December 2005 Archives

We just wanted to wish you all a Happy New Years! From all of us at the Search Engine Roundtable, thank you for reading, thank you for commenting and thank you for creating that awesome 2005 community buzz in the forums. 2006 is going to be a real exciting year for the search engine industry and we are all very excited to bring that news to you first.

Besides for the logo, we fixed a few things that simply didn't work on this site:

• The internal search results pages now use the seroundtable design templates.
  
• The preview comments now works
  
• The error screens for comments now works
  
• One small error on the search page exists but that should be fixed soon
  
• Google Site Search links work globally now
  

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The best possible time for me for Google to do their maintenance is probably tonight at 11pm. But either way, it is not about me, its about the tons of publisher out there. The Inside AdSense blog reports Site maintenance this Friday calling for up to 6 hours of down time. Do not worry, the AdSense statistics and payments will not be affected by this.

Forum discussion both at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The first big SEO Content was Nigritude Ultramarine run by Search Guild back in April 2004, the winner was announced on June 7th, 2004. Recently, John Scott over at V7N forums announced his own SEO Content. What you win is simple; First Prize: $1,000; Second Prize: $500; Third ~ Fifth Places: $100 Each. But there is a catch;

Now I may be a nice, generous person, but I'm not giving away money for free. In order to qualify, the page must have a link back to the v7n home page. Participants who don't maintain a link to the v7n home page will be disqualified. (We are not specifying the type of link - that's entirely at your discretion.)

That catch ticked off the wrong person. WebGuerilla, Greg Boser, made his own challenge, Another SEO Contest where he offers the same but you only have to link to Matt Cutts blog to win, not Greg's and not V7N's forum;

So I’ve decided the best thing to do would be to match the offer. I’ll pay the same amount for top 5 positions as V7N. The only requirements to collect the cash will be:

A) Not linking to V7N

and

B) Posting a link to Matt’s blog without using the www. (the non-www version of Matt’s blog is only a PR4, so it needs a little help

He believes that this will "greatly benefit the SEO community by getting far more people to participate. And at the same time, we’ll be able to help out a good friend." I personally find this to be a great idea and just makes me love this SEM community so much more.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are two threads at WebmasterWorld in Yahoo! Publisher Network forum that discuss the same topic, they are named; YPN Testing Stretched Ads and the other is named Why do I get just one ad on my wide skyscraper.

First, Yahoo! Publisher Network has been doing this as far back as August 19th of this year. We have an entry on it with screen captures named YPN Randomizing Number of Ads.

The members in the threads are complaining about how Google increases the ad font of the ads when they use a less ads in the wide sky scraper banner. But I think that Google only does that for site targeted ads (I may be wrong and I'll ping JenSense to confirm) but I took some screen captures this morning of Google's non site targeted ads on this site and guess what? They look like YPN sized ads. See for yourself...

I believe the only time an ad fills the ad box is when its a site targeted ad. I can not bring up an example of an ad on my site at this time. But there are often examples of them on the homepage of the blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. :)

In Cre8asite fashion, the New Years logo is live now. We should have ours up in the next couple hours as well, but it won't be animated. Outstanding job.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

There is a nice new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named SEO Top 5 money investments. The member asks, "which you consider the top five SEO techniques for money investment?"

The first few responses accurately reply that it is almost impossible to say on a generic level, without seeing the site in hand. But if you had to give a general answer, what would you say?

Chris Boggs suggests that you should invest in the following five areas; (1) site structure, (2) content, (3) link building, (4) usability and finally (5) longevity. Well said. RCJordan (a SEM forum legend) writes that he always spends his time and money with "content management" (he can mean the framework or the content development or both). He then recommends buying some "near-bleeding-edge hardware" (trying to decode him), which may mean some black art magic. And finally he recommends, that folks spend money on traveling and attending search conferences.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Back in March I introduced you to an old RustyBrick developer who devised SEO Friendly Graphic Buttons. In that blog entry I linked to an article he wrote while with us named Graphical, SEO Friendly Buttons. Basically, it is a how to article on how to dynamically create graphical text with a header tag.

We now have a thread at our forums named H1 in a graphic where a member asks questions about if it is allowed and is it beneficial?

First, I see no reason why it would not be allowed. If you have a large content site with a sophisticated CMS sitting behind it and if you really want high end graphic headers, you would be crazy to have a graphic artist create a unique header for each page. This allows you to automate that with some code.

But where does it make sense? Matt, md_doc, an other guy who works at RustyBrick, discusses some of the issues with deploying this technology (oh, SEOJaimie is the one who wrote the article and he is in the thread discussion);

Just be careful about speed. I know the stuff that SEOJaimie wrote does cache the images but none the less if you are still stuck in the world of tables then your users will see a second or two lag time as that image is loaded and the page is rendered.

Matt goes on to suggest using CSS to rendered your Hx tags in the format you want. Basically, if you can get away with out using graphics on a site, especially dynamically generated ones, you can increase load time and decrease server resource requirements.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Two days ago dazzlindonna over at SEO Scoop wrote Update to Kooky Theory a year later where she explains a new theory she has. The theory basically stats that seasonal popularity is a factor in search rankings at Google and the other engines. She explains;

I have a handful of seasonal sites. These sites are ones that people generally don't go to unless the time is right - and of course the searches are seasonal too. The odd thing I've noticed is that when the season hits, and I start getting traffic to them (say, from yahoo and msn), my google rankings for those sites go up too. As soon as the season is over, the google rankings fall to barely nothing. The backlinks don't change appreciably during the season (maybe a handful more than usual). And yahoo and msn rankings don't fluctuate the same way. Only google. It almost feels like Google is using alexa traffic ranks in its algo. If a lot of people are going to a site, then let's rank it better. If no one is going to a site, then let's drop it. Now, I realize this is a kooky theory, and I'm sure it could be shot down in any number of ways, but for the last 3 holidays, I've seen this exact same pattern with Google. Of course, my non-holiday sites don't have such big spikes during the year, so I can't evaluate them the same way. Anyway, just thought I'd throw out the kooky theory for the day for everyone to poke holes in.

Now, she has seen this exact pattern happen again for this Christmas season. She uses a WebmasterWorld post (message # 138) has support. Seems like a nice theory to me.

Forum discussion at a new forum named SEO Refugee

About three months ago, Google announced an easy way to integrate AdSense into Blogger. Today, we get word from a DigitalPoint forum thread named Google is storing AdSense information on Blogger servers that Blogger is a bit slow.

Slow in the sense that even though AdSense made use of the new Google Accounts Integration, Blogger won't work with Google Accounts. Ok, so you can not use your Google Account ID to start a blogger account (I did not verify that), but when you plugin your AdSense information into Blogger, it won't work with the new Google Account ID, you have to enter in your old AdSense login information to integrate the two.

DigitalPoint says:

I didn't even know you could access your AdSense account from Blogger (although I couldn't log into it). The Blogger servers do seem to be out of sync with AdSense though. I tried logging in and I couldn't, so I tried my AdSense login from 4 or 5 months ago (before it was rolled into Google Accounts) and I was able to authenticate with my old (5 months old) AdSense login/password.

Crazy...Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This morning, and its still the morning, we talked about GERPs, well, later in the morning, I found a DigitalPoint thread that is named approx 41% of screen real estate is adwords now. Basically, he broke up his screen into segments, based on a screen resolution of 1280x1268;

1) Top sponsers listings, 1265x170 = 215,050
2) Side Sponser listings, 308x590 = 181,720
3) Actual Google Results, 958x593 = 568,094

Based on his computations, he comes up with 396,770 total ad space in pixels and 568,094 total organic space results in pixels. So about 59% organic pixel space and 41% ad pixel space. Based on what fit above the fold of the 1280x1268 resolution monitor. Also based on returning results with three ads at the top of the SERPs.

The forum members are debating if this is a good or bad thing. Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

JenSense reports that we got ourselves Malicious software that targets Google AdSense ads. She explains;

A new trojan horse discovered by an Indian publisher replaces Google AdSense ads with their own ads, advertising sites including dating, sex, viagra and weight loss. This trojan is very recent, because it not only converts regular AdSense ad units, but also the Google AdSense and Firefox referrer buttons into text links.

JenSense continues by saying that there was no reports of this affecting YPN ads. In addition, Techshout has pictures showing the very similar visual appears of these ads when compared to Google AdSense ads.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Remember Google Base, you know the way to get any data into Google and be searchable? Anyway, Danny is peeved about Google Base Switches To Force All Searchers Through Jump Pages. He wants the folks to go directly to the end page and not have to jump through hoops.

But what is also interesting is the subtle buzz that the community makes about this change. To the average folk it might not be a big deal. To Danny and others in the SEM community, it is. Yesterday Wail at SEW forums posted a new term I have not seen before (doesn't mean he invented it but I didn't see it before), the term is;

GERPs

Like SERPs, Search Engine Results Pages. GERPs stands for Google Engine Results Pages. Why does it deserve its own term? They "are different because they'll include oneBox content such as News, Shopping, stock exchange data, etc." Include Google Base and other items, the "search results", organic, natural, free listings are no longer seen by the searchers. They now see GERPs or GRPs. Google selected onebox results.

Google, can you have your cake and eat it too? Time will tell.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The big dog debate on the sandbox is still going on. And this is probably the first time I have seen Danny Sullivan specifically come out and say he has seen the sandbox-like results first hand. I believe he always felt it was true, but I do not believe I have ever heard him say he saw it with his own eyes. That all changed recently with a post he made in that thread at 04:34 PM on 12/28/05;

As it happens, I was at a friend's house yesterday who has a completely new site, only a month and a half old. He was wondering why another site was outranking him. I'm probably going to go into detail about what I found, but fair to say, there was a sandbox effect for everything I could see. If ranked for some terms but wouldn't rank for other ones that it absolutely, positively should have -- given the other terms it was doing well for.

Guys, this is what the sandbox is all about. A new site not ranking for keyword phrases that are easy to rank for. Simple basic optimization techniques or clean cut usability techniques would have normally brought this site within the top 10. But the sandbox doesn't allow that.

As always, forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums - Danny's post here.

This is a tad funny, the fact that Matt Cutts, who started a blog a couple months ago at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ has yet to post a robots.txt file for the spiders.

See http://www.mattcutts.com/robots.txt

I know he has yet to do a lot of things and will get around do it. But hey, I do not even have a robots.txt file for this site. It is obviously not that important if you do not mind spiders crawling your site and you do not care how they crawl it.

But for larger sites, it is always wise, this way you can optimize speed and resources to its max.

Forum discussion on Matt not using the robots.txt file at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Of course PageRank is overrated these days, but out of curiosity, how does the PageRank values distribute to other pages nowadays? A quick look at some PR values on some pages, you can quickly see it does not appear to be like it was two years ago. Shawn at DigitalPoint started a thread he named Internal Link Passes More PageRank Than External Link. In that thread he explains how he has page A, which has a PR 7, it links to page B and page C. Page B has only one link, and its from page A. Page C has many links, including one from page A. Now Page B, with only one link, from page A, has a PR 6. Page C with many links, including one from page A, has a PR 5. Does that make sense to you? Certainly, since both page B and C have a link from the same page, page A, page C (with more links) should have a higher PR then page B (with only one link, the same link page C has).

Let me quote Shawn's example:

For example:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/ is the only page that links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/faq.html

Check MSN: link:http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/faq.html
Check Yahoo link:http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/faq.html

So with a single link, that page is PageRank 6.

Now there is also a link to the support forum:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14

That URL is linked to from numerous other places as well, so at the very least it should have the same PageRank I would think... right?

Check MSN: link:http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14
Check Yahoo link:http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14

Instead, that page has a PageRank of 5.

I did not link to the pages, I don't want to kill the linkage data. :)

So what is up with PageRank these days? There are many theories in the thread. I personally do not know for sure, but I would bet the PageRank of the old works a bit differently then the PageRank of the new.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As one would imagine, the forum chatter is very very low this week.

I am trying to locate quality threads but so far, today, I can not find any new ones.

I'll keep looking.

If you know of any, please shot me an email at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

A forum thread in the YPN section of DigitalPoint Forums asks; Does Yahoo Publisher work for password-protected pages?

If the YPN or Google spiders can not fetch the page, then they can not understand what your content is about. I see it all the time. If a page requires password login, like test servers or private forums and so on, and the pages have AdSense or YPN ads on them, you will notice that they most likely do not serve up as that are contextually relevant to the page.

Google normally will serve up PSAs (Public Service Ads) and Yahoo! Publisher Network would most likely serve up RON (Run of Network Ads). It is possible they serve up ads based on the site's theme, but more often then not, I see that not to be the case.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Chris Sherman posted a Search Engine Watch article named 2005 in Review: The Best Search Engine Watch Forum Posts. He asked Elisabeth Osmeloski, the forum editor, to flag the most popular threads of 2005 and came up with the list. I wish every forum did that, I wish I did a roundup of the top 2005 threads at all forums, but that is a ton of work. Anyway, here is the list but I will link to both our coverage of the threads here and the forum thread.

• A thread named Keywords Co-occurrence and Semantic Connectivity which we posted a link to under the title of Orion, Dr. E. Garcia, SEW Forum Posts
• A thread named Major Google Changes: Latent Semantic Analysis which we posted a link to under our title of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) - Crawl into the Google Algorithm?
• A thread named How Long Does It Take For Search Engines To Remove Spam Sites? which we posted a link to under our title of Spam Reporting.

And more, visit the SEW Article for more information.

Very rarely will I publicly oust a particular piece software or spyware I think is rather bad. Most SEO tools are usually written to help people with their SEO projects and can provide some assistance in helping people acheive good rankings. I have never been bullish on the benefits of using SEO software but I do think it has some value for certain people.

For the last couple years I have had people email asking me whether or not I would review there SEO software and provide some feedback. I usually will provide some comments and test out the program. I install the software and test it out and then proceed to uninstall it after I am done. Someone contacted about a review for WeblinkSEO. I installed the program, tested it out, wasn't impressed, and that was the end of it. I forgot to uninstall it. After a period of a couple months, I found the program and have been through hell trying to uninstall the sucker. Basically it will not. It was coded by someone who didn't know what they were doing.

After closer inspection I found the little program has overwritten my environmental variables in Windows XP, including the system variables and values. This is critical stuff, software should not mess with it! Where there should have been "%SystemRoot%" and so on there was paths to the weblinkseo software in there. After deleting those, and fixing the paths. I tried to remove the program with Add and Remove Programs. No luck, it only asked me whether I wanted to delete it from the list. After that I found the folder in which it was installed, it took a couple attempts to uninstall the software and finally hard delete the left over junk the program left behind, I think I got it. Well so I thought, until I found the program was in my temp folder too. Delete. Success, no traces left.

So my warning, is to be very careful about the SEO programs you install. Its common to be suspious of any free software, but being that its SEO software you may not be aware of what it is actually installing and how difficult it can be to get off. SEO software will rarely if ever be the reason you obtained those high rankings in Google. There is no magic bullet and software that claims to be is just lying to you.

Update (11-20-06): The developer recently updated me on the status of WeblinkSEO and has stated the "software will no longer write to your system's environmental variables and the uninstaller will remove all traces of the software". They have made a good effort to fix any past problems with the software and I believe it should be okay to install the program and use it. They have also mentioned the software received a "major overhaul and [they have] added some new tools".

Honestly, I am a bit surprised that we won the Best Search Engine Community Blog : 2005 Search Blogs Awards. ThreadWatch, to me, seemed more of a community wide effort in the SEO world. But we do try our best to bring out what the SEM community is saying in a more editorial fashion, at this blog. It has always been our goal to find the community buzz and report it back to you, in a timely fashion.

Thank you all for voting for us. This public recognition is what keeps us going.

Update: Search Engine Journal announced the 2005 Best Search Engine News Blog; we came runner up to Search Engine Watch Blog, in second place. It is an honor to fall right behind Danny and Gary's outstanding Search Engine Watch Blog.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Brett Tabke posted a featured thread at WebmasterWorld named MSN and Yahoo In Talks? where he quotes an article named Microsoft eyeing deal to rival Google-AOL.

Microsoft may be cooking up a major internet partnership to rival Google's newly bolstered relationship with American Online (AOL), according to a blog posting by a Microsoft manager.

The blog entry that started all these rumors is named Whoa! A Major Player Looks To Take Google Down A Peg.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. There is actually a thread at WebmasterWorld on this topic from December 23rd.

A DigitalPoint forum thread asks AdSense publishers at what time of the day you earn most?? The thread has a poll, with the time grouped into four time segments; 00:00 - 06:00; 06:00 - 12:00; 12:00 - 18:00; 18:00 - 24:00. At the time of writing this, the poll results show that about 75% of the AdSense publishers, make a bulk of their income in the PM hours. With only 12 responses so far, join the thread and vote.

The "what ifs..." in life are ever so important. This is the first thread I have seen on the topic of, what if I get "hit by a bus"?

Basically, what the WebmasterWorld thread is asking, is what can you do to ensure the sites continue to run, the right people know how to maintain them and the checks keep coming in to your loved ones. One member has a three point check list;

1. URL's and login information for anything related to your sites. Be sure to include your domain registrar, hosting company, your control panels, databases and whatever else you might be using.
2. Info for any recurring fees such as site hosting and domain renewal with amounts, how paid, etc.
3. Definitely a will.

Hobbs in message # 7 writes his 4 point plan;

a) A file on my palm with all the login urls, usernames and passwords that I use in my daily work, as well as all the banking details. (a safe print out would not hurt too)
b) Plan to do a search around for a local company that manages web sites maintenance, update and content professionally, and I will make a list of the best ones I find and add it to my palm file. I am thinking that any company should not take more than 5% of the annual earnings to keep the server up and running, and another 15% for managing and updating the content would be very fair, another 5% for hosting , domain name and other misc. that leaves a 75% hands off net profit for my family which is not bad.
c) Don't forget to instruct your loved ones to immidiatley activate Payment holding.
d) The most important thing to do is to have a technically competent relative / friend that you can trust be in charge of the handover and details till things settle, the last thing you want for your loved ones after a (great terrible world changing catastrophic) loss is to put them through a technical and logistical learning curve.

Even one member left instructional videos on how to manage the AdSense programs, just in case.

The thread leaves open a question for the Google AdSense Advisor:

Please check out this issue for us and let us know, I really wouldn't wish for my family to have to re-apply for a new account, a simple suggestion is for Google to allow us to add a secondary name and email in case we cannot be reached.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at our forums named Penalty for metakeywords not being in the body asks the question;

If I have keywords in my META keyword tag and some of these words doesn't show up in the body anywhere, could I then get penalized for this by Yahoo?

