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I have made a few, which have not sold many, & still might not be good at it yet ;) but I will eventually pick up graphics a bit better and am a huge fan of irony.

Recently WordPress got caught content spamming by using a hidden div. Their motto is "Code is Poetry," and that it is.

Anywho, here is the image from my first SEO related T Shirt, which you can buy from SEO Shop (with what the price is set at I do not think that I profit from sales, but if I do that would go to charity.)

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Apparently the story about Larry and Sergey making underwear was true.

UnderGoos.

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Google:
Patent dealing with temparal ranking effects - Greg Boser called this "The most important SEO related document in the last 5 years."
2004 annual financials report

Yahoo!:
to give a clear API Answer? maybe

Search Awards:
Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch announced the 5 annual search awards. Yahoo! wins the outstanding search service award.

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SEOs Are Scum:
For a long time many bloggers have stated that SEOs are scum, as said best by Anil Dash.

I've always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image of the whole group.

Content Spam:
Blog comment spam is one common type that bloggers know all too well, but creating tons of rubbish content is another type of spam.

HotNacho hires writers to write low quality articles for $3 each. The articles, being of low quality, have little value by themselves. However, if you can get an authoritative site to host the articles you can make a ton of money from advertising.

Affordable Quality Hosting:
WordPress - an open sourced blog software make which is part of the anti spam brigade - hosted over 100,000 HotNacho spam pages, linking to them from the home page using a negative div.

Hmm... manipulating search results for personal gain by posting complete crap to a hidden section on your site.

What makes that action more ethical / better than actions of the average SEO?

Is this the type of openness we should expect from open source software? Where is the transparency? hehehe.

Google Funds Web Pollution, Again:
Google is funding that web pollution with their AdSense program.

If the stuff is bad enough that it needs kicked out of Google's index then how were they displaying ads on over 100,000 pages on that site without noticing the problem. Why are the ads still there?

I think this is the real story that everyone is missing. Google's AdSense quality control is a complete joke.

Advertisers and content publishers should be disappointed in Google's lousy policing of their AdSense program. Much web pollution would not exist if Google did not lucratively fund it.

The WordPress moto has never been more true:
Code is poetry!!!

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Keyword Density Analysis:
is complete rubbish - according to Dr Garcia.

this overall ratio [keyword density] tells us nothing about:

1. the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)

2. where in a document the terms occur (distribution)
3. the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)
4. the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics and relevancy.

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The Go Network:
is to Go from Google to Overture

Black Hat:
PPC Techniques. First time I have seen an article about Black Hat PPC. Good stuff Mikkel.

I do understand the reasons as they want to know what pages they send users to but why on earth does Google have to reset my hard earned high CTR if all I change is an added tracking parameter? In any case, I am not going to pay for it!

The simple solution is to set-up some kind of layer between you and them so the URL you use is actually not the one that shows the content.

Content, Content, Content:
A couple newerish (is that a word) products aim to help people grab or create loads of content. I have yet to use any of these.

• Article Equalizer - pulls articles from various content sources. I think he also created traffic equalizer, rss equalizer, and many other equalizer products. Wonder if he will eventually release the ultimate equalier suite. ;)

• AdSense Gold - evidently comes with thousands of articles
• ArticleBot - rewrites articles using grammar rules, allows you to dynamically reorganize SERPs, can mix up content and create many readable articles from a given seed set
• Yahoo! Creative Commons search - seach for content that can be freely used
• some people translate and then untranslate content.
• how not to steal content 101

LinkExplore:
reviewed

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Google Finance:
Search relates stocks:
Msft
Goog
Ebay
Yhoo
Amzn
Iaci
Askj
Fwht
Mchx
Look

Still need some work on the world markets though ;)
Fast.ol

Since some of the top ranking search results are owned by competitors (such as Yahoo! Finance) it probably does not hurt Google to keep the visitors at Google by providing a bit more data in the search results.

Arts:
Also, Google changed their logo for Vincent Van Gogh today. You gotta wonder if the person advertising for that term is going to see a huge traffic spike and lowered ROI on the day.

If I were an aspiring artist who had a few bucks and was trying to promote myself today might be a good day to get some exposure. One of my friends is an artist and a while ago he got to meet Pablo Picasso.

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Yahoo! have launched their social network / blog program Yahoo! 360.

NickW gave me an invite and my blog is here. Yippie. If you want an invite PM Nick on ThreadWatch or shoot me an email.

