Nevertheless, we do like to drop in from time to time and see what’s going on with Microsoft’s newest venture into the search world – Bing. It’s been almost a year since Bing hit the information superhighway and while it’s enjoyed some growth, it’s nowhere near taking over Google’s top position.

But one thing that will help SEOs understand how Bing works that was just released is an advanced query guide.  This guide basically consists of advanced search operators webmasters can use in their site’s coding to help their rankings in the fledgling search engine.

One of the biggest advanced search operators Bing made public was the norelax operator, which automatically implements relaxcount for queries that are five words or longer. Basically what that means is any words past the fifth word in a query will not necessarily appear in the search results.

Other advanced search queries include: AND:, contains:, feed:, filetype:, language:, noalter:, URL: and more.

Check out this quick post on Microsoft’s technical site which includes a list and description for each search operator along with a quick forum on the topic from WebMasterWorld.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse for the authorities so it’s important we’re all on guard so we don’t find ourselves in any trouble.

Privacy bill could mean increased disclosure requirements, privacy protections

One idea floating around Congress that’s seeing traction is an Internet consumer privacy bill being proposed by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), chair of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology & the Internet.

Rep. Boucher’s bill is more of a privacy bill for consumers. Its main target is online advertisers who target consumers through behavioral advertising. Many online advertisers – including Facebook with their new ‘like’ features – examine behavior patterns online to target advertising to relevant parties, which in turn increases conversions.

Behavioral technology tracks a user’s searches, how long the stay on a page and even the sites they visit. Data is then taken by advertisers to establish behavior patterns and online demographics.

Web advertisers fear this bill will require web users to opt-in, causing them to lose an important tool in how they target potential customers. However, Rep. Boucher says he supports an opt-out option where web users can choose whether they want their information shared or not.

“If I were [a publisher or advertiser], I would want Internet users to have a sense that their experience is more secure, that they know what information is collected about them, and they be given much more control. They will be more trusting of electronic commerce. . . .it’s good for business,” says the representative from Virginia.

Whatever happens, there will certainly be increased regulation like new disclosure requirements and legal forms indicating how a site tracks data and uses it.

Financial Reform Bill grants new powers to FTC

Tucked inside the financial reform bill passed by the House last November was a provision expanding the Federal Trade Commission’s powers to allow them to impose civil penalties on companies engaging in “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practices.

Since the mid-1970’s, the agency had to hear public testimony and a congressional review had to occur before any penalties could be imposed on the business. With this new power, the agency will basically decide for itself with no public scrutiny what constitutes unfair advertising practices.

Ad industry groups fear this could lead to the FTC acting as an “unelected legislature,” basically giving it free rein over regulating Internet commerce.

The financial reform bill is currently being debated between the two chambers. The House passed its version late last year and the Senate this past April. Both chambers are reconciling their differences, which will need to pass. President Obama has indicated he will sign the bill when it arrives on his desk.

This bill seems more dangerous than Rep. Boucher’s privacy bill since it directly expands an agency’s enforcement authority.

Appointees to the FTC are chosen by the President so vesting this much authority in a centralized executive authority could be dangerous from a checks and balances perspective.

Boucher’s privacy bill is understandable in a big way but it will certainly add new requirements for webmasters and SEO marketers. The combination of the two could be a double whammy for any of us marketing our businesses online.

Stay tuned…

We spend a lot of time here at the search engine optimization e-blog exploring the best and most legit ways of doing this.

One strategy of building links budding web entrepreneurs can consider is buying an abandoned website that has an existing cache of inbound links already. This can be a quick way to jumpstart your link-building efforts.

It’s been estimated that nearly half of businesses started in the U.S. fail within four years. In the old days, this exclusively meant a brick-and-mortar storefront was abandoned, leaving the real estate for someone else to pick up and use for productive purposes. In the online world, the site owner may keep his “online real estate” around in hopes of making it work one day.

These kinds of businesses or their website more specifically, are ripe for the picking at rock bottom prices. As far as cash outlay, this option may be more expensive than other link building strategies but the time you will save will make up for it. As the old saying goes – “time is money.”

