December 2007 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 31, 2007"

If you have been doing SEO for a little while you have most likely heard the phrase "My competitors are doing it, why should we do the same thing?!" or my personal favorite "Why is this guy that is nobody in our industry ranking above me with that spammy link exchange directory thingy, shouldn't install one too!?!".

Those questions never allow for a single dull moment when with working with new or existing clients. The question either becomes incredibly annoying or comical if you heard it enough. Sometimes I imagine saying, "Sure lets install that spammy link exchange directory thingy and see what happens!!!". However you know you would never do such a thing as the secret to your ranking success is hardly ever going to lie in what "other" people are doing. Pageoneresults on WMW, thought so too and started on a thread on WebmasterWorld talking about the My Competitors Are Doing It Syndrome.

He says:

Over the years I've heard the expression "My competitor's are doing it" more times than I care to remember. If your competitors jumped off a bridge, would you follow them? ;) Okay, so your competitor attached a link exchange directory to their site. Time to run out and do the same.
Okay, so your competitor purchased links from that particular site. Time to run out and do the same.

Why not look at this from another angle. How about doing something that your competitors are not doing?

Some of the forum members voice thoughts on their own experience with this type of thinking. Europeforvisitors brings up an excellent suggestion, that instead of studying the tactics that you competitors are doing, you need to study what their weaknesses are. He mentions "my biggest competitors have less flexibility than I do, because they're stuck with corporate overhead and existing business models, (e.g., the need to recycle content from print publishing or to rely on user-generated content of questionable quality). In niche markets, there can be advantages to being a mom-and/or-pop business. "

He is exactly right. You could use time as your weapon as a smaller website you are more nimble to quickly adapt and change your content. This won't always work, but its one angle you could approach with.

Finally, Mikedee points out that if you like what your competitor is doing, you could always buy the website/company or steal the idea and do it better.

Continued discussion on WebmasterWorld - The "My Competitor's Are Doing It! Syndrome"

Jordan Kasteler has written a very nice post to acknowledge three individuals over at Sphinn that are the unsung heroes. In his post, he recognizes Sebastian X, Bill Slawski, and Marios Alexandrou.

Why?

Bill Slawski "has an uncanny ability of decrypting insanely ambiguous search engine related patents and translating them into plain English in terms the average person can comprehend."

Sebastian "has carved quite a niche for himself being the ultimate guru in the programming spectrum of SEO. He has a wide array of experience with Apache, PHP, MySQL which he utilizes to always think outside the box with."

Marios has an SEO experiments category in his blog where he reports his findings in a straightforward fashion.

Congratulations to the three of you; the acknowledgment is well-deserved.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Just about everyone should know about Digital Inspiration, a blog by Amit Agarwal who apparently monetizes his site on Google AdSense. The Inside AdSense blog acknowledged him in a recent blog post which included this video of Amit's story:

Amit also illustrates how he displays his Google ads.

I have tried a couple of other advertising programs on my website, but none of them have been so successful as AdSense. That's because AdSense contextual ads are always so relevant to the content.

He also advocates using Google Custom Search because you can also monetize from the ads within as well.

Very cool. Congratulations Amit!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Michael Gray spotted an interesting quote from a recent interview with Matt Cutts and Ted Murphy of Izea (formerly PayPerPost).

I explained to Matt that in SocialSpark all links required by an advertiser would carry the no-follow tag. I thought this would be a great thing. Matt commended the decision, but then added ALL links inside of any sponsored post should carry the no-follow tag period, regardless of whether they are required, not required or even link to the advertiser paying for the post. That means if Nikon pays me to review a camera and I link off to a site about photography that link needs to be no-follow, along with the link to the blog of my buddy the photographer. His reasoning was that the sponsored post wouldn’t exist without the sponsor paying for it, therefore all the content is commercial and should be no-follow.

Naturally, there's a lot of shaky ground with this statement, because Michael believes that Google should start employing nofollow on all the links you see on Google pages -- such as press releases, partnerships, and the like.

