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.