November 2008 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: November 28, 2008"

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, I am posting the video early in celebration of the special weekend. I spoke for a while on why SEO's should be careful when using a site command. I also spoke a while about link building companies and how they are being perceived these days. Google is allowing some advertisers the ability to show ads based on mobile devices or desktop devices. Yahoo had a search update. Live Search added malware reporting to Webmaster Tools. Google improved Street Views in Maps. Google is cutting on contractors. Will Google give out holiday gifts this year? SEMPO will be ringing the bell at the NASDAQ. Learn how to save on this year's holiday gifts with Live Search Cashback!

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Happy Thanksgiving '08 From The Search Industry
• Why Shouldn't SEOs Obsess Over the Site Command
• When Did Link Building Companies Become "Black Hat" SEOs?
• Google AdWords Provides Option To Advertise Based on Desktop vs. iPhone
• Was There a November Yahoo Update?
• Live Search Adds Malware Reporting to Webmaster Tools
• Google Enhances Street View
• Google Plans Layoffs of Nearly 1/3 of the Workforce
• Will Google Be Giving Holiday Gifts Out This Year?
• SEMPO Has Been Invited to Ring NASDAQ's Bell
• See How To Save 25% On Holiday Gifts With Microsoft Cashback

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

Hope you guys had a great yesterday and a happy day today! Most of you I know aren't actually working, but some of us are, and we're going to make sure you're well-entertained today in what happened this week in the search industry.

Happy Thanksgiving!
How was your Thanksgiving? Hopefully you enjoyed turkey or tofurkey and spent some quality time with your family. I know I did. The search industry, naturally, celebrated with us with some high quality themes.

The site: Command isn't Reliable. Chill
Too many SEOs are obsessed with the site: command, but there's really no reason to be. The site: command doesn't always count the number of pages that are indexed in your site, so if you notice a drop, you shouldn't necessarily freak out. The thing is -- some people do. Perhaps it's better to think of alternative strategies, like looking at which keywords your site pages rank for.

Why Do People Consider Link Buying a Black Hat Tactic?
Last week, we had a blogger say that Microsoft endorsing link exchanges means they're approving a "black hat" tactic. Lately, too many people have considered link buying a black hat tactic too. Consequently, companies are trying to stop link buying and move to more "ethical" measures.

Yahoo Says it Updated -- Did it?
Yahoo said it was performing a search index update. But that's all that happened. Nobody knows if Yahoo did anything about an update, and they're just waiting and waiting and wondering what's next.

Malware in Live Search Tools
As anticipated at Pubcon, Live Search has added malware reporting to their Webmaster Tools arsenal. You can use this data to find out if malware is linking to you, or if you're linking to malware sites. I think this is a very cool idea.

Google's Street View Gets Better
Google is making street view more enhanced with new features. The pegman is now more visible and you can drag him from the zoom slider to activate street view. That's not all either: you can report concerns more easily and enjoy a mini map view to get two different views at all times. Cool.

Google Terminates Contractors - You Better Hope You Aren't One
Google seems to only value their long term employees, and instead has axed their contractors, which has been going under the radar for several months until someone caught wind of these activities. Looks like Google isn't as great as everyone thought it was.

And will Google Even Give Gifts This Year?
Now that we're in the midst of a recession and Google is dropping valued and dedicated contractors, should we expect gifts from them this year? It's that time -- do you think Google will deliver?

Google Releases Blogger Best Practice Guide
If you're a blogger and you're writing for search engines (I mean PEOPLE, people!), you should consider reading Google's blogger best practice guide which was released earlier this week.

SEMPO and NASDAQ = <3
SEMPO has been given a great honor to ring NASDAQ's bell next week. They may have struggled in their initial first year, but they have prevailed -- and now, you can see that SEMPO is shining. I'm very proud of all those who are participating in the honor. Congratulations!

Microsoft Cash Back Rocks!
My friend told me a few weeks ago that Microsoft Cash Back has made a $900 camera purchase $700 -- yes, a $200 savings. He used this trick to utilize Microsoft Cash Back and he's extremely happy. I guess you can win from utilizing Microsoft's search engine in this capacity, so take advantage of it while it lasts!

Have a good weekend!

Google has announced new technological strides: they have been able to sort 1 terabyte of data across one-thousand computers in a mere 68 seconds. (Previously, the same record of 1TB was across 910 computers and took 209 seconds.) For one petabyte of data, it took Google 6 hours and 2 minutes to do the sorting -- and the sorted data gets moved to 48,000 hard drives (crazy!)

Google also acknowledges that they had triple redundancy -- the data was backed up on 3 hard drives. Could it be that if you reduced that redundancy, this would all be much quicker? Not necessarily, since storing may not be part of the sorting algorithm that was recorded (and storing the data could have still been ongoing after the sort had been completed).

Do you call this "nerd erotica?" Forum members say it is.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

According to Nielsen as reported by CNET and according to comScore as reported by BusinessWeek, Google search shares went up for the month of October.

Nielsen reports that Google's search went up 8.1 percent (to a total of 61.2 percent). comScore's findings were similar: Google now has a 63.1 search share (up from 58.5 percent from last year).

Not surprisingly, Hitwise shows a higher Google search share of 71.86%.

But some think that Google has only a little to celebrate. After all, after Google opted users into SearchWiki (which I call SearchIcky), they think the users won't accept the change (since Google should be fair and make that an option not a necessity).

That Google SearchWiki thing might help shift some people back to Y!, MSFT & others.

Heck, maybe Google will see that people don't want it and should give us the option to choose whether we do.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Matt McGee writes at Search Engine Land that SEMPO has been invited to ring NASDAQ's bell in New York City on December 1st. This is a huge honor for SEMPO and it indicates that the organization has been doing quite well this past year. SEMPO has been asked as a result of a big deal with Microsoft where they are working with Microsoft adCenter.

Of course, everyone is super excited -- this is great news for the search marketing organization.

This is especially true after their early struggles and questions on if SEMPO will survive or not. They proved to show that not only have they survived, but they have been an important part of the search industry.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread confirms the sad news of Palm's future. Google has decided not to spend the time, money and resources to build out a new version of the Google Maps for Mobile specifically for the Palm OS.

Googler, Tom, from the Google Mobile team said:

I don't anticipate any new versions of Google Maps for mobile coming to Palm OS in the near future. I know this isn't news you'd like to hear, but the team has decided to focus their efforts on other mobile platforms at this time.

I assume, if Palm ever regains some popularity, Google would then develop more for that OS. But with Android, the iPhone, BlackBerry and other popular mobile devices - it seems like Palm and the Treo have seen their day.

Personally, this does make me a bit sad, since I was a huge Treo fan. That is of course, until I purchased the first generation iPhone and continued on to get the iPhone 3G.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Did you know that using accented characters in Google AdWords would mean you need to use both variations? For example, if you advertiser for the keyword [construção], you would also need to advertise for the unaccented version [construcao]. I guess this is a good thing, because sometimes, advertisers only want to show their ads to those who are capable or knowledgeable to use accented characters when searching.

A Google AdWords Help Discussion asks this question. AdWordsPro Sarah replied saying:

Great question. The short and simple answer is that the system reads these as two different words. Accented characters are treated as their own letters, not variations on the base letters. That said, if you included one of these words in broad match, the chances of the keyword expanding out to the other variation is very good because the keywords are so similar. If everything is exact match, you will need to include both.

So technically, they are different words. But if you use broad match, it is possible, but not guaranteed, that Google will show your ad when you bid for [construção] but someone searches for the unaccented version of [construcao] or visa versa.

We discussed a similar topic two years ago on how the non-paid algorithms handle accented characters.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Microsoft has added malware reporting to Live Search Webmaster Tools. This comes after a significant update just months ago from Microsoft.

Now you can easily see if your pages or pages you are linking to contain malware or not. If they do, you can fix your content or not link to a page that contains malware. The Live Search Webmaster Blog has screen captures of what the reports look like when a page is infected by malware. Luckily, when I looked at the reports from this site on Live Search Webmaster Tools, I did not find any examples of malware issues either on the site or to sites I link to.

In addition to the malware reporting, Microsoft made it simpler to authenticate your site with Webmaster Tools.

As a matter of history, we posted first screen captures of Live Search Webmaster Tools back in November 2007. Soon after, Microsoft opened a public beta for others to give it a try. Then in July of this year, I doubted Microsoft's efforts with their webmaster tools. I was proven wrong a month later with improvements made to the tool.

We have discussion at WebmasterWorld around the link reports, where webmasters seem to be confused on the accuracy and how those green dots are reported. We do not have much discussion around the new feature of malware reporting.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As some of you know, my company has been actively building out iPhone apps to sell on the iTunes App Store. Some of our apps are big hits and some are not.

Wednesday, we decided to try out AdMob, one of the most popular ad networks for the iPhone. AdMob can place ads within other iPhone apps, to help promote a brand, product or so on. We ran a $100 test to see what type of conversion rate we can get.

We picked the "App Store" from the "adverting goal" screen. The App Store will basically enable you to link the ad directly to your product on the App Store page. So that made most sense for us. The other options allow for linking to a web page, phone number, video (YouTube, I believe), audio (QuickTime), iTunes link, Maps or Canvas (I assume a picture).

So we picked App Store.

Here is the ad creation tool for the App Store. You have a title, description, graphic and app store URL:

Here is a closer look at the ad that showed up in iPhones:

We made sure to include the price of the app, for obvious reasons.

We then targeted only US iPhone users, since the price of 99 cents was most likely only relevant there:

Then we set our bid to 50 cents per click, so we get a lot of traffic in a short period of time:

The results? Well, not so great.

The ad was live for about 30 minutes. It received 26,815 impressions, with 200 clicks resulting in an average CTR of 0.75% with an average CPC of $0.50.

On Thursday, I received the sales numbers for Wednesday's BlackBook sales. They were a disappointing 16 sales. We average about that or more per day for the BlackBook, without the ads. Since we sell the BlackBook for 99 cents, we only make 70 cents per sale. With 16 sales, we made $11.20. $11.20 minus the $100 in ads, turns out to an $88.80 loss on the campaign.

Now, there may be other factors why the campaign stunk. Maybe people in the US did not know what a Little Black Book meant? Maybe they didn't like some of the reviews, cause our competitor left some nasty reviews about our app - which is honestly way superior to our competitor's app. Or maybe AdMob is not a great avenue to advertiser iPhone apps? I am not sure.

I am sharing this because I received a number of Twitters from interested SEMs asking me how the campaign went. So here is your answer, not well!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

There are sometimes where you don't want to show your Google ads to iPhone or mobile users and sometimes where you don't want to show your ads to desktop or laptop users. Google understands this and has finally given a new campaign setting option within AdWords to specify the "device platform" you want your ads to show for.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports one advertiser seeing this option in his account. I personally do not see this option in my account yet. Here is a picture:

Google added help documentation for this section. The question and answers include:

• Why is there now an option to show my ads on desktop and laptop computers? Isn't that where ads have always shown?
• What are full browsers, and what sort of mobile devices does this include?
• What are the different options for targeting ads to mobile phones and devices?

Advertisers are always happy to have more control over who sees there ads and in this case, on what platform.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

We wanted to wish all you American's a Happy Thanksgiving. As you can see, if you click through to the Search Engine Roundtable, we have a special theme live for the day - it is worth checking out. In addition, many search search engines and search related sites have special logos or themes live. Let me take you through them, as I do every year, at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Google's Logo:

Yahoo's flash logo:

Live.com's theme:

Ask.com's theme:

DogPile's logo:

AOL's logo (which is also animated):

FriendFeed's Logo:

Cre8asite Forums Logo:

Search Engine Roundtable's theme:

For the past years, see Thanksgiving 2007, Thanksgiving 2006, Thanksgiving 2005 and Thanksgiving 2004.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and we will likely postpone all new posts until tomorrow.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable 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: November 26, 2008"

This week, viewers on YouTube noticed that videos are now being offered in HD 16:9 widescreen format. This has also been announced on YouTube's blog, and it looks like it's here to stay.

Most of us are looking for a more powerful high-def experience, so not many are complaining about this feature. However, Barry notes at Search Engine Land that YouTube actually forgot to give users the ability to embed these high-def videos on their personal web pages. He says "the default embed code still uses the old 4:3 aspect ratio. Why not give the new format or at least an option for it in the “customize” section?"

Good question. And further, I noticed in the YouTube blog entry's comments, there's one REALLY disgruntled person who says that his movies look horrible and widescreen should be optional. Maybe they should have thought of those people who have really bad cameras. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google has announced that they have made some enhancements for Street View. Now, instead of clicking on "Street view" on the top rightmost corner of the map, you can click on Google's little "pegman" and put him on the map. As soon as you do, street view will be activated. Additionally, a mini-map is now visible on the bottom right hand corner that lets you see the map while enjoying street view. Google has also made navigation a tad easier with scroll-wheel-enabled mice and navigation control arrows on the upper left hand corner of the map. Finally, images can now easily be reported by clicking on the "Report a concern" link that's visible on all images.

Here's a video of these features:

What do you think? Google is taking your feedback in this form, so if you want to let them know what's on your mind, be sure to click on that link and give them some insights.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups and Sphinn.

According to WebGuild, Google has been quietly laying off hundreds of "employees" since August and had not reported it, getting around a legal requirement because most of these individuals were considered temporary contractors, thereby being considered "operational expenses." Those impacted by the Google layoffs were individuals who were hired full time at Google without being offered full-time benefits. After that WebGuild story broke, CNET said that there are 10,000 contractors on Google's staff and Google plans to "significantly reduce" that number.

At Sphinn, it's becoming increasingly obvious that Google is not the golden company it once was. Google is a "normal tech company" who does things just like other tech companies, though it's also a "powerful behemoth." Of course, being a temporary agent for the company is never a fun thing.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn (and Sphinn).

For the past few years, Google has given AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers pretty nice gifts.

In 2005, Google gave out a package of computer gadgets that was well received. In 2006, Google gave out these great Google digital picture frames, I still have it on my desk. Then in 2007, Google gave out a card and memory cards, which was less impressive for most people.

Now, we have a thread at WebmasterWorld worried that Google will either not give a gift at all, or it will be a worse gift than last year. Why are they worried? Well, I am sure you heard, we are having a global recession.

Typically, the Google holiday gifts arrive anywhere between the last week of November through middle of December. So, I guess we will find out within the next few weeks if Google steps up in these bad times. If I had to guess, we won't be seeing all that much from any search engine this year. But I can be wrong.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Well, officially, tomorrow starts the holiday gift buying season. We all want to cash in on these next two months. That might include Google. I am hearing rumors at Search Engine Watch Forums that Google is expanding the controversial AdWords Automatic Matching keyword technology. Currently in beta, Automatic Matching was expanded already once, back in May of this year.

What is automatic matching in AdWords? In short, automatic matching is a new algorithm used to automatically target new keywords, not included in an advertiser's set keyword list, in order to use up all of the advertisers allocated budget. So if you are advertising for [Adidas shoes] and you have $10 left in your ad budget for the day, Google might decide to show your ads for search terms as far off as [slippers]. Like, I said above, there is a lot of controversy around it.

Now we are hearing rumors from substantial AdWords advertisers that they are pushing this beta test on additional advertisers. Literally right before the holiday season. Accucast has a screen capture of where this setting is found in AdWords.

So beware and watch your budgets carefully, especially at this time of the season.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Many SEOs use the site command to see how healthy their site is in a particular search engine. So you plug in site:www.mydomain.com in a search engine and the search engine will return the number of pages they have indexed for that domain. If you know you have a hundred pages and the search engine indexed 90% of those pages, then you are pretty well off.

But the problem is, the site command is not often all that reliable. We had recent reports that Google is dropping pages and we had recent reports that Microsoft Live Search is dropping pages as well. Most SEOs determine a drop in pages indexed by the number of results returned by the engine for a site command.

But is this a valid way of really determining how many pages a search engine indexed of your site? From what I am hearing from search engine representatives at both Google and Microsoft, the answer is no. A webmaster should not depend on the number returned by a site command as a reliable indicator of the number of pages a search engine has indexed of their site.

Googler, JohnMu, wrote in a recent Google Groups thread three reasons why SEOs and Webmasters should not depend on this number:

• The previous approximation was incorrect, the current one is closer to the actual number of URLs that we have indexed or would show to users
• The previous approximation was close and the current one is worse than before (this can happen)
• A change in our algorithms (we make a lot of changes that will impact crawling, indexing and ranking -- for some sites perhaps more than for others)

At the same time, Microsoft's Jeremiah Andrick told me that it "is problematic to use the "site:" operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query."

That being said, how can you get an accurate number of pages indexed by a search engine for your site?

I know Google's Webmaster Tools has in their Sitemaps section a place to show you the number of pages submitted in your Sitemap compared to how many URLs actually indexed. So, this might be a better indicator, but I am nervous about this number, because way too often I hear of reporting glitches in Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to track each and every keyword phrase your pages rank for. Then see by keyword, not by site command, if those pages rank. This can be time consuming, but there are ways to automate this.

Overall, using the site command might not be the best way to determine how healthy your site is in a particular search engine. I know many SEOs use this as a factor, but maybe it is time we think again about this?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Let me start off by saying Microsoft did not pay me to write this post. I am only writing it because I think it will save you all money for the holiday season. I personally bought something on this yesterday. Now, let me get to how you can save 25% on your holiday gifts, it is really easy and legit.

As many of you know, Microsoft is desperate to gain market share for Live.com. How desperate? Extremely. Microsoft is so desperate that they are willing to pay for 25% of whatever you buy through Live Search, if you do it through their cashback program. Microsoft Cashback which launched in May of this year is still offering huge discounts. Let me take you through how you can buy almost anything and get 25% off.

Yesterday, I purchased a Delta faucet, specifically, Victorian Centerset Bath Faucet, for one of my bathrooms. My wife has been eyeing it for a while and I felt, I would be a good husband and buy it for her. The sticker price is $282.65 but after you go to normal stores, it runs just about $200. I figured, why not try using Microsoft's Cashback to get an extra 25% off of the $200.

Step 1: Search for wii on Live.com
Step 2: Find an eBay ad (or any ad) that has a cashback logo and click on it:

Step 3: Make sure towards the top of the eBay page it has the cashback logo. That logo looks like this:

Step 4: Now search for what you are looking for, in my case, 2555RB-216RB, which is the model number of the faucet I want to get my wife. If you find it, then your in luck, now its time for...

Step 5: Make sure you have a PayPal account, most of you do already, but if you don't, you need one. You can do this in a new window.

Step 6: Make sure you have a Cashback account, takes not too long to sign up for one. You can do this in a new window.

Step 7: Buy it now with your PayPal account. Make sure you see that cashback logo throughout the process.

Step 8: The confirmation receipt page, should have a blue "Get cashback" button. Make sure to click on it.

Step 9: A new window should open up and it might ask you to login to your cashback. Do that and you should be set. Don't worry if you don't see the cashback refund immediately. It should show up in a day or two. I received an email with my reward 10 minutes after.

The email looked like this:

Hello, Barry!

Thanks for searching, shopping and saving with Microsoft Live Search cashback - The Search That Pays You Back!

From your recent purchases, you have earned cashback savings!

To view the details for this purchase or your other Live Search cashback transactions, sign into your Live Search cashback account. The transaction will be listed as pending for 60 day(s). Your cashback savings will be paid to the PayPal account that you used to make the purchase after a 60 day(s) pending period.

You received $48.00 from your eBay purchase on 11/25/2008:



For more information about Live Search cashback, see our FAQ page or Contact Us.

Thanks,
The Live Search cashback team

Soon later, you should see it show up in your CashBack account. I know several people who use this often and it is really a great way to save some of your hard earned money in these tough times.

Now, I know people who take advantage of this platform. I won't discuss those details, but most of you can figure out how to make some money off this Cashback system. If not, maybe I'll tell you via Twitter only, not via email, but you need to follow me on Twitter and @rustybrick me and Ill reply that way, if I see it.

Hope this helps a few people and if it helps Microsoft, great!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable 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: November 25, 2008"

Rumor has it -- as reported on Search Engine Land and Liveside -- that Microsoft is rebranding its search under the name kumo.com. According to the reports, kumo.com is owned by Microsoft and points to search.live.com nameservers. It also provides Microsoft employees with an internal site.

Whether or not it's true is only speculation at this point. However, sentiment is pretty heavily expressed against Microsoft taking this approach.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld members are reporting that Google is being stricter in accepting new publishers for Google AdSense. Your site must adhere to specific guidelines to be included. Rejection reasons include not owning the TLD of the site you are applying for Google AdSense, an active domain (6+ months of age), including personal information that is accurate, and applying from a website with original content.

Good news? Absolutely. Nobody wants to see AdSense on domains that have poor quality. But some suggest that Google should review all sites with AdSense -- yes, manually. Of course, that won't necessarily cure all issues, because I could be approved on mysite.com and still publish my ads to myothersite.com, but it can help.

In any event, most advertisers are happy that Google is finally being a little more stringent about the quality and age of the sites that advertisements are being pushed out to.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

At the new Google Groups, even more wholesome good tips are being offered, this time from users to users.

