May 2006 Archives

An interesting thread over at Cre8asite Forums has members discussing links and how they should be formatted. Ironically, the thread, Should links still be underlined and blue?, is very similar to another thread that Ben (Phoenix) covered in November 2004, also at Cre8asite.

There are some good opinions regarding how to insert links in both of these threads, and may help you formulate thoughts on how to do linking on your website. As Ben noted in 2004, the main goal is visibility, especially if the link is a call to action. The main question is still "does the average user know it's a link?"

My thoughts are that as long as you pick one method and stick with it, people will use the links. For SEO purposes, I like to try and insert at least one link per page to another relevant page within the content using descriptive anchor text. I try to avoid using the "Read more" anchor text found at the bottom of many pages on the Internet.

Short post since this is basically a recycling. Read the thread at Cre8asite Forum for more opinions or to add your thoughts.

I'll admit I like a good juicy story, especially one when crooked SEM companies are involved. They seem to have some of the most creative ways to bend the truth about search engines. There is a entertaining thread on SEW Forums about the ways that SEM companies bend the truth in order to get more business. First off, the main problem is the difference between experts and the average user. The experts are supposed to have the knowledge and information that will enable the average website owner a better chance in ranking in the search engines. When the supposed expert doesn't have this information, or has false information that he is selling, he becomes a liar and crook.

The members at SEW explore some of the "truths" that SEM companies could use to convince you of their capability.

1. With Yahoo and Google you can do Paid Inclusion and get higher ranking. We can get you in top 10 quickly.

2. Our engineers know what Google will do with their algorithm in the future.

3. Google Site Maps is a great thing to get better results in rankings.

4. Our expertise includes a SEO Knowledge Transfer session for your development team.

5. We have several Fortune 500 clients on our portfolio

6. That was the fault of an overzealous junior optimizer who is no longer with the company.

7. We have extensive connections within the SEO industry that are on hand for consultation.

8. We share a deep rapport with industry experts such as Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer

I am sure you can think of some rebuttal for all of those. Some are really really bad representations of the truth that anyone worth their salt should be able to recognize as false. Yet some of the arguments are harder to root out the truth. Take the last one. How can you prove they don't know the celebrity ring of experts?

Interestingly enough, the fact remains that even though years have passed where these tactics were quickly identified, there are still plenty of SEO/SEM companies deceiving the public with tactics the schew the truth and disrupt the progress of those businesses on the web.

If you have opinions on the subject, continued discussion at: Search Engine Watch Forums

Is obtaining links really as hard as getting a date? Getting a date with someone you like can be an ordeal and difficult at times. All that anxiety and waiting and anticipation, enough to make do things you normally won't do if you were in the right mind. Love can be intoxicating, and so can the accumulation of links. So what are the similarities to dating?

There is a really entertaining thread on High Rankings that is having some fun with the comparison. The thread started out with a desperate webmaster asking: "Many people says paid link is no good, reciprocal link is no good, article submission to directory is no good, so, how can you do link building?"

Good question, the thread starts off and one of the members, jehochman, says:

Looking for links is like trying to get a date. If you are desperate, nobody respectable will be interested, but if you relax and behave nicely, you'll have plenty of success.

Debra Mastaler follows it up with some good advice on link building in general. She says "Link building, whether to drive traffic/publicity or to assist with rank, isn't just about one tactic. Nothing is ever just about one thing because nothing exists alone." I agree, its takes some good creativeness and determination to get out there and obtain links.

And finally, same great advice on instilling urgency in your linking building practices:

The more desparate you appear to be for the link (or the date), the less chance you have of getting it -- the linkee (potential date) is going to start to wonder what the urgency is, you'll raise suspicions, and next thing you know you're spending Friday night alone with the TV remote control and a pint of Haagen Daz.

Despite being a bit silly, there are some excellent points in this thread. Too many times do people confuse urgency with importance. Links are of high importance, but they should not be considered urgent. If you run around the internet with the urgent need for links, you will run into less than satisfactory oppourtunities for linking. People will not respond to your urgency, as it they don't have too. Look at obtaining links as obtaining a hot date. Take your time and behave nicely.

Continued discussion at High Rankings - Links Like Dates?

Alright, this post is a little bit different in that it explores Google Sitemaps and the urban legend that is can and will ruin your website if you let it. There is a thread on WMW, which quotes the latest Matt Cutts evangelistic utterance in that:

I’ve talked to the sitemaps folks a lot. Having a sitemap for your site should *never* hurt your domain.

One of the forum members then disagrees and says he has heard of examples of it making all there pages disappear where "I started using Google sitemaps and my house exploded the very next day". Now the incentive for a webmaster to use Google Sitemaps is high and the risk you would think is not that high. It remains that their is a higher chance of getting included in Google if you use it, then if you don't. Based on new indexing and spidering tactics Google is using. Some of the members chime in with their experience in loosing pages in the index due to sitemaps. The evidence is not very strong since proof seems limited. Most claim they started using sitemaps for a section of their site and within a couple weeks the pages were gone from the index. Was it Big Daddy? or Sitemaps? However their are some good points I agree with, such as:

My take is that joining sitemaps is a very poor substitute for making a site search engine friendly in the first place.

Thats a great take on the subject, Sitemaps really is only a limited use option, don't expect it to work miracles. Finally, someone comments that:

From what I read I believe a lot of you created/uploaded your Google sitemaps several weeks ago and then noticed that your pages started disappearing from the Google index. If you read other threads this was also happening widely to people WITHOUT a Google Sitemap ... with me being one of them.

Granted this is just his opinion.

If you are one of the people who have lost pages from Google Sitemaps. Then you should take a look at this post over at Google Blogoscoped. According to them, the reinclusion request in Google Sitemaps:

...in order to submit a reinclusion request, one has to acknowledge violating Google’s quality guidelines, even if they do not believe they did so.
So basically – under this system if a site has been dropped from the index, the owner is forced to admit wrong doing (even if they didn’t) and at the same time clear Google of any wrong doing (even if they did).

Okay, to most this isn't probably a big deal, since they just want to get their site and pages back in the index and really don't care who was right or wrong. Even though, its a whole lot easier to blame Google. Bad Google.

More discussion at WebmasterWorld Forums

Yahoo announced last night that they had updated the index this past weekend, so keep an eye out for any changes that might occur. Additionally they have updated the way to contact them. Instead of relying on email, they have switched to a simple form for any feedback. According to them:

For feedback, we are moving away from the email address "ystfeedback at yahoo.com" to a simple form available at http://help.yahoo.com/search/feedback. Please write in and let us know what you think.

There is some limited discussion on the forums notably at Digitalpoint and WebmasterWorld. Most webmasters seem to be experiencing some positive changes in regards to rankings and increased traffic. So what is the best way to describe this update? Well, its seems "our site is bouncing back and forth" is the most common descriptive people are using to describe the change. So expect the update to bounce you back and forth a little and settle down later in the week.

Search Engines like to include web pages in their query results that provide plenty of relevant content, either directly or through introduction and linking to other pages. It is hard to argue against the consensus that "content is king." Thus, when people attempt to improve the chances of ranking through the process of search engine optimization, content is a priority. Through research and testing, many SEO's have found that keeping content "fresh" is a way to gain the favor of the search engine spider, especially if the content is expected to change. That is - if your content rarely changes and the content of what you would consider to be competitor websites does, chances are that you will not be able to keep up when competing for highly popular keywords.

An interesting thread started a couple of weeks ago at High Rankings Forums has a member asking which is better for the overall SEO efforts of a website: simply updating current content or adding fresh content to the web site completely new pages? Some good points made so far in the debate include Chip Johns'

Remember, there are no definitive answers when it comes to SEO. If you have a site that deals with medieval history, many of your pages are not going to change, because, for the most part, history doesn't change. Google may prefer that pages NOT change in this instance.

High Rankings Moderator Torka also adds an interesting thought:

When you make significant changes to the content of a page, there can be (at least temporary) rankings drops as the SEs sort out where the new page should rank.

Content will always be important to a website. Although the above example shows a possible topic that could be considered "safe" if it remains unchanged; I feel that the linking and some of the commentary probably should change, in order to keep up with recent research and discoveries dealing with medieval history.

Please comment on this topic at High Rankings Forums. It would be interesting to hear from people who have experimented with both content-freshening techniques.

Thought this was a bit refreshing topic that some webmasters have been wondering about. A thread at Digitalpoint explores the process of submitting your blog/website to Google News to be spidered. Its not an easy process at all, but a few people with experience have chimed in to give a few pointers that might enable you to get added quicker. I know this year after a long time of trying Barry was able to get Search Engine Roundtable submitted sucessfully to Google News. Its something that we have been trying to do for sometime and despite the obstacles was successful. Shoemoney makes a few good pointers if you are considering adding your site such as in order to get accepted you need "url structure has 5 digits, you have 5 authors with profiles, and you have 3 editors with profiles".

Continued discussion at Digitalpoint

There is a good thread over at Digitalpoint discussing why some people are still using the "aff" abbreviation in their Google Adwords copy when its no longer needed. One of the members is seeing this practice still in place and trying to determine the incentive from doing this. According to 5Star, "They just don't know any better. Some people just don't keep up with the news and missed that whole big change." I can't say I noticed it exactly the day it came out and I watch a lot of the news. There are a couple of other reasons why a person would still use the "aff" in the ad. One, they do not want to disrupt their CTR of the campaigns, or the placement. Additionally, some advertisers are required by the affiliate company to use this particular branding. I don't know many that do, but apparently their are some. Another reason, might have to do with the url. I just searched on affiliates in Google and one of the first ad has a nasty "?afid=AFX1DNQ7889" affiliate id tag in the url. Now, maybe I am wrong but if you are trying to target savy webmasters to become your affiliate, and you are using a url like might raise a few red flags for stay away.

For continued discussion see Digitalpoint - "Aff." in ad copy?

Link building is one of the most important aspects of ongoing search engine optimization. As websites gain links from other well-linked sites, their inbound link rating goes up. This is of course a very simplified explanation of the link-specific part of any search engine algorithm, but it essentially describes what Google PageRank is supposed to do. The problem is that if you focus only on PageRank, you may not be getting the links that will help you garner "authority" or "hub" status. Some SEO practitioners actually claim they completely ignore PageRank.

So if you want to rate sites based on their ability to help yours with a link, how else can you do it? Bob Mutch has started threads at SEW and Cre8asite formally introducing his latest methodology for ranking sites based on their own inbound link quality, or ILQ as he calls it for short. He has been playing with this idea for the last couple of months, and now wishes to get some feedback.

In my opinion, it is a sound system, giving greater value to links that are from known trusted URL's or Top Level Domains. I imagine the discussions to follow this announcement will be lively, so make sure you stop by and voice your opinions at Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums. (Probably others too)

The title kinda sounds like something from an old 1940's monster movie, where the big ugly futuristic robot crawls out of it's dark hole to terrorize the common advertiser with blinking lights and mechanic tendrals of quality score readers. Thankfully, this robot is really not that scary, Google instead is again improving some things they are doing with Adwords. There is an excellent thread on this subject at SEW Forums, and Danny S. and other member go into more detail.
To recap, Google has been busy with Adwords this year, everything from a new layout, talks about quality changes, and finally back in December discussion about the Quality Score including the landing page as part of it influencing the adwords position on the page.

According to Google, the new changes will be:

We've also added some language to anticipate Google's retrieval of advertiser landing pages. To further improve program quality, our system will soon visit and evaluate all landing pages specified in AdWords ads. The quality information collected will affect AdWords account performance in the future. If a landing page has informative content related to its AdWords ads and keywords, these keywords will receive higher Quality Scores and potentially lower minimum cost-per-click bid (CPC bid) requirements. Poor quality landing pages or those that restrict visits by our system are likely to experience a decrease in quality scores (and a potential increase in CPC bid requirements).