Ted Murphy, by the way, clarifies his stance in the Izea community blog, and Matt responds:

"I support No-Follow for any links required by an advertiser, but why should a blogger be forced to no-follow any other link?"

A blogger isn't forced to do anything; they can do whatever they want on their site. I'm trying to communicate Google's views, so that if a blogger wants to do well in Google, they know our stance. I think all major search engines have taken similar positions on paid posts that pass PageRank as well. I think Google has been pretty clear about our opinion on paid posts that pass PageRank.

So in the end, if you want to do well on Google, you should probably use nofollow on all paid posts regardless of the sponsor from what we're all reading.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks if Google orders the link reports at either a link:www.seroundtable.com command or via Google Webmaster Tools in level of importance.

Google's JohnMu confirms the link: command as just being a random sample of your backlinks. He therefore says, since it is a random sample, ordering these results in level of importance does not really apply. But what about the results in Google Webmaster Tools?

JohnMu, a Googler, said:

I wouldn't count on any list being in order of importance -- after all, how do you measure importance? How can any tool know what you personally feel is important?

Scanning some of those link reports shows me that Google clearly is not ordering them by level of importance.

But is Yahoo? Take a look and you might think they do.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A lot of people seem to experience negative web experiences from those abroad. I can personally think of my own experiences and have thought to myself that it would be ideal to block an entire country from accessing a website to prevent fraud and the like. A WebmasterWorld member thinks similarly but wants to know if there are any consequences to blocking countries in this way.

But is this dangerous in the eyes of Google? If Google ranks the site but the visitor from, say, China, visits his site and gets a dead page, is this a bad user experience?

Well, it is, but from the eyes of two other webmasters who have done the same thing, there have been no negative affects by blocking "entire countries" from accessing certain websites. It looks like this webmaster can rest easy.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has confirmed reports that Google has slipped up majority with payment to their Australian and New Zealand publishers. Google AdSense has inverted the exchange rate, to pay publishers more than 20% less than what they should have been paid this past pay period.

For example, if an Australian AdSense publisher earned $1,000 US dollars, they should have received a check for about $1,139 AUD (Australian Dollars). Instead, the currency exchange rate was flipped the other way and they received $878. So they received 88% a rate, as opposed to a 114% rate.

AdSenseAdvisor confirmed the billing issue and said:

Our payments team asked me to let you know that they're aware of this conversion issue with AU currency payments, and will be contacting affected publishers shortly.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for the confusion.

Google might just make the adjustment during the next pay period or they may send out payment before.

Like noted in the forum thread, if this was for a different currency, the results could have been much more extreme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting several webmasters noticing that Ask.com's crawler has recently been generating tons of 404 (file not found) errors on their sites. The issue appears to stem from Ask.com auto inserting URL-Encoded spaces into the URL. URL-encoded spaces are those %20 signs you may find in URLs.

The specific crawler called out is crawler100.ask.com. Reports say that this has been going on for two weeks now.

Forum moderator, jdMorgan, offered up a mod_rewrite technique to force the Ask.com bot to obtain the correct URL and not a %20 URL. So if you are noticing this issue as well, check out the thread and try implementing jdMorgan's solution.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 28, 2007"

It is that time of the year again and Search Engine Journal is holding the Search Blogs Awards of 2007 now. I cannot express how important these awards are to me personally, so please take the time to vote for the Search Engine Roundtable by clicking here.

We are up for nomination is five different categories and I, Barry Schwartz, am personally up for nomination in an extremely important category.

The categories we are up for nomination include:

• Best SEO Blog of 2007
• Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007
• Best Overall Search Marketing Blog of 2007
• Best Contextual Advertising Blog
• Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007

Again, personally, I am up for nomination in the "Most Giving Search Blogger" category. So if you feel I am the most giving of my time, energy, sleep and knowledge in the search blog world, please vote for Barry Schwartz. Also nominated are Search Engine Roundtable's Tamar Weinberg and my colleague at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan - all well deserving of the award.