Today's subject is on Location Targeting. Using Location Targeting, advertisers can take advantage of their audience based on the location they are searching from.

Two tips are being offered:

One suggests that you take advantage of IP-based targeting. Google is able to figure out where users are searching from by looking at the users' IP addresses. A more detailed location targeting tutorial is referenced.

Additionally, you can achieve location targeting by including the location you wish to target in the keyword. Google can figure out the location due to query parsing. However, if you utilize this, it takes priority over IP targeting. Also, be liberal - don't include location targeting and location based keywords (since that's overkill).

You're also able to use location targeting for ads on the content network and Google uses the IP address to target. Finally, it's noted that local ads are not preferred -- you're still competing with other AdWords advertisers for the same location.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Less than a week ago, Google announced that Google Sync is now available for BlackBerry users. BlackBerry users rejoiced to join the family of phones supported for syncing up contacts, calendars and so on, on their BlackBerries. Other phone devices supported in the past include Android, iPhone, Motorola, Nokia phone, Nokia S60 phone, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Windows Mobile.

But since the day they released in, many BlackBerry users find themself not able to get a full sync. A Google Help thread has tons of complaints from a wide range of BlackBerry users who are unable to fully sync between Google and their BlackBerries.

Googler, Alden, has asked users with issues to post in the thread the BlackBerry model, whether you are upgrading Sync or using it for the first time and roughly how many contacts you are trying to Sync.

There seems to be no resolution for many BlackBerry users as of yet.

Forum discussion at Google Help.

The Cuil search engine has been around for a few months, and now that the momentum has died, we've taken the liberty to look at the usage statistics to see how it is faring.

At High Rankings Forum, most individuals forgot about it (and even forgot how to spell it). Some think it's a dead fish in the water; Jill Whalen, however, suggests that Cuil will relaunch eventually once they address the issues that were brought up during the shoddy launch of the service. (Personally, I think Cuil is out of their window to launch in such a fashion; they missed the ball.)

We'll see. I think Cuil is forever forgotten, and I think I'm not alone.

Here's Alexa's usage statistics:

And Quantcast:

And check out the dying Google trends:

What do you think? Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

I have seen two smallish thread, relative to a normal Google update thread, that discusses changes in the Google search results. A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has discussion around some changes being noticed in Google.

Now, typically these threads are much larger. So I was a bit hesitant to post this information. In fact, I would not be surprised if this was just a quick blurb that went away.

This does come soon after the Yahoo November update this past Friday. The last Google update reported was in early November and turned out to be a bug in the search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There are bugs and there are oversights that can be a pain in the neck for users. But I think this oversight in the Google Maps for Mobile client that runs on LG Incite by AT&T tops them all.

Benjamin Stephens documented the issue on a video, you have to watch this:

It is almost comical.

Googler, Tom thanked Benjamin for such a descriptive bug report in Google Groups. He said he "forwarded this to the team." I hope this gets fixed soon, it is just too funny.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I've been in the "SEO industry" for a long time, relative to the industry. Over time, the industry and the perception both externally and internally, has changed. I guess that happens with all industries, but quicker in more evolving and newer industries, like SEO. A few years back, I doubt many people would consider "link building companies" as being on the side of "black hat" techniques. So when has that shift been declared?

Jim's WeBuildPages company is trying to change their name from a "link building" company to a "internet marketing" company. In Jim's most recent post, he wrote that one of the most visible link building companies has stopped buying links. Yes, a link building company has stopped buying links. Do I believe it? I think so. Of course, a paid link is not always black and white. So, in order for Jim to change the perception of his company, he must of felt, let's take the extreme alternative and say, we no longer buy links. If we no longer buy links, then we must not be a link building company anymore.

If you want to make the argument that link building companies are not on the "black hat" side of things, then fine. But as Jim said in his post, "I don’t want to risk my business’ future by buying links…and if you’re worried about your site’s future, and you’re buying links, you might want to think twice." Google has come out against paid links and artificial links, with penalties. So it is hard to say that today, a link buy is not something more on the dark side of things, even if you don't believe it or I don't believe it.

But why and when did this happen? Clearly a milestone is when Danny posted Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google on October 7, 2007. If that wasn't enough, on November 12th, the first penalties hit sites selling links, including this one. And the penalties continued. So by then, I would think it was clear, link building companies might have shifted over to the dark side.

Before October 7th, 2007 - a link building company, to me and many others - would have been considered white hat. But that has changed, changed with the nofollow attribute in 2005, changed with the October 7th announcement and changed with the real penalties coming down.

Looking back, I just find it interesting it has come to this. We Build Pages, one of the most well known link building companies decides to send out a press release that they are no longer building links. They hire top names in the industry to blog, make widgets, and get social, but do you hear of We Build Pages letting employees go? They can be retraining all their "link ninjas" in the art of getting non-paid links. But how? Link exchanges don't work, three-way links aren't as good, you can't buy links anymore - are you training them in content development. Jim said they are still going to be getting links, but they won't be buying them. It just seems very odd to me.

Some are as skeptical as I am at the Sphinn thread. Don't get me wrong, I really like the folks at We Build Pages, really. But something just doesn't seem right. I hope this transition works for them and it is sad to see it come to this, on some level.

When did it all come to this?

Also read SEO Book and SEOish (SEOish works for Jim).

Forum discussion 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: November 24, 2008"

It's been confirmed by Microsoft: MSN Groups is closing on February 21, 2009. Microsoft, in turn, will be moving over to Multiply for all of its community needs. As for why Microsoft has opted to close its own service, their reasoning is simple: they want to provide the best technology and offerings. Microsoft believes that by using Multiply this will happen.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

At Search Engine Watch Forums, Discovery has a gripe.

He has noticed that the top performing keywords on Yahoo Search Marketing are no longer top-performing. Yahoo is invalidating them and making them inactive due to minimum bid requirements. He wonders why Yahoo is wasting its time doing this at all:

Why let bids go inactive at all? What does it hurt to just let them hang around at the 16th position until the marketplace shifts back and puts them on the top 10 again?

Further, he wants to know how Yahoo is determining that minimum bid and finds that Yahoo may be falling further than it should be.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Do you have any insights for Discovery and other Yahoo Search Marketing Advertisers who are also affected? And does Yahoo have any comment?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Saad Kamal notes on his blog that Google has released a blogger's best practices guide in the Webmasters/Site owners help forum. The ideas behind the blogger's guide are pretty self-explanatory: write great content often. Make sure it's discoverable. And finally, add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools for more insights.

Of course, this is basic information, but as many note, it's a good refresher in case we have our minds stuck in the advanced details and nuances of optimization.

So on behalf of a bunch of bloggers out there, thanks, Google!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread has a webmaster asking if it helps for him to rotate content on his site. He believes it might help for three reasons:

1. Revised content will encourage GoogleBot to recrawl his pages more often.
2. Revised content makes the pages look newer, which may help improve rankings.
3. It can't hurt to do, so why not.

Are any of these reasons a valid reason to rotate content on a page? Nope. You really need to think if rotating content on a page refresh will help or hurt your conversions. GoogleBot is often smart enough to tell how much of the page's true content is changing versus a snippet of weather data, testimonials or so on.

Googler, JohnMu, said "the use of random testimonials most likely won't make or break your site." John then goes on to explain how certain ways this guy's site was built can be improved. But that doesn't touch on the heart of the question.

We discussed this twice before. Most recently in May 2007 with Does Rotating Content Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings? and a while back in September 2004 with Dynamic Content on Static URLs - Rotation of Content.

The potential to confuse your end user by not showing content on a refresh can be huge. So knowing what to rotate on refresh is very important.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I spotted two thread this month discussing how little Microsoft is indexing their sites but how often Microsoft's bot, MSNbot, is crawling their sites.

A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has details of the newish behavior from MSNbot. BillyS at WebmasterWorld explains:

I was just looking through my logs and noticed that msnbot was crawling our site pretty hard, grabbing about 10% of the site in the last half hour or so.

I just checked the site: command on Live and we've only got about 100 pages in their index now - which is fewer than the number of pages mentioned above.

Billy, as others, wonder if they should just block MSNBot all together, since they feel the traffic they received from Live Search is not worth the stress the bot puts on the server when they crawl.

Let's do some comparisons of Google versus Live Search in site command counts:

• site:www.seroundtable.com - Google 12,800 vs. Live Search 268
• site:www.google.com - Google 1,680,000 vs. Live Search 330
• site:www.flickr.com - Google 71,000,000 vs. Live Search 268
• site:www.webmasterworld.com - Google 446,000 vs. Live Search 357

So either I am doing something wrong or Live Search's site command is wrong, or Live Search forgot how to index pages?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Microsoft sent me a response to this post, which I felt would be great to add.

For webmasters, It is problematic to use the “site:” operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query.

You posed the question about whether users should block MSNbot because traffic from the bot is not worth the stress on your servers. Obviously, we would prefer that customers not block MSNbot, rather customers who are concerned with stress from Live Search crawls should add the crawl-delay parameter to their robots.txt file. This can help reduce the load on your servers and still be a part of the Live Search results. Webmasters can refer to the MSNBot support page for more information on crawl-delay.

The Yahoo Search blog announced there would be an update over the weekend at Yahoo Search. The thing is, there are currently no comments at that Yahoo blog post on the update nor do I see many threads discussing any update at Yahoo.

We do have a WebmasterWorld thread talking about the announcement. Maybe one or two are noticing some slight changes in the Yahoo search results. Maybe Yahoo is updating and maybe SEOs have gotten to the point where they don't care? I hope not.

One member said that for his niche, Yahoo stopping mimicking the Google results. He labeled the update, the "Divorce from Google" update. This is what he said:

It seems they've dropped many of the Google manipulations they started in July especially in my areas. Wise decision on Yahoo's part. Let the good times roll. Commerce sites are coming back.

The last Yahoo update we reported was in mid-October and it didn't show up until a couple of days after the announcement. This November announcement was made on Friday, but still very little reaction.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In this week's recap, Yang steps down from Yahoo. Google launches SearchWiki. What are Google search results like. Google launches new keyword tool. Google doesn't cap AdSense. AdWords tests new interface. Yahoo lets you block more domains. Google splashes ads every where. Yelp gets some nasty forum discussion. Text Link Ads launches inLinks and link debate starts again. Google Sitelinks now appearing on sub domains. Videos are rocking the search results. Check out Google's voice enabled iPhone search app.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Jerry Does What Is Best For Yahoo By Stepping Down From CEO Role
• I'm Surprised Google Made SearchWiki The Default, Really
• Mid-November Google Search Update
• Google Gives Us Search Based Keyword Tool & Updates Keyword Data in Other Tools
• Google Promises They Don't Cap AdSense Earnings
• Publishers' Top Requests to Google AdSense Are...
• Google AdWords Tests Out New Interface
• Yahoo Search Marketing Now Lets You Block 500 Domains
• Google Ads Now In Images, YouTube, Finance & News
• Is Yelp.com Paying for Positive Comments?
• Text Link Ads New Product, InLinks, Causes New Link Debate Brawl
• Google Now Showing Sitelinks for Some Sub-Directories
• Do You Need Video Content to Compete in Google Today?
• Video: Google Launches Mobile iPhone Voice Application

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

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: November 21, 2008"

Happy week before Thanksgiving! What are YOU doing next Friday? (Chances are, I'll be here blogging!) This week, we saw the biggest news of the month (or so I think), and that's where I'm going to start.

Jerry Yang, Ex-CEO of Yahoo
Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang is stepping down. While he's a really nice guy, I'm sure they say, there has been sentiment that Yang was not a suitable candidate to be running the million- (billion?)- dollar company. Some say that Yang's problem was the fact that he was too attached to the company, and that probably led to the fact that Yahoo didn't innovate as much (to avoid fearful change, perhaps?). I don't know. Meanwhile, there's no turning back on a Yahoo-Microsoft deal (thanks Avi) -- it's just too late for Yahoo. Who will be the next CEO? We'll let you know when we find out.

Google's SearchWiki: Really?
Google announced a new SearchWiki program that lets visitors rearrange their search results as long as they're signed in. It's completely personalized, but it's also the default. Even I don't know what to do with this. Do you think the average user would? According to the poll we're hosting, 74% say NO. So--why make this default? Seriously?

Google Results Going Berserk Again
There's a November Google Search Update in our midst, with observations of a universal search yo-yo effect, emphasis on the H2 and metatags, cache cross-ups, and errors in Google's Webmaster Tools. What observations have you made?

Google's Search-Based Keyword Tool Launched
To make Google more of a profit, they've launched the Search Based Keyword Tool, which has the goal to let you know which keywords your customers are searching for on your site and thus which to advertise on. The result? A positive ROI, perhaps.

Google AdSense Publishers Requests
What would you want as an active Google AdSense publisher? A thread is collecting the the new Google AdWords interface? You can sign up or check the screenshots.

Yahoo Search Marketing: 500 Domains Blocked!
You can now block 500 domains on Yahoo Search Marketing, and people are thrilled. The question now is -- when is Google going to follow suit? (This is a good question for Yahoo folks, that's for sure!)

Google Ads EVERYWHERE
I had a dream last night and there was a Google ad in it the entire time. Okay, maybe not, but perhaps we're going to see more ads given Google's investment in advertising everywhere, including most recently in Google Finance. Hey, it's not a bad thing to add ads wherever people are looking. I just am waiting for the day when an ad shows up and I'm not looking.

Yelling about Yelp
I seemed to have started quite a ruckus when I regurgitated forum sentiment about Yelp -- that it's paying for positive comments (or rather, hiring telemarketers to make that claim) after summarizing what people thought and then reviewing relevant newspaper articles to reflect that sentiment. Someone from Yelp wanted to speak to me on the phone to clarify their stance. It's all and good, but when other people are making the statements that I merely am repeating, I'm a bit confused if Yelp should be reaching out to press people or to the people who feel they have been slighted. Further, if you don't know this by now, the Search Engine Roundtable bloggers barely put their personal opinions into posts; we're simply here to tell you what other people are saying on forums around the Internets as it relates to search marketing. Yeah. Now you know.

Link Debate Brawl over Text Link Ads Inlinks Program
Earlier this week, Text Link Ads launched inlinks.com, a "new" textual advertising program. To be honest, it's not new at all; inlinks have been around for perhaps 2 years now from said company. I can attest to the fact that Google knows about them also. Meanwhile, the fact that there's a claim that the FTC doesn't endorse this activity is causing a debate, but I repeat that this isn't news.

Have You Noticed Subdirectory Sitelinks?
Google is apparently showing sitelinks for subdirectories, which is a welcome change for a guy who runs his website off /blog.

You Compete Better with Video
Given that we have universal search, Google loves varied content. That's why it's great to integrate video into your site so that those results show up in the SERPs. Seriously -- video isn't hard to do. Barry's doing one on Sunday, just like old times.

iPhone Voice Activated App from Google
Google has released an iPhone voice activated application and Barry has strutted his stuff showing how it works. In a way, I want an iPhone, but in a way, I'm willing to wait until Apple considers the fact that not everyone wants AT&T. Thanks and have a nice day. :)

On the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Blog (and even in a second post), Senior Product Manager Skip Chilcott writes that link exchanges are a "popular way to generate more links." Blogger Saad Kamal has a problem with this. Citing several guidelines from Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft itself, it's apparent that link exchanges to artificially inflate rankings is frowned upon.

But Saad Kamal goes further to say it's black hat SEO. Really? The idea that it's "black hat" might be a stretch; link exchanges themselves are sketchy. Most would consider black hat SEO to be a lot worse than a simple link exchange that thousands of webmasters do daily. I'm sure they'd argue that black hat SEO is a practice that only a fraction of webmasters even knows about and thus employs.

But while being equated with black hat endorsements, Danny Sullivan considers this "embarrassing" because the Microsoft Office Live team doesn't seem to be on the same page as the Microsoft Search team. I guess it's hard when Microsoft's initial project and core goal isn't search whereas a company like Google or Yahoo emerged out of their search services. In the latter case, the idea of search appears to preside over the entire company.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A new Google AdWords interface may be coming to an account near you. At Search Engine Land, Barry provides screenshots of this greener interface that looks like it's sporting a new green type of Gmail theme.

Here are some screens:

If you want to be considered as a test user, you should read Google's blog post announcing the test interface and sign up with the instructions.

Whatcha think?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Want some industry information about getting the most of your Google AdWords budget? Check out the Google Optimization Center, which gives you some great strategies depending on the type of industry you're in. PDF files are offered in each individual sector. Areas covered include automotive, education, health care, retail, travel, technology, local, finance, and business and industrial markets.

AdWordsPro Sarah explains how these documents can be used.

[I]f you run a travel site, you could download the travel optimization PDF for tips on ways to increase the ROI on your top trips.

What else can you get out of this? You'll know when to better target your campaigns (as Sarah says, there's no "one size fits all" method for advertising) and how to do it.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

The blogosphere is buzzing about Google's announcement that they have made Google SearchWiki the default for users who are signed into Google while searching.

What this means is that users will see features to promote, delete and comment on search results. This is advanced searcher stuff. I am really a bit surprised Google pushed this to every Google account user as the default. Why? (1) As Arrington said, it wasn't broken originally - well, some would disagree with that. (2) It is confusing for the average searcher, no?

Do you think the average searcher is ready for it? Take the poll directly below this line:

Okay, so some basics that might not be clear to every reader of this site:

• This only changes your search results, no one elses
• You must be signed in to use it
• You can change the results back

For SEOs, will this impact the future of search? Well, yes and no. Clearly, people can now promote and remove sites, so you may benefit or not from that. But will Google use this data to improve their overall algorithms? I would suspect so, on some level. But with any Wiki-like system, it can be spammed, so I doubt Google will rely on this data too much.

That being said, let's get our SEO and promote me higher. There is this other Barry Schwartz who uses Barry Schwartz in his title tag. He wrote some books to play with people's heads. He is much older. He spoke at Google. He is much cooler. But I am in the SEO crowd, so I should rank #1. No?

Here is the current default results for barry schwartz in Google:

Now, go down to my personal blog, CartoonBarry.com and promote it.

It will then pop up this window, say "yes."

It then should put my blog at the top for you:

Click on the comment bubble on the right of the result and leave me a witty comment:

Thank you!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google Maps Guide Tom replied to a Google Groups thread requesting Google to bridge the data between My Maps and Google Mobile Maps.

Typically, a Google representative would say, thank you for your feedback and leave it at that. But Tom said, "keep checking back for updates!" That implies to me that this feature might be coming in the next release.

So soon, if you save maps on My Maps, then you might be able to take them with you on your Mobile device.

As an FYI, the new iPhone 2.2 update has new map features such as street views, new pin placements, walking and transit directions and more.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

For those Google AdWords API developers, you should be aware that currently any requests sent over the SOAP protocol to the API Sandbox will return an error.

A Google Groups thread has one developer complaining and an official Google representative confirming the issue. Jeff Posnick from the AdWords API Team said:

I can confirm that the Sandbox is returning "internal error" SOAP faults for all requests right now. I've let the engineering team know and they're investigating the root cause.

Typically, sandbox errors are not fixed as quickly as production errors. But since the API is returning errors for all SOAP requests, I have a feeling this will be fixed faster than an normal sandbox bug.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Sam from OhNuts informed me that Google is having some major issues with Google Base feeds. Google Base feeds are used to send data from your site to Google Product Search, amongst other places.

A Google Groups announcement thread says the issue will slow down the normal time it takes for your updates to be seen on Google Base and Google Product Search results. There is nothing a webmaster can do here but wait for Google to fix the issue. So do not bother resubmitting your feed, cause it won't help.

Google did fix the processing delay for smaller feeds, but feeds that are larger than 1 MB are still affected. The Google Base Guy, the official Google representative, said:

Thanks again for your patience and I will get back to you with more updates.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: On December 1st, Google has fixed the issue completely.

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: November 20, 2008"

Ever wonder what a link on Google's homepage would bring in terms of traffic? Let's take this G1 link:

The Compete blog gives some detail into the number of clicks that link had while it was extremely visible on Google.com.

First, some background. Google planned on running this between the 22nd and 29th of October. It was for Google's new phone with T-Mobile. What's was the value of the traffic to T-Mobile? Well, the visibility of the link did some incredible things:

* More than 800,000 unique visitors went to that page.
* In one day, more than 233,000 unique visitors were registered.

That's impressive. Too bad it didn't hit 1 million, but 800,000 in 7 days is pretty impressiveis

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Numerous (10) Google Maps users are complaining that they are reliant upon Google Maps but the "Saved Locations" is empty even though some have saved 50 locations or so. Addresses are hard to remember by the human mind, so why is Google forgetting them too?

Fortunately, not all locations are lost. After the problem was reported by 10 different individuals, Maps Guide Mike jumped in on the thread, and as of early this morning, said that Google is working on a fix. Therefore, if you're having the problem too, hang on tight; Google is working on it. If all else fails, you can always join the forum discussion at Google Groups.

