A recent article by Mark Evans titled "Keep your Google Mania in check" states that Dipsie will be released later this year with an index of over 10,000,000,000 documents.

"What Dipsie is trying to do is develop search technology that does a better job of retrieving and presenting data. It aims to index many parts of the Web that Google or Inktomi don't. While Dipsie's technology is complex, in simple terms it will use semantic-based analysis to produce searches featuring content and context.

Jason Wiener, Dipsie's founder, is realistic that knocking off Google is a huge challenge. He realizes being a little bit better than Google will not be enough to make Dipsie a relevant rival. Dipsie needs to be several magnitudes better. "If we are 5% better, I should just work at Starbucks and make some lattes," he says."

Later in the article it states that they intend to create a buzz using 100,000 test searchers, and that they intend to hire the same PR firm that NutraSweet used.

The biggest advantage Dipsie has is that there are no expectations or people relying on it right now. They can make major changes and wait to put their index out when the algorithm is really good. In addition nobody is gaming their algorithm the way people are gaming Google.

Google has done some amazing things, and I don't look for them to stop anytime soon. The brand of Google will not be easy to knock off, but if you want to take a chance, Dipsie is hiring!

A recent thread at SearchGUILD brought up the question "just how exactly do you make a forum 'spider-friendly', and is it something that a silly novice like me can do?"

Recently Webby (Alan Webb) wrote an article in Darwin Magizine about how to use forums to create your content, and how to make them SEO friendly.

NEW Google Datacenter IPs: Well say goodbye to Google Dance Tools...Google has updated their Datacenter IPs with 60 new ones (subscription required)...presumably used for load balancing and to make it harder to watch search results as they dance.
(From About)

New Google Toolbar: In addition Google is to offer a Dutch Google Toolbar.
New Google Languages: Google will have 9 new interface languages: Serbo-Croatian, Yiddish, Guarani, Sesotho, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Breton, Twi, and Oriya.
(from ResearchBUZZ)

The 4^TH annual search engine awards now have open voting until the 4^TH of Febuary. Registered members of SearchEngineWatch may vote for the winners.

In addition today's SearchDay references the search engine article series "On Search, The Series" by earch engine pioneer Tim Bray.

What did you say? Due out next month: http://searchlimo.com/.

While the concept is appealing, the current search seems a tad bit cluttered for my tastes...I am sure that sometime this year (or next at the very latest) Google and other top search engines will enable voice activated search.

Software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking has came a long way in voice recongition technology in the past couple years. The first major search engine who can fold this type of technology in with their search will have a huge advantage...What is stickier than mobile, voice activated search?

MSN search results have been found to contain the dubious Web Directory results in many search results.

For those who do not know the official MSN description of this category is "Within Web Directory results, there may also be links where the Web site owners have paid for the expedited review of their site or for clicks to their site. These sites are ranked using the normal algorithm applied to all links within each section, with no change in rank due to payment."

These are where the EVIL LookSmart listings appear. An example search for "dubious" shows a couple dubious web directory results.

MakeMeTop has stated that the offical contract MSN had with LookSmart allows them to use the LookSmart directory free of charge as it was when they dumped LookSmart. Those people appearing in LookSmart as it was 16 January are getting a ton of free distribution.

LookSmart stocks are on a slight bounce upward today (~5% when I looked), perhaps MSN does still find some value in their product?

Excruciating: The Lycos portal is dying a slow death... recently they announced they will be closing their chat and community services in an effort to streamline their core business.

"Beginning Feb. 1, Lycos' community sites, such as chat, message boards, clubs and images, will close. All content, such as text and photos, will be deleted, the notice states."

When a portal does not own its own search services, does not have the best news, and is giving little notice to the fact they are destroying their main asset, it is an ugly site.

They really could not have thought of a quicker way to sell of customer loyalty. Look for Lycos to disappear in the next year or two...

I keep reading these marketing books which say that markets are conversations and over at SearchGuild we recently had two distinctly different types of people come to the forums. Each came to represent their product and they fared way differently. Person 1: Dez from WebSearch.com.au spoke in a human voice about his search engine. He has even lended tips to some moderators on how to improve their sites...we think Dez is the bomb diggity!

Person 2: DirectorySearch from DirectorySearch announced his URL and basically bailed. In the process he alienated many of us and actually hurt his product. He never gave his name and failed to even fully answer the questions about his products.

DirectorySearch does have a good script, but product alone does not make or break you. It's how you use the product and how you communicate with the customer that helps build long term value.

