July 2005 Archives

I just wanted to let you know that we will be performing that upgrade this week.

Please add your suggestions, feature requests and comments at the Site Touch Ups comments area. Just scroll down and add a comment. We won't be doing an upgrade again for a while.

Good weekend all.

Ask Jeeves just deployed MyJeeves 1.2: Tagging Solution for Virtual Folders but it does not offer the community aspect focus that Yahoo! has done so nicely with MyWeb 2.0.

I call asks version, self-tagging, because it doesn't allow you to view your "communities" tags. For example, about a week ago, I was surfing through my community tags at Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 and found a tag named blogsiread. After clicking through, I noticed this tag was used often by Jeff Weiner (Yahoo! Senior VP). I was upset to learn that this site was not listed within the tag. So I decided to go over to Yahoo! 360, which I use almost every day now, to get Jeff Weiner's attention.

You see, Jeff Weiner is part of my community, in fact, he is a direct link in my community (not a friend of a friend). So I knew if I blogged about it at Yahoo! 360 he would see it, so I wrote a Y! 360 blog entry named Jeff Weiner...Why Am I Not on blogsiread? and posted his image. Guess, what? It got his attention. A few hours later Jeff Weiner left a comment stating;

Page Search Engine Roundtable ::: The Pulse Of The Search Marketing Community

http://www.seroundtable.com/
My Details
Saved 1 minute ago - Edit - Email
Note: rusty, never really thought of search engine roundtble as a blog so much as a search engine trade resource. read your stuff quite a bit (and have saved, tagged and shared rusty search among other docs you've published). now duly tagged.
Tags: blogsiread, rustybrick
Access: Everyone
See similar pages saved by me

Basically, he copied and pasted the addition of this site in that tag with a very nice note. I also like to think of this site as "a search engine trade resource" and not a blog. :)

Back to the community aspect. Do you see how this tagging thing is working at Yahoo! versus Ask Jeeves. Don't get me wrong, Ask Jeeves did comment that they might be going in that direction, but not just yet.

In the long term, we intend to provide a smoother "upgrade path" by suggesting the gradual adoption of tagging. As users become more familiar with the process, they’ll be able to explore the collective corpus of information through related tags or their social network, and further refine their taxonomy in some kind of virtuous circle.

I also left out the whole component on how this can affect one's rankings...

Today, Ask Jeeves announced an upgrade to MyJeeves named MyJeeves 1.2. The two main differences are (1) Tagging and (2) Photo Management. The big one obviously is the tagging component.

Read how they explained the use of tagging in MyJeeves 1.2:

The first impulse was to blur the line between foldering and tagging by merging them into topics. This turned out to be too confusing for most people. The second scenario was to overlay tagging on top of foldering, resulting in "virtual folders". This is the approach Longhorn seems to be taking - sorry, I meant Vista...which sounds far less intimidating - and dagnabit if it didn't work. So there you have it: "tags as virtual folders" is what we just launched with MyJeeves 1.2.

"Virtual folders", in reality, that is what it is.

I have started threads about this at Cre8asite Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Tagging has been around for a while now, not sure why they blogged about it today. Gary notes that he blogged about Ask Jeeves adding tagging on April 11, 2005.

Todd Mintz wrote an article at Search Engine guide that I thought many of you would like. He named it How To Be A Blogging Idol Instead Of An Idle Blogger.

It goes through the basics; writing good copy, narrowing your focus, write often, and monetize when applicable. And also touches on some advanced topics; pinging, rss, link building and press releases.

Towards the end of the article, he reviews the success story results. There is some weekend reading for you all.

A thread at SEO Chat Forums named Optimizing eBay Store asks some questions about how to rank one's eBay store well. SEO Chat Moderator, EGOL, gives advice about the standard eBay store;

If you have the standard ebay store you will get five pages on their domain plus an "about me" page. The more items you place in your store the higher up in the store index listings you will be in each category. This will pass some of ebay's PR down to your store. These pages will show in the search engines. To optimize the pages in your store you need to know a bit about SEO and be pretty ingenious to "trick" their system to put your optimization in place. You control the second half of the title tag plus onpage design.

If you really want to have full flexibility, then I recommend you check out the eBay Developer Platform.

A thread named Dmoz "mini Directories'" Everywhere at HighRankings Forum discusses an old classic issue for the search engines. The Open Directory Project, DMOZ.org, clones. ODP provides a method for one to automatically create and update their clones at the Open Directory RDF Dump. You can either download a piece or whole of the directory.

So how many of these are out there? Some in the thread guess about 4,000. DMOZ lists about 360. But everyone knows that is not accurate.

A HighRanking Forums thread named Cookieless Sessions discusses one of the biggest issues with dynamically driven Web sites - the session id.

Including a Session ID in a URL, will cause the search spiders to run around like chickens without their heads. Think of it this way. I have a single page on the topic of the Big Blue Pineapple Chair. Now, I decide to serve up a different URL for each person visiting that page. Why do I do this? Sessions can be useful for tracking, up-selling, keeping track of users and so on. So by applying a unique identifier (session ID) in the URL, I can track that person throughout my site. So one spider might go to the site and get one URL, three others will get three different URLs and so on. Duplicate content disaster...

What about using cookies, storing that unique identifier on the user's computer so you can identify the user. And not worry about adding an ID to the URL itself. Well, spiders do not accept cookies for many reasons. So if you serve up a cookie, the spider won't accept it and if you require a cookie for site navigation, the spider won't navigate.

What are your options? Make sure your homepage, product pages, category pages, brand pages, and so on, work without requiring a unique identifier of some sort. I have an old but still valid article on building dynamic sites that work well with search engines, specifically Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs.

Yesterday afternoon, GoogleGuy posted a reply [msn #16] at a WebmasterWorld saying:

I believe some scraper sites went out today. It's something that we're going to look more at over time, too.

This inspired a new thread at WebmasterWorld named Scraper Site Clearout Collateral Damage? Where members are upset that Google would deem their sites as "scraper sites."

An SEO Chat thread named Who is GoogleGuy? offers some theory in who the mystical GoogleGuy is who travels the SEO forums.

Some suggest that GoogleGuy is really not just one guy, but rather several Google employees. The thread creator suggests that it might be one of the following; matt cutts or larry page or a 'do no evil' engineer or possibly a spy.

One member links to a Google Blog entry named Greets from GoogleGuy! which gives some insight into GoogleGuy(s)'s personality.

GoogleGuy's profile at WebmasterWorld and at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The forums are starting to buzz a bit about a possible Google Sandbox like algorithm being applied to new sites over at Yahoo! Search. There are two large threads on this topic at DigitalPoint Forums, one here and the other one here. In addition, there is a thread at SEO Chat Forums on the topic. WebmasterWorld moderator Caveman replied to the WebmasterWorld version of this thread stating;

jgbmarc, IMO, there is some evidence that Y has recently introduced some sandbox-like elements to their algo(s). Also, IMO, the so-called sandbox over at G is not at all just about age of sites/backlinks. There are other algo elements that can make it hard for new sites to appear, that have nothing to do with age per se.

It has been eight days since Yahoo! announced this update, I have not really looked or seen evidence for this theory.

A thread over in the WebmasterWorld Supporters forum discusses how those nasty scraper sites can actually be helpful. In fact, I have always enjoyed, in one sense, finding content I write on a dozen scraper sites with the links I embedded in them pointing to my sites. It is a very quick and easy way to build backlinks. One thing I do often, but which I will start doing less, is conduct several feedster searches on variations of this site's name. Every day, I find many scraper sites come up, simply pulling the content from this site. But a good percentage of those sites not only decide to share my content with their readers, they also provide links back to the site without knowing or caring.

Some elementary math...

5 articles per day
2 links within each article on average
20 scraper sites taking the articles
=
200 new links per day.

Of course those links are of "bad quality" but can you blame me for those links? Welcome to the new link building game, not really new, but you know what I mean.

Jenstar posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named SES San Jose 2005: Parties, Events & Gatherings. The thread contains or will contain all the information about the Special SES Events for San Jose show. In addition, people are chatting about some of last years events and what you might not expect and some parties. :)

I find it a bit funny that Google would file a patent for this, but I find most patents funny. MSGraph, an SEW Member known for posting patent applications, started a thread named Google's Advertisements in RSS Patent App where he quotes an abstract from the patent application.

Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner is described. Syndicated material e.g., corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server is used to provide keyword or content based targeted ads. The ads are incorporated directly into a syndicated feed, e.g., with individual ads becoming items within a particular channel of the feed. The resulting syndicated feed including targeted ads is supplied to the end user, e.g., as a set of search results or as a requested web log. Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing. The automated targeting and insertion process allows ads to be kept current and timely while the original feed may be considerably older.

See how they specifically discuss say "Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing." Many of the older RSS ad programs charge more with the CPM basis. Google might have done this specifically to ward off the folks at Yahoo! and other companies looking to automate the billing process of the business.

I am writing this from my treo. Both my connections in the office (T1 & Cable) are out do to some crazy storm last night. 2 of my office lines are out. I should be back up in 4 hours. Hold tight.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named 5 mistakes I made which effected decrease in CPC and decrease in earnings asks members to post 5 mistakes they have made in the past with AdSense. Some of those listed already include;

- I seo'd a site for a general term "small widgets" and adsense displayed general ads for "small widgets". However, "small blue widgets" was paying much higher. I had to go back and optimize the page for adsense to show "small blue widgets" while seo'ing the page for "small widgets"

- Biggest mistake = not adding new content often enough.

- Putting a 120x600 skyscraper in my site's colours to the right of my content, and thinking that was the best I could do.

