December 2006 Archives

Google had a method of converting your Froogle feed to an AdWords campaign by using something named "Ads Automator." We first wrote about Ads Automator in September 2004 but ClickZ had one of the first write ups on it on May 10, 2004.

Via a WebmasterWorld thread, we learn that Google has removed the Ads Automator feature with the recent changes to the Froogle / Google Base format.

AdWordsAdvisor2 said:

With the change to the Base upload, Ads Automator has been removed as an option for new campaigns. I am not sure that it will come back, at least in the near future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have reported time after time again the issues with Google's Webmaster Central tools, specifically Sitemaps. It is a wonderful tool, it allows you to see a ton of data about your site plus submit data back to Google. But some folks are losing trust in the information Google is sending back to you via Webmaster Central.

A thread at WebmasterWorld recounts some of the issues people have repeatedly had with the Sitemaps tool. They include (but not limited to):

• Robots.txt Google Sitemaps Bug Fixed
• Google Webmaster Sitemaps Tool Back With Old Data?
• Google's Sitemap Tool Showing Random Pages in Highest PageRank Stat
• Google Sitemaps Tools Sends All Sites Back into Pending Verification?
• Google Sitemaps Robots.txt Validator Does Not Properly Validate

A recent report at WebmasterWorld shows that some people are noticing that the "Home page crawl" that shows the last time Googlebot crawled your home page in Google Webmaster Central, is not on par with the Google Cache date. Now, Google explained this before, the cache date is different that the crawl date, but it should say so on this page - so Webmasters don't lose trust in that data.

I am seeing the same thing here. "Home page crawl: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Nov 18, 2006." Yet my logs show that the googlebot has been downloading my home page several times in the last days.

This causes some Webmasters to lose trust in these tools.

Especially some of the reports that show Webmasters that there are no pages of their site in the index, when in fact they are and they are ranking just fine. Yes, that is an other bug people have noticed, but I did not report.

I personally give new software a lot of time to mature and get the kinks out. But how much time is too much time?

I haven't trusted Webmaster Tools to reflect accurate information for some time. There are ongoing issues with site verification, where previously verified sites suddenly need to be verified again, then when verification is attempted, it won't work.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Pretty much every webmaster runs into this once a year. Someone publishes something on the Web and they did not mean to put it up on the Web. Google crawls it and someone finds this information while searching on Google. The content is now easily accessible to the world. So you take down the page, but it is still in the Google cache and you need it removed asap.

Vanessa Fox in a Google Groups thread tells a user that they can expedite the removal of content in Google by using this form.

That form specifically states:

If you've worked with the site's webmaster to have the live content changed, and you need us to expedite the removal of our cached copy, please provide us with the URL(s). We'll follow up with you only if we require more info or we have additional info to share.

I never gave it a try myself, but I would love to hear the response time on that form.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how can an advertiser get his Google video ad to show up in the content network (AdSense). AdWordsAdvisor2 responds to the thread that video ads are CPM based so you have to ensure your CPM bid is high enough to warrant the ad to show up.

The CPM for video ads is based on how many times it appears on the network, not how many times it is actually played. Video ads are definitely live, so you may just need to adjust your CPM to be closer to what you'd expect to pay for an image ad on the same content sites.

It is clear that if someone plays the video, it does not cost more. But what is not clear is does it cost more if they click? I assume so.

My question in the thread is "if your a publisher, you get paid by impression and also by click? Not anything extra if they play it?"

I'll keep you updated on any response.

Update: That was quick, AdWordAdvisor2 responded shortly after saying:

If the ad being displayed is a CPM ad, then the publisher gets paid based on the CPM the advertiser is paying. The publisher won't get any additional revenue if the ad is clicked on as we don't charge the advertiser anything for those clicks.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Member PPC started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums describing what can be a serious design flaw within Yahoo!'s new search marketing application, Panama. When you edit keywords in bulk by going to clicking on the ad group and then checking off the keywords you want to edit the keyword bids for, you are presented with substantially less data on those keywords than if you were at other pages. PPC says, the data on these screens makes it "very inefficient" for him to manage multiple keywords at once.

For example, on the primary keyword screen you see Avg. CPC (USD), Avg. Position, Impressions, CTR (%), Clicks Cost (USD), Conversions, Revenue (USD), CPA (USD), and ROAS (%) for that keyword phrase. Plus you get more data, here is a screen capture:

Now, if you select to edit multiple keywords, you are only presented with Current Bid (USD), New Bid (USD), and Prime Placement Range of Bids. You can also click on a link for "Bid Range for Top Positions" that opens up an AJAX box with more information. It looks like this:

I suspect it can't be too hard to add some columns of data to the edit keywords screen?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Brett Tabke posted a WebmasterWorld thread linking to a new survey by Convera that polled 1,112 professionals in various industries in November. The article is at The Enquirer by the AP and it reveals the following:

• Only 21 percent of professionals feel that their search query is always understood.
• Just one in 10 professionals always finds exactly what he or she is looking for on the first attempt.
• About 70 percent admit getting sidetracked during the search process and end up on sites they didn’t expect to visit and are not relevant to their work.
• When searches do not return precise information, more than half of professionals believe the information they’re seeking exists, but they do not have the skills to find it.
• One third of professionals will make decisions without all the facts they need after a series of search attempts fails to help them.

If they can't find the results, what do they do?

• 90 percent will try the same search engine using a slightly different term
  
• 60 percent will try another popular search engine
  
• More than half will turn to a topic-specific search engine
  

I was a bit surprised by this finding;

Nearly 90 percent of professionals think that search engines developed by trade publications or professional organizations would yield more relevant content than popular consumer engines.

Just realized that this was also posted at Search Engine Land a couple weeks ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Since so many SEM/SEO bloggers are doing it, I figured, I do it also. Here are some stats from the 2006 year for the seroundtable.com domain, not including the forums.

Top Requested Pages:
(1) Home Page - 14.73%
(2) Google Earth - Free Download - 3.27% (um, yea)
(3) Google.com beats MSN.com according to Alexa - 1.62%
(4) A Serious Google Maps Bug - 1.35%
(5) Google AdWords Showing Same Two Ads On Search Results Pages at Google.com - 1.03%
(6) Google Testing AdSense Cost Per Action (CPA) - 0.86%
(7) Pages Coming In & Out of the Google.com Results & Google Index - 0.72%
(8) Google.com & The Da Vinci Code Quest - 0.67%
(9) New MSN Beta Live? - 0.67%
(10) Google Payments (GBuy) Coming Soon to Public? - 0.60%

Top Referrals:
(1) Google - 25.27%
(2) Direct - 22.01%
(3) Yahoo Search - 9.56%
(4) Google UK - 3.26%
(5) Google News - 2.20%
(6) MSN Search - 1.91%
(7) Search Engine Watch Blog - 1.75%
(8) Google Canada - 1.60%
(9) Bloglines - 1.39%
(10) StumbleUpon - 1.17%

Top Time Zones:
(1) -0400 - 19.25%
(2) -0500 - 18.63%
(3) -0700 - 14.27%
(4) +0100 - 10.46%
(5) +0200 - 9.22%
(6) -0600 - 5.92%
(7) -0800 - 5.80%
(8)+0000 - 2.86%
(9)+0530 - 2.70%
(10) +0800 - 2.48%

Top Screen Resolutions:
(1) 1024x768 - 45.09%
(2) 1280x1024 - 20.61%
(3) 800x600 - 9.53%
(4) 1280x800 - 5.72%
(5) 1152x864 - 3.85%
(6) 1400x1050 - 2.38%
(7) 1440x900 - 2.29%
(8) 1680x1050 - 2.20%
(9) 1600x1200 - 1.99%
(10) 1920x1200 - 1.51%

Feedburner Stats:
5,491 subscribers (combined my two feeds)

Top RSS Readers (via Feedburner based on short feed)
(1) Bloglines
(2) Firefox Live Bookmarks
(3) Netvibes
(4) Rojo
(5) NewsGator Online
(6) FeedReader
(7) Google Desktop
(8) Windows RSS Platform
(9) Safari RSS (OS X Tiger)
(10) Thunderbird

Email Subscriptions:
699 Active Readers powered by FeedBlitz

Visits:
I will just say I average consistently well-over 150,000 visits per month.

Articles Count Summary:
Total in 2006 (to date): 1,777
Average per Work Day: ~7 (depending on how you count work days)

For some of our highlighted events and articles over the past year, read our We Are Three: Search Engine Roundtable's 3rd Birthday post.

Let me start off by saying, I am having a really hard time finding juicy threads this week and this morning, I am digging really deep, but still can't find good ones. It must be the holiday season...

Two posts, with no one backing them up, are reporting shifts in Yahoo! search results.

The first is an update to a WebmasterWorld thread, a post yesterday, post number 3201071. He says:

Beginning today, my referrals have soared... up about 8X... looks great for me!

The second post is from SEO Refugee from the day before, saying;

Something Happened At Y Yesterday for me it would seem because Y is suddenly very fond of one of my sites that it was previously ignoring up until yesterday... or maybe this is some sort of isolated flukey ... anyone else seeing some super-tremendous Y movements?

Honestly, I doubt this is a major update. Just some changes to some individual sites, IMO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & SEO Refugee.

I'll keep looking for threads, but if I can't find, it will be a slow day...

A WebmasterWorld thread asks "How does Google determine which pages to crawl?" Google didn't always crawl and index pages as they do now. With the Big Daddy update Google adapted their crawl priorities, which was around April 2006.

Google now bases the crawl priorities based on several factors, one of those factors includes PageRank. As far as I understand it, pages with higher PageRank will be crawled and indexed quicker than pages with lower PageRank, as a general rule.

That is one of the reasons people recommend placing links to your most important pages on your highest PageRank pages (i.e. homepage). One it will increase the PageRank of those pages and it will also give the bot easier access (higher level access) to the page.

Back in the older days, it was easier to get Google to index and rank all your pages on your huge dynamic site, if the pages were search engine friendly. Now even indexing requires page popularity and trust factors. Don't even get the SEO community started about being indexed but being in the supplemental index. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are two recent threads that I found at forums I typically do not cover much on the topic of pay per post reviews. The posts are at HighRankings Forums and at SEO Refugee Forums. I am going to pull in all sources I know of, to give you the perspective of the search engines, advertiser, SEO and the blog writer.

Search Engines View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
Earlier this month, I reported at Search Engine Land on Pay Per Post Reviews Acceptable By Some Search Engines where I quote SEOMoz's coverage of a SES Chicago session.

Specifically, Tim Converse from Yahoo starts off saying that "there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material." The rest of the search engines, including Google, represented by Adam Lasnik nodded their heads, according to Rand. Now, this was not just shocking to Rand, I was shocked by the response after Rand told me this on Thursday.

Yes, shocking... would Matt Cutts of Google say something like that. No! And I quote his comment at SEOMoz and at Search Engine Land:

Just to chime in and expand on Adam's comment: Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.

The specific guideline for doing paid reviews or paid links is to make sure that your links don't affect search engines. You can do that via a nofollow attribute on your links, or an internal redirect which goes through a page which is robot.txt'ed out, or several other methods.

So in short, Google doesn't like this model but the other search engines haven't commented much on it. Perhaps because it is not a huge issue right now, in terms of hurting the current state of search relevancy algorithms. They know it can be an issue but currently they cannot do much about links within the main copy of the site, without removing or devaluing trust side-wide, which may be extreme in some cases.

Advertisers View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
Bottom line, they want their message, product, or service in the public eye. Be it on a blog, forum, radio, TV, or billboard - they want people to know about what they have. Blogs tend to do a good job spreading this stuff. So a little money to encourage some bloggers to review your product/service can't hurt the advertiser. Unless, they give a poor review for the product or service.

SEOs View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
An SEO wants the link, it is a link building strategy, and its one of the best types of links. They do not care if the review is positive or negative, they are perfectly happy with the link. In reality, the more extreme the review (positive or negative) the better off they are. More eyes catch it, more bloggers pick it up and you get free viral links out of it. Adding a nofollow attribute to those links, will make the links worthless.

Bloggers View of Pay Per Post Reviews:
Well, a blogger, by nature, writes about items they buy, try out or consider buying. DazzlinDonna puts it well from the blogger's point of view...

Over the years, I've had a ton of people email me and ask me to review some seo tool or something, and most of the time, I would (for free). It gave me something to blog about for one thing, without me having to rack my brain, and it also was of interest to the readers. So I figure I've earned the right to get paid every now and then for a review, and I'll continue to also do free reviews when I want. Either way, I'll state my opinion of the product, good or bad, and money doesn't play into it. I don't mind disclosing the payment, although I have to also agree that it's kinda weird considering all of the celebrity endorsements that have inundated us for decades (as Robert Paulson brought up). But Dave's point is well made. I think (hope) that over the years, my straightforwardness has come through on my blog, and I assume people will know that I'm telling it like it is - paid or not. But I imagine there's probably a million or so bloggers out there who may not have that same level of trust because they just don't care one way or another. So, I can see how it could be useful. If I stumbled upon a blog from someone I didn't have any kind of trust relationship with, I might want to be reassured that the review I'm reading is an honest opinion - paid or not. Of course, who's to say whether I could believe that or not. I dunno. I think the big bru-ha-hah is a little silly, but whatever....

In short, I tend to do a lot of reviews of products I am personally interested in at my personal blog. I also review products I have bought in the past, and I write the good and the bad. I rarely ever nofollow a link, unless I am trying to make a point. A blogger's job sometimes goes unappreciated and for granted. Pay Per Post and ReviewME offers models where, at least, they can review products and services they find interesting and give a fair assessment of those products, while being appreciated ($$$) for it.

In Summary:
That is a tough one... Let's look back... E-mail is a great thing, but spammers got to it and make it tough to use sometimes. The Web is a great thing, but spammers got to it (spyware, adware) and make it tough to use sometimes. Search engines are a great thing, but spammers got to it... Blogs are a great thing, but comment spammers got to it, making it tough... Paid blogger reviews are a great thing, but they can and will be used by people with bad intentions. As a blogger, I believe you can judge for yourself if a review is for a link or for a review. It is up to you if you are willing to risk a site-wide trust devaluation by Google or other engines. You are the only one who can judge, but don't let Google scare you - do what you know is right.

FYI - this was not a paid review of anything.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums & SEO Refugee Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread links to a story named Microsoft adCenter can't bill correctly. It goes through how the individual used a $100 promo, ran up a bill of $111 or so and was billed the whole $111 instead of just the $11 (i.e. $100 minus the $100 promo).

December 21st - Spoke to a customer service rep (CSR) who thought that I had to pay the full $111.85, and then I'd get another account credit of $100. He really wasn't sure, however, so after arguing with him on how to read an invoice, I was finally transferred to a supervisor. The supervisor told me the same exact thing that the first CSR told me about paying the full $111.85 and not $11.85.

If you want a laugh, go read that post, kinda incredible.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, I reported that the Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filter Not Working. That meant, if you had a list of ads you wanted to block, i.e. MFAs, competitors, etc. those ads were running, even though you blocked them.

Matt Cutts commented telling us he notified an AdSense representative.

It appears that AdSense has fixed the issues, one WebmasterWorld member received an email response back from AdSense saying;

I just received a reply to the email I sent to AdSense Support last night. They said they've resolved the filtering issue but to allow up to 24 hours for it to take effect and if I'm still seeing filtered sites after 24 hours, to let them know.

So hopefully soon, you should no longer see those ads you don't want, running on your sites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

On December 21st, Ben reported a Google Data Refresh - Rankings Fluctuations Before Christmas via a WebmasterWorld thread. Now, I have been tracking that original thread, along with two additional WebmasterWorld threads named part 2 and Is there any point in adding new content?

So what have I got from this? Honestly, not much. One person wants this update to be coined "The Google Xmas Debacle." Sounds cool to me, but too many people are reporting not seeing anything. On the other hand, many people that I know and trust are reporting serious changes.

But what patterns or commonalities do we find with those changes? Again, not much. Some things I pulled out of the thread include:

• Affecting AdSense sites
• Affecting new pages
• Supplemental results increase dramatically
• Less results found in the site operator
• Suggestions of a bad data push

But these are all individual cases. Most of the posts say, I lost 50% of my traffic. Some say, my competitor dropped off from the number one spot and is no where to be found. Some say, everything looks fine and dandy.

So something is going on, but without evidence and actual results to look at, it is hard to reproduce. But I do believe something has happened - to what extent, I honestly do not know. What can be done to reverse it? Again, I do not know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kim Krause started a thread at Cre8asite Forums detailing that Cre8asite Forums has collected $1,600 to give to various SEO/SEM organizations. The money came from when they began adding ads to the site, almost a year ago. So how do they decide which organizations should get the money? Since it is a community, they have started a poll to allow the community to have a say in that decision.

You can vote here for the various organization including; SEMPO, Search Engine College Certification , Bruce Clay's SEO ToolSet, Fresh Egg Internship, Web Design Training Program, Human Factors Intl, SEOPros or enter in one not on the list in the other field.

Select up to four, since each of the top four will get $400 each. Also, the poll closes January 15, 2007.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Don't think we don't notice, Adam Lasnik and Vanessa Fox at Google spent a portion of their Christmas Day working.

Vanessa posted six posts at Google Groups, here they are:

• Can Matt Cutts be this arrogant??? Touch one to respond to...
• Removing dead link from Google
• Supplemental Results - What does it mean?
• Still have Penalty - Help Required
• Supplemental Results - What does it mean?
• Penalty on our Danish shop sites? Vanessa?

Adam Lasnik posted two threads on Sunday and one post Monday, they were:

• Excluded after today's discussion in here which was a bit of a parental post, followed by a response to someone about it
• Excluded after today's discussion in here being a mod is not always fun...
• Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google see post # 3199741 for his response

Thanks Adam and Vanessa!

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that URLs added to the Competitive Ad Filter in Google AdSense, are not blocking those URLs.

There are five posts at the thread all this morning reporting the same thing.

I can't believe the timing of your post. I just emailed AdSense Support because this is happening to me as well. One of the domains that is now appearing in AdSense ads on my site has been in my competitive ad filter for over 3 years. And there are others as well. I hope that everyone experiencing this will email adsense-support@google.com.

More details on the competitive ad filter at this page.

This is not good, if true. I did not test it myself.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread admits to possibly making a bidding mistake. For example, this user wanted to bid $0.01 instead of $1.00, but either the individual entered in $1.00 or it was a computer glitch. The same thing happened in an older thread at WebmasterWorld where someone wanted to bid $0.21 but accidently placed a bid of $21.00.

Now, in the later thread the advertiser was refunded the money. Why? Well, no one knows for sure.

AdWordsRep responded to the thread in post number 3174050 saying;

I have seen no details of this particular situation at all, so can't say for sure - but based on four years in AdWords support this sounds to me like a one-time 'courtesy credit' made, on occasion, when an advertiser has made a costly error. Hopefully, surf4soul will correct me if I am mistaken.

Since that November 30th post, no correction has been made, so I will assume it was a one-time courtesy credit.

But what can Google do to help advertisers not make this mistake in the future?

Why not make the two input boxes one for dollars and one for cents. IMHO a lot of advertisers use bids in decimals and this would avoid mistakes with the "." or ",".

It is now officially in the Google AdWords suggestion box and hopefully will be an option for some. But yet others may not like to have to enter in the price into two different boxes, who knows.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have talked about the topic of dynamic keyword insertion plenty of times here. Basically, if you bid on hundreds of keywords, creating an ad that contained each keyword phrase you are bidding on, can take a long time. That is where dynamic keyword insertion comes into play. You tell the ad network to replace a parameter in your ad, normally [keyword], with the user's search query, if your ad comes up.

A recent thread at WebmasterWorld asks if the same works for adding dynamic keywords to the URL string. So for example, if I wanted my ad to read;

Buy Blue Widgets
The best blue widgets in the forests of Europe.
www.smurfs.com/blue-widgets/

It appears that adding dynamic keyword insertion techniques to the display URL of your ads in Google has been around since about September 14, 2004. BakedJake posted a thread back then, based on nuclei's findings, and then it appeared to only be limited test.

The question in the new thread is, does the display URL actually have to work?

Honestly, I do not think so, I think as long as the destination URL works, it is fine, but I can be wrong. It is obviously important to make sure your display URLs work and with a little mod_rewrite and fancy database coding, you can easily make those URLs work. But if not, will Google allow it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Early this month we reported that Google Testing Showing AdWords Quality Score Data to Advertisers, well, I finally found a screen shot. A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a member posting a screen shot of the quality score being shown to him in the AdWords reports. It looks like this.