As a side note, a number of users relying on Google Maps Mobile are having a problem accepting the license agreement. What does this mean for them? They can't use the application. A relevant discussion is ongoing at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread is gathering the top 5 publisher requests to be shared with Google's AdSenseAdvisor. Forum member participation is building up, with the following requests being made thus far:

1. Ability to block more than 200 sites in the Competitive Ad Filter
2. Ability to block by keyword in domain name. The example used is that a publisher wants to block spammydomain.com and spammydomain.net -- but wants to use "spammydomain" instead of having to use up 2 slots (see #1) for the filter.
3. More advertising channels.
4. A minimum CPC option.
5. Ability to enhance blocking by phrases on the landing page
6. Ability to block ads by keyword
7. Implementation of a referral program where commissions can be granted.
8. Make the AdSense Manager easier to use

Is that all? Nope. There are more requests. A few of these requests have even been echoed by more than one publisher.

What are your topmost priorities for the Google AdSense team to consider in the upcoming future? Join the forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Let's say you've geotargeted your Google AdWords ad for Florida. You'd be alarmed if you saw that the ad was being run in Oslo, Norway, wouldn't you?

I suppose I would be.

Is this a problem with Google? Well, in a way, it could be. AdWordsPro Sarah explains what could be happening if the geotargeting seems to be off as "query parsing [which] helps people who reside outside your targeted region but are interested in your product/service in your targeted region." To illustrate this phenomenon, she says that if you're targeting an ad with the keywords "buy surfboard" to Florida, and a guy from Oslo searches "buy surfboard florida," query parsing would come into play. After all, they're looking to find out ads specific to another region, and they can't do that with geotargeting blocking out Oslo from this specific query.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

We have already written our Google November report but when I see a spike in conversation about Google Search changes, I try to keep you informed, even if it is not a new month.

So as you know, we covered the Google November changes and we saw a scary change at Google that was a mistake. That being said, here is what seems to be new at Google.

• Some are noticing the universal search yo-yo effect or at least symptoms of that issue.
• Some are saying Google is now giving more weight to the meta description and H2 tags on your page.
• The site command, as some report, is showing higher number of pages then they have in the past - this comes after a recent report of pages dropping out of Google but some are reporting the exact opposite.
• Some are noticing new reports of Google cache cross-ups.
• Others are noticing an increase in 404 errors in webmaster tools.

Those are some of the non-validated discussions going on about Google in mid-November.

There is also a new, pretty well-organized, thread on these changes at HighRankings Forums.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums and continued at webmasterWorld.

I often try to stay away from talking about all these heated link debates, but sometimes, the discussion around these debates are so important to our industry, that I find myself having no other choice to write about them. That being said, Text Link Ads launched a new product named InLinks, which is being coined around the web as being extremely hard to detect as a form of link buying. So not are they only a good source of advertising, but one might argue they can be extremely valuable in terms of possibly improving one's ranking in search engines.

So why am I torn about writing about this topic? A few reasons:

1. Link buying is a very controversial topic and people get really heated about discussing it.
2. Patrick Gavin, the face behind the product, is a really nice guy - if you get to know him
3. Google hates, I mean, hates this form of advertising
4. Text Link Ads is not only a long time advertiser of this site, but also a client of my company

So when the news came out, several blogs picked it up and ran with it. The most noted blog to cover it is TechCrunch, who wrote a post and then later updated to include Google's Matt Cutts comment. Matt said, in short, that these types of links are against Google's terms of service and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not condone such activity. That is all we needed to start a huge debate on the topic of Google standing up so strongly against this product.

ShoeMoney's Does Google Really Want To Go Down This FTC Route was featured on Sphinn, where Jeremy shows his displeasure with Matt using the FTC claim. Jeremy calls the FTC document just a "suggestion" and then goes on to point fingers at Google's AdSense and AdLinks product as "engaging in some of the most deceptive advertising methods" he has ever seen. Matt replied to Jeremy saying, "the FTC has more than the power of suggestion." Matt then goes on to imply that Google should have no issues finding these links and uprooting them.

Now, you as the SEO or advertiser need to decide for yourself if you want to go this route. Most SEOs I know are very into trial and error.

There is the beginning of discussion at the Sphinn thread, but honestly, most the blogs own the discussion right now.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Many Google Webmaster Tools users are complaining about not being able to see their "Top Search Queries" report for a week's worth of time. If you go to Google Webmaster Tools, then go to Statistics, and then click on Top Search Queries, you will see an error that reads, "Data is not available at this time." Here is a screen capture:

Do note that Google is aware of this issue and hopes to have it resolved in a few days. Googler, JohnMu, "stickied" a Google Groups thread and said:

We're aware of this problem and working on resolving it.

I was hoping it would have been resolved for everyone already, but it looks like it might be a few more days until the data is available for all sites.

Thanks for your patience!

So just give it a bit more time.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and WebmasterWorld.

Since we have concluded video is important for your overall search efforts, I figured I follow up about a recent thread I spotted at Google Groups about the question on if Google supports MRSS as a format for Video Sitemaps.

The quick answer is yes, but it is not so clear from their documentation. MRSS, which is Media RSS, is one of the two formats Google seems to accept. I submitted an MRSS feed as a test and it did realize and label the feed as MRSS, but my feed did have some errors.

Googler, JohnMu, explained in the thread:

Yes, we do support mRSS for video Sitemaps. It's not explicitly mentioned, which may cause some confusion (we'll fix that :-) - thanks for bringing it up).

What you can do is the following: Just submit your mRSS file as a normal Video Sitemap in Webmaster Tools. Once we start processing it, you should see the mRSS information in the Sitemaps information page in Webmaster Tools to confirm that we're processing it correctly.

So if you have a video sitemap in MRSS format that you already publish, it might be worth trying to submit that to Google as well.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: November 19, 2008"

A Google Groups thread asks if Google has made Google Webmaster Tools iPhone friendly? In other words, did Google make a version of Google Webmaster Tools optimized to render well on an iPhone? The answer is, kind of - yes.

You can go to Google Webmaster Tools, click on Tools and then Gadgets and add the iGoogle gadgets to your iGoogle front page. Once you add that, those reports should be available in an iPhone friendly format on igoogle.com.

I tested it out and here are some screen captures:

(1) Crawl error reports:

(2) External link report and some of the Sitelinks data:

Clicking on any of the hyper links takes you into Google Webmaster Tools, but the interface is not optimized for an iPhone.

This leaves open a great opportunity for someone to build an Apple iPhone App, using Google Webmaster Tool's API, so you can interact with the data with greater flexibility on your iPhone.

We hope to make this site more iPhone friendly in the near future. But we are hand picking some pages on our RustyBrick site, specifically rustybrick.com/iphone to have an iPhone optimized version. Right now, we redirect users with an iPhone user agent to a special version of the page, but honestly, I want to use a style sheet and leave the URL the same.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google has launched a new tool called the Search-Based Keyword Tool which lets you know which keywords your customers are searching for and which you should advertise with based on your site's content. From an interview with Barry and Google at Search Engine Land, the goal of this tool is to "give advertisers a look at keywords that they are currently not advertising for that might bring in a positive ROI."

A screenshot of the tool is here:

Looks pretty impressive -- a lot of good information is provided. Now is this tool linked from any existing Google property or only a bunch of blog posts?

Also, it seems that Google has also updated the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. One member notices that the October 2008 number for searches has been updated. Perhaps this is related (or not) to the launch of the new tool.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld, and DigitalPoint Forums.

This is pretty awesome stuff for history photo enthusiasts. Google has shared great information that it is now hosting a never-seen-before LIFE photo archive. The LIFE photo archive photographs date back to the 1750s!

Stunning? Absolutely. And fascinating, too. One forum member even questions whether some of the photographs themselves are legit: "does a full frontal of a 1-2 year old boy qualify as kiddie pic? Is it legal to publish that online?" I suppose it's art and acceptable.

The next question is whether Google (or LIFE, I suppose) will give people rights to distribute these photos. I'm sure they can be used in a lot of great articles.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In the Official Google Blog, Nick Fox points out that Google is rolling out "ads in new places." These locations include:

• Image ads in Google Image Search (SERoundtable coverage and a foreshadowing post)
• Sponsored videos on YouTube (SERoundtable coverage)
• Text ads on Google Finance, which was rolled out on Monday. Search Engine Watch Forums member abbottsys calls this a "financially smart" move, saying:

  If you do a stock quote on a company the AdWords ads that display are not finance, they are for the industry sector of the company. In other words, AdWords knows what industry you're in based just on your trading symbol, and displays appropriate ads.

• Google will also be rolling out ads on news refinements in the actual search engine, so that if you click on a news link, there will be text ads nearby.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are only so many results on a search page. You do a search at Google, you typically get about ten results. Those results are either web pages, videos, news results, blog posts, images and so on. Video results seem to be the most growing result vertical on the page. That being said, the question coming up at WebmasterWorld is, do we need videos to compete in the future of Google's search results?

Excellent question. Personally, I think the answer is yes. I think currently, the best place to put videos are on YouTube. Clearly, YouTube videos will not drive direct traffic to your site, but you can add links from the video description to your pages and you can embed branding overlays in the videos to hopefully direct traffic to your site. Why YouTube if the direct traffic doesn't land on your site? Simply because those YouTube video rank better than videos hosted on your site or on other third party video sharing sites.

The bottom line is that videos are growing and that just means more and more videos will be finding their way into the search results. If a video takes up one of the ten results, then that is one less result for a web page. So don't you think you should try to get your video to show up in those results?

Amit had a timely post today, showing video results, extreme mode. Just take a look over there and see how shocking those results are.

As Tedster said in his post at WebmasterWorld:

So many people find reading difficult - especially online but even otherwise - that I'm pretty sure we'll see a push to more video results in the near future. As long as the end users click and watch, it will keep increasing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We discussed the Google AdWords policy on a max URL character space of 35 in the past. They recently started enforcing this rule back in June of this year.

A new Google Groups thread has an issue where on advertiser needs to have a display URL that is longer than 35 characters. So what can he/she do? AdWordsPro Sarah says that you can submit an exception.

In short, make your display URL 35 characters, and ask for an exception to allow the display URL not match your real URL. Sarah explained:

We can grant exceptions for URLs that are over the 35 character limit. I suggest you modify your URL to something like GreenSolar-Wind-Hydrogen-Energy.com and then, when you submit the ad, ask for an exception request (see links below). If you explain that your URL is over the 35 character limit, our policy team can help manually approve your ad to run.

You can submit an exception request to Google over here and to learn more about exceptions, see here.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: November 18, 2008"

Guess what, iPhone owners? The Google Mobile Blog has some great news for you. Google has released an iPhone application with voice recognition that will return searches formatted for your phone. This eliminates the need for you to have to type any queries.

Barry has illustrated how this works:

Cool, isn't it? Most people do think so. One defines this move as "cutting edge technology," though I'd have to attribute that to Apple's superior iPhone rather than Google. Jill Whalen is looking for an iPhone application that does voice recognition dialing; you'd think Google would have thought of that!

All in all, the application has been very well-received.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

AdWordsPro Sarah is not done giving Google AdWords subscribers great tips. In yesterday's tip #8 on Google Groups, Sarah tells us about how to take advantage of negative keywords.

She explains that if you are using a negative keyword like -fast blue, any keyword iteration that utilizes both words will not show up, including terms like "blue fast". Essentially, consider an "AND" operation. Therefore, if you use a key phrase like "fast car mercedes," and there's no mention of "blue," an ad will show. But with the inclusion of "fast car mercedes blue," the ad will not show because both terms are included in the negative keyword.

On the other hand, if you had a negative keyword like "-fast blue", which is a negative phrase match, you won't get ads that show "fast blue" in the actual keyword list. But if you had an ad like "fast green blue", it would show up.

Sarah goes through examples for negative exact match also.

Understanding negative keywords and how they are applied in different scenarios should help you get an understanding of how to maximize your campaign and make sure to generate the most targeted impressions.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Yelp.com, the review site, is reported to have been engaging in some shady activity with business owners. In one example quoted by the linked article, a business owner was told by telemarketers that if she paid $300, reviews can be rearranged where the negative reviews would be essentially placed "below the fold." However, Yelp doesn't actually allow that.

At Cre8asite Forums, it's suspected that Yelp.com's employees may even have a hand in writing bad reviews for local businesses to encourage them to purchase into the paid program. If this is true, that would make for a pretty shady operation, don't you think?

In fact, if telemarkers engage in a practice that Yelp obviously approves of (they're reading from a script, after all) and Yelp gets a negative review by business owners for actually engaging in these shady operations, is it legitimate for Yelp to remove those negative reviews? In another article, a business owner states that her negative review about Yelp itself was removed by Yelp.com. (But wait, she can't remove her own negative reviews, so why doesn't it work both ways?)

Is this practice extortion? Is Yelp.com legit? Is it time for a new company to take over and do it better and ethically without greed of money being on the mind?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Update: We received an update from Yelp saying that reviews are purely algorithmic and that only one positive review can be emphasized. Reviews can come down if the person writing the review closed his/her account or the account was terminated due to violations. A third reason why reviews would be hidden is due to suspect behavior; the review is removed from the actual business but not from the reviewer's profile page.

Every day that goes by, I become a bigger fan of setting up an XML Sitemap file for Google and the other search engines to chew on. I think Sitemap files are important for sites to take full advantage of being indexed in Google. Clearly, submitting a Sitemap file is just one small step you need to do to enjoy ranking well in Google. You can often submit a sitemap file and Google won't index all your pages. We discussed this topic yesterday with My Pages Are Dropping Out of Google: What Do I Do?

What I find interesting is not only does a Sitemap help you tell Google about your pages, it also gives Google another document to index and include in their search results. Yes, Google may index your XML sitemap file and rank it in the search results. For example, a search on inurl:sitemap.xml returns Google's XML Sitemap towards the top of the search results for me:

That being said, hundreds of Sitemap files are indexed and in the search results. They typically only come up for very specific searches, that likely won't impact the normal searcher.

Two Google Group threads are discussing this. One, JohnMu of Google replied to, saying:

It does look like we have some of your Sitemap files indexed. It's possible that there is a link to them somewhere (or perhaps to the Sitemaps Index file). At any rate, I wouldn't worry about this since these are generally not URLs that will come up in the search results, so apart from people like you who look at the details, nobody will really be seeing them.

If you really don't want them to show up in the Google results, you have a way out. Here is how according to JohnMu:

If you do want to have them removed from the index, you could have your server send a "x-robots-tag" HTTP header tag with the contents of the file. Since they all appear to be originating from a single script, I imagine adding this would be fairly easy. For more information on the "x-robots-tag", please see our blog post.

Is Google indexing your Sitemap file? Do you care?

Forum discussion at Google Group.

Google Maps for Mobile has become an essential tool for maybe mobile warriors. I have spotted a Google Groups thread that asks Google if they would be willing to allow users to download maps to the application and then use those maps while being offline or not connected to the Internet.

This comes in handy when you:

1. Don't have a data plan but have wifi
2. Your internet connection is in a dead zone
3. When you are on an airplane with airplane mode on

Google Maps Tom, an official Google Maps representative has almost confirmed Google is working on it. He said:

There have been a number of posts in this group specifically requesting this functionality, and we're working to meet your needs - but for now, Google Maps for mobile requires a data connection for use.

How soon? Who knows, but it does seem like Google is working on this.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

We have questioned if Google limits how much an AdSense publisher can earn in the past. We even ran a poll where the majority of publishers felt Google did not have a glass ceiling for AdSense earnings.

Now, a WebmasterWorld thread pulls out a quote from the new AdSenseAdvisor that Google does not cap publishers. Let me quote you:

I 100% guarantee that there are no earnings caps on AdSense accounts. I will swear it on a big stack of Google search results. No earnings caps.

That is believable to me. Do you believe it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Jerry Yang, from what I hear about him, is a kind, gentle, caring and giving person. To see the news that he is stepping down form the CEO role, for the betterment of the company, is sad but yet necessary. It is sad, cause he is a good guy, but if it was anyone else, I don't think I would be upset about it. Don't get me wrong, Yahoo needs a new CEO to step in and get the company back on track.

Between all the back and forth with Microsoft and Google, all leading to failure, it is a necessary step. Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as CEO in June 2007.

I like Mack's take at the WebmasterWorld thread, where he said, "I think Jerry's main problem was he was to attatched. In business you realy need to think with the head, not the heart. Yahoo! was clearly his "baby"."

Overall, I don't think anyone is surprised. Most wonder what took so long and many are not too confident about Yahoo's future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Sphinn 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: November 17, 2008"

Today, gabs spotted a new feature in Google.co.uk that lets you skip through the splash screen of sites. Using this query, you can see a similar result to this:

Search Engine Land spotted this in June, and it looks like Google isn't done testing this out yet. Further, the "Skip Intro" link isn't very visible, so it'd be interesting to note how many people actually have seen this but never actually clicked on it (probably because they overlooked it).

It's a nice addition, but indeed, I think the "Skip Intro" link would need to be more prominent to be useful.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

NetworkWorld reports that the State of Washington has sued an SEO firm for a variety of infractions, including making claims that they can increase traffic to clients' websites, falsely claiming affiliations with other marketers, making claims that customer service representatives are available for any calls (though they never returned calls), failing to provide refunds, continuing to bill credit cards of customers who have canceled, and failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor.

In the past four years, 90 complaints have been lodged against the company, which uses the name Visible.net.

Is this lawsuit a good thing? A few people are a bit worried. How many SEOs promise a lot but deliver below expectations because competitors overdeliver and the algorithm changes [drastically], despite all that you've done? It can happen. While some say that this is a plea aimed at snake oil sellers, if a client is unhappy with legitimate SEO work, what's to say they won't consider you a snake oil salesman?

On another note, how come nobody has sued those companies that send you mailers claiming to be your domain registrar and wanting to renew your domain for a few years (at least to my knowledge)? Like these guys. Seriously -- I'm sure there are more than 90 complaints against those people.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Peter Da Vanzo poses a question on SEOBook asking if social media marketing is a waste of time. In it, he adds a few qualifiers including traffic (is the traffic to your page to see a monkey riding a bicycle worth it?), an uncontrolled message, a concern about the ability not to measure branding, the level of interaction isn't clear, it takes time, it's stupid and is a useless distraction, and it's difficult to scale.

This all may be true to an extent. EGOL recounts his own experience being Dugg: when the page was submitted to Digg, it had no inbound links. Within a few weeks, though, it had several hundred. Three years later, it's still on the top of the Google SERPs.

That said, it's not completely a waste of time.

I should add that this industry is very focused on Social Media Marketing as getting Dugg on the front page. That's not all there is to SMM.

One important thing to note, as shared by forum member glyn:

The thing with Social Media is the moment you get too specific with your advertising you scare the user base away.

Forum discussion continues at Crea8site Forums.

The Yahoo Search Marketing blog has announced that those utilizing the Sponsored Search account functionality can now block 500 domains instead of the standard 250.

While this is helpful--after all, the number of blocked domains has now doubled--there's a concern that Yahoo is still sending "garbage traffic" to YSM users (from Yahoo search partners). One mentions that 500 blocked domains is not nearly enough. One mentions that he wants to block all non Yahoo domains.

On the other hand, one forum member says that he hopes that Google sees this as a challenge and also ups the number of domains that can be blocked.

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

Google's video ads can be an interesting way to drive more traffic to your site. But if you expect video ads to be approved immediately or as quickly as your text ads, don't bank on it.

A Google AdWords Group thread has one advertiser who posted his video yesterday and got impatient. He then asked how long it will take for approval and AdWordsPro Sarah said it takes about 48 hours but can take longer depending on the "volume of submissions."

This answer really does not correspond to the answer at the FAQ, where Google wrote:

Your video ad will begin running as soon as it is processed and passes through our editorial review. This process usually takes a few hours, but it may take as long as a day.

I guess Sarah is right?

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Group.

Over the course of the past few months, I have hearing buzz from the forums and from people in the SEO industry that Google is dropping pages out of their index. How do these people know? Well, when they do a site:www.domain.com command, i.e. in my case, site:www.seroundtable.com, Google is showing less results then they have a few months ago. Personally, I do not track these things, so I am not sure. In fact, the last time I documented that number seems to be in June, when I had 7,990 results, today this domain has 14,000 results.

But that doesn't stop the fact that many many webmasters and SEOs are noticing a huge decline in the number of pages indexed by Google for their site. Or at least, the site command is returning less and less results over time for a site command. Is it a reporting thing or is it really Google dropping pages out of the index due to quality or other issues?

There is a new but largish WebmasterWorld thread with several webmasters complaining about this happening on their sites. Even moderators are noticing it and trying to reverse the results. What actions are they trying?

• The most obvious is to get more links to your inner pages
• The next thing I would do is control what Google removes by 301ing or noindexing pages that are not critical to your success
• Some are trying using the nofollow to, again, control what Google removes.

Overall, in my humble opinion, Google is getting picker about what content to show and what not to show. I believe it is a hybrid effect of both link popularity and duplicate content filter in play, in these cases.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As Googler, Matt Cutts Twittered, he now has Sitelinks under his domain for a search on [matt cutts]. Why did it take Matt over two years to get Sitelinks for his domain when it is such an authoritative source?

