October 2006 Archives

Quick reminder that the Search Pulse will be live today at 5pm (EST), after being off the air for the past two Tuesdays. We have a lot of topics we need to make up, I doubt we will cover everything, but I will post a recap of the show as soon as it is archived.

To tune in visit WebmasterRadio.FM or tune in at 128k connection via your streaming media player at 5pm (EST).

Catch you all then!

We have put up our own Halloween logo and it looks like this for this year.

Which reminds me of Google and Yahoo's past logos for this day. Check Halloween 2004 and Halloween 2005, which also sports Jeeves.

Let's also not forget Cre8asites Halloween logo.

But did Google stop with the AdSense themes, remember the AdSense Halloween theme?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Search Engines are in the business of providing relevant results, whether paid or organic. In order to do this in a timely fashion, many major engines will ignore what are commonly known as “stop words,” such as “the,” “if,” “for,” “what,” etc… Thus if someone enters a search phrase such as “what are better mousetraps,” the “what are” is omitted from the search of the index, often yielding most of the same results as a search for “better mousetraps,” in this example. This can actually pose to be an interesting dilemma for search engine optimization managers.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch forums posed a question about the handling within MSN Live of search queries with and without stop words included. An interesting discussion sprouted, with member fulton savage asking “How many users know of/use search query operators?” This lead Ian McAnerin to state

That's really the problem... The vast majority of users don't use quotes or operators. Therefore the default behaviour of a search engine is a very important issue. It doesn't matter how they act when operators are used (they should all work the same), it matters how they act when explicit operators are not used. At this point, the search engine needs to go into "handholding" mode, basically trying to guess at the best methodology for the words typed in. Generally up until recently, this meant assuming the AND operator.

As a side note: In the above example, in my results, “bettermousetraps.com” disappears from the top 5 when the words “what” and “are” are included. What makes this happen? The supposedly ignored words have affected the rankings slightly in this case, and it is likely the other “ignored” words would do the same. It is possible that "what" and "are" are included in more in-link anchor texts than some of the others that appear without that in the search, and it is also possible that "bettermousetraps.com” has over-optimized for the term "better mousetraps," getting trapped in a filter that does not pick up the flag when "what" and "are" are included...would love to hear more opinions on this idea in the comments.

Barry recently covered the NY Times Google Bombing article discussion, highlighting a campaign tactic of influencing rankings based on buzz phrases or even politician names. For the politicos that are scrambling to find SEO’s for next year’s election, we have found a little Halloween story told by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

Digital Point Forums points to an article at the Financial Times from earlier in October in which Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying that within five years, search engines such as Google will help the public decide who to vote for. Mr. Schmidt claims that search will allow people to evaluate the potential truth of statements uttered during the campaign season by candidates for office. A quote directly from the article explains:

He forecast that, within five years, “truth predictor” software would “hold politicians to account”. Voters would be able to check the probability that apparently factual statements by politicians were actually correct, using programs that automatically compared claims with historic data.

The short discussion can be found at Digital Point Forums.

Reports via WebmasterWorld that Microsoft's Live Web Search is ranking blogspot blogs that have redirects to adult sites for some popular debt keyword phrases. At WebmasterWorld you are not allowed to list examples, so I tried to dig some up.

I found a search for debt consolidation currently ranks five blogspot blogs in the top ten results. The others also included other hosted redirected sites. They don't necessarily link to adult sites but they do redirect to other sites.

Microsoft is still new at the game. It is a constant battle between search engines and search spammers. Some engines are better than others at staying on top of the battle.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread explains that if you have two sites advertising for the same keywords and one is an affiliate for the other, they won't show the ad of both sites when the domain is the same, but the TLDs are different.

For example, if site A advertises domain.com in Google's AdWords. And also, site B advertises domain.co.uk in Google's AdWords. They both are bidding on the same keywords. In this case, only one of the two ads should be displayed according to Google's affiliate policy.

AdWordsAdvisor2 explains;

Under our affiliate policy, the .com and the .co.uk will be considered the same domain, so they should not both show ads at the same time. On a search where more than one ad with the same domain is available in the auction, we will show whichever one would have the highest position. There is no bidding competition between the same domain ads, so it should not effect what your actual CPC is on that search.

More details at AdWords Help.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo's Site Explorer is a very powerful tool for both competitive intelligence as well as to help your site in the Yahoo! Search index. Yahoo! Stores are now able to easily authenticate their site in Yahoo! Site Explorer, so they too can benefit from the features:

• Find which sub-pages within a URL are indexed by Yahoo!.
• Find pages that link to that site or any page. (inlinks)
• Submit and track feeds for your sites.

The Yahoo! Search Blog announced this new feature last night. There are more details at the Yahoo! Store Blog and a how to here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums discussion has several cases of Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers being banned in the past day or so from the contextual program. The thread believes there is now a round of YPN cuts, bans, going around at this time.

YPN is known to be very strict on the publishers they (1) allow in and (2) keep in the program, when compared with other contextual advertising programs.

I'll be specific and make Google look bad.

I often spot people scraping content on this site, sometimes, if I have time, I'll try to do something about it.

The other day I wrote an article named Forum Hack Enables Google AdSense Code To Be Placed On Site. Soon after, I saw via a blog search engine, the same content on this site (nofollow added -[sc]) with my content on it. So I figured I would email my AdSense rep to let him know. His response;

Thank you very much for bringing this to my attention. If you would like to file a formal complaint, I have to ask you to fill out the DMCA paperwork. This is the best way for Google AdSense to resolve conflicts such as these.

Um, you see this person is making a mockery of your contextual ad program, named AdSense. But yet you don't want to remove him? Instead you put it on an other publisher to do the work? YPN, I know, would jump on this are remove it asap, if I reported it.

I told Google because I thought they would want to improve the quality of their contextual program. If I wanted to, I could have filed a DMCA originally and not informed Google right away about it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Most of the search engines are sporting fancy and scary logos for Halloween today. Here is a run down of this years Halloween search engine logos.

http://www.google.com/search?q=halloween

http://events.yahoo.com/halloween06/

http://www.ask.com/web?q=Halloween (sporting a whole background change)

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/guides/halloween.htm

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses the response by Ask.com to Google's request for you to only "Google" at Google.com. To summarize, Google posted Do you "Google?" asking;

We'd like to make clear that you should please only use "Google" when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services.

Ask.com decided to have some fun with that request, as all of the media did, with their post You Do and/or May, In Fact, "Ask" (or "ask").

As our colleagues at Google work to protect their brand from becoming a generic term for Web search, we're receiving lots of mail and calls asking us to clarify the difference between "ask" and "Ask" (as in "Ask.com®")

To me, this seems a bit like Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com's, humor - but I have no proof of that. It is nice to see Ask.com play like this.

In any event, there is a nice discussion about trademarks and copyrights - and use of terms at Cre8asite Forums if you are up for it.

These pictures come from DigitalPoint Forums and are simple funny.

The Google Car:

The Google Jet:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports you can earn $75 for taking a survey at Google at services.google.com/inquiry/user_study.

The FAQ explains that you can get paid $75 for it.

Do I get paid?

Yes – it depends on the type of study, but typically we pay $75 for each hour that you spend with a Google researcher, either in person or on the phone. Most studies last for one to one-and-a-half hours. We don't pay for your travel time, or travel expenses, though. For online surveys, which you complete from your own computer, the amount varies, depending on the length of the survey.

The FAQ is pretty funny, it also explains that you do not have to attach electrodes to your body for this study. But you do need to be 18 years or older.

When I first reported this, I named it, Want To Be a Google Lab Rat? but I did not see it may be worth $75.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

GoogleGuy is well known in the WebmasterWorld forums. He has over 2,800 post since he joined in October 7, 2001. So he had around one and a half posts per day since his join date. This may have been the longest period of time in recent times for GoogleGuy not to make a post at WebmasterWorld.

His last post was on August 30, 2006 at 1:46 pm (EST) at the Danny Sullivan Announces He is Resigning From Searchenginewatch thread.

Hope GoogleGuy is feeling ok.

We miss you!

A WebmasterWorld thread has some credible sources claiming the site:www.domain.com, site command, at Google is becoming more accurate. In the past, conducting a site command on a domain may have returned a lot more pages than what is currently accessible on the main site.

WebmasterWorld admin, Tedster, said,

I also see sites returning numbers that are reasonable now when they were always 4X or worse -- and I see this even in cases where there was no canonical fix (or issue) on the part of the site owner. I think theBear got it right. The site: operator is returning better url number estimates now. Matt Cutts said that this was in the works.

This may be directly related to some folks using Google Sitemaps within Google Webmaster Central.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I received this email this morning from an individual who asked, "Is the below mentioned email id belongs to any of your company official?" The email was sent from web.rustybrick@gmail.com and read as follows:

From: Rustybrick [mailto:web.rustybrick@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 1:37 PM To: [removed] Subject: Cost for SEO and Link Building

Hi [removed],

I saw your Website its quite rich in content and also ranks on some keywords i am the marketing consultant in usa and i am having various Link building and SEO projects which i wanted to outsource in India.Can you let me know about your Link building and SEO charges in brief and also the portfolio of the websites which your company have been handled.Do you also provide web development services if yes please let me know in breif

Thanks&Regards

rustybrick
Marketing Consultant
web.rustybrick@gmail.com
skype :webrustybrick
aol:[removed]

I was shocked by this, RustyBrick is such a unique combination of words, why would someone in the SEO business use that for their gMail account?

The email is incredibly hard to understand, based on the English used in the email. I emailed this email address asking if they are the official RustyBrick and they responded very quickly saying, "sorry i am not the Concerned person." He then later emailed me a gmail invite, to my gmail account?

Imitation is a form of flattery but I don't want others to think that my company is emailing people trying to sell SEO services or outsource them.

I am not sure what I can do to prevent this?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

AussieWebmaster at Search Engine Watch Forums records an email sent to him from Microsoft about a new ad campaign they have launched October 27th to "promote Microsoft Live Search." Here is the email;

I wanted to make you aware of the beginning of a phased marketing campaign to promote Microsoft Live Search. As mentioned, Microsoft has heavily invested in the development of our Live Search product and we’re launching various marketing campaigns to generate awareness and gain share over time. The information below provides additional information about our initial campaign.

We are beginning the next major phase in the launch of Live Search with an acquisition campaign involving both print and online advertising, so we wanted make sure you were aware of what was happening, and also take a moment to update you on how we are doing on executing the Live Search launch plan.

Today we start a significant customer acquisition campaign for Live Search. There are plenty of details below, but you will want to look for our online ads throughout the web and our print ads running in the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, USA Today and the local papers.

The campaign launching today builds on the momentum of the successful MSN migration and expands the target audience beyond loyalists to what we call sharers – people who use our services like mail and MSN channels, but have not heavily adopted Live Search. We’re starting with an introductory phase to build awareness of our new Live Search service. We then quickly move into a direct response phase where we drive people into the Live Search service itself to experience all of the great innovations and features we have spent so much effort building. The campaign starts with a bang on Oct 27 (look for it in your newspaper, MSN homepage, Hotmail, and Microsoft.com), which will include online advertising through the end of March, and sustained strategic online programs through the end of the year.

We will be building awareness using both print media as well as highly targeted, contextual online placements that aim to connect with people at the right time and place for them to consider a new search engine.

Our efforts here will be focused on connecting with consumers at appropriate life moments and through highly contextual placements. For life moments, we have chosen to focus on Travel and Health and will be deploying custom advertising vehicles on the Everyday Health Network, Reuters, the Away Network, and Weatherbug that will demonstrate how Live Search can help with the topic being investigated by driving them to the Live Search service that’s appropriate for their topic.

For the print campaign, we will have full-page print ads in the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer starting tomorrow. These ads will run three times in each publication over a one week period.

This is not the first time Microsoft spent money on advertising their search technology. Late January, early February of last year, Microsoft spent big on promoting MSN Search. Now they need to spend all over again, to promote this new Windows Live Search.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I reported this morning at SEW Blog that Google Enhanced Google Alerts & Adds Blog Search Alerts. Yea, so you can now subscribe via email alerts to blog search for specific keywords. They have also updated Google Alerts to "show results from multiple sources (including Google News, the web, and blogs)."

The thing is, there are two cases that I found where people who have subscribed to Google News alerts a while back are now automatically receiving Google Blog Search results.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one person complaining;

My wife runs a local community site that's been in Google News for sometime. To stay up on who’s talking about our area she has Google News Alerts setup using a variety of keywords (her domain, the community name, etc.). The alerts have been in place for over a year and yesterday she started getting notifications that included blogs that are now part of Google News - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/on-alert-for-bloggers.html.

The problem is, blog search in general is often not wanted for alerts for many people. So getting these alerts, automatically and without opting in, is bad practice.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports how someone with an Invision Power Board, a popular discussion forum software, found Google AdSense code embedded on his site, without him doing it himself.

So if you have forum software, double check that it is your AdSense publisher ID and code in the site and not someone elses.

If you see something sketchy, you should report it to Google at AdSense Abuse. More details on reporting violations at Google AdSense Help.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why after he set up his site in Google's Webmaster Central Sitemaps, his site was no longer "verified."

Vanessa Fox from Google replied saying;

We recommend that you leave the verification file or meta tag in place after verifying because we periodically check for it. If the file or meta tag is still in place, the site remains verified. If it is not in place, we prompt for verification again. (This is to ensure that the person who verifies the site continues to own it -- sites change ownership from time to time and this verification check ensures that sites don't remain verified after they change hands.)

This seemed a bit obvious to me, but if one person didn't seem so, then I am sure many others may think it is ok to remove it once you are verified.

Again, you can verify your site by either adding a META tag to your home page or adding a special page to your main root directory of the site. Google has personalized instructions on how to do this for your particular site, when you login to Sitemaps.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how long on average would you guess that it takes Google to find good links and act on it?

