The Saboteurs of Search

Entertaining article about negative SEO from Forbes.com.

Marchex Simultaneously Launches 100K Local Search Sites

Marchex Simultaneously Launches 100K Local Search Sites

Domainers that essentially rolled over 100,000 parking pages into real sites simultaneously creating about 1 billion pages of content with about 31 mil unique traffic.

Domain Auction

List of selling prices at a Moniker Domain Auction in New York.

Highlights:

IrishWhiskey.com $8000

Menopause.com $1.5 mil, did not sell

Pimple.com $82,500

Shaft.com $17,500

Tart.com $30,000

Keeping Up On The Gossip

Google Phone Unveiled?

Google Sponsor Search Query by Ad Location

Query string to search just Sponsored Ads that are running in specific geographic areas.

How to Survive the Affiliate Revolution

Basic overview of how to create a strong affiliate site and what the future holds for affiliate marketing.

Keyword Research Tool

SEODigger is a free tool that finds and lists all the keywords that your site ranks for. Not sure how they do it, but they claim they have a database of 44 million keywords that they update about every 2 weeks.

Large Brand SERP Dominanace

Seobook address a great topic about Authority Sites leveraging themselves through the use of subdomains, shadow brands, and buying competing sites, all ideas we should consider. He then makes a comparison of the ethics of link buying and the behavior of the big brands.

SEO.com Purchase

Former Domainer, Mike Mann, purchased SEO.com for $5 million with the intention of starting a web optimization company.

Relevance Feedback

Great post on Relevancy Feedback in search. Specifically comments on the post I mentioned a few back about Google, clicks, and Google Analytics for search quality enhancement.

June Google Update, Pt. 2

A very notable point from the WebmasterWorld Thread is the likelyhood that the update just affected single word phrases. It matches with our own SERPs and also follows with movement I'm seeing on RankPulse. Cutts further confirms this in a comment he made in his own blog:

1. Matt Cutts Said,

   June 18, 2007 @ 12:31 am

   Joost, thanks for the reminder.

   Harith: historically speaking, summer is a good time to incorporate ideas into search, but I wouldn’t consider that an update myself. We do always reserve the right to tune our scoring algorithms or change the weight of different factors, even if it only affects a fraction of queries (things such as single-word queries).

   feedthebot, I’ve caught up on much of my internal email, but I haven’t tackled external email from the conference yet. That’s high on the list when I can find time this week though. It’s all part of the digging out from vacation + SMX Seattle + SES Toronto process. Is Isla Vista not right?

June Google Update

Everyone is now convinced that the most recent Google changes are the largest update since the rollout for Big Daddy, over a year ago, so much so that it has been given a name, Buffy. Here's an overview and a link to the WebmasterWorld Thread.

Overall, we have fared very well with all of our terms holding SERPs except for our main term, which seems to have settled down a bit.

State of Search Engine Safety

McAfee did a study on The Safety of Search Engines, links to dangerous sites.

Highlights:

• Safety overall has improved since last year, about 4% of results link to risky sites.
  
• Yahoo & MSN declined
• Yahoo nearly twice as bad as Google
• Sponsored results more that twice as bad as Organic
  

Google Earth GUIs

Guiweather has some really cool overlays for Google Earth. One is a current lightning GUI and a Sea Bouy GUI(say that 10 times fast). Their homepage also has a nice Java app that overlays temps on to Google Maps.

Plugin for Non-Personalized Search

Works with Firefox or IE7 for Google only.

Cutts on Clicks

More from the Cutts Q & A session at SMX. Summaries from MarketingPilgrim.com:

Q: What is the impact of click-throughs on authority? If a site has a high PageRank, but a low click-through rate and a high bounce—or vice versa—what is the impact?

A: We neither confirm
nor deny that we use this.
But it’s quite noisy.

(i.e. “a noisy signal” that is quite susceptible to abuse. He thinks MSN has confirmed that they use it with their toolbar.)

And Bruceclay.com:

Question: What is the clickthrough impact?