Interestingly, this line is also included about screenscraping affecting quality scores:

Additionally, due to Google's progress in making an AdWords API available, we're asking users not to "screenscrape" AdWords web pages. We believe screenscraping may negatively affect the performance of AdWords and that more efficient results can be obtained using the AdWords API.

It seems some of the members are not thrilled about the changes. Many are pointing to bigger problems like quality issues with the content networks and click fraud should be better priorities. However, some are thrilled at the response from Google and I have to agree. This will improve things for advertisers who are using Adwords genuinely.

One last point, Danny mentions that you can opt-out of getting crawled:

Basically, they were getting some of the landing pages through other crawling but now will get all of them through a dedicated spider. You can opt-out -- but if you do, your quality score will suffer.

Continued discussion at SearchEngineWatch Forums plus Danny has a nice write up at SEW Blog.

Seems somebody at Yahoo doesn't know how to train Slurp well enough to behave. It's misbehavior has got a few webmasters on WMW talking about the problem with Slurp (the bot) taking down their servers after bulk submitting keywords to Yahoo. The issue seems to arise when the spider comes by to verify links in the ads. The impact of the verification can take down a server if it doesn't stop trying to verify the link exists. Unfortunately if the site goes offline, then the ads at Yahoo don't get approved because the spider took down the advertisers site. Making this a efficiency problem for Yahoo to fix. I have heard of another case like this last year, so was glad to see a thread about it. According to one WMW member who, "spoke with someone at Yahoo who confirmed that they do have a process that clicks on the links and it is possible that we'd get a lot of concurrent clicks. "

Another member goes on to say:

This is an issue that is well-known to any advertiser who has uploaded several thousand terms, and yet seems to be a mystery to Yahoo's 'support' people.

In the past, I've sent them dozens of megabytes of our log files showing slurp hammering our servers as it checks our submission. If you use the bulk upload to modify your listings, slurp will check both the old and the new versions ... sometime at rates up to 20 hits per second or more and often continuing for many, many hours (over 32, in one case).

Y 'support' has no idea what is going on. We end up blocking the bad (terribly rude) spider for a few days and it finally stops coming. Seems to have no impact on whether the listings are approved or not.

Continued discussion at WebmasterWorld

I posted news about Google & Dell Partner: Google Software To Be Installed On Dell PCs at SEW Blog yesterday. Here is the scoop...

The Wall Street Journal reports that Dell will be installing Google software on "millions of Dell personal computers." That means software like Google Desktop search, the Google Toolbar, and the default search engine will be set to Google on these Dell PCs. Google is paying Dell an undisclosed amount for this partnership.

Quick rundown on forum threads:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• DigitalPoint Forums

Some quick posts, while I am suppose to be away....

MSN Search seems to be having an update. There are forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

So check your MSN rankings.

Many of you remember when I first proposed to my, soon-to-be, new wife. It was on October 2nd of last year, when I asked Yisha to marry me with the help of Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com. Ask.com working with me on my proposal shows you something about our industry. I cannot count the number of blog entries, emails, trackbacks, comments and personal notes I received from the SEM community congratulating Yisha and myself. The gifts received by the search community, including gifts from friends from the SES/WMW conferences, the various forums I participate in, and from the search engine company representatives was overwhelming. Those are just a few reasons why I enjoy sharing these personal moments in my life with you guys. That being said, I hope to update Yisha & Barry.com a few weeks after the wedding, so I can share more of these moments with you.

The wedding will take place in St. Louis, this Sunday. I promised Yisha, that I wouldn't spend too much time online the week after the wedding. So that means I won't be able to contribute to the Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Watch blog over the next week or so. Ben Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause, Nacho Hernandez, Shawn Hogan, Jeremy Schoemaker and Dan Thies have all graciously agreed to chip in while I am away. I feel comfortable and secure leaving the site in their hands while I am away for such a long period.

The RustyBrick creative guy designed this special logo for the blog for the week.

Off I go, to get married. Best wishes to you all. Hope I don't miss too much search marketing community buzz while I am away.

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

I just posted over at SEW Blog that eBay & Yahoo Partner On Graphical Ads, Other Areas. This is what I wrote;

Everyone is talking about the eBay & Yahoo partnership, where Yahoo will be eBay's exclusive provider of graphical ads and Yahoo will promote eBay's PayPal to its merchants and publishers. Reports via the Washington Post, The Street and BusinessWeek.com stress how this poses a threat to Google and Microsoft. It is important to note that this partnership is primarily to provide graphical ads and click-to-call ads and on a lesser standpoint to provide some search ads. The limited search ads are probably because eBay does not want to detract visitors from the eBay products and auctions, which is logical.

Not really too much to add to it then that. Some folks in the forums show this is having an affect on Google's stock price right now. Long term, who knows.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

On April 26th, about one month ago, we reported Google AdWords Glitch: Bid Tool Conflicts With Position Preference Tool. The problem was and still is that when you enable the Position Preference it disables the Bid Tool.

Cline posts a new thread at WebmasterWorld reminding Google that it is still a serious problem. Cline writes;

I *do* mind that a month goes by and that the problem is neither reported to users nor is it fixed. Once a problem like this is identified, an organization is ethically responsible for either quickly fixing it or explaining the problem to users it might affect. A simple notice on the Edit CPCs Tool would have sufficed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am not sure when this happened, but in the past when you did a search in Yahoo and a site with an RSS showed in the results, an "Add To My Yahoo!" link was present. The "Add To My Yahoo!" link was a quick way to enable Yahoo! registered users to subscribe to a site's RSS feed. But that is now gone. Or appears to be gone.

Conduct a search on search engine roundtable, you won't see the link there, you will just see the following.

So, does that mean Yahoo! cares less about RSS these days? A post I wrote back in July 2005 named Using RSS to Improve Yahoo Search Success praised Yahoo!'s RSS approach. Here is the image of the SERPs from that post.

So where did it go? Why did it go? Does Yahoo! not care about RSS feeds any more? So many questions.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Duplicate content issues are one of those plaguing issues that SEOs have to deal with often. Often, Webmasters are unaware they have a duplicate content issue until it is too late. Yes, by too late I mean, your pages are dwindling down in the index and your rankings suffer. So what can you do?

Well, there is a new tool out named Site Wide Duplicate Content Analyzer;

This tool crawls your entire site and then analyzes all your pages for duplicate content. It shows similarity percentage among all pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in major search engines and consequently they can penalize your site for duplicate content.

I didn't try it out myself, but give it a whirl. Any comments or feedback, discuss at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Cre8asite Forums has an excellent new thread named Keyword Research and Related Tools, What do you use? The thread contains many ideas for tools and common sense ideas. Here are some tools:

• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
• http://www.wordtracker.com/
• http://www.keywordsanalyzer.com/

Ammon Johns goes about it a different way. He takes out the old clipboard and pen and talks to people, actual people.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Commission Junction, the largest affiliate management company, is changing from allowing affiliates to use any type of link to only JavaScript links.

The option to view and use Legacy links will only be available for publishers with relationships that were formed PRIOR to June 23, 2006. Any publisher-advertiser relationships formed after this date will only provide JavaScript links.

Full details at http://cju.cj.com/publishers/lmipub_en.html, you will need to login to view the contents of this page.

This can be bad news for SEMs.

The threads are already hoping at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster, started a thread named AdSense Ads with Phone # in Them. He asked if this is a good thing or bad thing to have the phone number in the ad copy in AdSense ads. Publishers only get paid based on ad impression or ad click, the clicks are what really bring in any significant money, I believe. So for the ad copy to contain a phone number and not require a click, the publisher does not make as much money.

Rodney in the thread breaks it out nicely:

Thinking about it as a customer: I don't think I would call a phone number just from seeing a few words of text before it. However, it would help that particular ad to stand out from ads that didn't have numbers as possibly a company that is more reliable with phone support if necessary.

Thinking about it as a merchant: seems like just another tactic to get your ad to stand out. I really doubt you'll get lots of calls just from the phone number and 3-4 words.

Thinking about it as a publisher: it seems like it would show that there are quality (ie: non-MFA) advertisers showing on my site, and if the merchant is correct, and the it makes the ad stand out, then that means that ad would get more clicks, which menas more money for me, more leads for the advertiser, more relevant ads for my site visitors.

But that is just his opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Channel 4 News posted a video of Larry Page and Eric Schmidt answering questions and answers from the press. You can view the video here. They talk about how artificial intelligence will change the future of search. They also discuss the "do no evil" but yet Google does evil in China, which Google responded to that the US government also does the same thing, which was replied to that it wasn't a good response. They also talk about privacy, specifically with gmail and discuss how the tradeoff of convenience and privacy must be the right balance.

Yesterday, I also posted a video interview at SEW Blog named Google's Eric Schmidt Interviewed on CNBC.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigtialPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting Sporadic Reports of Google Testing New Ad Layout. The new ad layout shows two ads at the top, and then four ads on the bottom, but none on the right hand panel. You can click on the image to see a full size screen capture of the new layout. Does this new ad layout suggest that Google may be adding "zoom" like features on the right hand side, similar to what Ask.com does with their search results pages? It is way to early to say.

This should create a more competitive landscape for the two top ads, if it is deployed over at Google.com Web search. Google is trying to sell the ad space to the most relevant advertiser? I have no idea if they will make this the future style but it does raise some interesting questions.

Senior Member vincevincevince theorizes;

Compare this to a typical Adsense monetised site and the cycle of changes the operator goes through over time. 1. Well defined ads which match the colour scheme and are in their 'proper' place

2. Ads moved within the 'read-line' to ensure they get seen (increase in CTR)

3. Ads in 'hot position' i.e. most important spot of page (increase in CTR)

4. More and more ads, at the top, the side, etc. (increase in CTR)

5. Ads progressively blended and made to look closer to the content (increase in CTR)

6. Reduction in number of ads to focus on high EPC ads (increase in EPC outweighing loss of CTR)

7. Experimentation with Ad Link units ("See results about 'related term')

You've got to face it, Google is the biggest Adsense monetised site there is - and many of the things that help Adsense sites get a boost apply just as much to Google herself.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google sent out an email to all publishers that they will change the default color palette from Seaside (formerly known as Mother Earth) to Open Air. They say the change is because "many publishers prefer the cleaner look of this palette and have also seen that a blended color palette performs better for them."

Here is the difference:

You notice that this really blends the ads into whatever the site may look like. It is like hiding the ads, and displaying them as the text on the page. That is why many publishers opt for the borderless style. But as a default... I am not sure...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Jojo in our forums points out that site:www.dmoz.org returns zero results while site:dmoz.org returns over 26 million results. Is this an other example of Big Daddy at play?

That is the question of the thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I counted about 28 DigitalPoint members claiming they are under 22 and in or taking break from college or high school and making money with Google AdSense. The thread asks;

I am curious to know that how many students here working on adsense and studying too and Does it effect on your studies?

It is not surprising to see that a ton of college students use Google AdSense to earn extra cash while in school or even use it to pay their tuition. Even a few high school students admitted to using AdSense to earn more money or to fund their college account.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A touch question at hand, does one join the class action settlement against Google on PPC fraud or not. Google is giving back $90M, $30M which will be going to the lawyers, the rest to the advertisers. How much will the average advertiser get back? That is the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

The details for the settlement can be found at http://www.clicksettlement.com/.

