November 2006 Archives

Brett has posted in the Webmaster Supporters forum asking for help with picking a 3-4 word mission statement for WebmasterWorld. He might be getting jealous of all those trendy brand name taglines that are so cool (Fedex: peace of mind, etc..) Maybe not though. Some companies (eBay, CNN, Amazon) which have acheived common word status can get away without a mission statement. I think WebmasterWorld might qualify for that. Regardless, its never to late to add a clever mission statement for fun.

Brett asks:

So Guy says that you should have a 3-4 word mission statement. He used examples:

Fedex: peace of mind.
Wendys: healthy fast food.
Nike: genuine athletic performance.

What would webmasterworld's be?

Help WebmasterWorld pick a mission statement in the Supporters Forum (Paid Reg required).

Danny Sullivan just posted his last thread as a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums. He named the post Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch!

As you all probably know already, Danny is leaving Search Engine Watch after not being able to agree to contract renewal terms with Incisive. He will be involved in the next three or so Search Engine Strategies conferences. Danny wrote a long goodbye post at SEW Blog named Goodbye Search Engine Watch & Best Wishes!

The post answers some of the questions we may have, it looks back a bit at the history of Search Engine Watch and then gives some possible insight into the future of Search Engine Watch.

You can keep up with Danny and the SEW Blog crew at Search Engine Land.

Send Danny your best at the Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch! thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon for allowing you to verify if the useragent, MSNBot, that is crawling your site, is truly from Microsoft or being spoofed by some content scraper. Google has released information in the past for verifying Googlebot and it is excellent to see Microsoft doing the same.

To catch fake MSNBots you can do as follows:

1. When you get a page view request, it specifies a user-agent and an IP address. As I described above, all requests from Live Search use a user agent starting with the word ‘MSNBot’.
2. If you see the MSNBot user-agent, it’s time to check the identity of the bot. Starting with the IP address (i.e. 207.46.98.149), you can use reverse DNS lookup to find out the registered name of the machine.
3. Once you have the host name (in this case, livebot-207-46-98-149.search.live.com), you can check that it really is coming from Live Search. The name of all live search crawlers will end with ‘search.live.com’. If the name doesn’t end with ‘search.live.com’, you know it’s not really our crawler.
4. Finally, you need to verify that the name is accurate. In order to do this, you can use Forward DNS to see the IP address associated with the host name. This should match the IP address you used in Step 2 – if it doesn’t, it means the name was fake.

More details at the Live Search Blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google cache typically only stored about 100KB of your page. So if you had a heavy page with lots of content, not all of that page would be seen in the Google cache. That seems to have changed at some point since I last checked, probably years ago.

Looking at the cache page of many sites, you can see Google is clearly downloading and archiving more than the first 100KB of that page.

A WebmasterWorld thread has reports where Google is caching 400KB+ pages.

I guess space is getting cheaper.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts of Google is known as a spam fighter, he is part of Google's Search Quality team and has a inner moral spirit to prevent web spam from creeping up in the Google search results. Watching Matt Cutts in action is something to see, when spotting out spam or just reviewing typical sites in terms of search quality. At PubCon's Thursday Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum, Matt sat at the end of the table, with his laptop turned to him only, and his search quality (spam fighting) tools fired up while connected to the Google VPN.

If you want to know what goes through Matt's mind during a site review panel, then read his own review of the panel, it is pretty enlightening to read it from the horses mouth.

But if you want to see the reaction of the crowd as Matt chews on these sites, you have to go to the conference. I heard many wows, laughs and OMG! at the conference during this panel. But how did he (Matt) know that? Where did he learn about this? etc.

WebmasterWorld has a great thread with reaction to Matt and his secret search spam fighting tools. I tried my best to get a screen capture of Matts screen, but it is almost impossible. He doesn't accept bribes (why would he need to?) and he is very protective over his laptop (who isnt?).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is the first thread I have seen on the topic of the old 1 cent bids from back in the GoTo or Overture days are no longer going to be in affect with the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Panama release. A WebmasterWorld thread quotes an email an advertiser received that states;

Important Note Regarding Grandfathered Bids : In addition, our current minimum bid requirement of $0.10 will be enforced after an account is upgraded. This will impact your keywords that are grandfathered to bids below $0.10.

This particular advertiser has 2,000 plus keywords set at one cent per click.

If you are one of those advertisers, make sure to carefully watch your budget as you upgrade over to the new system.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported that Google Webmaster Sitemaps Tool Back With Old Data? where I said, there was in issue with the common words. The issue is most likely old data. Vanessa Fox replied to the forum thread at WebmasterWorld saying;

As Googlebot recrawls the site, you should see the common words table updated to reflect the new content.

I then found a Google Sitemaps blog post named Unexpected Common Words that gives a few reasons why you may find "unexpected common words" in the report.

(1) Googlebot hasn't crawled all pages on your site.
(2) Your site has changed since we last crawled it.
(3) Googlebot is unable to re-crawl modified pages.
(4) Your site is not being crawled.

Continued forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo!, as expected, is slowly releasing changes to the reports and tools to get search marketers up to speed with the "whats to come." What is to come? A new ad ranking algorithm that operates both on bid, ad quality and more. So what changes were made? The Yahoo! Search Blog wrote that new bidding information is coming.

First, what is leaving?

In early December some of the information you’re used to seeing on the Manage Bids page will no longer be available. The “Top 5 Max Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns will be removed from the current account interface. The View Bids tool will also no longer be available.

Second, what is coming?

Instead, you’ll see two new columns on the Sponsored Search Manage Bids page:

1. Estimated Average Position
This column provides an estimate of the average position in which your ad may be displayed on the results page, based on your max bid and the bids of other advertisers.

2. Bid Range for Top Positions
This column displays the bids for the positions at the top of the search results page for each of your keywords.

The Yahoo! Search Blog has pictures and you can learn more at the FAQ section.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google announced that Google Answers is closing up shop by years end. The old questions and answers will still be available, but they will not be accepting any new questions or answers after December 31st.

Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds.

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.

Danny has a nice write up on it over here.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some comments, including this one that I liked;

Bummer. I've been a Google Answers Researcher since 2002. It was fun for a while, but my life just got too busy to spend hours researching and writing the answer to a question for $1.50.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member reports that his AdWords account has been terminated after being in good standing for four years due to "cookie spidering." He said he spends about $100,000 per year for the past four years, and all of a sudden as his account terminated. Here is a quote:

So, for some reason my Google AdWords account was cancelled. We spend almost $100,000/year and received no notice or no reason for the cancellation. After some digging through higher ups at Google, it was determined that my account had a notice "cancelled due to cookie spidering." Does anyone know what this even is? My site is still in the Google index and I'm not aware of violating any terms of service.

It appears that they recently hired an outside PPC company to help with the campaign. But what they did is unclear.

I am not sure what "cookie spidering" is exactly. If I had to guess, maybe they built a spider that logins to the AdWords console and then scrapes data to automate the process of keyword bidding and reporting. Of course, this is not recommended, Google has an API for this.

I asked around and no one has heard of this term before, "cookie spidering."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are reports from WebmasterWorld that a new Google data refresh is taking place now. People are noticing both large and small shuffling of the positioning of pages for select search queries. I do not believe this is a huge update but I can be wrong.

The thread was started last night and is already two pages long.

No confirmation from Google yet on if this is a real update or not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am pretty sure this is not new, but just in case it is... Via WebmasterWorld, Yahoo!'s Alta Vista and AllTheWeb are now showing different results when compared to Yahoo! Search.

WebmasterWorld Member, beren, said:

For the past year or two, AltaVista.com and Alltheweb.com have produced the same results as Yahoo.com for a given search. Today, they don't. AltaVista.com and Alltheweb.com still show the same results as each other, but they are different from Yahoo.com. I tried several searches on terms I don't usually monitor. In each case, the results were different.

Could it be that Yahoo is using alltheweb.com and altavista.com as a test search site?

Could be...

Some history for you...

Very early 2004, Yahoo! was shopping for search engines to buy, so they no longer have to be dependent on Google's search engine. They were expected to use Inktomi which an engine they bought earlier, but then they bought AllTheWeb and Alta Vista. They made changed to both engines and released their own flavor of Yahoo! Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kim Krause Berg at Cre8asite Forums informed us that long time moderator, ILoveJackDaniels, Dave Childs Child, is stepping down from his moderator position at Cre8asite Forums.

ILoveJackDaniels has been the technical administrator for the forums for years. Ammon Johns, BlackKnight, brought him on as a moderator years ago, to the forums. Dave will now act as a regular member and hopefully continue to contribute to the forums on a more limited basis.

You can learn more about him at his web site: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/.

You can send your best wishes to Dave at Cre8asite Forums.

The tenth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. This is the first week in a while where we only had one weeks worth of topics. Makes it much easier to manage, and more relaxing. 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.

Program note: Next week's show will be at 7PM (EST), live from SES Chicago. So if you are in Chicago, we will be live at the WebmasterRadio.FM booth in the exhibit hall at 6PM (Chicago time).

Contest Winner Announced: More details here.

Topics we covered:

1. Contest Winner TBA on Search Pulse #10 on 11/28
   
2. Happy Thanksgiving From The Search World
   
3. Chicago 2006 Conference Schedule Posted
   
4. SES Chicago 2006 Quad Coverage Schedule
   
5. Microsoft Live.com MSN Search Turkey Day Update
   
6. AdWordsAdvisor Denies Google Uses Conversion Tracking & Analytics To Determine Minimum Bids
   
7. Danny Sullivan & Crew Moves From SE Watch to SE Land
   
8. Moving From Old To New Domains: What To Expect In Terms Of Google Traffic
   
9. Google Webmaster Sitemaps Tool Back With Old Data?
   
10. More Google Map Quick Links in Search Results
    
11. Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag
    
12. Google Spam Filters Not Working As Planned?
    
13. Google AdSense Gift 2006: Digital Photo Frame
    
14. Photo of Google AdSense Gift Digital Picture Frame
    
15. Google & Belgium: Google Goes to Court Over News Inclusion

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 10: Turkey Day, Google Spam, SES Chicago, MSN Update, AdWords Denial, Holiday Gifts, Yahoo Jobs & More"

As I posted at Cartoon Barry, Chris's comment has been selected by Ben P., Chris B. and myself as the winning contest idea.

Chris's idea was that;

the person who can take as many pictures of different people holding a piece of paper with your url on it over a 24 hour period? That would make a cool page on your site, many different people/ages/nationalities etc.

Ben picked this one, and we all agreed it was a very good idea.

So in the upcoming weeks, I will announce the final rules for this next contest.

Congrats to Chris and thank you for such a great idea!

I often hate reporting on threads that do not have any direct link to examples but sometimes you have to trust certain members. A thread at WebmasterWorld has senior member crobb305 claiming that for many searches he is finding "loads of junk and subdomains moving back in" the top results at Google. This is something we have seen with MSN search in the past.

crobb305 continues by explaining;

I sent about 8 "spam" reports in through the Webmaster Tools console. I rarely report stuff, but these urls are junk redirects. One was a blank page!

The thread does have some examples of searches and more discussion backing crobb305's feelings.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As we reported last week, the Google AdSense Gift 2006: Digital Photo Frame. We finally have some pictures of the photo frame. Here it is, with a little of the picture blocked out...

A DigitalPoint member posted a thread and picture of it, which I used here.

Shawn Hogan of DigitalPoint also received his photo frame and took a picture of all the pieces of the present. You can see it at his post named Google Christmas Present where he explains;

Comes with a mini USB cable, power cord, batteries, and an international power adapter. The international power adapter will really come in handy for some other stuff.

According to the instructions, it's a 960x240 screen and supports JPG images, MP3, WMA or WAV audio files and AVI movies. It also has a SD card reader for extra memory.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The popular Microsoft bCentral directory has announced they closed their doors to new business.

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services.

This means that those who were in the directory before, will continue to be there and be allowed to renew.

Matt McGee writes that going to the add url page, will then redirect you to the announcement page after clicking forward.

The WebmasterWorld community is a bit surprised and upset that the directory is going away.

But moderator stuntdubl said;

That was absolutely the worst directory to submit to in terms of usability - it was always in my top quality "bang for the buck" submission list though - shame they're doing away with it. It'd be nice to see something new and improved launched on the live domain.

Again, if you are already included, you should get renewal notices and ways to keep your current listings.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Some people are noticing Google referrals from search strings that look like:

https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=XXXXXX

This comes from Google's http://eval.google.com/ which only available to those part of the "EWOQ group." SearchBistro has a ton of details with demos of it in action named Google Secret Lab, Prelude.

There is some old forum discussion on it at Search Engine Watch Forums.

When I tried accessing one of the referral strings I was prompted with a 403 forbidden code saying:

Forbidden

The user [username]@gmail.com is not a member of EWOQ. Please contact the ratingprojects@google.com for access.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and Google Blogoscoped Forums.

I just posted our coverage schedule for the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference here. As you can see, we have two new names to add to the crew working on this coverage for you. As usual, we have Chris Boggs from Avenue A RazorFish. Our new additions include Kim Krause from the esteemed Cre8asite Forums and Rob Kerry a SEW moderator also known as evilgreenmonkey. More details about these contributors at the authors section. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to post them.

Please be aware, that our coverage is is almost in real time. The conference coverage is basically note taking. The grammar and spelling will not be 100%, we aim for speed, comprehensiveness and timelines.

If you see any of us, please free to stop us. Maybe you will get a Free YoYo.

Search Engine Roundtable SES Chicago 2006 Quadruple Coverage

Monday - December 4th, 2006

Times 9:00am - 10:30am 11:00am - 12:30pm 2:00pm - 3:30pm 4:00pm - 5:30pm

Barry Schwartz Chris Boggs Kim Krause Robert Kerry Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies Video Search Optimization Business Issues for the Small SEM Shop n/a Drive traffic to your site with Google Ads in a Quality Score Network Business IssuesFor The Big SEM Shop n/a Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix Working with Ad Agencies Podcast and Audio Optimization n/a Working With Clients Ad Testing: Research & Findings n/a ClickZ Forum: Advertising In Social Media

Tuesday - December 5th, 2006

Times 9:00 - 9:45am 10:15am - 11:45pm 1:15pm - 2:30pm 3:00pm - 4:15pm 4:30pm - 5:45pm

Barry Schwartz Chris Boggs Kim Krause Robert Kerry Keynote: Calacanis Not Applicable Bulk Submit 2.0 n/a n/a Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads Local Search Marketing Tactics n/a Earning Money From Contextual Ads Mobile Search Optimization n/a Bot Obedience Course Beyond The Single Site Mentality Meet The Mobile Search Engines Successful Site Architecture n/a

Wednesday - December 6th, 2006

Times 9:00 - 10:15am 11:00am - 12:15pm 2:00pm - 3:15pm 3:45pm - 5:00pm 5:15pm - 5:45pm 5:45pm - 6:30pm

Barry Schwartz Chris Boggs Kim Krause Robert Kerry Social Search Overview n/a Images and Search Engines Search Arbitrage Issues Dealing With Affiliates Flash and Search Engines n/a Buying & Selling Links CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines speaking Converting Visitors into Buyers Link Baiting and Viral Search Success Search & Regulated Industries Search & Regulated Industries Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One n/a Keynote: Danny Sullivan Not Applicable Not Applicable Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan Not Applicable

Thursday - December 7th, 2006

Times 9:00 - 10:15am 10:45am - 12:00pm 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Barry Schwartz Chris Boggs Kim Krause Robert Kerry Meet the Crawlers In House: Big SEO n/a n/a Search Engine Q&A On Links In House: Big PPC n/a n/a 75 Minute Search Abs In House: Building the Team n/a Organic Listings Forum

The winner of the contest has been decided by Ben, Chris and I - we are all in agreement on the winner. But we won't be announcing the winner until Tuesday night, 11/28 at 5pm (EST) live on the Search Pulse. So how do you tune in?

Ben, Chris and I hope you can tune in. And if you want to chat live while listening, we will all be live in the chat room during the show. To access the chat room go here.

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

If you cannot tune in, we will be posting the winner here and on my personal blog at Cartoon Barry.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Reports via WebmasterWorld that Microsoft released a new update for its MSN Search, Windows Live Search product over Thanksgiving weekend. Senior member, crobb305, was the first to report it, stating;

In the top 20, on a financial term I watch, I only see 4 blogspots, versus 8+ a few days ago.

In short, it looks like, to many, that Microsoft pulled many of the splog (spam blogs) from the search results.

In the past, Microsoft said they Won't Do a Search Index Update on holidays or weekends, but they are known to have broken that rule.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Like any new tool, there are bugs, and Google's Webmaster Central tools, including their powerful Sitemaps tool, seems to have its share of bugs. Two different reports come from WebmasterWorld with possible bugs in the tool over the weekend.

The first report was that there are Many Strange Reports in Google Webmaster Tools - Sitemaps. And I quote:

As of midnight Friday, G Sitemap tools is showing "no pages are indexed" for 11 domains that were just fine Friday afternoon. A site: search returns the same miserable results I've had all week after getting whacked in this latest data push.

Page with the highest PageRank has changed and shows www.example.com/?PHPSESSID=1c9eb347d770d93ad076f8ae3106319a although googlebot is filtered not to see sessions and if it goes to page with session server will return 404 error. This filter is up from start of November.

The second report says that there are Completely wrong common words in GWT?. I'll quote again;

When I look at the keywords for the new site in the Google webmaster tools, the list is packed full of words... that have nothing to do with my site! They seem to be about cruises, sports, casinos, and various commercial and financial matters.

WebmasterWorld administrator Tedster believes that this is a reporting bug only and possibly old data is being presented in just the reports.

Past Sitemaps bugs include; Google's Sitemap Tool Showing Random Pages in Highest PageRank Stat and Google Sitemaps Tools Sends All Sites Back into Pending Verification?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld here and here.

Last week, I was nervous that possibly Did MSNdude Get Fired? Darren commented saying that MSNDude is "Greg H." and that he was promoted. He said;

The very active & helpful msndude was Greg H. He said msndude is a rotating title/responsibility. Maybe it got passed on to a less attentive MSN employee. Hope not, Greg is a good guy.

But on Thanksgiving, MSNDude came back to make a post at WebmasterWorld. MSNDude said;

At this point there is no way to specifically say "do not index this piece of text". Something you could consider doing is only putting the survey on a specific set of pages and then using a robots.txt to block that set of pages.

Good to know he is well and still kicking. As for GoogleGuy...Still no signs of him posting since August 30th. We know Matt Cutts is alive, because he posts and writes on his blog almost daily, but GoogleGuy?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There has always been confusion on if Google uses the meta tag data. Some say Google uses the meta description tag, some say they don't. Most say, Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag. In any event, Google's Vanessa Fox said that you should use the meta description tag.

In a Google Groups post, Vanessa responded to a perceived indexing issue as follows:

Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn't found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page -- in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.

In summary, by adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page. That is how I understand it. Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page's content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. This comes in handy for conducting site: command searches with no keyword specific data given after the site command.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I have been covering the Google & Belgium legal issues at Search Engine Watch for a while now and I thought it would be a good time to give a short summary for you here. Belgium publishers sued Google for including their news sources in the Google News index. They found that it was a violation of their copyright rights. Yea, shocking that a news source would ask to be delisted for the Google New index. But it is true. After a long to do, as Danny reported, Google Settles With Some Belgian Publishers Over Belgium News Inclusion. Danny has an excellent roundup of the past coverage and where it as lead to. Google is not done with Belgium...

The Belgium Court is to rule on the legality of Google including their content in the index. The ruling won't come before the end of this year, so time will tell.

You can see some of the reaction at WebmasterWorld.

I'm endlessly amazed by the number of people who insist that search engine's practice of copying data and then displaying snippets is wrong/should be made illegal/is illegal. The internet as we know it would not exist if search engines didn't do this. That, at least, is one thing upon which there can be no reasonable debate.

This is not just going in in Belgium. It is also taking place in Norway and France to some extent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google released a Sitemaps protocol and reporting engine for the Google News index. I am lucky enough to be included in Google News, so I am able to share with you some of the reports I have in my Sitemaps account. For a top level "News crawl," you can see the full screen capture by clicking here.

The first "News-specific errors" it shows me is from Nov 15, 2006, with the error message, Title not found. Google links all errors to pages with more details, so the Title not found message says;

We were unable to extract a title for the article from the HTML page. Try setting the <title> tag on the HTML page to the title of the article, and repeating the title in a prominent place on the HTML page, such as in an <h1> tag. Also ensure that the title is not too long or too short. Currently, the title is required to be between 2 and 22 words, inclusive.

The page that had "title not found" was an old article written by Ben back on March 9, 2005 named Eye Tracking and Search Combine To Show Us The Golden Triangle. The title looks ok to me, so I am not sure if this is a valid error or not.

Other errors I have in my report include; Article disproportionately short, Article fragmented and No sentences found. The no sentence found was for this page which makes sense.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has begun giving out their AdSense gifts for the 2006 holiday season. WebmasterWorld senior member, incrediBILL, said he received his two days ago. The gift appears to be a digital photo frame, he posted the specification:

Looking for Digital Photo Frame? If you are here to buy a digital photo or picture frame, via Google, we do not sell them, but Buy.com does and here is a link to Buy.com. Find Digital Photo Frames at Buy.com

* 3.6 inch TFT digital photo frame
* 960 x 240 TFT screen, 16 mega-color
* Picture: JPG format
* Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV and records WAV itself
* Video: ASF only
* Media: Internal memory and SD card, comes with sample slideshow in memory
* USB 1.1 interface
* Power: 4 AA batteries or USB 5V or AC/DC power adapter

There are no pictures of the photo frame as of yet, as soon as I get one, Ill update this post or write a new one.

Last year, Google gave out holiday gifts with a wireless mouse, usb memory stick, 4 port hub, and more, he is a picture.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Find Digital Photo Frames at Buy.com

Last week the search engines, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! united to provide one standard sitemaps protocol for submission to the search engines for page inclusion. But there is confusion as to where one would submit a sitemaps file to Microsoft.

