August 2007 Archives

Last week, the Search Buzz Roundup was primarily replaced by our conference coverage (and the awesome Google Dance). But now we're back to the daily grind (and us RustyBrick folks are at it on Monday as well, so you all have a nice Labor Day and don't forget about us... we'll be reporting here too).

So what has happened in the last two weeks of search? Ah, let's see.

Google and DMOZ and Shoemoney and Corruption
Google has updated DMOZ, but then Shoemoney got extorted by one of the editors for $5,000. After that, Joost de Valk, a DMOZ editor (well, former editor), decided to look into what happened and his account was disabled. So the question is: if Google is not evil, why put so much emphasis on a truly corrupt directory?

Cre8asite Forums Turns 5

Last week, Cre8asite Forums turned five years old. Can you believe that? In honor of their 5th anniversary, you should join if you haven't already!

Microsoft Launched ContentAds for All Advertisers

Users advertising with Microsoft are now all opted into ContentAds. This went into effect two days ago, so if you want to opt out, visit the Microsoft ContentAds page.

YouTube Looks to Monetize

Barry reports during SES San Jose that you'll soon see ads appearing in YouTube videos. I guess it was about time given that other video providers do this, but I hope that the content providers get a percentage of the revenue. I believe that's going to happen -- and it's user initiated. Cool.

Yahoo, Google Search Updates

Yahoo Search was updated last week with the bot behavior being more polite and traffic increasing (or decreasing, depending on the particular person). Ultimately, people are displeased with the behavior of Slurp, so let's see what happens.

Google users have also noticed a surged of dropped links in the index. But the traffic is the same. What will the long term impacts be? Patience, my friend. :)

Map Embedding Now Possible with Google Maps

I love this feature. Google is now allowing you to easily -- without using the API -- to integrate maps into your website. I'm not fond of programming so much, so this is incredibly awesome.

Microsoft Webmaster Central Coming Soon

Great news for everyone: Microsoft has announced that they will be launching a webmaster portal for all of us who have really wanted it. Sweet!

Google Gets Sued Again

American Airlines is suing Google over trademarked AdWords. Good luck to both.

Microsoft Launches Tafiti Search

Microsoft launched Tafiti, a Silverlight-based search engine, last week. You can save your searches in little boxes on the right hand side, but a lot of people wonder if it's more than just eye candy. To me, it looks like a way to sell Silverlight to the masses, but I'm not sure how many people are heading that direction.

Congratulations JohnMu!

As an active participant in Google Groups, JohnMu has been asked to join Google's team in Switzerland. JohnMu has been a huge contributor to the forums and Google is very lucky to have him. Nice!

Search Pulse is Back!

After a long hiatus, Barry and Chris did the Search Pulse live at SES San Jose last week (and even though I'm in the picture, I didn't get to say more than a "hello." This week, Ben came back, so you can hear Ben, Chris, and Barry as well.

Bloglines Goes Beta

Bloglines has launched an awesome AJAX-based beta feed reader. There are some shortcomings, but it really is still in beta. I know they're still working on it. Overall, however, it's nice!

AdSense for All Sites Available to Everyone

Google AdSense has enabled you to specify which sites should display your ads so that people do not steal your publisher ID on their site. That's pretty cool as long as it doesn't get taken away again. It's back now so don't worry!

Google Dropped the Current Time Search Operator

Google apparently dropped the time operator and now you cannot see the time in a variety of locations. Matt Cutts writes in the comments that it is a temporary issue and that it should be working again soon.

Search Suggest by Yahoo is Launched in the UK

UK members are more privy to cool new Yahoo features than us American people. That's the case for Yahoo Search Suggest which was rolled out in the UK.

You Can Ban Google in AdSense

Using AdSense, you can ban Google by going to the competitive ad filter and adding google.com there. How many of you out there are going to try that?

And with my tip about reporting AdSense-monetized splogs, how many of you are going to report them? We did two yesterday and we have many more coming. I'll report on the results later.

