July 2006 Archives

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Here are the main changes, some not visible on the frontend at this moment:

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Well-known WebmasterWorld member, reseller, started a thread at WebmasterWorld named Possible Shift in Google-Webmasters Communication Policy! Reseller says;

I have noticed in recent months a remarkable shift in the way Google employees communicate with the webmasters communities.

For one reason or the other the Googlers have stopped posting weather reports about the new infrastructure. No more posts explaining critical changes on the serps. No more talking about specific DCs as they use to do. No more chat when it comes to Google serps and possible changes which are so clear and obvious to even novice webmasters. The only thing we have been hearing is the famous "Data Refresh".

Soon later, GoogleGuy comes in and argues, "I think that there is a lot of good things we've been doing for communication with webmasters lately," listing out a few key things. He then gives some specific advice and continues by saying, "I do think that we'll be discussing data centers more toward the end of the summer, if I had to guess."

Then we had Matt Cutts post himself at WebmasterWorld, saying "Maybe it's time to do a miscellaneous question thread on my site, too? " Which leads to this and SEO Answers on Google Video at his blog.

Overall, I think Google is only improving at Webmaster communication.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week Google launched Google Code Project Hosting a place developers can go to share and host new software they have developed. I guess it is suitable for the king of "beta" to release a repository for others to release beta applications. Ed Burnette has step by step screen captures of how this environment works. Of course, we already have SourceForge for years - which is basically the same thing, I believe.

Folks at DigitalPoint Forums are discussing the long term viability of this Google product. One member said, "I doubt I'd use it. Source forge is way better, and is already established in that area." An other said, "if google can take up just 25% of current SF's share..it would be great."

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a funny recount of a back and forth between an AdSense publisher and Google. I'll quote the back and forth below, but in short, Google tells publisher, that he has invalid clicks. The publisher responses, what can I do to stop it since I am not doing this myself. Google responds to the publisher that he has invalid clicks and they will disable the account if it continues. Publisher responds back asking Google again, what actions can he take to stop the invalid clicks. Google responds that they have disabled his account due to invalid clicks. Kinda funny.

Continue reading "Google Warns AdSense Publishers of Disabling Accounts Due to Invalid Clicks But Gives No Advice"

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses how Google's PR team sent out a box of Google goodies to a upset Google Checkout shopper. Kirb, at his blog, complained about his difficulties trying to buy something from Buy.com with Google's new Google Checkout. Well, soon after, that unhappy user was showered with an apology letter from Libby Neville at Google and tons of Google shwag.

Cre8asite Forums discusses the press benefits for Google and this act. All I know, is that this made the press and spread pretty quickly.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I reported last Friday at the SEW Blog that Yahoo! has announced the launch of a new crawler, slurp. The new slurp is faster and more efficient;

In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.

While transitioning to the new crawler over the past few weeks, we had been running both crawlers in tandem. In some cases, this increased the frequency of Yahoo Search requests to websites. Now, with the new crawler in full production, we have turned off the old crawler and site owners should see a much lower crawl load without a loss in content coverage.

With this change of behavior in the crawler, you may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses methods of speeding up the page load of a page that has Google AdSense on it. Sometimes, because of the ads are called from a different server, it may make the page of the site appear to load slower, when in reality, it is the ads that are slowing down the page load times. So what can you do to speed it up?

WebmasterWorld Admin, trillianjedi says;

Source ordered content

Pull the AdSense code last and position with appropriate CSS DIV markup. I'm not sure that's all easy in my particular case as I'm using a full float CSS layout already which is probably pushing the margins of what is currently possible. I don't know that it would stand any additional complexity.

This is the preferred method. Of course, adding some timeout code to the page, just in case Google goes down would also help with things.

Forum discussion for other solutions at WebmasterWorld.

Danny reports that the $90 Million Click Fraud Settlement has been approved. $30 million goes to the lawyers, $60 million goes to AdWords customers, in terms of credits. Danny says that "apparently around 500 companies choosing to opt-out" of the settlement and will go after Google solo.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kudos to Google for coming up with a search portal specifically designed for the blind and visually impaired! From Google's FAQ's (in nice large Font) for the product, which is still in BETA:

Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set.

…In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully--that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

There are a few forums discussing this groundbreaking product, Cre8asite Forums, WebMasterWorld, and Search Engine watch Forums all have good participation. please feel free to post further relevant links, especially any in forums that cater to the visually impaired community, in the comments.

A new WebmasterWorld thread is theorizing a new Google filter, currently coined, "google 2 kw filter." Now, this is what several Webmasters are reporting:

• 2 kw term
• used to rank very high, now vanished
• with " "'s returns to high rank
• does not affect rankings for other terms on same site
• home page involved
• only happens on google, still rank high on Y/MSN
• appears on only specific but changing data centers
• long standing site
• Without quotes main keywords gone.
• With quotes, main keywords appear in normal positions

I have not validated any of this but there is a three page WebmasterWorld thread with many folks discussing this new Google filter.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo launched a new tool in the Korean domain named Webzari. What it does is use the Site Explorer data to map your inlinks on a map, in the form of planets. A link map, in a sense, with AJAX and more flavor.

You can check it out in action by clicking here.

Pretty cool and here is a screen capture.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Google's Internet marketing platform AdWords places ads within search engine results: most people now understand this concept. Generally, people will not notice if the ads change on a page-to-page basis. For example, if I was one of the very low number (by percentage) of searchers that went beyond the first page of results, would the ads remain the same or change? The answer is in the number of advertisers bidding on a particular term. There can be as many as 11 (sometime 12) sponsored results within a Google search result page: 3 on top of the results - in rare cases 4- and up to 8 on the side of the page. So if there are dozens of advertisers bidding on the term, it will take quite a few pages to sift through before you found a duplicate on the side. ***Note that if an ad is in the top three, it will stay there on subsequent pages of the results.

An interesting question was posed the other day at Search Engine Watch Forums, asking if a searcher goes beyond the first page of results and "sees" a sponsored listing again, would that be credited as an additional "impression" in its statistics? He adds that this could make a difference in the performance of the ad, since total impressions versus click-through total is measured as "Click-Through-Rate," and CTR is one of the factors used in determining ad position. The answer, according to paid search expert and moderator Frank Watson, aka Aussiewebmaster, is that yes they do count as multiple impressions. He also ads with justified urgency that

The famous back button contributes to the high numbers Google - and other engines - are getting!!!

Join the discussion and give your thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Let's say, for a minute or two, that you are a web site. What would you ask the people that visit you? Do you like my hair? Nah. How about, did you like my landing page or do you think I look better on my homepage? Do you come here often? First impressions count, but who is it you're trying to impress?

Google?

See Cre8asiteforums, As a Site Visitor, What do you LOVE to find the most?. Bring beer.

The is some interesting discussion over at SEW Forums you might want to check out. It is discussing the trends of the major PPC providers in terms of the lengths of their ad creatives and how over time they have gotten shorter or even longer at times. Yahoo in particular seems to want to shorten its creatives while Google on the other hand wishes to test longer versions of its ads including many variations in between. What is going on here? Will Google ever stop its never ending testing? Will Yahoo, conform to the pressure of its larger rival to prevent social rejection from webmasters? Some people would like to know.

One of the members commenting on ad length says:

Our advice to advertisers was always "the more you tell, the more you sell." This is true for PPC as well. Yahoo's longer ads definitely do a better job of getting targeted clicks. But it's hard to compare apples to apples, because the audiences for the two engines are so different, and the programs keep changing in terms of distribution partners, "quality score," and so on.;

Good stuff. To find out more about where the market is heading navigate over to SEW Forums - PPC Search Marketing Creatives

This is a long time problem with the current Yahoo! Search Marketing platform. The only way for you to turn off the auto pay feature, the feature that funds your account when the funds are depleted, is by calling Yahoo!. A WebmasterWorld thread tells a newbie to the AdWords game that phone is his only option.

I do believe email also works. But there is no simple button to shut if off in the advertiser's console.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two forum threads, one at DigitalPoint Forums and the other at WebmasterWorld show how some, but not all, of the changes that took place on June 27th have been "fixed."

dazzlindonna said this morning at DigitalPoint;

Just so you know, things aren't back exactly as they were. I know because I had some rankings show up in the June 27 update (which made me happy) and they are still there.

WebmasterWorld Moderator, SkiBum, said;

Traffic lost on June 27 appears to be bouncing back very nicely today. No changes made to the site since it got hit, just algo changes on G's end.

And some are reporting that the Google site command is beginning to work again.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Jennifer Slegg (JenSense.com/Jenstar) wrote a SearchDay article at Search Engine Watch that I was highly anticipating. The article is named Analyzing the Google AdWords Landing Page Algorithm and boy does she do that. She covers a lot of detail, but let me summarize some how what we covered in our first edition of Improving Your Google AdWords Quality Score.

Jen recommends that to achieve an improved Google AdWords Quality Score you should be careful with the following points:

• URL for landing page must work - no dead links and link to the right page (obvious but important)
• Does the ad copy jive with the landing page text?
• Clearly pull out navigation and ads from landing page from core context
• Have a contact form and privacy policy page
• Unique content - duh!

Now I am not going to give all the tips listed. The full member version is located here, these alone are worth the yearly subscription.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is not new, it has been around for a while now, but I thought it was important to document. Google AdWords sometimes shows local specific data on under each AdWords ad when either the advertiser calls for it or the searcher calls for it.

For example, a ny web design has listings on the right side that display "New York" or "New York, NY" underneath them. Now, I am currently in St. Louis, MO - so if I do a standalone search on web design I get some ads that end with "Missouri."

First case, I called, as the searcher, for new york based web design companies and the second case, I did not. In both, there were advertisers who set the local details in the AdWords campaigns. In the later, I did not make a specific geo based search, but since Google knows my ISPs location, it displays relevant geo based results.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

There is an good thread at Cre8asite Forums discussing the effects of doing search engine optimization on one page websites. Most of us know these sites, generally they always try to sell you on something. Whether it be collecting information, clicking on Adsense, or trying to get you to visit somewhere else these sites can be useful to the marketer but they can also have their limitations. The thread starter asks, "How would this affect one's SEO strategies? Is it more of a benefit to having one page whereby you are scrunching all of your content, and subsequently, your keywords onto one page?"

Ammon posts some thoughts on the subject:

A one-page website always has less options than a multi-page website. That always means it has limitations, and is slightly handicapped (possibly a lot more than just slightly).

Your own internal links and link text (navigation) have weight in many search algorithms. Your site structure can have weight. With a one-page site there are neither internal links, nor structure.

Whatever you can do to make one page successful, you could do to six pages to make the site more than six times as successful.

Continued discussion at Cre8asite Forums - One Page SEO

Via Wired, Shawn Hogan, who runs the incredibly popular DigitalPoint Forums and Tools has been sued by Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America for allegedly downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Shawn denies this and has turned down the offer to settle the case for $2,500 - he wants to stand up for everyone who has been falsely accused and fight. Shawn said he is willing to "spend well into the millions on this." Wired calls Shawn a "Hero."

Let's show our support by dropping him a note in DigitalPoint Forum Thread his sister started for him.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that Microsoft is conducting some focus groups for the adCenter product this August. The thread creator notes that this is run by an independent agency that is "conducting a user interview session in my area (San Francisco) that is sponsored by Microsoft Adcenter in August."

Yahoo! has done this in the past and also sent out recent paid surveys, and I hear they may be doing focus groups during SES time (but not 100% sure).

Nice to see MSN Search doing the same.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has members estimating how much the forums make in AdSense income. Some estimate $500 per day, which is $15,000 per month. They base it off of how much they make in the revenue share feature of the DigitalPoint Forums community.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Have you ever accidentally searched for a number at Google? Practitioners of search engine optimization would probably agree that trying to rank well for a single digit in Google search results is probably a waste of time, except possibly for the testing that could be accomplished. How many searches are there per month for "1" or "2," or even "3275984," for example?

A thread at Cre8asite Forums describes how a UK member performed a search at Google UK without selecting "results from UK only," and was returned some interesting results. He found BBC Radio station websites 1, 2, and 3 listed as number one for each of the respective digit searches. This lead to others around the world trying the same thing, and it seems that media companies have the slight early lead in this rankings category.

I think personally that this could be an interesting marketing idea for a company with lots of money to spend on optimization and link building. We have discussed the merge of traditional advertising with search engine marketing here is the past. I could see pitching something along the Pontiac lines of: “Want to find our product? Search for the number 1 at Google.” Of course your competitor would probably buy the top paid listing. Also, this sounds like an SEO Contest in the making...

Join the discussions and add your results at Cre8asite Forums.

Every now and then I check the directory listings I have at Yahoo! to see what is up with them. I have bookmarked them ages ago and when I have some free time I check them out. I checked last night and noticed that Yahoo! has added the "Save to My Web" button to the top right corner of the pages.

Social search, online bookmarking, is found everywhere with Yahoo!. In Yahoo! Local, where I bookmark phone numbers I use every now and then and now in the directory, which gets less and less attention from Yahoo.

The little icon to me is very useful. If you want to see my listings you can check them out in the New York Consulting list or the generic Yahoo! Web Rank.

I posted a forum thread on if this is a new feature for the Yahoo! Directory or not at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google's AdWords blog just announced that the AdWords reports now give you the ability of Estimating invalid clicks. Yea, you got that. Google will be showing you which clicks they have deemed "invalid" and credited towards your account. Great move on Google's part, IMO. First to do so and I hope the other PPC engines follow. More on invalid clicks here.

How do you see the data, just add them to the reports as so:

This goes great with Google's invalid click efforts being considered resonable, just one more step in the right direction. Chris also posted a topic on click fraud this morning, asking if you are worried about click fraud? Well this may just help a bit.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Wikipedia is, by its own "simple self portrait" an encyclopedia that anyone can change or add-to. Of course, there are editors, who seem to do a pretty good job of keeping content relevant and useful, and of removing blatant attempts of "link dropping." DMOZ, conversely, is a human edited directory of websites which has had its fair share of problems and accusations of corruption.

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums discusses how a member seems to be seeing more and more Wikipedia pages indexed highly in Google search results. Others concur (including me). Does this mean that Google is starting to place as much or more faith in Wikipedia references as those from long-trusted and powerful DMOZ? The member asks about the seemingly fruitless process of submitting to DMOZ:

Why should I bother now when Wiki sits atop Google (for nearly every information search term) and they let you add your link if you have a extra good resource.

Good discussion follows. Naturally, any discussion about DMOZ will lead to agreement about the headaches associated with submission and acceptance. It also is beginning to seem many people are wary of the "Web 2.0" folksonomy aspect of Wikipedia - and how much you can trust it. I have seen examples of people actually attacking Wikipedia's credibility quite often in forums and even in comments to posts in here where I have "dared" to use Wikipedia as a reference link. Some call it a mere content-thief. Some "interesting" people even compare Wikipedia to a cult.

The main point is, however, will Wikipedia help to affect your own search engine rankings if you have a listing there? As one comment points out:

You're missing the point. Wikipedia pages might rank well, but that's not the same thing as saying that out-bound links from Wikipedia are valuable. Google doesn't have to PR0 a directory to devalue it's OBL’s (outbound links).

It may be wise if you are a brand owner to ensure that your brand has not been ill-defined by a competitor or even someone who is just a little too excited about your product or service. I would recommend taking the time to at least submit an article before that happens...

Join the thread at WebMasterWorld Forums. Another related WebMasterWorld thread discusses Wikipedia getting two listings in Google for one term.