With Google, you submit your sitemaps file at Google Sitemaps. With Yahoo!, you submit your sitemaps file at Site Explorer.

But where do you submit your sitemaps at Microsoft (aka Live.com)?

That is the discussion of confusion at Cre8asite Forums.

Probably most of you know that Danny has announced his plans for moving beyond Search Engine Watch. He is starting a new blog named Search Engine Land.

Will it become a success? I would count on it. Proof? Well, how about the reaction Danny received when he announced he would be leaving Search Engine Watch.

At last week's PubCon Danny announced towards the end of his keynote that he will be starting Search Engine Land and that Chris Sherman and I would be joining him and also leaving Search Engine Watch. Soon after, Danny announced that all the other search correspondents who write at SEW Blog will also be coming over to Search Engine Land.

It is less than 10 months since I joined blogging at Search Engine Watch. I enjoy it, but I enjoy working with Danny on a daily basis. Waking up a bit earlier is well worth the experience I get from this.

Why did I not stay at Search Engine Watch? Well, that gets a bit personal, so I posted it at Cartoon Barry. I am touched by the community response towards my contributions to Search Engine Watch and their support with Search Engine Land. Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle wrote in a comment;

Barry, I think you don't understand how important you were to SEW. Gary Price, then you, were the workhorses of SEW. Danny was the big name and Chris appears to be the glue, but you (and previously Gary) were the real reason to read the site: To get the news every day. A person who can do that well is hard to replace, and if SEW had lost only you, they'd already be in a tough place. I mean, when Gary left, they got lucky that you were able to jump right in and keep it going, but there's no way they'd get lucky a second time this year.

Wow, now that means a ton to me. Of course, I don't think I am the reason people come to Search Engine Watch. I know Danny and Chris are the reason, I just try to pitch in with short, quick stories related to search - so that we have a place to reference back when Danny or Chris want to do a bigger write up. Sometimes, I may do a big opinionated write up, but it is often not my style to write that way at a blog that I do not own. :)

In any event, the community is very excited for the new site. I have no idea what will happen over at Search Engine Watch. I do wish them the best. But I am looking forward to something a bit new.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Last night, I was at my sister-in-laws for thanksgiving (my favorite holiday) and I was sent upstairs to the computer to look something up. While doing that, I decided to geo tag some of my most recent pictures. I had to look up the address for the Palms hotel to I can map them on Flickr. I typed in "palms las vegas, nv" with the intent of finding the address. Up came this Google Maps link that dynamically opened up a map and address details. I was like, wow this is perfect, I copied the address into Flickr and I was done with my search, right from the search page. Replicating that, was not possible this morning on my Mac.

But like I reported this Monday at Search Engine Watch Blog, via a confirmed Matt Cutts Threadwatch post, this is a Google test.

This morning, Gabs, an all-star member of our forums, posted a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums with a link to his blog post named New google serps layout.. map included!. His post has more screen captures.

I loved how it saved me a step and didn't take up that much room. I believe other search engines do this as well. But I forgot specific examples.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Just wanted to wish you all a happy thanksgiving! Here is a rundown of the search engine's special logos for the day.

* Google is sporting a home page logo that links to a query for thanksgiving that looks like:

* Yahoo has a home page logo also that links to Yahoo Holidays and it looks like:

* Ask.com went simple, not redoing their whole homepage, like they have done in the past, with a simple icon that links to a thanksgiving query and looks like:

* Dogpile always out does everyone with their cool and fun logos:

* At the Search Engine Roundtable, we have put up a special logo that looks like:

So today, I will be taking it slow, very little reporting on search news, if possible. Happy Thanksgiving!

Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Monday, I reported at the Search Engine Watch Blog that Yahoo Strikes Deal With 176 Newspapers, a great deal for Yahoo! to promote the HotJob service and obviously for branding purposes.

The New York Times reports that Yahoo has struck a deal with 176 newspapers, consisting of a 7 newspaper chains to "share content, advertising and technology." The first part of the deal will promote Yahoo's HotJobs site, where newspapers will post the local jobs to HotJobs and use HotJobs's technology on their local newspaper site for classifieds listings. Then Yahoo wants to make these newspapers content more accessible within Yahoo's search index, local news and other search services.

This topic is currently being discussed at WebmasterWorld where members find this deal to be a good one for Yahoo!. Robert Charlton believes this deal is a "major development for Yahoo Local."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have discussed this topic over and over again this past year or so. What happens when you move from an established domain to a new domain name? What can you expect to see in terms of traffic drops from your Google referrals, specifically? That is the topic of discussion in this WebmasterWorld thread.

I would simply like to highlight two select member's experiences with making this type of move.

First from WebmasterWorld admin tedster:

I would strongly consider having a GWT account that ties the old domain to the new one. You don't need to submit an xml sitemap unless you like that idea, but the crawling data alone could be valuable -- an giving Google a solid reason to trust the new domain could only help. We moved a domain 20 months ago from the .org to the .com of the same "rightmost non-generic token" (in Hilltop language.) The old owners had allowed the domain to fully expire -- there was a clear break in the Whois history and the new ownership was clearly the same as the .org ownership. We did a domain wide and url-specific 301 redirect and the new domain's url structure exactly mirrored the old.

And still there was a major dip in traffic and an 8 month quarantine from the trust filters. Reports I've heard this year are that the process can be much faster, but I would still pull out all the stops and give every possible trust signal. Where possible get inbound links changed -- especially deep inbound links. Get new IBLs, both to the domai root and to deeper pages. A Press Release might help a lot.

For an earlier domain move, back at the begining of the so-clled sandbox effect, we did not use 301's, we placed dumb old "we have moved" links on every page. To my memory, that changeover actually went faster (5 months), although I'm not recommending it. I just wanted to mention it as a cautionary tale about the magnitude of what you pla on accomplishing.

Extremely helpful! Here is what member BigDave had to say:

You *will* get a drop in traffic. The absolute best case is that Google takes your current results out of the index and the new pages go into the index at the same time. Google credits your 301s within a month, and takes another month to recalculate everything else.

Since the new domain is not the old domain, it will not get any benefit of any age related factors. You also have a new domain that is suddenly appearing with 50K pages.

If you are lucky, Google will recognize that it simply a new domain name on an old domain. It isn't the sort of luck that I would want to bet a business on.

Sometimes you have to make the move, if you do, use the tools available to you to make the move as "legit" looking as possible. Document every step you make, track the results, be patient and hope for the best. Oh, and don't forget to share your experiences with the community.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious is not always obvious. Google's AdWordsAdvisor in WebmasterWorld went on record stating that Google does not use the conversion tracking or Google analytics data to determine the minimum bid for your keywords. That would be evil, if they did, wouldn't it?

And I quote:

Because of persistant rumors and conjecture along these lines, I'd like to clarify that information from Google's conversion tracking and Google Analytics is not used in the calculation of ones minimum bid, nor otherwise incorporated in the calculation of CPC.

I know people who would bet their house that this statement is not accurate. But I would highly doubt Google is looking at a particular advertisers conversion and earnings factors to adjust the minimum bid on that specific keyword phrase.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The ninth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. Last week was WebmasterWorld's PubCon, so not only did we talk about the major events at the conference, but also discusses the past two weeks of search buzz. One of the big topics we focused on throughout the show was search engine to search marketer communication. So tune in to hear some of the good and bad on that topic. 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. WebmasterWorld PubCon Vegas 2006 Recap
   
2. Yahoo! Rents Out Hugh Hefner's Sky Villa in Palms Hotel
   
3. Suspicious Pictures From Hugh Hefner's Vegas Suit in Palms Hotel
   
4. Search Engine Roundtable & RustyBrick Contest
   
5. Summary Of Recent Posts on Google's AdWords Quality Score Upgrade
   
6. Limited Google.com Result Changes Taking Place?
   
7. Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! Back SiteMaps Protocol
   
8. Submitting a Google Sitemaps Does Not Guarantee Indexing
   
9. Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link Exchanges
   
10. Confusion Over Google's Supplemental Index
    
11. Does Registering A Domain Name for 10 Years Help Search Ranking?
    
12. Yahoo! Publisher Network Adds "Compliance Manager"
    
13. Am I Banned From Google or Other Search Engines?
    
14. A Method To Delist Your Competitor From MSN Search's Live.com?
    

Lightening round topics;

Continue reading "Search Pulse 9: PubCon Vegas, Hefner's Sky Villa, Google Update, Yahoo's Compliance, Microsoft's Banning, AdWords Quality, Sitemaps Protocol & More"

GOOG (stock), Google's stock, has surpassed the landmark price of $500 per share. The stock closed last night at $509.65, making many stock holders and Google employees very happy.

I am shocked it is so high, but I thought the price it was set at for the IPO was way too high also. I guess that is why I am not a day trader or investment banker.

Many folks in the forums agree with me about the price, but still, the price is the price and some figure it will hit over $600 by the end of the year.

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

Don't miss tonight's Search Pulse! We have a lot of topics to discuss, since we missed last week due to PubCon. Obviously, we will spend some time talking about the conference, plus a lot of time discussing all the new buzz on search we reported on here at the Search Engine Roundtable over the past two weeks.

Ben, Chris and I hope you can tune in. And if you want to chat live while listening, we will all be live in the chat room during the show. To access the chat room go here.

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

The question at a WebmasterWorld forum is does registering your domain name for 10 years, instead of one year, help you rank better in Google?

Reading the thread, it appears that most senior members in the thread, feel that it does help.

Here are the arguments to register your domain name for an extended period of time:

(1) Shows the search engine that you are here to stay
(2) Google has a patent application that looks at this data (doesn't mean they use it)
(3) Secures your domain for an extended period of time
(4) Lower price per year if you register over an extended period

Seriously, anyone who is serious about their domain would not flinch at making the small investment of registering for an extended period of time. There is honestly, not that much to lose. There is a lot of back and forth in the forums about why people should not, but I personally disagree with all the arguments. So it costs an extra $30 to transfer the name to a new registrar, it is not the end of the world.

I am off to see when my domains expire, of course I have them set to auto renew, but at what yearly renewal schedule? :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: It seems Google has gone on the record saying domain registration length does not impact rankings.

This morning, I logged into my Google Webmaster Central Sitemaps tool and noticed all my sites are "pending verification." I then found a thread at WebmasterWorld with an other person reporting this issue.

So I dug deeper and found a thread at Google Groups reporting this issue a while back, like a month ago. But Vanessa Fox from Google has a response that reads;

If your verification file or meta tag is still present on your site, try clicking the "pending" link on the My Sites page and then clicking the "Verify" button on the Verify page. We reverify periodically and generally this is done in the background -- we find the file or meta tag and the site remains verified. However, every so often, this reverification process is pending, and clicking the Verify button requests the reverification check right away.

If this doesn't work, please post back with your site URL so we can check into it.

My thoughts is that there was a bug, and when the verification ran, the bot couldn't find any of the pages it tried to verify. Thus putting the sites back into verify or pending verification status. I assume the next automatic run will resolve the issues automatically.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread records that someone was transferred from the original Yahoo! Search Marketing product (i.e. Overture) with 22 campaigns to the new Yahoo! Search Marketing 2.0 (i.e. Panama release). When he/she tried adding an additional campaign to the pie, the program did not allow it. Reportedly, Yahoo! restricts the account to a maximum of 20 campaigns.

This is not unusual, Google AdWords restricts the campaign size to 25.

The reasoning is the same, I assume, with Yahoo! as it is with Google.

That 25 or 20 campaigns should be more than enough. That you should be easily about to use ad groups and keywords/ads within the ad groups to achieve what you are looking for out of your campaign. The past YSM was more flat, the new YSM is more relational, so advertisers will have to learn to adapt.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google sent out an invite to AdSense Publishers for a Webinar that is taking place Wednesday, November 29th at 2PM (EST). The email reads;

Recently we launched a new feature in your account called ad placements. To help you learn more and take advantage of this new feature, we'd like to invite you to an AdSense webinar where members of the AdSense and AdWords Product Management Team will walk you through ad placements and how this feature can highlight your site's audience and content to advertisers, as well as provide you with valuable insight into what advertisers really want. We'll also leave time for the team to answer your AdSense questions.

- - - - - -
AdSense Webinar: Increase your visibility to advertisers
Wednesday November 29, 11:00AM PST / 2:00PM EST.

To register, click on the link below or paste it into a new browser window:
https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=570857556

Once you register, instructions for participation will be sent to you via email from WebEx.
- - - - -

Please note that space is limited and registration will taken on a first-come basis. Participation is by invitation only, so we ask that you please keep the registration details to yourself. We'll be recording the webinar, so if you're unable to attend, you can view it after the event.

If you have any questions, or if you are interested in participating in future beta tests for new features, please contact your account manager.

We look forward to having you join us!

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

The deal is, they are also sending out these invites to AdSense Publishers that are banned.

A DigitalPoint Forums member claims in a thread claims that he is banned but he received this email.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks what is the skinny on how Google views site credit links. For example, a web design company might place a sticker on the site, saying, "site designed by Company Name here."

This is a common marketing tactic, that is basically an extension of word of mouth advertising. Landscapers, roofers, air conditioning, contractors and similar companies place a sign in the front area of the lawn of homes they have worked on. Basically wanting to tell the neighbors that they have worked on this house, provided services that included X, Y and Z and a way to reach that company if they want similar services provided on their home.

You see it all the time with sites as well, a little footer link with site credits, including site designed by, site developed by, pictures by, illustrations by, sponsored by and so on.

The question is, should SEO's place an sticker that says, SEO services by?

The Search Engine Watch Forums thread suggests that SEO's should not do that. Why?

(1) The Google Webmaster Help Center says;

You should never have to link to an SEO. Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

(2) You do not want your SEO to work for your competitor, do you?

(3) Some SEO's consider it a sign of stature to never talk about or mention a client's name.

I am not sure which way to go on this. I see both sides. In my opinion, I think, that it is up to the client.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

We all know MSN Search is now Windows Live Search, but does that mean lose our MSN representative in the forums? MSNdude, who patrols the Microsoft Search forum at WebmasterWorld has not posted a reply or thread since October 17th.

The last post was in a thread named Does msnbot obey meta tag noindex? but nothing since.

Was he fired? Is he sick? I hope all is well. We do miss you, just as much as we miss GoogleGuy.

Barry has just posted on the SEW Blog that Yahoo has now officially integrated Answers into its search results.

We reported back a month and a half ago that Yahoo Tests Enhanced Yahoo Answers Integration In Search Results but now everyone can see it for themselves by conducting a search for vacation ideas.

I personally feel that Yahoo Answers will form an extremely important part of the company's future. Not only will the Q&A platform keep users coming back to Yahoo (or installing the toolbar for instant Q&A notifications), it also offers a way to improve search results for some topics. Unlike algorithms used to position web pages for a specific term; Yahoo Answers offers not only a comprehensive database of topics people are searching for, it also gives a moderated and democratically chosen best answer for those questions. A search for [viagra side effects] which can often return affiliate links, can now show an answer which is voted for by the community in an environment completely controlled and moderated by the engine.

I've gone into more detail on the history, purpose and future of Yahoo Answers in an article which I wrote just before this announcement was made.

Further Discussion At SearchEngineWatch Forums

One of the biggest complaints you read about in the Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network forums in various search forums are from people who have been banned. You see it all the time. A person comes in, says, I hate Google or I hate Yahoo! and rant about how they have been banned for no reason at all. Well, you can blame Google and Yahoo! for not providing sufficient evidence as to why they have been banned. But now you can't blame Yahoo! anymore. They have listened and added a new feature named "compliance manager."

The YPN Blog explains;

Here’s how it works: If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days.

I think this rocks and Google should follow Yahoo!'s lead on this. Huge kudos to Yahoo! for adding this feature. We love transparency! The YPN Blog has screen captures, you won't see this report until you have a compliance issue - which will hopefully be never.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A limited number of people are noticing significant changes in their rankings and traffic from Google.com at WebmasterWorld forums.

Some have seen a 80% drop in traffic from Google and some have seen a 350% increase in traffic from Google.

Here are some reports:

My pages lost about 80% of their traffic about 10 days ago or so. Nov 16/17 I noticed a few terms popping back into the top three positions...

My traffic is down about 20% but I am not worried.

I lost 90% of my Google traffic in 2 Days

I'm seeing a 350 percent increase in traffic on 1 of our websites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums post has the first documented, public, case, that I have seen of someone receiving an email from the Live (MSN) Search team for being banned for using link exchanges. Here is the email as reported in the forums:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you've removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Live Search

So, Microsoft is making an effort on spam. But I believe, not 100% sure, the way Google handles unrelated links to your site, is by not banning your site, but not counting those links. Unless, of course, it is a clear and transparent attempt for you to hurt the search results.

Of course, I do believe Google applies the Minus 30 penalty to some sites participating in some link exchanges or communities that are outright done for the purpose of ranking well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An internal memo reportedly from Yahoo!'s Senior VP, Brad Garlinghouse was posted at the WSJ and at Kedrosky that he thinks Yahoo! needs to cut back by 15 to 20%. In short, Yahoo! has invested in everything and anything and has too much of the same thing making it confusing, redundant and overly costly. They lack a focus, "clarity of ownership and accountability", "decisiveness," and "vision." The peanut butter thing has to do with, "Yahoo is spreading its resources too thinly, like peanut butter on a slice of bread."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

It seems the more Google talks about the supplemental index, you know the results in Google that are labeled as "supplemental," the more confused SEOs are, including myself. Here is an image of what a result in Google.com from the supplemental index might look at.

Typically, there results only appear for very obscure queries. Why? Because, a supplemental by definition, belongs towards the back of a novel and it just enhances any missing parts of a complete story. So first you would get results from the main index and then the supplemental index when all is equal.

But traveling through the forums recently, it appears that Google is trying to give off the impression that the supplemental index is nothing bad for your site. Whereas, all expert SEOs used to and some currently, call the supplemental index, the sign of death (in terms of your site ranking in Google).

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread is named "supplemental not bad according to matt cutts?" And you also have this huge 17 page thread for about two weeks ago that is still very active at WebmasterWorld linking to Adam Lasnik's Google Groups post named The skinny on the supplemental index.

Adam explains;

1) Penalty? When your site has pages in our supplemental index, it does *not* indicate that your site has been penalized. In particular, we do not move a site's pages from our main to our supplemental index in response to any violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.

2) Freshness?
You can expect to see a fresher supplemental index in the coming quarters. By the definition of "supplemental," however, I don't forsee it becoming as comprehensive or frequently updated as our main index.

3) Cure?
Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index.

Ok, first two are great Google-like responses, IMO. But to call something a "cure," kind of implies that there is a major issue with being in the supplemental index.

At PubCon, Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox both said that the supplemental index is not a bad thing. But is it a good thing? Not bad for who?

I would love to hear a definitive pro and con on the supplemental index from Google.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Update: There is an other thread at WebmasterWorld named Supplemental Results: What exactly are they where Adam Lasnik of Google posted to yesterday where he said;

Pages are in the supplemental results because we still wanted to be able to show them to users, but the pages didn't have enough PageRank to make it into our main index (which is more extensive and updated with greater frequency).

Getting more *quality* backlinks is generally a good way to get more of your pages in the main index.

Still, there is a lot of confusion on this.

Last week we reported on Wednesday that AdWords went down not allowing advertisers to login and change their campaigns. The issue was reportedly resolved shortly after but for some reason, still people are having issues logging in.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread still accounts for issues, even after AdWordsAdvisor suggest there should be no more issue.

There are also weekend reports at WebmasterWorld with the same issue.

I hope they get is resolved shortly.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

It has been a while since we ran a contest, so I figured I run a new contest. You can win a new RustyBrick Messenger Laptop Bag filled with a bunch of Search Engine Roundtable YoYos. Here are pictures of both.

How do you win?

I have the details at my personal blog under the title Contest: Win a RustyBrick Bag Filled With Search Engine Roundtable YoYos.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Search Engine Watch user davec004 has posted a question on the forums regarding the word "Georgia" appearing underneath a PPC listing in Google. I've also seen this occuring on the term [car insurance] for an account which my housemate and PPC Guru, Duncan Parfitt, coincidentally manages.

I just put this down to just one of those “features” that sometimes crop up in search results, although a similar occurrence on US adverts appears to show that Google is performing a low scale test. I would assume that this is connected to either Google Local features, or more likely, Google seeing whether reference to a geographical location increases CTR or conversions.

With the search leader already making plans to move into the Cost Per Acquisition model with some verticals, is this a sign of them automatically including copy which is proven to increase targeted clickthroughs and therefore a more efficient CPA model?

Further Discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums

UPDATE: I've just contacted the person running the above Car Insurance campaign and they have confirmed that this is simply geo-targeting and that it's been out for a few months now. With this in mind, I can't believe that I have not seen this before. Surely advertisers in verticals such as these would be fighting to use these features to make adverts even more personalised and targetted?

I am back from the PubCon Vegas conference. It was the best PubCon ever, in my opinion, Brett totally did an awesome job, even without his wife not being able to come (we noticed). This conference is much more laid back than the SES conferences, but that is what makes it special. The speakers are informal, joking around, the search reps are trashing on SEOs, it is just fun all around.

I loved how Tim Converse of Yahoo! started his speech by saying he is imagining everyone in the room are white hat SEOs. It is like when normal speakers imagine people in the room are naked, to relax them. He needed to think white hat, to relax him. I loved how Matt Cutts totally ripped on sites during the site review panel, oh and he totally won the battle against Time Mayer (sorry Tim). Danny also dissed Yahoo!, kinda, in his keynote, saying, all of search is going up, except for Yahoo!'s revenues. I met all sorts of cool, smart, nice, and fun people at the conference. I won't shout out any names, but you guys know who you are. I met MSN adCenter reps, including the PR person (not sure if I can mention names), adCenter411 and adCenterEU were there (sorry about the Microsoft comment EU). The Yahoo! folks, well, they seriously know how to have a good time (thanks guys, you seriously rock!). I didn't see any Ask.com people, but they were a huge sponsor of the conference, thanks for the wifi. Google, well, Google also rocks. Such nice people, they honestly care. Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, Brian White (I didn't see Adam Lasnik) but I had long conversations, one on one with those three. I can honestly say, that they care.