The question mark leads to the Google AdWords help page;

Quality Score Column

The Quality Score column displays your keyword's Quality Score to help you monitor your keyword relevance. This is a customizable column that is disabled by default for new accounts. It can be enabled at any time.

Each keyword will be labelled with one of three possible Quality Score states: Great, OK, or Poor. Your ads may be performing effectively and with lower costs if your keywords have Great or OK Quality Scores. However, keywords with a Poor Quality Score may need to be replaced with more specific keyword choices. If you don't want to replace poor quality keywords, you can try optimizing their associated ad text and landing pages.

To learn more about optimizing your ads, keywords, and landing pages, visit our Tips for Success page.

So you have three statuses, Great, OK and Poor. I guess that shows you something to work on, better than nothing.

This is still a limited user test, so all of us do not have this data.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Wow, tons of buzz over the weekend over a new search engine started by Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia. The new engine is to be named wikiasari. The story was broken on The Times in the UK, where it describes how the engine will leverage the community.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Techcrunch has claimed to post an exclusive screen capture, which was rejected;

The TechCrunch story is also wrong. This project has nothing to do with the screenshot they are running, and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Also, this is not an Amazon powered engine, but Amazon is funding part of a large part of the project.

We currently have a lot of discussion in the forums on this topic. The Google killer? :)

Brett Tabke came in Christmas eve to comment:

Lets try some math:

If you have 1000 people making editorial decisions at the rate of 3-4 pages a minute for 400 minutes a day = 1600 pages per person per day - or about 1.5 million pages per day. If you have 5000 people doing that - you have about 7.5million pages per day, or about 150million pages per month.

Strangely enough, I have heard the figure 150 million pages used in reference to the bulk of the long tail in the top two search engines. Meaning that the top 150million pages on the web comprise 95-98% of the search engine listings popping up in search engines on any given day.

That said, I would rather have machine based results. Humans are easy to manipulate (Ever hear of Dmoz? lol).

Also, Li Evans does a good job summarizing things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

An Adam Lasnik post in Google Groups sprung a post at Cre8asite Forums explaining that if you have bad HTML, Google will be OK with it.

Yes, that is the case, your code does not need to be 100% validated or 100% proper syntax. Pretty much, if the code renders on the browser, Google will be able to crawl the page to some extent.

Bill Slawski wrote;

Here's a blog post I wrote a while back about how Google might handle navigation when trying to take large pages and put them on small screens:

Google Indentifies Navigation Bars for Small Screens, Snippets, and Indexing

Here's a snippet:

QUOTE
The primary focus of this patent is on identifying navigation bars on a page that can safely be re-written or changed in some manner for display on a smaller screen. An integral part of the process involves actually identifying navigation bars. It’s probably important that the patent mentions (briefly) that this identification can be helpful in indexing a page and deciding upon which text to use to provide snippets to searchers, which goes beyond the reauthoring process.

Considering the ways in which search engines may want to manipulate the content of a site, and possibly even rewrite parts of it, I want as much control over the code as possible.

So yes, search engine spiders are forgiving of bad code. But, how much control do you want to turn over to them in their ranking and presentation of your site to others?

So when Adam says; "I'm betting that in the vast majority of cases in which folks have indexing or ranking concerns, the core issue is NOT that their site doesn't perfectly validate," I would nod my head and move on.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and Google Groups.

The holiday season is here and most of the search engines are already sporting holiday season logos. Tonight is the last night of Chanukah, so we took down our logo for Chanukah and put up the Christmas logo. Here it is:

Google is changing their logo daily, this is the second logo, but make sure to track them here.

Yahoo! has a very cute one, that is flash, they skate around the logo, I took a static image of one frame.

Dogpile is sporting a shopping search engine theme.

Ask.com doesn't have anything yet, but I am sure they will (I'll update the post when it is added). Update: Ask.com does the background change...

Cre8asite Forums sports a holiday logo:

I wanted to wish you all a happy and healthy holidays!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread suggests that Google should not only show the URL, the type of error and the date of the error in the web crawl error report within Google Sitemaps. It should also referrer data, so that the webmaster can better diagnose the issue. That will tell the webmaster the source of the error and be able to better resolve the issue.

Adam Lasnik who is currently on a roll, answering questions this morning, wrote;

we've indeed heard this request before, and so it's definitely on the Webmaster Tools folks' radar!

Good to hear, I wonder how soon it will come?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

On November 20th, Yahoo! announced they will be a bit more transparent by providing something they call Compliance Manager. What does it do? It tells you if there are problem areas on your site, stuff you have done on purpose or by accident that warrants your ads to be taken down. Compliance manager gives publishers a way to take corrective action, something not done before in the contextual ad game.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread notes that people are now seeing it work. People with problem areas are being notified via the compliance manager of problems on their pages or sites. Some said that it was presented to them, but was a bug and was soon fixed. Some said that it was helpful in correcting the issue. So what does it look like? Well, there is one screen capture at the thread but Yahoo sent me samples in the past.

The portal homepage will show you this message, if you have compliance issues:

You can then click on a link in the message to see the compliance manager report that looks like this:

I think this is great, the transparency supersedes all other programs to date.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As Danny wrote Google Pushing New Blogger In Search Results searching on anything with the term "blog" in it our part of it (i.e. blogging, blogs X, etc) will bring up this special one box result promoting Google's Blogger application.

There was recently a lot of stink over Google using AdWords to promote their own products. Danny said that he has "no problem with the tip." Danny adds that he "wants Google to do promos like this outside of the ad units, so advertisers aren't to lose a spot to Google itself."

Let's take a look:

Now, that is some pretty real estate that is not for sale. Why is a search on prenatal care bloggers or barry schwartz blogging related to Blogger or even at all relevant?

I think Google should use AdWords, like they said they do and pay like the rest of the world. I believe Yahoo! has totally separate divisions that market their products and they keep them totally off limits to the search side of things. I know, Google is a search company, Yahoo is a media company, so it makes it hard. But it is possible.

I much rather they play in the fair ground then insert a one box result, which has much higher visibility then the ads (I would assume).

We have a thread on this at Search Engine Roundtable Forums since December 20th and member PPCblogger makes a very valid point:

I just find it amusing after Matt Cutts recent comments about hard coding products into search results after the whole should Google advertise on Google argument - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-debunking-duty/.

"I agree that buying ads where other people can outbid you is much better than hard-coding the search results page to favor someone. That’s what Yahoo does with searches like [online advertising]."

Thats pretty much what Google are doing with their 'tip'.

Of course, as Phillip noted, they do the same thing for calendar or barry's calendar.

It just seems wrong to me.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports that Microsoft adCenter is inflating the conversion metrics by 30 to 40 percent.

Member, PPC, says:

For those that track conversions at MSN, does anyone else see inflated numbers? MSN consistently reports 40-50% more conversions than we are actually getting from MSN. I don't see how this is possible since the conversion code is only on our confirmation page and that page only displays for successful orders. Yet every day, MSN reports tell me that I have sold more units through this outlet than I actually have. Sometimes, one term will show 8 sales when in fact only only one unit of that specific product has been sold and there actually was only 1 click on that term!

Another member came in to confirm the same bug.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google tweaking rankings once again before the holidays? Some people are crying foul at the disruptions going on this holiday season. How could they!? Members on Webmasterworld are talking about some recent changes over yesterday and today that have occured recently to change search rankings. Some are wondering if it has to do with a penalty or just some general reshuffling going on? I had a new client call me a few minutes ago that overnight lost its rankings for a relatively uncompetitive term and wanted to know why all the sites changed in the top 10. Call it an early christmas present from Google maybe?

A senior member on WMW said "Looks like some kind of data refresh to me. I'm seeing lots of movement in what's normally a quiet sector." Whether he is right or not, I am not sure, but I don't think it has to do with any penalties and is more the normal flux we usually see. People are just a bit hyped and sensitive right about now to what is happening with their traffic. Any disruptions seem to be cause for panic. I would recommend those webmasters effected to have a nice frothy egg nog and wait it out.

Continued discussion on Webmaster World - 20 Dec 2006 - Data Refresh or Penalty?

Much of what I cover and write about every day is inspired and tailored to you guys. The design, the emails, the RSS feeds, the categories and tagging are all done to help improve the accessibility of the content and our buzz coverage.

I figured the new year is almost here, so it is a good time to open things up to suggestions from the readers again.

Please feel free to comment below or email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com to make suggestions, comments, and bug reports for the Search Engine Roundtable.

We will listen to all your submitted feedback, because you make this site what it is.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses Yahoo!'s gift for the 2006 holiday season. Yahoo! sent all publishers and advertisers a email holiday card, which you can see at http://brand.yahoo.com/snow/. Yahoo! sent some advertisers a Yahoo! sweatshirt and USB drink cooler. It looks like:

Yahoo! also sent some bigger advertisers a "fancy corkscrew kit from Leeds."

I have more details on Yahoo!'s gift to me at my personal blog, Cartoon Barry.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread notes that Google has changed their AdSense feedback form. In the past, clicking on an ad's "Ads by Goooogle" link would take you to a special page. Now it takes you to product promotional page that looks like this.

You can then scroll down and click on the blue link that reads "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw." That will open up a DHTML form, where you can give feedback on the ad or report violations.

Here is a screen capture if you don't see it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if one's ad position affects the CTR value in the quality score. In short, you do not have to worry to much, Google thought of this.

AdWordsAdvisor said:

CTR is normalized for position when we are calculating your quality score.

Exactly how is it normalized? Well, we are not too sure, but it is.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

I love the advice admin, tedster gives one member in a WebmasterWorld thread. The member describes that he has several pages, all with the same content, but sorted differently.

For example, he has a page on pineapple chairs (love going back to my Big Blue Pineapple Chair example). You can view the main pineapple chair landing page, you can then sort the page by price either highest to low or lowest to high, you can also sort by popularity, sizes and colors. So you have several pages, the same content, just displayed differently.

Check out tedster's response:

For a site that is just now instituting sort pages, I agree that restricting which urls get indexed can be wise, especially if the site doesn't have really strong PR. However, your site already has the sort pages in place, correct? I've seen lots of people try to 'fix' something because of something they read, and they end up hurting their business.

So I was wondering if you see some signs that your sort pages are in some way problematic. In other words, Google may already be handing your urls quite nicely for you. If so, you might cause a problem when you're just trying to make something better.

On the other hand, if there are symptoms of trouble -- then yes, I agree that a simple title change is probably not enough to fix things and you will want to exclude the sort pages from being indexed to see if that helps.

Often people have a set up that would be considered duplicate content. But often the search engines handle those pages fine. Obviously, if your pages are suffering due to duplicate content, you should fix the issue. How? Duplicate content tips here, which was a great thread and conversation on itself.

Don't fix what ain't broken, or what others (search engines) don't perceive to be broken.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld reports that Microsoft's adCenter PPC product has a very delayed reporting engine, for about two days now. The official adCenter representative, adCenterEU, explains;

I've recieved an alert over night (GMT) that reporting is behind SLA by around a day or so.

The adCenter team is working on a fix and we will update you as soon as we have any news.

Cheers

adCenterEU

So only "around a day or so" of delayed reporting. Is that acceptable?

I am still not showing any data at all for yesterday. Would like to see how much I spent yesterday. :)

I guess not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread spotlights the official way to perform dynamic keyword insertion in Yahoo!'s new search marketing product, code named Panama.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is the ability to tell the PPC engine to match pieces of the ad copy to the user's search query. So if you conduct a search for "ipod" and you are bidding for "ipod" but do not want to create an ad for each product you sell. You can tell Yahoo! to match on the search "ipod" and stick it in your ad title or ad description. How does this work? Well, YahooSarah explains;

1. Click the Campaigns tab > Summary subtab. The Campaigns page opens.

2. Identify a campaign and click its link. The Campaign Details page opens.

3. Identify an ad group and click its link. The Ad Group Details page opens.

4.Click the Create New Ad link. The Create Your Ad page opens.

5. Decide whether to insert the keyword into the title or the description of the ad.

6. Enter the title and description of your ad. At the point in your title or description where you would like to insert the keyword, click the Insert Keyword link below the text field. {KEYWORD: DEFAULT_TEXT} will be inserted into your title or description, and you may then replace DEFAULT_TEXT with the keyword of your choice.

7. Enter the URL and ad name for the ad.

8. Click Save Changes.

9. In the Ad Group Details page, find the related keywords in the keywords tab.

10. Click the keyword link. The Keyword Details page opens.

11. Click the edit link in the Alternate Text field at the top of the page. The Enter Alternate Text dialog box opens.

12. Enter the alternate text to display.

13. Click Submit.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums moderator EGOL created an excellent thread at Cre8asite Forums saying, he has seen on a relatively small sample, that sites with an equal number of inbound links but different number of pages on the site itself makes a different in rankings.

For example, Site A has 1,000 inbound links from external sources but also has only 25 pages. Site B has 1,000 inbound links from external sources (let's say the same exact sources) but also has over 10,000 pages. EGOL has seen that Site A would tend to rank better.

In the past, most people would brush this off by saying, link popularity is not on a site level, but rather a page level. So it doesn't matter how many pages you have, each individual web page on your web site will rank on their own merits.

Today, things change with trust, site wide popularity and hundreds of other factors.

Can I dismiss EGOL's findings? No. Can I vouch for them? No.

It does make for an interesting online debate.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Search Engine Journal is running the 2006 awards today. You can vote for Search Blogs 2006 today. In 2005, we won the Best Search Engine Community Blog of 2005, it seems that category has been put aside.

But you can still vote for us in multiple categories, including:

• SEO Blog of the Year
• Search News Blog
• Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
• Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006 (vote for individual people here)

There are so many excellent blogs out there this year, so the competition is very very tough. We were lucky enough to win the Best Blog on Search Marketing by MarketingSherpa for 2006 and also for 2005. Again, thank you so much for all your support with those awards. Your devoted readership keeps us going here, and winning these awards shows us that you really find value in our work.

To vote for us just click here but make sure to vote for all your favorite blogs. I did but I won't mention which ones. Tell your friends.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A slow but very interesting WebmasterWorld thread asks, "Is Googe Devaluing "Social Content" Links?" Tedster, WebmasterWorld Admin, said;

It's not a big secret. Webmasters looking for a ranking boost have been using "web 2.0" tactics for quick link building. Even folks with long-established sites began to dabble in this trendy area. It sounds pretty innocent, doesn't it? The question is being asked even by major corporate web teams. While this trend mushroomed, I've been wondering how long it might take for the Google algo to defend against this kind of link, which really is not the kind of "earned vote" that they most want to reward. So, has the time arrived?

This is all stemming from that Google Webmaster Central blog post named Building link-based popularity that also sprung this debate.

Now, Google tells us to "focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy." But it is my understanding, that the point behind these social sites are that they are the human vote. To get to the top page of Digg.com, please need to like your content, and if people don't then you won't get on the top page. Why do SEOs want to get to the front page of Digg? Well, not only does is send a lot of quick traffic, it also encourages Digg users and others to blog about your content. That means more links. More eye balls, more links.

So you have two obstacles here. Assuming that a link on Digg.com in the eyes of the search engines may be valued at a normal level. The SEOs first need to get their content on Digg.com, ranking well. The second thing is they need to have people write and link to their content on their own sites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Just a factual post, based on a DigitalPoint Forums thread. How often does Google update the AdWords Quality Score value for your ads? The answer is addressed by GuyFromChicago, who links to a Google Help page.

The AdWords system visits and evaluates advertiser landing pages on a regular basis. Due to the evolving nature of the quality evaluation system, the frequency may change based on improvements to the system or the level of user traffic to AdWords ads and landing pages. We plan to visit pages at least once a month but may do so more often.

So at least once per month.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

With AdSense, Google does not allow you to encourage people to click on your contextual ads. But this rule does not apply with the referral products that AdSense allows you to market.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks this question and AdSenseAdvisor comes in to clarify;

I don't know if this is the page you already found, but you might want to check out the referrals tips at:

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43870

"Unlike with AdSense for content ads, we encourage you to endorse referral products by calling attention to the button or text link. If you believe in the quality of the product that you're referring, feel free to let your users know! Of course, in line with our policies, you may not click your own ads nor encourage conversions for deceitful reasons."

Hope that helps!
-ASA

Some may forget this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the past few weeks there has been some discussion in the forums about how the Open Directory Project has not been working at all. Yesterday there was an update posted on the ODP home page saying;

Notice: Editing is Back!! Login now for more information - Dec. 18, 2006

So it seems like soon, who knows when exactly, you will be able to continue submitted sites for inclusion into the ODP directory.

The add form, but when you got to submit a site to a category, it takes you to http://www.dmoz.org/unavailable.html.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Last night I reported at Search Engine Land that Ask.com Tests New Search Interface With Ask X. This is what I wrote:

The Read Write Web blog first spotted Ask.com testing a new interface they named Ask X. The new interface sports a steel background for the home page with more goodies inside. A search on Ask X for barry schwartz shows a three column pane interface. On the left hand side is the search box, where you can type and as you type you see search suggestions appear below the search box [Note From Danny: Pity this doesn't happen on the home page as well]. In the middle column is a smart answer, followed by two paid listings and then the organic results, with Ask.com's binoculars. You can also save to "my stuff" each result, if you mouse over them, notice the notepad with a plus sign. On the right pane you see image results, latest RSS results from blogs and the wikipedia entry of Barry Schwartz (not me, the other one). Gary Price himself has a bunch more details about the new release, so check it out here. You can also see more information at Ask.com and access Ask X at http://www.askx.com/.

In any event, I started a thread soon after at Cre8asite Forums to get more user feedback.

I noticed that many users outside of the US cannot see it without making sure to change their default preferences to US. Cre8asite Forum moderator, Ruud said:

Oh, that is quite pleasant! Place names and countries get some info extract, current time & weather, images, maps. Celebrities have a short bio, images. Many entries have an extract from Wikipedia. A non-specific search ("top stuff") returns just results. The interface is smart enough not to add images etc. Some searches ("Matt Cutts", "Barry Schwartz") have a Posts section in the sidebar. They do a much better job at presenting a lot of information, including sponsored stuff, than Yahoo does. Really nice... added to my bookmarks toolbar...

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

The eleventh edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. We were able to discuss in detail about half of the topics I wanted. This week, we had on Eric Ward to discuss one of the most discussed topics of the week, a Google blog post on link building. We also talked about duplicate content, CSS to hide content, AdSense no longer allowing images near ads, the Yahoo Directory Tag, Panama information and much more. Also, Chris Boggs had a nice rendition of the "Hello Panama Song," see lyrics below. 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 Discusses Link Building Strategies (Eric Ward)
   
2. Google Defines Duplicate Content & Answers Duplicate FAQs
   
3. Using CSS To Hide Text: Search Engine Responses
   
4. Google Officially Disallows Images Near AdSense Ads
   
5. Yahoo! To Support No Yahoo Directory Title Tag in January
   
6. Here Comes Panama; Ready Or Not; January 10, 2007 (Chris Sings [MP3 download - 332KB])
   
7. Panama Opens To New Advertisers Before Old Advertisers
   
8. Google Discontinues The Free Google Search API Key - Is It Gone Forever?
   
9. Keyword Phrases SEOs Should Think Twice About Before Attempting To Conquer
   
10. Google Patent Search
    
11. What Happened To Yahoo!'s Web Rank?
    

Continue reading "Search Pulse 13: Google Link Building, Duplicate Content, CSS Tricks, Images Near AdSense, Yahoo! Directory Tag, Here Comes Panama, & More"

Over the past few years more and more website owners are coming to the realization that the "if you build it they will come" ideal does not fit with websites. Simply registering a domain and putting up content is not enough to draw consistent traffic to a website, unless of course there is a major marketing initiative in place that draws visits. Sites need search engine rankings in order to drive people interested in their product, services, or information, for the most part. Of course there are exceptions, such as educational websites that get lots of links from popular related sites. But when it comes to trying to drive traffic, search engine optimization is becoming almost a required element of site design.

A recent thread at WebmasterWorld Forums advocates that SEO should be considered when doing a site design or redesign. The original poster, Senior Member "reseller" titled his thread "Watch Out For Those Web Designers & Programmers." he listed a few things that should automatically be considered when building a site and wonders

why site owners don't "incorporate" SEO Specialists from the beginning as part of the site building / site migration team to be sure that their sites would be "search engine friendly" too?

Some excellent responses follow, and the thread turns into a valuable evangelistic conversation about the merits of SEO. One of the highlights is an interesting analogy by "webdude" who compares web designers and web developers to "right-brained" and "left-brained" individuals. He reasons that the best sites will be designed by teams of people that consist of both of these types of individuals.