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I am not really a star per say (as I do not use the word blogosphere enough to be one), but I will be on the phone tomorrow at noon Central. The topic is SEO and local search. You can listen in too if you like.

This will be like the third audio recording thingie I have done in the last year. I think I am probably getting a bit better at them, though I do have a tendancy to talk a bit quick.

It is free to listen to if you want to.

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Content, Content, Content:
Mark Cuban on content & technology

Urchin:
being acquired by Google. Wonder if they will include THAT in their free stats package. (found from SEG)

WebTrends:
Bought by Francisco Partners.

Find Profit:
recently had about a 15 page interview with Andrew Goodman talking about where search is headed. It comes free with a free trial or subscription to their site.

If You Snooze:
you lose. hehehe

FyberSearch:
Updated

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Yesterday I was using that Hub Finder tool I had made.

In not so competitive industries it can help find some good resource pages & potential links, but in some competitive industries I was amazed at how many scraper websites were running AdSense. I knew it was going to be a ton, but sometimes you just have to see it to appreciate it.

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Jim Boykin creates another free SEO tool. The reports take about 3 minutes to make. It tells unique linking domains, unique linking IP address, and unique linking C blocks (as well as how many links from each unique linking domain).

Since links from sites on the same C blocks are more likely to be owned by the same person some search relevancy algorithms may lower the weight given by links hosted on the same C block.

Try the WeBuildPages C Class Backlink Analyzer Tool

here is another cool C class IP address tools I mentioned in the past:
IP Report

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Happy Easter all.

I just got back from eating way too much food :(

While digesting it...

I thought about looking up how to spell gluttony and noticed that Google only shows two ads for the proper spelling and no ads for glutony.

Overture only appears to have one ad.

Does this term have any value to various dieting products or services? Maybe. Maybe not.

Kinda weird to see the fact that almost nobody is currently testing the market though, eh?

The No S Diet is advertising on Google AdWords and looks cool.

Its kinda funny that the site does not have much of a business model since thier advice is free and

Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain "the solicitation of funds and do not display tax-exempt status".

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Google Video:
Jeff Dean talks about how Google works. Although he mentions nothing about rotating algorithms.

Google Rotating Relevancy Algorithms:
being discussed at SEW forums in this thread.

[update: NickW pointed to this post, which states that currently there are 3 main Google relevancy algorithms and that they use Agent Web Ranking to check their positioning.
McDar & WM Community also have tools that search multiple data centers at the same time.

in the SEW thread PhilC also points to a list of current active datacenter IP addresses.]

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NYC SES Pictures:
Stephen Turcotte took some pics. There is a pic of me wearing a FireFox T shirt standing next to AussieWebmaster, and there are lots of other pics.
link looted from PeterD's blog.

Buying the Best:
CGI Holdings snags Mike Grehan. It is unbelievable how many companies they have acquired recently.

Ad Spend:
UK online ad spend increased ~ 50% in 2004. Europe SEM spend is expected to increase 65% in 2005.

MarketingExperiments.com:
Has dropped their subscription fees. Good stuff.

Why VCs Suck:
A Unified Theory of VC Suckage - its how they get paid.

Tension on the Web:
Adam Bosworth riffs about privacy and sloppy folksonomies. He also states breaks make everything more clear when you come back to work.

Seth Interviews:
Hugh email interviews Seth & Clikz does too

Seth also has another seminar coming up soon. If you work at a small company it only costs $400. If you are a charity you might be able to go free.

Our Media:
our media launches. free media storage. cool.

ChrisTools:
new SEO tool site from Chris Ridings. his first tool creates a topical OPML file

You Gotta Love:
how blunt Rob Frankel is

The widespread ignorance of branding is a scourge on the economy

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Google News:
has been in the news...

• AFP, who sued Google, is no longer being syndicated in Google News

• recently Google had Nazi news.
• since Google does not list their sources people decided to scrape to find some of them (link via BuzzMachine)

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Deceptive?
deceptive advertising in search results.

• Who profits the most from others believe in their divine word?

• Are threads and articles about ethics just an underhanded form of marketing?
• Ever wonder if search engines employ SEOs to do the ethics spin B/S?

NFFC has always had a silver tounge

Spy vs Spy:
SEO Counterintelligence
competitor link spying tool (with free happy music)

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Yahoo! Creative Commons Search. A while ago I would have expected Google to be first to market with an idea like that.

Apparenlty at SEW forums a Yahoo! employee denied their alleged contempt for tracking companies.

