XML Sitemaps Might Not be Great

Finally someone has addressed this. All the crazy drum beat in the SEO community over the last year to create site maps was loud. It became almost a mantra. Of course the fervor really originated from Google, heck if they say it, it must be good right? I haven't been able to pin down the true benefit to Google. But it seems to me that there is no clear benefit to a site owner if your site is crawlable and indexed well.

SmallBusinessSEM address the topic and gives some vague anecdotal evidence that when he implimnented a site map his site took a hit, when he took the map down everything came back.

Facebook Tops Myspace in May

According to comScore, Facebook passed up Myspace in May for number of unique visitors, 123.9 million to 114.6 million. Most of the growth for Facebook has occurred overseas where Myspace has appeared to stagnate a bit.

ICANN Paves the Way For Unlimited Domain Extensions

This is pretty big news, at their recent meeting in Paris, ICANN opened the door to basically unlimited domain extensions. Soounds like it will be an application process that will also likely involve hefty fees. ICANNs big concern initially was on a technical side and whether that many extensions could be supporsted at the root.

comments here at WebmasterWorld

SEO and SEM Job Boards

Here's a list of links to SEO and SEM related job boards.

Data Answers All

Interesting read from Wired, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Notable quotes:

"All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

'But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete...'

'Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.'

What Data Google Collects

This is worth a look, basically a very detailed look at all the sources Google uses to gather data on users. Pretty staggering or Why Google is the Web. Skip the top part of the article and go straight to the list.

Serving Different Content Based on User Search Query

This is an awesome question and I surprised the topic hasn't been more deeply covered by someone. A thread in HighRankings asks whether or not he is risking it with Google if he serves different content on a page based on the search term source. He switches out content by looking at the HTTP_REFERER details for the specific search query if its avaliable but serves Google the default content when GoogleBot comes crawling.

Certainly this is against Google's guidelines, however the site owner is simply trying to customize content for his user thus enhancing their experience, Google mantra 'design for the user not the search engines'. Only 2 comments but both seem to suggest that the site owner is dangerously walking the line here.

I have to believe this is going to become a big issue down the road for search engines as sites look to customize user info more and more. Consequently I would have to believe that Google will come to accept this practice. Guess it remains to be seen.

SERPs on Google.co.uk

For the last 6 months or so, I have seen a number of threads on WebmasterWorld about Google.co.uk issues. Everyone is in agreement that there have been big changes.

The latest WebmasterWorld thread, Google.co.uk SERP Changes started a long discussion with more of the same. Random theories and off tangent disscussion abounds, but the big point in all this is that there are still inconsistent results and a lot of movement, though things have settled down a bit.

It seems to me that Google is using Google.co.uk to heavily test localization. This is bourn out by experience that .com site previously hosted in the states with powerful backlinks in the US, moved to the UK has developed great search results in the UK and retained positions in the US. I suppose the tweaking will continue but it appears that Google has come a long way in the UK.

Another Reason Not to Use Google Analytics

Search Engine Land did an announcement of the new Google Trends functionality and it sounds like had RJ Pittman, Google's Director of Product Development walk them through the product. What was interesting was this bit in the article, which I am led to believe came from RJ Pittman:

'...this tool basis its data off Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. In addition, the search volume numbers are estimates...'

Hmm, so that Google Analytics 'private' data that i have about my site is being shared with my competitors, freely?

SEOBook does a great job of covering the issue.

More Website Data in Google Trends

This is pretty cool, Google Trends in now offering more data for websites. See regions that brought traffic to the site, top search terms, and other sites that visitors to that site visited (suppose downstream traffic) and you can do comparisons of websites. Here's a few examples:

Single Site Trends

Trends Comparison

Google Webmaster Tools API

Need to look into this a bit more, but Google now has and API for Webmaster Tools. Depending on the functionality this could open up some really cool options.

GoogleBowling, Myth Busted?

GoogleBowling:Sending links to your competitor’s web site from bad neighborhoods in order to harm their ranking on Google.

There has always been speculation that this works to tank a competitors site. I ran across a good Google Webmaster Groups discussion where a poster said his site he had proof his site had been hit and that was the reason his rankings tanked. There indeed were a high percentage of shady porn links from shady forums all over the place linking back to his site.

