June 2006 Archives

So you are considering outsourcing search engine optimization, and you have in front of you a statement that guarantees you will get rankings. Should you be impressed? Should you laugh out loud? The answer is and always has been "buyer beware." It is virtually impossible to trust a guarantee of true organic listings within any search engines results page for any keyword phrase, no matter how obscure.

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums has a member posting a promise that comes up about every few months in the big forums:

I was shown an SEO services offer with all the normal submission to 400+ engines, resubmission, keyword research etc. etc. etc. but with one strange new entry Guaranteed Google Listings

The bogus 400+ submissions jargon aside, this is just an invitation to disappointment, in the opinion of many of the responding members. One of the best replies came quickly from 5400 post monster TrillianJedi, who says:

Never trust any SEO (no matter who they are) that says they can guarantee you a position in the SERPS.

Personally, I feel this is not only an invitation to disappointment, but actually a possible invitation to disaster. If you enter into a business relationship with any company that guarantees search engine rankings within the organic (free) results, you may become the subject of future Google or other search engine bans, because if someone is guaranteeing rankings, chances are they are not doing it legitimately within the webmaster guidelines. OK I’ll get off my white hat horse now and let others comment.

Please join the discussion at WebMasterWorld Forums. There is also a nice older thread at Search Engine Watch Forums related to this, and you can find an even older thread back at WMW.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread sprung my interest in locating one of those shopping cart icons near a Google AdWords ad. So far, I have only seen them in screen captures, such as the one posted here. The thread asks, how do I get one of those icons in my listing, of course someone explains that it is from Google Checkout.

The search term that triggers a shopping cart icon in the buy.com ad on the right works for CS50, the thing is, if you are using Safari, you may not see the icon. In Firefox I see it fine, but no matter what I do, it does not appear in Safari. Plus the ad text is slightly different.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forum.

Typically a search engine representative would not reply to a thread where a Webmaster accuses them of penalizing a site for using a competitors service. In a WebmasterWorld thread, a member said that his site is suffering in MSN Search due to placing Google AdSense on the pages.

The WebmasterWorld members reply to the thread creator that his accusations are unfounded and wrong. But then we have a shocker, at least in my opinion, MSNdude (official MSN representative), replied to the thread!

That's certainly not by design. I suspect something else is wrong with your site to cause this. However, we'd like to check this one out -- just in case -- because if it really is our bug, it's very serious and we'd want to fix it immediately.

This is just not typical.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses a topic we discussed a while back named AdWords Adds Account Size Limitation. Basically, at some point, Google does not allow you to add more keywords to your account, they have some account size limitation.

Some forum members say that to increase that keyword cap, all you need to do is call your Google representative and beg. They can increase it for you.

AdWordsAdvisor replied to this thread, in response to what that cap is defaulted at. Some believe it is 50,000 keywords or so. Here is the response;

If you run into a keyword limit and need more, you may certainly contact AdWords support with a request. They'll review your account, and reply dependent on what they find there:

* An account chock full of thousands of keywords that are carefully selected and performing well? Your request will likely be approved.

* An account chock full of thousands of randomly picked keywords that aren't targeted to the products or services advertised? You'll likely get suggestions about how to streamline your keyword lists, and more effectively use keywords within the current limit.

So give your rep a call.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread named Removing the Google sitemap got all my pages indexed. People in that thread tend to be piggy backing off each-other, saying that after removing their Google sitemaps file from the Google Sitemaps product, their indexing issues (i.e. pages being in the supplemental index) have improved or more stabilized.

Should Google Sitemaps be blamed or attributed to the improvement on ones indexing in Google?

Reviewing these cases in the threads, without specific evidence or examples, I strongly feel Google Sitemaps is not the issue here. Many other sites have recently improved in terms of not displaying the "supplemental result" near the search listing during the time frame of this thread.

I believe this is just one of those common cases of timing and coincidence.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This site, as well as some of my other sites, will be moving to a new hosting location. The same server, just a different location. The move is suppose to take place tomorrow morning, when I do not update the site. So most of you will not be affected. Just wanted to inform you of this prior.

Any problems that you notice with the site, the feeds or anything else, please let me know at barry.schwartz@gmail

Yahoo! sent out a newsletter this month notifying customers that U.S. Sponsored Search Listings No Longer on MSN. And I quote,

MSN's U.S. search distribution agreement with Yahoo! Search Marketing ends this month, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings will no longer appear in MSN's U.S. search results. Although we regret the loss of MSN as a distribution partner, it was not unexpected, and we do not anticipate a significant change in the total amount of traffic to our advertisers as a result.

We expect that MSN will continue to display Yahoo! Search Marketing Content Match listings in the U.S., and Sponsored Search listings in non-U.S. markets, beyond June 2006.

As you know, MSN has been powering the sponsored search side of MSN Search and Windows Live Search with Microsoft adCenter. So, is this the official end of the Yahoo! & MSN relationship. Looks that way.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of the ways that website owners sometimes try to defray the costs of hosting and other overhead is to solicit donations from their readers. We are fortunate not to need to do that at SER (although I am sure Barry would be happy to accept), but this is a perfectly acceptable method of raising funds, in my opinion. I have sometimes wondered if this method works. As a matter of fact, in recent research for an upcoming conference, I came across a website that actually tried to use PayPal to accept donations but was shut down. This is a different story, however, since the website was soliciting donations in a manner that was somewhat questionable in taste. See that whole story at savetoby.com...

A thread at WebmasterWorld Forums from earlier this month asks a very interesting question:

Has anyone tried to make money with PayPal donations? And if yes, how do the earnings compare to AdSense earnings (same site, same traffic, etc..)?

The answers ranged from

I never received a penny with PayPal donations.

to

While donations are few and far between the value of each is at least an order of magnitude higher than an AdSense click.

Another member claims to make twice as much from donations as from AdSense.

This is an interesting subject. From the responses so far, I would compare AdSense to the slow turtle that beats the rabbit in the long race. Yet the average donation received by the people who spoke up seemed to be certainly worth it. Head on over to the WebMasterWorld Forums to vote for your income champion.

One of the good things about most search engines, including Google, is the fact that if you have your site properly formatted and your content easily crawled and indexed, you will most likely rank first for searches of your own brand name. Many companies or owners of websites, when considering search engine optimization, actually first started thinking about it when they found that their site or name was not ranking - or even worse, that negative articles were appearing above their site.

A thread recently started at Search Engine Watch Forums by one of the arguable leaders in the SEO industry, Barbara "Webmama" Coll, she points out that she has seen a noticeable dip in brand name rankings in the SERPs. Knowing that Barbara works with some pretty big names, this should be a topic of concern. She states

I have confirmed that a number of brand name sites are no longer showing up in their traditional #1 position. The new results do not appear consistently so it must be part of a new algorithm.

Unfortunately, not many people seem to have found this thread yet, because there has been very little input. I tested some of the pharma brands that we work with, and they fortunately are not having the same problem. However, if this is a trend and not just an anomaly, it would be nice as a community to know about it.

If you have experienced a drop in Google rankings recently on very "obvious" brand terms, or if you haven't seen such results, please stop by the Search Engine Watch Forums and share your experience.

Reports are coming from the forums that Google has updated the AdWords interface. The most comprehensive documentation of the changes made are at WebmasterWorld. Basically, Google placed most of the features in additional tabs. When you login to your account and drill down to a campaign, you may notice a little balloon pop up on the right hand side. Under the ballon, which introduces the new tabs, include three tabs, named "Summary", "Keywords," and "Ad Variations." Here is a screen capture.

The AdWords Support page has detailed information about the new tabs. It reads;

Your account statistic tables are now presented on separate tabs, which can be found along the upper right edge of the table. These are the available tabs:

* Summary displays the performance totals for your Ad Group.
* Keywords shows you how individual keywords are performing, and allows you to add new keywords or edit existing ones. This tab appears only in campaigns with keyword-targeted ads.
* Sites shows you how your ad is performing on individual sites you have selected. You can add new sites or change your bid for existing ones. This tab appears only in campaigns with site-targeted ads.
* Ad Variations displays all the ads you have created for this campaign. You can add, edit or delete ads here.
At any time, you can view the information from all your tabs on a single long page. To do so, click the View all tabs at once link below the display table. To return to the tab view, click Condense tables into tabs.

There are other changes, you can read at AdWords.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Chris Sherman has the huge write up on Yahoo's settlement of the click fraud case. He describes;

The terms of the settlement include a cash payment of $4.95 million to plaintiffs' counsel and a provision that will allow advertisers to file a claim for Yahoo to investigate potentially fraudulent clicks back through January 2004. Yahoo will pay refunds to advertisers who file claims if it discovers evidence of fraudulent clicks.

Chris explains that the amount does not come close to the $90M Google Settlement but Yahoo is "offering cash refunds, and there is no ceiling on the amount it will refund if it finds evidence of click fraud," where Google offers advertiser credits.

Forum discussion on this settlement at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread discusses one site owner who has mysteriously received two hours worth of free Google AdWords traffic. He received an extra 800 unique visitors from pagead2.googlesyndication.com, the referring source of Google AdWords. The site owner does not have any active AdWords campaigns running. The site owner does not run any affiliate program.

Possible reasons for the traffic listed in the forum?

(1) Spyware or something that changes the referral source of a fake click bot or something similar.

(2) A mistake by another advertiser, where the advertiser plugged in the wrong URL and let it run four two hours before realizing.

(3) A secret admirer who sponsored 800 visitors for this site. :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Probably in coordination with Google Checkout's launch, Google has revamped the Google Accounts page. It now has a sections to update your personal information, your credit card information (checkout and wow CC), your default ship to address, and your Google services which include;

AdWords, Analytics, Base, Browser Sync, Calendar, Co-op, Gmail, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader, Groups, News, Notebook, orkut, Personalized Homepage, Personalized Search, Sitemaps, Spreadsheets, Video

Forum discussion at DigtialPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Google has been busy with the AdSense product, this time adding channel tracking support for the referrals program. The Google AdSense whats new page says;

We've added channel support to our referrals feature to offer you more tracking flexibility. Now you can track the perfomance of your referral units across different pages, sites, or topics. You can also use channels to determine whether one referral design works better for you than another.

Better tracking is always appreciated.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The rumored Gbuy (click to see historical tracking of coverage) has been launched under "Google Checkout" at http://checkout.google.com. It basically has the same exact interface from the sellers or buyer accounts perspective as when I first tested it in March.

As Chris Sherman wrote;

Checkout isn't a person-to-person, stored-value system like PayPal. But with its pricing and ease of use, it's a compelling alternative for businesses of any size that are currently using PayPal as a payment processing system—particularly with its aggressive pricing and incentives for AdWords advertisers to use the system.

The cool thing is you can checkout with Google at many stores, here is a list of them. Want to see a tour of Google Checkout from the buyer's side, click here.

If you are a seller, you can learn more about it at http://checkout.google.com/sell. As a seller, and an AdWords advertiser, you get a special little shopping cart logo near your AdWords ad in Google. (WOW). Here is the sellers demo.

Are you a developer and want to code in Google Checkout, check out Google Checkout API.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums & Cre8asite Forums.

I spotted over at Philipp that Google seems to be manually scanning books for the Google Book Search service by hand. Don't believe me? Check out the first page of The Trial and Death of Socrates. Yea, there is a hand there. Is it Matt Cutts's hand? Chris Boggs thinks so (kidding). Very nice find Dan Cohen.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Arbitrage is defined by Wikipedia as "the practice of taking advantage of a state of imbalance between two or more markets." When related to Internet Marketing, specifically paid search and contextual advertising, this practice has become known as "AdSense arbitrage" since this was probably the first widely used platform. Essentially, people make money by bidding on less expensive terms to drive people to a page with AdSense or some other Publisher Network ads. When people click on those ads, the money that the site owner makes for the click exceeds the money that he spent to drive the traffic to the site. With a good enough "conversion rate," this can be very lucrative. Note that we spoke about this in April when covering a SEW thread.

A more recent thread at WebMasterWorld brings up the subject of AdSense arbitrage in a slightly different manner, but leads to many similar points about the ability to make money using this process. One member states:

Arbitrage works best when you can take advantage of the differences in cost/return on 2 different networks.

And another ads:

Whenever I have used AdWords my AdSense earnings have averaged 25-30% of the advertising investment however I use AdWords to introduce new product lines or a new site.

