January 2006 Archives

A nice thread at High Rankings forum discusses Internal Linking To Your Homepage. A basic SEO topic, but also very important. What is the best way to link to your homepage? In my opinion, http://www.domain.com/ is the absolute best way. You can link to it using absolute links or relative links, but link to it so that you do not link to http://www.domain.com/index.html, http://domain.com/index.html, http://domain.com/ and so on. You just want the www, the domain and the / and nothing more.

You may ask, but what if I always link to http://www.domain.com/index.html type of domain? As long as I am being consistent, isn't that good enough. Well, yeah it is, but can you guarantee that you won't upgrade your site's technology and the index.html page will turn into an index.php page? Of course you can do mod_rewrites and 301s after the fact but if you are just consistent, with linking to http://www.domain.com/ you don't have to do all that work. Plus most people will link to you with http://www.domain.com/ and no other way.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forums.

Yesterday, Google released the New Google Toolbar Version 4 and with it came "Bookmarks."

Want to create and label bookmarks that you can access from any computer? Simply click the Toolbar’s star icon, or right-click the star to add and label a bookmark. You'll be able to access your Bookmarks menu on any computer with the new Google Toolbar installed. Note this feature stores your bookmarks online, so you’ll need to have a Google Account and be signed in to create and access your bookmarks. You can also view your bookmarks using your Google Account’s Search History feature. Just click the "Search History" link that appears in the upper right-hand corner of the Google homepage when you’re logged into your Google Account and you’ll see your Bookmarks

Aaron has a ThreadWatch entry describing these bookmarks and how they are displayed in your personalized results. Here is a quick screen shot from Aaron. Notice the new link under the results, I placed arrows pointing to them, those are the bookmarks...

But before you install this new toolbar, let's take a look at an old thread started by Bill Slawski back from Jun 18 2005 named If a Googler Offers you a Bookmark Manager, Punch Him. Long read, but he goes through how Google can use that data for personalized search and beyond. So when Bill heard about the new toolbar yesterday, he updated the thread saying, "I might hold off on this upgrade if I can."

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I hope not! Those annoying ads you get when you mouse over them or that float on the page with you on your scroll. JenSense has the scoop describing what these ads are;

Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that "float in" from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.

I was not able to find threads on this topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint or Search Engine Watch Forums, but we do have a thread starter at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

In that thread, I reply to the "do no evil" response, asking if it is Google that is evil or the publisher that is evil here? The gun debate can be applied here. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I can't remember the last time I said anything negative about Ask Jeeves. But honestly, they haven't been tested much on the Webmaster relations front. So I found a perfect opportunity to test them. Viggen, a well known forum member at many forums, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld forums named Previous Domain Owner Penalty. He basically said that he bought a domain name in 2003 that has a previous penalty, Google told him that. In time, Google and Yahoo released the domain from its penalty, but Ask Jeeves did not. So I told the folks I know at Ask Jeeves to reply to the thread. Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves replied with the following message;

Hello: You can contact us via this page: http://webk.ask.com/contactus

Please choose the "Help with getting your site listed" option and please enter comments on why we should review it.

thanks,
Kaushal Kurapati
Senior Product Manager for Search, Ask Jeeves, Inc.

Great. Now I sit back and track to see how Ask handles this. What is disturbing is that at all the conferences Ask Jeeves says they take all responses seriously and they reply to them by individuals quickly. Why do they do that? Because they don't get the volume of requests that Google or Yahoo gets and they were proud to say they are better at communication than G or Y.

But two weeks later and Viggen has yet to see a response from Ask Jeeves on the topic.

Makes me wonder if Ask Jeeves does take feedback requests seriously?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Kaushal Kurapati emailed me and has now taken care of the issue.

A week and a half ago we covered a topic we named Yahoo Laughs Off Click Fraud Report, soon after the thread was renamed to Click Fraud Report Gets Laugh From Yahoo Rep and featured on the Search Engine Watch Forum homepage.

Yesterday, Discovery, the thread creator, posted an update to the thread. He/She got a call from senior YSM Management, they provided a refund in in excess of the $6,000, and they asked Discovery to provide constant feedback on PPC fraud issues. So Discovery decided to start a new site named http://www.junkclick.com/ which is not yet active. At this site, "search marketers can submit their data regarding junk clicks. We will aggregate this information and provide results to those who submit data. Our goal is to provide the major ad networks with concise and timely information on junk click activity within their networks."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Danny Sullivan just posted an SEW blog entry named A Picture Says 1000 Words About Google's Censorship In China which is show true. He shows a screen capture, side by side (Google China versus Google US) of a search on "tiananmen" at Google Images China versus Google Images. Here it is.

SEW has a long thread on the topic since its inception named Google Agrees To Chinese Censorship and I started a forum thread just on this Google Images comparison, since I feel that alone is shocking enough.

Forum discussion at Google China: Story Told in Google Images.

With this whole Google Censoring Google China fact, Google had to make a change to its "Does Google censor search results?" page. Gary covers the before and after;

Before:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google’s search technology, please visit http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

After:

It is Google's policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so. When we remove search results for these reasons, we display a notice on our search results pages. Please note: For some older removals (before March 2005), we may not show a notice at this time.

John Battelle is notifying the media front with this news, I love it when he picks this stuff up.

And of course we got the forum coverage at WebmasterWorld.

Laura is getting some nice coverage the past week or so, first with the Free SEO Basics Video by ZDNet which was starting her and now with this outstanding topic at High Rankings forum named How to Speak SEO. This was already covered by Rand but incase you didn't see it, I wanted to bring it to your attention.

This thread describes how to;

• How to talk SEO to a CEO
  
• How to talk SEO to a Project/Product Manager
  
• How to talk SEO to a developer
  
• How to talk SEO to an editor
  
• How to talk SEO to your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/husband/lover/mistress/pool boy
  
• How to talk SEO to yourself

Worth a read, in my opinion, forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Outstanding post by martinibuster, moderator of the Link Building Forum at WebmasterWorld, on the thread named I was Cheated on a Reciprocal Link. His advice?

Basically, - You don't exchange links with any page with a white bar. - Don't exchange links with any site that has a huge link directory - Always view the source code to make sure there's no monkey business - Always check the robots.txt to make sure there's no monkey business - Always check the backlinks of any sites they are linking to to make sure they show up as a backlink - Never trade links with anyone who approaches you for links - Always trade links with those that you approach - There are probably more things to keep in mind when trading links.

Of course those last too lines can become circular and the forum thread gets a bit into that, as well as adding a few more tidbits, including this one....

The link page should be in google cache (and not be too different from the original page!)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Jill Whalen started a thread over at her forums named H1, H2, H3 Placement, per W3C standards. In that thread she asks if it matters if the header tag sequence in the source code displays in order of header number hierarchy. Meaning, does the h1 tag have to come before the h2, and h3 and h4 in the source code and in the visible content on the page, as per "W3C standards." I tried looking up the answer, but I failed to find anything where it said it had to be in a particular order.

The thread discusses the topic and most people agree that is makes most logical sense to place the header tags in order of number, much like a structural document for a paper's outline. But in terms of SEO, does the header tag matter? Some say yes and some say no. Does the header tag hurt? If you use it properly, and don't overdo it, I can not see how it would hurt you. Would it hurt if you placed it in the wrong order? I doubt it, the standards on the Web are far from standard. :)

But does anyone know about the W3C standards on this topic?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Looks like Google released a new toolbar today at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/T4/.

Chris Sherman has the official Search Engine Watch write up he named Google Releases Upgraded Toolbar. The new features include;

Now you can make your Toolbar as unique as you are. You can add buttons and bookmarks; get instant search suggestions; share web pages with friends; and enjoy the Toolbar's pop-up blocker, web form filler, and spellchecker.

I think most people will benefit from "Search smarter with instant suggestions as you type in the search box."

Matt Cutts, Google Engineer, blogs on it also with his ideas and suggestions. Of course we got the forums talking about it, including, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

It was an ad free world at Google, at least for part of Friday afternoon. Reports via WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums show members documenting the outage.

Basically, they reported when they went to Google.com or any Google, and searched on a term, no sponsored results came up.

Maybe it was for "tax free" week in NYC or maybe it was a glitch.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

I had a meeting with a non-prospect this Friday. That means, a family member asked if I meet with a friend of hers and offer advice on his Web strategy. So I did that, as a favor, but it turned out to help me better understand, what I think, is the difference between Search Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. Let me explain...

After sitting with this individual, discussing how his new, non-profit organization is looking for fund-raisers, it hit me. Before I get to that, let me guide you through some of the conversation. I go over many of the basics of SEO. I tell him he doesn't want to rank number one for the keyword term "philanthropy" or the like and I explain why. Basically, as we all know, he is looking for the donors that are sensitive to what his organization caters to. I explain that someone looking to give a sizable donation to an organization will not type into Google, "philanthropy". Instead, they may type in "support [cause] in [location]" or "supporting poverty in America" as one example. There are tons of these examples and the person I was meeting with immediately understood, which was nice. Then I go through how to optimize for those types of keywords on each page.

Finally, I explain that he won't realize top rankings in Google right away. I explain what the "sandbox" is, without using the term "sandbox" in the explanation. And trust me, he understood and excepted the reasoning for some new sites not ranking well. He understood that he is a new kid to the block and will have to earn some respect, respect from his patrons, respect from his industry, respect from the world and respect from Google. He totally got it, and I was really enjoying this meeting.

But then he hit me, he asked. "Is RustyBrick overkill for his needs?" Meaning, should he go with a low cost design shop and ensure that they comply with the basic SEO tactics and save a bundle. I said, at this point, yes. He asked me why.

The reason was "Search Marketing" versus "Search Engine Marketing". It has been what Mike Grehan has been saying in his articles, attacking the sandbox theory for what it is.

The bottom line with this individual that I was meeting with was that he did not have enough money to add a "wow factor" to his organization. I explained that we need to think up of an idea that makes you better then the rest. You need some type of marketing strategy, be it online or offline, that makes you worthy in the eyes of everyone, that your organization is simply WOW.

I explained that you can hire a room full of marketing people to sit there and think up unique ideas. It is done all the time with large companies. But if you can not afford that and most companies cannot, then you need to come up with the idea yourself. And guess what, he got it.

Marketing is discovering the Wow Factor. Search Marketing is utilizing the Wow Factor in the search world. Search Engine Marketing is implementing your SEO tactics off of that wow factor.

I told the individual, to come back to me, when he realizes his wow factor.

Sunday morning rant, hope it makes sense.

It started with an interview I found on "Trustmarks", in which Paul Walsh, the co-founder and CEO of Segala M Test, was talking about a way to enhance personalized search by including a trust rating.

Perhaps you've heard of ICRA (Internet Content Rating Association) descriptors for child protection. I've had this code on one of my sites for years, since I wanted parents to trust it. (And being one, I care about that sort of thing.) Walsh was interviewed about the Segala trustmark scheme and their working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Segala is a founding sponsor of the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) responsible for creating best practices and guidelines for the future Web on small screens such as PDAs and mobile phones. Paul Walsh is also a committee member of the Web Accessibility Initiative.

I was very curious about how search engines, or if search engines, would implement "Trustmarks". We started a thread at Cre8asiteforums about it, featuring the interview, and several members were most interested. Some wondered how this trust is tracked. What would stop anyone from being registered, getting a trustmark and then changing their content?

Paul Walsh dropped by when the thread first began to tell us more.

Continue reading "Search Engines Find a Way to Gauge and Confirm Trust"

Doug at Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting once again notified me of a great thread. I actually read the thread yesterday but then lost track of it. The thread is a Search Engine Watch Forums named Up The Creek With Google AdWords Broad Match. So what is the issue.