Let's assume that this site gives off "good links" when I link to someone. For example, I am going to link to Justilien who suggests in the WebmasterWorld thread that;

For a high-quality link from a site with "a lot of trust" I have seen it affect rankings in as little as a week.

He should see a bump up in some of his rankings in Google on about November 3rd from that link.

I'll be honest, people have told me that soon after I linked to them from within an article on this site, their rankings did improve.

I think it all goes back to trust. You get links from trustworthy sites, you become more trustworthy yourself.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a poll asking folks if they think if Google "will ever release a Disk Operating System?" By "disk" operating system, I assume he means a OS that runs native on your PC.

I personally don't think Google would go that far. I think they want to make an OS, in some sense, that runs off of the browser. Can a browser be an OS? Honestly, I do not know enough about computers to say if it is possible. There must be some basic kernel components to boot the box up. :-)

In any event, we had a few related topics discussed here in the past, they include:

• Google Developing An Internet Operating System? very detailed by Ben
• Google to Sell PCs with Own Operating System?
• Google Drive, GDrive, Platypus Coming Soon?

Forum discussion and poll at DigitalPoint Forums.

Well that was fast! After I resubmitted the site October 25th at 7am and I checked again this morning at it is back in the index. This is after Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Hacked & Delisted In Google.com, I decided not to ask for favors and used the Google Reinclusion request within Google Webmaster Central. Currently, ranking number one for Jennifer Convertibles like it should be.

I no longer get the message in Google Sitemaps;

No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we'll evaluate your site.

I know see;

No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index. Indexing can take time. You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines.

But when I look, it seems as if some pages are included, even spammy pages - which lead no where right now. Conduct a site:www.jenniferfurniture.com and you will see those old spam pages that were hacked in.

Kudos to Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts of Google for making Google Webmaster Central an efficient place. FYI - it would be cool if you have a tracking number and status within the Webmaster Central Reinclusion request area - like a simple ticketing system, so you know the details.

Also see Time Line To Get Reincluded in Google With Reinclusion Request.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: I got a quote from Matt Cutts of Google that is very insightful:

No one expedited your request. I checked later just to make sure that it was processed in the order that it arrived in the queue. However, you should be aware that things like a hacked site or hidden text are among the easiest to check for reinclusion. More serious webspam incidents can take longer for reinclusion to happen, and we do not guarantee reinclusion in response to each request.

It is funny how Google Bombing is now getting a lot of attention again, with the elections coming up.

A NY TImes article named A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data discusses how it is being used in the political campaigns to win the election.

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

The project was originally aimed at 70 Republican candidates but was scaled back to roughly 50 because Chris Bowers, who conceived it, thought some of the negative articles too partisan.

Just makes me smirk. As Chris Boggs said;

Funny how they don't seem to realize that republicans are doing this too, albeit maybe at a slower pace than the dems.

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

Outstanding news, Tim Mayer from Yahoo! has told us via WebmasterWorld that Yahoo! is working on a No Yahoo Directory Tag, to compliment their recent support of NOODP Tag for Yahoo! Search.

Tim said;

Yes we are working on it. Will let you know when it is ready. What do you think is the right approach a different tag or should the NOODP tag apply to both YDIR and ODP?

I personally thing they should use a different tag for YDIR, gives us more control. But I think Danny Sullivan disagrees and thinks it would be easier just to use one META Tag for all.

Add your two cents to this decision at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses how long would it take to get back into the Google index after being kicked out. From the day you submit a reinclusion request, how long will it take to get back into the index.

Some people say it can take over 6 months!

As many of you know, a client of mine, Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Hacked & Delisted In Google.com. I submitted a reinclusion request yesterday morning around 7am (EST). The site has fixed the hacked area but removing the script that created them.

The Google Webmaster Central Sitemaps page for this particular domain still reads;

No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we'll evaluate your site.

We did our best to figure out how they got that script on their in the first place, but since we do not run the server, we do not have enough access to determine the way it was hacked. So it can easily happen again, if we keep things the way they are.

In any event, currently the site is spam free and I will keep you posted on when the site is reindexed.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update on this at Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Back in Google.

Big conference is taking place now, named eComXpo. In any event, a bunch of PPC engines are there giving away coupons. An other accessible coupon for you is from Google AdWords, they are giving away $50 in free clicks for new users. The coupon is available at this web form.

Enter your email address and the URL of the website you want to promote with AdWords, then click "Send me a coupon!" We'll send an email in a couple of days to the address you provide containing a coupon code and instructions for redeeming it and setting up your AdWords account.

Also get your MSN coupon while they last.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Big conference is taking place now, named eComXpo. In any event, a bunch of PPC engines are there giving away coupons. One accessible coupon for you is from MSN adCenter, they are giving away $50 in free clicks for new users. The coupon is available as a PDF document over here for now.

Go to www.msftadcenter.com/events and sign up today!
Enter promotional code: ecomxpo1006
Open a new search advertising account by November 15, 2006
and get a $50 credit for ad clicks when you start an account for $5 today!*

Reading the fine print is almost impossible for me.

Also get your AdWords Coupons.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Chris Sherman has the ultimate write up on Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks. Here is a bullet list of updates, as I see them:

• auto-complete feature
• bookmarking with thumbnail captures
• bookmark folders
• bookmark tags
• bookmarks searched by toolbar
• bookmarks and tags are private in nature with this toolbar

Download the new toolbar at http://beta.toolbar.yahoo.com/.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Most you know Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 the other day. And most you know Google AdSense has a Firefox referral program where you can earn money if someone downloads Firefox. As an FYI - this does not apply to them downloading Firefox version 2.0+, as of now.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread received a response to an email from AdSense support saying;

Thanks for writing in about the Firefox plus Google Toolbar referral button. We currently offer Firefox 1.5 in our referral download. We can't yet say if or when we will offer Firefox 2.0, but I'm happy to pass along your comments to our engineering and product teams.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

In the past, having a dynamic site caused issues with most search engines. If your site has weird parameters in the URL, they were known as stop characters, and search engines would stop crawling them - in fear of getting thrown in a loop. For example, if you had a dynamic calendar system and the spider can just keep clicking next until year 3405, that is dangerous for the spider, indexer and your bandwidth and server. We have tons of articles on dynamic site topics.

As I reported yesterday at SEW Blog; Google Removes Dynamic Parameter Clause From Webmaster Guidelines. Google has removed the line that reads;

Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

It doesn't mean Google will index all dynamic URLs. If you have around five or more parameters, the spider still may be wary of crawling those URLs. That is why Google still recommends "rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions" as good practice.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread has tips on how to rank your pages well in Microsoft's Live.com MSN Search. These SEO tips are being debated in the thread right now.

They go through subjects such as:

• Importance of Content
  
• Importance of Freshness
  
• Page size and weight issues
  
• Basic SEO Principles
  

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A fun debate is brewing at Search Engine Watch Forums on a controversial DMNews article by David Pasternack named Troubled times for SEO firms from yesterday. David has three points, all making a case for PPC being more challenging than SEO. Here are the three main points:

1. Marketers Are Discovering That SEO Isn't Rocket Science
2. Marketers Are Realizing That SEO is a "Fix-it-Once" Task, not an Ongoing Service
3. Marketers Are Wary of Pushing the SEO Envelope

Now, let's look at each point:

(1) SEO isn't rocket science, but neither is PPC. I do not want to take away from either. There are some very smart SEOs that can really do wonders, but SEO as a whole is not rocket science. PPC isn't rocket science, same deal - if you know PPC like Kevin Lee from Did-It, you can try to make it into rocket science and deploy all these fun statistical models (same can be done with SEO) and run with them. But PPC is not rocket science either.

(2) I think he may be confusing "search engine friendly design" with SEO as a whole. SEO includes "search engine friendly design" and I am a strong believer that search engine friendly design can be achieved through a build it once strategy. Build a solid frame work, and you are set with that. You have your title tags, meta data, body content and site architecture all set out from ground up.

But it doesn't mean you do not have to continually work! You have to add content often, you have to get links, you have to get good press and do the whole social thing to rank well over time.

And the same thing goes with PPC. You must have a good framework to build off of. This way you can run your campaigns, make changes, track those changes and continue. But without a solid framework, making changes to a campaign can be cumbersome.

PPC is just immediate. You pay, you get traffic, you convert - or you hope that is the case. SEO takes time and you normally do not see immediate ranking results from any one thing right away.

(3) I can't say anything about this. This goes to a person's personality and type. You don't have to "push the envelope," you just need to spend time and resources to make your site the best. If you don't, then you may want to get risky.

Some really great forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a nice poll running at DigitalPoint Forums that asks AdSense publishers to vote on if they use Google Adsense's section targeting or not.

I explained section targeting in the past, and there is also this AdSense help page now that explains it a bit better. But in short, AdSense allows you to specify the content you prefer AdSense use within your page's content, to target for matching the ad relevancy of the AdSense ads to. It should help drive more targeted and relevant ads, which should help increase CTR and revenue.

The poll asks if this really works for you. Currently there are only 17 results, I would love to see more, since the results are pretty even across the board.

Please visit the DigitalPoint Forums thread at take the poll.

Not only did we get support for the NOODP tag but we also have an official weather update for the activity we have seen Monday, 10/22. Webmasters and SEOs are noticing the search results shuffling over at Yahoo! Search.

So it is official now, there is a new index or algorithmic change at Yahoo once again.

The update before this one was on October 11th and was not a good one, according to SEOs.

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

The Yahoo! Search Blog announced support of the NOODP tag, which enables site owners to tell Yahoo! to not display the ODP title and description in the Yahoo! search results. This is a direct response from webmasters communicating in the forums that they want Yahoo! to support it. In addition, on October 10th, on the Search Pulse, I got confirmation Yahoo! To Add NOODP Tag Support But Not No-Yahoo-Directory Tag Support from Tim Mayer. Tim and I spoke on the 6th edition where he promised it within weeks, and it is now done.

We strive to show the most useful information in search results. We look at multiple sources for titles and abstracts, including page content, anchor text in the links to a page, Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP); and we pick the best based on our algorithms. You might have seen some of the features that we have implemented with this approach, such as quick links for Wikipedia, and local business data. However, some webmasters have had issues with titles and abstracts in ODP and have adopted the 'NOODP' META tag to indicate to search engines not to use them. As Tim Mayer promised a few days earlier talking to Barry Schwartz on The Pulse, we are launching support for this tag in tonight's weather update.

We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"

or

META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP"

If we find any of these tags on your page, we will not consider ODP titles or abstracts as candidates for your URL in search results. We are reindexing content on the web to launch this change. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index that are typical of weather updates.

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

Jennifer Convertibles web site [http://www.jenniferfurniture.com/] has been delisted by Google because some hacker got in and generated an infinite number of dynamic affiliate spam pages.

Let me start off by explaining that my company, RustyBrick, developed this site years ago, like 5 years ago. We are now in the process of redesigning it. We currently do not maintain the hosting or server environment for the site. The client called me and told me they no longer rank anywhere for their brand name [Jennifer Convertibles] in Google.com.

So the first thing I did was to see if any of the pages on jenniferfurniture.com were indexed, they were not.

So then I asked some people I know to look into it and they discovered that the cause of the Google ban was because someone dynamically added an infinite number dhtml pages to the Jennifer Convertibles web site and domain name. Such as a URL like jenniferfurniture.com/this-site-has-been-hacked.dhtml, here is a screen shot.

So I sent this information over to the server people and my development team to look at first thing tomorrow.

Luckily, I have some contacts at Google that can hopefully expedite the reindexing of the Jennifer Convertibles web site. But if it was a normal web master and a normal site, a hack like this can have serious issues in the long term, i.e. may take a while to get back into the Google index.

I was given permission by the client to share this information with the search community. I hope this at least helps others.

Update: 9:30pm (EST), we have blocked those pages from coming up. I'll share the technical reasons tomorrow when I have a solid answer. I believe it has to do with the htaccess file hack.

Update: 7:00am 10/25, based on popular demand, I have submitted the site for reinclusion via the Webmaster Central Sitemaps tool, at this time. I will not make a special request from Google to reinclude the site. Let's see how long it takes through the tool. If I was using this tool for this client, I would have spotted the issue much earlier. More to come on what exactly the hack was later.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update on this at Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Back in Google.

Yahoo! has redesigned and built out a lot of content for the Yahoo! Publisher Network home page at http://publisher.yahoo.com/.

The enhancements and additions include:
(1) Complete redesign
(2) Build out of homepage and second-level pages that speak to the broader value YPN has for the small-to-medium sized publisher
-- Earn Revenue
-- Enhance Your Site
-- Drive Traffic to Your Site
(3) Integrated YPN blog entry listings
(4) New flash tutorial

Some feel that this is a sign that Yahoo! may open YPN to the public and take it out of invite only beta.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Oliver Humpage wrote Give Me Back My Google a search engine that does its best to strip out affiliate links, comparison sites and extra, non-unique information from the Google search results.

A search on ipod reveals some all of the sites that it currently blocks.

They include: elkoo, bizrate, pixmania, dealtime, pricerunner, dooyoo, pricegrabber, pricewatch, resellerratings, ebay, shopbot, comparestoreprices, ciao, unbeatable, shopping, epinions, nextag, buy

All shopping search engine related engines. But of course the ads remain.

Maybe he should of just used Google CSE to make it happen and allow others to add to it.

Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld suggests some improvements:

- increase the size of the snippet by atleast two fold
- strip the over blown JS and CSS
- remove the those tricky adwords/premium ads that you accidentally click on.
- remove or expand the supplemental garbage that obfuscate results,
- get rid of the indented junk to twelve layers (if I want a directory - I'll go to Yahoo)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Media Post coverage of Google's financial earnings report breaks out Google's earnings with AdSense;

Revenue from Google affiliate sites using the AdSense program came to $1.04 billion, or 39 percent of total revenue--up from last year's earnings of $675 million.

