September 2005 Archives

SEOmoz reports on a Dodge the Sandbox for $79... Is this for real? which links to an SEO Chat thread named RankAttack/SEO Sandbox Tool Advisory. It discusses a tool named RankAttack which claims to have a product that gets you out of the Google Sandbox (see page at http://www.savemoneyfast.com/sandbox.htm).

This is the product offering:

This software was designed using Google's new relevancy models and patents. The technology used in this software is brand new and no other software package offers it. First understand that the most important attribute your site can have, in the eyes of every search engine, is relativity. SandBox received its name from one of Google's new secret weapons, the SandBox filter. The new Google filter sends all new websites into the garbage can for an unknown period of time -- and it also places websites that have been abused or have low quality into the garbage can. This means, no matter what, your website cannot get listed with Google on any keyword that gets decent traffic. Hundreds of search engines are adapting this concept and it is becoming quite a problem. RankAttack's SandBox software can get your website off this list and much more.

The thread links to a blog entry which explains how this software works.

The means by which the software appears to increase "...popularity..." is by submitting a massive amount of queries to each search engine in its database by taking the url and keywords provided. The algorithim used is apparently a trivial combinitoric permutation of submitting search queries in a cascading manner to each engine by spoofing the HTTP REFERRER from another engine in a fashion similar to spanning trees. This manner is of questionable ethics and even more questionable in results given the simplicity of the algorithim.

Not good, not good at all.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

Yesterday, Google took Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) out of beta for the first time within AdSense. Next time you login to AdSense you should see:

That links to Electronic Funds Transfer is out of beta;

Electronic Funds Transfer is ready for the big-time! We've been working hard on our payment system, and with our thanks to the thousands of AdSense publishers who took part in our beta test, we're now ready to bring EFT out of beta.

Publishers who have already received payments through EFT don't need to do anything – they can continue to have their payments conveniently deposited directly into their bank accounts.

The forum discussion on this topic is at WebmasterWorld.

Just an update for the readers. This October, please expect more guest writers here, including Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads, to fill it. Ben will be writing more often this month and the Guest authors confirmed to write include; Nacho Hernandez, Kim Krause, Andy Hagans, Chris Boggs, and possibly Shawn Hogan from DigitalPoint.

The dates I will be out this month includes;

Here are the dates:
October 4th
October 5th
October 13th
October 17th
October 18th
October 19th
October 25th
October 26th

I hope to write more on the weekends to make up for it.

Google has implemented a while back, something we named Google Search Web Categories, basically, those little sub links you get under the URL to take you to other popular sections of a site. You can see an example if you search on search engine watch. So how does one earn those links? That is the topic of discussion at a thread in WebmasterWorld.

The answer? Well, no one really knows exactly. I would assume you would require lots of repetitive linkage data to the core sections of your Web site. For example, check out apple and you will notice the web categories for apple are "iTunes - Download iTunes - iPod+iTunes - QuickTime - online". Those are probably the four most popular sections on the site. Was it done manually? I doubt it, why would they use "online" to symbolize the Apple Store? So I believe it is based on linkage data.

Based on a Google Blogoscoped blog entry, it looks like Google is prepping to start some sort of calendar application at calendar.google.com. What exactly, we don't know - will it happen? Seems like it.

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

Ben wrote that Yahoo! Site Explorer is Live and had a nice summary on it. He did however forget to mention the Site Explorer API Web Services which enables developers to work with the data in a more streamlined fashion. Outside of that, I thought I share with you a forum round up on the topic.

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

Finally! It appears Yahoo reads this blog and answered Barry's prayers, but Yahoo Site Explorer looks like it just went live. I am including a screen shot for verification. Barry has been diligently watching and documenting Yahoo Site Explorer progress like a kid waiting for an ice cream truck, so I hope he doesn't hate me for posting on this for him. I just checked the site and I am able to plug in URL's and get results. Such as a site check tool listing all pages from a website, and also more detailed stats for what Yahoo calls "Inlinks" or backlinks to the website.

This tool enables users to check linkage data and bulk submitting of urls to Yahoo.

Check it out: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

From coverage at SES here is a recap of what it includes:

Yahoo Site Explorer is a place to see which pages Yahoo has indexed. After clicking "Explore URL" you'll find the number of pages found in the Yahoo Index and also the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by "depth," submit URLs, and quickly export the results to CSV format. Site Explorer is also supported via an API.

Except a more thorough overview from Barry when he gets back.

