January 2007 Archives

The sixteenth edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. We talked about how Google solved some of their Googlebombs issues. We also talked about the Yahoo Title issue that is now resolved. Yahoo! Search Marketing's Panama is coming this Monday. We talked about YouTube sharing revenue with users, and the possibility of spam videos. Plus many more fun topics with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and some SEO tips. 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.

Update: Show archive link fixed, you can now listen to the archive here.

Topics We Covered:

1. Yahoo! Fixes Titles in Search Results Sourced From Internal Anchor Text
   
2. Ready Or Not, Here Comes Panama: New Yahoo Sponsored Listings Ranking Model Coming Feb. 5th
   
3. YouTube to Share Ad Revenue with Users - "Spideos" Here We Come?
   
4. Writing Search Engine Friendly Titles
   
5. More PageRank Changes at Google?
   
6. Toolbar PageRank Without Page Being Indexed in Google?
   
7. Yahoo! Site Explorer Wants You To Show Off Your Links With Badges
   
8. Google Bombs Defused? Google Updates Link Analysis Algorithm
   
9. "My Publishers" Tab Found in Some Google AdSense Accounts
   
10. Google Offering "Custom Placement Packs" AdSense Publishers
    
11. Google Groups Launches New Design
    
12. Google Images Undergoes Redesign
    

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 17: Googlebombs, Yahoo Titles, YouTube Rev Share, Panama Monday, SEO, AdSense, PageRank, Groups & More"

Yesterday, I reported at Search Engine Land that Google Officially Adds Docs & Spreadsheets Integration With Gmail, based on Google's announcement. I wanted to be clear that it does support Microsoft Word and Excel documents, so I have been tracking a Google Groups thread, where a Google representative confirms that if an email with a Microsoft Word or Excel file is sent to your gmail inbox, it should show, "Open with Google Docs" or "Open with Google Spreadsheets."

When I try from my Mac, sending a Word or Excel document from Microsoft for Mac, it does not show me the option in my Gmail account. But if it did, it should look like:

Technically, Google is importing and converting the Microsoft document into a Google formatted document.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Middle of December we reported that Yahoo! said they would be adding support for a no Yahoo Directory tag, similar to the NOODP tag, by the end of this month.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has posted an update in the WebmasterWorld thread in message number 3238011 saying it has been delayed but they are still working on it.

Update: This is still in the works. I will provide a revised ETA in the near future. Tim

The update is greatly appreciated, and we have faith that it will be coming soon. Hopefully in February?

We broke the news originally with Yahoo! To Add No Yahoo Directory Tag on October 26, 2006.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

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

As, I reported yesterday, Yahoo! announced that they launched new features for their Site Explorer Tool. As an FYI, Site Explorer went live September 29, 2005, it was the first of its kind, until Google came out with Sitemaps, followed by a name change to Google Webmaster Central. (Google Sitemaps came out first, sorry for the mistake, I guess I am losing it. :))

The features Yahoo! added includes:

• Site Authentication using META tags
• Detailed Authentication Errors
• Delete URLs
• Site Explorer Badge

The first two are cool. The last one, Site Explorer Badge, we spotted and reported on yesterday, before they announced it.

Delete URLs scares me a bit. As soon as I heard, I changed my Yahoo! ID password to something more secure.

All you need to do is login to your account (or someone elses) and click the delete URL. I didn't try it, but I would hope there is an added layer of confirmation. Maybe a requirement to add a meta tag or something to confirm it, or maybe an additional confirmation email to a non-Yahoo! email account?

In any event, I would change my password on my Yahoo! account, so maybe you should think of that.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! explains a bit more about the delete URL feature:

If I use Delete URL, do I also need to use Robots.txt? Yes. Once you've used Delete URL to remove a URL from our index, we recommend using robots.txt to exclude the content from being added to out indexed again. Robots.txt excludes Yahoo!'s crawler (Slurp) from re-indexing your content. A robots.txt exclusion rule reduces the number of pages Slurp will read from your server. It also helps you save bandwidth on your website. Note: Site Explorer Delete URL service facilitates the quick removal of your URL from our index and is helpful when a URL that you have excluded, continues to show up as a thin document, but it may not prevent our crawler from continuing to crawl the URL again. It is not an alternative to using robots.txt.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yesterday, at Search Engine Land, I reported that Google Adds Local Reviews In Search Results. In reality, they were there in the past, but Google made them bigger and added reviews. When I reported it yesterday, I noted that pizza 10010 returned three local results with reviews. Now when I search for the same thing, I get the same three results, but no reviews.

Here is a side by side:

The image on the left was a screen capture from yesterday, notice the stars, showing the reviews. The image on the right is from just now, no stars, no reviews. I wonder why it is not returning reviews now.

In any event, this is important, because (1) it takes up a huge amount of screen real estate, (2) there can be user reviews on your listing. So you want to make sure you are in Google Local and that you have good reviews. More tips on that here.

I also covered the other engines and how they handle local searches at their main search engine. But Gary Price also has a good review of other local search services.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of the biggest complaints over Yahoo!'s contextual network, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, was that when you used multiple ad blocks on a page, it would sometimes show the same ad from ad unit 1 in ad unit 2. Reports via DigitalPoint Forums have been noticing that this has been happening less and less as the days go on.

Ads no longer repeat ad nauseam across your ad blocks on a given page. Before, depending on how many ad blocks you had on a given page, the same ad that showed up in the #1 ad queue position would show up in all the #1 ad queue position of all your ad blocks on that page. Not anymore. I'm no longer seeing repeated ads across the ad blocks.

After that post, it appeared that things went downhill again, but then recent posts have shown to confirm this.

I'm noticing more and more geotargeted ads, and no repeating ads too.

No repeats, CTRs are up by 75%. I'm happy.

3 bocks of 5 ads each and they are showing 15 different ads.

Which is very good improvement.

No official word from Yahoo! yet on this, I will track the thread.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: A Yahoo representative has confirmed to me via email that improvements have been made to YPN ads and to keep an eye out on the YPN blog for details.

Update: Here is that blog post at the YPN Blog.

Monday we reported that Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? YahooSarah replied to that at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums explaining that the Overture tool is having issues but they are not taking it down.

I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

If you are an advertiser, I'd suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one).

In her message, it is clear that Yahoo! will be focusing their efforts on a new keyword tool, as opposed to getting the Overture tool working consistently.

The new Yahoo! tool will have an API, that will enable developers to integrate right into their campaigns, so I look forward to it. But it appears that Yahoo! will not continue to fully support the old, Overture tool.

Aaron Wall reports that Wordtracker is now offering a new free version of their keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. Defintely worth bookmarking, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion over the PageRank score found within Google's Toolbar. So I thought I explain why I, and many other SEOs/SEM reporters would love to see the PageRank score disappear from the Google Toolbar.

Back in the good old days, SEOs used to do whatever they could to increase their PageRank. If you had a high PageRank, typically a 7 or higher - you were set. You could literally rank for almost anything, if you also followed that up with good, on-page SEO work. That quickly went away, I believe, with the florida update of November/December 2003. In any event, SEOs used to wait for the toolbar PageRank to update, to see how they did in getting links from high PageRank sites. If they did a good job with that, they would see their PR increase and immediately see their rankings improve. SEOs were able to see an update coming, when the various Google Data Centers didn't match each other. Google rankings would change on some data centers, the link counts would change and the PageRank would change. Hence, the term, the Google Dance. Those days are pretty much over. Google is now changing almost daily. Google's current link count is almost useless at the time being. Google's data centers are frequently updating.

Ever since then, top SEOs and even Google engineers have been pushing to explain that PageRank is not as important as it once was. In fact, some go to extremes to declare Google PageRank Lunacy, in Sweden, we had a Google representative tell us that the link command was not so useful, later we had someone quote Google as saying PageRank is for Entertainment Purposes Only, which was then refuted by GoogleGuy. We had two other posts that discussed GoogleGuy Once Again Responds to Link Command and Why Does Google Show Old PageRank Values?

All that understood, it is clear that many would like to see the PageRank score go away from the Google toolbar. I am confident, this won't happen soon. I would say that most engineers would probably like to see it go away. But the marketing folks probably would not. I am not talking for Google her, I am just throwing out my feelings on it.

So we see that people are or were obsessed with PageRank, and rightly so. Hence why SEOs and reporters and even some Googlers wanted to tell people to not live and die by it. Some were extreme in their message, but for good reason.

So what is the bottom line at this time on PageRank found within the toolbar?

As Matt Cutts wrote back in his more about PageRank post:

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

PageRank in the toolbar does show you something about the site. But we are far past the days where a Google PageRank update in the toolbar would have almost an immediate impact on your rankings in Google. This is important and you should not obsess over it. It is an indicator of the quality of links you have to your site, but the indicator is old and is not real time - so you need to understand this.

I hope that explains some of the questions out there on Toolbar PageRank, why SEOs fight about it and what it really is at this point in time.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Link building is one of the most important deliverables of any ongoing search engine optimization plan. All three major engines are known to assign some value to a page based on the links pointing to it, and many SEOs research high ranking competitor backlinks to find the ones that they feel may be helping those pages rank well for desired terms. The problem is, even though search engines advise site owners to get relevant links to their pages, they also frown on linking schemes designed to gain links at a rapid pace.

So the "game," for SEOs, is to build links to a page without arousing suspicion on the part of the engines. Unfortunately, there are many so-called SEOs out there that build links with no regards to relevancy or to the link-host's probable reputation, and end up causing their clients or their own websites to fall in the rankings. The easiest ones for search engines to detect include obvious link schemes such as "free-for-all" link directories or buying links from highly visible networks. However, some people claim that some links are built to their content without their permission, bringing to mind the old argument of whether or not one can be penalized by someone else’s actions.

MSN has recently taken the forefront, carrying the standard for the other engines when it comes to banning or penalizing sites for linking practices, and being very specific about the reason in their communications with affected webmasters. This has caused a rush of posts at WebmasterWorld with members complaining of being penalized or banned due to what MSN terms as unacceptable linking practices- and claiming innocence. Is MSN throwing proverbial babies out with the bathwater?

On January 15, one webmaster claimed:

I was banned from MSN very unfairly , i am not into illegitimate affiliate network or link exchanges...

A thread started 3 days later purports that:

It seems that if one site on a shared IP gets banned, then ALL SITES GETS BANNED!

This was followed by another thread 3 days after that started with the assertion that:

In December, if I read my log files right, MSN changed their way of handling links, the quality of incoming links and if they are natural or not.
Sites that have been in an "illegitimate link exchange" were banned from MSN, and if you have more than one site on the same IP and/or own more than one site ALL sites were banned.

So is MSN handling this problem a little too heavy-handedly? Share your thoughts, experiences or opinions at any of the three WebmasterWorld forums threads linked above.

Since the introduction of the Google Toolbar and subsequent addition of the PageRank display, there have been many discussions about its value. SEO specialists really began to focus on PageRank in 2003, almost to the point of obsession. Since, people have realized that PageRank is an important indicator of the probable weight that Google gives certain pages' inbound links, but not the do-all-end-all.

A recent thread at WebmasterWold forums poses an interesting dilemma for PageRank-watchers: what if there is toolbar PageRank displayed but the page does not appear to be in the Google index? Can this happen? According to a few posters, it has happened over the past few weeks. Does this mean that having PageRank does not necessarily mean the page can be ranked in Google results pages?

The thread has some interesting suggestions, including the idea that the page or site may be banned or penalized, as well as that it may just be a glitch. However, the thread "died" on January 16 with no further follow up. One particularly insightful comment is that:

It would seem like a strange tactic for Google to leave PageRank on a site that has been banned. PageRank is not only viewed by webmasters but a lot of web users and professionals judge their surfing experience on PageRank. (Ex. Where they buy from, trusted sources, etc.)

I personally never use PageRank to help me decide on the validity of a page, trusting instead the content and any linked sources within. But I had never thought of this, and it makes sense that some people would use it as a vote of confidence in the page, even though PageRank is certainly fairly easy to manipulate, which is why it is most likely not the major factor in search rankings.

Some people have chosen to almost completely ignore PageRank...I wonder if Rand still does a year later? Anyway, it would be nice to have an update on this question. Join the thread at WebmasterWorld forums.

There honestly has not been much discussion in the various forums about the recently released adCenter beta by Microsoft. There is a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that calls the new beta more confusing and has slightly more bugs. But with that, coincided reports via WebmasterWorld that advertisers in the adCenter program, noticed their traffic from adCenter increase dramatically.

WebmasterWorld adCenter moderator, Receptional, said:

It's morning now and apart from one of our accounts being on pause for no discernable reason (yeh... they are still looking into it... come ON Microsoft!) we are piling on the bids so fast that we are experiencing really dramatic increases in volumes but can't directly attribute this to a change in the query share.

People suspect the increase in traffic is due to Microsoft switching on content network by default for all these campaigns.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are two conferences coming up, outside of the Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld's PubCon events that I would like to bring your attention to.

The first is Elite Retreat where Jeremy Schoemaker and friends are running the second ever show. The first was a huge success and the next one in San Francisco will be a sure bet. Jeremy just announced that he secured Guy Kawasaki to speak at the event. He recently spoke at WebmasterWorld's PubCon and he was great. So check out
Elite Retreat, it takes place on March 19-20 at the San Fransisco Courtyard Downtown in San Francisco and costs $5,000 per person.

The second is a Sydney, Australia event named Search Summit and takes place on March 1st & 2nd.

With over 90 individual presentations on everything from how to research keywords through to optimising your website architecture, 40 speakers from the US, UK and Australia, Search Summit aims to bring the type of quality conference that is common in the northern hemisphere, but has been sorely lacking in Australia.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

Yahoo! Site Explorer, Yahoo!'s Webmaster tool that details your index count and link count for your pages and site, has released badges. These Yahoo! Site Explorer Badges can be placed on your site to promote how many links you have to a page or to the site overall.

Here is what it looks like in real time:

I find it weird that Yahoo! is offering this badge. Just doesn't jive with what a search company should want SEOs or webmasters to promote. But I can be wrong - something just doesn't sit well with me on this.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums - thanks Kevin.

A Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread spotlights a feature that Google seems to be testing on select advertisers. The feature appears to be a detailed budget report or analysis, on the edit campaign section, under the budget settings section.