Yahoo! will not ban you if you have keywords in your meta keywords tag that do not match the exact content on your page. I mean, if you have meta keywords that are totally off topic to the page, and someone reviews the page, it might raise a flag. But if you have a page on plasma TVs and you do not use the word "television" on the page copy, but you use TV and then in the meta keywords you decide to add "television", how can that be bad? Of course you may want to add any keywords that are important to you to the visible page copy, but if you don't, I don't think it will cause a penalty. You just won't rank that well for the keyword, since its not in your visible page copy.

Sometimes it is nice to touch on some of the basic SEO questions. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Let me start off by saying that I do not know exactly when Ask launched its French version of the engine. It might have been today, I do not see any press releases on it. But there is a brand new thread on the topic at Cre8asite forums named Ask in France where member Nadir points out the Ask logo on http://fr.ask.com/ does not have the "Jeeves" portion in the logo. It is not only Ask France, it is on Ask España launched a few months ago and also no "Jeeves" name on Ask.jp について. However, "Jeeves" is written out at http://uk.ask.com/ and all of them have the Jeeves character logo.

I wish I would have known if the Japan and Mexician versions had Jeeves written out when they launched. Anyway, it is a subtle thing to notice and it may be part of the Ask Jeeves transition to be known as just Ask.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

There is a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Future PR Fact or Fantasy??? One of the questions asked by the member was;

Many tools on the web claim to "predict" a site's future PR can this actually be done, is the info they provide true.Also I see that the info one tool provides contradicts that provided by another tool, which one do i trust.

I believe I was one of the first, if not the first, to come up with the Google PageRank Prediction Tool. I launched that tool on April 1st, 2005 - yes it was April fools day. To appease the SEM community, I added a line about the tool should be used for "entertainment purposes only." How do I come up with the future PR? I pull some historical data from different places, I won't say exactly what they are, and I either increase the current PageRank value of a page and or decrease it by a percentage factor.

So is it accurate? No way! It was an April fools joke. Sometimes it is right, and often it is wrong. But I still get emails, at least once per week, asking me questions about the tool or ways to help increase people's pagerank.

There are other tools that look at your PageRank at all the Google datacenters. They are not really future pagerank tools, they check your real time pagerank at these datacenters. If a "Google Dance" or PageRank update is taking place, it will show the current pagerank at that datacenter.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A few housekeeping tasks completed here at the blog.

• We updated the The Forums page with revised content, new forums and removal of some older forums.
• We removed the resources page, since I really didn't have time to update it ever. It will be completely removed from all navigational elements shortly, but the URL will remain up.

That is about it.

Suggestions or questions, please post them in the comments area here or in our forums at this thread or create a new one.

A ZDNet Blog entry named Google to start renting videos? shows how Google recently updated their terms and conditions for the Google Video Upload program, "and with it comes some insight into new features that Google may be preparing to launch for Google Video — including rentals."

Even more interesting, numerous mentions of "renting" is scattered throughout the new terms which suggests that they could be getting closer to providing pay-per-view or similar service — of course that would involve some sort of payment system in place (Google Purchases).

Media company? :) Where is Google going with this?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums. Where one member points out a search on dvd at Google.co.uk brings up Google as the number one organic result. Here is a screen capture from December 26, 2005 at 10:00AM (EST).

Search engine optimization overall strategies change over time. The individual tactics may be constant, but how much effort you put towards each constant changes. For example, 5 years ago it may have been about creating lots and lots of content. 2 years ago it was more about link exchanges and getting any link and a lot of them. In 2005 it was more about getting better quality links. In 2006, what will be the major force of gaining long term search rankings in the engines?

That is the topic of a new thread at Search Engine Watch forums named SEO/SEM Tactics For 2006. As you can see from the thread, much of the 2006 predicted effort is going to go towards user centric patterns. Most SEO/SEM companies are going to begin (if not already) applying their focus to creating a better user experience, improving user trust, increasing non search generated traffic to a site and keeping users on a site longer.

The thread is a nice one, so check it out at Search Engine Watch Forums.

To keep the momentum of John Battelle's Searchblog 2006 Search Predictions going, Danny started a new SEW thread. The thread is named, ummm, 2006 Search Predictions, where Danny asks the members, "What do you predict will happen in search in 2006?"

Some cute responses so far. Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Reports via WebmasterWorld that MSN Search is now using DMOZ descriptions in the SERPs. Honestly, I have no idea if this is new or not, but the folks in the thread seem to think it is new.

Check it out:
The Search Engine Roundtable's DMOZ listing:

The Search Engine Roundtable's MSN Search SERPs listing:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

More people hanging out with their families offline, means less Web traffic to your site. I know I spent a lot less time this weekend on the Internet then I normally do. Folks in this WebmasterWorld thread and this DigitalPoint thread are reporting as much as 80% less impressions on the 25th. However some are reporting no changes at all.

P.S. Slow day in the forums... I hope to pick out some select threads and then clean up the other pages on this site. More information to come...

If you go to http://beta.msn.com/ you will see a cleaner, slicker version of the MSN homepage. Not sure if it has been live for a while, probably has, but a new thread on the topic at WebmasterWorld.

Here are snapshots, you can click on them to enlarge. Notice on the new MSN Beta, if you go to it, you can "Add Content from MSN" to it. Now it doesn't look to pretty in my Apple Safari browser, but it is in beta.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask Jeeves released their top searches for the 2005 year yesterday. The details are in release but here at the "top 10 list of Ask Jeeves news searches"

1. President Bush 2. Iraq 3. Hurricane Katrina 4. Tsunami 5. Michael Jackson 6. Britney Spears 7. Natalee Holloway 8. American Idol 9. Xbox 360 10. Angelina Jolie

Danny also blogged about it at SEW Blog and I posted a forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Some really appreciative and happy Google AdSense publishers have started a couple threads wishing the AdSense team a happy holidays. One thread is named Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Google where we even have a little poem for AdSense;

To the Adsense Team
We would like to say
Thanks for your efforts
To help our sites pay.
You develop tools
To publish our wares
And earn revenue,
With generous shares.

You listen to us
Try out our ideas
So that lots of us
Can change our careers.

Some of us now live
A different life
Putting behind us
The '9 to 5' strife.

So, Merry Christmas
And Happy New Year
To all at Google
From all of us here.

An other WebmasterWorld thread asks the publishers to send Google emails, wishing them a happy holidays. That may be a bad idea, but to each his own.

Wonderful product you have there Google. Nice work and happy holidays!

Bill Slawski, over at Cre8asite Forums, tears deep inside how Google Suggest suggests terms for you, as you type them. Of course, we have the Google Suggest FAQ but that doesn't explain it how Bill does.

Bill believes that the terms suggested come from the following four criteria;
- Most Popular Searches
- Hot News Topics
- Recent Search Activity
- Most Used Cache Query

However, Bill then goes through the process of how he located and examined this new Google patent application named Anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine. Based on his finding and tests in that document, Bill concludes;

This very quick, and very rough search shows Google returning queries which are likely the most popular in terms of people searching for them, and in the instance of ryanair, a word that is very topical right now.

He also greatly expands on this at his blog entry he titled; Can Google Read Your Mind? Processing Predictive Queries.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Since we found out that Google would keep AOL as a syndication partner, rumors started spreading about the new revised relationship between Google and AOL. Some thought that Google would boost AOL's content in the SERPs and some also thought that Google would go the evil route and show graphical ads in the SERPs. Due to all of these rumors, Marissa Mayer (no relation to Tim Mayer of Yahoo!) headed over to the Google blog to talk a bit about the AOL announcement.

She basically squashes the rumor about graphic ads;

here will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

But she does admit that they will work with AOL to make the site and content more search engine friendly (didn't get too specific about the current issues but how can she). She also said that AOL has always been a part of Google's OneBox results and will continue to be.

Anyway, the forum discussion is at our forum under the title Google Clears Up AOL Rumors and Fears.

We wanted to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday! We deeply appreciate your dedication and loyalty to this blog. We hope you are happy with this past years insider coverage of the search industry. We truly strive to provide honest, unbiased information from those deeply rooted in the industry, before it hits the major news outlets. We hope to continue this and add a new level of reporting in 2006.

As a sign of gratitude, I am mailing a small present to the first 15 people who post in our Happy Holidays thread. Oh, if shipping isnt bad, I may ship overseas, but otherwise, I might not.

We also uploaded or special holiday logo for the season. I hope to keep this up, as often as the engines do it. It is fun.

Happy Holidays Everyone!!!

I was reading this disturbing thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums named AdSense For Domains Garbage Traffic. The thread shows how one AdWords advertiser that spent "20K+ dollars worth of garbage traffic that came as a result of parked domains and similar types of sites." He even notes that a "couple of the sites are porn related." Now now... I remembered that Danny wrote about this in the past, the past being only two days ago, under a blog entry he named Google AdSense For Domains Program Overdue For Reform.

Danny describes the AdSense for Domains program and shows how often, it leads to poor results for the advertiser and the end user, but great for Google and the publisher. Danny asks for the minimum;

At the very least, Google should make AdSense For Domains a program that really is independent of AdSense For Search and allow people to opt-out. It certainly should be pondering the mixed message of telling AdSense For Content people that they can't put ads on parked domains on the one hand yet running a massive program that does exactly that on the other.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, where they are on the topic of advertisers opting out of parkdomain (Google AdSense for Domains) program.

Normally Sandbox threads bore me these days. Mostly because people lack the understanding of what is truly meant by the Google Sandbox. As most experts say, people now use the "sandbox" as an excuse for why a particular site does not rank well. I have seen tons of examples of non-sandbox like issues with a site, where people put blame on the sandbox for its under-performance. But in this debate at Search Engine Watch Forums, DaveN kicked it off by saying;

Mike Grehan, said '...the sandbox doesn't exist...'. ... Nope that was me ... we where on the same panel ...

Well, that is all the thread needed. DaveN, in my opinion, jokingly suggests to push back the time stamp your pages. Then GoogleGuy challenges the people to "experiment" with that, but he feels that it won't make any difference (don't you just love that).

The fun starts when Mike Grehan joins the thread restating his disbelief for the Sandbox theory;

Yes I did say the sandbox doesn't exist Dave.

And I've said it at every session at every conference (dozens of them this year), since whichever "I don't understand marketing" nitwit came up with this half-baked theory about nothing, which never affects a well marketed business.

And I'll say it again... If your web site doesn't rank anywhere at all at a search engine - it's probably because it has no differentiating appeal or simply because it sucks.

What you actually need is called advertising and promotion and it has nothing to do with code of any kind, or subdomains or servers, or...

Here's a tip I'd like to pass on for Christmas. Don't read anymore of this thread or any others about this ridiculous notion of a sandbox.

Buy a good book on marketing instead.

Directly below Mike's response, we have Ian Mcanerin post a "conditional" I agree with Mike. Which then Danny Sullivan follows up on by putting things in perspective. The folks go back and forth a bit and then Marcia shakes it up a bit by indirectly questioning Mike and Ian. So I then pop in and outright argue with Mike for the first time in my life. Then Jill Whalen also argues with Mike;

I don't generally disagree with Mike either, but in this case, he's flat out wrong.

I believe this thread is just getting started on its third page right now. Mike has yet to come back and defend or clarify himself. I still expect it to be an enjoyable sandbox thread.

Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update, new thread split and cleaned up by Danny, named 2005 Year End Revisit: Is There A Google Sandbox?

The folks over at WebmasterRadio.FM hooked up a monthly show starting Tim Mayer & Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! It airs Wednesday nights, at 8pm (EST) monthly (I believe). Last night was the first showing, and you have to check the archives, the show should be live soon. Show description;

Tim Mayer and Jeremy Zawodny, presented by Yahoo! Search, are your hosts for a power hour surging with an exciting look at some of the Valleys newest and hottest companies! Tap in to interviews and commentary from people working behind the scenes… plus, Tim and Jeremy will light it up with the latest happenings in the online world… and details on their ongoing quest for world domination! This show airs the last Wednesday of each month...make sure you tune in.

Also, check out the powerful intro to the show.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The folks over at DigitalPoint forums reported that Google Images Has Updated on the 20th of this month. Over at WebmasterWorld they have a thread on the topic as far back as December 17th. So if you see an increase or drop in your referrers from Google Images; you know why.

You may seem them here, or some where else, the AdSense holiday themed ads are now live. Basically you will notice them, when you see a faint background image in the ad units. Almost all the Google blogs have an entry on it, but I will only link you to the AdSense Blog's entry Flair for your ad units which shows a picture of an AdSense unit that is popping up all over the place.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo! Publisher Network has been sending YPN beta publishers a YPN blanket fleece. It looks like this closed, when you open it, you will see a red fleece. Very nice gift for only being in beta. This is to compete with Google AdSense's Geek Kit which was also extremely nice.

YPN sent me a bit more, since I am one of the folks on their "Advisory Council" (whatever that means). They sent me a yahoo sports bag filled with all sorts of goodies, including; a very warm holiday card from the YPN team, that when you open the card it yodels at you (Yahoooooo!), which made me jump a bit, but is very funny. In addition, they had a ypn usb drive (128MB), a Yahoo thermos, a very nice yahoo lunch cooler and an outstanding Yahoo branded Fossil watch, in a yahoo branded Fossil watch case.

This was completely unnecessary, but very very appreciated.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Finally, Ask has begun to offer page translation for some languages. According to the Ask Jeeves blog entry last night named Word Up they are now offering page translation;

Page Translation is now available on Ask.com. Why haven't we had it in the past? Because we didn't have many foreign-language pages in our index. As we approach site launches in Europe next year, the index has taken on a more international flavor. Voila! We need a codebreaker for those who do not speak seven languages (like most of the folks on our international team). Look for the "Translate this page" link.

They are offering more things explained at the Ask Jeeves blog so check it out.

Also, I clicked on Translate this Page for angela merkel search and it allows me to "Save translated page to My Jeeves." Nice addition.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google came out with its annual Google Zeitgeist 2005. It basically shows the top keyword phrases for 2005 by category. Most search engines come out with this list, and the Search Engine Watch Blog has been posting them all. However, this one made it to the forums, hence the reporting of the Google Zeitgeist to you here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves all are sporting customized logos for the holiday season. When you go to Yahoo.com and click on the top center logo it takes you to http://events.yahoo.com/holiday05/. When you go to Google.com and click on the middle center logo it takes you to Google's first of many holiday season doodles at http://www.google.com/doodle10.html (more to come). And if you go to Ask.com and click on the Jeeves logo, it takes you to a search results page (as a search engine should, imo) for http://www.ask.com/web?q=Happy+Holidays. Now Ask was sporting a snowman logo yesterday, so they are changing things up, possibly daily for the holiday season, keep and eye on them and Google for logo changes.

Folks are discussing the Google logo at DigitalPoint Forums. And I started a thread for Ask Jeeves at our forums here.

Oilman blogged an entry he named Googlepedia, where he shows how when you do informational searches, Google serves up OneBox results from the Wikipedia. Yesterday, I tried to get the wiki results but I could not. Today, I see them! I did a search on driving information and I see it, and so do others! Same with typing information or swimming informaiton and so on.

This adds an other method for wiki spammers to vertically creep into the Google SERPs. So please do take advantage of it. ;)

I posted a thread and a poll asking if this is a good or bad thing at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Unless you are a damn good spammer, as DaveN says, there is no such thing as overnight affiliate driven success. As grasshopper says, "having spent my fair share of time recruiting, developing and managing affiliates, i have never seen any "formula" that guarantees success with affiliate marketing."

Marcia composes a very nice list of "criteria for choosing good [affiliate] programs."

1.Products that are in demand by consumers so there's a good chance of picking up plenty of targeted traffic.
2.Merchants and their AMs need to be fair, honest and trustworty - those who are develop a following.
3. A decent commission rate needs to be offered.
4. A decent number of return days need to be offered, so that commissions will be paid if visitors continue to shop around and then come back to buy.
5. Reliable tracking of impressions, clicks and sales.
6. Merchant site needs good usability and should be one that can convert well for the traffic sent, and have a record of good conversions
7. Commissions need to be paid regularly, and on time.
8. NO PARASITES! Some defend them if the BHO's and applications can be opted out of or uninstalled at will. Not so, chances are those are merchants or AMs who are parasite friendly rather than affiliate friendly. Parasites over-write affiliate cookies and steal commissions rightly earned by affiliates - they are NEVER ok.
9. NO LEAKS! Leaks can be 800 numbers displayed without phone tracking for affiliate sales, LivePerson or LiveHelper chat windows that grab visitors at the point of sale, even when visitors arrive when being sent by clicking on affiliate links. They take the orders - no commission for the affiliate who sent the customer. Another leak is Adsense running on the merchant site. No one needs to send traffic to another site to click on Adsense when visitors can click on *their* Adsense and they get paid for the clicks.
10. Cooperative attitude is important - when affiliates need tools or special links, providing them increases income for both the affiliate and the merchant.

There's a lot more, but that's what comes to mind right off the top of my head, just for starters. Most important: HONESTY and TRUST factors.

And you wonder why Marcia is one of the most respected forum contributors out there? :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

If you guys can scroll down to #11, Best SEO Blog, and vote for us, that would be sweet.

The voting is at http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/

Thank you!

Kalena from Search Engine College wrote A Google Christmas Carol that i thought many of you guys would appreciate.

The folks at High Rankings Forum are discussing this now.

Matt Cutts doesn't give it all away, but he did write this excellent and easy to understand article named How does Google collect and rank results? I found this by way of a classic Gary Price blog entry at Search Engine Watch Blog named First Issue Of Google's Newsletter For Librarians Released.

Here is a snippet from the article;

Once we've made a list of documents and their scores, we take the documents with the highest scores as the best matches. Google does a little bit of extra work to try to show snippets – a few sentences – from each document that highlight the words that a user typed. Then we return the ranked URLs and the snippets to the user as results pages.

I posted a thread on the topic at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

If you have been trying to submit your site to the Yahoo! Submit Your Site form, you are probably getting a timeout error.

Submit Your Site Request Failed
Your submission request was not accepted because: The following resulted when trying to access your document: timeout Please correct and resubmit the form below.

As you can see from this screen capture, I tried submitting www.yahoo.com to the Yahoo! submit URL form and it spit back the time out error.

