August 2006 Archives

Finally, Finally, since wanting to do this since April of 2005, we will be launching our PodCast! In conjunction with WebmasterRadio.FM, we will be starting our show this Tuesday, on September 5th at 5PM (EST). The name of the show, by popular request, is "The Search Pulse."

The Search Pulse will have Ben, Chris and myself chatting about the most popular search topics covered over the past week at the Search Engine Roundtable. It will be unique in that we won't cover any search news. We only cover news and search topics that deemed important by the search community, which we figure out from the search marketing forums. Also, the show will differ from other shows in that, the method of discussion will be a lot like one of those political round tables shows or news shows. Where you have a moderator asking experts (in our case, Ben and Chris) their thoughts on the topic at hand. Kinda like Bill O'Reilly's show but only on search.

After the show airs and is archived, I will post a link to the podcast and I will also provide links to the topics we covered during the show. Much like how Danny Sullivan does the Daily Search Cast recaps.

Finally, we currently do not have the final artwork for the show, nor do we have the official show opener, as of yet. I am told this will all be finalized prior to this Tuesday.

Any comments, suggestions, questions about the Search Pulse? Feel free to comment below or post in Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Posted archive podcast here.

A WebmasterWorld has a beginner to Google's AdWords program asking for folks to share their "most valueable links" to resources that will help a beginner get off the ground. Thought it may help to share that here.

• 15 tips for AdWords Beginners - WebmasterWorld
• AdWordsAdvisors Informational Posts - WebmasterWorld
• Jumpstart links for those new to the AdWords - WebmasterWorld
• The last 6 Months of AdWords Info - WebmasterWorld
• AdWords Library - WebmasterWorld
• AdWords Demos and Guides - Google
• AdWords Learning Center - Google

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

TrueLocal, the owner is a very well known forum personality from WebmasterWorld, bakedjake, has launched a Canadian version of TrueLocal at http://www.truelocal.ca/. As an FYI, Jake lives in Canada.

The article Brett Tabke linked to from the WebmasterWorld thread says;

The site offers a localized search engine in English and French that consumers can use to track down more than 1.3 million Canadian brick-and-mortar businesses, ranging from nearby dentists or contractors to car dealers or golf courses.

The website asks what you're searching for and where. It then displays a list of businesses matching the search term, along with contact information and driving directions.

To access the English version go here and for the French version go here. If you get stuck, use the links at the top to get back to your localized language of choice.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An excellent WebmasterWorld thread named Top 3 PPC: Where does AdWords Rank for You ranks the three top players, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing & Microsoft adCenter against each other. The ratings are broken out by (1) Traffic Volume, (2) Quality of Click, (3) Ease of Use, (4) Lowest Cost per Conversion, (5) Technical Support, (6) Has the Options for Your Needs, (7) Versatile and (8) Overall Rank. We have a nice amount of responses so far, but I would love to see more, currently, here is how they rank.

G = Google, Y = Yahoo and M = Microsoft. Each letter represents a vote for that slot. Ties are represented /.

(1) Traffic Volume:
#1 G G G G G G M G G
#2 Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
#3 M M M M M M G M M
(2) Quality of Click:
#1 M M M M M M M Y G
#2 G G G Y G G G G M
#3 Y Y M G Y Y Y M Y
(3) Ease of Use:
#1 M Y G G G G G G G
#2 Y G Y Y Y M Y/M Y M
#3 G M M M M Y X M Y
(4) Lowest Cost per Conversion:
#1 M M M M M M M G G
#2 G Y/G G Y Y G G Y M
#3 Y X Y G G Y Y M Y
(5) Technical Support:
#1 M Y G Y M Y M G Y
#2 G M/G Y M Y M Y Y M
#3 Y X M G G G G M G
(6) Has the Options for Your Needs:
#1 G Y/G G G G G G G G
#2 Y M Y Y M M M Y M
#3 M X M M Y Y Y M Y
(7) Versatile:
#1 G Y G G M G G G G
#2 Y G Y Y G M M Y M
#3 M M M M Y Y Y M Y
(8) Overall Rank:
#1 G M M G M G M G G
#2 M Y/G G Y Y M Y Y M
#3 Y X Y M G Y G M Y

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am surprised I missed this. JenSense reported on this Wordpress plugin that makes your AdSense ads more attractive, hence noticeable, hence clickable back on June 27, 2006. She explains that it is not clear if the plugin would be in accordance or not with the AdSense TOS, so it is best to ask Google prior to placing them on your site. Below is a static image of what the plugin does from the plugin page itself at supriyadisw.

Yes, those are really beautiful.

There is an older and now newer thread at DigitalPoint Forums on the topic. Again, I would show the ads to a representative at Google, to get written permission. If they don't give it to you, then, I don't know. It is clear that the images, IMO, are separated enough from the ads - but who knows.

Steven Bryant wrote that Google Sued for AdSense Fraud. In short, Theresa B. Bradley, owner of bravacorp.com has sued Google for being terminated from the program after allegedly spending a hundred hours placing the Google AdSense code on her site.

Hold on a sec....

(1) 100 Hours to place ads on a site? I can attest that it can take less than 3 minutes to place AdSense code on millions of pages of a dynamic site. But it looks like her 24 page (or so) site is pure HTML, so let's say it took 3 minutes per page, to add the code? 72 minutes of work? What about economies of scale? :)

(2) She admittedly clicked on her own ads and as Jen clearly points out, it is "against the AdSense terms & policies, which states "Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited, to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs." So she is in violation of the agreement she signed.

JenSense and eWeek have great coverage of this.

Both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums have long threads on the topic, even though the news was broke late last night. It is honestly a shame that this woman sued Google. She is destroying her name, in my opinion. Just look at all of the comments in the forums. They read all of the tone as;

Funniest damn thing I've seen in awhile.

Perhaps it is time for Google to file a counter-suit seeking damages for:
a) Damaging the good name of Google by implicating them in a frivolous suit
b) Breach of contract (the TOS)
c) Fraud (clicking ads herself)

Wow... honestly what a stupid woman. I can't wait for Google to own her in court.

It appears the 100 hours includes the time taken to review the ads, so she's suing google for the time she spent clicking her own ads :)

Some comments are worse. Everyone has Google's back on this and that is rare. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

After tons of speculation, Microsoft has finally come out to say that Microsoft adCenter Content Ads program is expected to be launched early Fall. As an FYI - I have asked to beta test it, so I hope to hear back soon on that and share the ads with you, like I have done with AdSense and YPN. Here is the official email sent out to the press and bloggers;

On behalf of everyone on the Microsoft adCenter team, I’m excited to announce that we will be starting our pilot of Microsoft adCenter Content Ads early this fall. Content Ads is Microsoft’s next product that allows advertisers to place content-targeted, text-based advertisements primarily on Microsoft-owned properties including MSN Money, Real Estate, and many others within the www.msn.com portal. Like our search advertising product, it will also utilize our demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools to help our advertisers reach the audience they want. Our Content Ads pilot will start as an invitation-only pilot, limited to selected current adCenter advertisers.

If you are interested in participating, please reply back and I will send you additional information. This is your opportunity to drive change and improvement in our Content Ads product, and we hope you’re as excited about it as we are.

Also, adCenter411, the Ad Center rep, posted in WebmasterWorld thread saying, "I can't comment a lot about this, except to say later this fall, adCenter will be running a pilot for our contextual-based advertising option. Stay tuned. :)" Also, JenSense has some more insight into this announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is at the beginning of people sharing their ICR, invalid click rates, reported by Google since they released "Invalid Clicks" in AdWords Reports.

One Google AdWords advertiser shares;

In my case ICR's have tended to fluctuate between 5.5% and 9.0%, for campaigns where content bids are ~1/5th search bids and still accounting for ~40% of total clicks.

An other advertiser shares;

Depending on the global region, I'm anywhere from 2.5% to 7.5%... the US is near the low end of the range, Asian countries at the high end.

What is your ICR? And more importantly, do you think it is accurate? Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am not going to give a review of the magazine, that had it's first release in Mid May, Philipp at Google Blogoscoped has his Search Marketing Standard (Review).

If you’re already an SEO expert, much of the advice won’t be new to you, but it’s a great overview for those starting out with SEO, or those experts still trying to expand their horizon.

The Search Marketing Standard second addition is also being discussed in the forums. Cre8asite Forums has positive things to say about the edition;

I recieved my copy several days ago. Although I have not finished reading it, I wanted to say how much I have enjoyed reading it. I love to get away from reading the computer screen and curl up with this magazine. I like holding something printed and reading it at my liesure.

I reviewed it in my blog and had to laugh. My "complaint" is also that its too thin. I love the chance to also curl up and read it. It's much lighter than my laptop, for starters. And way more colorful!

Many folks still not receive the second issue, but I suspect it will come soon.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yahoo!, please enable a method of requesting that you do not display the Yahoo! Directory title in the search results. I mean, I know I like my title, because it is cute, but still, I rather the title listed in the search results pull from my title tag, or at least have an option to define that.

We won't think that you are being a copy cat, I am sure we will praise you like we praised Google and MSN. Your brothers each enabled the NOODP tag, that allows a Webmaster to tell the engines, no matter what, please do not use the ODP title in the search results. MSN implemented the tag on May 22, 2006, they were praised for it and Google implemented it on July 13, 2006 and they were praised for it.

We will praise you for implementing a NOYDIR tag or something like that.

It is the difference between showing:

Versus this:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

For those of you that use Google Analytics, you should be aware that if someone steals your source code and leaves your "UA" code, the unique identifier for Google to know what site the traffic is from, that your traffic may be inflated.

The code you place on your site looks like:
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-######-#";
urchinTracker();
</script>

Now, the ######-# is replaced by a unique number that tells Google Analytics who you are. Sometimes when scrapers pull your content, they pull everything.

So just keep this in mind...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Two of my most favorite companies, Apple and Google are now a bit more intimate. Apple and Google announced that Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, has agreed to join Apple's Board of Directors.

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

“Apple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire,” said Eric Schmidt. “I'm really looking forward to working with Steve and Apple’s board to help with all of the amazing things Apple is doing.”

People in the forums are both joking around and discussing the move from a futuristic perspective.

Maybe we'll get iAdsense accounts that run out of their CPC value and can't be restored without sending it back to GoogleApple HQ for a disablement of ismartpricing.

Maybe they'll add Google to Sherlock now

so what if Google buys Apple? that would turn microsoft upside down I think.

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

This morning I wrote that Danny Sullivan To Leave Search Engine Watch :: Search Industry Shocked (someone dug the story), I promised to let the search community digest this information and then summarizing that buzz. Below you will find a collection of blog, news and forum links to all the coverage I found on Danny's news. I have pulled select quotes and summarized the rest.

Danny, the Grandfather of Search Industry, will undoubtly remain a huge part of our every day lives. I, as does the whole community, wish Danny all the best and look forward to the future of our industry with Danny being a huge part of that. It was and remains to be an honor to have worked with Danny on a daily basis. I have learned an incredible amount both on search, diplomacy, and friendship.

Continue reading "Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure"

Search engine optimization has become a legitimate industry, with companies spending thousands of dollars per year on consulting to effectively help climb search engine rankings. For the past few years, there have been rumblings in the community as to how SEO would deal with the increased use of personalized search, and for the most part, optimizers have maintained that adjusting to change is something that is already part of the game.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discusses the concept of a special type of optimization geared towards Social Search and Networks, dubbed "SMO." The poster relates to the SEO industry, saying:

I think we SEOers need to take concrete steps to incorporate Social Media as a important element of WoM and SEO.

From an agency point of view, I can say that we in the SEO department are working together with Media and Paid Search teams to try to establish best practices in this growing area. Join the discussion and add your thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In case you are wondering, another thread at SEW attempts to answer the question: "What is Social Search?"

Google has added a new feature to AdWords, My Client Center now allows you to configure email alerts. So if you want to be notified of when an ad delivery is stopped, or if your credit card was declined, or if a cmapaign is near ending, or if an account budget is almost done, or if your budget is 80% empty, you can get these alerts prompted to you via email. What about RSS notifications? Well, not yet.

The AdWords help center says;

MCC alerts feature makes it easy to stay on top of important issues that may affect your managed client (sub-MCC) accounts. Based on your preference settings, alerts will appear on your MCC dashboard about account-specific issues such as stopped ad delivery, credit card declines and the approach of campaign and budget end-dates.

If you go to User Preferences section and click on the Edit under the Alerts section you can opt in to these alerts. It looks like this:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Part of the recent Google Update that was really not a full update, by any standards, was that the Google Related command has been updated. Back in mid-July we reported that Related Search Command Changes at Google.com and it looks like more changes have occurred to it.

The related command is when you type related:www.domain.com into Google or click on the "Similar pages" link in the search results.

How do you test the new results? Use the IP 64.233.187.104 and give it a shot. They seem much more on topic then they are now at Google.com. There is currently a nice result set for related:www.seroundtable.com.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I wrote about the news that eBay Signs International Paid Search Deal With Google at the SEW Blog. Since then, WebmasterWorld started discussing this.

eBay, the company that launched a competing contextual ad product named AdContext. eBay, the company that banned Google Checkout from use on eBay auctions and eBay store fronts.

That eBay has formed a partnership with Google to show Google ads on eBay international. Plus a click-to-call deal that is discussed here.

One WebmasterWorld member describes this deal as "It seems like they are playing on both sides of the fence."

But all in all, this relationship should be interesting. Yea, search on anything at Google and get an eBay ad. Go to eBay and now find a Google contextual ad. Oh, and yes, Yahoo also has an ad deal with eBay for the main US site. Fences.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Most forums have a feature that allow you to automate your signature at the end of each of your posts. So instead of signing off each post with, "All the best, my name here" you can place that in your signature file and it will automatically post that signature after each post. Today, people use it to put your slogan, their company info and links to sites they represent.

I just saw a DigitalPoint Forums thread which discusses some forums allowing members to place Google AdSense block ads within their signature file.

Is this legal, or in accordance with Google's terms of service for the AdSense program. I would think so. Is this use of a signature file what one would consider proper? I don't think so.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Danny just posted about him leaving Search Engine Watch and SES by this December. The specific reasons was contractual and that Incisive and Danny couldn't come to terms on (what I believe to be) some sort of equity stake in the future of SEW and SES. There are just so many questions buzzing through my head. I know the industry has not yet had time to react, so I plan on doing a follow up to this post with the industry response but first let me try to predict.

(1) What will happen with Danny?
Well, as he said, his last day at SEW is November 30th. He will be doing the SES Chicago event, but that is it. Will Danny start a new site? Work for a company? Do consulting? Well, these are all options. We know Danny won't leave the industry, he has had a huge impact on creating this industry - and I can't see Danny just getting up and walking away from it. I would expect to see a new blog/site come about, where Danny continues to write on search topics. Maybe the blog/site will act as an anchor for his book, that he has been eager to write. I would also expect Danny to get tons of offers from both SEM companies and the search companies themselves. You can expect him to get a few offers to write for an other search industry site. But I think Danny will initially start his own thing, do consulting on the side, and start getting his book underway.

(2) What will happen with Search Engine Watch?
On one hand, Search Engine Watch (SEW) is the site on search, it is the authority, it was the first source and remains to be the ultimate source on search topics to this day. On the other hand, the reason SEW is all of that is because of one man, Danny. Danny invented, created, built up, and made SEW into a success. Is SEW dependent on Danny? I thing very much so, in terms of the day to day management. I know a little of what goes on behind the scenes, and I know that the site runs because of Danny. So it is hard to say how this will impact the site. The site should remain an authority, but you can expect those close to the industry, those at the forefront will have some inward resentment towards Incisive and whomever takes Danny's role. But that can and most likely will be done diplomatically, to reduce the level of any resentment.

(3) Who will take over SEW?
Well, the next man in line is Chris Sherman. But Chris and Danny have been working together for five plus years. I doubt Chris needs SEW to be successful. I honestly have not spoken to Chris about it. But I am sure that if he wanted to take over, he would be able to. But for some reason, I think he may not. Just a feeling. So who will? I don't know, but I bet lots of people will be jumping at the opportunity to fill Danny's shoes.

(4) How will this affect the industry?
I feel there will be resentment towards this whole event, but that will die down by itself. Danny will continue to contribute to the industry, so much won't be lost there - I hope. SEW may lose some of its authoritative power, that it once held. The industry will move on. The conferences, I suspect will continue to do well. The site will continue to get lots of traffic. But the industry, the community, will probably see less activity around the SEW brand and more around Danny and other names in the industry. A lot has to do with #3. More on this later today.

(5) What will happen with me?
Will I still work on the SEW blog? I have no idea. For now, yes. But I have no idea what will happen.

(6) My advice to Incisive?
If there is any way to keep Danny, do it. All in all, I believe the next year will be very rough. The site will suffer, the conferences will suffer, and the industry as a whole will suffer. Try, try, to do whatever you can, to keep Danny - if it is not too late.

If you have questions for Danny, there are instructions on how to communicate with him at http://daggle.com/060829-112950.html.

I did post a thread at SEW forums, but I don't expect many answers from Danny there. Use the methods above.

Friday we reported on a Back Link Update, and as suspected, it was not a major change that affected search results. Since then, WebmasterWorld has named the update, Pluto (kinda cute, don't you think?). Which reminds me, doesn't Ask.com have to update their Smart Answer for said (message # 3061576),

I agree this one isn't anything to write home about. Like Pluto, I think this would be a shrinking update; the SERPs aren't really changing. :)

Continues forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you go to Yahoo!, I bet you'll have a had time trying to use Yahoo!'s Blog Search feature today. Well, at least until it goes back online. Try doing a search at blog.news.search.yahoo.com, it is gone! Yes, it has also been removed from being embedded in Yahoo! News, and has been replaced by Yahoo! Images, for now. A search on google.com at Yahoo! News would typically show both a Yahoo! News listing and Yahoo! Blog Search listing for this site, now we only see a Yahoo! News listing.

Is it gone forever? Nope. At least that is what Greg Jarboe finds from a Yahoo! spokesman, Brian Nelson.

In an email sent a short while later, he added, “Maybe this goes without saying, (but) blog content remains an important part of our overall news and news search strategy. It’s worth mentioning again because I’ve read speculation in the blogosphere about what Y! might be thinking bigger picture when it comes to blog content.”

What is interesting is that the forums are pretty dead on this topic. I was not able to find a WebmasterWorld thread on this, but I did find a Search Engine Watch Forums thread with some limited discussion.

Why didn't Yahoo! post something about this? Why pull it without telling anyone? Heck, the blog community is almost in an uproar about this, as you can imagine. Take a look at Zawodny's recent links section and how he quotes, Steve Rubel;

To me this is a sure sign that Yahoo is gearing up to launch an integrated feed reader/search engine the way Ask.com/Bloglines did in June. This is the second piece of evidence in the puzzle.

Of course Jeremy can't say anything or he would have. Quoting someone else... Well, let's see.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

What if you are a US based SEM and manage PPC campaigns for a company that is targeting UK consumers? How do you view the ads, as if you were in the UK, so that you can see what needs to be tweaked? That is the question of a Search Engine Watch Forums thread.

What is suggested in the thread is to add this extra variable to the end of the URL (&gl=uk). What that does is tell Google that you want to see UK results. For a complete list of country names, visit here.

Sometimes then you can get stuck with the localized results. I talked about how to get back to your default setting here.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Honestly, all this is, is a combination of products they have been testing for a while. The press release, Google Launches Hosted Communications Services with the Gmail for your domain product not just applied to gmail, but also Talk, Calendar, and Page Creator.

Google Apps for Your Domain, an expansion of the Gmail for Your Domain service that launched in February 2006, currently includes Gmail web email, the Google Talk instant messaging and voice calling service, collaborative calendaring through Google Calendar, and web page design, publishing and hosting via Google Page Creator. Domain administrators use a simple web-based control panel to manage their user account list, set up aliases and distribution lists, and enable the services they want for their domain. End users with accounts that have been set up by their administrator simply browse to customized login pages on any web-connected computer. The service scales easily to accommodate growing user bases and storage needs while drastically reducing maintenance costs.

Yea, it is cool to host these apps on your own domain, that is for sure - and it is free, for now. But there are signs that Google will be offering paid, permium services tied to this program.

Is there a premium version of this service?
Not at this time. However, if your organization has advanced needs not met by this free service, let us know and we'll get in touch when a premium service is available for your organization.

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

Friday, we reported that Microsoft released an MSN Search update. It caused some obvious and surprisingly weird bugs at MSN.

It turns out that MSN has rolled back that update Friday evening. MSNdude says;

We rolled back the recent update, so we're back to the status quo ante. All of your complaints may be accurate :-) but they shouldn't be any worse than they were a few days ago.

This is not the first time MSN has done a roll back.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google is unquestionably the number one search engine today. The numbers don't lie. But is there a trend developing of people giving up their Google habit? According to the second chart in the example above, the G line does seem to be slightly dropping during August per projections, with the others rising. So, what other engines are people using to quell the urge to google? (Apologies to G for using "it" as a verb)

There is an lengthy thread going on at WebMasterWorld Forums asking "Does anyone here still use Google to actually 'search'?" The premise of the original poster is that

for a few months now I've been Google-free. The time I waste desperately hacking at the Advanced Search options on Google to try and get some sort of answer to my query is just too much and I'd rather wait the extra milliseconds for Yahoo/MSN pages to load.