In short, Google's Broad Match has been getting broader and broader. What that means is that if you sell toner and broad match on "toner" you will now, today, get clicks for "NEC Supersrcipt 860" and other specific models. Google is just that good at expanding the keyword phrase "toner" down to the model numbers. Problem is, this advertiser does have that model number in stock, and doesn't have many other model numbers in stock. So those clicks are a waste of money.

Answer is simple, just use phrase or exact match. Well no, you can't do that, because if you do then you will lose your CTR factor in your ad rank. And your ads will drop in rank.

So what can you do, well you can use negative match, but that is a reactive strategy as opposed to a proactive strategy.

What should Google do? Doug, aka cline, has great suggestions;

Adwords needs to do one of the following:
* Allow the advertiser to turn expanded broadmatch off
* Inform the advertiser of *exactly* what terms expanded broadmatch will trigger
* Get rid of expanded broadmatch.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A post by seo-ireleand at our forums named New look Yahoo Directory listings notifies us of a slight change to the UI of the Yahoo! Directory. Take a look at the Y! SEO Directory and see how it is incredibly spaced out, between results. I have attached a small screen capture and a larger screen capture to document it. I do not have a screen capture of the page before hand.

So it makes me wonder if it is really different. But I really thing there was a change to, at least, the spacing in the directory pages.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread named View Bids Tool Errors, shows that Yahoo! Search Marketing's bid tool is chocking up errors. This tool tells advertisers how much to bid for a particular keyword and advertisers are very dependent on it to run and operate their online businesses.

Deal is this WebmasterWorld thread was posted January 12th! On January 25th, an update popped up for this thread where a user posted that a response from Yahoo!

We are aware of the problem - it's a server issue and have no idea when it will be fixed. We are working on it as it is a priority for us. They also mentioned that this is not the first time it occurs.

So I figured I do my part and call Yahoo! out on this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in mid December we reported on Google Moves Tabs to Side Bar in UI Test. Over the past few days, lots of folks are talking about an other, but very similar Google UI side bar test. This one looks a bit different,

Large image is at Flickr.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Quick note that the logo on Google's homepage today is due to Mozart's Birthday.

Linking to http://www.google.com/search?q=mozart.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The other day we reported that YPN EPC Was Decreasing and we offered possible explanations as to the reason. However, today, I noticed a featured thread at WebmasterWorld named Declining eCPM where members share their experience noticing that although traffic is rising on some sites, the earnings for those impressions are declining.

eCPM "is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands."

Now this thread's title is just about the ads that pay on a impression basis. There are folks complaining about the CPC (click based payouts).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I love this feature, showing the start time or date of a thread. Some forums have it, but by default, the vBulletin forums do not have it. This morning while surfing for quality threads, I noticed Shawn's DigitalPoint forum has it. Great feature added, like many of Shawn's features on his forum. No wonder it is quickly becoming the most popular Webmaster forum on the Internet.

Here is a screen capture.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Ben aka Phoenix started a thread at our forums named SEO for Video Search basically asking if anyone had any experience to share with search engine optimization for video search. There are some articles on the topic, but we wanted to know if anyone has any practical, hands on experience.

Things to share would be; tips on optimization, what to expect from which engines, is it worth it, and so on.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A new thread stated by Ian (mcanerin), an SEW Moderator, may be the thread of the coming week. He titled the thread SERP Overflow and Butterfly SEO where he describes what he calls "butterfly SEO."

Basically he says for many of the competitive terms (and the number of competitive terms grows daily), the top 30, 50 etc. results are pretty much equally relevant for their keyword phrase. Meaning, Result number five can be flip flopped with result number twenty-five and the end user would be just as satisfied with that result. Based on this theory, Ian is concerned that the search engines will have the "good-enough" approach and give up. But he also understands that engineers are not the type to leave "good-enough" alone. :)

So how does Ian define the butterfly SEO?

This could result in what I'll call "Butterfly SEO", where, once you get to a certain level of optimization, the things that affect your rankings are things that are less and less obvious, and more and more technical. I know for a fact that in certain SERPs you can see this effect, where something that traditionally isn't an problem, suddenly makes or breaks your rankings.

Legendary Bob Massa pulls out Ian's outstanding thread and some up Ian's concerns into one line.

How do I optimize for YOU when you go to Google?

Because that is what is going to set apart the "overflow" of the top fifty results. You and me, our personal preferences. And as an SEO, you need to start thinking about, how to optimize for the individual searching at Google and not for the keyword searching at Google.

Don't these types of threads make you just tingle. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Just a blog administration note. I have removed the YPN RSS ads from this blog. Why? Simply because the FeedBurner RSS ads have been performing very well. And since the YPN ads were not contextually relevant, I might as well show the ad that makes more money. :)

Anyway, the reason for this post is to see if I messed up the RSS feeds by removing the code.

No development environment for this blog... I know I know...

Short Feed YPN Ads Removed √
Short Feed FeedBurner Ads Shown √
Long Feed YPN Ads Removed √
Long Feed FeedBurner Ads Shown √

Talk about a major news story that has caused the two major SEM forums to debate. We got two large threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at Search Engine Watch Forums. The WebmasterWorld thread started by the founder of WebmasterWorld, Brett Tabke and the Search Engine Watch thread started by the founder of Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan.

Danny does an excellent job explaining the two different sides of the story, in his thread. He explains that it makes sense that the court ruled in favor of Google to allow them to cache pages be default, since they do allow a opt out protocol (i.e. <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">). He explains, since spidering a site requires an opt out, not to be included in the index, the same should apply to the caching of those pages. Danny also give other logical and reasonable explanations as to why caching should be allowed by default.

Brett explains that "the court did not understand what real caching is and what Google calls caching." Explaining that what Google called caching "does not meet the crieteria for caching." He continues to warn that this will "effectively neuters all copyright laws on the internet today. It is the wild-wild west again. It legalizes content theft."

There are two sides to the story, the court ruled in favor of Google.

After Danny spoke with DaveN on his Search Cast morning show and read Brett's thread on the topic, he has changed his mind.

But not that we have a court that seems to not understand some real copyright issues, I'm flipflopped. I'm with Dave and Brett -- make it opt in. And we don't need a court decision for that to happen. The search engines themselves could do it. The problem is, with this ruling in their pocket, they have less reason to do so.

It makes you think if that was one of the reasons why the other day the Google Cache Currently Offline (if you do not know what the Google cache is, click on that story, it will show you). The Google cache is currently back online and running properly.

Join the debate, maybe the search engines will listen, forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Shawn asked me if I was aware of this thread at his forum named New referrals adsense ruls? where a member points out that AdSense has added a little line to the TOS that includes a phrase "within 90 days of sign-up." Now, everyone I ask, and every place I look, I can not find the 90 day requirement. That is a big deal. So on November 4, 2005, when the AdSense Referral Program Launched, it did not have the 90 clause, as far as I know.

Of course you can imagine how upsetting this is to those who sent AdSense tons of referrals, and how those will expire.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The first magazine "dedicated to solely covering SEM " has been launched. There is a free subscription offer that runs until February 28th.

If you want to check out The Search Marketing Standard, their press release contains more information.

The first issue is due for May 2006.

"The first issue of the full-color, high-quality magazine is set to be released in May 2006, and will be published worldwide on a quarterly basis. The publisher also announced that until February 28th, subscribers in the U.S. will be eligible to receive a free one-year subscription to “Search Marketing Standard” by registering directly on www.searchmarketingstandard.com. International subscribers will be charged a nominal fee."

Cre8asiteforums ponders the news in Would you subscribe or read a print SEO pub?

Again, Gary with the early scoop yesterday on Web Authoring Statistics. This is a break down of "popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata" of "slightly over a billion documents" in December 2005.

Note: You will need a browser with SVG and CSS support to view the result graphs correctly. We recommend Firefox 1.5.

There are some really cool figures represented in the study.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

New to SEO, old to SEO, want a clear cut refresher on the basics? A Cre8asite Thread links to a SEO 101 - At The Whiteboard by ZDNet. It is a very good basic video that you can send to your client's if you do not want to do the basic education yourself. I'm going to try it and see if any of my client's understand it, because there is a lot packed into the 5 minute video.

I believe Laura goes to the SES conferences, she has links up on that video page to HighRankings, Search Engine Watch and SEOMoz.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I first spotted this a couple days ago at Gary Price's SEW Blog entry named Google Quietly Beta Testing Desktop AdWords Editor.

AdWords Editor is Google's free, downloadable account management application for your computer. Now you can download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, then upload your revised campaigns.

You can download it at http://services.google.com/adwordseditor/

I was waiting for a forum thread on the topic and I have found one at WebmasterWorld today. There AdWordsRep provides more details;

There is a huge faq at http://www.google.com/support/adwordseditor?fulldump=1 and if you like to apply to use the editor (Windows only) submit your request here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an excellent thread at Cre8asite Forums named $2000 For a Search Engine Thrill Ride and Low Conversions? It discusses where people should put a $2,000 Web site budget towards.

Honestly, this is a hard one to sum up and the thread is not too long. If you have 2k to spend, not more, then check out the thread for some good ideas.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I found this interesting thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named AdWords "Radio Ad". This member describes how he was able to put up "a regular adwords ad but linked to an mp3 file - so clicking it plays an audio ad." First time I have seen anything of this sort posted in a forum, doesn't mean that it hasn't been posted before. Cute idea.

However, the reason it is a cute idea and that you do not see this ever, is because it doesn't meet the editorial guidelines of AdWords.

AdWordsRep replies saying;

Sorry to rain on the parade - but before considering this folks, please be aware that this is counter to the AdWords Editorial Guidelines, and such ads will be disapproved as soon as they're reviewed...

Your Destination URL must link to a working website. You cannot link to an email address or a file (ex. an image, audio, video, or document file that requires an additional program or application to open or run).

But Cline replies that you "can link to a webpage that runs audio or video on the page."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Andy Beal pinged me about Google Forcing Desktop Download? Well, it is unintentional, what is happening is if you do a search for anything at Google and try to click on page two or anything in that navigational results bar at the bottom, it won't let you, in Internet Explorer. Andy explains that "Google has a transparent DIV tag that is interfering with the layer behind it. The problem doesn't effect Mozilla." Give it a try yourself, and if it is working, trust me it wasn't. Andy also has images of this.

So I went to our forums to post it and found a thread on it already named Googles' New Desktop Search Ad on SERPs - prevents Clicking SERPs Page Links. You would think they would test it out on IE before going live with the ad. :)

Forum discussion is also widespread; see Search Engine Roundtable Forums or WebmasterWorld.

Andy Hagans is a pretty good link builder, much better than myself. He came up with an idea to throw a contest, to get links. The contest is simple; give Andy a link baiting idea that works and you will earn $1,000. He posted the details at BizNicheMedia Link Baiting Competition: $1,000 Prize.

What is link baiting? Nick Wilson has a great post on it which he titled The Art of Linkbaiting.

But if you think about it, this competition that Andy is holding, is a link bait, in itself. So which idea will work best? The ideas posted in the competition or the competition itself? Hey, it got me to link to it. :)

Forum discussion at ThreadWatch and at DigitalPoint Forums.

I labeled this under "Search Engine Industry News" because that is exactly what it is. DaveN, also portrayed here on the left of the screen, is a well known "black hat" and has decided to start a cartoon blog that depicts what is taking place in the industry. What is interesting Fantomaster had a cartoon blog also. :)

The site is at http://www.seops.co.uk/.

Currently you see an entry named So what will the Search engines do showing Paul Gardi of Ask Jeeves towering over Matt Cutts and Tim Mayer with MSN lagging behind. Paul Gardi, so you know, is a really tall person.

There is a lot more to come, including, cartoon me.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Marcia posted a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Plagiarism, Splogs and Search Engine Spam where she quoted a blog entry at Plagiarism Today named Why Sploggers Splog The snippet Marcia selected was ironic, to say the least.