This was first reported yesterday at 3:30 PM (EST) at Search Engine Watch Forums and then later at WebmasterWorld. No updates as of yet.

We came up with an idea to allow members of our new forums to post questions to the moderators. The moderators will then review the questions or topics and create a new thread in the appropriate forum. The thread will be locked down for moderator only discussion, initially. The moderators will discuss the topic, back and forth, and when the discussion slows, we will open it back up to the general registered membership.

A true roundtable discussion. :)

Post your questions or topics of discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Moderator Threads: Ask Your Questions thread!

Seems like we have a backlink and possbile pagerank update taking place now, just in time for the holiday season.

Forum Round Up:

• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• WebProWorld Forums
  
• SEO Guy Forums
  

More news with Google Boosting AOL's Content in SERPs from a WebmasterWorld thread named Google Will Start Using Graphical Ads in SERPS! Moderator, martinibuster links to a NY Times article and quotes one piece;

at AOL's request, Google would begin to test various forms of graphical ads, and that it would make the same formats available to other advertisers... One format being discussed is a box, which may include a photograph and a logo...

An other article at Hendersonville Times;

One format being discussed is a box, which may include a photograph and a logo, that would appear on the main search results pages toward the bottom of the advertisements in the right-hand column. Traditional banner ads may appear on Google Image Search and the Froogle shopping site, which already include many photographs, an executive involved said. No advertising is contemplated for the Google home page.

Shame, Shame, Shame.

Update: Danny has a wonderful write up on this topic.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo! came up with a neat idea, Time Saving Search Shortcuts where you can customize your Yahoo! shortcuts at http://search.yahoo.com/osc/create.

Pretty neat.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Andy shows that The Street reports that Diller Asks Jeeves to Grow. Specifically by 20% says Berkowitz;

Barry Diller's Internet empire expects to increase the staff at its Ask Jeeves search engine by about 20%, Ask Jeeves head Steve Berkowitz says. The expansion comes as Jeeves, which employs 650 workers now, posts solid gains in traffic but remains overshadowed by its more famous and deeper-pocketed rivals. IAC shares are down 10% for the year.

Steve Berkowitz adds that they need to continue to grow and capture market share.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld where Mack explains that this is a "sharp contrast to their UK opperations where they laid off a large proportion of their sales staff." Think they are letting their UK division go to hell?

A WebmasterWorld Thread reports that Google has been crawling double slashed URLs. For example, instead of crawling www.mysite/products.htm it would crawl www.mysite//products.htm. Apparently, this has been an "issue" since the summer. An other member reported this back in late November, as well. Plus there is Google Group Discussion from late October on the topic.

Update: Martin sent me an example of Google indexing double slashes. If you do a search on the "?id=" at Google, the bottom result shows you;

301ing those URLs to the standard slash, may help.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last Friday, the deal was sealed, Google to Keep AOL. The forums discussing this today include; Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums, but the most interesting thread, may be at Cre8asite Forums.

The Cre8asite thread named The Craziest Thing About The Google/AOL deal brings out one statement from a New York Times article that says;

"Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google's recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before."

Now it does not say specifically if AOL will get a boost in the paid listings or organic results. It may also have to do with the OneBox results you often see in the vertical creep of the Google SERPs. Either way, this may be the first time anyone at Google publicly said or gave the impression that they would "give favored placement to content" to any site.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

We have an interesting thread at our forums named Are Ask Jeeves UK Thieves? This thread describes a UK advertiser's experience with working with Ask Jeeves. In the UK, Ask Jeeves has an advertising program named Branded Response. This program is described as follows;

Branded Response is one of Ask Jeeves premium ad placements. These ads appear prominently near the top of the results page and offer strong targeting, performance and branding opportunities. Branded Response placements are triggered by user keywords and offers high click-throughs. Branded Response is integrated within the results and is highly functional by allowing users to perform searches, fill in forms and begin the online buying process within the ad placement.

The member in the forums reports shocking information about how he was treated with the program. He accounts 33% of clicks, being outside of his target market. More shocking then that is that when reported, Ask would not comply with a refund.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

It has been almost a month, November 21st to be exact, since WebmasterWorld Banned All Bots from crawling the site. Since then we estimated that WebmasterWorld Lost Over 40% of its Traffic after being delisted from the major search engines. It now appears that WebmasterWorld is back in the index.

According to a WebmasterWorld thread named WebmasterWorld Back In Google Index, Brett in message number six specifically thanks "GoogleGuy, YahooGuy, MSNDude, JeevesGuy, his Taco'ness, and OJR..." It seems as if some cloaked or other solution was worked out with the engines. And in my opinion, since WebmasterWorld has rockin content, they deserve special treatment. The folks over at DigitalPoint Forums are carefully watching the Alexa charts to see when WebmasterWorld passes them by, to take the lead once again.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

According to a post by Tim Mayer at Yahoo! Search at Search Engine Watch Forums, Yahoo! will have an official response to the debate on Jeremy selling text links on his site. You see, Jeremy is a Yahoo! employee, who specifically works in the search department. But yet, this is his personal blog.

I will keep you posted on any official response from Tim Mayer and Yahoo! on this highly debatable topic.

You got to love Gary's title for his SEW Blog posting Sorry Bill? WSJ Reports Google Near Deal on AOL. The WSJ article starts off;

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Google Inc. have entered exclusive negotiations about deepening their advertising partnership, shutting out Microsoft Corp. which has been wooing AOL since January, according to people close to the situation.

Gary writes; "If Gates and Ballmer wanted a deal with AOL (Time Warner) for Christmas it appears that they're not going to get it."

All those rumors that AOL would switch to MSN adCenter I guess may be false. We are still not 100% sure which way they will go. How exciting!

And best of all, my dad, posted a thread on the topic at our forum under the title AOL Nears Deal With Google.

Reported over at ThreadWatch a screen capture taken over at http://www.glenn.ca/google.gif of Google pushing the tabs (Web Images Groups News Froogle Local) to the side bar menu.

In my opinion, it takes up too much screen real estate.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just wanted to notify all the blog readers that due to our new forum, we now have a devoted forum for Blog Feedback & Suggestions. If you have suggestions, problems, issues with ads, and so on - just register and post a thread. It will better help me understand the needs here and address them.

That also goes for changing the writing style, the topics I cover and the guest author's posting frequency.

So if you want more SEO advice, let me know. If you want more cool finds, let me know. If you want more news, let me know.

The Blog Feedback & Suggestions Forum is the perfect place for that. Of course you can still email me or leave a comment in this entries or other entries.

Our fun thread for Friday comes via WebmasterWorld Forums, under the self-explanatory title Google Myth & Paranoia. In that thread, the thread creator asks members to "Share your innermost Google fears and see if you're just worrying...." So here they are in bulleted format for you:

• Adsense Login Paranoia (post #1)
• Google Toolbar False Tracking (post #2)
• Buying Links Even with NoFollow Tag (post #4)
• Getting Filtered Out (post #7)
• Placing Scraper Sites Above Unique Content (post #8)
• Collateral Damage (post #9) (read post #9, very funny)
• Selling Text Links (post #10)
• Clicking on Text Links (post #11)
• Interlinking Sites (post #15)
• Google Launching a Product that Replaces my Business (post #17)
• Matt Cutts will dress up like the Dread Pirate Roberts (post #20)
• Won't Live Long Enough to See Site Escape from the Google Sandbox (post #23)
• Competitors Read These Types of Forums (post #26 - some goodies for blackhats)
• Google and Yahoo are the same company (post #28)

And plenty more coming at the WebmasterWorld thread. Also note that someone says in the forum, that the solution to all of this is to block GoogleBot like Brett did. :)

Chris Sherman has the write up at the SEW Blog on this; Google Gmail Now Accessible via Mobile Phones. To view gmail on your phone go to "m.gmail.com on your mobile phone browser."

I tried it out on my Treo 650 and it works pretty well. Has a cute little gmail icon and loads pretty quickly.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Have you guys had a chance to check out MSN Local Live that launched last week? If not, you may want to check out the bird's eye view, it is truly nice. Here is my office via zoomed in bird's eye view. The image below can be clicked on for a larger, but different view of my office (if you are interested), you can see my car (i didn't highlight it).

Very cool stuff. Now it doesn't work for my home, but Google Maps does. However, Google Maps doesn't have great satellite views of my office either. So who wins?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

An email went out last night to all Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) customers notifying them of new changes to come to YSM in 2006. YahooSarah at Search Engine Watch created a thread named New Look Coming For Yahoo Sponsored Search Listings where she informs the rest of us about these changes.

How this change impacts your listings:

• Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored Search listings
• You don’t have to make any changes to your listings; they’ll be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
• If you’d like to optimize your listings for Yahoo!, begin your description with one short sentence that includes your keyword and focuses on your most important information in the first 70 characters
• Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that we believe works best for advertisers and search users
• Most of our partners, including MSN, CNN, ESPN and Infospace, will still display longer descriptions for your Sponsored Search listings, though the exact length may vary from partner to partner

We believe that this change will improve the search experience for its users. As usual, if you have any comments feel free to post here, we welcome your feedback or send me a private note.

These changes will take place on January 18, 2006, so be prepared and optimize your new ad titles.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

All this hype about Google AdSense giving out holiday gifts, words comes via our forums from YahooSarah that YPN will be doing the same.

In regards to gifts for publishers, yes Yahoo is planning on doing something similiar. But of course, we thank all of our beta participants for being a part of our network and look forward to a prosperous new year!

YahooSarah

How nice. :)

The other day I promised to notify you if I locate an image of the Google AdSense Holiday Gift. Well today, Shawn notified me that someone posted an image of it in his forum. Here it is, you can click on it to enlarge.

I just wanted to notify the many folks eager to sign up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network that if you do not enter in a company name, you will get paid (currently) to your username. The name you use to login to your YPN account. This information comes by way of a posting at our new forums, in which YahooSarah, an official Yahoo! company representative, came in to provide the following answer;

I'd like to clarify how Yahoo! determines the payee name to include on Yahoo! Publisher Network payments. When you sign up to be a publisher in the Yahoo! Publisher Network, one of the first things you do is fill out an Account Information tab with your name (first and last), company name and web site URL. We make our payment checks out to the name listed under "Company Name." If you do not represent a company or cannot cash a check with that company name on it, please enter your first and last name in that field.

I apologize for the confusion - we will be updating the language on this site tab soon to make this more clear. Rest assured, we do not use your user name on your check.

We value our publisher feedback and really do listen to your suggestions, so please continue to post your thoughts here.

YahooSarah

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Yahoo emailed me to clarify that they normally do not use the username in the pay to field. Normally they will follow up with the publisher if it is unclear. They want to clarify, put something in the Company Name field, even if it must be your First and Last Name.

There are two very interesting threads on the topic of hidden divs. The first one I found this morning at Search Engine Watch Forums named Is Google No Longer Indexing Hidden Divs? but then decided to hold off on posting on it until we received some more confirmation in the thread. Later, WilliamC at article distribution, notified me of a thread he posted at Phil C's forum named Jagger and why so many fell and still dont know why?. Ok here is the scoop, as I understand it.

Google is no longer indexing hidden div tags. Spammers used hidden divs to hide content, but also many non-spammers and even non-SEOs have used them for design purposes. The theory is that the Jagger update now hurt any site using hidden divs. One example site thrown out in Phil's forum was a white hat site at ducor.com that used hidden divs for its menus. If you look at the site's CSS you will notice in the CSS code a line for #elnav {position:absolute; visibility:hidden;}. The member reports that the site "has been all but delisted from Google now.. Right now they show just 4 of our pages in the index.."

My own sites that use a form of this seem not to be hurt, but I do not see any penalty. It may be because the CSS is off the page. Supposedly, if you do not have it on page, then this wont be an issue. Maybe that is why some sites have been affected. Should they be? Most should not. But that is a Google update for you.

So what can you do now? Move that CSS off the page, to an external style sheet. Then maybe, block the robots.txt from those files.

Forum discussion at Web Work Shop Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week, during the SES show, I heard the rumors about the possibility that AOL will be dropping Google AdWords for MSN's adCenter product "really soon." But I haven't had time to post the information here until now. Gary Price has some information at the SEW Blog and Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld started a thread a week ago Tuesday named AOL to Drop Google and Sign with MSN. In that post he links to this Reuters article and quotes it;

Time Warner Inc is closing in on a deal with Microsoft Corp. to team up on an online advertising service to compete with Google Inc, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the talks. The paper said the two companies were now focusing on a deal that would combine their advertising-related assets, with little or no money changing hands. It said they expected to reach an agreement before the end of the year, but that it was still possible that Time Warner's America Online unit could strike a deal with competitor Google instead. Time Warner has been holding talks with both Microsoft and Google over AOL, sources familiar with the situation have told Reuters and other media.

This can be a major shake up for the industry. One member says, "This could have a massive impact on webmaster community." As eWhisper says, "Very interesting things ahead in 2006, and this is just the beginning."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has added Google Music Search to its search services line. Chris Sherman and Gary Price have the Search Engine Watch prime time article named Google Adds Music Search Feature. But there is crazy vertical creep with the music search feature already, just do a search on one of my favorite artists at Google. And you will notice it selects an image (not sure if it is using Google Images) and has links to more info. That link takes you to a lisiting of albums "sorted by popularity" by default, with quick links to buy it at the various stores (first being iTunes). Then if you click on album name it shows you the details of that album with more links to buy it now. You can drill down deeper into the song and see information on lyrics and more (also buy the single track, if available).

Pretty neat.

A thread is posted at our Search Engine Roundtable Forums and now WebmasterWorld.

Google has come out with loads of products this year. Here is a list of some of those products, new to 2005:

• Google Maps
• Google Analytics
• Google Video
• Google Ride Finder
• Google Transit
• Google Base
• Google Earth
• Google Blog Search
• Picasa 2
• Google's Sitemaps
• Google Talk
• Google Local
• APIs

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asks which product do you think is the Best Google Product of 2005.

Funny how even GoogleGuy responded with his favorite.

I'm gonna have to go with Maps/Earth, for two reasons: - when was the last time you spent hours looking up where you grew up, cities around the word, or where your grandparents lived? - just like last year when Gmail kicked a lot of other web mail providers into high gear and made things better for users with more storage or a better UI, Maps did the same thing for local search/mapping.

DigitalPoint forums has a thread with a poll asking Should jeremy Zawodny as a Yahoo! employee sell backlinks from his blog?

Currently the responses are scattered with no strong position either way. Of the 17 polled, currently, the answers are as follows;

No, it's a conflict of interest [3] 17.65%
I see nothing wrong with it [5] 29.41%
It's ok but doesn't shine a good light on him or Yahoo! [5] 29.41%
I really don't care one way or another [4] 23.53%

If you can get over to the thread and vote it would make for an interesting poll.

Oh, btw, funny how I place this in the Yahoo Topics category.

When Tim Mayer at Yahoo! posts at the Yahoo! Search Blog, the likelihood that it is about a Yahoo! Web search update is high. Last night Tim posts the Sixth Weather Report: Yahoo! Update Tonight. He tells us that;

You should see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. This update will be completed tomorrow (Thursday).

Forum Discussion at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums

As many of you know, I got the underdog's back, and Ask Jeeves has been the underdog for a while now. Heck, they helped me propose to my soon to be wife, so of course I love them. ClickZ reports that Search Volumes Rise as Market Matures but in that report they note;

Ask Jeeves emerged as the highest-gaining search engine in the period.

The search engine experienced a 77 percent growth in market share to reach 2.6 percent.

I am so happy for Ask. A lot has happened to Ask since our Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could entry here.

Forum discussion posted by yours truely at;

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums

Last week, when MSN launched Local Live, Bill Gates was quoted in many news sources (including this one) as saying;

“When you use a search engine, if somebody is making lot of money from advertisers they ought to share it with you,” Gates said on the business news channel NDTV Profit.

This quote is now being picked apart at a WebmasterWorld thread. Moderator, martinibuster, says, "It sound like incentivizing clicks. But he could be referring to rewarding users for registering with them, and using their various services like MSN Spaces, and hotmail etc."

A WebmasterWorld thread describes the gifts given to those AdSense publishers that bring in nice loot for Google. The contents of the gift are described as follows;

- marooon carrying case with embossed google logo. zipper closure
- wireless mini mouse, with scroll wheel
- usb charger for mouse with retractable cord
- usb 4 port hub
- usb gooseneck led light
- 128mb usb flash drive with wrist strap
- headset with retractable cord. has two plugs (one for mic and one for earbud) so it is for a computer, not a mobile phone.
- shipping package is a small white box with multicolored polka dots - keep an eye out for it.

If you have a picture of the gift, please post or comment or let me know. I would love to post it here. If I got the gift, which I did not (Google???), then I would have posted the picture.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

Matt Cutts has been telling us that there is a test data center out there where Google is testing future algorithms. There is supposedly a special Googlebot named "Mozilla Googlebot" that is out there crawling pages for this special index. Dayo_UK created a WebmasterWorld thread named Mozilla Googlebot and the New Index at 64.233.179.104 where he describes that the index at 64.233.179.104 is "being built for the future." The pages in this index seem to have cache dates in November time frame, which may be consistent with Matt Cutts comment; "the test data center certainly has some different crawling and indexing characteristics."

What is important, for you SEOs, is that this data center should roll out in "months." So it is nice to be prepared for it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an interesting WebmasterWorld thread named Affiliate ID's removed from the urls on serps. In that thread, the affiliate describing how he achieved top rankings for a merchant. The listed URLs were to the merchant's domain name, but appended to the URLs was the affiliate's ID. Then recently, the affiliate IDs were scratched out of the Google SERPs and the affiliate was no longer getting credit for sales.

The affiliate asks was this something Google did or something done by the affiliate? It is hard to say for sure without having more detail. I would assume that if Google dropped the affiliate URLs, the rankings would drop as well, unless Google did a wide spread affiliate URL bashing. It is more likely something done on the merchant side.

I contacted the sponsor and I showed him proof of how his listings were showing up for some of the searches targeted. Although it is always tricky to pair a result with ones own efforts, I was able to provide him with information on how the linking took place, during which time period and how his site started to show up originally (under my code) and how it progressed over time. I kept detailed stats on searches as well as screen shots throughout the relevant period.

The sponsor was convinced that he now gets this great traffic due to my effort but has said no word on crediting me for it, specially now that the urls listed have NO partner Id. He must be thinking he is getting mana from heaven without any sweat, my sweat. I went a step further and showed him how Google still lists a url that was read as text, but whose content (and final destination) is actually different. No redirects here, although clicking on that link does redirect.