See the thread and add your thoughts at Webmasterworld Forums.

Just a reminder, Barry, Ben, and I will be live on the Search Pulse tonight at 5pm (EST).

This evening, we will have a special guest on during the first topic we discuss...Eric Ward! He is a well respected link expert that is known in some circles as the "Grandfather of Linking" or "Link Moses." Eric will be sharing his perspective on the recent Discussions about Google cracking down on links, as covered by Barry here.

How do you tune in live and communicate with us 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 make it tonight...the podcast will be archived, usually within a day: Search Pulse Podcasts.

Thanks for listening, and bring your questions to the chat room! You may even gain immortality by being mentioned on the show.

Yesterday, I was conducting a search on michael jordan for this post and I spotted related searches at the bottom of the Google results. It looked like this:

I thought it was new, but waited on it. I then saw a post at WebmasterWorld this morning by senior member, crobb305, who believes it is new as well. If it is not new, it is for sure showing up for more and more search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Typically, if you want to make sure your site is indexed in Google, you would use a site command (i.e. site:www.domain.com) to see if Google returns results for your site. You can also search on just the domain (i.e. www.domain.com), specific keywords for your site or sign up with Google Sitemaps and verify your site.

Via a DigitalPoint Forums thread, I spotted a new way (I know it is not new, but new to me) to see if your site is in the Google index.

Go to google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus and type in your domain.

It returns with details about your site, a way to encourage you to possibly sign up with Google Sitemaps (Webmaster Central) to get more details. Here is a screen capture of this site:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google AdSense blog wrote a much needed Ad and image placement: a policy clarification. There has always been confusion about Google's policy about placing images near ads, to increase ones click-through rate on those ads. Here is a quote:

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers.

The Google blog has more details with examples of what does not comply with the terms of service.

Over the years, there has been a lot of confusion about this. Google recently was caught show casing a site with images near ads. And we have covered ways to use images to increase your CTR, plus tools for wordpress to make that easier.

Most AdSense advertisers are a bit upset by this clarification.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums (also here & here) and WebmasterWorld.

It seems like we can not get away from the topic of duplicate content. A recent post at the Google Webmaster Central blog named Deftly dealing with duplicate content by Adam Lasnik, gives more insight (possibly) to what is duplicate content in the eyes of Google. Yes, I know we just wrote about it; Duplicate Content: What Is It 12/2006 but that was based on hearsay.

FYI - I believe the first time we ever wrote about duplicate content, with the terms "duplicate content" was on May 6, 2004. Aspen, a guest author back then, wrote What is Duplicate Content based on a lot of discussion about it back then. Yes, the discussion continues, but we do have a clearer picture of what it is and what it is not, now.

In short, Adam gave some tips, most we should know already, on how to prevent some duplicate content issues, they include:

• Block appropriately
• Use 301s
• Be consistent with your URLs
• Use TLDs for language specific content
• Syndicate carefully
• Use the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools (easy, so why not)
• Minimize boilerplate repetition (sometimes hard to do)
• Avoid publishing stubs (empty pages)
• Understand your CMS (common sense)
• Use the DMCA form when needed

Some of these answers went into question in a WebmasterWorld.

The first was "Minimize boilerplate repetition" where they ask about navigational elements and quoting other sites. Adam responds that those areas are typically not a major issue, he says;

I wouldn't worry about a 40 word snippet of that sort, unless it's the primary content on many of your pages.

The next question was on using country specific TLDs. Should I or shouldn't I. Again, more practical advice from Adam.

If you already have German language content that's indexed / ranked decently in search engines, then I'd hesitate starting over, but otherwise yeah, I think putting German language content (or, more specifically, Germany-audience-targeted content) on a .de domain is a good idea.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In response to the discussion on Video Demonstrates PPC to PPC to PPC Pages Via Google AdWords & AdSense Network at WebmasterWorld the AdWords representatives noted that you can exclude your ad from coming up on the content networks and park domains. In reality, you can exclude your ads from showing on the content network, which I believe is the parent of the parked domain service.

For example, in the "Edit Campaign Settings" section of your campaigns, you can define which Google networks you want your ads to run on. Here is a picture of that.

You can have your ads run on Google.com only. You can have your ads run on Google's search network (explained here). And you can have your ads run on the content network (explained here). Which network does the park domain program fall under? It is not 100% clear to me from this documentation, but I believe it would be the content network.

Does this solve all of the advertisers issues? I doubt it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo!'s web 2.0 version of their PPC management software, aka Panama, is now going to be a mandatory switch for most advertisers by January 10, 2007. It was first released on October 17, 2005 to advertisers to try. Since then we have written about it a lot. New advertisers can now only sign up with the new panama system, as of last week. And now all (if not most) existing accounts with be migrated over by January 10, 2007.

Yahoo! has sent out a ton of literature on the new system. I received copies and originals of that information. It is organized very well and should have enough information for most advertisers. Yahoo! is looking for a smooth transition for both advertisers and on the tech side of things.

Update: Yahoo! called me to explain that although they do want to migrate everyone over by the end of Q1, these mandatory upgrade requirements are on a group by group basis. So for example, if you were invited to update on a specific date, you may have to upgrade the 10th. But if someone else was invited on a different date, they may have to upgrade on the 3rd. Etc...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A topic that is often revisited in Search-related forums is how to pick the right SEO company. This is a subject that would fit just as easily in other industries' forums, as business owners are constantly wrestling with how to best pick service-providing vendors. Since SEO is still a relatively new field in consulting, it is possible to find people that may seem to know as much about the subject as others, but in fact are lost in tactics that were successful years or even months ago and no longer carry much value.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums started with a member asking how to find a good SEO in the Denver area. Moderator Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) started off by suggesting local resources such as the Denver-area Craigslist. He also asked exactly what he was looking to accomplish, which is an important question to help determine of the need to outsource actually exists.

Li Evans (storyspinner) ads a good point, agreeing with Bill that looking local first may be the best method for finding someone you can work with face-to-face.

Have you contacted your local Chamber of Commerce? …Being from a small town upbringing I'm a big proponent of using local folks - sometimes the best people aren't the biggest or the priciest. A lot of time you can really find a "diamond in the rough"

If someone is worried about getting into SEO, it is best to try and schedule a face-to-face meeting in order to get a feel for the vendor that may prove priceless. Naturally, if your account is only going to generate a few hundred dollars a month, the likelihood of the vendor visiting from afar is much lower. The Digital Point thread goes on for quite a few posts and was rejuvenated in early December with some more interesting observations. Highly worth a read, and it includes some links to some other good resources and sites about the outsourcing SEO.

Over the past year, we have discussed the various headaches associated with the incorporation of the new Google Quality Score segment of the Paid Search ranking algorithm, up to the latest discussion covered early this month by Barry during SES. A couple of recent thread have continued this discussion.

In November, there was a short discussion at WebmasterWorld Forums about how long it takes for Google to recalculate the landing page score once a page is updated. There was no real definite answer given by anyone from Google, but the WMW members involved in the discussion gave ranges from "weeks to months." One good point was that

They'll never give out a timeframe because it they do and miss it, everyone will complain.

Another recent thread at Digital Point Forums had a member asking if the Quality Score was based on the website or the whole Google account. The resounding answer was that it was based on the keyword, and not the account, although one member states:

a little birdie (who heard it from a little google birdie) told me that quality score for search is determined at the keyword level and account level. The account level quality score is made up of overall keyword scores and spend.

Last week Moderator Frank Watson (aka AussieWebmaster) started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums which gave a link to the recently updated page in Google's AdWords Blog which gave a typical veiled guideline of what Google is looking for, and looks very similar to the Google Webmaster Guidelines page describing what factors help organic rankings.

So it's that simple: follow the rules of SEO when creating a PPC landing page, and all will be well.

Additional discussion at WMW, Digital Point, and SEW Forums.

Google appears to have secretly discontinued the free Google SOAP API Search key. The existing API keys still do work, but they are no longer giving out SOAP keys to anyone who applies. There hasn't been any mention about this at the Google API blog, they have however pushed some new products to possibly replace it. This key has been used for years as the gateway key used by developers, webmasters and SEO's to track Google rankings, accesss Google search data, and a huge host of services Google has offered in conjuction with this API. So why has it been discontinued? It seems to be a huge shame for any user that in the future wants to access Google's search services. But then again, Google might have something better planned in the future. The SOAP API key has been around for at least 6-7 years (don't quote me on that). So it's hard to speculate why exactly Google has discounted this service.

After pointing a client to Google, they alerted me over the weekend to the fact that you can no longer access the page that gives out new Google API keys. They appear to have taken down the page. Following up on Digitalpoint thread was confirmation that other webmasters were having the same trouble.

According to the Google page:

As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer actively supporting the SOAP Search API. We encourage you to use the AJAX Search API instead.

So what does Google want to give us now? They are referring all people to their AJAX Search API. After careful review of the product, I felt like I lost my SEO thunder or some bully kid had stolen my bunny if I was a kid. I assume the logic must be, if it's AJAX it must be cool. Kidding aside, the AJAX is a nice service that lets users place an AJAX search box on their site. Its useful, but the API key it provides doesn't do anything for any of the SEO tools out there that require a Google API key. I tested it on some Digitalpoint tools just for confirmation. Feel free to try it yourself. I think some SEO developers need to hop on developing some slick SEO AJAX tools to start filling the void.

If anyone has more information on this or details from Google, please post in the comments.

There is continued discussion on Digitalpoint - How to Get A Google API

Update: Keys are still being given out, but the page to confirm has been taken down by Google and they have stated they are no longer actively supporting the SOAP API. Visit here to get a new key.

Over the weekend there was a lot of news on Google and Orange working together to create a new mobile phone. An article named The future for Orange could soon be Google in your pocket has a nice amount of details on this possibility.

Executives from Orange flew to Silicon Valley in California for a meeting at Google's headquarters, or 'Googleplex', to hold preliminary discussions about a joint deal. The companies believe that they have an affinity as brands that are perceived as both 'positive' and 'innovative'.

Now, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt recently said publicly that cell phones should be free. So maybe, just maybe, they are pushing towards that.

Their plans centre on a branded Google phone, which would probably also carry Orange's logo... But it would have built-in Google software which would dramatically improve on the slow and cumbersome experience of surfing the web from a mobile handset.

Phone calls monetized by Google AdWords? I doubt that. But I see no reason why the web experience can't be monetized with Google AdWords...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld sparked this post from me. At SES Chicago '06, during a session named CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines the search engine representatives were asked about how they handle CSS.

It is currently easy to hide text using CSS, everyone knows it. But do people do it?

Back to the SES session, on this panel were search engine reps. Many of the search reps were new to conferences and were not necessarily prepared to get certain questions. It all started when a Yahoo representative told the crowd to open up your CSS so Yahoo can peak into it. Then Google said they will also be indexing JavaScript and AJAX and CSS, so don't use it to hack.

Now, if you know Yahoo! and specifically Google, they typically will never say that they will be doing anything in the future. They typically first do and then tell, but not tell and then do.

All the search engines, except for one, I believe (but I forgot if it was Ask.com or MSN) said that you should not block your CSS and JavaScript files from the search engines using your robots.txt, just in case they want to take a peak.

I am honestly still confused by that statement. Well, if we block it, will it raise a red flag? If it raises a red flag, will you manually peak? Are you going to algorithmically crawl those files and look for problems if we keep them accessible to you? If we format something a certain way, but it may appear like spam, but in reality it is not, will an automated ban come on the site?

Personally, I am not worried. But these types of responses, by the search engines, can fuel a lot of questions and unnecessary worries.

As pageoneresults says in the WebmasterWorld thread:

Google has a hard enough time now dealing with html/xhtml. Parsing CSS files and determining whether something is hidden or not is not a solution. Now the bot would need to determine why that CSS exists. There are many valid uses of display:none or display:hidden.

For those who may be hiding things through CSS or negatively positioning content off screen to manipulate page content, I surely wouldn't do that with any long term projects. ;)

The penalty for getting busted using this technique I would imagine is a permanent ban. No if's, and's, or but's, you're history. You'll need a pardon from the Governor to be reconsidered for inclusion. ;)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back on October 26th, we reported Yahoo! To Add No Yahoo Directory Tag. Since then, it has been very quiet on the Yahoo! front for this topic.

Finally, Tim Mayer of Yahoo! replied to the questions as to when it will happen.

He said in a WebmasterWorld thread, in post number 3189985:

We are planning to do this in the near future. It is in progress. I will check if this will go into the next update happening in January.

So, the last Yahoo! update was on December 11th, so hopefully early to mid-January we will see this new feature.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

A late Friday post at the Google Webmaster Central blog named Building link-based popularity sparked a ton of discussion over the weekend at WebmasterWorld.

The WebmasterWorld was named "It's Official: Google Discounting Reciprocal Link Exchanges" by martinibuster to spark some top notch discussion. Based on the last paragraph of the Google post, martinibuster writes;

Within a recent Google Blog post about bad linking practices, the author lumps reciprocal link exchange tactics alongside paid links. The author does not qualify the statement against recips by singling out non-relevant or aggressive exchanges. Neither does it make a distinction between relevant link exchange or free for all link exchange. The blog simply references the exchange of links.

After a few pages of debate, Adam Lasnik of Google came in to try to clear things up from the Google perspective. In post number 3191649 Adam said;

This is a lot of speculation about reciprocal linking in response to an official blog entry, when there's not even one mention of "reciprocal" on the entire page ;-). Take a step back, look at the bigger picture, take a deep breath!

Honestly, Adam, I think the words "exchanged links" is pretty much the same as "reciprocal linking." But that is here nor there.

Over time and with lots and lots of data (and very handy tools for crunching it :-), it becomes more clear to us at Google what is "natural" (or organic) on the Web and what is not. We aim to reward the former, discount the latter. Take that as a broader SEO strategy statement if you will... it's not just about links, and it's DEFINITELY not all about reciprocal linking.

As Adam says continuously, it is about the patterns Google sees in your site and niche around it. Google is a different beast, it used to be before Adam was hired.

But more recently, Google has tremendously refined its link-weighting algorithms. We have more people working on Google's link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find. So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

That is what makes it harder to play with the Google SERPs. Google can now trust-less a particular link, assign less "weight" towards a link.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses a video demonstration of someone going from a search in Google, clicking on an paid ad and then being taken to a Google AdSense page with just ads with similar ads for the same keyword. The video goes through similar examples of how advertisers are not complying with Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. Here is that video...

Now, this has been an issue for a long time. You click from a Google ad to a Google ad to a Google ad and so on.

At SES San Jose this year, we were in a car service to the Google Dance and my wife was with me and a bunch of SEMs. The SEMs were discussing this topic. I said, well, let's ask a normal searcher, aka, my wife, if she ever noticed clicking on an ad, to just be taken to an other ad. What did she respond? What is an ad?

So how serious is this issue? Well, it is serious for numerous reasons. I believe Google wants to do something about this but many SEMs disagree with me on this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Microsoft China To Display Baidu's Search Ads. Yes, Microsoft asked Baidu if they would run and manage the ads on their China properties. My reaction and the communities was something like, wait a second, shouldn't Microsoft be powering Baidu's PPC ads? But no. Baidu is the powerhouse in China, so Microsoft decided Baidu is the best bet for monetizing their Chinese properties.

WebmasterWorld senior member, walkman, said;

am I missing something or should it be the other way around?

But Quadrille feels this is just a way for Microsoft to learn from Baidu and as soon as the contract expires, they too will enter the Chinese PPC market.

It's just Bill poking his tongue out at Google China! More seriously, it's probably a fairly short contract while MSN develops its own China search.

Win or Loss for Microsoft? Time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

InfoWorld says Google to offer domain registration services through Google Applications. Now, Google became a registrar back on January 31, 2005. Since then Google said the reason was (1) because they register a lot of domains internally and (2) (not sure if they said this publicly, or if it was inferred) Google uses the registrar data for ranking and trust purposes. You can see our past articles on that speculation with a simple Google search.

As you can see from the Google Applications Help section, Google added one line to the "Cost" section:

Administrators who choose to register a new domain will pay $10 per year for private registration through one of our partners.

They also said, "We have partnered with GoDaddy and Enom to provide this service for $10 per year including private domain registration to help protect you from spam."

So Google is the domain registrar here or is it GoDaddy and Enom?

In any event, it makes sense for this service to be added to Google Applications. Why not add it to Google AdWords Starter Page.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

The Google AdSense Blog announced that Google has updated their payments page to be clearer.

You'll now find your earnings and payments divided into two separate columns so you can better distinguish between them. Clicking on any details link will give you more information about the noted Earnings or Payment event. For example, the details link associated with a payment will show you the payment number, amount, date, and depending on your form of payment, the tracking number.

We've also added a Monthly balance column, which displays the running total of your unpaid earnings and credits at the end of each month. If this column shows an amount greater than $100 and you've removed all holds from your account, you'll be issued a payment at the end of the following month. You can see an example in the screenshot above -- since the publisher's unpaid earnings totaled $58.23 at the end of November, a payment will not be issued during December.

Of course the forums spotted this before the blog post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Yahoo!'s cache is mishandling the <SUP> </SUP> (superscript) HTML tag. The superscript tag basically looks like ^this, often used for adding comments¹ numbers for reference or other characters to words.

Yahoo! Moderator, jdMorgan, confirmed this as an issue;

In your case it was the </sup> closing tag that got changed to HTML character-entities. In my case, it was the opening <sup> tag. Because of this difference in our applications, it looks like a problem handling <sup>s nested within other tags.

So that's a confirmation of what appears to be a fairly straightforward bug.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows an issue where an advertiser saw his average position drop from position five to position 195.6. adCenterEU, an official Microsoft representative explained that this is indeed a bug in the system and Microsoft is working on a fix.

There is a known issue with some advertisers where the average reported position is higher than expected.

The adCenter team are aware and hope to release a fix as soon as possible to recitfy the behaviour.

So if you see your ad position drop like that, do not fret - it is a known issue.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday on IBM's co-announcement with Yahoo! on the release of a free enterprise search application named OmniFind. OmniFind is defined as a entry-level enterprise search software solution.

Features Include:

• It will index up to 500,000 documents
  
• Search internal documents as well as web documents
  
• Supports 200+ file types
  
• 30+ languages
  
• REST & XML
  
• Uses open source Apache Lucene
  

Yahoo! and IBM got some good feedback on this release. More details at http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/productinfo.php.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

On March 18, 2004, Yahoo! released what they called Yahoo! Web Rank. Yahoo! explained it as follows:

Yahoo! Web Rank is the name that Yahoo! has given to a technical measurement of a particular URL's popularity. If you choose to enable the Yahoo! Web Rank feature on the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar, a toolbar icon will display the Yahoo! Web Rank value of each URL that you visit. The Yahoo! Web Rank values range from 1 to 10. This feature is currently in Beta release.

That page that described it used to be at http://help.yahoo.com/help/companion/webrank/ but now that page redirects.

You can take a look at the Wayback Machines copy of it from April 1, 2004. Lots of good old details on it.

Even Danny Sullivan wrote a huge write up on it at Search Engine Watch back on April 2, 2004.

Where did it go? Why did Yahoo! stop using it?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Ever since Yahoo! took a stance against images near their contextual ads, it has appeared Google has done the same. Many threads discussed that Google no longer felt it was acceptable to put images near the ads, because they unfairly drove a higher click-through rate.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread spots that Google has showcased a site in their case studies that uses images near ads to increase their click-through rate. Here is an image I snapped from this page, with an image near the ad.

So is this specific implementation acceptable?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google Blog announced the release of Google Patent Search. You can search for any patent, and if Google indexed it from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) then hopefully it will come up. Google uses a combination of their search technology, Google Book technology and hopefully will be adding "saving" and "printing" features to the tool.

I conducted an advanced search to find all patents with the assignee as Google and came up with 29 documents. Why did I need to use the advanced search, because a simple search on Google brings back some unexpected results (for me, at least). It is important to remember, a patent application is not the same as an issued patent (thanks Gary).

If you are into this, I recommend you read Gary Price's compilation of Other Free Patent Search Databases for U.S. and International Patents.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & WebmasterWorld.

The eleventh edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. We were able to discuss in detail about half of the topics I wanted. We discussed SES Chicago, Andy's click fraud rate, AdWords quality score tests, holiday updates by Google and Yahoo and much much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file here and listen at your convenience.