One of the interesting things that came out of my discussion with the reformed splogger is that Google is not the target of splogs. As odd as it may seem, Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google and is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain. Thus, even though the service is wholly owned by Google itself, Yahoo is the first to snatch up links contained with it....

The desired end result is that Yahoo searchers will be directed to the junk domains where they will then click on the Google Adsense ads. This arrangement is not only very profitable for the splogger, since they get a sizeable chunk of the revenue from each ad click, but is very beneficial to Google as they are getting money directly from Yahoo’s visitors.

Now I am not sure if there is a study done that shows that:
(1) "Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google", I hear that not to be true. That Google is quicker, but there has never been a wide study done on this. I am basing that on forum chatter for the past four years or so.
(2) [Yahoo] "is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain." Again, not sure where this is from but I won't argue.

But if those two statements above are true, which I do not think they are a 100% true, then it is funny.

Yahoo! ranks blogspot splogs high, Yahoo users click through, yahoo users are more likely to click on an AdSense ad, Google makes money, sploggers make money.

Of course this can be applied to any search engine, even Google. And it can be applied to any advertising program that is easy to sign up with and pays on a cpc basis, even Yahoo!.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Loren at SEJ posted Yahoo Publisher Network Expanding This Spring and listed out all the changes discussed on a phone call with the YPN team. I got the phone call also, I was just under the impression that this was not for the public, but I was wrong. So here is some of what you can expect from YPN in early spring.

1. Improvements in Relevance : The ads that are shown by YPN are based upon what Yahoo calls its ‘matching expert’s. These ‘experts’ will be expanded to include :
* Contextual Engine : Targeting based upon the content of the page
* Ad Targeting : Publishers can “tag” their own site by defining their ad targeting category in the YPN admin
* User Data : Behavioral targeting or profiling (geographic & demographic)
2. Wire Service : Offering publishers payment via direct deposit this Spring
3. Expanding Invitations : Continuing on reviewing and approving thousands of high quality web publishers
4. International Rollout : Global expansion beyond the United States to English and non-English speaking countries
5. Yahoo Search Box : Publishers can add Yahoo Search to their site which will pay publishers a percentage of sponsored search revenue
6. Integration into Yahoo Answers : Yahoo may be offering its registered users the ability to earn revenue or points for contributing to Yahoo Answers and other user generated content offerings.

Maybe YPN is trying to bring back the honeymoon? :)

I also started a thread about this yesterday at DigitalPoint Forums and it seems most YPN publishers are happy with this announcement.

We are still at it on the Search Engine Roundtable Forums to Host Moderator Roundtable Discussion and it is working out very well. If you like, please feel free to submit a question and we will reply to it in the order it was submitted.

The 3rd question we tackled and then opened up for member discussion is Effectiveness of Link Popularity Decreasing? the question posted was;

Does Google's apparent de-valuing of reciprocal links lead you to believe that the concept of link popularity is going to decrease in importance altogether in the near future? And, if so, how might Google compensate for the loss of this ranking factor? Perhaps they'll introduce human editorial review as a more important factor affecting SERPs? (This is probably just wishful thinking on my part )

The bottom line of the thread was that we all believe link popularity will remain to be a major part of the search ranking algorithm. But we all feel it will adapt and get better. So link exchanges and so on will be looked at differently then it was two years ago. But links will still be important.

Public forum discussion now at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I have been tracking a thread at WebmasterWorld named The YPN honeymoon is over. It discusses how most of the members in that thread are noticing a drop in earnings compared to when they first started. Back when YPN first launched, and even somewhat the case today, the contextual ads were not too contextually relevant and so the ads displayed were higher paying ads. But recently YPN started getting relevant to the page's content and the earnings per click (EPC) has started to drop. Hence, the YPN Honeymoon is Over. :)

Which brings me to a question I asked about a week ago, Should Contextual Ad Networks Use CPC In Ad Placement? I personally feel the answer is no. If I sign up for a contextual advertising program, I want the ads to contextually match my content. I can sign up with other ad programs that are totally off topic to the content, if I wanted to.

So where does that leave the YPN product? I asked the Yahoo! Search Marketing team for a response. Will Johnson, YP & GM of Yahoo! Publisher Network Online, offered this response:

YPN is in beta mode and we continue to make changes to the algorithms to improve relevancy as we strive to balance revenue opportunity. The balance between these two is very much the focus of our efforts. Our goal is to provide industry leading monetization for publishers in our network. As always, we appreciate the feedback from our publishers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Huge write up by Danny at the SEW blog on Google Now Censoring In China. He writes;

Oh, the irony. Less than a week after we hear that Google is ready to fight the US government in part to defend its users, now comes news that Google will cave into the Chinese government's demands for its new Google China web site.

But he continues to explain and provide historical information to show some more irony in Google's actions. Well rounded article...

My thoughts? :) Sorry.

Take it to the forum, currently forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday we wrote, Yahoo! Gives Up Search Race: Admits Defeat to Google which basically said that Yahoo! is ok with being number two in terms of the market share race, and doesn't expect to beat Google out any time soon.

The Yahoo! Search team replied to that at the Yahoo! Search Blog saying Are you kidding?!

This commitment to being the best should be crystal clear from our investments in talented people, research, innovation and new products. Believe it or not, we are still in the early days of search. As all of us at Yahoo! agree, we're in it for the long haul, and we're in it to win.

Qi Lu, VP Engineering, Search
Eckart Walther, VP Products, Search

So what is up with Yahoo!'s CFO?

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Have you tried out Google Suggest, it has been out in beta since 12/04. If not, give it a try. Try typing in "americans are" and see what it suggests. :) Try different countries and see what it suggests. Even try "yahoo is ", "google is " and so on. You may be surprised.

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Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Do not panic if you do not see your site in the Google Cache right now. Currently, at the time of writing this, the Google cache seems to be broken. This is not the first time this has been reported. Try a search on seroundtable and click on the "cache" link.

Your search - cache:56XNmfOrgEAJ:www.seroundtable.com/ seroundtable - did not match any documents.

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

Reported by a member over at our forums, who asked me to post a thread on his behalf, AdWords Getting Large: 4 Lines. Let me say that this is coming from someone I trust and the image is not doctor'ed up. It may be a test or it may be a bug. But it is for sure large. It occurred on a search for california weather.

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Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Gary Price added a postscript to Danny's link to us on this topic saying;

A Google spokesperson has confirmed that Google is currently conducting a "limited test" of longer ads.

Even though Yahoo! has given up they still are updating the search index and ranking algorithms. :) According to a WebmasterWorld thread, there is a Yahoo! updating taking place; Yahoo Update January 23rd, 2006. It seems like many are impressed with this new update.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld posted a thread named Yahoo Captitulates - Gives Up Goal of Being #1 in Search quoting an article from Seattle Pi.

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

Wow! So what are the forum folks saying about this?

they don`t want to set expectations to high, that way they can`t fail! it is a win-win situation.

Yahoo going for the underdog approach?

I'm sure the shareholders will just eat that one up.

Then they need to ditch their search engine, or sell it, and concentrate on being a portal and/or something else.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports over at DigitalPoint forums that YPN has 1099-MISC Problems. Where two YPN publishers report that the 1099 form sent by YPN reports exactly double the earnings they had with YPN in 2005. An other publisher reported that there were no errors on his 1099 form.

Anyone else notice this? I would figure many wouldn't take the time to look and just hand it off to their accountants.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

JoJo posted a thread at our forums named MSN "judging" websites manually? and at DigitalPoint forums named http://64.4.8.28/hrsv3/Judging.aspx in ref logs ? revealing a page at MSN Search named HRS at http://mshrs.search.msn-int.com/hrsv3/Login.aspx, which has the logo at the top, shown below.

Does anyone have the password? I am guessing, wild guess, no evidence, that HRS stands for "Human Review System" but I can be totally wrong. I did a search on msn hrs and found only non-english pages, here is one translated.

We know Google has human reviews and so does Yahoo, who doesn't. So one can assume that MSN does as well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

We all know about ABC's World News Tonight Reported from Google HQ last Friday. But Nightline also had a spot where they interviewed Danny Sullivan about the story. It was a pretty long interview. Gary Price has a lot more detail on it, I saw a snippet of it and he did well. Why is this important?

We turned to Danny Sullivan, of searchenginewatch.com, one of the world authorities on search engines. yes there are world authorities on search engines. it's a multibillion dollar business and quite baffling to most of us and even to some experts.

The industry is growing, big time.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

According to C|Net Ask Jeeves improves image search by adding;

New sophisticated image recognition technologies measure attributes such as image type, shape, brightness and contrast level to determine picture quality.

It is hard to tell from the naked eye, so lets do a search on Danny Sullivan. At Google the first result has nothing to do with the Danny Sullivan I was thinking about. But at Ask Jeeves, bingo, the first result is the Danny Sullivan I was thinking about. Of course that is just one search and maybe Ask just got lucky. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I laughed reading a thread named Fun Stats Correlations at WebmasterWorld. The thread asks members to share funny correlations in the statistics they see over time at AdSense. For example, "average daily uniques of 1000 would equal $1000 monthly earnings."

The one response that made me chuckle was;

210 lbs = $2.10

:)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Yahoo Search Marketing Account Rep - U Got One? asks what it takes on a financial level, to earn the luxury of having a dedicated Yahoo! Search Marketing representative for your accounts. AtBatt explains there are different tiers to the program, including;

4 tiers of service based on spend.
Normal <$1000 a month
Gold >$1000 a month <$5000
Platinum >$5000 a month <$10000
Diamond >$10000 a month with National Brand Recognition

AtBatt, who says he used to be a Yahoo rep, explains that "in order to retain a dedicated advertising rep, you must quality for their Platinum tier of service." That equates to at least $60,000 per year spend with YSM.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: I knew it couldn't be that simple, a Yahoo! representative responded to the thread saying;

Hi All, For an accurate, up to date break down of account service, please visit this link from YSM's Resource Center:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/performance/customer/dtc/policies/#policies-01

But to be clear, our team is dedicated to providing the best service possible to all of its advertisers and publishers. If you have any direct questions around this subject, feel free to send me an email.
Thanks

YahooSarah

The link provided by YahooSarah, has the correct information.

Many have seen a little date next to the title in the SERPs before. What this is Google Personalized Results, and if you are signed in and you have clicked on a result in the past, it will show you the last time you clicked on that result. For example, I did a search on urchin url builder and clicked on the result back on Jan 12. When I searched on that term today, I was shown this information, in addition to the remove result link.

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This is perfectly normal to see in your results. If you want to try it out yourself, login, click on Search History, top right of the inner SERPs page, and search on a term you found in your search history.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite forum thread asks Is there any conclusion with sitewides? Where Ammon Johns, aka Black_Knight, answers;

Site-wide links seem far more likely to be ignored or down-valued. I'm basing that on what I have seen generally, rather than on a specific empirical test.

Ammon goes on to explain that even when the links are in your navigation, he would "not counting them to count as separate links on each page.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

If you are a newbie to SEO then I strongly recommend you check out this Cre8asite Forum thread named What am I not doing? (newbie SEO checklist) The thread goes over actionable fundamentals that you can use for your site, today.

It also links to a resource that I have been telling many newbies to read first. That resource is seoMoz's Beginner Guide. But as you look through the thread, you will notice some well, detailed, and thorough posts on where to begin.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I own the domain http://www.seoangels.com/ and had no use for it. So I had my designer put together a little something something over at SEO Angels.

Depending on how well you know the search industry and attend the conference, will show if you get it.

Thanks WebGuerrilla, Oilman and of course DaveN.

Forum thread posted at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Good weekend all.

It looks like ABC's World News Tonight will be featuring a story on Google tonight.

In the coming up section of the site it says;

Bob Woodruff reports from Google headquarters

If you can catch the show, I am sure it will touch on the US government wanting Google's data.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A nice DigitalPoint thread asks members How long did it take for your new site to become profitable with adsense? If it was that simple...

I am not sure why people ask it that way.