Just part of my documenting of how Yahoo! Site Explorer is still coming soon. Today I checked it out again and now its back to being redirected to the Yahoo! Advanced Web Search.

Getting very boring Yahoo!

It was promised back in June at the WebmasterWorld New Orleans Conference.

Cre8asite Administrator Bill Slawski does it again by posting five (yes you heard me right) different threads discussing two Google patents, two Yahoo patents and one MSN patent. Lets start with Google.

Google Patents:
- Variable personalization of search results
Bill explains;

This invention would enable a searcher to fill out a profile, perform a normal search, and then use a slider button to indicate how much his or her personal information from the profile should be used to modify (rerank) that search based upon the personalization information that they have entered into the profile, by sliding the button partially, or all the way to a full influence on the results.

- Google Help with Advertising Creatives
Bill explains;

This invention is aimed at novices to advertising, and to individuals or small business owners that may not have a web presence, or may need assistance in coming up with creatives, keywords, etc... The description of their "Advertising Generation Engine" is interesting, including the generation of a creative. I'm wondering where they will be getting their "eye catching images."

Yahoo Patents:
- Yahoo! Color Graphing and Personalization
Bill didn't have enough time to summarize, but the patent application's abstract reads;

In a search processing system, identifying input authority weights for a plurality of pages, wherein an input authority weight represents a user's weight of a page in terms of interest; distributing a page's input authority weight over one or more pages that are linked in a graph to the page; and using a resulting authority weight for a page in effecting a search result list. The search result list might comprise one or more of reordering search hits and highlighting search hits.

- Inverse searches and User Annotations
Bill explains;

Imagine being about to enter a URL, and find out information about the site, collected over time, such as which other sites point to it, what other people feel about it, and more. A couple of new patent applications from Yahoo! cover these types of topics.

This is really two patents in this one thread.

MSN Patent:
- Assigning textual ads based on article history
Bill explains;

There's something to this new patent application from Microsoft that reminds me of the movie Minority Report, where the protagonist goes through a shopping area, and his past purchases inform the billboards and advertisements of his potential future interests... Collecting keywords from pages that you've visited in the past, to decide what ads to show you now? It's an attempt, somewhat, to get away from contextual based ads that may not be appropriate...

Makes for some nice light reading... :)

Search Engine Watch Moderator, Marcia, created a thread named Google ranks #9 for Batman room decor at MSN! And she took a screen capture to prove it was on the first page. Currently it dropped to the second page of MSN results.

DaveN suggests that this is "msn trying to fix there 302 problems." Now if you look on the first page results for batman room decor you will notice the result mid way down, to Google groups;

http://groups.google.co.uk/froogle_url?q=http://www.linenstore.co.uk/children-s-bedding-batman-bedding.html%3Fsource%3Dfroogle&fr=AJnTJbmmMai_Bvuv_NUNVzxikdH7SP3tZTmEFoFOKLtqw0HMnXTKao4AAAAAAAAAAA

DaveN explains that if you look at the cached result for this page shows header information of HTTP/1.1 302 Found. Hence the results above found in MSN, a 302 redirect issue.

This is speculation, but seems reasonable to me.

DaveN writes Yahoo! Overture Bid Jamming is "when you raise your bid amount to just a penny below the top bidder." So basically if your competitor ups a bid to $25 and the next two highest bids are $5 and $4, all you need to do, is raise your bid to $24.99 and that will ensure that your competitor pays. DaveN says;

#1 is 25 ( what they pay is 5.01 ) <- silly boy !
#2 is 5 ( what they pay is 4.51 )
#3 is 4.50 (these guys pay .10 )

but you want to play in this keyword. So if you bid 24.99

#1 is 25 ( what they pay is 25.00 )
#2 you 24.99 (but you pay 5.01) <- Bid Jamming
#3 is 5 ( what they pay is 4.51 )
#4 is 4.50 (these guys pay .10p )

Forum discussion on this basic but important topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ruben over at ThreadWatch writes, Google Adsense "Advertise on this Site" which links to a blog entry spotting a new feature on AdSense. If you go to AskTheBuilder.com you will notice on the top right portion of the Google AdSense ads is a link that reads, "Advertise on this site" which takes you to a customized landing page about AskTheBuilder.com

AsktheBuilder.com is a home improvement website created and maintained by national award-winning home builder and remodeler Tim Carter. The rich content at AsktheBuilder.com is a combination of Tim's 20+ years of hands-on experience and time-tested methods that tell visitors the right way to build and remodel homes. AsktheBuilder.com has won countless awards since 1995 and it continues to be one of the leading home improvement websites on the Internet.