For some AdWords advertisers the section has a "New: Come back in 15 days to get a more detailed budget recommendation based on your campaign performance." There is a link to an FAQ section that reads:

Detailed budget analysis: When possible, we will analyse and display the percentage increase in clicks that you would be eligible to receive with an increased budget. We make this detailed analysis based on your campaign performance data over time, so it is only available when you have not altered your campaign within the last two weeks.

Basic recommendation: In many cases, we will supply a budget recommendation based on historical data for the same or similar keywords as yours. The basic recommendation considers variations in language and location, but it does not consider traffic you might receive from the content network.

Kevin Gibbons has a screen capture of the budget settings page.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

We know that when Yahoo! fully moves over from the old search marketing product (Overture) to the new one (Panama) that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool won't be that useful anymore, but it still will have some valid and useful historical data. But it appears that reports around the web are showing that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is currently down.

Also, tools that depend on the Overture tool, are spitting back errors.

Examples include DigitalPoint's tool that is reporting under the "No data for phrase:" under the Overture column. Also, SEO Book's tool returns an error that reads;

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to www.inventory.overture.com:80 in /home/awall19/tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/clsOvertureSuggest.php on line 37

Many of the reports call for it being down for a few hours and then coming back up. But it is now down again. I wonder if Yahoo! will keep supporting this tool in the future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: YahooSarah has replied to the threads stating:

Hey there, I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

If you are an advertiser, I'd suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one).

YahooSarah

A WebmasterWorld thread has continued discussion over the past week or so, of the Microsoft Live.com page submission tool being broken.

Microsoft has numerous page submission pages depending on the geolocation of your site. There are various reports of the page bugging out on users.

I have tried the US page and it seems to work fine for me.

But after continued discussion, it is clear that the page is not working for some users.

It can be specific issues with certain browsers or security settings, I am not sure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over the weekend, there were tons of buzz over a prank YouTube video that claims Google launched Google TV. The guy has two videos, taking you through him using Google TV. Here is the most recent one.

Is it real? Probably not.

(1) Any person who knows HTML could have put this together.
(2) tv.google.com, which is the URL that is shown in the video, does not exist as a sub domain for Google within the DNS info.

There is a ton of discussion over at Google Blogoscoped Forums. Also Techcrunch has well over a 100 comments, and we also have a thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

How do we know that tax season is just around the corner? Not because it is a month after the new year, but because we are seeing tons of H&R Block ads promoting their TaxCut program. I noticed it on my blog as Flash ads, and I described how to close out AdSense flash ads, a technique that felt very empowering, but yet only lasted a short while.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread is trying to figure out a few things.

(1) How to block them
(2) Are they paying well
(3) Why they are coming up if they are not relevant to a specific page of content

Right now, no one has posted a secure way to block them with the exclusion tool. TaxCut.com did not work, I wondered if they tried hrblock.com. I suspect the ads pay pretty well, since they are overpowering all the other ads out there. Finally, I do not know why Google dropped the contextual relevancy aspect, and are showing these ads, even without them matching the contextual relevancy of the content of the page.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The news over the weekend was all about Google's YouTube sharing ad dollars with their users, the users who generate the video content. Jennifer Slegg has her Search Engine Land post YouTube to Begin Revenue Sharing for Video Providers.

WebmasterWorld has the largest conversation going on in the forums we track about it. Most are fairly skeptical, thinking people won't earn so much. But some are not so skeptical, if AdSense proved anything, there is money to be made from niche sites, and niche topics.

Video is just an other means of content distribution.

ShoeMoney took a look at what a number one ranked video at Google Video can bring in money wise. Add that to when YouTube starts sharing ad revenue and you can start a whole new industry.

Will it produce a ton of YouTube and Google Video spam? Probably. Splogs for Video, let's coin it "Spideos." I guess that doesn't have the same ring to it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Kevin Gibbons reports that Google Adwords Qualified Professional logo's stop verifying. The Google AdWords Professional Logo can be placed on sites where the company or individual has meet the requirements by Google to be certified as an AdWords Professional. In the past, if you clicked on the logo or seal, it would verify that the user is a legit individual. Now, for many, it takes you to the AdWords Login home page.

I feel it is probably a bug and not some devious and evil scam to get people to sign up directly with Google.

If you are logged into Google, you should get the verification. For example, Kevin Gibbons status shows up for me, only when I am logged in.

This individual has met Google's requirements to attain recognition as a Qualified Google Advertising Professional.

To become Qualified, this individual has:

• Accepted the terms of our programme.
• Managed at least one AdWords account in a master account for 90 days.
• Built and maintained our 90-day spend requirement.
• Passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam.

Kevin Gibbons is one of the first 100 Google Qualified Advertising Professionals in the UK.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The Google AdWords Blog announced that a Google AdWords Editor for Mac is now available for download over here.

Prior, a WebmasterWorld thread had the PC version working on an Intel Mac with Crossover for Mac (http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/).

That is now no longer required.

As AdWordsAdvisor says;

I can assist with that one. ;) Please take a look here:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/index.html

BTW, this is the sort of update that'll routinely get announced on the Inside AdWords blog - you'll find a post about it there now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Google Video Search Now Includes YouTube Results based on a Google announcement. So a search on Scooba Cleaning in Action brings up my YouTube video that I used in My Scooba In Action post at Cartoon Barry.

Part of the announcement clarified the roles of Google Video versus YouTube.

Google's strength -- and its history -- is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide.

So Google will be more about the search side of things whereas YouTube will be more about the community aspect of videos.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, more new reports of PageRank changes have been reported at the various forums. Again, the PageRank score shown in the Google Toolbar is old, not up to date, and is basically for entertainment purposes only - but people still do track it.

On January 9th we reported the last Google PageRank update. It seems too soon for an other PageRank update to be happening, but anything is possible.

This is either a new PageRank push to the Toolbar or it is still some data fluctuations of the old PageRank push.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Since I just wrote Open Advice to Yahoo! Regarding New Search Marketing Tool, Panama, I figure I highlight a WebmasterWorld thread that offers Yahoo! advice on their publisher network product. Here are some of the ideas from the thread:

• Ad Link Units (like Google Adsense offers)
• YPN for search and sitesearch (like Google Adsense offers)
• YPN referral links for advertisers to sign up with Overture (Like Google Adsense offers)
• Open the ad market to other countries. You can start with the other English-speaking countries, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
• Better targeting
• Option to delete old channels
• Option to enable/disable RON ads
• Quick and easy tool for management of multiple accounts ala adwords editor
• Better contextual targeting.
• Unique ads in every ad unit.
• The ability of advertisers to select which sites they'd like to advertise ("Advetise on this Site").
• Image banner ads!
• and more...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, I, as well as hundreds of other AdSense publishers received an email from Google offering them access to the "Custom Placement Packs" program if they would just add a larger banner ad unit to their site. Here is the full email:

Subject: Add 300x250 AdSense units to your site

Dear Publisher, After a recent review of your site, we would like to include seroundtable.com in our custom placement packs program. Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers. We would like to feature your site more frequently in these advertiser packages, but to do so, we need you to place more image and text-enabled medium rectangle ad units (300x250) on your site. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats to see a sample of the medium rectangle unit. The medium rectangle is the most demanded size among our brand advertisers that utilize these packages for both text and image ads. These advertisers want to ensure they reach visitors on high quality sites like yours, and are willing to bid more for ads prominently displayed on these sites. They require that the units be placed "above the fold" on a page so that the ads are immediately visible to your site's visitors without scrolling down. If you decide to add medium rectangle units to your site, please notify us by replying to this email so that we can begin featuring your site in more of our advertiser packages. We also recommend you use the newly launched ad placements feature to define your ad slots to advertisers so they can bid on specific placements on your site. For instructions on how to create ad placements, please visit https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50691.

My initial response, was a quick reply asking, and I quote:

How much can I make on this?

Seriously, you do not tell people to add larger banner ads to their site without giving them some data. Am I crazy here? Whoopie! I get to place some of Google's largest brand advertisers on my site! So they pay how much more? That is what I want to know.

I thought I was special, but it looks like dozens, if not hundreds of other AdSense publishers received the same email.

Threads at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld are buzzing with it.

The first response to the DigitalPoint Forums thread was, "I would ask them how much more money I am gonna make to see if its worth while." Duh.

Some suspect this has to do with Google wanting more ad space, real estate, to test the video ads they recently talked about.

I will tell you this, I will watch the results of the threads and let you know how it works out for them.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

There is a nice thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that has civilized and useful ideas and feedback for Yahoo! to add to their new search marketing product, Panama. Here are some of the ideas in short from the thread:

• Custom URL Management
• Date Range Selection Needs an "All Time" Feature
• Key Features Unavailable When Setting Up Campaigns
• Default Settings Are Expensive
• The Standard Match/Advanced Match and Content Match Hierarchal Layers are Confusing
• Add a Client Center
• Improve Custom Reporting
• URL Search
• Add Conversion data for ads
• Move keywords from one ad group to another
• Keyword tool with monthly searches
• Working in 2 seperate screens leads to errors
• and more...

That is some useful feedback...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Matt Cutts and team wrote at the Google Blog that they have minimized "the impact of many Googlebombs" by "improving our [Google's] analysis of the link structure of the web." They then go into the history of the Googlebomb and explain why they did it...

Danny Sullivan with Google Kills Bush's Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs does an excellent job looking at all the angles of this announcement (yea, he is even on the road when he wrote this). So look over there, I am going to steal his before and after screen shot for a search on miserable failure.

Google Bomb Photo credits, Danny Sullivan

One thing Danny did not discuss in much detail was the specifics of the algorithm change, an aspect that is on the top of the mind of most SEOs right now.

For that, we can take a look at Bill Bill Slawski's comment on Danny's post.

Compare that to what Anna Patterson wrote in the section on "Document Annotation for Improved Ranking" in the following document:

Phrase-based indexing in an information retrieval system.

Instead of [BOMB otherwords], it tries to locate "related phrases" (some examples in the patent application). It also provides a means of weighing the strength of related phrases.

Of course, they could be doing something different, but this is the only document I know of from Google that discusses a means of stopping Google Bombing:

[0153] This approach has the benefit of entirely preventing certain types of manipulations of web pages (a class of documents) in order to skew the results of a search. Search engines that use a ranking algorithm that relies on the number of links that point to a given document in order to rank that document can be "bombed" by artificially creating a large number of pages with a given anchor text which then point to a desired page. As a result, when a search query using the anchor text is entered, the desired page is typically returned, even if in fact this page has little or nothing to do with the anchor text. Importing the related bit vector from a target document URL1 into the phrase A related phrase bit vector for document URL0 eliminates the reliance of the search system on just the relationship of phrase A in URL0 pointing to URL1 as an indicator of significance or URL1 to the anchor text phrase.

Matt Cutts replied commending Bill on his find, but saying he cannot confirm or deny if this patent is used in the new link analysis.

Let me paraphrase the paraphrase from Bill's quote.

A related phrase bit vector for document URL0 eliminates the reliance of the search system on just the relationship of phrase A in URL0 pointing to URL1 as an indicator of significance or URL1 to the anchor text phrase.

Seems like a nice method, but who knows...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread spots a third new Google AdSense feature for today, this one is called "My Publishers." It is a new tab added to the top tabs of the AdSense console that allows you to search for "my publishers." This was reported over at Media Vipers and he has some screen shots, I have cleaned one of them up for you.

You can see that it is a search form that allows you to search by email, company name, contact name, client id, association date and country. Very interesting screen...

The URL to get to this page doesn't work for me, but it is at https://www.google.com/adsense/dev-search-publishers.

I am not sure how this will be used exactly. Maybe it will be for a new breed of consultants, those that manage Google AdSense ads for publishers. I guess time will tell.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Search Engine Strategies is coming to London in a few weeks. I will not be going to SES London, so I am not sure if we will have our typical SES coverage of the event. If you would like to sign up, you can do so at the SES site. It is taking place between February 13th and the 15th in the ExCeL London. For a quick glance of the sessions being given go here.

Rob, evilgreenmonkey, posted the *OFFICIAL* SES London 2007 Party and Events Schedule, so far this is what we got:

Monday 12th February
Drinks and socialising in the Crowne Plaza Hotel bar. The traditional pre-conference shindig that gets everyone in the mood.

Tuesday 13th February
No confirmed parties.

Wednesday 14th February
Valentines Day - In contact with one possible sponsor although this spot is still up for grabs.

Thursday 15th February
LondonSEO.org - confirming sponsor.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Andy Beal is running a poll asking SEOs and SEMs in the community to vote for the Godmother of Search, this is a play off of Shoe Money's post on who is the Godfather of Search.

Currently in the running are:

• Vanessa Fox
  
• Marissa Mayer
  
• Jill Whalen
  
• Kim Krause Berg
  
• Elisabeth Osmeloski
  
• Heather Lloyd Martin
  
• Jennifer Laycock
  
• Christine Churchill
  
• Dana Todd
  
• Shari Thurow
  
• Barbara Coll
  
• Jennifer Slegg
  

Jennifer Slegg, aka Jenstar, aka Jensense.com, is currently killing the vote with 332 votes. She is followed by Jill Whalen with 72 votes and then our own Kim Krause Berg with 49 votes.

Jen is a super star, she has risen to the front of the SEO/SEM pack very quickly. However, Jill and Kim are both legendary personalities in the SEO/SEM community. Kim started her forum, where Jill actually was a moderator at, back in the day - prior to Jill starting her forum (I believe that is how it went). So in terms of age, Kim and Jill are more in the "godmother" category - not to take anything away from Jen (trust me, Jen rocks).

In any event, vote yourself for the Godmother of Search at Andy's Blog.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums (Kim's Forum) and High Rankings Forum (Jill's Forum).

A Cre8asite Forums thread is picking at Rand's post this week on Best Practices for Title Tags. First go read his post and then come back here to read the forum commentary on it.

Cre8asite Forums Admin, Bill Slawski, also well known for his outstanding SEO By The Sea blog, goes through some of his points.

The first is about branding your titles with your brand name. I.e. Company Name - Keywords Here. As you can see here, I do not include the name of the blog in the titles for the individual pages. I personally agree that branding is not that important when it comes to SEO titles. Bill says, "branding is something that you could take advantage of in title elements, but it's probably not the place to attempt to build a brand - there are better ways to do that." He explains that putting company name on the contact us page, about us page, etc are smart ideas. I would also put the brand up and front on the home page page title. But there are two schools of thought on this and go with which you prefer.