Honestly, it is about you - do you want to just take it easy and join the settlement or do you want more from Google. Many want more and think the settlement is unfair.

Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Discovery posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Top 10 Adcenter Fixes. The list includes;

• Firefox and Safari support for a Mac
• "Organize the site navigation according to a date or date range."
• Copy and paste feature buggy
• Bugs with conversion reporting?
• Weird editorial review process
• UI browser max width and height issues
• Timeout issues with functions

adCenter representative replied to all of these requests at the thread.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week I wrote Ask.com Promoting via TV But Not via PPC? where I noted Ask.com appeared not to be using search ads to promote the engine. But they are using TV ads, like often, to promote the engine. Last night I was watching 24 (who wasn't) and I saw one of the Ask.com commercials. It was the one about the "pimped out search engine." So I decided to see if they are advertising for that keyword at Google.

So guess who is advertising for pimped out search engine? Not Google, not MSN, not Yahoo - Ask.com. Would it be smart for the three other search engines to bid on that term also? I suspect so, but I also suspect that they wouldn't out of respect. There are some times results from the other engines, when broad match comes in, but it may require a few refreshes of the page.

Here is the ad.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Google has taken their ad network to the next level, a level the founders probably would never have thought they would have taken it when they first started the Google AdWords program. They have announced the testing of Google AdWords Click-to-play video ads. You got that right, they will be allowing AdWords advertisers to post video ads, that will display in the Google AdSense network.

What is Google's rational?

(1) Web visitors must click the play button to see the ad move, otherwise it will be static
(2) AdSense publishers have to enable them on their sites
(3) AdWords advertisers have to produce them and post them

See an example at the Inside AdWords Blog.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Text Link Ads launched a Text Link Ads Calculator that tells you the value of a link on a particular Web site. The price is derived based on Alexa ranking, link popularity, site theme, numbers of links available to be sold, sitewide versus single page link and most importantly, the location of the link on the page. The thing is, when you test it out on this site, you get the following prank!

There are several other examples of funny responses, including wolf-howl.com, seomoz.org, msn.com, davidnaylor.co.uk, shoemoney.com, text-link-ads.com, webguerrilla.com, and jeremy.zawodny.com. Also if a site is like a Google.com or Yahoo.com, you get the "Priceless!" response. As an FYI - SEW Blog is worth over 6k per month for a single link. More details at the link building blog.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

MSN Search blog posted that they added a new meta tag to the mix, one that allows Webmasters to specify if they want or do not want, to use the ODP title as the title in the MSN Search results. As many of you know, sometimes Google and others use the dmoz title in their search results page as the title of your listings. Many Webmasters don't like search engines who do that, they prefer the search engines use the text within the title tag of the page and not the dmoz title. MSN Search now allows you to opt out with the following meta tag(s).

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

or

<META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">

Excellent news! Hopefully, Yahoo will do the same for Yahoo! Directory titles, Google will do the same, and anyone else.

Forum discussion (I admit, I started three of them but this needs to get out) at:

• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Web Work Shop Forums

As Kim reported here back in January 2006, the magazine Search Marketing Standard has finally been sent out. I received my copy over the weekend and just reviewed the topics now. The contents of the fairly thin first edition includes:

• 15 Biggest Myths in Search Marketing Exposed by David Rodnitzky
• An Interview with Perry Marshall by Andrey Milyan
• Measuring SEO Success with Web Analytics by Michael Nguyen
• Managing Your PPC Bids: 4 Most Important Things to Consider by Kevin Gold
• Targeting the Tail: How to Get the Most Out of Every Marketing Dollar by Alexandre Brabant
• Product Review: Dynamic Bid Maximizer Advance 3.0
• Industry Watch
  • Google Insider by Tom Dahm
  • Click Fraud Alert by Boris Mordkovich

They have about 19 advertisers, including WebmasterWorld's PubCon. They sent out, reportedly, over 15,000 of them. They put a free plug for this blog in the magazine, which is appreciated. The magazine seemed a bit thin, but it is the first edition.

Continued forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that the Google Wireless Transcoder (GWT) does not obey the noarchive meta tag to tell Google not to cache a particular page and does not serve up the ads, including AdSense on the page.

I do not have an example of Google not obeying the cache command, but simplicity posts that he tried it on a page he has the meta tag on, and it indeed caches it.

You can test it out by going to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and entering in an example URL there.

Regarding not showing ads, including AdSense, you can clearly see that all my "premium sponsors" including the AdSense ads are removed from the GWT.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week we took a look at the Measurability of Search Engine Ads this week we have a new thread that has sparked the interest of many top names in the business. The thread is named The ROI from SEM can not be measured accurately and resides over at Search Engine Watch Forums. The thread creator starts off with a really long post. I summarized it as follows;

Big Brand X has PPC ads for the the keyword phrase of the Brand Name of Big Brand X.

That keyword phrase brings in $10,000 in sales per day but costs $5,000 per day on PPC spend.

You remove the keyword phrase from the campaign and you have the same gross sales on your site.

So in essence you are saving $5,000 per day.

But the tracking tools show you have a ROI of $5,000 per day.

He is fighting a battle with his company, to keep the campaigns live, due to the above example. He has received a ton of advice, including;

Simply bid with PPC using same/similar ads for a different site or subsite. Heck, for a spend that size you could alternate every hour (or any other way you wanted to) for as long as it takes to get the information necessary, as long as you were using PPC software capable of making those changes on the fly. Use a second company if necessary.

Treat the PPC as you would the banner ads, just trickier to control. It sounds like all you really need to do is show the ROI (or lack thereof).

And more. But the bottom-line, if he doesn't make it happen, the affiliate will, as Mikkel points out;

My best advise for a client like that would be: Drop search marketing and leave the market to your competitors.

Interesting discussion, forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are two recent threads on the topic of what Matt Cutts and Google define as a relevant or related link. As many people know, Google has become very picky over the types of links you get and how much they matter to ones rankings. Also, recently, in Matt Cutts's blitz of interviews, he discussed links and Google's take on them. This sprung the recent discussion in the forums on relevant linking, in the eyes of Google.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Read those two threads to get the run down.

Adam Lasnik, Google's new poster boy, wrote a thread at WebmasterWorld named Google's site: query returns bad results - now being fixed. In that thread he links to a Inside Google Sitemaps blog entry the describes the site command bug in more detail.

They explained they found a "few" bugs with the site command which would show less or supplemental results for your particular search. The two bugs they listed are;

site: queries where you type in a trailing slash (such as site:www.example.com/)
site: queries for a domain with punctuation (such as site: www.example-site.com)

They said, they hope to fix it in the next few days. Until then, they recommend using the site:www.example.com syntax.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week, the folks at Yahoo! Publisher Network, gave me some great news. They told me they would be launching direct deposit for the YPN publishers, starting Friday night (a few days ago). Here is the run down of my notes...

(1) Direct Deposit was big request from feedback from:
(a) One on One Interviews with 20 publishers
(b) Customer Satisfaction Surveys
(c) Blogs/Forums/Email feedback

(2) Direct Deposit Features
- Shorter payment cycle
- Added Direct Deposit option (default option for new publishers)
- Withholdings option (they will take out taxes for you if you want, optional)
--- On the google front:
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/03/google_adsense_2.html
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001726.html
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=9909
- If a payment fails due to bank or tax reasons, you will be emailed automatically and a prompt alert will go on the YPN home page with links to the page you need to fix.
- Payments placed on the 25th of each month if balance is $100 or more

Yes, Yes, the forums are rejoicing over this news.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

A thread at WebmasterWorld talks about how one can get more relevant Google AdSense ads to display on their pages. Often, when you just put up AdSense, the AdSense spider may be confused about what your page is talking about. The code might be cluttered with navigation content, footer content, other ads and other information, where what the page is actually talking about is not the same as what the AdSense ad is targeting.

So what can you do?

Simple, use "Section Targeting." What is it? Well, AdSense explains that it allows you to define "sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content." You can tell AdSense, this is the content that is critical to the page. Google introduced Section Targeting in October 05'.

How do you do this?

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An other recently featured thread at WebmasterWorld is named What Can I do about Blog, Forum, and Community Spam? Spam in blogs, forums, and other types of online communities is exponentially getting worse. Heck, I even turned off and disabled completely the commenting and trackbacks ability a couple days ago. I now required people to go to our forum to comment. Why? Because the spam was getting so bad, that it was greatly affecting the performance of accessing the site and also affecting other applications. I disabled it, and presto, we are back in business.

So what can community Webmasters do?
- Well, they can take an extreme and turn of blog comments and blog trackbacks, like I did
- Require registration
- Have active moderators
- Use captchas
- Disallow or flag certain regions via geo-detection
- Use throttle limits

What is interesting, one person claims they blocked certain geo regions and noticed a 2 percent drop in traffic, but a 95% drop in spam.

More ideas in this members only section at WebmasterWorld.

Now that I possibly convinced you that SEO is different by engine, how do you build links that Yahoo! would find important? That is the featured discussion at WebmasterWorld named Yahoo - Where to Start with Link SEO.

I'll summarize some of the points, but the thread is worth a read...

• Get ODP/Dmoz links
• Get related directory links
• Trade links with related but not competing businesses
• Send out articles for other sites to syndicate (include links in them back to you)
• Use Yahoo!'s Site Explorer Tool
• Link bait!
• Get on the good side of bloggers
• KEY: Try to get the attention of local media

Now, don't these all work at also Google & MSN? Or maybe not...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the past 6 months, ever since MSN really entered the search space, SEOs have now began talking about optimizing differently for each search engine algorithm. Back in the old days, there used to be a handful of search engines that people had to worry about. Then there was just Google, really. But not it is more diverse - we have four search algorithms to worry about. We have Google, we have Yahoo, we have MSN and we have Ask.com, which is increasing share each day.

ProjectPHP, Cre8asite Forum administrator, started a thread named Do Search Engines Use One Algorithm For All Results? The obvious answer to me is no, they all use different engines. But what you typically find these days are that people have one optimization strategy for MSN and Yahoo and then an other optimization strategy for Google. So how do you work that? You can cloak - oh no you can't! You can build different sites for different engines. Work different pages or subdirectories of your site for different engines. Or you can pay them al off. :)

But seriously, the thread gets into the heads of what is going on today, in the trenches of SEO. If I tweak for engine X, will that hurt my rankings on engine Z? Do you believe all engines share the same algorithm? I don't. Do you?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Microsoft's adCenter is now out of beta but the support team doesn't think so. You should read some of the reports at this or this and even this thread from WebmasterWorld Forums.

The first thread has six of six members complaining about how poor the adCenter customer support is. Here are some quotes;

If I had to rate adCenter support on a scale from 1-10 with 10 being best, I would be generous at giving them a 2.

Yes the telephone support people are horrific - I actually kind of feel bad for them because look how bad the product is. I'm just not going to call them anymore

Overall it has been a terrible experience. 1 outta 10.

Yeah this program has no business being in business in its' current state.

The second thread shows how an old help page had a number for pre-beta period for Singapore-English support. He called the number and got someone's, what appears to be, a Nextel cell phone voicemail box. That page has now been removed.

The final thread reports the help feature on the adCenter page does not work.

Webmasters are reporting over at WebmasterWorld that MSN Search has been dropping pages of their sites. I am not sure how similar these reports at to the Google issue but it seems that it is about "site quality" as well.

The thread creator said;

Can anyone tell me if they experienced this lately on MSN Search. I had a site doing quite well for some very good keywords, top 10 rankings. Site has about 12 pages internally and about 20,300 backlinks according to Yahoo. As of a week or two ago when I do a search for MYdomain.com I get a total of 4 pages back and they do not include the index.html page. I wrote to MSN Search and they gave me a reply stating that only high quality sites will rank well and maybe my site is not linked correctly (the index page is linked to from every page on the site)?