Of course, Chris Boggs and Donna (DD) totally rocked with the coverage. I cannot thank them enough. Both honest, down to earth, giving people - the type of people I like to be associate with. Ben, we missed you.

Ok, here is the summary of our coverage: WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006 Coverage Schedule

November 14th:

1. WebmasterWorld Pubcon Kickoff Keynote Address - Guy Kawasaki
   
2. Feeds, Blogs, News, and Social Search (FeedBurner, Digg, Topix)
   
3. SEO and Big Search
   
4. Feeds and Other Alternative Optimization Opportunities
   
5. Link Development and Linking Optimization
   
6. Affiliate Strategies and Content Strategies
   
7. Feeding the Engines - Writing Copy
   
8. Corporate Mega Site SEO Management
   
9. Special Afternoon Keynote by Jon S Von Tetzchner of Opera
   

November 15th:

1. New Age of Web Advertising Keynote by John Battelle
   
2. Local and Mobile Local Search
   
3. What Every Webmaster Should Know: PHP, PERL, ASP.net
   
4. International and European Optimization
   
5. Search Blogger and Reporter Forum
   
6. Purchasing Links
   
7. Duplicate Content Issues (Yahoo & Google)
   
8. Super Session : Search and Research on a Rail
   

Cool Party: Yahoo! Rents Out Hugh Hefner's Sky Villa in Palms Hotel

November 16th:

1. Special Guest Keynote - Danny Sullivan - Search Engine Land
   
2. Press and Public Relation Campaigns
   
3. Forums and Communities : Building and Optimization
   
4. Spider and DOS Defense - Rebels, Renegades, and Rogues
   
5. Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum
   

Great job Brett, hope the Pub part of the PubCon is going well now! :)

Today, I hope to post a quick series of short posts on recent threads on some hot topics for the past week. I just got in early this morning, so I will take it easy on the blog today. For more info about my personal stuff, check out Cartoon Barry.

Watching the AdWords forums this past week has not been fun. Google has really stuck a nerve right before the big holiday season and they deserve this backlash, in my opinion. Here are some recent threads to bring us all up to speed.

(1) Quality Score?!?! lots of frustration in that thread
(2) Improving Landing pages QS -My Experience tips to get things working right again
(3) Done with AdWords the title says it all
(4) The Google Quality Bot talking bot specific

Hope these threads help.

Today, I hope to post a quick series of short posts on recent threads on some hot topics for the past week. I just got in early this morning, so I will take it easy on the blog today. For more info about my personal stuff, check out Cartoon Barry.

Over at WebmasterWorld there were some recent threads on the new Panama, Search Marketing 2.0 system. As you know, I have some extensive, first looks, at Yahoo! Panama from about a month ago.

(1) anyone in Panama hit by Quality stuff? No, the quality factors for ranking do not get applied to the frontend until after January.
(2) Panama geotargetting available? yes, they have some pretty cool Geo targeting. You can target cities, states, radius by zip code and more.
(3) Panama rants, but Panama isn't perfect yet!

• It does not work well in Opera
  
• Bulk keyword upload allows 50 keywords max, only.

With Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, Danny Sullivan and modded by Jake Baillie.

This is a site review forum, so my not taking won't be so great...

It is just funny how people trash on these sites. Matt Cutts of Google has his special tools, listing off dozens of domains for a site that he has with the same content...

Now Tim from Yahoo! is put up to the challenge, a different site is presented, it does well in Google but has only three pages indexed in Yahoo! Tim is typing away. Tim says they have 395 pages of the site. She replied that they have 5,000 pages or so. Finally, Greg Boser discovers tons of sitemap link pages, with hundreds and hundreds of links on those pages. Looks kinda spammy. Matt suggests breaking the sitemaps into chronological order.

Next site looks average but seems to have a link exchange issue.

Next guy wants to rank well for a specific keyword, but the keyword phrase is not in the title or content of the site. Very basic issues with this site. Danny tells him to focus on local engines, google local.

Ok, I am done with this. Going to catch the flight back to NY now, which, yea, is delayed - of course.

Vanessa Fox from Google to talk about bots... The basis is that major SEs bots behave well, they do not all use the same syntax, test your file to make sure you're blocking and allowing what you want and use webmaster tools to diagnose any problems with Googlebot. The standard at robotstxt.org info and at google.com/webmasters/. Google has good tools to help you out at Sitemaps. There is robots.txt, reobots meta tags, nofollow tag, password protect files, url removal tool and sitemap xml file. She then went through some of the tools out there. Sorry for lack of coverage here, something came up...

Dan Kramer was next up to whitelisting, cloaking and metrics on bots. Use your analytics to track your bot activity. He does custom scripting to set up a script that logs bot activity. They log if they have the http referrer header. You can selectively log certain requests based on footprints. Have the script email you reports. Even then there is manual work you need to do. Some people spoof good bots, so then you need to DNS reverse requests and whois info. Typically in the user agent info, there is a URL with more info. Bot detection strategy, search engines bots almost nver use an HTTP referer header, they use recognizable user agents. Search engine bots come from known IP ranges. Their IPs are normally registered to company. IPLists.coom, WMW has a good forum on it, fantomaster.com/fasvsspy01.html, jafsoft.com and others. What do you do with all this data? Bot control with robots.txt, mod_rewrite for handling, cloaking and banning bad bots. He explains what robots.txt is... He then gives some suggestions for these bots.

William Atchison from Crawl Wall is next up. Check out my past coverage from his presentation at SES San Jose over http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/004336.html. I love his presentation.

Brett Tabke was up next... WMW was knocked offline four times last year because of robots. There were dup content issues. They guess that 1 billion pages views by bots in 2005. WMW is a big target, so they get hit. He shows off the rogue access control system backend module for WMW, pretty cool. They require logins by agents, domains, IPS and referrers. They have a banned list on same criteria, they identify the search engines by domains, IPs and agent names. They also have whitelists by same criteria. The results were 90% reduction in rogue spider activity, 5 TB savings in bandwidth and average page generation time reduced by 50%.

Roger B. Dooley is up first. there are youth oriented communities, the challenges include population changes from yea tot year, behavior issues and generation caps. But they spend a lot of time online, they are a desirable demographic and they can benefit from it. He is sharing a youth community case study. The new site was to provide free info for kids and parents for college making decisions. The site features in 2001 were articles, advice column, and discussion forums. In 2006, it is the leading community in its space. 1.5 million pageviews per day and is constantly growing. What made it grow? They made clear rules for behavior and language. Impartial moderation is important. Treat all members as adults, even though they are kids. Member "moderation" where members moderate others, reporting features, etc. Provide areas of looser moderation, like cafe areas, etc. They have an adult membership of about 15% that help things from boiling over. There is a lot of turnover, because a student's life-span is only so long. To deal with turn over they have good word of mouth, ongoing link development, targeted forum topics to keep students on. Going beyond the forum is the next stage, look at myspace, how do you users want to react, he shows off tools to give your community for that community. The successes include lot of content, lots of work, real rewards to help people, make connections, change the world, and helping individuals.

Lawrence Coburn from RateItAll was next up. He runs a site named RateItAll.com. Why are online communities important? online community is disruptive, allows little guys to run with big guys, self sustaining, lightweight business model. Why do people participate in online communities? (1) recognition, (2) selfish interest and (3) the good samaritan. He gives examples of this. Characteristics of successful communities; common interest, communication, personal investment of users, relationships between users, online reps, minimal barriers to participation, user recruits other users, utilitarian vs. entertainment and offline presence. Community enhancing features; user pages, user to user messaging, widgets, publishing tools, alerts, user search, tagging, networking, reputation indicators, accreditation, editorial privileges, business blogs. Social Network theory: reed's law as nodes are added to a network, the value of that network will grow exponentially, why enable social networking? user acquisition. linking network growth to user experience is hard to do. Distributed Social Networks: widget mania, the aggregators and the edge feeders. The embedded flash player by YouTube helped them skyrocket. He also talked about StumbleUpon's toolbar, a way to rate sites you are on. Types of incentives; adsense integration so users can make money (but be careful with that), recognitions is still the foundation of it. User recognition include avatars, hall of fame, featured posts, moderato status, newsletters, etc. Reputation tracking by quantity, quality, etc. So what is next for it? Portable reputations, distributed social networks, implicit vs. explicit participation, niche social networks, and convergence of mobility and community.

Elisabeth Osmeloski from Search Engine Watch Forums. Keys to a good community include; passion about the subject, pay it forward by sharing knowledge, good vibes and opportunity to meet/network in person. He gave a background on SEW Forums... She goes over more stuff with history. She shows some stats on SEW's growth compared to other forums, comparing WMW, SEW, HighRankings, DigitalPoint Forums, and so on. SEW is fairly liberal on most parts but they have a 3 strike and your out rule. They do allow URLs to be posted, for the most part. Mods staff needs to help with guiding users. What does SEW have to do better? they need to make sure the rep remains solid, set the ton, be unbaised, attract new members, keep quality conversations up, crosslink content within network, upgrade vBulletin and add new features.

Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld explains that what works for some communities doesn't work for other communities. See what works within your industry and find your own niche. He got the idea from Steve Jobs about connecting the jobs at Apple, to start his own forum. He was born in 1962... Involved in community in 84 and WMW went live in 99 and goes back about his past computer history. WMW gets about 150M uniques per day, he said. Star Trek was hugely influential for him. He talks about his personal and computer historical past. Talks about his SEO stuff, infoseek, excite, alta vista. Then talks about early conferences. WebmaterWorld has unique software, easy to use, we focus on the members, site designed for member comments first, success is members on site time, it isnt about the content is is about the relationship. Stuff WMW avoids includes visual noise, social networking noise, and it is about relationships and interactions. The hardest thing they do is maintain the long term relationship with the members and moderators, not everyone thinks alike. They are a subscription based model over an advertising model. They dont care about signups, they care about quality posts. Professional forum spamming is much more advanced these days, it is a challenge. Rogue spiders are an issue also. Biggest challenge over past year was a press release stuff and PR stuff. Speed, size, community and cultural awareness sums it all up.

Moderator: Justin Sanger
Speakers:
Robin Liss, Founder and President, Camcorderinfo.com
Lee Odden, President, TopRank Online Marketing
Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com
David McInnis, Founder and CEO, PRWeb

Moderator is missing, so the speakers will do this on their own. Each speaker first introduces themselves. Robin Liss is up first.

Her company changed its name recently (camcorderinfo.com digitalcamerainfo.com). They do reviews of camcorders, and they do a lot of outreach to other media - helping them do a piece on the latest camcorders. Robin is one of the Inc top 30 entrepreneurs. She will talk specifically about how to do an interview. She sees a lot of bad interviews out there because of nerves, so she's got some rules to go by to do an interview better (either radio, print or tv).

Rule 1: Be Over Prepared.
You can't ask the interview what questions they are going to ask, but you can get a sense of the topics will be. So, find out as much info about the topic, and then research - prep, prep, prep. Figure out your opinion on the topic. Example: She went on CNN to discuss media coverage of Apple. She prepped a dense page of notes, and wrote out her opinion as to why the media is too in love with Apple.

She put the contact info of the reporter on her notes. You don't want to forget the interviewer's name!

Intertwine your company's mission/purpose with the topic that is being discussed. Wirte out 3-5 key one line message points to show your company strategy.

Research data and facts which back those points up and place them in your notes.

Add funny one liners that sound smart and clever which you can throw in.

Annotate the memo with boldings, highlighting and underlining so your eyes can easily jumpt to a part of document.

Keep these notes to just one page.

Rule 2: Practice

This is especially important if it's a tv or in-person interview, but also applies to print interviews.

Write down a few prospective questions you think you may get. Be prepared especially for zinger questions.

Practice with a family or staff member, and practice in front of a mirror.

A key skill is to be able to quickly look down at your notes, and then quickly look back up.

Learn how to fill space without "ums", "ahs", you knows", and "likes" - this is hard but important! Practice!

Rule 3: Develop a Relationship with the Reporter

This is easier for non-live segments such as newspaper interviews.

Berfore you start talking on-message, find a common subject you can connect with. She always opens by talking about journalism ethics, and it's something all reporters can relate to.

Rule 4: Give Straight Answers

If you're well-prepped, you can give good, succinct 30 second answers. Keep your answers to no more than 30 seconds, or they will tune out.

If you don't know the answer, say so. Don't just babble and make something up.

Always correct yourself. If you make a mistake, you want it on the record that you know you made a mistake and corrected it.

Rule 5: Message, Message, Message

Your business objective is important, so you need to artfully and subtly work in your business message. Don't just shout out your business message - give them an interesting interview, but get your message in ther subtly. "What we believe at mycompanyname.com is ..." Drop the url a couple of times, but not too many.

Rule 6: Be Cautious

Before you speak, think through what info you will make publicly available. Don't give out strategic info that you hadn't meant to give out. Reporters are experts at getting you to divulge info that you didn't mean to give out. Stick to the rules about what you're going to talk about and don't sway from that. Never say anything off the record that you wouldn't say to your wife, your mother, your boss or a judge.

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David McInnis is up next.

PRWeb is not about traditional uses for Press Releases (written for mainstream media and investor relations). But there are new opportunities for Press Releases.

Direct-to-Consumer PR
Puts the public back in public relations
written for the public/customer
leverages power of news search engines, news alerts, rss an social media tools

2 primary pillars of D2C PR (direct to consumer)
* seo soptimized distribution (pre-distribution)
* social media (post-distribution)

Why D2C?
bypass the meida filter
control your mesage - repuation management, expert status
increased online visibility - more traffic, content in context

2 components of seo press release

keyword optimization - prior to distribution. research keywords, build linking stragegies and write release.
Tools available - newsforce.com, and prweb seo wizard

distribution platform - once you've optimized the press release, need to choose the optimum platform for distribution.

PRWeb constantly tuned for SEO

EON, Billboard magazine are using PRWeb services.

Why Social Media?

Search engines are constantly evolving. Ongoing opportunity as things change. You could even specialize just in optimizing SEO press releases. Same thing with Social Media. Lots of opportunity to tap new social networks.

Blogs are the "human powered" search engines - provide access to an audience and encourages online discussion.

PRWeb wants to help users tap into this sphere. It's also faster and more complete response than normal media. Blogs are more times and are the bridge between mainstream media.

2 components of social media press release - distribution platform and post distirbution networking. The blogosphere can interact with your press release via technorati, digg, etc.

Once you distribute your PR, then you start your networking with the blogosphere.

Social Media Rules (he thinks these are crap, but he presents them anyway)

1. Do not seed your own conent. Do not expect your wire service to seed it for you.

2. The blogosphere rewards transparency. (he thinks this is crap)

3. Monitor and know your audience int he blogosphere.

4. Participate in the online dialogue before you need something from them.

5. Be respectful (use living room behavior).

Safe Bet: Adhere to WOMMA guidelines

Getting Started:

Find stuff to release, create news.

Optimize your headline, link your news to current events where possible.

Short titles are best.

Abstract and Summary is probably more important than the body of the release. Get some keywords in there and don't make it just a copy of your first paragraph.

Use Correct press release form.

Create a news image (400x400 pixels or smaller and square is best).

Body copy - include multiple quotes, anchor text (1 link per 100 words of copy), and don't forget who, what, when, where and why. Copy should be about 300 to 800 words.

Don't forget to SEO your attached files with filenames, tag your audio and video files, and your file titles and descriptions.

Something new for PRWeb: Trackback/Pingbacks. This closes the loop in the press release process. First you need a compelling news release. PRWeb responds automatically with Wordpress users. All of their services are trackback enabled.

Don't forget to use RSS feeds of your press releases. PRWeb does manage and include it in their distribution.

PRWeb editorially scores all releases. 1-3 doesn't get wide distribution, score of 5 (highest) gets wider distribution.

They also block trackback spam and has a human editor to catch trackback spam that makes it through their filter.

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Lee Odden is up next with Push and Pull Public Relations (Optimizing PR with Social Media) as the topic.

Gives some background info on TopRank Online Marketing. The quickest way to get into the media is to become the media, and a blog is the best way to do that.

The Time is Right:

There's a market opportunity with news search. It has a huge audience. So getting into something like Yahoo News via something like press release optimization is the way to go. Increasing use of social media such as blog and news search engines, social news, social bookmarks, podcasts, and video - all tied together via RSS - is what makes the timing right for expaning the distribution channels available for getting your message out.

Adding social media to online PR can have a multiplying effect.

Push and Pull PR:

Push PR means pitching - sending out press releases - contacting journalists and bloggers and pitching yourself.

Pull PR is making it easy for the media and your intended audience to find and pull themselves to your news. So you need to make yourself available in those places where they are searching for news.

Push - Wire Service, Pitching Journalists
Pull - News Search, RSS
Media Coverage - Once one or both of these gets you media coverage, you are pulling people to your message because they are reading about you, but you can also push it by sending out emails etc to mention the article that was written about you.

Blogger Relations Tips:

Be relevant, personalize, make it easy, schwag is good, be persistant.

Pitching bloggers is different than pitching journalists. Bloggers can be fickle, and not have time to deal with your pitches, so handle them differently than you would a journalist. Get an idea what they write about normally, and personalize your pitch to them, with relevant information. Make it easy - summarize and include a link to the full copy of the article. If you have a product or service, give the blogger a free trial, free products, etc. Be persistant, they may not have noticed you the first time - but don't be annoying.

Add social media to the mix:

A press release can be in a traditional format as well as in a Social Media format.

This format makes it easier for someone to write a story about it. It includes bulletized key points after the title and summary paragraph. Also gives contact info so they can get more information. Break out quotes into a separate section to make it easy for them to just grab quotes. Include links to a blog post that elaborates on the story. And of course, give them links to all the social bookmarking sites and RSS subscription links. Finally give them a link to a traditional pr format as well.

All of this is just to make it easy for the journalist or blogger to use your story. You can even give them additional resources to use (technorati tags for example).

Post news release on your blog.
Bookmark the release
Create a MS Word version of the release and optimize it with keywords and links. Do the same with a .pdf file.

Measure Success:
Wire service reporting, web analytics, google and yahoo alerts, and RSS feeds.

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Greg Jarboe is up last. Asks who in audience is with small/medium/big business. It's a good mix.

Almost 75% of search marketers are now optimizing press releases. A year ago, it was only about 31%.

Last year's message is "optimize press releases". This year's message is "advanced tips for optimizing press releases".

Interesting new trend is that media is starting to get this. The NY Times is training its reporters to optimize their news, which is a fundamental shift. We knew about it, but now we have to compete with the news media as well.

It also creates opportunities, when the news media hires search marketers to optimize their news releases! SEO-PR took on this challenge with the Jill Carroll Story.

Tip 1:

Add Images! Sure, optimize the text, but add an image too. Journalists are looking for visuals (90%) to go with the story.

Tip 2:

Add multimedia! (podcasts, video, etc.). Then take that video on places like YouTube. These videos can really drive lots of traffic.

Tip 3:

Distribute the release in various places (US, Canada, UK, etc).

Tip 4:

89% of journalists prefer to receive majority of info via email. Build relationships. If you make the journalist feel like he/she is the most important person in the world, you'll get their attention. Don't just put out a release and expect the journalists to find it. And the most important point - email the release to the reporters BEFORE you put it out on the wire. Make them feel special.

Tip 5:

Don't just pitch anchors at CNN.com. Pitch to the human editors of Yahoo! News. These editors don't get pitches often. They are lonely, and are happy to hear from you. They want some scoops before others. And they want video, audio, and ADVANCED ACCESS to the story. Give it to them!

Tip 6:

Matt Cutts says main benefit is NOT PageRank of links in press release and that he would zero out the link benefit from releases. So the links in releases are now valueless, but IF others pick that up and give you links, then those count.

So who gives links all day long? Blogs. The mainstream media might occasionally give you a link, but it's rare, and it's usually just to the home page. But bloggers will give you a deep link to the exact page relevant to the topic. Use Lee's tips (above) to contact key bloggers (even A-list bloggers). Offer them images, video links, excerpts and ADVANCE ACCESS. Bloggers love this and will usually happily post on the story.

So, THAT link juice WILL count, even if the press release link juice is taken away.

Greg shows stats on traffic generated by the story they pitched. Their efforts brought in tons of traffic.

They also realized that a small blog site (Huffington Post) generated 3.4 times more visitors than ABC News which also ran the piece. And the blog traffic was sticky! The users who came from the blog, read an entire 11-part series with 65% of the visitors finishing the entire piece.

They generated 4,081 new links from 763 additional blogs from this press release. These links took them from #65 ranking to #12 ranking in one week!

Things to have:

1. Original and unique content of genuine value
2. Pages designed primarily for humans - great story with graphics
3. Links intended to help people find more relevant information

Brett Tabke welcomes everyone. He recaps things and talks about the schedule for today... He blamed Danny for breaking the news about the new sitemap protocol. He then talks about Danny resigning from SEW and how he asked Danny to speak at PubCon and he agreed. He says Danny is and still is the authority on search. He thanks Danny.

Danny is now up.

He said he is a bit tired because he had to do a drug deal, with someone from Google. He passed along his medicine for her cold, Vanessa Fox, guys. He then makes a few more jokes, people laugh to be nice (playing with you Danny).

He explains that he hasn't come to PubCon in a while because of scheduling things. But timing works and it is Greg Boser's 40th bday this week. He explains how he came up with what he will say, while missing an exit driving his kids to soccer practice.

