August 2005 Archives

Today I had the privilege of guest hosting The Daily SearchCast at WebmasterRadio with Danny Sullivan. It was my first time hosting a radio show of any kind, so I hope it was good for a first time. So what did we discuss and how do you listen to the archives?

Discussed Today:

Today Danny & Guest Host Barry Schwartz chat about the latest Blogs, Feeds and News. Today's topics include Google selling print ads, Yahoo ad management system, Traffic Power & trade secrets, International trade war between France & the U.S. about search engines, publishers accuse Google of violation book copyrights, Google international interfaces, Google Talk, RSS Feed search engines, Google group results, Yahoo mail enhancements featuring a photo gallery... and the South Park Google parody!

You can listen to the archives at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/audio/2005/SC083105.mp3.

A thread at WebmasterWorld asks What happens if we stop paying for Site Match? In response to that we have two replies (I have no experience with this, so I can not comment on its accuracy).

We got screwed both ways. We had a bunch of sites that were anywhere from #1 for 2yrs and mostly top 8 sites in many areas. Joined site match in hopes of maintaining positions, ALL sites disappeared almost instantly. We cancelled site match and NONE of the sites have returned to index must less prior positions. Go figure.

and

Ditto. I would love nothing more that to be able to preach the glory of how great Yahoo is, but no-can-do at the moment.

AussieWebmaster asks Why Can't You OutBid Urchin & Other Google House Ads? He reports that "Web Side Story claims to have even tried $100 bid and no go...." AdWordsRep responds that she (I think a she) will look into this, but she says that "'house ads' are well outside of my ordinary realm. I'm not even aware of who places the ads and looks after the account." Mikkel, of course, adds a valid point.

They could be bidding $10,000 or more - after all, if they limit distribution to their own sites they'll get every cent back.

I see Urchin AdSense ads everywhere, but this morning I did a search on web analytics and found Urchin in the 5th position and web stats Urchin was in the 3rd position.

An update on Google Sitemaps for you.

(1) A Google Sitemaps for Mobile version. Gary Price blogged about this at SEW Blog, other coverage at the GoogleBlog and InsideAdWords Blog. Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

(2) A method to verify that your Google Sitemaps are being indexed. A SEW Forum thread named New Verification For Google Sitemaps & Other Changes says that "G sitemaps now offers a verification feature that shows you what urls had problems being indexed."

I am not kidding with you. Google is actually experimenting with being some sort of brokerage house for advertisers to put ads in magazines. A C|Net article released this morning named Google takes ad sales to print describes this in detail.

Google recently began buying ad pages in technology magazines, including PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and reselling those pages--cut into quarters or fifths--to small advertisers that already belong to its online ad network, dubbed AdWords.

I knew about this for days, when Elinor Mills asked me for my thoughts on it, here is the small portion she used to quote me.

"All the big talk today is how the inventory available for PPC (pay per click) ads is shrinking each day," Barry Schwartz, editor of Search Engine Roundtable, wrote in an e-mail. "So it does make sense for Google to look for ways to increase that inventory."

Some revealing URL; http://www.adsbygoogle.com/pcmag and http://www.adsbygoogle.com/maxpc/.

Some other tidbits I looked into while verifying this are. I did look to make sure Google owns adsbygoogle.com and as you can see by the Whois Record http://whois.sc/adsbygoogle.com Google does own it. But it seems its brand new... No links to it (according to Yahoo). Google finds no mention of the site anywhere else or links to it as well. That is pre-release of this article. Some screen captures of the adsbygoogle pages, here and here.

I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums (which is a tad slow right now).

I enjoy surfing High Rankings from time to time as they do have some good threads going on often. In this case there is a particular thread where some of the members are deciphering, picking apart, learning from some answers that Matt Cutts gave at the recent SES conference in San Jose. I saw him often at the conference and it was usually with a large group of people surrounding him looking for nuggets of Google knowledge they could deploy.

In this case, the member Laura is asking about the following response on Nodes (or websites):

"In graph theory, a clique in every node in the graph is very unnatural. So don’t link to every single node in your network of sites; it’ll get flagged."

Basically this means don't link to every page in your network from your other sites. M. Martinez concludes saying that "A clique would be more like a link circle, in which every page links to every other page, rather than every page simply linking to all the home pages." The advice follows something I started doing a couple years back in order to create unique network linking diagrams, enabling owners of site networks not to get in trouble by linking all there sites together in a way that Google would catch on to and consequently penalize. The technique also works in the reverse for correcting cross linking penalities.

Stephen Spencer who originally blog on the Matt Cutts Q&A explains further into Graph Theory, and provides an example here where you can see about what a "clique" is and how "unnatural" they can be when applied to linking.

There is also some answers about parameters in urls. Such that Matt Cutts says "For dynamic sites, you’re very safe if you have fewer than 2 parameters; keep the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits, and don’t name a parameter “id”. Googlebot sometimes tries variations of URLs by dropping parameters, but we only do that deep level analysis on big, quality sites." This is more understandable. Stephan has a nice write up about this on his website Parameters and Dynamic Sites.

For continued discussion visit High Rankings - Deciphering Matt Cutts

I like to follow the leader and Danny Sullivan being the leader of the SEM industry, I followed suit and migrated the RSS feeds on this site over to FeedBurner. Please let me know if the feeds are not working properly. Either leave a comment here or email me at barry AT rustybrick DOT com. All the feeds have been migrated or redirected (if not longer used).

- Full Feed at http://www.seroundtable.com/index-full.rdf
- 1.0 Feed at http://www.seroundtable.com/index.rdf
- 2.0 Feed at http://www.seroundtable.com/index.xml

Any other feed you have should automatically be redirected to one of the main feeds. I will add more features as I get more comfortable with FeedBurner. Also every third entry should have an Ad from Google AdSense or an other.

Looks like SEW forums just got another search engine rep to add to their belts. Promoted from a discussion on whether or not Ask Jeeves would employ the ability for agencies to manage all their client account under one roof. Mike McGrath, with the Sponsored Listings Client Services posted today that indeed their is the ability for SEM agencies to manage all their client account under the same roof. He says:

"The new automated system does allow advertisers or agencies to link together an unlimited number of accounts, each with an unlimited number of campaigns. To set this up, go to the “Manage Account Access” page for your account. Then, input the account name (i.e. email address) in the “Give User Access to this Account Address” and choose the access level (Read, Read and Modify, etc.). "

Go to know, and very nice. I hope Mike sticks around and answer other questions from members. Will be a great resource to have as people develop questions. Some of the stuff they have, in the program that is not mentioned thoroughly and or either not in the help file in detail so having a rep is a good place to start.

Mike also mentions that if you are a not spending more than $5000/month then you are confined to the email service for your questions at listingssupport@askjeeves.com. If you are spending over $5000 a month then you can use the AJSL Managed Account program and actually talk to a real person.

In my personal opinion I really don't see Ask Jeeves sponsored listings doing better than any of the other main PPC providers out there. I have been using the programs since they started about 2 weeks ago, and I keep asking myself when I use the program, why they didn't do anything to spice it up, do something innovative, different, or creative so that they stand apart and users can identify the value in what they are trying to do.

At the last SES conference in San Jose, on the evening forums on the 3rd day was an Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan. We didn't blog on this, but it was a very good sessions for the fact that people finally got a chance to voice their opinions on what they wanted to see. People were primarily pissed at Google. It was the first time since I started this SEO stuff soo soo long ago that I have actually see people turn on Google. They were tired of the canned responses and lack of desire to implement better functions in the Adwords accounts when all along they could just do it very easily. As someone once told me, their is "great money in inefficency".

Some of the primary concerns people had related to very simple things that could be fixed easily, other not so much. But the lack of response on behalf of Google was being to wear people thin. Some of the things from my notes that concerned them the most:

• Better tools!


• Better tools to track success


• What affects ranking...


• Better fraudulent click tracking... tell them what and where its happening


• Better inferface, simplier


• More responsive to customer problems


• Better phone support and better reps


• Support for better tools for agencies


• Integration of 3rd party management tools, API


• Educate the editors


• ...and finally Better Tools!

While there is more, that touches on some of it. People need better tools was the consensus from that session I attended. When it came down to it, tools were important to people, and it was simple stuff like having a tool to schedule when and when not the campaign could run. Currently you can't edit this, its either on or off.

So the jist of my speal here is to identify Ask could have and should have come in with better functionality and some neat features. They could have easily attracted advertisers with ease being that they could say "Hey look, we did what they wouldn't!", and then again maybe they will in the future. Guess we'll see.

Continue discussion on ASK at SEW Forums

Most people I deal with on a daily basis with this blog include industry experts, search engine engineers, search engine PR people, journalists, bloggers and even spammers. It took a really long time to earn the trust of all the different types of people listed above. I have no journalistic background, no schooling in professional writing, nor in the PR industry. Over the past month, C|Net was blacklisted by Google, it was widely discussed. I do not have all the details about the real reasoning behind it. I know how both sides "feel" about it, but I would never publish those thoughts here. Let me get into what code of ethics this site stands-by when writing entries at this site.

Search Engine Roundtable Code of Ethics:
(1) We try to cover public forum threads and quote from public information within those threads.
(2) We will never quote anyone without explicit permission in the following cases:
-- Phone conversations require explicit permission to quote
-- Email conversations require explicit permission to quote
-- IM chat conversations require explicit permission to quote
-- In person conversations require explicit permission to quote
(3) We will quote any publicly posted and available content from forums, content sites, blogs and so on.
(4) Anything said during a public presentation at a conference (not at the bars or in the hall ways but rather, what is said on the podium) is quotable as well.

Basically what it comes down to is a deep consideration of respect towards the industry and the people within the industry.

Often I wish I can write about something presented to me X days before it comes out. Often I wish I can write about something I heard from Matt Cutts or Tim Mayer or Jim Lanzone for the respect search engines. Often I wish I can write about something found by a fellow blogger or a journalist before they do. But I don't.

I thought it would be a good idea to clarify this code of ethics for the Search Engine Roundtable for the readers, guest writers and for anyone else who might not have known. Respect is what is at the core of it all.

The reason I am writing about this, is because I reported this issue probably over two months ago. Basically, if you try clicking on a Google AdSense RSS Feed Ad within Safari, it does not take you to the destination page. I don't click on my own ads, but I happened to click on one of my ads when I was actually interested in the advertisement offering. When I did that, I got the same screen I got today, which looks like...

I first thought it was an issue with the way I configured the ads in my feeds. But then I signed up with FeedBurner and they put the ads in for me temporarily here and I clicked on it and guess what, same error. Now I assume that it has to do with my browser being Safari. It did not work in Bloglines when I tried about two months ago, I also don't think it worked on Firefox for Mac but I am not sure. I never heard back from Google on this, the email probably got lost. I wonder if this entry will help get more answers, if not from Google, at least from readers. Oh, do not click on the ads, it is against the TOS for me to ask you to do that, so do not click, please (I am serious).

I started a thread on this topic at DigitalPoint Forums (where I like to post AdSense related topics).

I first learned of the Dynamic Keyword Insertion AdWords trick at the Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic during SES NYC 2004 and then I got a refresher in both August 2004 and December 2004, the best description I have is from August.

The "bracket trick", which she told the audience in NY. (1) {KeyWord:Long Beach} = All words with initial caps (2) {Keyword:Long beach} = First word capitalized (3) {keyword:long beach} = All words in lower case. This allows you to dynamically put the keyword the searcher used in the engine in the title of your ad with these brackets "{keyword}".

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discusses some odd behavior with this trick. One member reports that "In each of these ad groups, 90-100% of the keywords are now inactive, and the new minimum CPC's are 200%-1000% higher than our previous bid prices." He believes it has to do with the new AdWords Pricing Changes.

But Andrew Goodman reports, "I am using dynamic keyword insertion widely and am not seeing low quality scores as a result. I have seen no change in pattern on that front." AussieWebmaster warns that the title area is very short and if the query is long and followed by a brand name, it can get cut off and look weird. So be careful when using it.

The past four out of five entries posted here (including this one) have been about the PPC area within search marketing.

Changing the target URLs of your ads within your AdWords campaigns can really take a toll on your earned rankings within AdWords. As we all know, Google uses a ranking algorithm within its paid listing program which looks at both CPC and CTR, when determining rank. Ads over time can outrank other ads even though they are paying a lower CPC, if they have a higher CTR. By changing the ad (I think in any way - although I am a newbie with AdWords management) the CTR history is wiped out. By losing that CTR history, you can dramatically affect your ad's ranking.

In a WebmasterWorld thread named Google Adwords destroyed my account a member tells us a story;

A couple of days ago, I decided to update my adgroup ads in a campaign that I have run for many months. I had excellent ranking in all of them, some I was #1 and #2 in the blue area for many. I made a domain name change to all the ads in this campaign (about 30 adgroups). When I checked later to see how the ads looked and their position, I could not believe my eyes. Every single keyword that I had worked so hard and spent thousands to get in a great rank and reasonable prices was GONE! It was as if I had started over as a new member. The worst one was one where I was #2 in the blue and ended up as #38 on the fourth page! Paniking, I called google and emailed them. The tech person that I talked to there said this is the worst he has ever seen of destruction of rank. Later on they said that part of the quality part of an ad is its domain name. Then they said the new ad had to get some quality thru I guess getting impressions and clicks. Well I told this gentleman, "how am I going to get quality in the 38th position?" I am getting the run around at google right now. They are not admitting that the system is flawed. There was no warning, nothing written in the literature that this kind of massive destruction of an account could happen.

I feel bad for this member, but others in the thread to not feel as bad as I. One member says that "It is "public knowledge" that a change to URL will get you to loose your history." And then he offers advice, "The better way to go would have been to add a new ad with the new URL, then waiting until it gets the same CTR and position than the old one and then deactivating the old one." Others try to make the member feel that he/she has other options. The member can use the API to try "reinstating your old ads" or try calling Google to do so. But in this specific case, it won't work. Others say that in time, the ads will navigate its way to the top.

We know Yahoo! is working hard on a new paid listing web interface but now we got what we got. WebmasterWorld members complain over a Major Overture Interface Flaw within the Overture interface. Basically, when you set up new keywords, by default, YSM sets the bid price to the number one position. When setting up hundreds of keywords within the system, it is virtually impossible to go through each listing to lower the bid. Plus, it is clear from the thread that it is not easy to understand how to set bids when adding listings. Bottom line, new and even old advertisers are confused by the add listing process at Overture. For one advertiser, it cost them "$200 in about 3 hours" and a lot of frustration.

I just set up a keyword campaign of over 200 keywords yesterday but I did not personally find it confusing. Doing it manually is a lot of work, to set the bid prices properly. But if you are seriously going about adding hundreds of keyword phrases on a frequent basis, consider building a software application that works with the API Yahoo! provides. It will help you control prices and budgets.

It feels like it was just yesterday when Cre8asite Forums turned two and now I turned around and the good, wise forum is three years old! Cre8asite Forums is one of those forums that I would call a hidden treasure. On one hand, I hate to promote it because I would hate to see it get folded with too much volume. Basically, for selfish reasons, I want to keep it all to myself. But on the other hand, it deserves a lot more credit then it gets today.

I would like to wish Cre8asite a wonderful three year anniversary!

Join the celebration at the official Cre8asite's Third Anniversary thread.

Today, I had a need to take several permutations of keyword phrases and bulk them together for a PPC campaign. So I had one of my developers build a tool I named Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator Tool.

What does it do?
Given a set of primary keywords:

example: vanilla,chocolate chip,strawberry

And Given at least a set up secondary keywords:

example: ice cream,cakes,candy,ices

Also, if you want tertiary keywords:

example: colored sprinkles,chocolate sprinkles,syrup,whipped cream

You can generate a full set of permutations for those 3 sets of keyword phrases. Final list would look something like:

vanilla ice cream colored sprinkles,vanilla ice cream chocolate sprinkles,vanilla ice cream syrup,vanilla ice cream whipped cream,vanilla cakes colored sprinkles,vanilla cakes chocolate sprinkles,vanilla cakes syrup,vanilla cakes whipped cream,vanilla candy colored sprinkles,vanilla candy chocolate sprinkles,vanilla candy syrup,vanilla candy whipped cream,vanilla ices colored sprinkles,vanilla ices chocolate sprinkles,vanilla ices syrup,vanilla ices whipped cream,chocolate chip ice cream colored sprinkles,chocolate chip ice cream chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip ice cream syrup,chocolate chip ice cream whipped cream,chocolate chip cakes colored sprinkles,chocolate chip cakes chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip cakes syrup,chocolate chip cakes whipped cream,chocolate chip candy colored sprinkles,chocolate chip candy chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip candy syrup,chocolate chip candy whipped cream,chocolate chip ices colored sprinkles,chocolate chip ices chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip ices syrup,chocolate chip ices whipped cream,strawberry ice cream colored sprinkles,strawberry ice cream chocolate sprinkles,strawberry ice cream syrup,strawberry ice cream whipped cream,strawberry cakes colored sprinkles,strawberry cakes chocolate sprinkles,strawberry cakes syrup,strawberry cakes whipped cream,strawberry candy colored sprinkles,strawberry candy chocolate sprinkles,strawberry candy syrup,strawberry candy whipped cream,strawberry ices colored sprinkles,strawberry ices chocolate sprinkles,strawberry ices syrup,strawberry ices whipped cream

We also gave you the ability to choose the syntax you prefer. Google AdWords; Broad Match, Exact Match or Phrase Match AND SEO Types; Title Tags, META Keyword Tags, H1 Tags.

Try out the Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator Tool when you like. Coming soon, a way to send all those keywords to your AdWords campaign via the Google API. Feedback requested here.

Last week we discussed Yahoo! Local twice; (1) Yahoo Local & 360˚ Adds Vertical Reviews and (2) Yahoo! Local Using Wrong Localized English. Today, I want to point you to a thread I started at SEW Forums the other week, named Yahoo! Local Driving Web Leads?

Basically, some are seeing a positive affect from having a listing at Yahoo! Local and also Google Local. I personally have not "noticed any significant referrals from Yahoo! Local in my stats." (I just quoted myself)... Member, MoneyMan said, "It's worth noting that in terms of "click-through" and viewing detailed business data, the results I have seen from YLocal on clients have been fantastic."

It is a bit early to tell, but I would love to get more feedback at the thread or over here.

Time Magazine, this Sunday, published an article named On the Frontier of Search where it almost scares people into what search features are on the horizon. A Cre8asite Forum thread named The Future of Search is where Bill Slawski actually linked to the technologies available today, discussed in that Time's article.

Some very interesting replies at the The Future of Search Thread.

We know that HTML Entities do not hurt in terms of SEO, but can they benefit you? Well, in MSN Search it can give you better visibility. A DigitalPoint thread discusses how stars work in the title in the SERPs. *** Here is an example.

Google removed unicode characters from the title back in December 10, 2003. Yahoo! removed unicode back in March 2005. When will MSN remove them?

Jamie from Channel9 posted a funny cartoon named at a thread titled GooglePark: "Scoble goes to google" ;) Its worth a look.

SEO Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Aaron Wall from SEO Book wrote last Friday, NOTICE! YOU HAVE BEEN SUED. He has been going back and forth with Traffic Power, an SEO company with many faces, about how he wrote about what Traffic Power has been doing with its SEO clients. Many in the industry are not happy with Traffic Power's tactics and many have voiced it. As many of you know, we try to stay away from political topics here, so I have not been discussing the topic here. And to be honest, if I did and TP threatened me with a law suit, I would pull it. For me, it is not worth the money, time and stress to get involved in a lawsuit based on principle.

I commend Aaron for keeping up the content, many, in Aaron's position, pulled the content. There are many showing Aaron support by participating in Search Engine Watch Forum Thread, Traffic Power Files Suit Against SEO Book.

Linking experts strike out on their own! Two of the industry's top link experts let me know this past week they have been kicked out onto the cold hard street, banished from their hometowns, thrown away their earthly possessions, and to survive will be traveling the globe doing Dali Lama worthy Linking Seminars to business owners and SEO/SEM companies. The world might not be ready for this level of information, but their epic crusade will go on to stamp out bad linking techniques.

Okay, okay, not really, but I had to embellish a bit. The real story is that Debra Masteler and Eric Ward have teamed up together to put on a Linking Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina in October 27/28 at the Charlotte Sheraton Airport. This conference devoted solely to linking is the first of its kind as I understand it, where as linking was paired up with SEO in the whole.

Debra Masteler from Alliance Link and Eric Ward from EricWard.com are putting on this 2 day seminar, and they have also invited Dan Theis to come as a quest speaker. All of which are very talented regular speakers at SES conference through out the year. Both Debra and Eric have a combined 15 years experience building links and generating online publicity to add behind their seminars. They are callling their series the Powerhouse Linking Seminars.

According to the information they sent me (Check out those topics!):

This is a "nothing held back" seminar. Debra and Eric will review and discuss all linking strategies available and share the link building tactics they use to consistently help clients achieve targeted publicity, search engine traffic and high rankings. You'll learn proven and effective link building techniques which can be integrated into your current SEO/SEM process and provide you with an unbeatable path to link building success. You'll leave the seminar with a solid understanding on link building plus valuable online resources and tools to help in your everyday linking.

Topics include:

• Linking For Rank


• Linking for Publicity


• Finding Authority Sites


• Linking Myths & Mistakes


• Buying Links


• One Way and Reciprocal Linking


• Key link Influencers



• Holistic Linking


• Links and Audio/Video, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, PDFs.


• 301 Redirects


• Affiliate Programs


• Identifying Link Farms


• Linking Tools

I guess though the big question you might be asking - Is It Worth It To Do This Seminar?
I would bet that it would be an excellent oppourtunity for companies and other SEO/SEM to get some hands on experience. it however is probably not something an experienced SEO would get much out of. Having done so many conferences, one of the key things I think this seminar will have is the personal attention that you don't get with the larger SES and WebmasterWorld conferences that go on. Its the small classroom verus the big classroom comparison, better oppourtunity to learn the tactics that you need to know for your website to thrive. You get more for your dinero basically. I would recommend my clients attend too.