GoogleGuy Disappears, Returns

Barry wondered aloud yesterday and asked where GoogleGuy has been. After all, it's been over a year since GoogleGuy posted on WebmasterWorld. Fortunately, GoogleGuy returned and said hello today. He must be reading Search Engine Roundtable. I'm proud of him. High five!

Yahoo Search Marketing Launches Features

The YSM team has launched some cool features, enabling enhancements to create ads, providing information about low quality ads, and giving the ability to optimize your campaign, among other features. The only downside is that the minimum bid is now $30, but overall, advertisers look happy.

Have a great Labor Day everyone! Have a picnic for me (with Kosher hot dogs!) Be sure to check Search Engine Roundtable on Monday to see our Labor Day theme!

YahooPete writes in on Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums, and WebmasterWorld about new features that the YSM team has rolled out.

Enhancements to the process for creating an ad
Low quality index alert – Advertisers will be alerted if their quality index drops below a certain level.
Ad generator – Add titles and short sentences to the ad generator which will automatically combine various permutations of those titles and short sentences to form a set of candidate ads
Campaign optimization – Optimize your campaigns according to your specified goals

The biggest response is on DigitalPoint Forums, where forum members aren't happy that the minimum deposit is $30 (but they're happy that PayPal is now an accepted form of payment). And now impressions can be sorted by descending order.

I nearly had to replace my undershorts today when I hit sort by impressions, and it sorted in DESCENDING ORDER! Thank you! This has been something that annoyed me since the day I began using the most recent version.

The other observation is that the AJAX script is just a bit slow and members are requesting an offline editor.

I can see that YSM is making good advancements in the system efficiency department, but the ajax code in use seems incredibly slow, even on fast computers for the javascript end of things... any chance of an offline editor in the future?

I think that would be hot.

The YSM blog also has in-depth information about these enhancements.

Looking good, YSM team!

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

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz tied Matt Cutts to a chair and pleaded with him asked Matt to provide some clarifications regarding the nofollow attribute. Matt essentially said that nofollow links aren't followed, but you can exercise control over what is followed ("fine-grained control," as he puts it) by implementing nofollow. He had the following to say:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

Matt then adds to the comments:

I think saying people "should be" using nofollow is a bit strong. More like people can use it for internal links if they're power-user-y enough to want to sculpt PageRank flow within their site at the link level. But I'd say that most regular webmasters don't need to worry about link-level PageRank flow within their site. I think saying "power users and webmasters should be employing on their sites" overstates it a little. It's available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.

This insight into the behavior of nofollow has welcomed the WebmasterWorld community. A clearer picture has been desired and it is now provided.

In the end, though, use caution when employing this feature.

Anybody who uses nofollow "to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity" (luv that engineer talk), must be absolutely sure it doesn't inadvertently orphan any important pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld members are reporting on the Google AdWords announcement that the AdWords Report Center has gotten a makeover and looks a lot like the familiar interface of Google Analytics.

Some, however, are not too keen on the changes. For some, it's a lot of extra work (and more clicks), and it's not possible anymore to copy and paste these charts into email since they're in the standard analytics display.

Others feel that it's useful but they want the best of both worlds: old style and new style.

AdWordsAdvisor is monitoring the thread and says that any feedback will be passed onto the AdWords team.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I reported that it has been One Year Since GoogleGuy Has Posted in WebmasterWorld. I also pleaded with GoogleGuy to make a post and just say hello. He has done so.

GoogleGuy has posted in a WebmasterWorld thread in the Foo forum on a malware topic. The thread was totally not on a Google topic, but it is nice to see that GoogleGuy is still alive. ;-)

GoogleGuy wrote:

Seems like a lot of people end up spending visits home and holidays cleaning off malware from relatives' computers. I have heard of people buying new computers though.

True, true, true!

Thanks GoogleGuy!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google AdSense has re-enabled the allowed sites feature after taking it away soon after they launched the feature.