Matt: We haven't talked about if it affects regular search. If you did use it, it would be really noisy so you'd have to be careful. He mentions programming the toolbar and how then there would be "Happy face rings". Noise level would make using clickthrough as a barometer really hard.

MSN has said they use it. Google hasn't and probably won't ever say if they do or not.

The Toolbar question is something i hadnt really considered. Keyword Discovery just eliminated all of their IP capture data and are moving to tool bar based data capture. The reasoning is that IP data is not only noisy but spamable. It only makes sense that Google is using their Toolbar data as well.

Rank Checker Tool

This is an awesome new Rank Checking Tool. Downside is you have to sign up for a free account at SEOMoz and are limited to 5 searches per day unless you are a premium member. Use the Browser Button bookmark. Allows you to be on a website and simply click the link to the tool, then enter in what keyword you want to check.

Matt Cutts on Paid Links

Another comment on paid links from an interview with the MarketingPilgrim.com. Also, they don't have a way to do it automatically, yet:

Q: Are paid links going to be the death of the algorithm?
A: Many people want
to report paid links for a
level playing field.

We’re looking for a
scalable, robust way, but
we’ll do it by hand

Also: “We as a search engine can do what we feel is best to return a high quality index. Do what you want and we’ll do what we want to return a quality index.”

Google Focusing on Specific Industries

This was of great interest to me because we have had this discussion recently. Namely, how can you target an algorithmic based system at specific areas.

I watched an interview with Matt Cutts done by SEOMoz at the recent SMX conference in Seattle. The most insightful point in all 20 min was a discussion about how Google devalued what was a huge Reciprocal Link network in the Real Estate Industry.

A precedent was set early on where if I was an agent in say Cleveland with a site, I could easily exchange a link with another agent in Nashville. None competing markets, good for everyone. Well the link lists became massive. In May Google devalued all of them, but specifically focusing on the Real Estate Sites.

SEOMoz failed to ask the most obvious important question, how does Google algorithmically and fairly do that? Cutts implied that it was essentially found and studied by human review and they 'came to a decision' to do it. Additionally, this was a shot across the bow to all large scale reciprocal linking schemes. But most importantly, Cutts said that Google does focus and will focus on specific industries and can have different parameters for them.

Real Time Site Visitor Data

This new tool shows number of users on a given site in real time, even down to the specific page.

Google Using Behavior in Rankings?

Interesting stuff. This SEOMoz post goes direct to the point I raised a few posts back about the possibility of Google using clicks for authoritative sites and affecting rankings. While the evidence is not conclusive, the main points are:

• Google admits it uses click data to check the quality of rankings, especially top sites
• From a simple study that was done, clicks seemed to affect rankings slightly
• From another simple study, Google appears to be using quality factors such as bounce rate tied through Google Analytics
  

Great Quote

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard- working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard- working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.

General Erich Von Manstein (1887-1973) on the German Officer Corps

Another Good article from Tropical SEO

SEO Class

Pubcon and Webmasterworld are starting a small, interactive SEO Workshop. First one is in NY, $1999. Heres the agenda.

SEO Toolkit

Blue Hat is offering his set of customized tools on a subscription basis. As I've mentioned before i really like this guy's content. The basic list includes; a quick indexing tool, SEO site analysis tool, promotion analysis tool, custom databases and scripts, all for $100 a month.

Dogpile Search Study

Dogpile.com released a study on search overlap of the major engines' results. This is a summary, but the short of it is that since the last similar study in 2005, results have diverged.

Automated SEO Software

Though the full version is not out yet, Yield Software is testing a solution to automatically optimize your website. Something to take a look at again in the future.

Google Monitor

RankPulse.com is something I ran across in Webmaster Word. Really cool graphical representation of movement within Google SERPs. Rank Pulse tracks 1000 keywords and the associated movement of sites ranking within the top 10 for those keywords. Shows really big adjustment around June 1.

Mine Your Visitors Browser History

Here's a way to check where your site's visitors have been. Though you can't create a complete list of URL's, you can develop a checklist of sites to look for.