Digital Marketing SEO Blog

Yahoo Hijacked by Baidu?

2007-10-18T08:48:00.000Z

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

2007-03-15T02:56:00.000Z

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

2007-01-26T03:01:00.000Z

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

2007-01-25T14:55:00.000Z

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

2007-01-12T08:51:00.000Z

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

2006-12-28T14:29:00.000Z

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

2006-12-21T07:15:00.000Z

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.

MSN penalising for non-relevant reciprocal links

2006-11-08T10:30:00.000Z

Has your website experienced a slip in rankings in MSN recently? This may be due to the relevance of your reciprocal links. Donna Fontenot (otherwise known as DazzlinDonna in various search engine forums) reported in her blog SEO Scoop that MSN are apparently penalising websites for non-relevant links.

In Donna’s post she speaks of a friend whose website has been apparently penalised in MSN. This friend had correspondence with MSN for several months to find out why his website was penalised. After months of only receiving auto generated e-mails he finally made human contact with MSN, who alluded to a probable issue with a links exchange directory he had on his site.

Donna’s friend eventually got a clearer response from MSN. MSN stated that his website was acquiring links either through posting or exchanging non-relevant links, which were considered spam.

Personally I think handing out penalties to websites with non-relevant links is a bit excessive. And how strictly do MSN rate the relevancy of your links? Can an SEO website only link to other SEO websites? Or can they link to hosting, web design and directory websites?

Donna is well respected in the SEO community and I greatly admire her myself for being a female SEO. In South Africa our SEO community is growing steadily, but we are unfortunately still lacking in female SEOs. Read Donna’s original post including the snippet from the e-mail that MSN sent her friend: “MSN support rep on link exchanges and penalties”.

Mobile web usage slows in USA

2006-10-31T07:20:00.000Z

Mobile Internet is something that many people expect to catch on globally, but especially in the USA in the very near future. Well, the latest reports indicate otherwise as according to a "Mobile Tracking Study" by comScore, the use of Mobile Internet is far more widespread in European countries than in the USA.

Percent wise, 29% of all European Internet users use mobile services on a frequent basis to access the Internet, while only 19% of Internet users here in the United States use mobile devices to access the Internet. Statistics per country: Germany (34%); Italy (34%); France (28%); Spain (26%); and the UK (24%).

Bob Ivins, Managing Director of comScore Europe said, "The uptake of mobile usage started sooner [in Europe] and is more evolved than in the USA. The ability to have a mobile phone carrier in the UK and fly to France and use the mobile phone, those connectivity walls broke down sooner than in the USA."

The study also find that while in the USA, major Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo are visited most frequently using mobile services here in the USA, these portals make up just 34% of all web sites visited using mobile browsers from European countries: 34% in Italy, with smaller audiences in the UK (31); Germany (29%); Spain (28%); and France (24%).

"Across Europe, the portal doesn't translate well, and carriers have created mobile-specific sites," said Ivins. "I think people in the USA are familiar with the concept of a portal…and some of the portals in the USA are pushing content suitable for a mobile device."

The comScore research study is an “ongoing mobile tracking study” that is studying the differences between how Europeans and Americans use mobile web browsers.

To find out more on mobile web usage join our SEO forum or leave a comment here. Also try our articles page for more great resources such as this article on "How to Optimise your Web Site for Mobile Browsers".

Take control over page snippets

2006-10-11T08:35:00.000Z

Did you know that you do have some control of the snippets that appear under your page’s link in Google SERPs? Snippets, or otherwise known as descriptions, can have a huge impact on whether an internet user clicks on your link in the SERPs.

A snippet of text appears under the blue links in a search engine’s list of results for a particular query, as seen in the image below.

Google uses a number of sources to generate snippets, such as page content, references to that page from other sites, the Open Directory Project and META description tag. Unfortunately we’ve even seen Google using menu lists and other navigational links as snippets, which looks unattractive. So you can see just how important in SEO to monitor your site’s snippets.

The snippet is usually taken from the description META tag embedded in the HTML document, but hidden from human visitors. Very often the keywords used in the original search will appear as bold letters in the URL and snippet. The description tag will take the form:

It’s important that you write a meaningful sentence and don’t keyword stuff descriptions because many canny search engine users will skip over a spammy looking description to a site ranked below yours if their snippet looks more relevant. A spammy description is unlikely to help improve your rankings, but it could hurt your click through rate.