- Not originally blending my ads into the site

- Not putting AdLinks on as soon as they came out, cost me a few thou$and

- When I started using this in Sept 2003, I thought just putting ad will give me revenue and when I received 3 times more income than other banner exchange I thought its perfect I don't have to do any thing

- Until July 2004 I wasn't convinced that anyone can earn 4 figures per months in AdSense.

- replying to this thread instead of working on my site ;)

More at the thread (might want to skip over the first few).

Danny Sullivan reported that New Ask Jeeves Paid Listings Program Said To Come August 1, based on ThreadWatch spotting this AdRants entry. In addition, Danny saw that MediaPost has a thing or two on the rumor.

Remember about a week ago we posted an entry named Would Ask Dare Drop Google AdWords in 2007? Well, possibly they will do it within two weeks and not wait for 2007.

Reportedly, Ask Jeeves' paid search will look similar to Google's system. It primarily will be based on keyword bidding, but with some measure of relevance, such as click-through rates, factored into the advertiser's ultimate cost. The minimum bid will reportedly start at 5 cents. Ask Jeeves' sponsored listings likely will co-exist with Google's, at least for the time being. Google's contract to power sponsored listings on Ask Jeeves doesn't expire until 2007.

Forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

We do not know exactly the current setup Google has for its datacenters. But a thread at WebmasterWorld asks the question, "How are Google's servers connected?"

lammert provides an extremely helpful and well-written response to the question. I can not write it better myself, so I will quote it below.

Google operates a number of datacenters around the world. I am not sure about the exact number, but at the moment there are about 15. Each datacenter has one or more clusters, and each clusters consists of thousands of computers calculating the SERPs for your search query. When you do a query, you are connected with one of these data centers. Which one is determined by the DNS settings of the nameservers of Google called ns1.google.com ... ns4.google.com.

The DNS servers play an important role in the load distribution and disaster recovery. When you request the IP address for www.google.com, the DNS server first replies with a canonical name. This name has the form www.X.google.com where X is a letter. At this moment the name www.l.google.com is returned from the location where I am working, but this can vary depending on location and time.

Then a second query is done to translate this canonical name to an IP address. Every canonical name of the form www.X.google.com returns 3 IP addresses which can be used by the browser to attach to the search engine.

Throughout the day, you are not connected to the same data center or cluster. This is, because Google has decided to set an extremely short TTL (time to live) time for the canonical name and IP address. They have a good reason for it. If a cluster is overloaded or brakes down, they can route requests to another cluster or datacenter. Within 5 minutes (the TTL of the IP addresses) all clients will request a new IP address for www.google.com and all traffic is rerouted.

Some tests you can do yourself. This works on Windows 2000, but probably also on XP.

Start the command line program nslookup
Type the command set d2
Type www.google.com

The program will now query the Google nameservers for the canonical name and the IP addresses for www.google.com. Because debugging is switched on with the set d2 command, you will also see the TTL times for the canonical name and IP's.

I really enjoyed reading that reply.

There has been some recent buzz at WebmasterWorld that YPN coming very soon. The thread creator used a conference call where Yahoo's CEO Terry Semel, "apparently said that YPN would be rolled out "very soon.""

Nick at ThreadWatch then wrote a thread, Yahoo Publisher Network to Debut in August? In that thread, he uses some logic to determine that it is very possible that YPN will be here in August. The logic comes from the announcement by JenSense about the recent listed panel on the SES San Jose 2005 Contextual track Earning From Search & Contextual Ads. On that panel is an individual by the name of Will Johnson from Yahoo! Search Marketing.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums about an announcement that Yahoo Upgrading bursted into a outcry by some Yahoo! Search Marketing PPC managers. So much so, moderator, sebastian started a thread named 10 Reasons Yahoo Should Kill Direct Traffic Center. The list is now a bit larger with reasons why the DTC is disliked by PPC managers. Here is the list:

1) DTC (Direct Traffic Center) is excruciatingly slow.

2) DTC reporting is over 24 hours behind

3) DTC requires almost weekly updates *(see #4)

4) DTC updates always make DTC worse * (see #5)

5) DTC updates not only run longer than expected, but DTC will usually not work at all after an "update"

6) Your reps will "all-of-a-sudden" not be there to answer the phone when DTC is down. Are ya listenin M.A. ???

7) You can only create "one-word" categories for organization

8) Deleting keywords and phrases does not always do so ...trust me, finding out later that you spent $100 on words you thought you deleted is quite common and highly aggravating ...can i get a witness?

9) DTC is a joke with respects to User Interface Design. I have since learned that Yahoo inherited DTC from a previous acquisition. ...Know when to fold 'em big guys.

10) Direct Traffic Center is a stupid name ...much like Yahoo Search Marketing. Brand managers at Yahoo should be fired.

11) DTC reports are a joke. Even when they are working, they don't always give you the information you need. In other words, "NO CUSTOMIZATION!"

In fact, some members are willing to pull their ads down for five whole days in order to protest. That can mean a lot of money lost for lots of different people.

I tend to think the title is a bit harsh, but a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named What Are Your Favorite SEM Client Lies? discusses just that. The thread creator, Todd Malicoat, works at We Build Pages, a SEO company that does SEO day in and day out. He complied a list of some lies, or as I like to say, misunderstandings, that he heard from clients prior to starting SEO services for them. I thought most of you would get a kick out of it. Others add to the list as well, here are some.

• I'm new to SEO (on third SEO company)
• I don't have any other domains (well only 17)
• I don't interlink my sites (well only 23 of 'em)
• I have a great business idea (but no money)
• I've never signed any guestbooks (only 4k blog comments)
• I'll help write content (twice a year)
• I have a good informational site (about viagra)
• I have a great business model (selling MLM loans)
• My design company will work with you (to overwrite your changes)
• I'll pay for consulting (but not when I'm telling you about my great business ideas)
• I don't cloak (well only to the 3 majors)
• My CMS system is SEO friendly (except for the session ID's and 10 versions of every page)
• We have good programmers (who know frontpage)
• It's not an affiliate site (it's a "reseller site")
• I've had good luck with 2nd tier PPC (really, it converts!)
• My site runs itself
• We've never been banned
• I have a guy from Google starting next week and he is bringing all the code with him.
• I don't care how much it costs (because I'm not planning on paying anything but the deposit)
• You're the expert (but everything has to be done the way we've always done them)
• I have no idea why we were banned - the site is clean (well, except a, b c, d, etc...)
• The cheque is in the mail (nuff said...)
• I know exactly what my keywords are (my 1 page site should be number 1 for "mortgage")

More at the thread of lies.

A HighRanking Forum thread named 8/10 - Need Advice, keyword research - getting 10/10 shows how quickly SEOs like, keyword research expert Dan Thies, agrees with well known SEO woman, Jill Whalen that when optimizing pages, one should not worry about keyword density figures.

I'll quote Dan's reply here:

As Jill says, keyword density means nothing. You're going to spend a bunch of time chasing your tail with tools like that.

If you want to play around and test/tweak stuff, test your TITLE tags and the first heading (H1) on the page. You can make changes, and see how your rankings change. A few rounds of testing on each should give you 90% of what you're going to get by fiddling with the HTML code on a given web page.

For the rest of the copy, just work on using keywords naturally, and make it work as copy. Do that well, and you're at about 95% if not higher. Now forget about the other 5% and use your internal links to help searchers find the right page for the right search terms.

Ron Carnell offers good advice as well; "The key to any scientific testing is repeatability."

The news that Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator (spiffy new homepage), rolled through some of the SEO Forums. I had used Konfabulator in the past, before upgrading to Apple Tiger, which came with Dashboard - that alone is a big Apple scandal.

I rarely use either Konfabulator or Dashboard these days. I am not sure why Yahoo! bought them. I assume it has to do with the Yahoo! Life Engine concept... Anyway, forum discussion at:

- WebmasterWorld
- DigitalPoint Forums

Notice the little war with Apple and Windows users, also note people's comments on Microsoft.

Oh, You can find the widgets at http://widgets.yahoo.com/.

On July 20th, Yahoo started a major algo update. Since then, DigitalPoint Forum members also reports a Massive jump in yahoo BL. In the past, Yahoo! has always updated back links on a more frequent basis (possibly daily). I find it a little odd that the DigitalPoint forum members, who use the DigitalPoint forum tools, (Yahoo! API) to track backlinks at Yahoo reported an increase in back links shortly after we reported that Yahoo!'s Link Domain Command Funky. When conducting searches using the API, the results for that command we much lower then with the site itself. Maybe they are related, I did report this to Yahoo about a month ago.

The news about Google adding more options to to its personalized search page brings us back to the question, Google Homepage Personalized or Portal?

But in light of that, forums are discussing and liking the new feature allowed at http://www.google.com/ig of adding RSS feeds and bookmarks (amongst other things) to your Google homepage.

Will Google use RSS feeds the same way Yahoo! does? I dont think they will at this point, but its possible. Will it get you more visibility? Will it get you indexed faster? Good questions, my thoughts are no to both. But time will tell.

Forum discussion at:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- WebmasterWorld
- DigitalPoint Forums

A Cre8asite Forum thread named Ask Jeeves doesnt seem to be working right! reports what seems to be a session issue. Basically, you do a search on any keyword, try search engine at ask.co.uk and then you click the next page link. The results should pretty much mimic the first page results. I have tested this myself and it seems to be true.

One interesting distinction is that the second result, www.ultraseek.com, shows a different title on the first page, versus the second page. Although the first X listing are from the same URL.