The answer might be that his content was on a sub-directory. Yes, right now, there is no substantial content on www.mattcutts.com, all or most the content is on www.mattcutts.com/blog/. And it seems like Google is now giving sub directories Sitelink love.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topic, noting that Matt Cutts is not the only query returning a sub directory listed with Google Sitelinks. I'll just guess a few right now and show you that others work, such as:

* iPhone:

* Apple:

* MacBook Pro:

What does this show to us? That you can have different Sitelinks for different queries, if your site is authoritative enough. Google told us this fact in the past, but we were all skeptical, including myself, that this is possible. I guess I have yet to see Sitelinks for the same URL change based on query but it can change for different URLs on the same root domain.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has discussion around how to properly use the alt attribute and title attribute for your web page images. Of course, Google recommends that you make sure to make them as useful for the end users. So use them as per W3C recommendations but let's hear from Google on what they expect.

JohnMu from Google explained how to use both the alt and title attribute:

• alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So if you have an image of a big blue pineapple chair you should use the alt tag that best describes it, which is alt="big blue pineapple chair."
• title attribute should be used when the image is a hyperlink to a specific page. The title attribute should contain information about what will happen when you click on the image. For example, if the image will get larger, it should read something like, title="View a larger version of the big blue pineapple chair image."

I'll quote John from Google now:

As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the "alt" attribute. Feel free to supplement the "alt" attribute with "title" and other attributes if they provide value to your users!

So for example, if you have an image of a puppy (these seem popular at the moment :-)) playing with a ball, you could use something like "My puppy Betsy playing with a bowling ball" as the alt-attribute for the image. If you also have a link around the image, pointing a large version of the same photo, you could use "View this image in high-resolution" as the title attribute for the link.

There is a Google blog post on using alt attributes as well.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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: November 14, 2008"

Guess what? The "con" part of PubCon is over and the guys are preparing to head to the pub later today. But alas, I'm back in New York -- like Barry, I took the red-eye. It's 11AM EDT (or 8AM, whatever) and I'm all confused about where I am and how I got here. But moving on...

PubCon Keynotes Rocked
I had the pleasure to liveblog the George Wright keynote at Pubcon. He talks about how, with a $50 budget, he made a viral phenomenon. It's pretty impressive to hear that kind of reinforcement when you have business objectives, don't you think?

The following day, we liveblogged Satya Nadella of Microsoft. They launched Project Silk Road, an API that looks pretty promising.

I'm Not Giving Up Liveblogging, Even if Barry Says I Should
There's a jerk on the Internet who wanted to get attention, so he blogged that we should stop liveblogging because our reporting is inaccurate. Then he says that he's upset because he has "liveblogged erroneously." Well, sorry that you suck at liveblogging, John, but that doesn't mean you have to attack two of the greatest livebloggers this industry has ever had. Meanwhile, the blog post that this John dude wrote evoked some heavy emotions and Barry is running a poll. Should we stop liveblogging? Answer us. And if you say "yes," identify yourself with a comment on the thread so that we livebloggers can burn you in effigy.

Why is Google Using Blog Comments--and Not Public Forums--to Communicate with Webmasters?
Do you find it annoying when you report a problem on a blog post and Google chooses to respond on the blog and not in an "official" channel? Does it irk you that Google doesn't appear to use its own internal blogs to communicate these "bugs" or observations with the rest of the community? To some, it does. But for Google, it makes a lot of sense. Why should they worry an entire webmaster community if only some people are being impacted? What does this mean for you? Keep being active in the blogs, baby!

Google <3 SEO
Finally, after all this time, Google has finally released an SEO guide. It's a 22-page PDF with all this useful information, or so I hear (no, I didn't read it yet either). Now when is Google going to talk about linking?

Googlebot Won't Answer Your Calls if You Ignore Him
I have no idea why someone would block Googlebot and then realize later that this was a stupid decision and try to reinvite Googlebot back into his life. However, some guy does want to do that. How do you tell Googlebot to crawl your site again? The idea is to send signals to Google that you're interested in reigniting that flame: get more links, submit a sitemap, and whatever else you can do to call your site to Google's attention.

YouTube Sponsored Ads Broken
Isn't it nice when YouTube launches a new feature but it doesn't actually, erm, work? Barry tried to play with YouTube sponsored ads and got an internal error. What gives? (I think it has something to do with a Mac.)

Deleting Your Google Sitelinks May Not Remove them from Google
Apparently, a webmaster has discovered a bug in Google. When deleting his sitelinks, a webmaster realized that Google kept them intact. Five days later, the deleted sitelinks are still listed on the search engine. Hrm.

Argentina Doesn't Honor Free Speech
It sucks if you're living in Argentina and want to learn about a prominent figure. It seems that Argentina prefers censorship rather than allowing content to be discovered. Search engines were forced to comply with this legal measure, and well, I'm glad I live in America.

Veteran's Day Comes and Goes
With PubCon in our faces, many forgot that we celebrated Veteran's Day on Tuesday. Google forgot to honor people in the Coast Guard and eventually updated their logo. Dogpile and Yahoo joined in the fun too. Of course, so did we!

No Video on Sunday
Barry got a new MacBook Pro and I think he wants to play with it instead of making our video for Sunday. You'll just have to wait for him next week (sorry Sam!)

On Google Groups, AdWordsPro Sarah is giving us tips on how to engage in the Google content network in such a way that you can optimize that contextual traffic. Recently, she shared a tip on how Google suggests you get this done.

The idea is to separate the content and search campaigns. Why is this necessary? When people are searching in a contextual basis versus in a search basis, they have different mindsets. In the former, they're already looking at content; they're not searching for it. Therefore, capturing the person's attention in the content network is more important.

Other benefits of this practice include being able to maintain different budgets, write different ad copy, and more.

In a second Google Groupsposting, Sarah says that you should create tightly knit ad group themes. Google needs to look at all the keywords in an ad group to determine relevancy among text. As Sarah says, "[t]his means that individual keywords do not matter as much as the particular theme (or concept) of the type of websites you want to target."

So what keywords correspond with what themes? You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups and Google Groups (#2).

What happens if you want some good link juice to your domain? You may engage in the practice of buying a site and 301ing it to your old domain. In yesterday's PubCon session, we even talked about buying sites for maximum exposure and minimum risk. But the question is really: will you get juice by doing this?

At a High Rankings Forum post, member Randy claims that Googlers say that the "trust" of the site gets reset upon a domain transfer and that you won't get the PR value. At the same time, how is Google to know that you have bought a domain for this purpose? That said, Randy says it's 50/50.

If you have experience in this area, the comments area of this post is waiting for your insights.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Google has a requirement -- at least, the site says so -- that you need to be enrolled in the Google Professional Program to be considered for the AdWords exam. But is it really required?

AdWordsPro thinks so (but unfortunately isn't 100% sure). I think that if it says it's required, it probably is.

The question is: is Google really strictly enforcing this requirement? Search Engine Roundtable readers: do you know? Have any of you ever tried to register for the exam (which is paid) and had the course enrollment requirement be an obstacle?

Let us know in the comments.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Want to see who you're talking to over your IM? You may want to use iChat or Skype, but now, Google Talk can support voice and IM chat. You can find out more.

For those who are dependent on Skype (and perhaps 3-5% of my friends actually use the service consistently), it's nice to know that Gmail will probably fill the void for the remaining 95-97%. Many forum members found that Skype's functionality was limited (you needed XP SP2, for example), so the Gmail solution should work pretty well.

That said, the actual integration of these new features hasn't come without its criticisms. One person expressed his disappointment that Google has not installed a folders system and he considers that important. (I see the point and I agree that Labels alone are NOT the suitable replacement. A future Gmail Labs feature, perhaps?) Other tweaks have been requested within Gmail that would make the *mail* experience a more productive one.

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

It is now 8am, I am at my desk, in my office in New York. I landed this morning at about 5:20am in Newark, NJ, after flying all night (the red eye) back from PubCon Vegas 2008. It was an exhausting three days. Between live blogging, keeping up with the forum news, writing at Search Engine Land, speaking on panels, meeting with people and search companies, running my daily business and being married - it is just exhausting.

So, about 30 minutes ago, I notice a Sphinn thread, which links to a blog post (which I won't link to) that totally trashes our live blogging efforts. This guy calls live blogging, "useless" and "inaccurate." He goes on to say what we do is "selfish disregard for reporting integrity." To call live blogging "selfish," oh, that makes me mad. To call the 38+ conferences we've flown to, paid hotel costs, sometimes paid conference passes for, "selfish." To call the dumbing, incredibly tiring and exhausting work it is to sit there, session after session, to write down the words that come out of speakers mouths, no matter if you disagree with them or if you find them boring - or, even worse, love what they are saying, but are too consumed in typing down what they are saying to have the time to actually appreciate the words of wisdom - to call that "selfish" (long sentence, sorry, been up for over 24 hours).

I have often wanted to stop live blogging these conferences. Why? Simply because it is extremely taxing on the individuals who do the live blogging. It seems simple, but it really is not. But I have decided to continue live blogging because most people appreciate it and many tell me they "depend" on it.

So to read a "blogger" who has had a blog since September 30th, 2008 - yea, you got that, completely trash this effort. Well, I am totally disgusted and insulted. Not just for myself, but for all the volunteers who spend their own money and time to make this happen.

I have been on both sides of the coin. I speak and I live blog. It is true that live bloggers might get something wrong or hear it wrong or miss important parts. That is the nature of the game. But does that mean there is no value to it?

Danny Sullivan has often wanted people to stop live blogging and pull out the key elements of the sessions. I agree with that, 100%. But we invented live blogging in this industry, people, I think, expect it of us. If not, then I am more than happy to stop - because honestly, it would be a relief to not have that burden of responsibility. To not have to get up at 4am on a conference day to make sure to get all my work done prior to the sessions, so I can be at a session at 9am to live blog it for people who cannot make it to the session. So I would love to not have that burden.

Hence, I leave it up to you. Please take the poll below and tell me if you want us to stop live blogging:

Continue reading "I'm Insulted But Should We Give Up Live Blogging?"

I found an interesting tidbit while reading a somewhat detailed thread at Google Groups. The scenario is as follows. You have blocked Googlebot from accessing your site for a 6 month period or so. Then you want to welcome Googlebot back into your site by removing the disallow from your robots.txt file. Will Googlebot bite? If so, how long will it take?

Yea, you ditched Googlebot and now you realize what a good friend Googlebot can be for you. So now you want to become friends with little old Googlebot again. Truth be told, the longer you ditched Googlebot, possibly the longer Googlebot will accept your renewed friendship. Just like real friends. Well, not really.

It is just a matter of how many times Google will recheck your robots.txt file. If you blocked Googlebot in your robots.txt recently, then I would expect Googlebot to check the robots.txt more often. If it is six month or longer, than likely less frequently. It just makes sense from an efficiency standpoint on both Google's side and for your server.

Susan Moskwa of Google has a great analogy in the thread, so let me quote her:

I sometimes use a telephone metaphor to explain this--imagine you called someone and their answering machine said "I can't come to the phone right now, please don't call me." If you called back an hour later and got the same message, and then called back the next day and got the same message, and then called back the next week and got the same message, you'd probably call less and less frequently, assuming the response would be the same, right?

The same is true of Googlebot; if your site consistently sends the message "Don't crawl me," we may wait longer and longer between the times when we attempt to crawl it again.

So what can you do to encourage Googlebot to come back quicker? Send it flowers and chocolate. Just kidding! But you do want to entice Googlebot to come back. How so? Submit a Sitemap file to Google, get more links, get buzz out about your site, write more content and so on. As Susan said, "once it starts being 'active' in the online ecosystem, it'll naturally end up in search results and start ranking accordingly."

I had fun with this post because it is pretty late now, been up really long with little sleep. In fact, I feel like I am going to fall asleep while typing this. In any event, hope you enjoyed this little tidbit, it will be posted in the AM.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google AdSense had a two hour outage yesterday morning causing lots of concern amongst the publisher groups.

There are two long threads, one at Google Groups and another ad WebmasterWorld discussing the outage.

The first report came in at 4:09am (EST) Thursday morning and at about 6:44am, first reports came in that the statistics started to populate in the AdSense reports. At 1:05pm (EST), AdsenseAdvisor and AdSensePro Jennifer wrote the same message, a minute apart, at the respective forums:

There was a minor reporting issue for about 2 hours. This should be back to normal, and all data form that period will be restored.

Thanks for your patience.

Jennifer

All looks good now.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and another ad 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: November 13, 2008"

One of our most popular PubCon sessions, this event is also known as the Search Engine Smackdown.

Expect a "State of the Engines" address by the leading search engines of today. Yahoo, Google, Ask and Microsoft will all run down the current status, features, and fresh offerings of their respective search spaces.

Related blog entry from a few years back:
http://www.pubcon.com/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1156867200

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Sean Suchter, VP, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo!
Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

Nathan Buggia:
State of Live Search - what does it mean for publishers? We've talked about themes of live search - deliver best search results, simplify key tasks, and innovate in the business model.

Best search results: it's all about relevance. We've made a lot of progress. Does a query answer your question? We've been tracking this for 4 years. In the past year, we're in the same ballpark - not exactly like Yahoo/Google but very similar. Some queries we're better on but some aren't perfect. It's about freshness of content and depth of content.

Specific improvements: improving the crawling performance - compression and if-modified-since. We create less load on your server and do a more efficient job of crawling. If your resources are gzipped, we take less bandwidth.

Standardization of REP rules - these are a core set of rules for robots exclusion protocol. It's easier for publishers can specify the policies for searche engines. These rules are shared. MSNbot has adopted the common set of rules: now we support regular expressions.

We continue to invest in sitemaps. They can be hosted anywhere. There's a lot of flexibility for publishers. It also helps understand canonicalization issues.

There's a significant increase in crawling capacity.

We also realized that the best search results isn't about algorithmic improvements. It's also about providing tools: Webmaster Tools. We offer: troubleshooting tips. We took a list of the top issues that Live search encountered when crawling websites - 404 errors, too many parameters, blocked by robots, and unsupported content. There's reporting being provided around these and even filtering. Next week, we'll launch a new feature about malware. We scan every page and see what spawns a malicious process; those pages are flagged and cannot be clicked on in the user experience of Live search. Publishers can find their own links in the tools; they can also get a list of outbound links that are also infected.

We also provide a lot of tools around ranking. Information is provided on Static Rank, dynamic ranking within site, backlinks, and penalties.

There are also some issues on the community forums with a 3 day turnaround.

Another tool launched about a year ago is the adCenter Excel Keyword Research tool. It gives you access to an API that gives you keyword data for Live search - demographic and monetization information.

Simplify key tasks:
- The future of relevance? We found that there are many use cases for when people come to search engines. Sometimes they're doing navigational queries. Sometimes people come to search engines and don't know what they want. These are exploratory scenarios. We provide richer media in the search results in addition to 10 blue links. Also, deeper pages may not be related to the search experience but the topic. As a publisher, there's more surface area on how to reach customers with specific content. Some of this is video, structured content (products, reviews, and more information about your website). This is expanded into Hotmail and other properties as well.

Innovation in the business model:
We're talking about the Cashback/adCenter scenario.

We also have Project Silk Road that consolidates things to increase engagement (enhances the seite with Live search results/customizes 404 error pages with the error toolkit, and create rich user experience with Virtual Earth and silverlight), generate traffic (optimization of site with the tools, deep content partnerships that increase distribution, and enhanced ad format solutions), and drive insight (how your website performs and your customers. Rich site statistics, monitoring, and optimization)

Within that, there's the Live Search API. We asked a lot of our partners about what they needed in an API. Publishers wanted to be in control of the results of the API. Now, you can reorder the results, skin results and ads to match your website or application, and filter out 300 ad providers that don't make sense (competitors, aren't good for your audience, etc.)

The technical aspects of the API also needed to meet business needs:
- The query limit is removed - now unlimited
- Rich query language - site operators that you've seen in the past (e.g. site:). You can alter how dynamic ranking relevancy favors freshness, accuracy, or whatnot.
- Many types of content - web, news, images, encarta answers, spelling. Different corpuses in the backend are now accessible.
- Implements all standard protocols (REST, JSON, RSS, SOAP) - they can use the API any way that people develop.

Sean Suchter:

Yahoo is trying to get rid of the 10 blue links.

Limited choice: three players dominate the maket. Neither site owners or searcher can exert influence, so Yahoo is trying to address it.

Search Assist feature is being worked on to make the best possible search queries.

Right now, Yahoo is looking to move from "to do" to "done" - getting to the answer by reducing frustration, trying to structure information from the web directly, etc.

One example is the music player integration- "Play the web" in Yahoo Search

He shows a SERP that shows many initiatives: rich media modules (video and headlines), deep links, and news federation.

The other big area is about the ecosystem. We're really trying to create a community around search (think PubCon). We're trying to set up incentives for everyone - Yahoo and end users. A few ways to do that: opening search (SearchMonkey) - coming from outside in. What does this mean? Yahoo wants to move from a simple presentation to a more useful structured presentation when appropriate for the task the user is trying to accomplish (not uniformly, not for all queries, not for all users). For site owners, this helps the users get right to the answers. The traffic should increase in quality. It hasn't hurt clickthroughs to your site. It will increase loyalty and engagement.

There is a lot of success with the SearchMonkey ecosystem. A lot of properties, including People magazine, Wikipedia, Trulia, WebMD, and more are utilizing it.

Another innovation includes BOSS, a big initiative - build an open search service. The idea is to open the platform completely. Trying to be a principal search engine is a hard thing. You need hardware, data, and more. So the idea is to open it up completely so people can interact with the query handling and crawling and use it directly. The goal is to have high quality search experience to be relevant, comprehensive, fresh, and well-presented.

Some examples: 4 hoursearch - it was made in 4 hours by guy who said he paid $10 for pizza and beer. It's very straightforward and a different type of search presentation. Another one is PlayerSearch which is more specialized (like SportsCenter). NewsLine is another with a cool layout of how the news are presented. Finally, Tianamo is a 4th - it presents the data in this somewhat mountain format. It's a landscape of queries and things surrounding them in a visualization.

Matt Cutts: State of the Index.
What has happened in 2008 and what should we expect in 2009?
- Google Chrome is a wicked fast browser
- Google Android is an open source operating system

There's other stuff too - better machine translation, better voice recognition, Google Suggest, improving personalization and universal/blended search

There were a lot of small things: 2001 search index, video and voice chat in Gmail, ability to track the flu (by finding out who is searching for the flu/cough/cold symptoms on Google!) - it's really cool.
- Why is this interesting to webmasters? You don't have to do this with flu. You can look at Google trends in general and even check them for websites.

Google Ad Planner slices and dices by demographic.

Let's drill down: what have we done for the webmaster? We're taking PDFs that are images and are running OCR on them. We're crawling flash better - pulling out text of transitions of Flash files.

2008 Webmaster Launches. Look at pinkberry.com/mobile versus redmangousa.com/ on your iPhone. Only one works. Google is working to understand these flash files that aren't showing up on your phone.

Google has gotten better at keyword spam and gibberish. We have also provided some extra tools. For example, there's a tool that shows who is linking to you who is linking to a 404. You can also make your 404 better with 14 lines of JavaScript. This code by Google suggests pages that might be useful on that site.

There are a few other things:
- Adavanced segmentation of Google Analytics
- On demand indexing for Google Custom Search Engine - Google will reindex up to 10 pages within 24 hours.
- webmaster APIs for hosters and Gdata
- translation gadget for your website. If you have Chinese visitors and you write in English, the site can be translated into Chinese.

Webmaster Communication - it's huge so far. We've had 3 chats so far with 700 people dialing in on the most recent chat. We're blogging more, including more videos, and there are now blogs in different languages. If you register your site and you have malware or are caught for spam BEFORE you register, those messages will be waiting.
- Yesterday, Google came out with a 30 page guide on SEO 101. This means Google values SEO.

2009 Blackhat trends:
- jeevesretirement.com was bought by Ask.com. Ask forgot to renew it. Jeevesretirement.com was bought by porno people. People grab expired domain names and take advantage.
- Illegal hacking will become more common.
- Blackhat moves toward the outright illegal - DNS subdomain hijacking. Without getting DNS resolvers update, it can be hacked. Do we want to do stuff that gets people in jail?

Conclusions - blackhat SEOs will continue to veer toward the outright illegal, SEOs need to decide risk tolerance, Google will keep communicating efforts with webmasters, and Google will provide tools to help webmasters

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
Lawrence Coburn, President, RateItAll, Inc.
Roger B. Dooley, VP of Online Community Development, Hobsons U.S.
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com

Chris Tolles of Topix begins:

Topix is a local news aggregator. Turned it into a community around news. 40,000 local forums, 150,000 comments a day. Only provider of ZIP code local news on the web. Largest local forum provider on the web. Participation from people in over 20,000 US localities monthly. 15 million uniques a month. Roughly the same traffic as Digg.