Bill then looks at the tip to repeat the title phrase in your header tag. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this, but if you want to change it up slightly, that is also fine.

Finally, he added to the list, putting the title of the page in your breadcrumb trail (the links at the top of the page that tell you where you have clicked). Often, it is not able to fit it all in there, so matching the title tag to the breadcrumb trail is often not feasible.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I noticed Google has placed a new feature in my AdSense account this morning. It is called the "Message Inbox" and it shows up directly under your earnings summary on the front page, after you log in. It looks like:

When you click on the "View all messages" link, it takes you to the inbox and that looks like:

Then Google has shared with me a personalized optimization tip, via the inbox that looks like:

It looks to be a monthly email, named "January 2007 Optimization Report." What do they advise? To place more than one AdSense unit on each page and they link me over to Maximize ad space with multiple ad units.

A neat feature that I suspect may turn into Yahoo!'s compliance manager and more.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread discusses a new feature that Google AdSense added last night, named "Ad Placements." Ad placements are specific groups "of ad units, defined by you, on which an advertiser can place their ads."

You can see the new addition, if you log into Adsense and go to your channels page. At the top it has the following message:

NEW! We've improved custom channels - now, you have the option to enable any custom channel to be targeted by advertisers. You can also update any existing custom channels to allow advertiser targeting. Learn more about targetable custom channels.

It links to an AdSense help file: How can I make a custom channel into an ad placement? And there are also more details at What is an ad placement?

Google said that they are expecting "that creating ad placements will increase the visibility of your pages to advertisers who are creating site-targeted campaigns."

Thanks to Tom for also emailing me about this.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The sixteenth edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. In this edition we discussed the recent discussion around the Wikipedia community adding back the nofollow attribute to all external links, and if Google treats Wikipedia too well in the search results. We also discussed the bug with Google's site command search. There was a Yahoo! Search update we talked about, and also the bug with Yahoo! displayed anchor text as titles in the search results. Plus many more fun topics with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and some SEO tips. 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. SEO's Force Wikipedia to Add Nofollow Back To Wikipedia Links
   
2. Google Treating Wikipeda Too Well?
   
3. Google Seeing Sub Domains As Part Of Main Domain? Site Command Change
   
4. Yahoo! Search Update Underway: 1/18 - 1/19
   
5. Yahoo Search Replacing Site Titles in Search Results Listings
   
6. Google Fixing .com Domains in UK Only Results
   
7. Google Germany (google.de) Offline?
   
8. Yahoo! Indexing & Crawling Google AdWords Links?
   
9. Google Maps Removes Links to Other Mapping Services
   
10. Want To Switch to a New Domain? 301 Redirects vs. 302 Redirects
    

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 16: Wikipedia Nofollows SEOs, Google Follows Wikipedia, Yahoo! Search Update, SEO Titles, Google Site Command, Google Germany, 301s vs. 302s & More"

While I was reading Adam Lasnik's "little algo secret", I noticed the Google Groups Beta design is now officially out of beta. I personally really like the new design.

The new design has changed from the orange/yellow color to a light blue color. It is more Web 2.0 stylish and has some new features.

Here is a screen capture of the top part of the Google Groups - Google Webmaster Help page:

Now, here is an image of a specific thread, I find it much cleaner then before:

Of course, Google Blogoscoped has the before and after screen captures and links to some issues with the new design.

For a guided tour of the new Google Groups, click here.

New Features Include:
- Pages. Create and contribute to shared web pages with simple drag, drops, cuts, pastes, and clicks (i.e., no coding).
- Customized look and feel. Select pictures, colors, and styles to express your group's style.
- Member profiles. See who else is in the group and read their profiles. Personalize your own profile with a photo and other details.
- File sharing. Post documents that anyone in the group can access.
- Easy reading of group discussions. Read easily in a Gmail-style interface.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Oh, don't forget Adam's little algo secret from above...

And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. Or Googler or Webmaster.

Which we discussed already here.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if site targeted campaigns via AdSense are affected by Google's quality score? Most say they are unsure, but AdWordsAdvisor2 comes in to basically say yes.

We are slowly integrating a Quality Score component to ads showing on the Content Network. The performance of ads on the network will now impact how often and where they are shown in the future.

Now, does this mean that AdSense ads, any type, until recently, were not impacted by the quality score? I thought that a couple of months ago, the quality score did begin having an impact on AdSense ads. I guess this is a more recent phenomenon...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this month we reported that there was a Google Sorting Ad Groups by Clicks Bug that has been plaguing some advertisers since mid-December.

Since December 15th, WebmasterWorld members have been reporting a bug in Google AdWords where the ad group is being sorted by clicks and not alphabetically, by Ad Group name.

The bug seems to have been fixed.

Reports via the WebmasterWorld thread show that as of last night, around 7pm (EST), it has been fixed.

FIXED! Well at least it is now working for me how it used to. Hopefully everyone else has this standard functionality back as well.

Secondary confirmation comes this morning, so it seems Google may have fixed this one.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It appears Google Images has changed their design and some of the usability of the pages. Now if you do a search at Google Images, such as on pineapple, you no longer see the image source details, including url source, and size of image in kb and height and width off the bat. The only way to see these details is to mouse over the images, and then Google will show it to you. Here is a screen shot of my mouse over the middle image:

For a before and after, check out Google Blogoscoped.

As you can image, some folks are not happy about Google removing these details from initial display. I personally like how it is cleaner...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

You conducted a Google News Search, let's say on Yahoo, and up come news results related to Yahoo!. But you see those images next to the articles? Where do they come from? That is the question a WebmasterWorld thread asks.

If you click through to those images, it normally takes you to the article that has the image as a source.

As far as I know, Google News only pulls images from sites included within the news index. And they don't always select your image, the image has to be optimized for Google News.

Google News Image Optimization
Optimizing images for ranking in the Google News results is not incredibly hard, I believe. Here are some tips off the top of my head:

• Make the image as square as possible
• Ensure the image is relatively small in file size
• The file name should be specific to the article title
• Can't hurt to add alt tags
• Place keywords next to and under the image
• Of course, the article must be about the keyword you want the image to be found for

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

January 15th, Ben reported that Yahoo Search Replacing Site Titles in Search Results Listings, and then on January 17th, I dug into it more with Danny to come up that we believe the titles were from anchor text, specifically internal anchor text. In any event, Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has commented at our site saying it will be fixed tomorrow (i.e. today).

We launched a fix to the issue with lower case titles coming from anchor text. You should notice some changes tomorrow. Tim

After a quick check of one of the results that had this issue, i.e. a search on searchbliss, the number one result no longer is pulled from anchor text.

Before:

After:

Thanks Yahoo! for fixing that! What exactly was happening? We have not received official confirmation on our theory.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

We all knew that Yahoo! would be releasing the new ranking model for their sponsored listings in the first quarter of this year, but honestly, I am surprised it is towards the beginning of the 1st quarter. Word comes via a Yahoo Press Release that the new ranking model will be in place February 5, 2007 - that is right around the corner, less than two weeks!

So what do you need to know? Well, instead of reading my detailed notes on Panama, maybe you want a quick summary... A WebmasterWorld thread has a post by poster_boy with a great summary:

Here's a quick summary of this important change: * Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007. * This will replace the current method, in which ads in search results are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position). * This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads. * By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.

What is "Ad Quality"?
Ad quality is determined by:

1. The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

Overall ad quality is displayed in graphical form by the quality index.

Other Important Things to Know

* We recommend that you review your current max bids. Keep in mind you may be charged up to this amount.
* Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads.
* Fewer Sponsored Search results may now appear at the very top of the page for certain search terms.

Now, there are a lot of advertisers that are not happy about the change. Honestly, Yahoo! had no choice, they had to make this change to compete. Overall, in my opinion, this is the best move for Yahoo! and the market, so advertisers will have to learn how the new Yahoo! bidding environment works and capitalize on that. Yes, change sucks - but it can also lead to many rich opportunities for you - so embrace it and take advantage of it.

Oh, Yahoo! also released their 2006 financial results, even though profit is down, profits did increase and the ranking model was announced also, and YHOO is up in pre-market trading.

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

I have been meaning to create a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) specifically to search the forums that we report on here for a while. I had 5 minutes and that is all it took. You can visit the the Search Engine Roundtable Google Custom Search Engine and conduct a search. It should bring back results from the following forums:

• Cre8asite Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• High Rankings Forums
• I Help You Forums
• Jim World Forums
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Site Point Forums
• SEO Guy Forums
• SEO Refugeee forums
• Web Pro World Forums
• V7N Forums
• WebmasterWorld Forums
• Web WorkShop Forums

You can see a search in action by searching on minus 30, where I wanted to find all threads discussing the Minus 30 Penalty (also discussed here).

So give our Search Engine Roundtable Google Custom Search Engine a try and let us know what you think.

Search Here:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses how Google may be treating Wikipedia a bit too well. We all have seen it, search on anything generic and you are likely to find a Wikipedia result at the top.

Here are some random examples as I write this entry:

• parrots - Wikipedia #1
• farm - Wikipedia #3
• viagra - Wikipedia #2
• baseball - Wikipedia #2
• search engine - Wikipedia #4

Chris wrote about this with The Rise of Wikipedia = The Fall of DMOZ? in July 2006.

I thought I give you a fresh thread to chew on at WebmasterWorld. Yes, Google used to treat DMOZ a bit too well in the past.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Several threads have been reporting issues with bulk uploading keywords to Yahoo!'s new Search Marketing product (Panama). Because of that, I believe, Yahoo! is offering a one time courtesy upload of your keywords, hand done by Yahoo! for your account.

A WebmasterWorld thread has this message from an official Yahoo! representative, YahooSarah, said:

The bulk upload functionality is usually extended only to gold-tiered (or higher) accounts. However, we offer a one time courtesy of submitting your keywords to us. Simply send a copy of the .csv export of your keywords from your campaigns with other ad networks to our support center, which we will convert and upload the data into the account; or, send a copy of the file that you have converted, and we will upload that data into the account for you.

I am not sure if Yahoo! wanted me to publicize it, but if it is in the forums, it is fair game.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread reports that Google has made a slight change to the Google Personalized home page, by adding a little plus sign to the RSS feeds. Instead of just seeing the title, you can click on the plus sign, it will then expand and show you a snippet of the summary available for previewing. This allows you to decide if you want to click through to the article or not. If you click the minus sign, it will then collapse down to just a title again. Here is a screen capture.

A nice feature that adds some of the perks of a more advanced RSS to the Google Homepage.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports one member seeing a Google Checkout icon on AdSense ads. Typically, you see a little shopping cart icon when you search at Google and the sponsored listings are from a site that accepts Google Checkout. I personally have never seen a live Google AdSense (ad on a publisher's site) that had this little shopping cart icon.

The DigitalPoint member took a screen capture as evidence (although the screen shot technically could have been doctored up, I doubt it was).

View Full Image

We first reported this behavior earlier this month with Is Google Testing Google Checkout Icons on AdSense Ads?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google AdSense blog announced that they will be revitalizing the "AdSense video distribution and sponsorship" that they did in the past with MTV on a more wider base. I have detailed coverage of the Google & MTV Networks Streaming Content Pilot from last year, running on one of Shoe Money's sites.

This new deal will test it out on a wider base of content from Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment and others.

Over the next few weeks we'll be testing AdSense video distribution and sponsorship with a small group of publishers. You may remember us doing a similar trial last year with MTV Networks, where we distributed ad-supported MTV video content to publishers who displayed the content on their sites. This time, we'll be working with a larger set of content providers, grouping together video content from providers such as Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment together with quality ads and offering them as playlists which publishers can select from and display on their AdSense sites. Participating publishers range from small to large, and cut across many different types of content.

A WebmasterWorld thread tries to make more sense of the post, yea - Google's post is not too clear. But there still seems to be confusion. One thing we learn is that it seems publishers will be paid when the videos are played, and not simply by impressions - but that is still not a 100% clear.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Try going to google.de, Google's German based engine, and you may see a page that looks like:

As of right now, it seems Google.de is offline. Why? I have no idea...

A quick check of the Google.de registration shows Google owns it, but doesn't show me a date of expire...

Danny first reported this at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Appears to be back as of last night some time. Rumors are that the domain name changed ownership for a short period of time. Please see comments for some other ideas.

Update 2: The Register has more details on this story:

Goneo called us with the full story from its end. The google.de domain changed hand three times last night, a spokesman said. A request to take over the domain was placed with Goneo about a week ago. The firm automatically placed a request with German domain registry DENIC (the equivalent of Nominet), which put the request to Google's German provider. The provider did not respond in the first instance, and ignored a second approach from DENIC. According to procedure, DENIC then approved the request on Monday evening. Goneo became aware of the registration, and arranged with Google and DENIC to have it transferred back. Unfortunately, somebody else had made an application to register it too, through another domain company, which had also been ignored, so it was transferred to them first. Google finally took possession its German digs this morning.

Nuclei at SEO Fox tipped me off to Fark Thread that shows Google Maps suggesting over 200 U Turns during a route from 19020 to 1579 US-1 (S), North Brunswick, NJ 08902. Click on that link, you will be amazed.

View Full Image

Pretty funny.

Forum discussion at Fark.

Vicyankees posted a WebmasterWorld thread that explains that when searching with a site command at Google, using site:www.domain.com, Google now returns results that may be sub domains.

For example, when I conduct a site search for site:www.seroundtable.com I see in the second result, the listing, "forums.seroundtable.com." I have never seen Google return a forums.seroundtable.com result before, when using a site command. Yes, I use this site command search very often.

View Large Image

SEO Scoop also noticed this and has given examples from about.com, blogspot.com and craigstlist.org.

Excluding the site command by sub domain does work, so a site command on site:forums.seroundtable.com only returns results from forums.seroundtable.com. That is good, but I will really miss being able to exclude the site command by www only, since I constantly search for articles only on the www.

To be clear, a site command for site:domain.com always brought up sub domains. But I specifically used site:www.domain.com to bring up only results on the main directory. If you have a site that redirects www to non www, or only do site commands with site:domain.com (i.e. without the www) you would not notice much of a difference here). But I find the site:www.domain.com search very valuable.

If you don't see this happening, try these IPs, 72.14.205.100 or 72.14.207.100 or 66.102.11.100 , or 216.239.39.44.

More importantly, does this mean that Google sees subdomains as part of the main domain? In the past, subdomains were seen as standalone sites, for the most part. Now, is that still true?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google has informed me that this site command change was not an intentional change and we should expect the old behavior to return relatively shortly.