ThreadWatch reports that Danny Sullivan to Podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm. WebmasterRadio.FM launched a year ago November, since then they have been doing a wonderful job. Darron Babin, SEGuru, founder of WebmasterRadio.FM announced;

Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineWatch, will be hosting a daily SearchCast featuring the top news and events in search as reported from SEW. Gary Price, also of SEW, will also host the SearchCast when Danny is on the road or has schedule conflicts.

We are proud to provide the platform to help Danny produce SearchCast and be involved in this new project of his.

It will air live daily at 11:30am EDT and rebroadcast at 2pm EDT. The Podcast will be available for subscription either at Webmaster Radio or at the SEW Blog.

I guess this was the announcement he was holding back from me for two weeks now. Forum discussion at WebWorkShop Forums.

The SEM & SEO industry is flourishing. New SEO companies spring up each day. So what stops anyone from starting an SEO company? Well, nothing really. Since the industry is so unknown to the public, most people still don't understand what SEO really is, anyone can really start a company. Most of you know that I won't sell "SEO services" to anyone. That is just my comfort level of building out large dynamic sites that do well in search engines. We build the site and do our best to make sure it does well on all level's, especially the back-office components.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Starting SEO business. Any advice? kinda steamrolled from advice on how to start one, into why the heck would you want to start one without SEO experience. Jill Whalen remarks; "I'm confused as to why people wake up one morning and say "hey, I think I'll open up an SEO shop" whoo hoo!" Andrew Goodman follows that post up with; "He's an SEO company now! To me it just screams that he's between jobs." But Mikkel deMib Svendsen plays devils advocate; "Off course, it depends on what kind of person you are. I am the jump-in-the-water-and-see-what-happens kind of guy - and so far I survived just fine."

Marcia reports at both WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums that MSN has done some search update. WebmasterWorld senior member steveb confirms;

Yup major shakeup. Apparently MSN thought that two-word.subdomains.com needed to be joined by three-key-words.subdomains.com in the results. Pathetic. It's amazing they haven't lost even more of their market share than they have... or at least they can thank their competitors for that.

Other forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

One thread, one post, on July 23rd, no responses yet, at WebmasterWorld. How many of you SEOs watch Ask Jeeves that closely, but one member reports going "from around 420 pages to 790" indexed by Ask Jeeves.

Lots of buzz in the past on MSN Virtual Earth, even an interview with the MSN Virtual Earth team in the past. But today, Chris Sherman announces that Microsoft Launches MSN Virtual Earth.

Where is it at? http://virtualearth.msn.com/

Microsoft Geek Blogger, Scobleizer links to a Channel 9 video interview with MSN's Virtual Earth team.

Forum discussion will be wide spread, but right now, only at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Recently I came across a statistic that I've been long waiting to see, it was published thanks to a recently released Advertising Age report named "HISPANIC FACT PACK: Annual Guide to Hispanic Advertising & Marketing 2005 Edition". See following table:

This table, which takes into account both English and Spanish speaking Hispanic users, demonstrates how #1, #2, #3, #4, and #7 are our dearly beloved SEARCH ENGINES! Oh YES! Hispanics love search! Here is the data to prove its impact. There are no other web properties that get higher visits than these. Search is an important tool for all people online (including Hispanics) to accomplish their daily needs. Whether it?s for shopping, research or knowing what?s new in entertainment, news, or a favorite recipe. The recipe for success is search for them. Then again, websites like eBay (#5), Amazon (#8) and Cnet (#10) could have received in large proportion of their traffic via a search results as they are highly optimized.

One more thing that grasps my attention, is the reach among each of these web properties. From these percentages seems to me that both Yahoo! and AOL have been doing a great job focusing on the Hispanic market. Most likely this is due to their Yahoo! en Español and AOL Latino advertising campaigns. Their marketing push has brought great rewards. Microsoft is not doing that bad. On the other hand, Google and Ask Jeeves must keep these numbers in mind and keep thinking of strategies to gain market share reach against its rivals. Google already taking action from its recent deal to power Univison.com search results into the world wide web. However, "Donde esta el Mayordomo Jeeves?".

How can we (the search engine marketers) do for website owners to help accomplish growth in this market segment? There is so much content, especially Spanish content, that needs to be optimized so that search engines can understand it via their algorithms and point users in the most relevant direction. At the same time, I feel there is so much education still needed for search engine marketers to do it right.

From time to time, I come across SEMs that are *only doing translation* and applying the most typical SEO factors. This is a typical mistake when search engine optimizers or website owners only use machine translations. Seriously, it?s not that easy. Proper nouns need to be in the right sequence and verbs can be in a total different position from what a typical translation would provide. I believe it has to do more with the ?relevant position? and the ?keyword distribution? factors within the search engine?s algorithms.

Another example, the other day our consulting firm, iHispanic Marketing Group, came across a website that was optimized for a keyword phrase that removed the preposition in between the two primary keywords because they most likely got it from one of the typical keyword suggestion tools (ie. keyword1 en keyword2, such as ?restaurantes en Dallas?). Unfortunately, the tool most likely took the word ?en? as a stop word for this Spanish keyword and ruined the optimization partially. Search engine optimizers SHOULD NOT DO THAT when optimizing in Spanish. Search engines remove stop words as part of their tokenization process, but the stop words are important elements of natural language and most likely analyzed as part of the raw data.

Keep these things in mind and hope to see all of you interested to learn more in SES San Jose 2005 during the Spanish Language Search Marketing Tactics session (which is given in English).

T0PS3O sent me a PM about this thread at DigitalPoint forums. The thread uncovers a security loophole in CJ's template repository management system. It was discovered when a DigitalPoint member asked;

When I check my site log stat. I found this dns ace.cj.com with ip address 216.34.209.23. It crawl every pages of my site. Are you familiar with it?

After more digging, one found the issues:

1. They have this machine publicly-accessible (it's not their main web server, somebody actually put in on the outside).
2. This apparently wasn't enough publicity for them and somebody ran/running a crawler on this machine, which identifies the machine to all the sites it's visiting.
3. There's no authentication of any kind for this system.

More information at the DigitalPoint thread.

Remember Orkut? I wrote about it several times here. Well, it looks like it is useful for something... C|Net reports yesterday Police: Orkut used as Brazilian drug network.

Forum chatter at DigitalPoint Forums.

Late May I wrote an entry named DigitalPoint Forums Helps Member Increase CTR 4X. This method is now being scrutinized at a WebmasterWorld thread. What exactly does the thread mean by "Images above ads to increase ctr"? A picture can explain it...

At the WebmasterWorld thread, people are not too sure if the implementation is in accordance with Google AdSense's TOS. But the person who implemented this tactic said Google gave her their OK. I see nothing wrong with it, as she explains... "However, flashing arrows pointing at the ads would not be OK."

Yesterday, WebmasterWorld moderator eWhisper created a thread named AdWords Changes: Minimum bids, No more 'on hold', etc.

In that thread he discusses his "interpretation" of the "info provided by Google." Basically, Google is going to be changing the way minimum bids work, how disabled keywords work, bidding works, the user interface, a new method for bulk upload and reporting changes.

Here is a quote from the thread on how the min bid will work:

Example:
Christmas widget
Off season, low quality keyword with low CTR, higher minimum bid.
During season, CTR is higher, keyword is more relevant, lower minimum bid.

More goodies at the thread.

A WebmasterWorld thread named I've banned Googlebot discusses the best possible way to remove a site (your site, not a competitor, hopefully) from the index. Many of the members in the thread simply recommend disallowing Googlebot from indexing your site with the robots.txt file. Others also recommend using the remove URL request form.

But many warn that if you do this, your site will be gone for at least 6 months from the index. So if your rankings drop and you think its due to a ban, do not jump to disallow Googlebot right away.

JenSense reports on a WebmasterWorld thread named Adsense by a hacker? which describes how an old Tell a Friend script added a "300 x 250 adsense box at the bottom of the page" without knowledge or authorization that this would happen to his pages.

Jensense points out the code used on the page:

<!--------- START Tellafriends.com CODE ----------->

<div align="center">

<script src="http://tellafriends.com/s/?ID=12345&SL=http://www.example.com/images/announce.gif"></script>


<noscript>

<a href=http://www.tellafriends.com/p?ID=12345>Tell a friend</a>

</noscript>

<!---------- END Tellafriends.com CODE ------------>

In addition, she links to the source behind that code, which I have taken a screen capture of.

For more information visit JenSense or the WebmasterWorld thread.

This is a little nice forum idea, to bring out the community spirit. Shawn at DigitalPoint posted a thread named Weekend In The Life Of... You.

He asks the forum members to take pictures of the activities they participate in this weekend and post them in that thread. The weekend he said would be in your local time; from 12:00 am Saturday morning to 11:59 pm Sunday night.

Can be anything you want, but get creative... if you are planning on going skydiving or something, do it this weekend. I will setup a place where people can upload their pictures, and will see about putting together a gallery of the best ones next week.

A thread at SEO Chat forums named Do your sites make some huge traffic from msn? Basically, what types of traffic do you get from ranking well in MSN? This of course is very dependent on the competitiveness of the keyword and your placement, but the thread is interesting anyway.

Some figures:
- #1 placement bring in 30 uniques per day
- #2 placement bring in 2 uniques per day
- #2 placement bring in 1,000 uniques per day
- #2 placement bring in 500 uniques per day

I had the privilege of having a client come to me and ask me my thoughts on an ethical and business dilemma he is having in regards to his search marketing campaign. Let me start off by giving you a bit of vague background on the situation.

The company specializes in a very unique niche, manufacturing a product specifically for a need. What this means is that they will not sell a product off-the-shelf. They design solutions in the form of customized products based on a customer's problem. This type of detail requires that an engineer from the company speak with the prospect before a solution (i.e. product) can be designed. The company has engineers that speak the languages, English, German, and Hebrew.

