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.