For more screen images check out AskDaveTaylor for the information on "What is the 'Advertise on this site' link?" visit the Google AdWords Support page.

A couple of days ago, Avi from Promediacorp.com, emailed me that while he was at WebmasterWorld PubCon New Orleans his sister saw a guy named David Karandish. Then when Martha Stewart's The Apprentice aired, she noticed David was on the show. His bio reads;

David, 22, is fresh out of college but already an accomplished businessman. David, the youngest candidate, was a charismatic student at Washington University in St. Louis and was known to lecture classes at the request of his professors. The American Mensa member now earns six figures as the owner and creator of an internet advertising company and a mortgage information services company - both of which he started while still in college. In high school, David created "AIM Talk," a plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger that spoke instant messages using text-to-speech. David has a B.S. with a second major in entreprenuership. He lives just outside of St. Louis.

Prove he is an SEO, check out his site at karandish.com.

Search Engine Watch Forums has a thread supporting David in this conquest. Go SEO David, represent the industry well!

I wanted to wish the following forum moderators and administrators a happy birthday. This is the list I have, so I am sure I am missing a bunch. Feel free to let me know if I missed yours.

- Respree, Garrick Saito, Site Administrator at Cre8asite Forums, who is celebrating a birthday today!
- Phoenix, Ben Pfeiffer, Moderator at SEO Chat Forums, who is celebrating a birthday on September 29!
- Black_Knight, Ammon Johns, Administrator at Cre8asite Forums, who is celebrating a birthday on October 01!
- Adrian, Adrian Lee, Site Administrator at Cre8asite Forums, who is celebrating a birthday on October 02.
- Nacho, Nacho Hernandez, Moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums, who is celebrating a birthday on October 03!

Happy birthday guys, your dedication to the SEO/SEM community is much appreciated by us all!

An excellent thread at WebmasterWorld discusses one person's case of making a typo and being dup filtered out because of it. The member accidently put an extra hyphen in the URL of his products, but before he had a chance to remove the extra hyphen Google found them. So now the original pages (single hyphen URLs) are marked as duplicate content and the others are not. So what should this person do?

One person recommends 301 redirecting the double hyphen URLs to the single hyphen URLs. But most suggest just removing the double hyphen URLs from the index completely either using a 404 or 410 response code or the remove URL form at Google.

Join the discussion to find more tips and debate on the topic.

This might be obvious to many but it looks like if you are outside of North America and Canada, you do not need to have 20 million pageviews on your site to qualify to become a Premium AdSense publisher. Instead, you need only half of that, 10 million pageviews to qualify.

The page with the information is apparently geo-specific, so the content is dynamically changed, based on your ISP's location.

If your site receives more than 20 million page views a month, you may be eligible for premium service, which includes:

If you are in German it reads;

Wenn Ihre Website im Monat über 10 Millionen Seitenzugriffe (Page Views) hat, können Sie sich auch für den Premium-Service bewerben. AdSense Premium bietet Ihnen:

I don't speak German, but it seems to me that "10 Millionen" is 10 million. :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The forum folks at DigitalPoint are discussing what is the best keyword density for your AdSense ads to show the most relevant ads. Some member say you want at least a total "around 200 words with a 4% density" to get the most relevant ads. And here is a quote from page two.

go for 4% but not from the get go. I kind of work my way up there. The problem is, it could take anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks for the change to take effect.

To complicate matters a change may take effect very quickly within a few hours only to return to the original in a day or two! So you need to monitor it carefully.

Also, in my opinion the mediapartners bot prefers to “see” a couple of keyphrases so I always target say “striped blue widgets” 2.5%, “blue widgets” by itself around 3.5% and 1% or so of “blue striped widgets” while all the time target is really “blue widgets”.

Note that the above densities are not cumulative. Total “blue widgets” density never exceeds 4%

Talk about watching AdSense like a hawk. :)

Monday morning, the Link Vault team sent out this email.

Link Vault Status

We have received an email from our server hosts in Port Arthur, Texas.

They have told us that they have had no power since Hurricane Rita hit the area on Friday. The flooding around the area has not damaged any of the servers that they supply us so that means all our servers and data are ok.

