May 2, 2007 Archives

It's been a pretty interesting week, and well, truth be told, Diggers might hate censorship and SEO but they definitely like Google.

First of all, it's really true what they say. Diggers hate SEO types. That means that if your Digg submission mentions "SEO" in the title or description at all, you're 99% likely in for instant burial. I guess it's good for those of us who want to keep this information close to home, as the wealth of information provided by Todd's SEO Playbook didn't make the cut. It's a shame that the breadth of knowledge provided by Todd cannot be dispersed as publicly as one would hope, but that makes his post incredibly special. Only those who seek the knowledge will find the gold.

However, other tactics are useful, if they fit the bill for what Diggers look for. Apparently, they all love Stephen Colbert. That's why these two pages become popular on Digg: first, SEOmoz's post asking people to make Stephen Colbert the Greatest Living American totally rocked, and not after long, he was crowned the greatest . (This is frustrating information to some guy named Brandon Wirtz who is trying to secure his #1 spot once again. Brandon, I'm sorry to ask, but who are you?)

Google's greatness shines once again. They are now the most visited site on the Internet, beating out Microsoft, which was previously the record holder. All the same, they are apparently very rich too, giving out more than $1 billion to website publishers.

Google has been focusing on changing the user experience lately. From one facelift to another , Diggers are eating it up.

And of course, there are privacy concerns. Google wants to know everything you do . The web history feature of Google is pretty comprehensive (and scary!) indeed. Consequently, Andy Hagans decided to volunteer Ask.com as the privacy search engine because there are likely a few people who don't want to believe Google has so much information, and this could be a good move for Ask.

For fun and games, we learned that Marge Simpson searches for herself on Google and finds Homer sunbathing -- unclothed -- instead. Also, Barry's great picture column at Search Engine Land was widely accepted. Personally, those pics are awesome.

Last but not least (but there are so many other stories that made it on Digg lately), the Google Hell story did become Digg popular for awhile. (Shame on the submitter, though, for sending a duplicate story with the same URL. Digg had to improvise and append a 2 to the end of the popular submission when really everyone should have just focused on the first story. Such is power of social media.) Matt's response got buried, which goes to show how much a Digg democracy can overpower even the most basic and sound logic, especially when it helps users be better educated about how their sites can stay safe. Sometimes, social media is frustrating.

Yesterday, a popular article on Digg (stay tuned for the Digest) was the Forbes article on the impact of Google to search engine rankings and how losing rankings can negatively affect your business.

A Webmaster World forums post discusses the topic of Google Hell, a term that was coined by Jim Boykin, I believe, and links to Matt Cutts's response.

In a nutshell, a jeweler was delisted from Google and people were confused as to why. The article mentions some reasons why you may lose your visible rankings:

Web designers have found that pages with duplicate content, few words or pictures, and a lack of links to other quality sites are the most likely to be pulled in [to the supplemental index].

Matt, however, provides another take. Google received spam reports of link exchange emails and that caused the site to lose its credibility in the search engine's eyes.

Reciprocal links by themselves aren't automatically bad, but we've communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.

Still, a few questions remain:

If Google is weighing in on these email reports, did they just admit that they're looking at email? The thought is unsettling.

Did he just let us all know that Google is now looking at emails?

What's the point of the supplemental index anyway?

What exactly is the purpose of the “supplemental” index? Why do they need it? Why do they need to have two categories of results? The index, and then the supplemental index?

Personally I don’t see anything “supplemental” about it. Why not just a continuum of results, based upon relevance?

Another member believes that the supplemental results do serve a purpose:

Supp index exists because of all the crap that is made everyday. Unfortunately a lot of good stuff could get thrown in too.

I will chime in and say that I think ranking for regular results would become all the more competitive if there was no way of filtering out extraneous results and putting them into some sort of supplemental index.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Digg hit a democratic milestone. The social site found itself consistently challenged by what was publication of sensitive information, and the staff tried to remove the questionable content, albeit unsuccessfully. A WebmasterWorld covers the topic in greater detail, and Danny also covered the Digg revolt on Search Engine Land.