Of course Google did not keep all of that, they had to pay out publishers a huge chunk. But 39% of total revenue? Impressive... For some reason, I think I am missing something here (must be too early).

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As rumored a while back, Google has launched their flavor of a Rollyo, or Eurekster or Yahoo Search Builder named Google Custom Search Engine. So why is this different? Well, it is built into the Google Co-Op, which allows you to add search refinements and annotations via topics. Also, you can easily integrate your AdSense account so that you can make money. Here is Google's check list:

(1) Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
(2) Place a search box and search results on your website.
(3) Customize the look and feel to match your website.
(4) Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.
(5) Make money from relevant ads in your search results.
(5) Learn more: FAQ and featured examples.

Here is my quick Google Custom Engine that should search only this site.

I do have the option to host a search box and search results on your own site or use the AJAX search APIs to display results but in this case I selected to host the results at Google.

How did I integrate AdSense?

I clicked on the Make Money section, added my email address associated with my AdSense account, the zip code and the last 5 digits of my phone number. Then AdSense sent me an email saying;

You are receiving this email because you recently requested access to use AdSense through www.google.com/coop. In order to use AdSense features through www.google.com/coop, you'll need to give the site access to the ad code and performance information in your AdSense account. To do so, please follow this link:

I clicked on the link and was presented with:

I said yes and then success!

With this release comes a new product to allow you to easily add other sites to your search engine. It is called Google Marker; "Google Marker allows you to add and label sites in your Custom Search Engine (CSE) or in a Google topic."

There is advanced documentation here on this feature. It explains how you can collaborate with me or others to build a social search engine.

Collaboration is an optional feature for Custom Search Engines. It allows you to let other people whose expertise you trust contribute to your Custom Search Engine. You can either invite people explicitly, or allow anyone to volunteer to collaborate, with your approval. Your Custom Search Engine (CSE) can benefit not only from your hard work, but also from that of others who collaborate with you.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ben, Chris and I were all ready to present the Search Pulse tomorrow but we were informed that all shows with the exception of Danny's Search Cast, will be postponed until next week.

So next weeks show will have about 3 weeks worth of topics.

I am sorry for the last minute notice.

WebmasterRadio.FM will be live from Ecom Expo all day long from Tuesday through Thursday.

Danny Sullivan (founder of SearchEngineWatch) has just announced that he will continue to work with Incisive Media on the Search Engine Strategies conferences.

In August this year Danny Sullivan, who has always been independent contractor, announced his intention to step away from an active involvement in SES at the end of 2006. Since this point both parties have remained in contact and today announce that an agreement has been reached to extend this relationship through 2007.

Overall, I'm glad things worked out. Like those who attend, I myself look forward to the SES shows. This allows me to remain part of the US ones for a further year. It also allows me to keep working with the SES team.

And this weeks 'Armageddon For Paid Search' subject is... Click Fraud (according to the Washington Post).

OK, maybe not put that strongly, although the mainstream newspaper does go to quite some length to unravel the underground world of paid to click.

From her home surrounded by cornfields in Dow City, Iowa, Jackie Park spends hours each day on her computer, earning half a penny every time she clicks on an Internet advertisement.
By the end of the day, she usually tallies a few hundred clicks, yielding about $300 a year. It's not much, but it adds up for the 35-year-old mother of five who became disabled three years ago.

In New Delhi, small companies place ads in the top English-language newspapers every week looking to hire people who will use their home computers to click on text ads on certain Web sites. One ad offers the equivalent of several hundred dollars a day for spending two hours on the Internet. A visit to the company that placed the ad, Shipranet, leads to a small windowless apartment converted to an office...

Further Discussion At WebmasterWorld.

Back in April at SEW Blog, I reported Change Your Time Zone Once & Only Once At AdWords because if you make a mistake, Google said you are stuck. Well, of course there is a way out.

AdWordsAdvisor at WebmasterWorld says;

This can be adjusted once by the support team, DamonHD, so contacting AdWords support should have done the trick for you in terms of changing it around. I apologize that they have not responded. It might be worth checking your filtered email to see if a response may have been sent to a spam folder for some reason. And also worth writing in once again.

So it appears that if you made a mistake with changing your time zone, you can still call AdWords and have them update it for you (once?).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Several WebmasterWorld members report conducting a search on a keyword phrase at Google.com and being presented with results in the form of URLs only, for all 10 results. This is not just reported for one obscure query, but several other forum members have seen this happen also over the past couple days for all types of queries.

I personally have not seen this happen when I search at Google.

Senior Member jimbeetle said:

I ran into this the other day and boy, it was really freaky. A couple of searches returned all url only results. A couple of searches returned 6 or 7 regular results, then url only after that (I have my prefs set to 20 results).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The folks at DigitalPoint Forums discuss the news that Google has opened up Orkut to anyone with a Google Account. That means you no longer need to be invited to use Orkut by someone already in the Orkut community.

I am not sure if you are all aware of the past troubles Google has with Orkut. If not, just read this check list of some of the items I posted on Orkut at SEW blog:

• 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
• Aug. 22, 2006 :: Brazil To Close Google Brazil's Offices Over Orkut Issues?
• Sep. 1, 2006 :: Google Has 15 Days To Provide Data To Brazil Or Be Fined $23,000 Per Day
• Sep. 4, 2006 :: Google Says They Will Give Brazil Orkut Data
• Sep. 28, 2006 :: Google Not To Deliver Orkut Data To Brazil Authorities
• Oct. 10, 2006 :: Court Issues Notice To Google For Allegedly Spreading Hate In India Via Orkut

So, opening it up, should make things more interesting to other parts of the globe.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Google is indexing and ranking YouTube results in Google Images. An example search that brings up results is [+"good times with weapons"]. I currently see four YouTube results displaying, there is also a screen capture at image shack that shows a slightly different result set than I see.

I am sure these images were indexed and ranked prior to Google buying YouTube.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Yahoo! Search moderator, martinibuster, at WebmasterWorld reports a lot of changes in the rankings at Yahoo! Search. Some say it is a reversal of the Oct. 6th Yahoo! Update, but it doesn't appear that way to me.

There is currently no Yahoo! Search Weather report, but it may come soon.

I'll keep you updated if I get more information.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This morning, I was the lucky few to be included in the first batch of accepted upgrades from the old Overture Yahoo! Search Marketing system to the new Panama 2.0 Yahoo! Search Marketing system. As I informed you in the past, last week I spent two days at Yahoo! learning about the Panama release and I even explained how you can request a Panama invite. So here is what I saw this morning when I logged into my Yahoo! Search Marketing account.

Notice on the introduction screen telling me I can upgrade, if I like.

Are you sure?

Great, so what to expect?

So in 8 hours from now, I should have been fully upgraded to the new YSM 2.0.

Update: 8 hours later when I login, I get this.

I login and I get a System Error, "We're sorry. We could not process your request at this time. Please try again later." So I login again and I see we are ok to go. So NO more errors at this time.

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

I reported this morning at Search Engine Watch that YouTube Deletes 30,000 Japanese Media Files & Deals With Record Labels. Basically, they were hit with a copyright infringement notice and YouTube complied.

It has drum up some discussion in the search forums, specifically making a featured thread at WebmasterWorld.

Most of the comments are simply jokes but many also feel Google has made a "1.6 billion mistake."

Time will tell, time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A great thread at DigitalPoint Forums asks member to post what is "Google best unknown feature." There aren't too many posts yet, but pretty much all the answers are unique.

Answers include:

• Google Alerts
  
• Google Spreadsheets
  
• GMail
  
• GTalk
  
• Googles Webmaster tools
  
• Google Analytics
  

So what is your favorite Google service?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports some changes to the rankings of Google images. One member reports;

Last Monday Google image search was giving me 32% of all referrals. Today it's 16%. So definitely a big change.

I also noticed some changes in my referrals from Google Image Search.

Some believe the changes are due to Google being better able to categorize images with Google Image Labeler but it seems too new to me to be already a piece of the algorithm.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

You ever go to Google.com, conduct a search, and think, wow those results are bad. Or maybe there was just one result you didn't like? Or maybe, you feel that your competitor should not be in the top spot, but you should? :-)

A WebmasterWorld thread asks;

Is there anyway to "complain" about a result that I don't think is of benefit to searchers or is it a case of tough luck?

Well, yes, you can complain as tedster explains. Just scroll to the bottom of the results and click on "Dissatisfied? Help us improve."

So if you search on the keyword [google] at www.google.com and you don't like the results, you just click this and tell them why.

Now, does that suggestion go to a person or be sent to the trash can? I cannot answer that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread goes over the technical issues specifically with WordPress blogs and how they are very susceptible to duplicate content issues. But it is not just WordPress, it is most blog formats, even this one.

This single article I am writing right now can be found in a number of different pages all on the same site. You will be able to find this article on the home page, on the search engine optimization category page, on the 10/20/2006 page, on the October 2006 page, on the individual entry page. Also, if I placed this article in multiple categories, you would find the same content on those pages as well.

Is this a problem? I don't see it to be a huge problem. I have always been an advocate of Google figuring out the problem and not having webmasters figure it out, because most outside of the SEO world have no idea that this is an issue. And for the most part, I think for the most part they do a good job with blog software used widely.

But if you are worried, the WebmasterWorld thread has tips and other discussion on what to do.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Remember when you booted up your computer and that friendly browser quietly appeared, ready to take you anywhere with no fuss?

Not anymore. Now, Microsoft is going to sneak in an upgrade to your IE 6.0 browser. If you don't want it, (and what developer isn't cautious about environments?), read the instructions first.

1.Use the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to prepare for the release of IE7

2.Test and resolve any issues with their Web sites and applications using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 (ACT 5.0).

3.Determine if their organization is ready for IE7 or needs to delay deployment. Find information on deploying the nonexpiring IE7 Blocker Toolkit on our Web site.

Some programmers and web developers are having a blast testing it. You may want to stop by and take the training, or just watch the daring ones, like John.

Ah, and of course: No, it's not just a browser update. It also forces me to install some tool to avoid bad software. Isn't my system slow enough already? Software firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. Now I am also forced to use some tool which I have no idea about - no idea what it really does, if it's running now as I type or what it will do.

Forum discussion:
Cre8asiteforums

Google released its third quarter results today, showing financial strength across the board. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google stated in the official press release:

Our third quarter results are a testament to the strength of our network of advertisers and partners, as well as our continuing focus on users. We were particularly pleased with the contributions of our international business in a seasonally weaker quarter. In addition, we continued to forge significant partnerships with companies such as eBay, Fox Interactive
Media, and Intuit that will be of great value to all involved.

During the three months until the end of September, its net income was $733m ($390m), a 92% increase on the $381m it made in the same time last year.

Google surpassed market expectations and the GOOG share price continues to rise as traders sit eagerly awaiting further advertising initiatives after the company's acquisition of YouTube.

Forum Discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is now available for download here. I installed it on my MacBook Pro running Parallels and it works just fine. Danny Sullivan has THE article on the search side of things, i.e. the default search engine war for the toolbar search feature. The article is named Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine a must read.

One comment somewhat related to search at WebmasterWorld is this funny remark;

The biggest disappointment is that there is no animated paperclip to utter profanities such as 'It looks like you are writing an email, do you want to see help with writing emails?', 'It looks like you you are trying to search with Google, do you want to change to Microsoft Live search' or even 'You searched for uninstall this *$#!, do you want me to *#!#$ off?'.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a poll asking members to inform us if they are Google (GOOG) shareholders.

Currently the poll has 23 responses with the following break down:

• Not Shareholders: 14 (60.87%)
  
• Yes Shareholders: 6 (26.09%)
  
• May Become Shareholders: 3 (13.04%)
  

I would love to see greater participation in this thread amongst the search forum community.

So go to the DigitalPoint Forums thread and vote please.

Shandy King posted a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums letting us know that you can now use Yahoo! TV to program your TiVo to record shows for you. FYI - I do not own a TV, so I am not addicted to TiVo's but a lot of people are.

To schedule programming, visit http://tv.yahoo.com/onlinesch/tivo/introscreen.

What do you need to make this happen?

• A valid Yahoo! account with a yahoo.com e-mail address
  
• A valid TiVo user account
  
• A TiVo Series2 DVR
  

So now what is the benefit of using Yahoo! TV over TiVo's interface?

(1) Yahoo! gets to associate your TV watching preferences and history with your Yahoo! profile
(2) If you are a Yahoo! user, you have one place to manage this stuff

But number one is a biggy for bridging online ads and TV ads.

This was a long time coming, Yahoo! partnered with TiVo back on Nov. 7, 2005.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

AdWords advertisers are rejoicing over the release of a new tool released by Google yesterday named Google Website Optimizer. The tool allows you to test different landing pages against each other and reports back to you which pages and content is working best for your campaign.

The Website Optimizer allows you to test changes in the website content of your pages in order to determine what will be most effective in getting conversions. You choose what parts of a page you'd like to test -- headline, image, promo text – and we'll run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic to determine which content on your site users respond to best. When we've collected enough data, we'll provide you with reliable reports and a suggested course of action in order to optimize your site for maximum business results.

There is a demo here and this is a sample report:

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the release of several new tools added to the Webmaster Central toolbox. The new features are pretty neat and include;

1. Googlebot activity reports that shows the "number of pages Googlebot's crawled from your site per day, the number of kilobytes of data Googlebot's downloaded per day, and the average time it took Googlebot to download pages."
2. Crawl rate control tells Google how fast or slow you want Googlebot to crawl you.
3. Enhanced image search allows you to be included in Google Image Labeler
4. Number of URLs submitted

Don't you just love transparency?