Here is a quick timeline:

- 10:30 AM (EST) on August 28th, Google enabled Allowed Sites in AdSense
- 7:30 PM (EST) on August 28th, Google rolled back Allowed Sites in AdSense
- 12:30 AM (EST) on August 31, Google re-enabled Allowed Site in AdSense

Publishers love this option!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there is a way to tell if a particular site or page is able to pass PageRank. In more global terms, is there a way to check if a particular site or page is able to pass link popularity?

There is not always a clear way to check if a page is able to pass link popularity. However, there are many signs you can use to check this.

However, you must keep in mind that many believe that search engines are able to define specific block elements of a page and then block links from those areas. So if a site has an ad section, the search engine can identify that section and decide that those paid advertisements do not deserve to pass any link popularity. That being said, what signs can a person use to see if a page will likely not pass link popularity?

Signs:

• Is that page indexed in the search engine?
• Does the page have toolbar PageRank?
• Does the page have inbound links?
• Are outgoing links from that page found in a link command at Yahoo from the reciprocating page?
• Does that page rank well for unique text found on the page in the search engine?

Those are just some signs you can use at your own discretion to tell if a page is capable of passing link popularity.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a simple question. Is a robots.txt file required for SEO?

The answer is no, a robots.txt file is not required.

If you want the search engines to crawl your site, you do not have to do anything. If you do not want them to crawl your site, you can tell them not to with a robots.txt file.

That is not to say the robots.txt file isn't useful. You can use it to control which pages the search engines should not crawl, which can be very useful for duplicate content and SEO purposes.

In addition, most search engines have added layers of features that you can control via the robots.txt file. So if you want to institute a crawl-delay for Yahoo, you can. If you want to specify a sitemaps location, you can. If you want to try to catch rogue spider, the file can be helpful.

There are many useful uses with the robots.txt. But it is not a required element for ranking well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In November 2005, Yahoo lowered the minimum deposit from $30 to $5.

Early reports are coming from DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo has now increased the $5 minimum from $5 to $35. Yes, flipping the minimum deposit back to that number pre-November 2005.

So I decided to give it a try and sign up for a new account and they are right. Here is a screen capture from the billing page on the sign up process:

You can see the minimum bid is now at $30.

Is this a bug? I took a look at the sponsored search page and it still says $5.

Each account requires a nonrefundable $5 initial deposit.

Maybe it is a bug because I didn't see an announcement on this.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Susan Moskwa of the Google Webmaster Central team posts on Google Groups asking group participants what they usually do to monitor posts.

There's a lot of interesting feedback, but ironically, some people actually say that the Google Groups search "sucks." Ah well, at least the search engine is running smoothly!

Some tips on how to check the Google Groups came from a variety of members:

In terms of what to read - I check for post count and sometimes the starring to decide whether to read particular threads. Also look at the last poster - some folk are very worthy of a read.

This sounds like typical Digg behavior:

As for determining factors about what I read, post title & snippet [Good point there about trying to correlate title with response numbers], reply count, starring and the thread-starter & last-poster all play a role.

And others check to give attention to the threads that have less love within:

First and foremost I scan down the page for items without a response - there is usually a reason - either the question is one we don't have a standard answer for (I like them) or more likely, the person hasn't put the question in a way that is clear - so I'll often prompt them a bit and try and get the ball rolling.

What are your tips on browsing the forums? Join in the discussion at Google Groups.

Every Google Adsense ad -- including ads on splogs -- can be reported to Google if it is in violation of any particular AdSense guideline.

How is this done? Let's walk through an example from a splog.

First, you click on "Ads by Google" (in some instances, you will see "Feedback - Ads by Google").

Then, you will scroll down where you can click on "send Google feedback on the ads you just saw."

After that, expand the form to "report a violation."

Fill out the required information.

After you report this splog, Google will send you a DMCA form to fill out and you'll have to show screen caps in order to validate your claim. It will take some time to get these DMCA complaints verified (which can be a bit of a pain), but in the end, it's worth it if you're concerned that your content is being ripped off.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Users from the United Kingdom on the Search Engine Roundtable Forums report that they are now seeing the Yahoo Search Suggest feature.