Yahoo! also purchased Flickr recently so who knows, maybe they will Google a run for their money.

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Just logged into the Digital Point Keyword Tracker. In the past it only worked for Google, but I just saw that they added Yahoo! and MSN as options.

It may not be a good idea to make it too easy for search engines to cross connect too many of your sites, but if you like the whole keyword tracking concept this is probably the best free web based one on the market.

Yahoo! and MSN limit the number of API queries from a given IP address each day. You need to place a script on your server to interface with tracking Yahoo! backlinks and Yahoo! or MSN rankings.

The tool can also track the number of Google backlinks and PageRank, although generally the data given by Google is rather useless.

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Frank Watson has a scathing post about some of the dumb ideas which have been floating about over at Yahoo!.

"We do not see Google and MSN as our competition," Tom HockSteatter said today, "we look at offline media as our competitors."

...

Right now no new SEM/Analytics companies are being allowed in, or the "not no, not now" response. Though he did not confirm it, more pointedly he did not deny that the existing SEM/Analytics/Tracking partners would soon be pushed out as well. "I won't say if existing agreements will continue."

I hope Kevin over at Did-It, the guys at Atlas and KeywordMax et al are ready for this.

...

"We have a strategic position for the web going forward", Tom HockSteatter said.

So did LookSmart and when MSN left that engine it rapidly feel to the side. I hope the Yahoo stock does not fall as heavily as that of LookSmart come announcement day.

With newspapers trying to buy their way into the web why is Yahoo! trying to move backwards?

Their clunky Overture interface, sporatic outages, contempt for analytics, and impending loss of MSN sure could make for a rather sticky situation.

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In the News:
Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett take a stake in Topix.net. With NYT recently purchasing About.com it is clear that newspapers are starting to wake up to the online world.

BlowSearch:
May have launched a new product that "blows"?

You have to respect how quickly they commented on it though. I wonder why more of the small PPC search engines are not actively monitoring their brands and replying to what people say about them.

I'm Feeling Lucky:
Google Bomb for sale. so many creative ideas come to mind.
found on SE Roundtable.

Dear Diary:
Letter from a blog spammer. As long as the algorithms require it people will do it.

SEO Conferences to become the new SEO forum?
SEO Chat is thinking about holding an SEO conference. I can't see the conference medium becoming as saturated as the forum medium with all the associated costs and constraints, but there surely are a good number of conferences.

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Google Groups:
Froogle Merchants Group
also if you do not yet subscribe to SEM 2.0 it is a good list.

Buy Forum Sigs:
not sure how much value there is to it, but Sig Trader buys and sells forum post sig links. Amazing how many different ways there are to build links.

For Search Geeks:
in a forum post Xan recently mentioned
IBM Research Natural Language Processing
The retrieval of information from historical perspective

Become.com:

• try it

• Q & A With Become CTO Yeogirl Yun
• They recently hired Jon Glick (who was the manager of Yahoo! Search).
• links to patents and other info about Become.com.

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What is Hub Finder?

Hub Finder is a free link analysis tool which finds pages which link to related websites.

You enter in two or more related sites. If they have common backlinks in the Yahoo! Search database those pages will be returned in the results.

Try Hub Finder

When using it don't forget to use the full URLs including the http:// part.

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InterActiveCorp, the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc., the nation's fourth-largest search engine company, for about $1.9 billion, according to an executive involved in the negotiations.

An announcement could be made as early as today. - NYT

IAC own CitySearch, Expedia, HSN, and a ton of other web properties.

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Making Money from Blogging:
While I was at SXSW some of the speakers asked "Who here has a blog?"
Most everyone in the audience raised their hands.

The next question was "Who here makes a living blogging?"
I think I was one of about 2-3 people who raised their hands.

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Urchin:
Is apparently good stuff.

AutoLink:
48 minute IT Conversation w cory Doctorow, Robert Scoble & Marty Schwimmer

VC:
Venture Capital When You Need It When You Don’t
ResearchBuzz posted that GigaBlast was looking for some funding. the VC page looks like it is no longer up though.

Books:
list of MBA resources.
Design thinking books
(both found on Seth's Blog)

FireFox Extensions:
the ones that DaveN uses

Getting Exposure:
how to get media coverage: create your own channels.

Another Blog about Google:
from News.com (found on Blogoscoped)

Flickr:
Jeremy Zawodny says Yahoo! bought them. Looks like Jeremy is getting into marketing too?