As many of you know, I have spent a lot of time also writing at Search Engine Land, specifically on search news topics. Search Engine Land has some of the best names writing there both on news and columns. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Greg Sterling, Vanessa Fox and I all are part of the Search Engine Land team. I suspect Search Engine Land will win at least two awards, I am personally voting for Search Engine Land on the Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007 and Best Overall Search Marketing Blog of 2007 - along with the Search Engine Roundtable. Tamar runs Techipedia, where she shares some awesome gems on social media. Techipedia is up for nomination in the social media category, so make sure to vote for Techipedia also!

The Search Engine Roundtable is not just made up of my personal thoughts. It is made up of the thoughts from you guys. We report on search items from the search forums. The Search Engine Roundtable represents the search industry's views. Tamar, Chris, Ben, Kim and I all take our industry's thoughts and changes - be it happy, sad, excited, or disappointing and share it with the rest of the world. Not only that, our conference coverage is made possible by not just our authors but from friendly faces in the industry, such as cshel, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Marty, DaveR, Justin Davy, Avi Wilensky, Debra, Steve Krull, Lee Odden, and so many more people. This is what makes us so special - having the search industry make up what we write about at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Why should you vote for the Search Engine Roundtable?

Best SEO Blog of 2007: Day in and day out we find new SEO topics to write about. Writing for five years now, every single work day, and we still find new SEO topics to write about. From link building to keyword research to the minuet changes at Google, Yahoo and Live Search - you know we will pick up on it faster and in more detail than any other SEO blog on the Internet.
Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007: Honestly, Search Engine Land takes it for this. Yea, I know, I am biased, being the news editor. But Danny and I weed through thousands of news items each day and hand select the news stories we find to be the most relevant to our industry. The Search Engine Roundtable differs by watching the search forums to find which news stories are most important after it has been discussed by SEOs and SEMs. A cool, but unique angle.
Best Overall Search Marketing Blog of 2007: Search Marketing is what we write about each day. It includes SEO, PPC, Social Media and more. Like I said above, with us it is more about our consistency in finding anything new, interesting and exciting that is out there - every day!
Best Contextual Advertising Blog: Same with SEO, we cover the slightest changes in contextual ads. From Google changing the clickable area of those ads and how it impacting the typical publisher to Google sending out AdSense gifts. We cover contextual almost like no other blog out there.
Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007: We pretty much invented search conference coverage. There is no blog out there that covers more sessions and search conferences each year than us. BruceClay does a great job, but we cover more sessions, in more locations than any other search blog on the Internet. It is the most tiring and exhausting thing we do, but we have been consistently doing it since 2003. We have covered over 30 search conferences, consisting of over 1,000 sessions.

Personally, I have been writing since 2003 on search. I have written over 5,000 articles here, but well over 10,000 articles and posts at blogs and forums across the Internet. For more on that see here and here.

Did we win enough awards? We have won six substantial awards in the past, but does that mean we shouldn't win this year - since we won already? I don't think so. In fact, winning these awards shows us that people find our content to be important in their every day SEO and SEM lives. Personally, I give my heart and soul to this industry every day, for the past five years. The awards mean so much to me, probably too much.

So please vote for the Search Engine Roundtable and Barry Schwartz and don't forget to vote for Search Engine Land and Tamar! With my deepest respect, thank you all in advance!

To vote click here, note that 5 is the highest vote, and 1 is the lowest.

Forum discussion at Sphinn (yes, vote for Sphinn also).

This week has been incredibly slow. It's the last week of the year and everyone is having holiday celebrations whereas us Search Engine Roundtable folk (Barry and I) have been working diligently to keep you informed of the latest in Search. In fact, if you missed it (and I really hope you didn't), I spent the entire weekend compiling the best Internet Marketing blog posts of 2007 which was an incredible undertaking. If you're bored this weekend and have been partied out, this is a gift you cannot miss.

But on another note, while I gave an incredible amount of time and energy into that post, you should be advised that it is really Barry who is a much more giving search blogger, so consider that when you vote for us for the Best Search Marketing blogs for 2007. I'll remind you again before this post wraps up.