Here is the number of pages crawled per day by Googlebot for last 90 days for the Search Engine Roundtable:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Currently a search on Raccoon at Google.com brings back an AdWords ad from Ask.com. The ad description says, "Use the New Ask.com to find it. Save time. Search better." If you click on the title, which reads, "Raccoon" it takes you to a Smart Answer result at Ask.com for Raccoon. Of course, that Smart Answer rocks.

I am seriously impressed by this long tailed approach to marketing Ask.com. I have always wondered why search engines didn't use this approach more. Heck, bid on a ton of obscure, low priced keywords, to send traffic towards your own engine. Shopping search engines do it all the time. Travel also, heck most niche vertical engines do this. Why not the main search engines?

I am happy Ask.com is taking this approach.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Does Microsoft adCenter, like Google AdWords & others have an API (application protocol interface) for developers to build software around? The purpose of an API is to help streamline, automate and easily access data from a 3rd party application. They are used all the time for many reasons, but in this case, account automation, reporting and integration into your own backoffice solutions.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if Microsoft adCenter has an API. I dug up some things and discovered a MSDN Forums thread with links to the adCenter API.

Here it is:

The following are the WSDLs used for the Microsoft adCenter API.
Production WSDLs:
V3 (released 10/7/2006)
https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v3/Administration/Administration.asmx?wsdl https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v3/CampaignManagement/CampaignManagement.asmx?wsdl https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v3/CustomerManagement/CustomerManagement.asmx?wsdl https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v3/Reporting/Reporting.asmx?wsdl

V2
https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v2/Administration/Administration.asmx?wsdl
https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v2/CampaignManagement/CampaignManagement.asmx?wsdl
https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v2/CustomerManagement/CustomerManagement.asmx?wsdl
https://adcenterapi.microsoft.com/v2/Reporting/Reporting.asmx?wsdl

Sandbox WSDLs:
V3
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v3/Administration/Administration.asmx?wsdl
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v3/CampaignManagement/CampaignManagement.asmx?wsdl
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v3/CustomerManagement/CustomerManagement.asmx?wsdl
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v3/Reporting/Reporting.asmx?wsdl

V2
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v2/Administration/Administration.asmx?wsdl
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v2/CampaignManagement/CampaignManagement.asmx?wsdl
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v2/CustomerManagement/CustomerManagement.asmx?wsdl
https://beta6.api.idss.msn.com/v2/Reporting/Reporting.asmx?wsdl

We anticipate retiring the V2 WSDLs January 7, 2007, so plan your migration to the V3 WSDLs now!

Thank you,

The Microsoft adCenter API Group

Hope this helps some people.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

adCenter411, the Microsoft adCenter representative at Search Engine Watch Forums said a bug in the system auto rejected a bulk of keywords a while back. But they are working to fix the issue and reach out to those to resubmit. Here is the message;

Hello everyone, It has come to our attention that, since our last release, some keywords are being erroneously rejected. We are currently looking into the situation and are hoping for quick resolution. If you have submitted keywords on or after November 13th, and received large rejection volume, please be aware that we will reach out with more information soon.

Thanks for your understanding,
adCenter411

Pretty big. This goes back to almost last year? November October 13th? Wow.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: adCenter411 said that November was a typo. Phew!

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has discussion on how Yahoo!, like other search engines, is able to locate and index sites that have no links to them. The weird thing appears that these sites not only are found, any many sites can be found through many different means, it is that they happen to rank for their own site name.

I wish I had more specifics, but since the last Yahoo! Search Update things at Yahoo! have been a bit weird.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

So emails went out to everyone last night about information about the new Panama. As many of you know, I have a wealth of information on Panama here from yesterday. I personally have an account where I can use the new interface. In fact, I with 6 others, were the first ever external Yahoo! folks to be set up and play directly with the new interface (at least that is what they tell us).

Ok, what about "me"? You too can request an invite to the new interface, aka Panama.

Much of what you need to know before you upgrade can be found at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/upgrade.php.

If you don't care about reading about the migration process before requesting your invite, then just request an upgrade there and hopefully you will be one of the select few to be migrated over in the next week or so.

Forum discussion on Panama's release at Search Engine Watch Forums, WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Disclaimer: These are my personal notes. I have not quoted anyone directly, these are just my notes and interpretation of what I got from my time at Yahoo!.

Bill Demas from the Yahoo! Partner Solutions begins introducing today's agenda. Today we will talk mostly about the Yahoo! Publisher Network. The vision of YPN is to enable consumers and businesses of all sizes to realize the full value of publishing. Mission is to be the most trusted and valuable global distribution network for pubs, advertisers, developers and users. A Publishers need is to create content, engage the audience, monetize it and refine through analytics. He goes over the "SMART" framework... He describes that at Yahoo! they have a ton of assets that are not easy to find, so when they design the YPN portal they want to make the other "badges" for lets say finance and Flickr, travel, etc available to you right there. Currently you need to go to each site and get them. They have large publishers, and mid market publishers and also smaller influencer type publishers.

YPN Beta Update
- Goal was to understand how we could create a best of market entry
- They want to build it with Panama in sight, Panama compliant
- YPN some time in 2007
- They want to ensure it is a quality publisher experience for the advertiser
- The beta is out for a while, longer than they may like, but they want to do it right

Key Updates Since Launch
- New messaging feature
- YPN Blog Launch
- Direct deposit
- New publisher services tab
- Improved ad format
- Reporting enhancements (editing and deleting of categories and URLs)

Future
- YPNO into Panama
- Revenue generation via shopping, search
- Content via del.ici.us, answers, etc.
- Redesign of portal for more Web 2.0
- And a global launch in various markets

Tricia Hoff from Market Research was next up

The Process:
- They first try to understand who is the target market
- Then they develop concepts and products
- They ask the publisher if those concepts or products are feasible
- Then product spec research
- Then they do UI testing
- Then they repeat the cycle

Market Research:
- Sat down with 17 publishers (remember it?)
- What motivates them are includes their life style (freedom), interests include educate others, some like their hobby, and they just get satisfaction out of building out a successful site and content.
- Challenges publishers face as new publishers versus mature ones.
-- New have problems with set up, revenue and traffic
-- Mature group want methods to optimize revenue sources
- Why join YPN?
-- Revenue opportunities
-- Alternative to Google
-- Peer recommendations (WOM)
-- Diversification
-- Credibility
-- Access to network of advertisers
-- Availability of customer support

Categorizing Long Tail of Publishers
- Segmentation study was a 35 minute online survey of more than 48 questions, of 1049 publisher (remember when they sent it out?)
- Segments include
-- Established Site
-- Long Term Visionary
-- Emerging Entrepreneur
-- Hopeful Hobbist
-- Conventionalist
-- Progmatist
- Classifications of distinctions between the segments were five but I missed those...

Cody Simms, Product Manager is up now to give us a scoop on what is late and greatest with YPN

- Live Demo
- Showed some basic stuff on ad setup
- Showed ad targeting feature...
- Ad blocking
- Custom reporting categories and URLs
- Shows more of the pages, all stuff I covered here in the past
- PayPal support may come on with check and direct deposit

What's Next for YPN?
- As Panama rolls out you will see much improvements on the content match side
- Panama is the foundation for monetization engine
- Last night 100% of the ads now are using the new ad format
- Panama will allow advertisers to manage sponsored search separately from content match
- More relevant ads, etc, with Panama
- Geo targeting capabilities for YPN via Panama

Day One - Today posted at Yahoo! Announced Panama Launch : See My Notes About Panama Directly From Yahoo! Search Marketing's Headqaurters.

Disclaimer: These are my personal notes. I have not quoted anyone directly, these are just my notes and interpretation of what I got from my time at Yahoo!.

Disclaimer: These are my personal notes. I have not quoted anyone directly, these are just my notes and interpretation of what I got from my time at Yahoo!.

Arrived at Yahoo!, greeted by Kristen, who brought me to a room with other Yahoo! Search Marketing people. Also in the room was Greg Sterling (outstanding guy), Jennifer Sleg (aka JenSense), Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim), and Mona Elesseily (Traffick). Soon after Catherine Seda and Andrew Goodman walked in to join us.

Upon arrival they gave us a welcome basket in form of a Yahoo! Publisher Network messenger bag with a thank you card with our names on each one. Inside the bag is a pen, sticky pad, note pad, keychain, stickers, gum, pin, long sleeve tshirt, mini flash light, hot cup, basketball hoop game, umbrella, Zen MP3 player and more. Pictures at Cartoon Barry of Yahoo! Shwag.

Then they gave us a tour of the Burbank office, showed us the different departments on the four floors, the conference rooms, etc. It is a fun looking office and adjacent to the office is an other Yahoo! Search Marketing building for other departments, like customer service, sales, etc. Then we walked back down and had lunch, thanks Yahoo! Then the day began.

Yahoo! Search Marketing
- Code completed about a few months ago
- They have been testing in staging environment and in live environment
- Live beta testers are internal users (Yahoo! employees)
- We (bloggers here) are 1st to play with this as "external customers"
- It is "battle tested"
- Migration to panama over next couple months
- It will be voluntary over next few months
- Hard migration over sometimes after 1st of new year
- Once you switch, you are stuck with it
- It will 1st launch as a UI but then later
- Launch a quality algorithm in Q1 sometime of 2007

- He explains why it is named Panama, the Panama from history (cute)

Account Structure
- Current structure is flat, like a giant spreadsheet
- New structure is a dynamic structure, more flexible, more relational
-- There are controls at different levels of the hierarchy. Campaign level such as daily spend limit, monthly budget, scheduling, optimization setting and guidelines, default tactic settings, geo-targeting, watch list flag. Ad Group level such as tactic settings, watch list flag, optimization guidelines, creative optimization settings. Keyword level, editorial status, marketplace bid, custom landing URL, alternate text, tactic settings, watch list flag. Ad level, show, long description, landing URL, display URL and editorial status.

Some questions... Yahoo! is confident this is the best campaign management software available. But there will be bugs, it is new.

Fast Ad Activation
- Get your ads online within minutes
- Improved timeliness
- Ad Freshness
- Increased Flexibility
- Promotional Integration
- Sensitive ads will get live sooner, but what is sensitive, that is the question (trademark, illegal, etc.) (maybe have misquoted...)

- Start and end dates for campaigns (that is nice)

Spend Caps & Scheduling
- Set campaign budget and schedule
- It shows you dynamically based on your bid, your impressions and clicks and what you may miss

Enhanced Forecasting
- Improved forecasting services should reduce transaction costs by allowing you to more effectively allocate your marketing resources, weigh opportunity costs and set campaign expectation - this page is customized for each advertiser.
- This page is the most tested piece of the software
- It isn't 100%, it will be updated and changed
- You tell the tool the keyword the bid, the match type geographic target, distribution tactic. It outputs clicks, average CPC, average position and share of potential click. Forecast data reflects the current market state, forecast data is available at both the ad group and individual keywords. Forecast data will adapt and improve over time.

Analytics in Campaign Management
- He explains that they check latent clicks and conversions...
- Insight into assists, conversions, revenue, CPA and ROAS
- Reports wont break out by YPN versus YSM but you can see referrers (Jen asked that)

How Geotargeting Works
- The dev team is all over the world (San Diego, San Jose, London, India (of course))
- The London operation is where Yahoo bought "Where on Earth" a geo-targeting company, who they find are the best at geo-targeting (at least at that time).
- Explicit query (california mortgage)
- User defined location (your yahoo account)
- missed last one..

Advertisers Controls of GEO
- By market
- By Region
- By City and surrounding areas

National vs. Local Prioritization
- user located in LA searching on "bank"
- advertiser "A" bids on "bank" keyword at entire market
- advertiser "A" bids on bank with geotargeting

Creative Optimization
- Testing on
-- Ads are tested and optimized
-- Overtime optimization will drive towards...
- Testing Off...

Optimization Guidance
- Little bars to show performance

Live Demo of a test account done for us...
- Lots of AJAX
- Same people who helped develop Yahoo! Mail helped with lots of portions on the YSM Panama Interface
- "Watched campaigns" flag, cute
- Within a campaign you see the ad groups, in a similar interface and layout
- Dynamic AJAX drive adjust bid tool, with neat sliders
- Shows how budget changes, how they affect the overall campaign
- He shows the "Reports Navigator", you can plot graphs dynamically, etc.

Now we test it ourselves... Bugs I found
- Found a JavaScript bug with the add ad tool
- Signed me out then, so I have to start from scratch... errr...
- Displayed capital case in control panel but on live search page, it lower cased things

John Kim gives next presentation
- Sign up process is easier and simpler
- They reduce the steps to sign up, they just add you to set up an ad, not ad group, or campaign, etc.
- He basically talks about how they tested it and such
- Flat to Campaign based model for campaign management
- They moved from bid for position and the volume associated with the position and a new ranking model based on CTR, algo, targeting, context, competitor not shown, etc.)
- Tried to make it easier for smaller new advertisers, and can also be used for advanced users

Migration Process:
- Everyone will get a preview to the new panama before migrating
- "Categories" become "campaigns"
- Terms with common creative templates become "ad groups"
- 3rd Party Campaign Import
-- Upload from a 3rd party your campaigns
- The new system has new data, so download your history with your old system
- Old data will be available in old system until April
- Accounts will be moved to your own time zone
- Listings with zero impressions for past 13 months or zero clicks for past 18 months will not be transferred over to new system
- Tracking URLs will remain
- Search Optimizer is forward compatible
- Local sponsored search will be discontinued because they have geo-targeting
- Content match bids will migrate over with will use a weighted average approach based on the bids ...
- If you use a 3rd party tool, Yahoo will work with them

Meet The People Who Built the Yahoo Search Marketing Platform
- Zod Nazem, CTO
- David Ku, VP of Engineering (aka Mr. Panama)
- Brian Acton, Director of Engineering (came from Search)

Zod explained that this is a new system that was built out as an Internet system. It is very modular, very expandable. Only a small piece of it, all the way in the backend is from the Overture. Brian said, They are tapping into search and research at Yahoo to tap into their stuff for ranking, etc. He explains that given an ad without any historical data, you need to make assessments on what you have. Title, abstract, landing page, authority, etc. Then you can gain more info from impressions, clicks, etc. Zod added, It is done by machines and not humans. Since Brian is from search, he gets excited about that stuff. Humans do have an input also, it is part of the machine generated ranking.
Zod explains why Panama took so long to develop. Yahoo bought Overture in 2003. They first had to get their arms around this large system and it was growing like a weed. They learned that the existing system won't take them where they need to go. So they had to start from scratch. They couldn't use the existing team because they were maintaining Overture. They deployed a new team to build out the new Panama. That took a while.