This is SEO:
Greg Boser, known for talking straight about SEO, gets a mention in Wired.
Xan states that he views the article as short sighted. I was going to post on his blog, but I did not feel like signing into my .net passport to do so.

LEGOs Rock:
and now, so does Batman.

TV B Gone:
brilliant

Website Dating:
My Density shows first and second degree relationships between websites.

The interface could be a bit cooler and smoother (perhaps if they used a bit of AJAX and ensured the text was easier to read on scroll overs if they are showing a ton of data in a small area), but it looks like a cool idea. more info about My Density and even more info here.

A9 OpenSearch:
I saw this mentioned a while ago, but I think I forgot to link to it. Essentially it allows search results to be reformatted & reappear elsewhere. Robin Good has more about why he feels it is important.

Amazon Ads:
Amazon textual ads hack. cool.

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This Just In:
Google News being sued by Agence France Presse for displaying subscriber only images

MSN Shopping:
Beta

Google AdSense:
Publisher Conference, reviewed. They highlighted a few sites and I think I know some of the people who may do some of the ads for some of them.

When my friend initially set up his personals page on AOL a long time ago (before he knew what a landing page was) he got so many leads that he was sending girls to his friends. Unfortunatly, I was not a friend of his at the time :(

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Alex Steffen & Bruce Sterling held the final keynote speech at SXSW. Most of their speech was about ecology and creating a sustainable world.

I was about to write this review and noticed there is a good one on WorldChanging already.

The core of the speech is that we are depleting resources at a faster rate than the world can provide them. Things will need to change. Options going forward:

• fold dumps into the production cycle

• create long term stuff
• label everything

They stated that the biggest problems in the world are closely releated to infistructure, not necissarily social, political, or religious ideolology.

Fabricators, computers, and other small fast production technologies will shorten pruduct creation time and thus enhance the efficiency of micropublishing or small scale creation of various items. Actual will become the new virtual.

To show how fast things change Bruce Sterling asked us to imagine describing our jobs to a time traveler from 30 years ago. Many of us who were in the room at the time worked on web related or industrial design type projects. Our jobs would have been a bit hard to explain.

He said the future will be somewhere between unmanagable or unthinkable. We should strive to make it as best as we can.

After his speech I bought an autographed copy of Bruce Sterling's Tomorrow Now, which looks at how the world may change over the next 50 years. On page 65 he explains the exact reason many people are doing well with SEO:

You're likely to thrive if you learn plenty about subjects where the tests and grading papers have yet to be invented. And if you find yourself learning about something unusual and there's no sense of drudgery to it - on the contrary, you find yourself spending long, smiling hours just painlessly soaking it up - take my advice and look for a job there. If there don't seem to be any jobs there, find a way to make one up.

[added: here are some of the videos from SXSW, including Alex Steffen & Bruce Sterling]

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Panel by Tantek Celik, Jonas Luster, Joyce Park, Ernie Hsiung , & Danah Boyd.

Social relationships only require single directional relationships. Social networks place more emphasis on relationships than personal information. Many of the things which are currently being touted as social networks are community based sites which place greater emphasis on individuals than on relationships.

Danah stated some of the more common problems with social networks are

• social akwardness

• articulation problems
• problems with being public

Joyce also stated another recurring problem is that many networks are created by men and do not take women into account. Another common problem is that some social networks fail to adapt to their audience.

A couple interesting facts:

• Orkut took off in Brasil for two main reasons
  1. Brasil had two large cities which for a long time did not mix much but recently started mixing more frequently on a larger scale.

  2. Orkut originally had many flags on it. This reminded many people in Brasil of the World Cup. Some people joined because they wanted to beat out the other countries. Now the innovation at Orkut is driven by the Brasil community.

• For this next statement you will have to pardon any cultural ignorance I display, but I think this is what they were trying to say :) Friendster is popular in some Muslim areas because with certain segments of that cultural background you have to show how and when you met someone, you can't just meet someone and instantly marry them.

They also talked a bit about XFN and recommended a few books. Jonas recommended John Scott's Social Network Analysis. Danah recommended Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language

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Code:
Google Code. kinda funny to see them plugging Mark Pilgrim, who recently authored Butler.
found from SEW

State of the Media:
2005 version

Big Things:
How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams PDF - quick slides from SXSW presentation.

How Expensive is a Website?
tips to price a website.