Articles as links The fundamental base of the internet is not the page, but the link. A great way to accumulate links is to write articles and submit them to places interested in quality articles. Where do I submit articles in my field? Some places will accept articles automatically and some require editorial approval. If you know your industry well you should know some places that accept articles. I know within the search engine field I can submit articles to sites like Lil Engine, ISEDB, SearchGuild, and a variety of others.

Where do I submit general articles? There are also sites which take general articles such as Idea Marketers, Buzzle, Ebooks n Bytes, Article Central. The list goes on and on.

How do articles give me links? When you write articles for free you are typically given a by-line or author bio which you can link to your website.

How long should my articles be? Typically it is a good idea to review the editorial guidelines of websites before submitting articles. Most sites like articles around 600 to 900 words since the internet is a quick medium. Some sites like articles up to 1500 to 2000 words so they can split up the content to show more ads. Reading a few articles from the site should give you an idea what they are looking for.

Article resource location tips: A good tip to finding more might be to search for the name of a search engine copywriter. Karon Thackton is found on over 1,000 documents!

In addition to searching out people in your field you may want to use some of the Yahoo Announcement Groups and other article resources. Feel free to submit article resource locations in the comments :)

Submiting articles to Ezines is not something I generally do. I find that if you write an ok article and submit it to a few of these places people will just pick you up. You want to be careful about seeming spamy when trying to submit articles to ezines. A few good Ezine lists would be Ezine Universe, Topica, the Ezine Directory

Additional article resources from Jeremy Gossman are listed below.

http://goarticles.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://amazines.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://bpubs.com/
http://businessknowhow.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.promotionworld.com/
http://promotenewz.com/

Yahoo Announcement Groups

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ArticlePublisher/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_eContent/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeWrites/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freE-zinecontent/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/netwrite-publish-announce/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ReprintArticles-Paradise/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheWriteArticles
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aainet/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/

Eventually if you do a good enough job with your articles people who syndicate your artilces will have those same articles syndicated from there! Here is another small list of Ezine directories.

<update>here are a few more sites you can submit articles to:
www.purplepages.ie
www.stickysauce.com
www.certificate.net
www.freesticky.com
www.bullmarketer.com

Here is another free XLS articles checksheet which shows over 70 sites where you can submit articles. Thanks Zoran

[update: here is more article submission locations]

</update>

The search for "Google Sells Christmas" will show you that about 40 web pages reference my second article. Before I wrote those articles my site was not popular, now it kinda is.

You can also look at content provider networks in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory.

Also a while ago somebody spammed me trying to promote "marketing blaster" and "search engine geek." If people publish articles that were sent to them via spam then odds are they will likely want to publish your articles too, so you may want to search for a few variations of those names such as "marketing blaster" or "marketingblaster."

AOL and Playboy makeup and makeout...alright I know what your thinking "Playboy would never makeout with the ugly likes of AOL."

Your right! But Playboy did settle their keyword advertising case with AOL.

The entire revenue model of search goes in the toilet if they can not sell ads related to companies and products. Whie I personally am not a fan of AOL, this out of court settlement is a good deal for search in general.

Many people have reported major changes in the search results since the last dance.

It makes me wonder if part of their refinement is to change the weighting of factors each month just slightly to make it exceptionally hard to game the search engine. It would be a logical move on their part. Most of the core powerful websites will stay in or near the top of the results while the sites that are most prone to the severe swings are those gaming the search engine heavily.

There will be some innocent sites that disappear, and some slop that rises to the top, but gaming the search engine has become a more fun and exciting game :)

The News It appears as Google is doing some updating this weekend, I also saw the new Google search engine results page format at a friends house (originally noticed at WebProNews).

Google Descriptions How do I get a good snippet?

Google does not usually use the meta description tag, but uses random snippets from the page copy itself. From what I have seen Google likes to pull the keyphrase that was searched for from locations where it is by itself or in small word groupings. Common locations could be headings, lists, and navigation.

The first search engine marketing is in my navigation, the second search engine marketing is from the title of an unorganized list.

The keys to getting a good snippet are

• Provide the keyphrases you want to list well in by themselves or in small clusters in a few different locations. These will be the "snippet anchors."

• Place the words you also want to show in the search results right before and right after these elements on your page.
• Tweak as necissary!

I also have noticed on some pages with low content Google may also use IMG ALT tags in the snippet. If you search for "black hat seo," my home page of that site is #1 and it has its IMG ALT tag in the snippet. Me Happy! My other site snuck back upward near the top of its field. My friend Daniel told me I am #1 for "search marketing" and #8 for "search engine marketing."

Me Happierestest Google is using an amazing snippet for my other site for the search "search engine marketing."

