SEO PittFall
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007WordPress Turbo - Powered by Thesis
WordPress, along with other personal publishing platforms like MovableType and Blogger, have given everyone the ability to publish their thoughts and experiences online for the world to see. Each of these different content management systems offer different solutions including hosted and self-hosted answers. I started blogging through a hosted Blogger site for two and a half years and then moved to the self-hosted WordPress option that has suited me very well for almost two years. The reason for moving from blogger was to gain the versatility that WordPress offered.
WordPress has been a great option that quenched my thirst and gave me the versatility to build my dream, but it was still difficult to feel ownership of my site. However, it’s versatility had left me with something to be desired, as in, I have limited experience with css and web development, but I really want to deliver a quality product with my blog. This led me to a few different themes for my blog over the short time I have published on the WordPress backbone:
SEOpittfall v1.0
I really liked the feel of this theme and loved the color and the three column format, which took some doing, because it started as a two column theme.
I retired the theme because it left the user (me) with more to be desired. A quality theme, don’t get me wrong, to think of all of the time that I spent tweaking it was probably the hardest part of letting this one go. I guess you do get what you paid for… this one was “free.”
SEOpittfall v2.0
Yet another “it looks solid… but I think that I can…” situation. Another two column theme that I really liked. I think the dark tones and they were done tastefully so color really pops!
It took some effort to adjust the theme to something I could live with, however, it was quickly trumped by WordPress Version 2.6 as it didn’t support new functionality and really didn’t have the potential to grow with me. Mostly due to the fact that the original designer sold back in March and little has been done to update existing templates or develop at the same level as the previous owner. Another “free” theme, but I am sure I would have ponied up some cash or bartered my time, pretty much anything to keep it….
I expanded my professional role, picked up my family and moved to snow country (don’t get me wrong, I like snow however, I have never lived in it before) and this has left me with less time to invest here. So, when minor tweaks are required, it takes me away from exploring the industry to maintain the theme.
Enter Thesis… I noticed this new theme that was “SEO Friendly” and thought, I’ve heard this before! (If you haven’t noticed, I tend to be skeptical in many things).
A month or so later, I was hearing (well reading) others rave about the benefits and the ease of use. Then came Rae Hoffman with a review of the theme and a real vote for Thesis, she changed her theme to it. It looked cool, clean, ready to use and it did contain many of the foundations that are necessary for SEO best practices. Couple of days later, a friend of mine was asking about themes for WordPress and I told her about the theme, which in turn she bought and gave me a developer license to play with.
SEOpittfall v3.0
OK, so all of the SEO goodness isn’t quite “baked in,” but it is getting there. One of the most valuable assets of Thesis is the community that has built up around it and the responsiveness of the developer(s). If you have an idea to improve it, share and it will probably be incorporated in the next version.
I know, I suggested something to incorporate my previous title tags from another plug-in, so I didn’t have to manually adjust all of the post titles. I posted to the community support board and it was done in a few short weeks. Sub-versions have come, three since I moved over in fact, but little has changed. This is because the theme incorporates customization files (css and hooks) so you can adjust what your theme does without concerns of overwriting them with a newer version. To put it simply, IT ROCKS!
I don’t think that I will ever go to a “free” theme again! I have found that “free” is a term that is used when no cash is exchanged, however it has costs associated with it, mostly time.
If I didn’t think the theme was worth more than the $87 cash outlay, I wouldn’t share. Find out more by looking at others like SugarRae or others provided at DIYthemes.com
If you would like my personal feedback, or have specific questions about some of the functionality, feel free to drop me a line! I wouldn’t pitch it if I didn’t love it!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
WordPress Turbo - Powered by Thesis
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved. WordPress Turbo - Powered by Thesis [Link]
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving
I have so many things to be thankful for this year:
My wonderful daughter! My beautiful wife! A great job! Supportive friends & readers!
Thank you for all of your support this year, I am truly grateful.
-pittfall
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Let the Holidays Begin - Get Elfed
I know what many might be thinking, It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet!
But with all of the fluctuations with the economy, politics and such, I think that it is always a great time to get in a positive spirit, there’s no better way I know than having fun. OfficeMax and JibJab get things started with ElfYourself, where you can create a quick video (with your head pasted on an elf, like a bobblehead) and up to four more friends and cut a rug to four different songs.
Here is a disco themed groove, staring Sophia (left center, aka baby pittfall), Sweetpea (far right, our chihuahua), Kris (far left, my wife) and me (right center).
Send your own ElfYourself eCards
Have fun and even if the holidays aren’t here yet, it doesn’t mean you can’t get into the holiday spirit!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Let the Holidays Begin - Get Elfed
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World Usability Day 2008
What is World Usability Day?
World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, it has a specific focus and is honored around the world on the second Thursday of the month of November. WorldUsability.org
World Usability Day is being celebrated tomorrow worldwide, organized by The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). I have posted my thoughts on Usability Today previously and I am proud to be a part of an organization that understands the value of usability and supports it. Brulant (now Rosetta) is the platinum sponsor of the Northeast Ohio Usability Professionals Association’s celebration of WUD:
November 13, 2008 - Celebrate World Usability Day 2008 with NEOUPA!
NEOUPA is celebrating World Usability Day by discussing Web Usability with a panel of presenters from a variety of local organizations including Ernst & Young, Cleveland Institute of Art, KeyBank, Progressive, Brulant and more. Learn how professionals in your community are infusing and advocating usability in the companies they work for and the Web work they do – both from a small and large scale – and take away a few ideas of your own.
I still feel like they could have a more “user-friendly” name for the day but it makes sense and is actually as descriptive as it needs to be!
Happy World Usability Day!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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WTF - Malware in SERPs?
Recently, Google Webmaster Central Blog republished a post from the Google Online Security Blog highlighting that Google is taking a step in protecting you from malware by warning you in listings (image on the right).
You may be familiar with this type of warning, Yahoo! has been using a beta product from McAfee (SearchScan) to highlight potentially harmful websites in search engine listings.
Sounds great, Google and Yahoo! are trying to help keep you computer clean by warning us before we click on a website listing and find out that our personal information has been comprised, right?
Google even goes into it further and let’s webmasters know why they decided to put the label on the listing and offers some advice:
Advance warning
I often hear webmasters asking Google for advance warning before a malware label is put on their website. When the label is applied, Google usually emails the website owners and then posts a warning in Google’s Webmaster Tools. But no warning is given ahead of time - before the label is applied - so a webmaster can’t quickly clean up the site before a warning is applied.
But, look at the situation from the user’s point of view. As a user, I’d be pretty annoyed if Google sent me to a site it knew was dangerous. Even a short delay would expose some users to that risk, and it doesn’t seem justified. I know it’s frustrating for a webmaster to see a malware label on their website. But, ultimately, protecting users against malware makes the Internet a safer place and everyone benefits, both webmasters and users.
Google’s Webmaster Tools has started a test to provide warnings to webmasters that their server software may be vulnerable. Responding to that warning and updating server software can prevent your website from being compromised with malware. The best way to avoid a malware label is to never have any malware on the site!
WTF
“As a user, I’d be pretty annoyed if Google sent me to a site it knew was dangerous.” - Really?
Why would anyone leave a listing for a website that may have malware at all? Google and Yahoo are both trying to take the “good citizen of the Internet” approach, but if they really were, they wouldn’t allow anyone to take that last step. Really, if you know there is a sign that says “Thin Ice” and someone is walking towards it, wouldn’t you stop someone from walking out on the ice? They have a further opportunity to put up a fence in this circumstance.
It isn’t the right of a website owner to be in the index of any search engine, so the idea that they can’t exclude someone is out the window. Lord knows that they exclude websites for other reasons, so why wouldn’t they here?
Am I really off base here? Please let me know… Here is a quick poll to voice your concern, or feel free to post in the comments.
Should search engine results contain potentially harmful websites? ( polls)
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Vote
As I am sure many of you share my feelings, I have become very disenfranchised with the 2008 Presidential Election. Both side have used negativity and scare tactics to drum up support for their ticket. Each side has highlighted the historical event that is about to happen no matter the outcome.
I am not here to start a stump speech for either ticket, or pass my personal opinions of who is best suited to lead this great nation. Like many, I have served and sacrificed for this country. No matter the situation that we are in, I still love and support the United States. Time is short, no matter who becomes our next president, it is abundantly clear that all of us (even me) needs to be more active in our country. I pledge to be more involved in local, state and national politics. Why are we here? Because we elected the officials that led us here. I am not going to blame one politician, one party or even one administration. The only one that I have to blame for the condition of our economy, energy policies and general disorder is the guy that I look at every morning in the mirror.
So, if you are registered, VOTE!
If you are not registered, REGISTER!
If you don’t know what is on the ballot, GET INFORMED!
Don’t leave it to others to decide what is best for you and your community.
See you at the polls!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Green Link Building - Part 2 of 2
In the first post about Green Link Building, I explained my classification of links that make up a “greener” Internet. I expressed which sources of links I would consider to be a positive influence upon rankings and which shouldn’t be pursued. This post is the final piece of the link building puzzle: techniques to employ to take this classification to the next level. Basically, how to apply the classification of links to better build link equity to your site for better results. Unlike the link classification, with seven distinct categories, this has three steps (easier to remember) and can be more important than the classification of links.
1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
We will break it down into three steps:
Step 1 - Reduce
The first step in understanding the true value of links is authority. Authority online is not given based upon who you are or because you have done something valuable in another area, it is given based upon how many times you have been referenced, the amount of information, and of course the quality of the information you provide on a particular topic. Makes sense right?
Let me give you an example: you might listen to a friend that is an expert mechanic, when your car is acting up, however, you are unlikely going to heed his/her advice in matters in relation to your body acting up, right? Both a mechanic and a doctor deal with advanced machines (an automobile and the human body) but that doesn’t give them authority for all advance machines. In the same manner, search engines have been working to understand websites based upon topical reference & authority and those websites can pass general reference & authority.
I know what you are thinking… What does this have to do with “Reduce?” You haven’t gotten to the point!
OK, this will be a big difference in what many of you may think is important to link building, I just ask that you read through before you leave the page or blow me away in the comments.
Reduce the number of links you are trying to build to your site
Hurray, no more link building!!! - Not quite yet. 
What it is all about: stop trying to get links from any site… I have said before, and still strongly believe, that a link from another site that is in a bad neighborhood does not lower the value of your page independently, but crappy links are just crappy links, they don’t help you rank! Stop trying to get a lot of links and go after the great links. Attack each link that you want and make sure you know who you are trying to get a link from. Go after those great links for your site, forget the chump links.
Just like thinking greener in the real world, you don’t need to collect all of the junk that is available, focus on what you need and what will bring long-lasting results. Quality over quantity is the key! This is the first step in a greener Internet.
Step 2 - Reuse
Link building isn’t only about the links that are coming from external sources. You have a very powerful, authoritative page on your website, your index or home page. Not only your index, you have other pages with value, why wouldn’t you leverage these pages to improve ranking for new pages. A new page can use the help and a contextual link within a page that already has authority can not only get the new page indexed quickly, but also pass value to the new page with the anchor text of the link. Don’t worry, if you are publishing valuable content, the crappy links will come on their own!
Just like in the real world “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got!” Reuse the pages of your website to build relevance and authority to the pages that you want to rank better.
You may already have the links you need to start ranking
Get it done with internal links!
Step 3 - Recycle
OK, how do you recycle links? I am sure that you are aware of the value of links that you have pointing to the pages of your site, but are you actively working to improve the links you already have?
This might be a new concept, but there are a few tools that can make recycling links much easier:
Link Analysis Tools, a plug-in for FireFox that allows you to see more information about the links pointed to your site while logged into Google’s Webmaster tools.
Screenshot of Link Analysis Tool in Webmaster Tools
This will give you the PageRank, anchor text and type of link for every link to each page on your website. Now that you know what the anchor text of the link to your particular page, you can go out and request to adjust the link text to your pages to include the keywords you are working to rank for.
Recycling the links you already have can be easier to improve your rank
Does anyone else have tips or tactics at building a greener Internet? Feel free to share below!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Green Link Building - Part 2 of 2
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Green Link Building - part 1 of 2
This is the first post about thinking greener when building links. This post is about understanding different types of links plus when and why the different types of links will be important depending on what type of site you are building links for. The second post, to follow, will be about the three “R’s” of link building: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle links.
We all should be familiar with the numbering system that you will see on plastic materials inside of the recycle image (like above). Recently, I started looking at understanding the numbering system, it gives you insight into what your bag, bottle or toy is made of. Below are the numbers and the definition of the type of plastic with an example of the types of products that use the type of material:
1 PET - Polyethylene Terephthalate - Soda Bottles 2 HDPE - High-Density Polyethylene - Milk Jugs 3 V - Vinyl or Polyvinyl Chloride - PVC Pipe 4 LDPE - Low-Density Polyethylene - Grocery Sacks 5 PP - Polypropylene - Food Containers (not Styrofoam) 6 PS - Polystyrene - Styrofoam 7 O - Other - Mixed resins
Here are the link building reference numbers that will help you to better understand what your link is made of:
1 DIR - Trusted Directories
Like PET plastics, trusted directories are durable and really necessary in our online society. Directories were the way to find other websites before search engines were available, but as we all know, like search engines, all directories are not all created equal. There are few truly trusted directories and yes, there are hindrances to entry. These hurdles to get past are usually either money, influence or time.
Examples of Trusted Directories:
Yahoo Directory DMOZ, the open closed directory LII - Librarian’s Internet Index Best of the Web
2 NDIR - Niche Directories
Like HDPE, the niche directories fill in the gaps for food storage, not quite as strong as PET but very durable and necessary for daily living. Good niche directories work to become a trusted directory eventually, however, they deal with a particular topic or area of concern. Now, I am not suggesting that you go and submit your website to every niche directory that you find, however, to be recognized as a valuable resource in your given vertical, you might want to be listed in the directories that are specifically targeting your vertical or niche. In the same manner, niche directories wouldn’t be considered a trusted source if they didn’t include the most relevant websites either. However, like the trusted directories, you will most likely have to pay to be listed.
Good source lists to look for quality niche and vertical directories
Strongest Links iEntry Directory Portal ISEDN - Independent Search Engine & Directory Network
3 QR - Quality Resources
Vinyl, like quality resources have so many applications everywhere. Quality resources are recognizable online and off. Websites that an average person would know as a reputable source of information like a government agency, news source or reference source. To be listed by a quality resource it may require a newsworthy act or offer a very important or valuable service or product.
Examples of quality resources:
CNN The New York Times Government Agencies - List of Agencies Wikipedia
4 NR - Niche Resources
Niche resources, just like LDPE, have valuable applications. These types of resources are relevant to a particular vertical and include quality sources of information on a particular topic. These can sometimes include quality resources if they have segmented their content into major verticals or niche areas for specific types of information. Many of these niche resources would be difficult to isolate because they will be different based upon the topical area. Like the quality resources, it might require a newsworthy act.
Examples of a quality resource broken out to become multiple niche resources:
5 QNB - Quality Niche Blogs
Blogs have become an important piece of what the Internet has become, like PP plastics have done for food service over the last few decades, niche blogs are useful to everyone that is trying to pay attention to a particular vertical. Niche blogs have replaced specialty newspapers and magazines for industries for many professionals trying to keep up with their industry or even their passions.
Examples of niche blogs:
BB Geeks Search Engine Land Search Engine Watch SEOmoz TechCrunch
6 B - Blogs
Blogs, like Styrofoam, has value, however the value of a link in a blog post is limited by the structure of a blog. Blogs publish the latest post on the index or home page (typically, the most valuable single page of a website) of the blog so a link in a post is very valuable when it is posted, but the value drops over time as the post with the link drops from the home page to the depths of the site. Like Styrofoam, the post doesn’t go away but the usefulness of the link diminishes. I won’t list blog examples, I am sure you know a few.
7 GL - General Links
General links like other mixed resin plastics are just that, general. General links are links that you may not have intended, they may not have a real value to your website but they are links none the less. These might include scrapers or aggregators that pull your content and republish it as their own without even pulling out internal links or such. General links aren’t something you should be trying to get, but I wouldn’t be concerned if these links start showing up in back-link checks with Site Explorer or link search attributes.
So, here is my link classification of the “Green Internet.” The follow-up post, part 2, will be understanding how to take your link building efforts to the next level and include eco-friendly activities online.
If you have ideas on how to further clarify these categories, feel free to comment below.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Green Link Building - part 1 of 2
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2008 MLB Postseason
No matter if you are a big baseball fan or not, you have probably heard about the history that has already been made and the opportunity for more to come.
Already has taken place:
1st time in 14 years since there was no New York team in the playoffs. 1st time since 1907 that two teams from Chicago were in the postseason. 1st time ever that Los Angeles has had two teams in the playoffs. 1st time since 1907-1908 that the Cubs have had back to back playoff appearances.
So, many of you know me, I try to be as transparent as possible… and I like to be an instigator at times. Because of this, I must be honest, I am a huge Chicago Cubs fan. Yes, the “lovable losers!” As a life-long Cubs fan, I have waited a very long time for my team to win the world series. This season is actually the 100th anniversary since their last Championship Years.
It looks to be a great year for baseball and I like my odds more this year than a long time.
Go Cubbies!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Teaching Old Media New Tricks
Stephen King has never really played by a traditional set of rules, it shows in his books and in the way he markets his products. I must be perfectly transparent, I am a huge King fan and enjoy his writing more than any other author, I own over 60 of his books and have at least 10 more about the writer.
One important thing to point out, Stephen King has always been involved in the user’s experience. He hasn’t written for the critics and has always held his relationship with his readers the paramount of his career. Refering to them as “Constant Reader,” King knows that for his books to be successful, he needed to know his audience, and it shows.
That being said, here is a quick run down of some things that he has done to stand out that quickly come to mind:
The Stand
King’s 6th published novel (5th as himself), was republished in 1992 with an additional 75,000 words. The Dark Tower Series
A never ending series that has had 8 books spanning some 22 years from publishing the first book to the seventh (including a short story in a collection). The Plant
A “little book” that was written via email and sent in installments to his friends. The Green Mile Series
Released over 6 monthly installments, this serial novel was published as paperbacks with around 125 pages a month. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Pop-Up Book
I think that the title says it all. The Dark Tower Graphic Novels
Reaching out to a new audience, one of King’s most popular stories is being adapted by Marvel comics as a graphic novel, released in monthly comic book format and retelling the many stories contained within the original series in chronological order (which the books didn’t adhere to).
And now, “N!”
N is a new short story that is part of a new collection of short stories called Just After Sunset available November 11, 2008.
What sets N apart is the method of exposure. Stephen King, Simon & Schuster, Marvel, CBS and iTunes have all teamed up to present a 25 episode video series, Message Board to bring the story to life.
To build it further, they offered the series via a widget, seen below, so you can share with others.
OK Steve, what’s the point?
The point is that you don’t always have to fit within the predefined box with your marketing efforts. Stephen King is a great author, however, some people can’t get through many of his novels because they aren’t as engaged with his writing as I am, however, Stephen King hasn’t lost them, because he delivers in different ways, not just as a new media, but also in a format that will appeal to a new or different audience that he hasn’t reached.
My questions to online marketers:
What are you doing to engage your existing audience and reach new ones?
Are you only succeeding because someone else hasn’t done it better?
Are you constantly trying to reach other markets?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Seven Years
There aren’t many events that have touched so many, not only in the United States, but worldwide. I hope that when there is another event that brings everyone together it is for something greater than the loss of life of so many by so few.
“I have been driven to my knees many times because there was no place else to go.”
- Abraham Lincoln
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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The First Decade with Google - 1998 - 2008
Google hits 10 years old today, Happy Birthday… glad to see you make it out of beta!
Then
Now
The Company
Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page to make it easier to find high-quality information on the web. The company is based on three years of research in web search and data mining done by the founders in the Stanford University Computer Science Department. Google Inc.’s headquarters are located in scenic downtown Palo Alto, California.
Google Inc. is not at present a publicly traded company, and we are currently unable to speculate on whether or when our privately-held status might change.
The Name
10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling “Google” better. We picked the name “Google” because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters.
A new camera, what a great birthday present! - see the launch
UPDATE: 09/20/2008
Google has been publishing posts to mark their 10 years on the Official Google Blog, you will find that these special posts are marked as Google at 10.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
The First Decade with Google - 1998 - 2008
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A Compendium of Google’s Chrome Browser
What a whirlwind of activity that has surrounded the launch of a new browser. I don’t remember any browser getting this amount of buzz than Google has with Chrome. I really wanted to start posting information on Monday afternoon when the info leaked out and the firestorm got started. But I wanted to see how it all played out and has it been a ride!
There have been a lot of rumors that Google would develop their own operating system (OS) and their very own browser. The rumors about a Google OS turned into Google Docs and Spreadsheets and now the rumors of a Google browser are coming to light. The rumors continued, but largely went unnoticed.
Two years ago, CEO Eric Schmidt went as far as to say:
“The industry is obsessed with this browser question… It looks like people have some good browsers choices already,” Schmidt said.
“The way Google operates, we would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser and creating another choice… We would only do something along the lines you’re describing if there was a real end-user benefit. So far, we’ve seen the end-user benefit has been to augment or expand both AJAX and JavaScript, which is available on all the browsers. We’re working closely with Firefox, we have a good partnership with Safari and with Opera and a couple of others as well. That seems like a good answer for us right now, strategically,” Schmidt added.
But, Monday, Labor Day 2008, the information was out, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped released leaked information about the new browser and the comic book, by Scott McCloud, that was to present Chrome to the world. Quite a different way to market an online product by a company that predominately works online, isn’t it?
So, this started the firestorm:
Search Engine Journal
TechCrunch
Search Engine Watch
Search Engine Land
Pandia
Marketing Pilgrim
TopRank
Which led Google and Matt Cutts to respond to the firestorm that was generated:
Official Google Blog:
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
I can’t wait to talk more about Google Chrome, but I’ll hold off until it officially launches. Once people can download Google Chrome, I plan to talk about my experiences using Google Chrome, to lay some truth on you about questions you might ask about Google Chrome, and to give some tips for power browsers.
This was quickly followed by additional scrutiny:
Chrome: This Is Web OS, Make No Mistake
Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer
Google takes aim at Microsoft with new Web browser
Tuesday, Google launched a webcast to officially announce the release of the browser. Which was live-blogged by Matt Cutts (webcast video). The responses on Twitter alone were amazing. I watched and listened to the webcast and much of it was the same information that was released in the comic, but the biggest take-away was the “speed” of the new engine under the browser’s hood. There were live comparisons to Internet Explorer, the twitter buzz wanted to see it up against FireFox and I really wanted to see it challenge Opera, but no dice.
Not much time passed and Google responded to the fact that Apple users will have to wait for the new browser, Matt Cutts addresses concerns with the new browser’s interaction with big brother Google and common objections.
It didn’t take long for reactions to start flooding in:
Can Google Win The Browser Wars With Google Chrome?
Which was answered with - 44% of SEO/SEMs Say Google’s Chrome Won’t Win the Browser War
Google Browser Anti-Competitive [By Google's Standards]
Firefox counters Google’s browser speed test
Google’s Omnibox could be Pandora’s box - Privacy concerns
Does Chrome Signal The Removal of Google’s PageRank Indicator?
Google’s brand is pure gold, but its tech edge is unproven in the browser sweepstakes
Google’s Chrome Kills the Lucrative Toolbar Business
Then security exploits were found:
Exploit #1 - Google’s new Web browser (Chrome) allows files (e.g., executables) to be automatically downloaded to the user’s computer without any user prompt.
Exploit #2 - The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error when handling the “SaveAs” function. On saving a malicious page with an overly long title ( tag in HTML), the program causes a stack-based overflow and makes it possible for attackers to execute arbitrary code on users’ systems.
My thoughts:
Google Chrome is a nice browser, however, it doesn’t have the functionality of FireFox. If I am going to use a browser for fun, I will stick with Opera, at least for now. The average user might want to stick with their normal browser until Chrome is out of beta.
I think Google allowed the “leak” to happen, after all, they know the value of a viral campaign, now don’t they?
I wonder, does the Chrome logo (above) appear to be an all seeing eye?
What do you think?
Have you used Chrome?
How has your experience been?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
A Compendium of Google’s Chrome Browser
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Yahoo! Calls It Quits on Another Social Portal
Mash has fallen!
I posted about Yahoo! Mash last September when it was released in private beta and only available through an invitation. Now, Yahoo! will be scraping the fledgling social site, never having a real understanding of it’s true potential.
In my first post about Mash, I posed the question:
Can this give Yahoo an edge in the social market that many consider they have owned since taking it from AOL until MySpace and Facebook came showed on the scene a few years back?
I guess we have our answer!
Here’s more:
About Mash 2007:
Mash is a new approach to your profile that brings your people together and keeps things interesting. Mash is invite-only right now, so ask a friend who’s in to get you in. If you’re already in Mash, welcome back! - September 14
Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it!
Are there more shutdowns to come?
First came 360, launched in 2005 as an early attempt to get Yahoo into social networking, was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year. In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal (Bebo went to AOL for $850 million). Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago and is best known for sporting a Darth Vader playing guitar and eating a banana image when it was in private beta. TechCrunch
I guess Yahoo! is battening down the hatches to stay in the game, or are they even still viable?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Yahoo! Calls It Quits on Another Social Portal
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Is Google a Local Pusher?
Back in May, I noticed what appeared to be a test by Google to add more relevancy to search engine result (SERPs) by publishing a search box for geographical modifiers to a requested search query (Google Pushing Local Results). See image below:
If you used the “looking for local” search box, this would modify the SERPs to show a geographical target and return a map of local results. I am sure many of you have seen this, but an example is given below:
Google has taken it a step further. A few days ago, while doing some research online for a particular keyword search query, the following information (located at the top right of the page) caught my attention in the search results page:
Note: I was not signed into a Google account while receiving these results.
Looking for additional information, I clicked on the More details link next to the results and was given the following:
Additionally, subsequent queries have produced similar adjustments to search engine results. Once again, without being logged into a Google account, the search results have been altered. This time was “based upon recent search activity.”
Looking for more information, I clicked on the More details link again and was given similar results as the previous search:
So, this begs the question: Does geographical modifiers really provide for more relevant results?
When I moved to the Cleveland area, earlier this year, I was without a phone book or a network of people that I could depend on for finding the little things in my area, like a grocery store and local restaurants. I did try to get results for local things then, but I added the geographical modifiers to my search queries. I was rather disappointed in the results I received and ended up braving the winter weather to do some exploring on my own to find what I was looking for. I also know that I have very different search behaviors as compared to normal users, however, do many use the internet to find information for their local areas or is the intent of going online and searching for something related more to the fact that they are looking for results from everywhere else?
I wanted to share my findings with you and find out your thoughts and opinions were?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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SEOmoz PRO Training Series - Expert Seminar
Next week, I will be headed to Seattle, WA for the Expert Seminar hosted by SEOmoz.
This looks to be a very interesting two days of expert education covering a list of topics beyond entry level SEO:
Elite Site Architecture for Enterprise, E-Commerce and Micro-Targeted Domains White Hat Cloaking “Avoid Being Labeled a “False Positive” - How Black Hat Tactics Impact White Hat Websites” The Site Review Process SEO Action Items from the Legal World Improving SEO through Content Licensing & Distribution without Incurring Problems Global Search Landscape & International Targeting Sitemaps, Javascript, Rich Media, AJAX, and Crawlability Comparing Keyword Research Sources & Alternate Methods for Discovering New Keyword Targets Content Strategies & Social Media Push Tactics for Viral Marketing Success SEO Tactics for Vertical Search Inclusion & Rankings Where the Search Engines Have Been, Where They’re Going & Why We Need to Know Expert Q&A
The SEOmoz team will be joined by other experts in the industry:
Rand Fishkin Stephan Spencer Danny Sullivan Rebecca Kelley Jeff Pollard Jane Copland Nick Gerner Sarah Bird
I am excited to be able to attend and sharpen my skills with the panel of experts.
I hope it will be as eventful as my last trip to Seattle…
If you happen to be in Seattle this week for the conference or live in the area and would like to touch base, reach out to me directly at stephen.pitts@gmail.com.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
SEOmoz PRO Training Series - Expert Seminar
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SEO: The Online Triathlon
I am a very competitive person when it comes to many different areas including athletics, games and even sports teams. The fact that I work in the SEO industry is no different. I am pushing myself both in learning what is relevant to their market and keeping abreast of the changes in the industry as a whole. So, seeing that the Olympics is starting soon, I see a very relevant correlation between triathlon and SEO.
A triathlon is an endurance sports event consisting of swimming, cycling and running over various distances. As a result, proficiency in swimming, cycling, or running alone is not sufficient to guarantee a triathlon athlete a competitive time; trained triathlon athletes have learned to race each stage in a way that preserves their energy and endurance for subsequent stages. In most modern triathlons, these events are placed back-to-back in immediate sequence and a competitor’s official time includes the time required to “transition” between the individual legs of the race, including any time necessary for changing clothes and shoes.
source - Wikipedia
Unlike the athletic triathlon, this online event doesn’t really have an end, however, like the race you have to be mindful of each event as one slip any any of the areas could mean second place (or even second page) but either the athletic or online competition, it’s all about endurance.
The events of the athletic triathlon are:
Swimming Cycling Running
The events of the SEO triathlon are:
Keywords Content Links
Each event will equal results. If you are the best distance swimmer, cyclist or runner, you have great chance of posting a good time and being competitive. The same can be said for SEO, you can perform well in SERPs with targeted keywords, content and lots of links, but it is the seasoned SEO professional that “have learned to race each stage in a way that preserves their energy and endurance for subsequent stages.”
I am not saying that if you are an effective link builder or have created extremely effective link bait campaigns that these efforts shouldn’t be continued, however, don’t forget about understanding your targeted audience and the keywords they use to find similar products or information. Always remember the user, getting to the targeted page is the first (and arguably the most important step), but when they get to your page that is keyword focused and well linked, will they leave for something more?
Another important thing to remember, don’t focus too intently on the website at your side or above you, look to the finish line (1st position in the SERPs). Keep improving your endurance by working on honing your Keywords, Content and Links and your competition may be #2 but they might be miles behind in the race.
Do you have anything to add? Do you relate SEO to any other sport or athletic activity? Feel free to share!
Cheers
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Cuil is Live
Back in September 2007 I posted about a new search engine on the horizon called Cuill, the next “Google Killer”. Since then, not much has come out about the engine, except additional funding and concerns with their crawlers. Now they have launched their search application and shortened their name to Cuil.
Why so special?
The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can - Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.
Powerset, you might have heard recently, was purchased by Microsoft.
If you haven’t checked it out, browse on over. They do return results in a columnized form, however, I would like to do more research around the ranking of the results and the ranking factors of the engine.
Here are a few screenshots:
Search
Results
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Useful Tools for Blackberry
Recently I switched from a Palm Treo to a Blackberry Curve because it offers functionality that helps me stay connected when my laptop is closed, I’m on the road, etc. It definitely offers more than the iPhone and Palm for business applications. A few of my finds (thanks to some friends) that I think are useful enough to share with others.
Opera Mini 4.1
Mini technology
Opera’s mobile software uses a remote server to pre-process Web pages before sending them to your phone. Web content is compressed to reduce the size of data transfers, enabling fast browsing experience at low costs even on simpler phones.
Yet another great offering from Opera, a mobile web browser that doesn’t reconstitute web pages, or force you to see the “mobile” versions of a website. Like the Safari for the iPhone, it actually lets you see the whole web page as it was intended to be viewed. It also features a fast browsing experience, css support, shortcuts and more.
Here is a quick video:
TellMe
TellMe is a free service from Microsoft that combines GPS (or preset location if not activated or concerned with big brother) and search for finding what you are looking for from your phone. It offers more than just a quick and easy way to find caffeine from the nearest Starbucks including a phone number, directions from wherever you are and even a map function to see where it relates to your location.
It has a few preset information functions as well:
Movies Sports Weather News Stocks Travel Entertainment
Internet + Telephone
TellMe combines the passion of people, the innovation of the Internet, the potential of voice technologies, the unprecedented transformation of the phone, plus a few new ideas.
It is really useful, still being new here in Cleveland, I have used it to find what I am looking for and I look forward to using it on the road. I will let you know if it isn’t all that it seems.
If you want more information or download it for your Blackberry, go to TellMe. Currently it is available for select phones on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. You can also access this service, also for free, without having to download to your phone by calling 1-800-555-TELL.
Gmail for Mobile
If you are a Gmail user, I would recommend Gmail for mobile for keeping up with your email:
Need to get caught up on your Gmail? Try Gmail for mobile. Keep your conversations going and get to any message you want - anywhere you are - for free.
Smooth and responsive user interface Powerful shortcut keys and intuitive menus Search and find any Gmail message
Here is a quick video:
Find out more about Gmail for mobile here.
Do you have any tips for new functions, software or such, let me and everyone else know by commenting below.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Google Out to Destroy Keyword Estimation Tools?
Google has always offered very valuable tools to advertisers, one of which that is extremely useful to organic keyword research, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool for discovering and building a keyword list. The only limitation is that it expressed search volume and search volume trends as a green bar. This was a great way to see the volume of traffic a particular keyword had in relation to the other keywords on the generated list, but without realistic quantitative data.
It was always a great place to start keyword research, like the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, however, this tool is still up unlike Overture. So after you built your list, after applying some common sense, you could import your list into Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, WordZe or another tool to rank them accordingly. Now you might not have to…
Last month, Google Trends, another valuable tool to understanding the seasonality of keywords, added the ability to see the search volume for websites and subsequently struck fear in the hearts of Alexa, Compete and Quantcast.
Google Trends for Websites
Back to the Keyword Tool…
Now Google actually offers numeric values instead of small green bars for search volume:
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Will this replace all of the other keyword tools? Even if it doesn’t accomplish this, Google has definitely turned up the heat on the paid competition.
What keyword tools do you use? Feel free to share them to other readers.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Google Out to Destroy Keyword Estimation Tools?
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Happy 4th of July from SEOpittfall
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Happy 4th of July from SEOpittfall
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Microsoft Still Pines for Yahoo!
Microsoft still wants to purchase Yahoo!, however, now their true intentions are becoming more visible:
There’s yet another chapter in what’s beginning to look like an eternal corporate love triangle: Seems Microsoft just can’t get past it’s obsession with Yahoo’s search business, at least according to The Wall Street Journal.
It reports Microsoft is looking to team up with News Corp. or Time Warner to buy Yahoo. They would then bust up the company with Microsoft keeping the search business.
The idea that Microsoft might team up with News Corp or Time Warner, regardless of the new relationship with online ad revenue sharing with Google, to buy Yahoo! might help with Carl Ichan’s quest to sell Yahoo!
The other new order of business is that the Google Yahoo! agreement might be up for review, not by the SEC, but by the Justice Department:
Google’s proposed deal with Yahoo is being looked at by the Justice Department because of antitrust issues and many Yahoo shareholders would like to see Microsoft move in.
From Information Week:
When the deal was announced, Google and Yahoo said they had agreed to delay it for three months to allow the Justice Department time to review the arrangement. It may be that the investigation is nothing more than the government’s acceptance of that invitation. Indeed, that’s how Google sees it.
In an e-mailed statement, Google said, “We are continuing to have cooperative discussions with the Department of Justice about this arrangement and voluntarily delayed implementation for three and a half months in order to give them time to understand the agreement. That process is continuing exactly as expected. We are confident that the arrangement is beneficial to competition, but we are not going to discuss the details of the process.”
But according to the Post, the formal investigation undertaken by the Justice Department represents more significant scrutiny than the sort of pro forma review that the two companies appear to have anticipated.
Whatever the case, Google has already weathered a similar antitrust review as a consequence of its decision to acquire DoubleClick.
What are your thoughts?
Will, or should the Google-Yahoo! deal go through?
Will, or should Microsoft keep up efforts to purchase Yahoo!?
Does it even matter anymore?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Microsoft Still Pines for Yahoo!
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AT&T Offers Up Pogo - Do We Need Another Browser?
AT&T stepped into the online realm last year with the purchase of ingenio, and now they have launched their very own browser called Pogo, now in invitation only beta. TechCrunch has invitations for this limited beta.
Essentially, it looks and acts a lot like Firefox. Here are a few screenshots from the new browser:
Pogo Start
Springboard - Home pages (multiple) start with your list of important pages to choose from.
Springboard
History - Pogo offers your search history visualized with screen shots from the websites you’ve visited.
History
Bookmarks - Visualized bookmarks with screen shots fro all of your bookmarks.
Bookmarks
New Cells - Instead of tabs, additional open windows are called cells.
New Cells
Pogo is a 3D web browser created in collaboration between AT&T’s business development group and Vizible. We weren’t particularly impressed when we reviewed it a few months ago, but a new version has since been released.
If you get your hands on it, feel free to let me know how you feel about it!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
AT&T Offers Up Pogo - Do We Need Another Browser?
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pittfall on twitter
I have begun playing with twitter. In it’s honor, this post abides by their rules of 140 characters or less. Free to follow me pittfall.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Fishing for Links
In October of last year, Google made some major adjustments to PageRank because of paid links, then in November, Google noted that buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and asked for webmasters to report them. I have heard, since this time, from a few sources, that this may not be the case consistently, but I was unable to validate these any of these.
Recently, while doing research, a friend inquired about some link behaviors that appeared to be purchased links, however with a little bit of searching he found that these links appeared to pass an ample amount of value to the site. This was not for a low volume search term:
Search Term - “engagement rings“ Daily Search Volume
KeywordDiscovery - 1,682
WordZe - 1,498
WordTracker - 5,432
Google Trends “engagement rings”
OK, I know what many of you might be thinking, “this is probably under the radar,” right? Not so much…
This website, along with others are clients of a SEO, design and marketing service, here, with a list of clients that utilize a site-wide block of links that are consistent on most of these websites without the “no follow” tags or any reference that they are sponsored. Many of these also engage in exchanging links to non-relevant websites. This also led to finding another grouping of a link exchange network, that state “PageRank boosts benefit both sides and is a win-win situation for all.”
Back to the action…
Doing a quick analysis of the website in question, www.mysolitaire.com, also gives insight into other concerns with the relevance of search results.
Links
Google - 309 (predominately from link exchanges and site-wide blocks)
Yahoo - 13,810 (same as Google plus lots of blog links and pages of only links)
On Page
28 instances of “engagement rings”
2 - title
3 - meta keywords
2 - meta description
3 - content (included in “h” tags at bottom of page)
10 - alt tags (many in spacer or non-ring images)
4 - text links
4 - table summary
So, what does this all mean? The question is whether Google is concerned with paid links, site-wide links that are passing PageRank, irrelevant sites linking to move websites to the top?
Is this blackhat behavior? In my opinion, this is as gray as it comes?
Is this a valid reason for reporting to Google?
Does this fit within the Google Webmaster Guidelines as a “link scheme?”
Examples of link schemes can include:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
What are your thoughts?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Move Completed - Welcome to SEOpittfall 2.0
I would like to thank everyone for their patience as SEOpittfall.com has been moving hosting.
SEOpittfall 2.0
WordPress 2.5
SEOpittfall has been upgraded to WordPress 2.5
URL changes
The URL string has been updated to include the post and page titles into the URL.
Category Housecleaning
I have updated the categories to only include the parent categories and adjust all of the sub-categories into tags.
New Tags
Instead of having a multitude of sub-categories, I have now adjusted these into tags to keep your favorite categories simple.
The DNS changes were addressed today, so it may take up to 96 hours to see all of the changes to SEOpittfall. I am still in the process of adjusting the categories because the upgrade did not go as well as it could.
Thank you again for your patience and if you see something that appears out of place, please let me know.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Move Completed - Welcome to SEOpittfall 2.0
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SEOpittfall is Moving
SEOpittfall will be moving hosting over the next few days (up to a week). Please forgive me if there are any disruptions in accessibility during the DNS updates.
Feel free to reach out to me if you need anything during the adjustments.
Thanks,
pittfall
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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Sharing Information With Google Reader
Google Reader is a very valuable tool that I am sure many of you are aware of, however, it has offers more than just keeping up with your favorite XML and RSS feeds. It also gives you the ability to share posts from your subscriptions that you find valuable and would be useful to your friends.
You can mark posts with a star, giving you the ability to come back to posts that you want to revisit. Along with the star option, you can label feeds with tags so you can organize all of your feeds within specific categories. Other valuable options for you to share information that you find via the feeds that you read is the ability to share the post in a couple of different ways:
Email Shared Page Widget
Email
Sending feeds to people that you think will be able to use is a very efficient way of sharing posts from your feed reader. The Google Reader makes this rather easy to send and incorporates the post along with a message.
Shared Page
Google Reader also offers a great way of sharing information that you find relevant to people who want to know what is on your mind, or at least in your feed reader. Just like adding a star to a valuable post, you have the ease of a single click to share a particular post and this can publish this post through a page or on a widget.
The personal page is the default for all of your posts marked as share (figure 1). Similar to a personalized Google page, or iGoogle, you even have the ability to personalize this page to reflect your personality, or at least reflect your preference (figure 2). Of course, this page has a RSS feed that you can share with others to simplify the reading process by adding it to their feed reader.
figure 1 - Shared Items Page (click for example)
figure 2 - Personalize Your Shared Items Page
Widget
Similar to the shared pages, the widget publishes your shared items from your Google Reader account (figure 3). Easy to set up (figure 4), the Shared Clips Widget has a few different color schemes to choose from, even a version with no formatting for you to customize.
figure 3 - Shared Clips Widget
figure 4 - Shared Clips Widget Setup
What’s the point of all of this?
In my opinion, Google wants you to be able to access the information that you are looking for without the need to republish or rehash the information. Have you ever played the game telephone? The basic gist, for those who answered no, is that a single phrase is whispered in the ear of one person and passed this way through many people until it gets to the end and is told aloud to be verified by the person who started the circle. Typically, the ending information is grossly different then how it began. This can be true even when you are not whispering it into someones ear.
My other thought is that Google wants the information indexed once, by the original author and not republished over and over, filling their index with essentially the same information that they have to sort and determine the author or authority.
Google also offers some tips for publishers of feeds that can help you publish more engaging content for your visitors.
Write engaging and descriptive headlines. Include pictures. Don’t overload your users.
Google Reader can be a useful tool for keeping up with information from useful resources.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Sharing Information With Google Reader
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Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents
This paper is being reproduced as a resource to my readers. The document was moved by the University of Toronto after the departure of one of it’s authors as an active professor at the institution. By no means am I trying to take credit from these individuals for the research and subsequent paper below. I have updated the references, as some of these have also been moved from their original locations. This research, theory and algorithm was very influential in my early research into ranking factors that search engines employ in the valuation of web pages in search engine results.
It eludes to and assisted in my personal definition of a search engine algorithm:
taking qualitative data, converting it into quantitative data, ranking it based upon a query and returning the qualitative data.
Enjoy! - pittfall
Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents
Krishna Bharat
George A. Mihaila
Abstract:
In response to a query a search engine returns a ranked list of documents. If the query is broad (i.e., it matches many documents) then the returned list is usually too long to view fully. Studies show that users usually look at only the top 10 to 20 results. In this paper, we propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of “expert documents.” These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics. Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page. We present a prototype search engine that implements our ranking scheme and discuss its performance. With a relatively small (2.5 million page) expert index, our algorithm was able to perform comparably on broad queries with the best of the mainstream search engines.
1 Introduction
When searching the WWW broad queries tend to produce a large result set. This set is hard to rank based on content alone, since the quality and “authoritativeness” of a page (namely, a measure of how authoritative the page is on the subject) cannot be assessed solely by analyzing its content. In traditional information retrieval we make the assumption that the articles in the corpus originate from a reputable source and all words found in an article were intended for the reader. These assumptions do not hold on the WWW since content is authored by sources of varying quality and words are often added indiscriminately to boost the page’s ranking. For example, some pages are created to purposefully mislead search engines, and are known popularly as “spam” pages. The most virulent of spam techniques involves deliberately returning someone else’s popular page to search engine robots instead of the actual page, to steal their traffic. Even when there is no intention to mislead search engines, the WWW tends to be crowded with information on topics popular with users. Consequently, for broad queries keyword matching seems inadequate. Prior approaches that have used content analysis to rank broad queries on the WWW cannot distinguish between authoritative and non-authoritative pages (e.g., they fail to detect spam pages). Hence the ranking tends to be poor and search services have turned to other sources of information besides content to rank results. We next describe some of these ranking strategies, followed by our new approach to authoritative ranking - which we call Hilltop.
1.1 Related Work
Three approaches to improve the authoritativeness of ranked results have been taken in the past: Ranking Based on Human Classification: Human editors have been used by companies such as Yahoo! and Mining Company to manually associate a set of categories and keywords with a subset of documents on the web. These are then matched against the user’s query to return valid matches. The trouble with this approach is that:
(a) it is slow and can only be applied to a small number of pages, and
(b) often the keywords and classifications assigned by the human judges are inadequate or incomplete. Given the rate at which the WWW is growing and the wide variation in queries this is not a comprehensive solution.
Ranking Based on Usage Information: Some services such as DirectHit collect information on:
(a) the queries individual users submit to search services and
(b) the pages they look at subsequently and the time spent on each page.
This information is used to return pages that most users visit after deploying the given query. For this technique to succeed a large amount of data needs to be collected for each query. Thus, the potential set of queries on which this technique applies is small. Also, this technique is open to spamming.
Ranking Based on Connectivity: This approach involves analyzing the hyperlinks between pages on the web on the assumption that:
(a) pages on the topic link to each other, and
(b) authoritative pages tend to point to other authoritative pages.
PageRank [Page et al 98] is an algorithm to rank pages based on assumption b. It computes a query-independent authority score for every page on the Web and uses this score to rank the result set. Since PageRank is query-independent it cannot by itself distinguish between pages that are authoritative in general and pages that are authoritative on the query topic. In particular a web-site that is authoritative in general may contain a page that matches a certain query but is not an authority on the topic of the query. In particular, such a page may not be considered valuable within the community of users who author pages on the topic of the query.
An alternative to PageRank is Topic Distillation [Kleinberg 97, Chakrabarti et al 98, Bharat et al 98, Chakrabarti et al 99]. Topic distillation first computes a query specific subgraph of the WWW. This is done by including pages on the query topic in the graph and ignoring pages not on the topic. Then the algorithm computes a score for every page in the subgraph based on hyperlink connectivity: every page is given an authority score. This score is computed by summing the weights of all incoming links to the page. For each such reference, its weight is computed by evaluating how good a source of links the referring page is. Unlike PageRank, Topic Distillation is only applicable to broad queries, since it requires the presence of a community of pages on the topic.
A problem with Topic Distillation is that computing the subgraph of the WWW which is on the query topic is hard to do in real-time. In the ideal case every page on the WWW that deals with the query topic would need to be considered. In practice an approximation is used. A preliminary ranking for the query is done with content analysis. The top ranked result pages for the query are selected. This creates a selected set. Then, some of the pages within one or two links from the selected set are also added to the selected set if they are on the query topic. This approach can fail because it is dependent on the comprehensiveness of the selected set for success. A highly relevant and authoritative page may be omitted from the ranking by this scheme if it either did not appear in the initial selected set, or some of the pages pointing to it were not added to the selected set. A “focused crawling” procedure to crawl the entire web to find the complete subgraph on the query’s topic has been proposed [Chakrabarti et al 99] but this is too slow for online searching. Also, the overhead in computing the full subgraph for the query is not warranted since users only care about the top ranked results.
1.2 Hilltop Algorithm Overview
Our approach is based on the same assumptions as the other connectivity algorithms, namely that the number and quality of the sources referring to a page are a good measure of the page’s quality. The key difference consists in the fact that we are only considering “expert” sources - pages that have been created with the specific purpose of directing people towards resources. In response to a query, we first compute a list of the most relevant experts on the query topic. Then, we identify relevant links within the selected set of experts, and follow them to identify target web pages. The targets are then ranked according to the number and relevance of non-affiliated experts that point to them. Thus, the score of a target page reflects the collective opinion of the best independent experts on the query topic. When such a pool of experts is not available, Hilltop provides no results. Thus, Hilltop is tuned for result accuracy and not query coverage.
Our algorithm consists of two broad phases:
(i) Expert Lookup
We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations. In a pre-processing step, a subset of the pages crawled by a search engine are identified as experts. In our experiment we classified 2.5 million of the 140 million or so pages in AltaVista’s index to be experts. The pages in this subset are indexed in a special inverted index.
Given an input query, a lookup is done on the expert-index to find and rank matching expert pages. This phase computes the best expert pages on the query topic as well as associated match information.
(ii) Target Ranking
We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant. In such cases the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their qualifying text matches the query. By combining relevant out-links from many experts on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high relevance that our algorithm delivers.
Given the top ranked matching expert-pages and associated match information, we select a subset of the hyperlinks within the expert-pages. Specifically, we select links that we know to have all the query terms associated with them. This implies that the link matches the query. With further connectivity analysis on the selected links we identify a subset of their targets as the top-ranked pages on the query topic. The targets we identify are those that are linked to by at least two non-affiliated expert pages on the topic. The targets are ranked by a ranking score which is computed by combining the scores of the experts pointing to the target.
1.3 Roadmap
The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 describes the selection and indexing of expert documents; Section 3 provides a detailed description of the ranking scheme used in query processing; Section 4 presents a user-based evaluation of our prototype implementation; and Section 5 concludes the paper.
2 Expert Documents
Broad subjects are well represented on the Web and as such are also likely to have numerous human-generated lists of resources. There is value for the individual or organization that creates resource lists on specific topics since this boosts their popularity and influence within the community interested in the topic. The authors of these lists thus have an incentive to make their lists as comprehensive and up to date as possible. We regard these links as recommendations, and the pages that contain them, as experts. The problem is, how can we distinguish an expert from other types of pages? In other words what makes a page an expert? We felt than an expert page needs to be objective and diverse: that is, its recommendations should be unbiased and point to numerous non-affiliated pages on the subject. Therefore, in order to find the experts, we needed to detect when two sites belong to the same or related organizations.
2.1 Detecting Host Affiliation
We define two hosts as affiliated if one or both of the following is true:
They share the same first 3 octets of the IP address. The rightmost non-generic token in the hostname is the same.
We consider tokens to be substrings of the hostname delimited by “.” (period). A suffix of the hostname is considered generic if it is a sequence of tokens that occur in a large number of distinct hosts. E.g., “.com” and “.co.uk” are domain names that occur in a large number of hosts and are hence generic suffixes. Given two hosts, if the generic suffix in each case is removed and the subsequent right-most token is the same, we consider them to be affiliated.
E.g., in comparing “www.ibm.com” and “ibm.co.mx” we ignore the generic suffixes “.com” and “.co.mx” respectively. The resulting rightmost token is “ibm”, which is the same in both cases. Hence they are considered to be affiliated. Optionally, we could require the generic suffix to be the same in both cases.
The affiliation relation is transitive: if A and B are affiliated and B and C are affiliated then we take A and C to be affiliated even if there is no direct evidence of the fact. In practice some non-affiliated hosts may be classified as affiliated, but that is acceptable since this relation is intended to be conservative.
In a preprocessing step we construct a host-affiliation lookup. Using a union-find algorithm we group hosts, that either share the same rightmost non-generic suffix or have an IP address in common, into sets. Every set is given a unique identifier (e.g., the host with the lexicographically lowest hostname). The host-affiliation lookup maps every host to its set identifier or to itself (when there is no set). This is used to compare hosts. If the lookup maps two hosts to the same value then they are affiliated; otherwise they are non-affiliated.
2.2 Selecting the Experts
In this step we process a search engine’s database of pages (we used AltaVista’s crawl from April 1999) and select a subset of pages which we consider to be good sources of links on specific topics, albeit unknown. This is done as follows:
Considering all pages with out-degree greater than a threshold, k (e.g., k=5) we test to see if these URLs point to k distinct non-affiliated hosts. Every such page is considered an expert page.
If a broad classification (such as Arts, Science, Sports etc.) is known for every page in the search engine database then we can additionally require that most of the k non-affiliated URLs discovered in the previous step point to pages that share the same broad classification. This allows us to distinguish between random collections of links and resource directories. Other properties of the page such as regularity in formatting can be used as well.
2.3 Indexing the Experts
To locate expert pages that match user queries we create an inverted index to map keywords to experts on which they occur. In doing so we only index text contained within “key phrases” of the expert. A key phrase is a piece of text that qualifies one or more URLs in the page. Every key phrase has a scope within the document text. URLs located within the scope of a phrase are said to be “qualified” by it. For example, the title, headings (e.g., text within a pair of tags) and anchor text within the expert page are considered key phrases. The title has a scope that qualifies all URLs in the document. A heading’s scope qualifies all URLs until the next heading of the same or greater importance. An anchor’s scope only extends over the URL it is associated with.
The inverted index is organized as a list of match positions within experts. Each match position corresponds to an occurrence of a certain keyword within a key phrase of a certain expert page. All match positions for a given expert occur in sequence for a given keyword. At every match position we also store:
An identifier to identify the phrase uniquely within the document A code to denote the kind of phrase it is (title, heading or anchor) The offset of the word within the phrase.
In addition, for every expert we maintain the list of URLs within it (as indexes into a global list of URLs) and for each URL we maintain the identifiers of the key phrases that qualify it.
To avoid giving long key phrases an advantage, the number of keywords within any key phrase is limited (e.g., to 32).
3 Query Processing
In response to a user query, we first determine a list of Nexperts that are the most relevant for that query. E.g. N = 200 in our experiment. Then, we rank results by selectively following the relevant links from these experts and assigning an authority score to each such page. In this section we describe how the expert and authority scores are computed.
3.1 Computing the Expert Score
For an expert to be useful in response to a query, the minimum requirement is that there is at least one URL which contains all the query keywords in the key phrases that qualify it. A fast approximation is to require all query keywords to occur in the document. Furthermore, we assign to each candidate expert a score reflecting the number and importance of the key phrases that contain the query keywords, as well as the degree to which these phrases match the query.
Thus, we compute the score of an expert as as a 3-tuple of the form (S 0, S 1, S 2). Let k be the number of terms in the input query, q. The component S i of the score is computed by considering only key phrases that contain precisely k - i of the query terms. E.g., S 0 is the score computed from phrases containing all the query terms.
S i = SUM {key phrases p with k - i query terms} LevelScore(p) * FullnessFactor(p, q)
LevelScore(p) is a score assigned to the phrase by virtue of the type of phrase it is. For example, in our implementation we use a LevelScore of 16 for title phrases, 6 for headings and 1 for anchor text. This is based on the assumption that the title text is more useful than the heading text, which is more useful than an anchor text match in determining what the expert page is about.
FullnessFactor(p, q) is a measure of the number of terms in p covered by the terms in q. Let plen be the length of p. Let m be the number of terms in p which are not in q (i.e., surplus terms in the phrase). Then, FullnessFactor(p, q) is computed as follows:
If m <= 2, FullnessFactor(p, q) = 1 If m > 2, FullnessFactor(p, q) = 1 - (m - 2) / plen
Our goal is to prefer experts that match all of the query keywords over experts that match all but one of the keywords, and so on. Hence we rank experts first by S 0. We break ties by S 1 and further ties by S 2. The score of each expert is converted to a scalar by the weighted summation of the three components:
Expert_Score = 2 32 * S 0 + 2 16 * S 1 + S 2.
3.2 Computing the Target Score
We consider the top N experts by the ranking from the previous step (e.g., the top 200) and examine the pages they point to. These are called targets.
It is from this set of targets that we select top ranked documents. For a target to be considered it must be pointed to by at least 2 experts on hosts that are mutually non-affiliated and are not affiliated to the target. For all targets that qualify we compute a target score reflecting both the number and relevance of the experts pointing to it and the relevance of the phrases qualifying the links.
The target score T is computed in three steps:
For every expert E that points to target T we draw a directed edge (E,T). Consider the following “qualification” relationship between key phrases and edges: The title phrase qualifies all edges coming out of the expert A heading qualifies all edges whose corresponding hyperlinks occur in the document after the given heading and before the next heading of equal or greater importance. A hyperlink’s anchor text qualifies the edge corresponding to the hyperlink.
For each query keyword w, let occ(w, T) be the number of distinct key phrases in E that contain w and qualify the edge (E,T). We define an “edge score” for the edge (E,T) represented by Edge_Score(E,T), which is computed thus:
If occ(w, T) is 0 for any query keyword then the Edge_Score(E,T) = 0. Otherwise, Edge_Score(E,T) = Expert_Score(E) * Sum {query keywords w} occ(w, T) We next check for affiliations between expert pages that point to the same target. If two affiliated experts have edges to the same target T, we then discard one of the two edges. Specifically, we discard the edge which has the lower Edge_Score of the two. To compute the Target_Score of a target we sum the Edge_Scores of all edges incident on it.
The list of targets is ranked by Target_Score. Optionally, this list can be filtered by testing if the query keywords are present in the targets. Optionally, we can match the query keywords against each target to compute a Match_Score using content analysis, and combine the Target_Score with the Match_Score before ranking the targets.
Figure 1. Hilltop Ranking for the Query: “jobs”
4 Evaluation
In order to evaluate our prototype search engine, we conducted two user studies aiming to estimate the recall and precision. Both experiments also involved three other search engines, namely AltaVista, DirectHit and Google, for comparison and were done in August 1999. Note that the current rankings by these engines may differ.
4.1 Locating Specific Popular Targets
For the first experiment we asked seven volunteers to suggest the home pages of ten organizations of their choice (companies, universities, stores, etc.). Some of the queries are reproduced in the table below:
| Alpha Phi Omega | Best Buy | Digital | Disneyland |
| Dollar Bank | Grouplens | INRIA | Keebler |
| Mountain View Public Library | Macy’s | Minneapolis City Pages | Moscow Aviation Institute |
| MENSA | OCDE | ONU | Pittsburg Steelers |
| Pizza Hut | Rice University | SONY | Safeway |
| Stanford Shopping Center | Trek Bicycle | USTA | Vanguard Investments |
The same query was sent to all four search engines. We assume that there is exactly one home page in each case. Every time the home page was found within the first ten results, its rank was recorded. Figure 2 summarizes the average recall for the ranks 1 to 10 for each of the four engines: our engine Hilltop (HT), Google (GG), AltaVista (AV), and DirectHit (DH). Average recall at rank k for this experiment is the probability of finding the desired home page within the first k results.
Figure 2. Average Recall vs. Rank
Our engine performed well on these queries. Thus, for about 87% of the queries, Hilltop returned the desired page as the first result, comparable with Google at 80% of the queries, while DirectHit and AltaVista succeeded at rank 1 only in 43% and 20% of the cases, respectively. As we look at more results, the average recall increases to 100% for Google, 97% for Hilltop, 83% for DirectHit, and 30% for AltaVista.
4.2 Gathering Relevant Pages
In order to estimate Hilltop’s ability to generate a good first page of results for broad queries, we asked our volunteers to think of broad topics (i.e., topics for which it is likely that many good pages exist) and formulate queries. We collected 25 such queries, listed below:
| Aerosmith | Amsterdam | backgrounds | chess | dictionary |
| fashion | freeware | FTP search | Godzilla | Grand Theft Auto |
| greeting cards | Jennifer Love Hewitt | Las Vegas | Louvre | Madonna |
| MEDLINE | MIDI | newspapers | Paris | people search |
| real audio | software | Starr report | tennis | UFO |
We then used a script to submit each query to all four search engines and collect the top 10 results from each engine, recording for each result the URL, the rank, and the engine that found it. We needed to determine which of the results were relevant in an unbiased manner. For each query we generated the list of unique URLs in the union of the results from all engines. This list was then presented to a judge in a random order, without any information about the ranks of page or their originating engine. The judge rated each page for relevance to the given query on a binary scale (1 = “good page on the topic”, 0 = “not relevant or not found”). Then, another script combined these ratings with the information about provenance and rank and computed the average precision at rank k (for k = 1, 5, and 10). The results are summarized in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Average Precision at Rank k
These results indicate that for broad subjects our engine returns a large percentage of highly relevant pages among the ten best ranked pages, comparable with Google and DirectHit, and better than AltaVista. At rank 1 both Hilltop and DirectHit have an average precision of 0.92. Average precision at 10 for Hilltop was 0.77, roughly equal to the best search engine, namely Google, with a precision of 0.79 at rank 10.
5 Conclusions
We described a new ranking algorithm for broad queries called Hilltop and the implementation of a search engine based on it. Given a broad query Hilltop generates a list of target pages which are likely to be very authoritative pages on the topic of the query. This is by virtue of the fact that they are highly valued by pages on the WWW which address the topic of the query. In computing the usefulness of a target page from the hyperlinks pointing to it, we only consider links originating from pages that seem to be experts. Experts in our definition are directories of links pointing to many non-affiliated sites. This is an indication that these pages were created for the purpose of directing users to resources, and hence we regard their opinion as valuable. Additionally, in computing the level of relevance, we require a match between the query and the text on the expert page which qualifies the hyperlink being considered. This ensures that hyperlinks being considered are on the query topic. For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage. The result of the steps described above is to generate a listing of pages that are highly relevant to the user’s query and of high quality.
Hilltop most resembles the connectivity techniques, PageRank and Topic Distillation. Unlike PageRank our technique is a dynamic one and considers connectivity in a graph specifically about the query topic. Hence, it can evaluate relevance of content from the point of view of the community of authors interested in the query topic. Unlike Topic Distillation we enumerate and consider all good experts on the subject and correspondingly all good target pages on the subject. In order to find the most relevant experts we use a custom keyword-based approach, focusing only on the text that best captures the domain of expertise (the document title, section headings and hyperlink anchor-text). Then, in following links, we boost the score of those targets whose qualifying text best matches the query. Thus, by combining content and connectivity analysis, we are both more comprehensive and more precise. An important property is that unlike Topic Distillation approaches, we can prove that if a page does not appear in our output it lacks the connectivity support to justify its inclusion. Thus we are less prone to omit good pages on the topic, which is a problem with Topic Distillation systems. Also, since we use an index optimized to finding experts, our implementation uses less data than Topic Distillation and is therefore faster.
The indexing of anchor-text was first suggested in WWW Worm [McBryan 94]. In some Topic Distillation systems such as Clever [Chakrabarti et al 1998] and in the Google search engine [Page et al 98] anchor-text is considered in evaluating a link’s relevance. We generalize this to other forms of text that are seen to “qualify” a hyperlink at its source, and include headings and title-text as well. Also, unlike Topic Distillation systems, we evaluate experts on their content match to the user’s query, rather than on their linkage to good target pages. This prevents the scores of “niche experts” (i.e., experts that point to new or relative poorly connected pages) from being driven to zero, as is often the case in Topic Distillation algorithms.
In a blind evaluation we found that Hilltop delivers a high level of relevance given broad queries, and performs comparably to the best of the commercial search engines tested.
6 References
[Kleinberg 97]
J. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. To appear in the Journal of the ACM, 1999. Also appears as IBM Research Report RJ 10076, May 1997.
[Chakrabarti et al 98]
S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan, and S. Rajagopalan. Automatic Resource Compilation by Analyzing Hyperlink Structure and Associated Text. Proceedings of the 7th World-Wide Web conference, 1998.
[Chakrabarti et al 99]
S. Chakrabarti, M. van den Berg and B. Dom. Focused crawling: A new approach to topic-specific Web resource discovery. In the 8th World Wide Web Conference, Toronto, May 1999.
[Bharat et al 98]
K. Bharat and M. Henzinger. Improved algorithms for topic distillation in a hyperlinked environment. In SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, volume 21. ACM, 1998.
[Page et al 98]
S. Brin and L. Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. In WWW Conference, volume 7, 1998.
[McBryan 94]
Oliver A. McBryan. GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web. First International Conference on the World Wide Web. CERN, Geneva (Switzerland), May 25-26-27 1994.
More Information About the Authors
Krishna Bharat
Principal Scientist
Krishna Bharat is a Principal Scientist at Google Inc, working in the area of user interface and algorithmic support for Web search and content analysis (Web Information Retrieval). He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1996. Before joining Google in 1999, he was a member of the research staff at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, CA.
Krishna has served on the program committees of UIST and the World Wide Web Conference and has been a reviewer for the WWW Conference, UIST, SIGCHI, SIGIR and TOCHI. He has taught tutorials on Web-IR at SIGCHI and SIGIR.
Krishna is the creator of Google News which won the 2003 Webby Award in the news category. Also, he received the 2003 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. Krishna is the acting head of Google’s new R&D Center in Bangalore India.
George Andrei Mihaila
Research Staff Member
George is an instructor for Industrial Information Systems in the Industrial Eng. and Op. Res. Department at Columbia University. He also works at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York.
His research interests include:
database integration semistructured database query languages metadata and resource discovery on the WWW
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents
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Google Pushing Local Search?
Today while doing research for a client, I happened to notice something very interesting in Google’s results.
The given search was for “hampton inn” and further research on other geographically relevant, broad terms returned similar results like “restaurant” and “mcdonalds.”
Entering a city, state or zip code returned the Google map and relevant results based on the given entry. This did not appear differently if you are logged into a Google account or not.
Has anyone else seen this?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
[Link]
Meta Tags Constitute Trademark Infringement or Not?
A couple of influential court cases in the US have been decided, however, they differ on the overall outcome when it comes to use of trademarked words in META data including keywords constitute trademark infringement.
North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.
But in this case, I do not think Axiom denied placing those terms in their meta tags. The question Goldman has is, did the meta tags influence the site to rank for those terms? Google has told us they ignore the keywords meta tag, but said they do use the meta description tag. But would the meta description tag alone be enough to rank a site for? Hard to say. But if you add some links to the equation, then it is a no brainer. Search Engine Land
Although Axiom’s website never displayed NAM’s trademarked terms to visitors and never mentioned NAM or NAM’s products, Axiom nonetheless included the terms within its meta tags to influence Internet search engines. For instance, evidence in this case indicated that, before Axiom removed these meta tags from its website, if a computer user entered the trademarked terms into Google’s Internet search engine, Google listed Axiom’s website as the second most relevant search result.
The district court issued a preliminary injunction in favor of NAM and Adagen, prohibiting Axiom from using NAM’s trademarks within meta tags and prohibiting Axiom from making the challenged statements about the DRX 9000. Among other things, the district court specifically found that Axiom’s use of NAM’s trademarks created a likelihood of confusion, and the court also found that Axiom’s advertising statements are literally false and material to consumers’ purchasing decisions. Court Filing
Later, in another case (Standard Process, Inc. v. Banks):
However, today “modern search engines make little if any use of metatags.”
As more and more webmasters “manipulated their keyword metatags to provide suboptimal keyword associations, search engines progressively realized that keyword metatags were a poor indicator of relevancy.” Accordingly, search engines today primarily use algorithms that rank a website by the number of other sites that link or point to it. Court Filing
Barry stated at Search Engine Land:
Although Standard Process won part of the case, the judge ruled that since the keyword META tags do not influence search results, having trademarked terms in them are immaterial. US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter
Tamar at Search Engine Roundtable points out:
META keywords are not discussed in this Google Help document which should support the law’s findings. META Keywords Don’t Matter According to US Court
So, the real question is whether search engines still use the keyword META tag in ranking web pages in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google references META tags in their help document and excluded keywords from the list of tags that Google uses, “Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.” It does not explicitly cite the keywords META tag as being either important or irrelevant. Yahoo and MSN do not directly refer to the META keywords tag, to my knowledge, but many argue that they may still use the keywords data to rank web pages.
I have heard from other professional SEOs that the biggest value for META keywords is for your competition.
Stepping outside of the potential legal concerns for using trademarked content, I feel that the keywords tag still has relevance in website design and the SEO process. They may give competitors insight into your intentions, but if it may potentially help you rank well for a given query then why wouldn’t you use them? Even though both of these cases only reference Google, however, even if the courts don’t recognize the other engines, that doesn’t mean that you should!
What are your thoughts?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Meta Tags Constitute Trademark Infringement or Not?
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RSS Day 2008
What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.
What are you planning for RSS Day?
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
[Link]
Anatomy of Organic Listing Snippets in the SERPs and Outlining Best Practices
When returning results to a user, search engines use various resources based upon the particular search or query. The basic information published on a Web page may not be visible to a user, even when the page is displayed in an Internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox. Some of this information is used by the search engines to determine the topic (content) of a particular Web page.
Search engines use many specific characteristics to evaluate a Web page for a particular query string or keyword search. Many of these characteristics differ from one search engine to another and may even vary based upon the query string itself. Because of this, this user help focuses only on the “snippets” or information regarding a particular page, published in organic listings. These are the natural or non-sponsored listings, on search engine results pages, referred to as SERPs.
Traditionally, search engines provide three specific bits of information that make up the snippet in the SERPs. These bits of information are:
Page Title Page Description Page URL
Each part of the snippet provides the user with important information related to their query and, as such, gives them partial information for their review. This allows them to select the best result for their specific request. Each search engine controls what is and what is not included in its index. The index contains all of the pages that it feels are relevant and would be important to users for specific queries. Just like the index, the search engine also controls what information is published as the snippet in the SERPs.
The search engines look for a few different things when returning results. They want to provide the most relevant results, so that users will return again and again. Therefore, each search engine applies a ranking algorithm to a user’s query and then orders the results quickly. Obviously, human interaction with results would be difficult, based upon the massive amount of information available and the almost infinite amount of possible queries. I am not going to discuss conspiracy theories that the search engines do or do not manually rank individual results for specific queries.
Publishers of Web pages have the ability to influence the proper ranking of a Web page in the SERPs by publishing relevant content, titles, descriptions, keywords and page names. Some of these can even influence the actual snippet in the SERPs. Typically, the Title tag, META Description tag and the URL with the Page Name, which are part of the web page’s code, are used in the SERP snippet.
For consistency purposes, the search engine may truncate, or cut off, long titles, descriptions or URLs if they are too long to fit in within its SERP template. These lengths do not change frequently; however, each search engine has its own standards. For consistency purposes, here are Best Practice Guidelines that will ensure your information is consolidated and your message is fully legible in the three major search engines: Google, MSN / Live and Yahoo.
Best Practices
Title – 60 characters with spaces
Description – 150 characters with spaces
URL – 85 characters
Why is this important?
Marketing Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is consistent with your intent can be extremely important Optimization Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is consistent with your targeted keywords can be extremely important Visibility Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is written well enough to get the user to click is primary
The reason that your marketing, optimization and visibility need to be in sync is to convert those organic visitors into conversions.
The search engines may also use additional information located on your page or from a “trusted source” to return what they feel is the most relevant information in the SERP snippet.
Additional Information that May Affect Your Snippet
Title – In the event that a publisher fails to let the search engine know what the title of a page should be, or if the page title is not related to the content on that page, the search engine may use other “trusted sources” to publish the title of the snippet. These “trusted sources” are typically DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory, and the Yahoo Directory. Both of these directories have titles, descriptions and URLs for domains that are in these directories. Description – The description displayed in the snippet may not be from the META tag. Sometimes, especially for longer queries, a search engine may return a short section of the content of the individual page that is related to the specific query. URL – The URL that is shown in the snippet may be too long for the taste of the search engine, so they may truncate the “http://,” “www,” or even cut out directories after the domain name to return keywords related to the specific query.
The search engines have given publishers the ability to control whether they want the snippet to be influenced by DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory. There are additional META tags that are supported by the search engines that can be included in the page code that will tell the search engines to stop using this information in the SERP snippets.
DMOZ
All Engines -
Yahoo -
Google -
MSN/Live -
Yahoo Directory
All Engines -
Yahoo -
Google -
MSN/Live -
Additional Information:
How to create good meta descriptions
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise.
Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t give users a clear idea of the page’s content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.
Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren’t displayed in the pages the user sees, it’s easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google’s search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
Anatomy of Organic Listing Snippets in the SERPs and Outlining Best Practices
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April Fools 2008
Here is a quick breakdown of April tomfoolery this year:
Search Engine Roundtable becomes - Search Engine Squaretable
Google Introduces FrankRank, an ad ranking algorithm
Google AdSense announce the launch of AdSense for conversations
New for gMail - Gmail Custom Time
And, of course - Google Announces Project Virgle
Thanks for the laughs!
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
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The Future of Search is 24 Hours in Advance
So, April Fools 2008 Begins - 1st Up Google Australia
Google Australia offers gDay with MATE:
About gDay technology
The core technology that powers gDay is MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).
Using MATE’s machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.
From the gDay Press Release:
gDay was developed in Google’s Sydney engineering centre and can accurately predict future events and internet content. It does this by using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques from a system called MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).
Using Google’s index of historic, cached web content and a mashup of numerous factors including recurrence plots and fuzzy measure analysis, gDay creates a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now - including share price movements, sports results and news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of tomorrow’s blogs and newspaper columns.
Then, to rank these future webpages in order of relevance, gDay uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s PageRank, called SageRank.
Only Australian websites are included in the beta.
“Google’s Australian engineers have a history of major technological innovations, from Google Maps to Mapplets to Traffic for Google Maps. Giving humankind the ability to see 24 hours into the future is just a natural progression – of sorts,” said Alan Noble, Head of Engineering for Google Australia & New Zealand.
For more information about this service, please follow these links:
Official Google Australia Blog
Frequently Asked Questions
Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
Copyright © 2008, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall.com, All Rights Reserved.
The Future of Search is 24 Hours in Advance
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SEO Standards - To Be or Not To Be?
Background
There has always been a lot of mystery surrounding the online marketing industry especially Search Engine Optimization. There are even some that consider the efforts of SEO as selling “snake oil” and even some discredit the industry as a whole because of perceived SEO practices that will get your website blacklisted.
Chris Boggs at Search Engine Watch wrote on the topic, called for standards to be adopted and outlined steps to build these standards based upon 1. definition, 2. risk and 3. education. I think that these are all valid and could be a useful tool for accountability for marketers.
The Heat of the Game
Recently, Jill Whalen sited her own feelings regarding the topic in an editorial at Search Engine Land and Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay fired back. Based upon the voting on Sphinn about each of these posts at the time of writing this post here are the breakdowns:
No - 56 Sphinns Yes - 51 Sphinns
If you break this down a bit further, a realistic look at the online marketing community can be visualized:
(total unique voters are counted, votes for both are marked as undecided)
No - 35 or 41% Yes - 30 or 35% Undecided - 21 or 24% Total Votes - 86
I think that the split within the industry is pretty consistent with these.
I know, many of you are probably saying “but you haven’t answered the question!”
OK! I hear you!
I have to be perfectly up front, I land right on the fence on this issue, but don’t get me wrong, I feel that there are compelling arguments on both sides. I think that there is a need for any business consulting to hold itself to specific standards that are above questionable practices, but in that same respect our industry is held to standards that are maintained by independent entities (search engines) that are not publishing the specific rules of engagement for optimal performance. In fact, each of the engines have differing views as to what is more important, so this makes it extremely difficult to lay out specific standards for everyone to subscribe to.
Similar to the medical industry, there are adopted principles and practices that are approved by industry resources like the American Medical Association. Even though all of the secrets of the human body have not been unlocked, they still have standard operating procedures for identifying and treating medical concerns.
Why we would want SEO standards
To be simplistic, the adoption of standards for SEO would simplify the process of selecting a comfort level for making adjustments to a website to improve performance. Similar to medicine, you can do things that are outside the acceptable practices to gain optimal performance. Example, using performance enhancing drugs in professional sports, might get you a record or give your team the little extra that will win a few extra games or even a championship. But, in the long-run it runs the risk of tarnishing your reputation and potentially can get you banned from the sport.
Is it worth it? That is a question that the individual athlete or website owner has to answer for themselves. In the eyes of professional sports, the excuse that you didn’t know what you were doing… will only get you so far.
Organizations, like SEMPO, have already adopted standards and best practices that are widely recognized as such, so some might argue that they are already in place.
Like the medical industry, without adopting specific practices and principles, the process of finding a reputable SEO might be difficult, however this is required no matter what the type of business. Know your partners. You wouldn’t want to jump right in without knowing the risks and rewards of any other business venture, why should it be different for your website?
Adopting standards would allow for more formal education and certifications, like the medical industry. However unlike medicine, we are working to perform in an environment that is governed by the search engines not trying to ward off infection and disease. We communicate at different levels, so the medical industry does not need to be worried about withholding information about what we are doing to fight and eliminate cancer, because cancer doesn’t read their research. The search engines, on the other hand, do study SEO either for warding off artificial inflating performance or performing better themselves.
Why we wouldn’t want SEO standards
Search Engine Optimization is not always cut and dry. Many practices that are beneficial to one website may not be helpful to another, however there are consistent behaviors and practices that every website should include in their strategy. Although these practices, strategies and behaviors might seem elusive, they are easy to grasp when you take a holistic view of web development and visibility by fully understanding all of the ingredients of a web page, what the search engines can and cannot see and other fundamental components of web design.
Many feel that businesses have to make ethical and moral business decisions on a regular basis, so what is the great concern with them doing the same thing when it comes to online visibility? Search engine performance is not purely a game of popularity, nor does it consider how profitable one company is over another (although it can help). Search engine performance is all about providing the user with a positive experience. Sure, Google wants to index all of the world’s information and make it easily accessible for everyone, but before they can do this, they have to provide consistent results to user’s requests that are what the user is seeking, otherwise there is no reason to index mass amounts of information if you can’t find what you are looking for!
Pressing on, many SEO professionals don’t want to level the playing field in regards to competition with other SEOs and leak their secrets to the general public because of a fear of higher expectations from clients or dissolution of the industry. If everyone knows how to do, what will they need me for? Really, there is great benefit for a company to know what the best practices for optimization are, even if they are not doing the work themselves. The website owner has the industry experience in their particular industry, just like a doctor/patient relationship, both parties need to be transparent in order for positive benefit for them both.
My thoughts
I think that the SEO industry could benefit from solidifying standards and defining much of our craft for the betterment of those seeking our employ. This would also give value towards more formal education and accreditation and level the playing field. However, with this, there will still be advanced techniques that could be employed (not black hat) to enhance, not inflate, performance but that can’t be taught.
Search Engine Optimization has many truths, even if they haven’t been outlined by the search engines themselves, self-evident things from a common sense approach, that could be outlined and adopted or subscribed to by industry professionals above board. Whether or not this would be beneficial for the industry, we will have to only guess, but the one thing that would be accomplished is the search engines would have more power over their results than ever before. SEO keeps the engines honest, and as much as I hate it when an adjustment is made to their algorithms to address black hat techniques, these adjustments are necessary because they highlighted an exposed part that was taken advantage of.
I don’t hate the search engines, they are the yin to my yang. They are trying to do the same thing that SEO professionals, like myself, are trying to do, provide the user what they seek so they will come back again. I know that there are many website owners and SEOs out there that are in for today and not concerned for the future, such is the cycle of business. As Chris noted:
Every marketer should have the ability to make search marketing decisions not based on ethical or moral considerations of using specific tactics, but on their own business model. If you’re a Super Bowl T-shirt salesman and need to sell a few million items around the time of the big game, you may be willing to use riskier tactics. That should be your choice.
So, whether there are strict guidelines, principles or accepted industry standards, I will still be here for the user, they dictate my behavior.
I have nothing to be defensive about, I’m legit!
In an effort to be totally transparent, I work with Chris Boggs and I respect both Jill Whalen and Lisa Barone.
a
SEO Standards - To Be or Not To Be?
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Google Turns Black To Go Green
Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
Earth Hour
Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement.
Great idea and for a great cause, however, I was disappointed when looking at this further and EarthHourUS.org offered up ideas of things to do while in the dark and it linked to this. Not what I was hoping for, but at least it’s for a good cause.
Cheers!
a
Google Turns Black To Go Green
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Google Search within Search - User Assistance or Retailer Handicap?
Google recently began experimenting with a new site search box within results:
Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.
We hope that you will make use of the site search box in order to get the information you’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
Here is what this looks like in the SERPs:
This is what appears on the right sidebar for a simple site search:
As you can see by this query for “computer hard drive,” competitors have access to results for a query for specific search terms.
What does this mean for Best Buy and other retailers?
Well in the case of Best Buy, here are the top three results from the site search for the query “computer hard drive”:
Not their best showing, is it?
Here is what the NY Times had to say today:
The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site.
Take, for instance, a situation last week, when users of Google searched The Washington Post and were given a secondary search box. Those who typed “jobs” into that second box saw related results for The Post’s employment pages, but the results were bordered by ads for competing employment sites like CareerBuilder or Monster.com.
So even though users began the process by stating their intention to reach The Post, Google’s ads steered at least some of them to competitors. Similar situations arose when users relied on Google to search nytimes.com.
While executives of both The Times and Washington Post. Newsweek Interactive declined to comment, plenty of others assailed Google over what they saw as a heavy-handed approach.
So, regardless if your opinion is that “Google is being evil” or “just taking advantage of their own abilities” it certainly begs the question: “Do you think that titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords are no longer useful?”
Is this showing us that Google can/is be/being evil?
or,
Is this an answer to concerns with advertising on trademarked terms?
or,
Is this just Google trying to squeeze more ad revenue by giving competitors what they want?
What are your thoughts?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Google Search within Search - User Assistance or Retailer Handicap?
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Happy Easter
It has been a long time since I have posted, but as far as moving to Cleveland and getting acclimated to the area (and the weather), we are almost done!
Happy Easter everyone, and there will be more from pittfall in the near future!
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Getting Settled in Cleveland
It has been some time since I posted… I have been without a connection for almost a week, aside from my new office here in Cleveland. It has been an amazing experience so far and it looks to be an unbelievable opportunity.
I will be posting more when we get more settled.
Thanks!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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New Horizons…
I would like to take this moment to thank everyone that has been supportive of this blog and me personally in my growth and development in the Search Engine Optimization industry.
I am also extremely happy to announce that I will be furthering my career and moving from an in-house SEO to an agency. I will be working with the SEO team as part of Brulant in March.
This means a lot to me and has very dramatic implications on my family. We are uprooting from our beach-side cottage/apartment in Florida to brave the cold winters and four actual seasons in Cleveland, OH. Which just so happens to be the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (pictured above). It’s a brave new world that we are jumping into and very exciting for me, my family and my career.
Other changes might also occur as I may be moving the hosting of SEOpittfall to a new provider, so you might not hear too much from me on SEOpittfall.com until my family and I get settled in our new home.
Again, I want to thank everyone of my regular visitors and subscribers. There are so many changes on the horizon and it has been a fantastic journey that looks to be getting more intriguing. Thanks for your continued support!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Oops, an Error has Occurred - Yahoo! Says No to Microsoft
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid
Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.
After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo’s board determined that the $31 per share offer “massively undervalues” Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn’t account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft on Monday, spelling out its position.
Yahoo has taken “poison pill” provisions to prevent an unwanted takeover. Microsoft would likely have to oust the board in order to overturn them.
Will Microsoft and Steven Ballmer attempt a takeover?
Does this mean the end to the Search Wars… I don’t think so, but we will see!
This would equate to the second failed attempt in as many years!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Oops, an Error has Occurred - Yahoo! Says No to Microsoft
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The Great Search War or Search War I?
Whether the outcome would be Micro-hoo or Ya-soft the outcome would be the same, a new combined power that may be able to put some heat on Google to maintain their control on search and online advertising.
This is not new speculation, actually last year Microsoft was in the same role as they have assumed recently:
Competition is the thing that Microsoft has not had to directly face for some time, and Yahoo knows what it feels like to be on top, but both have not been able to touch Google in the department of search and search driven revenue. As Google looks to other areas, like radio, television and newspapers, to generate additional revenue streams, this might be the optimal time for these two tech giants to seize an opportunity (that may or may not exist). The only thing that I can see, outside looking in, is that Google has never really been tested in their core competency, search. This could expose weaknesses that might be there, but I don’t see that either Yahoo or MSN could accomplish this independently.
I know that the dust has settled, for now at least, but there could be something there today that might never be there again (an opportunity)! - Microsoft + Yahoo = ???
This time Steven Ballmer wrote a letter directly to Yahoo’s Board of Directors, this time with a bit more teeth than last year’s bid noting their lack of growth that was the main concern with not accepting Microsoft’s bid:
In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.
and continuing with a solid plan (at least on paper) to the reason that the board and stockholders would be interested in the merger:
While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:
Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.
Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.
Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.
Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.
Could they pull it off?
We may not know yet, as Yahoo has made little response over the news, however Google has appeared to be quite concerned. They took a whole day to build and publish a response to this development (via Official Google Blog):
The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions — and consumers deserve satisfying answers.
This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first — and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.
WOW! Sounds like Google is a bit concerned about the prospects of Microsoft who has the dominate OS and Yahoo! with a significant following joining forces that might be able to slow Google’s efforts at building office solutions, email and other user desired applications in Microsoft and joining a stronger search presence in Yahoo! Really, it seems like a good match for the two and these types of opportunities don’t come easy or frequently.
With that, Microsoft fired back:
Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.
Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals. Press Release
And so, The Great Search War has begun, or Search War I if you prefer!
The next bomb came from a third-party source, The Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.
It is considered unlikely that Google would itself bid for Yahoo because of regulatory concerns related to their large shares of the search and online advertising markets. But the people familiar with the matter say Google could play a role in attempts by others to outbid Microsoft, or by Yahoo to remain independent. Google could potentially offer money, or guaranteed revenue in return for a Yahoo advertising outsourcing pact, under that scenario, say people familiar with the matter. Even such involvement by Google would likely attract antitrust scrutiny because of concerns that competition between the two Silicon Valley Internet companies could be reduced.
Many of us on the sidelines have cheered or booed the concept and when there was the reaction from Google, many cried fowl. Personally, the idea that Google should be able to maintain such a commanding lead in search and online advertising and try to block this would be one of the most “evil” things that they could do!
I know that this is an election year, and it has been some 8 years, in the US, since we have not had an incumbent in the election for the President (No, I don’t think that Hillary should be considered an incumbent!), but this appears to be a much more active campaign for votes than the primary elections. Is this what we have to look forward to in the general election?
Back to the action… Steven Ballmer sent an email to everyone at Microsoft to educate them of the situation and outline their plan, but on the following Monday, via a SEC filing, we see what Yahoo is thinking via a confidential email to their troops:
Subject: more on today’s news…
fellow yahoos:
since we talked to you this morning, there’s been a lot of media coverage and industry chatter about microsoft’s unsolicited proposal to acquire yahoo!. we know you’ve been hearing and reading a lot about this. that’s why we wanted to reach out to all of you at the end of the day to emphasize a few things that we hope will give you some more context about this proposal, the process that our board is taking, and what you can expect in the days ahead.
first, we want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made — and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there’s certainly no integration process underway. this proposal is just that — a proposal. and it was only made in the last 24 hours. you can be sure the board is going to review it thoughtfully and carefully, and do what’s right for our great company. microsoft’s proposal is one of many options that we’re evaluating in order to maximize value for our shareholders and employees over the long-term. that’s why we will respond to microsoft after our board has completed a careful review of all of our strategic alternatives.
second, we can’t let any of the noise we’re hearing around this situation distract us from our core mission. it’s critical that we continue to focus on running our business, executing our strategy and delivering value to all of our users, advertisers and publishers.
finally, we realize that this may have been a tough day for many of you, especially those on the front lines of our business. we know you have many questions, and we’re committed to making sure you’re as informed as possible as this process moves forward. in the interim, we both want to thank you for your continued energy, focus and determination. we’ll continue to share information with you as we have it and can do so.
And then the users spoke:
Flickr users are openly protesting the idea of Microsoft acquiring Flickr’s parent company, Yahoo. A Group has opened up called MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR where users can upload protest photos.
And more news as to how Microsoft plans to make this move:
If the Microsoft bid for Yahoo goes through, Reuters says that they might have to borrow money to make it happen.
“It’s likely we’re actually going to borrow for the first time,” said [Microsoft CFO Chris] Liddell in an annual strategy meeting with analysts. “It’s going to be a mixture of the cash we have on hand plus debt.”
Jerry Yang then rallied the troops to stay focused and that no decision had been made:
as we’ve said, no decisions have been made about microsoft’s proposal. our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape. and we’ve hired top advisers to assist through the process.
Everyone in the practice knows that this is not over, but what is apparent is that Microsoft and Yahoo! have to do something to address the growing presence that Google has gained over the years if they want to continue to be a valuable property on the Internet and not be relegated to the history books and Wikipedia!
One thing that is for sure is that this episode will lay boundaries that are not currently as visible:
Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s bid (without help) - Strong Yahoo, Weak Microsoft, Google Unchanged
Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s bid (with Google’s help) - Weak Yahoo, Weak Microsoft, Google Stronger
Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s bid (with others help) - Troubled Yahoo, Troubled Microsoft, Google Unchanged
Yahoo accepts Microsoft’s bid - Stronger Micro-Hoo/Ya-soft and Google Concerned
Yahoo appears to be using this to leverage their value to their stockholders and users, but this will only keep them up for a little while. If they decide to reject the offer from Microsoft or accept, they will need to start turning a profit on the same scale as Google to keep their presence secure.
I guess we will have to wait, will it be round 4 between Microsoft and Google, or be the final decision from Yahoo… we shall see. No matter the outcome it has led to quite the drama!
A couple of other questions have not been answered yet:
Will Google come out looking like Yahoo’s David to Microsoft’s Goliath? or
Will Microsoft look like the school mate teaming up with Yahoo to battle the class bully Google?
Not just the future of search, but a BIG public opinion adjustment might be in our future!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
The Great Search War or Search War I?
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SEOpittfall is Welcomed into The AdAge Power 150
I know that it has been a long time since posting anything… no worries!
I will be visiting the lovely city of Cleveland in the next few days. I have not been and I say lovely because that is what I am being told, I will let you know after I get back. I am sure that I am in for a bit of a shock, Florida has been in the 60’s and Cleveland plays with the low 30’s regularly this time of year.
I would like to announce that SEOpittfall has been added to the AdAge Power 150 (even though I don’t rank in the top 150).
What is the Power 150?
The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It’s really as simple as that, except that the name isn’t strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline.
Looks really interesting, certainly an honor to get noticed!
You might recognize a few of the top 5:
Seth’s Blog Copyblogger Search Engine Land Micro Persuasion Marketing Pilgrim
Oh, and here is my badge:
Thanks for sticking around during this lull in programming.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
SEOpittfall is Welcomed into The AdAge Power 150
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Marketing and Learning - Division and Contrast
The smallest remarks can sometimes spur the greatest conversations.
Case in point, yesterday on a blog by Professor Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University made a very simple interaction with his students that many of us might remember during our time in college, regarding school and learning, and posted it on the Digital Ethnography blog:
First day of class …
I took an informal “raise your hand” survey of my 200 Intro students.
Me: “How many of you do not actually *like* school?”
… just over half(!) raise their hands
Me: “How many of you do not like learning?”
… no hands
You may remember their video post Digital R/evolution.
I left a comment regarding the post citing similarities with educators and marketers:
As a professional marketer, it is my job to reach an audience and make a lasting impression regarding a product or service. In that same respect, as an educator you are trying to reach your audience and make a lasting impression regarding a topic.
Marketing is changing, as is education, in that we have (because of technology) gained the ability to interact on new levels to reach and make an impression on our audience.
To which, a scathing response to my remark:
Marketing’s goal isn’t to empower consumers. In fact, it’s goal is usually to “dupe” consumers.
I know that it is not my intent to dupe consumers, but I can see that there are those that believe that we (marketers) are focused on a sale rather than a relationship. I have been a marketer for over 10 years now and have been an online marketer for half that time. I love the online space, it gives me the ability to engage and educate the user, I really do enjoy this.
I know that there are many that regard SEO in that same respect, which is something that I (and I am sure you) battle in our online communities around marketing and web development.
Are there many online marketers out there that are not trying to engage their users and build a relationship?
I know that there are a lot of SEOs that do the same. They are usually classified as black hats, but are there any SEOs that consider themselves white hats but are not concerned with building relationships with their users?
Yes. No. I would like to hear from you!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Marketing and Learning - Division and Contrast
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SEOpittfall has moved.
If you are seeing this post the DNS settings for SEOpittfall.com have not updated. This process began on June 8, 2008 and should be completed no later than June 12, 2008.
Thank you for your patience and for visiting SEOpittfall.com!
When the DNS changes are completed you will see SEOpittfall version 2.0. For a sneak peak, go here.
Stephen Pitts
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Post from: SEOpittfall.com SEOpittfall has moved. [Link]
SEOpittfall is Moving
SEOpittfall will be moving hosting over the next few days (up to a week). Please forgive me if there are any disruptions in accessibility during the DNS updates.
Feel free to reach out to me if you need anything during the adjustments.
Thanks,
pittfall
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Sharing Information With Google Reader
Google Reader is a very valuable tool that I am sure many of you are aware of, however, it has offers more than just keeping up with your favorite XML and RSS feeds. It also gives you the ability to share posts from your subscriptions that you find valuable and would be useful to your friends.
You can mark posts with a star, giving you the ability to come back to posts that you want to revisit. Along with the star option, you can label feeds with tags so you can organize all of your feeds within specific categories. Other valuable options for you to share information that you find via the feeds that you read is the ability to share the post in a couple of different ways:
Email Shared Page Widget
Email
Sending feeds to people that you think will be able to use is a very efficient way of sharing posts from your feed reader. The Google Reader makes this rather easy to send and incorporates the post along with a message.
Shared Page
Google Reader also offers a great way of sharing information that you find relevant to people who want to know what is on your mind, or at least in your feed reader. Just like adding a star to a valuable post, you have the ease of a single click to share a particular post and this can publish this post through a page or on a widget.
The personal page is the default for all of your posts marked as share (figure 1). Similar to a personalized Google page, or iGoogle, you even have the ability to personalize this page to reflect your personality, or at least reflect your preference (figure 2). Of course, this page has a RSS feed that you can share with others to simplify the reading process by adding it to their feed reader.
figure 1 - Shared Items Page (click for example)
figure 2 - Personalize Your Shared Items Page
Widget
Similar to the shared pages, the widget publishes your shared items from your Google Reader account (figure 3). Easy to set up (figure 4), the Shared Clips Widget has a few different color schemes to choose from, even a version with no formatting for you to customize.
figure 3 - Shared Clips Widget
figure 4 - Shared Clips Widget Setup
What’s the point of all of this?
In my opinion, Google wants you to be able to access the information that you are looking for without the need to republish or rehash the information. Have you ever played the game telephone? The basic gist, for those who answered no, is that a single phrase is whispered in the ear of one person and passed this way through many people until it gets to the end and is told aloud to be verified by the person who started the circle. Typically, the ending information is grossly different then how it began. This can be true even when you are not whispering it into someones ear.
My other thought is that Google wants the information indexed once, by the original author and not republished over and over, filling their index with essentially the same information that they have to sort and determine the author or authority.
Google also offers some tips for publishers of feeds that can help you publish more engaging content for your visitors.
Write engaging and descriptive headlines. Include pictures. Don’t overload your users.
Google Reader can be a useful tool for keeping up with information from useful resources.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Sharing Information With Google Reader
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Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents
This paper is being reproduced as a resource to my readers. The document was moved by the University of Toronto after the departure of one of it’s authors as an active professor at the institution. By no means am I trying to take credit from these individuals for the research and subsequent paper below. I have updated the references, as some of these have also been moved from their original locations. This research, theory and algorithm was very influential in my early research into ranking factors that search engines employ in the valuation of web pages in search engine results.
It eludes to and assisted in my personal definition of a search engine algorithm:
taking qualitative data, converting it into quantitative data, ranking it based upon a query and returning the qualitative data.
Enjoy! - pittfall
Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents
Krishna Bharat
George A. Mihaila
Abstract:
In response to a query a search engine returns a ranked list of documents. If the query is broad (i.e., it matches many documents) then the returned list is usually too long to view fully. Studies show that users usually look at only the top 10 to 20 results. In this paper, we propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of “expert documents.” These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics. Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page. We present a prototype search engine that implements our ranking scheme and discuss its performance. With a relatively small (2.5 million page) expert index, our algorithm was able to perform comparably on broad queries with the best of the mainstream search engines.
1 Introduction
When searching the WWW broad queries tend to produce a large result set. This set is hard to rank based on content alone, since the quality and “authoritativeness” of a page (namely, a measure of how authoritative the page is on the subject) cannot be assessed solely by analyzing its content. In traditional information retrieval we make the assumption that the articles in the corpus originate from a reputable source and all words found in an article were intended for the reader. These assumptions do not hold on the WWW since content is authored by sources of varying quality and words are often added indiscriminately to boost the page’s ranking. For example, some pages are created to purposefully mislead search engines, and are known popularly as “spam” pages. The most virulent of spam techniques involves deliberately returning someone else’s popular page to search engine robots instead of the actual page, to steal their traffic. Even when there is no intention to mislead search engines, the WWW tends to be crowded with information on topics popular with users. Consequently, for broad queries keyword matching seems inadequate. Prior approaches that have used content analysis to rank broad queries on the WWW cannot distinguish between authoritative and non-authoritative pages (e.g., they fail to detect spam pages). Hence the ranking tends to be poor and search services have turned to other sources of information besides content to rank results. We next describe some of these ranking strategies, followed by our new approach to authoritative ranking - which we call Hilltop.
1.1 Related Work
Three approaches to improve the authoritativeness of ranked results have been taken in the past: Ranking Based on Human Classification: Human editors have been used by companies such as Yahoo! and Mining Company to manually associate a set of categories and keywords with a subset of documents on the web. These are then matched against the user’s query to return valid matches. The trouble with this approach is that:
(a) it is slow and can only be applied to a small number of pages, and
(b) often the keywords and classifications assigned by the human judges are inadequate or incomplete. Given the rate at which the WWW is growing and the wide variation in queries this is not a comprehensive solution.
Ranking Based on Usage Information: Some services such as DirectHit collect information on:
(a) the queries individual users submit to search services and
(b) the pages they look at subsequently and the time spent on each page.
This information is used to return pages that most users visit after deploying the given query. For this technique to succeed a large amount of data needs to be collected for each query. Thus, the potential set of queries on which this technique applies is small. Also, this technique is open to spamming.
Ranking Based on Connectivity: This approach involves analyzing the hyperlinks between pages on the web on the assumption that:
(a) pages on the topic link to each other, and
(b) authoritative pages tend to point to other authoritative pages.
PageRank [Page et al 98] is an algorithm to rank pages based on assumption b. It computes a query-independent authority score for every page on the Web and uses this score to rank the result set. Since PageRank is query-independent it cannot by itself distinguish between pages that are authoritative in general and pages that are authoritative on the query topic. In particular a web-site that is authoritative in general may contain a page that matches a certain query but is not an authority on the topic of the query. In particular, such a page may not be considered valuable within the community of users who author pages on the topic of the query.
An alternative to PageRank is Topic Distillation [Kleinberg 97, Chakrabarti et al 98, Bharat et al 98, Chakrabarti et al 99]. Topic distillation first computes a query specific subgraph of the WWW. This is done by including pages on the query topic in the graph and ignoring pages not on the topic. Then the algorithm computes a score for every page in the subgraph based on hyperlink connectivity: every page is given an authority score. This score is computed by summing the weights of all incoming links to the page. For each such reference, its weight is computed by evaluating how good a source of links the referring page is. Unlike PageRank, Topic Distillation is only applicable to broad queries, since it requires the presence of a community of pages on the topic.
A problem with Topic Distillation is that computing the subgraph of the WWW which is on the query topic is hard to do in real-time. In the ideal case every page on the WWW that deals with the query topic would need to be considered. In practice an approximation is used. A preliminary ranking for the query is done with content analysis. The top ranked result pages for the query are selected. This creates a selected set. Then, some of the pages within one or two links from the selected set are also added to the selected set if they are on the query topic. This approach can fail because it is dependent on the comprehensiveness of the selected set for success. A highly relevant and authoritative page may be omitted from the ranking by this scheme if it either did not appear in the initial selected set, or some of the pages pointing to it were not added to the selected set. A “focused crawling” procedure to crawl the entire web to find the complete subgraph on the query’s topic has been proposed [Chakrabarti et al 99] but this is too slow for online searching. Also, the overhead in computing the full subgraph for the query is not warranted since users only care about the top ranked results.
1.2 Hilltop Algorithm Overview
Our approach is based on the same assumptions as the other connectivity algorithms, namely that the number and quality of the sources referring to a page are a good measure of the page’s quality. The key difference consists in the fact that we are only considering “expert” sources - pages that have been created with the specific purpose of directing people towards resources. In response to a query, we first compute a list of the most relevant experts on the query topic. Then, we identify relevant links within the selected set of experts, and follow them to identify target web pages. The targets are then ranked according to the number and relevance of non-affiliated experts that point to them. Thus, the score of a target page reflects the collective opinion of the best independent experts on the query topic. When such a pool of experts is not available, Hilltop provides no results. Thus, Hilltop is tuned for result accuracy and not query coverage.
Our algorithm consists of two broad phases:
(i) Expert Lookup
We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations. In a pre-processing step, a subset of the pages crawled by a search engine are identified as experts. In our experiment we classified 2.5 million of the 140 million or so pages in AltaVista’s index to be experts. The pages in this subset are indexed in a special inverted index.
Given an input query, a lookup is done on the expert-index to find and rank matching expert pages. This phase computes the best expert pages on the query topic as well as associated match information.
(ii) Target Ranking
We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant. In such cases the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their qualifying text matches the query. By combining relevant out-links from many experts on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high relevance that our algorithm delivers.
Given the top ranked matching expert-pages and associated match information, we select a subset of the hyperlinks within the expert-pages. Specifically, we select links that we know to have all the query terms associated with them. This implies that the link matches the query. With further connectivity analysis on the selected links we identify a subset of their targets as the top-ranked pages on the query topic. The targets we identify are those that are linked to by at least two non-affiliated expert pages on the topic. The targets are ranked by a ranking score which is computed by combining the scores of the experts pointing to the target.
1.3 Roadmap
The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 describes the selection and indexing of expert documents; Section 3 provides a detailed description of the ranking scheme used in query processing; Section 4 presents a user-based evaluation of our prototype implementation; and Section 5 concludes the paper.
2 Expert Documents
Broad subjects are well represented on the Web and as such are also likely to have numerous human-generated lists of resources. There is value for the individual or organization that creates resource lists on specific topics since this boosts their popularity and influence within the community interested in the topic. The authors of these lists thus have an incentive to make their lists as comprehensive and up to date as possible. We regard these links as recommendations, and the pages that contain them, as experts. The problem is, how can we distinguish an expert from other types of pages? In other words what makes a page an expert? We felt than an expert page needs to be objective and diverse: that is, its recommendations should be unbiased and point to numerous non-affiliated pages on the subject. Therefore, in order to find the experts, we needed to detect when two sites belong to the same or related organizations.
2.1 Detecting Host Affiliation
We define two hosts as affiliated if one or both of the following is true:
They share the same first 3 octets of the IP address. The rightmost non-generic token in the hostname is the same.
We consider tokens to be substrings of the hostname delimited by “.” (period). A suffix of the hostname is considered generic if it is a sequence of tokens that occur in a large number of distinct hosts. E.g., “.com” and “.co.uk” are domain names that occur in a large number of hosts and are hence generic suffixes. Given two hosts, if the generic suffix in each case is removed and the subsequent right-most token is the same, we consider them to be affiliated.
E.g., in comparing “www.ibm.com” and “ibm.co.mx” we ignore the generic suffixes “.com” and “.co.mx” respectively. The resulting rightmost token is “ibm”, which is the same in both cases. Hence they are considered to be affiliated. Optionally, we could require the generic suffix to be the same in both cases.
The affiliation relation is transitive: if A and B are affiliated and B and C are affiliated then we take A and C to be affiliated even if there is no direct evidence of the fact. In practice some non-affiliated hosts may be classified as affiliated, but that is acceptable since this relation is intended to be conservative.
In a preprocessing step we construct a host-affiliation lookup. Using a union-find algorithm we group hosts, that either share the same rightmost non-generic suffix or have an IP address in common, into sets. Every set is given a unique identifier (e.g., the host with the lexicographically lowest hostname). The host-affiliation lookup maps every host to its set identifier or to itself (when there is no set). This is used to compare hosts. If the lookup maps two hosts to the same value then they are affiliated; otherwise they are non-affiliated.
2.2 Selecting the Experts
In this step we process a search engine’s database of pages (we used AltaVista’s crawl from April 1999) and select a subset of pages which we consider to be good sources of links on specific topics, albeit unknown. This is done as follows:
Considering all pages with out-degree greater than a threshold, k (e.g., k=5) we test to see if these URLs point to k distinct non-affiliated hosts. Every such page is considered an expert page.
If a broad classification (such as Arts, Science, Sports etc.) is known for every page in the search engine database then we can additionally require that most of the k non-affiliated URLs discovered in the previous step point to pages that share the same broad classification. This allows us to distinguish between random collections of links and resource directories. Other properties of the page such as regularity in formatting can be used as well.
2.3 Indexing the Experts
To locate expert pages that match user queries we create an inverted index to map keywords to experts on which they occur. In doing so we only index text contained within “key phrases” of the expert. A key phrase is a piece of text that qualifies one or more URLs in the page. Every key phrase has a scope within the document text. URLs located within the scope of a phrase are said to be “qualified” by it. For example, the title, headings (e.g., text within a pair of tags) and anchor text within the expert page are considered key phrases. The title has a scope that qualifies all URLs in the document. A heading’s scope qualifies all URLs until the next heading of the same or greater importance. An anchor’s scope only extends over the URL it is associated with.
The inverted index is organized as a list of match positions within experts. Each match position corresponds to an occurrence of a certain keyword within a key phrase of a certain expert page. All match positions for a given expert occur in sequence for a given keyword. At every match position we also store:
An identifier to identify the phrase uniquely within the document A code to denote the kind of phrase it is (title, heading or anchor) The offset of the word within the phrase.
In addition, for every expert we maintain the list of URLs within it (as indexes into a global list of URLs) and for each URL we maintain the identifiers of the key phrases that qualify it.
To avoid giving long key phrases an advantage, the number of keywords within any key phrase is limited (e.g., to 32).
3 Query Processing
In response to a user query, we first determine a list of Nexperts that are the most relevant for that query. E.g. N = 200 in our experiment. Then, we rank results by selectively following the relevant links from these experts and assigning an authority score to each such page. In this section we describe how the expert and authority scores are computed.
3.1 Computing the Expert Score
For an expert to be useful in response to a query, the minimum requirement is that there is at least one URL which contains all the query keywords in the key phrases that qualify it. A fast approximation is to require all query keywords to occur in the document. Furthermore, we assign to each candidate expert a score reflecting the number and importance of the key phrases that contain the query keywords, as well as the degree to which these phrases match the query.
Thus, we compute the score of an expert as as a 3-tuple of the form (S 0, S 1, S 2). Let k be the number of terms in the input query, q. The component S i of the score is computed by considering only key phrases that contain precisely k - i of the query terms. E.g., S 0 is the score computed from phrases containing all the query terms.
S i = SUM {key phrases p with k - i query terms} LevelScore(p) * FullnessFactor(p, q)
LevelScore(p) is a score assigned to the phrase by virtue of the type of phrase it is. For example, in our implementation we use a LevelScore of 16 for title phrases, 6 for headings and 1 for anchor text. This is based on the assumption that the title text is more useful than the heading text, which is more useful than an anchor text match in determining what the expert page is about.
FullnessFactor(p, q) is a measure of the number of terms in p covered by the terms in q. Let plen be the length of p. Let m be the number of terms in p which are not in q (i.e., surplus terms in the phrase). Then, FullnessFactor(p, q) is computed as follows:
If m <= 2, FullnessFactor(p, q) = 1 If m > 2, FullnessFactor(p, q) = 1 - (m - 2) / plen
Our goal is to prefer experts that match all of the query keywords over experts that match all but one of the keywords, and so on. Hence we rank experts first by S 0. We break ties by S 1 and further ties by S 2. The score of each expert is converted to a scalar by the weighted summation of the three components:
Expert_Score = 2 32 * S 0 + 2 16 * S 1 + S 2.
3.2 Computing the Target Score
We consider the top N experts by the ranking from the previous step (e.g., the top 200) and examine the pages they point to. These are called targets.
It is from this set of targets that we select top ranked documents. For a target to be considered it must be pointed to by at least 2 experts on hosts that are mutually non-affiliated and are not affiliated to the target. For all targets that qualify we compute a target score reflecting both the number and relevance of the experts pointing to it and the relevance of the phrases qualifying the links.
The target score T is computed in three steps:
For every expert E that points to target T we draw a directed edge (E,T). Consider the following “qualification” relationship between key phrases and edges: The title phrase qualifies all edges coming out of the expert A heading qualifies all edges whose corresponding hyperlinks occur in the document after the given heading and before the next heading of equal or greater importance. A hyperlink’s anchor text qualifies the edge corresponding to the hyperlink.
For each query keyword w, let occ(w, T) be the number of distinct key phrases in E that contain w and qualify the edge (E,T). We define an “edge score” for the edge (E,T) represented by Edge_Score(E,T), which is computed thus:
If occ(w, T) is 0 for any query keyword then the Edge_Score(E,T) = 0. Otherwise, Edge_Score(E,T) = Expert_Score(E) * Sum {query keywords w} occ(w, T) We next check for affiliations between expert pages that point to the same target. If two affiliated experts have edges to the same target T, we then discard one of the two edges. Specifically, we discard the edge which has the lower Edge_Score of the two. To compute the Target_Score of a target we sum the Edge_Scores of all edges incident on it.
The list of targets is ranked by Target_Score. Optionally, this list can be filtered by testing if the query keywords are present in the targets. Optionally, we can match the query keywords against each target to compute a Match_Score using content analysis, and combine the Target_Score with the Match_Score before ranking the targets.
Figure 1. Hilltop Ranking for the Query: “jobs”
4 Evaluation
In order to evaluate our prototype search engine, we conducted two user studies aiming to estimate the recall and precision. Both experiments also involved three other search engines, namely AltaVista, DirectHit and Google, for comparison and were done in August 1999. Note that the current rankings by these engines may differ.
4.1 Locating Specific Popular Targets
For the first experiment we asked seven volunteers to suggest the home pages of ten organizations of their choice (companies, universities, stores, etc.). Some of the queries are reproduced in the table below:
| Alpha Phi Omega | Best Buy | Digital | Disneyland |
| Dollar Bank | Grouplens | INRIA | Keebler |
| Mountain View Public Library | Macy’s | Minneapolis City Pages | Moscow Aviation Institute |
| MENSA | OCDE | ONU | Pittsburg Steelers |
| Pizza Hut | Rice University | SONY | Safeway |
| Stanford Shopping Center | Trek Bicycle | USTA | Vanguard Investments |
The same query was sent to all four search engines. We assume that there is exactly one home page in each case. Every time the home page was found within the first ten results, its rank was recorded. Figure 2 summarizes the average recall for the ranks 1 to 10 for each of the four engines: our engine Hilltop (HT), Google (GG), AltaVista (AV), and DirectHit (DH). Average recall at rank k for this experiment is the probability of finding the desired home page within the first k results.
Figure 2. Average Recall vs. Rank
Our engine performed well on these queries. Thus, for about 87% of the queries, Hilltop returned the desired page as the first result, comparable with Google at 80% of the queries, while DirectHit and AltaVista succeeded at rank 1 only in 43% and 20% of the cases, respectively. As we look at more results, the average recall increases to 100% for Google, 97% for Hilltop, 83% for DirectHit, and 30% for AltaVista.
4.2 Gathering Relevant Pages
In order to estimate Hilltop’s ability to generate a good first page of results for broad queries, we asked our volunteers to think of broad topics (i.e., topics for which it is likely that many good pages exist) and formulate queries. We collected 25 such queries, listed below:
| Aerosmith | Amsterdam | backgrounds | chess | dictionary |
| fashion | freeware | FTP search | Godzilla | Grand Theft Auto |
| greeting cards | Jennifer Love Hewitt | Las Vegas | Louvre | Madonna |
| MEDLINE | MIDI | newspapers | Paris | people search |
| real audio | software | Starr report | tennis | UFO |
We then used a script to submit each query to all four search engines and collect the top 10 results from each engine, recording for each result the URL, the rank, and the engine that found it. We needed to determine which of the results were relevant in an unbiased manner. For each query we generated the list of unique URLs in the union of the results from all engines. This list was then presented to a judge in a random order, without any information about the ranks of page or their originating engine. The judge rated each page for relevance to the given query on a binary scale (1 = “good page on the topic”, 0 = “not relevant or not found”). Then, another script combined these ratings with the information about provenance and rank and computed the average precision at rank k (for k = 1, 5, and 10). The results are summarized in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Average Precision at Rank k
These results indicate that for broad subjects our engine returns a large percentage of highly relevant pages among the ten best ranked pages, comparable with Google and DirectHit, and better than AltaVista. At rank 1 both Hilltop and DirectHit have an average precision of 0.92. Average precision at 10 for Hilltop was 0.77, roughly equal to the best search engine, namely Google, with a precision of 0.79 at rank 10.
5 Conclusions
We described a new ranking algorithm for broad queries called Hilltop and the implementation of a search engine based on it. Given a broad query Hilltop generates a list of target pages which are likely to be very authoritative pages on the topic of the query. This is by virtue of the fact that they are highly valued by pages on the WWW which address the topic of the query. In computing the usefulness of a target page from the hyperlinks pointing to it, we only consider links originating from pages that seem to be experts. Experts in our definition are directories of links pointing to many non-affiliated sites. This is an indication that these pages were created for the purpose of directing users to resources, and hence we regard their opinion as valuable. Additionally, in computing the level of relevance, we require a match between the query and the text on the expert page which qualifies the hyperlink being considered. This ensures that hyperlinks being considered are on the query topic. For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage. The result of the steps described above is to generate a listing of pages that are highly relevant to the user’s query and of high quality.
Hilltop most resembles the connectivity techniques, PageRank and Topic Distillation. Unlike PageRank our technique is a dynamic one and considers connectivity in a graph specifically about the query topic. Hence, it can evaluate relevance of content from the point of view of the community of authors interested in the query topic. Unlike Topic Distillation we enumerate and consider all good experts on the subject and correspondingly all good target pages on the subject. In order to find the most relevant experts we use a custom keyword-based approach, focusing only on the text that best captures the domain of expertise (the document title, section headings and hyperlink anchor-text). Then, in following links, we boost the score of those targets whose qualifying text best matches the query. Thus, by combining content and connectivity analysis, we are both more comprehensive and more precise. An important property is that unlike Topic Distillation approaches, we can prove that if a page does not appear in our output it lacks the connectivity support to justify its inclusion. Thus we are less prone to omit good pages on the topic, which is a problem with Topic Distillation systems. Also, since we use an index optimized to finding experts, our implementation uses less data than Topic Distillation and is therefore faster.
The indexing of anchor-text was first suggested in WWW Worm [McBryan 94]. In some Topic Distillation systems such as Clever [Chakrabarti et al 1998] and in the Google search engine [Page et al 98] anchor-text is considered in evaluating a link’s relevance. We generalize this to other forms of text that are seen to “qualify” a hyperlink at its source, and include headings and title-text as well. Also, unlike Topic Distillation systems, we evaluate experts on their content match to the user’s query, rather than on their linkage to good target pages. This prevents the scores of “niche experts” (i.e., experts that point to new or relative poorly connected pages) from being driven to zero, as is often the case in Topic Distillation algorithms.
In a blind evaluation we found that Hilltop delivers a high level of relevance given broad queries, and performs comparably to the best of the commercial search engines tested.
6 References
[Kleinberg 97]
J. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. To appear in the Journal of the ACM, 1999. Also appears as IBM Research Report RJ 10076, May 1997.
[Chakrabarti et al 98]
S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan, and S. Rajagopalan. Automatic Resource Compilation by Analyzing Hyperlink Structure and Associated Text. Proceedings of the 7th World-Wide Web conference, 1998.
[Chakrabarti et al 99]
S. Chakrabarti, M. van den Berg and B. Dom. Focused crawling: A new approach to topic-specific Web resource discovery. In the 8th World Wide Web Conference, Toronto, May 1999.
[Bharat et al 98]
K. Bharat and M. Henzinger. Improved algorithms for topic distillation in a hyperlinked environment. In SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, volume 21. ACM, 1998.
[Page et al 98]
S. Brin and L. Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. In WWW Conference, volume 7, 1998.
[McBryan 94]
Oliver A. McBryan. GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web. First International Conference on the World Wide Web. CERN, Geneva (Switzerland), May 25-26-27 1994.
More Information About the Authors
Krishna Bharat
Principal Scientist
Krishna Bharat is a Principal Scientist at Google Inc, working in the area of user interface and algorithmic support for Web search and content analysis (Web Information Retrieval). He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1996. Before joining Google in 1999, he was a member of the research staff at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, CA.
Krishna has served on the program committees of UIST and the World Wide Web Conference and has been a reviewer for the WWW Conference, UIST, SIGCHI, SIGIR and TOCHI. He has taught tutorials on Web-IR at SIGCHI and SIGIR.
Krishna is the creator of Google News which won the 2003 Webby Award in the news category. Also, he received the 2003 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. Krishna is the acting head of Google’s new R&D Center in Bangalore India.
George Andrei Mihaila
Research Staff Member
George is an instructor for Industrial Information Systems in the Industrial Eng. and Op. Res. Department at Columbia University. He also works at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York.
His research interests include:
database integration semistructured database query languages metadata and resource discovery on the WWW
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents
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Google Pushing Local Search?
Today while doing research for a client, I happened to notice something very interesting in Google’s results.
The given search was for “hampton inn” and further research on other geographically relevant, broad terms returned similar results like “restaurant” and “mcdonalds.”
Entering a city, state or zip code returned the Google map and relevant results based on the given entry. This did not appear differently if you are logged into a Google account or not.
Has anyone else seen this?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
[Link]
Meta Tags Constitute Trademark Infringement or Not?
A couple of influential court cases in the US have been decided, however, they differ on the overall outcome when it comes to use of trademarked words in META data including keywords constitute trademark infringement.
North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.
But in this case, I do not think Axiom denied placing those terms in their meta tags. The question Goldman has is, did the meta tags influence the site to rank for those terms? Google has told us they ignore the keywords meta tag, but said they do use the meta description tag. But would the meta description tag alone be enough to rank a site for? Hard to say. But if you add some links to the equation, then it is a no brainer. Search Engine Land
Although Axiom’s website never displayed NAM’s trademarked terms to visitors and never mentioned NAM or NAM’s products, Axiom nonetheless included the terms within its meta tags to influence Internet search engines. For instance, evidence in this case indicated that, before Axiom removed these meta tags from its website, if a computer user entered the trademarked terms into Google’s Internet search engine, Google listed Axiom’s website as the second most relevant search result.
The district court issued a preliminary injunction in favor of NAM and Adagen, prohibiting Axiom from using NAM’s trademarks within meta tags and prohibiting Axiom from making the challenged statements about the DRX 9000. Among other things, the district court specifically found that Axiom’s use of NAM’s trademarks created a likelihood of confusion, and the court also found that Axiom’s advertising statements are literally false and material to consumers’ purchasing decisions. Court Filing
Later, in another case (Standard Process, Inc. v. Banks):
However, today “modern search engines make little if any use of metatags.”
As more and more webmasters “manipulated their keyword metatags to provide suboptimal keyword associations, search engines progressively realized that keyword metatags were a poor indicator of relevancy.” Accordingly, search engines today primarily use algorithms that rank a website by the number of other sites that link or point to it. Court Filing
Barry stated at Search Engine Land:
Although Standard Process won part of the case, the judge ruled that since the keyword META tags do not influence search results, having trademarked terms in them are immaterial. US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter
Tamar at Search Engine Roundtable points out:
META keywords are not discussed in this Google Help document which should support the law’s findings. META Keywords Don’t Matter According to US Court
So, the real question is whether search engines still use the keyword META tag in ranking web pages in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google references META tags in their help document and excluded keywords from the list of tags that Google uses, “Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.” It does not explicitly cite the keywords META tag as being either important or irrelevant. Yahoo and MSN do not directly refer to the META keywords tag, to my knowledge, but many argue that they may still use the keywords data to rank web pages.
I have heard from other professional SEOs that the biggest value for META keywords is for your competition.
Stepping outside of the potential legal concerns for using trademarked content, I feel that the keywords tag still has relevance in website design and the SEO process. They may give competitors insight into your intentions, but if it may potentially help you rank well for a given query then why wouldn’t you use them? Even though both of these cases only reference Google, however, even if the courts don’t recognize the other engines, that doesn’t mean that you should!
What are your thoughts?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Meta Tags Constitute Trademark Infringement or Not?
[Link]
RSS Day 2008
What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.
What are you planning for RSS Day?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
[Link]
Anatomy of Organic Listing Snippets in the SERPs and Outlining Best Practices
When returning results to a user, search engines use various resources based upon the particular search or query. The basic information published on a Web page may not be visible to a user, even when the page is displayed in an Internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox. Some of this information is used by the search engines to determine the topic (content) of a particular Web page.
Search engines use many specific characteristics to evaluate a Web page for a particular query string or keyword search. Many of these characteristics differ from one search engine to another and may even vary based upon the query string itself. Because of this, this user help focuses only on the “snippets” or information regarding a particular page, published in organic listings. These are the natural or non-sponsored listings, on search engine results pages, referred to as SERPs.
Traditionally, search engines provide three specific bits of information that make up the snippet in the SERPs. These bits of information are:
Page Title Page Description Page URL
Each part of the snippet provides the user with important information related to their query and, as such, gives them partial information for their review. This allows them to select the best result for their specific request. Each search engine controls what is and what is not included in its index. The index contains all of the pages that it feels are relevant and would be important to users for specific queries. Just like the index, the search engine also controls what information is published as the snippet in the SERPs.
The search engines look for a few different things when returning results. They want to provide the most relevant results, so that users will return again and again. Therefore, each search engine applies a ranking algorithm to a user’s query and then orders the results quickly. Obviously, human interaction with results would be difficult, based upon the massive amount of information available and the almost infinite amount of possible queries. I am not going to discuss conspiracy theories that the search engines do or do not manually rank individual results for specific queries.
Publishers of Web pages have the ability to influence the proper ranking of a Web page in the SERPs by publishing relevant content, titles, descriptions, keywords and page names. Some of these can even influence the actual snippet in the SERPs. Typically, the Title tag, META Description tag and the URL with the Page Name, which are part of the web page’s code, are used in the SERP snippet.
For consistency purposes, the search engine may truncate, or cut off, long titles, descriptions or URLs if they are too long to fit in within its SERP template. These lengths do not change frequently; however, each search engine has its own standards. For consistency purposes, here are Best Practice Guidelines that will ensure your information is consolidated and your message is fully legible in the three major search engines: Google, MSN / Live and Yahoo.
Best Practices
Title – 60 characters with spaces
Description – 150 characters with spaces
URL – 85 characters
Why is this important?
Marketing Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is consistent with your intent can be extremely important Optimization Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is consistent with your targeted keywords can be extremely important Visibility Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is written well enough to get the user to click is primary
The reason that your marketing, optimization and visibility need to be in sync is to convert those organic visitors into conversions.
The search engines may also use additional information located on your page or from a “trusted source” to return what they feel is the most relevant information in the SERP snippet.
Additional Information that May Affect Your Snippet
Title – In the event that a publisher fails to let the search engine know what the title of a page should be, or if the page title is not related to the content on that page, the search engine may use other “trusted sources” to publish the title of the snippet. These “trusted sources” are typically DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory, and the Yahoo Directory. Both of these directories have titles, descriptions and URLs for domains that are in these directories. Description – The description displayed in the snippet may not be from the META tag. Sometimes, especially for longer queries, a search engine may return a short section of the content of the individual page that is related to the specific query. URL – The URL that is shown in the snippet may be too long for the taste of the search engine, so they may truncate the “http://,” “www,” or even cut out directories after the domain name to return keywords related to the specific query.
The search engines have given publishers the ability to control whether they want the snippet to be influenced by DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory. There are additional META tags that are supported by the search engines that can be included in the page code that will tell the search engines to stop using this information in the SERP snippets.
DMOZ
All Engines -
Yahoo -
Google -
MSN/Live -
Yahoo Directory
All Engines -
Yahoo -
Google -
MSN/Live -
Additional Information:
How to create good meta descriptions
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise.
Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t give users a clear idea of the page’s content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.
Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren’t displayed in the pages the user sees, it’s easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google’s search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Anatomy of Organic Listing Snippets in the SERPs and Outlining Best Practices
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April Fools 2008
Here is a quick breakdown of April tomfoolery this year:
Search Engine Roundtable becomes - Search Engine Squaretable
Google Introduces FrankRank, an ad ranking algorithm
Google AdSense announce the launch of AdSense for conversations
New for gMail - Gmail Custom Time
And, of course - Google Announces Project Virgle
Thanks for the laughs!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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The Future of Search is 24 Hours in Advance
So, April Fools 2008 Begins - 1st Up Google Australia
Google Australia offers gDay with MATE:
About gDay technology
The core technology that powers gDay is MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).
Using MATE’s machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.
From the gDay Press Release:
gDay was developed in Google’s Sydney engineering centre and can accurately predict future events and internet content. It does this by using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques from a system called MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).
Using Google’s index of historic, cached web content and a mashup of numerous factors including recurrence plots and fuzzy measure analysis, gDay creates a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now - including share price movements, sports results and news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of tomorrow’s blogs and newspaper columns.
Then, to rank these future webpages in order of relevance, gDay uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s PageRank, called SageRank.
Only Australian websites are included in the beta.
“Google’s Australian engineers have a history of major technological innovations, from Google Maps to Mapplets to Traffic for Google Maps. Giving humankind the ability to see 24 hours into the future is just a natural progression – of sorts,” said Alan Noble, Head of Engineering for Google Australia & New Zealand.
For more information about this service, please follow these links:
Official Google Australia Blog
Frequently Asked Questions
Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
The Future of Search is 24 Hours in Advance
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SEO Standards - To Be or Not To Be?
Background
There has always been a lot of mystery surrounding the online marketing industry especially Search Engine Optimization. There are even some that consider the efforts of SEO as selling “snake oil” and even some discredit the industry as a whole because of perceived SEO practices that will get your website blacklisted.
Chris Boggs at Search Engine Watch wrote on the topic, called for standards to be adopted and outlined steps to build these standards based upon 1. definition, 2. risk and 3. education. I think that these are all valid and could be a useful tool for accountability for marketers.
The Heat of the Game
Recently, Jill Whalen sited her own feelings regarding the topic in an editorial at Search Engine Land and Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay fired back. Based upon the voting on Sphinn about each of these posts at the time of writing this post here are the breakdowns:
No - 56 Sphinns Yes - 51 Sphinns
If you break this down a bit further, a realistic look at the online marketing community can be visualized:
(total unique voters are counted, votes for both are marked as undecided)
No - 35 or 41% Yes - 30 or 35% Undecided - 21 or 24% Total Votes - 86
I think that the split within the industry is pretty consistent with these.
I know, many of you are probably saying “but you haven’t answered the question!”
OK! I hear you!
I have to be perfectly up front, I land right on the fence on this issue, but don’t get me wrong, I feel that there are compelling arguments on both sides. I think that there is a need for any business consulting to hold itself to specific standards that are above questionable practices, but in that same respect our industry is held to standards that are maintained by independent entities (search engines) that are not publishing the specific rules of engagement for optimal performance. In fact, each of the engines have differing views as to what is more important, so this makes it extremely difficult to lay out specific standards for everyone to subscribe to.
Similar to the medical industry, there are adopted principles and practices that are approved by industry resources like the American Medical Association. Even though all of the secrets of the human body have not been unlocked, they still have standard operating procedures for identifying and treating medical concerns.
Why we would want SEO standards
To be simplistic, the adoption of standards for SEO would simplify the process of selecting a comfort level for making adjustments to a website to improve performance. Similar to medicine, you can do things that are outside the acceptable practices to gain optimal performance. Example, using performance enhancing drugs in professional sports, might get you a record or give your team the little extra that will win a few extra games or even a championship. But, in the long-run it runs the risk of tarnishing your reputation and potentially can get you banned from the sport.
Is it worth it? That is a question that the individual athlete or website owner has to answer for themselves. In the eyes of professional sports, the excuse that you didn’t know what you were doing… will only get you so far.
Organizations, like SEMPO, have already adopted standards and best practices that are widely recognized as such, so some might argue that they are already in place.
Like the medical industry, without adopting specific practices and principles, the process of finding a reputable SEO might be difficult, however this is required no matter what the type of business. Know your partners. You wouldn’t want to jump right in without knowing the risks and rewards of any other business venture, why should it be different for your website?
Adopting standards would allow for more formal education and certifications, like the medical industry. However unlike medicine, we are working to perform in an environment that is governed by the search engines not trying to ward off infection and disease. We communicate at different levels, so the medical industry does not need to be worried about withholding information about what we are doing to fight and eliminate cancer, because cancer doesn’t read their research. The search engines, on the other hand, do study SEO either for warding off artificial inflating performance or performing better themselves.
Why we wouldn’t want SEO standards
Search Engine Optimization is not always cut and dry. Many practices that are beneficial to one website may not be helpful to another, however there are consistent behaviors and practices that every website should include in their strategy. Although these practices, strategies and behaviors might seem elusive, they are easy to grasp when you take a holistic view of web development and visibility by fully understanding all of the ingredients of a web page, what the search engines can and cannot see and other fundamental components of web design.
Many feel that businesses have to make ethical and moral business decisions on a regular basis, so what is the great concern with them doing the same thing when it comes to online visibility? Search engine performance is not purely a game of popularity, nor does it consider how profitable one company is over another (although it can help). Search engine performance is all about providing the user with a positive experience. Sure, Google wants to index all of the world’s information and make it easily accessible for everyone, but before they can do this, they have to provide consistent results to user’s requests that are what the user is seeking, otherwise there is no reason to index mass amounts of information if you can’t find what you are looking for!
Pressing on, many SEO professionals don’t want to level the playing field in regards to competition with other SEOs and leak their secrets to the general public because of a fear of higher expectations from clients or dissolution of the industry. If everyone knows how to do, what will they need me for? Really, there is great benefit for a company to know what the best practices for optimization are, even if they are not doing the work themselves. The website owner has the industry experience in their particular industry, just like a doctor/patient relationship, both parties need to be transparent in order for positive benefit for them both.
My thoughts
I think that the SEO industry could benefit from solidifying standards and defining much of our craft for the betterment of those seeking our employ. This would also give value towards more formal education and accreditation and level the playing field. However, with this, there will still be advanced techniques that could be employed (not black hat) to enhance, not inflate, performance but that can’t be taught.
Search Engine Optimization has many truths, even if they haven’t been outlined by the search engines themselves, self-evident things from a common sense approach, that could be outlined and adopted or subscribed to by industry professionals above board. Whether or not this would be beneficial for the industry, we will have to only guess, but the one thing that would be accomplished is the search engines would have more power over their results than ever before. SEO keeps the engines honest, and as much as I hate it when an adjustment is made to their algorithms to address black hat techniques, these adjustments are necessary because they highlighted an exposed part that was taken advantage of.
I don’t hate the search engines, they are the yin to my yang. They are trying to do the same thing that SEO professionals, like myself, are trying to do, provide the user what they seek so they will come back again. I know that there are many website owners and SEOs out there that are in for today and not concerned for the future, such is the cycle of business. As Chris noted:
Every marketer should have the ability to make search marketing decisions not based on ethical or moral considerations of using specific tactics, but on their own business model. If you’re a Super Bowl T-shirt salesman and need to sell a few million items around the time of the big game, you may be willing to use riskier tactics. That should be your choice.
So, whether there are strict guidelines, principles or accepted industry standards, I will still be here for the user, they dictate my behavior.
I have nothing to be defensive about, I’m legit!
In an effort to be totally transparent, I work with Chris Boggs and I respect both Jill Whalen and Lisa Barone.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
SEO Standards - To Be or Not To Be?
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Google Turns Black To Go Green
Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
Earth Hour
Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement.
Great idea and for a great cause, however, I was disappointed when looking at this further and EarthHourUS.org offered up ideas of things to do while in the dark and it linked to this. Not what I was hoping for, but at least it’s for a good cause.
Cheers!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Google Turns Black To Go Green
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Google Search within Search - User Assistance or Retailer Handicap?
Google recently began experimenting with a new site search box within results:
Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.
We hope that you will make use of the site search box in order to get the information you’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
Here is what this looks like in the SERPs:
This is what appears on the right sidebar for a simple site search:
As you can see by this query for “computer hard drive,” competitors have access to results for a query for specific search terms.
What does this mean for Best Buy and other retailers?
Well in the case of Best Buy, here are the top three results from the site search for the query “computer hard drive”:
Not their best showing, is it?
Here is what the NY Times had to say today:
The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site.
Take, for instance, a situation last week, when users of Google searched The Washington Post and were given a secondary search box. Those who typed “jobs” into that second box saw related results for The Post’s employment pages, but the results were bordered by ads for competing employment sites like CareerBuilder or Monster.com.
So even though users began the process by stating their intention to reach The Post, Google’s ads steered at least some of them to competitors. Similar situations arose when users relied on Google to search nytimes.com.
While executives of both The Times and Washington Post. Newsweek Interactive declined to comment, plenty of others assailed Google over what they saw as a heavy-handed approach.
So, regardless if your opinion is that “Google is being evil” or “just taking advantage of their own abilities” it certainly begs the question: “Do you think that titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords are no longer useful?”
Is this showing us that Google can/is be/being evil?
or,
Is this an answer to concerns with advertising on trademarked terms?
or,
Is this just Google trying to squeeze more ad revenue by giving competitors what they want?
What are your thoughts?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Google Search within Search - User Assistance or Retailer Handicap?
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Happy Easter
It has been a long time since I have posted, but as far as moving to Cleveland and getting acclimated to the area (and the weather), we are almost done!
Happy Easter everyone, and there will be more from pittfall in the near future!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Getting Settled in Cleveland
It has been some time since I posted… I have been without a connection for almost a week, aside from my new office here in Cleveland. It has been an amazing experience so far and it looks to be an unbelievable opportunity.
I will be posting more when we get more settled.
Thanks!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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New Horizons…
I would like to take this moment to thank everyone that has been supportive of this blog and me personally in my growth and development in the Search Engine Optimization industry.
I am also extremely happy to announce that I will be furthering my career and moving from an in-house SEO to an agency. I will be working with the SEO team as part of Brulant in March.
This means a lot to me and has very dramatic implications on my family. We are uprooting from our beach-side cottage/apartment in Florida to brave the cold winters and four actual seasons in Cleveland, OH. Which just so happens to be the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (pictured above). It’s a brave new world that we are jumping into and very exciting for me, my family and my career.
Other changes might also occur as I may be moving the hosting of SEOpittfall to a new provider, so you might not hear too much from me on SEOpittfall.com until my family and I get settled in our new home.
Again, I want to thank everyone of my regular visitors and subscribers. There are so many changes on the horizon and it has been a fantastic journey that looks to be getting more intriguing. Thanks for your continued support!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Oops, an Error has Occurred - Yahoo! Says No to Microsoft
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid
Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.
After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo’s board determined that the $31 per share offer “massively undervalues” Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn’t account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft on Monday, spelling out its position.
Yahoo has taken “poison pill” provisions to prevent an unwanted takeover. Microsoft would likely have to oust the board in order to overturn them.
Will Microsoft and Steven Ballmer attempt a takeover?
Does this mean the end to the Search Wars… I don’t think so, but we will see!
This would equate to the second failed attempt in as many years!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Oops, an Error has Occurred - Yahoo! Says No to Microsoft
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The Great Search War or Search War I?
Whether the outcome would be Micro-hoo or Ya-soft the outcome would be the same, a new combined power that may be able to put some heat on Google to maintain their control on search and online advertising.
This is not new speculation, actually last year Microsoft was in the same role as they have assumed recently:
Competition is the thing that Microsoft has not had to directly face for some time, and Yahoo knows what it feels like to be on top, but both have not been able to touch Google in the department of search and search driven revenue. As Google looks to other areas, like radio, television and newspapers, to generate additional revenue streams, this might be the optimal time for these two tech giants to seize an opportunity (that may or may not exist). The only thing that I can see, outside looking in, is that Google has never really been tested in their core competency, search. This could expose weaknesses that might be there, but I don’t see that either Yahoo or MSN could accomplish this independently.
I know that the dust has settled, for now at least, but there could be something there today that might never be there again (an opportunity)! - Microsoft + Yahoo = ???
This time Steven Ballmer wrote a letter directly to Yahoo’s Board of Directors, this time with a bit more teeth than last year’s bid noting their lack of growth that was the main concern with not accepting Microsoft’s bid:
In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.
and continuing with a solid plan (at least on paper) to the reason that the board and stockholders would be interested in the merger:
While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:
Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.
Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.
Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.
Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.
Could they pull it off?
We may not know yet, as Yahoo has made little response over the news, however Google has appeared to be quite concerned. They took a whole day to build and publish a response to this development (via Official Google Blog):
The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions — and consumers deserve satisfying answers.
This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first — and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.
WOW! Sounds like Google is a bit concerned about the prospects of Microsoft who has the dominate OS and Yahoo! with a significant following joining forces that might be able to slow Google’s efforts at building office solutions, email and other user desired applications in Microsoft and joining a stronger search presence in Yahoo! Really, it seems like a good match for the two and these types of opportunities don’t come easy or frequently.
With that, Microsoft fired back:
Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.
Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals. Press Release
And so, The Great Search War has begun, or Search War I if you prefer!
The next bomb came from a third-party source, The Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.
It is considered unlikely that Google would itself bid for Yahoo because of regulatory concerns related to their large shares of the search and online advertising markets. But the people familiar with the matter say Google could play a role in attempts by others to outbid Microsoft, or by Yahoo to remain independent. Google could potentially offer money, or guaranteed revenue in return for a Yahoo advertising outsourcing pact, under that scenario, say people familiar with the matter. Even such involvement by Google would likely attract antitrust scrutiny because of concerns that competition between the two Silicon Valley Internet companies could be reduced.
Many of us on the sidelines have cheered or booed the concept and when there was the reaction from Google, many cried fowl. Personally, the idea that Google should be able to maintain such a commanding lead in search and online advertising and try to block this would be one of the most “evil” things that they could do!
I know that this is an election year, and it has been some 8 years, in the US, since we have not had an incumbent in the election for the President (No, I don’t think that Hillary should be considered an incumbent!), but this appears to be a much more active campaign for votes than the primary elections. Is this what we have to look forward to in the general election?
Back to the action… Steven Ballmer sent an email to everyone at Microsoft to educate them of the situation and outline their plan, but on the following Monday, via a SEC filing, we see what Yahoo is thinking via a confidential email to their troops:
Subject: more on today’s news…
fellow yahoos:
since we talked to you this morning, there’s been a lot of media coverage and industry chatter about microsoft’s unsolicited proposal to acquire yahoo!. we know you’ve been hearing and reading a lot about this. that’s why we wanted to reach out to all of you at the end of the day to emphasize a few things that we hope will give you some more context about this proposal, the process that our board is taking, and what you can expect in the days ahead.
first, we want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made — and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there’s certainly no integration process underway. this proposal is just that — a proposal. and it was only made in the last 24 hours. you can be sure the board is going to review it thoughtfully and carefully, and do what’s right for our great company. microsoft’s proposal is one of many options that we’re evaluating in order to maximize value for our shareholders and employees over the long-term. that’s why we will respond to microsoft after our board has completed a careful review of all of our strategic alternatives.
second, we can’t let any of the noise we’re hearing around this situation distract us from our core mission. it’s critical that we continue to focus on running our business, executing our strategy and delivering value to all of our users, advertisers and publishers.
finally, we realize that this may have been a tough day for many of you, especially those on the front lines of our business. we know you have many questions, and we’re committed to making sure you’re as informed as possible as this process moves forward. in the interim, we both want to thank you for your continued energy, focus and determination. we’ll continue to share information with you as we have it and can do so.
And then the users spoke:
Flickr users are openly protesting the idea of Microsoft acquiring Flickr’s parent company, Yahoo. A Group has opened up called MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR where users can upload protest photos.
And more news as to how Microsoft plans to make this move:
If the Microsoft bid for Yahoo goes through, Reuters says that they might have to borrow money to make it happen.
“It’s likely we’re actually going to borrow for the first time,” said [Microsoft CFO Chris] Liddell in an annual strategy meeting with analysts. “It’s going to be a mixture of the cash we have on hand plus debt.”
Jerry Yang then rallied the troops to stay focused and that no decision had been made:
as we’ve said, no decisions have been made about microsoft’s proposal. our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape. and we’ve hired top advisers to assist through the process.
Everyone in the practice knows that this is not over, but what is apparent is that Microsoft and Yahoo! have to do something to address the growing presence that Google has gained over the years if they want to continue to be a valuable property on the Internet and not be relegated to the history books and Wikipedia!
One thing that is for sure is that this episode will lay boundaries that are not currently as visible:
Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s bid (without help) - Strong Yahoo, Weak Microsoft, Google Unchanged
Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s bid (with Google’s help) - Weak Yahoo, Weak Microsoft, Google Stronger
Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s bid (with others help) - Troubled Yahoo, Troubled Microsoft, Google Unchanged
Yahoo accepts Microsoft’s bid - Stronger Micro-Hoo/Ya-soft and Google Concerned
Yahoo appears to be using this to leverage their value to their stockholders and users, but this will only keep them up for a little while. If they decide to reject the offer from Microsoft or accept, they will need to start turning a profit on the same scale as Google to keep their presence secure.
I guess we will have to wait, will it be round 4 between Microsoft and Google, or be the final decision from Yahoo… we shall see. No matter the outcome it has led to quite the drama!
A couple of other questions have not been answered yet:
Will Google come out looking like Yahoo’s David to Microsoft’s Goliath? or
Will Microsoft look like the school mate teaming up with Yahoo to battle the class bully Google?
Not just the future of search, but a BIG public opinion adjustment might be in our future!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
The Great Search War or Search War I?
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SEOpittfall is Welcomed into The AdAge Power 150
I know that it has been a long time since posting anything… no worries!
I will be visiting the lovely city of Cleveland in the next few days. I have not been and I say lovely because that is what I am being told, I will let you know after I get back. I am sure that I am in for a bit of a shock, Florida has been in the 60’s and Cleveland plays with the low 30’s regularly this time of year.
I would like to announce that SEOpittfall has been added to the AdAge Power 150 (even though I don’t rank in the top 150).
What is the Power 150?
The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It’s really as simple as that, except that the name isn’t strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline.
Looks really interesting, certainly an honor to get noticed!
You might recognize a few of the top 5:
Seth’s Blog Copyblogger Search Engine Land Micro Persuasion Marketing Pilgrim
Oh, and here is my badge:
Thanks for sticking around during this lull in programming.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
SEOpittfall is Welcomed into The AdAge Power 150
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Marketing and Learning - Division and Contrast
The smallest remarks can sometimes spur the greatest conversations.
Case in point, yesterday on a blog by Professor Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University made a very simple interaction with his students that many of us might remember during our time in college, regarding school and learning, and posted it on the Digital Ethnography blog:
First day of class …
I took an informal “raise your hand” survey of my 200 Intro students.
Me: “How many of you do not actually *like* school?”
… just over half(!) raise their hands
Me: “How many of you do not like learning?”
… no hands
You may remember their video post Digital R/evolution.
I left a comment regarding the post citing similarities with educators and marketers:
As a professional marketer, it is my job to reach an audience and make a lasting impression regarding a product or service. In that same respect, as an educator you are trying to reach your audience and make a lasting impression regarding a topic.
Marketing is changing, as is education, in that we have (because of technology) gained the ability to interact on new levels to reach and make an impression on our audience.
To which, a scathing response to my remark:
Marketing’s goal isn’t to empower consumers. In fact, it’s goal is usually to “dupe” consumers.
I know that it is not my intent to dupe consumers, but I can see that there are those that believe that we (marketers) are focused on a sale rather than a relationship. I have been a marketer for over 10 years now and have been an online marketer for half that time. I love the online space, it gives me the ability to engage and educate the user, I really do enjoy this.
I know that there are many that regard SEO in that same respect, which is something that I (and I am sure you) battle in our online communities around marketing and web development.
Are there many online marketers out there that are not trying to engage their users and build a relationship?
I know that there are a lot of SEOs that do the same. They are usually classified as black hats, but are there any SEOs that consider themselves white hats but are not concerned with building relationships with their users?
Yes. No. I would like to hear from you!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Marketing and Learning - Division and Contrast
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MyBlogLog Steps Up Authority for Blog Communities
Today, MyBlogLog added a new feature to the online blog communities… to put it simply, a validation process to verify that you are the owner of the website and have authority over the community.
Why verify?
As an owner of community on MyBlogLog, the Verified check mark is like a “seal of approval.” This shows anyone who looks at your MyBlogLog community page that the owner of the site has an active hand in the management of the community page.
How it works
When a site owner begins the verification process, we give them a bit of code to put onto their site that only someone with edit rights to the site can put into the page. Verification happens by putting the code on your site, re-publishing, and clicking the “Authenticate” button on the verification page. MyBlogLog then goes out to the site to check for the code. If it finds it, verification is complete!
Once you complete verification, you can remove the code from your site.
What it means
The verified check-mark on a community page is an indicator that the community owner has completed the verification process. Verification can only be done by authors and co-authors of a MyBlogLog community. Community pages that have been verified will flagged as such in our database and this flag will be used in the future to provide more visibility and other special mojo powers. from MyBlogLog
To start the verification process, go to the blogs you have registered and click on the verify link under the authors section in the community page.
You have two options when verifying a website or blog:
Post a link with a verification code Add the old faithful meta tag
Once verified, you can remove the verification post or tag.
Here is a quick shot after post or tag has been verified.
Here is the new community that has been verified.
The most interesting information was from the Official MyBlogLog Blog:
In the future, we’ll use the verified flag to indicate a higher level of “truthiness” and will use it help us better promote that site.
What is meant by “truthiness“? Is is related to some kind of authority? Is MyBlogLog working to offer new ways to “better promote” and/or “provide more visibility” to websites and blogs that maintain a MyBlogLog community? What super “mojo powers” does Yahoo have to bestow upon MyBlogLog communities?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
MyBlogLog Steps Up Authority for Blog Communities
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Bill Gates Retires from Daily Activities at Microsoft
This video was too funny not to share (thanks Adam)!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Bill Gates Retires from Daily Activities at Microsoft
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Yahoo’s Online Social Universe
Yahoo! has been a very influential provider of social services online for quite some time. Over the last few years they have either created or purchased online social sites, here is a quick breakdown of some of the major start-ups and acquisitions:
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2005
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name: flickr acquired purpose: photo sharing similar to: DropShots status: Top photo and image sharing website online. When acquired by Yahoo!, flickr was a top online property and it still is.
name: Yahoo! 360° created purpose: Personal Pages similar to: Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle status: Still in beta, Yahoo! 360° has yet to really take off as a sharable social personal page creator. It gives users the ability to create a public profile with feeds, photos, blog, lists and more. Without Yahoo! putting more emphasis on marketing this to their users. It may be outmatched before it gets out of beta.
name: blo.gs acquired purpose: manage online blogs and feeds
similar to: Bloglines, Technorati status: Not active. Blo.gs is still visible online, but the functionality is not there.
name: del.icio.us acquired purpose: bookmark and share web-pages accessible everywhere similar to: StumbleUpon status: Active and still a force in online sharing and bookmarking of websites and web-pages.
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2006
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name: JumpCut acquired purpose: create, upload, edit and share videos online similar to: YouTube status: Although YouTube is not designed to create and edit videos online, it has definitely become the driving force for online video viewing and sharing. Although it appears to be a quality product, Yahoo! hasn’t promoted JumpCut to be a force online.
name: bix acquired purpose: create, enter and judge online competitions similar to: online, user-generated American Idol status: Started as an online community to upload and compete with other lip-sync and karaoke fans online, it still is an online property to spend countless hours. Not heavily marketed by Yahoo!
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2007
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name: MyBlogLog acquired purpose: build communities around blogs similar to: Technorati favs status: MyBlogLog has developed a very strong presence in the blogosphere with it’s recent readers widget that is visible on many blogs.
name: Y! Mash created purpose: social networking similar to: MySpace status: Although it has been available in beta since mid-September 2007, it is still in limited release (for a free invite, send me an email). It is remarkably similar to MySpace and hasn’t really been pushed or promoted by Yahoo! yet.
name: Kickstart created purpose: social and professional networking similar to: Facebook, LinkedIn status: Rather than calling it beta, Yahoo!’s Kickstart is in a “preview” status that is accessible to everyone. Targeting college students and alums, Kickstart really hasn’t had much of one from Yahoo! yet.
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2008
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We don’t know yet!
Yahoo has invested a lot of money in the purchase, building and maintenance of these online communities listed here, but I wonder when Yahoo! plans on leveraging these online properties into a powerhouse that can rule the social Internet?
Here are a couple of questions and comments that come to mind:
Yahoo! 360° - Why not merge My Yahoo! (also in beta) together? Blo.gs - What happened here? Why did Yahoo! purchase this to let it go dormant? JumpCut - Can’t you get the buzz out and start making a move against YouTube? bix - This is a perfect time to get this property buzz, psst, this is an election year and with the influence politics has online, this could be a great opportunity! Y! Mash - Why is this still in beta? Legal concerns with MySpace? Kickstart - Another opportunity as people are raising red flags over Facebook’s use (or misuse) of personal information.
What are your thoughts?
Do you think that Yahoo can maintain all of these social websites to keep them recognizable to online users?
Will Yahoo start leveraging their search presence to gain additional traffic through these social websites?
Will other Yahoo social platforms go the way of blo.gs?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Yahoo’s Online Social Universe
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Technology is not Suited for Small Business - Business Week
Tech ‘Solutions’ Your Small Biz Can’t Use
A lot of highfalutin software and gadgets aim to help you run your company, but too little of it is suited for a small business environment - Gene Marks Business Week
Recently, Business Week offered up a reason to be concerned. In an article (title and subtitle above), by Gene Marks, warns small business owners away from “overhyped and underwhelming technology.” The article isn’t about usability, as I first expected, rather turned into a rant against products and services that can help small business owners manage their time more efficiently and even help them improve their business in the short and long run. Gene highlighted 10 products/services “that don’t work.” Now, I will warn you, SEO is on the list, but rather than taking offense to his opinions, I want to highlight some of these and how they can help you improve your business.
Here they are (numbers are based upon order in original article)
1. RSS Feeds
Bob, an electrical contractor, knows what RSS stands for, and I feel sorry for him. He had the misfortune of signing up for an RSS feed. This misnomer is designed to make us feel like we’re getting a “feed” of data just like all the really, really important media people do. When he first tried RSS, he thought, “Wow, I can get immediate updates on product and industry developments, important news from Yahoo!, and even get a new joke from The Onion, all as soon as they’re published!” Instead, he was “fed” an endless stream of meaningless items displayed in an overly large browser window that winds up distracting more than informing. Like Bob, most of the business owners I know have abandoned RSS and gone back to controlling when they get their information. Still don’t know what RSS stands for? Trust me, it’s just not that important.
I guess Gene doesn’t want anyone to subscribe to Business Week’s feed to be the “first” to find out about his wonderful insight!
OK, I’ll stop being snarky… for now!
Like many things, if you allow it to have a presence it can become a distraction. Personally, I like researching when the television is on (at home) or my iTunes is going in an endless loop through the 2.3 days or so of music I have plugged into my computer (at work). I know many people that couldn’t stay focused on their work while things are going on around them, but for others, they can perform better under these conditions. That doesn’t mean that they stop watching TV or listening to music, rather, make sure that you are in the right environment to be productive. If you aren’t a stock broker, I wouldn’t recommend that you have a stock ticker in your line of sight all day either, it just doesn’t make sense. Keep the RSS Reader for a time when you want to stop and see what is going on in your industry or on your favorite website. Oh, and if you are getting too much useless information from a feed, unsubscribe.
4. Blogs
Jamie! You started a blog for your business? That’s dope! Now go out and get some accessories, like a pair of black-rimmed rectangular glasses and a Starbucks card. And oh, by the way, you’ll need to set aside about 17 hours each day to keep it fresh. Dude, it’ll be so viral. What’s that, Jamie? You’re not in the media business? You don’t work for a software company? You just own a hardware store? Dude, that’s a drag! If you don’t have something new to say each day, no one’s going to bother to stop by and check out your blog. It’ll be, like, so lame. And if you do have something to say, just be careful you don’t give away too much information. You didn’t consider all this? You don’t have the time? You’re not such a great writer? Word.
Aside from the nailing blogger slang, Gene really misses the real power of blogs.
My hardware store owner, please look at what you are trying to do: get more customers in your store, right?
Let’s see, just off the top of my head… you could start a blog and…
highlighting new products that you now offer offer advice for those not so easy home improvement jobs to lower anxiety about starting a big project how-to tips communicate with your customers when they are not in your store announce discounts, savings or coupons to drive foot traffic to your store without having to hire a printer and distribution company….
without spending 17 hours a day keeping it “fresh“
I could keep going, but I’ll stop here!
Blogs are not a business solution for a brick and mortar business, or even an online business, but they can be a very powerful tool to keep your potential customers coming back, finding you and even in recognizing your brand. Oh, and all of these are extremely important if you want to get beyond the “small” in small business owner.
5. Search Engine Optimization
You mean for $5,000 I can get my company’s name on the very top of Google’s search results? Where do I sign? Many business owners have been fooled by the allure of search engine optimization (SEO)—and I’m one of them. I forked over a bunch of dough to a firm in California that promised to get my company’s name on “all the major search engines” when someone was looking for products that we sell. How did they plan to do this? I’m still not really sure, but it had something to do with spiders, black hats, and link farms. That should’ve been enough of a hint that witchcraft was involved. After a brief flirtation with page 47 of MSN’s search results, I gave up. SEO probably does the job for companies with oodles of money, but not for the typical small business.
Did Gene and other business owners get “fooled” or were they sold?
This is quite evident by the admission: “How did they plan to do this? I’m still not sure…”
Oh, you don’t have to have “oodles of money” to be on top. You can move up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) if you research and spend a little bit of time learning what it is! You wouldn’t bet your livelihood on an idea that you didn’t research, would you? I didn’t know much about coffee, but before I opened a coffee retail store, I did my homework. This only makes (common) sense!
7. Customer Relationship Management Software
Readers of my work may find this item a little surprising. I’ve always been a big proponent of customer relationship management (CRM) software. One big reason is that my company sells this stuff. And we have a lot of small business clients who have really used this technology well. Unfortunately, we have a lot of other customers who haven’t been as successful. Fred, a manufacturer of roofing materials, is one of them. Fred and I both learned that a CRM system doesn’t work for a small business without an internal “champion” who takes ownership of it. His $20,000 system just sat there. No one used it. At best, we hope it will become a glorified Rolodex one day. A CRM system can be a good thing, but it takes more than paying for the software and training. Without a substantial internal investment, CRM won’t work.
I hope Gene isn’t in sales! Wow, he hit the nail on the head (I don’t think he was really trying, but…)!
Everything that you add to your business mix requires an investment. Money is just the start, with most products, time is the biggest investment and it’s not just training. Maintaining a system is the only way to keep it working. This is true for CRMs, websites, HR, accounting… almost any aspect of business. Apparently, Mr. Marks’ CRM software isn’t very user-friendly! OK, that was really snarky, to be absolutely honest, I don’t know who Gene works for and have not seen or used his companies CRM software or even spoken to one of their customers… so I cannot speak about the usability or usefulness of the CRM software of the company he works for.
8. AdWords
John’s a pretty smart guy. He runs a company that sells specialty pet foods. He manages his own investments. He keeps an eye on his taxes. But I’ve found a way to turn John into a blithering idiot. I’ve asked him to figure out how to use Google’s AdSense profitably. Are you interested in a mind-numbing exercise? Give AdSense a shot. Or Yahoo SM or MSN AdCenter. Don’t you know how much to budget for “clicks” on your ad? Are you just a little suspicious as to who exactly is counting these “clicks” that conveniently turn into revenue for these companies? Like John, you’ve just entered the alternate universe of Internet advertising! Here’s a word of wisdom: Leave the mass-market advertising to Coke and Pepsi. Small business owners should stick to less mystifying forms of promotion.
It’s not that “mystifying,” really! There are even training tutorials and even account managers that can help you drive the traffic that you are looking for, plus, if you are running something as simple as log reports, you can verify those clicks. Apparently, there are people still out there that believe “if you build it, they will come” in regards to websites.
This is another foot-in-mouth experience for Mr. Marks:
Correction, AdSense and AdWords are two completely different advertising products offered by Google, one for publishers (bloggers, website owners, etc) and the other is for getting people to your product. Again, without properly researching something, you cannot really know if it is a product or service that will help your business (that old common sense thing again!). Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter is not only about “mass-market advertising.” You have the ability to get your marketing message on the screens of the people you are looking for to be your new customers.
OK, so I have had a little fun picking apart an article, but it really shines a light on what technology can do for you.
Technology, like any other tool, can be useful… BUT (big but), only when you know what it is designed for and learn how to use it effectively. The hammer is a very useful tool, but a baker might not have much use for it…
Technology does not equal success!
I have some advice for small business owners, as a business owner, I would never purchase something before I knew what the investment (time, money, space, etc.) and understood what to realistically expect from that investment, before committing to it!
Another suggestion, just because it’s been printed (even by a reputable source like Business Week), doesn’t mean it’s accurate! Even if it’s from me!
If you have questions, comments or anything else… I invite you to comment below!
Don’t agree with me on something… let me know!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Technology is not Suited for Small Business - Business Week
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New Look for SEOpittfall in 2008
After a while you have a tendency to want a change, so for the new year, I have changed themes and after an afternoon of work… Tada!
It has a few features that were in the old theme and is based upon Gluttony from WPdesigner.
I must stress that I am not a programmer, so, if you should happen to find errors or something not working right, please let me know by either commenting here or sending me an email.
Don’t like it? Let me know!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
New Look for SEOpittfall in 2008
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“Don’t Be Evil” - Philosophy, Corporate Culture or Inventive Perception?
Whether it’s a mantra, an “informal corporate motto” or just a slogan, Google’s statement: “Don’t Be Evil” has lost it’s shine with many users and publishers that make up the Internet.
This post has been a long time coming. This is a topic that I have been intending on writing about, however, every time that I sit at my keyboard and look for direction, it always seems to get lost. What I am trying to say, it is hard to be negative (not that this is intended to be negative) about long standing resources that have redefined a market that is as diverse as the Internet. But, as with most things, they age and sometimes go away. The Netscape browser will be discontinued the first of February, AOL has shifted to an advertisement based business that may be cut up and sold off to the highest bidders and Google is no longer just a search engine built on advertising.
When looking into what Google is really about, it is hard not to look at their own philosophy. It has changed a bit (minor changes) since it’s publication, but the root of the statement has stayed pretty consistent.
Here are the “Ten things Google has found to be true:”
Focus on the user and all else will follow. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. Fast is better than slow. Democracy on the web works. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. You can make money without doing evil. There’s always more information out there. The need for information crosses all borders. You can be serious without a suit. Great just isn’t good enough.
Does Google subscribe to these still? Here are my thoughts:
Yes, Google has maintained their simple design and accessibility to users with helpful information that is easy to access. Yes and no. Google sites search as their primary focus, but with the addition of other products like Gmail, Blogger, Orkut, Google Talk, YouTube, Picasa, Knol and others it is clear to see that providing information is not the “one” thing that they are focused on. Yes, Google has proven that they are consistently the fastest to return results. Not really. Google has changed, and continues to change the way of web democracy with different determining factors that are not always based upon a democratic model. (Google OS, SEL, TechCrunch) Yes, and Google has worked very diligently to provide their search services to mobile platforms and such. Yes, but are their efforts truly good throughout? Some speculate that their intentions are not this, but like many giants in industry like Wal-Mart, when you get big, your intent is always in question. Yes, Google has done a great job at bringing more information than just web pages and sites to the SERPs and adding to their index is a still happening. Yes, information does cross boarders, classes and so much more. The one thing that Google has added is the ability to translate a given page into your language. Yes, Google’s campus is teaming with (Google) t-shirts and jeans. But does a suit make you act differently? Of course, the fact that Google is a group of people that think differently and don’t want to break down the barrier that traditional companies have used in the past, like formal wear. Actions always speak louder than words. Plus, when people are comfortable, they tend to speak from their passions. Passion has always lent itself to ingenuity in my opinion. Yes, Google continues to build upon itself with additional services. Similar to AOL and Yahoo, Google has become a social portal on the web.
What’s next for Google? are they the next “big brother?”
Will they actually reinvent search? Personalize or universal?
Will relevancy go by the wayside in light of recently published information? or currency?
Will they continue to reinvent themselves as the years pass?
Will their focus continue to move away from search? maybe towards profit?
Will they become “evil?” or are they already?
Has the fact that they are now a public company change the way they act or are perceived by the public?
Can they keep their luster in the eyes of users? and stockholders?
I guess time will tell!
Feel free to share your thoughts!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
“Don’t Be Evil" - Philosophy, Corporate Culture or Inventive Perception?
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Happy New Year 2008 - SEOpittfall 2007 in Review
I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but I do want to learn more of my craft and connect with others in my field. 2007 was a wonderful year loaded with excitement for me and my family. Here are a couple of things that happened this year (no particular order):
Build a Better Website was retired SEOpittfall.com launched Finished my Bachelor’s Degree at UCF Attended SES Travel in Seattle I became a father - my daughter, Sophia Noelle Pitts was born
Thinking back, there are so many that have been helpful and insightful throughout the year, I want to thank my readers, friends and constituents for a successful 2007 and wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2008.
Here are the most popular posts from SEOpittfall that you may have missed:
Google Wants YOU to Report Paid Links! Google Wants You to Be Social and Share Your Stuff PeekYou.com - Online Reputation Management Google’s Attempt at Ruling Media (ALL MEDIA) Cuill - Have We Found a Google Killer? MSN Live Search Building Webmaster Portal Google Joins the Market Elite and Will Fold Because of Weaknesses YellowBot.com - An Interview with Erron Silverstein, CEO of Solfo Microsoft and Google Compete to Deliver Online Storage Solutions Insight into MSN Webmaster Portal
Here are the most talked about posts:
Alexa Ranking Not Valuable Will RSS Go the Way of Reciprocal Linking? SEO Laziness 101 BlogRush - MLM for Traffic A Note on Wikipedia - The Social Encyclopedia Search and Destroy - SEM Without SEO? Killing Two Birds with One Stone - Knol Tackles Wikipedia and Squidoo Google Joins the Market Elite and Will Fold Because of Weaknesses Mash - Yahoo!’s Answer to MySpace and Facebook Google’s Universal Search and SEO Wired Magazine’s Geekipedia Explores SEO
Thank you to everyone that has helped SEOpittfall have a prosperous year, and I look forward to your continued support in the year (and years) to come!
With that being said: Happy New Year!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Happy New Year 2008 - SEOpittfall 2007 in Review
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Christmas Remembrance
A Different Christmas Poem
The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.
Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.
The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.
My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.
In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.
The sound wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t too near,
But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn’t quite know,
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.
My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
And I crept to the door just to see who was near.
Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.
A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
Standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.
“What are you doing? “, I asked without fear,
“Come in this moment, it’s freezing out here.
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve.
For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts,
To the window that danced with a warm fire’s light.
Then he sighed and he said ” Its really all right,
I’m out here by choice. I’m here every night.”
“It’s my duty to stand at the front of the line,
That separates you from the darkest of times.
No one had to ask or beg or implore me.”
“I’m proud to stand here like my fathers before me.
My Gramps died at ‘ Pearl on a day in December,’
Then he sighed, “That’s a Christmas ‘Gram always remembers.”
“My dad stood his watch in the jungles of ‘ Nam ‘,
And now it is my turn and so, here I am.
I’ve not seen my own son in more than a while,
But my wife sends me pictures, he’s sure got her smile.”
Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red, white, and blue… an American flag.
“I can live through the cold and the being alone,
Away from my family, my house and my home.”
“I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.
I can carry the weight of killing another,
Or lay down my life with my sister and brother.”
Who stand at the front against any and all,
To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall.”
“So go back inside,” he said, “harbor no fright,
Your family is waiting and I’ll be all right.”
“But isn’t there something I can do, at the least,
“Give you money,” I asked, “or prepare you a feast?
It seems all too little for all that you’ve done,
For being away from your wife and your son.”
Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
“Just tell us you love us, and never forget.
To fight for our rights back at home while we’re gone,
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.”
“For when we come home, either standing or dead,
To know you remember we fought and we bled.
Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us.”
- unknown
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Happy Holidays
Happy Holidays to you and yours.
May this be a joyous and happy occasion that you can share with others.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Killing Two Birds with One Stone - Knol Tackles Wikipedia and Squidoo
“Knol” stands for a unit of knowledge, according to the Official Google Blog.
Here are some highlights on Google’s new project:
The challenge posed to us was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.
Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.
We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.
Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.
Questions, comments and concerns have been visible across the blogosphere:
Danny Sullivan via Search Engine Land
My concern in hearing this was that other pages with ratings might not have their information taking in as a quality signal, since Google couldn’t as easily harvest it. Thus, Knol pages might get an unfair advantage.
Duncan Riley via Tech Crunch
Google is moving away from simply indexing the worlds content to being a content provider itself. Of course Google in response would argue that it is simply facilitating user generated content (like with Blogger), that ultimately they are the host as opposed to the creator, but it still competes with existing content providers, many of whom rely on Google search results for their living. Which takes us to question of search results.
Philipp Lenssen via Google Blogscoped
That’s partly a strawman argument – author names are included in many blog posts and news articles already today. However, if Udi is talking about Wikipedia, he may have a point.
One of the last times Google tried to unite experts around the world for a project of theirs was for Google Answers, a paid Q&A service that has been canceled in the meantime. Let’s see how “Knol” fares.
Seth Godin via personal blog
Anyway, I got back from my trip to Google and crunched some numbers and posted this good news about Squidoo. We’ve hit profitability, grown to be three to five times as big as others in our space and reached more than 125,000 users. A good day.
The very next day, Google announced Knol, a direct lift from Squidoo circa 2005. Apparently, Google wants to be in our business. It’s almost enough to ruin your day.
The bad news for all other content providers out there is that it will be increasingly difficult to get a page one result in the search engines. The more webmasters make use if sites like Wikipedia and Knol, the more will link to them and the higher authority they will get. We will soon find that most of the page one positions are taken by services like these.
Frank Watson via Search Engine Watch
Seems Google has turned its eyes on the Wikipedia space and has a spin that may get a lot of attention from knowledgeable authors.
Tamar Weinberg via Search Engine Roundtable
Well, some others are just hoping that Wikipedia stops ranking #1 for every term. Maybe there’s hope. And maybe Project Knol won’t nofollow pertinent links within the articles.
Andy Beal via Marketing Pilgrim
Well, Google’s kicked that effort up a notch with news that it will now encourage the “average joe” to create content pages, saturate the web with them, and help Google earn some extra ad revenue along the way.
With all of that, I have to say, there is a lot of speculation about the new, unreleased, uncertain product from Google that may, or may not bring Wikipedia off the first page of so many (most) SERPs. I mean it, Google hasn’t released anything yet, but many have already counting that Wikipedia, Squidoo and others will be a thing of the past?
My first question in regard to this is a simple question, but it is a question that has not been answered by anyone yet: Why would Google, with all of their different products for publishing and sharing content, bring another product, essentially a blog post, to the forefront?
I still maintain that Wikipedia is just a blog, but it is given “better than blog” status in the SERPs, but does Google really need to take a page that is from a non-expert document (Wikipedia) and replace it with another non-expert document (knol), or even worse, adding the new, non-expert page from knol to the top SERPs and littering the results space with more junk.
Recently, librarians and teachers noted that Wikipedia should not be used as a resource in research projects:
Specifically the teachers and librarians sited two arguments to the reason for limiting access to and disallow the use as a resource:
1. Errors
2. Not a Primary Resource
Will this be any different for the proposed project knol just because it is provided by Google? Highly unlikely.
They have already stated that they are not responsible for the content and will take no role as an editor, so, like blogs, it will be free reign and open competition of ideas is already accepted!
On the other hand… will the owners of knol.com have grounds to sue Google if it goes live (like Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp.)?
Very interesting note: While doing research on this topic, I stumbled across the content of Google’s screenshot of knol being published on Squidoo… and the author of the lens? Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo and the one that I can see that has the most to lose if Google attempts to distribute knol. Parting shot or great sense of humor? You be the judge!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Killing Two Birds with One Stone - Knol Tackles Wikipedia and Squidoo
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Announcing the Birth of Sophia Noelle Pitts
Thursday, December 6, 2007 - 1:34 p.m. - 7lbs. 5ozs. - 20 1/2 inches
10 fingers - 10 toes - full head of hair.
I will post pictures and more when we go home (tomorrow at the earliest).
Happy, healthy and very coherent!
>>> UPDATE - DECEMBER 9, 2007<<<
Here are a couple of photos of Sophia:
This is my favorite picture of Sophia with me…
And this is a better picture (mostly because I am absent).
Kris and I would like to thank everyone again for your well wishes… I might be able to catch up over the next few days, but I am going to play it by ear for the next few weeks!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Announcing the Birth of Sophia Noelle Pitts
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Baby Pittfall Arrives Tomorrow
I would like to thank all of my friends, family, constituents and readers for their prayers and wishes for the health and well being of my wife Kris and our soon to be born daughter Sophia. Sophia has decided to stay in the comfort of her mother’s womb for 40 weeks, but she will be induced tomorrow and Sophia should join the rest of her new family.
I may not be checking SEOpittfall.com over the next few days as I share a hospital room with Kris and Sophia until our release from the hospital. Not to worry, I will be updating as soon as I am able. Pictures should be included too! I am extremely excited to see her little face for the first time.
Thanks again for all of your well wishes and blessings!
Until then, here is a 3D Image of Sophia at 32 weeks.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Baby Pittfall Arrives Tomorrow
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Has Technology Created Another Bubble?
Whether you agree or not, it is a very funny, well thought out video!
Enjoy!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Has Technology Created Another Bubble?
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Blogs in Plain English Video from Common Craft
Common Craft has put together another great video with common sense and explaining complex issues with a dash of common sense and a lot of comfort that breaks down the anxiety that can hold people back from trying new things. Enjoy!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Blogs in Plain English Video from Common Craft
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Google AdWords’ Click-to-Call Ending
If you can recall, last year (around October) Google started a project called Click-to-Call that allowed users to click on an ad and enter their phone number and connect with the advertiser.
Google and it’s very profitable AdWords is testing new service Click-to-Call to provide the user with the security to speak to an advertiser without passing vital information (like phone numbers) for companies that work on a call equals a lead. previous post
The Click-to-Call service was the first CPA type ad to come from Google’s AdWords Program. CPA stands for Cost Per Action or you only pay when a specific action is taken by the user, in this case a call is made. The way to track such an action is that Google would complete the call. This was similar to a similar service offered by Ingenio called Pay Per Call. The major differences, Google’s program was limited (as in they didn’t show these type of ads frequently) and Google does not provide any information about the caller, whereas Ingenio provides the phone number that the call was made from, length of call, date and the geographic location (city, state) of the caller.
Google does provide more information about the “experiment:”
What happens to click-to-call ads after December 3, 2007?
This ad format will no longer appear in Google search results. If you have active click-to-call ad campaigns, they will stop running completely after December 3, 2007. Statistics from click-to-call ads that you have already run (including clicks, impressions, and CPC) will still be included in your reports until January 9, 2008.
Why did you decide not to adopt click-to-call ads permanently?
The click-to-call ads trial was an experiment designed to measure advertiser interest and user adoption. The experiment has ended, and we’ll use the results to improve AdWords and build more solutions for advertisers who value phone calls.
So, now that the end is near, why would Google discontinue a service that may need additional development, but is a viable addition to their online advertising portfolio?
Ingenio, mentioned above, has been building a quality product around this type of performance based advertising. They have been profitable, as far as we know, but have caught the attention of telecommunications giant AT&T, who, is purchasing the private company. The deal should be completed in January 2008, reportedly.
I posted last week regarding the deal and while doing research on the topic, I stumbled across a theory that AT&T may have been trying to buy the patents that Ingenio owns to give them leverage against the marketing giant that Google has become, quickly devouring previous giants of online advertising like DoubleClick.
Was this in answer to the potential legal leverage that AT&T will have when the purchase of Ingenio is completed? Has Google admitted that they have been unable to make a type of advertising unprofitable?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Google AdWords' Click-to-Call Ending
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A Note on Wikipedia - The Social Encyclopedia
Once again Wikipedia is getting buzz from educators and marketers alike.
Linda O’Connor regards Wikipedia the same way former first lady Nancy Reagan campaigned against drugs.
She urges people to “Just Say No.”
The Great Meadows (N.J.) Middle School librarian hasn’t been a fan of the online encyclopedia for years. This fall, she decided it was time to make others at her school aware of the Web site’s pitfalls.
She put up a sign saying “Just Say ‘No’ to Wikipedia” over the computers in the school library.
Specifically the teachers and librarians sited two arguments to the reason for limiting access to and disallow the use as a resource:
Errors Not a Primary Resource
From (at least one) marketing perspective, it based upon the fact that Wikipedia can (and is) edited by anyone, and that the primary reason for the it’s success is traffic from Google. Wikipedia does rank extremely well in Google SERPs, consistently appearing on the first page of results. It is true that there are many marketers that exploit the value that Google gives the wiki.
I’ll say it again - Google doesn’t care about you. The only thing they care about is serving ads - the more targeted the better. And as long as all the mildly nutty, essentially benevolent, little do-gooding Wikipedians think that their 26,000 donations “to-date” are going to help them spread Wikipedia goodness all throughout Chad and the Ivory Coast, then we can thank them for helping Google to better “serve” (read: game) us.
Aside from a conspiracy theory that Google is engaging in some social engineering experiment, I think that there is a much more important questions:
“Is Wikipedia really a valuable resource?” - Absolutely
“Is Wikipedia an authority?” - Absolutely Not
Yes, Wikipedia may point you in the right direction for a search for specific information, but contrary to Google SERPs, it is not the authority rather a culmination of all of the opinions of the authors. This is the primary reason that I refer to it as a blog, just like the one you are reading from, it is an opinion from the author. Just like any blog, anyone can edit the content of it that is a member, but unlike most, Wikipedia allows everyone to be an author.
In my opinion, Wikipedia is a collection of perceptions and opinions based upon other resources.
Agree or don’t, feel free make your opinions and perceptions known!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
A Note on Wikipedia - The Social Encyclopedia
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Tis the Season for Giving
I have not used this blog as a platform to make money only to give my opinion, based upon my own experience and research. There are many places online to look for information related to search engine optimization and marketing, but if you have been in the industry for much time, it can be extremely difficult to find many offline resources that are worth their salt. In full disclosure, I will say that this is NOT a paid endorsement and no other form of compensation has been offered.
OK, back on track… Like I said before there are very few offline resources that I would consider consistent enough to endorse, but Search Marketing Standard has proven themselves over their two years in publication. They offer insight from noted experts in the field, from Kim Krause Berg, Chris Boggs, Eric Ward, Jaimie Sirovich, Joe Whyte and many, many others.
I have been reading the magazine for well over a year, so why would I start posting about it now? Because they are offering a valuable resource and offering it at cost plus an additional $1 donation to Toys for Tots for every subscriber using the coupon code during this promotion.
Here are the details:
$4.95 for one year (International - $6.60) 67% off the regular subscription rate of $15.00
Use the following coupon code - HOLIDAY67
It is only available until December 10th, 2007, so they can make sure the Toys for Tots donation is ready for Christmas.
Here is where you can get your subscription.
It is the season for giving, so feel free to give subscriptions to your favorite SEOs and online marketers and do a great thing for others!
Merry Christmas
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Google Wants YOU to Report Paid Links!
As reported by Philipp Lenssen, Barry Schwartz, Tamar Weinberg and Loren Baker, Google has updated their Webmaster Help Center question regarding Paid Links:
Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.
However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.
How do you protect yourself?
If you practice in exchanging, selling or buying links for the purpose of building value Google is looking for others to notify them so they can penalize you. Google offers two ways to protect yourself, but the easiest way is to stop these practices.
Is this right, what are your thoughts?
Is Google trying to enforce a primary component of the Internet for their own purposes?
Should a website be penalized because Google passed value for a link?
Should Google only remove the value it gave for the paid or exchanged link or take back more?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Google Wants YOU to Report Paid Links!
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Happy Thanksgiving
From SEOpittfall and our family,
Hoping you and yours a blessed Thanksgiving to share with friends and family!
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
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Conspiracy Theory - AT&T Acquires Ingenio to Fight Google
Monday, AT&T announced that they would acquire Ingenio, the leader in the pay per call marketing technology. To put it simply, a customer enters their phone number and receives a call from the service and is patched through to the advertiser. These advertisements are visible, most notably, on AOL within the sponsored listings. The user clicks on the ad and is transferred to a landing page to find out more information. The advertiser is only charged when a call is completed. This is similar to Google’s pay per action Click-to-Call, however, the major difference is that Ingenio provides information about the caller that Google retains.
“As advertisers add performance-based advertising to their marketing mix, this investment makes sense for our business,” said Ray Wilkins, AT&T group president-Diversified Business. “Ingenio’s technology will allow AT&T to expand our robust service portfolio for print, online and mobile advertisers, and that will further differentiate us from our competitors.”
This will give AT&T access to the network that Ingenio has built which includes AOL, Jingle Networks, Medio Systems, Switchboard and mobile networks with Microsoft, JumTap and go2.
Not trying to build a conspiracy theory here, but there are some that feel that this will give a major player in the telecommunications industry some leverage against search marketing giant Google:
Well - I suspect this move is more sinister than it looks. I wrote a post on my personal blog a while back, detailing Ingenio’s Pay Per Call patents. If AT&T decided to use their legal muscle to enforce the patents, Google may be in for some more legal woes (re: DoubleClick). Do I think this is the sole reason that AT&T is acquiring Ingenio? No. Do I think it’s a major contributor - definitely! AT&T probably wants to own this space - and if so, must believe that this set of patents are the key to keeping out competition. Vinny Lingham from a guest post at Marketing Pilgrim
A lot of information is not available because the fact that Ingenio is a privately held company, but they have many valuable assets beyond their profitability that AT&T can take to the next level. Will it lead to a confrontation between the telecommunications industry and Google or other online marketing providers, that remains to be seen. I guess that we will have to wait until January (or beyond) to find out how it will all come out.
From personal experience, Ingenio has a wonderful product and it has been more effective than the Google Click-to-Call.
What are your thoughts? Do you think that AT&T is trying to gain leverage in the telecommunications space, or are they trying to reinforce their dominance?
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
Conspiracy Theory - AT&T Acquires Ingenio to Fight Google
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It’s Official - MSN Webmaster Portal Center is Open for Business
I have outlined the MSN Webmaster Portal Center over the past few months, and now it is open for everyone:
Webmaster Tools: Open for Business
This week we’re excited to announce that the Live Search Webmaster Center has moved out of its closed beta and we are now open for a public beta. In conjunction with this release we want to announce the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog. In an effort to serve our webmaster community better we will be sharing information on how to improve your crawlablity and visibility.
We want the center and the blog to be a place for two way communication between Live Search and the webmaster community because we understand that SEO’s and webmasters need this kind of information and the tools we are building to keep their sites performing well.
In the coming weeks we’ll blog in detail about the improvements that we’ve made. Being a webmaster is what you do best. We want to provide a service that will help make you even better. Enjoy!
- The Live Search Webmaster Center Team
For more information about what the portal offers now, read my previous post.
Post from: SEOpittfall.com
It’s Official - MSN Webmaster Portal Center is Open for Business
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Google’s Attempt at Ruling Media (ALL MEDIA)
Everyone reading this is at least aware of the value of Google’s empire of advertising online, but do you see the areas that they are building? Today, I reviewed one of the messages at the top of my AdWords account announcing Google Television Ads in beta:
New! Place Ads on Television
You’ve been invited to participate in Google’s TV Ads beta. Reach new customers with TV ads — the perfect complement to your online campaigns. Easily select networks, choose your bids and budget and track your performance all in one online interface. Learn more | Dismiss this message
After reviewing the information it sounds extremely exciting for a moderate advertiser with Google to have the opportunity to explore a new medium for our company, advertising on national television.
As I looked through the information provided and watched a short video on how easy it is to set up, build your ad and monitor the effectiveness, I wondered “Where is Google not planning on making available to their customers to advertise?” Very few places remain that you cannot use Google to gain exposure to an audience. If you want to find out more, go to the Google AdWords Learning Center.
Google Television Ads beta
Create your campaign
Find out what channels your customers are more likely to watch. Enter your maximum bid and budget. Upload your ad.
Your ad runs on TV
Reach millions of potential customers, across more than a hundred channels. Nationwide.
Find out how it did
How many impressions did you get? Pay only for those. Did people watch your ad to the end? Get timely and useful information, so you can tweak your campaign and get the biggest bang for your buck.
Here is the Google AdWords Help for TV Ads
Demo of Google TV Ads
Sign up for the beta test
please note: you may need to be a current advertiser with a Google AdWords account to see this video
Google AdWords already covers these areas:
Online Advertising
Keyword Targeted
- Google Network
- Content Network Image Ads - More Information Video Ads - More Information Local Business Ads - More Information Mobile Ads - More Information Pay-Per-Action - More Information
Offline Advertising
Google Print Ads - More Information
Google Radio Ads - More Information - Demo of Google Audio Ads
Google Television Ads beta
What’s Left?
There are very few advertising mediums left for Google to be involved in. A couple come to mind though:
Billboards Buses Taxis Sport Teams Athletes
Google has taken a chunk of the marketing pie online and it seems that they are going right for the throats of offline advertising too, but where and when will it stop?
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Salute to All Veterans
Whether you agree or disagree with what is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan or even if you protested Vietnam, don’t forget to respect the sacrifices that others have made and are still willing to make to allow each and every one of us a voice.
Semper Fidelis!
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Microsoft Webmaster Portal is Live in Beta
MSN Webmaster Portal was announced in August and was to be released into beta in September and be fully accessible by the end of November, however very little has been released since the initial announcement. Until now.
The first screenshots of the new platform have been released by Barry at Search Engine Roundtable. Along with screenshots, Barry has included basic setup for a domain and what information is available from the portal on the given domain.
Here is what information that is provided by MSN Webmaster Portal:
Add a website Validate a website
When your domain has been added and verified you have access to additional aspects of your domain via Domain Tools. Domain tools offer six different sections about your domain:
Summary Profile Keywords Top Links from Top Links to Sitemap
Summary:
This is a basic summary of the website: number of pages in the MSN index, last crawl date, blocked ? and a new ranking factor called domain rank. Domain rank appears to go from 1 - 5. Along with this, it also gives the top 5 pages and domain rank of the page, last crawl date and other information.
Profile:
This includes the domain name, location of your xml sitemap, validation type (xml file or meta tag), webmaster email address and way to sign up for a “way cool” monthly email newsletter from MSN.
Keywords:
The keywords tab is actually a tool to find how your website ranks for keywords that you enter. Along with your listing, it also shows your competitors, the domain rank, last crawl date and other information about your organic competition for a given SERP.
Top Links from:
“Among all this website’s outbound links, these 10 are performing the best in Live Search.” Further information about what is meant by “performing the best” for outbound links. Along with the actual links, it gives a rank for each of them.
Top Links to:
“Among all the links to this website, these 10 are performing the best in Live Search.” Further information about what is meant by “performing the best” for inbound links. Like Top Links from, it gives the links and a rank for each of them.
Sitemap:
You can put the location of your sitemap (just like in the summary).
Other things included in the beta is a robots.txt validator and links for help.
There are many more questions that haven’t been answered yet:
What is Domain Rank and what components are included?
Will there be more tools and insight into your domain (as implied by the invitation questionnaire I received)?
Once again, if you would like to see the screenshots for yourself, go over to Search Engine Roundtable and review them for yourself.
UPDATE - 8:15 PM EST, November 11, 2007
Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta
On behalf of the entire Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta team, we are very happy to invite you to be one of the first beta users. We look forward to working with you over the coming months on the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program.
Looks like I’m in and that means there will be more regarding MSN Webmaster Portal as soon as I can review it and as long as I can stay in MSN’s Terms of Use.
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Do Not Track List?
AdAge.com announced that privacy groups are proposing the creation of an Internet do-not-track list:
In addition to the list, the proposal calls for a requirement that advertisers, as part of their online ads, instantaneously disclose details of what they intend to track. According to a media alert announcing the news conference, the groups behind the proposal include the Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others.
In the same article, interesting regarding online advertising:
According to a Forrester report on consumer attitudes toward advertising from November 2006, there are three main sources of advertising irritation to consumers: ads are too numerous, disruptive and irrelevant.
AOL has already preempted possible legislation by allowing users to opt out of behavioral tracking:
AOL Will Let Consumers Opt Out of Targeted Ads from the Wall Street Journal reports that AOL will announce today a new tool that will enable AOL users to opt out of targeted or personalized ads. (NOTE: The AOL announcement is now live).
AOL has behavioral ad technology that stores consumer’s preferences and then tailors ads based on the sites’ users’ visits. AOL is expected to announce a system that will give these users the ability to opt out of those ads. from SEL
Janet Meiners of Marketing Pilgrim noted:
Personal information about everyone is used in a variety of ways, and it’s not just when you are surfing the Internet. Google’s Gmail serves up ads based on what you write in an email. For example, you write that you’re feeling down and you start seeing ads on how to combat depression. MySpace enables advertisers to place ads based on what you write about yourself on your profile.
So, what is the point to online advertising? Online advertising provides for many products and services that the general public enjoys:
Information Education Email Social interactions Speech Entertainment Shopping
Where to begin… what is the value of online marketers providing advertising to potential customers? Really, the concept of online advertising as we now know it was revolutionized by Google with AdWords but what did it really mean? They made it possible to offer products and services to online users and have marketers foot the bill and be profitable.
Consumers might want the federal government to build this “do not track” list, however, unlike the “do not call” list, online marketers do not send messages or invade user’s privacy by disturbing their space, it is initiated by the users. The other main difficulty would be that people do not own their IP address, they borrow them from online service providers.
Marketers will argue that everyone is in the purchase cycle for some product or service. Many websites offer information to consumers to help them at all levels of their purchasing cycle. When I am researching information about, say a car, I am in the purchase cycle and would expect to see advertising about cars, even specific models that I am researching. If I see an ad for something totally unrelated, I am less likely to click on the ad, thus, I am not a potential customer for that product.
Users may not realize this, but the reason for all of the wonderful information that is available online is because of online marketers. The Internet is not owned and operated by any government, it is owned by everyone that is online and provides the information that the Internet is made of.
It is unrealistic to say that someone that walks into a store can expect the store not to be able to know who is in their store, so why should an online retailer? Can a store be sued if a clerk offers a suggestion for a similar product when a customer asks about a different one?
What about behavioral targeting that has proven to be useful and embraced by consumers? One that many have used is Amazon’s suggested products. Will this go away if legislation is passed?
What will happen, we will have to see.
Are you an online marketer? If so, what is your reaction to this proposed list?
If not, what is your reaction to this idea?
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Happy Halloween from SEOpittfall
hApPy HaLlOwEeN!
pittfall’s Jack-o-Lantern - Tiki Jack
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DoFollow Plugin
For all bloggers that appreciate their comments and building a community around their websites, the idea of not giving at least a little link love sounds preposterous. Even though WordPress is widely considered as the best blogging platform available, it comes with a few things that you might want more control over, like adding a “nofollow” relationship to all of your comments.
Now you won’t have to worry… Greg Boser has been working on the DoFollow OPML project and is offering a WebGuerrilla Version (download) of a plugin called DoFollow for WordPress.
This is a great plugin that gives you more control over your comments and trackbacks than ever before.
We’ve had a lot of great response to our DoFollow OPML project. While we work on compiling the list, I thought I would go ahead and release a new DoFollow plugin. We have been playing with several different plugins lately. Of all the ones we could find, we like the original by Kimmo Souminen the best. However, I wanted to have more control on a per-comment basis, so I had Dax add to it.
Once you’ve installed and activated it, you will be able add individual NoFollows or DoFollows from the comment moderation screen.
You will also find a new box on your editor that will allow you to add NoFollow to the comments of a single post.
For more information about the commenting policy on SEOpittfall, click here.
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MSN Jumps on the Analytics Train - Project Gatineau in beta
We are happy to announce that Project Gatineau, Microsoft’s new, free web analytics service, is ready for beta testing and the first invitations are now being sent to customers.
To manage Project Gatineau’s growth and give customers the best web analytics service possible, the beta is by invitation for US advertisers only for the moment.
All advertisers can request an invitation here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau
Project Gatineau’s web analytics are useful to sites of all sizes – from smaller sites that can’t afford an expensive web analytics solution to larger sites looking for a boost in their web analytics capabilities.
So, what’s the big deal?
Microsoft has been promoting the project for some time now, as noted by Tamar at 10e20 back in January, and again in March during a review of low cost analytics:
With Gatineau around the corner (and we can still anticipate its launch), there are other free analytics applications that you should consider using on your site.
David Naylor showed off some screen shots while it was still in Alpha in July that were impressive. But Search Marketing Gurus stole the show with more specifics that will be employed in the new Gatineau.
There are still some very important questions that remain:
How will Gatineau be able to pull website owners away from their current analytics packages? What can MSN bring to the table that hasn’t been offered by other analytics services? Will this be added to the Webmaster Portal that was supposed to launch into private beta last month? (still unconfirmed that it did launch in limited release)
MSN adCenter Labs has provided some unique tools for marketing and optimization, can this be what we should expect from Gatineau?
Have any of you signed up for the beta? If so, what are your early thoughts?
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Google Says Boo! and SEOs Run to Hide
OK, this week has been a rocky one in the social arenas surrounding the SEO communities. Why? Google has made a BIG statement by updating the PageRank visible from the Google Toolbar.
It all started on Wednesday when many notable websites dropped 2 to 3 points in the little green bar. Much speculation ensued and alarm around the blogosphere trying to figure out what it all meant. It was paid links became the consensus. A couple of weeks ago, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land announced that buying or selling links may negatively affect your PageRank and/or rankings in Google.
Here are a couple of posts that put things into perspective:
Toolbar Hysteria
8 Things We Learned About Google PageRank
Google Scares the Search Crowd
So, as everything started settling down, all of the Sphinns started getting hot, carrying the PageRank debate into the conversations into Thursday and still on Friday. Now, rather yesterday, I noticed that the PageRank (that to this point had remained unchanged) on SEOpittfall.com had moved from 4 to 5. Then today, while trying to catch up on all of my reading, Eric Lander at Search Engine Journal noted:
I’m seeing a number of new sites showing PageRank updates tonight, and assume that it has to be happening elsewhere as well.
So, many of the authority websites that lost PageRank earlier this week have regained most if not all of their green bar that was noted on Wednesday.
I sit here and contemplate the need for assuming the value of a web page to Google… I think that, more than anything, that Google may be sending a message, what could this message be, here are a couple of thoughts:
The PageRank bar is not to be trusted Paid links should not pass PageRank PageRank does not equal ranking PageRank does not guarantee traffic Traffic does not equal PageRank Google doesn’t want to help others make money from their ranking tool
I know that it is hard to imagine, but Google isn’t open source, when will someone build a better mousetrap?
Alexa, sorry
Compete, not yet
Who’s Next? 
Really? PageRank is a popularity contest and it always has.
So, those who want to continue to sell links, start valuing web sites using another form of measuring stick other than PageRank.
For those not buying or selling links, eyes on the prize, namely targeted traffic.
What are your thoughts?
Did you see any major changes in your PageRank this week?
Did you miss the whole thing?
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The Day the Music Died
Well, the music didn’t die, but the music industry, as we currently know it, might just be giving up the ghost.
Strike One - Radiohead released their most recent album “In Rainbows” via a band controlled download and an interesting marketing maneuver by allowing everyone to name their own price (even $0.00).
Strike Two - Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced on the band blog that they are free agents:
Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Strike Three - Madonna, along with Jamiroquai and Oasis, decide that they too will join the music revolution and do things differently.
With the industry’s war on illegal downloading or sharing of copyrighted music they have been looking to ensure their revenue or sue trying, but what about the bands. Their are still creative individuals out there and they are looking to earn a living on their art. I still find it extremely difficult to swallow the fact that you can sell millions of albums and tour for years and still be left with little to nothing to show for it. While the recording industry continues to grow.
I love the idea that the bands and musicians are not left to be slaves to the industry! This is a great thing, but I can see that it might make it difficult for new artists to enter or remain in the mainstream.
Even with the new dawn of online downloads managed and controlled by the musicians, there still appears to be troubles that the record industry was fighting, namely illegal downloads.
However, free doesn’t seem cheap enough. Despite the potentially free download, over 240,000 users got the album from peer to peer BitTorrent networks on the first day of release, according to Forbes. Since then, the album was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day, totaling more than 500,000. By comparison, Radiohead pushed 1.2 million sales of the album through their site, including pre-orders.
From Nine Inch Nails’ song Capital G (greed):
Well I used to stand for something
But forgot what that could be
There’s a lot of me inside you
Maybe you’re afraid to see
So, what does this have to do with search engine optimization? Nothing directly, however, stepping outside the box and leveraging what control you have can really impact your rankings with users and engines.
Does this mean the end of the record industry or just the inevitable evolution as the fans take control with the musicians help?
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BlogRush Keeps on Creating a Buzz
Since the launch of BlogRush (still in beta) just over a month ago, there has been buzz all over the blogosphere touting, questioning and now cursing it’s purpose.
Even a simple search for BlogRush at Sphinn returns 2 pages of results with 8 posts that have “gone hot” regarding the topic.
Now that there has been so much buzz, that was a bit unfounded, as there have been many holes in the service. Now they have offended many bloggers by automatically dismissing them. I can understand if they have guidelines, but they seem to be using this with the same reckless abandonment that they did when accepting all of the blogs in the initial launch.
Here is some of the most recent news (this is from an email announcing the updates for those blogs that “passed“):
Congratulations!
You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict
Quality Guidelines and criteria — we believe you have a high-quality
blog and we are happy you’re a member of our network!
10,000+ Blogs Removed From BlogRush
We’ve just completed a massive SWEEP of our entire network. We’ve
removed over *10,000* blogs (Yes, ten thousand) that did not meet our
new Quality Guidelines.
We have done a huge “quality control audit” of our network and have
reviewed all the blogs one-at-a-time. We will continue to review each
NEW blog that is ever submitted to our network.
You will notice the HUGE DIFFERENCE in the quality of blogs that now
appear in your widget. This major *sweep* of our network will also
increase the click-rates across the entire network and you will start
to receive more traffic.
But we’re only getting started. We’ve got LOTS of amazing
improvements in the works to help you get more daily traffic from our
network.
I guess I will be doing the same thing that I did before, waiting for the dust to settle and see if this can become what it claims to be!
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Information R/evolution
Digital Ethnography has another thought provoking video post called Information R/evolution
This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.
The ways in which we access information has been dramatically adjusted with the advent of the world wide web, but the glue that binds it and the fuel that maintains it is you, me and everyone else that chooses to interact, react and basically be involved with information online.
It is easily visible that the way of the web is not just commercial in nature, it is becoming everything that we want/need it to be:
information interaction entertainment shopping religion voice purpose
The Internet has become the platform for those without a voice throughout the world! That is why in some societies they are attempting to control this access to a free flow of ideas and information. This is what leads to choice, misinformation and all. When you have a voice, you have power, hence the reason political parties and candidates in the United States are flocking to ensure they have a voice in the social circles online.
I would like to encourage you to view the video and feel free to share your thoughts and opinions here!
I still wish they had a class like this one when I was in college!
[Link]
Google’s Sitelinks Become More Transparent
Today, over at Google Webmaster Central, Search Quality made an announcement about webmasters providing feedback about what sitelinks they provide to users for your website and which links you may want to remove.
Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don’t want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don’t typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won’t appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.
If you log into your account for sitemaps, you can now see if Google SERPs are offering users sitelinks for your account. As SEOpittfall.com has not produced any sitelinks, the following message was provided:
Sitelinks [?]
Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.
Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.
Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site. Sitelinks are completely automated, and we show them only if we think they’ll be useful to the user. If your site’s structure doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user’s query, we won’t show them. However, we are always working to improve how we find and display sitelinks.
How do you get sitelinks to be provided for your website?
Without knowing what specific factors are being used by Google to produce sitelinks, there are two things that have been apparent:
Only the first result for a search query will show sitelinks Large Websites containing major sections that are easy to distinguish
What does this mean?
This allows a listing in Google results pages to have additional real estate beyond additional relevant listings (tabbed under the first listing). This also means that you have developed a functional structure that is easy for an algorithm to decipher niches within a given topic on your website.
Here are a few instances of sitelinks for different search queries:
White House
NFL
Chicago Cubs
Automobile
Do you have any sitelinks?
Have you seen any additional traffic provided?
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What Does College Football have in Common with SERPs?
It is college football season, if you haven’t noticed.
Everyone is wearing their Alma Mater colors’ and talking up their team’s successes and being quiet after losses. There have been some real differences this season as opposed to many from the last 10+ years. Namely, the teams that were expected to be dominating on the field have come up short in the win column. The playing field seems to be more level and we all have heard the old adage “any given Sunday” (or Saturday for college football). What this means is that any team on any given day can show up to play and dominate or squeak out a victory over any other team.
So, what does this have to do with search engine results (SERPs)?
Here is a breakdown of the top 5 polls that are used in college football rankings:
| BCS | AP | USA Today | Harris Poll | Master Coaches Poll | Unique Teams |
| 1. Ohio State | 1. Ohio State | 1. Ohio State | 1. Ohio State | 1. Ohio State | 1 |
| 2. South Florida | 2. South Florida | 2. Boston College | 2. Boston College | 2. Oklahoma | 3 |
| 3. Boston College | 3. Boston College | 3. South Florida | 3. South Florida | 3. Boston College | 2 |
| 4. LSU | 4. Oklahoma | 4. Oklahoma | 4. Oklahoma | 4. LSU | 2 |
| 5. Oklahoma | 5. LSU | 5. LSU | 5. LSU | 5. South Florida | 3 |
| 6. South Carolina | 6. South Carolina | 6. Oregon | 6. South Carolina | 6. USC | 3 |
| 7. Kentucky | 7. Oregon | 7. West Virginia | 7. Oregon | 7. Oregon | 3 |
| 8. Arizona State | 8. Kentucky | 8. South Carolina | 8. West Virginia | 8. California | 5 |
| 9. West Virginia | 9. West Virginia | 9. California | 9. USC | 9. South Carolina | 4 |
| 10. Oregon | 10. California | 10. USC | 10. California | 10. Florida | 4 |
| 11. Virginia Tech | 11. Virginia Tech | 11. Virginia Tech | 11. Kentucky | 11. West Virginia | 3 |
| 12. California | 12. Arizona State | 12. Arizona State | 12. Arizona State | 12. Kentucky | 3 |
| 13. Kansas | 13. USC | 13. Kentucky | 13. Virginia Tech | 13. Virginia Tech | 4 |
| 14. USC | 14. Florida | 14. Florida | 14. Florida | 14. Arizona State | 3 |
| 15. Florida | 15. Kansas | 15. Kansas | 15. Kansas | 15. Kansas | 2 |
| 16. Missouri | 16. Missouri | 16. Hawaii | 16. Hawaii | 16. Missouri | 2 |
| 17. Auburn | 17. Hawaii | 17. Missouri | 17. Missouri | 17. Hawaii | 3 |
| 18. Hawaii | 18. Auburn | 18. Texas | 18. Texas | 18. Texas | 3 |
| 19. Virginia | 19. Texas | 19. Auburn | 19. Auburn | 19. Auburn | 3 |
| 20. Georgia | 20. Tennessee | 20. Georgia | 20. Georgia | 20. Tennessee | 2 |
| 21. Tennessee | 21. Georgia | 21. Texas Tech | 21. Texas Tech | 21. Michigan | 4 |
| 22. Texas | 22. Texas Tech | 22. Tennessee | 22. Tennessee | 22. Texas Tech | 3 |
| 23. Cincinnati | 23. Cincinnati | 23. Cincinnati | 23. Cincinnati | 23. Penn State | 2 |
| 24. Texas Tech | 24. Michigan | 24. Virginia | 24. Virginia | 24. Illinois | 4 |
| 25. Michigan | 25. Kansas State | 25. Penn State | 25. Michigan | 25. Cincinnati | 4 |
| Avg difference per position | 3.00 | ||||
As you can see, there is no consensus among the polls just like there is little to no consensus with search engine results for the same keyword query across multiple search engines.
Some of these polls are based upon human components like what sports writers or coaches think, others are based upon computer models (algorithms) and some bring both human and algorithmic factors into considerations.
What does it come down to?
Just like in SERPs, the definition of who should be in the top spot is in the eyes of the poll (I know that, for bowls, it is based purely on the BCS standings, but go with me here). Some fans will look to see what they think is the best, and this can change from season to season, others are hard liners and stick with the same one regardless and others really don’t care, they just want to see their team beat up on another team.
There is one proven thing though, if you keep on winning and doing what it takes to win, you will end up on top, regardless of poll or search engine!
Here is another idea, if you have the best offense (SEM), defense (SEO) or special teams (SMO), you may be able to win today but unless you are committed to all of the different aspects of how to play the game, you’ll end up falling.
What do you think?
Do you have a favorite analogy about online marketing?
What do you think about the college football season so far?
Let everyone know you opinion.
[Link]
Google Joins the Market Elite and Will Fold Because of Weaknesses
Tonight from Market Place was a great story about Google’s movement into the top 6 stocks on the NYSE. Prior to today, there were only five stocks on the New York Stock Exchange that were above $600 per share, Google has joined to make it six.
Instead of focusing on the upswing on the stock, Kai Ryssdal (host pictured above) and Brian Cooley (from CNet) looked at what Google’s strengths and weaknesses are.
Here are some juicy tidbits from the story:
Brian Cooley
Search is the core business, they do it really well and they really revolutionized it. And secondly… they sold against it really well.
There is nothing in their revenue picture that I know of that casts a dark cloud.
Google… finding what I want and then interacting with it is their whole base. Right now, they are the taste maker for the sector they occupy.
Kai Ryssdal
Let’s get to the down side though, and elaborate on that for me, for a minute. What’s it going to be that’s going to make this company stumble?
Brian Cooley
What Google has to focus on next is connecting the dots on other platforms. That’s one of the keys. In the car, on the cell phone or smart phone, in front of the television. I don’t use Google much in those places. That field is still open for someone to come in and be the killer app of that space. But also, today when you go to get your Google results, there is a good and a bad thing that happens all at once. You type in your term, you hit enter and it comes back and says 674,323 results, and you go “Great, a plethora of stuff”. But that’s also the problem. I know they know this at Google that this is a failed algorithm. Anything that returns 674,000 results on something that I am looking for is broken. They have to fix that.
Someone is going to fix it, someone is going to get search so elegant and so focused that I’ll get eight results and I’ll every one of them. That’s what I really want. So, that’s the thing that Google needs to be first at. Otherwise they would very quickly be relegated to second class status if someone else beats them to it.
WOW! What an unbelievable turn of events. On one hand, Google is an elitist and on the other, Google is really just a second class engine that is just clinging on.
What do you think? Is Google that close to demise?
[Link]
Google Analytics 101 from O’Reilly
Have you ever wondered how to adjust analytics to be fully functional without having to sell the farm to get what you need to be able to improve your websites? Google Analytics is the answer, right?
Google Analytics has long been the thrifty marketers answered prayers when it comes to a robust analytics package that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. The only problem with this free service from Google is that it can be extremely difficult to implement this with all of the bells and whistles you hear about, unless you are a true web developer. Don’t get me wrong, as a SEO, I have a great understanding for all of the capabilities for web development, but I don’t code websites.
I am fortunate to work hand in hand with a seasoned web developer with an understanding of SEO. This is our advantage.
OK, back on topic.
So, I have been researching the benefits of different analytics packages for a few months and have been astounded by the cost associated with the mainstream products. I know, you get what you pay for! I totally agree, but it doesn’t mean that I want to cut out a significant amount of my SEM budget to get it done, in fact, the point to analytics is to bring back more from the table, increase ROI so you can spend on profitable segments and limit or eliminate less profitable ones.
In my research, I found a lot of great information about a product called Urchin, which, just so happens, is the company that Google acquired a few years ago. Google revamped the service and produced it for the masses as Google Analytics for free. However, much of the functionality of Urchin is not visible in the squeaky clean interface. I had really written off Google Analytics as a viable option until I had the opportunity to speak with an engineer in the analytics program and he gave some great insight into what it can do, and where to begin the search for more information.
Well, all of your answers (or at least all of mine so far) can be answered in a new O’Reilly Short Cuts e-book by Justin Cutroni. This pdf e-book is over 80 pages and outlines Google Analytics:
Setup How Google Analytics Works Profiles and Profile Settings Filters Goals and Funnels Common Web Site Configurations Marketing Campaign Tracking E-Commerce Tracking Custom Segmentation CRM Integration Tips and Tricks
If you are considering implementing an analytics package into your website, I would recommend that you simply pay the ten dollars and give Google a chance.
What are your thoughts?
[Link]
Wired Magazine’s Geekipedia Explores SEO
Wow! I thought, pulling an additional insert in my recent Wired Magazine called “Geekipedia” and thought that it might come in handy. I spend most of my time at work with my marketing and SEO hats fully fixed on my head and much of my free time researching the aspects of the latter that keep me sharp and inspired. In other words, “I don’t get out much!”
So, leafing through and trying to keep my geekdom in check (testing myself along the way), I noticed SEO as an entry (just below Robert Scoble), and thought it would be interesting to see what other “geeks” think of the art, dare I say craft, that is search engine optimization. To my dismay I found what I would consider a Jason Calacanis inspired observation of SEO:
SEO
Search engine optimization services are the Wile E. Coyotes of the Internet economy: doomed to stalk prey that repeatedly slips away just as it’s captured. SEO consulting — fine-tuning client pages to land them atop search engine results — has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry. But even those that attain the ultimate prize of a number one ranking can’t celebrate for long. Search engines are always tweaking their algorithms to prevent sites from gaming the system to artificially boost their results. Sure, it makes for a frustrating chase. But it also means repeat business.
It is good to see what outsiders think about SEO, but it can be disconcerting none the less.
I feel bad for those of us who have the knowledge to use their experience for good, yet rely on the dark side of SEO to gain traffic to aid their cause. I know that Danny Sullivan does a lot to aid in the purpose of search engine optimization and defends it against the onslaught of others like Jason Calcanis, but the purpose of SEO (at least in my mind, if no where else) is that we provide a service not only to our clients or companies, but to the user. “Gaming the system to artificially boost their results” is not a competent way to get or maintain customers or users.
Search engines are trying to do the same as I am, provide what users are looking for. It is the intent the purpose of SEO to provide a positive user experience, not to do what it takes to get a user to a website, as it is with the search engines. A positive user experience is what we want and need to build quality relationships, not develop a cash cow!
Oh, and SEO isn’t only one dimensional. There is a lot more involvement that just “fine-tuning client pages to land them atop search engine resuts.”
What are your thoughts?
[Link]
More Information from Microsoft on Webmaster Portal Beta
Today I received more information about the new Webmaster Portal Beta coming soon:
Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta
Thank you for filling out the survey for the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program!
In order to provide the highest level of service to our Beta Partners, we have started off the beta program with our first group of participants. As the program is rolled out in phases, we will incrementally increase the number of participants until all applicants have been accepted by late November. The information you provided us thru the registration survey will help us determine when the right timeframe is to bring you into the beta program and ensure that our participants represent the widest range of industries and company sizes.
Live Search Webmaster Tools Team
I will have to be honest, I am ready to get this underway and see what offerings they will be bringing to fellow webmasters.
If you want to know more about MSN Webmaster Portal Beta you can find it in previous posts:
MSN Live Search Building Webmaster Portal
Insight into MSN Webmaster Portal
[Link]
Will RSS Go the Way of Reciprocal Linking? SEO Laziness 101
Today a well known blogger propositioned a new “link scheme” calling it Link Exchange 2.0.
The idea came from CopyBlogger back in 2006 when writing about effective ways to get more subscribers to your feeds:
Find a blogger that publishes related, but non-competitive content. Work out a deal where you both promote each other in your RSS feeds, using Feedvertising. If one blog has way more subscribers than the other, work out a ratio deal. Since Feedvertising allows you to create up to six rotating links, the smaller blog would promote the other blog continuously, while the larger blog would reserve one slot for the smaller blog, and use the other slots for other cross-promotion deals, affiliate links, or sponsor ads.
Similar to the BlogRush widgets that have been appearing in the blogosphere, it is another tactic to simplify the hard work of building a reputation and getting a chance to gain exposure to a new audience.
All of this after Google adjusted their webmaster guidelines recently (as noted from Search Engine Roundtable):
BEFORE:
Examples of link schemes can include:
Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
NOW:
Examples of link schemes can include:
Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
It has been only recently, even if very generalized without definition, that Google has given any inclination that there could be any value to a reciprocal link from another website.
Does this mean that the value of RSS could follow the same way of the reciprocal link?
Even though it is a quite different proposition, but what is the long term value?
I know that we are all working to limit the amount of time an energy that is required to properly promote websites, but is it really worth it or does it just show our laziness?
What do you think?
Is this a value proposition or another form of SEO laziness?
[Link]
The New MSN Live Search is Ready
MSN has launched the “new” Live Search portal to address four main areas of concern:
Relevance (why you use the search product) Speed (patience is a virtue, but not what users really want in search query results) Streamlining Concept (better usability) High-Interest Content (universal search product anyone?)
The MSN team claim that this is the biggest update since the launch of Live Search in 2005:
This week we’re excited to launch a major update to Live Search that’s relevant, faster and easier to use. Hundreds of us rolled up our sleeves and dug deep. We pored over your feedback, analyzed the data and talked to thousands of users. How major is this? It’s our biggest update since our debut in January 2005.
What have they done that will really affect your experience with Live Search:
Sitelinks-like addition to the first result for major search terms (see more about Sitelinks here, here and here) Related Searches in the right sidebar, above Sponsored Sites Stock Information Sport Teams Integration Image Integration News Integration and all of these new features have feedback areas to respond to MSN weather the new additions were helpful.
What does this mean for MSN Live Search?
At first glance it appears that the MSN Live Search development team is working to bring value back to their search engine (users too), by focusing on the extras that keep users coming back.
Is it too late?
This question has not been answered yet, but it appears that they are not wanting to go quietly into the night. I look forward to these changes and hope that they can bring a competitive spirit that will help the user to be the focus and providing them what they are looking for as the goal.
What do you think?
Have you used the new Live Search?
Have they whitewashed or really built a better engine?
[Link]
The DMOZ Blog Opens
Can the Open Directory be back?
Just yesterday I posted on the fact that the index page of the open directory, also known as DMOZ, had fallen from Google search results and I mused about the idea that the directory may have died or at least in the eyes of Google.
No dice!
It reminds me of the baseball season that is coming to a close this week and as it comes down to the wire, my beloved Chicago Cubs have an opportunity to keep playing into October. The Cubs have been fighting under new management this season and have been on the move against what seemed like an insurmountable lead by the Brewers, but they have their post season hopes in their hands.
Similarly, the Open Directory that has appeared by many as being past it’s prime has it’s own future in the palm of the editor’s hands.
Well, if there haven’t been many indications (which there really hasn’t been any in a long, long time), there may be a glimmer of hope on the horizon as DMOZ opens a blog to be “the official source for information, insight, and updates about DMOZ, the Open Directory Project (ODP).”
We thought now was the right time to open the door and start a conversation with the Web community about what’s happening with the largest human-edited directory.
We intend to use this blog to:
- Provide authentic messages about DMOZ and the efforts of our volunteer community.
- Highlight enhancements, both current and future.
- Allow editors to showcase their categories and describe, in their own words, why DMOZ is so important.
- Recruit new editors. If you have access to the Web and are passionate about a category, find out how to apply.
Additionally we want to hear from you.
What do you think about DMOZ? Why do you use the directory or data? Is there something you would like to see fixed? When you’ve been around as long as we have, some people are bound to have great things to say, while others might have a few choice words based on their personal experience. Either way, we want to hear it 
As the eternal DMOZ pessimist, I welcome the new transparency that this should bring. This is another opportunity that the Open Directory has to become a valuable resource that many search engines already give it value for.
I will reiterate a few questions posed by Bob Keating and two of my own:
Bob - What do you think about DMOZ?
Bob - Why do you use the directory or data?
pittfall - Do you use the directory or data?
Bob - Is there something you would like to see fixed?
pittfall - Does this change your perseption of dmoz?
[Link]
Did Google Drop the Open Directory
Just about four weeks ago I posted about the plight of a fellow blogger named Shoemoney and an alleged extortion attempt by a proclaimed editor of the directory. Now, I have not been exactly defending the open directory in its value with the major search engines like Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo (in alphabetical order as not to offend anyone who prefers one over another).
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land noted that DMOZ.com was not listed in Google for the query “DMOZ”
The Open Directory’s home page appears to have gone missing from Google’s search results. For example, a search on dmoz (the Open Directory’s nickname) does not return the home page in the search results.
This fact was also covered by David Naylor and Marketing Pilgrim.
I too have verified that the index page is not listed in Google for any query. Can this remain? I have been very vocal about my disappointment in the Open Directory Project, however, I still do admire the intention and spirit of DMOZ.
Can it work? I think that it can, however, not in it’s present state. I admire it’s lofty goals, and still I wonder how it can survive without a concerted effort by some organization as it appears that the internal structure is without the ability to renew the philosophy?
What do you think?
Should the Open Directory still be considered a resource by search engines or retired as a dinosaur to be exhibited in a museum of the Internet? Can DMOZ regain it’s perceived status and be a valuable resource on the Internet again?
Here are a few of my posts about the Open Directory Project (DMOZ):
Why DMOZ Sucks and Wikipedia is Nothing More than a Blog
Asleep at the Wheel - The Demise of the Open Directory
[Link]
Google Wants You to Be Social and Share Your Stuff
Google has launched a social bookmarking service aptly named Shared Stuff quietly.
But the news is out:
Google Shared Stuff - Google Blogscoped
Google Launches Google Shared Stuff - Search Engine Land
Google Shared Stuff is Delicious - Marketing Pilgrim
Google Wants You To Share Stuff - TechCrunch
Google and Being Social - John Battelle’s Searchblog
Here is the best description of the new product (from TechCrunch):
Shared Stuff is simple enough; users drag a “email/ share” button into their browser, and click it when they want to add pages to their Shared Stuff profile. Links can include an image, text extract, and/ or a user comment. The results can then be viewed directly, via iGoogle or RSS. An interesting addition is the option to use Shared Stuff to post links to other social booking sites as well, including Facebook Furl, Delicious, Reddit and Digg.
Friend can be invited by email, and bookmarks made by Gmail contacts using the service can be viewed as well.
Other aspects that make Shared Stuff more social includes a profile that you have limited, but valuable control. On your profile you have the ability to share your name, nickname, job, geographic location, short description (5,000 character max) and of course 10 links of your liking. Below you will see the profile section of a profile. As with many other social bookmarking sites, you can add a description and tags to help you manage your stuff and the ability to share your stuff via email and RSS/XML feeds.
Here is the new profile of the Google Shared Stuff
You just have to add a javascript link to your favorites on your browser, however there is no ability to add a button to your Google Toolbar which makes me think that they are really trying to keep the wraps on this new product.
So what happened to Google Bookmarks?
Create bookmarks you can access anywhere
Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in. Save time with quick links to your favorite websites
Use Personalized Search to find the sites you visit frequently and bookmark your favorites. Use the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer for quick access to your bookmarks and to easily create more.
A good question is why would Google discard their bookmarks service rather than adding the social aspects of shared stuff to their existing product?
If you would like a walk through of the new service, check out BlogScoped’s post which includes screen shots and instructions.
Have you added Google Shared Stuff to your Google Profile?
[Link]
BlogRush - MLM for Traffic
BlogRush is a new portal with a widget to drive traffic from to your blog from other blogs that are in the same vertical as yours.
BlogRush (still in beta) is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their #1 need:
More Readers For Their Blog.
By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs.
here is a look at the widget
Basically, for every impression you provide the widget, your posts will be added to other blogs within the same related subject. Get a referral (someone signs up from your prompting) then you get a “credit” for all of their impressions and yours too. You will get referral points for up to 10 referrals that you bring to the service. Just a viral, or multi-level, marketing technique to draw more and more to their database service.
There are many who are commenting about the new service:
ShoeMoney - Great New System to Get Free Traffic
Build a Better Blog - BlogRush Syndication Network
Yack Yack SEO - BlogRush - Join BlogRush, do it now!
SEO Journal - Why You Shouldn’t Rush into BlogRush?
Blogozine - BlogRush: Increase Your Blog Traffic
Marketing Pilgrim - BlogRush Offers Free Syndicated Blog Traffic
Search Engine Round Table - Get Free Traffic with BlogRush, But Watch Out, Google AdSense Publishers
Google Tutor - 5min = 182 visitors in 24hrs!
The jury is still out on the new syndication service, but it will be interesting to see the outcome.
Interesting note: all of the blogs listed above except for Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal have installed the BlogRush widget on their websites, so it has certainly grabbed some attention.
Have you tried BlogRush yet? If so, have you seen any dramatic spikes in traffic?
And if you are wanting a bit of reality, check out Robyn Tippins’ post about Talking to Yourself.
[Link]
Mash - Yahoo!’s Answer to MySpace and Facebook
Yahoo has released an online social portal into beta, Yahoo! Mash.
As you can see from the photo of my profile (above), it has some of the same look and feel of MySpace, without all of the advertisements (for now at least).
Here are the basic components of a Yahoo Mash profile page:
Basic info
- Photo
- Name
- Quote
- Profile Revision History About Me
- simple standardized questions My Stuff
- area to add links (opportunity) Blurt
- area to add a “blurt” (removable) Guestbook
- Sorry, I’m not available, leave a message in the box for everyone to see. (removable) Style this Profile
- adjust the look of your profile
- five easy adjustments
- advanced css available Customize by adding modules
- this includes widgets like flickr, rss feeds and more Friends Tags
Can this give Yahoo an edge in the social market that many consider they have owned since taking it from AOL until MySpace and Facebook came showed on the scene a few years back?
If you would like to experience Yahoo Mash beta, let me know by sending me an email: stephen.pitts@gmail.com.
If you have already experienced this new social portal, what do you think?
[Link]
Can a Marketing Message be Social?
I got into a very engaging conversation yesterday with a web developer at work on the topic of social aspects of the web.
So, what does social really mean?
According to Answers.com it is defined as: Living together in organized groups or similar close aggregates.
So what does social mean on the Internet (also known as a social network)?
According to Wikipedia it is defined as: A map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.
The discussion started with an assumption that blogs are social entities on the Internet, whereas other (traditional) websites are not.
So, this led to a very specific question, are blogs inherently social?
I think not. A blog is actually short for web log as know as an online journal. This is not anything that implies social. in fact a journal is not a conversation, rather a form of communication that has a single path. Now, many blogs, just like this one, allows comments from readers and that is a social aspect, however, the blog is not defined by it’s social aspects, rather the social aspects are defined by the blog.
My opinion is that you can have a blog that is not social (see Google Webmaster Central Blog).
This led to another great question, are marketing messages lost in a social environment?
They may be discounted by many, however, I think with transparency a marketing message isn’t lost within a social arena.
Even within social networks such as myspace, facebook, mybloglog and others their intention is to be social, however an online property like a blog or a standard website does not mean it is social just because they typically are. Other “social” portals online are not social at their roots, this includes social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. Likewise, other types of online properties, like standard websites, can become social with the addition of social aspects like forums. But, does this mean that a marketing message is lost because it is from a marketer?
I think that in any instance, online or offline, if a marketer is trying to reach a new audience, like online social networks, it is appropriate to have a voice in the given arena, however, if you try to game the system by acting as a user then you are tying to using a black hat technique to artificially inflate your values within that context.
Similar to other black hat techniques, it can help to inflate your rankings, but this is not something that you want to employ for long term success.
My opinion
Don’t fear other platforms like the social networking online, but make sure that you are transparent in your efforts. I do think that you can be more successful in the short run, but the rewards will be greater if you do it right in the first place.
What are your thoughts?
[Link]
Funding Interests in Cuill
From TechCrunch:
We got (at least) one thing wrong when we wrote about super-stealth search startup Cuill last week. We said we believed the company self funded after searching for venture capital. But we now have it from two solid sources that they actually raised a $4 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, with partner David Strohm taking a board seat.
Greylock is behind some of the biggest success stories of the new Internet, including Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and others. Most of those investments are led by David Sze, however. Strohm only rarely seems to invest in the consumer sector.
This is very interesting since most of the research that I have found have stated that this is a “stealth” project. While much of the information being written around the company being relatively the same, it will be interesting to see what will come of this.
Is this another piece of monetary fodder for Google to gobble up from ex-Googlers like a prodigal son?
If you missed the information that I recently posted on this search project, you will find it here: Cuill - Have We Found a Google Killer?
[Link]
Cuill - Have We Found a Google Killer?
Cuill Inc. (pronounced [kool]) is a startup company that is pioneering a new approach to Search.
What’s so special?
Cuill, the secretive search start-up — This is the latest start-up, started by two Google folks and two Stanford folks. Co-founders include Tom Costello, of Stanford, and Anna Patterson, formerly at Stanford and now at Google (described as a search wizard). They’re raising a VC round for the company. We’re told they claim they can crawl the Web at a tenth of the cost Google can. We’ve contacted Costello to find out more. We’re open to tips if you hear of anything.
from Venture Beat, Feb 12, 2007
The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can - Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.
Cuill was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google’s intellectual property library. Costello was the founder of Xift.
Cuill met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and offices in Menlo Park.
Another rumor circulating is that Google already took a shot at acquiring the company with a very healthy offer, showing that they take this potential threat seriously. And the company may have enticed at least one other senior search scientist from Google to join them recently.
from TechCrunch, Sep 4, 2007
What would you do if you could do the same work as your largest competitor at 10 cents on the dollar?
Whether they can actually accomplish this remains to be seen, but if Google has taken notice it is for good reason. Two of the three founders have worked for Google and two out of three have a PhD in computer science (the other is on leave for his PhD).
They have released a very limited amount of information about their technology, in fact, they haven’t said much more than “Yup. We’re working on it.” (search that is). What they said is about their robot:
Twiceler is an experimental robot. The user-agent to block this is twiceler. It could take 24-48 hours for us to re-read your robots.txt file.
Apparently they are already indexing websites.
I look forward to the competition for Google. Could this be an answer for Yahoo, Ask or MSN search?
Little is known, but I am sure that buzz around Cuill will be heating up!
[Link]
Google Searches Your Subscriptions - Finally!
Today, Google announced a new feature for their reader service:
That’s right, search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you’d like to search for “ipod” so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today’s announcements.
More information from the Official Google Blog:
The fundamental problem with information is that there’s too much of it, and this is probably why we all go to our trusted sources to learn what we really need to know. Your sources filter out the noise and present the most interesting bits to you in a useful way. For many of us, these sources include newspapers, magazines, and of course blogs. We built Google Reader as a way for you to see all of your online sources in one place.
They have also done some minor tweaks to other aspects of Reader:
Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.
Not mentioned is the actual number of unread posts in your folders list.
Seems trivial, doesn’t it? Search in a product from a search engine.
It may not seem like much, but it is a welcomed addition in my book!
[Link]
SquidWhat? - Squidoo Builds People Search SquidWho
Squidoo has launched a new portal called SquidWho “A people-powered Who’s Who on the Web.”
Here is the basic info:
SquidWho is the first people-built who’s who. It’s an easy way to find out what’s what (and where) about famous (and not so famous) people around the world. If you’re a fan of someone, build a page about them. Point to their books, their blog, their wikipedia entry and their videos. Share your opinions but most of all, make it easy for people to discover the really good stuff.
Unlike traditional Who’s Who directories, SquidWho is open. Everyone gets a chance to share her opinion without worrying about what some committee of anonymous people have to say. So, if you like Norah Jones, built a page about her. Hate Mick Jagger? Go for it. It’s up to you.
So, what is it really?
Just another way to repackage content already online including:
online poll at a glance (aka Wikipedia article) flickr photos Amazon products YouTube videos ebay items fan clubs
Of course it includes Google ads, lensmaster information and your basic list of services (RSS, email, print, del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon and stats).
Here’s what Squidoo says:
Squidoo is also about being at your best, so when you do a search for your favorite rock star or cousin, you’ll automatically go to the best lens. Not seeing YOUR lens as the top lens? Add some more modules, dig up some great trivia, and beef up the links, and tell a friend. Find a fan forum on your person and see if folks there want to help. You might just make it to the top and become famous in your own right!
What’s so great?
Nothing much.
Yes, you have the ability to build a personalized page, but for what? Online reputation management is something that we should all consider when building your reputation or building a social presence online, but is this what we have come to?
What do you think?
[Link]
Insight into MSN Webmaster Portal
Last week MSN announced Webmaster Portal should be available in late fall and offered a chance to apply to test out the beta and provide feedback.
I am not aware that the beta has actually started, however, I was sent an email to register for the beta. It was a simple form requesting information about me, the websites that I would include in the beta and some interesting questions about the tools and information that I would like to see. This included some insight into what they are planning to offer (they even categorized them):
Troubleshooting - Site crawling Sitemaps - Ping Stats - Inbound links to other sites Troubleshooting - Site Indexing Stats - Top search terms for your domain Stats - Outbound links from your site Troubleshooting - Robots.txt Stats - Top search terms for other domains Stats - Outbound links from other sites Troubleshooting - Sitemaps Stats - Top keywords on your site Stats - Perceived site quality score Sitemaps - Creation Stats - Inbound links to your site Stats - Number of pages indexed Sitemaps - Submission (upload, autodiscovery)
The tools that I really want to see are highlighted
This may not say much, but if you look at the categories you will find three consistent areas that they are concerned with providing webmasters with:
Stats Sitemaps Troubleshooting
Here are a couple that I thought they should add:
vertical trends keyword trends top keywords in search notification of inbound links
MSN’s list looks really solid, the kind of tools that every webmaster would want.
Here is some more information from the request to sign up:
In order to provide the highest level of service to our Beta Partners, we will start off the beta program in September with a small number of participants, and incrementally increase the number until all applicants have been accepted by late November.
I eagerly anticipate the results of the new beta.
Do you have any more information about MSN Webmaster Portal?
Are there other tools or information that you would like to see come from MSN?
[Link]
Labor Day 2007
Happy Labor Day Everyone!
Wow, what a wild weekend this has been!
I got a chance to catch up with some reading over the past few days, visited with my wife’s parents, my blog went down (the first time I didn’t have my laptop to get everything rolling)… OK, I am ready for the weekend to end (not really).
If you are like me, in-house marketing director, including online (SEO, SEM, SMO, mobile and others) and offline (print and others) to drive conversions across the Internet and over the phone, then you probably have some of the same aggravation of tracking metrics in these very different medias. I would like to encourage you to read “Offline Maneuvers: Improving ROI by Tracking Offline Conversions” by Natalia Vinokhodova in the Fall issue of Search Marketing Standard.
If you don’t currently have a subscription to this publication, I highly recommend it! I am not going to say that I subscribe to all that has been covered in the magazine, but the approach you might find enlightening. With almost every article that I have read over the past year, you will find a common sense approach that new and seasoned online marketers can relate to.
Oh, based upon recent comments, I have updated my Commenting Policy, please feel free to review these changes and let me know if you either don’t understand specifics or would like me to elaborate upon. I can get on tangents and miss the initial point!
So, Happy Labor Day and tomorrow I will be getting back to work!
[Link]
MSN is “STICKIN’ IT TO THE MAN!” little guy
Microsoft AdCenter has updated it’s trademark policy, wait… in an email sent out today they state that their trademark policy remains the same, however, how they enforce the policy will change dramatically:
Microsoft adCenter is changing the way we manage our trademark policy starting September 10, 2007. While no change will be made to the trademark policy itself, this update aligns better with marketplace practices, speeds up editorial review to get your ads live faster, and ensures consumers see relevant ads.
Microsoft adCenter’s Trademark Policy
As stated above, we are not changing the trademark policy itself. You may still use trademarked terms in your ads when you, as the advertiser, are the owner of the trademark, an affiliate or reseller of trademarked products or services, or a site that uses the trademarked term in an informational, descriptive, or non-competitive manner. Infringing use of trademark terms by direct competitors remains a violation of Microsoft adCenter policies.
What’s changing?
It will now be the advertiser’s responsibility to obtain permission from the trademark owner to use a trademarked term in their ads. It will also be the trademark owner’s responsibility to address ongoing incorrect usage of their trademark term(s) directly with third-party advertisers. Microsoft adCenter will no longer intercede to obtain permission for the advertiser wanting to use a trademarked term.
What does this mean for my search advertising?
Your ads may display next to other ads that contain your trademarked terms. Affiliates, resellers, and third parties may show up against queries for your trademarked terms. Competitor’s ads may show up in search results against queries for trademarks in certain scenarios, due to match types other than exact.
For example, if a generic term is included in the overall search query, advertisers who bid on the generic term may show up in the search results.
If you are a trademark owner and you believe your trademark is being misused in Microsoft adCenter, you can submit a report by following the instructions on our Trademark Concern Form.
Visit our adCenter Blog post to read more about this change and if you have additional questions about these changes please contact our adCenter Support Team.
(in an effort to make sure that nothing was out of context, the full email has been posted here)
I can truly appreciate what MSN is trying to do by protecting trademarked words/terms, however, I don’t think that the advertising portal should be addressed by the owners of trademarked material, rather, it should be directly addressed by the trademark owners to the offending party.
So, what does this mean for advertisers?
You may have to prove your right to use trademarked words in your keywords and ads. I can understand addressing concerns for using trademarked terms in advertising for a defaming manner, however, the way Microsoft responds to claims will be the concern. If it is any way that they address keywords and ads currently then it will be another reason to leave the platform in the near future, this, of course if you haven’t left because of the lack of traffic.
No, I do not intend to bash Microsoft, they provide some great tools in the adCenter Labs, but I have yet to experience the kind of traffic that I expect from a heavily used search portal like MSN.
What are your thoughts on the changes to Microsoft’s trademark policy implementation?
Is MSN attempting to dodge some legal bullet?
[Link]
GWC - Revival of the Penalty Notifications
Google Webmaster Central is a very valuable resource and looks to continue to give us important information regarding our websites in the Google index and actually gives us insight into how the Googlebot interacts with our websites and their contents.
In 2005 Google began sending notifications to webmasters to notify them that their websites were outside the published webmaster guidelines and because of this, some/all of their pages were removed from the index. Of course, this was used by others to spoof the notifications and get webmasters in a tizzy, so they stopped sending them and looked for a better way.
Back to the drawing board. In July 2006 they launched Message Center to help get the notifications to website owners without the threat of others sending “false notifications.”
So today they announced the new plan to help those not verified:
…we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message Center won’t keep messages waiting if you haven’t previously registered, but we hope to add that feature in the next few months. We’ll keep you posted as things change.
Will this be well received, or is this an attempt to get more website owners to “verify ownership” with Google? That remains to be seen. However, this will probably get the pranksters back into their chairs to start up the fake emails again.
What do you think, should Google even be concerned with websites that are outside of their published guidelines?
[Link]
GMail Fun
I wanted to share this great little video from GMail.
[Link]
DMOZ - Still Sucks and Now with Extortion!
In one of my most popular posts in the short existence of SEOpittfall.com “Why DMOZ Sucks and Wikipedia is Nothing More Than a Blog”, I had some very direct comments regarding the Open Directory Project:
DMOZ is a wonderful idea, however, it is inherently flawed.
I must say that I would have to rephrase some of the remarks I made (changes highlighted with deletions with new responses bold):
Wikipedia and DMOZ are not the most valuable resource for research on the Internet, search engines are. I am not implying that the results returned are more relevant, however, there is much more information from other sources that is not included in Wikipedia and DMOZ, however, because the editors of Wikipedia and DMOZ choose what is, and more importantly, what is not contained in the listing, it should not be valued any higher than any other website on the given topic (or any blog for that matter)!
I am not saying that you should immediately request your listing from either be removed I would recommend that everyone should request that their listings should be removed, but and I think that the search engines should consider the facts and devalue these sites because they are becoming less relevant and they do not appear to be working on improving themselves in any way.
Do I have a strong, deep-rooted, opinion on this topic? ABSOLUTELY!
Case in point:
Shoemoney.com (if you are not familiar, I suggest you stop by), was removed from the “almighty” directory after being approached through an email expecting a payout of $5,000 to remain in the directory. The response, nothing, is something that I would have done myself. However, not long after, the website was removed.
Does Shoemoney belong in the directory? This may be questionable, however, the way it was done was nothing more than criminal.
You might say: What’s the big deal?
Here was Shoemoney’s response:
If any verifiable DMOZ META editor would like to come on my radio show live and discuss what happened contact me jeremy@ you know where. I have nothing to hide… what do you ? You can listen to my previous shows and see I have never sandbagged anyone and I don’t have my finger on a edit button (I have no more control of the show then you do).
Is this link-bait? Maybe, however, it doesn’t change my opinion that DMOZ should be removed from the Internet.
What do you think?
Is DMOZ relevant anymore?
[Link]
Must Have for Social Optimization
Wow, that’s pretty absolute, isn’t it?
What makes something a “must have?“
I don’t mean this:
Must Have
Find Must Have Online.
Shop & Save at Target.com Today.
www.Target.com
(actual Google sponsored results for “must have”)
pittfall’s definition of must have:
n. “a valuable resource that should not be dismissed.”
OK, so what is this “valuable resource,” this “must have” for social optimization?
Social Media Daily - “a blueprint for marketing your website with social media, social bookmarking, social networking and other Web 2.0 fun.”
So, if you are looking for the traffic that can be leveraged through social marketing, then you should read this valuable report that includes:
Tools Link Building Software Checklists Conclusion (overview)
This is the down and dirty guide to building a social campaign for your website. I don’t think that I can do it any justice by regurgitating it because it is very well written and detailed, no fluff! This is a great refresher for seasoned SMOs and a perfect way to get started in the social arena for the rest of us.
[Link]
MSN Live Search Building Webmaster Portal
MSN Live Search has joined the race to provide webmasters with the tools and features that we expect with the announcement of Webmaster Portal. According to the announcement, the new service will be started in “private beta” and will test out some of the tools and commands that they intend on bringing to the public starting in late fall:
Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we’ll support these scenarios:
Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools Statistics about your website Consolidation of content submission resources New content and community resources
While we expect the tools to be available publicly in late Fall, we still have some polishing to do. In the meantime we’ve created a private beta program to let adventuresome folks get their hands on the tools sooner – and help polish things by providing feedback.
This is a welcome addition to the one engine webmaster show that has been Google’s Webmaster Central and I look forward to useful tools and information that MSN has been providing like AdCenter Labs. This is quite a surprise for me, after MSN had pulled (what I considered a basic tool) the “link” operator offline, I was concerned about their ability to return results (maybe a storage concern), but if they can turn tools and reports like they have done with AdCenter Labs, then this will be like Christmas!
Will this live up to the hype? That remains to be seen, however, if you are interested in getting into the “private beta” (in other words they have to accept you), then get over to the announcement and send in you request.
[Link]
Microsoft Offers Content Ads for AdCenter in Beta
In an attempt to provide additional traffic from their AdCenter platform, MSN AdCenter will offer start showing your ads (if you are an adCenter advertiser) on “content-based pages on website owned by publishing partners such as MSN” beginning August 29, 2007.
Here is more information from the announcement:
Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta
We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads.
Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network—connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We’re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers.
We realize that some of you may not yet be ready for content distribution. If you would like to upgrade without expansion (maintaining search-only distribution) please fill out this online form by August 26, or contact your adCenter representative.
OK, if you have been an advertiser using MSN adCenter, then getting additional traffic is a welcomed change to what is being produced currently from Live Search, but is the way to do this by forcing advertisers into the content arena. What about an opt-in rather than requiring advertisers to opt-out? This doesn’t make me feel better about what MSN is offering.
If you are looking for more information about this opportunity, you will find more information here:
Content advertising overview
AdCenter FAQ for Content Ads
AdCenter Webinar
What are your thoughts? Do you think that this will be profitable?
Is the best way to get more advertisers to test the new product by requiring them to request to be removed?
[Link]
Social Bookmarking 101
The CommonCraft Show has released another useful video, this one is about Social Bookmarking and highlights del.icio.us.
This isn’t just about bookmarking but rather the integration of bookmarking as a social event.
Feel free to share with others or let me know what you think!
[Link]
PeekYou.com - Online Reputation Management
PeekYou.com is a new way for you to manage and control your reputation online:
PeekYou is a new kind of online white pages.
A PeekYou profile helps other people find your websites, social-networking pages, photos, or anything else about you online. You can also create a profile for friends or relatives to ensure that they may also be easily found online.
What’s the point?
Well, the importance of online reputation management is becoming more important as potential employers are looking to online presence to find out more about potential candidates. So, this means that you need to be aware of what is online about you, or someone that caries the same name. Having a unique name, does not mean that you are the only one out there. Case in point, my name is pretty unique (more my last name), but there are others out there with the same or similar names. A political cartoonist, a programmer, a labor policy specialist at UC Berkeley, TV actor, an artist, chess master, another programmer that owns the domain…
Will the real Stephen Pitts please stand up?
So, knowing what is out there is only the first step. The second is setting yourself from your competitors, PeekYou.com can help with that!
The site allows users complete freedom to edit, add or remove information, links, photos, and tags (school, work, interests, etc.) associated with their profile or other PeekYou user’s profiles. In addition, PeekYou provides human created search engine results, reducing nonspecific and incorrect matches. Concerned with maintaining privacy, PeekYou empowers individuals with the opportunity to be “unlisted” (similar to the White Pages) as well as edit their profiles to ensure correct and accurate information.
If you are concerned about the privacy and terms of service, you will find them here: Privacy Policy Terms of Service
Here is more information about this new service (still in beta):
Looking for someone (or yourself)?
You can add people to PeekYou simply by clicking on a simple button after a search.
Finding too many people?
You can limit your search by location or tags (sorted by life, school or work)
Standard bio
Here are the items on the Biography Page:
Photo
Bio
Feeds
Info
Name Geographic Location User names (known) Sex Age
Tags
Life Work School
Links
Personal Business Social Networking Press & News Photos & Video RSS
This is also an opportunity to build links! This will also help you set yourself (and your online profiles) to outrank others with your name. This is the first step in stepping over others so you are more visible.
Just a bit more information from PeekYou about PeekYou.com:
Created by RateMyFace.com and RateMyTeachers.com/RateMyProfessors.com founder Michael Hussey, PeekYou aims to be an open source directory of every individual online. Hussey, who has been featured on CNN, NPR and BBC amongst others looks to bring his experience developing popular consumer destination sites to building PeekYou into the premiere people search engine. Each individual will have their own personalized page and a PeekYou profile that will include bookmarked links to all information available about the target person. PeekYou differentiates itself from other people searchers by the site’s ability to link and identify numerous Internet identities to a single individual based upon tags and online identities.
What are others saying?
Search Engine Journal
John Battelle
What are your thoughts?
Is online reputation management necessary?
Have you tried PeekYou? Let me know!
[Link]
Update Complete
Well, I have made the jump to WordPress 2.2 and everything seems to be running smoothly.
If you find that any part of my site is not functioning properly, please let me know through either comment or e-mail.
Thanks
[Link]
New Version of SEOpittfall.com
Hello everyone, thank you for your patience, SEOpittfall.com is in the midst of an upgrade… new machine and new version of WordPress.
[Link]
A Word About Usability
It is really remarkable that something that appears to make some sense could be overlooked… but it sometimes does.
As we can plainly see from the example outlined above, what is perceived by you may not be the same as your users/visitors. We might be laughing or just chuckling inside about the AT&T books bills that many are receiving from their brand spanking new iphones and wondering what a accounts receivable manager was thinking, but are your users thinking the same about your web developer?
Don’t over or underestimate the value system of your users. The first thing you need to consider about usability is the user.
What are your thoughts?
Are there consistent areas of concern that many are overlooking?
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Microsoft and Google Compete to Deliver Online Storage Solutions
Windows Live SkyDrive is now in beta from Microsoft.
Here are some of the details of this new service:
500 MB of free online storage Create personal, shared, and public folders Windows Live SkyDrive works on Windows or Macintosh with both FireFox or Internet Explorer
Unlike the new Microsoft product, Google is offering online storage with limitations (and not free).
Gmail offers over 2.8 GB of free storage to all users, and that space is reserved just for Gmail messages. Similarly, Picasa Web Albums gives users 1 GB of storage just for Picasa Web Albums images.
There’s currently no way to use your free storage space from one product to house content from another. However, if you purchase extra storage from Google, that space will be shared by both products as needed as you upload or receive more data.
So, MSN is offering 250 GB of free storage for use with anything you desire, Google gives you the ability to upgrade your storage for your Google Services (currently just Gmail and Picasa) for a fee. Currently 6 GB for $20 per year, up to 250 GB for $500 per year.
Are we wandering into an online war for storage supremacy?
What are your thoughts?
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Been Lookin’ for More?
Over the last few weeks I haven’t been publishing much information. By no means is this because I have been lazy (maybe just a bit), rather, I have been doing work in the background. I have reached some limitations and because of consistent growth in readers and additional exposure in SERPs, I have to move to a new server… I will be upgrading the version of WordPress just after moving to a more robust server.
So what are you saying? There may be a few bumps during this week. Much of these upgrades have to be done outside of my normal work schedule (8 A.M. - 7 P.M EST). So, if you come to visit this week and the page doesn’t load… thanks for the patience. We are making improvements to serve you better!
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Things I Learned at SES Travel 2007
There were many things that were shared at the conference, however, there is one that is of great importance that really struck a cord with me. Yes, it is extremely important for the travel vertical, however, it has importance for all websites. It really brings all of the aspects of development together:
Create an Experience
Let me ask you a question: what are the most memorial experiences that you have had?
It may be related to an event, place or those who you shared it with, right?
So, you are building a wonderful website, with considerations for everything…
Your website is easy to navigate for users and engines.
Your content is engaging, keeping the reader looking for more.
You are always looking for the next “big” thing that will get you more visitors.
But, what are you doing to give your users the ability to engage you and share with others? This is an experience! Experiences are shared, both positive and negative! Experiences are what keep people coming back (more frequent visits), share with others (viral), write about it (links) and can help you to move into the spotlight with communities both online and offline.
Yes, with the travel vertical, it is extremely important. Regular people aren’t afforded the opportunity to experience a vacation all too often, so it is extremely important to provide them with an experience that is consistent online with what they have to look forward to offline (when they arrive). But, if you take a step back and think about it, this is not restricted to the travel vertical, in fact, this is extremely important for everyone that has online exposure.
Sure, you can live vicariously through your website, but for long-term success, you will have to match the online experience with the offline reality.
I also wanted to share some photos from Seattle. By the way, the city had a great affect on me. Even though I work in the travel industry, I still don’t get out much!
Here are a couple of skyline photos (taken from the Space Needle):
Here is the Space Needle at Night:
Here we are (our group) on the needle:
Jacklyn, Steve (me) and Ryan
And, of course, the famous pink elephant:
I really enjoyed the conference this year and commend the producers of the expo!
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Search Marketing Spotlight - The Other Engines
I will not lie to you, if you are looking for quality traffic in large amounts, you will find it on the major search engines (Google, MSN Live, Yahoo! and Ask.com), but finding targeted traffic on these engines can require a larger budget than many have to invest. However, you can still find great traffic on the smaller engines and marketing portals that won’t require a venture capitalist to get started.
Unlike the ad platforms from the major search engines (Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Ask Sponsored Listings), the following advertising platforms bring targeted visitors and traffic from niche websites that are reaching the visitors that you want to reach… and at a lower cost.
Why choose a smaller provider?
With cost/benefit analysis, search engine advertising has given marketers the ability to target specific visitors by finding the visitors that are searching for the products or services the marketer is providing. The smaller providers can provide the targeted traffic your website needs, without the number of competitors that the major engines attract.
Here are some of the best performing “secondary” marketing portals. They are listed in alphabetical order, not by any given ranking factors.
Trusted by over 37,000 advertisers since 1999, 7Search has earned a respected status in the online advertising community by focusing on the quality, and not the quantity, of its search results. With the strongest patent-pending fraud detection in the industry, 7Search is putting the pieces of PPC advertising together for Web businesses.
Quick Notes:
Excellent support staff (personal experience) Exposure to over 150 English search engines Keyword bidding starting at $0.01 Over 1.5 billion searches per month more details about 7Search
Whether you need a wave of traffic or a steady stream of people who are likely to buy, ABCSearch is the solution to your online marketing dilemma. We’re one of the web’s fastest-growing suppliers of cost-per-click advertising opportunities. Handling more than two billion searches every month through our network, we can make your online success as easy as ABC.
Quick Notes:
Start an account with as little as $25 Phrase match helping you build your keyword list without all of the variations Exposure across more than 1,000 niche search engines Contextual advertising more details about ABCSearch
Reach prospects that match your customer profile with up to 16 million unique visitors and 400 million searches daily.
Quick Notes:
Premium property placements Webinars Newsletter and research information API more details about LookSmart
MIVA is all about helping your business grow through performance marketing services. From setting up storefronts to delivering customers to your website, MIVA can help in multiple ways.
Quick Notes:
Pay per click Precision network Vertical advertising more details about Miva
AdSonar enables cost-per-click advertising on best-in-breed publisher sites, and arms advertisers with the ability to find their target markets within those sites. With content targeted or site specific placements, AdSonar gives advertisers the tools to convert an interested, captive audience into customers.
Quick Notes:
Choose the website to show your ads Recognizable brand and media websites Channel search traffic more details about Quigo
Depending on your needs, these (and other) smaller online marketing portals can provide enough targeted traffic than you need to continue to grow and gain exposure in your vertical. As the web grows with more users and more usage, the need for additional marketing access will be necessary to provide users with what they are looking for.
Please feel free to share other advertising portals that are getting you targeted traffic at lower costs.
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Balanced Link Building
A link is not just a link, they are much more than just a simple way to move from one page to another. Rather, Links are the glue of the Internet!
Yeah, yeah, yeah… you’ve heard this before, haven’t you?
Then, in the next breathe, you will hear, “content is king!” Right?
Really, links are the glue that binds pages on a single domain together to become a website. Links are the indicators that build a network. Content just tells the search engine algorithms what a page is about, but it is links to that page that shows why it is valuable. Search engines are there to provide their users valuable results, relevance is much easier to determine than value, isn’t it?
Link building starts with the development of you website architecture. Text based without scripting is the best way to let your user and search engine crawlers know what the page is about. My best advice, make your links descriptive (call the page what it is) but don’t over do it.
Link building continues with links that point away from your domain to others. This is an extremely important step. Linking to authorities in your vertical does not mean that your visitors will be escaping your website for your competitors’ site, unless you have given them a reason. Link building is as important as developing relationships with suppliers of products for a retail business.
Step 3 is all about making yourself know in the areas that people traditionally look for valuable information. Directories are these places. If you are launching a website today, don’t expect to be listed in wikipedia or dmoz just because you graced everyone with your presence. Are these valuable authorities? Of course, but much work will need to be done to gain that kind of attention. Start with important directories and move on to directories that are valuable in your vertical.
Next, start working to build links to your website from social networks like blogs, forums, bookmarking sites and communities that are active in providing feedback and content in your vertical. Start with comments, even if they are “no_follow” links. If you are providing something relevant and valuable to the conversation, you can get traffic from visitors of these blogs and may give others researching similar topics to possibly site you in their research (usually a link).
The final step, keep at it! It isn’t a thankless job, I swear!
Link and content building are the fuel of SEO, like vitamins and food to our bodies. So watch your diet of links and make sure you are creating enough content that will sustain your rankings.
Here are some tips that I subscribe to:
Who you link to says more about you than those that link to you, so be careful to link to websites that are valuable… and value is not determined by PageRank! If you only link to those that link back to you, you aren’t doing for your visitors! If you are afraid that linking to others will cause you to lose your visitors, you already have! Just like content, if you link to a website that is not related to the subject matter of your website it’s value is lost. No website is an island, link out already!
Share your link building techniques, questions, comments and myths, won’t you?
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Catching the Sights in Seattle
Today was the first of two days in the Search Engine Strategies Travel Conference in Seattle, WA. I will be sharing more from the conference, but I wanted to share an opportunity that I had in Seattle, that some will enjoy… a Kwik E Mart.
More will come regarding the conference, I am just wondering if I will be able to catch up on my reader!
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Seattle Arrival
Well… We have landed in Seattle for the SES Travel Conference and Expo beginning tomorrow.
We took the mono-rail to downtown and checked out a great Irish pub The Blarney Stone… I am still trying to get over the 3 hour difference from east coast, but we will be up and at the conference in the morning.
I will try to do my best to share concepts and ideas that I learn.
Stay tuned!
Oh, if you know any great places to visit while we are here, or are in (or going to be in) the area, let me know!
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Setting an Expiration Date on Content
Breaking News!
Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!
So, what does this mean for search marketers?
If you are actively adding content to your website that is only useful to your users to a certain date, you will now be able to let the Googlebot know to stop indexing this content beyond your chosen date. Here is an example of this meta tag from Search Engine Land:
META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”unavailable_after: 23-Jul-2007 18:00:00 EST”
Once Google crawls the page and sees this Meta tag, it will take about a day for the page to be removed from the search results. Also this tag is only supported with web search. To remove the page completely from Google, including the cache copies, use the Google removal tool.
Google has also added support to control access to non-HTML documents that can’t have meta tags in them for blocking, such as PDF files, audio, xls documents and so. This is through a new X-Robots-Tag directive issued via the HTTP Header used to serve the file.
This can help you to maintain control over your content. If you have offers with expiration dates (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), you can now allow your new offer to be the primary focus for your visitors from Google looking for your latest offers.
Google is giving you more control over your content and what (and how long) it is provided by Google to users. This doesn’t mean that it will be easier, actually it will be more complicated. So content management will be more difficult, but more valuable.
What are your thoughts?
Have you tried the new meta tag?
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SEOpittfall Takes a Break
As I am sure some of you know, SEOpittfall went offline yesterday…
I would love to be able to say that there was some cataclysmic event that happened, but it was simply a hard drive failure. My host’s database failed and I had to restore from a back-up copy.
But, all is well!
Oh, on a related note, a little advice:
Don’t forget to back up your data… [Link]
Baby Pittfall is a Girl?
It’s official…
According to someone with much more experience than I do (certainly more experience than I want), we have been blessed with a girl!
If my wife has anything to say about it, her name will be Sophia Noelle (so-fee-a n-owe-el).
The baby is doing well, weight and size are all normal!
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Sphinn Hits the Scene
What is Sphinn?
Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.
Another product from Third Door Media, Sphinn joins the likes of Search Engine Land, Search Marketing Now and Search Marketing Expo in providing search engine marketers a forum and a resource for finding valuable information regarding the state of marketing on the Internet.
There are five main categories for your research needs:
News & Discussions Share News Discussions Network Events
This is really a social site for search marketers. Aside from the conversation on how to pronounce the name, it looks to be a valuable resource for finding information and insight in the search marketing arena. It is a bit slow to load right now, but it is still in beta.
What do you think?
Have you given it a “sphinn?”
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Search and Destroy - SEM Without SEO?
The New York Post released an article detailing the lack of many companies
Most executives, with little regard to how well their companies fare in the more important natural search results… …overspend on paid search because it is the one area of the search market they understand.
Aside from concerns for the relationship between the news source and the reporting agency, their is important information that is addressed:
Executives know the battleground for business success today is being fought on the search engine but they know very little about how well their companies are faring on natural search or if their paid search advertising dollars are well spent
Search Engine Marketing, advertising on search related products, is very valuable.
Search Engine Optimization, ranking high in search engine results, is also very valuable, but not as easy to achieve or measure.
Think of SEM as buying food at the grocery store and SEO as growing your own food. Either way you are providing for your needs and are a means to an end, but the difficulty is the time and energy spent. If you are engaged in online commerce, I think that SEM is a necessary evil, however, SEO can become a source of renewable energy for the long term.
What are your thoughts?
Do you consider the long-term effects of SEO as a valuable means and should be considered?
Do you think that SEM is not valuable?
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SoloSEO - Link Search Tool
There are a large number of things that many take for granted because of their time in the SEO arena… Because of this, it is always important to take a step back to see what you are doing and what you are not doing to improve your website for visitors and search engines.
That is why when a valuable tool comes to light I like to dig into it. The pessimist in me likes to try to find faults with tools, but this is a very valuable tool that bases itself on the search engines themselves (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask).
Tool: Link Search Tool
Provider: SoloSEO
Based upon: SEOmoz Long List of Link Searches
SoloSEO has taken advice from randfish at SEOmoz and built a web app to help everyone to speed the process. Basically, after completing your keyword research, the tool allows you to submit keywords and returns the queries for Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask to find those that will be more valuable. It is a simplistic approach, but simple doesn’t mean it will be easier!
I consider pace and delivery to be the two most important aspects of SEO that are overlooked by most. Delivery is all about finding the best exposure, i.e. “not all links are created equally!” My personal way of addressing pace is to adhere to a three tactics evenly:
1. Competitor Research
2. Link Building
3. Content Publishing
Keep building quality links, Cheers!
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Push Button Solutions for Bloggers
Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, has taken a step for their users using another of Google’s products, Blogger.
I know what many are thinking…
Blogger and Wordpress.org blogs are for fair-weather or social bloggers… but I think that anyone that contributes (not copies) content to the Internet are valuable.
From Burning Questions:
…we are very excited to announce the immediate availability of one-click redirection for Blogger Blogspot blogs (note our fine use of both alliteration and first syllable congruence).
If you host your content on a Blogger blog with a blogspot.com address (or use Blogger’s “custom domain” feature), you can now redirect your native Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed (quite easily, might we add). Gone are the muggy, languorous days of wrestling with “autodiscovery” tags in foreboding corners of your Blogger template code or hacking through this tangled discussion thread for a glimpse of configuration clarity.
OK, so Google is looking out for their users, right? Well, I think that any and everyone should be able to track their users, and those on a blogger domain that want to track their readers are using it for more than mere “social purposes.”
I will be honest, I started on blogger, something that I wish I could have changed, but I think that it does have a valuable place on the Internet.
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Social Networking 101
What is social networking?
What is a social network?
In a easy to follow, easy to understand, The Common Craft Show has published a short 2 minute video to answer these questions.
Check out Social Networking in Plain English!
Don’t forget to be careful with what you share and to whom you share it. If you are unsure of the outcome, do your homework. Thanks to SE Guide for this great find.
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Summer of Oh-Seven
Having been extremely busy for the past few weeks, taking a look at my schedule, it doesn’t look like I am going to get much of a break anytime soon! That doesn’t really matter, but I want to give you some insight to what you ave to expect from pittfall this summer:
Recommended Magazine:
Search Marketing Standard - Summer 2007
Recommended Article - “Think Before You Link…Bait” by Eric Ward
Books (to be read):
Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? and Call to Action - Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa T. Davis How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders - Catherine Seda Search Engine Optimization with PHP - Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie
Look for some feedback on these (possibly more) from me before the fall.
I am also going to be going to Seattle, my first time, later this month for SES Travel. It may sound a bit “nerdy,” but I am really looking forward to this conference…
If you are going to be at the conference, drop me an email, stephen.pitts@gmail.com. I look forward to meeting my readers.
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Happy 4th of July
Enjoy our independence and please remember the sacrifices that made it all possible.
Semper Fidelis
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MyBlogLog - SMO Tool
MyBlogLog has become a very influential aspect of SMO, social media optimization. What is SMO? Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a way to optimize web sites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites, also called social media sites. Methods of SMO include adding … [Link]
Don’t Follow Google’s Mistakes
This is not an attempt to bash Google. However, you can sometimes learn what not to do from some very successful people and products. Google has been extremely active in the last year adding services and developing products for users and webmasters alike, however, in some instances they have missed the … [Link]
Mahalo Greenhouse - User Generated Search Directory Results
Mahalo, the first human generated search engine directory, is now looking for users to build search results. Two weeks ago we launched the human-powered "search service" Mahalo.com in alpha at the WSJ's D conference in California. The tag line of Mahalo is "we're here to help," and after 15 days of … [Link]
Vanessa Fox Leaves Webmaster Central
Vanessa Fox has been, for many, the voice of Google's Webmaster Central. She has decided to make a change and leave Google: Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow. I’m moving on from webmaster central knowing that … [Link]
SEOmoz - Rank Checker Tool
SEOmoz has many tools and information that is extremely useful for SEOs. They have added another valuable tool for your rank building efforts, it is called Rank Checker. You do have to be a member of SEOmoz to use the tool, but there is free registration for those interested in … [Link]
Google - In Search for SPAM
In an effort to help provide users with more relevant results, Google is now encouraging users to report spam in their query results: Today, in response to your request, we're providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. To use the form, simply log in and provide information on the … [Link]
Engines “Search” For More Diversity in Organic Results
A recent research study by Dogpile.com with collaboration with Dr. Amanda Spink of the Queensland University of Technology and Dr. Jim Jansen from the Pennsylvania State University discussed the differences regarding organic results across the major search engines, specifically Google, Yahoo, Live (MSN) and Ask. Aside from being a pitch to … [Link]
Google Book Search “Steals” Attention
Something is missing! Theft is defined as: The unlawful taking, carrying, leading, or riding away of property from the possession, or constructive possession, of another person. Earlier this week at New York City’s BookExpo America, the CEO of of Macmillan Publishers stole two laptops from the Google Book Search booth: “There was no sign saying ‘please do not steal […] [Link]
Social Optimization for Real People
Peopleized is a new web 2.0 portal devoted to the social aspect of the Internet. With a simple design and concept, Peopleized.com has the the opportunity to become a hot property on the social web. Here is the idea: 1. Join a community devoted to people. 2. Interview others by building interviews and answering interview requests from […] [Link]
Google Admits Problems Dealing with the Googlebombing
Google claimed back in January that the Googlebomb was no longer a concern, however, today on the Official Google Blog, Marissa Mayer noted: If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints […] [Link]
Mahalo - Human Edited Search Engine Directory
What is Mahalo? Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for […] [Link]
New York Times Provides a Glimpse of Google’s Intent
An introspective look at Google was published today in The New York Times entitled “Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine.” At first thought, Duh! But after spending a couple of minutes of reading, it really gives a great look into the inner workings of the most influential (and most important, in my mind) group of engineers […] [Link]
Google’s Universal Search and SEO
Well, let’s find out what Google’s means by universal search from a user’s perspective: Search across all content with new universal search effort In striving to give you the best results to your search queries, we’ve found that the best information can take many different forms. For this reason, we have taken the beginning steps towards a […] [Link]
Google - The Official Announcement Feedburner Acquired
As speculated by TechCrunch on May 23rd, Google has announced the purchase of FeedBurner: As you know, we’re constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers. Likewise, we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we’re very […] [Link]
Google Gears Reader
In an unexpected circumstance tonight, while going through my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, I noticed something outside the ordinary. A nice little link in the upper right of my screen saying “offline” caught my attention. So, clicking on the link started off the installation of Google Gears for Reader: After clicking on Install Google Gears […] [Link]
Nerd Test Meme
I have not really ever considered myself a “nerd” per say, however, after being tagged by Bill at SEO by the Sea, I figured, what the heck, give it a whirl! Much to my surprise, I ranked a bit higher than expected, 88 to be exact. I decided before taking the test, not to use the […] [Link]
Memorial Day
In honor of Memorial Day, and in remembrance of all of those who have given their lives to allow each of us to enjoy the freedoms that were granted us. In Flanders Fields In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the Crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly, Scarce heard […] [Link]
New Features from MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is a portal for social networking around blogs. Since Yahoo purchased them earlier this year, not many visible changes have happened, but recently Yahoo announced that they will be focusing more attention on building MyBlogLog to be a better portal and possibly re-branding them. The first major addition to what MyBlogLog is offering has happened: Tagging Eric […] [Link]
Google Buys Feedburner
The headline: TechCrunch: Google to Purchase Feedburner for $100 Million Cash What is so important about this acquisition? Feedburner is famous for effectively and efficiently getting users to notify them of new content and it being published quickly and easily by publishers. It also offers great information to their members to monitor their feeds. The difficulty for Feedburner […] [Link]
Link Bait and Viral Marketing = Traffic - So What!
This is a topic that I have really considered to be an area of concern for me as an online marketing professional. So, what are link bait and viral marketing? Link Baiting: The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are […] [Link]
Google AdWords Tool for Your Marketing Toolbelt
As tools have progressed through the years, simple reporting tools are no longer fulfilling the needs of marketers professionals to know who, what, where, when and how people are using their websites. Analytics can answer this for you, but it still doesn’t answer another very important question: What about my competition? Google offers a little known tool […] [Link]
Microsoft + Yahoo = ???
As it stands now, a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! would up the combined companies’ share of the all-important search advertising market to 27 percent against Google’s 65 percent. It would also narrow the gap in overall online ads with Google to just 13 percent. More importantly, a deal would create what one source described […] [Link]
News!
I will be working on my blog over the next few days, but you may not see the results. I am working on bringing my body of work from Build a Better Website over to SEOPittfall. Because of the number of posts (170) and the fact that there are probably many broken links, it will keep […] [Link]
Happy Mother’s (and Mothers to be) Day!
I would like to wish my mother, my mother in-law and most importantly my mother-to-be, Kristin, my wife a Happy Mother’s Day. I encourage you to do the same to your mother, in person if you can, by phone if you can’t. Here is the latest photo of our baby in the womb. [Link]
Keyword Research - Tips and Tools
Before beginning any campaign in marketing online, SEO or SEM, it is important to look at who you will be targeting with your website. Really, your research should begin with the planning of your website, however, if you have published something already, you will need to look at your keywords on a regular basis, not […] [Link]
Catching Up
I have been away, a couple of days physically, a few mentally, but one great thing that has happened as I have sat on planes and sat in airports over the last weekend, I was able to catch up on some magazines to read. I picked up a copy of Wired and really enjoyed the 2007 […] [Link]
Not Much from Pittfall
I have to apologize for not posting anything this week, it has been a long one! My wife received some bad news Sunday evening and we’ve been scrambling all week. Today, I graduated and right now I am siting in Orlando Int’l Airport waiting for my delayed flight. I should be back sometime Sunday night… hopefully never […] [Link]
One Day Blog Silence
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Personalized Search - The Death of SEO?
Search Engine Optimization has been a topic of debate since the concept was developed in the mid 1990’s. Some think of it as techniques to artificially inflate organic rankings, in essence, to “trick” search engines to send them traffic that they do not deserve. I am not saying that people have used techniques to accomplish this […] [Link]
Yahoo Wants You!
Yahoo wants you… to give them feedback about the Yahoo Toolbar. They have set up a suggestions board for everyone to vote on and make their own suggestions for the toolbar. So what! Well this is a great example of what to do when building and maintaining your web presence. 1. Give users a platform respond 2. Be open […] [Link]
Google Doesn’t Own the Internet!
Here is a tool that is extremely useful for SEOs to know, it is provided by BruceClay.com and is called the Search Relationship Chart. (pdf here) They even have a histogram with the relationships as they have changed since November 2000. It outlines the suppliers and receivers of primary and secondary search results (raw index) […] [Link]
Earth Day 2007
Earth Day is a time to consider the amount of resources that we use and how this use affects the earth and everyone else in the global community. I would like to encourage everyone to be considerate of each other online and off, weather it be making a better effort to recycle, reuse or something as […] [Link]
Code of Conduct or Common Sense
Just a few weeks ago, Tim O’Reilly called for a blogger’s code of conduct and subsequently, and even with all of the April fool’s jokes that hit the web and blogosphere the following day it was not lost. NPR’s Morning Edition jumped into the discussion earlier this week (Wednesday, April 18, 2007), you can hear […] [Link]
Great News!
I know that I do not share much personal information on my blog, but this is something that I have held in for 3 weeks now and can share. Last weekend my wife and I visited her parents in Key West and let them know the great news, and finally, today we sat down and […] [Link]
Why I Blog - SEOPittfall.com
Recently, Eric Hebert tagged me with this topic and I though that it provides for insight into what SEOPittfall is about, it’s purpose, what I am trying to accomplish with my blog. Why I Blog 1. Build my Reputation. A professional reputation is as important as it ever was and in today’s online world it is […] [Link]
Google Nabs DoubleClick
Google purchased DoubleClick today for almost twice as much as they paid for YouTube. With the announcement, a post on the Official Google Blog was generated: At Google, we are constantly looking for new, innovative ways to make the information you want more accessible and more relevant—and to deliver it as fast as possible. Since Google’s […] [Link]
4 Ways to Rank Better in Alexa
I know that Alexa rankings are as valuable as, well a third grader’s personal opinion of traffic, and there are many bloggers that are concerned with them because they raise their value in advertising companies like PayPerPost, Text Link Ads and ReviewMe, which I don’t agree with (without being totally transparent about the posts being […] [Link]
Sitemaps.org Announces Autodiscovery Protocol
In four separate announcements today from Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo have announced a new robots.txt protocol for a sitemap autodiscovery on Sitemaps.org. Ask.com - The first bit of news is that Ask.com has joined their counterparts in the development of Sitemaps.org. Ask.com is now supporting submission of Sitemaps via http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=SitemapUrl. We are excited about our participation with […] [Link]
MyBlogLog Addresses Changes
In a recent post on the MyBlogLog Blog, Eric has announced changes to their management team, namely the exit of Scott Rafer, former CEO (before the Yahoo acquisition). When we were acquired, Scott was asked to stay on board and guide us through the transition. Now that we’re on Yahoo! hardware and deep into […] [Link]
User-Centered Design
Back in November of 2006, I wrote about World Usability Day and specifically focused on User Oriented Design (UOD), also referred to as User-Centered Design (UCD) by other experts. User-Centered Design is a very important component of Search Engine Optimization, in my opinion, it is the most influential aspect of SEO, I will explain further. What are […] [Link]
MyBlogLog Announces Community Manager
MyBlogLog has found their community manager in Robyn Tippins of Sleepy Blogger, and they have announced her responsibilities up front: Comprehensive FAQ Integration guides Community bulletin boards Yahoo! Customer Care integration Spearhead changes to the site that cut down on confusion. I look, with great anticipation, for Robyn’s role and keeping the momentum since before the Yahoo acquisition to keep rolling! I […] [Link]
YellowBot.com - An Interview with Erron Silverstein, CEO of Solfo
Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Erron Silverstein, CEO of Solfo, which has developed a new, Web 2.0 version of local directories with the user at the core of the project. It blends local and social aspects to bring local brick and mortar locations, such as restaurants, services, stores and more, to the […] [Link]
Google Goes for Bathroom Humor
Google announced a new service today, TiSP beta. Sign up for our free in-home wireless broadband service Sick of paying for broadband that you have to, well, pay for? Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), our new FREE in-home wireless broadband service. Sign up today and we’ll send you your TiSP self-installation kit, which includes setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, […] [Link]
Ask.com Sells Out to KFed
Jim Lanzone Video Announcement Sorry for the Sunday posting, folks, but we wanted to announce before the press got wind of it. We’ve had a company-changing development happen over the last few days, and we’re finally at a point where we can tell you about it. For the details, check out this video announcement from Ask.com […] [Link]
Are You Doing What You Can?
Today, I began my Sunday morning like many others, make some coffee, walk my dogs and settle down in front of my computer to read my Sunday morning news and catch up on the the articles that I wanted to spend more time reviewing from earlier in the week. Unfortunately, “Oops… an error occurred. Please […] [Link]
Blogger Offers New Widgets
Blogger has announced two new elements available for users on their blogs: Newsreel Video Bar To add to their list of elements that are available in the latest Blogger Templates: List Link List Picture Text HTML/JavaScript AdSense Feed Labels Logo Profile Similar to Google Alerts, the Newsreel allows you to choose the keywords that you would like to publish for and […] [Link]
MSN Live Search Limits Your Abilities
MSN announced today that they will be limiting the use of advanced queries: For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features […] [Link]
Focus on What is Important
Recently I was asked to be interviewed for a new blog that is being created. So what, right? I am not tooting my own horn, but many of the questions were very thought out. I would like to share one of them: Q. Why do you blog? friends, networking, verification of information, recognition? A. I have a […] [Link]
Yellowbot.com - Social Networking and Local Search
Yellowbot is live. Yellowbot in it’s simplest form is an online directory similar to the old yellow pages book that is delivered to your door on a yearly basis. But if you think that it is just a directory of a huge database of business listings with names, addresses, phone numbers, website address and such, you […] [Link]
PageRank - What It Is and What It Is Not
Here is the definition of PageRank from Google: PageRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. Before this they claim that it is “the heart of our technology,” however, this is no longer the case, actually it hasn’t been the case for many years. The basic […] [Link]
The Need for Duplicate Content
First, what is duplicate content? Duplicate content is republishing similar or the same information on multiple pages of a website or publishing the same content on multiple domains. Content is a something that is very important and should be considered when developing a webpage/site. However, when you are working on optimizing your website for different types of […] [Link]
New Tools for Optimizing Your Website
Beanstalk has added yet another tool for use by all that will help you to know your website better, your competition and gives you the insight to make informed changes to address your optimization efforts. Search Engine Spider Test - a concise tool that reports some important information for any given page: URL Meta Title Meta Description Meta Keywords Size Text Word Count Distinct […] [Link]
Social Media Information and Networking
Are you looking to find more information about social information related to the internet? If so, Social Media Today is a valuable resource to find out what is going on the the social arena. Joining the site gives you some additional means to build your social net on the web. Some of the additional features it offers […] [Link]
News from MSN/Live Search and the Fight Against Spam
What is the purpose of spam? Well, when it is in your “inbox” it is usually a phishing agent trying to get information that can be sold (money), when it is in search results it is a bit more direct (money). Either way, your information is valuable and your wallet is more direct. Bill Slawski turned […] [Link]
Don’t Believe Me? Listen to Another Expert!
Shari Thurow an applauded author and expert in the field of Human/Computer Interfaces recently wrote about SEO Niches and the Big Picture on ClickZ. There has been some that have complained about her remarks that eye tracking is overrated, however, if you look at the article as a whole, it is really very useful. All too often, […] [Link]
Search Marketing Blogs
I would like to thank Lee Odden and all of my readers for helping me to become one of the top 400 most valuable Search Marketing Blogs. Here is the updated OPML file and plain text list. [Link]
Notes About Navigation and Website Structure
Today I was thinking about Google SiteLinks and how this has not been copied in dramatic fashion like many of the updates and changes that they incorporate into search. What are SiteLinks? The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. … [Link]
Microsoft Buys TellMe
Microsoft Corp. today announced it will acquire Tellme Networks, Inc., a leading provider of voice services for everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance, enterprise customer service and voice-enabled mobile search. Microsoft and Tellme share a vision around the potential of speech as a way to enable access to information, locate … [Link]
AdWords Editor 3.0 Ready for Mac
Hi, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. Funny thing about Macs, they don't always have the same functionality as PCs. But now, that has changed, at least for AdWords Editor version 3.0. AdWords Editor 3.0 for Mac is now available and includes all the new features released a few weeks ago … [Link]
Yahoo! Answers Gets Personal
Yahoo! has announced that they are testing new functionality to add a level of social networking to their popular Answers product: We just added a new capability to Answers, the Yahoo! Answers Network – currently in beta, which enables you to build your own personal knowledge network. So what exactly is … [Link]
Beanstalk Provides Tools for Search Marketers
Beanstalk is a Search Engine Marketing firm that offers SEO news articles and have recently added to marketers toolbox with some free SEO tools. Beanstalk's Tools for Search Engine Marketers Ranking Tools Keyword Activity Tool This one help you to determine which keywords you should be targeting by providing the estimated searches per day … [Link]