing Book. It explains how the search engine algorithms work, why they do what they do, and has exclusive, and priceless interviews with search engine representatives. Also, if you buy the book, you get a free upgrade to the 3rd edition, which is due out some time soon.

There are many other valuable SEO/SEM books out there, and I apologize if I did not include yours. I can not possibly list them all. But do a search in Google for seo book or SEM book and you should fine a nice collection. It is my feeling that those three books, read in that order will give you the knowledge you need to become an SEO Professional. The rest is up to how you practice SEM, but at least those books will give you your best shot.

For other thoughts on this topic, visit the High Rankings Forum thread named SEO Books For Starting A Career In This Field, Which are the best ones?.

I am not a lawyer, I do not pretend to know copyright law, but I do have a pretty strong set of ethics and morals. I was shocked to see a thread at SEO Chat Forums where a member asked, and I quote:

I started a search engine marketing blog

A. Am I covering my butt when reposting articles as long as credit is given??

B. How do I make money with this thing?

Please take a look and let me know your thoughts.

Of course other members take offense to such a post. (1) I started a search engine marketing blog. (2) I want to repost articles, but do not want to ask for specific permission, just give the author credit. Credit how? A link? A name? Does it matter? (3) After reprinting other peoples articles and hard work, this individual wants to make money from it. You and I can do the same. We can all set up a blog in about 20 minutes and then copy and paste articles from other sites in the blog. It just doesn't seem right.

What is more shocking is that this member said he writes for SEO Chat's article section. As an author, would he want others to take his work and post it anywhere without his permission. I guess it doesn't bother him, but it must. If I knew about it, and someone was reprinting my original work without my permission, I would be very upset. It is very much like building a huge snowman and then having someone knock it down with one big push (maybe a bad example, but that is how I would feel). I know it is done all the time to my content, and I tend not to look for the reprints. Why? It takes way too much time and it is upsetting.

My thoughts on the topic; do unto others, as you would have others do unto you.

Last night (midnight exactly) Yahoo! Search Marketing announced the Yahoo! Search Marketing Think Big Contest where one lucky business can win 10 million free ads across the Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) network. I am told that they did the Sir Richard Branson recording last month in NYC, if that matters. The official press release is at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050428/276174.html?.v=1. I started a thread to get SEO/SEM feedback at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Continue reading "Yahoo!'s Think Big Contest - Win 10 Million Ads"

Yesterday was a slow day in the office, so I took the time to update My Yahoo! 360 Page. I added a blog entry, updated my blast, added information to my profile and then decided to add a "local review". I clicked over to the local reviews and then decided to review my company, which is listed under Yahoo! Local as Rustybrick, Incorporated, it should read RustyBrick, Inc. - so that kind of bothers me. Anyway, I posted a review under my screen name "rustybrick". My review read:

I am sure that after I publicly report that I have abused my own company's user reviews, that it will be removed but it is important to report on. After submitting the review, Yahoo! said that it may take 24 - 48 hours to be reflected in the reviews section. They said something to the effect that the review must be first manually reviewed by a Yahoo! quality assurance individual, to ensure that it is not biased. I thought to myself that the review will never go through, but it did. So here I am, a company with a 5 star review!

If you have Yahoo! 360 or even if you want to give us a review, go ahead. Local reviews, I hope, will be a major factor in online marketing in the future.

Update: Randy Farmer from Yahoo! has sent me a Yahoo! 360 Email that he has removed my biased review. This is a good thing, I think. :)

Thanks for reporting the inappropriate review in Yahoo! Local [even if you used an unusual venue to make the report]. It has been removed.

:-)

Not sure if this SEM blog is an unusual venue, it did get the job done. :)

One thing I have learned in this industry is that many of the SEOs/SEMs I deal with use PayPal in a large way. Most of the advertisers at this blog, prefer to pay via PayPal over a normal credit card. Personally, there is something about PayPal that I do not like. About every other day I get an email from PayPal about this or that, I know that 90% of them are phishing for something. I simply do not trust PayPal. Does that mean I never use it? No, I use it when I have to. Just recently, my WebmasterWorld Subscription ran out and I received about 3 emails from PayPal telling me I needed to update something in order to renew my subscription. I did not update it and my WMW subscription expired. I am a strong believer of Webmaster forums and I like to do what I can to support them. So I went to WebmasterWorld this morning, the day after it expired, and renewed there. I am glad to see that I do not have to pay through PayPal again. So I placed my one year subscription and I now await access to the supporters forum again.

Call me old school, but I just do not like PayPal.

Have you ever wonder what Googlebot might look like? Well, the folks at the Google Datacenters like to have fun at work -- very usual of Google employees -- so Ben Rathbone from Hardware Operations created his impression of Googlebot and brought it to us thanks to their blog:

He says, "The whole thing took 70 hours of work. It's 8' high x 22' long." Wow! great work!

It's no secret to you all that search engines are racing to see who cn come up with the best, new, innovative technology and still make search results logical, pertinent and "just what you asked for".

The usability industry (a generic term that nobody in the industry likes but are stuck with), has been conversing on the topic of search results - same as you all in the SEO/SEM industry. Here's a bit of one recent talk covered:

Recent Innovations in Search and Other Ways of Finding Information

Panel: Peter Norvig, Google; Mark Fletcher, Ask Jeeves; Udi Manber, A9; Ken Norton, Yahoo!; Jakob Nielsen, NN Group; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator">

as reported in Innovations in Search Results Pages

"# There’s a lack of context around search queries (esp. social context). Information about information (beyond prioritized relevancy) on the search results page could introduce much-needed context for users.

# Consumer needs are increasingly being better met by “vertical” search functionality (products, local, travel, multimedia, personal, etc.). Search results pages are addressing this by surfacing vertical search paths like “book results for…” and “local results for…”. This change illustrates a need to move beyond prioritized item lists into different organizational structures (i.e. vertical paths and prioritized relevancy).

# Search queries are becoming more focused on the “long tail” of information. Ask Jeeves has a continually increasing number of unique queries per day. This may mean users are looking for more specific information and would benefit from more contextual information.

Continue reading "How To Make Search Engine Results User Centered"

You will be the search agent crawling the web for the search engine. You will be able to index what you see when you see it, from email to video to webpage. Search will go beyond the query box and into your personal space, it will be shaped along with you, and not against you. Search engines are heavily looking to the future of search this year and deciding to make give you a bigger part in how you search the web. In At a very interesting thread at SEW, Orion posts on a presentation from MSN's research specialist Susan Dumais that explores the new technology Stuff I've Seen (SIS) and its implications for personal information management and as they put it "Helping finders become keepers." I am particularly excited about this new technology, more so than I would have imagined, as I see it really changing the way we use the web in the future.

Orion mentions that while the idea of this is not new, the technology to make this happen was always a barrier, but today that is not the case. Nacho theorizes that what we are seeing in science, technology, and marketing today will one day make our industry more important than television. Another member Xan comments that the researcher from MSN never believed in the idea of a semantic web and that such ideas were nonsense and impractical in the way for which we "want" to use search, not the way we will be told to use search in the future. I explore the area from the ability for search engines to index anything and everything, with the inate ability to index as we see something. Personally I find this as an intrusion, and would not want a search engine to index everything I see. Additionally I question how as marketers this new technology could have a impact on us. Since personalization and integration of this will take such a course in many directions, will there be any common reference points we can share with others?

Ms. Dumais presentation goes on to talk about search today, and how there are many information silos that can be indexed in order to grab documents. However doing this can be slow. She talks about how you might have the option of opening up your massive digital libraries to the world, or just for yourself so you can search them easier. One of the barriers mentioned is that as information libraries grow, it will become harder and harder to locate documents within them. Her presentation provides examples of SIS in use, and the current testing that is underway with a group of 3000 people. Not surprisingly, 76% who use SIS technology are using it to find email, with about 14% looking for web pages, and a good majority of people looking for documents over a month ago. There are some interesting implications for this technology such as the intregration with TV programming, and the ability to index even things watched on right then and there. Imagine going back and searching through a TV documentary you watched over the last year. Or going as far as a not to distant reality for marketers to say "target only women age 25-35 on a query for "chocolates" during february days." Pretty cool.

Continued discussion on Stuff I've Seen at SEW

Ever wonder how much a text link is really worth based on the sole factor of the link popularity component in search rankings? Most SEOs have thought about this more then once. Web ads are sold in large number of ways; CPM, monthly, CPC, CPA and so on. To sell an ad, text link ad, based on an objective characteristic of factors would be nice, to say the least. randfish, who has built several useful SEO Tools and already is in the process of building a new tool to calculate the fair price of a text link advertisement. The current criteria randfish came up with, which he listed at a Cre8asite thread named Factors Affecting Link Pricing, includes:

1. PageRank of Site (poor measurement, but probably still worthwhile)
2. PageRank of Page
3. Site Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (TLD)
4. Page Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (Page specific)
5. Number of External Links on Page
6. Site Flavor from Google (shows theme)
7. Date of Cached Snapshot of Page (shows spidering frequency)
8. Primary Topic of Page Extracted via Yahoo! API (Then conduct C-Index with target term)
9. Alexa Rank (again, poor measurement, but probably worthwhile)
10. External Links to Site (Using Yahoo! LinkDomain Search)
11. External Links to Page (Using Yahoo! Link Search)
12. Internal Links to Page vs. # of Internal Pages
13. Type of Link (customizable text, directory listing, banner/image, etc.)
14. Location of Link (content section, advertising section, navigation area, footer, etc.)

Bill Slawski and other members add their thoughts to the tool. Bill said he would like to see a weight factor added in for links from sites at the .gov or .edu domain extension. In addition, in anticipation of future search ranking factors, Bill recommends incorporating link location and age of site being linked from. Sanity also added a note about "trustworthyness" and including that into the equation. How can that be done? I know DigitalPoint's co-op network runs off of PageRank being one of the indicators of the site being trustworthily to be in the network. Interesting concept, but hard to actually quantify.

A new site was released the other day named GoogSpy which boosts of being a "Adwords Competitor Research" tool. I did a search on rustybrick and then clicked on the rustybrick.com result on the left under companies. This tool informed me that I rank #3 for "dynamic web sites", #9 for "pagerank" and #10 for "web development services" and "web definitions". I am sure I rank well for other competitive terms, or maybe not. But it is clear that I do bid on AdWords for rustybrick, see my AdWords Ad on the right. So it seems that currently the GoogSpy still needs some more development and testing.

However, the press release does boast of being able to easily figure out what ones competitors are bidding on at AdWords. "It also displays the search terms that they naturally rank in the top ten and it even computes the company's top 25 competitors."

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

A thread at Cre8asite Forums warns the members of a easy mistake thousands of people can be doing every day, which might cost them a virus on their machine. Basically, a domain name googkle.com (whois), takes you to a landing page with "at least 4 trojan/hijackers." It seems to be only prone to Internet Explorer browsers but that is a major concern for many people.

Advanced "Saving, Sharing, and Syndicating Search" as the Yahoo! Search Blog says. Besides for the features we have seen with MyJeeves in September 2004 and more recently, Google's My Search History release last week, Yahoo! has released My Web.

With Yahoo!'s My Web, you can:

• Save what you like to build your own personal web
  
• "Re-find" pages instantly when you need them again
  
• Share your personal web
  
• Better than bookmarks (imports the bookmarks also)
  
• Plus Attention.XML which allows you to publish your search history and more

You can publish your My Web links via RSS and, of course, there’s an API for My Web published on YSDN. We're also experimenting with Attention.XML as a way to ship around My Web data. To try it out, go to any My Web RSS feed and replace the "rss.xml" filename with "attention.xml". As is often the case with brand new ideas, we haven't really figured out how exactly this should work, but there’s only one way to find out.

Forum Discussion at:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- WebmasterWorld
- Cre8asite Forums
- SEO Chat

Yesterday Ben (Phoenix) blogged about a cool game called "GUESS-the-GOOGLE". So, I started a thread at SEW forums to get some discussion and Gary Price replied with another *very cool* memory game that uses Yahoo! Images. I've played it and is a lot of fun as well. The game's instructions aren't in English, but Gary was kind enough to provide ones for us:

1) Enter a search term, let's say fruit
2) Select how many images you want to have to remember (1-28)
3) Click "Go"

Boxes appear. Click one, remember the image, and now click to find the same image elsewhere on the grid.

Have fun!

Dear Barry:

I have some news that I thought might interest you for the Search Engine Roundtable. Multiply just launched the first "social search engine" - which finds content published within one's social network and ranks results based on social proximity.