We also gave out $50 Microsoft adCenter coupons, the coupon code is SERoundtable1206. Please see the legal, terms and conditions below...

Topics We Covered:

1. Search Engine Strategies Chicago '06 SER Coverage Recap
   
2. In SEO, What Changes Should You Track
   
3. Best Way To Contact Google?
   
4. Yahoo! To Reorganize; Where Is Search In Yahoo!'s Future?
   
5. Google Claims Click Fraud a "Fraction of One Percent"
   
6. Google Testing Showing AdWords Quality Score Data to Advertisers
   
7. Predicted Average CPC Bidding Coming to Google AdWords?
   
8. Google Checkout "Washing" Affiliate Links
   
9. Yahoo! Search Update 12/11 Confirmed
   
10. Possible Google Update Before Holiday Season?
    
11. Google Update Debunked By Matt Cutts
    
12. Onsite Store Owner To Sue Blog Owner Over Ranking in Google
    
13. Duplicate Content: What Is It 12/2006
    

Continue reading "Search Pulse 12: SES Recap, Versioning SEO, Contact Google, Yahoo, Google, Click Fraud, Duplicate Content, AdWords, Microsoft & More"

The Google Blog informed us about a new program they are offering employees to offer more "competitive compensation packages" and keep good employees around. They are enabling employees with stock options in GOOG to "transfer (sell) their options to a financial institution through a competitive bidding process." Meaning, they can trade their options, almost like they would a normal stock, which is commonly not done with stock options.

With the TSO program, employees will also be able to sell vested options to the highest-bidding financial institution, which may be willing to pay a premium above the difference between the exercise price and the market price for Google stock (even when the exercise price is higher than the market price).

More details on this Google TOS program at the following PDF documents:

• The Market for TSOs
  
• Google Employees Tom and Sally
  
• Accounting for TSOs
  
• TOS FAQ
  

Very creative, indeed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, the Google site sported a special logo of a painting by Edvard Munch named the The Scream.

This may be one of the most extreme work ups of their logo, a total contrast to their past holiday logos.

Forums are discussing it as well at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Yahoo Opens Panama To New Customer Sign Ups. This is a bit surprising to me. I would have thought that Yahoo! would first wait to move over all old advertisers to the new program and then have new advertisers join in on the new system. Either way is fine for me, I just thought that is how they planned on doing it.

In any event, new advertisers can sign up for Yahoo!'s Panama release over here if you are an old advertiser and want an invite to be upgraded, request one over here.

For our past coverage on Panama, read:

• Yahoo! Announced Panama Launch : See My Notes About Panama Directly From Yahoo! Search Marketing's Headqaurters
• How To Request an Invite to the New Yahoo! Panama Search Marketing?
• Upgrading Yahoo! Search Marketing to Panama
• Summary Of Recent Posts on Yahoo!'s Panama System
• Yahoo! Search Marketing 2.0 Limits To 20 Campaigns Per Account
• Grandfathered Bids in Yahoo! Search Marketing Do Not Carry To Panama

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are typically certain niche industries in the search space that are controlled primarily by SEOs with "special skills." Ian McAnerin has an excellent post on this at Search Engine Watch Forums. He gave this analogy; "if you were a normal home contractor and have the standard hammer, saw, etc toolkit, you could be very comfortable taking on a home reno, or even building a house. Pushing yourself, you could probably try to take on a small office."

For someone already in these niche spaces, they have the knowledge, skills and, most importantly, network and infrastructure to move into similar spaces. So what are some of these niche areas that are so competitive? According to Ian;

• Online Pharmacy
• Gambling
• Mortgages and Loans
• Legal Sites
• Porn/Adult
• Dating/Personals
• Modeling
• Website Hosting
• SEO
• Gifts and Gift Baskets
• Real Estate
• Affiliates
• Cheat codes/Warez
• Travel

On the other hand, some SEOs may not feel comfortable working on some of the niche areas listed above.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google is giving out Digital Picture Frames as holiday gifts, most US publishers & advertisers have received them already. I got my frame from Google last week, while at SES Chicago. But now UK and international publishers and advertisers are receiving them as well.

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

Now this is a Google box that you want to be in, hopefully. Google has released a UI feature in the search engine results called the "Plus Box" awhile back. Barry has some past discussion here. It is basically an expandable box that will show a map of where your business is located. Google figures that this will make it a lot easier for the user to find location information for a business without taking the extra step to use Google maps to find the location (or visiting the website). This is a nice feature that will add more usefulness and uniqueness to your search listing.

Example of the "Plus Box"

Matt Cutts has a full explanation of the Plus Box including how to get your business included in the box and other answers to how to correct your address if it is wrong. The only thing not answered is how to get rid of the "Plus Box". While a useful service, I question whether it will discourage a visitor from clicking on your search engine result listing and visiting your website. This way you can get information from Google as opposed to visiting the website to find the contact information. Some people may not like that very much.

Continued discussion on WebmasterWorld

Just a reminder, Ben, Chris and I will be live on the Search Pulse tonight at 5pm (EST).

How do you tune in live and communicate with us 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).

We have a nice amount of topics to go over, so this should be fun!

WebmasterWorld adCenter moderator Receptional, has an excellent post at WebmasterWorld where he goes over tips and common pitfalls you may experience using Microsoft's adCenter.

In his detailed and easy to read post, he goes over the editorial process, the acceptance policy, and how Microsoft handles trademarks. He also reviews some "basic tips" including; Keyword relevancy, Landing pages work, Include keywords in titles and you should use adlab.microsoft.com's keyword tool.

Check out the remainder of the post for:

• Improving Your Campaign Management
  
• Demographics Tips
  
• Reporting Tips
  
• What to expect in 2007
  

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a lot of buzz over Andy Beal's Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%. In short, Shuman Ghosemajumder of Google sat down with Andy and explained to him how to get these figures. Andy recently updated his post after Ghosemajumder took a look at his post saying;

UPDATE: Ghosemajumder has clarified that my assumptions of less than 2% should be based on “invalid clicks”, which means the actual number is more likely just a fraction of one percent!

Danny has a great commentary on Andy's report;

So to be clear, two percent of all clicks are investigated by Google as being possibly fraudulent after billing has happened. Some amount of fraudulent clicks, of course, are never reported. That will take the figure up. However, some amount of the investigated clicks will be cleared of fraud, taking the amount down.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A huge topic at the SES conference last week was duplicate content. The definitions and how search engines handle duplicate content has changed a lot over the past few years. So that is why I dated the title of this post.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses just that.

In short, duplicate content is not a penalty. It hasn't been that way in years.

When you have 20 pages of the same page of content, a search engine will do their best to pick the best page on your behalf and filter out the remaining pages.

Why? The search engines do not want the same page in their index more than one time because it wastes resources and provides a bad search experience (showing the same result twice is not good).

So search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) all try to pick the best page (one with cleanest URL, most links, etc.). But if they pick the wrong URL (not the best page, in your opinion) then you may consider it a penalty, when it is not.

This is why you should help the search engines out by using 301s and robots.txt files to tell the search engines which pages are the important ones. With Google you can also use Sitemaps and increase the priority score of the important pages, relative to the others.

So it is your choice: Let the search engines choose for you or you make the choice.

Forum discussion Cre8asite Forums.

Yesterday we reported wide spread reports of Google Trying Google Logo on AdSense Ads. Someone in the forums received a response from Google on the matter.

Thanks for your email - as you've mentioned, the change that you saw was part of ongoing testing to improve our ad formats. Such variations are a normal part of our testing process and generally run for short periods of time only. No permanent changes are planned at this time.

To maintain the integrity of ongoing testing, we do not permit publishers to opt out. However, please rest assured that such variations should impact only a very small percentage of your impressions.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to improve our program.

Sincerely,

Stephanie
The Google AdSense Team

Two things from this:
(1) This is confirmed as a test
(2) Even if you hate the way it looks, you cannot opt out

What can you infer? Well, what ever happened to the AdSense Theme Ads, such as St. Patricks Day colors or the holiday colors?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google keeps stocking up on staff dedicated to help with the Webmaster to Google communication aspects of the business. Last night, Vanessa Fox Welcomed Jonathan to the Google Groups forums.

Jonathan Simon was introduced as the "newest member of our team," I assume Vanessa's Webmaster Central Team.

His introductory post reads:

Hello, It was fun meeting and talking to many of the webmasters who were able to attend SES in Chicago. I hope to hear from many more of you.

I am extremely interested in what you have to say. So don't be shy, please post your questions, issues, suggestions & thoughts.

I will be reading and posting as much as possible to ensure that you receive timely and accurate responses. It is a privilege to join such a vibrant and helpful community.

May all the ships you set sail, reach their destinations. ;)

Welcome Jonathan, oh, we will be watching you like a hawk. Best of luck!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yahoo! Search is currently undergoing an update. If you noticed your rankings shuffle around, it is true. A WebmasterWorld thread first spotted these changes yesterday morning.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! said;

There will be more changes tomorrow. Things should settle on Wednesday Tim

So a relatively quick update. Keep an eye out for what was changed.

Oh, let me note, if Google did an update now, they would be nailed up against a wall for messing around during the biggest shopping season. Hence the denial of the update, which some say happened and Google says did not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Hello all...this is a late addition to the Chicago SES 2006 coverage we did last week. I apologize for not getting it up sooner, but I have been lagged like Barry. :)

This was gracefully submitted to me by my friend Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement (Search marketing firm in Atlanta). Thanks for the great recap!

Moderator: Dana Todd, Founding Partner, SiteLab International, Inc.
Presenters:
Phil Stelter, Director of Business Development, Range Online Media Isabel (Schoenberger) Sopoglian, VP of Search, Newcars.com Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.
Josh Stylman, Managing Partner, Reprise Media

Dana Todd opened the session by saying that in addition to introducing the presenters with their real names, she would also use our "porn names." (Porn names are devised by taking the name of your childhood pet and combining it with the name of the street you grew up on.)

So Dana...I mean "Periwinkle Cuthbert"...talked about what's on her mind regarding buying search ads these days. She ran through news at Yahoo (Panama being rolled out, the Peanut Butter Manifesto, the newspaper partnership - which is a big deal). She's excited about Amazon and Clickriver's partnership, as well as AskCity. She asked MSN/Microsoft/Windows/Live to pick a name already.

Dana said that early results from SEMPO's big survey (not too late to participate - go to www.sempo.org) shows that there may actually be fewer people buying local PPC ads than last year. Her money's on mobile search. Gannett - a traditional newspaper company - is getting with the times by using crowdsourcing (utilizing citizens to do reporters' work) and "mojos" (mobile journalists - they don't have an office but work out of their cards and post news live). Apparently immediacy is more important than quality or accuracy - but Gannett is only doing this with their online news.

A recent MediaVox announcement of Google's "secret" ad network was mocked (it's only banner advertising, people!), and Dana noted that the quality score issue is hitting people hard in their wallets. (That was a theme throughout the session, and indeed, throughout the conference.)

Dana's still a fan of several "search engine underdogs," including AOL (Fullview is cool, and AOL still has significant market share in the content space), Miva (quality of their traffic is increasing) and LookSmart's vertical play.

Next up was Phil Stelter, that is, Maya Jackson, who noted it was hard to follow Dana as a transvestite. He noted that everyone agrees that CPCs are rising, but few advertisers have hit their upper limit thus far. The engines will continue to add more options, such as MSN's demographic targeting.

Why are costs increasing? Click fraud, targeting options (again, MSN), algorithm changes, distribution changes, competition with affiliates and more. Phil gave a case study of a financial services client whose CPCs were doubled when the company's affiliates entered the market.

Phil noted that with Panama, bid management tactics like bid jamming and gap surfing are gone. Bid management tools, as they're used today, are becoming irrelevant. What we need to focus on is creative testing and landing page optimization. Those must outperform in order to get ahead.

Advertisers must reconsider how they measure their return - use an integrated approach and analyze it across channels.

Isabel (Schoenberger) Sopoglian, also known as Benny Osterender, presented on "Mastering the New Bidscape." She began by covering four major changes on Google:
* Landing Page Quality Score algo update
* Position "Normalizer" algo update
* Google toolbar update - suggested searches
* Refined Search Option on results page (affects organic results)

The latter two suggestions from Google takes traffic away from the keywords they're targeting and sends it elsewhere.

Isabel showed several examples of core keywords before the algo updates (Sept. 9) and after. They got 5,000 fewer clicks on "Honda" with the same CPC, and lost clicks on other keywords where they increased their CPC. It's had a huge impact on them. Their great account history is no longer important due to the position normalizer. Isabel thinks Google created these changes to increase their revenue and have better control over ad position 1.

Yahoo's Panama and MSN now are less transparent and more complex. They require more human intervention and less automation.

Isabel offered Tips & Tricks, including:
* For Google's landing page quality score, use dynamic landing
pages to create relevant content. Reflect the content of the landing page in the ad creative, even more precisely than before.
* For Google's toolbar, test the keywords Google suggests first in
the drop-down and focus your strategy on those.
* For the position normalizer, increase your CPC (and suffer from
lower ROI), optimize your ad copy and expand your keyword portfolio.

Tier 2 search engines - Newcars.com had been using Miva's network at 5 cents a click. Miva approached them with a "premium" option that would be 25 cents a click. They were hesitant but tried it and found it had a great conversion rate. Isabel noted that expanding into additional networks comes with an increase in costs - human resources as well as additional automation, tracking and licensing.

Regarding click fraud, they've analyzed their own results and found that 5-23% of their own traffic is fraudulent. Industry average inflation of CPC due to click fraud is 17%.

Next, I presented. You can call me Stacy Williams or Funky Ridgeway, your choice. Dana suggested I title my presentation "Search Engine Relationships," but I had a hard time being that diplomatic. It's called "Search Engine Meddling." I come from a traditional advertising background, and I'm used to buying media and getting what I paid for (what a concept!). Examples of the PPC engines meddling with our campaigns fell into three categories.

Think all Google ads marked as "Active" are actually running? Think again! We've been running a campaign for the TBS cable network since June of 2004, bidding on "Sex and the City" keywords. We recently moved them from one AdGroup to another for a short-term promotion. They were listed as "Active" in our account, but after a week, our account manager noticed they had generated 0 impressions, which wasn't normal. Our rep confirmed that the word "sex" had tripped a filter somewhere.

For our client Bradley-Morris, we bid on 60 versions of their brand name, including misspellings. These also showed as "Active". Six weeks into the campaign our client "Googled" their own name and didn't see an ad. Turns out "a technical glitch with the approval process" hung up these keywords.

We're bidding on "second hand as/400" for a client who sells used mainframes, bidding $4.25 a click. The keyword is listed as "Active,"
but when you roll over the magnifying glass to use the new Ad Diagnostic Tool, it's not running because our "quality score and CPC are too low."
There is no way to know which keywords are inactive unless you roll over the magnifying glass for every keyword in your campaign.

Think your match type settings are actually set and kept? Think again!
A recent Yahoo campaign for TBS' new show "My Boys" included the keyword "My Boys pictures." Yahoo apparently decided to display this ad for the query "boy picture," which we only knew because Yahoo emailed us to tell us it was removed due to a low Click Index. I don't know what someone searching for "boy picture" was looking for, but I don't think it was us!

Similarly, we had a Yahoo campaign for TNT's medical drama "Saved." An overzealous staff member included some overly broad keywords such as "doctor" (on Standard Match - Yahoo's version of exact match). We got an email saying that due to its low Click Index, the Yahoo system changed the match type to Advanced Match (Yahoo's version of broad match). This means that someone searching for "eye doctor in Chicago"
would see our ad. We immediately removed the keyword from our campaign.
Glad Yahoo emailed us, but they had no right to change our match type.

Google serves up ads for "synonyms and related terms" if you use broad match, which many people are unaware of. We bid on "refurbished as/400"
(an IBM server) and our ad appears for "rebuilt Calcutta 400" (a fishing reel). We bid on "used Sun" (as in Microsystems) and our ad appears for "used heat pump." We only know about this because we found a slew of unrelated keywords in our server logs - meaning we paid for these unqualified clicks.

Think the creative you wrote is actually running? Think again! On Google, we used keyword insertion so that the title of an ad running for the keyword "massage school" (geotargeted for Georgia) would read "Atlanta Massage School." While running a few spot checks, I saw that the actual title displayed was "Marietta Massage School." Marietta is a suburb of Atlanta - while we are using that title for the keyword "Marietta massage school," it should never have been displayed for someone not searching for "Marietta." Google told us their system found the alternate title "more relevant."

Yahoo's editors will rewrite your creative without telling you, although this may happen less frequently after Panama is rolled out and they rely less on editors. We ran a short promo campaign to drive clicks to funny spoof videos of "Lord of the Rings" on TBS' site (keyword = "Frodo").

Our copy:
Lost Lord of the Rings Video
Witness Sam and Frodo's secret love!

Yahoo's editor rewrote to:
Frodo
While you gear up for the premiere of the Lord of the Rings movies...

...which isn't compelling and isn't on strategy (the goal was to drive traffic to the videos, not drive viewers to watch the movie). The client discovered this one (how embarrassing!).

What can you do?
* On Google, look for keywords marked as "active" that have 0
impressions
* Be very careful with broad match in Google
 Use negative keywords like crazy
 Watch your web analytics for keywords actually used
* Be very careful with keyword insertion in Google
 Run searches and look at creative
* Ask your Yahoo rep to "flag" your account with instructions not
to change creative
* Keep a closer eye on your campaigns than you think you have to

The session was wrapped up by Josh Stylman, otherwise known as Otis Oakville. Josh said that when most people think of search, they think of Google. When most people think of search advertising, they think of a text ad. But search isn't just search anymore - you can search on eBay, Amazon, ESPN and all kinds of sites not thought of as search engines. There's contextual advertising everywhere. There's also demographic targeting coming into play, behavioral targeting (where you search for a car one day and see an ad about that car on another site the next day), and RSS.

Search is more than Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are second-tier PPC engines (Ask, Miva, pulse360, Enhance and LookSmart). There are also vertical players (SiteStep, Shopping.com, Business.com, AdSonar, indeed, and Kayak).

New formats are emerging, including images, rich media and video ads.
Search won't just be online - you'll be able to go to a search engine and buy print, radio, mobile, TV and more. Common themes we'll see will be that search across media will be:
* Targeted
* An Auction Market
* Measurable

Finally, search is not an island - if you want to get your message out to key markets across the US, you'll be able to go to Google and buy print, radio, TV and online ads in one place.

I wrote last Friday about a Possible Google Update Before Holiday Season? Matt Cutts WebmasterWorld on page five, message number 3184750 saying;

Hey folks, I asked around and I don't believe anything new went out Dec. 7th, or the few days before that.

So normal flux? Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is fairly entertaining... Via a WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums threads, a blog owner received an email from a online store owner, requesting he lower his ranking for a keyword phrase the blog is ranking well for. In short, the store owner feels he should rank better than the blog, because he is selling the item on his site and the blog is only informational and not transactional. If this person knew anything about Google, he would know things tend to work the other way around.

The emails, without specific identifiable information, can we read in part one and part two. Let me quote part two for you, since I find it the most entertaining...

You have to understand Dean that an online business should be higher in Google than a blog.

Don’t forget that Google is a business as well, they obviously make more money from other businesses than they do from blogs, so it is in their interest that I am higher than you for certain searches.

I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon.

I expect a reply soon.

I won't quote from the forums, but I think they tend to agree with me on this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

The rel="nofollow" was introduced by the search engines back in 2004 (I believe). Since then we have not had a clear understanding on how exactly each search engine treats them. Some speculate that the rel="nofollow" means that the search engines won't crawl those links. Some say they will crawl them but they won't pass the link on as a vote for the web page it is linking to. Some say the link is completely hidden to search engines.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that confusion in action.

One person said;

I just checked backlinks of one of my sites on yahoo site explorer and noted that the first site being shown in the results is a site which has my link with a "nofollow" attribute.

Does this mean that yahoo doesnt care about rel="nofollow"? Can anybody else check and confirm this from their own sites? And what about MSN?

Others noticed the same thing with Yahoo!

The response that seems to work for him is;

Technically, rel="nofollow" does not mean the search engines won't spider the page. They will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel="nofollow" means is "don't trust the link", i.e. don't pass PageRank/TrustRank, etc.

The robots meta tag "nofollow" is different, and really does mean "don't follow links from this page", and has nothing to do with backlinks or PageRank.

That works, but a clear definition from each search engine would be nice.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is also a thread from the Google's perspective that is currently active at WebmasterWorld.

I reported on Friday at Search Engine Land that Google Begins Testing Audio Ads Within AdWords.

