Other Search Topics Archives

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal teamed up with two great guys, Jordan Kasteler and David Snyder of Search and Social to launch IMBroadcast, which is advertised as the "first ever UGC video site dedicated to the Internet Marketing industry."

If you've taken a look at the site already, it really appears to be one of those sites with a ton of potential. Since as you know, Barry loves Video Recaps, I bet this is right up his alley too. At Cre8asite Forums, forum member Barry Welford also sees the potential. Many forum members think there are still opportunities to add text to the video, and that's still true. But there are opportunities to enjoy video as-is too--and we're not talking about from the perspective of search (not yet, at least).

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Sphinn.

A UCLA study has found that web search activity may stimulate and improve brain function among web-savvy adults. In the article, we are told that "researchers found that during Web searching, volunteers with prior experience registered a twofold increase in brain activation when compared with those with little Internet experience."

Details of the study will be published on the American Journal of Geriatric Psychology.

Is this why you're online? :)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

James Duthie at Online Marketing Banter is celebrating his one year anniversary at Sphinn. After spending a year on the social news network, he's been able to tell which kinds of Sphinners exist. There's the Sphinn hater (who ironically spends too much time on the site and calls for attention about how much they hate Sphinn and awfully resembles my relationship with Digg), there's the inane comment spammer, the flamer, the purist, the voting whore, the eager newbie, the star, and the leech.

I'm not even sure where I fit, and I'm not even going to give this a go. ;)

So which one are you?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Want to see some industry figures dressed up in comics as ... erm, squares? Well, if you do, go to the Ranked Hard blog and check it out. You'll find a nude Vanessa fox, a Jim Boykin ninja, a guy named Brad Smart who I've never heard of (and who Ranked Hard says is a fictional character anyway, so I guess I'm not totally out of the loop), and more.

Check it out for your morning laugh :)

For old time's sake, this should remind you of that US game show, Hollywood Squares.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

When search engines were born, there was a search engine results page that almost completely mimics what we see today: a URL, a description (perhaps), and a link for related sites.

Not much has changed within 10 or so years. We still see a search result, a description, and perhaps a link to similar pages, among other options.

For the most part, things have remained the same. But Dr. Pete shows that the SERP is changing, most notably with direct access to Onebox -- without SERPs at all. This behavior can be acknowledged with the iPhone and with Mozilla's Ubiquity.

Is this the end of the favored SERP, then? Not so much. Dr. Pete suggests that you don't ignore the opportunities to adapt (and preferably early) so that you can take advantage of these opportunities.

While this isn't an entirely new phenomenon, it's important to realize the correlation of this to personalized search: that the "10 blue links" may be replaced with multimedia, maps, and more. Blended search is becoming increasingly more mainstream, so it's not something to overlook.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Yesterday, Sam pinged me with a screenshot of Yahoo's explicit endorsement of Firefox 3.

The link takes you to http://downloads.yahoo.com/firefox/ which only seems to work on IE at this time (if you use FF to access that page, it will ask you to download the Yahoo toolbar instead).

Ironically, the same day that users spotted this Firefox 3 endorsement, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released. On the IEBlog, users can see the new features available to them in the newest version of Internet Explorer. On a similar note, Danny Sullivan reviewed IE8 with how it relates to search functionality.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums, DigitalPoint Forums (#2), and Sphinn.

Daniel Scocco has written a really great blog post at Daily Blog Tips of the importance of domain names--that length and quality do matter. After looking at the Alexa top 250 sites (and the "last 250 sites on the front page of Digg," he concludes that good domain names are vital in the long term success of the site:

All other things being equal (e.g., marketing budget, content quality, design, affiliation with larger websites and so on), a website with a good domain name will always outperform a competitor with a bad or average domain name.

The blog post is a great read, and is especially helpful on a personal note to convince a few people I know that their domain names of choice have been less than ideal.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Now that Danny Sullivan is a California resident, he can travel much much more easily. This year, he is stepping outside the typical conference boundaries of Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, and Pubcon, and will be speaking at the Gnomedex conference on August 21-23. As a result, Danny has posted about the engagement on Search Engine Land and has been looking to Sphinn for discussion that he can integrate into his speech.

The Sphinn discussion has had a lot of real interesting experiences, from people saying that judges are using Google to gain ammunition for court cases (in one case, for child support) to how search makes it easier to form relationships based on a single passion for a topic.

The ability to search online is making us smarter, not stupider, because we're getting results instantaneously.

There's some really great discussion, from Matt Cutts trying to give the background on how policies are implemented, to others feeling that "old news is not news." Overall, the entire thread is a good read.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Kevin Gibbons, UK blogger and apparently a fan of the TV show Dragon's Den, blogged about the importance of a high ranking and how people would pay to buy sites that rank that well, especially for competitive terms. In this specific case, the key words "diamond" and "diamond engagement rings" were in positions 9 and 12. Since those organic rankings can yield really high traffic, he was willing to pay 6 digits for it.

Or not.

The ranking is gone now according to those who checked it after the shoe aired (possibly due to the shady SEO who actually made them rank well to begin with, according to forum members), but regardless, it brought enough momentum to drive the Dragon Geezer to comment on the Sphinn! The Diamond Geezer acknowledges that his expertise is in the diamond industry, not SEO. It reminds me of a post I made yesterday about expertise. The Diamond Geezer's expertise is diamonds, and he outsourced the work to an SEO firm (who probably wasn't optimal). So, while the cameras were rolling, you never really saw the other side of the story, which the "Geezer" explains rather clearly.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Earlier this week, the Cuil search engine (from past Googlers) was launched, ridiculed by the SEO community and just about everyone else. In a Search Engine Land post, Barry showed the "relevancy" of the images as related to notable figures in the search industry. Barry Schwartz (yes, our Barry) is the renown psychologist, Danny Sullivan is the race car driver, Dave Naylor is a can of spam, and I'm a photo of a scantily clad Danny Sullivan.

We tried to do the Cuil search on a lot of forum personalities, but we didn't get so far. Instead, we saw some more industry figures, and here they are:

Here's a photo of Jerry Yang, or so they say:

Here's Eric Enge posing as Bill Slawski:

This, supposedly, is Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney:

This is supposedly Chris Boggs. I've never seen this person before in my life and I know what Chris Boggs looks like.

Here's forum personality Kim Krause Berg. Who is this lady for real? I don't know!

And Matt Cutts debuts again...as The Lisa Barone:

Here's the most relevant picture EVER: Matt Cutts attacks Greg Boser -

If anything at all, you can have a lot of fun with Cuil. That's the extent of it, though.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

As many people will attest to, it can be a reputation management nightmare when you are trying to push down negative press and remove the websites that speak badly of your company and your brand. But why are these sites incredibly popular? In a nutshell, they give people a voice when they previously had none. The thought process (sometimes) is that the companies will help the consumer to save face (and hopefully the negative press will be pushed down).

There are other ways to address the problem, though. Loren Baker writes about how to combat the reputation management problem and suggests that other channels are utilized, including blogs, media channels (.tv subdomain to share videos), get positive press coverage from other bloggers, brand social media profiles, get hosted/cobranded subdomains, and utilize video/YouTube for more "universal" search results.

Still, the fact that these sites exist create a huge problem for forum members who participate in the conversation on Sphinn. Instead of calling it a reputation management fiasco, they call it "defamation." But IncrediBILL says that you need to think about what you're doing at all times to avoid the Internet being used as a channel for negative press.

HINT: Don't do anything to generate a complaint in the first place and you won't have to combat those sites.

What about real defamation that can be generated by the competition? That's where the courts should come in.

Additional Search Engine Roundtable discussion: Personal Reputation Management: The Reactive Approach, Out-Ranking Negative Reputation Sites, Secure Your Brand Name on Social Sites, and Addressing Reputation Management Issues with Search.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Greg Sterling shares a blog post from the Patent Law Blog that says that "the Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc."

Does this mean that PageRank and search algorithms are going to be dissolved under these new restrictions -- since the claim is that they may inhibit future development? Yesterday, during the Daily Search Cast, Danny Sullivan said that the Google PageRank patent has changed so much that this is a nonissue, so perhaps not.

It's really hard to say that this will happen. I suppose that where there is no wiggle room, the patents will be revised to avoid being invalidated.

With regards to Google PageRank, if it ever does go away due to governmental restrictions, will they lose much? It won't be a competitive disadvantage, forum members say. PageRank is not that substantial in the grand scheme of things.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A High Rankings Forums member accidentally let his domain expire, and some company snatched it. The company stole all of the old content. Is there anything he can do besides tell them to take it down?

Well, in this case, yes. Since the new company is using the old content, it is likely to be a DMCA violation since the forum member likely holds all copyrights to the content that is currently being used by the unrelated party. The recourse here would be to hire an attorney and have them demand takedown.

