Blog Administration Archives

Tonight is Yom Kippur, one of the most sacred days of the year for Jews. To learn more about the day, just go to Wikipedia.

Because of the day, I personally will not be blogging here or anywhere on Monday, September 28th. We may have Ben and Chris come out of hiding and do some expert posts. But that is up to them. I have already posted about five articles, today, Sunday, to make sure I got you covered for the weekend's most important search marketing discussions.

As you can see, we made this site's color white. White is to recognize the importance of this Jewish holiday. For anyone observing Yom Kippur, have an easy fast and a very meaningful day. I hope you all forgive me for anything I have done against you and I wish you all a happy, healthy and successful new Jewish year.

Here is a picture of the theme:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This is a quick technical note that I had to disable comments. I am not sure what is going on, but starting this morning, when comments are added, the post's contents would disappear.

So I have disabled comments for now.

I'll try turning them back on later to see if it was a temporary issue. If that doesn't work, then I might have to switch to WordPress or something custom.

As many of you know, I had a baby girl on Friday morning. Cutest thing ever and mother and baby are doing great!

What I didn't expect is how little sleep you get during this stage. So, I apologize for the lack of posts here. That being said, I wanted to let you know I am still doing the forum research. I do hope to post a few things each day, but don't expect the volume and detail in each post until I get my feet wet with being a father.

Thank you so much for all the kind words left here and on my personal blog. The hundreds of good wishes on Twitter and all the emails, calls, IMs (yes, I was on my computer much of Friday, hospital had great wifi) and from the Search Engine Land Team and Cre8asite Team.

In classic SERoundtable tradition...

Forum discussion at Sphinn and Cre8asite Forums.

I am taking the day off today. I just had a baby girl. Feel free to comment on my personal blog.

I added a theme:

I'll take off Monday also. Didn't realize there is little to no sleeping. :)

We are being forced to migrate our feeds off FeedBurner's legacy servers and on to the new Google servers. Yes, Google bought FeedBurner a while back and now they are requiring all FeedBurner users to move from feedburner.com to feedburner.google.com by the end of this month.

So this morning, we hit the migrate button. It is still migrating. Most of you should be fine, because we used the MyBrand service, which meant our feed URLs were at http://feeds.seroundtable.com/[feedname-goes-here] but some of you may be subscribed to the old URL, which would be at http://feeds.feedburner.com/something.

If so, the new URL will remain to be at but is hidden behind a CNAME of http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ or likely at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/SearchEngineRoundtable1

Bottom line, if you don't get feed updates from us tomorrow or the next day, then there is an issue with your feed subscription and you will need to resubscribe. You can subscribe over at this page fairly quickly.

To be honest, I am terrified of making this switch. We track threads and we track the FeedBurner Group and all I see are complaints about feeds getting lost or subscribers numbers diving. So I am a bit nervous about this migration, to say the least.

Oh, if you have never subscribed to us via RSS, maybe it is a good time to do that now over here.

If anything goes wrong, please comment here or contact us or if you are a Twitter person, over at twitter.com/rustybrick.

Thanks for reading, as always!

I totally forgot to write a special article for this site's fifth birthday, which took place on December 2, 2008. We have been writing here for five years! We have written over 9,000 articles, and over 2,300 just this year alone. That makes for over 8 articles per work day this past year and just about seven articles per work day over the course of these past five years. I could not have done it with out our contributors and a special thank you to Tamar Weinberg. This article will be my 6,270th piece at the Search Engine Roundtable - hard to believe. But it is not all about the numbers.

This year we were voted the top SEO blog and also the top conference coverage in the industry. A huge honor, which means a ton to me. I also started doing a weekly SEO video podcast, which I am pretty committed to and gets a nice number of subscribers. Yes, that also takes a lot of time, but I am enjoying it right now - so I will keep it up. Oh and I experienced waiting in line for the iPhone, the night before it went on sale - something I likely would not have done, if I wasn't blogging for five years.

I thought instead of sharing the most visited articles written here over the past year, I thought I go through each post and pull out the most important ones, at least to me. Below, you will find these posts grouped as logically as possible. For me, it helped me look back at the year in search and see what really happened and how significant each change was.

So continue reading below by clicking through:

Continue reading "Search Engine Roundtable Is Five Years Old - December 2nd"

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?"

As you know, Google is switching many of their help forums from Google Groups to a new interactive help forum. The AdSense forums, Chrome forums and now the AdWords have all moved over.

AdWordsPro Sarah had the honor of posting the last message in the Google Groups forum. The new AdWords forum is over at google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords. In honor of the move, she posted the latest tip, Where Are My Clicks Coming From? Using The Geographic Performance Report.

I also wanted to let you know, after a couple days of research, I found a way of tracking the threads at these forums in a semi-efficient manner. Not as good as the old way, but it will work for now. So, we got you covered for the new forum and tracking the most important threads at these forums.

Forum discussion at new AdWords Forum.

Today is Columbus Day and we have a special theme up for the day. It looks like this:

But if you visit Google, you will see a Paddington Bear 50th birthday logo up for today. The logo looks like this:

Boy does that bring back memories. Of course, the logo links to a Google search result for paddington bear.

Happy birthday Paddington Bear and happy Columbus Day also!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Just to liven things up a bit, we decided to put up a special theme for today. Today is supposedly National Hot Dog Day, so hence, the hot dog theme. Here is a picture for archive purposes:

Doesn't that make you hungry?

Last year we celebrated the day with a theme as well, which can be seen over here.

Happy Hot Dog Day!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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) Google AdWords Showing Same Two Ads On Search Results Pages at Google.com - 1.03%
(6) Google Testing AdSense Cost Per Action (CPA) - 0.86%
(7) Pages Coming In & Out of the Google.com Results & Google Index - 0.72%
(8) Google.com & The Da Vinci Code Quest - 0.67%
(9) New MSN Beta Live? - 0.67%
(10) Google Payments (GBuy) Coming Soon to Public? - 0.60%

Top Referrals:
(1) Google - 25.27%
(2) Direct - 22.01%
(3) Yahoo Search - 9.56%
(4) Google UK - 3.26%
(5) Google News - 2.20%
(6) MSN Search - 1.91%
(7) Search Engine Watch Blog - 1.75%
(8) Google Canada - 1.60%
(9) Bloglines - 1.39%
(10) StumbleUpon - 1.17%

Top Time Zones:
(1) -0400 - 19.25%
(2) -0500 - 18.63%
(3) -0700 - 14.27%
(4) +0100 - 10.46%
(5) +0200 - 9.22%
(6) -0600 - 5.92%
(7) -0800 - 5.80%
(8)+0000 - 2.86%
(9)+0530 - 2.70%
(10) +0800 - 2.48%

Top Screen Resolutions:
(1) 1024x768 - 45.09%
(2) 1280x1024 - 20.61%
(3) 800x600 - 9.53%
(4) 1280x800 - 5.72%
(5) 1152x864 - 3.85%
(6) 1400x1050 - 2.38%
(7) 1440x900 - 2.29%
(8) 1680x1050 - 2.20%
(9) 1600x1200 - 1.99%
(10) 1920x1200 - 1.51%

Feedburner Stats:
5,491 subscribers (combined my two feeds)

Top RSS Readers (via Feedburner based on short feed)
(1) Bloglines
(2) Firefox Live Bookmarks
(3) Netvibes
(4) Rojo
(5) NewsGator Online
(6) FeedReader
(7) Google Desktop
(8) Windows RSS Platform
(9) Safari RSS (OS X Tiger)
(10) Thunderbird

Email Subscriptions:
699 Active Readers powered by FeedBlitz

Visits:
I will just say I average consistently well-over 150,000 visits per month.

Articles Count Summary:
Total in 2006 (to date): 1,777
Average per Work Day: ~7 (depending on how you count work days)

For some of our highlighted events and articles over the past year, read our We Are Three: Search Engine Roundtable's 3rd Birthday post.

The holiday season is here and most of the search engines are already sporting holiday season logos. Tonight is the last night of Chanukah, so we took down our logo for Chanukah and put up the Christmas logo. Here it is:

Google is changing their logo daily, this is the second logo, but make sure to track them here.

Yahoo! has a very cute one, that is flash, they skate around the logo, I took a static image of one frame.

Dogpile is sporting a shopping search engine theme.

Ask.com doesn't have anything yet, but I am sure they will (I'll update the post when it is added). Update: Ask.com does the background change...

Cre8asite Forums sports a holiday logo:

I wanted to wish you all a happy and healthy holidays!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Much of what I cover and write about every day is inspired and tailored to you guys. The design, the emails, the RSS feeds, the categories and tagging are all done to help improve the accessibility of the content and our buzz coverage.

I figured the new year is almost here, so it is a good time to open things up to suggestions from the readers again.

Please feel free to comment below or email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com to make suggestions, comments, and bug reports for the Search Engine Roundtable.

We will listen to all your submitted feedback, because you make this site what it is.