The Google AdWords blog announced yesterday that they have begun inviting advertisers to test out Google Audio Ads. The test is only running in the US. If you want to be part of this test, you can apply over here. After you get accepted, make sure to read Guidelines for Audio Ads, describing how you can use MP3 or WAV files, both 30 seconds long, with no long periods of silence and only containing one ad (no sharing). More details on how this is working at the Google Help section of the audio site.

So I waited over the weekend to hear the forum reaction to the real tests. I did not get too much.

Both DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld have threads on the topic, but both show very little excitement or buzz on the announcement.

I guess it goes to show you. Maybe once they open the test more, it will get more buzz. Or maybe online advertisers hate radio?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Whitemark at Cre8asite Forums spotted Google testing a Google logo, in place of Ads by "Gooooooogle". It looks a bit like this:

Update: A DigitalPoint Forums thread has tons of examples.

Here is one with a small G logo:

And they were even spotted on DigitalPoint Forums itself:

People are upset that there blending work is not as blended with these new Google logos.

I don't believe I have ever seen this implementation, but I may have just missed it.

I think I like the text version better, either "Ads by Google" or "Ads by Gooooooogle."

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld Google AdWords Moderator werty reports that he received to automated calls from Google's Chicago office about buying ads from Google. And I quote from the WebmasterWorld thread:

I pick up the phone and the message was slightly cut off the first time:

"Please press 1 if you spend less than $5000 per month, Please press 2 if you have the budget to spend $5000 or more per month and are interested in our Premium Services. Please press 3 if you are interested in job opportunities."

He then hit 2 and was transferred to a voice mail box in Google's Chicago office. A few minutes later, Google called him back, Google was on the caller id.

Normally, I would not trust such a thread. But this is from a legit source. I am shocked Google is doing this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I often use the site command query operator at Google to find results within a particular site. This morning when writing about Possible Google Update Before Holiday Season? I conducted a search for all matches for the keyword florida on seroundtable.com. It brought up a set of refinement links (often pulled from Google Coop's Topics (but I did not set up topics for this site). Those refinements look like this:

They link to:

• Dining guides
  
• Attractions
  
• Suggested itineraries
  
• Lodging guides
  
• Shopping
  
• Tours & day trips
  

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums are both reporting significant changes in rankings at Google starting last night. Typically, Google, since December 2003 (aka the Florida update), Google does not want to shake up the search results (did not mention search ads here) before the big holiday season.

Well, these reports seem to be wide and far. So I believe based on the recent volume and breadth that there is a possible Google update underway.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Reportedly, via a WebmasterWorld posts, there has been a significant drop in ad impressions noticed from sources in the Mid Atlantic to the Northeast areas of the US. There are literally a couple threads on this at WebmasterWorld, including here and here.

What caused the outage? A huge fire in one of the large data centers that house and power that region of Microsoft adCenter (Windows Live Search ads).

After much prodding and some fairly heated exchanges, the support rep, whom I will not name, told me there was a big fire in one of the major data centers in the east coast that feeds adcenter ads, all servers were burned and data destroyed. This does not mean your ads and data were lost. It means the distribution part of the service is disrupted.

WebmasterWorld's official adCenter representative, adCenter411, claimed the fire was not true. adCenter411 said, "adCenter did not experience a fire in any of their data centers." But she did add what she feels is the issue.

There was/is a delivery issue, now partly resolved, that adCenterEU and I are still looking into for some of you in the UK. I'm sorry for the confusion and misunderstanding, but please be assured that no servers or data was lost.

They say no data has been lost, historically. But lots of potential business has been lost since the fire. I am sure neither side is happy, Microsoft and the advertiser. I just hope they get things going again soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In case you missed it, we at the Search Engine Roundtable covered about 40 of the sessions at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I would like to thank again, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause Berg (Cre8PC) and Robert Kerry (evilgreenmonkey) for their huge contribution to the community here. I know, I appreciate it, and I know many of you do.

I am currently in the airport, yes - my flight is delayed again. So here is a quick roundup of our coverage over the past four days.

Monday, December 4, 2006

• Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)


• Business Issues For the small SEM Shop


• Drive traffic to your site with Google


• Session: Business Issues For The Big SEM Shop


• Ads in a Quality Score World


• Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix


• Working with Ad Agencies


• Podcast & Audio Search Optimization


• Ad Testing: Research and Findings


• ClickZ Forum: Advertising In Social Media

• Video Search Optimization


• Keynote: Jason Calacanis & Danny Sullivan


• Bulk Submit 2.0


• Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic


• Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues


• Getting Traffic from Contextual Networks


• Local Search Marketing Tactics


• Earning Money From Contextual Ads


• Mobile Search Optimization


• Bot Obedience Course


• Beyond The Single Site Mentality


• Mobile Search Engines


• Successful Site Architecture

• Social Search Overview (Google Custom Search Engine, Yahoo Answers & MyWeb, Flickr, & Ask.com)


• Images & Search Engines


• Search Arbitrage Issues


• Dealing With Affiliates (Pepperjam & Performics)


• Linking Strategies


• Buying & Selling Links


• CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines


• Converting Visitors Into Buyers


• Link Baiting & Viral Search Success


• Search & Regulated Industries


• Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One


• Keynote: Danny Sullivan

• Meet the Crawlers


• Search Engine Q&A On Links (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com & Windows Live Search)


• In House: Big PPC


• Organic Listings Forum

We tried to cover everything on the schedule, but sometimes that was impossible. Thanks again to the contributors and our readers.

This session is moderated by Detlev Johnson who is Director of Consulting for Position Technologies. It turns out that this was a purely Q&A slot, so I've included some of the Questions and Answers below.

1. What can I do to quickly rank a new website with no history or links?

Mike Grehan - There is no sandbox.

Dave Naylor - I agree with Mike, it used to exist although not so much now. Get a few .edu links and you're good to go (joke).

Todd Friesen - As long as you start up with some links from trusted sources such as Best of the Web, a site will start to get noticed and indexed.

Bruce Clay - I don't think that a sandbox ever existed, SEO/algorithms has just changed.

Dave Naylor - Don't chase after the golden link such as CNN, look for conduits (links from sites which CNN links to).

2. A lot of sites getting good positions seem to be using cloaking, what's a good software app?

Dave Naylor - Ralph's cloaking at fantomaster.com is a good IP Cloaking sofware. You really only need to use it though if you have lots of valuable content and want to show a subscription page or have another stumbling block which only humans could navigate past. Cloaking does not increase your search position alone, simply makes the site's content accessible.

Todd Friesen - IP Delivery (ip-delivery.com) is also a good cloaking app.

3. Should I split sites which I host with similar content across different IP addresses?

Dave Naylor - I have a large cluster of servers using only 4 IP addresses. Hosting white labelled sites, this never used to be a problem until about 6 months ago, although now it seems to cause issues. I recommend spreading the site across different IP addresses now, personally I use proxy servers to detect bots and serve sites from different IPs.

4. When launching a website, how quickly should I build inbound links?

Bruce Clay - If you have a site giving the cure for cancer, you'd get a million links in a week and won't be counted as spam. As long as it's all natural and on topic you'll be ok. Your site should be something new or interesting and look for sites, which you would link to, for inbound links.

5. What really is the key to SEO, is content still king?

Dave Naylor - Search Engines don't go to your page and say "That's the best story I've ever read, I'll put that as #1", You want everyone in this room to say "The best story I've ever read is - Insert Anchor Text Here Please".

Detlev Johnson - With people buying links and using them for spam, the typical kind of link is becoming less important.

Dave Naylor - If I had 1,000 pounds to spend on a super cool design, super cool content or super cool links; I'd take the link package every time.

6. I have a main basketball site and sub sites for 30 different cities, where shall I concentrate my SEO efforts?

Bruce Clay - I would pool the sites all under one main site, all that content under one domain would be very valuable.

Dave Naylor - Just use subdomains or subfolders and point the city domains you've already bought over to the sub-domains/folders and use them for print advertising.

7. What do you think about the ODP (Open Directory Project - http://dmoz.org)?

Todd Friesen - It's not as important as it used to be - submit your site and then forget about it.

Bruce Clay - Submit your site every quarter if you haven't been added, although if the category doesn't have an editor you're unlikely to get in. Alternatively, submit your site to a category for your city/town and the editors are more likely to move you into the correct category.

8. Is the keyword Meta Tag still worth adding to a web page?

Todd Friesen - We spend a lot of time working on Page Titles, use the description Meta Tag for a sales message and haven't use the keyword Meta Tag in 2 or 3 years.

Bruce Clay - We think that every tag available is worth using and spending time on. There's hundreds of variables which make up the search algorithm and if keyword Meta Tags make up even a minute percentage of that algorithm, why not use it. Yahoo has said already that it takes notice of the tag, so that alone makes it worth it.

Dave Naylor - I agree with Bruce on this. Even though it's not the most important thing to concentrate on, even something which is 0.00001% of the algorithm could be the difference between position 2 and position 1.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

I would like to thank my fellow SER bloggers for the support given to me on my first conference reporting, and also for providing this information resource which allowed me to follow sessions which I was unable to attend.

In House: Big PPC

Moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs.

First up is Beth Morgan from Red Bricks Media. She will discuss internal competition, units competing against each other. Gives a list of potential ways that can happen, including “generation gap,” when bus units compete against each other. The main thing is that you do not want business units to compete each other in bidding. Massaging: different divisions may have varying marketing approaches. Tracking and reporting…what are you going to track? Depends on how broad the products of the business units are. She is going through slides super quick. How are you going to track it? Discusses some different analytics tools. What should you report and how often? Varies. Keyword research and categorization. KW research takes time! Without coordination, divisions can duplicate efforts for kw research.

Bidding is the one most people think about. G, Y!, and MSN generally have a policy that only one paid ad from the same company will run at a time. Lack of coordination can lead to irrational bidding.. She goes over how engines handle multiple bids. Google is hardest, and historically it has been easier to bid with multiple ads at Y! and MSN. Of course Y! is changing with Panama. How can you beat these challenges? Centralize processes. Think big right from the beginning. Assume that the campaign will eventually spread out across division. Shows a very quick case study of work with Adobe systems. They went through coordination of messaging, moved from multiple tracking system to one streamlined system. This dramatically reduces the time spent repairing reports. Sat down with key players to identify which data needed to be analyzed.

In the KW selection area, they built libraries of similar terms that could be reused across similar campaigns. Example: graphic designer terms as well as brand terms. This minimizes changes as well as inaccuracies within campaigns. They created “categories of categories.” The system was flexible enough to run across all divisions. Showed a snapshot of a kw management system that was very categorized. One of the drawbacks of using common kws is that you have to focus on bid management. Suggests consolidation, then to identify duplicates, then to prioritize, then sort and strategize, then monitor.. Easier to do an ad group basis than kw basis. To implement and monitor is most important. They are developing an in-house tool to help better manage the process.

Matthew Greitzer of Avenue A | Razorfish is next. I think that’s a really awesome company. :) Says we have about 60 clients nationwide, most of which have multiple business units. He will discuss how to manage PPC in a way that avoids internal competition (or competing with other business units in the same organization). His four “Fundamentals of Managing Internal Competition” are 1) Build an organization and service structure to support collaboration; 2) Implement unified tracking across campaigns; 3) Allocate keyword ownership through testing; and 4) Protect your brand name.

Recommends a structure for success…using centralized vision for search marketing strategy. Companies with a central marketing team is able to manage conflicts within business units easier. If not, there needs to at least be a culture that supports collaboration. Unified management of campaigns across divisions. Use a master keyword list, Keyword allocation, and beware of competitive bidding conflicts.

Enforces the idea of bringing Visibility into interplay between search marketing campaigns. You need a unified view of your customers – AA|RF uses a Unified Keyword Report – Quantifies “Halo Effect” of each business unit’s search marketing efforts. He discusses allocating keyword ownership through testing. Case Study: Retailer with multiple business units vying for relevant keywords. Challenge: How do we assign keywords to the right business unit? Solution: Test comparing individual listings with multiple listings. Shows how one company has an 18% lower cost per order, and another has a 23% higher order volume. Obviously you need to make decisions based on this type of granular data.

He then goes over Trademark Protection and Affiliate situations. He reminds that all three major search engines offer some form of trademark protection. Use it. Also, you should restrict affiliates from bidding on your brand name. Shows a chart with pre and post affiliate bidding on trademark terms, and the volume increase after restricting affiliates is huge: average CPC was down 91% and the order volume was up 104%. Cost per sale was reduced from around $75 to around $4. Summarizes by restating the four rules.

Next will be Tim Daly from SendTec. He goes over a case study from Intuit’s QuickBooks division. They started with Intuit about a year ago. They have major issues with competition internally. There are 17 different subdivisions of QuickBooks alone. Each division was doing their own SEM programs, and each of them was bidding on the term “QuickBooks.” They had 13 sub-divisional campaigns running independently, with 7 management teams involved. Also, some were managed in-house, and some were outsourced. They found some major issues, including that CPC’s on branded terms were uncharacteristically high. The Google rules change on URL’s were causing problems too. He turns it over to Olivier from Intuit to discuss the immediate steps taken.

The two main areas that had to be focused on was organizational, and the outside agencies being used. There had to be one person to bring things together to share information. It is good to have a mediator, but who owns the results? So they consolidated to a central team. This gave then a more holistic view of how things were working. This delivered a more relevant search experience. In many cases, the targets overlapped. Hard to tell at what level of QuickBooks each needs to be. If you can determine this through their search behavior, you will deliver more relevant results. They used complimentary bidding practices across management teams. This allowed for faster sharing of best practices versus when teams were acting in silos. They then consolidated their agencies, by switching to SendTec.

There were many benefits to their reorganization, especially giving them more control over their campaigns. The results included in increase in orders of 31%, a lower media cost (-11+%). The next step was kw management, and then creating new rules of engagement across divisions. BY grouping in themes, you can be smarter about how you work with keywords. Tim Daly comes back to discuss the actual tactical implementation. It is great to put together a new system, but how do you implement changes. He feels that they are actually his best client because they have caused them to discover how to deal with these types of issues. They designed a de-duplication custom tool to help provide better analysis. They used an excel spreadsheet with a Windows based programming solution.

Once they worked out the details, they had to move into testing, which will go live January 2nd. They will truly find out then the impacts of multiple listings in various ways. “ Stay tuned.” Come to NYC SES next year to see results.

Chris Sherman mods the panel with:

Yahoo's Tim Converse
Google's Adam Lasnik
Windows Live's Eytan Seidman
Ask.com's Vivek Pathak

Q: For promoting a new web site, you run into problems with the sandbox or trustbox. What is more trustworthy, etc.
A: Google said they use a greater amount of trust for those "who is closer to the front of the conference." Kidding... Adam said there are a lot of signals they use. On the whole, have patience and over time get natural links and make sure you have good navigation... etc.
Yahoo said there is not explicit sandbox at Yahoo, they do use a lot of signals that determine trust. They look at linkage. They are trying to mirror the web in terms of trust.

Q: How does internal links affect your rankings?
A: Yahoo said it does, so make them descriptive.
Google said are those links useful to your users, then Google will probably find them useful as well.
Ask.com uses expert ranking and they must be meaningful.

Q: Is there a number of links you can have from a certain resource without being penalized?
A: Google said the answer is 42, obviously joking. They apply the "smell test" they see you get a ton of links, but they wont necessarily hurt your site, but the links might not be worth as much.
Yahoo agreed

Q: On how they identify primary site when it comes to RSS syndication
A: Yahoo said it is a big issue these days and they are working on that. Expect to see improvements in this regard.
Google said he doesnt see it happen that often, so please let him know. Splogs are a concern, but thankfully the splogs have little trust, normally.

Q: Use absolute or relative URLs?
A: Most say either is fine, just make sure they are valid.
Google says try to use absolute, because they can be a safer option, especially with splogs scrapping the sites.
Ask.com said do what is easier for you.

Q: Someone pulled up a site that has one set of navigation but in the source code, it has two pieces of navigation source code. One for firefox and one for IE.
A: Yahoo said just having two instances of the link on the page wont be an issue for them.
Google said dido

Q: Cars.com said they have many co-branded web sites and they ask co-brands to link back to them with an aff value. Some of the co-brands are pointing first to a redirect, through a tracker. What implications does that have?
A: The SEs really didnt know what to respond to that.
Yahoo said they will crawl through that like a human
MSN said a 302 redirect is different than a 301 redirect (temporary versus permanent). Also because 302s have had issues with hijacking, so be careful with that.

Q: Sitewide links from multiple sites, does it hurt, etc...
A: Diminishing returns.... It is not abusive in Yahoo's case, but doesnt help much more than one link.
Google is looking for what is really a vote of confidence via a link.
Yahoo agreed also.
Ask.com gives the expert rank thing.

Q: What if you had lots of clients and getting site credit links (designed by, sponsored by, etc. links)? Is there a penalty on that, from several hundred sites with the same link?
A: Google said two ways to look at this; (1) lots of great software packages that have a link at the bottom that say powered by and that is not manipulative, they wont ignore it either. (2) If 40,000 people say I love this product, all within two minutes, you would be a bit suspicious, especially if they all said the same thing....
Yahoo added that if you have a powered by link showing up on different sites at different sites, even if the link text is the same, they would discount the culmitive affect of that, using Diminishing returns. It gets abusive if you build out sites to do this for you with that intent.

Got to leave this session early... Sorry.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

I probably covered or sat on the Meet the Crawlers session dozens of times. So not sure how much new stuff you'll get out of me from this panel. This used to be the go-to panel, until people realized the presentations were all pretty much fluff.

Chris Serman announces the session, and says that this time to change it up, it will be Q&A pretty much. Cool. We got Google, Ask, Yahoo and MSN on the panel.

Q: Is there a particular order or pattern a crawler goes on your site?
A: Yahoo says anything that anything that works for your users, we have to add to our crawlers. Yahoo doesn't want to recommend things to webmasters. Do what is best for you. Optimize for users and not spiders.
MSN said, "no" as the short answer. Most spiders will look for all links, not the links on the top left or right, etc. Do not wrap links in JavaScript, etc. Make your links simple. Page size is also a factor, so keep it small.
Chris Sherman said your comment was valid in the early days of engines. So if you read this somewhere, make sure that SEO tip stuff is recent and updated.

Q: Will Ask.com be supporting the standard sitemaps protocol?
A: They are using sitemaps for select sites. They may, they are currently looking to see how well this is being adopted and they may in the future.

Q: Duplicate content in terms of appending tracking variables to URLs
A: MSN said those pages are redundant, so you dont want them in the index. Try to take them out of the index.
Ask.com said the search engine wont get confused by it, but you are wasting your bandwidth.
Yahoo said look at Site Explorer, see where the URL was found at and get rid of it.
Google said, I agree with MSN, its best to remove those IDs in the URL. You wont get a penalty, but Google will pick a URL for you, if you don't.

Q: Buying text links, does the crawler know this, do you downgrade those links?
A: Google said he recommends that editorial links are better, don't really worry so much as purchased links, so get editorial links.
Ask.com said you wont get much value in terms of crawling the page.

Q: PHP generated links treated differently?
A: MSN said no matter what coding language you use, it generates HTML, so the crawler will see the HTML...
Yahoo added the thing about looking at your site through the eyes of a user (kinda getting old Yahoo)

Q: If I have a 95% flash site with content in XML, will the XML file be read?
A: Ask.com said XML is not human readable, so not right now.
Yahoo said if all the content is also available in text, if the person has flash off, then ok.

Q: What are the most significant steps I can get my new site doing well, as opposed to the old site. Old site to new site? Domain the same, URLs are different I guess.
A: Google said, 301 the old URLs to the new URLs. Make a new sitemaps file.
Yahoo agreed with Google. Submit an old site map if you have the 301s to the one to one mapping.
Ask.com same.
MSN said they MSDN network, and they did tons of work to 301 from old URLs to new ones (live.com)

Some more basic Qs that I wont cover right this second. I am sorry, Ill save the battery on this computer for others. I will leave early. Hoping the next session is good.

Q: Are misspellings a black hat thing?
A: MSN said it is based on how it was designed and the detail. If it was done for search engines, then don't do it. If it was done for users, then possibly, it is ok. Also search engines invest in spell checkers.
Google said, he agrees, if you are adding text to the bottom of the pages just for search engines then avoid that technique.
Yahoo and Ask agree.
Chris added, if you have misspellings, then it is not professional.

Q: Someone asks Google about how do I get Google to show site links under the main listing?
A: Google says it is purely algorithmic and he doesnt know a way to get them to show up.