Check out Powerhouse Linking website: http://www.powerhouselinking.com

Chris Boggs, great guy and he helped out tremendously with SES Coverage, asked me to look at a thread at his forum. The thread is named URL Directories and asks if a shorter URL is better then a longer URL. So I looked back in my notes (this site) and found an entry named Length of a Domain Name which specifically discusses the domain name. But what about the URL structure? I couldn't find any entries here that discussed my humble opinion on that topic.

Talking within reason, having a URL that looks like:
http://www.domain.com/blog/2005/08/22/where-is-carmen-sandiego
versus
http://www.domain.com/blog/where-is-carmen-sandiego

Will not make a noticeable difference in your rankings. What the engines mean when they say a shorter file path structure is in terms of site navigation. For example, if I literally have to click from the main site, to the blog, to the 2005 section, to the August section, to the 22nd day section and then click on where-is-carmen-sandiego - then that is bad. But if I put a link (i.e the first, long, one listed above) on the index page, to a long URL, then the search engines will crawl it and index it well. The shorter the click path to a specific file, the better off you are. The length of the URL itself, is not a major factor in terms of search engines.

Upgrade to MovableType 3.2 just now. Downtime was like a minute.

Things aren't fully working, like related entries and spam things.

Let me know if you see anything funky please.

In the WebmasterWorld supports forum (to click on the link you need to pay) there is a thread named Radio Advertisement: (Just Google "keywords") where Shak (very nice guy) tells us about a radio commercial he heard.

Basically, you know when you hear a radio commercial and they say; call us at 800-###-#### or visit our web site at www.domain.com? Well, this time, Shak reports that the commercial ended with the phrase; "Just Google us for: "Keyword Keyword"."

This is very similar to visit us by "AOL Keyword _____" which we all heard before, but the big difference is that AOL Keyword was/is guaranteed, but not necessarily the Google keyword (paid or not paid). Bold move, nevertheless, and I wonder if this will continue (I bet it will).

The Link Selling O'Reilly Debate continues and a new thread popped up at WebmasterWorld with the catchy title, Google Says: Buying links not allowed?

In that thread, he the thread creator quotes a statement by Matt Cutts; top Google engineer as saying;

Google's view on this...Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.

This is a touch stance, does Google feel that all paid links should be discounted? Does Google feel that some paid links are not worthy link weight? We all know that AdSense links do not factor in to the link popularity equation at Google. We also know that Google hates link spam (comment spam, guestbook spam, trackback spam, link farms, link exchanges, etc.). But buying relevant text ads on high trafficked sites, is that worth any less?

Many of this debate goes back to some of the discussion at the first indexing summit at SES. Where Tim Mayer discusses a proposal for some sort of manually coded Block Level Page Analysis. It would be similar to the nofollow attribute or even the section targeting by AdSense. Bottom line, search engines want to understand where is the meaty content and meaty links versus the navigation, footer links and advertisements links.

The search engines are not looking to manually address this issue. It is too wide spread and we all know (using that phrase a lot here) that Google loves to solve these issues algorithmically.

A new search engine is pitching a new market segment, COWS! Yea, you got that right, they predict that by the end of this year, "23% of all internet users will be cows." The search engine is at www.mloo.com and it basically serves up results from an other engine as well as throw in Google AdSense, within the SERPs. I like what is hardcoded in the last 10 searches, on the left hand side. I prefer to use Ask Jeeves when searching on cow related searches.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forum thread named Google is testing a new Adwords format shows how the top three sponsored ads in Google SERPs are showing up different shades of background colors for one specific user (at least).

View Full Image

The screen capture above is from the user reporting the new sighting. It is very possible that this is an other UI test by Google. But this can also be a spyware or adware attack. No confirmation from Google as of yet.

Update: Official Response from Google (Thanks Gary Price):

Looks like our older UI. We used to do ads in different (tasteful) colors. Note the old version of the tabs for (Web Images Groups Directory News Local). I suspect that this is just a screenshot from years ago. The tabs wouldn't look like that on a current UI test.

The other day, when I was reporting on Yahoo Local & 360˚ Adds Vertical Reviews I stumbled across my company's profile also at http://local.yahoo.com/details?id=11262068.

What I noticed was that under the "Payment" type section, it reads "Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Cheque."

Notice anything weird? "Cheque" is not how good American's spell "check." Yahoo! is a US based company, they know that my business is in New York, USA - they should know to spell using American English, right?

I know, I am giving them a hard time. I just thought it was funny so I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Yahoo! Local Bad with Localized Language describing this. It lead into people rating my company, which I already got myself in trouble with (see bottom).

Yesterday, I wrote about the updates and downtime Yahoo Search Marketing Direct Traffic Center has undergone this week due things unexplained happening over the weekend. At this time it seems that most people are able to get into the Overture DTC without a problem, and some however are still steaming over the length of time it took to fix it.

Yahoo wrote us here at the Search Engine Roundtable in response to (the ads disappearing) and yesterdays post with an explanation as to what happened recently. Why there were delays, and what they are doing about it basically. Its doesn't reveal much but its a good start to at least letting us know.

"Yahoo! Search Marketing initiated a systems upgrade this past weekend to lay the groundwork for performance and availability improvements that our advertisers will see over the coming months. During this process, we encountered some unexpected issues that affected advertisers' ability to access their accounts. Our number one priority right now is to restore service for our advertisers, so we are working around the clock to resolve this as quickly as possible."

You may gleam what you like out of the above snippet. But we do know they are working hard to fix it, and I can't say its probably been a fun round for them with the troubles this past week. What I keep think though, is what would have caused such a delay over the weekend and into the week?

Some of you noticed that as soon as Ben posted the Held Hostage By Yahoo! Search Marketing During Update! entry, the YPN ads at the top of the index page were pulled. YPN called me last night to tell me the word "hostage" in the title triggered the ads to be removed, automatically. Ok, I said that is a neat feature, JenSense told me it is called a "stop word." YPN told me they would fix the issue on the YPN side but if I wanted the ads to show, I can change the title. I told them, I would wait. Its 2pm (est) here and I am still waiting, but I bet they will get it done by the end of the day.

However, what I find interesting is that the YPN ads on the left hand side of the archived version are showing. Why does the stop word apply to the index page and not the archive page? Possibly positioning of the YPN code within the content, but still.

Google AdSense released Ad Links on June 09, 2005 and publishers had plenty of time to test them out. A thread at WebmasterWorld named AdLinks bringing most of the revenue? Can anyone confirm? shows how for some it does well, and for others, it does not to well.

One member reports that "Ad Links have a really low CTR compared to the other ad blocks but it brings in about 1/5 to 1/4 of my income." While an other reports that "for me, one small AdLinks block brings nearly half my AS revenue."

As you can tell, and something AdSense professionals like JenSense has been telling everyone, it all depends on the site, audience, and implementation. You can not compare site A to site B, there are just too many variables.

In August 22, 2005 at 5:48 PM, CNN en Español during Finance and Economy block made a LIVE interview with Gaston Taratuta in a conversation about Search in Latin America.

I met Gaston back in SES New York in 2004. He is the president and founder of Internet Marketing Services Inc. ("IMS"), a leading media firm with exclusive rights to represent UOL and Folha Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest ISP and newspaper respectively. Gaston is an industry veteran and a leading authority in online marketing in Latin America. Some of IMS’ clients include Dell, Microsoft, Sony, and Visa – just to name a few. He is a very dedicated and talented person, but most of all, he is experiencing how Search is growing in Latin America.

In his interview, CNN en Español anchor Alberto Padilla asks Gaston to talk about the differences between Google and Yahoo! as well as their product and service offerings. Gaston talks about the importance of Search in the U.S. in comparison with other online advertising alternatives. Gaston gives numbers about the growth in Latin America for online advertising which was about 25% higher in 2004 and most likely will see an additional 20 and 30% growth for 2005. However, he mentions it's still only 1.5% of all advertising spend, so there is even more potential opportunities for companies to take advantage of this type of advertising by adding search marketing and other online exposure into their total mix.

When he moved on to talk about Search, he was more specific about Brazil, since it's his core focus. He said that there are about 600 million queries per month, which is a great opportunity for the small and medium businesses so that not only the big mayor brands can have access to this type of online advertising. He mentions that there are 7,500 companies already spending money on Search in Brazil, 2,000 companies in Mexico and 1,000 companies in Argentina.

Yesterday, I had a very good phone conversation with Gaston to talk more on this subject. We both agree on the investment opportunity for global companies to be doing search in Latin America. As well as the importance of the mayor search engines (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) to having local presence to educate businesses on search and the impressive returns on investment along with the effectiveness of tracking all information down to the smallest detail.

What a few of my closest collegues and I see, is a great opportunity for search engine marketing firms and professionals that know search engine optimization to take on this NEW roller coaster ride and make tons of money helping these businesses grow. This is the primary reason why SES Latino 2006 is taking place and everyone interested in the topic of making money on search marketing to new markets should definetly attend.

Last night I have changed the encoding on this site to use UTF-8 Encoding as opposed to the default ISO 8859-1 Encoding. That means I can write in all sorts of languages and funky characters. It also means there might be issues with other areas of the site, if you find any, please add a comment to let me know.

Tests:
עמוד ראשי - ויקיפדיה

忍者システムズ - webデザインとシステム開発

الصفحة الرئيسية

“Scooby”

RustyBrick®

´√ ™

<a>

Many of you know I am a big fan of Yahoo! 360, I use it, I believe, the way Yahoo! intended. That is, I use it to connect the dots in my life, work and blogosphere. One recent addition was the ability to use the new Yahoo! Local at http://local.yahoo.com/ to conduct vertical reviews. By vertical, we mean, rate a restaurant based on food, ambiance, service, value and a hotel based on amenities, room quality, service, and value.

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Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. Also you can view all my yahoo local reviews if you want, I only have four or so.

Phil Ringnalda started a big debate about how O'Reilly is causing link spam. One example he gives, and there are many more.

O'Reilly's ONLamp.com site, home of tons of interesting articles on Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Python/PHP over the years, now also features (at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, under the "oh, but it's related, really" headline "Travelling to a tech show?") eight links to the sort of garbage hotel sites that make it utterly impossible to find any useful information about hotels on Google.

Now this caused a response by Tim O'Reilly, where he asks, is it Search Engine Spam? Oh boy, did that get some responses. After reading through his detailed entry, you get into the comments area, where you have well known writers, industry leaders and Matt Cutts (from Google) getting into the debate. Ultimately, the bottom line is what Matt decides and this is his comment:

As others have noted, if you're going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links.

Tim points out that these these links have been sold for over two years. That's true. I've known about these O'Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a "link:" command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.

Google's view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda's. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.

There is a forum thread about this debate at Search Engine Watch Forums under the title; O'Reilly In Off-Topic Link Selling Debate.

We have discussed the header tag at least a couple times here in the past. But there is a new WebmasterWorld thread that asks what is The importance of the H1 tag, today?

What I find most interesting is the strong views from various SEOs on both extremes.

Those that feel the H1 tag isn't used say;

• I doubt if the use of the H1 tag is still working to get get higher listings. I think it even may hurt your listings.
  
• I personally don't see it as H1's giving pages a 'lift'...but as H1's doing what they are supposed to do, so that a page can be shown for relevant searches.
  
• So the H1 tag often represents an artificial attempt to inflate a page's ranking.

Those that feel the H1 tag is used say;

• I think that used correctly it is still a major contributor.
  
• I think it is still a very large factor
  
• The idea that using H1 will hurt you is nuts. What can hurt you is not following Google's guidelines. If you use a bunch of crap techniques, that is what will get someone into trouble, not having an H1. It's like blaming your windshield for a flat tire.
  
• I will continue to use the H1. It helps to create a well-formed document and just because others have abused it is no reason for me to create crappy mark-up.

The ping pong debate goes back and forth. Me? I use it because of the last quote above.

Situation: You can't login to your account. Y! is undergoing "updates" of which you really have no interest. During this time that your locked out, your spend over the weekend drastically increases, and come Monday you find you are stuck with a large bill and a lot of traffic you never asked for. What do you do?

Yahoo seems to be rubbing some people from SEW Forums the wrong way the past few days. Some are voicing their concerns about changes being made before updates this past week to the Y! system and them not being accounted for. I am not quite sure what went on during the "update" but as far as I know it had to do with the Alliance program and such stuff as the new center they are developing that is supposed to rival any competitors interface.

The member Discovery says that during the 3 day period "we get socked for traffic we didn't want over the weekend and had no ability to stop it, BUT for some reason the traffic was 3x greater than a normal weekend for us."

"Our ad spend increased by close to 20k in less than 3 days," he goes on to say. He is asking if there is a certain point in which it becomes negligence and can seek legal action.

Another member post he had a similar experience. I have not been able to get into my account for most of the week so I can't verify if I have seen increases over the weekend as well.

In any case, it would be interesting to have a Y! rep pop in and say a few words (comments). Let you know if that happens to clarify.

Till then, read the discussion at SEW forums - Held Hostage by Y!

Update: Appears that Overture has been down for the last couple days. People from Israel to US are experiencing issues. Discuss at SEW - Is Overture Down?

What if, god forbid, you lost your million dollar AdSense check? What can you expect the procedure to be? That is the topic of discussion in a DigitalPoint forum thread named lost my cheque!

Member, alph, responds from experience;

I've had a check get lost in the mail. You have to wait 30 days from issue date, then contact them and they will issue a new check to you. No extra fees were involved.

So there ya go.

I'll make this simple, one example given below, but many - many other examples are out there.

WebmasterWorld Thread: Google Ads on Neo Nazi site! How?

We recieved an email today informing us that our ad was on a neo-nazi site. We checked the link and sure enough, there it is. This is much to our horor and there is absolutely no way that any content on the site could be remotely construed as being related to our ad. The site is a personal site hosted on angelfire.com so maybe angelfire.com puts google ads out on their sites, but shouldn't they have to try and match content as well?

I emailed google as soon as I found out and have not heard back yet.

Any ideas on how this happened? What we can do to get our ad off and any other action to be taken?

Quality Control. Automation. Quality Control.

SEO Chat Forum members discuss their dislike towards the new CJ reports for the affiliates. Here are some quotes:

The data seems very suspect, my SIDs are gone from my report, and the interface just... sucks.

I agree with you- its very lame. I think they are trying to be more like google- but then again - who isnt?!

I looked at it a few times and then came to realize what I always realize about CJ -- they haven't the slightest clue what their market wants.

I have heard lots of negative feedback about this upgrade from both affiliates and managers.

More discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

For those of you who stay on top of those Google Patent, its important for you to know that they were just awarded a patent named Address Geocoding. Gary Price explains;

It's quite easy to envision how this technology could be used to identify and map info based on what's listed on a web page or other document. It also might be used to help identify local search results, personalized results (based on a users address) and when and where a paid ad would be visible on a results page based on the location of a searcher.

Patent member, msgraph, posted a thread about the topic a couple hours before Gary's post at Search Engine Watch Forums. Normally, Gary beats everyone to the patent announcements, I guess he was holding back on this one. :)

A recent change to the DigitalPoint Co-Op Network is making the product more Google AdSense like. The Co-op network is a free way to exchange banner ads (image ads) and text ads with other sites within the network.

The new enhancements give the publishers more control over which ads are shown on the site. Technically, it allows publishers to define the level of static links versus rotating links displayed. Shawn at DigitalPoint said;

But I have been watching other advertising systems (notably AdSense) and how more ads have been static (CPM ads in this forum for example). That coupled with the fact that I have a few sites that I think non-rotating ads would look better cosmetically.

It's 100% for the cosmetics of your site and gives webmasters more control over how they want other people's ads to display on their site. It has zero bearing on how YOUR ads are displayed on other people's sites. You could run 100% static ads for example, and it doesn't make your ads any more (or less) static on other people's sites.

Shawn says he is currently working on a solution to target theme based ads, so the ads can be even more relevant to the Web site. They will not be fully contextual as of yet, but its getting there slowly. Shawn explains; "but it's a MAJOR, MAJOR undertaking with redesigning the weighting system to take that into account. One of these days I will just turn everything off (phone, email, etc.) and bang it out one day."

All the rumors were of course true; last night Google launched its own instant messaging server, Google Talk. Last night, by way of SmashsWorld hundreds of IM users got into the Google Talk using a 3rd party client, through the Jabber protocol (of course I did as well, with Adium). So many blogs, so many forum posts about this new service. I just feel bad for Yahoo! The news about this client was even on 104.3 (NY Classic Rock Station) news this morning. This is a just instant messaging client, with voice (which most IM clients have now).

Some notes:
(1) They will not serve up ads in the IM client, like we joked about in the past.
(2) They will not log instant messages, in accordance with the privacy policy.
(3) They will not disclose any future projects or enhancements they are working on.

Forum discussion at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• SEO Chat Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• WebWorkShop
  
• JimWorld
  
• HighRanking Forums
  
• SitePoint Forums
  
• WebProWorld

At SES San Jose 05, during the Search Engine Q&A On Links session, Tim Mayer from Yahoo! announced a few things. One big announcement is Yahoo! Site Explorer which we are still waiting for...

The second thing was an announcement of a Google Sitemaps product for Yahoo! It doesn't have a name, and I am told it went live the Thursday at SES, but for some reason, I did not see anyone talk about it. Until now, when I saw SEO Scoop post an entry about it.

Go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request You will see an additional line added that reads;

You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz.

So there you go, Sitemaps for Yahoo! Pay for Inclusion without the Pay, just no guarantees.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Daily I check to see if http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ is live, and today, they finally posted a coming soon page, instead of redirecting you to an advanced search page. I guess they were getting tired of the redirects. :)

Tim Mayer is suppose to let me know when its live. He keeps saying, "soon." :)

So this is what we have today at 9:50AM (EST).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This just makes so much sense! As a publisher and Webmaster, you can tell your contextual ads, which content is the real content on the page. As you and I know, many content management systems default text into titles and meta information into the pages, that have nothing to do with the actual article on that page. By telling the contextual AdSense ads, what content is relevant to the page, AdSense can then serve up more contextually relevant content for the Web visitor. This makes the publisher happy, the reader happy and Google happy.

Google explains;

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting.

The AdSense Support page has more information on "What is section targeting and how do I implement it?" JenSense has her views as well. And of course we have a thread on the topic at WebmasterWorld.

One of my favorite commands in Google is the site:www.domain.com command. If I wanted to see all pages indexed by Google (or most other engines) you simply type in site:www.domain.com. So for example, if I wanted to see all the pages MSN Search indexed of MSN Search Results (laugh out loud), you go to search.msn.com and plug in site:search.msn.com to get 50,077,341. Now, this work well on Google, as well.

I prefer to use the syntax at Google, allinurl:www.google.com site:www.google.com, it tends to order the pages in order of popularity this way (no proof, of course). You will also notice that Google doesn't index its own SERPs, like MSN does. A forum thread at WebmasterWorld asks, Why are "Site:" command pages inflated? Members lammert, g1smd, and bull all provide solid answers, which I will quote below.

• URLs temporarily deleted with the URL removal tool
• URLs from other sites doing a 302 hijack of your site (should be fixed by now)
• Obsolete URLs which have still links to them from other sites and which Google visits now and then just to see of they are active
• Links to your site with typos in it i.e. www.yourdomain.com/fiel.html instead of www.yourdomain.com/file.html. At one time I had many copies of my sitemap in the SERPs because I used the sitemap as my 404 page. Except for the original sitemap they now all went supplemental, but Google still counts them.
• URLs that have been marked with "noindex,follow".
• Serving both www and non-www but without a redirect.
• Items crawled by the Mozilla Googlebot only.

Add also that Google also shows the supplemental index in that count, not in the API results but in the normal Web search results. Also, you might think you have X pages on a dynamic site, but you can have a infinite number of pages generated through a dynamically driven Web site.

Ask Jeeves, one of the most innovative search engines out there, just announced that they have So Many Smart Answers, So Little Time. In that Ask Jeeves blog entry, they list tons of example Smart Answer searches. Gary Price over at the SEW Blog summarizes the new features in categories.

So, what's new from AJ today? Here's a list of the new Smart Answers. Each is linked to an example.

• World Nations: Quick Facts
Not only facts from the CIA World Factbook listed on the results page but also direct links to other sources. We like!
• US States: Quick Facts
Note: Jeeves also offers something similar for major cities in the US.
• Mammals
• Popular TV Shows information
Fun! In many cases you'll also find direct links to episode guides.
• Famous People: Music profiles
• Video Games: All major titles plus platform
• NASCAR: Races & Drivers
• ISBN Search
Book info and link to comparison price engine.
• Periodic Table of Elements
• US Area Code lookup
• Planets: Quick Facts

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

We have joked about an Instant Messaging by Google in the past, and even heard rumors about it as well, but now, we have an LA Times article which says "the service may start as early as Wednesday."

Basically, talk.google.com was found to be "waiting for IM connections using the Jabber protocol."

Forum Coverage at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums. Update; nowWebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums & SEO Chat Forums.

In the past we discussed adding Image Ads Above AdSense Ads. Now it looks like some creative people are placing the ads in a vertically aligned fashion. What might be pushing it too far, in my opinion, is how they revamped the "Ads by Gooooogle" part.

The images themselves are not clickable, nor is the "ads by Goooogle" on the left but it is clickable by the Google default, at the top. I wonder if this will fly, I am sure CTR is pretty high for this type of layout.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and found via InsideGoogle.

Back link analysis tools are some of the most interesting to look at. I have built one, that I am not sure if it works anymore, on August 11, 2004. Since then, Google messed up the link command to show a "sampling" of all links to a particular page. So the scraper tools came back.

Anyway, Aaron Wall, from SEO Book, released a new tool last week he named Back Link Analyzer Link Popularity Software (Beta). I gave it a quick try and its pretty cool, its a lot like the OptiLink Software but free. Aaron is asking for feedback for ways to improve the product.

I am sure when Yahoo! Site Explorer comes out, it will lead to ways to improve Aaron's tool.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The white hat / black hat debates have been going on for well over five years now. I personally am tired of it all and rarely report on it over here any more. A new thread sprung up at Cre8asite Forums named Are SEO forums ruining the SEO/SEM Industry Image? In that thread, Kim Krause links to, Jim Hedger, a great writer's blog entry, The First SEO Republic Forumed.

Jim writes:

Like thousands of other SEO practitioners, I have been quietly monitoring a raging debate that has crossed several SEO/SEM related forums over the past week. While this debate rears its head from time to time, it remains unsettled and as it continues to unfold becomes more and more unsettling. Given that they differ in tone from forum to forum, there are actually several debates taking place but all seem to have one thing in common, a lack of civility towards other views and a decreasing level of common sense.