Two equally big problems
1) Getting participation
2) Dealing with it - running and managing it is a huge nightmare

Product management 101:

How do you build a community? Provide something people want to use. Build around the people you know. Build around what you know.
Build something no one else has. ODP was the first directory powered by people.

Has to be easy to use, easy to find. Obvious keyword optimization problems. Building a strategy for being found. Topix optimizes for news. Must be easy to understand. Some communities are not clear what the focus is. Easy to see the unique value. Are you another site talking about Toyotas? What is your unique value? Ease of participation. Maximizing engagement. Let people participate without registration. Make it easy for people to come back. Give them a reason to come back. Facebook is amazing that 15% of users come back daily. Let the audience virally build your business. Passion about your product / service is key.

Dealing with participation: Your users are all trying to "get you". Everyone on there is insane! Look for the attack on the system. A community is just another system. Assume people are out to get you. What's the experience like if they get your voicemail? Phone calls at 2am? Look for these issues, and build it to deal with this. Have functionality to deal with complaints. Ways of managing and moderating what potential problems are before they happen. Have to take a long view on things. Building tools and functionality with expected issues that will happen.

Security is policy. Topix powers the forums for a Hartford newspaper. Had an incident where someone was hit by a car. Lots of racist talk. Was there a policy on this? No. Hard to do anything with a community unless you've built a policy/rules and stick with it. Need policies! The efficiency of the organization depends on it.

Don't go down! If it's growing, it let it go down. Tech matters - have a solid setup. Think about the technology you use. Look at your growth. Look at other sites and look at their solutions. That's why Friendster probably went down.

Do as little as possible. If providing internet community services for free, limit your cost. If you are charging, people have expected value. Down drown in costs! But don't abandon your community.

Killing posts - need a balance. Have a policy, and enforce it.

Brett Tabke:

Talks about Steve Job's famous commencement address at Stanford. Main point is that you cannot connect the dots going forward, but can do it backwards. Brett is going to connect the dots in this presentation, of where he started, and where is today.

-WMW started in 1999. Before that, was SearchEngineWorld in 1997.
-Forum on ISP in 1996.
-Before that worked at Gateway 2000.
-In 85-89 was on BBSes.
-In 80's programmed in assembly. Very community oriented, all about speed.
-First BBS community went on in 1984.
-First computer was in 1976. First program was on a Commodore PET
-First computer owned was a Commodore 64 in college.
'
Grew up in the 60's - big Stark Trek fan. Dealt with social and cultural issues. If you run a forum, you must be culturally sensitive and must be PC. Built first search engine - JoeFarmer.com - an agriculture and farm search engine in '96. Went to lots of user groups, trade shows for Gateway.

Today, WMW focus is unique, easy to use. Required registration. No free email address registrations. Designed so that your words go high above the fold. Want members to feel important. Success = member on site time - member posts. More about relationships than content. Avoid visual distractions - visual noise. Avoided social networking stuff - but starting to add a few things this year. For WMW its all about the trust and long term relationship. Been the same site for 10 years. Standing on policy, even if meant losing friends. Subscription vs. advertisement model. Don't care about raw page views, clicks, or membership sign ups. Concern is quality, secondary is converting users to subscribers. Now, biggest day ever for WMW was 200,000 uniques and 1 million PV's during Florida update.

US accounts for about 46% of WMW. Big challenges are the spammers, link droppers, name droppers. #1 problem = rogue spiders and bots from cable modem ISP's.

One-offs - 4 days offline in 2005. Results? Uniques went up 15% and stayed up 15%.

Some problems in the blogosphere flat wrong about WMW and the bot issues.

3 rules of damage control 1) release early- tell your story. 2) release often - retell your story 3) tell the truth - never compound the problem. You can never correct and error that goes corrected and unchallenged.

Speed is key: When worked on a Commodore 64 speed was everything. WMW is consistently the fastest forum on the web.

Roger Dooley:

CollegeConfidential.com = A topical community - 1.7 million visits last month.

Why community? Nueromarketing - the intersection between brain science and marketing. Measurement of brain activity. Behavioral science. It's important because 95% of our behavior is subconscious. People need help and communities solve that. People looking for answers. Some communities are purely social.

Community participation. Why do people spend so much time helping others? Why answer questions? Why moderate? Human brain is programmed for altruism. We get a little reward for helping others. Helping makes you "hot". Members of the opposite sex rank helping others as a key desire.

Typical member cycle: Typically people start by needing help. Stumbled on the site perhaps on Google or through a friend. Then people start interacting. The same folks realize they can help others. Not everyone makes it that far, but very typical. With new arrivals - welcome if possible. Dumb questions are OK. Flaming is not away to build a strong community.

Long term members - recognize contributions, posting latitude, moderator status. Most important to community success.

Moderators - many thing of as TOS enforcers. In reality, they should be helpful, patient, tolerant, accepting.

Recruiting mods - long history in community. Mature behavior. Friendly, welcoming.

Rewarding volunteers - they are very important. Social norms vs. market norms. Market norms are doing a job for pay. Why do mods mod? They enjoy the community. Want to give something back. Experiments have shown that volunteers can be more productive.

Good rewards are anything that recognizes contributions.

Community death: Reasons for failure - emphasis on technology vs. members. Use of inexperienced community managers. Measuring the wrong metrics.

Last up is Lawrence Coburn, talking about "The social media river".

Definition: "A constantly updating news feed of content that be tuned and customized the by the user".

In the mid 90's there was the BBS. Mid 90's came the forum and message board. Still here to stay. 1999's blogs were the new format for growing communities. Then the profile via Friendster and Myspace became dominant for discovering content. The big leap forward was the concept of the river - don't have to go anywhere to find your content. Facebook was the big revolution in 2006. Aggregating friends activity. Twitter came along and took the concept of the river, and let people do it from any device. SMS, IM, etc. Reduced the concept to one single question. Friendfeed is the river for multiple sites - getting lots of buzz. Aggregates all the communities together.

Why the river works? Content comes to you. It's always fresh. You have control of what happens in the river. Relevant to you, and can adapt to changing tastes.

There are 3 primary sources of content:

1) People - you choose to follow people and see what they are up to.
2) Media type - photos, app activity, video, status updates. Total control. On Facebook, you can tune your feed - to get more relationship info, etc.
3) Topic - not subscribing to a person, but a topic. Want to hear all posts about social media for example.

River monetization - trying to find an ad format that works. Problem is making it relevant. Some revolutionary concepts emerging. Google doesn't have a format for this yet.

The river and widgets. This concept is a threat to widgets, because sidebar is becoming a distraction. Widgets need to find a way to get into the content.

Search vs. the river: MSN live is being revamped to go into the river. Yahoo! is working on this as well - called Yahoo! OS. If you are marketer, publisher, content provider - need to get it into the river.

Read more at sexywidget.com.

Live coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

Moderator: Jake Baillie

Speakers:
Lawrence Coburn, President, RateItAll, Inc.
Peter Adams, President, Matchpoint
Patrick Sexton, Search Engine Marketing Manager, We Build Pages
Will Price, CEO, Widgetbox
Peter Yared, CEO, iWidgets!

Description: With the Web 2.0 revolution, we have seen more and more sites offering widgets in all shapes and forms. Now, several years later, this session will examine how online publishers can take advantage of this trend to gain more distribution.

Session Notes:

First up is Lawrence Coburn...

Lawrence runs a blog called SexyWidget.com. He is going to talk about API strategies.

The four pillars of distributed web strategies:
1) Widgets but they are only downloaded one at a time
2) Toolbar extensions but the download is a barrier to success.
3) Platform Apps on Facebook, MySpace, etc actually a bit of a down turn in this sector
4) API like Yahoo Maps, Amazon AWS. This allow batch or mass distribution

He likes to think of APIs and widgets on steroids. It helps expand your footprint. Google rolled out the maps, got millions of downloads and now added ads to it for a great revenue model.

APIs can be used for branding, new business models, and internal content distribution.

Case Study: Netflix
Every single actor, movie, description, etc is available. Publishers are free to use this data as long as they use proper attribution. This is used to drive new subscribers to Netflix.

Case Study: RateItAll
Rolling out all content including ratings, reviews, etc. Using API to pull content back to home base. Using APi to spread brand, driver referrals, etc.

There are all sorts of business models for API launches. From free to pay per API call. You will need to decide what model meets your business goals.

Challenges and risks: limited number of developers, scaling, dupe content issues, fuel competitors, legal issues such as redistribution rights.

API resources include Mashery, Platform D, Swordfish and SexyWidget.com.

Next up is Patrick Sexton...

What are widgets? They are what is left when you remove all the headers, footers, sidebars and "phoophy stuff". For example just the YouTube video player.

Why use widgets?

Interaction. People must be pleased by what you are doing. Whether it movies, chat or even business applications.

Making money. Selling products, ad revenue and making things more efficient.

Traffic. Direct traffic is very important traffic (anything that does not come from a search engine). Widgets are not spread via search engines. They are spread by people. It is relativly easy to get ranked in major widget directories for keyword phrases.

SEO. Traffic and exposure can be big. Word of mouth communities will link to you. However his view on links is that links do not have credit cards, people do. Caution: your links need to be relevant!

Patrick believes in a cross platform approach to spreading your widgets. Your widgets should be tailored to the audience who will use it and the platform supporting it.

Put your widget in every widget directory possible. They will be found. Warning: viral installers do not not post your widget or brand in the directory. iGoogle has over 100 million users and most brands are not even listed.

Third presenter is Will Price...

Widgetbox is the #1 web widget provider with over 78 million uniques and 600 million widget views.

Web publishers are trying to reach new readers or visitors. They need to develop innovative content syndication programs. Widgets are ideal for this. Most sites offer content that can easily tranlate into a widget. RSS feeds, images, videos, slideshows, etc are all easy concepts to turn into a widget.

Widgets can be viral is you create galleries, use the invite feature or as feed updates on the social sites.

Next up is Peter Yared...

His first claim is that people are not going to websites any more. He gave a dozen example of major sites where the traffic is flat or decreasing. People are spending all of their time on social sites such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc. So the new model is to put your content where the users are!

There has been a big move from just widgets to SOCIAL widgets. People like to interact with engaging, social widgets. Polls or other actionable widgets are very powerful right now. Think of widgets as a great tool to reach your fans.

Rich media (video & widgets) is by far the fastest growing ad spend. Widget creation can now be a drag and drop creation process, so the entry process is pretty easy.

Last speaker of the last session of the day is Peter Adams!

Advertising is an essential ingredient of any content web site or strategy. Widgets can help you do that.

Widgets can generate income via the widget itself being an ad, an ad can be embedded in the widget, or the ads can be initiated by the widget. If you think about it, even the Google Adsense ads are just widgets. Now all the major players, like Amazon, AllPosters, eBay offer widgets through their affiliate programs.

There are also some in-page examples such as Snap that display an ad widget when you roll over an incontent text link.

Peter warns that you need to make widgets a seemless part of your user experience, not an appendage. So you need to be able to customize, customize, customize.

These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building services and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

Link-baiting is a topic that makes some people snicker when they hear it. However, the complexities and subtleties are a fascinating combination of clever copywriting and strategic placement. Did you know that there are 12 types of links? Moreover, there are eight types of link bait to get those 12 types of links? That means there are 96 different strategies to get links. This session will look at the eight and the twelve.

Moderator: Andy Beal
Speakers:
Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
Ian Ring, Application Developer, IGLOO Inc.
Bill Hartzer, Search Engine Optimization Manager, Vizion Interactive
Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOMoz

Bill Hartzer:

Link baiting specific sectors: target a group in your sector/topic, tell them what they want and what they need to know. Point out the industry problem (e.g. my funniest PPC mistake)
- search for "keyword" at search engine. Find companies biddibng on word "keyword." Copy the list of keywords from the spreadsheet, paste into PPC program.

Target sites that link out - research those sites. Blogstorm tracker, Technorati, and more are good tools.

Find linkbait that worked. Don't always reinvent the wheel. Research your topic in social media, find URLs that have gone popular, create a unique twist for similar linkbait, write an update to the previous article (link to the previous with new developments), watch for press releases in your industy for studies, research, and other news. Set up Google and Yahoo alerts for news.

News works well as linkbait: be able to respond to breaking news (set up a blog or page ready for the article). Post quickly. Submit to social sites. Go back and edit/update Add pictures/photos/logos/screen captures. This strategy helps you get the market share of links and is good for organic search.

Linkbaiting Techniques: problogger.net - tools, quizzes, contests, be first, scoops, expose, awards, lists, humor, make someone famous, create belonging/community, design, rants, controvesy, attack, shock, research and statts, give something away, resourcefulness, cool factors

Social media, linkbait, and search are all coming together. Create new linkbait on your site consistently. Participation is key - daily voting, commenting, and submitting.
Linkbait + social media = market share of links and getting noticed
If you get links when being noticed, you'll be successful in organic search.

Jane Copland:

Everyone can publish content online. It's low cost, high visibility, and easily digestible content.
Blogs imitate familiar old media - the banner, the sidebar, and the lead article. Their success is partly a result of the familiar nature.

Different types of blogged content achieve different results: shes shows illustration for some sites that have 2500+ digs with 27 external links. One had 900 diggs and 131 external links. It varies.

These multiple types of blogged linkworthy content exists as:
- "The Gimmick" - it helps to be drunk
- Light content lists - footer post - it's easy
- The OMG ticket (URLs ending in 0 - see on seomoz.org) - it's harder, and it doesn't help to be drunk
- Heavier content lists - it doesn't help to be drunk
- In-depth articles and case studies - which shouldn't be launched on a blog.
It's not a good idea to decide which type you're working with before you start writing.

It's never a good idea to launch viral content that isn't in a visible area.

SEOmoz has rewritten blog posts and 301d past links over to the new page.

Enable comments, because sometimes your readers are more interesting than you are.
- However, disabling comments have its place where comments are inappropriate.

Link building achieves 3 main goals:
* it adheres to traditional ways that content is distributed
* it invites interaction
* it's easy to spread becasue people can subscribe to blogs.

Todd Malicoat: awareness, sales, and revenue

Quick Digg primer: a lot of people read Digg and they have the power to put links to your site. You can either get a consultant or build up your own account.
- Get an optimal name - alpha sort organization
- Adding the right friends - they digg upcoming a lot, submit a lot, digg your stories. But don't do more than 5-10 a day. You'll want to reevaluate your friends.
- Find good stories quickly
- Submit good stories and ask for help

Some linkbait will bomb!

Have a friend submit your story.

Linkbaiting hooks: attack, humor, contrarian, news, resource, etc.

When you launch, if it doesn't bomb and it hits Digg's frontpage, you don't want your server to melt. Cache your content, host images on another host, search for the Digg/slashdot effect (and fix your server). Email friends and allies. Use sites as "jump off" points for other sites.

Don't have 25 social media buttons on the bottom of your blog post.

Reddit is similar to Digg - gives you less traffic but it's valuable.
StumbleUpon has a toolbar and brings traffic.

Ian Ring: Optimizing Conversion using Genetics
CSS styling can affect the clickability of links. Testing and optimization will increase your site's reevenue. Do you know if your current stylesheet is eleiciting optimzal user behavior?

Optimization algorithms: trial and errots, multivariate testing, hill climbing, simulated annealing (e.g. making the font size bigger, smaller, incrementally changing things until optimized), genetic algorithms

Introduction to genetic algiorthms - some are more optiized for environments.
- Metaphor: the page is the ecosystem, the page elements are living organizsms, a hyperlink is a species, a well-adapted organism thrives in its ecosystem. A healthy ecosystem is comprised of fit organisms.

How do you do it? Survival of the fittest.
- What is fitness? It's anything you can measure: clicks, purchases, subscriptions, sales leads, registration - these are all measures of fitness.
- Fitness is easy to measure. It's the number of times something good happens.

In biology, chromosomes affect fitness. Brown eyes are better optimized than blue/green eyes. On your website, you probably want to optimize for brown eyes.
- The chromosome that determines this is the CSS stylesheet.

CSS is a link's DNA: it could be an image, a graph, a link.
You may have 3 bits for a font size or 24 bits - if you're testing another interface element, you may have another set of genes - hue/saturation/etc. Properties of CSS stylesheets can be turned into a binary string that can be stored, manipulated, and moved back into a CSS stylesheet.

CSS can be expressed as a binary string:
A chromosome is a string of 1s and 0s. Define the genome: it's the map of placement of the genes that appear in a chromosome. You'll need a table to assign positions of the DNA to the genes in the CSS.

Create a template: inject genetic values into the template. You need functions to transalte binary chromosomes into CSS. Replace variables in the template with values from the DNA.

onPageLoad(): choose an organism; convert into CSS; if user clicks, increase organism's fitness. Increment organism's age. Do this until the end. After that, it's time to mate, spawn, and die.

Genetic variance via mutation and crossover: flip from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.

You need a lot of things - databases, web pages, server side languages, and more!

Conclusion: unpredictable successes, continuous optimization, and no maintenance.

Moderator: Michael Bonfils
Speakers:
Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5Media
Jeff Libert, CEO, DirectoryCompany.com
Grace Della, CEO, Ten Golden Rules
Victor Pitts, Vice President - Sales & Client Services, Moniker Online Services, LLC

Grace Della:

Strategy #1: Optimize sites for SEO. Select keyword rich domains. Develop a 5-10 page site at 250 words and build links.

Strategy #2: Buy domains with existing PR. Sometimes people are sitting on domains. Find one that fits your business strategy.

Aftermarket sites: Bido.com, Moniker, Snap Names, Grand Names, etc. Check trademark availability before buying an expensive domain.

Strategy #3: Domains as an investment. Investors are looking at domains for several reasons - a global commodity. Not based in debt. Internet is only growing.

Strategy #4: Develop a business on a domain. If you build it, they just wont come. Real value in domain is developing into a business, unless it has huge type in traffic. Build content, links, and functionality.

Strategy #5: Protect the domain by owning variations and the extensions. Countries, spellings, misspellings, etc.

Strategy #6: Stay current. DN Journal, ICANN, T.R.A.F.F.I.C, Domain Masters podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

Victor Pitts:

Why domains matter? Growing to 168 million worldwide. Aftermarket sales have been increasing by 20% year after year. Even in down markets, they are increasing in value.

Domains are both collectibles, and revenue producing. Unique - no two alike. Direct navigation traffic accounts for 10-15% revenue in Yahoo and Google. It's your first impression online. Primary way of locating your site. Tells customers what your business is about. Helps define and reposition brand promises. Improve SEO and SMO.

Protect your brand, register typos and other TLDs.

Case studies:

ToddlerToys.com = Fisher Price.

CreamCheese.com = Kraft.

Underwear.com = Calvin Klein.

All things going equal, your domain name can be the tie breaker in SEO. Case Study: TropicalBirds.com is a new site with less than 6 months uptime. Ranks above highly competitive sites.

Aftermarket domains offer additional benefits - Age, PR, Links. Properly redirected, can give strength to other domains.

Do your research. Check if they have shady links. Can get you hurt.

Domain does have an impact on your CTR in the SERPs. Expands your ad message.

More than 70% of internet users type in a domain to get to their destination. Study by WebSideStory. At more than 4%, direct navigation converts at 2x regular search traffic.

Ways to use direct navigation - redirection. Books.com is redirected to BN.com. Baby.com redirects to J&J. TennisShoes.com redirects to KSwiss.com.

Rebrand your business using a new domain.

Case Study: Stocks.com. Monthly visitors = 10k / mo. CPC on Google is $4.63 according to Spyfu on 11/3/08 for "stocks". The SEO traffic from the term pays off in long run. Would take 5 years for a + ROI.

Ways to acquire domains: Most single and 2 word domains are gone. Aftermarkets are the new primary market. Live auctions. Online sales platforms such as Snapnames, SEDO, or Afternic. Expired and deleting domain services. Private brokerages.

Jeffrey Libert: Moderator for domain forum and WMW.

"Domain Creation, Acquisition and Sales"

Started in domaining to increase law practice. Has got clients through domains, one converted at over $100,000k!

Strategy:

Step 1: Start in your own backyard by scraping your own website for keywords. The products and services - want to pull out all the keywords - usually 2 - 3 words generic phrases. Pull from navigational or topical links. Drop them into a bulk domain checker, and see if they are available. Avoid hyphening. Scrape competitors sites for keywords. Check in Adwords tool if there is search volume, and see if there are high volume related terms. Look in trade journals for hot trends, register keywords that are emerging as buzzwords.

Step 2: Once you have your list, do a SERPs analysis. See how popular the keyword phrase is. Check your log files for phrases.

Step 3: ROI analysis. Converted sales lead analysis. Estimating type in traffic- search the phrase in Google with quotes. Trend analysis - might not get traffic this year because it's emerging - huge opportunity. Read journals to find trends. Check PPC costs versus annual domain renewal fees. Reserved potential (microsite, resale, other). Rinse, repeat.