Search Engine Journal is running the 2006 awards today. You can vote for Search Blogs 2006 today. In 2005, we won the Best Search Engine Community Blog of 2005, it seems that category has been put aside.

But you can still vote for us in multiple categories, including:

• SEO Blog of the Year
• Search News Blog
• Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
• Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006 (vote for individual people here)

There are so many excellent blogs out there this year, so the competition is very very tough. We were lucky enough to win the Best Blog on Search Marketing by MarketingSherpa for 2006 and also for 2005. Again, thank you so much for all your support with those awards. Your devoted readership keeps us going here, and winning these awards shows us that you really find value in our work.

To vote for us just click here but make sure to vote for all your favorite blogs. I did but I won't mention which ones. Tell your friends.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Tomorrow, December 2nd is our birthday. We were born on December 2, 2003. It has been three years of blogging, almost 4,000 blog posts, about 5 blog posts per weekday. I thought it would be fun to look back at the years and highlight some important and meaningful topics we covered over the years. But first a little history...

The most important thing that happened this year was that I went Off To Get Married this year. This year we won the Best Blog on Search Marketing by MarketingSherpa again, a huge honor for us to win back to back years. I launched my personal blog by Introducing the Cartoon Barry Blog in July of this year. We even started our own weekly podcast named the Search Pulse. I set up a very successful Google Coop for Search Engine Roundtable, if you haven't signed up yet, please do. Chris Boggs became our Associate Editor to provide forum coverage back on February 14st of this year. We released Search Engine Roundtable Supporter Seals which are being displayed proudly throughout the search community by many people. In December of last year, Search Engine Roundtable Opens Forums, which was a big success, today we have over 1,300 members and 6,200+ posts. Later on this year we won the KB Cafe Blog Awards and Best Search Engine Community Blog of 2005 by Search Engine Journal, another huge kudo for us.

Our most important asset is our reader. Those of you who read on a weekly, daily or hourly basis is what keeps us going here. Our numbers continue to grow and we love to see that. We also enjoy all the comments we get via blog comments, email and our forum. Thanks so much for being such a vital part of our success and continued growth.

Here is our special logo for the day:

Highlighted Articles From December 2005 - November 2006 (No Specific Order):

Continue reading "We Are Three: Search Engine Roundtable's 3rd Birthday"

As I posted at Cartoon Barry, Chris's comment has been selected by Ben P., Chris B. and myself as the winning contest idea.

Chris's idea was that;

the person who can take as many pictures of different people holding a piece of paper with your url on it over a 24 hour period? That would make a cool page on your site, many different people/ages/nationalities etc.

Ben picked this one, and we all agreed it was a very good idea.

So in the upcoming weeks, I will announce the final rules for this next contest.

Congrats to Chris and thank you for such a great idea!

It has been a while since we ran a contest, so I figured I run a new contest. You can win a new RustyBrick Messenger Laptop Bag filled with a bunch of Search Engine Roundtable YoYos. Here are pictures of both.

How do you win?

I have the details at my personal blog under the title Contest: Win a RustyBrick Bag Filled With Search Engine Roundtable YoYos.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Rob Kerry is an SEO Consultant, living and working in London, UK. He previously headed up the Natural Search department at one of the UK's largest Search Engine Marketing companies. In order to further his knowledge and expertise, Rob decided to leave Steak in September 2006 and started a client-side role as a Search Marketing Brand Manager in one of the most cutting edge and competitive markets for search. Some of the websites which he's worked with in the past include Sony Europe, Sony VAIO, Cahoot, The English Tourist Board, plus many FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

Rob is a Search Engine Watch Forums moderator under the alias name evilgreenmonkey. You can view his personal blog at www.evilgreenmonkey.com.

Tomorrow morning I am flying to St. Louis, so tomorrow, blogging may be a bit sporadic. I have asked Ben, Chris and Kim to chip in while I am away, they have agreed. Monday morning, I fly back and won't be back on the blog until after 11am (EST).

I am off the blog tomorrow, Monday. I have scheduled two posts I found to be interesting to go live Monday morning. The rest may come from Ben, Chris, Kim or an other author.

See you all Tuesday.

It is the Jewish holiday season and over the next few weeks, I won't be able to post as timely as I normally do. Tomorrow morning I am flying to St. Louis, so tomorrow, blogging may be a bit sporadic. I have asked Ben, Chris and Kim to chip in while I am away, they have agreed. Monday morning, I fly back and won't be back on the blog until after 11am (EST).

I have posted more details on the Rosh Hashanah Trip here.

Did you know that I compile a daily roundup of search topics that I covered for the day? I post these search recaps in bulleted formats, with more humorous comments, at the Cartoon Barry Blog. By each recap, I post a voice over version of Cartoon Barry. Basically, Cartoon Barry give you a 600 character or less summary of the daily events in search.

The Daily Search Coverage Posts Offer:

• Video cast like summaries of the news I covered
  
• Bulleted hyperlinks to the news topics for the day at Search Engine Roundtable & Search Engine Watch
  
• Additional quick commentary on each news item, not posted at the source blogs

To activate the video over feature, just visit www.cartoonbarry.com and click on the "speak" icon or text for that blog entry. All the Daily Search Coverage post should have these icons from here on in. You can visit today's recap that I titled, XM Radio & Google Bird Watching, SEO Tips, Danny Who?, Vanessa Fox Cutts', Assist Tracking, Private RSS, Ask ISBNs. When you get to the blog post, then click on the icon to hear the voice over and watch the cartoon character. The voice over is a text to speech technology, and is not my real voice.

For more details on how it works, click here. Otherwise, feel free to visit the blog daily for quick news recaps.

We have upgraded the software here from Movable Type 3.2.x to 3.3.x. Please let me know if you see any issues or problems with the new software.

Here are the main changes, some not visible on the frontend at this moment:

- Tags: Readers can find content more easily and subscribe to custom feeds.
- Widgets: Arrange and re-arrange your page by dragging and dropping.
- Activity Feeds: Get updates on comments, feedback, and blog activity delivered via a secure feed.

Plus the editor now works in Apple' Safari.

My coverage this week will be sporadic at both this site and SEW. There has been a sudden need for me to be offline for this week. I have to be with family at this time. Everyone in my family is OK and well.

I am sorry for any inconvenience.

I always felt there was a void in my blogging abilities, I know, I blog all the time, I do. But, I have no where to go to ramble about things that are off search topics. So if I had a bad day and it was either for personal reasons (washer flooding a room) or business related (server blowing up), I wasn't able to really put that anywhere. Plus, since I write at two different blogs, it is important for me to consolidate what I write about in one place. So I have decided to launch a new blog, a personal blog named the Cartoon Barry Blog.

So what can you expect at the Cartoon Barry Blog?

• Summarized daily recaps of everything I wrote about, for example.
• Interactive Cartoon Barry, provided by SitePal, will also give short recaps virtually, click the play button here to see an example.
• Personal life things, if you care about them.
• Business related things from RustyBrick..
• Rants on anything, even search - and I normally don't rant on search stuff at the other blogs, here I promise, I will.
• And more... suggestions are welcome

Some of you remember the creation of Cartoon Barry, and I have to thank DaveN again for it. I have filled up most of the informational pages with content and I plan on adding more. Right now I have two posts up on the blog. I will have at least one per work day, but probably more.

Subscribe via:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

We hope to be launching a weekly radio show in conjunction with WebmasterRadio.FM. The show will be live one day per week, for one hour straight. It will include a weekly roundup of select topics we discussed here. The cool part is that Ben, Chris and I will all be conducting the show at the same time. I suspect I will lead the conversation, but you will hear from Ben and Chris as much as you hear from me. Oh, and yes, we tend to disagree on select topics. Expect a launch date and schedule to be posted about the show within the next few weeks.

Right now, we need your help in deciding a name. I personally like the name "The Search Pulse." It goes along with our tag line, "the pulse of the search marketing community." And it resembles how we dig deep into the community to learn what is really important to the industry and not what press releases deem to be important. Anyway, here is a poll with all the option. Feel free to add new ideas in the comments area or in start a thread in our forums.

Scroll down for the poll please.

Continue reading "Search Engine Roundtable On The Air Soon: Reader Feedback Requested"

The folks over at SitePal have made a Cartoon Barry into a character. I will be coding it to interactively read posts to you, based on the content of the post, when you click on an icon to initiate the playback.

Here is the cartoon with some text read back, that I manually added. You must click on the individual entry to view it.

Continue reading "Cartoon Barry Interactive by SitePal"

Wanted to wish you all a Happy July 4th! I will be taking the day off.

To keep yourself entertained, please check out http://www.ask.com/.

Pretty bold!

This site, as well as some of my other sites, will be moving to a new hosting location. The same server, just a different location. The move is suppose to take place tomorrow morning, when I do not update the site. So most of you will not be affected. Just wanted to inform you of this prior.

