Recent work and a talk with Juan Enriquez

Recently I did some very interesting work on Blogging connected to the new book the UNTIED States of America, by John Enriquez.

After sending off my reseach on this subject I also spoke to a Viral Marketing expert who verified that what I produced is about as much as one can do with the tools available (ie: SeoElite, OptiSpider, Google AdWords new keyword planning tools for Semantic Analysis, etc).

In some cases, getting interest would be easy - just know the right people; but it's not that simple and sometimes, even asking for that help might present obstacles. More on this later.

"my metrics diary" - Google Search

"my metrics diary" - Google Search: "My Yahoo! - Add My Metrics Diary
Stay current with My Metrics Diary and thousands of other sources on your personal
My Yahoo! page. What is My Yahoo!? Learn More. ...
add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http:/ /feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/INbw - Supplemental Result - Similar pages "

Interesting.....Google is indexing the FeedBurner RSS Feeds I created to subscribe to MyYahoo!

Google WiFi - Secure Access Software (Beta)

Google WiFi - Secure Access Software (Beta): "http://wifi.google.com/faq.html
Seems Google are gettign ready to launch Google WiFi! "

I just downloaded Google WiFi and it appears to be working using my existing broadband. I'll have to play with this and see if it works anywhere in NYC.

My Metrics Diary is now www.now-seo.com and www.blog-keywords.com

I decided it was time to get rid of the site that was www.now-seo.com as it no longer reflected me. Last month I purchased a domain called www.blog-keywords.com for which I will eventually develop a site (or another blog) with.

I was puzzled on how my site no longer showed PageRank once the site loaded, but showed PageRank as it was loading; decided it was a coding issue that I did not control and that made me more willing to get rid of the content on marshall.sponder.50megs.com and maybe just start all over with that domain, or just use it for downloads and extra storage, stuff like that.

Looked around for website templates for FrontPage and decided I did not like anything I saw that much. I also looked for blogger templates and did not find as many templates as I would have liked...

Updating My Website

I feel a hypocrite for optimizing websites of my clients while ignoring my own site. It's much easier to work with a site that already exists and has problems than deciding what to do about www.now-seo.com.

For one thing, when I built Now-Seo, I used 50megs.com as a hosting provider, which was a poor choice because it's really shared hosting. At first I triedmasking the actual address and doing a redirect from the hosting provider so only now-seo.com showed up in the address bar; then I realized that might hurt whatever rankings I might get, so I stoped that. As a result, I make no attemt to mask that www.now-seo.com resolves to http://www.marshall.sponder.50megs.com/now-seo/index.html.

I noticed today that my site does not show pagerank in the Google Toolbar. I became upset and looking at the site I've been ignoring, it's looked ugly and sloppy to me all of a sudden.

Soon, I was Googling for "seo website templates" and "seo friendly website templates" or just "website templates". Here I was, fixing multi-million dollar sites for others, but would not lift a finger to fix my own site over the last 30 months or so.

I found a couple of products that look interesting like SEO Website Builder http://www.seo-website-builder.com/ but I wonder if I'd have the patience to work though the templates. I do SEO/SEM.....I don't want to work though a restrictive system, and the site also says that an experienced Webmaster or SEO would not like this product as much because of the restrictions.

But I don't want to come up with the whole design of the site from scratch...and now I'm back to looking at the website project from the point of view of those who build sites and think more about appearance and message than SEO.

Rather than doing anything tonight, I'm going to step back and let the emotions pass and then take an objective look and see what I want am willing to do about it.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Special Exhibitions: Matisse: The Fabric of DreamsHis Art and His Textiles

Henri Matisse Show at the Metropolitian Museum



"The impact of Henri Matisse's lifelong interest in textiles is shown in a selection of approximately 75 paintings, drawings, prints, and painted paper cutouts. Also exhibited are examples from the artist's personal collection of textiles, many of which have been packed away in family trunks since Matisse's death in 1954."

I went to the Metropolitian Museum today, for a change, and tried to get away from my SEO work, and back to my artist beginnings. I looked closely at the Watteu's, Rembrants, Cezanne and Manet paintings and the Matisse Textile show.

I really enjoyed the Matisse show and it got me to thinking about how he progressed; I found his early work and middle body of work very satisfying but his later work, much less so. After 1930, there were examples of paintings that had taken several sessions, but looked like they were done in a couple of minutes, much like a sketch.

What's wrong with that? We'll, I think there is something that I don't feel comfortable with, and never have. As an artist evolves, the work through ideas and eventually evolve out of their artform! I belive that's what happened to Matisse; he evolved from a Lawyer to a Artist/painter and eventually became a textile artist! Sure, that's an oversimplifaction, but the same process happened to Picasso, and to many, many artists, even old masters, like Titian.

After you work though an idea, over and over again, we move on to the next thing; and that "thing" might not be as visible as the perfection we achived before. Titian's later works look sloppy; yet the are considered the apex of his art. Rembrant the same, Renoir is the same and Matisse certainly showed that..at least, that's how I view it.

The later works are simply not satisfying, they look like sribbles, however art historians talk about it.

Meet the Google Engineers at SES - including AdSense engineers - JenSense.com

Meet the Google Engineers at SES - including AdSense engineers - JenSense.com: "Due to the success of the 'Meet the Google Engineers' event at the Webmaster World Conference, we have decided to repeat the event during the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Conference next week. We have decided to host the event as a component of the Google Dance which is being held at the Googleplex on Tuesday August 9th.

Here are the details:
Googleplex
Bldg 40 Temp Tech Talk
7:00p.m.-9:00p.m."

I guess I can't go to all the conferences; Webmasterworld was good, and I'm pretty saturated.

Amazon.com: Books: Search Engine Marketing, Inc. : Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site

Amazon.com: Books: Search Engine Marketing, Inc. : Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site: "Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.

Marshall Sponder, August 5, 2005
Reviewer:M. Sponder (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

I've read just about every book written on SEO/SEM and this is by far the best! Search Engine Marketing Inc. is also about marketing strategy; in fact, there's a wealth of information one would never expect to find in a book about Search Engine Marketing.

The writing style is light, sometimes humorus, making Search Engine Marketing, Inc. an easy read; that's quite an achievement for a technical book.

Bill Hunt and Mike Moran's SEO/SEM book is unique because it tells you how to best set up a search team within your organization. The book also tells you how to evaluate external search vendors in order to decide if the company would be better off running a search campaign in house or by hiring an external vendor. Chapter 15 contains the best set of information on measuring success of any search campaign.

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is like going to all the major search conferences, absorbing every bit of essential information and writing down the essence in one book. Buy the book.


I wrote a review to Bill Hunt and Mike Morans' book on Search Engine Marketing, Inc. Mine is the first review on Amazon of this book, that is sure to break new ground in the SEO/SEM industry.

Finding the meanings of a page using Pertinence Summarizer

Been looking for a textual analysis tool for some time and have tried every one I can get my hands on, including Site Content Analyzer, Tropes, and a couple of others that I don't remember offhand.

But I just came accross a Semantic Analyzer that really does work and appears to summerize a html page (or any document) in a way similar to what Google and other search engines might sumerize a page to decide what the page is about and what it should rank for. Best of all, Pertinence Summarizer can be used for free at this link, that allows you to Summerize Google results for any query.

I tested this on two of my clients, http://www.thehousedesigners.com and www.livingconcepts.com, to see what Pertinence Summarizer finds is the essential meaning of the main pages.

For The House Designers, Pertinence decided that "decorate dream house plans", "build dream house plans", "the house designers", "beautiful house plans" "popular home plans" and "designer house plans" were the most meaninful phases on the main page.

These may, or may not be the best phrases for this page to rank for...and we'd want to see what the competition is putting into their pages and compare it with what Google thinks our pages are about. Lets look at the Google Results before going any further:

Google Query focusing on www.thehousedesigners.com results
decorate dream house plans Position # 1 of 194,000 documents found on 7/17/05
build dream house plans Position # 8 of 7,160,000 documents found on 7/17/05
beautifual house plans Position # 3 of 5,230,000 documents found on 7/17/05
popular home plans Position #20 of 22,300,000 documents found on 7/17/05
designer house plans Position # 7 of 2,640,000 documents found on 7/17/05

I found the best level of Sumerization to be between 30% to 10%; depending on how much text is on a page (for a lot of text, 20% works best).

What's important here is to 1) understand what Google thinks this page is about, and 2) experiement and change the copy to what you want it to be, and then have Pertinence read it off your hard drive and get the meanings you want to come accross, then republish your page and watch the results.

Of course, what ever is decided on in the body text, should be supported, somewhat, with backlink anchor text of sites pointing to your own.