Now he is completely out of the MSN Search index. Many other Webmasters have reported similar results from MSN Search. Some believe it may have to do with MSN not handling 301 redirects properly, but not all are reporting 301s as the issue.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that some Yahoo! Search Marketing customers have turned some of their keywords "offline" to only see them turn back on. One member describes the process that makes this happens as follows:

1) Take some terms offline that you're losing big money on (which is likely much of your Overture account these days) 2) Later, your account runs out of money 3) Add money to your account as usual to bring it back 4) Oops--your money losing terms are somehow back online!

I believe the new Yahoo! ad system will correct these issues with the current ad system.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread asks if the prices of search ads rise with the price of gas prices. Some reason that Google AdSense (or YPN) publisher's costs are going up, so the ad prices must go up. Others reason that Google AdWords (or YSM) advertiser's costs are going up, so they have less disposal income to spend on ads, because it is all going to gas, so the ad prices will go down.

But as more new advertisers get into the PPC advertising game, costs tend to go up. It is the nature of the auction based pricing mechasinim.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Yahoo! Design Preview became available earlier this week. Since then folks have been testing it out. One thread at WebmasterWorld notes that if you are testing the new design (more on that here) and if you go to Yahoo! Travel you will notice the search box is already filtered to show segmented results for travel search.

After you conduct a search, the results come from "Yahoo! Travel Guides."

It seems to me, that this was also implemented at the normal, non preview, Yahoo! Travel section. I am not sure if it is exactly new - but it is interesting to point out, nevertheless.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint forum thread asks members Which topic is your bread and butter? Basically, which niche topics are you targeting with Google AdSense, and bringing in a respectable income from? Here are some of the responses...

• Finance Topics
• Beauty Topics
• Security Software Topics
• Photography Topics
• Entertainment/Gossip Topic
• Regional Antique Maps Topics
• Technology Topics

And more..

But I find it hard to believe that the ones bringing in big money would reveal the niche that does it for them in an open and public forum thread. :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I reported at SEW blog that Google Video Makes It Easier & Faster To Upload. The folks at WebmasterWorld are discussing it now. One Mac user is happy with the change. But the other commenter said he is upset with Google, not about the technology, but about how the producers of the videos are treated. They create content, give it to Google, but they have no profile page for the producer.

What is astounding is googles lack of credit to the publisher, no profile page, just an unclickable url. So, this is really google branding, we takes your content, no credit for you. do no evil to G$! Bad google, another shining example of total disrespect for those who make the medium happen.

youtube.com has a nice profile deal set up so that you can learn more about the person uploading, go to their web site etc., pretty cool (and fair).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

How do you comment on an article written at the Search Engine Roundtable?

We suggest you either comment directly at the thread being referenced in the post or going to our forums and starting a new thread on the topic. If you are not a registered member at the forum, you will need to register an account at http://forums.seroundtable.com/register.php prior to starting a new thread or adding feedback to a current thread.

We recommend adding a link to the article within the new thread you are creating. We also recommend you add a descriptive title to the thread.

Accepting comments within the Movable Type framework was just too much for the servers. We had to turn off all built in commenting and trackbacks due to the level of stress being placed on the server from spam and fraudulent comments and trackbacks.

Questions, start a thread in our blog feedback section.

We scold Ask.com for not using PPC to promote their brand but we most praise Yahoo! for using Google AdSense for promoting their brand.

A WebmasterWorld thread notes that Yahoo! is using Google's contextual ad program, Google AdSense, to promote its own product. It is important to note, that Yahoo! may not be directly advertising in the Google AdWords program. It may be a Yahoo! affiliate who is doing the leg work here. If that is the case, and it probably is, then I will take away my praise from Yahoo! Nah, I am just kidding. Yahoo! has an affiliate program, that deserves some praise also.

It is also important to note that although I scolded Ask.com for not using PPC to promote their search engine, sem4u posted that he did see Ask.com ads in the Google AdSense program as well. So there you go.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator, skibum, posted a thread asking an obvious question no one else asked. Why is Ask.com spending all this money on TV ads and not spending a dime on PPC ads?

Do a search at Google for search engine, do you see an ad or organic listing for them on the first page? I don't.

Do a search at Yahoo for search engine, do you see an ad or organic listing for them on the first page? I don't.

Do a search at MSN for search engine, do you see an ad or organic listing for them on the first page? I don't.

So, Mr. Ask.com, search engine, why aren't you targeting search users looking for other search engines?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google AdWords has added a method of choosing the ad delivery method you prefer. The two options include:

Standard: Show ads evenly over time
Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible

Google has more details on this new campaign based setting here.

Standard delivery
This option is automatically selected for you, and is best if you want your ads to reach a wide range of users over the course of the day. We'll spread your ad impressions across the day to make sure you don't accrue all of your clicks early on. However, if your budget is set below the system-recommended budget, your ads may not receive all possible impressions.

For example, if you want to spend US$30.00 over 30 days, your daily budget would be US$1.00. With standard delivery, your ads would appear throughout the day, from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m.. If your system-recommended daily budget is US$3.00, you may receive only one third of all impressions possible during that time.

Accelerated delivery
This option is best if you want to increase the likelihood of spending your full budget each day. We'll display your ads as often as possible until your budget is reached. If your budget is set below the system-recommended budget, your ads may not receive all possible impressions.

For example, you might choose to spend US$30.00 over the next 30 days, with a daily budget of US$1.00. If your system-recommended daily budget is US$3.00, you may receive all possible impressions until your budget is reached. Therefore, you could spend your entire budget between 12:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.. In this case, your ads wouldn't appear again until 12:00 a.m. the next day.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts has been on a roll by providing tons of good information for SEOs to chew on, probably for the next two months. He came out with a interview with Mike Grehan the other day, and last night he was live on WebmasterRadio with Danny. Also last night, he posted one of his most detailed explanation of what the heck is going on with BigDaddy at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/.

What I recommend is that you read the whole thing, not once, but twice - if bid daddy has affected you. You will also notice there are 106 comments already in that post, I don't know how Matt handles it all.

Forum discussion on Matt's blog entry at Cre8asite Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

How does one get listed in the Google Coop Directory? As many of you know, I have been all over the Google Coop. I wrote about What the Google Coop Is, then I dynamically implemented it here, then I asked for feedback on my implementation and finally posted my thoughts on how easily it is to spam the coop.

Danny Sullivan started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named the Unofficial Google Subscribed Links List giving SEMs a place to post there coop subscribed links for others to learn about and subscribe to. So how does one get listed at the true Google Coop Directory? Honestly, I have no idea. I know we have just been listed in the latest category and news category. Google has a FAQ that says;

17. How does Google Co-op determine what appears in the directory?

Google Co-op uses a variety of algorithms to determine which contributors appear in the directory. These factors include, but are not limited to, how many subscribers and labels a contributor has-- as well as how successful a contributor's labels are at connecting users with the information they are looking for.

But, right now, it seems to be a manual process. So keep thinking of way to provide unique and useful Google Coop Subscribed Links and you can be included also. Oh don't forget to subscribe to our coop listing.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Since our RSS feeds here were temporarily broken by sending back a 'Host not found' error due to DNS issues, I have been placed in the Bloglines penalty box. I am told, that if Bloglines received such a 'host not found' response, it won't try your feed again for an other 24 hours. This 24 hour delay, is called the Bloglines penalty box.

I thought it would be interesting to document this for others who may be interested in it and just for tracking purposes here.

Any feedback, feel free to comment at our forums - comments were disabled in the blog for a bit...

Finally, Google launched Google Notebook at http://www.google.com/notebook/. To get started you will need either IE or Firefox, Safari is not yet supported. TechCrunch has a nice review of the notebook in action. But what do the forum folks think of it?

Over at WebmasterWorld moderator eWhisper calls Google Notebook a "pretty useful product." But member willmullis calls it "the coolest products that Google has come out with."

I personally have not played with it much yet. I am sure it will be used by many.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Yahoo! is stealing clients from their Yahoo! Search Marketing consultants (SEMS). The thread creator explained that he paid money and went through the necessary requirements to be a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and what he lost a client out of it.

However, two of my clients, who already had sponsored search accounts, were called [by Yahoo!]. One of them actually decided to cancel with us, believing the free fast track service was all they needed to manage their account, and our expertise was no longer necessary. The other client referred the cold caller to me, saying we handled ppc for them. This guy had the nerve to ask me to refer any new customers we have to HIM.

We reported Google stealing AdWords clients a year ago, and then again a month ago where they stole Israeli clients. Does it really all comes back to this cartoon?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: OvertureRep replied saying;

Hi All, I appreciate you posting this information and I’ve passed it along to our sales and agency teams as a heads up.

Batleon- Congrats on making Ambassador status. I’d like to address your concern. YSM values the role agencies play in the SEM value chain, and respects the contributions agencies bring to the engagement. We have strict guidelines for our sales team – and those guidelines are designed not to disrupt the relationship that advertisers have with SEMs or agencies.

Please feel free to send me a private message if you want to address further.

YahooSarah

Jenstar posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums asking members to post their questions for Will Johnson, the VP & GM of the Yahoo! Publishing Network. She will be interviewing him live, I think next Monday at 2PM (EST) at WebmasterRadio.FM. Some of the questions already listed include; international publisher launch date, direct deposit, better targeting, and so on.

Ask you questions at DigitalPoint Forums .

Also note that tonight Danny Sullivan is interviewing Matt Cutts on WebmasterRadio.FM.

This time the new Yahoo! home page that we showed is truly available for beta testings. You can test it out by going to http://www.yahoo.com/preview and following the steps. You can also read a full review of the new design here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As we continue to watch and report on the issues over at Google.com, we notice more and more weirdness in the Google SERPs. Reported at Search Engine Watch Forums that a site:www.yahoo.com command search at Google will provide three homepage results from Yahoo.com.

Notice the three different descriptions selected for the same URL? Look closely at the way the second URL is listed, looks a bit funky - no? Looks like ASCII like characters. Also the third result, the "m" in the .com is ASCII code %EF%BD%8D for "m".

A site command search for site:yahoo.com without the www brings back 360,000,000 results. So is this a Yahoo! server issue or a Google indexing issue? I am not sure.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Dave started a thread named PPC Analytics is only wishful thinking that possibly may be the best thread ever started at our forums, ever. The discussion goes deep into the question of the true measurability of search ads, compared to other marketing initiatives. I am going to pull out a few quotes from the thread, but if you have time, you should read it - it isn't that long.

But let's say the average revenue was in the area of 10 million and the PPC contribution was about 1 million and seasonal spikes and drops can be as much as 5 million... The margin of error would be grater than the PPC contribution. A drop in 1 Million could be easily attributed to other factors like seasonality or competitive conditions.

You can not measure how many people would have made a purchase anyway with search the way you can with Banner advertising. Search analytics can not measure lift against a control group who does not see search ads during the same period of time. The ads are either there or not. Lift if any in sales could be easily attributed to other factors like seasonality or competitive conditions for the reasons above.

The argument is, if the lift in search can not be accurately measured because of this limitation. You could argue that it might be possible to drive more sales on the website if you do no search marketing at all and save the money to do something else like a TV commercial, print ad or something cool or sexy that can't be measured either. Or just save the money.