WebmasterWorld as an Institution
- Google Dance yearly, he thinks of it as WMW (WebmasterWorld) giving so much of Google's vocabulary, i.e. Google Dance came from WMW.
- GoogleGuy comes from WMW
- Florida - the big algo change was named by WMW and weather reports coming from WMW
- Canaries, your one of the people who know when things go wrong in SEs first
- Unification, they said that the SEs need to come together to come up with common standards, and a lot of it has come off of WMW
- Brett is sort of a rebel in some ways (banning all spiders, naming updates, using a robots.txt file as a blog)

Ten Years On...
- He said maybe search stuff has some legs
- But he still gets annoyed with articles that say "the lowly search ads.", now videos are getting this type of hype
- He then gives off some search stats on search growth

What's It All Mean
- People spend on search
- People are spending a lot more on search
-- some due to contextual pollution of figures
-- some due to click prices rising due to better conversion tracking, more competition, brand money flowing in
-- Some due to increasing search volume
- He explains the Google Network (ads on AOL, ads on newspapers, etc) Google Network is everyone and he wants Google to separate it out.

Get On the Googletrain!
- Everyone is copying Google
- Time Warner is trying to auction of TV spots
- Ogilvy trying to enable people to bid on video clips

AdWords Vs. AuctionWords
- Its search marketing not search auctioning...
- He explains you go to search when you need something

What is Search Marketing?
- Putting messages in front of someone who has overtly and explicitly express a desire
- SEO is the act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings, usually crawler-based ones
- Search advertising is the act of doing this through direct paid methods
- SEM is the combination of them both

Reverse Broadcasting
- Search is a reverse broadcasting medium
- Broad ad (tv,radio, print, contextual) is all to build desire
- Reverse Broadcasting is about listening to the millions broadcasting their immediate desires on search engines

What Search Marketers Do
- Identify the key broadcasting stations (google, etc.)
- Understand how to feed and optimize messages shown on these stations
- Scout the location, write the dialog &U deliver customized commercials
- A unique job, so be proud

What Search Marketing is Not
- Having an auction doesn't equal having it as SEM
- Nor does PPC pricing mean search
- Contextual is not search

Contextual Pollution
- Google & Yahoo just reported earnings but didn't break out contextual from search
- Lumping the two pollutes the data
- Especially worrisome as vertical search grows

Generation of Search
- Vertical Search part of 3rd gen jump
- Vertical is info, news, health, shopping, music, video, cars, etc, pieces of each
- Personal/Social Search you change results based on what you personally search for, or your network is searching for. Danny says it helps the spam problem.

How To Succeed in Gen 3?
- Watch the vertical search engines
- Have great content
- Especially great titles & descriptions

Going Beyond Search
- Search players are looking beyond search
-- contextual moves
-- Google doing print, radio, video, etc.
- They want to drag you and your money with them
- Do you go? Are you still a search marketer?

Metrics Marketer
- You market on really good metrics
- The medium doesn't matter

Search: Here To Stay
- Search is now a fundamental advertising medium, like TV, radio, print and outdoors
- Search marketing - demand filling, reverse broadcasting...
- Apprentice - Martha Stuart
- Google Pontiac
- Google Remax partnership
- Maxim Google Earth

Future: More Integration
- Search will be part of overall ad/pr campaign
- Campaign may even more and more seek to drive searches
- Search will pull money from other mediums and force those to be more accountable

Future: More Complications
- MSN demo, daypart, etc.
- Non search products
- Automation will remain important
- Search is job security

Future: Other Things
- More vertical and personal
- Perhaps more balance for paid and organic
- More lawsuits
- Privacy challenge
- Copyright challenges, Belgian story, Australia, book search. etc.

Leaving Search Engine Watch
- He explained the story
- He is doing shows in NY, transitioning off

Search Engine Land Site http://searchengineland.com/
- New site where Danny, Chris Sherman and I (Barry Schwartz)
-- Daily news blogging
-- Longer stuff
-- Etc.
- Daily Search Cast

Brett Tabke posted a thread at WebmasterWorld showing that the SiteMaps Protocol is backed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

This was announced at the WebmasterWorld PubCon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Yahoo!'s party last night at the Palms Hotel. Yahoo! rented out the Hugh Hefner's Sky Villa, which I hear goes for 40k per night. They had Chris Pierce performing live with his band during the event. The suite is absolutely cool. You walk in and to the left is a bar, with two bartenders, past that is a living room type of area with a fireplace, big TV, sofas. It all looks out to the Vegas skyline, seriously a sweet view. Then there is an outdoor mini pool that looks like the picture below.

On the right of the lower rooms is an other bar with more sofas. Then you can walk upstairs to the rooms. There was a photobooth on the left, past that on the left is the bathroom and shower, Rand decided to give it a try. Outside the bathroom is the revolving bed, you can see Andrew Goodman, Rand Fishkin and Myself on it at the same time. Outside of that room, top level, right side of the level, was Hef's room (wasn't allowed in), this massage room, and then some other bedrooms.

The invite list, I hear was small, when I left, I took a cab back with someone who was pretty upset he was turned away at the door.

Very cool party and tons of pics at Flickr. Thanks Yahoo!

Tom Hughes from Sentient Services was up first. Brand positioning research presentation. While we are delivery web site performance, we are also delivering brand performance. Why should I care about brand experience? The web site is the front line for delivering the brand experience. It matters because optimal brand positioning can bring better positioning. It increases efficiency and consistency of marcom. It gets everyone on the same page. It drives strategy for SEO and it connects web site efforts to sustainable business performance. We need to measure what we can leverage.... Our strengths versus key competitors. What customers want from us. Research tools include 2ndary tools as syndicated studies and market data, primary research such as qualitative and quantitative. What can we do ourselves and what is the best left to experts? DIY: talk to customers, talk to employees, gather secondary research info. Get help with questionnaire design and analysis and interpretation of data. A useful positioning and messaging template: start with the position itself (why are you compelling different), then the identity (what business are you in?), then differentiation, the significance, and then the messaging support around all of that, finally emotional support. How do you use this info now? Deliver this experience on the home page. Incorporate pictures or taglines on site pages that resonate brand positioning. Define and audit search terms. Launch banner ad campaigns that resonate the brand positioning (brand, product and customer segment levels). He then gave a case study on Dell (ill omit it here, I am so tired). The formula for sustainable success is to have a line of sight on optimal brand position, use it to guide and deliver...

Gordon Hotchkiss from Enquiro was up next. Why is research important in search? Search marketing requires five things to work; you need to get the right message, right person, right place and right time, the right experience. He showed examples of PPC results... The golden triangle is not that simple, it depends on intent. Get into your customers mind. You need to research your customers to get the intent. Then you develop personas. He then gave examples, yes I am still tired. Intent should impact SERP scanning behavior. Researcher type queries should focus more on organic ads, but purchase type queries should focus more on sponsored listings. They tested this theory. Purchasers are more likely to look at sponsored results, more top heavy he said. Researchers also look at the top but concentrate more so on the bottom set (organic results) more than purchases. They also saw much heavier CTR on organic results for researcher type searchers. When they clicked through, he showed eye tracking maps of the landing page. Research group reads the whole page, but the purchases just looks for one link, a link to buy.

Glenn Alsup from Viewmark is now up. The area between the user and the object, showing a picture of a roulette wheel. How are people interacting with the game. There is a big difference between qualitative and quantitative data. User research prep; situation and background, then goals and objectives, and develop use cases. Then come the tactics, including, strategic (surveys and focus groups), models (observations, one on one and usability) and deployment (interviews). He then gives a case study on Agilent, yes, still tired, sorry. Traditional lab testing includes, a facilitator, observers and the participant. He also talks about remote usability, testing usability remotely.

Final one up is Dana Todd about SEMPO from SiteLab. She said she will be brief!!! SEMPO is in their 3rd year of tracking industry trends. They test over 100 data points. Primary interest in sizing market, pricing shifts, resource allocation, product demand, industry issues, click fraud, etc. The interesting data points from 2005, is that SEO has incredibly strong demand as an SEM tactic. SEM management is migrating in house. Click price elasticity is nearly capped out. Awareness and concern about click fraud is growing. All data points from 2005. Organic SEO most popular of SEM programs with advertisers respondents; 4 of 5 advertiser respondents engage in organic SEO, more than 76% engage in paid placement, and 2 of 5 advertisers engage in paid inclusion. Paid placement and organic SEO were offered by the vast majority of agency respondents, dollars are less in SEO then PPC. Majority of 2006 organic SEO spending will be managed in house, not outsourced to agencies. Most advertiser respondents could still tolerate further price increases at moderate levels. Agencies exhibit growing concern over click fraud. They have a new SEMPO survey, check it out at sempo.org.

Amanda Watlington was up first. The typical causes of duplicate content include many. Tools to detect dup content include your ability to search, take content of 10 words and search on it, also see cyberspyder or webbug, domain ownership info with whois to contact them. Multiple domains is a cause, it occurs when someone buys a domain, and other reasons as to why people have multiple domains... 2004, the monkbiz.com site acquired monkeybusiness.com, both domains are aliases to each other. Once you detect the issue, repair it with 301s, etc. An other cause of dup content is when you redesign your site, for example you change URL structure, or when you change from html to php, etc. She then gave an example. If you see more pages on the engine then in the site, that is a sign of dup content issues. You can 301 or 404 those pages. An other cause are content management systems, happens with e-commerce sites, also sites that have PPC campaigns, she shows examples as ways to get to the same product with two different URLs. Detect the issue, by seeing how the URLs look for products in multiple sections. Repair it by rearchitecture your URLs. She showed some examples... Landing page pages can have many URLs, with same content. You can 301 some of them or use a robots.txt exclusion protocol to tell spiders not to crawl. An other issue is with content syndication and scraping issues and she shows examples (lots of affiliates have this issue).

Bill Slawski is up ready to talk about dup content. He explains the fundamental issue is that the search engine wants on copy of the content, so which one do they choose. He talked about a site that had 3,500 pages, that had 95,000 pages indexed in Google. He noticed some weird patterns. He saw widgets that expanded and collapsed menus, each with different URLs, but the same content. They replaced the widgets with crawl-able JavaScript functions. The dup content dropped down. Dup content issue #1; reusing manufacturers product description is a common issue. Alternative print pages is issue #2, and there are ways around it. Issue #3 is that rss feeds are syndicated quickly, so you need to become the authoritative source. #4 are canonicalization issues. #5 is session IDs. #5 are multiple data variables. #7, pages with content that are just too similar (page titles, etc.). #8 copyright infringement can be an issue. #9 same pages on subdomains and different ltds. #10, article syndication may be an issue. #11 are mirrored sites. There is a white paper named DUST, Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text. It discusses ways identify dup content and how they may handle it. In the paper they use the word "dustbuster." The limitation of the DUST paper is that it doesnt detail which pages are kept and which are discarded. Collapsing Equivalent Results is MSN's patent app uses a query independent ranking component, a result analysis component, a navigational model selection mechanism, and more. He shows some results analysis factors such as extensions like the .com might be preferred over the .net, or shorter URLS may be better, or less redirects is better, and so on. It does not mean Microsoft is doing it, it is just a patent app. Searcher and site location or language may be a factor. Obviously, popularity may have an impact. Click throughs may be tracked also.

Tim Converse from Yahoo! he said he spends his days fighting off black hats. How do you spell a short version of duplicate. Dupe? Dup? Doop? etc. Why do search engines care about duplication? User experience, and they dont want to show the same content over and over again for the same query. An other issue is if they only crawl the dup content, they wont have any differentiate with other content (but this is less of an issue). The most important thing is to show the content of the originating source. Where does Yahoo! get rid of dups? At every point in the pipeline, including crawl time, index time, and query time, they prefer to remove dups at the time of the query. They try to limit two urls per host in the serps. Why does Yahoo! ever want to keep a duplicate page? Historically, they didnt want to, because of hard drive costs. If you are looking for news on a specific site, you want to show dup there, some times. They also want to show regional preferences. Also two docs may be similar but not exactly the same. Also, to have redundancy, just in case one site goes down. A legitimate reason to duplicate includes, alternate document formats, legitimate syndication, multiple languages and partial duup pages from boiler plate (nav, disclaimers, etc.). Accidental duplication includes session IDs, soft 404s (no 404 status code) these types are not abusive but can cause issues. Dodgy duplication includes replicating content over multiple domains unnecessarily, "aggregation" of content found elsewhere on the web," indenticla content repeated with minimal value. Others include scraper spammers, weaving/stitching (mix and match content), bulk cross domain apps, bulk dup with small changes. How can you help Yahoo with this issue is by avoiding bulk dup of your content over multiple domains, use the robots.txt to block bots, avoid accidental proliferation of dup content (session IDs, 404s, etc.), avoid dup of sites across many domains and when importing content from elsewhere ask do you own it and are you adding value.

Brian White from Google is last up, he was in the forums once, he works with Matt Cutts, in that group. He spotted on the other panelists. He said he will go quickly over stuf. Types of dup include multiple URLs going to same page, similar content on different pages, syndicated content, manufacturers' databases, printable pages, different languages or countries, different domains and scraped content. How do search engines handle this? they detect dup content throughout the pipeline like Yahoo! The goal is to serve one version of the content in the search results. What can you do to help? Use robots.txt, use 301s, block printable versions, Anchors (#) do not cause problems, minimize boilerplate, if two pages are really similar do you need both?, if you're importing a product database, create your own content. Same content in multiple languages are not dups, and geo tlds are not also. If you syndicate content from others, make sure to include an absolute link to the origin. Scrapers are working on it, let Google know at www.google.com/dmca.html, and more info on bots that are spoofing Google at google webmaster central blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-verify-googlebot.html

Purchasing Links

Moderated by Jake Baillie, he quickly introduces Andy.

Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads, and also “review ME” which launched last week. First most critical factor when looking at a link buy is the theme of the site. Theme’s are generally associated with the domain name, and he recommends looking at the site as a whole. The site will be associated with certain neighborhoods, and you want to make sure the site is the right theme. PageRank is often the most popular way of estimating the value of the link. Problem is that what Google shows you in the toolbar is not in sync with what is actually happening. So this is really not a solid metric, but a good “very quick brute force check” to determine what kind of juice it may have. He recommends doing a link search on Yahoo! Site Explorer to see who is linking to them. If they have authoritative sites linking to them, then it is good. Everything is about “Trust,” and there is no tool to really check a site’s trust. You have to have your own methodology for this, and generally for him it comes down to the neighborhood. If .gov’s, .edu’s and lots of authoritative sites are linking to them then they are probably trusted somewhat.

Third thin he looks for is Traffic. The reason for this is that it is hard to judge what kind of organic juice nay particular link is giving to you. If you are doing link buys also based on traffic, the ROI will come from the actual conversions, and SEO value would be “gravy.” Location is another hot topic. He is talking about the location of the link on the page, if it is in a footer then it will be unlikely to be seen. The best place is to be within the content…people are generally pretty blind to sidebars. He feels that SE’s are trying to devalue links that are outside of the editorial area. He also feels you should “trust but verify.” When you are buying links, eventually you will find people trying to scam you. View the page source and the actual code of the link. Want to see a “plain old-fashioned HTML link.” If within JavaScript, SE’s will unlikely follow. If there is a tag, you are not getting juice either.

Measuring results: very hard to do this. It is hard to measure ROI for SEO expenditures individually. Look at Traffic logs. What kind of traffic are you getting from the links? What would it cost you to replace that in terms of CPC? Look for search engine ranking…are you ranking higher on Google three months later? If not, the link probably isn’t helping you. There is no good way around the problem of trying to figure out which 30 of 1000 links are the ones that are helping you (paraphrased). Wrapping up: when buying links, think as naturally as possible. Acquire links over time, etc…

John Lessnau from Linkadage (sp?). He says there is no such thing as a free link. You can pay, trade, get one for a favor, or get links to great content or tools that cost a lot of money to develop. He started by relating the TV show “Survivorman,” saying that some webmasters need to be able to get a lot of links with few resources. So “What would Survivorman do to get links?” One thing that a new webmaster has is time. At ;east there is time to spend on researching competition, and to gain knowledge from seminars like this and by talking to other people.

He look at about 300K .net and .com domains and looked at how many were various PageRanks. He threw out the 210K that had 0 PR. Found almost no PR 9’s, only 18 PR 8’s (.027% of all sites. The majority of page had 1, 2, or 3 (23.5%, 27.4%, and 25.8%, respectively. Interesting. Link buying tips: buy keywords for your site imbedded in existing text within indexed sites. Do not worry about PR 0, as long as it’s indexed. Buy only permanent or year long links. Do not spend over $5/month on average per link…sounds cheap, but there are plenty like that available. Goes into an example of how to find keywords that might be relevant, and finding obscure websites that come up with the keywords. Approach the sites probably not making any money and buy links from them. Showed some cool examples of results of this type of research…finding some nice niche sites.

Beware of links that may fit into any of the following classifications: on home pages of very high PR sites. In long lists at the bottom or sides of pages. Links under “sponsored links” text. Links that are “run of site” (aka “site-wide links”). On sites designed to sell links. On an artificial networks of sites. He ends like Andy and says to keep your links natural.

Thomas Bindl of Thomasbindl.com. “How to avoid technical pitfalls” He shows an example of a fake PR…carl-bastam.de. Has a PR 9…he goes through and finds that there was a cache that shows that it was actually redirect spam. Often the toolbar PR is not real. Really emphasizes that you should check backlinks and cache to find the truth. Easy fakes: JavaScript redirects. Regular redirects. Rel=“nofollow”. META Tags such as noindex or nofollow. Robots.txt. Commented links: look for “commentized” area in source code. iFrame links. These are all bad things that can happen if you buy links online.

Harder fakes: User-agent cloaking. IP Cloaking. All other forms of cloaking. These are bad, and the Google cache can show you. If there is no cache, especially if everything else seems ok, then there is something wrong. If using a [site:domain.com “anchor text here”] command is unsuccessful, there is a problem. Also need to be wary of penalized sites. Use archive.org to see if there is the wrong PR passed to the next page. (PR should be one less than what the page coming from, in most cases). If this happens something is wrong. Also another flag can be a big rotation of “sponsors.” Why would someone stop buying links on a page if it’s working? Also stop if you don’t feel a boost after two weeks.

What can happen to me for buying links? Your site can get kicked out of the SE’s. Your ranking is approximately 30 positions worse…this is a new “minus thirty penalty” that apparently is related to buying links, according to recent forum and blog discussions. Also, if you are ranking for anything except the targeted term, then you may have beeen the victim of a penalty on a single terms. For example, if you are targeting “water bottles,” but do not have rankings for that but do rank fro “cheap water bottles.” He thanks everyone.

In QA, Thomas says that he feels that Google has directly penalized some sites including his own that used Text Link Ads. Andy says that typically what they see is that sites that have already gained a fair amount of trust prior to buying links can do very well doing this. However, sites that are newer may run into problems.

Search Blogger and Reporter Forum

Todd Friesen (aka Oilman) is moderator. This is an open forum format (more difficult to cover but I’ll try my best.” This is certainly an all-star panel, from the moderator on-down. Speakers are Lee Oden with TopRank Online Marketing; Rand Fishkin SEOMoz, Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim; Barry Schwartz from we all love him so much, Michael McDonald from WebProNews, and last guy Aaron Wall who wrote SEOBook.

Q: Wants to know if an online magazine writes an article about you, will the link always be valuable and crawlable. Andy: will have a lot to do with where the link ends up. If it is publicly accessible it will rank well. Has seen value lost when post drops off home page. Rand: suggests linking to it yourself by submitting to Digg, de.icio.us, etc. That way it gets a bunch of links from other sources that stay indexed. Lee also recommends using FURL which will archive. Aaron: Wikipedia page also would work. Michael recommends having a section on your site. Barry also says keep writing more articles and the links will stay fresh since they are newer?

Q: How to leverage social tools to get more “traditional links” back to site, especially if not so “interesting” industry? Rand: if you have a site and you know that you want to leverage Link Baiting, Web 2.0, consider that this is an different audience. They are like a news media, but obsessed with other thing. For example: Top ten ways to blow the 10 grand your parents gave you for college” may be a good article for the student loan industry. Andy: think of what their interests are, again, student loans people may have particular interest. Aaron: look for ways to accumulate the links. Barry suggests creating n a way to let them talk to each other in a community setting. Todd: where are the people “hanging out?” Maybe the Second Life areas would be something cool to do…”it is a real world, in sort of a weird way (laughs) where you can setup a virtual store.” Michael, also what kind of information can you offer in a very accessible manner?

Q: is it true that the “influencers” on DIGG have more to do with an article doing well? Resounding yes. Rand, half of them are good, the other half get “buried” due to the networks of influential friends. Is there a way to pay these people? Possibly. Todd would advocate this, but would say you could perhaps get a list of proxies and start say a few hundred DIGG accounts. Aaron actually kind of spammed an article on the homepage which was removed, but made it back through a more distributed network. Todd: certainly not a bad thing to DIGG your own stuff, but be careful. Says Rand is quite talented at “Self-digging.”

Q: About duplicate issues/other sites ranking for your content. Missed a couple responses, but Michael says that they (WebProNews) try to ensure that the links are there when they syndicate content. Barry says that sometimes when he covers the same topic at both SEW and SER, he makes sure to write different versions. Rand: try not to water down the quality and voice of the authors, because that is not a blog. A blog is supposed to be a personal conversation with a connection.

Q: About categorizing or highlighting content. Barry: Google blog does that with their multiple blogs and pushes interesting topics to the main blog. Michael: if you have lots of bloggers, you should have a page that covers whoever will be blogging that particular day and they are usually easy to categorize. For example they have a great writer about airplanes whose content wouldn’t be appropriate for the WebProNews property.

Q: About using Wordpress or trying to do something yourself. There are advantages and disadvantages. Barry talks about splogs and how they can be the right thing for some people.