The Internet marketing platform known as "pay-per-click" marketing has grown in popularity, gathering new participants at a very rapid pace. Along with the majority of legitimate businesses involved in search engine marketing and the contextual marketing products tied to it (which place the same ads in sites deemed to be relevant), there come the "fraudsters." Click fraud is naturally a worry to many. Following up on recent coverage of this topic in here (Google's Efforts to Curb Click Fraud and Click Pirates), we'll take one more chance to highlight the subject.

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums was started asking if there is a way to stop someone from clicking on your website if you suspect them of fraud. The member describes finding that a site which offers the "you click on me and I'll click on you" version of click fraud was the number one referring site in his logs. The first thing to do, as pointed out, is to contact the portals that are publishing your ads. Then someone offers code which specifically blocks a website from accessing yours through a link, returning a 403 "Forbidden" error.

I wonder...is this enough to protect yourself from an individual site? Does the click still count in some networks even if it leads to the error page? Join the discussion at WebMasterWorld Forums.

I personally feel that the problem needs to be tackled at a higher level. People do not have time to police their logs to find suspected fraudulent “clicksters,” but paid software does exist for that purpose. One free product that seems to be gaining traction is ClickFraudNetwork. Also, SEMPO is teaming with Fair Isaac to produce an in depth report on the matter.

I'm convinced, after reading Cre8asiteforums' Multiple Domain Names & IIS?, Just set it in IIS or 301 Re-Direct ..., that programmers are not unlike football players. They like to call out code words to their team mates and spend hours practicing plays to fake out the offense. Okay. I take that back. Programmers AND SEO/M's are like football players.

"An ANAME points a domain name to an IP, i.e.:
blah.com => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

A CNAME points a domain name to another domain name, i.e.:
blah.com => webserver.blah.com"

What I tell ya?

Next time your late to an event or to work, you won't be able to blame Google or wild animals getting out of the zoo. Thanks to Google, they have enabled Google Maps for Mobile with traffic information reports. Get the situation on the interstate highway before you head off to work, or even if your sitting in traffic find the best route to get out. The unique feature provides an overlay of traffic problem areas on the current Google Maps application for your compatable phone. To enable your phone for this functionality, point your web browser on your phone to: www.google.com/gmm

According to Google:

The latest version of Google Maps for mobile will enable users in the U.S. to view comprehensive information on traffic conditions in more than 30 major metropolitan areas–and partial information in many others–right from their mobile devices. To get information on traffic conditions in a particular area — including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York City — users simply move to the desired location within the application and select “show traffic” in the menu. The most up-to-date traffic information will be sent directly to the users’ mobile device, and will highlight the conditions on the covered commuter routes using red, yellow, and green overlays.

In addition, when mobile phone users search for driving directions, they will now see the expected drive time as well as any unexpected traffic delays, making travel planning much easier and more effective.

I downloaded the Google Maps for my blackberry this morning, and just now tried to monitor the traffic in Austin, Texas. While I was delighted to get the traffic information, I found it hard to decipher the yellow (moderately slow) areas from the rest of the map (as all roads are already yellow). Despite that, its a cool utility for the super geek.

Discussion at SER Forums - Google Maps for Mobile with Traffic Information

Billboards exclusively promoting websites? Does you domain enable others to remember it if it were on a billboard? There is an excellent thread on WMW that examines the uses of domains on billboards and what "type" of domain would be an excellent choice for advertising on a billboard. These days having a short and memorable domain for your business or website is priceless. People are paying more today for premium domains then they were several years ago. With type-in traffic being captured by all sorts of purveyors in order to monetize it. Businesses with excellent memorable single or easy to remember words and phrases can really benefit from these domains in the offline world.

One of the admin's on WMW starts the thread with some criteria he considers useful for making a "billboard" test for your domain.

1) Easy to remember, because drivers won't be able to write them down.
2) No hyphens or non dot-com TLDs - drivers will forget hyphens, and probably type in the .com even if you advertised ".net".
3) No easy-to-confuse variations that you don't own. (E.g., plural/singular variants when applicable).
4) Relevant to the buyer's interest or need.

While I agree with most of those, there are a few things I don't. I think .net's in general can be good for billboard purposes, there are plenty of examples of companies using .net's out there. Hyphens' are not good I agree, but they are still in use. One of the members cuts it down a little and says "Any chance you can get a memorable URI in front of an audience, take it!" Can't beat that assessment.

So what about all those Web 2.0 sites with plenty of periods and compressed words such as "http://del.icio.us" or "ma.gnolia.com"? One of the members dmorison states his rule is "#1 rule is never to use anything that requires clarification when dictated. Before registering a domain, imagine yourself telling someone about your URL or your email address over the phone". Good advice.

One of the gems from this thread is the discussion of geo-targeting with domains for specific services and how in the future direct navigation will become important. Webwork, a moderator on WMW says:

Billboards are the toughest medium for recall since exposure is brief, the viewer is concentrating on something else, and writing is often impossible.

What happens, come the day, when the lemmings latch on to this idea? When you pass 213 billboards emblazened with URLs on them?

My advice to the local webmaster, the webmaster or business that is geo-targeting for a service company, a service company being one that performs locally: Make the URL real simple for the masses, bordering on brainless, to remember. Apply the same thinking that went into building the domain-as-direct-WWW-navigation model.

Some great information all around. I would encourage you to take a peak at this thread today if you have the time.

Continued discussion at WMW - Drive-by Business URL's - The Billboard Test

On July 19th, we reported that Microsoft's adCenter's reporting features were severely delayed. Today, reports come from WebmasterWorld that the daily statistics are back to normal.

No other reports have been published in forums, as far as I can see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the procedure one should take when switching a site or server to a new IP address.

(1) Make sure all files are properly moved
(2) Make sure the site functions properly
(3) Try and keep your old site running on the old IP for two weeks after switching

The first two are no brainers. The 3rd, well, search engines run their own domain name servers (DNS), and those servers don't always update their records as quickly as other DNSs. So, that is why folks recommend keeping the old site on the old IP for at least two weeks. This way if the search engine's DNS does not update as quickly, it will still find a site to go to.

A week or so ago, we moved our physical server to a new data center. That means we did not have our sites running on the old IPs for any amount of time. What we did instead was lower the TTL (Time to Live) on the domain names to the lowest possible number and then migrated over. This is not the best solution, but for us, it was our only solution at the time. Ranking affects? Unknown... Traffic remains stable in my reports.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Moderator, engine, posted a new thread at WebmasterWorld noting the news that Database guru to lead Yahoo social search.

Yahoo!, if you did not know, invests heavily in social search. From MyWeb, to desktop search to Flickr and Yahoo! Video - social, tagging and all that fun Web 2.0 stuff is something Yahoo! takes seriously.

Yahoo! hired "Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, 45, as vice president and Yahoo research fellow in charge of defining the strategy behind Yahoo's "social search" system, based on his expertise in databases, data mining and privacy-preserving technologies."

Hopefully this will make things more interesting over at Yahoo!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

My coverage this week will be sporadic at both this site and SEW. There has been a sudden need for me to be offline for this week. I have to be with family at this time. Everyone in my family is OK and well.

I am sorry for any inconvenience.

There are two types of people who read our coverage.

(1) Those who can not make it to the conferences.
(2) Those who can not wake up for the sessions but spend most of their time at the parties

Joe Morin is the later, but he is known as the official party manager of SES events. He has posted the *OFFICIAL* SES San Jose 2006 Party & Events Schedule and plans on updating the thread as we get closer to the SES event.

Here is what we got so far:
Sunday Night: Be in the bars
Monday Night: Two private parties
Tuesday Night: The Google Dance (i'll be bringing my wife)
Wednesday Night: SEMPO's In-House Search Marketer Mixer & Webmaster Radio's SEARCHBASH 3
Thursday Night: Nodda

More details at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Link baiting is when you come up with a unique way to get links through developing cool content, tools, videos and so on. Link baiting gets its name from fishing. You bait your hook, you draw it into a pool of water where you know it is concentrated with fish, and you expect lots of bites. But you better (1) bait it with enticing food and (2) make sure your food is of the tastes of the fish. Same with link baiting. If I create a cool tool about how to cook pork, but I market it to Jews or Muslims, it won't get much attention.

Now, is this frowned upon by search engines? Is it a form of link manipulative link building? I don't think so? If your audience doesn't bite your bait then that is the determining factor. But if you create useful, and tasty bait, and your audience bites, then you deserve the reap the ranking rewards.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Seems like some Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers aren't satisfied with their YPN checks, they need to take the survey YPN is offering for pay. Or maybe they are just money hungry. :) Yahoo! is paying publishers between $15 and $50 to complete an online survey, more details here. Some said it is the easiest money they ever made. The survey says it will take about 30 minutes to complete, so you got to see if it worth your time.

Forum discussion DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that Yahoo! continues to make tweaks to the new index and algorithm they set into place on July 13/14th. Webmasters are still tracking the changes in the WebmasterWorld thread.

WebmasterWorld Yahoo! Moderator, caveman, notes;

Ya, just a tweak ... not sure for the better, but just having a look now. Most of the issues with the latest update remain. Looks like the internal site issues are still there (wrong page/right site) and externally, force is certainly outweighing meaning/intent. Putting this much emphasis on external links w/o having theming/mapping, authority, and (ideallly) semantic stuff working well is problematic. Issues that arise include: - quality niche sites with good but not huge numbers of links tend to struggle (I see a little more of that with this tweak, I think) - searches with words having multiple meanings can be awfully bad - lots of links with right words can work wonders for a page/site, even if from only vaguely related and unrelated sites.

Add to that heavy handed filters that clip out best pages and feature bad choices from good sites, and you've got a real mixed bag. Link sellers gotta be feeling giddy right now.

Some SEOs are loving it, some are hating it. What did you expect?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I reported Friday afternoon at the SEW Blog on an Independent Report: Google Click Fraud Detection Practices Are "Reasonable". Bottom-line, the report stats that "click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud." What is also interesting is that the folks in the forums don't seem to care, well, as of yet.

There are no forum threads outside of one that I found at DigitalPoint Forums and that one doesn't have much feedback from forum members.

This 47-page report by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU, has tons of clues about AdWords, that can benefits SEMs. Anyway...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows that dozens of people are reporting significant drops in search referrals from Google's Image search product over the weekend. What is very interesting to note is that no one is reporting increases in traffic, just wide spread drops in search referrals from the image search vertical.

This can mean two things, that I can think of right now.

(1) The image index has been updated and dropped many images it once had
(2) The vertical integration of Google Images on Google Web Search has been tweaked enough where Google is now showing less images in the One Box results in Web search results.

That is what I got so far.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Chris wrote about Suggestions for Improving Google Quality Score linking to a bunch of threads, but I thought I share a single post from a new WebmasterWorld thread that perhaps can help many of you. I understand how serious this issue is, and that is why you are seeing much coverage on it from here.

Why would a landing page receive a low quality score?
1. Not enought content
2. Privacy policy is lacking details
3. No contact us page
4. No external links to helpful resources

Getting the AdWords spider to come back?
1. Copy the site on a different domain
2. Block spiders (web search spiders) from accessing this page (no duplicate content issues this way)
3. Copy your AdWords campaign, but switch the domain name to this new one, make some tweaks so it is not exactly identical.

This may help you and it can't hurt to try.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google did well last quarter, more than doubling their profit. I blogged about it last night at SEW Blog. I wonder what will happen next quarter, with all the AdWords advertisers being so upset with the new quality score and their CPC.

Google reported revenues of $2.46 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2006, an increase of 77% compared to the second quarter of 2005 and an increase of 9% compared to the first quarter of 2006. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the second quarter of 2006, TAC totaled $785 million, or 32% of advertising revenues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

We reported in early May that Google was beta testing an AdSense feature named site diagnostics tool. Now, it appears that Google has released it to all AdSense publishers. If you login to your account, you should see a new tab on the first tab named Site Diagnostics. You can see a full size version by clicking here.

What does it mean? Well if you have URLs that are blocked it will show up in that report. The AdSense help says, "Your URL might show up as blocked in the site diagnostics tool for a number of reasons." There may be a robots.txt blocking the crawler, it may be password protected, your site may be down, etc. Any time you see something reported there, there has been a crawl issue to the page. I would guess this also can be used to determine your site crawl health for normal web search spiders.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

As you can tell, the RSS feeds from Cre8asite Forums on the left hand side are timing out right now.

It appears that Cre8asite Forums is down at the moment. I will try to find out more information soon and post the details here.

I hope it is just connectivity issues and the server is doing well.

Update: It appears there are connectivity issues, and the server is doing well. More to come shortly.

Update #2: 10:35AM (EST) Forums are back up now.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread tells a tale of what I see every now and then from an SEO. Basically, if you mess with an SEO, they can put up a page, optimize it for your name plus a negative keyword and ruin your reputation.

For example, let's say I bought a car from a local dealer and I was very upset with the whole process. I can create a web site or even post an entry on a blog with the title "Car Dealer Name Ripped Me Off." Typically, ranking well for a company name is easy, unless they are huge brands. But when it comes to a local guy or even a person's name, typically, it is easy.

SEOs can do this almost at any time and some may. Scary? Well, many jobs have their perks. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ask.com has launched a new Smart Answer that pulls sites RSS feeds based on the style of query. Gary Price was very involved in this release that was announced last night on the Ask.com blog. If you conduct a search on seroundtable you will notice at the top of the results appear this.

A query on seroundtable is navigational in nature, so why not show the RSS results? Smart... Last night a query on Search Engine Roundtable (1) did not return the RSS results and (2) did not rank this site number one. Both seem to have been fixed.

Not all navigational searches will bring you these results. Sites without RSS feeds obviously won't benefit from this feature. Also, Ask.com only used the "most popular feeds chosen by our users in Bloglines." Soon they will expand this out to more feeds. I give this two thumbs up.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just posted our coverage schedule for the San Jose conference here. As you can see, we have the same crew working on this coverage for you. We got Ben from RankSmart.com, Chris from Avenue A RazorFish and Lee Odden from Top Rank. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to post them.

I just wanted to let everyone know that Chris Boggs will be in the SEMPO booth during the 12:30-2:00pm time frame on August 9. Ben, Lee and I should be rooming the halls and in the sessions at the times posted above. Of course, a big thanks to Danny and his crew for allowing us to provide the coverage. And a thanks to you for reading it.

A search on clinical trials brings up drop down menus under the refine results. This is a feature of the Google Co-op, topics platform of the program. This is the first time I have seen drop down menus used in part of the Google refinement feature. Here is a screen capture:

Interesting stuff.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I always felt there was a void in my blogging abilities, I know, I blog all the time, I do. But, I have no where to go to ramble about things that are off search topics. So if I had a bad day and it was either for personal reasons (washer flooding a room) or business related (server blowing up), I wasn't able to really put that anywhere. Plus, since I write at two different blogs, it is important for me to consolidate what I write about in one place. So I have decided to launch a new blog, a personal blog named the Cartoon Barry Blog.

So what can you expect at the Cartoon Barry Blog?

• Summarized daily recaps of everything I wrote about, for example.
• Interactive Cartoon Barry, provided by SitePal, will also give short recaps virtually, click the play button here to see an example.
• Personal life things, if you care about them.
• Business related things from RustyBrick..
• Rants on anything, even search - and I normally don't rant on search stuff at the other blogs, here I promise, I will.
• And more... suggestions are welcome

Some of you remember the creation of Cartoon Barry, and I have to thank DaveN again for it. I have filled up most of the informational pages with content and I plan on adding more. Right now I have two posts up on the blog. I will have at least one per work day, but probably more.

Subscribe via:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This can't be real, I mean I see it, but it can't be real. A WebmasterWorld thread has a picture of, well let me show you.

Huh? Ok, so there is a market for bench ads but is someone piggy banking off of Google's name to sell bench ads or is Google selling bench ads? I would believe the first.