It's much different than what Friendster/Eurekster does which, as you know, is to show someone the topics that their friends have searched.

Here's a link to the news release that we're distributing today:
http://multiply.com/info/press/search

I've attached a short, one-page PDF as well, so you can see what makes this kind of search so compelling. Download file

Thank you in advance for looking it over. Again, I thought you might find it interesting. Hope you don't mind that I sent it along. Feel free to call or e-mail me if you'd like to discuss it some more.

Regards,

Marc Bernstein

Kind of under the weather, so I am posting releases today.

Over the past few months we have been listing to your feedback and developing our system to what our members have asked for. We invite you to log into Seotie and look at our most recent additions to the service in helping you in all your webmaster and seo tasks. Seotie monitors and notifies upon inclusion into directories monitoring for you so you can keep track of your sites without wasting your time checking daily.

Seotie Features:
Support for the most popular Internet directories - DMOZ, Yahoo!, Google, Tygo
Batch Submit and Update - Submit and setup all of your sites at once, make mass changes
Automated Category Discovery - Find out if your domain is addded to a new category, without lifting a finger
Detailed Activity Reports - Complete and customizable reports that are ready for print

The new Seotie directory monitoring algorithm provides faster and more accurate results with full additional directory support, so as a SEO or webmaster, you can trust that you will be kept up to date on your diverse directory exposure strategies. Presently, Seotie remains a free service with advanced features and customer support for premium members. If you haven't taken a look recently in what Seotie has to offer or you need to update the websites your are monitoring, you can simply log in to http://www.seotie.com

A Seotie premium membership is currently only twenty dollars for one year of service (that's about five cents a day). Premium memberships are what makes it possible to continue developing the system and adding additional features. For this small fee you can take advantage of all of Seotie's features that will your life easier and more productive.

Thank you!

http://www.seotie.com

Jenstar, who has a few entries at her JenSense blog on the changes at AdSense and AdWords, also has a thread at WebmasterWorld on these changes. Yesterday, DigitalPoint wrote a guest entry here named Google To Offer Impression-Based Pricing, a thread on that topic is at WebmasterWorld named Google to add CPM, other ad choices. In addition, Jenstar has a detailed thread named Complete rundown of the AdSense changes covering all the changes announced or rumored as of yesterday.

- The "Buzz" about CPM Based Pricing at AdWords/AdSense
- More AdSense Ad Formats; coming soon
- More Image ads, including Flash ads

And more. Very exciting news for many people.

Brought to you via /., A study that shows how MSN Search is favoring pages hosted on an IIS server.

On the whole is seems that the MSN search engine is indeed placing IIS hosted sites higher in the results more frequently than other webservers. Frequently the MSN search is placing more IIS servers in the important top 10 results than Google even where result sets from a query have actually returned fewer IIS servers overall on MSN.

Looking at the coverage graphs, most search phrases return a more even spread of IIS servers thoughout the results sets from the MSN searchs.

So what's going on?
I have no idea, I doubt it's all a big conspiracy... but some possible explanations spring to mind:

Perhaps the MSN search has simply been coded by developers used to talking to IIS machines and so it just does that job better?
Perhaps the MSN spider is taking advantage of some specific IIS features to provide enhanced indexing?

Interesting enough, I have never seen a thread at an SEO forum with this sort of speculation.

Update: Looks like I was wrong, DigitalPoint had a thread on this topic for a while now.

Rumors have been swirling the last few weeks about Google offering impression based advertising (ads sold in blocks of 1,000 impressions). According to various media sources, Google is expected to make the announcement later today that AdWords advertisers will get some new options (ability to base pricing on impressions, purchase ads only on specific sites, etc.)

The upgrade is currently being beta tested with a few select advertisers, and should be available to all advertisers 2-3 weeks following the official announcement.

A new "site selection" tool is also rumored to be in the works that should make it easier for advertisers to find specific publishers they want to run their ads on.

So is it better to have a 1000 sites with 5 pages that make $1/day or 5 sites with 1000 pages that make $1/day? Interesting question, and members at WMW are voicing their opinion on what works best for them. Most of you have probably seen those sites that people tend to "crank out" by the hundreds. They are useless but they take in some profit even if its small. The user mwack on WMW is guestioning the usefulness of this method and why it might be good or bad to do so. He is wanting more specifically how people promote these particular sites? For a smaller network of sites, it may take longer for someone to get it up to the level of profit or traffic that a large amount of sites might get. But is it worth it to spend 100 hours to make a money only 2 years later?

One of the member suggests that its kinda like putting an investment in the future of a website. He suggests to outsource a lot of the work, and have some write the content and do the links. Another user says she has found the answer that works for her, and in my own experience setting something like this up is an excellent time tested way to do it:

I have found the key is to have a cornerstone site, then a group of sattelite sites. The cornerstone drives traffic to the smaller sites. So, the question is really, how much money do you want to make today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and the next decade? If your goals are weak, a weak income will result.

Long term, the main reason I have done this is not for short term profits, but for long term stability. All industries on the web have high and low periods. Some are daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, even year to year. By using diversity in our network, I can spread my eggs into more baskets, both in traffic, and income providers. One site is hot today, another tomorrow. One is hot in spring, another in winter. One is fabulous in a recession, another only in an economic upturn.

Great post by janethuggard! If anything its worth checking out her insightful answers. There is more comments on this and some questions raised about interlinking within networks like this. In regards to interlinking, I can say that there is a secret sauce or method to this to ensure long term survival of all sites involved. This thread gives clues to it. But I'm giving it up my methods just yet. ;-)

Continue reading on WMW - For those who crack 'em out...

This is fun, and actually kind of challenging. The basic premise of the game is to guess what search phrase was used to find the 20 different partial images displayed in the box. I had to guess such searches like "noise, green, energy, purple". Check it out: Guess The Google

I sure hope not and don't believe they do, but it doesn't mean I am careless about leaving broken links "broken". Came across a very good thread on Highrankings taking about this very subject. While I would be very inclined to say having broken or dead links on your site is not a problem, and NO you will not get penalized for it. However I can't honestly say I think it will help either. Last year I was told by a credible source that sizable amounts of broken links on a site could potentially have a bad effect on search engine rankings. While the reasoning is good, personally I didn't buy it. The main reason for this came down to the credibility of those pages that are being linked to. A search engine for example like Google can not "verify" that these pages hold valued resources. Leaving the search engine in a condundrum to penalize or do nothing at all depending on the mounting evidence to suggest otherwise. How about indications in the anchor text, amount of link churn on the page in relation to broken links, or amount of broken links per page in contrast to broken links of the whole. Could those help to decide whether broken links are good or bad.

The general concensus is that there is nothing wrong with a dead/broken link for the most part. I totally agree. I can't say I like them much on my pages though, as most would probably agree. Nothing like clicking on a dead link for a site, and as a search marketer getting the bug to figure out what happened to the site or page and researching it. But thats me. Alan Perkins and Michael M. on High Rankings get into a discussion about whether broken links on scale are "bleeding pagerank" away from the page as they are having a detrimential effect on the global Pagerank of the site (in terms of the classic PageRank calculation). Alan disagrees and says "dead links are ignored for Pagerank calculations, since they are probably treated as dangling links (links to documents that have not been retrieved) and dangling links are ignored." The subject goes back and forth with no one really proving anything, until Michael posts some lines straight from the original PageRank document to back up his claims of their negative effect:

The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases. This makes it possible to return web pages which have not actually been crawled. Note that pages that have not been crawled can cause problems, since they are never checked for validity before being returned to the user. In this case, the search engine can even return a page that never actually existed, but had hyperlinks pointing to it. However, it is possible to sort the results, so that this particular problem rarely happens.

You decide for yourself, but it will be noted that while the Google founder do mention that dead or dangling links are neither good or bad, they do mention the problem can be fixed by sorting the results thus allowing this problem not to happen often. I imagine the time since then ways to fix this have gotten substantially more advanced and one can only wonder how they look at dead links today.

Continue discussion on HighRankings
*Barry is out for the day, so I will be taking on full coverage today. If there is anything you want to hear let me know - Ben.

Max, a dedicated reader, wrote me an email reporting a new occurrence at Google Web Search. Query Google for the term real estate directories and you should see "Real Estate Directories: 511":

The first link takes you to Linkelse but not the referral URL http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&start=1&oi=answers&q=http://www.linkelse.com/Dir-Real_Estate.htm. and the second takes you to more directory resources. I wonder what makes a directory a "resource", the "hub" concept maybe? See where I am going with this?

As far as I am aware, no forums are chatting about this as of yet.

Update: Both Gary Price (SEW Blog/Resource Shelf) and Shawn Hogan (Digital Point) feel that it is a "weird" Q&A results. Basically, it is a "poor choice" through Google's automation, "it's just a Google Answers thing gone bad."

I just wanted to inform the readers that I will not be posting this Monday. Ben (phoenix) and some of the guest authors will stop by to share a few ideas.

Maybe if you leave a comment here for a specific author, maybe, maybe, maybe, they will post an entry for you on Monday.

Have a wonderful weekend!

This week Barry blogged about Google My Search History and pointed to other sources from our industry that talked more in depth about this new direction. Today for the first time I noticed that Google has added "My Account" to its homepage as well as a link to "My Search History" and of course the ability to sign out. Here is a snapshot:

Remember that you can discuss about this topic at WebmasterWorld and SEW Forums.

Why does http://360.yahoo.com/rustybrick work and http://360.yahoo.com/rustybrick/?

Shouldn't the trailing slash work? Bugs me. They also do this in their engine, which I discussed at Yahoo's URL Normalization Issues.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda...Well Tried'ta...to buy GOOG. Anyway, Google released earning the other night and they way exceeded profit estimates. I know of two SEM forums discussing this now, one is of course WebmasterWorld and the other is Search Engine Watch Forums.

GOOG is doing just great in the market!

About a month and a half ago we reported on the controversy over the SEO Inc. The controversy was over have "Expo Babes", women in attractive attire standing by the both to promote SEO Inc. Danny Sullivan was able to track down SEO Inc.'s people and ask them a few questions in regards to the "Expo Babes". He posted his Q & A session, at the SES NYC Expo Center a Joke? thread. I will just reprint the first question and answer here:

Question: Did they find in the end that it was worthwhile to have these women in the booth?

Answer: SEO, Inc.'s purpose at SES was to raise brand awareness for our company and overall interest in Search Engine Optimization as an important and growing segment of Search Engine Marketing. We feel these goals were accomplished, and done so within boundries approved by Jupiter Media for this trade show.

Gary Price, from Resource Shelf and the SEW Blog, posted a nice updated collection of both Yahoo's patents circa 2003 and MS search patents.

Some more weekend reading for you folks.

Creative logos to celebrate Earth Day by creative search engines. Ask Jeeve's Logo is a link that takes you to Ask Jeeves Search Results for Earth Day. Google, does not link their image, at least not as this point in time.

Forum discussion on the Google Earth Day logo at WebmasterWorld and I started a thread at Cre8asite Forums on the Ask Jeeves Earth Day Logo.

It has been a while but it seems as if a Google PageRank update is currently taking place. You can use the SEO Chat PR Tool to check updates.

Forum discussion at:

• SEO Chat Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• Search Engine Forums
  
• HighRankings Forum
  
• V7
  
• SitePoint Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• SEO Guy Forums
  
• WebWorkShop Forums
  

I thought this deserved a quick mention for craziness and maybe some points for raising the issue that seems all to often sweep under the rug - possible abuse of power that takes place at DMOZ. I apologize in advance if the below website offends anyone, but for the most part I think if you create a website called "Corrupt DMOZ editor" and intended to let people know more about the inner workings you have some courage. There are really great people that work as volunteers at DMOZ, I have met some, but as the saying goes. A few bad apples can spoil the barrel.

The website, called Corrupt DMOZ Editor was created by a DMOZ editor who under multiple screen names (and growing) takes about the inner workings in details. She is taking the approach that before you can see the light, you have to deal with the darkness. Such as How to Bribe A Dmoz Editor. basically what you do is send the editor some funds via Paypal, before doing a submission, next submit your website to the category, and viola you have a listing. She also talks about abuse in regards to editors who routinely delay submissions or inclusions for certain areas, and sometimes even erase the submissions. It goes on to say that corrupt editors work in groups even mob units in order to benefit from the directory. You sometimes have to pay a boss above you a cut of what you take in. Whether the benefit is money, one way links, control, blocking competitors from submitting and others. Pretty darn digusting if you ask me, if true.