Q: I asked a question regarding an article that keeps showing up in my Yahoo! News RSS daily feed for “internet marketing.” (it appears about once a week on average it seems) The title is “Podcasting: Revolutionizing the way we live and work.” They had not heard about it and laughed at me and I am crying inside right now. ;) Really though do a search and you will see this article was picked up a lot (I got 650 results for the title in quotes without the colon after Podcasting). Hopefully, this actual session coverage will crack the front page soon, but I am still curious as to how this particular article seems to be continuously “making the rounds” and getting picked up time after time. ****Please comment if you have an idea…

Q: About how to link to articles when it may be archived eventually. Barry always sues the article name to link to it so people can search if the link is no longer working. Andy Beal often searches for the article name. He says many of his readers do not complain about old links being no longer active.

Q: Corporate blogging: do you think the number of comments on the blog is an appropriate way to measure success of the blog? Rand: what it boils down to is the executive level willing to allow this, even though there may be relatively negative things said about the company or leaders. If not ready for this, you can simple turn of comments. Barry: if you let them comment on your blog about something, you can always go back in six months and delete it and they’ll “never know” (laughs). Rand says that you can leverage other discussion occurring to comment about your own blog to bring people. Release things never released before and talk about things that people do not usually hear about and people will come more. Andy compares Rand’s blog which draws more comments since the topics encourage that while his blog is more matter-of-fact and news style that doesn’t encourage commenting. Michael doesn’t feel #of comments can be used as a measure of success or failure. Barry talks about how Moderators are important in Forums in generating discussion – if they act like “they know it all,” there may be less commenting. He heard of forums that got rid of “best moderators” and their traffic went up dramatically since more discussion occurred. Rand likes to end posts with questions like “what do you guys think about this,” which leads to comments. Todd reminds that the comments will always be based on the content of the post, like others have said. He recommends zeroing in on your target and goal in order to get the results you want.

Q: about some bad publicity through Wikipedia. Rand says this is why you always write the Wikipedia article first. This is a reputation management topic as Todd reminds. Andy says this comes down to managing search results and try to push them down. Aaron has used sub domains to help push others down. Recommends making a corporate page at Squidoo as another way to get to those 8 or 9. Barry nicely asks Aaron to talk about the Traffic Power situation (nice Barry), since it relates to it. Aaron agrees that you can fight if needed, but you may not get much money out of it, as in his case. Rand talks about being contacted for reputation management. First question is always “did this really happen/was it true?” He wonders if it is acceptable to “suppress” real news and how many would take that work. He feels this is the morally right thing to do. Now if it isn’t true, I would imagine Rand would work for them. (Personally, I would take the money, because someone else would…) Todd also mentions that money is a great motivator, and sometimes $500 will work very well towards taking a blog post down. Aaron says you can always offer people that have written good things about you in the past. Todd also says that there are “poison links,” that can make things very bad for someone, but wouldn’t want to talk about that because it is clearly unethical.

Q: What Wordpress plug-ins can you guys not live without. Rand likes threaded comments, which made a big difference in participation. Todd uses the “Akismet” comment spam plug-in. Andy mentions the “Hello Dolly” one. Barry uses movable Type. Andy has actually posted all the ones he uses at Marketingpilgrim.com.

Q: how would you try to go into MySpace without a “web 2.0” type product? Todd says that he thinks that about half of all the MySpace pages are not even real, and that in fact there is someone in the audience that probably owns most of them (laughs). Andy and Rand says that if you research the industry, you may find that some already exist, or something similar.

Q: Who is the next big thing? Rand, maybe Facebook? There are some in China that do very well. You may see a portal network. Andy thinks that you may see it starting to get more fragmented because there becomes too much to control. People may feel the need to belong to a more vertical community. Ning.com allows you to create your own community, and he thinks you may see more of that happening. Michael thinks you may see ways created to connect people across the different communities.

Moderated by Christine Churchill of Key Relevance. She welcomes people to the second day and introduces the speakers.

Dixon Jones from Receptional Internet Marketing. Will speak from the POV that people are considering going to EU market. Starts with some facts about EU and the world.. USA 300 M pop, 200M Internet users versus EU 800 pop and 300 M Internet users. 90 million more Internet users now than in US, with an anticipated additional half billion coming online fast. Just in UK there are 40M online. Over 10% of all ad spend in both UK and Sweden was online in 2006. This makes Internet advertising more developed as an industry tan the US. Poland is the 5th fastest growing country on the Internet. Worldwide 1.2B people. Choose your message, either my market is 5X bigger than I thought, or “OMG, third world countries are going to sell to my clients.” He suggests looking at it the first way. G

Goes over some GDP per capita, per CIA figures. Next chart lists countries by GDP growth rate. Starts with Azerbaijan, Angola,….China at 10,,,Usa is #139. The American strategy: attack is the best form of defense. “Take the battle to the enemy to protect the homeland.” Biggest problem is language, which may be a barrier mentally, but is a boon for us in the industry. Discusses the advantage of SEO in targeting other-than-English words for SEO. IE there are only 4 M pages for the word “Londres” versus 50M for London at G. The Greek word is less than 1M. If it wasn’t for the language barrier, SEO is considerably easier in other languages.

He says there is no real easy way to do international SEO. Recommends employing language-specific operators to take calls from overseas. Either do SEO yourself in foreign language, outsource locally, or use affiliate tactics. If you do try yourself, buy a TLD for the right country. Or Host the site in the tgt country. Track link building in a way that regionally themes the site. Use local press release services. Use a native translator. Minimize legal issues and deploying ground troops until you are confident of success in the market.

Jessica Bowman from Business.com. is on second day on job for them, used to be with Enterprise Car rentals. Will speak about multi-lingual SEO. She will not deny, “you are in for a ride.” KW research: need to brainstorm with a native speaker. Go to the competition. Tools are a challenge, but says Trellian’s Keyword Discovery is good, for example for breaking out UK English. Also says that Hitwise has a few languages, but probably not enough, in her opinion. Since there aren’t many tools out there, there has been a study that showed that the volume of search results in English tends to correspond with other languages. Andy will speak more to this.

It is best to start the copy in the foreign language, versus translating, although unfortunately that isn’t always and option. Not many translation companies know seo. Recommends learning the translation process inside and out, because the process breakdown is inevitable. Found that they used automated translation tools, which are fine for non-SEO focused. Also found they had 2 different sets of translation data, one sort of a glossary of terms, and the other a collection of sentences (“Memory Bank”). She found the problem was that these were out of sync. They needed to separate them. Once the translation come back: check it. She has seen error messages that said you “are not allowed to log on.” This was bad because they were telling the customer they had no right to login to their store, even though it was actually and logon password error.

Using wrong words. Found that sometimes more than one translator worked on the same doc, and they used different words/phrases referencing the same thing on the same page. Sometimes content comes back very long and doesn’t fit in the space. Factor this iteration into the cost, and make sure that the translator knows that this will occasionally get “kicked back.” Also translators sometimes add or embellish to content, which can lead to serious legal ramifications (I would guess especially in an industry like Pharma). Bottom line: do not assume it is good-to-go when it comes back from translators.

Final thoughts: Train the translator on SEO, using their own work as examples if possible. Send them useful information such as screenshots to see how much space there is. There may be character limitations for spacing and/or database fields, as another example. Remember to send corrections back to the translation company. Also, remember that translations confuse people, and painted a scenario where they wanted to change “car rental” to “car hire,” in UK English, and then to French. Found issues existed.

What she has learned: German text comes back 3x the length of English text. German grammar is a killer – sometimes merges words depending on the context, and there are two forms of the German language, one more formal and one less. UK English: treat it like a different language! British tend to be more verbose, and again you need a native speaker to review the copy. Spanish: consider which region it will be translated to. Use “North American” Spanish for US Spanish speakers. Spain Spanish is extremely different than any American Spanishes.

Michael Bonfils of SEMInternational. “10 Steps to Cracking South East Asia” Starts with SE Asia stats. 300 M Internet users, majority in China at about 118M. Japan 86M, South Korea at 34M. Indonesia 18M, Vietnam 10M, and more… Shows an Internet Population rate chart that is very interesting: SK 67% while China is only 9%. If China had the same penetration rate as Taiwan, they would be looking at 784M users!

Ten steps are: Understand audience; understands Asian domain names, hosting, search engines, translation, keywords, paid search, organic search, reporting and analytics, red tape. Step 1: Understanding Asian customer: often what is funny and creative over there, is not in other places. For example they have little pictures that “follow you around” during a search in Korea. Remember to think about that, what works in Western EU and US may not work there. Internet is more often used for researching, while buying is often done “downstairs.” In China approx 50% of all Internet usage comes from cafes. Often no coffee served, and not really a “social environment.” Shows a funny picture of a floating Internet café.

Step 2 know the major search engines. In China, for example Baidu has 62% of the market versus 25.3% Google and 10% Yahoo!. In Taiwan, 90% Yahoo!, 5% G. Japan, 55% Y Japan, 35% G, 5% MSN. In South Korea: “Naver” 63%, 14% “Daum,” 11% Yahoo! Korea. Shows a funny relationship chart taking off from Bruce Clay’s that he calls the “Bruce Lee Chinese search engine relationship chart. There “Sogou” provides most paid results to other engines.

Ste 3 Asian Domain name. make sure it is pronounceable. For example, Google not pronounceable in China, where there call it “Goo-Goo,” due to inability to do the L. Look for proper domain extensions. There are a variety: China: .cn or .com.cn. Korea: .kr or .co.kr. Japan: .jp or .co.jp. Taiwan: .tw com.tw. Hong Kong: .hk or .com.hk

Ste 4: Get hosting: Us hosting option gives slow access due to a gateway. It is more economical than hosting in Asia. If using Chinese hosting option, keep in mind that the larger the hosting company, the more politically regulated it is. Gives a list of china’s top web hosting companies.

Step 5: translate well. Gives a couple of examples, and agrees that you have to double/triple check. Even recommends using one trans.. Uses “Pepsi brings you back to life” example of translation that went to “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.” Ad:tech Shanghai brochure even had a mistake that was “cost per lead” translated as “cost per leadership.”

Step 6: Develop keywords. Same expression in English can be translated up to 15 different expressions across china, HK, and Taiwan. Local translation and research matters!

Step 7: Implement paid search. Would reco starting with this over SEO which is much tougher. G and Y! Works pretty much the same in Asia as in US in terms of paid results placement. Baidu works a little differently, including paid listings within “organic listings.” Sometimes will be in the center of the result, and you may get more traffic and conversions from this.

Step 8: develop organic search. Similar issues as us such as content, structure, Meta and kw placement. Link pop also a factor. Think local! There is a strong local company favoritism in China…try to use local sites and TLDs.

Step 9: understanding reporting. Shows some Baidu reports and how the daily spending reporting and keyword Report differ slightly. Also shows the much cleaner looking (IMO) Yahoo report. Step 9.5: Implement analytics. They happen to use Google Analytics since they were in the process of translating Urchin at the time of G’s purchase.

Step 10: Understand the red tape and unusual business practices. People impatient on the phone or expect payment. There is no API, no CPM reporting, and it is commonplace to find kickbacks and discounts. Quite normal to have someone knock on your door in China and say (as an example) “we are from Baidu and could use some extra $ to give more favorable results.” Poor payment methods…probably will need to wire to companies that you are looking to run campaigns with. Remember Political favoritism, and that they are partnered with Chine Government, which is a formidable competition. “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still” (Chinese proverb).

Barry Lloyd was unavailable due to being stuck in China. Andy Atkins-Kruger of WebCertain will replace him. Will be brief. Mentions blog: “Multilingual Search.” He starts by reminding people that SEO, Paid and other methods are closely related. Sows a chart of amazing growth that would happen if you applied NA adoption rates to the rest of the world. Prob of ranking+ internet audience+ market size must be measured. Uses example of “football boots” research (equivalent to football cleats in US) actually being most desirable as a target term in Spain, not the UK as one might have thought. Talks about different ways to operate overseas, similar to other speakers.

Recommended process: First: kw research then creation of glossary then translation then optimization. Feels that you do need a local domain, ideally. Things like local hosting and local links will come much easier. Beware of things such as duplication issues like same German content targeting Germany or Austria. Sometimes the wrong page can appear at the wrong time. Showed another study that showed that the Google results (number of pages), when compared to Yahoo suggestion tool (number of searches), showed an actual correlation in pattern. Looks at another example where there can be plurals and singular searches, as well as the use of prepositions in romance languages.

These do have an impact on the way results appear. People search with or without these prepositions, and you have to plan for both. Accents can also be a problem, but the search engines seem to have come up with a way to handle this. They do better with accents that have a distinct effect on meaning versus those that do not really affect the meaning. Also alternative characters. Also aggregation or not? Sometimes long words can be split into two, depending on how people are thinking when they search. Also a possible thing to look for are “declensions,” which many languages have. Ie: 16 different cases in Icelandic. Shows an example in Russian. SE’s don’t necessarily do well with non-Latin/romance languages, since algorithms are not written to cope with those issues. Do not use free online translation tools! Also gives a chart that shows a few of the top SE’s in other countries. Thanks everyone.

Ted Ulle gets up at the podium and welcomes every body.

Adam Young is first up, WMW PHP mod forum. He explains that you can do anything with scripting. It is more important to know what you want done, versus saying you need scripting. You can really do anything with scripting. What do you need to know first? First ask your host what they support. Figure out what is best for your server. Do you have someone working for you that knows this stuff? Figure out what you are trying to achieve. Look at available ready made scripts, also. Tips for better Scripts; you need a test environment, make sure to test everything, find the authoritative resources such as PHP.net, again - you need to understand the problem before writing the script, find scripts that do most of what you want to do and modify those, understand what those scripts do in detail (how they write, security issues, can they be hacked, XSS issues, etc.). Some common pitfalls, security (analyzing user input (SEL injection, XSS), auto form submission, research), misinformation, inadequate testing, not understanding that there are multiple ways to do the same thing. In summary, do the research and test.

Todd something was next, he seems to be a last minute addition. He said some notes from his note pad... Know how your servers work. With proper setup you can save a ton of development time. Look at Apache directives. It beats the RFCs he said. You can prevent duplicate content. He rarely uses mod_rewrite because you don't always need it. He said other solutions make it easier for your server. Server security.

Dan Kramer is next up to give a live demo of an install of WordPress. I cannot write this info, I am sorry. He then showed a PERL script off.

Brian Gmyrek from Traffic Programming is now up. To be a developer, you want to be a problem solvers. Then just get started using LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php, perl, python). A lot of webmasters are half way there. So then start solving smaller problems. Then install linux on a box. Also, make sure to read code and examples and resources. Most devs he said have a huge book library. Make sure to read the right books (use amazon reviews), PHP, PERL books, PHP & MySQL books, Orielly are good. If you are really serious, he said learn C. PHP is easy to integrate into web pages. He showed some code examples. Perl is not as plug as play like PHP. It is more mature and still very good for web applications. It is good for sysadmin tasks. It is also good for text processing. And there are tons of modules out there already. He showed a Perl script that makes a Froogle feed. Then he goes over Shell scripts, aka the linux command line. Showed some examples of that, including rsync. Then he moved over to MySQL, he uses phpMyAdmin, he uses Apache .htpasswd and ssl. He showed a shell script to do a quick back up of your db. He talks about database design. He then shows an example of MySQL an ad system database, showing a database design for a typical solution.

Final speaker is Ted Ulle who is not a scripter, he said. He is talking about .NET potholes. IIS knows corporate business systems. IIS is not case sensitive. Must be aware of duplicate URLs, just because of case sensitivity. Just try to always use lower case. HTTP Status Codes, a typical problem is that coders don't use an http header with a 404, instead they just make a custom page that shows 404 in the title. Microsoft hides 301 and 302 redirects, he said. ISAPI Rewrite is the savior for IIS, it is like mod_rewrite but designed for IIS. He shows resources like seoconsultants.com/tools/ and xoc.net.

Warren Kay, Director, Emerging Products, Yahoo!
Steven Stern, go2.com
Jake Baillie, President, TrueLocal.com
Doug Perlson, Chief Operating Officer, Seevast

Moderator: Justin Sanger

For 3 years, it was local search is hot. Last year, it turned to local search is now. Mobile local search is beginning as well.

Warren Kay is up first. Runs emerging products group of Yahoo marketing. Expand on yahoo local for consumers as well as focusing more on geotargeting for new advertising interface.

Yahoo from consumer perspective - largest local destination on web. 60k city pages, 80k zip codes and 600 neighborhoods. All populated by user generated content. Editors doesn't scale well, so user generated content is the way to scale.

Example of woman posting comment on a restaurant in Yahoo Local. Content can be seen via searches as well as in her 360 page to all her network of friends. Users can review local places and searchers can see these reviews. User tagged 11 different friends on his 360 page.

Flickr geo-targeting - yahoo local ties in geotargeting aspect to various properties, including Flickr. Can see all the places a user has visited because user tagged his photos with the area name. Can see actual street maps for bars that users have tagged as being on that street.

Y Labs: Geo-referenced photos - can tag photos that you take with your cell phone simply by using the cell tower's location. it will give you choices of places/landmarks to use as tags for that photo you just took with your cell phone. These tags will then be used when you upload the photo to Flickr.

Merchants - Adding services for the other 25 million merchants other than the US ecommerce 200k. reaching out to those merchants who aren't yet advertising via the web. yahoo local can develop a profile page for merchants even if the merchant doesn't have a website. Can upload lots of information about your business into this profile page. This info is fed into the listing level for the consumer.

Exciting feature of new search marketing platform is geotargeting. How the consumer mentions their location and how the advertiser targets that location is meshed together. ULM = universal location manager - a cookie that Yahoo captures to know the user location is very accurate. It leverages Yahoo's network-wide user location data for geo-location of Yahoo traffic (for things like movies, weather, etc)

IP address can also indicate user location.

Advertisers can target ads by market, region withing market or by city and surrounding area.

Key Differentiators:
Where On Earth : state of the art location recognition technology
Clear and distinct target areas: national, state and designated market areas
Yahoo Network: Universal Location Manager enables yahoo to increase listing relevancy through user defined locations on Y properties such as weather,maps and movies.

Mobile growth in the US is accelerating
Over 240 million mobile subscribers by 2010

Will have 80% mobile penetration by 2010. One in 5 mobile consumers use advanced mobile services. Increased adoption of wap-enabled phones is fueling growth. The demographic is young, which marketers covet.

yahoo online sponsored search is mirrored in mobile sponsored search. Works the same way as online sponsored search. User can either browse or peform a free form key word search. Yahoo Listing goes to the advertiser WAP site or a Y generated WAP site. If merchant doesn't have a WAP site, Yahoo can create one for the merchant.

Doug Perlson is up next from Seevast (including Kanoodle, Moniker, etc). He spends his time at Pubcon doing the contextual panel usually, because of Kanoodle. But in the last few years, he sees that context is only one way to target, and they see Local search as being another great way of targetting advertising.

Local Marketing
Huge growth in local search marketing
3.4 billion in 2005 growing to $13 billion in 2010 (kelsey group)
enormous opportunity for publishers and advertisers in local sponsored links

Local businesses use Valpack, Pennysavers, Yellow Pages
National Advertisers using online advertising but want to target at local level

Local search will be effective for both advertiser and publisher perspective.

Search Sites, Content Sites, and Navigation

Typical local search is user-defined such as "pizza in Las Vegas", but the advertiser may want to limit ot certain zip codes.

From content site perspective, use sponsored links to target local content and local users. If users are on a local content site, it will be easy to reach those local users, but you still want to geotarget, in case a user on the site isn't really within that locality.

You can geotarget content listings. Buying contextual listing will cost you more, but if you layer in a level of geotargeting (such as by zip code) it will be more effective.

Direct Navigation - finding a web site through a browser type-in. This is not referring to typos/traffic squatters, because these don't help the advertisers. But there is still an opportunity for direct type-ins. Parked pages are a great opportunity to run your sponsored links. (ex. a parked real estate site for a specific city). Track your direct navigation advertising separately.

Keys to success:

Advertisers - all local not the same - separate creative, bidding and tracking code for search, geo content and direct navigation

Publishers - should work with networks that have ability to charge premium for local content (i.e. should convert at higher rates for advertisers (up to 40% higher).

What's next in local? Mobile, pay per call, ISP, GPS

ISPs have lots of local data stored, so there may be local advertising opportunities with these ISPs - targetting down to a street address, since the ISPs have this kind of information.

Pitches Kanoodle, pulse360, and moniker.com. First to put sponsored links on pages, first to do lots of other things (goes too fast to get it all down here).

Jake Baillie (bakedjake) from TrueLocal is up next.

Local Search Ads - Helpful and not so helpful tips

Weird panel for him to do because 2 years ago Justin called him about doing local search, and Jake said he didn't believe in local search, and here he is running a local search engine. Wake up and get in the local game. Decided to teach people how to spam the search engines rather than giving a pretty speech.

These tactics apply just as well in organic, but they work in ad side and there's more money to be made in the ad side.

The best way to exploit local is keyword expansion. Obvious geo expansion - cities, zip codes, and states. These are the obvious local keywords to use (example Detroit real estate). Non-obvious expansion phrases include neighborhoods, area codes, counties, airport codes and metro areas. People in chicago dont look for a chicago restaurant. No, they type in a chicago neighborhood. In some markets, area codes imply a specific type of person. Seasoned traffic will look for airport codes, such as LAX and advertisers may serve visitors in the airport area.

Word expansion - product names, brand names, skus, slang/industry terms, government terms.

Government terms - a top local query is DMV. Some reasons a person might be going to the DMV is that they have a DUI. A DUI lawyer would want to target this term.

People Pitfalls - regional names for products (pop vs. soda), different names for localities depending on the user's perspectives (downtown chicago vs. the loop)

When targetting ads, use the language that the locals use.

The Tracking Problem
Online > Offline tracking - good for stores yet makes the PPC market look bad.

track, track, track: (i zoned out during this part, but I guess the idea is to track). :)

Some businesses are more suited local advertising:
anything service based
restaurants (sometimes)
golf courses
local b2b

Localize your CTR!

