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!)

Please join the thread for Speculation about a NEW Google OS at SEW Forums.

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%.

Seems like we'll continue to enjoy the rollercoaster ride as long as more dollars pour into internet advertising and search marketing in particular.

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."

I believe the objective of encouraging advertisers to translate their websites into Spanish mainly relies on the fact that U.S. Hispanics sometimes think in Spanish, therefore they will search in Spanish. Other times they think in English so they will search in English. They are not a "one size fits all" user, nor the statistics of how many are Spanish preferred versus English preferred reveal how dynamic the user is when searching. In my opinion, they are bi-lingual and bi-cultural. It's important to target U.S. Hispanics in both languages.

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