I quoted http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061011-094042 and they denied the sucking them up drive quote from the NY Times. 10% of his dev team is on Panama, so it is not the case. Brian adds that the integration is key, putting together several pieces and optimize that. Take in huge amount of advertisers, ad types and bring in all of Yahoo products and integrate them. Brain said they are in a good position, and the key is putting in place a system, and org structure to make them work. With Panama it is about the platform. And they can truly sit down and they is one Yahoo. Zed added that they have a test discipline. Testing concepts, etc, gives them a huge edge.

Zed responds to Microsoft adCenter's advanced targeting, explaining that if it is too specific, it may not get used. He then responds about click fraud, that they have the most experience with fraud and they are state of the art by far. It will be a race the whole time.

Tim C. & Team in the Cranium (or something like that) Conference Room:
Market Place Design
- Rules of the Game
-- Auction mechanism design (ad ranking and pricing)
-- Advertiser preferences (targeting and spend)
-- Advertiser feedback (forecast and performance)
- Goals
-- Deliver the highest quality ads to users
-- Drive high click volume to advertisers
-- Improve trust & participation
-- Drive rapid innovation

Key Features:
- New Ranking & Pricing Model
-- Past: Bid only. New: Bid & Quality
-- Been testing this in production over the last several months
- Quality Index
-- Is a representation on a scale from 1 to 5 on how well the ad performs compared to its competition.
-- CTR and relevance factors come into this equation
--- CTR is huge component
--- Other factors include; keywords related to the ad copy and display url (better the relationship between the two the higher your quality index rate).
--- They have a scaling window for a period of time to see your CTR drop or go up over a period of time (you won't coast once you get a certain CTR) So possibly a weighted scale assigned to decaying CTR & quality index scores over time.
-- Pricing Model, once cent above the guy below you is what you pay, that is if quality index is equal. If someone is paying $1 and an other is paying $0.75 and then an other is paying $0.60, so if the one bidding $1 is highest quality and the rest are equal, then one bidding $1 will pay $0.61, and one paying $0.75 will pay $0.51 and the one paying $0.60 will pay $0.26.
- Enhanced Forecasting and Spend Caps
- Geo Targeting

Rapid Innovation:
- Based on user experience, customer input, science and economics
- Rapid iterative releases
- Features
-- Improvements
-- Traffic quality controls
-- Pricing
-- Better advertiser experience

Last Session of the Day:
Cranium is the room the brains developed the Panama project. They ate more meals in this room than with their family. 30 different teams, 4 different areas. The releases will have most likely zero down time. In past three quarters, they had about 320 releases with quality. They will be doing releases to improve the product weekly from now on. A lot of hard work went into what they got now but they are very excited about what is in the future.

Code name Roosevelt, what is it? It is about taking all the different elements, and making changes in their capacity, ad serving, development, QA processes and so on. Roosevelt is the process of syncing all these teams. Why is it called Roosevelt? Because he set up the process to save the project time over time (i think he said that). It allows them to make changes quickly, very quickly. Code freeze is Wednesday. With weekly updates. Roosevelt is the process of for Panama.

Not all APIs will be free. Not all volumes. etc.

New advertisers will still sign up with the Overture system but that will change in a few months.

That was the end of our day at Yahoo!. Next was check in to the hotel, and then go out for dinner at this expensive place. Then bowling afterwards. I of course, did not go - but everyone else did.

I woke up Tuesday about 4:30 PST to start catching up, plus I am on NY time so I cant sleep. Those are my notes on YSM's Panama, today's note, I'll put in a different entry.

Day Two - Today posted at Day Two at Yahoo! Publisher Network in Burbank.

Disclaimer: These are my personal notes. I have not quoted anyone directly, these are just my notes and interpretation of what I got from my time at Yahoo!.

I just posted at the SEW Blog that Yahoo Acquires AdInterax Rich Media Advertising Company;

Yahoo announced that they have purchased AdInterax, a company that specializes in management of video and animated online ads. AdInterax built tools to float animations, dynamically expandable banners and streaming video ads. Also, Yahoo bought Rich Media today, an online advertising company.

Both acquisitions seem to be to be an effort to expand the Yahoo! Search Marketing product to support video and rich media ads plus add more ad volume.

It appears from a WebmasterWorld thread that advertisers are upset with the investment saying;

Yahoo should invest in getting Project Panama ready. Heck, they can't even deliver text ads very well at the moment. Their matching algo is terrible, it really makes you realise how well Google performs.

Yahoo!'s stock is a bit down today again after the news.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft's Live.com search launched a new search operator named LinkFromDomain that shows you "all sites that are linked from a given domain." In short, if you plug in LinkFromDomain:seroundtable.com it should show you all the links I have placed on seroundtable.com to other sites. Of course you can use LinkDomain to see who links to your site, but LinkFromDomain shows you who a site linked to, instead of who links to it.

It is a pretty neat operator, good job Microsoft.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & SEO Refugee.

According to Brett Tabke in this thread, links within the NOSCRIPT tag are not counted by Google in terms of passing PageRank.

Brett adds that "Google flips on/off support for noscript indexing from time to time," meaning Google may not even index the contents within the NOSCRIPT area.

He says Google will follow the links but not assign any value to those links.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

I am trying not to take this out of context, but MSNdude at a WebmasterWorld thread, in my opinion, goes out on a limb. In response to a question that states;

We used to get tons of traffic [from MSN]- however, it is now down to a trickle.

MSNdude responds;

When a site disappears like this it's almost certainly because it's been blacklisted as spam -- either manually or automatically. Send e-mail to webspam at microsoft.com if you think your site was marked spam by mistake.

I find that response strange. Typically a search rep will look for site owner issues, which is most often the cause of the issue. Maybe I am tired, but seems very strange to me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, Google's AdWordsAdvisor tells advertisers to try both Google's AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

AdWordsAdvisor calls this "friendly competition" between the two PPC giants.

Heck, AdWordsAdvisor even tells advertisers to try Microsoft's adCenter.

And don't forget that third big option, either

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

I wrote about Google Base Store Connector at SEW Blog when it first launched. In short, you can download a Windows based application to your computer and use it to pull data from your eBay, Amazon or Yahoo! stores and post them on Google Base. The results will link directly from Google Base to the eBay, Amazon or Yahoo! store URLs.

Finally a thread was created at WebmasterWorld with some feedback.

One person said, "I tried this tool and it worked great for importing an eBay store into Google Base. It took about two minutes and I didn't have any problems."

So others should probably give it a try. As an FYI, the Google Base Bug I found seems to only occur in Apple's Safari browser Matt.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

The Search Pulse show is cancelled this week due to conflicting schedules. I won't be able to give it. We will pick up next week, at Tuesday, 5PM (EST) at WebmasterRadio.FM.

This penalty, that penalty, this filter, that filter - we now have a new one named the "-30 Penalty." But this one I think may have some substance. A WebmasterWorld thread has a lot of discussion on it, 6 pages, so far. Here are some quotes.

The report:

I just got my site rank #31 on its own domain name and bunch of keywords/phrases I usually watch were bumped from #1 to precisely #31. Those #2 through #10 are sort of all over the map but generally within the first 60 results.

WebmasterWorld admin Tedster said:

I've seen urls get a -30 and then seen that penalty removed in stages over several weeks after some condition was fixed. It sure looked automated to me. No, I can't prove that, except to say that Matt Cutts talked about wanting to do some automated penalties with automated removal quite a while ago. And in general, Google always looks to automate wherever they can because "it scales".

Donna suggests the cause of the penalty in this case:

I just looked at a site that someone on another forum posted the url for, which was hit by the minus thirty penalty. Turns out, that site would be what I would classify as a "thin affiliate". Does that ring any bells with any of your sites?

I think there are many things that can trigger this type of penalty. I have seen it also. I also believe it is automated.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

A DigitalPoint Forums post reports that Google has begun rolling out a new interface upgrade to AdWords where you can preview keyword by keyword the status of a keyword in a specific campaign. We all know Google has the "Ads Diagnostic Tool," well they added a quick way for you to see this data right from your keywords report.

Here is a screen capture from DP Forums:

The AdWords help section is already updated with how to use this.

1. Log in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click the campaign that contains the Ad Group you want to view.
3. Click the appropriate Ad Group.
4. Select the 'Keywords' tab.
5. Point your mouse at the magnifying glass icon next to any keyword in your Ad Group. A help bubble will appear with information about your keyword. If your ad isn't showing, click 'What can I do?' for more information.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a member reporting he saw a Yahoo! Publisher Network ad that reads;

Ads by Yahoo!
Overture Panama Testing Title
www.overture.com

Is this a sign that Panama can be coming very very soon?

It is possible.

But it is also possible that some random advertiser made this ad for fun and it is not related to Panama.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forum.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

A cute thread at DigitalPoint Forums ask members to rename YouTube after the Google acquisition notice. Some ideas include;

• GooTube
• YouTuble
• Toogle
• YouToogle
• TubeOfGoo

So far GooTube is winning the vote.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

WebProNews has recently reported about Wal-Mart's failed attempt at online reputation management, after anti-Wal-Mart activists revealed the people behind the short lived blog.

Offering a positive outlook on the mammoth chain's US stores and workers, the pro-Wal-Mart blog soon gained attention and skepticism from many who protest against the retailer's alleged staff treatment and business practicies.The real identity of the couple who blogged on the site was traced back to the sister of an Edelman PR employee.

Since the birth of blogging, savvy PR companies have been using the medium to put across the views and opinions of their clients, often purporting to be customers or independant experts (or paying such people to post). Wal-Mart has long been the target of worker unions and rights groups, although with other companies using similar tactics - will this PR disaster be the end to blog-based reputation management?

Forum discussion at WebProWorld.

Cre8asite Forums has a thread on how to best find those paid links that are most valuable in helping your search rankings. BlackKnight, Ammon Johns says it best, "Publicised paid links are only worth maintaining if they actually drive traffic."

Ok, but what else? Ammon describes how SEOs are always worried about "staying under the radar" and how to keep your links out of a typical "pattern."

Google has and often does try to detect link networks. They all try to determine the true links and the valuable links.

Here is a great quote from Ammon to end this post:

Remember, the art of camoflage is the art of making things appear to be natural and expected. Draping your jungle-pattern camoflage nets over your bare-desert base really isn't going to camoflage it at all.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

I basic thread at Search Engine Watch Forums describes once again the importance of making your brand and/or site popular to have top rankings in Google and other search engines. The thread creator says;

I was just thinking about which one would be more effective. Is it Link Building or a Brand Building. I was looking at the site/blog of Matt cutts. Matt cutts never did Links with anyone, but he has build a huge brand name where thousands of people linked to him as the best seo resource.

BlackKnight (Ammon Johns) answers this;

Actually, Matt already had the brand, which was what built a large proportion of the links. He also does link to things fairly frequently.

What would be really interesting to see would be if Matt left Google to see how long before all his 'fair weather fans' would cease paying attention or caring about his thoughts if they didn't impact directly upon the brand of Google. I think the links would cease building pretty fast if he was just Matt Cutts of some lesser-known company (which is sad and fickle).

Makes you think about that situation, doesn't it. But all in all, brand building is crucial in link building.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

The Google AdSense blog announced the release of up to five channels per one instance of an ad unit.

What's the benefit of tracking with more than one custom channel? Well, multiple channels can be very useful when you want to track one ad unit across several different metrics simultaneously. For example, let's say you run a sports website and you've placed a leaderboard at the top and bottom of every page. To track the performance of the ad placement, you've created two custom channels -- 'TopLeaderboard' and 'BottomLeaderboard' -- and regenerated your ad code appropriately.

But what if you also want to compare your football pages and your baseball pages at the same time? With multiple custom channels, this isn't a problem. Just create two new custom channels called 'FootballPages' and 'BaseballPages', and add them to the appropriate ad units. Now your leaderboards will each be tagged with two custom channels that let you know which position they're in (top or bottom), and the type of page on which they appear (football or baseball).

The thing to remember is that each channel will report individual ad impressions, but on the aggregate, if you have five of the same unit on the same page, it will show lower impressions then if you would sum up the five custom channels for that specific ad unit instance.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It appears that if you try entering a bid for less than $1 in Microsoft adCenter, the interface pushes that up to $1.00. Reports come from WebmasterWorld stating this.

Anyone seeing new keywords submitted not allowing the bid amount you want to be accepted? i.e. if you are trying to submit a new keyword with a bid for, say, $0.15, the UI keeps returning $1.00 or some other higher amount. Seeing this across many, but perhaps just 5% or so, of new keywords I am trying to submit.

Several other people confirmed this to be an issue.

The adCenter reps have confirmed the issue and stated that it is a high priority and they are hoping to fix is asap. The issue was first reported on the eve of October 9th. It is four days later now. So I guess Yahoo! isn't the only one with problems.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am not going to do an other review of Ask Mobile Search, I did so already at SEW blog. You can access Ask Mobile search at http://m.ask.com/ or http://mobile.ask.com/.

A WebmasterWorld forum thread asks why is no one complaining that Ask is using Skweezer technology. It basically downsizes your pages and repurposes them for mobile. So Skweezer may remove ads and such.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Have you guys seen the new Yahoo! commercials hitting your TV? They are pretty good, in my opinion. This one I find to be pretty funny and witty...

