October 2005 Archives

A WebmasterWorld thread created by steveb named How to remove (some) Supplemental Listings has a theory on how one might be able to remove some of those supplemental results found for a site command. We all hate them, some are even embarrassed of them, many have travelled great voyages to remove them. This is the tale of SteveB's voyage.

The current situation: Google refuses to recognize a 301 of a Supplemental listing. Google refuses to delete a Supplemental listing that is now a nonexistent 404 (not a custom 404 page, a literal nothing there) no matter if it is linked to from dozens of pages. In both the above situations, even if Google crawls through links every day for six months, it will not remove the Supplemental listing or obey a 301. Google refuses to obey its own URL removal tool for Supplementals. It only "hides" the supplementals for six months, and then returns them to the index.

As of the past couple days, I have succeeded (using the below tactics) to get some Supplementals removed from about 15% of the datacenters. On the other 85% they have returned to being Supplemental however.

Some folks have hundreds or thousands of this type of Supplemental, which would make this strategy nearly impossible, but if you have less than twenty or so...

1) Place a new, nearly blank page on old/supplemental URL.

2) Put no actual words on it (that it could ever rank for in the future). Only put "PageHasMoved" text plus link text like "MySiteMap" or "GoToNewPage" to appropriate pages on your site for a human should they stumble onto this page.

3) If you have twenty supplementals put links on all of them to all twenty of these new pages. In other words, interlink all the new pages so they all have quite a few links to them.

4) Create a new master "Removed" page which will serve as a permanent sitemap for your problem/supplemental URLs. Link to this page from your main page. (In a month or so you can get rid of the front page link, but continue to link to this Removed page from your site map or other pages, so Google will continually crawl it and be continually reminded that the Supplementals are gone.)

5) Also link from your main page (and others if you want) to some of the other Supplementals, so these new pages and the links on them get crawled daily (or as often as you get crawled).

6) If you are crawled daily, wait ten days.

7) After ten days the old Supplemental pages should show their new "PageHasMoved" caches. If you search for that text restricted to your domain, those pages will show in the results, BUT they will still ALSO continue to show for searches for the text on the ancient Supplemental caches.

8) Now put 301s on all the Supplemental URLs. Redirect them too either the page with the content that used to be on the Supplemental, or to some page you don't care about ranking, like an "About Us" page.

9) Link to some or all of the 301ed Supplementals from your main page, your Removed page and perhaps a few others. In other words, make very sure Google sees these new 301s every day.

10) Wait about ten more days, longer if you aren't crawled much. At that point the 15% datacenters should first show no cache for the 301ed pages, and then hours later the listings will be removed. The 85% datacenters will however simply revert to showing the old Supplemental caches and old Supplemental listings, as if nothing happened.

11) Acting on faith that the 15% datacenters will be what Google chooses in the long run, now use the URL removal tool to remove/hide the Supplementals from the 85% datacenters.

Will the above accomplish anything? Probably not. The 85% of the datacenters may just be reflecting the fact that Google will never under any circumstances allow a Supplemental to be permanently removed. However, the 15% do offer hope that Google might actually obey a 301 if brute forced.

Then, from now on, whenever you remove a page be sure to 301 the old URL to another one, even if just to an "About Us" page. Then add the old URL to your "Removed" page where it will regularly be seen and crawled. An extra safe step could be to first make the old page a "PageHasMoved" page before you redirect it, so if it ever does come back as a Supplemental, at least it will come back with no searchable keywords on the page.

Examples of 15% datacenter: 216.239.59.104 216.239.57.99 64.233.183.99
Examples of 85% datacenter: 216.239.39.104 64.233.161.99 64.233.161.105

Three pages of posts later, the thread makes for a real whopper. SteveB writes, "bottom line, no 301 redirect of a Supplemental has been obeyed on 100% of Google's datacenters, even though in all cases there was a current (non-supplemental) page regularly crawled on that URL. (It sounds so confusing to even type...)"

I had a similar issue with a site. What did I do? Some 301's, waited... Some 404's waited... Some more 301s and 404s and waited. Then a combination of more 301s, 404s, more links, and Google Sitemaps. Finally, the site is looking healthier. Took over a year - oh, I didn't work to fast. :)

Looking for smart, talented and creative people at all times. They just keep hiring and finding ways to find the best out there. A cre8asite forum thread named Yahoo! hunting employees discusses how Yahoo! "have increased their global head count by 40% this year." But don't forget the PPC ad for I am scary smart at Google, which coincides a NY Times ad.

Basically, you install a firefox extension and then mouse over links, the little contextual pop up shows you inlinks via Google, Yahoo and MSN, plus the ranking of the site based on that anchor text.

Very smart tool, creative... Available for download at http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

You got to love the creativity;

I am sure some forums are chatting about them, but I haven't found any threads yet. I'll keep looking. On the logo front, check this out.

A very interesting featured thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Google places "Dummy Bidders" in Regional Search artificially raise required bids discusses a topic, I believe is very important. The poster says that when he does a search in Google and specifically requests that Google only show results within a certain country (i.e. Australia) it does so, but only on the organic side. It only shows Australian hosted, domain name and so on sites in the organic results, but it does not restrict the PPC ads based on those factors.

Of course, the PPC advertiser has the option of excluding countries and regions. But what about the searcher? Isn't it all about the searcher?

I like how Patrick Berry puts it in this reply;

I as the searcher have made a decision that I only wont pages servered from Australia (in this example). The advertiser is been excluded by the searcher. Not the search engine. Thats a big differnece.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Look. Here's the bottom line. If you own a web site, or work for somebody who has a web site, you know how vital it is to make that web site perform. It must be found in search engines - no easy task these days, even if you do have all the money in the world. It must meet requirements that go way beyond what you orignially considered were important, because, to be blunt, people are fussy.

A web site must do what you say it will do. It must say it will do something. Those two things are commonly unmet user needs or overlooked search engine optimization points.

So, you know everything there is to know about search engines. Your web design meets usability standards, search engine optimization and marketing, persuasive copy and you can read your traffic stats with one hand tied behind your back and the other hand eating a donut.

That may be so. However, I'm here to offer you one more incentive to register now for the High Rankings Search Engine Marketing Seminar to be held in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania on November 3 and 4.

Continue reading "Last Call to Meet Bill and Kim and Oh Yes, the High Rankings People"

Last week I reported on the auction of Jux2 comparison meta engine for sale at eBay. Apparently the auction ended yesterday with a $101,000 dollar ending bid!! The buyer was named 3vcap and beat out about 115 other bidders in the auction. I hope they have some great plans for the search engine!

Discussion at SEW Forums

Those are two words I never thought I would write on here, Martha Stewart and SEO together. Well it appears our brave contestent representing the SEO/SEM industry as been voted off (fired) from the show. On WMW one of the members mentions that in his closing sales pitch to get the job, "he mentioned that Martha's site was nowhere in the SEs for "recipes", and if he took over the internet division, he would fix it."

This might have impressed Martha's sidekick but it didn't impress Martha so much. At least we know in some regard how search engine friendly she is, apparantly not too much. Overall it looked like the guy probably had the time of his life. Good luck to him back in the SEO world.

Discuss more at WMW

Now thats what we like to hear. It seems only appropriate right now for someone to came out with a good way to get an editor account on DMOZ. As we know those people over at DMOZ aren't very nice at times and securing an editor account can be harder than scoring a PR9. Jim Boykin blogged however on a detailed plan to become a DMOZ editor. It's quite an excellent article on how to become an editor that every good SEO should probably read it. As for applying to become an editor, if you think its necessary for your success then go ahead and do so. One thing Jim points out that I totally agree with is this:

To start with, I think DMOZ is highly overrated. DMOZ may have been a bigger factoring to rankings in Google in the past, but I doubt that today it’s worth any more than any other link of equal value - that is to say, I doubt that just because you’ve got a link from DMOZ.org that that’s treated different than any other link. There’s lots of people who haven’t changed with the times and are mistaken into thinking it’s a magical factor to ranking high in Google.

So DMOZ as Jim puts it is soo 2002-2003ish, I agree. Infiltrating DMOZ is so 2005 though. If you don't like the directory, then you might as well change it from within.

Check out Jim's - Pssst Giving Away DMOZ Accounts post.

I have been sick for past three days. Taking the day off. I am sorry.

Since its introduction in the Adsense program, Google has not been forthcoming with any details on how Smart Pricing actually works (to the chagrin of many publishers!). Jenstar however reports on some details that a publisher got from Google's support staff. Surprising tidbit: smart pricing is calculated per account, not per site, so if you have one site in your account that sends poorly-converting traffic it is probably affecting your earnings across all sites.

More coverage at Threadwatch, Problogger and Jensense.

Matt Cutts has some information about the Jagger Update, looks like some people are over at WMW trying to figure it out and provide us with some info. Googleguy on WMW says:

McMohan, good eyes in spotting some changes at 66.102.9.104. I expect Jagger2 to start at 66.102.9.x. It will probably stay at 1-2 data centers for the next several days rather than spreading quickly. But that data center shows the direction that things will be moving in (bear in mind that things are fluxing, and Jagger3 will cause flux as well).

Matt Cutts posted how to send feedback on Jagger1 at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/

If you’re looking at 66.102.9.x and have new feedback on what you see there (whether it be spam or just indexing related), please use the same mechanism as before, except use the keyword Jagger2. I believe that our webspam team has taken a first pass through the Jagger1 feedback and acted on a majority of the spam reports. The quality team may wait until Jagger3 is visible somewhere before delving into the non-spam index feedback.

If things stay on the same schedule (which I can’t promise, but I’ll keep you posted if I learn more), Jagger3 might be visible at one data center next week. Folks should have several weeks to give us feedback on Jagger3 as it gradually becomes more visible at more data centers.

Matt indicates that you submit a reinclusion request to Google by putting "Jagger 1, Jagger 2, or Jagger 3" in the subject line of the email.

He also says, "Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3 are mostly independent changes, but they’re occurring closely enough in time (plus they interact to some degree) that it’s clearer just to act as if they were one update for feedback purposes. "

Discussion at WMW

Time goes by so fast sometimes its hard to get a handle on just what happened over the last 10 months. A member on Highrankings Forum has been away from SEO for sometime and is just getting back into the industry and wants to know what he missed in 2005. A lot of the members come to together to outline the year in review. Here is what they came up with that I have compiled and add too. Please feel free to comment and add to the list.