The Holidays

Over the past few days, you might have noticed Google's logo building project to build a nice holiday greeting logo just in time for Christmas. Cool. And on that day, there was nothing really to talk about (besides a Gmail quota increase to 6GB and the fact that JohnMu was so bury working too) so Barry took all the holiday threads he could round up and shared them with us. :)

Google Reader Privacy Concerns

Google Reader has been under a close watch ever since you can share your Google Reader stories with your contacts without opting out. It's not a pleasant thing for some people who feel that their privacy is compromised. I'm just glad I'm still using Bloglines.

On a positive note, you can remove your phone number and address from Google Search Results, so hopefully Google will solve the privacy concerns related to the Reader side of things quickly.

Is your site now ranking #6?

Have you noticed a Google position #6 penalty? If so, you're not alone. That's a strange change indeed.

Take the Search Marketing Quiz

Did you take Matt McGee's search marketing quiz yet? Well, don't, because I want to win.

Search Facebook App

It's FREEZING cold outside, baby. And you can be notified of these climate changes by installing the Search Facebook application on your Facebook profile. It pulls feeds from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land and provides a "weather" update of how hot or cold the news is in search. You know you want it. And if you don't, well, at least you can join our Facebook services page and become a fan of Search Engine Roundtable -- for real.

Remember, Vote!

We're in the running for the best Search Marketing Blogs for 2007. I personally am up for three awards (Best Social Media Optimization Blog, Best Conference Coverage in pictures, and Most Giving Blogger). Search Engine Roundtable is up for 5 other categories (Best SEO Blog, Best Search Engine Industry News, Best Overall Search Marketing Blog, Best Contextual Advertising Blog, and Best Search Conference Coverage). I say vote for Search Engine Roundtable for all of those, but Barry says that Search Engine Land deserves one of those votes. I'm not going to argue with the boss man. :) But in any event, vote for us and for me and for Barry and for anyone else you really love right over here. kthx!

A WebmasterWorld member noticed a strange Yahoo address in his logs and was wondering if anyone had ever noticed it:

alchemy.corp.sp1.yahoo.com

According to Yahoo, this is a URL that they use to test the relevance of landing pages. There are no charges for this activity.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A number of people are trying to set up Google AdSense video units via YouTube and are running into a really strange error:

AdSense error: The publisher must be associated with the developer account before the developer can invoke operations on the publisher's account.

Now I'm not sure what that means, and neither should you, but it looks like a lot of people are being impacted by this error.

AdSensePro Jordan has updated the thread at Google Groups informing the community that the error is acknowledged and being addressed:

Our engineers are currently looking into this issue, and I'll update this thread when it has been resolved.

Thanks for your patience until we're able to give you more information.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Update: This was now fixed on January 11th.

Karl Ribas spotted a great find the other day: Wal-Mart is now offering Search Engine Marketing services at this sign-up link. The offering seems to be a $100 per month PPC service led by a Redmond Washington SEM agency.

Forum members are having a field days with this finding, even though Barry points out over at Search Engine Land that the service has actually been available since the summer of 2004. Here are some reactions:

WOW, I never thought they would go that low. Now Wal-Mart/Sam's Club wants poor people to pay them for NOTHING when search engines pick your sites up for free? Freaking amazing...

Tim Dineen says:

I love their SEO service: "Establish a local search profile and have your website submitted to the major search engines..."

(Sound familiar?)

Some folks (like Matt McGee) think it's an April Fools joke. It must be given that the company offering has been around for 3.5 years now and nobody has really heard about it.... is it for real?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Matt McGee made a really cute 2007 search marketing quiz that you can take until later tonight. So far, I probably am the winner, but I challenge you to a duel.

Here's a sample question:

What color monkey is Rob Kerry?

You can choose from the following answers:

Red, black, green, brown, orange

Okay, I'm kidding. But the quiz is fun and the winner gets $25 from Matt's pocket. As of last night, only 6 people got all the questions right!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 27, 2007"

When you do your keyword research, my bet is that you may have tens or hundreds of keywords to choose from. How do you keep track of it and monitor your rankings? A High Rankings Forum thread asks this question.