Another consequence of having a spammy, keyword stuffed description is that a search engine can pick it up as being unhelpful and decide to build a snippet from text on the page. In other words you control over the displayed snippet. We’ve seen that this can also happen if you build a site with identical descriptions on every page.

It’s possible that if you duplicate spammy, meaningless descriptions (and titles), your site could lose a certain amount of “trust” in the search engines, so it’s important you pay attention to these tags.

There are many SEOs and web site owners that wouldn’t want Google to show snippets from the Open Directory Project. Good news is that Google (but not all search engines) supports a META tag that directs search engines to not use the Open Directory Project for snippets.

Remember that these META tags will only take affect once Google (or other search engines) crawls that page and refreshes their index.

Just add this META tag to your pages: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" />

Or to direct only Google’s Googlebot: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP" />

This article is based on a post by Vanessa Fox at Google Webmaster Central.

Join our SEO forum to help on maneuvering you web site through the SERPs.

SEO hell - the Supplemental Index

2006-10-05T14:24:00.000Z

There are lots of people in various SEO forums are asking "why has my site gone supplemental?" in other words removed from Google's main index and put into a backup one. The supplemental index is only used if Google can't find enough results from their main index. That often (but not always these days) means a huge drop in rankings in Google.

Google's parallel, supplemental index used to be made up of stale pages, and particularly "dropped" pages which had links from the site removed. Since BigDaddy, we've noticed increasingly that many otherwise apparently healthy sites have pages that are falling into the supplemental index. We see this especially in low PR sites that have made major navigational changes, such as renaming pages, changing link structure and so on. It's also common in sites with little text content and have duplicate or near duplicate page titles and Meta descriptions.

A highly respected person in the SEO community said that "supplemental pages are like a cancer for a web site". In other words, once a few pages from a site go supplemental there's a knock-on effect. Maybe it's because these supplemental pages don't pass back any PR to the site, and it sinks even further causing more pages to go supplemental and so on, like a chain reaction.

In any case, it's clear that anyone doing SEO has to check their sites regularly using Google's site: operator to look for pages that are going supplemental. If you see supplemental pages, be sure to act quickly, checking their titles and descriptions to make sure they are unique and perhaps increasing the text content on those pages. We’ve also found that getting a fresh links to a supplemental page can help get it back. It doesn't have to be an off-site backlink; a link from your blog entry will often do the trick.

You should also avoid any on-site changes such as renaming pages, moving or deleting links if you have a low PR site. By all means add fresh content though.

If your site does end up in supplemental hell and your rankings have dropped considerably, we've found that a high PR7 link can get your pages indexed again within a week. Such a link would cost around $30 a month. A relevant link will be the best but might be more expensive in some markets. However, it wouldn't have to be a relevant link if you just wanted to get your pages back in Google's main index.

If you do want to make major site changes and move content to new pages then it's vital that you use HTACCESS to 301 redirect the old page to the new one. Deleting the old page and updating the link alone will probably not be enough to avoid one of the pages going supplemental.

Even if you do a 301 redirect, this may not help because of the timing. It's possible that the new page will be updated and indexed before Google has figured out that the old page has been moved. You'll then be in a situation where you have two pages with the same content, and if you have moved or renamed a large enough number of pages simultaneously it could trip a filter that would land your site in the supplemental index.

If you've had pages going into Google supplemental index, we'd love to hear your experiences and perhaps you could post a link to your site in our forum for an SEO site review with as much background information as possible.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Code of Conduct

2006-09-28T14:36:00.000Z

Remember a time when SEO was little more than optimising your Meta tags and including keywords in your content? Back then online marketing was not very competitive and there where very few SEO companies. But now much of the industry is cutthroat and just about everyone with a website is a Search Engine Optimiser. Unfortunately, due to the now highly competitive nature of online marketing, many SEO companies, individual Search Engine Optimisers or website owners are turning to unethical tactics to get ahead of the game. It is the Search Engine Optimisers duty to represent a client honestly and reliably in any SEO campaign. Unethical SEO methods may bring in short term results but ultimately it will harm a website’s rankings, possibly leading to a removal of a website from a search engine’s index. Anyone with a website is strongly advised to read Google’s Advice for Webmasters before employing an SEO company who claim to use ethical practices. These guidelines, however, don’t form the basis of an SEO code of conduct so we’ve written our own:

