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