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. "

Not sure if this will lure me away from Firefox and Opera, but anything that makes website development testing easy and convenient is worth a nod.

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."

So not to fear the great people over there are working hard to get it resolved. Offically Webmasterworld has been temporarily moved to SearchEngineWorld.com for the time being. It may even be back to normal by Thursday morning but I am not sure.

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