Jim then calls on the leaders of the industry to do something about this. Maybe SEMPO, maybe SMA, who knows but he says whomever the leaders are, "that leadership needs to learn to work together to pull the various ends of the horseshoe into the powerful marketing industry we should all feel proud and privileged to work in."

The forum discussion is going on now, feel free to join.

Oh, Jim also writes:

There is a forum to the right that takes an increasingly hard stand on search engine guidelines, a few right-of-center white hat forums, the largest and most widely known one in the middle, and a few on the left ranging from the established radicals to the new radicals.

I would have placed the white hat forums on the "left" and the black hat forums on the "right."

A Cre8asite Forum thread references a ResearchBuzz blog entry, that links to the list of publishers MSNBC Newsbot "routinely indexed as part of the news service for your country/language."

It seems like it is fairly easy to get included in this list, just submit your news source and wait.

There has been lots of commotion about Ask Jeeves and the PPC Ads over the past year or so. We all know they started to do direct ads themselves, to supplement Google Ads. A Search Engine Watch Forum post reveals that you are beginning to show these ads in the Sponsored Results area. The image below shows the URLs of when I mouse over the Dell link (top URL) versus when I mouse over Circuit City link (bottom). The Dell link shows an Ask Jeeves url, whereas the Circuit City link shows a Google url for the search term DVD (and many others).

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I did very few search, but most Ask Jeeves ads seem to be Dell sponsored.

Last night Google announced a new version of its Google Desktop Search at http://desktop.google.com/. Of course Gary Price blogged the ultimate write up on this GDS 2.0. In short, a new feature called "Google Sidebar" has several tabs within it; E-Mail, News, Web Clips, Scratch Pad, Photos, Quick View, What's Hot, Stocks, Weather, and of course, Search. And guess what? Google is opening up an API for developers to program tools into the sidebar (Danny hints to Yahoo!'s acquisition of Konfabulator). The BBC has an interesting spin on the news; Google tool watches as you work.

Forum coverage currently at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums & Cre8asite Forums.

Free download at http://desktop.google.com/.

We reported on Cre8asite Forums: Expect Downtime Over Weekend and all went well. Kim Krause writes Cre8asiteForums Server Move Done, Nicknamed SpeedRacer.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google has been experimenting with tons of UI changes to the SERPs. One such experiment was "Dissatisfied?" Added to Some Google Results, which now turned into a few more tests. Why are they doing this? Matt Cutts explains that "Everyone who thinks that search engines are completely perfect and can never be improved, please raise your hand."

Danny clarifies that the most recent report by ClickZ that Google Tests "Commercial" Results In Organic Listings is false. Before he was able to clarify, the buzz went through the Internet, through battellemedia and MediaPost. Gary Price informed me that Danny updated his blog entry with an official statement from Google.

Google is testing an automated technique for detecting when an alternate query might help users find what they are looking for more quickly. For these searches, which are both commercial and non-commercial in nature, Google displays one or more alternate queries together with a preview of their top results.

See why people are thinking that this search leads people to believe that this section is commercial. It is not.

Forum discussion taking place at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

The folks at DigitalPoint forum are still trying to figure out if GoogleGuy is real or not. Anyway, a funny post discloses GoogleGuy's real face...

One member is trying to prove there is no GoogleGuy by posting a picture of someone from Google standing next to the "Dunk GoogleGuy" sign at the from the GoogleDance Party.

GoogleGuy is the real deal. :)

Via, Gary Price at Search Engine Watch Blog, "To honor the birth of Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry, Mr. Jeeves "beams up" a special logo today."

On the homepage of www.ask.com you will see a special logo in honor of Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry. "Gene Roddenberry was the man behind the ultra-successful Star Trek franchise, the creator and producer of the original television series (1966-69). A combat veteran of World War II, Roddenberry moved to Los Angeles to work as a writer for television in the 1950s."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I was a little surprised to see Yahoo! following the lead of Google, so fast, when it comes to randomizing the number of ads shown in a contextual ad.

The ads at the top of this page randomizing between showing 1, 2, 3, 4, and sometimes zero ads. Maybe they are just testing it but I have screen captures of those flavors to show you. So you know, as I write this, it is still happening.

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Posted a forum thread for discussion at DigitalPoint Forum Thread. After reporting it to JenSense, she captured some screen shots as well.

Bill Slawski started a very detailed thread about a new patent application named The Assigning Geographic Locations to Web Pages. Here is the abstract of the application.

A system and method for assigning geographic location identifiers to web documents may include identifying a set of web documents. A geographic location identifier included within a first web document in the set of web documents may be identified. The identified geographic location identifier may be assigned to a second web document in the set of web documents based on a relevancy of the first web document to the second web document.

Bill goes through the application in plain English in the thread, which is pretty cool to read. But after that post, he follows up, with offering a practical explanation for the use of such a patent at Google.

The thought of "invisible tabs" struck me. The idea that people don't like to switch from one type of search to another, and ignore some of the different types of searches that they could do at a Google or Yahoo!. But, was there something more? Because it is possible that people could become use to using a Google Local search, and come to love those tabs. Is there a problem with where the information from local search is being collected? Maybe.

Fascinating stuff, but even more so, its fascinating to see how Bill's mind works. :)

There are many forum posts asking what people have experienced with the newly released Ask Jeeves Paid Listing Program. Finally, someone posted some metrics on the program. The post is at WebmasterWorld and reads;

I have been live since monday as well, and I am quite happy with the results. It is currently 4.1% of my traffic and 4.3% of convertions. I just wish they had more users/traffic.

I'll keep watching and reporting back findings.

About a month ago, a thread popped up at Search Engine Watch Forums named Experience with IntelliTXT? I did not know how to reply or what to say, so I sat back and watched it develop (which is really didn't. Then I noticed that on August 11th, Threadwatch Tests IntelliTXT, which caused bit of a revolt over there. A week later, Threadwatch Drops IntelliTXT due to "Poor CTR, Poor Earnings, User Complaints."

IntelliTXT is a "in-Text advertising" technology, basically, if a word matched an advertisement it would turn green. If you hovered-over the link, it would pop open a small contextually relevant ad (more info).

Nick reported at ThreadWatch that "In 7 days, i've earnt the grand total of $10.92 with a CTR of 1.25%." So he obviously wasn't too happy with those results. I tried to string up some WebmasterWorld threads on intellitext and intellitxt and found some more information. In a thread at WebmasterWorld on March 15, 2005 which reported that it made "ok" money but payment is slow. An older thread on April 22, 2005 reports that "It did not work out for me, as most of my sites are around a niche topic, which does not seem to do well for contextual marketing." But most the threads at WebmasterWorld discuss if you can use both AdSense and IntelliTXT together without violating TOS. Message # 33 in this post seems to be the most recent thread discussing it. I am still not sure if it is OK, I'll try to find out, but it seems like it would be ok to run both on the same page.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Who ARE the three most powerful people in search? has a poll asking you to vote. This all comes from a thread named You're In A Room With The Three Most Powerful People In Search, based on DaveN's Most Excellent Google Adventure (with JenSense & ChrisR). Oh, by the way, some people are not too happy with that adventure.

So far, by way of popular vote, Google and Yahoo's founders are in the lead. Five votes a piece for Sergey Bryn and Larry Page. Jerry Yang has four votes, while Bill Gates only has two votes. Cast Your Vote for the Three Most Powerful People In Search.

For all of you who have been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the upcoming WebmasterWorld Pub Conference, its live now.

Brett switched the old home of the conference page from webmasterworld.com/conference/ to a sweet looking domain name, http://www.pubcon.com/. Discussion about the domain name is at WebmasterWorld Community Forum. The sessions and speaker list has not been posted yet, expect it by September 1st.

When: November 15-17, 2005
Where: Las Vegas, Nevada
Hotel: Renaissance Las Vegas
Keynote: Robert X Cringely

More information to come, and stay up to date on what is going on at the WebmasterWorld Conference Blog.

Also make sure to check out our past coverage of the WebmasterWorld conferences for WebmasterWorld 2004 Las Vegas & WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans.

As Google's, GOOG, shares continue to drop in value, reports come this morning that Google plans to sell $4 billion of stock.

Internet search company Google Inc. on Thursday filed with regulators to sell up to 14.16 million shares of class A common stock, which would be worth $4.04 billion based on last night's closing prices.

Its shares fell as much as 4 percent in preopening trade on Inet after it announced the news.

There is a forum thread on this topic at WebmasterWorld.

A HighRanking's Forum thread named I'm Stuck With A Bad Seo Company, what to do now? offers some advice to a member who took the wrong action when selecting an SEO Company.

Jill Whalen, a well known SEO, offers the following advice;

If you really feel like they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, you should document it all in a long email to them and tell them that you are firing them. Then don't pay any longer, and move on.

It's possible that they might sue you, but if you have good evidence documented, they probably won't bother. It's not going to be worth their time and trouble. If they do, you can decide what to do from there.

If you are going to cancel an automated billing on your credit card, "You'll need to provide written notice the the credit card company, and probably state reasons." Or you can file "a complaint with the BBB often yields decent results: http://complaint.bbb.org/."

The member was persistent and reported;

After repeated e-mails and documenting problems, they finally agreed to let me out of the contract. Not sure if I can get back any of the $ already paid, but at least I'm no longer stuck with them. Thanks for all of your advice. If I hire another company, I will be MUCH more careful this time!

In a WebmasterWorld thread named How is the Revenue with YPN compared to Adsense? members who have the privilege of being accepted into the YPN beta testing period are discussing how the revenue compares. What is interesting is that people are now reporting lower CPC earnings with Google AdSense since the Google AdWords pricing change went live. Which makes sense to me.

In addition, WebmasterWorld reports that iVillage to replace AdSense with YPN, which is a bold move. JenSense says, "It is a high profile move, and it will be interesting to watch and see if any of the other higher profile sites follow suit and make a switch from Google to Yahoo or vice versa."

In addition, Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc., who brings in a ton of money with Google AdSense through its network of blogs, writes Why publishers should (yes *should*) support the launch of Yahoo�s Publisher Network, via Jeremy Z.

All in all, YPN is paying well for me, but I can not get into the specifics. The relevancy as I report here and here are not so great but the clicks on the ads, when clicked, tend to make up the difference for not serving up as contextually relevant ads. I know that the relevancy will improve as they continue to work it during this beta period.

WebmasterWorld moderator, eWhisper, started an excellent thread named Strategies for taking advantage of new AdWords system.

He discusses that since the new system does not have a disabled keywords restriction, you can bid on big name keyword phrases, with the sole purpose of just getting eye balls to look at the ad. Basically, he says that for new products, and building brand awareness towards those products, you can bid on popular keyword phrases and have an ad that basically is there to serve impressions.

In addition he shows how you can use various low CTR keywords that are used to target specific demographics (i.e. 'buy trucks online', 'psp hacks', 'cosmo quizzes') to serve up impressions and possible click through that might lead to sales and conversions. It is an easy way to reach your demographic, much in the same way as you would with "email/direct marketing/snail dm works."

The thread is currently discussing these ideas and hopefully will add more in the near future.

Danny Sullivan split off a discussion from an old thread, that I would have never found otherwise, and named it Details On New Yahoo Paid Listings System. In that thread, member, shor, talks about a focus group he attended which gave him and others a "preview of the upcoming Y!SMS PPC interface." Shor summarizes what he has learned from that focus group.

Shor's Notes broken down by bullet point:
(1) The new interface "looked about 1000x better than the current DTC"
(2) "Think Adgroups, multiple creatives, quality scoring - i.e ranks based on max CPC and CTR, much less dependence on the Y!SMS editorial team - in a nutshell, Google reskinned."
(3) The ability to type in a competitor or your own URL which would then be crawled for keywords
(4) An auto-retrieval + submission of keyword capability
(5) And a much more robust keyword tool
(6) No longer will we be able to see competitors' bid amounts
(7) No longer will we be able to see the bid amount beyond the 10th position
(8) Reports to be highly customizable and could be scheduled

Yahoo!Sarah Replies by Bullet Point:
(1) Our plan is to begin introducing the new interface early next year.
(2) They will continue to improve and fix bugs with the current DTC in the meantime.

Very nice stuff, and no non-disclosure on this information.

This is an FYI that Cre8asite Forums will have some down time over the weekend due to a server upgrade. Kim Krause, founder of Cre8asite, posts Forums Community Alert! Downtime Notice.

We are in the process of moving these forums to a new server environment. This is stage one of a process whereby we're moving, and then later (stage 2) changing over to new software as well (Invision).

We have a new hompage designed and we'll be launching new things that we've been wanting to do for awhile.

For now, we expect to be offline this weekend - Friday, August 19 - Sunday, August 21. Our Tech Admins will keep you informed as to more details, and approximent times.

More information at the thread.

Yahoo! released its updated user interface and and feature set for Yahoo! Local. John Battelle has a very nice write up on it with inside information from Paul Levine, head of Yahoo Local Search. Danny Sullivan gives a write up of feature sets. Let's not forget to add Jeff Weiner's thoughts on local search and the changing face of media.

Forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Moderator, Chicago's thoughts on this new Yahoo! Local:

- A deeper more broad definition of "local search"
- Fostering a sense of community
- Movement from business lookup to an augmentation of local behavior patterns
- The realization that local search includes events, activities, and other time-based local actions
- Personalization and leveraging user data
- Deeper content integration from disparate local based content within the Y network in a local destination
- Drill down: From city to neighborhood
- Freshness
- Destination: City portal characteristics
- Further emphasis on user generated content
- One step closer to the integration of social networking

In the past we covered the tough decision WebmasterWorld had to make in regards to linking to blogs. The final decision was to never link to any blog, no matter what, as a matter of policy. I respect that decision greatly.

Yesterday I noticed that the founder of WebmasterWorld, Brett Tabke, made one exception to the rule. In a thread started by Brett named Google employee FAQ site, which links to the new Matt Cutt's Blog.

Brett calls it more of a "FAQ site", but by the name of the site and the URL, it seems to me its more of a blog then this site. The site resides at the URL http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. Just some forum politics for you in the AM.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Wikipedia gets too many high rankings shows one members dissatisfaction with Google ranking Wikipedia too well in Google results. For those of you who do not know what Wikipedia is, it is basically the largest wealth of knowledge maintained by volunteers online today. Basically, contributing writers, it can be you and me, add/edit/delete content from the Wikipedia. Since its open to anyone, it is susceptible to spam, but since anyone can then edit it, it is often corrected and cleaned quickly.

One member has a great two liner, explaining Wikipedia and wikis;

The bad thing of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. :(
The good thing of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. :)

Now, Google knows this, and must deem Wikipedia an authority on any topic it covers. Hence it ranks well. Besides for the authoritative status; it has lots of fresh content (new pages and updated pages daily), the content is all unique, there are tons of links pointing to the site and its fast loading (to name a few of the hundreds of variables).

I have, for the most part, stayed out of the debate with the recent controversy over if Yahoo!'s index size is inflated or not. All I did was link to forum threads and articles on the topic.

I sat down with Gary Price, News Editor at Search Engine Watch, at the last SES conference and one of the many topics we discussed was this one. Forget the controversy over index size, I have no way of knowing if the 19.2 billion count is accurate or not. That is not the point...

To measure index size by conducting queries, in my humble opinion, is not a valid testing method. Why? Because search engines have an indexer component and a query component. Both of those are pretty much standalone. So for someone to do a query, no matter what it is, at one engine and compare the "total results" to an other search engine, to me, it seems very flawed.

Some of the reasoning on this can be found by a blog entry at sethf.com. The query processor can be limiting the results based on its matching and filter algorithms. One can not measure index size, when it goes through a query processor. In my opinion, it really doesn't matter that Yahoo! claims to be more then twice the size of Google and still doesn't show, for any of those queries, more total results. I know many people argue with me, but this is how I felt from day two - after speaking with Gary about the methodologies being used to measure Yahoo!'s claim.

Update: Jeremy Z just posted a few minutes ago his via on Of Course Size Matters! Got of love the blog-o-sphere.

Like it's sister, AdWords Live Blog, Google AdSense launched the Inside AdSense blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/. JenSense reports that you can expect to see "posts around 2-3 times a week from an assortment of Googlers involved in the operation of AdSense."

JenStar will also be Talking YPN & AdSense on SEO Rockstars today, at WebmasterRadio.FM.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

During some of my forum lurking, I spotted a WebmasterWorld Thread on the topic of the nofollow attribute and RSS feeds. Basically the member asks if he is better off using the nofollow attribute to hoard pagerank or link out to "quality sites that provide the news."

I replied to that question in message number three stating that the purpose behind the nofollow attribute was to give control to the Webmasters. For a site like this, a forum, a guestbook and so on, people can come in and link to anywhere without immediate moderation of those links. We all have our spam filters and such, but we do not immediately control the outbound links until we have time to moderate them.

My point is, if you syndicate someone's content through an RSS feed - you must think that content has enough merit and quality for your visitors. If that is the case, then those sites you syndicate deserve a clean link back, that is how the Web works.

During this site's upgrade, the nofollow attribute was automatically installed, I will probably pull them now, since comment and trackback moderation here is almost 99% solid now.

It is kind of funny, we "squeaked" in to the Feedster Top 500 list for August. So I now get to put this fancy logo on the site.

Danny Sullivan has a nice write up on this, his SEW Blog should have been in the list.

A quick skim shows that among search-related blogs, John Battelle makes it at 139, the Yahoo Search Blog ranks 197 and Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable squeaks in at 500. We apparently suck and don't make the list at all.

I am told I have one of the two best spots in the list. This site ranks #500, the last in the list. Only better spot, is the first spot. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Hot off the forums from WebmasterWorld, Google AdWords Pricing Change Goes Into Affect posted at 4:30AM (est) a member refreshed his AdWords control panel to see:

We've simplified our keyword status system. Your keywords will now either be active (triggering ads) or inactive (not triggering ads). Quality remains the most important factor in your keywords' performance. Each keyword will now have a minimum bid that is based on the quality of your keyword and ad text. If your maximum CPC doesn't meet this minimum bid, your keyword will be listed as inactive.

What you should do differently:
If a keyword is listed as inactive, improve its quality through optimization, delete it, or raise that keyword's maximum CPC to the minimum bid indicated. (Raising the bid will re-activate the keyword.) If your keyword is active, you don't need to do anything.

AdWordsAdvisor at WebmasterWorld said that it was not live at that time, but was a slow roll out.

Sharp eye you have there poster_boy. ;)

The changes have not actually launched yet - and what you are seeing is some limited pre-launch testing as we get things ready for prime-time.

The changes will relatively launch soon, and as mentioned previously, we'll notify everyone by email when they do occur - and of course I'll post here as well.

In the meantime, for those few that do see the 'new' pages, please know that you are seeing testing, that your account will run as normal during the testing, and that any changes you make in the 'test' interface will be saved.

My apology in advance for any confusion that this testing may cause.

But it seems as if this will be live really soon, any questions, jump over to the forums.

Word came via TheSteet.com that Apple and Google might team up to offer iTunes dashboard.

According to market chatter, Apple is set to announce a deal with Google calling for Google to offer Apple's iTunes music store through its own site. The rumored deal would pair the nation's leading online music store with its leading search engine.

That rumor, supposedly, made Apple's stock surge up last Friday. And AAPL keeps growing. If you take a look at the Google SERPs for AAPL it will show you the chart. Also, notice the first result is finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL with those Google Web Categories listed below the result.

Forum discussion about the Apple and Google rumors at DigitalPoint Forums.

Two out of two Search Engine Watch Forum members report Poor results from Content match. Yahoo! Search Marketing offers a service named Content Match which enables Sponsored Search advertisers to have an ad shown on a publisher's site contextually. This is much like Google AdSense, but up until last week, only selected publishers were allowed to serve up contextual ads. Now that Yahoo! Publisher Network is available, anyone with an approved YPN account can server up an ad like the one below.

That being said, based on some of the comments in the SEW thread, it may worry the Yahoo Search Marketing customers about high quality ad impressions. One SEW member reported; "20 pct of my impressions were with content match but less than 1 pct of my clicks came from the content match and none of my conversions came from content match." An other member said; "We have had horrible results using Yahoo/overture's content match."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are hundreds of search engines out there that are powered by either Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves or an other engine. Should you expect that the search engines that are driven off someone else's technology, provide the same exact results? Bruce Clay has always had an outstanding Search Engine Relationship Chart so you know who is powering who (it changes all too often). But even though Netscape is powered by Google, it doesn't mean you will see the same 10 results in Netscape that you will in Google. I believe this applies to Yahoo! powering AltaVista, Inktomi, AllTheWeb and so on. Even though Yahoo! Search is a technology comprised of the above three, they each are slightly flavored for their target searcher.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, by way of example, I was giving Google a hard time. Then after seeing if they made any changes to the SERPs based on that post, which they did, I noticed MSN's bad behavior.

Yesterday, I noticed that MSN indexed a link to an Ask Jeeves SERPs page. For example, see a search at MSN on big blue pineapple chair and then scroll down to the 3rd result. You should see.

Ok, so they didn't write a piece of code to block results from Ask's SERPs page. But then I look again today, to take some screen captures and noticed that MSN's own SERPs are included in MSN's index.

And I am giving Yahoo! a hard time about which pages to index, and about index size.

I started a thread on the topic at Search Engine Watch Forums where a member adds that MSN has not only indexed that SERP but about 60,000 other Ask Jeeves search results pages. So then I decided to check the other search engines. Over 70,000,000 of its own engine, but it seems to be staying off Google & Yahoo for the most part.

The news hit that Google loses AdWords trade mark case in the US but it was not clear to me or WebmasterWorld and SEW Forum members as to what the exact ruling was. Basically, The Register summarizes that "The judge found that there was infringement where the terms were used in the text of sponsored ads." Also, "there had been a breach of the insurance firm�s trade mark rights �solely with regard to those sponsored links that use GEICO's trade marks in their headings or text.""