It takes exactly 4 days and 3 hours for your AdSense site to start making profit. :)

One member said;

Yes it depends on a lot fo factors.

Inbound links
Age of site
Quality of Content
Updating rate etc.

For my first month I made $.63 now I'm up at $21 in 6 months.

It does depend on a ton of things. Then once you start making money on your site, is that profit? How much time are you putting into your site? Time is money?

Am I making a profit from this site? I doubt it. But this site is not about profiting.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

YHOO, Yahoo!'s Stock, took a beating the other day after announcing profits were up almost 40% from the previous year. So in the forums, search forums, we have people discussing wether Yahoo! is at a price where it would be considered a "steal". You have this discussion at WebmasterWorld and at DigitalPoint Forums.

I have nothing to say on this topic. :)

Via Gary at the SEW blog Ask Jeeves: Cache Includes the Date and Time Pages Were Last Cached. Although it takes forever for Ask to Index a New Site, they added a feature to the cache pages, that shows the last crawl date of the page. So for this blog, the last time they crawled the homepage here was January 16th, or 4 days ago! That is for a page that updates several times per day. Whereas my corporate site has a cache date of January 13, 2006 5:14:32 AM.

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Note that this kind of reveals how fresh the Jeeves index is...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Our first press release was talking about our first year anniversary. It was more of a test then anything. Recently, with the help of Lee Odden and his team, we launched a press release for the launch of our new forums. The release was titled Search Engine Roundtable Launches New SEO and SEM Forums with All Star Moderators.

Overall, I think Lee and his team did a great job. I wrote the first draft, the mods helped tremendously revise it and then Lee's team optimized it for us.

Found at DigitalPoint Forums a very interesting, 15 minute, video tutorial of a theory on how Google does not arbitrarily pay publishers. The video presentation only works on IE for PC and is viewable at http://www.articlebot.com/tutorials/adstochastics.html.

Basically, he shows how there is a pattern to how one's average price per click is over time. He compares it directly to how stocks are estimated to rise and fall. The statistics is named Stochastics, something I know very little about, but it seems from his presentation that if you were to apply the "Stochastic Oscillator" (i.e. "a momentum indicator that shows the location of the current close relative to the high/low range over a set number of periods. Closing levels that are consistently near the top of the range indicate accumulation (buying pressure) and those near the bottom of the range indicate distribution (selling pressure).") to your AdSense figures you can;

(1) See that there is a clear pattern to how Google pays you per click; it is not arbitrary.
(2) You can use this data to know when to put less focus on your AdSense ads. For example, if you know your PPC will be at its lowest for the next X days, you can switch over to YPN ads or something else. If you know your PPC will rise, you can direct more traffic to those pages. Informed decisions through statistics. :)

Very interesting presentation, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I have been thinking some about contextual ads and why some ads show and why some ads do not show. Google shows very relevant ads in its AdSense program. But Yahoo! tends to often show less relevant ads. The thing is, people are very happy with the price per click they are getting from YPN over AdSense. So people think that this is Yahoo!'s strategy, to show higher CPC ads, no matter if they are irrelevant to the page's content. Whereas Google AdSense shows the most relevant ad to the page content, hoping for a higher number of clicks.

I thought this question would make for a good discussion. So I decided to post this question as the first question to be placed in our Contextual Ad forum. I named the thread Should CPC Be Considered in Contextual Ad Placement?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Danny Sullivan sums it up nicely in his SEW blog entry named Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No, Others Comply where he says;

The Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to find out how much pornography shows up in online searches and how often people may seek it.

Here's a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.

This sprung the need for Danny to start a thread at his forums named A Search Privacy Bill Of Rights. In that thread he asks members to answer a few questions, including; What do you think should be in such a bill? What protections do you want specifically spelled out?

Should make for a nice thread. Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A long time member of Search Engine Watch Forums named Discovery has posted a thread named Massive Click fraud on Jan 17 06 describing click fraud like activity on his account.

On Tuesday Jan 17 over a 4 hour period from about 1pm to 4pm one of our keywords which previously produce 1 or 2 clicks a day within content match generated 2,134 clicks and charged up over $5,199 dollars.

With zero conversions....

He described his conversation with his Yahoo! representative and explained how the YSM Rep laughed off his remarks.

MugShot said he "had a similar experience with Y for a client where one of the phrases that were getting charged for clicks were not even in the active list!"

Join the discussion and share your horror stories with YSM at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Tonight at 4pm (EST) I will be live on WebmasterRadio's GoodKarma with Greg Niland aka GoodROI. I think we will be talking about search engine community, forums, blogs, etc. type of stuff.

Should be fun.

Make sure to tune in and get in the chat room.

We will be answering your questions live.

This morning we wrote about Time to Index & Ranking in MSN is a Week or Less and then I saw a new WebmasterWorld thread in the Ask Jeeves forum named Re Index time in Teoma so I figured I cover that one as well.

The response to that question links to an older WebmasterWorld thread on the same topic named How often does AskJeeves update its index? where Moderator caine says;

Re-index schedule used to be between 3-6 months occasionally a couple in one month in the past, but the level of re-index was always sporadic and mainly shallow, hence why teoma's results outside of g, msn and yahoo/atw is probably the worst.

There is not much buzz about search engine optimization on Ask Jeeves. So it is hard to track down threads with more specifics, that are recent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld Administrator, BakedJake called Google AdWords support on Monday, MLK Day, and received a message that said The AdWords support team is temporarily unavailable. Please leave a message...

The question to Jake was; was AdWords closed for MLK or were they out for lunch. If they were closed for the holiday, then why not say, AdWords support is closed today in observance of the national holiday.

The thread gets discussion-ie :) when it starts to get into the reason Google doesn't offer 24/7 support coverage. One member says;

an someone please explain why Google Adwords does not provide 24/7 customer support? Their business caters all types of businesses and runs 24/7/365.

They can surely afford it:
- $138 Billion Market Cap
- $5.5 Billion in cash on hand

Then there is discussion about it being a holiday. But many folks say that it is not a holiday outside of the United States. Where is the global support?

But it looks like Jake's rep did touch base with him that day, towards the end of the day. No word if it was a holiday for Google or not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Shawn's AdSense forum rocks once again with this new poll already with 90 responses, asking How many "adsense websites" do you have? Can you believe 35% have seven or more AdSense Web sites? 85% have two or more AdSense Web sites. 15% have only one AdSense Web site.

This not scientific, but with 90 responses, it isn't a bad sampling. Of course, these are those AdSense publishers that are big time into AdSense, so they are more likely to respond to a poll at DP Forums, and they are more likely to have more AdSense sites then non AdSense fanatics. I wonder what the real data, at Google, says.

Also, how do you define an "AdSense Web Site"? Is it a site that happens to have AdSense on it? Is it a site that makes $X or more from AdSense? Is it a site that was built for the purpose of serving up AdSense ads? See my point?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is an excellent thread in the Search Engine Marketing forum at Search Engine Watch Forums named Are we obligated to tell the client. The thread creator tells a story that I am sure most Web design/development/etc companies have been faced with. To sum it up....

Prospect A comes to you with his dream idea, to build the next eBay. :) You listen to his idea and feel that it would be a waste of his money and time, since ultimately it will fail. Are you obligated to tell the prospect your feelings? If so, and you do, should you take on the job? That is the discussion taking place in that thread.

I added my two cents by comparing it to starting any business. Don't most new business fail within the first year? I forgot the percentages. But it is pretty similar, but in this case, you are the main contractor for the job.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

According to two Search Engine Watch moderators, Mikkel and Marcia, it takes less then a week to get indexed and ranking at MSN Search. The small thread is named How Long does it Take for New Site being Indexed to Receiving a Ranking through MSN? Answered by a few folks including;

Mikkel deMib Svendsen: MSN is probably the engine that index and rank new pages the fastest at the moment. At least, thats my experience. I usually get most new sites indexed and well ranked within a matter of days.

Marcia: Yep, less than a week from when the first pages are uploaded. And then they pick up new pages added almost immediately.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Spotted via threadwatch, which was found at Adverlab, Target painted the top of a roof top, it was captured by Google Maps.

Check it out at Google maps at http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.006505,-87.887138&z=0&t=k.

Here is a screen capture, if it ever changes.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Earlier this year, it was announced that the Google Video Store opened to the public, and with Larry Page's opening keynote... it was a big hit. Google, well known for organizing the worlds information, has demonstrated through services like Froogle and Google Local to combine other authoritative's website ratings from users rather than ofering their own technology to interact with users. However, with video.google.com, this would be a difficult task since it's so new to the Internet and the world. Therefore, if Google can't provide a simple form for me to give ratings and they are used to collecting data from the www, then I'm going to try giving my rating via this blog post for a video that I liked watching over the weekend.

Google Dance Tribute
By Gambert.com
5 min 44 sec - Dec 31, 2005

A "Thanks to video.google.com" That Connects Cultures and Expressions
Reviewer: Nacho Hernandez (La Jolla, CA USA)

This video deeply allows the connection between cultures and expressions thanks to one of most recent products by Google Inc. through the new store on video.google.com. In the little time spent watching it makes me realize how we are all different but united at the same time with a common joy... dancing! Outstanding short video for those who have the new Video iPods.

I can not say I am totally shocked, but I am a bit shocked it happened now. Tons of news on Google Buying a Radio Ad company, Google Agrees to Buy dMarc Extending Its Reach Into Radio (WSJ).

We got AdWords (PPC), we got AdSense (Publisher ads), we got AdPrint (Paper ads) and now we got AdVoice (radio ads). Mike Grehan believes TV is on the way, and I see no reason to argue with that. We also have Danny & Gary at SEW on the topic and Andy Beal where I found the news first.

GuyFromChicago said;

I'm looking forward to the day when I can control multiple advertising channels through my AdWords interface Exciting stuff!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld.

JenSense reports that AdSense pays publishers 78.5 cents on the dollar, according to NYTimes. Based on the NY Times article on Shawn Hogan yesterday, we learned that Google pays "roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads."

Good to know. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint forum thread named Anyones Yahoo ads slow to appear? seems to be right. Since I have the ads on this site in rotation, I normally can tell when a YPN ad will show versus a Google ad. How do I know? It depends on how quickly the ad loads. If it loads quick, it normally is the Google AdSense ad. If it lags a bit, then I know it is most likely the YPN ad. Again, YPN is in beta - so I am sure things will ramp up when it comes out of beta. But some people report as much as a five second load time. Enough reason to be cautious and even possibly go back to Google?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A thread over at Cre8asite forums named New kind of spider is in town links to a Wired article named Covert Crawler Descends on Web. In short, this article describes a new kind of spider designed to crawl the Web as human-like as possible.

How Does it work?

The program comes from different internet addresses, simulates different browsers and throttles itself to human-like speeds... Hoffman's program downloads everything that comes with a page -- images, JavaScript and components like ActiveX and Flash -- instead of just hitting the page itself like traditional spiders do. It also simulates a full web browser, keeping a cache and requesting only new material... To select which links to click on, Hoffman has settled on a solution somewhere between a masterful AI and completely random selection. "In some ways it's a very simplified Turing test -- you can assign the different threads a personality. This crawler, you're the slow reader, you read the entire page." Another thread may spend less time on a page before it starts clicking on different links. "Each individual crawler has its own browser habits," he added.

Barry Welford calls this spider, "somewhat scary" and that I agree with. Ron Carnell has it right, "any robot that doesn't ask for and then follow robots.txt is, by definition, unethical." So Ron gives you a technique you can use to track and then block this type of bot.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Almost a month ago we reported that Yahoo! Free Submit Was Broken and today, almost one month later, it still is broken. The error is pretty much the same;

The following resulted when trying to access your document: timeout

Try it yourself at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request.