It is speculated that Google and Yahoo are trying to do something about this. One would have to wonder how long that may take, however, since it makes the portals money even though it may muddle some search results. See the thread at WebMasterWorld Forums. The other very long and entertaining thread you may remember is at Search Engine Watch Forums.

What makes a website look legitimate? Is it the design and style? Is it the content? Is it the links to and from the site? This question is very subjective, because for many Internet surfers, "legitimacy" of a website is based on his or her preferences. Some people may feel that a site is more legitimate if it offers no advertising, and others may feel the opposite, for example.

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums links to an interesting study published by Harvard and Berkley scholars titled "Why Phishing Works." The WMW member relates this to AdSense as follows:

It is sometimes a concern that putting ads on a (legitimate!) site will reduce the perceived quality of a site--that somehow the site has been hijacked by the webmaster who wants to make a quick buck. (Whereas we're innocently just monetizing our websites, of course!) But this research seems to indicate that with careful page design and intelligent use of ads, the perceived authenticity or authority of our page content may actually increase.

Whether or not the Phishing paper can be related to this topic is questioned, but I feel it is an important snapshot of some people's views of websites. A few members share what they feel makes a site look legitimate. I personally do not get offended or impressed by sites that host AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, or any other sort of static ads. I do get a little perturbed when pop-ups or pop-unders come into play, however. I can smell a Made-For-AdSense (read more about MFA's) site within seconds of entering, and usually microseconds later I am elsewhere (*unless of course I am fishing for some good overused content- just kidding)

Hopefully some more opinions on this subject will find their way into the thread soon at WebMasterWorld Forums.

We know that Gbuy, Google Payments is coming soon, heck I have been accepted within Google Base to accept Google Payments for a while. But people are anxiously awaiting the public release of this Google Payments, GBuy payment solution from Google.

There is a DigitalPoint Poll asking users Are you going to make the switch to Gbuy? The results so far are a bit shocking, since no one really has publicly tested it.

Currently we have over 38% saying they will switch, only 19% saying they will not and 42% saying they just don't know. Why would someone switch without seeing it first? Well, it is Google.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The other day we reported that Yahoo! Publisher Network Allows Contextual Relevant Images Near Ads Only. We discussed the importance of placing images near the ads on your site. They increase visibility and increase the click-through rate of the ads. Last night I was talking with Jeremy, ShoeMoney, on NetIncome and he said he wrote a script to automate the process of finding relevant images to place near the contextual ads.

Today I found a thread discussing this at DigitalPoint Forums. Basically, ShoeMoney's advertising banner maker searches image databases based on a keyword phrase and gives you options for images you want to display. You check off the images and then the tool automatically downsizes the images to appear next to your ad units. Try it out, works kinda well.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The forums are buzzing about a new Google AdSense format seen around the Web that has both an image ad and text ads in one ad unit. JenSense has a picture of it in action and you can see an other screen capture of it in action here. One forum member said;

Tonight I noticed on my blog that my 160x600 ad had a picture of a basketball in the top spot.

Others report seeing the image ad in a 120x240 AdSense unit.

This is definitely feasible, since Google has recently been reported mixing Link Units Within Standard Ad Units.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

This has happened to me several times, I am told to visit a Google property and it turns all my Google properties (web search, gmail, etc.) into the language I just visited. For example, a Cre8asite Forum thread shows a woman who was stuck viewing French only in Google. She was desperate to switch back to the English results.

Want to get stuck using Google France? Do a search on seo and add &hl=fr to the end of the URL. Ah! How do you get back to the English results? Well, you can go back to Google.com, but sometimes that doesn't help. You can click on the link on the bottom of the Google Français homepage that reads, Google.com in English or you can once again append &hl=en the "en" for English to switch back.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Now, search conferences have sessions named "Reputation Management," in fact I have covered not one but two of these sessions at SES. When we first talked about it, I named a post Out-Ranking Negative Reputation Sites, then I don't think it had a name. Now there is a whole business to ensuring your company's online reputation is secure and positive.

A Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Negative Info/Personal Harm discusses a personal brush with online reputation harm. Basically, a local newspaper published negative information about the person, which he says is wrong and if anyone searches on his name, up comes the article. It is harming him both personally and professionally.

Search Engine Watch Forums members offer some great advice on how to try to ease the issue. Basically, rank other pages on top of that bad result. How does one do this?

- Create Personal Web Site
- Put up a blog
- Send out press releases
- Boost other positive pages on the Web by linking to them
- Write articles and have other sites syndicate them
- Join forums and post

Anything to get more pages, targeting your name, and ranking above the negative result is a step towards personal reputation management.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Thank you all for voting, we won the best blog award from MarketingSherpa in the category of Search Marketing. We actually did not win by popular vote, we "were second-highest. However, they did nail the highest percent of "Excellent" ratings -- vs 'Not Bad' and 'Blah,' and that's what matters." Honestly, I was hoping we would compete against Search Engine Watch (a blog I write at), Threadwatch, Matt Cutts and other more well-known in the category. I suspect we would not have won if some of those blogs were in the running.

It is still a huge honor to take the win for "Best Blog on Search Marketing."

Search Engine Roundtable
Bloggers include: Barry Schwartz, Benjamin Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause, Shawn Hogan, Ignacio Hernandez, Morgan Carey, & Dan Thies
http://www.seroundtable.com/

Sherpa Note: This is the second year in a row for this group Weblog to win the Search category. Notably, the voting for the entire category as a whole was fairly even (aside from one obvious ballot stuffer). The guys did not get the highest total votes, they were second-highest. However, they did nail the highest percent of "Excellent" ratings -- vs 'Not Bad' and 'Blah,' and that's what matters.

I just updated the post to attach the winners logo, and I hear they are sending me another mug. :)

More details at MarketingSherpa.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Search Engine Optimization often involves creating relevant content and adding it to your site on a regular basis. If the site is properly coded and spiders can get around easily - or even if you use Google Sitemaps properly - you should be able to count on the number of pages of your websites in the Google index increasing. So what happens if Google comes to town and your server has crashed? Will they immediately drop a bunch of your pages from the index? All of them? Obviously the answer to the last question is no, but could they hit your total pages indexed for this?

A recent thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums has a member asking if a server crash could be responsible for a dramatic dip in the number of pages indexed when he checked the next day. He says:

the number of indexed pages drastically dropped to 100+ (from 2000+) and for certain sub domains started appearing supplemental results. Even after 3 weeks, Google doesn't seem to pick these pages again.

Now this post was written about 3 weeks ago, so it is time for an update, but a couple of good answers followed the question.

Vayapues, a newer member who is very active and seems quite knowledgeable, immediately brings a calmer tone to the topic when he says:

Google understands that your server goes down from time to time, and will not penalize you for it, unless it is down for a few crawls in a row.

Then another member Fathom hints that this could have had something to do with Big Daddy, saying:

As many websites lost many pages recently you quite possibly suffered the same fate, and the crash merely occurring in and around the same time provided a convenient camouflage.

I have asked DinSurf for an update...hopefully the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums will pick back up...

Shawn is incredibly creative, he wrote code to follow the Digg Spy page for his forum. The page named DigitalPoint Forums Spy has a play and pause button at the top. When in play mode, it shows you in real-time, the new posts as they happen. Kinda neat to watch on such an active community. The tool is AJAX driven of course, so that makes it even cooler, we all love AJAX.

Shawn said it only works in Firefox and Safari at this moment. He is working on making it Internet Explorer compatible.

This is one more reason why Shawn's community is so loyal, proud and constantly growing.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo Publisher Network, Google AdSense, and a slew of competitors are all clamoring for Internet space to host their advertisements. Although this is causing some problems with the overall quality of content found for many competitive topics - due to sites specifically created to host these ads - we won't go there this time. The bottom line is that the portal pays the website owner every time someone clicks on an add within their designated box. These boxes are usually pretty obvious, marked with "Ads by Google" or "Ads by Yahoo." So how much can you make off this sort of Internet marketing?

A nice poll at Digital Point Forums asks YPN publishers what their average revenue per click (RPC) is. The choices range from less than 25 cents to above 2 dollars, with most respondents so far somewhere in between. In fact, in the small sample so far, 31% say they make an average of between 25 and 50 cents per click. That's not bad. Hopefully we'll get a much larger sample in there over the next few weeks and see where we as publishers stack up to the averages.

One thing to keep in mind when reading a thread/poll like this is that it is very specific. In this case, the only question is how much you make per click. Determining your actual profit takes many more calculations. Simple numbers (like your overhead including how much you pay to host the site, for example) mix with more complex numbers involved with arbitrage and other marketing techniques used to drive the traffic to the clicks. In either case, it is nice to try to get a good idea of what you could make. Of course it would be nicer if the poll was public and people told us what they made per industry, but chances are you can figure that out based on how much you are paying per click in one industry versus another.

Join the thread and add your average RPC at Digital Point Forums. I also dug up an old post from SER that actually ranks top page at Google for a related search. I wonder if this RPC theory still holds true?

We have discussed in the past how placing images near the contextual ads in the Google AdSense program works well in increasing ones clicks on the ads. Which in turn increase ones revenue. Those past articles are named Images Vertically Aligned to AdSense Ads, Using Images To Increase Your Adsense and Image Ads Above AdSense Ads Increase CTR. But what is Yahoo! Publisher Networks' policy on the use of images near the contextual ads to increase visibility and CTR?

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a response from Yahoo! on the question of placing images near the YPN ads.

A review of your URL NOT LIVE PAGE shows that the only possible issue with that page concerns the images placed next to the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads. These images must be contextually related to the content on the page as a whole. For more information about our policies, please visit the Terms and Conditions link, found at the bottom of most pages within your Publisher Network account.

And I quote again, "these images must be contextually related to the content on the page as a whole."

So you cannot place random images on the site, which make sense. The images most be related to the content and then you can place them near the contextual ads.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld has a featured thread named Three Warning Signs of a Nightmare Client. I find this thread very important for most business owners to read. I have been living by these signs for a long time now and I believe it works well. So what are the three warning signs of a bad client?

"I need to do this as cheap as possible"

If price comes up right away in a phone call or email, I am not afraid to tell them. I know my company does not offer cheap services and if they are looking for cheap services, then they will tell me we are over budget. The thing is, when I give a price and then they try to pick it apart. "Well, if I just wanted this piece, how much would that only cost?" I tell them that we do not build sites in "pieces" if you want to use us, we build out the site from scratch. Now that is me and most companies do work on portions of sites. But having this policy, of only working on brand new sites, makes it much easier to say no to the "cheap client."

"I need it yesterday"

Good thing we are busy, I tell them an ETA of a few months and then they jet. Anyone who needs it yesterday, and seriously needs it yesterday, has not properly done their planning. If they have and they have the budget to cover expedited services, then go for it, if you want the stress. But often, the stress is not worth it.

"My current web designer won't call me back"

This is classic and I have fell for it in the past. I got a big brand client, who hired us and soon we learned that the design they are using was from another design firm. The thing is, any changes we want to make to the design, we had to do on our own. The design firm was not available to make those changes on our behalf. That made me think, why? Guess what, 75-percent through the project the client became horrible to work with. The deliverables were not there, the people in the company did not respond to our needs and we had a deadline to meet for the VP. What happened? I gave them a full refund and walked away. Learned a lesson and moved on. Why a full refund? That is just how we operate and we are fortunate enough to be able to do that.

It is often not feasible to walk about from a project 75% through, so it is important to look at these warning signs.

Let me be clear, after they become a client and do continued work for you. You can expect that the client may want to cut some costs and have the occasional "need it yesterday" email or call. That is expected. And since they are a client, you do your best to meet those needs. Building a client base is also about building a relationship. You want the best for your client as you do for yourself. So you work through these times with them. But before you have established a relationship with a client, they should not be asking you for the above three, in my opinion.

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I found a thread at DigitalPoint Forums a bit shocking. The member said, "I am going away for a week trip and I want to take my ads off the website on july 20th, when I leave, in case of a click attack when i am not here."

Google AdSense publishers are afraid to leave their computers, afraid to go away on a vacation due to competitors or just evil-doers, clicking on their ads to have them kicked out of AdSense.

I run AdSense on a few sites and I never personally worry about this.

My question is, are those who are more likely to worry about getting booted from AdSense already doing something a bit on the wrong side? Do they run MFAs? Are they clicking on their ads in a "natural way." Or does this fear reside on most AdSense publishers that notice a nice income from the contextual advertisements on their pages? I don't know.