K I am done with this session...

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

WebProNews is shooting video all week at SES Chicago and they have recently posted an excellent one named SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank. Here are my notes, the video is about 18 minutes.

Rand asks is the duplicate content filter = duplicate content penalty?
"There is no penalty" but there is some type of "filtering" going on, Google picks the best page (at least they hope so).

Does Google care about the code to text ratio? Google doesn't care that much about this.

Which sitemaps file format should you use? It depends on how easy it is for you to make these files, totally depending on your coding level. The XML file might be best, because you have optional data that you can string along. More tidbits in there, also covered in sessions this week. She said sitemaps are more about crawling than rankings.

Is the PageRank in Sitemaps tools more updated than the toolbar? She said the data in sitemaps is more accurate and more up-to-date than the toolbar.

Will we see inlink data in Sitemaps? Vanessa said, she thinks it would be awesome.

David Naylor said Sitemaps is a poor choice for good SEOs, SEOs should be more than capable to get your site indexed. Your thoughts Vanessa? She said, why do you have to choose, everything is important.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Marcia at a WebmasterWorld thread writes that Google Checkout is "washing affiliate links/tracking and not tracking those that are tracked with cookies, so that affiliates won't get paid for sales made by customers they send to merchants using Google Checkout." This is not a small thing at all.

Matt Cutts of Google replied to the thread after first spotting it at Threadwatch stating;

I posted this over on TW too, but wanted to make sure I said it here as well: I escalated this to the Google Checkout folks as soon as I heard about it, so I know they're looking to see if there's anything they can do pretty quickly to help on this issue.

So it appears it is not by design but an accidental by product of Google's most recent upgrade.

I assume more is to come with this major issue. There are enough speculation around Google hating affiliates, this just fuels that more.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Simple questions, deserve simple answers, don't they? What is the best way to contact someone at Google?

Well, that may look like a simple question, but trust me, it is not. Getting in touch with someone at Google to help you with a problem you might have on your site, is typically not easy for the average webmaster. So here are some tips I read or know about based on what I have seen over the years.

Oh, trust me, it is getting much easier to communicate with Google and the other search engines.

Best Way To Contact Google:

1. Go to Google Webmaster Help at Google Groups and call out Adam Lasnik's name (kidding on Adam's name, but Googlers are always responding and reading these posts, title your posts effectively, so the proper Googler can read it)
   
2. Sign up at Webmaster Central and use the forms there to contact Google (they will trust you more)
   
3. Come to a search conference and speak to a search rep, often it is better to talk to a less well known search rep, they are more likely to be frank with you and they may have less on their plate
   
4. Post a question at WebmasterWorld or Search Engine Watch Forums or sometimes DigitalPoint Forums
   
5. Become friends with someone who is already in contact with search reps
   
6. Try emailing Google (but that may get you no where)
   
7. Have Google send you aspirin with a great blog post
   
8. Get slashdotted and have Matt Cutts react
   
9. Sue Google over anti-trust allegations and ask for their secret sauce like Kinderstart has done in the past
   
10. Pray to the Google Pray tag
    

Those are the ideas off the top of my head. I think they are in order of what might work best.

Good luck in your pursuit to contact Google!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a great featured thread at WebmasterWorld on the discussion of what details should you keep track of in a changelog when making upgrades and enhancements to your web site? Now, most of you may know that many of the coding changes can be tracked in a versioning system, one of the most well known versioning systems on the web is CVS (Concurrent Versions System), that helps keep track of all changes made to the code on the site. Most development houses use a form of CVS or version tracking.

But I do not believe it tracks everything. Things like domain name host changes, database updates, new links, and so on. So that is why it is important to set up your own methodology to track these changes. You can either do it in an Excel spreadsheet or build out a custom workflow for your employees to work through, to guarantee (or assist) the process of tracking these changes.

So what is recommended to track in the SEO game? Here are some ideas pulled from the WebmasterWorld.

• every change to robots.txt (CVS can handle this)
• every change to htaccess (or Internet Services Manager in IIS)
• site-wide template changes (especially menu changes) (CVS can handle this)
• DNS and hosting changes
• new outbound links
• ad purchases and run-times
• Server updates (especially reboots or outages)
• Config files
• Firewall block list

There are many more ideas of what you should track in the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

He starts off with some jokes, I think people giggle to be nice. ;-)

He explains that January 2005 was a huge month. With the CES, Google, Yahoo, etc. were there and it made him think that it is not just web, it is searching for anything. (I like to note that Ask.com was not at that show). As search marketers this might be scary. But don't be. If your a search marketer, you understand Google, and it can be applied to other things. Microsoft was at CES, and this is Microsoft's show and Google and Yahoo came in and there is this war there. He goes over Microsoft claims on search. Yahoo, Susan (CFO then), gave some realistic guidance, saying that it was not Yahoo!'s goal to be number one.

Danny now realized that his slides were not up. I honestly tried making faces and hand gestures at Danny to tell him, but I guess he did not notice us little people. :)

Yahoo said they are happy being number two and maintaining market share. Danny said that is a victory for Yahoo, to maintain share against Google and others.

Danny shows slides on which search engine has what number of share and he compares hitwise, netratings and comscore's data. He then shows Google's data alone. Google is getting incremental gain, a general slope upwards, based on all three data aggregators. Yahoo held share and maybe gained a bit, that is good. Microsoft did not have a great year, downward slope. No slide for Ask.com?

The Microsoft Challenge:
- Building From Scratch (Erik Selberg said we are not yet better, bit no longer laughable)
- Will IE7 help produce gain?
-- Danny doesn't think so, but Google and Yahoo is worried. Danny is sick of this topic. He gives his reasoning that he has given time and time again.
- Will verticals help?
-- Maybe live local is hot, image search scratchpad innovative.

Video Killed the Search Star?
- Search is boring, hard work, pennies on the dollar (Danny doesnt find it boring)
- There is suspected money in those videos
- Google Video launched in January
- YouTube popularity explodes, leading to Google's $1.6 billion purchase last month

Video Search = Video on Demand
- Video search not to spidering or reading "inside" of video
-- Instead, it's about video on demand
-- That Colbert Report you missed, I want to find it now
-- That viral video I heard about, where it is?
-- Google and Yahoo, you submit video, Yahoo did spider, but they now also allow submission
- Make bandwidth available
-- Encourages new content people can't afford to boost

Video Ads Not Search Ads
- Search ads you want to see
- Video ads you do not ask for it
- You may get top dollars on video ads
- Same with Google Audio, Print ads, etc.

- He showed the Time Warner quote about auctioning things, and makes fun of it, see Danny's past presentations for those thoughts...
- AdWords Versus AuctionWords :)
- Search is more about wanting things now and not being given something to want later...
- S'more repetitive slides, Ill link to the WebmasterWorld PubCon show or go to the archives to get the most recent Danny Keynote from PubCon Vegas 2006.

Reverse Broadcasting... see previous session...

Skipping here a bunch more, all covered in keynote from a few weeks ago.

He shows Google's stock quote over 500, now its a bit low. In January, people were saying Google is done. It is no bubble, Danny said. Then all the legal issues will kill Google; click fraud, copyright issues.

Video Disputes
- Money set aside from YouTube in case settlements needed, $200 million
-- Copyright over video will get solved
-- DMCA irony; studios don't like it, since it's so easy to copy and time consuming to file.

Crawling Disputes
- AFP sued over news content
- Belgians sue over news content
- Smaller markets
- He jokes about this, how they want Google, but in fact, they want Google to pay them
- Two groups already made a deal with Google over content

My Indexing Wishlist
- Search Engines, PErmissions and moving forward in copyright battles (on daggle.com)
- Allow indexing without permission
- Make caching opt-in
- Stop scanning books that are in copyright
- Work to extend the system (ACAP)

Amazing Changes
- Google Sitemaps & Webmaster Central
- Yahoo Site Explorer
- Search engines have united around common format (robots.txt, nofollow, sitemaps.org)
- Weather reports keep coming
- Bot identification and authentication from Google and Microsoft (Ask also allows it also, i think)
- An entire new ear, all from site owners speaking up
- Google does not see all SEOs as the enemy

January's Privacy Surprise
- Bush administration wants search records from engines
-- Google says no, and Ask.com complains they weren't Ask (everyone laughed)
-- Danny makes ABC's nightline
-- It can't get any bigger than this...
-- NY Times with AOL story on that woman who they tracked down by unique ids of search queries, big slip up

Privacy Challenge
- AOLs release of anonymous search data
- Still, nothing really has changed

Danny was way over time so he jumped a bit.

- Censoring China
- MLK link bomb
- BMW banned for cloaking
- Stanford does paid links, so does Washington Post
- Issues with ranking ads by "quality"
- Search trends via Google Trends
- Yahoo Answers grows while Google Answers closes

- Rebecca Leib is now editor and chief of SEW
- Search Engine Land is new venture
- Daily SearchCast
-- Podcast
- Search Engine Strategies
-- Charing NTY, co chairing San Jose, and will participate in Chicago

Open Forum now..

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Measuring & Converting Track

Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One

Build a user-friendly site and chances are you've also built a search engine friendly site. Learn how good usability can help your human visitors plus bring in the search traffic.

Moderator:
Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink - scheduled but not here

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, GrantasticDesigns.com
Matthew Bailey, President, Site Logic Marketing

Gord Hotchkiss moderates. In early days seo and usability were at war. SE's are smarter and marketers are smarter. Whats right for SE's is right for users as well. Introduces Shari, as a "guru of usability" Shari is wearing the princess hat, it looks like, that Liana Evans had in her pile of Hatbait hats.

ST= Shari Thurow
MB = Matt Bailey

If you do it for the users, its good for the engines. Goals are search usability overview, components of search usability and a case study. Search usability vs web sites usability. Myths and misconceptions. User confidence. Website usability. She's a big of Jakob Nielsen. A quality attributes that accesses how easy user interfaces or web pages are to use. Website usability is not about a focus group. Focus measures peoples opinions. There's a group mentality and they'll say things they don't want really believe. Assign a task instead. Do they complete the task. Web site usability is a balance between user goals and business goals. Addresses all search behaviors, not only querying behavior. Your website has to meet business goals but you have to make people happy too. Search usability addresses all types of search behaviors. Querying, browsing, surfing, foraging, scanning, reading, berrypicking, pogo sticking,...these are search behaviors. Not a linear process.

Search usab. scent of info, sense of place, user confidence...scent is textual and graphical cues that people use to decide what path is interesting or desirable. SE's use term highlighting is to help users feel confident. They highlight from meta descriptions, title tags. Its not part of the algorithm. It's a usability aid. Relevancy and encourging clicks to your site are how website usability serves engines. Where are you, what are you viewing, whose site are you visiting, are parts of an 8-second test she uses for a page to test for good usability. She found peoples eyes go to the center of the page, not the top. How do you get back and where have you been are other things to test a page for. Embedded text links are related keywords in the content. Does a page appear keyword focused.

Information archit. always should come first. Do keyword research and categorizaton of info. People are looking for information. Site nav is part of the user interface. It should contain keywords that people use when searching. Does a page provide a sense of place without the content? Look at the navigation, headings, highlighted link labels. She shows second and third level groupings of information. She tested for sense of place. Get rid of navigation and ask what page are you viewing? The navigation scheme should support the information architecture.

Interface. Every site should have horizontal and vertical cross linking. Page layout is important. Cross linking is internal. Link development is external. Breadcrumb links are vertical links (hierarchial). Provide you are here cues. Make links keyword focused. Help visitors form a mental model of your web site. Don't remove underlines in links. It communicates it is a link. Horizontal cross links are embedded text links. Related links to news, articles, etc. Alphabetical links (the abcdefg, etc). They provide access and are appropriate for glossaries. Alternate links. Sitemap should part of global sitemap. When you create one, describe to visitors what these links are for. Put keywords on there. URL structure is important. Hypens are better than underscore. Characters are problems. Urls with words are easy to remember, rather than the ones that are dynamically generated. Directories vs subdomains. Both are SE friendly. URLS are part of the interface.

"Web site usability is extremely important for receiving high quality link development (popularity)."

MB:

The perception is that usability and seo don't get along. We both want people to find our site and do what we want them to do. If they can't find it, it doesn't exist. If the user can't find it, its not there. If not in the SE's, its not there. Usability homepage should have clear directions. SEO makes homepage links out to the rest of the site. Keyword focused navigation. Use keywords for how to name categories, name products, help users find your stuff. People should see a reason to stay on your site and get their question answered. Shows a site with two choice - shop now or enter my site. Everybody laughs. This creates fear in the user mind. Things they'll go to the wrong place. If you click go to shop, you get directions on how to shop and review policies before you buy. Shows a slide on Fish ' Flush, toilet aquarium. Its one big image. No content. Won't rank well in SE's. Some sites focus on one specific product on the homepage, even if they sell a lot of them. What do your users look for? Whats important to them? You want to match their expectation. If you have Adsense on your site, you business model confused. Why display your competiters sites? Shows a site that sells wine racks but the right column is adsense. The navigation links can't be seen due to poor colors. He shows the Cingular site because it is focused on what its customers are looking for. It has a section for existing customers and new customers. It doesn't rely on the main navigation as sole way to get around the website. Shows a wine site with lots of links that are very descriptive, offer ideas on how to better find you are looking for. SEO offers multiple cat links w/ keywords. Usab. shows established heirarchy of categories. You want to do customer based navigation.Know what they're looking for. Text size is not an SEO concern but is vital for people, like if you have a senior market. SEO is the alt att's. Don't try to stuff product categories on one page. It dilutes the page. User will think what they want isn't there.

Shows a page with lot of different fonts and various images in unorganized layout. Distractions. Page full of noise. Shows a product page that forces user to use back button or back level link to start all over for a new search. Not easy to find sub categories. You can expose more products by organized groupings. Product pages. Call products what they are. No fancy names. Offer information about products. Specs don';t sell products, benefits sell products. Show how to meet or create a need. Then fill it. Use keywords when you write this content. This is the SEO side of usability. Use problem solver keywords. Help them solve problems. What did I help you overcome. Ask your users how you helped them. Do not send PPC people to your homepage. Go to the page for product you are trying to sell. Users will stay and follow.

Shows a page for Boudreaux's Butt Paste. Its really a page for diaper rash. It's optimized for butt paste. You have to call the product what it is. Not just the brand. Shows a page of USB Sushi. What is being sold, usb or sushi? Repetition will cause people to overlook. Get into your analytics. Drill down and separate keyword groups. Find conversion rate for each group. How did they find you and what are looking for. People use different terms to look for the same thing. International sales, don't get lot in the translation. Add address and shipping.

(Even after Matt left, people were still laughing at his slides.)

The room is so empty right now, modding is J. Rohrs.

Heather Frahm, co-founder, Catalyst on-line

She showed an example of a high cholesterol paid search ad, by pfizer. She shows examples of the ads, who uses what text and keywords and trademarks and terms in the ads. Using diseases in ads, can be an issue with FDA.. ?

Fair Balance Act
- Make sure your landing pages have all the safety info for that ad
- There are many rules here

Anything that is visible or not visible needs to go through regulatory in the pharmaceutical business. Most regulated healthcare have guidelines on how the content is written. There are cases where you need to have big words in the page, but that may be against rules (the language, by rules, need to be very simple). Misspellings can also be an issue with rules. There was a large query volume about a disease that doesnt have symptoms, so they made a page that said there were no symptoms. You need to explain search to marketers, regulators and legal.

They try to only get links from US base sites, because most these companies are set up in the US. Make sure the links you get don't make bold claims about you. All text links must be approved.

Press Releases can generate a lot of links, but typically the regulators dont like to link to the main site. It is dangerous to make those bold statements, that link to the brand site. So try to convince them of the importance. If not, then make sure to optimize the site that is getting those links and add call to actions on those pages to the main site.

Pharma has tons of assets. So make sure you leverage all those assets, but through the rules set forth by the FDA.

Ward Tongen from Medbonic is now up.
He posted an FDA Warning letter he received back in 2000. He said you do not want to get one of these letters. The FDA regulates the medical industry, and other organizations may regulate yours. Go to the FDA Warnings Letter Archive (I think over here.)

Before they developed an SEO process they had an "over the wall process." They wrote copy, sent it to legal, legal sent it back and they would then try to optimize the content after it was sent back. But this was not ideal. They had poorly optimizes pages, and reapproval was needed often. Expectations were often not met. So they...

After- (higher up the food chain). They worked with the copyrighters directly, before they even put pen to paper. A lot of time content is repurposed, so they have to get involved early. If you can work within the business process, it will help.

PPC - The Approval Sandbox
Anything inside the sandbox goes through legal, anything outside you do not need legal (such as budgets, etc.)

They use blogging as a tactic, believe it or not, because of all the regulatory issues. This also goes through legal.

The blog is at http://www.insidespine.com/, last updated October 30th, I guess those legal people are slow.

Martin Murray from Interactive Return to talk about the Drinks Industry
Starts off with the company pitch...

Industry Regulatory Bodies:
- Century Council
- Distilled Spirits Council of the US
- The European Forum for Responsible Drinking
- The Portman Group

Ethical Marketing Guidelines
- Alcohol strength of it should not be the main theme
- Don't promote buy one get one free
- Age should be kept into mind
- No association with drugs, sex, anti-social stuff, etc.

When his client moved from marketing to online marketing, they were in for a big shock, he said.

Google has a content policy, part of that, they do not allow you to market alcohol in AdWords. But AdWords for wine is ok, not wine or hard liquor. Yahoo does allow allow it, so does MSN.

With organic search marketing, all pages need to go through an age verification form. Search engines can not submit their age. He said there are black hat things you can do, but its not so good. It is a big challenge for them.

There are responsible drinking messages throughout the web site...

Search Marketing vs Branding Objectives, there is a conflict often.

Search Marketing Techniques include;
- Organic
-- content
-- linking
-- etc
- PPC
-- Yahoo
-- MSN
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Offline marketing

Success:
- Shows some queries they rank well for

Liana Evans from Commerce360 from the retail industry
She has a slide that shows the area the FTC regulates and she will touch on some.

She promised to send me her slides, Ill post it later, lots of good details in it.

Update: Here is Liana Evans great presentation as a PDF document.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

The eleventh edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. We were airing this live at SES Chicago, during the cocktail hour last night. We had hundreds of special guests all around us, some that got on the air included David Wallace and Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz). We talked about our third anniversary at the Search Engine Roundtable, we talked about the future of Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan and Chris Boggs, we also discussed various important topics of the week with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft MSN Live, and Ask.com. Oh, and I think I have about 4 Yo Yos left on me in Chicago, first come first serve (you can hit up Chris for some Yo Yos also). 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. SES Chicago '06 Today - Live Coverage
   
2. We Are Three: Search Engine Roundtable's 3rd Birthday
   
3. Danny Sullivan Says Goodbye To Search Engine Watch
   
4. Chris Boggs & AussieWebmaster to Blog at Search Engine Watch
   
5. The Why & How Google Handles Hacked Sites
   
6. Ask Gets Fancy With AskCity
   
7. Webmasters Discuss Possible Changes to Google AdWords Quality Score
   
8. Google Testing Showing AdWords Quality Score Data to Advertisers
   
9. Grandfathered Bids in Yahoo! Search Marketing Do Not Carry To Panama
   
10. Google Answers Closes Up Shop
    
11. MSNbot Adds Method For Verification
    
12. Google & Matt Cutts Magic Search Spam Fighting Tool
    
13. New Sitemaps Protocol May Hurt Your Listings in Yahoo! Search?
    
14. Google Update via Data Refresh 11/28
    
15. Yahoo! Pulls Tax Information Update Function From YPN Portal Temporarily
    
16. Google Cache Archiving More of Your Page?
    
17. Google Terminates AdWords Account for "Cookie Spidering"?
    

This is what we looked like during the show, I am not sure what I was looking at...

Photo Credits SmallBusinessSEM.com

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 11: Google Spam Tools, Danny & SEW, Chris Boggs & SEW, Ask AskCity, MSN Bot, Yahoo Topics & Much More"

This session is moderated by Detlev Johnson who is Director of Consulting for Position Technologies.

Detlev begins by welcoming people to the session which aims to shed some light on what link baiting and online viral marketing is, and more importantly - how it can help you. He introduces Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz who takes the stand.