So weird.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld post has a line of feedback from a Google representative reprinted in the forums that reads;

It is true that keywords which are inactive on search may still trigger ads in the content network.

Interesting. Now, the word inactive typically tells the advertiser that the keyword is no longer in the pool of ads running. But now it appears the ad may run in AdSense ads and not the sponsored search results in Google.com. Interesting...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are reports at the various forums that MSN Search was down for periods of time last night. The automated response from MSN Search was the following;

This service is currently unavailable

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

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread named "Other Side Of The Coin" has many cases of those advertisers who were not hit by Google bullet. If you haven't been following the reports that hundreds of AdWords advertisers prices going through the roof, then read up. Basically, hundreds of advertisers CPC prices in Google are way up and making it almost impossible for some advertisers to keep their ads up. But there is the other side, those who are doing well from this change.

Here are some quotes:

My site is a non-commercial site and I have seen about a 25% increase in ad revenue in the last few days.

I have a few campaigns unaffected. Funny thing is they are affiliate sites!

All positive changes for me. Higher up in the results for the same cpc, higher click thru percentages and much lower cost per conversion.

Do you share in these people joy? Even if you don't maybe you can learn a thing or two from there posts?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Tuesday we wrote about The Exchange Rate Google Uses for International AdWords Advertisers Unfair? where advertisers wanted to know the source Google uses to derive the exchange rate figures. AdWords Representative said that he/she will try to get an answer for the members, but he/she came back with the following non-response.

The currency calculation itself is nothing that special, but the way the billing system works and how it is integrated with the ad delivery platform is. I understand that you're not trying to get at the latter, but the product managers are not willing to discuss the former at this time as part of protecting the whole. As one of the two AdWords posters here on WebmasterWorld, I have access to the individuals responsible for this decision, and it's going to stick.

So, sorry, you won't be able to know how your rates are figured out. For a large advertiser, with a big budget, that can hurt. But the AdWords Representative doesn't leave them out in the cold, he/she suggests the following solution.

An easy way out of this situation, for you, would be to simply open a second account in your local currency. Replicate an Ad Group from your existing account in the new account, and pause it in the USD account. Once a billing cycle or two hits, you should have a good idea whether the currency exchange will be in your favor and if your bank really is charging your an exorbitant rate.

The only issue I see with this is that any historical quality factors the ad had, will be lost with this solution. And today, with the quality score being so critical on the bottom line, that is an issue. Would the exchange rate difference be a bigger lose in dollars as opposed to a drop in any quality score factor the advertiser achieved over the years.

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It seems like no PPC engine is on good terms with their advertisers these days. A WebmasterWorld thread shows how not only does it take a day to start a campaign, but when you want to pause or resume a campaign it can take more than 24 hours. For the PPC market, a 24 hour delay, is simply not acceptable. One hour, ok, that is doable, but seriously, just pausing and resuming campaigns, that must be an hour or less. 24 hours or more, not acceptable.

One member reported that the ad scheduling feature is even affected by this.

I have one site set to display ads four days per week - Thr, Fri, Sat, Sun. Last week they never resumed after the three days off.

So Google is ripping off advertisers, Yahoo! took a hit by delaying the new ad system launch date, and MSN can't run a proper PPC engine. Not good.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks what is that light bulb symbolize on the Yahoo! search results page? You know if comes up for some searches and says "Also try:" keyword phrase here...

Well, besides for it being obviously some sort of search suggestion, I decided to pull up the Yahoo! Search help documentation, which you can find here and you will see it says;

Also Try: When other people have done searches similar to yours, we'll list these queries under the search box. One of these might help you narrow your results. Click on a link to try one of these searches.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just a quick update on the Google update of its landing page quality score that is causing headaches for advertisers.

Two recent threads at WebMasterWorld Forums discuss the topic of landing page quality mostly without getting into all the numbers and frustration involved, and focus specifically on ways to help improve the quality of the landing page used in search engine marketing ads. Learn more at the threads, titled Quality Score for Advertisers -
Good for Publisher? and Figuring Our Landing Page Quality.

In addition, a thread at Digital Point Forums titled Google Responds To My Request For a Landing Page Review offers a specific example of a site that was deemed to be of lower quality, primarily due to the number of websites offering similar type of content.

One more addition to this post: A very long thread titled Open letter to Google Regarding Changes to The Ad Words Program at WebMasterWorld Forums also gives some insight between many frustrated posts.

Join the above threads to get some good suggestions on improving your quality score in Google AdWords.

Yahoo! provides websites for people that wish to sell goods online, known as Yahoo! Stores. This templated website allows for the use of a unique website address to serve as the home page, but requires any product and sales pages to be hosted on the Yahoo! subdomain stores.yahoo.net. This can pose a legitimate problem if you are trying to rank in search engines for a popular product that your are selling on the website. Can search engine optimization do the trick?

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discusses this topic, when a member asks if he is “facing any problems when trying to optimize a Yahoo! Stores website. Marcia, a senior and much respected Moderator offers that although she has not had personal experience optimizing such site,

I do know that there have been issues in the past because of links in from Yahoo shopping. You might want to check out Yahoo's technical documentation for their stores, and in particular check into usage of relative and absolute linking in the navigation.

Another member adds that

The (Yahoo! Store) site was extremely difficult to optimize for natural SERPs because it was built in Yahoo's internal template system, which is great for a novice with very little HTML knowledge, but frustrating for somebody with experience

If you want to preserve the simplicity of the web-based editing, you can learn a bit of RTML to get Y! Stores to output some pretty well optimized pages.

Have you had experience optimizing a Yahoo! Store? Worked with other templated ecommerce platforms successfully? Share your thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday at Search Engine Watch Blog I wrote Click Pirates Making A Mockery Of The Text Ad Space which covers a Peter Da Vanzo post on a thread at GetPaidForums. The threads discuss a program where people sign up and work together to form one huge pool of funds by clicking in ads on sites. Yes, mass manual click fraud, done by teams of, what I like to call, "Click Pirates."

The thread is 39 pages long and has tons of concerns and laughs about click fraud. Here are some of the disturbing quotes I pulled from the thread.

You do realize that someone up the click fraud line had money stolen from them by the click fraud system set up in these two programs in order to pay you don't you? Just because you got paid from the proceeds of theft doesn't make it right because someone DID get ripped off in order to pay you. $190 worth of valid searches for the sake of searching had to come out of someone's pocket in order to pay you right? Do you even care who's pockets that money was taken from? Or is it ok as long as it went into yours?

People just don't get it, read this.

What's wrong with click fraud? Search engines are suppose to be free. People should not pay to have their listing posted.

Why? because...

It is fraud because he is sending you Parked Domain ads fed by google or yahoo at a ptr site.

Click Pirates, that is what they are. Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

We all know about the heavily discussed AdWords landing page quality score that has come into play recently. A WebmasterWorld thread shows a conversation one Google AdWords advertiser had with his representative. Basically, what it says is that Google will be doing what they can to remove affiliate ads from the AdWords program.

So I called the support number. Here is the short of it: Google is deliberately removing all affiliate programs from adwords listings. They had a quality team go through and rate their experience on a whole wide group of sites, including affiliate sites. The over-all score for affiliate sites was not high enough to pass their new guidelines therfore they are all being flagged and when found are being removed. Indirectly of course with the $10 min bids.

When I asked what I could do to make it meet their new guidelines she told me, "Honestly we have not had any good news for these types of sites." No help offered.

There has been no response from any official Google representative in the thread as of the time of posting this. Well, the thread is less than 24 hours long, but it is 3 pages deep.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread unveils that Yahoo! is also polling select searchers on their PPC ads. Located above the sponsored search results was a poll that read.

How useful were the first 5 results at the top of this page?

1 2 3 4 5
not useful very useful

Yahoo! Research
Thank you for your feedback!

We also recently reported that Google polled their users on the AdWords ads. I thought I blogged this in the past either here or at SEW but I couldn't find it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo! Search Marketing has been touting the release of Panama, which we reported here. Trust me, this new version of Yahoo! Search Marketing is pretty impressive, compared to what they currently have - I have seen some demos. Now it was expected in the 3rd quarter, that release has been pushed back until the 4th quarter.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. Not this one line in the 3rd post, "What really scares me is that the search numbers are way up and that's without the MSN numbers. Makes you wonder where these results are coming from."

If you use Microsoft's new adCenter product that displays PPC ads on the MSN Search network, then you may have noticed your reports are a tad behind the dates. Pretty much everyone is reporting that they have no reporting data since 7/14, um, today is the 19th. Microsoft is aware of this and they have posted messages in the various SEM forums saying.

Hi everyone, I'm sorry I didn't post here sooner about this, but I have an update for you. There was a larger reporting delay earlier, but currently, hourly reports are 1 hour behind normal turnaround time, and daily reports are 1 day behind. Normal turnaround times for report data are: by 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time for previous day on daily/weekly/monthly/yearly reports and within 3 hours for hourly reports.

I will let you know once the normal turnaround times are back in effect, and I'm sorry about this inconvenience.

Thanks,
adCenter411

Ok, so those are the details.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

In mid-April we reported on one of the first ever Google Cooler Fridges. Guess what, if you really want one, you can get your hands on it for a fee. That is right, there is one up for auction at eBay. The auction ends in about two hours, and can be found here. I wonder how much this fridge will go for at the end.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google organizes the worlds information, according to its Mission Statement. One of the biggest problems for Google is dealing with multiple sources that cite the exact same information, or even what they would consider "very close to the same." This area of Google's indexing algorithm specifically deals with the issue now commonly known as duplicate content. As we can tell by research, "duplicate content" is a little misleading since it refers to "nearly duplicate" as well. We recently covered this subject in specific regards to Article Syndication.

A thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums brings up a nice real-life example of how Google sometimes omits certain pages from the default results due to being considered duplicate content. The member suggests that the solution in this case (the example discusses SER Forum pages indexed) is

to reduce unnecessary code on page

Barry wonders when "Google will "get it right..." However no further opinions have been added. Please join the Search Engine Roundtable Forum topic and give your thoughts or relate your experiences on the subject of Google unique content determination. Real "live" case studies usually lead to nice concrete discussion.

The first step in the process of most practitioners of search engine optimization is keyword research. This is often an iterative process in which the site owner and presumably industry expert works together with an SEO in order to determine which keywords and phrases to target for high rankings. Although to many this would seem like a very introductory level topic, the fact is that keyword research can make or break a campaign when it comes to determining actual success. Choosing the right keywords will lead to rankings that produce legitimate traffic, as opposed to rankings for terms that may have lots of "competition," but little "action."

A few threads going on at various forums currently are discussing keyword research. At High Rankings Forums, a member complains of - yes I know - high rankings in Google and Yahoo!, but no traffic. A couple of good recommendations follow.

At Search Engine Watch Forums, an interesting discussion about measuring keyword competition is happening, with the conversation seemingly helping to dispel some myths about degree of difficulty estimation. One of the classic discussions on keyword competitiveness can be found at the HighRankings Forum's Keyword Research category. A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums discusses the concept/alleged importance of keyword density.

Not sure if you are targeting the right keywords for your SEO initiative? Check out any of the above threads. If you know of more good ones, feel free to post them in the comments.

It appears as though India has blocked both Yahoo!'s Geocities and Google's Blogspot services from access within India. Folks in India are reporting that they cannot reach either free hosted pages services. Is this a censorship issue? Not sure. Is it a security prevention issues? Not sure. Probably somewhat of both.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums:

• Geocities.com pages not accessible in India????
  
• India Bans Blogspot, Typepad, etc... Wow!

We reported earlier this month that Yahoo! has taken a stronger stance against images near your ads. Whereas Google allows it (also see here & here), Yahoo! wants to set themselves apart from Google and not allow it. The thing is, most Yahoo! Publisher Network folks are accustomed to Google's rules, so Yahoo! has to educate.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that Yahoo! is sending out emails to publishers who are using the image near ads method to increase their click-through rates. The emails read like this;

You are in violation of our obscuring guideline. A user must be able to tell the difference between the Ad Unit and other content on your page. The Ad Unit should be separated from other page content, including images, by a border, a clear difference in color, or some other means. Images may not be used to draw attention to the Ad Unit or as a click incentive. I hope this information helps you to understand the requirements more clearly. Please let us know if you have further questions.

But many are written directly in relation to the site and give specific examples to help each publisher.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There has been a ton of buzz on the quality score being implemented over at Google. A WebmasterWorld thread that just got started caught my attention. Senior Member, david_uk is noticing more "scraper sites" appearing as opposed to "MFAs."

Scraper sites are sites that steal content from other sites and post them on their own site. Typically this is done robotically, made easier through RSS feeds. They tend to have a lot more content than MFAs, which were specifically designed to get people to click on ads. MFAs have less content, and more ads that appear like content. Scraper sites have more content and less ads. At least that seems to be the informal distinction between the two.

Since Google's new quality score looks at a page's landing page, and tries to figure out the content, MFAs are not doing as well these days. But david_uk says that scraper sites are now reappearing and taking their place. Google just can't win!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I would have thought Google has way more than 500 or so domain names. Anyway, this guy complied a list of all of the known Google owned domains, which I am sure Gary Price could of done in a second, at his site. You can see by the list that Google has done some damage control by buying up some negative versions of the domain name.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread uncovers a bit of the details behind the frustration an international advertiser may have when being charged for clicks by Google. AdWords advertisers, like the one in the thread, pays Google is his local currency. Google needs to use an exchange rate to convert that currency into US currency. Google, however, does not release the source of the exchange rate used for the conversion.

The official response from Google about the exchange rate is that "Google is unable to inform you of how the exchange rate is calculated."

AdWordsAdvisor2 is on record as making a case for Google to release the exchange rate source to the advertisers. We will see if this happens. But it is clear to me that the advertiser has a right to know this information. Especially when he feels that the rate is "horrible."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld .

As people learn about web sites and the importance of ranking in search engines, they sometimes think that they can do things quicker than the laborious process of Search Engine Optimization. This is good, because it fosters innovation. A topic that comes up every once in a while in Search Engine Optimization forums has to do with "tricking the search engines." This idea (which I admit I even thought about when I was first learning) has to do with creating multiple sites and hoping to dominate the rankings for a particular keyword search. The problem is that this simply doesn’t work, unless you are dealing with a brand new product or service. For example, lets say you create the world's first "Booglabangly." You could build multiple sites dealing with this new term and probably rank fairly quickly. SEO contests do this on a regular basis.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums discusses this topic. A member asks about creating multiple websites to rank for a particular topic:

His strategy is to find a niche and dominate it with many websites. The idea is to create as many websites as possible with various angles to the niche. As a result, when someone (does) search for that niche, most of his websites will show up on the resulting page.

The first response is well thought-out, and states that his experience show that

one monolitihic web site with many topics will acquire rankings for a new keyword quicker than a new site since it's a trusted site already.

focus on different market segments with some of those sites.

I'd be wary of too much interlinking between sites. That might send some warning flags to the search engines.

There are many questions to be answered within both threads, since it is hard to determine if the traffic that generated the CJ income was legitimate, organic, paid, etc... Personally, I think the days of ranking multiple sites for a competitive term are long gone, at least if you are talking about organic rankings only. On the other hand, holistic search engine marketing combining SEO and paid search, as well as local or shopping feeds, can yield a plethora of rankings above the fold in many search engines - including paid, free and "wild card" listings (local matches and/or feed results between top paid listings and organic results).

Join the discussions at Cre8asite Forums and Sitepoint Forums.