LowJack:
How to deindex a 302 redirect hijack

ABC of SEO:
Brad Talmir reviews The ABC of SEO. I too bought it and have read a chunk of it so far. Thusfar I have similar thoughts as Brad. Good for learning what the jargon means, but I did not like the occassional accusatory overuse of the term black hat SEOers.

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Words of Wisdom from somewhere in Kentucky:
The more layovers you have the greater your chance of getting screwed.

Grr, I hate Delta!!!

Well at least I got to hang out with Patrick Gavin for a bit tonight. He is always fun to talk with :)

French Court Says Google Ads Smell Bad:
Perhaps those were not the words they used, but Google lost the appeal and they want Google to pay up for trademark related ads.

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Yahoo! to join blogging fray

MSN adCenter is apparently being tested in France and Singapore first. they will be giving people more demographics and search details than the other engines do. more at
Cnet Asia
Investor's Business Daily

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Deliberative Democracy & Interactive Technology

Humor on the Web

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Online panel with Philip Kaplan, Jason Calacanis, Gokul Rajaram, Henry Copeland, & Bill Flitter.

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Ana Marie Cox, who writes for Wonkette, was the keynote speech at SXSW interactive on Monday.

She stated that she has been in reporting for 10 years. She is working on a political book about August in DC prior to a presidential election. As far as good political books goes she recommended The Gay Place: Being Three Related Novels and I think she also recommended something by a name similar to Minor Fall Major Lift.

She stated her past work at sites like Suck.com (I think) helped to:

• make her not care what people thought

• make her willing to offend all parties
• make her more edgy and funny

She was asked many questions on the blog vs journalism theme (which appeared strongly this year at SXSW).

She stated that as some bloggers became scalpers they started to turn into the media they critisized...and thus others will replace them.

She also stated that while blogs make some subjects more notable they also make other topics toxic, which prevents them from getting proper coverage in the national media.

She thought that blogs could be a supplement within the media diet, but should not entirely replace media.

A somewhat complete transcript of her keynote interview exists here. Please note that some of the text may be seen as slightly offensive to some.

Al Franken was the next speaker after Ana Marie Cox. He is an author and hosts a left wing radio show on Air America.

For blogs he recommended Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. He also recommended people read the 9-11 Commission Report.

Al Franken stated that George Lakeoff, author of Don't think of an Elephant, was good at indentifying framing errors but was not strong at comming up with the best solutions to them. He stated that he thought Frank Luntz was amazing at framing debates.

I tried not to get too deep into the political opinions of the people who were interviewed as I doubt it serves much purpose on this particular blog.

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Panel by Nick Finck, Jeffrey Veen, & Kit Seeborg.

Jeffry Veen shows Haynet as an example of good usability.

He believes that to perform well it is best if he imerses himself in the topic of the clients site. He jots down lots of notes on yellow stickies and covers the wall with the various ideas.

During project definition and research many possible solutions can be quickly eliminated, thereby lowering the overall cost of a project.

To find some of the core ideas behind the sales point of the website Veen collects market research data from people in the real world, often while failing to mention websites, as he feels that the needs overlap. The research ends up averaging out to about $200 per person and most smaller tests usually test about 6 to 8 people.

Veen also feels that analyzing data from server logs also tends to fall off track. Since you are only tracking where people are going wrong with the current system it may not bring about the most effective solution.

I totally agree with this concept. Often people have self fulfilling prophecies about their sites. The first day I talked to a marketer for a major cable and high speed internet provider. He stated that since most of their referals to their website came from direct type in traffic or bookmarks that he did not feel they needed to do SEO. If you don't know what traffic you are missing out on then it is kinda hard to see the need to go after it. This is why only analyzing your referal logs can give you bad or incompelete market data.

Seelong states that it is a good idea to follow the money trail before you get too deep into a project to ensure you will be OK to do whatever you desire. She also likes using survey services such as Survey Monkey.

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A Whole New Mind
Daniel H Pink, who spent 10 years as a political speech writer, stated that the keys to a good Monday morning speech were brevity, levity, and repitition. He then went on to explain some of the concepts in his upcomming book by the name of A Whole New Mind.

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Ad Links by Google:
Peter D shows new AdSense change

Google Local Business Center:
wonder if the Yellow pages are feeling yellow? Andrew Goodman has the details. for now US only.

Wonder What Google thinks?
of a free product that strips out their published ads for the user

their response to autolink thusfur has been nothing short of pathetic. nice job Mark.

Ask Jeeves also recently created a FireFox toolbar.

