SEO Advice

Google announced yesterday that they have enhanced the Webmaster tools and now allow you to examine internal and external links on your site much more thoroughly than you can with the link: command.

After playing around with the new enhancements, so far I have to give it a thumbs up. The new features allow you to examine every single link to and from your site, not just the links that sometimes show up with the link:command. In addition, you can look at internal and external links to and from specific pages and export any of this data to CSV format.

It was announced earlier this week that Wikipedia has put in place the nofollow tag for all external links in the Wikipedia web site. We did a quick check and yes, the announcement appears to be implemented. Apparantly it was done to combat black hat SEOs who were spamming the directory in order to boost link popularity by placing a link to their web site in related articles on Wikipedia. Bottom line, Wikipedia articles will no longer affect the number of backlinks to your web site and thus will not help you in the ongoing struggle of web site search engine rankings.

Well, its been a while since Google last updated pagerank for web sites. This is a special day where webmasters around the world hold their breath to see what kind of love Google will give to webby creations. Yes, pagerank is really irrelevant when it comes to SEO and rankings but its still one of many indicators and web site owners love the numeric gratification or distress over the lack of it.

Some existing sites are currently showing a pagerank of 0, some new sites are showing an actual pagerank so its pretty clear that Google is in process of updating their data centers. Hold your breath and hopefully the update will be done soon.

Yahoo! Answers celebrated its first birthday yesterday answering any query a web user may have. Over in the Google camp, they recently shut down Google Answers and are no longer accepting questions. I guess Yahoo! can celebrate being top dog for once although I am sure they would prefer it would be a more prestigious tool such as their search.

Yahoo announced late last week that they were releasing Yahoo Maps from beta. I assume this means that they have ironed out any and all bugs associated with the service and that it is running smoothly. For those not in know, here are some of the features that Yahoo maps touts:

• Multi-point routing, (from A to B to C)
• A new mini-map which gives you an overview of what you’re looking at
• Satellite and Aerial imagery, wall to wall in the USA, and for over 100 cities internationally
• Full integration with Yahoo! Local, including search and SmartView
• Saved locations and auto-complete against your saved locations, recent locations and Yahoo! Address Book
• The ability to return to the old-style Yahoo! Maps for when you’re on a Dial-Up connection
• Quick access to maps from within Yahoo! Mail using Yahoo! Shortcuts

Yahoo and MSN are now officially supporting the Sitemap XML protocol joining Google who originally released the protocol under the Alike Creative Commons License in hopes that other search engines would adopt it. Sitemaps is a free and easy way for webmasters and site owners to inform search engines about every URL in their web site and which ones they want crawled or spidered.

Recently, the people that brought you Text-Link-Ads.com, a site for buying and selling web site text links, has another site for boosting profits from your blog call reviewme.com. Once approved, your site will be listed in their database of blogs that will review advertiser’s products and services. Price for a review ranges from $40-500 USD and the blogger receives half of the funds. Pricing depends on the popularity of the blog which uses such factors as its Alexa rating, Technorati rating, etc. Advertisers are not guaranteed a positive review and discretion is with the blogger as to the content of the review.

Google announced today that they would not be charging any transaction fees on the shiny new Checkout service, a competitor to Paypal.

With the holiday season quickly approaching, we wanted to do something to say “thank you” to our merchants. To help out during this very busy shopping season, we are processing all of our merchants’ Google Checkout sales for free during the holidays. From November 8 through December 31, 2006, Google Checkout merchants will receive free processing for all of their Checkout sales, regardless of whether or not they use AdWords. If you don’t currently use Checkout, don’t worry—new Checkout merchants are eligible for this offer as well, so sign up now. To all of our merchants: thank you for contributing to the success of Google Checkout and Happy Holidays!

Google launched a custom search engine this week that allows you to define what web sites you want to have included in the search and some other nifty features. From Google:

• Specify the sites you want to include in searches
• Place a search box and search results on your website
• Customize the look and feel to match your website
• Invite your community to contribute to the search engine
• Make money from relevant ads in your search results

As reported by The Register, there is a new worm that infects Yahoo Instant Messanger and causes fraudulent clicks on web sites containing adsense advertisements. The adsense ads focus on mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused by asbestos exposure that also happens to have very high cost per click values. My guess is that its unlikely the worm creators will ever get paid.

During my normal Monday morning surf-a-round I found a great post at TLA that discusses the dreaded Google sandbox and how to climb / crawl / punch your way out of it. As you may have guessed, the article focuses on building trust with backlinks from authority sites, blogs or other sites that you can beg, steal, or cheat your way to getting a link. There is also some good discussion on link baiting; overall a good read.

I recently read an interesting article that explains, in lamen terms, SEO and SEM in the Australian. What I found interesting was that one SEO firm actually had a client pay 100,000 dollars, even aussie dollars are valuable, to have a certain press release show lower down in the SERPs when you typed in this fella’s name.

