April 2006 Archives

Yesterday Google announced a "quality change" to the AdWords ad delivery system. Danny Sullivan explained that the ads displayed on a search result page will differ in quantity based on the commercial nature of the keyword phrase. So if a keyword is more educational (non-commercial) in nature, less ads will be displayed. If a keyword phrase is more commercial in nature, more ads (up to 11) will display on the search results page. How does Google change the number of ads? Well, if it is less commercial, it will tend to use less of the broad match criteria in displaying ads (which tends to bring up more ad inventory).

As you can imagine, this will affect impressions for ads, which affects your CTR and your quality score - ultimately your ads rank in Google.com. Also, advertisers will get more "qualified" leads this way. I also guess this means that Yahoo! will continue to lead in displaying more ads as a percentage of Web searches. Makes you think, doesn't it? Google is lessing it's ads, making the ads more relevant but will Google make as much money? Yahoo? well, they just seem to want to show more ads, and give it up to the highest bidder.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As you already know from my coverage Google has updated Google Sitemaps to include many new features I discussed at SEW blog including;

+ New verification method
+ Indexing snapshot
+ Notification of violations of the webmaster guidelines
+ Reinclusion request form
+ Spam report
+ New webmaster help center
+ More about our new look
+ Adding a Sitemap
+ Navigating the tabs

But the main change, for Webmasters, in my opinion, is Google notifying webmasters of penalties as Matt Cutts describes it. They don't necessarily tell you, hey - your site is kicked out of the Google index because you did X, Y and Z. Plus Google doesn't necessarily tell you that you have no pages indexed, it tells only "some" webmasters. They have a message that reads;

No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we''ll evaluate your site. [?]
Submit a reinclusion request

Many Webmasters are happy about this and discussing it in the various forums. Two forum threads I found discussing it include; DigitalPoint Forums & Cre8asite Forums.

Earth Day was this past Sunday and there was a ton of news and blog buzz on the search engines being creative with their engines on that day however, there were no threads in our forums. Today, I finally noticed a thread at DigitalPoint Forums about the special day. The thread creator notes which engines made an effort for Earth Day and which did not - also asking you to comment on which you find to be your favorite.

Continue reading "Search Engine Commemorate Earth Day 2006"

There is a new WebmasterWorld thread that made it to the front page very quick named Flattening Effect of Page Rank Interations - explains the "sandbox"? I feel like I have to quote the majority of the post for you to understand this new Sandbox theory that many in the thread find "refreshing" and "intelligent."

Note the PageRank equation (sans filters) is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) .

The first observation about this equation is that it can only be calculated after a statistically significant number of iterations.

If you analyze a site with 5 pages that all link to each other (the homepage having an initial PageRank of roughly 3.5), what you see in the first iteration of PageRank is that the homepage is PR 3.5, and all other pages are PR .365 – the largest PR gap that will ever exist through multiple iterations in this example.

This homepage PR represents a surge in PR because Google has not yet calculated PR distribution, therefore the homepage has an artificial and temporary inflation of PR (which explains the sudden and transient PR surge and hence SERPs).

In the second iteration, the homepage goes down to PR 1.4 (a drop of over 50%!), and the secondary pages get lifted to .9, explaining the disappearing effect of “new” sites. Dramatic fluctuations continue until about the 12th iteration when the homepage equilibrates at about a lowly 2.2, with other pages at about .7.

I believe that the duration of the “sandbox” is the same amount of time it takes Google to iterate through its PageRank calculations.

Therefore, I think that the “sandbox” is nothing other than the time it takes Google to iterate through the number of calculations uniquely needed to equilibrate the volume of links for a given site.

Did you digest that? WebmasterWorld Administrator, tedster, adds that deep links may "short circuit the flattening effect that PR iterations might produce, especially if they were added at decent intervals." To which an other WebmasterWorld Administrator, trillianjedi, adds "You have to begin to consider whether actually the entire PageRank system of old has been replaced with something entirely different....." but he continues to explain that this and all the other theories are speculation, which is why these threads are so enjoyable.

Google has continued to say that PageRank is used and part of the algorithms. Many SEOs believe it is only used now (1) to determine which site should rank higher when site A and site B are equal in all other characteristics (like that ever happens) and (2) to determine the crawl frequency of certain documents. But maybe this theory is right, or maybe it is wrong - maybe Google is using PageRank for this purpose? Who knows....

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Please read the comments in this entry by clicking here.

A thread at DigitalPoint Forums had an interesting title, Are you click-o-phobic? I never really thought about this. Publishers are so trained not to click on their own ads, it becomes second nature to look at the ads, but never ever click on them. This constant wrist slapping training has possibly caused some to subconsciously never click on any contextual advertisement from Google or Yahoo and the others. Honestly, if you are a publisher, do you feel a weird sense of gratification or accomplishment after clicking on a contextual ad, on any site? I believe that I have a weird feeling after clicking on one of those ads.

Click-O-Phobia is the proper term for such a condition.

Do you have click-o-phobia? Are you click-o-phobic? Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I posted under embargo that Yahoo Adds Babel Fish at midnight, Wednesday night. Yahoo! has has revitalized Babel Fish at http://babelfish.yahoo.com/. Babel Fish is a translation tool first on December 9th, 1997 by Alta Vista (see SEW). You can translate up to 150 words of text to dozens of languages, you can translate a Web page, you can download babel fish widget to your Yahoo! toolbar, or you can add the feature to your web site. In addition, there are special features for German and French users that enables a "searcher's queries and looks across the entire Web in multiple languages to find the most comprehensive set of relevant results. Yahoo! Search results are returned on one multi-lingual page." For more information on Bable Fish, see the Babel Fish Help page at Yahoo! Also, see Gary Price's historical roundup on Babel Fish and the Yahoo! Search Blog.

WebmasterWorld members seem to be overall very happy with this announcement. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator, Discovery, posted an interesting new thread named Google POPS off. He says that he tested pop offs, ads that pop up after you exist a site, and realized a 8% increase in conversions. However, Google clearly does not allow any type of pop up to be present on a Google AdWords landing page, so Discovery can not implement this as he would have liked to. The deal is, how come larger companies, such as Lower My Bills and Network Solutions can implement pop offs and still use AdWords?

If pop offs only pop once per session, upon exit, when the site's goal has not be reached, should that be allowed by Google? If implemented "professional" should that change things?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Brett Tabke has split out a thread that has been getting a lot of attention named Pages dropping out of the index. GoogleGuy replied to that thread stating;

One thing to bear in mind is that Bigdaddy will have different crawl priorities. That can account for some of it. If you've run into any spam problems in the past, you might also want to do a reinclusion request. Otherwise, please send an email to bostonpubcon2006 at gmail.com with the subject line "crawlpages" (all one word), and I'll ask someone to see if they notice any commonalities.

This post, deserves its own thread, so Brett split it out and named it With Googles New Big Daddy Index, Crawling is Changing .

Currently we don't have much more information, than what GoogleGuy posted above. Does "different crawl priorities" relate to Google's new Crawl Caching Proxy? Or is it cache independent? I believe it has to be cache independent, due to the volume of posts in the original thread.

Forum discussion on GoogleGuy's comments at WebmasterWorld.

After Google announced the new Google Sitemaps features, a bug became visible in the tool. In fact, I noticed the bug when it was first being presented at SES yesterday, but the presenter was quick to cover it up. The folks at WebmasterWorld reported the glitch around 11:55 AM (EST), right when it was launched. Google would tell you that your robots.txt file was invalid or something, when in fact, it may not have been. Google confirmed and fixed the bug soon after.

Thanks to our users for alerting us to an issue with incorrectly reporting that sites and Sitemaps were being blocked by robots.txt files. We have resolved this issue. If you were unable to add a site or Sitemap because of this issue, you should now be able to add them.

If Sitemaps was reporting that your home page was blocked by robots.txt, you should soon see an updated status. Thanks for your patience as we refresh the display of this data.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

As an FYI, we reported a total of four Google bugs in the past two days.
(1) Google Fixes Extended URL Broken Page Issue
(2) Google AdWords Glitch: Bid Tool Conflicts With Position Preference Tool
(3) Google AdWords Showing Same Two Ads On Search Results Pages at Google.com
(4) And this one.

Many WebmasterWorld members are reporting that Google has been displaying the same ad and same creative more than once on the same search results page at Google.com. The, what seems to be, "bug" has been reported to Google, no confirmation as of yet has been made by Google.

WebmasterWorld AdWords moderator, eWhisper explains the two ways this can be happening;

1. A glitch in the AdWords system (which is admittedly happening quite a bit now). 2. When a domain has special approval to show upto 3 ads at a time (this is usually based around the landing pages being independent from each other).

Either this is a policy change or a bug - we will see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The past two days, as many as you know, I have been covered SES Toronto. The main takeaways from the conference, at least in terms of new items, includes;

(1) Google launches new Sitemaps with a spam feature.
(2) The Searcher Behavior Research Update session is always interesting, but this time it was mostly focused around relevancy and which engine is most relevant and why. I have an interesting (I think) entry on Is Google Search More Relevant Or Is There A Brand Factor?

Those are the two main "take aways" from the conference, here is the complete run down on sessions.

• Danny Sullivan's Keynote
• Search Marketing in Canada: Roundtable
• Search Engine Friendly Design
• Searcher Behavior Research Update
• Ad Agencies & Search
• Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior
• Meet the Crawlers
• Fun With Dynamic Sites

Now for the ride back, since you know about ride options to Toronto, the ride back I took 17, instead of NYS Thruway. Just a bit more turns and stuff, same deal I think with time. But check this out. I get to the border and they ask for ID, etc. like they always do. They ask me to turn off my car, give them my keys and open the trunk. I do exactly what they say and they search and find nothing. Now they ask me to pull into a garage, as a "random check." I do, they lock me in this garage, and ask me and my friend a few more questions. They look up to make sure the car is actually registered to me, which it was. Then they let me go. I drive a nice car, and I think they thought I stole it, because who in there right mind would drive from Toronto to the NYC area with a car like that?

They were right. I pulled out of the garage and got back on the highway, hit 65 MPH and bang, some rock hit my windshield. This is common, but this time, I notice a crack in the windshield. The windshield remains solid, so I continue to drive. The rest of the 6 hours back, my friend and I guess how long it will take the crack to reach the middle of the windshield (yes we were bored). So this AM, the crack is twice as large and I need to wait for the Lexus shop to open up to check how much it will cost to fix. I guess it is a good thing, since the windshield is filled with bug splatter from the 1,000 mile commute back and forth, trust me the windshield is covered with bug juice.

That is my story - the hotel was sweet, the conference was nice, and overall it was a fun experience like last year.

Chris Sherman moderates this session.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is up first, sporting his bright red suit. He explains that search engines want your content. SEO Basics; indexing, ranking, traffic, actions. With dynamic sites, the problems are normally with indexing the site. When it comes to the rankings side of thing, you can easily make changes to templates to increase or tweak rankings. Dynamic Web site Architecture; he explains how a dynamic site works. He explains that you can deploy URL rewrites, static replication and so on. What is not a problem? Content in a database is not an issue. A question-mark is not an issue. Server side include is also not an issue. Extension names are not an issue (i.e. php, cfm, asp, html). Indexing barriers include; long and ugly URLs, duplicate content (session ids, click is, time stamped URLs), spider traps (infinite loops), server downtime and slow response. There are also indirect issues with dynamic sites; required support of cookies, JavaScript, flash, etc, SEO-targeting and personalization, Form (post method) based navigation. Some non-related issues; robots.txt issues, password protection. Solutions that work; there are many ways to solve the system. (1) Fix your system (2) Add a "bridge layer" and if that isn't possible, you can "replicate your content." One fix he called the "one parameter web site" that makes sure all the parameters are limited to one. Identifying spiders; identify on a global level (session ids, geo targeting, spider traps), look for generic part of the agent name (googlebot, msnbot, slurp, etc.). Also think about building static Web pages (limit the use of dynamic pages, use dynamic objects on hard coded pages, create a site map). You can also use pay for inclusion, directories and PPC.

Jake Baillie from TrueLocal with a Dr. Phil slide. Common Dynamic site issues... (1) Circular navigation, same two links go to the same place. (2) Print-friendly pages to fix, block them in robots.txt or use CSS/Ja to generate them. (3) Canonical URL problem (what is my homepage, index.asp, default.html, / or what?) (4) Looks dont count, just add content. (5) Badly implemented mod_rewrite code, DNS errors with multiple domains. make sure to 301 redirect them. (6) Don't use a poorly written cloaking scripts. To prevent duplicate content, the same content should not be accessible via multiple URLs. What are URL rewrite URLs? He examples it. If your site is fully indexed by the search engines - don't use URL rewriting. He shows some of his "tasty tips" which I am not writing here.

With conversions being all the rage for web site owners, first thoughts are more likely on attracting first-time visitors and ways of converting this traffic into sales. However, they are not the only target group to be considered.

Ammon Johns starts a discussion in the Online Marketing and Promotion forum at Cre8asiteforums :

"Indeed, certainly within two years of business, one would hope that the majority of sales were coming from existing customers, happily returning. Of course, only you will know what the consumption cycle is for products or services of the type you deal with. But you would certainly hope that each sale you make would lead to at least one recommendation to a friend, and to repeat business from each customer."

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com

Google Sitemaps Launches New Features
Shiva Shivakumar from Google to talk about Google Sitemaps new launch. A live demo of site maps new features. He logged into his account and showed the "my sites" section. The pages look new, there is a "diagnostic" tab that shows summary data, including indexing summary, potential indexing problems, and so on. The tab on the left, gives you more detailed information, it looks like they moved those links from a sub tab at the top to the left hand side. Google now shows you that "no pages from your site is in the Google index" for constitution.org. He goes to the site and shows at the bottom of the page, hidden text - and that is the reason Google shows the message "no pages from your site is in the Google index." This is pretty big stuff. He then moved back to an other site, showing "statistics" main tab and showed "query stats," "crawl stats", "page analysis," and "index stats." He then clicks on the "sitemaps" main tab, and pulls up google.com/sitemap.xml to show the XML document. He then clicked on "robots.txt analysis" under the "tools" section on the left hand side. It allows you to see if you will be crawled or not.

Stephen Evans from MSN Canada. New products; windows desktop search, refreshed user interface, MSN local search beta, windows live search beta, crawling images and news and more. As much as possible MSN Search will attempt to crawl and index pages that help the user find what they are looking for. Basics; build a site map, use robots.txt, be conscious of URL length, query parameters, session variables, beware of text in images, unique content, links to your site or submit your URL, nothing can replace high quality content. Also use descriptive titles, redirects (HTML redirects are best, 301 or 302 are hard), JavaScript, page weight (150KB) and canonical domain. Things to avoid; keyword stuffing, duplicate copies, cloaked content, hidden text and link farms.