Any problems that you notice with the site, the feeds or anything else, please let me know at barry.schwartz@gmail

Thank you all for voting, we won the best blog award from MarketingSherpa in the category of Search Marketing. We actually did not win by popular vote, we "were second-highest. However, they did nail the highest percent of "Excellent" ratings -- vs 'Not Bad' and 'Blah,' and that's what matters." Honestly, I was hoping we would compete against Search Engine Watch (a blog I write at), Threadwatch, Matt Cutts and other more well-known in the category. I suspect we would not have won if some of those blogs were in the running.

It is still a huge honor to take the win for "Best Blog on Search Marketing."

Search Engine Roundtable
Bloggers include: Barry Schwartz, Benjamin Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause, Shawn Hogan, Ignacio Hernandez, Morgan Carey, & Dan Thies
http://www.seroundtable.com/

Sherpa Note: This is the second year in a row for this group Weblog to win the Search category. Notably, the voting for the entire category as a whole was fairly even (aside from one obvious ballot stuffer). The guys did not get the highest total votes, they were second-highest. However, they did nail the highest percent of "Excellent" ratings -- vs 'Not Bad' and 'Blah,' and that's what matters.

I just updated the post to attach the winners logo, and I hear they are sending me another mug. :)

More details at MarketingSherpa.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I seriously want to break the 1,000 subscribers mark on my Google Coop page. So here is the deal. The first 15 to email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com will get a free Yo-Yo IF...

If I break 1,000 subscribers by 5PM (EST) today. You can subscribe by clicking here.

More on what the Google Coop at:
- Getting Listed in the Google Coop Directory
- Is the Google Coop Spamable? Depends...
- Feedback on Google Coop for Search Engine Roundtable
- Dynamic Implementation of Google Co-op for Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Co-op: What Is It?

Want to see what the Yo-Yo's look like, I have more information here. To see it in action, see my YouTube demonstration below.

Continue reading "Free Search Engine Roundtable Yo-Yo Opportunity"

I hate begging, rarely ever do it, but like last year, this year MarketingSherpa is holding the Reader's Choice Blog Awards. We were honored last year to win the award, it meant a ton to us. Especially the comments about why we won, that really really meant a ton.

We adore the unusual editorial tactic for the winning Blog in this category -- instead of linking to news sites, the authors comment on and link to the very best new threads on search marketing on discussion boards all over the Web. So, it's a true insiders-insider blog, and a reflection of what people are realy talking about (vs what the media thinks.)

To vote for us this year, please visit http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=28308 and scroll down to "Blogs on search marketing" survey and mark the "Search Engine Roundtable" as excellent.

Please also take the time to vote for other blogs that you feel are deserving, I did.

Thanks again and please don't forget to vote for us!

Just a quick update that we have enabled comments again, as well as trackbacks, for this site. We turned them off on May 17th but after several tweaks to the blog software and our server configuration, we have decided to turn them back on.

We hope to keep them back on, but time will tell.

So feel free to begin commenting again.

Thanks!

Many of you remember when I first proposed to my, soon-to-be, new wife. It was on October 2nd of last year, when I asked Yisha to marry me with the help of Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com. Ask.com working with me on my proposal shows you something about our industry. I cannot count the number of blog entries, emails, trackbacks, comments and personal notes I received from the SEM community congratulating Yisha and myself. The gifts received by the search community, including gifts from friends from the SES/WMW conferences, the various forums I participate in, and from the search engine company representatives was overwhelming. Those are just a few reasons why I enjoy sharing these personal moments in my life with you guys. That being said, I hope to update Yisha & Barry.com a few weeks after the wedding, so I can share more of these moments with you.

The wedding will take place in St. Louis, this Sunday. I promised Yisha, that I wouldn't spend too much time online the week after the wedding. So that means I won't be able to contribute to the Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Watch blog over the next week or so. Ben Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause, Nacho Hernandez, Shawn Hogan, Jeremy Schoemaker and Dan Thies have all graciously agreed to chip in while I am away. I feel comfortable and secure leaving the site in their hands while I am away for such a long period.

The RustyBrick creative guy designed this special logo for the blog for the week.

Off I go, to get married. Best wishes to you all. Hope I don't miss too much search marketing community buzz while I am away.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Watch Forums.

How do you comment on an article written at the Search Engine Roundtable?

We suggest you either comment directly at the thread being referenced in the post or going to our forums and starting a new thread on the topic. If you are not a registered member at the forum, you will need to register an account at http://forums.seroundtable.com/register.php prior to starting a new thread or adding feedback to a current thread.

We recommend adding a link to the article within the new thread you are creating. We also recommend you add a descriptive title to the thread.

Accepting comments within the Movable Type framework was just too much for the servers. We had to turn off all built in commenting and trackbacks due to the level of stress being placed on the server from spam and fraudulent comments and trackbacks.

Questions, start a thread in our blog feedback section.

Since our RSS feeds here were temporarily broken by sending back a 'Host not found' error due to DNS issues, I have been placed in the Bloglines penalty box. I am told, that if Bloglines received such a 'host not found' response, it won't try your feed again for an other 24 hours. This 24 hour delay, is called the Bloglines penalty box.

I thought it would be interesting to document this for others who may be interested in it and just for tracking purposes here.

Any feedback, feel free to comment at our forums - comments were disabled in the blog for a bit...

If you are a feed reader, you won't see this. But the RSS feeds are temporarily broken. I switched over my DNS information from Register.com to Moniker.com and forgot to plug in the CNAME for the feeds URLs. So, this propagated overnight and didn't have the correct CNAME. I just updated it this AM. Hopefully it will resolved quickly.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Since implementing the Google Coop product for this site, I currently have 21 subscribers, which is a lot, I think. But after using it, I think it can be quite useful for those who "trust" this site and the content on this site.

Currently, the special subscribed links will only show related matches for queries that exactly match on our category names, which is not so many. At the same time, I don't want subscribers to feel that this site is matching on all queries they enter in. If that happens, I am sure they will quickly unsubscribe. So I need to find a balance, of what queries I can dynamically implement that are relevant to those that "trust" me. Pretty cool how this system seems to be self-regulating.

Over the next few days, I will be adding support for searches and results with character sets !, ?, and :. Currently, we stripped those because of some issues with Google parsing them properly. We will be adding them in shortly. Also, we will be running the updates to Google once a day at noon time, I figure that is the best time and we don't need it to be done hourly or in real time. We will also be adding a static query set for searches on 'search engine roundtable,' 'seroundtable,' 'ser,' 'seo roudntable,' 'seoroundtable' and 'se roundtable' to display a dynamic result set of the three most recent posts.

Then later on, middle of next week, I will be adding a database to specific other query sets and which results should be returned. So I may add to my query set the keyword "seo." If someone searches on "seo," I would want it to display the three most recent results from the search engine optimization category on this site. I may do the same for queries on "google," "ask, "yahoo" and so on. But I will be keeping it relevant to this site.

My question to you, and you can either post a comment, start a thread, or email me - is how far should I take this and would you find this useful? Would you find it useful to get articles about "seo" at the top of the Google results from this site?

And if you have not subscribed yet, why not give it a try by clicking here.

This brings me back to my early post about seo changing so quickly.

This morning I described what is Google Co-op, but I also promised I would try to implement an example for this site. Well, we have implemented phase one of Google Co-op subscription links for this site. You can subscribe to the coop and then when you perform searches that are an exact match to one of the SER Categories, you should see the subscriber links results (if you are signed into your Google account) while searching.

It will ask you to login, if you are not, and then confirm your subscription. Soon after, if you search on any of our SER Categories by name you should see a result that looks like;

If you like, you can preview the results by clicking here and scrolling down the page to the bottom, where it says "Preview these queries." Click on an example query and you will see what it will look like.

So, what do you say, subscribe to us and test it out. Then searches like Google AdSense or Link Building will finally become relevant at Google. :)

Chris Boggs, our Associate Editor here, has announced that he will be joining Avenue A | Razorfish as their "Search Strategist." This is a major move for Chris and I am very happy for him.

What is very interesting, in terms of our community, about Bogg's move was that part of his conditions in joining Avenue A / Razorfish was to remain a part of the SEM community. He has expressed to me that this was part of his conditions in joining the company. G3 Group, his previous employer, also allowed and encouraged Chris to be involved in the SEM community. I am so happy to see large, medium and small SEM companies understand the importance of being a part of the community that they are working within.

Chris Boggs not only writes valuable articles here, he is a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums and speaks often at the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Expect to hear a lot more from Chris Boggs in the coming weeks.

Congrats Chris!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Just a quick note that I will be offline Thursday and Friday. Expect some featured articles from Ben, Chris and the guest authors. They should be able to send you the best forum buzz, while I am away those days.

All the best!

Barry

Just a quick note that I am leaving early tomorrow to go to St. Louis. I am visiting my future in-laws with my fiance´. The wedding is just around the corner --- end of May! Anyway, I won't be blogging much tomorrow. Expect entries from Ben, Chris and some of the other contributing authors.