You should be expecting upwards of 10%!
Use localized ad copy - at least cities. 20-30% ctrs can be had with neighborhood names in ads. Of course you need a call to action on the page that speaks to that local targeting. If you mention the location in the ad, and you don't mention it on the landing page, they will leave and not come back.

Lots of choices to put local search ads: google, yahoo, msn, ask, online yellow pages, truelocal.com, local, com, newspaper and alt. magazine sites, vertical specific sites.

Local industry groups, local business development groups, hobbyists, geo-vertical directories are also good place to put your local ads.

Ran out of time, so he skipped the rest of the presentation.

Steven Stern is up next. Started in print yellow pages and went right to mobile from print. Will show trends in mobile.

Trends - shows lots of stats but the gist of it is that mobile usage is increasing, and lots of those people are the right target market for a lot of advertisers.

About go2: go2 has been a market leader in mobile, local search directories and movie guides. They launched go2 in 1999. Audience is mostly male for go2 - traveling businessmen, new home owners, etc. Great demographics for income and age. The key to driving traffic with mobile phones is being on all the major carriers (which go2 apparently is). go2 has lots of channels such as business, dining, directions, directory, entertainment, movies, search, shopping, travel, etc. You can do almost anything on mobile. The biggest barriers to mobile is that the carriers are still developing their ad and revenue models. Carriers are protective of their users. Must get a relationship with the carriers if you want to have a mobile site. Phones are all different, and carrier's all work on different networks, so new mobile sites need to be able to develop content so it shows on the majority of phones. Your site needs to have content that actually works on a mobile phone. You have to offer something compelling to the carriers, something they don't have, so they will put it on their decks. This is what will get you significant traffic.

Steven shows some examples of things that go2 has to offer (colleges, golf channel, premium directory listings, email captures, etc.)

Last time he spoke here was New Orleans and it was before FM and his book. He showed an industry narrative, and calls this the third wave of tech and culture. Between 1970 and 1980 they had Digitize Back Office where companies used computers (i.e. punch cards, fortran, etc.). Then between 80 and 2000, they digitized the front office (personal computer, etc.). The screen flips out, he blames it is an Intel Mac and it is confused as to where it wants to be. Then between 95 and now we digitized the customers with web 2.0 and Google etc. He believes search is our next interface on how we interact with technology, and he is upset he did not put that in his book. Remember DOS? Then after DOS came Mac and Windows. Then now we are in 1.0 of search. Search as an interface. What might the next search interface look like?

Scenario One:
He explains that when shopping for wine, you most likely will get ripped off. You pick out a $100 bottle and you then wand your phone over the product code or label or sku. You get back results for prices, stores, etc.

Before Search: Content as proxy for audience, content as packaged good.
After Search: Audience declared intent, then content finds audience.

Intent drives content and content disaggregates, content as conversation.

As intent becomes a proxy for audience.

Search drives audience towards social media sites, because they are well linked. Consumers expect all participants to understand the mores of those environment. They expect businesses to know what they want.

Now there is attention over distribution. Old media, you sent out in masses. Now it is about how much attention you can get from your audience.

Conversation Over Dictation:
In conversational mediums like blogs and forums, they are driven by conversation. The consumer is now in control. Let the people decide what to do with your brand. He showed some examples... MySpace, eBay, Amazon reviews, let people build your business for you. He gave a case study of Lenovo, they bought IBM's laptoo business. They were worried that the brand will be hurt when they took over the site. They made a big campaign, where you got to vote about if your laptop will be black or titanium. It is a start. He showed a Microsoft case study and a Symantec case study, etc. I'll leave this stuff uncovered for now. Symantec uses the FM network to promote their blog's RSS feed in the ads, they got Digged once... A Cisco case study, they wanted on to Wikipedia for a product, but started first at Wikia (a commercial Wiki). Dice Case study; they made a rant banner, a banner that allows you to type into the banner, anything you hate about your job, and it shows up on all banners in the network. A conversational; banner, pretty cool.

FM:
(1) Self service platform
(2) Big sales force

He showed a live demo, pretty impressive. He then gives more slides on the FM network...

They have a 100 sites now. They have more than 750MM ad impressions per month.

They are booking over a million dollars per month in business. They take 40%.

They have a sales force of 15 people, growing to 25, in NY, NE and SF. They have an engineering staff of 4, growing to 6. They have an author staff of 4, growing to 6. Nearly 1500 advertisers on self-service platform.

I reported this at SEW but yesterday I learned that no one was fired. Both of them got new jobs elsewhere. Bill Demas and Will Johnson supposedly both got some really good opportunities. So they moved on to take those jobs. Will I think is gone, Bill is leaving at the end of the month or so.

Where does that leave YPN? I am sure they have some bright people who can pick up where these guys left off.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Several folks over at WebmasterWorld reported that AdWords was down or extremely slow this morning. First reports came a few hours ago, about 3 hours after those reports, AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the issue and said they are working on it.

Thanks everyone, for the info. Engineering has been all over this as you'd expect - and things should be returning to normal for you soon, if they have not already.

AdWords seems to be working ok for me at the moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brett praises Opera....

Jon S Von Tetzchner is now up... They make browsers. They put the browser on anything out there. PC, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc. You can also run it on your mobile, nintendo, etc. all running the same source code. The product is the same, feature wise, on all devices, no matter what. 3 business units include, desktop, mobile and other. The browser is the glue between all devices (PC, tv, mobile, etc.) 39 millions downloads of Opera on desktop on 2006. More than 150 million downloads ever. More than 40 million phones shipped with Opera pre-installed. More than 7 million active Opera mini users. More than 500,000 my opera community members. Top 5 countries using Opera for desktop; Russia, Germany, USA, Poland and Japan. Top countries using Opera Mini; Russia, USA, Ukrain etc. They are a team of 350 people, including 250 engineers. They have been doing this for 10 years. Opera has spent more than 1 million dev hours and 2 million testing hours. Opera is innovative in many ways, tabs, etc. There can be only one web he said, but numerous devices are coming out, ready to connect to that web. They added widget support natively. Opera's commitment is to web standards; including the Acid2 test and they are working n 3D canvas support. They use fraud protection from TrustWatch and GeoTrust. They support cutting edge developer tools. Opera for Mobile, same code base - three products; Opera platform and Opera Widgets, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. He showed that the Nintendo Wii is coming pre-installed with Opera, he wants one for Christmas. Also the Ninentdo DS has Opera. Sonly Mylo has Opera, so does the Nokia 770, and the Dreampark Dreamgallery IPTV Solution.

Todd Friesen is modding.

Andrew Gerhart from Primedia was up first. They acquired an auto site with tons of strengths... The weaknesses of the site are that; entire site was built on a flat file CMS, code is a mess, majority of the content is not optimized, content is input manually, web site structure is not optimized, site links out to partner websites for content, and forum is on a different platform that is not SE friendly. The opportunity was that there was room for content expansion, minimal changes would product large returns, site does not currently rank for primary keywords, utilize established brand to gain rankings and links, traffic can be immediately monetized. The threats include; time, resources, political issues and pushback and multi-platform websites. Step 2 was planning, they needed to train people in SEO, optimize all the existing content, optimize the site templates and code, restructure the web sit, optimize the internal linking structure, build new content and build links. They made procedural changes which was communicated from the top, including SEO reviews, new URLs, one on one training, daily monitoring and weekly and monthly progress reports. SEO training includes; document content optimization guidelines, document seo best practices, basic seo training, review seo strategies and goals, review seo phases and current initiatives, work throughout content optimization examples and follow up with one o one meetings. SEO Phase 1: Seo team and interns optimize every page of every article, document of existing and new urls, set up 301 redirects. SEO Phase 2: optimize code of existing site, etc. SEO Phase 3: new content sections, use existing resources, replace link outs within site content, integrate links into existing CMS content, relaunch forums and launch blogs. SEO Phase 4: build links, etc. Results: 70% in search referrals.

Robert Carilli of Shop.com. He shows the shop.com timeline, starting off as catalogcity.com... He shows off their competitive advantage, all promo stuff for them so far. They have teams set up as; keyword review team, account management team, seo technology team, seo marketing team and analytics team. Keyword Review: keywords are the life blood of SEM, tens of millions of keywords are in the shop.com database, proprietary keyword review and classification tools, explore creative strategies for expanding the keywords and the keyword universe is constantly under review. Account Management: Daily ppc account review, regular account updates, constant creative testings, partner relationship management, regular reporting, invoice validation, international coordination and maintain subject matter expertise. Keyword landscape, plan for and react to seasonality, react to change in the bud market, stay up to date on the nuances of SEs, anticipate impact of current events, manage trademark budding practices, stay up to date on merchant changes, track ROI. BOT SEO: traffic driven via SE crawling and indexing pages, regular review and application of SEO practices, constant coordination with engineering dep. DATA FEED SEO: traffic driven via data feeds regularly sent to SEs, regular review and optimization to ensure max results, constant coordination with partners. MARKETING SEO: link building, content dev, social interaction, press release, reputation monitoring, close coordination with creative team and regular reporting and analysis. Phew, he spoke a mile a minute... hope I got everything.

Chris Boggs of Avenue A Razorfish and this blog here. Hey Chris. The little site that could, was his first slide. Type in "insert printing" in google and you will see a ton of PPC ads and the top result is from his old company, G3. He shows that that page only had 9 inlinks. Todd said it is a fluke, but Chris said he feels it is about the internal linking. He said, internal linking can be very powerful. Sample Site characteristics of a site from a fortune 500, with tens of thousands of pages. They found they had too many "Chefs" on this site. He then goes over Directory Folder Structure; avoid losing continuity in URL's. He shows some URL changes... Another big problem is client side redirects, avoid using them. META refresh does not allow spider to execute. Internal linking; a major issue is JavaScript linking, use CSS instead. Categorization and breadcrumb usage is good. Use your internal linking structure to capitalize on your landing pages. External links, relevance again is important. Current link popularity can be deceiving, a 100,000 inlinks can be worthless or pointing to the wrong place. You may have to increase your deep link ratio to internal pages. Business relationship building is like building links.

Aaron Shear from Shopping.com is next up, he did not have a presentation, but took the podium. He explains that highly trafficked sites that use load balancing can often run into problems with bad URL structures, with numerous URL "nodes." He said if your site performs very slowly, it normally wont do well in Google. He said focusing on the long tail is very difficult to make sure all those pages are fully indexed. If you have to click 30 clicks deep to get to a product, it is not good user experience, and Google will see that. He said, consider inserting multiple navigational paths to get to the same product or landing page. A good approach is to sell the optimization as a giant needle mover for the company, but make sure the engineers get credit for it, will make them work harder, quicker and more for your department.

Heather Lloyd-Martin, Jennifer Slegg, Ted Ulle, Byron White

Ted Ulle gives overview. Working with a team, problems with teams, and why workflow is a critical factor. How to avoid a Franken-site. Work flow must support your priorities. Final result must be simple and seamless. Getting to simplicity for end user is a challenge, but it will work well to keeping both people and spiders happy. Start with Clarity from the start. Business purpose is #1. Start with that web strategy before anything else. Add pile of content - rough drafts. Then make back end decisions and how are we going to measure things decisions. All this has to happen before you ever build a web page. Build an information architecture for your site. Very critical. Menu labels are important. Now its time to flesh out all the content. The graphic designer is now part of the process. Then its the final web edit in html. But the guiding light is always the business purpose. Every decision you make should be documented, so you will remember later why you made that decision.

Now he looks at each of these in detail:

Mine your market's language. Look at forums, email, keyword neighborhoods (LSI).
Research the Market's Concerns

Build a Process - not a product

Server Decisions - don't be naive. IT departments and isps dont care about search engines - you must care. There are choices for the backend. Dont just use the default when making backend and metrics decisions
Accurate HTTP headers and mime types must be set properly on the server.
One unique spiderable URL for each page (avoid duplicate content)
Custom 404 must return a 404 header! (not a 302 or 200, etc)
301/302 /framing/meta refresh/javascript - be careful to use the correct one

Build in the metrics
Already know the business goals
define the key metrics - too many blurs the picture
Logs - server logs are almost never enough
Build in what you need now

Menus and navigation
Menus are content. Getting menu list to be intelligable, gives users a sense of knowing that they are confident it is what they need.

Tell a story with your menu items with either Single Words or Longer phrases
Too many choices is no choice at all

Graphic Design
Now - only now - not before, can designer get to work
Graphics must NOT drive the process
Designer must respect the medium - he must at least know html

Final Web Edit
tweak calls to action
No time to be timid
Content interacts with layout
CSS - use it properly

you can kill good content with bad layout
or boost weak content with good layout
study print typography to learn how to put together a good web page

Where do "Seams" come from (if you've built this to be simple and seamless)?

Look out for someone showing off! Someone is showing off rather than thinking of business priorities. Who are the typical culprits? Look out for these things that take away from the simple and seamless and focus on something else.

Graphic designers, server side spaghetti, fancy features, IT folks writing copy
Keep your Balance - technology and aesthetics must both be in place for marketing results.
Accidents will happen. Full steam ahead and you drive off the road. Things that can go wrong - data queries are slow, copy breaks the template, seo mangles the message, cms mangles everything - things will go wrong!
When things go wrong, don't kludge! Better late than lousy. Do it right. Expect to make trade offs and keep priorities straight. You documented all those priorities in the first step, so refer back to that, and you won't end up with a franken-site.

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Jennifer Slegg (jensense) is up next on: Unique Content is a Budget Site's Best Friend

How to be a one or two person show rather than having a whole team.

Is unique content just a buzz phrase?
Never underestimate the value of unique content.
Duplicate content can be filtered out of the se's, causing you to lose referrals and visitors.

Why is it important?
Organic and free search traffic
If it's unique, people will come back to your site
Unique content is cost effective

Sources of unique content?
Do it yourself. This is the least expensive option for webmasters. Need to have writing and editing skills, must either know or research the subject. But if you write it, you know it is unique.

Hiring Writers
There are huge differences in pay scales for quality article writing
Must check that the content you purchase is unique
Make sure the articles' facts are correct

Don't forget to check uniqueness after a couple of months. Some writers will republish content you hired them to write, despite a contract you may have had with them.

Avoid these sources:

Free article sites - most of these will end up on spam sites, and you won't have unique content. Also most of these will be promoting something else.

Unknown submissions - research and check before publishing (these are people who submit content to your site - check them out)

Getting your content indexed well
Use descriptive and unique titles that clearly describes what the article about
When you add new articles to your site, feature them on your home page first to hasten the indexing process
add new articles on a regular basis

Considerations for product pages
when companies supply you with product feeds, don't use their descriptions and specs as these are not unique. rewriting those pages is crucial, and don't just do a find and replace on product name - it all needs to be rewritten

Checking if content is unique
Take a unique phrase from the second half of the article and check in Google for that phrase. Copyscape.com is a good tool also.

Forums as Original Content
Forums provide lots of original contnt quickly, and are great for generating new ideas for articles, and are great for long tail keyword referrals.

Blogs as Original Content
Comments do the same thing as forums for content, including new ideas for blog posts.

Last thoughts - good unique content is a cost effective method of buildingand promoting your site. Be original and not a copycat!

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Byron White, founder of lifetips.com, is up next. They provide clients with content and link popularity.

Focused on great content for last 7 years with lifetips.com. They do this with freelance writers. With what they've learned, they have 30 Tips for Web Writing.

Tips for web writers;
understand the new age expansion of choice
discover the rules for decision making
develop decision making map and process
create new methodology for bying decisions
forge simplicity into the art of content creation
get in tune with the vision
get under the skin of the target audience
inhabit the lives of the target audience
touch the heart of the audience
set the right course
add new meaning and distinction
create new confidence with your readers
create new energy for your sales team
create something that matters
learn to tell stories
great stories introduce great characters
great stories are contagious
great stories teach us to be smart
great stories surprise and delight
(tells a story of how he lost a testicle to cancer and created a golf event called Lost Ball Golf - something like that...)
Understand Web Readers
readers want to be able to find specific things
readers are in a hurry
readers love personilazation - it's all about "me"
readers want advice
readers want up to date, relevant, straightforward content
Map Out Your Readers Needs
readers want credibility, belief and logic
readers want exposure to new worlds
readers want to laugh and cry
readers want intimacy, mystery and bravery
readers want surprise and delight
Develop a Content Haiku
(3 line poem, 17 syllables)
create several different content Haiku
split test the conversions of each style
select the winners and apply rules
Keywords Without Compromise
harvest the rich search keywords
callenge is to pepper keywords without compromising the story
reader must come first

Find the positive story
Instead of saying We are not.....Cross out the negatives and build a story around the positives
Keep It Simple
Understand the Power of Links
link strategy is about validating content - the surrounding text is important - link internally as well.

Recognize the talent of good writers. Gives resources for freelance writers, such as craigslist, etc. Define the priority for the writer. be open to risks - make people talk, make them laugh, create buzz. Demand new data mining such as internal search boxes, and customer service centers to get new copy ideas. Develop a flawless process. Brainstorm, research, clarify call to action, manage the feedback. Agree on a sales funnel - writers can learn from the salespeople and the sales funnel.

He now just skims over a bunch of slides as he tries to give more time to the next presenter. Final - Hire the Pros.

--

Heather Lloyd-Martin

Introduced as the pioneer woman of SEO copywriting.

Fun and profit with SEO copywriting best practices

going to give a very short presentation because running out of time...just the meat...

SEO copywriting is the same as conventional copywriting - copy is so convincing that the customer can't help but buy the product being offered. But SEO copywriting is keeping the search engines in mind as well. It is Not just throwing in some keywords into a 250 word text block.

Need to have a keyphrase focus (2 - 3 per page)
first thing to do is make sure your kwd phrase is on the page

Length of copy - you can control this - short stubby copy is not great for ranking. Need about 250 words per page (which is not set in stone). Some can get away with less, some need several pages of text. Splitting this into several pages can focus on several long-tail phrases.

Too many links on a page won't help you convert. Too many links confuses the user.

Titles are highly important. These are your first opportunity for conversion at the search engine results page. They are headlines that need to be tantalizing. Must be unique for each page and should be as compelling as possible for 50-75 characters. But writing good titles is very important.

If you dont have complete control over the content, do as much as you can. Know what to do when. Tweak the title and editing some pages that are NOT critical for conversions. This can be a quick and dirty way of dealing with not having complete control. Tip; try adding headlines and subheadlines and hyperlinks to text.

IT sometimes is the one that handles titles because it's considered code. Don't let that happen. Marketing should work it out with IT to let them include keyphrases in titles.

She repeats that you should rewrite any product descriptions that came from the manufacturerer. Create FAQ and tips pages for the product to add original content. Press releases, newsletters, etc. can work well too. Can help you find new ranking opportunities.

If a competitor is slamming you online, seo copywriting can help you overcome these reputation problems.

summary: smart seo copywriting closes the loop between the engines and your offer, so the right approach is crucial.

Jake Baillie is moderating this panel.

Elisabeth Archambault was first up, her aka is buckworks. She is not anyone's super affiliate. She pays more in taxes then what she earned teaching in a community college. Content for affiliates... Optimizing an affiliate site is not a whole lot different from optimizing a normal site. Good content is critical in affiliate marketing. You must do your home work, keyword research, market research. You need to know SEO. Content gives you something to work with. Site factors includes spiderable, PageRank flow and internal anchor text. Off page factors include inbound links, quality and quantity, anchor text and theme of linking pages. Design your site for accessibility; layouts and labels that make sense to an audible browser reader also tend to please spiders. Good content is a magnet for links. Content allows for easier link dev, more spontaneous links, more offline mentions and more spider food. Content is real info for real people, entertainment works, uniqueness count and quality counts. It is important to find ways to promote your site outside of the search engines. Good content makes this task easier. Often good content gets stolen, copyscape.com can be a huge article, and learn how the DMCA process works. She said it all boils down to targeting.

John Coronella is now up. He quotes the Wikipedia for what is an affiliate, he shortened it and said an affiliate is just a middle man. He shows his wife's typical recent purchase, and how she clicked on an affiliate link to go through there. Affiliate models for the purchase cycle make it go through more channels, i.e. the middle man. He is worried that they will squeeze out the middle people, including affiliates. he explains that online marketing is far from mature. As the market matures, the market will squeeze people out. He shows some inefficiencies in the current market (i.e. from one adsense site to an other). There will be vertical integration like CPA models. Blocking paths through the market with banning multiple affiliate in adwords and quality score updates. Good news is that it is massively inefficient, and there is risk but lots of opportunity. The bad news is it is not going to last. Long term strategy; make the market efficient in a way you can control it. Become the direct navigation with quality content and add value. Give the SE's reason not to cut you out and cut out the rest.

David Rivero from JoeBucks.com is next up. Difference between affiliate programs and affiliate networks. You want to leave out the different layers where the money is getting filtered, go directly to the merchant. Sign up with the affiliate programs that pay the most, someone who you can contact, companies that have a good track record, make sure they have products that sell, 800 numbers, call center, etc. Tried to get paid twice per month, build a relationship with your affiliate, make sure you have different payment methods, and make sure they dont have a minimum requirement. Make sure the affiliate lets you optimize your site, build a brand on your domain, don't just send directly to the affiliate link. Control your exit traffic. Make sure they have multiple payment options for the customer. Be careful where you buy traffic, beware of fraud protection, test the traffic. Test banner networks, email blast, adware traffic and by from the big three PPC engines. Build out product or service review sites. Info about a particular product or service. Compare different products or services. Rate them on a grading scale. Find your niche market. Sign up for multiple affiliate programs.