• Year of the Google
• Year of the Map
• Duplicate content penalities gets a very close look from SEO's
• Reciprocal links even less useful
• Page rank even less important but still a mystery for some
• Text links brokers and link builders either change or die with the times
• Even more variation in "what works" across different topic areas
• Even more ad money flowing into Adsense away from traditional advertising
• Google ranking algorithm updates eliminates more crud (scrapers suffer this year)
• Comment spam gets some notice and a group effort to erradicate
• Search engine spammers take to the streets and forums
• usual complaints about good content penalized and bad content rewarded
• However, good content continues to become a staple and reason for high rankings.
• Yahoo! begins to become a force in search.
• MSN Search debuts.
• Google continues an aging Delay that keeps new sites from being able to rank.
• Google begins starts to get serious about eliminating scraper sites/directories
• Search Engine Patents!
• Continual search engine updates, which are not so bad this year until Jaggar.
• A year ago, few people disliked Google. That has changed this year.
• Overall tilt towards paying more for better-qualified AdSense traffic
• General interest in search marketing continues to rise
• Patience and understanding from SEO clients is on a decline

Phoenix in Search Engine Optimization at October 26, 2005 11:46 AM Comments (0)

• Google Co-op

Thanks Loren Baker for an interesting teaser at Search Engine Journal regarding LookSmart's third quarter 2005 earnings. Judging from the recent statements from the new CEO, David Hills, there should be at least some good news to report. LookSmart has not only been venturing into new partnerships, but seems to be focusing strongly on vertical search.

I recently had a conversation with LookSmart marketing representative Jim Barkow about their products. They are increasing their efforts to launch vertical search engines, and do not overly use the LookSmart brand within them (College search example), in order to create a "more pure search network."

Baker mentions the partnership between LookSmart and Search123, a so-called "2nd (3rd?) Tier PPC provider." Naturally I asked Barkow about the efforts of LookSmart to combat fraudulent clicks. Apparently, LookSmart has been more careful in choosing their partners, based on past click fraud speculation, and they now have "a team of people dedicated to the matter of clickfraud." In terms of the listings provided to/by Search123, "LookSmart will determine the CPC bid and include it in the live feed sent in response to such query. LookSmart will have sole discretion to decide the CPC bid for each search term, and such CPC bid may change frequently."

I would welcome comments or emails from people that have been using this system. If we get some clients going on it, I will be sure to share as well. I am also curious to see how the reports come out on Thursday.

Been following an interesting thread on SEOchat about the importance and power of .edu links. The member who started the thread wanted to know how much an .edu link in Google worth? Well most of us could answer that in our sleep. A LOT. SEO's love them, and we all wish we had a few more .edu links to add to our sites.

The thread quickly turned into interesting ways to get .edu links and what those links might be worth to someone? How much would you pay for an .edu link? Well, the best kind are free, and I have done some edu link building recently and there are a lot of neat ways to gain those links. One of the members mentions he is hiring professor to write articles for him and then letting the professor link the article from his webpage about the article he wrote. Good idea. There are some mentions of paying a student to link to your site from their personal page. The other idea I used several years ago, was to use the universities webspace and setup directories or articles on the space and then link out to websites you have. Worked very well, until they took down the space when I left.

Continued discussion at SEOchat Forums

Barry Welford, Cre8asiteforums Moderator, has posted this about the latest version of Netscape in Netscape 8.0.4 and Site Controls.

"It can basically be set up to show web pages either as they would be seen in Internet Explorer or in Mozilla Firefox. You can switch to the other by clicking on a small icon in the tab. If you want to check how web pages might look in the "other" browser, that's great functionality. It's all part of what is called Site Controls. "

That would be nice, says investors. Came across a good article that was just released talking about the potential for Google to reach $450/share. Is it possible? Some are thinking so, "Google is going to make it. Google will be a more important company five years from now than it is today." However some words of caution mentioned from the author, "Google helped monetize the Web for many of the Internet's popular fringe sites, but it's a victim of its own success. The competitive crowds are circling around."

Read more on Fool.com

There has been some talk this morning onto what will actually be included into Google Base, there are some nice screenshots that have come live this morning. Giving us a little glimpse of how Google thinks the world's information should be organized. Here is a shot where you can post your items to Google Base and another shot where you need enter in some information about a house.

According to Google:

This new tool will be introduced during the 'Google Zeitgeist'05 Partner Forum' to be held today at Google HQ in California.

We expect that 'Google Purchases' --the new micropayments service among users-- will be also introduced as a complement to 'Google Base'.

Now according to Philip Lenssen and SEL Google is getting into the real estate listing game, possibly taking a jab at craigslist for some terriority. This has been discussed before in detail and I think people expected Google to do this and many other things eventually. In my title I say "better late than never" in response to the real estate listing services they could potentially offer because it seems befitting to the situation. One because they better make it good. Two, its never to late to do something Google even though they never thought of it first. Three, it never hurts to try even if it stinks, people will try to use it because its from Google.

Forum discussion on SEW Forums

Honestly, I have no idea what my first search was at a search engine. I do not even remember if it was excite or alta vista or lycos or webcrawler. No idea and it kind of upsets me.

But so far two people at Search Engine Watch Forums took A Trip Down Memory Lane...Your First Search Engine Query.

Promediacorp started the thread and documented his first search was;

Year = 1995 (high school);
Engine = Yahoo (ok, it was technically a directory back then);
Query = "Married with Children";
Level of fascination when results returned = unquantifiable!;

StrategicRankings documented his first search was;

Year = 1997 (was working for Arthur Andersen)
Engine = Yahoo!
Query = 'windsurfing screensaver'

This can make for a fun thread.

This is the last time I will be scheduled not to be blogging until probably April 2006. Please expect coverage from Ben and the guest authors tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thanks for bearing with me during this month.

Last week news came way of someone naming their kid, Google. Yea it is true. C|Net reports;

A Swedish couple have named their newborn after their favorite technology company--Google. Walid Elias Kai, who has a doctorate in search engine marketing, and his wife Carol of Kalmar, Sweden, have named their son Oliver Google Kai, Google blogger Karen Wickre wrote in an official blog on the subject.

Confirmed by the Google Blog;

Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan of our company. Dr. Kai, who is Lebanese, and his Swedish wife Carol live in Kalmar, Sweden, where their son was born on September 12. His name? Oliver Google Kai.

And I thought I was creative with my engagement. Let's not forget the man who revolutionized link buying just had a beautiful baby girl last week named Grace, congrats Patrick!

Google baby naming discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

So you are having trouble getting paid by a client or two. They won't return your calls, they wont answer your emails, faxes or letters. What do you do? Well, of course you can send out a letter from your lawyer, but your a search guy - aren't you?

One search guy wants to pay for a PPC ad, when someone types in the defunct company's name into a search engine, up comes....

Company XYZ
Please pay outstanding invoice
#1234, which is 31 past due.
http://www.mysite.com/invoice1234.pdf

Cute idea, but will it be affective? Are there any legal repercussions? Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week we had a major Google update named the Jagger Update. That update increased and decreased many site's pagerank including http://blogsearch.google.com/.

The question raised in Search Engine Watch forums by Sharon and Roy was, why did Google's BlogSearch page jump from a PR0 to a PR9 in a matter of days? Sharon and Roy say that "Google blog search engine debuted on September 14, 2005" and then they list out a historical record of backlink tracking for that site by Google, Yahoo & MSN.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Reports via Search Engine Watch Forums that MSN Messenger Gains Sponsored Links. We joked about contextual ads being derived from your IM chats when there was early speculation with Instant Messaging by Google but Google never did, yet, put AdWords within Google Talk.

Major step for IM clients...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Congratulations TeRespondo for relaunching their new website and keeping their brand: http://www.terespondo.com/

Back in September I blogged about how Yahoo! Mexico was preparing for its reinauguration ceremony. I was invited to the party, but unfortunately I couldn't make it.

What's even more news it their launching of a CPC model for markets such as Mexico and many more. Before, they used to be offering Search products on a CPM model. Now all of that has changed. Their new sign up page takes you through 4 steps: 1) Contact Information. 2) List a few keywords and get some suggested keywords. 3)Build out your PPC ads. 4) Pick your BIDS (in Mexico, it's determined in MXP$, min bid at MXP$0.50). and 4) Login to your new account and add funds. They only accept VISA or Master Card. You can also do an electronic bank tansfer/deposit. They charge 15% tax for those who are local and it's waived for foreigners.

It was pretty easy to set up... although you do need to know spanish ;-)

More about the TeRespondo moves in the Search Marketing in Latin America achives.

Dan Thies, well known here as the keyword research expert, has opened his SEO coaching program. The newsletter goes out Monday, October 17 and here are some course highlights;

- 2 Hours one-on-one coaching per month (phone & web conference)
- Weekly Q&A conference calls
- 1 year access to private support site

HighRankings forum has the discussion now, and a coupon to save $100.

High Rankings people (that's you!) can get $100 off by entering advisor as the coupon code at checkout.

Congrats to Ben Pfeiffer for be nominated Internet Chair at SMA NA today. President and Chair is Ian McAnerin (well deserved), Secretary Treasurer: Debra Mastaler (well respected) and VP Public and Media Relations: Jeff Nelson.

News came via SEW Blog.

Also, I officially did not renew my SEMPO membership yesterday. But I did not join SMA NA either.

Back in the old days of this site, I used to find new SEO strategy in forum threads and post them here. I do that on occasion now, but not as frequently in the past. Why? Well, because not many new simple SEO strategies have been discussed in the forums. So I had an idea...

If you have any SEO questions, email them to me. I will then bring up old topics here or forum threads and do my best to answer the question. But please do not email me saying, my site is not ranking well for keyword A or my site has a PR0, Google sucks. I will only answer generic questions that can be applied to all the readers here.

If you are up for it, email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

OptiRex at Search Engine Watch Forums posted Just How Much Do You Trust Google/Adsense Stats? Read on... OptiRex says he has a hundred plus sites with AdSense on them and tracks all the data very carefully. Yesterday he said, he "noticed a substantial discrepancy within my Adsense reported figures/earnings." He explains that until the 12th of September the statistics of the custom compared to channels have been only off by a few cents. But now the discrepancy is much larger.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update, AdSense is not crazy. "Relax everyone...Google's not filching from me." See thread for more...

We have all seen Web design companies that say something to the effect of, "We are too busy designing sites for our clients, to make our site professional looking." Personally, I understand that, but I think its unprofessional to have a site that doesn't represent your design abilities as a design company. In my case, we are an automation company and we have invested a lot of time automating our processes. Why? Not because we want to necessarily show it off, but mostly because we believe in what we sell. :)

So when it comes to SEO firms not ranking well for keyword phrases, what does that mean? Does it mean that the SEO firm is too busy ranking its clients well? Does it mean that they are bad SEOs if they don't rank well themselves? Does it mean they don't want the leads?

That is the topic of discussion at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread named The importance of your own firm's rankings? In this thread they discuss the pros and cons of ranking well for keywords like SEO or search engine optimization. The number of leads and that conversion rate of those leads can be extremely low. At what point does your SEO firm become a sales firm? A good discussion I have not seen in a while.