Check out the thread, MugShot is doing an excellent job with his replies. Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you are a feed reader, you won't see this. But the RSS feeds are temporarily broken. I switched over my DNS information from Register.com to Moniker.com and forgot to plug in the CNAME for the feeds URLs. So, this propagated overnight and didn't have the correct CNAME. I just updated it this AM. Hopefully it will resolved quickly.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

A funny thread at WebmasterWorld shows a good intentioned member saying that he clicks on Google AdSense ads whenever he sees them to support the publisher. But he did not expect the response from the other Webmasters at the forum. Pretty much all of them shot him/her down as it being unethical to click on those ads, since it is costing the Google AdWords advertiser money.

Here is is word for word...

Good intention:

whenver i visit a website with adsense, i would give a click to the adverting firstly: because i think the webmaster provides some useful information to me, i should give him something in return. What's your choice in such occasion? :)

Maybe not...

That's not support that's stealing from the advertiser. Your argument amounts to idealism without the sentry of logic.

Bottom-line, just click on ads, if you are interested in the ads.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been received emails and notes asking me if there are any reports on a Yahoo! update. Well, there is one thread that I noticed at WebmasterWorld that has people discussing a bouncing pattern going on at Yahoo! Search. The deal is that not too many other forums are discussing this behavior, so it is hard to isolate if this is happening at a large scale or within a small niche of themes.

So you decide.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reseller has pulled out a post at WebmasterWorld linking to a Google Groups post by a Google Employee saying;

There are a few things to consider about our overall crawl and indexing pipeline. As part of some recent updates (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/) we're taking a much closer look at affiliate links, linkfarms, duplicate content, and other factors as described in our webmaster quality guidelines.

As with the Florida update, when Google went after sites that were perceived as going against Google Quality Guidelines, some good & clean sites were hit in the cross fire. With this, the same has happened, and it will always happen.

So if you are suffering, you can try posting in the Google Group or emailing Google, as specified in the thread.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts of Google announced that Google has hired a side kick to help him manage Webmaster communication. The new face to share the spotlight at Google is Adam Lasnik. You can read Adam's thoughts on joining Google and his role here. The deal is, Adam was an SEM & Affiliate marketer - one of the folks from the SEO community. That is why he was hired, to "advocate" for the Webmaster at Google.

Welcome Adam! We wish you much success at Google and can't wait to meet you at SES San Jose. And thank you, Matt and the whole search quality team for the wedding gift.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named What Do You Think Of Google Co-op? Future Spam Central? The thread is asking others, is the Google Coop easy to spam? It is a bit upsetting to read the thread, there is a ton of misconception about what the Google Coop is. I blame mostly Google for the misconception. They placed two very different services under one label, "Google Coop." The thing is, the Google Coop has two distinct services within it. The first is Topics which enables webmasters to "annotate" their pages, (i.e. tag their content), with "labels" - labels identified here. The second is Subscribed Links which is what I have been doing here. It enables you to tell your reader to subscribe to this site as a trusted source, and enable me to define queries that I want my content to match on, and provide you results back when you do a Google search. You can test it out by subscribing to my site, keep in mind, you can always remove it, after you subscribe, search on "SER" or "Yahoo" or "SEO", etc. I have added 100+ keywords, with 30 or so result sets tailored to that queries, that I feel you would find relevant to this site.

So is it spammable? Well, I have not fully implemented the "topics" version. But all I can say about that is that the result sets for topics results are very poor. When I first tested out those results sets, I was like, wow that is bad. So I figured I play with the Subscribed links service first.

First thing first. Google has not yet tied either of these services to how Google will rank a site in the pure organic results. For example, if I have 150 subscribers to my site and SEW has 200 subscribers, Google did not decide based on that, to rank SEW in pure organic results, higher than this site. Not yet. The same applied to topics, those with more labels on a specific topic, does not currently get higher rankings because of it. Will this change? I cannot say - it depends.

Once Google says that they will use the data from the Google Coop to determine site topic or popularity, then it will be abused. On the subscribed links side, if I knew that the more subscribers the higher my rankings are for a search performed by a non-logged in Google user, then I can possibly spam it. I would be able to create bots to create Google accounts, then automatically subscribe to my site, until I have thousands of fake subscribers.

Interesting discussion as long as we break out both topics and subscribed links. And if you trust me, then feel free to subscribe.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Since implementing the Google Coop product for this site, I currently have 21 subscribers, which is a lot, I think. But after using it, I think it can be quite useful for those who "trust" this site and the content on this site.

Currently, the special subscribed links will only show related matches for queries that exactly match on our category names, which is not so many. At the same time, I don't want subscribers to feel that this site is matching on all queries they enter in. If that happens, I am sure they will quickly unsubscribe. So I need to find a balance, of what queries I can dynamically implement that are relevant to those that "trust" me. Pretty cool how this system seems to be self-regulating.

Over the next few days, I will be adding support for searches and results with character sets !, ?, and :. Currently, we stripped those because of some issues with Google parsing them properly. We will be adding them in shortly. Also, we will be running the updates to Google once a day at noon time, I figure that is the best time and we don't need it to be done hourly or in real time. We will also be adding a static query set for searches on 'search engine roundtable,' 'seroundtable,' 'ser,' 'seo roudntable,' 'seoroundtable' and 'se roundtable' to display a dynamic result set of the three most recent posts.

Then later on, middle of next week, I will be adding a database to specific other query sets and which results should be returned. So I may add to my query set the keyword "seo." If someone searches on "seo," I would want it to display the three most recent results from the search engine optimization category on this site. I may do the same for queries on "google," "ask, "yahoo" and so on. But I will be keeping it relevant to this site.

My question to you, and you can either post a comment, start a thread, or email me - is how far should I take this and would you find this useful? Would you find it useful to get articles about "seo" at the top of the Google results from this site?

And if you have not subscribed yet, why not give it a try by clicking here.

This brings me back to my early post about seo changing so quickly.

Recent reports via WebmasterWorld note that several Webmasters made changes to their pages, specifically the title tag and the H1s and their rankings dropped drastically. Now, I assume these text changes were not incredibly drastic, where they changed the term they are targeting from (example) "Search Engine Optimization" to "Big Blue Pineapple Chair" (ah, it has been a while since I mentioned that chair).

Some specifically note that the changes they made were minor in detail.

It makes you wonder, if making any change to your page can have a drastic affect in your organic rankings at MSN Search. One Webmaster reported that his rankings are returning to normal.

There does not seem to be an algorithm or index update taking place at MSN. So it seems to be totally dependent on Web site changes.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forum reports that Google Analytics invitations are selling on eBay for over a hundred dollars. One specific invite sold on eBay for US $114.09 a few days ago. So much for Google making Urchin free. :)

But this is not uncommon for Google product invitations. When Gmail was hot, gmail invites were selling on eBay also, for at least double what Google Analytics sells for.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forum.

Sometimes when you do a Google Search you may see a link on some of the search results that say "'Translate this page." That is a sign that the page is mostly not written in English and Google can translate it using automated translation tools for you. But, a recent thread at WebmasterWorld notes that Google may sometimes offer the translate this page link even if the site is 100% written in English!

The Webmaster reports that his site is pure English but that the IP address of his server, although truely based in America, resolves to Argentina. So when you search on a result that matches his site, the search listings will contain a link for translate this page.

Tedster, WebmasterWorld administrator, accurately replies that "shouldn't happen," that Google should pick up on "different signals" such as language, meta data, links to the site and also server location. But Google should use a multitude of those criteria to make the determination if the "translate this page" link is necessary or not.

To possible situations here: (1) Google bug and (2) The Webmaster has some non-English content or meta data or links and with the combination of the server perceived location, Google serves up the "translate this page" function.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forum thread named Will SERPS be pointless in the future?, Will SERPS be pointless in the future? really gets folks thinking again about the future of search. Most people look at Google's 4 product announcement as Google moving away from search and focusing on non search related items. Heck, I even made that comment here yesterday. But then you take a step back and look at what companies like Google, Yahoo (specifically) and Ask.com are doing. They are all expanding.

Let's take a look at Google specifically, and limit it to those four new products. Google Trends, ok that doesn't tell us that much, but it does show Google keeps data over time and breaks it down by demographic criteria (we all knew this). Google Gadgets with Google Desktop, well duh, they are on your desktop, serving you real time information on what you are interested in. Google Notebook, well we don't know that much about it yet, but it will supposedly allow friends to share content and notes - um, again, content, private, details about registered users. Finally we have Google Coop where I can change the SERPs that you, yes you, see on your Google results page, simply if you subscribe. Now that is in your face.

Personalized search, trusted sites, trusted sources, tracking user preferences, always signed in registered users and then tailored search results. Is SEO the same today then it was yesterday. No, it has already changed. What will happen in a year? Wow, I can't even imagine how far this will be taken. But, seriously, step back, look around you at this present time, see what the SERPs look like.

Now, go discuss over at Cre8asite Forums. :)

ShandyKing posted a thread at our forums named Boston Legal Episode on SERPS, describing an episode of Boston Legal that mentioned SEO tactics. The show was based around a guy that wanted to sue a woman, his past girlfriend, for having a Web site that ranked well for "I hate my x boy friend."

The boyfriend claimed that the negative result "cost him nearly 40% of sales with his consulting business." ShadyKing explains that the defendant's lawyer asked his defendant, to just rank other sites above the negative results.

How classic is that? The world is learning our world in practical language.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This morning I described what is Google Co-op, but I also promised I would try to implement an example for this site. Well, we have implemented phase one of Google Co-op subscription links for this site. You can subscribe to the coop and then when you perform searches that are an exact match to one of the SER Categories, you should see the subscriber links results (if you are signed into your Google account) while searching.

It will ask you to login, if you are not, and then confirm your subscription. Soon after, if you search on any of our SER Categories by name you should see a result that looks like;

If you like, you can preview the results by clicking here and scrolling down the page to the bottom, where it says "Preview these queries." Click on an example query and you will see what it will look like.

So, what do you say, subscribe to us and test it out. Then searches like Google AdSense or Link Building will finally become relevant at Google. :)

Ben Charny wrote an eWeek article named Is 'Big Daddy' Choking Google? with a very nice roundup of the issues plaguing Webmasters since the Big Daddy Google infrastructure roll out, our latest update on that can be found here. Ben Charny used our community resources to document his story and has linked out to this site and our forums graciously, something rarely ever done by a well-known and respected publication.

Six paragraphs down, you will notice the link that reads "Many" goes to this site, an entry we named Pages Coming In & Out of the Google.com Results & Google Index where I summarized the forum discussion via links on the issues being reported at the various forums. Ben Charny continued by linking directly to WebmasterWorld forums, Search Engine Watch forum posts and to Matt Cutts's blog.

This is both good for Google and for or industry. Hopefully this will help Google prioritize search over some of the other things they have been dabbling in. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An other product Google released is named Google Trends, which is much easier to understand than Google Co-op. It basically shows you Web search and news search volume over time, broken down by region, city and language. I did a pretty large write up of it at SEW Blog named Fun With Google Trends and Danny has a great break down of what it really is also.

I would like to offer one more example, here, as a bit of payback for Danny's comment on the SearchCast about the Australians Fond Of Google; Vegemite Getting Jealous. In short, I had no idea what Vegemite was, supposedly it is a "dark brown, salty food paste made from yeast extract" to spread on bread or something. Danny said it is like Skippy in the US. So I thought it would be particularly interesting to see Google Trends compare the two, specifically using languages and regions.

Google Trends result for Skippy, Vegemite:

Skippy is in blue and Vegemite is in red:

As you can see from the chart, Skippy is way more popular. :)

But let's break it down by region and we will see that in Australia, Vegemite is way more popular, way more. In New Zealand, Vegemite is also more popular then Skippy, but not by much. But Skippy wins in all the other countries.

