Sam's Club Now Offering SEM Services?

What next? PPC and SEO from Walmart.

And what I found most amusing was how poorly their pages were optimized. Same page titles for multiple pages, click here click here links, and no Meta Descriptions. Funny.

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More On The DOJ Online Gambling Settlement With Search Engines

Here are a couple more tidbits for reading on the recent fines paid by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft related to PPC ads and online gambling:

• This is really the first successful Sphinn item I've seen on online gaming, more about the European settlement
  

• Webmasterworld thread started on the topic that bleeds into the legality and the rumor that Google UK will open up PPC to gambling ads in 2008

• Article by ClickZ

• PokerNews take on the subject, also mentions previous settlements with the US by Disney and The Sporting News
  

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Google, Yahoo, MSN to Pay DOJ $31.5 mil for Gambling PPC

Whoa, I didnt hear this one coming. The short of it is that the big 3, Google, Yahoo, and MSN settled with the Department of Justice for running ads for online gambling to the tune of $31,500,000. The 3 will establish a fund to air public service announcements to educate the young people of the United States that online gambling is illegal (play the lottery instead). Funny, out of all this Google walked away the easiest with only $3 mil. in fines with Yahoo and Microsoft picking up the balance.

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Google Translate In Gmail Chat

This is a great feature that is really easy to use; the chat function in Gmail will now 'connect' to Google Translate. You put in a distinctive address for each language to language translation, then paste in the snippet to translate, and the translated result is returned almost instantaneously. Ex. German to English would be: de2en@bot.talk.google.com.

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Official Google Comment On The Supplemental Index

The Google Webmaster Central Blog addresses the supplemental index and it future/demise. Essentially the supplemental index is being rolled into the main index. What served primarily as just that, a supplement to the main index for more difficult queries and deeper searches, has proven to be not quite as efficient as simply combining it all in one large list. All of this took a bit of time to roll out as there were massive technical hurdles with the ultimate result being hopefully better results with a broader slice of the web for every search. All this appears to have very large implications for multilingual search.

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Creating Automaitcally Varied Anchor Text

Here's a great piece about building a broad link profile, yet focusing on key overlapping terms. Slightly Shady SEO also offers a simple piece of code to automatically generate link text.

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Googlepedia

Google launches it own Wikipedia called Knol.

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Yahoo Robots.txt Support

Yahoo has expanded the functionality of the Robots.txt tags that they support by now allow the use of NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, AND NOFOLLOW.

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Lycos Top Search Terms 2007

The Lycos 50 Top 10 Search Terms for 2007 are:

1. Poker
2. MySpace
3. Britney Spears
4. Paris Hilton
5. Golf
6. YouTube
7. Naruto
8. Disney
9. Pokemon
10. WWE

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Cutts Clears Up Subdomains

Matt Cutts recent post on how Google will interpret subdomains in the future actually seems like less of a change that originally reported. The recent algorithmic change primarily affects longer tail terms. There should be little change to highly relevant terms or domains, ex a search for 'Google' will return a long list of subdomains, filling the first results page.

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Google To Count Subdomains as Subdirectories

This is a big change which has 2 parts and multiple implications.

• Google will start treating subdomains as they treat subdirectories
• Google will limit one URL to only 2 results in a search query

This news comes from Matt Cutts at the recent Pubcon conference. The intention here is obviously to limit domain spamming.

Its not clear to me whether or not this actually means that as far as value goes, the subdomains will be treated as subdirectories, in other words will they pass value back to the main domain as subdirectories do? Subdomains always existed as this partial exception in Google's eyes, not purely a different domain yet not purely part of the main domain as a subdirectory.

2 stories here:

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Roundtable

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Definitive Google Guide To Paid Links

Matt Cutts posted a long time line about the paid links issue at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

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