We hope to be launching a weekly radio show in conjunction with WebmasterRadio.FM. The show will be live one day per week, for one hour straight. It will include a weekly roundup of select topics we discussed here. The cool part is that Ben, Chris and I will all be conducting the show at the same time. I suspect I will lead the conversation, but you will hear from Ben and Chris as much as you hear from me. Oh, and yes, we tend to disagree on select topics. Expect a launch date and schedule to be posted about the show within the next few weeks.

Right now, we need your help in deciding a name. I personally like the name "The Search Pulse." It goes along with our tag line, "the pulse of the search marketing community." And it resembles how we dig deep into the community to learn what is really important to the industry and not what press releases deem to be important. Anyway, here is a poll with all the option. Feel free to add new ideas in the comments area or in start a thread in our forums.

Scroll down for the poll please.

Continue reading "Search Engine Roundtable On The Air Soon: Reader Feedback Requested"

People in the UK trying to access Google may be experiencing connectivity issues. A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows how several folks are reporting Google to be down.

Have not been able to access any Google site for the past 5 mins in the UK

Well I can't access Google OR login to Adsense OR get Adsense ads on any site - from the UK - using BT broadband

Down for me.... I'm in the Oxford area at the moment, on a BT broadband line.

Danny Sullivan just informed me that he found Google to be "sluggish." Danny is based in the UK.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The San Jose conference is coming up shortly. Yes, we will be doing some quadruple coverage, maybe more. The event schedule is live at the Search Engine Strategies site. I will be posting our coverage schedule probably within a week or two. But for now, you should check out the threads on the conference. They offer advice on finding a good hotel, since the two main hotels are now sold out and flight ideas.

Forum threads include:

• The OFFICIAL SES San Jose 2006 Thread - SEW Forums
  
• Getting to SES San Jose 2006 - SEW Forums
  
• SES San Jose - Golfers Sought - SEW Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• High Rankings Forums

Reports via WebmasterWorld show that Google's similar pages query, performed in the syntax of "related:www.domain.com" has been returning very different results.

Senior member BillyS reports, "As of late, this command seemed to report non-sense results anyway, maybe a fix is on the way." I get 10 results for a related match on this site, Google returns only 11 results, all from Google.com and Yahoo is similar. Something has changed with the related command at Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Via DigitalPoint Forums an Google AdSense publisher reported that his publisher ID, the ID that tells Google who to pay for ads on a site, has been changed without his knowledge. The publisher says that he logged into his account and saw zero impressions, so he reviewed the ad code and noticed that the publisher ID was not his own. He suspects someone hacked into his server and changed the publisher ID (pub_id) within the code.

This is the first time I have seen this posted in a forum. So beware of more scams like this.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Looking for RustyBrick in Suffern, NY, well if you are, you will get a map directly on the Google SERPs. So if you do a local search, you can possibly see some of Google Map's technology come right up on the search results page. Yea, they do take up a lot of room, here is a screen capture.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google's crawler constantly scours the Internet for pages to index, which is one of the reasons you should run away if someone offers to "submit your website to Google." On any page you do not want indexed, it is important to disallow the Googlebot (one of the nicknames for their spiders) by using special code. A prime example of pages you may not want indexed would be new pages under construction, especially if they contain content you already have in the index on "live pages."

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums shows us another example of pages you probably don't want in the Index: your FTP logs. The member complains:

My FTP log is cached by Google...and there has never been a link to it, ever!

One member astutely reminds readers that

When you use the Google toolbar and have the PageRank bar enabled, it sends url data to Google so.. so Google knows what urls exist out there, even if they are not linked to anywhere. So you have to be careful about what links you pull up when the PageRank bar is enabled.

The original poster comes back and thanks everyone for their responses, but claims it’s not that simple...The discussion continues at WebmasterWorld Forums.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, as reported at ZDNET on July 9, claims that the best thing that Google can do about Click Fraud it to "let it happen." His quote, taken from the ZDNET post, included:

Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.

A thread started at Digital Point Forums discusses this assertion, and has led to some good comments. One comment wisely tempers a little of the journalistic drama used in the headline, pointing out that Schmidt claims they are trying to stop it - because it is in fact a bad thing for its advertisers. The ZDNET article also quotes Schmidt as saying that Click Fraud is the type of issue that is "great fun" for Google engineers, since it poses a challenge.

One member of DP discusses accounting for click fraud when budgeting for Pay-per-Click Internet marketing:

In fact when I run AdWords campaigns I just assume there will be a certain amount of click fraud and base my bid rate on what is a cost effective bid.

Join the discussion at Digital Point Forums.

Postscript by Barry: Just wanted to add to this, something a bit different. Ok, so we have this debate over what Eric said, right... So Google puts up a blog post this morning here stating, that some "bloggers" have pulled out "select excerpts and ignoring the context of the remarks" from Eric's presentation. So Donna Bogatin from News.com responded strongly to that, with a challenge to Google's Eric and Shuman.

Eric and Shuman at Google: If you are committed to organizing the world’s information, and making it universally accessible, then why do you covertly allude to me as “a blogger” and why do you not provide the world with a link to my “blog post?,” which you do not identify, although it is the subject of your latest post at Google Blog?

Danny Sullivan's thoughts here.

Yahoo! appears to be updating their algorithm and index. Maybe it is related to this Yahoo! Redirects Link Command Requests to Site Explorer. Anyway, two large discussions taking place on the Yahoo! update.

Oh, by the way, we reported a Google PageRank Update this morning.

Forum discussions at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Confirmation from Yahoo! on this update at the YSearchblog.

Every since Yahoo! launched Site Explorer they had dreamed of redirecting any of you who did a link, linkdomain, site command on search.yahoo.com to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. Today, reports via Search Engine Watch Forums, Yahoo has done just that.

The thread creator states that when he conducted the search, it brought back a message

Your "linkdomain:" query has been redirected to Site Explorer. You can continue to use normal web search for other queries.

I personally try this out at search.yahoo.com and it keeps me there. So they may be testing this out on some users. But I know for a fact, that Yahoo! had plans for this move.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Yahoo! has confirmed this with me, this is a test some users at Yahoo! will notice when conducting these style of queries.

Chris did the write up on Google supporting the NOODP tag last night. But it appears there is confusion as to what the NOODP tag will do in Google. I have asked Vanessa Fox from Google to clarify, and she explained that the NOODP tag will work for both excluding the ODP title and the ODP description from displaying in the Google results.

So by adding <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> or <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP"> you can tell Google not to use the ODP title and description in the results.

You can see the confusion on this at the various forum threads.

Forum discussion continued at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• HighRankings Forums
  

DigitalPoints Co-op network, which is actually two-years and 6 days old now, has added new features recently. The first feature is the support to add the nofollow attribute to the links, enabling advertisers to protect themselves from a penalty, if they are worried about it.

The second addition is really a backend thing, where the "weight" calculation now takes into account ad impressions. The DigitalPoint Co-op tracks impressions, so if you have a high trafficked site, your weight should increase over the next couple weeks.

Keep in mind, there are many folks out there that have scrutinized the co-op network and ones link it, so be warned if you want to use it or not.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I reported at the SEW blog back in June that Google Asks If AdWords Is Useful With Feedback Buttons. Philipp discovered the little quiz and posted this image of it, so we can all see it.

This is the first time I have seen discussion reporting this feature in a forum. A WebmasterWorld thread has documented case of how this user feedback small form is generated (for some).

I don't know if any of you have seen this but I was just searching google and clicked an adwords ad and I pushed back to get to the listings and a little line of text below the url of the ad I clicked said "Was this link useful? Yes or No" Just thought this was interesting and wanted to pass it along.

So this individual clicked on an ad, then was taken to a landing page and clicked the back button. At that time, the user was given a small quiz. Interesting if this quiz would relate back to any new Quality Score.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread has a classic discussion taking place. The discussion is what can I do about someone who steals my content? We have discussed it here time and time again. But this thread has an example of a funny but yet serious example of what can happen if you mess with the wrong site.

Ha.ckers.org noticed he and some friends were being messed with and he didn't like it, so he deployed a little trick.

So anyway, it was fairly trivial to figure out who was ripping my RSS feed. So it took me a few seconds to modify my document management system to do some IP delivery to the moron, and a few seconds of searching on the web for some nice prescription drug spam and poof!

So, if you are going to mess with someone, don't pick a site or blog of a hacker.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Wires has a write up on how the Google AdSense product made the lives of a small consulting firm, a complete mess. A company named AdSense Consulting, established back in the late 90s, owned AdSense.com and because of it, received hundreds of emails and phone calls with Google AdSense tech and customer support questions. A nightmare for a small company that has to field these calls all day. They recently moved to a new domain at adsense2.com, and have a redirect up at AdSense.com for those who want to click over. This has helped reduce the volume of support requests.

This is funny but yet upsetting to me. I wrote more about it at the SEW blog, and JenSense has her take here. Note that Google has the trademark for "AdSense" even though this company has been around a lot longer than the AdWords program. :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Hey folks, there is a Google PageRank update taking place right now. Which ones of you can now say you gained a little extension to your green bar? :) What I like seeing is that there is less overall buzz about the PageRank update then we have seen in the past. This is a good thing.

Forum discussion at:

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

Recently there has been some concern at various forums about the use of Open Director Project (DMOZ.org) web page descriptions by some search engines as the default description used in the search engine result page listings. Simply put, if your web page is listed in ODP, the search engine may choose to use the description of that listing in its results, since they were approved by a human and are most likely accurate.

The problem is that many people have ODP listings that are outdated, and therefore do not match up nicely with the new page content. ODP is notoriously slow in responding to requests by webmasters to modify listings, so the idea came about to create a new snippet of code that would direct search engine spiders to not use the ODP description when indexing a page. Barry posted at SEW Blog today that Google is now joining MSN in recognizing the new "No-ODP" (NOODP) request.

Google has more information on this development at their Inside Google SiteMaps Blog, and the discussion is just getting started at Search Engine Watch Forums. Also see discussion when MSN implemented this in may at High Rankings Forums.

Search Engines such as Google are often at the mercy of the web developer when it comes to ranking sites. Usually, they choose to index content based on what is presented to the search engine when they first enter the site. In some cases, "tricky" SEO's will create one page purely for the purpose of getting that page ranked for a particular term, and then immediately redirect any human traffic to the page that they really wish them to go to.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums shows an example of a website that is using this tactic. The indexed website is hosted at Blogger.com, which is respected by the Google spiders and doesn't come with any "baggage," usually. The indexed page has a redirect to a gambling site. The thread spawns an interesting discussion about Spammers and their ability to thwart Google, and leads to some very interesting observations and comments about Obfuscated JavaScript and Google's ability to automatically detect things of this nature.

Join the thread at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread tells the story of one Webmaster who, a year ago, was doing very well in the Google results. He then took the advice of Google to redirect the non-www version of his site to the www version (ie. http://seroundtable.com/ --> http://www.seroundtable.com/). After doing that, Google dropped his pages from his site. He waited 10 months! 10 months, for Google to get the clue that he wants the www version index, but they never got it. So he decided to drop the 301 redirect he hand in place and presto, he is back in the results, two weeks later, like he was 10 months prior. Wow.

WebmasterWorld members, admins and moderators quizzed the member on what he did and it seems like he did everything by the book.

Just one more tail of Google's canonical URL issues?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Senior member, crobb305, at WebmasterWorld reports that a banned site in Yahoo! has top rankings for a popular search query. He explains the site is 100% banned in Yahoo!, it does not come up for any other queries, no internal pages of the site are indexed, and it does not come up for a unique names. But yet, the home page comes up for a very popular search query at Yahoo!

Does this mean that Yahoo! can ban a site and still rank it well for select keywords?

You can say this is somewhat similar to Google Showing Q&A Results but Same Site Not Indexed but in that case, it is clearly a different portion and feature of Google. Hand coded results in Yahoo!'s organic listings is not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that Yahoo! has reached out to some publishers in several cities in California. Yahoo! is inviting YPNers to join a focus group, and is paying them $200 for their time (which is a fair amount for a focus group). Some publishers remarked, "I would have done it [the focus group] for free, seriously."

Others received calls about a focus group taking place in mid-August in Los Angeles. JenSense also covers this.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Do you hate search spam? Do you report search spam often? Would you like to make reporting search spam easier? Well, if you answer yes to all or some of those questions, this tool may be of use to you. It combines all three spam reporting pages from Google, Yahoo and MSN all on one page. This way you can easily report the spam you find to all three search engines quickly. To be clear, this is a page with three frames loading the spam report page from each search engine. It is not a single form that then sends the data to each search engine. Forum discussion on this tool at DigitalPoint Forums.

Do you have a love/hate relationship with Google's PageRank? Do you find Yahoo's Web Rank to be a joke? Do you want to know, from an independent source how strong a page is in terms of Web popularity? Do you like Rand? If you answer yes to all or some of those questions, the new tool Rand released at SEOMoz named Page Strength Tool may fulfill your needs. Yesterday, I posted an interactive review of it at SEW blog, I will repost my video cast of it below. Forum discussion at DigitalPoint forum.

Continue reading "Quick Spam Reporting Tool & SEOMoz's Page Strength Tool"

Here is an other tidbit from MSNdude at WebmasterWorld. The NOODP tag should have no effect on your ranking. quote - unquote.

That is MSNdude's reply to someone claiming that after adding the NOODP tag to his pages, his rankings dropped drastically. Well, I would hope it would have no effect and so does msndude.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The folks over at SitePal have made a Cartoon Barry into a character. I will be coding it to interactively read posts to you, based on the content of the post, when you click on an icon to initiate the playback.

Here is the cartoon with some text read back, that I manually added. You must click on the individual entry to view it.

Continue reading "Cartoon Barry Interactive by SitePal"

Website owners that use AdWords like to use a variety of third party tracking tools to measure the performance of the campaigns. Comparing numbers reported by various systems will help give a bigger picture, and sometimes detect possible click fraud. One of the easiest (and usually least expensive) ways to tracks referrals is through a standard web analytics system often provided for a minimal charge with most hosting packages. The referring URL's can then be examined and this is a neat way to also find out about new "free" links coming to your site.

A curious thread was started recently at WebMasterWorld Forums that claims a referral attributed to a Google paid click came through Yahoo!:

I got a click from a referring URL that contained: "us.f314.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?MsgId=" I am assuming this came from an email that was opened by someone with a Yahoo account. How do you distribute AdWords thru email? Is that considered part of the content network? How does it and under what circumstances does it happen?

The discussion that follows starts of fairly normally, with people asking for more information. Then the "official" Google AdWords rep joins and asks for more information. He (she?) followed up yesterday saying that G's "interest had been peaked." The following posts are pretty funny, with a couple of members suggesting that G should bid for the information.

Join the thread and help solve the mystery at WebMasterWorld Forums.

Recently, Google's Internet marketing platform AdWords underwent a fundamental change in its algorithm that determines ad position and cost. The new system greatly increases the importance of the landing page that visitors are directed to from an advertisement. This part of the ranking/cost algorithm dubbed the "quality score" is causing an epidemic of complaints on Search Engine Marketing forums everywhere.

At WebMasterWorld Forums, a member shows a 2000% increase in cost, and discussion indicates this is directly attributed to the quality of the landing page. Later in the thread, a test shows a ten-fold increase when the same page is moved to a different URL.

A Digital Point Forums thread has a member claiming that a large amount of minimum bids were raised to $10, but that most of these were seemingly targeted to "Made For AdSense" sites (MFA's). "Some legitimate sites have been hit," however. One member states

My average CPC increased 20% from yesterday to today. My average position dropped (significantly)...This AdWords update is gonna cost me a few thousand dollars per month

A monster thread at WMW also discusses these topics in detail, and one member this morning complains

An algo that cannot differentiate between an ecommerce site and an MFA cannot be good and has to be flawed...So my main keyword has been hiked 400% and is no longer cost effective for me.