His excuse is that Google is the culprit. He blames the whole issue on Google. He says -very politely- that he has done nothing on his end to have the redirect listed and not my affiliate link -a flat url with no query strings-. According to him, Google has been undergoing some changes in the last week or so and as a result, they now list the bare urls. In other words, 'swallow it, that traffic is now mine'.

Currently, no one really replied with support that it was a Google action or that it is more likely an affiliate action. I personally wanted to draw more attention to this WebmasterWorld Thread.

Nothing like reading a blog entry on a library topic from a librarian himself. :) Gary Price, news editor at Search Engine Watch, posts an incredibly detailed resource on A Look Back as Google's Library Project Passes the One Year Mark. Today, Gary notes that the Google Library Project tuned one years old. He goes over the sequence of events with this controversial Google project in his blog entry.

This may make for a good thread, so I posted it over at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Back on August 16th I posted an entry that described how MSN was Indexing Ask Jeeves SERPs. But yesterday I was reading a blog entry at SEO Speedwagon named Watching MSN's Algorithm at Work. In that entry he described how MSN indexed pages from Google's blog search engine. But then showed how they fixed it soon after (12/13). So it encouraged me to take a look at my big blue pineapple chair query. Guess what, I no longer see Ask Jeeves SERPs in the results. To make sure I ran the site command at MSN search on web.ask.com and no results found, a good thing.

So I went back to the original Search Engine Watch thread and updated it.

Remember we saw some premium publishers hosting Halloween Theme AdSense Ads? Well, now it is available to all publishers. Based on this month's what's new for AdSense, they added these themed banners for seasonal ads. The how to and stuff is at AdSense Support. I have enabled mine. It seems to go well with the new Google AdWords Adds Holiday Colored Highlight Bar to Ads.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Most people I know hate Orkut these days. Yahoo! has blown Google away with its 360! product. But does Google hate its own Orkut also? According to a Search Engine Roundtable Forum thread named Have Google Banned Orkut? it seems as if Google has delisted Orkut from its index. Try a simply search on orkut or even on www.orkut.com or a site command query all results show nothing for orkut.com. It is not a simple case of the robots.txt file disallowing. Yahoo! has indexed a whopping 25,788 pages of the site and has ranked it number one for its name at at yahoo search, so it makes you wonder.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forum.

Do a search on peppermint or Christmas at Google and look at those AdWords ads on the right. Can you believe that they highlighted them with a peppermint candy cane looking bar! I bet the AdWords customers are loving it and the organic fellows are a bit upset. Now, if you do a search on candy cane not only do you get those bars, you get the top AdWords ads with a redish background! Not only that, they covered hanukkah with hanukkah candles and kwanzaa with kwanzaa candles.

Only a little discussion on if this is evil or not at WebmasterWorld forums. I also posted a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums and our Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

While Google's Matt Cutts is on a campaign to eradicate all unnatural linking, Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny is defending them. In recent news, WebGuerrilla writes Zawodny Says No to Link Condoms which basically describes how on Jeremy Zawodny's personal blog, he has paid links from a well known text link ads brokerage house. Jeremy responded to the criticism late last night defending the paid links he has on his site;

- I didn't hide the links. (Remember the WordPress fiasco?)
- They're clearly labeled as sponsored links.
- They're far less annoying than distracting graphical ads.
- I've made it possible for anyone to comment on them. In public. Who else does that?
- They don't show up in my RSS feed(s).
- I rejected the on-line casino, drug sales, cheap hotels, and really offensive stuff--basically, anything the reminded me of blog comment spam I've bit hit with or that sends me to a sleazy feeling site. No need to encourage 'em.
- The links aren't permanent. They go away after a month (see below).

I pretty much know how Matt Cutts of Google would respond to this. If I had to guess, he would tell Jeremy to put the nofollow attribute on these links. My prediction is that these ads will not last, the pressure from Yahoo! and the industry will force him to pull the ads. Time will tell.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Matt Cutts of Google response to Jeremy. Basically, Jeremy can do what he wants and the engines can do what they want.

Danny has a detailed write up on Alexa Offers Fee-Based Vertical Search Service at the Search Engine Watch Blog. Danny explains that this Web Search Platform;

You can create your own search engine by tapping into the 4 billion web pages Alexa has indexed over time. You can search against the entire index or just a selected set, in case you want to make your own vertical search engine.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

NickW, now at Performacing has an Exclusive: Google Talks About Splogs, Ranking & More. He talks with Nick about Google's initiatives with blogs, the blog spam problems and solutions and some other topics. Here is my favorite Q & A.

Q. Can you give the Performancing readers a few tips on ranking in Google?

I wouldn't bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I'd just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url. Don't try to rank for a huge phrase at first--pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up. Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility. I think you attract more links with a conversational style, humor, and doing your own research to produce new insights or tidbits of info. In my opinion, just commenting on other blogs isn't as useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences. A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links. Original information or research is great bait to attract links. :)

I posted a thread on this topic at our new Search Engine Roundtable Forums

Mobile is definitely one of those frontiers the search engines are going after. msgraph at Search Engine Watch Forums posted a thread named Yahoo! Go Trademark: go.yahoo.com = Connected Life hookup describing a new trademark Yahoo! filed for; "Yahoo! Go". He believes it has a lot to do with Yahoo Acquiring VerdiSoft Mobile Sync Company.

The URL is at http://go.yahoo.com/.

According to a Search Engine Watch thread named Google Serps Giving Broadmatch, Google is conducting broadmatch like targeting for very detailed and obscure queries. Graywolf shows;

For example look at this serp [aardvark mastodon zosterops] I'm not sure what those files are used for or why they are available on a public webserver, but I find it pretty interesting that google will search that far across a very lengthy document to find a match.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I am still catching up on the hot news and seo tips from last week. Last Wednesday, Yahoo released Yahoo! answers, Gary has a part 1 and a part 2 on it at the SEW Blog. A neat product tour is up for your review.

The folks at DigtialPoint Forums and at WebmasterWorld are discussing it now.

There is a funny thread at DigitalPoint Forums named All Gay Cruises which describes how a publisher is upset that Yahoo! Publisher Network ads find his fishing site to be related to an ad about "Atlantis All Gay Cruises". Anyway, he tried to block it, but it is important to note, it is not real time (almost real time, i think).

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

AdWords increased the font size of the ads displayed in the SERPs. Google Blogoscoped has a screen capture of the before and after.

Some folks in the forums are happy about this (advertisers) and some folks are sad.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Shor, last week, posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Landing Page Quality Now Influences AdWords Position. He quotes an AdWords Blog from 12/8 describing;

Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score -- the landing page -- which will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads.

Incorporating landing page assessment into the Quality Score will help us improve the overall advertising experience for users, advertisers and partners by increasing the quality of the sites we present in our ad results.

Advertisers who are providing robust and relevant content will see little change. However, for those who are providing a less positive user experience, the Quality Score may decrease and in turn increase the minimum bid required for the keyword to run. To help define site quality, we've created a general set of website design tips and guidelines that should help you evaluate and optimize your site.

Many of the responses at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread were positive outside of AussieWebmaster, the SEW Google AdWords Moderator.

If getting slashdotted wasn't enough for Rand and his SEO Beginners Guide, the other day, a Newsweek article named Hotwiring Your Search Engine covers Rand and SEO. The subtitle of the article says a lot, "Google a topic, and the results are based on popularity, right? Wrong. Inside the shadowy world of 'SEOs.'" And guess, what, Rand was slashdotted again for this article!

Not only that, this has been making lots of buzz in the forums and at other blogs. For example, Matt Cutts's Blog discusses how; he "didn't realize that he was also planning to write about a blackhat SEO (or if Brad mentioned it, I missed that)." Well, I was interviewed by the author for this article as well, and he made it pretty clear to me that he will be discussing the black-hat topics that no one else seems to discuss in the mainstream media.

There are two large threads on this article; one at Cre8asite Forums and the other at Search Engine Watch Forums.

DaveN at Search Engine Watch Forums posts a gem on how to get out of the Sandbox. He names the thread Google Sandbox - Get out Feature and gives us these steps:

• Get an old domain, something which google crawls
• Then put a subdomain on it ... newsite.olddomain.com original
• Copy the site exactly on the sub as it is in the orginal date last modifed to a few months after the domain was first registered
• Add a Link from the real site something like www .newsite.com ( forget about seo anchor text links, these are just to let google in
• Now 301 the subdomain to the new site

That is it, forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week, while I was at SES Chicago, Yahoo! purchased Del.icio.us, a very popular tagging solution. There is no doubt in my mind that Yahoo! is serious about tagging and how they will utilize it in Web search. Even Tim Mayer from Yahoo! made a comment during one of the sessions that tagging may be the next link popularity component to hit Web search. Danny Sullivan, I believe, is vocal that tagging is a "step backwards" and will be way to easy to spam - thus making for a bad advancement in the Web search space.

Forum discussion on the acquisition at WebmasterWorld. And a thread just getting started at our new forums on Yahoo and Tagging.

Let me start off by explaining that I never wanted to open a forum. This decision was done out of necessity. If you ask people, I have been asked to open a forum for years now, but I always tell people that I can not. Why? Well, the blog has to act as unbiased as possible. We cover forum topics, and for us to have our own forum would put us in a situation where we can not report without bias.

As many of you know, SEO Chat has shown a public display of what really goes on behind the scenes. I have been with SEO Chat before Developer Shed has joined. Since then, I, as many other mods and members, have not seen eye to eye with DevShed's practices. I will not get into the specifics, but I have just resigned from SEO Chat as a moderator. The problem is, the SEO Chat members, I don't want to leave them without giving them options. Many have fled already to Cre8asite Forums or DigitalPoint forums. But many do not know where to go, or do not feel comfortable at those forums.

That is the reason I have started our own forums at forums.seroundtable.com.

I have brought over many of the current and ex-moderators at SEO Chat. Including the forum's super moderators; Phoenix and Randfish. Also our forum's moderators; dazzlindonna, pk_synths, and sufyaaan. And guess what, we even signed on Darrin Ward, the founder of SEO Chat, to be a moderator at our forums! Not only that, DevShed's forum technical administrator, md_doc, has joined my company over a year ago and he will be running the technical components of the forums. So let me tell you, this forum will be very SEO Chat member friendly and we welcome you to join us.

How will this affect my positions at moderating at other forums? Well, I resigned from SEO Chat Forums. Secondly, I will continue to moderate at Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums. I have deep respect and devotion to those forums and would hate to leave them. Leaving SEO Chat gives me more time to run these forums, and with the great moderators we have on board, it will be fun.

Future of the forums? Well, I expect and already got word from other ex-moderators at SEO Chat that they will be signing on shortly. So lots of old faces will be coming on board. I am very excited about it.

Future of the blog? We will continue to widely link out and cover the forums we have. As you will see, every single page on the seroundtable.com domain name, has a link to the major forums we cover. We will continue to find the best threads at the major SEM forums and report them back to you here. We will do our best to not point more attention to the forums here, when compared to the other forums. In addition, all covered threads will link back directly to the source and not back to the forums here, unless the thread originates from our forums. I will not allow it. Call us out on it, if we do it.

I think I covered everything here, any questions? Join the thread at the new Search Engine Roundtable Forums; Welcome to the New Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Cre8asiteforums saw a great idea when Barry first launched the SearchEngineRoundtable blog. And, it wasn't just because he would be visiting forums to report on interesting topics. It was the mix of Search Engine marketing and engine news, forums discussions, and reporters who would hunt for a forums' pulse that we thought was original.

Over the weekend, Cre8asiteforums relaunched in its new board software. In addition to getting used to Invision, its members are treated to articles, interviews and an SEO tools section. While not abandoning the "forums" job, the hope is to fortify the SEO/SEM, Usability and Web Development industries with supportive materials, more opportunties for promoting credible works and finding new ways of keeping the creative juices flowing.

Asking one's girlfriend to marry him via a search engine is certainly creative. And, did you know he has a twin brother?

Say hello to the host of this blog in An Interview with Barry Schwartz

At this event's triple play coverage we covered 32 sessions. Huge thank you to Ben at Rank Smart and Chris at Instant Position.

Here is the roundup:

• Search Behavior Research Update
• Introduction to Search Marketing
• Video Search
• Earning from Search & Contextual Ads
• Reputation Monitoring & Management
• Podcast Search
• Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior
• Global Search Landscape
• ClickZ Forum: Ads Beyond Search
• Book Search
• Search Advertising 101
• KEYNOTE: The Search Marketing Community
• News Search SEO
• Creating Compelling Ads
• Business To Business Tactics
• SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging
• Meet The News Search Engines
• RSS, Blogs, and Search Marketing
• Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines
• Successful Site Architecture
• Working With Clients
• Shopping Search Tactics
• SEM Campaign & Project Management
• Working As A Team
• Search Engine Q&A On Links
• Future Of SEM
• Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
• Local Search Marketing Tactics
• Meet The Crawlers
• Search Head or Tail
• SEO Overkill
• Measuring Success Case Studies

Also, Chris has more coverage at Instant Position and so does Lee Oden. Glad to be home.

You must check out Randfish's Beginner's Guide to SEO. It was slashdotted and all.

Discuss it at Cre8asite Forums.

Sorry for short posts, haven't slept in 35+ hours.

You know those people that rarely listen and just talk and talk? They ask questions, and answer them for themselves. They listen to the first part of your question and ignore the last part?

Well, I caught Ask Jeeves possibly doing that. :) Here is the story line....

I received a sales call from the 206 area code. I often use Ask to look up local times, when I am not familiar with a particular area code. I searched on 206 area code which told me right away that the "206 is an area code in
Washington." Right there I knew I was looking at the west coast, but I decided to click on the link that said, "Local Time", which queried Ask automatically time in washington. It had the correct time, however, the box below began to answer a question I did not ask. So when I wanted to refresh the page, by hitting the go button, I noticed that Washington had the same local time as me, in New York. I then looked closer and I noticed it answered my question as "washington, dc" the second time around. Keep in mind that I search on 206 and then clicked on local time, I did not enter in "time in washington", Ask did that for itself.

Ask, you know it all.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I have to say, I always get nervous for Google and excited for the SEOs when Google sends a brand new representative to the search conferences. This SES Chicago, Matt Cutts was unable to attend, so in his place, Matt sent Charles Martin. The reason I get nervous for Google and excited for SEOs is because the new Googlers are more likely to slip up and say something that can get them in trouble. When Matt answers questions, you notice how he always throws in terms like, "in my personal opinion", "if I was to do it this way", "if I was you", etc. In addition, Matt has a tact of deflecting questions that he can not or should not answer. I believe the last conference I covered where Matt did not represent Google was SES Sweden 2004. At that conference, Google brought in Magnus and he said a thing that were misinterpreted as Google backlinks not counting anymore (or something like that).

So with this new guy, Charles, who I am told had two days of prep time, I did not know what to expect. When I first saw Charles, he looked like one of those guys who looks like he is from San Jose. Tall, longish blond hair (I think), huge smile, and very nice personality. Hey, he even had the same type of Apple PowerBook I had, so he had to be a standup guy.

I attended his two sessions, Q&A on Linking and Meet the Crawlers. Right away, Charles introduced himself to the other search representatives; Tim Mayer (an SES pro from Yahoo), Rahul (a lot less experienced then Tim, but still have conferences under his belt) from Ask Jeeves, and Ramez (MSN is a new engine, but he seemed to have done a conference before, normally its Etan) from MSN. Soon after, he saw me chatting with Tim and said that I looked familiar. Tim reminded him that Matt just posted a picture of me at his blog. So Tim took an other picture of me, I believe I was in the same outfit. And then the session started.

Charles gave the typical presentation. But the real test was the Q&A portion. Most of you know I don't stay for Q&A, but for his sessions, I made sure to stick around. Charles held his own. He answered questions accurately, as far as I can tell. He also knew his stuff cold. He told us he did his research by listening to some of the industry podcasts and reading some of the industry blogs. He even deflected the sandbox questions with tact. He made some funny jokes, such as when MSN's presentation wasn't working properly and Charles helped him out and got it working. Then Charles made a comment that Google can even fix Microsoft's products. The audience enjoyed that. The whole time, Charles seemed to have a good time and enjoy talking to the people.

Matt, nice choice on a representative to take your place this time!

Thank you for nominating us. I literally just got back from the airport. I am amazed I got home. First my flight was delayed from 6:55 to 9:20, then finally the plane that was suppose to come to us to take us back to Newark, took off. Half way in, it had to turn around, I am sure you heard about the tragedy at Midway Airport, causing the closure. Anyway, I took a shuttle to Ohare, on standby for a 10:30 flight. Issue was, it took me two hours to get to Ohare, arriving at a little after 11. Anyway, that flight, I was on for standby was delayed to 12:30 and then 1:10. I got on the flight! That flight took off at about 2:10 and I landed in Newark, which was now covered by snow, at 5:00am. The two hour trip home, crazy snow, skidding everywhere. But I am home safe. :)

Anyway, the point of this entry is to let you know about SEJ's blog awards. If you think our work and dedication is top notch, it would mean a lot if you voted at Survey Monkey.

Thanks again. I have a one more thing to post, and then I'll take a little nap.

Measuring Success Case Studies

Moderated by Mike Sack

Geoff Karcher, Karcher Group
Will cover what is important from management standpoint, a sales standpoint, setting up expectation with clients. Integrity in reporting and what can be gained from studying stats. What is important to a manager? Everyone’s priorities are different…increasing sales/leads? Branding? Traffic? Do they even know what to ask? It is your job to make sure they do. They should know what to expect going forward. You should outline all strengths and weaknesses of a campaign. Seeing ground rules and expectations: goals should be to increase rankings, traffic, and/or conversions. Once these goals are set, it is important to establish a baseline, in order to have something to measure against moving forward. How can negative statistics have a positive impact? This established and builds trust and the client will be more likely to trust you going forward. Also, it provides an opportunity to show what can be done. Real life example: FormPlusFunction.com had problems organically and with PPC. Karcher needed to set expectations and set baselines from natural and conversion standpoints. As a result of redesign, the site looked better and was easier to use. Search Engine referrals went up significantly, along with traffic and unique visitors. Bottom line conversion standpoint, however, was down. This led to questions about why? Used Click Tracks to help evaluate how visitors are using the site. They identified primary navigation problems, that catalog exits were high, and that cart abandonment rate was high. 4% of users were using primary navigation. Instead of adding products to their cart, visitors were getting lost in the category pages. The shopping cart abandonment rate was high…they needed to allow a different path for international visitors. This created a pop-up “stumbling block,” making people chose if they wanted international checkout or not…this scared people away, so they replaced it with a radio button, and also streamlined the entire checkout process. Result was that return visitors increased over the next 4 months, and the conversion rate increased by 56%! In conclusion: measuring failure is just as important as measuring success, and these should be reacted-to. (got as much as I could…he was speaking very fast).