But based on my past research on legal issues in search, Google stopped allowing the use of trademarks within the headline or description. So I, as well as others, were scratching our heads about what is new with this ruling. Good thing Gary Price blogged about this case and linked to Judge Brinkema's opinion, which on page three says (my understanding) that its

(1) There is not sufficient evidence to prove "confusion" by someone bidding on a trademarked keyword alone.
(2) There is not sufficient evidence to prove "confusion" by someone placing a trademark in the ad copy (heading or description) alone.
(3) But if both are done, bidding on a trademark and placing the trademark in the ad copy, then there is sufficient evidence to prove that Google "violate the Lanham Act."

I hope I got that right. :)

Forget if size is important or not, we probably all agree relevancy is where it is at. But the question if it is true or an inflated number. Anyone with some schooling in statistics knows that you can make a numbers say almost anything you want (its pretty cool). But when the New York Times quote says "Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, suggested that the Yahoo index was inflated with duplicate entries in such a way as to cut its effectiveness despite its large size," this is a major thing. I know the folks at Ask Jeeves feel the numbers are way inflated as well and so do lots of independents.

So what do the folks in the forums think? A WebmasterWorld forum thread named Sergey Brin Says Yahoo's Index Size Claim is Inflated has some fun chatter. Many offer hints that this is a cat fight. One said, "Someone's got a bad case of index envy..." A classic quote; "Some woman needs to tell these guys the size isn't as important as what you do with it."

Google News is rising in popularity and that means publishers want their content syndicated in Google News, I know I do (Matt???). A thread at Cre8asite Forums named Tips on getting on the Google News homepage asks the member base for advice on how to get your articles featured on the home page of Google News.

This assumes you have been approved for syndication at Google News. After that, Bill Slawski gives his rundown of patents and articles written about this topic. I'll try to summarize the thread here for you.

The most juicy part of the thread is when Bill links to Systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles patent application by some of Google's engineers including Krishna Bharat. Bill summarizes:

One or more metric values based at least in part on at least one of a number of articles produced by the source during a first time period,

- an average length of an article produced by the source,
- an amount of important coverage that the source produces in a second time period,
- a breaking news score,
- an amount of network traffic to the source,
- a human opinion of the source,
- circulation statistics of the source,
- a size of a staff associated with the source,
- a number of bureaus associated with the source,
- a number of original named entities in a group of articles associated with the source,
- a breadth of coverage by the source,
- a number of different countries from which network traffic to the source originates, and
- a writing style used by the source;

and determining a quality value for each source of the plurality of sources based at least in part on the determined one or more metric values for the source.

But moderator ProjectPHP is most probably right;

Despite what anyone tells you, Google put a lot of editorial control on News.google.com, and my guess would be that, unless you are triple approved by everyone including Sergey, you will have buckley's of getting on those pages.

It just makes sense to give the New York Times a higher score or bias then this site here.

One of the new, interesting individuals I met last week goes by the forum name, DaveN. He is a moderator at both WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums. He was also fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time.

While the rest of the SEO community were partying at the GoogleDance we where being shown around the PLEX. At 1.30am ish our little party was gate crashed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin! (DaveN shakes in pants!) Sergey actually just sat down with us and chatted for a good hour about everything from watches to Google.

It is true, DaveN, ChrisR and Jenstar all the "Most Excellent Google Adventure."

DaveN thanked Danny Sullivan for the opportunity at a Search Engine Watch Forum thread.

Looks like the folks at Ask Jeeves are getting a free small focus group on the name change over at Search Engine Watch Forums. The thread is named Ask Jeeves Name Guessing Game and asks the members which name they think Ask Jeeves will choose in the long run.

This is all brought up from a past article where Diller hinted to Ask Jeeves to be Renamed to Ask and then the recent Keynote by Steve Berkowitz at SES this past week.

My opinion, the name with be changed to Ask.

Last week the news spread about Google Snubs Tech News Outlet CNET. Basically, Google was fed up with the style of C|Net's reporters, specifically, the article named Google balances privacy, reach was the straw that broke the camel's back.

In her story, Mills included a link to Schmidt's home address, his net worth of $1.5 billion and noted that he has attended the Burning Man art festival and is an amateur pilot. Mills said she spent 30 minutes on Google to obtain the information.

But it was repeated issues that lead Google to make this decision. Over the week, I have met with many many PR people in the industry. Most of them feel this is a bold move by Google, some in fact wish they have the courage to do the same. Bottom-line is that the PR folks at the other search engines have all felt that C|Net has gone way too far, over and over again. But I am told by others that C|Net specifically has a statement that they will not hold to embargoes. Meaning, if a company gives them a pre-news release with the intent they hold it until a specific date, C|Net will not hold by it. But from my understanding, most of the PR people at the search engines are unaware of that - or neglected to mention it.

In my opinion, no one really agrees with me, this whole snub tactic on Google's part is a clever PR stunt. It is bold, it is courageous and it says that Google doesn't need them. To me, that makes a statement.

Of course the forums are chatting about this, both WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums have some Webmaster related discussion going on.

Does this strike anyone else as strangely ironic? It looks like the Google folks are applying a similar algorithm to media relations, as they do to developing search indexes.

Expect a patent application to follow soon ;)

Don't you love how SEO's think?

Well no one knows for sure. If I had to take a guess it might be a phrase (Google Test Ad or GoogleTestAd) used by publishers to see how their ads show up in the results or some kind of rank checking software. I came across a post today from the blogosphere talking about it. Apparently last month the phrase was in the top 30 most popular phrases and gained about 40,000 searches last month. Prime for the picking it seems for some people. There has been a rush for some to create websites and scrape some content in order to capitalize on the traffic with Adsense or by selling third party SEO software. If it does get that amount of traffic, it's questionable whether or not it would actually convert to a sale or click for anyone. But people are interested. If you haven't heard about it, then don't worry its not exactly exciting but with anything its gained some interest lately. As far as I can tell no is able to figure out what it is for.

One site in particular googletestad.net claims "Googletestad page developed for no reason at all. It's a popular keyword in need of a home." Hmmm...

The top sponsored ad on the page looks like the following:

Its family safe!

To see what the commotion is about, check out the search "googletestad".

Google's stock has been falling, Yahoo! is now bigger, and Yahoo! wins relevancy challenge over Google. If that wasn't enough, let me show you, what I would call a cheap shot, on Google.

Remember my Big Blue Pineapple Chair entry? Also, do you remember when I gave Yahoo! a hard time about them not ranking the correct page for the term? Yahoo! fixed that. But for some reason I did an other search at the four engines on that term. Guess what? Google listed my homepage and not the specific landing page.

- http://www.google.com/search?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair - listed seroundtable.com -
- http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=big+blue+pineapple+chair entry page +
- http://web.ask.com/web?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair entry page +
- http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair entry page +

You know, I have been wondering, as Google's stock sinks, when Yahoo! releases announcements that make Google cringe, as Google plays hard ball with the press; where will all this lead? If the searcher sees weakness in Google. Weakness through the stock market, weakness through index size, weakness through shutting down the press and weakness within the SEM community... will the Google brand sink as well?

Kleenex = Tissues, but I buy different brands. Xerox = copier but... Googling = Search but...

I guess you can tell I am tired...

I just landed at 6am this morning, taking the red eye from California. I am incredibly tired and I have a ton of work to get caught up on. I doubt I will have time to post anything today. I will try, but I doubt I will.

Here is a quick recap of all the sessions we covered over at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2005 at the Search Engine Roundtable.

- Mobile Search
- Search Algorithms: The Patent Files
- Weird Science: The Next Generation in Media Planning and Buying
- Earning From Search & Contextual Ads
- Eye of the Storm: Lessons from Large Search Marketers
- Searcher Behavior Research Update
- Search APIs
- Personalized Search & Search History
- Vertical Creep Into Regular Results
- From Broad to Specific: Capitalizing on vertical search and other niche publishing opportunities.
- Competitive Research
- Keynote Conversation with Ask Jeeves's Steve Berkowitz
- RSS, Blogs & Search Marketing
- Fun with Dynamic Sites
- Ad Management: Do Humans matter?
- Should You Chase The Algorithm?
- Link Building Basics
- Landing Page Testing & Tuning
- Ad Reps: Friend or Foe? - How to Handle Situations with Search Engines Going Direct to Your Clients
- Indexing Summit 2: Redirects, Titles & Descriptions
- Search Engine Advertising Forum
- Converting Visitors Into Buyers
- Local Search Marketing Tactics
- Executive Roundtable with Search Engine Executives
- Advanced Linking Strategies
- Site ECG
- Buying and Selling Links
- Usability Clinic
- Search Engine Q&A On Links
- B2B Tactics
- Organic Listings Forum
- Spanish Language SEM

Thanks Ben, Chris and the SES team!

Chris is going to post daily recaps as well, day one, day two, day three and day four.

Moderator and first presenter: Barbara Coll - WebMama.com
Wants to talk about the long and short term look at this market segment. Offers the opportunity to ask questions at anyone's convenience.
Will talk about the buying power opportunities, for those who are advertising in Spanish, reaching out to the Spanish marketing segment online. There has been a major growth in the buying power of Hispanics in the US as well as growth overseas. 10% of disposable income by 2007 will be from Hispanic community. Recent study by Media Channel shows that 82% of Hispanic online users made a purchase in the last year. Example: Pedro Martinez of NY Mets. 25% of pro baseball players are Latino. 2 weeks ago, the Mets decided to focus on the Spanish marketplace. They realized that the original community which was the Jewish community no longer lives near the stadium and is now Hispanic. Shows a search for "boletos de beisbol ny mets." Results (mostly English) do not reflect search listings in Spanish, and PPC ads are in English too. Same thing with "boletos de beisbol" one of the top organic results has Spanish content indexed as description, but the title tag still says official site of MLB is in English.

English enters into media for Latinos, but still need to focus on supplying Spanish content. Search advertising industry milestones: First SES Spanish session was Chicago in December 2003. Now IAB has a Hispanic committee. More focus now on standards. Online portal milestones: AOL Latino, Yahoo Espanol, MSN Latino, Yahoo purchases Terespondo in April 2005, the largest PPC network in South America. (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002142.html). Recognition of the second language of the US gives credit to the launch of the new MSN search for having a tab for Espanol right on their search home page. For Google, you can do this, but you have to go to personalized home page. Problems: Is the search entered a typo or another language? "Camara" still interpreted as a typo instead of being Spanish. Difficult problem to solve for SE's. "Real estate in Denver" search: Hispanic market is fastest growing home sales in this market. All organic, 80% of the website (sorry missed it) traffic came through the Internet. Another thing to remember is that kws are different in another language.

Lucas Morea - Latinedge

Stared with monografias.com, now one of top 5 Spanish websites in terms of traffic, achieved thanks to basic SEO and original content. Wants to make an emphasis on the online to offline relationship. According to Jupiter, each dollar generated online, travel companies received an additional $5 in revenue from research that came online. "hoteles in Acapulco" search at Yahoo gives the option to change to English, but displays organic Spanish results. He also tried some searches at Google Mexico which showed that the total number of results found were approximately the same, but if the search is done in English, there is about 6 times the results.

Paid search landscape in Spanish? CPC and volume are both fraction of the cost of comparable English searches. Even though it is less volume, still certainly "worth it."

User sophistication: long tail example. In English the difference between one word searches versus multiple words: 3 times as many multiple word searches. In Spanish, the opposite exists where one word searches still dominate, but not 3 times as many. This reflects how Spanish users are still learning how to search.

How do they get on the net? In South America, many many people get online in an Internet Cafe, which makes it less likely to make a purchase online due to security concerns. How do they buy offline? In the US, phone sales can happen, and more accustomed to credit cards. In Latin America, cash is preferred. Human contact is very important to Spanish market. Must increase points of contact with potential clients. Need to provide email support. Users want to know that there are people on the other end. Good idea to reply with a name instead of just a company. If you can provide live chat: even better. Call center or support service very good too. Good way to make online work in Spanish market is by using lead generation forms in order to make the sale offline. People follow up filling online form. Another very successful marketing campaign has been email marketing to optin network in Mexico (only method used), which resulted in selling out of 10k units of stock, all offline sales.

Once again, important to increase points of contact, by adding a phone number to a site, sales increased by 54%. Also seeing the number there and knowing they could call someone if needed helped increase online conversions from 22% to 37% in one specific country of Hispanic origin. Other statistics point that the addition of the call center has increased sales. Conclusion: the more offline capabilities you have, the better you will do. Even with the perception of offline presence, people will be more likely to buy. Also, make sure your expectations are moderated because it is a small market. Goal should be considered as ROI of Zero in order to break even and gain future clients. ROI will increase thereafter. Make sure the site is consistent with your offers. Start right away: get ready to build reputation. Build landing pages in both Spanish and English unless targeting all Spanish speaking company. Provide alternate forms of payment.

Ignacio "Nacho" Hernandez - iHispanic.com (note this is a true leader in Spanish SEM. if this is your market, he, Lucas or Barbara Coll are three of the most knowledgeable people in this field, in my humble opinion). Nacho handed out a recent white paper discussing this topic. It is available at his website.

Announced by Barbara that Nacho has just convinced Jupiter Media to hold an all-Spanish conference in the near future: SES Latino 2006 in Miami, FL July 10-11th, 2006. (Applause)

Used an example of the empty chairs in the room to describe how you have a great opportunity to gain market share where your competition is not present. Why the Hispanic market? Covered by Barbara, but showed that total Hispanic population is 434 million, with an online pop of 61 million! Myth: US Hispanic don?t have credit cards. This is totally incorrect. Credit Card use among Hispanics had grown from 48% to 57% from 2002 to 2004. 13 Million online US Hispanics spent 5.6 Billion in 2003. Recent study (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002254.html) showed that 5 of top destination sites for Hispanic users were search sites. Should look into paid inclusion and PPC. Focus on creative of landing pages and ads, both ?en espanol.? PPC issues: although most niche industries are still unexplored territory, competitive kws in Spanish have clicks cost rising 10-25%. Be prepared to see higher page abandonment if landing pages and process flow are poorly created. Be careful to not use pictures of non-Hispanic persons (blonde, blue-eyed people on the site, for example). Conversions may occur offline, but prepare to offer alternate payment methods. SEO strategies. If you already have Spanish content, then get it indexed first. Gave example of Univision.com now having 1.3 million pages already at Google. Y! only 119,000 and even less in MSN. Search for ?casas neuvas in san diego? at Google shows a good first result, but another listing shows terrible title tag, snippets and missing keywords in url. What language should I use? In South America and Central America, you should use Spanish, but in the US, make both versions.

Case study about mexgrocer.com focusing on Spanish keywords used by Spanish users, such as for example ?salsa verde Mexicana" and bilingual landing pages for keywords that may be reached by Anglo or Hispanic users. They used to have mexgrocer in English and mexsuper.com in Spanish, and they were ?butting heads? for some terms. Careful when doing kw research-often backwards in Spanish from the English version. Marks in words should be dropped. Misspelling is very important because 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics start to forget the language, for example ?Pozole? original spelling vs. ?Posole? which is now searched more. Sea

Search Engine real estate.. Shows a great example of hw they have dominated the top 5 organic listings as well as paid listings for a particular term. They are using a distributor?s site that has been optimized for the same term, and fulfilling orders through mexgrocer as well as their alliance with Amazon to gain real estate from 43% to 86% above the fold. Build link popularity?same rules apply: high traffic and relevant sites only. Use press releases with PRWeb and AmbosMedios in Spanish. Local search is going to be very big in the Hispanic market. Apparently 71% of Hispanic households are in just 20 metro areas. An example San Diego/Tijuana shows 41.4 million dollars per day are spent in San Diego by total defined market. An example would be to shop for ?Car? keywords in San Diego. English CPC $3.43, $2.80, $2.20 and $2.30 versus same keywords in Spanish .22, .21, .35, .16...a 94% savings! Results=Higher ROI. Don't panic, use tools such as Google, Yahoo Search Marketing and Terespondo while it's still available (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002080.html) to find keywords. If you already have Spanish content, check your log files for kw's used to find. Look at SERPs for other relevant keywords.

10 tips: Have realistic objective strategy. Be committed to the market. Do a readiness assessment. Set aside enough resources. Do research as to what language to use. Use effective creative. Start with paid programs. Remember that organic results more competitive. Test. Hispanic market is not one size fits all. If you are ready to commit to this market, don't just target TO Hispanics, target AS Hispanics.

Q&A

"What about translations that are done poorly or translated into standard Spanish when the site targets Latin America. Would it be wise to translate it into regional Spanish. Would they think you are spamming?"

B: says "no"

L: Spanish from Spain is very different, and can be easily seen by Spaniards . There is such a thing as "neutral Spanish," which is what he would recommend translating-to.

Nacho: their services provide a process known as "standardization of the language." This is very intensive translation and works well by taking translations that have been done in multiple Spanish dialects and adapting them to a more common Latin American Spanish.

"How to start when trying to setup a call center in SA, for example?"

L: There are a lot of outsourced call centers that can do this.

"Any statistics regarding income level for local areas?"

N: Buy the Synovate Report (costs $1,000, but worth it)

Some attendees gave example of success stories based on the recommendations given by the 3 presenters in previous SES shows.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan
Welcome focusing on indexing and submission issues.

Kaushal Kurapati - AskJeeves
Brief intro of AksJeeves. They reach 25% of US audience. Crawler goals: follow robots.txt standards. We try to practice �Politeness�: be gentle to your servers, you can tell us where to crawl, not crawl. Use noarchive, noindex, no follow standards. Efficiency: compression saves bandwidth (up to 75% savings with gzip). Also avoid duplicates. Freshness: variable rates of crawling. Completeness: multiple file types: html, PDF, Flash, MS-Office, XML. Time/date stamp your content helps. Simplify site organization and navigation to ensure crawlers can reach all parts of the site. Use site maps. Watch out for infinite pages such as calendars serving the year 3001. Do not put session ID�s on URL�s. Can I submit my site for indexing? We have gone away from site submission, we are able to find site organically now. My site pages not in index yet? Patience please, various speed of crawling. there is a FAQ page for spiders. JavaScritp- parsing difficult. Dynamic pages cause for mores selection in indexing, screened for dupes before crawling. URL�s within images cannot be followed.

Debbie Jaffe - Google
Will tlk about sitemaps. Help people discover more of your web pages. G site maps: what is it? Free and easy way to help G discover more about your sites. Allows for direct informing to G about site changes. Enables G to crawl site more effectively. This is a collaborative program with webmasters. Intended for all sites large and small. Web masters and users get better crawl coverage, fresher search results, and a smarter crawl. How does it work? Create a sitemap using sitemap geenrator available at G if you want (search �sitemap generator Google�) Submit a simple text file with all your URLs. Can included relative priority of pages (not relative to other pages on the web, but relative to yours. Then submit the sitemap and update as needed. Ned to setup an account as a webmaster. You can then track all of your submissions via easy to use reporting system. They think it is a great BETA program worth trying out in order to help G provide more and fresher content. Wants to add that this is just a supllement to the standard crawling occurring already.

Tim Mayer - Yahoo!
It is great to see another company adopting feeds, Y! has been using these since 2001, and has great experience and good results. Overview of Y search vision enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. Focus is on �Find.� Search not for sake ofs earching, but to achieve a purpose. Once you have found something you can share the knowledge with others. One thing people forget is to link pages from other pages. To encourage deeper crawling, would recommend not makji gsite depth too extreme (3-4 levels recommended). Use free addURL service if all else fails. Submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. Index friendly pages: Unique content with page-specific titles and descriptions. Separate pages only when there is separate content. Multiple domains only when there is a distinct business. Avoid spam such as kw stuffing, excessive cross linking, no cloaking, Yahoo crawlers include Slurp. Seeker, Multimedia crawler and audio-video crawler. Supports c command in order to stop caching. Can also add a crawl delay to help your servers. About to launch �Site Explorer� to see how many docs are already crawled in the index. Siteexplorer.yahoo.com (something else here) announced today. Find and save SS feeds available below search results. Add.my.yahoo.com/rss to add your RSS feeds within about 48 hours, then you will see the link appearing below your listings in the future. Search Submit Pro is a paid feed programs that allows for reporting and complete control over titles and abstracts. The paid Inclusion system is an entirely different content system than the main crawl. Over 99% of the index is crawled for free. Lists a fairt amount of support links available at Yahoo, including site questions like �I think I got banned, etc� the best is yet to come�see Yahoo search Blog at ysearchblog.com and go to next.yahoo.com to see new and future products.

Q&A.
�Is there a way to do the Google sitemaps type system at Yahoo?�
Tim: We just launched the feed to be able to do that. We will be expanding the products into the future.

Danny asks how many are using G sitemaps seemed as if a fair amount), Yahoo! Aid inclusion? (same amount) anyone using one system to submit to both? (none-seemed surprised by that.) Fair to say that the room would encourage you all to come together and do this.

�Does the sitemap feed effect the regular crawl?

D: No it doesn�t effect that. It does allow for additional information added.
.
Danny asks how many people that use sitemaps have benefited from it, molst have. Only one person ahd no effect, and no one raised their hand to �negative effect?�

�How to make sure country-specific engines pick up Yahoo content?�

T: No brainer way is to get a separate domain for each. Other way would be to make sure there are inbound links from that specific country to the particular content on the site. Somebody comments that you have to live in the country to get a domain. Tim says there are some services available that can be costly that provide this sort of help.

Danny ads that if you host in a particular country�it will help. Linkage is very important, especially if Authorities such as BBC in UK, for example

D: The index being generally the same is the same thing at G.

�anything in addition to using 301�s when changing a large site and changing many URL�s. Not root, but wanted to use the top fifty pages with 301�s?�

Tim: Why changing? They are going for more search engine freindlyness. Tim wonders why change if you already have good rankings. Danny answers to the idea that many search term appear in URLs in top searches, that many top ranks do not employ that. He thinks it is porbably other factors causing the content to be indexed highly. Danny ulls up a couple searches and shows that it is more important for the kw to be in the tile than in the URL.

K: They feel that content is the most important instead of the other stuff.

�What is the determining factor of how many poages get indexed?�

D: each individual sitemap allows for up to 50K URL�s. You can out sitemaps in individual directories if you have more than 50K pages. The re is no specific quota that she is aware of.

T: The importance is high quality signals such as authoritative inbounds links, no spam. There is no one factor that can be described as the largest. There are lots of things you can do to help the crawler want to dig deeper.