Seems as if Johnson and Johnson may need to come up with a new version of Alka Seltzer specifically formulated for AdWords/AdSense advertisers! Join the discussion or catch up on the epidemic at any of the threads above, and feel free to post links to further related threads in the comments.

I covered that Google To Set Up Offices In Michigan yesterday. Basically one-thousand Google employees will be housed there, primarily as a "call center." It appears that this will be a call center for AdWords support. It is also of importance to note that the two Google founders graduated from University of Michigan undergrad.

You can see the local coverage of this news at FreeP.com. The article shows that the "average salary for new hires is expected to be $47,000 a year." You will see that the Michigan - Ann Arbor job openings at Google include two for Operations and IT and three for Online Operations, expect 995 more. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

MSNdude simply is rocking this days with information you would normally not see a search engine representative divulge. While at the airport last night, I decided to dig deeper into some threads and pull out some chunks. Here is a post at WebmasterWorld by msndude on the adult content filter and the difference between Windows Live search and MSN search.

I think, but the reason for the difference is that the live.com beta has the adult content filter set to "strict," while search.msn.com uses the moderate setting. Once the beta actually offers a control to let users change the setting, it will produce results identical to search.msn.com. That should be soon. But it really is the same search engine behind both of them.

Very good information to know. Thank you for sharing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Someone once told me that it is inevitable that any large company or famous person gets "bad press" every once in a while. Chances are you can search the Internet and find articles maligning even Mother Theresa herself. A recent article in The Register seems to be quite abrasive when speaking of Google, comparing it to a cult and even Enron.

DazzlinDonna points to the article at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, and includes the snippets alluded-to above. Naturally, this kind of article probably doesn't worry Google too much, but it's fun to see what some people think about the search and Internet marketing giant. I would venture to say that many others have begun to feel this way about Google, but I will keep the tin foil hat on the shelf for now...there's much more to be worried about these days.

Join the discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, and see the article at The Register.

This was a great start to the SES Latino show, which I believe will be a huge conference one day. I have posted images of the sessions and area at Flickr, and so have others. Here is a session roundup for you.

Day One:
+ The Opportunity: Tapping Into US Hispanics & Latin America Via Search
+ Search Landscape: US Hispanics
+ Search Landscape: Latin America
+ The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans

Day Two:
+ Translate Or Create: Strategies For Those With English-Language Sites
+ Domain Issues - Latin American Version
+ Spanish / Portuguese Language Ad Issues
+ SEO & Spanish / Portuguese Language Issues

See you all at SES San Jose!

The final session of the SES Latino conference, Nacho welcomes...

Ian McAnerin to focus on the technical stuff. The accent "misspelling" problem, they don't enter in the special characters into the search box. To a computer, this is a completely different word. However, the practice is so common that marketers need to be able to capture the people looking for these misspellings. Search engines also want to provide results that help users. Issue is that treating and é as an e (nice i figured out how to make an é), can potentially result in completely different result set. Montreal versus Montréal has huge difference in search volume, also Mexico and México. The content issue is that many web sites cannot misspell words due to legal or quality issues. Marketers are not usually willing to just walk away from the keywords. A search engine will usually attempt to order the results based on the most accurate response to a query first. Even if it shows alternative spelling content, they will generally put the exact match above the best guess. This means you cant really on the search engine to solve the problem for you. He showed the ranking difference between Mexico and México on Google.com. He created a fake word named "altwrittén," www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/keyword-misspelling-test.asp. Keyhword chosen b/c is was nonsense and contained a special character that exists... Turns out MSN and Yahoo both treat the é as an e (you show up but order may change). Google does not, you do not show up. Worked with anchor text, title, hidden css, noscript, alt tags (link and not linked) and URL. Did not work with keyword meta tag, dc metatag, comments and bookmarks. Suggested solutions; (1) It looks unprofessional to have multiple spellings on the same page. You can use links within the alt text, URLs, incoming anchor text and noscript area can place those misspellings. (2) Avoid moving into the hidden text cloaking areas. (3) Anchor text is not only content for the target page, but also content on the source page. International Coding, use the doctype "EN" for English, ES for Spanish, the "-us" is USA Spanish, es-mx, es-us, es-es, es-are, etc. He said currently search engines do not use the localized country part of the language tag, but they may in the future.

Christian Van Der Henst is up again. There is a great opportunity to develop for the Spanish market. He shows some of the top ten languages on the Internet; Spanish users are a big part of the market (6.4%). The content evolution by language is putting Spanish behind other languages, Spanish is not growing. 45% of the web is written in English, Spanish is 4.6% of the Web, and its losing ground (he said "field" on the Internet). Spanish grammar has special characters; ñ, å, é, î, ó, ü, ú (sweet! just took me two days to try). He used Google trends to figure out if people are using the special characters and the search volume is low, like Ian showed. He showed papå, versus papa (without the å it means pope). "Grammatics?" When people search, they do not care about Spanish grammar. The search results differ between special characters and without them. You have to promote your web sites without using the right grammar. Where should you avoid using the accent mark? Title, META tags, and title= and alt=. You avoid them in the header tags, only if it is in upper case, because that is somewhat acceptable in the language. He then told a long story, but we really did not have time for it in this session. Nacho, I believe, is getting antsy, but I can be wrong.

Sylvio Lindenberg from MPG Brazil to talk from a Brazilian perspective. Brazil is the only Portuguese speaking nation in the Americas. The language is somewhat different from Portugal. Brazilian Portuguese is different from Ameridian. Portuguese and Spanish are very different. There are some similarities; it can be tricky (kinda got lost there). Regional Expressions in Brazil, funny examples. There are also translation issues, and doing it right is hard. Misspellings is an issue, happens often, example "johnson and johnson" versus "jonhson and jonhson." There are few tools and limited research in Brazil. Also understand user characteristics and habits, they are just a bit behind of America, so what happened in the US 5 years ago, will happen in Latin America. Do not have a single web site to target all of Latin America. If you must, use Neutral Spanish. If you want to rank well, then use local spanish approach. His methodology; the technology analysis is done in-house, and the context and content study is done with the local office.

Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads is now up to talk about advanced link building. Now localized versions need link building efforts. Link buying is buying links on various Web sites. The more links you have the higher you rank. Benefits of buying links, direct traffic + link popularity + branding + spidering, in the splash background of the Search Engine Watch Web site. Link popularity indicators include Google PageRank, or a link search on Yahoo! or MSN Search, but the best indicator is a page's ranking in a search engine, if it ranks well, then it is properly trusted. He shows bad rented links, in the footer of the web site, all jumbled together, search engines (except MSN) have learned to filter these links out). The best part of the page to get a link from is in the primary content (looks like the AdSense heat map). If you buy links, check the cache page in Google to see if the link is within Google, that means the link is counted. Link Baiting: creating content (articles, tools, programs, etc.) that passively attains links due to its intrinsic value. Pros: it is white hat, and it is cheap. Cons: takes time and creativity. Common Types of link bait; useful tools, results lists, controversial articles, contests, exclusive news, evergreen content and anything useful, remarkable or entertaining. He shows some real world examples...

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

Link building or link development (depending on your opinion,) involves approaching other websites and asking for a link. This is a simple business task that many people either blow out of proportion or trivialize while performing SEO for their or a client's website. Many linking experts will argue that the most important factor is to secure a link from a site that is somehow relevant. So what happens when the site you are optimizing is an ecommerce site or somehow otherwise supporting a for-profit venture, and the "target" site is a non-profit?

This question was posed by a member of Search Engine Watch Forums last month, and received few responses. He claims that he was told by the owner/webmaster of a non-profit site that they were wary of linking to a for-profit site due to the fear of losing their non-profit status. Fortunately, the one real answer came from the Moderator of the Search and Legal Issues area of SEW, Ian McAnerin. He stated (edited for brevity):

If the commercial site being linked to is owned or related to a member of the non-profit group, then be very, very careful...The fact that it might be commercial is not an issue by itself, unless the same information or value can be had from a non-commercial source...(and)The standard fund raising rules and expectations apply to links.

So this issue seems fairly cut and dry, but I am curious if there are others who have wrestled with this problem, and what if any problems they encountered if they decided to go with the links. Please add your experiences at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search Engine Optimization not only involves content, linking, and traffic, but also the location the website is hosted. People wishing to rank better in various international versions of Google, for example, may do well to ensure they are hosting in the country which they wish to rank in. Recently we discussed some posts at SEW about International Websites with Multiple Domains, as some may remember.

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums has a member asking about switching to UK hosting in order to do better in Google.co.uk rankings. One senior member, Quadrile, immediately points out a fairly popular opinion on this subject, saying

If the site is domain.com, then UK hosting may dramatically improve listings in google.co.uk, without much damage to your google.com placings.

The more important answer to this question, however, comes when a member states that he should

Make sure that the UK Host really is based in the UK and that its IPs are registered as belonging to the UK.

See the rest of the discussion and post your thoughts at WebMasterWorld Forums.

Brad Geddes from Local Launch is up first to give an overview of language and targeting options. Most common forms of Spanish language targeting; english web sites targeting spanish speakers, and many other options. There are many possible configurations (keyword, ad copy, audience). Google AdWords Language Options: they have a language settings under the campaign settings, this is based on user preference set by user at Google.com. Keyword & ad copy use; no restrictions as to the language of the keywords, ads and non for mixing and matching keywords and ad languages. There is a quality score that will regulate this, so the restrictions are not needed as much. Yahoo! Search Marketing Language Options; allows English or spanish keywords, they will allow english or spanish ad copy and there are restrictions; spanish keyword must trigger spanish ads, spanish ads must lead to spanish landing pages, and some more. Microsoft adCenter only supports English and French, so give MSN feedback. Geographic targeting, most common location targeting options are country targeting or region targeting. Country targeting can be done at Google AdWords (multiple countries can be targeted with one campaign (don't use the same campaign, but you can), Microsoft adCenter allows it also, same deal as Google, but Yahoo search marketing allows one account per country and in Q1 2007, you will be able to link accounts. Top 10 Hispanic Markets; LA, NY, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Harlingen. Regional Targeting; IP targeting, Specific Geographic based campaigns (ip based and keyword based), country & territory based companies (targeting country and keyword based). He then shows geographic permutations for keywords (Florida Pizza, Miami Pizza, etc.). Reach your target audience, location (ip/keyword), languages, and ppc inventory.

Paul D. Saffery from SilverDisc Chile was up next. Spanish is a much less standard language than English. Not only in pronunciation, but also in vocabulary. Spanish speaking territories can vary greatly in many ways; population, Internet penetration, wealth distribution, geography and psychology. Challenges specific to Spanish; the nature of the ad business, what jargon does your target audience expect from the business you are advertising? The nature of your target audience? The answers to these questions will help you decide to use neutral Spanish or country-specific Spanish. There are 14 different variations of Spanish. Issues about the SPanish language; text length (more characters compared to English), translation non-expstent or "poor," accents, non-unique translations and non-unique meanings. Is advertising in Spanish worth the effort? Only if your landing page is in same language, only if you access the user base, you access the demographics. You need to research number of users, broadband penetration, the spread of wealth, the demographics, the psychographics and the postal service. Selling PPC: the competition of traditional advertising media, market granularity (hot versus cold keyword judgment), awareness about the importance of measuring ROI. Make sure you communicate, get your audience to trust you, and don't deceive your clients.

Frank Watson from FXCM. He said foreign languages are the most profitable. Use keyword inserts, it has better results when compared to English usage of it (in terms of CTR). Use single keywords, the Spanish market is young, more likely to search on one word versus two or three, so be aware of broad-matching. Don't compete with yourself, when you need multiple accounts - you can bid against yourself - just be careful. Create coherent categories and groups, use multiple messages and test them. AussieWebmaster - big budgets...

Alexandre Kavinski from HotList is going to talk about mostly Portuguese case studies. SEM is about results, the WORDS are the means to the results. He shows two examples of bad translation. Challenges, cultural aspects, different languages, different vocabulary, different user profiles, different web use habits and more. When preparing a campaign you need to understand all these items. You should know which product or services are important, how people see a brand or label, what are ones strengths and weaknesses, and how is our competition positioned and what are my clients searching for. You should have different ad management styles for each country. Each country may have its own objective, which areas are a priority, so managing the results locally is important. A good report should support web site strategies definitions, should highlight user profile differences on each country, should bring up strategic information that may be used by marketing department even offline.

Jessie Stricchiola from Alchmist Media is last up to go over click fraud issues on a general level. She talks about the first sign she has seen click fraud, I remember when she presented this data at an SES a while back --- ohhh memories. She presented it back in 2001. She explains that some people make some extreme claims about click fraud to it threatening the global economy to it being immaterial. The search engines have definitions of click fraud, "click spam," "invalid clicks," and so on. She lists some more definitions, as quotes. How is click fraud generated; manually generated clicks, clicks from hitbots, clicks from spyware, and clicks from email distribution. There are now auditing providers; ppc trax, vericlix, hitslink, clicklab, adwatcher, clickrisk, whosclickingwho, and so on and the list is growing daily (demand is growing for this daily). CPC advertising agreements; advertisers are agreeing to pay for all clicks from publishers, regardless of their source or quality, they agree to limit the time frame in which they can dispute their PPC bills to 60 days, they agree to limit the data used in the investigation of the dispute to the publisher's data only - publishers are not required to look at any data from the advertiser, and they are agreeing to pay for any number of volume of clicks - no matter what amount of clicks may be retroactively found to be fraudulent after further investigation - as only "credits" and not refunds, are issued. Click fraud concerns; publishers are communication that they are in a safe ad environment, publishers are not working together to create a uniform method of scoring click validity, and publishers have not yet created a uniform methodology for data submission. What advertisers can do about it? Begin benchmarking and auditing your PPC data, document your tracking and analysis for future use, perform 60 day audits consistently, establish and maintain close relationships with publishers to address click fraud related problems as soon as they are identified, communicate to publishers - tell them what you need from them to create a safer advertising environment.

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

Nacho introduces the panel and the session. I am looking forward to this. I expected more people here but I guess they are all interested in "link building."

Ian McAnerin McAnerin Networks is up first to talk about International Domain Issues.

Domain Issues - Subdomains:
Subdirectories are domain.com/brasil/
Subdomain is brasil.domain.com
Domain is domain.com.br

Rule of thumb: Choose based on IBL linking patterns and number of pages. The subdirectories have light IBL, small number of pages, Subdomain is moderate IBL, moderate number of pages, Domain has heavy IBL and large number of pages.

The further removed from the main domain, the less freely the internal link weight seems to flow. Subdirectory > Subdomain > Domain (how link juice flows). Subdomains and second domains are better if you have multiple locations, multiple CMS and/or multiple IP addresses. If geolocation or multiple languages are involved, I strongly recommend subdomains or full secondary domains.

Suggested Best Practices:
Separate countries on separate domains (takes advantage of letting the engines know you have a a .mx site and should be in Google Mexico), separate languages on subdomains and separate topics in subdirectories. This is not the hard and fast rule.

Three types of domain redirection:
(1) Permanent redirection = 301 redirect
(2) Temporary redirection = 302 redirect
(3) Alias / Parking = 200 OK

An alias isn't technically a redirect, but is commonly used as if it were one. Search engines usually try to treat these properly, webmasters often use them improperly.

Domain A
   |--------------------------------> Domain C
Domain B

Alias / Parking 200 OK
Domain A and Domain B are just different names for the canonical domain - aka the big kahuna (domain C) -- (personally, I see this all over the place). Because different names are involved there can be a period where the search engine thinks they are separate sites, and can treat them as such, splitting PR and possibly treating one as a duplicate site.