The company is a big user of PPC engines; Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Second Tier PPC Engines. They want to target a wider market, because they know they can offer a solution to anyone in the world. The only issue is that they can not understand all the languages in the world, in order to be able to understand the problem, in order to formulate a solution (i.e. a product).

The idea of creating specialized landing pages in any other language outside of English, German or Hebrew sounded both good and bad. (Good) By creating these pages they can effectively provide an avenue for other markets to find them and the company's offerings. (Bad) Since they do not speak the language, (1) the prospect might feel deceived and (2) it will lead to unnecessary costs in translation and PPC spend.

So I decided to post a thread on this topic over at Search Engine Watch Forums. The responses were kind of contradictory to each other. Mikkel feels that you must be able to speak the native language to offer a product, such as this client is offering. Others believe that if the copy on the page explicitly notes that the company engineers do not speak that language and they must have an English, German or Hebrew speaking representative call the company - then it is perfectly ok.

Mikkel places a good logical statement down in the thread:

In my experience people search in the language they expect to be serviced in.

If you haven't heard, Google to Open Research and Development Center in China, where Google "Hires Dr. Kai-Fu Lee as Vice President, Engineering and President of Google China." The issue is, where he is coming from and his non-compete...

Dr. Lee, who is widely known for his pioneering work in the areas of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, joins Google from Microsoft, where he most recently held the position of corporate vice president, after founding Microsoft Research China in the late 1990s. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Lee was a vice president and general manager at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), responsible for Internet and multimedia software. Lee also spent six years at Apple, serving as vice president of the company's interactive media group, and before that was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

So hence, Microsoft tells Google to Stop Poaching:

Microsoft:

"Creating intellectual property is the essence of what we do at Microsoft, and we have a responsibility to our employees and our shareholders to protect our intellectual property," Microsoft's statement continued. "As a senior executive, Dr. Lee has direct knowledge of Microsoft's trade secrets concerning search technologies and China business strategies. He has accepted a position focused on the same set of technologies and strategies for a direct competitor in egregious violation of his explicit contractual obligations."

Googe:

Google's own statement read, ""We have reviewed Microsoft's claims and they are completely without merit. Google is focused on building the best place in the world for great innovators to work. We're thrilled to have Dr. Lee on board at Google. We will defend vigorously against these meritless claims and will fully support Dr. Lee."

Forums:
- WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- SEO Chat Forums

The Search Engine Strategies San Jose Show is coming up soon - August 8th to be exact. Danny Sullivan just announced who the keynote speaker will be, at SES NYC it was Keynote with Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, at SES San Jose it will be Keynote with Steve Berkowitz of Ask Jeeves.

Danny has more information on this at the SES blog, great new blog if your deciding or decided to go to SES. I will be there, so will Ben - we will be providing our detailed (almost real time) coverage (with plenty of typos).

Mikkel deMib Svendsen, SEW Mod - SES Speaker - SEM Industry Leader, created a thread yesterday named Is Yahoo cloaking Yahoo?

Mikkel points to this cached page of www.maddhattentertainment.com/jbm/index.pl/schiavo-garden-blog-blog.html. Mikkel asks;

What is the relationship between the site above, JustBlogMe.com and Blo.gs - they seem it all be part of some kind of interlinking,redirecting scam project. I haven't spend much time on it yet, but I just wanted to throw it out to all of you. It just dosn't look "clean"

blo.gs say on the website that it has been purchased by Yahoo. maddhattentertainment.com on the other side dosn't say anything about Yahoo (and it does look abit on the "adult" side ...). But if you go to for example: maddhattentertainment.com/jbm/index.pl/schiavo-garden-blog-blog.html (found in the Yahoo index) you are redirected to justblogme.com - allthought the title in Yahoo says blo.gs

SEOmike replies that a company like Yahoo! should know how to cloak without getting easily caught. He offers, "Yahoo next time please give me a call and consult with me before your next cloak, I'll be glad to make it completely undetectable."

Mikkel further explains that its not the point that they are doing some form of cloaking but rather that;

My only point is just that is amazing how little many of the people INSIDE the engines that are responsible for publishing content knows about their own webmaster guidelines and it makes it very dificult for the rest of us to even consider taking those guidelines serious when they prove again and again that they don't really care - or, are able to live up to it even within their own crew.

It is so true, especially with a company the size of Yahoo! They have many divisions, one division is the search division. They don't always communicate and rarely understand the details of each division. So it is Tim Mayer's responsibility to get to the bottom of this, which he will - "We will look into it and make sure the issue is resolved to abide by our content guidelines," Tim says.

AdWordsRep announced that on "Friday July 22, 2005, advertisers will be unable to login to their AdWords accounts from roughly 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. (PDT due) to system maintenance."

This will have no affect on ad delivery and tracking. In addition, this will not affect AdSense publishers.

One of my employee yells out that Yahoo! is broken, Seattle Tom comments that Yahoo! is broken, and WebmasterWorld members are commenting that it is broken. This is the same type of error we saw on June 13th Yahoo Downtime. I guess all these SEOs are running there rank checkers and its killing Yahoo!'s servers. :)

Seems like Tim Mayer was just a bit late to hit that upload entry button at the Y! Search Blog. He just recently posted Third Weather Report: Yahoo! Launched New Search Index Last Night. This is an update for this mornings entry named Unannounced Yahoo! Search Update.

I guess the SEO forums beat him to it.

Tim told me to expect more changes soon, this is not the end of it he said. He also writes in the blog, "The changes will be a little more intense than the second weather report and changes will continue over the next week or two."

Last year the SEO Roadshow was a huge success. It is not about the money for this SEO get-together, its about meeting people face to face and learning and having fun. I believe SEO Roadshow is invite only, as well. It is known as the "black tie event of SEO."

There is an SEO Roadshow blog at http://www.seoroadshow.com/ with all the details.

Date/Time/Location: Sat Sept 10th 2005, The George Hotel, Edinburgh.

Unfortunately, I can't make these weekend trips. I would love to, but it is just not possible.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I am sure many of you have seen this in the past, I have but I have never really seen a thread on the weirdness of Yahoo!'s linkdomain command. So I decided to start one over at Search Engine Watch Forums. What is the issue?

Besides for the fact the Yahoo! API returns completely different results for the linkdomain:www.domain.com command as compared to when you use the same command at search.yahoo.com...

Doing the search at search.yahoo.com returns different results as well. For example, I did this search within a few minutes of each other, same exact search.

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Now that isn't too bad, but when I do the search when logged into Yahoo! MyWeb, I get a huge spike in numbers.

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I posted the forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

You see these types of threads every day and they make you want to yell. I have a site with a PR4 and over the past 6 months my backlinks and quality (PR) of backlinks have increased exponentially but yet, my PageRank remains the same. What is going on?

Well, nothing you can see in terms of the PageRank bar updating. Case point...This site had a PR6 for over a year, probably over 1.5 years - I don't track this site for that type of stuff. But since then, I have accumulated over 35,000 links or 77,900 links depending on how you ask (more on that in the next entry I post). You will notice the links are from other sites such as Google's Blog, Yahoo!'s Blog, MSN's Blog and so on - so they are pretty high quality. But yet the PageRank remains the same.

We should all just let it go. If your PR changes, great. If not, great! Just don't expect anything positive or negative - like you could have two years ago.

The past couple Yahoo! updates we have had Tim Mayer report them to us, for example see the last yahoo update. This one there is no mention. Possibly because Tim only announces updates to the index and not algorithmic changes? I don't know... Are these changes for the better? That is where you go to the forums. :) Most forums are in discovery mode... Is it a new filter? Is it an update to the index? Is it a new method of how they handle links?

Forum coverage:
- WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- SEO Chat Forums
- Digital Point Forums
- Cre8asite Forums

Surf the Moon Google Style. This is too cool! Have become a map fanatic lately with all the free tools like Google Earth and the Maps interface on Google and several other search engines, so this just adds to the fun. Google has annouced today "In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor." The images are courtesy of NASA according to Google, and the particular area covers the exact spots astronauts made their landings in 1969. The area covered on Google Moon is not exactly large but their are zoom capabilities and all points of the Apollo missions are uniquely highlighted so you can trace the exact spots. Google has indicated that they are only displaying what NASA has given them. No driving direction yet either as I can tell. :-)

According to more information from Google the Google Moon project is a result of the Google Copernicus Center. Since I last heard they have been on a forever long hiring streak. The moon office and Google has indicated the following release:

"We usually don’t announce future products in advance, but in this case, yes, we can confirm that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information."

If you wondering whether you can zoom into the surface of the moon, Google has stated you will have to find out what happens when you do. :-)

For your viewing pleasure visit - Google Moon - Google Moon FAQ

In the last several years, sites with frames have been slowly burned at the stake by SEO's. Redesigned, converted, noframed, and removed in order to accomodate a better design that will do well in the search engine. For the most part many of the techniques used to fix frames in the past are as not much more effective than the frames themselves. Adding links and content in the noframe section is not often a good solution and only a temporary patch at best. In most cases the best advice is to just not use frames period. I wanted to highlight a good advanced search engine optimization technique for fixing frames on websites. This technique is actually more a way to preserve the layout using frames while redoing all the code work. I came across a good example of it yesterday as I was examining some excellent CSS resources from a post on Cre8asite Forums. If you have clients or yourself want to keep the benefits of frames but not have the negative side effects there is a very good solution.