Andy Renieris from Yahoo! Canada Search goes over the vision, find, use, share and expand... How to get into the index, link new URLs from existing page in index, make sure all URLs have an inbound link, good authoritative links, don't make site depth too extreme, or use free add URL. Index friendly pages are unique content and avoid spam... French sites, use french meta tags and meta descriptions. He puts up the classic "how yahoo handles redirects" slide. URL rewriting is important, parameters often changed to pseudo-paths, remove session ideas, limit the depth of the URL. He showed the yahoo crawlers, web, shop, audio, news, etc... Recent Yahoo Additions; Site Explorer (not so new); rss and atom feed submission support, ping interface via API, added internal link filter and more things coming to Site Explorer soon. They also have My Web 2.0, the save to my web button... They just did an index update on April 21st.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com who goes over the stats... #6 US web property, 28.5% reach, 48.8 million domestic unique users, 5.9% share of US searches and a division of IAC. Crawler Goals; follow robots.txt standards, politeness (crawl delay, noarchive, noindex, nofollow), efficiency (compressions, avoid duplicates), freshness and multiple file types (html, pdf, flash, ms-office, etc.). (Barry notes; when did they add "nofollow?) Date-stamp content, it helps, so put a "last modified" stamp on your pages. Simplify site-organization and navigation, ensure crawlers can reach all parts of site, use site maps. Watch out for infinite pages, calendars (year 3001) and session IDs. Crawler challaneges; javascript, dynamic pages, image with urls.

Moderated by Andrew Goodman...

Kevin Lee is first up and he shows the Google Golden Triangle, eye tracking study heat map. He explains that targeting will enable you to make a more profitable sale. Targeting brings us one step closer tot he holy grail of advertising. What is the holy grail? Marketers get to put more of their budgets towards their best prospects/customers, Searchers only see the ads that marketers really want seen, and Publishers get a higher yield on their search and impression inventory. MSN adds increased targeting options by allowing you to raise your bid by demographics (age, gender, geographic), plus with say parting, daily scheduling... Behavior segmentation; better conversion from click to lead/sale, higher immediate value, better lifetime value of the customer, offer responsiveness. Targeting by behaviors; prior search behavior, prior click behavior and content preferences. When do you want to target by demographics? :) A power segment is when several of these demographics and behavior criteria overlay each other, this segment is worth so much more to you. Look at conversion rates by geo and time of day, do an analysis of your current customers, gender and age, use your CRM system. He shows some MSN adCenter screen shots. Use your keyword data to buy other type of media, which sites rank well organically for your keywords? He then puts up his lunatic slide...

Jennifer Slegg is now up. Behavioral Ads are ads targeted based on specific user's previous surfing behavior. Different users see different ads. She then explains the difference between demographics and behavioral. She explains how behavioral works, how it looks at person A's past search and browsing experience - to show ads related to that data. Users are tagged normally via cookies and also 1x1 transparent gifs. Publishers can earn money by dropping cookies on your sites within networks such as Tocoda, Kanoodle and Advertising.com. There are privacy issues with his, there is a misconception of "big brother," no personally identifiable information used, only the fact that you viewed specific sites or pages are used to determine targeting. Behavioral versus Spyware. Why is behavioral targeting not spyware? Spyware installs software onto the computer, behavioral simply drops a cookie or an image, spyware often hijacks searches and web sites, behavioral overwrites ads on web sites, spyware doesn't overwrite ads, ads are served by the site itself or by a 3rd party chosen by the owner. Problems that can affect targeting with behavioral include; multiple users on the same computer, spyware and virus programs that flag and delete cookies as "dangerous" or "suspicious" causes misconception about purpose and targeting is lost when deleted. Other issues with behavioral? only small % of ads are behavioral, not widespread availability of ad space across variety of sites, and launch of a large scale publisher program for this. Companies that offer it is for Tacoda, Kanoodle, Advertising.com, AlmondNet.

Jason Dailey of MSN is now up. He restated why targeting is important, most from Kevin's speech. He shows a screen capture of MSN adCenter. It shows an overview of all the campaigns currently running, and how they are performing. He then shows a keyword generation tool which contains demographic information, with trends over past 12 months. These tools are important for writing your search creatives. He goes through the process of setting up the campaign, select locations ads should run, the days it should run, the times it should run, and continues to go through the steps of setting up a campaign. He then shows a screen which allows the targeting, you can add incremental bids for certain demographic and/or geographic information. He then shows off the reports within MSN adCenter.

Word from Cline at WebmasterWorld that if you are using both Find and Edit Max CPCs Tool and Position Preference is enabled, the Edit Max CPCs Tool will not update your bids. He noticed this when the tool was "failing to put into effect the bid changes." So he asked his AdWords representative, who responded that this was "indeed a technical problem" with the Google AdWords system.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

(conference coverage, missing the first session, have a meeting in 10 minutes, will catch the next sessions, but I am also skipping the last session, so I can get home at a reasonable hour tonight).

Yesterday, I reported at Search Engine Watch blog that Google added new street level details and driving directions to its European Google Maps. You can see it in action by zooming into London. You can get the idea of a before and after by zooming partially into to Moscow, notice the surrounding areas are missing the street level detail, but inner area has the detail.

Yesterday, Google also increased the resolution of some cities in the US.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday morning, a WebmasterWorld member reported on a Google bug, where Google would append '?sa=X' on some links. Appending that extra snippet lead to a page that was not existent on the server it referred the page to, hence taking the end user to a 404 page not found page.

You can see for yourself what Google adds to the URL by doing a search on gmail for example, and then mouse over the quick link named "New features!." That link looks like http://www.google.com/url?q=http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html&sa=X&oi=smap&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=2

It is a tracking feature for Google. Google has quickly fixed the issue by encoding the URLs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a basic, but interesting thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Does Title Tag Need To Come First? The question is more detail is, does the title tag within the HTML code of a page, need to come at the very top or can other code be above it, without it affecting search engine rankings?

There is a core rule in SEO that your keyword specific content for the page, should be as high up in the source code as possible. Meaning, your introduction content and your header tags, should be as high up within the source code as possible. There is also the belief that these keywords are important to have in the visible content as high as possible, not just for search engines but also for your readers.

But does that apply to the title tag and meta data for the pages? Good question.

Danny Sullivan and David Wallace both say it should not matter. But for standardization purposes and having clean code, it might be best to place the title tag at the top. But in terms of ranking, they both say, in the past it has not mattered and it probably doesn't matter today.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Reports come from Cre8asite Forums that Google Blog Search has added a "Search the Web" button next to "Search Blogs." Prior, there was only, "Search Blogs" but within the past week or so, Google reportedly added the "Search the Web" option to Blog Search.

This is not major news, a slight change - possibly something Google will stick with or may not.

Forum discussion about the addition at Cre8asite Forums.

Every now and then, when you do a search on google at Google.com, you notice sponsored ads on the right side of the page. Soon after, those ads seem to always disappear. Google doesn't like it when other companies bid on the name Google, in their search campaigns. It is a branding and trademark issue, that all brands have concerns about. But like anything with Google, people get through the system and get an ad up under the keyword "google."

Last week, I was notified of a weird looking ad, that lead to some sort of Arabic model site. The add came up in the sponsored results at Google.com for a search on google. It looked like;

and it linked to this landing page, which I can not understand, but looks to me like a model site. The ad is no longer present, but as you can imagine, the ad stood out on the page, due to its unique looking title.

Which brings me to the next case, of advertisers using weird unicode characters to make their ads stand out from the competitors. One such case, was posted in Search Engine Watch Forums for a search on sitemaps at Google.com. The search brought up an ad that looked like;

Again, this ad is no longer present, but you see how folks are targeting Google or Google products and making the title of the ad, look unique and flavored. Happens all the time.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The last session of the day, moderated by Danny Sullivan.

Kevin Lee from Did-It.com is up first. When we think about buying search, in comparison to other media is more complicated. Most online and offline media buying is predictable:
- IOs that have a fixed price
- IOs that generally are delivered
- Demographics based on averages but assigned to the publisher or network
- Cost per publisher ad unit is high
- One keyword has over 7,000 bid permutations in MSN
- Thousands of permutations in Google
- Many in Yahoo as well
- Click quality and profile changes with position, source engine, time of day and week, and competitive landscape.

Action marketing places sort of change things
- Limited high value inventory (in demand)
- Lack of predictability as to inventory availability
- Pricing escalates over time (marketers recognize value and get desperate)
- Best inventory zero-sum-game scenario
- Unlike other media, search has media urgency

When Do Auction Market Places Work? When...
- Media placements can be well defined
- Marketers/advertisers know and understand what they are bidding on
- All media in the network is of high quality or can be auto-discounted (like Google's smart pricing concept)
- There is sufficient scale in the network
(Barry Adds: Danny touched on this this morning, with his Time Warner Cable trying to auction off TV spots, read that keynote to understand his points on this).

When they don't work?
- When a publisher's inventory has special attributes that can not be defined a network style auction marketplace may leave value on the table
-- Media placements could be auctioned off individually (eBay, who is very developer API friendly)
-- API driven auctions still feasible
- Internal sales channel resistance also can derail an auction marketplace

Future Media May Be Auctioned
- Google Yahoo and MSN proved that...
-- Valuable, scarce media can be auctioned with high yield
-- Auctions make publishers lots of money and a high effective CPM, even if the advertisers is billed a CPC
-- Banners, Text, Radio and Print...
-- Next TiVo, IP TV, Video Ads
- Are traditional media agencies ready to become experts in auction media?

PPC Auctions, Two Types at the Top:
- Brilliant Marketers
- Total Lunatics
- Success Requires figuring out how to either;
-- be a brilliant marketer / afford top position
-- Deal effectively with the total lunatics

- Search is both media and a by-product, people don't search because it was spontaneous. Something stimulated that search... You need to know what else is going on, what is going on, may drive search behavior.
- Marketers are beginning to reach their price limits in search.
- Agencies must figure out how to buy the best clicks first
- That is why they need better technology
-- Segmentation marketing, new metrics...

Search is now more numbers driven, much more than compared to other media. This puts SEMs in a good position as the landscape changes.

Tim Daly from SendTec is next up. He tells a story about his 3 year old daughter, who "knows all about Googling." That tells us what the next generation will be and what agencies need to look at in the future. How has the world changed? From slinky to sony robots (pleo - so cool). We played cops and robbers and kids play play station. TVs were made out of wood, today we have TiVo. Social networking was the boy scouts, and now there are Web sites. Dating was by friends hooking up others on blind dates and now there are dating Web sites. Research was in a library and now it's on Google. To be a player in search, you have 3 choices; you can buy a search company, build your own search division or finally partner with a search company.

1) Buy a search company:
- Pros are gets you into search fast and new rev stream
- Cons are there are not too many good ones left, choose the wrong one you are in trouble, you still will need highly trained and expensive people to integrate a search company within your agency.

2) Build a search division
- Pros are you can own it, design it, profits are yours, a new revenue stream, and client loyalty
- Cons is very expensive, you will need technology, infrastructure and processes, and you need new people with new expertise.

3) Partner with a search company
- Pros, you're in the search biz overnight, immediate new source of rev, protects and solidified client relations
- Cons, pick the wrong one and you're in trouble, less control and the partner can potentially cut you out.

His company had a similar decision to make. They partnered, and it bombed. They lost one of their clients, because of the 3rd party firm. He was hired to figure out why it failed. They choose the wrong agency because it wasn't the right fit for the client, and there was too much stress on technology. So they went and built their own division, which cost $500k and built the technology, and an internal commitment by senior management to make it a go. And it translated into a great success.

It's all about people, with technology as an aid. Technology not as the decision maker, but as an aid to people.

If you partner, base it on; trust, knowledge, search experience, accountability, reliability, recognize what is at stake, reporting access in real-time, details, technology, and agency experience.

If you can buy a search vendor, or build your own division that operates on a very high plane and produces the result you want, all the more power to you. It is a huge under taking and it creates a lot of stress, he showed a picture of him before he did it himself with hair and how he is bald.

Dave Carberry from Advertising.com is last up.

Questions:
How many clients you have in house now?
Would your search spend warrant hiring employees to fulfill that need?
Can your firm handle maintaining an ROI focus rather than creative only?
Would you prefer to hire an SEM firm and split the client fee?
SEO is technical and time consuming - should you bill by the hour?
How often would you change bids?
Would you work 24 x 7?
What happens if you lose your SEM?

He put up a slide of which companies are hiring SEMs.

Tools of the Search Trade:
- SEM Specialist and/or SEM Specialist
- Static bidding vs. portfolio bidding
- Onsite analyst to determine client CVR and ROI
- Qualified AdWords Consultant
- Banner Ad Placement
- Landing Page Creation
- comScore Networks, Nielsen NetRatings
- Ad Serving
- AdRelevance

Thoughts for the Road
- Billing the client, how are you going to do it?
- Structuring the Fees (the engines don't bill in gross numbers)
- Trademark issues
- Indirect Competition (affiliate programs)

This can be very lucrative.

Chris Sherman is the moderator of this session. He introduces this as a unique panel, compared to the others. Recently, he said, we have real metrics on search behavior. That is the whole focus of this panel.

Gord Hotchkiss is up first. He is going to talk about his two stage eye tracking study. The first study he showed the "Golden Triangle" in Google. So a search on the blog for "Golden Triangle" for our past coverage of this. Phase two involved, 54 participants, recruited MSN and Yahoo users, applied 5 scenarios (free to completely scripted), interactions on MSN, Yahoo & Google, the study will be out later in May. He showed the eye tracking heat maps of all three engines. People had to go deeper on the page, to look for better results. The ideal User's Search Engine; if it was up to the user, the 1st top most result would be the only result I want and that is it. When you compare Google to MSN, it seems Google is more ideal. They had the same control users for the second study, so they redid the Google test with the same users to be sure. The 2nd study was remarkably consistent with the first study. So they sliced it differently, male versus female, by engine. It is not the searcher that is the variable, but it is the searcher... Are Google more results more relevant then? He said they did an internal study with his employees, that showed MSN was more relevant. He brought up my study, "RustySearch" where Yahoo was most relevant, but now Google is more relevant. The bolding in the title, bolding the keywords in the title and description, makes the listings more relevant. MSN didn't bold the keywords at the time of the study, hence the deeper and longer eye scans at MSN. That may affect this eye tracking study when comparing Google to Yahoo to MSN. He then discusses "Semantic Mapping" where if you do a search for "Digital Camera" and you see brands or attributes of digital cameras, it will resonate with the searcher as either relevant or not. 6.5 seconds was the time it took to click, and 4.5 seconds of scanning the page, to read 6 to 7 search results. Then he discusses "thin slicing" when you view the bolded terms on the search results page. Findings; much more scanning on MSN and Yahoo than Google, Even MSN and Yahoo users seem to find what they're looking for faster on Google, Google appears to be perceived as the more relevant and other....