Most SEOs ask you to stay away from this Alias/Park method.

Permanent Redirect 301
Domain A and Domain B are no longer treated as sites, and are treated as if they were the Big Kahuna (domain C). This is usually the safest and best redirection method. No theoretical limit to the number of domains that can be redirected. All links are passed on, but geolocation aspects of the redirected domain is lost. This can be bad, if you want to rank well in a local search engine, such as Google Mexico. Keep that in mind.

Temporary Redirect 302
Domain C is treated as a temporary location, and the redirected domain is the Big Kahuna. This works fine unless there is more than once 302 redirect - you can't have more than one Big Kahuna (canonical issue). This causes a lot of problems. The default standard is a 302 redirect on servers, so that is a big issue for webmasters.

He then does a real time example asking an audience member for example URLs for sites with multiple domains.

International Issues - Geolocation
Search Engines give a ranking boost to local sites relevant to the local search. I.e. Google.com.br gives a ranking boost to Brazil sites. Note: Google gives localized results for the USA if the search is on the .com version but also includes a recognized US location (miami pizza). Best method is by using a country code TOp Level Domain (.ca, .co.uk, .com.br). After that Google uses IP geolocation (server host location), Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com all use link analysis. Problem with geolocation is that many people do not host where the business is located, a Mexican site may be hosted in the US. The issue with link analysis is that when you get links, or higher a broker, you can get links from .ro (russian domains), it will think you are a Russian site.

Each individual page can only be localized to one location. If you have multiple ccTLD domains aliased to a site, this can cause issues based on followed link paths. If you have a gTLD (.com, .net, etc.) then the geolocation will be based on either IP or link analysis. Ian says do both.

(!) Use ccTLD
(2) Hist in target country with target country IP
(3) Get links
(4) missed this

"But our site is more complicated than that..."
Site has an existing .com and wishes to keep that branding and URL Host web site in geolocation and get links. Other solution, you can alias the ccTLD onto the .com, and have at least one link using that ccTLS to the site. An other solution, if we are only talking about 1 ccTLD, you can use a 302 redirect to redirect from teh ccTLD to the .com.

Use ip2location.com/free.asp for a tool.

Christian Van Der Henst from Miacosta Web (spelling?), it is the largest Webmaster community in Latin America (like WebmasterWorld).

Do I need a single domain name for my Latin America (20 domains) or a subdmain.

Subdomain Pros:
- You only need to build one Spanish Web site
- Easier to promote a single domain name
- Avoid having duplicate content
- Promotion for your main domain is easier

Subdomain Cons:
- Spanish language differs from different Latin American countries
- How do you add a new web site for a specific Latin American country.

Country Specific Domains Pros:
- Brand protection
- Users will identify their own country specific web site
- Web sites can include slang and other customizations for each country.

Country Specific Domains Cons:
- Some country specific domains are hard to register
- Your brand can be registered by someone else
- You may need multiple hosting companies
- You're going to handle several web sites (lot of work).

How much do you pay for domain names these days?
- $6 - $15 for an available domain names
In Latin America it can cost $25 to $100 for an available domain. Sometimes you need a postal address in the country. And there is only one provider for country specific domains in Latam.

Some countries promoting their domain extensions.
Examples: .es, Spain, not Latin America, but they are related by language.
.ms Mexico, normally it is $35 per year per domain. But sometimes they have offers, they had an offer in the past for $5 per domain per year.
.ar Argentina, these are free, you just need a postal address in Argentina.

Brand protection offered by marcaria.com and safenames.com.

If you want to go regional, you need to act now. Google got it all for most TLDs. But they did not act as quick for Gmail.TLD, et. Google.com.gt.

Strategy #1:
Get a spanish Web site, get some quotes about domain names for branding protection. Even get a subdomain for now.

Strategy #2
Get a spanish web site and get regional domains and redirect. Protect your brand and promote domains in business cards and other materials.

Strategy #3
Get regional domains and several entry pages, make sure to have entry pages with relevant info of your company in every country Avoid using the same content.

Domains and special characters:
- Country specific domains dont offer domains with accent marks.
- You're promoting somebody else domain
- Not available for all browsers
- They are actually very weird names

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

Danny is modding up this session, he asked if anyone went to any parties last night. No one raised their hands, I guess they are still sleeping.

James Douglas from Ion Global is first up. What percentage of people on Earth speak English as preferred language? Less than 20%. Spanish? More than English. Most popular language? Chinese. Success is not just about translation. He shows a sony site translated from Japanese to English and how poorly it was done. He then shows Target.com, and they show off their Spanish language site. They did not translate the top navigation and header of the Spanish site. Translation while understandable or accurate is usually unsuited for the Web, where you want to sell. Tone and formality, "Welcome back Joe" versus, "We are honored by your returned visit Mr. SDSSD." Most formal countries to least are; Japan, S. Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and so on. He shows off slides of a client of his, Walt Disney World site, not just translation, but XYZ is as big as "local place goes here." It is not just translate, it is "transcreate." He shows how the design can be affected by language issues, more text can make the page look awkward. He then shows a picture of a guy in underwear, with an "OK" mark, but the OK mark is not OK in Brazil (no idea why, someone may tell me). Amazon.com changed "cart" to "basket" for the UK version. Culturally audit your images and enabled your CMS to swap out images. He then shows Arabic, right to left, versus left to right type. So design with international in mind (nav, images, iconography). Make it easy for your users to find international versions of your site. GE does it well, so does Oracle. Or you can use a Global splash page (entry page, like Carnival.com or UPS (comes to mind), IKEA, FisherPrice). You can also do a persistent navigation option, for example Toyota, Intel. It is best to place that global gateway icon at the top right. So make it easy to find your global sites. Consider TEXT instead of GIFs, look at the IKEA web site, all the data is text driven, helps with language and SEO.

Huiping Iler from WinTranslation.com based in Canada. Online, you can online sell with content (including pictures and text). She shows how Babel Fish translation can drive people away, is machine translation viable? Machine translation is best at translating technical content. The Meteo system is a tool that works very well for weather translation. Example, the ford "front" it only means a weather system. But that is one case machine translation works well. But when we write content, the content we write, cannot easily be translated by a machine. What about using someone who speak native in the language? Well, would you ask a friend to pull your teeth or would you go to a Dentist. Ummm... A translator needs to understand the context around the text, the tone of the saying. If you cannot afford to translate all your pages, pick and choose. She said, 80% of the content Microsoft writes does not get read. Translation needs to know SEO, and which terms are used more in that language. She shows how the H&R Block site, english versus Spanish version are completely different in terms of level of SEO. The Spanish version is optimized for "Spanish Site." She shows the SEO + Translation workflow; before developer a glossary of keyword phrases then during apply on-page SEO best practices and then after to QA work.

Marcelo Sant'Iago from the IAB Brazi. Some machine translation like device was playing in the background, too funny - the speaker mimicked it. Translate landing pages into Spanish or Portuguese, you do not need to translate the whole site. Or you can use mini-sties. Adcopy/content strategy: have different budgets and strategies for each country in Latin America. He shows design versus diseno. He also shows Google Trends, country break down and city break down. Strategy: offshoring/outsourcing, you need a local partner.

Jonathan Mendez is last up, this time representing OTTO Digital. Relevancy = Engagement = Conversion = Optimization. It is difficult to deliver relevance to the user. He searches for "latin america" in Google and up came three Google image results, two were maps and a third was latin American girls. The Hispanic population is very diverse and dispersed. This is an opportunity to deliver relevance to the Hispanic market. Audience Segmentation is the first step, you segment by keyword, source, geo location, the language and the stage of the buying cycle. The keyword shows us the goal of the user searching. He shows edmunds.com targeting a "use cars" keyword in Spanish, and it takes you to the new cars landing page and not used cars (plus not in Spanish). The Source helps us show consideration stage, and their motivation. Geo location tell us where they came from and you can create localized messages and seasonality based messages. Language tells us what to serve up to the user, in terms of content. The stage of the buying cycle is also very important; new visitor, return visitor and regular customer. He shows how sites can change the site based on each type of customer. The tools that help include site analytics data, search channel data, customer/sales data and also research data. Within each segment you need to determine which user has the most value. Then they have the "highest value user" and they craft experiences relevant to that user. He explains that there technologies out there that can deliver based on your rules. You don't need to create a new site, just the highest value areas.

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

I received an email last night from Google AdSense saying;

Dear Publisher,

We wanted to let you know that Google Pack Referral conversions were not recorded for a 24 hour window beginning early July 5th and ending mid-day July 6, Pacific Time. Conversions from this period won't appear correctly in your reports and you won't have received the related earnings.

Please know we're working hard to reimburse you for the lost revenue in the coming weeks. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Wow, "Please know we're working hard to reimburse you for the lost revenue in the coming weeks." I guess these things happen to even Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The blogs and forums are buzzing about a rumored sneak peak of Google Drive, or GDrive or Platypus. Cocaman discovered this, and posted a screen capture of the page which he found. What did it say?

Platypus (Gdrive)

A filer for the world. But better.

Storing your files in Platypus has a number of advantages over storing your files on either your C: drive or filer.

* Backup. If you lose your computer, grab a new one and reinstall Platypus. Your files will be on your new machine in minutes.
* Sync. Keep all your machines synchronized, even if they run different operating systems.
* VPN-less access. Not at a Google computer? View your files on the web at http://troutboard.com/p.
* Collaborate. Create shared spaces to which multiple Googlers can write.
* Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible.

Philipp has more details on it here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread shows how MSN may not be properly listening to a robots.txt rule that Google set up for api.google.com. If you review Google's robots.txt file at http://api.google.com/robots.txt you will see the standard, do not index command. But if you go to MSN Search and conduct a site command search for site:api.google.com you will notice MSN has 14 results.

You will also notice those results are not full, they only contain the URL data. This is common, where the search engines will crawl just the URLs and not the content. I believe that may be the interpretation of the disallow. Take a look at Google, they are indexing site:api.google.com URLs, and so is Yahoo! Search, and they are all doing it the same way.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread describes how Google placed active keywords into a hidden inactive keyword state. Basically, Google "red flagged" the keyword because the words in the ad triggered a flag. The word was "kids" and it placed an ad campaign on hold, without the keyword displaying "inactive" for fifteen days prior to the SEM noticing.

Can you blame Google for flagging keywords? Nah, it is a good thing. But Google should notify the advertiser by telling them the keyword is inactive or under-review, or something.

This is a nice little tidbit for SEMs to know, if they did not already.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Website content is probably the most important part of the ranking algorithm at Google. For many months, people have argued whether Google penalizes certain websites because the content that they are using is borrowed or stolen from another website. Although the jury is still out, it certainly seems that sites with original content tend to rank better than those with borrowed content, overall. Of course there are many more factors that come into play, mostly dealing with the overall strength of the website within rankings, as well as the linking to the site and the specific page the article is hosted on.

A thread a few weeks ago at WebMasterWorld Forums has a member asking

I have been given an opportunity to write articles for an online trade magazine. The first one was just published. It now shows up in the Google SERPS for my name. If I post a permanent copy of each article on my website, will this trigger a duplicate content penalty with Google?

Google might just ignore the same articles on your site.

the originator of the article usually picks up a natural progression of backlinks which the copied articles do not.

I tried a couple of tests. I took a snippet of content that I wrote in 2004 and searched Google for it. Now this is a bit of a special case, since the site that I originally published the article for is actually banned at Google (Instantposition.com), but you will notice that the SEMPO site, which has much more "weight" is ranking #1 out of 2 for the snippet. I do believe that the article was actually published at SEMPO before I let my Malaysian buddy publish it on his site, so both factors would be "OK" by most people's feelings on the matter.

We often quote forum posts. I took a quote from Ben's post here in May and Googled it. I was happy to find Jill's forum occupying the justified first place, but was kind of bummed to see that other sites outranked SERountable, including Jim's blog quoting Ben's post referenced above! (***Note: added when I checked this post for links...now the SER post comes up #1...could it have been the one link from this very post that caused a jump of 6 positions? Obviously not, since it would take a crawl of this site for the link before that happened, unless the Google News feed somehow did something, woah this is strange...anyway the Highrankings site was ranked #1. OK Back again after checking a different browser, and Highrankigns is back to #1...very, very strange fluctuations in rankings. I was not logged-in to Google at the time that I last checked)

Obviously, this duplicate content of articles question is far from being answered. If you want, head on over to the WebMasterWorld Forums and restart the discussion...

Nacho threatened the lives of the SIX panelist, that if they go over, then (well I wont say). He then said something in Spanish, I assume, if you want to listen to the session in Spanish, go get a headset. See, I know Spanish. He said this may have been the hardest panel for him to put together.

Barbara Coll, WebMama is first up. Who is involved in SEM in general? The team, she lists out a bunch of titles. SEMs can't be performed or planned in a vacuum. Integration with other online marketing teams is critical for SEM program success. Education; come to a common terminology, decide what languages and domains will be focused on and used, provide case studies and suggestions as to how and why to integrate (sources for info; sempo, clickz, searchenginewatch (blog), attend conferences). Overlapping budgets; tighten relationship with other agencies, talk about who owns what budget, decide whether corporate or country budgets are to be used. Measurement; offline marketing effects online traffic volume, online marketing effects offline sales, attempt to merge multiple tracking systems and backend CRMs (you have to decide on success metrics). Creatives; Consistency but not the same when it comes to text vs. images, keywords versus page location, ppc versus cpm, searchers versus eyeballs and language issues (translation issues), shared branding experiences and responsibility for trademark disputes. We need to convince the management there is opportunity to target Latin America (how do we do this?)

Dave Williams from 360i. He says look back at 1999, and you will see a lot of similarities there, now in the Hispanic market. Build organization knowledge, you need to educate the people from CEOs to the bottom-levels. , develop 101s and 201s. Develop an integrated search strategy; the SEO investments you make today will have long term rewards and PPC is more like day trading (quick results). Looks at the important keyword buckets (english, spanish), what does your promotional calendar look like? What are your competitors running and how do you differentiate yourself from them? You need to test these creatives. It is important that when you run campaigns, you need to group them properly. Assign each product a bucket and then break down those buckets by high volume and low volume and then based on ROI. Use sophisticated data optimization can help. Statistical modeling, algorithmic optimization, predictive capabilities, understand the value of "assists." This data can be huge for you. Portfolio Approach Optimizes Results: Data indicates that rank has significant impact on clicks and conversions. Through non-bran portfolio optimization can maximize performance. Conversion rates are nearly identical for consumers rating the search process with either a brand or non- brand term provided the last click is brand term. Consumers that click on an ad ten times, are three times as likely to convert than users with one click. Focus on education, strategy, and data.

Eduardo Valades from iHispanic. Latin America; amount of PCs available and the cost to buy them, Internet access is not always available, broadband is expensive, limited content in Spanish and majority of Web sites in Flash (SEO issues). US Hispanics; demographics, psychographics and topologies are unique, us hispanics are forced to blend in, lack of commitment from ad firms and owners, both marketing and content is in English and non-related imagery. You need to commit on long-run, small time and monetary commitments wont do. Challeneges for Web and search engines are growth trends are high, the amount of search queries are few markets, markeitng budgets are small, users homepages may force users to begin with a poor search experience, loyalty with search engines is not high, lack of vision of market opps, SEM firms focusing too much in general marketing and not growing into multuilingual marketing strategies. Balance your online marketing tactics from pull marketing, permission marketing to push marketing. Establish a multilingual strategy, start with english then spanish then Portuguese. ROI Challenges; define goals, gain SEO traffic is lost to poor funnel navigation, PPC may be fractions of the cost (track offline conversions), not accessing web analytics reports. Establishing a road map for results; get educated on the market opp, research and validate research, balance your online marketing tactics, be committed, demonstrate to yourself that this works.