A little background first (in case you don't read Danny's post): a sensitive HD-DVD decryption key was posted on a blog run by Boing Boing author and professor Cory Doctorow. After receiving an DMCA takedown notice, Cory complied, but it was already at a point where people themselves were spreading the key. The story got popular on Digg, and it was soon taken down. Again, someone tried to fight against Digg, and that story, too, was removed by Digg staff.

This didn't satisfy the crowd. For several hours last night, the entire Digg front page was covered by stories trying to promote the HD-DVD key, and democratic vote had won. It was obvious at that point that Kevin Rose, Digg's founder, had to give in, and he did. This goes to show the power of social search: if people want it, they will find it. If people want others to find it, they will make it popular.

That's how they felt on Webmaster World, at least:

It's a safe position to take - at this point. Cat's out of the bag, can't put it back. No legal threat any more.

What do you think about the impact this will have on the future of social media? What do you think about the revolt? As a user on WebmasterWorld puts it, "Is this web 2.0 democracy in shaping or union formation with in democracy? "

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

There's an interesting discussion on Cre8asite Forums about losing rankings when you transfer your domain to another registrar. A few people suspect that doing so could cause a loss of rankings, but some other members have not seen any changes whatsoever. At this point, opinion is relatively mixed.

It is suspected that ranking drops could be simply because of another change (page structure, perhaps), but not so much because of the domain registrar information on its own. However, again, there are people who seemed to have experienced a drop in rankings due to a transfer of a domain, despite the legitimate reasons and need to do so.

On one hand, softplus (John) says that nothing has happened when he switched domain registrars:

Changing domain registration details will generally have no influence on your site's indexing and ranking on Google. I've moved domains across accounts and registrars and have seen no change at all (at least none that I could pin-point on the domain whois information biggrin.gif).

But on the other hand, rmccarley has seen something else:

Softplus I have definately seen ranking drops where the only change was registration info. While I agree the effect is generaly overrated by SEOs (and over-speculated) it is there.

What I have *heard* is that the link-age starts over so any value from aged links just isn't there. Without that the link structure is revaluated which can disrupt the SERPs

Last year, Barry wrote about changing domain ownership and how it impacts results. From an earlier posting, Google has admitted that it weighs upon registrar data to improve search quality. But recent developments may show that this is not the case because Google can't focus on rankings in this way anymore. In any event, perhaps a 10 year domain registration is in order, not because of the murkiness of the situation, but also just for the investment (and its affordability). Even so, however, one wonders if the investment really does pay off. I suppose there are a lot of questions that will remain unanswered and individual user experience may be the most important element here.

On the forums, this ownership question led the discussion to the question of whether Google is a good registrar to choose. Since Google is now a domain registrar, one wonders if maintaining a domain with Google is really the right way to go. Some people see looking at Google as a domain registrar is overrated; they own web properties and it's not a big financial sacrifice for them to become a registrar:

I believe the registrar status of Google is being over-rated by many SEO people. Anyone can be a registrar, provided they can prove that they have the infrastructure and that they pay the down-payment (I believe it's $10'000, but I'm not certain). To a company like Google, that's peanuts.

John, the same person who made the above statement, continues to say that it wouldn't hurt and that Google is probably not looking as closely as one may tend to think:

Would they really implement an algorithm to analyze domain changes just for a fraction (albeit a large one, at the moment) of the web?

Discussion continues about both topics at Cre8asite Forums.

In a Cre8asite Forums post, a user asks an important question for a link building campaign: how do you get links from .edu sites? As you know, .edu sites have a higher inherent trust and as such can help boost your rankings if you can get that coveted link.

A lot of good ideas were thrown out by members and moderators, including:

• "One of the easiest ways is to create content that fills an informational void that an edu site might be interested in linking to." (Bill Slawski, administrator)
• "Another way is to search for student blogs and see if you can connect with one." (yannis, member)
• "If you see a competititor with .edu links go to those .edu pages and see what they are linking to." (EGOL, administrator)

These are good tips, and we've already written a bit about getting .edu links in the past but I'm sure you have more tips. If so, please contribute to the Cre8asite Forums post.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Yahoo! has removed the UK version of the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool.

The tool used to load over at http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ but now it appears to just time out for me and those trying to access it.

It may be just a server issue or it may be a sign that Yahoo will also be replacing this UK version with a new one. Which they promised us after taking the Overture US tool offline.