Googler John Mu entered the discussion and basically dismissed the effect of the links, blaming specifically the content on his site as being the culprit:

"Looking at the site that you mentioned, I could imagine that studying
our Google Webmaster Guidelines, in particular the quality guidelines,
would be time well spent. Most of these guidelines involve the content
on the site itself..."

No one was satisfied with that response and it sounded like John was dodging the question, but the reality is that he had pointed out directly what the issue was and completely dismissed the influence of foul backlinks, which is what is really interesting in the whole discussion. His successive responses:

"I think what the original poster is worried about is not links on his
site but rather links to his site from other (bad) sites. In theory, I
can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that
would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing
website issues I have not once run into a situation like that."

and:

"There are a lot of factors involved and this is certainly not
something we take lightly. Google is a very data-driven company, so
you can be sure that people are looking at a lot of data about this
kind of problem. When we make adjustments because of issues brought to
our attention, they are generally on an algorithm level: we made over
400 changes last year alone. "

John comments a 4th time, basically tearing the guy's site apart, finding paid links, anti-virus issues. Ultimately the poster would have been better off not saying anything and he hasn't seen anything yet as far as a penalty goes.

GoogleBowling, myth busted? Verdict is still out, but the degree of this case (% of total backlinks that were crap) seemed like a situation which would cause concern for most webmasters and Google easily dismissed it. Though Jonh didnt claim it wasn't possible in theory, it seems like the threashold is much higher than most would have expected.

Post on How Google Measures Search Quality

This is a very good article which would those who are more interested in the technical side of how search works. The article is based on an interview with Googler Peter Norvig, Director of Research and the previous Director of Search Quality . The most intriguing point, usage data is not a good metric for the quality of search results:

Peter confirmed that Google does collect such data, and has scads of it
stashed away on their clusters. However -- and here's the shocker --
these metrics are not very sensitive to new ranking models! When Google
tries new ranking models, these metrics sometimes move, sometimes not,
and never by much. In fact Google does not use such real usage data to
tune their search ranking algorithm. What they really use is a blast
from the past. They employ armies of "raters" who rate search results
for randomly selected "panels" of queries using different ranking
algorithms. These manual ratings form the gold-standard against which
ranking algorithms are measured -- and eventually released into service.

GooHoo, My Thoughts Exactly

Echoing my comments on the Yahoo-Google deal concerning cross platform functionality of instant messaging services, SearchEngineJournal picked up on the same kernel of information that everyone seemed to overlook.

No URL's Ending in '0' Says Google

Thought this was an interesting bit, SEOMoz got a PR 7 page banned from Google for having a number '0' at the end of a URL. This was actually confirmed by Google. The page is their entrance page for the Web 2.0 awards with the URL http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0. It was a 2 year old page and had a PR of 7 which suddenly lost all of its PageRank, showing a PR0 and disappeared from the Google index. The haven't changed the URL yet, but here is the SEOMoz story.

No URL's Ending in '0' Says Google

Thought this was an interesting bit, SEOMoz got a PR 7 page banned from Google for having a number '0' at the end of a URL. This was actually confirmed by Google. The page is their entrance page for the Web 2.0 awards with the URL http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0. It was a 2 year old page and had a PR of 7 which suddenly lost all of its PageRank, showing a PR0 and disappeared from the Google index. The haven't changed the URL yet, but here is the SEOMoz story.

GooHoo, Jerry Yang's Perspective

Jerry Yang did a post on the Yodel Blog commenting on the Yahoo-Google deal.

Jerry says that Yahoo already allows other advertisers to place ads on Yahoo, this is essentially nothing new. Also, they will have complete control over the delivery of the search ads with a non binding agreement.

GooHoo or Comentary on the Google Yahoo Ad Deal

Yahoo has signed and agreement with Google to place Google Adwords on Yahoo search results and in Yahoo content. The agreement is specific to the US and Canadian markets. It also includes cross platform functionality for IM services which I think is huge and has been underrated in the articles.

Here's a list of items worth reading:

Yahoo Google deal press release from Yahoo on SearchEngineWatch

SearchEngineLand summary

Announcement on the Google Blog

SEOBook brief mention

Bloomberg Article

Forbes - 10 Signs Yang Made The Right Move

ValleyWag