She goes on to talk about the prime reason she started the blog here. And how hot a commodity DMOZ links have become. If there is a microeconomy and people involved there is bound to be someone who will eventually abuse it. There is another post of of interest that talks about how to Sabotaging a Competitors DMOZ Listing for Fun & Profit. I personally wouldnt try any of those methods if I were you and I would stress caution on some of the things said on the website. It seems like submitting is huge waste of time, and while I have submitted to DMOZ for many years, I have decided last year to stop totally, realizing you can spend your time more wisely getting better links elsewhere.

Brad Fallon from SEO Radio has a forum like discussion going on that I find to be hilarious. The title of the discussion is named Interview with a Blog Spammer, where Brad links to an interview of Todd "Oilman" Friesen. Brad says as follows:

One point is that the most successful spammers eventually go white hat -- short term, less money, long term they get to stay around. Did you know that many of the current internet marketing gurus started out as rank email spammers? True story.

If you continue to read the thread, you will fine some of the funniest comments ever. Forum members basically drop real remarks and then a spammy like link that follows. My favorite comment is by Max on April 20, 2005 at 03:50 PM. I had to share this with you.

Well it seems patent documents seem to be raining down on us from all directions. Barry posted on this news this morning, but I want to expand on it a bit more for a more thorough look at it. The link was found via Cre8asite forums from the talented Bragadocchio that highlights a Yahoo Patent that details how Yahoo plans to give searchers an informal editoral position to help shape the results. They want to know how you search, the nitty gritty of your habits more or less. To make a better Yahoo search engine I think we should probably consider it. However if you thought the Google patent was hard to read, the language in the Yahoo patent is way worse, and reads like a good VCR manual from China. It introduces us to such terms and concepts as superunits, a constituent units, concept network, signatures. There is an underlying message in the Patent that may not be picked up at first but overwhelmingly there is a lot about Local Search in the document and is interesting how Yahoo is approaching a lot of this. Examples are related solely to location "new york, paris, hawaii" from just a few of the examples. It definately not restricted to local but seems to have a big part in powering it.

Here is the following abstract from the document:

A concept network is generated from a set of queries by parsing the queries into units and defining various relationships between the units, e.g., based on patterns of units that appear together in queries. From the concept network, various similarities between different units can be detected, and units that have some identifying characteristic(s) in common may be grouped into superunits. For each superunit, there is a corresponding signature that defines the identifying characteristic(s) of the group. A query can be processed by identifying constituent units, determining the superunit membership of some or all of the constituent units, and using that information to formulate a response to the query

Here is a better illustration applied to the abstract:

What human beings think in terms of are natural concepts. For example, "hawaii" and "new york city" are vastly different queries in terms of length as measured by number of words but for a human being they share one important characteristic: they are each made up of one concept. In contrast, a person regards the query "new york city law enforcement" as fundamentally different because it is made up of two distinct concepts: "new york city" and "law enforcement. Human beings also think in terms of logical relationships between concepts. For example, "law enforcement" and "police" are related concepts since the police are an important agency of law enforcement; a user who types in one of these concepts may be interested in sites related to the other concept even if those sites do not contain the particular word or phrase the user happened to type. As a result of such thinking patterns, human beings by nature build queries by entering one or more natural concepts, not simply a variably long sequence of single words, and the query generally does not include all of the related concepts that the user might be aware of.

That last part is quite good in explaining some of the goal of what Yahoo is accomplishing, but just a little part the Patent is extremely thorough and will additionally take more time to read it all the way through.

The document also mentions co-occurrence as stated below:

To establish an association between units, a minimum frequency of co-occurrence may be required.

Which is roughly translates that Yahoo in order to build a thesaurus of terms needs to establish a minimum for which words are semantically connected.

Here is an example of some of the in use with the following example:

[0069] For example, consider a case where users search for information about their favorite musical performers. Typically, these users would construct a query that includes the name of the performer (e.g., "Avril Lavigne" or "Celine Dion" or "Matchbox Twenty") and also some other words reflecting the type of information sought, such as "lyrics", "mp3", "guitar tabs", "discography", and so on; these other words are neighbor units that would tend to appear with names of different performers. Based on the occurrence of similar neighbor units, superunit seed module 412 groups the performer names into a cluster.

There is whole lot more contained in the patent obviously. It also talks about a Content Analysis System, Concept Network Builder, Superunit Seed Module (?),

Possible applications for use of Superunits:

1. Resolving Ambiguity
2. Suggesting Related Searches
3. Suggesting "Sideways" Searches
4. Resolving Spelling Errors
5. Supporting Directory-Based Searching
6. Advertisements

Check out the Yahoo Patent on Systems and methods for search processing using superunits

With the re-branding of Overture into Yahoo! Search Marketing, Yahoo! released a new program named Travel Submit. Travel Submit allows the travel industry (airlines, rental cars, hotels, vacations, cruises, and so on) submit "detailed listings of your travel offers and deals will be featured in highly relevant areas across Yahoo! Travel, giving you access to a vast audience of motivated travelers and targeted leads."

In fact, they are pushing this Travel Submit program by giving "free clicks through June 15, 2005!" (see the bottom of the page). A WebmasterWorld thread named Yahoo Travel is expanding, where a member wrote that Yahoo! emailed him "discussing expansion of Yahoo Travel and that they'd like one of our sites to be a part of it."

A thread at WebmasterWorld suggests that a good competitive strategy is to sandbox your competitor. The thread creator said:

Now wouldn't it be in your best interest to sandbox your competition? You see a new site throwing up some PPC ads in your space, you immediately give them a few run-of-site links from some other sites you run and watch them get sandboxed.

My first reaction was the same reaction ciml, WebmasterWorld administrator wrote in message number 6:

It's an approach that is just as likely to help the competitor as it is to harm it, in my opinion.

As the member who posted before ciml said:

If they try and be agressive to rank, they will be sandboxed.

If they are not, they won't rank.

Eitherway you are safe.

Bill Slawski started a thread over at Cre8asite Forums named Yahoo! Superunits: of signatures and co-occurence. In that thread, he discusses a new patent Yahoo! Search released (on April 14th) named Systems and methods for search processing using superunits.

Here is the patent's abstract:

In a search processing system, a concept network is generated from a set of queries by parsing the queries into units and defining various relationships between the units based in part on patterns of units that appear together in queries. Units in the concept network that have some similar characteristic(s) are grouped into superunits. For each superunit, there is a corresponding signature that defines the similar characteristic of the group. A query is processed by identifying constituent units, determining the superunit membership of some or all of the constituent units, and using that information to formulate a response to the query.

Bill tells us to look for "some new vocabulary words - a concept network, a unit, a superunit, and signatures." I briefly skimmed it, but the whole concept network seems very interesting. "A concept network is generated from a set of queries by parsing the queries into units and defining various relationships between the units, e.g., based on patterns of units that appear together in queries."

Doug from Aderit just informed me of a thread at WebmasterWorld where Google Advertising Professionals "were granted promotional credits to hand out to new clients. They also got to link to a page on Google.com profiling them, confirming their status."

There is more information as to what are Google Advertising Professionals promotional credits here and it starts off by reading, "These credits are one of the ways we help you bring in new business." In addition, Google does say that "While promotional credits are only available to professionals operating businesses in the United States, we hope to offer credits globally in the future." For a detailed explanation of how the "Credit System" works click here.

Google just announced Google My Search History, a method to "view and manage your search history from any computer." Chris Sherman has a detailed write up about this new product by Google, where he begins by writing; "Say goodbye to bookmarks: Google has rolled out a seriously cool search history feature that automatically keeps track of all of your web searches and every page that you view from search results."

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

I am not a mathematician, so I will basically summarize the argument taking place in a thread at WebmasterWorld named Google caculator 1 / 0 = 0?!. Basically, the thread creator said he did a search in Google for 1 / 0 and received the Google Calculator result that read:

1 / 0 = 0

The member said, "anything / 0 = undefined" and not = to 0. Others say that zero is close enough. I have no opinion.

Many of you are already aware of the recent change to the www.google.org. Basically they recently posted information that says they will be pursuing "the philanthropic arm of Google." At WebmasterWorld, members are guessing as to what and why Google set this organization up.

Some funny and bold statements at the thread.

John Battelle wrote an entry the other day named Snap Does Suggest One Better. In that entry, John discusses how Snap is a much more advanced Google Suggest. Bill Gross, founder of Snap, told John;

Google suggest is awesome, but doesn’t do substrings, just the leading characters of the search term, I believe. Also, Google shows you hit count in the index, not number of searches performed by users. Number of searches by users seems to yield useful results from the “network” of people in a collaborative filtering kind of way. Just try typing in, say PASADENA, or SOLAR ENERGY, or anything, and watch what a relevant list you get because it’s using the collective knowledge of the whole network!

Pretty cool stuff. Check it out yourself at Snap.com. Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

My last blog got me wondering a bit more on what goes on with behind the URL parameters of a search result because all the sudden I noticed a new "/IPC=us/" on a search listing URL for a Spanish keyword on Yahoo! Search. We all know that these URLs have a language of their own, right? So, I remember back a great article from Danny Sullivan on SearchEngineWatch.com for "URL Deciphering At Yahoo" (sorry, subscribers only get the beef). He goes over each parameter on the URL and either tells you exactly what it is or he takes a good guess at it. Unfortunately, a few new parameters have been added since then (June 17, 2004). To compare apples with apples I did a search for the same keyword, kameleon remote. Here I got this result:

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=kameleon+remote/v=2/
SID=e/TID=F492_107/l=WS1/R=7/IPC=us/SHE=0/H=2/
SIG=11oci4r19/EXP=1114063661/*-http%3A//www.remotecentral.com/urc9960

Where as Danny's URL was:

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=kameleon+remote/v=2/
SID=e/TID=DFX5_30/l=WS1/R=2/SS=16752724/H=0/*-http://www.remotecentral.com/

Here are the new parameters and I will try to take an educated guess at each:

IPC=us - This is probably tagging the result coming from a U.S. IP address from the searcher. Perhaps one day Yahoo! will be willing to say "Do you only want U.S. traffic?" -- who knows.

SHE=0 - Could this be that SHE=1 identifies that the user is female and SHE=0 the user is male? Again, perhaps one day Yahoo! might say "Do you want traffic from females, males or both?". Looks like personalized traffic is very near for all marketers.

SIG=11oci4r19 - This is probably the signature file id associated with the page indexed, but I could be wrong.

EXP=1114063661 - I believe 111406 stands for 1/6/05 which is probably the date it was submitted, but I can't figure out the remaining 3661. Could that have anything to do with the expiration of the paid inclusion for this URL?

You agree/disagree with me? Did I miss other parameters? Have fun stripping out the guts of a Yahoo! Search URL in the SEW thread called Defining the Yahoo! Search URL Parameters.

Back in September 2004 I reported traffic changes in a thread called International divisions from Mayor Search Engines bring more traffic to U.S. sites.

Since then lots have changed. Yahoo! Search (Mexico) rethought their decision and in late October '04 it switched back to Mexican hosted sites for ranking preference. Their test only lasted about less than 3 months.

After closely monitoring traffic for the last few days I can verify that the T1MSN Search engine from Mexico has also rethought their August decision and switched its algorithmic preference for local hosted websites. Meaning that if your website is hosted in Mexico, regardless of the TLD used (.com, .com.mx, .mx, etc.) it will rank higher. If you are a US hosted website and you are targeting spanish keywords + landing pages this is most likely what happened to your traffic :

Google Mexico remians to give preference to any sites on the web rather than Mexico sites.
So thier test keeps going and going and going . . .

SearchEngineWatch has another forum topic very related to this called Should Search Engines adopt different results outside the U.S.? which is still open for discussion.

Jason Dowdell pinged me this morning about an entry he wrote at his blog named Comparing Search Engine Results - My Experiment, where Jason does a detailed non-statistically sound (but good) review of comparing search engine results. Something I am considering doing myself, but in a more objective fashion, if that is possible when testing relevancy.

Here is a snippet of the detailed entry to entice you to click over:

On the "big picture" side of things, it's a bit concerning that Google had the least amount of unique results when compared to the other search engines. I'm guessing this is because the other engines do indeed crawl Google's index to seed their own from time to time and to conduct qualitative checks of their own.

Wish I had more time to comment, looks like good stuff.

To be honest, I do not know anyone who relies solely on their AdSense income. I was browsing the Google AdSense forum at WebmasterWorld and found a thread named last fri. i quit my job,for adsense: need your "good luck". In that thread, the member said that he received 1 check, that check basically covered his rent. He admits he needs more money, but is willing to take the risk of quitting his day job to enjoy life and self-independence. As you can imagine there are many wishing this member the best of luck and offering him sage advice. He has my best wishes.