Lance Jones is next up from Keynote Systems. He will be talking about Google's brand. They did a recent study, to study the brand of the top search sites. First time they are talking about this publicly. Google is now in the Webster dictionary, now that is something, when your company name turns into a verb. He shows a Reuters story of Google's increase market share, from March 28th. Top three brands, Google, Yahoo then Ask.com. Usage, Google, Yahoo and than Ask.com. Satisfaction; Google Yahoo and than Ask.com. So is Google that much better, really? Brand study goals. (1) How important is the brand? (2) Which engine produces best results (3) Which engines produce best paid results (4) Who has the best presentation and layout? He will answer the first Q. How do they take the brand out of the question? He explained the Pepsi versus Coke challenge, blind taste test. They asked people to interact with one search engine. They used an unbranded search interface, and a branded search interface. Pages are live and screen-scrape Google results. Page design is held constant. The Google results were the same on both sites, only difference, was if the name Google was on the page (not even the logo). No paid results on the page. Feedback based on 1,600 queries. 12 distinct satisfaction metrics. Keynote calculates scores from 0 to 1,000 scale. For the unbranded condition, Google achieved 737 score. Some of the panel comments; "why would anyone ever leave Google for this? and many of these type of comments. The branded versions scored an 800, the unbranded 737 - there is a brand factor. Part 2, Google Web and sponsored results., and the same layout, same type of test, just added sponsored results. Unbranded scored 763 and 809 for branded version. Part 3 was Google Full Featured design. They stripped out all references to Google logos and images, but left text and bolding and you see A 753 score for unbranded and 806 for branded version. Google brand acts like a magnifying glass. Google's brand opens doors (google desktop, gmail, finance, analytics, earth, pack, base, etc.). Google's brand keeps the competition thinking.

Michael Ferguson from Ask.com is next up to talk about some of the innovation they went through. He is a senior user experience analysis from Ask.com. He explained that people love Jeeves but they used it for a very fixed reason, very infrequently. So they decided to take the risk to change that perception. Gives the stats run down on Ask.com and shows the sponsored listing program.

Changing Behavior on Ask.com then Trends in Search Use and show the opportunities for search marketing. He shows % of queries by category; 20.8% general reference and education, 15.2% other, 12.1% science and technology, 9.3% entertainment, 8.6% local and so on. Re-branding to change Behavior; Mental model - more occasional usage than competitors, iconic butler locked up with mental model, low awareness of huge suite of search tools on site, it was a risk.

Ethnography; soccer dad, office concierge, urban hipster, academic writer, creative professional, hydro-geologist and recruiter. He shows the topics of those types people listed before, searched on (from widow spiders, foot in mouth, and so on). Users spend much more time than they expected in their search time investment.

Focus on Ask: How can change behavior? So they pulled the butler off, replaced with a bar on the right, says "search tools". What this did, they looked and saw this, it was about the same height as the butler, so they saw it, when the butler was missing. He showed a sample search on "toronto" which has a the "search tools" at the top with a wikipedia listing and image search result. They also have "narrow your search" and "expand your search" (zoom feature, they show up 60% of the time and then clicked on 20% of the time) in place of where most engines have sponsored results. He also shows the binoculars feature. Results; usage of several tools up 10 times, binocular use up 5x, maps up 7x, and related search up 15%. Frequency, retention is changing and query mix and characteristics changing. Google's Test: They are testing expanded results (the blue arrows on the left side). He shows how Google tends to try things that Ask has been doing for a while, innovate here and there.

Opportunities for Marketing:
- Search Tools: More Qualified Clicks
-- Following the stream through these may change strategy and pricing
-- Information you offer to SE will become more rich
- Expanding Vertical Use
-- Images, maps, local, etc...
- Contexts
-- Mobile, position in the buying cycle
-- Pricing based on time of day, season, buying cycle stage, data from personal and social search will play in.
- He then quotes Danny's keynote, "remember, complication is nice job security!"

This is a classic session, with a classic presenter by the name of Shari Thurow from GrantasticDesigns.com. Shari has been doing this session, since the first SES - I believe. Anne Kennedy is the moderator for this session. It has been years since I have seen this presentation, so I figured I sit in to cover it again.

Search engine friendly design is not a site designed specifically for a search engine. She shows a text only page, with crazy h1 tags, and so on - she describes it as a doorway page.
Search engine friendly design is a user friendly Web site that can be easily found on both the crawl based and human based search engine (web directory).

Importance of the site design:
- End users/site visitors/target audience should be primary
- Human based search engines
- and then finally crawler based search engines

How you arrange words, how you place graphic images and multimedia files, will communicate to the search engines, what is important on those pages.

5 Basic Rules of Web Design
- Easy to read
- Easy to navigate ("sense of place")
- Easy to find (externally and internally)
- Consistent in layout and design
- Quick to download
--- Easy to Use ---

Easy To Find:
- On search engines, web directories, and related sites (industry sites like findlaw.com, thomas, etc.)
- Go directly to the relevant page (people should be sent directly to the relevant page)
- Within 7-8 clicks, preferably less, as long as...
- Most important information "above the fold" (she shows an example of Lake County Crisis Center FAQs page)
- Contact information should be easily visible and find (footer, header and never put contact info after your copyright, about us page, locations page)

Search Engines:
- Index Text
- Follow Links
- Measure Popularity

The first two, index text and follow links, are what all search engines do and will always do.

TEXT COMPONENT:

- Are you using words on your pages that match what your target audience types into the search engines?
- Do you have a site navigation and URL structure that the search engines spiders can easily follow?
- Bring in an SEO early on the site design phase... This happens all the time...

Success SEO depends on those three components... and all three are all important. She explains on the page criteria and off the page criteria. She calls those that claim they can control "off the page" criteria, "spammers."

What kind of text?
- The words your target audience is typing into search queries are called keywords or query words.
- When visitors view a Web page, does the content appear to be focused? Title tag, headings, breadcrumbs, cross links, intros and conclusions, product/service descriptions, and graphic images...
- Visible body text should not have perform any type of action to view the most important text of an individual web page in a browser.
- She shows how to select all and copy and paste it into notepad to show body text.

Primary Text:
- Title tags
- Visible body copy
- Text at top of the page
- Text in and around hypertext links

Secondary Text:
- Meta tag content
- Alternative text (alt tags)
- Domain and file names

Optimization Tip:
How you title and headline your Web pages play a roll in your rankings.

LINK COMPONENT:
Site and page architecture

Site Navigation Scheme (from best to worst)
-- Text links
-- Navigation buttons
-- Image maps
-- Menus (from and dhtml)
-- Flash
-- Consideration: dynamically generated URLs

-- You can use two alternative navigation methods on your site. I.e. flash and text links, etc.
-- She now shows types of text links, including navigation, breadcrumbs, contextual links, embedded text links (within the content and she shows examples of going overboard), optimize your sitemap page well.

- Informational Pages
-- Contain info your target audience is interested in
-- Do not contain a lot of sales hype but rather factual info
-- Are spider friendly Web pages
-- Often have a simpler layout
-- Visually match the rest of your Web sites
-- She shows the difference between an informational page and a doorway page

Ok, she says something I do not like. If your web developer or seo says they will host everything for you and you don't have to worry about it, they are generally a spammer. I know what she meant, but this is a beginners session and I am not sure how many others understand it. BTW, she is a very detailed and good presenter.

Ok, back.

She shows more examples of well optimized pages. Info pages, glossary pages, tips and how to pages, locations page, category/product pages,

Cross Linking

- In addition to a spider friendly nav scheme and a site map, all sites should have related, relevant cross links.
- Hierarchical (vertical)
-- Breadcrumbs
-- Cats - > Sub cats
-- etc..

Type of Web page
Page layout and structure
URL Structure

POPULARITY COMPONENT:
- Number of links
- Quality of links
- Number of times people click on links to your site
- How long end users visit your site
- How often people return to your site

Do people continue to navigate your site, link to your site? bookmark your site, return to your site.

Factors the Affect Popularity:
- Substantial and unique content
- How other sites are linked to your site (all about anchor text)
- Site usability - what are the 2 of the biggest complaints about site design?

Other Design Considerations:
- What is a splash page?
- Why don't search engines like splash pages?
- It is either a huge graphic saying click here or flash site with a skip intro link
- If you do a splash page, put text below the fold, with text nav also

Home Page Design:
- SEF characteristics to include in your home page:
-- keyword rich text
-- At least one spider friendly nav scheme
-- Link to the most important sections on your site
-- Visible link to a site map
-- She shows examples

That is all... Great presentation...

Moderator:
Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media Inc. gives us some background on the event. It is the 3rd SES in Toronto. The first two times they did this session, they had formal presentations. This time it will be more interactive. It will be a Q&A, where Andrew has Qs for the panel.

Panel Includes:
Gino Coutu, President and CEO, NetWorldMedia
Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image
Jonathan Lister, Vice President, Audience, AOL Canada, Inc.
Nancy Peterson, President, HomeStars.ca
Richard Zwicky, CEO and Founder, Metamend
Eric Morris From Google

Q: Sophistication of searchers and SEMs?
Jonathan said SEMs are getting more sophisticated. From offline marketing, and its impact on online and search efforts.
Mitch said the sophistication falls under the "long tail." The "niche" keywords, three to five keyword phrase searches.
Gino said SEMs are lagging behind in using tools, such as metric tools and so on. Very few are tracking here. And searchers are also lagging behind, using 1 to 2 words for searches mostly.
Eric said Canadians are not a lot more sophisticated than they were two years ago. On the SEM side, marketers have become more sophisticated.
Jonathan said he is not sure on searcher sophistication, but he is sure the product is not where it needs to be today. You are typically refining your own searches.
Andrew said he agrees, searchers don't need to reach a level of searching that Gary Price or Chris Sherman is at. Lazy search will be here with us for a while. So the products are what we need to see improved.
Nancy added, ummm :) ill leave it out

No real data here....

Q: It has been a chicken and egg Q... Has the made in Canada shopping site changed user experience? Or a US based site that ships within Canada?
Gino said the currency is very important and we have seen major conversion differences, in both French and English.
Mitch said from Amazon.ca is so different from Amazon.com, and the .ca is like 3 versions ahead. The flip side of it, is that, Canadian based companies are building fantastic sites that can be used globally.
Eric said it almost doesn't matter. The point is to sell things. Just because people aren't buying them online at the moment, they may buy in a store later. It is more difficult to measure, but a good marketing opportunity.
Mitch says that site search has got much better these days.
Jonathan said Canadian portals haven't done a great job of getting Canadian searchers in front of Canadian merchants.
Richard said TigerDirect does a great job, but sectors like Travel do worse. The usage rate in some sectors has not risen with the quality.

Q: Size of the Canadian market...?
Andrew said it is an opportunity, a first to market issue.
Nancy said she also looks at it as an opportunity, and with her site, she helps the market build some sort of Web presence.
Eric said, if the Q is about retailers and not having enough is one Q. On the SEM side, it is an opportunity, the ppc market is an auction. The CPC is lower than in the US. Also, more people in Canada search, by percentage, is higher than in the US.
Mitch said, as a marketer we always want bigger, better, faster... So we keep pushing our clients, our markets forward. Right now, there are no standards or rules.
Jonathan, we may be at the low hanging fruit phase. But early results have been fantastic.
Gino echoing others....
Mitch ads there are also portals and other sites where you can create traffic for your site.
Nancy adds that testing is the best part, since you can measure it.

Q: How has the art of search, integrated with the science of search?
Mitch said the science comes out of the creativity (art). That is where the "sweet" opportunity is. Part of that is the ability to play with it (low cost ads).
Jonathan added, you need to know your target customer - their behavior, how they search, etc.

Q: Search has exploded for a lot of individual marketers, looking for opportunities. In Canada, we have the same process going on. Are there certain verticals that are the big money areas? Are there big dollar verticals in the US but not exploited in Canada?
Andrew said anything in Financial, Travel, Jobs.
Jonathan said there is still a lot of content that needs more traction. Entertainment is one area. The content creates the new avenues to market against (um, yeaaaa - so).
Mitch asked the panel, do you see a vertical that is specific to Canada?
Richard said 22% of Canadians research travel online but very few book online, but in the US it's totally different, more people book online.
Andrew added, customer acquisition online, there is a bigger lag in the acquisition from time of inspection.
Eric added, there are two types of companies - niche companies and the big ones. The niche companies are always on search, year round. The big companies, they are all lagging behind their US counterparts, in every industry. 18 - 24 months behind US SEMs. US marketers are far more likely to track their results. In Canada, many are not using analytics to track. US companies do a better job of typing search with other marketing initiatives. In Canada, not yet.
Mitch adds the SEMs should educate the rest of the marketers.
Gino adds there are a few leaders that show a presence all year round in Canada. ING, TD Bank, FutureShops, etc. all deploy search year round (in response to Eric).
Nancy said the challenge is not in measurement, but rather - there is a million different sites. The biggest question-mark is how to drive them to a site. The creativity...

Q: Regional search behavior differences...
Richard has some slides...
- Search Traffic Comes From
-- 34.60% from ON
-- 25.93% from BC
-- 15.14% from AB
-- 11.45% from QC
-- 3.30% from MB
- Toronto v.s Vancouver
-- The engines that send the traffic to the Web sites vary greatly. 48% came from Google CA targeting Toronto, but 69% targeting Vancouver. 22% MSN CA for Toronto, 4.8% MSN CA targeting Vancouver.
- He then extracted search phrases that brought in traffic to a particular site. He shows how they search differently between Toronto and Vancouver.
- In Canada they search for "homes" in the US you search for "houses"

Q: Canada is a small market, so Quebec, is a small market within the small market. How can we tap into the French speaking Canadian market.
Gino said the assumption the traffic will come from is Google, Yahoo and MSN. But the local engines drive more searches that are specific to more companies and products. Gino sees the searches that are different between a Google search and a local search. The market is split between them and Google, they have 45% of the market share and Google having 50% of the share. They see the traffic in Quebec being different from the rest of Canada. Do not assume Google is the end all, look at the other engines as well, to put your budget towards.
Mitch adds that it may not be significant, in terms of the numbers - but there is a certain level of maturity in terms of how people search. The level of usage is pretty high, and search plays a huge component of that.

Q: Local search is one of the most exciting trends going on these days. He asks the the audience a few Qs.
Richard said they are seeing a lot of local advertisers coming in, in this market. Social networking sites, you can see 14% of Google Local referrers and 7% for Yahoo Local.
Eric said its important to use local keywords and local tools.
Andrew added said geo targeting is huge these days.
Eric said if you are not a local business, you can still use local ads in a smart way.

Some audience member said that Yellow Page is huge in Canada. SuperPages in the US has 10% of the local search market share, he said. But in Canada, it is 35% of the market share and Google has 15% share. In Quebec, he said SuperPages has 50% share. Interesting... I don't have this data, so I currently can not verify it.

He starts off, with I know Canada...
- Molson beer
- So clean at this conference
- Aboot

Ok...

Danny Is Ten Years Old
- Starting writing on search engines in 1996
- Maybe this search stuff has some legs, Danny says, when he first began his writing
- Then again, he was amused reading a Business Week article that said search is slightly below classified ads and above telephone poles...

Danny then shows some slides on stats, all these stats have been posted at the SEW blog. He doesn't need stats to show you that search is doing well.

What does the stats all mean?
- People are spending on search, it is a fundamental marketing medium.
- People are spending a lot more on search
-- Some due to contextual pollution of figures
-- Some due to click prices rising due to better conversion tracking, more competition, brand money flowing in.
-- Some due to increasing search volume
--- Up 55% from Dec 04 to Dec 05.