Using cloaking tactics are a sure way to get your site penalised by search engines. Cloaking is basically implementing methods to show search engines a different version of a page than that shown to your visitors. Search engines can now easily detect cloaking so it wouldn’t be worth it.
Dubious redirects aren’t liked by both search engines and directories alike. This will most likely cause your website directory listings to be deleted.
Don’t create “doorway” pages just for fooling search engines. This is also seen a cloaking and search engines will detect this and penalise your website.
Creating multiple domains, subdomains or pages with duplicate content will almost definitely result in a duplication penalty for your website in Google. When you have a duplicate content penalty, Google will de-index your website’s pages. However, having the same content on www.example.com and www.example.co.za and other top level domains shouldn’t be a problem according to Google’s Matt Cutts.
Do provide unique and quality content through out your website. There are too many “junk sites” (such as affiliate programs) websites out there with no original content. So if you are part of an affiliate program, then give your visitors a reason to come back, give them quality content.
Don’t add pages to a website that contain spyware.

SEO is not only just about your clients’ websites but also about the clients themselves. Here is our code of conduct regarding clients:

Don’t take on competing clients. This can lead to a potential conflict of interest for you. Competing clients are likely targeting the same keywords, and an ethical SEO would not put one client’s interest over the others for any reason.
Do put your client’s interest above your own. Don’t sneak your or other client’s links into a client’s website.
Don’t take risks with a client’s website. Don’t use unethical (refer to list above) tactics to give a client short term gains, as the website will be penalised by search engines.
Do be considerate and cooperate with a client even after they no longer use your services e.g. had over passwords and other information pertaining to their website.
Don't use any easy options to get backlinks for your client. Never use automated software to spam blogs, forums, and guestbooks. This will cause distress to people who are potential customers of your client and damage their reputation. Instead take a few minutes to contribute and you’ll likely get a better, quality backlink for your client.

How to embed HTML into your Blog

2006-09-18T02:32:00.000Z

Can't embed HTML tags in a blog? Ever tried to show a piece of HTML code in your blog but it won’t appear when published? Follow this step-by-step guide on how to write HTML code in a blog: For an example let’s use the HTML tag <title>. You can also use larger pieces of HTML. Open Macromedia Dreamweaver or any other similar website development software. I show you how to do this in Dreamweaver:

Create a new basic HTML page.
Click on the “Design” tab.

Type in or paste the HTML your want to appear as text (<title>).
Click on the “Code” tab. The tag will now appear as: <title>
Create a new blog post (in this case we use www.blogger.com/).
Edit the post in the “Edit HTML” window.
Copy the code shown in Dreamweaver’s “Code” tab and paste it into the blog window.

Now you can publish your blog post and your readers will be able to view your code example.

Using RSS Feeds for content syndication

2006-09-05T14:40:00.000Z

One of the great ways to improve your website’s visibility is to publish and syndicate your optimised content. This is done using a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. Lockergnome, an online newsletter, reportedly have a preference of 5:1 for RSS subscription rather than e-mail subscriptions. And their not the only ones. Many of the leading online newspapers are showing increases in their RSS Feed subscriptions. And as you will know, increased subscriptions leads to increased visibility & traffic, which will result in increased profits. With an RSS Feed, the content publisher places a feed link on their site which a user can register with aggregator software on their own computer. The aggregator software can be set to retrieve new content periodically. The advantages of RSS Feeds are that the user will be notified on new content instead of manually checking for it, and they can be automatically downloaded. It can be really simple to set up your own RSS Feed, especially if you already know HTML. Let us create an RSS Feed file step by step:

Your fist line needs to be an XML declaration.
Next you need to open the RSS tag and channel tag. Your feed content will go between these tags, and above the closing RSS and channel tags.
Now you can put in all the information about your RSS Feed. The LastBuildDate tag will be the date/time the feed was last updated.
After the RSS Feed information you need to list each RSS item. The example here is for one item. If you have more than one, put each item underneath the “” tag.
To finish off you just need to close off the RSS tag and channel tag.
Once this file is uploaded you can use Feed Validator to double check it.

For more information of RSS Feeds, join our SEO forum for advice.