One of the easiest ways to find these link jewels is to do a search on Google for outdated copyrights. For example: “copyright 2003” + your keywords

One of the easiest ways to spot an abandoned website is to find one whose copyright date is several years old. Sites that are consistently maintained will change that date each year but if it’s abandoned, the copyright year may be from 5+ years ago. Nothing says a site has given up like an old copyright date.

Another way to find abandoned or underperforming websites you can pick up for cheap is to type in “temporarily down for maintenance” or “under construction” plus your keywords. This is another indication that a site could be abandoned.

Once you locate a potential site, make sure its domain hasn’t expired. If a domain expires, Google wipes their entire history and infrastructure clean. Meaning, the value of any links and PageRank is reduced to zero so it would be a waste of time to purchase it for link building purchases.

We’ll have more on how to effectively build links through purchasing abandoned domains. Check back with the search engine optimization e-blog for more on this and other tips on building search engine rankings and effectively marketing your small business online.

For any of us who spend our time trying to obtain high search engine rankings, this surely threw a wrench in the gears. How would we know if our efforts are working if everyone was getting personalized results based on prior searches, their location, etc. In one respect, personalized search is nothing new. Google has returned results based on geographic specific elements for a long time now.

Now that you have to opt-out of personalized search (which most people have no idea about), search results may be slightly skewed. Meaning, if you visited a website, your browser was likely stamped with a 180 day cookie that will highlight any related keywords pertaining to that site. So the next time you do a search using those keywords, the site you visited will appear first rather than one that’s more deserving.

While this may not be a problem for most people, SEOs and webmasters like you and me want to see search engine results how they are and not skewed results pages based on some personalization.

So how can I see raw search engine results without personalization?

Keep reading for two ways you can shut off Google personalization in your web browser so you can see the raw results for particular keywords you’re targeting.

Option 1 – Add the search operator “&pws=0” to the end of the URL of your search query. Type in the keywords into the search bar like normal then click search. When that results page appears, simply add the above code into the URL bar on your browser. This will return raw results with no personalization.

Option 2 – Scroll down to the bottom of a search engine results page and click the “view customizations” link. Next, click the option to view your keyword search “without these improvements” to remove personalization and any cookies from your browser.

After doing one of two of these, you should be able to see non-personalized results for the keyword in question. Repeat for other searches to obtain raw search results. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any permanent shut-off switch for this feature but if we stumble into one, we’ll let you know.

These strategies can help you get the raw deal on how well your search engine optimization efforts are working. Personalized search isn’t affecting search results too much, the best we can tell, but shutting it off entirely will certainly give you the best picture on how well your efforts are working.

Normal crawling is reliable – just not quick enough sometimes…very inconsistent in other words.

Being reliable is great but if you’re 5 minutes late for the train, all the reliability in the world won’t matter if you’re inconsistent – show up early some days and late on others.

So, what can you do to get new content indexed faster in the search engines?

Continue reading for four tips on getting your site content indexed faster and check out the video below for more.

Update your XML sitemap and “ping” Google, etc.

Your XML sitemap is basically a file containing links to all of the pages on your site. Unlike an HTML sitemap, it is only visible to the search engines. Updating this file with links to new pages provides the search engine spider a one-stop place for finding everything on your site. So to get indexed faster, update your XML sitemap when you post new content. But instead of waiting for the spider to come, ping them through Google’s Webmaster Tools and let them know you have updated your file. If you ping, they will come.

Use Pubsubhubbub protocol

Pubsubhubbub protocol is a server-to-server web hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol that you can place in your site’s coding. You can create your own public or private hub that news aggregators like Google Reader, Friend Feed and Feedburner can use to find your new content. You can plug-in your Wordpress blog utility and Superfeeder to automate this process. Whenever you post new content to a PSH-compatible site, these aggregators will immediately be notified of your site’s new content.

Create a “tweet” on Twitter

We recently discussed this on SEOe – Can Twitter Get a Site Indexed in the Search Engines All by Itself? While it’s not a long term solution, “tweets” on Twitter can provide your site that initial boost to get the spiders to come and index your new content. Considering Google is now indexing “tweets,” simply posting an announcement of your new content will immediately be picked up by the search engine.