Google came out with Google Maps for the US market on February 8th and yesterday, they announced Maps and Local for the UK market. Google blogged about it and gave some examples. The Google Local UK version can be found at http://local.google.co.uk/ and the Google Maps UK version can be found at http://maps.google.co.uk/. Next up? Google Ride Finder UK?

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

Last night GoogleGuy stopped by to make a statement in the Google's 302 Redirect Problem thread at WebmasterWorld. In that thread GoogleGuy said in msg #:108:

We've been steadily improving our heuristics for 302s based on the feedback that you've sent us. There have been two recent changes that I know of. We changed things so that site: won't return results from other sites in the supplemental results. We are also changing some of the core heuristics for the results for 302s. I believe that most of these changes are out, but there may be a few more in the pipeline.

Note that for inurl: and allinurl: searches, results from other sites are perfectly valid. So if you own yoursite.com and do a search allinurl:www.yoursite.com, it's a completely valid result to get a url from www.someothersite.com/resources?url=www.yoursite.com, for example. That's how inurl: and allinurl: are supposed to work--they match all docs with the requested terms in the url, not just docs on www.yoursite.com. That doesn't imply any problem/hijacking/issue; just that someone else had your domain name in their url.

Thank you for the feedback that people have given us about 302s. I'd be interested to hear if anyone sees a result where site:yoursite.com returns urls from domains other than yoursite.com. You might want to wait another few days before checking though, to give things time to get fully out. I have to duck out right now, but I'll try to stop by and give more details as things are more fully deployed.

He goes on to explain that this has already been applied to the Google results. In addition, they might be adding methods for you to still locate hijack attempts with a filter=0 command.

I write this as I watch a video created by Robin Sloan named EPIC 2014. The flash video cleverly depicts a timeline of the growth of the Internet and how Google slowly, but surely develops or purchases technology that is around all the various spectrums of the social Web.

The page reads;

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The fourth Estate's fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And What is EPIC?

"It is never as easy for people to create as well as consume media" the video speaks. Paper is no longer the media of choice (remind you of recent NYTimes news?). "GoogleGrid" brings everything together. Google constructs news stories dynamically. They show how Google grabs content in milliseconds to construct a news story, personalized for every individual. NY Times sues Google for this and Google wins in 2014.

Everyone in the world contributes to this information construct. EPIC provides personalized news based on your profile.

EPIC is mearly a collection of trivia, most of it untrue. It explains that EPIC is what we wanted but its really not what we wanted. NY Times then goes print only, for the elite.

A very cool video, they even go the TiVo News in there. What ever happened to do no evil. Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

In that past, we knew that Google's AdSense served up PSA (Public Service Ads) for new pages and new domain names. Later on they assumed that a domain name, with new pages, should get ads that are relevant to the domain name. DigitalPoint is noticing that its a little different this time. In a thread named Mediapartners Determining Content In Realtime, DigitalPoint provides his log files for one of his blogs. He discovered that Google sends the Mediapartners spider in real time (almost), determine the content in real time (almost), then send the ads to you, in real time (almost). Shawn (DigitalPoint) explained to me that "they hold the HTTP connection open for about 1 second while they do that."

He goes on to explain that from a "technical standpoint (other than the resources required to do it in realtime)" it is not hard to do.

WeBuildPages is at it again, they released what they call a Deep Link Ratio Calculator that basically "analyzes how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines." "A website's deep link ratio is the comparison of the number of backlinks that go to pages under the top level of the website to the total number of backlinks for the entire website."

Here is a test I ran:

Results
Keyword Phrase: search engine marketing

An other thread at Search Engine Watch forums named What is an SEO worth [in cold hard cash] seemed to start off on the topic of how much is a SEO worth by the hour, how much is a Directory lisiting consultant worth and how much are PPC consltants worth?

The thread kind of lead its way into comparing the SEO job with other types of jobs. The question began to turn around and now it seems the question being asked is as follows.

As an SEM, what type of service offering should I offer? Should I charge hourly? Should I charge based on spend? Should I charge monthly? Or maybe, better yet, charge on the CPA (cost per acquisition) model. In fact, I have spoken with several well known SEO/SEMs and they all agree with Mikkel's statement:

This [CPA] model has turned out to be far the most profitable for me (as calcualted by prfots per working hour) and the one where clients stick around for the longest time (in fact, I never had one single client terminate such a deal - yet).

If you get a buzz from reading Orion's posts at Search Engine Watch forums, or you enjoy listening to Orion (Dr. Garcia) speak then your going to love a new conference coming up. Orion's friends consisting of:

Carey Priebe, Chair (Johns Hopkins University, Center for Imaging Science/Applied Mathematics and Statistics)
Damianos Karakos (Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing)
Mauro Maggioni (Yale University, Mathematics/Program in Applied Mathematics)
David Marchette (Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, VA)

Will be holding a Document Space Workshop at UCLA during January 23 - 27, 2006.

"This workshop on Document Space has the goal of bringing together researchers in Mathematics, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Linguistics; the hope is that a unified theory describing "document space" will emerge that will become the vehicle for the development of algorithms for tackling efficiently (both in accuracy and computational complexity) the challenges mentioned above.

If you are unsure or if you have questions, please join the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums. This one looks like a real informative and enlightening workshop.

A funny but sometimes true article named The Ancient Art of Gardening: Or How to Write an SEO Article starts off:

With so many articles out there describing how to get to the top of the SERPs, you all probably know by now just how to stick it to your competition. However, with every Tom, Dick and Poindexter cranking out SEO articles, the quality of the optimization self-help industry has suffered a bit. This is a guide to aspiring gurus who can't seem to get the knack to write their own revenue-generating marketing-hype, disguised as helpful SEO tips.

As you can imagine, each tip makes you laugh as you read them. We have all seen articles that fit this description, and we have all spoken to those "newbies" who have believed them. Forum discussion on this article is at Cre8asite Forums.

You, as an SEO or SEM, what does it read on your business card? Or, what would you like it to read? That is the current topic of a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named What title do you use on your business card?

Some of the suggestions include:
Director of Search
Director of Web Analytics
SEO Specialist
Web Analyst
Internet Strategist
Web Strategist
SEM Manager
Ecommerce Manager
Chief Traffic Officer
Chief Search Officer
Director of Search Marketing

So which one would you prefer? :)

By Nacho Hernandez | April 18, 2005

In recent news titled "Yahoo! Buys Brazilian PPC Search Network" from an article published by Kevin Newcomb from the ClickZ it says "Yahoo! is expanding its presence in Latin America with the purchase of Brazilian performance-based advertising network TeRespondo". This is one of the most important events happening for the Latin American search engine marketing industry. TeRespondo is the leading provider of performance-based online marketing solutions for Latin America, primarily Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

To better understand the deal, I put together a summary from aggregated numbers published by another ClickZ Article called "Population Explosion!" combined with a statistical analysis from the Internet World Stats:

This exhibit shows in more detail a comparison for each country in North, Central, South America and the Caribbean.

According to JupiterMedia with a projection of 77 million Internet users for 2005, Latin America ranks fourth among total Worldwide Internet users and is the fastest growing region in the world. In general, this market has been growing at compounded average growth rate of 33% - almost doubling the total worldwide average. Brazil alone is an extremely attractive market when compared to other global markets.

TeRespondo knew that most users were found in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Their market share for each region is unknown, but these three make up approximately 65% of the region's Internet population with Brazil alone accounting for 40%. The same also goes for most of Latin America's e-commerce transactions. Chile and Peru have large user populations and Colombia and Venezuela will most likely be part of this second group of important Latin American countries with Internet penetration.

How this deal came to be is fascinating to the Latin American search marketing industry. I have an understanding that for some time now Yahoo! had been trying to take market share away by going to TeRespondo's distribution partners and offering very appealing deals. However, these partners were very pleased working with TeRespondo and would just not want to let go. Could this be loyalty, a primary ingredient in Latin American business relationships? Then Yahoo! waited to see if MSN would renew their contract with TeRespondo as a first source of PPC ads for t1msn.com and other local MSN properties. Luckily for TeRespondo it was renewed and in very good terms. Therefore, there was really no other choice than to just buy them out and move on to gain long term market share over Google and MSN.

What a roller coaster ride that must have been for the two Colombian entrepreneurs that founded TeRespondo, Daniel (Danny) Echavarria and Juan Diego Calle. Bravo to these outstanding leaders of our search marketing industry. I also extend my congratulations to Brian Steel, President of Overture International, and Peter Celeste, General Manager for Latin America, with this outstanding strategic move for Yahoo!.

So what will Google do to compete with this move? I heard an interesting rumor that Google just hired a new general manager for it?s Brazilian operations. Well that's not all. Over at the Google Job Opportunities board it seems they have a lot more going on for Brazil, Mexico and who knows how many more new positions to be based in Mountain View, California will be focused on the Latin America operations. I believe that even though Yahoo! is well positioned in these countries thanks to the free email accounts which are widely used, Google can easily gain market share by hitting the young population with COOL ideas which are common to this company's marketing strategies.

I strongly believe MSN Search doesn't have much going on for these markets now. They are probably focused more in making their new search engine work at a level that can compete with Google and Yahoo!. They are probably happy with their PPC partnership with Yahoo! and gaining territory will be tomorrow's problem, not today's.

I wish most marketers in our industry can realize that this deal is just as important as when GoTo.com changed it's name to Overture back 4 years ago and then got bought by Yahoo!. Well, it's true that almost anything that happens in Latin America is usually delayed and mirrored to what's happened to the U.S. and European markets. Another latino entrepreneur from Argentina Lucas Morea, CEO of LatinEdge and founder of Monografias.com says, "Getting into this market now is like going back in time (like the 'Back to the Future' movie), where you can predict what will happen next because these markets follow the U.S. very closely. It just takes time." That's right and patience is sometimes a very good virtue to have for its Latin American dot-com players. Just like it happened for Danny and Juan of TeRespondo.

Now I hear Juan is off to Harvard for some business course retreat he does once a year (uff -- bad timing) and Danny is closing all transactions in their Miami headquarters. I wonder what these two latino entrepreneur superstars will do next after all of this is over?

I have a feeling it will take a good 2 or 3 months for the switch and hand off to Overture to happen. I imagine there are a lot of integration issues and notifications for their partners and advertisers to be made before they start seeing the name Overture or Yahoo! Search Marketing. Makes me wonder if they will even use the name Overture any more since it will be going away very soon now that Yahoo! Search Marketing was launched last week.

The other thing that I'm waiting to hear is what will happen to TeRespondo's employees which have an amazing know-how about the cultural aspects of these markets and the know-who to contact since most businesses are referral based. It would be a shame and a total wrong move if they let them go.

For TeRespondo's partners and advertisers this will be a positive transition. They will gain more efficiency with better platforms and technology. True that TeRespondo did an outstanding job with their PPC products and service, but Overture is a search marketing gladiator that will be able to deliver at a level that can compete with Google and MSN (in the future).

As a search engine marketer I know this will make my life a lot easier by managing my client's accounts under only two platforms rather than three. I also know that Yahoo! and Google will probably start tripping each other to gain market share. In reality, for the advertiser it's not about them dividing the Latin America search marketing pie, but rather growing it which will reflect in better products, service, technology and attention to these regions.

I'm sure there will be a lot more news to come about this deal. I will do my best to keep you posted. For the time being, you may join the thread "Yahoo! Gains Market Share in Latin America with TeRespondo" in SearchEngineWatch Forums and discuss the potential outcome for the Latin America search marketing industry.

Well, this seems to be brand new, http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/. Looks like they renamed from Overture's Precision Match to Yahoo!'s Sponsored Search. Well, actually a lot of the products were renamed. I did not look closely enough to see other changes, but I bet there are a lot.

Found by way of a new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Looks like they updated their Overture ads to Yahoo! Search Marketing Ads, see:

Overture's Web site was turned over this morning, http://www.overture.com/.

Apple Computer is 14 days away from shipping Tiger: Mac OS X 10.4. I already ordered a few copies from MacZone. Besides for all the new cool functionality included such as dashboard, very improved iChat AV, Automater, Safari RSS and more, they have done some really good work with search. Apple named the new "find anything, anywhere, fast" built in search engine Spotlight.

