Newbodog.com, What Happened to Bodog?

Online casino, sports book, and online poker company Bodog.com has been doused with some legal hot water and forced to relaunch their site on a new domain NewBodog. It appears that what happened was Bodog was being sued for a patent infringement claim. When Bodog's counsel failed to appear in court, a summary judgment was issued and one of the terms was for seizure of all of the Bodog.com owned domains, all 3000 of them.

From an SEO perspective, this is a sites worst nightmare. Bodog.com has maintained solid rankings in top terms in the poker industry to include poker and online poker. Newbodog.com will essentially be starting from scratch in one of the most competitive SEO areas, losing literally years of work.

Though Bodog and Calvin Ayre the founder are claiming: "We are working to resolve any remaining issues on the temporary site as soon as possible, and fully expect to have our original sire back up shortly.", it seems like there are no quick fixes in this situation.

These guys will have updates and information on Bodog and NewBodog and a page about NewBodog as well.

Yesterday NewBodog.com and Bodog hit Google Trends, with Bodog coming in at #33 and showing at #50 for today.

The case was in the State of Washington, King County Superior Court, Case #07-9-21969-8 dated 8/1/07.

Users Ignore Banners But Focus On Text, Faces, And Cleavage

Eyetracking research on the blindness of online users to banner ads. The short of it is, users ignore anything that looks like an ad. What works? Incorporating your message into the content, using no feeling of separation from the flow of the page. Also, keeping these items that Jakob shares which have been shown in eyetracking studies to be the 3 most important design elements for attracting eyeballs:

• 
  
• Plain Text
• Faces
• Cleavage and other "private" body parts

Yahoo Dynamic URLs Tool

Yahoo Site Explorer recently released a new tool called the Dynamic URLs Tab. It allows webmasters to have some control over how URLs for their site are being crawled and displayed. It seems a very useful tool for tracking codes and session ids, items that might not be able to be blocked(from being indexed) via Noindex tags. I've been keeping my eyes open on the forums discussing Yahoo topics and have found little thus far about anyone's experience using the Dynamic URL Tool. I submitted some changes today and we will see what effect it will have. With Yahoo stating that the have 'slowed down' their crawl, I expect it might take about a week to really gage the impact.

College Students Trust Google Rankings

This study, In Google We Trust, though only done on 22 students, seems to indicate that they are heavily influenced in their decision to visit a site, based on the ranking of the site alone. The students were more likely to click on the top results, even if the lower ranked results more closely matched their intended query. Great news for SEO.

PPC Ad Click Thru Rate

A new study published in IEEE called Sponsored Search: Is Money a Motivator for Providing relevant Results? analyzed overall click through rates for Paid Search ads in the major search engines. Their results showed a 16 percent overall click thru rate on PPC ads. Brief summary article about the search study.

More Query Data From Google Webmaster Tools

I haven't seen anyone mention this yet but it is worth noting, Google greatly expanded the query data available from Webmaster Tools.

In Google Webmaster Tools you can look up your query data, Top Search Queries and Top Search Query Clicks. There is a link which enables you to download the data for your URL to a spreadsheet. While this has been around since February of this year, what I noticed today is a huge list of query stats that include not just searches involving the homepage, but also all the subfolders for your site that Google has indexed, broken down by country for each and also by Google search source, ie mobile, directory, web, or image. Pretty cool.

Go to: Google Webmaster Tools>Statistics>Query Stats>Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)

My Page Is Blocked With Robots.txt But Still Shows In Results.

There is much confusion on this point.

Q: "If I have some of my site pages blocked in my robots.txt file why do they still show up in Google results?"

A: Robots.txt does not remove your page from the Google Index, it only stops Googlebot from crawling your specified pages. If you have a page showing up in the search results and you apply a robots restriction to that page and that page has no external links, typically that page will disappear from the results. If that page does have external links, the page may continue to show up in the results even after the Robots exclusion is applied. Two easy ways to check that the page is no long being crawled by Googlebot is by looking at your site logs or looking at the search result itself and you will notice that there will no longer be a cache version of that page(there could be other reasons for no cache version). Also, the result will no longer show a description.

The way to 'remove' a page from the index or showing up in the results is to place a noindex meta tag on the page and keep the robots.txt exclusion as well. Another, potentially more dangerous option, is to use the Google URL Removal Request tool in the Google Webmaster Tools for your website where you can remove entire sites, directories, or even specific pages.