Fix Frames with a CSS Layout

Some brilliant people have taken the time to do a few examples of this (below). Basically the trick is to work with the z-index and the images in the CSS. You tell it to have the content layer scroll over the shadows but under the main image. The benefits are: You get a fixed navigation and top header and scrolling main body. The code is super clean as all styles are in the CSS. Its works in IE6 and all other browsers (except IE5.x).

Here are two examples:
http://www.stunicholls.myby.co.uk/layouts/frame.html - you can grab the CSS here by doing a view source.

http://jfy.homeunix.net/misc/example.html - another good and clean example of it in use in the backend of an administration section. See the source.

http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial24/ - very thorough resource for creating this type of layout

This technique can be adapted in many ways for the use with a redesign. Its especially wonderful SEO benefits are paralleled with the benefits it can have conversions and design. Check it out.

A thread at Cre8asite forums named uppercase - lowercase asks the question if it matters to search engines in the body copy, title, url and so on.

Bottom line is that it does not matter. Titles should look nice, headers should look nice and the URLs should look nice to the end user. But I don't think search engines will care much if you didn't upper case the name of your cat.

I totally missed it, but it is well documented that Yahoo! Search was down. A thread at WebmasterWorld, created at 3:23 pm on June 13, 2005, with several confirmations from people all over the world, said it was down, with the following error.

Oops!

We ran into a temporary problem while performing your search. Please try your search again.

I have seen this error once or twice in the past, but never heard of it over such a long time period.

Funny response in that thread by caveman;

I think this is only happening to people who Y has identified as spammers. Y knows who you are, dudes.

Last week a new moderator who goes by the name, "thejenn", has joined Search Engine Watch Forums to oversee the Outsourcing SEM forum. Jennifer Laycock, aka thejenn, is well known for being JimWorld mod/admin and as editor of search engine guide.

Also, at SEO Chat Forums, a new moderator came on board under the name Wit. Here is the Welcome to Wit - New SEOChat moderator! thread with all the juicy details.

Both great additions to both forums!

Randfish over at SEO Chat posted a thread named SEOmoz.org - In Google's Sandbox - Hilarity Ensues! In that thread he describes how his SEOmoz.org blog has been sandboxed after moving it from socengine.com/seo to seomoz.org.

Randfish describes that for searches he used to rank well for, he no longer ranks for. He gives many examples in the thread and describes that he has never done any "unnatural" link building for this site.

I applaud Randish for giving this a go. He said towards the end of the thread, "I'm just glad I was able to do this with a site that doesn't need SE traffic..." This is in response to Ben's advice for most people, that he "rarely if ever advise anyone to mess around with already well ranked pages unless they have too."

One thing is not clear from the thread is when this all occurred. I'll assume he didn't move over the domain name within a week or so. :)

For all you affiliate nuts, Linkshare just had their Linkshare Symposium June 2005. The awards up for winning included; Innovative Affiliate of the Year, Innovative Merchant of the Year, Best New Affiliate, Best New Merchant, Merchant's Choice Award, Affiliate's Choice Award, International Merchant of the Year, Best Performance-Based Search Strategy, Best Online Merchandising Campaign, Best Integrated Online-Offline Marketing, Best Overall Online Distribution Strategy, and Performance Marketing's Most Vocal Advocate.

The winner list can be viewed here.

Forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums

Updated: Here is a great write up named Reflections on the LinkShare Symposium.

It looks like some individuals over at WebmasterWorld are taking up new hobbies solely for the purpose of generating new AdSense income. I like the language used by the thread creator;

I need to become an expert in something new.

Ever wonder what happened to the Overture handbooks? A thread at Search Engine Watch forums wondered, so did this one and this one at WebmasterWorld.

It can be found at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/intro101.php.

Aaron Wall links to the new print version.

Chris_D, Search Engine Watch moderator reports the Introducion of "quality-based" minimum bids by Google AdWords. The detailed "what is" can be read at https://adwords.google.com/select/qbb.html.

Basically;

If you have any on hold keywords that you don't want to trigger ads, we suggest you delete them from your account. This is because any keywords with a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC could be activated and accrue ad clicks.

The discussion on if this is good or bad for advertisers can be read at the thread.

Danny Sullivan started a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named How Should Search Engines Protect Privacy?

In that thread he asks for forum members to participate in what they feel should be an industry standard for privacy. The thread is now two full pages long, with 22 replies - many very informative.

I am a bit under the weather, so I am keeping these entries short today.

WebmasterWorld is the largest SEM forum on the net, probably one of the largest forums on the net period. WebmasterWorld Moderator and WebmasterWorld's founder's wife, Hawkgirl (Erika), has basically summed up some of the most valuable threads at WebmasterWorld. She did this, in addition to other things in a thread named Welcome to WebmasterWorld! Which she subtitles, "A guide and resource for our new members".

Even if your not a newbie to WebmasterWorld, the thread (towards the bottom) has some goodies that you might have missed.

There is tis new "seo challenge" with prizes up to $15,000. I found this by way of DigitalPoint forums, a thread named seo challenge prize 15.000 $.

Basically, they want you to rank well for game/casino type of keywords, sign up for their affiliate program and send them the leads. But what do you get aside from an affiliate income (which can be nice)?

For the keyword "Backgammon”
1st prize $3000
2nd Prize $1500
3rd Prize $500

For the keyword "backgammon games”
1st Prize $1500
2nd Prize $1000
3rd Prize $500

For the keyword "online backgammon"
1st Prize $2000
2nd Prize $1200
3rd Prize $800

For the keyword "backgammon rules"
1st Prize $1500
2nd Prize $1000
3rd Prize $500

Is this an SEO contest or is this a smart affiliate strategy? Or maybe it is both?

More information at the DigitalPoint thread.

Search Engine Watch Moderator, Jeff Martin reports that Google has been, some time, showing less results for a particular keyword. I am sure it is just a fluke because I did the same search as Jeff and came up with 778,000 results where as he came up with only 10.

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Cool find, nonetheless.

A featured thread at Search Engine Watch forums named What Degrees Or Professional Backgrounds Do SEO/SEMers Have?

The thread is thirty-one replies long and it makes for an interesting read. If you ever wondered what the typical SEO did before he did SEO, you might want to check out the thread.

A funny thread at DigitalPoint forums says Google has Paris Hiltons Number. That can be explained by here or here.

But in reality, isnt is a word Google doesn't like.

It's fun to see all the webmasters and SEO folk whipped into a frenzy whenever a PageRank update happens...

...and one has just started (showing updates on 4 data centers right now).

I'm sure the forums will fill up with threads about it, and these are the ones I could find so far:
Digital Point
SEO Chat

Update: from rustybrick: I posted a thread at SEW forums and decided to call it PageRank Update Underway: Update Danny just for fun.

Now there is nothing new about rating the search results between Yahoo and Google. I have seen an incredible amount of tools, articles, and other websites do this in volume in order to draw some conclusions. In my experience I use Yahoo and Google both for different things, where Google is more for research and Yahoo is to find things Google can't seem to find.

Some of the forum members have taken it upon themselves in a collabrative light hearted effort to do a survey type experience between Yahoo and Google of the top 5 results. Quite similar to how Barry created with RustySearch, except its just a rating based on if you think the result is relevant to the search, you give the site one point, if not its gets 0 points. You add the points together and it decides the most relevant search query for either engine. Now nothing can be drawn conclusively from this as the sample size is limited and subjective. But the main interest are the phrases they are using in this little survey and the amount of people that have participated. It should be noted that most of the keyphrases I see being used are in ultra competitive areas like "asbestos lawyer" "ringtones" which can be assumed are schewed in some fashion. Its almost but not quite an assesment on the quality that SEO brings to the top 5 and how each of the engines react. If you are guessing Yahoo is suffering in this area, then you guess right, as the results in the thread are leaning towards less relevancy at Yahoo. But thats just opinions. :-)

Check out Yahoo < Google, Manual Review

Google today pushed out some big looking changes to the AdSense program. They updated a few things, some I might have missed.

(1) Interface:

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(2) TOS, more at jensense on that.

(3) RSS Feed ads set up instructions for anyone.

Forum discussion:
- DigitalPoint Forums
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- WebmasterWorld
- Cre8asite Forums
- SEO Chat Forums

There are certain aspects of this site that simply do not work properly. I have decided to hire someone to work on those issues. Why don't I do it in house? Well, the person I am hiring has MovableType expertise and my guys only do custom Web applications.

What will we be doing?
(1) Upgraded from MovableType 2.x to MovableType 3.x
(2) Fix CSS issue on IE with aligning graphics right or left, example
(3) Ensuring all the plugins currently installed work, some broke over time.
(4) Clean up the code in general

If you have suggestions or ideas, please let me know. This is not a redesign, just overall site maintenance.

Also, Movable Type has a directory of plugins, if you feel any would be useful, please let me know and we will do our best to get them running. Plugins are viewable at http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Zip, City, State, County Data discusses solutions for someone to build out a local search engine. This individual asks for help in locating an "up to date list of zip, city, state, county, & lat/long to integrate into a local search function on a site." The reason this individual requests this information is to perform a service to the site's viewers to locate store locations within X miles of a zip code or city.

For this I have used http://www.zipcodedownload.com/ in the past. Actually, I believe they are on my blog blacklist for spamming this site. Others recommend in the thread, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html and http://www.melissadata.com/.

Well, slightly different placement. If you use Google and do a search on a keyword phrase with the default settings of ten per page, you will see some indented results. If you change your Google search preferences to a higher number displayed on one page, i.e. 100 results per page, you will notice a slight difference. Basically, Google likes to group the results from one site together, with only 10 results on a page, it would be redundant to show five or so results from the same site of the 10 results displayed. But with a 100 results per page, it does not cause the same issue as wit 10 results per page.