Apple says it is super fast because "Spotlight indexes every file on your computer transparently and in the background, so you never experience lag times or slowdowns." On the usability front, "A permanent new fixture of Tiger’s menu bar, the convenient Spotlight search field gives you instant results encompassing not only files, folders and documents but also messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, iCal calendars, System Preferences and applications." They say that Spotlight is "Organically Organized", where Tiger utilizes something called "Spotlight Smart Folders" to save your search results. One of the flashier features is "Star Power" which places these illuminated spotlights on your files when you do a search, screen capture here.

I am excited, a bit too excited.

I have been noticing that more and more feeds that I have been reading with my RSS reader have text ads at the bottom. I have about 500 Bloglines subscribers to this blog, so I assume there are about 1,000+ RSS subscribers in total, but I am unsure. The actual Web traffic to this site, is way above those RSS subscriber numbers. So I think I am going to give it a try. If you this sounds interesting to you, please email me at barryATrustybrick.com or advertisingATseroundtable.com.

The new wave of Web ads. If you are unsure of what an RSS reader looks like, here is a sample of one of the feeds at Blogline for this blog and here is one with ads.

Testing...

I was strongly considering building a Wiki for SEO topics for several months but never got around to it. ResearchBuzz reports about a Wiki for SEO at http://www.organicseo.org/.

The outline of the Wiki covers everything from the why of SEO to SEO terminology to URL rewriting to submitting your site to search engines to what not to do. It does not yet appear to be very filled out.

Hopefully the Wiki will grow quickly in Wiki fashion.

There is a thread at SEO Chat and there was a thread at SEW Forums that was on this topic but I had to pull it temporarily. But if you search on SEO at Google, you will notice that is overwhelmed with Asian results. At the top of the results it says "Tip: Search for English results only. You can specify your search language in Preferences" But why is Google doing this? Are they having fun with English based SEOs or is it a relevancy thing?

If you don't see it, click here for a screen capture.

Nathan Weinberg over at Google Blog News Channel reports that Gmail is adding feed reading to your messages. He reports that "Google has smartly monetized it, alternating evenly between headlines and text ads, giving you the best reason ever to actually look at an ad." Evan Williams clarifies that "Each [ad vs. rss feed] is labeled, of course." I was unable to locate any forum threads on this topic as of yet.

View Large Image

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named 3 Ads at top of Listings reports that Google is now testing adding an additional top AdWords ad at the top of the results. Currently there are two results in the top sponsored area, but according to the AdWordsRep, they are testing "stuff from time to time." AdWordsRep clarifies that "Probably only a few folks will see it, and then not for long. It's not a permanent change."

Yahoo! has released the URL for the new beta Yahoo! News at http://beta.news.yahoo.com/. A sleeker design and more. More information by Gary Price at the SEW Blog.

I showed the beta version to a few SEMs and here are their initial impressions:

- There's something very sissy-looking about the tabs on that page.
- Those tabs suck.
- They should be purple and yellow.
- That's a drastic change for yahoo...too drastic...

You do not often find someone posting a tool that was built specifically to spam the search engine results at a forum that is widely viewed by search engine reps. Member, JasonD posted a thread at Search Engine Watch named *cough* Spammer Tool? that announces the beta testing of his new spamming tool he named Widget Baiting. Personally, I love the name. He defines Widget Bating as;

Widget Baiting is to construct content with the aim of luring search engine spiders to your widget pages, on your widget site enabling a quality of content to be indexed that if written manually would not deliver a meaningful return on investment. Widget baiting is commonly used by search engine spammers in conjunction with cloaking, although has been known to reduce the time in constructing quality content for real people to read as well.

What does the tool do? You feed it a single page of content, it will then create a hundred or so similar pages with different flavors of those keywords you are targeting. It basically uses some sort of synonym database to replace words on the page with similar words. This way you can quickly create all sorts of landing pages targeting each individual keyword phrase combination. As Jason said "Widget baiting is commonly used by search engine spammers in conjunction with cloaking." Normally, one would want to cloak these pages, so the search engines get them but the end user gets the real page.

If your interested there is a new forum with currently 87 registered users named 360Invites.com. So if for some reason you didnt get the invite you requested at my Yahoo! 360 Invite page, then check them out.

News came yesterday from the Google Blog (so that is why I named this entry "Google Wants Your Videos"), that Google wants you to upload your videos for free and eventually they will be included in Google Video Search. You can sign up to upload your videos at the Google Video Upload Program page. As more people get into the digital media world, that Apple, HP, Microsoft and others are strongly building products for, it makes sense to build out this solution.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Google Offers to Host and Search Your Videos asks if that is why Google Bought all that Fiber, possibly...

Google is not the only engine aggressively pursuing Video search, Yahoo is making some strides with it as well.

A new thread at Cre8asite Forums named The Future of Results Pages? touches on the topic of whether or not we will be locked into the current way the search engines display the results on a page. The thread points to a blog entry named Innovations in Search Results Pages, where he asked the question "what makes it the right interface solve for displaying search results"? He asked this to a nice group of panelist, Peter Norvig, Google; Mark Fletcher, Ask Jeeves; Udi Manber, A9; Ken Norton, Yahoo!; Jakob Nielsen, NN Group (very interesting read).

Bill adds to the thread with a comprehensive listing of papers and articles about the topic. Stock (Grumpus) also adds his thoughts saying;

The notion that the way we read search results may lock us into this way rather than a new way is complete rubbish. Comparing it to a Qwerty/Dvorak or (as the article did) Imperial/Metric Systems analogy just doesn't work either.

In essence, the danger we have of getting locked into the current means of reading search results is akin to the act of telling me that I have but one choice - drive my car all the time, or drive my moped all the time, but I don't have the option of choosing the best (easiest, most efficient, most productive) one for the particular task I have at hand.

Gem of a thread.

Unfortunately, I am unable to attend every Search Engine Strategies conference throughout the year. But lucky for us, there were several well respected SEMs who have participated in the most recent SES conference, SES München Germany. A thread about the conference turned into a nice way to learn about what was going on at the conference. The subtitle of the post is named SES Munich Round Up, where Bill Hunt recapped some of the sessions he has visited for us.

It is important to note that "the majority of the sessions were in German." Also Bill said that;

The general conscientious was that the German market still has a long way to go for Search to be fully embraced by companies who spend the majority of their budgets on TV and print advertising. According to the SEO/SEM’s I spoke with they are having a good year and business is growing. Still, paid placement is the more popular technique since it requires minimal effort on behalf of the advertiser.

There are other reviews in the thread, so if your interested, check it out.

Last week Barry Schwartz (RustyBrick) was so generous to invite me to be a guest author at the Search Engine Roundtable. I gladly accepted and he made a formal announcement.

From time to time you will see me writing about spontaneous topics related with what is happening in our Search Marketing industry and the forums. Primarily, you will hear from me on the Hispanic and Latin America issues that need to be covered, which ususally don't get much coverage in detail. I also enjoy local search and link building tactics as well as good pizza.

In this first blog I want to point out a thread in SearchEngineWatch Forums called "Opinions on Quepasa.com PPC for Hispanic Market?" because it is so important to get the facts straight from forum Members about this PPC provider in the Hispanic market before you do a test with them.

For some time their business model seems to be getting companies to do tests, tests and more tests but are they reaching any conversions or ROI objectives for the advertisers? Should you invest $500 with QuePasa's Standard Package, please do read this thread first. At least you know what to expect.

As a follow up to my entry named Google Relevancy Poor Based on Generalization, I have started a new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Coke vs. Pepsi Challenge for Search Engines.

I understand that relevancy is extremely subjective, however, search engines all want to achieve the most optimal level of relevancy possible. The engines all want their results to be the most relevant for each individual searcher, no matter who it is. Based on that, I figured it would be cool to set up a Coke versus Pepsi challenge, but for the search engines. Basically, the concept would be to create a "white labeled" search engine page, allow users to query the search engine and return results from one of the big four (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves). Then the user would mark which results are relevant on some sort of scale. Collect this data over time and then show the results.

Currently, many search engine users accept that Google or Yahoo! or the engine of their choice is relevant. So if I am a Google user, I will compare those results to Yahoo! and say, wow Yahoo!'s results are far less relevant to me then Google. Relevancy, as mentioned above, is extremely subjective. And with subjective concepts, comes bias. Search engines spend a lot on branding, to influence user bias. If we take branding out of the equation, I strongly wonder what the user would consider relevant and what the user will consider irrelevant. Even more so, I wonder which of the four engines would win the contest.

I am strongly considering building a white labeled search engine to do this. Since Google and Yahoo! both have APIs and MSN has an RSS feed, I can make it work. In addition, I think Ask Jeeves would be happy to provide some sort of feed. If you are interested in building out this white labeled search engine to collect subjective relevancy data, feel free to let me know. This can be fun!

Eight hyphens to be exact. A thread at SEO Chat named Finally, the secret to Google rankings revealed refers to a domain name that has eight hyphens in it and nine keywords.

Normally I would not point out a site like that, but I have not seen one that long publicly mentioned in a while. I find it interesting that the domain name doesn't somewhat match the title of the page (Nikko Megatech Remote Radio Control Vehicles) nor is the heading of the page using an H1 tag - it's using a graphic that looks like text. I am sure there are other things but that is all the time I got. It does rank well, so it obviously has a few links.

Sorry if this is a "spam report" but I just appreciate the domain name so much, I had to share.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Verizon Rebrands SuperPages: Offline, that is pointed me to a blog entry at the Kelsey Group's blog named Did Verizon Demote SuperPages?

What immediately caught my eye was that Verizon had changed the name of its directory from SuperPages to Verizon Yellow Pages.

John Kelsey continues by writing, "As it turns out, Verizon did not give the SuperPages brand the backing it needed and some said SuperPages.com wasn’t seen as the incumbent Yellow Pages."

Local is going to be huge, so I will try to get more entries on the local topic here. Plus I have will create a Local Search category, which you should see below.

One of the original Search Engine Blogs, it actually has the domain name searchengineblog.com, is taking a break for a couple of month. Peter DaVanzo, the well known Search Engine Blogger will be traveling, he said:

I'll be winding my way (slowly) from the bottom of New Zealand to London, and places in between. I dare say I'll visit a few pubs along the way.

But he will be posting non search related events about his trip at the blog. Here is Peter's Last Post on Search. See you in a couple Peter and have a safe and enjoyable trip!

Everyone knows that Yahoo! has those tools to create quick, simply brochure-wear Web sites. Yahoo! figured that it would make logical sense to promote its Yahoo! Local Listings program by offering a free Web site as an incentive. The only thing they need to do now, it get the word out. These engines keep pushing each other further and further with local products and services. Chris Sherman has a detailed write up on this news, which he named Yahoo Offers Free Business Web Sites and even Nick said this was a "smart move."

Get your free listing here.

And here is the new and improved RustyBrick Yahoo! Site at http://ny.local.yahoo.biz/rustybrick/. :)

Our very own Ben Pfeiffer (aka Phoenix) started an outstanding thread over at Search Engine Watch forums named Can an SEO/SEM Company Own Your Meta-tags?

The thread was inspired by a friend of Ben who felt he was scammed by an well known SEO company. Basically, the SEO company required that he continue to pay his monthly fee in order to continue to use the meta-tags. In fact, the contract he signed or wanted him to sign read:

The Meta tags provided by ABC Company are the property of ABC Company and protected by copyright law. As a client, you may continue to use the Meta-tags and work provided solely for the website after the terminations of this agreement as long as payments are made as agreed.

Ben goes on to talk about the ethics behind this. Will such a clause stand up in court. And if so, what happens if your sued over your meta-tags, is the SEO company libel?

Replies to Ben's post are of all flavors. Some look at the case from an objective point and say, yes, this should hold up in court. They base this off of documents at copyright.gov that reads;

(b) Works Made for Hire. — In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright.

Others say that its perfectly fine to have that in your contract. It is the same thing as writing an email at work; unless otherwise specified, the business owner has rights to read that email. Others say that it is simply unethical, legal or not.

Think I'm kidding, do you?

One of the highlights for me at the New York 2005 Search Engine Strategies Conference was the presentation "Searh Algorithm Research & Developments". In addition to Orion's (Dr. E. Garcia) presentation (think Math), I became fascinated with references by the presenters to "personalizing search", "co-occurrance", hubs and concept searches.

Mike Grehan said that keyword search is "primitive", adding that personalization is where the changes are coming.

SEO/SEMs aren't the only folks interested in or studying search engines, algorithms and user behavior.

At the recent CHI 2005 (Conference on Human Computer Interaction, aka HCI), a speaker by the name of Susan Dumais, Senior Microsoft Corp. Researcher, gave a presentation about search engines and user behavior.