The following email went out to Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) customers;

Dear Sponsored Search Advertiser:

We’ve listened to your feedback and are happy to announce that we’ve eliminated the $20 monthly minimum spending requirement for Sponsored Search. Previously, all Sponsored Search advertisers were required to spend at least $20 a month in click-through charges. Now, you can choose to spend as much or as little as you like, with no minimum to meet.

Thank you for being a Sponsored Search advertiser. We appreciate your business and hope this change makes advertising with us even easier. As always, we value your feedback, so if you have any questions please contact us using the support request form within your account.

Sincerely,
Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

YahooSarah posted a thread at SEW forums to make the announcement.

Elisabeth from Search Engine Watch Forums posts New Keyword Popularity Tool Debuts in Adwords Accounts. Lee Odden adds;

Here are some very cool features including the ability to "review detailed keyword performance statistics like advertiser competition and search volume.":

Keyword Variations works much the same way except now you can sort the results by popularity, performance history, cost and predicted ad position.

A new Site-Related Keywords feature offers the ability to generate a keyword list based on a specific URL and can also include other pages linked to from that URL. It will break out relevant keywords into groups as well.

Keyword lists can be downloaded in .csv format

There are several other features worth checking out. I think it may be as useful for organic keyword research as it is for PPC.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool but I think you need to have a referrer from adwords to get it to open.

Old search engine has reached a memorable time in its history, LookSmart Announces Receipt of Nasdaq Delisting Letter and Intention to Appeal. Basically, the stock price is not high enough to meet the minimum requirements. Jim Hedger wrote a guest article with the SEM's perspective at SEJ titled, LookSmart to be Booted from NASDAQ.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ask Jeeves is calling them tasty cheats, because not only can Ask tell you Final Fantasy PS2 Cheats but also tell you some turkey recipes for one of my favorite holidays.

We've partnered with AllRecipes.com in order to provide a powerful Smart Search experience that serves up some of their most popular & highest rated recipes and delivers them right to your fingertips. In fact, I already started doing dry runs of a holiday meal in order to get over my fear of entertaining dinner guests:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Two quick updates.

(1) I got my YPN Check while I was away, and I promised to let you know, so I am.

(2) I just got back into the office, I need several hours to catch up. So I hope to post today, but we will see.

Just an update on the situation and in case anyone is pacing their living room because of not having their WMW fix hope is in sight. Brett Tabke mentions on the temporary site.

"A large data center outage in Chicago has left several thousand servers offline. To compound matters even worse, the data center was home to DNS servers by WestHost. We will be temporarily keeping tabs on stuff here."

Shawn of Digitalpoint has some explanation for part of the problem here. In the mean time, relax, sit back, get some sleep and enjoy a good book or link building exercise.

Seems to be a rash of outages today. People at SEOchat are complaining they can't access WMW forums (I can't either) and Threadwatch seems to have had a meltdown earlier today. They are moving servers according to there updating message "The move is complete, but if you're seeing this message, then it's simply because the new DNS info has not propagated properly yet. If you check back in a little while I hope it will be all well again." So do we Nick.

Meanwhile back at the batcave, WMW is still down for some people (can't confirm for all) and hopes of it getting back live look promising but undetermined.

So people are asking is if Matt Cutts and Googleguy who are sparking new interest in Google Update Jagger and the intense server load is causing crashes today. Not sure, but people do seem well overly interested on the forums.

Discussion about Update Jagger at SEOchat - WMW (soon) - Digitalpoint 1 - Digitalpoint 2 - SEW Forums

Thought this was pretty clever from Marketing Shift. Apparently you can bypass some of MSN's protocals for registering by going through the MSN Singapore Interface to register for a new account with MSN Adcenter. This will only get your ads displayed in France and Singapore but you can still get in. Many people are speculating that MSN is planning to release the Adcenter very soon, like it was supposed to be yesterday but now its going to be next month sometime. Currently they are only beta testing in the US at this point, but you can still apply for a beta testing position below.

One of the MSN Adcenter engineers replied to Jason Dowdell's thread and posted a url here you can sign up to beta test the adCenter. New screenshots have surfaced as well which you can view here.

Looks like you can have a chance to buy the search engine you have always wanted. Complete with luxurious amenities. Jux2, a comparison Meta Search Engine is up for sale on eBay. I had intended to post on this yesterday as was posted orginally at Battellemedia but it got to late in the day. In any case, looks like some familar faces were bidding such as Nacho and Webguerilla. This is great engine from my experience with doing searches on it. I loved the ability to see what Yahoo, Google or Ask left out all in one place. I would bid if I had the time for such a thing. Bidding is up to $26,300.00 at the moment.

Going, Going, Going...To The Highest Bidder

Throw out your bookmarks and ignore page navigation? A thought provoking article called The Search Lurch: Have We Become Lazy Googlers or Smarter Web Researchers? interviews Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Garrett, Gerry McGovern and Tara Calishain, to get their views on how or if search behavior habits have changed how we use and design web sites.

Will Web users bother going to homepages and trying to figure out each site's navigation scheme? Or with our increasingly shortened attention spans and demands on our time, will we just Google everything?

Is search engine optimization becoming more important than navigation optimization?

I won't ruin the experience for you, but their responses vary. I resonated with Tara's answers the most.

A truly effective navigation scheme, it seems to me, should prove effective for both a human visitor and a spidering 'bot. The challenge is to build a structure that a 'bot can appreciate and a human can understand, and build a vocabulary of description on your site that a human can appreciate and a 'bot can understand. I believe these are complementary aims.

and for those looking for thrills, the answer is yes. Dr. Nielsen does, in fact utter the words, "deviant design."

One of the things that I have liked over the years as being a moderator at SEO Chat Forums is the tradition of members going to great lengths to do really incredible 1000th posts on the forum. Many wait for the day for which they can contribute in some meaningful way to the forum by posting the knowledge they have learned and gleamed during their time as a forum junkie. Some of these 1000th's posts are long dissertations on what they have learned in SEO and then there are the quick highlighted lists of essentials you must know in order to survive in this crazy internet world successfully. The posts are badges of honor and a final thesis for many into the world of SEO/SEM. They are usually quite great to read and good information to refer too. At some point most involved members on SEOchat will do a 1000th or 500th post, there are even 2000th and 3000th posts. Sometimes people make planned exits from boards on the date of their big post (dramatics seems to heighten the effect these posts can have). I once did a 500th post and used my 1000th to welcome a new moderator on the board. In order to honor these fun and useful posts I am highlighting some of the great ones from SEOchat. If you have one you would like to add please leave a comment and I will add them.

• DazzlinDonna 1000th Post
• What I've Learned In 1000 Posts...
• My 1000th Post by Jasontnyc
• Getting backlinks for newbies - 1000th Post
• 1000th post...My reason for going to work
• Bruno's 1000th Post
• 1000th post...Blackhat gives advice
• 1000 Thank You's by Brandall
• 1000th Post - The business side

There is a good thread over at Highrankings discussing the impacts of tables on SEO. The member Karri asks about how the various tables on her site will affect how a spider interacts with the site. She is concerned that the spider might not be able to find the relevant information in the right order. Good question.

Several of the resident experts say that search engines don't have a big problem with tables and that "problems always turned out to be non-standard code, not the use of tables per se". You can also nest tables to your heart content and spiders will be able to get to the code. This is perhaps another SEO urban myth as back in the beginnings of SEO, some search engines had problems with tables in that nesting many levels deep often caused a spider to leave or not get the complete information.

Scottie follows up with some overview that there are a couple schools of thought. One that having content higher up on the page will be better than having it at the bottom. The second thought is that it doesn't matter where you content is located at its all the same to the spider according to Jill Whalen.

Things get a bit interesting when Dan Thies jumps in and disagrees with Jill and Scottie on the advice that content doesn't matter where it appears on the page its all the same. Looks like an SEO showdown in the making. Dan says it does matter and gives some examples. One how search term is at the beginning and search terms at the end of the content. See Dan's tests here and here. Those links to the tests might speed along the spidering process for the test (hopefully). Watch this link for results on which pages shows up first.

Continued enlighting discussion at Highrankings. Jump to the second page for the juicy content.

Thomas McMahon brings up an interesting SERP for the term "hardware tool" at Google. After the first five organic results, Google suggests that he may want to see the top three results for the term "Commutator," and insert three such results before continuing with its "hardware tool" results. (Please contact me for a screenshot if you cannot duplicate the above results).

Since one of the definitions of a "commutator" essentially describes a piece of hardware used as a tool, could Google somehow have assigned semantic connectivity between the terms? I sure hope Orion sees this. I look forward to other ideas or perhaps even a correction if my thinking is flawed.

People love to hate this directory and are doing everything they can to undermine it seems. There is a listing on eBay right now offered for sale by a seoblackhat of a PR5 category editorship that you can purchase for chump change. Apparently you get the login in and password details for the editor position with the auction and whisper not to say anything to DMOZ. Sounds like an SEO adventure. Worth it you ask? Probably not, but then again it could be for the right person.

Update: Appears that the auction was pulled and bidding is no longer available.

Forum Discussion at SEOchat

"If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor in a valuable space, you’ll need a lot of link power."

So states Rand Fishkin, of Seomoz.org, from an interview just out by E-Consultancy called SEO Ranking Factors - the Rand Fishkin interview.

Triggered by Rand's now-famous Search Engine Ranking Factors, which
E-Consultancy featured on their site, Rand answers SEO and search engine questions that a lot of web site owners have. Rand offers his opinions based on his own experience in search engine marketing and his ties to the industry that permit him access to its many experts.

The interview touches on links, page rank, Web 2.0, Mike Grehan's theory that "the rich get richer" as far as link power, and the value of search engine marketing. Of his list of favorite bloggers, he makes all the PC (politically correct) answers, which means he didn't include me, despite my having covered him here two days in a row. Next time, dinner's on me and we pick a much fancier pizza joint, Rand, okay? heh.

The interview reads well and is informative. I'd say more but the other guest authors here somehow seem to be posting when I'm also logged in and they always beat me to the finish line.

Matt Cutts wrote on his blog today:

Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I’m guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.

You can pretend you don't care, but then you'd be lying :-)

God is everywhere, but apparently though someone found real proof for himself this weekend while using Google Maps. Better than a grill cheese apparition, BoingBoing reports about those finding the face of Jesus in a sand dune. The level of detail is pretty good for a sand dune, check out the full image . Originally from Google Sightseeing, a place about visiting the world with just Google Earth.

Thanks to Heidi for posting at SEW forums her question about Content Match ads "disappearing." Apparently this happened when she systematically dropped her bids 5 cents at a time until she was "below the threshold" to compete for contextual positioning.

AdWords Rep came in and replied that it was most likely an issue with the G review/approval process, but it is unsure if that was the case. Other suggestions revolved around the possibility that the bids were too low, as she thought, and that she would have to raise her bid to compete again. The latest post by Heidi explains how she learned that her account was under review but had been "taken off review" on 10/11/05. She has not posted since, so this may have been resolved.