My snippet reads "... (401)207-1945. Aaron Wall. Search Engine Marketing (home) - you are here. ... The only limits are your motivation and imagination. Search Engine Marketing Tips: ... "

1.) Download the Alexa toolbar and surf your own site.
2.) Have a few friends download the Alexa Toolbar and surf your site.
3.) Shift the focus of your site toward a more webmaster like theme.
4.) Participate in many webmaster forums which allow you to place your site in your signature.
5.) Write articles about webmaster topics and distribute them around the web.
6.) Optimize pages of your site for Alexa and related phrases.
7.) Buy ads on search engines to increase your traffic. Your Alexa traffic rankings will increase.
8.) Write an article with tips on how to increase your Alexa rankings.
9.) Advertise that article on the world's largest network.
10.) Join an autosurf network which exchanges Alexa credits. <--- this actually exists and they sell off some of the credits. The problem is that those are credits. They are not real visitors. They are not what you need.

Direct Hit failed as a search engine because it based a large portion of its algorithm on web traffic. Alexa ranking is highly inaccurate and easy to manipulate.

It is the quality and quantitiy of traffic to your site and how you convert those visitors that determines whether or not you will be a success. If you need help obtaining targeted traffic read my eBook. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

Some people over at WMW are quite disappointed at click quality of Google DomainPark.

Most of what Google does is great in my eyes. The discouraging thing about paying good monies (always wanted to use that word) to people who are cybersquaters buying expired or misspelled domains is that you are promoting the creation of junk which wastes time. These people create ends to the web which is otherwise endless.

AdSense was created to help fund the creation of high quality content. DomainPark rewards people for not creating content.

Google will argue that these DomainPark pages help people find relevant information, but if you asked people knowledgeable about the internet what Ultimate Search does few would say "help people find relevant information."

Ultimate Search has a deal with Overture (Google's biggest rival) which pays him a percentage of the click through price from an add filled directory. He has bought thousands of domain names and the only difference between them is the title and url. They all stink!

Say you want some "True Democracy." What you find is commercial crap...the complete opposite of what the web is about.

Search engines do not execute java. They should not follow java links. I used java coding on the above link such that there will be no PageRank parsed to his evil site. If you ever want to link to evil stuff without parsing any PageRank or link popularity you can view the javascript I used by looking in the status bar when you roll over the above link. Place that string where you normally would place the domain in you href links.

Google please don't be evil :)

Yahoo Gets Personal Jeremy Zawodny announced the realease of RSS Newsfeeds for My Yahoo!.

Following a couple easy steps will allow you to make a customized My Yahoo! home page which will track all the important events in your field of study.

What the hell is this RSS? RSS stands for really simple syndication. Its a really simple way to syndicate. Neat how that works huh!

How do I use RSS? You can use it in a variety of ways.

• You can use the My Yahoo! website to make a personal home page.

• Create your own handy dandy custom home page yourself.
• Use RSS to keep up to date news available on your site or portal.

To use RSS you need to run the RSS feed through an RSS processor. Brad at SciFi Matter (and fellow SearchGuild moderator) showed me a really good RSS processor.

Recently many articles have been circulating about AdSense in email. Now a bunch more articles are about to circulate as Overture has amended its avertisers terms of service to include email ads.

Also a reminder that the contextual ad bid prices are to be seperated from the search bids over the weekend. Thanks to Kevin Lee at Marketing Wonk.

Ouch! Their CEO has steped down and their workforce has been choped in half.

Artistic, not so much garbage origami but more Just Paper Roses.

Snappy "TELSTRA snapped up local operations of LookSmart yesterday, barely a week after the shrinking Australian internet pioneer lost the customer that delivered two-thirds of its revenue."

Telestra is also the owner of popular the local search website and technology behind Citysearch.

In a big fight between Google and Overture ads are spreading through the web.

Kelkoo, the third largest European shopping site, is to carry AdWords ads.

Overture is to display ads on Net Temps job portal, and they resigned a multi year deal with Wanadoo (Europe's #2 ISP).

Caution parady sites are fighting for their share of the pie. Everyone knows about YouHo, but Booble has came out of nowhere!

This is just a fun post. Recently DMOZ linked into thumbshots with a little red ball to provide a thumbshot previews of listed sites. Here is a cool search page which will allow you to search Google using your own CSS file or one which already has thumbshots...

(GEEK STUFF) One of the largest problems many search engines run into is that after they get to a few hundred million documents their algorithms and hardware hit a wall.

For those companies that can afford the investment to get past this point they still run into the problem that each additional resource makes their job a bit harder.

One of the major ways around this problem is to take advantage of the natural patterns in human language. Using Latent Semantic Indexing allows indexing search results based on the pairing of like words within documents.

