Blog Administration Archives

Monday, June 9th and Tuesday, June 10th, Tamar and I will be offline and not posting, in real-time, to the Search Engine Roundtable. We do have several articles scheduled to be posted throughout the two days, but they were all written the previous week.

I have asked some of the guest authors to contribute to this site, as they see fit. So they may stop by and change things up while we are gone.

If you are still in need of stuff to read or listen or watch on the topic of search, I welcome you to check out my search videos and subscribe to the feed. You can download the videos to iTunes, iPod or iPhone and listen (don't have to watch them) at your convenience. Or you can watch them directly on the site in our search buzz category.

If you want to know why we are offline, check my personal blog.

I have created a 15 question reader survey that I hope you can all take. The purpose of the survey is to learn more about you and what you like best about the site. I basically want to learn your likes and dislikes about the content, design and features of this site.

As you know, we have been writing here since 2003 and we continue to try to add components that add value. In addition, we try to focus on search community news and discussion. So even though some news might be hot in the search industry, it might not be important to the average SEO. We try to focus on what is important to the average SEM based on what is being discussed in the forums. We will stay true to that mission but that doesn't mean we can't do better.

I am really hoping most of you can spend the time to fill out the 15 question survey. You can access it at this link.

If you need a reason to take it outside of helping us make a better resource for you, then here you go. If you fill out your name and email address, which is optional on the survey, I will randomly choose one winner. What does the winner win? The winner will win free schwag from Google, Yahoo, Live Search and other companies. Plus the winner will win a free dinner with me and maybe a few of my SEM friends (if they are available) at a kosher restaurant. The dinner has to be at a kosher place, but the winner can coordinate with me the date and time. FYI, the prize ideas came from suggestions at my personal blog.

Again, please take the time to complete our first ever reader survey by clicking here and answering the questions.

Over the past several weeks, I have been experimenting with producing weekly video recaps. You can view those recaps in the Search Buzz Roundup category.

The main issue was that many folks were not able to sit and watch the 10 minute or less video while at their computers. They asked if I can make a podcast version that they can download and listen/watch later on their computers, iPod or iPhone. So after a week or so of work, I have finalized that set up.

Today, I published a new RSS feed exclusively for the video recaps. You can find that feed over here. Now, if you are an iTunes user, you can subscribe with the single click of a button by clicking here.

Keep in mind, these are videos and can take a long time to download. So let it go in the background - I will look to compressing the videos even more. Of course, I will keep the YouTube version going as well, so if you like YouTube, stick with that and subscribe to the standard feed but if you use iTunes/iPod or an iPhone, the iTunes subscribe link is probably best. I have archived these details at the subscribe page.

FYI - I promise to keep trying to improve these videos as I go. And you can win prizes by watching!

So please subscribe and let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

A couple days ago, I announced on my personal blog that I expanded the keyword list that triggers the Google Co-Op subscribed links from showing up.

If you don't remember, the Google Co-Op subscribed links are a way for a person who trusts your content to tell Google. Once you trust our content and Google knows it, Google will then show our content for specified keywords (that I choose) in the Google web search results. For example, a search on link building will put content that I label to be associated with link building in the fourth result. Here is a screen capture:

Prior, a limited set of keywords that matched our category names would trigger Google to show our content in the subscribed links portion of Google web search. We have decided to expand that to more than 500 new keywords. I have been tagging our content since May 2007 and with over 1,700 unique tags, I thought it would be useful to add those keywords to the mix. So I added, dynamically, that tags that have three or more articles associated with them would show up. It turned out that by implementing that condition, we were able to add over 500 new query strings that would trigger the Google Co-Op from showing you relevant content from this site.

Not convinced yet? Give it a try, knowing you can always quickly unsubscribe. How do you see this in action?

(1) You must be logged into Google when searching
(2) You must be subscribed to our subscribed links, so subscribed here.
(3) You must search on one of our category names or tags (that match 3 or more articles).