The question that came to mind as I read this was in regards to running a "mirror campaign" within AdWords for Content-only positioning. This means creating Campaign “B” using Campaign “A” keywords and turning “Content network” to off in Campaign “A” (Campaign management page, #5: “Where to show my ads.”) and turning “Search network” off in campaign “B.” I recently tried it with a few Campaigns/Groups for a client, and this seems to have not only increased impressions, but also drastically cut the average cost per click (from approx $1.60 to $0.25 for one group with 371,000 impressions/987 clicks in one recent day). I am curious if others use this tactic effectively. Please comment here or at the SEW Forum thread referenced above.

A little something fun and interesting for your day. Elizabeth at SEW started a thread about a new service that is taking Google Maps interface and overlaying it with the locations of your friends and co-workers, formally called Frapper or "friend mapper". The SEO map here is of SEO's in the US and Canada and you can add your name and zip code to the list.

The company behind the mashup allows people to create maps for anything under the sun, such as getting a map of all the people that work in your company are or where all your college buddies might be located at the moment. Pretty handy idea.

Add yourself to the SEO Consultants/Agency Map or discuss at SEW - Map the SEO Stars

Regardless of the fact that Randfish says he made a mistake at SEOChat, I can vouch for the man's integrity and ability to understand the nearly impossible.

At the NYC SES Conference, I sat in the front row, in between Rand to my left and Bill Slawski, to my right, pretending to understand Dr. Garcia's (aka "Orion's) power point presentation on search engine algorithm technology. My eyes glazed over exactly the way they used to do in Math class.

Meanwhile, Bill and Rand were muttering outloud various things that convinced me that I was sitting between two geniuses. They understood the diagrams on the wall.

Rand, though admitting he may have said something erroneous, still understands C-indexing, and in his SEOmoz post today, points to some resources on term vectors, on-topic analysis and the mysterious and anal world of keyword density. Go there now, and read it all in the privacy of your own home or office cube, where nobody is watching to see if you really know what the heck all this stuff means.

I won't tell.

One of the members on SEW forums reported about an incident with his Adwords campaign not running overnight. The whole campaign would go down while his competitors where still up. He wanted to know apparently what might be causing it. Thought it might be interesting to report on why this is happening. According to the poster they run a large campaign, 30,000 keywords plus and can't find any reasons why it would drop overnight.

According to AussieWebmaster the problem could be:

...apparently the spend optimization looks at all potential terms and saves the spend level for those higher on the CTR/CPC chain as the day progresses unless your budget is considerably over the Estimator Tool suggestion... like double

The member webpundit, goes on that its his whole campaign and not just a few potential turns. Looks like this deserves as call to a Google representative.

Continued discussion at Search Engine Watch forums - Google Ads Not Showing At Night

Stolen content is a major issue, with RSS and people creating scripts to pull your content and dynamically publish it to blogs, the amount of splogs (blogs with stolen content) is incredible. But this is the funniest report of stolen content I have seen in a while. A WebmasterWorld thread reports that someone stole an individual's content and was too lazy to remove the Google AdSense code during the process.

The content owner contacted AdSense about this because he/she was afraid that there would be fraudulent clicks on the ads. And those fraudulent clicks would ban his AdSense account.

Friday we reported that the first YPN checks were sent. A thread at WebmasterWorld created yesterday was named Received first YPN payment today!

The YPN payment was postmarked October 13 from ZIP code 95054. I live in the SF Bay Area (California)

I guess since I am in New York, I should receive the payment tomorrow or the day after. I will report back Thursday, since I am out until then.

A Search Engine Watch Thread featured late last week, asks the question, Why Should a Business Outsource a PPC Campaign?

The reasons listed:

• A SEM firm has years of experience managing PPC campaigns.
  
• Automation. SEM firms have software to manage it (is that a good thing?)
  
• SEM firms can create targeted landing pages.
  
• SEM firms have sophisticated tracking capabilities and are able to specify which keywords are performing better.
  
• Many SEM companies have a wide range of marketing experience across many industries.
  
• Time...is it more economically feasible for them to employ a person in house to do this or outsource it?
  
• A dedicated consultant is more skilled at scanning the environment to determine if there are threats or trends that require incremental or fundamental strategy shifts.
  

Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Joseph Morin debuts his new blog with Danny Sullivan and Brett Tabke Embrace SPAM and posts this picture.

Funny picture. It was taken from the WebmasterWorld London Conference.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I am not 100% sure if this is new or not, but it looks like a recent blog posting at the Inside AdWords blog under the title Advertising outside of the (text) box says it is new.

Whatever you decide, and we do suggest that you test and track your results, you can take advantage of both static and animated image ads. We accept image ads (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF), as well as Flash (.SWF), which is a new addition.

So now you can upload those annoying Flash banners to AdWords.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This Monday - Wednesday night, I am out again. Ben and the guest authors will do their best to feed you those outstanding forum threads.

I am leaving Monday, early morning, to visit the future-in-laws for the first time outside of New York. In regards to that site, I updated two pages, one is the story page to tell you how it actually went down and I added some information to the gift registry page as well, if your interested. This is also my first time in St. Louis, so it all should be fun. I am flying back Thursday early in the morning, so early morning updates here Thursday, may be delayed.

Due to that, I will do my best to post more today and possibly some on Sunday.

Thank you!

Jim Boykin hit it on the nail again with an excellent post about what he thinks Google's top 10 choices are for search results. I saw this yesterday and had a chance to chat about it last night, and figured it was definately something to point out. Of the top 10 results Google likes are ones we often are already familiar with, they are sites we strive our websites to be like, and if we have those listed we covet them.

The College Paper top 10 Listing (.edu’s). That .edu link that might not have much to do with the topic, but Google will serve you the best it can find from a college site.

The Government Paper top 10 listing (.gov’s). Again, might not have too much to do with the keyword phrase, but is best they can find from the government.

The site that has lots of edu’s and some .gov’s linking to it. Googles best guess as to who has the highest "trust rank".

A huge site’s subpage on your topic. It’s that sub page PR 0 or PR 2 page of a site that has 1,000,000+ pages, and the homepage is a PR8 - examples are Amazon, Yahoo directory page, shopping.com, etc.

The old page which hasn’t changed in 5 years. With a backlink history of slow and steady link growth.

Pages from sites that have historically held top positions, and change their content on the pages on a regular basis (Fresh newsy stuff).

New pages from old established sites (looks fresh) - they fade in and out of rankings.

Sub pages of old established sites that just got a bunch of backlinks which co incided with new content on that page. (looks like hot news).

The old sites that keeps updating and keep getting new links (the authority)

The spam site that won’t be around next month.

Do you think Arizona a nice place to put a GooglePlex? Do you care? :) Gary's detailed blog entry on the topic.

Join the forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums

Sorry for short post, need to run to a meeting...

At least that is what the cloaking genius, Fantomaster, says in a Search Engine Watch thread renamed to A Little Help Needed Regarding Cloaking.

The thread starts off with an SEO saying that his client is set on signing up with Fantomaster's products or services. However, the client feels that by deploying cloaking, you will rise to the top without any work or effort. That is not the case! Even Fantomaster himself said, in the thread;

So if that client of yours is so desperate indeed and truly believes that cloaking will solve all his problems, I'd positively advise him against going for it because he's obviously quite clueless regarding the SEO game in general. For as Mikkel and Ammon and so many others have already pointed out: it's about business - and it's about the correct use of tools.

The bottom-line is that when using cloaking it is important to understand why. You need to understand your short-term and long-term goals. A professional and experienced SEO will then be able to formulate an effective SEO strategy for you. It may be a mix breed between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO, or it may be one or the other.

More at the forum.

Every now and then the debate about search engines manually removing or tweaking search results due to the topic being sensitive in nature. The last one we had, that I blogged on was Hate Sites Ranks # 1 for "Jew" which Google would not do anything about, besides for placing a Google Ad at the top with an explanation that is still running today.

This week, an article from Guardian Unlimited named Clampdown on chatrooms after two strangers die in first internet death pact reads;

Talks are taking place with a number of service providers, including Yahoo! and AOL, and search engine companies, in an attempt to reprioritise the results that are thrown up during a trawl on the internet. "When somebody keys in 'suicide' and 'UK', we would like them to be offered a link to the Samaritans long before they find a website showing them what they can do with a car exhaust and a hosepipe," one official said.

Of course, something like this makes its way to the search forums and blogs. The discussion is pretty interesting, join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and ThreadWatch.

Ben reported yesterday that Rotating YPN and Adsense can be a bad idea. Since then, we have learned that the irrelevant ads shown in those cases, are actually done on purpose. YahooSarah replies at the DigitalPoint thread saying;

The ads he mentioned are not PSAs but are “Run of network” ads, which we call RON ads. RON ads are more generic, category based ads (typically financial services) and publishers do get paid for RON ads. We serve RON ads when a publisher first signs up until we have had a chance to crawl or when the crawler finds sensitive content.

Run of network ads, nice terms.

As JenSense reports while I was away, Yahoo Publisher Network checks being sent this week. I noticed my account balance has depleted, but the checks screen shows nothing in that window - hence, still in beta. However, many others at WebmasterWorld forums noticed the total balance screen dropping as well for them. It is good to be in company. This probably is directly related to the payments being sent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

I will let you know when/if I receive the check.

There are two search related conferences coming up this November, that I am aware of.

(1) High Rankings Seminar, November 3 - 4 at the Philadelphia Crowne Plaza Valley Forge.

They are giving you guys a 25% discount if you use the discount code RUSTY.

More information at http://www.highrankings.com/seminar.

(2) WebmasterWorld Pub Conference, November 15 - 17 at Renaissance Las Vegas.

I will be speaking on bloging, I actually just got my prep notes, it looks like a good topic. I will also be covering this conference at the blog, under WebmasterWorld Las Vegas 2005.

More information at http://www.pubcon.com.

I saw it appear in Bloglines before I later discovered Danny Sullivan had covered it in Bloglines Announces Enhancements To Service. When I went to Bloglines, as I do about 29 times a day to check my feeds, I saw this:

So. Without bothering to memorize it, and not having a photogenic memory, plus in my normal rush, not really paying attention to the part where it states they will put the key at the bottom of the feed display (bad Kimmy!), I continued to look for interesting news and blog items.

This is when I realized I couldn't find the key or remember what it had said. I assumed they (the nice people at Bloglines) would put the short cut keys somewhere handy. The first page I checked was my SearchBrains feed. There were 69 results, which meant I had to scroll or page down a few times to get to the bottom where that danged hot key reminder thingy was stuck. Like I'm going to scroll....

A better illustration is what happened when I tested the new hotkey system to view Rand's Seomoz.org feed.