Join the thread at WebMasterWorld Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that back links are being updates at some of Google's data centers. The data centers documented with the updated back links are at 64.233.187.104 and 64.233.187.99.

What does this mean for SEOs and your rankings? Um, not much, in my opinion.

Just keep watching your traffic and see what resolves.

Also, this may be a sign of a PageRank update happening shortly. But again, that Toolbar PageRank doesn't show much.

Oh, there are also MSN Search Update and Yahoo! Search Update taking place now. Funny that it is all happening at once.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are some early reports of a Yahoo! Search update or algorithmic change. A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread have reports of shifts taking place. Of course, you see that those posting, currently at least, are unhappy with the result sets.

To me the results seem fairly static from where they were last week. But that is only for the few keyword phrases I looked at.

There are no "weather reports" posted at the Yahoo! Search Blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a very interesting questions. Does Google, or any other search engine, associate link popularity to a portion of a page? For example, if I link to a page and anchor down to a specific portion of that page, would Google see that portion to be more important than the other portions?

Anchor Link, I use them all the time to link to specific posts, is defined here.

My thoughts are that Google and other engines do not point specific popularity to a specific portion of a page. It would be interesting if they did and how that would work exactly.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, but the topic is not exactly about that - more focused towards penalties on specific portions of pages.

At 5:20 AM (EST) yesterday morning a WebmasterWorld thread reported that valid credit cards were being rejected and denied by Google. Meaning those advertisers who had depleted budgets were unable to refund their accounts, and get their ads back online. Five hours later, AdWordsAdvisor posted that the issue has been resolved.

Early word has it that the issue with the processor has now been resolved, and re-entering your credit card at this point should get you running again.

Please note that a delay between the time one re-enters the card and the time the ads begin running again is normal - and will be the case here as well. So once you've re-entered your card, if you don't see your ads running immediately, there is no need to enter the card again. I'd say give it an hour - though it'll probably be quicker than that.

Through this fairly short period, AdWordsAdvisor was there providing insight into the issue.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The MSN Search bug we reported yesterday where MSN Listing Same Top Five Sites on 1st & 2nd Page Search Results seems to have been caused by an MSN update that took place the night before.

MSNdude confirmed last night that the update did indeed occur;

You guys are correct; there was an update last night. Somehow I had thought this would happen later. Apologies for giving you wrong information earlier.

In that thread, some reported similar issues to what I reported yesterday morning via DigitalPoint.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In the past we have heard about AdWords Account Size Limitation, where you are limited in the number of keywords your campaign can hold. We have even heard of remedies to this problem. But these, I believe, were all after the fact - after you have max'ed out your keyword list.

A Search Engine Watch Forums shows that one advertiser received an automated (looks automated) warning from Google that he soon will reach that limit. The alert said...

The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size. We recommend that you reduce the number of keywords within your account. This will ensure that your account includes the most targeted and relevant keywords possible. Use our Find and Edit Keywords Tool to identify poor performing keywords within your account (such as keywords with few or zero impressions) and delete them.

I wonder if this is getting more wide scale.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is something weird I found at DigitalPoint Forums, where MSN Search is listing the same top five results (in terms of sites) on page one of the search results, when compared to page two.

Search on background check and notice that the first five listings are:
(1) www.background-check.info
(2) www.backgroundcheckgateway.com
(3) www.instantpeoplecheck.com
(4) www.easybackgrounds.com
(5) www.instant-background-check.com

Now click over to page two and notice the first five listings are:
(1) www.background-check.info
(2) www.backgroundcheckgateway.com
(3) www.instantpeoplecheck.com
(4) www.easybackgrounds.com
(5) www.instant-background-check.com

Never seen that before...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week, I reported over at SEW blog that Googlers Only Have Sold GOOG Stock - Cause Of Drop In Stock Price? I wrote;

"Google's top executives have offloaded about $7.4 billion of stock, equal to about a third of the company's starting market value when it sold shares at $85 each in the August 2004 IPO," says Bloomberg columnist, Mark Gilbert. Not only that, he reports "not a single Google insider has bought a single share of the company in the 18 months since the IPO lock-ups expired." Can you believe that!

Danny adds to my coverage saying he is not surprised "that over the past 18 months that neither founders Larry Page or Sergey Brin have been selling. That's because they already said in 2004 that they'd spend the next 18 months diversifying their portfolios through planned sales."

The forums began talking about it recently and they are mostly with Danny on this. Heck, if it was them, they would keep selling...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Conduct a search on five seo excuses and the top five five results in Google are listed excuses. Pretty cute SEO trick by this guy. I assume all it takes is a bit of linkage pointing for that anchor text to make this happen, but kudos for thinking the concept up.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are many ways to seek the right SEO company for you.

1) You can search on the keyword phrase you want to rank well for, and find the top ranked sites, then dig deep to find out who they hired (if they hired anyone) to make that happen.
2) You can go to SEO Consultants and search by a lot of criteria.
3) You can go shopping at an SES or WMW conference during exhibitor hours.
4) You can go to the forums and post a RFP (request for proposal)
5) You can go to a directory listing of SEO companies or search on "seo"
6) Go to a local directory like Craigslist

Members at Cre8asite Forums are discussing this now.

Some related topics we covered in the past on this subject:
- Outsourcing Search Engine Marketing & Optimization? Questions To Ask
- Hiring an SEM: Is it Hard?
- Stuck with a Bad SEO Company; Here are Some Tips

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I, like some others, have received an email from Yahoo! Search Marketing stating that my "Yahoo! Search Marketing account will soon be completely upgraded and redesigned, providing you with a number of advanced features that will help you better connect to Yahoo!'s audience." Yahoo! was not suppose to release Panama (code name for the new YSM product) until the fourth quarter. But the second week of August rumors spread that Yahoo! would release this product early to some advertisers. Based on this email, it appears that we are seeing signs of this early release.

Dear Barry,

As we informed you in May 2006, your Yahoo! Search Marketing account will soon be completely upgraded and redesigned, providing you with a number of advanced features that will help you better connect to Yahoo!'s audience.

To help provide a seamless upgrade for our advertisers, we plan on frequently communicating with you via phone calls, emails and U.S. mail. Thus, we are asking all advertisers to confirm the contact information currently on file with us, including physical address, email address and phone number.

As of August 2006, this is the contact information we have on file for your account:

Street Address: 2 Executive Blvd. Suite 305
City: Suffern
State: NY
Zip code: 10901
Phone number: ###-###-####

Please take a moment now to check the account contact information above. If any of the data above is incorrect, please update it by following these easy steps:
Log in to your account.
Click the Edit Profile link.
Check and update your contact info.
Another way to update your information is by logging into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account as you normally do, then click the "Edit Profile" link under the Account tab.

We greatly appreciate your attention to this matter, and look forward to providing you with all of the important information you'll need to know as your account is upgraded. If you have any questions, please contact us at (866) YAHOO-98.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Tuesday we reported that MSN Now Goes Beyond 250 Results from their previous state of only showing 250 results per search query. But I just read that thread and noticed an update, stating that although the web search front end gives over 1,000 results, the API only gives 250 still.

In my opinion, it is more useful to display the 1,000 results within the API, as opposed to in the web results that are displayed to the end user. Most people do not like to click beyond the 3rd page, the whole reasoning behind MSN only showing the first 250 results in the first place. So they opened it up to show more on the front end but not on the API....

I'll assume that this is a sign that the API is soon to follow. And let me note that I did not verify that the API is limiting you to 250 results, I am basing this on that forum post.

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that MSN UK Search is possibly testing a new layout. Here is a screen shot of the before and after. Let me note that I personally do not see this new layout, the image was taken from a screen capture in the forum thread.

New Layout:

Current Layout:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Earlier this month AOL Messes Up by Releasing Sensitive Search Data. Well, the other day they acted on that mistake by forcing the CTO to resign and firing the researcher who released the data, as well as his manager. AOL wasn't kidding when they said they will be "giving everything away for free."

Maureen Govern, who became technology chief last September, has left the company and her position has been temporarily taken by John McKinley, her predecessor. The researcher who released the data – that was aimed at academics researching search patterns but was widely copied across the web – and the researcher's supervisor have also been fired, according to people familiar with the matter.

Do you feel this move by AOL's top management to release a top manager and the two individuals closest to the slip up was good enough? Do you think those who decided to make AOL a free portal are more to blame?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Often SEOs notice that a search engine may test various result sets in the search results between a search update and an other search update. It appears from one of MSNdude's most recent postings that MSN does not do that.

MSNdude in response to someone saying that at one point his site appeared, then disappeared and then reappeared soon late, said;

Despite what some might say, we don't really randomize the results with each update. :-)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there is a way to avoid showing your ads on Google Maps. Now before beginning there are two types of ads displayed on Google Maps. There are the ads within the maps (Google Local ads) and the ads on the left hand side based on keyword search (normal sponsored search ads). I believe this member wants to know how to exclude his ads from showing on the sponsored search part, being that you have to manually create an ad for the Google local ads.

Honestly, I really do not know how you can turn off those ads. I don't think there is a way. But I do see that some advertisers feel those types of leads are produce "quite a significant amount of "junk"" that creates "lots of noise."

Just an other shout out to Google to help advertiser have more control over their campaigns.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses, what they suggest to be, issues unique to UK based sites, within the UK only Google search results. One such example;

A site:domainname search lists the pages in the site ok when performed in the default search, but lists all pages APART from the homepage when done with the 'pages from the UK' option. Also, a search for the domain name shows the homepage in the #1 slot in a default search, but a search for the domain name using the 'pages from the UK' option shows the same list, but no homepage anywhere.

The site is hosted in the UK on a shared IP, physically located in the UK. I have located other .coms on the same IP and their homepages show up fine when the domain name is searched for using the 'pages from the UK' option.

Can this be related to last week's Google update (not specific to the UK only)? I think it may.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night I posted at the SEW blog that Brazil To Close Google Brazil's Offices Over Orkut Issues? You see, Google and Brazil don't have such a great recent history. Orkut, Google's social networking platform, has received headlines that include;

- Aug. 16, 2006 :: Orkut Causing Trouble In Brazil Again
- Jul. 21, 2005 :: Drug Pushers Using Orkut Arrested In Brazil
- May. 25, 2006 :: Google Works With Brazil To Shut Down Orkut Communities
- May. 18, 2006 :: Google Faces Criminal Charges For Child Porn & Racial Material
- May. 3, 2006 :: Google & Brazil Fight Over Orkut User Data Rights
- Mar. 10, 2006 :: Brazil Asks Google To Help Orkut To Stop Organizing Organized Crime
- Mar. 9, 2006 :: Al-Qaeda Likes Orkut

Ouch! Well, I think Google has pushed Brazil far enough. The news is now everywhere; Reuters reports that Brazilian prosecutors seek lawsuit against Google.

Brazilian prosecutors asked a federal judge on Tuesday for permission to file a civil lawsuit against Google Inc., alleging it was withholding user information required for a separate criminal investigation.

The prosecutors want Google to pay a $61 million fine and asked that if it refuses to comply with its information request, its Brazilian unit be dissolved.

Should be interesting...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search engines use automated crawlers, also known as robots or spiders, to scour the Internet's content and add it to their indices. Once pages of a website are in an index that is used to provide search results, sites are revisited on a regular basis to determine if any new content has been added, or if there has been significant updates to currently indexed content. Since there is so much information available on the Internet, sites generally get re-crawled based on a variety of factors, including the frequency of content updates or even the command in a page's code that asks the spider to return every "X" days. However, except on occasion, spiders will not re-crawl the entire website.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums starts with a member asking "How do they do that?" He describes that he on occasion examines his log files to find varying degrees of robot activity, and asks how they determine how deep to dig. An initial answer by Moderator softplus offers some good ideas, and finishes with the thought that:

In the end, the main element I have seen for crawl frequency is page "value"; a page with good value is crawled more frequently than a page with little value... Even a static high-value page is crawled frequently, it doesn't make that much sense to me, but there must be reasoning behind it. Perhaps the frequency would be even higher if the content were to change frequently?

Business etiquette is something that is taken for granted in many industries, and tends to be more important based on various geographic areas. Many respected link builders stress that finding back links to a website is more of a process of entering into a relationship than just bartering for links. What about the links that you show your site visitors? If they are AdSense links should you ensure to follow a specific etiquette when placing the links in your layout?

A recent manifesto of sorts was introduced to the WebMasterWorld Forums community by member Vince. He wrote a nicely worded piece titled: A Modern Etiquette for AdSense - Or: keeping respectable in the race for money. Some of his comments are very insightful, such as:

Common usage has it that the server upon which your files are held is the web host, and the person providing the files to the public the web master. I suggest that is the wrong way around, as the person providing the files is hosting the visit of guests into his domain, whilst the server delivering the files is perhaps like a master butler overseeing the smooth operation of the visit.

Google’s heat map strongly suggests that immediately below your title should be placed your major AdSense block. Good etiquette undoubtedly dictates that the premise for the page must precede any other motive such as advertising. Placing a large rectangle at the bottom of the page, alongside links to other pages or other information on your website, provides the visitor with nothing but the utmost politeness as you are offering not just more of your pages but also the pick of external advertisers.

Some good comments follow. One thing to wonder is if a more concerted effort on etiquette could translate into a higher page quality score if used as a landing page? Also, perhaps this could backfire a-la "the nice guy never wins," since the ads might get less traffic.

Join the discussion at WebMasterWorld Forums.

Bill Slawski has an excellent post at Cre8asite Forums he named It's all about the signals, What the Search Engines Look For. You can tell by this thread that he was really inspired by the SES San Jose event just a couple weeks ago. What is Bill telling us?

I do think that search engines still place a lot of reliance on links, but am convinced that understanding user queries - like seen in our thread on the AOL data, is playing a larger and more important role in determining relevance. There have been a number of mentions in recent white papers and patents which mention search engines collecting information from ISPs about user behavior.

Bill explains what he believes is the tracking and understanding the search engines grasp from a users click pattern and "traffic flow." It "shows how some sites are more popular than others and are attracting traffic in response to searches and other methods of getting people to a site."

In discussion forum class, Bill ends his post prompting more discussion. He asks,

What signals do you think are becoming more important, and how are you taking advantage of being within an information stream?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

eBay launched eBay AdContext a while back and ShoeMoney is currently running those ads on his blog. When I went to his site yesterday, I notice that one of the ads (aka listings) had a racy image of a woman in a bikini (or at leas that is what the ad implied). You can see a screen capture of the ad here.

The ad was contextually relevant, in terms of the service selling web site submission services on a site mostly SEO related. But the image the eBay seller uploaded with his listing, was not contextually related to the ad, nor the site audience.

Should eBay allow merchants to control those images? I think they have no choice in that matter.

Should eBay display those images in the contextual ads? I think they are taking a huge risk by doing so.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if I have a page on strawberries, how do I get ads for "cream"? People tend to like eating strawberries with cream and the same deal with any product/service that is complimentary to an other.

The best advice I see in the thread is given in detail by ronburk.

He basically says that you should create a new landing page for the cream ad, target cream type of keywords, and link to that landing page via the strawberry page. Why does this work? He lists several reasons:

a) the user who is interested has to perform an extra click
b) you quite likely get payed a better CPC due to the prequalification that extra click represents and the effect it has on SmartPricing
c) you get an entire page (instead of little or no text on your strawberries page) to provide useful info that matches qualified visitors with the product(s) being advertiserd there
d) you get another chance to keep visitors on-site who were thinking about cream, but weren't really going to click on any ad for cream
e) you get more detailed stats about how many customers are interested in cream, but not really enough to click on and ad
f) you get 100% control over the "ad" that appears on page X (no Google T&C applies here!) without ever having to worry about MFAs or PSAs appearing there and, well, if you didn't get it by now, it ain't ever gonna happen :-).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Until some time recently a search at MSN only went up to 250 results displayed. For example, if you searched on "web" you would get up to 250 listed results, and nothing beyond that. Today, if you search on a phrase that yields more than 1,000 results you can go as far as the first 1031 results.

I can't find it, but I am pretty sure that the explanation used in the past by MSN for only showing 250 result was that no one goes beyond 250. I guess no one goes beyond 1031?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is this fun and simple flight simulator running on Google Maps. The game is named Goggles Flight Sim v0.94. It uses Google Maps API and a cute little animated plane. You can fly up, down, left and right to control the plane's direction. In addition, you can shoot little pellets into the air. Finally, if you keep going down, you will crash and explode, so be careful.

Cute game.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The Search Engine Optimization industry has long been ignored by the press, who often focus on more "established" forms of marketing. A few years ago, it was very difficult to find an article about SEO in any mainstream or even fringe media outlet. How things change. Recently, Danny Sullivan, among others, was covered in an article about SEO in USA Today (recap). Prior to that, there was an article about the demand for search marketing professionals in WSJ's Career Journal. And then there was the Sunday Times...

A thread at Search Engine Watch introduces the article from this weekend's Sunday Times, which as Rand points out is woefully full of errors. Some examples of non-factual statements made by the author:

There are two types of search engines — directories and web crawlers. Directories, such as Yahoo, have staff paid to consider every new website submitted before slotting them into categories or subsections.
Web crawlers such as Google or Ask.com work by sending out software programs — called bots — that trawl the web for information relevant to a user’s key word search.

Blogs are very “search-engine friendly” because they are rich in key words, and contain a large amount of text.

There are plenty more questionable statements in the article. It is a shame that the Times did not run this by an actual SEO expert for editing...I know there's at least a couple over there!

Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google AdSense provides publishers of content the ability to host ads from the Google Contextual network fed by AdWords. Many people already know that this has caused a great influx of MFA's, or made-for-AdSense sites. Some people have thought in the past that it may be possible to generate income by simply clicking on your own ads. Of course, Google has a way to prevent this from happening, and it is tied to your IP address(es). However, there are still some people who occasionally accidentally click on an ad.

A recent thread at Digital Point Forums offers some advice as to how to avoid clicking on your own ads, thereby possibly getting kicked out of the AdSense publisher program for click fraud.

Use a few php lines to determine visitors IP address, if it's your own then set AdSense to show ads for another account (such as one of your friends' or a random id number). This way even if you click on the ad unit while performing webmastering duties, your account will not register this click.

Some good discussion follows, including some sample codes to use to help avoid this rare accidental problem. Of course, the number one response was simply "just don't click on your ads." However, as one participant points out, some laptops automatically click on a link when the cursor is waived over it (remind me to never get that product).

Join the discussion and ad your thoughts at Digital Point Forums.

Earlier this month, Google announced that they will be working with MTV to place "Viacom video clips (MTV and other clips) on web site owner pages." Well, I got my hands on more exclusive details on that program. Google has hand selected 150 AdSense publishers to test out the pilot. The image on the right is a static image of a portion of a video ad from MTV & Google. You can clearly see the top link goes to http://vma.mtv.com/ and the bottom link goes to the All Eyes On: Christina 1 video posted by vma.mtv.com at Google Video. You can see it live at http://www.nextpimp.com/nextel_ringtones_Rap.html.

Here is a snippet of the document they sent some of these publishers.

Google's Streaming Video Content + Ads enables website publishers to display streaming video ads and video content from MTV Networks on their own sites. Partners will receive the video and streaming video ads as a JavaScript object that will embed a Flash player on their site. Google manages all the hosting and streaming of video. This document will help you implement the JavaScript code required to request and display Google's Streaming Video Content + Ads.

So I guess these ads will require 3rd party downloads of Macromedia Flash?

The code that generates the video ads looks like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://video.google.com/videoembed.js?pubid=####################&feed=musicchannel.xml"> </script>

What can you see in these ads?

For the initial test, we will be using channels of video content provided by MTV Networks, such as from their Comedy Central, MTV, MTV2, The N, and Nickelodeon channels. The video content is mostly short-form clips of up to a few minutes in length.

The reporting will be available for these publishers in the "referrals" section of their AdSense accounts.

Full FAQ posted below.

Continue reading "Google & MTV Networks Streaming Content Pilot"

The Google AdWords system charges advertisers every time someone clicks on one of the sponsored listings within google or Google network search results. One of the factors that is used in determining ad position is what is known as "click-through-rate" or CTR. Theoretically, if you have a higher CTR (more people click on your ad per impression), you will be able to bid less in order to appear in a high position. Conversely, a lower CTR requires an advertiser to bid more in order to keep a high position. This is not the only factor involved in ranking sponsored listings - bid amount and quality of the landing page also are very important.

Last month, there was an interesting question at the Search Engine Watch forums about the CTR and how it may be adversely affected if your ad is seen on more than one results page and not clicked on. The question was:

I've noticed that when you dig deep into the often unchartered territory of pages 2 onwards of Google search results, eventually you start seeing adverts from the same advertisers as on earlier pages...So, when this occurs are you registering two impressions (or more) from that one set of search results?

This seemed like a plausible concern, since in some cases the CTR might be the only factor that differentiates one advertiser from another. Fortunately, Google's official "AdWordsRep" came in and clarified everyone's questions. The bottom line, it turns out, is that the additional impressions do count. However, the other advertisers are also subject to the same impressions; therefore the issue should be mute.

What do you think? Read the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google pays you a dollar for each Firefox download you create from your AdSense account, it is called AdSense FireFox referrals. But Google doesn't like it when you tell people to click on your AdSense ads or if you tell people to take a desired action.

That is the topic of a recent WebmasterWorld thread.