How about language? Well, Skippy wins for popularity in that break down. Australians speak English, so you see how popular Vegemite is in Australia just by how close Vegemite comes to Skippy.

Pretty cool tool? But there are many other uses for this tool. You can use it to predict trends, plan your SEM PPC spend and much much more. Is it the say all and end all tool? Definitely not, we are not even sure what data is being used exactly for this. So use with caution.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

As you know, Google has announced four new products yesterday, one of those products is named Google Co-op. Google Co-op enables you to create what are called "subscribed links," which basically allows you to create a Google SERP, define the title, description and the URL(s) to be displayed in the SERPs, for those who "subscribed" to your link. Danny defines this as "a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging."

You can create an XML feed, submit your feed to Google Coop and then enable people to subscribe to that Coop. There are currently dozens of subscriptions available for you to be a part of at the Google Coop Directory, I personally set up my profile and subscribed to Fandango.com. Now, when signed in, if I do a search on movies I will be presented with;

View Full Image

Clicking on the top Fandango link takes me to here, clicking on the specific movies, takes me directly to those movies. I can also "edit" or "remove" the link, editing takes you to http://www.google.com/coop/subscriptions which basically enables you to "unsubscribe," not sure why I need the "remove" link then, but whatever.

It also works by searching on specific movies, like Goal! The Dream Begins, and it looks like;

The link takes me directly to that movie.

Why does it work? Because Fandango, submitted an XML file defining all those searches and for those who have subscribed to that subscription, they will be shown predefined results. How does that work? See the developer guide, I hope to create a few myself soon, that you can subscribe to.

Is it spamable? Ha. Well, lets give you the forum threads on this topic. I would call it more hackable, than spamable...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums and also WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan hosts an almost daily radio show/podcast at WebmasterRadio.FM named The Daily SearchCast, as far as I know, this show is listened to by many top SEOs and SEMs daily, I personally try to listen to ever episode. This coming Tuesday, May 16th at 11:30AM (EST), Danny will be at the GooglePlex, in Matt Cutts's office, asking Matt questions, live on The Daily Search Cast.

Both Danny and Matt have more details on their blogs about the event.

Currently Danny is requesting the submission of questions to ask Matt during the show. Currently on Danny's list are;

(1) Issues with missing pages some are reporting & the Google's "out of space" concerns

(2) Dealing with domain names (see Does Google Use Whois Information?, Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership)

(3) Sitemaps and spam checking tools (see Google Sitemaps Adds Spam Checking, New Webmaster Help Center & Other Features)

Number two should be very interesting, so clear your schedule and jump on the feed. More details on how to listen over here.

Do you want to submit questions, visit the Search Engine Watch Forum discussion thread and submit your question(s).

Google became a domain registrar back in January 2005. Since then SEOs have been trying to determine to what extent, if any, does Google use this data when ranking sites in the search results. We have covered this extensively in the past with articles named:

• Google Admits to Improve Search Quality with Registrar Data
• Changing Domain Name Ownership Whois Information & Google Search Ranking Impact
• The "Google Certified Domain Change" Proposal

Bill Slawski posted a detailed analysis of this at SEW blog named Does Google Use Whois Information? and then followed it up with a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums. In those discussion, Bill shows how a new ICANN definition may disallow Google from using such data for purposes outside of the scope of providing "a point of contact when there are technical problems with a web site." Ranking Web sites based on registrar data is well outside of that scope.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

SEOjunkie posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums on a tool he built named the Google Ban Checker. The tool uses "typical checks like site: commands and it automatically checks the sites you link to to see if any of them are banned," according to SEOMoz.org.

It is also important to note that if you use Google Sitemaps, Google may also notify you of a penalty.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo! Search Blog announced that AllTheWeb is the first of the Yahoo! owned search properties to test out a new search technology called Livesearch. Livesearch is similar to Yahoo! Instant Search in that it shows results as you type, but it also "related queries, spelling suggestions, and enables you to use keyboard shortcuts to help you find the right query faster to get to the results that you want." Let me tell you, it feels incredibly quick and sleek.

Only issue, I went to it on Apple Safari and saw this message.

For an optimal Livesearch experience, we only support the following browsers with javascript at this time: Windows 98/2000/XP - IE 6.0, Firefox 1.5 Mac OSX 10.3 - Firefox 1.5 Mac OSX 10.4 - Firefox 1.5 We plan to support Safari soon. Please let us know if there is interest. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yahoo!, yes there is interest.

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

A Search Engine Watch Forum member posted a thread named Yahoo.it censored for 'preteen'? Basically, if you do a search on the term "preteen" in Yahoo! Italy (image), nothing comes up, but the same search at Yahoo.com (image) brings up results.

Danny Sullivan ventures a guess that "Yahoo got some complaint, perhaps a legal one, about child porn sites in its results in Italy."

Who knows for sure, could be some whacky glitch or something.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Today we have opened up a moderator only discussion thread (in our series of mod only discussion) to the general public named Site Wide Links: Do They Help or Hurt?

We have some excellent responses from Rand of SEOMoz, Donna from SEOScoop, Ben from RankSmart and also Darrin Ward. They go over the historical changes of SEO and site wide links, they discuss the value in obtaining them today and they also discuss the risk/reward of the site wide links.

The details are available at our forums, feel free to add your two cents.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Early this month, we gave a short roundup of threads where people have reported Pages Coming In & Out of the Google.com Results & Google Index. Yesterday, GoogleGuy finally chimed in at WebmasterWorld on the issue, or a part of the issue, stating;

Just to give folks an update, we've been going through the feedback and noticed one thing. We've been refreshing some (but not all) of the supplemental results. One part of the supplemental indexing system didn't return any results for [site:domain.com] (that is, a site: search with no additional terms). So that would match with fewer results being reported for site: queries but traffic not changing much. The pages are available for queries matching the supplemental results, but just adding a term or stopword to site: wouldn't automatically access those supplemental results.

I'm checking with the crawl/index folks if this might factor into what people are seeing, and I should hear back later today or tomorrow. In the mean time, interested folks might want to check if their search traffic has gone up/down by a major amount, and see if there are fewer/more supplemental results for a site: search for their domain. Since folks outside Google couldn't force the supplemental results to return site: results, it needed a crawl/index person to notice that fact based on the feedback that we've gotten.

Anyone that wants to send more info along those lines to bostonpubcon2006 [at] gmail.com with the subject line "crawlpages" is welcome to. So you might send something like "I originally wrote about domain.com. I looked at my logs and haven't seen a major decrease in traffic; my traffic is about the same. I used to have about X% supplemental results, and now I hardly see any supplemental results with a site:domain.com query."

Chew on that for a bit. GoogleGuy then came back to answer some more specific questions. He admits to perfectly clean sites, with lots of pages, dropping pages out of the index, but only slightly losing search referral traffic from Google.com. He also says that you should "expect a reindex of most of the supplemental results over time."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and huge hat tip to Donna for spotting this.

A WebmasterWorld thread named 8k to invest, how to expand asks members to discuss where to allocate money you have to build up your site, in order to make more in Google AdSense revenue down the road. Here are bullet points of ideas mentioned in the thread:

• Google AdWords Traffic
• Improve Site Design
• Link Building Purchases
• Buy or Hire Content
• Translate Articles in Other Languages
• Advertise Offline
• Buy Out Other Sites
• Come Up With a "Stickiness" Factor (Game/Idea/Tool)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Many people at WebmasterWorld are reporting that many of there "inactive keywords," the keywords that were very low quality ads and removed from displaying on Google.com, have been set to "active" once again. One member reported having about 9,000 inactive keywords and now they are down to 1,804 inactive keywords, and they have done nothing to encourage the change. Others are reporting similar behavior in their Google AdWords accounts.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Nathan Weinberg reports that Googlers Advised To Limit Choice by professor Barry Schwartz, not me - the other one who has his fame from teaching and publishing on psychology, and wrote the very popular Paradox of Choice.

Nathan posted his presentation, where he urges Google to limit the choices available to the Google searchers. I did not have time to watch the hour long presentation, but I imagine this is kind of like the "invisible tabs" approach. So limit the options, and you can give the user more by doing so - "more is less."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

There is no doubt that Wikipedia entries tend to rank well in the search engines these days. Many SEOs would like to get their company, products and services listed in the Wikipedia because of this. So how can you write a Wikipedia entry and have the best possible chances that the entry will remain and, more importantly, grow within the Wikipedia community?

Added: Wikipedia has a notability criteria guideline, which describes how the authors of the Wikipedia should address certain issues such as, listing companies, products and services, recommendations of such and more.

That is the current question at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread named Help Getting My Company Into Wikipedia.

Jeff Watts from National Instruments gives a presentation at SES conferences where he talks specifically about this. We covered the session twice, one time at NYC and the other at Chicago. He provided excellent details on what makes a Wiki entry stick and what make the Wiki entry snip.

The Wikipedia is "self-regulating," meaning the community itself is quick to remove content that they deem inappropriate or promotional. That is why it is critical to write the Wiki entries in an unbiased manner, from a "neutral point of view." When writing the entry, use data, facts and stats, do not give the promotional swing to it. Do not try to embed links in your content, that would happen naturally on its own, just don't do it to start - let the community do it for you. In short, be dry - put up product specs and not product marketing materials.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, I spent some time on the nice folks at Yahoo! about the new ad platform they announced yesterday. Danny blogged a ton of details, so I'll try not to be too repetitive, but I will try to be concise.

What was released yesterday? The new API and specs of the project.
Who does it affect now? Not many people.

What will be released in Q3 2006? A whole new user interface, which I was previewed. The interface is very user friendly with a ton of good information at your finger tips to make your campaigns. In addition, they changed the language used in the console to match how SEMs talk and not how programmers talk. Of course they added, geotargetting elements, nice stats that show the "share of clicks" based on your spend and your "quality index" and other features Danny talked about.

What is this "Quality Index?" Well, the exact sauce of it was not revealed, but you can imagine it has to do with your CTR. So those rumors were true. The rumors that people were testing it in Sweden or Denmark, that was supposedly false. When will the quality score be integrated into the ad ranking? Some time after the new interface is released, but not at the same time as the release of the interface. The deal is, Yahoo! is trying to still figure out what will be best for the advertiser. So when I asked, if the "visible quality index" will be shown on the release of the new interface, they said they were still unsure. On one hand, they want to show the advertiser the data right away so they can get accustomed to it. On the other hand, they do not want to confuse the advertiser, to suggest it matters (at that time) in the ad ranking.

So we still have some questions, but as we get closer, I am sure they will get resolved. Overall, I am pretty happy with what I have seen.

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

Discovery reports at Search Engine Watch Forums that MSN adCenter, now known as Microsoft adCenter is to pilot in the United Kingdom in June 2006. Microsoft adCenter recently came out of beta and part of that beta launch was the announcement that the UK can play with it in June.

g7submit at the forums warns that UK advertisers are "conservative," and he wonders if Microsoft can compete with Google.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

When you search at Google.com on certain keyword phrases, you may see the sponsored listings at the top of the page. Those listings have a blue background, so that they are clearly labeled as paid listings. But, did you know, if you click on the blue area, with no ad text, it will still take you to the advertisers landing page and charge the advertiser?

As you can see from the image above, I boxed out the blank area, that if you click within, you will be taken to the advertiser who is closest to your mouse click on the left.

ShandyKing at our forums says he sometimes clicks on a page to drag the page down. When he does this at Google, he some times accidently clicks on an ad, even though he is not clicking on any ad text.