Matt Williams from Prominent Placement. Case study for Abacus Solutions. First dedicated international effort for either organization, no previous experience with developing non-English programs and funding was an issue. Limited program to high-end IBM dedicated servers. What "Translates?" Can a successful US focused, English language program be "translated" to SPanish and Portuguese? Not fully. Results for "IBM AS/400 servidores usados," they got great rankings right away. Spanish language visitors increased +1400%, Portuguese language visitors increase +700%, no degradation among other languages, the pie grew. Opportunity assessment; your ability to be seen in the search engines depends on your competition, or lack there of. Knowledge of the search landscape is critical. Intent, build awareness via search engine visibility, drive traffic that converts. Site page optimization, content creation, keyword selection , relevant, unique compelling, on and off page factors worked similar to US SEO. Linking, authority site, anchor text, branding opps, and additional research via RSS feeds, PR Web, additional SERPs through press releases. Things that are different; level of sophistication; competitors, tools very little. Project management, additional complexity and additional costs (time/money). Additional credibility required, international shipping, currency conversion, etc. Seasonality and world events; business cycles, elections, sporting, events, festivals, holidays, etc. PPC differences, Language issues, brand terms, acronyms, etc. misspellings and "spanglish." Tips: search is search focus on relevancy and content; latin american SEM requires time, money and doing it right and the opportunity it large, less competitive and huge potential with huge bottom-line effect.

Matias Perel from LatinThre3. Latino Challenges; language and cultural diversity, trademark terms, target locally, tracking conversions, how to track my offline sales and search engine of 3rd party tracking. He said the Brazilian market is more developed then the Mexico market. He will be focusing on trademark terms in this presentation. There is no policy in Latin America on trademarks, he puts up a slide on the definition of a trademark. In Latin America there is no law on this yet. He shows the purchase funnel: hotel in miami -> miami hotel reviews -> cheap hotel miami -> intercontinental hotel miami. The last keyword is a trademark, and there is a risk in targeting those keywords. He discusses the Google lawsuit and GEICO. He puts up a slide on Yahoo and Google, Yahoo allows you to use a trademark if you are a reseller or you are an information site (not competitive) and Google allows you to bid on trademarks unless the trademark has been filed with Google and approved by Google not to be used in AdWords.

Massimo Burgio representing SEMPO to present a SEMPO paper. He tells folks what SEMPO is, check them out at SEMPO.org. A SEMPO collaborative project to map the experience of being a SEM to target Latino. Results will be published on the SEMPO web site. 33 SEMPO members out of 417 replied. Do you Latino? 26% US Hispanic only, 20% US Hispanic and Latin America, 18% Latin America SEMs targeting US Hispanics and Latin America, 15% worldwide targeting both and 13% Latin America SEMs targeting only Latin America, and 8% Spanish SEMs targeting. What were your biggest challenges and hod did you overcome it? Content localization was one of the biggest list. The solution was to deploy different web sites with different products and different goals. "Flat targeting" is not the exception here, but the mainstream rule. Other problems include cultural and language diversities... To solve this issue, you create landing pages,or testing a mix-mode content page, they also hired Latinos in your field. Also there is a lack of reliable data on user behavior (browsing versus searching), the solution is to research. More problems is e-commerce issues, have patience with this or come up with alternatives. An other issue is client education, solution is to create case histories or free testing. What is your Latino search mix? SEO+PPC, design multiple landing pages for Latinos. Which general issues do you think should be addressed? tools, vendors, ad networks, and US clients need to be convinced. Then they ask for folks to tell them a fun story about their experience; Hispanics are being targeted in Spanish but searching in English and also a funny language issue story. Would you be interested in joining Latino SEMPO? Most said yes, so there is a SEMPO Latino starting.

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

One of the better ways to gain rankings in Google is to ensure that you have plenty of inbound links from trusted and relevant websites. In order to try and avoid websites from capitalizing on this, Google began hinting that it would devalue links that had been purchased instead of earned. Matt Cutts wrote a definitive (at least for the usually elusive Google) post in September 2005 at his blog. Ever since, people have been speculating how Google could actually devalue such links, unless they were clearly marked as being paid. In most cases, the "nay-Sayers" have won out, since it would be very difficult for Google to actually identify all paid links, especially anchor text links from relevant content.

In a post last Friday at Google Blogscoped, by Philipp Lenssen, it is pointed out that

You can buy a PageRank 9 backlink on a W3C page for a mere $1,000/ year

Matt Cutts himself points out that

The trouble with supporting a site just to get PageRank-carrying links is that you don't always get what you might want.

link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).

This is a very interesting topic, as it shows one way that Google now through Matt semi-officially claims it can effect the weight of links from individual pages on otherwise highly trusted sites. Although I have yet to find any forums discussing this issue, a lot can be gleaned from the Comments Forum attached to the Lessen post. Please feel free to post forum discussion links in the comments below.

(note: Barry covered this on Friday at the Search Engine Watch Blog)

Danny Sullivan preps the panel, big panel, big panel.

Gonzalo Alonso from Google Mexico up first. Trends in Latin America is that it is not that different from what we saw in the US. Search is pervasive in Latin America (same slide from the session right before this). Internet users search to learn more about product and services (70% brazil, 74% mexico), compare prices (66% brazil, 61% mexico), more stats but too quick to write down. Search marketing in Latin America is poisded to grow, $111M in 2005 and $337 in 2009, expected to triple in size in four years. Google is the number one property by page views, number two property by reach, number one property in search and number one property in online communities with orkut. 78% of search pageviews take place in Google, 84% in argentina, 88% chile, etc. He goes over basic AdWords information, where the ads show, how the ads are shown and some AdSense. Google reaches 80% of the Internet population worldwide. He shows a video of how AdWords is helping in Latin America, docid=2258046021913351677 title is Corpo Perfecito (Grupo Galgrin) e Google AdWords em Brasil (2 minute and 16 second video, posted on Feb. 22, 2006). You can see on the face of Gonzalo that the video means a lot to him, he cares.

Guilherne Gibenboim from Yahoo!, wow Danny pronounced it, he has a thick accent, I think he is from Brazil. Latam Market, there are many types of businesses on YSM but they generally fall into 4 basic types in Latam. (1) Internet pure players (2) SEMs (3) Agencies and (4) Small & Medium Businesses. Advertisers main challenge, to pinpoint relevant searchers in Latam. How are users searching? Over 500M keywords generated in YSM Latin America per year. Most successful advertisers own between 1k-50k keywords in Brazil. The buying cycle: The user can search to be informed, to shop or to purchase. Planning your customer experience: segmentation is the key to planning your customer experience. Tracking conversions: It is important to consider the factors that drive conversions. YSM's goal is to help advertisers to pinpoint relevant searchers.

Maria Teresa Arnal from Prodigy MSN. Leading online destination in Mexico with over 17M users per month. #3 player in market with 40% reach, 8M users and 100M search queries per month. It's only the beginning: VIsion of Search" deliver answers not just links, answer complex questions, understand and anticipate user intent, broaden search beyond the web and provide a seamless experience no matter where data resides, and put the user in control and deliver a personalized search experience. They are investing heavily in relevance, leadership, local and enterprise. They want to go beyond web search. MSN Search V1, start.com, livelabs, academic search, etc. Prodigy MSN User Behavior; single words are the main way users search for results, 64% of the queries are text link results while 36% are image results, users peak time to search is between 10am and 4pm and queries drop 50% on weekends. Prodigy MSN Portal 28%, Search Portal 39%, Hotmail 1%, Messenger 7%, and other (IE, Encarta, etc.) 24%. What can advertisers do with Prodigy MSN in Mexico? She shows sponsored search (advertising.prodigy.msn.com), Prodigy MSN will offer a unique opp for advertisers targeting Mexican internet users; they are partnering with players in Mexico, etc. She talks about adCenter, serving 100% of paid search listings in France, Singapore, US and UK (autumn 2006). Advertisers more strategically plan their online buys. Real audience intelligence and targeting capabilities. Available for SPanish speaking markets in 2007. She shows search funnels, search result clustering, and forecasting search volume functionality (we discussed them here in the past).

Erica Schmidt (not Eric Schmidt, EricA) from iProspect. Latin America GDP 2003 shows Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru are the largest, in that area. Erica will focus on the top five. She took a snapshot view of Internet usage online worldwide by country; US, then China, then Japan, Brazil is number 11 (March 2006, ComScore). Broadband subscriber growth in Latin America to grow 70.7% according to eMarketer, May 2006. Search Marketplace: Google leads in search queries worldwide with 39.5%, Yahoo 18.3%, 8.6% Google UK. Brazil Google has 55.8%, MSN has 30.2% and Yahoo! 11.9% (May 2006). Mexico; Google 74.9%, 17.2% Yahoo, Prodigy MSN 1.6% share. Argentina, Google 80.7%, and Colombia 87% and Chile is 93% Google market share (huge). Key Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese (Brazil). Radio Button Usage (you know clicking on Google.com versus Google.co.mx, etc. or search pages only in Spanish or search on pages in Mexico). Most users do not click on those radio buttons! Search engines "pre-empt" search results with content from within these tabs. Users don't utilize the "radio buttons." She explains the geo-filters placed automatically when searching in US versus anywhere else. Mega trends among all the engines; local, blogs, personalization, offline convergence, mobile and no more spam.

Marcel Sant'Iago from the IAB Brazil. He will give us stats from numbers generated within Brazil. More than 10M internet users, 12M from home, with a population of 180M. 78% of users belong to AB class. 40% of active users use broadband, 95% of IRS tax forms are submitted online, 500,000+ .com.br domains. Online ad revenue in 2005 is $111M US. 15-20% of online media investments, local search is not available, local publishing providing contextual inventory, big marketers coming in, retail still lead paid placement. Opportunities: CPCs are still low compared to US and Europe, most categories have few ads, broad reach of search engines. Internet activities; email 17%, school activities 11.5%, search for products (too quick), he broke down search specific search also. The Challenge; language, they have three names for Tangerine in Portuguese.

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

Danny Sullivan explains the timer to the panel which includes Nacho, Sarah Carberry and Jessie Stricchiloa.

Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic to give his presentation. He should be providing a detailed landscape overview. US Hispanic population growth; 44 million in 2004, 68 million was estimated in 2015, a huge growth. US Hispanics are spreading fast across the US landscape. 71% of all US Hispanic households are concentrated in 20 markets. US Hispanic household is 42% larger; 3.4 versus 2.4 in the general market (more people in a household). The US Hispanic market is young, 46% of hispanics are 24 years of age or younger versus 33% of non-hispanics. 40% internet penetration rate of US Hispanics, spain 39%, france 38%, Mexico (missed). Hispanics online are qualified consumers, with $30,000 or more household income. Hispanics are heavy internet users, US Hispanics view 150 pages on average, compared to 133 of general market - that is 13% higher. US Hispanics spend 87 more minutes online, 10% more. Time spent per week, TV 17.5 hours, Radio 11.2 hours, Internet 9.7 hours and print 5.4 hours. Consumed media is shifting; 62% of hispanics said they would be spending more time on the Internet as opposed to the other medias. Do you feel that you can find most relevant info on? Internet was like 95% the vote. He then ran some comparison tests between the search engines. 67% of Hispanics are not that loyal to a search engine, which surprised Nacho, since Hispanics are typically local to brands. 61% of US Hispanics are aware there is a difference between paid and organic results. They then asked the users if they can tell the difference between paid and organic. 56% of US Hispanics are not sure about the difference (lots of opportunity there). US Hispanic ad spend totaled more than 3.3 billion to market products to the US Hispanics in 2005, and a 6.8 percent increase from 2004. "$14 billion will be spent on paid search in 2006." They used this forecast model and tried to match it to the US Hispanic numbers, $884 million will be spent on paid search directly or indirectly to US Hispanics in 2006. $30M will be spend on spanish paid search. US Hispanics are primarily searching in English, because that is the content out there. Latin America is different. Measure the performance of an English ad versus an Spanish ad, compare. There is opportunity to increase Web sites in Spanish, better web content, better services and more paid ads. Advanced SEM Strategies for US Hispanic SEM: He gives some localized data for San Diego, Tijuana. And does a localized ad for them in Google AdWords. He compares the Spanish CPC versus the English CPC is much lower, higher ROI. He brings up the SEOMoz Keyword difficulty tool, and shows that "futbol" is a competitive keyword, and "Futbol" was $0.01 in Overtures bid tool! He goes over some quick tips quickly, people search backwards in Spanish (???). Identify your SPanish keywords for SPanish users only. He showed how to gain real estate on SERPs, not only did MexGrocer have top rankings, their affiliates were right under them. US Hispanic market is hot, paid search is taking off, trend for spanish content is rising, and SEM strategies for Hispanics require some basic dedication.

Sarah Carberry from Google is now up to share an online survey. The objective of the study was to learn more, to give advertisers an unbiased, 3rd party (Media Study helped) to help them make informed marketing decisions, to ensure that Google is meeting the needs for marketers targeting US Hispanics online. Findings suggest that current online US Hispanic market is comprised of educated, affluent and tech savvy early adopters. US Hispanics are more likely to purchase travel, technology, entertainment, beauty/cosmetics and or business service more so then US. US Hispanics are searching more than any other activity next to email. US Hispanics use a range of search engines. US Hispanics are more likely to use search engines to help with a variety of online shopping activities like compare prices, learn more about products, purchase it online. US Hispanics are purchasing online and offline, after using a search engine, US Hispanics internet users estimate they purchase 38% products. Users who consider Spanish their primary language are more likely to search in English. Text Ad Language: More us hispanics are clicking on English ads. US Hispanics use a search engine to pursue interests like finding recipes, read news, download music and blog posting more so then general population. They are also going online to access the net via multiple devices like mobile phones. She explains that US Hispanics are all different, they each have a unique personality and search differently.

Jessie Sticchiola Alchemist Media is last up. She praises Nacho, well deserved! She shows that many major US cities are dominated by Hispanics. If you are not a big dog in SEM you need to rely on word of mouth marketing, you are also suffering from lacking in top 10 rankings for SEM terms and you can a limited cash flow and budgets to spend on paid ads. You need to build successful client relationships, the loyalty business model. SEM-CRM is a world onto itself. Expectation management within an ever fluctuating SEM industry, cost variation due to lack of commoditization of SEM related services and client issues (dealing with tech team, external agencies). Client selection and sales process; you have to consider the clients understanding of the SEM industry, prior SEM engagements, development resources, commitment and availability and financial stability and accounting process. If they had 1 prior engagement, likely a wise business move, 2 priors is not unheard of, 3 priors then that raises a red flag (dig for background), 4 priors is a huge red flag). Client development resources; internal production and 3rd party agencies. Client commitment and availability, constant supervision of site production process to ensure CPC/SEO compatibility. Client accounting process; inquire about client's accounting process (net 30, net 60) and determine whether you will have a direct accounting contact for payment and if you are ok with the arrangement. Communication & Expectations; what you will, wont and might do with regard to the web site during the course of the project, the risks involved with your SEO tactics, influential factors out of your control, what you expectations are of their team throughout the project, consider incorporating these elements into agreements. Intuitive selection factors; internal unity with regard to SEM efforts, communication skills, EGO factors and cultural fit.

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

Pictures of SES Latino uploaded in almost real time also here.

Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.

Nacho is up on the stage ready to kick this event off, I snapped a picture, Ill post it live later. There seems to be under 150 people in this room. Honestly, I am a bit excited as we start off this event. Huge congrats to Nacho for putting this all together. We are a bit late to start, maybe that is by design. I have no reception for my pda in this room, plus no wifi, kinda of painful for me - but I will run up to the room or find the speaker room asap. FYI - a Yahoo PR girl is next to me, Heather, met her before, I'll publicly say hi to her here. Yes, we did talk but it is nice to reach out via blog.