Here, you can see that if you got to this point, at the end of a long page of results, there's not a whole heck of a lot of need for "J', which lets you read the next article. But, as long as you're here, you can use the little "K'" to shoot back up or "S" to get to your next subscribed feed. Nice, for those who don't or can't use a mouse. I couldn't get the "A" to do anything, which totally violates the "Don't Make Me Think or Worse, Make Me Feel Like An Idiot" rule.

I like it. I just wish the key to the keys was placed at the top and the bottom, for those of us who have no memory or aren't inclined to pay attention in class.

Kim's note: This blog entry was dutifully supplied as per Barry's request since he took off for the day. It's not about search engines or SEO/SEM, since my "beat" is usually the usability stuff. For the 99.5 % of you that came here looking for search engine stuff meet Joe Searcher.

What are your thoughts on SEO?

Is that that new football league where the has beens go? I'm all for more sports. Anything that reduces the percentage of home improvement shows on air is great in my book.

On this blog, you might know that YPN and Google Adsense ads are rotated at random between visits/pageviews. Barry has been actively testing what works better YPN/Adsense for the past couple months. His conclusions where that YPN clicks do slightly better then Adsense and earning are higher on YPN.

I came across a blog post and thread on Digitalpoint about how someone is saying rotating YPN and Adsense actually is doing harm to your campaigns because the YPN bot is having trouble matching ads with the content of the site. People are getting what Yahoo calls Public Service Announcements (PSA) ads such as Vonage.com, Lendingtree.com, and so on.

Tim Light from Timlight.com mentions in his blog that"

So the next logical question was why am I getting PSAs on YPN? After having a few of the YPN engineers look at my site they figured out the reason it was getting PSAs was because I was rotating pageviews between YPN ads and AdSense ads. Basically the YPN bot that crawls pages to determine the content was getting confused because the page content was constantly changing and the YPN ads were there one second and gone the next. So each time a YPN ad was displayed it triggered a new “content review” and PSAs would be displayed.

I didn’t buy this answer at first, however [YPN] suggested that rather than rotating AdSense and YPN ads by pageview that I rotate them by day or at least every few hours.

Long story short, rotating every couple hours, days or so on worked better and eliminated PSA ads.

Discuss more at Digitalpoint Forums

I admit this subject is a bit mundane, but a relevant topic nonetheless about some of the darker places a search result can serve. Sometimes too much information isn't always our best ally. Just this morning, I read a blog post about a how people were using Google to find ways to kill other people. Basically they were searching on Google for How-To's to quickly kill people effectively with tips from how to thrust a knife at someone or intimate combat tactics. It appears some people want Google to modify their algorithm in order to make less-harmful sites to show up in the top results.

A thread at SEW begins to discuss about this subject about how teenagers are discussing suicide in chatrooms and forming suicide pacts. An article on the Guardian mentions this and how the " UK Home Office is appealing to the leading search engines such as AOL (Google) etc to modify their algorithm so that when someone types in "suicide" they are shown the samaritans site long before they get results on suicide methods etc."

So the question is should search engine smanipulate results based on requests of governments?

My belief is that they should not and the reason is that kids will discuss this subject, look it up, form pacts and so on, one way or another. They are smarter than most people give them credit for. Government intervention is not the solution. It's not their job to police the search results. Not to say censorship doesn't have a place, it does, but not in every case. Ultimately though it will come down to what Google decides to do. Yahoo we know hand selects certain sites in some of the searches. Google has remained a cool "we do not modify results by hand" type statement for sometime, but could it charge? This isn't religious based disagreements or some silly lawsuit by a misguided company complaining about who is in the top 10 results, its people's lives we are talking about.

Threadwatch also has a debate on this subject as well. Mikkel mentions on the site that "The engines are already manipulating results based on European government requests". He also mentions Chinese government insistence on blocking certain results, blocking IP's and all sorts of stuff to censor information.

I could only find discussion at Search Engine Watch - SEW Blog - Threadwatch

Thought this was a funny and entertaining thread on WMW about ranking in the number 1 spot in Google. Seems some urban myths abound with doing so well in the search engines. One of the WMW members starts off the thread with:

Google Penalizes for being #1! Yes, it's true! Once you are in the #1 Position google WILL NOT let you get any higher, but WILL allow you fall - often drastically!

Okay before you believe the SEO wisdom of the day post, understand that being #1 in Google doesn't carrying booby traps or red herrings in place to drop the site as soon as it gets there. Its most likely regular changes to the algo that cause a site to flucuate. But... its hard to say for sure. Discuss it at WMW.

For a lighthearted thread today check out Penalized for #1 on WMW

For what it is worth, there has been some quiet threads plugging away this week discussing a possible Google update that is going on. Many are watching some of the datacenters closely. SEOchat has the biggest thread and people are analyzing what is happening during this particular update. Many are either seeing their rankings drop or no change whatsoever. Some members are thinking it has something to do with devaluing reciprocal linking and others think its another reason to believe PageRank is dead.

An interesting concept that is arising from some of this is the possibility that many of the members of a single forum often trade links with each other and because of this reporting on Google updates is really not very reliable. Its a tad unbiased don't you think. Naturally forum members who all trade links with each other may be more receptive to possible negative consequences a Google update have or maybe they don't. Members exchanging links on forums is common practice, but I dont' think anyone has asked what the critical mass would be for such thing. Can you imagine all the members participating in link programs such as Link Vault and Digitalpoint Co-op? Reciprical linking? Good number of people I imagine. What happened if they all disappeared overnight? We know Google knows about these programs, and people have gotten penalized for use of such programs in the past. My point is while you can use these programs successfully, tread carefully and "diversify" you link building activity.

Continued discussion at SEOchat & Digitalpoint

Google and Comcast are reported to be exploring a possible deal in which they own a minority stake in AOL. Microsoft has already been talking to AOL, so this pits the two giants squarely against each other. Whoever ends up buying will get a healthy chunk of distribution for their search, CPC and service platforms, so this will be interesting to watch. Read more at Reuters.

Looks like Google is taking their AdWords site targeting system (CPM ads) to the next level. Not only can you target a specific site, but now you can target a section within the site as shown over on the AdWords Blog. I figured it was coming at some point, since I see CPM ads on parts of digitalpoint.com that have nothing to do with what they are targeting.

Some discussion here.

Quick note that I am offline tomorrow, October 13th. Ben and the guest authors should be contributing throughout the day.

About a month ago, we received word of Google sending warnings to sites that are crossing the line, in terms of SEO. A new WebmasterWorld thread named Email from Google: You are being removed not only discusses the warning but also that Google tells you, sorry guy, but your out of here. It is probably the same email as discussed earlier but here is a three page current thread at WebmasterWorld on the topic.

Based on an Ask Jeeves blog posting named Deep Thoughts at Web 2.0, where Jim Lanzone writes up some detailed figures on Bloglines and its subscriber base.

Adrian at Cre8asite posted a thread summarizing some of those stats;

In Bloglines they have a pretty decent 1.3 million feeds with at least subscriber. I guess that says as much about Bloglines popularity as much anything, it owuld be interesting to compare that with similar stats from other RSS Reader services. But considering how many blogs there are meant to be, let alone all the other types of site now using feeds for news and things, that seems a relatively low number. And Jim says in the post, they kind of thought, is that all?

And then to show that less than 40,000 feeds had more than 20 subscribers shows the drop off in usage. That's less than 3% of the feeds with at least 1 subscriber also having more than 20.

I also thought the 'Search Index' section was quite interesting. Despite having billions of indexed pages, 6million cover half of all clicked on results. And looking at the graph, 250million cover 90%.

Makes for some good RSS/Blog/Bloglines discussion.

Cre8asite has a thread named Google Tooth, with a thread title like that, of course I click. The thread leads me to a blog at http://googletooth.blogspot.com/, where this entry explains what the blog is about.

I'm Google's first full-time on-site dentist. I just started a few weeks ago and am just catching my breath long enough to start this online diary, because everyone also asks me about my blog. They usually ask it when their mouth's full of cotton, so it took me a while to know what they were talking about.

He said that "they put up a sign, "Google Tooth (Beta)" with my own logo; I think the Beta is an inside joke." You can even see the Google Tooth Office Photo, this dentist may be the coolest dentist out there.

This may be one of the most exciting blogs out there, so I am subscribing to it.

Excellent find Cre8asite members!

Gary has found some speculative evidence that Google Wallet or Some Other Google Payment System Getting Closer to Reality. He told me he isn't sure but he rarely blogs about rumors, so why not (cool guy).

In the past week, Google has made a few chages/additions/adjustments to their Robots.txt file disallowing specific directories (content they don't want others to crawl) from being crawled.

Let's Review

Last week Google disallowed the crawling of a directory named /purchases.

In the past day, Google disallowed the crawling of the /gwt/ directory. GWT sounds sort of like Google Wallet.

Now, later he added three new postscripts;

• http://purchases.google.com redirects to: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sierra. Dirson calls "Sierra" the "service name." I also noted that purchase.google.com redirects to the Google home page.
  
• Google Rumors took our post and did some more digging and has a bit more.
  
• Remember, I said all of this was speculation. I knew when I posted the item I would hear from a bunch of you. I was right. One reader shares that the "/gwt/" directory has existed for some time and involves Google's mobile services. Any page that's reformatted for a mobile device eminates from the /gwt/directory. What must have happened today is that Google added /gwt/ to its do not crawl list. Oh well, there goes that idea. Thanks to B.O.B for the tip.

Got to love it, so this should make for a good forum thread. I started one at Search Engine Watch Forums last night.

Back on August 20, 2005 many were trying to figure out What is Google Planing For Google.org? Well the mystery of Google.org is no longer.

Last night Google blogged About Google.org, describing;

We established the Google Foundation, funded it with $90 million and have made a few initial commitments. We've contributed $5 million to support Acumen Fund, a non-profit venture fund that invests in market-based solutions to global poverty. Acumen Fund supports entrepreneurial approaches to delivering affordable goods and services for the 4 billion people in the world who live on less than $4 a day.

We’re also working with TechnoServe to build small businesses that create jobs and promote economic growth in the developing world. With TechnoServe, we are funding an entrepreneurship development program in Ghana that includes a business plan competition and seed capital for the winners to build their businesses.

In addition, we are working with Alix Zwane and Edward Miguel of UC Berkeley and Michael Kremer of Harvard University to support research in western Kenya to identify ways to prevent child deaths caused by poor water quality.

Google.org also includes projects we manage on our own, using Google talent, technology and other resources. An example is the Google Grants program, which gives free advertising to selected nonprofits. To date, Google Grants has donated $33 million in advertising to more than 850 nonprofit organizations in 10 countries.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search Engine Watch has the ultimate coverage on this, both Danny, Chris and Gary all have blog entries on the way Yahoo! integrated blog results within the news search engine.