K: Two things that are factored are the depht of the site as well as if you have a dynamic URL that may block the crawler.

For the last session of the conference we have Chris Sherman moderating the My SEM Toolbox session. On the panel are Ken Jurina, Bill Hartzer, Jim Boykin, Paul Bruemmer and Todd Malicoat.

Jim Boykin from We Build Pages is up first. He starts off discussing the sandbox and brings up The Way Back Machine (waybackmachine.org) to see when the site was first found by TheWayBackMachine. He also uses 123promotion.co.uk/tools/age-of-website.php to find the day the Web site was first found as well. He also asks people if the site they have is a resource or not. So he uses a spider simulator, like www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go to see if the page has lots of text and pages with lots of text is more of a resource. Do you have unique content or not? There is a tool called copyscape.com where you can find if they stole your content or not. Where can you find all this and more? URL Research, back links, alexa, similar pages and so on, go to the Fagan Finder, faganfinder.com/urlinfo. He uses the Google allinachor command (allinanchor:keyword phrase typed into Google) will tell you the sites that have the most anchor text pointing to a specific page for a specific phrase. webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php is good for analyzing anchor text. Looking for related topics, kwmap.net is a nice tool for related phrases and neighborhoods. What about backlink neighborhoods...linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php helps you with this. Check your rankings; use digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords.

Todd Malicoat also from We Build Pages is next up. Domain/Server Level information tools: whois.sc/yourdomainhere.com, dnsstuff.com is great for doing IP lookups, ip-report.com gives you a break down of sites on the same IP block. Competitive information tools: GoogSpy.com will tell you what types of terms your competitors are bidding on at AdWords, extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchproxy allows you to mask yourself when you do your competitive research. Backlinks and off page analysis tools; webuildpages.com/tools/internet-marketing-google.htm, this tool will return the number of pages indexed in Google/Yahoo, backlink to site or page the pr and so on, linkhounds.com/link-harvester/ gives you good info as well. Keyword information tools; labs.google.com/sets/ Google Sets automatically creates sets of keywords in the same family, gorank.com/seotools has an ontology finder tools. Header and Page Level information; webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php tells you the server header http status. Spidering and indexability, home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html is a desktop tool to tell you your broken links and redirected URLs, gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go has Poodle Predictor. He also plugged rand, seomoz.org tools.

Ken Jurina from Epiar to give us 6 tools. Firefox extension tools: getfirefox.com, pros is tool works right and is very quick, critiques, none and cool (tons of extensions). Web CEO tracks SE rankings, comparing a sites performance vs. competitors, exporting reports to clients but it is a bit slow (free but can go up to $400+). ClickTracks is a web analytics tool, path tracking, ppc info, exporting reports is not too easy and has a wonderful interface and visitor clickstream tagging options (costs free to 10k). LiveStats (deepmetrix.com) good reporting options, easy to understand and good export options, a bit difficult to login, price ($195/month to 1795/month). Roboform.com is a good tool, it remembers all your passwords, fills in fields when campaigning a web site, include profiles, price ($29.95). MarketLeap is easy, online, free, does link pop, search engine saturation and keyword verification.

Bill Hartzer from Intec. Optilink, www.optilinksoftware.com tells you link pop, number of outgoing links, easily analyzes link text, its an offline tool. OptiSpider, www.optilinksoftware.com spiders one site, compares link text to page topic and title tag, discover which link text or page title needs improvement, great for analyzing someone elses site and this is an offline tool. Ranks.nl/tools/keyword_combinations.html allows you to combine two keyword lists into one and expands it. Ranks.nl measures keyword density where you compare two page's keyword density to each other. www.keyword-helper.com helps you find more keywords. URLTrends.com shows PR, alexa, number of incoming links, page info, dmoz status and so on but it has an rss or email notification system. More tools; seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, digitalpoint.com/tools/, seotoolset.com, seochat.com/seo-tools/.

Paul Bruemmer from TrademarkSEO was last up. Alexa: Reach, Rank, Page Views, Compare Sites and Similar Sites, Site linking in. Ranking Manager reports by engine, keyword and so on. LinxViewer: it shows you what a spider might see. Yahoo! Finance: client information and trends. Hoovers Pro Plus gives you details about client model, client competitors and so on. Print Screen Deluxe, capture screen shots (americansys.com) just any easy way to do screen captures.

Forum discussion at SEW Forums.

Michael Doyle from ThomasB2B is going to talk about B2B search and a issues with B2B search. There are a couple types of B2B search, name of the company is known but not much else. What gets interesting is a supplier search and you don�t know the name of the company who supplies this part. If you do a product search in general engine, it works great. Major search engines and shopping site provide good consumer results because of defined list of product codes. It�s a relatively small list of well known brand names. B2B search is characterized by lack of common product codes/brand names and millions and trillions of parts. Some manufacturers have millions of products in there catalog.

A typical person doing sourcing in the B2B space. The B2B searcher spends a good portion of her day looking to fill a critical need for a product. Time is money he says. Purchasing decisions are very important to the buyer and the selected supplier. Traditionally done with print directories and manufactures/distributors catalogs. Everyone had a proprietary classification systems to organize suppliers by the type of product made. The decision to create a product category is typically made by a human editor. He puts up an example of a Google search for twisted shank drill bits. Its shows an eBay ad (which is irrelevant), the organic listings are not relevant either as its catalog and nothing to help source the product. He puts up an example of how ThomasB2B search, and how they list companies and show how relevant the pages are and clean too.

Directories are only as good as the number of companies listed and the freshness of information. Print directories gathered information useful to print users, like phone, fax, address but many companies do not even have a website. #1 compliant of ThomasB2B is you can�t click through. The company product specification data needs to be published in indexable formats. They think there needs to be standards and tools are the solution. Product classification is important (UNSPSC started by the UN). Software tools for classifying product content and a general consensus about content/data types as well. This new index will allow companies to include themselves in a standard index if they adopt general standards.

Up next Jeff Coyle from KnowledgeStorm is a information technology directories and provides structured information to mainstream sites and magazines. The information technology directory is aggregated content from thousands of vendors. Over 2 million visits per month, with a network of 160 sites. Product and service listings as well as white papers, demos, web seminars, etc.. KnowledgeStorm looks at user behavior such as researching & staying current on technology trends. Supporting a buying process and decision. One of the challenges for them is not getting the searcher there, it�s structuring the information so people understand it and generating a lead for their client. They help develop a portfolio of marketing efforts to leverage current marketing collateral. Jeff next showcases vertical search for technology such as built in direct response to requests from our users.

Sarabjit Singh from GlobalSpec was up next. He starts with describing the evolution of the television. In 1941 the first 2 TV stations licensed, etc.. For 50 years 3 stations owned the market. Its very similar to search engines today with the mass market engines. They do a great job, but they believe a similar trend will happen, and their will be a specialized engines for specific needs. Globalspec was founded 10 years ago, and have about 150 people. He explains they looked at what people wanted on the web. They make the dark and hidden web visible by offering information in their search. He explain how their engineering search works. He says they provide deep parametric, technical part and service search. Appears they offer a good service for their clients. Submit websites to them, www.globalspec.com/submit-site

Brennen Beyer from Business.com is going to talk about what they are offering to the market. He says it�s a slow growth business, it�s a fragment audience, and they are trying to reach decision makers. Business.com lists vertical markets, they are also built on a directory structure. They do not crawl the web. He explains how the engine works, advertiser and content layout on Business.com. It�s a CPC based engine, and its all paid placement. They don�t necessary power search on other sites, but its does take up a good part of what they do. Business.com has a reach of 3.5 million users per month. He says they are here to understand the needs of users. There directory becomes powerful as it can help offer suggestions for problems such as a search for �employee performance�. The directory might suggest �performance improvement� categories. Why is it worth it build a vertical search engine? Its because it has a higher concentration of decision makers.

Mark Cordover from It.com. It.com is a vertical search engine that focuses on IT market. He says traditional marketing began in the ancient bazaar, as people where hacking their wares to people that based by. He says things have changed, its �core routers, and managed hosting� instead of beads and clothes. Search marketing provides consumer pull, not vendor push. He gives and example of a story about Madison Avenue magazine, has a sparkling water company wanting to creating an ad in a magazine to make people look at the ad. Apparently you get to the page, and its explodes in bubbles, causing you to look at the ad. Marketing on vertical search engines delivers a targeted audience. So if you put all the vertical search ideas together you get a virtual trade show. He ends with some advice they have learned. How best to present yourself in a virtual trade show. He gives an example of a great ads. �PalmSource delivers IBM Websphere Everyplace �importance of embedded java in a mobile device more than 3 million java developers can deploy applications, then the url�.

Chris Sherman introduces the panel saying that metric people looked at was simply click through. That evolved into conversions, ROI, CPA and so on. Today we have lots of metrics to use to see, plus we have the ability to track a customer over time. That is what this session is about.

Ben Perry from IProspect was up first. If you use an agent you get a big difference in results when compared to humans. He showed how the agent (software) was much more aggressive in bid prices versus the human. The agent brought in a 37% increase in ROAS and a 55% increase in conversion. Time matters in bidding. He overlaid clicks and conversions on a 2d graph, for a specific client, it was very interesting to look at. There are also weekly trends, especially with b2b markets. Then he plotted a monthly view, which showed a combination of weekly trends, but it doesn't always look the same way for each client. Then again he backed it out by year and you see the same trends, and seasonal trends. Time should impact your bidding strategy. For a low consideration product, 88% of all conversions happen within the hour (batteries, snickers bar vs. car purchase, home, plasma screen). For high consideration products, 46% of all conversions occur between 1 and 60 minutes. 46% of all the other conversions too more than an hour. He plotted a scale by days and it took up to 6 months or so. Customers who waited longer had an average revenue per sale of 329% higher then those buying within the hour. For this client, 44% of revenue is driven by repeat customers (life time value of a customer). So what if we did not consider the 44% of revenue as a life time value within the bidding. Non repeat revenue would have been 59% lower if we had not counted lifetime value.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman from Rimm-Kaufman Group was next up to talk about the time warp. 3 questions and 4 tips. How soon can we tell if something is working? Why do we care? How does this wait affect bidding? The sample: 1 million paid search click (random sample from 6/1/04 through 6/1/05 Google & Yahoo. 41,377 subsequent conversions (6/1/04 - 8/1/05. 85% / 15% split B2C vs. B2B advertisers. Long duration cookie. How long must we wait? many order come quickly, 50% within 28 minutes. But getting nearly all takes longer, 75% within 25 hours, 90% within 12 days and 95% within 4 weeks. Are they looking for you? Search phrase contains client brand: 50% in 28 minutes, 75% in 3 hours and 90% in 7 days. Search phrase down not contain client brand; 50% in 32 minutes, 75% in 1.5 days, and 90% in 13.6 days. Big ticket purchases? $0-99 1.5 days for 90% to order, 100-199 about 2 weeks, 200-399 about 2.2 weeks and 300+ over 2.5 weeks. Holiday affect, as the holiday season gets closer, they order quicker (they need it now). Vertical? Hobby supplies, 50% in 38 min, 75% in 20 hours, 90% in 6 days... Consumer electronics almost 16 days for 90%. And professional leads take about 3 days for 90% of those orders to close. Why do we care? On average it takes about 2 weeks for advertising to sales ratio to stabilize. Tip # 1: Be patient. Don't overreact to short-term results. Long cookies; method, long cookies 90+ days, order crediting in reporting; 14 days, 30 days as per client. Preserves full data, can recast history to show impact of max interval decision. Tip #2: Handle click to order interval in reporting, not in cookie. Bid management & day parting. Bid management must address click to order delay. Day parting must be on time of click, not order. Example; over 25% of Monday midday orders driven by pre-Monday clicks. Tip#3 compute economics on a P90 conversions. Tip #4: If day parting, day part on click date, not order date.

Finally we have Rob Gaudio from MEA Digital to discuss a case study for one client, Oakley sunglasses company. This is more specific about allowing enough time to measuring conversions for your paid campaign. Oakley, Inc. World's leading manufacturer of premium sunglasses. An expanding line of performance footwear, apparel & accessories, sold in more than 100 countries. Investments in Direct Busines; new e-commerce system in Q1 2004, paid search campaign in Q2 2004, redesigned site in Q2 2005. They only sell MSRPO. Brand conscious, historical focus was on brand image and not ROI focuses. SEM Program: They developed an extensive keyword portfolio, they implemented core metrics to track and optimized daily, weekly, monthly and compared to quarterly and annual data. Technology integration; Google/Yahoo PPC, Atlas OnePoint and CoreMetrics. SEM Test Plan: Objectives; optimize SEM program in time for peak buying season, discover optimal time to test creative. They executed a creative copy test, suing time as an additional variable. Used Google AdWords. Isolated other variables like keyword position, cost and daily budget. Selected a stable time period to avoid major seasonality. Success metrics; click to purchase, cost per sale, cost per order, conversions, etc. Consider outside influences; other media, world news, weather, internal company issues, holidays, and competition. Implementation. Creative tests: used top performing creative from 2004 as a benchmark. They ran 4 creatives at same time (did not use auto optimizer), for 4 weeks. Monitored results for 7 days periods, and cumulative. Compared data on 7, 14, 21, and 28 day periods. Results: Summary conversion data was consistent across all weeks to the total (would not have known that if we did not allow the time to past). Determined the best performing copy at the Ad Group level. More aggressive call to action creative performed best. Products are seasonal and require attention to the product level. Some creative did not have enough statistical data to warrant a change in Winter. Next on the horizon is to retest in Winter. Use learnings for future launches; international SEM initiatives in 2006 and new products and keyword categories. Monitor sales data from test period sales for repeat purchases. (1) keep good historical data, (2) seasonality is important (3) give it time, (4) keep it simple and (5) watch for outside influences.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Open Q & A under Danny Sullivan, to the panel which includes Mike Grehan, Bruce Clay, Todd Freisen, and David Naylor.

Q: I have a huge site, template driven, city, state templates, why do some search engines not index the whole thing? Like MSN?
A: They all say MSN has deep crawl issues.

Q: Please make comments about the last Yahoo! algorithmic changes? She has one whitehat Web site, which has disappeared from Yahoo!
A: DaveN said Yahoo! has been looking throughout the social network to find footprints. You might have some past issues. So email them and ask them to fix it.
Mike said that for his major clients, rarely anything ever changes. On the less frequent queries, Yahoo! has been doing all whacky things (tail keywords).
DaveN clarifies that he has been noticing that Yahoo! still ranks you well for a specific keyword phrase but it takes you to a more top level page, and not to the most direct page. Yahoo! is working on it now.

Danny then goes into Yahoo! MyWeb 1.0/2.0 features.

Q: I work for a site that has about a million pages in Google but a week ago, the homepage dropped out of the index. He spoke with Google and they said that his site is not penalized, but it will come back shortly. They just updated the index and it will come back.
A: Bruce said this does happen and it does come back pretty quickly. There was a flurry of this with 302 hi-jacks. Also if people have server issues.
Danny gets the site example is cardirect.com and if you search in Google for cars direct, the jupiter media affiliate link comes up.
Todd asks if he is 301 redirecting it, he is not.
Its nice to see them all review this stuff online.

Q: The SEs talk about how it is evil to buy links. But yet you can buy links from Yahoo! Directory. There is a directory of directories listed by PageRank. What do you guys think of those types of links?
A: Todd said picking up a link from directories will never be a problem. If you get 500,000 links overnight, that might be an issue.
DaveN said you have to realize that the search engines lie to you. DaveN said look at how Yahoo! Travel buys links on search engine watch to rank well for travel.
Mike said he used to buy text links in newsletters and now those are archived and they have links for $75 forever. He describes how to find these types of links, search for "gold newsletters."
Bruce said the only ad he buys is the one on SEW for $5,000 per month. Danny said he doesn't get a commission. He gets about a 120 targeted visitors per day. He said how he once moved many of his links from one site to a different one, and the site he moved them FROM actually increased in rankings. Bruce said, buy for the traffic.
Danny pulled up Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

Q: The delay in powerful rankings, i.e. SandBox. In New York someone said something about a 301 redirect from an existing page with pop it out. He did it, and it worked. Does theme matter when doing a 301 redirect to give that site a way out of the SandBox?
A: Mike said, if they link to a brand new site from one of the large brand sites, it doesn't have an issue. But without that link, it sits.
Bruce said, he is not a believer of the sandbox theory. He said the links the sites get are unnatural, he feels this is what is going on. On the flip side, if someone comes up with the cure of cancer and gets a billion different links overnight from all different IP addresses, then that is natural. Bruce said, it looks unnatural.
Todd said this worked for some, didn't work for all. Everyone has theories and no one really knows. IMO, Todd is dead right.
Mike said the search engines know which sites are popular, and they know user behavior.
Danny brought up hosingmaps.com, which didn't exist until april and shows how it ranks number one "housing maps". One reason they are not sandboxed is because it was Matt Cutts's old roommate (kidding) but its a popular site.

Q: Structuring a multi-language site, 14 languages, the problem is the .com, .co.uk and so on. How do I make sure they rank well in the respective local engines?
A: Mike asks where are you hosting them? In each respective country, and that is a good thing.
Bruce said get links from those sites ranking well in those engines and it will help.

Q: What tools do you use to check rankings, and make your job easier?
A: There is a session today named "My SEM Toolbox", go to that.

Q: Extension of multiple languages...We have an European site with the Queen's English. Is there a duplicate content issue? They are hosted both on .coms and they are both hosted in the USA.
A: The panel is unsure, depends.
DaveN: But you are doing it for a legitimate use. If you want to be safe, change file names, and so on.
Danny said move it to a server in the UK. But he said you should be fine.

Q: Site structure question, with local information, using subdomain. i.e. city.foo.com vs. food.com/city
A: Mike said If you go to about.com you will see that they use subdomains well. Use that as a guideline.
Bruce said subdomains was a great way, in the past, to boost PR. Now Bruce said it doesn't matter either way. It depends on the site.
DaveN said subdomain names scare him, he used them in the past often, but never uses them again. He said don't use them because spammers used it a ton and if they blow up the spammers, there will be collateral damage.

Q: Yahoo! Instant Messenger as being a factor towards rankings?
A: Yahoo! tries to use user data but you are probably confusing personalization. Danny said he is not sure if Yahoo! Messenger has MyWeb built into it. Danny explains that this stuff is now moving to your desktop. Mike adds that he was talking with one of the data guys at Yahoo! and he said that how would it be if you just types a query in and you got the answer right away. DaveN bought an ISP just to see user patterns. Google has larger access then DaveN. HitWise buys data from ISPs, its crazy stuff. SEOs screw around with their data, so they give us APIs and SiteExplorer. So they get as much data as possible from as many sources as possible. DaveN adds, if Google is reading my gmail account, he will have loads of gmail accounts where he has them talk to each other about all his wonderful sites ;). Mike said personalized search is changing the idea of having a #1 result.

Q: What are industry best practices for testing purposes? I don't want affect my rankings by testing.
A: Bruce said Just noindex those test pages, just for your PPC.
Todd adds you can add a referrer and serve up pages to test based on that. But if that page does well, you want to switch, then your worried if your rankings drop. Most of the time it won't, depending on how you do it.

Side note: Mike says duplicate content issue, do a search on a paper named "mirror mirror on the web" to learn about it.

Forum discussion SEW Forums.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson - Search Rank

Karen Breen Vogel - Clear Gauge talks about B2B Search Marketing, the �considered purchase�

Clear Gauge focuses a lot on their optin email efforts. An example of why you need to be holistic in Internet Marketing. Considered purchase: what is different? Goals are to start or drive relationships. They believe that the Internet is more of a relationship medium. Engines: major se�s and b2b focused verticals. Keywords: buying cycle and role based. This is the major difference, emphasizes buying cycle, buying cycle, buying cycle! The major difference between B2B and B2C. Messages: value proposition and offers aligned to buying cycle and role. Landing pages: options for interactions/content/next date. Must give them options since you do not know where they are in the buying cycle. Tracking ROI: Show ROI Pipelines. B2B people think of pipelines. Listed thing people may be doing. Including educating themselves, ID various solutions, etc�they are at some point in the buying cycle, so your goal is to place your desire to form a relationship into the prospects search path. Paid versus natural., be relevant, but filter the prospect in the messaging of your PPC campaigns. Use negative keywords and other methods of pre-qualifying clicks. Measure and optimize valuable business behaviors such as where the clicks come from and the following behavior. Goal si to be able to communicate again via email. Many variables that im pact paid search: campaign groupings, ad groups, content vs. search ads. Kws, negative kws, ranking positions, match types, bid price gaps, daily ad caps, bid prices, message titles/descriptions, display URL�s, multiple messages (A/B testing), Conversions. Google emphasizes placing higher priority on campaigns with higher daily ad caps. Guy with biggest budget will get most activity. Raising ad caps is a good signal to G that you are in the game to stay. Key Pillars: Find (kw list research, root term methodology, Case study: tactics (went from 47 to 1600 terms) versus results (400% increase). Second pillar is engage: use operative keywords (similar tho theory of �latent� keywords from the (Monday session). Matching strategy important in order to expand audience. Landing page relevancy is important in order t put visitors into your pipeline. Instead of just telling them that solution is �X,� you should tell them you understand their problems and have solutions. Last pillar: measure value. Tracking highly valued activities, optimization logs, continuous improvements, pipeline visibility. Advanced tracking architecture�gives example of a spreadsheet that covers many aspects of the web site and its users� activities, in order to discover which keywords work best. Equating things such as optins and downloads to measure where they are in the buying cycle. Also uses scenario groupings of certain pages that work together to create a good end result, need to take corrective actions. A good sales person will walk out of a bad sales call and immediately try to discover what happened wrong, and then address that on the next call. In summary, must focus on entire buying cycle, engage all prospects at all points, be prospect-centric: use problem, not products messaging. Focus on most important business metrics. Optimize your program to what you care the most about: do not optimize to traffic or clicks, but instead to actual business results.