Update 1/29/07: I still see subdomains returns for www site commands. I am not sure why it has not been fixed yet.

End of December, I reported that Cre8asite Forums To Donate $1,600 Towards SEM Organizations. Well, today the results are in and were announced at Cre8asite Forums.

Here are the details:

The funds are going to:

• SEMPO
  
• Fresh Egg
  
• Search Engine College
  
• Bruce Clay SEO Toolset & Human Factors International (tie)
  

Each received $400, so a total of $2,000 was given.

Congrats to the winners and to Cre8asite Forums for the contribution!

Kim Krause-Berg has some more information here.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Answers.com runs a nice answer engine that does just that, it tries to give you an answer as opposed to just search results. Many search engines do this already, they try to give you an answer in the top box, Google has their OneBox, Ask.com has their SmartAnswer, Yahoo has they ShortCut - but BrainBoost does this elusively.

Gary Price took a look at this a while back when Answers.com Buys "Answer Extraction" Engine Brainboost for $4 Million in Cash and Some Shares of Restricted Stock. Also, Philipp has a older look at this answer engine where he looks at brainboost answers.

This came under recent forum scrutiny when EGOL started a thread at Cre8asite Forums after stumbling upon it.

I asked BrainBoost, how many fingers do I have? the response was, "Brainboost is not a chatbot. It was designed to answer questions which are factual in nature." OK, I guess that I most likely have five fingers, but yet it is not factual that everyone that would ask that question would have five finders. In any event, I then asked the engine, how many championships did michael jordan win? and I got my answer from several sources.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread reports that Wikipedia has added nofollow attributes to all the links within the English Wikipedia. Joost had the scoop sharing that due to the most recent SEO contest, the founder, Jimbo Wales, has ordered that the nofollow be added back to all links within the "en.wikipedia.org's article namespace."

Wikipedia did have the nofollow attribute on all those links in the past, but removed the nofollow attribute from the Wikipedia in November 2005.

The Cre8asite Forums thread has lots of discussion on if this is a good thing or bad thing. The reason Wikipeda made this move was to discourage "vandalism" but has the nofollow attribute discouraged vandalism in the blogosphere? I honestly can not say it has.

In any event, most folks in the thread feel this is a good move. I think it is wise for Wikipedia to give this a try one more time and see if it works. They can always decide in a few months if they want to keep the nofollow on or remove it. Either way, they will be able to test their theory.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

A nice Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks for tips on how to learn about your competitors web statistics in any way. Normally, the best and most accurate method is to see the actual log files, but very often that is not possible. So what data can you get?

Some suggestions given in the thread include:

• Alexa - but we all know that it is far from accurate
• Quantcast - free internet ratings service.
• Compete - like Alexa

There are other services listed in the Search Engine Watch Forums thread, but I also want to point you to A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available by Rand, it is a very comprehensive list of publicly available tools that can help you learn as much as possible about your competitors web site.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, we reported that Google changed their AdSense program policies but focused on the fact that Google is disallowing ad rotations of some type. But I missed something highlighted by a WebmasterWorld thread that shows Google making it more strict on content scrapers.

Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.

Google's DMCA policy is at http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html.

Honestly, they have always request that AdSense publishers use the DMCA request to stop scrapers, but I guess now they made it clearer in the program policies.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld post shows two respected members reporting that they have seen Google AdWords URLs within the Yahoo! Search index.

vicyankees says:

Is anyone else noticing that Yahoo is picking up Google Adwords links? I only know because i append all of my Google and other PPC links with a src=#*$!X and my tracking software also appends similar information.

WebmasterWorld moderator, bill, confirms this saying:

I just noticed this as well. I hadn't checked my Yahoo SERPs in a while and just noticed that they indexed several of my AdWords pages. What's up with that? I guess the first question would be, 'how do we get them to stop it?' Do I have to change all of my AdWords tracking codes?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It appears from the forums that we have early reports of a big Yahoo! Search update underway.

WebmasterWorld moderator, Sugarrae posted a thread at WebmasterWorld saying;

I'm seeing very big changes in the index this evening... looks like a big update in backlinks and some very big shifting in the serps for the areas I track. Also, that whole title change thing looks like a plague spreading through the web at the moment.

No official confirmation yet from the Yahoo! Search Blog but we typically beat Yahoo! to posted about their own updates.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Confirmed: Yahoo! posted at the Yahoo! Search Blog a weather report confirming the update:

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began last night and should be complete very soon.

Keep the feedback coming!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Yesterday there was some confusion on if Microsoft adCenter Advertisers Being Forced into Content Network?

The official adCenter representative at WebmasterWorld, adCenter411, has replied with more details, to clear things up.

A select number of adCenter customers are being migrated to the beta site so that we can expand our Content Ads pilot and gather feedback on the next version of the adCenter User Interface. All advertisers selected for migration will be given access to the beta site and an improved set of campaign management tools, reporting tools and navigation. We selected advertisers based upon their match to the MSN inventory we have available and to provide access to a sampling of advertisers.

I also wanted to clarify that you can modify your content ads distribution – so if you don’t want to participate in content ads, you don’t have to. Once you have migrated to the beta site, you can turn off content ads. We'll be posting detailed instructions with screen shots on our blog on Monday.

So, you will be able to turn off content ad inclusion, how that is done, will be revealed at adCenter Blog this Monday.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Here are instructions to opt out via adCenter411 at the thread above:

Here are the instructions for those of you who would like to turn off ads on the content network entirely. After your account is migrated on Jan. 25, after signing into your account: 1. Click the Campaign you want to edit. 2. Click the ad group you wish to modify. 4. Click the Ad Group Settings tab. 4. In the Targeting section, locate "Select a distribution method for this ad group." 5. Uncheck the box labeled “Content” and Click Save.

Back on January 4th, we reported Google Not Showing Localized Pages Within Country For .COM TLDs. We have specific examples showing that Google was not showing proper pages for .com domains, when one conducts a site command search, but restricts that search to a origin.

It appears based on Matt Cutts's Infrastructure status, January 2007 post that this should be resolved soon or even now.

I thought we’d nailed this issue in December, but we found another way that this can happen. I believe a fix has been submitted and is percolating its way through the system. Of the ~7 examples that I know of, I believe all but one is working now (and the remaining site is doing a chain of like five 302 redirects to weird/long/deep urls). However, if you 1) have a .com that is hosted outside the US, 2) searching on (say) google.co.uk for [site:yourdomain.com] returns your root page and all your pages for “Search the web”, 3) if you switch to (say) “pages from the UK”, the root page does not appear but the rest of your pages do, then this paragraph applies to you. I’d wait 4-5 days to let this second change percolate completely into our index, and if you still see the behavior after 4-5 days, please leave a comment with the name of your site.

So it has been 5 days since his post on this and we do see some improvements, but not all sites are yet a 100%, as far as I can tell.

SEOptimise tells his story, being a .com hosted in a UK data center.

Discussion at WebmasterWorld has others noticing that this isn't 100% right just yet. Discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums says it has been resolved for many cases.

Well respected SEO, Scottie Claiborne, wrote a guest article for Jill Whalen's popular newsletter named Switching to a New Domain Without Losing Your Google Rankings. In her article, Scottie recommends using a 302 redirect temporarily, so that Google keeps your current rankings in place. Here is her direct advice:

By using a 302 "temporarily moved" response instead of a 301, the original URL will remain in Google's index, and maintain its position as if the page were still there. However, visitors who click on the link will be brought to your new URL, exactly where you want them to be. It's the best of both worlds -- you retain your rankings during that interim aging period, but visitors are redirected to the updated and correct domain.

Once the 302-redirect is in place, it's imperative to start a linking campaign for the new site. You'll need links pointing to it in order for it to be ready to rank highly when it's released from the aging filter. When you notice the new domain starting to show up in the rankings (anywhere from 6-12 months, typically) then it's time to contact your previous linking partners to update their links from the old domain to the new one.

Once the new domain has properly aged, go back and change the 302-temporary redirect to a 301-permanent redirect.

I have heard that this used to work about a year ago. But I honestly would never recommend this action.

It is an old article, and is dated as such, so be careful with old articles. Things that may have worked in the past, may kill you in the future.

A recent High Rankings thread shows one member giving this method a try. He claimed it bombed badly;

As per Scotty's advice, I set up a 302 redirect exactly as described and all went well until about a week ago. Google saw fit to remove all of the pages that were 302'd from the search results. The pages are still indexed, but they aren't even on page 10,000 of results that we used to rank #1 for.

So I figured I do some research as well as ask Google for some information on what to do in this specific situation.

(1) http://books.google.com/webmasters/3.html number 2 says:

2. I migrated my website to a new URL.

If you've changed your URL, or plan to, and would like Google to display your new URL, please keep in mind that we can't manually change your listed address in our search results. That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your transition is smooth.

If your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will discover the new URLs. For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.

Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank and help our crawler find your new URL, you'll want to inform others who link to you of your change of address. To find a sampling of sites that link to yours, perform a link search by entering "link:[your full URL]" into the Google search box. To find more pages that mention your URL, perform a Google search on your URL and select the "Find web pages that contain the term" link. Also, don't forget to change any entries you may have in directories such as Yahoo! or the Open Directory Project.

Finally, you may submit a list of your new URLs through the Google Sitemaps (Beta) program. Google Sitemaps uses webmaster-generated Sitemap files to learn about your webpages and to direct our crawlers to new and updated content.

Sometimes during site transitions, we'll fail to find a site at its new address. Just be sure that others are linking to you, and we should discover your new site.

(2) A post by Vanessa Fox named More about changing domain names:

Recently, someone asked me about moving from one domain to another. He had read that Google recommends using a 301 redirect to let Googlebot know about the move, but he wasn't sure if he should do that. He wondered if Googlebot would follow the 301 to the new site, see that it contained the same content as the pages already indexed from the old site, and think it was duplicate content (and therefore not index it). He wondered if a 302 redirect would be a better option.

I told him that a 301 redirect was exactly what he should do. A 302 redirect tells Googlebot that the move is temporary and that Google should continue to index the old domain. A 301 redirect tells Googlebot that the move is permanent and that Google should start indexing the new domain instead. Googlebot won't see the new site as duplicate content, but as moved content. And that's exactly what someone who is changing domains wants.

So 301 is recommended.

Other advice given to me by Google based on my recent request is to read the following blog posts:

• Setting the preferred domain
• Changing domains
• My URL changed, so how can I get Google to index my new site?
• SEO advice: url canonicalization
• SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects
• Moving to a new web host

So please be cautious when moving domain names. 301 is the safest best, even though it may take several months to get right.

I want to thank Ben for his help here, he may come in later and add his thoughts...

Forum discussion at High Rankings.

Last week, a WebmasterWorld thread posted January 9th in the morning and a Google Groups thread posted January 10th, reported the Google Remove your URL form to be down.

It wasn't until last night did we get confirmation from Google that the tool was indeed down.

Adam Lasnik replied to the Google Groups thread saying;

We had a short amount of downtime with the tool, but it should be working now.

I suspect it was down for only about one day and not much longer.

Softplus's suggestion in the Google Groups thread to move the tool into Webmaster Central, I think is a nice idea.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google Groups.

A great forum and resource to get help with your Google ranking issues is the Google Groups: Google Webmaster Help Forum. But recently, the forum seemed pretty static and inactive.

On January 11th, a member posted a thread asking what is wrong with Google Groups:

1. Lots of trouble posting replies

2. When clicking on links to forums from http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help get messages saying the thread can't be found. These are new threads so the chances of them being removed is slim

3. When looking at a users profile, recent posts are not being listed so it's difficult to remeber which posts you have replied to or expect a reply for.

Adam Lasnik replied confirming the issue and saying things are currently back to normal, on January 17th.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks, "Are There Negative Consequences to Pausing a Campaign or Adgroup?"

There is a lot of speculation in the thread, but I believe the bottom line is that there is no direct consequence for pausing a campaign or adgroup in Google AdWords.

Deleting a campaign or AdGroup can and will cause issues. Editing a campaign or AdGroup can also cause direct issues. But pausing them should not.

AdWordsAdvisor basically confirms that, but we are waiting on confirmation on that.

What may happen is that your competitors gain better history for their ads (but your history should remain the same). It also may hurt you to not remain active, because this is a dynamic bidding and ranking environment, if things change and your not around to watch these changes, then you can be hurt from the lost experience and time.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: AdWordsAdvisor2 confirms that pausing ads have no affect on your quality score at a WebmasterWorld thread.

Pausing campaigns or Ad Groups has no effect on your Quality Score. Feel free to pause or use Ad Scheduling as necessary.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that notifications are being sent to advertisers that on January 25, 2007, they will be automatically included in the Microsoft content network. Other members confirmed the email, but I do not have a copy myself.

One member said:

The email stated that my current settings will be changed and I will HAVE to start using the new Content Beta. With NO option to opt out, just stating that it is going to happen on 1/25/07.

I suspect there must be a way to opt out, but maybe it is not clear. He said he called adCenter support, but they "tried to show [him] how to opt out, but had no clue themselves."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Microsoft adCenter advertisers receiving emails saying that they may undergo an account audit. I suspect these account audits are random and allow Microsoft to see if there advertisers are complying with their terms of service.

The email also had a promotion aspect, encouraging advertisers to opt in to their contextual ad network.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google AdSense announced they have updated their program policies page, but they say, "nearly all of the policies themselves have stayed the same." That is a bit of an overstatement. Besides for Google Officially Disallows Images Near AdSense Ads, which is huge! They now have updated their Competitive Ads and Services paragraph to read:

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

That means, you can not Dynamically Delivering AdSense & YPN Ads on Rotation, which I do here and hundreds of publishers do.

To be clear, you must make sure the ads you rotate in look different from the Google ads. So the way I have it set up, I need to change the colors of the AdSense ads from the colors of the Yahoo ads.

Not only that, if you have other ads on the site, they can not look anything like Google ads, even if they are not contextual.

JenSense has her analysis of this and what she expects from the publishers.

Folks are not happy, and there is no date as to when these changes need to be put in place (as far as I can tell).