The thread creator asks, can he place on his site, "This site is best viewed in FireFox" and then directly under that, have a Firefox referral button?

A friendly member replies that the AdSenseAdvisor replied to this question back in January stating;

To clarify, you cannot use language like, "click here" or "click on this button to download Firefox", or display a giant arrow drawing undue attention to your referral button. However, in the content of your site you could provide an endorsement for the product you are choosing to refer. For example, you might say, "I recommend the Firefox browser."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are some discussions in WebmasterWorld and some more recent discussion in DigitalPoint Forums about an MSN update taking place still. Many Webmasters are noting changes to their rankings, most are saying they are seeing a drop in their rankings. What can be the cause?

MSN has been very transparent with SEOs since their launch. MSNdude explains on Friday afternoon;

No one is talking about a "total ban" here -- just some recent changes that tend to demote (but not remove) "spammy-looking" pages. If your site has disappeared completely, it's not because of any recent update of ours. There is a blacklist, of course, but that process hasn't changed lately. If you think your site has been blacklisted, send e-mail to webspam@microsoft.com. Be sure to do a "url:" query first though -- just to make sure your page really is gone.

So, if you are not found at all in the index, after conducting an URL query, then email Microsoft. If you are found, but you don't rank as well as you did in the past, then make your pages look, less "spammy."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Brett Tabke posted a story at WebmasterWorld named Google's Share of US Internet Search Market Drops In July.

"We think (the) loss in domestic market share could signal a topping point" for Google, he wrote. "We do not expect Google's aggressive market share gains to continue in perpetuity."

According to comScore, 43.7% of all search queries conducted in the U.S. in July used a Google search engine, down from the 44.7% attributed to Google the month before.

Meanwhile, Google's loss was its competitors' gain.

Brett backs Google explaining that "a 1% difference is well within a margin of error." Moderator, skibum, also takes a gab at ComScore's metrics, "how reliable is Comscore data anyway?"

However, moderator, receptional says;

I think their indication will be proved right. I think other indicators will start to reinforce this. The quality of the competition's products - especially search - are developing apace and I think Googke is trying to diversify in so many different ways at once that they might start to lose the hearts and minds battle.

So what do you think?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yup, one of my favorite forums has turned four years old. Cre8asite Forums is four years old, helping Webmasters make their Web sites better through sharing experiences and ideas.

We covered Cre8asite's third and second birthdays in the past. So it is only right we celebrate and mention Cre8asite's fourth birthday.

Wish Cre8asite a happy birthday at the Cre8asiteforums is 4 years old thread.

Last Friday, I posted a fun topic at the SEW blog asking, Washington Post Selling Text Links? I followed up that post with a Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Do Washington Post Blogroll Links Pass Link Pop?

At first glance at the sponsored blogroll service provided by the Washington Post, you would believe that the links can and would be counted. Here is what they look like:

<p style="padding:0px; margin:0px 0px 2px 0px"><a href="http://www.VivaLasVegasBlog.com" target="_blank" onclick="sa_onclick( 'http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/tracking/textlink/blogroll/' );" style="color:#0C4790; font-size:11px">Las Vegas Travel</a></p>

Brian White comes in from Google and responds;

These links will not count for PageRank value. For instance, gadgets-weblog.com is not receiving PageRank from washingtonpost.com. Neither will the links count from washingtonpost.com to finance-weblog.com, for that matter.

Matt Cutts then backs up his team member with;

Yup, we certainly noticed these a while ago. dyn4mik3, it may look like a clean link, but the fact is that the onclick behavior invokes a new page and different behavior from a typical hyperlink, and that's visible to anyone viewing/analyzing the source code.

Hmmm. So any "onclick behavior" that invokes a new page, would not pass any PageRank? Has that always been the case? Of course, now Matt and Brian are being questioned in the thread. Not that they don't believe Google isn't counting the Washington Post links, but because they really want to know if these onclick JavaScripts would prevent PageRank passthrough or not.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

So, two days ago, Google announced Google is providing a free WiFi network under "GoogleWifi" (802.11b/g) in Mountain View, CA (see SEW Blog). But does it work well? What are the concerns of using it? Where else is it wanted? That is what we learn from the forums. I have tracked the discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

incrediBILL at WebmasterWorld comments on how Google can/will use this data, the traffic and usage data, to control the world (exaggerating here).

This free WiFi nonsense is a very dangerous precedent IMO as taking revenue away from ISPs will result in the end of 'net neutrality as the service providers seek ways to replace all the lost income.

But does it even work? dnielsen writes;

I'm sitting here in the middle of Mtn View, looking at my wireless network options. GoogleWiFi is one of them, but it shows only 2 out of 5 bars. Perhaps this GoolgeWiFi is still in Beta!

But dnielsen was able to post at WebmasterWorld his experience using GoogleWifi on the Google Wifi network.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

There are two threads at WebmasterWorld forums talking about a Google shift. The first is named 17 Aug - restored pre-27 June positions and the second is named 17 Aug - Supplemental again.

It appears that everyone agrees that the Google results have shifted a bunch the night of August 16th. It also appears that although it may appear that the supplemental of old are back, they aren't. Senior WebmasterWorld member, g1smd, says;

I see many recently created new Supplemental Results representing content from just a few months ago. These are where the content has been edited very recently (and searches for the new content point to a non-Supplemntal Result), or where on-site duplicate content existed but the alternative (non Supplemental) URLs have now been filtered out (in one case the filtering was through robots directives to get certain URL formats delisted).

This confirms what we reported on last week that we should Expect "Fresher Supplemental Results" At Google.com.

Some people are happy with the results and some are not. Of course, the ones that are happy are less vocal than the ones that are unhappy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld threads "17 Aug - restored pre-27 June positions" & "17 Aug - Supplemental again". Also forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Two days ago we reported on What Would Cause "No Such Link" to Display on adCenter Click? The answer has now been provided at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread by the adCenter rep.

As I suspected, "there was no ad associated to the keyword because there was no keyword destination URL for param1."

So it is good that MSN doesn't send the click to a blank page. I suspect the advertiser isn't charged, but I have not heard from MSN on if that is true or not.

What is disturbing is that there is no error checking in place (or it is not incredibly visible) to prevent an advertiser from leaving the destination URL blank.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

August 10th, I reported at the SEW blog that Google replaced Froogle with Google Video as the links on the homepage and top of the Google search box on the search results pages and also that they added an expandable more link. When you click on the "more >>" link, a DHTML drop down pops up with other Google services.

People in the forums talked some on Froogle being phased out for the Video link. But I have not seen any threads on the "more" link itself. Of course, it is possible that I missed the chatter, since I was at SES San Jose.

Does replacing Froogle with Video make a huge difference to SEOs? You can see from a traffic perspective that Google Video surged based on Bill Tancer's data. You will also see from that data that Froogle dropped from #5 to #7.

But think about it. Which vertical engine gets more play in the main organic search results? Heck, I even did a search on expandable more link and it returned an Froogle result for a "17 Link Stretch Bracelet ||17 Hoops for Charms Or Beads." It is clear to me that you see way more Froogle vertical creep instances than you do with Google Video.

Still, how much do you think this affects an SEO? Did you see your sales drop by referring source of Froogle?

The more link? Does that work for you?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread points out an issue at MSN Search, where subdomains that are excessively linking between each other, tend to rank well in MSN Search. Well, MSN is aware of it, according to MSNdude;

It bothers us too, and it's on our list.

Wonder what else is on their list. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an exhausting long thread at WebmasterWorld that I have been tracking since it started. The thread discusses that some Google AdSense ads, specifically the new video ads, may be prompting 3rd party software, like Windows Media player or Apple QuickTime, to install on your computer.

The other night, AdSenseAdvisor confirmed that this was indeed happening;

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We encountered some technical issues that caused some visitors using IE to see download prompts for third-party add-ons or plug-ins. Our engineers resolved the issue right away, so ad serving is now back to normal.
Don't worry -- all clicks and impressions have been recorded as usual. We're sorry for any inconvenience, and grateful for your patience during this time.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is kind of funny. Publishers that run Google AdSense on their sites can determine if there is some sort of public holiday taking place by watching their earnings and clicks trends for the day. One such publisher posted a thread at WebmasterWorld asking;

Was 15th August 2006 a public holiday? Because, my impressions was down by at least 25%.

It turns out that was a National Holiday in Italy, Spain, Germany, Korea, Poland, Austria, Lithuania, France, Belgium and some other countries.

Go Figure!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I wrote about this news yesterday at the SEW Blog. But why is it important for SEOs to know about this specific API? Well, Yahoo! is doing a ton of marketing for Yahoo! Answers. That product has grown very quickly. The content is very rich. The content is formed in a question and answer format. The content is perfect for those long tail queries.

If you use the API properly, you too can pull that content, repurpose it around your niches. You can:

(1) Build more content for you niche
(2) Provide more information for your users
(3) Help your users more
(4) Rank for more keywords
(5) Give users more of a reason to stay on your site
(6) Give site owners more of a reason to link to you

APIs have given many SEOs the edge to ranking well for their desired keyword terms. If used properly and with some creativity, you can do wonders with APIs, specifically this one.

The API is available at http://developer.yahoo.com/answers/

Good luck!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Since WebmasterWorld does not have polls, they restort to one word answer threads for questions asked in this thread. The thread asks for a yes or no reply to:

Are you as happy with Google Adwords as you were 2 months ago?

Guess what? Currently there is a tie, 7 people say yes they are as happy with AdWords as they were two months ago and 7 people say no, they are not as happy.

Well, if I remove AdWordsAdvisor's reply, then it is 6 Yes, and 7 No.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Via a Search Engine Watch Forum thread, Matt Cutts has a MySpace account. Well, maybe it is him or someone posing as him, who created http://myspace.com/mattcutts.

On this MattSpace, you can see some of his latest SEO videos, his profile, a temporary MySpace blog and some other links. Currently, it shows Matt as being online. Being that it is 4 in the morning in California, there is a small chance that he is actually the creator of this space. Well, maybe not, because I know Matt does work crazy late hours some times.

I am sure Matt will confirm or deny this space.

But would it surprise you if Matt or others at Google created a MySpace account? MySpace does have the ability to drive traffic, on some level, to a site. Which does affect site popularity and possibly site rankings. So maybe he is testing the waters? Or maybe Matt is really 99 years old.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread claims a Google AdWords representative sent him an email warning him not to use the add to Google Reader RSS button on his site. Why did Google tell this person to not have the button on his site? Well, because the Google Reader button has the Google logo within it, and you need Google's permission to use Google's trademarks prior to posting them.

Here are the exact words of the email, I believe;

It has come to our attention that your website is using Google's trademarks without our permission. We allow use of our logo only if we have granted express written permission to do so. Please remove the Google logo from your website until such time as you obtain permission and approval for its use.

Um, check out the Google Reader Blog, do you see the button they use on the right side?

What about Google's Help People Subscribe to Your Content page which has the button there for this specific use.

Obviously, this is a gross example of Google's representatives not being educated in Google's other properties.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It appears that the Google Checkout icon feature was flipped on for all ads earlier today. The first report of the bug was issued at WebmasterWorld at 7:55 AM (EST), and then more reports starting trickling in. Now the bug seems to be patched, but it took about an hour and thirty minutes to fix it.

SearchViews captured a screen shot of their reprise media sponsored listings sporting a little blue shopping cart icon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ever wonder if you are stepping over that gray line of spam with the search engines? Well, if you feel you are doing anything excessive, then don't, according to MSNdude at WebmasterWorld. In a post MSNdude made yesterday, he said;

Instead of "sometimes less is more" perhaps it would be clearer to say "remember that spam is often about excess." If you are doing something to excess -- something that you're hoping will impress the search engine, even though you know it'll annoy customers -- then you should reconsider. That's all I'm saying here.

Got to love that, don't you?

Also, he notes that "80%" of the notes he received about problems with MSN Search recently have nothing to do with the MSN update that took place a couple of weeks or so ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Remember back when we reported that The Exchange Rate Google Uses for International AdWords Advertisers Unfair? Then we followed up that report showing that Google Won't Budge on Exchange Rate issue;

You won't be able to know how your rates are figured out. For a large advertiser, with a big budget, that can hurt.

When Danny had A Conversation With Google CEO Eric Schmidt on August 9th at SES, Danny put Mr. Schmidt on the spot about this. Of course, Mr. Schmidt really didn't know what Danny was exactly referring to.

Q: Danny cites a forum thing where Google would not detail the information of the exchange rate used for AdWords.
A: Eric said he is sure they can address that specific case (good news for those advertisers).

So guess what? On August 11th, AdWordsAdvisor2 comes back to the thread to post an update with more transparency into the exchange rate. Here it is:

Thank you for raising this issue, and thank you all once again for your patience. Based on your collective feedback over the last several weeks, we would like to take this opportunity to provide greater visibility into how we manage our currency conversion process.

To convert currencies for ad ranking, we receive a daily feed from Citibank and use the average of the buy and sell prices to determine the exchange rate. This procedure was outlined accurately by AWA in a previous post:

"Google converts the bid value to the US Dollar and than determines the ad rank.
Before entering the auction, the CPC's are converted into what we call micro-currency. Basically, we calculate currency down to 6 decimal points. Highly exact exchange rates are retrieved daily.

The base currency is the US dollar, or more specifically, one hundred-thousandth of a US dollar, so even dollars are converted, really.

Because this is so granular a calculation, there is no advantage to bidding in one currency rather than another."

Once an ad is served, your AdWords account is charged in the currency you selected when the account was opened, so no further conversion is necessary.

It's also important to note that we charge your credit card in the currency you've selected in your AdWords account; however, if your AdWords account's currency is different from the currency of your credit card, you may be incurring an additional currency conversion charge from the credit card company.

So there you have it. CEO's of big companies can really make a difference.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

BrianM at Search Engine Watch Forums posted a thread explaining that some Microsoft adCenter ads in MSN Search are landing to an MSN page that has no content, outside of this html produced:

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>No Such Link</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY><H1>No Such Link</H1></BODY>
</HTML>

Here is the example ad, but I am told there are others. Please do not click on the ad.

A search on MSN for masterspas brings up an ad for "Relaxing Hot Tubs - www.besthottubs.com" Clicking on that ad, takes you to the following URL (I broke the URL so it will wrap on this page)

http://0.r.msn.com/?ld=2vwZU2MrVfPoOhdE2D2KbClf+bgr8g5Yci4yiMa/
uJDYJnUB5DraxL4D7sHV/TNt6vbhuzZ8sT9RQ9wX/
16eJrZM18Qqq6Ks4uMNyH0GD2MxoG8lqmIhJHA5cjETCq1WCtl8Gj
2LvM3HO56HElE28mQUoTzg0SvKcZdVPlCw==

and brings up the content, "No Such Link"

What can be the problem here? Is it a bug or a feature?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

USA Today published an article yesterday named Google search ads find momentum which discusses Google's AdSense program. Two well-known forum personalities were quoted in the article.

John Scott of V7N Forums:

"AdSense, in my opinion, is the worst thing to happen to the Internet," says John Scott, who runs the V7n.com online forum for search marketers. "Google is ... in essence, paying people to inundate the Web with literally billions of worthless pages."

Jennifer Slegg (Jenstar, JenSense.com) of Search Engine Watch and DigitalPoint Forums:

Whatever its editorial worth, the AdSense business model clearly works for what blogger Jennifer Slegg describes as "hundreds of thousands" of website and blog publishers.

Slegg, who runs the JenSense AdSense tips blog, says the monthly AdSense bounty ranges from $100 to tens of thousands of dollars.

"The average is more like a few thousand a month," she says. "The ones who do really, really well, however, really work for it. It's not a windfall; they put in the hours."

Cool beans!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google announced and update for AdSense for Search that enables you to host the search results directly on your own pages, unlike before, where you were redirected to a Google domain.

Publishers using AdSense for search now have the option to open search results within their own websites. By adding an additional set of search results code to your page, you can display Google search results framed within your own site. This new option will help you blend AdSense for search into your site even further. You'll also have the added advantage of keeping users on your site while still offering them the useful information available through Google search.

More details on the how to over here.

Want to see it in action, I set up a test page at http://www.seroundtable.com/adsense-search.html.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Have you received an email notifying you of a settlement by Yahoo! with Checkmate? "A proposed Settlement has been reached in a class action proceeding alleging that Yahoo! breached its contracts with Class Persons and committed unfair business practices by improperly collecting revenue by charging and/or overcharging Class Persons for certain types of clicks." You have up until October 14, 2006 to say you want out of this class action lawsuit, and you have until November 20, 2006 to submit your claim.

More details and instruction at http://www.checkmatesettlement.com/.

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

Danny reported that Google Maps Gets Coupons, yea so you can now show coupons to those who find you on Google Maps/Local. You know, for bridging the online and offline conversion metric... So I decided to give this a shot. Let me take you through it. Oh, at the same time, I decided to get myself a custom map icon, Ill show you that also.

1) Start Screen at http://www.google.com/local/add/coupons

View Large Image

2) Online coupon page form:

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3) Error I got when trying to post my toll free number with letters

4) The confirmation page

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5) Now Google Map Icon, I logged into AdWords and edited my Local Business ad (more detail on that)

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6) Checked the upload your own feature (16x16 jpg, gif or png file)

7) Preview of what it looks like:

8) See it in action:

View Large Image

The deal is, I cannot see the coupons... They should be under my listing on the left of this page stating, "Coupons..." but it is not... Not sure what I did wrong...You can see it in action for a search on Honey Baked Ham, 63129, and here is an example coupon. I personally do not see my coupons.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

MSN's Microsoft adCenter now appears to be live in the UK. To sign up go to adcenter.microsoft.co.uk. WebmasterWorld member, inbound, said he received an email at 8am announcing the launch. The launch happened when it turned Tuesday, in the UK, I believe.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts from Google started his blog about a year ago. As soon as he started it, he has drawn an immediate fan base of active readers and participants. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! had a blog long before, since June 2002. Jeremy has a huge following as well but a different following from Matt.

Matt focuses most of his blog posts on helping out Webmasters and SEOs with Google.
Jeremy talks mostly about what he wants to.

Matt posts instructional videos on SEO topics.
Jeremy posts recaps of his instructional flight lessons.

Matt announces Google data center updates.
Jeremy announces new jobs open at Yahoo! within his department.

Matt geeks out on search algorithms.
Jeremy geeks out on MySQL optimization.

Matt has been focused on search related topics since being with Google in 2000 (or so.
Jeremy has jumped from division to division at Yahoo!, not always focusing on search related topics.

Is Jeremy the Matt of Yahoo!? I would not compare the two. Yahoo! has Tim Mayer, who is more up Matt's alley, in terms of communication. But Tim is not an engineer. Jeremy is a blogger but is not that focused on search. There are those who work under Tim and speak at the conference, but they don't have blogs. Of course they blog at the Yahoo! Search Blog, but not at their own personal blogs.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google would like to protect their trademark term and not have it turned into a verb for web search. I guess it makes sense to me. With Kleenex, etc. Google doesn't want to be a commodity with search. Danny has a detailed write this morning on the non-issue that has become an issue.

Overall, I think everyone knows that Google's trademark police face an uphill battle in having to send these types of letters out. But sadly, that's what the laws seems to require. I guess every three years, we can all get worked up into a state over them, despite the fact that people will keep on saying google as they please.

In the end, the letters will go out and the authors will continue to ignore them and write whatever they want to, as is their right.

Most people agree in the forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Ever wonder when was the last time you logged into Google AdSense? Well, according to Google, the last time I logged in was on July 25. I guess that is possible, but seems very unlikely. Anyway, why would Google add this data? Possibly because we have some people login every two minutes, and by Google showing the user that they just logged in two minutes ago, maybe it will convince the user not to login so soon again next time?

I don't know, just a guess.

But others feel the same;

I guess its just to remind users that they have been logging in too much.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Honestly, this is kinda dumb, but it did cause some chatter in the forums. Google posted at the Google blog about Google Ice Cream.

Google chef Nate Keller worked with the fine folks at IT'S IT to produce a natural, locally sourced, trans-fat-free rendition of their excellent treat. Served only in our Mountain View cafe, it's even got a Google logo on the wrapper.

Supposedly, it is very good.

Doesn't look that good to me, but it is just a picture.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Brian White, part of Matt Cutts webspam team, has joined Search Engine Watch Forums to continue the outstanding Google to Webmaster communication we have seen recently. Brian adds some more detail to our post yesterday on Web Hosts Found Cloaking Webmaster Content.

Brian explains what exactly is being done by this fraud:

We've discovered that the likely explanation is that a third party gained access to a number of sites and dropped files in these accounts (including a modified .htaccess using rewrite rules) for the purpose of rewriting the home page through a proxy script. The proxy script adds links when Googlebot visits, and in a sinister twist, adds the rel=nofollow link to cap off PageRank bound for any external URL not under control of this third party. As Danny noted, they also add a NOARCHIVE meta tag to disable the cached version in results.

He then clarifies that Google has made sure to block any PR boost or ranking boost this person is trying to achieve.

Finally, Brian explains additional methods for you to see if this is a problem on your site.

At the risk of allowing the folks who created this to adapt, you can use Google Translate to confirm the behavior. Check any of the affected sites (no Cached link) on the Google search ["hairy sex porn free"] via Translate to see the cloaking, since the proxy script checks for a visit from Googlebot IP addresses, and doesn't discern between a regular crawl visit and a Translate request.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and welcome Brian!