We know they will begin expanding the Panama solution to the UK soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: A reader commented explaining that Yahoo changed the URL of the tool to http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ the other day.

Continue reading "Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool"

A DigitalPoint Forums thread got a bit heated over the belief that Google's Blogger service was stealing money from them.

If you add Google AdSense ads through the Blogger service (launched in September 2005), the AdSense code will automatically append this line:

google_ad_host="pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";

Some folks in the DigitalPoint Forums thread thought this meant Google was sharing your revenue.

This is not the case. This basically tells Google that Blogger is allowed access to your account for implementation purposes but not for billing purposes.

One member explained this is called "Hosts with access" and then quotes the Hosts with access page in the AdSense console;

If you use a third party service (such as Blogger) to manage your AdSense account, that service will be listed below as a host. Hosts are sites or services that require access to your AdSense ad code and reports in order to provide you with AdSense account management through their site. Hosts do not have access to your address or payment information and you can disable their access to your AdSense account at any time.

How would you know if you have third-party hosts with access to your account? Just login to your AdSense account and click on "my account" and then on ""account access," you would see more information there. Here is a screen capture of my account, showing how you can disable any third-party access.

Finally, if you want to set up AdSense on your Blogger blog, learn how here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I'll be honest, I haven't been following the different shades of colors in the Google Toolbar. But Gabs, someone I trust started a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums noting that new pages now have a grey color in the Google PageRank Toolbar score.

In the past, Gabs explains, that new pages normally received a white bar and not a grey bar.

In the past, a grey score in the toolbar meant keep away, while white meant the page was not yet indexed but would be.

I have taken a screen capture of the new forum thread (new URL, so not in Google's index yet) showing the Google Toolbar PageRank score from the Firefox toolbar.

Notice that the color is grey and not white.

I doubt this will have any impact on rankings, but it possibly may impact people's link exchange requests. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: More reports of this at DigitalPoint Forums.

The twenty-eighth edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. In this show we chatted about PubCon versus Search Engine Strategies conferences going head to head. We had several discussions on Google's PageRank. We talked about the AdWords malware issue and how Google News is being integrated into search results. Plus we talked about iGoogle, Google's new personalized front and many many more topics. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

You can listen to the MP3 file with our new player directly below:

Topics We Covered:

1. WebmasterWorld's PubCon Goes Up Against Search Engine Strategies Chicago
   
2. The Life Time Value of Links Based on Google Webmaster Central
   
3. Google PageRank April Update: Most Notice Drop in PR
   
4. Google to Review Most Recent Toolbar PageRank Update
   
5. Google Sponsored Listings Hide Surprises and Malware
   
6. Beware Of Google AdWords Account Hacks via Computer Exploit
   
7. The New Authoritative Document on Google's PageRank
   
8. Four New Document Scoring Patent Applications by Google
   
9. Screen Captures of the New Google News Results in Action
   
10. Google Launches iGoogle at Google Personalization Workshop
    
11. Google Personalized Home Pages Begin To Come Back After Scare
    
12. Google Placing UK Filtered Results in Supplemental Index?
    
13. Yahoo Buys Ad Company to Compete with Google's Acquisition of DoubleClick
    
14. Since Yahoo! Launched Panama Volume & Traffic Is Down?
    
15. Yahoo! Publisher Network Earnings & Relevancy Forcing Publishers to Revisit Google AdSense?
    

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 28: PubCon vs. SES, Links, PageRank, Virus AdWords, News Search, iGoogle & More"

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch Forums has changed the placement of the ads displayed on the site and forums. The ads used to be primarily on the left hand bar, in a box on the right side and a thin line at the top. I believe the forums pretty much had ads only on the left hand side, if any. That has changed, Search Engine Watch Forums has added ads.

Here is Search Engine Watch Forums before the ads:

It takes about 400 pixels from top to bottom to get to content within a specific forum thread.

The new Search Engine Watch Forums with ads:

Here it takes about 650 pixels from top to bottom to get to the content within a specific forum thread.

Some folks don't mind the ads, saying; "I have a degree in ignoring most things, including the ads so I dont mind."

Others like Marcia, an Search Engine Watch Forums moderator dislikes them, saying; "very intrusive."

I dislike them as well, and I would pay to not see them. I am not sure if that is an option, but hopefully it will be an option.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.