There is a thread on this topic at WebmasterWorld.

Wayback Machine is used so often by many of us for many reasons. Want to see the first RustyBrick Web site, use the wayback machine. But it is also used as a legal tool "to turn up old Web pages" that can be used in a legal case. Due to this, one law firm wanted to prevent this from happening and decided to bring in the Wayback Machine into a lawsuit.

This lawsuit has an incredible number of implications; to name a few:
(1) The fun aspect of bringing up old versions of Web sites
(2) A sure fire way to prove copyright infringement
(3) Many search engines have "caching" functionality

There is a definite search related impact on this case for all of us. The forums are buzzing on this topic, to major threads are at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Gary Price send me a link to the full lawuit http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/pdf/ia_lawsuit.pdf.

Sugarrae started a thread at WebmasterWorld about the news that AJ Interactive was just launched.

Seems they are offering email marketing, search results marketing (on AJ and the various properties they own) and what appears to be a "higher level" contextual advertising program. I say higher level based on the "traffic options" listed on the publisher application.

From the thread, it seems many are not interested.

I would like to wish Andy Beal, fellow SEO blogger, best of luck with his most recent blog announcement... Why I've Resigned from WebSourced. Andy is the name behind KeywordRankings. He brought in great talent and names like Mike Grehan and Heather Loyd-Martin.

Andy said his reasoning for leaving the company;

It is clear that my vision for the company’s future does not match-up with its current course. These philosophical differences have led me to conclude that WebSourced’s current path does not align with my own beliefs.

This is very similar to Jason Dowdell's entry on his resignation from websourced just a month ago. Where Jason says;

Well, quite simply, WebSourced and I had differences of opinion and have since parted ways.

Again, I would like to wish Andy all the best. In my opinion, this is a huge lose for Websourced & KeywordRankings.

Update: WebSourced pulled Andy's post.

Brett Tabke posted the news at WebmasterWorld that Claria launched a new search product. The press release describes "RelevancyRank".

RelevancyRank is a revolutionary search capability that ranks Web pages based on consumer surfing behavior. The technology incorporates basic metrics such as click rates, as well as critical post-click metrics of consumer behavior - such as time spent viewing a site, number of pages viewed at a site, number of return visits to a destination Web site, historical interests based on Web-wide surfing habits, and conversion behavior.

Brett feels that "Microsoft made a major mistake in passing on Claria."

A simple but fun test to see which image search engine is the best at finding "stick man" pictures.

In my humble opinion the best are ranked in this order, for this search:
# 1 Ask Jeeves
# 2 Yahoo!
# 3 Google
# 4 MSN

It is far from scientific, but an email from Pixsy encouraged this post, they didn't do too well.

Do you find link development the most boring and hated part of the SEO game? Do you sometimes find yourself pulling out your hair over building links? Do you sometimes want to take a hammer to your computer due to link building?

A thread at WebmasterWorld titled Just can't get myself to do link development is a place you can come and share your frustration with others.

The thread creator said;

My brain hurts just thinking about link development...it's such a tedious, boring process.

Some other quotes;

Dirtiest job in SEO but the most important.

Everyone hates it [link building].

Some positive words of encouragement;

I love trying to get links. It is like a treasure hunt.

Think of $,$$$,$$$ in a year or two ahead.

As I submitted this entry, I noticed the Link Building Blog wrote an entry named Life of a Link Hunter, which links to an animated video of "a very talented link building consultant."

Great timing & how fitting...

I will be interviewing a potential PHP developer this afternoon (see top of the index page) who was born in Russia. During my WebmasterWorld travels, I found a new thread named SE popularity in Russia. The thread creator, Blackie, who claims to have "actual SE use by different people in Russia." The results he posted include:

Yandex - 49,46%
Rambler - 22,27%
Google - 12,38%
Mail.ru - 5,12%
Aport - 2,29%

I'll update this entry later after speaking with the person I am interviewing. Of course, it will be his opinion.

A couple days ago, Jenstar posted a thread at WebmasterWorld named Review of the Google AdSense Webinar for new publishers. The Webinar was specifically for new publishers, so I am sure it bored many of the publishers that have some experience with Adsense. Jenstar does not that:

Confirmation from AdSense of the top three ad unit sizes are-
1. 336x280 large rectangle
2. 300x250 medium rectangle
3. 160x600 wide skyscraper
AdSense plans to release new languages each quarter.

The full transcript can be found under the name Google AdSense Optimization Webinar.

A WebmasterWorld thread named AdWords Broken? shows some AdWords professionals talking about the AdWords banners that are present at the top are not showing up as often. Normally when you do a search on a popular keyword phrase, the ads that have the highest rank number are at the top. AdWords professionals are saying this is happening less often this morning.

Nacho at Search Engine Watch forums started a thread named Optimizing for Google Video Searches that does some future thinking on the new Google Video release.

If you are interested in this, check out the thread.

yohaas, a reader, emailed me this crazy UI feature Google seems to be testing out. Basically, he did a search on Outlook object Model and on page two it showed "Alternate Searches" smack in the middle of the SERPs.

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Annoying, no? We had something a bit similar to this with April 06, 2005 entry.

Update: GoogleGuy confirmed this is not spyware and is in fact a UI experiment.

Google announced yesterday, a new Refine Search feature named Numrange search. This is a pretty neat feature, that I know I wanted in the past. It can be used many ways.

Just add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms.

(1) inventions 1850..1899
(2) DVD player $250..350
(3) 5000..10000 kg truck

And many other uses. I posted a thread about this feature at Cre8asite Forums.

Search Engine Watch Affiliate Issues Moderator, 5starAffiliatePrograms, posted a thread named Commission Junction to Spotlight Top 200 Affiliates. Basically, he posted information about CJ's announcement Top Tier Publishers Gain Competitive Edge with Commission Junction's CJ Performer. Basically, "top-performing publishers get access to enhanced support and resources, and recognition within Commission Junction's network as a premier publisher."

What is great is that I know about 25% of those 200 are in the SEM community, maybe more.

A member at Search Engine Watch forum discovered a new test Google is trying out. There is no official name for it yet, but we can nickname it "More Site Results". Basically, you can see from the picture below, that Google is embedding more site results from a page.

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This does not appear to be any form of AdWords, and GoogleGuy confirms that "this isn't spyware." In fact, he says this is a UI experiment by Google.

Two things:
(1) The members do not like the fact that it pushes down the other results.
(2) It seems like Google is able to break out a site by section. Look at the Amazon sample, Google breaks the site up into at least these categories; Baby, Books, Toys & Games, Free e-Cards.

Remember Darrin Ward, founder of SEO Chat Forums and then he followed that up with a new forum named SEO Town? Last Friday, he contacted me, asking me if I heard of the below URLs or Google Data Centers. I said I did not, so he decided to post a thread informing the SEO community about them.

Suggested New Google Data Centers:

* gfe.google.com
* gfe-va.google.com
* gfe-va2.google.com
* gfe-va3.google.com

More at the thread.

Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion wrote Yahoo Testing Blogs and RSS Search. Basically, the test site was at http://test.rss.search.yahoo.com/ which now redirects you to the advanced search page. Two small screen shots were captured by Steve, one of the homepage and the other of a search results page. There is a really large image at Flickr.

For some reasons, I haven't found any threads at the major SEM forums. So I started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google Site Search is a quick and easy way to provide a search feature for your Web visitors. I use it on this site but I tend to opt for the built in search feature.

Why? Well, the built in feature tends to look more part of the site. It is fully customizable, and much more professional then using Google's solution. Is it as good? I think sometimes its better, it depends on how I am searching.

A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses this topic. Clint offers some good advice. (1) "If you're in sales of a product, that putting a G search box (or any search box for that matter) that has a "search the web" feature, that this is going to potentially push your potential customers elsewhere." (2) "Atomz's paid version is great", if you can afford it.

Mikkel calls for the removal of the way Google currently handles the links to the author of the provided videos at Google Video. In a thread he named Google Video Doing 302 Redirects Mikkel describes how the link just below the "About this show" section is 302 redirect link, not 301 and not a direct link. What makes matters worse is that Chris_D points out, Google is not excluding that redirect within its robots.txt file.

Example of Mikkel's video.

We have all seen the results of 302 redirecting in the past year or two - and the problems dosen't seem to be over yet (especially not in Google). I am not sure I am so happy about this 302 from Google. With Googles high PR I am simply affraid that they will end up hijacking the sites I point to from the videos I upload and the question is, do I really want to add videos without any reference to my (or the artists) site?

Nacho started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asking Does Age in URL transfer with 301?

In that thread he asks, if one has a URL path domain.com/old-category1-name.html and wants to move that 301 style to domain.com/new-category1-name.html "will the age recorded in the search engine's records for "old-category1-name.html" follow down to the "new-category1-name.html"?"

I do not believe the "age recorded" for either of those file names will affect anything. I believe it is the age of the domain name, domain.com - that will play a roll in the whole site's success or failure. What do I base this on? Some personal experience.

While we are on the subject of patents today I wanted to highlight a very good thread on Cre8asite that is talking in detail about determining document freshness. Bill Slawski starts the thread off by going into some of the recent patents namely the Systems and methods for determining document freshness. Bill goes on to say that:

One of the problems that it addresses is that a "last-modified-since" on a document is often incorrect. That means that it cannot be used to accurately gauge the freshness of a document.

Quite interesting. The thread follows by discussing this effect as "Freshrank" in that search engines are looking for updates on pages. Now the information mentioned in the patent may not be in effect current effect, but it may in some fashion. One of the members details that Google wants to see updates in content, even if its just minor ones.