Good night.

Over time, I have had readers email me asking if I can provide a logo that they can publish on their site or blog. To help streamline that effort and to make the logos seem more official, we created Search Engine Roundtable Seals. The seals are not just logos that show your support for the blog and forum. It also has a "click here to verify" graphic directly under the button to prove that you have been verified to publish the logo on your site. Here is an example of an "Author Seal".

Note, I am not sure why on this blog the top graphic is separated from the bottom graphic... Clicking on the top portion of the seal will take you to the Search Engine Roundtable, clicking on the "click here to verify" will pop open a page that shows that you have been verified to put the seal on your site.

So why the verification process? Because we have implemented different classes of seals. Anyway is really allowed to use the "Fan Seal" but if you like to have the "click here to verify", you can request it by emailing me at barry at rustybrick dot com. Here is a break down of the seals.

• Author Seal - for all recognized and active authors at the Search Engine Roundtable Blog.
• Super Moderator Seal - for all recognized and active super moderators at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
• Moderator Seal - for all recognized and active moderators at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
• Member Seal - for all recognized and active members at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
• Contributor Seal - for all individuals that have submitted ten or more threads to the Search Engine Roundtable blog authors.
• Fan Seal - for any recognized fan of the Search Engine Roundtable. You can email me at the email address below to become a "verified" fan or just take the logo from this page. Any reader or forum lurker can be a fan, there are no requirements. :)

To get a seal, email me or go to our forum thread. Also, I would love feedback on this.

Chris Boggs, who has been posting lightly here over the past several month and who is well known for his tremendous help with the SES coverage has agreed to become the "associate editor" of the Search Engine Roundtable. Chris, along with his SES coverage, will be posting threads from some of the forums I do not get to, as well as some of the threads Ben and I miss. I wanted to publicly thank Chris for joining the team, under a more official title. You can read Chris's full bio here.

Ben Pfeiffer, who we all love, as taken the title "Senior Editor" of the Search Engine Roundtable. Ben has been a bit busy over the past couple months. Ben will be back in stride shortly, providing top notch coverage and his outstanding commentary on some of the best forum threads in the search community.

I am surprised the engines don't have a logo up for the special day. Today is the traditional Groundhog's Day, and we are told we have six more weeks of winter, according to the prediction.

What is weird, is that when I did a search at Ask Jeeves on groundhog's day I got a quick answer with a cute groundhog icon. Not today. :-/

Forum discussion about our logo, and hopefully other's logo, at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Just a blog administration note. I have removed the YPN RSS ads from this blog. Why? Simply because the FeedBurner RSS ads have been performing very well. And since the YPN ads were not contextually relevant, I might as well show the ad that makes more money. :)

Anyway, the reason for this post is to see if I messed up the RSS feeds by removing the code.

No development environment for this blog... I know I know...

Short Feed YPN Ads Removed √
Short Feed FeedBurner Ads Shown √
Long Feed YPN Ads Removed √
Long Feed FeedBurner Ads Shown √

Our first press release was talking about our first year anniversary. It was more of a test then anything. Recently, with the help of Lee Odden and his team, we launched a press release for the launch of our new forums. The release was titled Search Engine Roundtable Launches New SEO and SEM Forums with All Star Moderators.

Overall, I think Lee and his team did a great job. I wrote the first draft, the mods helped tremendously revise it and then Lee's team optimized it for us.

Tonight at 4pm (EST) I will be live on WebmasterRadio's GoodKarma with Greg Niland aka GoodROI. I think we will be talking about search engine community, forums, blogs, etc. type of stuff.

Should be fun.

Make sure to tune in and get in the chat room.

We will be answering your questions live.

Let me start out by saying this is not found in a particular forum, it was not inspired by a forum post, it is not even directly SEO related. But there is a serious issue out there for bloggers. It is a site at http://ambiraj.blogspot.com/ which daily steals content from this site, and dozens of other sites, with no link back. InsideGoogle said, Rajesh, You’re Messing With The Wrong People noting that Randy Charles Morin took note of this and is now reporting it to the higher forces.

We should all report this person. I flagged the site over and over again for months, and nothing has been done. I believe I even emailed people about it. It is sad, they copy content from here, SEW, GoogleBlogoscoped, BL Ochman, SteveRubel, InsideGoogle, and many others.

Even if he did add links, its still wrong.

Thanks for voting for us for the KB Cafe Blog Awards. We have won the Blog SEO category, see the results at KBCafe Blog Awards Winners. We have beat out very respectable blogs, including Online Marketing Blog and even Matt Cutts new blog. We had 44% of the votes with 37 votes in total, Online Marketing Blog had 27% of the votes with 23 votes and Matt Cutts had 21% of the votes with 18 votes in total.

Many SEO blogs were not nominated that should have, imo. JenSense was beat out by Pro Blogger by four votes, how crazy is that! Best Google Blog went in this order, Google Blogoscoped, John Battelle's Searchblog, and Google Blog - I would agree with that. Jeremy beat out Yahoo for best Yahoo Blog. Inside Microsoft won the Best Microsoft blog (you guys know him as Inside Google Blog). For the other results go here and for the actual figures see here.

Thanks for voting!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

We just wanted to wish you all a Happy New Years! From all of us at the Search Engine Roundtable, thank you for reading, thank you for commenting and thank you for creating that awesome 2005 community buzz in the forums. 2006 is going to be a real exciting year for the search engine industry and we are all very excited to bring that news to you first.

Besides for the logo, we fixed a few things that simply didn't work on this site:

• The internal search results pages now use the seroundtable design templates.
  
• The preview comments now works
  
• The error screens for comments now works
  
• One small error on the search page exists but that should be fixed soon
  
• Google Site Search links work globally now
  

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Honestly, I am a bit surprised that we won the Best Search Engine Community Blog : 2005 Search Blogs Awards. ThreadWatch, to me, seemed more of a community wide effort in the SEO world. But we do try our best to bring out what the SEM community is saying in a more editorial fashion, at this blog. It has always been our goal to find the community buzz and report it back to you, in a timely fashion.

Thank you all for voting for us. This public recognition is what keeps us going.

Update: Search Engine Journal announced the 2005 Best Search Engine News Blog; we came runner up to Search Engine Watch Blog, in second place. It is an honor to fall right behind Danny and Gary's outstanding Search Engine Watch Blog.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A few housekeeping tasks completed here at the blog.

• We updated the The Forums page with revised content, new forums and removal of some older forums.
• We removed the resources page, since I really didn't have time to update it ever. It will be completely removed from all navigational elements shortly, but the URL will remain up.

That is about it.

Suggestions or questions, please post them in the comments area here or in our forums at this thread or create a new one.

We wanted to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday! We deeply appreciate your dedication and loyalty to this blog. We hope you are happy with this past years insider coverage of the search industry. We truly strive to provide honest, unbiased information from those deeply rooted in the industry, before it hits the major news outlets. We hope to continue this and add a new level of reporting in 2006.

As a sign of gratitude, I am mailing a small present to the first 15 people who post in our Happy Holidays thread. Oh, if shipping isnt bad, I may ship overseas, but otherwise, I might not.

We also uploaded or special holiday logo for the season. I hope to keep this up, as often as the engines do it. It is fun.

Happy Holidays Everyone!!!

If you guys can scroll down to #11, Best SEO Blog, and vote for us, that would be sweet.

The voting is at http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/

Thank you!

I just wanted to notify all the blog readers that due to our new forum, we now have a devoted forum for Blog Feedback & Suggestions. If you have suggestions, problems, issues with ads, and so on - just register and post a thread. It will better help me understand the needs here and address them.

That also goes for changing the writing style, the topics I cover and the guest author's posting frequency.

So if you want more SEO advice, let me know. If you want more cool finds, let me know. If you want more news, let me know.

The Blog Feedback & Suggestions Forum is the perfect place for that. Of course you can still email me or leave a comment in this entries or other entries.

Thank you for nominating us. I literally just got back from the airport. I am amazed I got home. First my flight was delayed from 6:55 to 9:20, then finally the plane that was suppose to come to us to take us back to Newark, took off. Half way in, it had to turn around, I am sure you heard about the tragedy at Midway Airport, causing the closure. Anyway, I took a shuttle to Ohare, on standby for a 10:30 flight. Issue was, it took me two hours to get to Ohare, arriving at a little after 11. Anyway, that flight, I was on for standby was delayed to 12:30 and then 1:10. I got on the flight! That flight took off at about 2:10 and I landed in Newark, which was now covered by snow, at 5:00am. The two hour trip home, crazy snow, skidding everywhere. But I am home safe. :)

Anyway, the point of this entry is to let you know about SEJ's blog awards. If you think our work and dedication is top notch, it would mean a lot if you voted at Survey Monkey.

Thanks again. I have a one more thing to post, and then I'll take a little nap.