Kent Lewis, Anvil Media
Case study of Aspen Investment Group, which owns 5 geographically separate properties throughout the country. A variety of nicer old hotels that have been overhauled. Describes their success measurement process: Objective, metrics, benchmarks, strategies, tactics, analysis. Objective: Traffic? Brand? Etc… Metrics: which stats are being tracked? Benchmark: ask clients “what does success look like for you? That way if they say a few months later that they are not happy, you can compare their expectations to the results. Strategies: “Validate your gut.” Fine tune the PPC, optimize the site, and implement ROI. Tactics: use K.I.S.S. rule. Create campaigns, leverage SEO, in this case, use CitySearch, which has been one of the top converting traffic sources for them. Analysis: do a little, learn a lot. Destinations, specials, and manage inventory (occupancy). They found that one property, Lucia, has mostly business travelers that booked on average 2 days prior. This allowed them to save money by turning off PCC 2 days before “no vacancy nights.” Also likes to use specific analysis of paid performance vs organic, and is not yet happy with conversion rate once people start reservation process (which is 7%). 90% of reservations done between 2 days, as mentioned before this allows them to turn off PPC and save money when fully booked. Their 2006 planning includes: a new site template for all five properties. New property management platforms. International SEM. Use of blogs and newsletters, such as a concierge’s blog describing events and happenings. Measuring PR and offline activity, optimizing press releases, etc… get more data and do much deeper analysis.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Rimm-Kaufman Group, LLC.

Says he will be speaking quickly, but his presentation can be found online. His presentation is primarily targeted towards SEM. A deceptively simple question: I bought some clicks, what did I get? Not as simple of an answer as you think. Some issues to discuss: Brand vs non-brand searches? With a brand search, they already know what they want, vs if someone searches for non-brand, this is the harder to get client. In the case of a brand, you do need to fight your channels for spots near the top. Another twist is that some people’s brand names are actually popular search terms, such as “cheap tickets.” You have to advertise on your brand. It should be broken out in tracking, because it is naturally a higher-performing search term. Report on your non-brand ad spend and resulting sales separately. Channels: affiliates, organic, paid. Email, etc… are the different online marketing channels. Different tracking needs to be used for these, as well as different allocation rules. Use an “order audit,” where you take all the parties that are handling the media and bring in a full list of orders. Make sure you are not double counting orders. They use Excel to do this. Also strongly recommends placing test orders, using both IE and Mozilla, use multiple items and quantity, and use some easily-trackable keyword phrases. Use a fake visa if you don’t use online authorization. Also, you should purge cookies between each order you do, and shut down the browser, in order to make it a “new transaction.” Compare order numbers, quantities and timestamps. Tracking idiosyncrasies such as site A gets the order and site B gets the (something different-he is actually going faster than Geoff).

Tracking leads into a sales force? He has seen the majority of online coupons using static barcodes. He would like to see barcodes for such coupons generated dynamically so that it actually indicates the search that prompted the visit and the coupon print. He knows that Staples uses specific barcodes in their emails to repeat customers.See rimmkaufmann.com/ses-2005-12 for his presentation.

Q&A
Where organic leads more powerful than PPC? Kent says yes, and that branded terms outperformed non-branded.

Michael Murray from Fathom. SEo is not a shopping spree. Yes, you need traffic but pace yourself. Even sound practices may fail if they're rushed. Domain stuffing; short domains are easy to read, multiple hyphens or forced capitalization looks like spam, visitors are suspicious. Managing too many keywords at once, pick your priorities, what are your profit margins, give main keywords enough attention. Folder and page name excess, yes keywords can influence rankings, make sure they match content, limit repetition to appease engines. Taming the title tag, long titles are useless. Meta description overload; avoid long descriptions, portion appears in the search results, laundry list of keywords may not match content. Over the top meta keyword tags; hard to avoid this traditional step, some search engines downplay this tag due to past abuse, limit to a few keywords. Meta bonanza, skip misc meta tag options, they do little for engines, dont waste your time. Overdone visible text, massive keyword repetition in a small space may annoy web site visitors. Heading tag misuse, dont overstuff, avoid overuse. Visible text is unusual places, looks like an amateur put the site together, text placed above the entire page should match design and read like a sentence. Watch out for sitemaps, don't pursue too many keywords and avoid major copy clusters. Watch out for the visible links blitz, links in content are useful, but too many may be viewed as spam. Anchor text gone wild, too many search terms in the same hyperlink dilute the impact of a favored keyword or phrase. Renegade programmers, know what your programmers are doing (hiding keywords). Link title attribute mess, prime example of overkill. Alt tag overflow! Be careful about getting too many links too fast. Hidden text. Micro sites, search engines hate duplicate content, add good content to your main domain. No frames tag, the no frames tag space is ideal for citing browser limitations, include a robust summary of the site and links to specific pages.

Matt Bailey from Karcher Group. Users scan content; 79% of users scan a Web page, 16% read word for word (from Jacob Neilson). You look at headlines, sub headings, bulleted lists, headers, content arrangement, and half the word count. Screen reader users scan by listening; listen to the first few words, list links, list headers, and skip navigation. He plays a screen reader of a keyword stuffed page. He shows that hidden text is shown also on a mobile device. Well designed pages and content = credibility. Over optimization; write for search engines versus write for conversions.

Heather Lloyd-Martin, President, SuccessWorks International (very peppy, in a good way). Title stuffing, think of titles like headlines, when they are stuffed, they look bad. Remember that the SERPs are your first opportunity for conversion (and that is where your title is shown), make that title as clickable as possible. Kooky copy to get clicks; its on thing to create headlines that grab attention, its an other when it has nothing to do with the ad, titles can be creative but make the content relevant. Linkorama losers, she shows a page with tons and tons of links on it. Lots of links isnt helpful, its confusing and will overwhelm your readers, think about the rule of three and use those links to pre-qualify powerful landing pages. Conversion confusion; she shows a page with tons of text but no way to convert on that page. Baby, don't stuff the keyphrases and shows an example... Bad, bad misspellings, she shows how Google has the "did you mean xxx" in the SERPs, customers will notice misspellings pretty easily...which makes your company look really bad.

Search Head or Tail

(FYI: This means how long a search phrase is in terms of modifiers/words. A “head” search query would be “hotel,” and a “tail” term would be “4 star hotel Dallas area.”)

Moderated by Misty Locke, Range Online Media

Kevin Lee, Dit-It.com

Surprised that people are in the audience since they are competing this session against “Meet the Crawlers.” Capturing the Tail – Going Broad. Millions of searches every day that are unique, these tail keywords & phrases are very valuable. Tail searchers usually know exactly what they want. Publishers can make more money because they meet the needs of searchers seeking these long phrases. Some tail searches could only occur once per month, or less. Many people are searching for the various obvious stuff, but once beyond that, people have their own ideas about how to express their needs/interests. So: how far out to go into that tail and make it worth it as marketers? Search behavior follows a power curve: if you remember geometry, it is a curve that never actually reaches the axis. Somewhat asymptotic, but flattens out eventually. Gives some related search distributions from “travel” down to “travel south America.” Knows that there are probably thousands more keyword permutations that can be considered. The value of a keyword is directly proportional to where it is on the curve. Campaigns and goals should line up with the profile of the searchers. Positive actions vary throughout the buying cycle.

Searchers using head keyword phrases have ambiguous desires and needs for several reasons. In addition to typed searches driving search inventory at the head, it also contains link driven traffic from directories and within the portal, as well as syndication partners. How far out to go? Aggressively distribute the tail keyword phrases that are worth it. Quite often, the bids are far lower in the tail than the head. How to set bids in tail? Kevin recommends starting fairly high, since searcher is a desired target since they know what they want. You need to make sure to have a high position to get a large percentage of the few searchers. This will help you get an opportunity to gather more data. Remember that in Google and MSN, you are competing with those people that are bidding on Broad Match. MSN has great demographic data available by keyword. At first glance, Google and MSN seem to have systems that are friendly, due to broad match ability, which “casts a wide net.” But, not all people who are doing the searches have the same intent. Specific creatives should be written within each ad group in order to increase CTR. How to find new tail opportunities? Web analytics software, Campaign management technologies and raw log files will reveal great tail keyword phrases. Tail keywords that are short benefit from the dynamic keyword insertion tool (DKI). Generally the CTR will increase with DKI, increasing efficiency. They have seen up to a 27% DKI efficiency increase.

MSN also has a DKI, but with a different structure and no ability to place a default keyword in case the phrase is too long. Yahoo Standard Match always trumps Advanced Match regardless of bid. This means for more work, requiring you to predict searches as far out in the tail as practical. When looking at the head, you probably want to segment differently. These people do not know exactly what they want. Use other parameters such as geographic, or day-parting. Hard to get enough data in the tail to day-part, but since ROI is so high in the tail you would never probably want to use day parting anyway. Between the high numbers of keywords in the tail and the high number of targeting options that make sense for the head, the data becomes significant. In the tail, competitive reactions are less frequent, meaning more elasticity in the market. When do you “kill a tail keyword?” Use statistics to “come to the rescue” cluster analysis can help. Good thing about looking at head and tail separately allows for reduction of waste, targeting of best customers, and increased profit. Improve your messages and offers, and be more aggressive when it matters.

Harrison Magun, Avenue A - Razorfish Search.

Will focus on the analyses that marketers and managers need to use to help decide which keywords/what to bid. His alternate title is “Bid down or bid up you moron!” To explain how to determine what a statistically relevant sample is, Harrison uses an example of “twins.” If there are 120 people in the room, and 6 are twins, that gives us 5%. What is the likelihood that twins are 5% of the rest of population? He shows some calculus-derived results that depict a standard bell curve that shows this probability that the incidence is between 4.5 and 5.5% is 20.5% This means if we act of the smaller sample of 120, there is an 80% chance we will make the wrong decision. How big of a sample do we need to be 90% sure that the incidence is between 4.5 and 5.5%? Answer is you need 5,044 incidences to make this estimation. To translate this into the kind of numbers to make accurate PPC management estimates, Conversion rates: 1%, need 25,000 clicks to make right decision, even at 10% conversion rate, you need 2500 clicks to make sure the conversion data is 90% accurate. So lets say you have 400 clicks and the actual conversion rate is 2%, there is a 60% chance you will make the wrong decision, Don’t waste your time on insignificant data. Sedate the screaming lunatics in your organization that are demanding changes – show them the data just described. Create accurate tests. Understand how many clicks you need for a good test. If you can’t sustain bad results, then don’t test in the first place. Spread the tests out. The idea of creating multiple keywords and campaigns and tests at a time makes it more confusing. Understand factors that impacts conversion rates.

“How can I use this sexy stats stuff?” Use Excel, no need for fancy tools. Use your own categorizations – this lets you sum up related keywords that don’t have enough clicks, and make a generalization based on business similarities, such as categories dovetailing together with respect to seasonality, for example. Use Bid Management algorithms and toolsets. This is heavy math. Add the knowledge into the four levers of search: Bidding strategy, keyword creation, messaging, business intelligence. In summation, when you look at tail, understand how accurate the data is, and take that into account when making your decisions.

Q&A
Could you talk a little more about clustering? Kevin: right after I took stats test, I forgot most of those things, so I hired people with bid foreheads. (laughs) The reason he likes to start tail keywords aggressively, is because if you make a quick decision, it takes even longer to prove things wrong. When thinking about decision process, you can go conservative or aggressive. Conservative would mean you may have a 50% confidence, moving up to an aggressive stance with a 90% confidence. How to create clusters? Think about it in terms of similar intent. Requires not only a good statistical basis but also a good business basis, to make the decision. Harrison agrees…look for keywords with same attributes to cluster. Not a statistician, but knows there are regression analyses that can help with this too.

Ramez Naam from MSN Search.
- New Kid on Block
- Launched Feb. 1 2005
- Web, Local, Toolbar, Deskto
- Windows Live
- Get external links or submit URL
- Ensure pages are internally linked
- Link to most important pages
- Use Robots.txt
- Keep URLs Human Readable (reduce query parameters, beware of session IDs)
- Understand redirects (301s and 302s)
- Don't rely on JavaScript
- Unique, High Quality Content
- Good Organic Links (descriptive text, links that a person would click on, the more natural a link the better)
- Beware of using images for text, flash, and any deceptive optimization techniques.
- Windows Live at live.com, shows how you can customize the page, search and add the search to your home page and search feeds and subscribe
- Windows Live Local at local.live.com. With a new feature named "birds eye view" with actual aerial views from planes, change the angles and so on, very very impressive.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves
- About Ask slide
- Follows the Robots.txt rules
- Efficiency tips
- Freshness determines crawl rate
- Completeness (pdfs, html, flash, ms-office, xml)
- Date stamp content
- Simplify site organization and navigation
- Watch out for infinite pages
- Have patience when it comes to getting indexed
- JavaScript is a challenge
- Dynamic pages can be an issue
- URLs within images can't be followed

Tim Mayer from Yahoo
- Mission statement slide
- Link new URL from existing URL in the index
- Make sure all URLs have an inbound link
- Good authoritative links into a site to encourage deep crawls
- Don't make site depth too extreme (3-4 levels is recommended)
- Use the free addurl service if all else fails
- Unique content (page titles, metatags, unique pages, multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses)
- Avoid excessive doorway pages, keyword stuffing, keyword repetition, hidden text/link, link farms, cloaking
- Yahoo has many crawlers (they are exclusive to each service)
- Site Explorer Slide (talk about it here, here and here.
- Local & Navigational Active Abstracts (he shows local vertical integration into SERPs, also Quick Links, and so on.
- My Web product, social search, saving search and sharing results with friends (save to my web buttons can be put on your pages)
- Yahoo Search Blog and Next.Yahoo.Com
- He Mentions Answers.Yahoo.Com

Charles Martin from Google
- Freshness, Comprehensiveness, Different Crawl Rates
- Google Sitemaps, shows it off for crawl and error checking reasons
- Show how to remove content from Google at webmasters/remove.html
- Webmaster Guidelines slides
- What if my site is moving, use 301 redirects
- Googlebot uses too much bandwidth, respond 304 not modified
- I want Googlebot to stay away (robots.txt
- Gmail, Personalized Search, New Froogle Homepage, Images on Google News, Numrange, Google Local, Google Deskbar.

Q & A:

Q: On Rogue spiders, what are they?
A: Danny answers it, but if you want to hear what he said, comment and ill add the info, its basic.

Some realllllllllly basic questions.....

Q: Google Sandbox, how do I get out of it?
A: Charles said when he was listening to the podcast, he learned about the Jagger update thing. Internally there is no Jagger update, there are just improvements to the site. He said, whatever the marketers said, "i am behind it." They said that there is no google sandbox per-say, but its more about a series of filters that tries to figure out if a site is good or bad, etc.

Q: Is it cloaking to strip out session ids for just the bots?
A: They all said it is "no problem". Google added, "in fact, please do that."

Q: Images that are linked, are they followed?
A: MSN follows it, Google follows and recommends adding reasonable alt text.

Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch is up first. He notes that MSN came out with Windows Live Local, he shows it off, some more info about msn local live. Local Search Perspectives; To effectively address local search, isolating its constituents and components is critical. The Local Search User; Local search is changing out behavior- what did we used to do? yellow pages, newspapers, word of mouth. The birth of a new savvy local consumer. Three broad classes of LS (local search) users: (1) need driven business look-up, (2) Purchasing research activity (distance, price,, rating, products, coupons, etc.), (3) Community-driven activity (community city pages feature time sensitive activities, top user recommendations, personalization and social networking. All human activity is inherently local. 20% of all search activity is local in its intent. Local Search Content and Data: So where does the LS content and data come from? (1) offline derived local content, (2) internet-derived local content, (3) syndicated-authority content, (4) user-generated local content. Kelsey Group Survey; most people believe LS business data is poor, most people believe that user-generated content is critical. Focus on user-generated content; rich content beyond standard contact info, content that is not easily obtained by crawling the unstructured web, food for pure unstructured local search, content for qualitative, comparative buying decisions, enables meaningful compare contrast and filter functionality. The SME (small medium size) Advertisers; 10M SEMs in the US, 75% of SMEs do business within 50 miles, they spend $22 billion local ads, 70% of YP advertisers are service based orgs, 46$ of budgets go to YP, only 3-5% use paid search.. Local Online Ads and LS Marketplace; 4.1 billion wil be spent this year on local online ads, newspapers claim 41% of the total local online ad spend, in 2006 local paid search ads will grow 161%, but the marketplace is very fragmented. LS Sales Efforts; controlling margins and dealing with SMEs is difficult and costly (SMEs have less than $6,000 per year to spend, volume/scale, automation required, significant capitalization). Self-provisioning of local search ads, SME local search sales is actually a big man's game. For the aggregators, interactive is both an opp and challenge. The LS Facilitators; a new breed of facilitators are empowering large, traditional sales orgs. The birth of the agnostic local search marketing platform and fulfillment teams (locallaunch, reachlocal, webvisible, trafficleader). Facilitators consolidate a complex marketplace; different ad set up, pricing, algos, strategies, and performance requirements amongst inventories). The Local Search Providers; Yahoo Local, Google Local, True Local, Local.com, Windows Live Local. Internet Yellow Pages. Soon we will no longer differentiate between LS and IYPs. Local Search Providers; LS and Social Networking, Classifieds and Shopping (craig's list, shoplocal.com), pay per call and call tracking. LS Tactics; local seo and ppc are very important but here is a new form of local optimization; the accuracy and distribution of core business data is critical to local search optimization, businesses must pay attention to and help generate published opinions about their business and study the SERPs and ride the coattails of the LS authorities. Clean your core business data; offline derived local content furnishers IYP and local search engines. Generated from local regional phone companies and telemarketing forces. Focus on your Acxiom, Amacai and infoUSA data, they feed yahoo, google superpages. Think of this data as your foundation. Updating is easier than it once was. Distribute your business profiles as far as possible (he shows yahoo business profiles and shows the vertical creep of the local listings into the SERPs of a traditional search results, he also shows Google putting Yahoo local result in its SERPs. He then closes; no web site is required to do this, it helps but not required.

Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement to dive into tactics. Different types of local search engines, the big engines and local only engines and internet yellow pages. Bruce Clay & TrueLocal has a local search chart to show the syndication; bruceclay.com/serc-local.htm (i think). Big Search Engines; three ways to get into editorial listings; add physical address to every web page, submit business details directly and submit address to large databases. She shows screen captures of all these things. Local-only Search Engines; local.com and truelocal (powered by GeoSign). Business Databases; shows how to get into them, lists URLs which I can not type down fast enough for you folks (but you can figure it out). I also may have the info in my coverage of this session from SES San Jose 05. Lots of how to add to here and there, most of it covered in San Jose.

Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing. Err, I seems like a very similar presentation to the one from last SES. Google Overview; regional targeting is available as part of all AdWords accounts. You must have a Web site. Physical address is not required. Advertisers can target by state or city or metro, or radius from address or custom (polygon). Google serves ads based on searcher's IP address, search query and other factors. Yahoo Overview; they run it as a separate product, so you need to open a new account. Web site is optional due to hosted locator page. Must have a physical business address in the targeted region. One targeting option, based on specified radius from address (0.5 to 100 miles). Yahoo serves local ads based on; search queries, yahoo registered members address, and location of specific yahoo local site. She then gives a case study, which I believe is the same as SES San Jose 05.

Right now its only for Portland, but Google launched Google Transit. An idea I had since 1998 but didn't do much about. Gary Price at SEW Blog has the scoop and I posted a forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Also more information at http://www.google.com/transit/help/faq_transit.html.

Ok, back to the session. :)

Marcia spots an MSN update taking place, forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Oh, also MSN Launched Local Live and forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Loren at SEJ posted Search Engine Journal’s 2005 Search Engine Blogs Contest today. You can go nominate your favorite search blogs at the Survey Monkey survey up until Friday.

I'll keep my fingers crossed! :)

Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan

**Note: apologies to anyone expecting coverage on two sessions this afternoon. I was unable to cover the Retail Forum due to a scheduling conflict, and the “Converting Visitors to Buyers” session was actually covered by me this summer in San Jose, so I chose to attend the “Future of SEM” panel that Barry covered. The content was probably nearly identical to the post from the SES San Jose 2005 Coverage.

Invites everyone to wear casual clothing for the last day of the conference tomorrow: pajamas or sweats suggested. First question: a gentleman was hoping Allan Dick would provide some more toilet jokes. (laughs) Danny gives a quick history…he gets about 500 requests a day to speak. Allan was an attendee that came up with some new session ideas that Danny approved. He suggests this is the best way to secure a speaking position at SES.

First time attendee said that she was in many of the basic track sessions, and asks what to do about conflicting information delivered? Danny advises to weigh the people you spoke with and try to get a gut feeling. He spoke to a gentleman who is in the gambling industry, and told him he probably didn’t get much out of the conference since so many of the more aggressive tactics are not really disclosed in the conference.

Question geared to the search engines: why do the SE’s attempt to prevent SEO’s from succeeding? It is his experience that as an SEO, he provides better content. Why are they mad at us and not “certifying SEO agencies” and promoting qualified SEO’s like IBM promotes their business partners, for example. Danny asks Tim Mayer from Yahoo to give his opinion on this. If he really did “hate you,” he probably wouldn’t be answering questions at the conference or on his blog as often as he does. He says: “the mission of Y! Search is to provide the most trusted results…has to balance the needs of users, publishers, or advertisers. For example, the “mortgage” space only has ten spots available on the first page for related terms, so many authoritative sites may not show up there. Everyone thinks that their content is higher-quality, and Yahoo’s goal is simply to determine which actually is. Danny asks what are one or two specific things he would like “more love” regarding? The question asker can’t come up with any real specifics, but feels that they should be more geared towards educating people about “good SEO’s.” Danny says he has a good point…consumers do want to know who to trust. Should/could search engines “blacklist?” Probably not, but perhaps offer a “certified white list” of trusted SEM vendors? Some one follows up with “is there a way to create a validation process for a particular page?” Danny says “ let me channel Matt Cutts…he then gets a big roar for his imitation of Matt’s probable answer to this, which involves something along the lines of “we’re working on it, it’s difficult to do this, etc… they may be adding more “advice” within the sitemap submission system that comes back and says things like “your robots.txt file is blocking the robot,” or “you are using text that could be perceived as hidden,” etc…Best thing to do is send feedback to Google saying you want feedback.

Next question: standards of validation have not really been touched on too much in the conference…what is the deal? Are sites that are validated easier to get ranked? Asks Tim Mayer…who answers that this probably is not really a factor. Danny adds that the reason the topic is not really covered is because the conference is about search, not design. Same thing about all the blogging questions. They have discussed CSS and why to use standards-based “Stuff.”

Are search engines starting to get more sophisticated regarding CSS? Is the value of an H1 traditional tag better than the “less ugly” look? Tim says that it is basically treated as plain text. The issue is that you are trying to tell the search engine what is important but not let users know, if you use the CSS div-tag-surrounded H1 in order to make it look smaller. Things should be consistent, telling both the SE and the User. Danny suggests going to the “Meet the Crawlers” session tomorrow to get “more goodies.”

What considerations are being made regarding the theoretical sandbox…Danny takes it away since many people will ask this at Meet the Crawlers” tomorrow.

Next question about duplicate content/scraper sites, and if people are doing anything about this? Tim says they obviously try to measure the amount of Spam on their index, and the creation of duplicates is constantly evolving to “get around” spam detection methods. Describes an essential “cat and mouse” game (my description, not his). Danny says this is a rising concern, and will be addressed in more detail tomorrow.

Who is hiring? SEM’s? in-house? Are we growing as an industry? Danny surveys the room and the majority of people say business is good. One person stands and says business isn’t good…a furniture manufacturer in Wisconsin. She wonders if they can sell online? Allan Dick stands up and says “I sell tubs online, trust me, is can be done.” (laughs). Danny asks a couple basic question…frames? Dynamic URL’s?

Next question: conversion tracking. His client took off compulsory sign-in forms in order for someone to download a white paper, and downloads shot up. He suggests analytics, which would work unless someone runs a program that strips out referral data, such as what Norton Anti Virus does. Also suggests attending the Measuring Success sessions tomorrow.

Next person would like to hear more about Google Analytics, and separately, how do they measure the feeds for the Danny Sullivan podcast on webmasterradio.fm? Danny says he is using Feedburner. Polls the audience about Google Analytics, and most people think it is a good product. Many people are saying that Google will use the data in a “bad way,” essentially causing the cost of high-converting keywords to go higher. The good news is that the price of analytics will probably plummet soon, Danny feels.

Last question…person first time at conference, and has learned a lot, but is overwhelmed because she feels that her clients may not be able to afford everything really needed to perform better. Danny advises to go for the low-hanging fruit, and starting with the more important factors that are affordable, and adding further budget as available. Greg Jarboe adds that if it was that easy, “we’d all be making minimum wage.”

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Speakers:
Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC
Martin Laetsch, Manager, Worldwide Search, Intel Corporation
Misty Locke, President & Co-Founder, Range Online Media
Fredrick Marckini, CEO, iProspect
Dana Todd, President, SEMPO
Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
Chris Zaharias, Vice President of Sales, Efficient Frontier

Danny introduces each person on the panel. Dana has been speaking at SES since the first SES. Martin Laetsch from Intel, he controls search for Intel to represent the in house perspective. Fredrick Marckini from iProspect is also on stage, the poster child for SEM company success, he knows him from 1997. Greg Boser from WebGuerrilla to talk about the black hat side, but not only that - he had the first FTC complaint, he will speak his mind fairly. Chris Zaharias from Efficient Frontier, they run client campaigns for really big companies with huge budgets, he has been involved in search since Netscape (industrial strength paid listings). Jill Whalen from HighRankings, newsletter, forums, etc. she has a lot of small and midsize marketers. Misty Locke from Range Online Media who started her own firm, she has seen the good and the bad.

Q: Major trends that will drive the future of SEM?
Greg said "not local" its the biggest thing that will not take off. Personalization is an other thing SEs wont make great gains in.
Dana said 65% said 100% of search budget will be brought in house. We as a specialty group will go away as a niche and be integrated into marketing teams.
Martin said you will see the integration of traditional campaigns into search campaigns.
Fedrick adds that what Martin hit on was what we will see in 2006, the offline with the online. You will see questions being asked at the cash register like, did you search online before buying this?
Misty adds its beyond that, but more about mobile, when you are away from your desktop.
Chris said Versign is trying to become the global registrar for RFID codes, as soon as you get that, you can now track offline impressions.

Q: How the SEM firms relationship with SEs evolve and what about conflict of interests?
Chris said you will eventually see the SEs moving to revenue share models.
Greg said that you all (you!!!) will be giving them the data (Google Analytics, etc.).
Dana said from the publisher perspective, they wouldn't do this on their own. She said that we are making 3% what people are making then the print counterpart, so stop complaining.
Martin said it can really go either way. If we say its ok to give the SEs my data, in exchange for something more from the SEs. If we take the view of not giving them the data, then we have to do the work and analysis.
Fredrick said its not just keywords we are buying, we will be buying other media online.
Misty adds that these guys become the SEs customers and not ours.

Q: Back to the SEM and SE relationships..
Fredrick said there is a huge improvement.
Jill adds that she believes the SEs still prefer that the SEOs do not exist. They prefer (the SEOs only) we go away.
Greg adds a nice little line in there, he said they do steal clients. There is a long history of unfriendly behavior between the two, but yet we hang out together and get along.
Dana joked that the SEs do not give commissions, instead they give out iPods, but I (dana) only cares about increasing client ROIs.
Misty said she was just in a panel with the retailers. She is usually upset with SEs stealing her clients. But she was listening and realized that we are also a major part of the problem. A lot of SEMs do poor work and its bad. So the clients go directly to the vendors (SEs), we are doing this to ourselves!

Q: How is the market share going to evolve? Google, MSN, Yahoo! etc....
Dana said the end users perceive the engines differently. Each user is loyal to their engine. As a society we embrace choice. Yahoo is more of a portal. Google is about technology and fast access. MSN needs to find its value.
Martin said as a society we do like choices but how often do you say, hmm what am I going to buy? Normally you know what you want. Dana added that is the difference between men and women.
Jill said people have yahoo has their homepage, but when they search, they use Google.
Chris said Google got their market share through its technology (and monetization methods), it will only grow, he thinks.
Greg said its great for us, because you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
Fredrick said you have to pay attention shifts in market share. He said Google is not a search engine, its the largest grid computer out there. Google is the only player that has both hardware and software expertise. Yahoo! doesn't, MSN is only a software company.

Q: You can track so much with search marketing. Will that fuel the stealing of budgets from other media and ads? Who is the big loser in this?
Fredrick said we see a lot of money coming from TV budgets. He said he had a client put up a radio ad and then the bidding agents adjusted the bids because people were clicking more on the ads. They all work together, they are not individual silos.
Misty adds that she told people not to kill their other ad methods.
Dana added that it still blows her mind that people spend so much on TV without being able to track it.
.,......,..,.,.,.,.,.,.,,..,.......,.,.,.,.........,,,.,.,.,....,.,.,.

Don't ask what the line above means. :)

Q: Spam Questions....
Fredrick said Greg had the quote of the day, "anyone is a spammer" "if you are below me, you suck."
Greg nods and says it again; the hat thing to him, is just silly. He said he provides solutions to clients, he gives them all options and explains the risks. Don't sit there with blindfolds on. "Dont bring a sword to a gun fight" quote from Tim Mayer is used once again.
Jill says there is a frustration from folks, that when they do see "spammy sites" above their sites, and reporting doesn't help. If you see others doing it (spam) and it's working for them and you ask me should you do it too, I can't really tell you not to, when it's obviously working for others.
Dana said she loves it when the big white hats snuggle up to a black hat at the bar and ask them questions.
Misty said that "we" named black-hats and white-hats (as an industry). She realized its about explaining what you will do with the site to the client. You must be upfront with the client.
Fredrick said some companies will go that route and some won't.
Martin adds Intel would never go that route because it can hurt the brand.
Dana said that for SEO work in the contract they have a legal binder to go by all the SEs guidelines.
Fredrick said, did you ever hear of a "black hat print ad agency"?
Greg said the majority of aggressive stuff is seo people doing their own seo work. TrafficPower cases, he said, are happening less and less. But SEOs doing it for themselves is the bulk of the aggressive stuff.

Q: Most important vertical?
Fredrick said vertical search is cool when its paired with other devices (i.e. iTunes).
Dana said a bunch of tightly nichy things, mobile is too locked in legislation.
Jill said she doesnt know what a vertical is (she was joking)
Chris said its more about search and not vertical
Fredrick disagrees with Greg's local search and explained a case study he did for his dad.

Q: Are we in a search bubble? Will it bust?
Dana there wont be a bust.
Misty said no, but clean up and continued expansion.
Martin agrees
Jill SEO will go up
Fredrick No
Greg No
Chris said YES because there is too much VC money out there.

Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies is the moderator of this fun filled event.

Kaushal Kurapati, Senior Product Manager of Search, Ask Jeeves
- Ask Jeeves info slide........................................
- General Link Analysis Methods (links to page a, to b, to c, yada yada --- see past presentations)
- Teoma Approach on Links (communities, subject-specific popularity, hubs and authorities)
- Be Cautious of reciprocal links and buying links
- Avoid link farms, cloaked pages, hidden links and links by images.
- Become an authority on a subject
- Focus on your business and content, the rest will follow

Charles Martin from Google
- He is using a Apple Computer, kudos to him
- First time at SES, he works in the search quality group (I guess under Matt)
- Links are a proxy for human judgement
- PageRank slide.... "Most visible factor of the ranking algorithm"
- Be the user when building links
- "Click here" links doesnt help much, use rich anchor text
- Encourage related sites to link to use, use unique relevant content to attract links
- Avoid; recip links, poor quality link exchanges, fishy looking sites, who you link to can affect your reputation.
- He specifically says "You can be held accountable for linking to people"
- No hidden or cloaked links
- He said avoid & % etc, "We wont look at them" (hmmm)
- Do not obsesses with back links
- Design site with user in mind
- He then shows off a bit of Google Sitemaps and its error tracking

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo!
- There is this intense focus on link building, Tim says. There is very little focus on building quality content. If you build good content, people will link to it.
- A whole industry is built around linking strategies, but its not everything.
- He then said how tagging may affect this industry
- Links should be related and designed to help the user
- Add unique and useful content that invites others to link to your site
- Use appropriate and specific anchor text to describe the linked to content
- Don't use link exchanges or buy links
- Site Explorer slide comes up, shows the features (discussed at exhaustion at this site in the past)
-- new features include exclude the internal site links, and rss and atom feed submission support

Ramez Naam, Group Program Manager, MSN Search
- He expanded about the users
- MSN uses links to help them understand the popularity of the site and they use the anchor text for labels of the site
- Keep users in mind....

Q & A:
Q: How do you weed out artificial links?
A: No real answer.

Q: I asked Tim why they built site explorer, if he specifically wants people to stop focusing on links. :) I prefaced that saying, I wanted to give Tim a hard time.
A: Google backed Tim up and then Tim said that it will stop people using yahoo.com with automated tool to grab the data (which is a great answer).

Q: Depth of links...
A: A non issue on the generic level

Q: How often are the link data updated at the engines?
A: Tim said often, MSN said it depends, Ask said the same thing (depends on architecture, Google didnt say anything. Detlev said all it took was a link from me, to get indexed by all engines except for Ask and it wasn't due to add url form.

Q: Is there a limit to Google Sitemaps?
A: Yes, he thinks 50,000 URLs per sitemap, up to 50 sitemaps per account..???? see site documentation.

Maybe ill add more Q&A if anything is very interesting...

Q: Stolen Content...
A: Google and Ask Jeeves said do not worry, we will figure out which is the original source. Bold statement, don't you think?

Q: Do you penalize for people who link to me, I don't control it...
A: Tim said, I agree, you can not always control it. But Tim said, it may bring your site unwanted attention. If you were banned, you can always submit reinclusion.
Google said they only hold you accountable for things you control.
MSN said dittoed it.

Note: Google guy says that nofollow attribute is a "critical tool."

Q: How many links - too fast - do we have to worry about?
A: Google said it has nothing to do with the number or speed you get links. But it is about the link text all being the same anchor text.
Tim, Yahoo agrees, but also make sure to be relative to your industry, do not get a crazy number of links that way exceed the norm in your industry.

Detlev Johnson is the moderator for this session and opens up talking about how marketing needs to learn about the search space and bringing back those ideas to the IT department to help do their job better.

The session starts with Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International with his presentation titled: Working Together – Selling Your Plan. He will be talking on both points and covering another speakers material. He starts saying you need to start a centralized search marketing program. Your central team handles everything you need to do in one place in your organization. They build out a search engine marketing leadership council. They also put in place a management system for search engine marketing. Established to govern SEM activities and communications. This helps improves collective results and various expectations. The first thing they ask for with a new client is ask for a style guide. Set technical standards to control spider traps such as frames, pop-ups, flash, cookies, and so on. If the client doesn’t have a style guide, then they help them create one. They keep it up to date and keep it fresh. The other thing is the program needs to be broken down into layers such as a pyramid structure who tasks for each group. Infrastructure at the bottom, coding in the middle, and content at the top. He says to start at the bottom and work your way up the ladder.

You should also train your team. Explain why search is important they all want the site to be successful and they all search themselves. Training is important to help set the fundamentals. The specialists on your extended search team need different training in their own languages. Bill next talks about tops for getting your SEM budget. There is rarely any “new money” so give solid justification of what should be and the business case for change. SEM money usually comes from other projects that have been cut. Be sure to understand the goals of the current budget allocations and show how search can compliments or increase results over current spend. Also, explain competitive pressures and missed opportunities. Provide details of “total cost of ownership”. Often how much internal money is not accounted for. At IBM, they call is blue dollars. Prepare for turf warfare and budget battles.

The first things they do is try to explain search. Example, US paid search expenditures 2003 was 2 billion. He also explains that if we are not ranked well we will lose. Portals are the number one way customers find new web sites (Forrester). 55% of web users expect to find top brands in the top few results (iProspect 2002 Survey). 95% of corporate purchasing agents use the web to research products and services before selection. Also if they can’t find it, they can’t buy it. So how many search visitors come to buy? The right search result puts the visitor in the “learn” stage to view a product page. The other big one is that most executives are competitive. “The competition is doing it or doing it better”. Be sure to show competitors ad and positions.