Do you have ad "clumsiness" that costs advertisers dollars?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Mid-February we reported on a new Yahoo home page design. WebmasterWorld shows that you can now test the home page yourself. Go to http://events.yahoo.com/326123171.html and follow the steps.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

On Friday at SEW Blog I reported that Google was being sued by Nassau County Legislator, Jeffrey Toback for profiting on the sale of child pornography. We have some discussion on Google AdWords showing Child Prostitution Ads from the past. So is Google really profiting with a smile? I doubt not, and I doubt Jeffrey Toback believe so also. He clearly said that this suit is a "is a proactive step to keep children safe." It will basically make Google more proactive, instead of reactive with these sort of ads.

The folks at WebmasterWorld forums are exploring a few sites.

(1) Google technical glitches with the AdWords system to allow these sort of ads to be shown.
(2) A great political move by an electoral candidate (i.e. fight porn against Google).
(3) The whole suit is ridiculous and dumb.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Friday we reported that there were More Signs of Yahoo! Switching PPC Program to CTR Based Rankings but we are still unsure of this. Today, reuters and BBC News reports that Yahoo! is releasing the new ad system some time today.

Yahoo's new software system aims to let advertisers target potential customers more accurately based upon the words users type into the search box.

and...

The system is a software-based marketing console to help corporate advertisers and advertising agency buyers understand how to target relevant advertising to Web users based on the keyword search terms consumers use to find information on Web sites.

Advertisers can instantly calculate the cost of acquiring new customers using Yahoo's data and analytic system. Buyers can also test for the most effective ads and make rapid changes.

I should know more details, later this afternoon. I am continuously being told that the facts of my previous "rumor" post is wrong. So we will see.

Forum discussion on this specific topic at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld Admin, trillianjedi, posted a thread in the supporters forum (paid subscription required) named Referrer based delivery for contextual advertising. That is right, he has a theory that Yahoo! searchers are more likely to click on a contextual ad that says "Ads by Yahoo!" as compared to clicking on an ad that says "Ads by Goooooogle." Same applies to a Google searcher, where a Google searcher may be more likely to click on an ad that says "Ads by Goooooogle" as compared to clicking on an ad that says "Ads by Yahoo!"

That being said, and if this theory is right, would you cloak the ads based on referrer? You currently have to deploy some sort of cloaking for ads when on the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Specifically, blocking international users from viewing YPN ads, so you won't get your site banned for quality reasons.

I suspect the results of the theory may be posted in the WebmasterWorld Supporters forum at a later date.

Yes, we reported that Microsoft adCenter is out of beta but since it is out of beta, it does not mean it works in anything else but Internet Explorer. I am sorry for not clarifying that in my previous post. MSN / Microsoft adCenter does not currently work in Firefox and Safari.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is this active thread at DigitalPoint Forums named Yahoo Publisher Network Terminates More Publisher Accounts that discuss the recent termination of those who run Yahoo! Publisher Network on MySpace accounts. JenSense has a ton of details on this but that really sums it up. Yesterday, Willam Johnson, the face behind the Yahoo! Publisher Network team posted at the YPN Blog an entry named Maintaining a Quality Network addressing the DP thread.

As noted on certain message boards, some publisher accounts have been recently closed. These account closures were based solely on traffic quality issues

He explains that this program is still invite and beta only and Yahoo! is still working on balancing the publishers and advertisers. I think Yahoo!'s stand on removing some of the "lower quality traffic sites" is a good move and will help Yahoo!'s program stand apart from Google's AdSense program. With MSN, we have yet to see how they handle the issues of MFA (made for AdSense sites) and similar sites - not that all those sites terminated by Yahoo! were MFAs.

Will concludes that "maintaining the quality of our Network is vital to the success of everyone involved." I cannot agree more. Nice work Yahoo!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google AdSense blog announced new referrals available for you to begin earning money. If you refer someone to install Google Pack you will get $2 each time, and if you refer someone to install Picasa you will earn a $1 each time.

You can use text links or graphic links for referrals. Here are examples of the graphic links in action.

On April 5th Google added AdWords referrals, on March 3rd Google increased referral period to 180 days, on November 29, 2005 AdSense allows Firefox referrals for International users, on November 4th 2005 AdSense opened the Google referral program, but before that, they had an invite only Google Affiliate Program on February 2nd 2005.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

To clarify before even beginning, Yahoo! does not necessarily uses these techniques, they are just patent applications issued by Yahoo!

Bill Slawski posted an outstanding blog entry at SEW Blog named In Yahoo We Trust - The Link Spam Patent Application discusses one of Yahoo!'s papers and a patent application on fighting Web search spam.

(1) Combating Web Spam with TrustRank which discusses how non spam pages link to non spam pages, as Bill describes in short.

(2) Link-based spam detection which describes, similar to PageRank, the ability to "manually identifying reputable seed pages" and "separating reputable pages from spam pages."

Forum discussion on these topics at Cre8asite Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

PPC (member's forum name) started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asking How To Do Automatic Keyword Insertion With adCenter?

In the past we discussed how Google handles keyword insertion and I believe Yahoo! currently does not allow it. But MSN does.

werty replies to the question with many useful links to the Microsoft adCenter FAQs.

(1) What is dynamic text?

Dynamic text is a placeholder that automatically pulls in custom text you want displayed in response to certain search queries. You define what text should show up, and under what circumstances, and add the dynamic text placeholders to your advertisement where you want certain text to show up automatically in your ad title or description...

(2) How do I use dynamic text?

To use dynamic text, you define the location for each placeholder when you create your ad in the Ads tab. On the Ads tab, you can also insert the {keywords} placeholder in the Ad title or text, to display the keyword the customer uses in the Search. Then you may assign up to three dynamic text placeholders to each keyword, and define their content, in the Keywords tab.

(3) Can I use a dynamic text placeholder for my destination URL or landing page?

Yes, you can. The {param1} placeholder can be up to 1022 characters in length, which makes it ideal for use as a dynamic text placeholder for your destination URL. You associate this placeholder with a keyword on the Keywords tab, just as do would any other dynamic text placeholder. In fact, so many Microsoft adCenter customers are already doing so, that this placeholder is named "Keyword Destination URL {param1}".

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Simple and straight forward thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asks, "Does deselecting "Search Network" hurt my AdWords Quality Score?" The member who posted this thread felt that is may be reducing their quality score, thus reducing the ad ranks in Google.com.

In which, AdWordsRep responds, "Nope."

So simple, opting out of the Google AdWords search network option, does not, in itself, reduce your quality score.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Back in early April we wrote about rumors on Yahoo! Search Marketing switching to a new algorithm that ranks sponsored ads based on a CTR & PPC model. That was then kind of rejected;

As we've said in the past, Yahoo is working on a new search advertising interface that will provide businesses with a more powerful, easier to use advertising experience. We plan to introduce the new interface during the second half of this year.

However, today, one user posted a thread suggesting Yahoo! Search Marketing is actually testing the new algorithm out. The forum thread is at Search Engine Watch Forums and states;

Yahoo! seems to be performing some sort of test on certain accounts - one being my personal Yahoo! account. It is my guess (based on how that I see the rankings changed) that they are testing a pricing model similar to Google and MSN in which rank is a combinatin of CTR and max bid.

Wow - but Yahoo! denied this!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, I posted at SEW blog Ask.com Second TV Blitz Stars Chief Scientist Guru, Apostolos Gerasoulis. I have now spotted the commercials that you can view for yourself at http://about.ask.com/docs/about/televisionads.shtml.

Yes, Apostolos Gerasoulis, is one of the founders of Teoma, the search engine behind Ask.com. And yes, he is the one staring in the TV commercial. Do you think he did a good job of bring across the message? I am not sure...

Here it is in text:

RIMS This ad shows Apostolos Gerasoulis in action talking about how he loves "a tight ride." He explains how Ask.com understands the difference between "tight" cars and "phat" cars.

LIBRARIANS
This ad features Apostolos Gerasoulis among the bookshelves at Rutgers University, standing in the very spot where he came up with the idea for ExpertRank, our unique relevancy technology. Here he talks about how librarians prefer Ask.com, and the ongoing search for knowledge.

Share your thoughts at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Earlier today, I briefly noted that Google is dropping pages and then bringing those pages back into the Google index. The question is what is going on. Honestly, I have no idea. But at least, let me give you a ton of forum threads that may have some clues as to this weird Google behavior.

WebmasterWorld Forum Threads:

• Very Odd - Big Drops in SERPS Today April 26, 06
  
• Major Change in Supplemental Result Handling
  
• Somethings Up Right Now! -- 30 domains just went "home page only"
  
• Pages Dropping Out of Big Daddy Index

There are also other threads, but those are the most active and recent on the topic at WebmasterWorld.

DigitalPoint Forums:

• Is Google cleaning their index?
  
• supplementals was improving, now right back where we started?

A WebmasterWorld member posted a thread asking how critical it is to register a domain name for longer than a year. He asks, because his hosting company claimed that registering a domain name longer than one year, will improve his rankings in Google.

First, there is no conclusive evidence that the patent that Google issued that shows how a search engine can use domain registration length to determine the 'spamminess' of a site will be applied to Google results.

Second, if it did, why wouldn't spammers who can potentially make millions a month, spend an extra few hundred bucks to register a throw away domain for ten years.

Three, it is not right for a hosting or domain registration company to profit off of this, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: It seems Google has gone on the record saying domain registration length does not impact rankings.

WebmasterWorld moderator, pageoneresults, creates a new thread named Irrelevant Google News Alerts. He asks if others are receiving "irrelevant Google News Alerts" because he has been receiving news topics via email from Google that don't match his keyword subscriptions for three days now. One other member reported he noticed the same thing.

But has anyone noticed the problems with Google News subscription services? Are you guys happy with subscribing to Google News searches with your RSS reader or Google Alerts?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday we reported that MSN adCenter results were 100% propagating over to MSN Search & Windows Live.com. We suspected that something was up and it is. JenStar at the SEW Blog reports that MSN adCenter has fully launched and was renamed to Microsoft adCenter. Danny Sullivan wonders why it was not named "Windows Live adCenter," seriously, why wasn't it?

You can begin using adCenter in the US right away by visiting https://adcenter.msn.com/ and signing up.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has details on a new tool available to a select few Google AdSense publishers. The new tool is named "Site Diagnostic" and reportedly does the following;

This feature provides diagnostic reporting on errors our crawler encounters when attempting to serve ads to your site.

We've detected that you may have certain sites that our crawler is unable to access, so we can't deliver relevant ads. Using the Site Diagnostic feature, you can review the reasons why we weren't able to crawl a page and resolve the errors in order to receive more relevant ads.

If you want to see a screen shot, you can visit the thread or click here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forum.

There is a nice thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that asks Where are all the SEW Moderators? This question is in relation to the moderators not discussing or posting on Google's recent index page drops. I haven't really even covered the topic here, of Google dropping pages from the index and then re-including them and over again. With that specific topic, it is just too wild to say anything concrete.

This leads us to the question, as glengara points out in the thread.

Do Mods necessarily have answers unavailable to the rest of us peasants?

No, moderators, including myself, do not have all the answers. Moderators do not know it all.

It is the discussion in the forums that help everyone, moderators, members and lurkers learn it all.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Danny has a detailed write up on the rumors spreading from Wall Stree Journal article and also at CNN.

Microsoft has been in talks with Yahoo! about potentially acquiring a major portion of the company, according to a report published Wednesday. Members of the company's top management are considering a deal despite Microsoft's history of winning over major technology markets - think Web browsers - on its own, The Wall Street Journal said.