A quick case study:

Site subject: Glues, adhesive, sealants site. Jeffrey scraped the site and found the keyword "flexible adhesives". Domain flexibleadhesives.com was available. CPC price is $1.68. Volume is about 210 according to Google. Got it to rank, redirects to the main site. High ROI.

Aftermarket strategies:

Expiring domains. Telephoned people. Often the single best strategy, expiring or not. For sale or not, had incredible results. Get ahead of the bidders.

Every auction has undervalued gems. Now is a good time to buy because of the economy. Geo or local domains are getting hotter. City + Service, etc.

Jeremy Wright: "1001 Domain Buying Tips"

Secret formula for the PERFECT domain = SEO + Data (traffic, kw information, age, typability - no .orgs, misspellings, etc.) X branding and likability.

One hyphen rarely hurts, two isn't pretty, 3+ is evil. Consider buying entire sites, not just domains, for SEO value. If you are buying within an industry, look for a common footprint "Powered by WordPress", or use an older version # to find older blogs. Don't be afraid to buy a half a dozen secondary descriptive domains and either 301 them or push to them using in--context links.

Avoid double letters. Don't misspell unless it helps with branding. Domain age matters. Older is better. Don't change the subject of the site. Don't change the URL structure. Don't change the registration information. Put it in a trust.

Have 2 domain name options is a challenge. Use math to solve the problem.

Domain mailing lists. Big buyers and sellers have private mailing lists that they sell. Judge the quality of the domains before buying them. When negotiating - lowball, but don't offend. Counter, counter, counter! Sometimes it's a matter of patience. Have contracts and such ready for when you get a deal - don't allow cold feet to set in. When transferring domains, use a trust to avoid triggering engines that look at WHOIS data.

Find a domain you are happy with! Follow Jeremy on Twitter @jeremywright.

Live coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

This is a follow up to last year's highly popular linking session.

The panelists in this session are experts on linking and will take a critical look at linking strategies including outbound link optimization, outsourcing link building, old-fashioned linking via directories, and hiring an in-house link developer.

Moderator: Chris Tolles
Speakers:
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz
Roger Montti, Founder and Owner, martinibuster.com
Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web

Eric Enge: some ways to use social media as a link building strategy

Think big! Companies can be like Blendtec.

Social News Sites: the opportunity includes tens of thousands of visitors but the traffic sucks -- but there's also the opportunity for links

Match the Digg demographic
13-28 year old males
They like Google, Apple, novel technical thing, open source, Gmail..

Some other tips:
- Study what has worked before
- Write a compelling title
- Write an interesting description
- Vote for posts in front of you on the upcoming pages
- Make sure you stand out!

Case study: a website that has a restroom photo.
Was it successful?
2/3 of a year later, it has 159 links. It's prominent in Google results.
- But ask: is it helpful or relevant?

Authoritative content can win: for example, how to solve a Rubiks cube that was posted on a howto website.
Why did it go hot? It was relevant to the audience - Rubiks cube had a resurgence a year ago among high school/college males. There were other great articles that predated it. It was authoritative and unique.

Was it a success? Yes.
- Fits theme of site, content was credible, still has 147 links 2/3 years later, does rank for Rubiks cube related search terms, term gets 40-50 searches a day.

One more example - 45 excellent blog designs on the front page of Digg.
It was more successful and here's why: fit the theme, credible content, 1160 links more than 1 year later, it's relevant, authoritative, high rankings, and there are 645 searches per day!

Doing this for yourself - interest the audience, be authoritive, reflect well on your business, use titles targeted at BIG search terms - it needs to be in the article title and the Digg submission title (those are in anchor text)

Another case study:
Sports stock market - fantasy players would buy/sell players and see trends. They became social media powerhounds - how?
- They created great apps primarily on Facebook targeted to sports fans
- March Madness app with 150k users, Fantasy Football app with 350k users - there are apps for every sports team - 6m-7m users!
- They also succeeded by integrating ads into the environment.

Why is this link building?
- Got a link from mlb.com, a PR7 page; ESPN, TechCrunch, Google, Battelle Media

Success story: They built content that built their reputation - authoritative, right image for company, related to business. They matched the demographic.

Rebecca Kelley:
Traditionally, link building sucks! It's repetitive, time consuming, risky, and there is low ROI.

But we need links - links are votes, they give you better rankings. You will want high quality links, not low quality links. Links bring traffic.

Strategy #1: Find brand mentions - find people talking about you who don't link to you. Ask them for a link. Go to Yahoo SiteExplorer; do a search like "etsy.com" linkdomain:etsy.com -site:etsy.com

Strategy #2: Identify broken inbound links. Use Google's Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Sources, COntact linkers and ask them to fix the link.

Strategy #3: Take advantage of broken links to your competitors.
- Search for things that are "no longer available," or "no longer offered [keyword]"
- If the product is discontinued, contact the site's owner and see if they're willing to link to you instead. Contact sites linking to the broken page.

Strategy #4: Find out who is linking to your competitors. Try Yahoo! Hubfinder.
- Find out who is linking to one site and who isn't linking to other sites. Ask for that link!

Strategy #5: Take advantage of confirmation emails. Customers who like you will comply. Links are editorial and relevant. It's a scalable strategy.

Strategy #6: Embed links in widgets, badges, and banners. Create a quiz, poll, shareable content. Offer embeddable tools and programs. Include a link back to your site.

Strategy #7: Create some linkbait - brainstorm content ideas and host it on your site. Promote the content via social media sites, forums, blogs, etc. Profit!
- Identify linkbait opportunities - research your sector's link worthiness; discover the big players in your firled; target social media/social news sites.
- Analyze current trends
- Don't neglect your own industry.

Handy resources
- linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
- seomoz.org/linkscape
- seomoz.org/backlink-analysis
- quarkbase.com
- siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
- google.com/webmasters/tools

Blog posts:
- seobook.com/art-pitching-email
- searchengineland.com/lands/link-week.php
- seomoz.org/blog/long-list-of-link-searches
- seomoz.org/blog/a-long-list-of-competitve-link-searches

Greg Hartnett: link building via directories
- A directory is not a paid link. A paid link successful transaction results in a link on the page. A successful transaction on a directory is a review.
- A directory is not just a link farm. Link farms are a collection of links that are on a page that are categorized haphazardly without editorial discretion. They're created to manipulate search results.
- How can I tell a directory from a "directory?" Good directories have a history, contain great resources, have populated categories, are designed for the user, add lots of sites and not paid submits.

What kind of traffic can you expect? Not the Digg effect.
Can I list my website multiple times? Yes, it's called deep linking.
Is the Yahoo Directory worth it? Yes - it's an aged, trusted domain and the primary hub for internet mapping.
Is the ODP corrupt? No.
Which directories are considered the most trustworthy? Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, Librarians Internet Index

How do I ensure my site gets listed if I go and pay these review fees? Follow the rules. There's no guarantee of listing, read the direcotry guidelines, good titles and descriptions, and beef up your content.

Where can I submit my blog?
- Yahoo and DMOZ have categories
- BOTW blog directory - blogs.botw.org
- Search Engine Journal has a list
- Lee Odden has another list

Roger Montti:
- Traffic and links with pop.

.edu links are popular but they're not special.
- The page may not be authoritative, they may be link farms, and they may be poorly linked to.

Tips you can use:
- Industry heavyweight backlinks: check backlinks from the most important companies in your sector
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu [keyword]
- e.g. sponsors, donors, benefactors, events
Bronze sponsorships are cheaper than the diamond ones and you can get a good link regardless.

Use the following with your product/niche keywrods and .edu modifiers: hotlinks, bookmarks, links, directory, resources. Pay attention to what kind of sites the targets are linking to - if they're only liking to govs and edus, they may not want to link to a commercial site.

White Hat Black Hat strategies: almost every blackhat technique can be turned to white hat by using nofollow or rendering link with javascript. Blog widgets, counters, calculators, and wordpress themes.

Moderator: Joe Laratro President, Tandem Interactive

We are live blogging this session from Salon A @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Good afternoon. Basic research tools, killer paid reports, (knowing how to read them) and off the beaten path secret-sauce game-changing ideas are always on the mind of every good webmaster. From staples to, well ...actual secrets, this panel was a "no lame-sauce" give it up.

Todd Malicoat asks: "what's in a competitive webmaster's toolbox?"
Browser tools:

• User Agent Switcher For Firefox.
• SearchStatus Firefox Plugin, great for showing backlinks and what is indexed. Check age of domain and backlinks
• Type "Header Checkers" into Google, recommends Espion, check for 301s and status and other information.
• Live headers is another
• Siteuptime is a nice free system to test every 5-10 minutes to see if your site is up or down.
• DomainTools bookmarklet, really has a nice tool set, both paid and free. This includes historical WHOis, which can be valuable. It will also tell you the IP address and nameservers. Run an MSN IP Query and see who else is hosted on the shared server. An average ping time query gives speed indications.
• Keyword information: WordTracker, Trellian, SEOBook KW tool for "pages and pages" of current information aggregated. "Really slick

Competitive Information

• SEOBOOK SEO for Firefox. Make sure you don't get the office band by limiting the number of queries. Very nice for competitive intelligence right within the search results. Check out the age of the site and Yahoo inbound links.
• SpyFu, though a little flaky of late, is the best of the tools. Tell what AdWords keywords the competitor is bidding on including cost metrics. Sort different ways.
• Compete.com is a subscription service. See who's winning the search results data. The tool measures enragement as well and is charged on a "credits" structure.

Rank Checker Tools

• Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking runs really nice automated reports to send your boss.

BackLink Checkers

• Link Harvester is a free tool with some good data.
• Hub Finder tells you links that your competitors have in common.
• Internet Marketing Ninjas tools that are very good. Strongest Sub page Tool shows where the link equity in a site. Rand thinks that this tool is the best. It shows both internal and internal link juice on a page by page level. Gain insight to redistribute link equity.
• SoloSEO Toolset is a $29.00 per month project management software.

Spidering Tools

• Xenu's broken link report is a very popular tool tells 404 and other errors.
• Productivity Tools
• Roboform, $40.00 for 2 copies, logs into every single tool from whatever tool you're on. It saves hours and hours.
• JingProjectScreenCapture , kind of a free version of Cantasia.
• CopyScape helps detect scrapers and copyright violations.
• DupeCop assigns a "percentage of Unique" in testing content.
  

Rand Fishkin CEO, SEOMoz is speaking on 6 Tools That Rock

• SEOAutomatic Tool for on page on site analysis. Easy to run and quite good for beginners to expert. Identify critical problems in tags, images, robots and give advice. It looks a lot like the old WebPosition Page Critic approach where "expert" advice is offered. Internal links, robots, etc...
• DaveN's Keyword Density Tool shows keyword analysis, geolocation and link ratio, which surfs as GoogleBot to "see as Google sees." It shows keyword header information.
• Blogpulse is a blogosphere search tool showing top blog posts, top videos and search results (URL or keyword) that reveal information from hundreds of thousands of feeds. The information is very fresh. View a "trend graph" to see the genesis of conversations by way of authority users.. This is someone I want to target from my campaigns. [Marty note: this seems priceless.] Rand expects that tools like this will be come more and more important.
• Linkfromdomain command @ Live shows shows outbound links from any site. This reveals a site's proclivity to provide certain sorts of outbound links.
• SEOmoz Historical PageRank Lookup is a free tool that shows PageRank History, which is valuable information to see the positive and negative progress of a site. Find out if Google has been devaluing a site you're considering "acquiring" links about.
• LinkScape is the flagship SEOmoz tool: mozRank (mR) is the PageRank-type result on both page and domain level, from their own independent crawl. It measures internal/external links and considers what external are Do/NoFollow. Compare top ranking pages, domains, anchor text distribution, and links that matter. It also shows 301s and 302s, what pages and when they're ranking based on the strength of the 301s. There is also an advanced link intelligence report

Andy Beal is a fill-in and does not have a .ppt Here are the tools he recommends:

• SEOresearchLabs.com offers very comprehensive keyword research for a very reasonable price. If you're an SEO firm, the cost is $90.00.
• Google "SEO Link Analysis" and the #1 tool offering anchor text and backlinks
• TouchGraph.com is a really cool visual way of looking at hubs and authorities. It's good for competitive analysis
• Don't underestimate the value of Google Webmaster Central. Verify your site and use it.
• Backlinkwatch.com calculates the URL of where links are coming from, anchor text, PageRank, other outbound links from the page and whether it's followed or not.
• Semcheck.com sets for site maps, ULR structure, header errors, unique page titles, automates it, outputs with branding and costs $12.00 per report.

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear an Internet Focused Advertising Agency in Minnesota.

Moderator: Carolyn Shelby
Speakers:
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com
Marty Weintraub
Gary Kirk, Co-Founder, Technical Director, Rating Room Ltd

Gary Kirk - No cost local content - high value conversions

Most sales happen near the home

3 Basics for a Successful Site

- Good, relevant Linsk to your website

- No obstacles to search engine spiders

- Content that attracts and converts

Good content is available to all at $0 so well be concentrating on that.

Why is Cotnent King?

- google cant send valuable, relevant users to your site without it

- its a vital component in the decision making process for visitors

- you can get people to sites by writing content for people and the search engines.

- it doesnt have to cost a cent, but is always worth investing time into

You CAN win the content war

- Whoís your top 10 for your local searches? If you are in the local space you wil see yellowpages, google local, local businesses, review sites. Alot of the time, Google does favor the bigger sites on certain terms.  these sites dont rank for the longer tail terms.

- Content is the key to outperforming larker competitors in search engines but that tends to be alot easier on the long tail and when you pick the right searches.

A Provider or THE Provider

- good content on local subiness webistes will reassure the visitor ìThis is the right service provider for meî.  You should have the mind set to get them to think that when landing on your site.  Take testimonials a bit further and go over the top.  Take your content and expand on itÖ go over the process and if you target a dozen areas, you should link to the testimonial 2 ways. 1. Link to them with name/location and 2. Service/description.

- 750k visitors a day are from organic, 650k different phrases (stats for Garyís sites)

- you can target zip codes, town, county, neighborhoodÖ. Go after the bigger towns areas and the more common names that are used.

- Pick the right service descriptors.

Look at the combo of locales and service descriptors to cover as much as possible

Rewards from local content

- conversion from visitor to customer can be remarkable for specific searches like ìblocked toilet austin txî- targeting lots of well researched local phrases  can and often does work fast- better orfanic results, often combined with ppc, can reduce overall ad costs

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Marty Weintraub - Dirt Cheap SEO/social Hacks for Good Corporate Citizens

Case Study - no budget for link building, no ppc, little time, no budget for content

- Sourcing PR Feed Content without creating any new content & viral tactics

- fools gold link exchange

Set up to publish quick, clean and viral

- Primary cms = however you manage your site (ftp, stupid custom cms)

- secondary CMS(mashup) = blog

Publishing Correctly

- Existing content + fanatacial attitude + half a brain

Ask ìwhat do you already do?î

ìwhat if we could get billyís mom to talk about us? - getting things to go viral

Talk to:

- media relations

- investors

- community

- customer

- internal

- human interest

- crises management

Nuclear ìSend To Friendî - it is your friend

Vanity Bait with Business Feeds

- employee jelly of the month club

- requests for input

- stories of valor, tragedy and human condition

- product naming contests

- employee product recommendations

- customer, client or vendor features

What communications occur already?

- software updates

- human resources news

- weekly specials

- any press releases

- owners manul updates

Tips for content SEO Sourcing SEO Sucesses

- set up a schedule and stick to it

- these are your best friends in the world - they are finding you

Fools Gold Link Exchange

At the core is a reciprocal link exchange

- we no follow everything

2 Nodes of Link Value

1. Link Juice

2. Traffic/promotion

Google made me do it - do/nofollow sculpting

Trading partners perceive holistic reciprocal promtion and traffic

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Brett Tabke

What if there were no search engines? What are you going to do if you lose all of your traffic? Going to go over a list of all the little alternatives that we dont take time to go over.

Worst Case Scenario - What if you lose 80-90% of your traffic?

20-40% comes from search engines

60-80$ comes from trafictional means

- Recip Link Exchanges

- alterantive directories

- topic directories

- investigae the directory

Press releases - low cost alternatives (local paper) - national through internet press wires

Contests - do your homework first, legal issues, management issues, Can certainly be repeat traffic generators and good lost leaders.

Awards - they are old and tired but still work

Guest Books - use them properly. View the site, say something nice, include your url if offerend. egreeting carsds - we all thing they are a dead idea, its repeat traffic.  Article Submission - free content and links.

Affiliate Programs - viral and do your HW

Email Newsletters - huge amount of work, production costs, taking care of lists, boucnces and unsubscribes

E-a-friend - still great

KIDS! - ultimate viral promotion

Pete and RePeat - get people to resend your best material

Usenet & Forums - used properly, Usenet and forums can be excellent qualified traffic producers. Always check the TOS of sites to see what is acceptable. There is little that is more powerful that a good ole profile referral.

Building a community - (WMW)4 full time employees

Coupons - 60% that come to WMW used a coupon this year

Blogs

Traditional offliners - classifieds, trade mags, tv and radio. Got bodget to burn or a small market? radio can be quite affordable. (Brett sugests to stay away from radio right now)

Once you get people - do something with them.  Email, email, email, email. Follow up with any and all inquiries. Think viral, think repeat and recurring billing.

Coverage by Dave Rohrer

Moderator: Melanie Mitchell
Speakers:
Deborah Wilcox, Partner, Baker & Hostetler LLP
Clarke Walton, Founder, Walton Law Firm
David Naffziger, President & CEO, BrandVerity, Inc.

Clarke Walton starts the session.

Started out as an SEO before became a lawyer. Paid for law school through affiliate marketing.

Two most popular ways domain name disputes are resolved are through the UDRP and ACPA. Both enacted in 1999 to deal with cybersquatting. UDRP is like biding arbitration. Less formal. No hearing. ACPA on the other hand is more involved, it's actual litigation. Each of the two options has pros and cons. UDRP is fast, and works well against international registrars. Costs are fixed and easy to estimate. Attorney fees generally $3-$5k. Down side is that it's hard to get domain transferred if you win, can't recover damages, can't recover attorney fees.

ACPA: Benefits - can get domain name transferred to you if you win. Can get damages recovered. Up to $100k per domain. Can get emergency relief, and attorney fees. Expensive, difficult to estimate costs.

Brett asked Clarke to use a case study to prop up the central theme. Shares a story that everyone should identify with. The domain name is Pubcon.com. Was registered 9/22/03/ The original registrant was Clarke. Bought the domain name, and offered it to Brett.

Trademark strength: Trademark = source identifier. Anything that functions to identify the origin. Not all trademarks are created equal. 5 levels of trademark strength.

Fanciful is the most powerful, Xerox is an example. a word that has been made up.

Arbitrary is a strong one as well. Take a word that means one thing, and use it to mean something else - Apple is a great example. Apple is also an example of a generic or weak trademark. Between these types, are descriptive and subjective. Lines are fuzzy. Descriptive is relatively weak, American Airlines is an example. It's descriptive of the product. But over time AA spent money and time building the brand. You think of the brand nowadays. Suggestive - Microsoft is an example. Requires a bit of thought to decipher meaning.

Examples:

Fanciful: Zillow, Expedia - totally made up words.

Arbitrary: Kayak, Amazon.

Suggestive: - Youtube, Moviebuff, Gamespot, SeatGuru.

Descriptive: - IMDB, HomeLoanCenter.

Generic: - Hotels.com, Lawyers.com. Court said these are generic trademarks, few rights.

Who has priority? If two people are using the same mark - who has greater rights? In the US - the key is whomever uses it commerce first. Less to do with registration date - but rather date of use in business. Back to Pubcon example. Brett filed the trademark in 3/2004, but first use was in 2001. First common law rights. Pubcon is probably suggestive since it has the word "con" or conference.

Bad faith? Clarke registered the domain before registration of trademark. did not exercise bad faith, because he gave it to Brett. But if he bought it and sent it to SES, and took Affiliate commission - that is bad faith. The content on the domain name matters! What you do with the domain affects the right. Venetian is arbitrary. It's a hotel hear in Vegas, but also describes location. If publish content on Vegas casinos - bad faith. If publish content about Venice Italy, no worries - solid defense.

Next up is Deborah Wilcox.

Deborah reviews an interesting case study for us. Punch Clock Inc. v Smart Software Development. Came up in Florida courts earlier this year.

Plaintiff was Punchclock.com. Sells a computer program to record employee hours and pay. Generic name. Plaintiff did register the trademark covering the product. Was a supplemental register. There are 2 types, supplemental and principal. Supplemental is an admission that you don't have rights yet, but are on the books with the government and can use the trademark symbol - but have no rights. There are some benefits and drawbacks. Later, they filed as principal. When a term starts out weak, but brand strengthens. Need evidence of distinctiveness. Owner filed an affidavit.

The plaintiff described PunchClock.com as exactly what the name implies. A full featured punch clock software package.

The defendant owned Punch-Clock.com and was located in Canada. Also sold products to the US - time keeping software program. Plaintiff sent a cease and desist letter. A way to talk before going to court, to see if you can work things out. Was some email exchange, and Punch-clock.com felt safe up in Canada, and felt that the punchclock.com didn't have much weight. Maybe had stronger rights in Canada - rights go country by country.