One of the best ways to make people play along is a missed opportunity matrix. Is it a carrot or a stick? The matrix shows a list of keywords, there monthly and annul searches and also how much traffic they are getting. You can show areas for improvement and for flavor show where they currently rank in Google. So what is the best tactic he asks. It’s a more effective tactic vs. other forms? Tell them we’ll spend the money well”. We will experiment with small amounts of money. We can buy second teir keyword phrases at lower cost per click. Once we make the major changes major benefits. We will measure constantly for keyword, bad performing keywords, spend, and so on.

The second speaker is Marshall Simmonds from New York Times Company. When you think about the NY Times as a company its big and well organized. Instead he found there was a big ego, and a good deal of challenges. In there whole network of 11 million articles, it’s a huge amount of content. Most of it is unoptimized. The NY Times has an IT department and high security on their website. There isn’t much room for big changes, it has to be small changes. Some more challenges include working with “old school” marketing and getting them to “get” search. Coping with turf wars/budget grabs and egos.

Working together is important and this includes internally and externally. At the NY Times they are all about integrating search into the work flow. It has to be as common as email. They can not chase algorithms, and the changes have to be global changes, they can’t make page by page changes. At NY Times they don’t say “change” they enhance their writing. The change in words is big and works a bit better. They make everyone part of the SEO process so that each has a job or part. He says they get a hold of the templates for the site, no spider traps, and so on.

They sell the IT teams by showing them results. Example is titles writers use, they are not effective for search. Example: About.com 1095% increase in search refers since SEO initiative began in December of 1999. So how are they communicating? Getting them to move in the same direction. Example is that the NY Times told there writer to call the tsunami event as “Asia’s deadly wave”, so all writers had to refer to it like that. But in reality it’s a tsunami and a search engine needs to understand this. He says they send out a check list, and everyone gets a checklist to complete and it gets into the workflow.

Dave Willaims from 360i first up. Key challenges; organization knowledge, integrated search strategy and data optimization. Organization's Knowledge; If everyone in the organization does not have a baseline understanding of search, how is it going to ever be a strategic marketing initiative? People invest in what they understand and are familiar with and test what is unknown. Sometime using an independent 3rd party can help build org knowledge and buy-in. One Search Strategy; is there on overarching sem strategy that is integrated with other online and offline marketing initiatives? or is your search strategy in silos? Campaign strategy will drive tractical implementations, as related to brand, keyword bucketing, performance targets and optimization and messaging. Having one integrated search strategy allows for max campaign impact and growth. Data Optimization; Do you have ownership of your data and the ability to optimize campaigns based on all historical info? statistical modeling, algo optimization and predictive capabilities. Having ownership of data allows for marketers to make accurate forecasts and ROI decisions that have max impact across all search channels. Data management and optimization is the future of search, especially as search develops. Power of data for predictions and optimizations. Search marketers can now use sophisticated stats modeling to take advantage of current market inefficiencies. We typically see a 20 - 50% lift against actively manage campaigns. Portfolio optimization example; predictive capabilities using historical data (impression by keyword, click through by keyword, cost by keyword, revenue by keyword). Optimization; predictions about future performance based on historical insights and keywords similarities. Across entire campaign or across specific buckets. Keyword grouping guidance; they typically put core terms into one bucket and say that for branding reasons we want to always be number one. For retails clients they usually assign each product a bucket and within those buckets they further break things down into high volume terms... (1) Build org search marketing knowledge for paid and seo. (2) develop a fully integrated SEM strategy that does not look at the search in a silo. (3) leverage historical data and sophisticated stat modeling to take advantage of market inefficiencies and produce abnormal returns.

Harrison Magun, Vice President, Managing Director, Avenue A | Razorfish Search. He will talk more on paid search. "1st Rule of 4": (1) Define success (2) Make a plan (3) Measure results (4) Get feedback. He was going to show a funny commercial on "Axe" but the sound card is not available. (1) Define Success: direct response metrics (sales, volume, and margin of sales...), other metrics and key indicators (phone calls, buzz, etc.), dependencies (the price of your product, site design, customer service, etc.), what's reasonable (benchmarks are critical), define key milestones. (2) Make a plan: before you build a plan, understand what you have in your toolbox. You need a bidding strategy, keyword expansion and categorization, messaging, business intelligence. Now create that project plan; how much resources do you have? Which levers (toolbox tools) do you have? What are your objectives? Also take into account your business reality (seasonality, etc.). Take into account, statistical significance/testing time. He brings up a project plan example; week x do XYZ on week n do ABC, etc. Always stick to your plan! You can't always stick to the plan!!! If you cant stick to the plan; you can have a reactive strategy or a proactive strategy, be realistic about the tradeoffs needed to be made when you do not go on the plan, the plan is your currency. (3) Measure Results: measure about weekly, measure what you did, why did you do it? what was achieved?, what are you going to do next week?, what will be achieved? The answers should inform your project plan. (4) Get Feedback: Ask for it even if you know the answer. Know who your main constituents are. Ancillary constituents are important also.

Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind up next to speak about leveraging tech to use tools for the session topic. How do you identify a born project manager? It is the person who is able to juggle multiple priorities, someone who can maintain the balance, and someone who can withstand the pressure, someone who can handle the customers (some funny pictures explaining it). The most common roadblocks are; Organic Growth; unsure of required skills, unclear about whats expected, unwilling to be in unknown territory, and uncommitted to taking on new responsibility. Learning to Unlearn; education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. Key attitude adjustments; no longer a functional expert, lack of specifics, less flexibility with own time, no more instant gratification. You should create a roadmap for training project managers. Create many short learning units, so they can learn over time in small segments. He says use tagging to organize these notes, use webex or gotomeeting, and create a short quiz to test the knowledge. A typical skills profile for a PM; pre project, project setup phase, project continues, project roadmap and wrap up.

Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc. is last up. Initial client communication; set scope of work and get a PO, set expectations about deliverables and timelines, identify the multiple people within the organization. She explains that sometimes too many people are involved. SEO Deliverables; keyword analysis document, competitive report, ranking and traffic benchmarks, architectural, technical and source code reviews (SEO Audit), production of SEO guidelines (style guide for company), page by page audit and keyword mapping, recommendations for new content, development of unique meta data or formula for automated meta tagging. The biggest deliverables is educating people to be patient as to what is going to happen. Timeline: Deliverables --------------> Implementation --> Monitoring and fine tuning (you need to monitor during implementation) --------> Maintenance. Integration with other online marketing (competition). Education; come to a common terminology, talk about why you cant just do organic search optimization, provide case studies and suggestions as to how and why to integrate (sempo, marketingsherpa, iab research, clickz, sew, conferences). Overlapping budgets; tighten relationship with other agencies, talk about who owns what budget (you got overlapping keywords). Measurement; offline marketing effects online traffic volume, online marketing effects offline sales, attempt to merge multiple tracking systems and backend CRMs. Creatives; consistency but not the same (text vs images, keywords vs page location, ppc vers cpm, searchers vs. eyeballs) shared branding experience & responsibility for trademarks. Search +; All bests are off as Google moves to print ads, msn goes to demo targeting, local search, personalization, community based search and rise of vertical search.

Well I sure hope not, but the possibly is there and Google reps have not dismissed it completely when asked. Imagine what type of monetization potential this untapped resource has currently. According to some offical sources News is the second fastest growing segment for Google and Yahoo this year. 41% of Google users are looking for news. Not natural search, but news search. So it seems logical to eventually harness the potential and milk it for profit.

When will we see ads in our Google News section? No one know for sure, but my guess is potentially sometime in late 2006 or 2007. They are also testing various ad placements internally. Taking a look at the Google News homepage, I am not sure where they would place ads as anything inserted would seem out of place. Guess we will see. If you know anything about this speculation, please comment here?

Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath is moderator.

First up Laura Thieme, President and Founder, of Bizresearch. Clickz.com said mondays are popular for online holiday shoppers. (1) 12-3 daypart receives most online traffic, (2) tuesday 12-3 is also popular, (3) Research recommend marketers target at this time, (4) Non holiday shopping usually peaks during mid-week. December 12th businesses day, December 19th is the last day for peak online shopping. Post holiday shopping is expected in January. Post Holiday Shopping: Benefits of shopping search engines; product title, image, description, price from various vendors displayed on each search results page, easy to shop multiple vendors from one place, merchant ratings, upfront price and packaging calculator and so on. Creation of a Data Feed; excel doc or CSV file of raw data file of product database to include; title, description, price, delivery cost, image and category assignment. Recommend Automation, recommend after initial data feed is created, set up automation script to run. Third party programs also can help with this. Updates can be submitted automatically as product/prices change and begin optimization. She then flips through different screens of the shopping search engines results pages. Piggy back on shopping search CPC, determine if shopping engines are advertising for your target terms. Both pricegrabber and shopping.com to do this often. Case Studies Demonstrate Need for Close Monitoring. Seven retailers tracked and varying performance. Overall over the years there has been a diminishing return on ad spend (ROAS). She shows some total costs and sales figures for all the engines. How can you track shopping search ROAS? Shopping.com & Pricegrabber offer ROI tracking by cat, and others offer tools, but not Froogle yet. Click fraud concerns; review clicks by traffic software, review shopping search clicks, talk with your vendors about difference in tracking IP addresses. Improve ROAS: watch sales to expense ratios, note changing prices in some cats, get your customers to participate in shopping search surveys, consider adding your logo or phone #, one search engine may outperform the other in the same category, review interact, ranking and pricing, ask sales rep for recommendations, and if your site has poor ROAS, dont expect shopping search to be better. Closing recommendations; quality pics, accurate product descriptions and titles, monitor search term relevancy, monitor competitive pricing, monitor customer reviews, ensure rapid and accurate fulfillment, shopping search is form of customer acquisition = need to market to them to ensure your retain the customer (email, direct mail, customer service).

Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com up next. Reasons to use shopping engines; poor visibility on generic terms, few IBL's, additional; sales from value shoppers, large group of competitors in SERPs, looking for ROI based IBL's, high marking items were few, and organic SERPs algo change proof. Four Step Program; throw caution in the wind, then scale back, then tracking and develop technology. The engines they use; Froogle, Bizrate, Nextag, Shopping.com, Pricegabber, Amazon, Become, and others will be added. Throw caution into wind; listed as many products as we can on every engine, the highest costs and lowest return. Scale Back; best converting/ROI engines used to determine products to feed, limited feeds to all other engines, higher ROI but fewer sales. Scaling back needs fixing; each site is unique and different audiences, ROI still inst calculated properly at this point, its tough to identify hot new products, needed indepth analysis. Data analysis step; They realized bizrate was doing so well, because they had glowing reviews and higher rankings. They started to chart out by SKU all the data, clicks, charges, retail and ROI. Proper Targeting; tracked with everything turned on for two weeks. Started to turn off products at 2 weeks that had seen substantial traffic but no sales, also tested products at different times for seasonality. Trim as needed; when a product isnt over 100% ROI, dont be afraid to remove it from feed, remember the bottom line is your bottom line, not every product can be a winner in every engine, different audiences at search engine. Smart Feeds Win; re-evaluated ROI after 3 months, caution free ROI was 110%, scaled back ROI 185%, smart feeds ROI grew 135% first month to 1250% by 3rd month and still increasing to date. Overall effect on sales was an immediate spike after adding the shopping search engines. The normal sales on the site dropped, because the increased traffic caused issues with the support staff. Now they got things under control. They did a site redesign, and they were no longer listed in Google, he said, thank goodness for the shopping search engines. He quickly goes over direct sales and indirect sales. If you have the technology to track them the engines can provide a great many sales while being profitable. The more you know, the better you can track the ROI back to the source.

Craig Snyder, EVP, Marchex to give the SEM perspective. Retail e-commerce sales in the first quarter of 05, were 19.8 billion, up 23.8 percent from first quarter 04. He shows on that chart, the even though the nasdaq declined, the spend on the net still increased throughout that time. Physchological factors driving e-commerce; customer control is equal to customer satisfaction, imperfect service equals do it themselves, self service is cheaper and perceived as better, time to learning is much faster and e-commerce can be extremely efficient and improve margins. He shows a slide of growth by category of media type, showing that the internet is starting to pass other media areas in terms of spend. Then he shows that most of the spend is in the search marketplace on the net and not on banners, and so on. 3 Top Reasons for Underpefromance are; Product feeds or descriptions, product pricing, and the merchandising. Keys to success; start in high margin areas, actively manage CPC's across campaign, category and product, base performance after returns, charge backs and incentives, understand pricing, pricing changes and bidding, all required fields & recommended fields, shipping price /product availability, (Lessons From the Front: (1) Completeness; images, shipping info, tax info, product weight, inventory, other product specs.) favorable ratings, referable testimonials, non standard opportunities. (Lessons From the Front: (2) Non standard opps; bold inclusions and logo inclusion.) Lessons From the Front: (3) Store Ratings. He brings up a huge "Shopping Feed Matrix" chart that shows a list of the big engines and the required, recommended and optional fields required in there respective feeds. Now he puts up a "feed positioning factors" chart by engine, too much info to write.

Stephanie Leffler, CEO, MonsterCommerce, LLC is the last one up. Conversion rate; what is your conversion rate? how do you calculate conversion rates? How do you improve conversion rates? Your Store's Search capability. 64% of users were successful in finding what they wanted on the major retail sites with a internal search. Lots of people use site search, log your search queries and spot check them. Text on "add to cart" button is very important. Add to cart works best then any other text, in her opinion. Why does that text work? minimizes perceived commitment, properly describes action, common and understood. Dont be afraid to make the add to cart button huge. Shipping Specials; shopping specials are key to conversions, according to bizrate, free shipping with conditions caused over 40$ of buyers to make a purchase. The Fold... buy buttons and submit order buttons both should be kept above the fold, if its under you can lose 10% of your orders. Product descriptions; retool product descriptions to describe benefits, rather then relying on the manufacturers' feature-focused description. Load time; fast load times convert, time your landing pages, ensure homepage loads fast, optimize your graphics. Summary; try these changes, make them one at a time, track and record results, tweak site based on results. Issues #2, security and PCI/CISP standard. 75% of the 5,000 online consumers said they are more cautious when they buy online and 1/3rd bought less due to security concerns (i think). PCI = payment card industry, CISP = cardholder info security program. If you host your site yourself, your responsibilities are vast, but if you host outside your responsibility is cut in half. (Good thing I don't store CC info on my servers). Anyone accepting credit cards must be compliant. Why do this? its a good thing for the industry, to product yourself and your clients, and to protect your customers and your reputation.

Robert Murray from iProspect starts with some statistics from Jupiter Research. 64% of search marketers run into obstacles when trying to implement SEO recommendations. 48% of search marketers says they underestimated the resources required to implement SEO recommendations.

So what are the root causes of these obstacles? Its popular belief that client thinks they can handle all the work for the SEO. It’s the responsibility of both parties to get these tasks done. There is a lack of understanding clients constraints. Some of the solutions are an extensive discovery process, involve IT department early on, and build a realistic plan. The majority of times an SEO firm will recommend a significant change on the site and if you don’t involve the IT dept. then it may not get done. Lack of senior management commitment to SEO. Some of th4e solutions are to understand there are multiple constituents involved, senior management sponsorship and before the contract look. The next item is the inability to assess impact of SEO. Some of the solutions involve providing supportable forecasts, relevant case studies, and competitor examples. The next item is lack of prioritized recommendations. It’s a must for the SEO to have the IT department work on the high impact things first, do the easy things later. Rank items as low, med, and high impact. Also assess the effort of implementation vs. return. There needs to be understanding of a development schedule. The next issue is failure to set appropriate expectations. To do ease this you need to educate clients on SEO vs. P4P results. Provide a timeline with resource requirements. There are also internal vs. external requirements. You need to be realistic in your expectations. Robert did a good presentation, he mentions a url to see a report they did here: http://www.iprospect.com/about/free-sem-information.htm

James Gardner from One to One Interactive is up to share some insights from their work. His expertise is from pharmaceutical and life sciences clients. He says we are not in the business of delivering reports, its to deliver results. The responsibility as SEO there are some core expectations in order help our clients achieve success. Training clients to become great clients.

Awkward thought: How well do you really understand what goes on inside your client organizations? Think through how you can put yourself in the client’s shoes. He ask how many could step into there job and do it at the same efficiency? No one raised there hands. In his clients world, SEO success is not mission-critical. There are large complex organization with matrixed line of authority. Multiple internal stakeholders as well as multiple agency partners to deal with. He says they had one client to do an ethnographic study of their customers, it was amazingly revealing.

Managing internal resources is important. Sell SEO and make it a priority and sell the right expectations. Get (and keep) the right internal team is essential so that things can get done. If you are running a tight project with a client that is not involved you will suffer because of it. He also says have the client lead the charge, don’t delegate or outsource to an intern. He says he has seen it done where an intern is given the work. That will not work. Celebrate and share success with clients. Also conduct periodic review summits.

About managing SEO partners and his recommendations for people contracting an SEO firm. Ask hard questions early, and ask if they know anything about your industry. Encourage to share initial hypotheses you need to share with your SEO partner – then step back as you don’t want to limit your SEO. Let them explore and let them come back with creative thinking. Find out how SEO partner help us succeed with key stalkers. Make sure to recognize successes from your SEO. Expect and welcome new thinking. Don’t settle for a laundry list – insist on prioritized recommendations. Also ask about non-recommendations. These are things that usually don’t make it you, ask your agency why they didn’t recommend certain things. Engage an SEO as a long-term partners, not project based vendors. Share and escalate feedback so the agency can improve. He also mentions a matrix for deciding what the items are the most critical. Business value one side and how significant the recommendation is on the other axis.

I was chatting with the other Andy at the networking cocktail thing and I asked him if he likes paintball (I think we were talking about doh hunting, long story...). He said he loves it. Then I thought a bit longer and said, wouldn't it be fun to have an SEO Paintball event, the white-hats versus the black-hats. :) Now of course, there are tons of folks that consider themselves gray hats but, maybe we have a few games. White-hat versus black-hate, and then grayish-white versus grayish-black. And as I am writing this, what about the engines versus the SEOs?

So right now I am thinking, when would be a good time and where would be a good place.