“We have had a couple of individuals who were wealthy who wanted negative references to themselves disappeared, which was an expensive exercise,” he said. “You’ve got to optimise the 20 sites below them so the (negative reference) is moved down. We had one individual pay $100,000 plus because there was a (press release) about him on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission website that ranked No.2 when you searched for his name.'’

I guess it should be no surprise that people don’t take security seriously. This doesn’t really have anything to do with SEO but I am going to share anyways because it was a small source of entertainment this Friday morning.

As reported on The Register, it is very easy to do a search on Google for unprotected web cams using queries such as:

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3ACgiStart%3Fpage%3DSingle

OR

http://www.google.com/search?q=axis+inurl%3Aview%2Findex.shtml

A lot of people setting up these inexpensive cameras aren’t using the included security features to the delight of so called “video hams”.

From the Register:

IP cameras, widely available from around £70 and not to be confused with web-cams that connect directly into PCs, connect into corporate computer network or domestic broadband systems and are capable of transmitting live footage or individual images across the internet. However these systems are often set up without bothering to configure security settings (such as password protection), an omission that means nominally private cams can be viewed over the net by so-called “video hams”.

By using search engines such as Google, snoopers can locate and view hundreds of unprotected cameras, according to Robert Schifreen, IT security consultant and author of the book Defeating The Hacker. Insecure cameras can be easily located using search strings such as “inurl:CgiStart?page=Single” or “axis inurl:view/index.shtml”, to produce interesting results (as illustrated by Schifreen here).

The problem is compounded by the inclusion in many systems of so-called “PTZ” features, which allow surveillance cameras to be panned, tilted and zoomed remotely so that the operator can focus on a person or activity of particular interest. Wi-Fi versions of video surveillance cams have made it possible to install systems in a wider number of locations, further exacerbating the issue.

There was an interesting article written by Brandt Dainow entitled How accurate is Google Adwords? The article looks at the revenue made by Google with its Adwords CPC engine, accuracy of clickthroughs and click fraud. Definately worth a read.

Unlike Steven Colbert who is well known for his truthiness, I just spotted a small Google fib. I was just playing around with Google Sitemaps and noticed a link saying “How can I improve my site’s ranking?”. I’ll bite.

On the resulting page contains the line “We don’t manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.” That is interesting because I would call removing a site from its search results a pretty good example of manipulating its ranking (such as what happened with webposition.com and many other documented instances).

Hopefully this site doesn’t not not get “manipulated” for its cheekiness. More on Google Sitemaps later.

Yahoo! is in the process of updating to a new search engine index or have just finished. This means there will be some changes in ranking of where your web site shows up in Yahoo’s SERP. It will also affect what web sites are in Yahoo’s index. So start checking the ranking of your web site for desired keyphrases in Yahoo!

Calgary based Cambrian House performs publicity stunt by delivering 1000 pizzas to Google’s headquarters. Read their press release or watch the video.

A lot of webmasters use Yahoo! Search to get page and inlink data about their site, using ’site:’, ‘link:’, ‘linkdomain:’ queries. Beginning a few days ago, Yahoo is redirecting all queries of this nature to the Site Explorer results pages, so that you can benefit from this tool’s additional features.

To reiterate, the following types of queries will be redirected:

• site:ysearchblog.com
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com

All other queries, such as the ones below, will not be redirected:

• ysearchblog.com
• ysearchblog
• site:ysearchblog.com webmasters (looking for ysearchblog posts mentioning webmasters)
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html Danny Sullivan (looking for links to the article mentioning Danny Sullivan)
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com site:yahoo.com (looking for links to ysearchblog from within yahoo.com)

Google SOAP Search API (beta) has serious problems with accuracy. If you compare the results returned from the API to results from manually searching on Google, they are rarely the same. The is a serious problem.

It is against the Google terms of service to scrape the search engine results to obtain keyword positions for your web site. Unfortunately, this is the only accurate method of obtaining this information. Scraping search engine results takes up precious server bandwidth and resources that from Google’s perspective they want to be used for actual surfers searching for web pages and not for your web site analysis that earns them zero advertising revenue.

Bottom line is that SEO firms and many others use web page scraping as it is the only method of getting an accurate picture of whats happening on Google. Until Google fixes their API, expect this to continue.

I stumbled upon an interesting article that examines how users read web pages. Basically it summarizes that “eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.”

The implications are basically what most people already know: most people read very little of your textual content and the top text is critical. The screenshot on the right is an interesting look at how the majority of people read a google search engine results page.

Read Article

The Yahoo blog reported that they have launched the a new version of slurp, their search engine spider that crawls and indexes web sites.

We launched a new Yahoo! Search Crawler, Yahoo! Slurp earlier this week. In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.?

Read Yahoo! Blog news story?