Chris Sherman writes Yahoo Integrates News, Blogs & Flickr Search Results

Danny Sullivan writes Thoughts On & Playing With Yahoo's Blog Search.

Gary Price writes Yahoo Should Let News Search Users Know What a Blog Is; Search Only Blogs From Yahoo News/Blog Integration.

Basically, if you do a news search, for example, on wedding via ask jeeves, on the right hand side, you will find "BLOGS BETA", with blog results followed by a link to More Blog results...

It looks a like the following, but Gary doesn't like the fact they name it blog, and leave it at that. Many news readers might not know what blog means.

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Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An excellent post was made at WebmasterWorld under the title of YP Category Usage Percentages by a member named inbound. I am going to quote the whole post right here.

I just completed some research based on a variety of industry data, here are my rough figures for overall offline YP category use. It should not be a shock to many of you but I thought it might help some people in search of general data. Take your pick on the number of lookups, 15 Billion seems a nice round figure for the year. % - Category

15.6 - Health
14.2 - Food
13.8 - Automobiles
10.2 - Shopping (Consumer)
7.1 - Construction
4.2 - Supplies (Business)
3.6 - Finance & Insurance
3.5 - Home & Garden
3.4 - Professionals
3.2 - Entertainment
2.9 - Travel
2.5 - Beauty
2.2 - Pets
1.9 - Government
1.8 - Education
1.5 - Repairs
1.4 - Transport & Haulage
1.1 - Property & Real Estate
1.0 - Utilities & Fuel
1.0 - Domestic Cleaning
0.7 - Business Services
0.6 - Media
0.5 - Communication
0.4 - Weddings
0.4 - Motorcycles
0.4 - Employment
0.3 - Boats
0.3 - Agriculture
0.3 - Small Package Delivery

Moderator of that forum, Chicago, then posted some other resources, including "Top Ten" Category Searches in Print and Internet Yellow Pages Reveal What Consumers Want (PDF) by the Yellow Pages Association.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Beware of this sketchy eBay offering from the seller ourproductdotnet. This character is selling guaranteed AdSense revenue. For example, the Adsense Website $20 a day guranteed tell me your URL (not how "guranteed" is spelled wrong) guarantees you make at least $20 per day, if you spend $199 with him. Basically, you send him the URL, and he sends you the traffic. Seems a bit sketchy to me.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A suspicious thread is over at WebmasterWorld named Google Credit Card Copies Request where a member says Google sent him the following email.

Photocopy the front and back of the credit/debit card you used to set up your account. For security purposes, please black out the first 12 digits of your card number, leaving only the last 4 digits visible.

Fax it to the number ......... or send a scaned copy in an email.

The AdWords customer called Google to verify, which was smart and they told him that "it was legit but that the department requesting the copies did not have phone service capabilities to talk to me personally."

Why doesn't the billing department have "phone service capabilities"? And why does Google need those photocopies? And what about virtual credit card numbers?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan has the write up at the SEW blog on Yahoo Gains Podcast Directory. Basically Yahoo! launched a directory and search engine for podcasts at http://podcasts.yahoo.com/.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two cartoons taking nice shots at Google sprung up at a Search Engine Watch thread named Cartoon Editorial Jabs at Google Becoming Popular.

The first was posted by moderator, AussieWebmaster, where he linked to a NY Times Editorial Cartoon (archived) which shows not only tabs, but very thought provoking tabs. :) Some tabs include; "satellite photos of people you want to spy on," "medical records," and "your future."

The next cartoon was posted by Gary Price in the thread and at SEW blog under the title Unofficial South Park Characters Take Aim At Google. It is a must see, so check it out at http://www.googlebastards.com/.

Most companies, SEO or Web development, have had to deal with a client requesting that they give a 3rd party SEO company FTP access to their site. Basically, a client registers a new .com, that list is used by dozens (if not hundreds) of companies to pitch different online services. The client gets a phone call or email from an SEO firm, promising outstanding rankings. The client wants to go with the SEO firm but the SEO firm needs FTP access. You as the person who manages the site, as the person who has the keys to the site, are you willing to give this seo company access?

That is the topic of a thread at HighRankings forum named Seo "expert" Hired By Client -do I Give Ftp Acces, What do others do.

Let me tell you what I would do.

(1) Research this SEO company and if everything seems good on the outside...
(2) Schedule a conference call with the SEO company and the client.
(3) Then explain the pros and cons of using this SEO firm, if the client wants to proceed with the SEO firm
(4) Set up a plan for the SEO firm to work off of a development environment, so all changes can be first reviewed by me. (This can be as easy as having the SEO firm write up a list of changes or setting up a versioning system to track changes).
(5) Review changes and make suggestions to client, with client approval...
(6) Upload changes.

If the SEO firm demands full FTP access, I would tell the client to host the site on some other server (especially if it is a shared box).

Did you ever let a site expire and lay dormant for a while? Then come back to it later, to set up a new site on the domain name? If you have, you may have noticed that those types of sites, stay dormant within the SERPs even longer then what you may have expected.

A thread at Cre8asite Forums named Google Cache Other Website, Instead Of Mine tells the story of just that. Webmaster lets site expire, then puts new site up at the domain name, but the cache of the site still has the old version. Apparently, the spiders have not revisited the site in a while.

Search engines have a repository of expired domain names. Or at least I was inferred this information by a search engine representative. If a domain expires, it goes into that bucket and is checked less often for any update. Of course we know about sites that are not updated often, are spidered less frequently. Same with expired sites. So give the site more content, give the site more links and give the site more time and it will be revived in the search engines again.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Does Yahoo Change Your Ad Copy? discusses a annoyance some advertisers are having with YSM (Yahoo! Search Marketing). Basically, the advertiser creates, what they think, creative ad copy and Yahoo! changes the copy without letting the advertiser know. Then Yahoo makes those ads live, without notification of ad copy change to the advertiser.

The thread creator reports;

A couple of day ago I saw this listing suddenly had a completely different ad-copy from what I originally wrote! It had generated double the clicks I used to have for about 3 days, so it costs me some money. But when I checked my sales for that listing, there were ZERO conversions. The new ad-copy, from wich I have no idea how it got there, was a complete mismatch with my landingpage. So whoever added that stupid ad-copy ows me 50 bucks!

An other member reports;

I took a look and Overture has changed the wording in a number of my listings. Often the meaning is changed, sometimes the new sentences are not even gramatical.

But the shocker is a response one advertiser received from a Yahoo! representative. When the advertiser asked the editor not to change the ad copy, he received a response with something of the effect of... "So they just said if you don't want the content changed, let them know and they will just decline the listing next time." I doubt this was quoted, but that is how the advertiser, obviously, took the message.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Gary blogged on the Sergey Brin: The Video Lecture the other day. Basically, Professor Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley had a class featuring presentations by some of the top people in search, including Battelle, Pedersen, Norvig, Dumais, Horowitz and MANY others. Sergey was up next and his 40 minute presentation is archived in RealVideo.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Members at both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums reported that the YPN login system failed for over the weekend. The first report came via DigitalPoint Forums on Oct 7th 2005 at 10:37 pm (EST). The following morning, at 5:53 am, the first report marked YPN login back.

No forum thread on this one, but I thought most of you would love to read an interview with Matt Cutts, a well-known Google engineer in the SEO world. It is a must read; one quote;

Personally, I have a theory that some spammers want everyone practicing solid, common-sense SEO to believe that they're spamming, or that everyone is a black hat. To me, that fails at first blush; was I a spammer for changing the word "howto" on a page to "how to," because more people type it the second way? Of course not.

Loyal fans of SERoundtable are aware that topics branch off into fields related to search engines, SEO forums, search engine optimization and marketing. You can see what Barry and his guest authors cover by viewing the Categories on this page, where blog posts are conveniently categorized. There’s a good reason for the broad scope.

While working as an SEO in the middle 1990’s, it wasn’t until I started testing web-based applications that I realized people trying to use web sites were pulling their hair out trying to. Add to that clients raving about great rank, but puzzled why their investment in SEO wasn’t resulting in sales despite increased traffic. I became interested in learning more about this.

Enter usability, or really, what’s known as human factors. If you feel that people matter more than bots, things suddenly, get interesting. There’s cause for more discussion than just how to link and where to stick keywords. Somebody wants to do something after finding the page or after clicking a link.

They want to understand what you want them to understand, and you have to understand how to guide them.

Take a gander at Rand Fishkin’s new Search Engine Ranking Factors article that’s getting kudos around the SEO/SEM industry.

Continue reading "We Are All Relatives. Even You, the Search Engine Marketing Professional"

Google just made an RSS reader... Google Reader seems to be some sort of RSS reader. It has a very unique interface and its pretty cool.

You basically type in the content or site you are looking for and then subscribe to it. It will update its news via RSS, like all the other popular RSS readers. Google has a tour at http://www.google.com/reader/things/tour and the Google Reader FAQs.

Very cool user interface...

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Discussion taking place at Cre8asite Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Update: Just located the press release at Googles Press Center which says, "Today Google announced a web-based feed reader called Google Reader at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco." And Chris Sherman just blogged it and we are expecting comments from Gary Price shortly. Google Blog entry posted as well, just now.

I moderate at several forums, and making it easier to move threads is something at the top of my wish list. Basically, part of a moderators role is to make sure that members place the right threads in the right forums. Shawn at DigitalPoint used the AJAX support in vB 3.5 to increase moderation efficiencies. For demonstration purposes, I have made a quick MPG video of me dragging a thread in the Google forum to the Domain Names Forum.

A cool new feature from a cool SEM forum. Probably only interesting towards administrators and moderators, but cool stuff nevertheless.

You have a friend who runs a popular Internet Café overseas (or locally). Your friend offers you a great deal on making your site (blog with AdSense on it) the default homepage of a select number of the PCs located in the Internet Café. You think, wow, what a great way to get more exposure to my blog and increase AdSense revenue. But then you think again.

That is the topic of a thread at WebmasterWorld named Internet Café. The members reply to the user's story with some very good and sound advice. Imagine Google seeing impressions each day from the same IP range, lots of impressions, lots of clicks - it should and probably will, raise a red flag. An other member tells his experience using WebmasterWorld.com while at an Internet Café.

This year, I was on vacation in Italy. When I visited webmasterworld.com from the internet cafe, I received an error message, that I have to log in, because of abuse from this IP address.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Phew, that was a hard title to come up with and I am still unsure if it properly represents the latest patent application that has been filed by Google named Selectively delivering advertisements based at least in part on trademark issues. Based on the abstract;

A system and method for selectively delivering legal information communications for documents (e.g., advertisements). An input is received, wherein the input is a document delivery-triggering event operative to cause a document to be delivered to a user. A location associated with the input is identified. Based at least in part on the location, it is determined whether to provide a legal information communication. A document is delivered based at least in part on the input, wherein the document is delivered with a legal information communication if the location is determined to be in a legal information communication jurisdiction.

