June 2005 Archives

Came across a nice interview that Rand from SEOchat did today with Dr. Garcia (orion), a moderator on SEW forums and one of the SEO/SEM industry most well known experts on search engine technology and IR (Information Retrevial). He has been someone who came into this industry to help educate us heathens on the particulars of the search technology we only had a partial understanding of. Through his brilliant posts and amazing insights more and more experts have begun to understand our field even better than before. I had the great oppourtunity to meet him while in New York and I was delighted to see Rand did a great interview with him about many of the topics he discussed before.

Rand covers some good topics everything from “on-page” optimization via linearization, co-occurrence theory, he goes on to ask about underappreciated issues of SEO/SEM, major trends in the way search engines rank pages, shifts towards greater or lesser use of things like PageRank or link popularity, practices of buying and selling links, and much more.

If you are looking for your daily dose of salt or just care to brush up on some important topics currently in the search technology.

Read Rands Interview with Dr. Garcia

Danny Sullivan just posted a blog on The Illustrated Google Master Plan, which I found facinating. So, I look closer on the original size photo to notice this:

I remember talking about this amongst some of my collegues, but never really seen much out on the web about it. So I tried to dig out stories or web pages and here are a few:

• Ben (Phoenix) did a great write up with Google Developing An Internet Operating System?


• Garry Price blogged about the article Microsoft Loses Key Windows Architect to Google, with discussion on WMW about it.


• WebmasterWorld has this thread


• Kris Shaffer has a nice write up in part 1 and part 2.


• SEO Chat's coverage


• And if you have more, please list them on the comments below... (thanks!)

So you are like me and the other millions of people who write original content for your Web site. And yes, you find your original work taken in whole or pieces and placed on other Web sites. Jenstar posted a new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums basically telling us What to do when someone steals your original content. By the way, her presentation at WebmasterWorld New Orleans, Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines talks about this as well. The reason I am covering this thread is because I promised to follow up on the entry I wrote yesterday named Cache Pages are Not Duplicate When Not Indexed and because of the post I wrote this morning combatting the term Content Spam Remix.

I'll summarize by quotation of the thread:
- Send out a Cease & Desist
- State the content must be removed within 48 to 72 hours
- Send it to every single email address I can ferret up

If that doesn't work, then...
- Fill a DMCA with the hosting company of the content thief (or C&D)

If that doesn't work, then contact the search engines at...
- http://www.google.com/dmca.html
- http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html
- http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_CONC_AboutDMCA.htm

Personally, I can't keep up with all the stolen content. I do not have the resources to report and then follow up on these DMCA requests. It is not a big deal to locate the stolen content, there are programs that automate that. Also it is very easy to find them manually as well. But from that point on, there is just too much work for me to follow up on. I hope it gets easier.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Ian Turner is still missing, NickW at ThreadWatch posted a Ian Turner Missing: Facts Page. Use that page from now on.

"Ian has been missing since Sunday. He was due to fly back from New Orleans (wmw show) and has not been seen since. His wife and family are all very worried about him, and so are we."

There is more information with pictures at ThreadWatch. Please take the time to click over and help him and his family. The Search Community is tight, so lets show our support.

Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld posted a thread.

When Google Sitemaps was released the forums had both positive and negative things to say about it. Some said Google was lazy and wanted a lower costs, more efficient method to find new pages on the Web but others praised Google for offering a solution of indexing hard to reach pages. All in all, I am happy that Google released this type of free inclusion program. Why? Well, according to some (see the threads linked to here) Google Sitemaps has increased their visibility and traffic.

Kim, Cre8PC, wrote a guest article here last week named Google Sitemap - Is there a real benefit? and links to a thread at Cr8asiteForums named Effect of new Google Site Map on SEO? As a follow up, Umit posted his experience with it. He said, "I think it is beneficial for especially forum sites." He adds that "my forums' hit increased nearly %25 more."

Now there can be many reasons for this. Google Sitemaps should help those sites that have dynamic looking URLs get indexed quicker. It should not improve rankings of a site (in theory) if the site is already getting indexed quickly. No matter how "deep" the pages might be, if you have a search engine friendly site internal linking methodology, with search friendly URLs and so on, you should not need Google Sitemaps. It is hard for me to make generalizations on this topic without actually partaking in such an experiment. So I think I will partake soon.

Yesterday Google released Google Maps API and so did Yahoo, with their release of Yahoo! Maps Web Services. I have not seen any much search forum discussion on this, so I posted a thread at DigitalPoint's Yahoo! API forum on the topic.

Now we are in business. This lawsuit came across the news feeds last night, the one I spotted was at Yahoo! News by Reuters and is named Google sued over 'click fraud' in Web ads.

A seller of online marketing tools said on Wednesday it sued Google Inc., charging that the Web search giant has failed to protect users of its advertising program from "click fraud," costing them at least $5 million.

Currently forum discussion is at Search Engine Watch Forums where the members feel that this is a good thing for the industry.

Jason Dowdell wrote a blog entry named Content Spam Remix.In that entry he talks about content remixing and relates it to content scrapping. I believe the term content remixing comes about from music remixing, where musicians use other musicians art and remix them together to create something new and unique. As you can imagine, there was/is lots of controversy on this topic - and I am the last one to know much about the music industry's take on it.

Content remixing, I believe, is the same but with content. Jason says that smart bots that crawl the Web for content on a specific topic and mix it all together would fall under that category. I believe not so.

Remixing is an art according to all musicians that do it. To automate an art is oxymoronic. A bot can be programmed to perform certain tasks and repeat. That by definition is not art. So in my humble opinion, "content remixing" is not the same thing as scrapping content from a page in an automated fashion. What I do consider to be "content remixing" is the blog community. For example, this entry is referencing Jason's entry. Jason references two or three other blog entries. We all have our own opinion on a topic. We share language, we quote each other but add our own tune, opinion, to the topic. Automation can not accomplish this, if they could - we would be in a world of EPIC 2014.

Search Engine Watch Forums LIVE! coverage has been posted at the Search Engine Watch Forums by moderator Chris Boggs. Really detailed coverage, and very well done! The title of the thread made me laugh. :)

Yesterday Google released Google Earth for download. Today, it looks like they closed it down for a bit. If you go to the Google Earth Download page it reads "Google Earth downloads temporarily delayed". I first spotted this at Google Blogoscoped but it looks like WebmasterWorld forum picked up on it on page 6 of the "Google Earth" thread there. I also took the liberty to update the thread at DigitalPoint Forums with the news.

Lucky, if you have not yet downloaded, a WebmasterWorld member posted a copy of the download here. I assume they pulled the download because it was being used too much and they need to upgrade a few things before releasing it on such a wide-scale again. Oh, Google Earth is damn cool by the way. I just wish driving directions from New York to London worked. :)

TNS Media Intelligence just released an important study that shows how "advertising spending is expected to grow a moderate 3.4 percent to $145.3 billion". Other important highlights were:

• Internet expenditures are forecast to increase by 7.6 percent after two years of double digit growth in advertising spend.


• U.S. Hispanic ad spending will grow by 10.5% in 2005, sharply outpacing the overall U.S. ad market spending at just 3.4%.

Forget about the 10 or so new products announced by Google & Yahoo over the past two days, including Google Earth. Google just announced an API for Google Maps. You got to love the title they used at the GoogleBlog to introduce this; The world is your JavaScript-enabled oyster.

I guess this is in reaction to all the Hacking of Google Maps.

Forum coverage will be widespread, but I took the liberty to post a thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

A thread at IHelpYou Forums named Server Location resides in the Google Forum, but in reality, it applies to all major search engines. The question the member asks is, would it improve rankings in Google.com if he moved his server from the UK to the US?

He explains that he is "currently at No.4 on Google. I am behind two very large directories and about.com." In Google.co.uk he is second, ahead of two of the directories outranking him on Google.com. He continues to explain that he uses a .com tld. So he asks, "Would it be a good idea to move the site to a US hosting company, would that help me get nearer No 1 for my KW on Google.com or would moving hosts hurt my position in the short/long term?"

Very good question. And very good advice in the thread. Moderator Quadrille explains; "I think changing horses would probably be just about the last thing on your mind, unless you are looking very specifically at a US audience, and the UK audience is of little value to your site."

Many of us don't think about our audience and who we are trying to reach. If you have a site targeting the UK based audience then ranking well in a UK flavored search engine will rock. But if not, and if you want to rank well in a US based engine, then by switching to a US server farm, it can't hurt your US rankings (well maybe it can, depending on other variables). It can only slightly hurt your UK rankings but potentially improve your US rankings.

There is so much fear today with the term "duplicate content" that is really is disturbing. Many newbies in the SEO game don't fully understand it. Basically, duplicate content is when two or more pages in a search engine index are similar enough to trigger a filter. If page A and page B are close in content (how close is the question), page A might be filtered out of the results, or page B might be filtered out of the results. The filtered page has a lot to do with which page has less link popularity. So a page with more linkage weight, will probably not be filtered. So if you write an article and it is syndicated on a site that has more linkage weight, your original article might be filtered from the results. We had several dozen 'mentionings' of "duplicate content" at this site. More specific articles written by myself an other authors include (and make sure to note the date they were written); What is Duplicate Content by Aspen, Duplicate Content Penalty Timespan by Phoenix, and Duplicate Content - Resellers Ranking Higher by myself.

Now that we got some of that behind us, a WebmasterWorld thread named Google Lists its Own Cache Pages shows how people are so frustrated and nervous about such a filter. The bottom-line with that thread is that the Google Cache shows an exact duplication of a page (hence 'cache'). But since Google disallows bots to access it, search engines won't index it. If the search engines won't crawl or index the content, they will not even know it exists. If they do not know it exists, it is not considered a page and wont be considered duplicate.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to worry about with duplicate content. Both with internal database driven content and syndication of content. Search engines are constantly tweaking the algorithm and 'duplicate content filters' to adjust and see what works best. It should improve over time. I will follow up this entry with a new thread that helps with some of the illegal syndication issues.

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Pathetic Trademark Laws discusses a case where someone was not able to use the word 'target' in ones title of the ad. For example, the advertiser wanted to say "Reach your target audience today".

The issue here, at least the popular thought, is that Target is a popular brand. So Target asked Google to put the word "target" on some sort of blacklist. The advertiser is automatically not allowed to submit the ad with that word in the copy. The advertiser will have to ask Google for an exception.

Has Google gone too far with this? Can you blame Google or the trademark lawyers? Or is this just the game that must be played? A whole new discussion.

This parameter seemed to have been first spotted at WebmasterWorld on June 26, 2005. DaveN just posted a thread about it at Search Engine Watch Forums as well. DaveN explains that the "biw parameter in google sets the Browser window in pixels" and shows an example http://www.google.co.uk/search?biw=1004&hl=en&q=DaveN&btnG=Google+Search&meta=.

The WebmasterWorld thread tries to get into why Google is recording this data, and also how. How? Most probably through some JavaScript. They "why" is something very interesting and I wonder why...

This is truly mind blowing, on the surface, MyWeb 2.0 is basic. Its probably first best that you read Chris Sherman's write up on the concepts of this feature, his article is named Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0. But you don't realize what is meant by "Social Search" until you login. What I mean by that is I see my Yahoo! 360 social community's Web searches. The following image is called "My Community's Tags", look at it!

View Large Image

In terms of how this will change search, Chris Sherman sums it up well:

Yahoo has also developed a new relevance algorithm called "MyRank" for MyWeb 2.0. "It's a new search engine that we wrote that can search across thousands of nodes and millions of pages in a trust network," said Walther. Unlike PageRank and other link analysis techniques used by general-purpose search engines, MyRank is designed to ferret out clues to relevance based on the pages you and your community have saved to MyWeb 2.0.

In practice, this means your search results with MyWeb 2.0 will be very different than those you get with Yahoo, Google or any other major engine. It also means that your search results will change over time, as your personal web and those of your community expand. Walther says these changes should lead to more relevant results—but that depends largely on the "quality" of members of your community and the web pages they choose to add to your communal web.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forum & WebmasterWorld. Also, the Yahoo Blog has a nice recap of features.

Yesterday I bloged about the deal between Univision and Google as potentially happening next month according to sources from the news article. Just today I notice that Univision.com has added a search box at the top of its portal saying "Optimized by Google" in Spanish. Why "optimized by" and not "powered by" beats me. In my opinion, I think "powered by" is more appropiate since Univision does not have any search technology to optimize for, it's all 100% Google's as far as I can see it.

From the portal's homepage the search function defaults to "Uniclave" (which their way of saying "keyword" like AOL's original marketing strategy) rather than search. This, of course, is intended for the company to keep the user as much as possible within the portal before it hits the outside world of search. A simple click of the radio button that says "Internet" and the user is ready for Google searches specially tailored for Univision. Also, if no keyword exists then it goes for a search on the web for pages in Spanish.

If the user chooses to do an actual search of the www then no matter what language the keyword phrase he or she uses it defaults to Spanish pages on the web as the first option. If the user changes a radio button to Internet (Inglés) then it searches in English pages on the web.

It's also interesting to notice that URLs also express Univision's domain, for example:

http://www.univision.com/buscar/buscar_resultados.jhtml?base=0&chid=1&locale=1&pgsz=10&referring_channel=1&
referring_subchannel=12&schid=12&secid=0&type=basic&
search_type=internet&query=comida+mexicana

The third radio button option it presents for its search box is to look for documents within Univision.com. When you do a search, for example ?mercado hispano? (without quotes) you will notice that there a no snippets, but rather a description of what's available on that page. I clicked on a listings to verify as a sample and the actual description from the search results does not even appear on the page nor in the code. Therefore, they must either be using Google Sitemaps or a direct feed. Company sources have informed me that its internal search is powered by software they license, not Google's technology.

Univision.com was signed up with Overture in January 2004. Unfortunately, the page with the story is down and I can?t find a copy of the press release. If anyone does, please send me a copy, I would appreciate it very much. Anyway, I imagine that it was for a short period of time since now it?s clear that they have a deal to serve paid search from Google Adwords.

There are no details of the deal that I know of, but this is an outstanding move by Univision.com?s executive team and a great step forward for Google. I wish them both great success with their partnership.

Now, I wonder what they will be doing together for Video Search, since Univision is the largest TV media producer for the U.S. Hispanic market? It will be exciting to see what these two may be cooking up. You're welcome to join the thread at SEW Forums to discuss more on Univision.com goes LIVE with Search Powered by Google.

Ever since mid-April, I have been planning to start a podcast specifically for the purpose of providing weekly summaries of what we covered at this site. I used to write up summaries weekly or bi-monthly, but it was simply too much for me. I thought a good compromise would be something you can listen to at your convenience.

On April 22nd, MacWorld released an article named Start your own Podcast. I was simply waiting to have the time to set everything up, to do this somewhat professionally. Today, Apple release the new iTunes that supports an advanced podcast reader. With that they published a page that went live an hour ago named GarageBand Support for Recording Your Podcast. I am a Mac guy and I think I might go that route.

But before I spend the time and money, I wanted to know from you guys if this is something you would want to hear. Please leave a comment with your thoughts or email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com. Thank you.

Barry covered the blog on "Google Gets Really Personal with Personal Search". However, one thing I noticed on Danny's excellent write up was a mention of Dirson's screenshot (see blog entry), which Barbara Coll points out that Google has a tab for en Español as part of personal search.

After yesterday's news on the potential Univision deal, it's clear to me now that Google is taking action on gaining ground for the worldwide Hispanic market. I've mentioned before this is over 61 million users.

A thread at SEO Chat forums named Name That Filter is fun. You know how SEOs often come up with different names for the various changes taking place in the SERPs for particular sites. I have mentioned many types of filters here in the past. Here are some of the filter names mentioned in the thread.

1) Trust Filter
2) An Aged Link Filter
3) An Affiliate Filter
4) Rapid Content Filter
5) Rapid links filter
6) Missing elements filter
7) Exchange filter
8) Duplicate Content Filter
9) Domain Name Registration Filter
10) Internet Protocol Filter
11) Adult Content Filter
12) W3C Compliance Filter
13) Disabilities Filter
14) Slow Load Filter
15) Duplicate Content Filter
16) Bad Backlinks Filter
17) Outbound Links Filter
18) Length-Of-Time-Between-Updates Filter
19) Geography Filter (Country Search)
20) File Type Filter
21) Language Filter
22) Content/Keywords Filter

Here are some I discussed in the past, not all necessarily "filters."

23) 'Omitted Results' Filter
24) Country Specific Filters
25) The Network Filter
26) The Hyphen Filter

Fun...

MSN Search didn't do that well in The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge, currently based on the RustySearch Results they have the lowest rating of the 4 major engines.

But last week, MSN Switched Technologies to Neural Net Ranking System. And since then, SEO Chat members are calling MSN Results Incredible. The forum discussion is taking place, for the most part, most SEO Chatters are happy with MSN in terms of "relevancy," whatever that is.

Yes. It is only logical to say that it is possible for a subdomain that is deploying SEO tactics that warrant a penalization by the search engine to have the potential to spread that penalty across the whole domain. This is the current discussion taking place at HighRankings Forum.

The logic is that the owner of the domain (at least in most cases) have exclusive rights to the sub domain names under the master domain name. Someone told me, just two weeks ago, he received an offer from an individual who wanted to buy subdomain names from his master domain name. Of course, the individual who owned the domain name rejected any offer. The bottom-line, in this case, is that the master domain name, owner is responsible for any sub domain under the master domain name.

Ah, but you ask...What about a domain name used for a secure site purposes? Or for a shared shopping cart solution? Often you see sites switch over to a subdomain of a completely different master domain name, during the check out process. Would a search engine ban the whole domain name, if the master domain in that case is widely used? Possibly no, but I see no reason why they should not. (1) Most of those cases, the content in those areas should not be indexed (secure site area, https) and (2) It is still the master domain owner's responsibility.

Lots of news today from Google, they also are now allowing people to download the Google Earth program for free. Inside Google pretty much broke the news first (even though many other sites were under embargo). In addition, Inside Google has the most detailed write up in terms of screen captures and walk throughs. The Search Engine Watch article was written by Chris Sherman and is named Google Earth Flies Free, which then Danny Sullivan blogged on this morning.