The dispute: 6 years later. Lawsuit in 2007 in Federal Court. Why was there a delay? Courts usually have an issue with that. The other side builds up the business - latches is the term used as the defense. Usually there would have been a fight if there is a real trademark. The battle was happening in the organic results in Google, and translated into Alexa rankings. No evidence that other party was buying search terms. Defendant didn't end up showing to court. Shows lack of care. Not a good thing. Judge basically takes as true the allegations of the complaint. Canadian defendant defaulted.

The judgement for the plaintiff: Trademark infringement, cybersquatting, bad faith use, unfair competition. Likelihood of confusion.

What happened to the winner? Won the domain name. Awarded $100k which is the max damages. Awarded $30k in attorney's fees and costs, finding exceptional case. Judge ordered over $1m in corrective advertising damages.

Defendant bought PPC keywords from Google @ $136 / day. Time 7 years - total = $347k. 3X for willful nature of infringement = $1,042,440. Judge felt the $1m was too low because of this.

Unlikely that the plaintiff collected. Need to take the case to Canada, and even if you win - need to find assets. Now punchclock.com ranks #1. The defendant changed the name of the company and ranks lower. The plaintiff gloated the winnings of the court case on the homepage of the site.

Take-aways - Look for legal issues with competitors sites if not ranking high organically. Be creative in asking for corrective advertising. Show up to court! Find substantive experts. Attack casual assumptions on harm and money damages. Law protects consumers against confusion. To recoup funds, need to prove harm, such as lower rankings. Was the loss to plaintiff really a million dollars?

David Naffzigger wraps up the session:

Domain monitoring: Think like an abuser. Which domains to monitor register if you operate a website? Brand extensions, typos, alternative extensions.

Why would someone register a misspelling or variant? To make money on type in traffic, or SEO purposes, or to sell it to you. Maybe it's to defame or embarrass the company.

Tools to find typos - domaintools.com is great. will give you common errors and misspellings, and creates good lists of typos.

Find brand extensions: People aren't just typing "Virgin Atlantic" - typing in "Virgin Atlantic Mobile" or "Virgin Atlantic Phone". Adwords tool and KeywordDiscovery is great for finding variants of queries. Domainsearch.com is great for International registrations. Can be scary if brand is trademarked in Russia or places where trademarks are not strongly enforced.

Multiplex the three forms - combine typos and countries, brand extensions - virginatlanticmobile.co.uk, etc. Not great tools to do this - Excel can be useful. Figure out which ones you care about. Can't go after all of them. Find the ones that have traffic. Domains that are used by competitors. Domains that are offensive.

Tools to estimate traffic: Adwords keyword tool - plug the domain name in and the keyword phrase. KeywordTracker. Look at the registration date. Older registrations are more likely to have traffic. Buy Adwords for every typo in question.

Compete and Alexa can be useful.

PPC Trademark Abuse: Higher bar for PPC Abuse since it requires more investment to operate. Domain name registration is much cheaper, PPC abuse is costlier to operate. Abuse is conducted by organizations that compete with you, affiliates, or strongly dislike you.

How they hide from you? Reverse geo-targeting. Hide ads from where company headquarters are. Buy ads in every state where business does not have offices. Day-parting - run the ads at night when workers are asleep. Copy your ad text - and redirect it to affiliate link.

How they dodge Google filters? TM in display URL. Variations on TM (typos, spaces, etc.). Macy's for example does not have a trademark on "MacysStore".

Get your trademark registered in Google, Yahoo, MSN. Try to register your typos and extensions with Google. Make sure you use an email address from the domain you are protecting.

If that fails, trademark your most trafficked typos and then go back to Google.

Monitoring: Manual - Use Google translate or other translation tools. Use other proxies - AOL, or anything that gets your IP from a different location. Do the testing at off hours. Look at the page source.

Live coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

To buy or not to buy? That is the question in link building today. If you buy, what are the risks? If you don't buy, can you really make out just as well while exerting the same effort? This session examines the issues surrounding linkfluence.

Moderator: Todd Malicoat
Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
John Lessnau, Founder, LinkAdage
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book

John Lessnau: How to buy links with maximum juice and minimum risk

A lot gets talked about link building but today I will tell you how to buy links. This is about link buying, not link building. We'll talk about my system for buying links. There are ways to buy safe, powerful, and relevant links that will work that will keep away from the link police which is your biggest danger.

Why do people buy links? Why should you? One thing is that you need much fewer links than doing a link building campaign which is a shotgun where you hope for links. You can get the anchor text you want, on the page you want, the location on the paege you want -- bottom line is that you can rank better.

Still, people are afraid to buy links.
- They are afraid of Google's lowering PR across the board -- a lot of people sold 1-2 links went down from a PR7 to a PR6 -- and they thought it was because of the links they were selling. There's a lot of paranoia.
- A lot of people really don't understand how to buy links. They know they need links, they want them, but they don't know which ones will help them. Further, in this economy, there's a lot of up-front cost for links. The cost will come down over time.
- A lot of people also want a wave of natural links. Some people realize that they're not ranking; their backlink footprint indicates that there are like 10 links.
- Buying takes time, salesmanship, and effort.

What is a safe paid link?
- The link should be in relevant text. People will find it hard to believe that those are paid links.
- Ideally you want to be hte only paid link on the page. There should be very few on that page, and if possible, even the site.
- You want a lot of variation of your anchor text. If you're an SEO company, all the links shouldn't only say SEO company. Someone can easily look at your backlinks and determine that link buying was practiced.
- We're talking about safe links and homepages are the most powerful links, but inside paes definitely are better for a safer link.
- Links should be long term. Don't go chasing PageRank. If it's a PR4 and then it's a PR3, don't cancel it; think more about the page you're on.
- Buy links in moderation - 50-100 links max on newer sites is recommended.

What's a powerful link?
- I want sites that rank well for a lot of different search terms.
- I want dofollow links that are relevant
- Host website should not be a major link seller
- Host website should have a lot of natural links

My Link Buying System:
- Search Google for various keyword phrases you want to rank for. I write down 50-100 keywords in a spreadsheet.
- Look through the results for websites and web pages where your link would fit
- Verify the potential Link Partner does not link to major link buyers
- Contact the webmaster and make a fair offer for text link you want.
- Your links should pass a hand check to avoid being reported by competitors looking for personal gain.
(Google "Embarrassment to Google" to learn more.)

Example: cuttingboards.biz - I searched for various keyword iterations - "clean cutting boards," "cutting boards," "large cutting board," "using a cutting board" -- I found a PR3 in the top 30 and I made that link to my site.

After you buy the links, you should monitor your link to make sure that they stay up and the host site stays clean. Use your rankings as a springboard to gain natural links. Keep making your site better. Know when to quit buying links. Don't keep buying and buying and buying!

Rand Fishkin: His presentation is entitled How to Buy Links without "Buying Links"

Event sponsorships: SEOmoz sponsored a Seattle Startup Weekend.
The process: locate events (geographic/industry relevant), get in touch and offer to sponsor, often, $1-500 = permanent link from a good page. Added benefits include networking, goodwill, and branding.

Charitable donations: FreeBSD. You offer to pay for a project and they'll contribute back.
The process: find nonprofits/charities online, locate their sponsorship page/links, check that the links pass juice/get in touch, don't use standard donation forms - make sure to personally check about being listed on the page. Added benefits include goodwill, branding, and helping people.

Website purchases: Conde Net's websites.
The process: find relevant websites to buy, negotiating ownership, create relevant links that help with your needs - either sitewides (good for law link juice) or targeted (for individual rankings)

Targeted: onlywentworth.org and Seattle's Buddy.TV - they have targeted purchases
The process; identify valuable well-linked-to content, negotiate purchase, 301 to your site and host (preferably subdirectory)

Viral/Linkerati Traffic Buying: Put your good content in front of the types of eyes that are likely to link to it.
Example: Farecast.com. When the right people went to Farecast, they got some great links. They bought StumbleUpon traffic for people who tagged things as "travel"
Process: Identify/create viral-worthy content on your site, find relevant viral traffic sources like SU, Techmeme/Memeorandum/WeSmirch, TechCrunch, buy traffic/ads, measure/improve link acquisition conversation rate.

Send free stuff
Process: meet blogger in person, through contacts, send bloggers free stuff, follow up with email, don't ask for a link; ask for a review, the smaller the blogger, the bigger the brand - more likely the review

In-feed link buying
Process: identify sources that can use your feed/content, get in touch and offer power for free, if you really wnat it, offer to pay for branding, and make sure that you get live link

Blog incubation:
Example: The John McCain campaign - his political party in 2007 did this really interesting thing - incubated blogs to pass out messages from the campaign.
Process: put out ads for bloggers, have them use existing sites or create new sites,

And then he stopped. But the slides are at seomoz.org/dp/pubcon2008

Aaron Wall: Low Risk Link Buying
Alternatives to buying links -
- Syndicate content - builds authority/reputation/traffic/PageRank
- Barter - give stuff away, discounts for certain sectors (big in education). Give away software for review.
- Buy competing websites - the more archaic and gross the website is, the cheaper you can get it for.
- Social interaction - everything from speaking at a conference to networking. Any social interaction online or off can garner links.
- Public relations and follow up publicity - build off PR. If you are featured in the WSJ and NYT, while you have name recognition, push the story so you can get more links. In a week or a month, nobody will care again; the endorsement can help you get more links.

Encouraging Organic Links
- Cumulative advantage: when you put people in social networks, if you don't know what others like, they randomly vote. But if they see what others are voting, there's self-reinforcement on the vote. People win by a larger margin. The site can look popular -- or if it's regularly updated, people will keep coming back. Make it so that people can comment on your site or reference you. That can build up perceived value.
- Regular editorial voice
- Community participation
- Show social proof
- Beautiful site design
- Signs of credibility - about us, etc.

Yahoo! Directory
- Pick the best cateogry that you have a chance of being listed on - want to be in the first 20 results. You can sponsor a category if you are not. Sometimes the paid sponsorship can pay for itself in the direct traffic.

Business.com
- They sell links with editorial review.
- Submit a guide to WOrk.com as an alternative. Instead of paying, you get recurring exposure.

The Directory Purge of 2007
- Google killed many directories
- Buy in if homepage PR is where you expect it, cache dates are recent, listing quality is decent
- I like niche directories, JoeAnt, and BOTW

AdWords Ads for LinkBait
- If you have a high authority topic that people write about and it's a seasonal thing (e.g. holiday shopping), a lot of people are looking for this information. If you buy this keyword on Google and there is related content, reporters may be looking - they may click. But it can help you get links and it's a cheap permanent link. It's entirely editorial.

Clean bought links:
- Any time you review people's products or partner with people, they often list the partners on their sites. Those links may not pass PageRank but sometimes they do.
- Blog about a new google product and wait for someone to blog about your blog post
- Google Checkout, designer portfolio
- Sponsor events and advertise
- Contest and award programs
- Donate and give stuff away (widgets/software)
- Affiliate programs - can pass PageRank but some are configured to use 302 redirects. If you host your own affiliate program, you can 301 those links.

If you have dirty links:
- Try to buy links in content or organic looking link lists - without disclosure

Link Location
- Yahoo's Piryank Garg said that irrelevant links on the bottom of the page don't count in the rankings. Microsoft also has its own BrowseRank research.

- The bigger your brand, the more aggressive you can be without being punished.
- Eric Schmidt says that the internet is a cesspool of false infomration. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

If you're building a brand, someone will see it. There are remote quality raters. Google encourages you to rat out competitors. Popuar SEOs like to out sites to cause controversy and gain attention.

Moderator: Rand Fishkin

Rahul Lahiri, Vice President of Search Product Management, Ask is a maybe...

Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google is kicking things off.

Duplicate content issues include multiple URLs pointing to the same page or very similar pages. Different countries with the same language. Duplicate content is also across other sites as syndicated content and scraped content.

The ideal situation is you want one URL for one piece of content.

Examples of duplicates include www vs no www, session IDs, URL parameters, print version pages, CNAMEs. Then you have similar content on different URLs. Using manufacturers database of pictures and content. Sites in different countries with same language.

How does Google handle duplicate content? General idea is that they cluster pages together and choose the "best" representation page. They have different types of filters for different types of duplicate content. This is not a penalty, just a filter.

What can you do about this?
- For exact dups use a 301 redirect
- Near duplicates noindex and robots.txt them out
- Domains by country, note a different language is not duplicate, use unique content specific to country and use different TLDs and webmaster tool's geo thing.
- Try not to put extraneous parameters in your URLs

There are also things like duplicate meta tags and titles.

What about other sites that cause duplicate content. What if you syndicate your content out. One tip, make sure to include a link back to the original article or content. Maybe also just give them a summary. If you syndicate other's content then flip the reverse.

Scrapers are likely not to impact you, it is possible, but rare. You can then file a DMCA and/or Spam Report.

Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search is going short with his presentation cause he lost his voice.

Yahoo does filter dups throughout all steps in the pipeline. He shows some examples... They classify most duplicate content "accidental." Soft 404 (not real 404s) is one of the largest source of duplicates. There are also abusive forms, like scrapers.

He then links to Yahoo Tools, like Site Explorer. The dynamic URL rewrite tool rocks, so does URL removal.

Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optmization Architect, Microsoft is last up.

Duplicate content is his worse nightmare. CIRTA = crawl, index, rank, traffic, action. They have 180 million URLs in Live Search, 80 million in Google and a few in Yahoo, cause each engine filters them out differently.

- Consider you might need to detect when an engine is coming to your site, like cloak - in very specific considerations it is helpful, like session IDs
- Know your parameters
- Always link to your parameters in the same order
- Dig into the search results of your site and you can find things there
- Exclude dups using robots.txt or noindex, nofollow, etc.
- Don't assume engines cant find JavaScript
- Find a tool that will crawl your site, so you can see how an engine will look at your site
- Focus on your strong URLs first

These are his key points, heading out now, have a meeting.

Brett Tabke with Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, MSN Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft.

Brett welcomes everyone and does some quick house keeping.

Satya Nadella is now up, it seems like he will be speaking, no back and forth with Brett.

(1) Evolution of Search
(2) Services that Microsoft is providing for publishers

He starts with the web ecosystem, you have publishers and you have advertisers and then you have services; the ad platforms, audience platforms and infrastructure platforms.

Evolution of Search, he said how we had directories, to machine learn ranking algorithms. We had CPM/Paid inclusion, larger reach, and reactive customers, Consumers now query as oppose to browse.

The evolution is driven by the feedback loop of data. One of those data points is what are users doing on search engines. There are two things that are indicative of the next big shift in search. Close to 50% of time spent on search engines, about 50% is spent about 30 minutes on them. About 50% of queriers are returning.

50% of the time spent on a search engine, has behavior to look, find and then buying. Fundamental thing, is no one does queries in isolation, they do it in search for task completion.

Search engines have to get much better at understanding the queries, understanding the content and understanding the actions, in order to take search to the next level. Going forward then get better at getting to the action of search, making sure to take that click and finishing the task and then providing more visibility in that process to the advertiser. Better to bring a place, person or thing and bring them together to provide a better search experience.

That is the evolution of search, there is a lot of innovation to be done, a lot of test, etc.

Live Search is focused on (1) delivering the best search results, (2) Simplify the tasks and (3) innovate in the business model. Microsoft is "on pace" with the race on "core relevance." Microsoft is committed on this going forward. Core relevance improvements is to come up with new relevancy metrics and concepts. Powerset is an example of this. They also look at image search and video search and they have some of the industry leading in that. Microsoft wants to create more richer experiences that understand more user tasks in the commercial domain (product, travel, health, etc.) On the business model, live search cash back is a method for this. The next step is to introduce more efficiency in the CPC/CPM model.

Alexandra Mickel from the Live Search team takes the stage to show a demo. She shows off the home page and shows off the "hot spots." She then searches for "bellagio," which shows auto complete and then goes to images - they have integrated Virtual Earth. Plus they have "infinite scroll," so users don't have to hit next, you just scroll and it shows you more images and more.

She then showed a search result for flights from seattle to las vegas which shows details of Farecast, here are those details (I love Farecast).

She then shows a search for canon digital camera and how it shows product search results, and deeper links into Canon's web site. The product results have number of filters, rating, reviews, pricing comparison and Cash Back. Notice of the ad from eBay on the right has a Live Search cashback link (you can save a ton of money this way guys).

She then shows the updated Hotmail screen. Using their Live Search API, they integrated features on the right to insert details from Live Search.

Video Browse just started at Live Search Video. Hover over the images for a play back.

Satya Nadella is now back up.

150-200 relevancy improvements are made every quarter. They measure this stuff every month. If you have not used Live Search in a long time, give it a try and let him know your thoughts.

He now brings up Cash Back. A bigger criticism was that they didn't tie in the research mode into the buy mode with cash back. So they are bridging the two together more and more every day. They measured progress on three levels, consumer choice, advertiser ROI and query growth.

Consumer Choice: 30% increase in number of product offerings, 20 of top 50 US retailers and lot of merchants.

Advertiser ROI: eBay is shifting their spend to Microsoft. 50% better ROI because of the cash back model. Lots of these retailers are seeing great conversions. So give it a try.

Query Growth: User engagement is up in being more loyal and more click yields. They got a good unique growth. This is all substantiated by the comScore study coming out today.

Project Silk Road - Services for Developers and Publishers:

Lots of the technology they built up can be useful to developers and publishers. Project Silk Road is a broad project, all about opening up their data and technology more transparent. We care about: Increasing engagement, to generate traffic and drive insight (tools and analytics). It is all about boosting agility and control with turnkey solutions for storage, site management, merchandising and advertising.

They have Virtual Earth API, Webmaster Center, Video Syndication, Live Search API, adCenter for pubs, Custom Web Error Toolkit, Instant Answers, FAST ESP, adCenter API, Excel add in and so on. These are all bring brought together.

Live Search API 2.0, unlimited calls, easy integration, monetization methods and flexible:
Available today at search.live.com/developers/

Alexandra Mickel is back on stage to demo:

Fabrikam.com web site was put together in a single day from the Live Search API. It is a blog, with contextual ads, the ad in the top right is an interactive ad - this is a new concept to engage in the ads, the plan a trip link and it has many of Microsoft's APIs plugged in there. Maps, Images, silver light, encartra, and so on. She then goes to webmaster tools, she shows the crawl issues page, she then shows off the Excel add in tool for adCenter (pretty powerful add in for excel, in terms of keyword research, quickly).

Satya Nadella is now back up.

He then reinforces what she said. How important it is that they are opening up their data.

Overall they are excited about the progress they have made.

Danny has his write up on this at SELand with Silk Road and Cash Back.

So, as you know, I am a bit YouTuber. Okay, I am not, but I do have a YouTube channel with weekly videos on search news, that some of you watch, some of you listen to and some of you ignore.

In order to get some new viewers, I decided to try to promote my videos for search related keywords. I tried, at least, but Google won't let me run my ads and I am not sure why.

I read the YouTube blog post's instructions and several articles on the topic at Techmeme. I login to YouTube Ads and I set up my campaign, hit run and it gives me an error. Here are some of the screens, not all of them, but some:

The dashboard with my single ad:

This is the screen asking me to confirm my ad and then make it live:

This is the error I get after hitting the big GO like button:

So maybe when I get back to my office in New York, I can try to figure out what is wrong. I have some ideas, but we will see.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Starting yesterday, a new AdSenseAdvisor has taken over at WebmasterWorld. The introductory thread is at Webmasterworld, which says this new advisor has been transitioning in. The old is being promoted, so congrats to you!

Here is the post:

Our previous ASA is transitioning to a new role within Google, so I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be your new ASA.

I really look forward to working with you.

Fire away!

This is not the first time we received a new AdSense Advisor. Back in March of this year, we had a new rep. I guess they get promoted fast and now, eight months later, we have another new rep. Hope the new advisor can live up to the old one.

Forum discussion at Webmasterworld.

Last night, Malie of Google announced at PubCon that they have posted their internal SEO guide, the guide they use to building search engine friendly web sites within Google, to the public. You can find the SEO guide at the Google Webmaster Central Blog as a 22 page PDF document.

I wish I had time to review it, but I am at this conference and my connection is very slow. So I figured I compile the discussion around this document from the forums.

We have discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn. Here is the overall consensus:

• Some feel it will end the debate on meta tags
• The 404 handling topic was useful
• Google uses the nofollow in the document
• Document is formatted well and easy to read
• Some felt Google took jabs at the SEO industry in the document
• The same people feel Google learnt tips from the SEO industry
• SEOs might send this document to their clients to save them time
• This is a major step from moving from guidelines to actual SEO tips
• Google didn't talk much or at all about links

Again, I did not read it myself, I hope to soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and 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: November 12, 2008"

Based on WebmasterWorld's most popular thread ever:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm

Brett Tabke's "26 Steps" has received nearly 25 million page views and 15 million unique visitors since it was first posted almost seven years ago, and has been used as a training manual by numerous Fortune 100 corporations.