One member still uses the old-fashioned pen and paper tool. I've seen most people use an Excel spreadsheet, and one member at the forum suggests that.

Do you know of any current programs that monitor your rankings for keywords? I know there are some that used to take the Google Search API key, but unfortunately it's been over a year since that has been discontinued by Google. (Can you bring it back, please, Google?) :)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

Marios Alexandrou wrote a pretty cool post about the 55 questions you'd ask a would-be SEO which is probably the most recent post in my best Internet marketing posts thread and also hit the Sphinn homepage yesterday.

Most of the questions initially talk about your SEO experience, if you understand META tags, if you have any opinions on link buying, if you understand the difference between SEO and SEM, if you understand why Wikipedia ranks #1 for so many topics, and if you enjoy SEO. It's actually a very comprehensive list.

Interestingly, one member on Sphinn didn't think so.

Absurd. The list was created as if SEO is a technical profession. It prepares you for interviews with employers, SEO workers or otherwise, who share this misconception and then, because the question is on the list, they'll ask: If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?

But unfortunately for the writer, his comment was buried (yay for social networks) and many others took offense to his statement. One, TheMadHat in particular, says that SEO is definitely a technical field and these questions are totally appropriate.

You don't think there is anything technical about SEO? The questions were leaning more heavily in that direction but it's a combination of technical knowledge and marketing knowledge. Without both you may as well roll over and find a new profession.

As many people feel, SEO is a balance of technical know-how and creative skill. What would you say about that?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, has compiled the feedback of the December 2007 Google SERP Changes thread, which we covered earlier in a new WebmasterWorld thread. In this thread, he says there is a pattern of reports he has been noticing where webmasters are reporting that their rankings have dropped for some searches from a position two to a position six.

Tedster summarizes his findings:

1. Well established site with a long history.
2. Long time good rankings for a big search term - usually #1
3. Other searches that returned the same url at #1 may also be sent to #6, but not all of them
4. Some reports of a #2 result going to #6.

He explains that most the reports say it is not site wide but rather search term specific. Plus, he adds that is seems to be off-page related and not on-page related. That means, he believes the cause for such a "position 6 penalty" is caused by linkage reasons and not your on-page SEO.

Is there something to this new "Position 6 Google Penalty?" Is this just an excuse for some holiday forum chatter? Let the forum discussion continue...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As early as on December 14th, AdSense publisher began noticing new report options available to them. The new report type, found in the "advanced reports" section directly under the Aggregate data" and "Channel Data" options was named ""AdSense unit data."

This report is suppose to help those who are using the new announced back in October but not launched until mid-November. Many AdSense publishers, like myself, still do not have the manage ads feature, so they won't see this option.

A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has discussion on people seeing the reports and then it being removed from their reporting area. It appears to me that those reports were a bit off, but I am not sure if all the recent AdSense reporting bugs stem from this manage ads feature feature or not. It seems oddly ironic that all the reporting issues came along with this new manage ads feature, and that Google has been very reluctant to expand the manage ads feature to more publishers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 26, 2007"

A DigitalPoint member shows the Google doodle for the Christmas holiday as a 5-step logo building project as seen below:

Quite a cool and creative idea as always. I love 'em Google Doodles. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

What happens if Google has assumed your page is a different language than what it's written in? Well, I don't think mod_rewrite will work. But a few things will:

<html lang="en">

This declaration should be placed on the top of all your pages in the HEAD tag.

Furthermore, you should utilize Google Webmaster Tools to ensure that Google is acknowledging the proper language of your site.

What else would you suggest for this user whose site was inadvertently assumed as German even though it's written in English?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread asks if Google indexes and ranks Apple .Mac pages. Basically, .Mac is just a hosting service for Mac users, who pay for a "Dot Mac" subscription.

Googler, JohnMu, said Google does index and rank .Mac files. He linked to a site command for site:web.mac.com that clearly shows Google is indexing those files. But it appears Yahoo is indexing a lot more than Google, while Live Search is about the same as Google.