I am not sure if the title of this post is all that clear. Basically, if you go to the Robots.txt informational page at the Wikipedia and scroll down to the Directives within a page it claims Google has has a tag for indicating which "portions of a page that should not be indexed." Keep in mind, Google AdSense has such a tag that enables you to tell Google which content is the most relevant towards the ads you want to display. But Google, as far as I know, does not have a way for you to tell the web search index and bots which parts of your page are most relevant to the user.

Google uses comments for the same purpose: <!--googleoff: index--> ... <!--googleon: index-->

As far as I know, Google doesn't. I even searched for that on Google Help but nothing found.

Hope someone clarifies either at Google or Wikipedia and makes that correction in either place.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

There is a Cre8asite Forums discussion on having two sites on the same niche topic, residing on the same server, with the two domains resolving to the same IP address. Let me quote EGOL on this;

This is based upon observations of just a small number of sites. However, I am thinking that if you have two powerful sites competing for the same KWs and under the same ownership that google might show only one of them at a time. The sites I see in my SERPs that fit this will alternate in and out of the SERPs for the same KW one in and one out, occasionally both showing.

Backing EGOL up is the Site Admin at Cre8asite, Ron Carnell, who says;

I agree, Egol, and believe it's been that way for at least two years. However, to fine-tune that thought, I don't think it's so much the same keywords as it is the same "solution" (theme might be a more recognized word, but is still too broad). Naturally, keywords and theme often converge, but sometimes they don't, so it's a useful distinction (and may account for some of the exceptions you've seen?).

Some more good and even cute advice in the thread.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has examples of issues with Google possibly disobeying the robots.txt file. GoogleGuy and VanessaFox both come in, to offer some guidance on the perceived issue.

GoogleGuy first explains that "a more specific directive takes precedence over a weaker one." GoogleGuy comes back to explain in greater detail;

The rule of thumb I always use is "the most specific directive applies." So if you say "Everyone in the room, leave. g1smd, please stay; we need to chat" then everyone but g1msd would mosey.

Vanessa Fox from Google offers some useful links to help documentation and tools offered by Google to help you predict Google's behavior towards a specific robots.txt file prior to going live with it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The MSN adCenter blog announced that "Microsoft adCenter will launch in the U.K. this week!" Got that right, starting Tuesday 15th August, the Microsoft properties, aka MSN Search and Windows Live Search, will be serving up adCenter ads 100% of the time.

So make sure your campaigns are ready for the shift in volume.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Web hosts are typically in a very powerful position. One such example is discussed at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread showing how one Webmaster was finding "strange results" in the Google search results pages. The results contained pornographic terms in the description area of the search results for that listing.

Matt Cutts from Google explains that this is not any form of 302 hijacking but rather a rude cloaking bot implemented by the web host.

To me, it looks like this webhost is cloaking. Then including links to porn on the cloaked page that is served to Googlebot. Neonblitz, this is just me speaking my personal opinion. My personal opinion is that if you find out your webhost is cloaking, monkeying with your content, and adding porn links to your page, you'll want to think about whether that webhost is treating you with the respect you deserve.

So be careful with whom you host with. This can hurt you big time, both in rankings and in search results branding. How can you tell if this is happening to you? Well, I guess you can try the site command search (i.e. site:www.domain.com search in Google) and look through all the listings. Or even conduct a site command with a porn phrase such as [site:www.mydomainc.com porn] or [site:www.mydomainc.com sex] and see what comes up.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses webmaster complaints with Google treating the Wikipedia too well. Meaning, the Wikipedia ranks well for so many different keywords.

Often people mock the Wikipedia, because the information sometimes found there is not 100% accurate, since it is maintained by anyone. Of course there is a self-regulating force of the community, but still...

Anyway, I have seen many wiki results in Google. But the bottomline is, does it bother the non-Webmaster? Does it bother your mother (if she isn't a webmaster)? Does it bother the ordinary guy on the street?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Although Yahoo!'s Panama release for their new PPC platform has been delayed until the fourth quarter, some advertisers may be getting access to the new platform within a few weeks.

A WebmasterWorld post claims that an SES panel explained that some advertisers may be gaining access to Panama within a few weeks. I was not covering that panel, so I cannot confirm this rumor.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at WebmasterWorld has MSNdude, MSN's official search rep, trashing on some Webmaster's sites. Check out this quote:

I'm not sure why so many people seem to think the "spam look" is in this year (maybe it's a fashion statement -- like torn jeans or something) but it's a fact that it can hurt you.

You'd never seen that coming from a Yahoo! or Google rep. Pretty funny!

So Google and MTV are going to begin testing ads in videos on the Web. I wrote about it at SEW blog.

Google and Viacom have partnered to place Viacom video clips (MTV and other clips) on web site owner pages. The video clips will contain ads from Viacom, which Google and site owns will share the revenues from. These tests are to begin towards the end of the month. This is the first step, I bet, to AdWords on TV.

That being said, the folks at WebmasterWorld are pondering how they, as publishers, can leverage this new form of media to make more money.

Join in the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have completed an other *somewhat* successful quadruple coverage of the SES conference. Huge thank you to Benjamin Pfeiffer of Rank Smart, Chris Boggs of Avenue A | Razorfish and Lee Odden of Top Rank Results.

We have covered a whopping 38 sessions, would have been 39, but for some reason, I lost one. I would like to personally apologize for any mistakes, omissions, grammar issues, if it is hard to read and if we insulted anyone. The coverage is meant to be extremely quick but with that comes issues. Anyway... Here is a recap of the sessions we have covered...

Monday, August 7th, 2006:
+ Social Search Overview: Yahoo!, Windows Live & Eurekster
+ Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies
+ Searcher Behavior Research Update
+ Social Search: Up Close With Yahoo!
+ Leveraging Social Media (MySpace, YouTube, & Other Social Networks)
+ Does Demographic Targeting Matter?
+ Social Search: Up Close With Google (Google Co-op)
+ Communicating With Customers
+ Searchonomics: Serious & Fun Stats
+ Search and Branding
+ SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging
+ The Search Laboratories
+ Domaining & Address Bar Driven Traffic

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006:
+ Can You Please Them All? (Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask.com)
+ Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues
+ Reputation Monitoring & Management
+ Search Arbitrage Issues
+ Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues
+ Blog and Feed Search SEO
+ The Bot Obedience Course - New Yahoo! Site Explorer Tool Announced
+ News Search SEO
+ Search Algorithm Research
+ Search Engines: Friend or Foe?

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006:
A Conversation With Google CEO Eric Schmidt
+ Big Site Big Brand SEM
+ Linking Strategies
+ Big Ideas For Small Sites & Small Budgets
+ When Search Engines Do Search Marketing (AOL, Business.com, Yahoo! & Local.com)
+ Link Baiting & Viral Search Success
+ Usability & SEO - Two Wins for the Price of One
+ SEM for Non-Profits & Charities
+ Pricing & Contracts For The Small SEM Shop
+ The Vice Presidents Of Search Marketing

Thursday, August 10th, 2006:
+ Search APIs (Yahoo! Developer Network, YSM API, Google AJAX API & AdWords API)
+ Vendor Chat on Measuring Success
+ Search Engine Q&A On Links (Ramez MSN Search, Kaushal Ask.com, Adam Google & Rajat Yahoo!)
+ Balancing Organic and Paid Listings
+ Organic Listing Forums (Danny Sullivan In Costume)

PR Web, well-known in out industry for serving up the press releases for SEO-PR.com and many other SEO firms, has been sold to Vocus. Brett Tabke posted a thread at WebmasterWorld stating, "one of the long time Press Release services was sold on monday for a reported $28million."

Brett links to a Washington Business Journal article that says;

Vocus is paying $28 million in cash and stock for a company that develops technologies to help clients get their news to journalists and to the top of search engines.

Lanham-based Vocus, which make software for corporate communications and public relations, has acquired PRWeb of Ferndale, Wash., for $20.8 million in cash and 494,543 shares of Vocus stock.

Congrats PR Web and forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yea, last minute change in coverage. Why? because, well, Danny is doing a "short presentation before we begin." He lost a bet with Thomas about a World Cup soccer deal and he had to put on, well this...

Danny then warns the folks that the search engines are listening so be careful what you say.

I am only going to cover questions that are interesting, IMO... Otherwise, I will just relax. So you know, I just found out one of the sessions I covered was not posted and it was lost. The Search Engine Bloggers sessions with Matt Cutts, Gary Price, Nile and Jeremy Z. Sorry about that, it was a pretty cool session.

Q: What is the next big component of the algorithm?
A: Dave Naylor said it will be the same, link analysis.
Mike Grehan said user behavior. Citation analysis is more like peer review these days.
Todd Friesen said overall nothing has changed, you can overload certain things and boost yourself to the top. It is still just linking and we have a lot of time left.
Bruce Clay you will see a wide spread use of complementary tools, what do you I mean I search for "java"...
Dave added, looking at the AOL data, and he saw such random searches based on the persons token ID, personalization is sooo hard, he said.

Dave says I would like Yahoo to add to Site Explorer to add a way to say, hey, I don't want that link. A way to discredit the links pointing to you.

Balancing Organic and Paid Listings

Moderated by Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink

Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media
Overview of paid and organic. Will talk about how they can be used effectively in combination with each other. Says that organic clicks represent 75% of total clicks. Organic listings are basically an impartial endorsement of the pages. This is a long term solution. Front loaded cost required for SEO. Huge impact on site traffic. Paid search takes the remaining clicks. Also has benefits. Can control messaging and placement, on demand. Broad distribution channels if syndicating results and/or using contextual opportunities. Performance pricing.

Organic + paid equals lasting impact + immediate results. Goes though some more explanation. 5 out of 6 consumers do not understand the difference between organic and paid. They have seen that paid search enhances organic listing when same site has both top listings. Gets into some examples of integration. They see benefit on the publishing side. Lifecycle of a news story: published, blogged, then searched. You can target during each part of the cycle. Paid search for published, con textual ads for blogs and news outlets, and organic for searched. Does another example regarding a news story of the California heat wave and how they did creative for cnn.com paid listings. One more example: Hezbollah news. Nice to get different types of results, such as specific info an recent crisis in paid area vs a longer history of Hezbollah in organics.

Speaks then briefly with some more examples including a branded search and some entertainment searches. They think analytics are the most important bridge between paid and organic, and they use a software that can tell the difference between them. They can optimize against top paid performers, and use organic results to refine keyword list. Suggests that everyone give a lot of consideration as to how the two tactics can work together.

Craig Hordlow from Red Bricks Media, LLC.
Fact: when searchers see a website listed both organically and paid, they are more likely to click to a site. Could give “SEM Commandments,” but this isn’t why he is here. Wants to recommend people put aside the dogma. The above fact is actually unimportant, because there is no mention of goals or cost. Goes into some biology stuff and compares “Le Chatelier Principle” to search. To compete, you have to have a superior process and technology. Recommends using “A.R.P.” Accountability, Reporting, and Process. Accountability discusses how to structure search programs players. There can be problems with accountability both with in-house and agency. For example, business units might compete against each other in an in-house scenario. Talks about how many in-house will be Jack(ass) of all trades. Recommends asking proper questions like conversion goals, responsibility for overseeing? Show an example of a kw you are pursuing in SEO since PPC goals are not being met. Goals should be clearly articulated.

Create goals at the keyword level. Use reports that show the synergies between SEO and PPC efforts. Shows a “keyword portfolio analysis,” which is a Spreadsheet with common metrics and KPI’s for both SEO and PPC. Goes though a variety of interesting scenarios with one outperforming the other. Recommends that you be wary of using multiple vendors for reporting. Goes into the importance of keyword level reporting. Need to have a “line item of action items.” Begin report with a recap of action items. Conclude with a summary of action items assigned to each individual. Conclusion is that the Internet will require you to manage your marketing with increased efficiencies.

Abu Noaman from Elliance
Paid versus Organic: Deciding which to Use and When. Tells of speaking to a couple of the presenters and finding out that even senior mangers do not rally know right off-hand how they divide budgets between SEO and Paid Search. He finds that most of their clients spend about 10% of their overall marketing budget on Internet. Senior marketers want to be able to structure “fair amounts” of budgets on and offline. How much should you be spending on paid versus SEO? Will give an overview on how they approach this.

Typical challenges faced determines the allocation of budget. Some problems include: excess inventory, timed offers, product launch, site launch, customer acquisition, brand awareness, retention. Some of the questions are more long term than short term. So these goals will help determine the budgeting between SEO and paid. Clearing inventory, for example. They go 75% PPC and 25% sponsored links. Timed offers: 25% SEO, 50% PPC, and 25% “ePR” (online buzz). Product launches: 20% SEO, 40% PPC, 20% ePR, 20% sponsored links. You need more balance in this situation. Site launch: 15%ePR, 10% links, 50% SEO, and 25% PPC. Customer acquisition: 30% SEO, 40% sponsored links, 10% each links, ePR, and PPC. Once again, need a well balanced portolio for acquisition over long term. Brand awareness is 25% each SEO, ePR, Sponsored links and PPC. Retention: looking for reassurance of purchase. 40% ePR, 10% PPC, 50% SEO.

Does a short case study…have to go now. That’s all folks! See you in Chicago for the next SES coverage.

Ramez Naam from MSN Search has two slides. Links are for three things, (1) discovery (what pages exists), (2) reputation (how important is this page) and (3) annotation (what is this page about). What are good principles of links? Offer links in your pages that are useful to your users. He said use shorter and more readable links. He said use descriptive links. He said make sure your link navigation is useful. Search engine algorithms change rapidly, so use these principles, because those will help 6 months down the road. Giving specific help now may not help tomorrow, so principles are key.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com is now up. He shows the general link analysis slide with A pointing to B point to C, etc. Then he shows the community, Teoma, link analysis approach with hubs and authorities within communities. Global popularity... Clustering techniques to cluster these links.... All links are not equal... Be cautious of reciprocal links and purchasing links (it is like buying votes or reviews). Avoid link farms, cloaking, hidden links and links in images are not understood. Become an authority on your subject, focus on your business and content...

Adam Lasnik from Google (minimatt) without a presentation will keep it short. We are all interested in having webmasters make links that are useful for their users. It is not a numbers game, he said. He said the optimal number of links is 42, of course he is joking. It is not a numbers game. It is about making your links relevant. A garden site with links to mortgages, is not relevant. Do your links pass the "smell test" or the "common sense test." He then said if all the links say the same thing about you, then something is a bit sketchy.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo said he will go off links become we are kind of obsessing over links. Because search engines are doing a lot more outside links to determine popularity. "7 links for highly effective people." (1) ysearchblog.com, track this blog for good info. (2) answers.yahoo.com, social search, Yahoo! sees a strong indication that users also vote in this base. Answers is a very specific case of this. (3) builder.search.yahoo.com is a different way at looking at content. People don't have a great search experience on searching on your site, so this helps. (4) myweb.yahoo.com is a very strong social search element, social bookmarks. (5) siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com shows you your inlinks in detail. (6) help.yahoo.com/search shows you all you want to know about Yahoo! Search. (7) search.yahoo.com is the main search engine.

Q & A Time:

Q: He built a site, really good site and finally sold it. Now he is building a new site. But he is building up the links slowly, even though he can get links in a second because of his past situation. It is really annoying going slow when he can do it overnight. He said he doesn't want to "irritate you," the search engines.
A: Yahoo said go organic and natural.
MSN said don't think of it as a speed issue but a relevance issue. If they are relevant, there won't be any problem.
Google said if they naturally want to link to you, then let it happen. If they want to do it on their own, and you're not twisting their arm. Don't worry about what other people are doing. Continue what you are doing.
Ask said that it should be fine. You see this in blog links. Slashdotted, digged, etc.
(Matt Cutts is in the room he (looks like he) is itching to talk, but he is holding back).

Q: Running in a very competitive industry, they have invested a lot of money creating the the site. He has seen people link to him with from very bad places. In an effort to harm his reputation.
A: Google said it is something what they have heard and they understand. But links are just one factor, there are many ways to judge the spam level of a site, the trust level of a site. Bad links by themselves in-themselves won't typically hurt you. I would not worry to much about that, Google said.
Yahoo said there are thresholds, like when tech.yahoo.com launched, it got tons of links above that threshold. If you go above a threshold, you will be manually review (did he just say that).
Ask.com said if there are bad links, they will be discounted and not counted.
MSN said as long as there are positive signals you should be ok?

Q: Do you consider non hyperlinked urls written on content, like www.yahoo.com, written out, to be a link?
A: MSN said they don't count those.
Google said, "i understand," the AP has a policy to never link, so a lot of readers may be aware of that and you may still get traffic from it. The purpose of pagerank, it won't have that "same type of weight."

Q: Bill S. asked links pointing from your pages from older more mature sites and there are some "web decay" going on with broken links. There was a search patent on issues with web decay and soft 404s. How do you deal with that?
A: Yahoo said in general they do track from an authority perspective how long a site has been around and how long those pages are there. If you are talking about repurposing a domain for a new set of content, those things do get flagged and get reviewed.
MSN said they use every possible piece of info will be used. How old is the page, when it was registered, etc. Pages with broken links are bad for users, so take care of your pages.
Ask.com repeats that, yes, it is bad for the users.

Q: If I have a page that have 404s for a year or so, will there be a discounting factor, if I put something back up?
A: Ask.com said they dont have a time discount based on that, but they have to find the URL again.
Google said you have choices, you can do nothing with it, or 301 it to a new page or continue to update the page. The last two options will be more favorable then the first option.
Yahoo! added that it may be useful for your users who have linked to you in the past.

Q: When will you start counting in RSS feeds that you index.
A: Ask.com said they look at them separately in blog and feed search compared to web search. In blog search, those links are looked at. They do circle that content on the main web search (RSS Smart Answers, I assume).
Google said they also have a blog search engine. He doesn't know how they are handled in the main search engine.

Q: Real estate question about link resources pages, should they be removed?
A: Google said there has been a lot of work to determine the relevancy and purpose of the links, if your example is not taking the users first, then...If you feel those links will give your users a benefit, because the link has more unique content.... If not, in the aggregate, then that is "kinda junk."
Yahoo! said it is also an issue on how your pages rank. If you rank well.
Danny brings up the nofollow attribute.

Danny asks the audience, how many of you are "less freaked out about who you link to?" and Matt Cutts raised his hands. Danny also said that Eric Schmidt said link buying is ok, he may be joking.

Q: Rand asks Ask.com, tell us about the growth of the blogosphere, and how it affects normal web search...
A: Ask.com said that blog and feed search... Bloggers talk about many different things. Not a real answer... on this. but what can you expect?
MSN said the question was philosophical, so he will give a philosophical answer.
Google adds, and I am pulling out a quote, although it may not be "topical, it still may be relevant."

Q: Danny asked are you looking at a link to a page and the value of the page trust or are you looking at the whole domain and trust of the domain?
A: Yahoo! said there are other algorithms that tell you the trust of a site, not just links. They also do look at a site's aggregate popularity.
Google said it depends, sometimes it may be inappropriate to share the link love of a page and aggregate that across a whole domain. It is probably clear in which times it is done.
MSN said diddo on Google. Look at Geocities, the domain as a whole doesn't make sense.
Ask.com said they do have a domain level trust but it plays into a whole bunch of things and it doesn't always come into play in rankings.

Q: I have two URLs one with my main site and one with my game portion of the main site (on a different URL). How do I merge the game site into the main site?
A: Google answered 301s, when you want to point to new pages to old pages, generally 301s are a good way to go. 301s will past PageRank, will be not be instant but it will happen.

Q: A follow up on the 301s... If you run a super site and then 301 to a new location. Will you eventually get full credit for the links coming in? And how important is it for us, or it is necessary for us to go back to the sites to change the links?
A: MSN will give you full credit with proper 301s. There is no critical need to change those links. But it is a little better for the user to get those links change.
Google said they will also pass the full value through. He diddos MSN.

Vendor Chat on Measuring Success

Moderated by Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink

John Marshall from Clicktracks.
“It’s all about persuasion” Focus on this instead of ROI. ROI only describes two points in the customer’s journey. Does nothing to help you understand all the micro-decisions made during the buying process. If you go to the end point, you miss a lot of data. There are many reasons that the ROI Data suffers. It’s such a long journey. Dispel a myth about funnel analysis. On the web, this doesn’t work. Inherited from offline sales process. An online funnel is more like a “series of tornados.” Eventually the mindset of the customer takes them to the next mental stage in progression towards purchase. To define a good funnel, divide site into stages. Think about what mental state people are in each step. Aggregate lots of distinct pages into meaningful page groups, then segment by conversion ability. Shows an example of their site stats, and how if came through search, most persuasive sections and landing pages changed from entry point to entry point. Organic was most “swayed” by “services” page. Landing page for paid that worked best was the “Click fraud” page. Yet another best one for email entrance. Closes with summary.

Akin Arikan From Unica
Shows an example of a disaster when bidding on web tracking (“hurricane tracking web site”). Recommends starting with paid keyword report and ends up with recommendation.