They have an emergency generator that they use when they lose power. However this generator runs on gasoline and has ran out during the storm. They are currently trying to get a supply of gasoline from the only available working gas station in the area. They have said if they manage to get gasoline they will have the power back to the servers ASAP.

The worst case scenario is that they do not manage to get some gasoline and cannot get power back to the servers. They are estimating it could be up to 14 days until the power lines are repaired and stable.

We will keep you all updated on the situation with the servers.

We would like to thank you for your patience on this unfortunate matter.

The Link Vault Team

The links on the Web sites were not slowed or anything due to this outage. But access to the forums and the site were down. Now, we all know DigitalPoint has his Coop Network which almost competes directly with the copy-cat Link Vault network (competition is a good thing). But what is very high-class of DigitalPoint, is not only allow the Link Vault users to participate in his forum about the incident, but also offer advice to the network. Other forum discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

Danny spotted and featured a thread by moderator Jeff Martin at Search Engine Watch Forums. The thread is named Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Results Seem Hijacked? and shows how since the recent Yahoo! SERP Update business.com redirect PFI links are being drifted to the top of many of the competitive keyword searches.

Jeff reports that he is noticing these Business.com redirected URLs are "now ranking #1 over state government agencies that police this industry and .edu sites." Jeff has more detail here where he suggests that Yahoo! PFI results have been hijacked. Danny offers a logical reason for all of this in the thread. So he feels that the paid inclusion part makes it look like a hijack when it is really not.

Smart? Annoyance? Privacy Issues? Easier Management?

Just like Orkut, Google AdWords accounts will be migrated into the Google Accounts username/password system. Why are they doing this? Most probably for consolidation, integration and flexibility for its current programs and future developments.

Next time you login to your AdWords account, you will notice the following box.

There is forum reaction at both WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

At SEW Forums, Andrew Goodman summarizes:

You'll soon be able to update your login any time before Jan. 15, 2006, through your account. Here are some things to consider when updating your login:

* Your login is the only thing that will change. All your account information - such as billing and campaign details - will remain the same.
* We recommend you don't share your Google Account with other users in order to safeguard your information.
* If you already have a Google Account, you can use it as your new AdWords login. You might already have a Google Account if you use Gmail, Google Groups, Google Alerts, Froogle Shopping List, Personalized Search, Personalized Homepage, and Google Answers.
* If you currently share your AdWords account with other users, each user will be asked to create their own Google Account when they sign in. You can also send each person an invitation to make the switch.
* After you choose your new Google Account, you'll still be able to sign in to AdWords at adwords.google.com. In addition, if you choose a Google Account that you use for your other Google services, you'll be able to move back and forth between accounts - without having to sign in and out each time.

However, Danny Sullivan is more accepting of this change. He says, "I'm OK with it. I was kind of tired of having three different logons, adwords, gmail and everything else."

I keep tracking the Yahoo! Site Explorer page and today, the coming soon page, is now back from the dead. Brief update, not all that important, but I am just noting these events as they happen for my historical records.

It looks like according to a DigitalPoint thread that asks Would you switch to YPN 100%? that many will switch to YPN now. Why? Bottom line, Google is paying out a lot less then Yahoo! on a CPC basis. I wonder how this will change as the network grows and the advertisers adjust the campaigns to factor in YPN advertisers.

Cornwall at ThreadWatch has the scoop on New Duplicate Content Filter at Google? He reports on a really long WebmasterWorld thread that I wasn't yet able to read. In that thread he reports Caveman posting in msg # 171;

There are cases where established site homepages and subpages are holding their ranking for one phrase, but dropping out of the SERP's for another closely related phrase (when the site previously ranked for both) ... and where there is no evidence of dup content filters playing a role where pages dropped out.

They've tweaked something else IMO. Possibly related to linking/anchor text/kw patterns.

I have been receiving emails from people about these types of changes, but I have not reported on it until now.

GeoTrust, probably the second most popular online security brand on the net, launched a new search service today named TrustWatch. Ask Jeeves wrote a blog entry named “Trust, But Verify" to symbolize the message behind the new search service.

Powered by Ask Jeeves algorithmic search technology, the new service is designed to combat web-based fraud, identity theft and phishing scams. Users simply type queries into the search box at www.trustwatch.com and view easily understood green, yellow and red verification symbols beside each search result that represent the web site's trustworthiness rating.

For example, users wanting to donate money for tsunami relief can type "Tsunami Relief Organizations" directly into the TrustWatch search box. The Ask Jeeves search engine will return relevant search results based on each site's authority on that specific topic, including redcross.org, usaid.gov, directrelief.org and americares.org. Each result will also appear with the TrustWatch rating prominently displayed, so users can quickly select trustworthy sites and donate with confidence.