There are others, like the Yahoo! raising dead flowers one for Yahoo! Answers. You can also see Yahoo!'s Yahoo! Music commercials . Here is a funny one with a driver. Good stuff Yahoo!

This is all part of Yahoo!'s plan to spend big to compete.

Forum discussion at DigitialPoint Forums.

Two days ago there were rumors that Yahoo! Publisher Network is Coming To India but I got Yahoo! to comment on it and they are not.

YahooSarah said;

Hi All,

The YPN Self Serve Beta program is not set to launch in India. When we are ready to launch in other markets, we'll be sure to notify you through an official announcement.

Last month, we launched Yahoo! Search Marketing operations in India. As with other markets our Sponsored Search and Content Match listings in that market are placed on Yahoo! India. Additionally, they will be distributed to Yahoo! India's partner sites as agreements are signed.

YahooSarah

So there you have it. No YPN India soon.

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

This is pretty bad, a search on jobs in norfolk or jobs in san jose and up comes a Google Base OneBox result. But now, if you click on those links, they take you to a broken URL, in the form of http://base/search?q=. You see it is missing the http://www.google.com/base/search?q portion of the URL.

Pretty funny that even Google makes human mistakes.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yesterday I reported that Yahoo! Fixes Search Marketing Bugs that have been plaguing advertisers and agencies for over three days. Well, it doesn't seem to be accurate. Maybe they fixed one bug but not an other.

After reviewing additional discussion in Search Engine Watch Forums advertisers are still reporting issues with updating their bids and their keywords.

Added listings and they just disappeared!

When we try to modify listings (changing title, description AND URL) they get rejected and flagged as "duplicates".

This can be just an isolated issue, but I am not 100% sure just yet. So maybe my title was a bit harsh, but maybe not?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Google bought YouTube but how are they going to make money with it? Jen has her post here with her thoughts, honestly, it is a bit long and I didn't read it. But I would assume Google will be embedding a form of video ads, text ads, within the YouTube video content - eventually. Much like how the Google & MTV Networks Streaming Content Pilot worked.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks when this will happen?

SEW Forums moderator Discover "predict within a couple weeks."

To me, I think that is too soon. You have this community, YouTubers, and you need to integrate ads slowly and with courtesy to the community. The last thing you want is for YouTubers to revolt and switch to, um, Google Video. ;-).

So, I predict within 3 - 6 months.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ever want to see images on Google Images fly around the page? Well now you can. Spotted at SEO Home, you can view green trees at Google Images and then type in the JavaScript code found here in the URL of the browser bar. Presto, you will see this...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I just visited WebmasterWorld and I see for the first time ever, a banner ad, animated nonetheless, at the top of the page. The banner is promoting their PubCon in Vegas, and rotates images of sponsor logos. At this point the ad doesn't appear to link to anywhere, but that may change. No community reaction to it yet but I'll update this post as soon as we got some threads going (update, I started a thread linked to below).

This is major, I have never seen a banner of this size on WebmasterWorld before. Yes they have sponsors at the top right, but that is nothing like this.

The banner looks like this.

It appears like this on the home page:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Brett confirmed he did it and that hey placed a link to www.pubcon.com.

Did it really _need_ to link somewhere ;-) hehe thanks rusty..

Yahoo! has finally confirmed that they have fixed the Search Marketing bug that left agencies & advertisers paralyzed. We initially reported it two days ago and then again today and I also posted it at SEW. Well, YahooSarah updated us at Search Engine Watch Forums stating;

Hi All,

We've been experiencing some technical difficulties that were impacting the editorial tools in our search advertising UI but are happy to report that these systems are back up and running. Thanks for your patience.

YahooSarah

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports that a search on mac computers currently displays an Apple Store click to call feature. I created an animated gif which shows that it shows closed, but when you click on the ad, it opens an input box for your phone number.

Google has had click to call for a few months now and it is nice to see some major advertisers giving it a try.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This morning ShoeMoney.com (be careful visiting that site now, may have malicious code on it) was hacked, I reported it over at Cartoon Barry. ShoeMoney.com currently looks like;

Just do not go to the site, it will redirect you after about 10 seconds to a malicious script.

But this got me thinking, ShoeMoney, is a really good link baiter. What if you had a semi-popular site and hacked the site yourself to get people talking about your site and linking to it? A neat link building / bait idea? I would think so, if it was a fake hack. But this hack seems to be the real deal. Who knows how much damage was done and how far back this set Shoe. Shoe, we are here for you.

Update: Seems like ShoeMoney's partner in crime on the NetIncome show had her blog hacked as well at planetandrea.com - careful again! Seems like someone is mad at them?

Oh and Google's blogger is down as I reported via SEW blog.

Forum discussion at ShoeMoney Forums & Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yup, Google announced the merging of Writely and Spreadsheets to form Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Danny has the lowdown on this here.

You can access it at http://docs.google.com/.

But wouldn't it be cool to have this integrated directly with one's AdWords or AdSense or even Sitemaps accounts?

Have your reports exportable to Google Docs so you can easily manipulate them and easily share them with clients.

That is a request asked for at DigitalPoint Forums.

It is unclear if Google allows people to do revenue sharing with Google AdSense. For example, back in May of 2004 DigitalPoint Forums began a revenues share AdSense program. Basically, you can plug in your AdSense Publisher ID into your profile at DigitalPoint Forums and for every thread you create, you can share the revenue with the forums.

If you have an AdSense account, you can enter your client ID here. You then have a 50% chance that the AdSense ads displayed are credited to your account on threads you participate in.

But is this allowed? There is no direct answer in Google's Terms of Service but one member has a long Q&A thread with Google at DigitalPoint Forums. One question and answer reads as follows:

Q : Is it allowed for displaying the google ads code at any sharing revenue forum?

A : Please note that Google does not endorse or encourage the use of ad code rotation. We recommend that you review the AdSense Terms and Conditions found on https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms, and exercise caution if you choose to rotate the ad code on your forum. All AdSense participants are responsible for ensuring that pages showing their ad code comply with AdSense policies and that invalid clicks are not generated on sites showing their ads.

It does not discuss revenue sharing but it does say that they do "not endorse or encourage the use of ad code rotation." Heck, I use ad rotation here.

The second part seems like if your publisher ID is on a site that generates invalid clicks, you have to be worried. So if for example, DigitalPoint forums generated invalid clicks (not saying it does), and you plug in your AdSense ID and someone clicks on the ad, when your AdSense ID is present, then you are held accountable. At least that is how I understand it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Two days ago we reported a bug in the Yahoo! Search Marketing interface, but I didn't give it the credit that was due, this is serious. Many advertisers and agencies cannot operate for literally for now over three days!

There are two main threads on the bugs that I know of, the first at WebmasterWorld and the second at Search Engine Watch Forums and it is featured.

Here are some devastating quotes:

After discussing this situation with my Y! rep yesterday, she told me... "I can't get into any accounts to make any changes for my clients either."

That makes me feel a lot better.

They said we could use email to submit changes and they would make them. Does that mean I can use email to have them make changes on other accounts I don't manage?

What a mess for those poor guys. The potential for claims liability must be huge. We run some campaigns over the weekends only. We are still getting unwanted clicks, presumably being charged, and can't shut them down.

Yahoo! did send one of the customers back a response via email that read;

We apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that we are aware of the issue and are currently working on resolving the problem. As there is currently no estimated date or time frame for the issue to be resolved. We sincerely thank you for your patience and understanding while we try to resolve the issue.

No ETA!

Continued Forum Discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Via WebmasterWorld a USA Today article named Jury awards $11.3M over defamatory Internet posts;

A Florida woman has been awarded $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit against a Louisiana woman who posted messages on the Internet accusing her of being a "crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud."

Wow - this can forever change how forum administrators monitor their forums and how bloggers write openly on their blogs.

The plaintiff Sue Scheff of Weston, Florida charged ahead with the case because she knew that the defendant, Carey Bock of Mandeville, La. couldn't afford to go to court.

We had something similar but our boy Aaron didn't back down.

But to be fair and show the other side; Scheff says, "people are using the Internet to destroy people they don't like, and you can't do that."

One forum member, Jon_King, says;

I guess this is my last post. :)

Very interesting case and forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It has been over 24 hours since the most recent Yahoo! Search Update and some of the threads have been getting some traction. All in all, it appears to me that the Yahoo! update was a step backwards, from what I read in the threads. How do I know? Let's forget any of my own sites and just look at a WebmasterWorld thread.

You have those who are happy about the changes, but they all say something similar, I'll quote one.

wow great update i got like 30-40% of traffic income really nice i like it

In short, those who have sites ranking well now are happy, of course. The best sites are ranking well in Yahoo! Or are they?

Senior member steveb says;

Call it the groups.google.com update. This stuff should have been purged three years ago.

You have some calling this update the MSN Search update because the results appear to him to be easy to game.

Yes, we are seeing a lot of shifts. Did yahoo recently hire anyone from msn? Results are looking more like msn's

All in all, I think from what I see in this thread, that the Yahoo! update was a step backwards.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting thread has been started on the SEW Forums regarding a paragraph in the Wikipedia External Linking Guide. It discusses the possibility of sharing link spam data with Google (and presumably other interested parties) in order to monitor and potentially penalise spammers.

The idea is still more of a suggestion then an official statement of intent from Wikipedia, although it would be interesting to see whether existing records of past link spamming would also be shared (opening up a can of worms for SEOs who use such tactics).

Is this just an off the cuff remark by a rogue editor? A warning shot across the bows from a tired Wikipedia? Or some other idiom which I've yet to think of?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Rob Kerry is an SEO Consultant, living and working in London, UK. He previously headed up the Natural Search department at one of the UK's largest Search Engine Marketing companies. In order to further his knowledge and expertise, Rob decided to leave Steak in September 2006 and started a client-side role as a Search Marketing Brand Manager in one of the most cutting edge and competitive markets for search. Some of the websites which he's worked with in the past include Sony Europe, Sony VAIO, Cahoot, The English Tourist Board, plus many FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

Rob is a Search Engine Watch Forums moderator under the alias name evilgreenmonkey. You can view his personal blog at www.evilgreenmonkey.com.

A reporter for BBC News was tipped off today about the sale of AOLs UK based operations - offering dial-up and broadband internet access.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said Carphone Warehouse, owner of the TalkTalk broadband and phone offering, was paying £370m for the operation.

sem4u states on WebmasterWorld:

Yes this is big news for the UK ISP business and Carphone Warehouse.
I am kind of surprised that Vodafone didn't buy AOL UK, as they don't own a UK ISP and Orange and 02 now do.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld

Late last night, Yahoo! announced a new "Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update." They said;

Welcome to our first weather report of the fall season. We are rolling out an index update tonight. As usual, you'll see some changes in ranking along with shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

What I find very surprising is the lack of forum discussion on this update. Maybe no one noticed much of a change in rankings or their traffic. There is no discussion of this update at Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld or Search Engine Watch Forums.

The only discussion I found was at DigitalPoint Forums and that is only discussing how Yahoo! wrote a post about it at the Yahoo! Search blog.

I believe I see some changes, which makes me think, why are the forums so hush hush about it? It is like Ask's forums, not to knock on Ask.com or anything. :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I found an interesting thread at DigitalPoint Forums that claims that Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN), the contextual ad program from the Yahoo! Search Marketing guys, is coming to India. Currently, YPN is only open in beta for United States publishers. This post claims that Yahoo! is releasing YPN for India under a different name and is "only available to select publishers."

When is this reportedly coming? In a few weeks, the post says.

I will see what I can dig up on this and readdress this if necessary.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks why hasn't the Google algorithm been leaked? Often company secrets have been leaked in the past, such as company product releases and more. But why not Google's algorithm.

Well, it kind of has been. Over the years, Google has changed their algorithm time and time again to try to stay ahead of those who figured it out. If you can honestly tell me that your strategy to rank a page in Google has not changed in five years, at all - then you prove me wrong. But it is clear to me that once there was content, then there was PageRank, then there were raw links, then there were specific type of links and now there is trust.

Things leak, things are discovered through backwards engineering. Google has to constantly upgrade and tweak their algorithm to combat this and make their results "more relevant."

In addition, there is not one person who holds the keys and knowledge to the complete Google algorithm. You hear Matt Cutts talk and he frequently says, he needs to go to team A or team B to figure out the current way Google handles X, Y or Z. The collective brain power of the algorithm, helps keep only parts and pieces of the algorithm spread out through the whole company.

But aside from that, hasn't the Coca Cola recipe been kept under lock and key for a really long time? Why not Google?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Last night on the sixth edition of the search pulse Tim Mayer came on the show to remark on my Request To Yahoo! To Add Support For No Directory Tag. He said that in about a week, Yahoo! like Google and MSN will support the NOODP tag that enables a webmaster to tell the search engine not to use the description from the ODP directory.

Now why would Yahoo! implement this?
(1) Yahoo! does sometimes use the ODP description in the SERPs.
(2) It has already been set up as a standard meta tag.

Why didn't Yahoo! commit to releasing a version to opt out of using the Yahoo! Directory title in the SERPs?
(1) Tim said their alogirtms are good at figuring out when and when not to use the title
(2) Tim said, they don't want to create yet an other meta tag without really needing it

The deal is I still want them to create this tag, because as Danny showed me last night, a search for tony knowles still has the same issue Danny pointed out here. So I believe there is still a need for the Yahoo! Directory meta tag.

This is a move in the right direction, so thank you Yahoo! for taking a step forward here.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

The sixth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. Tim Mayer from Yahoo! was our special guest. Tim told us that we can expect support from Yahoo! on the NOODP tag, but it would be a lot more time for us to see support of a new META tag to opt out of using the Yahoo! Directory titles in the search results. Other topics included Google buying YouTube, Porn found on Google News home page, several SEO topics, Google's pinging service, code search, Yahoo's Panama release in the UK and much much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file here and listen at your convenience.