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

The fifteenth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. I sat this show out, since I was a bit jet lagged but Ben and Chris did an outstanding job. They had Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link on the show as a guest. This week, they talked about the recent search marketing blog awards. They also discussed the PPC versus organic listing question. DMOZ was the guest topic, where Debra dug into the link value and how easy it is to get a DMOZ link. There were many other topics discussed. 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. Best Search Marketing Blog Award From Search Engine Journal
   
2. Should I Keep My PPC Search Advertising If I Already Rank #1 Organically?
   
3. Organic Search Versus Sponsored Results: The Forum Round
   
4. Supplemental Results Aren't Something To Be Afraid Of
   
5. DMOZ Is Accepting Submissions Again (with Debra Mastaler of www.alliance-link.com)
   
6. Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues
   
7. More Tidbits on Google's Duplicate Content Filter
   
8. Google Awarded Patent for Duplicate Content "Similarity Estimation"
   
9. Yahoo Search Replacing Site Titles in Search Results Listings
   
10. New Google UI Test: Bottom Page Related Searches
    
11. How Do Search Engine Robots Work?
    
12. Brett Tabke Asks For Practical Experience With "Domain Age"
    
13. Idea To Place Google Image Ads Near Google Text Ads As Alternate
    

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 15: Best Search Blogs, PPC & Organic, DMOZ Back, Debra Mastaler Guests, Related Google Searches & More"

In the past, since Google Maps launched, a search that was address or location specific, may have brought up a Google Map result, which also contained links to other mapping services, such as Yahoo! Maps and Map Quest. Those links have now been removed and now Google only shows a link to Google Maps.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land received a statement from Google on the matter:

"Google is always working to improve search. The redesign of maps onebox better simplifies the Google user experience when looking for business and address information. Users will now be able to obtain directions and store their default location."

He wonders when will Google stop showing other financial quoting services for searches on ticker symbols, such as aapl.

Google Blogoscoped has a before and after screen capture for san francisco.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports UK Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers receiving notification that the minimum bids accepted will be lowered to 5P (£0.05). Not all keywords will receive the lower bid of 5P, some will remain at 10P (£0.10). Which ones exactly, I am not sure.

I believe this also applies to Germany, Austria, Switzerland.

The new bid prices go into affect January 19, 2007.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums threads are both reporting issues with Yahoo! Slurp (Yahoo!'s Crawler) indexing pages they should not be, and in quantities that may be harmful.

It appears that only specific bots are not obeying the robots.txt file and indexing pages are rates that can potentially cause server issues.

The specific IP addresses appear to be in the 74.6.x block. They do reverse DNS to inktomi, which is correct.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

As expected, Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, has launched his search engine, named Wikiseek.com. (This is not a search engine by Wikipedia, but it does use Wikipedia's content - sorry, still catching up). All I have seen are negative reviews about the search engines, you can read Danny's huge analysis at Search Engine Land, his conclusion:

In the end, if you want to search Wikipedia, just go to Wikipedia and search there rather than Wikiseek. That seems the better experience. Or search at Google -- it tends to bring up Wikipedia pages all the time for relevant queries.

I have searched through the various discussion forums and honestly did not find much conversation on it. There is a large thread at WebmasterWorld and a very short one at DigitalPoint Forums.

The overall consensus is that it is currently a poor search experience because of the restrictions of only showing results within the wikiepdia community.

I also did notice someone at WebmasterWorld noted that http://wikiseek.com/ returns a 404, they need to 301 that to the www version.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week, Yahoo! launched OneSearch a downloaded application for your mobile phone that helps you search quicker on a mobile device.

The Yahoo Search Blog gives you examples of how it works. It currently doesn't work on many phones, you can see the list of carriers and phones that are supported over here. Plus Greg Sterling has a write up at Search Engine Land.

It does seem to be supported in multiple countries, based on the "Choose your country" drop down on the phone selection page.

Yahoo! has added that they are pulling back on the number of people who can download it:

Note: due to overwhelming demand for our cool new Yahoo! Go 2.0 beta, you may be placed on a waitlist of up to 1-2 weeks to get it (depending on your phone model). Register now for the beta — the sooner you do, the sooner you'll get it!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Although Barry will not be with us, Ben and I will be hosting the Search Pulse show tonight at 5pm EST (GMT-5). We will have a special guest on the show, after negotiating all day with her PR people and other handlers: Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link and the Link Spiel Blog.

We are excited to cover as many topics from the past two weeks as we can get to, and hope you will join us. The show can be heard live at WebmasterRadio.fm, and you can join the chat room to ask questions (click here if you cannot download the desktop chat player), although not guaranteed any answers. We will post the link to the Podcast hopefully sometime tomorrow.

See you at WebmasterRadio!

Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld, created a thread at WebmasterWorld (1) placing the age of a domain a top five factor in Google rankings and (2) asking for hands on advice on what this exactly means. Here is Brett's post:

Most of us know that the age of a domain is one of the single most important criteria of the Google algo. I'd put it as a top ten - maybe top five - filter. It is a gate keeper. The real question to me is if that matters on a parked or doa domain? We have some domains 10years old this month that have never had sites on them. I am wondering if there is a default value there because of the age? Is it a pure whois thing? Or is a age of inbound links thing?

Now, here are some excerpts of responses to Brett's question:

I'm thinking that so many people own a warehouse of stockpiled domains for experiments and possible throw-aways that it can't be just a pure Whois thing. - Tedster

And likewise there are surely enough people who just threw up a blank index page (or even "Coming Soon") with a title that it can't be just age of domain...(or, if it is, there will be a rush of people searching for underconstruction.gif) - Stever

I think there is something to the domain age, but I think general history of the domain and pages and rate of change and ranking on similar terms means a LOT more. - BigDave

Those two are key factors. It is not just the age of the domain but also how long it has been in the index. I don't think parked domains count (much). Or do they?

Another factor, WhoIs turnover. Has that domain exchanged hands once, twice, thrice?

Age of inbound links.

All sorts of stuff. This is a loaded question. ;)

-PageonResults

IMO whole "signals of quality" thing factors into the question of parked and dark domains. Right or wrong, we distinguish between the two kinds when it comes to potential for launching a new site. Based on our own experience/judgement/guesswork, if we think a newly acquired domain will be turned into a real site in the relatively near term, we do NOT allow the domain to resolve to a parked page.

IMO, age of domain matters, age of inbounds matter, age of inbounds is factored by quality of inbounds and growth pattern of inbounds (which can produce positiveor negative influence), templates matter, content matters, page update patterns matter (and sitewide issues play a role here), IP's matter.

Food for thought:

-Caveman

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We have more evidence of our past coverage that Google sends out notifications to Webmasters when they violate Google's terms of service. For example, Gabs received a notification and posted the details at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, explaining he was accidently hiding text on the page.

Here is the email he received:

Dear site owner or webmaster of *******co.uk,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently
pages from *****.co.uk are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on ********.co.uk:

e.g.
**********************
…

We would prefer to have your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please visit:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/reinclusion?hl=en

to learn more and request a reinclusion request.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Our past coverage of this includes:

• Google Sends Warnings to Sites
  
• Google Notification of Site Removal
  
• Google Steps Up Webmaster Spam Warning Emails
  

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

AussieWebmaster has posted information in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread where a Google representative has told him that Google's quality score helps determine the ad delivery. Here is the quote:

Regarding the serving, this actually is a common question that we receive. The system tries to equally rotate ads but there are other factors that weigh into this rotation. In your case it does look fairly even for the most part, however the system may be looking at the one ad as one with a less quality score than the other, thus not serving it as often. Although you have it opted into rotate more evenly it isn't guaranteed that the system will functionally work to an exact science. I know this isn't the answer you were hoping for, but this is what we have been told by engineering!

Jonathan Mendez has a great case study blog post from a while back that goes into more detail on What Google’s Quality Score Is & What It Is Not. This post helps clarify the message above.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses how hundreds, if not thousands, of AdSense publishers based in Brazil did not receive their Google AdSense payout, when they expected it.

Their checks were a month delayed, according to the thread, because of Brazilian Customs Regulations.

The post reads;

Thousands of brazilian webmasters which are expecting the december check (delivered 12/20) noticed the delay this month, and yesterday they received an email from Adsense, informing that the checks are interrupted due to Brazilian customs regulations with couriered payments.

I do not have a copy of the email from AdSense but it is very interesting to see this, especially with all the Brazil versus Google stories over the past year or so. For more on Brazil and Google woes, start here and keep clicking.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have no idea what is going on here, but I saw a few instances just a few moments ago myself. This was first reported on WMW where a member noticed that Yahoo was changing the titles of his site's listing in the search results. Yahoo was replacing a shortened lowercase different title for its normal title that was Uppercase longer and the accurate original title used on the site.

At first members wondered if Yahoo was just playing hooky and messing with Dmoz titles or even Yahoo Directory titles. This was not the case, as most of the sites mentioned don't have Dmoz or Y! listings.

Join the discussion and outrage at WMW - Yahoo Replacing Site Titles

Update by Barry: I wrote a long post with Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land on this, hope to have official word from Yahoo! soon.

Update 2 by Barry: This has been fixed now, Yahoo! Fixes Titles in Search Results Sourced From Internal Anchor Text, Thanks Tim!

So if you are getting 65% of your traffic organically from Google for free, should you pay for the other 35%? This is one of the questions posed by a member on High Rankings Forum about whether they should continue to pay for PPC ads for the keyword they already rank #1 for. I don't see why you wouldn't want to pay for it, but there are plenty of good reasons for not paying. Sometime the costs these days are so high in the top position not including other barriers to entry that it doesn't make sense for the average webmaster.

Some of the members have some excellent thoughts on why it would be benefical to keep paying for that extra paid traffic:

There is one theory that having top results in both organic and PPC listings can help build the credibility of the site (Customer: "Hey, these guys are all over this page! They must be the industry leader" or something along those lines.).

Also:

Studies have shown that multiple exposures increases CTR. I've even seen a study that asserted that while banner ads may not provide direct benefit in many cases, customers were more likely to buy when exposed to a company's brand in multiple places.

I tend to agree with what they are saying. High rankings in those position will not always warrant high click throughs. Its best to cover your bases. Sometime paying for PPC is not an option, as its too cost prohibitive or not in the original marketing plan for the business. Other times the PPC ad itself can be more successful than the organic listing. Whatever the case, if you are a small business or in a very niche area, branding can be very impactful to your customers and users to see your dominate the area for your search terms. This adds credibility and trust to name and product which can lead to bigger profits or better business oppourtunities.

Discussion at High Rankings

Word comes from the forums that DMOZ is again accepting submissions for site inclusions in their directory.

On December 20, 2006, we reported Open Directory Project (DMOZ) Coming Back From the Dead with the reopening of the editor area.

Now submissions seem to be back. I tested it myself and it seems to be live.

Now making sure your site is listed is a completely other story. But at least now (1) editors are technically able to review sites and (2) site owners can technically submit sites.

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

I should be back from my vacation this Wednesday, this is just a guest post since I have some time.

Ben reported that MSNDude Still Missing, I think he heard us and came out of his hub to inform us he is still around...

In a post at WebmasterWorld (post number 3216990) he wrote;

Rest assured, MSNDude is, and will continue be around -- though I should say that I am the 'new' MSNDude. We do seriously appreciate and consider all the feedback we get (both here and elsewhere). Sorry for the slower response time in getting back to posts and feedback, but we do look into and investigate all of it. Keep it coming!

So it appears, the original MSNDude is no longer around, and that we got a "new" one. So welcome, MSNDude!

This is not the first time MSNDude has gone missing, more on that here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I should be back from my vacation this Wednesday, this is just a guest post since I have some time.

New Search Engine Watch forum member johnno123 has started a topic regarding country filtering at Google Australia; where the option to only view "pages from Australia" is given. A similar option is given on most (if not all) non-US Google search pages, with non-English speaking countries such as Germany, also able to filter by language.

This added functionality (also available on other major search engines) can prove extremely useful when trying to find local results. You can see this filtering in action by searching for [the kings head pub] with and without the filtering on.

Johnno goes on to say:

I am currently reviewing a website for a Local Tourism Organisation in Australia that is a .com site which is hosted in the USA. It therefore doesn't appear at all when the "pages from Australia" option is selected by people living in Australia.

This problem frequently crops up in SEO outside of the states, especially when a website is not run on a ccTLD, hosted abroad and/or receiving inbound links mostly from pages outside of the country in question. The easiest way of ensuring that your site is included within this filtered result set is to use a local domain - .com.au/.org.au in this case. If the website has been using a gTLD already for marketing and publicity purposes though, it is not always possible to make such a change. In these situations I would advise trying to move to a website hosting provider with local IP addresses, ensuring that all WHOIS data has a local address and building links from other sites using your local ccTLD.

The main question in this post is asking about how many people use country filtering. From my experience, I've found that its usage is largely increasing. Non-English speaking countries are using it to find easily digestible information, switching to "the web" only if they cannot find what they're searching for; or when international content is specifically desired. English speaking countries use it partly as a filter of trust. Many people feel more comfortable with local websites and content, especially if the site uses their local (and increasingly recognised) ccTLD.

Further discussion on the topic at Search Engine Watch.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network is the system which allows bloggers and other web content providers to host ads from Yahoo! Search marketing's contextual advertising product. YPN has been ramping up its exposure greatly over the past few months, thanks to a solid PR effort. They had an excellent private party for publishers at Pubcon in Las Vegas, and followed up with an equally well received party for all attendees at SES Chicago. YPN regularly polls it users for feedback on important topics. Additionally, they have been posting quite regularly to their blog, including introducing a new series of posts which promise to give a summary of the results of their polls.

A thread at Digital Point forums discusses the latest poll offered to its publishers, and the biggest choice seems to be "Traffic" so far. Some seem to feel that many of the other choices lead to additional traffic, such as "Increased focus on good content." Since YPN presents this poll via login to the system, we have chosen not to present all the choices, and will let Yahoo! do that on their schedule.

If you are a member of YPN and have voted or have your thoughts on the best answers, please visit the Digital Point thread and share your answer and any reasons behind it.

We recently recapped the Google Minus-30 penalty discussion going on at WebmasterWorld. The topic of Google ranking penalties that seem to indicate a pattern has been revived in a new thread by Administrator Tedster, who wants to get a better handle on what people are calling the minus-950 penalty. (WebmasterWorld seems to always get to name these kinds of things).

This topic is discussed in more detail in the WMW thread, but to summarize: the question is whether the minus-950 penalty is being applied only to specific pages or keyword results, as opposed to the minus-30 penalty which seems to affect an entire site.