Matt Tuens from CKMG. He quickly summarizes what everyone said before starting his presentation. Key to success is the depth, breath and variety of your content. This will drive organic ranks, quality traffic and conversions. Super Affiliate secrets... Build your success, run the site like a business, tremendous number of articles and leverage your content. It is common sense, but many affiliates don't do that. You need to invest, strategize, market and brand with your site using content. The more content is better. Make your site a destination site, organic listings and targeted traffic. Encourage linking. Increase conversions. Differentiate your competitors. Fill your site with hundreds of short informational articles, longer detailed articles, landing pages, and make a blog. You want your content to help your visitors through the decision making process. Set up your navigation to help the visitor down the buying path. Get the word out about your site (press releases, etc.), grow every day, be customer centric. Leverage content on other sites, on industry sites, industry blogs and forums.

Link Development and Linking Optimization

Moderated by Greg Niland aka GoodROI. Introduces Rae Hoffman, who will talk about “Delegating Link Development.” Quality link building takes time, so how to get them without doing it yourself. Is speaking extremely fast… outsourcing link development can take on a variety of forms, including link exchange, triangular, etc. The right link firm can do good things, but the wrong one can cause irreparable damage. Suggests using highly recommended firms from friends and colleagues, recommended firms that appear at conferences, and last resort is jump in the water and see if sink or swim. Makes sure that you research choices very well…ask for references and actually talk to past clients, look at the companies own backlinks…lots of companies will say that they focus on clients and not their own site, but there should still be at least some decent links. Link dev has become actual marketing, no longer just sending out a templated email. Look at what factors they consider when evaluating link partners? Do they only focus on PR? Do they use automated programs? What is the cost per link or per hour? (goes over a long list of general questions at about a million miles and hour…good questions and I’ll try to get them later…)

Remember that you are who you hire…so be careful. Hiring and training a link dev is not a light task. Her experience is that the number of quality links from an in-house dev is greater than outsourcing, in most cases. Goes over a list of questions to ask when interviewing link developers. Asks questions that try to determine how they use the Internet/how well they know it. I.e.: what is your favorite SE? Do you know what a link is? (sometimes people overcomplicate these) Do you use IM? Do you use html? What email client do you use and why? (If they know what that means, then you probably have someone who is pretty Internet savvy. Ask them to do a product search for something they can buy. Through trial and errors, it is easier to train someone with Internet experience than a “marketing person that can’t check their email.” Give s a good overview of things to be included in your link dev manual, including: diff types of links. Tracking competitor backlinks info (this is the best thing you can teach – knowing competitor links are very effective. Links to own articles. A glossary of terms and definitions. Common link myths. A spreadsheet template for tracking. Example email templates and teach them how to customize them. A clear listing of expectations (her link developers have always worked on quotas). Set realistic expectations. Links to access SEO tools that are valuable, and make sure you give them a time for QA since they have had time to look over the manual.

Tasking a link developer…remember that if you choose to make a link dev as independent as possible, let them train on “less important” sites…let them tool around in the station wagon but keep a careful eye when driving the Porsche.” When evaluating performance: judge how the links are working towards gaining rankings. Outsourcing versus in-house will depend on a variety of factors…expectations of quality, ability to house employees, the value of the search rankings versus the cost, whether you have expertise to train and developer link manners, and whether you have the time. If you do not have time, consider outsourcing, but remember to get referrals, as mentioned earlier…and also task them in detail until they get their “link developer license.” Greg thanks her and jokes about how she crammed 30 minutes of info into 10 minutes.

Joel Lesser from linksmanager.com. He will speak about link exchange, aka reciprocal linking. Talks about the tarnished image of link exchange. The fact is most marketing methods have received bad press at one time or another. The reason for this bad press is due to “full duplex services” which are linking schemes which afford no editorial discretion on making links and create problems for SE’s. When abused, it has been frowned upon. Avoid sites that “guarantee” links. Asks if no reciprocal links in the WWW is a realistic picture? It is a give and take world, and most websites will not link to another site without money or and exchange. Link exchanges facilitate relevant knowledge transfer.

Compelling reason to use LE: provides relevant traffic independent of SE’s. Extremely cost efficient. Relevant links may increase performance in SE’s. Links provide users with knowledge gateways to alternative information. How to ID potential link partners: Look for sites that have an unusual amount of high quality content, sites that link to other high quality sites. Real world challenges: time consuming; small marketing budget; big business versus small entrepreneur – link exchange levels the playing field. Proper strategy: link to and obtain links from sites that benefit end users experience. Relevant links are typically obtained slowly (aka “naturally”) so avoid sudden high volume. Always maintain editorial discretions. Always use link exchange forms when available. Make linking decisions for the end users, not for the search engines. Link with related businesses that you already have an established relationship with.

He recommends watching out for link exchange misinformation such as the idea that listing a title and description does not work. Shows two quotes from Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny, and states that they have never come out and said that you should not use link exchanges. Talks about Google’s 2003 patent “Information Retrieval base don historical data.” And shows how they mentioned that you should gain links naturally. Wrap up: maintain editorial discretion. Keep “natural volume,” which he defines as one link one day, none for a few days, and then maybe a dozen in the next week, and so forth. Update content regularly – webmasters will not link to a junk site. Publish links even if not proactively looking…links beget links! Alternate publishing methods such as linking within content, sidebars, Linklets, and Linkblogs. Provide a link request form on your website to make it easy.

Don’ts: require links to be placed on specific page with specific PageRank. If not sure that user experience is benefited, don’t do it. Be careful which third parties are used to manage campaign. Remember that links allow you to have another source of traffic than Ses. Keep in mind that your competition is likely exchanging links. Another good thing is that link exchanges avoid click-fraud concerns. Remember that linking is the foundation of what makes the web a web.

Roger Montti (aka Martinibuster), VP of verticals at BOTW.org. Will talk about alternative link building strategies for most websites including from corporate to affiliates. Advertising and link buys: what should you look for? Relevance, no mention of PageRank in the sales process. No ads for non-relevant sites, and a year long purchase. He prefers smaller magazine sites that offer banners, even without the ext links, In some case, these small magazines give you a link for as little as $60 a year. How to find the opportunities? Use Ses with search queries like: [“advertise with us” –cpm] [“rate card” –cpm advertising] [allintitle:sponsors –cpm site:.org keyword].

Buying websites. This is also a good way to build links. Look for: inactive or underperforming websites. Search for: [“temporarily down for maintenance”] [allintitle: “site is offline”] Site of the month-type pages. Many sites will reward good sites with links that are free. Search for: [“site of the month” +keyword] . Look for site of the day and site of the week also. These are especially ideal if dedicated to a niche. Newsletters. He feels that these are an underutilized method of finding backlinks. Prices vary, and make sure that they are archived, unless they are at least sending good quality converting traffic. Searches: [“newsletter keyword sponsors”] [newsletter “advertising rates” keyword]. Sponsorships can also be good. Look for industry associations, charity groups. Sample searches to find them: [keyword sponsors site.org] Research competitor backlinks suing Y! Site Explorer. Look for Dot EDU job fairs and hope to get a link for participating. He emphasizes that he rarely researches links on G, mostly using Y!

Proxy sites: cultivate leads with informational websites. Create inbound links with satellite sites. Take advantage of the power of blogging through thoughtful comments, trackbacks, blogrolls, and even DMOZ listings. YouTube and Google Video…shows an example of getting link-backs from a PR5 page within YouTube. Also shows how to add your link to a Google Video. Sowed hoe expertvillage.com had over 1600 backlinks from Google Video alone. Covers other methods such as selling software. He is surprised that many people forget the Pad File which allows for submissions to software directories. What happens is that not only your site will show up, but other listings from favorable software directories will also show up for your keyword phrase. Charity site design…he isn’t that hot on this any more because it might not pass PR due to possibly being deprecated. If it is an org in your vertical space, then it makes more sense.

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com was up first. He shows a slide of news search, vertical search, local, blog and social search, as they are used more and more by agencies and marketers. MarketingSherpa tested the tactic known as SEO PR. They gave the task to his son, the college intern, to create an optimize versus not optimize release, and test it on different news service engines. That was the test. They made mistakes; optimized for one word, he also optimized for the singular version of plural releases (so he changed the test cases). the results turned out that the unoptimized released, ranked higher than the unoptimized. The publicity generated 8 times more visitors than the 2 releases themselves. The SherpaStore.com's unique visitors were 10.5% higher. The blog generated 30x more visitors than the article. Using the most popular keyword is not always the best strategy. Press and blog mentions can generate traffic also. It is your news that generates coverage. Do not be surprised if the traffic comes from blogs than news articles.

Amanda Walington from SearchingForProfit.com RSS can be seen in many places, including web sites, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, etc. Build your feeds right from the start... How many feeds are appropriate? How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh and attractive (she likes full content feeds). How much of each content should be included in the feed? Updating feeds, tracking stats of feeds. RSS is not just for blogs, affiliate communication, media and commercial distribution, syndicating content, new product announcements, job openings, press rooms, investors, etc. Who is using feeds creatively? She shows titlist.com. Target.com is using it. Optimize your feeds, use keywords, write descriptions as if your are writing it for a directory, use full paths on links, each feed should have a keyword theme, use images, etc. She explains you need to pay attention to details of the feed spec. Blog optimization: optimize the templates, use the plugins, write powerful keyword rich posts, socialize your blog, use tags and clouds, submit to blog search engines and make it easy to subscribe. SEO Tips for Podcasts; optimize the audio file, building landing pages, build accurate RSS, submit broadly, watch for changes. SEO Tips for Video; fill out all the info, use tags consistently, make sure that your feeds work if you include video back into your site, submit broadly, and create landing pages. MySpace, it is all about social networking, she shows examples of MySpace profiles. Second Life, when one life is not enough (very interesting), she shows optimization methods for second life.

Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl is now up. He starts with a story. The self-perpetuating buzz, links and traffic snowball. Link baiting via Netscape and Digg. Some link baiting will bomb. No matter how good your link bait is, it may fail. Digg is now in the top 100 sites, and these guys are thought leaders, he says (some may argue with that). You need about 30 - 50 votes within a 24 hour period to make it to the home page. Your title is incredibly important. After that, the content in the click through is important or else you will drop. Make sure you add friends on Digg. Vote on your friends stuff. Don't submit your own stories, ask your friends to submit it for you, and then make that push. Don't bash Steven Colbert, dont attempt to sell to diggers and dont post your own release. He said, one oh his stories he spent 3 days writing, got over a 1,000 diggs but over 1,500 links - which is huge. Netscape comes from the bottom up. You need less friends to help you out there. Smaller site but still pretty good. Top 6 quality indicator of link value are the theme value, power source, outbound links and so on. Social media for traffic include del.ico.us, technorarti, reddit, and stumbleupon. Del.ico.us you need about 30 bookmarks within 24 hours. With Technorarti use one or two very specific phrases and also one generic. Reddit is a cross between digg and del.iou.us. StumbleUpon is kinda random he said, it is a toolbar you download. Social media for reputation, based on Graywolf's post. You want your top 10 results for your name to all be positive. He shows LinkedIn also, then Naymz.com (they give you a free PPC listing), squido and technorati claim your blog.

Last up is Greg Hartnett from Best of Web. He does not have a PPT, which is ok. He explains it is import to submit to all popular directories but he wanted to present alternatives. He explains that you need to visualize your site a node on the net, part of something bigger. He loves Flickr, the photo sharing site. You can drive some interesting "juices" to your site from Flickr. He recommends joining Flickr groups, adding notes, and tags, and keywords. He shows a Google Video he uploaded of his son in a hockey fight, his son is so young, the move is JR hockey fight (so cute). The video was viewed almost a million times on various sites. He said that commenting on blogs in a meaningful and productive manner, you can piggy back on the blog's traffic. StumleUpon has an advertising product, that he uses and it drives nice traffic he said. You can not trick people into this...

SEO and Big Search

Moderated by Joe Morin. He welcomes everyone to Pubcon, says that it is officially the largest conference in their history.

Melanie Mitchell from AOL. Starts with a review of the “old AOL” versus the new AOL. Said it was a good 20 year ride. With BB, the writing was on the wall: change or die. Recently, their response was to give it all away. Trying to generate more of an audience on the web. Needs to gather new audience and grow revenues in advertising. Simply put, they have changed their entire business model. This includes SEO for their goals, since it is so important to their new strategy. Feels they will win with deeper content in longer tail of search. They want to market the plays, and not the theatre (AOL). They generate revenue through advertising and search and commerce by allowing people to navigate through their new areas.

One of the first things they needed to do was to establish an organization to succeed at SEO. They created channel leads for multiple areas, accountable for SEO. Created a core SEO group working towards common goals. First looked at indexing and rankings to determine problem areas. Needed to allocate resources from other areas of the business in order to support. ID’d issues and prioritized channels to support the program.

Next, they need to optimize assets. Increase number of indexed pages. Raised quality of rankings of AOL pages. Optimize existing pages to increase presence. Next, they needed to track metrics. By implementing consistent metrics with a consistent methodology, they were able to create an SEO dashboard to communicate results across the company. They need to track PV’s, search referrals, visits, and financial seo goals. Lastly, they needed to increase consistency of the SEO. They defined SEO-compliance standards and developed training. They drive a consistent approach to SEO strategy for products and programming. SEO needs to be a part of the company’s DNA.

They created a workflow which allowed for the requirements to be forwarded to the unified team and then onto the project teams, programming teams and other stakeholders. For paid search efforts, it is more centralized than SEO because they want to look at efforts across the company. They need to understand the quality of their traffic, recirculation, and lifetime value, and understand it better in order to generate revenue. They use a reporting system that provides tracking value, and then manage bids based on research. Once they ID the value of the visit they can define CPC and break even points and set daily budgets. Lastly, how do they work with partners, and how do they fit into the equation. Is it working? Yes. They continue to see growth wit the majority of traffic coming from non-members. Q3 results showed a 46% increase in revenue from paid search. She finished with a couple of short case studies which showed AOL sports having a 60% increase in traffic from organic search. This translated to 130% increase in page views from organic search. Finishes with a funny slide of a mockup NY Times cover saying “AOL is really serious.” (This answered the question “how do you know we are serious.?” (laughs)

Dave Roth, Director of SEM for Yahoo! Starts by thanking AOL for all the ideas they gave them for their new home page (laughs). He will focus more on organic search, although like Melanie he focuses on both paid and organic. Why does Yahoo! do search marketing. Made some jokes about is name and quitting “The Band” and hating Sammy Haggar. Is “an agency guy from way back.” Yahoo! has been doing SEM for some time. They need a central perspective to deal with Efficiencies, best practices, and Scale (3 billion page views a day). Needed to ask, like a lot of big companies, “why don’t we rank for a term like “search engine?” Feels that this is our time, regarding those who do SEO/SEM for a living. He advises to have fun if you have time. (Laughs)

Now, everyone knows that SEM is the best way to acquire customers, even if you are an SE. Refers to it as the holy trinity of performance marketing: Paid, SEO, and Affiliate. Y advertises on millions of keywords. Y! rolled out a central SEO program across all business units. Y has a corporate affiliate marketing program that works closely with paid. Lists a variety of areas across the org that participates in search marketing. Lots of different business models in play: subscriptions, conversion, transactional, lead generation, CPM revenue. God thing is that it’s just marketing, and we need to come up with one method to measure. For example, what is the lifetime value of a conversion? What is the net present value (NPV) of that lifetime revenue stream? What is an acceptable profit margin on NPV? Created a monthly “scorecard” across business units. Good news is that this scorecard works for SEO too. They can compare organic referral value versus paid, analyze differences in users behavior, and adjust accordingly. Offers some examples like what is branded versus non-branded value, and how they can track progress of how much of the opportunity can they realize?

Central group provides resources and expertise; training and education; standards and best practices; tools and technology; and acts as a product release gateway. The business units and properties needs to assign points of contact per property; coordinate a baseline SEO audit; build and execute the SEO plan; use their own scorecard metrics and related actions, and evangelize ongoing SEO implementation. This is important because you have to get it into everyone’s head that SEO is important. culture must be preserved and cultivated even through employee turnover. In terms of centralizing versus de-centralizing…business owners need to know their business. SEM’s know search. They have to manage the tradeoffs and manage against a single standard. Also important to allow budget mobility, in order to “keep people honest.” They struggled on “build versus buy.” They found that you want to build to core business, and buy the rest. Finishes with “it’s just marketing…no voodoo involved. They do SEM just like everyone else, but on a larger scale. SEO is mostly about training and trying. It is a game of tradeoffs…finishes with “I’m hiring!” (laughs)

Adam Lasnik from Google. Introduced by Joe as “works with some guy named Matt.” (laughs). He introduces himself as Google’s “Search Evangelist.” Will discuss what happens when “Google SEO’s Itself. fancy SEO tricks G has up it’s sleeve: (Page intentionally left blank). (laughs) When G sneezes, people notice. Sometimes this isn’t good, but others times it is. SNACC attack: Speed, Navigability, Accessibility, Clarity and Comfort. First: “speed really really counts.” People will notice and care if there is even a delay of a half second. Has two component: throughput (how fast can it be sent) and latency (how long until after someone clicks link until something happens. Navigability: where am I and how did I get here? Users should know where they are going. Anchor text is important…important for SEO and important for users. It is about the users (great he just used up two of the main points I’ll be presenting later today). You should be able to see the URL at the top, for example. AJAX does not allow bookmarking, for example. Back button should always go back…no two links on the page should link to the same thing.

Accessibility: need reasonable URLs, useful ALT Tags, and accessible search. He is the first to admit that google has it’s own problems with sometimes subdomains sometimes subfolders. They recently introduced audio capchtas, which can help with SEO. Feels that using these will lead to more links from blind people, for example. Clarity: makes links easy to find. Comfort: text easy to read. Black text is never a loser…pretty boring maybe but easy to read and appreciated by users. If you can’t read it or easily copy text, users may not come back. Also suggests that italics should be avoided, since they can be hard to read. Consistency: routine can be rewarded. Make sure that if you have notes, you print them out (talking about his presentation…laughs). Use consistency in fonts and colors.

Some of the prior speakers spoke about how they do SEO. At Google: what do we do? The answer is not much and I don’t do it. (laughs). They don’t worry about PageRank. They have user interface people that are fabulous and work with people across organization to make content more accessible, usable and intuitive. What about real SEM? Integration is being worked on, and content is being updated, for example tree like structure of Gmail. They try to keep pages simply, focusing more on text and “whiz bang” type of stuff. Use the same domain, for example “webhost.com” uses separate URL for “webhostsupport.com.” Having more content in one domain will serve better than lots of different domains. This also is better for user because it reduces the chances of Phishing and makes your site safer. For example if you use webhostrebates.com. web host specials.com, pretty soon phishers will pick up on this and try to get data from your clients.

Use “smart AJAX and Flash” to only support the other content on the page. Also, use 301’s…they once bought the website goggle.com and forgot to 301 it. He added during QA that 301’s will transfer link juice as long as you are linking from/to equivalent content. Sometimes we are not perfect, and sometimes we “cheat” by adding additional topics or content on a page simply to plug its own products. Conclusion: “yes, it really does come down to making the user happy.” “Your rankings will improve, your love life will improve, and you will make it on time for breakfast.”

Attend the next Pubcon or come out for the last three days and get all the QA.

A bit late to this panel, got caught talking outside in the lobby. Niall Kennedy is up on the stage, he is currently talking about wikipedia. He is now explaining web feeds as alternates. They are highly structured, discovery by Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and others. the user-facing in al modern browsers (he shows examples). He quickly goes through how to create a feed. The base vocabularies for RSS, include ATPM, IETF RFC or RSS 2.0. Extended vocabs; dubmin core meta data, comments, photo, audio, video, opensearch, creative commons, geo, item pricing, weather report, etc. You do not want to create a confusion, you need to use a structure and format that is standard. Popular parsing libs include python's universal feed parser, php's magpie, java's rome, perl's xml:rss and more. After you publish, you want to make sure to ping the engines. Always check your feeds for errors, validate it with feedvalidator.org. Also make sure to "claim your feed" in Technorati, in Google Sitemap, and in Yahoo! Site Explorer. Make sure to subscribe to your feed, populate the subscription search index, tag, add notes, view states and more. Watch out for "masked links" such as with feedburner, they now enable 302s. Watch out for false updates, such as Topix.net. Avoid reinvention, digg did this, and they made a digg:category name space. He then runs through some final things really quickly, nothing that crazy because most blog software apps handle this stuff automatically.

Rick Klau from FeedBurner. He gives the "who we are slide" you can learn about them at feedburner.com, they do rock, I use them. He shows a slop of feeds they manage, and you see the slope rocketing up. He explains that feeds are now not just about blog consumption but it is growing into podcasts, video blogs, print, online, news, retail, e-commerce, and web services. He explains the new IE7 and Firefox 2, then the social services like Digg, and Google Reader's shared posts, he shows TechMeme, FeedDemon and more. He shows of a new service named edgeio, a distributed classified service. He shows off sphere (I dislike that service, but maybe they changed since I reviewed it months ago). Full text vs. partial, the more content in the feed, the more these services can give back to you. Links matter. He then talks about "FeedFlare" which enables you to add functionality to your feeds, by leveraging 3rd part APIs. Examples include a digg this link, where it shows digged stories.

Owen Byrne the co-founder of Digg.com. The idea was user driven news. Went live on Dec. 1, 2004. They grew about 20% a month for the first few months. Paris Hilton hack on Feb. 2005 was a huge article that got digged and got them a ton of awareness. The server was crawling, load factor was at 100%, it took him 20 minutes just to login via SSH. Since then it took off. July 2005 they got some seed money and went from one server to three, they hired a designer, they added some cool features, added diggspy - that was version two. In June 2006, version 3.0 was released, they hired a DBA, finance people, got an office. It is a democratic process, no editors. Users are extremely vocal and motivated. They vote down spam, control home page, top stories are what are important to users. Passionate users - really passionate. They have over a 1/2M register users, 4,000+ stories submitted stories daily... They want to be a slashdot killer, and they sorta have done that, he said. There is a process for multiple developers, technical and management issues, avoid premature optimization, cache, cache and more cache. Hardware is cheap, but downtime is not. Lots of servers - spares, monitoring, testing and developing. They introduced a Digg API.