You can download Google earth here.

The forums discussing this news is currently DigitalPoint Forums. And now WebmasterWorld. And now Search Engine Watch Forums.

Back at the end of March 2004 Google announced a new labs product Personalized Web Search. Since then, they announced other products like My Search History. And now it is all coming together over at http://www.google.com/psearch.

Danny Sullivan has a big write up at his blog under the title Google Relaunches Personal Search - This Time, It Really Is Personal, recommended reading...

I tried a few searches and then ran into an error when searching on "search engine optimization." Error read; "The requested URL /find?q=search+engine+optimization&btnWeb=Search+Web&d=28&m=6&y=2005&hl=en&zx=ta5bfXAyksc was not found on this server."

Forum discussion currently only at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is a question I have seen asked many times on the forums usually meet with speculation and regarded with careful consideration on the potential risk. This might be off interest to those of you that run large websites or for some reason or another like to add TONS of new pages to the Google index regularly. If you are doing it currently then you probably know you risk level and what you can and cannot do. I haven't seen any good explanations with some possible answers until I came across some good information from Donna at SEO Scoop yesterday that I thought deserved a good mention. Donna gave some the true scoop from the WMW conference in New Orleans last week. She went about finding some of the best tidbits and common gossip and posted some good short summaries. While attending the Meet the Google Engineer session she picked up one some good info. In regards to adding hundreds if not tens of thousands of pages she reports that:

Google does not specifically filter for any one particular thing like that. Instead the algorithm looks at other similar situations and determines if the action is good or bad. For example, if a 2-page site suddenly adds 10,000 pages, there may in fact be a legitimate reason for it to do so. But the algorithm will first make the assumption that the action is "suspicious" and will then look at a large sample of other 2-page sites that have suddenly added 10,000 pages. If the majority of those sites were considered spammy, then your site will get lumped into the same spammy category. Of course, if the majority of those sites were deemed to be legitimate, then your site would likewise be deemed legitimate. Basically, he admitted that there may in fact be absolutely nothing wrong with your site, but it may be filtered or penalized if it fits the profile of other sites that have been marked as spammy.

He suggests that if your site falls into such a category (of being legit, but being lumped into a spammy classification), then you should let Google know about it. He implied that the matter would be looked into, and that the algorithm may be adjusted to be able to handle situations like yours in the future, but that nothing may be done to directly impact your particular site (other than adjusting the algorithm in general).

Check out the full report at SEO Scoop. There are a few forums threads about this but at this late hour I can't seem to find them. Check your local hangout for related discussion.

In recent news, Google.com is taking a step in the Hispanic market by partnering with Univision.com, which is one of the largest portals in Spanish for the U.S. markets. The article reports:

"And Univision is about to partner with Google to do page searches in Spanish, an executive familiar with the deal said. Expected to start in the next month, the partnership has the potential to develop Spanish-language listings and key words, and could encourage more advertisers to translate their Web sites into Spanish."

A thread at SEO Chat named New Google Interface links to a blog entry at SearchGrub with a screen shot of a new Google SERPs page.

An other screen shot found at SEO chat can be looked at here.

My only issue of this being "new" is that the old "directory" tab seems to be back. Forum discussion at SEO Chat Forums

Last Friday MSN Search Blog posted a blog entry named New Operators Explained. In that entry they "explain" what each of the following search operators do. Operators include; Filetype:, Link: and LinkDomain:; Contains:; InURL:, InAnchor:, InTitle:, InBody: and so on.

A thread at HighRankings named Msn Linkdomain: Command Looks Hot! discusses the new linkdomain command supported over at MSN Search. One member says, "I've only run one test on it, but gee, I found backlinks I didn't know about for the site!" In all of my tests, Yahoo! still located a larger number of backlinks for my sites with the linkdomain operator. But I did not conduct a test to analyze if the results overlap between MSN and Yahoo! with that command. That would be an interesting test.

WebmasterWorld is known for the large threads on popular topics, the mods do what they can to break up the threads to make them more legible and forum friendly (they do a wonderful job). One such thread is named Dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update which is currently 82 pages long with 1,225 posts, starting on June 5, 2005 by a member named reseller. Reseller has been very active within the thread, keeping a summary and the thread going. On page 78, message number 1,167 he wrote a reply named Dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update: Google-Updates Survival Kit (scroll down to the reply). In that reply he recaps most of the topics discussed in the thread:

- Do a 301 redirect regarding yoursite.com vs. www.yoursite.com (canonical url problem)
- Removing 302 redirects
- Removing duplicates
- Subtle page changes and monitor SERP changes
- Create and submit a Google Sitemap
- Send feedback to Google engineers
- Optimize your site for other search engines (like Yahoo, MSN ..)
- Transfer your affected site to a spare/emergency site
- Outlet Sites Strategy

You must check out at least that post On page 78, message number 1,167 he wrote a reply named Dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update: Google-Updates Survival Kit (scroll down to the reply) for more information and then read from there, reseller does a good rolling update.

The day before tax day, April 14th, 2005 I posted an entry named Google Wants Your Videos, where we discussed how Google is allowing people to upload video that will be hosted for free at Google. John Battelle today posted News: Google To Launch Online Video Playback This Monday, which is big, big news (it even got /.ed). He discusses four reasons why this is big, (1) he says you can expect Google to charge for video upload and accept payment with Google Wallet. (2) Google is currently allowing the free upload & distribution of video, opening up the possibilities for those who can not afford it. (3) Google is directly competing with Microsoft's Windows Media Player by allowing a browser based video player that works anywhere. And finally, (4) "this will help the spread of an alternative universe for video distribution and playback."

As we said in the original Video upload entry, this probably relates to Is Google Planning to Build A Global Fiber Optic Network? but now even more so it relates to Ben's post on Google Developing An Internet Operating System?

I started a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are rumors at the forums that when you see a referral from "gnome.corp.google.com" it means that a Google AdSense representative is conducting a manual review of your Web site. The most recent thread that discussed this was at SEO Chat Forums. The SEO Chat thread references back to a WebmasterWorld thread named Google Monitoring.... That thread, dated back on Jan 8, 2004, Jenstar (AdSense Guru) said "GoogleGuy had commented on this before, and said their employees, just like employees at other companies, will surf from work." That is not the only WebmasterWorld thread on this topic, there is also a thread that started on Feb 22, 2005 that discusses this "strange referral."

On Saturday, Phillip Lenssen reported a PR Update. On the same day, a member started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums on this possible update. SEO Chat has not one, not two but three threads on this possible update. But I wasn't able to find other threads on this topic.

One day I was standing in line at the local supermarket, they rang me up and presto, bells went off. I was the 5,000th shopper at the supermarket and what did they give me? A free Turkey.

Nah, I am just kidding, I never won anything like that. But at Search Engine Watch Forums the 5,000th member did win. He did not win a turkey, instead he won (1) Search Engine Watch membership and (2) pass to one of the Search Engine Strategies conferences. The lucky member is eagent. The forum celebration is at a thread named CONGRATS to our Lucky 5,000th Forum Member!.

A cool thread at WebmasterWorld named Google Satellite View Coverts the World shows that Google Maps can now map the whole world, or much of it. An example that works is Stockholm, Sweden.

Side note: Not sure how much I will be posting today, lots to catch up on.

I am heading back to New York now. Before I leave, here is a quick recap:

The full archive is categorized under the WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans section.

Tuesday - June 21, 2005
Keynote - The Search, by John Battelle
Contextual Advertising for Publishers
Local Search - Issues and Opportunities
Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines
Lead Generation & Tracking && Shopping Search - Getting Listed, Getting Traffic

Wednesday - June 22, 2005
Coffee Talk with Philip Kaplan of AdBrite and F**ked Company
Contextual Advertising Program Issues
RSS Feeds and Pod Casting
Super Session : Real World SEO - Organic Or Die?
Tech Issues : Domain Name Registration and Server/Webhosting Issues

Thursday - June 23, 2005
Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters
Linking on a Dime
Blogging for Fun and Profit
Morning Coffee with Yahoo's Tim Mayer

Update: It seems as if some people are upset with the grammar and spelling on some of these entries. Let me clarify. I did not edit, proof or even look down when typing as fast as I can to provide the details of the sessions. In the past, I once read some of my coverage, and to be honest, I was embarrassed. But the readers told me they prefer I write as quickly as possible, as opposed to making sure I write everything in proper English. I am sorry if anyone is offended by the english used in the session coverage. Outside of any conference coverage, if there are any grammar issues - that would be more upsetting to me. Again, please keep that in mind when reading this coverage.

This session is moderated by Brett Tabke.

Rahul Lahiri, Vice President of Search Product Management AskJeeves
No powerpoint but he is going to go through some questions and answers he has on paper.

The questions he gets is why don't we get ranked? Why is out site missing from Ask? Why is our site getting crawled too much? Why are you crawling these pages when I said no? And which tags do you support? He plugged Cre8asite Forums thread, he will answer those questions mostly.

He said when building a site, make sure you make it for your users. "Its all about content" without it, its hard to rank well. Link to good sites on the net. Make sure to have good, internal, navigation. You at where your referrals are coming from to better understand the users. For the search engine you have to have links to rank well for popular keywords. When your looking to get links, look for themed links to your site. Subject specific links weight a lot more in the Teoma world. He then explains the hubs and authorities concept with teoma. If you have a large dynamic site (variables in URL) then make sure to create a site map to link direct to those pages. He said, he into DMOZ and directories. Dont spam, dont link farm, dont use redirect gateways, mirrors and affiliate sites. He then goes over the teoma ranking technology.

Sites not getting crawled? (1) Get links, (2) If its a domain you purchased recently and it was spam site, it can be in their block list - let them know.

Crawl delay is supported, noindex is support, nofollow and nocache but not the nofollow link attribute.

Eytan Seidman, Program Manager, MSN Search Microsoft Corp.
MSN Search Timeline
- Started in 1998 with Yahoo as a partner
- In Jan 2003 they decided to invest in building its own technlogy
- July 2004 they released preview
- etc.

Today's Reality
Billions of Web links, hard to find what you need, many needs go unanswered.
The Dream
Search helps me with everything...

He then moved into a demo mode, search.msn.com. Tech glitch with the web results that came up...So he jumped to Local Beta product. He typed in Dry Cleaners, New Orleans and it brought up results.

June 2005 Release
- MSN Local Search Beta
- MSN Search Answers (basketball, baseball)
- Core Web Search Improvements (improved ranking algo, and changed the way they crawl the Web)

Features for Webmasters
- Selection
-- Most Comprehensive
-- Organic Crawl
- Protocols
-- Exclusion - Robot.txt
-- Inclusion - Submit URL (Free)

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search
He said how much he likes the WebmasterWorld conference.

Yahoo Search Vision
- Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge
- Find: Enable people to find what they are looking for
- Use: Search not for sake of searching, but to achieve a purpose
- Share: Sharing knowledge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with
- Expand: A promise of what is coming in the future (one such thing is the creative commons)

Why You need to be Included in Yahoo!
- Yahoo Gaining Market Share
- Large audience

How to Get into the Index
- Link new URL from existing page in index
- Make sure all URLs have inbound link
- Good authoritative links into site to encourage deep crawls
- Don't make the site depth too extreme (3 or 4 levels is good)
- Use the free addurl service if all else fails (http://submit/search.yahoo.com/free/request)

Yahoo Crawlers: User Agents
- Slurp (Search)
- Seeker (Shopping)
- Newscrawler
- MMCrawler
- MMAudVid

Useful Robots Commands
- No Archive & Crawl Delay
- Bandwidth Saving Ideas
- Yahoo Redirect Handing Rules

Inclusion Realities
- Paid inclusion system is an entirely different content system than the main crawl
- Any submission to the paid inclusion service will have no impact on free crawl
- If I dont renew my subscription
- We suggest inclusion submitted content to the crawler and it decides whether to include it in the index base.

He showed off MyWeb, RSS Features, and so on. He showed how many products they have been launching. He wanted to highlight Y!Q product.

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Google Inc.
Google Mission
Organize the world's info to make it universally accessible and useful.

He then recaps the past year new announcements. This year they announced; Google Maps, Google Local, Gmail storage, Video Search, Desktop, My Search History, Google Scholar/libraries, and Machine translation. Google Suggest, More & better communication (google blog), revamped webmaster pages, 10 engineers x 2 hours - 20 hours of answering questions (meet the engineers), nofollow, radical improvements on 302s, google sitemaps, update bourbon (jun05feedback@googlegroups.com), AdSense spam reports.

Pretty funny, Tim and Matt while Matt is speaking are hitting eachother. Tim said, how you handling those 302s now. ;) Matt said we just announced Google Sitemaps, a paid inclusion but for free. ;)

How Google Handles Spam Report Communication
- Site indexed
- Detection
- Corrective action
- Webmaster fixes site (google.com/support with "reinclusion request" in subject line)
- Approval

Nofollow
- Shows an example of the code
- Allow someone to say "I cant wont vouch for this link (blog comments, guestbooks, referrer pages, etc.)
- Lots of software already adopted the tag (so webmasters dont need to deal with it)
- A new, standards-compliant attribute that anyone can use to give more information about a link.

302s
- Previous heuristics were vulnerable (Given two URLs, take the one with higher PageRank)
- Problem: For a while, most hijacked URLs were penalized
-- Spam penalties caused low PR
-- No one would tell us the name of their site
- Really got strongly on the radar after WMW Las Vegas
- Many problems fixed in late 2004, most of rest fixed in March 2005
- Now we have:
-- an internal mailing list and dedicated engineering resources
-- a way to report problems google.com/support with "Canonical page" in subject
-- an engineer at the Q&A last night works on 302s
- We are open to suggestions for how to improve heuristics
- Misconception: allinurl:mydomain.com does a search for "mydomain com" in URL
- Real problem: if site:mydomain.com shows urls from other domains
- Do NOT use the URL removal tool to try to trim wrong versions of a URL
- Do pick a standard root page, and do 301 permanent redirects from variant pages to standard page
-- e.g. mydomain.com -> 301 - > www.mydomain.com
- By the way, [adsense] was a newer bug, It was only two weeks old.

Google Sitemaps
- Provides method to tell Google about URLs
- Dont let the XML scare you
- Text files work as well
- Try it out he says

Reporting AdSense Spam and Scraper Sites
- They have way to report this spam, because GoogleGuy hates this type of spam.
- He showed a funny example about this (save that for people who paid to attend - plus too long to offer)

Update Bourbon
- Algo A around May 20
- Algo B around June 3
- Algo C around June 10 (no one noticed)
- Algo A with newer data around June 16
- Algo D at June 16 (no one noticed)

feedback jun05feedback@googlegroups.com

Then he chats about future stuff; globalization, new types of data, more communication and SEO will get easier, spamming will get harder.

This session is moderated by Todd Friesen.

Patrick Gavin, President Text Link Ads, Inc.
He will be covering the evaluation of a link. Direct Traffic; Link Popularity; and Branding are the three main factors of the value of the link.

Theme of the Linking Page
- Most value is when the link in the page contains content about your Web site.
- Some value if its about a related theme or site theme (but not direct theme)
- Less value in a link that has no theme to your site at all.

Traffic of the linking page
- Most value in sending large traffic to your site
- Less value of it sends less traffic to your site
- Rough indicator is Alexa.com
- Better indicator is visitor stats from site owner
- Best indicator is the referral data

Incoming Links to the Linking Page
- Rough indicators of this is Google PageRank
- Better indicators is the quality, relevant incoming links from topical attributes (gov, edu)
- Yahoo has best link command

Outgoing Links on the Linking Page
- Theme of the site can be picked up based on the outgoing links
- The fewer number of links on a page the better off you are (to get clicks and link pop).

Location on Linking Page
- Most value is when its in the content of the page
- Some value is not in the content but reasonably visible
- Less value if it is barely visible
- He brings up discussion on "Block Level Link Analysis"

Spider-ability
- Search the linking page using the cache command
- You can see if the link is cached
- The frequency it is updated
- Make sure your link will be found

Anchor Text
- This is a heavy weighted variable in all major search engines
- The more characters allowed for your test the better
- Most value is the link describes what your site is about
- Less value is the link doesn't describe the site (i.e. "click here")

Theoretical Example & Review
- The most valuable link scenario is a link from a page on your theme, high level of traffic, large number of incoming links from authorities and small number of outbound on theme links.
- The less valuable link scenario is a link from a page that is unrelated to your site, low level of traffic, small number of low quality links and large number of unrelated outgoing links

In Closing...
- Buy links from a pure advertising perspective. Then look at potential traffic and link popularity benefit. Monitor traffic and track keyword movement.

Todd Malicoat (stuntduble), V.P. of Sales and Marketing We Build Pages
He starts off that you do not need to know the algorithms, you need to know about your links and their value. He explains you don't need a PR9 link to rank well for ice sculptures or three word phrases. You need to balance that effort with links distributed wide on normal PR sites. Dilute the anchor text, use some click here and web site name to emulate natural link development process. DigitalGhost form WMW forum said use the 70/30 rules (70% links to homepage and 30% deeper pages). He said its very easy to buy links and you should do it (he gave Patrick a plug there). He said a good way to get links is to start an affiliate program that allows search friendly affiliate links (make sure to use a 301 redirect for those affiliate links). He said you can also beg for links. With all of them, be creative in finding links using search engines to locate them. You can also barter for links; WeBuildPages I think does some of that. All links are not created equal. He put up the Google AdSense Heat Map and said that is a good way to look at Block Level Link Analysis. He goes through what you should check for when buying links (repeated what Patrick said pretty much) check robot.txt file, check cache, check dns information, check history of site. He lists out some tools which i didnt have time to write.

