October 2007 Archives

Those of you have been anxiously awaiting the launch of Microsoft Gatineau can now sign up. The sign up form is here and is available only for US subscribers for the time being.

What is the benefits of Gatineau, you ask? adCenterEU says the following:

Project Gatineau is closely related to adCenter – for example, adCenter customers will be able to use their existing account to access Project Gatineau if they choose to use the web analytics service.

But it also a full-fledged web analytics offering with a lot of great reports and tools for measuring your site traffic and understanding your visitors:

- Click and visitor tracking

- Marketing campaign reporting

- Conversion tracking

- Demographic and geographic segmentation

- Paid and natural search analysis

- Visitor information including browsers, languages, operating systems and resolutions

You will need to create an adCenter account but you won’t need to buy any advertising – the account can be used for Gatineau only.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It really sucks to live in Southern California, and my heart goes out to all those affected by the wildfires. In case you were not aware of what happened, thousands among thousands of residents were forced to evacuate because of some of the worst wildfires in California's history. As such, a WebmasterWorld member believes that the wildfires -- particularly the evacuations that prompted half a million residents to flee their homes -- may have caused a decrease in AdSense earnings. This isn't the first time either. When wired cities are affected by natural disasters, the consequences are inevitable.

What else has contributed to decreased AdSense earnings? In July, Harry Potter may have done it. The World Series and World Cup tends to keep users away from the computer and glued to the TV. School holidays, when families take vacations, can contribute as well.

What do you think may be responsible for a decrease in AdSense revenue?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Want some cash? Got a Facebook application developed? Numerous reports to Facebook developers suggest that Facebook is looking for some cash, and they're willing to share. An application developer has received the following email:

Dear Facebook Application Developer,

Would you like to drive more users to your app? We've expanded our pay-per-action (PPA) beta test and would like to invite you to participate by creating ads for your Facebook application. [snip]

A WebmasterWorld member has pointed out that Facebook is intending to launch SocialAds next week so that advertisers can target Facebook users anywhere. Will SocialAds end up competing with Google AdSense if these ads can be viewed everywhere?

That's certainly a thought. Danny Sullivan suggests that Google is launching a competitive campaign of its own: OpenSocial.

Who do you think will win this battle? Facebook clearly has the lead in the social sphere. AdSense clearly has the lead in the advertising sphere. Will the tides change with the times?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

As many of you know, I'm a heavy social media user. I love finding interesting content that is typically determined by an audience of my peers who vote on articles on many different web 2.0 sites. A WebmasterWorld member, whose website is typically one of those frequently-voted-upon sites, is having trouble getting regular traffic because all of these links on social sites are nofollowed. He asks, "[I]sn't Google missing on a lot of that action by not taking this new web 2.0 dynamic into consideration?"

A few users suspect that these sites are actually the driving force behind some of the drops in PageRank from the October update.

Google might be missing out, but forum members suggest that other factors may end up causing the algorithm to shift in due time:

With all the "no follow" tags being used these days you'd think it would be nearly impossible for sites to get rankings. My guess is that google will be looking more at the volume of traffic a site gets. Especially if they use analytics.

That's certainly an incentive to use Google Analytics. ;)

Here's a thought: the users acknowledge that these social media sites can be spammed, but what about very popular pages? Should nofollow be removed when the stories reach a certain threshold of votes (assuming there are no negative votes as well--to keep out gamers)?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Today is Halloween and the search industry, from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile, us at the Search Engine Roundtable and others, have decided to dress up for the day. Here are some of the logos and designs the companies have released for the day.

Yahoo is incredibly creative with their flash logo:

Here is Yahoo's static image, if you do not have flash enabled on your browser:

Ask UK and France is sporting these theme:

Google goes with this special logo, see history of Google and Halloween at Danny's post:

Dogpile, got to love them:

And, us, the Search Engine Roundtable, has a sweet animated theme for the day:

Gary posted Fast Facts: Resources for Halloween Week 2007 at ResourceShelf. And here is some history of our coverage:

• Halloween Logo From the Search Engine Roundtable, in 2006
• Google, Yahoo, Ask.com & Dogpile's Halloween 2006 Logos, in 2006
• Search Engines Dress Up for Halloween, in 2005
• AdSense Offers Halloween Themes, in 2005

We have forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Let Google Know The Geographic Location of Your Site from Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has nice coverage of Google's new Set geographic target feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

In short, if your site is tailored to a certain geographic location, you may want to use this feature. Google says, "If your site is targeting users within a particular geographic area, please provide us with the relevant information below, using only the fields that apply to your target audience."

Clarify, it is not to tell Google. Hey, Google, my site is hosted in Canada. It is to say that I am trying to target users who are based in this specific location. So your site can be hosted anywhere, Google won't care, Google will learn that you are trying to target a specific location by you setting this feature. If you are a travel site, be careful when using this, because I am sure people in New York, looking to vacation in Spain, won't be searching for "Spain Vacations" while sitting in an Internet cafe in Spain.

To get to this feature, login to Google Webmaster Tools, click on "tools" and then click on "Set geographic target." You should see:

Specify your preference, and if that means, you want to specify a geographic target, you will see this:

Yes, you can get as granular as the street address you want to target.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that some folks are buzzing about a new update taking place at Yahoo Search.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has one person documenting a major change in traffic from Yahoo:

Just like every morning I am checking my SERP's through the Keyword Ranking tool here at DP and to my astonishment I found that 90% of my sites lost rankings in Yahoo...

Most rankings have declined from top3 into lower top 10 or even top50 and my previous top10 rankings are now nearing the 100. ALL my hotel related sites lost rankings, while some of my other sites have gained some, but that is from outside top200 into top100.

This leads me to believe that they did on algo update today, but I would like to have some input from you all.

I personally reviewed a couple of my sites and noticed a decline in traffic from Yahoo on some sites and an increase in traffic from Yahoo on other sites. It may just be too early to tell. The last update was just about a month ago, so it does make sense that this can be an update.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Now there is chatter about an update at WebmasterWorld.

Update 2: Yahoo Search Blog has confirmed the update saying:

Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

There appears to be more reports of issues with Google's Webmaster Tools. The issues are not exactly the same as we reported earlier, but the issue appears to impact the same tool, the Link Reporting tool at Google Webmaster Tools. But is it an error in reporting or part of a new Google update?

Many are reporting that Google is showing zero external links for their site.

We have threads at Google Groups, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld about this topic, plus some random guy gave me a call about this yesterday.

Is it a penalty? Most have seen that zero links are coming up for their site and their PageRank dropped a point or two. The person I spoke with yesterday showed me his site and it appeared plain. It was in a competitive landscape and was not extraordinary, by any benchmark, but it didn't appear penalized to me. Yes, this person's rankings dropped and traffic dropped, and the site's PageRank and link count dropped.

I personally do not see any of this on my sites but there are plenty of reports about this going on, as of a few days ago.

Forum discussion at Google Groups, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

The 40th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. In this show, Ben and I chatted about the big PageRank massacre, if you want to call it that. We spent a whole 15 minutes on that discussion, so check it out. The final 15 minutes we chatted about Yahoo Site Explorer old bug, a problem that was solved with AdSense channels and a new feature coming to AdSense. We also talked about a Microsoft adCenter upgrade, a Google Image update and asked the big question, Are SEOs better searchers?

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.

Topics We Covered:

1. What Does This Google PageRank Message Mean?
   
2. Matt Cutts Confirms that Paid Links Killed Your PageRank
   
3. 2nd Google PageRank in October 2007
   
4. Theory: How Does Google Determine Which Sites Sell Links?
   
5. Yahoo! Responds to Site Explorer Inlinks Issue
   
6. Google AdSense Reporting Discrepancies
   
7. Google Fixes AdSense Channel Reporting Issue
   
8. Code Free Changes Coming To Google AdSense
   
9. MSN adCenter Adds Editorial Status, Campaign Management & Reporting Features
   
10. Google Image Index Update
    
11. Are Seach Engine Optimization Professionals Better Searchers?

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 40: PageRank Paid Links Drop, Yahoo Fixes Site Explorer, Google AdSense Topics & Searching"

Selling links? Matt Cutts has told Loren at Search Engine Journal that it was buying and selling links that ended up getting your PageRank lowered over the past few days.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Danny Sullivan adds in the comments that he already knew this was happening. On October 7, Search Engine Land came out with a post warning you that you could get your PageRank lowered for selling links. Fast forward three weeks and we're here.

The discussion moves to Sphinn where there's a lot of confusion over the fact that Google seems to have penalized sites that simply do not participate in selling links. Copyblogger is an example.

Of course, there's also the other side (in a blog post that I can't find and link to): why can't bloggers make a little money on the side? Some of them aren't as rich as the Googlers. :P

How many people do you think were really outed by SEOs?

Still, according to a more recent Search Engine Land post, Google's stance seems unclear:

Google is always working to improve the ways that we generate relevant search results and update our opinions of sites' reputations across the web.

Some of the hard-hit sites seem to be pretty relevant, if you ask me. Again, the question goes back to the many posts I've seen where bloggers ask why they should be penalized if they provide quality content -- and sell links. So what? Why slight them?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Some people like to check their Google AdWords every few days. Others take a more extreme approach and check every few minutes. Which one are you? Are you addicted to AdWords?

Many are. They want to be on top of their competition. They want to make tweaks all the time. Surprisingly, there are more AdWords addicts than there are casual users of AdWords, including those who check AdWords on days off.

Others had to stop, like AussieWebmaster, who went to rehAd. ;)

And you?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses strategies about what you would do if you started advertising with a brand new keyword in Google AdWords. Are you compelled to pay a lot per click at first or start your bids low?

The responses vary greatly and it's interesting to gauge the strategy. Some people start a little higher:

I've always done it by starting about 50% higher than my max bid (so if my max bid is 30c, i'll start off with a 45c bid), but put a low campaign maximum. This way I can establish a click history so i'm not penalized right off the bat by having bids too low on historically high cpc rated keywords.

Others price it according to competition:

Here is what I do on a new site. I set a moderate price on my better keywords Not too high or low. Put a pretty good size daily budget on. Keep it on for 24 hours daily. When the high bidders have spent their budget or vacate their their normal time slot, you should be able to move up the page and garner some traffic. Conversion of course always depends on the site, content, the offer, etc.

What do you do when you have a brand new keyword? Personally, since we've implied that it's an existing campaign and we're merely adding a keyword, I would be compelled to use the max CPC and see how the ads perform with this keyword. Depending on the CTR, I will lower or raise the bid.

If you have anything to add, forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Numerous reports indicate that Google AdWords has removed the negative keyword tool. Here's a screenshot of forum members' findings showing how the negative keyword tool is missing from the drop down field above all the keywords.

But actually, the negative keyword tool still exists. It has been reassigned to individual keywords as forum member fluxposure points out. This screenshot shows that you can expand the keyword itself and add a negative keyword on the selected keyword.

Do you think that relocating the negative keyword tool is an inconvenience or do you find it easier?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Microsoft adCenter announced that it has new features for campaign management, including immediate editorial feedback on ads and keywords, a daily budget for campaigns, campaign importing tools that are compatible with AdWords Editor, and reporting access, among other nice features.

This is great, and it's certainly a step in the right direction. Forum members feel that adCenter still needs some of the fundamentals for improvement, however:

They seem to miss some basics I would really like to see such at totals for cost, clicks, impressions ctr etc. on campaign and ad group level pages.

What do you think about the adCenter changes? Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The largest topic by far this week in the forums is the PageRank update that hit sites that are selling links. There are literally dozens upon dozens of threads at many of the webmaster forums on the topic.

We covered it with What Does This Google PageRank Message Mean? and 2nd Google PageRank in October 2007. Yes, Google has confirmed this is a PageRank reduction in the toolbar for selling links. Even Matt Cutts, of Google, gave Loren a quote:

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

The big question is why did this PageRank update hit some sites that are selling links, while others it did not hit? In addition, how did Google hit some sites that were not selling links, which they had to restore a few later?

That is where the theory on how Google determines which sites are selling links.

Remember when Google released the paid link reporting tool back in June? Google asked everyone to report sites that sold links. People reported sites, sites they love, sites they hate, sites they are impartial to, to Google via this form. The form collected hundreds, if not thousands of sites. Google probably put a person or two on the task of scanning the list to validate if those sites sold links. YouTube was on the list, the person who reviewed it may have been on the call and forgot to uncheck it as a site that sells links and moved on. Many sites were not manually reported by you and I (SEOs and Webmasters) and those did not see a PageRank reduction, at least not yet, not until someone reports them.

In my opinion, this was a fairly manual process. Of course, I can be wrong. I am sure Google will automate the process as they continue to collect data, set up characteristics and profiles of sites that sell links. But right now, this seems much more manual than automated to me. And that is why I feel that "we" did this to ourselves. Webmaster A reported Webmaster B, who reported Webmaster A.

Does it matter? I have personally not seen any decline in Google referrals since the drop. Does it mean I will lose sponsors? I have lost one but I have also received an email from another sponsor who said:

I know with the latest PR update that just went live last night you are going to get hammered for going from a PR7 to a PR6 to now a PR4. I wanted you to know that I won't be one of those. We will continue to support you as an advertiser as long as the quality of your blog continues.

We're proud to be a sponsor, regardless of your PageRank.

Honestly, that email was incredibly touching. I never sold links for PageRank purposes. I always thanked those who placed their ads on my site, not in a promotional method but in a way to support the SEO community and this site. I do share site statistics, I don't share PageRank scores on my advertise page. This PageRank update may be a good thing. It will weed out advertisers who are just looking to "buy PageRank" from those who have good intentions about supporting the industry and this site.

But the big question is. Is my theory right? If so, did we do this to ourselves?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld (plus a zillion other threads).

Ever have to take down your site for an extended period of time? By extended period of time, I am talking about more than 5 hours or so.

Those who have, might also worry about how Google or other search engine spiders may treat the long down time.

A Google Groups thread has a response from Google's Berghausen, a Google Webmaster Central representative. Berghausen recommends that you serve up "a '503 Service Unavailable' with a 'Retry-After' header indicating when you expect your site to be back up." That is, if you can serve up that server message while your site is down.

A 503 status is defined as:

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

Note: The existence of the 503 status code does not imply that a server must use it when becoming overloaded. Some servers may wish to simply refuse the connection.

Berghausen says that "Googlebot will not index your error page, and will come back looking for updates some time after the date specified in the 'Return-After' header." Very good to know that Google supports this specific header.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

About a week ago, Google announced that they have added the IMAP protocol to Gmail. Google said they would be rolling "out the feature over the next couple of days."

It has now been 6 days since the announcement and many Gmail users still do not see the feature in their account settings.

Gmail Guide has been trying to weather the situation in a Google Groups thread, explaining that these feature roll outs need to go slow to ensure the servers and hardware can handle the new load.

Gmail Guide explained:

t's really great to hear how much everyone wants IMAP, and I feel for those of you that have been such loyal Gmailers for so long but have to wait a little longer. We knew the roll out wouldn't be instant for everyone. Because of the way the system is designed, the feature would go live in Gmailers' accounts gradually and randomly. As a result, we decided to first announce IMAP as it started to roll out rather than later.

We are trying to get IMAP to all users as soon as we can. If you don't have it yet, expect to see it approximately one week from our announcement on October 24. Rolling out new features often place extra burden on our servers, particularly in the case of IMAP where users may be downloading their entire inboxes at once. I know that it is frustrating to wait for a feature that's been highly anticipated. Thanks for your patience, and it won't be much longer!

So, if you still do not have it by tomorrow or the day after, then something is probably wrong.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yesterday, I asked the question, What Happens When an Google AdSense Publisher Dies? As I promised, I would let you know what Google's stance on this matter is. Now Google has replied saying:

I've spoken to several of our specialists who handle the account issues of deceased publishers, and they said that the best thing you can do now is to leave your preferences in your will. There's no need to notify the AdSense team directly; we'll ask your heirs for any necessary official documentation and will be more than willing to work with them on a case-by-case basis to ensure that everything is handled in the way you specify.

We're not able to provide tax or legal advice on this issue, so everyone should talk to an attorney or tax advisor as well, as several of you have suggested. As with any other asset or business, you should also make sure your heirs know of your intentions, whether that include training them to take over your sites and accounts or simply letting them know they exist. It's great to hear that many of you are already doing this.

OK, so Google says make sure someone knows how to get into your AdSense account. But what if the publisher doesn't tell anyone? What if the heir needs access to the account but does not have that information? What steps will Google require to transfer the account to the heir?

I assume this should require similar steps as with resurrecting dead Gmail accounts.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask Google what a month is and Google will tell you it is 30.4368499 days long.

Can't Google tell us the same thing about a day or a decade or maybe even a century? Nope, Google just knows how long a month is.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Eric Lander wrote an interesting post over at Search Engine Journal about a "flaw" in Google's behavioral targeting.

Here's an example:

First, do a search for "florida ford dealers" and look at the sponsored results. Everything looks fine and there are no strange ads.

(Click for larger size)

Now let's do a search that immediately follows that for "new york yankees." Look at the sponsored results!

He and forum members believe that this is a problem. After all, I wasn't searching for Ford that time around.

Clearly, advertisers are put at risk with their ads being served up on irrelevant result pages. To make matters worse, it’s clear that the maximum cost per click associated with an ad can allow it to effectively dominate keyword markets it has no business being in.

In some instances, however, it works well. The chances, however, for that to occur seem to be rare from my testing. For example, I searched for "florida dodge dealers" and then for "car dealers." Only one sponsored result was geared to Florida.

Note that it is the third sponsored result:

So what's your take? Is behavioral targeting a good idea or not? Google has appeared to be unexcited about it and it makes sense. I can see that people are not enthusiastic about it. Forum members hope that advertisers aren't charged as much.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums member noticed that his site is reporting 404 errors when in Google Webmaster Tools. What can he do about it? Is it bad from an SEO standpoint?

First of all, a bit of troubleshooting is recommended. You may want to try Xenu link sleuth to see if it finds any broken links. You may want to see if those pages are on your server and if the links to the pages are correct. It may also be possible that they just weren't accessible when the Googlebot last crawled your site.

However, the member realized that the pages were from an old directory and ended up setting up 301 redirects to the new pages. That works too. In fact, there are two ways to do that as discussed in the thread:

redirect 301 /directory/ http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/

or:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^domain.com/folder/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/newfolder/$1 [r=301,nc]

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A very interesting USA Today article talks about "gray Googlers," retired folk who are making good money off AdSense. The article, according to forum members, makes getting money from AdSense really easy. But WebmasterWorld members know that it's pretty tough work. In fact, they're also concerned that the article begs people to click on ads so that Google can pay these publishers more money.

It's really not that easy, but it's nice to know that some people can use their expertise to do well.

Any article could make life on the web sound easy if it neglects to mention the challenges of building traffic.

Others find it really fishy in general:

If "building traffic" is key as buckworks points out, then how can someone make $800 the *first* check and $2000 the *second* check as mentioned in the article? This certainly doesn't sound like a site that had time to build traffic.