Example queries that work:

• link bait
• keyword suggestion tool
• live search
• google update
• smxwest
• matt cutts

I feel that expanding our keyword list this way would keep it relevant and also help our readers find useful and trusted content. So what do you say, subscribed now?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you haven't noticed yet, today we put up our new design. The design is based on more of a 'tabloid' type of theme. Yes, we decided to change our focus and become a more 'edgy news' type of publication. We wanted to stop boring you with all the latest minor SEO tips, AdSense changes and Google news items. We will not bring you the hot and edgy news from our industry.

We have thus decided to change your design, as you can see, but also our name. Our name now has more 'edge' to it, we are now the Search Engine Squaretable. With this new name and design, you can expect some hot, edgy news from us. Here are our top stories for April 1st:

• Microsoft Buys Yahoo So Google Buys Microsoft in Hostile Takeover
  Of all days, on April 1st, Microsoft finally acquired Yahoo. All the silence we have been hearing was confidential discussions between Yahoo's executive team and Microsoft's executive. It really didn't even take that long, but most of us expected that Microsoft would own Yahoo in the long run. At this point, Microsoft tells us that they will leave Yahoo as a standalone property. They did not yet decide if they will consolidate their efforts on
• Berkowitz Replaced By Lanzone at Microsoft
  The search world was in for a surprise this morning when it was formally announced the Jim Lanzone will replace Steve Berkowitz as Senior Vice President of Microsoft Online Services which includes the Live.com search engine. Berkowitz had previously announced that he would be stepping down in August of 2008, but last week he indicated he would be leaving earlier for personal reasons and would announce a successor. Berkowitz quickly announced Jim Lanzone as his
• Danny Sullivan Starts Four Door Media
  We've received reports that Danny Sullivan and his friends (Chris Elwell, Chris Sherman, Claire Schoen, Sean Moriarty, Michelle Robbins, and Karen DeWeese) have launched Four Door Media. What's behind door number four? The team has decided to take a direction away from search. Four Door Media is all about Apple and Mac evangelism. Last month, Danny finally caved and bought a Mac. Only a few days later, he was raving about Mac and Windows on
• Matt Cutts Transfers to Performics - Will Assume Lead SEO Role
  In a move that comes as a surprise to many, Google has decided to reinforce Performics, a company that came with the Doubleclick Acquisition, by transferring long time search quality lead Matt Cutts into a role with the search engine optimization firm. This immediately strengthens the perceived value of working with Performics, since Matt is obviously very familiar with the Google algorithm, and has had insight into the Yahoo system during his brief stint with

Please let us know your thoughts! It has been a crazy day.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Squaretable Forums.

Today is Mardi Gras. In celebration, we Search Engine Roundtable folks have put up a nice pretty theme for your enjoyment.

I don't believe there are any special decorations on Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, or Ask's site, so we alone at Search Engine Roundtable wish you a very happy day!

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Search Engine Journal has finally finished posting all the awards for the best search blogs of 2007. We are very proud and appreciative that we won two of the five categories we were up for nomination for. We won for one of the most prestigious awards offered, the Best SEO Blog Award and for our hard work in conference coverage with the Best Search Conference Coverage Award.

I am also personally extremely delighted Search Engine Land won three awards, being part of the Search Engine Land team - it matters to me. Search Engine Land won the Best Search News Award (very important to me, since I am the News Editor), the Best Search Marketing Blog and Sphinn won Best Search Marketing Community/Forum Award.

I thought I comment specifically about each of the two awards the Search Engine Roundtable won.

Best SEO Blog of 2007 Award:
Finding new nuggets of SEO advice each day for the past five years has not necessarily been an easy task to do. But with the aid of the community from the forums we cover, it has not only been hard but it actually is a lot of fun. Like I have said time and time again, it is the community that makes up this site and our content - so the community deserves this award.

Each day, I research several search marketing forums looking for unique SEO topics to write about. With the help of Tamar Weinberg, Ben Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs and Kim Krause - we are able to bring these threads to you in a concise, readable and tactical format. It is an honor to win this prestigious award, the best SEO blog of 2007.

Loren Baker, of Search Engine Journal, said:

For 2007, Search Engine Roundtable’s team of Barry Schwartz and Tamar Weinberg continuously bring excellent coverage of SEO and webmaster issues as discussed in the various search marketing forums that they cover. Additional authors to the blog include Kim Krause-Berg, Robert Kerry, Carolyn Shelby, Chris Boggs and Benjamin Pfeiffer.

Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007 Award:
We basically invented search conference live blogging, starting back in 2003 with SES Chicago. Since then, we have covered 30 search conferences, consisting of over 1,000 sessions. But we still had steep competition from the likes of Lisa's team at Bruce Clay's Blog (very worried about them), AIMClear, DD and of course, TopRank - all of them deserve this award as much as we do. But the award really goes not just to the Search Engine Roundtable, Bruce Clay, AIM Clear, David Dalka and Lee Odden but mostly to the writers, the people who lose feeling in their finger tips while typing lightening speed.

Those people include (and I can't thank them enough), cshel, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Marty, DaveR, Justin Davy, Avi Wilensky, Debra, Steve Krull, Lee Odden, Tamar, David Wallace, Chris Boggs, Ben P., Lisa Barone, Dazzilin Donna, Kim Krause and so many more.

Loren Baker, of Search Engine Journal, said:

With the most votes and the highest ratings, Search Engine Roundtable took this category to school! Thanks to the SER crew, and all bloggers who cover the search, publishing and advertising conferences .. you keep us tuned in when we cannot leave our desks.

I figured I end off this thank you by linking to each award and also the discussion on that award at Sphinn (since they won). Thank you again and as always, forum discussion at...

• Best Affiliate Marketing Blog : ShoeMoney, Sphinn
• Best Link Building Blogs : Jim Boykin's Blog & The Link Spiel, Sphinn
• Best Social Media Optimization Blog : Dosh Dosh, Sphinn
• Best Google Blog Not Owned by Google : Google Blogoscoped, Sphinn
• Best Search Engine Corporate Blog : Google Webmaster Central Blog, Sphinn
• Best Search Industry News Blog : Search Engine Land, Sphinn
• Best SEO Blog : Search Engine Roundtable, Sphinn
• Best Contextual Advertising Blog : ShoeMoney, Sphinn
• Best Search Conference Coverage in Photos : Everyone, Sphinn
• Best Overall Search Marketing Blog : Search Engine Land, Sphinn
• Best Search Blogger on Paid Linking : Matt Cutts, Sphinn
• Breakout Blog : Dosh Dosh, Sphinn
• Most Giving Search Blogger : Rand Fishkin, Sphinn
• Best Search Conference Coverage : Search Engine Roundtable, Sphinn
• Best Search Engine Research Blog : SEO By The Sea, Sphinn
• Best SEO Plugin for Wordpress : All in One SEO Pack Plugin, Sphinn
• Best Search Engine Community/Forum : Sphinn, Sphinn

Thank you all and congrats to all the winners, nominees and to having such a tight industry!

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

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

The categories we are up for nomination include:

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

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

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

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

Why should you vote for the Search Engine Roundtable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loren Baker has opened up nominations for the annual 2007 search blog awards. I think we deserve a few nominations at the minimum. Wouldn't you agree? :)

There are 24 categories and I bet you can fit Search Engine Roundtable into a few of those. For example, who rocks the house with conference coverage? Don't you think Barry is a very giving search blogger?

So nominate us (and perhaps other some personal blogs too... cough) and we'll be sure to thank you for adding to our trophy shelf. It is because of you, the readers, that we write, so thank you to our loyal reader base. :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Today, the Search Engine Roundtable is four years old. That is right, we have been writing about search engines, search engine optimization, ppc, spam, contextual and more for four whole years now!

What makes us unique has remained true to this site time and time again. We are consistently covering stories, news, trends, SEO & PPC techniques that are popular with the search marketing industry. Without the search industry and the forums the industry participates in, this site would not be what it is today. So thank you all for that!

Here are some stats to share with you, so you know what we have been doing over the past four years:

• Published over 6,500 stories
• With about 10,000 comments (note, a server crash deleted all comments from January 2005 and earlier)
• Over 1,500 new articles this past year alone
• We undergone three, different design changes over the four years
• We have won dozens of awards over the years
• Received gracious testimonials from industry experts and search engine representatives
• We have awesome & dedicated supporters who keep this blog going
• Our authors are top notch

This means an incredible amount to me personally. Over the past four years I have dedicated myself to writing over 5,000 articles here, so it is a lot of work. It honestly feels a lot longer than four years, but I enjoy it.