Roger Montti (martinibuster), Founder and Owner martinibuster.com
New Websites / Low PR Websites
- Leverage your own personal network (friends, your stuff and so on)
- Directories (paid and unpaid)
- Paid links
- Buy other Web sites for inbound links

Paid Links
- Quick source for spidering
- for traffic
- for link popularity

Buying Websites
- Look for Inactive Web sites
- Search for "Temporarily Down for Maintenance"
- Under-performing Web sites (search for copywrite 2002)

Directories
- Niche directories are really good
- General directories
- Don't worry about DMOZ, submit and forget it. He talked about some DMOZ editor corruption and tricks (nothing crazy).

Long Term Strategies
- Build your own backlink network
- Build your own directories
- Blog, Blog, Blog

Link Development for Competitive Topic
- Aggressive link buying
- Aggressive domain name purchases
- Aggressive automated link exchanges

Final Thoughts
- Consider outsourcing link development
- Build an attractive links page,
- Choose the appropriate strategy for your Web site.

Check in Yahoo! is there is a real back link value in a page or directory.

Todd Friesen (oilman), Owner/Founder Oilman Promotions

Jumped into Q & A now...

Just got word from Yahoo that they along with Sir Richard Branson have annouced a winner to Yahoo's Search Marketing "Think Big" contest. If you are not familar with Yahoo's contest it was started about in April to allow small business owners to submit their ideas for thinking big for an award of 10 million free ads on the Yahoo! network. The offical judge is Sir Richard Branson, Chairman and founder of the Virgin Group of companies, who will choose one lucky one small business owner he believes truly “thinks big.”

The winner of the contest is Phoenix-based StairCycle(TM) Innovations who's product combines the benefits of stair-step exercise systems and a recreational bicycle that you can use indoors and out. It's a pretty neat cycle, and looks like a very good choice, you can check it out here.

Now not only will the winner receive 10 million free ad impressions across the Yahoo Search Marketing network the “Think Big” winner will be operating business as usual out of a glass office cubicle constructed in Times Square. How cool is that to do for one day. At the same time Yahoo will be running the winner’s ads (10 million free impressions!) on its network. So if you run across some nifty ads for a bike that can walk up stairs then your seeing the company who won this incredible contest.

For more information read the Yahoo press release or visit Times Square today to see the man in the glass box.

This session is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR seo-pr.com
There is a lot of misconceptions about what blogs are and he will go over it. He said a lot can be learned from the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Paul Revere road out to people he knew, and those people road out to people they knew and so on. The message spread and it totally shocked the area. He then talks about William Dawes who failed to raise the alarm in Waltham. The message was "The Regulars are coming out!" (not the red coats). Different messengers, same message, same medium. Paul sent that message to opinion leaders, whereas William sent it to random doors (they didn't know him). So if you are going to create a blog, you need to think about what effect you want. You need to be an expert in your field, and if you speak to other experts - you are set.

Over 11 million adults have created blogs, 9% of internet users - these people are not average. They are well educated, smart and well-off. Blogs post more "how to" information than new or opinion. Some people talk politics, more talk news, but most talk "how to" topics in blogs.

The reason why people read blobs is because they find the information there "extremely useful." The audience is about 32 million blog readers (11 million blogs), 25% of Internet users. The ratio is weird, but its a discussion. Its very interactive. 15 million post comments, and 6 million subscribe to RSS feeds.

There is a new model out there for marketers. More to it than awareness, interest, desire and action. Bloggers process is a bit different; knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation.

Wharton Business School had an issue that some publications had a rating system for business schools. They didn't, nor did other schools, have a way to know what the rankings would be. So they decided not to give out their data. That was a risk. So they needed to figure out who the opinion leaders are; staff, faculty, alumni, and current students. The current students were the sweet spot for this. So they put together an MBA admissions blog, where current students answer potential student's questions. The effect was lots of applications (5,622 applicants, 1,219 admitted, 825 enrolled, and 3.5 GPA did not drop). The magic was not just the blog, it was harvesting the opinion leaders.

What happens if you try to fake it, fake opinion? www.ragingcow.com, a company hired bloggers to post wonderful things about this new milk product. This fake attempt failed miserably. All they achieved was a boycott of Dr Pepper/Seven Up's Raging Cow site (number one result is the boycott site in the SERPs).

Amanda Watlington, Ph.D. APR
The 20 Secrets of Success from 70 Bloggers

1. Not All Blogs Look Alike - she showed examples...Wow, she put up a picture of my blog, thank you.
   
2. Not All Blogs Readers and Writers Are Teenagers: April 27 - 10,000,000 mark passed, lots of bloggers are using traditional media to blog topics.
   
3. Most Blogs Have a Limited Audience
   
4. Blogs Threaten the Media (so true; examples is h2otwon.info, ncblogs.com and toledo).
   
5. Not Not All Blogs are Intended to be Media (INDIVIDUAL POLE << creation, collection, context, connection, conversation, community, collaboration >> NETWORK POLE)
   
6. Most Blogs Are Conversations
   
7. Blogs Are Easy to Set Up (She shows an example of Blogger)
   
8. Blogs Are Not Easy to Maintain (blogs must be fed often and require discipline, blogs content must be well written, blog content must be fresh and timely, The blogger's voice must be easily heard in the content, Blogging must be a habit - not a chore)
   
9. Blogs Have Got the "Google Juice"
   
10. Blogs Can Make Money
    
11. RSS - The Big Secret (It drives conversation)
    
12. RSS - Feeds the Mix
    
13. An RSS Feed is Just Another Text File
    
14. Manage Your RSS Feeds
    
15. RSS Readers Make Skimming Easy
    
16. Search Engines Grok RSS (Yahoo News, Ask Yahoo)
    
17. RSS is Not Just for Blogs
    
18. Metrics for Measuring Blogs
    
19. Just Do It!
    

Jeremy Zawodny, Technical Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc.
He said he actually started blogging on his own and then it cropped into the corporate blogs.

Why I Blog?
- I like having a voice
- It helps me connect with smart people
- It's in the Bill of Rights
- Helps me keep up with friends/family
- It is addictive
- It's fun
- The company [now] encourages it

Me vs. Yahoo Me
- I never intended this to happen
- Started writing about technology
- Mentioned Yahoo now and then
- People asked for more
- So I wrote more
- The rest is history

Why Companies Need Blogs
- Small Companies need it for exposure, community, and personal connections
- Big Companies need it to have a human voice, affecting internal change, exposure what's behind the curtains and you get feedback.

Unscientific Survey
- Last year he asked on his blog, "Does reading my blog affect your perception of Yahoo!?
- He posted a sampling of the replies, vast majority were positive, some neutral and some negative.

Surprises
- People read this stuff (people stop him in hall and ask him how is plumbing is going, because he blogged on it)
- People want to know more about Yahoo
- Co-workers read it
- Bosses, founders and CxOs read it
- Journalists too
- And competitors

Risks
- Get Fired (Mark Jen (Google) & Joyce Park (Friendster))
- Piss off Co-Workers
- Look stupid
- Become public whipping boy
- Become tech support for everyone on the Internet

It Got A Strong Reaction...
- Hello GDS, Goodbye YDS (entry on his blog)
- The world could really use Google Calendar (even though yahoo has one)
- On Google Buying Flickr (Yahoo bought them later)
- Yahoo Mail Pisses Off Google's Head PR Guy
- Feed Search vs. Web Search
- He lists a bunch more...

Yahoo Blog Guidelines
- You can get sued
- You can't tell secrets
- Watch out for the press
- Be respectful
- Get your facts straight
- Provide context for arguments
- Engage in private feedback too

Subtle Things
- There is no Yahoo! logo on my blog
- I write "we" most of the time, but will write "Yahoo decided" once in a while. Usually when I disagree.

Random Stats
- Number of times someone has "the talk" 3
- Number of posts being censored 2
- Total posts 1,727
- Total number of comments 14,673
- First post on 6/20/2002

Profit
- I use Google AdSense
- I make hundreds of dollars every month
- I try not to let that influence what I write
- I get a lot of job offers
- I have way more connections with smart people

A new entry in the SEO/SEM social gathering circuit is sponsored by Bill Slawski, an Administrator for Cre8asite Forums and Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal called SEO by the Sea.

Our hosts, for three days in August (19, 20, 21) have been generously creating a delightful outing for anyone who wants to hit the east coast of the USA for fun in the sun, with fellow SEO/SEM's, usability and web design folks.

Location: Havre de Grace, Maryland, USA (French for “Habor of Grace")

So far they've planned:

Friday August 19th:

Make-it-if-you-can Dinner / Pubmeet

Saturday August 20th:

Breakfast & Discussion (possibly a speaker)
Tour of Havre de Grace
Attend Havre de Grace Art Festival (250 artists displaying their crafts on Saturday and Sunday)

Lunch & Discussion (possibly a speaker)
Free Time

Chartered 2 hour Chesapeake Bay / Susquehannah River Tour on the Skipjack Martha Lewis

Dinner and Night on the Town

Sunday August 21st:
So Long Brunch

More info in their new blog - SEO by the Sea and Bill is open to questions at Cre8asiteforums here.

This session is basically an interview and Q & A style with Tim Mayer from Yahoo! Brett gave him a very nice and warm introduction.

Brett asked what Tim thinks about the conference. Tim answered its very useful to get the feedback from the Webmasters. He said search has grown so much but new issues always arise, so this helps.

Brett asks is it your designated position to reach out or is it a team effort? Tim said part of Yahoo!'s mission is to appeal to the Webmasters as well as everyone else. It is not really in Tim's job description to reach out, its just something he has been doing a long time.

Many of the WebmasterWorld people wanted to know from Tim.

Q: How did you approach to being through so many companies, working for so many teams and so on?
A: He said part of it is the relationships he has with people. He has been part of this industry for such a long time. He has always been very passionate about search. That was one of the biggest draws about FAST versus Inktomi (since FAST was more search focuses). He keeps in touch with people. Inktomi had a goodbye dinner for him, he left on a good note - even though he went to a competitor. Then during the acquisition by Yahoo! that was good work.

Q: My Yahoo! is one of the best personal management system. That leads into personalized search, how will that be used in the index?
A: They just launched in the default engine (MyWeb) with the "Block" and "Save" links. This really creates a personalized index for everyone, people have really taken to the product and that is why they moved it to the main results. They also just launched the subscription product. He also mentioned Yahoo! Mindset, which is about a commercial and non commercial classifier (this is not the implementation they will use out of beta he said).

Q: What is the best product you launched this past year?
A: Tim said he loves MyWeb, personalized search experience, since it encompasses a lot. He also likes the media search; "image search - largest index out there", video search (which they sorted invented a method to submit videos), there is so much improvements to be made in media search - so lots of fun to be had.

Q: What is the next thing that will change relevancy over the next year? Is it personalization?
A: Tim said, personalization will give lots of signals (blocking pages, and saving pages). Link popularity has gone so far. He rather know that john Doe knows he likes these types of pages over those, user specific. Also spam fighting (detection) is a big area (blog spam is the big issue last year and now its AdSense scraping causing issues).

Q: Geo delivery is becoming big, search engines getting big into local, etc...where is yahoo going?
A: Yahoo! is going after the most popular queries. But where it will expand is where the businesses are not on the Web. Tim has a baby-sitter, how does she get on the local Web?

Q: What is the biggest product you have out there that is the most under utilized?
A: Tim said the search.yahoo.com is the most under utilized. Everyone goes to Yahoo.com and not the search page. There are lots of customization features with search.yahoo.com. The other service is the YSDN (yahoo service developer network) he encourages everyone to use it, instead of scraping the results.

Q: What is the biggest thing you are fighting out there and the biggest strength?
A: He mentioned my relevancy test and how they won and he said they are doing a good job with rankings. He said overall, discovering new content is some area where all engines can improve (finding new content).

Q: Any big plans for AltaVista and AllTheWeb?
A: He is looking for a product manager to run those two sites, so please apply for the job.

Q: Is there any difference between AV, AllTheWeb, Yahoo's indexes?
A: Tim said they are slightly different, because they tweak to make it more relevant to the user.

Q: How important is the Chinese market?
A: Asia is very important to Yahoo!, they are very big in Japan (60+% share). They have acquired 3721 in China, its a navigational service. He agrees with Shak that China will explode, but he thinks international in general will grow dramatically.

Audience Questions:
Q: Re-inclusion requests, how do we do it?
A: YSD Feedback @ Yahoo .com is the method they track it, they also have a Web form. That is sent to a team that will look at your site. They will usually get back to you. If your violating terms then its hard to respond. More then 50% of the time it is not a ban, its a technical issue. He said its great to get feedback from fellow SEOs before sending it off to a search engine representative. But they do take it seriously.

Q: Does Yahoo have plans to use the feedback they get in MyWeb for ranking purposes?
A: Tim said, if he says yes then everyone will start clicking on everyone else to block or save. He said they will look at the data and if it makes sense, they might use it. They will have to see if it will help relevancy. The main reason was to find old results, people forget how they get to places some times.

Danny Sullivan just announced the new agenda for Search Engine Strategies (SES) in San Jose 2005. This is the big one for most tech savvy webmasters and marketers. Plus the parties are phenomenal! The show will be held August 8-11, 2005 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. I highly recommend to register early, this show books up all hotel rooms in the area.

As part of my Hispanic SEM blogging coverage, I would like to inform you that there will be a session focused just for Spanish language SEM tactics. As described, "This session looks at how to target Spanish speakers within the US and the world through paid and organic search marketing efforts." Speakers give their presentations in English. This session was previously called "Search Marketing To Hispanics & Latin America" (also given in English). The objective is for search engine marketers in various segments reach these growing markets. For example:

• US Hispanic companies targeting US Hispanics (example: Univison.com)


• US American companies targeting US Hispanics (example: espanol.officedepot.com)


• Both US Hispanic and American companies targeting Latin America as well as their own markets (examples: CNNenEspanol.com, Marriott Hotels, United Airlines, etc.)


• Latin American companies targeting their own markets (example: esmas.com, TeRespondo.com, UOL.com, etc)


• Latin American companies targeting all markets that include both Latin American, US Hispanic and American markets (for example: the singer Luis Miguel or the most exported beer in the world, Corona)

This session is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

Jake Baillie was up first to give his Practical URL Rewriting presentation which I covered several times, but the other session I covered as well. Err, I am just going to link to the past coverage of this one. He said its the same slides. May 2005 - Language & Domain Name Issues or December 2004 - Redirects and Rewriting.

Jeff Libert was next up. Doh!Mains
Homeric analysis: All the good domains are taken. Why bother?
Non-Homeric Thought: Trend analysis might hold some promise and who knows who will be the first mover into that domain turf.

Homeric analysis: I need a big honkin world class generic domain for this to be worth my time and effort.
Non-Homeric Thought: What do I pay per click? Hmm...Domain cost???

Homeric analysis: This domain registration stuff is easy! The registrars are all the same.
Non-Homeric Thought: Do a little research
Ask for discounts, go to domain forums (domainstate.com and dnforum.com) and set up accounts for free, start to register a domain, and look out for things (see forums).

When it comes to domains, watch out for trademark issues. He said soon they will just sue you and really go out and put a hurt on you for registering typos of people's trademarks. They want and will send a message.

Don't let your domain names site idle and see what money makes. Do something with them, AdSense, etc.

He said long domains are bad. Dot Coms are best, but he loves the .orgs as well. He said registering nameblogs.com are good. Misspellings are good too (not trademarks). He said the trick of buying a domain name is to pick up the phone and call them. Domain forum valuations +/-, paid domain appraisals, the offer and the non-acceptance, automatic domain renewals, to lock or not to lock, set the DNS, domain addiction, hyphens are bad, make a concrete offer, not everyone wants to sell - move on, bidding wars, you mean club drop caught it.

Monte Cahn, CEO Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com

Industry Growth
- Domain registrations have increased on average of 10% each of the last 2 years
- There are now 70M domain names registered
- 66% of all domains are renewed today versus 45% in 2000-2001
- There are 450+ ICANN Accredited Registrars today
- Most if not all good previously registered names are re-registered when they expire/drop
- 67% of web sites are found through direct navigation

New Trends
- .com is not the only option...and it cant be
- sTLD's - .travel . jobs, . mobi, .xxx
- Length of domains & terms are increasing
- IDN's and Country Codes - ccTLD's
- Most names are going to landing pages or Web sites - not to dead pages

Compliance and Regulatory Issues
-Changes in ICANN Policies - Transfer Policy
- UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy) & WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) - Its Purpose
- WhoIS Accuracy - Why all the fuss?

Security & Privacy
- Domain theft prevention - lock your domains, protect and change PW, don't use commercial emails, registrar oversight
- Traffic Theft Prevention - Register all variations, extensions, misspellings, set ip and DNS properly.
- WhoIS Privacy - why is it used? What are the pros and cons.

Domain Sales and Values
- Upswing in Domain Sales and Prices - UltimateSearch sale to Marchex for $164M
- BuyDomains sells 70% to Highland Capital
- Appraisal values increasing 20%
- Real Metrics on comparable sales and new evaluation factors - PPC, LInk Popularity, Alex, Page Rank, Zone file look ups, etc.

Domain Traffic Monetization
- Domains going to PPC Landing pages and earning registrants and PPC Companies money - Advertisers are Happy.
- Domain Traffic is also going direct to advertisers
- Overture and Google - MSN Coming along with others
- Compare PPC Solutions on a domain by domain basis - do not put all your eggs in one basket

Resources & Forums
- DnJournal.com - News, articles, and recent sales
- DnForum.com & DomainState.com - domain specific forums
- TargetedTrafficForum - domain and traffic monetization
- WhoIs.SC - Historical WhoIS information
- WayBackMachine - Historical Website Info
- WebmasterRadio.FM - 8 shows each week

Ten Tips to Generate & Convert Traffic
1. Purchase industry generic & descriptive keyword domains
2. Create keyword domain sites
3. Think International
4. Cover your basics of SEO
5. Protect Your Domain Names (misspellings, TLDs)
6. Test, Test, Test
7. Create UVP (Unique Value Proposition)
8. A home page is not a landing page
9. Learn How to Monetize Your Domain name
10. Revenue Opportunities (PPC, CPA, CPM)

This super session is moderated by Brett Tabke. On the panel are some big names in search including; Mike Grehan, Daron Babin, Bruce Clay and Todd Friesen (now works for Range Online Media!!!!). He says many of the panelist did both the blackhat and whitehat stuff. This is an open forum, but before hand they will talk each for two minutes.