How much this individual is making per click is the real question for me.

Agreed. How are they doing that? The only thing that would make sense is if they've had a well established website months prior to installing AdSense.

There's a bit of jealousy and awe among the crowd, indeed.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks a question we once touched on in the past, how should AdSense publishers plan for death?

We wrote about this in a post I wrote named AdSense Publisher Ponder Death back in 2005. Besides for the steps one should take to make it easy for a family member, friend, business partner, etc, take over their AdSense account - what does Google do?

Google's AdSenseAdvisor said this is not an atypical question:

We get quite a few emails about this issue, from both publishers and their surviving relatives. Different people choose to deal with the AdSense accounts of deceased publishers in different ways. It's always good to have a plan, but we understand that many people don't.

While I can't offer you a "right" answer to the question, know that the team is extremely sensitive to these situations and will work with publishers and their survivors to make sure everything is resolved as smoothly and comfortably as possible.

But seriously, what are the steps Google would take to know when or how to transfer the holdings and management of an AdSense account in case of death?

AdSenseAdvisor promised to get us the official answer:

This is an important discussion. I'm going to escalate this issue through my team and find out what your best course of action is now.

I will report back as soon as I see the answer.

We did document the process to Getting Access to Gmail Accounts of the Deceased, so hopefully we will be able to document the process of gaining access to AdSense accounts of the deceased. Because you can never be too prepared.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports from WebmasterWorld are suggesting that there was a recent Google Images index update.

WebmasterWorld senior member, zeus, said:

I noticed some of my sites have got more images indexed on google image also a little change in rankings, but still no improvement on the filter "Moderate SafeSearch is on " which still filters to mutch good content which has 100% nothing to do with adult stuff, but maybe that comes later in this update, which is often the case with the image update.

So is that SafeSearch feature that WebmasterWorld.

It appears that the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool has gone offline from yesterday evening to this morning.

Several reports from DigitalPoint Forums have confirmed the issue with the keyword tool.

If you have not used the tool, you should give it a try. It has come a long way since Google first released the tool.

The short 8 hours of the tool being offline really seemed to worry many advertisers and Webmasters.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Two weeks ago, we reported that users using Yahoo! Site Explorer were seeing different results depending on whether they were logged in or not.

The Yahoo! Search Team has answered the call in a recent blog post, saying that a product fix was released:

While the counts have been incorrect in some cases, the actual returned results have been correct. However, we did roll out a product fix yesterday and will be rolling out a couple more over the next few days to resolve this difference in counts some of you have observed.

Thank you, Yahoo, for reading the Search Engine Roundtable. ;)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This week can mostly be summed up to one thing: PageRank. Of course, a week of search always has some other events, so let's take a look.

The Big PageRank Update

A bunch of blogs, including ours, dropped PageRank this month. We don't really care since our disclaimer about PageRank says that PR is overrated, but that didn't stop Andy Beard and Daniel Scocco from alerting the community about the pages that dropped in rank.

However, I must say that I didn't expect any PageRank update from our report last month that Matt Cutts said not to expect one. Therefore, why is there one? Can't we just make it obsolete like everyone really wants? Google is a big name as it is. I'm sure Larry will get over it. (SEOs need to get over it too.)

I still wonder what this will do in the long haul, as does Barry. After all, nobody is seeing decreased traffic, and they shouldn't have to: the affected websites are pretty relevant for their search terms. PageRank smagerank. Stupid.

Ask.com Commercial - Verdict = Cool

I like the Ask.com commercial. I think it's creative. Is it a knock on Google? Whatever. I don't care. Ask.com has come out with pretty awesome features lately so I am not complaining.

Google Analytics Gets Updated More Often

According to several reports, Google Analytics is being updated more frequently. We polled the users to see how often they're seeing results and some are still seeing updates every 24 hours whereas others are seeing them as frequently as every hour. I suppose that these people are addicts. ;) Hey, it's all good.

Please Fix Google Blog Search

I really like Google Blog Search. Please fix it and stop returning spammy results. It just doesn't meet the expectations that we have come to enjoy in the regular search engine. kthx.

Google takes Social Plunge, but Microsoft takes the Cake

Google News introduced a Facebook application, but it was Wednesday when we learned that Facebook will be using Microsoft for ads. The world is about to end as we know it.

IMAP on Gmail: Score!

Gmail is now supporting IMAP, which is great news for all Gmail users around. This announcement comes on the heels of another announcement that Gmail now supports over 4GB of new email. iPhone users, most specifically, love the IMAP feature. However, I heard yesterday and today that Gmail for iPhone has gotten a bit of a redesign too. I can't reproduce this on my iPod Touch. Can someone take a picture and show me?

AdSense Glory

This week, we polled that crowd and asked how old the AdSense publishers are. You thirtysomethings came in first place. Congratulations. Behind them were the twentysomethings (25-29).

Also in this week: you can make changes to AdSense code without having to swap your ads to put the changes in effect. Cool.

And finally, if you're an AdSense success story, create a video for Google and they may feature you in their blog. Cool, eh? As long as you tell me how to retire on AdSense, I will think so.

Libraries go Open Source, Shun Google and Microsoft

Go libraries! You make us proud. As you may or may not know, libraries would rather share with everyone than make exclusive deals with Microsoft or Google. Kudos to you for standing up to the big guns. Information, especially books, should be freely accessible without any restrictions.

Quality Score Gets Detail

Concerned about your Google AdWords quality score? You can now get more information about what is wrong with your campaign.

Amanda Camp on Video

Amanda Camp talks to webmasters about how Google Webmaster Tools works. Now I know what she looks like when I attend the next conference. Hi Amanda!

That is all for this week. See you next Friday!

As many webmasters know, link exchange requests are not abnormal. Eric Ward wrote a Search Engine Land post about the many mistakes that people make when asking for a link from an impersonal email to a statement saying "I'm in charge of getting links!"

The discussion moved over to Sphinn where members share their own tips and tricks to avoid making the same mistakes.

• Don't title your email "Link Exchange Request."
• Use proper grammar.
• PageRank isn't as important as these people think. More on that here.
• Don't insult the credibility of the sites that you ask for links from. If you're already pursuing a link, stop asking for a "verification process."
• Do your research and contact the right person.
• Avoid link exchanges.

In other words, don't write link exchange request emails at all. ;) (Or just do it right.)

Forum discussion continues on Sphinn.

A discussion at Cre8asite Forums goes into a lot of questions about what a search engine prefers to see in a homepage. Is dynamic content preferred, or does a static homepage do just as well? For instance, the big contenders (eBay, Amazon, CNN) are updating their homepages constantly. Should we follow their example?

As Bill Slawksi says, it varies per site. A hybrid of dynamic and static features may be the best solution for most. Too much dynamic content may lose a familiar feel to a regular user.

Old stuff that doesn't change too much or too frequently that gives people a feel for the personality of the site, and a glimpse of what makes them unique while providing some stability.

But it really depends who your competitors are, according to Pittbug. If you're challenging these big sites, then sure, you'll want to emulate them as much as possible.

Ruud, however, says that search engines don't take preference over any particular homepage presentation. It all depends on your business.

Finally, EGOL says that you can view your analytics and see what kind of activity your users are doing on your website to see if it necessitates change.

An interesting read indeed. I personally like some dynamic elements. It makes the site feel like it's being attended to more often.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of Mozilla Corporation, has blogged that Mozilla's 2006 revenues were $66 million, mostly (85%) from Google:

Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2006 were $66,840,850, up approximately 26% from 2005 revenue of $52,906,602. As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google.

Will Google buy Mozilla? DigitalPoint Forums members think that Google's big eyes might set upon Mozilla, but others don't think so. The partnership is beneficial for both parties.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Inside AdSense blog has alerted the community to a pretty cool contest: share your experience with AdSense and you can be featured on the Inside AdSense blog.

In order to do this, you need to have a YouTube account. Videos should be 2 minutes long (or less). Other criteria is posted in the contest detail post itself.

Here's a sample AdSense video that spurred the contest idea:

This is what the AdSense team is looking for.

Forum discussion (and funny responses) is at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread has a confirmed bug with adding Google maps listings in the local business center.

If you see a message that reads:

Posted Dec. 31, 1969

And it says you are verified, you can rest assured that you are not verified yet.

Maps Guide Jen said:

It's a bug that we know about. I know, it's confusing, but you can assume that if your listing says "verified in 1969" that it isn't actually verified. Unfortunately it also means that you won't be able to take any action on it at this time.

There has been more and more discussion about this bug across Google Groups recently, so I thought I mention it here.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Two days ago we reported that on Google AdSense Reporting Discrepancies, which actually started sometime on Monday.

In short, the channel reports were not matching up with the aggregated reports. So any reconciliation between the two reports did not add up.

This has finally been fixed.

Last night at about 6pm (EST), the first reports started coming in that the channel data has been updated.

As of the 3PM Pacific hour I'm starting to see increased channel impressions. Not sure yet if it's back to normal as the channel data historically had a 30 minute (or so lag) for me. Either there may be headway on the issue or my SERPS have undergone a major change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google Groups.

With all that is going on with these PageRank Scores, I am seriously amazed to see a DigitalPoint Forums thread with a poll that shows SEOs are still all over the board on the meaning of PageRank.

The poll asked "How Obsessed Are You With Your PageRank?" The responses, 58 of them so far, are across the board - which implies there is a ton of confusion about the importance of Toolbar PageRank.

• Obsessed. "I check it daily" - 15.52%
• Concerned. "I check it weekly" - 18.97%
• Normal. "Check it every month" - 18.97%
• Laid Back. "Check it every update" - 25.86%
• Don't Care. "I never check it" - 20.69%

Was this past PageRank update a message? If so, from this poll, it doesn't appear SEOs and Webmasters got that message as a whole. At least not yet.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Earlier this week, the Google AdWords team announced that you can find a lot more detail about the quality score of your ad in AdWords:

The new Keyword Analysis page gives you a detailed breakdown of your keyword's Quality Score and how it might impact your ad's visibility. Specifically, you'll learn how keyword quality and landing page quality are performing and receive recommendations for improvement.

Here's what it looks like:

This is exciting news for advertisers, but a few questions remain: if Google suggests that you delete a particular keyword, can't you still improve your Quality Score by revising the ad copy or the landing page? (I'd think so, wouldn't you?)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft and Facebook are new best friends. According to a Wall Street Journal article, Microsoft has invested a considerable sum of money -- nearly $250 million -- to provide advertising on the coveted social platform.

Microsoft Corp. agreed to invest $240 million for a minority stake in Facebook Inc. that values the social-networking site at $15 billion. As part of the deal, the two companies expanded their advertising agreement.

Forum discussion is mixed. Microsoft has valuated the company at roughly $10-15 billion. Facebook is only bringing in $150 million a year. How does it add up?

Others find that Microsoft screwed up.

Looks to me like M$ have got a great deal and FB have gone [nuts].

They've denied themselves any future bids from Google Yahoo! etc., and for what?

A little bit of development cash in exchange for a long term advertising deal - which will get M$'s money back in twenty minutes.

However, even others are happy for Microsoft since this is good exposure for them.

As for myself, I can't say I'm happy with the Microsoft-Digg advertising partnership (I am sick of seeing classmates.com advertisements) so I honestly am a bit skeptical about this relationship.

Additional coverage (lots!) is at Techmeme.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last few days, Gmail has now begun to support IMAP as indicated by the screenshot below:

Google announced the feature yesterday. This will make life easier for all users who depend on Gmail on multiple devices (especially the iPhone) so that the changes made on one device will be replicated in other locations when you log back into Gmail. (That's the benefit of IMAP over POP in a nutshell for the tech-illiterate.)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has a fairly simple but educational FAQ on how the "Set Crawl Rate" feature works in Google Webmaster Tools.

In short, you can only set the crawl rate for a site on the domain or subdomain level. If you have folders and want to control the crawl rate for items within the folder, you are out of luck.

Googler, Susan Moskwa, said:

The crawl rate tool is only available for sites at the domain or subdomain level; since your site is in a subfolder (/lcsworks), the tool is unavailable for that particular site. If you can verify freewebs.com or a subdomain of freewebs.com, you'll be able to set the crawl rate for one of those sites.

What is the Google Crawl Rate feature? You can learn more about it over here and here. Here is a snap shot of the page, that you can get to by clicking on "tools" and then clicking on "Set crawl rate."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

We talk a ton about Google Webmaster Tools and how important they have become to SEOs and Webmasters over the course of this year. Amanda Camp, who worked with Vanessa Fox (before Vanessa left to Zillow), at the Google Seattle Kirkland office, created a video about why she loves working on Webmaster Tools.

Honestly, I feel that video comes from the teams heart. It really means a lot to me that they have (1) created the tools and (2) expressed why they have done so.

Adam Lasnik of Google created a Google Groups thread about the video. Feel free to stop by the thread and share your thank you to Google.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Two days ago we reported, Google Webmaster Tools Link Page Troubles Again. Since then, there has a huge amount of discussion on this topic.

Tons of SEOs and Webmasters were really frustrated that the tool wasn't giving them information. They should keep in mind that this is a relatively new tool that is free and we are lucky to have. :)

In any event, I just checked to see if the tool is now operating correctly and it is. We now can login to Google Webmaster Tools and get to that linkage data without error.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

Yesterday we reported about a 2nd Google PageRank in October 2007 which turned out to be a message from Google, at least most of us think so. At Search Engine Land I wrote in Google's PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?:

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Can't say that we were not warned about this? Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over two weeks ago, and now it appears many sites are getting hit with a drop in PageRank.

The coverage of this PageRank update was absolutely massive. Just check out Techmeme and you will see. Heck, even Forbes (who was hit by this) covered it with Google Scares The Search Crowd, where they quoted me extensively.

This morning, I went through the various forums to see what message has been sent to the SEO community. There are a few dozen threads at DigitalPoint Forums on the topic, but I will reference only this DigitalPoint Forums thread and a WebmasterWorld thread.

The first thing I took strong notice to was that none of those impacted reported any drop in traffic from Google. Proof? This site was hit with a PageRank drop from PR7 to PR4. What did it mean for our traffic from Google? We actually have more traffic than we did before the update. Here are two charts from Google Analytics showing week to week comparison and day to day comparison of Google traffic, respectively:

Yes, an increase in traffic.

So this PageRank update seems to just be at the surface, possibly a message. What message? The most logical message can be sending is to come through on Danny's official report, Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google. Sites that sell links have seen a hit in their PageRank score.

Andy Greenberg at Forbes asked me why wouldn't they penalize the sites in terms of removing them from the index? I thought about that and explained that most of these sites produce excellent content. Sites like Forbes, Washingtonpost.com, Techcrunch, Engadget, Search Engine Journal, our site and others produce some of the best content on the web. If Google delisted all of those sites, then that would hurt their relevancy on some queries. With Google, they want to deliver the best possible results. How can they do that and also send a message to link sellers and link buyers? The safest method is to take this route and lower their PageRank. Link buyers, although not recommended, look at PageRank as a measurement for buying links. Google lowering the PageRank of some of these sites should make it harder for some of those sites to sell links.

Andy then asked me why would Google do this if you clearly label your ads as ads to the user. I said, that is a whole new debate, since the nofollow tag came out. Google feels it is not enough to just place those ads in a box and mark them as ads. Google wants you to nofollow the ads so they don't impact the algorithm at all. I said, I understand Google's stance on that and it is a decision each publisher needs to make for themselves.

Will this impact the selling of links on those sites? Time will tell. Will these sites slap on a nofollow tag? Time will tell. Will this make PageRank less valuable in the eyes of SEOs? Time will tell.

For now, I think Google sent a clear message that they don't want sites to sell links or people to buy links. Will this message stop people from doing that? I don't think so, but like I said just before, time will tell.

On a personal note, I trust my sponsors, I value their sponsorships and I couldn't do what I do without their financial support. Some sponsors can't afford huge sponsorships, so they sponsor in their ways. It is what enables this site and many other sites to function and operate on a daily basis. I turn down sponsors all the time because they are simply not relevant or useful to my reader. I hand select them and for them to be on my site, means I trust them. Why nofollow someone you trust and want to thank? Is that a slap in their face? Will I have to and will they continue to sponsor? Time will tell.

As you can see, the message is clear - the reaction is not so clear just yet.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Starting October 22nd, Monday, there has been reporting discrepancies in Google AdSense between the aggregate numbers and the broken down channel reports.

Here are some of the reports in a WebmasterWorld thread:

Now the URL channels show 30% higher earnings and number of clicks than sum of individual channels.

Same here. Stats on URL channels is out of whack.

Glad I'm not the only one. All channels for one site are showing about one tenth of what should normally be there. I thought there had been an outage on the site -- but no such thing...

This bug has also been confirmed by Google. AdSenseAdvisor confirmed yesterday at 4:50 pm (EST) the bug:

Our engineers are aware of this aggregate/channels reporting discrepancy and are working on resolving it as quickly as they can. I'll let you know when I know more.

Sorry for any confusion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread have reports from some users that Google News, the home page, is not auto refreshing with news.

In the past, the page updates the news throughout the day, if you leave the page open. It seems, at least on some browsers, that Google News has stopped auto-refreshing with new news. This requires users to manually refresh the page.

Google News Guide 2 has confirmed the issue and explained they are working on a fix:

Anyone else experiencing similar issues, we've confirmed that there's a bug on our end that's preventing Google News from refreshing. We're working on a fix, and I'll get back to you as soon as there's an update.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yesterday the Google AdSense Blog announced that you will be able to make changes to your ads in the AdSense console and those changes will automatically be applied to your live ads without swapping in new ad code.

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account -- you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks. Fancy! We hope that this new feature will help you save time and will simplify the process of optimizing your ad units.

This is going to be rolled out in the next few weeks, you will now when it is live when you see the Ad Setup page change. The page will look something like this:

There are two forums threads on this topic, one at DigitalPoint Forums and the other at WebmasterWorld. The bottom-line response is that publishers are thrilled with this announcement. It will save them so much time and headache.

This feature is great and should improve their ad serving speed, reduce their servers load, as well as reduce our served page file size -> better visitor experience.

Note: You will have to change your ad code once after Google implements this new feature. After that, you will not have to change your ad code to make changes to your ads.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread is reporting yet another large PageRank update taking place in the Google Toolbar.

So you know, there already was a PageRank update this month and it is unusual for there to be large PageRank updates twice in a month.

Of course, PageRank is only Toolbar PageRank and it does not officially represent a site's authority and rank, more on that here.

Some suspect that this update is again attacking paid links.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: I posted a longer piece on this at Search Engine Land named Google's PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?

Cre8asite Forums moderator eKstreme asked in a Cre8asite Forums thread, "Are SEOs better searchers?"

Wow, what an excellent question!

I think SEOs have to be better searchers. Why? We know how search engines work, at least we know more about how search engines work when compared to normal searchers. Don't you think Matt Cutts at Google is a better searcher than most SEOs even? He really knows how Google works, more than SEOS. But SEOs know how search engines work more than normal searchers.