Continue reading "A Search Engine in Every Bathroom"

MSN seems to be taunting Yahoo! (which is cool) about being able to take away Yahoo!'s "Principal Scientist & Head." This is the second top engineer/scientist to leave Yahoo! this year, John Glick went to become.com. Here is Dr. Gary Flake's Yahoo! Bio and his Yahoo! personal page. Danny Sullivan blogged about it this morning, linking to Gary Price's 3 part interview with Dr. Flake.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

The link building team at WeBuildPages is up to it again. During their daily link building efforts and theme song creatives, they found the time to build a Query Combination Tool.

It is extremely useful when you want to find two permutations quickly in the search engines. So for example, if you want to find matches for the main phrases:
Travel
Lodging
Real Estate
Florida
Timeshares

And combine those phrases with:
add url
directory
submit your site
resources
sponsors

This way you can easily locate sites you can submit to that are related to your site.

Everyman (Google Watch), has been after Google for as long as I can remember. I do not blame him, I actually think it is good for the industry. He recently posted a thread at Search Engine Watch forums comparing Google to Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Gigablast. He named his thread Google has big problems, and showed how Google's results were less relevant then all the rest. The example given:

Exact search term: apache "2.0" namevirtualhost

On Yahoo you get the exact documentation from apache.org that you are looking for in positions one and two.

On MSN you get the exact documentation from apache.org that you are looking for in postions one, two, and three.

On Ask Jeeves you get the exact documentation from apache.org that you are looking for in positions one and two.

On Gigablast you get the exact documentation from apache.org that you are looking for in positions one and two.

On Google you find, if you haven't given up by then, the exact documentation from apache.org that you are looking for in positions 70 and 71.

This example brought me back to my college days when I took a Philosophy class that focused on Logic. So I went over to Google and did a search on "logic fallacy" and was presented with an excellent resource named Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies. Then I clicked on the "Index of the Logical Fallacies" and found what I believe I was looking for. The Hasty Generalization of Inductive Fallacies. I believe, I am not an expert in this field, that Everyman's logic falls under what is defined as a Hasty Generalization. If not that, then an other logic fallacy. But my point is, I used Google to find the technical name of the fallacy I was looking for, to show how one specific example in a specific time during a day, is not a solid proof of reasoning.

Yesterday I received an email from Michael Yang, in bulk, saying, "We are opening our site to the general public." Become.com is a search engine vertical focusing on the shopping niche. They have received some good PR in the past, so a lot is expected of them.

Here is the full email, for some reason, the email had a blank subject. To me that seems unprofessional.

Dear Become.com Beta Testers,
On behalf of everyone at Become, I would like to thank you for using Become.com. Your feedback has been invaluable to us as we continue to improve our service. Many of you made suggestions that led directly to new features, such as our recently launched spellchecking technology. Other suggestions are influencing current development. Thank you!
Starting today, you can use www.become.com without having to login.. We are opening our site to the general public with the world's largest shopping index of 3.2 billion web pages from over 40 million web sites. We have many new services in development and will continue to roll out new features in the future. If you would like to stay up to date on our progress, please sign up for our Email Updates service at http://www.become.com/email_updates.html. Otherwise, this will be our last communication with you as a registered user.
Thank you for your interest and support of Become.com.

Warmest regards,
Michael Yang
Founder, President & CEO
Become, Inc.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Doesn't look like anything extra ordinary, just a simplified version of Google Local. But isnt that what mobile devices are all about? The new Google Local for Mobile devices can be found at http://mobile.google.com/local. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The tagline at the very top of the Cre8asite Forums this morning reads "We Celebrate Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) as He Reaches 10,000 Posts!" I can not count the number of times I have quoted Bill's posts at this site. His dedication to the SEM community is evident of this monumental achievement of 10,000 posts. In Cre8asite family style, the Cre8asite people have started a thread to hold a Virtual Party for Bill's 10k Mark. In addition, Cre8asite collected enough for a gift certificate for $235 from Amazon. This party was a total surprise for Bill, he had no idea it was coming up. Just check out the kind words that have been said already towards bill at the thread, he deserves them all. Great work Bill!

Search Engine Watch forums have been public for about 10 months now. Based on forum activity and the administrators getting their "feet wet", they have reorganized the forums to better suit the members. The first forum you will see now is the Google forum (with the same sub forums), then followed by the Yahoo forum (with the same sub forums, for now), then MSN, then Ask Jeeves and then the "Other Search Engines & Directories" forum which has two sub forums including the AOL Search forum and the Open Directory Project forum.

A lot of consolidation has been made in the Search Engine Marketing Strategies section. My forum, "General Search Engine Marketing Tips" has been renamed to "The World of Search Engine Marketing" and two old forums (Outsourcing SEM & Conversion, ROI Improvement & Tracking) have been rolled in. In addition, two new forums have been added under The World of Search Engine Marketing, inclduing the In-House & Corporate SEM forum and Affiliate Issues forum. The Search Engine Optimization forum remains the same, but gained some children forums including the two established forums, link building and dynamic web site issues and a brand new forum named Blogs, RSS & XML Feeds. Search Engine Advertising gained a sub forum named Contextual Ads & Alternatives. A forum named "Vertical Markets & Specialty Search" has four sub forums; Local Search (new), Multilingual Search Markets & Non-US Engines (old), Shopping & Comparison Engines (old), News Search (new).

There were other changes and a few more are going to take place shortly. All in all, there are several new forums; In-House & Corporate SEM, Affiliate issues, Local Search, News Search, Blogs, RSS, XML, Contextual Ads & Alternatives, and Invisible - Deep Web forum.

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named PPC Blackmail....... can easily top some of the scummiest PPC stories I have heard in a while. An affiliate came on to tell us how his affiliate manager set up strict guidelines for the affiliates that they must comply with or be kicked out of the program. The guidelines include:

(1) Your bid must be set to .50 cents (or less) this applies to both Google and Overture
(2) Cannot use parent domain
(3) You must stay out of the top 4 positions on Overture and with Google we'll see how it goes due to CTR bidding

The affiliate also noted that the reason for guideline number three, is because the affiliate manager (the merchant) was controlling the top four PPC ads with their own domain names. That specifically is against the PPC company's Terms of Service.

This should make for an interesting forum discussion.

Just wanted to point you folks to a sticky thread I have been working up for Cre8asite's new Ask Jeeves forum, for about two weeks now. I named it the Ask Jeeves SEM Time Line of Events.

Towards the end of the timeline you see more of my unique events. I have only been really following them for a little bit more then two years. I'll keep updating that thread when things change. Also, I am waiting on some more goodies from Ask Jeeves for that thread, so we will see.

I have always been the type of person that believed that it would be unfair for a search engine to penalize you for having bad links pointing to your pages. The logic is; if I want to outrank my competitor, just make sure to send a ton of bad links to the competitor's Web site and watch it drop down the rankings.

Gary Price over at the Search Engine Watch Blog wrote an entry named Research Papers: Rankings, Link Farms, Personalization, and PageRank Collusion that have downloadable research papers in PDF format, mostly on the topic of Web spam. Many of the papers discuss methods to detect "3rd Generation Web Spam" and then methods to penalize them.

I have started a thread over at Search Engine Watch forums named BadRank & Page Penalization. In that thread, I am hoping to get a discussion started on the possibility, and likelihood of such a penalization to occur. Some papers go to the extent of discussing "BadRank" and a threashold of X before bad links can negativily affect a Web page. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Last week I received the promotion card for the WebmasterWorld Search Conference, taking place in New Orleans. The dates are set for June 21 - 24, 2005. I hope to be able to provide our patented search engine conference coverage. Here is the front cover (downsized) of the nice post card I received in the mail last week.

Ask Jeeves posted a blog entry named "Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me". Yes, they are 8 years old. But, like us, they posted the information one day too late.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Ask Jeeves!

If you're the type that does a lot of offline reading on the weekends, make sure to check out Gary Price's entry at SEW Blog. He has linked to many fun and excited (technical and dry) research papers related to Rankings, Link Farms, Personalization, and PageRank Collusion. What is even better is that he plans on doing this more often, "installment number one."

As part of our pursuit at the Search Engine Roundtable to have guest appearances by top forum representatives, we have invited Nacho to guest write here. Nacho is a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums, and is the top face behind the Hispanic and Latin American Search Marketing Industry. Nacho will tend to be writing entries here on the topic of the Hispanic industry, Local Search, and occasional link building topics. Nacho has lots of expertise in the SEM industry; both practical experience with his Web ventures and educational (or theoretical) experience with his study of the search technology.

Ignacio "Nacho" Hernandez, president of iHispanic Marketing Group, has been involved with international business, e-commerce and marketing for the past 10 years and has been targeting the U.S. Online Hispanic Market for the last 5 years. He founded MexGrocer.com in 2000 and is now one of the very few profitable businesses in the online grocery segment. He has made strategic alliances with the major shopping portals, such as Amazon, Univision.com, Terra-Lycos, HispanicOnline.com, Yahoo! En Español and many others. He is a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo and a member of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (www.sempo.org) and SMA-NA (www.sma-na.org) to help develop the Hispanic and Latin American divisions. He is also a Moderator for SearchEngineWatch Forums for the "Multilingual Search Markets & Non-US engines" and the "Yahoo! Paid Inclusion/Site Match" forums.

Other publications where Nacho has been quoted include: Forrester Research, SearchEngineWatch, WebProNews, MediaPost, Entrepreneur Magazine, La Opinion, AARP Segunda Juventud, El Financiero (Mexico), Reforma (Mexico) and others.

Testimonials:

Nacho Hernandez is a well-known and highly regarded member of the Hispanic search engine marketing community and he is a master of his field. His Search Engine Roundtable blog is chock full of online marketing tips, advice and recommendations. It’s an extremely helpful resource for Hispanic and Latin American marketers or anyone looking to globalize.

Deborah Hickey
Marketing & Brand Manager
Search Engine Marketing Firm, iProspect

They say a picture tells a thousand words, words I and many other have been trying to paint. In the recent news about Google Stealing PPC Clients from SEMs and the Double Standards Set by Google for High Spend AdWords Customers, seomike contributed a cartoon image at ThreadWatch that says it all. Well, at least Mikkel deMib Svendsen believes so.

I had a rough time tracking down any forum threads on the news Google released yesterday in a blog entry they named Just the facts, fast. Basically, Google is now providing a form of Ask Jeeves's SmartSearch, where you search on something like braveheart running time and it shows you this at the top of the results:

However, it still does not do what the other Q&A search engines or even MSN engine are doing. Like When was ben franklin born? or Who was the 27th president of the united states?. Questions students can ask the search engine on their mobile device when in a jam during a test.

Again, I am surprised there are very few threads on the topic, or at least I could not find many (even at WMW or SEW). DigitalPoint has a thread, but someone named it This is kind of neat..., which made it very difficult to locate. But there are tons of blogs and news sites writing about it.

In a thread discussing the value, or better yet, the devaluation of having multiple links on a page over at Cre8asite Grumpus writes a beautiful analogy explaining PageRank.

Think of it like a map. Pages are the towns. The roads are the links. In the past, Google was assigning value to towns based upon the roads that came into them. Roads from bigger towns are bigger roads and thus the value of the town that bigger road goes to is given more value. That's all fine and dandy, but we can learn as much (or more) from a map by studying the roads themselves, and not the towns that are on it.

How nice is that?

Looks like there is a new kid on the block for link advertising networks. Alan Webb, senior moderator of SEOchat and his own forum at Abakus Internet Marketing released today information about a new free advertising network similar to the popular Digital Point network but with quite a different setup and approach. Alan says the concept for this network is not new, but the methods used by newly released Link Vault are significantly different to any other network available. Here are some of the striking differences:

• Links are dynamically generated but are static permanent links meaning the dont rotate/change on refresh.


• You get 30 links from which you can choose 3 link text and apply weight to them as you see fit eg. 50% for 1 link text, 30% for another and the third link text 20%.


• You can set your own link growth rate. If you want 5 links per day you can choose to have your inbound links growing at that rate. If you want 50 links per day you can do that too (DP coop adds all links at once).


• You can choose to have links only in your own language or accept all languages.


• Links can be formatted how you like (as footer or vertical links)


• There are already many domains in the network so you can get a lot of links now even though it is only going public today.


• Links and accounts are vetted for no porn, online pharmacy (viagra), gambling, illegal content, spam sites so you dont end up with with unsavoury links on your site.