Mike Grehan, chief executive officer Smart Interactive Ltd.
He said he just had a conversation with Yahoo!'s chief scientist (cant spell his name), he was talking about bandwidth usage on some search sites. He was explaining what the search engines know about the SEOs and end user galaxy. You would be amazed at what the search engines know about the end user. The future of search looks pretty interesting.

Bruce Clay, President Bruce Clay, LLC
He is more concerned with the SEO side of things, a well rounded SEO project. He doesn't focus just on links, just on server, just on content - he does it all or nothing. His focus is on improving the quality of Web sites. Its not the job of an SEO to make a pig fly but rather making an eagle soar. We are working with things not under our control and doing what we can with them.

Daron Babin, CEO NewGen Broadcasting
Daron is more practicle. He looks at user intent, and says half of his clients are morons. Education is a large part of SEO, but also reeducating yourself, search is constantly changing. Its a reactive business. It requires proactive thought to look at what end user intent and not what ones brand is. Daron is an "intent" guy. He said times he will deploy cloaking when his client won't let the design go.

Todd Friesen, Range Online Media
He has two philosophies, (1) his past about brut force SEO, where he didn't want to put in effort in content, etc. "Push button marketing" where you link spam blogs, etc. Entirely game the current search environment. Burn domains, bogus whois. (2) Now his philosophy is shifting more to white-hat, even when he was in the affiliate business. He started actually building more content and more web sites. So now he is working with fortune 500s and he has to be more careful. Fortune 500s have lots of links. What he finds with them is that these fortune 500 sites are no search engine friendly and not easy to update. They work around on how to "fix" these content management systems. Current philosophy is working with the search engines on their client behalf. They will help you out.

Time for open forum part...

Q: LSI and the effect it will have in the future?
A: Daron said he thinks its huge. He said the one thing the dark arts do is drive better search. Search engines plug the loopholes (spam). LSI has been something the coming of contextual relevance. He said it has force guys like Todd to put a white-hat on.
Mike responds that LSI is a method for an engine to deal with words that have two or three meanings. It is very difficult to optimize around LSI. It is not a ranking method. (Perfect Mike! but I hope the audience got it)
Bruce said his thought on LSI has been in his mind for a long long time. We need to figure out how we use other words on the page to help the search engine understand what you are talking about. Our job as an SEO is help people understand what the page is about.
Todd says he has not seen LSI implemented today.
Mike said; Susan Dumais lead scientist at MSN, she is a leader in this area for a long time now.
Daron said Mike is right, LSI has been around for a while, LookSmart discussed it.
Bruce adds that it also helps you rank for words related to that page and not just that phrase.

Q: What is the key differences between optimizing between Yahoo! and Google?
A: Bruce answers that if you see different results on a search engine you can say that half is right and half is wrong. He then brings up Yahoo! Mindset to explain user intent on a search. He said Google leans to research engine (in his opinion) and Yahoo leans to shopping end. He said Google and Yahoo! handle links differently.
Mike said Google outright prefers .gov sites. Google and Yahoo! results are pretty similar, they differ on more niche sites.
Daron said he sees in the PPC (porn pill and casino) arena that you typically have several different approaches with Google then Yahoo!. Yahoo! is easier he said. He said its all about risk tolerance and intent. He said Text-Link-Ads.com is the last standing company in this area, because of the way they market.

Q: Reinclusion and the difference between Google and Yahoo!
A: Todd said to get a second look from Yahoo! use paid inclusion, SiteMatch.

Q: The scrapes are becoming a big issue for him. Is there a way to stop these scrapers? And he gets links from these scraper sites and its bad. He is worried about stolen content and links from bad sites.
A: Todd; You really can't do much to stop them, they will work around anything you do to try to stop them. He said do not publish full RSS feeds (I do but let the scrapers take it).

Q: How do you use RSS?
A: Daron said he loves RSS, he said he just was on the RSS Panel where he podcasts his WebmasterRadio.FM. he recaps some of the SEOing of the RSS feeds, see that session. He said he doesn't see much future in RSS Search spamming.
Mike said for original material, RSS is great to build links.

Q: Google has authority to rank information resources sites well. What is the best way to become an information resource?
A: Mike said by a .gov. He said its difficult.
Bruce said he uses information words "how to", "tips", "information", etc. "Buy Now", "Add to Cart" those shopping words go into graphics. He said the size of the page isnt really that important, but big is good.
Mike adds that search engines us a taxonomy to figure out user intent (informational, transactional, and navigational search queries).

Q: The recent Google patent, talk about it?
A: Mike said that Google is good at making smoke screens (since Matt Cutt's name is on it). TrustRank is is about seasoning, must look natural.
Daron said its a bit "iffy" still. An other example is the "nofollow attribute" which is not well thought out. Mike quickly adds, yea, look at PageRank.

Q: Thoughts on domain name registration?
A: Daron said he wouldnt be surprised.
Bruce said he auto-renews one year at a time. He thinks Google looks at the time you register first. Google also looks at the whois information. If you have 100+ sites under the same registrar whois, and they are linked together, be careful.

Q: Brett asks what is your current thinking on linking?
A: Mike said its the most important area right now.
Todd agreed.
Daron agreed and then goes into making affiliate programs search engine friendly and gives you linkage.
Bruce adds the value of the link outside of search rankings (branding).

This session is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

Amanda Watlington, Ph.D. APR

She started off saying she wants to talk more about podcasting, saying podcasting is not just a fad. She showed slides of figures to prove it is not a fad. Feedster is managing about 6,000 podcasts (podcasts with more then 5 subscribers are included in this study). She explains that podcasting is not just radio. A Detroit band named The Transfer is using it. Sunspot is an other band that is using it to promote. Product promotion is an other use of podcasting, Henkel used it to promote its duck tape. Audio books, EarthCore launched on March 24, with weekly episodes, after 5 weeks over 1,400 RSS feed subscribers. Audio Obit, blog of death is written for obituaries. E-learning is using it as well, some schools provide lectures for download. Social networking is into podcasting as well, "SparkCasting". Audio Guides, PodGuides.net - for travelers. Business applications are using it (competitive intelligence, analyst briefings, corporate breaking news).

Where is the money in podcasting? Money in content, ads, production, publishing, hosting, promotion, searching, catching, and listening.

Success is about imagination and implementation. She shows examples of sites using it...She explains how its important to give multiple avenues to locate the podcasts on the topics you offer (through podcast landing pages, linked through related articles and side navigation - hope I got that right).

Recommendations:
- Focus on Findalibilty
- Use a separate RSS feed
- Include keyword rich wrappers
- Submit to podcast directories
- Provide solid content

She just released a new book named Business Blogs.

Daron Babin, CEO NewGen Broadcasting
He is going to talk to us about podcasting from the radio perspective. He said it has been a learning process of what we need, on demand. Podcasting he explains is not new, its been around for a while. Archives of MP3s have been around since 1997. Being able to form and hand them off in an organized fashion is the new part. For WebmasterRadio.FM it was first about broadcasting and then they got feedback that the listeners wanted to listen to it when it is convenient to them. They put 1 to 1.5 hour shows into one podcast, because that is what his listeners want. But for many, short podcasts are best. As soon as he added podcasting they made mistakes. They had to quantify the listeners to the advertisers. On average I have X podcasts getting listened to X times. FeedBurner he said is great at managing those feeds and provides great stats. He said it is very worth the fees. He said podcasting is in such great demand, that it "blew his socks off". A particular program had an average reach during the live broadcast, then they launched the podcast and that show is getting pounded really hard. Bandwidth consumption jumped a 160X before podcasting. Pitfalls; (1) track your feeds, (2) be prepared for bandwidth issues. Podcast.net, podcast pickle, podcasting news, pod feed. You need to set up pinging, to ping all podcasting directories, so the directories know about it. Keep files at 128 bit rate, its average right now.

Daron then ends with the basic principles of SEOing podcast feeds (titles, anchor text, descriptions). Use good audio gear. Excellent job, no notes, no presentation.

Jeremy Zawodny, Technical Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc.
RSS Feeds and Search

Why RSS? Traffic
- RSS is the ultimate opt in.
- Readers fetch content frequently
- Syndicate summaries and send clicks back to your site
- Add to My Yahoo! button increases subscriber base
- More and more starting to subscribe

Why RSS? Ranking
- Bloggers love RSS feeds
- There are a lot of active bloggers
- They link to sites they like
- they do this every day
- quality links help ranking
- Theres a lot of automatic linking going on.

Online Aggregators
- Bloglines
- My Yahoo

RSS Search
- Technorati
- Feedster
- Bloglines
- PubSub

My comments: FYI - RSS search is very useful, but I have seen spamming of these engines grown daily, making it almost unusable.

Feed Finders and Directories
- My Yahoo
- Syndic8
- Hundreds of others

My Yahoo Content Directory
- Cute directory,

Web Search Results
- Yahoo highlights sites that have RSS results

RSS Soon to be Baked In
- Built in Browsers
- Built in the Mail Clients

Pings & the FeedMesh
- RSS Pinging makes the Web active
- Updates coming in real time
- RSS based search vs. web search

What Can You Do Today
- Good Content
- Provide Feeds and Ping
- Add Them to Directories
- Use The Add to My Yahoo Button
- Read the Publishers Guide to RSS
- Use the RSS auto-discovery link

Yahoo!'s Role
- One Top Shipping Feeds
-- Aggregation
-- Publishing
-- Pings
-- Discovery
-- Search

Garrett Rooney, Software Engineer Bloglines

He shows off bloglines, IMO, one of the best blog readers available.

Audience Benefits
- Consumers: Provides manageable access to new dynamic content, Web based, free.
- Publishers: solutions for building, sustaining and measuring audience, percents distributed of denial of service attacks from desktop readers
- Advertisers: new web ad venue, rick historical targeting info

Consumer Adoption
- 27% of people in US who are online read blogs, 12% post comments and 7% create
- 5% use RSS aggregators
- Evenly divided male/female
- 70% of blog creators/readers are online for 5+ years

Bloglines Evolution
- Focus is on increasing the adoption of the service by mainstream consumers
- Free, personalized news in any language
- Where does it go from here?
-- World Class Blog search
-- Multimedia content
-- Functional RSS feeds for more than just news
-- Richer blogging tools
-- More sharing and social networking features

This session is moderated by Brett Tabke.

Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager, Google Adsense Google Inc.

The Internet Ecosystem
There are advertisers, publishers, and users. The program needs to respect all three parts of the ecosystem.

Drive monetization with targeted ads
Google is committed to helping you achieve the best end to end monetization solution through world-class technology. There is AdSense for content and AdSense for Search.

AdSense for Content
He skimmed over AdSense features, they use targeting methods, click feedback, comprehensive base of advertisers, maximizing revenue by displaying relevant ads, they are global (17 languages), and support all business categories. It uses similiar technology from the organic site but slightly tailored.

AdSense for Search
There is publisher and user benefit. It provides quality search for your users and gives the publisher a way to make money. It is very easy to do.

Site Targeting: New Targeting & Bidding Option
Advertisers specify sites where trhey want to appear, sophisticated site tool pinpoint the right sites, MaxCPM bids (no reservations - its not a fixed model its a max model - so they are pooled with CPC and CPM), site-targeted ads and keyword-targeted ads compete in same auction "May the best ad win".

Link Units
He explains link topics and not ads in the link ads, when someone clicks on the topics, it takes you to ads on the topic. Complementary to other unites, users select the ads they want by user involvement, they are compact enough and uses the same contextual matching technology.

AdSense for Feeds
Goal is to monetize feeds with relevant text ads, highly targeted audiences, increasing traffic and high quality syndicated content. They target based off the entry text not just the title, so its very relevant. The ad serves up in a gif and not html. Ads are displayed in real time. Publisher creates content, users subscribe to feed, advertisers compensate publisher, and revenue from ads allows publisher to grow. :)

Jay Sears, Vice President, Business Development and Publisher Relations ContextWeb

He first goes over the company information, which I am sure you can get from their site.

Contextual Flavors
- Technology or Manual? >> Scalable? Page level technology?
- Real time or Delayed? >> new or some inventory?
- Keywords? Categories? or Both? >> targeted?
- Site-specific or other? >> sales conflict?
- Collects user data or not >> privacy issues?

The ContextWeb Difference
- Real Time Indexing; Dynamic URLs require R.O.C.K., ContextAds is real time, this creates new targeted inventory, older spiders dont work right.
- Categories & Keywords; keywords alone are meaningless. They use both keywords and categories in context to one an other.
- Optimization; it looks at CPM, performance of ad, the keyword, category, creative and publishers.
- Auto Bid System; marketplace determines the minimum CPC, advertiser sets the max CPC and not all clicks are the same value to the advertiser.

Contextual CTR Slide
The increase in "lift" in CTR for contextual ads is 4 - 6 times.

He then wrapped up with a live demo.

Doug Perlson, Chief Operating Officer Kanoodle

Who We Are
- Founded 1999 in NY
- Profitable, 95 Employees
- Team innovated content contextual ads
- Launched ContextTarget in 01/04
- Laucnhed BehaviorTarget on July 7, 2004
- Launched LocalTarget on Sept. 6, 2004
- Launched BrightAds on Sept 20, 2004
- The AVIS of Sponsored Links

Content Requires a Separate Solution
Targeting by keyword on content pages has limitations, like ContextWeb said, you need more. Keyword is binary, Ignores context of page/section, and content sites include pages from broad home pages to smaller niche pages.

The Kanoodle Difference
- The first company to offer advertisers separate solutions for search and content pages
- Several advertise products - more publisher solutions

BrightAds Different
- More control and greater options, greater relevancy, ability to monetize RSS feeds, and easy payment options (including paypal). He came out and said Google kicks his A@# for niche target contextual matching but they are improving.

Publisher Demand Control
- Bright Ads Offers four products (content, RSS, Pops, Cookies)

BrightAds Content
- First sponsored links provider to map by topic
- Utilizes combination of editorial mapping and page scan technology
- Great network of partners
- Flexibility
- Human Element
- Revenue per Click method
- etc...

BrightAds RSS
He shows an example in Bloglines

BrightAds Pop
Skips over it, because everyone hates pop up ads.

BrightAds Future
- Expanding to thousands of topics in summer 05
- Already robust ads
- etc.

Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and SVP, Product Management Quigo, Inc.

Company Info
- Founded April 2000
- HQ is NY with 75 employees
- Funding 12M
- Technologies licensed by eBay, Yahoo and Lycos
- Two products - AdSonar and FeedPoint

What is AdSonar
Contextual ad marketplace, etc.... Its all algorithmic, yada yada.

What makes AdSonar Different?
- Fully branded interface offered to premium publishers
- They encourage to create and maintain advertisers relationship and offer private label solutions
- Separate bidding on premium publishers (so advertisers can bid privately - very cool)

Unlocking Value for Premium Publishers
Brands lose value on CPC in a "blind network" as opposed to this network.

Topic Based Bidding
- The marketplace is topic based and not keyword based.

PageMatch
- PageMatch allows bidding on specific pages with high volume traffic.
- You can bid differently for each page.

Automated Topic Suggestion
- Takes a lot of the guest work out of the advertisers hand.

Average CPC is 65 cents, AdSonar is for smaller publishers too, and they are more active in travel, autos, local, health, etc.

This is pretty interesting news and one that shows how MSN is looking to automate some of the editoral process to fine tune its search results. They have introduced us to something called Neural Net Technology, which as Danny points out appears to be some enhanced way to recognize the good from the bad. He allows points to a MSN research paper that Gary found about neural net technology, except it calls it RankNet. MSN has released details of this new technology here which goes on to talk about how the team has obsessively focused on the relevance of the web results. It really doesn't go into much about the new technology just that it gives the example of the search "pbs evolution videos" as an example of improving results by raising the main PBS website to the top for the particular phrase. It would make sense for this site to be at the top, and MSN is trying to get it there. They provide the example of a nifty color indicator (below) to show how the term "pbs evolution videos" has risen to the top. The green is the actual PBS site rising int he ranks finally to number one. What the yellow is appears to be either another relevant page fromt he same site, or other closely match relevant sites to the search query.

MSN Adds New Commands

inanchor: - this will make some people what a cool command that lets you search all the text in anchors. However as Danny reports here, its NOT working right now.

filetype: - search by filetype, pretty simple

inurl: - find pages that have text within the url, nifty feature

intitle: - search the title of sites only

linkdomain: - a favorite of SEO's, the linkdomain: replaces link: and does a pretty good job of finding all incoming links to the site.

contains: - this one is a tad interesting, it lets you find pages with links to documents of a particular filetype.

The SEW Forums are a buzz this morning with results for this new technology and what people are seeing happen. I have been studying it closely myself and there are some distinctions. One of the member originally noticed heavy changes back at the start of the month, and in which other follow up to report some different changes as well in the rankings of their pages. Sudden spikes in traffic seem characteristic lately of the new changes being put in place. My observations are in line with the first poster on the thread where the spike was seen in the beginning of the month. Marcia and a few others are seeing good spikes right now.

Continue discussing at SEW Forums

This is the morning session, the only session taking place between the 9:00 - 9:45 slot; to just chat.

He introduces Philip Kaplan and how much he is interviewed and his past. Philip talks about mobog.com and how people are constantly posting pictures none stop. He admit it has gone completely to the gutter, with nude pictures constantly being posted. FC.com was started in April 2000 with cold fusion. He did some Web development in the past. But for the most part, he had people come to him with huge budgets and he built sites for them. He built some BBS software after outgrowing the open source or paid stuff he did. Before he had his own business he worked for an other company, think for new ideas, inc. A customer needed a super simple form on his web site and he said it would be a $150 for the form. He told his boss the price and his boss said we should charge $2,000. Then his boss gave it to the sales guy who added an other zero to it, so now it was $20,000 for a 10 minute form. He then built Avon.com for 1.5 million or so. He then decided to do this on his own, since there was a lot of money to make.