It seems like they are going to be offering those with trademarks to submit electronically proof of trademark infringement. The system will automatically do its best to verify the documents submitted and process ads based on that data. I am not about to read the whole patent application now, but it can just add to both of our light weekend reading.

Bill at Cre8asite forum has the thread on this, which he named Trademarks and Google Ads (a much simpler title, but it says a lot). He explains that the patent application provides "a technical framework for considering trademark issues when serving advertisements." He adds;

One aspect of it would serve a legal disclaimer in some jurisdictions to limit consumer confusion. In other jurisdictions, it may not serve an advertisement at all based upon the laws of that region. The document provides thoughtful technical framework for handling trademarks in ads.

Msgraph, known for his postings of complex patent applications, posted two new threads at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The first I want to share with you is one that might make you cringe. The thread is titled, Patent App For Behavioral Monitoring Desktop Application. Msgraph explains that this is really scary stuff;

Imagine all of your actions being constantly monitored in order to build personalized search queries. Those last words you typed in a Word document or IM window. The e-mail you just sent. What words your cursor is next to. The text you copied to the clipboard. All of it constantly monitored and processed, in real-time, locally and/or using Google's search engine in order to build search results for you in case you need them at a moment's notice.

Little brother. :)

The next thread msgraph started is on Gmail patent application requests, he titled the thread GMail Patent Application Bundle. It is a bundle of patent applications, because he linked to six different applications in that one thread. Here they are;

• Providing snippets relevant to a search query in a conversation-based email system
• Displaying conversation views in a conversation-based email system
• Identifying messages relevant to a search query in a conversation-based email system
• Processing messages in a conversation-based email system
• Email conversation management system
• Rendering content-targeted ads with e-mail

There is your light weekend reading for you.

Reported over at Search Engine Watch Forums, AdWords Now Allows Targeting Ads To Sections Of A Site. That is right, and I am not sure why I haven't seen this before today. I mean, yesterday the InsideAdWords blogged about 25 cent CPMs for Site Targeting but no mention of such accuracy within site targeting. The Google Help section explains What are site sections?

Site targeting places your ads on individual sites in the Google content network. Site sections take that one step further by placing your ads on only one section or even one page of a site. If you sell football shoes, for instance, you might choose to advertise only on the sports section of a news site rather than placing ads across the entire site.

Select a site section by entering its URL in the AdWords site tool or in the 'Edit Sites and CPM' section of your account. If the full site is example.com, the section URL will take the form example.com/section. You may target individual pages by using the form example.com/section/page. Refer to the URL of the actual site to see how its sections are named.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Rand Fishkin does it again by releasing his Search Engine Ranking Factors article.

This article contains a large list of the factors that can influence a web document's rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase. Although it is impossible to say for certain which of these items affects which search engine or how important the factors are individually, I've created an estimated ranking importance scale as indicated by the following symbols (based on my personal opinions):

The list, 5.0 is the highest a factor can get:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.31
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

Danny has some reservations about it, "There were some factors I didn't think were well explained or unclear on how to vote. But the good news is that what emerged is an excellent starting list of factors for anyone to consider." Those that helped with this list include members at the SEO Chat Forum Thread, Danny Sullivan, Dan Thies, EGOL, Graywolf, Jill Whalen, Donna Fontenot, Michael Martinez, Bill Slawski, Ammon Johns, Scottie Claiborne, 2K, and Todd Malicoat.

Post forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, good job Rand!

Oilman, well known in the forums, blogged that MSN adCenter Pilot Program is sending out email invites to locate qualified participants in the MSN adCenter Pilot Program. He quotes the email in his blog entry, which I will re-quote here;

As you know, we launched MSN adCenter –our next generation advertising platform — in France and Singapore last month. This was an important first step to delivering our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a more meaningful way.

Now, as we prepare to launch the US pilot of MSN adCenter, we need your help in getting your friends and family to apply to participate in the self-service offering for small-to-medium businesses. This pilot represents a unique opportunity for small and medium businesses to be among the first to experience the more powerful tools and wide-ranging benefits of MSN adCenter. Our paid search offering will help advertisers:

- Learn by accessing comprehensive data to plan more strategic campaigns,
- Connect by using advanced demographics to target the right audience at the right place and time, and
- Refine by making meaningful changes on the fly with features for greater flexibility and control.

If you know a business-owner who would be interested in advertising their business on MSN Search, please forward this email to them and encourage them to apply to participate in the US Pilot by completing our online registration form at http://advertising.msn.com/adCenterPilot/89621.asp.

Please note that entry in the US pilot is by invitation only. We will select participants on a rolling basis from those you refer and who express interest. During the US pilot, MSN adCenter will be delivering text-based advertisements on up to 25 percent of MSN Search traffic; the remaining traffic will continue to be served through our partnership with Yahoo.

I hope that you will support this important initiative by sharing this information with your friends and family. We look forward to serving their advertising needs and gathering their valuable feedback on our products and services.

thanks,

Yusuf

An older WebmasterWorld thread came back to life with a confirmation about these invites at 12:13 pm (EST) today. I also posted a thread about this at Search Engine Watch Forums. Sign up at http://advertising.msn.com/searchadv/PilotForm.asp.

Google announced today Google Merges Local and Maps Products. Google explains that "users can visit http://local.google.com to find local search and mapping information in one place." Chris Sherman clarifies that (1) Google Maps North America is out of beta and (2) that http://maps.google.com/ still works. On WebmasterRadio.FM this morning, during the SearchCast, Danny Sullivan said he thinks this is an easier way for Google to monetize Google Local and Maps but he doesn't like the merger.

Forum discussion currently at WebmasterWorld.

Not a standard Web search update, but rather an update to the Google Images index has been reported at the forums. Adrian, Cre8asite Forum Admin, has been noticing an increase in Hits from Google Image search.

Other forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Two big news items while I was away. First is a DigitalPoint thread named Google Geeks Going for Gazillions which notes that Larry Page 33, and Sergey Brin 32 are moving up that Forbes Richest person list to the number 16 spot. They also note that they are the two youngest people in the list.

At WebmasterWorld, there is a featured thread named Google and Sun in Collaborative Effort which discusses the news;

Sun Microsystems and Google plan to announce a collaborative effort that some analysts speculate could elevate the profile of the OpenOffice.org and Java software packages.

Discuss it at WebmasterWorld.

Rarely do we talk about searching as an end user. A DigitalPoint thread started about two days ago named My Girlfriend's Guide To Good Results on Google shows just that. In fact, he claims to post his girlfriend's method of using a search engine. Guess what, she bypasses the first 4 search result pages and looks at the fifth page.

1. Type in Search 2. Click Search Button 3. Click on page 5

I assume this is a hack at SEOs and wanting their search engine rankings to be higher then their competitors. It may be a smart way of saying, Google is filled with spam and his girlfriend is smart enough to skip to page five to bypass the spam. Anyway, this is a unique method of saying this and I thought you may enjoy it.

JenSense reports that AdSense error means many publishers must wait until NEXT payment cycle for August earnings. This is the emails thousands of AdSense publishers received as a notification of the error on Google's part.

Hello, Due to an issue with our payment system, your most recent AdSense payment was mailed to an incorrect address. Our system pulled the payee name and address information from your Google AdWords account, rather than your AdSense account, when printing and mailing your check.

If you are unable to receive your payment at the address listed in your AdWords account, or if the payee name is incorrect,please respond to this email so that we may cancel this check. Your earnings will be credited back into your account and included in your next payment cycle. Once this process is
complete, you will see a 'Payment Canceled' line appear on your Payment History page.

If you are able to receive your payment at the alternate address, or if you have already contacted us about this issue, no action is required on your part.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Of course this upset many and you can let your aggravation out in the forums. One forum chatting about this now is at WebmasterWorld.

Ben already covered this, but I wanted to add some more names to it. Danny Sullivan started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named GoogleWashing, DupeWash, SourceWash -- Suggest Some Names! We all know about the duplicate content filters out there. We know some days its thinner then others, some days more inviting then others... But we have been all calling it some sort of duplicate content filter. Danny wants to name it. Some of the suggestions he and others offered include;

• GoogleWashing
• DupeWash
• SourceWash
• GoogleRinse
• GoogleCutt
• PageTanked
• DupeDump

But some others believe it does not deserve a name. Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

There are reports via Search Engine Watch Forums that Google is testing a ninth ad on the right hand side column. Supposedly, it is occurring very infrequently for the keyword phrase "childrens chat rooms" and others. I personally have been unable to verify this, but in the thread the poster copied and pasted the source code from Google.

Firstly, I would like to thank the guest authors for really doing a great job over the past two days here. You can expect the same thing several more times this month, due to my October schedule. So thank you and without it, I would be lost, when it comes to catching up.

I would also like to thank you for all your kind words with my engagement. I have turned back on the comment support and trackback support for that entry, if you wanted to comment, you can now.

I received an email from an X-Yahoo employee, stating that he actually proposed to his wife, via a search engine banner. So technically, it looks like I was not the first. But definitely the first via smart answers and a non-paid search method.

Anyway... back to forum coverage...

I wasn't sure this topic would be of interest but the more we got to checking out this search engine, the more curious we became.

The search engine is called RedZee . It's a topic over at Cre8asiteForums in What's a RedZee

A member asked:

"What's really puzzling me is the amount of referrals it's sending this site. It is a new site so I'm not expecting too much in the way of traffic just yet, but RedZee is the second highest referrer. That's the puzzle. Who uses it?"

Fans of the book, "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug may like this review of a recent workshop blogged by Jonathan Broome in Brainspill

In the entry, Don't Make Me Think: The Workshop, With Steve Krug - Notes and Opinions, he recaps some of the tips and design guidelines presented at the workshop. Topics include On Graphics/Colors, Working with Programmers, Forms, Layout, Graphics, Order and more.

If you haven't yet purchased the book, a second edition is now out with more chapters. It's a popular favorite web design book and one of the few that makes you laugh your head off while you're learning new stuff. (Why couldn't school be this way?) Broome comments on it:

"Get the 2nd edition of the book, by the way. Chapter 12’s "Help! My Boss Wants Me To ___." is worth it. I was asked (just the day before leaving for the trip, actually) to "add some pizzazz" via flash/music, and this chapter gives expert testimony to back up your natural "Ugh, do I have to?" reaction."

Gary Price, News Editor of Search Engine Watch, blogged today about a new game utilizing Google Earth. I looked at the directions and it seems not only fun, but a good way to get a handle on the features of the new Google Earth product. The instructions and information are available here, and you can play towards gaining entry into the "Expert Version." Yes, not surprisingly, there are AdSense ads on these pages. Help support the game creators and Google, all while having fun! :P

Sounds like a fun time for those of us who have it...I will tinker around with it and others are invited by Gary to share their thoughts at the SEW Forum thread about Google Earth: The Contest.