Brett Crosby Google Analytics
Discusses history of G Analytics. Interesting journey since launch in November as a free product. Happy to say that the wait for G A is now only about 15 minutes from signup.
Starts with a discussion recommending “analyzing & acting on the data.” G Analytics support offers free email support. No predefined support packages to “force you into a model.” Use of the product is very intuitive. They recommend that if you are “serious about analytics,” that you hire or train someone to run in-house products. Some client prefer DIY. They have “conversion university” online. Teaches best practices methodology for driving traffic, honing conversion process, etc. Has multilingual online help and FAQ. Has user supported Google Group around analytics, moderated by several people, in their division and also have a blog. Shows a cool new logo/button that looks like the “GAP” button but says “Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.” Finishes with a reminder that the best thing you can do is analyze your data and act on it.

Chris Knoch from Omniture
“Web Analytics and Bid Management” How to take customized web metrics for your goals and apply them to your keywords. They have seen that traditional conversion metrics differ per organization. Some use average pages viewed per conversion, for example. Gives an example of an online car and truck magazine and the “cost per car research page view” and “cost per truck research page view.” These are custom numbers that give the particular metric that is best for them. Then he shows a specific example of how to build a bid rule based on assigning costs. Uses “action sets.” High end: if the cost of the car research or truck research page views is 3X target, then automatically lower bid by 30% and keep doing this until you risk loosing too much traffic. You can further customize using this methodology. You not only want to set a ceiling, but also a floor. So if you are spending “not enough,” then increase bid.

Warren Raisch from WebSideStory
Will speak about HitBox. Says he agrees with John that conversion points other than the final are important to monitor. “Micro-conversions” help to measure success and failures throughout site, particularly to focus on the failures. In each area you can see” where you are losing it.” Are you not gaining trust? Is your form bad? They use a “return on action” calculator. “Let’s look at what you can do this week. They take a funnel approach initially, looking at total visitors in the “11 step process” as they go through a website. The “fallout points” are what you need to identify and study. A little information can be a dangerous thing if misinterpreted. They are using a push model,” putting the info into an easy format like a Word document or PPT slide to make it easy for people to analyze and take action. Shows some examples of their reporting outlook and some other metrics. Looks pretty cool, they are
Called “Active dashboards.”

They also look at what they call “active alerts” or “active reports.” This way they can push KPI’s directly to someone’s desk. Has “alarm” kind of system that changes the skin and launches and auto email if some thing important happens. Finishes with a brief look at the importance of navigation, and how they were able to change navigation titling and double traffic.

Barry Parshall from WebTrends
Has no PPT presentation. “Wants us to look at him.” He feels that web analytics has not done a good job of relationship marketing over the years. “What is missing is people.” Goes through a story about people making journeys through websites. It is very critical to focus on what your customers care about and when they care about it.

(added 8/16. one of the panelists sent me the follwoing, describing the last question of the Q&A:

"this question is for everyone on the panel except Brett (from Google Analytics). I am a happy Google Analytics user now, why would I ever consider using one of your products?" The other vendors sat there quietly for several moments. Then John Marshal wisely replied, "Unless everyone here wants to hear 5 sales pitches, maybe it would be best if you contacted our sales reps."

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo is up first. He explains that an API is a consistent way for a programmer to work with a third party software. The traditional way to do that in the past was to do screen scraping. With an API, there is a way you should pull the data, this is the supported and official way to get to that data. The Yahoo Developer Network has a whole suite of APIs available; search, hotjobs, finance, traffic, travel, widgets, JS code, and so on. If you are thinking about trying them out, you need to come to the Yahoo site and get an application ID (a unique id to track you), there are simple URLs (REST interface, no SOAP, simple XML results and RSS also), there are 5,000 requests/services/IP/day limits and they posted many examples of their site. He then handed it off to his colleague.

Dan Boberg of Yahoo to talk about the Search Marketing (paid side) of the APIs. They are building the API new from ground up with the new ad platform (panama). Incorporates services based on new YSM ad platform, they are using a SOAP protocol, they are also using a simple new licensing format with a usage model and there are new authorization types such as roles and agency roles. There is a YSM API Sandbox 1.0 only US based, forecasting provides sample data, etc. They have command groups such as Marketing, AdvancedTools, Research, BasicReports, CampaignOptimization, UserManagement and CustomerManagement.

Mark Lucovsky from Google, code.google.com has their APIs. Google AJAX search API is simple, it allows you to do parallel search over web, maps, video, blogs, etc. AJAX, JSON, HTML Microformats and its open and free. If you know HTML, you can use this API he said. They want search to fit in naturally on your Web site (be it maps, search, video, etc.). He skips over a case study on this, he said even a guy like Tim O'Reilly can do this. They repackaged it as an iGoogle Module on the Google homepage, so you can reuse it there. They want search everywhere, even while you are building lists. He also shows how you can add it to blogs and message boards, where he added to a phpBB forum, a video clip added to the message. He shows examples of email integration. As well as any custom application, integration.

Rohit Dhawan from Google to talk about the marketing side of Google APIs. The AdWords API overview. Users can write programs and applications to perform functions in each of these four areas; account management, campaign management, reporting and traffic estimation. The AdWords API is designed to be a do it yourself program using the developer web site, developers can find valuable resources to help them create applications. The developers guide is a guide from programmers, the key components are reference docs, WSDL's, etc. The developer forum is a Google Group message board where developers can interact with other developers and also interact with Google. He then does some case studies. Online retailer, they used to manually pull data from the AdWords web site, and they would scrub through it and look through other programs and merge them together. After a few days they made decisions based on that data. So they then integrated with the AdWords API. Now they can see on a real time basis, if the product is out of stock, then don't advertise it. Revenue has increased while reducing operational expenses. Case Study #2. Large agency did it manually, so for managing several dozen campaigns, it takes a lot of time. They integrated and they had "real time" feedback loop reduced risk leading to shorter planning cycles." Case Study #3: Small advertiser, who spends $3,000 per month. she integrated and profit doubles and conversions increased 20% with less manual work. She manage the ads manually but the bids were done automatically. Top ten tips: (1) Phased approach is best when integrating (2) understand your business drivers, (3) understand your customers' business drivers, (4) understand the adwords auction system, (5) monitor and manage your quota, (6) focus on quality keywords that drive click volume, (7) align bid strategies with goals, (8) actively participate on the developer forums, (9) read the AdWords blogs for tips and latest information and (10) continue to think of new and creative ways to leverage the API.

Please excuse grammar, readability, mistakes and omissions. This is covered in real time and posted literally minutes after the session is over.

Danny Sullivan introduces this panel, how he was amazed big companies have VPs of SEM.

Abhilash Patel from Passages Malibu is up first. Lots of people raised their hand for people who have more than a hundred employees in the company, wow. Since when does SEM/SEO get a VP? So who needs a VP for search? As "relative CPA" valuations and studies become more widely read, anyone with significant offline media budgets, which is more important, sales or leads and if you separate sales and marketing, it is time for a VP of search and if you want to quantify the market for the growth. How big should a company be that deserves a VP? Are you prepared to go after 70-80% of search traffic? The future of corp SEM. Obstacles and opportunities, if profit maximization dictates a smaller operation. What does the VP do? Progress on a daily basis with constant execution, a level of harmony with the technologist and sales/marketing, independent of growth stats and revenue channel numbers, accountability for significant levels of traffic, and for e-commerce you maintain affiliate relations, and providing invaluable consumer data back to other arms of the company for employment. Things he did? install web stats, web usability, SEM, and lots of work in click fraud, does organic SEOs (content production, site pops, link building, reputation management, affiliate management, and business development through the web) and then viral marketing and community building. The argument for in house and the relationship with vendor outsourcing: they are not mutually exclusive, many things can't be outsourced, how many times have you been burned by a vendor, and the scalability issues. Case Study; skipping...

Marshall Simmonds VP of NY Times and About.com and also a consulting firm. NY Times has high resistance to change, 11 million documents, email registration wall, paid subscription wall, it issues and so on. Working together was dealing with turf wars and getting people to work together, education was key and is key here. There was an internal approach, reach each player. There was an external approach, users, spiders, engines and the mother factor. The process is to integrate search into the workflow, small changes are big results, buy in from the bottom up, enhancing writing styles and multi-departmental communications. Everyone owns search marketing; the challenges of working with old school marketing... Selling search to NYTimes, they had to show the results of About.com, easy to follow examples, finding projects with extensive involvement, consistent communication. He shows some examples, all very good examples. Training is key, so they do lots of training over and over again. Checklists are key, he said (unique titles, annotations on all links, etc.). Putting fun graphics in fun of people. And then establish baseline metrics. External they make it more user friendly, push back registration walls, SE friendly approach. He then sums up.

Sean Smith from Citigroup made me remove this and threatened a lawsuit. So it is removed. Apparently, I misunderstood what he said. This is the first time I have ever been threatened like this.

Ken Jurina from Epiar, Inc. is up first and says to start that the information presented is their opinion and there are many ways to do things. He then goes into various industry pricing models. 1. Retainer-based – monthly fees (6-18 month contract) or the search and peak. 2. Fee-for-service model – project based, with finite scope about what is going to be done. 3. Pay per performance – skin in the game, commission structure. 4. Hourly consultation – he says this may be a tough one as when you have an hourly rate and a fixed expense. He says the services offered are more valuable than an hourly rate can compensate for. There standard SEO services, is more service based than monthly fee. There are three “branded” core service phases. They go into extensive keyword research (20,000-100,000 phrases). Keyword placement & site architecture. He says not every clients needs are the same. He talks about virgin domain vs. established site with past SEO and can be an inherent mess. There are different level of services available, which may include website audits, web analytics, monthly maintenance plans, hourly consultation.

The importance of profiling. Determining your target market and go after it. Small companies usually buy in quicker, but can’t afford the services. Larger companies can afford, but buy-in is not always possible across depts. Or there a long sales cycle. Mid-size seems to work great for them. When you can talk to the owner or c-level executive approval is easier without having to go through marketing or IT departments. Now, from a pricing and perception side of things. There can be some initial sticker shock from prices they charge. No opportunity for clients to “taste the goods”. The redid the pricing models, and starting presenting the ROI and benefit from the beginning. As for proposal must be detailed and comprehensive. But get to the point, they have them down to 5 to 6 pages. Show the transparency in the services. Ensure that logic evident, clients buy in & refer when they understand the deliverables. Proposals and contracts much be seriousness and professionalism. They define the work without being bound to a guarantee. Cover Your Arse clauses should be in the proposals and contracts as well.

Pricing based on what can bear is important. When pricing is out of the major marketing such as New York and LA. They can be a tough sell. Small town companies except big town services for small town prices. That can be tough. Don't put up with it if you can.

So why should we go with you? Common question most clients consider. You choice between being a “me too” organization and offering a unique value proposition. What are your competitive advantage, are your competitively prices, experience, etc.. In closing a little advice. Keep your focus, niche serve and product. Don’t be distracted by shiny object. Often flexible payment plans to accommodate your customers, costs can be spread of the projects. Work with thousands of dollars a month. Develop a strong home base. Well known local brands = credibility.

So what about promoting your own brand? Finding it tough to rank in the SERPS? Promote your brand, promote yourself. Be active, present, blog, doing training seminars. Become a recognized experts. Awards? Not-so obvious conferences & tradeshows. Trademarks, copyrights – register them (increases goodwill). Develop an exit strategy… do you have one?

Todd Frisen from Range Online Media opens talks about how he tried everything when he was one-man operation. Now contract issues to never compromise. 1. Indemnification – indemnification is a two way street. Make sure your contract only agrees to indemnify your client for negligent acts, errors, or missions. 2. Agreement Termination – a contract that allows either party to terminate for any reasons with 10 days written notice isn’t a good contract. Restrict a client right to terminate the contract to you committing a serious breach that cannot be remedied with 14 days time. 3. Intellectual Property Rights – never agree to relinquish you intellectual rights to anything you create or contribute to unless you’ve negotiated a separate (large) fee. An SEO should not be a “work for hire consultant. 4. Confidentiality. 5. Resolving Disputes – Key point he made here, resolution needs to happen in your jurisdiction. Never compromise on this one. It could cost you a ton of money. Make sure that any potential legal disputes are settled in the your jurisdiction. You might want to also require mediation/resolvement in your area only.

He next goes into performance based contracts. He says establish a proper baseline data. Before you can determine if a rev share deal will work, you need to be able to properly access where the potential client is at. What is the overall search activity for their space. How well do they currently rank for those terms. How many search related sales are they currently making. Always work off gross revenue as you don’t have any control over net profit. Be reasonable on the percentage you ask for. If you know you can remove a robots.txt file and triple their revenue overnight, don’t ask for a percentage that will make your 100k a month in two weeks. Make it based on what you think it would take for you to be making the same amount you would charge for upfront consulting in a reasonable amount of time (30-60) days. Set a time for the contract to expire. Provide an early exit clause for the client.

So what do you charge hourly? Good. Double It! Great information.

Jessie Stricchoila from Alchemist Media, Inc is up third. She says if your not a big dog or large SEM operation, there is a good chance you are dealing with some of the following issues in your business development. There is good reliance on Word of Mouth lead generation. Lack of top 10 rankings possibly in the engines for local terms. If there is a limited cash flow/lack of marketing budget to spend on paid advertising – on the web, or elsewhere. She next goes into client relationship management in the SEM world is unique for many reasons. We are dealing with , among other things. Expectation management with a ever fluctuating SEM industry. There is cost variation due to lack of commodization of SEM-related services (not that is a bad thing). Some of the things that make a good client relations is, clients understanding of the SEM industry. If there are prior SEM engagements, how about development resources, commitment and availably of those resources and the stability of the organization.

She next goes into companies that have prior SEM engagements. Zero to two SEM engagements is fine, but when they have been through 3 SEM companies this is a red flag. You need to investigate this. She next recommends what you need to inquire about the client’s accounting process? Is it Net 30? Net 60? Determine where you will have a direct accounting person to communicate with. Jessie recommends as well that in regards to communications, that you need to tell the client exactly what you are going to do and won’t do.

Stephen Anderson from Rock Coast Media is up first. He is going to go through PPC in the search space for non-profits. He says that search tends to work, and the challenge for non-profits is that there is not many pro bono opportunities available. Google has its grants program however there are some stipulations when you use it.

Non profits must compete in an open marketing. It can be an extremely effective medium and donations can still be driven. He gives an example of Amnesty International USA which wanted to drive donations online. They started working with their objective, looked at keywords. They developed copy and landing page copy categorized by brand, issues, current events and donation keywords. The result of the campaign was a success, it drove 76K in donations. When they looked under the hood, the brand keyword where driving the success of the campaign. A comparison between brand terms and non-brand terms, the brand terms outweighed the non-brand terms considerably.

Another one of their clients, Environmental Defense wanted to drive sign up for their online emissions petition. They did the copy and landing page work, over all the results were a bit different than Amesty. SEM recruits of high value over time. They had about a 100% subscriber retention rate. They were very active recruits which could be marketed to later on. They also asked friends to sign up as well. What the campaign was trying to do, is get Bush not to veto the stem cell bill. They did take advantage of search spikes on current events. They also addressed the emotion /intent behind the search. In summary, search works, there are high value recruits out there for non-profits.

Kevin Gottesman from DonorDigital and starts by explaining what these pictures have in common of extreme figures and says that those are keyword he buys every day. What his organization do is fundraising, list building ( to convert to donors) and contacting donors. He gives the example of Defcon, which was trying to get Pres. Bush not to veto the stem cell bill and do a lot of politicking to get politicians to support the initiates of Defcon stem cell campaign. Another example is the American Jewish World Service which wanted to form a rally to stop genocide in Darfur, Sudan. They created a campaign around keyword unique to African aid. They did postcards and online campaign; it had really great success of rallying people for support. His last case study is from the Humane Society and the pet evacuation & transportation act. They wanted to urge congress to pass a bill. They had 5.5 million impression, 60,000 clicks, and lots of new members to the humane society. He gives some stats, that 200 billion was given to charity in 2005. There has been an increase in donors giving money online. Declining direct mail efficiency however. The need is for solutions for online fundraising, ie. Search.

Rick Mitchell from World Vision is up third. This speaker came up to a bunch of people in the audience before hand to see who was in the audience. He says that donations are becoming a vertical all there own. World Vision does a lot of children in disaster areas. They are positioned globally in 100 countries to respond rapidly to disasters. They are prepared to help 24/7. Search popularity has increased in non-profit search. He talks about how his charity has done all this world with world disaster and responded to places of need. The Asia tsunami is mentioned a lot. He puts up some interesting stats about the increase in online giving. It has risen dramatically. He says that when there is a disaster people go to the internet. The term “tsunami” became a household name. He next goes into how World Vision does PPC and search.

Moderated by Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ with presentations by Matt Bailey of SiteLogic and Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs.

First up is Shari who answered questions about usability and search.

What is usability? Shows term highlighting in Google search results. Titles, snippets and web address.

Web site usability serves two purposes: Relevancy and encouraging clicks to your site.

Usability addresses all search behaviors.
- Querying (refining, expanding)
- Browsing, surfing
- Pogo-sticking (Jared Spool)
- Foraging
- Scanning
- Reading

What is web site usability? Shari believes usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use (Jakob Nielsen). Usability is task oriented. Usability meets a balance between satisfying users and business goals.

Information architecture precedes building the interface of a web site. Shares interface usability best practices. A balance between good architecture and the interface means the site has meaning whether there is search engine friendly content or not.

Interface: Areas of a website that are of benefit to users and search engines
- Navigation
- Linking

People need to understand where there are on a web site. A sense of place is what tells people where they are in a web site and also provides information to search engines.

Cross linking is important: horizontal and vertical. Vertical links are often breadcrumb links. Breadcrumb links provide "sense of place" cues, they are keyword focused and also provide a keyword optimization opportunity. They also communicate visited and unvisited pages.

Also need horizontal cross links. Types: embedded text links, related links, alternative links, alphabetic links.

Site maps should be part of the information architecture. Add a link both above and below the fold.

URL structure is part of the interface. Hyphens are better than an underscore. Also avoid problematic characters: &, ?, =, $, +, %. Short urls with keywords are usually better.

URL structure does not affect ranking, but it does affect accessibility.

Shari winds things up with a case study on Medicine.net and a reminder that usability is for both users and search engines.

Next and last up is Matt Bailey from SiteLogic with a special pen that he used to mark up example web pages.

SEO - get people to the site.
Usability - Get those visitors to do what you want them to do.

The main problem with usability is that for users, if they can't find it, it's not there - it doesn't exist. Same goes for SEO. If you're not ranked, you don't exist.

Matt explains what is important for both SEO and usability on the home page. It should be clear immediately what the site is about. It should also lead them to the information they're looking for.

Uses several sites as examples bad usability. Don't call your products, "products" and services, "services". Label content based on descriptive phrases rather than generic references. Make sure links to content are obvious and easy to read,

Taxonomy: hierarchal structure, classification, grouping. Offer alternative methods of getting to content because users search differently.

Category Pages - Use established set of categories with supporting categories. Use Keywords in the links to categories. Obvious links to products with images. Be careful of cramming categories together, as that will dilute the relevance for each.

Great example of usability: thinkgeek.com, wine.com

Product Pages. Matt's advice is to call products what they are. Give product information so users understand and to include keywords. Selling products to the logical and emotional sides of a consumer will involve the use of descriptive content and keywords. Include benefits to answer the questions consumers have and to provide keyword rich content.

Landing pages should provide exactly what the consumer is looking for.

Matt provided a variety of examples showing good and bad usability with a particularly humorous example involving something called "butt paste".

Usable Analytics - Analytics can be the key to finding usability problems. Also segment your keywords and content according to the users' needs.

Great job to Shari and Matt on this presentation. It was one of the best I've seen at this SES. Very informative, lots of examples, some humor and a great session overall.

Danny Sullivan was late to this session, tisk, tisk tisk.

Rand Fishkin, possibly the king of link baiting, as Danny introduces him. What is link bait? Web site content that is targeting link friendly audiences. Goals include high levels of traffic, numerous links and visibility/branding. Link bait combines the practices of viral marketing with popular tech trends. Step 1: Researching a sectors link worthiness; what is your market size of your industry? How many of them are active online? Do folks in your industry blog? read forums? newsgroups? What are some recent contents that got this type of attention? Step 2: Discovery of the "big" players in your field? Who are the most well read online sources? USe del.icio.us tags, google searches, technorati and referrals from colleagues. Create a list and identify the format, features and successful tactics each of the sources employ. Step 3: Targeting YDD5 (Yahoo, Del.ici.us, slashdot), can your content be tweaked to appeal to those types? Step 4: Targeting offline media also, launching press releases, hiring PR experts, reaching media through online exposure. Step 5: Selecting a content focus; brainstorm 2-3 dozen ideas from people inside your company, think of content that's completely unique and incredibly appealing?, decide based on what you feel would be most effective with your audience and industry. Step 6: Meld branding and viral elements; the piece should carry your brand without forcing it on your users, the best linkbait has elements built in that help with viral spreading including email friends, etc.. Step 7: Targeting keywords/search traffic; search hot keyword sin your sector before creating linkbait. Step 8: Look at examples of brilliant ideas, find the sites who have built amazing applications, tools and content, Digg most popular, yahoo site of the day, technorati, stumbleupon popular tags. Step 9: The value of a web 2.0 look and feel, the right look and feel with earn links others can inhibit link growth from design densitive bloggers social taggers. Step 10: Elements that encourage linking; viral features, link friendliness and social tagging links. Step 11: Pre- launch public relations; email or call relevant friends, consider hiring a PR pitch agent, confirm that everything is working 100% and ensure that your server can support the traffic. Step 12: Managing Launch Traffic; be careful not to respond negatively to criticism of your content in blog comments, you might wish to update your content with additional data or insight and quotes the source, once you've been mentioned at several big sites, be sure to continue to update your site/blog... Step 13: Continuing to get value from Linkbait; you'll often receive man emails and comments, use your new profile to launch new apps... He shows some examples...