Yahoo is also rolling out Yahoo Search Assist, which is still in limited beta, and this is a screencast of those new features as taken by Barry yesterday:

I still don't see either of these new features since it's being slowly rolled out to those of us in the US, but Search Engine Land confirms that the Search Suggest feature has been rolled out to all UK users.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Today is the one year mark since the last time GoogleGuy has made a post at WebmasterWorld forums.

GoogleGuy was the first Google search representative at WebmasterWorld to have such a huge impact on webmaster communication between Google and SEOs/Webmasters.

GoogleGuy's last post was on August 30, 2006 at 1:46pm (EST). GoogleGuy joined WebmasterWorld back on October 7, 2001 and racked up a whopping 2,879 posts. GoogleGuy's last post was in the Danny Sullivan Announces He is Resigning From Searchenginewatch thread, which makes you wonder.

In any event, there has been plenty of Google communication in WebmasterWorld and other forums since GoogleGuy's departure. But, there will always be a special place in the hearts of SEOs and Webmasters for GoogleGuy.

Wouldn't it be great to see a "Hi, I am still around" post from sir GoogleGuy?

Tuesday we reported on a new feature at Google AdSense named "Allowed Sites."

That feature was then soon removed from publisher's AdSense consoles without warning.

Finally, AdSenseAdvisor chimed in at WebmasterWorld about the issue.

Sorry for the delayed update - I've been trying to find out as much as I could about this situation in order to make sure I passed along accurate information to all of you.

We're very happy you're all so excited about the new Allowed Sites feature. Unfortunately, we had to temporarily roll back its release, but expect to see it in your accounts again soon. We hope that it helps alleviate many of the concerns publishers have had about code theft and click sabotage.

In the meantime, our engineers have confirmed that we deactivated any settings you made yesterday, so your ads will continue to monetize as normal on all sites.

Again, we're sorry for the inconvenience and confusion, and appreciate your patience.

At this current time, the feature is still not live. But as AdSenseAdvisor said, it should be back soon. Any of the settings you put in place on Tuesday, will probably not be applied in the future or even currently. So pretend Google did not release this feature and wait for it to be released in the near future.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

SEOs and Webmasters are the ones typically complaining in forums about their site not being displayed in Google and possibly being banned.

Well, if you want to ban Google, you can. Of course you have the robots.txt option, but how about banning Google from displaying ads on your site.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if you can ban Google from showing their ads in your AdSense spots.

Of course you can. Just go to your competitive ad filter list and put Google's URLs in there.

Like one member said:

Nope, they can't ban you [for blocking their ads]. Now it's your chance to ban G.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks how can he generate unique robots.txt files for each domain he has, when each of those sites are sharing the same local files through a form of IIS mirroring?

There are several ways to do this, however, member Pittbug, said he had the same issue. He explained that he wrote domain specific rules in isapi_rewrite to define a unique robots.txt file per domain. He explains that you can set it up as, "robots1.txt will appear as www.domain1.com/robots.txt, robots-b.txt will appear as www.domain2.com/robots.txt" and so on.

Of course you can also dynamically generate your robots.txt file on a per domain basis via your database, I would assume.

The bottom line, as Ammon Johns explains,

I'd simply tell the developers what needs to be done, and let them figure out their own preferred method of achieving it, as they'll know the limitations of their system better than I can.

I agree a 100%, just understand what solution they come up with and how ti will impact the spiders and crawling process.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Google Groups member asks about the ability to display a desired location underneath a search ad. As I mentioned two weeks ago, you can geotarget ads to a specific city.

And thats' what another member says:

You need to change targeted area.You can change it in campaign settings. Edit "Countries and Territories" option.

Therefore, if you target a specific region in your campaign, the location should show up.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

An article about lack of research into sales pitches has Cre8asite Forums members reeling.