Here are our top stories (I am missing data from September) for the past year:

1. Google Maps: Invading Your Privacy? (Not Anymore!)
2. Google Earth - Free Download
3. Getting Access to Gmail Accounts of the Deceased
4. Screen Captures of the New Google News Results in Action
5. A Look at Google Gears Working with Google Reader
6. Google Sending Out More Google Coolers To AdWords Advertisers
7. First Screen Shots Of Google Pay Per Action In Action
8. Google's April Fools Jokes?
9. Search Engine Demographics: Women Prefer Yahoo, Men Prefer Google
10. A Serious Google Maps Bug

Want more stats? Sure, how about a run down of the top topics we write about. Here is a break down of the number of articles we wrote by category - showing the top ten categories only:

1. Google Optimization with 714
2. Other Google Topics with 586
3. Google AdSense with 549
4. Google AdWords with 520
5. Google Search Engine with 418
6. Search Engine Optimization with 331
7. Microsoft MSN Search with 299
8. Google News & Press with 279
9. Link Building with 203
10. SEO Forum News with 203

All together we average just about 6 posts per workday!

That is four years! We have a special theme up, that will stay up for a few days. Here is a static image of that theme:

A huge thank you to our readers, our sponsors (on the left side of this page), the search industry, our authors and everyone who has helped us by donating or contributing in their own ways.

For our past birthday posts, see our third birthday, then our second birthday and our first birthday.

I would also like to wish a happy birthday to Search Engine Land, who is now celebrating its first birthday. The site has come a long way in just one year, check out Danny's write up on those achievements. Wow, I wrote over 1,250 articles in a year just over at Search Engine Land - that is over 40% of the articles at Search Engine Land. Happy birthday Search Engine Land (Readers, Team and Sponsors).

To sign off properly...

Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Can you believe it, this post is my 5,000th article here at the Search Engine Roundtable. I started writing here on December 2nd, 2003 - just under four years ago - and have kept up with it since.

On average, I have written just about 5 posts per work-day. There are times where I have written on weekends or holidays, which skew the data slightly to show 4.7519 posts per day where I have written any posts. In fact, you can see at any time throughout the day, the number of articles our authors have written in real time. Tamar, has already written 695 articles in just about 6 months so far!

In any event, how does my article writing break down by category? Since we have dozens of categories, I will show you the top 20 categories by article count:

1. Google Optimization with 598
2. Google AdSense with 469
3. Other Google Topics with 431
4. Google AdWords with 405
5. Google Search Engine with 317
6. Microsoft MSN Search with 255
7. Google News & Press with 229
8. Search Engine Optimization with 222
9. Yahoo! Search Optimization with 189
10. Ask.com with 184
11. SEO Forum News with 180
12. Blog Administration with 172
13. Link Building with 163
14. Yahoo! Search Engine with 149
15. Yahoo! Search Marketing with 147
16. Search Engine Conferences with 140
17. Yahoo! Publisher Network with 120
18. Google PageRank/SERP Updates with 113
19. Search Engine Industry News with 110

As you can see, I am very Google focused. But I can blame the forums for that. Since I cover what is hot in the forums, Google is typically what is hot in the forums.

Who would have thought, four years ago, still going strong at about 5 articles per day on search at the Search Engine Roundtable? Consistency and reliability is huge for me.

Adding Tamar to the team has helped us average about ten stories per day, which would not be possible without her. It has helped us expand our conference coverage and keep up with the fast growing search marketing industry.

In addition to my articles here, I have done a ton of writing throughout the web. Here is a brief run down of my contributions to the search industry outside of my 5,000 articles at the Search Engine Roundtable.

• Cartoon Barry: 1,406
• Search Engine Land: 1,212
• Search Engine Watch Blog: 1,137
• Search Engine Watch Forums: 2,755
• SEO Chat Forums: 2,642
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums: 1,639
• Cre8asite Forums: 1,027
• DigitalPoint Forums: 303
• WebmasterWorld: 252
• HighRankings Forum: 124
• JimWorld: 100
• Sphinn: 58

Thank you all for reading and making this site what it is today!

Here is to 10,000 articles at the Search Engine Roundtable!

Are our daily posts becoming overwhelming? Do you prefer to just get one update from this site daily and not several? Do you want to learn about the search forum threads that did not make the cut to become a featured article at the Search Engine Roundtable?

If so, you will be glad to know, we have started a new daily recap feed. You can either subscribe via RSS using this link or via email by using the form directly below this sentence:

The new recaps are named Search Forum Recaps and they contain the articles from the day and links to other forum threads that we felt were great but just didn't make the cut to us writing about them.

Note, if you ever see a thread that you feel would be great for us to cover, please consider submitting a thread.

Is this format very similar to the SearchCap at Search Engine Land? Yes, but Danny is cool with it and it should be helpful to many new and current readers.

I rarely post a thank you to our sponsors. I thought I take this opportunity thank our advertisers at the Search Engine Roundtable as well as introduce a new ad format that we will be testing for the remainder of the year.

Thank you to:

• Text Link Ads for their continued sponsorship over the past few years.
• ACS SEO for signing up to be a long term sponsor of the site.
• SEO Inc. for sponsoring our site throughout the years.
• PubCon for being a sponsor of our site for a couple years now.
• Google Analytics for signing on as an advertiser, I have been using Urchin since they were an alpha product.

Google Analytics is actually the company testing out a new ad spot in our RSS feeds. We are testing a simple RSS text ad, at the top of each of our feed items. The test will continue throughout the end of this year. If you do not like the ads, please feel free to contact us and we promise we will listen.

I would also like to thank all our bronze sponsors who are listed on the left hand side of this page.

Tonight is the holiday of Simchat Torah, so Tamar and I will be offline starting tonight through the weekend.

We have scheduled several posts to go live during our time offline. But we will also have live coverage from Ben, Chris, Kim while Tamar and I are off. I have previewed some of the topics and they are really exciting. So stay tuned.

It is the last day we are off during the week for months. So after this week, we are back to a regular schedule. At least I hope so.

For those celebrating Sukkot, have a happy holiday. Everyone else, thank you for reading and commenting!

Tonight is the holiday of Sukkot, so Tamar and I will be offline starting tonight through the weekend.

We have scheduled several posts to go live during our time offline. But we will also have live coverage from Ben, Chris, Kim while Tamar and I are off. I have previewed some of the topics and they are really exciting. So stay tuned.

Next week is the same story. It is the last day we are off during the week for months. So after next week, we are back to a regular schedule. At least I hope so.

For those celebrating Sukkot, have a happy holiday. Everyone else, thank you for reading and commenting!

Starting tonight is Rosh Hashanah, that means Tamar and I won't be doing live coverage of the search news and topics found within the search forums. It does not mean that there won't be any news published here.

Ben, Chris, Kim and company will be helping while we are gone. In addition, we have several exciting articles that are scheduled to be published over the next couple days.

We decided to create a special theme for the Jewish New Year. Here is the preview:

I expect Google.co.il to have a special logo, like they did last year.

On a personal note. I want to thank everyone for making this site such a success over the past four years. Thanks to all the authors and contributors, big thank you to our sponsors, thanks for the search forums for the great topics, thanks to all the search engines, thanks to all the press and a special thanks to all the readers and those that comment. Without your continued support and loyalty, we would never have been able to keep up the comprehensive coverage of our industry.

Happy, healthy and successful new year to all!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I often get questions about how I can be notified of updates to this site.

Just a reminder to those out there, we have a detailed page describing the various ways to subscribe to our site over at http://www.seroundtable.com/subscribe.html.

We offer daily email notifications:

We also offer two RSS feed options, both a short feed (which is the default) and a full feed.

So by all means, if you want our full feed come and get it.

One of the Search Engine Roundtable's trademark features is our extensive, quick and comprehensive coverage of the major search marketing conferences available to the community.

Most of our readers see the hard work we put in time and time again to type up and publish our notes on this site. In fact, we have covered 26 conferences dating back to 2003. In fact, we have covered 546 sessions over those 26 conferences. We have done so across America, and globally, including places like San Jose, New York City, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, Seattle, New Orleans, Sweden, Toronto, London, Germany, China, and more. We have had dozens of hard working contributors type away hard at their keyboards to get this done for you. You can find our past conference coverage by scrolling through our search conference archives.