What if? Could it be? What is Google thinking? No way! Or maybe?

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

Jonathan Mendez notified me of a Google Groups Thread that shows many reporting that their Gmail emails sent to AOL are being returned. The error code people are receiving back from AOL is Error RLY:CS4, which is defined as;

EXPLANATION: This error message indicates that your email has been identified as coming from a server or web site that may have a compromised script or program available.

SOLUTION:
Please contact the server administrator or hosting provider for additional assistance.

Providers: This error message will allow the offending emails to stay in your mail queue. This will give you the opportunity to look at the offending mail, which should assist you in tracking down the compromised script.

No reports back yet that this is being worked on by Google or AOL.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A very information poll is taking place at WebmasterWorld asking;

Are you as happy with Adwords as you were last year?

There are only 13 responses so far and I hope to see more. Generally, the answer to the questions is NO.

Five members say they are happy with AdWords compared to last year.

Eight members say they are not as happy with AdWords this year, compared to last year.

Join the discussion/poll at WebmasterWorld.

Philipp Lenssen covered a new book named Google's PageRank and Beyond : The Science of Search Engine Rankings by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer from Princeton University Press. Reportedly, the book is incredibly mathematical, scientific and technical.

Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University (some of may you may know the name) gave the following review;

Comprehensive and engagingly written. This book should become an important resource for many audiences: applied mathematicians, search industry professionals, and anyone who wants to learn more about how search engines work.

Interested in a copy? Discuss it with others at DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld has a thread named Class Action Suit Filed Against YSM which discusses a Washington Post report that Yahoo is being sued for "syndication fraud." Syndication partners are those who place Yahoo! ads on their Web sites and products. Most of the law suit is based on Ben Edelman's uncovering of PPC Ads Found In Spyware With Auto Click Fraud.

A class-action lawsuit filed Monday against Yahoo! Inc. and group of unnamed third-parties accuses the company of engaging in "syndication fraud" against advertisers who pay Yahoo to display their ads on search results and on the Web pages of partner Web sites. The suit claims that Yahoo displayed these advertisers' online ads via spyware and adware products and on so-called "typosquatter" Web sites that capitalize on misspellings of popular trademarks or company names.

Potentially more explosive is the plaintiff's claim that Yahoo regularly uses its relationship with adware and typosquatting sites to gin up extra revenue around earnings time, alleging that the company is conspiring to boost revenue by partnering with some of the Internet's seamier characters. From the lawsuit:

The article also mentions typo-squatting issues where people go to a Web address, that is a typo of the Web address they really want to go to. They see ads on the site and click on them. This is a big business and has always rubbed people the wrong way. For some reason, Google's Domain Park, just now is getting a lot of attention. We wrote about it back in early January under the title DomainPark - AdSense for Domains Sparks Huge Forum Debate.

Bottom line with this law suit, probably like with Google, Yahoo! will settle out of court for a relatively small sum. Who will win here? The lawyers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is some speculation over at Search Engine Watch Forums that MSN has dropped Yahoo! Search Marketing ads completely for its own ads, MSN adCenter. jbgilbert in the thread notes that he has yet to see a YSM ad on MSN since May 1st.

He asks if this is for real or a temporary glitch. It is unlikely that MSN would switch over 100% to their ad network, prior to leaving beta.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Monday, some of the big news was Amazon A9 & Alexa Dropping Google for Microsoft's Windows Live Search product. It is always nice to let that type of news settle a bit and see what the forums have to say about it. We have three active threads, that I am aware of;

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

Many are happy to see more competition come Google's way. In this case, Google is the leader and Microsoft is the underdog, and who doesn't love an underdog? Some speculate that AOL may switch to Microsoft also, but that was shot down before.

DaveN mentioned on WebmasterRadio.FM yesterday that he thinks this is an incredibly smart move for Amazon. Amazon has generated so much buzz about A9 and Alexa with the announcement, it is huge. If they would of just resigned with Google, no one would have paid any attention. If they would have dropped Google for Yahoo, there would have been a splash. But partnering with Microsoft, now that makes a huge statement and generates a ton of buzz.

Forum discussion at:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums

I was searching on MSN Search this morning and noticed this weird debugging code under the search box that read;

LOC_GEOREDIR_GOTO_SITE

I dismissed it quickly as an issue with my browser. But it was not just an issue with my particular browser, it seems to have been an issue with other Mac browsers.

A WebmasterWorld thread notes the same error but by a user using a browser named Camino to browse. It seems to be gone now, but I found no reference to such a debugging code in the past.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An other WebmasterWorld thread asks Google penalizes non-payers? Basically, the thread creator has a client that decided he did not want to continue his account AdWords with Google. So to cancel, instead of calling and paying off his bill, he decided to have Google cancel the bill due to non-payment. The thread creator makes it sound like this is a common way of canceling accounts, I certainly hope not (ok back on topic).

Soon after they have lost rankings for all their keywords, outside of entering in the domain name. The speculation is that Google AdWords non-payment has triggered the organic results to change for that site. Everything we are told from Google would say that this is impossible. Google AdWords and Google Web Search results are completely independent of each other. Is this possible?

Well, forum members certainly think so. One member says, "I can see Google automating a system that throws domains into the black list when bills go unpaid after so many days. Clever." An other member said, "Not paying a bill is a pretty clear indication of black-hattery and dubious value to end users." But one member suggests to tell the client to pay the bill and then see if the organic rankings improve.

What do I think? I think that it the clients non-payment has nothing to do with his rankings drop in the organic results. I think there is something else going on.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld named YSM Platinum Service - Not! It is kind of funny, it shows the tale of a company that has been trying to spend a "5 figure GBP sum" with them and he won't get a call back from the Platinum service representative.

I have counted 12 days of the customer waiting to have a real conversation with his representative. And it is not like the customer didn't try to reach the rep. He called, what looks to be, five times in the past 12 days.

This may be an isolated case but that is up for you to judge.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in late March of this year, I reported at SEW Blog Yahoo Removed Block Result Feature From My Web. At that time, we did not have official word on Yahoo! removing the feature. Today, I spotted a WebmasterWorld thread that noted the Yahoo My Web FAQ had a new question named What happened to the block feature that enabled me to block any site from showing in my search results?

We have removed this feature from My Web. Previous users of the block feature can still access their blocked sites by clicking the Blocked Pages link under Go To in the My Web management Pages or Tags tabs.

So why has Yahoo! removed this feature from My Web? That is where the forum discussion comes in. Pure speculation, but some are saying that blackhat SEOs have made that feature unusable. I am not sure about that... The theory is that some how, blackhats blocked results of other My Web users, so that the results that go to the top, are their own sites. But that requires username and password of the searcher's Yahoo! ID. No? Maybe the feature wasn't being used and there was a lot of overhead?

The thread does state an inaccuracy. The thread creator says, "Google was anticipating doing something similar." Google has done something similar, they call it remove result and it is still active at Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you haven't seen it yet, go read the NY Times article named New Microsoft Browser Raises Google's Hackles. In short, Google is upset with Microsoft that IE7 comes with MSN Search predefined in the toolbar search box. Google is so upset about this that they have complained to the Department of Justice & the European Union.

Google is raising objections to the way that it says Microsoft, the incumbent powerhouse of computing, is wielding control over Internet searching in its new Web browser.

Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft.

The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors.

There is a huge forum thread on this topic at WebmasterWorld. The thread sums up the argument and as you can see, people are taking both sides. Here are some snippets from the thread;

Well done Microsoft. Hopefully MSN and Yahoo Search can increase their search engine market share and reduce Google monopoly power over us.

Google and other search providers have to pay for a place on the desktop or in the default Windows browser, while Microsoft doesn't.

Google is complaining and at the same time they have paid Dell a small fortune to install the google toolbar on all their pcs?

Microsoft and Google fighting it out can only be good for the webmaster.

Microsoft use their browser to promote MSN Search, Google uses Firefox and Opera to do exactly the same thing.

My thoughts? Well, I kind of posted them at Search Engine Watch Blog and I am glad Danny post-scripted with his own thoughts on the matter.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Chris Boggs, our Associate Editor here, has announced that he will be joining Avenue A | Razorfish as their "Search Strategist." This is a major move for Chris and I am very happy for him.

What is very interesting, in terms of our community, about Bogg's move was that part of his conditions in joining Avenue A / Razorfish was to remain a part of the SEM community. He has expressed to me that this was part of his conditions in joining the company. G3 Group, his previous employer, also allowed and encouraged Chris to be involved in the SEM community. I am so happy to see large, medium and small SEM companies understand the importance of being a part of the community that they are working within.

Chris Boggs not only writes valuable articles here, he is a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums and speaks often at the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Expect to hear a lot more from Chris Boggs in the coming weeks.

Congrats Chris!

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

DigitalPoint Forums reports that Yahoo! has added, what seems to be a totally irrelevant feature, to the Yahoo! Search results page. It does not work in all browsers, so it seems to be one of those tests, it works in Firefox. Do a search on anything, I did it on yahoo and you will noticed this big box with a yellow/brown header on the right side named "Buzz Popular Searches" and it constantly refreshes with popular searches ranked from 1 though 12.

The Yahoo! Buzz Index "is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read." But what does the listed searches in the buzz index have to do with my search query on "yahoo?" I have no idea!

View Large Image

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It is a shame to see Google themselves not following their own recommendations. At all the conferences, when asked about having a dozen domain names, what do you do with them? Google, as does everyone, say that you either put a unique site on the domain name or you 301 redirect them to the real domain name. So what is up with Google not 301 redirecting their names?

• http://googlecom.com/
• http://www.googlee.com/

Granted, some do 301 (or 302), http://www.gooogle.com/ but not all.

But check out all that duplicate content;

• http://googlecom.com/help/index.html
  
• http://googlee.com/help/index.html
  
• http://google.com/help/index.html

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I have been tracking forum discussions for years now and one thing I have been noticing over the past several months is how Yahoo! has been losing a lot of the internal forum buzz. Let me clarify that this does not apply to the Yahoo! Search Marketing or Yahoo! Publisher Network side of things, but rather the Yahoo! Search organic side. The forum buzz, to me, it seems, is at an all time low.

Who is to blame here? I don't know? Is Yahoo! not exciting anymore? Does Yahoo! not send enough qualified organic traffic for it to matter to SEMs? Is the lack of some old and well-known search representatives participation in the community having an impact? Is it that Yahoo! Search results seem to be not as relevant as the competitors? Is it all of them?

One personal result that bothers me is that a search on rustybrick doesn't list rustybrick.com as number one. Google seems to have no problems with it, MSN gets it kinda right, Ask.com does a superb job (I even got binoculars). Some people are blaming the recent Yahoo! Search issues to an RSS handling issue but I see enough evidence to prove that wrong sometimes and sometimes not wrong (depends on when you search - which is bad, really bad.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, named Is Yahoo! Web Search Losing Its Fire?

I have been noticing a patters of posts where more and more people are claiming that Google is posting JavaScript forms. All of those posts, including this one, all have the same story. Basically, if you have a clean URL in the JavaScript, GoogleBot will try to explore that URL.

The same type of story spring up over the weekend at a WebmasterWorld thread. As you can tell by the thread, the JavaScript included some clean URLs, which GoogleBot extracted and explored.

Just be careful your JavaScript doesn't opening contain a method to delete your whole Web site.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Quietly Alexa switched from being powered by Google, for its Web search platform to Windows Live. If you conduct any search at Alexa now, you will see a new logo on the right top portion of the page that looks like;

I am surprised Microsoft didn't play this up, maybe it was part of some of the conditions of the switch?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (subscription required).