A new study by the Intelligent Business Group, a UK-based marketing think tank, provides a devastating critique of the performance of most advertising and marketing agencies ... Eighty-five percent of the survey respondents believe that the agencies pitching them do a lousy job of researching their basic business issues before making their pitch. Astonishingly, 61 percent believe that the agency did no research at all.

That's a huge number. The forums discussion wonders how much time members spend to pitch their SEO or SEM services.

Everyone says that they do research in some form or another whether to determine the industry, the type of product or service being sold, and information about competitors. Some of the participants don't generally make sales pitches at all; instead, people seeking services call them.

But this much is true:

The statistics are staggering but not unexpected. Too many people want to do their job w/o doing it.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

According to a Google press release, Google CFO George Reyes has announced his retirement. He is 53. The Washington Post has more information about his retirement, with a quote from Reyes:

"I know I'm leaving the company in good hands with a remarkable team of professionals that will continue to build on Google's tremendous achievements," Reyes said in a statement.

Reyes has indicated that he will remain on board to assist in the search for a new CFO, which should happen sometime before the end of this year.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

NewKidOnTheBlock, is asking some excellent questions at Search Engine Watch Forums. His newest question is that he's wondering if it's worth targeting your PPC ads by specifying a minimum cost of a product within the ad copy so that you won't get clicks that won't convert. Apparently, Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords book says it's not optimal.

Im reading Andrew Goodman's book at the moment and yesterday I read that putting the price in the PPC ad was actually not a good idea as it can prevent potentially good clients from clicking on the ad as well, etc..

To be honest I had thought this was one of the best ideas to filter out low quality traffic (people just into finding information).

I'm inclined to agree with the new kid at first glance.

But experience really would determine the effectiveness of the campaign and whether specifying a price is useful or not.

In fact, some members believe that by specifying the price in the ads, the CTR dropped but the conversion rate increased, which is what you'd typically expect.

It's an interesting read, and it's also a good idea to get Andrew Goodman's book for more PPC insights.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Tamar Weinberg in Pay Per Click Engines at August 29, 2007 9:10 AM Comments (2)

• Google Co-op

In the past, a search in Google in the format of [time in location] would return a little clock at the top of the search results, with the current time in that location.

For example, a search on time in san francisco or current time in london would return the current time in those locations at the top of the Google search results.

It appears that this feature is currently not working anymore.

We know Ask.com added a real-time clock to their search results. So the same searches in Ask.com return the time in those locations. Try time in london or if you do a search just on london and scroll down and look on the right pane, you will see the real time clock.

Why did Google remove this feature from their search results? Was it a mistake, will it come back or is it gone forever?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting, in heavy numbers, that Google is returning fewer results for sites they have in their index.

What I mean is that if you do a site:www.domain.com command in Google, the number of results being returned is much lower than in the past.

This is not only being reported by one or two people, there are dozens of people reporting this in that thread.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, confirms:

One of my clients - 9 year old site - has dropped from 1,700 urls indexed to 1,300. They've never been that low in recent years.

However, many are reporting traffic to be at the same levels. So is this just a Google reporting issue or something else?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks if it is best to break our your articles or content on multiple pages or keep them on a single page.

The answer? It depends.

It depends on the length of the article. It depends if the article can be broken out in to logical subsections, where each subsection provides enough value on its own. It depends if it makes sense for your reader to click from subsection to subsection or not.

You must also keep in mind that if you have all your content for a specific article on one page, you are more likely to get more links to that one page than have them spread out to multiple pages.

Like I said, it depends.

In this case, I would listen to DigitalPoint member, WorldImpulse:

Forget google and think what will be better for your visitors?

Will they like to have one long page or 3 short pages ?

What is best for the user.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A very interesting discussion has emerged on WebmasterWorld about link equity from images or text links. What's better? Do image links pass PageRank? Do they imply trust?

According to moderator pageoneresults, both links pass equity, but image links are not as efficient as text links.