Ping-o-matic

Ping-o-matic is a service that allows you to “ping” a bunch of different web services and notify them of new content on your site, much like ringing an alarm bell to alert the world to your new stuff. Ping-o-matic is linked up with different blog directories and news aggregators like PostRank, News Gator, Bloglines, Google Blog Search and more.

It’s to your advantage to find different ways to get your site’s content crawled and indexed as quickly as possible. Your competition is likely working hard to do the same thing so you don’t want to be passive and think that great content alone will bring home the bacon. If a competitor is working hard to get their content indexed quickly, they will leave you in the dust quicker than you can blink.

Check out this video SEOMoz produced on the heels of the SMX Advanced conference for more.

Topping the list – Facebook with 540 million unique visitors in the month of April, which translates to 35.2% of people on the Internet!

The top ten most visited sites include:

1. Facebook
2. Yahoo!
3. Live.com
4. Wikipedia
5. Msn.com
6. Microsoft
7. Blogspot.com
8. Baidu.com
9. Qq.com
10. Mozilla.com

Websites on the list come from a diverse range of industries and specialties – social networks, other search portals, news and information, ecommerce and more.

Google made the list as part of its Ad Planner, a tool to help businesses effectively use their pay-per-click advertising services. While we don’t spend too much time talking about PPC here, it does have one main advantage when you’re first getting online – it gets your fledgling site in front of millions of users!

Aside from PPC though, this list is good information for any search engine optimization pro or group. Getting links from sites like these can give your site a powerful boost in the search engines. Ones farther down the list might be a little easier to obtain links from.

Having more links to your site boosts your site rankings and in turn, brings in more site visitors and revenues. Now with millions perhaps billions of websites out there, you may spend a lifetime trying to get on a list like this but don’t worry, you can certainly use lists like this to maximize your online stature, site visits and ultimately sales.

Check out the list for more detailed information on visitors, unique page views, the other top 1000 sites and more.

Caffeine is a change in the index, or infrastructure of Google. Unlike the “Mayday” update, it’s not changing the algorithm in any way…it’s simply changing how sites are indexed on their servers. Since content on the web is blossoming and getting more complex, Google felt it needed its index to evolve with it so it could return the most relevant, up-to-date results to its searchers.

In a nutshell, the following are the main things you need to know about Caffeine:

• It’s NOT a ranking change. You shouldn’t see any major ranking changes from this
• It DOES change how Google indexes pages – speed, scalability and how deep they can get into a site
• It should now deliver fresher results
• Search results should go deeper over time

Before, the old index consisted of several layers, each of which was updated at different times and frequencies. When refreshing a layer, Google would have to analyze the entire web which caused a delay between when new content was discovered and when it was made available to a searcher.

With Caffeine, Google will now analyze the Internet in small portions and continuously update the search index on a global basis. As the spider finds new pages or information, it can automatically be added to the index, making it available immediately.

Caffeine can index pages on an enormous scale – its server takes up over 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database. It adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes a day. To compare, you would need 625,000 of the largest I-pods to store that much information.

As with anything, there is some controversy as to the effects of this. Some comments on different forums discussing the new infrastructure claim Google is making a smart move, staying ahead of the bell curve when it comes to the advancement of websites.

However, others worry about spam and how this could be a great boon to spammers. Since Google is striving to post the most current results, spammers could take advantage of this by copying other sites’ content. Some have even said this could lead to Google’s demise and only gave them 6 months!!

Either way, we will stay on top of how Caffeine is working and its effect on websites and web searchers. If it is a bad move on Google’s part, we will certainly witness a decline in their search volume.

In the mean time, see Google’s spam chief at the recent SMX Advanced conference explaining Caffeine in this video below.

Now Google has confirmed the “Mayday” update with Matt Cutts saying at Google I/O that “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times (2009) which is why many veteran SEOs recommend you not get too focused on specific ranking factors, which puts you at the mercy of these types of tweaks.

Every so often though, Google makes a big enough change in their algorithm that it gets noticed by people who usually don’t spend much time thinking about it.