Topics we covered:

1. Forums Buzz on GooTube - Google Buying YouTube for $1.65B
2. Search Community Talks on Google YouTube Rumors
3. Porn Found on Google News Home Page
4. Can Google Take Away A Site's Trust Value?
5. Google's Blog Hacked, Fake Post on Cancelling Click to Call Feature
6. Does An SEO Need to Know HTML?
7. Why Does Google Show Old PageRank Values?
8. Another Request To Yahoo! To Add Support For No Directory Tag
9. Google Blog Search Pinging Service
10. Coders, Search For Code With Google Code Search
11. Google's White Labeled Search Site: SearchMash

Lightening round topics;

Continue reading "Search Pulse 6: Tim Mayer on NOODP Tag, GooTube, Google News Porn, SEO, PageRank, Pinging, Code Search, SearchMash, Yahoo Panama UK, Mobile AdSense & More"

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that when you are logged in to the Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers interface, you get server side errors such as;

Can't insert page '/acctStatus.do' : EJB Exception: ; nested exception is: javax.ejb.EJBException: nested exception is: weblogic.jdbc.extensions.ConnectionDeadSQLException: weblogic.common.resourcepool.ResourceDeadException: 0:Could not create pool connection. The DBMS driver exception was: Io exception: Connection refused(DESCRIPTION=(TMP=)(VSNNUM

I have confirmed this to still be an issue 25+ hours after first reported at WebmasterWorld.

Later yesterday, advertisers were unable to login to the system and after being able to login they received this message;

We are aware of current difficulties in adding, modifying or deleting listings and are working to correct the problem. Please check back for updates.

The server side error is still there but I don't think it makes an impact on anything (but I don't know for sure).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So last night I was upgraded to participate in the Microsoft Content Ads Beta program. Now I only see a way to place my ads, as an advertiser, in the content network. I do not see any way as a publisher to place these ads on my web site and get paid for clicks. The added feature for advertisers is under "Targeting", it says "Select a distribution method for this ad group." You can check off "Search" or "Content" or both. Here is a screen capture, fyi - the question-mark icon doesn't currently work for me (says forbidden access).

This is a limited beta, so many of you won't see this added feature, I believe. I'll keep you posted on what I can, as a I learn more.

More details on Content Ads at About Contextual Advertising on MSN and out past coverage of Microsoft Content Ads is always available to you.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Marketing Shifts claims Microsoft pre-launched content ads on Microsoft's MSN Money Central. On this page there is an ad at the bottom that appears to be a contextual ad, but with no named provider.

This is what the ad looks like:

Also, MSN did tell me that a select few sites are pre-testing this feature, so it does make sense that Microsoft would test it on their own properties.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread is discussing this cool list named Google’s 56 forgotten (secret) pages. Basically, the guy goes through some forgotten URLs at Google that may be cool to Google loyalists. Here are a few examples.

• Google Investors Code of Conduct
• Bouncing Heart Applet
• Funky Google Logo

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

You all heard the news already, Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock;

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 9, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

There are just tons of forum threads out there, here are a some of the many thread;

• Cre8asite Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• Jim World
• High Rankings Forum
• V7N Forums
• Phil Craven's Forum
• SEO Chat Forums
• WebProWorld
• SitePoint Forums
• I Help You Forums

Is it like Google did a huge dance, but they didn't, instead they just forked over a ton of money to two young guys for 1.5 years of work.

Now, why are SEOs buzzing so much about this? Where is the money? How can they use this to benefit their rankings? :-)

That is the question being asked at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread. And to that extent, "How much HTML do I need to know first for SEO?" Most of the replies in the thread are adamant that HTML is a prerequisite to SEO.

SEOMike said;

html is the foundation to SEO. The first thing I do when I work on a site is go through and make sure the html is solid and that the site is accessable to the SE's.

Like a bad foundation for a house, if it's cracked or shifting you cannot build anything stable on top of it.

Ian McAnerin said;

n my experience, about 60% of all difficulties in rankings are due to technical issues with coding or hosting/DNS.

Therefore, if you do not know enough to troubleshoot these two areas, you are only able to do about 40% of your job.

I agree, a fundamental understanding and working knowledge of HTML is very important for one to perform their SEO Work.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google to buy YouTube? That is the rumor Techcrunch started and then the Wall Street Journal backed.

Web-search giant Google is in talks to acquire YouTube for roughly $1.6 billion, a person familiar with the matter says. An acquisition of the closely held company would catapult Google to the lead spot in online video at a moment when consumers are rapidly increasing the amount of time they spend viewing video clips online, and Internet video advertising is booming.

So what does the search community think?

Brett Tabke answers peoples concerns about Google having to worry about copyright woes perfectly by just linking to an article found in the Google cache related to this topic. Brilliant. :) I reported some of that at my SEW blog post named A Look At Google's Copyright Battles last week, so this is no big deal.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

Confirmed: Google has posted a press release on the acquisition.

On Saturday a post went up on the Google Blog at 05:07:34 PM (PST) with the title, "Google Click-to-Call project cancelled." The post read;

After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.

All in all, as Loren reported it was a hoax, a hack. Google responded later about that fake post saying;

A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog last night, claiming that we've discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we're pleased with the results thus far.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks when will we see Google AdSense ads for mobile sites? Currently, you can put AdSense on normal web sites and RSS feeds. But when will we see Google add the ability to place ads on your mobile version of your web site?

I personally cannot see this being implemented in the near future. I don't think Google has mobile ads on its mobile web search platform. That has to come first. Google this technology out but it is not out there yet. Yahoo! is a bit ahead of Google on betating mobile ads. But we are still a bit away from seeing contextual based ads even being testing on mobile supported sites from Google and Yahoo!.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

A reader, reported to me that he found pornographic material on the Google News Home Page, it is live right now.

I see it myself, I took a screen capture and blacked out the offensive part.

Shocking and I have never seen this before.

Someone chose to pick Google's brain by testing and comparing search results based on keyword density or frequency, to see which ranks better.

As you can see, pages rank in order by the number of times a keyword is repeated (9x ~ 12x). Besides page size (number of words on a page), and keyword frequency, everything about those pages are identical, including PageRank.

Not so fast say others, including Bill Slawski, who pulls out patents data. Others point to recent information by Matt Cutts on keywords that target the long tail and Mike Grehan on latent semantic indexing.

In other words, when you think you have it figured out, you discover you're not finished yet.

Cre8asiteforums discussion restarts here: Keyword Density

A DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses how "getting digged" will affect your AdSense click-through rate (CTR) and earnings for that time period.

Digg.com often will send a user base that is anti-ads. Digg users are most likely the most blind to ads, and Google ads. If you read some of the comments in the thread, you will notice that most enjoy getting digged, but the bottom line with AdSense is not that much of a difference. Here are some quotes;

Last week I had 10k for 2 days from digg.com but the CTR was only 0.01, only positive thins is you getting alot backlinks thats it.

I'm getting farked once and i get 27K of unique on 1 day and got my adsense increase about 3 to 4 dollar but i like free backlink more, looking to get more farked!

It would beat gambling on Digg and even if you did get on the front page, the traffic would be so untargetted it would probably be a waste of bandwidth if nothing else, although it may generate some links for you I guess.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

Sometimes it is hard to find the different supported Meta tags to help control where Live.com (MSNbot) can crawl on your site and what content they should cache. I dug up the resource on MSN's Site Owner Help section that details Use metadata tags to control page indexing and link crawling. Here is a summary of those tags.

• <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="noindex" /> will tell MSNbot not to index the page
• <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="nofollow" /> will tell MSNbot not to follow links on that page
• <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow" /> will tell MSNbot not to index the page or follow links on that page
• <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="nocache" /> OR <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="noarchive" /> will tell MSNbot not to store a local cache of the page

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

Via WebmasterWorld a member said that he spoke with his UK representative who told him the release of Yahoo! Search Marketing's new search ad system, aka Panama, won't be released until the second quarter of next year.

Project Panama has moved further back. It's now sitting at Q2 2007, at the earliest, for UK release.

The US release is still expected in Q4 of 2006.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

Want to ping Google Blog Search manually to tell them you have updated your blog or feed? You can do so at http://blogsearch.google.com/ping. Want to automated it? Build it in to your code using the Pinging Service API. Have more questions, see Google About Pinging Service.

You can see that I had some issues with Pinging Google Blog Search.

I think Google doesn't support xmlrpc.com/weblogsCom standard. But I am not a 100% sure.

DigitalPoint Forums explains;

I don't ping pingomatic anymore, just feedburner and google, feedburner pings all the others for me.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This article was written the night before, and scheduled to go live the following morning.

Update: Seems to be working now.

Tomorrow morning I am flying to St. Louis, so tomorrow, blogging may be a bit sporadic. I have asked Ben, Chris and Kim to chip in while I am away, they have agreed. Monday morning, I fly back and won't be back on the blog until after 11am (EST).

It took some time to decide and competition was, well, what WAS the competition? I forget. Anyway, Cre8asiteforums Administrator and well-known industry voice, Ammon Johns, has won Sexy SEO Boy of October.

Cre8asite discussion on this win is mixed in with his 40th birthday thread.

Search engines for searching code bases is nothing new, but this time Google did it with Google Code Search.

Google Code Search helps you find function definitions and sample code by giving you one place to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. With Google Code Search, you can:

• Use regular expressions to search more precisely
• Restrict your search by language, license or filename
• View the source file with links back to the entire package and the webpage where it came from

Obviously, it only searches "publicly accessible source code" but there is plenty of that available. Specifically, you can search within archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip), CVS repositories and Subversion repositories. There are advanced restrict functions that Google allows you to use to find your code of choice, to only search PHP you can use this command, [lang:php].

Yes, there is an API for this product and you can submit your code to the index as well. Hey, search engine optimization for your code. Outsourcing firms, you may have a niche or vertical creep strategy at your finger tips here soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke asked in a WebmasterWorld thread;

I think I have been logged into Google when I hit google.com before and gotten the "classic homepage".

Today, I just went there and I got my personalized Google page as the http://www.google.com homepage.

Have they been doing this for awhile?

As far as I understand it, if you recently visited Google's Personalized home page and then went back to Google.com while signed in, Google will always take you back to the Google Personalized home page. The only way to get back to Google.com's main search page, while logged in, is to click on the Classic Home link, and Google will remember you want the Google.com results. That is until you click back on the Personalized home.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It is pretty well known that Google assigns a trust factor or trust rank to sites as a whole. I have personally seen it come and go with sites. What this means is that if you are a pure white hat with your site and you are doing everything perfect, you have a huge readership, nice level of inbound links and you write about any topic, in general you should rank well. But if you take that "white hat" site and start to push the envelop with some "grayer" tactics, such as some linking schemes or tricky on page SEO tactics, then you may see a drop in rankings.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if trust rank can be taken away? The answer, in my opinion, is of course and it can happen all of a sudden. For example, you can have a great site with huge Google trust. Then implement something that may be frowned upon by Google. But it can take weeks and even months for Google to spot it with their algorithms. But when they do, you can find yourself ranking on the tenth page for a very specific keyword phrase that you used to rank number one for (and no one searches on that phrase also).

I have seen it, it happens.

WebmasterWorld, Senior member glengara said;

I'd suspect it's a combination of being a PR8 and the sudden massive increase in monetised pages, IMO you may have got away with it with a PR4 site, or if there was no monetization..

Now the "monetization" part of his line was hit big in the forum, where everyone argued with that. But 'getting away with it on a PR4 site" and not on a PR8 site, may have something to do with it. I do not know for sure, but I can see that come into play.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is shocking, if true. A Search Engine Watch Forum thread has two accounts reporting the same issue.

I decided to use Phrase match for the whole campaign except one keyword. To my surprise, their system automatically added the Exact match types as well! Instead of a cute 40 keyword campaign, it balloned into 80-something.

One SEW member confirms this to be true;

Yes - this has been a big problem for me too.

He says this not only costs him money but also puts him at legal risk for trademark and copyright PPC claims.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The fifth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. We had two special guests on this show. Matt Cutts from Google came on two discuss what he would ask a Google engineer if he was an SEO and he also commented on the new Google Reader. I then brought on Daniel Read, the Vice President, Site Product Mgt & User Experience at Ask.com to tell us why he feels SEOs should care about the Ask.com search engine. Other topics included a Google Maps bug, the PageRank update, Google's 8th birthday, some discussion on what types of links can hurt your rankings, a Google Analytics message and much much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file here and listen at your convenience.

Topics we covered:

1. A Serious Google Maps Bug
2. Google PageRank Update Underway
3. Happy 8th Birthday Google
4. Google's Adam Lasnik Speaks On What Links Can & Can't Hurt You
5. Can Competitors Damage Google Rankings?
6. Link Relevancy: The Seven Degrees of Separation
7. What Would You Ask A Google Engineer? * Matt Cutts *
8. Google Reader Updated: More Friendly to Power RSS Users * Matt Cutts *
9. Building Links To Rank Well In Other Countries
10. Google Analytics And Secret Messages
11. Apax Buys Incisive Media Owner of Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch
12. Microsoft adCenter Bulk Uploads, Not So Bulk
13. Microsoft adCenter Bug Wont Allow Some Advertisers To Save Keywords
14. Ask.com Getting Noticed by SEOs * Daniel Read *
15. Google Sitemaps's Query Stats To Be Updated Weekly
16. Rotating Google AdSense Background Colors

Lightening round topics;

Continue reading "Search Pulse 5: Google Maps Bug, PageRank Update, 8th BDay, Links, Matt Cutts, Daniel Read, Ask.com, adCenter, Apax, & More"

I reported this morning at SEW Blog;

Niall Kennedy has a good summary of Google's Universal Gadgets that can now be put on the Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Pages or your own web site using the Google Gadgets For Your Webpage collection of applets.

