tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69164002009-02-20T23:21:46.397-06:00News and Information about SEO, Search Engines and Affiliate Marketing.patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1125675437394292442005-09-02T09:48:00.000-05:002006-11-22T04:09:33.653-06:00

A few days ago I noticed that the Yahoo home page had changed:If you notice, suddenly there's a "Start on Yahoo" link to the left of their logo. Put this in combination with the news about the Yahoo Instant Messenger "upgrade" which takes a page straight out of the spyware creators, and forces the installation of the Yahoo search bar, changes the default search and home page, and scans your IM

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1124894192064654482005-08-24T09:14:00.000-05:002005-08-24T09:43:16.076-05:00

With the launch of Google Talk, Google has simultaneously jumped into the instant messaging and VOIP marketplace.With a slick, simple signature Google style interface - it is a nice-looking, unobtrusive piece of software. It even includes the GMail notifier, which means that you aren't adding another program to your start-up list so much as switching one for another.The one feature I can't test

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1124715244426514852005-08-22T07:23:00.000-05:002005-08-22T09:05:56.380-05:00

Google has rethought their desktop search tool and attempted to create an all-around useful tool, called Google Sidebar.The new Sidebar integrates a RSS reader, new mail notifier (works with Gmail and Outlook), custom weather, custom news headlines, custom stocks, image search, and Quick view - a list of frequently viewed documents and files, and, perhaps, the handiest feature - a little scratch

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1124596395838983932005-08-20T22:41:00.000-05:002005-08-20T23:01:34.163-05:00

Google definitely seems to be shuffling out a new index, and some of the changes seen in Google Update Bourbon seem to have been rolled back.The main thing I've noticed so far is that one of my sites that has had a double listing for years, and lost it in Bourbon has suddenly shown up in its serps with a double listing again.Since this is the 3rd Google update of 2005, (the previous two were

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1124163860079039802005-08-15T22:51:00.000-05:002007-03-08T11:50:52.410-06:00

Recently Yahoo announced that their index now contained over 20 billion "web objects", specifically 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files.At first this number was blithely accepted, but within hours, the impact began to sink in... 20 billion is a lot, and far outstrips Google's current claim of 8,168,684,336 web pages. Google pushed past the 8

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1123949178265777892005-08-13T09:29:00.000-05:002005-08-13T19:10:51.740-05:00

There have been suspicions for months that Yahoo has been hand-editing results for competitive search terms, however I recently stumbled across a pair of search terms that essentially prove that these suspicions have foundation.When searching for a particular popular commerical single word search term (over 400K searches a month, according to the Overture keyword tool) and a two-word related term

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1123711881151761442005-08-10T16:51:00.000-05:002005-08-12T00:01:34.373-05:00

If you attend the Search conferences like Webmaster World's Pubcon, chances are you've met Matt Cutts, one of Google's principal software engineers.He is not only a nice guy that always has a moment to listen to a webmaster's problems, he's now started his own blog where he has promised to publish some of his most frequently asked questions.I think it's a good thing when a company like Google has

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1123091488648958542005-08-03T12:51:00.000-05:002005-08-05T09:09:22.423-05:00

With 3 major news stories in this week, one on the imminent launch of Yahoo's contextual advertising program and then today's news about MSN's paid search program, and finally the announcement of Ask Jeeve's CPC program, it's obvious that everyone is gunning for a slice of Google's advertising pie.What will Yahoo Publisher Network, a competing contextual advertising program, do to Google's

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1123006062172815822005-08-02T12:58:00.000-05:002005-08-03T17:39:23.636-05:00

Martinibuster recently made an interesting post in his blog: Scraper Sites are Good for You - Surrender Your Content. I've pretty much been on the same side - as far as I am concerned, scrapers are just another free link to my site. The latest Yahoo update and a mini-update at Google both seem to be targeting the oft-maligned "scraper" sites.We know that Google is definitely targeting the

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1121706270146805922005-07-18T11:47:00.000-05:002005-07-19T12:44:29.093-05:00

I was an early Orkut invitee. I tried it out, invited a few people, and even founded the "Mexico" community.But these online social networks aren't really for me. I got bored and eventually stopped logging in.One of my friends (stuntdubl) mentioned that he had been amused by my recent change I had made to another community that I founded that he was a member of. I hadn't logged in for at least 3

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1120598974484596202005-07-05T16:08:00.000-05:002005-07-09T13:36:45.186-05:00

I had to send in my Dell laptop for service, and had the "pleasure" to be helped by Dell's crack team of outsourced techs in India.So far I've spoken with "Steve", "Paul", "Mark", "Sharma" and "Nikita" (who all spoke with Indian accents), honestly, all in all, just fine for answering general questions. However, I apparently threw the call center techs for a loop by using a different city and

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1119855842044243442005-06-29T01:28:00.000-05:002005-06-30T00:06:22.620-05:00

Storytime at Dotcomicide.About 150 years ago, just about anything liquid that was worth saving in a bottle was stoppered with a cork. This of course, lead to the existence of a few very powerful cork distributorships.The easiest way to sort the corks was to dump them all into a nearby lake, at one point their were about 8 billion of them, bobbing this way and that, just waiting to be plugged into

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1118168660550995322005-06-07T12:37:00.000-05:002005-06-07T13:27:20.306-05:00

Are people tired of outsourcing? While checking the logs for one of my new sites, a directory of web designers - I was amused see this entry:In general, you can certainly get a website done cheap by getting it from India or what have you, but there is a definite disadvantage when you divorce the optimization from the planning of a website.From what I've seen the bulk of the outsourcing companies

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1118092524227634362005-06-06T14:44:00.000-05:002005-06-06T16:15:24.270-05:00

SearchEngineWatch.com is arguably one of the foremost sites in the biz - so why are their forums so bad?I am not talking about their members, or the content - but the forum's design leaves a whole lot to be desired.1) Hard to Navigate - too much clutter - and the navigation is not intuitive.2) Not search engine friendly: SEW's forum URLs are a tangle of parameters that could be easily

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1118032254869932302005-06-05T22:54:00.000-05:002005-06-05T23:30:54.886-05:00

As Bourbon heads towards its final hours, some interesting side effects are surfacing.Right now, Google seems to have the authority knob turned to 11. A good example is a google search for "adsense".If you notice, Slashdot is currently ranking #4 for adsense, in fact, the article that is ranking is the discussion of the recent AdSense URL hijacking.There are several other examples of this -

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117735840519749872005-06-02T11:45:00.000-05:002005-06-02T13:28:44.120-05:00

Webmasterworld is currently hosting a Questions for Googleguy thread, as well as a Googleguy only thread where he answers select questions that were brought up in the lengthy Google Bourbon update threads at WW.Highlights so far include:Googleguy reminds people again that Bourbon is only "halfway through".He suggests that Googlebot pretty much ignores any page with "&id=" in its URL - this is

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117655095507261032005-06-01T13:00:00.000-05:002005-06-01T17:21:36.996-05:00

According to this post (msg 422) by GoogleGuy on the Webmaster World forum, the Bourbon update was set to implement "3.5 improvements in search quality", some of which have yet to be implemented.He also goes on to say that the ".5" change is slated to go into effect today, with another major change planned for later this week, after which the usual tweaking / adjustments will take place.This is

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117591430801622212005-05-31T17:56:00.000-05:002005-06-09T14:13:11.730-05:00

With the recent closing of the Open Directory Project's Status Check Forum, search engine experts like Danny Sullivan have suggested that perhaps it's time to change their name to the Closed Directory Project.Transparency issues aside, the ODP (aka DMOZ) has gone through some rocky times, ironically its fate tied to Google's decision in 2000 to mirror the ODP's content on their

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117393936450728902005-05-29T11:37:00.000-05:002005-06-09T09:35:09.226-05:00

The Bourbon update started around May 20th, 2005, and 10 days later has yet to settle down. This officially makes it the second longest update since Florida which lasted almost 20 days.What has Bourbon filter/algo adjustment gone after? So far it looks like:Non-thematic LinkingDuplicate Content*Fraternal LinkingRun of Site LinksLow Quality Reciprocal Links* Google Bourbon seems to have screwed up

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117299762781962942005-05-28T11:54:00.000-05:002005-05-28T13:04:56.323-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, Google's cached pages servers went down, shortly thereafter, all pages stopped displaying PageRank ™ - which, according to Google, is "the heart of our software".Dozens of worried webmasters, fearful that their "green fix" was gone and would never come back, posted on forums like WebmasterWorld, to express their anxiety at not seeing Page Rank on their indicator bar in a

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117228029255167312005-05-27T15:45:00.000-05:002005-05-30T23:46:12.443-05:00

The Google version of the Open Directory - DMOZ.org - has always "lived" at directory.google.com, which is why I was surprised to notice today that Google has in fact duplicated its directory contents via the WWW subdomain:A google search for site:directory.google.com yields approximately 1,300,000 results while site:www.google.com/Top/ pulls up a respectable 995,000 pages.Recent speculation has

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117149056655170362005-05-26T18:10:00.000-05:002005-05-26T18:16:24.166-05:00

The new BitTorrent Search is live and is showing Google contextual advertising syndicated through Ask Jeeves.As I predicted in an earlier post, Jeeves Embraces Piracy To Expand Reach, a search for "star wars" pulls up over 100 different download options for the latest Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith.Advertisers for this term include the Washington Post. I believe that this site is in direct

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117047675187817022005-05-25T13:42:00.000-05:002005-05-25T14:05:38.063-05:00

According to The Street, Ask has announced plans to provide contextual advertising for the upcoming Bit Torrent search engine.Currently Jeeves is syndicating Ads from Google on its properties - and it is assumed that they will start showing Adwords advertisers on these searches.Imagine, sites like starwars.com can have their ads shown contextually right next to the link to download the pirated

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1117041022309527532005-05-25T11:31:00.000-05:002005-05-25T12:21:08.496-05:00

When I broke the story about the adsense URL hijacking, I posted the news, in a number of prominent forums in order to get the word out.This lead to getting additional stories on several prominent blogs, every one of them credited me as the source for the original story... with the exception of one - Mike's List (I am not linking to it).Mike Elgan, proprietor of mikeslist.com has not only omitted

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6916400.post-1116904431218304782005-05-23T22:12:00.000-05:002005-05-30T09:43:49.060-05:00

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.Using this bug, someone could be #1 in Google for Yahoo, #1 for, well,

patrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12651711969624595442noreply@blogger.com5