WebmasterWorld has a thread that has a possible work around. Storyman says;

I found by opening another brower and bringing up the site, then returning to the browser with the Yahoo free submit the submit went through. I've done this for a couple of sites and have no idea why it happens.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Almost all Webmasters are aware of the Million Dollar Homepage, what a great idea (in hindsight). But let's look at these types of sites from a link building stand point. I have a client that advertised on this site and it brought in a ton of traffic, guess what, I still can't find the location of his ad. :) But besides for the traffic, will those pixel links, 1x1 pixel links, be seen as link spam by the engines?

Two recent threads touch on this topic, the first at Search Engine Watch Forums and the second at WebmasterWorld.

It is of the belief that a single pixel like link can flag a site for review. If the links are pretty much hidden, then bam - you can be penalized. But what about the Million Dollar Homepage and all its clones? The WebmasterWorld thread asks if the clones will be seen as link farms by Google and be taken down from a popularity building component in the link equation? Good question.

Right off the bat, the WebmasterWorld thread has some excellent responses, if you cant see them, I will quote a few, but it six pages deep and it makes for a nice read.

Receptional: I confess it occured to me the second I got a phone call from a person setting this up as a business model and wanting help. I had to say no thanks straight off the bat. The idea was cool once - but Google won't even have to tweak their algo to stop it working a thousand times. Why? because it is only unique once. No other attempt will get the same media attention.

Mack:We over look one fact when viewing these million dollar pages. Google will only count the first 100 links on any given page. Even if then where to pass PR what would you honestly expect to receive from a 100th share of even a PR8. I dont see how it is possible for these pages to pass PR anyway, some use redirects etc so all you can realisticaly hope for is clicks.

Stuntdubl: >link farm yep. >pass PR nope.

>help rankings
nope.

>great idea (the first time)
yep.

>piece of internet history
yep.

Nacho has started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that deserves some more respect. He named it Reasons Why Search is Not Perfect Today and asks;

Mention at least 1 reason why search technology in general or search engines in general is not perfect today. Not that it will ever be perfect, but you know.

Currently, the answers we have are few;

• Because of Spammers
• Programming Limitations
• and They'll be in the bar at SES NY.

Does that cover it all?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

You know about Google AdSense AdLinks, Gary Price at SEW seems to have spotted cool Yahoo! like AdLinks. These Sponsored Results do not seem to be part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network program, but rather they are hosted on pages, at the Yahoo! domain. At least we haven't seen it anywhere else.

To see this in action, go to the Good Night, And Good Luck movie at Yahoo! movies. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on one of the "Sponsored Links". It will open up as if it was done in DHTML, whereas AdLinks takes you to a different page.

Gary has screen captures, if you do not see it.

I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

DaveN pushed me towards a ThreadWatch post which shows a new UI Google is testing. Just take a look at some of the results for v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest query.

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Looks like all these links are taking you to Google Base. If you do a Author: L3DG search at BlogSearch, you notice it brings back the result from the SERPs above. This is looking like some sort of source detail, added to the SERPs, which is pretty cool. Still a bit foggy on what exactly is going on here, but thought I would post it anyway. This does seem a bit different then what we reported on early today, Google Testing Refinement or Clustering Filter Links.

Forum thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

There are reports over at DigitalPoint forums that AdLinks in a normal Ad-Unit? Basically, AdLinks which was released back in Mid March 2005, is an ad unit that just has links to a AdWords landing page. Some people opt for it in place of navigation, to encourage additional clicks. There are many strategies for its use.

But most people consciously opt for normal ad units to be placed in certain areas of a page. The reports suggest that Google is testing AdLink units by replacing a normal ad type with an AdLink. I certainly hope that is not the case. Three different DigitalPoint Forum members have said they have seen this happen.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Over the past week, the forums were buzzing about Yahoo! Search having some issues. Greg Boser has a good explanation of the issue, where he describes;

Normally, when you search for a term on Yahoo you will never get more than two listings from the same site in the results. However, that clustering feature wasn’t working yesterday. If you searched for a word that appeared on dozens of pages from a single site, Yahoo would show all of them before listing any pages from additional domains.

Lack of clustering makes SERPS virtually worthless. And I can’t think of any other glitches that will cause people to think your results suck quicker than lack of clustering.

But the good news is the problem appears to be fixed.

Well, DaveN noticed the issue is still alive over in the UK.

The two thread I brought up on this topic are at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Dan Thies reports over at Search Engine Watch Forums URL Removal tool doesn't support robots.txt extensions. He explains that even though "Googlebot supports an extension to the robots.txt syntax, which allows webmasters to use wildcards in disallow directives." It does not support the same extensions when using the URL removal tool. He said it "will generate an error message telling you that wildcards aren't allowed, if you feed it a robots.txt file which makes use of these extensions."

Dan continues to explain that "Matt Cutts confirmed this... but it really shouldn't be a huge problem under normal circumstances, since it should only take a few days for Googlebot to pick up changes in the robots.txt file, and drop any pages that are disallowed."

So I would expect this to be added soon to the removal tool.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ever want to search on a particular phrase but only want to bring back documentation or blogs, or news, or store results? It seems Google is testing this option now for some users (I do not see it).

A Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Google Refinement Keywords shows this in action. This person search on Cookies (link to screen capture) and was presented with refinement options, including, Blogs / Troubleshooting / News / Stores / Documentation / Recipes (links to screen captures).

It looks like it changes the query to cookies more:blogs which doesn't change anything on my SERPs.

Danny Sullivan thought this may be how Google Base works, but it seems to be simpler then that. This can be useful, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I started a thread at our forums which has been getting some nice feedback recently. The thread is named What To Do When Clients Just Don't Get It? and I would love your input on it as well. Let me give you a run down of some of the responses;

Andy Hagans says he would just fire those clients that do not get it. To me that seems a bit harsh, but for some SEOs, having clients is just not their thing.

Chris Boggs prefers to keep trying on the clients, but towards the end of the business day. That is when, he said, he can fine tune his "patience skills."

Nacho drops a nice one liner; "Let them spend their time getting educated, not your time educating them."

Brandall takes the approach that he is an SEO consultant, most of his clients just want the results. If they are on teachable then he doesn't care - he just continues his work. But he says it is rare, in fact, most of his "clients very open to the SEO conversation."

Dave takes the approach of a client. He says, if he was this client he would want "100% honest with me regarding possible opportunities." But he understands that some people just will never get it, but give your all and if after that, then take other course of action. Of course he is wise enough to mention an important distinction in the equation; "If they’re just a drain with endless questions they don’t understand the answers to, and don’t want to pay you for consulting services etc."

Randfish is at the point where he requires his clients to give him a 100% of the control and the final word on the decisions of the site design and architecture. So he no longer has these issues? But does he not have to explain his actions to the client?

Dazzlindonna takes brandall's approach; "Do they have to get it? As long as they aren't going to undo something important, if they are willing to pay you, knowing that you get it, then they can blissfully go on their merry way."

EGOL takes Rand's side.

Overall, I think most wouldn't mind a client to keep paying them to restate the same topics each time. But what if you just feel like it is not going anywhere? What if you feel so bad for the client that you tend to not want to give up? What if the client wants to know and learn but can't? These are the questions of the thread.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Shawn was telling me about this last week, it happened pretty quick, it being Shawn being featured in a NY Times article on AdSense. JenSense also reports this and she is the thread creator of the thread on this topic at DigitalPoint forums named AdSense article in NYTimes with Shawn Hogan.

To read the article, you need to register at the times, its free and quick. The article is named Google's Shadow Payroll Is Not Such a Secret Anymore. The article basically uses Shawn as a case study for the Google AdSense program, hence the "shadow payroll" of thousands of publishers getting paid by Google. They also talk about DigitalPoint forums AdSense revenue sharing idea which was done in May of 2004. Make sure to check out that awesome picture of Shawn, his cat and his 30" Apple Cinema Display at the article.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This is huge, huge enough for Danny Sullivan to post an image on the SEW blog. Danny writes at SEW Blog, IAC's Barry Diller To Keynote SES NY 2006 Next Month. Yea, that is right, this is bigger then Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Keynote SES San Jose and probably even bigger then Yahoo Cofounder Jerry Yang To Keynote SES NY last year (keynote notes). I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums, maybe members will post interesting questions Danny can use for the keynote?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search Engine Watch Moderator, 5starAffiliatePrograms, started a thread she named Affiliate Commissions $6.5 Billion - SEM $5.75 Billion showing a MarketingSherpa.com Affiliate Summit 2006 Wrap-Up Report that says that affiliate "Commissions to Reach $6.5 Billion in 2006."

That is a lot of money when compared to a SEMPO study showing that "Search Engine Marketers Spent $5.75 Billion in 2005".

Keep in my SEM & Affiliate Marketing are very intertwined.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Forbes article released today named Microsoft Plans Launch of Search Ad System has in the first paragraph that the system is going live by June.

Microsoft Corp. plans to launch its system for selling advertising alongside regular search results by June in the United States, giving the company its next piece of ammunition in the battle with rivals including Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

Forum members ponder this 5 month deadline at DigitalPoint Forums.

Are link request emails considered spam? That is the question over at a Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Is Emailing Webmasters For Links Spam?

Lets ask Google; http://www.google.com/search?q=what%20is%20spam.

To indiscriminately send unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages, especially commercial advertising in mass quantities. Noun: electronic "junk mail".

Are these emails "unsolicited"? Most.
Are these emails "unwanted"? Most.
Are these emails "irrelevant"? Most.
Are these emails "inappropriate"? Depends.
Are these emails sent out in "mass quantities"? Many are.

In my opinion, an overwhelming percentage of link request emails are spam.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread named Google Offers My Client Center For Adsense shows a screen capture of a "Client Center" for AdSense. We all know Google AdWords offers a client center but AdSense? I guess it is possible that publishers can begin hiring professional AdSense gurus to manage the ads on their properties. Hence the need for a client center.

What is weird, is that the URL in the screen capture of this page is to https://www.google.com/adsense/mom-online-report. For me, that page returns at 404 not found error. Anyway, below is a screen capture, and click on it for the original large version.

View Large Image

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The second in a series of moderator only discussion has now been taken to the public forum. Member, Wit, asked the moderators to have a roundtable discussion on the topic of How to Deal with a "Forum Troll"? After five posts, we have decided to break that thread open to the public, for their views.

The public thread is available here.

There are a couple sides to the story; (1) how should regular members deal with these trolls? and (2) how should moderators deal with them?

Enjoy.

As some of you may know, Bill Gates unveiled Windows Vista at the CES Keynote address early this year in Las Vegas. There, attendees and users that followed via webcast (thanks Gary!) and other news stories all around. What Bill didn't talk much was about Google on Vista, so here is a peak.

I couldn't help keeping this one to myself. A friend of mine just forwarded to me these images from the Beta version of the new Windows Vista and how it recommends search engines, calling it "Windows Search Guide" (click image to view a full snapshot):

Funny how it says way down at the bottom of that page, "Done, but with errors on page."

Anyway... Google strickes back on IE 7!

This should be fun :-)

Postscript: Added link to page "Windows Search Guide", which currently shows no mention of Google.

Update: Added a forum thread at our forums, named it Tit for Tat Between Google and Microsoft based on Battelle's ping. Should be a fun conversation. Thanks Nacho for bringing this to light.

Danny reported on Google Tests New Local Ads On Maps which describes that when some people do a search on hotels new york in Google Local, and Google Maps comes up with blue balloons that represent the blue backgrounded sponsored results. Since I am in New York, I believe I can see it, here is a screen capture for you all.

View Larger Image

I personally find this very cool and I am glad they are labeled so clearly.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: added a thread at our forum asking Are Sponsored Results in Google Maps / Local a Good Thing?

It doesn't take much to make Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers happy. YPN added a much wanted (and I bet requested) feature to the YPN Login Page. The feature is labeled "Remember my ID" and if checked, it automatically remembers your login information, so you do not need to type it in over and over again. Don't get me wrong, Webmasters hacked ways to login to YPN in the past.