Cameron Otthus (spelling) from ACS. Track your buzz because your reputation depends on it. Tools to track: Blog search engines, conversation tracking, message boards. Track the right terms, subscribe to the RSS feeds for those terms (company name, company URL, product names, public faces, etc.) Manage your buzz; what are people saying about you? Is this good or bad? You need to join the conversation because it keeps your buzz going. If the buzz is bad, look to turn the buzz around. He gave an example of about the bottle of aspirin Google sent a guy at Marketing Pilgrim which generated a lot of buzz. You Tube is an other example, the CEO of YouTube had a lot of bad negative buzz about privacy issues. The CEO got up and spoke out that they don't want to be bought. He created a controversy and took the focus off the negative buzz. If the buzz is good, keep the buzz going. ClaimID is a company that helps you manage your personal online reputation company. ClaimID always participates in the conversation. Naymz buzz is ClaimID's closest competitor, but ClaimID, he says, is better. He then shows the Diet Coke Mentos commercial on YouTube, it created a lot of buzz on Mentos. Mentos embrased this, but Coke responded negatively to it. Mentos spike continued to grow based on that. Always want to embrace your buzz. You also have to measure your buzz; backlinks, brand image, trends and new customers, yahoo site explorer, blog search engines, google trends, opinmin and analytics. Most important thing with linkbait is being original.

Jennifer Laycok from Search Engine Guide. She starts off by saying if she pulls off going into labor while giving this presentation will be the ultimate linkbait. Why link baiting and viral marketing? The cost is the idea, not the marketing. Any idea wont do it, you must be something worth talking about. Once you get that idea there is almost no cost to it. It created brand evangelists, gives people a reason to talk about your product, like Mentos. Link baiting is driven by passion, there is a better response that comes with that plus there is a rapid response rate to the bait. There is also a downside to link bait, i.e. the subservient chicken, did it sell chicken? It was not about selling chicken, it was about awareness. And one thing they did get was awareness. They had hundreds of millions of visits, and average time on site was seven minutes! They did make their brand cool and introduced them to a whole new generation. An other downside is that there is also a lack of brand control. Unbridled growth, make sure you can control how quickly it will grow. It is also hard to measure the impact of the campaign. Creating these ideas? ask yourself what sparks passion in your customers? Also, what hasn't been done before? How will the idea benefit your users? Will your audience risk their own reputation on it? Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader and not the originator. A good viral marketing idea is one that builds and works through relationships. Getting started; give away products or services, attract eye balls and talk by offering free things, free offer to select spark talk. Make it easy to spread the world. Scalability; make sure you can handle it. Exploit motivators, people want to be cool, give them a chance (gmail invites). Also use existing networks. Take advantage of others people's resources, use up someone else's web site space. People are talking and linking CGM... Understand the image of a good post and bad post. She talks about her 30 day lactivist project; launch a new business and promote an existing business with no money. She got people talking about it by arousing their desires, people wanted to donate services and products, learn people's names in the industry, and show respect for others. Did it work? 6 months later, the site made $2,500 in profit and $1,000 donated. NYTimes, Denver Post, more than 1,000 incoming links making up 75% of traffic, 36,000+ unique visitors.

Chris Boggs from Avenue A / Razorfish is last up. He plugs SER, SEW, and his company. He then discusses how about marrying SEO and viral marketing, and link baiting is one method. He shows off how communities and blogs within an industry drive some great buzz, he even brought up the cartoonbarry.com/link-farm.html page, also SEW forums, SEOMoz's resources section, of course the lactivist, also Cameron's blog, He shows blogrolls, forum rolls, keep the link circle going. He then brings up the Search Engine Roundtable, a post he made on how Gary Price emailed him about a post and how he linked to it and then linked to more. He then brings up the Agency.com's "Subway pitch" story, and how it generated some bad buzz. Link baiting cannot just put the bait on the hook, you have to throw it out (building), some people say the bait is enough. He believes you need to do link building for effective link baiting. You have to get it out there. How do you measure success of a link baiting campaign? Use a link analysis tool, like the WebBuildPages tool (link?). There is the good and the bad, customer service issue with comcast (comcast guy nap on couch while waiting). SaveToby.com, check it out. Gives a Folgers link bait example, Tolerate mornings. Television and Cinema are kings of viral marketing; i.e. Lost (hanso foundation), "A scanner darkly." A terrifying message from Al Gore" youtube video. "The Church of the flying spaghetti monster," too funny, google it.

Great session, Rand no links needed, and Chris - excellent!

Detlev modded up this sessions.

AOL was up first, The old was in the business of sending out CDs. AOL is giving everything away for free. They are going from being an ISP to a portal. They changed their entire business model. 2006 goals include to publish and SEO their content to everyone can discover it. The are basically taking a bottom up approach these new days. They look at the different search engines, and they drive people to their properties, then they drive people to AOL Search to drive people to other AOL properties and so on. The SEO/SEM Team becomes part of their DNA. They have two teams, SEM is more centralized (business priorities, holistic view), SEO is more cross functional. They developed SEO standards and education. The look at optimization and then track and measure. With paid search they look how do they monetize search? understanding the traffic quality and recirculation and lifetime value, ads, search revenues and commerce. They also look at internal reporting. The then back this data into CPC to meet ROI. Can AOL really make this work? AOL sees that SEO pays off, they continue to see month over month growth with the majority of the traffic coming from non-members. She shows a Google search on superbowl commercials and how they rank number two. They saw a 60% increase in traffic from organic search and 130% increase in page views from organic search. SEM, paid search, 18% increase in traffic from paid search and 39% increase in page views from paid search. AOL is serious, look at the NY Times headlines that says so. She shows how Yahoo! almost directly copied AOL's home page.

Todd Simms from Business.com. Business.com built 65,000 business categories and subscategories, prior to thinking about SEO. Their approach is to do well by users, will lead to doing well with search engines. On page SEO - category page treatment. Title before was "accounting information" and after SEO it was "accountants and accounting services." Pretty name; before it was "Customer relationship management" and then "CRM." Description before was "Resources for getting a business started" and changed to "Vendors that specialize in helping entrepreneurs start a business. Resources for how to start a small business and providers of new startup business ideas." #2 was the PageRank distribution, the internal linking, they made links to the most important sections of the site on the home page. #3 is off page SEO, with a clean link strategy, shows the business directory link on Forbes.com, "powered by Business.com."

Joe Morin is next up. They renamed the main directory categories of business.com, they did keyword research using their own directory's conversion rate and ROI, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Yahoo and Google suggestion tools and end user paid directory listings. They move content to the root domain, less clicks to conversion and higher PageRank. Issues include; canonical issues, internal link popularity is channeled to the home page, redirects using 301s. Local.com review: Launched a year ago, it is a search engine and directory, with a challenging structure. There were robots.txt issues, canonical issues and redirect issues. Search engines are learning how to play on each other (shows the SES Party Rule #1 in 2003). He then shows some candid pictures of search engine reps. That is all.

David Roth the SEM Directory of Yahoo!. He snagged AOL back saying that I am happy AOL learned that you don't have to require people to pay to access your home page. Funny guy. He was a search guy from way back... he talks a bit about his personal history as a rock star, seriously as an SEM. He joined Yahoo! about four months ago. Yahoo! is an online company with a lot of products to sell. Why SEM?; everyone knows SEM is the best way to acquire customers, Yahoo! has extensive SEM campaigns and more. Yahoo! is engaged in SEM for a large number of properties like; personals, small business, domains, stores, shopping, travel, autos, broadband, music, etc. Within paid search they have lots of campaigns, lots of keywords, lots of marketing. With SEO they are developing a centralized program, SEO guidelines, standards, etc. Yahoo! also does affiliate stuff; he recommends you have keyword policies for your affiliates. Business models; subscription models, conversion (messenger), transactional, lead generation and CPM revenue (media). LTV optimization; what is the lifetime value of a conversion (subscription, referral, CPM/CPC), What is the net present value of that lifetime revenue stream, what is the acceptable profit margin on NPV, monthly scorecard for all business units and channels. Managing; which should be centralized versus decentralized? Business owners know their business. SEMs know SEM. Managing the tradeoffs. Adding the centralizes resources; mac efficiency and scale and maintain business knowledge. Manage against a single standard. Also allow budget mobility to incentives stakeholder between channels and business units. What should be done in-house versus outsourced? Yahoo! uses a mix between in and out house. SEM infrastructure exists within Yahoo!. Yahoo! will continue to leverage agency relationships to gain industry expertise, time to market. Yahoo! has built and will continue to build, strategic pieces of SEM infrastructure.

Q & A now, so I will be leaving...

Big Ideas For Small Sites & Small Budgets

Moderated by Anne Kennedy. I got in right as Jennifer Laycock was introduced for the first presentation. She is the Editor of the Search Engine Guide.

The Internet was supposed to be the “great equalizer.” The old saying was nobody knows you are a dog. That is not really the fact. Common sense is the great equalizer. Coming to SES means that you should learn how to use the common sense you already have, and convert that business acumen to the Internet. You are only as good as your ideas. Forget about “chasing the algorithm.” You do not have time to be the SEO experts, so you should have a philosophy of forgetting about magic formulas, and again, get back to common marketing sense.

“The Pinocchio Effect” The whole story is that P was a puppet, and wanted to be a little boy. SE’s want this same thing, wanting to be like a human instead of a mindless program. What SE’s have found, is that when you “create a magical formula,” others will reverse-engineer it. Keyword densities, etc… This is not the type of thing that can last long term (just the math). How does a computer make a judgment and how can you use your common sense to overcome any changes. Think about the past: progression of link analysis from numbers only to link text. The moved to link quality, since people learned to “play the system.” Now it’s not just what you say and how many you have, but do the others have “authority.” In the last year, we have seen Link Age becoming a bigger factor. What is the next step the search engines will use to replicate human judgment in regards to linking.

The Pinocchio effect in action now. How many have heard of Sandbox? Do you think it is affecting your site? The truth is that there is no sandbox. There would be no reason for an SE to say, if your site is brand new, you cannot rank. Let’s talk about a real life example from Columbia Ohio. If a new Chinese place opens, since there are already 50 of them, it may take a while for you to check it out. If, however, the first Ethiopian restaurant opens, it would more likely be visited first. From an SE POV, if you are one of a million sites that has “mortgages,” it will take a while. This is a “raised barrier of entry.” If, conversely, you have a brand new popular widget with not many competing sites, you will see results within a few weeks, probably.

Where is Pinocchio going in the future? Any number of things we as people use to judge the popularity/acceptability of sites. Perhaps G will start tracking click throughs, in the way that they do in the Google Quality Score for the paid search. Google is adding a feature where if you click on your back button, you may see an added box to the results which says “was this link helpful.” Very big news. If you are the number one listing and people click on it but often hit “Back,” it may need to be moved down?

Speaks briefly about Latent Semantic Indexing and how SE’s become more able to tell what a site is really about. It is all going to be about the old writing good content that people (and Pinocchio) like to read. Number one rule in organic Search: Speak the customer’s language. Let the businesses and PR/Legal department worry about including their terminologies, and add what people want to read. Next briefly touches on the search buying cycle. Depending on what you sell and how you sell it, you may want to target in any of the three cycle periods: Interest, research, and Purchase. Build yourself as a resource during the Interest area, for example. Use different keywords (longer tail” as yku move to research and purchase points. Understand the intent behind different searches and utilize that knowledge.

Number one rule of PPC…it’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers! Just because it is a higher CPC does not mean it is converting better. You have to track actionable item interaction by visitors. If you do not know what converts best, you are wasting time. PPC without metrics is like launching tv, yellow pages, and direct mail on the same day without tracking them. #1 rule for small businesses when link building: It is relationship building! Must be treated like working with a local business association. Just like in person, the best referrals you will get are from people that you have built relationships with and that trust your site. A link is the same as an online referral – remember someone’s reputation is on the line. You would not walk into the business association meeting and just throw a bunch of business cards in the air and walk out. The best way to get a link si to earn it – let others do your linking for you.

You can catch more flies with honey. “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” This book by Dale Carnegie translates very well from 1936 to how Internet marketing works now. He spoke of viral marketing, talking in terms of other people’s interests, and even PR. Online reputation management applies very closely. If you are wrong, admit it quickly.

Matt McGee from One World Telecommunications
So can small businesses compete? He is a firm believer based on experience that you can. Work smarter, work harder, and be more creative in your search engine marketing. Work smarter: first question: are you going to hire and SEO/SEM or do it yourself? Work harder: Small businesses can react much more quickly to opportunities. Be more creative: “Alternative SEM” and how to get away from the main SE’s.

Work Smarter: Choosing an SEO/SEM. 4 things: Trust (are you getting actual answers or just a sales pitch? Do not hesitate to ask for references – note some will not be able to tell you all of them due to NDA’s), risk comfort level (Black hat, White hat, grey hat, etc…fact is there are different levels of aggression when you are working on SEO or SEM. What is your risk comfort level?), Measuring success (think beyond getting the top ranking – use ROI, etc, to make sure you have clearly defined measurement goals), and Cost. Recommends some areas to find businesses, includes SEMPO, SEO Consultants Directory, SEO Dex, Top SEO’s, SEOPros.org, SEMList.com. Do some investigation and figure out what the qualifications process are to be in these types of lists.

Options for do-it-yourself SEO/SEM. Use books and training seminars. Plenty of good books include SEOBook (Aaron Wall), Small Business Guide To Search Engine Marketing (by fellow panelist Jennifer), Search Engine Marketing Guide (Dan Thies), most recently: Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day. (J. Grappone G. Couzin). Seminars: SES, Search Engine College, SEO Research Labs, Search Engine Workshops (one more I missed).

How is Local search a good way to “Work Harder?” Local search targets buyers! Lists a bunch of local search options from the big Yahoo’s down to Merchant Circle, Yelp, and TrueLocal. You do not know which of these will grow into a true power. Local search is not a big source of Direct traffic, but it can be valuable traffic. Briefly describes one success story from the use of local search. Reemphasizes that this is an area for good growth. Shows some good numbers but is moving through slides too quickly for me to catch while typing what he is saying (sorry).

Use Alternative SEM. Try participation marketing in message boards, discussion groups, social networking groups, etc, where people do not mind if you are talking about your business. Make sure that you connect, not alienate. One that he likes for Small Businesses to use is Flickr. This is a lot more than just photo sharing – there are groups for many different hobbies/industries. For example, if you own a pet shop, join pet/animal-related groups. How to market on Flickr? Use your URL when you create a screen name. Upload your logo as your buddy icon. Make your business profile not “spammy.” Don’t spam, you want to “market without making it look like you are marketing.” In conclusion, remember: work smarter, work harder, and be more creative. Go connect with your customers rather than waiting for them to come to you.

John Carcutt from AppliedSEO.com
Will focus on PPC. He has found he can get past the big guys. You do not have to be Number 1, you do not need to beat Amazon. Define the goals that are profitable, and make your presence level a profitable one. You can find ways to outperform your larger competition . Use tighter product focus, you can keep in better touch wit your customers, and you have faster reaction time. All of this works organically as well as in PPC. In terms of competing in PPC, you can not let your competition pile cash on top of you and dominate the market. You have to stop this by predicting. “Become a Keyword Psychic” You need to know ahead of time what/how people are searching. Keep abreast of changes in “how people talk” (natural language keywords). Example: “Inkjet cartridge” could be a search for: HP 56, HP56 (no space), HP 56 black, remanufactured HP 56, etc…) so one inkjet cartridge has literally thousands of kw combinations.

Recommends using Yahoo’s exact match, since you can save more money this way. He describes how an exact match longer tail keyword will always outrank the broad match for that search, even if you only bid 10% of the broad match bid. (This was also explained on Monday very well in the Compare and Contrast – Ad program Strategies session by Patricia Hursh). Highly recommends Google Analytics as a free alternative to NetTracker, WebTrends, etc. Suggests Yahoo! Bid Maximizer free product that compares to Atlas Bid Maximizer.

First up in this session is Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link. She is going to go over some good tactics that you can use today to build links to your site. She talks about directories first, and says there are about 30 good ones out there, the rest aren’t worth bothering with. She recommend to avoid directories hosting excessive search engine ads (takes away from your listing). Check pages for no-follow and robots.txt. Steer clear of directories with a lot of site wides. Look for directories with RSS feeds. A couple of other tactics that work for finding information about your competitors. Look at Marketleap, PubSub, Bot A Blog, Backlink Analyzer. Other traditional sources include BBB OnLine, Chamber of Commerce and so on.

Build content she recommends, a lot of people are saying this and it really helps with gaining links. Create a corporate blog to support/complement your main website. Blogs generate links, attract press coverage, etc.. Debra also mentions that corporations are using wiki’s to promote there business. She gives the example of Ducati motorbikes and a blog they created to promote their brand. Her next tip is to find influential bloggers, taggers and media contacts. Use the term “popular” in searches on del.icio.us to people that are tagging and will possibly review your website.

Next the good stuff, she goes into getting links from MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr. Each of these sties allow clean HTML links in the profiles. Those links accrue PageRank. Flickr does allow comments and allows urls in there. She goes into an interesting example about Beer For Dogs. It was a business that they started in their garage and had no money. They eventually figured out they needed a website and needed to reach people with dogs and money. They created promotions to display on YouTube, which got some press and earned them a premier video ad on CBS worth a substantial amount of money. They have only been online four months. Debra recommends to use the basics as a baseline. Very well researched presentation.

Up second was Eric Ward, he does a great presentation about Link Reclamation and since it’s rather thorough, I will point you to his site instead – http://www.ericward.com/ses/linking_strategies.html or your can get a copy in the conference handbook. Great stuff there, I would recommend checking it out.

Greg Boser was up third from Web Guerilla, and starts to talk link building strategy. He recommends to identify competitors in your industry first, select the top 5 and then reverse engineer their links trying to find out where they are getting their links. What are their tactics? He says that web tool distribution is very popular and attracts a good number of links. Greg says that people something focus to much on anchor text links, but you can also get some help from working on the ALT text of an image link. Software distribution is very helpful, many software download sites will allow links in the software/company profile. Affiliate programs are another area that works but often overlooked. Develop or use a system that enables you to get credit for your affiliate links. Awards and contents are great for building links. Seomoz did Web 2.0 awards and reviewed a lot of sites, did extremely well. He also talks about buying links brielfly. Only purchase links from sites that have pagerank that is similar to the average sites in your space. Contact sites that sell advertising and ask if they can provide straight links. Don’t use identical anchor text across all your sites. Search for non-profit organization with sponsor pages. Great links for very little money. He also talks about blogging is the quickest way to develop links. If the blog is new, consider turning comments off. “Pre-blog” on domain of upcoming projects. Learn the art of “link baiting”. Good information from Greg.

Barbara Coll headed up moderator duties for this panel that includes familiar faces Bill Hunt of Global Strategies International and Marshall Simmonnds of the New York Times. It also includes Kara Jariwaia from Cisco.

First up is Bill Hunt.

Audience poll: How many of you are big brands? Over half.
How many of you have multiple people attending? About half

Bill mentions he's seen this as a trend.

IBM current results, 55 million pages in Google, 5,000 terms in top 5, search is 25% of all traffic, keyword research in all marketing.

Search as we know it (meta tag edits) is over. Times are changing. Multiple people are attending conferences, many brands are hiring in-house search marketers.

New product launches make search critical.

Search is being integrated into all marketing on a global level.

Search Maturity Lifecycle
1. Phase I: Search is a functional task
2. Phase II: Search has moved from functional task to tactical implementation
3. Phase III: Search is integral to the business and is a centralized solution
4. Phase IV: Search is integrated globally with support for OEM partners. Search is mission critical to the business.

5 Steps to success for big sites
1. Leverage the business case
2. Education and communication
3. Remove crawl barriers
4. Leverage page templates to fix multiple pages
5. Leverage your size for links

Opportunity matirx - estimate what opportunity there is if you engage a search campaign. Use this to sell the idea of a search campaign and to motivate managers.

Importance of understanding intent - In addition to ranking, the percent of demand depends on how well you pages match searchers intent. Paying attention to this can mean incremental increases in conversions and sales.

Semantic mapping of keywords - Segmenting and profiling of searchers based on intent and position is the "Decision to research cycle" is critical to a richer experience. Many brands use language that is not indicative of what people search on.

Update the styleguide to be search engine friendly and the effect can be site wide.

Use a "Search Health Report". Monitor on an ongoing basis to indentify possible issues.

Next up is Marshall Simmonds who works with New York Tiumes that also owns About.com, International Herald Tribune and the Boston Globe.

When About.com was acquired, one of the first steps was education about search.

5 Steps
1. Organize. Reach out to individuals as point people at each company. Engaged a team of marketing, technology, research, editorial and sales.
2. Analyze. Found out where the low hanging fruit was to show what kind of impact search can have.
Got control over the templates, cleaned up code, global search/replace, fixed redirects and Title tag naming.
3. Education. This is an ongoing process with editorial staff and content producers. With About.com the goal was that anything coming "out of the shoot", it would be optimized. The New York Times presented a host of other issues. Provide ongoing on education so the company understands search and to integrate it at the root level. Training was customized by department according to how that department's activities would affect search.
4. Execute strategy and measure results. Metrics are critical starting with baseline measurement and including projections as well as causes of variations such as seasonality.
5. Track your results. Quantify your actions. Get buy-in from IT.