So I decided to give it a spin, let me take you through it. Searched on web site design services and the first result was http://www.hwg.org/, which was not verified. So I clicked on the little yellow light with a question mark (verification icons explained here) and received this pop up window.

The next two top tabs look like, this and this respectively. To me, this seems pretty easy to spam.

Forum thread started at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There has been lots of speculation in the past about Google Increasing Index Size Again. As a present to us, Google says, in appreciation of Google's Official 7th Birthday, Google says, "for our seventh birthday, we are giving you a newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index." In that, they link to a new page posted at http://www.google.com/help/indexsize.html notes, "search engines' published metrics for index size measurement vary greatly and are no longer easily comparable."

A must read on the topic are the following articles;
- Google Announces New Index Size, Shifts Focus from Counting by John Battelle.
- End Of Size Wars? Google Says Most Comprehensive But Drops Home Page Count by Danny Sullivan

The thread discussing this at the moment is at Search Engine Watch Forums.

On September 7th, we thought Google would celebrate its 7th Birthday, but we noticed Google hasn't posted any logo to celebrate - like they normally do. Today, up goes a special logo to celebrate Google's 7th birthday and it looks pretty tasty;

Google's blog entry reads; "Google opened its doors in September 1998, and we’ve been pursuing one mission ever since: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. For our seventh birthday, we are giving you..." More on what they are giving us later.

In the forums, there is some confusion about the birthday, like I mentioned above. Search Engine Watch Forums asks "I thought this a week or two ago?" The date of 9/7 happened to be pulled just a few days ago, from the Google site. Danny explains;

It was. But then Google decided today was the day it would be celebrated. Apparently the date floats around a lot within Google and they've now decided to go with this one. Or maybe they want two slices of cake. Or prefer to be a Libra over a Virgo

Other forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums & SEO Chat Forums.

In previous blog I had reported about Overture Mexico being launched between August and September, but nothing has happened yet. Most likely it wil be delayed to early October is my hunch.

Last week while I was in Mexico CIty I was able to meet lots of great people that are doing a big effort in growing the search marketing industry. Amongst them, I came across the rummor that the company is scheduled to throw a reinaugural ceremony (party) for it's efforts to present the new Paid Search model in the Yahoo! Mexico office now headed by Rafael Jimenez who reports to Peter Celeste, Latin America Manager.

So, which brand will be used for this effort?

Will TeRespondo remain to have a very strong brand in Latin America and they might be keeping that name? I'd be very happy for Juan Diego Calle and Danny Echavarria to see their brand prevail. Nothing official yet, so we'll soon find out.

Is it clean enough to eat off of? Is it elegant? There is a great thread going on over at HighRankings talking about the benefits of having clean HTML code on your website. The original thread starter has questions whether having clean code correlates to having high rankings in the search engines. He wants to know how you would even know if have clean code to begin with.

One the members says that having clean code and doing well in SEO is an urban myth. Its true, having sparkling clean code doesn't necessary mean you will have great search rankings nor is it a primer for ever having high rankings. Out of practice I am a big fan of cleanly coded HTML websites, its a standard for me and more out of continual principal then anything to set a good browsing environment for my visitors. It makes life a lot easier when you can easily read a website source HTML. You can diagnose errors, make changes, and reduce the size of the page for your visitors.

I think some of the confusion coming out of the clean code / SEO debate has to do with a bit of the history of SEO. Back in the days when SEO was more "optimization" than it is "link building" these days clean code did make a difference. Things were based more on on-page factors than on off page. Optimization is truely a process of cleaning up something to make it more efficient. When I optimized a website back many years ago, the primary goal was to get it cleaned up and essentially target it for selected keyphrases based on research. These days things are bit more complicated and not necessary worse either. Making sure you have clean code is really doing your due diligence for your high ranking chances so that can't hurt at all.

An interesting thread at WebmasterWorld reports Slurp entering site through Overture Ads. The thread creator reports this behavior only on Thursday mornings.

On four seperate days (all Thursday mornings) we had Slurp bombarding our site for about an hour with over 1000 requests, all of these being referals from our Overture Ads

An other member confirms the same activity on his site;

show an abnormal amount of Slurp activity between 07:00 and 14:00 every other Thursday (as well as on a couple of Saturdays). Each time it's about 1,000 visits from the Inktomi IPs.