It has been two years since this place was created, two years! Since then we have published 2,782 entries, almost all related to SEM and most of those (95%) of the topics were sourced from discussion forum topics. That is how we try to stay unique, we look for what people are discussing in the forums.

We also kicked off this blog, back in December 2003, with SES Chicago 03 coverage. The style was a bit different back then but now we got the hang of it.

Since then old forums died off, new forums rose up - I have met really great and smart people. I even get invited to speak about this blog at conferences.

It has been a true honor and opportunity to be able to write here almost every day (several times a day).

And most importantly, thank you for your continued support and loyalty. It has not gone unnoticed.

The week before conferences Ben and I get tons of emails and phone calls from PR people asking us to meet with company ABC. PR people, if you are reading this, listen.

We have a much different reporting style then any other news site or blog out there.

Instead of talking to the company, we talk to your customers. We scourer the forums for good threads from various Webmasters. They discuss you, good or bad, and we report on it from that angle.

So please do not call or email us. If you like, jump in the forums and answer your customer's questions. We will cover that and we encourage it. Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and MSN all have representatives in some of the major SEM forums. Why not you?

Last time Feedster came out with the Feedster 500 list, it was in August, and we came in last place, at number 500. Today, Feedster came out with the list for November and December (it looks like) and we moved up to slot number 161 - not a bad gain. But I bet the number 500 spot, held by Molly.com.

This time blogs that were first not included, in the search industry are - specifically Search Engine Watch at number 109 and ThreadWatch at number 181. Lots of other search blogs made the list, congrats to everyone!

I have been sick for past three days. Taking the day off. I am sorry.

This is the last time I will be scheduled not to be blogging until probably April 2006. Please expect coverage from Ben and the guest authors tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thanks for bearing with me during this month.

This Monday - Wednesday night, I am out again. Ben and the guest authors will do their best to feed you those outstanding forum threads.

I am leaving Monday, early morning, to visit the future-in-laws for the first time outside of New York. In regards to that site, I updated two pages, one is the story page to tell you how it actually went down and I added some information to the gift registry page as well, if your interested. This is also my first time in St. Louis, so it all should be fun. I am flying back Thursday early in the morning, so early morning updates here Thursday, may be delayed.

Due to that, I will do my best to post more today and possibly some on Sunday.

Thank you!

Quick note that I am offline tomorrow, October 13th. Ben and the guest authors should be contributing throughout the day.

Firstly, I would like to thank the guest authors for really doing a great job over the past two days here. You can expect the same thing several more times this month, due to my October schedule. So thank you and without it, I would be lost, when it comes to catching up.

I would also like to thank you for all your kind words with my engagement. I have turned back on the comment support and trackback support for that entry, if you wanted to comment, you can now.

I received an email from an X-Yahoo employee, stating that he actually proposed to his wife, via a search engine banner. So technically, it looks like I was not the first. But definitely the first via smart answers and a non-paid search method.

Anyway... back to forum coverage...

Just an update for the readers. This October, please expect more guest writers here, including Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads, to fill it. Ben will be writing more often this month and the Guest authors confirmed to write include; Nacho Hernandez, Kim Krause, Andy Hagans, Chris Boggs, and possibly Shawn Hogan from DigitalPoint.

The dates I will be out this month includes;

Here are the dates:
October 4th
October 5th
October 13th
October 17th
October 18th
October 19th
October 25th
October 26th

I hope to write more on the weekends to make up for it.

Many of you probably notice the addition of contextual ads to this site. The primary reason is to test out YPN versus Google AdSense. Yesterday, I was able to set up a method to barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

In addition, I have been experimenting with Google AdSense in the RSS Feeds. I have put the AdSense in every 3rd entry for the abstract entries and every entry for the full entries. This week, I switched to FeedBurner's advertiser, to test that out. I plan on testing YPN's version, if and when it comes out as well. I expect some of you to be annoyed by it. So again, please let me know by commenting here or emailing me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Ultimately, I see all rss feeds containing ads of some sort. RSS is like how the Web first was, clean of ads. But, they too, one day will be commercialized. It is sad, but I see that happening. Not sure if I will keep them here or not. Hence the feedback request.

No logos up at the major search engines yet, today is labor day, so posting with be slow to none today.

Last year, I wrote an entry named Labor Day at the Search Engines.

Good old Ask Jeeves.

I like to follow the leader and Danny Sullivan being the leader of the SEM industry, I followed suit and migrated the RSS feeds on this site over to FeedBurner. Please let me know if the feeds are not working properly. Either leave a comment here or email me at barry AT rustybrick DOT com. All the feeds have been migrated or redirected (if not longer used).

- Full Feed at http://www.seroundtable.com/index-full.rdf
- 1.0 Feed at http://www.seroundtable.com/index.rdf
- 2.0 Feed at http://www.seroundtable.com/index.xml

Any other feed you have should automatically be redirected to one of the main feeds. I will add more features as I get more comfortable with FeedBurner. Also every third entry should have an Ad from Google AdSense or an other.

Most people I deal with on a daily basis with this blog include industry experts, search engine engineers, search engine PR people, journalists, bloggers and even spammers. It took a really long time to earn the trust of all the different types of people listed above. I have no journalistic background, no schooling in professional writing, nor in the PR industry. Over the past month, C|Net was blacklisted by Google, it was widely discussed. I do not have all the details about the real reasoning behind it. I know how both sides "feel" about it, but I would never publish those thoughts here. Let me get into what code of ethics this site stands-by when writing entries at this site.

Search Engine Roundtable Code of Ethics:
(1) We try to cover public forum threads and quote from public information within those threads.
(2) We will never quote anyone without explicit permission in the following cases:
-- Phone conversations require explicit permission to quote
-- Email conversations require explicit permission to quote
-- IM chat conversations require explicit permission to quote
-- In person conversations require explicit permission to quote
(3) We will quote any publicly posted and available content from forums, content sites, blogs and so on.
(4) Anything said during a public presentation at a conference (not at the bars or in the hall ways but rather, what is said on the podium) is quotable as well.

Basically what it comes down to is a deep consideration of respect towards the industry and the people within the industry.

Often I wish I can write about something presented to me X days before it comes out. Often I wish I can write about something I heard from Matt Cutts or Tim Mayer or Jim Lanzone for the respect search engines. Often I wish I can write about something found by a fellow blogger or a journalist before they do. But I don't.

I thought it would be a good idea to clarify this code of ethics for the Search Engine Roundtable for the readers, guest writers and for anyone else who might not have known. Respect is what is at the core of it all.

Upgrade to MovableType 3.2 just now. Downtime was like a minute.

Things aren't fully working, like related entries and spam things.

Let me know if you see anything funky please.

Last night I have changed the encoding on this site to use UTF-8 Encoding as opposed to the default ISO 8859-1 Encoding. That means I can write in all sorts of languages and funky characters. It also means there might be issues with other areas of the site, if you find any, please add a comment to let me know.

Tests:
עמוד ראשי - ויקיפדיה

忍者システムズ - webデザインとシステム開発

الصفحة الرئيسية

“Scooby”

RustyBrick®

´√ ™

<a>

It is kind of funny, we "squeaked" in to the Feedster Top 500 list for August. So I now get to put this fancy logo on the site.

Danny Sullivan has a nice write up on this, his SEW Blog should have been in the list.

A quick skim shows that among search-related blogs, John Battelle makes it at 139, the Yahoo Search Blog ranks 197 and Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable squeaks in at 500. We apparently suck and don't make the list at all.

I am told I have one of the two best spots in the list. This site ranks #500, the last in the list. Only better spot, is the first spot. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just landed at 6am this morning, taking the red eye from California. I am incredibly tired and I have a ton of work to get caught up on. I doubt I will have time to post anything today. I will try, but I doubt I will.

Some of you might have noticed the lack of ability to add a comment or trackback to an entry. During the upgrade, our spam detection device did not upgrade properly. So we had to turn this off temporarily. It will be turned back on either today or after the weekend.

I am sorry about this. Spam is a major issue, we must block hundreds if not thousands of attempts each day. Some get through and keep me busy hitting the delete key. That means less time for me to research the forum buzz and bring it to you guys. So comment spammers & trackback spammers - I know many of you read here, please put us on your blacklist - just this one little blog. :)

Also, many are reporting CSS issues, please shift+refresh the page a few times to clear your cache and they will go away. You are probably using the old style sheets, and it is messing up in your browser. A few shift+refreshes should clear up the issue. Thanks.

At least I think so. It looks as if we have successfully upgraded to MovableType 3.x. And we made all of the CSS changes.

Thanks for reading.

I just wanted to let you know that we will be performing that upgrade this week.

Please add your suggestions, feature requests and comments at the Site Touch Ups comments area. Just scroll down and add a comment. We won't be doing an upgrade again for a while.

Good weekend all.

I am writing this from my treo. Both my connections in the office (T1 & Cable) are out do to some crazy storm last night. 2 of my office lines are out. I should be back up in 4 hours. Hold tight.

