Yahoo Hijacked by Baidu?

With Baidu controlling the market-share in China for Search, it's quite surprising that they seem to be hijacking searches on Yahoo. In our office there's about 30 machines, and on the majority this seems to work. If you do a search on Yahoo.com(any search) you get redirected to Baidu (as shown below) and shown chinese results. You can also see when on http://search.yahoo.com everything is fine, but when you add http://search.yahoo.com/search to the end of the URL it redirects to Baidu. Here is the header info we picked up, showing a 301 to Baidu. Anyone have any news or thoughts on this?

MSN random SERPs generator

We had a recent Digital Marketing seo forum thread discussing bizarre, off-topic MSN referrals. Specifically the anime site had an MSN referral for “roulette” and importantly, the referring IP suggested that it was coming from with Microsoft.

At the time we put it the MSN referral to one-off and joked that MSN were experimenting with a new, random SERPS generator – but it’s happened again!

I got one of these wildly off-topic search engine hits myself for one of my sites http://www.projects-inprinciple.com/ which is essentially a little experiment in Adsense. The theme is project management, but I got an MSN search hit for "alprazolam", a stress relief drug e.g. a pharmacy hit for a project management site.

Here's the relevant part of the server log:

[24/Feb/2007:23:10:41 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6373 "http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=alprazolam&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; SV1)" 131.107.0.95

Like Blazingpie, when I followed the referral URL I saw an MSN Live Search error page; "the URL was not found". However, when I appended "&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Search" to the referring URL, it then it gave standard MSN SERPs.

Looking at the Whois information for that IP gives;
OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond

So now the team at Digital Marketing SA are wondering if there really is an MSN engineer working on the latest MSN SERPS algorithm. At the moment it seems to be throwing out random SERPS. The poor guy must be tearing his hair out, but we’ll give him a few tips.

When scoring a site, look at a site’s backlinks, especially the anchor text as well as relevancy of the external sites who are linking in. Then have a look at the site itself and look for “mentions” of the keyword phrase in page text, as well as in anchor text and other tags, and award a ranking score based on these. These are very basic criteria, easily manipulated, but they’ll produce much better SERPs than the ones you appear to be generating at the moment.

Meets our representatives in the SEO World Championships

As I mentioned in the previous post, we are being represented in this year’s SEO World Championships. The site Globalwarming Awareness2007 is owned and run by two South African female SEOs, Crystal Pretorius and myself, Karen Gaylard.

We started a little later than most of the entrants due to the time constraints of keeping our day jobs. But for both of us this is an opportunity to show the SEO community exactly what we are capable of.

The site is not just focusing on exploiting every trick in the book (especially not black hat tricks) to get ahead in this competition, but rather relying on the slow and steady theory. We’ll be building the site over the next few weeks, ensuring that we provide quality content that will make the site last beyond the competition close date.

A realy nice feature on our site is the fun addictive game Globalwarming Awareness2007 Gas Gobbler game.

Early next week we will put up our news section, "Globalwarming Awareness2007 News", where we’ll be posting articles surrounding the effect global warming has been having on earth. Should you want to notify us of any news we may have miss, feel free you use our contact form to get in touch with us.

Would you like to help us out? Then please add our link to your site or just spread the word about the site. You can use the link text below or add a link to any of our deeper pages.

<a href=”http://www.awareness2007--globalwarming.org/” title=”global warming awareness 2007”>Globalwarming Awareness2007</a>

SEO World Championship

You’ve probably hear the buzz lately about this year’s SEO World Championship. And yes we have entered our team Karen Gaylard and Crystal Pretorius with their site Globalwarming Awareness2007. The competition was arranged by leading Swedish SEO company GetUpdated, who is owned by Eastpoint.

The focus of the competition is to encourage the improvement of SEO and grow the “invention level” of Search Engine Optimistion. They want this to be seen as a serious annual competition, and how can you not take them seriously with prizes such as a Citroen C2, a Caribbean Cruise and a Plasma TV.