As we prepare to cover the approximate 75 sessions at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference, I thought I share a little behind the scenes on how we prepare to cover such a huge conference amongst several authors.

I recently released RustyBudget a tool to help coordinate the stories bloggers and authors write about on a daily basis. We are now using it to coordinate the sessions each of our writers will be covering while at the Search Engine Strategies conference. For more information about this tool, which I use to manage the topics here, at Search Engine Land, my personal blog and other places, read the RustyBrick press release named RustyBudget - the Writers Budget, see my personal blog post on it, or read TechCrunch's review.

The screen shot below shows a screen shot of the budgeting system:

As you can somewhat see, we place all the sessions into a folder named "Available Sessions." On a first come first serve basis, the authors login and drag the topics from the "Available Sessions" folder to their own folder, titled by their first name. Here is a video of me dragging a topic into my folder.

That is what goes into preparing to schedule several authors over a four day conference with 75 sessions.

We hope to cover all 75 sessions. We currently have about 40 to go, but I suspect we will have no problem covering 90% of the sessions. If you are interested in helping with the coverage, please contact us.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This past Sunday I launched a new element for locating content at the Search Engine Roundtable, I launched the Search Engine Roundtable Tag Cloud.

Ever since we upgraded to the new version of Movable Type, which supported tags, I have been tagging my content. I figured after I had enough tagged content, I would then launch a tag cloud. I did that this week. We currently have have almost 900 different unique tags. I tried to limit the tags to display only if there are two or more articles tagged with the tag, but I was unable to get that working.

In any event, we have 900 or so more ways to find content on the site. It has expanded our category archives tremendously, and also gave us a visual understanding of the most popular topics covered here. The larger the font of the tag, the more times we wrote about that topic.

A timely Cre8asite Forums thread asks;

I am doing a bit of development recently and part of which is going to be creating a tag cloud for a personal app... I was thinking about Blogs in general, and the amount of duplicate content they can produce with things like tag clouds etc...

Do you think adding rel="nofollow" to all the links in the clould would be a good move?

This individual is concerned that a tag cloud will generate duplicate content. My concern was that Google does not like to index search results pages. Are tag pages search results pages?

I spoke with some high profile people (not at Google) and they were confident that tags are not search results, but they are category pages. Even more so, only authors can tag the content here, so it is fairly structured, if we can call tags structured. So I personally decided to enable Google and other search engines to crawl and index the tag cloud and tag landing pages. The tag cloud not only is a benefit to my readers but can help searchers find the results they are looking for.

Bill Slawski added an excellent point about nofollowing internal links:

I don't like the use of the nofollow value for internal links within a site. If a search engine uses "nofollow" in a link as a sign of distrust, then there's the potential to harm your site by using a rel="nofollow" within a link.

So in our case, we left it open. Enjoy our new Search Engine Roundtable Tag Cloud.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Kathy Sierra's horrific blog comments experience and subsequent refusal to speak in public out of safety fears has prompted a Blogging Code of Conduct. Draft one, authored by Tim O'Reilly, comes with a badge and time for feedback for revisions.

The outcry against it is nearly as outraged as the response to Kathy's situation. Should blog owners follow a code of conduct or continue to blog as they have been?

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Call For Some Sort Of Blogging Code, Now That Was Inevitabl(y stupid)

I just wanted to give everyone an update that the site design for the blog is complete, as far as I know. We launched version three Tuesday night and then received some incredibly feedback.

Based on that feedback we made the following changes:

• Fixed issues in IE6 with formatting
• Bolded title fonts
• Tried to synchronize the two font styles on the site, keeping the middle fonts all neutral
• Added minimum width of 900px and maximum 1500 pixels
• Added image code verification on contact us forms
• Lightened up sponsored links
• Some minor style changes
• And some minor functionality changes

If I missed anything, please comment below or email us at contact us form.

We also maxed out our advertiser, in fact, we have a waiting list. I still have a banner to upload. So that is good news.

The forums should be migrated to the new design this week.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

We just launched a new design for the Search Engine Roundtable. All the changes are primarily design and very few functionality changes. I do hope the new design will speed up a few things including commenting on our stories and also searching our archives.