But if you want to see what others say, and most responses are back and forth, discuss at DigitalPoint Forums.

Since the Eisenberg's new, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, is such an insightful book filled with ways at understanding how people use web sites, I thought it best to just jump into a discussion on it. Head first.

Even if you've never read it, or plan to read it, we're looking at some of the ideas in a thread at Cre8asiteforums called Persuasion Architecture and the Art of Agreement for Website Success. I've been taking notes on the book, to write an official review. It's taking longer than normal because I'm not skimming it. I'm enjoying every page.

One of the key points raised in it (and believe me, there's a ton of them), is that our site visitors have agreed to come to our sites. They weren't dragged there. They volunteered, often based on massive marketing efforts. They can just as easily click right off, unless the web page has something they want. This situation can be something as scary as asking a teenager to view a web site during the summer, that is about teens and educational stuff. If you've ever tried to get a cat to bark, or a teenager to go anywhere besides MySpace on the Internet, you will understand why you need to read this book.

In MSN's continued strive to make the best search engine on the planet, they come back to the forums and boldly ask Webmasters, What is Spam? A WebmasterWorld thread started by MSNdude, asks;

Everyone complains about Spam, but the single term hides a multitude of different problems, and different people often seem to mean different things when they use it. I know how we use the term here at Microsoft, but I would be interested to hear your ideas about it; there seems to be enough difference of opinion to make for an interesting discussion.

This post comes soon after MSN asked What Are Quality & Authoritative Sites?. So let's do the same here and try to pull nuggets out of MSN's posts.

(1) MSN talks about "hierarchy of spam," some spam pages being spammier than others.

(2) MSN asks if affiliate sites are spam?

(3) Interesting how MSN seems to imply that an authority or quality site, may be consider spam. And if so, "Is it worth losing a quality or authority result to get rid of a spam result?" Hmm...

(4) Spam is not junk pages. Junk pages are useless. Spam can be useful information. And I quote;

If a page is a useless result for any imaginable query, we call it "junk" not spam. A junk page could be "under construction" or it could be gibberish surrounded by ads, or even a page full of fake links.

(5) MSNdude defines spam as; "A fair definition would be a bad search engine result caused by someone doing something over and over again where once should have been enough, but I'm not sure it'll work to just call ALL bad results "spam.""

(6) MSN suffers a lot from "obscure Javascript redirects" than other spam tactics.

Lots of good information in that thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft sometimes shocks you, it is like they do not follow the rules that Google and Yahoo! set forth in being secretive about how, why, what and when they do search index updates. Yahoo! recently began giving us updates, that yes, we did do an update. Google followed suit, to let us know during an update, what to expect, in order for us to give feedback on the update. Today, I noticed a post in a WebmasterWorld thread where MSNdude says, and I quote;

It's a pretty safe bet that we won't do an update on a Sunday afternoon -- especially not one as beautiful as today was. :-) Saturday is out too. In fact, we're unlikely to do an update on a Friday, since it can mean sacrificing our weekends if there are problems.

Now, I try my best not to update our sites on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays also. But I never saw Google or Yahoo! say they would most likely not conduct a search index update on any particular day. In fact, I think they have done index updates on the weekends.

Anyway, this is a good piece of information to know about MSN. They most likely will not update the index on the weekends, or even on Fridays.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is kind of funny, a dress up Matt Cutts web site. You can dress up Matt Cutts, famed Google search quality man, in a nice assortment of clothing and customs. You simply drag and drop the clothing on top of Matt. Now, it doesn't drag at all on Safari and drags slowly in Firefox for Mac.

I wouldn't post this if I didn't think Matt wouldn't find it funny himself.

Build your own Matt Cutts here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The most ridiculous case I have seen in that past week, was brought to my attention via a DigitalPoint Forum thread. They link to articles at JournalNow and at The Inquirer that is named, "Google "hacked our website"."

The schools claim that Google's search engine spider grabbed information they shouldn’t have and posted it on the Interweb.

The data included the names, Social Security numbers and test scores of 619 students which are still available online when the page was removed by the schools.

There is no way Google can type in a username or password into a form box. Someone at the school must of left something open, some how. Either a URL was posted that contained a direct link to the information, via some sort of password embedded in the URL to enable access.

I agree, the judge is right, Google should remove this data from the index ASAP. "The temporary injunction, granted by the Honorable Richard D. Boner, calls for Google to remove any information pertaining to Catawba County Schools Board of Education from its server and index..." But "and alleges conversion and trespass against the corporation," is out right crazy.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A great question came up at Cre8asite Forums asking;

If I essentially give away bandwidth so that sites A, B &C are displaying a GIF or a Flash file that's remotely hosted on my site, does this potentially amount to an SEO benefit?

So, if I take an image from your site, but decide to call the image directly from your site. I.e. I do not copy the image from your server over to my server, but rather I just link to the image source on my page, does that count towards link popularity or provide any ranking benefit?

As anyone with HTML knowledge knows, to call an image from any site you just use the following code

<img src="http://www.domain.com/pics/imagename.gif">

So does that code give any power to the site the image is being called from?

Ammon Johns said that it used to back in late 2001. He explained that "One could take 2 domains, and show images on one that were located on the other, to gain a cross-linking benefit that apparently bypassed all of the cross-linking checks and filters."

But he said it was most likely an oversight then by the search engines. Simply, if you think about it, many affiliate and other types of tools uses hidden image files, hosted on a 3rd party server, to track hits and impressions. So the value of allowing people to host an image off your server is no longer as important or at all important to a search engine.

EGOL remarks that there may be some perceived value to someone pulling an image from your server. He explains that "in some ways these are votes for your domain and in other ways it is simply mooching BW."

So it is not black and white but typically, I doubt search engines will use hosted images as a link popularity factor without being able to differentiate the difference between a image used for a "vote" reason versus a tracking or other "mooching" reason.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

There is a good new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Some questions to ask when souring an SEO/SEM company. The thread creator posted a dozen or so questions that he feels it is wise to ask a SEM/SEO company in order to make an informed decision about which company best suits your needs.

Lee Odden in the thread also points to two past cases of helpful resources on this topic, one at Stuntdubl and the other at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I seriously want to break the 1,000 subscribers mark on my Google Coop page. So here is the deal. The first 15 to email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com will get a free Yo-Yo IF...

If I break 1,000 subscribers by 5PM (EST) today. You can subscribe by clicking here.

More on what the Google Coop at:
- Getting Listed in the Google Coop Directory
- Is the Google Coop Spamable? Depends...
- Feedback on Google Coop for Search Engine Roundtable
- Dynamic Implementation of Google Co-op for Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Co-op: What Is It?

Want to see what the Yo-Yo's look like, I have more information here. To see it in action, see my YouTube demonstration below.

Continue reading "Free Search Engine Roundtable Yo-Yo Opportunity"

A WebmasterWorld member, g1smd, compiled a list of over 500 IP addresses of Google data centers. The list is the most current posted in a Webmaster forum. Thanks to Donna for spotting this. Below is the list in table format.

Continue reading "Current List of Google's Data Centers by IP Address"

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that those who are displaying Google referral code (within the AdSense account) for the Google Pack product are in fact not showing Google Pack buttons and material. They report that it is showing Firefox icons, graphics and materials instead. Seems like a database slip up to me.

To test if this is still happening, I have embedded the code just below this line. It should show Google Pack material and it also should show a text ad for Google Pack right here.

Update: After posting the Google Pack creative, it is displaying Firefox creatives. So I decided to take a screen capture and time stamp it for evidence. Hopefully the above ad will change soon, to the Google Pack.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread rightly asks Why does it take 3 hours to see ads - pause ads? Normally, when one wants to pause an ad, they want it paused virtually immediately. Google works that way.

One member reports, "We paused several high traffic orders and 5 hours later there's still no slow down in our traffic."

The official response from Microsoft?

The average time to pause or resume a campaign is 3 hours, it's sometimes more, sometimes less. The product team is working to make this shorter, and once we get this resolved I'll let you know.

So they are working on it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I reported over at Search Engine Watch blog that the Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible, meaning the issue with the 5 billion pages indexed at Google was most likely because of how Google handles sub sub domains. Well, that may not be true. I wanted to offer up another explanation, this time from Cre8asite Forums.

Ron Carnell, Cre8asite Forum Admin, wrote up his explanation of what he believes the issue may be. I'll quote;

Whether the issue is subdomains or sub-subdomains isn't relevant, in my opinion. The real issue is whether either should be considered independent entities. Should barry.tripod.com be lumped in the same barrel with ron.tripod.com, even though they ostensibly have very different content compiled by entirely different people? Should poetry.about.com be considered apart from pediatrics.about.com in spite of being managed by the same parent company?

Ron explains that the search engines "historically" views sub domains, and sub sub domains as "as separate entities from their parent domain." Ron believes that Google's clustering algorithms have been fined tunes just a bit too much, causing a site like this to appear less or more as one site. The "relationships between sites" is what is determined here and by Google's mission to thwart all spam, it may have gone too far?

Ron's post makes an interesting read. I personally did not mean to associate sub sub domains, i.e. the keywords in the domain as the issue. Because, we know that Google doesn't put too much weight towards keywords in the URL. It was first hypothesized that the issue with sub sub domains was that Google treated them too much as individual entities, and that can be used to ones advantage.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread discusses how Yahoo! Network Publishers are noticing that the earnings with Yahoo!'s answer to Google AdSense is becoming more on par with Google. In our non-scientific AdSense Compared to YPN the advantage went to YPN. Yahoo! earned way more money then did Google at the time. As one would have assumed, that gap seems to be closing.

One DP member said;

I used to make double or triple per click compared with adsense, now it's closer to even.

An other reported;

For me YPN was 10x RPC compared to AdSense a few months ago. Now it is only 5x. Still kicking AdSense butt, for now anyway.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread notes that Google's Alexa ranking has dropped. Google currently ranks number three, in the top 500 list, right behind Yahoo! at number one and MSN at number two. Google dropped one spot, from number two to three, giving up the number two spot to MSN.

One other thing to notice as an SEM or Internet marketers, take a look at the Google Alexa listing then scroll a bit down to "People who visit this page also visit" and you will notice the number one listing is WebmasterWorld. I bet that drives some qualified traffic. Nice.

Ok back to Google's Alexa dropping. The reaction in DigitalPoint Forums can be summed up with one image.

How funny! A larger image can be found in the forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Someone posted at Cre8asiteforums about a new Firefox Extension called "Stumble Upon" and already it's a hit with forum members. Since the guys were all ga ga over it, I decided to give it a shot, using my female abilities of remaining calm and practical in a room filled with men playing with their toys.

If you have Firefox, and time to waste, you might like this. I was glued from the moment I saw the menu of sites to explore. You can vote up or down, which is nothing new. However, this little app goes out and finds sites you may not have seen before, in topics you like. From the site:

"In effect, StumbleUpon's members collectively share the best sites on the web. You can share any site by simply clicking I like it. This passes the page on to friends and like-minded people – letting them "stumble upon" all the great sites you discover."

Some of the folks trying it out, in StumbleUpon!, Great Way to Generate Traffic admit to becoming quickly addicted. Heck. It's either this, or those squishy stress balls.

Danny digs deep into the censorship taking place at Google Answers. Basically, as I wrote yesterday at SEW, Google Pulls Question About Google From Google Answers. The question was, "What percentage of Google searches are contextual?" Google pulled it, the reason why they pulled it was initially unclear. Danny explains that we now know why.

Google officially disallows people to ask questions about the company because the researchers at Google Answers aren't Google employees.

Wow! You kidding me! As Danny said; "Freelance researchers are apparently qualified to answer questions about any other company in the world, but when it comes to Google, special treatment is required. Incredible." I cannot agree more.

The funny thing is that Danny posted this question, at Yahoo! Answers. "Why Shouldn't Google Answers Let People Ask Questions About Google?"

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Some people don't like to read, so what we have are streaming audio and streaming video. The Inside AdSense Blog is one of the first official search blogs to use video to answer questions at the blog. They announced they would do this the other day and then uploaded the first vcast, video cast, answering three basic AdSense questions.

Neat way to do it and it provides a more personal touch. Google asks folks to submit questions and their photos, so they can be part of the next vcast.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago, I reported at SEW blog on a Garett Rogers discovery, where he found that Google added a line to the robots.txt file for "/call". So we made some speculation on that. He then updated us on that discovery finding that the headers for this site now say "ctcserver." CTC server? Click to Call server?