Get on The Googletrain!
- Time Warner cable said we can auction ads on TV, like Google...
- He cites the Reuters article (search on SEW blog for Time Warner Cable, it is a recent article there)

AdWords Vs. AuctionWords
- It's search marketing, not auction marketing, that's a success
-- IE, the type of marketing - not the pricing model
-- Besides, many would prefer "Buy It Now" pricing
- Who else doesn't get it?
-- Carter from Vanity Fair (search on it at SEW Blog)

Saving Pvt. Search Marketing
- Remembering! They don't need to remember you want them to buy something they probably don't need at that moment

What is Search Marketing?
- Putting messages in front of people who overtly and explicitly express a desire - usually via keywords - for a particular product, search or information
- Search engine optimization is the act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings, usually crawler-based ones
- Search Advertising is the act of doing this through paid methods
- Search engine marketing - search marketing is combination of them both

Reverse Broadcasting
- Search is a reverse broadcast medium
- Broadcast ads (tv, radio, print, contextual) is all about trying to broad cast and build desire among millions of people, most of whom aren't interested
- Reverse broadcasting is about listening to the millions broadcasting their immediate desires on search engines

What Search Marketers Do
- Identify key desire broadcasting stations
- Understand how to feed and optimize messages shown on these stations
- Scout the location, write the dialog & deliver a customized commercial
- A unique job; be proud

What Search Is Not
- Having an auction doesn't equal having search's reverse broadcast impact
- Nor does ppc define it
- Nor is contextual

He shows the difference between search ads on a search engine and contextual ads on the NY Times.

Contextual Pollution
- Google & Yahoo just reported earnings but didn't break out contextual/display from search
- Lumping the two together pollutes the data
- Especially worrisome as vertical search grows... they won't break it out then?

Generations of Search
- Vertical search part of 3rd gen jump
- 1st Generation: Words on page; humans
- 2nd Generation: Link Analysis
- 3rd Generation: Vertical & Personalized
-- Links not abandoned; trusted ones used but also supplemented with other data

What is & Why Vertical Search
- Info, News, Health, Shopping, Music, Video, Cars.....
- Narrow focus/index/database means less off-topic junk
- You can sort in different ways, use different display metaphors

Personal/Social Search
- Reshaping results based on
-- What you personally do or visit
-- What others you know do or visit
-- What people in aggregate do or visit
- Definitely helps to solve the spam problem by greatly multiplying the "fronts" in the arms race
- He shows screen captures of Google Personalized search
- Explains Ego search, where your site is #1, because it is customized for you and your site is #1 in your eyes
- He then shows Yahoo personalized search (add notes to search results, My Web)

Success in Gen 3
- Watch your vertical; focus on key ones for your industry
- Have great content (improve time spent on pages)
- Especially great titles & descriptions (improve CTR)

Going Beyond Search
- Search players are looking beyond search
-- contextual moves
-- Google doing print, radio, video
- They want to drag you (and your money) along with them
-- Google's $1 billion demand it couldn't ....
- Do you go? Are you still a search marketer? if so?... Do you as a search marketing go into this stuff?

Metrics Marketing
- Are you a performance marketer or search marketer or both?
- Today, better terms may be metrics marketing
- All marketing mediums will continue to shift towards accountability through solid metrics

Search: Here To Stay
- Search is now a fundamental advertising medium, like TV, radio, print and outdoors
- Search marketing - demand filling, reverse broadcasting - will change, evolve, move to new devices, but it's not going away

Search Makes Prime Time
- The SEO on the Apprentice (Martha Stewart), where the SEO told Martha said "When I search for "recipes", I don't get Martha Stewart"
- Pontiac & Remax on Google (Search for us on Google & Google Maps integration)
- Maxim ad, Google KVM plugin for Google Earth (search maxim on SEW Blog)

Future: More Integration
- Search will be part of an overall ad/PR campaign, thought of from the first
- Campaigns may even more and more seek to drive searches, as a way to build brand and sales
- Search will pull money from other medium and force those to be more accountable

Future: More Complicated
- MSN is giving more demographics
- Non search products will continue to be tossed at advertisers
- Automation will remain important but doesn't eliminate humans
- Remember, complication is also nice, it is job security

Future: Other Things
- More vertical, more personal
- More balance on paid & organic
- More lawsuits (click fraud, trademark issues)

The Canadian SEM Community
- A lonely party; a great indicator - he explains how he went to an SES party and he didn't know anyone, but everyone else knows everyone else at the party. Canada has a healthy SEM community.
- You have lots of leaders;
-- Andrew Goodman, Mona Elesseily, Gord Hotchkiss, Barbara Coll, Jennifer Slegg, Todd "Oilman" Friesen, Jim Hedger, Ian McAnerin
- Canadians who are leaders, not just Canadian leaders (leaders of SEM)

A recent article by Mike Grehan named Does Textbook SEO Really Work Anymore? sprung some interesting discussion at Cre8asite Forums. The article explains that basic optimization simply won't do it anymore. You need to look at "end-user behavior" on your site to increase site traffic and usage. This requires more "creative thinking and promotional efforts" to increase your site's true popularity. It has been the popular topic in most forums recently, traffic versus links.

I have always been a believe that the core of SEO will always remain the same. You need certain structural components of your Web site to be a certain way, to ensure your pages are fully indexed by a search engine and to ensure the search engine properly understands the unique value of each individual page on your Web site. But to gain rankings these days, you do need to think as more of a marketer than as a SEO, in terms of generating site buzz. Now many SEOs are good at generating buzz for a site, either naturally or artificially - so an SEO's job is now inclusive of marketing...

Ammon Johns, in the thread, says "I fully agree with Mike's actual point - that SEO today is not so much a code thing as a marketing thing." I love how Bill Slawski puts it;

I'm not sure that text book SEO is dead. Maybe instead, it's just one chapter in the book.

The thread has some really outstanding comments, in response to Mike's request for feedback on his article.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums. Worth a read, in my opinion.

I wanted to point you guys to a new service named the Click Fraud Index. In an SEW blog entry Danny Sullivan reports on some recent figures that put click fraud at 13.7 percent, industry-wide. The major problem is that we do not know how "click fraud" is defined in this index and which advertising networks they use to come up with the data exactly. Danny summarizes;

I didn't mean to say the the Click Fraud Index was offering up an industry wide statistics. I meant only to highlight that the data is specific to your particular network only.

Which received more criticism;

hese figures have to be vetted - how are they calculating the percentage, i.e. what does that represent?

For example, if 30% of the universe of all PPC clicks are fraudulent, and the publishers "catch" and don't bill for half of that 30%, then we would see 15% of advertiser traffic that is being billed for as fraudulent. Is that the figure they're talking about?

Or, is the percentage of fraudulent clicks 15% of the entire universe of clicks? And if so, then what percentage of those clicks are being billed for, and what aren't?

Also, how are they defining "click fraud"

So much methodology to vet.

There is a Search Engine Watch thread named Thoughts On New Click Fraud Index & Network? In that thread most are skeptical about the service. SEW moderator, Marcia says;

Brand new, multiple sites, no privacy policy in place. Nice setup for a data mining operation, eh?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Some folks at DigitalPoint forums have been noticing an increased resolution of satellite imagery within Google Maps. For example, if you view Las Vegas you can zoom in to see some cars, it is pretty cool. There are more cities that this is available at. I am pretty sure, this is fairly new, and only available in some selected cities right now.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is a recent thread at DigitalPoint forums named Is Matt Cutts a part of the DP Coop? What is happening, is that some DigitalPoint Co-Op Advertisers are using some of their "link weight" to create text ads for Matt Cutts for the term, "search engine optimization." The links reportedly helped Matt Cutts blog earn first page rankings at Yahoo! and MSN Search.

I wonder if this is a good thing or bad thing for the network?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The new CEO of Ask.com was just announced, it is Jim Lanzone - the true face of Ask.com today. A great move by Ask.com, in response to Ask.com's current CEO Steve Berkowitz leaving Ask for MSN. The press release says;

Previously Mr. Lanzone was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Ask U.S., leading product management, marketing and engineering for the company under former IAC Search & Media CEO Steve Berkowitz. "Jim is one of the most respected leaders in the search industry, having been principally responsible every day for the turnaround of the Ask product and brand over the past several years," said Doug Lebda, IAC President and Chief Operating Officer. "With his vision for the future and successful track record for driving the Ask.com business, he has been and will be the ideal leader for the next stage of the company's growth." "We have a lot of momentum behind Ask.com," said Mr. Lanzone. "My goal is to keep pushing us forward down the path we're on. With the team we have in place and the backing of IAC/InterActiveCorp, I believe Ask can take a significant piece of the search pie in the years ahead."

I have had many conversations with Jim over the years - I am a huge fan of Jim and I think this is a great move for Ask.com.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Continued forum discussion at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  

DigitalPoint Forums reports on the What's New in April for Google AdSense. Google added two new ad formats, (1) Square (250 X 250) and (2) Large Rectangle (336 X 280) for ad format options. And made site-flavored search smarter by "learning technology, site-flavored search delivers search results that improve over time to become customized to the interests of your visitors."

Overall Google AdSense Publishers in the forums are happy with these additions.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is also more detailed discussion about the mysterious changes to the site-flavored search at WebmasterWorld.

There is a potentially fun DigitalPoint forum thread based on the recent 1st Quarter Announcement. The thread asks Where's Google’s Money Going? in 2006? Here is what the thread creator believes;

1. Making search searchier through steady improvements

2. Expand infrastructure and data centers; enhance with speed, depth, flexibility

3. Push more server-based applications to reduce reliance on traditional PCs

4. Expand advertising channels (that's where the money comes from) through video, audio, and print

5. Scare the bejeezus out of Microsoft (and eBay too)

Got to love the last one. :) Also, expect some more cool tools that have no direct relation to search. But do relate to expanding the advertising channels.

Share your thoughts in the thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Changing Domain Name Ownership Whois Information & Google Search Ranking Impact, and also was asked to post something on it at the SEW Blog. What happens when a company changes ownership and the domain name information must change or the company must buy a new domain. What happens to the site's rankings? That is the concern. Google did not want to comment so we are currently left with nothing.

A new thread at WebmasterWorld is named "Google Certified Domain Change" - just an idea. Tedster, WebmasterWorld Administrator, asked Matt Cutts at last weeks PubCon, about the idea.

Google create some kind of "certified domain change" service -- so that companies who really must rebrand, or who purchase a more desirable domain name for some other reason, have some recourse with Google other than getting buried in the SERPs and taking a financial hit.

This is not something that rarely happens. Companies rebrand often. I would love for this thread to grow and get feedback on it. I personally like this proposal.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Shocking news from the SEW Blog, Ask.com Chief Steve Berkowitz Jumps Ship To Microsoft's MSN. I personally didn't see it coming. The CEO of one of the fourth ranking search engine, Ask.com, has left to join the third ranking search engine, MSN Search. Wow! He will officially leave Ask.com May 8th. Who will replace him, still is yet to be decided. I will hold my comments on how this will affect Ask.com, until they name a successor.

Here are links to the major new sources on this:

• Search Engine Watch Blog
  
• Wall Street Journal
  
• New York Times
  
• Reuters
  
• Information Week
  
• News.com
  
• The Street.com

Forum Roundup:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  

Interesting thread on DigitalPoint where people are posting there SearchBot ROI's. This stems from my blog post on the subject:

Each time a bot spiders your page it costs you money. It may be a small amount but it does cost you money. I did some number crunching on one of my larger websites. Kind of a ROI on the bots if you will. Basically what kind of return hits am I getting for each time my page is spidered ?

People are reporting some pretty neat results.

Personally my results were as follows:

#1 GoogleBot .78 Search referals per spider.
#2 Yahoo Slurp! .14 Search referals per spider.
#3 MSN .01 Search referals per spider.
#4 Ask.com 0.00 Search referals per spider.

Will be interesting to see how many people take part in this thread over the next few days.

Yahoo! has issued an other index update this past friday. The updates are occurring more frequently these past several months, in order to make "improvements to the indexing system," according to Yahoo. What I have seen is an incredibly large drop in SEM community buzz on Yahoo! Search. So much so that the major forums with Yahoo! Search sections have been fairly inactive for days on days. This does not include the Yahoo! Search Marketing division, that runs the paid side of Yahoo! Search.

Forum discussion on the update at:

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

Matt Cutts and Google have always had a strong stance of any form of cloaking, for as long as I have been covering the search industry. While I was away, Matt Cutts posted a comment at his blog where he provided the "short answer from Google’s perspective."

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.

It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that's cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be "if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages."

So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

It all comes down to intent, as Cre8asite Forum Site Admin says in the forum thread named Final word on cloaking?

Search engine optimization and marketing forums see the same questions repeatedly asked. Ammon Johns created the perfect document at Cre8asiteforums for anyone wanting to understand how to make friends with the Google search engine. This popular piece suffered some damage during the move to a new server and new software. However, due to strong demand for its use, it has recently been repaired and it's back in action.

It's called Google FAQ - the Essential Google Forum Primer . Simply scroll down the list of questions and you'll not only find the answers, but quickly learn you're not the only person asking for help. Some areas covered are how Google ranks pages, how Google handles "dynamic sites", page rank goes up, page rank goes down, links and for fun, " Is PageRank really democratic or fair?" You don't have to be a registered member of Cre8asiteforums to view the document.

Jeremy made some big news with a post at his blog named Matt Cutts Confirms Media Bot Crawling For Big Daddy. In response to that, Matt Cutts commented at his own blog saying;

It's literally just a crawl cache, so if e.g. our news crawl fetched a page and then Googlebot wanted the same page, we'd retrieve the page from the crawl cache. But there's no boost at all in rankings if you're in AdSense or Google News. You don’t get any more pages crawled either.

Danny and Jennifer dug deeper into this. Danny explained;

In other words, there are two big issues with the AdSense crawler helping Googlebot:

(1) Since the AdSense crawler swoops in fast, it could be a way for people to effectively get fast inclusion of their pages. Just add AdSense, wait for the AdSense bot to fly in, and you're set.

(2) Is having the AdSense crawler likely to get you a RANKING boost, in addition to getting INDEXED faster. I've capitalized both words to stress them, as a reminder that being in the index isn't the same as ranking well for a query.

Matt's saying that no to both cases. There is no ranking boost. As for fast indexing, no to that as well. The AdSense bot is simply refreshing the cached copy of your page -- but the copy in the index, what people are searching on, won't be updated.

Danny then explains that this causes an other issue. The new issue is that Google may show a fresher copy of a page that is in the index, that it actually used to rank the page. For example, Googlebot crawls and page, put that page in the Google index. That content is what is shown in the Google Cache and what is used, in part, for ranking purposes. Now if they use Google AdSense's Mediabot for the Google cache, the cache may most likely be more up-to-date than GoogleBot. So your Google cache information is more likely more up to date then the index the searcher searched on.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google continues to test new interfaces at google.com. The new test is expandable results, that have arrows on the left, when clicked, open up the result to provide more data. I actually reported this a week or so ago at the SEW blog under the title Google Expand & Collapse Results With Embedded Images, Content & Search Site? Now the story is getting a lot more buzz within the search community. Here is what it looks like, presented by YellowPipe.com and Michael Nguyen.

You can see larger images at YellowPipe.com.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, where the members discuss this new UI. One comment that I would like to pull out of the thread is; "I think it means more traffic for google, less traffic for us, hence more rev for google and less rev for us."

JenSense reports that the Google AdSense team has added text link, in addition to its graphic ads, as an alternative option for sending AdSense/AdWords referrals to Google. It works the same way, you paste a snippet of JavaScript code on your page, and presto, you have the text link. It may look and work like the link directly below.