Note: Please clear your cache to see all changes.

Overall, I felt it was critical to keep the theme the same. So you can see many elements and themes from our previous design throughout the site. But now the site simply looks and fits better with our content. I am pretty tired right now, so I will sum up the major changes in bulleted list:

• New look
• Less ads
• Revised authors page
• Revised the forums page
• Archives page jazzed up
• Revised awards pages with added testimonials
• Revised seals page
• Easier to use contact forms
• Google Coop powered internal search feature
• Easy to understand subscribe page
• Added recent entries page via left side bar
• Revised advertise page
• Easier to submit threads for consideration
• Added custom 404 pages (forgot to mention this)
• and more...

Our RustyBrick designer, Skew, and I worked on the site design. I then worked with Sergio to code the site, I love his work.

Please feel free to leave comments or email me via the contact us form with bugs or suggestions. Oh, yes I know the forums still needs to be converted to new design.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: FeedBurner is having connectivity issues. Nice to have this happen when I launch a new design. It is slowing down the site right now. I hope they fix it fast.

I have been meaning to create a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) specifically to search the forums that we report on here for a while. I had 5 minutes and that is all it took. You can visit the the Search Engine Roundtable Google Custom Search Engine and conduct a search. It should bring back results from the following forums:

• Cre8asite Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• High Rankings Forums
• I Help You Forums
• Jim World Forums
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Site Point Forums
• SEO Guy Forums
• SEO Refugeee forums
• Web Pro World Forums
• V7N Forums
• WebmasterWorld Forums
• Web WorkShop Forums

You can see a search in action by searching on minus 30, where I wanted to find all threads discussing the Minus 30 Penalty (also discussed here).

So give our Search Engine Roundtable Google Custom Search Engine a try and let us know what you think.

Search Here:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I just wanted to give everyone here an update. I will be going on my honeymoon this Sunday. I won't be back until 1/17 or so. Ben, Chris, Kim and Robert have all agreed to keep things going here in my absence. I do hope to check in once or twice a day - possibly sneak in a post or two when my wife is sleeping. Also, I hope to be posting pictures and experiences of the trip to Israel at my person blog, Cartoon Barry.

I pretty much will be off the Search Engine Land blog the whole time, but Danny has that under control. I will be slow with email and responding to things this whole time.

I am confident that Ben, Chris, Kim and Robert will do a killer job while I am gone. I also wanted to thank them for taking this on them.

I wanted to thank everyone for voting for us and reading this site every day. We have took first place in the Search Marketing Blog 2006 category. It is also important to note that we came very close in other categories including Best Search Engine News Blog of 2006 where this site came in second place by 0.05 points, but second place to Search Engine Watch Blog, which I wrote at with Danny basically the whole year, so it is basically a win for us. For the Best SEO Blog of 2006 we came in second, right behind SEOMoz, a great blog that offers some of the best SEO tips I have seen and they have a great community over there. I personally came in 3rd place for the Best Search Blogger of 2006, behind Danny (second place) and Matt Cutts (the winner) of Google (I will comment personally on this specific award at my personal blog).

Over the years we have had the privilege of winning many blog awards, they are all listed over here. Honestly, these awards me a lot to me, I am not sure exactly why, but I really like when we get such great feedback.

Thanks again for voting for us, just one more contest going on now, the 2006 KBCafe Blog Awards, the Search Engine Roundtable is listed under section number 11, please feel free to vote for us.

Thank you so much.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

KBCafe is running a blog awards, they did it also last year and we won.

If you would like to vote, you can go here.

We are listed in number 11, with Matt Cutts and Online Marketing Blog.

Thanks!

Also, we are live tonight, airing the Search Pulse, edition 14, at 5pm (EST).

Since so many SEM/SEO bloggers are doing it, I figured, I do it also. Here are some stats from the 2006 year for the seroundtable.com domain, not including the forums.

Top Requested Pages:
(1) Home Page - 14.73%
(2) Google Earth - Free Download - 3.27% (um, yea)
(3) Google.com beats MSN.com according to Alexa - 1.62%
(4) A Serious Google Maps Bug - 1.35%
(5)