The Google Gadgets Directory has a nice amount of gadgets to quickly give you a ton of things to play with.

A WebmasterWorld thread notices how going to the directory without a trailing slash makes a difference on the gadgets you see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In short, Google owns SearchMash a new search engine where Google can test user interface designs without influencing the public opinion by placing the Google logo on the site. Danny has a huge write up on Google's New SearchMash Test Site if you want more details. Why did Google do this? Well, like I said, the Google logo has a huge affect on searchers perception on what is relevant and what is not, plus it taints what may be considered to be a "cool" feature and what is not. How do I know this? The Searcher Behavior Research Update in Toronto told me and it inspired me to write this at SEW, Is Google Search More Relevant Or Is There A Brand Factor?.

SearchMash features are listed here.

There is a lot of mixed feedback at the search forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Aaron Pratt at Cre8asite Forums asks why Google is showing us outdated PageRank values. He asks, "Can Google Multitask or is it in need of some serious upgrades?"

What is interesting is that this seems to come after Matt Cutts posted his more info on PageRank entry which explains all this stuff.

In short, Google takes their internal PageRank scores which is not a number between 0 and 10, but more of an exact "floating-point number." They then plot those numbers on a scale between 0 and 10 and then export that data at some point in time to the Google Toolbars.

Matt said;

At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users. If you’re splitting hairs about the exact date that backlinks were taken from, you’re probably suffering from “B.O.” (backlink obsession) and should stop and go do something else for a bit until the backlink obsession passes.

Why does Google just not show us our exact PageRank at this moment in time? We know they have it and they know we know they have it. It is the same reason why Google won't give us an accurate result set for our back links when using the link: command. Too much information, they feel can harm us. We are on a need to know basis with Google.

Let's take a historic look at this. Of course you can view our Google PageRank / SERPs Update section to read all 78 articles and stories we have on the various updates. But let me pull some out.

- End of Toolbar PageRank? remember when the Toolbar went blank?
- GoogleGuy Claims PageRank Statement to be False in response to...
- Google Tells Us that PageRank is for Entertainment Purposes Only
- GoogleGuy Once Again Responds to Link Command

Those are some of the more important historic PageRank and Back link stories I have.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Not only can you check your Google web search rankings in any country, you can now check your rankings for image search, news search, video search and group search on any Google data center.

A new tool at http://oy-oy.eu/google/trydc/dc.aspx has a method for you to plug in a query URL at Google.com and hit submit, after specifying a Google data center.

Softplus, at Cre8asite Forums, who designed the tool said;

You can specify any C-Class datacenter (or all of them) and run a Google-query of your choice on it. It sends it through my server (so you'll have Swiss geotargeting) directly to that datacenter and returns the results just slightly adjusted (so that the links work and the images are displayed, optionally with the javascript removed). It won't give you any "secret information", but if you stumble upon a query that brings unexpected results, you can work out which datacenter it is and let other people use that datacenter directly (this is especially the case with image-search, though I have seen differences in video, news, froogle and even groups as well).

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I pleaded with Yahoo in the past to Please Enable a No Yahoo! Directory Tag, and I am doing it again. It is especially important now, that Yahoo! adds support for this tag. Webmasters are confused, they think that because Google and MSN (Live.com) support a tag to force the engine not to use the ODP directory tag, that Yahoo! would support the same.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows several web site owners complaining that Yahoo! forces the Yahoo! Directory title in the search results.

It really sucks that they do that and the listings are so bland and one simply cannot change anything with them...we have tried to get them to change our listing, but they NEVER answer. That is highly irritating.

It is sad that you pay to get listed in the Yahoo! Directory and it can have a significant difference in your click through rate on your organic results.

More details at Yahoo! Please Enable a No Yahoo! Directory Tag.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

Link building is usually the most time-consuming part of an SEO engagement. Search engine optimization requires not only focusing on the still-King “content,” but on gaining authoritative inbound links. You don't have to believe me, just look at what Google says in its Webmaster Guidelines:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

A thread at Cre8asite Forums from a few weeks ago takers a nice hypothetical example and draws some interesting suggestions. The original poster asks if he wants to link to a "football boot" site, should he consider a link from a hiking boot site? The answers are very helpful, and most of the other posters agree that the hiking boot site would be relevant. Senior members Joe Dolson and Adrian provide a glimpse into how many experts vary in their performance of the task of finding relevant sites, which I consider to be looking for the "seven degrees of separation."

Joe suggests that the individual words in the focus keyword phrase should be analyzed for relevancy:

..."blue raincoats" and "blue heeler". One site is about outdoor gear, the other is about dogs. Blue is NOT a significant relating factor. However: "dancing lessons" and "dancing slippers" or "dancing lessons" and "piano lessons" are both reasonably relevant.

A “seven degrees of separation line exercise” for the term "football boots" could go something like this: "Football boots > football socks > sporting gear > football clubs > local football organizations > state/county football organization > national football organization" Yes some may argue this particular seven degrees in the comments, but in my opinion each is somewhat relevant to the other. This "seven degree line" is a great exercise in thinking out of the box...and that is what is required to gain those links beyond the 4th or 5th month when all the hyper-relevant links have been either achieved or denied. I do hope that others will share an example of a hypothetical seven degree line in the comments.

Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

In response to Marcia (SEW mod, old time WMWer) for getting booted from MSN Search or Live.com Search in a WebmasterWorld thread, MSNdude sheds some details of Live.com's handling issues of 301s.

The one place we know we need to work on is deciding which URL to associate with the site: in some cases it's the new one, but in others it's the original one. That's mostly a cosmetic issue, though.

So if you 301 redirect a domain to an other the site command may not return the correct URLs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We all know it is fairly easy to get kicked out of (1) Google AdSense, (2) Yahoo! Publisher Network, (3) Google Web Search, (4) Yahoo! Web Search but how hard is it to get kicked out of Google AdWords?

AdWordsAdvisor says in message number 3105533 at a WebmasterWorld thread that it is pretty hard to get booted from AdWords.

Much of Google's income comes from AdWords advertising, as is well known - and it is not to anyone's advantage to 'toss aside' advertisers without an excellent reason for doing so.

Put another way, when and if advertisers are 'let go', it is done for excellent reasons - and in most cases after repeated warnings.

So the next question is how far can you cross over that line without getting kicked out?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A small case study, very small case study, posted at DigitalPoint Forums shows how a person who has Google AdSense on three different sites, has the highest click through rate on his ads on the site that is most tailored to women and girls.

(1) Woman tailored site has 40% CTR with 200 uniques a day.
(2) Cell phone site has 1% CTR with 500-600 uniques a day.
(3) Unknown site has 2% CTR with 1200 unique visitors a day.

He concludes that women are more likely to click on contextual ads.

Well, that is a hard conclusion to make. Of course, the target user is a huge factor in one's earnings. But there are a ton of variables on any single page that can encourage and influence a person (male or female) to click or not to click.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Chris Sherman hosted an SES Local Denver conference in his back yard last week. A Search Engine Watch Forums thread calls the conference, "fantastic" by several attendees. Christine Churchill said;

I’d declare it one of the best conferences I’ve been to in a long time. I heard it sold out, but it still had the friendly personal feel of the earlier SES conferences when you were able to talk with almost everyone attending the conference. The sessions were excellent. Local search is one of the fastest moving segments of search so it was really helpful to be able to talk directly with the people making the changes.

Ok, so where are the reviews and recaps of the sessions? I was not there, but Mike, The Internet Guy has some excellent coverage.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread argues if the news about Google renting their garage, the garage Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented eight years ago, to house their project, is worth being on the front page of WebmasterWorld or not. In short...

The article says;

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company bought the 1,900-square-foot home in nearby Menlo Park from one of its own employees, Susan Wojcicki, who had agreed to lease her garage for $1,700 per month because she wanted help paying the mortgage.

When Page and Brin first moved into the garage, Google had just been incorporated with a bankroll of $1 million raised from a handful of investors. Today, Google has about $10 billion in cash and a market value of $125 billion.

Here is a snap shot of the Garage taken from SMH.au;

Folks in the thread argue if this is front page news worthy... People say anything Google does these days gets coverage, no matter how small or ridiculous. Others say that this is a critical piece of Google's history and Google wanting to preserve that is smart and cool.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo! sent out a mass mailing the other day to all (I think all) of their Yahoo! Search Marketing customers with news about the new ad platform, code named Panama. The email goes over new "terminology" that will be used throughout the new ad platform that is important for current advertisers to get accustomed to prior to the switch over.

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator AussieWebmaster summarized the changes in five points:

1. Keywords still serve as your foundation.
The keywords that describe your business can remain the same. These are still the connecting point between you and customers who are searching online.

2. Individual titles and descriptions will apply to multiple keywords.
Titles, descriptions and URLs-known as "ads" in the new Sponsored Search-may apply to more than one keyword. This should cut down on the time you have to spend generating advertising messages.

3. Keywords and ads will be organized into ad groups.
Ad groups can contain multiple keywords, along with up to 20 ads (titles, descriptions and URLs) that apply to those keywords. This will allow you to test multiple ads to find the message that works best with prospective customers.

4. One or more ad groups will make up a campaign.
Campaigns may contain multiple ad groups. Some new features will enable you to set up geo-targeting, scheduling and budgeting at the campaign level. This should give you more control, and help ensure that your campaigns are working as efficiently as possible.

5. Your account will be comprised of all your campaigns.
Your campaigns will make up your new Sponsored Search account, which will still apply to one market only, i.e., the United States (which includes English-speaking Canada). To advertise in more than one market, you will need to have multiple accounts.

Forum discussion on YSM at Search Engine Watch Forums.

One of the more well known names in the search engine marketing industry has turned 40 years old. If you've hit that mark yourself, you may relate to how it can sometimes bring on a time for reflection and review of one's contributions, if any.

Cre8asiteforums Administrator, Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight"), thought to share his birthday by asking forums members to Help Me Celebrate My 40th, (and 11 years in Internet Marketing). He writes,

I want to look at where I am and what I've been able to do so far.

Search Engine Optimization comprises many tasks, some more mundane than others, and some more valuable than others. Most tasks performed by a legitimate SEO firm will likely help a website gain search engine rankings. One task that was less important, or so it seemed in the past, was the "clean up" of internal navigation. It is now generally accepted that the use of text links within internal navigation schemes not only helps to lead visitors to more information about a site and its pages, but also helps the search engines in weighing the value of certain pages to a particular topic or search.

A very informative thread at WebMasterWorld Forums from last month detailed a case study that showed the Administrator who started the thread that simply changing navigation links from images to text had a profound effect on rankings for some highly competitive terms. "Tedster" provides the topic, "The Power of Text Navigation," which spurred some great discussion about navigational text links – including anchor text links within content - and also some warnings about overdoing it. He summarizes his study:

Lesson for me -- don't let the issue slide when it comes to using text in main navigation.

Join the discussion or just read the thread to gain some insight at WebMasterWorld Forums.

The use of forums and blogs as a platform for customer outreach and communication is common practice by Search Engines such as MSN, Google, Yahoo, and Ask. It can be argued that this is one of the many ways that search portals have provided an example to other major corporations about how to effectively use the Web to conduct public relations efforts.

Short threads at WebMasterWorld Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums from last month indicate that this practice is becoming more specialized, with MSN providing a new separate employee to address Europeans that seek additional information about their adCenter product. WMW Moderator "Receptional" introduces the latest MSN forum outreach specialist:

AdCenterEU has joined the forums to provide a European “voice” for MSN. He will compliment AdCenter411 in the US and will hopefully mean that we don’t always have to wait for America to wake up if something urgent hits the boards.

Europeans and EU-marketers: please read the full introduction and welcoming comments at WebMaterWorld Forums. Also see Search Engine Watch Forums' adCenterEU self-intro.

Webmasters and Internet marketing professionals have long worried about the possibility of rankings being negatively affected by some inbound links. A search for "inbound links hurt" at Google will yield thousands of results that show the conflicting views on this subject. Google itself, as well as primary and secondary research by many SEO practitioners, however, has suggested that some inbound links can hurt search engine rankings. This has often led to the question: "Can my competitors hurt my rankings by maliciously linking to my site from 'bad neighborhoods' or by using sitewide and FFA link submission tactics?"

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums discusses this topic. The original poster points to the Google guidelines that admit that the possibility of inbound links hurting rankings exists. He then asks how this could be used by a competitor. Some good discussion follows, mostly along the lines of other arguments on this topic. However, one somewhat new twist on the topic is raised when a member suggest that linking to non-www versions of a website that does not have canonical issues can sometimes cause duplicate content problems.

Senior member "g1smd" explains eloquently, beginning with the following:

If a site is fully indexed as www and all links inside the site always point to www, and all non-www requests are 301 redirected to www, then you can't get any of it indexed at non-www, ever. It is bomb proof to that particular effect.

The idea of Google-bombing has proven to be valid, especially during searches for terms like "moron" around Presidential election times in the US. So if someone was to combine the practices of linking from bad neighborhoods and using non-www versions of a competitor's web pages, could they effectively harm them in the rankings?

Join the discussion at WebMasterWorld Forums. Another related thread discusses the idea of "bad" directory listings hurting Google rankings.

On the heels of the announcement by Barry that Google's Matt Cutts would be joining us on Webmasterradio.fm's The Pulse, we wanted to let you know about an interview that Matt had given to John Battelle that was published last week at John's Search Blog. John is one of the undisputed early leaders of the Search Engine Optimization industry, and his book "The Search" is often cited at industry conferences and within forums and blogs as being a must-read for SEO.

In the interview, Matt clarifies his official role at Google, and discusses "Google Pray," manual web spam removal teams at Google, and the news that W3C schools is selling links on high PageRank pages.

A short thread introducing the interview was posted last week at DigitalPoint Forums.