• How often do you find yourself using quotes in your searches?
• How often do yourself scanning the paid listings when you are looking to buy things?
• How often do you use site operators in your searches?
• How often do you use time based operators?
• The list goes on, allinanchor, allintitle, special file operators, etc...

We know how to find things things that the ordinary searcher may not be able to find. Of course, it is the search engines goal to make sure the searcher finds what he or she is looking for ever time. So it may not be all that important to be "a better searcher" these days then it was back in the Alta Vista days.

But when it comes down to it.

• I know when to use a generic search engine versus a speciality search engine.
• I know when to use special operators and when to let the search engine do the work.
• I know when to disregard the paid search ads and when to focus on them.
• I know when to consult Gary Price for help and when not to

What an excellent topic!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

The 39th edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. Chris had a new baby girl, congrats Chris! In this show, Ben and I chatted about the big October paid link debate and noticed that most SEOs won't stop buying link. Yahoo's Site Explorer tool is having some major quirks. Google Webmaster Tools has new features including Sitelinks management, now with 8 Sitelinks. There was a Google link and PageRank update. Ben talked about duplicate content issues. We discussed Google's improvements with proxy hijacking. Yahoo enabled blocked domains. Google has a duplicate URL issue still. 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.

Topics We Covered:

1. The October 2007 Paid Link Debate
   
2. Will SEOs Stop Buying Links in Light of the Risks?
   
3. Yahoo Site Explorer Showing Different Counts For Registered vs. Non-Registered Users
   
4. Yahoo Search Showing Less Links in Site Explorer?
   
5. Is the Yahoo Site Explorer API Broken?
   
6. Google Webmaster Central Gets Updated with Sitelinks and More
   
7. See 8 Google Sitelinks in Action
   
8. Google Webmaster Link Tool October 2007 Update
   
9. Google Webmaster Tools Link Update More Frequent?
   
10. Google Toolbar PageRank Update (October 2007)
    
11. Who Is Better At Finding Duplicate Content?
    
12. Has Google Fixed the Proxy Hijack Problem? Google.com Cleaner
    
13. Yahoo Enables Blocked Domains Feature For Advertisers
    
14. Google.com Showing Same URL on Page One & Two of Search Results

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 39: Paid Links, Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, PageRank, Duplicate Content & Search Ads"

For the past couple days, Google Webmaster Tools has been having issues displaying the detailed links for a particular page of a site.

Many people are seeing what I am seeing:

When you try to download all external links or when you try to view external links for a specific page, an error message has been popping up.

There are threads on this topic at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

when i try to check my internal or external links in webmaster tools by clicking on the hyperlinked number on the righthand side of the page, it gives me "Our system is currently busy. Please try again in a few minutes." for the last 2 days. This is true whether i use a different computer, different browser and for all websites i have listed there.

This is not the first time, we have reported similar problems in the past .

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

Another Google privacy discussion has emerged as a result of a Times Online article:

Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when.

Right now, Google says you can opt in and that your data is protected. But in a few years time, will the same board members make the same decisions? Probably not. Forum members fear a change in regime when that may occur. So what can be done? One member suggests that there be another search engine that lures people away from Google. This could be Ask.com, perhaps.

But for those concerned about privacy, there are two options: create multiple accounts for multiple purposes, or don't sign up for Google accounts at all. The former seems a little complicated.

And all this time, I'm wondering that if Google really wants my data, when is Gmail going to have unlimited storage? ;)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A New York Times article discusses the Open Content Alliance, an initiative to put books online for everyone's consumption regardless of affiliation.

This is in stark contrast to restrictions put in place by both Google and Microsoft who also want to scan library books and make them available online but by limiting the libraries from sharing the books with other commercial search services.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

WebmasterWorld members are cheering for the libraries.

I think this is great news, and in the spirit of libraries. A commercial business person may walk into any library and browse any book. Why should Big-G or M$ get to convert such a freedom of information into their own revenue stream?

True. An additional kudos goes to the libraries because they have to actually pay the Open Content Alliance to have their books scanned; Google/Microsoft don't impose fees. Still, the libraries are doing the right thing, according to forum members.

Why can't Google share with everyone? We're all about information retrieval and accessibility, so why prevent that due to competition?

In the name of Do No Evil, why not just donate cash to the libraries and the Open Content Aliance so everyone can benefit from the work?

I think that would be the best solution for everyone.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

As many people reported within the blogosphere two weeks ago via Googlified, Gmail has had an increase in storage and is over 4GB whereas it was less than 3GB earlier this month.

As of this writing, my Gmail capacity is at 4.3GB:

Forum members are just hoping that Gmail will go unlimited like Yahoo in due time. I'm down with that.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread goes into a debate about the nature of link swaps or link exchanges.

EGOL, forum moderator, sparked the debate by saying:

Link swapping is manipulation.

Now, you and I know that he did not mean that to be a blanket statement. I would think he would have liked to put the word, "Most" at the beginning of that sentence.

Joe Dolson, moderator, expands by saying:

Practically speaking, if you want to swap links, swap links. Just be critical of the properties you're working with; and don't swap links exclusively. The "give a link, get a link" exchange doesn't need parity.

Let's analyze the typical link exchange request. An email comes into your inbox and it reads (here is a sample one someone sent me recently):

Dear Webmaster,

I would like to express my interest in 3 Way Link Exchange with your website for our mutual benefit.

Your website link will be placed on http://www.domain.com/ or http://domain.com/

I will add your link here:

http://domain.com/Internet_and_Web_Services/Search_Engine_Optimization/
OR
http://domain.com/directory/Search_Engine_Optimisation_2/
OR
We will make an article about your site here: http://www.domain.blogspot.com/

Below is my linking information:

URL: http://www.domain.com
title: Internet Search Marketing Consulting Location
Description: Internet Search Marketing Inc. is a search engine optimization and Internet marketing consulting company near Location Name.

Exchanging 3 way links would benefit our websites by increasing their link popularity, boosting traffic, and moreover three way links, being counted as one way inbound links by the search engines receive greater value than conventional reciprocal when it comes to rankings.

Blogging is the new way to go! Business blogs can be an excellent choice for both large and small companies - most companies already have a profile on the internet, but especially smaller companies are struggling to get visitors, and have serious problems reaching people interested in their field of business. Blogging can be a tool of communication to give hints for your sites new products to get featured.

I hope you will find the proposition interesting. If you feel, this will mutually benefit our websites, don't hesitate to send me your website details, and I will add it right away.

Thanking you in anticipation of a favorable reply and hope to communicate with you again for link exchange with more websites.

Best Regards

Mr. First Last
Link Builder Specialist
email@gmail.com

Now, right off the bat, this person did not even mention my content. The whole purpose of that email was to, and quote, increase "link popularity, boosting traffic" with search engines.

Most link exchange emails work that way. And by typically, someone who asks you for a link is not wanting it because they think your site's audience will find it valuable. But this is not always the case. Danny and I often get genuine requests for placing a link to an SEO's blog on the blogroll of Search Engine Land. Those requesting that link are typically in the SEM industry and want to stand out on that blogroll. I am sure they want some of the link popularity, but to them, it is more about being included on the list of SEO blogs as opposed to the link value. Note: I do not control who is on that blogroll, so please do not email me about that, only Danny is involved in that (which I am grateful for).

Are all link exchanges manipulative of search engines? Not all, but I would say the majority are. So be careful with them and be selective.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I personally always had the impression that the bulk of AdSense publishers are between the age of 18 and 30 years old. That is just my biased opinion of how I see Google AdSense publishers.

I guess I feel that way because typically small publishers put ads on blogs and other sites similar to blogs, like forums, simple content sites and so on. But is that the true average age of the typical AdSense publisher? Only Google knows. But there is an informal poll at WebmasterWorld, which makes the poll, itself, skewed. Why? Well, it is polling only members of WebmasterWorld and then adding only AdSense publishers. In any event, what are the responses?

40, 25, 60, 40, 50, 40, 62, 28, 71, 45, 47, 43, 30, 48, 38, 28, 33, 63, 44, 41, 42, 47, 46, 49, 26, 55, and 36. Those are the responses. Well, I can honestly say I am surprised by the responses. I suspect the same poll at DigitalPoint Forums would yield younger responses, but I can be wrong about that.

Let's do our own poll. Google AdSense publishers, how old are you?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is possible for a competitor to get your AdSense account "smart priced." By smart priced, the folks in the thread mean, that your average daily Page eCPM drops, and your earnings are seriously impacted.

How would a competitor make your earnings drop? This individual suspects that if someone is capable of seriously impacting your AdSense impressions and clicks, Google will take notice. So if you average 100 clicks with 10,000 impressions and all of a sudden you see 5,000 clicks with 11,000 impressions - that may raise a red flag.

The suspicion is that Google has automated the smart pricing algorithm to be very sensitive about activity like that. The AdSense publisher said:

In any case, it looks as if the smartpricing algo is much too sensitive. The previous week had CTR and eCPM the same every day +/- 1% (as had the previous months). An entire week or month should determine smartpricing, not one or two hours. Obviously two hours doesn't provide enough accurate and reliable data to draw a reasonable conclusion about site performance.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld members have gotten into a heated discussion about whether Google is manipulating organic search results to increase ad revenue. The idea is that they're making a lot of money when the organic results are irrelevant, according to forum members.

While Google says that organic ads do not have any correlation to paid ads, forum members contest that this may not be true.

I am thinking that there IS a strategy to the madness and to me it seems that whatever they have in their Ad inventory IS effecting the SERP's. If you can't find what you are looking for on the first pages you are more likely to click on one of their ads, because the ads sure seems to be accurate!

However, not all members feel that this is the case. These observations may not be intention on Google's part. Other reasons discounting the original claim include the following:

- They don't have to, SEOs do it for the sake of AdSense, affiliate and other such programs
- They must not do so, otherwise the first semi-official insider comment on this would be the end of their public company
- They can't do it because their infrastructure doesn't allow them to do so
- They don't really wanna do it, because it'd hurt those who work at Google.

The debate is rather heated with many members taking extreme (and not so extreme) stances on this idea. What are your thoughts?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Since Google can, Google will. With their interest in Facebook (as Marissa Meyer said at a recent keynote at SES San Jose), Google has taken advantage of installing the Google News app on Facebook (account required).

One forum member believes that "two of the greatest internet sites working together" could be a great thing. I think so too... if using Facebook apps is your thing. ;)

Here is how Google News is being used on two different profiles:

By the way, Vanessa Fox wrote about the Google News Facebook application on Search Engine Land too.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Over at Cre8asite Forums, moderator Barry Welford has spotted an anomaly with the results of Google Blog Search when compared to Google's relevant search results.

Barry asks what drives the poor quality of these search results. Perhaps it is the domain upon which these blogs are hosted?

How can Google, which prides itself on its search algorithms, possibly present results that are clearly meaningless. To add insult to injury, these items were created with the free Blogger blogging software offered by Google since they all are located on the Blogspot domain.

Most forum members agree that Blogspot is a haven for spammers which isn't surprising or anything new considering the study we reported on in March. It seems like nothing has changed.

However, what is it about relevancy on Google's Blog Search engine? Why is Google neglecting a very useful tool (if I say so myself... when it works?)

I hope that the Google folks are looking to improve relevancy on the Blog Search Engine. I like using it and would hate to see these issues interfere with quality of the Google Search Engine.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports seeing a small Ask.com algorithm and index update.

I personally took a look at my traffic for this site and compared this past week to the week before and saw a 30%+ increase in search traffic from Ask.com. Does that mean there was an update? Not necessarily. But there seems to be some suggestions of some type of update over at Ask.com.

The last time we reported an Ask.com update was in August.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google AdSense enabled AdSense Channels back in March 2004 to give publishers a more controlled method of tracking ad performance. Since then, they have expanded the use of channels for that purpose.

Since then we really have not discussed the different methods of using Channels to track efficiently and accurately.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a collection of methods of using channels to help publishers track their advertisements success.

Here are some channel strategies mentioned in the thread that you can use for your AdSense campaigns:

• Ad Type Channels (is it adlinks, search, adblock) and always defining size and kind of the ad IE: "adlinks 4 ads 728x15"
• Language Channels (to track what users are making you earn money) IE: "spanish", "french"
• Position Channels (where is the ad positioned on page) IE: "top", "left column", "bottom"
• URL Channels (what page is paying) IE: "mydomain.com/home", "mydomain.com/product1.asp"
• Color Schema Ad Channels (what color palette are ads using, you can put palette's name or description) IE: "contrast, red", "mypalette1", "site similar look and feel"
• Visitor Type Channels: Loyal users, new users
• Ad Size Channels, to define the various sizes of ads and see which works best

Those are just some of the AdSense channel methodologies used and discussed in that forum thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread mentions noticing the new Ask.com "Instant Getification" commercials that start of with a message that reads, "Can Your Search Engine Do This?"

First, let's all watch one of the commercials:

As you can see, they are simple and show a compare and contrast between a "typical" search engine and what Ask.com can offer.

I personally like the commercials, but a WebmasterWorld thread has a member who feels Ask.com is knocking on Google.

The new ad shows someone searching for music and looks like you can demo songs / see popular tracks and also a mouse over preview etc.

Then it shows google serps (looking bland) with no sound or anything and goes "Does yours do this?"

I would think google would have something to say about that.

Technically, they are not showing Google's search results, they are showing a white labeled engine. I am with martinibuster, who said:

Those were great ads. I loved it. Ask made it's point elegantly. Reminded me of the Apple ads, except it wasn't exagerrated nor featured smug people.

Good job on your ads Ask.com! We asked in the past, Is Ask.com's "The Algorithm" Campaign Really Working? I hope these do.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Some webmasters at DigitalPoint Forums are suggesting that Google Analytics is updating more frequently than every 24 hours.

One member said they update every hour and lag about 3 hours behind in reporting:

mine updates about every hour, and is almost always exactly 3-hours behind.

Others suggest it is more like every few hours.

But if you take a look at the Google Analytics help center, which says:

How often is the data in the reports updated?

Report data is generally updated every 24 hours, but data may sometimes take longer to appear in your account. AdWords cost information is imported once daily, to import the previous day's information.

So who to believe?

It seems like I saw an early update this weekend, but I was not a 100% sure. 24 hour updates make most sense to me. Here is a poll where you can add your two cents:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

What a week! I'm still recovering from the highlight, which, of course, was SMX. But even when conferences are held, search doesn't stop. Here's what happened in this week of search:

Google Adds Features

Early this week, we saw reports that Google AdWords has rolled out new features. On the same day, we reported that Google Webmaster Tools link data updates are more frequent. This was confirmed by the new announcement today about Google Webmaster Central has gotten a bunch of new features including extra sitelinks. Barry illustrates how 8 sitelinks can really change the landscape.

Similarly, Google Analytics is getting a major overhaul and Urchin is returning. I can't wait for the latter, quite frankly.

Google Q3 Earnings: No Surprise There

Google Q3 earnings have soared 57%. That means that anyone owning Google stock is rich. Unfortunately, that excludes me.

Oh, and and 77% of their 34% of revenue goes to AdSense publishers. That means that you're profiting off of Google's success.

Yahoo Catches Up

Yahoo has now added a blocked domains for advertisers so that their ads will not display on certain websites.

...and then Yahoo Slows Down

Yes, the Yahoo spider is out for coffee as many people are seeing its slurping activity slowing down.

Google Gets Naked

Now this is why Google is the #1 search engine of choice! Nude images are easily accessible on the search engine. Sweet!

Microsoft Gets Voice Activated Search

Microsoft Live is going mobile and their 1-800-CALL-411 will compete with 1-800-GOOG-411. Has anyone tried it yet?

Google's YouTube Anti-Piracy Tool Rolls Out

But will it work? How many of you are worried about this new YouTube anti-piracy tool will do nothing for copyright thieves?

China = Dumb

China has directed all search traffic to Baidu in an attempted coup d'etat on search. This totally sucks for American tourists stuck in China. I'm not going there till it's fixed.

Too Many Identical Results on Google

So at SMX, Danny pulled up a page of mine with a search query and my result, on the same exact URL, showed up in positions #1 and #2. Weird. I'm not the only one. Barry reported that others are seeing this behavior too. My robots.txt is fine. Something's up with Google. Danny, it's not my fault!

Link Buys to Stay... for Now

Many folks think that buying links is great. In fact, most are not afraid of penalties. Will Google's algorithm change drastically to affect the sentiment? I think that the results are pretty relevant right now, link buying or not. The truth might be related to the number of clicks on a result. I think that Google should take note.

SMX Recap

We blogged every session at SMX Social Media (except for the Wikipedia Clinic) and Barry summarized what we covered:

1. Social Media Marketing Essentials
2. Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
3. Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
4. A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
5. Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
6. Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
7. Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM
8. Micro Communities
9. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

For the record, I spoke at one and blogged three of them. Kim Krause Berg covered the remaining six. Thanks Kim!

Oh, and did you know I was mentioned in Forbes with a bunch of wonderful people? Neither did I -- not even after I got home and was told "great job in Forbes!" I had to do the research myself. Next time, people, please provide a URL. :)

See you next week!

Forum members have spotted that the Google Webmaster Central has been updated with some new functionality. The Webmaster Central team has confirmed this and outlines the additions in detail:

• Up to 6 months of historical data.
• Percentages of the top queries.
• Ability to download and export this data.
• Data is updated constantly for freshness

Nice. Forum members think so too.

Barry has written a little more at Search Engine Land about these features. He also adds that Google Sitelinks has grown to 8 links. He then illustrates all 8 sitelinks in action. Cool!

Not only that, but the Google Webmaster Central team has announced that Google is rolling out code search sitemaps - that is, you can "create Sitemaps that contain information about public source code you host and would like to include in Code Search."

And if your sitelinks aren't your first choice, you can provide feedback to Google on what you want changed.

It is only getting better from here. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Barry Welford presents an interesting question, one that has been highly debated in the past, on Cre8asite Forums:

I am getting the distinct feeling based on traffic to my websites that clicks on particular entries in SERPs are being weighted more strongly in the Google algorithms. In other words, suppose you had a web page sitting at #3 position for a given keyword search. If this web page gets more clicks by searchers than the #1 or #2, then this will eventually move your web page to the #1 or #2 position.

The question has evoked similar sentiment and others feel the same way. Respree, for example, says that Google likes popular sites. Does that extend to click popularity?

Bill Slawski, on the other hand, thinks that other factors come into play: which page was clicked? How long has the visitor hung around? How much of the page do they view (do they scroll down?) Do they refine their query? Are they returning to the page, and if so, how?

There's a lot of discussion, but there's no real support to the method. It is possible that people might access the 4th result and give it enough link juice to hit the #1 position. However, there's no definitive answer, and Google would never tell us anyway. ;)

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Google has announced its Q3 results and they're doing just fine.

Google reported revenues of $4.23 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2007, an increase of 57% compared to the third quarter of 2006 and an increase of 9% compared to the second quarter of 2007.

Their stock as of this writing is over $639.