The rules of the competition are simple:

• The site needs to include a text link or a banner with or without a link to the SEO World Championship site.
• Yours site needs valid contact information.
• Your official domain cannot be older than the 15th January 2007.
• And most importantly your site needs to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The scoring will work on a points system. You need to rank for the keyword “Globalwarming Awareness2007” in Google.com Yahoo.com and MSN.com (in no particular order). Only the sites found in the top ten results of these search engines will get points. If you rank 1st you get 10 points, if you rank 10th you get 1 point. So the highest possible score is 30 points.

Good luck to everyone!

Google FeedFetcher

Some of you may already know about Google’s FeedFetcher, but I thought it might be useful to those who’ve seen it listed as a User Agent in their logs but don’t know what it is.

Released in 2005, Google’s Feed Fetcher is a web bot that is activated by a human action.

FeedFetcher allows you to add your feed to the search results for Google Reader and visitors to add your feed to their Google Personalized Homepage.

It’s quite simple to ensure that your feed is part of this index. All you need to do is add a <link> tag to the header of your webpage to enable the feed autodiscovery.
The <link> tag for your Atom feed will look like this:

• <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.domain.com/atom.xml" />

Or if you use an RSS feed your <link> tag will look like this:

• <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.domain.com/rss.xml" />

If you are using blogger.com these links will be added for you automatically, which has implications if you are using a private blog. Jessica Cutler is facing a lawsuit of $20 million after her "Washingtonienne" blog featuring lurid details of her sex life with six law makers was discovered by a Washington journalist and made public.

Also bear in mind that Feedfetcher will retrieve feeds at the request of human users who have added them to their Google Personalized Homepage or Google Reader. Unfortunately because it acts as a direct agent for human users it will ignore your robots.txt file.

So is Google FeedFetcher trying to download files from your “secret” server? If you have a problem like this, it is likely that a request came from a user who knows about your private blog, or it could have been typed it in by mistake. Google do offer a variety of ways to prevent this, for more details you can read their detailed instructions.

An advantage to Google FeedFetcher is that it conserves bandwidth by making requests for common feeds only once for multiple users. How often does Google’s FeedFetcher retrieve your feed? Well apparently on average it shouldn't retrieve more than once every hour. More frequently updated sites may be refreshed more often.

As to be expected Google FeedFetcher’s IP address changes every so often. So if you want to filter your log files you can identify their user-agent at:
(+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

For any questions on Google FeedFetcher, you may leave a comment here.

More information can also be fournd here: Google FeedFetcher

MSN giving away laptops to bloggers

We hear that Microsoft are giving away laptops to bloggers reviewing the Windows Vista operating system, which becomes widely available in South Africa this month. These aren't bottom of the range laptops either; Acer Ferrari 1000, no less, with Windows Vista Ultimate pre-installed.

We at Digital Marketing pride ourselves on our integrity and Editorial independence. We have been using advance copies of MS Windows Vista and we would say with hesitation that:

• Windows Vista is a super operating system
• It's well worth upgrading from Win XP to Windows Vista
• Windows Vista is a far better O/S than that awful Mac OS X rubbish
• It's great that MSN Live search is an integral part of the O/S

Bill - if you're reading this and if you've got any of those laptops left, be sure to pop one over to Digital Marketing. The postage to SA isn't too bad, but you can send it collect if you like!

South African Online Industry Summit

South Africa's Traffic Synergy, an affilliate network, have announced a 3 day online marketing summit in Johannesburg. Topics covered include

• South Africa's Online Landscape
• The South Africa Online User
• The Changing Face of Media in South Africa
• The Electronic & Communications Transactions ACT
• Online Media Law
• Web PR and Business Blogging
• The Challenges of Selling Online Space
• Paid Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
• Web 2.0 and the growth of Online Social Communities
• Internet Marketing Skills and Recruitment

and there are many other topics covered in the South African Online Industry Summit, which runs from February 7-9 2007. If you're involved in selling online in South Africa, or are looking to move into internet marketing, it's definitely worth considering going to this summit. The cost is pretty reasonable too at around 8,000 Rand including lunch, and there are discounts available. Take a look - The South Africa Online Industry Summit.