Weekly Email Updates Archives

I would like to apologize for the delay in the coming out with the Search Engine Roundtable review for the last 15 days in May. It has been a real busy month, but late is better then never. Here is the Roundtable review for May 15th through the 31st.

Lets start with Gmail related discussion, where a funny but sophisticated cartoon was draw up to illustrate the desire people have to get a Gmail invite. In fact, people were able to lookup gmail usernames and then go to the gmail swap portal to try to get their desired gmail account. Google has been busy, on the 31st they had the long awaited backlink update, Google's AdWords department launched the AdWords Jumpstart program, and they took the time to block this nifty site named Proogle.

There was also recent technical news and theories that were brewing in the forums in regards to Google. The Hyphen Filter was suggested but ultimately disproved, for now at least. Then came something I named the Network Filter where Google looks at the cross linking between sites within the same IP block. After that we discussed the Country Specific Filter, which in fact is all so true. There was a lot of discussion on a pattern seen across large Web sites that were taking a hit in Google, but isolating the reason behind this loss in rankings was no easy task. So what solutions were discussed for these filters and problems that came about? Well, several were discussed; including the use of cloaking, traiangular linking strategies, fueling pagerank before launching a Web site and getting your site into Google News, your company listed in Google Stock Quotes or by getting into Google's Secret Directory.

Alright, enough about Google, lets talk more about the industry as a whole. In late May, I used my reach (lol, this site) to ask the search engine industry to publish some sort of acceptable cloaking usage policy, this was in response to the recent research conducted by Ben Edelman and Google stepping up with their Software Principles. On more of a competitive note, lets discuss some of the lawsuits and competitive events that took place. We had this hilarious Nigritude Ultramarine contest where we even found sites ranking number one in Froogle for this term. Dan Thies pointed out that these wise SEOs were painting a bulls-eye on their foreheads asking the competition and Google to look at how I am tricking you. Yahoo's customers in late May began to lose patience with Yahoo and Google was sued by Geico for trademark infringement. So what can one do to gain the competitive edge? One answer is to offer great incentives to your employees.

Let's see, Yahoo! released a new design for their homepage, or at least some people can see this beta design. Yahoo is having a real tough time with 301 redirects, which is forcing Yahoo! representatives to tell SEOs to create doorway pages to solve the problem. And DigitalPoint found MSN is secretly previewing its search technology.

To conclude, lets touch on some general search engine marketing topics. One that hit home for me is from my own blog, where I decided to take customer service into my own hands. We had an interactive review of some of the best SEO books on the market. And now that your a search engine expert, what should you do with all that traffic?

The weekly recap takes me the longest to write, but I appreciate this part the most. I am able to take a look back at the past week or two and categorize my posts into a concise post. It is just amazing how much takes place over a week or two in this industry. So let's take a look back from May 1st 2004 until today the 12th.

Continue reading "May 1 - May 12 Roundtable Summary"

This past week was all about the anticipated Google IPO, which we are still waiting to happen. But I tried not to discuss the financial aspects of Google and the industry, not that I am not following it. A major event occurring with Google is something known as the Sandbox Effect where new sites seem to be put on a hold before ranking well for any keyword combination. There was a bit of speculation on why this is happening, some of which is in the topic of purchasing expired domain names but that theory does not seem to be consistent with the reports at the forums. Other speculation was that these sites were seeded with Ghost PageRank, but I do not believe that to be true either. Theories are springing up daily, one thing that seems to be fairly consistent is that this hold period lasts for about 90 days.

It has been an exciting week for Google's AdWords department. Besides for the new Pay Per Click's Trademark Policies, where Google began allowing US competitors to buy trademarked names but those names can not be used in the ad text. Maybe that is why the Google AdSense and AdWords server had some technical difficulties, speak up who ever you were that hacked in. There was some good news this week on PPC, spending on PPC is up compared to other online or offline advertising media. That is what influenced my post named, Organic and PPC Are Friends not Enemies.

Continuing with Google, yea I know it was a big week for them, Google gave props to the earth. Soon after, Google gave back to the SEOs with a PageRank and backlink update. Some people reported that Yahoo! search was back to using Google's index, but that was rejected. We tried to figure out how to manipulate the description for ones site in the SERP but instead found Google was doing a heck of a job indexing Flash. Finally with Google, new look for Israel Google, "I am Feeling Lucky" Has no Referrer, and we tested hyphens and underscores in url and title.

On a more general search engine optimization we discussed the pros and cons of multiple sites with same database and linking between multiple sites on the same IP address.

Forum specific topics included Dan's post on his dissatisfaction with some forum threads. But I was able to find some of the more hot threads on the Internet. And we even talked about how AskJeeves is growing so quickly. If you think that is wild, to top it off we even had a thread on a Famous Subservient Chicken.

Looking forward to next week!

This is the first of many weekly or bi-monthly entries to sum up what has been posted here at the Search Engine Roundtable. We currently have enough people signed up to the list to warrant this entry. Only problem is, I do not know how to send out email notifications, without publishing a blog entry on it. So this entry will be live, categorized under Weekly Email Updates and be sent to the notification list.

The Cre8asite people asked me to do something similar at their blog, so I figured I would just reuse most of it here. So here it is.

Google had its own update on April 7th, which was a bit of a surprise for many. In fact, the day after, I reported on how Google can't even control its own search engine - now that is a real shocker. Yahoo! went soul searching only to find itself as Life Engine, something which kind of scares me. That not all that scares me, ISPs began blocking GMail emails, which drummed up a lot more controversy between O'Reilly and Yahoo!, plus the US government even joined in.

Besides for all the talks about PageRank and links, there was discussion on trademark issues and fraud issues with Google AdWords & AdSense.

Finally there were several brand new packages that came out over the past week or so. First is the launch of Amazon's A9 Search Engine, a 3-D Search Engine, a paper on named Web Spam Taxonomy, and a new design for the Search Engine Roundtable.