There are certain aspects of this site that simply do not work properly. I have decided to hire someone to work on those issues. Why don't I do it in house? Well, the person I am hiring has MovableType expertise and my guys only do custom Web applications.

What will we be doing?
(1) Upgraded from MovableType 2.x to MovableType 3.x
(2) Fix CSS issue on IE with aligning graphics right or left, example
(3) Ensuring all the plugins currently installed work, some broke over time.
(4) Clean up the code in general

If you have suggestions or ideas, please let me know. This is not a redesign, just overall site maintenance.

Also, Movable Type has a directory of plugins, if you feel any would be useful, please let me know and we will do our best to get them running. Plugins are viewable at http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/.

Wanted to wish you all a happy July 4th. Seems like Google has yet to put up the July 4th logo, maybe they are being fair.

Ask Jeeves (smart answer):

Yahoo! (smart shop)

HighRankings Forum has a happy July 4th thread.

Ever since mid-April, I have been planning to start a podcast specifically for the purpose of providing weekly summaries of what we covered at this site. I used to write up summaries weekly or bi-monthly, but it was simply too much for me. I thought a good compromise would be something you can listen to at your convenience.

On April 22nd, MacWorld released an article named Start your own Podcast. I was simply waiting to have the time to set everything up, to do this somewhat professionally. Today, Apple release the new iTunes that supports an advanced podcast reader. With that they published a page that went live an hour ago named GarageBand Support for Recording Your Podcast. I am a Mac guy and I think I might go that route.

But before I spend the time and money, I wanted to know from you guys if this is something you would want to hear. Please leave a comment with your thoughts or email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com. Thank you.

Last night, after checking email, I got word that this blog has won the "MarketingSherpa's Best Blogs 2005". Ben posted much of the details here. There are many of you I need to thank. Of course the readers who come back daily (some several times a day) to read our content. I must thank Ben, who helps immensely with the forum coverage. All the guest bloggers who spend the time writing about topics that mean something to them. Also all the people behind the scenes that start these threads with the juicy content that we can use to write on and inform the greater public. The forums are where it all happens. In addition, I must thank the sponsors listed on the left and everyone else who has helped keep this blog open.

The quick URL can be found at http://blogawards.marketingsherpa.com.

Here is the official award logo:

I have tons of threads in my "topics to discuss" folder, I hope to get through many of them today.

Before I forget, just wanted to inform you I will be offline this Monday & Tuesday (13th & 14th). I will make special requests from guest authors to contribute a bit more during this time. Also, Ben should be back in full force, so hopefully you will have plenty to read.

Back to researching forums to share goodies with you for the rest of the day. Have a wonderful weekend.

This is your last chance to vote at the 2005 Readers' Choice Blog Awards - Voting Form. If you really like this blog, please vote for the "Search Engine Roundtable". Question number 8 is where you will find "Blogs on search marketing" and we are the last in the list.

Voting ends Wednesday June 8th, and then we'll announce the winners. Prizes this year include a "Winner" icon for your Blog, a special coffee mug, and your name and blog URL on our site and in a press release. So please vote for us.

I really want that sticker on this site. :)

I was just notified that this site, has been nominated for the MarketingSherpa Award. That means if you like this site, you can go over to 2005 Readers' Choice Blog Awards - Voting Form and vote for the "Search Engine Roundtable". Question number 8 is where you will find "Blogs on search marketing" and we are the last in the list.

It is a true honor to have been nominated.

Voting ends Wednesday June 8th, and then we'll announce the winners. Prizes this year include a "Winner" icon for your Blog, a special coffee mug, and your name and blog URL on our site and in a press release. So please vote for us.

Based on your feedback, I have removed the RSS AdSense Ads from the abridged versions of the RSS feeds. You should no longer see them in new entries.

I have made the full RSS feed more visible and left the ads in that feed. So if you like the full RSS feed - it will contain small AdSense ads in it. If you prefer the abridged version, they are without ads at this point.

Thank you for your feedback.

The AdSense RSS Ads I have been beta testing for Google have been live for less then two days now. It seems to be really annoying some of the readers here - as Cre8asite Forums points out. Trust me, it is not permanent. My first priority is to bring you the latest from inside of the SEO world, and if I can make some money on the side that is great, if not, then I wont put the ads up.

So let me ask you what you want to see or not see. Here are the options and please, please comment or email me at barry AT rustybrick.com with your feedback.

(1) Convert the abridged versions of the RSS feeds to full entry feeds and keep Google Ads in them.
(2) Remove ads from abridged versions of the RSS feeds and just put them in a full entry feed, for those who want it.

I think those are the two options that seem fair. But you're the reader, so you tell me.

Do you want the full entries in the feed and if so, would you mind if there is an ad at the bottom of each of those entries? Hopefully, they will be targeted and hopefully I will be able to change the colors to make them less distracting. Or do you prefer the clean abridged versions of the RSS feeds? Or something else?

I just wanted to inform the readers that I will not be posting this Monday. Ben (phoenix) and some of the guest authors will stop by to share a few ideas.

Maybe if you leave a comment here for a specific author, maybe, maybe, maybe, they will post an entry for you on Monday.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I have been noticing that more and more feeds that I have been reading with my RSS reader have text ads at the bottom. I have about 500 Bloglines subscribers to this blog, so I assume there are about 1,000+ RSS subscribers in total, but I am unsure. The actual Web traffic to this site, is way above those RSS subscriber numbers. So I think I am going to give it a try. If you this sounds interesting to you, please email me at barryATrustybrick.com or advertisingATseroundtable.com.

The new wave of Web ads. If you are unsure of what an RSS reader looks like, here is a sample of one of the feeds at Blogline for this blog and here is one with ads.

Testing...

As part of our pursuit at the Search Engine Roundtable to have guest appearances by top forum representatives, we have invited Nacho to guest write here. Nacho is a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums, and is the top face behind the Hispanic and Latin American Search Marketing Industry. Nacho will tend to be writing entries here on the topic of the Hispanic industry, Local Search, and occasional link building topics. Nacho has lots of expertise in the SEM industry; both practical experience with his Web ventures and educational (or theoretical) experience with his study of the search technology.

Ignacio "Nacho" Hernandez, president of iHispanic Marketing Group, has been involved with international business, e-commerce and marketing for the past 10 years and has been targeting the U.S. Online Hispanic Market for the last 5 years. He founded MexGrocer.com in 2000 and is now one of the very few profitable businesses in the online grocery segment. He has made strategic alliances with the major shopping portals, such as Amazon, Univision.com, Terra-Lycos, HispanicOnline.com, Yahoo! En Espa�ol and many others. He is a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo and a member of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (www.sempo.org) and SMA-NA (www.sma-na.org) to help develop the Hispanic and Latin American divisions. He is also a Moderator for SearchEngineWatch Forums for the "Multilingual Search Markets & Non-US engines" and the "Yahoo! Paid Inclusion/Site Match" forums.

Other publications where Nacho has been quoted include: Forrester Research, SearchEngineWatch, WebProNews, MediaPost, Entrepreneur Magazine, La Opinion, AARP Segunda Juventud, El Financiero (Mexico), Reforma (Mexico) and others.

Testimonials:

Nacho Hernandez is a well-known and highly regarded member of the Hispanic search engine marketing community and he is a master of his field. His Search Engine Roundtable blog is chock full of online marketing tips, advice and recommendations. It�s an extremely helpful resource for Hispanic and Latin American marketers or anyone looking to globalize.

Deborah Hickey
Marketing & Brand Manager
Search Engine Marketing Firm, iProspect

I would like to publicly thank Brett Tabke and the folks over at WebmasterWorld for supporting this site. It is a true honor to have WebmasterWorld appear on the left hand side, under the premium sponsors section. WebmasterWorld is not just a forum these days, although they have the largest forum related to webmaster topics, they run an excellent Search Conference. The next conference will be taking place in New Orleans (based on WMW feedback) and on the dates of June 21, 22, 23. I reported on the WebmasterWorld Las Vegas Conference in 2004, it was a great conference and I am looking forward to the New Orleans show.

Most of the readers here are aware of the WebmasterWorld Forums. They also offer a "noise-reduced" "supporters forum", which is nice. I have been a supporter for a while now. Again, it is a privilege to have a forum at the stature of WebmasterWorld, support this site.

Ben and I thought it would be fun to hand out these funky yo-yos that light up when you use them. The slogan of the Search Engine Roundtable, "The Pulse of the Search Engine Marketing Community", is imprinted on the yo-yos. Since the SEO world is filled with such ups and downs, we thought it would be clever to give out yo-yos. Then we added the glowing aspect to the yo-yo to make it "pulse" a bit.

I admit, its not as cool as having William Hung at a party, but we are not on the same level as Jeeves.

So if you see Ben or myself at the conference, please ask for one or two. After the conference, I will probably mail out a bunch to some dedicated readers. Any left over, might get some at the Toronto SES show.