Google Sandbox:
Does the sandbox only affect phrases containing popular words?
found on ThreadWatch

I have recently seen a site under a month old rank for some rather short query sets.

New SEO / SEM Blogs:
maybe not new, but at least new to me.
Got Ads? - seems to be more focused on the ad / ppc side of the search game. have not read it a ton yet but have seen John contribute many good posts on Andrew Goodman's SEM 2.0
Wolf Howl - should have mentioned and found this one a while ago as multiple friends have recommended it to me. his most recent post references Flatland, so it must be a cool blog :)

the conference I am at:
ended today. I could blog about a bunch of stuff but now find myself headed toward the closing party, which I suspect may give me more stuff to blog about.

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Resource Rate is the brainchild of Chris Ridings from SearchGuild. Essentially it aims to tap an Alexa type data from those of us willing to add a bookmarklet to FireFox to rate threads we view on various SEO forums.

Currently the system is heavily biased toward the newer / smaller / more hip forums ;)

If a few people join from some of the other forums it could help create a rather comprehensive resource. Editors get a share in the AdSense revenues from the site and it requires little effort beyond automatically sending back your feedback.

More info about Resource Rate on Brad Talmir's blog and ThreadWatch.

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Blog spam is on a sharp rise. These systems will only get more and more sophisticated as time passes. May as well give an interview and celebrate!

So today was the fifth annual Bloggies. Boing Boing won blog of the year for the second year in a row. Gawker media won a bunch of Bloggies too. The guy grabbing the awards for Gawker decided to rotate someone else in after a while.

Blog seems to be the single most used word at SXSW. Blogger just updated their API service and they are throwing a blog party right now - which I am either too tired or too lazy to attend.

This message was posted on a blog ;)

The other word I have heard in a ubiquitous fashion is the word ubiquitous.

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MSN to start beta testing their own ppc ad network Wednesday, March 16 2005.

Andy Beal thinks it will be better than AdWords and Gary Price states that the official word will come out tomorrow, but that the system may not be fully integrated for 6 to 12 months.

I would just like to say that the MSN ad sales person I spoke to yesterday who told me Overture sometime in 2006 may have not been giving me the best info he could have ;)

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With respect to companies and their home pages showing up as the number one result I would like to point out that large companies who are SEO savvy do not necessarily want to have their home page show up first. Let's take Hewlett-Packard (disclaimer - I work with these guys)

Just found that on a discussion list.

Is it me, or does that lack tact?

At what point do we jump in head first? :)

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Review of the first couple days of the South by SouthWest conference. It does not much relate to search, but if you like other web, design, and interactive media stuff it might be worth glancing at.

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I still need to shower and pack and be on a plane in less than two hours...I am going to South by Southwest. I just browsed through the old feed reader and posted links to all the stuff that was cool.

If I can get on the web in Texas I will, and if not I will be back Wednesdayish.

I heard they have really big broadband down there. :)

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Quote a friend sent me

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
- Thomas Merton

Having a frequently updated website makes it easier to live that fallacy.

and here are some great tips for Creating Great Online Content (OJR Wiki found from NickW)

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It is sometimes hard rewriting a post when your view of a topic entirely changes.

Vic Johnson and I had a misunderstanding which was quickly resolved. From our conversation he seemed like a swell chap who was willing to do what he could to work things out.

We all make mistakes, and I could have perhaps pursued the issue from a better angle. Thanks to everyone who linked to this post and thanks to Vic for being swift and courteous. If you want to learn more about Vic Johnson click the link to visit his site.

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Good Music:
Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash - song #9 is amazing.

Uncyclopedia:
the free encyclopedia of politically incorrect non-information

Volcanos:
Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam

Igloos:
Igloo Builders Guide

BlahCorp-Sucks.com:
Top Corporate Hate Web Sites

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Not a new concept to SEO or marketing here, but it is not talked about that often as compared to other linking techniques.

Instead of buying sitewide links it may be better to buy an advertising pages hosted on other sites. Link to that page from many pages on that same site (which in a sense is like pointing a sitewide link on that site at that advertising page). Link popularity flows more naturally within a domain than it does across domains.

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Buying Links to Ban a Competing Site:
Rumour has it that with the latest Google update a few people have started in on this practice...buying sitewide keyword rich links to help their competitors get blacklisted...surely SEO is going to get a bit more ugly here soon ;)

Directory Submission:
150 directories for $99. Not that long ago the price was $30 so there must be decent demand.

I tried the 50 blog for $10 package for a few sites a while ago, but something about that price makes me feel like the service quality has to be limited.