So in short, search engines have no reason not to index .mac hosted content. Just make sure those pages are search engine friendly and allowed via the robots.txt file and you should be set.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

On December 14th, Google Reader announced a feature that automatically shares your feed items with your friends. Google Reader Gets Social With Friends Shared Items from Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up. Honestly, I think we were both surprised that there was not much of a big deal made about Google automatically sharing your feeds with all your Gmail contacts without asking you if that would be OK.

Danny said, "but after now experiencing it first-hand, it's kind of scary that it isn't more opt-in rather than opt-out." Very true. I am just glad I don't use Gmail and I don't have too many Gmail contacts. Why would my wife care what feeds I am reading, specifically all the search feeds. Plus, why should all my competing bloggers have easy access to all my feeds? Got it? Of course, if you are subscribed to feeds that you might not want to share with others, health blogs, etc, then it may become a sensitive issue for some.

That is exactly what has erupted over Christmas with the aid of a Slashdot post:

"One week ago Google Reader's team decided to begin showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family who says they won't be able to enjoy this Christmas because of this 'feature.' Will Google start doing this with all their products? You can check a summary of complaints in my journal here or browse the whole thread in Google Groups."

Felipe Hoffa has a detailed summary of the announcement thread at Google Groups. Now with over 200 messages in the thread, with complaints starting as early as the day they launched the feature, Google has said one thing:

All of us on the Reader team are paying attention and are aware of the feedback from this group. However, we do need to balance all these concerns with keeping the feature useful for those who like it and use it. (There aren't many of those on this thread, granted, but this is only a small subset of the people using this feature.) The incremental changes we've been making this week have been aimed at finding the most reasonable compromise.

Let me reiterate: If you're uncomfortable sharing items, you can unshare everything in a single click. With just a few more clicks, you can move all those items to a new tag, to preserve your organization. After unsharing, any privacy concerns you had about sharing your shared items should be taken care of.

We are aware that friends management is still very basic at this stage. Your Google Talk contact list is taken as an approximation of the set of people you're interested in communicating with, but you can remove people from that list as necessary if you don't wish to see their items. The update I mentioned today was intended to help in that, since various folks have expressed confusion about who's who in their lists.

We do intend to keep iterating and improving this feature, though we'll necessarily slow down a bit over the holidays. Thanks for your patience, and we do hope you'll end up enjoying the sharing functionality of Reader.

Happy Holidays to All,

Graham

The all or nothing feature.

There is more recent discussion on this over at Techmeme and forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

As Vanessa Fox writes at Search Engine Land yesterday, Google has kept up their tradition of providing support on Christmas day via Google Groups forums.

Last year, it was Googler's Adam Lasnik and Vanessa Fox found working on Christmas and this year it was John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central AdSensePro Jordan providing support for both webmaster related questions and publisher questions.

Now, keep in mind that John Mueller is based in Switzerland. Here are his posts throughout Christmas eve and day at Google Groups:

1. Please help: sitemap error: Paths don't match -- but the should?!
2. 301 several pages to one - will this harm rank?
3. Hit with a penalty, but not de-indexed?
4. A Google search inserted into html
5. disney
6. dot .mac indexing
7. example sites with no follow links?
8. Sitemap by Atom 1.0 feed?
9. Happy Holidays!

Not only was John active in the Google Groups forums, he was also active at Cre8asite Forums. As you can see by his Cre8asite Profile John was last active yesterday at Yesterday, 06:25 PM.

John was not the only Googler active in forums. AdSensePro Jordan, a newish AdSense rep posted in a forum thread.

2008: The Year of the Friendlier AdSense Help Forum

So there you have it, Google continues the tradition of support on Christmas!

I spent some of the morning reviewing the search forums, practically unable to find any content and news to write about. So instead, I thought I compile a collection of threads from the forums that make up our search marketing industry. The compilation of threads are Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday threads from the search forums.

• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• WebmasterWorld
• High Rankings Forums
• Digital Point Forums
• I Help You Forums
• V7N Forums
• Search Engine Forums (JimWorld)
• Site Point Forums
• Web Work Shop Forums
• WebProWorld Forums
• SEO Refugee Forums
• Google Groups
• Sphinn

Happy Holidays everyone! Wishing you all the best in the new year, health, happiness, and success!