Well, it is no secret that Google is working and testing Click To Call features. We reported Google Tests Click To Call Feature back in November 2005. It was legit. So now they may open it to the public?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator eWhisper posted a thread at WebmasterWorld documenting some of the smaller changes made to Google AdWords recently. He discusses how recently Ad Scheduling, AdWords Editor and Local AdWords got all the attention. He lists several other features and bug fixes that he feels are huge to the overall performance of the AdWords program. They include;

1. Local time zone added to MCC reports.
2. Bug fixed where the 'account' box didn't show on sub mcc reports.
3. Add your GAP business to Google Local (although, not sure why this wasn't attached to base so the pin was unnecessary)
4. HTTPs errors fixed on internal help pages (note, the only place I can tell the error now occurs is on the help home page).
5. Possible negative keywords under the AdWords keyword tool.
6. Ability to add keywords to an AdGroup when accessing the keyword tool from the tools menu.
7. 'add custom text' under the site spidering section of the keyword tool.

Nice list eWhisper.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny reports that Google and Adobe formed a deal that will "Adobe will distribute the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer as part of Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player downloads." Danny also notes that Yahoo! partnered with Adobe to provide a special version of the Yahoo Toolbar within Adobe Reader. Interesting...

Danny quotes a Reuters article on if Yahoo! and Adobe's deal.

Adobe previously included Yahoo Inc.'s toolbar as an option with the Shockwave Player, Adobe spokeswoman Katie Juran said. Adobe still offers the Yahoo toolbar as an option for its Flash Player and Adobe Reader products, she said.

Ok.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Inside Google Sitemaps blog announced new features for Google's Sitemaps free service. The additions include;

1. Full list of crawl errors (not just 10 anymore)
2. Now, you can view data for individual properties and countries as well. For instance, you can see the search queries from users searching Google Images in Germany that returned your site in the results. You’ll only see properties and countries for which your site has data.
3. Stats also now available for subfolders
4. 75 common words displayed, 20 is what was displayed in the past.
5. Sitemaps submission increased from 200 to 500 sitemaps
6. Robots.txt test tool added Adsbot-Google to the list
7. Rate this tool addition, to show Google that you like the tools or not.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I can't believe I didn't spot this until Philipp Lenssen blogged it, Google is testing CPA (cost per action) AdSense ads. What that means is that instead of getting paid for clicks or impressions, you can get paid a commission for a sale or desired action.

WebmasterWorld has a thread on this since June 19th, with details of some Google AdSense publishers getting "invites" for the test program.

I received the invitation this morning. I intend to try this program, but I'm not excited about it.

Well, based on the screen capture above, there is a lot of potential. Full details of the AdSense CPA program available at SeekingAlpha.com and also reprinted as quote below.

Continue reading "Google Testing AdSense Cost Per Action (CPA)"

I have been watching a WebmasterWorld thread named Loads of Supplemental and the titles are all corrupt. It is true, there are many examples of pages in Google's supplemental index that have inaccurate titles. It appears that Google is listing the title plus some of the first piece of content at the top of the page.

I have an example, but the site owner asked I keep the URL and any revealing information hidden. Take a look at this search result;

The part after the blank area in the clickable title is actually from the content at the top of the page that shows the day and date. This result is also obviously in the supplemental index, as you can see in the green font on the right side of the image.

This is a very interesting observation. Google isn't always doing this, it may depend on the query at hand. Is this a sign that Google may be producing dynamic titles based on queries? I know Google sometimes opts for DMOZ titles, but this is way different than that.

But by taking the top text, which is normally standard header text, in our case date information, but in many cases text such as "home," "about us," etc. this can make for a poor search experience.

Big hat tip to Tyson and also over SEO4Fun.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks are the good advertisers jumping ship? Are Google AdWords advertisers either turning off the content network option and only advertising on the search network, slowed their advertising down due to the content network performance and/or completely "jumped ship" from Google to another advertising model or network?

Why is this speculation taking place? Well, hundreds of Google AdSense publishers are reporting a noticeable slump in earnings over a set time period.

Some believe that the whole contextual advertising model is doomed unless Google or someone else comes up with a method of thwarting MFAs (made for AdSense sites).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

What I am about to show you is nothing new, it happens all the time, but today is starting out to be a slow day, so I thought I post on it.

I DigitalPoint member conducted a search on the keyword [baby] and up came an eBay ad. eBay AdWords ads come up all the time for random keywords and they often are funny to read, since the content of the ad is auto generated and often don't make much sense. In our case of the [baby] search, we get an ad that reads;

Baby
Buy it Cheap on eBay
Low Prices, New and Used
www.ebay.com

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld, where the Google AdSenseAdvisor posts how geo-targeting works with Google's contextual ad program, Google AdSense.

Geotargeting is based on the IP address of your users. So, say one page of your site is about Spain, and a user from Japan is viewing it. That user will see AdWords ads targeted to 1) a Japanese audience and 2) the text based content of the site. The advertiser chooses which countries they would like to target. A user in Canada might see a different set of ads.

So, your Japanese readers MAY see ads specifically targeted to 'Spain'. However, they may also see ads for 'Portugal' if these are the highest paying ads available for a Japanese audience that are also relevant to the page content (i.e., travel in Iberia).

Regardless, the highest paying ads available at any given moment for any geographic audience will always appear on your site. And 'highest paying' isn't solely determined based on bid price, but on quality score as well -- meaning how the ads actually perform (see http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/02/ad-rank-explained.html for more information about ad ranking).

AdSenseAdvisor continues to explain that;

When viewing a travel page from Spain, the Japanese and Canadian visitors will see ads for hotels in Spain as long as the Spanish advertisers configured their ad to show to users not just from Spain, but from other countries such as Japan and Canada. The advertisers control the targeting in this case.

I didn't want to misquote, so I pulled the quote direct. The wording of the posts are very clear.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forum thread asks SEO training- is it worthwhile? There are many ways to train oneself to become an SEO, they include;

• Seminars
• Conferences
• School
• Books
• Forums
• Friends
• Trial & Error

A great way to begin is to pick up a basic book and follow that up with a seminar or conference. Then once you get the core principles down, joining a forum and reading and sharing in the discussion is often very helpful. Make friends and then experiment through trial and error. Finally, go back to the conferences and also read the more technically written books. Rinse and repeat.

Ammon warns;

The one thing I would caution against is if anyone were considering a course being an investment to make them an instant SEO. It won't. The course is merely a fast way to get all the basic principles into your mind so that you can then set off to learn more advanced and specialized skills from there.

Does the order I listed above matter? I don't think it has to be in that order, that is why it is listed in bullet format and not number format.

Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google Pages does not allow you to currently place Google AdSense ads on your pages. A WebmasterWorld thread has a reply from AdSenseAdvisor stating that AdSense is currently not supported on Google Pages. AdSenseAdvisor does say that Google hopes "to offer this feature soon (although we don't currently have a date for when this option may become available)."

In the meantime, they suggest you set up a blogger.com site and host Google AdSense on it. :) I guess it is better than hosting trojan horses on Google Pages. No comment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Sometimes you may notice a URL listed in the search results page that may look like www.domain.com/?tracking=5 or something like that. You normally do not want to see your pages with URLs listed in the search indexes like that. It is bad for a few reasons, the two most obvious include (1) you are tracking results (clicks/conversions/etc) from a different source (Google is most likely the source you did not want to track those clicks from, in this case) and (2) the link popularity of that page is somewhat off according to the search engine.

This use to be a bigger issue with search engines, today it seems to be slightly not as big of an issue.

So what remedies do you have?

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses 301 redirecting the tracking "URL to the same page URL but without the parameter." The other solution given is to add a noindex meta tag to the page with the extra variables (make sure it is only on that page and not on the version without the extra variables (often harder to implement).

Best solution of the top two? 301 redirect.

Best solution? Get the main URL indexed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I hate begging, rarely ever do it, but like last year, this year MarketingSherpa is holding the Reader's Choice Blog Awards. We were honored last year to win the award, it meant a ton to us. Especially the comments about why we won, that really really meant a ton.

We adore the unusual editorial tactic for the winning Blog in this category -- instead of linking to news sites, the authors comment on and link to the very best new threads on search marketing on discussion boards all over the Web. So, it's a true insiders-insider blog, and a reflection of what people are realy talking about (vs what the media thinks.)

To vote for us this year, please visit http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=28308 and scroll down to "Blogs on search marketing" survey and mark the "Search Engine Roundtable" as excellent.

Please also take the time to vote for other blogs that you feel are deserving, I did.

Thanks again and please don't forget to vote for us!

Just when you may have thought that writing a good, optimized page title tag was elementary SEO, someone suggests that maybe they should be written for humans, too. And, as this Cre8asiteforums discussion suggests, even that is not enough.

Thought provoking discussion in How to write SEO friendly TITLE tag? Ron Carnell rocks the boat with:

"Yes, the Title should focus on the visitor, not just the search engine, but I doubt many visitors specifically go looking for Calls to Action or long, grammatically correct sentences in the web page Title. Just as with a book, just as with a movie, just as with a song on the radio, the web page Title should capture interest succinctly, even at times, tersely. Your call to action, I think, should be in the SERP description, not the SERP Title."

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has several reports that MSN Search is reporting fewer and fewer links for Web sites, then they have in the past. By that I mean, if you do a link: command search, you will notice less results returned today then you had a month or two ago. Here are some examples;

Then: 1,106
Now: 110

Then: 207
Now: 28

Then: 4,900
Now: 149

But it is important to note that many SEOs are not reporting any loss in rankings at MSN Search.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forum thread named SEO in China asks, how does one conduct SEO in China. The deal is, according to SEW moderator mcanerin,

I can tell you this: almost everything (including "organic" listings) is for sale in China, if you know who to talk to. I don't think Google sells organics there, but the Chinese ones mostly do.

SEO in China is mostly SEM.

Interesting enough.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are two ways to look at a thread at WebmasterWorld where an official MSN representative asks;

One complaint I hear a lot in this forum is that MSN Search fails to identify "quality" sites or "authority" sites. I'd actually be interested in hearing your collective idea of what these terms mean. It's hard for me to respond intelligently to this type of concern if I'm not sure we mean the same thing by the words.

(1) Wow, MSN is asking laymen about what quality and authority sites are? MSN is so far behind the eight ball. :)
or
(2) Wow, MSN is bold enough to ask Webmasters how they would define quality and authority. They are seriously interested in improving the search experience!

But as a Webmaster, you should be looking at this thread for hints on the future of the search algorithm at MSN.

Point 1: MSN is claiming by the title of the thread, i.e. "Quality and Authority: Relevance Alone Is Not Enough," that relevancy is currently not a factor of site quality or the authoritative status of a site. Interesting.

Point 2: quote; "So then could a single query have more than one authority site? If so, how do you distinguish authority from quality?" Is there only one answer to a query? Is there only one authority? I doubt MSN can think this way? But imagine if they could...

Point 3: quote; "Perhaps we need an independent category "authoritative but useless."" Governmental sites that have little information, or well known organizations that don't have content or content is not useable.

Point 4: quote; "I've been thinking of both quality and authority as a property of results, not just a property of a site." Quality tied to the query or just tied to the site? Authority tied to the query or just tied to the site?

Point 5: quote; ""Authority" in this sense implies (to me) that a site already has a reputation with a significant fraction of users. The actual page, though, might be so recondite as to be useless to any but the most expert user. Given that definition of Authority, it would seem that Quality would be about accuracy and completeness of the result. A quality result would be complete, accurate, and useful to an average user -- even if most users had never heard of the site before." Summarizing how he perceives Webmaster's thoughts on those terms.

The thread is incredibly interesting and worth a watch in my opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I know I have (so has the world) been picking on Google issues recently, but Yahoo! has their share of problems. A WebmasterWorld thread named Spamming Blogs for Top Yahoo Rankings shows that certain spam tactics are working fairly well on Yahoo! also.

Honestly, right now, there is not one engine that I am particularly in love with.