Gaston Taratuta from IMS Inc, there are a large portal in Latin America and a large newspaper. Key Elements, the economic landscape, 80% of the DFP of the US go through Latin America. He tells us not to underestimate the power of the smaller locals in Latin America such as Colombia, Peru, Chile, etc because they have large penetration for internet usage. In 1996 - 2000, Yahoo displayed banners that were CPM based and keyword base not auctions. CADE has the same yahoo model. UOL used a keyword base client buys the first result for a period of time, not auction, then they moved to CPM base. Yahoo was the leader in Brazil. In 2000 - 2002, Yahoo bought Cade, UOL bought miner and then Google came into the market. Between 2000 and 2005 Google became a big brand in Latin America on both the user and publisher front. Terespondo.com was founded by two young guys, Juan Calle and Daniel Echeverria. Terespondo.com 100% based on CPC keyword auction, like GoTo back in the day. Terespondo business model was to secure as fast as possible distribution deals with major players in Latin America. The deal was the first five responses will be commercialized by Terespondo through an auctioning system. Publishers receives either a revenue share or a CPM guaranteed for searches generated. He shows the campaign by Terespondo running on UOL. They worried about showing too many sponsored results and not enough visible organic results (remember Ask Jeeves). By 2002 Terespondo secured deals with MSN, Terra, UOL, iG, Estadao,etc. By 2004 Terespondo was covering most of the major sites in Brazil, they owned the market between 2002, and 2004. In Mexico, they did well, not as well as Brazil. He shows Argentina, a fight between terespondo and Google. The "games begins" in 2002, Google and Overture had conversations with those in Brazil to use their sponsored search. Overture's approach was that they were not destination sites, they don't care who you display in terms of organic results. Google said, we are a destination site looking to provide the best results, Google required both organic and sponsored to be in the same deal - no picking and matching. Terespondo.com decided to talk to Google and Overture, since it is hard to compete. Overture in October 2004, launched in Brazil. Overture bought Terespondo in April 2005. Google launched in Brazil in June 2005. Google bought AKWAN in 3Q 2005. Brazil has 650M searches per month (US 4.5B searches), Mexico 250M, Argentina, 150M. Brazil 8M ad dollars, 3M in Mexico and 1.5M in Argentina.

Eduardo Valades from iHispanic Marketing Group. 44M US Hispanics who spend 575billion dollars. 15.7 million online US hispanics. Spend $5.6 billion in 2003 online. 20 countries in Latin America, spanish, Portuguese, spanish. Is search a commodity? Search is the number two reason people go to the Internet, behind email. They also asked which search engine is the most relevant? Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc (published this data at SEW blog in March 06). Search experience? Google, Yahoo, MSN, in that order. Favorite places to go online, in Latin America, the internet cafe is the most popular place (hence Nacho's proposal to Google). What are Hispanics Searching? for web sites and information, then products then images then news, then music then maps, local info, movies, video and other. Language preferences between US Hispanics and Latin America (you can imagine the difference). They believe that there is a lack of spanish language content out there. Some more data, all posted in that SEW post, ill try to link to it NOW. Bottom-line, lots of opportunity in the Hispanic market both in Latin America and in the US. Also, mobile devices are huge and mobile search opportunity is there. 25% of US hispanics have used mobile search and 20% of Latin Americans have used mobile search.

Gonzalo Alonso the General Director of Google Mexico. Search is pervasive in Latin American, usage of a search engine when researching or purchasing a product online; 93% Brazil and 99% Mexico. Search is well developed in Latin America. Brazil, Google gets bumped down by Orkut on the chart. Mexico, Colombia and Chile are doing well on the cart. They want to see Argentina move more. As in US, users search on most days they connect (some graph shows it). Search pageviews per usage day higher than US. More people search deeper, more pages viewed, in Latin America then in the US (lack of content or quality search?). 78% of search pageviews take place in Google in Latin America. What users are searching in Google. May 2006, Brazil popular queries, "rebelde," "enem," etc. Mexico, "ronaldinho," "amor en custodia," etc. Google has 20 domains for Google in Latin America, in three languages (spanish, portuguese and Quechua). Some Google products localized for Latin America; Search, Orkut, Blogger, Gmail, Toolbar, Desktop, Earth, Picada and Google Scholar plus AdWords AdSense, etc. AdSense network is on terra, Ubbi, and Cronica. They have resellers like Clarin and Planet and also comarketers such as locaweb and bighost.

Peter Celeste from Yahoo! Search Marketing, General Manager, overseas Latin America and Canada, he was with the company since 2000, with GoTo.com. YSM connects advertisers to the Internet's most valuable audience with the industry;s most comprehensive sit of highly effective products, offering the greatest level of control. Yahoo's footprint in global. Q4 2000 in the UK, then Q1 2002 in Germany, then Q4 20002 in Japan, then Q4 2004 went into Latin America. This year, they will launch in Argentina, the "panama platform" will allow them to expand more, with geotargeting and linguistic technologies in 2007. In 2005 there were 850M internet users worldwide, 22% latin america and in 2010 there will be 1.6B internet users, 21% from Latin America - most the growth is from outside of the US. There is a 20% increase in Internet users in the past 10 years, most growth from outside of the US, i.e. globally. Since launching the TR platform in Sept 05, Mexico advertiser base has grown over 50% Q over Q. Advertisers on YSM Brazil reach over 95% of users searching online. Yahoo! has over 70 partners in Latin America (UOL, MSN, etc.). Yahoo! Telemundo reaches more than 75% of the online audience - 12.5M us hispanics each month. Online ad spending targeted at Hispanics is projected to increase 32% this year to $132 million, compared with a 25% increase to $15.6B for the overall us internet ad market. The population of 16M hispanic users of the Internet in the US is projected to expand roughly 30% over the next five years.

You would think that the Google AdWords Editor, the one for the desktop, would allow you to manage more ads than you would be allowed to on the Web console. But I guess not.

A WebmasterWorld thread says that is not the case.

Whilst setting up a new campaign with 12,000 keywords and 1,000+ Text Ads (different creatives) we ran out of Text Ad quota!

This only happened on the AdWords Editor client.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Although MSN has told us recently that they wont do an update on a weekend they have "made an exception this week." msnDude confirms the update at a WebmasterWorld thread. msnDude also explains the difference between an algorithm update and index update here.

I'm happy your site got indexed. It had nothing to do with the recent software update...

An index update, on the other hand, happens automatically -- usually at least once a day -- and no one here pays it much mind unless they're debugging a problem that might be affected by it. An index update is nothing special. Kind of like breathing; you don't think about it at all if things are going well.

Anyway, I think there has been some confusion over the difference between the two. When I say "update" I always mean "software update." I think a few people have interpreted that as meaning "index update," and that might have left a wrong impression.

Forum discussion on the update at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Big forum news from WebmasterWorld today. They have updated the forum software. I first noticed it by looking at the new URL formats.

Old URL:
http://www.WebmasterWorld.com/forum30/

New URL:
http://www.WebmasterWorld.com/google/

Brett Tabke says,

We have just completed a significant update to the forum software (BestBBS) that we run on WebmasterWorld.

The majority of this update was an internal database format conversion. It took well over 300 hours of labor to convert the system to the new formats. When completed, we have a faster, more secure system than we have ever had before.

Find any bugs? Report them here. Good luck Brett!

Full Details;

Continue reading "WebmasterWorld Upgrades Forum Software"

The Yahoo! Publisher Network blog posted that there is a new payment schedule in place, replacing the old.

Q2 July 07/25/06 August 08/25/06 September 09/26/06 Q3 October 10/25/06 November 11/28/06 December 12/27/06

Also, it appears Yahoo! now allows you to update your password in the control panel.

Forum discussion on the feature at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

That is the question posted at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Is SEO on Google worth the effort anymore?

The poll can use some more responses.

Some SEOs are feed up that when they "SEO" their sites, it doesn't have enough of an impact on their Google rankings.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The latest blog entry at Inside AdWords is named Landing page quality update. The blog entry describes, in short,

Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.

Is this targeting sites specifically made for AdSense? AdSense arbitrage? Well, I am sure we will hear about it in the forums shortly. JenSense has her thoughts here, she looks into the possible changes but ultimately, it is a wait and see type of thing. There are so many factors that can impact pricing, it is hard to say the level of impact it may have on MFAs and AdSense arbitrage.

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

Reports come from WebmasterWorld that AdWords, since updating the user interface, has some bugs. Specifically, the content network conversion data disappears. Another member confirms this, saying "9 days between June 20 and July 3 show no conversions on the Content Network. Same for all my campaigns."

I am also surprised this is not getting anymore play in the forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is another tidbit from MSNdude at WebmasterWorld.

Thing is, we can't just automatically call a site spam because it has a url with a lot of hyphens in it.
Are other people seeing a lot of spammy hyphenated domains getting ranked by us? I know we used to have a bad problem with that, but lately I haven't seen it so much. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

Hmmm....

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Honestly, I do not personally track Google at the level of looking at my raw log files daily. But a WebmasterWorld thread describes Google recently (i.e. "for months") using HEAD only requests for crawling. Typically, Google uses GET requests when crawling pages, to pull the content down to its index. Google has now been also using HEAD requests to just pull the header data.

This is possibly a method to more efficiently crawl pages. They can (1) make sure the page exists quicker and (2) they can pull the last modified date and other header type information only.

Forum discussion on this new (??) GoogleBot behavior at WebmasterWorld.

Google's new Google Checkout has been officially disallowed by eBay as a form of accepted payment within the eBay network. As I reported yesterday at SEW blog, if you visit the eBay Accepted Payments Policy page, and click on the "show" link on the "Some Examples" portion, you will see;

Payment Services not permitted on eBay: AlertPay.com, anypay.com, AuctionChex.com, AuctionPix.com, BillPay.ie, ecount.com, cardserviceinternational.com, CCAvenue, ecount, e-gold, eHotPay.com, ePassporte.com, EuroGiro, FastCash.com, Google Checkout, gcash, GearPay, Goldmoney.com, graphcard.com, greenzap.com, ikobo.com, Liberty Dollars, Moneygram.com, neteller.com, Netpay.com, Nochex.com, paychest.com, payingfast.com, paypay, Postepay, Qchex.com, rupay.com, scripophily.com, sendmoneyorder.com, stamps, Stormpay, wmtransfer.com, xcoin.com

WebmasterWorld has a featured thread on this topic, with two pages of responses so far. Many feel that it is a smart move on eBay's part.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a three page WebmasterWorld thread with people reporting that many sites are having indexing issues in Yahoo! Search. Basically what is being reported is that the listing in Yahoo are only displaying the URLs and nothing more, such as page title or page description.

I do not have any specific examples to share, I am sorry. But the thread is currently three pages long.

There are other reports at DigitalPoint Forums also.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has a OneBox result named Q&A, we discussed it a while back here. Google pulls answers to questions from sites it indexes. But we have one documented case of a site that is not included in the index, but does return results for the Q&A style searches.

Conduct a search on % of African American in Los Angeles and you should see a Q&A result that looks like;

But if conduct a site command search for the site at Google you get no returned results. Same thing if you try just searching on the domain name, "Sorry, no information is available for the URL idcide.com."

This question was posted at Matt Cutts blog and then reposted at DigitalPoint Forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, the thread is named Google Using Sites for Own Purposes Then Dropping Them?

On May 23rd, Google launched Video ads, Google AdWords Click-to-play video ads. Since then it has been quiet on the video front. Now we have a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asking if anyone has any experience with them on the advertisers side.

We have one response which is overall positive.

Well from my experience we have seen significant click throughs on our video eye blasters.

Development can be costly and CPM rates can be high ... but to be honest I would rather have just floating eyeblasters and video clips ads that cost $50CPM and recieve 2-9% CTR over 728x90 or 120x600's that recieve .03% CTR and cost $20CPM.

I would say though that floating eyeblasters first ... then video ads (only because they are still really high in CPM)

Although $50CPM seems high, as AussieWebmaster points out, it is all about the ROI.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ego searching is when people want to rank well for their names, such as being number #6 for barry when the title and the content on the page doesn't have the words on the page. But there is a new ego search out there, well not really new, but I like to think a new definition of what an ego search can be.

SEO Speedwagon posted on it today and I think it makes for a great topic. Ever search at Google and get a "did you mean" suggestion at the top of the result, in red? Normally it comes up when you spell something wrong. But sometime it comes up for a branded query.

So when someone searches on rusty brick the two worded version, they accurately get "Did you mean: rustybrick." Technically, rustybrick, one word, is the correct spelling of the company. In the past Yahoo! also listed that suggestion for the word, but now that even the single word rustybrick doesn't even come up in the number one spot at Yahoo! I doubt they will offer a suggestion to the searchers. SEO Speedwagon also got themselves to come up for SEO Speed wagon, three words, instead of just two.

How are your "did you mean" ego searches working for you?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there are any issues with using hotlink protection for your images and the same images suffering in image search. Hotlink protection, if you do not know what it is, is when you want to dissuade others from pulling your images directly from your server. You can use hotlink protection, such as with htaccess, to either block or serve up a different image, to those pulling the images from you. But does this affect your search rankings in image search engines like Google image search?

Most of the folks in the forum discussion say there is no issue with Google and hotlink protection. Some recommend that you allow certain domains to display the images properly, such as your own domain (duh) and the shopping search engines (if that applies), news engines (if that applies), blog engines, image search engines and so on. But that list can get long.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

You can tell someone is passionate about what they do when they feel that the terms used to describe their job, comes into question. A thread at WebmasterWorld named Link Building is a bad phrase, started by WebmasterWorld moderator Receptional, goes into a discussion about the word "building" versus "development." It even goes deeper into using the word "reputation" versus "linking."

The thing is, the thread only has three posts. Are "link builders" satisfied with the term "link building?" Or would they prefer the job be termed, "reputation development?"

That does depend on how one performs the task. Is it a robotic fashion? Is it a more detailed and meaningful to you? What I mean by that can be explained by people who think at this level. People who research, who build the reputation, possibly before the ground is settled for there to be reputation built. I'll stop there and keep it short.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google AdWords advertisers are noticing a snippet of text at the bottom of the AdWords pages, that reads;

Create an ad variation to test different messages, at no extra cost.

The copy is confusing some veteran AdWords users, specifically the "at no extra cost" portion of the copy.

A WebmasterWorld thread has people discussing the unusually languages used. One member asked, "Which begs the question - are charges being considered for such tasks?" eWhisper, WebmasterWorld moderator, feels the wording is "strange" but also knows Google to well and says "It seems one of those 'We'll give away free stuff for free' type of offers."

AdWordsAdvisor replies to the thread stating that Google does not plan to charge extra fees. The representative explains;

Here's my take on it: over the years I've heard many an advertisers (though usually newer ones) ask if there was an extra cost for adding additional ads to run in rotation. (I've heard the same question as applied to additional campaigns, or Ad Groups or keywords for that matter, though perhaps not quite as often.) I imagine this to be an effort to proactively address that question.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This Monday and Tuesday I will be in Miami covering the Search Engine Strategies show, SES Latino. My good buddy, Nacho Hernandez, who I believe is the face behind SEM in the Hispanic industry, will be hosting this event. I want to wish him the best of luck and my support.

I will be covering all the Landscape & Tactics tracks, which you can view at the conference at a glance page.

I also hope to continue my normal forum buzz coverage and my SEW coverage before the sessions begin.

So I hope not to miss out on the day to day stuff.

Keep track of my coverage here and forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.