The forums are enjoying it, and discussing it. One of the members at WebmasterWorld noted the AdWords text link has a typo. Notice it?

I am surprised it is not fixed yet...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

I am sure you guys realized that we did not cover the WebmasterWorld PubCon that took place this week in Boston. I was not able to make this conference, but I expect to be at the next on in Vegas. There are tons of roundups on the event and I wanted to provide you a quick listing of them.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent post with links to all the other blogs covering here. Plus you should read the big to-do on Google's Matt Cutts Confirms AdSense Bot Helping Googlebot With Indexing.

The forums are discussing the conference at:

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

Recent buzz on the Web and in the forums have been about Google advertising Da Vinci Code. Basically, you can go to www.google.com/davincicode and play the game. After you go through the setup process, it will add "The Quest" to your personalized homepage box, at the top left. And then you can play the game.

Folks at WebmasterWorld wonder how much money it cost Sony to work this out with Google.

Folks at The Search Engine Roundtable Forums discuss how this is just annoying and irrelevant to gmail or search.

So I have taken the liberty of confusing you with the title, which should be "Is Keyword Phrase Word Order Important?" When conducting keyword research for search engine optimization or a sponsored listings campaign, people often use a variety of phrases. When dealing with geographical terms, for example, how do you know if you should put the location before the keyword phrase or after it? Is this important?

A thread recently started at Search Engine Watch Forums has a member asking why Google returns different number of searches estimations based on the word order, while Yahoo/Overture seems not to. Does it matter, he asks? SEW Moderator Orion (Dr. E. Garcia) has offered his opinion, which is a "no." As usual, Orion provides a thorough technical explanation as to his opinion, and he states:

most keyword discovery toys and keyword research services out there fail to provide to customers.

To identify the importance of word order I recommend an on-topic analysis for the document.

The original poster is wondering if he needs to place the words in different order in order to rank for searches conducted in those particular unique orders. Aaron Wall (Seobook) recommends that it isn't needed and:

you can mix anchor text to hit different variations and permutations.

Join the conversation and offer your opinions./experience at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Via High Ranking forum, the SMA-NA has been busy working on a new website for the last four months. According to the thread:

The site has been completely redesigned and allows search engine marketing professionals the opportunity to stay connected by providing industry news, conference information, articles and a searchable member’s directory. The new corporate logo reflects the commitment the SMA-NA has to the development of a professional member organization for people involved in search engine marketing.

Disclaimer: As a member and part of the executive board of SMA-NA, I had the job of helping get this developed.

If you have any comments about the new design, visit High Rankings for discussion.

According to a ClickZ study people who search for brand names are not necessarily ending up at the official brand name web site. Only 85% of those searches will. The other 15% visit other competitors or information sites containing information about a brand. There is an excellent thread on SEW Forums about the ClickZ topic. Danny Sullivan explain in the thread "For example, if I search for McDonald's, lots of people want the McDonald's site. But some people might be researching the company; some might be looking for an anti-McDonald's site and so on." He continues asking "Is 85 percent pretty good? Should a brand expect to get in the high 90 percent of all traffic?".

In my opinion, I don't think they should nor should expect to. If you are an increasingly savvy shopper you will quickly scan all the various brands that meet your match. People also don't like things to break or have holes in them and they always like to get exactly what they ordered online and nothing different. Additionally some corporate websites are pretty boring and rarely a help. Back to Danny's example, those websites do not help in my buying process. Do I really need to go to the McDonalds website to learn more about BigMac's when I can just go down the street and order one in 5 minutes? It would seem that searchers are being smarter. They are not the drones who randomly click like we might believe.

Continue discussion on SEW Forums - What Percentage Of Brand Name Traffic Should Brand Names Get?

Found a nice thread at Cre8asite Forums that is good for anyone to catch up on. It concerns the indexing limits Google has for certain websites and pages. When does Google decide to stop spidering all your pages? Why does it just grab the most important pages first?

Having had good experience with getting large numbers of pages spidered. For some large part in my opinion, discovery date and how effectively linked internally and externally pages are what help assign some importance to certain pages and which keep Googlebot coming back for more daily.

The original poster of the thread is trying to understand by Google only spider 20% of his 800 pages. The first clue from the thread is his comment relating to the following: "we only seem to have about 100 pages indexed." Okay that is a start.

Next clue: "We have added about 2000 pages recently and changed the menu". Hmmm... that would probably have something to do with it.

And finally: "the only theory i can think of is the amount of links on a page as the menu alone is about 100 links"

Well, being that Google has spidered only 100 pages, and there is only 100 links in the navigation menu. I would say that Google is not having trouble listing any of the pages, it just can't find them all! This comes down to an information architecture problem relating specifically to the menu organization and IMO some beliefs that might be limiting the webmaster from fully utilizing the navigation. The first mythbuster, is that you can have more than 100 links in a navigation menu and get by just fine. The prevailing thought for a long time was that Google would only spider the first 100 links, and any more was risk for penalty. Not true anymore, times have changed. However, there is still inherent problems with more than 100 links, such as page size which can cap the amount of spiderable links and so on.

In order to understand a bit more about how Google spiders pages and which ones they favor the most. Admin on Cre8asiteforums, bragadocchio, posted some excepts from the Google document called Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering.

In this paper we study in what order a crawler should visit the URLs it has seen, in order to obtain more "important" pages first. Obtaining important pages rapidly can be very useful when a crawler cannot visit the entire Web in a reasonable amount of time. We define several importance metrics, ordering schemes, and performance evaluation measures for this problem. We also experimentally evaluate the ordering schemes on the Stanford University Web. Our results show that a crawler with a good ordering scheme can obtain important pages significantly faster than one without.

Bragadocchio goes on to define what is said a little more, "Importance metrics, like those defined in the paper, can be combined, so on a site that has a number of pages with higher pageranks, or more inbound links, those might help combat the weakness of a page like that when it comes to a importance metric based upon location and distance from the root directory."

Excellent thread, for continued discussion about Google Indexing Limits visit Cre8asite Forums.

Someone sure seems to think so. It seems some of the forum members from SEW are trying to understand why SEO appears to be quite easy, but in reality can be more difficult than it lets on. It being one area where what is learned in a book is quite different than what is learned in the real world. The forum member is applying a "keep it simple stupid" argument to search engine optimization and its methods. But really, if it was all that simple would we all consider it a career?

According to the thread this is how easy SEO is: All I need to do is create a website and add lots and lots of keywords, submit to 100 search engines and directories, get loads and loads of links, use meta-tags, and THAT'S ALL!

Unfortunately I hate to break the bubble of the original poster, but SEO really isn't that easy. The best test to prove this, is to create a website like above and see how far you get. Ian McAnerin makes a good analogy between SEO and Chess, saying:

For one thing, if SEO was super easy, then everyone would be number one for their own keywords, and forums like this would not exist, nor would professional SEO's, or the fees they charge.

Chess is easy too. There are a limited number of rules and pieces. Yet, someone usually loses, and someone usually wins, and some people spend their whole lives studying it without becoming "masters". There are tournaments and clubs and so forth.

That's a lot of effort for something so "easy".

Continue discussion about how EASY SEO really is at SEW Forums - SEO? Easy Peasy? What's the fuss all about?

AdSense became a popular Internet Marketing platform through its two-pronged model of selling keyword based ads and paying outside websites (known as publishers) to host them. Since publishers have found out this is a proven way to generate income, many sites have been developed solely for the purpose of hosting AdSense or Yahoo Publisher network ads. Publishers have discovered that by paying to drive traffic to the site, often through AdWords and AdSense accounts of their own, they can turn a profit when visitors click on the hosted advertisements.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums clearly identifies and discusses a perceived growing problem of websites solely created for the purpose of hosting ads. The member (by proxy) gets straight to the point about such sites and the links to them:

If you click on them, you will find almost no content, and AdWords ads disguised as menus and content to fool non suspecting users into clicking them and thus making money. It is just spam and outright abuse.

.... they pay me say 65% of the click value.... so I take searchers for 10 cent words and send them to a page of results of $2 words in that space... any click is worth $1.30 to me so all I need is one click from every 13 clickers and I break even - two and I make $1.30 etc.

This conversation is going strong at Search Engine Watch Forums. Topical threads at Webmasterworld and DigitalPoint Forums. (and many more: search at any SEO forum)

Some future issues associated with search arbitrage were nicely predicted in 2003 by Kevin Lee.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) often involves a link building initiative. Depending on the popularity of a keyword phrase targeted, as well as the strength of competing highly-ranked sites, this can be a very tricky process - requiring links from a variety of domains. Over the past year or so, it has been widely reported that links from .edu and .gov top level domains (TLD’s- like the more common .com or .org) carry more weight than others.

A recent thread started at High Rankings Forum features a very good discussion about the value of inbound links from Educational and Government sites. The member asks simply if there is any proof that .edu and .gov domains in fact “count more” when a search engine evaluates inbound links. Jill Whalen immediately responded with a simple “no” answer. In this case, Jill seems to be fighting the tide, as many SEO’s believe the answer is “yes” or even “definitely.”

Another member, Edward Lewis, has offered some interesting comments on TLD’s. One of his strongest arguments begins:

I know for a fact that the .gov and .edu domains are natural authorities out of the gate. Why? Because they have very strict guidelines to first secure the domain, and then maintain it...

Yet this argument is rebutted by another member who asks if any of the search engines has come out and stated that these TLD’s are more highly regarded. Of course, we all know that this scenario is as unlikely as the SE's releasing any other information on its ranking algorithm. In my personal research, I have found high ranking sites that have a noticeable percentage of .edu and .gov’s. In fact, one large website that I recently analyzed had literally pages of .edu’s in its Yahoo Site Explorer backlink report.

See the rest of the discussion at High Rankings Forums. (I only covered the information on the first of three pages so far)

A related recent SER post: “Standford University Removed Paid Links and 'Hosted Pages'"

Search Engine Watch is the industry leading resource for search news and tips, has been forever. Danny Sullivan started the site and then brought on Chris Sherman to help out. Since then, Gary Price came on to help out but then took a job with Ask.com. I then came on board to help fill Gary's void. Jennifer Slegg came on to blog on contextual ads, soon after Brain Smith came on to blog on shopping and vertical search and now Bill Slawski came on to blog on patents & search research. See where I am getting out.

• Danny Sullivan
• Chris Sherman
• Barry Schwartz
• Jennifer Slegg
• Brain Smith
• Bill Slawski
• and Elisabeth Osmeloski

Everyone on the SEW staff page have last names that start with an "S" except for Elisabeth.

Now, think about it. Danny's last name starts with an "S" and so does Chris Sherman. Both Danny and Chris are the big decision makers at SEW. Maybe they only like people with last names that start with S? Maybe? You think it may have anything to do with the industry name? Search Engine Marketing? The "S" in search? How about the name of the company, "Search Engine Watch," an other "S."

Chris Boggs suggests that maybe Gary Price was forced out? Maybe? There is no conflict of interest with Price as a last name at Ask.com...

If you are upset about this, like many are, join the forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Disclaimer: (1) I wrote this yesterday, I will not be blogging today and tomorrow - please expect blog entries from the other authors over the next two days. (2) This is a joke post, and should be seen as pure sarcasm.

Danny Sullivan is doing more than celebrating his first ten years as the man with the glass to the wall reporter of all things Search Engines. He has wisely selected Bill Slawski as his new correspondent to the SEW Blog.

Bill's fame as the calm master of intelligent conversation at Cre8asiteForums is legendary. He also has the uncanny ability to understand patents. One can easily picture him sitting at breakfast munching on Cheerios and reading Google patents before he settles into his work for his new SEO company, SEO By The Sea.

"He'll be keeping readers here abreast of new patents and what insights they might give, as well as interesting search research. Occasionally, he'll also post news about search acquisitions, as well," writes Danny.

Discussion: Congrats Bragadocchio!, New gig!

The subject of reciprocal linking comes up fairly regularly in discussion about search engine optimization. "Reciprocal linking" in its "pure" form means that you exchange a link with another website, by hosting a link to that site in return for a link to your site. Chances are that the more search engine rankings you have, the more requests for link exchanges you will receive. Reciprocal linking is mostly related to SEO and improving your visitor experience by linking to and from relevant sites, but the larger category of Internet Marketing also can gain some momentum in the form of increased traffic.

A thread started by a member of the High Rankings Forum the other day asks “How do I know if a site is good to exchange links with.” Some good suggestions follow, especially those that have to do with relevancy. The thread deals with mostly basics, and can be found at High Rankings Forums.

As I mentioned, this topic does come up fairly often, but I thought this may be a good place to gather some particularly good resources (thanks to the trusty Category Archive found here at SER). Other posts that relate to this topic and link to still very valid discussions about reciprocal linking and their SEO and other benefits include:

Traffic Building - Link Building for 2006
How to Avoid Being Cheated on Reciprocal Link Exchanges

And for those that may want to request links of their own:

The Do's & Don'ts in Link Request Emails

Back last November Ingenio & Yahoo! to teamed up for Pay Per Call service. Yesterday, Search Engine Watch Forum moderator, Discovery, posted a review of his tests with Yahoo Pay Per Call as a consumer.

Discovery says that with Yahoo! you go to an ad, click on it and it tells you to dial this VOIP 800#. The line quality is poor, since it's over IP lines and the consumer still needs to pick up his phone and dial you. Discovery says, it is easier to just put your direct 800# in the Yahoo! ad and let the consumer call you that way.

He asks,

Do you feel that giving the user the ability to simply CLICK to call is going to inspire visitors to respond to these ads? Will they convert better? Will the ROI be greater? Will these calls result in tying up your sales team with unqualified calls? After all the visitor has only read 70 characters or less about what you are offering...

These are great questions and since Pay Per Call is so new, it is hard to say. These beta testing periods by all the Pay Per Call providers are going to reveal a lot. I am excited to get some of this data and learn the pros and cons of actual Pay Per Call campaigns, directly from the forums.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, I posted about a zdNet blog entry where the author feels Google is beginning to make a play at the travel search engine vertical. His reasoning, really quickly;

• A job posting for a "Google: Senior Account Executive, Travel Vertical."
• The keyword "Vertical" used in the job title
• Orbitz being open to buy and located in Chicago, the location of the job opening.

It would not surprise me if Google did go after this market. As I explained Google has added OneBox results with links to Expedia (the default), Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity. Try a search at Google with the syntax AIRPORT CODE to AIRPORT CODE like JFK to YYZ and you will see the OneBox results.

We have the forums discussing this as well, how Google will monetize it (AdWords) and how they may implement it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Danny Sullivan reported last week that the Traffic Power case against SEO Book filed last August has been dismissed. The appeal time for Traffic Power has passed, "the case was tossed out on February 13, so the 30 period for appeal has elapsed."

I suspect, Matt Cutts and Google's official confirmation of Traffic Power ban had something to do with it. But I do not have any confirmation from either side.

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Recently, there has been a lot of popular concern over search technologies and terrorism. Danny just blogged last week on Terrorists & Extremists Worry About Their Search Privacy and there is a Cre8asite Forum thread named Google Earth Suspected to Have Helped Terrorists from this weekend. Basically, people are now exploring that these technologies are out there and available.