When & Where: Any time there is a big SEM conferences (SESs or PubCons)

So I will be posting links to several forums below where they can discuss this in greater detail. Then, I'll update you guys on the when and where, and more details. Oh, by the way, I purchase SEOPAINTBALL.COM for this event. Oh, if anyone is interested in helping out with the organization of it or even sponsoring a portion of it, I guess let me know. Not sure if I personally want to organize it, so just let me know.

Forums with Topics:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• HighRankings Forum
  
• I Help You Forums
  

Update:
Recommended Venues...
- Bear Creek Paintball in San Jose.

Successful Site Architecture

Moderated by Barbara Coll, WebMama.com Inc.

Derrick Wheeler, Marketleap

Came in late due to speaking in the previous session…as I entered Derrick was speaking about making sure that you do not accidentally get a site that is still under development indexed. If your development server is not password protected, you should ensure that the Robots.txt exclusion code is in the site’s pages, just in case Google or another search engine was somehow to find it. This also applies to using Sessions IDs, but in the reverse. You should turn Session ID requirements off in order to not dissuade the spider from indexing your content. Be careful with cookies, they sometimes also attach session IDs, which will hurt. Some sites require cookies to be turned on in order to view content. If this is the case, the search engines will not be able to see the content. Derrick shows quite a few examples of sites that were well-ranked before sessions ID’s/cookies were enabled/required…the results in the “after” showed tremendous loss of rankings and traffic.

The use of “weird redirects” can also inhibit your ability to rank/be indexed. Uses the site www.omahasteaks.com, suggesting that you type it directly into the URL. Each time you visit, you will see a different URL in the browser bar. Another issue is JavaScript requirements. This can cause problems with search engines, which will index “were sorry, but you need to install JavaScript…” etc. Another issue that can cause seemingly duplicate content is how you link within your site. All of your links on secure pages should have the full path of the URL instead of being a relative link, otherwise SE’s may feel that all pages are under the https secure URL, and therefore not “indexable.” Also mentions that you should use descriptive anchor text in your links, in order to help the search engines identify the probable content relevant to the link.

It is good to have sitemaps, but if improperly created, this can cause for trouble. Gives and example of a site that uses a JavaScript link to its sitemap, which is bad. URL structure: 3 main factors: 1 is the number of parameters you have within your URL. You should use one or two parameters, or even three, but you should be consistent, otherwise you are dealing with a possible duplicate content mis-identification. Shorter URLs are also easier for people to link-to, remember, and virally distribute. Every unique URL should have specifically unique content. Shows an example of a jewelry site that uses duplicate content on different URLs, which is bad.

When selecting a domain, do a “lemon check” to ensure if any prior owner of a domain was not penalized. Also: always think unique: if you have two or more domains indexed with the exact same content, this is bad, most major search engines specifically recommend against this practice. Darren uses a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect, because he has had better luck maintaining all the current links. Also to avoid: invisible text, small text, link farming. Each page should have unique content, down to META information. He suggests using CSS to present content. Note: added after the speakers were done, Barbara Coll highly recommends the fee tools available for research purposes at the Marketleap website.

James Jeude, AskJeeves
Will focus on some things that he has learned in his own experience. Improving chances of being picked by users: visual relevance is critical in order to “get clicked.” Ensure that important keywords that you want to highlight are surrounded by helpful words, in order to be used in the organic search result “snippet” description. Also, don’t forget to organize and tag all of your images. Spelling is a weak suit? Decide a strategy if you want to go after a lot of keywords. If you feel that a particular keyword will be misspelled, try to find some way to place it in the content. Keeping it short because many of the topics were already covered by Derrick.

Rajat Mukherjee, Yahoo!
Will discuss a few new developments that Y! has in store. Why is it important to be indexed in the Yahoo search index? Because the Y! Network is the largest online audience in the world…yada yada (to quote Barry). Spidering and indexing are sequential processes. You should optimize for both processes, crawling and indexing. The Spider crawls, and the Indexer removes duplicates and Spam. Ensure you enable your site though the robots text inclusion for SLURP, the Y! Crawler. Navigation: always link back to your home page. Use unique content and avoid spam. What gets crawled: static URLs and dynamic pages with in-links from static pages. You can also use feeds to send your pages with dynamic content to Yahoo for inclusion into its index.

Site Explorer: was released at SES San Jose, and there are more new features being added. It was created specifically for webmasters, and it is incumbent on all developers to go “give it a shot.” It is a set of tools and interfaces that allows for webmasters to explore a URL from the point of view of Yahoo. Will show you which pages are indexed, your in-links, and many more “neat” things. He is very excited to announce that you can now submit URLs to the site using various feeds (see the announcement today at the Yahoo Search Blog). The tool is also now able to filter specific in-links by domain. They have also simplified the support process with a new URL: help.yahoo.com/search.

The session then moved into specific questions about URLs. I will not blog these comments…come to the next SES and you too can participate and gain knowledge about your site from the panel of experts.

I was looking forward to the "Google Print & The Copyright Debate" session but it was cancelled. :( So now I need to go to a session about blog and feed search engines; they are all filled with spam anyway. Detlev is modding up this session. I believe Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! was unable to make it, so someone may take his place.

First up Kaushal Kurapati, Senior Product Manager of Search, Ask Jeeves to discuss Bloglines. Bloglines has 1 billion articles indexed, feeds that matter include 1.3 million feed with at least one subscriber and there are 2 to 3 million new articles per day. Bloglines is a free online service for searching, sub, creating and sharing news feeds and blog content. RSS or Atom works. 10 languages supported. Track buzz. Track the future with search subs. New features; hotkeys, package tracking, weekly and monthly horoscopes and winning lottery numbers. He shows screen captures of bloglines. Average bloglines user visits 4x per day - very active audience.

Bob Wyman, CTO and Co-founder, PubSub is up next. Briding Light to the Gray Web: Visible Web, Hidden (Dark) Web, Gray Web (changing web and structured Web). PubSub takes the queries in and indexes the queries and then looks for the documents live (unlike a typical search engine). As they find what you are looking for, they store it for you and tell you about it. He gives an overview of the technical process. The second problem they work on is "structured blogging" where they allow you to specify more information about why you are writing this blog entry and it becomes more structured. They have about 20 million blogs, 50k newsgroups etc. He shows off the "LinkRank" feature which ranks blogs and sites based on how many links on a trend basis (time sensitive). Some cool stats. He actually threatened black hats that if they do think "unnatural" "we" (as search engines) would do "nasty things" to you (black hats).

Scott Johnson, Founder and CTO, Feedster. They are launching a new design soon, we are the first to see it. How does Feedster get data? end user submission, crawler discovery, ping server of our own, monitor industry ping servers (pingomatic, weblogs.com), feedmesh (distributed network of ping servers), and batch data loads (45k plus podcasts). What is a blog? Original assumption; 1 feed equals a blog. No that is not correct! A blog is a non reviewed, non edited publication that is generally the result of a single person's effort. Adopting a tagged data mode; feeds (blogs, news podcast, sale, forum, etc.) every feed has one master tag which defines its nature. They're also all tagged with "everything" tag. Its not just blog search tho; yahoo got it right (kinda), its search across rapidly changing data with easy access to the latest across categories. The all new feedster homepage is now revealed. On the top you see "master buckets" with search "blogs, news, podcasts, etc.") He then showed the new results landing page, which enables you to filter by language. the default area on the left are blogs, there is a tag button to allow you to tag, which flow into a pink box on the top right that says "my tags". They also have a best results box in orange, the brings up the best results based on your search. Then a blue box for "news articles" that has recent news articles. And a green box for podcasts. Everything is taggable, blog searches automatically search blogs, news and podcasts, search zooming (jump from blog search to news search, etc.) and 1 click end user spam reporting and there is more coming.

Nathan Stoll, Product Manager, Google. He said he is the product manager of Google News but he is here to answer questions on Google Blog Search and the new reader (lens) and Google news. You may notice there are multiple blog search UIs, it depends on where you come from, they serve up different user interfaces.

Q & A:
Q: Something about blog spam...
A: Bob Wyman says it will be under control soon, he calls splog generators, "scum." Then Scott Johnson said Bob is arrogant to think that it will be under control, he said just like there is email spam, it will forever be an issue. Bob retracts his statement. Then Kaushal compares it also to search spam, its a never ending battle. Nathan adds that his colleague Matt Cutts recognizes false positives happen as well.

Danny opens the session saying this is the “Blogging is Dead” panel, nice joke to jumpstart the session.

Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit is up first to discuss all three elements of the session. Blogs in the last year have gone from the warm puppy to not so much. She quotes some humorous quotes from places like BusinessWeek and Forbes. Next there are quotes of the same places slamming blogs as evil. So why the debate about Blogs? The good is that they can rapidly spread the “meme”. They can provide a personal or human face to corporations. Can provide valuable feedback through comments and trackbacks. They are bad because they can spread misinformation, rants, and wrong information.

She puts up a graph from Technorati about how blogs have been doubling and doubling and finally doubling. 70,000 blogs are created each day, she doesn’t know how long they will continue. Only 13% are only updated daily. There is about 1.2 million legitimate posts a day. The news people say that “aren’t blogs use teenagers or politically charged people posting?”. No not necessarily. She puts up a list of the top mainstream media sites. There is a good mix of blogs in there.

There is a message to use from the blogosphere. Blogs are extending and changing the tasks and role of the search engine marketer to include: Brand and reputation monitors and management, content strategy and development, and link development and site publicity efforts that include consumer-generated media.

Blogs are not the only force that is changing our role in the search marketing field. RSS is the high octane fuel is changing things. But isn’t RSS just some geeky thing and no one cares about the orange box? Well the data says different. People are using it in places they don’t know they are using it.

So why add RSS to your arsenal? You build stronger relationships, end cross platform content delivery problems, avoids email spam, and strong traffic generator from the traffic side. The best part of RSS is when you break down its uses. Such as affiliate communications, syndicating your content on other sites, new products, security alerts, product types and tips, customer communications, and so on. Its good stuff.

So if I want to use RSS for content syndication? She puts up examples of LifeTips, and they have hundreds of tip sites. You can use there RSS tip of the day feed, and get a tip each day. Smart retailers are using RSS as well. You will hear that RSS is a proven driver of valuable traffic. A simple feed could improve click thru rates.

There are some steps for managing your RSS feed. First you need to create it, then validate it, disseminate it, and finally eliminate old content. There are some great feed creation tools – trade offs out there. Tools like List Garden, NewzAlert, Composer and so are in the middle to help you. Amanda goes into optimizing your feed. Its basic SEO type stuff, I won’t go into it. Some tips though, how many feeds do I need? She says find out what your customers want.

The next horizon is going to be RSS advertising. She says watch out for it. Why RSS advertising? RSS advertising can outperform email advertising, by as much as 26%. There is a storage of online ad inventory is creating interest in new resources. RSS advertising is complex and compelling.

Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts is up second. He says he is an RSS junkie. There are two main areas he sees offering capabilities. It’s better than an inbox, and it produces interaction. So how do you take RSS to the next level. What will help subscribers keep their finger on the pulse of your business/industry and compel webmasters to disseminate to their visitors? If you are writing a book you can include revisions into the RSS feed. There is a wide range of things you create RSS lists on. Give it away, be sure to include the full content. Watch out for SEO’s using your feed content as search engine fodder and hoarding the link gain.

He puts up a few examples of RSS in action such as Yahoo news, Dealnews, marketingprofs.com, and itconversations. You also need to make it easy for subscribers to add a feed to their aggregator. Also make sure that auto discovery is also happening (Safari does this). Also be sure to have My Yahoo listings appear in search results. Create My Yahoo account, and then start pinging Yahoo with updates or use Pingomatic.

It’s also important to track user behavior and capture the link gain to right place. Track your subscribers as well if you can. Some aggregators will track the amount of subscribers you have. You can also track click-thrus which is helpful.

Up third is Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR and asks some audience questions. The bad news he says is that there are 18.5 million feeds out there and there are 22.2 million blogs out there. There are 22.2 million tv channels out there, how many are tuning into your tonight? You have 20 million competitors, that’s the bad news though.

Basically you have no choice in order to take this to the next level. Taking it to the next level can be difficult. Consumer Reports thinks feeds as text broadcast of site’s content. He shows a picture of a girl from 1938 testing a bizarre hair curler. RSS can be like that some how. The is real story is the much larger population of “unaware RSS users”. Consumer Reports magazine has 4.2 million paid subscribers. ConsumerReports.org has 2 million paid online subscribers.

So what kind of RSS feeds do people want? They want World News as number 1, and National News as number 2. You need really compelling stuff and create more than one feed. Having a feed is useful, but getting it found is a different story. People find them different ways and it’s important to distribute it as much as you can. You can use RSS Submit or Press Feed to do some distribution for you.

Create your feeds and create your blogs but create them for people. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

There are about 25 people in the room. Andrew Goodman jokes about how we have a small by hyper interested group. I have attended this session before, and it’s been good but I hope they present some interesting information this time around..

Nathan Stoll from Google is up first to talk about Google News. He is going to present some historical background for Google News and where it came from. He will continue to discuss how Google News functions, no trade secrets unfortunately, but a nice overview of how it works.

His first screen shot is a demo shot of what Google New first looked at. Google wanted to provide a level of introspection to present new articles. The styles then (2001) are similar to what it looks like today. There is the example of Indian and Pakistani news, and he asks what perspective these articles were written from. What is the best article to present from these various sources from similar locations.

Google News hosts a conversation around stories in the news. All news publishers are invited to participate. They want to offer a comprehensive coverage of online news. He says they want users to become more passionate about news from what they do. It can change the perspective the way people use news. They are scientists and don’t want to editorialize the news. The interface has gotten more complex over times, by adding RSS and Atom feeds, you can customize the interface and so on. Google crawls thousands of news sites and there is an ongoing challenging to find the best content. They want to be able to accept the broadest amount of news out there. They are always looking for new news urls. Once they grab the html page, and extract the new article and images while obeying the robots exclusion protocol, it goes to be sorted. There is some specific aspects for new articles that can be problematic for Google. They want to do it accurately as website varying and so does structure. One of the mistakes for news site is to use the same url over and over. The crawler may not recognize the article if its from a url that has been used before. He says be sure to use a unique url each time your do a news article.

So how does Google group articles by story. Google looks for the words in the articles and groups them together (clustering). They build a cluster of articles that have a high degree of commonality. Some are put in different sections, but at the cluster level they are in the same place. The search engine classifies the articles into section from clustering.

What is the most important news story of the day? How does Google decide? How do they look at a cluster to do that? A big event causes a lot of articles to be published at once. A smaller article has lesser sources. Within the group of stories, what article will be shown first? They use different signals to determine this from a web search aspect, clustering, and so on. Google News homepage changes often. They rotate between a bunch of different viewpoints. Originality is important. Google wishes to include opposing viewpoints as much as they can.

Google News Search is based on relevancy, such as the importance, recency, and relevance. One of the problems they run into is wrap ups of articles, or several news articles on the same page. Users really do understand brands very much in the news space he says. They understand brand, but also speed, reliability, and cleanness in the space. Those things can also help with publishing news articles.

Chris Tolles, VP of Marketing from Topix.net and is going to talk about the business of online news. Online news is driving major traffic. News is the second largest driver of traffic. 41% of Google users are looking for news. Online news is very sticky, a lot of return users. 39% of users at online news sites visit two or more times per day. Key 18-24 old demographic reads more news per week than any other. MySpace generate 10 billion page views a month. How do they do it? They let users create there own news.

The online transition rough for print. Online growth vs. print revenues is an issue. Is online news growing fast enough to affect offline news. He says no. There are natural monopolies breaking down due to online news from accidents in geography. You are competing with sources from around the world instead of just a local area. The business of journalism is changing. The trust of main stream sources are in flux. The audience wants to join the game. The internet you heard about in 1996 is here. The audience to support it is here. A cheap publishing system for everyone. Advertising networks turn traffic to revenue.

Search is kind of like the yellow pages. People want to come find something, and its easy to monetize. For example, you are not going to Google before you go to lunch, to find the lunch specials. It just doesn’t work yet. The monetization of news is different than the yellow pages. The user problem is the proliferation of content sources makes it difficult for users to survey the entire pool. Example of this is Palo Alto, CA, there are so many news sources. There is a tremendous amount of growth in news search. If there is a free way to publish anything, people will use it.

They are finding now that there are 8-16 million blogs that they can add as new sources. People are changing the way they view news. Why do you include them as news? They are different yes, but the people that often matter are in conversation in the blogspace. Entertainment and business are better covered on blogs than on traditional news. If you tag the news, it happens to monetize a whole lot better.

There is a huge investment ongoing in the online news area. Yahoo and Google both investing. People want to read more, they get to the end of the page and want more. There is opportunity there. This is no longer a niche, it’s a conversation. Need to create a system of participation. There is no way to tell if a emerging article will have influence on the news. The new generation expects a voice and one of the keys about the internet is that is interactive. People expect to participate and interact. A newsroom should also support itself. Weblogs point to new content models.

Very nice presentation, lots of good information in this one.

Q & A

Q: Have you had people refuse to publish? How do you monetize Google News?
A: They don’t monetize Google News at this point. Maybe in the future it seems. He said he can’t comment on things going on. Google will also not pay for royalties. You either request to be added or not. By in large the vast majority of people want to be included in Google News. They usually don’t see it as a competing source. People still use there CNN.com homepage. Its not a competitive space in that regard. Topix says they have an opt out option. In 2 years they have had only 4 people request not to be spidered. You should want the traffic.

Q: We work with organizational products. If we were to try to include links in the news source, can you do that? Or would be better to approach your (Topix) sources?
A: If you publish information that is useful to your users, you will most likely get found. You can do promotional editorials, or buy link based advertising with them. It needs to be clear to get picked up correctly.

See Andy, now I have to blog it. Andy asked if I am blogging someone's request to pump heat into this room. Danny invited the woman to his hotel room, which he said had all the heat in the room. Then Andy said I am blogging this.

Jeff Watts from National Instruments. Traffic = Community + Search + Content. Content (delivery/meta data) -- ROI --> Search (traffic & conversions/ most wanted) --continuous improvement--> Community (readers/creatores) --collaborative innovation--> Content... Buzz: The conversation is going to take place (you choose whether or not you take part). Engaging with the community allows you to respond to criticism, educate, be transparent, discover leading users (apps and trends), and grow mind-share (when customers think of you instead of the competition). Getting started with Wikipedia... They have started back about 1.5 years ago. They first tried to put an articl