The interesting portion is that the other member reports that the Inktomi bots are coming through on ads that they pay for but are not being charged to them. BrotherAl says, "Some of the keywords used by Slurp to get to our site have never been clicked according to Overture's stats, so we're pretty sure this activity isn't being charged for."

Can it be some sort of destination page verification process?

Matt Cutts last week posted an entry named UI fun: Remove result where he describes an added beta feature added to some Google Personalized search users. Matt describes;

But if you’re in this experiment, you’ll have newfound powers. Click the “Remove result” link and with one click you can drop that url from your search results. It looks like this.

By default, it will only block that url for that particular search. If you’re really annoyed, you can click “More options” and you’ll get two more choices: block this url from all future searches and (my personal favorite) the ability to block the entire host from all future searches. Here’s what it looks like:

How do you see it?

f you have an email address like johnpublicuser@gmail.com, you should be able to go to http://www.google.com/psearch and sign in with “johnpublicuser@gmail.com”

If you don't want to do that, I did a search on "Web site" and removed the first result. Here is the step by step.

I clicked the remove result link and was shown this line.

Then I clicked more options and was presented with...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Tons of speculation floating around right now, based on a New York Time article that says Microsoft Plans to Sell Search Ads of Its Own. Last week, a representative from MSN Ad Center called me asking me if I was interested in getting signed up with them and testing the puppy out. I told them, honestly - I am not, but referred them to Ben (phoenix), so he can report more on it. Then today, this article comes out and the blogs begin to buzz.

The Microsoft Corporation will unveil today its own system for selling Web advertising as it struggles to compete with Google and Yahoo in the expanding Web search business. The system, to be used by MSN, is meant to improve on those of Microsoft's rivals by allowing marketers to aim ads on Web search pages to users based on their sex, age or location.

For a while now, there has been lots of positive feedback on the MSN AdCenter, so there are high expectations to be met.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

Over the weekend, our industry leader, Danny Sullivan, celebrated his 40th birthday. Nacho, is good taste, spent the time collecting photos from the SEW mods and put together a new thread with an image of all the mods around Danny. The thread is Happy 40th Birthday Danny Sullivan!!!! Wow, the big 40 - I wonder what that feels like. Shows how old the industry is getting...kidding...

Last year the mod team was a bit smaller so you can compare the image below to last years.

Happy Birthday Danny!

For those of you that signed up for the email notification on this site in the past or want to in the future, you now can. If you signed up in the past, you will need to sign up again, I am sorry. But you will be notified daily of new entries via email and you can manage your subscription as well.

Basically, to be notified when a new entry is added to this site, just fill in your information below.

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Gary reports that AOL.com Portal Leaves Beta, after "a three month beta period, the AOL.com open web portal has been officially released." I personally don't remember what the AOL homepage looked like before, but Gary told me it was not much of a visual change, since the roll out has been slow, in terms of UI. But yesterday, AOL officially announced;

AOL.com is no longer in Beta! hanks very much for all your testing assistance.

Notice the typo in the word "thanks." :)

I started a forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

JenSense reports that Enhanced AdSense interface launched on Blogger where you can easily now add AdSense to your Blogger templates. This was something that was very hard for most Blogger users to do, until now. Besides for the standard AdSense features; JenSense says that;

Another unique feature is that in addition to the regular Google AdSense color palettes offered within the account, bloggers can also select "Match Template" or "Blend Template". While some of the Match Template color combinations are on the garish side, a few of the blend templates are not too bad, but still not as "blended" as I would make them for the highest CTR.

You can also select "Custom" from the drop down template menu, and supply your own colors (click the screenshot below for full-size), although there is not the built in color picker available as there is in the regular AdSense control panel.

It literally took me 30 seconds to put up the AdSense ads into one of my blogger blogs. Nice addition.

Forum discussion started at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ok, without a doubt, there are some major shifts in the Yahoo! search results page for some of the more competitive keywords. I have seen a few examples, but the forums are now buzzing about it. I held off on posting on this, until I can verify some of these results. People starting noticing these changes on the 19th of September. Here is the forum coverage.

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• SEO Chat Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

The ever so much feared downtime and its effects on search engine rankings have sprung up conversation at the WebmasterWorld supporters forum (paid access only). The thread is named My server is in Houston & Hurricane Rita's Coming, Should I Move it ASAP?

Hurricane Rita is being tracked and expected to hit over Texas. The s