Being the biggest fish in the aquarium has its ups and downs. If you are having a "bad scale day," all the viewers will notice it pretty easily. So when Google's search results change dramatically, especially when focused towards a particular niche, someone will be sure to write about it. For example, the recent blog post at PBS (yes that PBS) blog MediaShift discusses that

just after Christmas... a Google bug made a handful of influential sex blogs “disappear” from Google search results.

The article links to a good post by Danny Sullivan, circa 2003 and titled Google Dance Case Studies. It also has an excellent interview with him on the current "blip," which Danny theorizes:

In this case, it seems like Google might have been tweaking porn filters somewhat

.

So the forum connection to this topic is thanks to WebmasterWorld, where a thread was started to discuss the PBS article. This thread has become much more than a discussion on algorithm tweaks and blips, as WMW administrator Tedster introduces his theory that there is a lot more than just a few minor things going on at Google at the same time to just be coincidence. He cites over a half dozen threads at WMW discussing issues with Google, including:

AdWords disruptions
AdSense Outages
Webmaster Tools Reporting Issues
Increased "URL-only" Listings
Site Root Pages Disappearing
The 950 Penalty Increases
False PR 0 Reports
URL Removal Tool Troubles (he links to each thread)

Tedster feels that

We don't see a clear picture yet, but these disruptions to normal operation, all occurring at about the same time, seem like they might be related to a bigger picture of some kind.

Catch up on the sex blog story in the links above and then join the discussion(s) about Google at WebmasterWorld forums.

Malware or spyware is often confused as being something that can only come from opening a bad email attachment. In fact, there are many web pages that contain this kind of additional code, which can cause havoc for your personal computer or even a network you are in. In many cases, sites and pages use tracking software which some would also consider to be spyware or malware. However, in most of these cases there is little damage that the program could do, and it will in fact increase your user experience by customizing your pages to your past behavior.

So what kinds of malware could be bad? Google apparently uses a system that can help you find out. A recent thread at WebmasterWorld forums discusses the following introduction by a member:

While searching for a specific keywords or just typing my domain name in Google and after clicking on my site, it generates a warning named: "Malware Warning". Further they say:
"Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
You can learn more about harmful web content and how to protect your computer at StopBadware.org."

Although some interesting and valuable discussion follows, one of the best replies came in the form of a post from Google Engineer Matt Cutts, who describes a similar discussion occurring in the Webmaster Central Google Group. Matt explains that people that claim they are seeing this result for a site that does not have any malware should look more closely.

I’ve checked out a quite a few “we don’t have any malware” reports at this point, and I’ve yet to see a false positive

.

To find out more about Google's Malware reports see the thread at WebmasterWorld or the Matt Cutts’ blog post.

Matt Cutts wrote yesterday about recent infrastructure changes on his blog detailing everything from the recent Google PR update to a more detailed explanation into how supplemental results work. The information also included some fixes for sites that are hosted outside the US and were not showing up in regional Google locations such as google.co.uk. There has been some discussion about this on the forums at Digital Point and I thought it important to point out because Matt mentions some relevant thoughts on links and the freshness of supplemental links. He even claims you might even start seeing some more traffic from your supplemental results!

On the topic of supplemental results and links Matt said:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of...Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank... I think going forward, you’ll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher, and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.

If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

That last part about white hat whatnot we would expect Matt to say that, the part about links is a bit interesting. It's not necessary new info at all, but its often forgotten. Sometimes we can look at links statically as never changing, where quantity is a healthier indicator than actual quality. We know this not to be true however. This way of thinking is an age old trap for newcomers in our industry to understand this. One of the members on Digital Point commented about the best way to get pages out of supplemental is to point some links at them. Great, but that may not last forever. Other times its all you need to do.

Continued discussion on Digital Point and Matt Cutts Comments

In a generous move by Google, the Adsense team has offered to help optimize Adsense ads for some webmaster sites. The Adsense team has sent out some invitations this past week to some people for improving their ads performance. The response has been very positive and one member on WMW has commented:

They gave me great site-specific suggestions about ad placement. Implementation of their suggestions increased revenue. I also learned some new things about advertising. My experience has been that they are genuinely concerned about helping you increase income (theirs increases too, of course) in a way that also enhances a site visitors experience.

More discussion at Webmaster World - Adsense Invitation

In an effort to catch up and out do Google, MSN has replaced one of its search engine representatives with the first robotic search engine representative to help webmasters deal with issues on its Live.com search engine. This is a first for the search industry which previously had some very well known and (human) search engine representatives such as Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, and quite a few others. Webmasters theorize the volume of webmaster questions just became too much and they needed an automated approach to dealing with the public.

I am kidding of course. Members on Webmasterworld are discussing the disappeared of MSNdude from the WMW forums. One of the members has found out what happened and they have located that he has gotten a new job in the Natural Language department at Live Search. Congrats. Hopefully Microsoft will put someone new in his place to be active on the forums once again.

Continued discussion at Webmaster World - MSN Dude Theories

YPN users have been experiencing some strange compliance issues with their accounts the last few days. Barry reported on the Compliance Manager in YPN last year and some of the compliance issues that start back then. The issues were fixed, but just like a Rocky movie they are back again for another fight to confuse webmasters with compliance issues. Yahoo has stepped up the level of transparency with publishers and many are happy about this situation. But what is going on with these compliance alerts Yahoo?

A thread on Digitalpoint Forums tracks these new compliance issues. One of the members says that the YPN representatives know the issue exists and are working on fixing them. One member even goes to compliment the work of the YPN staff saying "Everything is well and under control. Gosh, I love YPN staff..." Good to hear every now and then. Despite the warm and fuzzes, the issues are still going on. One of biggest fears is that users will get kicked out of the program for not being in compliance for no reason whatsoever. However none of this has happened yet and I doubt highly it will occur.

For those with issues, please contact your YPN representative and keep up with updates on the Digitalpoint Forums thread.

I'm sure they wanted Jakob Nielson, but 15 minutes before Danny's Keynote talk at the Chicago SES Conference, Cre8asiteforums' founder, Kim Krause Berg, was planted in a chair by WebProNews for an interview about usability. She made sure to mention important keywords like "search engines", and she pointed out the value of adding descriptive link labels for engines and people.

Discussion of her debut performance at Cre8asiteforums' usability forum, where usability and SEO/M have always played nice together.

The New Year often brings outstanding compilations recapping the past year and providing predictions for the future year. Greg Jarboe has started a series for Search Engine Watch's SearchDay that he has called "The 12 Days of Search Day." For anyone not familiar, there is a song called the "12 Days of Christmas" (Lyrics).

Greg's first post in the series about 2007 trends to watch covered the following:

In the first week of New Year’s, my SearchDay gave to me:
12 speakers speaking,
11 bloggers blogging,
10 scribblers scribbling,
Nine Diggers Digging…

He follows up with a second installment which describes the next gifts:

Eight firms a-buying,
Seven forums buzzing,
Six engines searching,
Five Google things...

Fun stuff, and a good synopsis of things to keep an eye on or add to your favorites, so far.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Great Question for 2007 for companies that seek reputable search engine marketing people seems to be whom to trust? Several leading bloggers have presented lists of their top choices of companies or individuals in whom they place their faith. Yesterday, three other well-known blogs from the SEO industry charged forward with lists of people they trust to do business with, or simply find to be a leader in general. One of them looked deeper at the criteria for choosing.

Add to this the recent flurry of doomsday predictions for SEO/M, mixed in with promising news for growth and opportunities. One wonders at this industry and its pondering navel mood. I think its healthy to look, because the discussions generate growth and maturity as a whole in the long run. To that end, if you have thoughts on leadership, role models, credibility, trust, and feel strongly about whom you look up to, there is a discussion called How Do You Decide Whom To Trust To Lead? at Cre8asiteforums waiting for you.

There has been much talk recently in the search engine marketing industry about the relative value of Organic (free) search engine positions versus Sponsored (paid) results, especially in the terms of the cost associated to manage the efforts. This topic has been covered extensively, in case you somehow missed it, but the most recent thorough coverage can be found with all parties involved in the comments at Search Engine Land and Greg Boser's less word-mincing WebGuerilla Blog. (Nice "clueless" subdomain, Greg ;)) Barry originally covered this topic at SER.

One thing that has been common but a little more in the background on this subject is the direct value of Organic versus Paid results when it comes to conversions. A recent thread at WebmasterWorld Forums discusses this slant in more detail, with the thread starter asking:

If I was in the business of selling products, say if I was Amazon dot com, as an example.
Would you want to be in #1 in Google PPC position or #1 Organic position? (lets assume the PPC is free for this argument)

Plenty of responses follow, with people debating the value of the listings purely in terms of conversion ability.

This year will likely yield some more thorough research into the effect of having multiple types of listings within search results, but if looking at search holistically it is very likely that the higher number of listings one has for a popular and converting keyword phrase, the better chances of reaching the end goal. One member details:

For some of most competitive keywords we have multiple sites in "free" top 10 and 3 or 4 in PPC... competing against ourselves... So pretty much whatever visitor would click, they'll end up at the "right place". This kind of enterprise is costing a very high price, naturally...

Join the discussion at WebmasterWorld Forums.

There is a thread at SEORefugee discussing a new Google UI test for related searches that are located at the bottom of the page. I personally like the look of the new test, but unfortunately can't duplicate the same thing in my searches. The related searches were found by member Skitzzo doing a Google search for baseball history. A screenshot was posted and looks like:

Continued discussion at SEO Refugee

I have always had a thing for spiders. Not the creepy crawly kind, but the one made of bits and bytes who scour the web for new documents to index and download. They are so predictable but at the same time quite surprising you when you least expect it. How the hell did they do that or find that page? Many a webmaster has scratched their hand in disbelief at a crawler at one time or another. There is a thread on WebmasterWorld asking new questions about the various characteristics of a how search engine crawling technology works and the bare bones infrastructure of how a search engine goes from finding a page to ultimately deciding to list it in its search engine results. This is the nuts and bolts of the technology and also updating previously known information with new questions and answers.

So how do search engine robots work and what comprises them?

Spider : a robotic browser like program that downloads webpages.
Crawler : a wandering spider that automatically follows links found on pages.
Indexer : a blender like program that dissects webpages that are downloaded by spiders.
The Database : a warehouse of the pages downloaded and processed.
Search Engine Results Engine : digs search results out of the database

Pageoneresults takes it a step further in creating this thread to ask new questions about search engine robots for those that are not previously familiar.

1. Do robots accept cookies?
2. What happens if my site forces a cookie?
3. Do robots execute JavaScript functions?
4. Could I be doing something technically that is stopping a robot from indexing my site?
5. How do robots interpret my page?
6. In what order to robots index my page? What is the very first step that robot takes?

Continued discussion on WebmasterWorld - How Do Robots Work?

One of the major factors in helping to rank for particular terms, especially in competitive and long-established industries, is the age of the website. This is the consensus opinion of search engine optimization experts, especially after the Google "Bourbon" and "Jagger" updates in 2005. Naturally, SEO's have experimented with this factor, as Jim Boykin explained also in 2005.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums, a member asks:

We all know that google like old domains. But does the domain need to have been live to benefit? For example, is a domain which was register(ed) in 2000 but has never be live, still a lot stronger than a domain which was registered in 2006 but has been live for 2 months?

Not many responses to this question yet, but two good comments include the important reminder that:

Domain age is just one of the factors.

Also, the next reply moved towards the real question within this question: whether the domain has to have had content on it and links towards it in order to gain strength. Member "Phaithful" also cautions:

If you're looking to purchase an old domain simply to get out of the "sandbox" / "trustbox" then look for one that has links going to it still and has had content on it for some time through archive.org. That will increase your chances... but "buyer beware"... some old domains are being resold because they've been blacklisted or have been part of spam schemes and those domains are worse off than a brand new domain.

Many would argue that the old domain would really only be of value not only if it had content and consistent links, but also if the content was always at least generally-related. Join the thread and give your thoughts at Cre8asite Forums.

Larry Constantine recently wrote The Open-Source Solution: If most commercial software isn't any good, why not use a more communal approach?

Open source may be superior in producing robust, reliable code. It can hold its own in providing functionality. But its weakness remains usability, which increasingly is the battle­ground for competing programs.

He writes that the joint efforts by a million programmers increases software reliability, but overall usability hasn't been reached yet, especially as new functionality is added. Joe Dolson brought this topic up for discussion, and it appears as though the consensus is that in some cases, usability has been accomplished. They point out WordPress as an example. What do you think?

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Open Source Software Weak In Usability?

What are the pros and cons of building a bunch of smaller sites that promote and point to a larger site? Sounds spammy, right? There's always a way to do something without tripping the search engine spam-o-meter. Writes one poster,

I don't think there's anything wrong with using Site A to promote Site B. It only becomes a problem when Site A is the ONLY thing you have promoting Site B. When push comes to shove, Site B has to be able to stand on its own, as part of the mainland. If it's just sitting in the middle of an artificial island, the engines are going to pretty much ignore it.

Discussion: Cre8asiteforums

Due to Barry's vacation, we will not be having our Search Pulse radio show on WebmasterRadio.fm this week. Please find past episodes on our Search Pulse archive page at WMR, and we look forward to returning next week with tales of Barry's trip, and maybe some of the usual stuff we talk about like search engines and such.

It was announced late last night that Yahoo! has bought the blogging community and widget MyBlogLog. Although the agreed amount was not disclosed, a Forbes source claims an amount of over $10m was offered.

There has been surprisingly little reaction to this announcement in the forums, despite being a Highlighted Post at WebmasterWorld.

Rather than letting me ramble on about what MyBlogLog is, Danny has an extremely comprehensive write-up over at Search Engine Land.

What I'm most interested in however, is what value the community and widget site will offer Yahoo! at a very important stage of their battle with Google. Is this simply a case of seeing value in the community aspect of the site, or the fact that their widget for placing on your blog, gives them access to the same (if not more) information as a your web analytics package? If this data was fed into the main Yahoo! beast, it would offer insight into what users do when they reach a specific site; maybe even using the data to manipulate natural search and paid search results. As the widget would only feature on blogs, the data won't necessarily effect individual site, although still provides interesting user behaviour information.

Further discussion over at WebmasterWorld Forums.

Does it's location really matter? Yes and no. While it might be better to have a link from a country specific domain, a natural link from .com hosted in the same country can have just as good benefits. Often with country specific linking it comes down to who you are trying to target. If you are looking to only get traffic from your country (or local city, town, village, hut) then you should focus on websites targeted for those people in that country country. You will build natural search engine rankings for your targeted country and also any traffic that comes from the links themselves.