Chris Tolles from Topix.net. The team behind Topix created the ODP. He explains how it works, how many feeds they look at, etc. You can interact with the news on the Topix site by geographic location, http://www.topix.net/forum/geo. Topix provides fresh content for your site, local and topical content. Fresh content from your site, pull instead of push, rss feeds to increase distribution of content.

Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technology Ventures, worked at Apple in the past. He makes fun of PC's and then begins his keynote. He worked at Apple in the mid 90s and he was responsible for convincing companies to write software for the Mac. He is pretty funny and made a ton of jokes... Wow, he nailed Microsoft, love this guy. He explains he have done things wrong, many things wrong, in his life time. He recently started blogging, he loves blogging, and he spends about 4 hours per day blogging. He then asks the audience for help ranking higher in Technorati.

Are of Innovation:

(1) Make meaning... Make people more creative and more productive. End something bad (MSDOS) and make something more good. VCs are looking for people who want to make meaning... If you start your company to make money, then you will attract the wrong type of people.

(2) Make a mantra, innovators need to make a guiding light that always stays consistent. It needs to be two or three words about why you exist. MBAs learn that you have to create a mission statement. You always have to make your mission statement offsite for two days and a really expensive offsite location. He describes that making a mission statement is a lot like making a baby, you need to push it out. There was joking that lead up to that line. He shows a bland mission statement from Wendy's that says, they provide superior quality through leadership, innovation and partnerships. The manta of Wendy's should by "healthy fast food." Nike, "authentic athletic performance." FedEx says "Peace of Mind." eBay says "Democratize commerce." Forget the mission statement, it is about mantras.

(3) Jump to the next curve. Creating the next curve, not getting to it. He explains the Ice industry, you had ice harvesters, then you have ice factories and then ice machines. Not one of the harvesters moved to the next curve, they just tried improving their own business. Like, innovating through making Arial in five new font sizes.

(4) Roll the DICEE. People who keynote say, "create a great product." He makes fun of that, because who doesn't want to create a great product. Instead, make a deep product. He showed a deep product, a sandal that is a sandal and also opens beer bottles. He shows a flashlight that takes multiple sized batteries. Completeness, he shows a Lexus - the service, the pre-sales, after sales, all the support around it. Elegant; the nano is an example. Emotive, like the harley davidson.

(5) "Don't worry, be crappy." Technology works, "we ship and then we test." He says, welcome to Vista. She revolutionary stuff with elements that don't work, or else you wont ship.

(6) Polarize people. Two people who quite a PhD program to build a program that the two people will want to use themselves. That means some people will love it and some people will hate it. Apple, Harely Davidson, TiVo (he has four TiVos), Toyota Sian car.

(7) Let a hundred flowers blossom. The start of innovation, sometimes people who you did not anticipate, will buy your product or use your service. Something is wrong. He said don't panic, take the money. Go to your current customers and sell them more.

(8) Churn, baby, churn. It is not OK to ship bad stuff and keep it that way. You must keep improving and not stopping. To be an innovator, you need to be in denial. As soon as you ship, you need to listen to people, as they complain. But before that, you need to be in denial about "it can't be done." Version 1 to version 2.

(9) Niche thyself. He makes fun of the graph that shows a vertical access with "ability to provide unique product or service" and on the horizontal is "value to the customer." Bottom left corner is "Dotcom," right side and bottom is "price," and top left is "stupid," finally top right corner is "high and to the right." An example of that corner is Fandango.

(10) Follow the 10/20/30 rule of powerpoint presentations. Pitch. 10 slides is a ppt is the best number. Give the 10 slides in 20 minutes. Best font size is 30 points. Smaller than that means you are going to be reading your slides and that is bad.

(11) Don't let the bozos grind you down. If someone with a lot of money tells you it can't be done, don't listen. He gave so many examples. Even one where he was a bozo himself.

Excellent Keynote!

I walk down from the conference hotel across the street to the conference center. As I am slowly lifted via the escalator up to the conference area, I see this line forming. The line must have been hundreds of people long and I have no idea how they would register all those people within 30 minutes. Lucky me, I am on the speaker list, so I bypassed the line, and just waited about 5 minutes to get my badge. Why is it taking so long to register people? My guess, it has to do with only having three people man the stations, requiring them to print out badges on label printers and then stick them onto a conference badge, and assemble the badge there. Also they do not have a line for A-K, L - N, etc... it is just one line for normal attendees and one line for press, speakers, exhibitors and staff. I hope it all works out, because there is now 4 minutes until launch off and the room is only 25% filled.

Just had a quick chat with Brett, he said a ton of people just registered on site, which didn't help the issue of running late. We probably won't start until 9:15 here, and push all the other sessions back. But Brett gave out the wireless access code to everyone, sponsored by Ask.com. So some people are now happy. Guy Kawasaki just snapped of a picture of me, as he scans the conference room with his camera.

Brett is up speaking at 9:05, welcoming people, saying the conference is almost double of what it was last year. He explains that he started WebmasterWorld in 1999, and started back with forums in 1984 or so. He thanked the sponsors. He said most parties are private, but go to your reps and ask them.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has tips on what things to look for when purchasing links. I thought I pull out 10 of them to make a top ten list:

1. Relevancy to your page
2. Alexa ranking
3. Site popularity in niche
4. PageRank
5. Site health in search engines
6. Location of links on page
7. Site rankings
8. Do they look bought?
9. Are your links useful?
10. Number of other links on that page

The list is in no order, just some highlights from the WebmasterWorld thread.

Today, we will be covering the WebmasterWorld PubCon conference. I will try to get some hot forum threads up as well, time permitting.

Check out our WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006 Coverage Schedule.

In Google Sitemaps there is a statistic under stats/ crawl statistics that shows you "Your page with the highest PageRank." It looks like this for this site:

Now, several people are reporting that they have heard of or seen themselves, random pages being displayed in that report.

I suddenly see a change in my highest PR page as reported by Google Webmaster Tools. It used to be the homepage, obviously, until October 2006. One both months - October and November the pages shown as highest PR are what seems to be just random internal pages. The homepage is PR4 (down from long time PR5) and the October page is only PR1 and November page does not even have any PR at all according to the Toolbar.

For one of my verified sites, the report does not show at all. But for all the others, it seems like it works just fine.

Maybe this is showing a different, more current, PageRank value? I really do not know for sure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A reader asked that I give the new Amazon PPC program some coverage, since there is a WebmasterWorld thread on it. The thread links to Gary's ResourceShelf post named What’s A ClickRiver? New Pay-Per-Click Sponsored Ad Program from Amazon and A9.

Clickriver Ads is an advertising program -- currently in beta -- that allows businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com®, next to search results and on product detail pages. Clickriver Ads presents a unique opportunity to advertise services and products that complement the selection on Amazon.com, an online marketplace with tens of millions of active customer accounts.

Clickriver Ads was created by A9.com®, a search technologies company based in Palo Alto, California. A9.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Visit https://clickriver.com/advertiser/ for more information.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week I think it is best to cancel the Search Pulse. Chris and I will be in sessions at WebmasterWorld's PubCon and it will conflict with our coverage schedule. So we will postpone this weeks show until next week.

We should have two weeks of coverage and conference coverage roundup for you on the November 21st edition.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks, how do you know if a search engine has penalized your site?

With most engines, the quickest method of checking that is to see if the engine has you in their index. How do you do that? Just do a site:www.domain.com command. Examples of those searches for this site:

• site:www.seroundtable.com at Google
• site:www.seroundtable.com at Yahoo! (redirects to Site Explorer)
• site:www.seroundtable.com at MSN (Live.com)
• inurl: www.seroundtable.com site:www.seroundtable.com at Ask.com

If no pages are found, you can assume something is wrong. If your site is very new, less than a month or so, then just wait and be patient (get more links). If it is Ask.com, they take longer than a month to get indexed. But if your site is old and it once was indexed in the search engines and you do not have any pages indexed now, then it may be a sign of a penalty.

If you exclude all site technical problems, the next thing you might want to do in Google's case is sign up with Google Sitemaps. They may show you enough detail to explain that you are banned and why... Or they may not.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

The Gmail What's New section talks about four new features released after Google released the Gmail Mobile Client.

The new features include:

• Reply on top, which looks like:
  

• Updated email conversation notification
  

  Ever replied to a message only to find out that someone sent a better, smarter reply right before you? Now, if someone sends a reply while you're in the middle of reading a conversation (or replying to it), you'll get a notification that a new message has arrived. Click "update conversation" to see what you’ve missed.

• Forward all of the message feature

• Offline chatting, i.e. voicemails or text messages
  

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread points to a PPC Discussions post that shows how Microsoft adCenter is converting the & to & (the HTML entity) on the fly.

So if you have tracking URLs set up that use &, then you may not be able to track them in your analytics package. Because if your analytics package or server does not translate back the & to & then the data won't be captured.

So it is important for the advertiser to know about this change and it is important for Microsoft and the other PPC engines to work with the advertiser before making these changes.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As expected with the updated landing page quality score factors, Google advertisers are extremely mad and hurt (financially) by this change to AdWords. We expected this to happen, because it happened the first time Google updated their quality score to include the landing page factors. In fact, we titled our article AdWords Landing Page Quality Score Causing Epidemic.

We are just at the beginning of a new Google AdWords epidemic.

Steven Bryan of eWeek was the first to post on it with his Google: Screwing Advertisers Over Before Christmas? Then Threadwatch wrote Adwords Quality Update II = Price Gouging Round II with some very convincing details.

As you know, I get my results from the masses, the forums.

WebmasterWorld has three threads on this, I'll put quotes from each of them...

(1) Changing Algorithm on Content Ads

I think it just started today. One of my content ads campaign is down from >100K impression/day to 30 today :(

We have seen a dramatic drop in Content impressions in the past week. From >200 000 impressions per day through August and September, we went to a very volatile period in October - up to 1.8 million on some days. Since 30th October we have seen < 150 000 per day.

Done today for me. I'm death. My content-only campaigns has less than 100 impressions today at half-day, no clicks.

(2) Done with AdWords

500 relevant, targeted keywords going to relevant, targeted pages in the site. Hardly a shotgun approach. 5% CTR over several months. Bids were .04. Today, wake up and Google wants $1 - $5 per click. So that is the final straw. We are done, done, done and I hope someone comes soon to knock Google off its arrogant perch. I will not spend another dime with them ever again.

From an Adsense publisher's perspective, I'm certainly seeing evidence of this on one of my sites, as all my regular "little guy" advertisers, who have small, local businesses relevant to the site, have suddenly disappeared.

I can only conclude they've been priced out of the market. Not good for them, and not good for me. :(

(3) Here we go again

I have a keyword, "fish" (for example), it gets 40% CTR, no other bidders on it (exclusive trademark usage), page is as optimized as it can be (Fortune 100 website) ...... bid used to be $0.03 -NOW- $0.25.

But as normal, some advertisers are not affected.

I am going to be honest, when I see other sites get knocked out but my campaigns remain in good shape, I appreciate it, from a purely selfish standpoint, as it means less competition for me.

My predictions, AdWords advertisers will adapt to the new algorithm and Google will change things to adapt to some of these complaints. But I think AdWords advertisers will have to do most of the work here.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that some Google AdWords advertisers can now easily place Google ads on the Orkut community. He said when he logged into his AdWords account he was shown the following message:

New! orkut.com is now part of the Google advertising network. With site targeting you can select specific communities on which to advertise. Run text, image, and Flash ads on orkut to start gaining new customers.

Advertise on orkut and show your message to the millions who use orkut to meet friends and stay connected. Over 60% of orkut's users are between the ages of 18-25 and are located around the world, including the United States, Brazil, India and the UK. Learn more about orkut [http://www.orkut.com/About.aspx]

I logged into my account and I do not see this message, but I doubt this guy is making it up.

I also could not find any news, blogs, history or details in Google AdWords help section on this new feature.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: The link takes you to here which is a site targeted campaign for Orkut.

Folks at WebmasterWorld are reporting that the Google Webmaster Central Sitemaps tool is now showing older data.

One member said when he looked at his last visit date to his home page it was November 7th. He then looked again and it showed November 4th.

He asked if Google.com is doing a rollback?

Tedster believes that Google is not doing a rollback, but it is the Google Webmaster Central Sitemaps tool that is doing the rollback in terms of what it is reporting.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread links to a popular recent study where Google returned the right diagnoses 58-percent of the time.

Dr Tang and Dr Ng selected 26 difficult cases presented in the New England Journal of Medicine, including Cushing's syndrome, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, encephalitis and cirrhosis.

They then plugged the symptoms of each case into the search engine to come up with a diagnosis.

When these diagnoses were compared with the correct published diagnoses, the researchers found that Google got it right 58 per cent of the time.

They say an online search is likely to be more effective at helping to diagnose conditions with unique symptoms that can be used as search terms

So is Google able to diagnose a patients illness better than a Doctor would? That is currently the joke in the forum thread. Are Doctors right more than 58-percent of the time. :)

Danny has a write up on Google MD? How Doctors Use Search from a while back and you can also meet the Google Doctor.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

AussieWebmaster posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums with a link to a blog post named How to remove your competitors from MSN Live!

In short, the "hack" is to generate enough duplicate content on your competitors site, so that Microsoft's Live.com search sees it as spam and then delists the site from the index.

How do you do that?

(1) Check the competitors site to see if a non-valid URL returns a 200 status code with any header checker tool.
(2) You create hundreds of URLs like somedomain.com/index.html?test=test and somedomain.com/index.html?test=test1 and somedomain.com/index.html?test=test2, etc.
(3) You get MSN to index them by putting them in front of MSN

You wait and according to this guy, your competitors site will drop out of the index.

The post offers a solution to this potentially bad loophole. And Brian M in the forums suggests that using a 404 but the 404 also causes some indexing issues.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a member not understanding why Google has not indexed his PDF files. To make a long story short, Google did index his PDF files, but I thought it would make a nice quick post to explain the type of PDF documents search engines can or cannot index well.

Like with any document, HTML, PDF, Word file, etc, the search engines love text. So you write this document, 100% text in Word and then you convert it to a PDF file. Some PDF convertors will translate the text in the document into text format in the PDF document. Some PDF convertors will take an image screen capture of the Word file and use that within the PDF document.

Now images may look fine, but just like you cannot copy and paste the text from an image from one text editor to another, the same is with this PDF document.

If a search engine cannot read the text, due to it being a graphic and not text, then it won't be able to fully index the words on the document.

I assume, eventually, if not now, search engines will use OCR technology to read those PDF files that appear to be text driven, but in reality they are graphics.

So how do you know if your PDFs are Search Engine Friendly? Try to copy and paste the body text from the PDF to a text editor like Word or Note Pad. If that works, then it is most likely that Google, Yahoo!, MSN (Live.com), and Ask.com will index those PDFs.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Kevingibbons, from our forums, wrote at his blog Google AdWords account snapshot and posted screen captures of the new beta tool, Google is testing in some AdWords accounts. It is called "Account Snapshot" and it shows you; Alerts, Status, Announcements, Help & Tips, Campaign Performance Overview, Cost Chart, Click Chart, Impression Chart, and CTR Chart.

Here is a smaller image of the full screenshot kevingibbons posted.

Pretty cool feature and nice find by Kevin.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Google began testing the Magnifying Glass Feature in the Diagnostic Tool in mid October, but it appears to now be live in all AdWords accounts now. Here is a screen shot on one of my sample campaigns, of the tool in action.

What does the tool do?

The Ads Diagnostic Tool can identify why a particular ad or group of ads may not be showing. In those cases where an ad is not shown, this tool provides recommended steps to help you get your ads up and running.

How do you activate it? Well, drill down to the keyword level within your Ad Group and then "Click the Keywords tab and point to the icon next to any keyword to see whether your ad is appearing."

More details at Google AdWords help.

The folks in the forums love the feature.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A typical WebmasterWorld thread has a member who is upset about submitting his (I believe) new site to Google Sitemaps and 3 weeks later, Google has still not fully indexed his site.

Well, it is a great way to tell Google where your pages are but Google won't necessarily index those pages.

I personally believe that Google won't crawl those pages if they are very low value to them. Value is perceived from links, content and PageRank.

Want suggestions on improving your sites indexing in Google?

Most are obvious but if you need more just read the WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why is Google showing him a really long description for some of the pages of his site. I reported back a while ago at Search Engine Watch a post by Philipp where he spotted this over at Сплог, here is a screen shot from over there.

Matt Cutts of Google did reply to Philipp over here saying that he was unable to reproduce the error, and neither can I.

But this is the first thread I saw about it over at WebmasterWorld .

A member at DigitalPoint Forums was told to learn how to spell negligible but searching for it in a search engine. So he entered in neglible (misspelled) into Google.co.uk (same works for .com) and Google did not offer up a spelling correction.

Instead Google shows the first result from www.misspelled.com/common/n.htm and then offers up those Middle of Page Google Refinements option, but for the word "dictionary."

Pretty cute.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A couple days ago Reuters said that Yahoo! is testing graphical ads on mobile devices this week.

Yahoo Inc. is to begin delivering graphical ads to mobile phones as part of a test of how it can extend corporate brand marketing on the Web into the wireless market, the company said on Monday.

The Internet media company said it will start an initial public evaluation later this week in the United States of slimmed-down banner ads and similar advertising to the small, but growing number of users of Yahoo's Mobile Web service.

This should be interesting.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The eighth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. We discussed some hot new topics this week. Google announced that we should be expecting a new landing page quality score soon. There were possible Microsoft and PageRank updates late last week. We posted our WebmasterWorld PubCon conference coverage schedule. We looked at some SEO considerations in Google, Yahoo and other engines. We also discussed dozens of other topics. 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. Google to Update Landing Page Quality Score Factors
   
2. Microsoft Live (MSN Search) Update 11/3
   
3. Possible PageRank Update Underway?
   
4. Dual Plus Coverage of WebmasterWorld's PubCon Next Week
   
5. Google Advertisers Receiving Settlement Payouts
   
6. Does Change of Domain Name Ownership Hurt Rankings?
   
7. Some Firefox Browsers Blocking Google AdWords Clicks?
   
8. Are Any SEOs Considered White Hat?
   
9. Yahoo! Search Marketing Version 2.0 (Panama) Invites Going Out
   
10. JotSpot Acquired By Google
    
11. Yahoo!'s Logo Surprise (Yahoo! Easter Egg)
    
12. Subdomains & The SEO Benefit in Google, Yahoo, & MSN
    
13. Microsoft adCenter Updates adCenter Labs Tools
    
14. My Experience at Google New York with Vanessa Fox
    
15. Google Invites 100 Advertisers to Test Print Ads
    

Lightening round topics;

Continue reading "Search Pulse 8: Google AdWords Update, MSN Search Update, PageRank Update, SEO, PubCon Coverage, Firefox, JotSpot, Yahoo! Eggs, & More"

Shimon Sandler wrote a post named Cloaking An Ecommerce Site where he asks, should you be allowed to cloak your e-commerce site for religious purposes. The situation is that some orthodox Jews shut down their web site on the Sabbath. So if you go to a site such as B&H from sundown Friday to darkness of Saturday night, you should get a sign that says they are closed. You will not be able to browse the site, you will not be able to look at product, I believe (but I am not sure) a one page message comes up telling the customer to come back after the Sabbath.

The issue here is that this may impact the site in the search results the rest of the week, and not just on Sabbath. Why? Because Google and other search engines may send a spider to the site and it will be inaccessible for about 25 hours, once per week.

So, Shimon asks, should Google allow you to cloak the site on that day only, by allowing spiders to access the main site, but not allow humans to access the site?

My argument, as I posted in Search Engine Roundtable Forums is;

Well, just like you are allowed special treatment for religious reasons, i.e. you can take standardized tests on sundays instead of saturdays in NY (I think), or you get kosher food on airlines, or you don't have to swear on a bible in court.... Why not special treatment for Google for Religious Reasons?

So should Google allow cloaking for religious reasons?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you visit AdSense.com it does not take you to the AdSense Consulting marketing company, it takes you to a Google search page. I assume, soon enough, they will make it go to Google AdSense.

Back in July, AdSense Consulting made a big issue out of getting unwanted traffic and inquiries from those looking for Google Adsense tips and consulting. AdSense Consulting has been around since before Google launched AdSense and they do not offer Google AdSense tips.

It appears that some how Google is now the owner of AdSense.com and AdSense Consulting goes under AdSense2.com.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has been sending out emails to their customers trying to influence them to promote Google Checkout as an option on their site. Here is a portion of this email;

As you may know, for every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 of Google Checkout sales for free. Just in time for the holidays, we're giving you even more by processing all of your Google Checkout sales for free through the end of 2006! Here's how it works:

- From November 8 through December 31, 2006, we'll process all of your Checkout transactions for free, even if you aren't an AdWords advertiser. If you're already an AdWords advertiser, we'll process your Checkout transactions for free regardless of what you spend on AdWords.*
- Valid Checkout orders you receive during the promotion will automatically qualify.
- There's no limit: we're processing all of your Checkout sales for free.
- You can take full advantage of this promotion by encouraging your buyers to use Google Checkout on your site.

On January 1, 2007, the standard transaction fee will apply again. Also, if applicable, your regular free transaction processing (based on your December AdWords spend) will resume.

I have been accepting Google Checkout on my personal blog for a while now. Matt Cutts even sent me a little something via Google Checkout.

Of, I also am a Google Checkout affiliate, so if you sign up, use this URL. ;-)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Reuters article named Google positioning for move into U.S. radio has the first, I believe, confirmation from Google that they will be launching radio ads tests by years end.

Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said this week that the company will begin a public test of Google Audio Ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same AdWords system they use to buy Web search ads.

So I guess all the rumors were indeed correct.

Danny doesn't understand why "Google is doing absolutely nothing in terms of podcasts." Which is a very good point.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.