But on the other note, this may just be a grace period if the hosting and registrar are the same. So before one goes to the extremes, it's best to check with the hosting provider and registrar to make sure of ownership.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

It's becoming easier to start registering domains with typos -- but not the kind you'd expect with a little extra letter here and there. It starts out with a discovery from pageoneresults:

With the approval of IDNs recently and now the testing phase, I do believe we as Internet Marketers and Webmasters are going to be faced with a new level of search sabotage and phishing that makes the current methods look like amateur stuff.

By using special characters in the URL, which is becoming increasingly possible now, one is able to register domain names never thought to exist, such as www.pàypal.com (note the accent over the a).

It seems that a number of people are looking to monetize on these domain names. They're putting them up for sale and hoping that the rightful domain name owners claim them.

While it's still relatively new and we're not sure how long this will last, one thing is certain that it's time to start educating website owners about the potential dangers of this version of typosquatting.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Whenever a post is removed from a blog, my first instinct is to go to an RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and find the same post there, to see if it is still available.

A big mistake most bloggers and authors make is when they make mistakes they delete the post and not edit it. For example, let's say you get mad and you blog about what angers you, while you are angry. Yes, that is typically the worse time to blog, when you are angry. You hit the publish button and then go on your way. Minutes later, your post comes up in your RSS reader and you read it. You instantly become ashamed and want to pull the story asap. But instead of editing the post, you click the delete button in your blog software.

What happens? Your story remains in most RSS readers because most readers to not support removing deleted posts. Most readers do support post updates. So if you simply replace your blog post with "This post was removed...", then the RSS reader will update with that content and your original post might not show up in your friend's RSS reader.

A Google Groups thread discusses just that. Google Reader Guide, Roger, explains how this works:

As a workaround, publishers such as yourself who wish to remove content from Google Reader can change the item's content but leave the item in the feed - Google Reader's crawler will update the item in the cache with the new content as long as the item ID remains the same. This will at least keep the content in question from continuing to appearing in the feed.

Please keep in mind that although Google Reader will re-crawl changed items with stable IDs, not all feedreaders are obliged to do this - any content posted at any time has the potential to be cached by other services.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

At Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan discusses how search 4.0 will integrate human elements and that editorial decisions will help keep the freshness and relevancy of results. (In case you were wondering, search 1.0 from '96 used on-the-page criteria, search 2.0 from '98 used off-the-page criteria, and search 3.0 from 2007 included universal search).

But times are changing. Google Personalized Search is already incorporating our preferences in search results. Social networks can be tapped into for some personalized results. Mahalo uses human editors, as does Wikia. It's something that we're likely to see more of in the upcoming months.

Is Search 4.0 today's reality, though? The Sphinn discussion suggests that Danny is a bit early in his assessment. It's coming, but it's not yet here. (Still, Danny's pretty darn good at what he predicts in terms of search, so I think the column is timely.) On that note, I don't think Danny intended to say it's here now (we know it isn't), but that he's all ready to coin the phrase "search 4.0" to mean human powered search.

Gary Price mentions that library and academic tools have been human-powered for years. Gary has a point, but these aren't as mainstream as Google. I believe that the interesting part of this all is that Google is taking that direction to keep its results top notch (and to avoid gaming).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Mike Grehan wrote an article on the future of SEO and shared his thoughts on Search Engine Watch Forums. Perhaps most importantly, Mike talks about the personalization of search among different verticals and how social search will have a predominant impact on the future of search in the next five years. He notes in the forum discussion that there's an advantage (perhaps an unfair one at that) because of some people having access to the web over others and poses the following question:

Should search engine ranking algorithms continue to be based only on the data they have about people who happen to have web sites and therefore have text pages and can link to others. Or is the voice and opinion of the end user now being heard much more clearly?

It's an interesting dilemma, but I think having a website means that you have a vested interest in the growth of the Internet (whereas if you didn't maintain/own a website, your motives are different). But that's just me. What about you?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Webmaster Talk forums member is trying to reduce the amount of search traffic he's getting.

Allow me to explain. Basically, he's looking to even out his traffic because other sources are yielding overall traffic success. Search alone hasn't been cutting it.

What can be done to reduce the emphasis on getting traffic through search engines? The usual: link building, tools and services, community involvement, a forum, a newsletter, advertising, word of mouth, and contests.

Or you can go the extreme measure and disallow search spiders by updating your robots.txt. Still, some search traffic would be nice, right?!

The idea here is a good one. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Focus on getting traffic from a variety of sources.

Forum discussion continues at Webmaster Talk.

A study performed out of Penn State College found with reasonable accuracy that "about 80 percent of queries are informational and about 10 percent each are for navigational and transactional purposes." At Search Engine Land, Barry breaks down the behaviors and says that the informational queries include searching for a fact or topic, navigational searches include looking for a specific website, and transactional queries address buying products or services.

According to Bill Slawski on Sphinn, this data was obtained from Dogpile. It appears, then, that the information may not be accurate if accounting for searcher behavior on Google. Indeed, as forum member evan420 points out, navigational searches make up for 5-7x what they cite in the study. He says that if the same study would come out on Google, you'd see different results.

Google has a nearly ubiquitous toolbar and is the "navigational gateway" for so many who bypass the browser address bar, so I have to think a new study using the major SE's search logs, while improbable, would yield far different results.

It makes a good deal of sense. Is anyone up for doing research on searcher behavior on Google? :)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

If you're like me, you live on the internet for a big chunk of your day. You thrive on the internet. The internet is a big key player of your being, and if there's no internet, you can hardly imagine your existence without it.

This feeling is only going to grow with time. We become increasingly dependent on our online activities. We become increasingly dependent on search. Whereas 20 years ago, we had to do research in, uh, libraries, we can now do it at the tip of our fingertips at any time of day (wearing nothing or everything).

So what would happen in a world where, if you got banned by a search engine, you had some recourse? Imagine that if you got banned from Google, it would actually be illegal? In other words, search engines were not allowed to ban sites without a reason (assuming there is no reason already).

Search Engine Watch Forums members are discussing the possibility of exactly that. And forum members believe that it would be a great idea to take legal action against those search engines who ban you or who lower your position in the SERPs.

But more than that, search engines are becoming viewed as commodities and this can't necessarily be as far fetched as some folks imagine. Could they eventually be regulated by government entities? Probably -- or probably not. In a "probably" scenario, there would be rules on who would rank, where they'd rank, and the like.

I foresee that to be an incredible undertaking and waste of tax dollars if implemented. Right now, there may be a few unhappy webmasters, but overall, the state of search is pretty good. Bringing in a big player (like the US government) would be a mistake.

There's more to this really interesting discussion. Worth envisioning or not? I still think not. But if you want to read more about what forum members are saying, check out Search Engine Watch Forums.

I remember working as a private investigator and visiting the United States Patent and Trademark Office way too often as part of my job. And when I read Sarah Bird's post on SEOmoz about an individual named Jason Gambert who is looking to file a trademark for the term SEO, I knew exactly where to go.

The background: an individual named "Mr. Gambert" is trying extremely hard to get his "process" of SEO (or so that's what he claims it is) to be trademarked. He's been rejected but he's been narrowing his scope every so often so that he can persevere and succeed with the trademark filing.

This will hurt the industry heavily if such a thing actually pans out as any SEO could be held accountable (and have to pay) if the trademark goes through.

I encourage anyone interested in pursuing this further to speak with a lawyer (particularly one involved in trademark litigation) to dispute this filing.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Kalena Jordan writes a blog about her concern over an SEM rating site called SEMCompare. She tells us that the Search Marketing Standard magazine has started this site to allow people to write reviews about the search marketing agencies they've worked on, whether it's positive or negative.

After doing an interview with one of the people behind the site, she was alarmed by a comment from said individual: "At the end of the day we can’t really endorse or condone reviews on the site.” Does it make sense to create a site if you can't vouch for its content?

The discussion moves over to Sphinn where sentiment is similar. Here are some reactions:

U gotta be kidding me right? So I can hire a gang of offshore monkeys to go by (spoofed IPs) and whack attack all the competition? I Love It.....

And another:

One of my concerns, which you didn't mention, was whether SEM/SEO firms would be able to buy their way to the top or to good reviews? To me, the site looks like one of those kind.

Finally, another valid point:

Another concern that I have that I don't think has been discussed is the conflict of interest in asking a client to review your agency and knowing that SEMCompare exists.

A positive review is great, but exposure to your compeitiion is not so.

Boris Mordkovich of SEMCompare responds to these concerns and says that the concept arose from several inquiries about SEM agency recommendations. They created a site driven by user generated content to do this. There are some safeguards they've put in place, including contacting people whose reviews don't match up. This should prevent the system from being abused. Users need to have a valid email and website and if their reviews are specious, the SEMCompare staff will ask the user directly.

Does it have promise? Perhaps. I still think that the service can be easily gamed. Also, it's interesting that a lot of marketing companies I haven't heard of have a solid 5.0 score whereas the more known companies have lower scores (between 1.7 and 4.9). Something about that just doesn't feel right.

The ongoing discussion (oh yes, there's a lot more) continues on Sphinn.

Lately, we've heard a lot about the need for search marketing standards. Most people that I've encountered are overwhelmingly supportive of such a move.

Not Jill Whalen, however. Over at Search Engine Land, she provides her four reasons as to why we shouldn't go that direction. Her reasons: there's no "one size fits all" solution to SEO, the definition of "SEO" is not agreed upon entirely by the community, laws already exist that protect consumers from SEO scams, and there's no such thing as "cheating" in SEO.

At High Rankings Forum, people are largely supportive of Jill this time around. One even puts it this way: "standardizing SEO is like standardizing art."

But Ian McAnerin, who spoke at the Search Marketing Standards session I liveblogged during SMX West, disagrees with her. His blog post addresses this (note: there are two parts) and he feels that the standards are more for the public's understanding of SEO, not for SEOs themselves.

In the end, it may be two different discussions entirely. We may need to standardize this debate. ;)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Ann Smarty has written a post at Search Engine Journal about how the mindset of webmasters who launch sites with and without SEO in mind. If SEO is a priority, choose a relevant domain name and think over website structure. Of course, that's how you'd approach it if search engines were important.

But what if they weren't?

If search engines didn't exist (or rather, you'd like the search engines to find you instead), you wouldn't care about indexing the site immediately and you certainly wouldn't submit your site to search engines. You wouldn't update your content that quickly. Instead, you'd search for alternative traffic sources, like blog comments.

She has a good point. As Barry Welford says, "Simply put it’s getting the fundamentals right then watching it grow." Eventually, it will, but technicalities may not have to be at the forefront of your thought process.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

According to Aaron Wall, since Mahalo adds no value (if you remove the links which point to other pages on the Internet), it violates Google's spam guidelines.

While many people, particularly SEOs (who have been frustrated with Jason's commentary in the past -- though to me, he redeemed himself during the keynote at SESNY last week), lauded Aaron's statements, I have to disagree with Aaron's statement. Personally, do you think that this post on how to convert from a PC to Mac lacks any substance? I think it's a great piece.

Jason responds in the Sphinn thread:

Over time I think you’ll see our pages grow to be over 50% original content, 20% links, and 20% UGC (i.e. reviews, votes, comments). Most pages in the system are 50-70% complete.... over the next two to three years they will reach 80-90% complete thanks to the help of the community and they will be worthy of a top 30-50 ranking in 20-30% of the cases is my guess.

Furthermore, all pages with less than 400 unique words will be nofollowed.

Personally, I think that's a great step. And I have to continue to disagree with individuals who think it's appropriate to continue bashing Jason when he clearly rectified the situation last week -- since, well, I was there.

As one member puts it, "if an actual human being combs through that data to provide us a garbage free page, then it should not be considered scraping or spam."

Agreed on all fronts.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Brett Borders wrote a great article on the 13 pages negative online publicity comes from that are most difficult to outrank, which includes articles on authority blogs, government pages, press releases, off-topic pages, and rip-off report listings. Are there more? Probably. On Sphinn, a user suggests that this beginner guide on reputation management should be applied, and here are some suggestions: don't open 100 blogs, don't start a MySpace account, don't start a Wikipedia page, and more.

Personally, given that I just scored Andy Beal's new book, I suggest reading his 7 step online reputation crisis plan which realistically gives you steps to identify and respond to reputation management crises. (btw, he's giving away an iPod Touch. I claim it.)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

We talked about the SEMMYs at least twice. These are awards from Matt McGee about his favorite blog posts voted upon by everyone else.

Well, the winners are now in, and guess what? I won an award! My article, Top 6 Ideas for Incredible Viral Content, won the best of its class in the Viral Content category. Score!

The official results are at the SEMMYs website. But in case you don't want to venture there (though you should; it's worth the visit to see the other contenders), here are all the winners:

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2 - Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Pay-Per-Click
Optimizing Paid Search & Landing Pages for TV, Radio and Print Advertising - Greg Meyers, SEM Geek
Google
Why Google Can’t Just "Dump" PageRank - Dan Thies, SEO Fast Star
Viral Marketing
Top 6 Ideas for Incredible Viral Content - Tamar Weinberg, Techipedia
Link Building
Help! I’m New, I Need Links, What Can I Do? - Debra Mastaler, The Link Spiel
Local Search
Anatomy & Optimization Of A Local Business Profile - Chris Silver Smith, Search Engine Land
Blogs & Blogging
The Blogger’s Guide to SEO - Aaron & Giovanna Wall, SEO Book
Reputation Management
Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Tools You Must Have - Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim
Small Business
Branding For Small Business And Bloggers - Steven Bradley, TheVanBlog
Social Media
The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play - Muhammad Saleem, Search Engine Land
Web Analytics
Web Analytics Demystified - Avinash Kaushik, Occam’s Razor
Search Tech
Which Is Better For SEO: Shared or Dedicated IPs - Lisa Barone, Bruce Clay Blog
Online Marketing / General
How A Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away - Bryan Eisenberg, GrokDotCom<
LOL Funny
9 Ways To Bore The Audience at SES New York - Lisa Barone, Bruce Clay Blog
Rants
Web 2.0 & SEO: Must We Piss In Every Public Fountain? - Dan Thies, SEO Fast Start

It's been a lot of fun, Matt!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Bryson Meunier posted a characteristics of the top 100 mobile search queries at AT&T. The top five keywords, in order, are "google," "yahoo," "sports," "facebook," and "myspace."

Further, Bryson says that mobile users are looking for navigational options as opposed to the traditional sit-at-your-computer search where you may not know what you're looking for.

According to the classification, the mobile queries were overwhelmingly navigational in nature, with almost three quarters of the queries coming from users who already knew what they were looking for: query intent percent of queries informational 12% navigational 73% transactional 15%

The article concludes with some best practices, including:

Using navigational queries such as branded terms, competitor terms and names of known products as core keywords could lead to increased visibility in mobile search engines.

...[U]sers are looking for usable sites, [so] developing a mobile web site and including the term "mobile" in the copy as a secondary keyword could lead to increased visibility in mobile search engines.

The research is very detailed and incredibly in-depth. If you're going along the mobile route, it's a definite read for you.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Jeff Quipp over at Search Engine People has started a funny blog post about search spammers. His post, entitled "You might be a search spammer if...." has hit the front page of Sphinn and caused a lot of chuckles. Here are some of the items on the list:

1. You know what a Markov Chain is
2. you use an image editor to write your emails
3. you think of him as “Matt Cutts Me Out”

Surprisingly, there are a lot of people who can identify with these tactics! Do you?!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Last week, we introduced the SEMMYs, Matt McGee's awards for his favorite blog posts. Well, folks, the judges' votes are in and you can now vote for the best of the best. Matt explains the voting procedure on his blog.

For a list of finalists, go to the SEMMYs website and cast your vote. There are 15 different surveys from which to vote, so at the minimum, choose the two where I appear as a finalist.(Viral Marketing and Analytics). ;)

What are you waiting for?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

On her blog, DazzlinDonna proposes a plan that some people think is unfathomable: stay away from search news for 24 hours. Her argument is that if you avoid the news, you might actually be able to get things done.

The question is: can you do it? If so, do it today.

The discussion moves over to Sphinn where most, if not all of the forum participants, believe that they cannot step away from their computers and avoid search-related news. It just seems too difficult.

In a way, I can relate to that. If I avoid reading blogs for 24 hours, I have over 2500 new posts to read and I don't give them the attention they deserve. That's why I'm checking my feed reader constantly.

(Oh, and if you vowed to participate, why are you reading this?!)

Maybe Donna will just have to form a support group.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Matt McGee arranged a very cool contest that highlights the best posts in Internet Marketing this year. His creation has been called the SEMMYS. And both Barry and I are judging it. In addition, several of our posts have been nominated:

• Impact of Changing Registrar Data on Search Rankings
• Pages Ranking Poorly in Yahoo but Well in Google?
• Why Do Some SEOs Want the Toolbar PageRank to Go Away?
• Google Declares War on Paid Links: But Why Now?
• Ethical Link Building Incentives
• Google Does Impact Many Small Businesses
• First Screen Shots of Microsoft's Live Webmaster Portal

Soon, the judges will have their votes in. Then it's up to you, the people, to vote for the best post of the year. We can't wait to see what the keys hold!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Over at Hobo SEO UK, Shaun Anderson wrote a really interesting "take me back to the early days" post about how established SEO and SEMs got started. He looks at many bloggers' very first posts and many have come a long way since then.

For example, here's Danny Sullivan's first personal blog post. And apparently Jim Boykin is a snail and Sebastian just wanted to follow the crowd.

By the way, Barry's first personal blog post is here. And here is Search Engine Roundtable's first post. Nostalgic, isn't it?

It's funny and cool at the same time to see how many bloggers have started and how they have changed and grown over the months and years of blogging.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

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

Here's a sample question:

What color monkey is Rob Kerry?

You can choose from the following answers:

Red, black, green, brown, orange

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

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

The I'm Not a Doctor blog has an interesting poll: how often do you dream about SEO? The poll has some interesting results so far (one guy dreams about SEO every night, but most go with once a month). The discussion led to Sphinn where many people admit that they do dream about their work -- a lot.

Haha. Yup, I am sad to say that I do. I was just thinking about how dorky I am when I wake up and run to my computer in response to a dream I had only to be disappointed (or relieved) that the dream was not true.

Yeah, those are the kinds of vivid dreams I typically don't have. But it's funny that so many people have these funny dreams.

DigitalPoint Forums members don't dream about SEO. Instead, they dream about Google AdSense.

Replying to a post just now has just reminded me that last night I had a dream where I checked my Adsense account and found I had a huge amount of clicks but only half the impressions.

Yeah, and someone recommends that he goes outside more. I guess that most of the community there doesn't relate. :)

Anyway, what do you dream about? Barry has interesting dreams. He dreams about blogging. He also dreams about Matt Cutts leaving Google and working for RustyBrick. Maybe ... in his dreams. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn.

The Register reports about some corruption that was discovered within Wikipedia: the existence of a secret mailing list that cracks down on users why may be threats to Wikipedia administrators' power. The article goes into depth about what ensued, what happened, the reaction, and the community is pretty shocked.

Can Wikipedia still be considered a trusted source by search engines with this information known? Well, most people say that there are always flaws in these sources, but the data is still more relevant than other search terms.

The real story here seems to be the paranoia and the heavy handed treatment of dissent by the Admin group. It comes down to control. I don't think Jimbo wants to lose that.

Users will still be in control to keep the results relevant.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

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

Wow, what an excellent question!

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

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

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

But when it comes down to it.

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

What an excellent topic!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread points to recent research on mobile search in a document entitled Deciphering Trends in Mobile Search (PDF link).

The Google team (a Ph.D student and senior staff researcher) analyzed data on over 1 million page views from Google logs and found the following:

• The average mobile query was 2.56 words.
• The most popular searches are listed in the chart below:
  
• Mobile queries are less homogeneous which may be attributed to the diversity of mobile users.
• More users are clicking on search results in comparison to 2005.
• There is a reduction in the amount of time it took to enter a query, possibly due to better keyboards or greater experience with mobile devices.

Some of these results come as a shock to users, especially since local searches are not as heavily emphasized as originally thought.

There are some surprises in this research for me - in fact, some of it has me scratching my head in bewilderment. I've always assumed that mobile search would be HEAVILY about Local Search.

But the data may not be completely accurate, as administrator Brett Tabke notes:

As it stands today (just checked) they are not properly detecting several browsers and a mobile browser variations on google.com. This was one of the main topics I talked about down at the mobile conference in Orlando last week. The fact that Google misidentifies Opera, Netfront, BlackBerry/RIM, and Thunderhawk.

Regardless, the findings are interesting and are worth a read if you're interested in mobile search.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Let's say you're ranking really well for a specific keyword. You also have a PPC campaign and your paid listings are on top. Is it too much? Should you curb your spending and focus on your organic links, since in the end, it is free?

In many cases, the answer is no. They complement each other. Awhile ago, I covered a webcast where link expert Eric Ward says the same thing: an appropriate mix is critical. Bill Hartzer says the same thing on Search Engine Guide. This still holds true. Reinforcement is always helpful, and if your results appear on both the organic and paid side, your users might be inclined to click on those links and increase your revenue.

Some very valid thoughts are voiced by member J. Clark:

1. I want the conversion no matter how we get it (as long as it is profitable)
2. If my company isn't visible in those sponsored spots, our competitors will gladly take the real estate.

If it costs more to rank in both areas, do it. Just keep tweaking to find the solution that converts best for you with the least amount of spend if budgeting is your concern.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This post was composed on October 2nd and was scheduled for publication on October 5th.

Picture this. You're a search engine marketer from the dawn age of web site promotion. You go to a cave and meditate on what the heck Google is up to next for a few years. Return to this reality and do a bit of research to catch up on your old industry. Your heart races with joy when you discover this new-fangled thing called "social media". (As one might, having been stuck in a cave, ok?)

It looks strikingly similar to web sites from the early days, with the same type of ads mentality, placement and channels for lead development. You wonder. Just exactly who was it that was living inside the cave all those years?

Two lively forum pro's, "Glyn" and "iamlost", tackle the lack of marketing creativity and progress online in a Cre8asiteforums thread called Quite Frankly I'm Staggered...Advertising on the web hasn't moved on at all. They bounce around some ideas and play around with the topic.

From Glyn:

"Here's another thing at the end of the day I question whether or not a person will get spooked if advertising is so targeted that the user is clicking on every add. Thought police of 1984?

When does targeted advertising become spooky?"

This one could be juicy.
(Note: Please forgive the dancing bananas.)

An article about lack of research into sales pitches has Cre8asite Forums members reeling.

A new study by the Intelligent Business Group, a UK-based marketing think tank, provides a devastating critique of the performance of most advertising and marketing agencies ... Eighty-five percent of the survey respondents believe that the agencies pitching them do a lousy job of researching their basic business issues before making their pitch. Astonishingly, 61 percent believe that the agency did no research at all.

That's a huge number. The forums discussion wonders how much time members spend to pitch their SEO or SEM services.

Everyone says that they do research in some form or another whether to determine the industry, the type of product or service being sold, and information about competitors. Some of the participants don't generally make sales pitches at all; instead, people seeking services call them.

But this much is true:

The statistics are staggering but not unexpected. Too many people want to do their job w/o doing it.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

In response to an article by SEMPO about the ineffectiveness of in-house search engine marketing (caution, PDF link), Search Engine Watch members believe that SEMPO is off the mark.

The article highlights obstacles that get in the way of efficient outsourced SEO:

1. SEO/SEM campaigns are time intensive.
2. SEM requires dedication.
3. SEM is very competitive and the market drives costs up.
4. Successful SEM campaigns demand accurate tracking and analysis of effectiveness.
5. In-house SEM programs often are unaware of search engine policies.
6. In-house SEM programs do not have support.

But forum members believe that there are advantages to in-house SEO, such as keeping confidential information confidential, having more insight into the industry to which the marketing is being performed, and having internal control of the people within the company for whom the responsibilities lie.

Having someone in house provides a dedicated resource and know-how for any search marketing campaign. Being able to hire someone solely for the job of search marketing is very effective.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land posts a startling (but not surprising) report that internet ad spend will surpass traditional media ad spend by 2011.

Driven by audience migration, the US Internet is anticipated to capture $61.98 billion and become the top ad medium in 2011. Traditional media will show slow, low single-digit growth while alternative media will grow at a compound annual rate of 17.4 percent during the forecast period.

WebmasterWorld members don't find it surprising either. In fact, it can be often viewed as the desire for newspapers not to conform.

The leading online newspaper consultant screamed at his clients to get into the retail and business directory biz online. They just sat there. Yellow Pages and Google took it over.

Scary thought but quite true.

The Internet is taking a chunk of advertising. Media is evolving. To stay in the game, newspapers will have to get up to speed and bring their services online.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

While doing a website evaluation for a client who hosts his website on Microsoft IIS, Ogletree noticed that Google was indexing a bunch of URLs that did not seem legitimate. These URLs were in the form of adding parenthesis between two slashes, like so:

http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/(I(id=1546973))/Default.aspx

It will take you to the same page as http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/Default.aspx.

Upon further investigation, ogletree found that if you use IIS and the .NET 2.0 framework, this will occur. A default IIS installation will not experience these strange side effects.

The problem with this is a threat to duplicate content, a concern that plagues many webmasters. As ogletree puts it, "You can also link to these new URL's and even submit them to a bunch of directories. It would create as many copies of the same pages as you like."

pageoneresults, WebmasterWorld moderator, says that there are other problems with IIS too. For example, since IIS filenames are not case sensitive, you can "wreak total havoc on someone's IIS hosted site." A scary thought indeed.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that Business.com, an online marketing directory, was sold for $345 million.

Business.com works as a kind of online yellow pages. It allows users to search for business services, while collecting a bounty for sending Internet traffic to individual merchants.

WebmasterWorld members react to the purchase. The price tag is quite high. Will it be worth it?

They'll need a great strategy to turn a quick profit on this investment.

Maybe.

If the owner of utube.com can generate $162k a year from the ads and traffic they get, one can only imagine what business.com must be pulling in...

Would you ever invest in a domain that is that costly?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums poses an interesting question regarding social responsibility. If you have a site that requires age verification and you want to keep the content away from people who are not of age, what can you do?

The best solution offered is to hold true to your concerns of social responsibility and keep the content from search engines just as you would from users.

But I think that has to be carried over to the search engines, too. If you can't show your content to underage surfers then the engines shouldn't show it to underage surfers either. And that's exactly what will happen, via snippets and cached pages, if the site is indexed.

So that seems to be possible, by using the following directive:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Gord Hotchkiss blogged about an amazing interview with usability expert Jakob Nielsen on the future of the search results. A discussion ensued on Cre8asite Forums about the interview, since Nielsen brings up a lot of really interesting points:

• He says that results may not be computed by the number of links in the future so sites like Wikipedia may no longer be in the forefront.
• He proposes changing the search results to more two-dimensional layouts.
• He believes that personalization is impossible since people may want different results depending on the time of day.
• Display ads may cause "banner blindness" which means that users may disregard other multimedia presented on the page.

Bill Slawski disagrees with much of what Nielsen says. For one, he believes that the search results have changed drastically within 3 years, whereas Nielsen believes that they haven't. He also believes that Wikipedia is useful as a starting point in conducting research -- and I'd agree with that. Wikipedia links are often relevant to the typical user.

The interview is very comprehensive but should definitely be read, and forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Being #3 usually sucks. People like #1 and some have learned to settle for #2. But when you're the third-most-preferred search engine, why continue competing? That's the question of the day at the Cre8asite Forums.

I see figures like 50-65% for Google. That does not leave mu[ch] for the rest. Yahoo is number 2 from far away.

Moderator eKstreme has some good insights. He suggests that one reads Don Dodge's article on why 1% of the Search Market is worth more than $1 billion. He mentions that the race is still on, especially since TechCrunch just announced that Microsoft is gaining on Yahoo.

He adds:

Why do they bother? Why does anyone bother starting a business? Simply put, they believe they can do it better. The search market is about solving people's search problems.

But what else can it be? Some people say that audience is key. You might have a site that appeals to savvier users. They're likely to be using Google. Then you have the other search engines, and back to what eKstreme said, those people think that these search engines do it better than Google.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google is gaining momentum in the search sphere, but Microsoft seems to be picking up the pace. According to a Chicago Tribune article, financial analysts expect that over the next decade, Google will take a whopping 90% of the market "through increased spending on research and development."

WebmasterWorld members are not convinced.

10 years ago Google didn't even exist (at least not as a commercial company), what did the analysts back then predict for 2007?

In fact, another WebmasterWorld thread says that Microsoft's search share is increasing. Was that predicted by financial analysts? I don't think it was.

Still, as Danny writes on Search Engine Land, Microsoft is picking up the pace. Could we see them controlling the market in a decade, at least more so than is expected?

For some nostalgia, check out Barry's post from 2004 where he muses about Microsoft's relevancy. Microsoft has gained the market share only in the past few weeks, but I'm not hearing anything about relevancy getting worse. Search is alive and well.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (Google) and WebmasterWorld (Microsoft).

We cover reputation management every so often. There are reputation management sessions at Search Engine Strategies. With search, a positive company image is quite important. Bad publicity ranked on the top of the SERPs can hurt your image.

Barry wrote about multiple ways to deal with reputation management last year and the year before. A few suggestions included starting a blog, creating a personal website, sending out press releases, linking to positive articles about the company, writing articles, and participating in forums under the company name.

A WebmasterWorld discusses this a little further. Administrator tedster offers some great tips about how you can work with your audience to improve your image.

Maybe some do that -- but I prefer it to be done legitimately with real sites entering into real dialog with the market.

Years ago there was a lot of attention to the book Cluetrain Manifesto. In my view, reputation management is taking on the purposes expressed there as intensively as possible. Good reputation management also involves addressing whatever seems problematic to the marketplace, and doing it for real.

Moderator martinibuster adds that social media can help too:

[Reputation Management] consultants were purchasing domain variants of your name or company name, then pointing links to those pages which then lead back to your main site. Be sure to purchase the same variants with blog pages, including squidoo, myspace, flickr and any other service that you can add your name to the URL. And don't forget the power of subdomains.

It is suggested that you even participate in reputation management before your reputation sours so that you have the rankings before you run into a threat.

IMO reputation management should be a process built into your online marketing efforts from the start. If you take the longer view and make consistent efforts to do a good job servicing customers, fixing mistakes and investing in your brand you will be ahead of the game when it comes time to defend from a potential threat.

This is an incredibly informative thread for anyone looking for advice and tips on how to proceed in the realm of reputation management.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting thread has arisen on the Search Engine Watch Forums out of a relatively interesting question. Many of us who are "search savvy" can get a feel of what might be the next big thing. Do we invest in stocks because of our industry know-how?

It appears that a few people have done so.

Ian McAnerin has an interesting story to share about his experience with Yahoo. Some highlights are below:

[O]ne day I came across this cool site run by a student at Stanford named jyang. The directory was great, though it had a silly name (Yahoo). I sent him an email saying I liked his site and noticed he didn't have a lot of Canadian links. I also wanted to grab a bunch of his. We were both students so we basically agreed to swap links....

Anyway, a couple years later, I was walking by a newsstand and noticed that an issue of Barrons featured Yahoo as going IPO. SInce I was working with a small public company at the time (mostly for stock options), I was interested and read the article.

Funny thing was, Barrons thought that the stock was interesting, was concerned about monetization, and didn't really recommend buying. The reviewer said something to the effect that if you bought it, it would likely be a "nice ride".

I had more faith in Jerry's project and bought as much stock as I could on IPO day.

Do you ever have a hunch or are swayed based on industry talk? Do you have a story like Ian's to share?

Discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week, findings of a Penn State University Study were published with some pretty interesting results. Thirty-two participants of the study did searches relating to a variety of terms and were asked to choose a search engine of preference. Regardless of the presentation of the results, Google and Yahoo were clearly the search engines that the participants chose to use.

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks why this is. The thread starter, NewKidOnTheBlock, feels that the sample size of 32 participants is not statistically significant. This is very likely to be the case.

However, considering that Google and Yahoo are truly the recognized brands, I am not surprised at the results. If we had a larger sample size in the study, would the results be the same? I would be inclined to think so.

Barry's summarized the findings on Search Engine Land:

[Participants] were then asked to rate each result on a three-point scale consisting of very relevant, somewhat relevant, and not relevant.

After the study was complete, on average about 36 percent of all results were judged relevant to the query. Yahoo scored 15 percent above the average while Google scored just 0.7 percent above the average.

He shows his shock at the anomaly that Yahoo ultimately scored higher than Google. But perhaps that is simply because of the small sample size who may have already had preferred Yahoo despite Google's stronghold on all search traffic. Still, I think that Google and Yahoo would remain clearly victorious if additional participants were invited to partake in the study.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This entry was written on July 2nd and was scheduled to be published on Wednesday, July 4th.

Jason Calacanis, who launched human-edited search engine Mahalo late last month, has initiated a LinkedIn discussion asking users what they'd do if they were the CEO of Mahalo.

There's some interesting feedback, especially since Mahalo has captured the audience's attention at least at the present, but it's still in "alpha." Will the users stick around as more articles get added?

Until you have more human results on there - its just a rebranded Google.

500 pages a week isnt a lot - so i would probably see how this can be improved by a factor of ten, otherwise by the time you have nice results you will have lost all publicity. First impressions and all that...

The nature of human-edited search engines also come into play:

One thing that a human-powered engine can do that a computer cannot is identify "sides" of an issue. If someone enters a search for President Bush, a human can identify pros and cons. Likewise, if someone enters a search for a movie or restaurant review, a human can decide if it's for or against.

But then again, I think about how Mahalo will become a lot like Wikipedia if this is the case. That's what the others thought, too:

How are you different than About.com or Wikipedia? I'm not sure I see where the generation of yet more content is leading. Granted, there is an ocean of junk out there, and good content is always welcome. How do you differentiate yourselves? That is what I would focus on.

[Hat tip: Todd Mintz]

Discussion continues at LinkedIn.

There's an interesting discussion on Cre8asite Forums about losing rankings when you transfer your domain to another registrar. A few people suspect that doing so could cause a loss of rankings, but some other members have not seen any changes whatsoever. At this point, opinion is relatively mixed.

It is suspected that ranking drops could be simply because of another change (page structure, perhaps), but not so much because of the domain registrar information on its own. However, again, there are people who seemed to have experienced a drop in rankings due to a transfer of a domain, despite the legitimate reasons and need to do so.

On one hand, softplus (John) says that nothing has happened when he switched domain registrars:

Changing domain registration details will generally have no influence on your site's indexing and ranking on Google. I've moved domains across accounts and registrars and have seen no change at all (at least none that I could pin-point on the domain whois information biggrin.gif).

But on the other hand, rmccarley has seen something else:

Softplus I have definately seen ranking drops where the only change was registration info. While I agree the effect is generaly overrated by SEOs (and over-speculated) it is there.

What I have *heard* is that the link-age starts over so any value from aged links just isn't there. Without that the link structure is revaluated which can disrupt the SERPs

Last year, Barry wrote about changing domain ownership and how it impacts results. From an earlier posting, Google has admitted that it weighs upon registrar data to improve search quality. But recent developments may show that this is not the case because Google can't focus on rankings in this way anymore. In any event, perhaps a 10 year domain registration is in order, not because of the murkiness of the situation, but also just for the investment (and its affordability). Even so, however, one wonders if the investment really does pay off. I suppose there are a lot of questions that will remain unanswered and individual user experience may be the most important element here.

On the forums, this ownership question led the discussion to the question of whether Google is a good registrar to choose. Since Google is now a domain registrar, one wonders if maintaining a domain with Google is really the right way to go. Some people see looking at Google as a domain registrar is overrated; they own web properties and it's not a big financial sacrifice for them to become a registrar:

I believe the registrar status of Google is being over-rated by many SEO people. Anyone can be a registrar, provided they can prove that they have the infrastructure and that they pay the down-payment (I believe it's $10'000, but I'm not certain). To a company like Google, that's peanuts.

John, the same person who made the above statement, continues to say that it wouldn't hurt and that Google is probably not looking as closely as one may tend to think:

Would they really implement an algorithm to analyze domain changes just for a fraction (albeit a large one, at the moment) of the web?

Discussion continues about both topics at Cre8asite Forums.

The New Year often brings outstanding compilations recapping the past year and providing predictions for the future year. Greg Jarboe has started a series for Search Engine Watch's SearchDay that he has called "The 12 Days of Search Day." For anyone not familiar, there is a song called the "12 Days of Christmas" (Lyrics).

Greg's first post in the series about 2007 trends to watch covered the following:

In the first week of New Year’s, my SearchDay gave to me:
12 speakers speaking,
11 bloggers blogging,
10 scribblers scribbling,
Nine Diggers Digging…

Eight firms a-buying,
Seven forums buzzing,
Six engines searching,
Five Google things...

Fun stuff, and a good synopsis of things to keep an eye on or add to your favorites, so far.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There has been much talk recently in the search engine marketing industry about the relative value of Organic (free) search engine positions versus Sponsored (paid) results, especially in the terms of the cost associated to manage the efforts. This topic has been covered extensively, in case you somehow missed it, but the most recent thorough coverage can be found with all parties involved in the comments at Search Engine Land and Greg Boser's less word-mincing WebGuerilla Blog. (Nice "clueless" subdomain, Greg ;)) Barry originally covered this topic at SER.

One thing that has been common but a little more in the background on this subject is the direct value of Organic versus Paid results when it comes to conversions. A recent thread at WebmasterWorld Forums discusses this slant in more detail, with the thread starter asking:

If I was in the business of selling products, say if I was Amazon dot com, as an example.
Would you want to be in #1 in Google PPC position or #1 Organic position? (lets assume the PPC is free for this argument)

This year will likely yield some more thorough research into the effect of having multiple types of listings within search results, but if looking at search holistically it is very likely that the higher number of listings one has for a popular and converting keyword phrase, the better chances of reaching the end goal. One member details:

For some of most competitive keywords we have multiple sites in "free" top 10 and 3 or 4 in PPC... competing against ourselves... So pretty much whatever visitor would click, they'll end up at the "right place". This kind of enterprise is costing a very high price, naturally...

Join the discussion at WebmasterWorld Forums.

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.

Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is now available for download here. I installed it on my MacBook Pro running Parallels and it works just fine. Danny Sullivan has THE article on the search side of things, i.e. the default search engine war for the toolbar search feature. The article is named Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine a must read.

One comment somewhat related to search at WebmasterWorld is this funny remark;

The biggest disappointment is that there is no animated paperclip to utter profanities such as 'It looks like you are writing an email, do you want to see help with writing emails?', 'It looks like you you are trying to search with Google, do you want to change to Microsoft Live search' or even 'You searched for uninstall this *$#!, do you want me to *#!#$ off?'.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebProNews has recently reported about Wal-Mart's failed attempt at online reputation management, after anti-Wal-Mart activists revealed the people behind the short lived blog.

Offering a positive outlook on the mammoth chain's US stores and workers, the pro-Wal-Mart blog soon gained attention and skepticism from many who protest against the retailer's alleged staff treatment and business practicies.The real identity of the couple who blogged on the site was traced back to the sister of an Edelman PR employee.

Since the birth of blogging, savvy PR companies have been using the medium to put across the views and opinions of their clients, often purporting to be customers or independant experts (or paying such people to post). Wal-Mart has long been the target of worker unions and rights groups, although with other companies using similar tactics - will this PR disaster be the end to blog-based reputation management?

Forum discussion at WebProWorld.

There is a thread on WMW talking about an advertising deal between Facebook and Myspace that will allow those using MSN Adcenter in the future to reach the audience on Facebook. Like the Google and Myspace deal, this is good news for SEM's and advertisers.

Also regarding Facebook there is a lot upheavel and discussion going on from its membership base about new changes that they put in place over the last few days. The users are protesting new changes made by Facebook to include more detailed tracking of friends in users networks. How this applies to search marketers is maybe helping them to understand the social networking space a little better and how to leverage it with their SEO strategy. There has been good discussion recently, especially recently at the SES San Jose about how to gain links and traffic from some of these sites. It makes complete sense that as social networking sites become more and more part of what people do on the internet it will be inherent that search marketers get to know these social networking hotspots in order to leverage them. This recent incident is more a lesson on learning to identify the right people that are first movers or trendsetters which will introduce new features, websites, and products to the user base. This method applies in a link building strategy as well both for traffic and for spiderable inbound links marketers can use to grow sites. You can't force or shove new features/websites/links onto to people, they have to be introduced and it then spread by word of mouth or virally to others. SEO and Youtube is another example of how an SEO's can gain some free links from learning to leverage this site correctly.

The major story about Facebook has to relate to major changes taking place over at Facebook resulting in a brand new News Feeds of sorts that updates you on every single thing that your friends are doing on your Facebook network. One would think that people would love new features and appreciate the addition. Wrong, they hate it with a passion. The News Feeds track EVERYTHING from who your friends added as friends, who left what comment, who of your friends joined a group, posting image comments, who deleted you as a friend, when you login in and off and so on. It's become utterly creepy in a terrible peeping tom type way to watch your friends every single move on Facebook. Privacy was partly lost and there was no way to turn off the feature. The users felt betrayed in some small way.

So what did the users do? They started a new petition online and they resisted to this new change, by creating a group within facebook of over 250,000 people protesting the recent changes. Facebook is large, there is no doubt about that. I am a user of Facebook user, so luckily I can see a lot of what is going on that others can't since its a closed network.

Their message to Facebook:

You went a bit too far this time, facebook. Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update. We want to feel just a LITTLE bit of privacy, even if it is facebook. News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.

We demand that either the feature goes, or that we have an option to remove ourselves from the feature. Nothing people write on our walls, or what we write, or what we update goes up on the "News Feed." These are small demands of your users, but we are here to complain and protect our privacy.

We understand that they want to hold dear their new feature, and we respect that. But there are thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, who want either one of two things

1) Removal of the news feed program
2) A simple, one-click way to remove our presence COMPLETELY from News Feed. Not clicking x every time we have an action, but an easy option that will make it so that others, yes, even our friends, don't see what irrelevant thing we posted on someone else's wall.

Now's the time to give them constructive criticism and to let them know that we're not going to go quietly in the night.

Pretty powerful words from the groups on Facebook. As a user of Facebook myself, I can't say I am fond of the new changes either and hope that they allow users to opt-out of the new features. I have heard also that Facebook is thinking about opening up the profiles on Facebook to let people see them who don't have a facebook account. With something like this News Feed tracking enabled and anyone anywhere can see profiles, it will reveal a lot about the people who use Facebook and incidentially destroy some of the privacy that Facebook users so much love about the site.

Because of the SES coverage, I didn't have much time this morning to continue our Search Marketing forum coverage. So here is a short hit list of items we hope to get to in the next several days. I.e. catch up items.

• Google to distribute MTV programming - WebmasterWorld
• Google To Identify Malware Sites In Search Results - WebmasterWorld
• A Modern Etiquette for Adsense - WebmasterWorld
• Does anyone here still use Google to actually "search"? - WebmasterWorld
• Yahoo Negative KW Advanced Match - WebmasterWorld
• PhotoSynth - Anyone else following this? - DigitalPoint Forums
• New Google Documentary - released Video 19th July - DigitalPoint Forums
• how to avoid clicking on your ads - DigitalPoint Forums
• Sergey Brins Original Web Page - Cre8asite Forums

Just some threads on our hit list at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Wikipedia is, by its own "simple self portrait" an encyclopedia that anyone can change or add-to. Of course, there are editors, who seem to do a pretty good job of keeping content relevant and useful, and of removing blatant attempts of "link dropping." DMOZ, conversely, is a human edited directory of websites which has had its fair share of problems and accusations of corruption.

A recent thread at WebMasterWorld Forums discusses how a member seems to be seeing more and more Wikipedia pages indexed highly in Google search results. Others concur (including me). Does this mean that Google is starting to place as much or more faith in Wikipedia references as those from long-trusted and powerful DMOZ? The member asks about the seemingly fruitless process of submitting to DMOZ:

Why should I bother now when Wiki sits atop Google (for nearly every information search term) and they let you add your link if you have a extra good resource.

Good discussion follows. Naturally, any discussion about DMOZ will lead to agreement about the headaches associated with submission and acceptance. It also is beginning to seem many people are wary of the "Web 2.0" folksonomy aspect of Wikipedia - and how much you can trust it. I have seen examples of people actually attacking Wikipedia's credibility quite often in forums and even in comments to posts in here where I have "dared" to use Wikipedia as a reference link. Some call it a mere content-thief. Some "interesting" people even compare Wikipedia to a cult.

The main point is, however, will Wikipedia help to affect your own search engine rankings if you have a listing there? As one comment points out:

You're missing the point. Wikipedia pages might rank well, but that's not the same thing as saying that out-bound links from Wikipedia are valuable. Google doesn't have to PR0 a directory to devalue it's OBL’s (outbound links).

It may be wise if you are a brand owner to ensure that your brand has not been ill-defined by a competitor or even someone who is just a little too excited about your product or service. I would recommend taking the time to at least submit an article before that happens...

Join the thread at WebMasterWorld Forums. Another related WebMasterWorld thread discusses Wikipedia getting two listings in Google for one term.

Now, search conferences have sessions named "Reputation Management," in fact I have covered not one but two of these sessions at SES. When we first talked about it, I named a post Out-Ranking Negative Reputation Sites, then I don't think it had a name. Now there is a whole business to ensuring your company's online reputation is secure and positive.

A Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Negative Info/Personal Harm discusses a personal brush with online reputation harm. Basically, a local newspaper published negative information about the person, which he says is wrong and if anyone searches on his name, up comes the article. It is harming him both personally and professionally.

Search Engine Watch Forums members offer some great advice on how to try to ease the issue. Basically, rank other pages on top of that bad result. How does one do this?

- Create Personal Web Site
- Put up a blog
- Send out press releases
- Boost other positive pages on the Web by linking to them
- Write articles and have other sites syndicate them
- Join forums and post

Anything to get more pages, targeting your name, and ranking above the negative result is a step towards personal reputation management.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Cre8asite Forum thread asks SEO training- is it worthwhile? There are many ways to train oneself to become an SEO, they include;

• Seminars
• Conferences
• School
• Books
• Forums
• Friends
• Trial & Error

A great way to begin is to pick up a basic book and follow that up with a seminar or conference. Then once you get the core principles down, joining a forum and reading and sharing in the discussion is often very helpful. Make friends and then experiment through trial and error. Finally, go back to the conferences and also read the more technically written books. Rinse and repeat.

Ammon warns;

The one thing I would caution against is if anyone were considering a course being an investment to make them an instant SEO. It won't. The course is merely a fast way to get all the basic principles into your mind so that you can then set off to learn more advanced and specialized skills from there.

Does the order I listed above matter? I don't think it has to be in that order, that is why it is listed in bullet format and not number format.

Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A new member posted a thread promoting his SEO Comics at our forums. I personally find them funny and wanted to share them with you.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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...

A WebmasterWorld member posted a thread asking how critical it is to register a domain name for longer than a year. He asks, because his hosting company claimed that registering a domain name longer than one year, will improve his rankings in Google.

First, there is no conclusive evidence that the patent that Google issued that shows how a search engine can use domain registration length to determine the 'spamminess' of a site will be applied to Google results.

Second, if it did, why wouldn't spammers who can potentially make millions a month, spend an extra few hundred bucks to register a throw away domain for ten years.

Three, it is not right for a hosting or domain registration company to profit off of this, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Earth Day was this past Sunday and there was a ton of news and blog buzz on the search engines being creative with their engines on that day however, there were no threads in our forums. Today, I finally noticed a thread at DigitalPoint Forums about the special day. The thread creator notes which engines made an effort for Earth Day and which did not - also asking you to comment on which you find to be your favorite.

Continue reading "Search Engine Commemorate Earth Day 2006"

According to a ClickZ study people who search for brand names are not necessarily ending up at the official brand name web site. Only 85% of those searches will. The other 15% visit other competitors or information sites containing information about a brand. There is an excellent thread on SEW Forums about the ClickZ topic. Danny Sullivan explain in the thread "For example, if I search for McDonald's, lots of people want the McDonald's site. But some people might be researching the company; some might be looking for an anti-McDonald's site and so on." He continues asking "Is 85 percent pretty good? Should a brand expect to get in the high 90 percent of all traffic?".

In my opinion, I don't think they should nor should expect to. If you are an increasingly savvy shopper you will quickly scan all the various brands that meet your match. People also don't like things to break or have holes in them and they always like to get exactly what they ordered online and nothing different. Additionally some corporate websites are pretty boring and rarely a help. Back to Danny's example, those websites do not help in my buying process. Do I really need to go to the McDonalds website to learn more about BigMac's when I can just go down the street and order one in 5 minutes? It would seem that searchers are being smarter. They are not the drones who randomly click like we might believe.

Continue discussion on SEW Forums - What Percentage Of Brand Name Traffic Should Brand Names Get?

I see it every day. As a professional search engine marketer, I come across many sites that have employed search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. In many cases, at least some of the methods used are either outdated or very risky - using tactics clearly defined in Search Engine Webmaster Guidelines as being "against the rules." These include simple tricks such as hidden text to more crafty poor man's cloaking, and in some cases "IP Delivery".

When these sites don't rank, they become likely targets for SEO sales people, especially for small to mid-sized SEO's looking to increase their client lists. Cre8asite member "softplus" started an interesting thread last week titled: "How to approach a company about their SEO... when you can see that it's been done badly?" He asks how members would suggest contacting the owner of a website that has had questionable SEO modifications performed. He even adds

how do I approach them without telling them what they are doing wrong in the first place (eg doing the work before getting a contract)?

Some interesting responses so far ranging from Moderator "bwelford's"

I've never had any luck in telling companies even about the most damaging problems with their websites.

I personally don't search for sites using poor SEO and in turn contact them, but I have certainly offered a large amount of advice to people who have asked - never afraid to "tell 'em like it is." If you are a website owner I would highly recommend using Forums like Cre8asite, Search Engine Watch, and our own Search Engine Roundtable forums to pose questions, especially if you feel something may be wrong. Once a problem is identified, however, I would recommend trusting recommendations and referrals from reputable SEO's, and taking care of any problems before they cause major damage to your site's ability to rank.

Please add your thoughts or experiences at the Cre8asite Forums.

I am currently running a Private Beta from SurfWax to embed a new search technology that overlays the blog's current built in search. Basically, as you begin typing, it searches the most recent entries, to help you find articles as you type. It is a bit similar to Google Suggest, read Gary Price's SearchDay on it, you will notice the difference as you try it out. Here is a how to on it. You can test it out by typing in the search box on the left side of this page.

- Start typing to see blog sentence "snips". (sorted by date; most recent stories first) (a line separates sentences by story)

- Enter words in any order.

- Backspace to change.

- Put a space between words that go together
(e.g., white house)

- Use a + for non-contiguous words
(e.g., white house+president)

- Keep typing to narrow the list.

- Use up/down arrows or scroll.

- Click on a snip to go directly to that page.

Please let me know what you think. I will populate the site with this feature now.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

What percentage of search engine users click on paid listings and what percentage click on organic results (paid inclusion listings aside)? This question was posed by a member at SEW forums and has yielded some good statistical sources.

Forum moderator Chris D posts the following stat from a 2004 iProspect report:

Google - 72.3% organic, 27.7% Paid ads ---All engines - 60.5% organic, 39.5% paid ads---....Internet users are more likely to click on an organic search link on Google, and a paid search result on MSN...

My own search revealed only statistics from the 2004 time period.

I pause to wonder if the search engines, especially one notoriously guarded leader, actually reveal such information? Probably, but how much use it is to search marketers is debatable, in my opinion. Each keyword universe will probably have greatly varying results, but I feel the best way to measure this question would be for search marketers to do it instead of relying on the SE's. A large enough sample of data from websites that enjoy top page organic positioning as well as utilize paid listings could yield much better results, however these would probably again vary by industry.

Hopefully someone has some more recent data sources to report. Join the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Both Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves have special Valentine's Day logos up, while Google is currently conducting its Olympics logo series. For documentation purposes, you can click on them to be taken to landing page they are taking you to, here they are.

The search engine companies are not the only ones celebrating Valentine's Day, the search engine communities forums are also. Including Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums. Here are there respective holiday logos, clicking on them will take you to the Valentine's Day threads for the respective forums.

Laura is getting some nice coverage the past week or so, first with the Free SEO Basics Video by ZDNet which was starting her and now with this outstanding topic at High Rankings forum named How to Speak SEO. This was already covered by Rand but incase you didn't see it, I wanted to bring it to your attention.

This thread describes how to;

• How to talk SEO to a CEO
  
• How to talk SEO to a Project/Product Manager
  
• How to talk SEO to a developer
  
• How to talk SEO to an editor
  
• How to talk SEO to your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/husband/lover/mistress/pool boy
  
• How to talk SEO to yourself

Worth a read, in my opinion, forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

You got to love the creativity;

I am sure some forums are chatting about them, but I haven't found any threads yet. I'll keep looking. On the logo front, check this out.

Honestly, I have no idea what my first search was at a search engine. I do not even remember if it was excite or alta vista or lycos or webcrawler. No idea and it kind of upsets me.

But so far two people at Search Engine Watch Forums took A Trip Down Memory Lane...Your First Search Engine Query.

Promediacorp started the thread and documented his first search was;

Year = 1995 (high school);
Engine = Yahoo (ok, it was technically a directory back then);
Query = "Married with Children";
Level of fascination when results returned = unquantifiable!;

StrategicRankings documented his first search was;

Year = 1997 (was working for Arthur Andersen)
Engine = Yahoo!
Query = 'windsurfing screensaver'

This can make for a fun thread.

Joseph Morin debuts his new blog with Danny Sullivan and Brett Tabke Embrace SPAM and posts this picture.

Funny picture. It was taken from the WebmasterWorld London Conference.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Every now and then the debate about search engines manually removing or tweaking search results due to the topic being sensitive in nature. The last one we had, that I blogged on was Hate Sites Ranks # 1 for "Jew" which Google would not do anything about, besides for placing a Google Ad at the top with an explanation that is still running today.

This week, an article from Guardian Unlimited named Clampdown on chatrooms after two strangers die in first internet death pact reads;

Talks are taking place with a number of service providers, including Yahoo! and AOL, and search engine companies, in an attempt to reprioritise the results that are thrown up during a trawl on the internet. "When somebody keys in 'suicide' and 'UK', we would like them to be offered a link to the Samaritans long before they find a website showing them what they can do with a car exhaust and a hosepipe," one official said.

Of course, something like this makes its way to the search forums and blogs. The discussion is pretty interesting, join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and ThreadWatch.

Rarely do we talk about searching as an end user. A DigitalPoint thread started about two days ago named My Girlfriend's Guide To Good Results on Google shows just that. In fact, he claims to post his girlfriend's method of using a search engine. Guess what, she bypasses the first 4 search result pages and looks at the fifth page.

1. Type in Search 2. Click Search Button 3. Click on page 5

I assume this is a hack at SEOs and wanting their search engine rankings to be higher then their competitors. It may be a smart way of saying, Google is filled with spam and his girlfriend is smart enough to skip to page five to bypass the spam. Anyway, this is a unique method of saying this and I thought you may enjoy it.

The ever so much feared downtime and its effects on search engine rankings have sprung up conversation at the WebmasterWorld supporters forum (paid access only). The thread is named My server is in Houston & Hurricane Rita's Coming, Should I Move it ASAP?

Hurricane Rita is being tracked and expected to hit over Texas. The storm's path does not look good for many, and we just hope and pray it does not do as much damage, as is expected.

But what about the damage it can have on an online business. Many hosting farms are located in Texas, and what if those hosts go down and are not operational for 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days and so on? Besides for the fact that if your site is down for any number of hours, you are losing potential sales and customers. What about the affect it can have on your search engine rankings?

The longer you are down, the higher the potential for a negative impact on search engine rankings. Personally, I think it is logical to assume being down for 12 hours will not impact your rankings in the engines. But beyond that, I do not know. All the engines say they keep trying, but for how long?

So how should you prepare? (1) Get your sites set up on a backup server, in a different location. (2) Make sure all the files and databases are sync'ed up frequently. (3) Lower the TTL (time to live) to the lowest maximum you can. (4) Test the backup server. (5) Get ready to change your DNS information to point over the domain names to the new server's IP addresses. If the TTL is low enough, you can expect some name servers to update within 30 minutes or less, whereas others can take up to 48 hours.

Paid forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last time Rand put up an SEO Quiz it was a huge success and much fun, as well. A couple weeks ago, he put up an other quiz, this time named the Search Engine Marketing Exam. It is 44 questions long and has been underway for a few weeks now. I happen to rank fairly well on the SEM Exam Leaderboard but I am sure I will be knocked down shortly. Of course I disagree with Rand on the questions I got wrong, at least some (kidding of course).

Forum discussion on SEOmoz's SEM Exam at SEO Chat Forums. Take the Search Engine Marketing Exam if you got time, its fun!

A thread at Cre8asite Forums asks Which will survive the longest, Orkut or DMOZ? There is a poll up at the thread and currently DMOZ is in the lead, people believe DMOZ will outlive Orkut. I personally do not think they should be compared to each other, they are completely different organisms, but nevertheless, it still makes for a good topic.

ProjectPHP suggests, "DMOZ, with absolutely no funding, will die at some point. Servers cost money, and since AOL pulled the plug and gave 'ema bunch of $$$ to go away, AFAIK there is no revenue coming in fullstop. So, DMOZ must die in it current format. When is the question. No more than 10 years I would think." However many across the Web, including Barry Welford, who started the thread, said they barely log into Orkut anymore (same here) and it seems to him that Orkut might die soon.

Recently Google invested the time to integrate the Google Accounts login with Orkut. I am sure it wasn't an overnight process, but it is now done and you have one login across all platforms. Would Google spend the time and money with such a venture, when they feel it will just die out in a few years? I doubt it.

The question then moves over to DMOZ. I personally consider DMOZ to be a historical monument on the Web. To knock one down and let it rot, seems unethical to me. Of course, this can happen and I am not trying to kid myself. So I thought that possibly a Google or Yahoo! would buy them out or give them money to help them continue. Ammon Johns replied to that staying it would be a "class-action lawsuit of the decade" if someone would buy them out. Why?

You do remember that AOL got rid of all its initial unpaid volunteers from the early days because of the class action they faced? You see, there's this thing called minimum wage. And people in DMOZ keep referring to themselves as 'staff' ... The exact same situation that AOL faced and distanced itself from once before...

To have any real hope of escaping a legal minefield, DMOZ must clearly be indentified as a non-commercial, open, voluntary project that happens to be given support by a commercial entity. Anything that erodes such identification, be that commercialization thru ads, or a purchase rather than a donation, is like throwing stones at a hive.

The thread gets into deep discussions on Tar baby and quotes from T. S. Eliot.

Today I had the privilege of guest hosting The Daily SearchCast at WebmasterRadio with Danny Sullivan. It was my first time hosting a radio show of any kind, so I hope it was good for a first time. So what did we discuss and how do you listen to the archives?

Discussed Today:

Today Danny & Guest Host Barry Schwartz chat about the latest Blogs, Feeds and News. Today's topics include Google selling print ads, Yahoo ad management system, Traffic Power & trade secrets, International trade war between France & the U.S. about search engines, publishers accuse Google of violation book copyrights, Google international interfaces, Google Talk, RSS Feed search engines, Google group results, Yahoo mail enhancements featuring a photo gallery... and the South Park Google parody!

You can listen to the archives at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/audio/2005/SC083105.mp3.