There is discussion on Digitalpoint Forums about the nature of origin in linking and their impact on natural search rankings. If you are targeting local or country specific local search then this subject in linking is something to consider. One of the members in thread asks: "Does it not matter what kind of site links to a .com in the US?" The user 'on-on' had a good point, often it doesn't matter for sites in the US. Some sites are kinda the melting pot of links as people try to attract any and all links to the site. This discussion could continue into link quality, link type, link location on a page, and quantifying the estimated impact of link juice, and the interaction of the anchor text on rankings to make sense of all the factors that contribute to the benefit of that link. I think its best to say that if the link is worthwhile no matter what country, it may be worth pursuing.

Discussion continued at Digital Point Forums

Just a quick update on the Google Minus 30 penalty that Barry covered last year.

The WebmasterWorld thread has spanned into 2007, with some new and interesting discussion about the penalty that has been largely attributed to linking practices in forums and blogs, and was discussed briefly by Thomas Bindl at Pubcon in November (blog coverage with typos). Catch up and add follow up research now that some time has passed.

Start at the beginning or on the latest page at WebmasterWorld Forums.

It appears that there is a Google Toolbar PageRank update underway. For anyone not familiar with this topic, the value of the toolbar-displayed PageRank is often argued. A recent discussion which helps to clear up the original poster's misconceptions about PageRank can be found at Cre8asite Forums. Note that the first post per consensus is not considered to be accurate.

WebmasterWorld Forums has been reporting since last week that a Google toolbar PageRank update is underway. The thread has been updated as of today with more adamant proof that people are seeing more or less green in their PageRank diets. The topic was also started at Search Engine Roundtable Forums today, and feel free to link to further discussions in the comments below.

Many industries rely on simultaneous innovation in order to grow and prosper. New ideas are scrutinized, and ways to improve them fill the minds of competitors nearly from the concept stage as word leaks out. Search engine optimization works this way, as most expert SEO practitioners constantly monitor discussions in industry forums and collective research that takes place when algorithms change or new engines appear. Many would argue that people that push the limit and fail to follow strict guidelines (read here “black hats”) help those that abide by search engine-approved best practices, and visa versa, quite consistently in this fashion.

A new thread at Search Engine Watch forums explores methods for marketers to keep an eye on actual SEO performed on the websites of competitors. The original poster decided to start a discussion about the potential value of performing the following:

Analyze your top 3 competitors’ source code and robot.txt file (if its not been hidden)

There are just a few responses so far, but this has the makings of a great discussion highlighting some important things that can be monitored competition-wise. One member poses that competitive analysis is paramount to success:

By understanding the necessary benchmarks for a particular industry or market one can calculate the financial barrier to entry, undertake strategic niche planning, create an effective SEO plan, set specific goals and much more. By carefully studying the playing field you learn IF you can compete and HOW to compete. You can set specific goals and run evaluations.

Certainly the thread should yield some recommendations for valuable analysis tools. One thing to keep in mind is that in a lot of industries people know they are being watched. In fact, one of our Engineers, Brian, was relating to me the other day how he had some friends that would create fake META tags and ridiculous keyword lists, only to find them in competitors’ source code within days!

Share your secrets at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A new topic for discussion at Cre8asiteforums, called Interdisciplinary Research And The Future Of Seo has inspired some interesting discussion. The thread originator writes:

"The SEO industry must engage various experts in all possible fields to remain relevant in the future."

This is no ordinary discussion on SEO/M. Anthropology - "As it relates to SEO, we need Anthropologists to inform us as to how various cultures behave." Psychology - "How effective are PPCs?" Plus Educational Psychology, Ethics... This one you just have to sorta dive in, head first.

As juicy topics go, there's always "SEO is Dead", "SEO isn't Rocket Science", or is, and "classic" SEO is about as useful as sugarless jello. Starting off the year with a bang, Mike Grehan jumps in with a ClickZ article called SEO: Art, Science, Bollocks Or What? .

Taking a cue from more recent debates that brought out Danny Sullivan and Kevin Lee, Mike refers to a book called Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology, which he just digested. He asks us to take another look at our purpose for search in the first place and how we can apply new technology to better benefit business endeavors for the long haul.

In other words, marketing. Discussion is at Cre8asiteforums

As the discussion on duplicate content drones on (to the dismay of some), it's only natural that some really excellent how to guides come about. Part of the duplicate content discussion is the best way to avoid domain and canonical URL issues when linking internally, fixing typos in URL's, and redirects on your site. WebmasterWorld has one of the best technical guides that I have seen of late on how to fix these duplicate content issues in Google that arise from some of the URL canonicalization issues.

For those that need a refresher on about URL canonicalization, it is summarized as "choosing what single domain you want to use for your site, and what single URL should be used to request each of your pages," having urls that are outside this standard can cause problems in the search engines and part of this guide instructs you how to fix that. According to jdMorgan, the following are some step you can take to ensure you are not in terrority where duplicate content would be flagged on your pages:

• Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)


• Canonicalize my index pages (redirect "/index.html" to "/")


• Remove multiple slashes in the URL


• Remove spurious query strings (my sites' pages are mostly 'static' with a few exceptions)


• Fix-up common typos in type-in URLs


• Fix-up invalid inbound links caused by bad HTML mark-up


• Fix-up URLs resulting from bad copy-and-pastes


• Fix-up outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings


• Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file


• Suppress the fix-up if the link is on my own site (In this case, I want to see the 404 error)


• Suppress the fix-up if the remote user is me or a site tester (Again, we want to see the 404 error)


• Avoid recursion in mod_rewrite running in a per-directory .htaccess context


• Avoid the nasty mod_rewrite bug in Apache 1.3.x


• Do all of the above using a single 301-Moved Permanently redirect

Definately worth a look at this thread. Continued discussion at WebmasterWorld - Guide to Fixing URL Canonicalization isssues

Every industry has certain words and acronyms that are considered a part of the basic vocabulary by those in the industry, yet often confused or misunderstood by new entrants or observers. The SEO and SEM industry, along with website design, has quite a few terms that are commonly misunderstood or misused due to common acceptance over time of the improper term. One of the ones that always got me was the use of "ALT tags" instead of ALT Attributes, but once I was corrected I have been careful to use "attributes" since.

An excellent thread at WebMasterWorld forums begins with Moderator Tedster who quotes George Orwell as follows (partially):

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

he goes on to list some commonly made errors when "speaking Google," including ALT Tags, PageRank, Java vs JavaScript, and a list of others. He asks WMW members to share what they feel are other common errors, and the thread has rapidly grown to its second page.

Join in an find out if your use of search engine otpimisation and web design terminology is right or wrong, or share your own "words that make you want to cringe" at WebMasterWorld Forums.

Google is hiring. What does it take to work for Google? Apparently, the rumored requirement for "Straight A's and Double 800 SAT's" is no longer the only thing, and Google is looking for more than just brains.

Two recent forum threads discuss working for Google from a different angle, each quoting a recent article in the New York Times about Google hiring practices. Cre8asite Forum Moderator "swainzi" introduces the subject by asking "What It Takes To Work At Google." In that thread, always insightful Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) discusses a recent Google presentation and links to an excellent video series from 2002 about Google Corporate culture. Swainzi returns with another link: to a Google recruitment video hosted at YouTube.

WebmasterWorld takes a slightly different angle on the article, suggesting that, because each applicant is required to complete a long survey, Google hires people based on an algorithm.
The thread, titled, Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm leads so far to only one response, but it isn't what one might think. Senior member jtara suggests based on one quote from the article and his own conversations with Google employees that

the biggest challenge Google faces is growing cynicism within a workforce that is by and large over-qualified for their jobs and constrained by a surprisingly top-down structure.

It will be interesting to see if Google comments directly in either of these threads. Recently, Matt Cutts discussed and revisited working for Google and some of his feelings about the corporate culture.

Join in the discussions at Cre8asite Forums and WebMasterWorld Forums.

Hosting ads through Google's content network has always been an excellent way to increase impression counts. If the main goal of a Paid Search campaign is to gain impressions, then using the various contextual networks is certainly a consistent method. However, many marketers have become aware that the Content network carries with it a risk of fraud, as well as a difficulty in determining exactly where advertisements appear.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch forums starts with Moderator "Discovery" asking

Since google cloaks all their partners in their content network and your referrer logs will only show something like pagead2.googlesyndication.com what methods are you using to identify good and bad content partners on Google?

he goes on later in the thread to explain that

Bottom line, I think we all want more transparency into the networks.

So how are people trying to identify where their ad appears? The use of referral logs seems to work in some cases, but cannot always identify the sites. Analyzing this chunk of data is probably useful. One member claims they have automated the process of tracking referrals, although I personally would wonder how much value this brings...it seems as if they are simply copying referral reports to a spreadsheet for analysis, which is obviously something that can be done fairly easily. However, the member claims additional benefits:

we just send you some code to put on your site and it will track the referring sites for you in an easy to use report so you can see/slice/dice/exclude.
the best part of it will be seeing what our other customers think about a certain referring site to let you know if it should be excluded or not...even if that particular site has never sent you traffic before.

It will be interesting to see if this plays out. There are some other good ideas in the thread so far, but please head over to Search Engine Watch Forums to add your own!

I just wanted to give everyone here an update. I will be going on my honeymoon this Sunday. I won't be back until 1/17 or so. Ben, Chris, Kim and Robert have all agreed to keep things going here in my absence. I do hope to check in once or twice a day - possibly sneak in a post or two when my wife is sleeping. Also, I hope to be posting pictures and experiences of the trip to Israel at my person blog, Cartoon Barry.

I pretty much will be off the Search Engine Land blog the whole time, but Danny has that under control. I will be slow with email and responding to things this whole time.

I am confident that Ben, Chris, Kim and Robert will do a killer job while I am gone. I also wanted to thank them for taking this on them.

A thread at WebmasterWorld and later a blog posting at Search Engine Watch draws attention to a document filed by second tier PPC, Pay Per Text and Pay Per Call network MIVA. In the document, it mentions a new partnership with Google to display AdWords on its network when they have spare inventory available. The deal follows the company’s non-renewal of a similar agreement previously made with Yahoo.

MIVA (a former e-commerce software) was acquired to primarily form a shell company and central brand after the merger of FindWhat and eSpotting in 2005. eSpotting was the first PPC network in Europe, and used to run the European advertising on Yahoo’s network before the search giant acquired Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing).

Some AdWords users are unhappy about the decision, citing MIVA’s “poor quality traffic” as a possible threat to their Google AdWords conversion rates. Although I haven’t used the MIVA network personally, I have heard that it can be a good quality traffic source for certain verticals. In the UK it seems to have excellent conversion rates when marketing towards the “Chav” demographic. These are mostly low income households, who buy products and services such as high-rate loans, mortgages and cheap last minute holidays.

Further discussion on the pros and cons of the deal can be found at the WebmasterWorld forums.

I wanted to thank everyone for voting for us and reading this site every day. We have took first place in the Search Marketing Blog 2006 category. It is also important to note that we came very close in other categories including Best Search Engine News Blog of 2006 where this site came in second place by 0.05 points, but second place to Search Engine Watch Blog, which I wrote at with Danny basically the whole year, so it is basically a win for us. For the Best SEO Blog of 2006 we came in second, right behind SEOMoz, a great blog that offers some of the best SEO tips I have seen and they have a great community over there. I personally came in 3rd place for the Best Search Blogger of 2006, behind Danny (second place) and Matt Cutts (the winner) of Google (I will comment personally on this specific award at my personal blog).

Over the years we have had the privilege of winning many blog awards, they are all listed over here. Honestly, these awards me a lot to me, I am not sure exactly why, but I really like when we get such great feedback.

Thanks again for voting for us, just one more contest going on now, the 2006 KBCafe Blog Awards, the Search Engine Roundtable is listed under section number 11, please feel free to vote for us.

Thank you so much.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread links to a blog post named GoogleBot Requested a CSS File. This is not the first time I heard threads where people suspect GoogleBot is crawling their CSS files. But this one has the most discussion I have seen so far.

Some people in the thread think a manual review sparked the crawl. But I am not too sure about that.

The request in the log file looks like this:

66.249.72.52 - - [24/Oct/2006:17:17:35 -0500] “GET /global/x.css HTTP/1.1″ 200 8382 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

So it looks like Google crawled his CSS. But he never discusses if he disallowed the directory in his robots.txt file.

Anyway, for past articles on Google and CSS see:

• Does Google Read Your CSS Files? - November 11, 2005
  
• Hidden Divs Not Indexed by Google - December 15, 2005
  
• CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines - SES Session - December 6, 2006
  
• Using CSS To Hide Text: Search Engine Responses - December 18, 2006
  

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Here are some takeaways from Adam Lasnik's latest post at WebmasterWorld, see post number 3208854 or post # 70 in that thread.

• Boilerplate content is "huge swaths of text repeated on every page, such as an obnoxiously long legal footers"
• Product pages that are the same but only differentiate themselves by color may be filtered out (Google will show one of the several colors you have)
• Typically Google won't penalize you for linking from your .de site to your .com site; "penalties for country-domain cross-linking isn't something I have seen"
• Go with the country specific TLDs, using index.de.html or de.example.com won't make a difference to Google. TLDs and language used on the page does.
• Is the sandbox effect time bound? "No, it's not a universal truth that all domains take a year (or [insert time period]) to get indexed. As Matt and I have both noted, there are many variables at play and while some sites will indeed take longer to be more comprehensively indexed, many will not."
• "Our algorithms take a look at their pages and (computerwise) ask, "What value is this site providing that users can't get from other sites or even the 'mothership'? (originator of content)"
• Google may add a tool to Webmaster Central that is a sort of "Duplicate Content Filter Meter" (I doubt it), since he said, "The fact that duplicate content isn't very cut and dry for us either (e.g., it's not "if more than [x]% of words on page A match page B...") makes this a complicated prospect."
• Similar / Identical content on .com and .mobi should not be an issue of duplicate content

I think we got some good tips from that post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The big take away is that the question people ask me a ton, what is the percentage difference between page A and page B for them not to be seen as duplicate content.

The fact that duplicate content isn't very cut and dry for us either (e.g., it's not "if more than [x]% of words on page A match page B...") makes this a complicated prospect.

There is no exact percentage is what I have been telling people.