Will they hit $700? Some people say yes. Others are not so sure.

Coverage continues at Search Engine Land and Techmeme.

Maybe this is why AdSense publishers are doing so well. But then again, a forum member suspects that the financial gains have something to do with higher PPC costs. Supply and demand, my friends.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld advertiser is trying to display his ads on the most relevant sites within the content network so that he can bring his page impressions to a manageable level.

With that request, he also would like to filter out by country (extensions, such as .ru) because he does not want to have these ads displayed on such websites.

Right now, beyond doing an analysis of your raw website logs, this isn't possible. However, AdWordsAdvisor has added this request to a feedback report to be sent off to the powers that be so that this may change.

I don't advertise in the content network, but I'm all for both requests. Go AWA!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld

A couple days ago, Forbes wrote Digg This Headline, For Google's Sake. The article basically describes how SEOs are using Digg to build links. I have described how that works with my article named The Power Of Digg In Link Building on March 1st of this year.

The article covers news from the Search Marketing Expo - Social Media conference we covered this week. And yes, they quote many of our friends, including our very own Tamar Weinberg as saying:

Blogger and search marketer Tamar Weinberg suggested that users provided contact info with their Digg accounts, encouraging other users to contact them and thus building a network that can be used to float links higher on the site.

Other familiar names mentioned include:

• Cameron Olthuis
• Neil Patel
• Brent Csutoras
• Chris Winfield

Thanks guys for representing our industry!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Typically, every time Google releases earnings, there is a thread about how much share Google is giving to their AdSense publishers. You can often some what get an idea of that share by looking at Google's financial statements.

Google released earnings yesterday. Greg Sterling's Search, Ads And Apps: The Google Q3 2007 Results has nice coverage of it, and I am sure Tamar will post the forum recap later, plus there is more roundups at Techmeme, if you are interested. From those earnings, in the Q3 highlights it says:

Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $1.45 billion, or 34% of total revenues, in the third quarter of 2007. This represents a 40% increase over network revenues of $1.04 billion generated in the third quarter of 2006 and an 8% increase over second quarter 2007 revenues of $1.35 billion.

The majority of TAC expense is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.12 billion in the third quarter of 2007. TAC is also related to amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $105 million in the third quarter of 2007.

From that, we can somewhat figure that Google has shared 77% of the earnings from the content network with their publishers. So Google's AdSense network brought in 34% of Google's revenue and Google gave away 77% of that to their publishers. Yes, it is that important to keep those who feed you happy.

Some forum members don't believe it is as high as 77%. Some feel it is closer to under 50%.

And just a note on payout that was leaked from FEDERATED MEDIA (conference call) earlier this year and no one in this forum showed an interest in was that Google was taking a MINIMUM of 44% from small publishers. They discovered this through their own hard fought efforts to negotiate a higher payout from GOOG.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I got confirmation that Google is now showing up to 8 Sitelinks for a search result. I tried to find real examples of this in action, and finally found something that works on my computer.

A search for search engine roundtable in the Google UK, brings up the 8, as opposed to 4, Sitelinks. For me, the same search at google.com or google.co.uk in Firefox, returns only 4 Sitelinks. Here is a picture of both:

8 Google Sitelinks:

4 Google Sitelinks:

ignore the little line under the meta description, those are Google notes

And now when I login into Google Webmaster Tools and click on "Sitelinks" within the links section, I am able to manage those Sitelinks from showing up.

That is one of many new features announced by Google yesterday, as part of a Google Webmaster Tools update. Tamar will have forum reaction about that update later today.

It appears that many folks still do not see the 8 Sitelinks as of this time. I suspect by next week many more will begin seeing it and many more forum threads will pop up asking about them.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks why a URL is showing up twice for the same search.

The example search is sheffield jobs. Result number nine is www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=49, but if you go to page two you should see the same exact URL in the second position (position twelve).

When has Google begun showing the same exact URL for the same search result in multiple positions? Of course, we know Google may show different URLs from the same site (domain) for a specific query. But the same exact URL, same exact page, multiple times for the same query?

Forum discussion Search Engine Watch Forums.

First came Google Voice Search, and now Microsoft has followed suit. The LA Times reports that Microsoft has rolled out Live Search Mobile:

Live Search Mobile, which users have to download to their handsets, displays listings and driving directions on maps.

You can get to it on the Live Search Mobile site, where it's available in three flavors: Windows Mobile Devices (wls.live.com), Blackberry devices (also wls.live.com), and any mobile phone (m.live.com).

The voice search phone number is 1-800-CALL-411, which is a completely free service.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld

A WebmasterWorld member is afraid of having affiliate images on his website because he has seen that many sites with similar listings have been dropped out of the SERPs. Should he follow suit?

It's possible, says tedster:

I can't say with 100% certainty, but this wouldn't surprise me, either. Google is very wary of affiliate sites and wants them to add significant and unique value when they appear in the SERPs, over and above "default affiliate content". So serving anything at all from the affiliate's server might at least raise a flag.

Therefore, you should take caution and try to eliminate it if you're afraid. It's better to be safe than sorry.

Adam Lasnik commented on an earlier WebmasterWorld post (in 2006) to reflect this sentiment. If the links are related, great. If they're not and a Googler would review the page, you may not do so well. As tedster says, read between the lines.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In the next coming weeks, Google Analytics will add features to its current rich analytics feature set. In a blog post, these new features are described:

Site Searches:

First, you'll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity. Simply edit any of your Google Analytics profiles to enable "Site Search" and you can find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead.

AJAX and "inflated" pageviews:

We'll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.

Where do your users go?

We'll also initiate a limited beta test in the coming weeks of our new Outbound Link Tracking feature. This feature will report on links visitors clicked on your site that direct them to another site.

Google to bring Urchin back to its former glory:

Finally, Brett announced the Urchin Software from Google limited beta. Urchin is a software product that you run on your own servers.

Forum members are relatively excited to see the new features, but some wonder how much outbound link tracking they'll see. For example, one member would like that to extend to AdSense links. That may be a great way to find the most appropriate ads to display on your website.

The discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Back when Google updated the AdSense terms of service in January, they began allowing publishers to place AdSense ads on the same page with Yahoo Publisher Network ads and other contextual ads.

I don't think we made strong emphasis of that change at that time. But a WebmasterWorld thread brings that topic back to life.

AdSenseAdvisor has confirmed this to be true:

Yes, I can confirm that this was a change we made in January. Publishers are permitted to run Google ads on the same pages as other contextually targeted ads as long as the formatting and implementation are sufficiently different so the other ads will not be mistaken for Google ads, or vice versa.

The program policies clearly state:

Competitive Ads and Services

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.

Now, practically speaking, you still cannot put your AdSense ads on the same page as your YPN ads. Why? Simply because Yahoo does not allow other contextual ads on the same page as the YPN ads. It violates their terms of service and you can be banned.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About five minutes ago, I posted a story at Search Engine Land named Did Dalai Lama Award Cause China To Send Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Search Traffic To Baidu? Danny and I wrote it together, because this seems to be a huge deal.

It seems like China is fed up with the U.S., so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine.

We have reports from TechCrunch, Digital Marketing Blog and Google Blogoscoped Forums that all three engines, when used for searching, are being redirected to Baidu.

Danny felt it had to do with the Dalai Lama being given a US award. China Protests US Award for Dalai Lama from the AP says "The United States has "gravely undermined" relations with China by giving the Dalai Lama an award, the Chinese government said Thursday."

I don't have to explain how important the Chinese market, including search market, is to the U.S. economy. I wonder what else China has up their sleeves.

Note, right now this is all speculation. China has not yet confirmed taking these actions. But I doubt Baidu has the power to redirect traffic at the ISP level.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Blogoscoped Forums and Sphinn.

The SMX Social NY 2007 conference is just about over, and our session coverage is now complete. You can read the complete nine-session coverage at our Search Marketing Expo 2007 New York Archives.

Huge thank you's go out to Kim Krause Berg for covering a ton of the sessions and Tamar Weinberg for covering the rest.

Here is the recap of what the Search Engine Roundtable covered:

1. Social Media Marketing Essentials
2. Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
3. Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
4. A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
5. Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
6. Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
7. Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM
8. Micro Communities
9. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

For the global recap, check out Search Engine Land.

Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you're credibility will be shot-and your brand damaged. You'll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer "Durova", Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Matt McGee!!!!!!!!!! is up first and he says that people can use it for their expertise and knowledge for businesses, not so much for people who are providing widgets and the like.

What is Yahoo Answers?
A simple Q&A site that is incredibly busy. There is a constant stream of questions and answers.

Like any social media site, you can create a profile with a link to your website (nofollow, sadly). Therefore, it's for traffic building, not for link-building. It is the #2 reference site behind Wikipedia.

They know that people are using it to market their business. In fact, they encourage that to build credibility and to create a positive brand image compared to other types of social media.

It is also okay to drop links as long as you're providing a helpful answer to someone's question. If you're a good member of the community, go for it.

Yahoo Answers gives him a huge jump of referral traffic: highest source of new visitors and the lowest bounce rate. Shocking!

Also, it gives a great amount of search traffic. It does not come close to Wikipedia but it still gives good traffic.

How to use them:
- The interface is easy to use, and there are a lot of categories so it's inundating to browse. They have RSS feeds for every category on the site and every subcategory.
- Sort wisely. View by date or view by number of answers. Matt says that it's better to sort by date and then he finds questions that are about to expire so that he can provide a more meaningful answer so that he can get points. If you sort by number of answers, if you sort for most answers, those are answers that get a lot of traffic and it helps to get eyeball exposure rather than point exposure.
- Sign your name when leaving a question or answer - why? Spammers don't leave their names, so you don't want to be construed as a spammer.
- Don't spam!

Next up is Jonathan Hochman, Wikipedia administrator. We all want him to take Wikipedia down, but alas, we cannot, or Jonathan won't be an administrator anymore.

Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of traffic share over Digg and delicious. In a way, I am happy about the Digg part.

Here's what you can do as a marketer:
- Answer questions, interact with editors, donate images/media with an appropriate license, report problems, request changes via talk pages. Build goodwill.

Don't be a dick. Don't spam, etc.

Here are some newbie mistakes:
- Don't pick a promotional username - those are called role accounts that are not allowed.
- Don't violate copyrights.
- Don't edit stuff that you have conflicts of interests in.

Don't start stories for yourself. Don't write about something you're close to. Don't spam or you'll hit the MediaWiki spam blacklist and you don't want to get there. IP addresses are not anonymous, so be careful when making edits. The actions can reflect poorly on the company.

Reputation management issue: there was a company that was called out as a spyware distributor (they did, apparently, but they don't anymore). Fortunately, they do the right thing and talk with the Wikipedia administrators to prevent page vandalism.

Keep in mind that Wikipedia information spreads virally, especially images (they're licensed by creative commons which means you need to link the page when you borrow the image). Participation can improve your reputation.

3 links
- Wikipedia Business FAQ
- Wikipedia Conflict of Interest
- Wikipedia Search Engine Optimization

Up next is Stephan Spencer who covers Wikipedia from an SEO standpoint.

Become a virtuous participant: build edits that stick (clean up spam, fix typos, adding to the value to the site that is clearly noncommercial). Develop that profile over a period of time and you get street cred. Then you can possibly be awarded (Barnstar award) that acknowledges your contributions. You can change your User page and Talk page to remove some anynomity. Over time, you can become an admin like Jonathan.

Incorporate content edits when adding a link. It makes it harder to revert your edit.

Communicate with the main editor (the guy who makes the most edits) to negotiate with them regarding changes.

If you add links as references, it sticks better becasue references substantiate claims made in the document. If you substantiate claims, you're adding value.

What if you wanted to create brand new entries?
- Be logged in with a virtuous profile. Wikipedia mantra is that you're guilty until proven innocent.
- Be careful - you can be deleted: AFD (articles for deletion) or the speedy delete. AFD is a discussion; it's not a vote. People discuss why to keep it and here's why, versus other people wanting to remove it.
- Use lots of references: clear the notability hurdle. Get press mentions. (People, write about me.)

Notability:
- Don't put press releases to establish notability.
- Discuss this with people through the talk page if it's related to your company.

How do you make sure your investment isn't reverted? Social networks rely on friends. Make sure that they are on top of these changes - work with the people in the community.

Wikipedia has its own politics: Jimmy Wales doesn't like being "co-"founder of Wikipedia so his friends try to make the edits. He also wants to bury his history in the porno industry. But the rest of us know - or we do now.

As new tools get developed, you may be found out if you're manipulating the content.

Next up is Don Steele who has spoken so many times about Comedy Central's success with Wikipedia. Instead of regurgitating and tiring my fingers, I'll link you to my past coverage:
Wikipedia and SEO: August 23, 2007
Wikipedia and SEO: April 12, 2007
- He talked about South Park (which I've written about too).
- He talked about the lawsuit between Viacom and Google (he works with Viacom). He can't comment so he won't involve himself.

Finally, Lisa "Durova" is up. She's another Wikipedia administrator who has written for Search Engine Land. Her presentation is about Humans 1.0. She gives accolades to Comedy Central for being involved in Wikipedia in a positive way.

A lot of people come to Wikipedia follow advice that they think is good because it's in mainstream sources. However, they are not publishing for you - they're publishing for themselves.

Virgil Griffith is the WikiScanner guy. That is a tool that automated IP lookups for Wiki edits.

If you have a conflict of interest, declare it upfront. Don't do it behind their backs. A company called Melaleuca made some changes that looked like advertising copy. Two Wikipedians noticed this and they were caught. But the guy denied the involvement - however, this is not the first time that people have done this. Don't make an article conform to your company branding. If you get banned, don't post from a different IP address isn't from your company headquarters. We know when you're using proxies. We know when you're asking your friends. You're not fooling us. Now, you can't edit this company's page. The page is protected to new edits.

SMX Social Media, Wednesday 17, 2007
1:15pm-2:15pm

Pick an interest area, and there’s probably a social media site that’s serving a community around it. These sites might be "micro" in size compared to some of the large, well-known services, but they have passionate members who might also be a more targeted audience that you wish to reach. This session tours some of the many smaller communities out there.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker:
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz

We've had lunch downstairs and discovered where they put the uncomfortable chairs from yesterday.

Danny is up. "If you're from NY, do you like Huey Lewis or hate him?" Frank Sinatra popular? (yes) He's joking around about sharing rides to the airport after the conference and how this is a way of "being social". Everyone is freezing. The room is either too warm or too cold. At the moment, we're very cold. Next up are Liana Evans and Rand Fishkin.

First up, Rand Fishkin:

Micro Communities in Social Media - why important, how to pursue them? Asked if we liked Rebecca's talk yesterday. Vertical portals are based on our hobbies, interests. Micro communities help you promote your brand. Can be done underground or via marketing. Why go mirco? These are different from Digg, Reddit, and all the bigger SM sites. Micro's are smaller. You can reach who are your peers and who are interested in what you have to say. Accessibility is easier because your voice can really be heard. Sometimes you just need to contribute on a regular basis to get people to recognize you. Those people are also connected to other micro communities.

How do you find these MC's (micro communities)? Search engines. Ex. Search for "artists community" and "handmade goods" bring back broad results. Communities don't come up in first results in those examples. However, if you run broad searches and begin to see site names over and over again, you can tell these might be good places to check out, or join. As your MC grows in size, it's more pervasive.

There are SM discovery blogs. This is a good way to find MC's. Uses SEOMoz.org blog as an example. Find lists of communities, and "web 2.0" lists. "Read/Write Web" (http://www.readwriteweb.com/) has lists. Recommendations and networking are other ways of finding MC's. If folks are talking about certain communities, you can follow up on this by following the link.

How to determine if an MC is right for your business? Membership numbers is one way. You can find this on About Us pages, for example. Forums also show the number of members. Or use search engines. Topical focus and relevance help determine value. Look for conversations on the web. Can search on these using keyphrases. Care2 is an ex. of leveraging features.

You're looking for others in your field rather than people to sell to in many of these communities.

Try these communities: (You can find URLS for these via a link at the bottom of this post.)

Care2 - they connect non-profits to other non-profits; they work with a lot of large companies
WebMD - They also have a community, a little over a year old. You can tag there. Create blogs. Talk about your own brand.
Library Thing - share and review books, great for authors and publishers; you can market books there
Yelp - A local reviews community; it's vertical but huge. 15 million reviews in it so far. If small or local biz, you can control your own description and manage your own information.
Trulia - For real estate, make blogs, news, network with other real estate people.
Peer Trainer - online trainers, mentors for body building and fitness, gym members. You can connect with local people there.
Donor Choose - education oriented, idea share, students read the site, you can blog there, leave comments.
Think Vitamin - for web developers, put up guides, content, launching point for your blogs to get readers
Minti - For parents. Photo share, blogs, advice, connect with other members, discussion threads.
Real Esate Voices - new site, it picks up links from other blogs and discusses them there.Handles news.
DeviantArt - older established site; has new social stuff link portfolios comments recruiting getting your works out there to show people.
SportsShooter - very active sports site; polls, networking community, leave comments on photos
Threadless - You submit designs of your own t-shirts
Cork'd - for wine lovers; blog, comments, reviews, wine industry
Imbee - "Facebook for kids", not for adults to market to kids; large membership;
Virb - Web design, video, music; creative site for artists; create content, comments, tagging
Wayfaring - create maps and share them; used for parties, map out Halloween route, create, share, explore, connect by creating and sharing maps
CouchSurfing - kinda like hitchhiking; you put your "couch" for rent, other folks can come to your house. Groups, good for travel industry.
Wikihow - How to content; these do well in search engines; you can mention your brand, write how-to lists
Helium - writers contribute content, knowledge share
Etsy - shopping, ebay for handmade goods, not an auction. Great site search. Product sales, network with other who make things.
Avvo - new site for lawyers, link to your site; networkin
(He's out of time and runs by these quickly...)
Urbis
Bakespace
FoodCandy
Sphinn - for search marketers
The Stranger - local for Seattle
Ebay - now is getting into SM; there is a community there now

Next up,

Liana:

Marketing to Your Audience - How can you take your clients and apply MC's to your marketing strategies.

Remember the "old days"? The marketing space is becoming more crowded. There are more ways to market now. Highly competitive markets are crowded. Where else can you get traffic in these markets? CAse study - diet client, diet foods. PPC was done. SEO is very hard to with ranking. Tough market. Client only ranked for brand name. PPC campaign spent 40,000 in 3 months, less than 50 requiest, no return, $800 per lead. Very bad. They looked at micro communities.

You have to start the conversation. Feed the community. Give information. Give a reason to talk. "Fish where the fish are". Go where they buy your products. They targeted at "Fat Blogging". They looked at networks, boards, communities. It's more than Digg and Facebook. She mentions Cre8asiteforums (yeah). They identified bloggers they wanted to talk to. Look for reach, depth, reliability, readers. Gauge fit for the client. Theme of blog.Attitude. Personalize the communication to avoid being salesy. Don't toss out just pitches. They read the blogs they targeted before approaching. Start small. This limits the negative reaction. Refine your approach. They wanted to follow WOMMA, to be ethical and being honest, due to bad marketing campaigns by companies in the news.