Nice job Yahoo! Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

GOOG at this exact time is at $471.63 per share. Forum members discuss where they feel it can max out at. Back, during IPO time we covered the Google IPO Game - Guess the Stock Price, no one imagined that an analyst would estimate it would go up to $2,000 per share (article). So let's take it to the forums and see what real Google users feel.

DigitalPoint forums has a thread named New ceiling for Google shares. And here are the guesses;

• $1,000.00 or Less
  
• $500
  
• $700 by end of 2006
  
• $650 end of 2006
  
• 5,000 or more in 10 years
  

More predictions at DigitialPoint Forums.

I love DigitalPoint Forums AdSense Forum, they always have new and useful threads going on. Today's featured thread is named Choose you most profitable adsense unit? With 32 responses, the "Large Rectangle" AdSense unit is currently taking over 40% of the vote. The options include; Leaderboard, Skyscraper, Wide Skyscraper, Square, Medium Rectangle, Large Rectangle, Link Units, adsense for search. View the live poll results here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Search Engine Watch Forums has a thread asking members What's Your SEO Daily Routine? Now, I know many SEOs, some are morning people, some are evening people and some are sporadic. So typical in the SEO community, as with many other industries, is not so typical.

I pattern I see in the responses include;

• Most read blogs on a daily basis.
• Some devoted listen to podcasts
• Many obviously check forums
• Meetings
• Work Work
• Phone Calls & EMails

One member posted his strict SEO schedule;

8am - 10am give or take 1-4hrs: Check client rankings with proprietary tool, get my SEO news fix through my 27feeds on Google reader, and check and respond to emails.
10am - Noon give or take 1-4hrs: Optimization tweaks, link building, competition research
1pm - 3pm give or take 1-4hrs: Keyword research, web design, blogging, forums, etc
3pm - 5pm give or take 1-4hrs: New client research, optimization, meetings
5pm: Go home.
5:30pm - 10:30pm give or take 1-4hrs: Webdesign, SEO, and PPC for my own personal websites and clients

My Routine?
6:30am- 7:15am: Respond to emails
7:15am-8:00am: Get to work (few stops on way)
8:00am-9:00am (maybe longer): Blog here
9:00am-6:00pm: RustyBrick work and sometimes check forums for more stories (if time allows)
6:00pm-7:00pm: Either go home or stay at work
7:00pm-?: More work or Play basketball or go to NYC to see fiance.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums

WebmasterWorld has a very cute thread named What Is The Most Commonly Misspelled Word On Message Boards. Now, this may be SEO related, since misspellings are a great way to gain search traffic that is less competitive, and forums are a great way to get those misspellings. So here is a quick break down of some words in this huge thread.

• definately --> definitely
• "There" for "their" or "they're", "advise" for "advice"
• "than" versus "then"
• "It's" for "its"
• loose vs. lose
• accommodation accomodation acommodation acomodation
• affect ¦ effect

And many more. Heck, I make these mistakes here all the time. Happens often at forums and blogs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the years there has been a lot of hush hush about Google and Yahoo! (Overture) giving large advertising agencies discounts for their PPC campaigns. The other day, a thread named Agency Discount for AdWords was started over at Search Engine Watch Forums. Member, GuyFromChicago, who said;

I've heard rumors (for quite some time actually) that agencies get (or at some point got) a discount on their AdWords spend. I spoke with my rep this morning and was told flat out - no - agencies do not get a discount. I've had others tell me they have spoken with rep who confirmed that agencies do get a discount.

He links to a past thread at SEW Forums where people tend to discuss that they do give discounts to some. However, at 08-02-2004, 02:07 AM (EST), Danny Sullivan received word back from both Google and Yahoo that "in the US, they aren't offering any type of agency commission payments to anyone." Note, in the US.

Shor quotes an SEW blog entry from September named Google Changing Agency Commission Payments In Europe.

Many search marketers in the US are unaware that in Europe, both Google and Yahoo offer agency commissions. Today, Google has announced plans to restructure that practice. ... Google does NOT consider the new program to be paying commission but rather having a "best practice funding element."

Moderator, AussieWebmaster, said that "Yes, Europe and Asia have them now and though Europe seems to potentially lose them from Google."

Let's see what MSN adCenter brings to the table.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Reports over at WebmasterWorld this morning that there was a serious bug in ads today! When clicking on an AdWords ad, it would take the user to an error page. This was reported for advertisers in the Europe region, including Sweden, Germany, and the UK. Most have reported that the issue is now resolved. But the advertisers still wonder if they will be charged for the clicks.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in June 2005 Google Earth became available for download to your Windows computer. Yesterday, the Google blog announced Google Earth for the Macintosh. I am a Mac user, so I downloaded it and it worked well - I doubt I will ever use it again. :) For some reason, I doubt Google will have to temporarily disable downloading Google Earth for Mac. Oh, I am so psyched to get new Intel based Apple Laptop, I just hate the name of it.

Anyway the forum coverage is at DigitalPoint Forums.

Barry Welford started a Cre8asite Forum thread where he asks, Does the Internet level the playing field? Barry W. believes that "The Internet has levelled the competitive playing field." But has it really? DianeV said that "First, the Internet made it more level. Then, SEO made it more level."

kensplace tries to break down the pros and cons:

The big boys with money have a few advantages over the little guy.

They can advertise more
They can devote more resources to a problem
They can devote resources to support
They can (and this is a biggy) just purchase a little guys hard work outright.
They have more money for better hardware.

The little guys have a couple of advantages.
They are more flexible.
They are usually more inventive and produce better quality work/ideas.

Nadir rightly points out that the "big guys can buy the little guys." Which Ammon Johns answers that it was that which resulted in "the first web bubble." Ammon continues to explain that the big guys are now being smarter, they are hiring employees and consultants that have this expertise.

What I have noticed reading this thread is that it is the same story. The big guy versus the little guy. Be it Internet marketing, be it generic marketing, be it a war (David vs. Goliath). The little guys are more flexible and they can be smarter - but brut force can over power the little guy in due time. Egol summed it up nicely; "1) Being the first mover in your field and getting the jump on them. In a showdown the fastest draw wins if you can hit your challenger. 2) A person working on a "passion" will generally defeat someone working on a "profit"."

As Ammon closes;

There are still niches that either are not profitable enough for the big companies to develop, or that the big companies haven't seen yet. That too will always be true. That is where the little guys of today can become the big guys of tomorrow.

Welcome to the basics of marketing.

Eat it up while it lasts and hope you catch the wave. Keep finding those niches!

But in my opinion, I do not think the little guys are on the same level as the big guys.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Well not on real leeches, those wonderful little yummy bugs. :) But the leeches we are talking about are those evil search engines, specifically the ones that charge you for those rankings. Pretty much everyone has heard about Jakob Nielsen's recent article he named Search Engines as Leeches on the Web. In response to that, Danny Sullivan (our industry leader) started a Search Engine Watch forum thread he named Search Engine Leeches, Dependency & Losing Perspective. The thread has some really excellent responses.

Danny seems to clarify that Jakob Nielsen's article is mostly referring to the PPC side of things. And he explains that most Webmasters should not solely depend on only search engine traffic for their Web properties (the dependency part). Let me pull out some of the excellent comments in that thread.

projectphp: "One thing though: shouldn't the SEM community be proud that people have overblown how important it is?" So true!

massa: "Maybe I missed the "big picture" with his post but I didn't get that his point was to not want, wish for or work for search engine traffic. I thought his point was that the underlying motivation of search engines is changing from wanting to be a library of sites to send people to, to becoming a destination site which would in essence make them not the sender of traffic as much as the stealer of customers."

cre8pc: "Why the push to be liberated from seach engines and turn to other forms of marketing, from a usabilty guru? Well, of course. Duh. Marketing was never just about rank or PPI."

Oh, ThreadWatch reports that Brett Tabke Challenges Jakob Nielsen to Block the Bots but if this is not about organic results then the challenge is not relevant. But the challenge is exciting based on his rankings for this little keyword phrase.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An update on the Irrelvant YPN Ads on Our Forum is that we are now seeing more relevant YPN ads in our forums since reporting it here. For some reason, I do not think all the folks complaining about the relevancy issues have seen improvements. But many people believe that the irrelevant ads are due to the fact Yahoo! wants to give its publishers a higher payout then AdSense. So they serve up higher paying ads, even though they are not incredibly contextually relevant to the page copy.

So I am now seeing ads on Web Design, SEO Services, and others. And very few of those high paying ads. Did I just kick myself in the butt? :)

I have updated our thread on this at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you are in the Dallas area, then you may want to know that Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association is hosting an SEO 101 Panel, some nice names of panelist on the list. More information at http://www.dfwsem.org/press-release-08.html.

Search Engine Forum administrator, Bill Hartzer posted a few threads at various forums. Here is the forum roundup:

• Search Engine Forums
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• WebProWorld Forums

Reports over at WebmasterWorld forums that Adwords Keyword Tool Trademark Blackout. Cline from Aderit Internet Marketing reports that if you use the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool, and plugin a trademarked name, it won't return suggestions. I personally tried this and I am getting suggestions, so maybe this is a limited user test?

I am not sure. But I know Cline knows his stuff and I doubt this is a mistake on his side.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Seems like Google is dabbling in every thing these days. Gary Price writes last night that Google Video Store Now Open at http://video.google.com/. He notes that they "tweaked" the Google Video homepage to show video categories. I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums about it and asked can Google compete in this area? I wonder what the responses will be. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread asks, Is Aiming For Repeat Visitors A Waste Of Time For Adsense Sites?

Many people argue in the thread for both sides. Some say that since repeat visitors are used to your site, they have higher ad blindness then new visitors. Some say that you want the repeat visitors because they increase your ad impressions. Some say new visitors lead to repeat visitors, and repeat visitors lead to more word of mouth for new visitors to become repeat visitors.

I would think every site wants a loyal base of repeat visitors. It keeps a site healthy and going, in my opinion. It is the repeat visitors that increase the popularity of the site, to drive new visitors. In my opinion, the new visitors are more likely to click the ads then the repeat visitors, but the repeat visitors and new visitors work hand in hand.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Danny broke up a thread to create a new one named Bad Reasons To Want A Top Ranking on the 3rd of this month. Mikkel posted that a client of his wanted to increase the value of a company before it is sold, and one way to do that was to increase the client's ranking. Although the thread did not list many other bad reasons to want top rankings, it did discuss this one reason.

Ammon Johns tells a story of one of his clients looking to buy a company based on rank. To make a long story short, that company they were looking to buy was ranking well due to a single seo tactic. A few months later, that company's rankings dropped. Good thing they did not buy them. Ammon continues to explain that you should not look at rankings alone, but rather the traffic over time of a site.

Interesting thread, check it out at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are those who like to watch the Google data center fluctuate and those who prefer to wait until a data center moves over to the main Google results. If you are one of those very detailed people, who enjoy watching each and every data center shuffle, then there is a thread for you at WebmasterWorld. Reseller posted a new thread named Google Datacenters Watch.

Some people in the thread discuss the various data centers, specifically watching http://66.249.93.104/ where big daddy resides. And some people are getting sick of the watch.

Either way, if you skim through the thread, you may pick up a few tid bits, or you may not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is one search feature I did not know MSN had until I was pinged by a Syndk8 Forum Member about this thread which has the details (I know the forum is locked down, sorry). Basically, if you do a search in this format at msn search; ip:64.236.116.57 you get a listing of all the sites hosted on that particular server. The information on this search feature is written up at MSN's Web Search Help page.

Locked down forum discussion at Syndk8 Forums.