I always had a fall back. For example, Google is going through an update but Yahoo! recently did an update and the results look nice, I would use Yahoo!. Or Yahoo! stunk but Google was solid. MSN, well, that is MSN. Ask.com is just always a bit too slow to update but they do have features that encouraged me to make them my home page. But now what? Google, Yahoo and MSN all pretty much are not doing too well. Sad...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the news that Google Pages was used to host a trojan horse that can infect computers. The trojan horse was "designed to steal bank details relating to certain financial institutions." It did not do too much damage, from what I hear. Also, this is not a big deal - dozens of similar services (Yahoo!'s Geocities, etc.) have the same issues, I believe.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It looks like some Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers came up with a solution to view the editorial reviews of ads that were declined. I guess if you are outside of the US and your ads are rejected, you can not view the reasons for the rejection, on an ad by ad basis. One WebmasterWorld member posted that, in order to view those explainations you need to do as follows;

(1) Log into your account
(2) Click on the 'edit profile' in the 'account' tab.
(3) Select 'English(UK)'
(4) Then check your editorial status.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just a quick update that we have enabled comments again, as well as trackbacks, for this site. We turned them off on May 17th but after several tweaks to the blog software and our server configuration, we have decided to turn them back on.

We hope to keep them back on, but time will tell.

So feel free to begin commenting again.

Thanks!

Bill Slawski at Cre8asite Forums has a thread named Deletion Probablilities for Better Ads. In that thread he clearly explains a Yahoo! Patent named System and methods for ranking the relative value of terms in a multi-term search query using deletion prediction, the abstract reads;

The likely relevance of each term of a search-engine query of two or more terms is determined by their deletion probability scores. If the deletion probability scores are significantly different, the deletion probability score can be used to return targeted ads related to the more relevant term or terms along with the search results. Deletion probability scores are determined by first gathering historical records of search queries of two or more terms in which a subsequent query was submitted by the same user after one or more of the terms had been deleted. The deletion probability score for a particular term of a search query is calculated as the ratio of the number of times that particular term was itself deleted prior to a subsequent search by the same user divided by the number of times there were subsequent search queries by the same user in which any term or terms including that given term was deleted by the same user prior to the subsequent search. Terms are not limited to individual alphabetic words.

Bill explains the logic of the patent as a method of deleting the less relevant word, if the whole phrase of the search query does not match an ad within the ad inventory.

This could be done by looking at two word searches from users, and seeing if they might delete one of the words in a follow-up search. Search engineers might be able to set something up to find such deletions, and create a "deletion probability score" for terms.

More details at Cre8asite Forums.

Matt Cutts went on a very extended vacation and some people feel that the Google search results are suffering big time since he left. A new featured WebmasterWorld thread was subtitled by a WebmasterWorld administrator;

We continued with this months Data Center saga: "Matt Cutts goes on vacation. Is it any wonder some problems pop up in the index?"

Ouch!

What is a bit interesting, is to look back at our what-if-scenario about What If Matt Cutts Left Google?

I believe my answers to the question seem right on target. My question is, is Adam Lasnik up to the job? Years and years of experience, Matt has accrued over the years. Matt invented his role, it is ingrained into his role at Google. Can someone else pick up in his place? I do not know. I certainly hope so.

Has the Google results suffered since Matt Cutts left? If so, is it a direct result of Matt not being available to keep a tab on what is going on in the SEO community?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Long long time SEO forums member, Nintendo, posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums a couple days ago which revealed the work of a spammer. Soon after, a blogger posted the step by step guide on how this spammer got billions of pages indexed within Google all within eight days. Here is the summarized guide;

(1) Register a domain name (could be new)
(2) Set up server to manage domain and subdomains and subsubdomains
(3) Buy article databases
(4) Develop a content scraper script
(5) Create a blog comment spam script and set it loose
(6) Wait about eight days

After the story got Digged, the site has been delisted at Google.

Some quotes for you from Ammon Johns;

Is Google broken? No. Go back just 6-7 years and these pages would not have surprised you - spammy redirecting doorway pages like these were everywhere. You expected to see some of these in virtually any SERP before Google. The fact that so many people are shocked and amazed at these is itself testament to how far the search engine algorithms have come.

The real black hats practitioners regard work like this as amatuerish and foolish. It closed another loophole, rather than continued to quietly use it.

Forum discussions at DigitalPoint Forums & Cre8asite Forums.

Friday, I asked New York Times Allowed to Cloak Content? Where I explained that I felt the NYTimes was indeed cloaking content, based on Matt Cutts interpretation and that they are receiving special treatment from Googlebot. Danny Sullivan posted his thoughts in the forum thread, stating clearly;

Do I think the NYT is spamming Google? No. Do I think they are cloaking? Yes. Do I think they should be banned because Google itself warns against cloaking? No.

Yes, Danny believes they are cloaking. But no, Danny, as do many, feel that Google should not ban NYTimes.com or others like them.

Of course, there are others that do not feel that this is a typical situation of cloaking. And cloaking can be defined differently. But I prefer to use Google's definition of cloaking, or at least Matt Cutts definition.

Strong question:

IF IT'S SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION, I NEED TO KNOW IT BEFORE I CLICK!!!

That would be nice, I try to always let my readers know when I link out to a subscription required link. Some news search engines do that also, but adding "registration req." or "subscription" in small text. If Google is allowing this, then at least give us that detail. And at least enable all publications to do the same. And clarify your policy on such "cloaking" practices.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Long time WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster, has an excellent blog post named Growing Forum Participation followed up with an excellent summary of the blog post at WebmasterWorld named Growing Forum Member Participation.

Martinibuster clearly describes how encouraging and enticing discussion in a forum is a lot more important than answering questions in a forum. This came to martinibuster when one of his top forum members began a new job that pulled his most authoritative member away from the forum. What he noticed was that members no longer received the bottom-line authoritative answer on a question posted in the forum. He noticed that a discussion began to brew in the forum threads and that more and more members we actively participating through discussion and opinions as opposed to answers.

Martinibuster thus feels that encouraging moderators to build discussion as opposed to answering questions is the way to go when growing forum participation and growing your forum numbers. Encouraging your lurkers (members who read threads but do not post in threads) to participate by reaching them, talking to them and asking for opinions that may inspire a lurker to become a participating member, is key. How do you do that? Give them confidence in expressing their opinion, it is not always about what you know but how you can express your opinion, that is important in a forum discussion.

What is even more inspiring about the WebmasterWorld thread is how Martinibuster ends the post. Yes, he encourages participation in his thread. He ends with a few open ended questions, asking other members "So what do you think?"

As you can imagine, since we track forum discussion and buzz every day here, this type of thread would excite me. Very nice Martinibuster, very very nice.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A SearchDay article by Danny and Chris over at Search Engine Watch named Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly talks about how Marshall Simmonds (first with About.com and then acquired by NY Times) made the NYTimes.com search engine friendly. Part of that process is to allow the search engines, including Google, to access, crawl, index and rank content that would require a username and password by a normal Web user.

Danny and Chris ask the question and answer it; "Isn't this cloaking—serving different pages to a search engine and an individual web browser? Yes, it is." Yes, there is a BUT;

Although both Google and Yahoo warn against cloaking, Marshall says both companies are aware of what the Times is doing, and apparently condone the practice.

"They want the content, and they're very interested in displaying it," says Marshall.

Reviewing the latest from Google on cloaking you see that Matt Cutts makes a clear distinction;

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

NYTimes.com is clearly doing something "special for Googlebot" here and in terms of how Matt Cutts defines "acceptable cloaking," this does not fall within those terms. At other engines like Yahoo!, Ask and MSN, engines that have not taken as strong a stance on cloaking, this most likely would be acceptable. But at Google, I believe, based on Matt Cutts continued campaign against cloaking, this would not fall within Google's webmaster guidelines.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

When it comes to Yahoo! conducting an update, we normally certainly know about them when we have a "weather report" from the Yahoo! Search blog. But sometimes, like with Google, but on a much less pronounced level, forums pick up on index and algorithm shifts prior to the update.

A WebmasterWorld thread suggests that the beginnings of a new update is happening over at Yahoo! Search.

One member sees a big jump on the Yahoo.com search results. Others do not necessarily see the changes yet but suspect something is coming soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Word comes from WebmasterWorld that Yahoo! is planning on reducing the minimum bid for their UK customers from 10p to 5p.

WebmasterWorld senior member, sem4u, says he was reading an article in the "Interactive magazine" that claimed Yahoo! to be reducing its minimum bid due to heavier competition by MSN in the space.

Competition is good. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports via DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld that Google has sent out a batch of email surveys to AdSense publishers. One member said;

Took about 10 minutes to complete. First, it asked general questions about how I liked adsense, how I used it and what would I like to see. Then it gave some examples or maybe even _hints_ of features to come and asked my thoughts about them. Hopefully I get picked for the $1000 gift card!

So they provided an incentive of $1,000 to have people fill out the 10 minute survey.

Some members were cautious about the validity of the survey. I personally did not see the survey.

If you like to receive these surveys and you are an AdSense publisher, or if you like to not receive these surveys, you can tell Google within your email preferences section.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Bill Gates leaving Microsoft may have some type of impact on Microsoft's outlook on search. Who knows? This is just big news and since Microsoft is in the top four of search engines, I thought it would be important to note here.

Microsoft Corp. said its founder and longtime leader Bill Gates will step down from his day-to-day duties at the software giant in July 2008 to focus full-time on his nonprofit foundation.

Tons of news out there on this, as you can imagine.

Forum discussion buzzing at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

As Jen reports over at SEW blog, Google has finally added the highly anticipated ad scheduling feature to Google AdWords. Here is a step by step, on setting up your campaign with ad scheduling.

(1) First locate the campaign(s) you want to set up for ad scheduling. You will see a "New" word in red, that is the ad scheduling option, it looks like.

Continue reading "Ad Scheduling Live on Google AdWords"

SEOBlackHat.com discovered a job posting at MSN Search. Part of the job posting includes this specification:

Hand crafted results
When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user. Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user’s query in less than 3.8 seconds. This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well. We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks. If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method – come join us and delight users real-time!

Ummm, wow! Is this the first search engine to publicly admit to hand tailoring or "hand crafting" search results? I believe so. I am just amazed.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: This is looking more like a joke. Danny updates his blog entry on it adding, "(Fake? - Shame On Me!)" and....

Note: As Threadwatch spots in comments, this page looks like a joke that MSN is hosting. Shame on me for not reading more closely -- type 150 words per minute! The page IS on the real MSN Search domain, but it's not linked from the real jobs area. Anyway, I'll drop a note and get confirmation. And the points below -- still valid :)

I know there was news that Google.com was being blocked by China for many users. But also, news came out that the blockage was removed on the 12th.

China has lifted its online blockade of Google.com after a two-week crackdown that had prevented direct access to the site and temporarily thwarted popular workarounds, a media watchdog group reported. The Paris-based journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said that tests revealed the uncensored version of the search site was accessible again to internet users in Beijing and Shanghai.

However, there are new recent reports over at WebmasterWorld after the 12th that Google.com is still unaccessible in China.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The folks over at TechShout.com noticed link units within standard ad units. Here is a screen capture of it in action;

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network has launched a new how to guide with detailed help documentation. Besides for a FAQ section, they have sections for tax questions, ad setup, rss ad setup, reporting help and account info help.

They also released a section to help you drive traffic to your pages. Including;

• RSS Guide
• Quick Submit RSS feed to Yahoo!
• "Add to My Yahoo!" quick button
• Podcast submission form
• Yahoo! Video submission form
• Web search submission form
• and more...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Via Search Engine Watch Forums, an interview in French, of Danica Brinton of Ask.com's Blog Search product. There is a PDF document of the English translation that you can download here.

Key Points not already covered at Ask.com Launches Blog & Feed Search include:

• Ask.com Blog Search uses the Bloglines Subscription Data
• More subscriptions the more quality the site
• Most robust blog index with 1.5 billion documents indexed, and 4-6 million added per day
• Search Filters
• Binoculars views

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

USA Today posted an article named Website designers want searches to work for free. The article explains how web designers are doing their best to rank sites well in the organic Google results. The article is probably the most accurate out of all the articles I have seen by a big media publisher. They discuss the importance of links and the importance of quality links versus non quality links.

The article also has quotes from "us." By "us" I mean, from our buddies in the community, including;

Rand Fishkin:

"If you are intending to build a profile online, a website alone won't cut it anymore," says Rand Fishkin, CEO of website consulting firm SEOmoz.

"The younger people at companies who are using blogs and going on MySpace are starting to make their firms more savvy about it," says Fishkin.

Greg Boser:

To do well on Google, says Greg Boser, who runs the WebGuerilla consulting firm, is to understand the Web as a whole.