Let the conversation happen. One blogger tried the free trial, she was featured on MSN. Her response triggered viral, word of mouth. Accept the feedback and don't try to control the message. Accept both good and bad. Listen to your audience. If a bad review, you can suggest another product or alternative to the person leaving comments. 98% of people drank the free product that was offered. 308 trials delivered. Traffic increased, SEO improved.

Look at the communities you want to use. If blogs you can email them to see if they will test a product for you. This worked really well for this diet food client. Far better than PPC did.

For a list of the URLs to the list of sites that Rand listed, check out Marty's coverage of this session in AimClear

Want to be really successful in social media marketing? You need to be an evangelist and activity participate in communities, forums and blogging. Leave this session knowing how to evolve from community observer to community participant and influencer.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies

Rob Key is first.

We're here because social media is subversive - it subverts traditional distribution content channels. Why are we here? Why do we talk about social media? 12-24 year olds find that community is the heart of the web experience. This is why the community should become part of a marketing strategy. There are virtual worlds and each of them are starting to have emerging cultures that are a bit different.

Mass media has been the glue for shared experiences and helps us understand things. Marketers haven't been invited to the community. They're really for consumers to consumers.

In communities, different language evolve: you see stuff within delicious that differ from Second Life or Wikipedia. What's the role of a marketer? It's about being a bit of a cultural anthrpologist.

You can be exiled or told that your language is not the same language. Wikipedia has its own culture and it differs greatly from Second Life. (RTFA on Digg!)

As marketers and brands increasingly penetrate social media communities, backlash will occur. But we advocate (for ROI) that you need to think differently as marketers. Think about what you can do for the community.

Participate in the community. Make friends with the community members. Understand and respect them. Lead with altruism - come bearing gifts. Discover a community need. Learn the linguistics. Value and cultivate relationships. Leverage appropriately ... over time.

We did an initiative in Second Life (they are very anti-marketer). It's the beginning of the 3D web with over 7 million users. The problem is that surveys show that 72% of surveys were disapponinted in real-world company activities in second life. Regular companies are unimaginitive and are boring to the community, they say.

Our approach: we became active and started understanding the community ethos. We spoke to elders and asked what to do with the community. We learned that environmentalism is important so we started a virtual tree initiative. He shows a video about "Second Chance Trees" which explains the program: you can plant a tree in Second Life and they planted the same tree in real life in other ecologically sensitive regions throughout the world. You were able to see the tree in a Google Maps mashup. The accolades came in from the global community and the Second Life community - they took ownership of it in their own way. People started to do things with programs that we haven't even fathomed. Let people start to own it. They started talking about dedicating trees to people who passed away in their memories. It became viral. Fifty thousand pages were indexed in search. American Express Member's Project selected this as a finalist.

The mainstream media picked this up and it won the OMMA award because we really understood and took advantage of the community. It's hard to do for some companies but you should start to asking yourself "what can I give?" and you will get your return.

When you put together your strategy, you realy need to go through a process and should listen to the community. You shold understand the policies and go through the planning and infrastructure and take it from there.

Adam Sherk is next.

When you talk about social media, you need to be nimble and flexible and react to current events. That doesn't work with big brands - these are huge ships that turn very slowly. You've got marketing and PR who are concerned about reputation management. You have the SEO team thinking about inbound links and improved rankings. You have the IT department who has to make sure your server can handle this. When you have huge sites with millions of pages, you can't always change them as often as you want. The legal department is also afraid of issues and backlash.

Over the course of the last day and a half, we've learned that many people don't always have a strategy (banned accounts, etc.) There is a lot of ignorance - people try stuff and get kicked out. There's lack of support/resources. They are never true members of the community. We find a lot of companies that are enthusiastic but don't have a strategy set so they get themselves in trouble. There's poor coordination.

Here's a problem: everyone in the same room (on the same IP address) vote up the same article (okay, guys, I hope you realize that this doesn't work) - you'll get banned.

There is a path to success: selling upper management the concept, getting buy-in from all key departments, instilling a "give to gain" philosophy.

The top executives need to give the blessing to these strategies. You need to find the right people to manage the effort. Give them what they need to be effective.

Then test, do oversight, and measure results.

Adam mentioned my name saying I'm an expert. I'm flattered.

More to consider: the messages change over time. You need to adapt. How will you sustain your efforts over the long term? What happens if your brand ambassador leaves the company? What about employees with their own personal profiles? How do you deal with negative reactions?

We work with Hearst magazine. Most of their content doesn't appeal to the twentysomething male that is typical of these other social news hubs. They can interact on other niche sites. They subjectively found stuff related to environmentalism as well - they interviewed the top greenest Digg users (I remember this article! yay!)

What about Good Housekeeping on the first page of Digg? We created content about how mothers could dress up their pets in star wars costumes. It got 998 Diggs. (I just want you to know, Adam, that I read Good Housekeeping and the content there rocks. Thanks.)

TV Guide: there's a full time brand ambassador, regular monitoring on social sites, full transparency within communities, networks of partner sites developed for publicity efforts, and efforts tied to SEO/online marketing/print marketing, Special promotions developed around exclusive content.

TV guide wanted to test something so they tried High School Musical 2 - they came up with exclusive content for the film and they featured it in an article. They spread the word through Facebook, etc. The success was far-reaching because it was what people wanted and it was exclusive. There was unprecedented user engagement.

Next up is Sarah Hofstetter.

How do marketers influence the influential? It's a matter of finding where the places that marketers can place smartly across social media so that they can be evangelists. What are the assets that you can use to promote your brand? You can't just say "my brand rocks." Offer something different: widgets, CD-ROM, etc. Align assets with interests.

She presents a few case studies including NBC's Heroes. Now I like Heroes - a lot. So it should be doing well all the time. Let me note that Diggers really like Heroes.

One of the things that we look at when we do outreach is what they link back to. We analyze and see that they're linking back to a certain page (e.g. MySpace instead of NBC). Why MySpace? In one instance, there was a contest that showed that you can win a trip to Universal Studios on MySpace. But that contest wasn't on NBC.com. They added the conest there and the landscape shifted.

Another case study was to figure out how to drive awareness to politically related stuff on Comedy Central as well as unique content. A lot of these guys have a nice following online. Comic book bloggers loved an analogy we used about the Green Lantern and started linking to it - they also became controversial about it. These intense relationships that were developed with these bloggers is important. Feed their hunger. They are always looking for interesting things to write about.

We were able to find out who is linking to what and where the traffic was coming from - it came from the blogosphere - word of mouth marketing.

She says that you should harness the opportunity. People use interns in order to do it because they think it's not rocket science. However, if you use interns or people who don't know your brand, you can screw up the opportunity. If those interns get your brand, use them, but if they don't, don't use them! Look at Craigslist and see how many links ask for interns to manage blogs and pitches - this is bad!

Do: Find people who will write aobit you. Create something worthy for them. Write a customized message. Keep an updated database of all influentials.

Don't: Just hope that whatever you have is blogworthy. Mass email press releases. Pretend to be "joe consumer." Let interns do the job (yes, like she said). :)

This session was cool. Thank you. Adam, thank you too.

SMX Social Media, Wednesday 17, 2007

9:00am-10:20am

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and others allow people to connect with others and foster networks of friends or colleagues. Participate appropriately, and your company will find "friends" interested in what you have to say (and sell). Cross the line and the mob may turn on you and reject your message. In this session you'll learn to network and participate in an acceptable and effective manner.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works
Dave McClure, Entrepeneur & Startup Advisor, 500Hats
Helen M. Overland, Director, Search Engine Marketing, non-linear creations

Good morning! After an interesting evening of networking and later, dinner at Uncle Jack's Steak house, that we walked to, rather than taking a cab...I'm here, awake and ready to deliver you another day of sessions from SMX SM. The schedule for SERoundtable today calls for Tamar and I to share the sessions, with me starting off. She's here though. She's only person I know of (so far) who can make a NY cabbie crack up. I've made friends with the guys at the sound desk, so that every time "Eminence Front" by Pete Townsend comes up, they turn up the volume. Feel that power? The room is full again. The highlight of this morning, first thing, is that Danny followed through with the complaints about the "butt numbing" chairs, and they've been replaced by a room of white ones with a bit of better cushion and stronger back support. Free breakfast again. Incidently, lunch was covered yesterday, as well as free drinks at The Elmo, for the networking event. (How do you network in a dark bar with blasting music?)

Notes: I had the wrong date in yesterday's posts. I figured this out veryyyy late last night, but a reader comment prompted Barry to repair this boo boo. I also neglected to link to Matt Mcgee yesterday (now fixed), and 345 other people. Tamar has the list and we can fix this too. Bandages for my fingers and pain killers for my back are welcome gifts.

Ah! Danny's here. Time to start.

"Second day is casual day. Hope that's okay," he says. Tells us the chairs are the lunch chairs. He's disappointed that nobody has "Stumbled" Vanessa's live blogging for SELand. No del.ico.us traffic either. He's teasing the audience that they're learning how to use SM but nobody has applied their lessons to promote the conference.

Within SM, there are categories or "silos". People use them to make friends, make a date, network with business folks. He just signed up for "Hatebook". Other people who hate you can sign up."It's gonna be big." He's introducing Dave McCLure. He'll talk about Facebook.

Dave:

Gauges the room to see how many people use Facebook and how often. He's showing a page from Facebook. He's showing the "Status" and how its used to market by inserting URLs into it. The Newsfeed shows all the shared activity that you and your friends are doing. You can see videos, comments on walls, applications your friends are using. The real trick is setting up your network appropriately. Tag your content. You can reach people this way, via people who are logged into Facebook.

Tags: Shows people who are tagged in videos, under "My Videos". Your friends will see this, if friends of those who are tagged. "My Photos" does the same thing. You can change photos to logos. Some people change their photos very often in their profiles. However, he was playing with it and can insert logos there too. If you tag someone (he demos how), the person tagged will be notified they've been tagged. This can be shared through the messaging system in Facebook. He's doing this "live", to show how tagging is carried through. There's the "mini-feed", which are your actions. These appear on your profile and show the history of your actions. Your friends can also see this, if they visit your profile. Some "very powerful" people are in Facebook. You want to connect to them, tag them. This gets you or your company out there...noticed. You can "push" content by sharing it via Facebook. "Seven Steps to Graphing your Facebook Strategy" in Techcrunch is an article he wrote. Follow up if you wish. (article date Oct 3). You can share pages using the "Share" function in Facebook.

You can create "Groups", for people you share interests with. People can join, you can add and invite people. It's visible to all the people in your friends network. You can add videos, links, photos and messages there. The feeds will pick up on all this and fan out to your network. You can create moderators and admins for Groups. A member of the audience is asking questions about Groups set up. In the background, Danny is demo'ing a Group, in which he set up a SELand profile. This is a company account, rather than a personal account. Non-profits also do this. Facebook is not encouraging this but it is being done. A company profile would have its own profile, status, history, etc.

Next up...

Helen:

Marketing on LinkedIn...asks audience who uses it for recruiting, updating profiles. It's a professional network site. Connect with friends and coworkers. You can reach 15 million professionals. Ave income 140k. Do you want volume of contacts or trusted contacts? Trusted is better. It's not like Facebook. You want to reach who you can sell your product or service to. You can have both volume and trusted contacts. "Linkedin Open Networkers" are trying to get a lot of contacts. Pick a few of them, and connect and you get their first levels of contacts. This instantly increases your contacts. Use Linkedin to:

Increase branding and visibility
Generate sales
Traffic and support SEO

Linkedin Answers - answer questions there. This increases your brand visibility. Display your expertise. This starts a conversation. Announce your web site or service by looking for feedback on something, or asking for referrals for certain things. You can drive people to your blog post if you answered a question there. You can get your service recommended by getting recommendations.

Barack Obama asked a question there and got almost 1500 answers.

For sales, use search to find contacts or potential partners. You can respond to service requests in "Answers". Say "I can help you out" or get someone to refer you. Get your service recommended. No "nofollow" at Linkedin. Links are indexed. Your can drive traffic to your website from there. You can create a vanity URL in your profile and add keywords to profile your URL. Have employees link back to your website. She shows an example of someone who asked a question needing help with an artice he was working on. Case study of "organic" marketing. People from Linkedin spent more time on sites they visit from links from there. You can reach your target market.

Cindy:

MySpace Whoas and Woes...MySpace has been getting bad press but it still reaches certain demographics.

Whoas - Flying Dog Brewery is example. They sell beer. Demographics are skiers, snowboarders, drinkers. They created a profile to create sales and traffic to their company. Establishes voice and personality for company. Creates a community about their brand. Notifies users to events and news via feed. They send out flyers. Change your profile picture by putting in a logo or in their case, a copy of the flyer. They put up images of their beer. Shows the labels. "Edgy". Helps people relate to the brand via the visuals. The have photo albums too. Album full of logos. One is of party pictures at the brewery. One is about founders and employees of the company. One is a cool stuff section, acting like an online catalog. They have travel pictures. They have an events listing. Searchable via zip code. Shows maps, costs, times, comments, rsvp. Can see if your friends are going. People can blog about the event. They use their blog to send out bulletins to all their friends. They notify of contests. They have a "Weekly Treat". They offer discounts to Facebook friends. They show a company video of employees having fun. Their profile out ranks Wikipedia because they're using MySpace so well to market their brand.

True is another company. Online dating site. Younger demographic. Snazzy profile page. They're trying to create a relationship with their people. Creates brand awareness. They offer tools and games. Lots of visuals."Sexploration Test" can be shared with friends. Some of the icons used are funny (we're laughing). These icons encourage you to interact with "potential mates". They have fortune cookies you can open up, send, create, copy and paste and share with friends. To keep people on their MySpace page, they create things to do. They have games. "Create a date" game. "Date-a-Rama" engine is another. It recommends times and places for dates based on criteria you enter. It has a sense of humor in the results. "Heartbeats" mixer. You can input data, on what you're looking for. Takes users to the True website.

Woes - Westwood College is the ex. Private college. They wanted to leverage MySpace. They wanted to create community online. They created a profile to communicate with students. It wasn't a quick setup. It takes CSS. MySpace has a tool to help with layouts. Cool Profiles have to be updated frequently. Profiles can't be static. Have to create meaningful content and reasons to come. Some people who friended them were not what the college desired or who they wanted to target. This was a real learning experience for them.

You have to manage friends. Some are not the most "savory" characters. Some clients are particular about which friends to accept. Only students? Anyone? What if pictures aren't acceptable? How does what we put up affect our brand as a college? They chose non-offensive content. They learned profile pictures can be changed. One "Friend" had to be banned because he changed his picture to something offensive after joining with a non-offensive picture. If Friends change, you may have to notify them. What blog communication is appropriate? Who is going to respond to all the email? What happens if you make a mistake? Who handles chats? What are appropriate topics? You can leverage groups. Do you participate in groups? What if someone says your company sucks? How to handle?

AutoEurope is a rental car broker. Another client. They wanted to use Facebook to help with linking, targeting world travelers. MySpace encodes links, profiles groups, forums and classified. She shows example of text vs html links. Link to a page within MySpace,not encoded. Blog posts, no. No news articles. No for events. So links within Myspace are fine (not encoded). Use Flash verison 9 and action script 3.0 only. Links in Flash files just won't work. MySpace cvoncerts HTML into preferred Object Format before saving. This can cause problems for creating widgets. Widget development for social networks is more complicated. May not work in MySpace/IE AND MySpace/Firefox.

MySpace might launch a new dev platform...rumor. Will allow widgets better network interaction. Ability for 3rd parties to market their widgets.

Google AdSense announced a new waiting period to validate that the leads or sales from your Google Referral ads have actually gone through. So all but Google specific referral ads must go through a "validation period" before you, as a publisher, can get paid your earnings for those leads and sales.

We've recently made a change to help make sure that the conversions generated by referral ads are valid. For some publishers who display referrals for non-Google products, the earnings you receive for the ad may now be less than the maximum referral value displayed for that ad. This is because our system will initially place a restriction on referral earnings as we monitor click and conversion data to determine that the conversions generated are valid. Once this validation period ends, you'll begin earning the maximum value of the conversions as displayed in your account.

There is a large thread at WebmasterWorld with mixed reaction to this announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

In August, Yahoo announced a new crawl behavior for Slurp, Yahoo's web crawler. The new crawl behavior was suppose to tame the crawler to go through your site in a more relaxed and efficient manner for both the crawler and your server.

But it seemed like soon after, Webmasters were not happy with the new crawler's behavior.

Recent discussions over at DigitalPoint Forums reports that Yahoo Slurp seemed to have taken it easy on some sites. It is hard to confirm that this is a global change, since only about four or five Webmaster have confirmed this activity, but it does seem like something may be up at Yahoo.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Before I copy and paste my liveblog from Notepad, I'm going to say that it rocked to meet Garrett and Josh because I admire them so. That is all.

Now, here we go:

Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp and del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter head up two of the most important social bookmarking and discovery services on the web. In this session, the two will talk about trends in social media, where the future may be heading and entertain questions from attendees.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Garrett Camp, Founder & Chief Product Officer, StumbleUpon
Joshua Schachter, Founder, del.icio.us

These are two of my favorite social sites. I have been super-excited for this keynote. Now we're going to hear from Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, a service that rocks, has over 3 million users, and was acquired by eBay for $75 million.

Garrett introduces SU. He says that he started it when he was in school but then got funding. He says that SU is not about search but about getting information based on friends' recommendations. There's such an explosion of content so you need filters to get through the extreme content to bring the best content to you. SU wants to create something that learns as you go to give you the best experience.

Joshua Schachter started del.icio.us in 2003 as a hobby. He is going to introduce his site as well. Key elements of delicious: tagging (social value of labeling). Delicious, has about 3 million users.

Joshua talks about how he created delicious in 2003 but it stemmed from a single-user creation he started in 2001. It's very hard to find things that you've seen before. You can go to a search engine and type it in, but delicious wants to make it easier for you based on other people's bookmarks. It's an interesting phenomenon because the attention of users is crystallized: people can recover what they've been looking for. A lot of people use delicious for personal memory but they also want to access what people they know have saved. Very little of the site is generic, unfiltered, 0-context social connections. However, the network pages (social connections) helps you see what other people bookmark where you can bookmark the same thing - you can see what's important to other people. It's an interesting way for people to have memory. It doesn't have to be you that recovers the item; it can be what other people have found. In that way, it's a social memory platform.

Now we're going to have some Q&A:

Danny: How would you define the line between social media marketing and spamming?
Josh: A bookmark means "I pay attention to this" but it would look a lot different than something that is "Please pay attention to this." The community is less tolerant to that kind of behavior. It's not here for marketing; it's here for people to remember things.
Garrett: We don't mind people marketing on SU but we have created a system to do that. Generally, if you have good content, you don't have to do much work. If it's not that good, people give a thumbs down, and it stops the story from being further promoted.