Last up is Kara Jariwaia, a search marketing strategist from Cisco..
Kara talks about the challenges faced by Cisco: internal demand, word competition and leveraging partner networks. Cisco has over 80,000 web pages with 5,000 products.

Embrace internal demand: Obstacles include large product portfolio, frequent product launches, local and global audience. Solutions include prioritized goals, global implementation, SEO training, keyword research and consult with external consultants.

Managing word competition. Example, "VoIP". MarCom, Tech support, Product Team. How to figure out which group gets the SEO resources for this phrase? It depends on what the customer is expecting. Also groups keywords into tiers: tier one, tier two, etc.

Equalize your partner network. Current links showed most going to Cisco home page. Implemented an action to ask partners to link to more relevant internal pages. Focus on the most influential (in terms of page rank and authority) partners for links.

How do you motivate the partner to change the way they link? Train partners on the value of search. Helping a partner rank well, it helps take up "shelf space" in the search results.

Recommendations: Build a search strategy, centralize your search efforts, coordinate a cohesive link program.

Danny walked up to the stage with Eric. They are broadcasting this live, so the podcast will be archived also for later.

Q: He asked him about Eric saying don't bet against the Internet. Danny asked who is betting against the Internet?
A: Eric first thanked everyone for coming and asked if everyone enjoyed the party. He then answers the questions. 20 years ago people were involved in the PC client model. What is interesting is that there was a business model built by Oracle to sell this stuff. There is a new model emerging, and people do not understand how big this opportunity is. "Cloud computing" If they have the right type of access, you can get access to these applications, from any device. This is the same talk he gave in this room ten years ago about the "network computer." In the past ten years, AJAX, LAMP came out and now we have it, and we also had the development of advertising. There is a new business model to fund this work, to enabled people access to these solutions. Often lot of people are still doing this the old way. Proprietary software versus open standards.

Q: Danny brings the NY Times up about the woman who was found via token data from the AOL slip up. He said there are tons of privacy issues. What do you do to protect this? Government taking it, accidents, etc....
A: This is obviously a terrible thing. The data was not anonymized and it was a mistake. If Google were to make this mistake, it would be a terrible thing. They have lots and lots of systems to prevent this from happening at Google. They don't share everything in Google with everyone in Google. He describes a case where the government gave Google a subpoena that was over-broad, and they fought it in court. They take is so seriously that they fight it in court.

Q: Will Google destroy data they have?
A: Eric said they had this debate in Google. But they are take steps to prevent issues.

Q: He then asks about people using search engines to find details about people, public information out there. Are search engines pulling back to make this information harder to get? It is not directly a search engine issue, but....
A: He gives an example of an issue with this and that there are criminals, evil and bad people in this world. Google would be very concerned if data found on Google would hurt someone. They try to not index credit card numbers. He said Google made it easy for you to delete a phone number from the index. It is harder for things such as home addresses. The solution is that Google is an aggregator of information, and the publisher is the one publishing this information. He cites an example of an abortion hate site listing names, etc. of numbers of people who are pro.

Q: Would Google remove that site from the index?
A: They thought about it but thank god the sites dont rank well, since there arent so many crazy people in the world compared to the whole. But overall Google tries to do more good then bad.

Q: Transparency of Google, specifically Google must know the click fraud numbers but they don't publish the rate.
A: Last week they released a report to show click fraud numbers for each advertiser.

Q: Danny cites a forum thing where Google would not detail the information of the exchange rate used for AdWords.
A: Eric said he is sure they can address that specific case (good news for those advertisers).

Q: How much money is going into search versus content ads? When those figures are mixed it is hard to figure out if there are issues there.
A: Don't worry, there is no bubble with either contextual or search ads. They are both doing well. They historically did not want to give out detailed information because (1) competitive reasons and (2) they don't want to give out information that may be assumed or misconstrued.

Q: Do you think that may change with adding more channels? TV, Radio ads?
A: It could. Google is more focused from the advertisers questions versus the analysts questions. They want to give the advertiser the data they want. They are less concerned about answering analysts question (cool statement).

Q: Search ads, contextual ads, then image ads, now radio ads and soon tv?
A: Radio thing is coming and they are also moving into new areas. (1) Video ads to video content ON THE WEB (that we knew, i.e. MTV deal) and (2) with MySpace with nearly a 100M users, it is a whole new category people, it is an opportunity to advertisers to reach an audience you are not reaching today.

Q: We are looking for measurable ads. With radio and TV, the metrics are laughable.
A: Remember these are early days. Targeted measurable tv and radio ads are starting now. We are thinking about using our ad system for every form of advertising. Because it is a big opportunity to provide value to both advertisers and consumers (more targeted ads to you). One of the outcomes, if they do this right, is that you should end up with fewer but more relevant ads, in more context. Google's analysis says they have a "good shot at this."

Q: Why are search engines now working together? What changed?
A: It has always been our goal to work together. It is in all of our individual interests for SEs to talk with each other. Specifically with click fraud, standardization of ad formats, etc.

Q: AdSense is this huge boom for publishers... But there is a lot of junk out of the Web. You need to fight to keep this stuff out of organic and paid listings. Should Google be stomping down harder?
A: These are signs of success, it has been far more successful before. A lot of people who were unable to make money to do their sites, now have this money. Overall it has been a great outcome. Of course, with anything like this you have abuses. They anticipate for this and they have algorithms for it. But they can never do everything. But they continue to work towards getting it better.

Q: The way I dialog with search engines is boring. Simple, plain, etc.
A: Eric said people like that.
Q: What is the next big thing?
A: Many people are happy with the simple Google search. They also have a personalized version of Google (IGoogle), that has RSS, gadgets, etc. It is possible to take this and give yourself a uniquely more complex version of search. Second answer is that people are taking Google search and embedding it into their portals and online communities. So you will have these choices to pick from and people will choose what they like best.

Q: Google's claim to fain was link analysis. Link economy has grown out of that. But is it too late?
A: Google's fundamental goal is to drive the most relevant search result. They want the perfect result. So they would make a decision on those technical questions based on that goal. We have many new ideas, on how they can used non link based solutions. The precise formula is only known by a few people in Google.

Q: Ecosystem question..
A: Google has to be careful about launching products that may step on people's rights, also it may be costly in terms of legal costs. Most legal cases are business negotiations done in a court room, that is his personal opinion and he hates to say that. They have to respect the copyright owners. The fair use law is not as crisply defined as you might want. In Google's case, the library work they are doing, being that they do not reproduce the whole book, and just have a snippet, that is good, in Google's opinion.

Q: Google is giving us everything, just give us the Google implant and ...
A: Eric said we are working on that, do you want to be the beta user?
Q: How do you keep people from fearing you?
A: That is why Google is trying to be more transparent. These products are coming out because they want to solve the problem with data online. The test they apply is does it fundamentally effect a users online experience in a positive manner. Our primary goal is not about making money with these new products, but making their users more happy online. Google is one click away from searchers going to a new search engine. So they try to address this by solving the end user experience.

Q: Do you ever say you Google anything?
A: Cant say for legal reasons.

Q: How often do you personalize your search?
A: Thousands of times per day.

Q: When was the last time you clicked on an ad at Google?
A: All the time, he buys a lot online. He then plugged Google Checkout.

Q: What is your favorite Google product?
A: I use Google search the most but the most interesting one now is the Google certified buyer.

Q&A from audience?
Q: Will (searchers) users be able to control their click stream data?
A: He said that is a smart idea. They are already doing some of that.

Q: Someone asks about how algorithms are not good at user intent.
A: Eric talks about Google Co-op (topic links). Your question is at the root of where does algorithmic search goes. Even with search history, etc. they still dont have enough information.

Q: What is your current thought on eBay's response to Google Checkout?
A: eBay would have to comment on that. They are a good partner with Google. They told eBay that they want to integrate with PayPal. But he doesnt know the details.

Q: Rand asks, The trust people place in your queries.
A: I am not sure there is confusion with this? Google is not a truth machine. They do the best job they can. They dont think they will get the perfect answer but they keep trying.

Because of the SES coverage, I didn't have much time this morning to continue our Search Marketing forum coverage. So here is a short hit list of items we hope to get to in the next several days. I.e. catch up items.

• Google to distribute MTV programming - WebmasterWorld
• Google To Identify Malware Sites In Search Results - WebmasterWorld
• A Modern Etiquette for Adsense - WebmasterWorld
• Does anyone here still use Google to actually "search"? - WebmasterWorld
• Yahoo Negative KW Advanced Match - WebmasterWorld
• PhotoSynth - Anyone else following this? - DigitalPoint Forums
• New Google Documentary - released Video 19th July - DigitalPoint Forums
• how to avoid clicking on your ads - DigitalPoint Forums
• Sergey Brins Original Web Page - Cre8asite Forums

Just some threads on our hit list at the Search Engine Roundtable.

This is a very full panel today with 7 speakers. They are Peter Hershberg, David Jakubowski, Jakob Nielsen, Dana Todd, Todd Malicoat, Jennifer Slegg, and Scott Orth. Jeffery K. Rohrs is moderating this thread. It should be a good and probably entertaining thread where the panelists will be able to voice opinions. Hopefully there will be a little calamity and vivious agreements and disagreements about this subject.

It opens up talking about an article that Jakob Nielsen wrote called “Search Engine as Leeches on the Web”. He talks about how search engines extract too much of the web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. He shows an eye tracking study, where the user is creating for information about LaGuardia in which the airport was named after. His point is that the search engine is taking the content from the website and displaying it on the search results page. The search engine didn’t create this content or pay for it, and they are displaying the content. There are too many free services being created just to drive traffic to the search engines. He says that search engines are becoming answer engines.

They next define the term “leech” and point to an article that Danny Sullivan wrote about search engines being leeches and that people are becoming to dependent on search engines for answers. Jeff next directs a question to David from MSN about his thoughts on the article. David says it was an interesting article, but at the same time there isn’t a line from webmasters saying please don’t send me traffic. He says when you think of a search engine as a consumer vehicle that a search engine can free up content and let them access it. In the early days, portals were thought to open up the web to allow people to get information from the web. He asks, “what does the user want?” They want easy access to the information they want. So the industry that has evolved around the search engines is wonderful because they help deliver the information to the people.

Jeff goes into asking about robots.txt and which consultants on the panel that have clients excluding the search engines. Dana replies its on a selective basis or to prevent them from getting mirrored content. Peter says they have 0 clients excluding the search engines from spidering them. They do have a number of advertisers, that are considering possibly excluding vertical search engines. Syndicating their content out though is good. He says that developing tools to help users shift through the content is a great thing. Jakob starts talking about farmers, how using the resources correctly is smart. Basically the websites can’t afford to exclude the search engines. He says that the interaction and branding a website has on a website is lost when it’s content is being presented in the search engines. He says you need to build you customer loyalty. Dana asks that if search engines should start paying us to include our content in there engines. Scott points out that they want the lines of text in the search engine and they wish they could have more text in the search result pages.

Jeff asks Jennifer about the bandwidth issues and how a search engine disrupts the a business. She tells the story about how yahoo publisher network bot came in high bandwidth for 83,000 times sucking up 4gigs of bandwidth. She says she blogged about the issue. Yahoo figured out the issue and stopped it. Next Jakob talks about hidden costs. He mentions the Myspace and Fox deal and how this deal actually downgrades those sites possibilities to develop other services because everywhere you go on MySpace or Fox in the future you will be blasted with search boxes. This is driving people to those search boxes and not other features or services. David from MSN next talks about keeping the search engines skewed towards more the consumers. Jeff next talks about Google Analytics and how this can expose your data to Google. He asks if the panelists would recommend this to their clients. Jennifer says this would be giving to much data. You care already giving them your Adsense data, and then you could give them your conversion data, that is a bit too much. Todd makes the point that the engines know the seasonality of certain times periods and how CPC costs rise. Giving Google this data may not be a good idea because they could control the minimum CPC’s in those categories. Dana makes the point that the toolbar already knows your upstream and downstream data with all the Google Toolbars installed. Jennifer makes the disclaimer that Google says they don’t use the data for anything “evil”. Scott says the Google free analytics tool isn’t that great to begin with.

Jeff next talks about search engines as a black box. How are things done behind the scenes? Are there any burrs under the saddle that really make your upset? Dana says that the industry is created around technology. She says there is impediment to innovation if they don’t have all the information needed to create better solutions. Rather than see innovations to create efficacy to help us manage our time, the innovation are being created just to keep up with everything. She says she wants to see an audit trail, of all the tracks along the way, and maybe where the click came from. It sort of feels like a 2.3% conversion. Good point.

David from MSN talks about the search engine perspective. There are two types of groups, one that wants the in-depth informaiton and the other that wants it simple. He talks about sophisticated marketers that require that info, but then there are less sophisticated marketers that don’t need that much info. He says the status quo of the industry is not enough. Microsoft is committed to increased audience intelligence. He says the trick is that when you talk to the different groups. The simple marketers want the data simple and easier, while the sophisticated marketers want more information and empowerment. Jakob talks about the advertising and extracting too much value. He says in any auction system the value can be bid up to high so that there is not enough profit margin. So the search engines are making all the money and the companies are all competing for the very slim profit margin. He examines that anything you can do to maximize customer loyalty becomes more valuable as the cost of that advertising goes up. Email newsletters and things like the side bar in Windows Vista to communicate. Peter also mentions that search is an integrate point to get other things, such as immediately going to a search engine when you see something interesting to find more about it.

Jeff then asks about what things in the current market you would like to change? Dana says she says that landing page relevance should not determine my price and then holding us ransom to get our clicks back. Peter says this tries to align things for everyone and create a better standard and higher conversion. Dana says that some advertisers are told not to touch their campaigns and they listen. When did we get afraid of our advertising?!? If I do touch it then somehow I might end up in penalty land if we makes any changes! And then the customer service is so bad, it just sucks all around. Dana is saying we don’t want to control the algorithm. PPC has more control available. Todd makes the point that the relationship may be abusive but its better than nothing, its an opt-in thing.

Jeff he next talks about Eddie Haskell, was the fictional character from Leave It to Beaver, where he kiss Ms. Cleaver but then punches Beaver. Funny. He is basically asking about how search engines are bypassing SEM’s. The panelists say that there is benefit in working with agencies. David says he would get on the phone with the client and recommend working with agencies. Peter talks about getting data from the engines to make better decisions and that we can crunch the numbers. He also mentions how Google wants to charge for the API, something that was originally free and how that hurts the agencies and people. He says its hypocritical for a company who recommend its employees spend 20% of its free time on innovative projects. Scott talks about what benefit is for it the engine to lower your CPC to improve your conversion if they put you 5 or 8th position. Instead the only thing that happens is the CPC keeps going up from month to month.

Jeff next talks about the last part of Jakob articles about the other things you can do to diversify your online marketing. They are: brand building, retention marketing (email, direct mail), request marketing, discussion groups & communities, affiliate programs, newsfeeds, url promotion on physical products, where possible connect your service to proprietary hardware, investigate in mobile services, and traditional marketing. Dana talks about how search engines need to differentiate themselves from each other. She gives the example how the search engine results where all the same. Jakob agrees they are mediocre today. Users are not always being led to the sites that will help them. They are popular places but that helpful all the time. He says the search engines are better than searches on website or internal website. He recommend have a good internal search to keep them there. David talks about how technology has tremendously excelled in the last several years. Search is definitely a software problem. He says that people that shape the market share are the people at this conference.

Q: A member from audience asks about if a client has 48,000 real estate listings, would it be a good idea to give those listing to Google in the Co-op.

A: That is a tough question. It tough because that real estate section on co-op is not indexable and can’t be put on other engines. Todd recommended you will need to evaluate the benefit from it and if its worth it to try.

Q: Was Google and Yahoo invited here? MSN showed up.
A: They were invited, but can’t say for one way or another if they declined or not. There were originally 9 people on this panel.

Jeff then mentions that search engines are “self interested” partners. Its not a black and white situation, there is self interest there. They need to make money. Dana talks about a publication from Bearns Sterns, called the Google Ecosystem. Things don’t stop here, there is good and bad. There is an ecosystem associated with the search engines. We all are here because of them, and can profit from them. We are all committed to making this happen, because it’s an exciting place and it gets more exciting all the time. We need to have some respect. We should incentive it for us, why should we stay around. She asks if Jakob put a no spider on his site. Take a stand she says. Go Dana Todd lead the revolution!

Dana then talks about how Google can object to a companies business model through their quality score system and evaluating the page. That is wrong. That is at the expense of the business. What if Google doesn’t like the YPN is on the landing page, they could inflate the CPC and cause them to use Adsense. Even though Google isn’t doing this, it would be pretty scary if they started. There are cases of false positives but some of the panelists agree there is some good things going on with it.

Detlev is the mod.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz is up first. Yesterday morning Chris Sherman said the algorithms of search engines have reached their max. Rand says most would tend to agree. He said lets look at the last two years of link analysis. What is a manipulative link? What are algorithmic techniques combating this by the engines? Then he will look at some solutions. Manipulative links? She shows a link to free poker tournaments in her blog, via a comment spam link, but she didn't use the nofollow attribute. If you go to technorati, and add your blog links, is that a manipulative link? He then mentions the DP Coop links and said it doesnt work now. He then shows the W3C page that had bought links on them. He shows a little diagram showing off ways to detect spam links. The DMOZ directory clones are an other method that have been dropped. He then brings up the Google Trends page, zillow the term had a major spike, that tells Google that these searches are legitimate searches and you can expect that level of links developed. They also have Google Analytics and they can (they say the dont) use that data for ranking purposes. You also have free WiFi in San Francisco, but what will they do with that data? Google has manual link identification site identification systems. He then brings up the SandBox, "throwing out the baby with the bath water." Not all sites have to go through the SandBox, i.e. Zillow. He shows an example of the Sand Box at Google for Bill's SEO By The Search query. Sand Box is about trust, Rand says. Launching with a bang is a good way to bypass the Sand Box. Also you can link build slowly and naturally, will help. Link building practices; links via email (not automated), gaining attention, link baiting, trust sites, regional sites, press releases. Subdomain issues, non english sites do well, and also wiki, technorati, mysapce and other web 2.0 sites get around this. He then shows off some SEOMoz.org resources.

Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea is next up (big mod Cre8asite forums). This should be pretty technical.... Stage One: one size fits all. The search engine index web, match queries, return results - that is how it was in the 90s. Stage two is understanding the users. Search engines index web, analyze queries, collect users info, match with intentions and return results. Stage 3, understanding people. Search engines index the web, analyze queries, map peoples' interest and return results based on that. He said that is what makes the MySpace Google deal interesting. He has a list of some of the stage two papers released, some by AltaVista, Excite, etc. In stage two we see user measure user behavior a lot; historical data patent application, bookmark manager patent application, web accelerator patent application and google suggest patent application. How does Google collect user data; personalized search and news, toolbar, isp data, gmail, etc... Retroactive answering of search queries; Google Alerts that looks at your search history and shows you news based on your search history (wow). On to stage 3, where Google understands people. InterestMap: Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations, "as a recommender systems become more central to people's lives, we must start modeling the person, rather than the user." "Why should recommenders be restricted to data fathered within the context of the application," i.e. partnering with other companies. InterestMap identifies interest from social profiles, maps passions, merges interests and passions with detail... Achieving results in the age of personalization; ranking reports dont help, log file analysis doesnt help as much as they did, you need to know your users better. He asks, when a customer buys from you on your e-commerce site, do you Google those people? (My comments: Who ever thinks that way, but he makes a good point). Bill adds that he spends a lot of patent application reviews and published summaries late last night on them at SEW Blog. He mentions one of outland research, about user interest and information - gender and sex ranking results based on that. (Bill, excellent job keeping this talk easy to understand).

Jon Glick from Become.com is last up. He said of all the stuff being put out there, what is being used. A patent is really a trade, they get exclusive rights to use this information for a number of years. Patents are used for: (1) red herrings (not going to be used but you know), (2) trade secrets (like Sand Box) are not in patents and (3) rumors, (4) missed it. How fast you change your content has an impact, including registration, when they first found the site, most recent crawl, and last time you changed the content on the site. They look for meaningful change (not just date changes). When a site moves IP Addresses, it is often re-evaluated, it shows a possible new ownership and change in parked status. Rate of change of links is tracked; most search engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandbox, link aging), a sudden jump in in-links can draw scrutiny from the spam cops (joining a major link network, interlinking of lots of domains), there are exceptions for spikes sites; editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blogs posts and lots of web searches. Tagging; unlikely to be used by major SEs because it is easy to keyword stuff, anchor text offers the same benefit with better source validation and SEs experienced this with the keyword meta tags and google experimenting with a closed system (Google Coop), very useful for multimedia content (images, video, audio, etc.) and it hasn't been heavily spammed. Quality Scores; editorial quality is now part of paid listings, yahoo also will have it in their panama release, any pages you submit will go through this review, it will most likely not impact your organic rankings. Evaluation of outlinks traditionally looking for who links into you and not who you link out to, but now search engines are looking at who you link out to, they use this for spam evaluation and give you a spam score to change the trust level of your site. AdSense links do not count against you, they are through redirects also, and also the nofollow attribute may make a difference. The use of personal data is not used heavily right now but it may be used soon, information sources include user registration, search history and yahoo groups, gmail, etc. Hurdles to search "getting personal"; SEs not sure what to do with all that information, multiple users/machines, people tend to search for what they don't know, and serious concerns with both privacy and perception. Zip Codes/IP may be used to improve local results, SEs already extraction local info from web pages and AdWords and YSM support geo-targeted bidding. Unusual stuff that actually does matter include URL length (short URLs are more authoritative, and crawl depth limits), and RSS feeds (theory is if you have RSS feeds you probably have fresh content, sites with RSS feeds are crawled more frequently, especially with Yahoo and you also get an extra line in your search result). Yahoo uses over 80 factors in ranking, small changes happen with almost every new index. Content, connectivity and outside opinion all matter.