Paul Slack - WebDex
Appreciates us showing up on the first session of the last day. Agenda: B2B sales cycles, who to target, how they search, developing an Internet marketing strategy. B2B sales cycle: Figure out who is making the decision. Uncover the need, research possible solutions (they will do typical due diligence at this point), pair down to short list of vendors, go to bid, make decision. SEM is involved in both research and decision of short list. Enquiro study of SE buying funnel. Awareness 8.7 consideration/research 68.3, 42.6 decision, purchase 28.2. This is why it is so important to be present on the Internet during the second two stages. Influencers and decision makers will use SE�s differently. Influencers: website needs to be an �influencers-catcher>� use specific words, they are more likely to respond to ca call to action, will typically �bite� on comparison matrixes, webinars, trials, demos, etc� Sources of content important to them: spec sheets, white papers, product pages, newsletters. This allows you to communicate effectively with the influencers. These things make the influencers� jobs easier by giving them the info to download and show to their boss. Gives an example of a white paper written that was about a certain compliance issue, and now it is number ne at G for a search of that issue. Very targeted to people that search for this exact solution to their need for a software. Also, the white paper uses a conversion form to gather info at first (giving up info to get info is accepted). 17% conversion rate for this form. Decision makers: different because they are late-cycle. They search for validation. High level searches of 2-3 words instead of the 4 word phrases influencers tend to use. Less likely to respond to a call to action. Look for sources of content. They purchased the term �Sarbannes Oxley� for a client, and the positioning in PPC for that term makes the client look like �one of the big boys.� Very high level landing page geared more towards the decision maker. Developing an Internet Marketing strategy. Website don�t exist for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific purpose and to satisfy specific consumer needs. Define goals and objectives, understand audience, understand conversion activities, know budget, use measurement, refine and make changes for improvement. Circular pattern: define, refine, measure (repeat). (Technical difficulties - presentation computer locks up.) They use a spreadsheet in order to get as much info from clients/prospects as possible regarding their goals and prior activities. They determine a qualified lead is defined as someone with a eed and a budget. The more you can define this, the better chance you will have at success. Use their COA goal as a benchmark, and determine that they will be happy as long as you can stay below that. Then you can determine how man y accounts the website needs to close in order to match or improve on other marketing activities. Then figure out based on the conversion ratio, how many visitors are needed. To sum it up: �Begin with the end in mind.�

Christopher Grady - Merak Communications
Has done all SEM in house, thus invited to speak from that perspective. Four main issues: Turning business hurdles into SEM advantages ID kws and engine sin b2b2, biggest kw targeting mistakes, and Monitoring activities that lead to buying.. Turning hurdles into strategic advantages: disadvantage, you cannot actively sell a mail server, advantage: they do use the Internet to find a solution (a replacement for their faulty mail server. Identifying engines and kws used in B2B: conducted behavior usability studies and continue to find out info measuring sales cycle and after purchase. Kw analysis study included study of terminology used by competitors, related forums and usenet, technical books, categorical terminology, terminology used in mags and newsletters., wrote custom DB application to help with task. Ended up writing a kw ref guide for use by all their content writers to refer-to. This corporate dictionary helps them have the best possible kws constantly infused into new content. One big kw targeting mistake was accidentally ranking for the term �email.� since the product is B2B they fielded about 70 useless calls a day. They found that their largest customer found them using an 11 kw search, second largest used a nine kw search, etc�they actually ended up finding non-optimized pages. Largest customer used a core keyword and then a list of requirements. They have used a forum to help their communications with customers. Found that monitoring closing rate based on pattern of downloading and subsequent behavior.

We got Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google and Kaushal Kurapti from Ask Jeeves on this single panel. No one knows what is going to happen now. Danny is modding up.

Ask was up first, he gives his company info slide, yada yada yada. He briefly reviews how the link analysis works here. Page A links to page b and c, that is a recommendation from page at to page b and c. More links, better you are, in short. Then he discusses the Ask Jeeves approach, the whole community & hug/authority thing....He then describes that all links are not equal. Be careful of reciprocal links and purchasing links. Avoid link farms, cloaked pages, invisible or hidden links and links by images - text based links can be understood, but not image links. Become and authority on a specific subject. Focus on your business and content and the rest will follow. Blog links do not mean too much from the blogrolls to Mr. Jeeves.

Yahoo! now. Tim announces a new product named Site Explorer, http://sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ where you can get your linkage data. It is a place for people to go to see which pages Yahoo indexed and to let Yahoo know about URLs Yahoo has not found as of yet (submit URL or URLs). He showed an example, you basically type in a URL into it (this is also supported via an API, good good), then you hit explore URl and it spits out the number of pages found in Yahoo Index and also shows you the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by "depth" how deep pages are and you can also submit URLs here. You can also quickly export the results to TSV format. Links have been very popular, he said Yahoo! has been moving towards the social community aspect and probably will go in that direction with link pop. He said, create natural links, make it look natural.

Google up now. Matt goes up with no presentation. He said Ask Jeeves covered most of the basics, and basically recapped it quickly. If Matt was someone starting out, he would get links from...HousingMaps.com shows you craigs list stuff on Google Maps. It has been around less then a few months and it got tons of links quickly. Also think about useful services to offer (validation tools for rss feeds, etc.) Matt ran across one that makes signs dynamically, he built his own "watch out for falling spam." If you don't have to ask for links, that is awesome. Add one new page of content everyday. Syndicate my content. Matt Cutts started a blog today, www.mattcutts.com. Make a community, reviews, forums, and so on. One of the best ways is to think outside of the box. For example, one of the seo contests (cant spell it).

Q & A:

Q: When I do comparison across the engines of who is linking to me, I see differences between the two. His answer he got was that the link command isn't full accurate.
A: Matt said that they used to show only important backlinks. But then someone suggested to show random samples of backlinks. They have never shown all backlinks. They do have all the backlinks at Google but they do not show them all.
Tim shows more backlinks then Google, they do not show all links but a more comprehensive link. The new system will "be very comprehensive" he wouldn't say it is every link.
Kaushal said you would see a difference, because different engines filter spam and dups differently. Also not everything is exposed and each engine takes a slightly different approach.

Q: I have a client that has a great site, lots of links but the anchor text being used throughout the web is the same.
A: Matt said that is very unnatural. Most natural links are not 100% one exact phrase to the site. It won't hurt you, there is no OOP, but all the links might be devalued.
Tim agreed with Matt on it being unnatural.

Q: Reciprocal links; we have them now, we have plans to do more, what should I do? There are 20 of them links.
A: Matt said here is my rule of thumb, pretend you are my competitor, what would they think of it? Plenty of people have reciprocal links but if its excessive, then you need to be careful. Editorial given links and independent links are best.
Danny then asked 4 people in the audience to point to each other and then asked several to point at each other.
Matt said if you go into "graph theory" you have a "clique", that clique is when everyone in a network is pointing at each other, that is not natural.

Q: How do you know when too much is too much?
A: Tim said that is the hard question. It is all about "intent".
Matt adds that if you take this to random 5 people outside of the SEO community, they would agree.

Q: Do none clickable links count as back links?
A: Matt said he has never been asked that, and he can see it both ways. Google has the code that they can flip the switch either way - but use the hyper link.
Tim said its best to get the hyper link.
Ask Jeeves said the same thing as Tim.

Q: PageRank; is it important or not? With the rel="nofollow" thing, if I cared about my PR, I would use nofollow on all my links to keep the PR within my sites. What are your thoughts? And is there a correlation between PR and number of pages indexed?
A: Most Webmasters say PR is not as important. Google has always said there are many variables in the algo and they keep evolving. Very few people outside of a search engine can say exactly how valuable a specific link is from a page. In Matt's opinion, the nofollow has been a very valuable thing for the search engines. It gives the Webmaster the ability to say if I vouch for this link. So now we have this new type of data the search engines can use, he said its being used very responsibly. If you can authenticate or trust a comment poster, then there is no reason to use the nofollow.
Tim just repeats what Matt said.

Q: Query strings at the end or URLs, when does that make it a problem for engines?
A: Matt said 3 or more, its not great, but GoogleBot sometime is smart. Don't use id= in it, and if you have numeric parameters, dont go above 4 numbers.
Kaushal agrees with Matt, but a limited set of parameters are ok.
Tim adds that if you have inbound links to those dynamic URLs, they will more likely crawl it. Yahoo! is less considered with duplicate issues.

Q: We build directories, what is the proper way to link out from those directories?
A: Matt said you love something, you need to set it free. It looks very weird to have tons of ibl and no outbound links. So static link those out.

Ok here is some fun. Danny was showing examples of high PR sites and Danny joked about sometimes Google goes up to a PR11. Tim Mayer then said, "Matt, that is only for advertisers." Good one.

Someone asked why Yahoo!'s PR went down from PR10 to 9, why did that happen? Tim said because of the index size announcement. Matt said we don't do that, we don't give ourselves (google) a 10 because we give a 10. He said, we are too busy for that.

Tired...Stopping...Good Night.

Forum discussion at SEW Forums.

Moderator Elisabeth Osmeloski

Site reviewers: Shari Thurow and Mathew Bailey

Came in fairly late�had to catch the rest of the exhibits in the expo before it closed. Sites are being analyzed for usability issues. Walked in on the discussion as the site actuate.com was being reviewed. Issues include using a drop down menu on top bar �tabs.� Shari feels that these bars can sometimes make people less satisfied, since they clicked on �Corporate� for example, in order to find out about corporate, they now have to make another choice. Instead , the sub-menu should be presented on the corporate �home page.� Recommends breadcrumbs in order to know where they are on the site. Someone in the audience mentioned that the use of capitals in the menus�

Tableandhome.com. Asked what the target audience is, and the owner wasn�t exactly sure. Drilled down to the toys>cool animal stuff>stuffed animals>sea life found �stop lights� and asked why? Those indicate in stock if green, legend is on bottom. Note that may be better to just put �in stock� instead of making the puzzle. Calls to action are good. �Add to registry� is excellent idea too. You can only buy one item at a time? The add to cart button at the bottom gives the choice of numbers. Once again something at the bottom that should be closer to top. If did a visual affordance test to find out what looks clickable, left nav bar doesn�t seem clickable. If you have to mousse over something to tell that it is a link, then it is NOT user friendly. Some pages seem better than others�the ones that have more info above the fold, primarily. Check out page. Should be using a 1, 2, 3, 4 idea to let people know what the process will be. Good thing is that first page doesn�t ask for personal info too soon. Shari noticed with a client that they had a large abandonment rate due to the fact that they asked for too much info right away instead of letting them place the order and then give payment info. Overall there is not enough color differentiation, which makes it difficult to see what is happening. Next stage in checkout asks for sign-in or create an account. Elisabeth asks the room how many people would leave now, and approx 90% raise their hands. This is bad because now you are asking them to go through all this stuff. The people were ready to buy, but no longer. Why do you have to enter info in order to find out shipping cost. The problem according to Shari is that the shipping does vary based on location. Shari feels that they need to hire a pro usability firm to analyze site using a heuristic process. Needs more color differentiation too. Landsend.com is Shari�s favorite example of a shopping cart page. Another point made by audience that once name and address is captured, the person should never have to fill that out during the rest of the process. ? Says people buy based on emotions, and if you make them stop to think, the feeling could go away. MPABS rule from Shari mentioned a couple of times: �Most people are basically stupid.� Remember this when working on usability.

Edgewisemedia, a Yahoo store site. Shop.store.yahoo.com/edwisemedia/index.html. Too many links. Good headings, not using the word products anywhere, which is something he likes. Shari recommends a three column layout, and feels that the products are not categorized as well as landsend, for example. No �Sony mini DV� heading on that page when drilled-down to, and also needs to use more keywords on page. That sales page also looks like the DV costs $290.00 since that is on the same line as �add to cart� and the rest of the sentence is the line prior (says 100 for 290.00.

Cisco-eagle.com Products page: categorize the products differently, the A through B idea makes it tough to navigate. People do nto search alphabetically. Usually people expect the products to be categorized. This would be a good candidate for a �card sort test� and a �reverse card sort.� This takes a while, but will be able to see how people would categorize your content based on one product per card. Detailed assistance on navigating is cool, but sounds a little ominous. Also, the �all� or �any� above the search button but well below the box is confusing. Needs breadcrumbs. No �mental model,� once again - bread crumbs make this much better. Navigation becomes difficult once in the shopping area�Shari says when she goes to the online catalog, she loses her �friggin ladder.� (laughs) Long term plan: find an commerce solution that is search-friendly.

Govisitcostarica.com. Google ads are too dominant. Distracting from calls to action of the site. This gives people four unique calls to action before they even see the content. They are off the site almost immediately. Need to get people to make a reservation, if that makes more money than the AdSense revenue. The comment made by the owner was he is having conversion issues. He then seems reluctant to want to move the AdSense. Shari says �that is the type of client that makes me crazy: �I am having conversion issues but I don�t want to change anything.�� Further�too many drop downs. Shari: �To put it politely, this is a navigation disaster.� Card sort and visual affordance test. Check and see if people click on drop downs in menu�s, if they do, keep them. Logo is nice, but the whole site needs potentially a few color changes. First fix nav, then determine what you want somebody to do, and call them to action.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Intro: Called buying and selling links, probably should be called buying. We have covered links extensively, but the goal of this session is to learn more about buying.

Patrick Gavin - Text Link Ads
�Evaluating links� what to look for on the buying side. This is really about buying a static html link to help with organic rankings. Many benefits: direct traffic, link pop, branding, spidering. Used links found at SEW as an example of excellent links because they are both text and images (to help with branding).

Criteria: theme traffic, incoming, outgoing, location, spider ability and anchor text. Theme: use topically related sites that are �on theme.� Many ways to still receive targeted traffic without being an �exact theme match.� Incoming: Look though analytics, and you may see a pocket of links from a small article or mention of the site. If you got traffic from this, it may be worth pursuing more from the same site by offering a little cash. Traffic: Use Alexa to get a rough idea of traffic, but best to get a media kit if available. Since the whole concept of buying links is new to some sites that you may contact, it may be difficult at first to explain that you need a fixed link for a certain amount of time. Keep an eye out for use of redirects. Traffic: single page vs. site wide. Some people have a concern that buying too many site wides will get you in trouble. Patrick�s opinion on this is that with a more established reputable site it may be easier to get away with this. Incoming links: general indicator: PageRank. Better indicator, using link command at Yahoo, which does seem to prioritize links in terms of value. Outbound links: the fewer the better. Be careful of getting into neighborhoods that are unrelated by linking out to those. Location on the page: probably best to place in main area of content if possible, but he hasn�t seen evidence that it being in the footer area, for example, is any detractor. Spiderability: do a cache check to ensure they are indexing the right domain and check for duplicate content, also cache search will show how much of the page is being cached. If links box is not cached, the link will not be found. Anchor text is important. Wrapping it up, the basic strategy is to �be natural.� Mix up anchor text, mix single page and site wides.

Eric Ward - ericward.com
Takes a moment to thank Danny Sullivan for everything he has done for the SEM industry. What not to do: use systems that you get in email offers that offer links in 750,000 websites for only $39.95 . Consider other places to buy links that you may not have, including, e-zines, blogs (recommends blogads.com as a very valuable service), newsletters (example: ivillage.com and their categorized newsletters) (remember that this is about traffic that is relevant, because these will not be crawled or indexed by an SE unless it gets archived), auto-responders, RSS feeds, PDF documents (example: approach someone with a specific white paper or something that they have which is relevant, and offer to �sponsor the document�) You can also use a PR service to buy links within popular publications. Session presentation online live at ericward.com/ses.

Thomas Bindl - OPTOP
Avoiding Technical pitfalls. First off, is the Google PageRank real? Shows an example of a page that shows PR9, but deeper research shows that it is cloaking content of Disney to gain the toolbar rank. Check cache, backlinks and use �related:� command at Google to see sites that G finds similar. Fake links: easy JavaScript redirect, no-follow, etc. Harder to see: Cloaking. Look at source code to see if there is a different URL being shown �on mouse over� than the actual destination. Redirects look for them too. Look for tags and also check META for Robots.txt. Flags for �harder fakes� include no cache at all, META tags different in cache, or cache different. Penalties - one way to tell if a site has been penalized is by using archive.org. Warning that link mat be bad: PR doesn�t get passed (should be the page�s PR minus1). Links exists for longer than 8 weeks. Big rotation of sponsors. Don�t feel a boost after 2 weeks.

Greg Boser - WebGuerilla
Brief comments. He is very happy that there is now an actual session on this topic because it used to be considered so �bad.� The wild wild west of buying links is settling down and people are beginning to understand that it is advertising just like any other form. Sees that paid links will continue to be a part of their links in the future. Suggests adding it to your mix.

Debra Mastaler - Alliance Links
Brief comments: Good points made by Greg. You should make sure to spread your message across a wider audience that there is nothing wrong with buying links. The challenge now is convincing sites to host links, especially if they have not done so in the past. In regards to selling links, using the auto responders after a sale has been made is a good idea for that since they are already respecting you.

Q&A �what kind of investment should you make in link buying?� D: depends on the market. P: agreed, can be anywhere from $25 per month for a quality link to upwards of $5000. G: looks at competitor and helps to determine spend . Ie 3 competitors, one just buys links, one blog spams, and one uses keywords: in this case you may be able to just buy a few links. Natural seeding from just a couple of links from authoritative sites.
�How do you judge value of this and how fast can you see results, in order to be able to sell the idea of buying links to upper management?� G: it does take a while to get results from this. Benchmark, know where you are at to start with, build naturally (G is starting more and more �white hat� every minute)
�Are you sure we will not be penalized for buying links?� G: first of all they created the problems, doesn�t feel that they can come out and say �no.� Danny sells links and it hasn�t hurt him. Danny then describes that SEW has been selling off topic links since before G was even around. Some people have suggested that they use a there (in Internet Commerce box) but developers are reluctant to use that. In essence, we would be talking about this if it was just an AdSense box, which Google wouldn�t care about (audience claps) Greg agrees that G thinks the only sold textual ads should be AdSense. Danny speaks about the long history of buying/selling links when Stanford was the first site being indexed for links�
�Is there any negative reaction by se�s when they see content inside of a box that is identified as being sponsored? or if they are repeated� P: not really in our experience. Danny: speaks about how Google never answers a question �straight� but tends to speak in generalities, he mentioned that in relation to site wides, they are not necessarily going to penalize a site, but where they used to count 30K links, as Eric said, now they will only count one. P: says that he agrees, they have not seen any negative connotations from this practice.
�Do you use tools for information?� G: we have in house tools that do not necessarily follow all the rules, since we scrape results, etc to get more information. �optilink� is pretty cool. Debra: likes �Track Engine.� Eric: says you can track changes to a search results and use Track Engine (which is very affordable). Danny says that you can also setup any search result as an RSS feed. Other cool things are coming up.
�Do you have any sense that links that rotate will end up helping for SEO?� Danny (the questioner was speaking directly about SEW ads) did the sales people ever tell you that they would help your SEO? �NO� (Phew) He is being told that the links are not sold for any search engine value, but rather purely for traffic. Other speakers agree that this probably cannot hurt either.

Elisabeth Osmeloski is the moderator.

Rand Fishkin was up first from SEOMoz. I missed the beginning since some of the speakers go thirsty and I ran to get them some liquids. His presentation is at www.seomoz.org/ses2005-site-ecg.swf - Detecting Link Popularity Manipulation Schemes is done through search for "Spam Islands". Link Vault, DigitalPoint, TrafficPower/1P and private party link schemes are out there. He said dont use these if you're not prepared for the risks. Back link over optimization penalization; over optimized anchor text, speed of link gain (new websites normally do not get links quickly, there are exceptions) , link sources (site wides, community based links, off topic links). Google's Sandbox; He defines the sandbox. The penalty or devaluation of a site by Google resulting in a vast discrepaency between ranking at Google vs. MSN, Yahoo, Teoma and Google'[s own "allin" searches. The phenomenon first observed in March 2004. Does not affect site universally. No One knows exactly what causes it. Can affect 301'd sites as well. Rumors vs. Experience in the sandbox; it does not only affect sites with only unnatural links, it affects all types of sites - also it does not only affect commercial or competitive keywords. Analyzing Web Page Text; the goal is to discover the most important terms (the focus) of the document. Search engines go through these steps; linearization, tokenization, filtration and stemming. The Term Weight Formula is TF*IDF, basically helps search engines find out what topic the page is about. Automatic Topic Classification; search engines classifying documents automatically via text analysis and constructed ontologies vs. learned categorization and text quality analysis (training algorithms to find higher quality results, measuring reading level, flow, grammar, spelling and so on to judge text quality). Click Through Rates & Visitor Analytics; click through rates in the SERPs, time spent on the pages, data from toolbars, and log file and visitor stat analysis. How Best to Optimize Web Sites & Pages Based on This Data? Natural link and content building is best, judge the links and link services with great scrutiny, and write your own text. What to Watch Out For? Visitors tracking or log analysis programs that search engines have access to, toolbars and data collected through them, tools that claim to measure keyword density or page topic, and low quality links.

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink was next up. What is your site's search ECG? Diagnostics & Forensics; index count, google cache, xenu link sleuth, seo-browser.com and server logs. The index count shows you a few things; look for the titles and tags showing in the SERPs with a site: command. You can tell if a page is having spidering issues with just the URL is listed. This will also show you dead links, 301 those pages (supplemental results sometimes). She then discusses supplemental results, anyone in the dynamic site business has seen some of these issues (Jake will talk more about this hopefully). Doorway pages built for search engines found with the site command. Signs of a healthy site; a good title, good snippet, cache, index count, back links and good 301s. Spam Penalty Symptoms; back links disappear, sudden drop in rankings, supplemental results appear, decreasing page count, "no information" for your domain. Avoid Risky Behavior; ffa links, doorway pages, multiple domains with different links to each, mirror sites and hidden text. ICU for Site Search Flatliners; clean up the wounded pages, excise those doorway pages, hidden text, comment tags and use Google sitemaps, yahoo site match, plead with the search engines to get back in and then be patient. She then brings up the form to contact Google, www.google.com/support/bin/request.py and type "Re-inclusion Request" in the subject line. Yahoo go to add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_urlstatus.