He started an obituaries site for dying companies, which recorded obituaries and its incredibly popular. Brett asked him if he felt guilty about it? He said no way. There are many creative ways to make sites make money. That is how he started F*ckedCompany.com and charged a fee to post stuff ($75). $75 came from his cable bill, so he reasoned if he had one subscriber, his cable bill is paid for.

The owner of WebLogsInc came up with an idea to take all press releases and mined financial data from those press releases. He made a ton of money selling this data (which most people trash, I do) to wall street companies.

He said he never did SEO his whole life. He said Google and other search engines does a good job ranking good quality sites, like his. He said, my advice, build quality useful site. He said he drove traffic to his site by making up hotmail addresses and posted into some sites where people were pro for this company and he went in there and posted a link to his site (acting like its not his site). We see this all the times in forums, that is how a lot of buzz starts. Brett said, so your a forum spammer.

Brett asked why did people find out so late that the boom was going to happen? Philip said why did it happen in the first place. He said some people made a lot of money during this boom.

How did AdBright start? He said he was running F*ckedCompany and he wanted to build up advertising but nothing worked right. Ad the same time people were emailing him wanting to advertise on his site. He didn't have a way to manage this. So he couldn't find a company to do it. So he built it just for F*ckedCompany only. So he has "Your Ad Here" that took you to a shopping cart. The first day he sold out and he raised his prices. He said other sites can use it so he turned it into AdBright. September 2004 he realized it had potential, he decided to get some funding for AdBright. So he went out and bought a booth, which the airline lost and he had to build his own (kinda funny since he 4 million in funding).

F*ckedCompany originally used a shared hosting company site and they called him and moved him to a dedicated. The site is pretty old school, its a whole mix of technology (flat files, cfm, php, perl, etc.) Its now on 3 boxes and he said its all a mess. He said his boxes are all rusted and nasty. He said AdBright is done right with 60 severs all uniform (PHP, MySQL, Apache). AdBright has two datacenters, 100MB per second.

Q: Do you see competitors coming?
A: Like anyone they have seen lots of copycats. AdBright users are all gun-ho about AdBright. So AdBright customers send marketing materials of other AdBright competitors to him. He said what they do is a lot like AdSense (they were before AdSense). But here you manage all ads, who advertises on your site, you set pricing and so on. Google and AdBright are moving towards each other in technology perspective.

Q: Are you getting into branding ads (now mostly text links)?
A: Yes, they are going to do this. In fact, AdBright started with banners. The whole idea is it is a tool for the publishers. But if the publishers wanted popups, they would facilitate it. Within a month or two you can see banner ads.

Q: Shaq asked if Philip thinks we are going to see a boom number two?
A: Its a bit different now then it was then. He said in the past it was a powerpoint that got funded. But now people who get funded are those that have real working products. But also, look at AdWords people were paying up to $150 per keyword, and that will bubble but its a little bubble.

Q: How many clients have right now and what type of accounting solution do you have.
A: The homepage of AdBright tells you in real time. They tried to make AdBright very transparent compared to how Google does it. "Serving 131,800,601 daily pageviews on 4,834 sites" at the time I write this. Probably 20,000 advertisers on the network. The accounting system is home grown, and its integrated in QuickBooks (cool).

Last minute they decided to combine the two sessions. Search reps couldn't make it and a speaker from the Lead Generation session couldn't make it last minute.

Gregory Markel from InfuseCreation.com
Keywords & Ad Copy: The larger your keyword base, the better chance you have to lower your overall CPC/CPA. Include all variants of the keyword. Don't be fooled by your "common sense" in keyword selection.
Keyword Tracking: Basic tracking variables are search engine, keyword, clicks and conversions. Also try to track individual keyword, ROIs and so on. 3rd party tools include; Google and Overture's free tools, Atlas One Point, Did-It, and KeywordMax.
Ad Copy: The quality of ad copy is one of the most critical in this chain. He showed an example of bad PPC copy; all lower case, body text is missing "trigger words", the URL doesnt reinforce keywords. Then compared it to a very good ad, basically the opposite of the bad one. Tip # 1; watch competition ads for several days to see patterns and consistency. Tip # 2; write a specific ad for each keyword phrase you target. Tip # 3; test for multiple ad copy. Tip # 4 monitor CTR for each ad. Tip # 5 check competition ads. Tip #6 Common sense does not always work. Test and go by the numbers and not your subjective opinion.
Landing Page: Landing page types include; single static pages commonly have the lowest conversion rate. Do not send all your ads to one landing page, be creative and spend more time on it. An other type is a micro-site which have higher conversion rates because they have be developed top statically or dynamically tailor those pages to the keyword phrase. An other way to boost conversion rates is to do A/B testing. The final method he listed was to do Multivariable testing, your also testing the elements of the design, form, functionality of this page (you test each component statistically). Conversion expectations should be realistic, most people have a conversion rate below 1% but can be between 1 and 2%. Generally, he sees anything lower then 3% is too low and have achieved as high as 36% conversion rates. Page economy is important, you must extract all non essentials from the page and deliver that message in that area (less = more). All important elements/messaging must be above the folder. Page must load quickly. Test pages on all browsers, use viral campaigns (email a friend), do not be verbose, test with and without an incentive, include an 800 when possible. Measure visitor event behavior and adjust to it often.
Tuning: You want your client to tell you the maximum they are willing to spend to get that lead. That number will be used as a ceiling for your CPC. Qualitative campaign tuning elements must be done often (keyword conversions, ad copy tuning, search engines, landing page tuning and so on).
Beyond: He then showed some very advanced campaigns. Tracking SEM leads online for offline sales. Leads generated in almost "real time" to live call centers, classified as "cold", "warm", or "hot." Dynamic site content changes triggered via 'what/ifs' based on lead behavior resulting in same session sales.

Cheryle Pingel from Range Search Marketing
She said she is basically going to explain why she is upset with the search shopping engines but explains that they are making progress. She showed a screen shot of Yahoo!'s homepage in 1999 where they were promoting the Yahoo! Shopping network and then showed Yahoo! today, difference, the promotion of Yahoo! Shopping is much less. Back then they took a percentage of sales and now they don't. Google in 1999, simple search page and now Google with a Froogle tab (says "Smart Shopping" on Froogle). What is smart shopping, what we have now is not smart shopping (I agree). For a laugh, she was acting out her reaction to something and used the S word (and apologized, but no one was insulted at this geekfest). She then shows MSN in the old days with a shopping link, and today they announced integration with Price Grabber. She said no one is using Shopping portals, its all about integration with Web search. Now MSN shopping link is not even above the fold. She talks about the new MSN Search Shopping blog and complained that when she added a comment, it didn't add the comment. If the shopping search portals are not the way to go (if, if) where is there to go? She brings up a site named Daily Candy which is a fun local shop site. She then brings up Amazon.com and shows how Amazon personalizes things for her at the site. Back to Yahoo! Shopping, and explains that its not just about money spent, she does a search on "sheets" and see the Overture ads at the top above the shopping results (cannibalization). MSN Shopping, she said she gives them props, because they make it pretty and has the "emotion of buying" in the design. She then brings up Yahoo! Mindset (the slider thing), she shows how it works. She then brings up Froogle. Then she shows some shopping search feed export files with optimized names. She said its true 30% that if you "optimize" the title, it will rank you higher. She said, spending more money typically makes more money. She feels the beginning is near for shopping search engines.

Now you have no excuses for finding excellent pizza in your hometown. MSN not to be left out has entered into Local Search arena with its own version of city and regional searching capabilities. Looks like they are going hand and hand with the moves of the other search giants out there. Better late than never might be true for them. A thread on SEW forums talks about MSN Local in more detail and it has just been annouced today at the WMW conference in New Orleans.

There is a great thread at WebmasterWorld that is talking about what people think of the new search. One of the moderators over there raises some good points as to the significants new capabilities of their search in relation to other local search options out there. The search includes a Google like display, it's proximity ranked, it comes from internet derived data, and contains no user reviews or rich business profiles. This seems like a natural and predicted step for MSN to undertake, and so far it looks like a good one.

I got a moment to test out the local search and did some default searches. I can say it looks good, and I most notably like some of the navigation options at the top and the neat ability for it to highlight on the map the location of a place as you move your mouse over the business listings. The map is good, but I still love the Gmaps interface a tad better.

Check it out MSN Local Search. Continue discussing on SEW Forums and WMW.

Brett Tabke is moderating this session, named Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines . I have expectations that this might shade towards the side of black hat writing. But I am not too sure about that expectation, we will see...maybe I am hopeful. He introduces the folks, Ted as the best designer out there and Jen as the foremost expert in AdSense.

Ted Ulle - Partner The MEWS Group
How do you put together a complete package so your content doesn't get lost in the way. How to avoid the "frankin site." Work flow must support your priorities. Your business goals must be number one; must look simple & seamless to the end user (which works for both the user and the search bot). So simplicity has to be your discipline. Work flow; (1) Web strategy (SEO - keyword design process) he explains he gets annoyed when a client brings a completed site to him and asks him to "SEO it" (I know, I know...), (2) Content (3) Backend & Metrics (4) Information Architecture (5) Menu & Content (2nd round), your menu is content (6) Graphic Design, now talk to a graphic designer (7) Final Web Edit in HTML. Make sure to document each decision.

Web Strategy - SEO
- Mine your Market's Language. Look at forums, emails, keyword neighborhoods (LSI - he explains that LSI is out there (my comments: not too sure if LSI term should be used here...) and you do not need to stuff the keywords in there, the engines will figure it out based on your "universe around your keyphrase"). He said you can now, more then ever before, write for the users and have confidence the search engines will pick it up properly (my comments: I like that).
- Research the Market's Concerns
- Build a Process - Not a Product

Content
Skiing is a high control approach, which is like pick your phrase and force it to rank.
Surfing is when you use shifts in environments, which is when your write your content, watch logs, and tweak for phrases that already bring traffic.

Backend Choices
Not by Default - there are choices, this is technical bedrock, check server headers/mime types, don't put everything on index.php? (2,000 pages all in one index.php).

Build In the Metrics
Already know the business goals, define the key metrics, and logs are almost never enough for tracking purposes and then build in what you need right here.

Information Architecture
Learn something about this field from Information Architecture for the Small Site and Putting Information Architecture into Practice.

Menu & Navigation
Menus are Content (make it descriptive). Tell a story of the site in your navigation (it can work well). Single Words or Longer Phrases all work. Too many equivalent choices is the same as no choice

Graphic Design
Only now and not before the other steps do the graphic design. IA and menus in place, graphics must not drive the process. designer must respect the medium. Work with the designer.

Final Web Edit
This is not a time to be timid, content interacts with layout, ask for outside opinions (couple of people outside). Really get someone who really knows CSS, you can kill good content with bad layout and boost content with good layout.

Showing off works against your business; typical culprits are graphic designers, server side spaghetti, client side features, print mindset and IT folks writing copy (email messages, error messages and so on). Accidents will happen, despite all your planning things will need to be reworked. He then concludes very elegantly.

Jennifer Slegg - President JenSense
Jen is going to talk about Duplicate Content. Duplicate content is when your original article can be found on more than a single page on the internet, it will go into the supplemental index (one of them will). Google finds new version of the article (people who took your content) and places your original content in the supplemental index. To find stolen content, take snippet of the middle of the article or so and paste it into Google with quotes around it, and then presto. Copyscape.com helps you find duplicate content, there are some third party tools that can alert you if one of your selected articles were stolen. What can you do to remove stolen content? Take screen shots, then send a cease & desist to site owner, send a DMCA notice to search engines or send a DMCA to hosting company. She then describes each one in detail (i'll take a little break here). Interesting, Google sends all DMCAs reported to them to chillingeffects.org. The infringer can file a counter complaint to get back in. If this happens, use archive.org to prove date for when the site has been there.

Heather Lloyd-Martin - Director of Search Strategies WebSourced, Inc.
She was unable to make it here today. She is a great speaker and its a real shame for the audience.

Q & A:
Q: How did you do an LSI analysis?
A: Ted said from a site named Theme-Master.com for a fee. But he said you don't have to be that heavy, just go to top ranking pages and look at content and write down nouns used on those pages.

Q: What percentage triggers a duplicate content filter?
A: Jen answers that it was a low percentage of duplication (50% or so) about two years ago, then it let up and now its low again. But the percentage is really unknown.

They should probably label this update the "Do Nothing" update for the fact that it didn't do much more than clean up the index. Which is definately good, and in most cases better than the latter, but I think it kinda had a lot of people's hopes up for something a lot worse. Which seems to be a result of past updates from other unmentioned search engines that have us shell shocked a bit. To Yahoo though, we can say they are kinder creature this time around. I have been following a lot of the forums this morning on the results from the update. Many people not really seeing any changes whatsoever as a result of the changes. One member on SEW even labeled it a clever farce, or maybe an early summer joke.

What does seem to be happening is characteristic of how Yahoo handles sites low quality sites in the top results. They consequently don't ban them, they just knock those top sites down a page or two. I have read about 4 reports today of people claiming to have the #1 position for a term and then consequently getting slapped down to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th page. Some may disappear completely. Once at the #1 spot its not necessarily smooth sailing on open waters, so don't get too comfortable. Barry posted on SEW that he think "They didn't say anything about a new algorithm. Just improved index, which implies more sites in the big Yahoo Search database." Sounds close to me.

Check out some of the other forums discussing the Do Nothing Update

SEO Chat
SEW Forums
Digital Point

Stephanie Leffler, the CEO of Monster.com is moding up this session. Behind the scenes, Jake Baillie is up first because he has to run to an other session taking place (at the same time) to speak on both panels (iron man of search speaking).

Jack Baillie - TrueLocal
Local search issues from the True Local perspective. TrueLocal history was up first, their mission is to drive offline sales online, TrueLocal has 30,000 unique queries per day and TrueLocal is tiny. Regular users are sick of results from main search engines (all that spam). Technical issues; use local hosting, have a spider-able address on your site, have a store locator on your site, put your catalog online, get listed in shopping engines, data providers (d&b, infousa, etc.). Average word count per search is 1.8 (after entering in location), most popular category is restaurants and top feature request is up to date data. Most popular cats; restaurants, dentists, apartments, golf courses, kitchen cabinets, furniture, gyms, tax help, movie theaters, dry cleaners, government offices and construction. Most popular location, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, San Diego, NY, San Diego, etc. Biggest challenges, fresh data (closed businesses), determining user intent (local user or traveler (65% are travelers)), differentiation from our competitors, approximate matching, categorization and synonyms. Local search advertising considerations; online ads local do better, IYP vs Local Search vs Directories, pay per call vs pay per click vs sponsorship (click fraud issues and patent issues with ppc), many times - its cheaper, an advertisement for restaurants in 60603 is getting about 10,000 impressions per month.

Justin Sanger - LocalLaunch
Separating Local Search Issues:
- Local Search Targeting
Local search belongs in everyone of these sessions (local web site development (50%+ local businesses do not have Web sites), local PPC (geo ip), local SEO (geo keyword), local authority identification and internet yellow pages (IYP). Basically, he is tired of people saying local search is new, it is not new.

- Small Business Adoption
There is opportunity; 60% of SMEs conduct 75% of their business from customers within a 50-mile radius, 22 million small and medium sized businesses, $22 billion spent on local ads, $15 billion in yellow pages, 46% of their ad budget on yellow pages and only 3% on Internet. The difficulty; SMEs have on average $5,000 per year to spend on marketing, complexity of paid search products, product bundling necessities (my comment: make it easier, remember Yahoo!'s free Web site and local listing?), and lack of established local search engine sales channels (product simplification aggregators and agency support).

- Local Search Segmentation
Why Segment Locally? Google Local & Yahoo Local is where you see it, unique environments for local. 20 - 35%+ of all search has local intent, local search requires unique results sets, different drill down requirements, approximately 90% of search conversions occur offline. Local search data is coming from offline content (D&B, InfoUSA, etc), internet content (web page contact us pages, etc.), and user content (registered with engine). Local Search needs to display business profiles (structured data), user reviews, proximity scoring, business ratings, and mapping features. He then brings up a Yahoo! Local result, and its great and you must look at your local results (my comment: Yahoo! does an excellent job with this). He said you should go in there and rate the business with five stars (I did that and reported it to Yahoo!).

- Innovation and Pure Plays
Social networking, life management, pay per call, mobile are all methods of to innovate your business to do well in local.

- Local by Locals
Is there room in the marketplace? Yes. Search engines by nature are horizontal. Vertical coverage is achievable by local businesses, unlike major search engines. Local media, like newspapers have an advantage.

John De Vitis - MSN Search
He is the product unit manager at MSN Local Search. They launched MSN Search on Feb. 1, when they first did this, they introduced this "Near Me" button on the search box, allowing to provide more relevant results. Today they are happy to announce their local search offering that looks a lot like Google Local (sorry), it shows a listing in directory style ordered in proximity, with maps on the right (with more filtering options and satellite views). Next for Local is to integrate MSN Earth with local. MSN Search Strategy; (1) Better Answers, Faster, (2) Broader Selection, (3) Integrated User Experience, (4) Platform for Innovation.

Ryan Massie - Ask Jeeves
What is local search? 10 - 15% Ask.com searches have local modifiers, More than just business listings (its maps, web, weather, movie), local impact. Challenge 1 is understanding user intent and challenge 2 is delivering the right results (volume, and freshness/comprehensivness). Understanding Intent is what he explains next by showing a keyword search for "Atlanta Bread Company". Ask brings up ways to help the searcher figure out; they bring up a local vertical box at the top and then the web results and further more they have "related searches" on the right side. Ask gets content from CitySearch with line listings, ratings and reviews. CitySearch is the content, infousa for line listings, google adwords for web search ad pages. Opportunities to improve local search through better content (structuring web content), search (intent), social and personal qualities of local search (craigslist, wikis, and personalization).