Someone also details a rumor that Google is planning to do another major update this summer and planning to leave things alone for awhile. If there is any truth in that, no ones know for sure. But you know how rumors spread.

Ammon Johns provides some insight on the patent and explains that:

In other words, I really don't believe that it is all that important as to whether a page itself updates regularly, so much as guaging whether the page continues to be a currently relevant citation. The age of the links will be far more important to guaging that than whether or not the page itself has been updated (except in regards to spotting ye olde Bait-n-Switch technique).

This also implies to how they might look at domain registration time. With the recent information from the last patent about this some people rush out to register their domain for the full possible time sometimes as much as 10 years from now. While none of that can't hurt, its debatable how much good it will do. As I have explained in some forums, Google is probably considering more how long the domain has been registered, or its current life (from registration till now), not its future life.

There is some more discussion in relation to the patent and other ones that have been released lately. Worth a quick visit.

Continue discussion at Cre8asite - Google Freshness of Pages Revisited

Google recently added Currency Conversion to its list of Google Web Search Features. Gary notes that Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves both had these feature already.

Forum discussion over at WebmasterWorld.

You have seen it time and time again, especially when doing a search on a company name. It occurs when there are three or more relevant results at a particular domain name for the search query. Many SEOs do what they can to get two listings and the more results from link on a particular search query. It helps ensure the searcher clicks on your result. Obviously the more screen real estate you take up, the higher the CTR (click through rate).

Currently this works well for a search on rustybrick, I suspect it will work in the foreseeable future as well. If not, I have attached a screen capture here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. I know this is a simple topic, but I have never covered it before here.

msgraph, who is known for posting Google patents over at Search Engine Watch Forums posted three new threads. Each thread summarizes a patent Google released. Here they are:

- New Google Patent App: Systems and methods for improving search quality
- New Google Patent App: direct navigation to specific portion of target document
- Google's New AutoLink-type Patent App

I have yet to read any of them in detail.

So much for the catchy title... Gary Price blogged Ask Jeeves: Barry Diller Ponders Leaving Google Ad Network. Gary recaps an article, "Diller does tell Liedtke that he's considering leaving the Google ad network and forming an his own network when AJ's contract with Google expires in 2007."

Gary, as well as other analysts, believe that Barry Diller said this to be able to negotiate a better contract with Google when this one expires. But it makes you think, would Ask Jeeves Dare to Drop AdWords in 2007? That is the name of a thread I just started over at Search Engine Watch, participate, if you will.

As they promised, Google has just released for download, Google Toolbar BETA for Firefox. I wasn't even sure if it was important to write on this topic, I know many of you love Firefox, so I decided to anyway.

Forum coverage:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- SEO Chat Forums
- WebmasterWorld

I have been searching the forums for a solid, positive sign, brought from implementing Google Sitemaps for a site that is already fully indexed. Member Relevancy at Search Engine Watch Forums posted a response stating;

Something else that appears to be cool with Google sitemaps is tht it appears to take pages out of the supplemental results. I just recently added a sitemap for one of my sites that was fully in the supp index and a few days later half the pages got taken out.

Now, sites within the supplemental indexed are arguably not fully indexed. But I know tons of developers have issues getting these sites out of that index. If it is as simple as feeding Google a Sitemaps file, then it might be worth the effort.

Many of you are aware of the terrible London Bombings, where MSNBC reports 40 dead so far. Danny Sullivan set up a News Sources On London Bombings at the SEW Blog. In addition, many of the SEO Forums have support threads on this terrible terrorist attack; including Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

But a new thread in the WebmasterWorld AdSense forum came about due to this news, Does Al Kaida ruin impressions and EPC? In this thread AdSense publishers are reporting lower impressions, lower EPC and lower CPM but average CTR. Most believe its due to this attack. The global affect of a terrorist attack.

I hope it doesn't insult anyone to have posted on this sensitive topic with a SEM twist. That was not my intention and I hope the numbers of deaths and injuries do not rise.

DigitalPoint forum thread named getting listed on Yahoo in 24 hours argues that by adding an RSS feed to your site and ensuring Yahoo knows about that feed, will in fact get you indexed more quickly. Of course this is disputed and there is no scientific proof of this as of yet.

In the context of tagging, RSS is an invaluable SEO tool. But outside of that, it does clearly help with site visibility. Black arrow is the Yahoo! Directory listing for this site, the blue arrow is the RSS listing for this site and the green arrow (box) is the My Web tagging I have done for this site. All of this increases the visibility of ones listing in the SERPs.

A thread at HighRankings forum named MSN Showing Meta Keywords in description shows a few examples of this. The first example is the number one result for print server. The description snippet on the SERPs read; "... print server,jet direct print server,what is a print server,wireless print server,used print server,2 port usb print server,dlink print server,usb print server,usb wireless print server,usb print ..." But take a look at the source code of the result page.

<title>Print Server Software for Windows Platforms</title>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Print Server software allowing manipulation of print stream and Print to File options.">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="print server,Print Server,printer server,wireless...

This is not a global issue nor is it an isolated issue.

Almost all Webmasters have experienced the Teoma Crawler that crawls too much. What I mean by too much, is that the bandwidth usage of Ask Jeeves sometimes can spike uncontrollably. There are threads all over the place about this. The most recent thread I found is at DigitalPoint forums and is named Ask Jeeves hitting thousands of pages on a 12 page site...

So what can you do? Here are just a few?

(1) Exclude the image directories from these crawlers. Unless you want to rank well for image searches, there is no real reason to have the spiders crawl your large images.

(2) The Teoma crawler supports the Crawl-Delay, you can set a crawl delay for that spider. More information at Teoma Tech Information page.

(3) Then of course you can do the caching stuff and compression stuff on the server side.

A thread at WebmasterWorld asks Yahoo & Grammar: Does Yahoo Detect Proper Grammar?

A member says that he took over a client's Web site from an other SEO. He noticed that the client's ranking in Yahoo dropped. He also noticed that the content in the title tags are not grammatically correct. If you put one and one together, it can imply that your rankings will tank in Yahoo if your title tag is not in proper English.

But that is absolutely wrong. Most title tags don't read 100% grammatically correct, some times on purpose. It is important it reads quickly and catchy and sometimes that means you need to put grammar on the back burner.

In the past, we wrote an entry named GoogleGuy Wants AdSense Spam Sites Out. Some of the AdSense spam, scraper sites, click fraud and so on were out of hand. Jenstar at WebmasterWorld posted a thread named Reporting click fraud to Google AdSense, which is a shorter version of what she blogged on under the title Reporting publisher click fraud to Google just got easier.

It is true, it got very easy to report spam. All you need to do is click on the text at the bottom right of the Google AdSense ad that reads "Ads by Google" or "Ads by Goooooogle". Then it pops open a new window, at the bottom of that window it reads "Give Google feedback on Ads by Google". By including the phrase "invalid clicks" in the comments field (to report click fraud), it will be routed to the correct team.

Above is an image of a typical Google AdSense Ad, where I highlighted the link you click on to report such activity.

There is a wonderful thread at WebmasterWorld named Which are the leading search engines in Europe? I am not sure how statistically valid all of the responses are, but these are real people with real experience talking about which engines are the most popular in the European market.

UK Engines: Google, Yahoo, ASKjeeves, MSN,
UK Portals: Wanadoo, NTL, Tiscali, Lycos, BTopenworld

Netherlands Engines: Google (~85%)
Netherlands Portals: startpagina.nl , planet.nl

Germany Engine Stats: Google 81.6% , Yahoo 4.5% , MSN Web-Suche 4.3% , AOL Suche 2.5% , T-Online 1.6% , WEB.DE 1.2%

Sweden - Besides for G,Y,M,A eniro.se
Denmark - Besides for G,Y,M,A eniro.dk
Norway - Besides for G,Y,M,A kvasir.no

The thread goes on...

A new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named DMOZ Top Listed Domains discusses a list published a while ago at www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/dmoz-listings.html.

At the same time, a new thread on this topic was started at Cre8asite Forums.

When I became a DMOZ editor, one of the most obvious things to look for or ask yourself on a submission was: Does this domain name exist already in the ODP? If it does, then you have to be really strict about if a new (additional) listing should be allowed it. I assume this is very subjective and some editors are more easy going then others.

The conversation touches on that topic in both threads. Overall, the Open Directory Project has been getting lots of negative attention in the past several months.

Randfish does it again, he organized a question and answers session with the MSN Search Term at SEO Chat. The thread is named Ask Questions Directly to the MSN Search Development Team. It is a great opportunity for those who have questions, to get them answered. MSN is a serious engine and should not be taken lightly.

Last night I received a demo of a new product that Hitwise released this morning. The product is now available at http://www.keywordintelligence.com/.

Normally, I would not blog product promotions but this keyword research tool is (1) incredibly powerful and (2) very affordable. The press release is available and pdf with the features.

The three major components of the product at:
(1) Search Term Suggestions - provides the most popular search term variations for any word
(2) Industry Search Terms - provides the most popular search terms for over 160 industries
(3) Search Term Portfolios - an easy to use tool to manage keyword lists

Basically, this is a lower end version of Hitwise's master products. It is an affordable, but rich data set of information which you can use for your clients. The data is superior to other keyword research tools because they can tell you two more important things than other products (might be more then two):

(1) The "Success Rate" which is basically the click through rate from the SERPs to the page. You can use this data to not only see which search terms are most popular, but which drive a larger number of clicks.

(2) "Industry Search Tool" provides a method for you to search for the most popular search terms within an industry. An excellent started for brainstorming.