Rand starts by discussing "Linkbait Portals" which are commonly targeted as a platform for performing online viral marketing. The portals receiving the most traffic include Digg, Fark and Slashdot. The Linkbait audience is driven by very specific passions, on some sites - a few key people decide whether you're mentioned or not. No matter what your marketing, make sure that you do not lose focus on the target audience. The design and feel of a baited page should be attractive although not too promotional. Create a reputation - a strong profile at the social media websites can control what gets published. Use attention grabbing headlines; highlight topics within the bait which might be particularly attractive to the audience. Don't shoot yourself in the foot - spamming Digg from the same IP or geographical area can get you blocked from the portal; the same users "digging" the same material looks suspicious and is tracked by social networks.

Resources for the Dedicated Linkbaiter:
www.pronetadvertising.com
www.seobook.com
www.seomoz.org
www.wolf-howl.com
buzz.stumbleupon.com

He thinks that the search engines including Google do endorse link baiting as it's about building great content which the internet community will love.

Cameron Olthuis from Advantage Consulting Services is up next. Track your buzz and make sure that it does not get out of control, good buzz could end in bad PR. You can track your "buzz" using tools such as Technorati, Feed Reader and many comment tracking software. Whether the buzz about your company is good or bad, respond to the comments and help the users to understand your point of view or correct any misconceptions. You can also monitor competitor buzz, by using their negative PR to promote why your company is different and better. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check people linking to your site and finding out what they're talking about. Linkbait is not just for the techie geeks, ringtones for example was plugged on Digg using a "How to create ringtones from MP3 files" viral post. Linkbait should be a continual process and not a one time campaign.

Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide starts a presentation explaining why to use link baiting. The cost of link baiting is getting the perfect idea, not the marketing. Once you get the idea, there's almost no cost to release it into the world. When starting off with brainstorming, ask yourself - What sparks passion in your customers? What hasn't been done before (be original)? How will your idea benefit your users? Ideas spread because the audience think they are important and want others to know about them.

You can give away products for people to test, such as giving free trials/samples to bloggers. Make it easy to spread the word, Hotmail for example added a promotion for the service to the bottom of each email sent by the user. Embrace a successful campaign - Starbucks release a coupon offer which spread more then they expected and then cancelled the coupons, a competitor then turned Starbucks bad PR into good PR for them by accepting the Starbucks coupons in their stores. Be prepared for large growth - that your website can handle all of the traffic and that you can honour every offer that you advertise. There are 2 blogs per second being created, these are the perfect places to get your name out to. Learn from the news, don't repeat the mistakes of other companies.

Quick Tips:
- Offer a genuine resource for free
- Play off of people's ego's
- Consider a "Blog Carnival"
- Become a regular commenter on blogs
- Offer limited time exclusive offers (such as at Woot.com)

Chris Boggs takes the stand and explains about the company Avenue A Razorfish and gives a shout out to Search Engine Roundtable and also mentions the "link farm" page on Cartoon Barry which lists all the industry websites. Rand is also given credit for his blog post listing the top destinations for Search Marketing information. Mentioning a number of search sites, Chris shows that in the marketing vertical, sites and blogs aren't afraid to share link love. The "My Super Bowl Proposal" viral is a great example of viral marketing - someone in the community reaching out for their help.

Some less successful examples of viral marketing include the Did-It CEO quote that SEO is not worth spending time or money on. He then goes on to show how to check who links to you so that you can find out what people are talking about - good or bad. When Neil Patel from ACS wrote a post on "My 50 Favourite Blogging Resources" he received over 4000 Diggs, it doesn't have to be controversial to be controversial - just interesting. ShaveAnywhere.com was a website build off the back of a survey which discovered that 50% of men use a razor to shave place other then their face. In 4 weeks they received over 750,000 unique visits and they cancelled the rest of the marketing campaign as it could never match the traffic and buzz already created.

Chris gives some great other viral marketing examples, which can be found at http://avenuea-razorfish.com/presentations/linkbaiting/

An excellent Questions and Answers session which turned into a mini baiting "Site Clinic" then followed.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Measuring & Converting Track

Converting Visitors Into Buyers

Getting visitors to your web site is only half the battle. To be victorious, you need them to convert into customers by making purchases, signing up for services or fulfilling whatever are your goals. Learn about making this conversion. The latter part of the session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about changing them to improve visitor conversion.

Moderator:
Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers:
Michael Sack, Director, SEM technology & Development, Idearc Media Corp.
Howard Kaplan, Vice President of Strategic Development, Future Now, Inc.

AD = Allan Dick
MS = Michael Sack
HK = Howard Kaplan

AD is moderator and launches into the session. How to persuade users when they ignore search marketing.

MS - No power point presentation available for download. The challenge is to go back to job and put principles into action. Alot of information to cover in a very short time. He wants to outline problems we face. Marketers are concerned channels are eroding? 80% of businesses will invest in the web. Perhaps its the customers not responding to marketing? Customers are tuning us out. There's an erosion of mass marketing model. Costs on the rise. Cost of traffic is on the rise. Cost per click is up over 80% than last year. Customers are actively avoiding marketing and hype. Traffic may increase but conversions are low and disappointing. Customers leave w/o getting what they came for.

Study the top exit pages. Look at data, Look at scerario analysis reports. Highly recommended to get the data but what does it tell us about the people? Their fears, dreams, needs, wishes. How do we define conversion. The only thing they care about is how they want to buy. Shows a hilarious example from Joe Dirt movie where the seller isn't selling what the buyer wants. The marketer is selling what the marketer wants to sell because its what he likes.

We're moving away from push to pull marketing. Word of mouth is "Muscular beast". Aim for interconnectivity. Talks about behavorial sciences, like Pavlov. Behavior studies factor into marketing. Take your consumer, your marketing, ring the bell a number of time and you get the conditioned response. He used dogs becasue their digestive track is similar to humans. Runs an audio file of comedy skit on Pavlov and his tests on dogs. Why not cats? Day one, cat fu...ked off, day 2 rang door. day 3 cat had eaten earlier, day 4 cat stolen bad cheese, day 5 cat put a paw on bell made a thunk noise, day 6, I hate food. Customers behave more like dogs than cats. The cat has a staff, and a dog has master. Who controls the bell? We do. We do what we want, when we want. We are a volunteer in this process.

If conversion is important due to rise in traffic costs and consumers are ignoring marketing and they are in control, how to convert them? Conversion is a choice your visitors make. They click or not. Persuasion is a different story. Conversion is a reflection of customer satisfaction. They must achieve their goals. Give them the answer to their question. Help them scratch their itch. What is relevance? He talks about the scent of information. Talks about Jared Spool study and study he did on information scent. If words were desc. they clicked on it. If prices, they clicked. If generic keyword, no click. Trigger words are important here. A web page gives them what they seek or gives link to where it is. If not relevant to user goals, they click the back button.

The problem is "users". Usability is a software metaphor. Users are clearly volunteers in the process. What's the intent behave the keyword? Example, "web analytics consulting" doesn't convert. Describing what that is, will. Add words like "Fully customized" to the description. But what action do you want them to take? The goal is create positive scent. Scent fuels persusasive momentum. It keep consumer engaged and moving thru the process. Study drop off data. Why do they bail after 1 or 2 clicks? What is ave number of clicks in a shopping cart process? Likely more than 80% more than 3 clicks and consumers bail. Make offers clear, precise. Keep reaffirming they are in the right place. It's not just eye candy. It's a formula you are trying to aim for. How do you plan persuasive momemtum.

who are we trying to persuade? What is the action? What does taht person need in order to feel confident? These 3 things are key to persuasive momemtum. (try typing that fast!) There are ways to plan the user experience. Uncover your personas, plan their journey through scenerios, story the creative, test effectivness, implement, measure scenarios to optimize results. Personas help predictive models. You need to understand motivation and can plan for the outcome. Create persuasive scenerio funnel. Driving point to funnel point to way points to points of resolution. (Had a diagram of this.) Do they know what they are looking for? Try to figure out the angles of approach they have? He describes a few user personas. He uses a storytelling technique (I happen to know this. He doesn't call it that. Instead, he read the "Story" of each persona.) It's a good example of how you can create someone like a methodical persona. How would he react to what things on your site? Will they read copy? Or will the persona want the image? Some want copy written to them. Two people will look at and approach and respond differently to the exact same page. They have planned in advance for these two people by creating user personas in advance. Measure actual behavior to expected behavior. Customer satisfaction is key.Give them what they're looking for. What motivates that cat? What makes them decide to buy?

Resources AB Testing white paper, email him for a copy.

MS:

Apologizes for not having video and audio in his presentation and won't take as long as preceding speaker. Two sides of lifting conversions. Outside - in. Target keywords. They need to be able to find the site. Find right keywords. Make content findable by SE's. Other marketing avenues. It's more like pull vs push environment. You have to get them through the site. Correctly target your visitors. You will need to keep working on this and improving on it. What works today will not work tomorrow. Put time in testing and analytics. Get the site ready. Target your traffic and landings. Track and learn. Fix your shopping cart. These are 4 steps to improving conversions. Do not make it 20 steps to buy a hat (he had a client that did this.)

Compare your site to the best of the best sites. What makes their site converts. They will brag. Take them apart and try to learn what they have done. Copy them. No rule against that. Don't steal code. See their structure. Navigation.Messaging. How can you adapt this to yours. Emulate best practices. Don't be proud. Identify conversion points. Measure them all. Do you want them to call you? Every magician knows in advance the card you are going to pick.

Control the Experience. Why is the milk in the back of the supermarket? He asked a manager why that is. Because we paid consultants hundreds of thousands to tell us to put it there. This is science. Every store is watching you. They are studying your patterns. They are controlling your experience. What happens online? Can we emulate this? People want a similar experience. They don't want complex navigation. They don't want to get lost. Few companies have gotten homepages right. They are usually a poorly implemented idea. We assume people will click all the way down. They can be info overkill. Too many links, like over 50. Confusing navigation doesn't match the experience in the store. Imagine a store doing this to you. If they had a very large shelf with every product on it at once. This is what ecommerce does.

Showed KMart site. There are over 100 links on the homepage. Where do people go? It was hard to find the search button? Its easy to get lost. If you know Mike is walking into a store and he is more likely to buy if the milk in aisle 6 then you put the milk in aisle 6. What if you satisfy every single customer? You can't know what every sgl customer will want. Leverage the medium. Web is dynamic.Use landing pages. Put the milk anywhere, anytime. Don't need to know who walks into the store. The web enables other methods of ID. Use virtual doorways. one door in real world. Many doors in virtual world. We can use several keyword phrases in search engines to attract the different types of users. Route them this way. Personalization doesn't worl. Groupings of people does. We all behave in similar ways in choosing products. Understand what brings groups into your site. Use good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self id, good search function. Those are elements of a good homepage. Let people search your site. Use market research, make your site fit peoples searches, you will not change how they search.

Target right keywords. Use specific search phrases. Makes for higher conversions and better ROI. Target more search keyphrases. Stem popular keywords, use match type options, comb your logs. It's what they think, not what you think. How are people searching today? Majority of search terms are still one and two word phrases. The long tail is more desc. phrases, lower cost, higher predictability. Expand the "tail" by expanding the keywords. Target more and more phrases. Try to understand WHEN they are shopping for you. Time of day matters. Days, weeks, months have seasonality to them. You can target certain terms for certain times of day. They use heat maps to understand hot zones. They spend more money at certain times of the day on certain words and less at other times. Identify when you get the most conversion times. Target landing. Direct traffic to specific destinations. Direct users to desired content. Control how they navigate the site. Implement test analyzi adjust cycles. Determine best click paths. You want to understand the path people use on your site. Target landing by their intent. DVD players, not saying much from that searcher. Test different landing pages to see if they need more education. What is the best content to show. If they search for model, show them the model of that model. If they add "compare" to the search phrase, show them the list of all DVD models with different pricing. But keep testing the landing page results. He showed an example of testing 3 different versions of a product page to see which one converted better. Keep the one that converts the best.
Must be able to track keywords, see click path, track direct and deferred conversion. Understand the impact of keywords as they relate to conversions. SEarch stacks and assists are terms used prior to conversion. Relative contribution. List of terms and how often used to help convert. Track offline conversion too. Include that into your data. You may be doing then you think you are. Elements of a good shopping cart. Few steps, 4 or less. Ask for the least info as poss. Privacy. Let people know where they are in the process. When will they get it. Don't hide things from people. Don't hide charges. Make it savable. Let them return. Give option to enter email to remind them about it. Giftable. Be nice about error messages. No surprise handling and processing fee. Huge reason for abandonment.

Q & A (some quick points)

Show of hands for first time visitors to an SES showed a large number.

You can put tracking codes on site to track online shopper who calls. Free shipping really boosts conversions. Offline presentation notes are available by MS at his email address. Email him to get the info on tracking offline conversions from a website. You can track how many times someone searched for your site by certain terms and the additional terms they add to the keywords they use. They call it a search stack. By use of cookies and other things, they know how people are finding them, and refining their search terms to get to the site.

Human contact is very important on sites. Add a phone number. People wonder why Live Chat and email and phone and etc. The reason is that people have many different preferences for making contact. Don't ask for a lot of information from them beforehand. How to people choose to interact with you is important to understand. They want to feel confident about it. Let them know the types of information you can provide if they make contact. For law firms, increased calls for no charge and anonymous calls. No personal information. Other incentives are no risk, no obligation.

Shari Thurow from Grantanstic Design

CSS is an html addition allowing webmasters to control design, placement of elements, etc. You can use it to change the look of a site very quickly and easily. It also decreases the download time of the page. It is also easier to control the exact positioning of elements on a page. CSS formatted text links easily communicate visited/unvisited links.

CSS Disadvantages:
- End users must have font installed on their computers or the page will not display as designers intended
- Usability testing and focus groups might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers
- CSS formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page, making the content appear unfocused.

Issues with CSS:
- Text formatting
-- Text wrapping
-- White on White is dangerous
-- Don't make all your content H1 tags with CSS
-- Alt text in an h1 wont work
- CSS Layers
-- X, Y, and Z coordinates
-- Ways of hiding text and links inside of CSS invisible layers
-- She said the search engines know the position of all your text on your page, so don't try to trick them
-- Stacking content on top of content, typically with a flash box on top of a text box

She then shows examples. She then says do not exclude the CSS style directory in your robots.txt file because it may raise a red flag and search engine reps want to be able to get to that content...

Jim McFadyen from CriticalMass is next up.
Everyone wants AJAX on their sites, but they don't necessarily know what it means. AJAX is Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It allows the browser to communicate with the server without refreshing the page. It may improve user experience. AJAX is comprised of the JavaScript CMLHtttpRequest Object. It uses XHTML and CSS often. AJAX is not a programming language.

AJAX is nor supported by search engines.

Search Engines and AJAX Do Not Mix, spiders do not run JavaScript. Search engiens cant see AJAX delivered content. AJAX created navigation wont be crawled.

Every page must be HTML, every page must have its content on the page, all links must already be in the HTML, and test this by turning off JavaScript in your browser.

Web developers can use (non-AJAX_ JavaScript to update the anchors on the page, and change the functionality to AJAX calls. This ensures that the AJAX will work, we know it will work because AJAX calls were set up by the JavaScript, which search engines are not capable of...

Ensure baseline application is built first and then you can take AJAX to take the user experience one step forward.

AJAX breaks the normal browser refresh
- This means content not necessarily corresponding to URL
- No addition to the browser history
- No history, no back button

Fix this by Add Unique page IDs to each Page:
- Use JavaScript to update the URL using #
- Use JavaScript to fake an entry into the browser history
- But is that a duplicate content issue? But typically # signs do not count as duplicate content, they ignore that.
- Make sure not to cloak, it is very easy to cloak in this case, dont do it

Bad AJAX:
- Gucci.com
- Looks nice
- Most content is served through AJAX
- AJAX navigation
- He then turned off JavaScript and the page was blank
- Bad

Good AJAX:
- Amazon Diamond Search (www.amazon.com/gp/gsl/search/finder?ie-UTF8&productGroupID-loose_diamonds
- He shows off the diamond search feature with sliders
- When he turns off JavaScript it shows a simpler version of the AJAX version

Scott Orth from Selytics to talk about Web 2.0
He explains web 2.0 is hard to define, he gives his conceptual explanation of it... How you interact with customers...

Case Study on Carrier North America Home Comfort:
- Problem was the site was very static, not much in terms of being interactive, slow, conversions bad
- They did the paper prototyping and focus groups to plan the new navigation
- Interactive tools to enhance the user experience (polls, sliders, cost savers, forms, etc.)
- New site was mainly built in CSS
-- Makes it easier to update
-- Loads faster
-- Reduces Code size
-- Allows you to do a lot more with the site
-- Tables caused errors, they got rid of it
-- They used H1s and H2s and standard content

2005 vs. 2006
Size 260KB 204KB
HTML 760 250
Line 1 484 91

Results:
- 97% increase in top ten organic rankings
- Traffic jumped from search 53%
- Organic performance accounted for 73% of all search referrals
- Targeted conversions increased by 59%

Yahoo wants to make some general points:
- There is a reason why Yahoo wants it to work for a general user that doesnt have JavaScript, they want to look at the site from a "baseline."
- Yahoo will understand this stuff, they will get there, so dont assume stuff right now
- Open up your CSS so Yahoo can peak into it
- He also brought up Sitemaps as a way to also submit content (Site Explorer)
- Search engines arent built to interact with the site, like users

Google said they will also be indexing JavaScript and AJAX and CSS, so don't use it to hack. Google will walk you through it with Webmaster Console. Google's ultimate goal is for you not to worry about engines, and it is Google's job to figure it out.

Yahoo added again, again. simple user...Build it for the simple user and not the search engine.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session is moderated by Danny Sullivan, who runs Calafia Consulting and Search Engine Land.

Danny kicks off by welcoming everyone to the session which covers the process and ethics behind buying and selling links for SEO and/or traffic reasons. He asks the audience whether anyone in the audience has bought links, a nervous crowd hesitates before putting up their hands.

Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads is up first, starting off with mentioning the Link Mix - Natural Links, Directories, Link Buying, Reciprocal Linking and Link Bait. The first thing to look at when thinking of buying links from a site, is it's theme. You want to purchase for links on a site which has the same or complimentary theme. You can use Google PageRank to gage the real link value and worth of a site, although a new popular blog could have no backlinks although is very important. Patrick recommends avoiding the really high PageRank sites, as it can stand out amongst your lower PR links. Relevancy and mid-PR sites are the best properties to buy linkage from. Alexa is another general guide to whether there is any traffic going to the site. If a site is not on Alexa or has a 2,000,000+ rank, its probably not worth buying links from. The location of where a link is placed on the site is also important for not only the engines but also for direct traffic. You can use the Google SERP heat maps to see where people look when they visit the site. A good link could be located on the top right of a page, and using a varied selection of link text on each site purchased from. You should also check that the link that you've purchased is actually hardcoded and not javascript, plus also does not use a "nofollow" Meta Tag, robots.txt or href attribute. It's important to also look at what direct traffic you gain from each link via your Web Analytics package, possibly dividing the link cost by the number of unique visitors clicking through. Think Natural - make sure that links look as natural as possible, use different link text, from sites on different IPs/networks. To help increase the rank and worth of your individual product pages, use the paid links to point over to these (where it's harder to gain natural links).

Eric Ward is up next and explains that he's not against buying links, although he buys text link ads for traffic and not SEO. Paid links don't have to be just traditional style websites, look at other alternatives such as blogs. BlogAds.com offers an advertising platform purely based on blogs with niche and targeted audiences. E-zines (email/web magazines and newsletters) may not help your PageRank although could target the perfect demographic for you or your clients. Another format worth looking at is PDF documents published online, the search engines still count the links and index the pages - so why not get a link in these documents. Content networks such as Yahoo's Top Sites and Forbes Best of the Web list top websites which can't pay for placement, although a PR company could lobby for your website to be included. Eric then mentions that he now has his own newsletter with advice on links and PR, and thanks Danny for his contributions to the industry.

Thomas Bindl then takes the stand to discuss how to detect bad paid links and making sure that you get value for money from your links. He starts off by showing a Fake PR9 website and why its not always trustworthy. The example German domain is using cloaking to fool the engines into think that it's the same site as Disney. Going into some links which would not parse PageRank, Thomas first mentions JavaScript links which appear to genuine text links although actually use JS which search engines don't follow. Redirects are also use by many sites (mostly for tracking and conversion monitoring) and search engines rarely follow them. Even a real static link could be worthless, as it may contain a "nofollow" attribute. Before buying a link, visit their robots.txt file (found in the root folder) as it may be disallowing a section of the site where your link exists. Some sites use comment tags () around links so that automated link checkers see the links although the search engines or users don't see them. Take a look at the Google Cache of the page which you're looking to get a link from, to make sure that the meta tags or links don't change when viewed by the engines. You can also use the WayBackMachine on archive.org to check the history of the site and how long links tend to stay on the site. Check other paid links on the site and see if their PageRank has increased or benefited, see how long their links existed and whether there's a big rotation of sponsored links. What can happen to me if I buy links? - Your site can get kicked off the Search Engines; Your ranking is 30 positions worse (a relatively new Google penalty); You don't parse PageRank to sites which you link to.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session was contributed by Amy Edelstein of Ascent Copywriting.