Danny: Both of the services have been sold to larger companies. How do you maintain the smallness?
Josh: We have 3 million users so it's a big community to navigate. We want to make sure people have a pleasant interaction with the system. I don't think I could have gone this far without Yahoo. The infrastructure is far beyond what we could have built as a startup. To a significant extent, it is good pairing.
Garrett: It's a relatively new thing. We try to keep the same team and we've maintained the same atmosphere in the office and things have been really good. When we get bigger, we will try to integrate additional resources.

Danny: What kind of role do you think these services will play in search?
Josh: There's a lot of opportunity. Search has been in stasis for awhile. There's a lot of opportunity for exploring in dimensions and that social metadata is an important part of it. There's a lot of territory to be covered and a dozen things we can do from here. The partnership with Yahoo will help.
Garrett: There's a personal social relevance. We want to shift from quantity to quality.

Now the audience polls the guys. I'm sad that they didn't ask my question.

Q: Based on recent acquisitions, your companies have changed - what are the positives and negatives?
Garrett: Not much has changed besides finance. Productwise, it's exactly the same.
Josh: We have a lot of technology that has helped us scale. The current engineering team that is working on delicious built Yahoo! Photos - this is an important consideration because we needed other access to resources so that we could scale for a large userbase. It's been a huge plus. In terms of direction, they bought us because they liked where we were going and haven't changed it.

Q: For Garrett - can you describe your first breakthrough? What pushed you out of this tiny idea and put you in the spotlight?
Garrett: I think it was when we moved to San Francisco. When I was in Calgary, I wasn't going to networking events and I had about 500 users. Firefox is also a contributor - we were on the top 10 list and people started downloading it. There is no one event that drove our success.
Josh: This is about hours and hours of effort for years and years. Delicious picks up more traffic in a day than it did in the first year.
Followup: How did you know you were on the right track?
Garrett: I really just built it for myself. But apparently it worked.
Josh: I did it for myself too and it worked from there. You want tight feedback from the users. When you're the engineer and the QA, you learn very quickly. If you're using it, you need this tool and the turnaround time is faster.
Followup: Is it hard to implement new changes now that you've been acquired?
Josh: The sense of it is still intact. We know where it should go. Engineering does slow down a bit however. The new delicious has been worked on for a long time - it's the same delicious I built with more patches and layers.
Garrett: As you get bigger, it will be a bit tougher because people need to get used to the new features. You can't just change something without an announcement. Get feedback from the users (take note, Kevin Rose!) before implementing any changes.

Q: If you believe in the value of the collective voting, why nofollow links?
Josh: It's too much of a spam target otherwise, but that's it. It's not collective voting when someone registers 1,000 accounts and votes. There's no easy way to enforce that. We're not about building links, so we don't care.
Followup: Would you algorithmically erase it?
Josh: If I can prove that you're a real person, maybe. But we see it being gamed too often that it's tough.

Q: What's been the biggest "a-ha" for you when you rolled this out? How did they change the evolution of products?
Josh: Delicious is very unconstrained. You can tag things the way you like. There are some people who tag things "to read" and then will access it later. People build workflow around links. People have also built chat systems around these bookmarks.
Garrett: Some people have installed StumbleUpon extreme and they hack their profiles, but we don't have an API (awww - get one please!). In the future, we intend to (yay!)
Josh: The current posting interface for delicious was some random guy and he said "you should do this" and we didn't listen. He built it anyway and it was a success: we still use it.

Danny: Your emphasis is on the bookmarking but you also have social networks.
Josh: For delicious, that's only there as necessary. If you add someone to your contacts, it may be because you want to follow them on similar interests. We're not so much about a generic social profile. Delicious 2 is the same site on a completely different platform.
Garrett: We're halfway between Facebook and delicious. We are about social aspects but we also like the content discovery. We're not going to implement changes just because MySpace or Facebook did it. (Thank you, Garrett. You rock.)

Q: I tested the paid version of SU and it worked quite well. How far are you going to take the paid program?
Garrett: Pretty far. Less than 10% of our traffic came from that system last year. We want to datamine the feedback to provide more consumer insight. We want to guide marketing efforts based on demographic interest (some cities respond better than others for particular content). We're going to track this and determine why this content arrives.
Followup: Do you have any negative feedback toward the paid side?
Garrett: Not really. The quality is pretty good. If the site is not good, we actually select sites based on the best matching ad for the user. If the advertiser has a better piece of content, they're going to be selected over yours.
Followup: Is eBay pushing you to push paid content as well?
Garrett: Nope, not really. We're doing pretty well right now.

Q from Neil Patel: From delicious, if you have a lot of friends, it hangs. Is that a database issue?
Josh: It's a Javascript error.
Neil: Can I use delicious again?
Josh: No, you're way too popular. :)

Q from Brent Csutoras: Is there a way to sign up for the new delicious?
Josh: There was a form but it's full right now. We're going to do roll it out to the public sometime this year.

Q from Brent Csutoras: For the paid submissions, if many people vote those stumbles up and the campaign ends, will SU still serve the page?
Garrett: Yes, if people like that content, then you'll do just fine. It's a way to get your foot in the door but the votes (and quality of your content) will bring your content. You won't be paid for the views beyond that point.

Q from Brian Wallace of nowsourcing.com: Any chances that we're going to see any major changes to the SU homepage such as recent Stumblers and recently popular.
Garrett: We're planning on doing that but we're really focused on the quality of presentation. Right now it's not our main focus. But we'll try to give you more of a personalized experience in the future because people have demand for it.

Q from Brian Wallace: Any plans for combining logins from eBay with OpenID?
Garrett: Not at this time.

Q: Can you talk about the concerns about private bookmarks versus public bookmarks?
Josh: When I launched delicious, we didn't have hidden bookmarks until we were acquired. People need to understand that the behavior around these systems. There's a little less privacy now that you're much bigger. You can get closer to people's brains in a very direct way. Delicious is not explicit; it's implicit. It's not publishing - it's below publishing. I had a brief round a week or two ago and I was bookmarking financial sites. People were asking me if I went back to finance. It's terrifying and useful at the same time. If you don't want your information on the Internet, don't store information on sites that are connected to the Internet. There's some loss of perceived privacy.
Garrett: With information systems, there's no scarcity until you get bigger. You may want to share stuff just with family and friends. You may want to keep things private and other things public.
Josh: People want things with a lot of features but they want it as simple as possible.
Garrett: Can you build an interface that integrates both? Yes. But it's something we might add in the future.

Someone said something about how delicious is great for collaboration. He said that they discussed podcast informaion (which I've done as well) based on delicious's tagging. It really is useful, guys.

Q: Have you guys ever thought about unifying these networks in the future where you can have one profile that can be merged?
Josh: There are a lot of things that people call social bookmarks that are not. I read Digg all the time but it's not social bookmarks. (I agree. It's social news, dudes.) I don't think that StumbleUpon is a competitor in the slightest. There are a bunch of things that are referred to the same way but they're not related.
Garrett: There are different use-cases. I don't think that one company will be able to do this really well.

Danny: Do you view yourselves as rivals in the social media space?
Garrett: We learn from each other design wise and interaction wise. We all share semantics while we figure out what makes the most sense.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC

3:00pm-4:20pm

Consumers are sharing best-of-Web content with bookmarking and tagging sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Flickr, YouTube and Technorati tap into "tagging" to categorize material, so people interested in topics can locate community finds. This session is a marketer’s guide to using bookmarking and tagging effectively.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

We just had 20 minutes for a break, with cookies, which I was too busy to eat. I had mentioned to Danny that the poor quality of the chairs we're sitting on was a new topic at his social media site, "Sphinn". He checked it out and then told the audience he apologizes. SMX is still new. They'll be making improvements as they get feedback like this.

He introduces Guillaume.

He speaks to us in French and Deb Mastelar and I are having hot flashes. She takes his picture. Funny stuff. He discusses an example of a site they did that made top SM sites in 24 hours. It was about sea creatures. They were able to reuse some of the hype and get several stories from it. This translates into being bookmarked. They have a lot of friends who help them promote sites on different sites.

Social bookmarking allows you to organize inside social search sites. Not a lot of link juice because most have "nofollow" links. However, sites that don't have "nofollow" will pick up the site that you submit. Tagging is popular on these sites. Sorta like keywords. Help with organizing and cateories for your sites. Benefits include better search engine rank, natural linking, traffic, but keep in mind all the efforts not as strong as Digg. Increase brand awareness. Influence traditional media. Creates a presence in online social communities. Helps build links from alternative sources.

How to tag. Every time you enter a site, take an hour or so to see how people are using tags. Are they spamming? What are the popular tags? When in doubt, pick the one that's most relevant. You can co-ordinate your efforts and establish a set of standards on how to tag resources you want to share with others. You can coach them. Ask them to choose certain tags. It's organizing the content - that's the ultimate goal. Manual tagging is anchor links, hyperlinks, keywords. Create your own set of tags to represent your content. Tags work best with sites with images and videos. Top SM sites feature tagging. Automatic tagging is more "blackhat". Automatically extract tags from content. Incorporate other people's tags in the automatic process. Does not benefit creativity. It's more a "usability thing". It should improve the user experience. There are problems, such as poor choices. If we abuse the tagging system, creates problems in the long term.

Technorati - search engine for blogs that uses tag system. Popular blogs ranked by number of unique links. Set up a blog for clients, write blog posts with high profile tags and claim it through Technorati. High amount of pings signals popular site. Use Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc. If you have a new blog, it needs really good content to do well here. Field is diluted now.

Flicker - popular for photo sharing, use tags for photos. Google didn't put nofollow on comments in Flicker. Select the right tags. Use the photostream on your blog. Participate in comments on popular pictures there. Encourage users to link and comment on photos. Add links to profiles. Let friends share pictures.

Youtube - Mashups work well here. Content is more important than tags. Use Digg to promote. Share your submitted video with friends. Use your blog to promote your video.

Facebook - Create profiles, use it for corporate profiles, brainstorm on widgets and get application unique to your industry. Offer a good reason to join a group. Add incentive to join there. Moderating these groups is needed. You can use it attract people to your company.

Next up is Michael.

"Del.ico.us is not the government". Everyone laughs. It allows you to share your bookmarks with people. You enter a title. Tags are basically a label or a folder. No limits on them. This is for work, or travel or whatever. You can see how many people have saved your page. You can add notes when you save a bookmark. You can see how they inerpret your page. These are clues on what is important. What tags did they use? Tag clouds show importance, with bold words being more popular. Tracks the first person who bookmarked it. They may be an important person or leader in the field. You want to watch this. There are friend networks. You can add people there. You can subscribe to certain tags. You can get all the stories in that topic. People can send you links, but this is not effective unless someone is logged in. The homepage changes a lot. You get a bit of a preview. You can see what's popular or not and see the tags assigned to it. The homepage shows active tags on the right side. This is how to find popular tags.

Digg is young, male, tech savvy audience. Del.ico.us is everybody. You don't have to be tech related there. You can see how many people have saved your post. If you do a search on Del.ico.us, it will give back things you bookmarked first. Next, other things people bookmarked. High number shown first. You can see a list of all the tags people used. Sometimes words come up you may not have thought of. You can use plural. You can use "+" to combine words.

When you submit, enter the url, title and description. You can save just for you. It will show all the tags you've ever used for everything. IF you want to send in someone in your network, you'll see the tags they use. Tag clouds show popular tags and equals more bookmarks. See if you can apply popular tags to your piece. Look for leaders in your subject and add them to your network.

How to expand exposure. Taylor your content to tags. Make it easy to add to Del.ico.us. Suggest anchor text.The popular page updates every 4 hours. Time your submit to when you can get in there.Don't create many sock puppet accounts or you may get discounted. Your friends can help influence the suggested tags.

Neil is next.

He'll talk about Stumbleupon. Why should you care? He shows the homepage of it. There's over 3 million users. Over 12,000 visitors in 1 day. Traffic keeps coming. Great for branding. Traffic lasts for months. More males, less females. Older people - age 45 and up. They have credit cards!

Install the toolbar. You click on the Stumble button. There's an "I like" or "I don't like" thumbs up or down icon. More thumbs up, more traffic from members. You can send stories to people. Create an account.

Step 2 is to Add Friends. He added 200, and if they don't respond, drop and add more. Find content on your site and submit it using the submission page. Add a title. Can use keywords for this. Don't stuff with keywords. For review, put something like "A great resource for...." Pick topics. Add tags. Be relevant. It asks if adult site. Use the send-to feature and send a message to them. Your friends can vote. This brings in fast traffic.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
1:15pm-2:40pm

Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine and others allow community members to share and rate news stories. They are primary news sources and influential outlets that must be considered by marketers. But don't expect to post your old-school press release and get a good response! Learn how these sites work and how to best tailor your message for maximum visibility on them.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Chris Winfield, President & Co-founder, 10e20
Tamar Weinberg, Search Marketing Strategist, Rusty Brick, Inc.

More coverage at Search Engine Journal and aimClear Blog and Search Engine Land.

Lunch was one floor down, and was free. I joined a group and we grabbed lunch, buffet style. Still trying to get my laptop charged, I brought it with me and we grabbed a table by a group of wall outlets. Now, back upstairs and preparing for the next session, I've relocated to a new "Blogging Pool", which is closer to the speaker podium, and by a great set of outlets close by. Matt McGee, seeing the logic in this new choice, has joined me. Barry Schwartz, Liana Evans, Eric Enge and Debra Masteler are also next to me. Matt, Barry and I have our exit routes mapped out, so we can duck out during the Q&A session and post to our blog commitments.

This is Tamar Weinberg's debut speaking engagement. As she tells the story, "This is Danny's fault." We have a small cheering session gathered here for her, as the ambulance is parked outside the building. (Just in case she passes out or something.) Meanwhile, Liana Evans has been posting pictures. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/storyspinn/ - Look for set. We're now waiting and listening to music. "She blinded me with Science" was just on. Twice, today, we rocked out to Eminence Front by Pete Townshend of The Who (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminence_Front).

Danny is now up to the podium and I must officially start sounding official. SM is not just about Digg. First up, Neil.

Neil:

I love Digg. I'm a young kid. Most kids look at porn, I look at Digg. What is it? Why should you care? Who uses them? Shows homepage. You submit, people vote. If good, it lives, if not, it dies. There's a bury button. If tons of buries, it's no longer on homepage. Average story gets 129 links. On Digg homepage, some sites can get 10,000 in an hour. If you pay for links, per link, that adds up. As long as the site/page stays up, the link is live. Great source of branding. Neil did so well on Digg that the NY Times wrote about him. There's roughly 20% more males on Digg. You need a website. You need images and content. Or video or audio. Podcasts don't bring traffic from Digg but video does. It's a voting system. 100 votes, likely an important story. 100 votes in a 100 days is not as good as 100 votes in an hour. Some SEO's created a lot of accounts and tried to vote their own sites but Digg figured it out. No self promotion. Don't pay for votes. No spamming. No SEO's are allowed in Digg. There are sites like usersubmitter.com (www.usersubmitter.com/) that submit for pay. Doesn't recommend doing it for sites that are valuable. If someone discovered you're an seo, not a good thing. Don't be discovered.

Top 100 users control 56% of what gets on the homepage. You can pay them to get there. You can't control what people say. Not all pages get to the homepage. "Embrace the community and call it a day."

Tamar:

Digg Tips and Tricks is her topic. She's nervous and Danny is trying to put her at ease.

Overview: advice for winning content, advice for promotion as a digg user, networking, tools and lesser known tricks.

Content - viral content works well. Lists work very well. Games, quizzes, controversy, tools, breaking news, videos, pictures, technology/science are other topics. She describes an example of a controversy topic. Tools are things you can describe that help people do things. Track latest news. Describes ipod as a popular story which was Dugg by tons of people. Be on top of breaking news. Videos, try funny ones. Creative ones. Pictures.Everybody likes eye candy. Digpicz.com (http://www.digpicz.com/) is a site to try. If you label your title with pictures and people will find it there. Digg is built on a science and tech foundation. Focus on those stories to build a strong account.

Title and desc. are important. Be careful when marketing your content. The smallest mistake you make, people will call you on it. Make yourself easy to identify. Get an avatar. Don't blend in with everyone. Stand out. Provide your email IM, blog, etc. and ways for people to contact you. Befriend users and Digg their stories early. People notice who submits their stories early. Comment on stories early. You want to be funny. People will find you early. Comment early to be noticed. Digg shouts exist but use sparingly. Equates to spam and you'll be buried. Shouts are fine for promoting friends and networking. Do it privately. Get to know people off-site. Take advantage of Digg social elements to help people Digg your site. You want to use Smart Digg Button, works only for Firefox. (Digg This, for ex.) Digg Alerter. Search for "social media for Firefox". (www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools) for other tools to check out. (Her blog.)

Everybody wants to do well in Digg but its not the only site. Things to note. Be careful. Don't put SEO or search marketing ID's in title. Don't email everybody and say "Digg my story". Get a diverse amount of people to submit your story. It's hard to bring an old story back to the homepage. 20 diggs in a few hours. This is considered "natural". Anything more, dangerous. You can push up stories to give your story visibility. Check Digg/news/upcoming to check. You can't get "unburied". If you promote to Digg, also promote elsewhere. Stumbleupon is good. Digg archives show what are considered good content. Digg doesn't really have a sports readership. Top Digg submitter, requires at least 50 Diggs. The algorithm is sensitive. You can just submit content, with no intent on being a top submitter. This is fine too.

Chris:

How many people want links and traffic to their sites? He'll focus on Digg. Why business on homepage of Digg? Traffic and exposure. You can get between 10-20,000 people to your site quickly. People look to Digg for content. Digg is free links. Homepage on Digg, they'll bookmark your site to Stumbleupon, and elsewhere. Sales? Do they convert? It brings brand awareness. Know the languae. FTW is "For the Win". RTFA "Read the f...article" is another. Understand the lingo. Diggers love the iphone, Apple, shows like Heros, Ron Paul. They don't like things like "I love this or that" President Bush, don't say you like him. Press releases don't work in Digg. "Boring". Overtly selling, even if free, is a no-no. Faking it doesn't work. Sony tried this and failed. Know your audience. Blendtech knows people love Chuck Norris, things being destroyed. They used it in a video. Dove video is another example. Get featured on a popular blog. Get that submitted. This is a trusted source. You get traffic from blog and Digg homepage. Sometimes all it takes is a creative idea.

