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

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)

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.

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.

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. Why is Hub Finder Useful / Important?

• Pages and sites which link to common related resources often exist in the same topical community.

• Well themed pages have a tendency to rank well in search results since they use many similar variations to describe simarly related sites, products, and services.
• Pages which rank well and are topically related may drive direct traffic which converts well.
• As search advances more search technologies will likely place greater weight on links which come from pages and / or sites of the same theme.
• One of the fundamental flaws with PageRank is that it looks at the web on the whole. Looking for thematically related links makes it harder for a person to manipulate relevancy with links from entirely unrelated powerful sites. By looking for thematically related links it forces websites to be well cited within their community of experts to achieve top rankings.

What does Hub Finder Cost?
Hub Finder is free.

Not only is Hub Finder free to use, but you can download the source code and place it on your site.

By default the tool has a link to this page and this site on it, but you can remove that if you like.

This software is released under a GNU General Public License. You can modify the source code and make the tool better.

Requirements:
Hub Finder was created in PHP. Your host must support PHP and DOM XML for the tool to work properly.

Problems with Hub Finder:
Some scraper sites tend to scrape thematically similar resources. Some of these may show in the search results. Along with those many of the actual hub pages will be returned.

Hub Finder usually works best if you look for cross referencing backlinks in well developed fields or check backlinks across a good number of sites.

Hub Finder works with the Yahoo! API, which I believe only allows you to query their database up to 5,000 times per day. This is part of the reason why the tool was made to be distributed, so that anyone can host it and so one central host site was not hosting a tool that frequently exceeded its limit.

Additionally other upgrade ideas are listed below.

Suggested Upgrades for Programmers:

• Fetch top ranking sites: Currently the tool allows you to enter URLs one at a time, up to a limit of 10 URLs. This tool could be improved by also allowing the option of entering a search term and fetching the backlinks of top ranked sites.

• Disclude: Option would be to disclude results from any specified URL. (This could be used to prevent you from sifting through backlinks on sites you already know well. Or sites which clog up the results with hundreds or thousands of rubbish scraper pages).
• Paired with: Option would allow webmasters to look at pages which link to topical resources AND link to a specific page or site. An example use of this tool could be informing webmasters that they have a broken or outdated link when one of your competitors moves their site.
• Find pages OR sites: On top of searching for common backlink pages the tool could also have another option or section of its results which looked for common root URLs between backlinks.
• Grab more details: Tool could grab IP ranges, number of links on the page, and link text.
• Multi Engine: the tool could allow people to grab backlinks from multiple engines. MSN seems to be more realistic than Google is in their policy toward SEO tools.
• Sort: Tool could allow people to sort the search results by any of the topics it grabbed.

More Tools?
A cool friend made this tool. I have a few other tool ideas. Production depends on:

• how quickly I can learn PHP

• or how quickly I can find programmers who would like to make a few tools
• or how quickly my friend is available to make more tools.

Try Hub Finder:
My friend Andy Hagans was one of the first people to host Hub Finder on his site, although his host seems to not support the tool sometimes. I created another mirror of that tool on the Link Hounds website.

If you would like to host Hub Finder or tinker with the source code you can find a copy of the original source code here. Change the file name to index.php and it should work if your host supports it. When using it don't forget to use the full URLs including the http:// part.

Upgrades & Mirrors:
If you upgrade or mirror the tool feel free to leave a comment below.