It’s 8:50 am, just before what’s meant to be Danny Sullivan’s first moderated session this morning on Advanced Linking. But frankly, all the buzz over double espresso and avocado tofu vegetable breakfast wrap is…well…you all know…Danny’s big Third Door Media news release yesterday, and the mark of a landmark juncture in the Search Engine industry road. I imagine he’s going to be a little busy this morning.

What’s the buzz? People are shocked. People are stunned. People are happy. People are incredulous at Incisive Media’s seeming lack of advance knowledge. People are sentimental and genuinely appreciative of Danny’s friendship, humanity, and unquenchable passion for this rough and ready cowboy (and cowgirl) industry.

So, it’s with that caveat that I snap my laptop shut and head downstairs for the Link Building session to see just what this morning might bring.

I pass Danny in the hall, heading the opposite direction from the session he’s meant to moderate. Big smile, long stride, heading towards who know what, and still a warm connection in the midst of the bustle. That’s Danny. And that’s what we all love about this industry.

The other aspect of this industry is that search marketing always marches on. Or accelerates exponentially, morphing, innovating, evolving with the changing times.

Somehow, appropriately for this fast-paced industry, the session starts, sans Danny, with the inimitable and sardonic Mike Grehan, giving a Biblical history of links, link value, and all good things connecting, starting from the beginning of time, way back in our dim and ancient past. Circa 1994.

Grehan educates and entertains, talking about linking strategies and the deeper implications and knowledge that can be derived from linking data. From Brian Pinkerton tinkering in U of Washington’s dorm room, to Jon Kleinberg development of hubs and authorities. Then the next chapter, heading out of Genesis into the book of Search Exodus with the almighty revelation of PageRank, before which Larry Page and Sergey Brinn decreed, “we can never be spammed.” But verily, they were wrong.

As he builds a picture of the foundation of linking, Grehan than teaches us bleary-eyed seo’s about heuristics, about social network theory and its connection to connectivity properties, and an appreciation for how for example, relevancy can be built through citation analysis at the end of white papers, where who’s who can determine the quality of your link, and therefore rank.

Now just before you relegate Grehan to an anthropologist of search, he moves into some of the technical underpinnings, discussing the algorithmic bases for analysis of linked anchor text: PageRank and HITs. Before getting lost in the myriad mathematical complexities, Grehan keeps it simple. Real simple.

The buzzword is signal. What is the quality of the information coming though? How is it related to everything around it. For practical application, the take away is:

If you can get the query term to match the title text to match the anchor test than you’ve made it.

Eric Ward, the maestro of linking, took the podium. Now for anyone who doesn’t know Eric by now, you must be brand spanking new to linking. Eric, in his free-access, throw back to the love and happiness, share and share alike mindset of the 60s, makes all his hard won knowledge available on his site. Anything you missed or want to follow step-by-step, log in, it’s there.

As a little background for what you’re in store for, Eric started building links in 1993, when seo was but a twinkle in its developer’s eye. Eric made his break linking for Amazon and the rest is history.

This morning’s Ward Wisdom focused on link reclamation and holistic linking. So, what is Link Reclamation? And when do we need it?

There are times in the course of a developer’s life, when it becomes necessary for…. Ok, perhaps not as dramatic as a declaration of independence, but when current online wisdom calls for significant strategic changes, great and dramatic breaks from the past, including moving from .asp to cold fusion, changing domain names, etc. it’s important to reclaim your link equity.

In case we didn’t quite appreciate the perils of not Eric candidly took us through a rea-client example with the massive Discovery Health site, and what he encountered when Discovery changed their site structure. Lo and behold. Can’t get better link equity, then…the pain as we watch a link on a first rate recommended site, with great views, great page rank, and the thud, a click and instead of the Discovery’s health resource, a cold, dead 404 redirect.

Now, everyone knows, 301 redirect is the way to go. Don’t lose your visitors, don’t lose your link rank with the engines. And everyone lives happily ever after.

Ward Wisdom II -- Holistic Link Building:

Remember, deep and wide linking is better. Why? Simple. Engines rank sites higher that have links throughout the entire site—both home page links and deep links. Can anyone get them? Sure. Holistic links are waiting to happen, for those who are a little creative. Play around in blog directories. Subject specific blogs. Podcast directories. Audio and video directories. Believe it or not, great links from Google itself. They’re looking for great A/V content, so they’re happy to freely take and link to your video content.

Big announcement of the morning – Eric starting a free e-newsletter, with tips and tricks for all happy linkers. Sign up everyone, it’s sure to be good content.

Last but not least, Justilien Gaspard, up-and-coming link building specialist, runs through the basics for link building success.

The list is clear, complete, and comprehensible. Not earthshaking. Not rocket science. Good solid web knowledge combined with common sense, public relations 101, and long term relationship building savvy.

Here’s the low down:
Use Directories- They’re the foundation for stable links and stable visibility. Of course, older directories give better results. It’s a trust thing.

Capitalize on Vertical and Niche Directories. Go for both industry and local specific. Don’t panic with low cost membership fees. Good directories have strong link credibility, with backlinks from .gov and .edu. A little credibility can go a long way, and believe it or not, can give you a leg up especially in competitive industries like travel ore real estate. A tip: rely on backlink makeup as your primary quality indicator.

A little leg up-- vary the wording of your directory descriptions and the keywords in your anchor text. Show a little human touch.

And don’t forget blogs, wikis, forums, and influential media. There’s loads of link potential. Takes a little work. Creates a long standing impression. Make yourself an industry leader, set trends, let your voice be heard, and let what’s heard create links. Link with reporters, media directories, radio stations, and other bloggers.

There are ways and means of doing business with people that creates relationships. Don’t be shy, co-promote. Do business with other people who will link back to you. Find reviewers or critics in the industry, get them to review or test your product. When you do, presto, a real link, with content, and a relationship.

Finally, think viral. Viral and social situations used to carry all kind of noir connotations. No more. With social media, viral infections lead to more fun, more content, more link, more rank.

We finished with a little wrap up in the Q&A. We sang the swan song of the sad decline of Dmoz. A beloved monolith, covered in cobwebs and dust. For those who still hold out a link from the great, after this morning, you can put your aspirations and dreams to rest. With few category editors, and even Eric, a category editor himself unable to use his log in to edit his category for days, we’re looking at a behemoth in the industry. BUT, you can still rely on Dmoz to point you to quality businesses and approach them for backlinks. If they’re listed here, they’re reputable and have been around online for a good long span of time.

Mike admonishes, When you’re looking for links, take a brutally honest look at your own site. Make a list, check it twice. If you can’t list 10 good reasons someone would want to link to you, then ask who you built the site for and why. ☺

Todd Freisen, our stand in session moderator, ever the pragmatist, pipes in, “You can always go out there and buy some links, and that works just as well if you do it right.”

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Posted by Amy Edelstein, Ascent Copywriting.

Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating this panel, a new panel for SES.

Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media is up first.
He starts off explaining that he is a fan of affiliate marketing. They have a brand new affiliate program, they offer 15% commission. He then lists a ton of terms you cannont bid on, you cant bid more than $0.25 and you much praise the client and no bidding on client names, this is of course a joke on affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing obviously has its challenges. Affiliates can drive up bid prices, affiliates can effectively block your ads from showing up in Google AdWords, they can cause a lower volume of traffic, higher cost per acquisition. The bad thing is that clients are not able or unwilling to control their affiliates use of paid search. He shows an example for one of his clients get bidded up, 7 out of 10 links are from affiliates. Google favors affiliates in some cases, he says, because amount of historical data, higher CTR and better quality score matters. Google is making a little easier for search marketers by requiring things like unique domain names and a landing page quality factor. A case study with Sirius radio, with Google's changes, increased volume by 15% and drove higher CTRs and lower bid prices, since Google's changes went into affect. As an affiliate, you can always be harsh and say no bidding on brand terms, limit the search engines and channels, unique offers only for affiliates, no brand name in copy and don't let affiliates bid higher than the search vendors. He advocates against such tight restrictions, the 7 deadly sins of affiliate marketing book, he came up with his own. 7 Brilliant Ideas on dealing with affiliates intelligently:
(1) Ground Rules, fight the "reflex to restrict", revise inventory estimates with affiliates in the equation, create a search revenue model for affiliates and show the shortest path to the long tail.
(2) Learning from Affiliates ; closely examine affiliates that appear to be performing better than you and why are they beating you out (landing page, ad copy, larger sample, etc.)
(3) Reconnaissance Mission; monitor top affiliates keywords, landing pages and ad copy for brand compliance. SEMs: offer affiliate monitoring as a standalone service. Automated tools can help harvest the data for analysis.
(4) Are you good at sharing? Build loyalty, in exchange ask affiliates for search intelligence, ID two or three key affiliates and use them to complement your efforts and develop metrics to report on affiliates search contributions.
(5) Battle for Search Domination: use affiliate intelligently to own more SERP real estate, design search programs to boost awareness and trial, quantify benefits using branding metrics and do not offer exclusive affiliates.
(6) A Taste of Organic; run ranking reports on affiliates, educate affiliates on SEO best practices and potential pitfalls. Use them as a workaround. Train them
(7) Advocating your SEM Work: success will require solid relationships between SEM and the client and other agencies and affiliates, create a what if scenario for the client and be vocal to your client.

Mark J Rosenberg from Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross P.C.

Key Intellectual Property Issues with Affiliates:
- Trademarks
- Copyright
- Infringement
- Third Party Liability

Trademarks and Affiliates:
- Keyword issues (when you can buy trademarks, how you can, intent, etc.)
- Domain Names (cyber squatting, intent is important)
- Meta Tags (playboy examples)
- Search Results
- Affiliate Web Pages

Take Control:
- Know your Affiliates
- Set Guidelines and Standards (they need to be contractual)
- Police Your Affiliates
- Terminate The Problem Affiliates

Kristopher B. Jones from Pepperjam is now up.
They are super affiliates and leading outsourced affiliate marketing management company.To run an good affiliate campaign is about two things; communication and transparency.

Affiliate Friend or Foe:
- Affiliates are your friends if you work with them strategically.
- 95% of your sales are generated by 5% of your affiliates (super affiliates)
- SEM affiliates are generally most sophisticated than you are.
- SEM agencies can be expensive or cost prohibitive
- Believe it or not, you can control what your affiliates do, he says.

"Affiliates" Potential Strategic Partners
- Affiliates are your partners, not a cowboy or something like that, they consist of
- SEM Professions
- SEM Agencies
- Niche Web site owners
- Coupon web sites
- Comparison Engines
- Maybe Amazon
- Maybe eBay

It's a Land Grab
- Search results represent available real estate
- Google offers users 10 organic spots and 10 paid listings (max)
- The more land you own, on average, the more sales/leads you will generate
- Work strategically with a few professional SEM affiliates and control more land
- You can't be selfish if you don't own the real estate

Working Strategically with Key SEM Affiliates
- It's your choice, your competitors or your affiliates
- Identify potential partners
- Carefully select your SEM affiliate partners
- Define a list of keywords from the head and long tail
- Broker the deal; agree to provide internal conversation data and metrics

The Rules:
- Use the basic affiliate contract or add an amendment to control the relationship
- You must share information, require an NDA
- Set a min and max bidding rule
- Restrict or include certain keywords
- Allow affiliates to bid on trademarks

Examples of Good and Bad policies were not given at the end due to time..

Chris Henger from Performics is last up.
4 or 5 years ago, affiliates totally dominated the search results, it was very much the wild wild west but now that has changed a bit. Understand the business market of the affiliate, each market is very different and you need to know that. Biggest thing to think about is what is your business model as an advertiser? Each business model will alter the search landscape and types of affiliates you want and attract. He shows examples of merchants that use two different affiliate partners (CJ and Perfomics). He shows a bunch of examples, stuff hard to type. The key thing to note about affiliates, is that they can be very opportunistic on your behalf, be selective with your affiliates, they are willing to take risk, they are willing to spend money and they can be top performers.

What is the affiliate wish list?
- Authorization and guidelines to bid on trademarks and brand names
- Ability to direct link to an advertiser's site
- Ability to send traffic to domain that contains advertisers brands
- For lead generation programs, the capability to host the form on your own domain
- Authorization letter to search engines providing permission to use advertiser's brand in ad title and copy
- Ability to build links quickly and flexibility (offline BYOL, and data feeds).

Lessons Learned:
- There is a balance between advertisers interests and the affiliate's need to drive traffic
- Affiliate publishers are often at focusing on conversion than advertisers
- Set guidelines, communicate and monitor for compliance
- Maintain feedback loop
- Provide tips and best practices to your affiliates
- Measure the impact across channels

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

This session was going to be moderated by Jeffrey K. Rohrs, although due to a delayed flight, Tim Daly filled in for him.

Tim from Sendtec gives a brief description of Search Arbitrage, where PPC advertising is purchased for the purpose of getting the user to click on more expensive ads on your own site (making money from the price difference). Search Arbitrage was linked to Click Fraud by BusinessWeek who performed an in-depth investigation into the issue. A 23 year old Hungarian millionaire Roland Kiss rakes in $70,000 ad revenue per month through a "Paid to Read" membership base. He then explains that Google's introduction of PPC Landing Page Scores was partly because of the problem of arbitrage and not offering any value. An example search for Cypress Trees shows a PPC advert on Google which enters a disguised arbitrage site and all the links click through to yet another Made For AdSense site, making an infinite loop. What's Google doing about this problem? - They introduced landing page quality into the PPC position algorithm; Keep on updating the algorithm to weed out people trying to beat the system. What's MSN doing? - Have been slow to react, although not as significant as Google's needs; MSN was clean and friendly when launched, but Arbitragers found it as a new home in August; MSN began its first efforts to combat arbitrage by only allowing one advertiser to use a specific URL. What's Yahoo doing about the problem? - Yahoo refused to comment on the BusinessWeek article and did not want to provide information to the session panel about what they do to combat fraud and arbitrage. How do we solve this problem? - Search engines need to develop specific requirements and have strict enforcement in the terms used of the amount of content required to show paid ad listings; Engines should work together and also have a joint blacklist of suspected fraudsters; there should be a manual daily review of each partner site that delivered traffic to see whether they are in violation.

On opening the panel up for comments regarding the presentation by Tim, Jake Baillie from TrueLocal jumps in to say that he doesn't think that Click Fraud should be directly linked to Arbitrage. Although the Cypress Tree example is a bad thing for the users and he doesn't like it, he does support the need for arbitrage when done correctly and honestly. He's worried that search engines may try to regulate advertisers too much and remove creativity which is so important in PPC.Kris Jones from pepperjamSearch then steps up to take a very strong view of what he calls "Garbitrage" for Made For AdSense arbitrage, although thinks that affiliate arbitrage is perfectly legitimate (Buying PPC and sending traffic to affiliate links to earn a percentage of the end sale/conversion). Kris then goes on to hammer the search engines for not attending the panel, and goes on to promote his company's own arbitrage-style shopping site. David from Clix Marketing which purely works in PPC introduces himself, and makes a controversial joke which I'll exclude from this transcript. He agrees that search engines are partly responsible for managing arbitrage, because is effects the user experience. Frank Watson of FXCM asks the audience, who came to the session to actually learn how to do search arbitrage - no one puts their hand up - although most people probably were.

Only one presentation was made on this session, it seems that this session was mostly aimed as a debate. You'll have to come to the conferences to learn what questions people asked and some of the more extreme opinions voiced.

These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.

Images & Search Engines

Regular search engines can't understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.

Speakers:
Shari Thurow,Webmaster/Marketing Director, GrantasticDesigns.com
Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google, Inc.
Chris Smith, Head, Technology & Advanced Development, Verizon Information Services

ST = Shari Thurow
KS = Kakul Srivastava - Did not appear
LE = Liana Evans
VF = Vanessa Fox - Was present but was "not permitted" to make a presentation (I'm assuming by Google). Danny invited her to add comments and answer questions if she wished to. She said the new Google Image Label tool (application?) in BETA is popular.
CS = Chris Smith

Note: This will be a brief recap of what was a very informative, interesting session with great speakers. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with my laptop, I couldn't take notes. I did, however, record the entire session and Liana had previously sent me her presentation, so I will be able to compile an article at a later point. With Barry's permission, I can refer you to a fellow blogger, Lisa Barone, who is reporting for the Bruce Clay blog and was sitting next to me. I have no doubt she will provide a nice recap in their blog and we respectfully point you there, and to those others who are reporting SES, who may have sat in on this session.

Quick notes and observations from my head...Firstly, Danny Sullivan arrived as the "Emergency Moderator". Incredibly, he looked awake and ready to tackle Day 3. He warmly addressed the attendees and then presented a quick overview of the purpose of the session. It is about discovering the ways search engines find images. The first speaker was Shari Thurow.

Shari gave an overview of the nuts and bolts of optimizing web pages that contain images or are image intensive. If you have images on a page, there are specific ways in which you can still attract SE's, such as alt attributes (she refers to them as "alt text"). She showed an example of a web page that was image intensive and contained no alt attributes behind any of the images. It was essentially a blank page. This is what both SE's and those relying on screen readers will see. Shari was good at discussing and providing examples for where to place content on pages around and near images. She talked a bit about the information architecture (which is your navigation and organizational presentation), and the page layout and where you place keywords and natural descriptive text. This would include breadcrumb text navigation, anchor links, image captions, headings (heading tags), and title tag.

Liana Evans spoke on the value images are for retails sites and she was quite good at finding clear examples of where online retailers are not properly utilizing image searches. All of the major SE's now provide image search capabilties, but each has its own algorithm and way of presenting them to users. I saw good tie-in for basic conversions usability in the example she showed of a search for a product on a comparison search engine, that showed where some ecommerce sites didn't provide a thumbnail of a product vs. those who did. Obviously, the site that shows images is going to get the click. She showed how each SE displays images in their image search results to show differences. Do not block spiders from your images folder, else they won't find images to add to search. Li made a great point that people are visual and love to print out pictures of things they want to buy.

Chris made his debut talk. What stood out were the details he provided on how to optimize, using Flicker as the example, photo share apps. Photo enhancement is the way to go. There are lot of ways to add keywords in photo apps, such as comments, captions, links, groupings of images, file names, etc I'm not doing him justice here. He gave a highly actionable presentation with many, many good suggestions you can apply now, and easily. I hope someone posts more on his presentation.

Chris Sherman is the moderator of this panel, the room is very empty. Why? Maybe because it is the first session of the morning or maybe because people assume it isn't a big deal, when it is.

Chris puts up a slide that defines what social search is. He said social search are "wayfinding tools informed by human judgment." It can also mean uninformed, where people give wrong information to the social community. Chris explains that the very first web page was a directory and Yahoo! is a directory, all these are forms of social search. We also had meta tags in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines, they failed. Fundamentally, algorithmic search is social because search engines are programmed by people who have biases of their own. The search engines also observe our behavior to change algorithmic search. And there are new personalization efforts to refine search for everyone.

So why is there so much buzz right now? Chris said, possibly because algorithmic search has plateaued to some extent, also humans are still better than computers at many things and there are thousands of volunteers to help in social search.

Types of social search:
- Shared bookmarks and web pages; del.icio.us, shadows, myweb, furl, diggo;
- Tag engines such as technorati and bloglines;
- Collaborative directories such as ODP, Prefound, Zimbio and Wikipedia (an encyclopedia but lots of links to other resources);
- Personalized verticals such as eurekster, Google COOP and rollyo;
- Collaborative harvesters such as digg, netscape and reddit;
- Social Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers and Answerbag.

Problems with Social Search:
- Scale and scope issues
- Tagging issues )ambiguity, lack of controlled vocabulary, human laziness, and "idiots".
- Spammers

What will make Social Search Work?:
- A combination of algorithmic and "people-mediated search"
- Trust networks (like shared bookmark services and friends)
- Increased personalization and user control over result filtering
- Social search will probably work best for non-text content (photos, music, video, etc.)

Tomi Poutanen, Directory of Yahoo Social