Price points also help people associate a value with the service, so even if the service is decent the person doing it should charge more to make people think they are getting something of value, which generally appears not to be the case right now.

I do a good bit of directory submissions from time to time. I usually submit to about the same number of directories as that package except I do both free and paid directories. I do not mind paying for links because it means that the directory is more likely to have a functional business model and the links will not go away as quick.

Directory registration is exceptionally effective in MSN and Yahoo! right now.

Competition Equalizer:
other than having a different name what the hell does this software do that AdWords Analyzer does not? Wouldn't it have been better to release any additional AdWords related features as an upgrade to the AdWords Analyzer program?

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You say Potato, I say Cloaktato:
Google caught cloaking?

More SES Coverage:
from the man with yellow shoes.

Tim Mayer at the Indexing Summit

Tim then brings up a remarkable new tagging system that Yahoo! is proposing and would like to see the other engines support. It’s a method to specify the separate content blocks of a page, so the search engines don’t need to conduct block-level analysis in their algorithms. The tags look like this:

<div class=”content-public”>…</div> - indicating the content is publicly created and not monitored by the site owner

<div class=”content-nav”>…</div> - indicating that this is internal navigation content for the site

<div class=”content-default”>…</div> - indicating that this is the primary content area of the page

Tim notes that these tags can also be applied to link attributes.

Link Building

Matt Cutts say that just because a link is shown in the link command doesn’t mean it carries any weight at all

Greg Boser on Advanced Link Building

Greg calls the sandbox, the “litter box” and suggests that websites that stick out as being over-optimized will generally fall into the trap. He says that in order to bypass it, he simply builds a subdomain on an existing and well-ranking site, then 301 re-directs to the new URL. He warns against getting too granular for subdomains and says to try to use a general domain rather than a specifically themed site.

ROI Testing is a new bid management / ROI tracker tool in beta test created by MakeMeTop.

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So right now I am up at 8 am on a Monday from the night before. I came back from SES NYC Thursday night and just got done catching up with my 100 or so blogs and half dozen or so forums I track.

While looking through blogs I noticed that I just missed the Online Social Networks conference.

Last night I just bought my ticket and Friday I will be flying out to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest interactive festival. While surfing further I noticed an overlap with O'reilly Emerging Technology conference.

From April 11-12 there is the Search Engine Meeting

From April 25-27 there is Ad Tech

From May 27th - 29th there is ThreadWatch. While there you may want to stay by for SES London on June 1st & 2nd.

From June 21th-24th there is WebmasteWorld

From June 23-25 there is Gnomedex

From August 2nd-5th there is SES San Jose

I was joking with a friend and we figured that there were about 30 conferences you should go to each year, and it seems like soon that will be the reality.

I think some people have traded in their regular jobs to be traveling salesmen / lead generation / speakers at various conferences. I can't see myself ever trying to be too much of a salesman (or a public speaker), but the conferences sure are fun and there are a ton of them.

Someone should write an ebook about working (or optimizing the output from) the conference scene ;)

What conferences do you like?

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There is no PPC pricing bubble

New link exchange network. seems like a hybrid between the Digital Point's COOP link exchange network and some other link exchange sites.
What link exchange software or programs do you find useful?

More free webmaster tools. Google Dance tool and others.

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ACCOONA gave away a car at the NYC SES show and since then I have seen multiple forum owners complain about them spamming their forums.

Even if they were not the ones doing it, the complete lack of participation in those conversations is a bad thing for their search engine.

Not to mention that the ads are in the left rail and when I clicked an organic search result link in the right rail it went through Overture. At least I had a good laugh when I saw clicking on a link to my other site sent me to this one and cost me 50 cents.

Whether or not you actively participate in communities if you are above radar people will find a way to create hate threads about you. People tend to look much more credible when they show up than when they ignore them.

You gotta wonder if the $30,000 they spent on the car and booth would have been better spent actively participating in their marketplace. Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts do.

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• Yahoo! Directory UK now free to submit to.

• The Yahoo! directory now also has RSS feeds.
• Yahoo! contextual ads to come? Three ways Yahoo! can beat Google in this market are transparent revenue sharing, legitimate parner quality standards, and using XML and the like to make their ad service more publisher friendly.

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• Google Print now accepting PDF files

• Google adds weather to search results
• adds reviews to their local product
• I am told they recently did a backlink update as well.

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As a person who once put chickens in cages for a while, I totally can appreciate:
The end result is that it's essentially impossible to become successful or well off doing a job that is described and measured by someone else.

Seth also has a new book coming out and an obligitory promotional blog.

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Lawrence Lessig - The Comedy of the Commons (1.61 hr audio)

Mitch Ratcliff is to launch a social network mapping product.

Online Social Networks conference 2005 - not sure how I missed it but it looked cool.
New Media Ecosystem Flowchart
Deception Detection Techniques for Journalism

Secrets of Journalism Success. Jon Stewart style (mov file)

Berkshire Hathaway 2004 Annual Report (PDF) - not related to search, but probably some good investing and economic tips.

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Google Autolink Video - learn how it hurts your site. Even GoogleGuy thinks adding links to other sites is a scuzzy practice.

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• Google Search Counts Tool -Beta - data not 100% accurate, but interesting

• Google Recently Spidered
• Funky Site Search using Yahoo APIs
• Yahoo Keyword Tracker
• ODP Directory Script - sure lots of people are going to create a ton of niche ODP mirror directories with this. here is another one too.
• NicheBot
• Keyword Discovery
• Yahoo! Search developer network wiki

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The Best SEO Tactic is to do Nothing at all?

Not true. Google may be slow to rank a site. They may even temporarily or permanently dump websites for aggressive promotion.

While many people are still stuck on the mindset that Google is search, there are many other sources of traffic. Some sites get banned by Google and lose less than 10% of their traffic.

MSN and Yahoo! are fairly easy to manipulate right now, and Google can only throw out a limited amount of baby with the bathwater before their search results become irrelevant - causing them to lose market share.

When Google talks about how PageRank uses the uniquely democratic web blah blah blah... they fail to mention how they sometimes are willing to dump a million websites to plug a hole. There is nothing democratic about that.

Many of the people who are going after algorithmic exploits are focused on conversion. If a site has a 30-40% conversion rate there is no legitimate way a search engine can state that they filtered it out to provide a good user experience.

Yahoo! and MSN seem to understand that. Google seems a bit behind the curve on that concept though.

Google got ahead because they placed user experience ahead of profit. As they twist about figuring out how to extract profits from the value they created - they should recognize why and how they built that wealth - and realize it is just as easy to lose it.

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The first person who responded to my free Google AdWords coupon post stated that they are currently ranking well but if their rankings ever drop then they can use the $100 AdWords coupon.

Why would anyone want to wait to collect free market research data? If you don't participate then you don't know if you are missing out on profits.

The longer you wait the more competitive the marketplace gets. The sooner you test the quicker you may be able to create another profit stream.

[added: they replied that they were near full capacity. when that problem occurs it is sometimes a sign to start charging more :) ]

More market research data from SES:

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This year was my third SES conference. I think while eating lunch 2 of the 4 days people described my ebook and site to me without knowing I was me, which must mean I am getting a good bit of market saturation. :)

Many of the people who talked to me at past SES events either were SEOs or wanted to know how to hire one. Recently my inbox and at SES a much higher percent of my inqueries were people asking "how do I become an SEO?"

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1 decade down:
Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web

Switch:
Lycos now powered by Ask Jeeves

the $35,000 link:
Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. I will likely be moving or going to jail before I pay taxes for linking to other sites.

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Update: The AdWords coupons are all gone, but I still got some coupon codes for Microsoft adCenter. Sign up today and get $75 in free clicks at Microsoft AdCenter. Try Microsoft adCenter for free* with a $75 credit for paid search clicks.

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At the SES conference there are many parties. Yahoo! and Google both held parties which were rather open. I think some of my friends who did not even attend the conference were at the Yahoo! party and I guess Jason Briggs or someone like that was at the Google party.

Ask Jeeves held an invite only party.

MSN held a party where many people thought you only needed to have a conference badge to get in. You drive across town in a cab for 20 minutes to get turned away at the door.

With all the money MSN is spending on marketing it is rather stupid for them to turn people away. I am not ranting stating that I deserve a free party just that its bad marketing to turn people away like they did.

The parties are often as good as the conferences because on top of being able to do social networking you can learn a ton about how various people market their products and services.

This conference was awesome for meeting people. I can't even name all the people who I got to hang out with, but thanks to everyone for all the fun.

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So I am getting ready to go to the Yahoo! party tonight. Yahoo! has been busy.

• Jerry Yang did the SES keynote today

• Yahoo! announced they are rebranding Overture as Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions
• Yahoo! launched an API service

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