If you login to your Gmail account and scroll to the bottom of the page, you may notice that your Gmail capacity is now above 6GB. Mine looks like this:

In fact, it is exactly 6.020702 GB at the time I am writing this. Just a couple months ago, Gmail reached over 4GB of Gmail storage and now we are at 6.

A nice little present for some Gmail users on this holiday day.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 24, 2007"

Aaron Wall recently posted about why many of the best SEO ideas aren't found on popular blogs. His main points are that many people share incorrect and outdated information and it's dangerous to share the best tips because it could negatively affect you. If you expose a secret, it will be addressed shortly thereafter. The best secrets are those that nobody speaks of.

Over at Sphinn, this sentiment is reiterated:

There are a lot of people republishing stuff from 3 to 8 years ago that is no longer quite true, or is in some cases now totally wrong.

It's true. SEO is constantly evolving and those who test often will be more successful. Those who are newer are generally more interested in sharing their findings as well.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

With the entire ongoing debate about paid links, is there a benefit to buying links with nofollow? Perhaps. What would be your argument to go with nofollow paid links?

For one, you can possibly get traffic from the link even if Google doesn't give it any love. Another thing is that it's good for branding. Furthermore, if you have a paid link, it's an endorsement.

But the bottom line is that many people agree that a paid link can still get traffic. As one person says, she gets a lot of traffic from her nofollow Wikipedia link, so it's proven to be successful.

What are your thoughts on the nofollow debate? Would you still buy nofollow links? Forum discussion continues at

A Cre8asite Forums thread poses the dilemma about web 2.0 sites getting web 1.0 wrong. Bill Slawski quotes the following from Jakob Nielsen's article:

Before throwing spending money at "2.0" features, make sure that you have all the "1.0" requirements working to perfection. Of the 149,784,002 sites on the Web, maybe a handful can make this claim. Most sites don't even use the customers' terminology in headlines and page titles — if you want one quick action item to improve site profitability through better SEO ranking, more clickthroughs, and better understanding of your services, rewriting the first two words of your microcontent will beat any technology any day.

As an avid user of web 2.0 sites, I find this so very true.

Some users just think that web 2.0 is a whole lot of bunk:

Web 2.0 is a rather stupid little term, and a prime example of hte complete "marketing and sales" spin on most things today. It's not new, it's not phenominal, and it won't make your busienss a success by simply using it ...It's all merely smoke to me... slapping a fresh coat of paint and selling the vehicle on does not make it worth a whole lot more.

EGOL brings the discussion back to the web 1.0 roots:

You might be much farther ahead to write an EXCELLENT user's guide, detailed FAQ, a few articles and put them out for consumption.

The extremely detailed and interesting discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Bill Slawski discovered a patent application by Microsoft that seeks to "restrict the results for queries to be from blog pages."

Does that mean that blogging has had its day? Well, if the key word is restrict and Microsoft is seeking relevancy (since when are blog posts irrelevant?), then maybe they can't limit the number of blog posts that hit the results page.

Some people want this to happen. Tim Dineen, for example, has this to say:

Blogs get a disproportionate boost (relative to their actual usefulness) because they tend to be well-optimized and are more likely to gain links than a typical (albeit just as useful) website developed by a small business or unique content provider who has a web design shop build a site for their content.

Then again, bear in mind that not all blogs use Wordpress. They're using Wordpress and the platform because it's already well optimized, so restricting the results will affect those who decided to develop upon that platform.

And finally, perhaps Microsoft should take a clue from Google's success:

Because blogs are so dynamic and oft-updated, they can often be the best source of results for new events.

I'd imagine why most blogs are still #1 for many searches I perform: because they're relevant!

Here's some additional Search Engine Roundtable coverage on the success of blogs (or why Google likes them):

• Setting Up a Blog - Some Things You Should Know From an SEO Perspective


• SEO Through Blogs and Feeds


• Blog & Feed Search SEO - Blog Optimization Strategies You Need to Know


• Blog and Feed Search SEO

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn