+ The pulse of the search marketing community

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 4, 2008"

I thought I post this week's video recap on July 4th, because it is a special day. Happy July 4th Americans! In this week's video I show off the various July 4th logos from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and other sites. I discuss the recent "cloaking" debate. I then get into the various changes at Google, Google UK and even over at Yahoo. Then I discuss the news that Google and Yahoo are indexing Flash files. Google dropped the referrals system for DoubleClick's affiliate network. Google's content removal tool should be used correctly. Did Google lose to Viacom and is this a loss for our privacy? Don't forget to secure your brands on social networking sites. Finally, I hit 4 shots and missed five, so congrats to the winner and don't forget, you can win by listening and commenting at SERoundtable.com!

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Happy July 4th from the Search Industry & JohnMu of Google Takes Break
• Give It Up
• Google Retraction: Blocking Regions Is Not Cloaking
• Updated: Google Says Blocking Countries Outside of the US is Against Policies
• Webmasters Report July 2008 Google SERP Changes
• Webmasters Report July 2008 Google.co.uk SERP Changes
• Google UK Filled with Aussi Sites?
• Yahoo's June Search Update Goes Unnoticed, For Now
• Google & Yahoo Begins to Index Some Flash Files (SWF Files)
• Predicted: Google Drops PPA Program, AdSense Referrals & Adds DoubleClick Affiliate Network
• Google's Content Removal Tool Is Not HTTPS or WWW Specific
• Google Ordered By Court to Turn Over YouTube Records
• Secure Your Brand Name on Social Sites

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

I may not be able to mail schwag outside of the United States.

Happy July 4th my American friends! While most of you are sleeping in, having BBQs, or enjoying the day, the Search Engine Roundtable authors are still keeping you abreast of what's new in the search world. So take a look in case you missed out this week!

July 4th in the Search Industry

Today is America's Independence day. And guess what? A lot of search engines and other sites actually participated in redesigning their logos for the party. Dogpile must've forgotten, but all other expected search engines (including Ask!) participated.

Give It Up Released

We covered SMX Advanced 2008's Give It Up last month, and now it's live for your viewing and learning pleasure. Enjoy it while it's up on the interwebs. :) It's dangerous information!

Blocking Countries is NOT Cloaking

Google initially made a statement that said that blocking regions is considered cloaking. However, they rectified their statement to say that it's not cloaking, and if you block the entire country of China, for example, it's actually called geolocation. JohnMu who made the original post retracted his statement and all is well. If Googlebot sees the same things that regular visitors see in a particular region, you're doing just fine.

Google SERPs Findings for Google.co.uk

Every month, we report on Google SERP observations from webmasters -- fluctuations in rankings, loss of rankings entirely, strange results in the search results, and more. We started reporting Google.co.uk SERP results as well after realizing it's not the same as Google.com and there are different algorithms driving the results. In fact, we reported a day later that there are a number of Australia TLDs on page one of the Google.co.uk SERPs, which is a bit strange.

Yahoo Makes Search Update, Nobody Notices

This week, Yahoo changed its search algorithm and alerted us to the possibility of reshuffling and different results. But after the change was supposedly implemented, there was silence. I guess they didn't change much.

Your Flash Files May Start Getting Indexed

Got contextual content in your SWF file? The search engines may start to crawl them. Your SWF files are safe as long as they have textual elements, but your FLV files won't be crawlable. Either way, it's a huge step forward for anyone who has a flash-heavy site--as long as there's text!

Google Folds PPA Program, Starts DoubleClick Affiliate Network

Results on the Google Pay Per Action program must have been dismal enough to cause Google to fold the entire program. But that doesn't mean that there's no hope for you. Google has started a DoubleClick Affiliate Network.

Google's Content Removal Tool is Not Specific to HTTPS/WWW

If you ever remove content from Google Webmaster Tools because you think it's a duplicate page (e.g. https://mydomain.com/blah.html versus http://mydomain.com/blah.html) be advised that you will be removing the entire page off search results. Google's removal tool is not prefix-specific. Be forewarned.

YouTube to Violate Privacy as Ordered by US Judge

A judge who I think doesn't really understand the Internet has ordered Google to turn records of YouTube users over to Viacom in a move that has incensed much of the internet community. Hopefully Google will win an appeals on this!

Secure Your Name Brand -- Fast!

If you have a company name that you want to keep clean, secure it on social networking sites before others do it for you. It's for your own safety.

Have a happy holiday weekend!

Happy July 4th everyone! We have special logos and themes from across the search industry, including a special logo from Google, Yahoo and even a pretty neat theme from us, the Search Engine Roundtable.

Here is the logo from Google:

Here is the outstanding Yahoo Flash logo:

Ask.com's look:

MSN actually added some July 4th love:

Dogpile does not have a logo today, I am honestly shocked! They rocked it out the past years.

In any event, here are the logos from the various search marketing sites, including ours:

Here is PPC Hero:

Cre8asite Forums (logo might not be live yet):

Happy July 4th & Enjoy the Day! For a look at the past July 4th logos, see 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004.

Another tidbit of news is that John Mueller of Google, one of the hardest working people at Google, is taking a much deserved vacation. He announced his vacation at Google Groups on July 4th, saying he will be off until July 21st. Here is his message:

Hi everyone & happy 4th of July for those celebrating!

It's that time of year again, the kids are all fidgety and can't wait to get away from it all. I'll be off on vacation until July 21, when I hope to be back with fully charged batteries (thanks to solar energy :-))!

Lots of Googlers are still watching over the groups, and I'm glad that we have so many people regularly active here (thanks, everyone!!) that I know things will run smoothly.

See you all again soon!

John, enjoy the much deserved time off, we will miss you and come back soon!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Jill Whalen (whose birthday is today -- wish her a happy one!) wrote a very logical article at High Rankings about the problem of SEO plagiarism. She explains that numerous not-so-established SEO types are regurgitating a lot of articles online and just switching up a few words, probably so that they can look smart. It's not so much the same as copyright infringement because of the fact that it's not a word-for-word regurgitation; instead, content is made to look original by making a few edits and calling it a day.

Jill ends her post by saying that the people who will succeed at writing articles (in the SEO world, but this is really true for any discipline) are those who can think for themselves and put their own original thoughts into writing. It's not about finding news somewhere else and then saying, "Oh, I can write this too and have my friends vote upon my content on Sphinn," which she alludes to in the article. (A few people have done that in the past.)

Jill is not sure whether to fault the education system for this behavior, but High Rankings Forums member Orpheus Descending actually does feel that this has something to do with lack of education in some areas. She explains that when working with students in a college level, 30% of a class of 70 were caught plagiarizing, and it was because they didn't know better. The internet makes it easier to do but not to think. And most of these people are ignorant.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum and Sphinn.

Do you reside in the US or Canada? Do you want to improve Google Maps? Google is looking for volunteers for a study which would involve you either going to Google's offices (if you're able), performing a study online, having a Google rep visit you, or by filling out an online survey. The actual study itself isn't exactly explained, but if you're interested, the URL to register and be considered for participation is:

https://survey.google.com/wix/p0822776.aspx?referral_code=MAPS1

Google says that qualified participants may be able to earn up to $100.

If you've taken the initial survey like this before, it's relatively long. Google asks about your usage of software products, business habits, and more. It should take 10-20 minutes. But in the end, you may end up getting an extra $100 if Google likes you enough to pick you from the crowd. :)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: July 3, 2008"

This is conference coverage of the Search Marketing Expo Advanced 2008 event. There was an "embargo" on releasing these session notes until this time. Enjoy these outstanding SEO tips.

Give It Up! - No more secrets time. In this session, our panel of noted SEOs all share some of their favorite and largely overlooked SEO tips. Then we turn to the audience for more sharing. Attendees vow not to blog what's discussed for the now traditional 30 day waiting period. Search reps in the audience agree to a 30 day delay in fixing any loopholes, too -- or give up their own secret.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink

Speakers:

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz
Todd Friesen, Vice President Search Strategies, Visible Technologies
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Rob Kerry, Head of Search, Ayima Search Marketing
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
Marty Weintraub, a guy from Duluth and an aimclear.com blogger

I'm on embargo. 1PM PST on July 3rd.

Danny says that there aren't women on this panel. He is going to kick out three guys next time.

Stephan Spencer talks about conditional redirects. He says he doesn't want you to do conditional redirects if you have an affiliate programs. Do unconditional redirects, especially Amazon.

He is sharing a Link Ninja tool that they've had for a few years.
- Underlying principles
* the 80/20 rule that there's high value links that drive a lot of value
* Logarathmic nature of PageRank
* Thus PR8 and PR9 and PR10 are highly desirable
* Topically relevant
* .edu and .org

Google Directly Mining Tool - spider the google directory - directory.google.com - google's robots.txt allows it.
- Extract site name, URL, pagerank, and dump into a database. Mine this database via web interface to look for sites with super high PR by category and TLD. Optionally collect supplemnt info in a second pass (site age, TBPR, link neighborhood, monetization, present of attribution links, paid links, export to TSV file).
He shows how it works and gets a full report for the TBPR and populating a spreadsheet with all of this. He shows sample output with all the cool data.

Other ideas and methodologies:
- Proxy server based SEO - use a server as a middleman when you have a complex inflexible CMS e-commerce platform that you can't make changes to. You can have sitewite rules and page specific rules. Think scalable SEO and automation. Page-specific rules are best done through an admin interface or bulk upload.
On top of that, add thin slicing. Think "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. Overthinking can be detrimental. Make quick decisions. It only really works if you're an expert.
e.g. hand optimize title tags across hundreds of page quickly (prioritized)
Focus on title tags, H1s, URLs
Don't obsess and you don't have to be perfect. Iterate instead.
If you don't have an admin interface, use a spreadsheet and import.
There's an SEO title tag plugin that has thin slicing.

Optimize URLs in an interative format. URL affects searcher clickthrough rates. Better URLs = shorter ones get more clicks. Iterative testing and optimization would be cool. You can do that with WordPress. If you change a post slug, the WordPress core automatically does a 301 redirect from the previous slug. You won't lose juice from that. He explains that you can mass-edit your URLs using the SEO Title tag plugin.

Marty Weintraub has 62 slides. Danny is afraid that this is too long. In 7.5 minutes? GOOD LUCK.

Three favorite overlooked SEO topics - defensible.

Fool's Gold Link Exchange.
- reciprocal link exchange -
Clients understand reciprocal link exchanges. We nofollow everything. It's not a link exchange anymore. Some people have no idea that your authority juice is or the traffic and promotion value. They don't know what link farms are and they don't know about sculpting. Why do this? Clients understand it. SEMs want devasting unique 1-way link strategies. The opportunity - links trading partners don't understand the basic pathology of links. We send this to our clients and tell them to send it to their link trading partners.
- Unless website marketing amateurs study or hire and experienced natural search agency, they simply don't know enough!
Ethics of this is in the privacy policy - it's for branding, traffic, site referral purposes. At our sole discretion, sites will have nofollow!
- Clients dance the link exchange hootenanny. Trading partners perceive holistic reciprocal promotion and traffic. It's highly effective for local SEO. The true spirit of social community. Invite 70 direct competitors - highly relevant links. The client gets all the link juice. Stagger your delivery and put it in your privacy policy so that Matt doesn't get you one day.

Nested iFrame Community Crawler
- Automated browser crawl of targeted communities. (MyBlogLog)
- We automate a browser crawl in targeted communities. LEave ambasssador's MBL and other community bread crumb badges behind. You're vanity baiting targeted authority community members. They see your avatar day after day.
- StumbleUpon, Sphinn, MBL
Tactic: research vanity bait topics (alltop, technorati, Google blog search) - make a bigass list of all your friends. Log into all the services. It crawls all the site every second.
Ethics: we make clients participate in the communities that they're active in. Ignore web developer and other plugin so that people don't know where it came from.

Persona SEO with social media profiles.
Why SEO? Great SEO comes from frequent participation. Worthy content will result in friends, buzz, and SEO, links.
Close cousin to the sphinn scrape-all-users and auto-add-all-users as friends tool.

Using social media profiles, it's distributed interior linking. Friend, join groups, that creates a massive anchor text to your profile and if leveraged, it can be very powerful and defensive and offensive reputation management.

Authentic participation and hard work. It works for competitive niche keywords. Serious forethought is needed.

Keyword: soy candles. It's 65% difficulty in Rand's tool. The profile is a 51 year old female chick. There is a legitimate reason for this avatar to exist. She's a world class photographer, a 90s Prodigy instructor at NYU (she's bookmarking a lot of content!). She's totally hot. Persona blogging is twisted and brings oodles of traffic. We know she's bisexual and participates in monthly Lesbian poetry slams in Denver.
- Don't forget to optimize that soy candle picture on flickr!

Next up is Michael Gray: how to beat the Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score.
- Search engines - stop trying to be a moral compass. Stop sidestepping the questions.

Landing page quality score is a lie. Landing page quality score algo has nothing to do with your landing page. It looks at organic factors. The better organic rankings, the better your quality score.

He shows the methodology to do this. Campaign - sanjia ringtones
- He ran it for $10.00.
- Landing page is a standard page.
- He ran another one for $0.75
- Landing page is identical.

What's the difference?
All of these campaigns were in the identical account. Keywords were identical. Ad copy identical. Landing page - identical.
The difference? The domain name was different. Domain from 2006 was $10 and the 2008 domain was $0.75. It's not just the domain age. They're looking at the number of trusted links over a period of time. You need to prove to Google that you're trustworthy and need to do that over a specified period of time. It will go up to $10 if you don't get those links.

The quality score goes through iterations - just like the sandbox.

George Bush does not sell ringtones (yet). You're not looking at the landing page if you believe that.
- Main factor - organic stores
- Trusted sites have low pricing because they're good
- Nontrusted sites are bad and have high pricing
- New or unknown pricing - unknown and unknown pricing.

As Google updates its organic trust rank every few months based on link data. Unknown sites move into trusted or nontrusted categories.
If your website moves into a non trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all keywords.
Lather, rinse, repeat

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data you give to Google through toolbar, email, analytics - you're giving it to Google and it can be used against you in a court of Google. Think twice before you give them what you give them.

Rob Kerry is next. He's a white hat green hat monkey. But he says that some people will see this as black hat. These aren't ideas you should use on non-brand sites.

1. Microsite creation: creating many anonymous sites which appear as third party links. Independent websites that link to your main site.
- Benefits: complete control of inbound links, control and manage anchor text, often cheaper than buying links, sell links to non-competing sites.
To do this, get free/cheap hosting and domain names. Avoid .infos but because everyone sees them as spammy and duplicate class C class ranges - different hosting networks to be more independent. Choose a CMS like WordPress. Roll out content. Link over to the main site once aged.
Don't: use the same whois data, register domains on the same day/week, get links from the same places, use the same content on different blogs, and use the same templates and linking structure.

2. Automated content - generate unique content using software.
Mikkel deMib Svennson introduced us to Markov Chains last year at Give It Up!
- it uses a mathematical equation to create unlimited content from a single source.
- downside is it's hard to perfect and the content produced doesn't pass human review
Also, multi-souce sentence arrays. Write original piece of content. Rewrite each sentence 5 times. Each must be unique but say the same thing.
Variant 1: Link development is the process of attaining links to a website in order to increase the site's perceived value and popularity.
Variant 2; Increasing a website's perceived importance and popularity through the acquisition of inbound liks is called Link Development.

If you're not a coder, get someone off elance or a Russian. They're usually very Good. You can get someone to explode sentences to big arrays as variables. Randomly pick one sentence, then the second one, then the third, etc. The result is 6 articles with 25 sentneces that turns into 28 quintillion articles according to Yahoo answers (6^25). You still can get quite a bit of content.
Benefits:
It passes human review because it makes sense. It's always sentence 1, sentence 2, sentence 3, and it looks unique. It's the fraction of the cost of copywriters. You can distribute articles across your microsite network. Submit content to every article directory with embedded links and offers the unique content to other sites in exchange for links (they'll think it's unique content).
This is white hat, isn't it? It is, because content is king!

Issues: not all generated articles will pass dupe tests. Full sentences can leave a fooprint
- So use CopyScape to check before publishing articles. Randomize words within sentences - "don't" is "do not", "pub" is "bar", etc. Then you'll have more than 28 quintillion articles.

3. On topic spamming. Auto post comments and trackbacks to blogs and guestbooks that relate to your site. This isn't really spamming. It's a time saving device for Rob. He uses technology to use exactly what he'd do but he's not as fast as a computer.
- Useful for getting links into your network of microsites. Free links for affiliate sites. Rank for long tail terms. Increase site visibility.
e.g. target the term "red wine." Run precise searches on Google and Yahoo (site:.edu +comment + "red wine" + "you must log"]
- scrape all URLs from comments. Create an array of comments to post - "I'm still trying to find good red wine. Can you help me find good California Red wine?"
- Get your coder to create bot to auto post comments to the blogs
- Use your target term as your name, which will form anchor text in the comment.
Benefits:
It looks human, massive success rate, even passes through pre moderation, nany blogs still don't nofollow comments or trackback list. Yahoo and MSN still have problems handling nofollow.

Todd Friesen is up next. He has a cool website called traintalkwithtodd.com where he posts his Twitter messages.

- Old blogs - this is one that he's had success with. Go and find old blogs on blogspot or Wordpress (better on blogspot, though, because you can find ones that haven't been updated but they rank for keywords that drive you nuts). You look at the profile page. He might have a hotmail address too. Hotmail addresses get recycled to public domain if they don't check it. Request the login credentials. Then go back to the blog - get the password sent to you, and now you own the blog.

- What about hotlinking images? If you hate that, you can fix that bastard. Make it a pornstar picture. Or say "XYZ is a thief." If someone links to your images, that's a link to your image. Pop open that .htaccess file and 301 that image link to wherever you want.

- Todd isn't a social media guy but he has these ideas about what you can do with Digg. You have a great domain that has hit the front page of Digg but you can't use it anymore because Digg has banned you. YOu can't get unbanned. What do you do? Scrape content - put the list of funny things and throw it on a new domain and submit it to Digg, call your Digg army, wait for the fervor to die down. Then redirect off of it.

- Custom 404 pages. Why do you use custom 404 pages? You've had a product go out of stock or whatever so you put up this 404 page. Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL will take you out of the index. But people may link to that page - why would you put up a 404? 301 that one level up. 301 it to an associated product instead then! Custom 404s - why would you ever want a page taken off the internet if there were links to it? You can recover from it but you should still do related pages.

- Reputation management is important. Help clients hide skeletons in closets and clean up messes. Occasionally, the sites you're monitoring on a regular basis goes down for a few days. He's not advocating DDOS attacks. Monitor sites in the space. The second you get an email that a page is down, use the Google removal tool so that Google can remove it (for at least 6 months to the date). It buys you 6 months of time to get positive content.

- DaveN suggested this: Google bowling is alive and well. Because different link brokers moved from sponsored links to inline linking, his theory is that there's a filter that looks for too many new links from old blogs that are tied together so they can knock sites out. Say you have an old network of 40 blogs; add a link to a site you want to knock down in the search results.

Rand Fishkin is up last. He has 58 slides.

- Searching for links
Less common query operators. Use the related: tag. Find out who your competitors are related to with the related: tag. Top ranking sites. These are sites to get links from even if they're not directly related.
intitle: search. The intitle: results are very different. Go across playing fields. They've earned the ability to be there but not the trust to be there.
inurl:
intext: intext is crap. It doesn't work.
inanchor:
The last 2 are broken, he thinks.
allintitle, allinurl, allintext, allinanchor (last 2 not working)
Do wildcard searches (everybody likes *) - what's very popular? When you plug in a product search (dell desktop *), you can see what people are typing in and using as their keywords - good competitive keyword analysis.
Temporal searching - you don't have to obey the little dropdown. You can modify the query in the string - as_qdr=d43

Linkfromdomain: only offered by MSN/Live Search - what domains are linked to from a given domain
ip: tool to see who is linked where. They set their DNS to resolve to Google's address.

Competitive link searches - Yahoo! Site Explorer. Append a parameter - yahoo will show you links through their regular search interface. link: inanchor: works there

Google blog search - accurate link data at Google. Literally see

Exalead - link: operator - order of importance.

Alexa also shows links, as does Technorati.

linkdomain:zzzz. region:europe - great for geotargeting.

Experiments in advanced queries - linkfromdomain: + linkdomain: - or linkfromdomain: + site:

Pages in order of importance www site:yourdomain.org.

Brand mentions with no links "seomoz -linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org"

Linkingto multiple competitors but not yoursite linkdomain:seobook.com linkdomain:searchengineland.com

COmpetitor Domain and Add URL searches - "bruceclay.com" "add URL" -site

Keyword + inURL directory

Tracking manual link building efforts - use a unique word while conducting manual link building and track progress through engines.

- Google local ranking tips - in order of importance
1. Registration with Google Local
2. Perceived closeness to center of city
3. Number of local reviews
4. "Local" link popularity
5. Local phone number
6. Participation in the online menu services - Zagat, menupix, menupages, allmenus
7. Quality of local reviews
8. city name inclusion in anchor text
9. Local non-Google directory listings. Gayot, Zagat, citysearch, lilaguide, superpages, Yelp
10. Keyword in the business name
11. Domain authority
12. Address inclusion on webpages

- Reputation tracking techniques
Google Temporal Web Search - do a search for "seomoz" within last 24 hours
Google blog search
Google links Search
Google news search
Summize Twitter search

Obligatory black hat slide: Google bowling - point the DNS of your banned sites so they fall out of the index pretty darn fast.

Donna Burnett gives a tip:
- Google has this wonderful site tool and part of their AdWords - doing keyword research, type in a keyword into Google, then grab the URL out of Google, go to the site tool and put that URL into the tool - it spans every keyword possible in the search results. It works great.

Some guy gets up:
- Local is frustrating, he says. He was flamed for being inept. Use categorization from superpages and disable Google categories. If the categories don't work well for you, disable the categories completely and use Superpages. Went completely unlisted to the top of Google in about 10 pages.

Yesterday, we reported that Google's John Mueller said that if you block a whole region from accessing your site, it would be considered cloaking and thus be against Google's Webmaster guidelines.

Since then, we have seen many comments on that coverage, including lots of discussion across dozens of forums. The discussion was not positive and they called this policy, simply, outright wrong. Well, you are all right. Google has retracted that statement.

John said at the Google Groups thread:

After a bit of double-checking, I have a clarification where I was mistaken. Sorry about the confusion!

The important part is that you do not treat the Googlebots any different than other users from that region. So if your site blocks users in the region where the Googlebot comes from (based on the IP address and your IP/Location lookups), you should be blocking it as well. Blocking users outside of the Googlebot's region would generally
be ok.

For more questions, feel free to post here, thanks!

That is alright John, we all make mistakes. At least you gave us something to get excited about. :)

Google also gave us a general statement on this saying, "As long as the web server always blocks IPs from (say) Africa, it's not doing anything special/different for Googlebot, and so it wouldn't be considered cloaking, but geolocation instead."

Then Matt Cutts of Google commented at the Sphinn thread explaining why Googlers can make mistakes:

The downside of doing a lot more talking to webmasters and site owners is that sometimes we'll misspeak, but I'd much rather have that problem and sometimes need to clarify than not be talking to webmasters as much.

Barry, thanks for highlighting this, and JohnMu, thanks for always being willing to answer questions in the Google webmaster discussion group.

Yes, people make mistakes and John was bound to slip up once. Heck, he is a robot in answering questions at Google Groups. I don't there is another Googler that comes close to his daily average post count. So John, please do keep it up, you simply rock!

Forum discussion at Google Groups, Sphinn, WebProWorld, and WebmasterWorld.

The Google AdWords API is now supporting the Traffic Estimator Service, which provides traffic estimates (CPC, clicks per day, etc.) for new and existing keywords, according to a recent blog post. The blog post states:

AdWords API users can access our trove of historical keyword and bid data via the Traffic Estimator Service, which gives detailed estimates of how much traffic a keyword may generate at various CPC values. The service is not only useful for new products or campaigns, but it can also estimate the impact of changing the Max CPC of existing keywords as well.

Pretty cool stuff. There may be some very fun applications for this API function.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A recent ruling has people reeling about how a judge recently ordered YouTube to hand over its history to Viacom. All of the sudden, your privacy is not being honored. To summarize the recent story, Wired says that "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday."

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land is alarmed about the ruling. The fact is that every single person's YouTube video is being passed onto Viacom, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. Danny adds that "It's against Google in general. Asking for individual viewing data isn't necessary."

Forum members believe that Google should fight this -- perhaps in an appeals process. I know that Danny (from his postscript on Search Engine Land) is trying to alert the judge that his ruling was pretty brainless.

IncrediBILL adds that perhaps Google will win this battle through other means:

Maybe the truth is Google already knows the answer and the user contributed stuff is way more popular and Viacom is just pounding sand. Truthfully, I've never watched any Viacom material on Youtube and I've seen a bunch of videos so who knows.

Additional discussion continues and there's an ongoing debate about whether Google should just give in or fight it out. If Google gives in, some of the people who are being held accountable may not even be in the US and may not have the money to protect themselves. Google, after all, has already spent countless hours developing the platform and removing videos that are problematic. The debate rages on.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The Nets2Go curtain and blinds company decided to do some viral marketing that would entail some big tech products, such as Digg, YouTube, Firefox, and of course, Google.

Here's the picture for you to see:

It's a smart idea, has some really good viral marketing aspects to it, but hey, are people using it? (I would.)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Did you know that Google's Remove Content tool in Webmaster Tools is not HTTPS or WWW specific? Meaning, if you want to use the tool to remove all your HTTPS pages from the Google index, it will also remove your HTTP version. And if you want to remove the WWW version, it will also remove the non WWW version from Google?

A Webmaster learned that the hard way and we see his story in a Google Groups thread. In short, he tried to remove all his HTTPS pages form the Google index to find that his whole site was removed. It is a good thing Google has a way to reinclude content within 90-days, with ease.

JohnMu of Google basically apologized for the misunderstanding, he said:

Yes, the URL removal tool removes both the https:// and the http:// versions of the URL. Additionally, it also removes both the www and the non-www versions (if relevant).

Some of the documentation and the descriptions within Webmaster Tools look like they might be incorrect, we're working on fixing that in one of the upcoming releases (it takes a lot of time to get all the translations in :-)).

Personally, I am always afraid of using this tool. I use it for specific URLs, but outside of that, I stay away.

Google launched a new Google Removal Tool within Webmaster Tools in April 2007. In July 2007, Google dropped the old removal tool and redirected it to Webmaster Tools. There is a public content removal tool available for sites outside of your verified list.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the various classifications of an MFA site (made for AdSense). The question is, what is the true definition of such a site? Is there a gray area or is it black and white?

One member classifies three types of sites running AdSense:

1. A site that has content that consists only of ads.
2. A site that has substandard content, and lots of ads.
3. A site that has good content, and ads that take up no more than 1/3 of the available space.

Now, I am sure there are shades between. How about a site with really good content, but the only way to see that content is to scroll past the AdSense ads. I know several sites like this, and I wouldn't consider them MFAs, cause I scroll past the ads to read the content. Maybe the sites that you hit the back button on, would be the proper classification here?

Senior member zett adds his classification of an MFA:

• Ad units blended.
• Ad units in places where you would expect navigation or content.
• Mediocre/generic/useless content.
• No outbound links except Adsense ads or link to the same site (with more crap).
• New domain, no PR, only way to get traffic is to buy cheap Adsense traffic (with ads that promise things the landing page cannot keep).
• Private domain registration.
• No real contact information on site.

But let's poll the audience here and ask you, based on the three types of sites listed above, which are MFAs. Here is the poll, check ALL that apply:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread has a member who is a bit concerned that the page listed in his Google Webmaster Tools, crawl stats section for "highest PageRank" is not his home page. Instead, an internal page is listed as having the highest PageRank on his site.

Googler, JohnMu, replied to this webmaster saying that this isn't all that bad. In fact, John said, "I think it's great to see a non-home page listed as the page with the highest PageRank." John explained, "it's a sign that people love your content and are sending visitors right to something they really like." But still, any webmaster would be concerned that something happened to his home page that caused a drop in PageRank. This does not mean PageRank dropped, but rather maybe the internal page's PageRank increased. The thing is, we really don't know. Should we obsess, no - but will be stop obsessing?

One more tidbit that most of us already knew. When John was questioned about the recency of the PageRank values in Webmaster Tools, he said it was more updated than the Toolbar. John said:

As far as I know, those statistics are updated slightly more regularly than the Toolbar.

Google first started displaying the PageRank stats in Webmaster Tools in September 2007. Back then we thought maybe Google would maybe stop updating the Google Toolbar, but that never really happened.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.