Roger Montti (martinibuster) was up first to talk about AdSense Integration. He broke up the different types of Web sites that have AdSense on them. When is an AdSense optimized site created to induce clicks versus presenting relevant content? He shows an example of a blog with AdSense outside on bottom left. He said if you move it to the middle, it will increase CTR. What is relevant information? On average bounce rates are up to 50%. AdSense Ads are content too, well, kinda... You need to treat them as blocks of content, integrate your ads using the same blending you would to other content, and monetize the 30 - 50% who bounce away without alienating visitors who are there for your content. Tips: Use the same color background and text and think of your ads as part of your content but don't overdue it. He said he is experimenting using CSS to embed AdSense to float AdSense ads to any area of the page, he noticed a 13% CTR on those.

Jennifer Slegg from JenSense (aka JenStar) was up next to talk about increasing your AdSense earnings with testing. She says it is one of the easiest ways to increase your earnings is by testing. Testing variations of colors, placement, ad unit sizes and more can make a difference in your earnings. There is a sweet spot on one site that might not be a sweet spot on the same site (different content or template can dictate the sweet spot), so you must test. What can testing do for you? (1) Increase earnings, (2) you can apply what you learn and (3) it will help on other sites. Tools for testing AdSense, office google tools (custom channels, url channels), AdSense Preview Tool and The only way to get specific earnings data is from Google's Official Tools. Third party tools; know what specific ads are being clicks on, what page they are located on and what IP clicked. Get CTR color data on a title, description, URL, border and background level, does not have any earnings data, and download .csv data from control panel and graph earning trends. Start your testing, keep track of those results, timing is everything, avoid holiday weeks in the country of your primary traffic. She goes over the pros and cons of Custom and URL channels (she prefers custom channels for doing testing). What Should you Test? Ad Unit colors; test border-less techniques, size and placement, above the fold, right column placement even above fold is the worse place to put it. Final thoughts, test on regular basis, try all variables, keep track of those changes.

Venkat Kolluri Chitika was next up, he will be giving the inside story from the contextual ad company perspective. There are online publishers and online audience, and there are lots of merchants/advertisers with products and services (connecting them the right way and at right time is important). How do you turn page views into profits? First they need to turn the content, keywords, topics and categories into "Currency Tokens" to be used for the ad program. How do they do this? (1) They need a really good, real time spidering system to extract the content. (2) Text mining to quickly identify the meat of the content on the page. (3) Info extraction (currency tokens), (4) ad selection (maximize revenue) and (5)feedback loop. The challenges and how online publishers can help the contextual ad providers? They love spider friendly pages, iframes confuse the spiders, spiders are text hungry (give them text). Text minding, they are primary english focused, structure of pages (titles, headings, etc.), Information extraction (currency token), did you say Spears or Brittany Spears? Stick to one topic so they can figure it out. Advertising is not a one way street. Customer is the king, demand more flexibility and control. Browsers or clickers or shoppers (so experiment with multiple models (CPM, CPC, CPA). Advertising vs. Product Merchandising (you need to test these).

Brett Tabke started off with an introduction to the conference. He explains that they re-scoped all the sessions and discussed some of the popular ones coming up. Next WMW conference will be in Las Vegas, Nov 15 - 17 and Pub Conference 9 will be in London in September 30th, one day only. He then introduced John Battelle (damn famous search blog, ran Wired, and wrote The Search (to be out soon)). He said John is the man who knows where our industry is going. He then brought up the reason why WMW doesn't link to blogs and he said John's blog is the exception to the rule.

John Battelle thanked Brett for the warm introduction. He describes who he is, with a who is this guy slide. Schooled at Berkeley, helped to found Wired, then started HotWired (remember that), he thinks he started first banner ad model with prodigy, then he left Wired and went to the Industry Standard (thestandard.com) (my all time favorite magazine until it closed), he then spent 6 million dollars on a CRM system that reversed engineered AdWords (before AdWords was around), he then went back to Berkeley after thestandard "blew up". At Berkeley he did lots of research on search and saw that Google and Overture were ripping it up (not blowing up), and he describes how his new book "The Search" talks about that. He then talks about his blog, Searchblog (100,000 readers). He then started a conference named Web 2.0 (lots of discussion on that like 6 months ago). He then brought up boingboing.com (most popular blog in the world) and described how he mad money from it for them. He then announced his brand new company FM company.

Web 2.0: He describes the version1 of the net versus the version 2 of the net (lose money versus make money). The rise of Web 2.0; Mod-late 90s, we thought whomever one the browser war wont he internet, but its not that, its more about the content services. Web is a robust development platform. The architecture of participation; businesses are leveraging user-generated content & the force of many to create advantage and value. HE says that innovation is in "Assembly", i.e. Dell, Feedster, etc. Lightweight business models are in and smart. He describes "the power of the tail"; where he says they should change the name of this "meet the google engineers" to "the google engineers meet the tail." He said "Search Rules", its the driver of Web 2.0, search heralds the new Web OS, its a cultural point, a new reality for all forms of business and artifact of a new culture and its just the beginning. He shows some money slides on why search rules (cant type that fast). He shows slides of the "length of the query" and as you have a long query, the higher the CTR is (the tail of CTR). There is much more usage of the Internet then ad dollars in Internet (huge potential growth). New media was not that new he says. He realizes now that in the past, they were using old model publishing (print) in a new medium (Web). Search blew this old model up; he describes "intent before content." He said publishers are just realizing this now and they are freaking out. Ad models are shifting to intent. We have search, RSS, blogging are all redefining the model. The rise of the "point to" economy. He asks, "what about branding?" The reaction of mainstream media business is to save the old model, they fight search and what makes it work (they call Google a killer). He describes how his new company will help other companies work with the new media. He feels the blog is a publication, it innovates in assembly, its low cost, good blogger is a good editor/filter, deep-linked and conversational, author is a leader in community, for now, mainly non commercial, there is a direct relationship between author and audience (so true). Blogs are for real, he showed some stats (10+ million blogs, 35 million readers in 2004, people are clearly reading). John's theory of publication is that there are three elements to a great publication; publisher, marketer, and audience. He describes that the marketer adds to the publication (some ads are so sweet and tells you the health in the market). He believes the best publications are those that use the communication between these three. The reality is that the publisher and the marketer are talking direct. The audience is there, out there, the authors talk somewhat to the authors and the authors somewhat talk to the publisher. But the marketer is out of the loop, its not balanced. Blogs have a great convo going between author and audience, but its missing the marketer (except for the AdSense). He said we can do better, he said AdSense doesn't really work (its only keyword based and not marketing driven). What that means is the marketer needs to be smarter then a keyword algorithm search. The problem is there are too many blogs, how do you stay focused. AdBright, WeblogsInc, and FMPublishing are solving this issue. These companies connect the blogs to the marketing aspect they are missing. Basically he will bundle these blogs together, in marketing terms. He then sums up.

I wanted to inform you about a new blog that was officially announced today that is at http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/. It is run by Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads. The blog talks link building and link building only. There are currently around 30 link building entries for you to read there.

Good work!

Here is a snapshot in time for you with 9,981 rated searches completed to date. Total searches placed at RustySearch is 14,000+, of which, 9,981 were rated.

The graphs and charts below are the most recent results pulled from The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge, RustySearch search engine. I'll explain each graph and chart below.

The "Search Engine Relevancy Dials" below show how each search engine scored on average in terms of relevancy on a one through five scale at this point in time. The search engine with the highest score is considered the most relevant search engine voted by you.

Search Engine Relevancy Dials

This link graph groups search engines by rating. The reason we plotted it on a graph like this is to show you that there is this U shaped curve that is consistent between all search engines when rated. In our opinion, it means that most people either feel the results are relevant or not relevant. Very few people feel that a search engine can be "somewhat" relevant.

Finally, here is a raw summary count of data that we placed on a simple chart view for you. This data is real time and will continue to update as people rate. The averages from top-down are the average rating count by search engine. The averages from left-right are the average rating count by rating group. The value at the far bottom-right corner is the total rated search results obtain at this point in time at RustySearch.

There are some reports from a member on SEW Forums that says he is experiencing sites who initially get indexed for the first time going straight into supplement results. I can't say I see this as being a good sign in anyway. He goes into how he has watched several sites for a few indexing cycles and noted that they are getting dumped into the abyss of supplement results index. Some people are saying that if you launch a new website and your pages go into the supplemental index, its not Google, its your pages. Marcia, a moderator at the forums says that new sites no not go into the supplemental result index and that it has to be a result of something else. Some people are disagreeing with a few other members jumping in saying that it does indeed happen, and for some site they get into this index before going into the true index of results. In my opinion it could be related to pages with no links to them that get this effect when first indexed. The thread meanders on with feedback and disagreement about certain issues. If you are experiencing this, you might want to jump in, otherwise it looks like new sites do not first go into the supplemental index automatically.

Discussion at SEW Forums - New Sites & Supplemental Results

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets have some amazing implications to help the SEO create better optimized pages without tables in addition to a fluid and clean design that not only helps visitors put helps search engines get to the content of your page. There is a very good thread on Crea8site Forums I wanted to highlight as its got some gems to take away for those that use CSS to design websites. Barry Welford started the thread with a tip that helps many browsers deal with DIV tags by using a containing block to help get the positioning right. He says "It's so simple too. It's always to use two divs one inside the other." He goes into detail that his tip works well for many browsers such as Firefox and IE that might treat the width, padding, and borders differently.

Some of the members go into detail why this is and not useful in most cases. Adrian goes into saying that unfortunately we wouldn't need to use the hack unless all browsers handled div's correctly, basically stating that the hack is using 2 div's to do the job of one. Most designers I run into don't go as far as the hack mentioned in the thread but instead use container div's for overall page layout as Adrian mentions. There are some good posts and information from some experts on how they design. Plus some nice resources for other sites to help with CSS. Felt this thread deserved a mention for its great content.

Check out CSS, Style, and Positioning - The Single Best Rule No One Told Me

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! blogged today an entry named Second Weather Report: Yahoo! Launching New Search Index Tonight. The first weather report was named Tim Update because Tim announced it, I wonder what this one will be named... I am pretty sure they rushed this new index out before the WebmasterWorld conference but Google already has the name Bourbon Update.

The weather report reads;

We will be making changes to the index tonight so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

I am hopeful that this will resolve much of the reported indexing issues since the last update.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An SEO Chat thread named Yahoo BLOCK element discusses the new Yahoo! MyWeb feature that allows you to save and block (amongst others) Web results from your SERPs. The SEO Chat thread discusses the possibility that Yahoo! can and will use this data to either deflate a page's rankings with the block feature or boost a page's rankings with the save feature.

As many of you know, the WebmasterWorld Conference is taking place tomorrow through the end of the week. I have set up a category for this specific conference named WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans. I hope to provide almost real time coverage of the sessions I attend (depending on wifi access / Internet access).

I have not looked at the session offerings yet, if you want me to attend a specific session, feel free to request so below. Forum coverage will be light this week, I know Ben will do his best, but this week will be mostly WebmasterWorld Conference coverage.

There is a thread at DigitalPoint forums from back in April that caught my attention. The thread is named Google "ADD URL" hurts your potential rankings? which links to an SEO Chat article which reads:

First, let me tell you what you don't do. You don't use the "Add URL" form with Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Believe it or not, using that form to let Google know about your site will actually hurt your PR and, at the same time, make Google rank you lower. In other words, you absolutely never want to use that form, or the similar form on any other search engine, to promote your website.

The thread at DigitalPoint takes issue with this quote. If it was the case that using the Add URL form at Google (or any other search engine) would hurt your rankings, why wouldn't a competitor submit all your sites time and time again? What I believe the author was trying to convey, which he did not do, was that one should not waste their time with automatic submission programs. The author, in my opinion, should not have gone to the extent of writing - "Believe it or not, using that form to let Google know about your site will actually hurt your PR and, at the same time, make Google rank you lower."

On topic to this, is a recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Whats a good program to do the once-a-month submissions?

On Friday night, my WSJ RSS subscription showed a title that read something like Google Plans Online-Payment Service, which Gary Price at SEW Blog quickly uncovered under his blog entry title A New Business for Google: Online Payments. Updated news stories reveal that the code name for this Google project is "Google Wallet."

Of course the forums are buzzing about this news:
- WebmasterWorld
- DigitalPoint Forums
- Cre8asite Forums
- Search Engine Watch Forums

As a continuation to my attempt to host the "Best Search Forums Awards", where I asked many of you to nominate best search forums....

So far the forums to be rated on several dozen criteria (which I still need to work up, if you have ideas, feel free to comment) are:

- Cre8asite Forums
- DigitalPoint Forums
- High Rankings Forum
- I Help You Forums
- JimWorld Forums
- SEO Chat Forums
- SearchGuild Forums
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- SitePoint Forums
- WebmasterWorld Forums
- WebProWorld Forums
- WebWorkShop Forums

If you have suggestions for public search forums that should be added to this list, please let me know. If you have suggestions for criteria to be used when evaluating these search forums, please let me know.

Nomination process will close a week from tomorrow and then I create the survey, where anyone can respond to.

Thank you.

Brazilian search engine marketer, Alexandre Kavinski, just informed me that next week there will be a one day marketing conferenece held by The International Advertising Association (IAA) Florida Chapter which will include a session about Search Engine Marketing in Latin America with Yahoo! Search Marketing and other native Latin American speakers. Here are more details about the conference:

THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2005
The Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, Fl

11:00 - 12:30 NOON: SEARCH MARKETING - a US $4.5 Billion Dollar Industry in the US, what is the status of Search Engine marketing in Latin America.

SPEAKERS:

• Alexandre Kavinski, CEO, Hotlist Latin America


• Peter Celeste, General Manager Latin America, Overture


• Romero Rodrigues, CEO & Founder, Buscape Latin America

Members $45.00 | Non-Members - $95.00 |$115.00 at the door

So what is the difference between a link from a guestbook and a link from a forum? The answer is that guestbook links are non-moderated and without editorial discretion and links from a forum are moderated and do have editorial discretion. People are examining over at SEOchat the usefulness of several linking methods mentioned in the Google Patent document. The nature of editorial discretion comes up and determining precisely what they mean by this. The patent mentions 3 examples of link spam techniques - "exchanging links", "purchasing links" or "gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links". It also goes on to mention that guestbooks, referral logs, and several other sources are examples of linking spam.

One of the members on SEOchat who started the particular thread is guessing that links from signatures on the forums are not helping anyone get better rankings in the search engines. This has been talked about before. Abakus forums did something on it last year. The result from those studies indicated that forums link do not help nor hurt in any way. However, some at SEOchat think they might actually cause a slight penalization to occur as MANY forum links can be construed as one big site wide link. I personally have never understood the signature link method as a form of SEO. I have even seen recommendations as to members telling other members that SEO begins on a site with 1. Setting a website up and 2. Getting forum sig links to get it including into Google. It has seemed to work in the past for some, but sig links are not worth the time in my opinion nor really that effective for organic SEO purposes.

DazzinDonna a mod at SEOchat says for the large number of posts she has the use of signature links has not affected her sites. Another member says that he has seen decreased rankings due to many links from the forums, but can't really say whether that is forum links or just something else he did. Some think that forum links are devalued and not worth much anymore. The thread meanders off topic a bit and returns with a few comments. Might be a good time for someone to jump in. If sig links could hurt your sites, then its probably bad news for sites like Sig Traders.

Continue reading Post Often, Kill Your Ranking

Gary Price yesterday blogged on Google Now Offering Index of Pages Optimized for the Mobile Web. Google named their entry The world in your pocket, because they offer this mobile search product not just for English speaking folk.

More information on the Google Web Product at http://mobile.google.com/mobile_search.html. If you want to try it out on your non mobile appliance (i.e. your browser) go to http://www.google.com/xhtml.

Past Search Engine Roundtable discussion on Google Mobile:
- Google Mobile
- Google Takes Local to Your Mobile Device
- Google SMS - Getting Mobile With Google

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named What is the most YOU'VE paid for a static text link has a poll asking that question. Right now, the responses to the poll are pretty much all over the place. But the discussion about the value of a text link is intriguing. Bottom line of the thread is that as long as there is positive ROI on the link buy, then go for it. It is true that it is hard to realize the direct value of each link you buy, unlike with PPC, but it can be measured on a level better then print ads.

I was checking some of my awesome rankings in Yahoo! this morning (kidding, of course) and I noticed Yahoo! has been messing with the titles they use.

In the past Yahoo! defaulted to showing the title created in the Yahoo! Directory listing (if available) in the organic search results page. So my site's listing in Yahoo! Search looked something like this:

Now if you do a search on rustybrick at Yahoo! Search, I saw my title specified in the source displayed.

Yesterday, I did not see this, just now. Same for search engine roundtable and other sites. I have a feeling I can expect my CTR to climb in Yahoo! for some of my sites, as should you, if this sticks.

I posted a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In light of the MarketingSherpa awards, I thought it would be fitting for this site to hold a Search Engine Roundtable Best Search Forum 2005 Award. The first step is to nominate your favorite search forums. If there is enough of a response, then I will design a survey asking particulars about the nominated forums. The survey will be anonymous and work much like the MarketingSherpa survey. I will probably ask questions about forum style, friendliness, professionalism, homeyness and so on.

If you would like to nominate a forum, please either add a comment below or email searchforum@gmail.com.

Nomination period will run until Monday, June 27th at 9am (EST).

Update: Please see named Best Search Forums Award - Continued...

Remember all that buzz about CPM AdWords Bidding? Well yesterday, Google AdWords's Inside AdWords Blog wrote Targeting in a whole new way describing the new Site Targeting AdWords feature. There is a ton of information on the CPM model and site targeting features at Google Help Center.

Forum discussion on this topic is at WebmasterWorld.

A tool for the crazed PageRank fan. Thought this tool was quite neat and deserved a quick mention for sheer creativity. This was mentioned on Digitalpoint yesterday. You can do some nifty things with flash, but as far SEO Tools go you don't seem to run into a large amount of them. This little tool is not too much different then a tool that tells you your PageRank, however it allows you to organize your sites (with PR information) in a visual network and then correspondingly connect them with arrows. You can move them around like cards, connect them or not, and even delete them by throwing them in a trash can.