Moderated by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, this session included: Greg Jarboe from SEO PR, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, and Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting.

Relates a metaphor for press release optimization as a shortcut. People initially looked at news search SEO as a shortcut tactic into search results. But the search engines have devalued links within press releases. However, there are opportunities and they are not shortcuts.

Classic model of communications was Pavlovian. "Who says what in what channel to whom with what effect?"

The problem with traditional public relations is that the "middlemen" (newspapers) are losing their jobs. So if you're in PR and trying to push your message to the same old channels, you're missing an audience.

NY Times, LA Times and San Jose Mercury News have all cut jobs. So if you're promoting stories the old way, good luck.

News search engines reverse the classic model of communications. Start with what the consumer is interested in. "Who seeks what in what channel from whom with what effect?"

The public as well as the media use news search engines daily. According to Pew Research Center, the audience for online news has jumped from 2% to 31% of Americans and the audience for nightly network news slipped from 42% to 28%. 75% of journalists search the internet for previous stories on their subject.

If you don't have a news search engine strategy, you're missing out on a significant trend.

People search differently on news search engines as they do on regular search engines. How can you find queries that are specific to news? Google News suggest, Yahoo News suggest.

Yahoo News, AOL News and GOogle News in top news sites. Yahoo News is by far the biggest. As such, your press releases should be optimized for Yahoo News and Google News should be secondary.

According to Outsell, knowledge workers in businesses trust press releases more than trade press as sources of information.

The hard part of news release optimization is not the optimization, it's measurement. The ideal is to track leads from clichthrough conversions.

Case Study Southwest Airlines:
SEO PR was able to track $3m in ticket sales to press releases. Describes the issues of using language in optimization that was consistent with the corporate message that was in contrast to what consumers search on. He overcame the objection by sharing keyword research.

New York Times is starting to optimize story titles for search engines.

There is a press release SEO workshop being held by Incisive Media on Friday.

Next up is Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting. Half of clients are non-profit and half are corporate.

Online news comsumption is big and growing. 50 million Americans are going online daily for news.

Technorati is tracking 50 million blogs. Bloggers are avid consumers of online news but most don't consider themselves as journalists.

Blogs act as a watchdog for mainstream media. Blogs are often sources of news for mainstream news. Example: "Dell Hell"

Journalists follow blogs. Increasingly blogs and news are grouped together.

Blogs appear in the results of some news search engines. Google News says they don't index blogs, but they do and appear next to mainstream media. The bottom line is that blogs can help you dominate news search results. Blogs get coverage in news search as well as regular search results.

Once a blog covers a source, it will often cover that same source again.

A way to get into Google News is to get covered by niche blogs. Don't assume that politically charged or low ranking blogs are not in Google News.

Topix shows blogs. AOL News does not include blogs unless they have a podcast.

Establish a blog outreach program. 50% of bloggers write about companies once per week. Only 21% report regular contact from companies they write about.

- Create a target list. Identify bloggers that match your topic. Search Technorati tag search.
- Use BlogPulse to qualify them and find what "neighborhood" they belong to.
- Develop relationships. Be familiar with the blog. Do not send unsolicited press releases.
- Be honest and transparent. Never offer to pay. Product tests and reviews can work well.

Although blogs are effective at getting into news search, they do not replace optimized releases. Do both.

Last up is Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus.

She cites an interview with Matt Cutts of Google. "There's no point in doing SEO stuff unless you have enough content and reputation in the community to be a contender."

In order to reach where your audience is, you need to go onlne.

Online Media Relations.

Old model: Company to wire service to journalists to media.
New model: Company to wire service to (simultaneously) to news, company web site and to target audience.
Or this model: Get your news on a trusted site that your target audience is already exposed to.

How?
- Research what keywords your audience is searching on
- See what web sites are appearing for those searches
- Engage in media relations with those web sites

Target other new media sites that pick up RSS feeds
- Use the social media press release
- If you send out press releases, be sure you are using a RSS feed
- Syndicate your content

Case study:
Skin lotion company that started creating an audience for the phrase "shielding lotion"

Researched online media that rank well for relevant phrases and engaged in media relations with those web sites.
- Created a news page using RSS on the client web site.
- Distributed articles

Resulted in "shielding lotion" going from non-existant search demand to becoming the most popular related phrase.

This should be an interesting session, Danny Sullivan is moderting this session. We have Jon Glick, ex-Yahooer now at Become.com, also have Bill Atchison, Dan Thies, Rajat Mukherjee of Yahoo and the new famed Vanessa Fox of Google. Brett Tabke is on my right, talking with Jon now about bad bots. Tim Converse is one row behind me on my left. Danny mentioned Brett's fight with bots and had Brett wave at the crowd.

Jon Glick up first. Robots are good at finding links and pulling that content. Bots pull the content but don't do the analysis. Bots are dumb, finicky and they cannot type. Bot friendly sites includes hypertext navigation, well ordered-hierarchical site and clear instructions in your robots.txt. Robot traps include; dynamic content, excessive parameters, and perpetual calendars. Use a robots.txt file to tell the bots what to or not do on your site. You can also used meta tags on a page by page basis, or you can also use the rel nofollow attribute. Well-behaved bots obey the robots.txt file and metatags, they identify themselves (they dont spoof), they dont crawl too aggressively, they provide FAQs, etc. When bots go bad, the most evil bots don't obey the robots.txt and metatags info. How do you detect these? look at your daily logs, do some real-time analysis. Dealing with misbehaving bots; don't hesitate to block them, sometimes just do a 24 hour block, block at the firewall level. You can also try put up a challenges, such as a text code in an image. Be careful who you block; track who gives you traffic.

Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs. Duplicate content is the same content presented on more than one URL. Most web sites do this to themselves. There is also near duplicate content also. There is a difference between filtered from the index and filtered from the search results. Duping yourself; duplicate URLs, shopping sites and near empty pages. Getting Duped; by screen scrapers, RSS feeds and proxy URLs. The impacts on traffic... 10 - 15% of traffic is organic search. After de-duping the site, 20 - 25% came from organic search. Revenue drop was "feelable." Reverse cloaking vs. scrapers: simple user agent detection, if the user agent is not a major SE spider insert; meta name="robots" content="noindex". Screen scrapers that steal an entries pages's HTML get a page that will not be indexed. Easily thwarted by someone who cares to but reduces duplication by scraping substantially. Links by proxy is an old trick. Hack someone else's site to create a link or redirect to one of your sites - either create a page or credit a URL using XSS attack... then link to it using a proxy URL. There are also public proxies that you can use. Proxy URLs as duplicates; thousands of public proxy servers, every URL on the web can be duplicated by them, proxy based duplicates when link to can affect duplicate content filtering. Public proxies pass along the user agent but proxies use their own IPs. How do you stop them? Spider validation vs. proxies; when you get a request from a search engine spider user agent, check the requesting IP address. This is dangerous so use with caution. But what if they get through? Change and rotate content; testimonials, news and headlines and use brute force. The most important page on your site is probably the home page, yet it is the least likely to get changed often (hmmm). Monitoring Dupes; set up monitoring for a signature SERP text that is unique to your pages, home page duplication is the #1 issue, use a second signature for internal pages and he then lists some tools. You can use the DMCA, digital millennium copyright act. Send the hosting provider or the search engines. I'll leave off the challenging the search engines slide.

Bill Atchison from CrawlWall.com is now up. He calls these bad bots, parasites. He said one day, a scraper took down his server. 10% of his traffic was from bad spiders, these parasites. Bad bots ignore robots.txt, spoof bot names, use multiple IPs. They want to get your data to make money. Motivations include, AdSense, YPN, affiliates. Who are these bots? Intelligence gathering bots, content scrapers, data aggregators, link checkers, privacy checkers, etc. Stealth bots vs. visible bots - visible bots are easy to block, the stealth bots are those masking as humans. How scraper bots use your content? He created the name CrawlWall to easily find pages that were unique to that keyword. He used that to locate sites that stole his content with the term CrawlWall. They took several web sites and scrambled the content together, to serve up Google AdSense. He sometimes feeds them back cookie information, so he can then track them better. He logs all this activity. Scrapers also cloak and hide your content. He shows two active proxies that hijack content, that crawled as Googlebot. How do you stop bots? Opt out bot blocking fails; robots.txt only works for the well behaved bots as the most bad bots ignore robots.txt except when trying to avoid spider traps. He went to an optin strategy. He said, only Google, Yahoo, etc. can come into my web site but that can get you intro trouble. You need to review your traffic prior to doing this. He finds Google Analytics very useful. He created a lot of rules to determine the difference between stealth bots versus a visitor. Some bots use cookies, very few bots execute JS, bots hardly every examine CSS files, rarely do bots download images, monitor speed and duration of site access, observe the quantity of page requests, and so on. He will then serve up a image access code to them. Robots.txt is spider trap because stealth crawlers reading this file expose themselves while trying to avoid spider traps. Also anyone visiting your privacy pages, it is probably not your visitor. Avoid search engine pitfalls; dont allow search engines to archive pages as search engine cache is also scraping target. People are also scraping through translation tools. Ways to rpotect your site: USe a script to dynamically display robots.txt and show proper info to allowed bots and all others see disallow. USer agent filtering and blocking with the rules structured for an OPIN allow list. Block entries IP ranges for web hosts that host or facilitate access for scraper sites. For blocking large lists of IPs, such as proxy lists, use PHP and a database like mySQL.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo! is now up. Yahoo! Search Web Crawler is named Slurp. He has news about the new site explorer features. New features include; you can add your site, you then can authenticate your site (looks so much like Google Sitemaps), to authenticate, you place a file on your site and that will authenticate you. You can manage site feeds, rss feeds, etc. In addition to those standard features they added a subdomains filter, a different view of those results and a way to get those data out of the system via flat file or API.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo! then moves on to bot obedience. Slurp is a very obedient bot he said. Read robotstxt.org. He showed us a photograph of slurp, a joke of course. Make sure you allow content you want Yahoo! to get and disallow content the content you dont want them to index. Yahoo! does honor a crawl delay parameter. http://help.yahoo.com/search is very well organized there, plus some new resources added there. Slurp is new and better, they announced it last week. They show the blog posts from Yahoo Search Blog and Loren Bakers blog from 7.28.2006 - where you should see up to 25% reduced load on your sites. He asks who have seen a reduction of load, and about 1.5 people raised their hands out of hundreds. Yahoo! does have multiple crawlers, but please send feedback to Yahoo about these crawlers.

Vanessa Fox from Google is last up. She put up some funny robots.txt files she found, she had no real slides. She talks about google.com/webmasters they announced last week, a tool to check your robots.txt file. She talks briefly about the www vs. the non www issue, which is now at the google.com/webmasters, that allows you to define which is the proper structure, www vs. non www. Every once and a while a host may block a googlebot IP.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Tech this panel included: Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts, Rick Klau of FeedBurner and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

First up was Amanda with yet again, a unique presentation. There is still lots of unclaimed territory.

Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging according to SocialText. 35% of companies plan to start a blog in the next year.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic.

Build your feeds right from the start. Questions to ask:
- How many feeds are necessary
- How much content is needed to keep it fresh
- Should you publish an excerpt or the full feed
- Will the feed include other media
- How will you propagate the feeds initially and on an ongoing basis
- How to measure performance

RSS is not just for blogs
- Affiliate
- Syndicate content to other sites
- New products
- Security alerts
- Product use tips
- Customer communications - best sellers, out of stock, special offers
- Press room
- Career channel/job listings

Poll of the audience: Large part of the audience does search optimization, so how do you optimize a blog?

Optimize the blog itself
- Socialize your blog and optimize its relatioship with the rest of the blogosphere
- Submit to blog search engines
- Make it easy to subscribe to feeds

Optimize the template
- Archives - use cleaner, shorter urls
- CSS - tweak to improve usage of H1, H2, H3
- Titles - Keywords first
- Permalinks
- Other- use robots.txt and favicon
- Validate code

Use plugins to increase functionality of WordPress and Moveable Type.

Optimize the content and do what you would do with web site optimization.
- Develop a keyword list
- Don't use graphics where text will do
- Use keywords in category names
- Use keywords in other places on the page - "SEO Sites I Like"

Steps to Powerful Keyword Rich Content
1. Write your post. Focus on your message.
2. Review your keyword list for the phrases more relevant to the post you've written
3. Keywordsin headline

Harness the link power
- Free giving of links in content
- Ample use of anchor text

Amanda recommends publishing a blog as a separate site to become a link authority.

Socialize your blog for link power
- Inbound links are important
- Cross link site and blog
- Notify other bloggers about your blog via comments/email

Social bookmark tool
http://www.ekstreme.com/socializer

Ramp up traffic
- submit your feeds
- Make subscription easy
- Chicklets
- Include bookmarking sites
- Enable auto discovery
- Burn your feed with Feedburner

Optimize your RSS feed
- Use keywords in post titles
- Write description as you would for a search engine directory
- use full paths on links and urls

Measuring Results
- It will get easier over time
- Stats come from meany sources
FeedBurner
FeedCraft
SimpleFeed
Nooked
MeasureMap
SiteMeter
Technorati ratings

Next up is Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts - "Optimize for blog a feed search engines".

Shows how different search engines show blogs in search results: Yahoo, Google, Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, MSN

Optimizing your feeds:
- Use full text
- Show 20 or more items, not just 10
- Multiple feeds (by category, comments)
- Use a keyword rich title
- Use a brand name in the item title
- Use your most important keyword in the site title
- Do not use tracking urls in your feed url - it creates a duplicate url which can be a problem for search engines

Optimize your blog
- Modify your internal linking structure
- Use the ultimate tag warrior plugin
- Related posts
- Top 10 posts
- Next and previous posts

Build inbound links
- Add Technorati tags to you posts
- Get onto bloggers' blogrolls - one way to do this is to meet bloggers in person
- Trackbacks and comments wont help with link gain because they are no follow

Use Tag Clouds that show posts according to how frequently you use certain tags

IF you tag with a certain keyword phrase often, you will often rank well for that phrase.

Title Tags: PUt the name of the blog at the end of the title tag
- Tag name should go in title on a tag page
- Customize with additional keywords for display only on your home page

URLS
- Rewrite to contain keywords and use hyphens not underscores
- 301 redirect from non www to the www version of your url
- Maintain legacy urls even if you switch blog software

Anchor text
- Post titles loink to permalink
- Use "Neat-o-tool" http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o to look for opportunities to request revisions to anchor text of links coming into into your site

Sticky posts - Posts always appear at the top of a page
(Adhesive plugin for wordpress does this)

Emphasize tags within posts (bold strong)

Use one click subscribe buttons

Track subscriber behavior
- Subscribers
- Reads through web bvugs or images
- Clickthroughs through clicktracked urls

Last up is Rick Klau from FeedBurner: "Blog and Feed SEO - What's New, What's Important"

Rick offers a perspective from a service provider point of view. FeedBurner is the world's largest manager of feeds.

What's New in the past six months.
- 301 vs 302 redirects
- IE7 will affect how many people are aware of feeds, It will recognize the autodiscovery tag. That means sites with a RSS feed might have a slight visibility advantage.
- TechMeme shows a tren in mem tracking, favoring full text feeds.
- Style sheets helping feed usabiolity - no more raw code. i.e. when people click on a feed, users don't see raw XML code, but rather a visually appealing web page
- PubSub, Yutter offline

Technorati will now give users the ability to use 301 redirects, There is a SEO advantage to this but a tracking accuracy disadvantage. 302 redirects which will do a better job of tracking will still be available.

Full text matters because it includes links. Use full text links so news services like Techmeme can undestand and reward your posts. Having links within the feed post will dramatically increase your feed awareness.

Ping - FeedBurner offers PingShot or you can use Pingomatic.

When IE7 ships, then 80% of the browser market will be able to recognize feeds.

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

Moderated by Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink, who also has a short presentation.
“Double Trouble” What is duplicate content? Multiple domains: identical homepage, different URL’s. Different links to several URL’s from one site. The reasons not to do this: the SE’s say so. That is enough. Confusing the robot (crawler): Mirror sites (one website multiple domains). Uses an example of the site for the International Research Foundation for RDS/CRPS. They decided instead of using the (.org) Top Level Domain, they thought it would be better to be a (.edu) TDL. When they did this, it disappeared from view. This is a note to watch for IT types that think they may know how to optimize for SE’s. Another example: Lifeline Systems had 2 URL’s. Previously, all business came from health care professionals. So many links came from various health care partners and hospitals. When they decided to launch a consumer campaign, they changed URL and caused much confusion. They ended up getting banned, but it was fixed.

Dynamic URL’s: short introduction because Mikkel will be addressing, but look for pages in results without real Tile or description and the “we have removed pages that were similar” at the bottom of the results. 301 redirects are the “hero.” Highly recommends using these in the case of removing duplicate content. If you have been banned, use Google’s and Yahoo’s reinclusion requests.

Shari Thurow from Grandtastic Designs
Will talk about some elements to the duplicate content filter, and why SE’s like to filter dupe content. Understand that duplicate content is an unclear definition. It can be an exact copy, or simply the change of a date or something that is “near-duplicate” content. #1 reason is that too much dupe content interferes with the retrieval of information process. SE’s and consumers both want fast results. They learned how to cluster by limiting results from one particular site to two maximum from a website. They omit duplicate results with the note that Anne mentioned above.

When SE’s look to determine uniqueness of each document, they use a “boiler plate” approach. This is also known as “block level analysis.” They omit the navigation bars, and focus on the main content areas. They look for every single webpage to have unique in-links (linkage properties). If two URL’s have the same in-links, there is a possibility of duplicate content. In the case of articles, they can be represented in more than one site because of the unique boiler plate and the unique linkage properties. They also look for “content evolution.” “In general 65% of web content does not change on a weekly basis. 0.8% will change completely on a weekly basis, such as a news site. They are looking at the “average page mutation” of a URL and a website. If too high, and the boiler plates are too similar, they will filter out the duplicate results.

Another type of filter is the “host name resolution.” Uses BMW example. If the host name resolves to the same company or organization, that organization is probably monopolizing control of content. If content is moved to different servers too often, they will look for that too, since “search engine spammers” tend to do this. Last thing: she is an Andre Broder “groupie.” All SE’s uses his concept of “shingle comparison.” You can search for a detailed explanation, but essentially, the more shingles of word groups (word sets) that are available on multiple URLs, the higher the likelihood of dupe content. SE’s only want one page. Shari doesn’t like when SE’s pick which one to display. She suggests determining the URL’s you want displayed if you have similar descriptions, and robots.txt exclude the other ones.

Some duplicate content is considered spam. This is where clustering has come in handy. The ability for SE’s to determine dupe content has improved greatly even since NYC SES. Shows an example of a University website that has a “hallway” page which is a “sitemap” of their doorway pages. The example has a link to “marketing degree,” followed by a link to “marketing degreeS.” Some duplicate content is a copyright infringement. She recommends using CopyScpae.com to help find people “swiping your content.” Also suggests using the “Waybackmachine” at archive.org to find copies of old content that may be in there and have been copied. Keep your own records with versions of your content. You have to prove this to the SE’s because they cannot take it down just on your word.

Summary: use Robots exclusion, have a copyrighting plan, keep track of you content, register with copyright.gov. Last but not least: don’t exploit the SE’s and help everyone’s experience.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen from RedZoneGlobal
Will be covering some of the technical duplicate issues. The list is pretty long, so he could not possibly go through the entire list, so he will focus on more common tech issues: With and without “WWW” (canonical issues). Session ID’s, URL rewriting, many-to-one problems in forums, sort order parameters and breadcrumb navigation.

WWW or not WWW? Indexing issues: most engines seem to be able to deal with this. Linking issues: yes, still an issue, because you want people to link to the URL’s that the engines are prioritizing. So he recommends using 301 redirect to the most popular one. The WWW version seems to be most common.

Session ID’s can be a true nightmare. A website (smartpages.com) had 200,000 versions of its homepage indexed. Recommended solution is to dump session info into a cookie for all users, or id spiders and feed them their own content. Google recommends this – it is not “cloaking.” You are striping out info to help the engines.

Wordpress and other blog solutions. Rewrite URL’s without parameters by identifying what you want used (such as post name and /or post ID). The problem is that when you do this, you still have the re-written URL and the original URL. Even thought here are no links to this, the engines end up fin ding them. It only takes one link to the original version for it to be crawled and a dupe issue. Once again, use 301 redirects to fix. In Wordpress there is a plugin you can use to automatically 301 redirect the original to the next. Uses a tool (Schlueterica Wordpress Canonical URL plugin) for this (isaacschlueter.com/