Many complex searches may lack exact matches in the results as well. Being able to find near matches will allow search engines to provide more comprehensive results.

Its hard to get computers to understand anything human, but the process of latent semantic indexing delivers conceptual results while being entirely mathematically driven.

There are two main ways to do this, single variable decomposition and multi dimentional scaling.

Some of the steps of the single variable decomposition process are to:

• create a database of all words in relevant documents
• remove common stop words
• stemming
• remove words appearing in all results
• remove words only appearing in one result
• create a database of relavent keywords
• weight the pages based on the frequency of keyword distribution
• increasing the relevance of terms which appear in a small number of pages (as they are more likely to be on topic than words that appear in most all documents)
• normalize the page to remove the pagelength as a factor
• create relevancy vectors for the keywords

The single variable decomposition process is not scalable enough to work on large scale search engines though as it requires too much processor time. Multi dimentional scaling allows us to take snapshots of the topicology of different documents. "Instead of deriving the best possible projection through matrix decomposition, the MDS algorithm starts with a random arrangement of data, and then incrementally moves it around, calculating a stress function after each perturbation to see if the projection has grown more or less accurate. The algorithm keeps nudging the data points until it can no longer find lower values for the stress function."

This does not provide exact results, but only a rough approximation. When combined with other factors this approximation improves scalability and quality of search.

Good Reading on latent semantic indexing

This technology is so amazing that it may eventually help lead to a cure for cancer. Already the technology is being refined for cognitive improvements and test grading!

Many sites do not have a custom 404 error page. When a site visitor clicks on a dead link the visitor is most likely gone. Here is a perfect article about creating the perfect 404 error page.

Did it has released a new free keyword suggestion tool located at http://www.did-it.com/suggest.php. They analyzed the meta tags of millions of websites to create keyword relationships between them.

While not as robust as WordTracker, this is a great tool for free!

Some recent articles ("Google's House of Cards" "A Perfect Storm for Pay Per Click") have been saying that the ROI for paid advertising is going away. It has been. It was not very competitive a few years ago, but now with over 150,000 people in the market you need to be more effective to extract profits from a campaign.

I honestly think many of the articles are suggested / written by people who want to make their own jobs easier and make more money while doing it. Some articles may even be written to scare away competition or drive leads to firms who provide the services.

In the past a sloppy website with low conversion rates was ok because there was little competition. Now some areas are requiring a smooth ad, which is well targeted, that leads to a smooth site, which has great usability, and is customer centric. In essence the shakeup of the organic listings and the rising costs of pay per click ads are forcing websites (and the internet as a whole) to be more functional.

There are few mediums which have feedback as rapid as AdWords does. Pay per click is here to stay. Those who know how to use it will make a ton of money.

The most important part of SEO is off the page factors, but for those of you heavily interested in on the page criteria...
Over at GoRank they created a tool for comaring the keyword density of various pages. In addition they have a small report about their keyword density findings in the post Florida Google.

Local pay per click idea? "Topix.net launched into beta today, and was done by the same team that built dmoz.org/newhoo. One of our goals is to aggregate local traffic at the zip code level and be able to drive local web hits to ads." - Rich Skrenta

Topix has over 150,000 news channels which are constantly updated. I think a big flaw with their idea is that currently you have to go to their site to find all the information...or at least they did not make it easy for me to find a data feed. Thus they can not compete with sources like Google News (ad free and not biased by human editors), and they will likely strugle to pull visitors from local news papers due to customer loyalty. Time shall tell...

An Awesome new news aggregator (which is ad free and amazing if you figure out how to use it) is del.icio.us

Just a reminder that the strongest competitors may not initially seem like direct competitors. IBM Webfountain article.

In any medium there will be free rides as new adopters take advantage of knowledge not share by their competitors. While there is always a new technology which creates new markets, this quick read does a good job of explaining why off the page optimization is more effective than on the page optimization. Chris Ridings explains "The Glass Ceiling."

Update: above link to chriseo.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=62&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 delinked, as the site is owned by a domainer and is a page full of ppc ads

Just another tip on improving conversion rates with Google AdWords. When search words appear in a Google ad they are bolded. A good way to improve click through rate (and thus lower price per click) is to place keywords in the ad.

Sometimes it may not be practical to create 100 different ads and 100 different groupings. If you have similar terms which can use the same creative description, but you would like to have the title dynamically match searched keywords you can.

The syntaxt for Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion is {keyword: }

When you create the AdWords creative place {keyword: } in the first line and then fill out the rest of the creative like normal. Automatically your title will match the search terms which will improve click through rates. Please note that Google does not want this feature used on search terms which are mis spelled or otherwise break their ad policies.