With Google Earth, you can get satellite images of remote locations, even of your home. Well, Google Earth just made it popular to the end users, but there were many services out there, prior to Google Earth that enabled the same thing. And trust me, terrorists knew about them prior to Google Earth.

Times have changed, tools are more easily accessible, these tools are both useful and powerful. Do we worry? Do we stop using them? Do we fight them? I don't have the energy to go into a post on my thoughts on this. Here is one comment from the Cre8asite Forum thread;

Next thing you know the terrorists will have used email or cell phones...

Let's take it to the forums; forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Danny Sullivan, called by many - "The Father of Search Marketing" - has been writing about search and search marketing for ten years and one day now. Yesterday, Danny wrote a blog entry at SEW blog named My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines. In that entry he takes us through his historic journey as a writer/journalist in the exciting field of SEM. The thing is, it wasn't called SEM back then, it actually didn't even have a name. Danny helped give our industry a name - he helped sculpture the good party of the industry into what it is today. If you only read one blog entry this whole entire year (except this one), you have to read My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines by Danny Sullivan - it is a wow!

After reading it, I am sure you will want to ask Danny a question or two. If not, I am sure you will want to thank him. You can do that at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread, we started based on this blog entry.

Thank you Danny.

Last year I decided to drive from my office to SES Toronto 2005. So, I figured I do it again, since the 7 or so hour drive, wasn't so bad. It will be my last "road trip" before I get married, so I figured I go with one of my friends. I will be using my GPS device in my car to navigate my way to the hotel, but I figured I would test out the various search engines mapping technologies.

I find it interesting that Yahoo! and Ask.com are only about a minute off in total time to destination. But Google's directions estimate about two hours longer. Even Yahoo Maps beta is 30 minutes longer than Yahoo Maps non-beta.

• Yahoo estimates 468.4 miles with an approximate drive time of 7 hours and 12 minutes.
• Yahoo New Maps estimates 470.3 miles with an approximate drive time of 7 hours and 48 minutes.
• Google Maps estimates 468 miles with an approximate drive time of 9 hours and 7 minutes.
• Ask Maps estimates 494.8 miles with an approximate drive time of 7 hours 11 minutes.

The main difference is that Ask.com's directions pretty much keeps you on the NYS Thruway the whole time, whereas the others want you to take Route 17. Last time my GPS wanted me to get on Route 17, but I opted for NYS Thruway - maybe Ill take 17 this time.

SES Toronto Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Jennifer beat me to it by posting at the SEW blog a WebmasterWorld thread named Spying on your competition (requires paid subscription). Basically, when you set up your Google AdWords conversion tracking code, it asks you for an optional "cost of conversion" value. That value is stored in JavaScript, visible to anyone, as;

var google_conversion_value = 15.0;

The 15.0 represents a $15 cost of conversion, entered in by the advertiser.

The cost of conversion value can be attributed to how much a product costs, how much each lead or sale is worth for a company. You can learn a lot about a company with this metric. The question is, why isn't this metric encoded some how? An oversight?

Excellent find and excellent thread, forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (requires paid subscription).

Google is reportedly giving away Easter presents to some high spending AdWords customers and high performing AdSense publishers. Via DigitalPoint forums, a thread named Google cooler?, has documentation that people are receiving a 18x18x10 small fridge from Google. After digging up some information, I found Philipp linking to http://googlefridge.blogspot.com/ that shows a nice picture of the fridge. This person received the gift because they "hit their millionth PPC lead through AdWords." So what does it look like?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

We are all do some time off, heck, I took off two days last week and I am taking off two days this week. Recent forum chatter suggests that GoogleBot, Google's spider, has been slacking off a bit. A WebmasterWorld thread named Googlebot isn't crawling is now five pages long, with many Webmasters reporting that GoogleBot activity is relatively low compared to the norm.

What can this mean for a particular site and its ranking? Well, if GoogleBot is slow in general and not on your particular site exclusively, then I doubt you have anything to worry about. So keep an eye on your spider activity, less activity, can mean less fresh crawls and less fresh content in the search index, which means less search engine traffic.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a new WebmasterWorld thread named Ad title changed without my permission? Basically, Yahoo! Search Marketing representatives are taking the liberty to tweak the PPC ad titles for their clients, without client permission. The member reports;

My previous ads were doing well, so I did not touched them, just edited the URL but guess what? The OV editors changed my ad title to just the name of the product. Previously it was an attention grabbing title containing the name of the product. How lame!

This is really nothing new, We reported back in October of last year that Yahoo! Search Marketing Changing Ad Copy.

The ad was ultimately put back to its original content.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

With the recent marketing blitz performed by Ask.com, and the latest positive buzz on the search engine, with some positive data to back it up, Ask.com has been beginning to get some attention from SEOs.

A recent Search Engine Watch Forum thread has an SEO saying;

Seriously though, our clients are seeing the commercials and are starting to bug us about their rankings on Ask. Can we get a discussion going about how they rank sites?

Makes me so happy to see The Little Engine That Could really succeeding, really makes me happy.

Now it's time to get your SEO hats on for Ask.com optimization.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend this weeks WebmasterWorld PubCon that starts tomorrow in Boston. So there will be no live coverage of the conference here. But don't sweat it. PubCon Las Vegas was announced recently and I will be able to attend. Open registration begins June 2006 www.pubcon.com and the conference takes place November 14 – 17, Las Vegas Convention Center, USA. The forum thread for this conference is at WebmasterWorld.

Next week is SES Toronto and I will be driving the seven hour trip, like I did last year. SES Toronto this year is a two day event, taking place on April 25 and April 26th. There is more information about the event here. The forum thread is at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week at the SEW Blog, I reported that Google that on July 1st, Google will be adding a pricing model to the Google AdWords API program. This opens the Google AdWords API up officially towards commercial use. The news has traveled around the forums enough, while I was away. We now have a thread at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

The folks over at WebmasterWorld are not too happy with the return on investment Google is offering here. One Webmaster estimates "1,500,000 @ 25c/1000 = $375 would be the monthly cost for us if we were regularly using all of our quota." But it is important to keep in mind, that Google may not be charging a fee to everyone. In fact, I believe this fee will only be applied to bid management tools that want to use the tool outside of direct big management for themselves and within commercial reasons.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

In Referrer Spam - Why you shouldn't publish your Web logs - Best Practices Search Engine Forums, an old thread originally posted by Alan Perkins, was recently revived by IHY member Dave B, who posts an htaccess file that looks like it could make a big dent in referrer spam for web sites that implement it.

Referrer spam is the practice of sending fake visitors with fake referrers to web sites, to have your URL appear in their log files. This is done in the hope that search engines will find the links and boost the spamming site's rankings.

It's not just a search engine spam problem, though: referrer spam can also interfere with traffic analysis. I checked my logs against Dave's htaccess list, and it looks like about 95% of the fake traffic would be blocked. Nice.

Google recently had a bit of a public relations problem due to their decision to censor content in their Chinese version, discussed here. On Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt followed up on that topic, continuing in defense of the decision, and also announced a new name for Google China.

A Webmasterworld Forums member started a thread yesterday about the announcement, and a subsequent poster linked to a SiliconValley.com (San Jose Mercury News) article describing the announcement, which included:

Schmidt was speaking at a ceremony to announce Google's Chinese-language brand name -- ``Gu Ge,'' or ``Valley Song,'' which the company says draws on Chinese rural traditions to describe a fruitful and rewarding experience.

I now have a happy feeling and know that Google is back to its "Do No Evil" philosophy. Funny thing is, many people still aren't buying this, if you read the thread at WMW, which has veered slightly off topic and turned into a slight pro/anti-Google discussion. Add your thoughts/experiences at Webmasterworld Forums.

Although there are many different "recipes" for gaining search engine rankings, most experts in the search engine optimization (SEO) field will recommend that website content should be a priority. Without discounting the value of links and traffic, content is most likely the key element of a website's charisma. Good content will lead to links and traffic. So for those website owners that have to start from scratch and add large amounts of content, how much should they expect to pay for this service?

A member of High Rankings Forum asked yesterday

the estimated cost of producing the copy for a key aspect of the site

I encounter this question fairly often. When clients didn't have someone in house that could produce enough content for me to optimize, I have worked with a copywriter who interviews the client and creates the necessary number of pages matched up to the topics we would like to focus on. Generally this works out to a per-page basis and is fairly reasonable in comparison to "average" copywriting charges. Only one poster so far at High Rankings has given a range: about $90/page. Of course, there are copywriters out there that specialize in SE-friendly creative, and these would probably charge more. My thought is that if you are paying for optimization, you will probably do better by saving on the copywriting, since the SEO will be done by the organization responsible.

Hopefully some copywriters will see this and choose to add to the discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Came across a great thread on Search Engine Watch forums about the importance of current algorithms on MSN? What does the SEO need to know about MSN Search in order to ranking effectively? What are the algo experts saying about current patterns and observations in MSN?

Well some of the members have chimed in and posted about possible algorithms and changes that affect ranking in MSN. Obviously there a lot of factors that combine to come together to produce the results in MSN. Incoming backlinks are rising in importance, and what else? According to the one of the posters when "optimize[ing] for MSN pay attention to Key word phrases (specificly getting them in the right order), use good description and title tags, good h1 and h2 tags, keyword tags don't hurt so toss em in". Many of the other member concur that titles are very important for MSN and having a correctly optimized and worded title can be make a campaign a success.

For more discussion on MSN surf on over to SEW for the full thread.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) through the use of Pay Per Click advertisements within search results has been made famous by Google - although the process was invented and originally patented by Goto.com, which became Overture and was acquired by Yahoo Search Marketing. MSN recently introduced its own portal for paid search advertising, known as MSN adCenter. They are phasing out of their relationship with Yahoo Search Marketing, which has traditionally provided the sponsored listings within MSN Search results.

Since the launch of the product in the USA, various members of the SEM community have had a chance to participate in the pilot, including SEW Moderator Aussiewebmaster, a very talented in house search marketer based in New York. On the 11th, he posted some interesting changes coming to the system which have been predicated by user feedback. Having been involved in the pilot myself, I can vouch that MSN has been very proactive about communicating with its advertisers. However, there have been problems associated with this system, as could be expected for any advertising platform of this magnitude.

With MSN's recent increase in exposure discussed in March, advertisers will be anxious to see improvements in the system.

To learn more about the changes, see the thread at Search Engine Watch. This thread is in the SEW adCenter area. Other forums with areas dedicated to discussing MSN adCenter can be found at Webmasterworld, and Digital Point Forums. Various threads can also be found at High Rankings Forums and Cre8asite, among others.

Say goodbye to Outlook, welcome Google Calendar! Looks like Google wants to help keep us organized and in sync with our daily tasks and appointments. Google released Google Calendar today offering an impressive set of features to allow us to create schedules and share those with others. I am quite impressed myself with the online application and the ease of use. Chris Sherman wrote an excellent write up about Google Calendar for SearchDay.

According to the Google folks, Calendar can help you:

Simplify. Organize. (And relax.) Organizing your schedule shouldn't be a burden. That's why we've created Google Calendar – our free online shareable calendar service. With Google Calendar, it's easy to keep track of all your life's important events – birthdays, reunions, little league games, doctor's appointments – all in one place.

After testing out some of the features this morning, I am quite impressed myself with the online application and the ease of use. After trying multiple PDA's, calendar software, finally one seems to easy enough to use that I just might make the switch from my old fashion way of paper calendars to actually keeping stuff virtual.

Got Outlook? One of the neat features of Google Calendar allows you to upload your CSV files from another calendar into the application. Still a little rough around the edges on this part, but they do provide good support. Another nifty thing is you are allowed to create multiple calendars and share them with friends, family, or business associates. Also included is ample searching features to find those old or future appointments if need be.

Matt Cutts also has a nice witty review of the Google Calendar application. There is forum discussion on SEW and WMW.

If they can get it right then searching by voice would be quite a step for the search engine. According to a newly published patent which points to further evidence that Google is developing a voice-activated search engine. Patent number 7027987, of which Google is the assignee, concerns "a voice interface for search engines". The patent is dated and filed back in 2001, so they have been working on such techniques for some time. Will it come to reality though?

There is forum discussion on WMW and SEW. Some of the members at WMW, comment that while this patent is revealing it really doesn't mean much for the present. It implies that Google sees the technology as possible in the next 20 years. The rest of the members are actually pretty critical of the patent and Google vague description of the patent.

One member on WMW john_k, says

"If their patent is on better voice recognition, then they should say so. If the patent is on a better search algorithm, then say so. If it is on localizing the search based upon the physical location of the caller, then say so. If the patent is on the transport process, then say so. But the patent is not for any of these things. The process (It is a process that is being patented) covered by this patent application is widely employed and has in fact been in use for quite a while. "

If it does come into full use, the only obstacle I see, is the relaying of information back to the searcher. Can you imagine have some phone-bot tell you the top ten listings of a search result. What if they get it all wrong? You try to search for "local" pizza in your zip code, and all you get is commerical pizza jots and some directory listing which are of no-use over the phone (i.e. citysearch, switchboard, superpages) and a spam result. Yeah...I am don't see a huge future for this, but I guess we will have to see.

Talk about it at SEW and WMW.

Chris Sherman has the SearchDay and Gary Price has the librarian perspective on the launch of Windows Live Academic from yesterday.

Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas.

Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer.

Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution.

We have built several features designed to help you rapidly find the content you are searching for including abstract previews via our preview pane, sort and group by capability, and citation export. We invite you to try us out - and share your feedback with us.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, where members initially complain about how slow the search is.

This entry was written yesterday, but scheduled to be published today.

Chris Sherman reported Wednesday that Yahoo's Farechase Adds Features. New features include;

(1) Integration into the main Web search. For example, a search on flights to st. louis puts this Yahoo Shortcut at the top of the results.

(2) They added a social networking element, where you can save fare searches to Yahoo My Web. I conducted a search and saw a "save to my web" link at the top. Attached is an image of how it looks, cropped a bit, click on the image for a full view.

(3) They also integrated satellite imagery of Yahoo Maps beta into FareChash, but I am not sure how that works.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

This was written on 4/12 and schedule to be published today.

I see it every day. As a professional search engine marketer, I come across many sites that have employed search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. In many cases, at least some of the methods used are either outdated or very risky - using tactics clearly defined in Search Engine Webmaster Guidelines as being "against the rules." These include simple tricks such as hidden text to more crafty poor man's cloaking, and in some cases "IP Delivery".

When these sites don't rank, they become likely targets for SEO sales people, especially for small to mid-sized SEO's looking to increase their client lists. Cre8asite member "softplus" started an interesting thread last week titled: "How to approach a company about their SEO... when you can see that it's been done badly?" He asks how members would suggest contacting the owner of a website that has had questionable SEO modifications performed. He even adds

how do I approach them without telling them what they are doing wrong in the first place (eg doing the work before getting a contract)?

Some interesting responses so far ranging from Moderator "bwelford's"

I've never had any luck in telling companies even about the most damaging problems with their websites.