Danny Sullivan started a thread at SEW in response to a recent issue that has been brought to service. Back last week, Nick at Threadwatch reported on Matt Cutt's blog getting buried under Matt's home page with content created from other people who weren't so nice.

Nick called it hijacking, but Danny disagreed, and I happen to agree as well. Having worked with a bunch of these cases that last several years its not hijacking. Danny suggests coming up with a better name. Some possible suggestions:

GoogleWash - Your source page gets wiped out due to many other copies Google finds on other sites.

DupeWash -- the duplicate content filter causes the best pages from your OWN site to get lost. Usage: "I got dupewashed with that update." I'm not wedded to that term, just think we could use something less cryptic than "duplicate content filter."

SourceWash -- Related to DupeWash. It means the source material is washed out by all the duplicate content from across the web. You post, then 8 billion blogs repost what you had, then the source material gets wiped out.

Got a suggestion for a term? Continue discussion at SEW - Suggest Some Names!

Save Jeeves, so says a very concerned blogger! It appears one of the past employees of Ask are getting up in arms about the decision from Ask/IAC to sack the butler. He apparently has a following that is voicing their dismay at loosing him eventually. Over at the new createdSave Jeeves Blog, an unnamed anonymous person who says he is "a former Jeeves employee, who has put in many years of service to the butler, since the early heydays of the dotcom boom, to the darkest depths of looming bankruptcy, and the remarkable rebound" writes a long pointed article on why the Butler is so important to Jeeves.

He goes give evidence for the reasons for keeping the butler: "the sites most loyal users want Jeeves" "the other area in which Jeeves execs have been chronically short-sighted has been the value of Jeeves persona to kids." "he can't be replaced" "the butler is the most human face, the most welcoming character to greet the curious internet searcher." The probably the best yet argument I have heard yet is that Jeeves is just fun, why get rid of a bad thing?

You can decide for yourself what you think about Jeeves. For all the latest on the dedication to a search icon visit the Save Jeeves Blog

If you're an Adsense publisher, you can surely understand arran's point in this WebmasterWorld thread:

When considering the TOS surely you have to apply common sense?

Scenario : I want to change my text color from 000000 to 000033.

Option 1.

Log into adsense, locate my template, make the color change, regenerate the code, copy it to my html.

Option 2.

Change 2 digits in my html.

Surely people with even basic knowledge of html are not choosing option 1.

I believe editing the code in any way does break the Adsense TOS. But in that case, I think about half of us have broken the TOS! Hopefully AdsenseAdvisor will speak up on the issue...

Looks like another follow the leader situation. Businessweek reported on Saturday about Yahoo annoucing a new blog search to come shortly. The search may be "cover only one aspect of blog or RSS search, and not the comprehensive release the search industry's waiting for." according to the article. I do hope it goes one for one with Google's blog search they released last month.

Could not find forum discussion on this, but check out Battellemedia or SEL for more discussion.

Thanks to Natasha "That Girl from Marketing" for offering insight into a new feature available for misspellers using Yahoo! Search in this thread at the Search Engine Watch Forum. She described misspelling the word “jewellery” (or “jewelry,” depending on your location –see thread for more) in the search, and not only did she receive a notice of a possible misspelling, but Yahoo! automatically changed the spelling in the search to what it felt was correct, and returned those results. I did a similar search and found the same correction.

Will this put to waste all that hard work stuffing META tags with misspellings that so many SEO’s have performed for clients? (FYI for those that don’t know me that was a joke.) It will be interesting to see if Google keeps its current style of offering a replacement search, or will also begin to substitute the “correct” spelling into the query. Currently, ask.com offers just a suggestion, and MSN offers no such suggestion or action, instead returning almost 700,00 results for my specific spelling faux-pas.

In the fast-paced, "maybe-I'll-breathe-tomorrow" world of Internet search technology, one old friend has returned. Towing along a familiar format of no-spam, no-flames discussion, Detlev Johnson has brought back what was once known as I-Search.

Today, he calls it the SearchReturn Digest. This free subscription publication arrives via email every Tuesday and Thursday. Contained within are topics that interest anyone involved with promoting web sites, search engines, web site development, and search engine optimization.

As it was in its earlier incarnation, SearchReturn's format offers a sane, intelligent, pleasant reading experience. Discussions are broken up into sections and each one has its own email address that allows subscribers to respond directly to a specific discussion topic.

Detlev also picks out news items and presents an opportunity to discuss them. This moderated list avoids the pitfalls of larger forums, such as endless threads, banter and personal attacks. In SearchReturn, as it was in I-Search, there's an air of professionalism and respect that has made the return of the digest a much-welcomed industry resource.

Still getting its toes wet, Archives are starting to be placed online. In today's issue there is discussion of a question posted by Debra Mastaler, where she asked "So, what motivates you to link to another site?" The answers may surprise you. And if not, who cares? You'll still feel good (and better informed) after reading them.

Business.com paid inclusion URL's in the search results get a closer look. SEW has a thread on some listings popping up in the Yahoo organic results originating from Business.com. The clicks appear to be routing through Business.com urls and there is a unique tracking code assigned once you click on the link. As Jeff Martin, a moderator at SEW explains he found since the last Yahoo update this past weekend, many business.com paid inclusions feeds were taking up some of the top spots above .gov's and .edu's in Yahoo. It would make sense to assume that something about those feeds is getting a boost to put them in the top position in the many serps and I can't say many would be happy about this either since it will cost advertisers. The particular site mentioned lost its previous rankings and they were replaced with the Business.com paid listings.

Now, Danny Sullivan explains that:

As for the ranking, paid inclusion URLs are given a quality score checkoff, and that can help with rankings. Some non-paid inclusion URLs are also given it, but that's more random. The checkoff for any site isn't a guarantee, but it can help. All the more reason why people may want to do paid inclusion at Yahoo -- or all the more reason Yahoo might want to elminated that, because of the trust issues involved.

Some words from the wise. Basically, if Business.com advertising is causing you to loose your rankings in Yahoo. Write, email, phone, or yell at Business.com and tell them to take your site out of the inclusion feeds it sends to Yahoo. By default, B.com will automatically put you site into a paid inclusion feed and inject it into Yahoo, thus causing your site to drop if it held natural rankings before hand.

Jeff goes onto explain that over the weekend the "business.com" 302 redirect urls in the serps have disappeared so it harder to identify, but they are still there. He also notes that while this may be something to consider for people that are not listed in Yahoo, he also notes that this will not be good for advertisers and their costs have gone up. For SiteMatch you might pay .10 a click, and in Business.com you are paying .65 a click. Good for them, bad for advertisers.

The big problem I see with some of this is the further encroachment of paid advertising links, feeds, and so on into the organic results. Why are Business.com feeds taking over previous rankings for a site in Yahoo? Are we approaching the point where a search engine no longer becomes a search engine, it become a search engine listing other search engines. Now how pointless is that? I think some of the time we often forget about what the web has to offer past the 10th result. To be honest I am not a fan of Yahoo search, and I can't see how these are helping relevancy or quality in the search results.

This SEW thread was pretty revealing and I think rather important.

Continue discussion on this at SEW - Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Seem Hijacked

The way that Google handles canonization has, frankly, angered some in the SEO community for quite some time. I guess we can call it dramatic irony that GoogleGuy's own blog seems to be having some canonical issues.

From a WebmasterWorld supporters thread:

To me it definetly looks like Matts site is on the verge of a Canonical url problem.

Ok - it depends on what datacenter you are accessing but if you do a domain.com search and a www.domain.com search Google now has these listed as seperate pages. Also on some DCs the domain.com search is now url only......

Also do a site:domain.com -www for Matts site.

We'll all have a good laugh if it gets hijacked. Meanwhile, I can't say this is a bad thing, especially if it prods Google to put more resources into solving this issue once and for all.

I frequent Jim Boykin's blog a couple times a week to see what kinda ramblings he happens to be going on about, but most importantly what new tools he has released. They come out with some of the handiest tools I have come across and I continually find myself using them to prove a point to a client or collect data for SEO work.
Today Jim released the Neat-O-Backlink tool, that allows you to check url's linking in and their corresponding link text they are using.

Check out the Webuildpages Neat-O-Backlink Tool

I remember the day welcoming ThreadWatch to the game, and I can't believe it has been a year already. Over the year, ThreadWatch went through its growing pains, trying to figure out its niche in the industry. Is it a blog? Is it a forum? To be honest, today I am still not sure if it is a blog or a forum. :)

But I think Danny got it right. He said, "Threadwatch to me has often been our tabloid newspaper." It is fun to read and at least once a day, makes me laugh.

Kudos to Nick Wilson for all the hard work he put into ThreadWatch. Join the celebration at the Threadwatch: 1yr Old Today, dare I say it, thread. :)

Jennifer from Search Engine guide wrote Companies Miss the Boat When Outsourcing Search Marketing, writing about an iProspect white-paper...

A new study released today by iProspect shows that while companies are moving toward outsourcing their search engine marketing efforts, many are failing to follow through on the very advice that they are paying for. 64% of companies that responded to iProspect said that they run into problems implementing the changes that are suggested by their search engine marketing firms. The most frequent reason given? Lack of human resources and lack of budget to actually make the changes.

Jill Whalen says that this is "no surprises there for anyone who's been in this biz awhile."

Forum discussion at High Rankings.

Google is trying it but many are against it some even willing to go to court to prevent it. But Yahoo! just announced the Open Content Alliance.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

Forum support and coverage at WebmasterWorld.

Disclaimer: I do not believe this is in accordance with Google's AdSense terms of service, be warned.

A thread at DigitalPoint Forums describes how you can realize a 500% Increase in revenue from Search. Basically what the AdSense publisher did was pre-populate a keyword within the Google Adsense search box.

Is this legal? Probably not, since you are not allowed to modify the AdSense code in any way.

Looks like an MSN Search update is currently taking place. At WebmasterWorld they are reporting that Msn SERPs Disappeared but over at Search Engine Watch Forums, they officially named the thread Oct. 2005 MSN Search Changes.

Other forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and SEO Chat Forums.

I just wanted to let all you know, that I am now engaged to be married to my beautiful girlfriend, Yisha.

Why am I posting this here, at a search blog? Well, because of the way I did it.

I proposed via Ask Jeeves. I brought Yisha to my office, ask her to search on her name. While she was doing that I kneeled behind her with the ring and flowers. She typed in her name into Ask Jeeves, full name, and up came a special Smart Answer (thanks to Jim Lanzone and team) with the proposal.

I don't have much time to explain it, so go to the idea page for more information.

Also try rustybrick engagement for some other smart searches.

Thanks again to Jim Lanzone, Scott Grieder, Steve Orr, Daniel Read, and the whole Ask Jeeves team!