When you use {keyword: } make sure you place a keyword after it so that search terms which may be too long or are not processed correctly still have an ad to show. I know this because I had one of my Google AdWords ads disapproved for not doing this. For me I would probably use something like {keyword:SEO Book}.

Some people will want to try this with a huge catalog of products and will lose money in the process. When products are widely varying you want to send the person to the specific page for that product so you must specify that as well.

This technique is likely to be most profitable to those who use it on smaller niche specific areas...the whole thing that makes Google so appealing is that you can customize every aspect of your ad and track every cent spent from begining to end.

Dynamic keyword insertion capitalization:
{keyword:} will make the title small
{KeyWord:} will capitalize all the words in the Google AdWords ad title.

Try the new Google WhoIs feature

Google now allows you to search for the owner of a domain. If you think you have a network of evil competitors which are just cross linked you can search it via Google (even via the Google Toolbar) using whois seobook.com.

Most registrars require you enter a password to find the WhoIs information. This new Google feature may raise some privacy issues.

thanks to wmw

Bloomburg announced that Google is to go public in April at a value of $12 Billion. The company is expected to raise as much as $4 Billion by selling 1/3 of the company. The Wall Street Journal said that Yahoo! is to dump Google in the comming months, possibly as early as the first quarter.

In "Google's House of Cards" Nate Elliot states that the lowering quality of clicks from AdSense ads is erroding the ROI on AdWord accounts. He believes a second set of bids should be applied to AdSense ads which allow advertisers to bid on those ads at fair market value (less than the price of other ads).

While it may be a bit more work for the search engine marketers, Google already has this feature.

Set up your account and ucheck "the content sites in Google's network" box. This will disable content sites.

Set up a second account (with your lower bid prices) and enable the content sites.

Sure its a little more work, but why should Google harm itself and its content providers to provide a feature which is already there?

The biggest gripe most people have with Google AdWords is that niche specific products must compete for market share with general merchandise using the broad match feature. Overture places exact matches above broad match ads.
Its seems Overture is going another step further to make its product more user friendly. Later this month Overture will allow seperate bidding for its Content Match product. While implementing this change they will also remove the 20% discount they initially offered and are expanding the product throughout the Yahoo! network.

Open an Overture account today and get a $50 signup bonus.

Thanks to Michael Wong

Just a reminder that Alexa is only a representation of traffic and not the actual traffic levels to a website.

Less than 1% of web users have installed the Alexa toolbar
The Alexa system is easy to manipulate

and as a bonus today the stats are all out of wack...

These stats were from 6:40 PM eastern for my Search Marketing Info site.

How does the reach rank go way up with relatively constant page views per user to see your overall pageviews go way down? Thats right, Alexa is not worth much.

Page Views rank:

Today 18,074
1 wk. Avg. 625,017
3 mos. Avg. 3,999,599
3 mos. Change -3,847,978

Reach rank:

Today 18,074
1 wk. Avg. 19,143
3 mos. Avg. 24,375
3 mos. Change + 63,574

Many people have claimed to have seen this on a limited basis, but I have been seeing Ink on Google for a while today. I was first tipped off by my friend at Just Paper Roses.com. I have asked some other people and the switch appears to be only be seen by some.

People in the past have been happy with Google search (Google is one of the top brands in the world right now). With Yahoo branding the hell out of Yahoo search they want people to think Yahoo search. They do not want people thinking Inktomi or Google. It really would not make sense for them to announce a change. With Google's recent massive algorithm shift and upcomming IPO this would be a good time to switch search results.

Again, only some people are seeing the shift, but today is the first time I have. Time for me to tweak a few pages :)

Inktomi relies more heavily on page criteria vice links. The problem with really optimizing a page up for Inktomi is that one might trip the believed over optimization filter of Google. To give you an example of how easy it is to optimize for Inktomi take a look at this search for "website copywriters." Somewhere in the top few pages you will see my Website Copywriters on Search Marketing Info page which is rather short and has low link popularity.

There are a few techniques I would recommend:

1.) optimize the pages each for different terms by search engine. If one sold 5 HTP, they could optimize Inktomi for 5 HTP, and they could optimize the same page for 5 Hydroxytryptophan on Google. This should help you pick up traffic in the short term while you

2.) build a solid linking campaign which will eventually lift you in both engines for the desired terms

Some people may recommend making pages in two different versions (one for each engine), on a rare occasion I may try this. I do not recommend building an entire site this way though as it will make updating confusing. The end goal should be to generally have a strong enough link network that you can do well on both engines.