Using Pertinence at 20% Sumerization, I came up with these important phrases for www.livingconcepts.com . I don't think these phrases, below, are the best ones to rank for but that's what Pertinence shows are, in fact, what Google thinks their main page is about.

house plans golf Position 1 in 3,000,000 documents on 7/17/05
lakefront house plans Position 3 in 152,000 documents on 7/17/05
product development home building industry

The last phase, "product development home building industry" does not work, and I'd have taken it out of their copy and put it on a different page because Google does not think the main living concepts page is about product development or the home building industry..and if that's something the client wants, they have to re-write the copy to reflect that.

So you can get all kinds of ideas of how to use this summerizer service, which can be used for free, though a license that translates to 145.00 USD, is probably a good way to go if your going to use it alot. For the Google Demo, which opens up Pertinence Summarizer for your use, you'll need to supply them with an email address, and they will supply you with a password.

Happy Semantic Analsyis!

IBM advancing on its search engine project

Well, I do work for IBM and have been working on Search Engine Metrics, both for the company, and on my own freelance work, things like that. So I guess an article as interesting as this one would peak my interest.

I was suprized an the amount of information contained in the article. I've never seen an actual collection of data, gathered and given meaning my WebFountain. I'd certainly like to see it and I hope I will in the future.

I've been thinking about what it would be nice to have now; what I'm envisioning might not have anything to do with WebFountain. Take for example, the Karl Rove, Joseph Wilson, Valarie Palme case that's rapidly unfolding.

It would be great to have a graphical viewer that did something like this: Software that would allow me to chose a subject and, or story, then datamine the internet and pull related information and catagorize as positive or negative, or you can set up as many states of catagorization as you want.

I keep on wishing I could find a program like that today; but I haven't see anything remotely close. ONly WebFountain sounds like it could do it...but I have yet to see how WebFountain is configured to do this work.

Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: New Awareness Feature: BuzzBoost

Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: New Awareness Feature: BuzzBoost: "New Awareness Feature: BuzzBoost
If you have several blogs or other sites that have their own feeds, we'll bet a few bottom dollars you've been looking for a way to easily cross-promote them. Or, perhaps you're a podcaster who would like to list your latest podcast postings in a blog sidebar or other handy garden spot somewhere on the web. The bottom line? You've got feeds you want to get out there where people can see 'em, and you'd like to allow people to see the feed headlines (or content itself) in some compact, convenient format.
Enter BuzzBoost. It's the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it's free. BuzzBoost's job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code � in a Blogger or TypePad page template, on a corporate website, or even in a 'signature' block on a message board. BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide. You get to control how BuzzBoost displays the following elements"

This FeedBurner enhancement is definately worth a look!

Portable Rollable Displays: Foldable Screens That Fit Your Pocket

I'm waiting for this! I keep thinking about how the portable devices we're using now are still pretty limited. I have a TMobile Sidekick II, I think it's great, but what I really want is what's below.

Robin Good mentioned the Foldable Screen in This Article,while the information about wearable digital camaras came from This Source.






I want one of these today; actually, I wanted one yesterday too!

Google Earth is Addictive!

I've been using Google Earth quite a lot, both for personal enjoyement and for my SEO work.

One of my clients is an architect (I have several house designers as clients) and I looked at the sales data in one of the channels the architect sells his plans through. Before Google Earth, the address of the people who bought architectual house plans would not have mattered to me much. But look what I did with 6 months of my clients' data!

I was able to home into each address and, in many cases, look at the actual address where the plan was sold. I was also able to search for builders and related types of professions that tend to buy house plans using the local search part of Google Earth.

Amazing Stuff! Thanks Google!

New EyeTracking Study

I've been reading the New Eye Tracking Study sponsered by Enquiro and Did-it.com; trying to make sense of it.

The "sales letter" for this publication led me to believe I'd find out something conclusive; but I did not really find that was the case. I think I'll re-read it over after I finish the last couple of pages. I don't think a sampling of 48 people is a large enough sampling; they need 10 times that number..

Another thing I noticed was the "Google Effect"; the authors contended that we had been educated to think the top listings in search results were more relevent because Google was sopposed to produce highly relevent results. We look withing the Golden Triange (above) and then the first couple of paid ads. But if we did not find what we were looking for, we quickly lose confidence (in the Google Effect?) and start looking all over the page when we next search on the same query.

It's really hard for me, right now, to decide if this has any long term meaning in my SEO work or not. I have to absorb it and see if it works.

Google hovers as Baidu readies IPO

Google hovers as Baidu readies IPO: "Google hovers as Baidu readies IPO
Monday July 4, 6:00 am ET
By David Shabelman in San Francisco
As Baidu.com Inc. nears an initial public offering in the U.S., the company appears to be drawing a close look from Google Inc., which sources said could have an interest in acquiring the Chinese Internet search leader. "

Interesting. I've been tracking Baidu closely....it does produce a lot of search traffic.
For Google, it makes sense to aquire it.

Boing Boing: 3D TV (no glasses required)

Boing Boing: 3D TV (no glasses required): "3D TV (no glasses required)
During the cyberdelic early 1990s in San Francisco, my friend Dan Mapes was one of the rave scene's most dynamic digital video and virtuality evangelists. I hadn't heard from Dan for several years, but today's New York Times reveals that his vision for the future hasn't changed. Dan's now co-founder of Deep Light, a San Fernando Valley-based start-up marketing a high-res 3D TV that delivers the illusion of depth without any clunky glasses. In the Times article, Michael Krantz gives a sneak preview of Deep Light's HD3D, a system based on technology first developed by Cambridge University professor Adrian Travis."

I'd like one of these.

The New York Times > Technology > Dear Blog: Today I Worked on My Book

The New York Times > Technology > Dear Blog: Today I Worked on My Book: "hen he has writer's block, John Battelle, author of the forthcoming book 'The Search: The Inside Story of How Google and Its Rivals Changed Everything,' keeps on writing. But not his book manuscript. Instead, he goes straight to his blog (battellemedia.com).

Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired and The Industry Standard magazines, sometimes makes quick notes on the blog about a topic related to his book, and other times posts longer essays. 'Writing for the blog is more like having a conversation,' Mr. Battelle said. "

Small world! I met John Batelle briefly at Webmasterworld; told him I have been reading his blog since I am using My Yahoo! as a news aggregator.

Smart Mobs: Foundcity: social mapping tool overlaid on google maps

Smart Mobs: Foundcity: social mapping tool overlaid on google maps: "Foundcity: social mapping tool overlaid on google maps
Shibuya Epiphany, The Era of Sentient Things
Posted by Howard at 12:38 AM
'Social mapping tools' like Foundcity connect your journeys through the physical world with maps you can tag and access from your desktop or share with your social network. Snap a picture with your cameraphone, add a tag in the message body, and send the message to nyc@foundcity.net (also in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Los Angeles right now) "

I just signed up.

Gary Stein - JupiterMedia post on using BlogPulse to determine Buzz

But...I mean...look at this. Really. Who's going to be able to concentrate for the next 3 weeks? I'm doing a session at Ad-Tech on the FIRST DAY IN THE ALPS!

OK. Focus.

Take a look at the chart above, courtesy of BlogPulse. Cycling has enjoyed a pretty incredible in interest these last several years, at least here in the US. The reason is clear: Armstrong is an amazing athlete with an incredible story.

I'm interested in the how Gary Stein used Blogpulse to discover trends. I have decided to do the same thing...but I had not seen too many people explain it as well as Gary did.

RSS Autoresponders: Pros and Cons - Robin Good's Latest News

RSS Autoresponders: Pros and Cons - Robin Good's Latest News: "Top 10 Reasons WHY 'RSS Autoresponders' Are Becoming A Permission Email Marketers BEST Friend ... and WHY you should Seriously consider the switch if your a Permission Email Marketer. "

Robin Good has published an article on setting up RSS Responders..why we should have them.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with Bill Hunt last week at Webmasterworld in New Orleans.
I mentioned to Bill that feeds need to be kept fresh with several posts a week; he said he did not
have time for that but had a autoresponder that would create posts for him...he just had to
sit down and put the information into the autoresponder.

Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0

Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0: "In practice, this means your search results with MyWeb 2.0 will be very different than those you get with Yahoo, Google or any other major engine. It also means that your search results will change over time, as your personal web and those of your community expand. Walther says these changes should lead to more relevant results but that depends largely on the 'quality' of members of your community and the web pages they choose to add to your communal web."

Over time, top rankings, as we know it, will become less and less important. One of the goals of personalized search results is to show you only what your interested in...your search results will differ from everyone else. That's the future.