When reading other blogs or sites that have links to specific forum posts, you often see that the person links not directly to the post that they are quoting, but rather the thread or the page the post is on. For those that do this, I'll show you how I link to individual posts within the context of a whole thread.

For example; Danny Sullivan had an excellent post today, in response to a members post on the second page of the thread named The Little Engine That Could - Part II.

The code looks like:
For example; Danny Sullivan had an excellent <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=35782#post35782" target="_blank">post</a> today, in response to a members <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=35599#post35599" target="_blank">post</a> on the <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285&page=2&pp=20" target="-blank">second page</a> of the thread named <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285">The Little Engine That Could - Part II</a>.

Getting the thread URL; i.e. http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285 is easy, just click on the thread name from the forum. Getting the page specific URL is easy as well, just click on the page number while in the thread or forum.

But getting the link to the specific post, within the context of the thread (so the single post isn't only shown), can be done by clicking the view source button. Then do a find command in the source code on the post date, in the case above, with Danny's post I looked for "Today, 07:56 AM" within the source and then it shows "post35782". The next step is to click on the "find new post" button and then replace where it says "p=XXXXXX#postXXXXXX" with the appropriate post number.

In firefox, you can view "selection source" which makes it a bit quicker.

Kim Krause, a great person, who happens to have a great blog on usability and sem, was awarded the blog of the month by TechSmith Corporation. Check it out at the bottom of the page, it says:

Blog of the Month
Cre8pc: Intriguing blab about usability, seo, web dev, search engines, and Internet stuff. Cre8pc Blog

Well deserved! Kim talks about this award at her blog.

As promised about two weeks ago, I have went through all 1,400+ entries at this site and have reorganized them. The new category archive structure was done pretty well, I think. It was actually nice to go back, and rethink how to categorize the entries at this blog. There is a very nice distribution of the entries associated with categories, of course the Google categories have the most entries, but everything else seems to be a normal distribution.

The best part might be the fact that I reorganized the Search Engine Conferences category as the parent category of the following conferences:
- SES Chicago 2003
- SES New York 2004
- SES London 2004
- SES San Jose 2004
- SES Sweden 2004
- WebmasterWorld Las Vegas 2004
- SES Chicago 2004

Coming soon SES New York 2005.

Please email your answers to barry.schwartz@gmail.com, the first THREE CORRECT responses will win a free gmail invite. Good luck!

Which search engine did Disney acquire?

Feel free to provide a link to your source, your name and email.

Ben (Phoenix) and I were messing around with a slogan for this site. Ben came up with

::: THE PULSE OF THE SEARCH MARKETING COMMUNITY :::

I think it really represents this site well.

"community" = the forums
"pulse" = the live action, where the real goods are

If you have time, and you do not mind the image access code when posting a comment, please let us know your thoughts on the slogan. If you prefer not to comment here, feel free to drop me an email at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Thanks.

As I said here, I hope to have the categories association to all entries completed within the next two weeks. You can view the proposed structure of the categories at the category archives page. You will also notice that most entries have a link to the primary category for the entry, next to the authors name. I hope to go through a 100 old entries each day and re-associate them to the new categories. So it should take about 15 or so days.

The server crash gives me the opportunity to rework how I have been using the category system so far. Since the crash caused the lost of the association of all categories to entries, I will need to go through each of the 1,400+ entries on this site and re-associate them to a category. So why not rethink the categories now?

First question; do you think it would be useful to have a method of associating each entry with a forum. This would act as a secondary category system allowing me to keep track of which forums were covered here more often.

Second, this is the new category structure I was thinking. Notice the addition of sub categories. Any feedback would be nice.

Ask Jeeves / Teoma
Blog Administration
Google Search Engine
- Google PageRank/SERP Updates
- Google News & Press
- Google Optimization
- Other Google Topics
Interviews
Search Engine Optimization
- Keyword Research
- Link Building
- SEO Copywriting
- Dynamic Site Topics
Microsoft MSN Search
Miscellaneous
Other Search Engines
Pay Per Click Engines
- Google AdWords
- Google AdSense
- Overture Precision Match
- Overture Site Match
- Overture Content Match
- Contextual Ads
- Second Tier PPC Engines
SEM / SEO Companies
SEO Forum News
Search Engine Conferences
- SES Chicago 03
- SES ...
- WMW Vegas 04...
Search Engine Industry News
Search Engine Tools
Search Technology
Search Theory
Shopping Search Engines
Spam
Tracking & Conversion Measurements
Usability
Web Promotion
Web Directories
- Yahoo! Directory
- Open Directory Project - ODP
- Other Web Directories
Weekly Email Updates
Yahoo! / Overture
- Yahoo! Search Optimization
- Yahoo! News
- Other Yahoo! Topics

Thank you.

Last night I added a new preventive measure for comment spam at this site. Its a very simple image security access code, that is required before submitting a comment. I tried to stay away from using this as a preventive measure, but the comment spammers are just too much to deal with. I apologize for any inconvenience when commenting...

All you need to do is type in the code, into the box provided and then click submit. It should go through just fine. Any comments, feel free. :)

It looks like the server crash corrupted the files and even the backup badly enough that all the past comments are corrupt. So I will not be able to get them back. I do have a text backup of the comments throughout 07/16/04. I will try to get those back in. I am sorry about this. We will have to move on from this. Live and learn. Now everything is stored in a MySQL database and backed up frequently. We are setting up two replicated machines next to the main machine, just in case this happens again.

Back to forum and SEM coverage...

I guess you know that this site was down yesterday. Of all my sites on the server, this one was the worst hit. We have recovered all the entries on the site. We are now working on comments and mapping the entries to the appropriate categories.

This has been a huge inconvenience and we hope to get things rolling again shortly.

Thank you for your support.

As Gmail rounds out the 2004 year, I will be giving out 12 free gmail invites to those who leave a comment with their full name and valid email address. If the email address is invalid then you will not get the invite. Invites are sent via email, and can be blocked by spam filters. Here is the Gmail 2004 recap from the Gmail home page.

2004 was quite a year for us! Here's a quick recap:

April 1st: Gmail launches. Some thought it was a joke, but we were serious about our gig of free space. (The real April Fool's jokers wanted to give people the moon.)

July 10th: Users can import contacts. Suddenly, keeping in touch with faraway friends becomes a lot easier.

October 9th: We finally add 'Save Drafts.' No one is more excited than we are about never again having to answer "Why don't you have a way for users to save drafts?"

November 7th: Ideas POP into mind. Why not offer POP and auto-forwarding for free? Sure. Why not?

And of course, there's the one thing that we've been doing every day... trying to build a great email service for you. After all, it's all about you. We read the blogs, the forums, and every testimonial. We appreciate all the nice things you say. There are so many ways for you to contact us, but so few for us to speak to you. So as we start the new year, we just want to say: "Thanks."

We hope you enjoy our approach to email in 2005!

Isn't this sweet of Google to say; "After all, it's all about you. We read the blogs, the forums, and every testimonial. We appreciate all the nice things you say." Kind of tears you up, doesn't it. ;) We love you to Google.

Just wanted to wish you all a happy holidays! We made a card for our clients and those on the RustyBrick mailing list. Wanted to share it with the readers. FYI - Ronnie on the card is my partner at RustyBrick.

		Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season! Ronnie, Barry and the entire RustyBrick Crew www.rustybrick.com

I wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays! Thank you for reading every day and thanks for your kind and thought provoking comments.

I have 15 gmail invites to give out, so the first 15 of you to leave me your Full Name and email address in the comment area of this entry will get a free gmail invite. Important, I need a real email address or else the gmail invite will never get to you.

Happy Holidays!

You know something, good thing this site is not my wife, because I would be dead now! I can't believe I forgot that December 2nd was the one year anniversary of this site. It is really amazing how much has been covered here, how it has grown and most importantly, how much has changed in our industry within a year.

This entry would make for the 1153 entry posted on this site in 369 days (365 + 4), 1380 comments (I block about 100 comments per day, most spam but if I blocked yours I am sorry, false negatives do happen) and many great authors.

Traffic has been wonderful as well, its because of you that I continue to put so much of my effort towards this site. Again, if you have suggestions, comments or want to add your thoughts to this site, please email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com or leave a comment.

I will try to think something up special for the anniversary. If you have ideas, please let me know. Next week is the SES Chicago conference and we will have a special treat for the readers for that event. Stay tuned...

There were those that requested more RSS feed options. We aim to please, so we added two new feed options, one for completed entries and an other rss feed for each category.