Example: Leading vacations site. They wanted brand exposure, natural links, start a conversation. It's a commercial site that sells vacation packages. Not a place for Digg. 10 Tips to a Better Disney Vacation wouldn't work there. They want something that relates to vacations and Digg audience. They did a list. They wanted to appeal to everyone. People love their cities. They played on this. Stripped out sidebar navigation, and ads. Left top navbar, so when people come they'll visit the whole site. Use "11" rather "Eleven" in list titles. Use brackets. Caps. Add opinions. Choose the right topic and submit there. They tried a lot of these and make the homepage very fast. People left comments. 20,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. It spreads to other social networks. These are where buzz is created. Links still come in. Their example was featured on popular blogs, who had never heard of them before, due to the Digg story. 1000 natural links built. 200 new email signups. 12 new bookings, and this wasn't even an initial goal. If you want to play with Digg, make sure you have good hosting.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
10:40am-12:00pm

Attracting visitors on social media sites involves using the right bait -- link bait. Compelling content is best. Added benefit: it appeals to bloggers too. Do it right and they'll link to you, enhancing the prominence of your brand and driving traffic to your site. This session explains link baiting and provides examples and ideas to help you craft your own bait.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com
Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz
Cameron Olthuis, CEO, Factive Media

Last minute change in our blog schedule. I’m taking over for my blogging partner, Tamar, who was going to do this session. So…here I am. Danny is introducing Rebecca first.

More coverage at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal and aimClear.

Rebecca:

How many people have allergies? She sounds stuffed up and feels badly.

(Time out. Need to plug in to outlet. Battery going. Will try to catch up to Rebecca. I've relocated to a wall, sitting on the floor, plugged in and listening. There's an echo and I can't see the screens.)

If you have an authoritative site, that link passes link juice. It will increase visibility of your site overall. (Time out. Needed to move again. Getting a bad echo and can't hear her well.) She’s talking about link stickiness. Target "linkerati". Anyone who is likely to link to your site. May not be your normal users. They’re important anyway. The Net is evolving. People like share. They like to share. They link to blogs. Send links to friends. You want to take advantage of that. The best thing to do is create content.

Do a search for your sector, in Digg, Reddit, etc. See what others are doing and see if you can do something similar. Do your homework. YouTube is great for research. Look at current trends on places like Google Trends, Technorati. What are people talking about this week and tie your link bait to that. Don’t neglect your industry. Your own community may have a lot of closet sites. Search on blog search engines. Linking other sites to your site helps with relevance. People may come back again if you’re in the same niche. Not always about Digg and Reddit. You can keep your own niche in mind.

Brainstorming sessions are a good thing. Ask questions from friends. Link bait can be as simple or hard as you want to be. She’s showing funny screen shots I can’t see from where I am. Shows an example of a picture used for bait. Lists work too.

Be aware of negative link bait. "Are you being brave or being an asshole?" Is saying someone is a jerk going to affect your brand? Negative mudslinging is a kind of link bait but do the ends justify the means? She has everyone laughing with some of her remarks here.

Look before you leap. Contact people in the industry to get feedback. Bloggers will help you create a buzz. Make people feel included. The first few hours are the most crucial after sending out link bait. Monitor traffic. Check server. Keep offering fresh content. Watch trends. You can take advantage of trends and hot topics with your own spin. Your goal is to attract "linkerati" but be sure you’re educated on the topic. Link bait gets links in quickly. It’s one part of the arsenal you have to work with.

Greg:

He’s a social media junkie. You want the links and you want the branding. Ways to link bait.

Categories

Top 10 lists – These types of articles are extremely effective at Digg. Digg is powerful. Don’t go with cliques.

How-to – Be helpful. Make sure you offer value. No one will link to you if you offer no value. Make it easy to read. Add some images. SM users are quick users and are intimidated by lots of text.

Current events – People are already looking for what you have. Make sure you act fast. You need to get something out there. Write it your own way; add more value to the topic. Be accurate. Don’t put out false information. Right jargon. No spelling errors.

Offbeat or extreme topics – “The smallest toilet” is an example. He launched a blog that did really well on this niche. Hardest type of campaign to sell to clients. You have to be careful with offbeats. Don’t hurt your brand. Don’t violate terms of service. You can be banned from some sites like Digg, even if you didn’t submit the link (someone else did.) Be careful.

Image campaigns – Avoid using long URLS for these. Links to long urls aren’t as valuable. People do steal images. Put it inside a post and people aren’t as likely to steal the post and will just link to you.

You need to research. Find out what worked, what was effective and what information works. You need to know what’s happening with current events. What’s worked in the past? Watch what was on front page in the past few weeks on sm sites. When you have your category, title and desc. are next. Make it simple. Be strong, Be focused. The description must back up the title with good description. If you submit just a title to a site like Digg, not enough. A description helps convey the point of the article. This helps people come to look at it. Capitalize the first letter of the first word. Avoid spelling out numbers (use numerical instead.) Keep people involved in what you want to sell. It’s a bandwagon kind of community. Make friends. Use IM to share links with friends. These people are there to help you succeed.

Tips – Relate to the community you’re submitting to. Find communities that relate to your topic. Use images. Limit ads. People have seen them. You don’t want to be selling ad content. Give summaries of what you’re submitting. Pull quotes. Make it easy for people to link to you. No spelling errors. No bad information. (SM readers have no tolerance for spelling errors.) No duplicates of something already submitted and popular. (Wait a year.) You can re-submit old favorite topics. Make sure your server can handle the load (Digg-effect). People will not wait for pages to load. He’s been kicked off SIX servers so far. Hosts don’t want that kind of pressure. Being on the front page of Digg will bring you links. Be “link worthy”. Submit at the right time. Friday eve is a no. Holidays no. Weekends no. Shoot for time when most people are online searching ("when at work", everyone laughs).

A lot of people miss out on what SM really is. Look at it like a real social event. Reserved until you feel more comfortable. You need to be social. He does an analogy of being social in the physical and translated that to online.

Cameron:

Digg effect example of a site that goes down. Story got buried. Talks about the importance. Link bait – information pieces, how to lists, controversial, rebuttals, ex. Is when people pick on the seo community. Make people laugh. Show funny videos. News, current events, tools, quizzes. Things that are useful to people.

Benefit – everybody wants links. Link profile, Google see’s natural linking going on. Traffic. Word of mouth. Bookmarks. People will bookmark your site or page at a later date. Immediate publicity.

Ex. Drug rehab center. Find an idea. Search the SM sites what’s out there. Use a whiteboard. List 25 topics. Create content. He uses ex. of writing a guide article. SM users have short attention spans. Give them info quick as possible. Provide lists with pictures. You need to seed the article. Submit to Stumbleupon, Digg, etc. Come up with a title. Write a review or description. Add tags if possible. People subscribe to topics. Target your articles to them. Get a “power account”. These are people recognized in the community. A great title can make a story. Look for social communities that are in your niche. (SEO’s use Sphinn, for ex.) Doing all this helped the drug rehab site perform really well.

(Needed to cut out of this one shortly before he ended due to technical problems with laptop.)

Susan Moskwa, a member of the Google Webmaster Central team, has said that afraid.org, a free DNS provider, has been known to block GoogleBot.

Just found out that your DNS provider (afraid.org) has been known to block Googlebot from certain sites. You're not the only one who's had this problem:

http://www.ameir.net/blog/index.php?/archives/26-Site-removed-from-Google-due-to-FreeDNS.html

You may want to contact afraid.org about this.

This can be an issue with other DNS providers. So be careful when picking a DNS provider for your web server, it may make the difference between getting indexed by Google and other search engines or not getting indexed.

This discussion is actually a continuation of GoogleBot having DNS caching issues themselves.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
9:00am-10:20am

Customers interacting with brands -- that’s marketing in the 21st century. And SMM is key to fostering brand/customer conversations. This session will orient you to the world of social media. You'll learn the leading sites, the functionality they provide, and best practices for interacting in these virtual places.

More coverage from Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land: Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Social Media Marketing Essentials, also at Search Engine Journal and aimClear Blog.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Intro:
Welcome to SMX Social Media. I woke up at 6:30 am to get ready and catch a cab with Matt Mcgee to get to the Metropolian, where the conference is being held. Once we arrived, registered, found the speaker/press room and began munching on free breakfast, we realized we're in rooms at the Affinia, right next to each other. Matt (www.smallbusinesssem.com) is sitting to my left and Marty Weintraub (www.aimclearblog.com) is to my right. The breakfast layout is awesome. Free coffee, juice, fruit, bagels, banana bread, etc. Rand Fishkin (www.seomoz.org) and Danny Sullivan have showed up. Neil Patel, (www.pronetadvertising.com) who is also speaking in this first panel, joined us while grabbing breakfast. Michal Gray (aka Graywolf, www.wolf-howl.com/) came over and chatted for awhile with Matt and I as well. These little gatherings first thing in the morning are good for getting the brain going. I'm splitting session coverage today and tomorrow the Tamar (of SERoundtable/Rustybrick). She is far better at catching every single word than I. I'll do my best to record my sessions and fill you in as we go along here.

The room is just about full. The music is blaring, at least for me, since I'm sitting right next to a speaker in the front row. We have wireless access here in the conference room, which is nice because the press room is close by and I can push this out without having to log back in again. For this conference, I'm using a new laptop, with Vista. Already, Marty is showing me tricks and shortcuts to make this job easier with Vista.

Danny is launching into the conference. He's explaining to everyone how to access the wireless internet access. His intro was preceded by a song that was turned up and Matt and I were starting to rock out. Funny thing, at this hour. Danny is asking folks if they visit Sphinn. June 3/4 is a SMX in Seattle. NY again Oct 6-8. Website Magazine is a sponsor for SMX. A rep (Dante Monteverde) is allotted 3 minutes to give a brief promo before the session begins. Basically, he holds up the magazine and is describing it to the audience. (I get the magazine and enjoy it.) They want industry experts writing articles for them. They also have a web site and an affiliate program. They archive their content on their website. Replaceatree.org, is a green program they're involved in, being a print magazine.

Danny introduces Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz. He'll be touching on aspects of the conference to come.

Rand:

I think social is something he's passionate about. He'll show us why it exists, how to use it, what it is. He wants to give an overview of what we'll hear in the conference. The first thing people ask, what is social media marketing? Why are we in this space. It's web site traffic, conversions, sales. Page views, ad revenue, it helps grow brand awareness. Create a postive brand impression. Shows the MAC/PC commercial guys. Business dev and networking. Uses something like Linkedin as an ex. SM really can deliver. How? There's interacting with communities on the web. You can connect with millions of people. Create viral content. You take some piece of viral content and submit to Digg, for ex. Shows a map where there are more single women and men. There's single women in NYC. Someone scanned it, posted it to sm site, and got tons of traffic for showing this map. (Search for National Geog. Singles map to find it). Reaching key influencers. References the Tipping Point to understand connectors and how this works.

Why is SM valuable? Supports and brand and mind share goals. Supports search engine marketing goals. The entire domain receives some ranking benefit. The page gains rankings. SM helps with traffic and conversion goals. Branding is one way. In the social world, positive promo is something people identify with. Apple does it. ThinkGeek toys and games. Why now? Why is SM so cool now?

Shows a graph with stats from different SM sites like blogging, sm sites, forums, video, podcasts, wikis. These are kinds you can use. SM usage is still small but growing fast. June 2007Businessweek study he references. Very few users are actually creating the content. Yahoo study: Brand advocates: Have emerged as primary infuencers. They're better connected. SM is the key. Brand advocates are taking full advantage of the tools. Search for Yahoo Passionistas Report Sept 2007. User generated content is photos, blogs, videos. Shows a graph for how fast blogsophere has grown. Fast. Posting volume will spike based on social events.

Shows a graph that shows people who blog. Stats from emarketer. Shows demographics. Wealthy consumers are heavily engaged in the blogosphere. Shows a graph of what countries read blogs. The US is not #1. Japan is, with South Korea, China and the US, and UK following. Belgium is #10. 91% from Japan and 34% influencers from USA. These are people who take action after reading a blog.

How do they locate the blogs? Links on other blogs 67%. (Emarketer stats.) Recommendations, search engines, blog search engines and other. Quality of reading is the #1 reason for reading a blog. Credibility is still quality of writing. Topical focus is another. Popularity is the least noted reason for visiting a blog.

Video is an exciting space for online marketers. By 2011 86.6% of Americans will be watching online video. News is top reason. Comedy, education, music. Adult sites are the least common reason. (People giggle). How do users engage with online video? You get link from a friend. Via links, send links to other, watch with others, rate video, post comments, post video links online and pay for video.

In the early days, we had SE's that weren't too smart. Shows a slide of Alta Vista. In the beginning it was keyword focused and it was easy to spam them. Engines came up with page rank to measure popularity. SE's began to determine credibility and trust in the content. Links equal votes, if the link really reflects an editorial recommendation of one page to another. Dead a link farms, reciprocal link exchanges, directory link building, forums sig, blog comment spam and paid link networks. Links should come from valued and trusted domains. These are government and educational links, major media websites, broad and niche authority sites like National Geographic, popular blogs, high quality SM sites. On one side people will provide editorial links vs sites that require links to rank well. SM becomes a solution, in a way. Who are responsible for creating links on the web ("linkeroti"). Reddit, blogger, hobby sites, researchers, customers.

Customers don't link to your site. We must reach these people. They email their friends. SM sites. Social news portals, forums, groups, newsnet, word of mouth, links on their own sites, podcast, mainstream media and video. These are ways they can be influencers. He shows a graphic of qualities people use to want to link. Stunning design, ad free content, non commercial content, good graphics, good writing, high accessibility, authority, clear navigation are all things people like to see. No Flash, poor IA, hard to read text, forcing registration, splitting articles on separate pages, bad site search, unprofessional design, long URLs, obtrusive ads. These are things that people will not be impressed with.

Where to conduct SMM:

Social news aggregation portals - user generated content, users influence visibility, comment features, ratings. Reddit, Digg, Propeller (was Netscape), Sphinn, Meneame (spanish) (Rand says SEOMoz gets good traffic from there), Techmeme, Newsvine (was sold to MSNBC). Users link together. They provide events, public announcements, external applications. Facebook is an example. MySpace. Facebook is an "influencer" more than MySpace because demographics are younger. Linkedin, for professional networking. These are sites where users can submit content with some editorial review on some of them. YouTube provides user generated content. Wikipeida has very visible content. Flicker, for image sharing. Yahoo! Answers has more than 3.5 million users in the last year. Yelp is a local portal for business owners. Popular blogs are ready by several thousand daily readers. Comments and content are accessible. True participatory community. Bloggers can be reached directly. TechCrunch is an example of a large blog. Boing Boing is another. Gizmodo, The Huffington Post for politics. Life Hacker for news and advice. Gawker is a celebrity blog. Mighty Goods for shopping.

Social Bookmarking sites:

You can tag content and share it with friends, the more who bookmark it, the more it rises to the top. Stumbleupon is one. Del.iciou.us is one of the most popular ones. (Someone says they're going to change the name.) Ma.gnolia is another one shows up in search results well. Yahoo! My Web.

Niche and topical participartory sites. Slashdot is one. Fark (not safe for work surfing, nice long tail.) Truemors is gaining in pop. NowPublic has a tech focus. Upcoming.org for events (Yahoo! owns it.) The long tail of blogs, forums and groups reach smaller, niche communities. Mainstream media portals. Large, well known brands. Enable participation or influencing. They note most talked about sites. News.Google.com lists most popular news sources. SearchEngineLand is a source for News.google.com. NYTimes (which now allows user comments. Some people don't like this.) San Francisco Chronicle. CNN (allows comments). Wired is connected to Reddit. Wired will link to blog content. MSNBC is another one.

Conference will cover techniques to succeed in SMM. Ideas for vital content that can help your site gain traffic. Which social communities are valuable for your business? SM is still cutting edge, which means you have the advantage over your peers or competitors who aren't into it. (He's showing screen shots with Simpson characters.)

(Note: Spelling errors exist. We traditionally type and post. Blogged by Kim Krause Berg for SERoundtable.)

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Google announced the release of YouTube Video Identification Beta system.

In short, Google and YouTube came under a lot of pressure for not doing enough to stop those who upload copyrighted materials. This tool is part of Google's solution to that problem. But will it work?

I am sure there will be many piracy advocate groups who come out and test the new tool. Give it about two weeks until those reports come out. Until then, the folks over at WebmasterWorld are very skeptical.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As expected, Yahoo Search Marketing has launched their blocked domains feature. Advertisers can now block up to 250 sites from showing their ads on the content network.

The Yahoo Search Marketing help page has detailed instructions on how to block domains. In short, go to your accounts page under administration tab and click on the "Submit Domains".

Then you will see this page, which will allow you to block up to 250 domains, subdomains or pages.

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

We recently had the October 2007 Paid Link Debate which recapped the discussion around Danny Sullivan's Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google.

But will SEOs and Webmasters stop buying links? That is the question being asked at a DigitalPoint Forums thread.

Currently there is a live poll there with 25 responses in under 24 hours. The poll asks:

Will Google's threats make you stop selling text link ads?

The responses are:

• Google's bluffing. I'm still selling ads (11) 44.00%
• Google's not bluffing. I've stopped selling ads (6) 24.00%
• I'll stop at the slightest sign of trouble (please expalin what is that sign?) (4) 16.00%
• Google's not 100% ready yet. I'll stop in a month or two. (4) 16.00%

I would love to see more responses in this anonymous poll.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

On Cre8asite Forums, Rand Fishkin asks an interesting question: how do you create search-friendly URLs out of foreign characters, particularly Arabic?

Ammon Johns says that DMOZ can handle it, so it should be spiderable content.

A.N.Onym says that he creates the URLs to look friendly to native Arab speakers:

One thing that our local webmasters do is to write the words using Latin letters for the corresponding letters from the language. While it doesn't help with the search engines, it makes the URLs appear in the native language (albeit using Latin alphabet) and such URLs are easier to use (remember, refer and link to), too.

Pierre aka eKstreme has subsequently responded in his own blog post with a few considerations.

How do you optimize URLs for a foreign language that doesn't use the Latin character set?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

The Search Marketing Expo, Social Media conference is tomorrow and Wednesday in Manhattan. We will be providing in-depth and full coverage. Tamar, Kim and I will be posting sessions. There is only one track comprising of:

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM
• Micro Communities
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing
• Wikipedia Clinic

Please make an effort to attend the Internet Marketers of New York's Charity Party, which is taking place tonight at Town Tavern Bar & Grill 134 W. 3rd Street and 6th Ave. between 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

Also, Tamar will be speaking at the Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites session tomorrow, so make sure to get a front row seat!

See you all there!

A really helpful Search Engine Watch Forums member wrote an extensive post on a case study for long tail searches. The user found an interesting result:

In otherwords, only 31% of our traffic comes from the main search terms, while 69% comes from the long tail.

Additionally, search engines aren't everything. There are other ways to get traffic:

Search engines are not everything. All together, we only got 224,325 visitors off of search engines. That is less than 1% of our total traffic. Most of our traffic comes from other places. Anyone putting all the hopes on search is missing 99% of the traffic that they could be building. The rest comes from other marketing efforts, quotes in published works such as books, software, magazines, as well as news casts, word of mouth, inbound links, billboards, commercials, etc.

So how do you optimize for long tail searches? Write. Write a lot. Keep your site content-rich (and readable to the user). Target terms that your users may search with.

For more long tail analysis, Chris Anderson has written a book on the Long Tail.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

GuyFromChicago has spotted and blogged about some new features added to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Some of the features include new filters, such as disallowing results that contain specific phrases, disallowing keywords that are already in your ad group, and not showing ideas for new keywords.

