Scumbag of the Year Award

I know its a bit early to give this one out, but there is a guy who has taken autoclick software to a new level. His new software, which goes by the name of Google Clique, is based on the Holland Engine - the mass email spam software.

• Holland Engine was the originaly written to allow spammers to conceal thier orginating IP from mailservers and to keep it from apearing in email headers.

• Holland Engine is the core of LincolnSX, the most powerfull mass-emailing software, running at rates of 5 Million emails per day per machine.
• Holland Engine will actually tunnel through the internet and connect to the desired IP address from, not your IP but rather from another, the one at the end of the tunnel. It is this tunneling that makes LincolnSX so valuable, and now we bring it to you with Google Clique.
• And for you technicaly challenged, NO, THIS IS NOT PROXY/SOCKS, and maybe you should be looking elsewhere if you are looking for such an amatuer solution.

Notice he is selling software for $1,000 down and is too damn lazy or cheap to hire a proof reader. Granted I am a horrible speller, but I am not trying to get you to spend a grand as down payment for software that steals. This is from his "interview" with Google.

I take this two mean one of two things, either they were feeling me out to see if this was for real or they are just oblivious as to how serious this software really is.

He also plans to launce a product by the first of April which goes by the name of Reaper. Reaper will aggressively autoclick on a competitors site to get them removed from Google AdSense program.

here is his WhoIs data.

I recently started posting again over at The Search Engine Journal. If you have not visited recently, The Search Engine Journal is working with the Kelsey Group to promote a new Paid Search Survey which your feedback will help improve. If you buy pay per click advertising, feel free to participate.

The Kelsey group is one of the main data aggregators of information about the growing local search industry, and this quick survey is looking more at general paid search practices.

Bonus: Getting Cheap Feedback

Survey Monkey is free for up to 100 responses a month. Their more full featured survey costs as low as $20 per month.

If you do not appreciate how valuable feedback is, or how hard it is to get feedback then juist look at how few comments are posted on this blog. Yesterday I had over 1,000 page views and 0 comments.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

What does that mean?

What does it mean to be ethical? Does that mean you produce the best results for clients? Does that you mean you follow all search engine guidelines? Is it possible to deliver the best returns to your customers at the best price while following all search engine guidelines?

Certainly ethical search engine optimization can not be a "yes" to all the above questions. That my friend would be a panacea.

When refering to search engine optimization ethical is an empty tag. Ethical search engine optimization is like the empty statement "Support the troops." It is the leaders and their policy that makes the war.

How can search engine optimization companies working for companies with giant sweat shops claim they are ethical?

I have never got a single page banned, but I am not a fan of the ethical tag. Neither is Chris Ridings:

I am not ethical within the search engine related industries because within those "ethical" is a tag. It's a tag that says "I'm better than them", but never goes on to say why. It's a tag that practically never comes with a definition of exactly what ethical means within the industry. Nowhere does it say in black and white everything that is and isn't allowed. Nowhere does it define the decision process for solving the gray areas.

One could say that the tag was meaningless, but that would be wrong. For within the search engine marketing world "ethical" itself stands amongst the kings of marketing speak.

Continue the discussion on ethical search engine optimization at SearchGuild.

Recently Yahoo! announced its Content Acquisition Program. Search Engine Watch did a review of the changes.

Yahoo! is to increase the size of its search database through the use of more aggressive crawling, Site Match, and human editors looking to find ways to include portions of the hidden web.

Yahoo! recently rewrote much of the Inktomi core which will allow them to

• better process 3 and 4 word querries

• easily change the algorithm in the future
• easily turn stemming on or off

AltaVista and AllTheWeb are now using the same indexes as Yahoo!, though they are still powered by their own algorithms.

When Yahoo! reviews a site for Site Match they store data that the page has been quality reviewed. These sites may receive a ranking boost for being reviewed. This move alone would make paid inclusion seem exceptionally biased. Yahoo! is offsetting this by randomly reviewing other sites in its index.

Many people are concerned as to how this website review boost will effect the purity of the index, but any bonus that may be given will not be too large or Yahoo! would earn a bad reputation and a bunch of negative press in a time period where they are trying to aggressively expand their distribution.

Yahoo! believes they can offset some of their additional charges by opperating more transparently with webmasters when issues related to search come up.

Some good info about SEM, websites, and the future of search.

Nick Scevak of Jupiter Media recently showed a yummie pie graph which showed

• 16% of businesses surveyed outsourced search engine marketing

• 15% do not do search engine marketing
• 69% do search engine marketing in house

This shows some amazing room for growth potential within the industry.
Nick also stated that his biggest fear with paid search is that we may have unrealistic expectations based on amazing performace and returns for early adoptors.

Cheryle Pingle of Range Online Media stated that a large portion of the current growth in search is due to the growth of the economy.

Michael Sack of Inceptor stated that of the term space the bulk of commerce comes from a few hundred thousand terms. He believes this year that large companies will begin to buy out markets to place them out of the reach of smaller businesses.

Geoff Ramsey of emarketer.com also had many yummie pie graphs. His graphs he showed at the SEMPO meeting showed that

• from 2000 - 2003 the search marketing industry has increased about 10 fold

• from 2002-2003 search engine marketing had a 145% year over year growth rate
• 22% of US households have broadband
• Yellow Pages currently make $14.3 billion annually, whereas paid search is currently only a 2.2 billion dollar industry.

Also at SEMPO Google announced that it is now supporting search engine marketing and sponsoring SEMPO as the rising complexity and competition in the industry is preventing many business owners from being able to functionally use the marketing systems.

Fredrick Marckini of iProspect quoted a stat from StatMarket which stated the average retail web site conversion rate is 1.8 - 2.0%

Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla also provided a few good link tips on the day. When buying links, 501 C organizations are a good place to look. He also stated that he has seen unlinked URLs in TXT files count as backlinks. Some other good link ideas offered by others include trade organizations, tools, and specialty directories.