Alan also notes that he was not the sole developer of the network, but provided consultancy for its development as from the onset seemed worthwhile. He also notes that the more that sign up the more benefical it will become.

Definately look forward to checking it out myself. Do so yourself at Link Vault

Update from Sue at Link Vault: Just to update everyone on the progress of Link Vault. Although it was only a couple of weeks before the official launch, (feels much longer!) the steady supply of excellent feedback from our rapidly growing user base has helped us implement some significant changes - one of which being to expand our method of categorizing the adverts. This is now in place to enable us to greatly increase the default relevancy of the adverts displayed on member’s websites. Thanks for all your support

It has been a little over a week since I first got my Yahoo 360 Invite, since then I have made over a 120 friends, by giving away invites to 360, in fact there are over 60 invites I sent that have not been accepted, I assume a spam filter thing. So besides for the the community aspect of Yahoo 360, it has a ton more features.

Many have complained that is too overwhelming, too confusing and too large. But I like it, I love all the features and yes it is a huge waste of time, but I think I know have the hang of it. I spend no more then 20 minutes with it each day, including sending out about 25 invites a day :). But I really am understanding the whole 360 degrees "thing". In one place I am (1) connected to "my friends", (2) a blog to connect my other blogs, (3) my photos, (4) my music, (5) my books, (6) my interests, (7) my mail, (8) "blasts" are a broadcast type of thing to tell my "friends" about something, (9) my reviews of local (10) my lists and (11) my groups. All of those are part of the overall larger Yahoo! network, all connected by Yahoo! 360. A personal page at http://360.yahoo.com/rustybrick has it all in one place.

I like it now, but its still new. Will I get bored? I do not know. We will see if it turns into an other Orkut but this service has a lot more to offer, in my opinion.

Dan Thies, the Godfather of Grunge (for the SEM community - bet you never heard that title before), along with SitePoint has finally released The Search Engine Marketing Kit. I just received my copy yesterday and hope to review it over the weekend. It is huge and I know Dan has been working on this for a really long time, I believe well over a year. As many of you know, I greatly respect Dan for his outstanding contributions to the SEM community, specifically in the area of keyword research. Dan runs a successful company named SEO Research Labs and offers low cost but high value Keyword Research Reports and SEO Training for the SEM community.

I expect the book will be outstanding and I hope to share my thoughts as soon as I read through the whole "kit".

There is an interesting thread taking place at WebmasterWorld named Yahoo's re-review process. The topic is not as interesting as the pattern seen in the thread. The topic is basically about how Yahoo! is slow to respond or unresponsive to "re-review requests" submitted through the Yahoo! Search - Second Review Request form. I do not blame Yahoo! for not being so responsive to these requests, the other engines are not, so why should they?

The topic that interests me more is that there is a pattern being seen in that thread of people reporting that Yahoo! has only indexed their home pages and possibly a second page - but no more. The thread creator said, "I specified that the site was listed in the index, but only the home page." An other member reports that "They have gone from having 2 pages in the index to 49 now" after using the form. Yet an other said, "If they arent going to index more than my homepage I might as well ban slurp from my sites all together!" And an other, "I just did a site:widget.com, and also just found my homepage listed as well."

Often with cases like this, there are some sort of filters, like duplicate content filters, that cause this event. However, I have a specific site that I am working on that has the same issue. I have been in discussion with the folks at Yahoo! about it, but I have not received anything solid as of yet. We believe that it had to do with a previous domain name being used as an alias to the, now, main domain name. But no improvement on the indexing as of yet. In addition, the site is purely unique from content, html, layout, colors and everything. Oh, and its very white hat. As soon as I hear anything that I can share, I will share.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named A real Google conundrum: Established site losing all its Google traffic, asks the question, what should one do when a site that has been ranking well for years, all of a sudden drops in the rankings.

In fact, this site, experienced that back towards the end of September. The Google traffic basically dropped off to a small fraction of what it was in the past. What did I do? Well, nothing - I did nothing at all. And sure enough, traffic came back in less then a month (I believe). I wasn't going to start changing a site that ranked very well in the past. But what if my income depended on income from this site? What if it was how I put food on the table everyday? Would I have reacted? Very hard to say.

All I can say is that many have suggested the same advice in the WebmasterWorld thread. Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld, suggested to do "NOTHING". He said, "The worst thing you could do, would be to go make a bunch of changes. Just let the algo work itself out." A senior member said that he "made the mistake of making many changes after taking the hit, many months later no where to be found." Other's suggested that during the down period, it is a good time to do some double checking of the basics. Examples they offered include; "move a bunch of sites to dedicated IPs, checked/tested that all sites had a 301 from domain.com to www.domain.com, checked reverse DNS, and added a timestamp to the pages."

But, if you feel you have not made any drastic changes to your site to warrant the decrease in rankings and referral traffic from a specific engine, then do not do anything drastic now.

As a follow up to my entry the other day on the topic of Google Stealing AdWords Customers from Pros, Danny Sullivan wrote a blog entry pointing to an SEW members only article named Google & SEO Support For Advertisers. In that article he discusses how he is aware of cases where Google has allegedly provided support services to high paying AdWord customers for their organic listings. In addition, he reports that "Google was taking in feeds of content for web search" to help sites get included in the index. Pay for inclusion for free, to special sites, wow. There is a lot more "shocking" allegations in the article, I won't give them all to you, since it is a paid article.

Many of us hard our suspicions, but when it comes from Danny, it makes it much more serious.

Legendary Fantomaster has finally updated the look and feel for his fantomas site. He is the leading IP Delivery, cloaking, content generation, and "spam" suite toolkit on the Web. He has been around for longer then most people and has really made a name for himself.

Plus, Ralph (aka fantomaster) has updated the fantomNews section of the site. To have some fun, he will be releasing a weekly cartoon he called fantOon series. It is updated weekly on Mondays and I bet they might tick off a few search engine reps, from time to time. In addition, there is an RSS feed selection for you RSS feed nuts (like me).

Seems that some retailers have finally had enough to do about click fraud so much so that instead of complaining about it draining their budgets or reducing the effectiveness of online advertising they are doing something about it. The retailers instead of being proactive about managing their campaigns for click fraud, they are taking care of it the good ole American way by suing them. It appears a small retailer from Texarkana, Arkansas is asking a circuit court in Arkansas to certify the suit as a class action, which would allow many other companies to sue as well. Not only is the suit going after Google and Yahoo, but some others like Time Warner, Ask Jeeves, Walt Disney, Lycos, LookSmart and FindWhat.

As you know click fraud is a major issue these days undermining the search engines in many ways. Even many top SEM experts in the field without hesitation will tell you this and "spam" are two of the main battles search engines will fight in the next couple years. Even, Google's chief financial officer George Reyes told investors that click fraud is the biggest threat to the Internet economy currently. It will be interesting to see what happens with this lawsuit, whether it will be accepted or thrown out and how the search engines react. No word yet from Google or the above on the lawsuit.

There is some forum discussion on this at SEOchat. Related news articles here, here, and here.

Looks like the guys at Google are messing around again with new features. Andy Beal reported that his SEO team has found a "Try Alternate Searches" button at the bottom of the search results on specific computers. I have not seen it myself, but Andy has a screen shot of it at his blog, which I borrowed to show you.

Andy says it does not appear to be spyware, "The link "Try Alternate Searches", when clicked on, takes you to a page that includes other suggest keyword searches, you may want to consider." No official word from Google yet on this topic.

Forum coverage also at WebmasterWorld.

Nacho, one of the leading faces behind the Hispanic SEM industry, will be interviewed on the eMarketing Talk Show in two days. The topic of the show is Marketing to the Hispanic Market and it will take place April 8th, this Friday, at 4pm (PST). As we all know, the Hispanic market is growing fast in the SEM industry. Nacho is giving us the opportunity to ask him questions that he can address on the show, live. If you would like to participate, please join the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Rand, recently elected moderator at Cre8asite, had the opportunity to interview the MSN Web Search Team and publish the dialog. He asks questions on (1) The Creation of MSN Search, (2) The Level of Community Input, (3) MSN Search & Hardware, (4) MSN's Crawling Process, (5) The "Corpus Size" of the index (5 billion +), (6) Competitive Challenges, (7) Quality Testing & Spam Fighting, (8) What its like to Work at MSN Search and the (9) People Behind MSN Search, other (10) "Non-Search Technologies" and finally (11) Future Developments at MSN.

Rand posted threads on this topic both at Cre8asite Forums and SEO Chat Forums.

Remember all the hype about the Google AdWords Professionals program when it was first launched? When members first got their pro logos they were delighted. This morning, Mikkel deMib Scendsen posts a story of a strong reason not to join the program.

He said one of his "good colleagues and close friends" who has been accepted to the Google AdWords Program and was also delighted to place the logo on their site was "shocked" by what happened next.

Some days ago he signed a new very large corporate client, so he contacted his partner rep at Google to set it up but was basically told: “No, that client we want! It is too big for you and we don’t think you can handle it.” Natural to say, he was shocked! How can they say he cannot handle the account after he just passed the test? (Not to talk about the fact that he, like many SEMs I know of, optimize AdWords campaigns much better than any Google editor will ever learn!)

Furthermore the rep made it very clear that Google consider his client to be theirs – not his! So, Google think they know better than the client that chose the media agency and the media agency that picked my friend to manage the campaign. In fact, Google did not even ask the client in question about this. Google just knows better, right?. Or maybe, they are just greedy…?

Mikkel goes on to explain that he signs on large clients, but hasn't joined the program. He basically goes in and creates a new adwords account, no one gives him any trouble. So he asks "Why should a pass a test if it only makes Google more of an enemy to me instead of a partner?"

Let's not forget one of the PPC legends, who writes, "I'm just too busy to take the exam. I'll get to it. Taking it benefits me how? And proves what?"

This morning, the first thread I clicked on at Search Engine Watch Forums was named Google shows different titles depending on search term used. It is true, and its a pretty significant change on Google's part.

For example, do a search on rustybrick at Google and you should see:

If you change the search to rustybrick web, you get the normal, programmed title, which looks like:

The theory is that if the search matches the ODP listing, it will show it. So in my case, if you view the Google Directory (uses ODP) in the /Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Full_Service/R/ section, and look at the 10th listing, you will see "RustyBrick" and the description. Both used in the main SERPs at Google when search on at Google, under "rustybrick".

There is an additional thread on this topic at SEW forums, named Meta descriptions displayed in Google results?

Some are reporting that they are seeing major changes in rankings over at MSN Search. One thread at DigitalPoint forums says "referrals from MSN are down about 80%." I have checked some stats on my side, of clients ranking well in MSN, and some of their rankings have dropped off. Some others have jumped up and many have stayed put. An other member reports that "my msn traffic is down about 30%." And over at SEO Chat Forums people are reporting the same things, "couple of my sites dropped from top 5 positions on targeted keywords to about #85." Same type of thread going on at Cre8asite Forums, where a member is seeing "major changes" but for the good.

What is weird is that there are no recent threads on the topic in the Search Engine Watch MSN Forum or the WebmasterWorld MSN Search Forum.

Google holds back on features for AdSense early on and then slowly gives the publishers what they want. Guess what? Most are delighted. Today, Google announced that they have added real-time reports for channel data, enhanced reports to show ad unit impressions vs. page impressions, and added support for two new languages.

JenSense has her write up here, where she says;

These changes are very much welcomed by AdSense publishers, particularly the ability to see channel stats on the fly. This should hopefully result in more publishers working on tweaking ad unit performance, since they can see the results immediately, rather than waiting two fill days to see if it worked or not.

Forums are now buzzing about the news, including WebmasterWorld, SEO Chat, and DigitalPoint.

The other day Google Labs came out with Google Ride Finder. It's pretty cool, Google is going nuts at this time on local search ideas. Google Maps, Google Satellite Maps, Google Local, Google Ride Finder and so much more. This tool actually plots down the real time location of vehicle's within the Google database. My first thoughts were..."Yea, let me check NYC, I bet it is covered with little dots." The dots represent the current location of a specific vehicle. But since SuperShuttle is the only taxi service currently participating in the program, NYC is pretty clean. A place like Washington, DC has three fleet operators.

So when can this become useful? Let's say 50% of the taxi services are signed up in NYC. Well, what is the point? There are about 5 taxis on every NYC corner. It would be a mess. And if you don't plot at least 50% of them, then what are you missing out on? I can see it being useful for small towns or for specific fleets to monitor their vehicles. But for the average person in a large city where taxis are used by everyone???