Most all links pass value. Its the level of value that is in question. A textual link is at the top of the food chain, it doesn't get any better than that. Image links are okay and perform well. Image links that are formatted properly and utilize accessibility attributes like the alt attribute are going to perform better than those that don't.

But then pageoneresults goes on to say that links that are enclosed in <h#> tags are better than regular text links. And that response evokes harsh criticisms from other users that doing so would be purely to manipulate the search results.

The discussion gets heated with members on both sides of the argument claiming that it may or may not be an issue of ethics and manipulation. But what do you think?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The 35th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. Ben is back with us, to get things back on track with our new 30 minute show format. We covered the SES show and our indepth coverage. We also discussed the Yahoo Search and Slurp updates. Microsoft is releasing a webmaster portal in late fall. We shared our opinions on Google's new top promotion forumla. Google began cashing in our YouTube, with ad overlays. And we chatted about the heated article on in-house SEMs. We discussed many other 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.

powered by ODEO

Topics We Covered:

1. SES San Jose Coverage Wrap Up
   
2. Yahoo Search Update Underway - New Slurp Crawl Patterns
   
3. Webmasters Not Happy with Yahoo's New Crawl Behavior
   
4. Microsoft Promises Webmasters a Live Search Portal
   
5. First Feedback on Google AdWords Top Ad Placement Formula
   
6. Google Wants to Cash in on YouTube with Overlay Ads
   
7. Is In-House SEM Ineffective? Forum Members Don't Think So
   

Continue reading "Search Pulse 35: SES Wrap, Yahoo Updates, MSN Webmasters, Promotion AdWords, YouTube Ads & In House SEM"

While a lot of advertisers are dissatisfied with Google AdWords on parked pages, some folks, like two advertisers on Search Engine Watch Forums, find that it's performing rather well for them.

We get good results from parked pages for the most part. Like you, they make up most of our content traffic and conversions.

Very interesting.

"This is the first time I have ever seen a forum post about how advertisers are loving the traffic and ROI they are receiving from Google Domain Ads (aka Parked Domain ads)," said Barry Schwartz.

So if it doesn't convert for you, bear in mind that you'll soon be able to opt out of AdSense for Domains, according to Google.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums member suspects that if there are no changes performed on any given ad campaign, the ads will drop off the first page and perform progressively worse over time. He wonders if anyone else has run into a similar issue and if Google is taking preference over new advertisers instead of old ones.

Some advertisers feel that Google is hiding the true costs of their campaigns. They feel that Google is estimating lower costs and then hitting them up with higher costs. This may be perceived as a typical "bait and switch" ploy by Google. But you and I know this as the "quality score" weighing in on pricing.

And truthfully, I am not seeing the same results on any campaigns I monitor. A few people believe that the space that the particular advertiser is focusing on is either very competitive or that Google is figuring out the quality score, as GuyFromChicago suggests.

From my experience, this quote sums it up nicely:

It's simply because you have no history so they anticipate a best case scenario. After a couple days google knows if you have a decent click through rate and has calculated your quality score. At this point they know if you deserve a good position or not. It's pretty simple when you get down to it. They aren't going to penalize you for being a new user.

Do you feel the same way? Do you think you have better results whenever you start a campaign and then it gets worse? Do you think you should start a new campaign every time you want to hit the front page?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, posted on his blog that he's been extorted by a corrupt DMOZ editor. Without naming names, he was told that he'd have to pay $5000 to keep his website in the ODP.

There's been a big stir at DigitalPoint Forums (in two posts) about this, with many individuals suggesting that there's no benefit in being in DMOZ since it's nothing special. Still, however, a good number of people (and Google) put weight on the DMOZ listings and a lot of tools still put weight on it.

However, as forum members notice, DMOZ is pretty much dead and it's impossible to get your site listed there. And with corruption that dates back two years, why give juice to DMOZ at all?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums (thread #1) and DigitalPoint Forums (thread #2).

Update: Joost De Valk, a former DMOZ editor, adds more about the DMOZ corruption to his blog.