"By getting yourself out there on other sites, like blogs, Google will really reward you for those links and help your site rise," Boser says.

Matt Cutts:

"It's the same thing any small business would do to get started," says Matt Cutts

"You would drop fliers all over town. Online it's the same thing. Trying to get links is letting people know about you and what you're doing."

Jennifer Laycock:

"This never could have happened five years ago," she says. "It took the blogging and social networking revolution to make this happen."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) there are hundreds of factors, some weighted more than others, that make up for which page should rank above the next. Discovering and documenting each factor is a daunting task. Rand over at SEOMoz has done an excellent job a while back documenting 103 Search Engine Ranking Factors, but that is not enough!

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread is calling for 200 listed onpage and offpage search ranking factors to be documented.

Who knows, maybe after the thread gets a bunch of response, just maybe, Rand will update his document with an other 97 factors. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a nice thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums named Subdomain Limit Per Domain. The thread innocently asks, what is the a safe number of sub domains to put on a single domain name? As many of you know, sub domains from old domains are thriving these days. So, even more reason to ask the question, is 20 sub domains on a domain too much? Does it make the domain too suspicious? Does it raise a red flag?

In my opinion, and how I stated it in the thread, there is no magic number. I suspect it has to do a lot with the structure of the site. Including the following variables:

• Number of pages on the domain
• Number of pages within a particular sub domain
• The primary site navigation
• The secondary site navigation
• Linkage data towards the primary and secondary navigation
• And the number of subdomains based on the above

Those are just some of my guesses. Like anything, it is about your "intent." If the intent is to rank pages well and not serve the end user, then something may be wrong. If you are like about.com, with a trillion sub domains, but they are very suiting for the user's reader, then it is fine.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

One of my most favorite forum members at Search Engine Roundtable forums posted a thread named google table nah.. google tilt. In that thread he links to a blog post describing this new Google Maps hack that allows you to pick up your laptop, tilt it up, down, left and right and the map moves in that direction. Very cool stuff. It is also funny how yesterday we reported on a Table Top Touch & Command Google Earth Solution.

Another day, another hack. Here's a demo that controls Google Maps using ThinkPad Hard Drive Active Protection sensor. You tilt your ThinkPad and Google Maps roll over. Pretty cool.

The video is at YouTube and it is named Google Maps ThinkPad Controller. I have embedded the video in the extended entry portion if you would like to view it here.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Continue reading "Google Maps Table Tilt Control Solution"

Have more than 10,000 pages? How about 100,000 pages or even 1 million pages? Can't seem to get them all included in MSN within a reasonable amount of time? There is a thread on Digitalpoint that might be able to help you out. The thread starts with a webmaster asking how he can get the "rest" of his 1000K pages included in MSN. He explains that MSN will only spider the pages in the first and secondary levels of the site and then stops. Why you have that many pages to begin with I am not sure (forum?), but its a good question. I observed a larger site today with a similar problem. The simple answer to getting a large amount of pages indexed almost completely: submit a sitemap.

Some of the Digitalpoint members have some ideas, such as sitemap methods, get a ton of links, do some deep link building, link back to the homepage, and other advice. Great thread with some good answers.

Continued discussion at Digitalpoint Forums - How To Index A Huge Site

Bill Slawski, of SEO by the Sea loves the ocean and search engines. He loves them so much, that he researches Google patents and then, waves rolling in the background and sand in his toes (on a good warm day), he gathers his thoughts together and reports to us what those patents say.

Aaron Pratt interviewed Bill in a recent SEO Buzz Box Interview. The focus was on how much Bill knows about what really matters to the Google search engine, and why we should care. Bill has been writing in his SEO by the Sea blog about search engine patents for awhile now. Danny Sullivan invited him to speak on them at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York city. I was there. It was a packed, standing room only crowd.

There's some joking around about Bill being "new to SEO", or not so famous as far as the big-names go, but that's just hockey puk talk. I've known him since 1998. He's been around for a long time, quietly helping people in discussion groups and forums. Today, he is an Administrator for Cre8asiteforums, where the community is talking about him and his interview in Aaron Pratt Interviews Bill Slawski.

While the emphasis of the interview is on Google insights ala Bill, he is also skilled in usability design, Internet law, and search engine optimization techniques. He's also very tall. Smart. Handsome...Oh Kim. Shut up.

Check out the interview and then come to Cre8asite to shake his hand.

There is a thread with a fun name at High Rankings Forum named False Gods. The thread discusses how when searching for some "ego keywords" (keywords a person wants to rank well for) he found himself ranking well. But then he noticed that Google personalized search was turned on.

The results within personalized search, no matter which search engine, are tailored to your liking. So if you want to be number one for "seo" you can be over time. Especially if you use the remove result function until your site is #1 and also if you tend to click on your pages more often than others.

Past related article on this that may be of interest is named Search Engine Optimization is Changing So Quickly.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Reports come from WebmasterWorld that Google recently stopped obeying the noindex meta tag; <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. The tag is suppose to prevent Google from displaying your pages in the search index.

WebmasterWorld senior member, g1smd, explains that this is some sort of Google bug;

Such a page should never appear in search results, ever. Well, now they do, and in very large numbers; all (so far) marked as Supplemental Results, and with cache dates from a year ago.

It appears that something in their system is forgetting to check the index/noindex status of the pages in their database and is showing them all in the SERPs whatever their status.

I first noticed this yesterday; but found it on some searches that I have not done for several months. I have no idea how long this bug has been showing up... it could be several months.

tedster, WebmasterWorld Administrator confirms g1smd statement, this certainly is an error/bug and not just some intentional change.

As tedster points out, the noindex meta tag is an invaluable tool to help Webmasters prevent duplicate content issues. If Google accidently took that away, there can be serious issues in the short-term future for those Webmasters that heavily used the noindex meta tag as a solution.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan blogged about a Search Engine Watch thread named Google Earth on an interactive tabletop display, Minority Report style!

The thread links to a video at Google Video named Google Earth on a Table. The video shows how a PhD student put a layer over Google Earth to make Google Earth work a lot like how the Minority Report movie's interactive technology worked. I.e. with voice commands and touching screens seamlessly.

If you got some time, check out the video at Google Video.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

It has been years since we talked about Google tailoring the search results based on your location. It is well known, that if you conduct a search in London, you may get different results for the same search conducted in New York. But according to some reports at Search Engine Watch Forums the level of tailored results based on geo-location has increased significantly.

Typically, Google will show sites that they believe are more relevant for that location. What makes a site more relevant in a specific location? The TLD, the server location, the language used on the site, the company address listed on the site and other characteristics that may suggest a geo specific attribute.

Past coverage of these topics include:

• Country Specific Filters & Weights - May 20, 2004
  
• Ranking Well Outside US Centric Google Results - June 7, 2004
  

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Just a quick post to point out the interesting thread at Search Engine watch Forums from Nacho Hernandez. He introduces an economic concept for Google, suggesting that they provide computers and access for free in cafe's. He describes that the

primary objective is really to get a working model for growth in Internet access in Latin America

The idea sounds very cool to me, and I hope he has success in pitching it to Google. At the very least, someone is going to take this idea and run with it, in my opinion. Take a look at the introduction at Search Engine Watch Forums or the full Google Cafe Proposal at iHispanic (PDF).

Suppose you are creating multiple websites based on particular countries and languages. Should you choose a .com and use subdomains to classify the variations? Use different sites completely? Use Top level Domains tied to the country you are targeting? Not much credible research has been posted on this topic, and as is often the case, it seems that Matt Cutts is speaking most clearly about this subject.

Highly respected (and deservedly-so) Search Engine Watch member Robert Charlton recently posted a couple of excellent comments in response to a thread about TLD's, their ability to affect ranking in foreign searches, and possible issues with duplicate content. Robert carefully explains the concept of mirror sites and localized markets, linking to some other topical threads. He then prescribes a good dose of 301 redirect. In a follow up post he points to the Mike Grehan interview of Matt Cutts, during which Matt suggested that keeping to the country TLD is very helpful for ranking within that country, although you can rank if your .com is hosted locally.

Robert also points to his practice of using country and language specific links in helping to rank sites in International versions of Google (and I assume other search engines when applicable). In any case, even if you don't comment, the thread is worth the read in order to get an understanding of this important topic, as well as for some good links to other related threads that tie it all together.

See the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search Engine Marketing allows for the purchase of positioning within a variety of search engine and directory results. However, the analysis of its effectiveness lies not in the positioning but in the conversion rate associated with searcher activity. One of the more difficult types of advertising return on investment (ROI) to measure is the offline conversion. Barring the download and use of a coupon by a customer that can be directly tied to a specific click, or the offhand chance that a salesman will remember to ask and the client will remember that he clicked on a paid link in search engine XYZ, most conversions of this type have to be measured as a "best guess." This difficulty is one of the reasons that SEM benefits so much when case studies and analysis are brought into the open for discussion.

A thread started yesterday at Search Engine Watch Forums describes a brief case study published on the Marketing Sherpa website, describing some very interesting results of a recent test. The test pitted Google Local advertising versus Google "Regular" search engine ads in AdWords, and seemed to be soundly controlled. The surprising results were that 100% of the coupons used in this test at a store location were tagged as coming from Google, not Local ads. The poster asks for people to share if they feel that

It's possible people are only going to Local if they are actually searching for the store itself

This could be an interesting thread. First, the test will probably be further questioned. Was the tracking code accurate? How many Local versions of the coupon were said to be printed, if that was measured? The list goes on. The discussions of whether Google AdWords converts better than Google Local can also be good. However, in my opinion, the real discussion gem in the report is the last part about the Google Local ads "feeding regular results for particular phases." This is research I want to run immediately...

See the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums and the Marketing Sherpa Case Study.

The folks over at Yahoo! graciously invited me to write a guest blog entry at the YPN Blog. In my guest post, I wrote about how one can use discussion forums to optimize their Yahoo Publisher Network campaigns. Publishers sharing with other publishers, their experiences in monetizing Web pages with YPN can help you substantially increase your earnings. Check out my guest blog entry titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

It appears that a major link network named Link Vault has been banned from Google. Conducting a search on www.link-vault.com brings up no results. Doing a site command brings up one result. Other data centers have the link-vault.com domain listed as well.

Is Google banning link networks? Will DigitalPoint's Coop be next?

Forum discussion at both Link Vault Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Normally, I would not point to a thread that discusses rumors that I know are misguided. But at a thread at WebmasterWorld the official AdWordsAdvisor from Google replies to the speculation that Google uses data from Google Analytics (conversion data) to determine the price a keyword should cost. Here is AdWordsAdvisor's response;

This is a theory that seems to have acquired an (inaccurate) ring of truth through repetition - and I'd like to comment in as straightforward a way as possible:

AdWords does not currently (and has no plans to) use any information from Analytics or Google conversion tracking to set minimum CPCs.

AWA

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There has been recent interest in how a site can be included into Google News. Ben covered a thread at DigitalPoint Forums a few weeks ago on the topic. I thought I would revisit it with my own personal experience on how I was accepted into Google News.

(1) It took me a long time to get included. I was rejected a couple times prior and I had to make a good case for me to be included.

(2) Technical requirements:

• In order for the Google crawler to correctly gather articles, each page that displays an article's full text needs to have a unique URL that does not change. Google cannot include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL.

• The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

• Keep in mind that Google cannot include sites for which the URL of the main page includes a date. URLs with dates in them often change on a daily or weekly basis. This prevents Google from crawling the site for new content, as Google is unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.

• Google's automated crawler is currently best able to crawl regular HTML links. Google is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript.
  

(3) Making your case:

• Provide a good historical background of the site
  
• Show awards the site received
  
• Give stats on the site
  
• Tell them about your editors and authors
  
• Tell them about who links to your site (if the Google blog links to you, that is a good thing)
  
• Make sure you are news related or mostly news related.
  
• Make sure your site complies with the technical requirements, and show them that is does.
  

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: To clarify the URL aspect of the Google News inclusion requirements... The URL has to be unique, but the numbers within the URLs do not have to be unique. I new Google Groups thread clarifies this more:

As long as you have at least three digits in your URLs (and the digits don't resemble years), they can be anywhere - not necessarily at the very end.

The thing is, many sites are included using digits that do in fact resemble years. I am still trying to get to the bottom of this.

Update #2 A Google News representative said that you do not need digits in your URLs if you submit content to Google News in the Sitemaps format. You can find out more on the technical requirements of the URLs at this document and more on Google News Sitemaps.

