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