BBC NEWS | Business | Lessons from Silicon Valley

BBC NEWS | Business | Lessons from Silicon Valley: "So lesson number two is about the new markets created by the internet, the ones making big profits for Google quarter by quarter.
'The 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people,' observes Mr Kraus. "

Mirco Marketing. Micro Targeting. Geo-Demographics /Psychographics. All these things the internet makes possible now. The rules of success have been modified by the potential of what now exists.

What Other People Say May Change What You See - New York Times

What Other People Say May Change What You See - New York Times: "What Other People Say May Change What You See

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: June 28, 2005
A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity.

Dr. Gregory S. Berns
In the new study, subjects were asked to decide if geometric shapes were the same or different.

The study was based on 1950's work by the psychologist Solomon Asch, above. The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch."

This is a interesting article and I'm trying to understand what it means. Does it mean that if your
in group of people and they have one opinion, and you another, that you will actually change the way I see, what I think about the subject in question?

Ballmer: We'll Catch Google In Relevancy In 6 Months

Ballmer: We'll Catch Google In Relevancy In 6 Months: "Ballmer: We'll Catch Google In Relevancy In 6 Months

We've had Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer make jabs at Google before. However, ZDNet Australia article Google in sight as Ballmer vows .NET push reports a new spin, that 'in the next six months, we'll catch Google in terms of relevancy,' Ballmer said.
It will be interesting to see how this will be proved in six month's time.

As Danny points out here, trying to determine search relevancy is a difficult thing to do.

That said, if you look at the results from Barry's unscientific but very interesting survey, the difference in relevancy between Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and MSN Search is already very small. "

I'm not using MSN that much; it's a habit. If MSN starts to show itself to be a better experience for me- I'll start using it more.

WebmasterWorld Conference New Orleans Update

WebmasterWorld Conference New Orleans Update: "Just wanted to thank Brett and crew for a great conference. The hotel was pretty bad, but I won't hold that against WebmasterWorld. :) Had a great time. Really loved meeting online buddies, as well as tons of people I'd never talked to before. Will be leaving the hotel in a couple of hours (thank goodness), and heading home with my head full of ideas. "

I feel the same way about the Webmasterworld Conference. I hated the hotel and we left a day early, right after the Conference, last Friday. The conference itself was great! It was the best SEO conference I've been to. I don't think I want to
go back to New Orleans for a while though....I've seen enough of it.

HitWise Launches Keyword Intelligence - a New Keyword Research Tool : SEO Book.com

HitWise Launches Keyword Intelligence - a New Keyword Research Tool : SEO Book.com: "HitWise Launches Keyword Intelligence - a New Keyword Research Tool
HitWise launches a new keyword research tool by the name of Keyword Intelligence.
Keyword Intelligence data is based on Hitwise's sample of over 25 million home, work and educational Internet users worldwide and how these people use specific search terms across all search engines to find products and services online.
HitWise has partnerships with various ISPs and search services to track search and clickthrough data. Some of their products are a bit pricey for small webmasters (I believe starting at around $25,000 a year). The Keyword Intelligence offering looks like an attempt to break into the mid to lower market.
Keyword Intelligence has two different subscription plans starting at $90 and $190 a month. It allows you to subscribe to geographic markets and categories and do keyword research from there.

I heard a little about this at the Competitive Research panal today at Webmasterworld. I also spoke with Bill Tanner of Hitwise about the product.

John Battelle's Searchblog: WebmasterWorld Ho

John Battelle's Searchblog: WebmasterWorld Ho: "I'm at the WebmasterWorld Search conference today, so posting will be light. "

I spoke with John right after he arrived last night to attend Webmasterworld; also was at his keynote address today. I enjoyed listening to the his ideas about Federated Search and the new company he is founding.

The SEO Industry Cathing Up on RSS?

The SEO Industry Cathing Up on RSS?: "The SEO Industry Cathing Up on RSS?
posted by Rok Hrastnik in RSS Marketing.

With RSS getting more and more coverage, 'traditional' internet marketing industries start branching out in to it. The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry was quite early to catch on, but only in some limited and highly early adopter circles.

But now it's starting to move in to the more 'mainstream SEO' waters. In 2003 I considered myself a late-comer to RSS, but now I guess I'm getting close to dinosaur status. OK, it's not that bad, but I can't get over how the positive aspects of RSS keep getting discovered these days ..."

Not surprised. I have been picking up the buzz for more than a year at the SES and Webasterworld conferences. I'm at Webmasterworld right now, in New Orleans, and there are a couple of sessions that deal with PodCasting and RSS feeds as part of SEO.

TrustRank ALGOs Begin: SearchEngineWatch Page One for Search Engine Optimization

TrustRank ALGOs Begin: SearchEngineWatch Page One for Search Engine Optimization: " TrustRank ALGOs Begin: SearchEngineWatch Page One for Search Engine Optimization



TrustRank and Good Seed Algos?



Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Marketing


are possible two of the most SEOd terms.

Looking at the three sites added to Page One this morning
from virtually nowhere near the first page previously

Search Engine Watch
Overture
SEMPO

This is possibly the beginning of TRUSTRANK implementation in ALGOs
and GOOD SEED - implementation in LINK POPULARITY

http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/2004-17


Quote:
Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine's results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. "

This is going to be very interesing! I'm going to be speaking with Google on Wednesday at Webmasterworld..i hope I rembember to ask them.

A New Business for Google: Online Payments

A New Business for Google: Online Payments: "A New Business for Google: Online Payments
Google is many things to many people. For some, it's a search/media/ad/marketing company. One of these days, according to the WSJ (reg. req.), Google will also be an online payment company that will compete with eBay's Paypal."

Interesting.

Visual Decoder for PageRank: Create An Interactive Link Network

href="http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002085.html">Visual Decoder for PageRank: Create An Interactive Link Network: "Visual Decoder for PageRank: Create An Interactive Link Network
A tool for the crazed PageRank fan. Thought this tool was quite neat and deserved a quick mention for sheer creativity. This was mentioned on Digitalpoint yesterday. You can do some nifty things with flash, but as far SEO Tools go you don't seem to run into a large amount of them. This little tool is not too much different then a tool that tells you your PageRank, however it allows you to organize your sites (with PR information) in a visual network and then correspondingly connect them with arrows. You can move them around like cards, connect them or not, and even delete them by throwing them in a trash can.
I honestly think this tool should be renamed as the makers might not have thought of its other uses. Having a tool tell your pagerank is pretty boring these days. However, from the standpoint of ease of use in working with external linking networks this tool could be useful with the addition of some more information in creating diagrams for use in SEO. Backlink information could also be useful with this. Overall though a fun tool to play with. "

This looks like a great tool

Blowhard Clients & Bad SEO Leads : SEO Book.com

Blowhard Clients & Bad SEO Leads : SEO Book.com: "Blowhard Clients & Bad SEO Leads
Bad clients will waste your time and destroy your business. Since SEO can deliever such cheap marketing sometimes it is easy to sell yourself short, taking on bad clients.
The worst prospects I have ever encountered are:

those burned by SEOs who have no trust left

those who used to rank well, feel they deserve free top rankings, and are unwilling to change with the algorithms

those who think SEO should be free marketing"

THIS IS SO TRUE!

DMNews.com | News | Article

DMNews.com | News | Article: "Recent online search behavior suggests that consumers are as concerned about a real estate bubble as the media.
Searches on the terms 'real estate bubble' and 'housing bubble' climbed to a 12-month high for the week ending May 28, according to online monitoring service Hitwise, New York.
Hitwise said the market share of those two terms across search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN jumped 311 percent and 174 percent for the weeks ending May 28 and May 21, respectively.
'Increased traffic on real estate Web sites is reflective of the sector's growing adoption of Web-based technologies and databases, often used for digital storefronts, marketing, inventory listings and buyer financing,' Bill Tancer, Hitwise vice president of research, said in a statement. "

....Hitwise data indicate that search activity is fast becoming a bellwether of consumer moods.

"Recent Internet search activity suggests that some activity in the category is being driven by curiosity of rising property values and the possibility of a bursting bubble," Tancer said in the statement. "Should we undergo a decline, it will be interesting to see how site traffic and search activity correspond."

It's more and more possible to do research on the web about customer behavior (ie: using Yahoo! Buzz or HitWise). HitWise is a fairly expensive solution that I'd love to have, but it's out of reach of most SEO people.

Omniture: Company Overview

Omniture: Company Overview: "Omniture Shatters Traditional Web Analysis Boundaries with Breakthrough Omniture Discover� Tool
Fully Integrated with the SiteCatalyst� Suite and the Omniture Data Warehouse, Omniture Discover Drives �Exploration Momentum,� Allowing Companies to Realize Business Value in Seconds, Not Days, for Increased Revenues, Conversion Rates, and Competitive Advantage
OREM , Utah � June 8, 2005 � Omniture, the largest and fastest growing provider of on-demand Web analytics, today announced the launch of Omniture Discover, creating the first and only third-generation on-demand Web analytics solution. Omniture Discover is fully-integrated with SiteCatalyst and the Omniture Data Warehouse, finally making possible the combination of instant-response times with the power to view Web data across any dimension. This highly-effective exploratory analysis leads to the discovery of valuable visitor segments and behavior correlations proven to positively impact business performance. Together these tools establish the third-generation online analytics platform, providing unprecedented levels of intelligence and delivering valuable insight to users of all levels of sophistication throughout the enterprise, from the casual user to the most demanding marketing analyst.
�Compared to Omniture Discover, other Web analytics tools deliver just �reports�,� said Christopher D�Alessandro, Director, Web Analytics for J. Walter Thompson. "

Now all we need is to see the demo.

Eric Peterson - Omniture Discover

Eric Peterson - Omniture Discover: "Omniture Discover

<< Oh how the mighty have fallen ... | Main

Eric Peterson | June 15, 2005, 11:58 AM
I finally got a chance yesterday to see Omniture's version 12 release and the much hyped Omniture Discover. Interesting product really. It reminds me of Visual Sciences Visual Workstation product, something I first wrote about in our web analytics report (clients only) in October of last year. At the time I referred to Visual Sciences as a disruptive technology in the analytics space.
I guess the disruption was noticed."

Hmm...I'd like to see that demo.

More On AOL's SEO/SEM Campaign

More On AOL's SEO/SEM Campaign: "More On AOL's SEO/SEM Campaign
AOL.com's Search Effort: Music Visitors Up, So Are Keyword Prices from MediaPost is an update on the story we blogged earlier, that AOL is to do a significant search marketing push to drive traffic to its site. Carat Interactive is heading the campaign and comments in the story. Another follow-up story, Paid Search a Footnote in AOL.com Push from ClickZ, noted briefly that the push is almost entirely on the free SEO side, rather than through buying search ads. The MediaPost article gives some examples of this, as well as how keyword buys from AOL are pushing up the cost of music terms."

I'd be curious to see the organic side of thier campaign, what they're coming up for. Too bad there's not a ranking program where you can put in a url and it will tell you all the terms it's coming up for.

RSS Metrics Focus: Interview With Dick Costolo and Stuart Watson, Part 1 - Different RSS Metrics Approaches

RSS Metrics Focus: Interview With Dick Costolo and Stuart Watson, Part 1 - Different RSS Metrics Approaches: "RSS Metrics Focus: Interview With Dick Costolo and Stuart Watson, Part 1 - Different RSS Metrics Approaches posted by Rok Hrastnik in RSS Audio Interviews and Conversations

We did an incredible joint interview on RSS metrics last week with Dick Costolo of Feedburner and Stuart Watson of Syndicate IQ, two of the handful of companies that are leading the RSS metrics way.

Feedburner is bringing RSS metrics and some other specific RSS tools to the masses, while Syndicate IQ is more focused on the enterprise level. Naturally, both of these companies have different approaches to RSS metrics and one of our goals was to discover what approach is best suited for what situation.

The interview got so huge and we covered so many interesting topics that we're braking it down in to several parts, with the first one covering the comparison between RSS metrics based on unique RSS feed URLs and RSS metrics conducted through ''static'' RSS feeds.

RSS Metrics Focus: Interview With Dick Costolo and Stuart Watson, Part 1 - Different RSS Metrics Approaches"


I'm going to spend some time listeing to this series of interviews because "metrics" is my business.

Enterprise SEM: Getting a click in the blink of an eye...

Enterprise SEM: Getting a click in the blink of an eye...: "With the increase in popularity of search merketing these days there are a lot of studies coming out and sometimes key data gets blinded by the big numbers marketers want to hear.

One such piece of data came from Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro that showed people spend an average of 6.4 seconds on a search results page before clicking on a link. What is equally compelling is that in that time span they scan an average of 3.9 search results.
In those few seconds, searchers assimilate an average of 140 words. Gord went on to day that 'Included in those words are between 35 to 60 factors and details we have to consider to make a decision.' These are the semantic relevance that goes into their thinking on what is the most valuable to click

This is the lastest proof point that we must make absolutley sure that our ad copy is the most compelling it can possibley be with a string call to ation as well as a unique selling propostiion that as semantically relevant. "

Well said, Bill. Wish I had a program that would read my snippit, or anyone's snippet/visible text
and tell you how likely someone will click on your snippet (if they see it ...that is).

Duplicate Content Penalty Timespan

Duplicate Content Penalty Timespan: "For those that are worried about duplicate content issues and getting penalized for them this information might serve useful to you. There is a thread on SEW forums detailing a situation where one of the members had several pages 302 redirected to pages on his site. This caused problems for Google. Fathom, a member on SEW forums posts information about duplicate penalty timeframes for offenses based on first, second and third time offenses. He mentions that:
A dup penalty timespan is based on your offense.
1st Offense: 30 days
2nd Offense: 60 days
3rd Offense: 90 days
So 'if' [for example] you had a 1st Offense and change something and Google detected that and then later found other dup content - you would go to a 2nd Offense timespan.

I emailed fathom to get some verification on where he obtained this information. He posted back in the forums that Matt Cutts of Google at a recent WMW PubCon mentioned it. "

Good information - I have a bunch of House Designers as clients and many of thier pages are duplicates.

Google + Keyhole = Google Earth | newrecruit

Google + Keyhole = Google Earth | newrecruit: "I don't see anything in the email about being quiet about this so here goes with some cool new mapping features. Friday I received an email from Google inviting me to download the beta of the soon to be replacement for Keyhole. Google Earth.

Compared to Keyhole, you will notice changes right away with the interface. Integrated Google searches and a large number of landmarks that can be turned on and off.


Lets start with the big things first. On selected US cities, you can view a grey scale 3D rendering of the city skyline. Pictures are worth more then words so I'll let the screenshots do the talking. "

I need to play with this; maybe I'll just buy a Keyhole subscription.

Yahoo! & Deep crawling?

Yahoo! & Deep crawling?: "In Vegas 2004 (Webmaster World conference) Yahoo! talked about the need for creating hierarchies. If you're going to throw in a whack of sitemaps then keep them hierarchical.

Then there's an issue of depth. Yahoo! said that 6 levels deep was probably too deep whereas three was probably fine."

Getting interior pages listed in Yahoo has been a recurring issue that I've noticed over and over again with different clients. This posting from SearchEngineWatch suggests it's possible to achieve a good, deep crawl of a site with many pages, provided the site maps are set up properly.

My impression though, was that Yahoo wants to charge money (alot of money) to crawl your interior urls in their own inclusion program.

Yahoo News Beats Google News In Jackson Verdict

Yahoo News Beats Google News In Jackson Verdict: "Yahoo News Beats Google News In Jackson Verdict
The fact that Google News uses automation to decide what to feature on its home page versus Yahoo employing human editors is often raised as a issue when comparing the services. In the case of the Michael Jackson trial, it looks like the humans won out. I've been watching both this afternoon to see how they responded to the not guilty verdicts in the case. All times listed are Eastern Daylight Savings Time."

I'm not surprized. Human editors make Yahoo News easier to read, easier to look at, more artistic satisfying, and in some cases, quicker to report the news.

Hacking Google Maps - Sites Exploiting Its Usefulness

Hacking Google Maps - Sites Exploiting Its Usefulness: "Hacking Google Maps - Sites Exploiting Its Usefulness
Some of yall might have seen some creative uses of Google Maps lately. Came across an interesting article this morning and some cool sites that people are using to hack this Google service. I personally can't get enough of the map interface Google has provided and I use it for everything now on my travels. I am even integrating the satellite map service into one of my own sites, and had the thought the other day that having it in my car would be pretty awesome, however not possible at the moment. There has been a rise recently in the use of Google Map hacks and those sites that are using it innovatively and creatively to accomplish tasks before not possible. A recent article at CNN that came out Friday talks about some of the sites that are taking Google Maps to the extreme. A site that came out a couple months ago using Maps in a very unique way. Housingmaps.com integrates the use of Craiglist listings with a the graphical interface of Google Maps to present where the houses in the listings reside. You can first start by clicking on a city, find house for rent or for sale, and then get a full listing from Craigslist of what is available. Very handy site and an accomplishment in usability as far as I can see. "

Need to take a closer look at this.

Semantic-Knowledge: Semantic Search Engine and Text Analysis

Semantic-Knowledge: Semantic Search Engine and Text Analysis: "Content Analysis
was never so easy!
Semantic-Knowledge is a leading provider of Natural Language Processing (NLP) software, including Semantic Search Engine, Text Analysis, Intelligent Desktop Search, Text Mining, Knowledge Discovery and Automatic Classification systems."

I found this amazing content analysis software, and this version is free! I don't know exactly how to describe all that Tropes text analysis software does...you'll have to see it to understand it's power. Tropes is one of the most amazing and powerful programs for text analysis I've ever seen...it blows away anything else I've ever used for SEO, any of our cottege tools...Tropes is HOT!

Download the program at http://www.semantic-knowledge.com/download.htm

My CV or Curriculum Vitae Is Up

My CV or Curriculum Vitae Is Up: "My CV or Curriculum Vitae Is UpWell it's official, I'm now a free agent. As part of being a free agent I did the resume update deal but also created a CV. I did so because a resume is just too narrow a document to describe me and my areas of expertise and interest. Plus, it's more like telling a story and is a lot more fun than a plain ol resume, IMO anyway.

So I know this raises some questions like, why aren't you at WebSourced / KeywordRanking anymore? and Are you still going to do seo? and Oooh, give me all the juicy details of why you aren't at WebSourced.

Well, quite simply, WebSourced and I had differences of opinion and have since parted ways. I wish them the best of luck with everything they have going on and I'm sure they think the same. I'm sorry but there will be no juicy details, quite simply, we were moving in different directions and that about sums it up."

WebSourced got a hold of Mike Gerhan earlier this year (or was it sometime last year). Being director of Search for WebSourced must have been a difficult job. I looked at Jason's resume and it reminded me of my own; he jumped around alot because it appears he was bored; he also appears to have exceptional programming skills. I question why someone who is that good as a programmer would want a Director's position....it's not hands on enough..too many client meetings, too much massaging of results to keep the high profile clients happy. I guess he had enough of it and left the company.

I realize big search firms exist for a reason, and that reason is the big customers who are generally charged 150K and above; these customers have high expectations of search marketing. I also look at the big search firms with suspecion, alot of times the real work is done by contracted employees or farmed out to other countries where workers are paid at a lower rate.

Hidden Links on Financial Times Website. WTF? : SEO Book.com

Hidden Links on Financial Times Website. WTF? : SEO Book.com: "Ever get the sense that many business models are being challenged by the web? In spite of being subsidized, the Wall Street Journal has been seeing eroding profits. In the most recent issue of the Linking Matters Newsletter Ken McGaffin noted that Financial Times sells hidden advertising links.
That is prettymuch the two largest papers about making money and both of them are getting worse at it, and Financial Times is running a business model based on deception. Can you trust news sites that hide their content and their own business model? "

I'm just wondering who's responsible for putting the hidden links on the pages in question. Maybe it's just stupidity and not deliberate. If it is deliberate, I'd have to wonder who is giving FT this advice.

Very Good Basic RSS Tutorial

Very Good Basic RSS Tutorial: "Very Good Basic RSS Tutorial
posted by Rok Hrastnik in RSS Marketing
... and it's free to view (yeah, it's video). Covers both RSS for end-users as well as publishers.
Doesn't cover any of the advanced or marketing stuff, but if right now all you want to know is how to create an RSS feed, it's for you."

Might want to look at it.

Another Google Backlink Update

Another Google Backlink Update: "Another Google Backlink Update
As expected, we are now seeing the last wave of google bourbon updates now. A great tool to do a quick check on backlinks and ranking changes is Mcdar's Tool, opt for the horizontal view.
Forum discussion currently at Search Engine Watch Forums, SEO Chat Forums, nothing yet at WebmasterWorld, more to come..."

I'm looking at the tool right now. There's many tools out there that check backlinks including OptiLink (which is almost worthless now), SeoElite, LinkSurvey 1.4 (a gem for what it does), and online tools like this one. It's what you do with the tools that matter and that's what I concentrate on, pulling the data into Excel and merging it with the output of other programs. I hear alot of people still use Xenu to check broken links (internally). WebCeo Auditior Module does that too.

There are many, many tools, but no tool does everything and no backlink tool is perfect.

Five Across Ships Drag & Drop Web Publishing; Create Rich Multi-Page Web Sites with the Ease of Blogging

Five Across Ships Drag & Drop Web Publishing; Create Rich Multi-Page Web Sites with the Ease of Blogging: "Five Across Ships Drag & Drop Web Publishing; Create Rich Multi-Page Web Sites with the Ease of Blogging

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 2005--Five Across, Inc., the Silicon Valley start-up that launched the world's fastest blogging engine in Feb. 2005 at DEMO@15!, today announced it has extended its technology to enable the creation of multi-page web sites. Available immediately, the hosted service, Bubbler(TM), provides page navigation that is generated automatically; updates text and pages in real time; provides drag-and-drop photo, audio, and video sharing; and has a group model that provides wiki-like collaboration for authorized users. "

Blubber might be an interesting service to look into to. I know I could make this blog look a lot better than it does just by having something like Blubber
to publish it with. It's alot easier to put graphics and just nice things that
people would want to look at.

On the other hand, I'm wondering how well the Blubber sites will work for SEO. My guess is they might work pretty well....but I'd like to see confirmation of that. The other thing: once a person sees they can put zillions of graphics
into the blog/website, won't they get carried away and end up spending 50 bucks a month to have Blubber host the site? I mean, if i can easily
drag all kinds of really nice presentations on to my Blubber Blog that I can't do in my Blogger NowSEO blog, what's to stop me from ending up with
a Blubber bill?

Yahoo! Index Out of Room?

Yahoo! Index Out of Room?: "Yahoo! Index Out of Room?
A thread at WebmasterWorld named What triggers Yahoo to fully index a site? discusses the issues many are having with having their sites fully or even partially indexed. For many who run large dynamic content sites, Yahoo! is having trouble capturing all those pages and its not necessarily due to the crawler barriers (I know first hand).
One member says; 'IMO for what its worth, i think the yahoo index is full with not much room for new content.' Of course some sites can be penalized but I don't believe this is the case for many of the sites not indexed by Yahoo! I am curious what the next two to three weeks will bring."

I have been noticing that Yahoo will not capture many interior pages of new sites; my take on that is they wanted customers to pay them to deep crawl and index their sites. Perhaps it makes sense in some cases, though I've found it's usually not worth the money.

Bloglines Adding More than 2 Million Articles Each Day to Its Database

Bloglines Adding More than 2 Million Articles Each Day to Its Database: "Bloglines Adding More than 2 Million Articles Each Day to Its Database
Those of you who track the steady stream of blog, blogosphere, and RSS stats might want to add some new numbers from Bloglines that were released today to your files.


500 million blog and news feed articles are now stored [and made searchable*] in the Bloglines database

Between January and June of this year, the size of the Bloglines index doubled

Each day Bloglines adds 2 million to 2.7 million new blog and news feed articles to the database"


FYI

RSS Security Issues

RSS Security Issues: "RSS Security Issues
posted by Rok Hrastnik in RSS Conversations
It's quite evident that RSS enclosures are a security threat, especially if RSS aggregator developers don't start automatically (by default) blocking certain types of content item 'attachements'. If they don't, RSS could easily be used to 'infest' trusting people with harmful executable files.
Furthermore, in an IT Manager's Journal article, Richard Stiennon, vice president of threat research at anti-spyware company Webroot, warns against the possibility of profit seekers going further and finding new and new ways of exploiting RSS. Malicious code in full-text content items is the first that comes to mind."

Another thing to worry about. Oh well, I guess there will be a bunch of updates to all the Virus and Spamware checking programs that will say "Will check and eradicate harmfull RSS Feeds!"

Become.com Now Providing Dynamic Search Term Suggestions

Become.com Now Providing Dynamic Search Term Suggestions: "Become.com Now Providing Dynamic Search Term Suggestions Via Threadwatch and an e-mail from Become.com's CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Yang, news that the shopping research engine is now providing dynamic search term suggestions that can help the searcher create a more precise query (with little effort) even before clicking the search button. "

Interesting; have to try it. Sounds good though most of the keyword suggestion tools I have used, or purchased, haven't really delivered, in my opinion.

Good SEO is Bad to Google. Dareth a Light Flicker On? : SEO Book.com

Good SEO is Bad to Google. Dareth a Light Flicker On? : SEO Book.com: "Doug Heil, the evangical whitehat SEO, is worried that the new Google Sitemaps offering may remove the USP for good SEOs."

The idea of offering a utility to help with Sitemaps is a good idea. There are many sites that have deep content and/or dynamic urls that are difficult to get spidered.

Intelliseek's BlogPulse

Intelliseek's BlogPulse: "BlogPulse Trend Tool
As a featured technology in the showcase area, now you can create your own Trend Graphs with the BlogPulse Trend Tool. Internally, we've found this to be an incredibly cool tool. Try it out >"

This is a pretty cool tool; have yet to figure out how to use it for my clients, or for search work. I'll have to set aside some time to take an indepth look on what can be done with it.