It appears that a few searchers at Google.com are noticing a new flavor of expandable results. In the past, Google tested expanding results with arrows that were like --> when collapsed and downwards when expanded. Now Google is testing using a plus and minus sign.

Forum discussion on the new user interface at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

It appears from this WebmasterWorld thread that the most amount of characters you can have in your robots.txt file is 5,000. Google Sitemaps reports back an error to those who have more than 5,000 characters, stating;

Must be at most 5000 characters

The question is then, does Google ignore the full file or does it read the first 5,000 characters and ignore the remaining?

Either way, this is a good piece of information for Webmasters to know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has been tracking the various updated at some of Google data centers since June 5th. Over the weekend, many are reporting that the update has set many "sandboxed" sites free.

The Google results are still moving around at Google.com. Reports show that results are coming in and out. Will they stick? That is the question.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports come from WebmasterWorld that web pages are being dropped from the Yahoo! Search index.

What some people are noticing for some domains, a site: command search bring up only the URL of the homepage and/or just the URLs of the pages. You can read a handful of Webmaster stories at the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen in a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Subdomain Spamming Good or Bad? writes that;

Subdomains work very well at the moment. No doubt about that. I can take aprominent, old, domain, set up a brand new subdomain, add one link from the original domans front page, throw up whatever content I want and within days have plenty of traffic. These days it sems that almost all linkpop value from the original domain is transfered - and I see this happening in both MSN and Google.

He does believe that this will not last forever and that Google and MSN will close the hole sooner than later. However, subdomains in general, will continue to be an important part of site structure. So the search engines simply can not do away with them.

Forum discussion on sub domains and spam at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Should search engines introduce a tag of some sort that enables you to tell the spider not to index and not to use the content for ranking or relevancy purposes? Similar to the nofollow attribute for not counting links, and similar to AdSense Section Targeting, that enables you to specific which content is the relevant content for the AdSense spider to serve up relevant ads.

So why not a tag to tell the Web search spider what content is the content that should be indexed?

Well, right away, you can see how people may abuse it. But besides for that, there may be a way for search engines to deploy it safely.

Danny Sullivan says that Yahoo! had plans on introducing such a tag. But for some reason, has yet to do so. I believe they had plans on introducing something like it about a year ago.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Remember when we were beta testing Google Payments? I have three different, detailed write ups with step by step screen captures of the whole process documented. You can read them at:

• Accepted by Google Base to Sell Through Google Payments
• Buying and Accepting Payments at Google Base
• Ratings & Reviews with Google Payments

It looks like Google may open up this PayPal competing program sometime this month. A DigitalPoint Forum thread has more details.

Google to Add Payments in EBay Threat, Analyst Says (Update3) June 9, 2006 16:43 EDT -- Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, will start an online payment system this month that will challenge EBay Inc.'s PayPal and let Google offer more targeted ads, an analyst wrote.

The article seems to be from Bloomberg, but the thread creator did not cite the source. The thread also has a link to a Forbes article on the topic. Estimated arrival date of GBuy - Google Payments is June 28th.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A CNN Money article reports that eBay is launching a contextual ad program this week named eBay AdContext.

eBay's system differs from existing pay-per-click advertising systems offered by Google and rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. by linking only to eBay auctions rather than serving as a generic advertising network.

Advertisers don't seem to get paid on a per click basis, and also not on a CPM basis. It looks like the only way to make money is to actually have your click lead to a sale. You can earn between 35% and 60% in commissions per sale based on volumes sold.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google posted at the AdSense blog that they are hiring a AdSense Product Specialist. Part of the job description reads;

- Provide verbal and written feedback to Product Managers on new and existing products, representing the AdSense Online team and publishers.
- Develop and manage the operational support plan for the launch of new AdSense products and features.
- Coordinate beta testing of products and features with selected publishers.
- Closely monitor the release process, troubleshoot and escalate issues as required.
- Actively solicit feedback internally and externally with respect to product needs and enhancements.
- Be the cross-functional champion of AdSense publisher needs.

All of these lines suggest Google is looking for a new AdSense Advisor to bridge the publisher and Google lines. They are looking to hire an AdSense publisher who is deeply involved in the Webmaster and publishing community.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports come from WebmasterWorld that trying to access the Yahoo! Search Marketing DTC is futile. The reports of the downtime began this morning at 5:30am and now at 8:10am (EST), it is still inaccessible.

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers are frustrated and concerned.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The first ever SES Latino will be hosted at the InterContinental Hotel in Miami Florida. The face behind this show is Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic Marketing, who has been working incredibly hard to promote and educate the Latino/Hispanic search engine market. Nacho is also a guest author at this site.

The two day Search Engine Strategies event will be take place on a Monday and Tuesday. Each day contains two tracks, and is a smaller conference than what you can expect from SES NYC, Chicago or San Jose. The conference agenda has many Hispanic focused tracks and is perfect for anyone interesting in entering that emerging market.

Will I or someone else from the Search Engine Roundtable be covering this event? As of now, I am not sure.

Forum discussion on the new SES show at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A new member posted a thread promoting his SEO Comics at our forums. I personally find them funny and wanted to share them with you.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Last night the MSN Search folks at Microsoft adCenter sent out an announcement about new features coming along. The features are mostly reporting in nature and include;

A new Reports page user interface

Create a New Report tab
Recent Reports tab
Report Templates tab
Customize date ranges
Schedule and save reports
Download reports

Additional reporting upgrades

Schedule and run multiple reports in the background while you are working in adCenter
Run more than 10,000 rows of report data (downloadable in .ZIP format)
Run reports in multiple formats .TSV (Tab Separated Value) and .HTML formats
View the previous 20 reports in the Recent Reports tab

We’ll also be launching our new Video Help that will provide a variety of step-by-step videos explaining adCenter tasks and information.

There are a few other goodies in there so be sure to check in after 10PM PST (or whenever the last “golden popcorn” is handed out) to explore the new features.

Because of that, last night adCenter was unavailable between 4 P.M. Pacific time until around 10 P.M.

Forum discussion on the features at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Watch Forums is two years old as of yesterday, June 8th, 2006. Search Engine Watch Forums intitally launched on June 8th, 2004 and made a huge splash. The post I have was dated on June 2nd but the official launch date was six days later.

Today Search Engine Watch has over 10,000 threads, over 80,000 posts and more than 10,000 members.

Join the celebration at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Spotted via DigitalPoint Forums, a search result at MSN UK. Do a search on web design uk at search.msn.co.uk. The first result is;

Yes, the URL is cut off, the full URL looks like;

http://www.velnet.co.uk/domain-names.html/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/web-design/

Let's count the number of times we see "web design" in the URL. I see 14 times, "/web-design."

So does this work with any keyword phrase? I doubt it. Just funny to see pages like these rank well in a top tier search engine.

Danny Sullivan has the detailed write up on French Lawsuit Over Google Book Search. Basically, a French publishing group is to sue Google for publishing book excerpts online without permission. But is it without permission? :)

The group's web site, it should be noted, has 919 pages listed in Google, all of which are protected by copyright, all of which Google and other search engines index without explicit permission -- and all of which the group apparently doesn't object to, since it doesn't seem to have banned indexing using a robots.txt file (the site is down, so I can't verify this first hand -- but the pages really are unlikely to be listed if this were the case). But do the same thing with a print book -- copy for indexing purposes rather than reprinting -- and suddenly, that's infringement. Well, the courts will sort it out.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread named Yahoo is Altering Webmaster Content describes how Yahoo! has added a security feature that removes all JavaScript from the publishers. The security feature is a tagged known as "securty=restricted" which disables all javascript in Internet Explorer. That means any AdSense or JavaScript driven banners are stripped from the content.

Senior Member Cabbie says; "To me this constitutes blatant theft. For all purposes they are providing your content on your bandwidth and at the same time preventing you from getting a return. How can anyone buy anything while in a secruity restricted frame, when all cookies and java is disabled."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Spotted over at WebmasterWorld, Google has released Google Browser Sync. What does it do?

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

My first question was, does this send my data up to Google based on my Google Account. Yes it does! The FAqs are here by the way. Let me now take you through the initial set up.

Continue reading "Google's Firefox Browser Sync"

The Google PageRank Patent has been updated the other day, the patent is titled Method for node ranking in a linked database. The abstract reads;

A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database. The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it. In addition, the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document. The method is particularly useful in enhancing the performance of search engine results for hypermedia databases, such as the world wide web, whose documents have a large variation in quality.

So what was changed? Bill Slawski says four things, but nothing substantial to the algorithm itself.

1. The references section was updated in this patent to include documents that are listed in the filing granted on September 28, 2004.

2. The abstract section remains the same in the new document, but the claims section was reduced in length, and appears to now cover aspects of both previous patent filings.

3. There are some minor looking changes in the “Detailed Descriptions” section between the version granted in 2001, and the one granted today.

4. The main changes appears in the summary section of the document. In the two previous documents, there were many passages that were repeated, but there were also differences. I’ve copied the areas of that section below where the three differ:

Continue reading the differences at SEO By the Sea.

Also Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The title of this thread may seem like an easy question, but unfortunately for many webmasters, Google's algorithm in many cases doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between original and stolen content within its index. With so many sites "borrowing" content these days in order to generate revenue (see Barry's last post about MFA's for more info on this), the problem of website owners finding their content reused and indexed above them in the rankings is growing exponentially.

A thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums that started last week gives an example of one member's frustration, as they say:

It is pretty lame if someone (who) just copied content gets better SERP than the one who made the original content.

.

Member “Sprouty” envisions an army of humans trying to solve the problem at the Googleplex. It would seem to be a simple issue of assigning priority for particular content to the first site which it was indexed, but therein lies the problem. Sometimes the plagiarism happens so fast that the first site crawled actually copied the content. This poses yet another challenge for people adding content, especially as a part of their search engine optimization efforts. It would seem that you would want to wait to release new content until just before a scheduled crawl, or use the Sitemaps system to submit the content directly to Google.

Hopefully there will be some more good thoughts and advice on this topic as the discussion grows at SER Forums.

There is a pretty interesting thread named MFA warriorship 101 at WebmasterWorld that tries to explain a theory on how MFAs (Made for AdSense) sites get into your Google AdSense ads. The thread creator explains eCPM, how eCPM is calculated in an ad unit, how an MFA can get a high eCPM, how that spreads and how you can try to prevent it.

I believe that the solution sums up the whole explanation listed in the thread.

The way to prevent this happening, in this example, is to reduce the number of ads on the page to two and price the MFA off your site. You could use, say, a vertical banner instead of the skyscraper and putting it in a hotspot to keep the CTR high.

Eg: if you maintain an overall 8% on the page, the top ad might have a CTR of 5% and the bottom one 3%, giving eCPMs of $25 and $15. This puts the price of the ad slots out of reach of the MFAs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back on May 22nd we reported that the Google's Site Command Search Being Fixed, where searches in the syntax of site:www.example.com/ (trailing slash) and site: www.example-site.com (with a hyphen in the domain name) were not reporting the correct information back. Last week Google said they partially fixed it. They fixed the issue with domains with punctuation in them, so the second example listed above should now work. When using the site command, for now, just don't append a trailing slash to the URL.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Some Webmasters have recently noticed a change in the number of pages that were indexed by Google of their sites. A WebmasterWorld thread shows a few that noticed positive changes after doing these three bare minimum things;

1. 301 redirect from non-www to www.

2. Removed any search engine specific pages, focused on user only.

3. Submitted Re-inclusion request.

Some have done the same three steps but have not noticed a change in indexing behavior by Google. See our continued linked coverage of these changes at Google here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A featured Search Engine Watch Forum thread links to an AP article at Yahoo! News that is titled; Brin says Google compromised principles.

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

"We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference," Brin said.

I am impressed that he said it. I am.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forum.

Back in January Google released the AdWords Editor which allows one to manage your AdWords campaigns from your desktop. At first, it was not open for everyone to use. Just recently, the Google AdWords Editor became available to all to use.

You can download it here and learn more about it here.

Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The majority of successful people are so partially because they are constantly driven to learn. This can certainly be said for some practitioners of search engine optimization. Most of the arguable leaders in the field are in some way active in Forums or Blogs - not just to show off their knowledge but also to learn from participants with a wide ranging skill level. The problem is, however, that SEO is in such demand these days that it becomes hard for many to learn new areas of the field. For example, many who may be experts in content development and linking would love to learn to use Cold Fusion in a search-friendly manner. Fortunately, SEO is a process that can be very well handled by a team of experts in various areas.