Forum discussion on this specific quote at Cre8asite Forums.

Several threads from the various forums are reporting changes in the Google search results and a back link update.

A Search Engine Roundtable and DigitalPoint Forums thread all reports changes to their back links in Google. I honestly did not think people continue to track their back links using Google anymore, I guess I am wrong.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports changes to search results and shuffling taking place. Tedster, WebmasterWorld administrator says;

The observation about fewer double entries rings a bell with me -- even going back a few weeks. In fact I begin to wonder if there is some extra barrier in place to go from #11 to #10. Yes, I'm also seeing some minor shuffling today.

There is also a thread at DigitalPoint Forums on SERP (search engine result page) changes.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread where folks are reporting that MSN Search is indexing a bit too much. Reports suggest that MSN is crawling and indexing the content found on pages which are excluded via the robots.txt directive.

Normally, if a search engine crawls the page, they may only keep the URL in their index but not the content.

Moderator Receptional adds, "My examples show no snippet. But I can get them by typing unique text into the search query."

So if they are returning results for text found on the page, maybe they are indexing a bit too much?

On the other hand, I have a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums suggesting MSN doesn't index enough, specifically new sites...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Mid December Google Officially Disallowed Images Near AdSense Ads and the forums went nuts. Now, people are coming up with new ideas on how to get images near their AdSense ads. One method discussed at this DigitalPoint Forums thread is to place a Google AdSense image ad unit near the Google AdSense text units. The member with the idea posted an example.

You can see, at the top are Google AdSense Ad Links, on the left side is a standard AdSense text unit and then on the right side is a AdSense graphic ad unit. You can specify if you want image ads or text ads or both, to show up in each ad unit block. So technically, you are not serving images near the text ads, Google is.

I think Google may be OK with this implementation, but you can't go by my word. It is important you first get confirmation from Google before trying this out.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is unclear speculation at WebmasterWorld that Google is placing the Google Checkout Icon it uses on AdWords ads also on AdSense ads.

For example, Dicks Sporting Goods uses Google Checkout and a search for a keyword they are bidding on has the special shopping cart icon on their AdWords ads. It looks like this:

Google AdWords Ad

After a few minutes of tracking down a site that had an AdSense ad for Dicks Sporting Good, I was unable to verify that Google is placing the checkout icon on the AdSense ads. Here is an ad I pulled from one site.

Google AdSense Ad

I was wondering if anyone has seen the icon on a contextual Google AdSense ad?

There is speculation at WebmasterWorld that this is a limited test.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The senior AdWordsAdvisor at WebmasterWorld has posted an update in the alert thread stating that he/she will not be able to post at WebmasterWorld for the next several weeks.

The reason stated;

I'm very sorry to say that, due to a serious medical issue with a family member, I will not be able to read or post here for some time - likely to be several weeks.

I have missed this forum quite a bit since my last post, and look forward to returning asap. In the meantime, AWA2 will be reading and posting as his time allows.

Again, best wishes to you all for 2007!

AdWordsAdvisor, we appreciate all you have done for the community, with a current count of 3,619 posts since July 9, 2003, you have well surpassed GoogleGuy who has gone MIA since August 30, 2006. I would like to take this opportunity to wish AdWordsAdvisor and AdWordsAdvisor's family a healthy new year. Get well soon!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There appears to be this bug lingering around since August 2006 that I did not fully look into today. A site that is hosted outside of the US, let's say, in the UK or Australia, with .com TLDs, are indexed in Google.com but are not in the index for Google.co.uk or Google.com.au, respectively.

A WebmasterWorld thread has been reporting sporadic issues of this since August and it has sprung up again around New Years. I travelled over to a recent Google Groups thread to get more evidence and examples.

The site http://www.awkspcrepairs.com/ is hosted in the UK (confirmed via traceroute). A site command search on the domain name in Google.com brings back the home page result (screen capture. A site command search on the domain name in Google.co.uk brings back the home page results (screen shot). But a site command search on the domain name in Google.co.uk with pages from the UK only does not return the index page of the site (screen shot).

That seems to be the issue. An other example was emailed to me by Nikhil, who told me to try a search on Telstra at Google.com.au and you will see www.telstra.com listed as number one, reportedly a Aussi site. But when you select the pages from Australia option, the main domain does not show up (screen shot).

Forum discussion at Google Groups and at WebmasterWorld.

Two days ago Loren Baker wrote Does Digg.com Belong in Google Results? He basically summarized two points of view, the first by Allen Stern who says that Digg adds no value to the story and should not be indexed (hence duplicate content). The second point was by William Burn, who argues that Digg's pages do provide value and give pages that may have never been read a chance. Skizzo adds that he doesn't like when commentators copy and paste the original content from the main site in the comments of the Digg post.

OK, having read all that. I also would like to see the original article found first in the Google results. I do believe that the Digg article should be indexed and found. Typically, a Digg title may differ from the original article's title and thus has doubled its chances of coming up in the results. If you are worried about article hi-jacking, then that is a different story - but I would say, just go with the flow.

As an SEM, I can understand why you don't want to be outranked by a commentary to your article. But often, commentary to one's article does provide greater value. Often, but not always - I must add. If the Digg article does add value and that value is greater then the original source, then it should outrank the source article.

Either way, people are reading your thoughts and you got a nice link from Digg. The value of the link from Digg, is discussed here.

Forum discussion at SEO Refugee & DigitalPoint Forums.

Reported by Gabs at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, it appears that Google AdSense's Site Diagnostics report is showing some weird errors. Here is a screen capture:

It appears the ads are trying to be generated via the Google Cache, example cache link in report shows us that it is the Google Cache. And we know that the robots.txt file at Google disallows spiders from crawling those pages.

So now they are coming up in our site diagnostic reports, making a big mess for data some publishers might really need.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The fourteenth 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 talked about the holiday season and the new year. We argued about a possible Google update. We also debated on the blog tip Google is offering. We looked at social links and gave some tips with that. Overall, we had some pretty good discussions that may be of use to you in the 2007 year. 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. Happy 2007 New Year From The Search Engine Industry
   
2. 2006 Holiday Season Search Logos
   
3. Open To Suggestions: Things To Improve, Change or Remove in 2007
   
4. Yahoo!'s Holiday Gifts for 2006
   
5. WebmasterWorld Threads of 2006
   
6. Google Data Refresh - Rankings Fluctuations Before Christmas
   
7. Google's Data Refresh; Any Patterns or Commonalities?
   
8. Blog Like Searches Bring Up Special One Box Result For Google's Blogger
   
9. When Will Google Begin Devaluing Social Links; Such As Digg.com, Yahoo! Answers & del.icio.us?
   
10. Paid Blog Reviews: ReviewMe & PayPerPost
    
11. Do Larger Web Sites Require More Links Than Smaller Sites To Rank Well?
    
12. If You Don't Have a Duplicate Content Problem; Don't Fix It
    
13. Ask X Allows Users To Interact More With Search Results
    
14. Screen Shot Of Quality Score Metric in AdWords Console
    
15. Fighting Search Spam With PhraseRank: The Latest Google Patent Buzz
    

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 14: Search Holidays, New Years, Google Update, Blog Tips, Social Links, Paid Reviews, Ask.com X, AdWords & More"

Since December 15th, WebmasterWorld members have been reporting a bug in Google AdWords where the ad group is being sorted by clicks and not alphabetically, by Ad Group name.

After over 15 days, Google has finally acknowledge the bug and said they are working on fixing the issue.

According to our Technical Team this is a known issue. Our engineers are currently working to resolve this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime, I'm afraid that the only workaround is to have to manually sort again each time you navigate to a new page.

It appears from this issue it is not a high priority fix. But from the thread, it seems it is really annoying advertisers. So maybe this little bug should be pushed to the front of the list?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Another duplicate content thread with a different perspective at WebmasterWorld. Google has been awarded a patent for a 2001 submission of an application named Methods and apparatus for estimating similarity. The patent is a relatively short read compared to others, here is the abstract:

A similarity engine generates compact representations of objects called sketches. Sketches of different objects can be compared to determine the similarity between the two objects. The sketch for an object may be generated by creating a vector corresponding to the object, where each coordinate of the vector is associated with a corresponding weight. The weight associated with each coordinate in the vector is multiplied by a predetermined hashing vector to generate a product vector, and the product vectors are summed. The similarity engine may then generate a compact representation of the object based on the summed product vector.

It is old but can be a fun read for some.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a member posting a detailed write up on how he believes he went from $10 per week to $800 per week, in earned income from Google AdSense. His tips were to write 100% original content articles, several per week. Then the way he formatted his pages, with the articles on the page, was how he made his AdSense money.

Tips include:

• Giving each article an individual highly relevant page title.
  
• Using meta descriptions and keywords, but not abusing them.
  
• Using H1 and H2 tags.
  
• Using good keyword density and specific phrase targeting.
  
• Using good quality, unique, original and focused content.
  
• Building some well anchored backlinks.
  
• With a good navigational system between articles.
  
• Using an aged domain with good TrustRank.
  

The image on the right was posted by the DigitalPoint member and it shows where he likes to place his ads on the page.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

When you upgrade from Yahoo!'s Overture product to the new Yahoo! "Panama" product, the data from your reports in the Overture area will not be transferred over to Panama. This was disclosed in all the upgrade documentation, but there seems to be some confusion about this in the forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why hasn't the data been moved over. It is just the way it is.

If you want old data, you will have to login to your Overture account over here and access that data. Otherwise, you are starting with a blank screen, new data set.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last year we had our Traffic Building - Link Building for 2006 and I have spotted a thread that asks about link building strategies for 2007. The thread is at Search Engine Watch Forums where link building queen, Debra Mastaler responds with some ideas, they include:

1. I believe the development of the corporate blog and corporate wiki will continue to grow as businesses look for new and innovate ways to capture attention and build reputation on the Web.

2. Article writing will also be another homerun tactic provided it’s done as a way to attract media and consumer attention instead of being fodder for an article directory.

3. Create a media center for your site and don’t forget the RSS. All sites should sport a little orange button if they want to spread the word.

Great tips. So, besides for the 2006 tips. I agree, building out rich media content, video tutorials, podcasts, screen casts and more visually appealing content, may be the edge you need to build links. Leverage social links as a promotional tool and you got yourself a nice link building strategy.

Debra wisely explains; "there’s no dinosaurs in linking – yet! Nothing really dies in cyberland, it just goes round and round and comes back with a new name!"

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

KBCafe is running a blog awards, they did it also last year and we won.

If you would like to vote, you can go here.

We are listed in number 11, with Matt Cutts and Online Marketing Blog.

Thanks!

Also, we are live tonight, airing the Search Pulse, edition 14, at 5pm (EST).

Google has an AdWords tool for advertisers to better estimate the traffic they may get from a particular keyword phrase. The tool is named Google AdWords Traffic Estimator. Google themselves says;

All estimates are provided as a guideline, and are based on system-wide averages; your actual costs and ad positions may vary. To view estimates based on your keywords' performance history, use the Traffic Estimator within the appropriate Ad Group.

But PPC managers like GuyFromChicago in a DigitalPoint Forums thread says;

The estimator is for entertainment purposes only

(seriously, don't waste your time with it)

Others estimate that the estimator is "off by a factor of 3 usually."

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Talking about those Y2K glitches (kidding), the Google Calculator seemed to have stopped working yesterday, all of a sudden. I tried it on New Years and it did not work. But this morning, it appears to be working again.

A search on 2+2 typically brought back a response from Google that looked like:

But yesterday, it just returned weird web results.

It seems like it was down for about 7 hours or so yesterday, based on tracking this Digg post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The blogs have been discussing a new Google patent application named Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system. The abstract reads;

An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases. A spam document is identified based on the number of related phrases included in a document.

Bill Slawski wrote up his excellent analysis of the patent application at SEO By The Sea and then coined the term PhraseRank at Search Engine Land.

Bill asks, "Is Google using a process like this?" Bill answers "It’s possible."

From the foregoing, the number of the related phrases present in a given document will be known. A normal, non-spam document will generally have a relatively limited number of related phrases, typically on the order of between 8 and 20, depending on the document collection. By contrast, a spam document will have an excessive number of related phrases, for example on the order of between 100 and 1000 related phrases. Thus, the present invention takes advantage of this discovery by identifying as spam documents those documents that have a statistically significant deviation in the number of related phrases relative to an expected number of related phrases for documents in the document collection.

In the WebmasterWorld thread, tedster believes that this is here to target auto generated spam pages, my initial thoughts also from reading the abstract.

This approach seems to me to be aimed at autogenerated pages, constructed from scraped bits and pieces to attract a long tail search to a page with ads. Of course, it does all hang on the base measures of assumed non-spam documents, but I assume Google has enough data to take a decent baseline measure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator stuntdubl has started a thread in the WebmasterWorld Supporters forum (paid subscription required) named 2006 Threads of the Year. I will list some, but not all, of the threads selected to be the best of 2006.

• Link development vs. traffic development (our coverage named Traffic Building - Link Building for 2006
• Adwords beginner's guide
• Fixing your website's quality score
• Where to start at SEO with yahoo
• Google hot topics
• SEO mythbusters
• Growing forum paricipation

Most of these I covered, but I am just not in the mood to find those posts. Sorry.

To view the rest you need to be a paid member at WebmasterWorld, worth it if you are part of the SEM community.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a poll asking members to vote on the most important factor they believe determines your CTR (click through rate) on your ad. The options include:

• Title
• Ad Copy
• Display URL
• Position
• Narrowness/broadness of keywords in group
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• Other (please specify in comments)

Member PPC feels that is an industry by industry variance that comes into play here, but overall, he believes "position and narrowness/broadness or keywords" are the most important factors. SEW Moderator, Discovery, says;

In my view, a narrowly defined set of keywords, used within focused ad groups is what gives you a solid position resulting in a high CTR. Then on top of solid keywords you have a related title and ad copy, both of which should be different from the viewable competition. With this set up and a competitive CPC you should achieve the best CTR.

But overall, the list makes a good checkpoint on what you should look for in your ads.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy New Years! 2007! Here are the forums and logos being sported over at the various search engines and search forums.

Google:

Yahoo:

Ask.com:

DogPile:

The Search Community is celebrating also...

Search Engine Roundtable:

Forum discussion here and here.

Cre8asite Forums:

Forum discussion here.

WebmasterWorld discussion here, DigitalPoint Forums discussion here and HighRankings Forum discussion here.