Remember our coverage of The Big Dogs Debate the Sandbox Theory? It was a forum thread on the sandbox theory where the "big dogs", Mike Grehan, Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, DaveN and so on debated the sandbox. In reality, everyone but Mike agreed there is some sort of sandbox affect out there. Then Mike stopped defending his argument for his beliefs on the sandbox theory at the forums and announced it at at his "own pad". Then today a ClickZ article named Goodbye, SEO Push. Hello, SEO Pull which basically is his response in article format to the whole sandbox theory. He notes that Jill did argue with him, in that ClickZ article. He did not note the other names that disagree with him, including Danny Sullivan. Some people actually took this article a bit too personally.

My only pet peeve is that it should be defended in the original forum thread. :)

Let me start out by saying this is not found in a particular forum, it was not inspired by a forum post, it is not even directly SEO related. But there is a serious issue out there for bloggers. It is a site at http://ambiraj.blogspot.com/ which daily steals content from this site, and dozens of other sites, with no link back. InsideGoogle said, Rajesh, You’re Messing With The Wrong People noting that Randy Charles Morin took note of this and is now reporting it to the higher forces.

We should all report this person. I flagged the site over and over again for months, and nothing has been done. I believe I even emailed people about it. It is sad, they copy content from here, SEW, GoogleBlogoscoped, BL Ochman, SteveRubel, InsideGoogle, and many others.

Even if he did add links, its still wrong.

Remember when we posted information about Search Engine Roundtable Forums to Host Moderator Roundtable Discussion? Well the first hosted moderator only discussion is complete.

Members submitted their questions and are encouraged to continue so. We then posted a thread in the Moderator's Roundtable named Strategies to Get Out of Sandbox Faster which is two pages long and 13 filled with Search Engine Roundtable Moderator only discussion.

Just minutes ago, I opened up the thread in the Google Web Search section so that any registered member can now join the discussion. The thread is at http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=219. Join, share, learn and teach!

Ever since Google AdSense released CPM Based Pricing for AdSense one would assume that refreshing your page over and over again, would be against Google AdSense's terms of service. But even then, even though it says in the TOS in section 5; "Prohibited Uses";

You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to: (i) directly or indirectly generate queries, Referral Events, or impressions of or clicks on any Ad,

People still think it is ok to fake ad impressions. A thread at DigitalPoint forums named Putting sites in autosurf? asks the question, and the first response says; "you will get impressions but no clicks. no it's not against TOS." which is wrong - you get paid for impressions and it is against the TOS.

Of course there are legitimate reasons to have robots hit your site. You may want to do load checking, stress testing, availability checking and so on. But you can easily exclude AdSense from these tests. There are also advertisers who want to boost their Alexa rankings or statistics and pay people to visit their site often. So is the next PPC fraud, CPM fraud? Or has this been an issue for a long long time? :)

Forum discussion on auto-surf programs and AdSense's TOS at DigitalPoint Forums.

Link churn which is mentioned in this patent application is "computed as a function of an extent to which one or more links provided by the document changes over time." Basically that means the rate a link and/or its anchor text change from an origin's page or document. The patent application discusses that Google may apply a penalty of your "link churn" is above the threshold, i.e. "63. The method of claim 62, wherein adjusting the ranking includes penalizing the ranking if the link churn is above a threshold."

The question is, what is that threshold?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The only type of linking you fully control are the links you have access to. For many, that means the pages on the site they are trying to rank well. So I have a site named abc-company.com and that is the only site I have to work with. The internal link, the anchor text and links you place within that site's pages to other pages within that site, is what you have to manage. At what point can you over do it with the linkage within ones own site?

That is the topic of a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named How far to go when linking internally? As one reads through the thread you hear about percentages, you hear about research papers, you hear about search theories, and you hear about keeping it simple. At what point does it look to the human eye that you are overdoing it? Is it about percentages or research papers or is it about the human eye?

Well, its both and its also about industry. For example the search term web design won't allow the mass manipulation of internal links to play a roll in ranking. But does the search term gift baskets allow for it? :) I do not know.

There is a lot to take into account, and its not just about if the site looks bad or spammy. It is not just about a percentage of the internal link ratio to external links. It is not just about the last research paper released. It is not just about the industry you are in. Who said search optimization was easy?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Moderator, pk_snyths reports at our forums Google pushing Personalized Search. He posts a screen shot of a ugly highlighted reminder from Google to use search history. Looks a bit like the screen capture below, click on it for a larger version.

I have never seen that before, and I tend to stay logged in at Google for most searches.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you guys missed it, Engadget is running crazy conference coverage of CES. You need to check out the Live coverage of Google Keynote with Robin Williams. The folks are discussing this at the forums, and here is the round-up:

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

I am not going nuts about this, but the news is all over the blogosphere. I started a thread on this at Search Engine Watch Forums. The about us page is the only current visible page available at http://pack.google.com/pack/about.html.

If you click on the Google Pack logo you are sent to http://pack.google.com/pack/pack_installer.html then redirected to the Google Accounts page. There is also an empty http://www.google.com/support/pack page.

Looks like it will be live very very very soon.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Danny has the write up on Yahoo Go Puts Yahoo Services Into Cell Phones, TV & PCs. Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Go which "allows you to access the information and content that is important to you on whatever device you choose." You can easily click over to find out the specifics, but it is all leading back to that Yahoo! Life Engine I keep going back to which I wrote on April 09, 2004.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over at Digg.com we have a quick entry named Google Maps gets ready for Hi-Res Satellite Images. One of the comments notes that the "new zoom levels are 100ft and 50ft." They report that NYC, LA and San Francisco have this, but I personally do not see it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Reports via Webmasterworld that the indexed pages of many sites have been dropping this past week. Meaning, if you had 1,000 pages indexed by MSN two weeks ago, this past week, it may have dropped to tens of pages.

I have no proof, just reporting the discussion at Webmasterworld.

The update we saw take place in December at Google is reportedly now at AOL Search. A WebmasterWorld thread named Google's update live on AOL reports this, but to clarify, member TammyJo says;

I think it may depend on the "update" you are talking about. The December "update" is most definitely appearing as our site had been dropped and was no where to be found on AOL. It is not re-appearing at the top of the serps. If it is the BigDaddy update they are talking about, I don't think so. (I really am not sure actually,because I decided to break my addictive habit of reading through the entire soap opera this time around :)

So this does not appear to be the big daddy update on AOL.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

PS. Sorry for slow updates, crazy day at the office...

I waited and waited a long time before posting anything on this. Google clearly understands that they need to show search related contextual AdSense ads on our forum. However, Yahoo! is showing ads about "Ionic Air Purifier by Oreck".

I figured I would wait until the forum was a week old before saying anything. Then I waited even longer but it is still showing these ads. It is a good thing I have my ads on rotation with Google AdSense and YPN.

But I do not rotate the ads in the RSS feeds or email subscriptions. So it looks really bad.

Join the forum discussion on this at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

We discussed the big hype back in late December on AdSense for Domains and Poor Traffic where Danny called for reform of these types of products.

Lat yesterday evening a thread at WebmasterWorld was started named Domainers making Millions. With a title like that, it sure brought in a ton of response, at the time of writing this, it has 68 posts within its 5 massive pages. The thread is about how much money these "Domainers" are making from parked domains with the AdSense product on them.

The discussion in brief, discusses the anger some people have with this product, much of what was covered in the December entry. But as novice points out this is not new, there has always been these types of monetized park domains out there, even before AdSense. "AdWords ads appeared on parked pages before AdSense even started." And you see them all the time with Overture ads.

WebmasterWorld moderator, WebWork has a detailed suggestion for the DomainPark product. A bit too detailed for me to recap here, so check it out. There is currently no word from Google on this in the thread. With its current popularity, and it not even being featured on the WebmasterWorld homepage yet, I am sure we can expect some type of response from Google, I hope.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have a small thread at our forums that shows that Google is indexing himself. The members use these links to show the XML results within Google indexed at Google. Examples;

• site:google.de/xml
• site:google.it/xml
• site:google.ro/xml

Besides for that, now I know that supplemental results in German is Zusätzliches Ergebnis.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A High Rankings thread asks members what is a good non-open source, but commercial shopping cart software package that is search engine friendly. Three people in the thread tell the guy to build a custom solution, because that is the best option (of course I agree). One person recommended x-cart and an other recommended SecureNetShop.com . Also, mcanerin recommended that you use any shopping cart, but build the product and catalog pages from scratch so they are search friendly. All of these solutions are fine.

The High Rankings Forum has a whole forum devoted to Shopping Cart Discussion. I also have a basic article on how to construct your Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

A cute, non-scientific, poll has been posted at DigitalPoint forums asking Is Adsense Creating Internet Clutter? Currently there are 19 responses, 63% saying Yes it does, 26% saying No it does not and the remaining just don't know.

Some folks believe the clutter will get better, when Google adds "better heuristics and algorithms detecting sites which are made specifically to take advantage of AdSense." But will they rush to add these algorithms? As an other member notes; "The 'scrapers' pull in large sums of money for Google and the publisher."

But like the phrase, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" someone placed a similar phrase;

Adsense doesn't create the clutter. People trying to make a quick buck do

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It has been a long time since we mentioned anything about the Yahoo! Directory let alone any directory. I found this nice thread at HighRankings forum named Quit Yahoo Directory - Still Listed which shows that even if you do not renew your Yahoo! Directory listing, after the year is up, you can still continue to be listed.

One member reported;

I stopped paying long back..much over a year...maybe 2 years by now...still not been removed from the directory.....I also sent 2 requests to be removed.

Jill Whalen adds that it is "great when they remove them though, because then the lousy directory description doesn't show in the organic results any more!"

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

The "Big Daddy" data center that was Discovered at 64.233.179.104 mid to early December has now migrated over to the main SERPs. Matt Cutts followed up a couple days later with a number of blog entries listed below;

• url canonicalization
• interpreting inurl
• discussing 302 redirects
• Feedback on Bigdaddy data center
• Bigdaddy on the move

All these post contain an incredible amount of information about this new non-update, "infrastructure" change. The forums (as well as Matt's blog) is spewing with feedback on this update, let me give you a break down of links to the forum threads;

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

I am sure we will more of this topic soon.

The big SEO Forum news of the day is that Cre8asite Forums has made the bold jump from ad-less forums to a forum with ads. Kim wrote up a detailed announcement she named Attention Cre8asiteforums Community. To make a long story short, this is the first time ads are on the forums, since they started in 1998. So what do the ads look like? It depends; If you are not logged in you get Google AdSense ads at the top and bottom of the page, here is a screen capture. But if you are a registered member that is logged in you get the ads only at the bottom of the page.

Kim explains how they are experimenting in phases;

We will be experimenting with the ad placements and limiting the number of ads, so that we can maximize clickthroughs and minimize banner blindness. We also invite you to give us your constructive comments on how we can improve our advertising campaign. Our goal is strike a reasonable balance between maximizing our advertising revenue and avoiding ad overload.

The members are very supportive so far, shows you something about the respect the Cre8asite admins and mods earned from the member base. Not all forums would have been so supportive. Add your feedback at the Cre8asite Forums Thread.

On a somewhat related note; WebmasterWorld placed a cute ad, wouldn't actually call it an ad, to show support for UT. Forum discussion on that at WebmasterWorld.

On December 16th, we were told to expect a response on Jeremy selling text link advertisements on his site. Remember the whole scandal? I named it Google Fights Paid Links & Yahoo Defends Paid Links which kind of annoyed Jeremy but it did make for a good title. Anyway, as expected, Jeremy pulled the ads from his site. Well not 100%. In his entry today he named Sponsored Links Update he said he would only put ads up with the nofollow attribute, without it, no text ad.

Does that end this big story? I think so.

Current forum coverage on this change at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

First let me start off by saying I am a huge fan of automation. I even wrote a blog entry at my corporate blog (which hardly gets updated) a while back named Verisign's Sweet Automated Verification Process. So when I saw a thread at DigitalPoint forums named Google AdSense Phone Verification I got a bit excited. Soon after, the thread was created, the page with the information on how Google's AdSense Phone Verification works was pulled, it was here and I know it was there, I checked it out yesterday morning. It said;

How does phone verification work?