If you happen to be a taxi service and want to be included, contact google. For more information on how it works, see the Google Ride Finder Help section. GPS is cool, but where should it be used?

Forum discussion at Digitial Point Forums.

The ultimate vote for a page is if someone bookmarks that page for later use. Well, maybe it is not the ultimate vote, since I have tons of orphaned bookmarks that I never visit. But if search engines can capture one's bookmarks with date stamps including frequency of use and date added, that can be a valuable measurement used in determining page importance.

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums, and I am sure discussed at many other forums (it has been a busy week), members discuss this as a possibility. In fact, in the recent patent released by Google, it discusses more then sandboxing concepts, it discusses monitoring "data maintained or generated by a user, such as "bookmarks," "favorites,"." Nacho pulled an excerpt for that portion, in the thread;

"According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, user maintained or generated data may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with a document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor data maintained or generated by a user, such as "bookmarks," "favorites," or other types of data that may provide some indication of documents favored by, or of interest to, the user. Search engine 125 may obtain this data either directly (e.g., via a browser assistant) or indirectly (e.g., via a browser). Search engine 125 may then analyze over time a number of bookmarks/favorites to which a document is associated to determine the importance of the document.

[0115] Search engine 125 may also analyze upward and downward trends to add or remove the document (or more specifically, a path to the document) from the bookmarks/favorites lists, the rate at which the document is added to or removed from the bookmarks/favorites lists, and/or whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the bookmarks/favorites lists. If a number of users are adding a particular document to their bookmarks/favorites lists or often accessing the document through such lists over time, this may be considered an indication that the document is relatively important. On the other hand, if a number of users are decreasingly accessing a document indicated in their bookmarks/favorites list or are increasingly deleting/replacing the path to such document from their lists, this may be taken as an indication that the document is outdated, unpopular, etc. Search engine 125 may then score the documents accordingly."

So the thread asks, will you soon see more Web site asking you to "bookmark this page"? Or better yet, will they run scripts that automatically bookmark the page for you, without your knowledge?

Ask Jeeves is going global with http://es.ask.com/. The official release can be found at Yahoo! News under the name Ask Jeeves, Inc. Launches Ask Jeeves Espana. I was hoping to find Jeeves dressed up in the local garb, but he was not.

Forum thread at Cre8asite, the first new Ask Jeeves thread in the new Ask Jeeves forum over at Cre8asite.

Update: Jeeves blogs on ¡Jeeves habla español!.

If you thought Google Maps could not get any cooler, you were wrong. Google has recently added satellite images to its Google Maps. What this means is you can see real images of a specific location. For example, NYC looks pretty nice from up here - I can even find a park in NYC. As you can see, its greener near my office but its a bit blurry now. :)

Chris Sherman has an excellent write up named Google Debuts Satellite Images, which he blogged about over here.

Forum coverage currently at WebmasterWorld and at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I love free SEO tools, most often times the ones that actually do something for you. I came across some tools today, that I thought I would mention to help you in your SEO efforts and in determining the performance of your Adsense campaigns. Both tools were made for public use, so don't worry you don't have to give up a dime for them. However I do imagine the creators wouldn't mind some feedback or "links" for their use. Liked them? Hated them? Let us know in the comments.

Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Checker

A member on SEOchat today released a tool that checks the backlinks of a site in Yahoo and reports back on the anchor text used in each of the links. Not only is this good for looking at your own backlinks, but even better when it comes to watching what you competition is up too. Stick in a site you are interested to learn about and find what their backlinks say. You might be surprised at the result. Initially this tool performed well after a few tests, but started to lag after a couple pages of data.
Check it out at: Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Checker - Dicussion at SEOchat

Revenue Checker for Adsense

This is a handy tool, do those that want to passively monitor their Adsense campaigns. I haven't downloaded it myself yet, but its seems to getting some positive feedback from members in the major forums. Screen shots look great, and this tool pass over the username and password from Google to the tool to provide the nifty charts and graphs. Concerned about security of your password, I was, so I checked into it. Apparently in the most recent update of this tool the security loophole as reported on WMW has been fixed, so its now fit for public use. About the tool from their website:

Revenue Checker is allowing Google AdSense publishers to check their AdSense revenue and detailed statistics in either specific time intervals or manually with single click option. Revenue Checker creates numeric, as well as graphic output to all statistics, including channels.

Found by way of Google Blogscope (who finds all these crazy things). A blog that follows all the negative vibes related to Google, and it is named F***edGoogle.

I like to point out Viral Marketing Web finds when I get them. I have done so with the Subservient Chicken and also tracked down the lost Hampster Dance.

Today, Daron Babin (aka SEGuru) at Webmaster Radio, informed me of this crazy site named The ZoomQuilt. Trust me its pretty wild.

One day, I hope to come up with an idea like that on my own.

Some are calling it the "Tim Update" because Tim Mayer posted the "weather update" at the Yahoo! Search Blog. Now that the update has settled, what are the forums saying

One average, most of the forum go'ers are delighted with the results. To be honest, I am shocked at some of the numbers people are reporting. Should SEO's really be controlling the top results of any search engine? If SEOs are happy, does that mean the search engine is doing a bad job of providing relevant results? It is hard to know. I get the impression that the answer to the latter question is, Yes, the search engines are doing a bad job. I am not complaining, I have some nice rankings to brag about myself.

Some others are reporting that their sites have been kicked out of the index. I have seen some cases of this where Yahoo! tagged a site as duplicate, even though the site, in reality, is far from duplicate. What I mean, is the content and html structure are both very different, not to warrant a duplicate filter. I have submitted a case or two that I have found and hope to hear back from the Yahoo! folks shortly. Until then, its off to the forums.

Forum Discussion:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• HighRankings Forum
  
• WebWorkShop
  
• SEOGuy Forums

I haven't talked about the topic of keyword density in a really long time. Why? Basically because I have never used it when writing pages. Last week, the resident scientist at SEW forum (orion), Dr. E. Garcia, wrote a detailed article for e-marketing-news named The Keyword Density of Non-Sense. In that article he clearly detailed his objections to using keyword research tools and keyword density analyzers when optimizing a Web site. There was a session at SES NYC 2005, the last session of the conference, named Advanced Search Term Research Tools.

After the panelist spoke, Dr. Garcia took the mic and gave a five minute speech on how some of the tools these vendors were providing were "bad." It is unfortunate that Dr. Garcia did not have more time to make his point, but most of the panelist agreed with him. His point was, as the article says at the end, "To sum up, the assumption that KD values could be taken for estimates of term weights or that these values could be used for optimization purposes amounts to the Keyword Density of Non-Sense." After you read the article, feel free to join the thread and discuss your thoughts. One thing many say is that they do not have other options, so they rely on these tools. But its extremely important to understand the math behind the tools, if the math doesn't work, you need to know.

Last week we discussed a new patent released by Google that contained a possible answer for the Google Sandbox. Since then the forums were buzzing on the topic, including Search Engine Watch, WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums, SEO Chat, HighRankings and DigitalPoint.

If you haven't had time to read the patent or you are just overwhelmed by it, seoMoz.org has an excellent and detailed explanation of the complete patent, it is a must read.

What is interesting, is that some are discussing the possibility that this patent is all simply PR hype.

Over the past two weeks I reported on Yahoo! Limiting Access to PPC API. Some advertisers were upset that they were rejected from using the API. There was confusion as to if Overture/Yahoo was restricting access to only certain groups or not. Today I received word from an official "Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) spokesperson" that read:

- Yahoo! Search Marketing's (Overture) position on APIs and open access has not changed. We support all advertisers, SEMs and agencies that desire to have direct access through APIs, and continue to expand the numbers of companies participating in our program.
- In addition, we've been working proactively with web analytics companies to determine how they would like to add value to their customers' campaign tracking needs, how we can expand our API program to help them achieve that, and how that can extend the value of advertising on Yahoo! and the Overture network. This does not represent a change in policy for Overture / Yahoo!

As you can see, it was worded very carefully.

I have a source, that I can not reveal, that told me Google and Yahoo! are talking about a merger. This is a real reliable source, but if I tell anyone who it is, I am dead. I made a mention of it at this SEW Thread but didn't say anything else since then. Now I see Andy Beal heard the same thing, I would guess from the same source as I. He titled his entry Yahoo and Google Consider Merger?

It makes sense, they know Microsoft is coming at them strong. For both to survive, IMO, they need to team up. Yahoo! has a huge portal share, trying to be part of your life with search. Google has a damn good engine and a great brand for it, like Yahoo! If they team up, MSN has no chance.

How crazy can this be?

Update: Danny has more information in his blog entry named Google & Yahoo Plan Merger; Brin & Page To Depart.

I certainly hope that this is an April fools joke and that he has hidden all the forums for the day. But according to the single forum and thread at Phil Craven's forum, the SEO Forum was Hacked. Phil said "It wasn't me folks. It was some saddo with nothing better to do. The restoration is on its way but it will take a little time." This morning I got an email from Phil's forum, I thought it was spam, but it read:

To: poop@poop.com
Subject: We Were Hacked
From: poop@poop.com Add to Address Book
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2005 02:24:18 -0500


The following is an email sent to you by an administrator of "fuxop". If this message is spam, contains abusive or other comments you find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at the following address:
poop@poop.com
Include this full email (particularly the headers).
Message sent to you follows:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but because of this we will not be re-opening the site.

I wish Phil all the best in getting everything restored. I know other SEO Forums have had issues with losing data due to crashes and hacks in the past.

Last year today Google launched Gmail, we covered it under the title of GMail - Google Email Service to Offer 1GB Mail for Free - Not a Hoax. Today is April Fools day in 2005 and a bunch of Google pranks have been released.

(1) Google Gulp a new sports drink released by Google. This seems to be the only real Google prank out there, by Google.

(2) Google increased Gmail to 2GB, at least battellemedia says its no hoax. In fact, I see my read "You are currently using 15 MB (1%) of your 1331 MB." So its more then 1GB right now.

(3) Released this morning http://www.googleaprilfools.com/, funny how the results come out. Looks like this prank was sprung up by Philipp Lenssen.

(4) Let's not forget http://www.undergoos.com/, the place to go to buy your Underwear. This is not by Google, but check em out.

Google Gulp and 2GB Gmail discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Not as in weather but as in a report to tell SEOs and Webmasters when a change will be taking place in the index. Last night, Yahoo! blogged Yahoo! Launching New Search Index Tonight, and this morning a post at SEW forums named Big Changes in Yahoo!???? reveals it is true.

I too have seen changes, not major, but changes in the Yahoo! SERPs.

Today I am sure will be a whacky day of entries. For example, last night a press release was sent out named Cre8asiteForums For Sale. In that release, they mention what they will do to make the forums more attracting to venture captialists. Kim, the founder of Cre8asite Forums, mentions in her blog, "Search Engines just aren't THAT interesting, so we decided to let Danny have at it." By Danny, she means Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Watch. Then if you move over to the Peabody Cre8tive Flow Blog, Cre8asite's Blog, you will see "While this is a sad time for Kim and her team, it is surely an answer to prayers for anyone wishing to get started in the SEO Forum market. Offers can be e-mailed to the administration team at admin@cre8asite.net. No serious offers will be rejected."

But, today being April Fools, they have a thread in the forums named April Fool on March 31? which explains the story. Oh, don't you just love the upside down avatars?

In good spirit of April Fools, Ask Jeeves wrote a blog entry named The Future of Search Arrives: Introducing The Jeeves9000 (BETA) where they joke about a futuristic Jeeves robot to help you with your daily tasks. There are three videos at the site you must watch, the middle one talks about their subject specific stuff, the last one you can see Jim Lanzone from Ask Jeeves get whacked by Jeeves9000 (priceless). I started a thread on this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

But, I found last night, a Jeeves1000 for sale. And this is really no april fools joke. I found the Jeeves1000 at eBay and its currently on bid with 7 days 2 hours remaining. I am really not kidding and I even started a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I left out these two videos, Intro Movie, note the "beta" on the back of the head. And Integration Movie, note Mark Fletcher (CEO of Bloglines, acquired by Ask Jeeves recently) being strangled by Jeeves9000. Too funny.

This is something interesting that someone posted on my forum.

It looks like it really might be the case too:

Zero results for inurl:com.au, but plenty of results (as expected) for inurl:net.au and inurl:edu.au.

Google.com.au isn't even in the index: site:www.google.com.au. And even more confirmation is every .com.au domain (including Google's) has a PR0 right now.

If it's an April Fool's joke, I don't think the Australian webmasters are having a good laugh. heh