I personally don't search for sites using poor SEO and in turn contact them, but I have certainly offered a large amount of advice to people who have asked - never afraid to "tell 'em like it is." If you are a website owner I would highly recommend using Forums like Cre8asite, Search Engine Watch, and our own Search Engine Roundtable forums to pose questions, especially if you feel something may be wrong. Once a problem is identified, however, I would recommend trusting recommendations and referrals from reputable SEO's, and taking care of any problems before they cause major damage to your site's ability to rank.

Please add your thoughts or experiences at the Cre8asite Forums.

Another WebmasterWorld thread caught my attention and is named Subjects to Stay Away From. It asks member to list which niche topics does not typically work well in generating Google AdSense income. So here they are, from the thread.

• Files Upload Sites
• Many Forums
• Children Game Sites
• Original Poetry
• Cooking Web Sites
• Music Lyrics
• Comic Books
• Sites written in Non Supported AdSense Languages
• Sites with no content, just graphics
• "Good content that no one else is interested in.."

Here are some generic concepts of sites that wont pay well.

• Topics with no Advertisers
  
• Too Much Competition
  
• Topics You Can't Make/Buy Content For
  
• Topics that are Nevergreen (stuff that requires constant updating and research to be useful to visitors.)

Heavy Google AdSense topic day...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Tax time, how much have you been able to expense? asks for advice on how and what can be used as tax deductions towards the Google AdSense income earned over 2005. Here are some possible deductions listed in the thread and that came to my mind;

• Hosting Fees
• Advertising Fees (if any)
• Computer expenses
• Conferences
• Postage
• Telephone
• Really any expense that might be deductible for a business.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a new wonderful thread at WebmasterWorld named How to make Smartpricing work to your advantage. Member 21_blue shares his four step process to achieving top earnings with Google AdSense. He believes targeting an "EPC-based strategy" will help you achieve the best possible bottom-line results.

Here is a summary of the steps, but for the full details visit the thread;

(1) Collect relevant information including EPC data, AdWords PPCs, and identify which pages are using SmartPricing the most.
(2) Improve your EPC - lots of ways to do this.
(3) Watch and monitor your results over next several days
(4) Remove the ads from the low paying pages and direct them (some how) to the higher paying pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just a quick note that I will be offline Thursday and Friday. Expect some featured articles from Ben, Chris and the guest authors. They should be able to send you the best forum buzz, while I am away those days.

All the best!

Barry

Some folks have been noticing screen captures of the the advertised sites in Yahoo Sponsored Results, within the Yahoo! News network. AJ has taken a screen capture after he viewed this page, I personally see tax ads at the bottom, but since he is not US based, it is possible they are not showing tax season ads.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I am currently running a Private Beta from SurfWax to embed a new search technology that overlays the blog's current built in search. Basically, as you begin typing, it searches the most recent entries, to help you find articles as you type. It is a bit similar to Google Suggest, read Gary Price's SearchDay on it, you will notice the difference as you try it out. Here is a how to on it. You can test it out by typing in the search box on the left side of this page.

- Start typing to see blog sentence "snips". (sorted by date; most recent stories first) (a line separates sentences by story)

- Enter words in any order.

- Backspace to change.

- Put a space between words that go together
(e.g., white house)

- Use a + for non-contiguous words
(e.g., white house+president)

- Keep typing to narrow the list.

- Use up/down arrows or scroll.

- Click on a snip to go directly to that page.

Please let me know what you think. I will populate the site with this feature now.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld forum thread asks Do article links expire? He asks this because he noticed a drop in backlinks recently. After skipping over the first few posts, I noticed WebmasterWorld moderator sugarrae, respond. She said that she noticed the same "thing this week." She made a distinction between "out of the box" article directory sites and sites that have an "editorial process" when accepting articles. The links from the sites that have the editorial process are still worth something, she explains. Whereas the other "out of the box" article directory sites are not.

She concludes;

Article sites weren't a mass link building tool a year ago. And much like everything else, things being abused usually inspire changes in search engine algorithms.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a DigitalPoint Forum thread named that discusses a neat PageRank tool at http://www.webmastereyes.com/. The PageRank tool is different from others, in that it will enable you to plug in a URL and it will then place graphical PR bars on all the links you have on that page. For example, I plugged in my corporate site's sitemap and it told me the PR values of all my pages on my site (since all my pages are listed in my sitemap. On the right hand side, is an image of how they plotted my PR values over my left hand side navigation.

Back to the PageRank debate. I do not believe it is worth much in terms of ranking. Google does claim that PR affects your crawl frequency. And when everything else is equal, you have to assume PageRank makes the difference. But when is everything else equal in our world?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Seeing Double discusses how those who run Yahoo Publisher Network ads on their Web sites, and place two or more ad blocks on the same page, can run into seeing the same two ads on the same page. So basically, if there is an ad for Turbo Tax in the top skyscraper YPN ad, there can also be on directly under it, in a different banner, but on the same page.

Is that a bad thing? Is that something that is done by Yahoo on purpose or is it because YPN is still in beta? I wonder if CTR increases if a Web visitor glances at the ad at the top of the page, and then scrolls down and sees the same ad again. I wonder if this is a strategy which is aimed at making the publishers and Yahoo more money or if it is just a version one thing...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an interesting thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Hidden Links On Colgate-Palmolive Site. SEOs are debating if Colgate Palmolive is using hidden links on it's site to spam the search engines. Go to http://www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/HomePage.cvsp and click on the link at the bottom that reads, "Click Here To View Other Colgate-Palmolive Products." It opens up more links, that in itself is not the hidden links, we are talking about. What I know want you to do is go to the text only Google cache of this page, you can see it here. Notice that there are more visible links available to be seen. Here is a side by side;

What We See:

What Search Engines See:

Basically, they are using CSS to style some of the links as normal text and other links, to look like they are normal links. Many many many sites do this. Either for SEO reasons or for cosmetic reasons. The question is, is this considered spam or against Google's terms of service?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a known vulnerability that came to light yesterday based on a WebmasterWorld thread named Links hijacked in search engines. It is called DNS Cache Poisoning, and can affect your search marketing campaigns, big time. What happens?

Sub Attacks

Once an attacker has managed to poison a DNS cache, there are a number of ways they can subvert protocols that rely on DNS. Some of the potential methods are listed below.

Redirecting Web Traffic

An attack of this nature might range from a simple annoyance to a financial nightmare for a great number of people. The goal here is to set up a website that looks enough like the original so as to not raise any suspicion. Then the domain is hijacked via cache poisoning for as many ISPs/companies as possible, causing their traffic to hit the phony site instead.

Some of the sub-attacks here are:

Redirect a popular search engine to a pop-up ad site.
Redirect a bank website to gain access to account passwords.
Redirect news site to inject false stories and manipulate stocks.

From http://www.lurhq.com/cachepoisoning.html.

This can be a major issue for you and you should run a DNS Report today at http://www.dnsreport.com/.

For more information visit http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/dns/cache/.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yahoo has launched a blog for the Yahoo! Publisher Network. The blog is at http://www.ypnblog.com/ and will contain "latest on issues, new releases, and tips—but also in-depth how-to's, publisher interviews, industry trends, links to articles and other news and information you can use." Jennifer has a full write up here on the YPN Blog.

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

A featured Search Engine Watch Forum thread named SEO & Newspapers discusses a recent NYTimes article named This Boring Headline Is Written for Google. The first paragraph of the article somes it up;

Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Danny Sullivan explains the difference between browsing news and searching for news. This is an important distinction and I think Danny gets it right;

When I'm reading a newspaper, a catchy, funny headline might be what I need to pull me into a story. And I do love a good headline. But if I'm keyword searching for news, I know what I'm after. Your catchy headline isn't what pulls me in. Your headline using the terms I searched for is what will do it.

I personally do not know how to write a "catchy headline" that is not direct and too the point (i.e. keyword specific so that searches can find it). Do folks like us now need to worry about being outranked by the larger publishers? Not only do they have popularity on their side, they now know how to "SEO" an headline.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a fresh thread at WebmasterWorld named Google algo moves away from links, towards traffic patterns. This reinforces what many have been saying for the past year or so. Google's popularity came from using linkage data and PageRank to score how popular a Web page is. Times are changing and algorithms need to shift. Linkage data, although incredibility important, is not the complete future of Web page popularity. Traffic is where the popularity is heading, and Google is trying to lead the pack to it.

How does Google measure traffic of a Web site? They can look at dozens of factors, including clicks from the SERPs to your page, and then back. They can use the Google Toolbar data, AdSense data, AdWords data, Analytics (although they would never), and so on. Just keep thinking....

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Haaretz reports that Google has purchased Orion, "an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student." The search forums are buzzing on this right now. Ori Alon worked on Orion while at University of New South Wales in Australia.

"For example, if you search information on the War of Independence, you'll receive a list of related words, like Etzel, Palmach, Ben-Gurion," he explained. The text will only appear on the results page if enough words relevant to the search and the link between them is reasonable. Orion also rates the texts by quality of the site in which they appear.

Search Engine Watch Forum moderator Orion (I know), posted about this technology at SEW Forums back in September 2005. The forums are now all buzzing on this news, including at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

SearchKing has regained its PageRank valyue for its Web site, after a four year penalty. The Search Engine Watch Forum thread, Four Years Later, SearchKing Regains Google PR has Danny Sullivan providing the historical guide as to explain why this is important. In November 2002 Google was sued over PageRank decrease by SearchKing. Since then the PageRank value came back but soon went away. SearchKing case was the first of its kind.

Bob Massa, owner of SearchKing, is a frequent visitor of Search Engine Watch Forums. I would not be surprised to hear a comment from him at Search Engine Watch Forums. Also, on a professional note, he is a wonderful person to work with.

On Digtal Point Forums user korzon starts a thread called "using pictures next to Adsense ads".

Seems like most arcade games use some variation of pictures next to google ads to improve CTR and reportedly, it works great. The question is, is this OK with Google? Would you recommend using this tactic?

Jenstar was the first authority figure to chime in with:

I went directly to Google to ask about images above/beside ad units, and if the images could be confused as being part of the ad, you need a border between the two.

Here is the full response

So the questions is asked and answered right? Well, in my opinion, there is a VERY fine line between blending ads into your site and flat out tricking people.

Check out this See the top listing on this adult theme site? Besides having Adsense on a adult theme site is this a good example of blending in or tricking?

Here is the word on Googles official site. They show a nice example of "Blending In". Is this page just "blending in" ?

The advice I give to anyone who asks me if there site is "pushing it to far" when it comes to blending techniques is just to email google and have them tell you. They will respond with a yes or no and then you have your official response.

Of course... what fun is that =P

Other related entries on blending with ads:

Blended Contextual Ads At Its Best: Blend Those AdSense & YPNs

Every since Google became a registrar in January 2005, SEOs wondered how Google would use the whois data. In mid-February we reported that Google admitted to using registrar data to "increase the quality" of the search results. Today a new thread was created at Cre8asite Forums named Changing Domain Ownership, Do's & Don'ts.

Webmasters and SEOs are afraid of changing the whois information of an established domain name, after changing ownership of the domain name. Bill Slawski goes through a logical breakdown of the rational Google would deploy in such whois data usage. In short, Bill explains that he doubts Google would penalize or lower the value of a site/page if the ownership changes. Why wouldn't Google do this? Well, what about large company mergers? What about someone buying out sites, like Incisive buying Search Engine Watch from Jupiter Media? However, Bill explains that if a domain is bought and there are other drastic changes, in terms of content and linkage, then maybe Google would reset the domain name?

For example, Search Engine Watch's whois information is still under the control of Jupiter. But what affect, if any will it have on Search Engine Watch's rankings, when Incisive takes over the domain name? There were significant change in content in the footer and headers of the pages. Would that classify enough to warrant the domain name to be reset? In my mind, absolutely not.

I asked Google for a comment on this, but they would not give me anything on it. So where does that leave us? Great question. I believe, the Webmasters and site owners have a right to know if changing ownership of a site will have a negative impact on a site's ranking. Often a business would buy an other business because of its reputation and success. If buying a company, solely because you bought it, removes any reputation that company had, then what?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This morning I reported at SEW blog on a Forbes article that says Yahoo! is testing a ppc algorithm similar to how Google AdWords works. The new pay per click model will use a relevancy factor, in combination with your bid price, in ranking your ads in Yahoo! Search. The test, code named "Project Panama," is being run in Scandinavia and will be working in the U.K. by July.

eWhisper at WebmasterWorld says we can probably see this in the US by September of this year. Most of the discussion in the thread is positive. This is a huge change and will affect you, forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Watch moderator Jeff Martin reports that Chinese Adwords Advertiser To Sue Google Over Click Fraud. The thread has a link to an article written in Chinese which was "loosely translated," into the following.

Mr. Huang, who has been using Adwords since 2004, normally pays 158 RMB per month. However, on 1/26/06, his Adwords charges suddenly run up to 8,000 RMB.

He sent an email to Google China and asked for investigation. Google replied that there was nothing wrong with the clicks and had no suspicion of click fraud. He then asked Google to provide supportive data and Google declined. He’s going to file a lawsuit, which will be the first lawsuit against Google in China.

With the recent refunds to US based advertisers for "invalid clicks" by both Yahoo and Google, it is no wonder non-US based advertisers want a piece of the pie.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday I reported at the SEW blog of the new Firefox Google Toolbar version 2.0 release. The new features include;

• An auto-completing search box
• The layout option to replace the Firefox search bar with the Google search
• Safe browsing, which will alert you of phishing sites
• A subscribe to feed option, allowing you to auto-detect RSS to be then added to the Google Personalized Homepage
• An option to connect “mailto” links with Gmail

The community is now discussing it at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

We all know about Google calling folks to sell them AdWords assistance directly, we reported it back April 2005 when Top PPC Names Say No to Google AdWords Professionals. Heck, even cartoons were created Explaining the SEM & Google Relationship. But reports at WebmasterWorld show that since Google opened an Israel office Google is now calling Israeli AdWords customers that already have PPC management companies.

WebmasterWorld member Yelled_Boy says that Google has called every client of his (for whom he already manage AdWords campaigns) and attempted to convince them that they would do a better job then his company. He said after speaking with Mayer Brand head of Google Israel, he confirmed that Google was contacting "selected clients." Now is that fair? No, but it happens all over.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This weeks featured moderator only thread was named Pros & Cons of SES & WMW Conferences. Search Engine Roundtable moderators discussed what they felt were some of the benefits and disadvantages of attending search engine marketing conferences. We were specifically asked to talk about Search Engine Strategies shows by the Search Engine Watch folks and WebmasterWorld PubCons. The WebmasterWorld PubCon is coming up in a week and a half, check it out here. I won't be able to attend, speak or do our coverage for this specific event.

There are just too many pros and cons listed in the thread to summarize here. Visit the Pros & Cons of SES & WMW Conferences thread to read them yourself. Feel free to add your two cents to the thread.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Reports from WebmasterWorld show that dozens of advertisers have noticed and reported drastic and incredible increases in the cost per click of the keywords in their campaigns. Keyword price inflation examples posted include $0.05 to $5.00, $1.00 to $5 - $10, $0.51 to minimum $6.24, $0.17 to $5.00, and so on. These price increases were noticed overnight by many people, so it does not seem to be a slow, long term change that went from $0.05, to $0.25 to $0.50 to $1 and so on, but rather $0.05 to $5.00 overnight.