Brian Kennish, aka AdWords API Advisor, writes in a Google Groups thread that Google is seeking talent to clarify their help document.

Making our Developer Guide (http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/) and Help Center (http://www.google.com/support/adwordsapi/) as clear and comprehensive as possible is a big deal to us. Tell us how we're doing! What's working and, more importantly, what's confusing or just plain missing?

Are you game? If so, join the Google Groups discussion.

A brand new beta version of Bloglines has been launched this week, and it features a great amount of AJAX and customization features.

The key features in this new beta include:

A Customizable Start Page: You can now drag and drop desired pages to your start page so that you can get a quick glance of the stories from your favorite feeds.

When you mouse over a particular title on your feed, you can see an excerpt of the feed or summary.

Three different viewing options: You now can view your feeds in a standard full feed view, which the old Bloglines version is based off. You can also view only headlines in quick feed view, or you can view the feeds in a three-pane view which combines full feeds and quick feeds in a split pane.

Here's the standard full-feed view that most of us are used to:

But here's a quick feed view which looks very similar to the customized start page. However, this is only for a particular folder that I have selected.

This is what it looks like when you opt-in for a 3-pane view. It kind of reminds me of the way I set up my email.

I like it.

Drag and Drop Feeds for Easy Organization. And finally, for someone like me who subscribes to over 180 feeds, a drag and drop feature is available so that I can organize my feeds better. I really needed this and now it's here.

So far, the direction of Bloglines is promising. The only caveat forum members and I have noticed noticed is that it's not easy anymore to mark feeds as read unless you mouseover them or scroll into the blogs. I can see that being an issue that the Ask team will address, however, so let's give it some time. :)

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

adCenterEU has updated us on the adCenter bulk import draft problem, saying at a WebmasterWorld thread that the problem will be resolved in a "month or so."

Microsoft will be adding new functionality to make it easier and quicker to import campaigns and mark those campaigns from the "draft" status to the live status.

adCenterEU, Microsoft's official adCenter representative, said:

Watch out for this capability in a release scheduled within the next month or so.

So I am expecting the release within the month of September.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in June, we reported that Google ramped up testing the allowed sites AdSense feature.

In short, the Allowed Sites feature, enables publishers to specify which sites can display their ads. This way you do not have to worry about a person stealing your ads with your publisher ID on them, and getting your account banned for "invalid clicks."

The new allowed sites feature now seems to be live for all AdSense publishers. Just login to your account and go to https://www.google.com/adsense/publisher-whitelist-view. Here is a screen capture of what the page looks like:

You can allow domains and even subdomains (i.e. if you have a hosted blog on a blogspot.com domain or something similar). Note, if your ad is found on a domain that is now specified in the allowed sites database, then your ads will still show, but impressions and clicks will not be recorded.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks a unique but very interesting question.

In short, this SEO's client wants him to rank a page well for a keyword phrase, but at the same time, he does not want the page to rank for a single keyword found within that phrase. The example given in the thread is that he wants to rank well for [bmw defects].

I have a good example of this in play on a real site. I purchased a Niko TV (it is an excellent TV by the way) because it had a very attractive rebate offer. Problem was, the rebate was too good to be true. So I wrote a blog post at my personal blog named Niko Rebate Very Scammy. Guess what? I rank in the top Google result (top two) for niko rebate. However, I do not rank in the top ten for niko in Google.

In another example, I was upset that my Sunbeam Water Cooler Sprung a Leak back in 2004, so I wrote about it. It now ranks number one in Google for sunbeam water cooler and has hundreds of comments from other owners of this water cooler, who have experienced the same thing. In fact, Sunbeam customer service has commented several times to offer support. Plus, it has influenced consumer's purchase decisions.

How can you guarantee that a page ranks well for a specific keyword phrase but not the keyword in the phrase? In the BMW example, to rank well for bmw rebate but not rank well for bmw? That is hard. The more competitive the brand name is, the less likely you will rank well for that keyword. It is much easier to rank well for a keyword phrase. So start slow and hope for the best.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.