In regard to the Mayday change, Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land prodded Cutts for more on the specifics of their change. He stated that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. This seems to imply that sites seeing less traffic are still getting their pages indexed but are not ranking as high as they were before. Google’s changes seem to only be affecting “long-tail” traffic which generally comes from longer searches that few people do. But when you add them all up, it could be a lot.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, like an ecommerce site. These pages generally don’t have many links to them and buried deep within a site. They also may not have substantial amounts of unique content on them.

These observations and admissions regarding the Mayday update confirm one thing for sure – it’s certainly beneficial to create unique product descriptions for items you sell on your site (B2C companies). Simply using a manufacturer’s generic description could be causing you to lose rankings for your product pages.

What can I do if I have pages affected by the Mayday update?

Creating compelling content and attracting links to these pages can be difficult. The best we can suggest is to isolate the pages/keyword phrases you’re experiencing a drop in. Do a search using those phrases and see what sites are ranking on page 1 and see what they do. Don’t copy them verbatim but get an idea of what they may be doing that you’re not, or vice versa.

We spoke the other day about whether Twitter is a good tool for getting your site indexed and ranked. While it can provide you with a good boost initially, you have to sustain that energy by following up with a good crawlable site that includes compelling, keyword-rich content.

So how can I optimize my ‘tweets’ for search that can translate into a good boost for my search engine rankings?

Continue reading for 5 steps you can use to optimize your ‘tweets’ for search.

1. Front Load Tweets

Treat your Twitter post like it’s a Meta description tag. You only have 140 characters to make your splash so be sure you put the most important part of your ‘tweet’ at the beginning.

2. Anchor Text

Be sure and get your anchor text into the URL you’re linking to from your ‘tweet.’ If you’re using a shortening service like bit.ly or j.mp (uri’s), use the custom naming options to get your anchor text in there. Use hyphens to separate words but don’t overdo it!

3. Custom Named Uri’s

When using a shortening service like bit.ly, you can take the first three words of your page’s title and use them as a custom uri, if appropriate. Start your ‘tweet’ with the URI and lead into the rest of the title and/or sentence, like a precursor. You can also include the URI in the middle or end of a sentence – it all depends on the document title.

4. Retweets

You can also recycle old ‘tweets’ that are still relevant. Front load retweets and unlike original ‘tweets,’ place credit at the end rather than the beginning. Other than that, treat retweets like you would a regular ‘tweet.’

5. Retweet Scrubbing

Go through your ‘tweets’ every so often and fix any case issues or typos you may find. You can even edit the title if the ‘tweet’s’ originator changed the title based on the destination document. This change fragments the meaning of a ‘tweet’ in some ways. Twitter’s new retweet feature prevents this from happening but doesn’t allow scrubbing.

These are just a handful of tips to get you started on harnessing Twitter to boost your site’s indexing and ranking potential. You would be surprised at what you can do in 140 characters or less!

So what is Google Caffeine?

Caffeine was formerly kept secret by Google and only limited details were released to the public last August. The search engine characterizes it as the “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.” It appears this new architecture includes crawling, indexing and ranking changes and that it’s not simply an addition or change to their existing infrastructure but rather a complete overhaul.

Based on Google’s announcements regarding Caffeine, we can best surmise that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more effectively, determining reputation and authority and returning relevant results quicker…however, Google’s spam chief Matt Cutts says the changes are “primarily in how we index.”

Most of these changes do not affect the user-interface (what you see) very much but you may have noticed some subtle changes in a search engine results page in the last few months. Take this search – “buffy the vampire slayer” for example – and how it returns video and news results midway down the page.

If we use the existing infrastructure, Google displays news results at top, video in the middle and images at the bottom.

Google’s new infrastructure has undoubtedly caused quite the stir in the online world, with webmasters and SEOs scrambling to try and understand how this will impact their rankings…along with many a speculative blog post about how to best optimize to the new changes.

In the end though, it still comes down to having the right foundational elements – a crawlable site infrastructure and compelling content – maintaining these will certainly keep you ahead of the curve.

We’ll keep you posted on Caffeine and its effects on optimizing websites for the search engines…in the mean time, keep creating compelling content for your target audience and be sure your site’s architecture is setup so search engine spiders can effectively crawl your site.