I honestly think this tool should be renamed as the makers might not have thought of its other uses. Having a tool tell your pagerank is pretty boring these days. However, from the standpoint of ease of use in working with external linking networks this tool could be useful with the addition of some more information in creating diagrams for use in SEO. Backlink information could also be useful with this. Overall though a fun tool to play with.

Check it out at PageRank Decoder

Marcia, SEW Moderator, started a great thread named Cookie washing and the threat to affiliate income which links to an other forum thread (a forum specializing in affiliate marketing) named The Truth About Affiliate Cookies.

I got to run but the threads are worth checking out.

Nacho, SEW Forum Moderator, posted an excellent thread named Suggestions for the ideal SEM/SEO RFP Guide. He offers the following questions to ask in an RFP process:

Organization's background (history, business model, etc.) Website's target audience Organization's primary goal with an SEM/SEO campaign Overall marketing strategy Human Resources: Who's involved or who will be involved? Competitors Alliances or business development opportunities Budgets Deadlines and development schedules Design, creative and content Level of risk Other: __________ [fill in the blank]

Other's add to it at the thread.

Randfish, popular amongst the forums, has posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named OpenRank - An Open Source WWW Index. Basically, he started OpenRank "with the goal of creating an open source index of web pages." In the thread there is a lot of confusion about the intent of the project. Randfish clarifies that this will not be used for searching, which seemed clear from the introduction, but it will be used to gather data for Webmasters to better understand where they stand in terms of the whole Web in search engines.

1. Create an alternative to PageRank using the link structure stored in the database. This new measure of global popularity would be both "accurate and precise" and could help people see exactly what links are influencing their "OpenRank"

2. Create a measurement system of local popularity by segmenting pages into subject-specific communities and then examining the popularity of pages based on their links within those communities.

3. Create tools that would conduct more advanced and comprehensive link analysis then is currently available using the APIs or link commands at the search engines. One could, for example, see the exact number of links to each web page with a particular anchor text or view all the links sorted by anchor text, or by extracted page topic or poularity, etc.

Besides for this being a huge project to undertake both technically and financially, I am not sure how practical it is. Most search engines indexes, i believe, do not overlap that much. There were studies done that Yahoo! index has maybe 30% (not sure on the figure) overlap with Googles. If this is the case, then one can imagine the difficultly with this. Spidering the Web is a huge task, we built some small spiders and its not easy. I respect and wish this project the best, I will do what I can to support it.

Visit OpenRank at http://www.openrank.org/.

Yahoo! Blog wrote Expanding Your Web Searches to Include Deep Web Subscription Content discussing its plans to begin providing a search tool for subscription based content. There is a US version at http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions and a UK version at http://uk.search.yahoo.com/subscriptions.

The Web content providers include; Consumer Reports,
Forrester Research,
FT.com,
the IEEE,
the New England Journal of Medicine,
TheStreet.com, the
Wall Street Journal Online, the
ACM,
Factiva,
LexisNexis, and
Thomson Gale.

Forum discussion currently at WebmasterWorld.

A couple months I reported on the news about Yahoo! buying TeRespondo.com to gain market share in Latin America. Today, I just got a news by my sources in Brazil that Overture's full integration of TeRespondo will happen the 25th of this month. While Overture Mexico will be launched between August and September this year. Why say "Overture"? Because there has not yet been word about an International transition campaign into the new name "Yahoo! Search Marketing" for Latin America. I'm sure there will be more news to come as the date gets close. Stay tuned.

It is one hour an counting since Google AdWords has been reported to be down. If you try logging in to the Google AdWords account screen, it will not let you in.

Reported first at Search Engine Watch Forums and then at WebmasterWorld Forums.

I have tested it myself and its down.

A new poll and thread just went up at Search Engine Watch forums asking How fast is too fast to gain links???

Natural link building, which really implies not doing anything proactively with the intent of building links, that any link obtained is too many. What I mean is that if you specifically write an article with the intent that it will bring in links to your site, then that intent is wrong according to the search engines. What search engines want is that people should read that article, use that tool, buy that product because it is useful. If that happens to attract people to link to it because of the reasons listed in the sentence before this one, then that is natural.

If I invent a super natural product and it hits the market today, you better believe that I will get hundreds if not thousands of links in one day. Is that too many? Not if its natural. When it is natural? See where my logic is going?

The thread can be fun, because it has a poll. There are dozens, probably hundreds of threads on this topic over the years. Here is a new one with a poll.

If you are like me and the thousands of others that don't read the Google AdSense TOS, then this will be new to you. A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Google AdSense in desktop applications asks the question if you are allowed to embed Google AdSense ads in desktop applications.

Jensense who is a whiz with AdSense and has read the TOS more then once, replies with a sturdy no. She quotes the TOS, "No Google ad or search box code may be pasted into any software application." And in addition, someone says, just make a Web based application, so the ads are served up on HTML pages. She explains that doing so "would still be against the terms, people have been warned because they did this very thing."

An SEO Chat thread discusses the caching frequency of the MSN Search Engine. Basically, how often does MSN re-cache your page in the index.

My corporate site was last cached by MSN on 6/4/2005, this blog was last cached by MSN on 6/13/2005. So like any good search engine, MSN has different caching frequencies based on the frequency the site is updated by the webmaster.

This complies with the reports in the SEO Chat thread of individuals reporting 3 weeks, 2 weeks and even 3 day re-caching frequencies by MSN Bot.

A thread started by SEW mod, mcanerin, named Should there be a Google USA? asks the question that many have been thinking about for years. The poll asks "Should Google.com and Google.us be different?" and there is currently a dead heat between option 1, "No. The .com is already the US version. Keep it that way." and option 2, "Google.us would be more relevent, The USA counts as a region too!"

Let's step back a bit. While reading the thread, I kept thinking to myself that the .com extension was pretty much designated for US based businesses or other businesses that wanted it. Not until relatively recently did the .us extension become a domain of choice for US based businesses. The .com, to many, symbolized a US operated (or serviced the US) business. So in a sense, the .com is really not "international" based but rather it is US based Google results.

Bill, bragadocchio, explains that "The .us tld has been around since sometime in 1988. The .com was from around three years earlier in 1985, as was the .uk."

The thread remains to be interesting, and I for one, would love to hear from a Google representative as to what they do specifically for the .com and what logic they used in this decision.

Last night, after checking email, I got word that this blog has won the "MarketingSherpa's Best Blogs 2005". Ben posted much of the details here. There are many of you I need to thank. Of course the readers who come back daily (some several times a day) to read our content. I must thank Ben, who helps immensely with the forum coverage. All the guest bloggers who spend the time writing about topics that mean something to them. Also all the people behind the scenes that start these threads with the juicy content that we can use to write on and inform the greater public. The forums are where it all happens. In addition, I must thank the sponsors listed on the left and everyone else who has helped keep this blog open.

The quick URL can be found at http://blogawards.marketingsherpa.com.

Here is the official award logo:

I have tons of threads in my "topics to discuss" folder, I hope to get through many of them today.

There is talk about news last week on Google current worth of $80 billion dollars, taking it up the ranks to become the #1 Media Company worldwide, just above Time Warner with $78 billion in worth. Now the experts get a chance to weight in on whether this is good or bad news. I have been following a very interesting thread at SEW forums about what they think this means for Google. Can they continue to go up up and up? Will Google continue to become more ubiquitous in people's life? Many quickly point to Google's main revenue stream as an unstable point that could be vulnerable to potential problems in the future. What many people are wondering is what else Google has up its sleeve. Danny Sullivan goes on to say "I'm sure a lot of dubiousness over Google's valuation is in order. I honestly don't know how anyone can say what it is worth, especially given that this company in particular seems to swing in new directions that even it doesn't know it's going into."

Continue reading at SEW Forums - Google Now the #1 Media Company Worldwide

The results are in! I just got word from MarketingSherpa's site that Search Engine Roundtable was annouced as winner of the Best Blog in Search Marketing category! This is an incredible honor, and I wish Barry was here to find out. He honestly didn't think we would win the honor as there were so many great blogs up this year.

They were some excellent editor notes about this site that I will highlight for you as to why Search Engine Roundtable stuck out as winner this year.

Editor's Notes: We adore the unusual editorial tactic for the winning Blog in this category -- instead of linking to news sites, the authors comment on and link to the very best new threads on search marketing on discussion boards all over the Web. So, it's a true insiders-insider blog, and a reflection of what people are realy talking about (vs what the media thinks.)

Also mentioned is Brad Fallon's blog which got an Honorable Mention for Best Blog on Search Marketing another excellent blog that definately deserved the honor. Congrats Brad!

Barry is unfortunately gone today so if you would like to leave him a comment do so here or send him an email.

Take a look at all of the MarketingSherpa's Best Blog's for 2005.

When we-won't-do-SEO's-any-favors Google launched its new Site Map application, it was like dangling a carrot in the air and seeing who would bite. Is it worth going through the hassle of learning this thing just to get more web pages indexed?

Curious Cre8asite members wanna know, in Effect of new Google Site Map on SEO?

Question being:

"If your site is already indexed and ranking well, is there any benefit to submitting the Google Site Map from an SEO viewpoint?"

Not everyone is drinking Google's Koolaid. Michael, (aka "Projectphp") quips:

"For a static site with little changes, SiteMaps is a useful as tits on a Bull"

So what does Googlebot look like? I have heard crazy stories that it resembles something like a scary sea monster, others have said you can't see it unless you have special decoder glasses and a fast internet connection. For the most part I believe thats a bunch of nonsense but some members at Cre8asite Forums are having some fun and trying to get to the truth of what a search spider looks like. They take a creative look at what we know about the known territory and existence of such the search engine spider creature and dive into what its others are saying about it.

Ammon Johns, quotes expertly that they are "powerful elemental entities that can be harnessed in a small container, and can cause insanity in those they torment." Yep, I would say thats about right in most cases. I have known a few SEO's and webmasters to go crazy in the pursuit of a spider from time to time.

Here is a reported picture of Googlebot as drawn by one of Google's own employees. Seems more like art to me.

For more discussion about what a search engine spider looks like navigate over to Cre8asite Forums.

Some of yall might have seen some creative uses of Google Maps lately. Came across an interesting article this morning and some cool sites that people are using to hack this Google service. I personally can't get enough of the map interface Google has provided and I use it for everything now on my travels. I am even integrating the satellite map service into one of my own sites, and had the thought the other day that having it in my car would be pretty awesome, however not possible at the moment. There has been a rise recently in the use of Google Map hacks and those sites that are using it innovatively and creatively to accomplish tasks before not possible. A recent article at CNN that came out Friday talks about some of the sites that are taking Google Maps to the extreme. A site that came out a couple months ago using Maps in a very unique way. Housingmaps.com integrates the use of Craiglist listings with a the graphical interface of Google Maps to present where the houses in the listings reside. You can first start by clicking on a city, find house for rent or for sale, and then get a full listing from Craigslist of what is available. Very handy site and an accomplishment in usability as far as I can see.

Other people are using the hacks to create visual listings of sexual predators in a particular area. A Florida site outlining the addresses of these people in Florida has just done that. Or even better how about Google Maps integreted with the Seattle bus information and traffic cams data, check it out here at Busmonster.

So how do you hack Google Maps?

Well good question, as its not quite a simple as Yahoo Maps for instance. There is an excellent Wiki resource that compiles a lot of the work done by other developers to help share some of the hacks they have developed. You can visit Google Maps Hacking . Another Sourceforge resource is a recent thread on the subject here. Finally there is a Google Group on Map Hacking here as well. Some great places to start.

Someone came across something interesting this morning... DNS entries for Google continents. For example Europe.

Not sure exactly what they are for.... maybe groupings of data centers, maybe nothing. But it's still interesting.

There is some discussion about it over here.

Found a good thread over at SEOchat asking what your top factor is in deciding to submit to a directory or not. There are thousands of directories out there and so many so that its necessary sometimes to take a critical look at the ones you submit to and even more so the ones you pay for. The member is looking at it from a singular issue, and see what people really value in a directory.

Some of the members are mentioining such things as directories with little creativeness in there design in that they use all the same templates and the category structure is terribly limited. DazzinDonna a moderator at SEOchat makes a good point that friendly urls are of major importance in the directory listings. In my own opinion subject specific or related directories are also a big plus in a decision I would make to submit or not. Secondly looking at the entire directory for an indication of "management" such that someone is actively submitting listing sites, categories are getting expanded, there is a live person behind the contact page, and that they are NOT including spam sites, other directories, or general trash into categories where they don't belong.

Some joke that the best directory is the free directory, or better yet there is no recip link required for inclusion. There is a good discussion about design and the visual appeal of a directory. While I do agree it is nice to see, it doesn't necessary mean the directory is always the best.

Continue reading Main Deciding Factor at SEOchat

It's interesting to see how the two big search engines solve problems for the same target end user. "We are not a portal" Google certainly looks like one when placed in a side by side comparison chart.

Author, writer, User Experience Director, Luke Wroblewski, made a recent blog entry comparing user interface solutions for both Google and Yahoo. In Google vs. Yahoo! Interface Design, Luke writes:

"At a high level, Yahoo! has better integrated business goals with their product designs. For example, their comparison shopping site features multiple entry points that better match consumer shopping behaviors (browse by brand, browse by category, featured products, etc.) than Froogle’s single search box. Yahoo! also has more robust answers to vertical information finding (Travel, Finance, Movies, etc.) than Google’s Web Search features. That doesn’t negate the value of Google’s simple solutions to these tasks. It’s just that a simple solution sometimes requires something in addition to (or other than) a search box."

At the bottom of the comparison shots are the two main search pages, side by side. Strikingly similiar, aren't they?

Amazon has jumped into the simplicity-is-hot wave, with their new barebones header navigation. It used to take me several minutes to figure out where Amazon stuck their gift certificate stuff, but now, it's the first text link under the tabs.

From an information architecture perspective, all three sites are a treasure trove of solutions for how to handle mammoth sites. For anyone thinking of breaking their Google-habit, seeing the two search engines neck and neck may help make that break easier.

The new version of vBulletin was released as a public beta a few days ago, so I've been playing with it extensively, and for lack of a better word, it's just flat out awesome.

Plug-In Architecture
Now administrators don't need to install hacks by editing PHP files. Instead there is a full plug-in architecture. This will be painful for heavily modded forums. I spent 10 or so hours converting my customizations to plug-ins, but it was totally worth it IMO.

Data API
You don't have to worry about validating data when custom stuff any longer because you can pass data to the data manager class and it handles all that stuff for you.

Inline Moderation
For moderators, you can now moderate inline, managing multiple things (posts, threads, etc.) at once. For example you could merge 10 threads into a single thread with one click.

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)
Taking a page from some of the cool stuff Google is doing with AJAX (Google Suggest, Gmail, etc.), you can now do some neat stuff with it. Double clicking a post or thread title, will let you edit it "live", sending a private message will give you username suggestions, quick reply automatically inserts your post into the page that's already rendered (no refresh needed). It's some really neat stuff IMO.

Template History
You can save different revisions of templates (sort of like CVS), with the ability to compare them side by side with an easy to use difference tool that shows line by line differences.

rel="nofollow"
Lots of use of rel="nofollow" now, which is a very good thing IMO. Should cut out most of the duplicate content as well as stuff (like reply to thread pages) that anonymous users don't have access to.

Datastore
For frequently accessed data (like the list of forums), you can now throw them into shared memory on the web server, so no need to make queries to the DB server each time. Not only is this really cool, but the way it was all setup (with a class and sub-classes) is cool. I wanted support to use eAccelerator as the shared memory system on my setup, and it took no more than 3 minutes to create a new sub-class for it.

Since most of the big SEO forums use vBulletin, hopefully they are all about to get a whole lot cooler. I've already moved the Digital Point forums to 3.5 beta 1, but it's definitely beta software. I've personally already submitted 7 bugs so far (it would have been more, but some others beats me to it).

Yahoo!'s MyWeb which was announced in late April has now hit the main stream Yahoo! Search SERPs page. I personally did not notice the change, since I am logged into Yahoo! on my main browser and the MyWeb. So when you do a search on any term, for example myweb, you should notice (even when your not signed into Yahoo!) two new options, "- Save - Block".

Forum discussion, mostly positive at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums was split off of its parent, and named DMOZ Treatment of "Affiliate" sites. The thread has a number of views, from affiliate site owner to ODP editors and then in between. It should make for an interesting read if your either an affiliate type, or even applied to be an ODP Editor.

Before I forget, just wanted to inform you I will be offline this Monday & Tuesday (13th & 14th). I will make special requests from guest authors to contribute a bit more during this time. Also, Ben should be back in full force, so hopefully you will have plenty to read.

Back to researching forums to share goodies with you for the rest of the day. Have a wonderful weekend.

A new thread at Cre8asite forums named A visit to Google London tells a story of an individual who has the opportunity to discuss ideas with "the head of European marketing for Google." Part of the ideas he discussed with Google included; (1) A postal code database for people search, (2) integrating ID+ with Orkut and (3) improving Froogle and Google with a concept he calls "Google Mart".

Yesterday the U.S. Census Bureau reported official U.S. Hispanic population growth to 41.3 million (thanks Gary). They also mentioned that the median age for Hispanics was 26.7 in July 2003, compared with 35.9 for the overall U.S. population. (These are kids and young adults that go to public schools down the street, guys). Here is even more news. In a radio interview over at NPR, Jeffrey Passel, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center, talked about the following:

In past years, Hispanic population growth has been due to immigration, but last year was the first in which Hispanic births outnumbered immigrants. Passel says that's due to a large population of Hispanic women in the their 20s and 30s. "Even moderately high levels of fertility translate into large numbers of births".

Jensense has the story about new horizontal formatted AdSense Ad Links. As Jensense notes, forum discussion is taking place at Search Engine Watch & WebmasterWorld.

For example:

Today I found a new (new to me) term used at WebmasterWorld. The member who only has 16 posts at WebmasterWorld noticed that he has a PageRank that was grey. He was pretty upset that his useful, unique, and even popular Web site received such discredit from the Google PageRank formula. So this member started a thread named Cool - I've been Google Bowled.