AdWordsAdvisor replied but did not really have more detail outside of the quality score with landing pages system. But I suspect we will hear more about this sooner than later.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Today, between 11:35AM eastern time and about 3:00 PM eastern time, MSN Search was down. Going to http://search.msn.com/ brought back the following message;

This service is currently unavailable

Our team is working to restore service as quickly as possible.
Please try your request again later.

At this time, MSN Search seems pretty stable right now. The Wall Street Journal reported;

A Microsoft spokesman said the outage began at about 8 a.m. Pacific time. At noon, the service was still down, but shortly afterward began working again.

The spokesman said company technicians have been working on the problem, but have not yet concluded what caused the shutdown in the first place.

Of course the forums are buzzing about MSN Search being down. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

As part of the detailed step by step guide on Google Payments with Google Base, I wanted to give you an update I just received. Google sent me an email from purchases-noreply@google.com asking me "How was your transaction with RustyBrick, Inc.?" In that email it asked me to rate RustyBrick (I know that is me, but I bought something from me), on a five point scale;

So I proceeded and gave myself a rating. It took me to a screen that read;

Review successfully published!

Sellers will be able to use your feedback to improve their customer experience. In the future, other potential buyers will be able to use your comments to guide their purchase decisions.

Thanks again for taking the time to tell us about your experience.

I do not see where I can see my stars, maybe it takes some time to get published on the payments side. I'll keep looking...

For past instructions see my reports on Accepted by Google Base to Sell Through Google Payments and Buying and Accepting Payments at Google Base.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yes, it is possible for you to advertise on your own Web site, to drive traffic to that same Web site. If you both are a publisher and an advertiser in a contextual ad program like Yahoo Publisher Network / Yahoo Search Marketing or Google AdSense / Google AdWords, you can run your own ads on your own site. That is the topic of a thread at WebmasterWorld. But don't fret it, you can block yourself from showing your own ads on your own sites. This is important to keep in mind, when running both the publisher side and advertiser side of things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Blending your contextual ads into your content is an extremely effective way to get people to click on your ads, and earn you money. A Cre8asite Forum thread named Adsense Blending, Example Site shows an example of a site that deploys it better than any other site I have ever seen. Here is the test, visit this site and let me know how long it takes for you to find the contextual ads?

Find it yet? If not, here is a picture highlighting them. The forum discussion then goes into, if this is going overboard and is it possibly against the TOS? Either way, this is one heck of a blending job.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread shows that Google Is Banning Sites That Use Open Directory (DMOZ) Data. The thread creator conducted a "study" that looked at the published sites using the ODP database. He then checked Google, Yahoo Search, and MSN Search using a site command, and found that approximately "50 percent of them were banned by at least one search engine." Google had a ban rate of Google 37%, Yahoo 11%, and MSN 9%.

Pretty much anyone can go ahead and clone the ODP by using the freely available Open Directory RDF Dump. But this is the first time someone did a study (not sure the validity of the study) showing which sites are banned and which are not. What brought on the study? Yea, this individual was penalized "after operating for more than five years." Was it specifically the ODP data that got him banned? Who knows. Was it the ODP data that got the other 37% banned in Google? Who knows... There are some out there, believe it or not, that use the ODP data to better their rankings, exclusively. Is it possible that some of those people try other things to better there rankings, that may have warranted a penalty outside of the ODP data side? Possibly. Does Google or any other engine want duplicate content? Not likely.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has been testing various flavors of what Danny Sullivan calls, "Middle of Page Google Refinement" results. Danny just wrote about it at the SEW Blog here. You can see these results for random searches, one such search that currently works is relentless and if you don't see it, here is a picture of it. For some images of older tests, take a look at "Alternative Searches" and then a more mature version named "Dissatisfied?" Now it seems to be "See results for: [new keyword phrase here]".

Anyway, Danny Sullivan split off GoogleGuy's post from yesterday into its own thread, named Google Confirms Middle Of The Page Query Refinement No Longer A Test; Suggest A Name! It is legit, this is no longer in "test mode" and is out in the public. But sadly, there is no official name for this feature. Danny prefers the name "MidBox Results", I tend to like "Alternative Searches" if that is what it remains to be. If they start putting forms of "Smart Answers" in the box, then "MidBox Results" seems perfect, but if it is purely organic, then I think "Alternative Searches" are the way to go. Why? Because OneBox, to me, seems less purely organic to me than does the refinements we are shown here.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

London bus company, Metroline has been found running AdSense ads on its fleet of buses. Someone snapped a picture and posted in at DigitalPoint Forums, the day after April Fools Day. It is a pretty good picture, barely looks "doctor'ed" up. But yea, I doubt they are running real AdSense ads on those buses. :) Seems like a post April Fools Day joke.

Not bad, ehh? Forum Discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are two spiders from Yahoo! that you may have been noticing crawling over pages recently. The first, is named Yahoo! Slurp China has reportedly been around since mid-Novmember of last year. The second, is named Yahoo! Search Marketing Crawler and has just been discovered, I believe.

Yahoo! Slurp China found recent activity as reported at DigitalPoint Forums under the User Agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp China; Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp China; http://misc.yahoo.com.cn/help.html)

WebmasterWorld has an older thread on the topic that IP block is 202.160.178. and 202.160.179. and it resolves to *.inktomisearch.com. If you don't like this spider, the folks at WebmasterWorld say you can just block its user agent and it won't affect the main Yahoo! Slurp. They say block; "User-agent: slurp china"

Yahoo! Search Marketing Crawler is a fairly unknown spider that sprung up some recent concern at WebmasterWorld Forums. It has been reported from the IP address 66.35.192.197 and 64.209.232.29, which is resolving to Savvis and not Yahoo! Senior Member, StupidScript, says that this spider is an automated ad-checker. He also said that Yahoo! has never claimed ownership of this bot and that they blocked it only to stop "receiving mail from SBC-Yahoo subscribers." I am not 100% sure about this so I will do a follow up with Yahoo! Search Marketing on this crawler.

We reported in the past of some publishers noticing AdWords in the referrals section of their AdSense portal. But now it is officially open to everyone with an AdSense account.

Here is a typical ad:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums

FAQs on referrals here.

Yesterday I reported over at the SEW blog about a Ben Edelman report. Ben Edelman uncovers how some spyware programs have Yahoo Search Marketing ads in them, and auto click on them, without the user's knowledge. You may want to check out his findings for yourself.

Ben is at WebmasterWorld forums, if you have any questions, he will reply to them there.

Other Forum Discussion at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  

Reports come from all the forums that Google is currently updating backlinks and PageRank scores of pages. This means that little green bar, in the Google Toolbar either increased, decreased or remained the same for you. It also means that Google may be showing more or less or the same number of backlinks for you, when running the link:www.domain.com command, which is practically worthless anyway.

Forum Discussion at:

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

According to Alexa.com and when you play around with the URL to change the standard range=2y to range=10y, you can see Google's tremendous growth in traffic reach. Interesting enough, when you compare side by side Google.com vs MSN.com, here is what you get:

Other curious information you see on this page is "Where do people go on google.com?":

• google.com - 75%


• images.google.com - 9%


• mail.google.com - 8%


• groups.google.com - 2%


• video.google.com - 2%


• news.google.com - 1%


• froogle.google.com - 1%


• Other websites - 2%

I know some of you reserve your thoughts on how accurate is Alexa, but keep in mind that you're comparing apples with apples here.

Google has now officially released Google Related Links which is now part of the Google Labs project. I first reported evidence of this last month at the SEW blog, and now Danny has the official write up.

Let's implement!

(1) Go to http://www.google.com/relatedlinks/
(2) Click Get Related Links
(3) I selected small banner size
(4) I selected the default two link types including "Searches" and "News."
(5) I then selected the Grey color
(6) And it generated the code for me, here is the output.

My only question is why is the "related searches" showing a search for "Search Engins" spelled wrong?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

eComXpo is holding a free online "virtual tradeshow for search, affiliate and interactive marketers." A full speaker list is here with some well-known names from SES including; Anne Holland of Marketing Sherpa, Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, Kevin Lee of did-it.com, Catherine Seda of Seda Communications, Matt Bailey of Site Logic, Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance, Lee Odden of TopRank Results, Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR and more.

Free and right in your office, can't beat that. Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

There is an excellent recent thread named Canonical URL problems results in two sites in Googles eyes where Dayo_UK explains the current issues with having a domain name without 301 redirecting the non www to the www.

He uses Matt Cutts's blog as an example, saying;

mattcutts.com/blog/2005/10/ is not indexed under the non-www and if you query all the DCs you will see that it references the www on a "mattcutts.com/blog/2005/10/" search as the page.

So you would probably think that the Canonilization process is working correctly - and we would assume that Google thinks that mattcutts.com/blog/2005/10/ is the same page as www.mattcutts.com/blog/2005/10/

But if you do a PR check on the non-www and the www pages you will start to see that they are in fact split - the non-www has no PR while the www has PR accross the DCs.

Dayo_UK explains that Matt's site "survived the site split" effect of the canonilization process. But many sites are not. Matt most likely survived it due to the number of fresh inbound links to his site.

So if you have an ordinary site and the non www version is not 301 redirected to the www version (or visa versa) then you should probably look deeper into this thread and make that decision. You can easily check your header status at this or this tool.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Add To Google button is not for site inclusion into the main Google index. It is however for feed inclusion into Google Reader or Google Personalized Homepage. You can go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html and create a button like; to add to your blog or news site for people to click on.

When you click on the icon above for this site, you are take here. On that page it asks you if you want to add this feed to Your Google homepage and/or Google Reader.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts is the poster boy of Google and the SEO community. He bridges what is Google and what is SEO together as one. He has be the man behind spam fighting at Google for years now. He wrote the safe site search feature, Google uses today, to block out adult content from searches. Matt Cutts is the SEO's community's tie to Google and has been for five or so years now.

Matt Cutts joked on April Fools Day about joining Yahoo. However, the day before that viggen posted a thread at our forums named Matt Cutts leaves Google. I'll be honest, reading the title of the thread made my heart skip a beat. Wow! Matt Cutts leaves Google? Wow!

But he did not, but what if he did? That was the point of the thread.

There are many ways to look at this, what-if scenario.

(1) How will it affect the SEO community? It would be huge? Matt is an extremely patient and giving individual. His outreach, was done on his "20% time," how many others at Google would spend their time listening to us whine about our Google rankings? Just look at his blog and the number of comments posted. Look at his participation at the search conferences? He would be a huge lose for Google on the SEO front.
(2) How will it affect Google? Same deal, Google learned a ton about improving the search index from Matt's communications with the SEO community. There is no secret that Matt has befriended many "spammers" and "black hats" in exchange for knowledge (trust me it goes both ways, and there is also a true friendship there). It would take years to build up the trust and respect, that Matt has built with the SEO community. It would be a huge lose for Google. Let alone the technology and procedures Matt set up inside Google, that I am not even privy to.
(3) The rest of the world? Most would most likely have no idea how his departure. Matt Cutts who? Most likely they have heard of the founders and the CEO - but Matt Cutts? So there is no public awareness. But behind the scenes, would "search quality" at Google suffer? I hope not. I know Matt himself would hate to see search quality suffer if one day he decided to leave Google. I am sure Matt would transfer every bit of knowledge he had to ensure that it would not suffer. If he did not transfer his knowledge? I still have to believe that Google has enough smart people to pick up in his place, on that front, at least.

Very interesting topic. What If Matt Cutts Left Google? Visit the forum thread and share your thoughts at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Updated: The new feature is named position preference and there is more information at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I have received an anonymous tip that Google will be adding big management software for AdWords advertisers. The bid management software will replace, to some extent, tools such as Atlas OnePoint, KeywordMax, BidRank, and BidHero. There is supporting evidence of this also at WebmasterWorld forum, where AdWordsAdvisor, in message #24, suggests something new is to come.

I'd like to say, however, that the 'settings' column was designed to support new functionality we'll be releasing in the coming weeks.

So will we soon see bid management software right in our Google AdWords console? Much like how Google did with Google Analytics?

Continue reading "Update: Position Preference Feature: Google AdWords To Add Bid Management Software To "Settings" Section?"

Dogpile.com, a meta search engine that uses Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com results, created an incredibly creative April Fools Day logo. The logo was posted at DigitalPoint Forums. You can see the full size image of it here. Pretty funny.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I started a thread last week at our forums named Answer --> Question Search Engine :: Jeopardy. In that thread, I asked, wouldn't it be cool to have a search engine that worked backwards? For example, you submit an answer, instead of a question, and the returned results would be questions. Kind of like how the game Jeopardy works.

I would love your thoughts, I don't see how useful it is, on a day to day basis. But I am sure SEOs can figure it out.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

DigitalPoint Forums has a thread named Next Generation Violations that shows how this blog created this video which begged his visitors to click on his AdSense ads. As he noted in his blog entry on Tuesday, March 28, it took him no time to get kicked out of the AdSense program.

Pretty funny stuff.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

http://www.google.com/romance/

Google Romance is a place where you can post all types of romantic information and, using our Soulmate Search™, get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of your life. Then we'll send you both on a Contextual DateTM, which we'll pay for while delivering to you relevant ads that we and our advertising partners think will help produce the dating results you're looking for.

With Google Romance, you can:

* Upload your profile – tell the world who you are, or, more to the point, who you’d like to think you are, or, even more to the point, who you want others to think you are.
* Search for love in all (or at least a statistically significant majority of) the right places with Soulmate Search, our eerily effective psychographic matchmaking software.
* Endure, via our Contextual Dating option, thematically appropriate multimedia advertising throughout the entirety of your free date.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Sorry for slow start, feeling very very under the weather.

A very interesting thread is brewing over at Digitalpoint Titled The advantage of "ugly" over "pretty". The thread seems to be focused directly on the CTR of AdSense on ugly sites vs pretty websites.

User Troutnut posts:

It's too easy to set up a "pretty" site. Just download one of the thousands of free forum scripts, CMSes, etc, and pick from the thousands of themes available, and you're all set. Many of them have very pretty layouts with nice subtle touches of borders, bevels, gradients, rounded edges, yadda yadda yadda.

The result is that there are lots of these cookie-cutter pretty sites on the web with little to no content. Somebody puts WhateverNuke on autopilot, adds a few crappy articles, throws on some ads, and forgets about it. The menu is packed with links to feature-rich, well-designed sections with "No widgets have been added yet" where the content's supposed to be. The web is cluttered with pretty, hollow skeletons of websites.

I think maybe web users are becoming conditoned to associate stylish designs with these hollow skeletons. And if that's true, one way to a successful design may be to create a home-made feel. It isn't that they're ugly that helps; it's that they look like somebody took some time to personally build them from scratch, and that means it's likely they put a similar amount of care into the content. A custom site has something worth saying.

Some of the more interesting posts in the thread-

User Sbabb posts:

Is his theory that an ugly site makes people want to click away immediately, so they click on his ads to leave?

It looks like the Notorious Hacker Known as Cy60rg has taken over the Digital Point Forums Homepage!

User mightyb posted:

Cy60rg Was Here...

X-ed by Cy60rg le Avantgarde
Greetz: Zorlac, KT, Stingray and all..

Admin: old index.php moved to old_admin ......... php

WTF? I just got that a second ago...

April fools joke?

screen shot here: