SEO Forum News Archives

Google's Matt Cutts, the man who is incredibly responsible the idea of webmaster and search engine communication, has gone over a year without posting anything at WebmasterWorld.

His last post was on November 2, 2008 in a thread named Google.com SERP Changes - November 2008. His last post was in response to changes at Google, where Matt said "Nope, it wasn't a test, whitenight." Since then, we have covered monthly WebmasterWorld Google related threads on these topics, including the November 2009 report.

Of course, Matt is incredibly involved in webmaster communication. He is active on his blog, he publishes daily videos over here, writes at the Google Webmaster Blog and lives at conferences all year round.

Speaking of which, GoogleGuy's last post at WebmasterWorld was on July 24, 2008.

We miss the Google search folks at WebmasterWorld - I believe that is where this concept mostly got its start?

Rob Kerry, Sphinn's administrator, announced Sphinn has finally come out of beta. Sphinn has moved off of their original software, started from scratch, improved the user experience, spam filtering and zapped most of the bugs since the launch of Sphinn 2.0 in July.

Sphinn dropped the "beta" badge from the logo:

Other changes include that moderators and administrators will more actively promote items to the home page, even before they become "hot." There is a new Sphinn paid members section which includes:

• Members-only Discussion Forum – a private Internet Marketing discussion area, closed off from the spiders, bots and outside world.
• Live Chat – don’t clutter up your Twitter feed, chat directly and instantly with other internet marketers in this private and specialist environment.
• Members Directory – Find and follow “the ones to watch” on Sphinn, with our searchable directory of Sphinn Members.
• Top Sphinners – Sort and filter our private league table of top Sphinners to add to your network.
• Member Banner – Show your support for Sphinn and the internet marketing community, with a Member’s banner displayed under your avatar.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

It has been just over a year since Google opened the new Google help forums. The official date seemed to be the Google Talkabout forum in September 25, 2008, but most Google services didn't move over until later. The Google Webmaster Help forum didn't move until December 2008 and the Google Reader forum didn't move until last week.

The forum received many updates since the launch. The most significant was the redesign last August. Today, I was told by Googler, JohnMu that one of my pet peeves of the forum has been resolved.

Now, Google support forum profiles have not just questions asked, but also answered posts. So if you leave answers on other people's threads, they are included in the profile of the user. There is no RSS feed yet, but this is a major benefit to me and helping me bring you some of the best discussions in these forums. For example, see JohnMu's profile and you will see both questions he started, plus threads he replied to (but did not start).

Forum discussion continued in the original welcome thread at Google Webmaster Help.

Just about a year ago, most Google help forums moved from the old Google Groups platform to a new platform. But not all have moved. The Google Reader group finally moved to the new platform a day or two ago.

I asked in a Google Reader Help thread, "what took so long?" The response from Roger from Google was "We liked our old group so much we had a hard time letting go! :)" Cute.

But there are other Google support groups still on the legacy system, including the AdWords API Group. I am not sure what the hold up is, but I don't know why they are staying in the old platform.

I assume most Google groups within Google have already moved, based on what I am tracking.

Google Reader, welcome to the new forum.

Forum discussion at Google Reader Help.

I spotted a weird thread at DigitalPoint Forums with a new member of the forum claiming to be a Yahoo employee. The person said, "My name is Matthew, I am a Yahoo! employee who works with advertisers on both the search and display side. I came across this forum and wanted to introduce myself."

What made me suspicious of this person were a few things:

• He said his email is newyorkysmaccountmanager@yahoo.com, but if he really worked for Yahoo, he likely would not list his email in the forum.
• Yahoo employees do not use @yahoo.com as their work email, they use @yahoo-inc.com as their work emails.
• Plus it seemed more like a sales pitch then a help post.
• Yahoo already has a rep in that forum

I have emailed Yahoo to confirm or deny this person's identity. I have not yet received a confirmation yet, but initial thoughts are that this person is not a real Yahoo employee. I will update this post and the thread when I get final confirmation from Yahoo.

So beware of fake search engine reps, in any forum, pretending to be from any company.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Yahoo has confirmed with me that this is not a real Yahoo employee.

Update 2: Turns out, Yahoo was wrong. This is a real Yahoo employee. But it seems like this employee did not have Yahoo's approval to post on their behalf. I hope to find out more and post a new article afterwards.

Update 3: I have some more details in this new post.

I never understand it when I see trolls come into forums, owned and managed daily by search engine representatives, and spam them. It is clear that these forums are crawling with people who can seriously impact your site's ranking in that search engine - but they are clueless to that fact?

Two recent examples for you:

(1) A Bing Forum thread discusses one member who has been just spamming the forum with link drops to his site. Literally every post of his, is a link to his site. The posts rarely answer questions related to the thread, they are just clogging up the forum.

One active webmaster finally called him out and then warned him:

And a side note, you really think it's a good idea to do this in the forum from a search engine company? I am sure they can add and remove URLs from the index if they really want this...

(2) Some guy came into the Google Webmaster Help forums and asked outright to do link exchanges. I mean, come on! Besides for Google clearly not approving such methods of link building, the forum is filled with people who absolutely hate exchanging links with others.

One of the main DO NOTs of SEO is DO NOT raise a red flag on your site. Coming into an official search engine forum that clearly is monitored by search reps and spamming it with links to your site, doesn't just raise a red flag, but gives them a bulls eye. Now, if you are doing this to a competitor, that is a different evil story.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum and Google Webmaster Help.

I follow tons and tons of threads on SEO, SEM, Google, etc. I have been doing this for just about six years. One thing I often see is that there are people who want quick answers to why they don't rank well or how they can become rich in days. When they don't get the answer they like, they rant on how unhelpful the "experts" in the field are.

A WebmasterWorld thread member, wheel, was very smart about his post. He initially posted a teaser saying, I built a site five years ago, did SEO for a month on it and it still ranks in the top ten for a competitive keyword with zero additional work. Of course, we all wanted to know how he did it and he strung us along. But that was part of his plan, his plan to get us listening so he can follow up and blast all us newbies. He said:

The secret is, there is no secret. There are two themes that run through this and all the other forums, for years. The first is, everyone's looking for the latest trick or secret to ranking. The second theme is all the experts (at least the ones that I read) tell us to forget the glitter and develop proper backlinks.

And people repeatedly don't like the answers from the experts - to forget the glitter and develop proper backlinks. We want a quick technical answer. We don't want to hear what basically means 'try working hard yourself'. The experts actually aren't holding back some big secret or the latest trick. They ARE telling you directly and specifically what to do. Hard work marketing your website is what gives high long term rankings, not some technical gimmick.

It is true - SEO, money, happiness, etc, doesn't come easy - it requires work. Wheel, did explain how he got the site and his other sites to succeed in the search results, but it wasn't over night and it took work. For more on how he did it, read the thread and get to work.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I found this video on "seo secrets" to be very funny, especially how they dressed up Matt Cutts of Google. Maybe you will laugh as well, so here it is:

Forum discussion on this video at Google Webmaster Help.

A day after Sphinn's two year birthday, that is right, Sphinn was launched on July 12, 2007, version 2.0 of Sphinn was pushed live. Sphinn is the social forum-like site where SEOs and SEMs can submit stories or discussions, members can then vote and comment on those stores. It is a fairly popular site and it is pretty fun to use.

The Sphinn Blog has the details on version 2.0 of Sphinn. Here are the main points:

• New, cleaner look
• Much improved moderation and spam controls
• The removal of the “Discussion” option for submissions
• My Network – Friend and follow the people you like
• "Show Me" Filters – Only show submissions from My Network, or your favourite categories
• Subscribe/Unsubcribe to stories that you’re interested in, with email notifications
• Save stories that you enjoyed or want to come back to
• My Sphinn – A one-stop dashboard for your network, important topics and an expanding list of blog content

Also coming soon, but not yet live, are Private Discussions, Live Chat and a Members-Only directory.

Here is a picture of Sphinn soon after it first launched in 2007:

Here is Sphinn 2.0:

Happy Birthday Sphinn!

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

We rarely cover forum news about the forums themselves, so I figured I pull out one significant thing that happened in the forums over the past 24 hours that is really bothering some forum members. As you know, Google has newish help forums, which launched in October.

In the forums, each member is assigned a "level," which shows other members how active (helpful) a member is in a specific forum. The levels go from 1 to at least 5 and then there are "Top Contributors" who are assigned that status manually by the Googlers who manage the respective forums. Each forum has their own weights to determine the number of posts required to reach a new level.

In any event, over the past twenty-four hours, it seems like some member profiles were demoted from a high level, down to a level one. There are threads about this in virtually every Google help forum.

I figured I would highlight one thread, the one in the Google Webmaster Help where you have several members complaining about the bug. JohnMu of Google confirmed the bug and said:

Hi everyone,

We're still working on a fix, so those who are not Bionics will have to wait a little bit, sorry! I'll post more when I have it!

For what it's worth, this will not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking in Google. Nor it's PageRank. Just so you know :-)

John

I just find it so funny, because most people are worried about their Google PageRank. In this thread, they are more worried about their Google forum level rank then anything else. Good times.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I love it how personal some people are in the SEO/SEM forums. It reminds me of the old days when the forums were like extended family for most of us. It many cases, that is still true, but as the industry has grown, we feel less of that.

Case in points, a Googler, AdSenseAdvisor in WebmasterWorld first tells us that he/she will be on vacation for a week and there will be a fill in during that time. Here is the post:

I'm taking some vacation next week, so I'll be away from Webmaster World 5/16-5/25. I have someone covering for me if you need anything in my absence, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case you notice a significant drop in snark compared to your usual ASA. :)

Later on, he/she tells us that the vacation is in Barbados. Just reading the back and forth in the thread, reminds me of how forums should be.

In any event, enjoy your trip AdSenseAdvisor, we will miss you - but you deserve the time off.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There aren't many people out there that can say they have been in the SEO industry and optimizing sites for search engines since 1999. But there are probably a hundred or so people who can say that. Personally, I joined the "SEO industry" in 2002 (been in the internet industry since 1995), what is known as the second wave of personalities who joined the industry. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Daron Babin, Greg Boser (I better stop naming names before I insult people) were part of the first wave - people who were in the industry before it may have been known as SEO.

That being said, a YouMoz post named SEO Since 1999 takes you through the history of one quiet SEO, who was optimizing sites for ten plus years. Can you imagine? In any event, this write up should interest anyone who loves the industry.

Here is the introductory paragraph:

Monday, April 20th, 2009: Today I celebrate the completion of my first decade in search. I have been waiting for this day with some trepidation for the past 6 months or so. I am not really sure why or even what this anniversary really means. Does it mean that I am some sort of expert? Well, anything is possible. Or does it mean that I have wasted the past decade with little to show in an industry that my friends and family can hardly even understand? Hmm, I hope not. In truth, it means I not only have a job that I like, but a career that I love.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Googler, JohnMu, suggested in a Google Webmaster Help thread that they give Google's Lively, Google's failed attempt at a SecondLife virtual world, a shot before it closes down.

Yesterday, John posted a thread announcing an "Informal End Of Year live-chat over at Lively." I missed it, and so did most people. In fact, I don't think it actually worked.

Looking over the thread, it seems like the event really never happened. I did see a chat room URL in there, but I don't see it anymore. So it seems like the Lively event, wasn't too lively. But it was a great idea to give Google's Lively a last whirl.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I see them every day, the newbie SEO post. Almost every SEO goes through it at one point. They ask a newbie question and people in the industry are nice enough to answer it. Some mock others, but overwhelming, the community responds in good kind.

I spotted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help discussion forum, where long time members are letting off steam. In short, one member writes this long post mocking, with extreme sarcasm, some of the posts he typically sees in the forum. Of course he put in a lot of exaggeration into his post, which makes it incredibly funny.

Here is a brief snippet of just part of his post, where he asks like a person seeking Google webmaster help:

My friend, who's cousin Nora, once went out with someone who's brother built the stand at Seomoz said he heard someone saying that they oveheard someone else saying that Mattt Cutts said Google are going to stop indexing websites with less than 20 pages, is this true?

A while back, I installed the seo for lemons plug in on my blog, which might have helped, so I also added the seo made ez tool, the get google by the balls widget, the mega meta tag generator and the google number one blaster. The only hitch is that my home page now has 5 titles, 10 description tags, 7128 keywords, 233 h1 tags and 300 outbound links to the tool makers sites. This was so heavy, I had to remove all the actual content, do you think this will matter?

It goes on and on and it pretty funny if you are an active forum goer. It might insult some people, but I assume these folks who reply to twenty questions per day just need to let off some steam some time.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

Here is the post:

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

I really look forward to working with you.

Fire away!

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

Forum discussion at Webmasterworld.

Last week, we celebrated the birthday of the High Rankings Forum. The festivities are not over, because if you hop on over to Crea8site Forums, you'll see that they're celebrating the forum's 6th birthday!

Awesome logo! Congratulations to Kim Krause Berg and all the forum members!

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Today, we'd like to celebrate a few birthdays. First of all, click on Search Engine Roundtable's link for the one that everyone and their pet fish has heard about. But, on a note possibly closer to home, Jill Whalen reports on High Rankings Forums that it's their fifth birthday!

Happy Birthday, Jill, and the High Rankings folks!

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

The YouTube Blog announced that they have launched a YouTube support forum at Google Groups. The forum can be found at groups.google.com/group/youtube-help. As you know, we track forums for new discoveries, insights and hot topics. So we will be adding this forum to the list of discussions we are tracking.

What I find interesting is that the YouTube representatives do not have the standard blue G logo [] by their posts. Instead, they have a special red YouTube mini logo by their name, which looks like this .

The forum is currently structured with these sub-discussion forums:

• Announcements
• How do I...?
• Bug Reports & Issues
• TestTube Feedback

We promise to keep an eye on this forum and report back any news, topics and discussion we think will interest our readers.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yahoo has been having a rough time over the course of the past several months. But that doesn't mean the company stops working and competing, at least that is what you would think.

YahooSarah, the official Yahoo representative at WebmasterWorld, has not posted a response at WebmasterWorld in exactly a year from today. YahooSarah's last post was in a thread named Publisher broken? on July 16, 2007 at 3:50 pm (EST). She said:

I wanted to chime in briefly to let you know that we are aware of the problems you are experiencing and are working to resolve as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience.

I'll post again when I can confirm that we have resolution.

But not post came after that. Yes, YPN was fixed, but no confirmation from Yahoo was received - even a year later.

Yes, we still have YahooPete posting in the forums. His last post was about three weeks ago. But YahooPete is responsible for Yahoo Search Marketing topics, while YahooSarah is responsible for Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) topics. Maybe YPN is dead and there is no need for YahooSarah's posts?

I am sad to report that Mark Berghausen, aka Bergy, of Google Webmaster Central, has decided to leave Google to pursue his legal profession.

Bergy, as he likes to go by, has responded to well over a 100 questions in the Google Groups forums, contributed countless blog posts, participated in the webmaster chats and come to many search conferences.

Berg's first post as a Googler was on May 17, 2007.

John Heneck notified me of Berg's announcement post. Is this the end of us hearing from Berg? Berg said no!

It's been a lot of fun spending time with you here. Also, this isn't exactly goodbye either, since I will definitely be stopping by without my big blug [G] and contributing in my personal capacity when I'm not reading about contracts or rules of evidence. :-)

I certainly hope it's not the end of his posts. When Vanessa Fox left Google she did stop posting under her Google Groups profile, but she did not stop contributing to the SEM community. I certainly hope to see Berg post under his profile in the future.

Berg, I am sure you will be very successful in the legal field. Thank you for all your contributions and please do stay in touch!

Forum discussion at Google Groups and Sphinn.

Over the weekend, we learned that Bill Slawski, aka bragadocchio, has stepped down from his administrative duties at Cre8asite Forums. Bill has been with Cre8asite Forums, pretty much since the start, back in the Yahoo club days - as a moderator in the Yahoo forum.

Bill said he will be stepping down from moderating but will hopefully continue to be active in the forums as a typical member. Bill said, "I am stepping down as an administrator at the forums, though I hope to continue as a participant." Why? Bill said, "I've been going through many professional and personal changes recently that have begun to limit my ability to give my role as an Administrator of Cre8asite Forums the time that it deserves."

Bill reassured me that he won't be leaving completely. Bill told me, "You'll see me here. I just won't be in the back rooms cleaning up spam, or participating in some of the threads back there. "

So, all in all, this is not a complete loss of a legend. I honestly cannot see Bill stop contributing - it is just his nature and without those contributions, the SEO/SEM world would be at a great loss.

Also, make sure to check out Bill's excellent blog named SEO By The Sea.

Bill, on behalf of the SEO community and myself, thank you for all your contributions over the years and we look forward to even more as the industry continues to grow and mature.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Last year, the internet marketing and forum discussion site, Sphinn, was launched. Today, it's one of the hottest forums around and we post a lot of discussion from it here at Search Engine Roundtable.

So how's your stay at Sphinn been so far? For many, the Sphinn community is vibrant, active, and incredibly awesome. And the news shared within the site is top notch. If you've waited a year to sign up, your wait better be over. There's really good stuff there!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

For the past few hours, Search Engine Watch Forums has been returning a server starter page from Red Hat Linux. It seems like many, if not all, the internal forums, such as the Google forum page are returning 404 not-found server status codes. A true shame to see.

Here is a picture of what I see when I go to SEW Forums:

I was emailed by a few concerned forum members, but I honestly don't know what is up. I suspect it is a server issue. It does not seem like a standard server hack. I think it might be database issues, because when I visited the main home page, I saw an error that read:

Error in page SQL statement

Tried 'SELECT * FROM pages WHERE name='sew_home''

But that is now gone and the home page is working fine.

I hope the forums come back soon, I am sure the team is working on it now.

Forum discussion is unavailable at this moment.

Update: Seems like we are back a couple hours later.

A few weeks ago, I joined Plurk to mess around with the newest social media buzz. After playing around with it for a few weeks, I have really grown to enjoy many of its addictive features. The main thing I want to explain is that Plurk feels to me like a micro-forums format. Just like Twitter is a micro-blogging system, Plurk is really a micro-discussion forums platform.

Plurk works where you can post a 140 character message (a plurk) and then other plurkers can respond to your plurks. The more active you are on Plurk (i.e. more responses and replies), the more "karma" you earn. As you earn Karma, you earn more privileges, such as unique profiles, more smilie options, stars near your names and so on. Those with a lot of Karma downplay Karma, those with a little Karma desire the additional Karma. That is how Plurk encourages participation.

But participation grows more from the discussion forum like feel of the network. While Twitter has @replies as a way to respond to a twitter, it is often hard to isolate the response with the specific twitter message. Plurk threads responses directly into a specific Plurk. Here is a picture of my timeline at a specific point in time:

As you can see, the timeline shows Plurks before or after my Plurk. To reply to a specific Plurk, you click on the message and it opens up. As you can see above, that specific Plurk has several responses (as annotated by the number at the right corner of that Plurk). You can see that specific Plurk page over here and can reply there as well.

As you can see, Plurk looks and feels more like a discussion forum then a blogging format. Limiting the Plurks to 140 characters, makes it the Twitter for discussion forums. In addition, you can create "cliques" within Plurk to subgroup your friends on Plurk into categories. For example, you can make an SEO clique, SMO clique and so on. Cliques help you manage your audience so that you can send plurks to only the friends who need to be notified.

Plurk is a lot of fun and can be very addictive. It is worth exploring because it can send some traffic your way. It is all about your friends and how you use it. I am still fairly new to Plurk but join in and let's explore this tool together.

If you are going to join, please use this URL to join, so you are friended to me right away.

Forum discussion at Sphinn with the following threads:

• Plurk: The Power of Wasting Time...
• Plurk - An investigation into the benefits and detriments of micro blogging
• Five great Plurk tools to feed the need!

John Carcutt wrote at Search Engine Journal that "real SEOs don't go to forums." That said, we here at Search Engine Roundtable cover only forum discussion, so we ask the question: are SEO forums really needed? After all, blogs have replaced forums (but this blog is a combination of both!)

After reading through his detailed analysis of whether SEO forums are needed, one can come to the conclusion that SEO forums are useful to unite people on a common ground (SEO, of course), but that there are still errors of judgment that can be made. A lot of people who post on forums really don't know the right answer to the questions. The same goes for blogs, though. There are a lot of blog posts that have been argued time and time again based on [mis]information.

Still, however, for many of the prominent SEO bloggers, forums were a staple of education and provide value for the beginners. John explains, "All in all, if you leave the forums out of your everyday SEO life you are not living as full of a life as you could be."

The discussion moves onto Cre8asite Forums where many echo the sentiment that some of the larger "SEO" forums don't actually feel like a community. There are just so many members that one can get lost in the sea of new faces. Others agree with John's assessment that forums are a wonderful place for a beginner to ask new questions and get answers from people already "in the know."

A.N.Onym makes an interesting statement regarding forums:

For me, the forums replace a chance to just talk about the topic with my colleagues. It could be discussing the latest G quirks, tactics or just bouncing off ideas/approaches. You don't get that on social sites, unless you specificially ask about it on LinkedIn or smth.

The discussion moves on and has some great insight from Ammon Johns on why SEO forums are needed. I suggest you give it a read.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Sphinn.

Hasn't been a good weekend for forums. First we learn that DigitalPoint Forums had database issues and now I learn that the software used at WebmasterWorld was "compromised last week."

Brett Tabke posted the details of the issue. He said, there was a "security fault in the lostpassword utility was used to access admin passwords." Although this may sound serious, Brett said "the perpetrator did not actually do any harm that we can see."

How does this impact you? Well, you may want to change the password you have been using on WebmasterWorld to a different one. In addition, if you are a lurker (i.e. you don't post threads), your account may have been deleted during the pruning process.

Brett said he "scrubbed/weeded the entire membership base of inactive nonparticipating accounts going back three years (around 200k - almost 50% of the membership base)."

Please note that you cannot change your password just yet. The tech team is reworking that password utility feature as we speak. So stay tuned on the announcement page for any update.

DigitalPoint Forums, one of our main sources of search news and topics, is currently suffering a major outage. Since last night, the forum has been offline due to what appears to be database issues.

It appears to me, from the VBulleting software error message that the database server is having major issues. Either it was some how disconnected from the web servers or it went offline. Here is the current error message:

The database has encountered a problem.

DigitalPoint Forums launched in 2004, and quickly gained in membership for many reasons. One major reason was for all the popular and free tools Shawn, DigitalPoint's founder, created. The other was that he was the first to come up with the AdSense revenue sharing model on his forum.

In any event, it is currently down. Shawn seems to be away at the moment. So many of those who are dependent on DigitalPoint Forums will need to take a minor vacation until the site comes back online.

Update: DP was back online as of midnight last night. No official word on what caused the database issues.

We have Google's Blog Search and Technorati for blog search, but has anyone found a reputable forum search engine? Enter Twing.

Twing allows you to search and discover forum discussion. We do that here but this is something different. Find content from long ago and use the tag cloud to get additional inspiration.

Here's a screenshot of the system in action.

Sort you results by relevance and date and then even search forums with the associated keywords.

Looks pretty cool. If you're a forum junkie, this search engine looks very cool.

Yesterday I reported that AdSenseAdvisor seemed to have gone MIA (missing in action) since mid-January of this year. Later that day, a new AdSenseAdvisor introduced them-self at WebmasterWorld.

The re-introduction thread at WebmasterWorld reads:

Our old ASA has taken on new responsibilities, and I'm delighted to announce that I will be your new ASA.

Going forward, you can expect greater involvement from our side, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on AdSense, and representing you here at Google.

I look forward to working with you all.

That is great news. The old ASA is moving up? The new ASA promises "greater involvement!"

Like I have told past search engines representatives, welcome and we will be watching you like a hawk. ;-)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I Am Not a Doctor blogged about his new license plates. Yea, he got plates that read <H1>SEO<H1>, talk about loving SEO. Here is a picture:

The Sphinn comments rock:

Was 'SEONERD' Taken already? ;)

So, I thought I was a Geek! Well, our good buddy "imnotadoctor" just went to complete "SuperNerd" status with his new license plates. Share your thoughts....can he be saved??

That is the sweetest plate I have seen in a while!

I am impressed, very impressed.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

If you haven't visited Sphinn, the new "Digg" for Internet Marketers, it's about time that you go. It's a bustling community of users who share informative stories about anything related to search, PPC, blogging, social media, and more.

And yesterday, one of the most controversial features has been launched. As editor Rob Kerry puts it, the Desphinn button is live. This is equivalent to "bury" (like Digg), "sink" (like shoutwire), "downvote" (like Reddit). The catch: if you Desphinn something, you actually have to provide feedback (in 50-250 characters) about why you didn't like the story. Your "desphinn" reason is then available for all to see. It's not anonymous. This prevents abuse of the system to Desphinn just everything.

As an added "bonus," if you will, the button doesn't appear for brand new users. You need to be a member on Sphinn for at least 7 days before you can see it.

What do you think about the Desphinn button? Will it hurt or help the community only promote the good stuff to the front page? Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke announced a major software update at WebmasterWorld this week. The most noticeable change to me is the "Quick Reply" feature that many other forums already have.

You should be able to see the Quick Reply box at the bottom of all open threads when you are logged into your WebmasterWorld account. The box looks like this:

Also, a major change is the ability to manage the skin of WebmasterWorld. The current available options include:

• WebmasterWorld Default
• Tundra Spring Time (pastel green)
• Cherry Rose
• WebmasterWorld Classic
• WebmasterWorld Classic Large Fonts
• WebmasterWorld Classic Thin
• Cool Breeze

Plus you should be able to make your own personal skin at this section if you so desire. Just keep in mind, it may be "reset in about a week to the default WebmasterWorld template" for now.

Other changes include:

• RSS Feeds for each forum
• StickyMail changes where older than 6 month messages will be discarded
• Revalidation of WebmasterWorld accounts

For more details and discussion join the WebmasterWorld thread.

Update: More changes are to come and the links above may not work after these updates. Keep watching the WebmasterWorld thread for more updates.

SEOmoz is holding a search marketer's survey to get information about you. The winner can get an iPhone (or $400 to be spent at Amazon.com).

I just took the survey and the questions are quite interesting. A sampling of questions:

1. How many jobs have you held in the last 5 years?
2. What is your current position?
3. How many emails do you receive for work-related tasks in a given day?
4. How many feeds do you read?

and more.

It will be interesting to see what SEOmoz learns from the data!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

As you may know, the highly popular Sphinn Internet Marketing Forum is looking for ways to get better. So they're proposing a Desphinn button which will work much like a "Bury" button that you see on other social networks. If you think a post doesn't deserve to be frontpaged, you can downvote it using Desphinn, or so that's the goal.

But is it worth it? The current proposal suggests that when you downvote something, you need to give your reasons why -- and the information will be public. I have to agree that this is a good way of using it, but t here are other forum members who find that this can polarize the community and cause animosity. Honestly, though, if your reasons are compelling enough, you can agree to disagree -- or so we'd hope that the community would be open to criticisms from their peers.

I think it's going to be a wait-and-see type deal. As Maki says:

I'm looking forward to the depshinn button. I understand the reservations of others, but its good to just launch it, monitor how the community uses it and then make the necessary adjustments from the feedback or actions.

On that note, there is also a "Report as Spam" button on Sphinn. This is for blatant spam, not for posts you disagree with.

Finally, Search Engine Watch Forums has come out with a Social Media category. If you're in love with social media like me, this is where you should be posting.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn, Sphinn, and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, I received a private message from a DigitalPoint Forums member that was asking for help. The member said he is from Egypt and has a PayPal account used for online transactions. He said his PayPal account "got limited" and the only way for him to withdraw funds from his account is to mail the check to a US address.

He said that when I get the check, I can then send him the money via e-gold, moneybookers, or western union.

He then ends:

Please be sure of that, the account is %100 legal, and I am not a scammer.

Typically, when someone needs to explain that they are a 100% legal and not a scammer, you need to be worried about something.

But after doing some research, it appears that this person may just need some help. He started a DigitalPoint Forums thread asking for help and as you can see, he has over 200 posts at DigitalPoint Fourms, clearly some history there.

Will I help? No way. It still seems to fishy for me. Typically, in the Nigeria scams, they send you money, it initially clears with your bank and then 2 weeks later you learn that it bounced. By then it is too late and you sent them real money. This is called advance fee fraud.

I still think this guy may be legit, but I won't be risking it. Beware of such possible scams in SEO/SEM forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

One day, Matt McGee decided to take a deep look at Sphinn (as a moderator) and acknowledged 7 recurring mistakes that continually happen on the booming social news network. He listed them out and encouraged users to be distinct, different, and unique. Here's what you should avoid when pitching to a site like Sphinn or another type of social news website:

1. Avoid sales pitches disguised as "good content."
2. Don't submit your entire website. Social news sites don't need your "about" pages. They aren't directories.
3. Have a good headline. Seriously.
4. Make your description interesting. Don't you want people to vote on your article?
5. Give yourself a noticeable avatar. Stop blending in with the crowd.
6. Create a unique username.
7. Stay on topic and contribute articles that are pertinent to the categories you've submitted to.

(I feel like I've said much of this before and it still works quite well for other social networks. Thanks Matt!)

But what else would drive someone bonkers? Well, for a smallish site like Sphinn, you shouldn't submit more than 2 stories in a row (it's in the guidelines, people). That one frustrates a lot of people.

What would drive you crazy on a social network? Forum discussion continues on Sphinn.

Ammon Johns (Cre8asite Profile) has announced he is stepping down as an administrator at Cre8asite Forums.

His nick on the forums is Black_Knight and he has been well known for his posts through the SEO community at all the major forums, but especially Cre8asite Forums. He first started contributing under Black_Knight in 1998. His Cre8asite profile was created pretty much the same day the forums went live. He has been with Cre8asite since before its inception. Ammon has posted almost 10,000 times, averaging almost 5 posts per day and making up almost 4% of all the posts in the forum, to-date.

I personally have covered many of his posts here.

The Cre8ative Flow blog has a bit more information.

Ammon's farewell post:

Being an Administrator of this community has been a wonderful experience over the years. I've (virtually) met so many interesting people. I've been able to be a part of something truly immense and spectacular. I've been able to be a small part in many people's lives here. I don't regret a second of it.

However, I do feel a need to take an indefinite break.

It is not an easy thing to walk away from such a great team. But it is not my way to allow the team to carry me either. So I am stepping down as an Admin rather than take this break leaving the team and community hanging.

I want to take this opportunity to say a big "thank you" to all the folks who make this community. To all those over the years who have been a part of this amazing place and its creative energy. It has been an amazing journey.

We will miss you dearly Ammon! Best of luck with your future endeavors!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Rob Kerry, aka evilgreenmonkey has announced he will be leaving Search Engine Watch Forums, as their forums editor, for Sphinn.

Rob will be the Sphinn editor. As Danny explains:

Rob’s role will be to work with all the Sphinn moderators, provide a steady hand on a day-to-day basis to watch over the site and oversee the further development of the site.

Rob took over the Search Engine Watch Forums Editor position when Elisabeth Osmeloski left on May 25th. Frank Watson (AussieWebmaster) will be taking over his role as Forums Editor at Search Engine Watch Forums from next week. He has been a moderator here since 2004 and also writes for the SEW Blog. Rob will continue to moderate at Search Engine Watch Forums, but not play an active role in SEW's future growth.

You can wish Rob good luck in his new position as Sphinn Editor at either Search Engine Watch Forums or at Sphinn.

Justin Goldberg, a Search Engine Watch regular, has announced on the Search Engine Watch Forums that he has created a feed that combines four Search Engine Watch forums feeds. Using Yahoo! Pipes, he has created a single feed that integrates the Search Engine Watch homepage feed, the blog feed, the forums feed, and the experts feed.

If you're interested in subscribing to that for more forum goodness, you can do so by clicking here.

If you'd like to preview the data, you can do so here.

That's pretty cool stuff.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday I reported that it has been One Year Since GoogleGuy Has Posted in WebmasterWorld. I also pleaded with GoogleGuy to make a post and just say hello. He has done so.

GoogleGuy has posted in a WebmasterWorld thread in the Foo forum on a malware topic. The thread was totally not on a Google topic, but it is nice to see that GoogleGuy is still alive. ;-)

GoogleGuy wrote:

Seems like a lot of people end up spending visits home and holidays cleaning off malware from relatives' computers. I have heard of people buying new computers though.

True, true, true!

Thanks GoogleGuy!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Susan Moskwa of the Google Webmaster Central team posts on Google Groups asking group participants what they usually do to monitor posts.

There's a lot of interesting feedback, but ironically, some people actually say that the Google Groups search "sucks." Ah well, at least the search engine is running smoothly!

Some tips on how to check the Google Groups came from a variety of members:

In terms of what to read - I check for post count and sometimes the starring to decide whether to read particular threads. Also look at the last poster - some folk are very worthy of a read.

This sounds like typical Digg behavior:

As for determining factors about what I read, post title & snippet [Good point there about trying to correlate title with response numbers], reply count, starring and the thread-starter & last-poster all play a role.

And others check to give attention to the threads that have less love within:

First and foremost I scan down the page for items without a response - there is usually a reason - either the question is one we don't have a standard answer for (I like them) or more likely, the person hasn't put the question in a way that is clear - so I'll often prompt them a bit and try and get the ball rolling.

What are your tips on browsing the forums? Join in the discussion at Google Groups.

Today is the one year mark since the last time GoogleGuy has made a post at WebmasterWorld forums.

GoogleGuy was the first Google search representative at WebmasterWorld to have such a huge impact on webmaster communication between Google and SEOs/Webmasters.

GoogleGuy's last post was on August 30, 2006 at 1:46pm (EST). GoogleGuy joined WebmasterWorld back on October 7, 2001 and racked up a whopping 2,879 posts. GoogleGuy's last post was in the Danny Sullivan Announces He is Resigning From Searchenginewatch thread, which makes you wonder.

In any event, there has been plenty of Google communication in WebmasterWorld and other forums since GoogleGuy's departure. But, there will always be a special place in the hearts of SEOs and Webmasters for GoogleGuy.

Wouldn't it be great to see a "Hi, I am still around" post from sir GoogleGuy?

Cre8asite Forums, a forum we have been covering forever here, has turned five years old today.

I was chatting with Cre8asite's founder, Kim Krause Berg, last night, when she mentioned it.

Cre8asite is truly a wonderful place to learn tips about SEO and site development. It is friendly, educational and patient.

We have covered most of Cre8asite's birthdays including their fourth, third and second birthday.

You can wish Cre8asite a happy birthday at Cre8asite Forums.

The other day I reported on several SEO glossaries at Search Engine Land.

Over the weekend, a new WebmasterWorld thread began a group effort at building out a new SEO dictionary. The list is pretty impressive and is expected to keep growing.

It would be nice if the moderators cleaned it up after the postings settled down a bit and made it a sticky thread.

The dictionary goes from well-known people at Google, to the definition of an authority site, to canonical issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch and the blog and forums, underwent a redesign and had features added. There is a Search Engine Watch Forums thread now discussing the changes. I thought I do a before and after comparison.

The Home Page
Before:

After:

A Search Day Article
Before:

After:

The Blog
Before:

After:

The Forum Home
Before:

After:

Forum Post View
Before:

After:

Those are the side by side comparisons.

Personally, the new look is a lot more "airy" due to the white new look. The homepage has this new AJAX tabbed approach to see content from SearchDay, Forums or the blog. The forum upgrade added the latest VBulletin features, which is nice - especially the quick reply. My only issue is the smaller fonts used throughout the site, and even more so on the forum thread titles within the thread views of the forum.

One other thing is that this new design reminds me a little of SEO Chat:

Overall, the feedback in the forum on the new design is positive. It will take a bit getting used to, but that will happen over time.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Rob Kerry (evilgreenmonkey), the new Search Engine Watch Forums editor, has posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums announcing that a new design and feature upgrade is coming to the property.

He explained he visited the Incisive headquarters yesterday and received a preview of the new design. Rob said, "Well, the SEW guys will kill me for announcing this first - but we're about to receive a facelift." The new design is reportedly going to address "usability issues and cluttered pages," he added.

The Search Engine Watch Forums will be undergoing a complete redesign as well, with added features. "An exciting new array of features on the forums, including status rankings for long-serving members and some awesome prizes to the most helpful and sociable members," said Robert Kerry.

When can we see these changes? Rob said, "new look going live as soon as next Monday."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I was browsing WebmasterWorld this morning and noticed these little video icons on the home page. They look like the image at the top right of this page.

If you click on the page, such as this example, you see this video format.

The videos seem to come from YouTube and be embedded within WebmasterWorld.

Is this a form of featured content or a new form of advertisements?

WebmasterWorld has also added new paid discussion forums including; "The Wall" and "Review My Site." "The Wall" is a forum to chat about pretty much anything.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The SEO community is suffering a big loss. Aaron Wall has announced on Threadwatch that he is closing down the site on Friday for a number of reasons: bad publicity, edgy news, gossip, decentralization, spam, and having other priorities in life.

Aaron is happily in a relationship now, so I really cannot blame him. However, the news has come as a shock to the Threadwatch community, many of whom are asking Aaron to change his mind.

Threadwatch was nearly three years old, having been founded on October 5, 2004 by Nick Wilson who then sold it to Aaron Wall in November of 2005. Over the course of time, Threadwatch has been a centralized part of many SEOs/SEMs to find the latest news and discuss some of the more controversial topics of the industry. It was a hub with some very good information, and I personally am sad to see it go.

I wish Aaron and the other Threadwatch moderators the best.

Threadwatch forum discussion continues at Threadwatch -- until Friday, I suppose.

If SES and SMX have not been enough for you, or you haven't been able to attend any conferences in the past few months, we're happy to inform you that Jill Whalen, administrator of the High Rankings website and regular conference speaker, is holding a High Rankings Seminar to be held on June 28 and 29 in Denver, Colorado. The seminar has a great lineup of speakers, including Christine Churchill and Jennifer Laycock. The seminar will cover topics in keyword research, social media, Pay Per Click, and copywriting, in addition to many other SEO issues.

We're happy to inform you that if you register for the High Rankings Seminar through this website using the coupon code RUSTY, you will be entitled to a 25% discount. Also, non-profit organizations can enter to win one of two free seats if you submit your information by June 15. If you are a non-profit organization looking to learn some great SEO tips from industry experts, you are encouraged to apply.

By the way, I know I mentioned it yesterday, but we don't have coverage of SES Toronto after all. Both Carolyn Shelby, our conference reporter, and WebProNews did not make it to Toronto.

Forum discussion continues at the High Rankings Forum.

As many of you know, Kim Krause Berg, one of our contributing authors, has partnered with Matt Bailey and SiteLogic for usability and performance testing consultation. Kim has also confirmed this on her blog as well, and there is a Cre8asite Forums post that is dedicated to honoring Kim's achievement.

Kim, on behalf of everyone here at Search Engine Roundtable, congratulations. :)

There will be no changes to the Cre8asite Forums as a result of the partnership, so we'll continue to report stories from there as we always do.

Again, congratulations, Kim! We're so happy for you!

Discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land site has been caught hiding text and performing "poor man cloaking" techniques. A WebProWorld thread called attention to the fact that Search Engine Land was hiding text in a CSS file:

text-indent: -9000px;

But Danny Sullivan didn't know about it. In fact, someone had to call this thread to his attention, and then he wrote in.

Still scratching my head, I then wondered, "Wait a minute. Is this about my site?" Surely not. But yep, there in our style sheet was the damning code. It's true. We were totally hiding text and technically might be considered spamming the search engines. Curses -- just when I hoped not to be counted among those other search spammers like Google and Yahoo that have been outed for using hidden text.

So what happened? Apparently, there was an H1 tag that was visible only to users who have images and stylesheets disabled. That's why regular users typically don't see it. Danny continues by saying that he doesn't approve of this technique and will fix it after SMX next week.

We'll look at a way to make the logo be a hyperlink that doesn't involve using a hidden style, though our permanent solution might have to wait until next week as we're sort of busy with the upcoming conference we have this week.

Sorry for anyone that somehow thought we were endorsing some spamming technique. We're not, of course.

Yeah right.

Image of Danny Sullivan (on left with beer in hand) endorsing Mr. Spam man

Forum discussion continues at WebProWorld.

Elisabeth Osmeloski, the Search Engine Watch Forums editor, has decided it was time for a change. She has announced she will be leaving Search Engine Watch, as the forums editor, and joining Zonder.com, a vacation rentals company.

At Zonder, Elisabeth will be the director of online media for the vertical niche site. I hope we all get discounts on sweet vacation spots!

Elisabeth was integral in creating the Search Engine Watch Forums when it launched in June 2004. The forums have undergone many many changes since then, but it is time for Elisabeth to hand over the administrator keys.

I believe Elisabeth will continue to be a part of Search Engine Watch Forums, but she just won't have the time to be an administrator. So it is good to see that we won't lose her as part of the community, she has helped build.

Robert Kerry (EvilGreenMonkey), a guest author here, will be taking over Elisabeth's role. He has been with Search Engine Watch Forums for a while. His professionalism and sense of humor are a good fit to running a forum. Rob, we know you will do a great job running the forums.

Some more history:
- Danny Sullivan Says Goodbye To Search Engine Watch
- Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure
- Apax Buys Incisive Media Owner of Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch
- Search Engine Watch Forums Broke 3,000 Members
- Search Engine Watch Forum Reorganization
- Search Engine Watch Launches SEW Forum

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

What do you do if a forum moderator becomes hurtful to your forums rather than helpful? A WebmasterWorld thread asks this question based on negative actions performed by a moderator of his forum that resulted in loss of membership. Consequently, he also demoted the moderator.

What I’ve learned from this experience:

1)Never reward a member with a moderation spot just because they have been an active/long time poster. Find other ways to reward good members.

2)Look for warning signs that they might not be a good moderator. Do they get snippy or argue with other members? Are they very opinionated? Do they have an even temper? Have they been ‘know it all’ posters?

3)Avoid mixing moderators and friendship. When things go bad it’s hard to separate the two.

4)Make sure you have written rules on what the moderator job is and how they are expected to act and make sure the see them BEFORE you make them a moderator.

5)Chose a moderator as if you were hiring an employee. Will they represent you well both on and off the forums.

6)Remove moderators quickly if they are losing a forum.

Some people just take the power trip for personal gain. This quote by another member is so true for this instance:

" Power corrupts...

and absolute power, corrupts absolutely"

Appointing moderators can be a pretty sticky situation if they are biased in such a way that it is destructive rather than helpful.

Moderators who are immoderate and partial are very destructive, damaging users' trust.

You can lose a lot of core/good members when even one mod gets rude/patronising/personal or is clearly editing in a partial or biased way!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch Forums has changed the placement of the ads displayed on the site and forums. The ads used to be primarily on the left hand bar, in a box on the right side and a thin line at the top. I believe the forums pretty much had ads only on the left hand side, if any. That has changed, Search Engine Watch Forums has added ads.

Here is Search Engine Watch Forums before the ads:

It takes about 400 pixels from top to bottom to get to content within a specific forum thread.

The new Search Engine Watch Forums with ads:

Here it takes about 650 pixels from top to bottom to get to the content within a specific forum thread.

Some folks don't mind the ads, saying; "I have a degree in ignoring most things, including the ads so I dont mind."

Others like Marcia, an Search Engine Watch Forums moderator dislikes them, saying; "very intrusive."

I dislike them as well, and I would pay to not see them. I am not sure if that is an option, but hopefully it will be an option.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebmasterWorld administrator engine introduced a new moderator to the Google News forum at WebmasterWorld. The new moderator is a long time WebmasterWorld member and very involved in many of the SEM forums. He is Robert Charlton and he is a kind and respected member of the community.

As many of you know, WebmasterWorld's Google News forum is pre-moderated. That means all threads added have to be preapproved by a moderator before they are posted in the forum. It is a huge task, mostly handled by Tedster these days, and now he has some help.

Nice addition by WebmasterWorld and good luck Robert!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums launched a new forum last night named Social Media And Tagging. Kim Krause-Berg, founder of Cre8asite Forums, explains the new forum:

In light of the addition of social media and tagging as tools and methodology for SEO/M practiices, we have added a new forum on the topic of social media.

We're in the process of putting together a team of people to moderate it and provide answers to your questions, as well as educate the community on all aspects of this exploding area of the Internet.

Our first confirmed new Moderator is Liana Evans, (aka Storyspinner), who many of you know.

We look forward to some lively discussions and learning from those who are passionate about social media

Li Evans, aka storyspinner, will be the new moderator for this forum. Liana Evans runs Search Marketing Gurus and has been known to pull off some nice social media tactics in the past. Li's welcome thread is over here.

In other SEO forum news, last week, WebmasterWorld Launches SMO Forum Named Social Media Tagging & Bookmarking Optimization.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yahoo! has added a dedicated representative in the search forums to respond to Yahoo! Search Marketing questions. The new representative was introduced by YahooSarah in both DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

YahooSarah, who has been managing both Yahoo! Search Marketing threads and Yahoo! Publisher Network threads has enlisted YahooPete to focus pretty much on the Yahoo! Search Marketing side of things. Now, YahooSarah will be able to focus most of her efforts to the Yahoo! Publisher Network side of things.

YahooSarah said:

All, I’ve got some good news to share and wanted to start a thread here. Since we’ve rolled out our new advertising system, my goal was to be even more engaged in message board discussions to help you with questions or concerns. I think this community embraced that goal, because I’ve been pretty busy keeping up with posts and private emails- thanks ;-)

To help grow our involvement on the boards even more, I’ve recruited a colleague of mine to serve as a new rep for the boards, YahooPete. He will have more time to dedicate to issues specifically about Yahoo! Search Marketing, while I start to focus more on threads about the Yahoo! Publisher Network (doing both took quite a bit of time, and this is only a part of what I do for Yahoo!). I’m still around though, so you may see me chime in from time to time.

We really do appreciate all the feedback you have given us over the past few months and we look forward to continuing the dialogue. Welcome YahooPete- good luck!

YahooSarah

YahooPete said his introductory hello; saying,

Thanks so much for the kindness. I am looking forward to partcipating in the discussion threads. All my best, YahooPete

Welcome YahooPete, oh and trust me, I will be watching you very closely.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebmasterWorld has launched a new forum named Social Media Tagging and Bookmarking Optimization. The new forum comes to life with the recent buzz on SMO - Social Media Optimization.

What is SMO?

• Tagging
• Web based bookmarking
• Digg.com
• StumbleUpon
• del.icio.us
• Link bait content
• and so on

It is being used all over, you see we have our SMO buttons in the footer of each post.

WebmasterWorld administrator, engine, said in the WebmasterWorld thread:

With social media now paying a huge role in modern Internet life, we decided to create this forum to explore the opportunities and developments.

I am excited to watch this forum for some juicy topics.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The SEO community has been seeding promotions for the My Super Proposal campaign, where a mystery guy wanted to air a commercial proposing to his girlfriend. Rand Fishkin (randfish) proposes to his girlfriend, Geraldine last night. The idea didn't work exactly as planned, but did air on his girlfriend's favorite show, Veronica Mars. Here is the commercial:

Joe Morin (his blog) is very active in the SEO community, he can be thanked big time for helping orchestrating the event. He got the press involved, he got bloggers involved and so on. But that should come to no surprise. The SEO community is very tight, they help out each other when the need arises. It is a very giving industry and I am proud to be part of it.

You have to check out her reaction, here it is:

I appreciate Rand noting that he got the inspiration from my search engine proposal. But he took it one step forward and actually video taped her response. I actually planned on doing that, but I am glad I did not - but that response is priceless. Thanks so much for sharing Rand.

The SEO community wishes you and your Geraldine all the best. We look forward to your future and you having a wonderful and beautiful marriage.

Drop Rand a wedding note at SEOmoz.org.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Andy Beal is running a poll asking SEOs and SEMs in the community to vote for the Godmother of Search, this is a play off of Shoe Money's post on who is the Godfather of Search.

Currently in the running are:

• Vanessa Fox
  
• Marissa Mayer
  
• Jill Whalen
  
• Kim Krause Berg
  
• Elisabeth Osmeloski
  
• Heather Lloyd Martin
  
• Jennifer Laycock
  
• Christine Churchill
  
• Dana Todd
  
• Shari Thurow
  
• Barbara Coll
  
• Jennifer Slegg
  

Jennifer Slegg, aka Jenstar, aka Jensense.com, is currently killing the vote with 332 votes. She is followed by Jill Whalen with 72 votes and then our own Kim Krause Berg with 49 votes.

Jen is a super star, she has risen to the front of the SEO/SEM pack very quickly. However, Jill and Kim are both legendary personalities in the SEO/SEM community. Kim started her forum, where Jill actually was a moderator at, back in the day - prior to Jill starting her forum (I believe that is how it went). So in terms of age, Kim and Jill are more in the "godmother" category - not to take anything away from Jen (trust me, Jen rocks).

In any event, vote yourself for the Godmother of Search at Andy's Blog.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums (Kim's Forum) and High Rankings Forum (Jill's Forum).

End of December, I reported that Cre8asite Forums To Donate $1,600 Towards SEM Organizations. Well, today the results are in and were announced at Cre8asite Forums.

Here are the details:

The funds are going to:

• SEMPO
  
• Fresh Egg
  
• Search Engine College
  
• Bruce Clay SEO Toolset & Human Factors International (tie)
  

Each received $400, so a total of $2,000 was given.

Congrats to the winners and to Cre8asite Forums for the contribution!

Kim Krause-Berg has some more information here.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Ben reported that MSNDude Still Missing, I think he heard us and came out of his hub to inform us he is still around...

In a post at WebmasterWorld (post number 3216990) he wrote;

Rest assured, MSNDude is, and will continue be around -- though I should say that I am the 'new' MSNDude. We do seriously appreciate and consider all the feedback we get (both here and elsewhere). Sorry for the slower response time in getting back to posts and feedback, but we do look into and investigate all of it. Keep it coming!

So it appears, the original MSNDude is no longer around, and that we got a "new" one. So welcome, MSNDude!

This is not the first time MSNDude has gone missing, more on that here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I should be back from my vacation this Wednesday, this is just a guest post since I have some time.

The senior AdWordsAdvisor at WebmasterWorld has posted an update in the alert thread stating that he/she will not be able to post at WebmasterWorld for the next several weeks.

The reason stated;

I'm very sorry to say that, due to a serious medical issue with a family member, I will not be able to read or post here for some time - likely to be several weeks.

I have missed this forum quite a bit since my last post, and look forward to returning asap. In the meantime, AWA2 will be reading and posting as his time allows.

Again, best wishes to you all for 2007!

AdWordsAdvisor, we appreciate all you have done for the community, with a current count of 3,619 posts since July 9, 2003, you have well surpassed GoogleGuy who has gone MIA since August 30, 2006. I would like to take this opportunity to wish AdWordsAdvisor and AdWordsAdvisor's family a healthy new year. Get well soon!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator stuntdubl has started a thread in the WebmasterWorld Supporters forum (paid subscription required) named 2006 Threads of the Year. I will list some, but not all, of the threads selected to be the best of 2006.

• Link development vs. traffic development (our coverage named Traffic Building - Link Building for 2006
• Adwords beginner's guide
• Fixing your website's quality score
• Where to start at SEO with yahoo
• Google hot topics
• SEO mythbusters
• Growing forum paricipation

Most of these I covered, but I am just not in the mood to find those posts. Sorry.

To view the rest you need to be a paid member at WebmasterWorld, worth it if you are part of the SEM community.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kim Krause started a thread at Cre8asite Forums detailing that Cre8asite Forums has collected $1,600 to give to various SEO/SEM organizations. The money came from when they began adding ads to the site, almost a year ago. So how do they decide which organizations should get the money? Since it is a community, they have started a poll to allow the community to have a say in that decision.

You can vote here for the various organization including; SEMPO, Search Engine College Certification , Bruce Clay's SEO ToolSet, Fresh Egg Internship, Web Design Training Program, Human Factors Intl, SEOPros or enter in one not on the list in the other field.

Select up to four, since each of the top four will get $400 each. Also, the poll closes January 15, 2007.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Danny Sullivan just posted his last thread as a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums. He named the post Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch!

As you all probably know already, Danny is leaving Search Engine Watch after not being able to agree to contract renewal terms with Incisive. He will be involved in the next three or so Search Engine Strategies conferences. Danny wrote a long goodbye post at SEW Blog named Goodbye Search Engine Watch & Best Wishes!

The post answers some of the questions we may have, it looks back a bit at the history of Search Engine Watch and then gives some possible insight into the future of Search Engine Watch.

You can keep up with Danny and the SEW Blog crew at Search Engine Land.

Send Danny your best at the Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch! thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Kim Krause Berg at Cre8asite Forums informed us that long time moderator, ILoveJackDaniels, Dave Childs Child, is stepping down from his moderator position at Cre8asite Forums.

ILoveJackDaniels has been the technical administrator for the forums for years. Ammon Johns, BlackKnight, brought him on as a moderator years ago, to the forums. Dave will now act as a regular member and hopefully continue to contribute to the forums on a more limited basis.

You can learn more about him at his web site: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/.

You can send your best wishes to Dave at Cre8asite Forums.

We have put up our own Halloween logo and it looks like this for this year.

Which reminds me of Google and Yahoo's past logos for this day. Check Halloween 2004 and Halloween 2005, which also sports Jeeves.

Let's also not forget Cre8asites Halloween logo.

But did Google stop with the AdSense themes, remember the AdSense Halloween theme?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

GoogleGuy is well known in the WebmasterWorld forums. He has over 2,800 post since he joined in October 7, 2001. So he had around one and a half posts per day since his join date. This may have been the longest period of time in recent times for GoogleGuy not to make a post at WebmasterWorld.

His last post was on August 30, 2006 at 1:46 pm (EST) at the Danny Sullivan Announces He is Resigning From Searchenginewatch thread.

Hope GoogleGuy is feeling ok.

We miss you!

I just visited WebmasterWorld and I see for the first time ever, a banner ad, animated nonetheless, at the top of the page. The banner is promoting their PubCon in Vegas, and rotates images of sponsor logos. At this point the ad doesn't appear to link to anywhere, but that may change. No community reaction to it yet but I'll update this post as soon as we got some threads going (update, I started a thread linked to below).

This is major, I have never seen a banner of this size on WebmasterWorld before. Yes they have sponsors at the top right, but that is nothing like this.

The banner looks like this.

It appears like this on the home page:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Brett confirmed he did it and that hey placed a link to www.pubcon.com.

Did it really _need_ to link somewhere ;-) hehe thanks rusty..

This morning ShoeMoney.com (be careful visiting that site now, may have malicious code on it) was hacked, I reported it over at Cartoon Barry. ShoeMoney.com currently looks like;

Just do not go to the site, it will redirect you after about 10 seconds to a malicious script.

But this got me thinking, ShoeMoney, is a really good link baiter. What if you had a semi-popular site and hacked the site yourself to get people talking about your site and linking to it? A neat link building / bait idea? I would think so, if it was a fake hack. But this hack seems to be the real deal. Who knows how much damage was done and how far back this set Shoe. Shoe, we are here for you.

Update: Seems like ShoeMoney's partner in crime on the NetIncome show had her blog hacked as well at planetandrea.com - careful again! Seems like someone is mad at them?

Oh and Google's blogger is down as I reported via SEW blog.

Forum discussion at ShoeMoney Forums & Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Via WebmasterWorld a USA Today article named Jury awards $11.3M over defamatory Internet posts;

A Florida woman has been awarded $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit against a Louisiana woman who posted messages on the Internet accusing her of being a "crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud."

Wow - this can forever change how forum administrators monitor their forums and how bloggers write openly on their blogs.

The plaintiff Sue Scheff of Weston, Florida charged ahead with the case because she knew that the defendant, Carey Bock of Mandeville, La. couldn't afford to go to court.

We had something similar but our boy Aaron didn't back down.

But to be fair and show the other side; Scheff says, "people are using the Internet to destroy people they don't like, and you can't do that."

One forum member, Jon_King, says;

I guess this is my last post. :)

Very interesting case and forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It took some time to decide and competition was, well, what WAS the competition? I forget. Anyway, Cre8asiteforums Administrator and well-known industry voice, Ammon Johns, has won Sexy SEO Boy of October.

Cre8asite discussion on this win is mixed in with his 40th birthday thread.

One of the more well known names in the search engine marketing industry has turned 40 years old. If you've hit that mark yourself, you may relate to how it can sometimes bring on a time for reflection and review of one's contributions, if any.

Cre8asiteforums Administrator, Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight"), thought to share his birthday by asking forums members to Help Me Celebrate My 40th, (and 11 years in Internet Marketing). He writes,

I want to look at where I am and what I've been able to do so far.

Brett Tabke posted a featured thread at WebmasterWorld named "Incisive Media Sold to Apax for $377m." In short; Apax Partners has bought Incisive Media, "backing a £199m management buyout of the publisher of business titles including Legal Week and Investment Week." Yes, Incisive Media bought Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch from JupiterMedia back in August 2005, and they turned around and sold it.

As far as I know, things will remain the same - including Danny going on his own. From my understanding the same people are going to be working on a day to day basis at Incisive and SES and SEW - so again, I am not sure what this means - outside of a new company owning it.

The WebmasterWorld thread has thoughts on both sides of the fence. One said,

Saw it last week, found it interesting, moved on to bigger and better things :)

An other said;

it would be very interesting news to all of us if something similar to what we owed can sell for $tens of millions so don't blame Brett :)

I don't blame Brett. It was a nice catch and I honestly was surprised that there was not a thread at WebmasterWorld on this topic until yesterday.

Danny Sullivan came into the thread to address some questions, here is a quote, where he replies to some questions:

> Why didn't Danny or Barry inform us about this?

I hope it's clear we did inform you about it. We didn't do a standalone post because (1) it's unclear how big of news this is to the search space, given that as I said, the company structure seems to be the same, though the name and going private will change and (2) it's frankly difficult for me to write much about a company that I'm also still working for.

> What impact does this have upon the SES conferences?

No idea. Again, that's part of the reason I don't have much more to say on it.

> Barry and Danny are still employed by whatever company owns and operates Incisive and thus they are likely being asked not to mention the topic

Incisive has not given me any instructions on what to post or not post on Search Engine Watch. So I still weigh up everything and try to deal with it as best I can. Again, in this case, the main fact people are mainly focusing on is whether the sale meant Incisive decided not to negotiate better with me or not. That's a good point, but it wasn't one I feel comfortable raising. I'll leave that analysis to others. And when Joe did one such analysis, a few days after we reported the sale of the news, you'll see in our headlines yesterday that I pointed to him.

Simple why we didn't cover this news until now at the Search Engine Roundtable. If there is no thread at a forum, we won't cover it. Last night a thread went up, so we are now covering it.

Honestly, I am confused as to what this means for the future of SEW and SES. I got an email last week from Incisive about it, that email confused me. But things tend to just be going on as they were a week ago. Danny Sullivan leaving SEW is more of an impact to SEW and SES than Incisive being acquired, IMO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This Sunday was Danny Sullivan's 41st birthday. We covered when Danny turned 40 and also 39. As many of you know, this year a ton of things changed or will change with Danny - what exactly, we are not too sure.

We all wish Danny the best this year.

In good SEW moderator tradition, the mods put together a card.

Happy Birthday Danny.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebmasterWorld has a new Microsoft representative named adCenterEU who will be the European arm of adCenter411. adCenterEU explains his/her role...

I've just joined the Microsoft adCenter Community Team and will be based out of our London office. The idea is to make sure the support we offer is on a global scale and that our adCenter Community programs are run in all markets.

So I'll be helping adCenter411 support you where I can, basically while they're asleep!

Having been on the adCenter client service team for over a year now and having seen the product launch in France, the US and now the UK, I'm thrilled to be taking up this new role. I'm also looking forward to meeting a lot of you at the Trade Shows we'll be attending in the UK/FR over the coming months.

Cheers

adCenterEU

Very cool.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums Administrator, Ammon Johns, AKA Black Knight, launched a new "SEO Intern Training Programme." The details of the program are here where Ammon explains that this program differs from other SEO training programs, in where you actually work in person on real projects with Ammon and the SEO Director of Fresh Egg, Lee Colbran.

The program is divided into two options:

(1) SEO Internship Training; you pay £500 per week, for the full 2 week course. Included is bed and breakfast accommodation from Sunday night to Friday morning. You then go through training and real life working experience.

(2) SEO Intern Scholarship; you pay nothing, you don't get bed and breakfast, but you do learn. What does it really cost? Well, you work for them for a month for free. Which basically means to me that this is a free 6 weeks course. :)

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Kim Krause, founder of Cre8asite, has posted a thread at Cre8asite Forums announcing the latest addition of emoticons (aka smilies) to their arsenal of emoticons database.

Yes, it is "Mr. Lederhosen. In honor of Danny Sullivan" as Kim describes.

Why Mr. Lederhosen? Good question. Well, at SES San Jose '06, Danny had to put on Lederhosen at the last session he moderated, in front of all the people in the audience. The real picture can be found at my coverage of Organic Listing Forums.

Here are more images that I took of Danny pre Lederhosen and post:

www.flickr.com More of rustybrick's photos tagged with Lederhosen

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This morning I wrote that Danny Sullivan To Leave Search Engine Watch :: Search Industry Shocked (someone dug the story), I promised to let the search community digest this information and then summarizing that buzz. Below you will find a collection of blog, news and forum links to all the coverage I found on Danny's news. I have pulled select quotes and summarized the rest.

Danny, the Grandfather of Search Industry, will undoubtly remain a huge part of our every day lives. I, as does the whole community, wish Danny all the best and look forward to the future of our industry with Danny being a huge part of that. It was and remains to be an honor to have worked with Danny on a daily basis. I have learned an incredible amount both on search, diplomacy, and friendship.

Continue reading "Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure"

Danny just posted about him leaving Search Engine Watch and SES by this December. The specific reasons was contractual and that Incisive and Danny couldn't come to terms on (what I believe to be) some sort of equity stake in the future of SEW and SES. There are just so many questions buzzing through my head. I know the industry has not yet had time to react, so I plan on doing a follow up to this post with the industry response but first let me try to predict.

(1) What will happen with Danny?
Well, as he said, his last day at SEW is November 30th. He will be doing the SES Chicago event, but that is it. Will Danny start a new site? Work for a company? Do consulting? Well, these are all options. We know Danny won't leave the industry, he has had a huge impact on creating this industry - and I can't see Danny just getting up and walking away from it. I would expect to see a new blog/site come about, where Danny continues to write on search topics. Maybe the blog/site will act as an anchor for his book, that he has been eager to write. I would also expect Danny to get tons of offers from both SEM companies and the search companies themselves. You can expect him to get a few offers to write for an other search industry site. But I think Danny will initially start his own thing, do consulting on the side, and start getting his book underway.

(2) What will happen with Search Engine Watch?
On one hand, Search Engine Watch (SEW) is the site on search, it is the authority, it was the first source and remains to be the ultimate source on search topics to this day. On the other hand, the reason SEW is all of that is because of one man, Danny. Danny invented, created, built up, and made SEW into a success. Is SEW dependent on Danny? I thing very much so, in terms of the day to day management. I know a little of what goes on behind the scenes, and I know that the site runs because of Danny. So it is hard to say how this will impact the site. The site should remain an authority, but you can expect those close to the industry, those at the forefront will have some inward resentment towards Incisive and whomever takes Danny's role. But that can and most likely will be done diplomatically, to reduce the level of any resentment.

(3) Who will take over SEW?
Well, the next man in line is Chris Sherman. But Chris and Danny have been working together for five plus years. I doubt Chris needs SEW to be successful. I honestly have not spoken to Chris about it. But I am sure that if he wanted to take over, he would be able to. But for some reason, I think he may not. Just a feeling. So who will? I don't know, but I bet lots of people will be jumping at the opportunity to fill Danny's shoes.

(4) How will this affect the industry?
I feel there will be resentment towards this whole event, but that will die down by itself. Danny will continue to contribute to the industry, so much won't be lost there - I hope. SEW may lose some of its authoritative power, that it once held. The industry will move on. The conferences, I suspect will continue to do well. The site will continue to get lots of traffic. But the industry, the community, will probably see less activity around the SEW brand and more around Danny and other names in the industry. A lot has to do with #3. More on this later today.

(5) What will happen with me?
Will I still work on the SEW blog? I have no idea. For now, yes. But I have no idea what will happen.

(6) My advice to Incisive?
If there is any way to keep Danny, do it. All in all, I believe the next year will be very rough. The site will suffer, the conferences will suffer, and the industry as a whole will suffer. Try, try, to do whatever you can, to keep Danny - if it is not too late.

If you have questions for Danny, there are instructions on how to communicate with him at http://daggle.com/060829-112950.html.

I did post a thread at SEW forums, but I don't expect many answers from Danny there. Use the methods above.

Yup, one of my favorite forums has turned four years old. Cre8asite Forums is four years old, helping Webmasters make their Web sites better through sharing experiences and ideas.

We covered Cre8asite's third and second birthdays in the past. So it is only right we celebrate and mention Cre8asite's fourth birthday.

Wish Cre8asite a happy birthday at the Cre8asiteforums is 4 years old thread.

USA Today published an article yesterday named Google search ads find momentum which discusses Google's AdSense program. Two well-known forum personalities were quoted in the article.

John Scott of V7N Forums:

"AdSense, in my opinion, is the worst thing to happen to the Internet," says John Scott, who runs the V7n.com online forum for search marketers. "Google is ... in essence, paying people to inundate the Web with literally billions of worthless pages."

Jennifer Slegg (Jenstar, JenSense.com) of Search Engine Watch and DigitalPoint Forums:

Whatever its editorial worth, the AdSense business model clearly works for what blogger Jennifer Slegg describes as "hundreds of thousands" of website and blog publishers.

Slegg, who runs the JenSense AdSense tips blog, says the monthly AdSense bounty ranges from $100 to tens of thousands of dollars.

"The average is more like a few thousand a month," she says. "The ones who do really, really well, however, really work for it. It's not a windfall; they put in the hours."

Cool beans!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Brian White, part of Matt Cutts webspam team, has joined Search Engine Watch Forums to continue the outstanding Google to Webmaster communication we have seen recently. Brian adds some more detail to our post yesterday on Web Hosts Found Cloaking Webmaster Content.

Brian explains what exactly is being done by this fraud:

We've discovered that the likely explanation is that a third party gained access to a number of sites and dropped files in these accounts (including a modified .htaccess using rewrite rules) for the purpose of rewriting the home page through a proxy script. The proxy script adds links when Googlebot visits, and in a sinister twist, adds the rel=nofollow link to cap off PageRank bound for any external URL not under control of this third party. As Danny noted, they also add a NOARCHIVE meta tag to disable the cached version in results.

He then clarifies that Google has made sure to block any PR boost or ranking boost this person is trying to achieve.

Finally, Brian explains additional methods for you to see if this is a problem on your site.

At the risk of allowing the folks who created this to adapt, you can use Google Translate to confirm the behavior. Check any of the affected sites (no Cached link) on the Google search ["hairy sex porn free"] via Translate to see the cloaking, since the proxy script checks for a visit from Googlebot IP addresses, and doesn't discern between a regular crawl visit and a Translate request.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and welcome Brian!

Gary Price, of Ask.com and ResourceShelf, has proposed to his long time girlfriend, Lisa last night. Gary & Lisa will be getting married some time this Spring, I believe in Chicago.

Gary has given his soul to this SEM community. Serving at Search Engine Watch as the News Editor prior to joining Ask.com. Gary has strong ties with all those in the search community. Gary is a genius, he is extremely generous and a down right good guy. He has been a true friend to me over the past few years and it is an honor for me to break this news.

Gary, we all love you and wish you and Lisa all the best. Mazol Tov! Yisha & I can't wait for the wedding.

Please feel free to wish Gary & Lisa a congrats at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread.

USA Today published an article last night named Got a search engine question? Ask Mr. Sullivan. Yea, you got that right, they wrote a whole article on the most respected, looked up to and most down to earth man in the search engine marketing community, Danny Sullivan. Here are some quotes;

Google's Matt Cutts considers Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch website "must reading." To Yahoo's Tim Mayer, it's simply the "most authoritative source on search."

When the world he writes about arrives at work in Silicon Valley, Sullivan has just finished dinner with his wife and two boys. He then retires to his den, parks himself in front of three computer monitors and spends the remaining evening hours trying to decipher the mystery of how online search engines rank listings.

He was born and raised in Newport Beach, Calif. After graduating from the University of California, Irvine, he spent a year in England, where he was hired by the BBC to type articles for reporters.

He met his future wife, Lorna, at the BBC. They married and moved back to California, where Sullivan worked at the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register in their graphics departments.

Then search came into his life. At the time, a friend had put up a website and couldn't make sense of how to be found in search listings. Sullivan tried to help him and was so successful, he went to work with his friend helping others with their sites.

Meanwhile, Lorna missed home, and Sullivan agreed to leave California behind for this village near her family. Chitterne is so small that it got high-speed Internet access only last year.

Well, I can't quote the whole article, read it all at USA Today.

This is just great for everyone in this community.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Via Wired, Shawn Hogan, who runs the incredibly popular DigitalPoint Forums and Tools has been sued by Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America for allegedly downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Shawn denies this and has turned down the offer to settle the case for $2,500 - he wants to stand up for everyone who has been falsely accused and fight. Shawn said he is willing to "spend well into the millions on this." Wired calls Shawn a "Hero."

Let's show our support by dropping him a note in DigitalPoint Forum Thread his sister started for him.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has members estimating how much the forums make in AdSense income. Some estimate $500 per day, which is $15,000 per month. They base it off of how much they make in the revenue share feature of the DigitalPoint Forums community.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As you can tell, the RSS feeds from Cre8asite Forums on the left hand side are timing out right now.

It appears that Cre8asite Forums is down at the moment. I will try to find out more information soon and post the details here.

I hope it is just connectivity issues and the server is doing well.

Update: It appears there are connectivity issues, and the server is doing well. More to come shortly.

Update #2: 10:35AM (EST) Forums are back up now.

Big forum news from WebmasterWorld today. They have updated the forum software. I first noticed it by looking at the new URL formats.

Old URL:
http://www.WebmasterWorld.com/forum30/

New URL:
http://www.WebmasterWorld.com/google/

Brett Tabke says,

We have just completed a significant update to the forum software (BestBBS) that we run on WebmasterWorld.

The majority of this update was an internal database format conversion. It took well over 300 hours of labor to convert the system to the new formats. When completed, we have a faster, more secure system than we have ever had before.

Find any bugs? Report them here. Good luck Brett!

Full Details;

Continue reading "WebmasterWorld Upgrades Forum Software"

Aaron Wall of seobook.com points in his blog to a new forum in the search engine marketing world, "Earner's Forum," started by Lee Dodd. Aaron describes Lee as being "serious about monetization," and states that the forum is already achieving lots of traffic.

The forum seems to be nicely categorized, including on topic sections titled:

- Monetization
- Servers and Security
- SEO / SEM / Internet Promotion
- Liability / Legality

…and more. Also included is one that many in the field will love: "Advertise It! Advertise websites, products, or services within." In this section he takes the time to include very lenient rules that only disallow adult, distasteful, or illegal topics.

Check out the new forum at Earner's Forum. See Aaron's blog post at SEO Book.

Very sad news, one of the most respected forum members to participate at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums has passed away. Known in the forums as DaveAtIFG, Dave Bellis, was member number four at WebmasterWorld, he joined WebmasterWorld back on Sept 21, 1999 and 2,140 posts later stopped posting on May 25, 2006. He resigned as admin from WebmasterWorld on Sept. 23, 2004 to begin taking it easy.

WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke, said;

Dave was member #4 on WebmasterWorld in 1999 and was an admin here for many years. You could always count on Dave for an unbiased independent opinion. I will remember Dave best for is unflinching insistance that the forums remain advertising free and that a subscription model could work. Dave was the first person to donate to WebmasterWorld and signup for a subscription.

Dave was always helping people out on the boards. One of his first major deeds here was helping a fellow member get back in Google, retool her site, and go on to become very successful in her niche.

He will be missed.

Please wish Dave & his family your respect at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Shawn is incredibly creative, he wrote code to follow the Digg Spy page for his forum. The page named DigitalPoint Forums Spy has a play and pause button at the top. When in play mode, it shows you in real-time, the new posts as they happen. Kinda neat to watch on such an active community. The tool is AJAX driven of course, so that makes it even cooler, we all love AJAX.

Shawn said it only works in Firefox and Safari at this moment. He is working on making it Internet Explorer compatible.

This is one more reason why Shawn's community is so loyal, proud and constantly growing.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Long time WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster, has an excellent blog post named Growing Forum Participation followed up with an excellent summary of the blog post at WebmasterWorld named Growing Forum Member Participation.

Martinibuster clearly describes how encouraging and enticing discussion in a forum is a lot more important than answering questions in a forum. This came to martinibuster when one of his top forum members began a new job that pulled his most authoritative member away from the forum. What he noticed was that members no longer received the bottom-line authoritative answer on a question posted in the forum. He noticed that a discussion began to brew in the forum threads and that more and more members we actively participating through discussion and opinions as opposed to answers.

Martinibuster thus feels that encouraging moderators to build discussion as opposed to answering questions is the way to go when growing forum participation and growing your forum numbers. Encouraging your lurkers (members who read threads but do not post in threads) to participate by reaching them, talking to them and asking for opinions that may inspire a lurker to become a participating member, is key. How do you do that? Give them confidence in expressing their opinion, it is not always about what you know but how you can express your opinion, that is important in a forum discussion.

What is even more inspiring about the WebmasterWorld thread is how Martinibuster ends the post. Yes, he encourages participation in his thread. He ends with a few open ended questions, asking other members "So what do you think?"

As you can imagine, since we track forum discussion and buzz every day here, this type of thread would excite me. Very nice Martinibuster, very very nice.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bill Slawski, of SEO by the Sea loves the ocean and search engines. He loves them so much, that he researches Google patents and then, waves rolling in the background and sand in his toes (on a good warm day), he gathers his thoughts together and reports to us what those patents say.

Aaron Pratt interviewed Bill in a recent SEO Buzz Box Interview. The focus was on how much Bill knows about what really matters to the Google search engine, and why we should care. Bill has been writing in his SEO by the Sea blog about search engine patents for awhile now. Danny Sullivan invited him to speak on them at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York city. I was there. It was a packed, standing room only crowd.

There's some joking around about Bill being "new to SEO", or not so famous as far as the big-names go, but that's just hockey puk talk. I've known him since 1998. He's been around for a long time, quietly helping people in discussion groups and forums. Today, he is an Administrator for Cre8asiteforums, where the community is talking about him and his interview in Aaron Pratt Interviews Bill Slawski.

While the emphasis of the interview is on Google insights ala Bill, he is also skilled in usability design, Internet law, and search engine optimization techniques. He's also very tall. Smart. Handsome...Oh Kim. Shut up.

Check out the interview and then come to Cre8asite to shake his hand.

The folks over at Yahoo! graciously invited me to write a guest blog entry at the YPN Blog. In my guest post, I wrote about how one can use discussion forums to optimize their Yahoo Publisher Network campaigns. Publishers sharing with other publishers, their experiences in monetizing Web pages with YPN can help you substantially increase your earnings. Check out my guest blog entry titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Search Engine Watch Forums is two years old as of yesterday, June 8th, 2006. Search Engine Watch Forums intitally launched on June 8th, 2004 and made a huge splash. The post I have was dated on June 2nd but the official launch date was six days later.

Today Search Engine Watch has over 10,000 threads, over 80,000 posts and more than 10,000 members.

Join the celebration at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a nice thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that asks Where are all the SEW Moderators? This question is in relation to the moderators not discussing or posting on Google's recent index page drops. I haven't really even covered the topic here, of Google dropping pages from the index and then re-including them and over again. With that specific topic, it is just too wild to say anything concrete.

This leads us to the question, as glengara points out in the thread.

Do Mods necessarily have answers unavailable to the rest of us peasants?

No, moderators, including myself, do not have all the answers. Moderators do not know it all.

It is the discussion in the forums that help everyone, moderators, members and lurkers learn it all.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Search Engine Watch is the industry leading resource for search news and tips, has been forever. Danny Sullivan started the site and then brought on Chris Sherman to help out. Since then, Gary Price came on to help out but then took a job with Ask.com. I then came on board to help fill Gary's void. Jennifer Slegg came on to blog on contextual ads, soon after Brain Smith came on to blog on shopping and vertical search and now Bill Slawski came on to blog on patents & search research. See where I am getting out.

• Danny Sullivan
• Chris Sherman
• Barry Schwartz
• Jennifer Slegg
• Brain Smith
• Bill Slawski
• and Elisabeth Osmeloski

Everyone on the SEW staff page have last names that start with an "S" except for Elisabeth.

Now, think about it. Danny's last name starts with an "S" and so does Chris Sherman. Both Danny and Chris are the big decision makers at SEW. Maybe they only like people with last names that start with S? Maybe? You think it may have anything to do with the industry name? Search Engine Marketing? The "S" in search? How about the name of the company, "Search Engine Watch," an other "S."

Chris Boggs suggests that maybe Gary Price was forced out? Maybe? There is no conflict of interest with Price as a last name at Ask.com...

If you are upset about this, like many are, join the forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Disclaimer: (1) I wrote this yesterday, I will not be blogging today and tomorrow - please expect blog entries from the other authors over the next two days. (2) This is a joke post, and should be seen as pure sarcasm.

Danny Sullivan is doing more than celebrating his first ten years as the man with the glass to the wall reporter of all things Search Engines. He has wisely selected Bill Slawski as his new correspondent to the SEW Blog.

Bill's fame as the calm master of intelligent conversation at Cre8asiteForums is legendary. He also has the uncanny ability to understand patents. One can easily picture him sitting at breakfast munching on Cheerios and reading Google patents before he settles into his work for his new SEO company, SEO By The Sea.

"He'll be keeping readers here abreast of new patents and what insights they might give, as well as interesting search research. Occasionally, he'll also post news about search acquisitions, as well," writes Danny.

Discussion: Congrats Bragadocchio!, New gig!

It looks like the Notorious Hacker Known as Cy60rg has taken over the Digital Point Forums Homepage!

User mightyb posted:

Cy60rg Was Here...

X-ed by Cy60rg le Avantgarde
Greetz: Zorlac, KT, Stingray and all..

Admin: old index.php moved to old_admin ......... php

WTF? I just got that a second ago...

April fools joke?

screen shot here:

Cre8asite Forums launched this morning a new forum named Cross-browser Device Assessment Panel (CDAP). This forum is tailored to enable members to do online testing and get feedback and solutions for improvements and repairs. The forum is already filled with quality unique threads on useful tools, resources, accessibility, examples, devices, browser standards, submission guidance and the introduction thread.

For questions or comments about this new forum, visit Cre8asite Forums.

Recently, Jenstar stepped down from WebmasterWorld and today I got news that she has joined DigitalPoint Forums. She will be moderating the Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network DigitalPoint forums. Jennifer (Jenstar) also moderates at Search Engine Watch Forums and writes at the Search Engine Watch blog on contextual ad topics. In addition, she runs a popular contextual ad topic blog at JenSense.com.

This is a great pick up for DigitalPoint forums, since I believe it is one of the best forums on the Internet to get AdSense related advice and support.

Welcome Jenstar to the team at DigitalPoint Forums.

In recent forum news, it seems as if SEO Chat Forums has been delisted by Google. Not the main site (i.e. www.seochat.com) but the forums.seochat.com. It seems to have happened yesterday afternoon and currently, the management claims they have no idea why. Lots of wild theories out there and I have my own suspicions that I will keep to myself.

Now I see 12,700 pages indexed of the site:www.seochat.com but zero pages indexed of the site:forums.seochat.com.

As you may imagine there is a large thread on the topic at SEO Chat Forums named Seochat Booted From Google, we also have a thread at our forums named Google kicked out SEOChat from its index.

Ammon Johns puts on his "Business and Management Professor" hat with an excellent topic at Cre8asiteforums called Protection from Unscrupulous Prospects, Avoid getting ripped off by 'customers'. He writes:

"People posing as clients just to get ideas, then using those ideas with no intention of ever buying them, are so common that it is 100 percent certain to happen to any service business online."

"Beware of any potential client who wants to know how you will do something, rather than what you will do," offers Ammon"

Disclaimer: I heard this on WebmasterRadio.FM's StrikePoint show, where Mikkel and DaveN go at it on the air. I do not know both sides of the story.

I have heard that Jenstar, of JenSense.com, has stepped down from moderating at WebmasterWorld. Jenstar is known as the contextual ad queen, speaking at both Search Engine Strategies and Webmasterworld Pub conferences. She also blogs and moderates at Search Engine Watch on contextual ad topics. Jenstar was the moderator at WebmasterWorld for the Google AdSense Forum.

I found a thread where the JenSense domain name has been blocked out by the WebmasterWorld blacklist. The blacklist is a list of domains that are not allowed to be posted. Maybe this has to do with Jennifer leaving? I can not say.

IMO, this is a big loss for WebmasterWorld.

I have to admit, John Scott's thread Who to Pick On? really made me laugh. I am not getting into the specifics, but John has been a little scuffle with some others in the industry over the past few years. Just recently there was an other popular scuffle. But John has a sense of humor about it all.

He started a poll asking Who to Flame. On the list includes myself, and I only got one vote out of 28, don't I deserve more? What is funny is that Matt Cutts is leading the pack with over 42% of the vote. Go Matt!

Yesterday, when I reported WebmasterWorld Forums Down 9AM it came back up soon later. Brett Tabke emailed me that this was "required system maintenance that couldn't wait" and that the server had to be rebooted. The whole down time was about 10 minutes according to Brett. He would have liked to do this at night hours, but when you think of it, WebmasterWorld really never has night hours.

Maybe I am jumping the gun, but I waited several minutes before reporting anything. It seems to me that WebmasterWorld is currently down. I first noticed when the RSS feed on the site of this forum began loading slowly and timing out when it hit the WebmasterWorld feed.

But it seems like it is down from multiple locations.

This is not the first time this popular forum was down, it was also down on November 09, 2005 which lead to the Bot banning and ultimate re-inclusion of the site.

Updates to come in this entry.

Update 9:24(EST): Seems to be back, but still pretty slow and sometimes unresponsive. I am trying to find a thread in the forum with more information, not succeeding yet...

I love this feature, showing the start time or date of a thread. Some forums have it, but by default, the vBulletin forums do not have it. This morning while surfing for quality threads, I noticed Shawn's DigitalPoint forum has it. Great feature added, like many of Shawn's features on his forum. No wonder it is quickly becoming the most popular Webmaster forum on the Internet.

Here is a screen capture.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Shawn was telling me about this last week, it happened pretty quick, it being Shawn being featured in a NY Times article on AdSense. JenSense also reports this and she is the thread creator of the thread on this topic at DigitalPoint forums named AdSense article in NYTimes with Shawn Hogan.

To read the article, you need to register at the times, its free and quick. The article is named Google's Shadow Payroll Is Not Such a Secret Anymore. The article basically uses Shawn as a case study for the Google AdSense program, hence the "shadow payroll" of thousands of publishers getting paid by Google. They also talk about DigitalPoint forums AdSense revenue sharing idea which was done in May of 2004. Make sure to check out that awesome picture of Shawn, his cat and his 30" Apple Cinema Display at the article.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The second in a series of moderator only discussion has now been taken to the public forum. Member, Wit, asked the moderators to have a roundtable discussion on the topic of How to Deal with a "Forum Troll"? After five posts, we have decided to break that thread open to the public, for their views.

The public thread is available here.

There are a couple sides to the story; (1) how should regular members deal with these trolls? and (2) how should moderators deal with them?

Enjoy.

WebmasterWorld has a very cute thread named What Is The Most Commonly Misspelled Word On Message Boards. Now, this may be SEO related, since misspellings are a great way to gain search traffic that is less competitive, and forums are a great way to get those misspellings. So here is a quick break down of some words in this huge thread.

• definately --> definitely
• "There" for "their" or "they're", "advise" for "advice"
• "than" versus "then"
• "It's" for "its"
• loose vs. lose
• accommodation accomodation acommodation acomodation
• affect ¦ effect

And many more. Heck, I make these mistakes here all the time. Happens often at forums and blogs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The big SEO Forum news of the day is that Cre8asite Forums has made the bold jump from ad-less forums to a forum with ads. Kim wrote up a detailed announcement she named Attention Cre8asiteforums Community. To make a long story short, this is the first time ads are on the forums, since they started in 1998. So what do the ads look like? It depends; If you are not logged in you get Google AdSense ads at the top and bottom of the page, here is a screen capture. But if you are a registered member that is logged in you get the ads only at the bottom of the page.

Kim explains how they are experimenting in phases;

We will be experimenting with the ad placements and limiting the number of ads, so that we can maximize clickthroughs and minimize banner blindness. We also invite you to give us your constructive comments on how we can improve our advertising campaign. Our goal is strike a reasonable balance between maximizing our advertising revenue and avoiding ad overload.

The members are very supportive so far, shows you something about the respect the Cre8asite admins and mods earned from the member base. Not all forums would have been so supportive. Add your feedback at the Cre8asite Forums Thread.

On a somewhat related note; WebmasterWorld placed a cute ad, wouldn't actually call it an ad, to show support for UT. Forum discussion on that at WebmasterWorld.

In Cre8asite fashion, the New Years logo is live now. We should have ours up in the next couple hours as well, but it won't be animated. Outstanding job.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

As one would imagine, the forum chatter is very very low this week.

I am trying to locate quality threads but so far, today, I can not find any new ones.

I'll keep looking.

If you know of any, please shot me an email at barry.schwartz@gmail.com.

Chris Sherman posted a Search Engine Watch article named 2005 in Review: The Best Search Engine Watch Forum Posts. He asked Elisabeth Osmeloski, the forum editor, to flag the most popular threads of 2005 and came up with the list. I wish every forum did that, I wish I did a roundup of the top 2005 threads at all forums, but that is a ton of work. Anyway, here is the list but I will link to both our coverage of the threads here and the forum thread.

• A thread named Keywords Co-occurrence and Semantic Connectivity which we posted a link to under the title of Orion, Dr. E. Garcia, SEW Forum Posts
• A thread named Major Google Changes: Latent Semantic Analysis which we posted a link to under our title of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) - Crawl into the Google Algorithm?
• A thread named How Long Does It Take For Search Engines To Remove Spam Sites? which we posted a link to under our title of Spam Reporting.

And more, visit the SEW Article for more information.

We came up with an idea to allow members of our new forums to post questions to the moderators. The moderators will then review the questions or topics and create a new thread in the appropriate forum. The thread will be locked down for moderator only discussion, initially. The moderators will discuss the topic, back and forth, and when the discussion slows, we will open it back up to the general registered membership.

A true roundtable discussion. :)

Post your questions or topics of discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Moderator Threads: Ask Your Questions thread!

It has been almost a month, November 21st to be exact, since WebmasterWorld Banned All Bots from crawling the site. Since then we estimated that WebmasterWorld Lost Over 40% of its Traffic after being delisted from the major search engines. It now appears that WebmasterWorld is back in the index.

According to a WebmasterWorld thread named WebmasterWorld Back In Google Index, Brett in message number six specifically thanks "GoogleGuy, YahooGuy, MSNDude, JeevesGuy, his Taco'ness, and OJR..." It seems as if some cloaked or other solution was worked out with the engines. And in my opinion, since WebmasterWorld has rockin content, they deserve special treatment. The folks over at DigitalPoint Forums are carefully watching the Alexa charts to see when WebmasterWorld passes them by, to take the lead once again.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Let me start off by explaining that I never wanted to open a forum. This decision was done out of necessity. If you ask people, I have been asked to open a forum for years now, but I always tell people that I can not. Why? Well, the blog has to act as unbiased as possible. We cover forum topics, and for us to have our own forum would put us in a situation where we can not report without bias.

As many of you know, SEO Chat has shown a public display of what really goes on behind the scenes. I have been with SEO Chat before Developer Shed has joined. Since then, I, as many other mods and members, have not seen eye to eye with DevShed's practices. I will not get into the specifics, but I have just resigned from SEO Chat as a moderator. The problem is, the SEO Chat members, I don't want to leave them without giving them options. Many have fled already to Cre8asite Forums or DigitalPoint forums. But many do not know where to go, or do not feel comfortable at those forums.

That is the reason I have started our own forums at forums.seroundtable.com.

I have brought over many of the current and ex-moderators at SEO Chat. Including the forum's super moderators; Phoenix and Randfish. Also our forum's moderators; dazzlindonna, pk_synths, and sufyaaan. And guess what, we even signed on Darrin Ward, the founder of SEO Chat, to be a moderator at our forums! Not only that, DevShed's forum technical administrator, md_doc, has joined my company over a year ago and he will be running the technical components of the forums. So let me tell you, this forum will be very SEO Chat member friendly and we welcome you to join us.

How will this affect my positions at moderating at other forums? Well, I resigned from SEO Chat Forums. Secondly, I will continue to moderate at Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums. I have deep respect and devotion to those forums and would hate to leave them. Leaving SEO Chat gives me more time to run these forums, and with the great moderators we have on board, it will be fun.

Future of the forums? Well, I expect and already got word from other ex-moderators at SEO Chat that they will be signing on shortly. So lots of old faces will be coming on board. I am very excited about it.

Future of the blog? We will continue to widely link out and cover the forums we have. As you will see, every single page on the seroundtable.com domain name, has a link to the major forums we cover. We will continue to find the best threads at the major SEM forums and report them back to you here. We will do our best to not point more attention to the forums here, when compared to the other forums. In addition, all covered threads will link back directly to the source and not back to the forums here, unless the thread originates from our forums. I will not allow it. Call us out on it, if we do it.

I think I covered everything here, any questions? Join the thread at the new Search Engine Roundtable Forums; Welcome to the New Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Outstanding news, you can now search WebmasterWorld with MSN Beta (at least for the time being). Receptional reports If you want a search solution for Webmasterworld;

A standby solution is to go to your control panel in WebmasterWorld, select "system Preferences" then in the "insert custon code at the top" put in:

<center><form method="get" action="http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx" target="_blank"><input type="hidden" name="cp" value="1252" /><input type="text" name="q" size="25" /><input type="submit" value="MSN beta" /><input type="hidden" name="q1" value="site:webmasterworld.com" /></form></center>

The quality of the results will probably degrade over time, but it is at least a short term solution for people.

Insert the code above in here:

And you will get this box at the top:

Or you can do a simple site search command at MSN Beta, like so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld's MSN Forum.

I have been on a rampage, asking people their thoughts and gathering data on exactly how much traffic WebmasterWorld forums. You all know about WebmasterWorld Banning Search Engine Bots from Crawling its site, it was a tough decision I bet, but how tough? My first guess was that WebmasterWorld lost about 30 - 40% of its overall traffic due to being delisted from Google and MSN (soon Yahoo). The one question, I didn't feel comfortable asking Brett in the Interview was how much traffic he lost. I doubt he will tell us, and I don't blame him. But let's guess, at it. First let me tell you what others thought, based on electronic conversations I had with them (they gave me permission in exchange for a link to quote them).

Rae, old time WebmasterWorld member from sugarrae.com, said "I'd guess BT has a crapload of natural traffic." She guesstimated only a loss of about 10 - 20% of overall traffic due to the lose of search engine referrals and she stands by it.

I then asked Daron Babin, SEGuru, from Webmaster Radio his thoughts. He felt it was more in the range of 35-45% of lost traffic.

I also asked Shawn Hogan of Digital Point who estimated more like 50% of lost traffic. But he gave me some very informative statistics, (of course stats are based on assumptions). Here we go...

He tells me about half of his forum traffic is from search engines, I can tell you about half of my traffic (maybe 40%) is from search engine referrals. Shawn puts WebmasterWorld "at loosing 500,000-1M unique visitors per month." He continues to explain, that if you look at Alexa Reach Per Million for WebmasterWorld, you will notice that they went from 2,190 to 1,050, about half of their traffic. But in reality, he explains, that since more WMW members are likely to use the Alexa toolbar, that you can even bump up that figure to WebmasterWorld losing a three-quarters of their traffic. Wow!

Shawn also posted some of this information in Digital Point Forums so discuss it there as well.

Remember when SEO Chat Added Karate Belts to the forum? Pretty much everyone I know made fun of them and thought they were ridiculous. Well, they grew on most of the members and just when everyone was getting used to them, SEO Chat pulled them. There is a thread at SEO Chat named My Belt? with the discussion. One member, rightly so, said; "It's funny. When they first intoruduced the belts, noone wanted them. Now, people get upset because they didn't."

Anyway, there is a new "belt" system, which is really a reputation system. Based on number of posts, you can get one of the following logos near your name, in this order.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, has given me the privilege to ask him a bunch of questions on the recent news that WebmasterWorld Bans Search Engine Bots from Crawling. So here it is....

Barry: Brett...Thank you for taking the time during this hectic period at WebmasterWorld to answer several questions about the recent changes you have made, to disallow spiders from accessing your site.

Barry: The big change was that you, on November 18th, changed your robots.txt file to disallow all bots from accessing your Web site. In a thread you started in the Foo forum at WebmasterWorld named lets try this for a month or three... you elegantly linked to your robots.txt file to show people. And subtitled the thread, "last recourse against rogue bots." Why was this the last course of action? I have spoken with dozen of site owners who run sites as large as yours. Most tell me that you can fight off these rogue bots one by one, but you need to factor in the costs of these bots into your hosting prices. How would you respond to that?

Brett: It is difficult to talk about issues that brush shoulders with security related matters. Once you talk about something and your actions to counter that problem in public, you give rise to an invertible counter measure. That said, we have been saying for many years that it was our number one problem on the site. I made a plea in the forums five years ago for a robots Inclusion standard (instead of an exclusion standard).

One thing that sets WebmasterWorld apart from all other similar sites, is the ease with which we can be crawled. There are no CGI parameters on url strings and all off-the-shelf bots can index the site. I can write a 15 line perl program in 5 minutes that will download the entire site - even with cookie support. That same thing can not be said about sites that are not freely crawlable (like other forums and auction sites with cgi based or non standard urls).

The change was for us to require cookie support via member login. That action mandates either allowing the approved big search engine crawlers to feast on a login page instead of page viewing several million pages before they realized the site was 100% different than before. The easiest solution to that is to set a robots.txt ban on all crawlers.

I knew it would be a controversial action. In such cases, it is always better to bring up the subject yourself or least people get the wrong impression that it was by no action of your own. I just threw up the post as a marker so that people knew we'd taken the action ourselves and I would come back later with more information after things settled down a bit. We had started down this road about mid-july when we began blocking many of the major crawlers.

> Why was this the last course of action?

We've tried every thing to stop the bots. Once we got up to several thousand ip's in the system ban list, it was having a serious effect on system performance. We also were occasionally into a situation where we would ban an IP and then that ip would get recycled to another member that had nothing to do with a download attack. It is hard to block an IP such as an AOL ip, because you block several million users using that IP via the AOL proxy cache.

> I have spoken with dozen of site owners who run sites as large as yours.

Size is not the only issue. The ease with which WebmasterWorld can be crawled is first up. I've been studying offline browsers for about a week. All of the site rippers or offline browsers available from Tucows, are able to download WebmasterWorld in it's entirety. Only 6 were able to successfully download part of a Vbulletin site. One would also choke on weird urls (like caps in filenames, or extremely long filenames).

> Most tell me that you can fight off these rogue bots one by one,

Ya, we were spending about an hour or two a day on this problem. I was to the point of hiring one person full time to address it.

Barry: Part of this process, you made a change that now requires cookie support, something that most bots can not support. As a side affect, all members had to relogin to WebmasterWorld. First question, do you have any stats on how many times the "forgot my password" function was used over the past 5 days? :) And my second question is; wouldn't it have been more affective to spend money on a full time server guy to fight off these bots then to lose the search engine traffic completely?

Brett: The majority of people are using browsers such as Opera or IE that auto remember passwords. We also have switched our cookies about once every 60 days for this very reason. That keeps people from leaving cookies laying around in an internet cafe, or on their work machine.

> affective to spend money on a full time server guy to fight off these bots then to lose the search engine traffic completely?

Even hiring a full time guy at this point wouldn't fix the problem. All the tools we have used are only a bandaid solution at trying to cure cancer. We have tried: page view throttling, bandwidth throttling, agent name parsing, cookie requirements from selected ISP's (over 500 including all of Europe/China), IP banning, link poisoning, various auto banning, and various forms of cloaking and site obfuscation to make the site uncrawlable to non-se bots.

The biggest issue, is the massive amount of overhead system and time it takes to manage all that. The totality of it all is staggering. From raw parsing of log files, to code, to server setup, to managing it all takes an inordinate amount of time. It is very easy to make mistakes in all that. (like the time we banned New Zealand visitors because we banned the big ISP's proxy server there) Our site is here for the members - not the rogue bots.

Barry: On that note; almost all the big names in the industry were shocked that you would take this action. They pretty much laughed that you thought you wouldn't be delisted within 30 days, let alone 60 days. Danny Sullivan said;

Brett figures he's got 60 days until pages drop from places like Google to get an alternative search solution in place. That seems optimistic to me. WebmasterWorld is a prominent site and should get getting revisited on a sub-daily basis. If search engines are hitting that robots.txt ban repeatedly, they ought to be dropping those pages in short order, or they aren't very good search engines. I mean, can you imagine the irony of Google and Yahoo getting pilloried on WebmasterWorld for taking so long to drop pages after they were told to do so after the ban was put into place.

Search experts like DaveN, Oilman, SEGuru and others all felt the same way. Why did you really feel it would not happen so fast?

Brett: It has been over 180 days since we blocked GigaBlast, 120 days since we blocked Jeeves, over 90 days since we blocked MSN, and almost 60 days since we blocked Slurp. As of last Tuesday we were still listed in all but Teoma. MSN was fairly quick, but still listed the urls without a snippet.

Google will hang onto a site up to 90 days after you put up a robots.txt ban. Even if the site is completely unreachable, we have seen sites still listed as url only sites up to six months later. It is only via the Google url removal utility where that process will be faster. It is a feature I had not used on Google in many years, and completely overlooked it.

Barry: Also in that summary thread, listed above, you expressed your frustration with the engines for "changing a perfectly good and accepted internet standard." Can you expand on that, and what steps you think they should take to get the robots.txt syntax the way it should be for 2005?

Brett: Without webmaster input, changing the robots.txt standard only encourages others to also play with the standard. Of the offline browser bots I looked at from Tucows, the majority of them can be set to ignore robots.txt. Why, because the standard has not been appreciated, endorsed, or adhered to by the engines as will as well as by the offline browser or site ripper programmers. The engines have fostered an era of robots.txt disrespect.

The engines changing the standard to suit their own needs, is exactly the same as Netscape and Microsoft playing around with the HTML standards during the browser wars. Only by adhering and endorsing standards can we together keep the net from becoming more chaotic than it is now. The enormity of what a webmaster has to already know is already too much for one person. The last thing the internet needs is every big search engine coming out with it's version of robots.txt standard. We need them to support the standard or form an open commission of theirs and our peers to come up with a new one (Which I have been endorsing for 5 years).

That said, as the author of the first robots.txt validator in 1998, I do take the standard very seriously. Hardly a day goes by when I don't get a email from someone asking why their robots.txt with an "Allow" line was marked as bad by the robots.txt validator.

Barry: Due to the fact you are an SEO expert, people came up with wild theories as to why you really did this. Some people said you were banned for cloaking. Some people said that you had a crazy PR stunt in mind. One PR stunt was that the search engines were coming out with a uniform site submission tool and you wanted to be the first to use it. Others said that you wanted to show the search engines that you do not need them. I am sure you heard of many other theories. Which do you find the most funny? Which do you find the most outrageous? And how would you respond to some of them?

Brett: I often forget the scale of how huge WebmasterWorld has become and how many people look to us on issues like this leadership. I have given up trying to disabuse people of notions to contrary why we do things. Not every hat is tin foil and not every helicopter black.

> Some people said you were banned for cloaking.

In order to address many of the rogue site ripper issues, we do openly cloak on the agent level some things. We have to be able to determine what is a good se bot and what isn't. If we randomly go throwing around poison links that lead to autobans without knowing what bot was what bot - we would be banning the se bots left and right. We also use it to keep random ad served content off the page where the only difference is the filename of the image file. That would encourage massive amounts of respidering.

We do everything we can to try to out fox the rogue bots. SE bots were always served the same content as members, and we never IP cloak so it is clear to just about everyone what we are doing. You could always check by a simple agent name switch to slurp. Sometimes we will trip and make a mistake ourselves as there are a few thousand lines of code dedicated to the issues we are talking about.

The number of things needed to address rogue bots is absurd. It was when I was trying to trim down the htaccess ban list to a few thousand IP's after getting hit for 12m page views in a week, that I threw my hands in the air and turned on required login and blocked all the bots. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision, but it was a spur of the moment reaction. If I had it to do over again, the only thing different I would do, is have the new site search engine debugged and ready to go.

> Some people said that you had a crazy PR stunt in mind.

I knew there would be an interest in to to WebmasterWorld members. Some of the other speculation by other noted webmasters was flat out wrong, self interested competitors, and showed a complete lack of understanding of the tech issues involved. One major blogger suggested that we could address all this with a couple of bans in the httaccess list. I laughed when I listened to it, because we had close to 4000 IP's in there and were on the very of banning entire C blocks and all of the AOL proxy servers. Clearly, the tech issues were well beyond his knowledge.

> Others said that you wanted to show the search engines that you do not need them.

Yes, a hundred thousand targeted referrals a day are just plain wrong. Lets cut to the chase; I adore search engine traffic, but my first duty as a webmaster is to the visitors and members of our site. Anything that interferers with that to the degree that rogue spiders, downloaders, offline browser, monitoring services, site rippers, or whatever you call it - I have to take action.

> I am sure you heard of many other theories. Which do you find the most outrageous?

That I was starting a bot busting service that I had talked about 4 years ago in the forums.

> And how would you respond to some of them?

I would not respond to it. My first and only duty is to the members and visitors of WebmasterWorld. Anything I can do to enhance their experience at the site is our goal. That viewpoint is what built WebmasterWorld and what will sustain it. Take care of your members first, and everything else will take care of itself. The more transparent we can make the tech, the better it works for everyone.

Barry: Do you expect support from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves to get back into their indexes quickly? Have they offered you any support or advice?

Brett:
> Do you expect to get back into their indexes quickly?

No different in that regard than any other website.

> Have they offered you any support or advice?

Yes, they have been great off-the-record. It isn't something they can talk about in public either. I am saddened by that fact, but I do understand the big sites simply can ill afford to talk about security or tech issues that can have a negative effect on their own system in public. I was asked in Vegas why we had banned so many engines - clearly, they had taken notice - but no one had a answer except to ask why G was still allowed on the site.

Barry: What are your plans for the next 7 days? And then the next month or two in terms of these rogue spiders and non rogue spiders?

Brett: There has to be 5 pounds of turkey in the fridge and I think the last half of the pumpkin pie will be done by the end of the day ;-)

Other than that, I have a site search engine to finish debugging and then we have an open house at our new offices, Christmas travek, PubCon Australia, new employees training, and a spring PubCon in Boston to plan and flush out. Interesting times indeed!

> And then the next month or two in terms of these rogue spiders and non rogue spiders?

We have made alot of changes to the core bot detection architecture this last week. The members have been so helpful and giving with new ideas and new ways we can address the problem. There is no one magic bullet that is going to fix the problem, but a more polished approach using all the techniques is what we are working on. People have gone so far as to write custom code for us to use free of charge.

The one thing I would like to leave people with, is to download a few of the site ripper programs and run them against their own site. Test how easily their site can or can not be crawled. There will be site owners that will be shocked to see their site is either completely crawlable without regard for robots.txt, or uncrawlable because of various site architecture problems. There is something there to be learned by every site owner.

Barry: Well thank you for spending the time answering my questions. I wish you all the best and I hope everything works out in the long run.

Brett: Thank you.

If you try accessing a thread today at WebmasterWorld you will notice that you will have to re-login. It looks like the staff at WebmasterWorld has reset cookies, requiring all members (and rogue bots) to re-login in order to access any thread. I hope you remember your password, if not, I am sure there is a forgot your password link that will be used often today and tomorrow.

Brett's plan to ban all search engine bots from WebmasterWorld has caused WebmasterWorld to be delisted in Google and soon, Yahoo & MSN.

DaveN updates us in the foo thread Brett started saying:

MSN has 1 pages
Google has 0 pages
Yahoo is dropping them fast than I can search!

Try a site command at Google and notice this response "Your search - site:www.webmasterworld.com - did not match any documents."

Continued forum discussion on the delisting at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Danny reports that WebmasterWorld Bans Spiders From Crawling where he points to a thread Brett started which he named lets try this for a month or three...

Brett explains that the bots, mostly from unauthorized sources are taking a toll on the server. He explains; "We have pushed the limits of page delivery, banning, ip based, agent based, and down right cloaking to avoid the rogue bots - but it is becoming an increasingly difficult problem to control."

Members are worried about how they can search WebmasterWorld, since the internal search engine is sub-par. Brett hopes that they can allow the bots again within 60 days, but it depends. Best of luck Brett!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As randfish reports Changes to SEOChat, members in SEO Chat Forums are revolting against the administration.

The recent changes include;
- nofollow tag added to sigs
- deletion of many old posts
- rewriting of all URLs
- a weird looking sitemap at footer of forum homepage
- banning of many seo chat members
- several mods recently resigned

There is a revolution going on at SEO Chat, the members feel like they were slapped in the face. No warning of this came.

You can discuss this freely at SEO Moz (rand's blog). DigitalPoint forums is probably the place most of the disgruntled members will flock to. Three recent threads sprung up;

- Seo Chat Changes Bring Me Here
- SEOChat deleteing threads and banning highly respected members
- SEO Chat members will be flocking here soon

Is this the end for SEO Chat or will SEO Chat prevail?

Update: Word comes members are deleting their posts. Taking back what they gave SEO Chat forums.

Also, Cre8asite is welcoming SEO Chat members in the Welcome SEOChat Members thread.

Several people have reported to me issues with WebmasterWorld loading slowly or not loading at all. It seems to be up and down for the past couple of hours.

I'll shoot Brett an email to see if he has anything to report.

WMW, we miss you!!!

WebmasterWorld thread on this here, if you can get there.

Update from Brett Tabke;

Had some issues this morning that have to be corrected asap because of the massive - just massive load - it is now under.

All should be fine now, I am glad it was not a major issue like last time.

11/10 Update: Brett said he had to locate the source of the problem, so the downtime was due to several reboots and small crashes. He normally would have done this on the weekend, but next week is the big PubCon.

The founder of the largest SEM/SEO focused forum on the Web, Brett Tabke, has just been interviewed. Lee Odden, posted the interview at his Top Rank Blog.

Brett talks about the following topics;
(1) How did Pubcon start?
(2) Brett explains the "communication conduit between search engines and webmasters" at WebmasterWorld.
(3) Brett discusses "How has the Pubcon audience changed over the years."

And much more, read the interview at http://www.toprankblog.com/2005/11/brett-tabke-interview-on-pubcon-webmasterworld/.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So damn creative. Shawn from DigitalPoint decided to map his currently active forum members, based on IP location, on a Google Map. Check out the Map of Who's Online. Forum discussion on this at See Where Users Are In Realtime forum thread. Already it uses different pin colors for mods, admins, members and bots - I requested a special color just for myself.

Shawn will be adding features such as, on mouse over of each individual pin, it will show user profile information. He said users will be able to opt out via the usercp page, of this feature. Also he wants to add that if you click on a pin, it will open up Google Earth. I am sure he has plenty of other ideas. Creative!

Just an update on the situation and in case anyone is pacing their living room because of not having their WMW fix hope is in sight. Brett Tabke mentions on the temporary site.

"A large data center outage in Chicago has left several thousand servers offline. To compound matters even worse, the data center was home to DNS servers by WestHost. We will be temporarily keeping tabs on stuff here."

Shawn of Digitalpoint has some explanation for part of the problem here. In the mean time, relax, sit back, get some sleep and enjoy a good book or link building exercise.

Seems to be a rash of outages today. People at SEOchat are complaining they can't access WMW forums (I can't either) and Threadwatch seems to have had a meltdown earlier today. They are moving servers according to there updating message "The move is complete, but if you're seeing this message, then it's simply because the new DNS info has not propagated properly yet. If you check back in a little while I hope it will be all well again." So do we Nick.

Meanwhile back at the batcave, WMW is still down for some people (can't confirm for all) and hopes of it getting back live look promising but undetermined.

So people are asking is if Matt Cutts and Googleguy who are sparking new interest in Google Update Jagger and the intense server load is causing crashes today. Not sure, but people do seem well overly interested on the forums.

Discussion about Update Jagger at SEOchat - WMW (soon) - Digitalpoint 1 - Digitalpoint 2 - SEW Forums

One of the things that I have liked over the years as being a moderator at SEO Chat Forums is the tradition of members going to great lengths to do really incredible 1000th posts on the forum. Many wait for the day for which they can contribute in some meaningful way to the forum by posting the knowledge they have learned and gleamed during their time as a forum junkie. Some of these 1000th's posts are long dissertations on what they have learned in SEO and then there are the quick highlighted lists of essentials you must know in order to survive in this crazy internet world successfully. The posts are badges of honor and a final thesis for many into the world of SEO/SEM. They are usually quite great to read and good information to refer too. At some point most involved members on SEOchat will do a 1000th or 500th post, there are even 2000th and 3000th posts. Sometimes people make planned exits from boards on the date of their big post (dramatics seems to heighten the effect these posts can have). I once did a 500th post and used my 1000th to welcome a new moderator on the board. In order to honor these fun and useful posts I am highlighting some of the great ones from SEOchat. If you have one you would like to add please leave a comment and I will add them.

• DazzlinDonna 1000th Post
• What I've Learned In 1000 Posts...
• My 1000th Post by Jasontnyc
• Getting backlinks for newbies - 1000th Post
• 1000th post...My reason for going to work
• Bruno's 1000th Post
• 1000th post...Blackhat gives advice
• 1000 Thank You's by Brandall
• 1000th Post - The business side

I moderate at several forums, and making it easier to move threads is something at the top of my wish list. Basically, part of a moderators role is to make sure that members place the right threads in the right forums. Shawn at DigitalPoint used the AJAX support in vB 3.5 to increase moderation efficiencies. For demonstration purposes, I have made a quick MPG video of me dragging a thread in the Google forum to the Domain Names Forum.

A cool new feature from a cool SEM forum. Probably only interesting towards administrators and moderators, but cool stuff nevertheless.

I remember the day welcoming ThreadWatch to the game, and I can't believe it has been a year already. Over the year, ThreadWatch went through its growing pains, trying to figure out its niche in the industry. Is it a blog? Is it a forum? To be honest, today I am still not sure if it is a blog or a forum. :)

But I think Danny got it right. He said, "Threadwatch to me has often been our tabloid newspaper." It is fun to read and at least once a day, makes me laugh.

Kudos to Nick Wilson for all the hard work he put into ThreadWatch. Join the celebration at the Threadwatch: 1yr Old Today, dare I say it, thread. :)

Here is some SEO Forum news for you. DigitalPoint forums has recently earned the respect of Yahoo! & Google by being known as one of the most active and popular forums to discuss Google AdSense & Yahoo! Publisher Network questions. On September 2, 2005 AdSenseAdvisor registered to answer question in the AdSense Forum at DigitalPoint and on September 14, 2005 YahooSarah registered to answer questions both in the Yahoo! Forum and Yahoo! Publisher Network Forum at DigitalPoint. In addition, the contextual queen, Jenstar has over 65 posts at DigitalPoint Forums.

Recently DigitalPoint forums broke the 10,000 member mark and recently surpassed WebmasterWorld, at least on Alexa traffic stats. It is nice to see things going so well for such a new forum.

It feels like it was just yesterday when Cre8asite Forums turned two and now I turned around and the good, wise forum is three years old! Cre8asite Forums is one of those forums that I would call a hidden treasure. On one hand, I hate to promote it because I would hate to see it get folded with too much volume. Basically, for selfish reasons, I want to keep it all to myself. But on the other hand, it deserves a lot more credit then it gets today.

I would like to wish Cre8asite a wonderful three year anniversary!

Join the celebration at the official Cre8asite's Third Anniversary thread.

The white hat / black hat debates have been going on for well over five years now. I personally am tired of it all and rarely report on it over here any more. A new thread sprung up at Cre8asite Forums named Are SEO forums ruining the SEO/SEM Industry Image? In that thread, Kim Krause links to, Jim Hedger, a great writer's blog entry, The First SEO Republic Forumed.

Jim writes:

Like thousands of other SEO practitioners, I have been quietly monitoring a raging debate that has crossed several SEO/SEM related forums over the past week. While this debate rears its head from time to time, it remains unsettled and as it continues to unfold becomes more and more unsettling. Given that they differ in tone from forum to forum, there are actually several debates taking place but all seem to have one thing in common, a lack of civility towards other views and a decreasing level of common sense.

Jim then calls on the leaders of the industry to do something about this. Maybe SEMPO, maybe SMA, who knows but he says whomever the leaders are, "that leadership needs to learn to work together to pull the various ends of the horseshoe into the powerful marketing industry we should all feel proud and privileged to work in."

The forum discussion is going on now, feel free to join.

Oh, Jim also writes:

There is a forum to the right that takes an increasingly hard stand on search engine guidelines, a few right-of-center white hat forums, the largest and most widely known one in the middle, and a few on the left ranging from the established radicals to the new radicals.

I would have placed the white hat forums on the "left" and the black hat forums on the "right."

We reported on Cre8asite Forums: Expect Downtime Over Weekend and all went well. Kim Krause writes Cre8asiteForums Server Move Done, Nicknamed SpeedRacer.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This is an FYI that Cre8asite Forums will have some down time over the weekend due to a server upgrade. Kim Krause, founder of Cre8asite, posts Forums Community Alert! Downtime Notice.

We are in the process of moving these forums to a new server environment. This is stage one of a process whereby we're moving, and then later (stage 2) changing over to new software as well (Invision).

We have a new hompage designed and we'll be launching new things that we've been wanting to do for awhile.

For now, we expect to be offline this weekend - Friday, August 19 - Sunday, August 21. Our Tech Admins will keep you informed as to more details, and approximent times.

More information at the thread.

In the past we covered the tough decision WebmasterWorld had to make in regards to linking to blogs. The final decision was to never link to any blog, no matter what, as a matter of policy. I respect that decision greatly.

Yesterday I noticed that the founder of WebmasterWorld, Brett Tabke, made one exception to the rule. In a thread started by Brett named Google employee FAQ site, which links to the new Matt Cutt's Blog.

Brett calls it more of a "FAQ site", but by the name of the site and the URL, it seems to me its more of a blog then this site. The site resides at the URL http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. Just some forum politics for you in the AM.

Joseph Morin, Search Engine Watch Forum Moderator, informed me of this very funny but yet so important instructional video that all forum participants, new and old, should view before posting at a forum.

The instructional video is named Posting And You..., it is a must see.

Update: Joseph posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums on this topic.

An SEO Chat thread named Who is GoogleGuy? offers some theory in who the mystical GoogleGuy is who travels the SEO forums.

Some suggest that GoogleGuy is really not just one guy, but rather several Google employees. The thread creator suggests that it might be one of the following; matt cutts or larry page or a 'do no evil' engineer or possibly a spy.

One member links to a Google Blog entry named Greets from GoogleGuy! which gives some insight into GoogleGuy(s)'s personality.

GoogleGuy's profile at WebmasterWorld and at Search Engine Watch Forums.