The Portfolio is a great way to organize all this data and build personalized reports with "Volume" and "Success Rate" marks. Not only this, but you can compare different markets (US, UK, Australia, and so on). Very powerful and worth taking a look at.

This tactic at best is questionable and for most purposes I would discredit any positive effect it would have on improving rankings. However there is an interesting thread at SEOchat discussing how bringing your site down for a short period of time might actually help increase your rankings slightly when it comes back. I have seen quite a few sites go down some because of server issues, others because they forgot to pay a hosting bill, others they accidentially disallow the entire site in robots.txt and I can't say most of these sites have risen above their previous positions. Some might have, but for the most part they just go back to their normal positions.

One of the members who started the thread indicates he has seen increases in both Google and MSN for his phrases after the site went back up. When the site goes down, it disappears from the search engines, once back up things slowly start to return to normal. The effect could be comparable to the effect some news sites get in a boost in ranking once they are first included and then slowly decline to obsurity over the course of time. In any case, interesting read, but I don't know if I would recommend anyone trying it. It doesn't make sense to loose all that traffic while the site is down to hopefully get more of it back later when the ranking come back. However a few are discussing letting visitors still get to the site, but not allow spider to get in as a way to test this.

Discussion at SEOchat - Bringing Down Site to Raise Rankings

An interesting thread at WebmasterWorld named Blocking Adsense Traffic to poor countries have skyrocketed reports just that. Member, asianguy, with 177 total posts at WebmasterWorld claims;

I just blocked all Asian countries and some countries in Europe, then I saw a spike after a couple of hours. Then it stayed there on top since then.

Of course this shocked many. Who cares if a click in Asia is worth 5 cents and a click in America is worth 25 cents? Why not take the 5 cents clicks as well as the 25 cents clicks? Why block the low income visitors? As jomaxx said, "Block all those countries and your bottom-line revenue will go down, not up. Your CPM may go up, but who cares?"

It is still hard to understand if AsianGuy is talking about the advertising campaigns (the actual ads) versus the people who click on the ads. He further tried to clarify, "I am talking about those pages with Google Ads." But I still do not clearly understand if its advertising campaigns or the readers he is blocking. It makes more sense that is it is the campaigns. Jenstar?

A WebmasterWorld thread shows the SEMs disappointment with Google specifically for now actively promoting the Live 8 campaign that took place over the past few days. With the exposure Google, Yahoo and MSN have - the SEMs were upset with the lack of involvement with this campaign.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Five Year Anniversary of Google on Yahoo!, where Yahoo picked Google to provide its default search results. I did some clicking and found the press release on Google's site; Yahoo! Selects Google as its Default Search Engine Provider. The press release was dated on June 26, 2000. I assume that the results switched over on this date, July 4th, 2000.

I hope most of you remember five years ago today (July 4th) when Google replaced Inktomi to serve secondary search results at Yahoo!. How many of us predicted then that Google would be as huge today, and paving the landscape of search? It is incredible what can happen in just five years.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asks AdWords: No Tobacco but Pornography OK... why? Some guess it has to do with tax reasons, some believe it has to do with the war against smoking, but the best answer in the thread is by Ian.

It's because tobacco gives you cancer and porn only gives you hairy palms.

Did you ever wonder what else is prohibited? In the thread is a link to the Google AdWords Content Policy. The list includes; Aids to Pass Drug Tests, Alcohol, Anti and Violence, Bulk Marketing, Cable Descramblers and Black Boxes, Counterfeit Designer Goods, Dialers, Drugs and Drug Paraphernalia, Fake Documents, Fireworks/Pyrotechnic Devices, Gambling, Hacking and Cracking Sites, Miracle Cures, Mod Chips, Prescription Drugs and Related Content, Prostitution, Sexual Content (Adult), Solicitation of Funds, Tobacco and Cigarettes, Traffic Devices, and Weapons. Note, the "Sexual Content (Adult)" is "not permitted for the promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material."

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator, DaveN, feels that Google is targeting directories, by that he means, devaluing the links from directories. He bases this statement on the large amount of recent data he collected. For those not familiar with DaveN, he is someone who might be referred to as an "algo chaser." In other words, he is one of the guys that make the search engines better by exposing loopholes within the algorithms.

Of course, most of us would just push off such a statement. Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN and all the search engines recommend getting quality inbound links. Some even say that you should get them from directories. Heck, Yahoo and MSN promote paid directories, Google uses the ODP.

But if one would think about it more. The way this industry has been going follows this sort of pattern. Search engines like variable X. Some SEOs look for ways to exploit the variable X. Search engines have to move away from liking X and then move on to Y. The process repeats, over and over again. So maybe DaveN is right.

The well respected Search Engine Journal blog has been "Defaced by Outlawsys." This is very sad to see, I hope we see SEJ back soon. Loren Baker, the owner of SEJ, is a very nice guy. I don't see why anyone would want to do this to his Internet property. If you want to see the screen image of what these "Outlawsys" did, click here.

Pandia has coverage on this as well.

Wanted to wish you all a happy July 4th. Seems like Google has yet to put up the July 4th logo, maybe they are being fair.

Ask Jeeves (smart answer):

Yahoo! (smart shop)

HighRankings Forum has a happy July 4th thread.

Thank goodness, Ian Turner has be found in Atlanta without his passport. It is truly amazing the effort the whole SEO community put through to try to track him down. It shows you something about this group of people.

Nick Wilson of ThreadWatch was instrumental in getting this going. He created the official Ian Turner Missing: Facts Page which helped keep everyone worried about Ian in the loop, as well as bridge the communication of Ian's whereabouts. At about 5:30, ThreadWatch received a comment by DaveN (who was in contact with Ian' wife throughout the time) which sprung the new post named Ian Turner Found!

Forums that I know of, that did what they can to get the word out include:
- WebmasterWorld: Ian Turner Missing
- WebmasterWorld:Ian Found - Safe and Sound
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- HighRankings Forum

And others...

The blogs that covered this was truly spectacular, I don't believe I am able to name them all. A few include:
- Yahoo Search Blog
- Google Blog
- SEW Blog
- and so many more

Glad he is back and safe! Have a wonderful weekend all, and a happy July 4th!

I was chatting with this awesome guy known as Gary Price, you know he is the news editor at Search Engine Watch. We were talking about all the cool things Google releases (and Yahoo and especially Ask Jeeves) but one thing we noticed was that Google every now and then takes away these things. For example:

(1) It has been two days and Google Earth Download is still temporarily not available.

(2) Google Sitemaps was up for a bit, then Google Sitemaps was Slashdotted to the Ground - its back up now.

(3) Google Web Accelerator Closed and seems to still be offline, no way to get to it.

(4) And forget about Google X coming back ever.

I am sure there are many others I left out. Seems interesting, announce things, they work for a little bit, get the press and forget about it. Then announce new things, and repeat.

I have done that with a few tools, but simply do to lack of resources. I know how hard it is to manage the human technology resources of a 7 person Web firm - I can not imagine what Google has to go through. I started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Google Giving & Then Taking Back? asking "Is this just a PR ploy or a resources issue or something else?"

Gary Price blogged about New Web Engine From China Now Online. iAsk, SINA Corporation "self-developed algorithmic search engine", is using that dock effect that Apple has created. Gary also notes the name is a bit too similar to Ask, for a search engine.

Here is the dock effect being used at iAsk:

Here is what Apple's looks like:

And the old Google X:

For fun, I posted a thread about this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ask Jeeves is the one major search engine engine to post a special logo for Canada Day. Since a bit over 2% of our readers are from Canada (I am sure its more but the stats can't be a 100%), I thought I note this.

The Smart Answer for Canada Day is very useful. A guy like me who knows very little about things outside of New York, can easily become very cultured in a matter of minutes. No I am not proud, I blame the education department of the state of New York.

On June 20, 1868, a proclamation signed by the Governor General, Lord Monck, called upon all Her Majesty's loving subjects throughout Canada to join in the celebration of the anniversary of the formation of the union of the British North America provinces in a federation under the name of Canada on July 1st.

There seems to always be a thread going on at Search Engine Watch Forums on a heated topic such as SEMPO, SMA-NA, SPAM, Cloaking, and many other ethical debates fought about within the SEM community. One currently taking place at SEW Forums has just been closed, but it was named Is Black Hat SEO a form of Hacking? A great topic, one of which I did not participate in, due to the lack of time.

But the reason I point you to this thread is because of the last post Danny Sullivan made before closing it for the holiday weekend. The last post summarizes a collection of heated SEW threads. I'll quote Danny's post below:

• Spamming Versus Creative / Real World SEO Tactics

• Spam - How Do We Fix The Problem?

• The Great Doorway Debate

• Improving The Reputation Of The SEM Industry

• An SEM Code Of Conduct?

• SEMPO & The SEM Reputation Problem

• whitehat vs. blackhat, it is all BS

• Low, Medium, High Risk SEO tactics

• when is a page "spam"

• Guerilla Marketing & Underhand Tactics - All Fair in Love and War?

• Cloaking 101 - Questions and Answers

• Ethical Standards and The Search Engine Marketing Industry

• Confessions of a White Hat Content Spammer: What I've Learned by Ignoring Google

• Black Hat, White Hat & Lots of Gray

• Ethical Search Engine optimisation Explained

• What is Spam? - SES NYC 05

• SEM Industry Biggest Growing Pains

• Cloaking, load of BS?

The resourceful randfish got a hold of Greg Jarboe of SEO PR, an other resourceful guy. There is a question and answer session taking place at SEO Chat Forums with Greg. The thread is named Q+A with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com. This is a great opportunity to ask Greg your questions in regards to press releases and SEO. He has lots of experience with this.