Search Engine Optimization Eblog

Marketing Sherpa's readers have voted for their favorite blogs and podcasts and the results are in. Search Engine Roundtable was the winner in the search engine marketing realm.

The process used to evaluate the blogs can give some insight into what makes for a good blog. Voters were asked to take four factors into consideration:
#1. Personality
#2. Usefulness
#3. Design & readability
#4. Would you revisit?

The 3 ratings possible by voters were:
A. Excellent
B. Not Bad
C. Blah

I wish they had said which blog got the most "blah's"!

It's worth checking out the winners in each category for great resources on topics like public relations, advertising, marketing, etc.

View all of Marketing Sherpa's blog and podcast winners here, complete with links.

>>Why are we doing this? Simply stated, we always aim to improve our users' experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads. Have you ever searched on a keyword, found an ad that seemed to be exactly what you wanted, and then clicked on it only to find a site that had little to do with what you were searching for? It's not a great experience.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-addition-to-quality-score.html

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/12/09/yahoo-acquires-delicious/
Source: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4970

One of the highlights is that AOL will switch to using MSN search results. And MSN and AOL will form a joint venture to make a PPC (and I presume eventually a contextual ad network) engine. That PPC bit could be pretty tempting for buyers to have their ads appear on two good sized search portals.

Source: http://forums.spider-food.net/index.php?showtopic=3782&hl=

Should be an interesting merger. MSN is alot easier to get new sites into. AOL and MSN's combined over all search percentage will be higher than Yahoo's share.

Recently...

Google tweaked their algorithm and many sites stopped ranking for their own site name. I do work on a limited number of sites but have many friends who do a good amount of SEO work and have seen many sites disappear from the search results.

In this article Aaron Wall talks about the recent changes in the Google update. Both his site "seobook.com" and the site by seoguy "seoguy.com" have both dropped for the term SEO.

His observation goes over unatural link structures as one of the colprits. Aaron even goes over a list of what Google may have done. This of course is all hypothetical since no one but Google know what they did.

Here are some good quotes that have been taken from the article.

"Does My Site Deserve to Rank Well for "SEO"?
In many search algorithms it does, but relevancy is in the eye of the beholder.
For most optimists the genericness of the term means it does not have much value other than as a mantle piece."

"WWGD? What Would Google Do?
Google tells people to create content that is good for their users and they can't say that they are doing the same when they filter out tens of thousands of domains for their official site names. "

"My site has a bunch of naturally occuring links, and seeing how some other sites do more sitewide advertising than mine I did not think my site was prone to ranking fluctuations for its official name."

Read the article

The Street reports a downgrading of Google and Yahoo shareswhich slid today after a top analyst downgraded the shares and lowered his price targets on both.

RBC Capital Markets' Jordan Rohan cut his investment rating on the stocks to sector perform, saying channel checks show unexpected weakness in paid-search pricing. Rohan, who had previously rated Google a "top pick" and Yahoo! outperform, lowered his price target on Google to $200 from $250 and cut Yahoo!'s to $34 from $43.

The $200 price target reflects a multiple of 20.2 times RBC's forward estimate of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $2.6 billion and 39.3 times its forward earnings estimate.

"We believe this level of valuation is defensible and reasonable in the long term," the brokerage wrote. "However, the loss of momentum in the category, coupled with high investor expectations after two quarters of blowout earnings, creates a situation where investors are likely to apply a higher discount rate to future cash flows of Google."

A similar argument informed the Yahoo! downgrade

Article from Forumwatch.org

PageRank has suffered from many theoretical fallacies and problems. Presented in Search Engine Watch here are papers on the general theme of fixing pagerank.

The Effect of the Back Button in a Random Walk: Application for PageRank

Outlink Estimation For Pagerank Computation Under Missing Data

Weighted PageRank Algorithm

Trend Detection through Temporal Link Analysis

Web Structure, Dynamics and Page Quality

On the Temporal Dimension of Search

I was just sitting here drinking my coffee and I had a thought. Far from making sense of the web as they purport to do, Google is single handedly turning it into a bloated disaster zone.

First they spouted the content mantra. Webmasters diligenlty pumed out millions of pages to satisfy the hungry cralwers.

Then they started the anchor text numbers game. People then went out and built millions of sites especially to promote their other pages.

Now we have adsense. Pages are now being made from crap especially to make as many adsense impressions as possible.

Add to that buying pagerank, blog and guestbook spamming (all due to Google's algorythms) and the rest and I wonder if it's a master plan to take down the net :)

More... http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1349

This is just a new building block that lets software makers have better granularity--at a link level instead of a page level. And they can declare things about the authorship of a link that they couldn't before. Lots of people are using it to do smart things; for example, LiveJournal can recognize authenticated users and they won't get the nofollow tag. So it's not the case that every comment or trackback will be reduced in value. Last week, a software maker didn't have that ability, but now they do.

In other words, if you trust a user or like their comment, it won't be hard for them to get search juice from commenting on your posts. I believe that adding this flexibility for software makers will be a very helpful thing in the long term.

By: GoogleGuy at 01/19/2005 08:17 AM | http://battellemedia.com/archives/001197.php#9161