A screenshot is below, courtesy of GuyFromChicago:

There's no official word from Google yet on these, but users are starting to see these new features in their account.

What do you think? Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Guess what? If you thought your robots.txt file wasn't being spidered by search engines, think again. Try the following in Google:

"robots.txt" "disallow:" filetype:txt

I'm sure you'll find a significant number of results.

Are you concerned about what content is going up? Then don't hide it under a disallow directive; just don't put anything up that you don't want search engines (or users!) to see.

If you're really concerned about your content, you can disallow these directories in your .htaccess, and that file is not accessible by search engines.

Forum discussion (it's a good one!) continues at Cre8asite Forums.

There were several reports yesterday of an inappropriate image found on the Google News home page. The image was sourced from an Inside Bay Area article, that talked about a new study on youth STD cases. The image shown on the home page was of an uncircumcised penis.

One Google News user said:

Please take this down. I do not appreciate my 12 year old daughter seeing this while looking for news story's.

An other Google Groups user was very upset with this picture as well. Google News Guide posted an apology and explanation:

As you may know, nude images like yesterday's are against the Google News policy. That said, since we rely on our crawler to objectively choose the headlines and images from news sites across the web, this kind of content can sneak in from time to time. That's why we're really glad to have watchful users who help us take care of these situations as quickly as possible. I'm sorry for not addressing this in the group earlier, and we openly apologize to all the users who encountered the image. We're working to make the product better and our response time faster -- and in the meantime, you can continue to help out by letting us know when something like this comes up.

Seems like every October a nude image ends up on Google News. Last year we reported that we found Porn on Google News Home Page:

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google AdWords has added a feature for non-U.S. based advertiers. It is called the "currency indicator" and it shows what currency you are being billed in.

Advertisers who are in Canada see a CAN near their numbers, while advertisers in Australia see an A near their currencies.

One member described his difficulty with this new user interface:

I'm not sure if this is only an international thing, but as of today the Adwords UI now shows "Can" in front of all figures that have money in them. AWA: This makes cutting and pasting and reading the UI REALLY HARD NOW. Please ask them if they can put it up at the top of the window as a permanent setting or something, it doesn't need to be stuck in front of all the dollar figures. Please pass this feedback along!

There are several complaints already in the forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread is reporting yet another recent Google Webmaster Tools Link update. It appears Google is now updating the linkage data, not monthly, but much more frequently, over at Google Webmaster Tools.

We typically track only the monthly updates at the Search Engine Roundtable, so here are the monthly updates:

• October 2007 Google Linkage Data
• September 2007 Google Linkage Data
• August 2007 Google Linkage Data
• July 2007 Google Linkage Data
• June 2007 Google Linkage Data
• April 2007 Google Linkage Data
• March 2007 Google Linkage Data
• February 2007 Google Linkage Data

So it appears that Google may be updating the data more frequently and that means.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Search Engine Roundtable's Weekly Search Buzz Roundup is back in session. After two weeks of holidays, we're back to give you the latest and greatest news in search for the past 3 weeks. Let us begin...

Yahoo Search Assist is Now Live

The new generation of Yahoo Search is now available with a bunch of features, including Search Assist, which is an autocomplete feature. Yahoo's recent search rollout also featured blended results, which seems to be the direction that search is headed.

Google integrates YouTube into AdSense

After testing AdSense and YouTube, Google has finally rolled out video units that are ads. Barry walks you through setting up Google AdSense video units via YouTube if you're interested in trying it out.

DMOZ Gone and Back Again

The DMOZ hompeage disappeared from Google results last month. Today, it seems to be safe and sound in the #1 position, and I assume it's because they're taking better care of the community by creating a blog. Looks like this is headed in a positive direction.

Gmail 2.0 Coming Soon?

Is a new version of Gmail around the corner? Some people hope so. I did notice that if you right click on an email within Gmail, you'll get a preview window -- that's certainly an additional feature.

Overture is Back!

Overture works again after being reported as dead a few weeks prior.

Google: Stock Going Up, Up, and Away

On September 24, Google hit a high of $564 in stock. Now, it's at over $600. Google is now seeing fallout from its success as many of its top people are moving to other opportunities, probably because they suspect that Google can't get much better from here. Regardless, Google is still richer than many companies and has the majority of August's search shares, which should come as no surprise. By the way, Nathan Weinberg reported yesterday that it reached $625. Then it was at $631 when I checked again, but it's gone down just a bit. However, that didn't stop the founders from buying a Boeing 757. And all I want is a Google beanbag.

PageRank Updates?

First, there was a Google Directory PageRank update. Now, there's apparently some sort of PageRank update for October.

MSN Live 2.0

MSN Live Search 2.0 is showing life and algorithmic changes. Do you expect that Microsoft's Facebook stake has anything to do with making Live Search 2.0 more social? Will it be integrated in the future?

And what about Microsoft's acquisition of Jellyfish? Will it have any impact on the future of Live 2.0 from a marketplace perspective?

Microsoft Docs?

Microsoft is about to engage in a fierce competition with Google Docs by starting Microsoft Docs which will give people the ability to view documents (but not edit them) online. It would be nice to have Microsoft Office Online, but I guess I'm dreaming...

Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer Released

Last month, Google AdWords released AdWords Conversion Optimizer. A lot of people want to try this out but cannot because of the minimum requirements (300 conversions in 30 days). Others don't like it. It's a learning curve, I guess.

By the way, what are your thoughts on Google Campaign Optimizer? Chris Boggs, who covered for us last week, brings up an interesting discussion.

Can You Hear Me? Google Audio Ads Reviewed

A really great Google Audio Ads review has been shared with us. If you're looking to advertise (on the radio, people!), this is a must-read for starters.

The Answer is 42

Now you know Danny's age. Happy Birthday, Danny!

For Others, the Answer is 9

Google's 9th birthday was celebrated without me. For shame.

Stupid Man Sues Google over Social Security Number

A dumb person has sued Google because he says that Google -- upside down -- looks like his social security number. Yesterday, I saw a car in the parking lot with the last 4 digits of my social security number. Who do I sue? The DMV or the car owner?

How does my Googlebot Crawl?

If your site being is crawled too quickly, you can reduce the speed of the crawl in Google Webmaster Central. If you're not being crawled at all for whatever reason, you can perform some steps to alert Google of the existence of your site.

Log onto Yahoo for Best Results

Remember when we reported that Yahoo shows less results in Site Explorer? This may have something to do with it: using Yahoo's Site Explorer will show different results whether you're logged in or not. You might want to log in for the most accurate reporting.

GooKu

Of course, these three weeks couldn't possibly go by without an acquisition by Google. That's why they grabbed Jaiku. I wonder what they'll do with it.

Some SEO/PPC Tips and Tricks

Over the past few weeks, forum members have been very kind to share some SEO tips and tricks. First, we have image optimization techniques. Then, we have a starter guide to the SEO process. Since the holidays are around the corner (really!), we have a recommendation to use Google Trends to get optimization tips. Matt Cutts clarifies nofollow and another Googler, Wysz, clarifies Google's position on hidden text. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, here are some AdSense tricks and an official document from Google regarding Dynamic Keyword Insertion. This is good stuff, guys!

Friday Fun

Ever want to see Google results backwards? You can with this cute little game. And if not, well, you can kill time with the game too.

Next Week

SMX Social Media will be held in New York. Expect liveblogging from yours truly (probably for every session except the one I'm speaking at). If you're in the city, be sure to stop by the Internet Marketers of New York Charity Party, and if you're not but want to sponsor an event in the future, that would be most welcome.

Looking forward to seeing you all next week!

A very comprehensive WebmasterWorld thread has advertisers sharing their biggest AdSense tips and tricks. The post spans two pages, but here are some golden nuggets of wisdom:

• Medium to large rectangles outperform other ad types.
• Try to blend your ads into your website if possible because it increases CTR.
• Horizontal ads can be successful if strategically placed.
• Remove low earning pages and focus on high-earning pages for the highest eCPM.
• It helps to minimize AdSense on sites that have a lot of affiliate links.
• Put appropriate keywords around AdSense ads.
• Understand heatmaps of your site and place your ads in suitable locations.

Other tips are shared and expounded upon in the WebmasterWorld thread; feel free to join in on the discussion.

According to reports, the Google founders have snatched up a Boeing 757 which is an addition to their impressive fleet of a Boeing 767 and a helicopter.

DigitalPoint Forums think this is a beginning of a new airline: Google Airlines. Strangely, that's what Gary Price reported about in April 2005 when he joked about GoogleJet airlines. I guess it's possible. They definitely have 3 aircraft headed in the right direction. ;)

According to Search Engine Land, they even have permission to land at Moffett Field.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Photo: 757 by Drewski2112. No, it's not the Google plane itself.

A DigitalPoint Forums poll asks if there's any benefit to adding Google features similar to Yahoo Search Assist. On one hand, he believes that pre-filling the search results can be detrimental because people will rely on the "popular searches" and not focus on their own search combinations. Do others feel that way?

The poll itself only has 4 votes at the present, and so far, they say that offering search suggestions is a bad idea (2 votes). One person thinks that it's a great idea because it gives users more power, and a final voter thinks that there's going to be no change.

It's hard to say and I assume Google is testing this out. But there are definitely valid concerns, like this one:

the problem I initially see is similar to what you mentioned, that it will kind of eliminate long tail keywords and misspellings because people will start typing them then just use the GS version. I don't like the idea for PPC either as obvious PPC (and SEO) will become much more competitive for already highly competitive terms

What do you think about this? Poll and forum discussion continue at DigitalPoint Forums.

Have you ever had to redesign a site so that it's more SEO friendly? How can you do so without eliminating the good amount of traffic that you're receiving?

There are a few things you should take into consideration. Ammon Johns contributes to the Cre8asite Forums thread with a lot of good information, including the fact that you should see where the healthy traffic comes from and ensure not to screw it up.

When you redesign your website, you should focus on improving the user experience for new users and existing users without breaking that which works well.

Ammon adds that there are changes that you can make that are imperceptible to the average customer. But you should look at your analytics to see what works well for you.

DianeV suggests that you take precautions because if you're doing well already with conversions, you don't want to do anything that could reduce the conversions.

And the bottom line isn't necessarily just to get higher rankings; it's to increase the sales. That means, necessarily, ensuring that the current successfulness of the site isn't hindered. So, unless you have a sure-fire way to increase sales without having to preserve whatever is currently causing conversions, I'd suggest treading very lightly indeed.

It's important information. You should not make any visible changes to the site without understanding what drives the conversions and whatnot.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Yahoo Site Explorer is a wonderful tool to check your page index count and the number and source of links you have pointing to your site. But did you know that you get different results if you are logged into Site Explorer when compared to not being logged in and authenticated for that site?

Here is a Site Explorer search for this site, but I am not logged into Yahoo:

Notice, here Yahoo reports seroundtable.com to have 14,999 pages indexed in Yahoo and a total of 57,146 inlinks to the home page from all pages. Now let's compare...

Here is a Site Explorer search for this site, but this time I am logged into Yahoo under the account I authenticated this site for:

Notice, here Yahoo reports seroundtable.com to have 15,556 pages indexed in Yahoo and a total of 216,880 inlinks to the home page from all pages.

That is a huge difference in numbers. 57,146 inlinks and 216,880 inlinks is a huge difference in the amount of data one can get about a site.

Is it possible that Yahoo is pulling back on showing all linkage data for a site to anyone? Now you need to be the authenticated webmaster to see full data? This is similar to how Google works.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Go to Google and type in elgoog, then click "I'm Feeling Lucky" and you will be taken to the first result automatically at http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/index.cgi. Some SEO optimized a page for the reverse spelling of Google and flipped the page to look like this:

The same type of thing happens when you search for the following terms:

• google 133t
• google gothic
• google bsd
• google ester egg
• xx-piglatin
• google linux
• ewmew fudd
• xx-klingon

Some lead to Google sites and some lead to SEO sites. All fun and games until someone does that and leads you to a site with adware, spyware and viruses.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

On the Daily SearchCast with Danny yesterday, we got into the topic of the paid link debate. He was joking that if SEOs are really that upset that Google is coming out on paid links with the nofollow, then they should all block GoogleBot with their robots.txt file.

He and I joked that they would never do that. Google is just too valuable to their traffic and revenue to block the crawler that feeds them. But Danny believes that if every SEO in the world got together and blocked GoogleBot from indexing all their sites, then Google would hurt. Will that happen, absolutely not.

This morning, during my forum research, I spotted a timely thread on the exact topic over at DigitalPoint Forums. The thread says, "Lets Stop Google bots to crawl through robots.txt and teach it a lesson." He must of been listening to the show, no? In any event, there is a poll that asks, "Who is greater- Google or Webmasters?" The results are currently:

• Google (4) 25.00%
• Webmasters (8) 50.00%
• Can we stop Google by stopping its bots through robots.txt? (3) 18.75%
• No Google is too big (3) 18.75%

Ultimately, I agree, the Webmaster is more powerful as a collective. But it won't happen, and since it won't happen, Google is "greater" in this 'battle.'

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A smart WebmasterWorld member has offered sound advice for the holiday season: don't worry about fewer visitors but prepare by checking Google Trends:

For the majority of my websites (consumer electronics)this is a quiet time of year - visitors drop off, revenue goes down, and it can be too easy to think it's something to do with penalties, algo changes or other things out of my direct control.

So what I do is punch in my most historically important key-words and phrases to Google trends and look at what has been happening over the last few years.

He adds that you can use these trends to build related content to get visitors. It's great advice.

Do you use Google Trends and find it reliable for optimization?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A few days ago, we reported on Google's clarification of hidden text and how not to get yourself penalized. This is part of an ongoing "Popular Picks" series in Google Groups and Matt Cutts has decided to clarify the nofollow tag as well.

Matt introduces his post by saying that he had an interview with Rand Fishkin, which we reported on, where he gave some insights into nofollow. But to be clear, let's review what he has added.

Matt says that if Googlebot can't access the page, don't try to pass PageRank to pages. A "sign in" link is a good example of what you should nofollow.

What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you'll see that the "Sign in" link is nofollow'ed. That's a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn't going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn't benefit users or convert any new visitors?

Personalized pages, too, won't work. He adds that a link like "My Itineraries" has no value to the Googlebot because they vary per user.

Matt also refers you to his own blog post where he says that blog comments should be nofollowed to avoid spam, and he links us to an interview with Eric Enge that also covers some nofollow issues.

nofollow, then, is a tag you'd use if you don't want Google to crawl a link from your page. The links may exist elsewhere (and are followed), though, which means that you may actually see those links indexed.

So nofollow as a link attribute causes Google to drop those links out of our link graph. If you have a nofollow link from page A to page B, we won't crawl via page A's link to discover page B. Note that we may still find page B via other links around the web, though.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

WebmasterWorld members have reported that they are unable to find the Picasa referrals are missing from AdSense settings, as seen in the screenshot below:

Slowly, it appears that Picasa banners are dropping off sites. Some forum members mention that Picasa is now part of Google Pack. However, Google Pack referrals are only available to some countries, as another forum member notes.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld members reported earlier that their Google AdSense accounts were not updating or showing any clicks for a short period yesterday. This was confirmed by many other members who were frustrated.

About an hour later, however, the servers started working again, according to reports.

Just in: apparently the clicks were clumping at the bottom of the hopper. A tech person has since stirred the pot. Everything should be back to normal soon.

Is anyone still encountering issues? Join the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that many of the proxy highjack pages for your domains have been removed from Google. Proxy highjack pages are basically pages that try to outrank yours for the same keyword phrases, and thus replace your pages in the search results at Google.com.

One member said:

This morning while looking to see if there were any extra proxy highjack pages in Google’s index for my site I got a very pleasant shock.

Zero
Nadda
Ziltch

WebmasterWorld forum administrator, Tedster, confirms this analysis, saying:

That is indeed very sweet news. I am not seeing any proxy sites either right now - but there have been many sites affected, so I hope we hear from more people. If Google has indeed fixed this issue, it can only be a good thing for them and for webmasters.

For past coverage of the Google Proxy Highjacking issues see Reports of More Google Hijacks via Proxy Sites and Detailed Explanation of the Page Hijack.

Good job Google!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week Tamar wrote about How to Stop Googlebot from Crawling Your Site Rapidly, so I thought I write about the opposite. How can you induce GoogleBot into crawling your site.

Although there is no magic shot that guarantees inducement of the crawl you can always increase your chances of that crawl in a few ways.

• Submit a Sitemap file to Google Webmaster Tools
• Make sure you have plenty of links pointing to your site from pages that are already in the Google index
• Build out a real sitemap for users
• Make sure you have a search engine friendly site
• Increase the crawl rate at Google Webmaster Tools to "Faster"

I am sure there are many other ways to help induce a crawl, but here are just a few good ways to do it.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are unconfirmed reports from DigitalPoint Forums that Microsoft is going to upgrade adCenter soon to support daily budgeting.

Currently, I believe, adCenter only has a way to set a budget at the month level. You can supposedly set a "daily limit" but that will pause your campaigns based on the monthly average.

This new feature should give advertisers more granular control over their campaign finances.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Over at Cre8asite Forums, forum member Sascha has written a very in-depth guide to beginning the SEO process. The guide is broken into several parts:

• Considerations (new site vs. old, budget, competition, size of company)
• Business Objectives
• Online Marketing Objectives
• Starting points and syntax issues

My summary does not do this in-depth article any justice. Really, it's a wonderful read, especially from a beginner's perspective. Take a look and join the discussion too.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Google has written an AdWords Help Document to clarify Dynamic Keyword Insertion, forum members have learned. There's a really nice starter tutorial for beginners, with information on syntax and capitalization rules.

Finally, guys. My conference coverage was good and all, but an official document has been most welcome by forum members.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A number of WebmasterWorld members who use Google's Blogspot application are reporting that when they log into Google Webmaster Tools, they're getting a lot of errors that many URLs are being restricted by robots.txt. However, blogspot.com users have no control over the robots.txt file (and as far as anyone is aware, such a file cannot be created).

One example of this problem is explained:

I've noticed that if there's a 301 redirect from Page A to Page B and Page A is disallowed in robots.txt then Page B will be reported as Restricted in robots.txt in GWT.

Nobody knows of a fix at this point, and the negative impact, if any, is undetermined.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting question at Cre8asite Forums has been asked: when you click on the cached version of a website, does it show up in the website's log files?

One member says yes, as long as there are images on the page:

It would only show up in logs if the file requests for images are made. The cached text and code exists on Google's servers, so those requests wouldn't be counted.

Additionally, other page elements could be logged, like JavaScript, CSS, video, and Flash, according to another.

But if you're indeed curious to the extent of these views, you could always do a test with Google Analytics, as JohnMu proposes:

Google Analytics runs as Javascript on your page, it runs on cached pages as well ... but does it count visits from the "wrong" URL? It should be easy to test

If someone does perform this test, I'd love to know what you find.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.