Full Entry RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-full.rdf
Category Feeds:
Blog Administration RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-blog-admin.rdf
Directories RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-directories.rdf
E-Commerce RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-ecommerce.rdf
Google Search Engine RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-google.rdf
Interviews RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-interviews.rdf
Keyword Research RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-keyword.rdf
Link Building RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-link-building.rdf
Microsoft MSN Search RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-full.rdf
Miscellaneous RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-miscellaneous.rdf
Other Search Engines RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-other-search-engines.rdf
Pay Per Click RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-ppc.rdf
Programming and Coding RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-programming.rdf
SEM / SEO Companies RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-sem-companies.rdf
SEO Copywriting RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-seo-copywriting.rdf
SEO Forum News RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-seo-forums.rdf
Search Engine Conferences RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-search-conferences.rdf
Search Engine Industry News RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-search-news.rdf
Search Engine Optimization RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-seo.rdf
Search Engine Tools RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-seo-tools.rdf
SPAM RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-spam.rdf
Usability RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-usability.rdf
Web Design RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-web-design.rdf
Web Promotion RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-web-promotion.rdf
Weekly Email Updates RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-email-updates.rdf
Yahoo RSS Feed: http://www.seroundtable.com/index-yahoo.rdf

Please let me know if there are any issues with these feeds or if you have other suggestions.

Just wanted to inform you that we made a few changes to the site.

(1) The home page of the blog is now smaller in size. I used to list the past 7 days of entries on the index page, I reduced that to the past 15 entries. The page size was over a 101k, now it is about 70k on average (depending on if there images in the entries).

(2) Didn't realize how bad the left hand size navigation looks in Firefox. We improved it while adding the "Premium Sponsor" ad. So its cleaner.

Any other suggestions are welcome, I am looking into providing more RSS feed options for you as well.

Thanks.

I wanted to welcome a new sponsor for the Search Engine Roundtable. The new sponsor is a new search engine friendly Web directory named Uncover the Net Web Directory. I would like to thank all of our sponsors, including Text Link Ads that is running a 15% discount on its inventory for our readers, and all the sponsors listed on the left hand navigation.

You should see the following little banner on the left hand navigation starting tomorrow.

Of course, the reader is most important and your feedback on the layout, content quality and coverage is always appreciated. If you rather not post a comment with feedback, feel free to email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Search Engine Roundtable Associate Editor Chris Boggs, of eMergent Marketing, the search arm of Brulant, Inc., is a specialist in search engine optimization and paid search advertising. Chris joined Brulant in 2007 as the Manager of the SEO team.

Chris has worked in Search Engine Marketing since 2000, starting in-house and moving into a consulting role in 2002. Chris has worked with organizations ranging in size from small businesses to Fortune 500. Chris is experienced in performing "hands-on" SEO from keyword research to content development and link development strategizing, as well as pay-per-click (PPC) campaign creation and management.

Chris is actively involved in the SEM Community. He speaks regularly at major search marketing conferences, is a Moderator and Expert columnist for Incisive Media’s Search Engine Watch, and is Associate Editor for the Search Engine Roundtable blog. Chris serves as Secretary of the 2008-2009 Board of Directors of SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional's Organization. Chris also writes frequent articles related to SEM, and has been published in a variety of online and print journals.

Seems like no one got the last one right, if you think you know which search engine uses/d click data answer that entry and win a gmail.

Otherwise:

First three correct answers emailed to barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Question is:

Which company uses this image as marketing material?

Good luck!

!!!CONTEST OVER!!!

It has been a while since I gave out Gmail Invites, so here is a new contest.

First three correct answers emailed to barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Question is:

Which search engine uses or used click data as a factor to determine the rank for a page in the search results?

Good luck!

Sorry, this is the last time for a while where I will be taking off from writing here. I have asked the guest authors to help out and I am sure Ben will do some writing over the next two days. Have a good weekend all and sorry about this.

I will not be around to write Thursday or Friday. I have asked some of the Guest Authors to step in and Ben will be back tomorrow to continue the forum coverage.

Next week, Thursday & Friday, will be the same story. Sorry about this.

I after next week, I see no future 'vacations' from this site in the near future.

Its amazing, its been less then I year since I started this site. The traffic is great, comments posted are excellent and I seriously enjoy writing from the forums perspective.

I often get requests from people to advertise on the site. I started with putting sponsored links at the bottom left of these pages. I have also added Google Ads (Image and Text) to the individual pages. Now I am about to take one more step by putting an ad, very small, at the top header, to the right of the logo.

I will not allow this site to get to flashy, it is important that the readers come first. Feel free to leave your comments, either before or after you see the ads up. Your feedback is important to me.

Thanks!

Who ever wants a free gmail invite, no contest, just email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com and the first 6 responses get a free invite.

I will update this when there are no more invites left.

***NO MORE INVITES AVAILABLE***

Check Back Later Please.

I will not be posting for the next two days, Thursday and Friday. I am confident that Ben will do a fine job here, while I am gone. Just wanted to drop a note. Have a nice, rest of the week.

Benjamin Pfeiffer, known here and at the forums as Phoenix, has graciously accepted the responsibility of helping me provide you with top notch SEM forum threads. With this role, Ben will be the first associate editor of the Search Engine Roundtable. Ben is a moderator over at SEO Chat, he has tons of experience in the SEO and PPC field, as well as affiliate marketing and general SEM topics.

The goal of this site is to provide a quick and easy way for you to find the best threads out there. As you know, reading threads at all the SEM forums can be a daunting task. We, here, aim to make these threads available to you on a daily basis (weekdays). Ben has agreed to help me with this task.

I will continue to write on average three to six entries per day. Ben will aim for one to three entries per day. We will try to cover different forums, this way our forum coverage can be more diverse. We hope that these efforts make for a more comprehensive and informative online resource.

Thank you for reading every day - without you, this would not be possible.

A question for the readers:

Do you like that all links in the articles of this site to open up in a new window by default? Or do you not want this action to be taken by default?

The answers to this question will dictate what is done in the future.

If you do not want to post a comment here, please email me at barry.schwartz@gmail.com. Oh and as an incentive to answer the question, I will randomly select 6 responses that contain the answer to my question above AND "please enter me in gmail contest" in the email or comment left below.

Thanks for your help!

Here is an other chance to win a Gmail account, I still have an open contest here that only one person got right so far. :)

So here is the question.

According to Overture, how many searches were there on "labor day" during the month of July 2004?

The first 3 people to email me the right answer at barry.schwartz@gmail.com, gets an invite.

I am basing this number on Overture's data as of 11:10AM (EST) 09/06/2004.

Good Luck!

This one is easy, but maybe you'll get it wrong. You don't need to know anything about SEO for this.

Guess a number between 1 & 10.

The first 3 people to email me the right answer at barry.schwartz@gmail.com, gets an invite.

Of course, you need to trust me. But I have the number written down on paper in front of me.

Good Luck!

Updated: Only one try per person (please don't use multiple email addresses, I run these contest all the time) and I will announce the winner as soon as I get 3 correct answers. But you need to be the first three, if I get four correct answers, the 4th does not win.

***CONTEST IS OVER***
The answer was 5. If I have time, I'll post a summary of the attempts.

Here is an other chance to win Gmail invites.

- Correctly answer the question below by emailing the address below
- First Three Correct Answers Win
- Email barry.schwartz@gmail.com the correct answers

Question is:
What date in Month, Day, Year format was "Black Monday"? Hint, it applied to the AltaVista search engine.

*** CONTEST OVER ***

Answer is Monday, October 25, 1999, see http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/14042.htm.

Thank you Marcia for helping with the question.

Since I just received some new gmail invites, I thought it would be a good idea to start up the gmail invite contests again. If you want the chance to win a gmail invite please follow the instructions below:

- Correctly name the search engine marketers shown below
- You must name them in the fashion of: A = First Name Last Name, B = First Name Last Name and C = First Name Last Name.
- First Three Correct Answers Win
- Email barry.schwartz@gmail.com the correct answers

*** CONTEST IS OVER ***

Answers are: A = Danny Sullivan, B = Mike Grehan, C = Jill Whalen

This past week was the first time I received an email by someone who was upset that I removed their comment from this blog. Plus earlier this week, one of the blog elite had set up his own weblog comment policy. So I thought I would follow suit and set one up for this blog. Keep in mind the commenting policy can change over time and will be updated here.

DO NOT:

1. post off-topic.
   
2. engage in personal attacks.
   
3. provide a URL to a non-topic-related Web page.
   
4. spam will be deleted

If a comment is posted that falls into any of the above categories (or close to them), I will delete them. If you repeat your comments, I will block you from posting comments at this blog. I have to protect myself, the authors and all those reading this blog.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Last Tuesday on I was as a guest at SEO Radio. I had a good time and the host really knows his stuff. If you happened to have missed the show, you can hear the archives by clicking on the segments below:

• Segment One: RustyBrick, Industry and Tools
• Segment Two: MSN's Future, SEO Forums and SERoundtable
• Segment Three: Link Building, Teoma and other

CONTEST OVER

Please email your answers to barry.schwartz@gmail.com, the first THREE CORRECT responses will win a free gmail invite. Good luck!

What month and year (format should look like Month Year) did Excite go online?

Feel free to provide a link to your source.

Just wanted to drop you a note that Mark Carey of