Details from Google Webmaster Help Center on Robots.txt and Meta Noindex

Details on Google URL Removal Request from Google Webmaster Central Blog

Keyword Research Google Gadget

Though I don't use my Google Homepage, this might prompt me to do so. SEOBook created a Keyword Research Google Gadget that is quite nice. You will need to add it to your Google Homepage, but its very easy to do. The tool is dense with features including, Google Traffic Estimator, various keyword generators like WordTracker, and competitive tools.

Internal PageRank Tool

I found this tool, PageRankBot, and have been playing around with it a bit over the last week. It's a great idea and something that I have been looking for. The tool crawls your site and models the PR flow inside the site. It allows you to 'adjust' incoming PR through external backlinks a creates a visual picture of how your internal PR would be affected. It doesn't capture actual PR but approximates it through your own internal link structure giving a good picture of PR flow internally.

I suppose by stripping out external backlink influences gives a true picture of your internal structure and a optimum view of how your site passes PR. Although it takes into account Meta Nofollows, it does not obey nofollow tags on links, which seems to be a shortcoming.

My success with the tool has been spotty. I've crawled a few sites, some seem to be accurate and some have had issues. I have not tried an extremely large site yet but I suspect there might be some issues there.

The tool was created by Half SEO and he has a good PageRankBot tutorial which should be read while using the tool. I think the original intention was to create something which would help you to pull pages out of supplemental and I'm sure it would work very well for that. Regardless, this is certainly worth a look and some time. I'll be keeping an eye on this and looking out for improvements.

Hitwise Launches Presidential Election Data Center

If you have any interest in the 2008 Presidential Elections, the new Hitwise Election 2008 Data Center is worth checking out. Coverage is candidate site traffic, search terms, and other top political site traffic. Shows just share of overall category traffic, not actual visitor counts.

Google's Double Standard

SEOBook found what amounts to Google selling links by profiling retailers who use Google Checkout. They have a straight text link off their Google Checkout Blog, which is a PR 8, to Golfballs.com and to one of their product pages using optimized anchor text. Aaron has a couple of older examples on the post and this is obviously not the first time.

Google Deletes Its Own Blog For Spam

Classic. Google accidentally tagged their own Custom Search Engine Blog as spam and deleted it. Their statement:

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

And a couple of responses to it:
Search Engine Watch
Search Engine Roundtable

Google Supplemental, Again.

Back and forth we go. Google turned off the Supplemental label for Sup results. The few days after that there were a flurry of posts trying to determine a replacement query, one I listed in this blog. Alas, those were turned off as well. For the time being, it looks like Bruce Clay has come up with an alternative. I've given it a test run and it seems to work by the power of deduction.

How Does Google Handle The Nofollow?

Good question. I assumed that Google just ignored the link, but apparently thats not the case. Google(and Yahoo) both follow the Nofollow, but don't allow any of the link juice to flow so no PR is passed. They will also use Nofollows to find and index new content. Search Engine Journal has a small blurb about it.

Redirecting Older Pages To Combine Value

I really like this idea from SEOMoz, taking older pages like blog posts that target similar keywords and redirecting them all to one URL. The synergy created by increased PR should create a page that has stronger ranking power for those specific keywords.

Google Counts Links Inside Word Documents

This is a new find, Google actually counts links inside of a Word document. Not surprising since they also index Word docs and PDFs.

Clean Code Counts

This piece is taken from an interview by SearchEngineWatch with Googler Dan Crow who runs the Crawl Infrastructure Group. Google can't index the entire web so they are forced to make decisions on which pages they crawl and indexe. Certianly one limiting factor is Google's own infrastructure and crawled site inefficiencies further reduce the overall amount of the web that Google can crawl. So, does Google factor in how the actual code of your website is constructed in determining whether they will crawl it or crawl deeper pages inside the site? It appears to be the case:

What can we do to get more pages indexed? I've always suspected that streamlining HTML code is a good way to facilitate indexing. Reducing code bloat helps pages load faster and use less bandwidth. I asked if it would help to move JavaScript and CSS definitions to external files, and clean up tag soup. Dan's answer was refreshingly clear. "Those would be very good ideas," he said.

How To Create A Jump Script For Affiliate Links

This is a good bit which covers how to cloak affiliate outlinks off your site so that the URLs look friendlier and for easier click tracking.

Google, Behind The Curtain

Found this piece on Google's computing power. Surprised I've never stumbled upon it before, but it is a definite eyeopener on PR and their algorithm.