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: Google Study Reveals Many Technology Purchases Begin With Search

Search Engine Lowdown :: News: Google Study Reveals Many Technology Purchases Begin With Search: "Google Study Reveals Many Technology Purchases Begin With Search
Google has released details of a study, conducted with the help of Millward Brown, which demonstrates the importance search plays in the purchase process of business technology products.

The survey of 900 technology decision-makers looked at the sources of information most commonly used during each of the three stages of the buying cycle; Research/Engagement, Consideration/Comparison and Purchase.

Measuring 13 different sources of information, the study demonstrated that many B2B buyers utilize search heavily throughout the entire buying cycle, with search most likely to be used during the research stage."

75 Million RSS Users?

75 Million RSS Users?: "75 Million RSS Users?
posted by Rok Hrastnik in RSS News
Alex Barnett has a post with a very catchy title: 75 Million RSS Users?
His analysis takes a look at the Jupiter RSS consumption March 2005 research report, which states that 12% of consumers use a variety of RSS newsreader, and the PEW '5% report'.
'Assuming the Jupiter number is overstating reality and Pew's is understating, and we assume the average of these two data points is the closer to reality, we end up with 8.5% of today's internet population using RSS readers (either as a web-based application or local client application). If we take the 235m US & UK internet population as of March 2005 (according to World Internet Usage Stats) to be reasonably accurate that makes at total of 20m RSS users in US & UK alone. If we use the total world internet population of figure 888.6m and assume 8.5% of the total world internet population is using RSS the number comes in at 75.3m.'
If Alex is correct, the reach of RSS is beyond what any of us could have hoped for just a couple of months ago."

I do think RSS is the future, is now.

Waldman to Publishers: RSS, or Possibly Perish � MarketingVOX

Waldman to Publishers: RSS, or Possibly Perish - MarketingVOX: "Simon Waldman of the Guardian offers a sober overview of RSS and news aggregators - ''Opportunity or Threat?' - based on a talk he gave to publishers at the World Editor's Forum in Seoul (via paidcontent), concluding that 'we are looking at the first moves in a quite profound and permanent shift in the way that people engage with content. And that brings with it both opportunities and threats.' He adds: 'Those who deal with the issues thrown up by RSS and aggregation over the next 18 months will, I believe, find themselves in a much, much healthier shape to face the next set of challenges that the internet throws our way.' The reward, he sums up, is likely to be this: 'Relevance, presence and revenues in a fickle and fragmented world.'"

Been thinking about this too...everything is moving to RSS really fast. First the NYTIMES press release
in March 05 detailing 5.7 million pageviews to the site (NYTIMES had 555 million pageviews, it think it was
Feburary 05 they're talking about). The percentage of change from a year ago was several hundered
percent increase in traffic from RSS Feeds.

Internet Marketing Guru Corey Rudl Dies at 34

Internet Marketing Guru Corey Rudl Dies at 34: "News comes by way that Two Killed In Crash At California Speedway. One individual killed in that crash was Internet Marketing Guru Corey Rudl. Corey Rudl is the owner of Internet Marketing Center and has written dozens of columns for Entrepreneur's eBusiness section. For more about this legend, please see this detailed Corey Rudl Interview."

I feel sad about this. I never met Cory Rudl but he represented one of the big success stories of internet marketing. In 2002, I spent alot of time looking at internet marketing businesses that made money, that made it. Cory Rudl was on the top, he was the top dog...he was better at it than anyone else. Sad, I'm sorry to see him go.

GoogleGuy's posts

GoogleGuy's posts: "Google News"

I have to read this...lot of stuff.

Google Using Human Reviewers, Google Launches Google Sitemaps : SEO Book.com

Google SiteMaps - Want to find out more about this

Google Using Human Reviewers, Google Launches Google Sitemaps : SEO Book.com: "Lazy Crawling:One of Google's major hangups with paid inclusion was that it allows lazy crawling. It appears that is no longer an issue, as Danny spots the free new Google Sitemaps program. FAQs here"

This is pretty, pretty interesting. I'll have to ask Google Engineers about this new feature/functionality, at Webmasterworld.

I'm wondering it this new sitemap funtionality would benifit the deep crawling we're trying to kick off for CREASTWOOD TECHNOLOGY GROUP at the bottom of the page. Over the last month or so, we've been taking some moves forward and some back trying to get up to 11 million part numbers indexed as pages in Google. That sounds CRAZY.....why would anyone
want to do something like that. In fact, it's not so crazy, lots of big companies have
huge parts inventory lists, and would love it if people could just put the part number in
the search box and find the page with that part number....just a page about that part number.

Most Military and Electrical Parts Supply vendors are using a more simple technique, creating pages with thousands of part numbers and getting those pages indexed. Seems to work, though you don't get a page about a particular part number, just
a page with a form on it, and maybe, if the programmer is resourceful, the part number is placed in a query box for locating the actual page on the site.

The GoogleMaps program might be the shortcup around all of this. I'll investigate.

Google Secret Lab, Prelude - Henk van Ess's Search Bistro

Google Secret Lab, Prelude - Henk van Ess's Search Bistro: "What is it? It's a lab of humans from all over the world (from China to The Netherlands, from Korea to Brasil) They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet.
I call it Google's Secret Evaluation Lab, but the real title is less adventurous; 'Rater Hub Google'. The coming days I will reveal all I know about this lab - must find the time first to do so. To keep you busy, here's a Flash-movie from a part of the site. Stay tuned, next posting will be tomorrow."

Have you seen the Flash movie that shows part of the Eval.Google.com site?

Come to think about it, two months ago I saw some ads in Craigslist.org for Google Testers to work part time, freelance. Google wanted (and still wants) to hire people who are specialists in certain areas to evaluate content.

Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't think they were even keeping it a secret.

ON one hand, everyone complains the search results are not as relevent as they should be......but when the search engines figure out ways to improve it (by getting humans involved) it becomes a hot issue with some who feel the search engines are getting two powerful and need to be restrained. How else are they sopposed to improve results?

Amazon.com: Books: Google Hacking for Penetration Testers

Amazon.com: Books: Google Hacking for Penetration Testers: "Google Hacking for Penetration Testers
by Johnny Long, Ed Skoudis (Foreword), Alrik van Eijkelenborg (Editor)"

I did not realize you could do such a thing.

Becasue I was a Unix Admin in a previous life, I understand and am intriqued by using Google this way.

John Battelle's Searchblog: An Example of Search Image Manipulation Via Blogs

John Battelle's Searchblog: An Example of Search Image Manipulation Via Blogs: "To put it simply, Quixtar enlisted various people to help create dozens of Weblogs that linked to each other and were filled with positive stories and key words. The idea is to help put these newer blogs at the top of search results for phrases such as 'Quixtar success' and 'Quixtar opportunity,' while more critical sites such as Quixtar Blog and Amquix.info would drop down. "

Hmm....where have I seen this before?!

I know the answer and it's work I do for one of my clients. Personally, I don't like the idea of manipulating search results by
creating new content to push down and out, things that certain companies, certain individuals, don't want you to see.

SES New York City Pictures

SES New York City Pictures: "Kim Krause Berg's Search Engine Strategies New York City 2005 Pictures (ok, some of them.)"

I liked the way she made me interact to see all the pictures. As I was at SES in NY, i remember most of these people. I'm going to Webmasterworld in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, maybe I'll take some pictures this time.

Yahoo! Mindset Review Continued

Yahoo! Mindset Review Continued: "Using Yahoo Mindset To Your Advantage
One interesting feature of Yahoo! Mindset is that every time you conduct a search or move the slider it indexes every page in your result set. So if you have a site that hasn't been spidered by Yahoo in some time and you want to get your site spidered then you can simply enter the search site:www.marketingshift.com and it will index all the results on the page you're currently viewing. Then, there is a link at the top of the page that tells you to click here to reload the results. Now when the results are shown, any site that had a gray bar next to it will now have a bar with orange on either side of it indicating whether it's research related or commercial. Scanning through each of the pages of results will ensure that at least Yahoo's Mindset app will know about the pages they need to visit on your site.

Now I'm not sure whether or not it means Yahoo's normal spider will index your site or not and I haven't done any tracking to check into that but that's easily done with any decent stats package. If you need help in getting the code done yourself then just ping me and I'll put up a post showing how to accomplish it."

Hmm...have to try that with www.thehousedesigners.com, etc.

Internet Group OKs 'Xxx' Web Addresses - Yahoo! News

Internet Group OKs 'Xxx' Web Addresses - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON - The Internet's primary oversight body approved a plan Wednesday to create a virtual red-light district, setting the stage for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses ending in 'xxx.'

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers said it would begin negotiations with ICM Registry Inc., run by British businessman Stuart Lawley, to iron out technical issues and prices for the new Web addresses."

Reminds me of what's going to happen when the .travel domain becomes available. Creating more segmentation (more choices) instead of everything
being a .com, is a good thing.

GoogleGuy's posts

GoogleGuy's posts

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720-1-30.htm

Need to read GoogleGuy's posts regularly.

Listening to RSS Feeds, Not Reading Them

href="http://www.marketingstudies.net/blogs/rss/archive/000406.html">Listening to RSS Feeds, Not Reading Them: "SearchEngineWatch reports of a new service, Speakwire, which allows you to listen (audio) to selected RSS feeds instead of reading them, through a synthesized speech technology.
And they even invented a new -casting word, this time it's Autocasting and it means generating audio automatically from an RSS feed."

I'm going to try this; just not sure how it's going to sound on my ThinkPad.

Leaky Web Sites Tell All About You

Leaky Web Sites Tell All About You: "But it is distressingly easy for anyone to assemble a profile of Fred -- or you or me -- because of the way Web sites leak personal information. "

I had not thought of it, but maybe there are people, organizations even, data harvesting information about individuals for various reasons, some neutral, and some harmful.

Traffick - Internet Search Enlightenment: Yahoo's Slider Makes Commercial vs. Informational Dichotomy Overt

Traffick - Internet Search Enlightenment: Yahoo's Slider Makes Commercial vs. Informational Dichotomy Overt: "The other important implication of a world where searchers see vastly different results depending on their own personalized algorithmic recipes, of course, is that search engine optimizers and especially hard-core search engine spammers can't reverse-engineer 'the algo'. It becomes harder to make generalized claims about 'what search engines like.' That would mean search marketing would really begin to be about deep marketing strategy, not just B.S. game-playing. A few really good cloakers might clean up, though. More likely, SEO's would claim that the best strategy would be to create multiple site types and multiple page types in order to do their job properly."

Since SES in March 2004, I've been thinking that SEO, going forward, is going to be more about personalizing, localizing, optimizing for personalized results to those market segments you want to reach; and not that much about Search Results ranking.

Some people think SEO, as a vocation, is dying...people like Ken Evoy, that want to sell you his SiteSell solution and who argue that Search Engines are getting smarter, can detect deliberate optimization, or make it irrelvent. SEO is not dying...it's changing. Here's an example:

Old/Current Way:
One of my house plans clients had a site that really is a disaster for Search Optimization, and had next to no rankings for any terms important to the those looking for house plans on any major search engine. In the old days, my job would have been to just figure out what's wrong with the site, direct them to make the changes and measure the results using a ranking program.

New Way:
Sure, the site is a disaster for search, but it's not about search at all; it's about "branding" and the poor technology the site owner employed. Taking that aside, we look at shopping cart fullfillment orders and see that this architects' site sells 300% less than another competitor who sells thier plans on a joint site they both belong to. On further investigation, the "SEO" person (me) finds out that on the house plan details page, the first house plans architect fails to write any copy to explain why the searcher should buy the plan, fails to put the best, most colorful drawing of the plan, fails to name the plan with a romantic name, and so on. The actual plan detail page was the same. The best designer on the site made 3 times more sales and money by simply doing these things. Tell the client this information, get them to change, and get good analytics to look at the results, AND also watch the search engine rankings.

See the difference? SEO is not dying...it's getting much better, and merging with marketing and analytics. For those who can walk this talk...there will be plenty of work long into the future..

For anyone that wants to know the details of this case, please contact me at now.seo@gmail.com

Some New RSS Tools

Some New RSS Tools: "Robin Good points to some interesting new and semi-new RSS tools.
Here's a quick overview ...

RSS Mix
RSS Mix allows you to take a number of RSS feeds and create a new joint output, featuring all of their combined content.

Pop2RSSThis is a tool I've been waiting for --- Pop2RSS automatically takes your POP3 e-mail account and converts new incoming messages in to an RSS content stream. I can think of a number of uses for this, ranging from creating a quick overview of your e-mail from many different accounts to using RSS to check your e-mail on the road, especially if you don't have webmail access."

I'm going to check both tools out today. Pop2RSS sounds more interesting to me, but I'm not sure how I'd use it. There's so much you can do with this stuff but I don't think that just because you can ...
you use it.

Search-Related Ads Rely on Poetry of Words, Numbers

Search-Related Ads Rely on Poetry of Words, Numbers: "When Kiesha Ramey tells people she works for Google Inc., they usually think she's a computer geek.

She's more like a commercial poet.

Ramey, 30, is part of Google's in-house advertising agency, a team called the Maximizers that helps clients navigate the complex world of search-related advertising.

Her mission is worthy of a haiku writer.

She crafts text ads to intrigue Web surfers because advertisers don't pay Google unless the ads are clicked on. She has only three short lines of 25, 35 and 35 characters each and a link to make her pitch.

'I've learned to speak in 95-character sentences,' she said."

I have a couple of AdWords accounts that I'm managing; the wording could be better. Some people I know
rotate the text a couple of times a week to increase clickthrough. I don't think 100% clickthrough is attainable on any large campaign, but some aim for that. 8-10% is proabably as good as you'll get, overall; but we can always try to push that percentage up.

Seth's Blog: Cookies you can feel good about

Seth's Blog: Cookies you can feel good about: "Cookies you can feel good about
Everything about the packaging is perfect. The matte finish. The old fashioned roll top. The colors and more.


The only problem is that these cookies are no healthier than most of the others on the shelf. The reason to buy them is that they make it easy to lie to yourself when you feed em to your kids.

My Comment: I just posted about Cookies that aren't harmful, from and internet perspective. Now here's some cookies (actual) that are just as
bad for you as the regular products from familar brands.
Is it only my supermarket that is now filled with stuff like this?"

Eric Peterson - Will somebody show me how cookies can be hacked?

Eric Peterson - Will somebody show me how cookies can be hacked?: "I was reading a particularly well-written piece about the cookie issue that I was interviewed and I came across this quote from Richard Stiennon, vice president of 'threat research' for Webroot, talking about his anti-spyware application:

'Now you can be a little more safe that your sexual preferences, your buying habits, your political stuff isn't being tracked by somebody who can ultimately use that information to foist stuff on you.' While the context is not 100% clear, whether Mr. Stiennon is talking about spyware or cookies, but this has come up before, the idea that cookies are easily used to determine the browsing habits (sexual preferences, buying habits, etc.) While I continue to hear rumor of this type of activity I am unable to find a single decent account of A) somebody's cookies being hacked and B) personal information (of any import) being gained."

This is an intresting post. Eric goes on to say "Given the type of activities that some people (not me) engage in on the Internet, activities that would be embarrassing or worse if discovered and reported, you'd think that if this were easy the so-called "cookie hackers" would have already published lists of people's browsing habits. Or perhaps, E! would have a nightly feature on "What's Paris Hilton browsing now!" ... you get the idea."

Sounds like there's alot of misconceptions around cookies and what they do and can be used for.

Yahoo! Mindset

Yahoo! Mindset: "A Yahoo! Research Labs demo that applies a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources)."

I'm going to try out MindSet, Yahoo's new Beta Search Engine. OK, I just did that and it's cool. As I move the slider bar near the top, the search results change. I wonder what algo they are using to determine if the index pages are more buy cycle vs research. What could they possibly be using to decide that? More buy words in the copy?

Enterprise SEM: Its a small world after all ...

Enterprise SEM: Its a small world after all ...: "This week I have been at the IQPC Globalization conference in San Francisco. This was the 11th anniversary of this conference. I spoke at the first conference 11 years ago and there were about 15 attendees and 5 of them were fellow speakers. "

I'm looking forward to Bill Hunt and Mike Moran's new book on Enterprise SEM to be published in
July. Search and Globalization are becoming hot topics and now a lot
of large companies want to jump on board.

Bill said that he was "vindicated" that his predictions in 1994 that "the internet will be the gateway
to global business". Today such a statement seems obvious, though
it did not seem that way in 1994.

I wonder what Bill would say now about what is the next gateway..the next
next thing around the corner.

10 Google Engineers at WebmasterWorld's Conference

10 Google Engineers at WebmasterWorld's Conference: "Brett Tabke is doing an outstanding job driving up the buzz on the upcoming WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans Conference.
(1) He recently secured John Battelle to keynote the event.
(2) He named the most recent Google Update, Bourbon
(3) And now he secured ~10 Google Engineers to answer your questions, specific to Google.
In an unprecedented move, Google is sending a team of engineers to support WebmasterWorld�s World Search Conference, being held in June 21-24, 2005. Conference delegates can get involved in roundtable sessions with the Google engineers on specific subjects of interest. In addition, the event will feature an invitation-only cocktail party where conference delegates can meet the engineers on specific subjects of interest and relevance."


I was pretty impressed by the announcement. I was not planning on going to Webmasterworld in New Orleans but now I'm entertaining it seriously.

Eric Peterson - NetRatings sues Omniture and Coremetrics over JavaScript page tagging

Eric Peterson - NetRatings sues Omniture and Coremetrics over JavaScript page tagging: "Since I am still in information gathering mode over the announced lawsuit between Nielsen/NetRatings and Omniture and Coremetrics I encourge those clients who are concerned about how this litigation could play out to generate inquiry sessions to discuss offline. Needless to say, if Nielsen's claim to the origination and ownership of JavaScript page tagging holds up in court, several companies who are currently looking at the spectre of cookie blocking and deletion as a threat to their business will have bigger and uglier problems.
The patents in question are as follows:
5,675,510

6,108,637

6,115,680

6,763,386"

Hmm.....I did not realize that a company could own "JavaScript page tagging".
Well, if this turns out to be as big a deal as Eric says it was, it will trun out
to be good as it will force the web analytic vendors to come up with
better solutions and a real, viable replacement for the cookie deletionproblem
that's so common now.

RSS Works: Hard RSS Metrics

RSS Works: Hard RSS Metrics: "Custom Reader were great enough to supply us with their latest data, based on 3,500 users of their brandable RSS reader and on the last [two weeks ago] 48 hours of their reader usage.
The most interesting piece of data is the 23% average CTR from feed to site within last 48 hours, which proves that RSS works in terms of getting readers from the outbout message to the site."

Interesting stats....need to take a closer look.

Paper's aim: building blog for success

Paper's aim: building blog for success: "Other newspapers are experimenting with some or many of the same elements � particularly reader blogs � but few if any appear as ambitious or committed as the paper here. The implication for the future is clear � the website, not the print edition, might someday drive the newsroom. Although Robinson downplays this big-picture aspect of his newspaper's plan, others do not.

'There's no question people are watching Greensboro,' said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the journalism blog 'PressThink.' 'What they've succeeded in doing is developing a strategy for the next phase of the daily newspaper.'"


I'm coming up with a strategy for my clients that uses Blogs and RSS feeds to reinforce the message and increase traffic to their sites. I've been a subscriber to JupiterMedia's Analyst Blog for the last month and I'm always checking out interesting stories coming from the Analysts.

I think back to the NYT Press Release last month detailing the impact of RSS feeds on The New York Times , where NYT got 555 million PageViews in March 05; and......

"NYTimes.com's RSS feeds generated 5.9 million pageviews on the site in March, which represents a 342% increase year over year and a 39% increase from February's 4.3 million pageviews. The sections that were most popular among RSS feeds included: Washington and Business. The feeds have been available since February 2002 (www.nytimes.com/rss)"

Pretty impressive when you think about it.

Michael Gartenberg - Google bashing

Michael Gartenberg - Google bashing: "Has anyone noticed that Google bashing has become quite the rage? In many ways it surpasses the stuff the MSFT was subjected to in recent years in the sense that Google is getting taken to task for things it hasn't done, said it will do or given any indication it might someday do in the future. Apple bashing lately seems pretty popular too.
I wonder if the recent share price of either of these companies has anything to do with it?"

I've noticed it too; Google appears to have lost it's edge and the horse and buggy search engine
race has heated up.

SEO DotComicide: Google's Bourbon Hangover

SEO DotComicide: Google's Bourbon Hangover: "Funny thing happened when I did a regular search for Adsense on Google so I could check my channel tracking, I ended up in the 72.14.207.104 data center, where I saw this:





When has a Google page ever been beaten by another site, let alone by someone that is redirecting to the regular Google Adsense page with a meta refresh."

Never had an issue like this before but it sounds interesting.

New Local Search Technology Company Prepares for Launch

New Local Search Technology Company Prepares for Launch: " A new local search technology provider based in Denver that plans to fully launch by the end of 2005. One of the people behind the new company is Perry Evans, who was the founder of a company you might have heard of, MapQuest. (-:
To create Local Matters, Aptas is merging with Information Services Extended, a Florida-based information search and directory assistance company; and YP Solutions, a Louisiana firm that helps phone book publishers put their data on the Internet. Local Matters will sell its software and services to telecom carriers, Yellow Page publishers and others. The company, which employs more than 140, said it has lined up more than 40 companies in 18 countries. Aside from Dex Media and SBC Communications, other U.S. customers include Sprint and Yellow Pages publisher R.H. Donnelley.
I haven't used the Local Matters technology yet but another member of the SEW team, Chris Sherman, is quoted in the article saying that Local Matters is, 'taking local search to the next level.'"


I've done some work on Local Seach Optimization, namely with www.acisco.com and wrote a proposal for it on my website that anyone can download (I think I must of wrote the first local search optimization proposal because I could not find one last year, when I wrote it).

If a company can improve on what's alreadly out there (ie: ReachLocal seemed to have some pretty impressive offerings last year at SES and WebMasterWorld, where I came accross them).

But I also read the JupiterMedia study on the limitations on Local Search, and how people were mainly looking for a dentist, doctor, etc, and not using it overall. Tracking was an issue also, and that's always an issue. It's like tracking multi-channel conversions.

Seth's Blog: Telling a story with a picture

Seth's Blog: Telling a story with a picture: "The idea being sold is raw food, but the picture instantly tells a story that is far more effective than the words could ever be. Yes that's the same person, less than two years later."

Pretty cool! I think everything in Seth's blog is something I ought to read atleast
once.

Seth's Blog: A letter from Kentucky

Seth's Blog: A letter from Kentucky: "The takeaway here is that if your target audience isn't listening, it's not their fault, it's yours. If one story isn't working, change what you do, not how loudly you yell (or whine). Nice work, Jeff."


I found this entry in Seth's blog pretty interesting and got me thinking. I think I'll go back and read it again.

Secret of Rankings

I have a couple of clients that run house plans sites and I'm doing their optimization, linking strategy and Blog/RSS feeds.

While doing the site analysis for my newest client, I went over the all of the top 10 sites in Google that are ranking for "house plans" and "home plans". And then I noticed something that was staring me in the face.

Every one of the first 6 sites ranking in Google had, essentially, their site map on the home page. In other words, if your a house plans site....you like to all your house plans off your home page. This tended to make the site more relevent in terms of internal linking (because the links went from the home page to a particular house plan lower level page and it upped the on-page factors. Many of the sites in the top 20, over all (probably more than half) used this strategy.

The Syndicate Conference Wrap-up

The Syndicate Conference Wrap-up

I followed this conference, which took place in NYC, by subscribing to the blog associated with the event. Actually, I wanted to go but suspected
that there would be more fluff than substance. And sure enough, that's
what Rok Hrastnik, more or less, said, in post I link to above.

Most of the conferences I have gone to for the last 2 years - I haven't
really seen much change in what people were talking about, and in
many cases, the same presentations are given by the same speakers.

True, RSS and Blogs have been a much bigger part of the Search Engine
Strategies conferences than they were last year.

And Rok is right...where were the case studies, metrics analysis stuff..
the "real stuff" at this conference? What was at this conference were
people you'd want to meet and network with.

NY Times Sees Blogs as Affiliates � MarketingVOX

NY Times Sees Blogs as Affiliates � MarketingVOX: "Once it institutes paid subscriptions for some of its most popular online content, the New York Times will likely turn to bloggers as affiliate marketers to help generate revenue, writes ClickZ, quoting The Times's senior VP of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz. The new NYTimes.com financial model will also consider a restructuring of site and content, including RSS feeds, to take advantage of the 'trend to unbundle from the container.'"

According to a report of yesterday's keynote from the Syndicate! confrerence:
Once it institutes paid subscriptions for some of its most popular online content, the New York Times will likely turn to bloggers as affiliate marketers to help generate revenue, writes ClickZ, quoting The Times's senior VP of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz. The new NYTimes.com financial model will also consider a restructuring of site and content, including RSS feeds, to take advantage of the "trend to unbundle from the container."

That's going to be interesting to see.

Proposition from an Indian ad-clicker - Tim Yang's Geek Blog

Proposition from an Indian ad-clicker - Tim Yang's Geek Blog

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-654822,curpg-1.cms

I have often thought that Local Search targeting would help with click fraud; making it harder for India's secret army of online ad clickers to see your ad.

PageRank, Wrappers, Ranking News and More: Papers from the WWW 2005 Conference

PageRank, Wrappers, Ranking News and More: Papers from the WWW 2005 Conference

I want to read every one of these papers though I don't know if I'll ever get around to it. It takes alot of patience to read scientific papers, they tend to be pretty dry and obtuse.