Jake Baille from TrueLocal is last up. He will give us specific things we can do. There are very few "hand bans" or penalties. What this means is that if your site drops X places you are most probably not banned. Why Ranking Changes Occur? A change (internal or external) in linking structure to/on your site, search engine algorithmic changes, link calculations, on page changes and so on. The canonical page problem; side effect of link architecture, first observed in October 2004, specific to Google and the cause is inconsistent link references to directory index page. He explains the issue with it with a diagram. Symptom: An important page drops completely for a term, being replaced by another page in a mediocre position. Solution: Consistently reference your pages. If inconsistent references are external,s et up a 301 redirect. 302 Hijacking; side effect of redirect handling, first observed it Jan. 2004, specific to Google, and cause improper decision making with respect to redirect handling. Source --> Destination. Google has an algorithm to make the decision on whether to show source or destination. That algorithm can be manipulated and redirect would be replaced: a "bait and switch." Symptom: A URL form another domain shows up with your title and description in a position you used to occupy. When you click on the link, it redirects you. Solution: contact Google. Duplicate Content Issues: This filter is totally intended. All three engines have these filters - Googles is the most sophisticated. Yahoo experiments often with this and now is pretty tight. Symptom: On a site command pages from your site have a little message after them talking about duplicate content or pages being the same. Solution: Change your pages enough so that they aren't all the same. Also consider 301 redirect form all duplicates to a main page. Slow Death; specific to Google, triggered by irregular link patterns: Google is smart enough to know that a million page site should have more than one incoming link. Slow death can be triggered by massive content copying. Be careful with affiliate feeds. Slow death is not the supplemental index, do not get them confused. Symptom: URL listed in a site query with no title or description. The URL only shows up. Solution: Get more links, or in the case of content copying, add content and get more links. Bugs: SE bugs do happen. Before reporting a bug, look at all your options to make sure its a bug. Report bugs to webmaster@google.com and ystfeedback@yahoo.com.

To be honest, I did not agree with everything said in these presentations. But I am just reporting on it without sharing any opinion or views. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There has been debate for awhile regarding whether or not using a static IP address is better than having a dynamic IP address for your website. By preference myself and I think I speak for many SEO's, we prefer the use of a static IP address when hosting a domain. Most often you can pick up a dedicated IP address from most hosts for a couple extra bucks a month. There are many reasons for this, such as for linking, avoiding penalities on the same IP C Classes blocks, and so on. If you are doing a major site, its just a better idea to have a dedicated IP than a shared one.

I just had lunch with Ian McAnerin which I owe this credit of information to as him as he spent some time talking with Google Engineers last night at the Google Dance.

Generally speaking having a website on a shared IP address will not cause you any harm. You can rank just fine and there is nothing negative about hosting on shared IP's. So don't worry if you site is on it. However what is important to know as I was told is how, Google in particular and possibly other engines look at these static and shared IP. As I was explained when I search engine spider first comes across your site it will parse it with basic HTML 1.0. If its able to do this then it will normally go about getting spidered and indexed. For those sites with a static IP address they will get spidered with HTML 1.0 as its able to resolve the address immediately. If by chance you don't have a static IP address, Google may go about parse the site with HTML 2,3,4 and so on until its able to resolve the address for your specific site. This can take up to 3 months to happen. In the meantime it will use the IP of the main site on this IP, often times the hosts site. It will come back until its able to find your specific IP. During this period of 1-3 months, any links that you build to your site that is found by Google, will get credited NOT to your site, but to the main root site on the shared IP, often times your host site. Quite interesting. As I understand it, after Google is able to correctly identify your site from others, you will get credited for the links. However in the time period of limbo between that, another site will be getting credit for your links. Something which you probably don't want to happen. Interesting.

This session is going to be moderated by Danny Sullivan. They have not done this session before to this extent. There is a lot of people in here, and I would bet that about 90% of them are site owners looking for help with linking. Its great to see such a response for this session.

Starting off is Greg Boser from WebGuerilla. He asks, how do I develop an effective linking strategy? Identify the most visible sites with your space. Extract and analyze the backlinks from all three search engines. (anchor text, unique domains, PageRank, and domain registration). Build a profile of each competitor that outlines the types of tactics being used. Evaluate the cost/benefits of the various tactics being used and then emulate the ones that make sense. He describes ways that viral marketing works very well. Web tools is an excellent way to grab links. You want to create a tool that is useful, give it away for free, and embed a link with descriptive anchor text.

He puts up an example of an RSS feeder that gets a large amount of links for news feed display. They rank up at the top for this and it�s a result of all these sites linking to it. He also suggests that doing software distribution is a good way to build links. You can distribute your links to many free promotion sites.

Affiliate programs are another way to build links. He says to avoid the big third party affiliate systems. Develop or use a system that enables you to get credit for your affiliate links. Avoid creating duplicate content. Develop guidelines that control how affiliates link to you.

Eric Ward was up next, and he talks about his experience in the link field and announcing web content over the years. He says the process is not much different than it is now. He works with small and large sites. He says content is rather important and that most people will not link to crap. Eric goes into his explanation of Link Reclamation. We have good coverage on this but I will detail it again. He says that if you keep the same directory structure but change the domain, then reclaiming links is easier. For large sites with hundreds of inbound links this can be overwhelming. When every url on your site changes that means every link from every other site to you site becomes useless, unless you take steps to prevent that from happening. The steps to take may vary on your location. He suggests a program call Link Survey, it�s a cheap program but lets you know who is linking to your old domain. The 301 redirect approach is the best bet.

He says links are a great way to build links, however there is a lot of misinformation out there. He says search engines can�t find all your links. Why? Many reasons. For a better understanding of how and why links might or might not be discovered by engines. He recommends a great article about invisible link by Chris Sherman. Eric talks about non-web based links. Some of the most valuable links don�t appear on web sites, they appear in email based communication (newsletters, discussion posts, zines, etc..). An example of this would be Forbes Picks of the Week, Yahoo Dailywire subscription.

Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link was up next. She asks whether anyone went to Google or not last night. She says she will be talking about Linking for Rank. What works, what we should stay away from, and what�s effective. Effective use of anchor text is one of the single most important tactics you can use to gain rank. You can use it in inbound, outbound, and internal links. She recommends optimize your site first. Work on including you links the navigation links. They put up an example of a site that she worked with and give an example of keywords in navigation links, and keywords in anchor text in content zones. The inbound linking structure is important as well. Sites need to emulate a natural linking pattern. Stagger link text, utilize all keyword phrases. Deep link into pages with keyword filenames. Secure links from a wide range of PageRank pages. Link with authority sites within your niche.

On getting your links on other people�s sites. Place links in content/editorial areas, avoid �typical ad spots� (footers). Link gradually, correlate with content growth. Avoid getting large number of links with a corresponding jump in search volume. Debra suggests to link out. Engines analyze sites by their inbound and outbound links. Build credibility by links to sites who mention you. Helps establish your site as a topical resource by linking to authority sites. Cross linking, how much is too much. �My rule of thumb is how it would look to a visitor or to a competitor. I�d be careful with brand new + lots of sites + lots of cross linking. Its okay to cross link� ~ Googleguy.

So how do you we attract links. Develop and/or distribute link embedded content to establish authority. DIY guides are good, article libraries, survey results, how to instructions, product reviews, and sample. She offers an example of a client she had who made an article library. Establish yourself as an expert and get on a journalists radar. Write and distribute optimized press releases highlighting content in your resource center. Keep up on trends and buzz words become cutting edge. Speak to a journalist once a week, become their expert source.

Are directories still good for links? Yes, they are still very good. However there has been some issues with directories dropping out of the index. What to avoid in a directory. If they have more search engine ads then content, categories are not filled out, and so on.

Chris Boggs from G3 is going to give some information about underestimating the value of links. He talks about the downside of links, such as ranking for unrelated words. He gives an example for a site that ranks for loan information and how powerful these directories or link can be.

Mike Grehan says he has a slightly different view on links these days. He says don�t be a link collector, be a business developer. Start to think about business development and think about the value the link has. He says PageRank is green fairy dust.

Q: On anchor text, does it matter if you have the same anchor text for all your links?
A: Yes it does matter, when they look at links, he says its very easy to spot unnatural and natural linking. When you try to force the issue and make all the link text the same, its real easy to spot. You want to emulate creating a natural link pattern.

Q: Quality of links, will Google refine their techniques to look at links?
A: More and more you see less and less of the �crap links� and because of this is the sandboxing new sites, which have a lot of these links. Also engines figure out they may be giving value to a site for something they don�t deserve and they remove the effect thus lowering their ranking.

Q: Affiliate software
A: Search on �naked link technology�
Q: Domains with hyphens
A: Anything with more than 2 hyphens the quality drops off. Yahoo reps have stated they look at domains with more than 2 hyphens and flag them possibly as spam.

Moderating this session is Danny Sullivan talking with a group of search engine executives about the future of search, what is going on currently and how they are making search better.

Yahoo spoke next and discussed Flicker first. Flicker�s content is all submitted and its discovery is by the overlay of social networks. They want to find and store these pictures. He says that is hard to show a picture of a horse and have a computer tell you it�s a horse. He says you can get people to do the heavy lifting and have human beings help determine what is importance and provide the information. The privilege to decide what is important should be given to the people. My Web is an example of this, and says the selfish motivation to grab this information and save it. Its works great. Flicker is a visual blog in a way, as they share their pictures and life with the community. Overlaying things like social search with general search is great.

Google talks about the Semantic web is getting a bit better. He says the next version of communities, is to have to have people tell the computer what they are thinking. There are ideas of communities and its lets people decide what voices are important of them. Trends such as semantics have been observed and that it looks promising for the future.

Yahoo: Personalization is important. The opportunity to change the user experience and slide into a new generation of experience. The challenge is to bring in new experiences. The history of personalization has been good. Some of it has been red herring, as you chase something and find out people don�t want that. Doing the tasks and capabilities to extend the engagement opens up a lot of opportunity.

MSN: They think a lot of community. To summarize community, there are answers that people only in there community know. Community is an important part of searches future.

Ask: They launched something called My Jeeves last year. The notion to opening to the community, lets people get exposed to it. Tagging is important but for the vast part of queries daily tagging isn�t always possibly. Ask�s technology incorporates social networking technology. Their engineers all have these social technologies books on their desk. The technology will allow Ask to find experts in those communities. In regards to the semantic web, they can label the communities, and tell what they are about. In May they launched Zoom, and lets people get more in depth and they can identify what related searches are important to that query.

Yahoo: There was a big fear that Flicker would turn into a wild west type of thing. With adult images and such. Its hasn�t turned out that way and people have been quite helpful. Folksonomy has been a part of this. They introduced clustering recently, and you can get queries clustered together. Another feature they launched was Interestingness, it�s a way to measure how interesting an image is. He gives an example of how your mom may favor an image more than a strange. On the open web people try to game the system. They understand the relationships between people, and Flicker has been very helpful.

Danny: Another big change is the embracing of maps, and the exciting about this is the adoption. How do you see maps changing the metaphor of search? We will be able to fly through results?

MSN: They released Virtual Earth, and you can type in the three queries and these things pop up on the map. It�s really eye opening to do this type of search. You will go back.

AOL: Mapquest is an AOL property. He says they are his favorite features. They are working in the local market. The interesting thing about local is that its many facet. Mapping is the Rosetta stone for local. Its might be an exaggeration, but it will be an important.

Yahoo: Archive.org is a fun site to waste some time to look back in the past what things looked like. The ability to navigate through time will be fun. Using a map and navigating over time what it looked like in the past, or going to concert venues and such will be a next step for exploring some emerging areas.

Danny: Most people in search these days have jobs. Sometimes they are not even allowed to graduate. Where is research headed?

Google: As search becomes more central in people�s life. Things like dealing with information, user interfaces and so on are where some of the research is going on. Google invited a bunch of researches to investigate the problems and ways Google can help. Google is pretty typical as rest of the industry, thinking about shorter projects in short time, and then long term projects about human and computer interactions. In their research lab its pretty grounded.

AOL: AOL has a research activity which may surprise some people. They encourage Google and others to focuses on this. They don�t want to solve all the worlds problems. They spend a lot of time in IR, and incorporating thumbnail results and so on. Research is something that isn�t just refined to the academic world.

MSN: Research is fundamental for them. He says search seems like a conspiracy, as search has to make it relevant. They launched their search engine on Feb. 1st. and they are concerned with core metrics. Rank Net is a new way to rank these pages, and they have people there to think about the best way to use Rank Net. The question is whether they can have a closed loop for people to help their team give them what they want.

Yahoo: He was surprised at the amount of research going on. Yahoo was pretty modest at first, and today it�s a great place to do research. More and more people are becoming attracted to Yahoo.

Looks like I am following am following Detlev Johnson around, he is modding up this session as well. Oh, just finished that thing with Gary Price at WebmasterRadio.FM, so check it out. I'll be on tomorrow as well on WebmasterRadio.FM.

Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch was up first, he started off with some quick stats about the local markets. He will talk about local search marketing tactics for the small budget.
Tactics 1: Cleaning your core business data. Offline derived local content furnishes IPY and local search engines, generated from local regional phone companies and telemarketing forces. The accurate distribution of core business data is critical, that data must be cleaned. Focus on your Acxiom and infoUSA data and clean that data out (see also Yahoo, Google, Superpages and others). Think of this data as your foundation.
Tactic 2: Use of Business Profiles with optimized meta content. Local search engines rely on user generated content. This content easily obtained through business data providers nor by crawling the unstructured Web. Opportunities for businesses to distribute business information for free. All major local search providers accept business profiles (meta data as structured content). Business profiles feed pure search and assist users in comparative local buying decisions. A change to boost local business' rank within the local search engines. He showed an exampled of a Yahoo! local result and showed also how Yahoo! pushed the local results into the SERPs. He showed the same thing in Google, but also showed how Google crawled the Yahoo! Local results and it ranked #2 in the Google SERPs. So people will get to those pages, at least now. He shows how the local search engines show the business profiles.

Tactic 3: Riding coattails by studying your SERPs. Optimization beyond your Web sites. Google and Yahoo! SERPs contain the highest volume of targeted local searches. Determining authorities per Geo-Vertical result set. He showed a Google result for "auto repair san jose" top 6 results are local search engine listings, so get your company in those directories (yellow pages).

Tactics 4: Incentivizing and monitoring Reviews and Rating Channels. Businesses must pay attention to the published opinions expressed about their business. USer generated reviews and rating are subjective. Impact a business' reputation, status, and even rank within local search engines. Business profiles (even paid profiles) that are submitted by business owners may contain third-party reviews. He said imagine other people rating your business, you need to pay attention to it.

Tactic 5: Tap your social network: Local behavior patterns, local consumption is often driven by viral patterns. Our circle of friends, family, co workers. Checks and balances on user reviews and ratings are provided by social networks. Create a social network for yourself. InsiderPages.com allows you so filter reviews by these social networks. Judy's Book has a similar technology.

Tactic 6: Strategically utilize internet yellow pages. Verizon communications superpages leads the pack (PPC, PPCall, Distributon network including MSN Yellow Pages). The bells dominate the IPY arena, consolidation to compete with SEs. Category selection should taking into consideration SERPs.

When making determination on where to buy within these yellow pages, look at the SERPs to make that decision. No Web site is required for you to do any of this and its low cost.

Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement was next up. There are three different players in this space, Big Search Engines, Local Only Search and Internet Yellow Pages. There are two opportunities in this space, Editorial (sometimes Free) and Advertising opps. Ways to get into the local search engines. if you add a footer with the complete physical address of your company, helps you get into Local Search engines. She also shows how these local results vertically creep into the main SERPs. On Yahoo you can go to http://listings.local.yahoo.com to add your business profile. Bruce Clay and TrueLocal combined to come out with a "Search Engine Relationship Chart: Local Edition" at bruceclay.com, you can get it. Business databases include; www.amacai.com/form2/add/, www.infousa.com and on the bottom left navigation you can add/change your listing, GeoSign is an other but you can not submit your listing to them - they syndicate, Acxiom. You can also go to the superpages.com site to update your listing there, SwitchBoard click on the contact us and it is there somewhere. http://yp.aol.com/ is an other place you can add your listing. Advertising opportunities; PPC, flat fee, pay per call and so on. localsearchguide.org and kelseygroup.com are local information resources.

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing was the last panelist, who will focus on the PPC solutions in Local. She will start with a Google case study and then compare approaches on Google versus Yahoo!. Case Study is for a national ISP company the goal is to reach prospects in regional service areas. Search advertising tactics included a national campaign, national campaign with localized keywords and a local campaign. (1) National; targeting US, keywords were broadband cable, broadband provider, cable internet, etc. the Ad is very national (nothing local about it. (2) National with Localized keywords; targeted to US, keywords were specific, new york broadband, albany internet, etc. and they tried to match the ad copy to the search term ([city/state here] keyword). Local campaign, targeting LA, Laredo TX, Bakersfield CA, and so on, the keywords were broadband cable, broadband provider, cable internet, and so on and the ad copy was very generic but Google placed the city name under the ad, right under the URL. Google will show a local ad over a national ad (if everything else is equal). The results: were more positive in terms of cost per order, for the local campaign. You can reach more people with an IP-targeted campaign than a national campaign with localized keywords. At least in this category the most cost affected way to go is with the local campaign. The IP targeted delivered the best conversion rate and the best cost/conversions. So why do national ads? Its very inexpensive brand building and you will miss some prospects with an IP targeted campaign because the technology is still not perfect. Regional targeting is available to all AdWords accounts, must have a web site, physical address is not required, advertisers can target by state, city, metro, radius of addresses and custom solutions and finally

Google serves ads based on searchers IP Address, search query and other factors. Yahoo Local Sponsored Search: separate product, so you need a separate account. Websites is optional due to hosted located page (examples showed in other presentations). You must have a physical address in the area you are targeting. Currently there is only one way to target, based on radius. Yahoo serves these ads based on search query and not based on IP address of searcher, also they use Yahoo registered member info and if you search with Yahoo local. Which is best for you? If you don't have a site, you must use Yahoo! If you don't have a local address, you need to use Google. If you need to reach an entire state, Google is preferred since Yahoo makes you do it by radius. If you are truly a local business, the locator page is excellent to drive foot traffic or phone calls. But if you are a regional or national company; Google works best. Google and Yahoo are very different.

Detlev Johnson moderating this session, he let people bring up business cards so that the panel can review sites live. I think that will happen later in the session, which I will leave for, since I need to head over to WebmasterRadio.FM to do an interview with Gary Price. Should be fun, I think it airs at 11am California time. So let's talk about converting...

Bryan Eisenberg from Future Now is up first, that popular book. 12 Quick Tips:
(1) Persuasive Online Copy-writing: People do read on the Web. If the content is useful, people will read and you will get results. You can't write effectively to your whole audience, you need to focus on that "one reader" and write to that reader. If you focus on averages, you will get average results.
(2) Know Your KPIs (key performance indicators): He asks how many people use Web analytics? Then said keep your hands up if you make weekly changes to your site based on those analytics. See his point? You need to look at sitewide conversion rates, % of new and returning visitors, book ratios, sales per product impression, sales per visitor, average order value and so on.
(3) Improve Your Navigation: He shows some examples of bad navigations and good navigations. 80% of your traffic drop off after the 2nd pageview. He then discusses the concept of "scent", good scent versus bad scent. It is basically important to have the descriptive words that people are looking for on the page. Links within the content are critical. There are two types of links, call to actions and points of resolution.
(4) Prioritize your Traffic: He shows how the more specific the keyword search, the longer the latency to order. Query language refers intent. Categorize your traffic by traffic potential, prospect's intent, stage in the buying process, and likelihood to convert.
(5) Use Eye-Tracking Principles: He discusses the magic square, people look at the sides of a picture and not in the middle. Eyes scroll across the top to the right and then back to the middle down portion. So what happens is that people are missing some of the content.
(6) Point of actions, call to actions: Nordstrom has verbiage about exchanges and so on right in the shopping cart. So you do not need to find it, during your buying process. LandEnd.com has the same information on the right hand side.
(7) Keep them in the process: Adding to cart, keep them on the same page but show them it was added to the cart. He also shows how enlarged images in new windows are not as good as keeping you on the same page.
(8) Reduce Download Time: Page load time is a huge issue as well. Downsize those images.
(9) Substance over style: He shows lots of sites that do well with blue hyperlinks all over the place and boxed out. Dont be too fancy
(10) Give them what they came for: Give them as much information as you can right away about the product.
(11) Recapture Lost Sales: give them discounts.
(12) It is never About You: understand the motivations and outcomes.

Mike Sack is the last speaker, from Inceptor. Why focus on conversions? Conversion for the sake of conversion has lost its luster, but conversion for the sake of profit is where it is at. Retail industry average conversion rate is 1.8% - not so great. In a store, the rate is 30%. Two Sides of Lifting Conversions: The Outside-In, which is getting traffic that is better and more qualified and the Inside-In, which is getting your current traffic to buy more often. It's a 4 Step Process to improve conversions; (1) Prepare Your Site (2) Target Your Traffic (3) Implement Conversion Tracking (4) Test, Analyze and Adjust...
(1) Preparing your site; compare your site within the industry who do it best. Emulate best practices, imitate the best. Identify the conversion points, make sure you measure all conversions. Now you need to do site side optimization (market research on how people search, make your site fit people's searches, you will not change how people search).
(2) Target your traffic. Target right keywords and products. More specific keyword phrases the more likely people will convert. Target more search phases, steam popular keywords, use match type options and comb your logs. Remember that it is not what you think, it is what the searcher things. He then puts up a graph that explains the keyword tail... Make sure to target the delivery of that traffic, directly to the page that is most relevant to the search query. Watch those click paths to best determine the best path for that specific search query and referrer.
(3) Conversion Tracking: You must be able to track a conversion back to a search query and a specific search engine. You need to be able to follow those click paths to the sale. You must be able to track both direct and deferred (latency) sales. Need to associate cost per click with a transaction and the revenue it generates. Must be able to calculate at least a "Gross ROI." And it is wonderful to track offline conversions (9 out of 10 are offline). He then shows some reports you should be using. Key metrics: impressions, click throughs, conversions, revenue, and ROI. Track offline conversions also (there is a session about this alone, and I have covered that session probably twice, check archives).
(4) Test, Analyze and Adjust: He gave a case study, to test various pages against each other. He tested different landing pages on various cases.
He then asks why is milk always in the back of the supermarket? Because that is the product most people seek out, so you drive people through the supermarket, and they are likely to buy other items. Offline tactics are very similar to online tactics.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last night, I was invited with a few others to a YPN cocktail at some trendy place. Basically, all the YPN decision makers were there, including engineers, management and of course the wonderful PR people. Besides for chatting about normal things like family, weather, origin and so on - we did actually discuss the YPN product (i'll stick it below).