Phone verification is completely automated - you'll only need to key in a 6-digit personal identification number (PIN) using your touch-tone telephone.

When you're ready to verify your number, click the link provided in the email you received from Google AdSense. This link will bring you to the Phone Verification Setup page, from which you'll be able to initiate the call or set a convenient time for our system to call you. Have your PIN ready - the number of PIN entry attempts is limited.

Most publishers I have spoken with did not go through the phone verification process. Many publishers live overseas and do not have numbers that would work with this system. And many do not want Google to have their phone number (that I do not understand). Anyway, it was pulled and I know Google's AdSense Rep reads the threads at DigitalPoint, so maybe that is the reason. It is no longer used, people dislike it being there, so just pull it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday we reported that Craigslist Blocks Most Spiders: Millions of Pages Delisted. Danny Sullivan did some deep research on this and came to the conclusion that Craigslist Not Blocking Major Crawlers. He said;

Avi Wilensky, who posted at the forums, assumed some new change must be in place when he couldn't find a real estate listing from Craigslist via a Google search that brought it up that listing only a few days before. Checking the Craigslist robots.txt file, he noticed that sections with listings about community, housing, for sale, services, gigs and jobs items seemed to be blocked.

At a quick glance, I could see why someone might assume that entire swaths of listings were being blocked. However, the listings themselves are not contained within these sections.

Bottom-line is that I and everyone else, was looking at the .com version, when in fact we need to look at the .org version, which has almost 12 million results. Danny has more details and information at his blog entry and also at a large SEW members only article.

Forum discussion back at our forums.

Andy does a nice job updating his blog entry on the status of a page found at http://www.google.by/ that shows Google Ads on the homepage. Folks were freaking out, how can Google do this! These ads are not targeted, yada yada.

Few things noted at some of the threads out there.
(1) The copyright at the bottom still says 2005.
(2) The site looks unprofessional.
(3) The domain name is not owned by Google (at least not yet)

For a screen capture of the site in its state of writing this entry, click here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google is sporting a Google Braille logo today that looks exactly like;

If you click on the logo it gives you a one box wiki result for the search louis braille birthdate.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

By way of a thread at WebmasterWorld named API-Quotas, where members saw a drastic drop in the quotas they have for their API calls. It turned out the reduction of API queries was a bug and has been fixed since it occurred. However, before confirming that it was a bug, the rumors were that they pulled back the query limits for the AdWords API due to a new program that is suppose to be released named "AdWords Commercial Developer Program". Chris Sherman blogged about this in September but now it is January 2006 and we have no word from Google on it yet.

If you look at the FAQs page it says; "On January 1, 2006, we will launch the new AdWords Commercial Developer Program." And continues, "Starting in early December, a link to a registration page will be posted to the API home page and blog for those who wish to enroll in the program."

But there is no link to a registration page and its way after December.

If you noticed a reduction in your AdWords API calls or if you want to complain that the commercial developer program registration page is not live, shot over to WebmasterWorld.

Many of you have been noticing that you can have an AdSense ad that is a large box, and have a small little ad in it. In other words, they are sometimes showing 4 ads, some times 3, some times 2 and some times 1. The less ads shown on the page, the more white space (depending on your AdSense background settings) is shown. The more white space, the less professional your site is to your visitor.

A thread at WebmasterWorld Forums named 336x250 only showing two ads? discusses just that. On occasion Google will increase the font size of the text in the ad, but not always. When it doesn't some folks feel as follows;

Its just that it makes the site look funny with all this extra whitespace. Kind of makes it look as if the site owner can't sell the empty ad space of something.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday there were rumors that Google Were to Sell PCs with Own Operating System but those rumors were crushed by a C|Net article named Google denies Google PC reports;

Google has denied reports that it is working on a low-price personal computer or a "Google Cube" that would link up a user's PC, TV, set-top box and cell phone.

Oh well, it was a good idea. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I'm meddling in Bill Slawski's territory here, in that he's better known for presenting and analyzing papers on search engine technology. However, I caught this one and since it uses usability testing scenerios in the research, I gave it a shot.

The paper is Using meaningful and stable categories to support exploratory web search: Two formative studies by Bill Kules and Ben Shneiderman, of the Department of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland.

The purpose of the study is to better understand how people use search engines to research topics - specifically, how categorization of search results applies to the end user experience.

"Categorizing web search results into comprehensible visual displays using meaningful and stable classifications can support user exploration, understanding, and discovery. We report on two formative studies in the domain of U.S. government web search that investigated how searchers use categorized overviews of search results for complex, exploratory search tasks."

They ran test subjects through a variety of tasks. Here is one example.

"Scenario 2 (Breast cancer) - You are a 30-year old journalist writing an article on breast cancer and what the federal government is doing about it. You are exploring the topic, starting by looking on the Web to find out what kind of information is available. You have just entered the search terms "breast cancer".

Continue reading "Researching Search Engine Results and How People Use Them for Research"

There is this new creative way to search for images, that currently doesn't work too well, but it still is very cool. It is named retrievr and you can search the Flickr image database by sketching something in real time. I found this by way of John Battelle via Research Buzz.

I had to start a thread on this at our forums, under the title, Image Search via Sketch.

Via /. an LA Times article that says;

Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

Bear Stearns analysts speculated in a research report last month that consumers would soon see something called "Google Cubes" — a small hardware box that could allow users to move songs, videos and other digital files between their computers and TV sets.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread named Yahoo Ads W/No 'Ads By.'? which asks how can someone remove the "Ads By Yahoo!" part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads?

The thread continues to explain that in some cases, it may appear that the "Ads by Yahoo! is missing but in reality, it is just hard to see. Some what like hidden text on a page.

One member says;

The background is a light yellow and the Yahoo tagline is nearly invisible because it displays in white. The Y color is their choice not mine.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ever since March 2004, I have been comparing analytics software built by the same company. The first entry I have on this was named Comparing Web Traffic Between Different Web Analytictical Tools which shows the huge gap in traffic when comparing Urchin 3.x to Urchin 5.x. Then the topic came up again in January 2005, with an entry named Web Analysis Tools & Consistancy. Which led me to an entry in late May of 2005 where I said, Web Analytics Needs Standards Bad.

So when Google Analytics came up, I signed up and let the data collect. Keep in mind, Google Analytics is Urchin. The differences are; (1) its a half of a version newer and (2) one is server side tracking (logs and 1st party cookies) and the other is simple JavaScript tracking (3rd party cookies). Then yesterday, I did a comparison of my trusted Urchin 5.7 package against Google Analytics for the month of December. I came up with a 20%, 19.79% to be exact, increase in traffic for the Urchin 5.7 tracking over Google Analytics. Ill post the daily increases for December in the extended entry area, you will notice it was as low as 5% and as high as 30%.

For a visual reference check out this chart, you can click on it to enlarge. The red is Urchin and the blue is Google.

I started a thread on this topic at our forums and Matt, md_doc explains why this may be the case. He says;

Using logs you get information that you would not get with javascript... like when someone that has javascript disabled comes to your site, or when a robot parses your site.

Can you believe that it can affect on average, 20% of the visitors of this site? Who are you that are blocking those cookies? Do you even know you are blocking them? :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Continue reading "Urchin Server Side Compared to Google Analytics"

This is not new, but many of the folks out there are unaware of it. A search syntax at Google works as follows;

Search on ~*marketing will bold some the preceding words to marketing.

Search on ~*marketing*~ will bold some of the words in front of and behind the term marketing.

How is/was this useful? Well it was used often during the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) theory craze. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A thread started at our forums named Craigslist Delists Millions of Pages from Search Engine Indexes uncovers the new robots.txt file in place over at Craigslist. It basically reads;

############################## # Exclude robots from these

User-agent: YahooFeedSeeker
Disallow: /forums
Disallow: /res/
Disallow: /post
Disallow: /email.friend
Disallow: /?flagCode
Disallow: /ccc
Disallow: /hhh
Disallow: /sss
Disallow: /bbb
Disallow: /ggg
Disallow: /jjj

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /cgi-secure
Disallow: /forums
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /res/
Disallow: /post
Disallow: /email.friend
Disallow: /?flagCode
Disallow: /ccc
Disallow: /hhh
Disallow: /sss
Disallow: /bbb
Disallow: /ggg
Disallow: /jjj

#####################################

They supposedly had millions, 3.6 Million to be exact, of pages indexed at Google and millions at the other search engines. Now? 211,000 at Google, 280,000 at Yahoo and 4,695 atMSN.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Another Weird Holiday Graphic: The Animal Trend Continues suggests that the Google logos have been a bit on the animalistic side recently. The thread creator asks;

Is Google intentionally avoiding more predictable holiday representations, or is it just doing a terrible job?

See for yourself, the 2006 logo:

Versus the 2005 logo:

Ask Jeeves, like last year went with the simple approach.

If you look over the past Google Holiday Logos, the past three have the animal theme. Thanksgiving, of course make sense. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

For those of you following the "Big Daddy" Data Center, there are reports at WebmasterWorld that people have been seeing the "test DC 64.233.179.104" results at the primary Google.com site. Has this solved the canonical and supplemental problems? Does everyone see the new results? How much longer until everyone does?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at DigitalPoint forums named Adsense in 2006 asks publishers, what they expect to see and want to see with AdSense improvements in 2006. So what were some of the responses?

• Hopefully they will remove the content filters so you can get full price again :)
• Hopefully they will increase the % they give to publishers.
• I would hope they improve the 'contextual' part of the ads.
• Less fear (of being booted out) - there are a lot of worried users, maybe not justified though

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A two page thread at Cre8asite Forums named What do you learn from Matt Cutts?, Does he give you SEO advices?... He basically asks, is Matt's blog an SEO blog that SEOs can learn from?

Member Nadir gives Matt a really hard time. Saying that "his blog looks just like sensational newspapers." He compares some of the entries, where he calls out spammers, the same thing to witch trials done "middle ages, witches were executed in public in Europe."

There are some in the thread that agree with Nadir and some that do not.

Ruud offers up a post with many reason why Matt's blog is very important to SEOs. Concluding that "every Google employee should have a blog and post as much as possible about what keeps them busy. Just keep on talking."

This is all in response to Matt Winning Best SEO Blog at SEJ.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

It is true, Yahoo! search went down at new years. Saturday night my fiance does a search and she complains that Yahoo! is not working. I am like, sure its not working (thinking she is doing something wrong). So I mossy over to the computer and punch in a search term into Yahoo! and presto, I get;

Oops!

We ran into a temporary problem while performing your search. Please try your search again.

But it wasn't just seen by the two of us. Many at WebmasterWorld and at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums reported it was down. Heck even GoogleGuy tried it out and said;

Weird. For a second I thought April Fools had come early. :) Working fine for me now..

Too funny. This is not the first time a wide spread report of an outage was reported in 2005. On June 13th there was a reported outage at Yahoo! as well. Maybe this was a Y2K plus 6 years problem?

Thanks for voting for us for the KB Cafe Blog Awards. We have won the Blog SEO category, see the results at KBCafe Blog Awards Winners. We have beat out very respectable blogs, including Online Marketing Blog and even Matt Cutts new blog. We had 44% of the votes with 37 votes in total, Online Marketing Blog had 27% of the votes with 23 votes and Matt Cutts had 21% of the votes with 18 votes in total.

Many SEO blogs were not nominated that should have, imo. JenSense was beat out by Pro Blogger by four votes, how crazy is that! Best Google Blog went in this order, Google Blogoscoped, John Battelle's Searchblog, and Google Blog - I would agree with that. Jeremy beat out Yahoo for best Yahoo Blog. Inside Microsoft won the Best Microsoft blog (you guys know him as Inside Google Blog). For the other results go here and for the actual figures see here.

Thanks for voting!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.