The PageRank values came back a few hours later but that is not my point. I like the term and I thought some of you might like the term, Google Bowled, who knows, maybe it will catch on.

As many of you know, Google Becomes World's Biggest Media Company surpassing Time Warner, which is valued at $78bn, Google is at $80bn.

In other news, Diller to Sell Stake in Vivendi for $3.4 Bln to NBC which includes "about $100 million worth of advertising across NBC Universal's platforms." IAC can use this to build the Ask Jeeves brand across the NBC networks.

There are two Cre8asite threads, one discussing each topic.
(1) Ask Jeeves: $100 million in NBC advertising
(2) Google: $80bn Google takes top media spot

I am not one to normally report spam, but this was too funny to not bring to your attention. A thread at DigitalPoint forums named Check this Super Google Cheater! uncovers a Web site that is basically distributing "263 Commercial Web Scripts". In the "old days", I remember a friend showing me how to pirate software. He clicked from place to place, required to click on banner ads, this was before AdSense but during the times of pay per click or impression banner ads, when they were paying out lots and lots of money before the dot com boom. Each click gave you a piece of the password to get you to the final destination for software download. Along the way you clicked on three to ten banner ads, where the pirate would earn a nice PPC bid.

In this case, its simple, the user asks you to click on two buttons that open up AdSense ads, he asks you to click on them (but in reality you do not have to) and then you can download the file at the end. The site can be found in the thread, I have captured a screen shot of it for your viewing pleasure here.

I can not seem to be able to access WebmasterWorld for the past 15 or so minutes.

I hope everything is ok, this is very out of the ordinary for WebmasterWorld.

Update: Its back, seemed to be down for a couple of hours due to a DNS issue. Forum thread at WebmasterWorld.

Think of this strategy, everyone using Internet Explorer wants tabbed browsing. MSN wants you to use its search engine and install its toolbar. MSN announces Microsoft Launches Tabbed Browsing Tool. The toolbar can be downloaded at http://toolbar.msn.com/. Will the individual surfer who likes tabbed browsing, misses IE for certain reasons, switch back?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

As expected, we are now seeing the last wave of google bourbon updates now. A great tool to do a quick check on backlinks and ranking changes is Mcdar's Tool, opt for the horizontal view.

Forum discussion currently at Search Engine Watch Forums, SEO Chat Forums, nothing yet at WebmasterWorld, more to come...

A thread at WebmasterWorld named What triggers Yahoo to fully index a site? discusses the issues many are having with having their sites fully or even partially indexed. For many who run large dynamic content sites, Yahoo! is having trouble capturing all those pages and its not necessarily due to the crawler barriers (I know first hand).

One member says; "IMO for what its worth, i think the yahoo index is full with not much room for new content."

Of course some sites can be penalized but I don't believe this is the case for many of the sites not indexed by Yahoo! I am curious what the next two to three weeks will bring.

There is an excellent post at WebmasterWorld on the topic of Log Spam. Log spam is one of the oldest methods of link spam out there and it is often not discussed in forums (I know, compared to other methods, log spam is not discussed often). First, let me quote this excellent definition.

What is log spam? Oganisation setup a system to visit every domain (website) and 'request' their own domain (as if it were a page on the site).

What does log spam do?
The result of this is in the logs (and therefore your stats page) in the request report (NOT to be confused with the referrer report) within the stats for the popularity of each of YOUR web pages you see links to the log-spammers pages.

Why do they do it?
- Mainly to get links pointing to their site from stats pages,
- Partly to encourage visits from those viewing stats pages.
Sure, most stats pages are password accessed or have a 'noindex' meta tag, however there are many stats pages that are open or even have some PR.

Why is it bad?
Log spam messes up your stats reports, e.g. you don't have a page called http://ebay/
but your stats report says that page has been viewed (requested) 100 times.

Now, in this thread, the thread creator said he caught Google log spamming. Its a fact that many well known Web sites do this, he said "Yahoo do it, ebay do it and lots of other companies do it." But why is Google doing it? Do no evil? Is this even true? Questions remain to be answered in the thread named Google in my 'log spam'.

A while back, I started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Promoting a Site with WWW or Not?

The thread continues on and the discussion is interesting. When promoting your site online or offline, do you use the www before the domain name? Personally, I tend to like what the www represents. So on my business cards, I have www.rustybrick.com, in my email signature I use www.rustybrick.com and when I type it out, I normally put the www before the domain name.

The thread discusses the pros and cons of both and when people prefer to use the www or not.

A year ago today, SEW Forums launched. In fact, according to my records, SEW Forum Launched on June 2nd. Anyway, SEW forums has gone a long way since the launch date. According to the official Happy Birthday thread, SEW forums has grown to nearly 5,000 members, with 5,460 threads and the total post count reaching 48,146.

Join the celebration at Happy 1st Birthday, SEW Forums!

GoogleGuy is providing an extremely detailed Weather Update for the Google update taking place now, named Bourbon. In his post, message # 13 at the bottom of the GoogleGuy's Post, he says:

Okay, a bunch of reinclusions (and the responses to some spam complaints) went out today, along with some improvements to one of the first two things that went out with Bourbon. I also believe that we completed a binary push this weekend that has hooks for the last part of Bourbon. We'll turn on one datacenter, and then the rest of the datacenters over the course of the next week or so. After the other changes that went out, this last change should be less noticeable. In a few days, I'll post a way to give feedback, but feel free to use the the spam report form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html in the mean time if you want to mention spam that you see in the results. I'd use the keyword "bourbon" if you do decide to use that form, so that we can separate those reports out.

How transparent is that! So get your engines ready to analyze the update in about a week or so.

The bad press doesn't stop for Ask Jeeves and this MySearch toolbar. If you run a PC and use IE, you most likely found this MySearch Toolbar installed on it without knowing you installed it. Does that tick you off? I bet it does. A recent article over at MSNBC says "Ask Jeeves didn't ask before installing a search tool on millions of Web browsers. Now investors are asking questions." They use Ben Edelman, who was instrumental in the WhenU Cloaking case (sorry those comments were lost in a server crash). Danny Sullivan puts everything into perspective in his blog entry More Questions On Adware & Search Ad Distribution.

There is forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

DaveN reports over at Search Engine Watch forums that he is beta testing Mirago’s contextual product. Mirago’s Context Stream looks very similar to Google's AdSense, Yahoo!'s reported Y!Sense and even Kanoodle's BrightAds.

Jenstar comments in the thread that "It will be interesting to see if they offer it to publishers outside of the UK, because their site does appear to have products available to US-based sites as well." In addition, she also notices the "tried-and-true ad unit format that AdSense made famous." Jenstar posts screen captures of the ad at her blog, Jensense, under the entry name First sighting of Mirago's Context Stream.

This is your last chance to vote at the 2005 Readers' Choice Blog Awards - Voting Form. If you really like this blog, please vote for the "Search Engine Roundtable". Question number 8 is where you will find "Blogs on search marketing" and we are the last in the list.

Voting ends Wednesday June 8th, and then we'll announce the winners. Prizes this year include a "Winner" icon for your Blog, a special coffee mug, and your name and blog URL on our site and in a press release. So please vote for us.

I really want that sticker on this site. :)

Last week Gary Price at the Search Engine Watch Blog reported that eBay Goes Shopping and Acquires Shopping.com and then today the same Gary reports that Shopzilla Sold for $525 Million. Shopzilla is probably more well known from its Bizrate name.

The threads:
eBay to buy Shopping.com for $620 million at WebmasterWorld Forums and Shopzilla / Bizrate Acquired at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Lee Odden at Top Rank Blog has an entry named What's up with Microsoft Wallop? . Microsoft's Wallop is an other social network. So in good Search Engine Roundtable tradition, I'll give out as many invites to Wallop as possible. Just leave a comment with your name and email.

On record, Lee Odden hooked me up with my invite.

Marcia over at the Search Engine Watch Forums started a thread named What percentage of ODP submissions are made by corrupt webmasters? In that thread they get into the discussion of what type of directory spam they find and where spam is more likely to be submitted to.

The most obvious are categories "where there's tons of money to be made", such as m mortgages and poker. They say ">98% slammed by lead-generating sites" for those money categories.

But they also say its not always that easy to know which sites are submitted with the intent of spamming versus those that submit without really knowing the rules and guidelines.

Normally I would not report this, but it seems as if two different forums have reported that PageRank went back offline at around 5:00 AM (EST) this morning. SEO Chat Forums reported it at 05:27 AM and Cre8asite Forums reported it at 5:05 AM.

Related issues reported when PageRank is Back entry.

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Fear of spamming depicts the story of a Webmaster who is afraid to link four web sites together. Let me quote the Webmaster's exact words:

We have four websites in the legal field. One is a larger umberella site for the law firm and its two main practice areas which are criminal defense and injury law. The second is taylored specifically to DUI defense.. The other two sites are blogs with articles on DUIs and the other on personal injuries in our state. Our concern is that we don't want to be prcived as spamming the SEs. There is no duplicate content and no interlinking between any of the sites. What issues should we look out for to steer clear of being banned. Thanks for any input. Please excuse me if I placed this post inappropriately.

What hurts me more is the next response, "The only "penalty" you could incur is a penalty if you inter-link those websites. If you must inter-link them, you might consider using the rel=nofollow attribute on your links." Is that true? Well, it is possible. But interlinking four Web sites can rarely get anyone penalized. Plus if they are all related and linked to in a manner that shows it is done for business reasons (i.e. Jupiter, Developer Shed, etc.) then there is nothing wrong with it. Four web sites, I would go on record as saying, no problem. But as Tim Mayer said, it is all about "intent" and since search engine algorithms are so smart to figure out "intent" when it comes to spamming, and since Google doesn't hand remove sites, then you should have no problem interlinking four web sites even with improper "intent". (Sense my sarcasm there)

Look at the fear search engine place in normal Webmaster's eyes. Look what hoops Webmasters need to go through. It is 2005.

News comes by way that Two Killed In Crash At California Speedway. One individual killed in that crash was Internet Marketing Guru Corey Rudl. Corey Rudl is the owner of Internet Marketing Center and has written dozens of columns for Entrepreneur's eBusiness section. For more about this legend, please see this detailed Corey Rudl Interview.

Oilman posted a thread on this topic at WebmasterWorld.

For those of you who are trying to get to the page about Google Sitemaps you might want to try back later. Currently it is serving up a 502 Server Error, reason being is a simple mentioning over at Slashdot.

Normally Google's servers can handle it but this traffic is going to a secure https URL, which requires more server resources. GoogleGuy commented specifically on this.

That's funny, Joey! As soon as you said that, I told myself--"it must have gotten Slashdotted." Sure enough, it's the top story on http://slashdot.org/ right now. The info about Sitemaps may be running on a "normal" webserver instead of our custom setup. I'd wait for the stampede-o-technical-folks to subside; maybe read the Slashdot thread or give it a few minutes up to a half hour for the geek-slagging to stop.

I alerted the Sitemaps team, but a Slashdotting is hard enough for a regular webserver, let alone one that's doing https. I'd give it a few minutes.

We thought based on GoogleGuy's Posts that there would be an update for the Google Webmaster Guidelines. But according to a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named New Google Webmaster Guidelines and Gary Price's SEW Blog entry named Google Adds New Content to "Google Information for Webmasters" FAQ; Explains Supplemental Index, Google has done it early.

As Gary points out, we finally have an official explanation of the supplemental index, in the advanced section.

Supplemental sites are part of Google's auxiliary index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.
The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

Plus there is information about the new Google Sitemaps and much more. Good work Google!

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Google indexing parked domains from Registrar feed, shows a specific example of Google indexing and ranking a parked domain. In that thread members discuss possible methods that Google could have located the domain name. The notion of Google finding the page with the toolbar does not seem likely.

So what is it? One member replies that "Google must be using their new domain registrar status to add more domains to their database." What shocks me is this statement, "This is not only happening to parked domains, it's happening to domains that aren't registered and have never been registered."

I have noticed time and time again, that I would register a domain, make sure not to link to it anywhere, and all of a sudden Google would index it. Gary Price replied to the thread;

Accessing newly registered domains is easy, in fact I have an alert service (small fee) that every morning sends me lists of domains registered the previous day for any and all keywords I want. For any search engine to do the same and then add the domains to their crawl would be very simple.

That is my thought, and always has been. Logically, there must be some Web page feeding these newly registered domain names. And can there be a Web page that links to non existent domain names? I guess so, why not?

Last night Danny Sullivan broke the news on a new free service Google is offering named Google Sitemaps. Simply put, this program allows "webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they'd like to have included in Google's web index." Danny Sullivan has been pressing Google about such a program since even before the Indexing Summit, where he repeated that many would pay Google for inclusion and reporting. So Google took Danny's advice, and built a "beta" version of a free program to submit your pages and some simplified reporting. For more information on Google Sitemaps from Google, visit Google Sitemaps Docs, and also see the Google Blog.

So what are the forums saying about this? Search Engine Watch Forums quickly got a thread up in which GoogleGuy and the new "SitemapsAdvisor" have been answering questions on this program.

Other forums chatting about this:
- DigitalPoint Forums
- SEO Chat Forums
- WebmasterWorld (Paid)
- Cre8asite Forums
- HighRankings
- SitePoint Forums

Social Patterns has two excellent blog entries on this topic. First one is named Breaking Down Google Sitemaps XML and the second is named Google Sitemaps with Wordpress where he links to code you can use for WordPress blogs to generate a sitemap for Google.

Remember the New York City Search Engine Strategies Conference in 2005? If you were there but your memory is a bit foggy, Kim Krause posted her NYC SES 2005 Excellent Adventure to spark your memory. She linked to her narrated SES NYC Pics, and you can catch my nose in the first picture.

Forum chatter beginning at Cre8asite Forums.

Ever wonder why so many "SEO Experts" and GoogleGuy himself, tells people not to look too closely at an update when its occurring? They almost compare it to looking straight at the sun, well, maybe not...

I was thinking about writing a long entry but I do not think I can convey what is going on in a thread at HighRankings Forum accurately. The thread name? Different Serps On Different Pcs With Same IP.

You and I see them every day, sites made for AdSense. Either they scrape content or some other form of content generation and stick up AdSense ads on them. ThreadWatch spotted a thread at WebmasterWorld named The beginning of the end for AS spam publishers..?, which discusses just this.

That thread summarizes a discussion by GoogleGuy on page 3 of the Questions for GoogleGuy discussion. GoogleGuy says straight out;

I hate spam pages that use AdSense.

Let's see how they prevent this in the upcoming summer.

I must point you folks over to a locked down thread where GoogleGuy is basically doing some myth busting, question answering and explaining about topics the SEM community has brought up over the past year or so.

The thread is named GoogleGuy's Posts and it resides over at WebmasterWorld.

Topics:
- When most likely will Google do major updates to both algorithm and webmaster pages
- What is going on with the ODP titles in Google SERPs
- The scoop about Google Backlinks and PageRank
- Myth about iframes being penalized
- The discussion about using relative versus absolute links

As GoogleGuy promised, WebmasterWorld has set up a thread in which members can ask GoogleGuy questions. The thread is named Questions for GoogleGuy and the rules are as follows:

1- ask one question 2- be brief. 3- no commenting on other posts. 4- no specifics please 5- violators will go posting off ;-) 6- 1 q - 1 q only.

After we get 10-20 q's we will submit them to the plex...

This was done in the past, once before and was a success. Currently there are a 130 questions waiting for GoogleGuy in the Questions for GoogleGuy thread, ask yours.

I am sure many of you already heard the buzz about this "Secret Google Lab" rumor. Let me give you the timeline of events, that I know of, on how it broke the news. On September 19th, 2004 a WebmasterWorld thread was created asking about a strange referral string found within this member's log.

eval.google.com/happier/quest/altcache?local=/www/data/....

Yesterday, news has spread like wild fire via Slashdot about a flash video and blog entry posted at SearchBistro. The flash movie can be viewed here, might be slow...

There are tons of blogs discussing this now, I'll point out Social Patterns and SEW Blog, but there are others.

DigitalPoint forums was one of the first to have a thread on this topic. There is also a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Manual, humor review of specific sites or an automated method of rating results and having an algorithm do the auto-adjusting. Somewhat like artificial intelligence with a bit of help.

Many of you are following the most recent Google Update. In the past, at the Indexing Summit at SES NYC 05, Danny Sullivan requested the search engines to give the Webmaster a "Weather Update". By that he meant, he wants the search engines to let us know when an update will take place or if it is taking place. Tim Mayer from Yahoo was the first to provide a weather update based on Danny's request, so that update was named update Tim.

GoogleGuy this morning posted in the Google Update Bourbon Part 3 thread, message # 422, that he will provide his "weather report". In the beginning of his report he said he will ask Brett to set up a thread where he can answer moderated questions from the WebmasterWorld members. Currently he says the following is taking place:

Here's the advice that I'd give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well.

Been following an interesting thread today on SEOchat that details an issue a webmaster is having with getting his websites IP penalized on Yahoo because Yahoo finally caught up with some spammers on the same IP. He relates most of his problem to significant decreases in ranking positions for his site and is wondering how to possibly come out of the situation back to his normal positions. He goes on that the "pages were not "de-indexed" so to speak. Rather, they have all just dropped very very far in the serps". I thought it was an excellent question as I have seen other threads on the forums detailing this same issue especially with Yahoo. A past thread on SEW called Rackspace hates Yahoo? or Vice Versa? is a good summary of some past issues sites have been facing and how active they can be with this issue.

The forum member on SEOchat is looking to see if he can possibly avert issues that could arise potentially with Google. If Google did penalize him for the issue he would me sunk. Some of the other members recommend possibly switching to a new IP class as soon as possible and waiting it out to see what happens. Others are questioning whether this is a problem or not.

For those that are looking to get reincluded back into Yahoo or possibly see about getting a new review of the site. A thread at Threadwatch tell the story of a member who got his site reincluded into the index over night by asking for a new review. In that instance he used the following link to ask for a new review. For those that are facing issues with Yahoo this url might be of use. http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_feedback

Continue reading Punished C-Class, any chance..