I don't want to get into specifics details about what we talked about, but I will say that these guys are very serious about the product. They understand the publishers needs and wants - as well as the advertisers. I am very excited for what is to come in the near future.

GoogleDance

I actually took a cab there from the Yahoo! thing, because I heard the lines were ridiculous to get on the buses to Google. The cab ride was just about $40, but I like to thank Shak and DaveN for sponsoring that ride. We pulled up to the Plex and we yelled out to the security people, "excuse me" but they did not respond. So have trying for a good 60 - 120 seconds to get their attention we decided to just drive right in. We breached security and went in through the backdoor of Google. We walked in from the Google entrance, as opposed to where the SES people came in.

The GooglePlex was packed with SEOs/SEMs, many more people then last time. One good thing is that they did not run out of beer this time. I heard some complaints about the food. Of course, I bumped into many people out there - I rather not name names, because I will leave one or two out. Towards the end, I saw Tim Mayer from Yahoo! and Paul Gardi from Ask Jeeves chatting. I wish you could have been there, it was pretty funny listening to the two go at it. I promised them I would not blog about what was being said, so I won't, but here it a hint of one topic.

Back to SES coverage shortly.

Moderator: Andrew Goodman

Intro: Dana will speak briefly with an overview, and then the engines will speak briefly.

Dana Todd - SiteLab International, Inc.

What�s on my mind right now? Rank is dead. What you knew as rank before is no longer, things are getting weirder. Changes how we do things. You could say rank is unimportant, but you know that the sweet spot is in the top three, so what do you do? Banners are now �image ads.� Tools are improving. Click fraud still raising it�s ugly head. Tech limitations becoming a legal issue more often. Legal may be driving tech once again. Headline and hot topics:

Yahoo: Y! Publisher Network; Y! Audio search BETA; Ysearchblog.com (blog search); Marketing alliances program�yet still not loved by Wall Street. Still not as sexy as Google

MSN Keywords: Msn adCenter to include behavioral and demographic data?

AskJeeves anticipated PPC rollout this month.

Google gives/takes
- Now that you can stay active on high impressions terms, but tradeoff is arbitrary minimum bid
- Image ads: Site Targeting lets you cherry-pick network, but on a bidded CPM (minimum $2 CPM!!!)
- Testing longer ad text
- Video search requires special viewer and special uploader software�.why can�t they just be normal?

SE Underdogs/up-and-comers?:
AOL- opens its portal to public. Buys X-drive for personal data storage (photos, video, etc). They have all the pieces to compete�will they? FindWhat merged with Miva�yawn �marriage of mediocrity? (laughs)
Become.com becoming next shopping engine? Baidu goes public - is there a China search market yet?
Pay per call heats up: VoiceStar and Verizon superpages.com

Dan Boberg - Yahoo! Search Marketing
(apologies to Dan: I has a tech malfunction and lost most of your stuff. Replaced what I could from memory)
Speaks about new increased training. Services, and partnerships. Yahoo Publisher Network will offer more categories and sub categories to choose from. Also increasing ability for both partners such as Ambassadors or referers (people that simply refer sites to Y! SM) to gain more knowledge. Partnering w/ USA Today, Walt Disney, and (something) by Boeing.

Paid search was #1 outside source for buying during holiday season. Objective : brand awareness. Search now being used for reach, engagement, and increasing awareness. Obj: competitive positioning. Companies measure positioning and work to generate a strong share of overall searches positioning/ Objectives: promotions, special offers.

David Fisher - Google

Describes the �Google-Advertiser-Website Ecosystem� and how they effect each other including the publishers. Want to look for ways to benefit everyone involved. Advertisers- complimentary way to target intended audience. Reach consumers during diff parts of the life cycle. Same powerful platform. Users - better experience, etc.

Site targeting- Target by affinities show add only on spec sites. Flexible bidding options and pricing. CPM bidding and auto ensures that you pay only the market clearing price for an impression. Creative control - advertisers can run rich text and static image ads as well as rich media formats.

Quality based bidding- minimum bids. As low as .01 cent CPCs, but also true that some will go up. �Active� or �inactive� only, no account slowing or disabling of kws. Will be determined by your maximum CPC only.

Urchin- kw analysis. Website optimization- allows for optimization (?!?) for certain browsers, software platforms, search Site overlay- visual representations.

Geo targeting - allow a variety of targeting mechanism all the way down to spots on a map or a five mile radius. Allows for different parts of the country to be targeted w/diff campaigns.

David Jakubowski - MSN Search

Brief comments. Very exited about new opportunities. Happy to announce that they are actively in the space, France and Singapore pilot is live. We have a vision for adCenter to be a one stop shop for all buying across MS. MSN Keywords product is the first step for MSN into the search marketplace. The US pilot will begin in October by invitation only. 500 already signed up, will also invite an additional thousands SEM�s/agencies. Control, flexibility and the ability to refine campaigns are the major goals of this. Advanced features: Geo-target, target by gender. day of week, day-parting.

James Speer - IAC Adverting Solutions of AskJeeves

Lots of exiting things happening. Last week sponsored listing products launched to existing customer base. Launching to everyone August 15. An untapped audience. Overlap between Ask.com and other major players is small: Yahoo!: 16%, Google: 14%, MSN 13%, AOL 9%. Old Jeeves has more sponsored links, only 3 on ask.com. This equals �cleaner� page. Reach across network though many others portals including iwon, excite, dog pile, tickle, clear channel and others.

We back our benefits with technology. Forecasting capabilities, ability to set campaign budgets at monthly level or daily targets, real time reporting, estimated traffic summary reports, and more. Personal services from your client services manager (with as little as 5k/month spent). Helping to prevent click fraud by ensuring quality of traffic is legitimate. Bid management tools from Atlas One Point. Little risk to try the new system. White papers will be available on webs ite soon. sponsored listings.ask.com will be the site to answer questions.

Ron Belanger - Carat Interactive (a buyer)

Even though we are not a search engine we decided to launch a PPC platform since everyone else is (laughs). How are we utilizing search in the larger scheme of search engine advertising (SEA)? Note difference from SEM. SEM is a DR medium: Ecom, acquiring customer, etc�while SEAdvertising allows for more things, including brand building, how to address the 85% of the marketplace that isn�t ready to buy? SE�s is one of few effective channels to reach a large audience of teens.

Pro and cons of search as a medium

Pros: Micro targeting, Leverage consumer intent, Minimal media waste, Relatively inexpensive, High customer engagement, Flexible

Cons: 70 characters of text vs. a 30 second slot that can deliver a much more powerful message. Measurment is still a challenge

Google interest and your brand. Who would buy a term like Paris Hilton? What about Carls Jr? Jessica Simpson? Dukes of Hazzard. Lindsay Lohan? Disney. Madonna? AOL is buying it already with their music channel. Good creative, good landing page. Good example of a savvy marketer.

Larger case study that AOL is doing: situation: aol decides to offer rich, deep content to general web audience. Current portfolio includes 109.7 million unique visitors per month, which makes it hard to create a collective message. Introduced aol radio, AOL television, AOL Latino, AOL music. Results indicate success. CPC had remained the same while traffic has quintupled (at least). (his company is privy to this info because they run the campaigns for AOL.)

Recap: SEM and SEA are different. Competition is fierce. Open horizon on sea. Turn consumer intent into the start of a meaningful marketing dialogue. aol,.com portal is a testament to the power of SEA.

Andrew Goodman comments that the AOL news is an inspiration (that they have taken a chunk of their marketing budget and dedicated it to SE�s.)

Q&A:

�Will search engines be providing demographic data related to their audiences?�

David F: there are 3rd parties that provide this info. Also itr is fair to assume that the audience is very broad.

David J: MSN will come out with very robust audience intelligence research tools.

Dan Borberg: Search ahs an advantage in that it can collect this data, but ahs not really used it effectively yet.

�Is it ironic that interactive media used to try to emulate traditional media, and now visa versa vis a vis (edited - thought that sounded cool :) the ability to track metrics?�

Ron: answers vaguely yes.

Question uncertain - something about tools that are difficult?

Dan: we are focused on keeping things simple, even thought here will be complexity under that simplicity.
David J: Leave control of various tools in the advertisers hands.

James s: key is integration with 3rd party tools.
�Why si it so hard to get numbers like market penetration or AdSense numbers and other basic information the way traditional media is?�

David (sorry not sure which one): we are focused on that in terms of providing that stuff in the future. First focus is to be able to track sales and drive business, then we will expand on that.

David F: Must be balanced against user privacy concerns. General market information is OK, but we must establish trust with users and their concerns.

�It is challenging managing 2 campaigns, now with four, are you going to encourage your customers to manage?�

Dana: Tools are able to integrate, such as Atlas. These new portals are completely different offerings, will allow a deeper understanding of the entire market.

Ron: Some clients come begging for mercy saying that it is getting more complicated. A little job security.

Danny Sullivan introduces this session as the best session to be at now. He said the other sessions are for those who are not serious about SEO. In NY they did the first SES indexing summit and they got some weather reports out of it. Danny said he wants to talk about two things; (1) standards with redirection and (2) standards on how search engine create titles and descriptions in SERPs.

Topic One:

Redirect Issues

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! up first. He said people were able to use some redirects to hi-jack sites. He put up the Yahoo! Redirect Handling Rules (covered in many past conferences, will link to document later). Just to touch on how they handle it.

Danny then goes into explaining what this issue of redirect hi-jacking is, http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050801-130330.

Rahul Lahiri from Ask Jeeves was next up. He wanted to add, that Ask Jeeves had been looking at the problem and did not see a major issue with redirects at Ask Jeeves. He said if you run into these problems, let Ask know. He said again that people don't use the standards or guidelines. Ask realizes this and they make assumptions.

Matt Cutts was next up and he asks the audience a few questions. He then brings up the history of the Indexing Summit where Danny guilt-tripped the search engines to work together. It encourages Google Sitemaps for a paid inclusion, without the money, and any search engine can use the sitemaps standard. The robots.txt is from ages ago, and a good standard, nofollow attribute. He then moves into the redirect issue, like Danny did. A year ago, Google picked the URL with the highest PageRank. That worked very well most of the time but not always. So search engines had to pick the best URL, and PR wasn't the best way all the time. Right now, they are open to doing what Yahoo! does, just indexing the target URL. BUT, you don't have the pretty URLs. He said, Google will have lots of beer tonight at the Google Dance. But also there will be an event "Meet the Engineers" where you can discuss this with them. State at Google right now, is that Google is not aware of any hi-jackings, they need to tell Google about them.

Q: When is a 301 redirect spam?
A: Matt said a 301 is NOT spam when its a misspelling, redirected to the main site. A 301 spam redirect would be a doorway page, which are then redirected to the root page (i.e. cloaked pages).

Q: Do we need to use the robots.txt to block PageRank to them to be careful about spam?
A: Matt said just 301 redirect those. You do not need to exclude them in the robots.txt

Q: Is the redirect issue solved?
A: Matt said always go with the destination to be careful, but his engineers said, but we fixed all the issues with this. So he wants to show these engineers that there is still an issue.

So Danny then summarizes again, basically, all the search engines are doing different things. But this session is about the search engines working together. Randfish, said he is not cool with them all doing different things. One person stood up and said, if both are my sites, then allow me to denote so in the meta tags or in the robots.txt with the Yahoo! method.

Danny summarizes, we have different standards, a good chunk of us like how Yahoo is handling it now, but a good chunk wants to be able to specify the URL that should be listed in the search engine results. Clarity; give the Webmaster a way to define the URL they want anything listed.

DavidN looks at Google.com results for san francisco giants and shows that both redirected URLs are listed. He says that I can throw all 10 of my domains there and dominate the SERPs. Yahoo! has the same issue. This will be fixed, Danny said.

Nacho adds, once you figure out the domain you want listed, what information (link pop, age, etc.) flows through the the destination URL.

Some guy in the back adds there are legal issues why I might want to remove the URL from the search engines. So true.

Topic Two:

Title & Descriptions Management

Google dynamically created titles and then used some ODP directory titles sometimes, Yahoo! used the Y! directory and then stopped --- same with the description. Danny is being very very funny today, he goes through the various ways it is handled and he chatters incredibly fast to make a point. He brings up a forum thread, thread id=5759, the "Proposed Search Engine Standard for Titles & Descriptions" thread (see the poll there). Issue is, many pages have no title - so what do you do there? What do you do when a "created by adobe go live" in the title? What do you do when you have a CMS that inserts "Title Goes Here"? This is what should be listed in the SERPs? The search engines do not want it. The searchers do not want it. Do you?

Tim Mayer from Yahoo up first. The current behavior at Yahoo: (1) Feed titles and descriptions, (2) Yahoo! Directory descriptions, (3) Best match to query between contextual abstracts (on page) and meta title and meta description (on page), (4) If we cannot generate anything they use the ODP (implemented 1.5 years ago) or anchor text for the title. Abstract challenges; sites don't provide titles, sites use the same titles and descriptions for every page, meta tag T&Ds are not query specific, many sites over optimize their T&Ds and it does not accurately describe the page's content and different types of abstracts are appropriate for different types of queries (e.g. navigation versus informational). Going forward, Yahoo! will take all these different inputs and decide which is best based on user experience.

Rahul Lahiri from Ask Jeeves is up. If the page has a title, they use that one. If it does not, that is when they look elsewhere. They look at ODP, then they create a title from the text in the page (query words and content). The description, they look at ODP description and if the query term is in there, they will use the ODP description. If not, they will use the content of the page to build a description. Ask Jeeves prefers a single snippet over a longer one (like Google & Yahoo) if the query term is short, if its a longer query term they will try to match all the keywords in one or more snippets for the description.

Matt Cutts from Google is now up. He says all search engines want to show the most relevant listings title and snippets in the SERPs. When Google added the cache, people loved how you highlighted the keywords in that cache page. Matt hates "your browser does not support frames" as a snippet, so they will do what ever they can do avoid showing those snippets. A real issue with meta tags, you can not trust what people say. They have been doing a lot more experiments with the snippets. He said they tried and try things every day and test user experience. He said it will be time until you see standardization.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Some search marketing firms have had search engine reps try to snag accounts away from them. Some of these attempts can be fought off if you know how to state your case. This session explores those issues and some the issues affecting the situation. There seems to be very few people in this session for one reason or another I am not sure.

Danny Sullivan is moderating this session and starts with explaining why they held this session. He says firms are getting concerned about this and some issues needed to be explored.

Ryan Lash from Infuse Creative was up first and is going to go over some of the issues they have seen and their experiences. The landscape has changed over the last few years. Back in the good ole days, they did search media buying. They were offered net rates on this media and play broker with the accounts. They did work with Looksmart, Alta Vista and other engines. SEO was basic and pure optimization. They also worked with sales channel conducting direct sales reps. Today some of the main direct sales reps are Google advertising sales, and Yahoo search marketing sales. He says some reps are commission driven. Commission driven sales tactics are often what fuels these reps. They have reps admit to data mine their client accounts. They have direct client communication with the reps.

They put up an example about a major automotive manufacturer. They finally got to try a PPC campaign. Google got wind of this and contacted the firm directly. They declined to work with Google. Google provided free SEO consulting directly to client. They lost SEO engagement. The Yahoo side hasn�t been as aggressive. YSM direct sales channel offered to �Help�. YSM direct sales channel admitted to �downloading� campaign data. YSM continued to pursue independently the client. Ryan has some tips to combating the reps. On the SEM side, do not enable client communications with direct sales channels. Only work with agency channels and continue to improve you value proposition. For SEO�s they will have to continue to improve their value proposition.

Mikkel Svendsen from RedZone starts with talking about a client example of the situation and what is going on. He says there are a lot of good people at the engines and they understand what our business is. The Scandinavian Case. It was a large local Scandinavia SEO/SEM agency. Found applies for Adwords accreditation. Pass the exam and receive the official approval after the 90 days. The Agency signs a deal with large Scandinavian client. Google tells them they can�t have the client. Google sales team make is very clear that they consider Adwords advertiser to be their clients � not the agency�s. Do we have a deal or not? Google�s Scandinavian team told the Agency. The accreditation is worthless!

What they learned about the Scandinavian deal. Google is more of a competitor than a partner. Partnering up with Google increase your risk of loosing clients. Never tell Google about new prospects before you have a signed deal. Educate your clients well. Explain what you can do for them that Google just wont (or can�t) do. Recommend transfer of budgets to other PPC engines when that is best. Recommend transfer of budgets to organic SEO � when that is best. Optimize based on experience across all search channels and programs. Utilize external budgeting, tracking, and optimization tools rather internal. Track fraudulent behavior patterns and collect independent evidence. Utilize �black hat PPC� if that�s what the client wants. In any case, be sure to add some real value and show it.

He discusses the two main problems. 1. Channel separation. The engines have to decide if we, the search marketers are partners or competitors. 2. Managing people. It is not enough to have good policies if the people on the ground are running wild.

Misty Locke starts by saying how the engines can take clients out treat them nicely and then the client comes back saying we want that from the agency. What she says about the reps. The reps are pushy. They don�t do their homework. Don�t keep us in the loop while talking to the client. Not up to date with industry. Not interested in relation. Work on 100 accounts at a time. You say one thing and then do something else. We never work with the same rep more than a few months. What the ads reps say about us. They don�t provide enough information. They don�t attend meeting. They are difficult to deal with.

So how do you work together and what the vendor needs to know. We can work together. If we win if you win. Client goals come first. Yours second. Client goals are paramount and we need you to understand this. Keeping us out of the loop does not work for YOU, US, and the client. We know you have to grow the account. We are not out to stop their growth there are things you don�t know. If we partner, then PARTNER. Don�t take me out to dinner, don�t wine and dine me. Send research/product releases before: clients, press, before I have to call you.

What the agencies need to know. Treat them like partners and not like an information source. Okay, I am no fool. I know this hard to swallow. Limit & Control, but take steps. There are good reps out there just as there are good agencies. The client goals are important to them as well. Share enough information about the campaign and goals. Remember agencies you work for the client. Do your job and be their partner. It is your job to work and manage the relationship with AdReps � this is why you are paid. You clients goals come first. Your vendors second. Vendors have to feed their children too. Very enjoyable presentation with some comedy as well on the situation.

Stacy Williams just came into the panel and she talks how they have had trouble with working with the engines. She talks about her client Turner Broadcasting and how they started to pick up business with some of their branches. She says Google and Yahoo started to get wind of this. A Yahoo rep approached them about switching reps to go to Diamond level. They said they would like to bring in Turner Broadcasting along with her company. If she didn't want to, then her rep said his boss would probably force him to go around them, although he said that he personally wouldn�t want to do that. She was really shocked to say the least. Google did the same thing but was less forthcoming. They want the client whether or not the agency is included. She says she had an epiphany that she understand where the engines are coming from but at the same time she knows this could be a great opportunity for their firm. She says the bottom line is that if they can�t justify their existence then she doesn�t need to be there.

Her three wishes for ad reps. 1. When you call an agency and you say you want to help them. I wish you would mean to help. She doesn�t want to breathe down their next and try to sell for them. 2. Don�t treat me schizophrenically, you want to work with one client and but not the other 19 which outspend the one client. 3. Search engines don�t recognize that we work for them and with them. Search engines need to take care of the agencies.

Dana Todd talks about her experience which has been since the print days. She says we built this industry and we convinced the client that they needed this advertising. How dare they try to go around us. She says that agencies are more efficient. Search engines feed us that they are better than TV. There is more cash for search engines if the thing is inefficient. They say be like inefficient TV because it makes us more money.

We go into question and answer. Mikkel says that Google didn�t do due diligence about hiring people. Google has been flashing around saying they can take away their business. Overture was an example of this, by taking clients from SEM firms, and then going back to give them back as they couldn�t handle them all. Misty comes in an says her problem is not Google, its Yahoo. They don�t know what they are doing, she says she has 45 reps and has to email them all. Once that happens nobody knows what�s going on.
Mikkel states that when they reviewed the terms of service, it said that the client has the right to gain access to their account at any time.

This session had a lot of fired up comments and passion for the situation. My favorite session of the day so far.

Moderator for this session is Allan Dick. There are three speakers, Tim Ash, James Roche and Scott Miller. There is new technology being used in this session by Offermatica where the presenter asks questions, and we in the audience reply via a radio keypad and the responses are shown up on the projector in real time, pretty cool.

First up is Tim Ash from SiteTuners.com. Why should I tune? CPA = CPC/CR, the CPC is rising 2% or so per month. The only thing you can control is your CR, conversion rate. Your marketing program ROI is 25% How much do your profits improve if you increase conversion rate by 10%? Your profits would increase by 50%. What should I tune? price of your product or service, or the landing pages with trackable actions (lead form, buy, etc.). Price Tuning Basics; At the low end of your price, you will have low margins, at the high end you have no buyers, where is that profit sweet spot (somewhere in the middle)? They test a few prices and then build a model to predict the sweet spot for your prices. Common Tuning Elements; headline, page layout, nav, color scheme, offers, form layout, button text, sales copy, special offers, call to action, there are no universal truths. They test each and every component this of this, they tested 13 things, with 42 different values - 2+ million Web site variations. How Do I tune? A/B split testing, multivariate analysis and sitetuners tuning engine. A/B Testing; test one variable at a time, send equal traffic to all versions, very simple to implement. Multivariate analysis; test several variables at once, tries to predict best setting for each variable. Sitetuners tuning engine; proprietary math for internet marketing, designed for large tests, handles complex interactions. Outsourcing Considerations; Size of test, Services offered (tools, consulting, and hands-off), Business Model (rent tools, ppf, etc.). What Mistakes Should I Avoid? (1) Ignoring your baselines, always devote some bandwidth to your current version, measure relative to the baseline, not absolute to baseline. (2) Not collecting enough data (do not make decisions based on too little data, understand basic error bars, confidence intervals). (3) Not considering delayed conversions. (4) Assuming That Testing Has No Costs. (5) Ignore Complex Interactions.

Scott Miller from Verster is now up to give case studies. Test: Link Text; Objective: Increase Clickthroughs. They tested three different link texts. The best link text option was "Learn More", believe it or not. Next exa