Brett will look at the controversial issues the post raised and the potent strategy that so effectively builds Web sites.

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com

In this session, Brett starts with the stats the post has received to date:

• 29 million page views
• 5 million uniques
• 200 copies on the web
• 290 cease and desists issued so far
• First chapter in Google Hacks - the post owned by O'reily now.
• Total income = $500 paid by O'reily for Google Hacks Book.
• 10,000 thousands back links.

Brett goes over a lot of the points he wrote about in 2002, while opening up the discussion to the audience:

Prep work: The initial document stated to start with 100 pages of content before you throw it online. Back then that was good. Now you need probably 5x that to get to a real site.

Says the posts is not really about SEO. More about content, traffic, building a successful sustainable site. Mainly a content play, not an SEO play.

Asks the audience- What are your experiences? Most of the audience's experience with less than 100 pages aren't doing well. One guy here has a niche sites that is an exception. Another guy with a niche site says he does OK too. Another guy sells memberships in the real estate vertical and makes just under $200k.

Domain name: Wrote back then you don't want "mykeyword.com". Based on Web 2.0 names today, (demos a site that's a Web 2.0 name generator, pretty funny, audience laughs), it supports the original claim. Domain name game is more complicated than ever. Now you can make up your own TLD. That game is changing fast.

One guy talks about the volume of leads he generates from browser based traffic, over many different sites. Owns sites like kentuckyhomemortgages.com, etc. and lots of tail end query domain names like that.

Site design: Back then, the rule of thumb the simpler the better. New wild-card is the iPhone which validates that. iPhone users use the phone 5X as much as other mobile devices. Get into mobile as quick as possible. That is part of the design. Adapt your current template to the iPhone.

Asks if anyone has static sites still? Thought they were extinct. Talks to one guy, very curious. Wants to know why people still have them. Static sites are becoming extinct. One person wants to know if you can build the site in HTML, what's the point?

Google is still proof the easy, retro look is cool.

Content: Content is a complex thing. Not such the case that content for the sake of content is such a good idea. Big believer in quality targeting content. Smart content.

Matt Tuens takes the mic. States that the original SEO was content. That's why search engines were created. Stickiness - people are too busy to go to 20 sites. Creating one site that is the "go to" site is key.

Brett talks about user generated content. Now suspect, there's a lot of noise out there. Asks if people relying the same on UCG these days? On trusted sites, like TripAdvisor its less of an issue.

Outbound links was a controversial topic back then. Sites should be generous. Back then, you were who you link to. Search engines know you by who you link to. Now people talk about sharing the wealth. Suggested cross linking to offer PR to lesser value pages. Goal is the right balance.

Hosting: Now you can't even think about shared hosting. Everyone's got their own servers, costs have dropped dramatically. Asks who still has their site on shared hosting?
Polls the audience regarding regular log tracking software anymore? Brett says they use one they built themselves and compares against other analytics package. Incredible to see the wide variation. Try different analytics packages, will get a whole different view of the site.

Spiders: Lots of CMS's these days are still not spider friendly.

Directories: Still favorite. Lots of them out today Look for ones you should be in.

Gimmicks. Still a million. People much more web savvy today.

Rounding out the offerings: Add options like email a friend. Still valuable today.

Back to content. Still important, not as hot as used to be. Hot on targeted content. Talks about the sandbox. Built a few sites that are still taking a year to rank. Used to think it was be all end all, now its about smart content.

Matt Tuens elaborates on "smart content". when you think about the content, realize that everyone is going to criticize your content. Judging what you put out there. If you help your demographic - info that people are looking for vs. garbage just to rank for, your going to lose credibility, sales, customer based, business in the foot - just for a ranking.

Moderator: Larry Mersman

Speakers:
David Klein, Electron Wrangler & SEO, Purpose Inc
Joe Laratro, President, Tandem Interactive
William Leake, CEO, Apogee Search
Justin Sanger, Founder & President,LocalLaunch!

Description: It is not just for brick-and-mortars anymore. Many Web sites have discovered the power of local targeting. This session will focus on the marketing aspects of local search.

Session Notes:

The first speaker is William Leake...

Most searches have local intent -- eventually. Online search influenced $471 Billion in OFFline sales, while they influenced only 1/3 that in Online purchases. More than 80% of all purchases happen witin 50 miles of the buyers home.

Google does not always show local results even when location is specified in the search string. Creates a new, unique keyword research issue. What does and does not show local search results (the Google map with 10 listings).

Important to register ALL of your addresses (even get clever about where you might get additional addresses). Customize for your largest geo city center. Google tends to like the larger city centers.

Add your info to yellow page type websites too. ie. SuperPages, YellowPages, Local.com, etc. as they act as information aggregators. He also feels customer reviews are important. Figure out where Google is getting the reviews, then ask customers to provide real reviews.

Do not forget video for local. Tag the video for local searches and you will be surprised at the results. Many online profiles also accept videos.

Next up is Joe Laratro...

Joe says local keyword research is critical. Not only do you focus on the obvious state & local phrases, but think about local slang like "tri-city" or "triad" or "Valley". Then combine them with your vertical market or area of specialty. You will most likely have a large list of phrases that you will then need to create content around them.

Geo-centric Content creation ideas: client testimonials, client case studies or stories, blog and work logs, pictures with captions, and local resources & information pages. But do not use form pages (search engines will catch this). Always think GEO when writing your copy and remember to optimize!

Brainstorm to come up with our areas of specialty and then incorporate local keywords. For one of his clients, he hired writers to come up with local content in 30 different locations. They combined with keywords and 1 year later the website had 7X the traffic using 5X the keywords used to find the site.

Even though individually these terms generate small amounts of traffic, it is quality traffic and they all add up to lots of site visitors.

Next up is Justin Sanger...

He truly believes local search is only for brick & mortar companies, not pure web plays. With that said, it is a $1 Trillion dollar market. People will search online for local purchases and will find it without ever hitting the company's website.

Justin notes that both Google and Yahoo have incorporated proximity, user generated content (reviews), content accuracy and a local score into their algorithms.

Searchers now view mobile search as an indespensible utility. There are literally hundreds of ways for a consumer to find a business. Every piece of incremental content is a new opportunity to be found.

To win, you need to have your core business data online with the big aggregators - make sure it is accurate. For the next tier, you must submit your profiles to every place that you can. You need to get references for your site by looking at who Google is pulling reviews from. Seed social media and other site with ratings and reviews. Build links from your local associations, trade partners, etc. These are authority local links.

Last presenter is David Klein...

For your site to be #1 in organic you need content and links. So Mike spent his portion of the session uniting people from similar industries so that they could discuss trading links. There are now groups of peole all around the room swapping business cards and trading links. A great ending to this session.

These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building services and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

So get this, there is a break now. But the session also starts now, got that? The refreshments are until 3:30, but the session starts at 2:50. In any event, it is about 3pm and we have not started yet. This is an international track, so I suspect it is about URLs, subdomains, language issues, etc. I speak in the next session, Five Bloggers and a Microphone - What's The Worst That Can Happen? in Room C at 4:10, don't miss it. I doubt we will have coverage of it, since its an open panel.

Moderator: Dixon Jones

Andy Atkins-Krueger, Managing Director, Web Certain Europe Ltd is up first. He shows a chart at IP addresses used in the WWW excluding the US and you see UK, China, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, Korea, in that order... He then shows a similar chart in a tag cloud format.

The big forces in each area, i.e. how big is Google in UK, etc. Baidu in China, Yandex is Russia.

SEO Tips:
(10) UTF 8 encoding (unicode)
(9) Do not translate, use a native speaker
(8) Adopt a local PR strategy
(7) Manage 301s properly (big issue for some reason internationally)
(6) Keyword in URLs would help international SEO
(5) Links are important, local links
(4) Geo urself
(3) Use cit names in content
(2) Domain targeting with local domains or webmaster tool's geo tool
(1) Language and content presentation, manage duplicate content between multiple sites

Michael Bonfils, President, SEM International is up first and jokes about not making fun of his accent, which he doesnt have one. He is to talk about Asia.

Asia is important because 400 million users are in the Asia market place. He goes over the stats on why Asia is so important, trust me, he believes it is important.

E-commerce is Asia? Start with Japan, he suggests. Then move into Korea and then China. China is very under developed in e-commerce, so far.

Baidu: The average CPC is 20 cents, but it ranges. There is an implementation fee, like a deposit, and it is high. They dont take credit cards, they require wire. Baidu is very picky on the ads. Be aware of currency.

Google: It is easy to advertise in China. The CPCs and conversion rates are typically 2x higher than Baidu.

Yahoo: they have strong share in Asia. But they don't preform that well, 50% less effective than Baidu.

Chinese sound translations are hard.

Google looks mostly the same in China. Baidu is different, they mix paid and organic listings, but label them. The listings keep going dependent on advertisers.

Baidu SEO:
- Title and Meta Alt Tags
- Content, keyword density matters
- Linking, more quantity than quality
- Server and domain names, host in China and the domain is important for trust in searchers
- Localization and the market, use simplified Chinese
- Luck and connections matter

Yahoo is huge in Japan, followed by Google.

Korea has Naver, Daum (powered by Google) and Yahoo.

Competition: Your coming in from the US to compete locally. Monitor your local and global competitors.

Translation and Localization Tips:
- Use localized keywords, ad copy and landing pages
- Build trust in your ads and titles

Baidu has a very basic reporting system and they just added impression numbers, which he says don't work too well.

Ralf Schwoebel, Founder & CEO, Tradebit Inc. is next up. Might cut out soon, to go to the next session, where I speak in about 20 minutes.

He will focus on Germany and Europe. He first goes over basic SEO stuff. Translation is not enough. Ranking of a site is easier if it is locally hosted in that country.

Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media

Skipped out early, sorry, need to make it to my session and look somewhat awake.

We are live blogging, this session from Salon B @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Because it is live, there is no editorial or proofing process. The moderator is Joe Laratro.

PDFs, DOCs and feeds each have idiosyncrasies for optimization which can help your site rank. This session is going to dive deep into these formats to pass along best practices.

George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC is presenting, "optimizing PDFs for search engines." He wants us to seek rankings and more click-throughs from search engine result listings for .pdfs. He suggests that you create active links within .pdfs to increase the number of readers who visit your website or contact you while viewing your .pdfs online. Give search engines paths to find content on your website, which may help for internal inking.

Use mostly formatable text because search engines can't read text in images. Google can not create a meaningful description from an image. Optimize text in a .pdf documents according to SEO best practices. Pay special attention to the first headline. Google creates listings from text contained in the .pdf and the words and phrase being in bold, just like it does with HTML web pages. Tip: Rebuild old .pdfs if needed. Above all, update the document title, which is as important as the classic HTML title tag is for SEO.

If you don't have a title, Google extracts text from the .pdf's to create the listing, which it won't help "entice" people to click-through .There are many applications to create .pdf titles. Take note that Word 2003 usually adds "Microsoft Word" to the document title. It's best practices to update .pdfs in Adobe Acrobat. The document title usually becomes the headline in the organic Google listing.

If the .pdf is hosted on your site, link from pages that are already indexed. Add active hyperlinks to improve the likelihood that a visitor will click-through to other areas of your site.

Highlight your URLs, export/print as a .pdf and open in Acrobat. Menu commands in Acrobat: Advanced>Links>Create Links. Turn any text or image into an active link using Acrobat tools. Just draw a rectangle around the text or image and assign a URL. By adding these links in .pdf's, you're also giving search engines paths to reach pages on the site and may "very well help" in Google rankings. Promote your .pdf by linking to it from pages on your site and think about ways to get other websites to link to it as well. Inbound Google juice seems to have the same effect on .pdf's as on regular HTML pages.

Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com says the 30% of searches conducted on Google sites aren't web searches. He is going to discuss best tips, tools and techniques for non-traditional optimization that apply both to indexing and ranking support. He'll look at various file formats including DOCs, RSS feeds and video files.

GoogleNews examines recency, relevance and importance. If you're content is old, it's out after 30 days. Often corporate "news" is disseminated in a Word Doc. Greg is talking about optimizing a Word Doc. Newsforce offers an integrated suite of press release SEO tools. In the end, you export as an optimized Word document. He is showing five case studies of press releases that generated a measurable ROI including 88,00 entries into photo contents for "Parents," 200 million in CSAC leads for Symmetricon and $2.5 million in ticket sales for Southwest airlines.

GoogleBlogSearch examines a blog's title, content and popularity. Recency counts now. The older the ranking, the less important it is in Google Blog search. Try SEOSamba to optimize website and create RSS feeds. This can result in dramatic increases in visitors, visits and page views.

YouTube examines dozens of aspects, including hits and rating. YouTube's video view count is comparable to Yahoo! search count, which sheds light on the popularity of video search and YouTube. Comments are a part of the algorithm. "Once you start getting the views, you get the rankings. Once you start getting the rankings you get the views, but your must allow comments." Google's Universal search, means the presence of blog posts, videos and other channels in the SERPs. It takes up to 30% of the organic search results. It's crucial the SEOs optimize for that 30% or be left behind.

Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts is talking about his daughter's [famous] Neopets site. Here's the BIG SEO mistakes for bloggers.

• leaving title tags to be auto-generated from the post name.
• squander crawl equity by letting pages get indexed that don't deserve to be (email this,etc...)
• Having multiple homes for your blog (http and http://www.)
• not using unique "optional excerpt" WordPress feature to minimize duplicate content
• not using rel-nofollow to direct PageRank flow
• over-reliance on date base archives
• no stability in keyword focus on category and tag pages
• sub-optimal URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories)
• only one RSS feed and it's un-optimized
• hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don't own
• using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally

Re-jig internal linking structure. Use tag clouds, tag pages and tag conjunction pages. Use related posts, top 10 posts, next and previous pagination. SEO Title Tag plug in for WordPress allows you to override the title tag with a custom title tag. It also allows for "thin slicing, " which means making quick decisions and don't over think. If you're an SEO expert, you can do the same concept by using the mass edit capabilities of SEO Title Tag. "Crank through" the pages on your site to make them more keyword rich.

A common overlooked tactic is to simply name your blog with keywords in the title. Optimize URLs, because it's been proven that short URLs get clicked on 2X more than longer URLs. Further, long URLs appear to act as a deterrent to clicking, causing users to click on the listings below it. Use sub domains, subdirectories, new domains. Don't be www.metlife.com/blog. Rather, be StayingFitBlog.com. Using free blogspot.com or wordpress.com URL? You benefit from their domain authority, but you're forever wedded to them.

Optimize anchor text. Make the post's title a link to the permalink page. Use SEOMoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool or tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) to look for opportunities to request previous to anchor text to inbound links. Sculpt your PageRank to really decide where you're going to send juice and where not. Stephan is particular fond of nofollowing calendar archive links, trackbacks, comments and where the link would be reciprocal.

Minimize duplicate content. Code your main index template to display "optional excerpts" on everything but the permalink page. For each post, write unique content. Don't just use the first couple of paragraphs. Improve the keyword focus using heading tags, bold, strong, and sticky posts.

Optimize your RSS feeds

• full text, not summaries
• 20 or more items, not just 10
• multiple fees by category, latest comments, comments by post
• keyword rich item in the title
• your band name in the title
• your most important keyword in the title
• compelling site description
  
  

Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear, an Internet Focused advertising and public relations agency in Duluth, Minnesota.

Moderator: Joseph Morin said they changed the title to making search work on many levels.

Melanie Mitchell, Vice President of Marketing, Foliofn Investments, Inc. is up first. She first worked at AOL earlier this year and left.

The consumer is in control of your content, that is why search is so good. The power of search is it is the marketers holy grail. Search is one part of the whole mix. She shows examples of how offline drives online sales. She gives a few case studies.

I totally was distracted on this panelist, I am sorry. Focusing now...

Dave Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc is now up. He is Yahoo the web side, not the search engine, i.e. he is an SEM.

They have tons of properties, and this is their main challenge, he will take you through it. Yahoo does SEM for the same reasons you and I do it, because it is a great marketing angle. They do paid, organic and affiliates across a lot of businesses. Specifically with SEO, they do talk to search product managers, they do benefit that search is part of their property, but they do not get to talk to the engineers, they don't know the algorithms, they don't know CTR by position algorithms.

They have a lot of properties. Lots of these businesses are different, some are subscriptions, some are downloads, some are e-commerce, some are lead gens and some are display ad revenue. To measure them all, they use a Life Time Value metric, what is the value a conversion for a subscription, referral, CPC/CPM? What is the net present value of that lifetime revenue stream? etc.

How much opportunity is there out there for me to get? What your trying to get is what is that opportunity that I can capture? They created a predictive model, based on click data, search data, etc. They want to figure out how they are doing against their competition. Then you can figure out how much a click is worth to me. Then you can do this for all businesses. They were able to see the competitive gap and they figured how much it is worth. Then they can show you the money, how much it is all worth, by business line using SEO/SEM.

Yahoo decided to stop fixing things that were broken. Instead, they try to make SEO part of the product development process (i.e. web site development process). You need to insert yourself into this process. They developed about 6 different check points.

Paid Search Execution is easier. The decisions he makes is to do it in house versus outsource, build or buy, leverage LTV model, measure everything, etc. They do both of everything.

They standardized a workflow document, which looked complex, but isnt.

Then they do a marketing scorecard for all their businesses. It helps them decide where to move money to and from. It helps them keep track of things and they do this weekly. They also do an SEO dashboard to keep track of things at the VP level.

Hit blog is IndustrialStrengthSEM.com, so check it out.

Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optmization Architect, Microsoft is now up. He does SEO at the lowest possible level, but there should be involved throughout.

Microsoft.com is one web site, but they treat it as hundreds of individual web sites. There is windows, there are micro sites, there are directories (microsoft.com/australia) and even that is not consistent. Optimization has been done on a site by site basis, which causes issues. They have at least 9 CMSs to deal with.

They work every day to make their site better for search engines. They have 100 billion plus URLs or so, it is a huge challenge. He said how Live has a ton of pages, Google has a lot less and Yahoo has very few. This shows them they have structural issues they need to fix.

Three levels of SEO:
(1) Sitewide SEO initiative
(2) Then individual web sites need to do SEO (he cant do it all for all sites)
(3) Page level SEO, he doesn't focus much on this

He said, Microsoft does not know how much traffic Microsoft.com gets from organic versus paid search. Can you believe it?! They are working on fixing this. Plus they are trying to standardize the metrics they use throughout sites. They are also doing a lot of training and travel all over the world. Some of the out of the box SEO tools don't work for Microsoft, they don't scale for it. So they built internal tools to manage this.

SEO Initiatives:
- Duplicate and undesirable pages (big issue for Microsoft)
- Excessive use of redirects
- Improper error handling
- Structure of subsidiary content
- Low quality page titles and meta tags

Good SEO is about structure, content and authority.

They built their own spider, not from Live search. They are crawling their web site, to figure out what a search engine is experiencing. So they can fix issues.

Site Level SEO's 6 Steps:
(1) Business Outcomes and Metrics
(2) Keyword Research and Selection
(3) Structural and Technical Audit
(4) Content editing for keyword integration
(5) Link building strategies and tactics
(6) Outgoing optimization

Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer, Google is last up. Search is part of webmaster central and tools.

YouTube gives each video a unique URL, they have titles and a real description. It has easy search and great navigation. It has a social aspect and embed URL. It has great features...

Created an SEO starter guide, it is now live at over here. This is the guide they used internally for best practices, and it is now available to everyone.

If you have an image link, they will use the alt tag as the anchor text. Interesting...

Make sure to provide value, act responsibly (yes, large sites can be penalized), and have fun - they also did the halloween joke in the robots.txt file.

This session will look at methods for monitoring, managing, and influencing your reputation within the blogosphere and press. If you are not talking with your customer base, your customer base will be talking about you.

Moderator: Todd Friesen
Speakers:
Jessica Berlin, Social Media Manager, Cirque du Soleil
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

First up is Lee Odden.

Why is online reputation management (ORM) important?
Your customers, prospects, and competitors are online. People pissed at you are online. The future of your company is online. There are comments, blogs, reviews, and more -- you need to be aware of this.

How important is knowing about dissatisfied customers, brand de-vangelists, brand champions and evangelists? You should know about these people -- brand evangelists can be armed with tools to talk more about you in a positive light.

How is it that your online reputation is influenced? One is through search. ORM is about "search engine results". Another influence is social media - you can ask people for advice and feedback about a particular location, business, or whatever. There's also mainstream media - are you getting press coverage that's positive and negative? Do you have a handle on the top people in these channels?

Search engines = reputation engines.

Lee shows several examples of PayPal, Walmart, and Target.

What's going on and how can you monitor your ORM?
- Free: Google Alerts, TweetBeep
- Small Biz: Trackur
- Enterprise: Radian6, BuzzLogic

Short term ORM: SEO and social media displace SERPs
- Make brand optimization a process in the organization
- Brand optimize all digital assets: text, images, audio, and video
- Optimize aross departments: PR, Marketing, HR, investor
- Resul