Todd "Stuntdubl" has started a fun thread at SEW Forums titled: "What Top 5 Skills Would You Study to Become a Better SEO?" he describes how in the movie The Matrix, the girl (trinity) learns to fly a helicopter within seconds of downloading the information. he asks people to share what they would like to be able to learn instantly, and gives his examples of the top five things he would enjoy becoming more versed at, including programming and presentation skills.

I am not saying that SEO can not be effectively performed by a single person. Yet there are very few people who can legitimately claim to be experts in all SEO-related areas. Personally, I would prefer to pay $500 an hour for 2 experts at a rate of $250 an hour than for one at the full $500. Anyway, if you wish you could plug-in some instant knowledge, what would it be? Discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Discovery, Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator, shared with us a 2006 Test Run On Kanoodle. The results were less than positive, to say the least. Discovery funded the Kanoodle account with $300, ran the behavioral and context ad features and watched it go. Four hours later, the $300 was completely depleted by 588 clicks. The 588 clicks resulted in "99.86% immediately bounced back out of the site." There was one conversion, which turned out to be fraud or fake.

Discovery ran the same keyword on other networks and realized a 15% conversion over the past 6 months.

Kanoodle did contact Discovery to review the account and help. But will Discovery give them an other chance?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator Discovery reports that updating match types in Microsoft's MSN adCenter is now easier. Discovery details the new simplified process;

Select your campaign
Click "manage keywords" button
Wait a moment of your current keywords to fully load into the right window.
Check the check box of the keywords you want to work with
Now at the top of the keyword window select "Match Option" and select "show match types"
The Keyword window will now display a column for each match type option along with a check box to toggle on or off the match option for each keyword.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yahoo! has relaunches Yahoo! Video to be more YouTube and Google Video like. The Yahoo Search Blog announced the new features which include;

• New user interface to search and browse by new, featured, popular, category and more.
• A place to upload, manage, and share your videos named My Studio.
• RSS abilities
• The concept of "channels" which seem to be search based triggers.
• MyFavorites section
• And more sharing abilities...

Also there is a new Yahoo! Video Team Blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan has all the details on Google Spreadsheets To Launch Shortly. Don't believe me that Google is creating a Web based Excel-like application? Go to http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html or check out the Google Spreadsheets Privacy Policy or the Google Spreadsheets Help Center. It should be live some time today at http://spreadsheets.google.com/.

There are more screen captures at the tour which is available.

Forums are discussing it, but it is not getting as much buzz as I thought it might. Of course we have the debate if this is way too off search related focus and how much this may tick-off Bill Gates. Oh, let's not forget how much this may upset those small companies that have been designing web based alternatives to Excel for years, more on that at Resource Shelf.

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

eWhisper reports at WebmasterWorld on adCenter Labs. Microsoft has a suite of tools available for us that include;

+ Search Funnel: Analyze and visualize user search sequence in the form of funnels.
+ Search Volume Seasonality Forecast: Forecast seasonality patterns of search queries.
+ Content Categorization Engine
+ Keyword Categorization Engine
+ Demographics Prediction: Predict a user's demographic information such as age and gender based on online behavior (query searched or Web page viewed).
+ Local Ads: Detect a customer's location by their IP address, and list relevant local ads based on this location.

Pretty neat tools for SEMs to play with.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

While I was away, Google released the Google AdSense API. They announced the release on May 31st detailing that features of the API.

- Create an AdSense account - Manage an AdSense account - Create and modify AdSense for content ad units and link units, AdSense for search boxes, and Referrals - View detailed reports to monitor performance and earnings

Developers can earn money for the publishers they sign up with the AdSense referrals program.

All the technical guidelines and specifications for the AdSense API can be found here and if you are interested you can apply to be a developer here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

If you visit the Froogle Merchant Center you will see this message posted on the left hand side of the page.

In case you've been wondering, the old Froogle Merchant Center has been replaced by Google Base. Your existing account information and bulk uploads (formerly known as 'product feeds'') are already viewable there, and you can continue to upload your product data just as you did before.

There is a whole Froogle Migration documentation section to learn more.

Where did the Froogle Merchant Center go?

The Google Base dashboard has replaced the Froogle Merchant Center. Your existing account and product information have already been transferred and are now viewable in your new Google Base account. From now on, when you click "Information for Sellers" on the Froogle homepage, you’ll be brought to a new sign-in page.

As well as on Froogle, your content should be viewable at http://base.google.com; you can search there to verify that your products have appeared online after you post them.

If you are looking for a good summary, check out eWhisper's post.

There is forum discussion on the topic at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week Ask.com announced the launch of Ask.com Blog & Feed Search. The features include;

* World-Class Results: The result of mixing ExpertRank and Bloglines data. * Three Flavors of Relevance: Search by Date, Popularity, or Relevance (a combination of the first two) * Three Sorting Options: Sort by Posts, Feeds or News * Unique Tools: Including Binoculars to preview the last 5 posts from a feed * Open Subscription Options: Subscribe to a feed in Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo, or Newsgator * Open Posting Options: Post a link to Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Newsvine or Digg

They also added more features to bloglines search, such as;

* In-line Previews: See an entire feed, including pictures and videos, directly from the results page * More search options: Including search citations, search within your subscriptions and even Search Outside of your subscriptions * More Info: See how many subscribers and citations a feed or post have

The cool features include the Binoculars preview, the quick subscribe links and the post to links.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld Moderator eWhisper posted news under the thread title AdWords to Receive New Feature: Ad Scheduling. Google will be adding day parting scheduling features to the account management toolset.

This is a feature where one can list the time of day and days of the week they wish their ads to run. Google will automatically start and stop the ads based upon advertiser settings.

In addition, one will be able to change Max CPCs based upon time considerations.

The feature is expected to be released some time this month.

Overall, WebmasterWorld members are happy with the pre-announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Nice refresher thread about the types of bots that Google has besides it's regular crawler. I remember when they only had one running around and we watched every time it changed from 2.0 to 2.1 to much fanfare. These days, things are much more complex.

Here is a list of the current Google robots as far as we know:

• Googlebot


• MediaBot - used to analyze AdSense pages, user agent "Mediapartners-Google"


• ImageBot - crawling for the Image Search, user agent "GoogleBot-Image"


• AdsBot - checking AdWords landing pages for quality, user agent "AdsBot-Google"


• Feedfetcher-Google


• Generic Mobile Phone (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Got more?

Discuss at WebmasterWorld - Google Bots

Boy, do some people hate them and their traffic. Others don't see the big deal. There is a thread on SEW Forums about click fraud and second tier PPC companies that has been going on for well over a year now. The creator of the thread, posts some data in regards to the companies whose traffic is rampant with click fraud. The rest of the thread follows with people giving input on the data and their own experience. The result: People hate second tier search engines. They simply don't trust them to not fraud them out of their money. Why so bad, you might ask?

Well one of the members Nintendo, posted some of his log file as to why he believes some second tier engines are nothing but 100% click fraud. You can see the stats here. It doesn't take a scientist to tell that all the clicks come from one domain. But this is a simplistic view.

One of the owners of these operations (Infoseek) came to post on the forums to protest the abuse he was getting from the thread creator. He had to say:

I operate an affiliate & partner program I have canceled allot of members for cheating, I do not condole cheaters. there for your opinion of my site is an under statement. I have spent a lot of time on my website and my scripts get
updated every 2 months with anti cheat software. ...it is unfair for you to quote me as a fraud farm. ...You have caused my allot of pain & suffering.

Apparently he was pissed!

To be fair, not all second tier search engines are click fraud wastlelands with crookbots running around. There are some that are fair and deliver meaningful traffic. People are working to make it a better oppourtunity to advertise in. Places like Kanoodle, Searchfeed, and Verizon Superpages are some places I think doing that already.

Interesting thread to check out on a Friday - SEW Forums

Any SEO/M will tell you their job description sucks because in the process of describing exactly what they do, they nearly always watch the listener's eyes glaze over, waiting for a topic that may make better sense. Same thing with user centered design/usability industry folks. That glazed eyes thing is often followed up with, "Did you say you wanted another beer?"

There really are productive reasons to incorporate SEO/M (search engine optimization and marketing) and user centered design techniques into web design. Two, well, three discussions at Cre8asiteforums, are focused on how to inject logic and practicality into web design, and why. Two of them are human-computer oriented, for when you're ready to commune with the reasons why people do things, in addition to how. It's about meeting their needs. Of course, understanding them is no piece of cake, which is why there are so many ongoing studies. Some of these studies involve how people search and use search engines, since this is how they find most web sites they'd like to use.

Some thought provoking discussions on web design and programming that meet human requirements:

Features don't matter anymore, Welcome to the Age of User Experience

"What does matter is the way we can use the "thing". How the features don't get in our face and the "thing" just lets us do what at the most basic level we want to do."

Contextual Usability?

"One thing relates to another, and understanding relationships helps us build usablility into navigation strategies."

Should links still be underlined and blue?. The responses are all over the place. Cre8tive choice fights a strong battle.

The tie-in to SEO/M? There are many, but one strong one is landing pages. Large financial investments are made into the design of landing pages for search engines for use in marketing and conversions. Persuasive design is determined to figure out what people need and want, but that's not all. Web user environment matters too. Cultures, gender, and age matter too. Links on a landing page have assignments, much like an army of soldiers.

Don't let anyone tell you that you have a silly little job.

The usefulness of the directory for SEO is fading. It's fading because its not longer as valued as it once was for rankings purposes. There is a thread on SEW that talks about caching problem with 2nd and 3rd tier internal pages in some directories. The poster talks about he is not seeing the internal pages appear to be cached in Google, and consequently they won't find his links. So he asks:

"Out of 25 shortlisted directories I am finding I can only submit to 1/2 now as pages are just not being read anymore. Anyone else finding similar problem? Anyway we can get round it?"

I would agree this is definately an issue. We know Google has talked about pages dropping out of the index in the past. Some for explainable reasons, others for not. I talked to a well known link expert this week that told me about several good directories that are now useless because they were including hidden text at the bottom of their pages. Even though there was massive land rush to build directories the last couple of years, it remains. What places do you trust or still remain a good investment?

Good discussion to continue over at Search Engine Watch Forums

One practice used by search engine optimization companies that has remained relatively below the radar is the purchase of expired domains with good inbound links that are still active. The general theory is that the Google PageRank is still "alive," meaning that it is not only visible through the toolbar representation but actually still counting in the Google ranking algorithm results of that particular URL. Of course, with Google becoming an approved Domain Registrar (see recent discussion here), who's to say they can't set up a system where domains lose PageRank upon expiration?

The topic comes up occasionally in forums, and yesterday at Cre8asite, someone asked if buying domains can help for link building. Some good discussion so far, including Administrator Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) who points to a recent patent which actually supports the Registrar theory above and says:

I'm not sure how much value there will be to doing something like this in the future, but I wouldn't rely upon it for much for too long.

It would seem that this method may work for now, but all signs are pointing towards the SE's tackling this "loophole" head-on. Please ad your thoughts to the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Forums and blogs have become a very important part of the Internet landscape. I personally have learned almost as much about Internet marketing by diligently reading as I have from actual hands-on experience. With every positive experience, however, I have seen people trying to abuse the system. Forum and blog spammers, as Barry pointed out a couple weeks ago, can make the whole community experience a little less satisfying.

A couple of threads recently started at Search Engine Watch Forums has the same member asking about "Using Forums for SEO" and "Can I use someone else's blog to link to my site? " A few weeks ago, another poster detailed what he seemed to think was a new idea, saying "I was wondering if forums spam is something illegal with regarding to SEs?" he went on to describe his plan, but was a little worried about the Search Engines.

In my opinion, what they should really worry about is their status/reputation within their industry. In order to effectively do such a task and hope to get any SEO value from the links, they would have to be spamming a forum or blog somewhat relevant to their own industry. Imagine being known as "the guy/gal that's a spammer." Trust me, as a moderator at SEW, I have seen the reputation of seemingly very nice people go down the drain because of obvious link drops.

Not to mention many links that are placed within forums signatures and blog comments are blocked from being spidered by the site owner, and there ends up being no return on the time invested in spamming. Please give your thoughts or share your spamming success stories at any of the threads linked-to above.

I also dug up an older thread at Cre8asite Forums that has some good thoughts on this subject.