Googlebot Behaviour

2006-08-28T15:21:00.000Z

Ever had trouble understanding Googlebot’s behaviour or how to best implement a robots.txt file? A week ago, Vanessa Fox answered questions about Googlebot’s behaviour on Webmaster Central. Here are a few of the things I learnt. If your site is down for maintenance you may be worried that Googlebot will index your “Down for Maintenance” page. Let Googlebot know to rather try the pages later by simply configuring your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) instead of 200 status (successful). While some have trouble getting Googlebot to crawl their site at all others may suffer from their site being crawled too much. If you are the later, Vanessa Fox says you just need to contact Google and they will make sure they don’t overwhelm your server. She mentioned that Google are looking on bringing out a new feature on webmaster tools that’ll allow you to provide input on your crawl rate. Should you want to prevent Googlebot from crawling a number of pages, place those pages in a single directory (if possible) and use a robots.txt file to block those pages. You can also use META tags but those are for single pages. Any questions on Google’s behaviour? Join our SEO forum. You can read the full Q & A post by Vanessa Fox on Webmaster Central.

Best Affiliate Marketing For Your Needs

2006-08-25T14:23:00.000Z

Today Affiliate Marketing programs are more popular than ever before. I believe the success of Affiliate Marketing is due to the win-win nature of the program for both merchant and the affiliate. For the merchant, Affiliate Marketing is a more affordable way to advertise their products direct to their target audience. As for the affiliate, they can earn money easily by just adding a link to the merchant on their site. Now there are thousands of different types of Affiliate programs out there today. But which is best for you? Let us take a look at a few of the most popular Affiliate programs. Pay Per Click (PPC) PPC Affiliate Marketing has been around for years and is probably the most used. The affiliate will place a link on their site to the merchant’s site. Every time a visitor clicks on that link, the affiliate will be paid a certain amount. Even though the typical PPC fee is small, this is a good way for smaller Affiliate websites to earn money. Pay Per Performance (PPP) In PPP Affiliate Marketing, the affiliate is only paid if the visitor performs a certain action such as buying a product or filling out a form. This form of Affiliate Marketing is beneficial to the merchant as he doesn’t need to worry about click fraud. The affiliate also has a chance of earning a greater amount than with PPC, as they could be paid a percentage fee of the product sold. Pay Per Sale (PPS) PPS Affiliate Marketing is an off shoot of PPP. This is where the affiliate is paid fee (either set or percentage) for every purchase a referred visitor makes. Pay Per Lead (PPL) PPL Affiliate Marketing is also an off shoot of PPP, and similar to PPS. This method is usually used by merchants in finance or insurance field. With PPL, an affiliate is paid a set fee for every visitor that results in the company growing. Usually this is when a visitor completes an application form. Single Tier Affiliate Marketing All the above Affiliate Marketing types fall into the Single Tier Affiliate Marketing type. Two / Multi Tier Affiliate Marketing Two Tier Affiliate Marketing is not just when the affiliate (let’s call him affiliate 1) is paid for direct traffic / sales they refer. The affiliate (affiliate 1) is also paid for direct traffic / sales referred from another affiliate (affiliate 2) that joined the merchant’s affiliate program via (affiliate 1). To discuss this article, leave a comment here or join our SEO discussion forum.

Essential to SEO – Users’ Search Habits

2006-08-21T07:18:00.000Z

Last week we wrote an article Online Privacy Threat caused by AOL’s release of search information on 650,000 of its users. Let’s see some of the interesting statistics Lee Gomes wrote about for The Wall Street Journal Online. The most common word used in the searches was “free” followed by “new”. Not including proper nouns, the next most used words where "lyrics," "county," "school," "city," "home," "state," "pictures," "music," "sale," "beach," "high," "map," "center" and "sex". The 17th most popular search term was “Google” In Gomes’s research, 14% of all users conducted searches for explicit sexual search terms. There where 50,549 searches for nude pictures. Surprisingly “Pamela Anderson” was only second on the list. She was booted out of her long-standing first place by “Peter Wentz” of the group Fall Out Boy. What is interesting is that 47% of these nude celebrity searches did not result in a click. It seems not all users are finding precise results first time round with 28% of all searches being refinements of earlier searches. Good news for companies’ spending money on Search Engine Optimisation strategies. The quest for 1st place rankings in AOL is well worth the effort. 42% of clicks made, were made on the first result, and it’s likely that this statistic applies to the other major search engines too. Gomes found that 413,638 searches were questions. With these searches only around 35% of users clicked on any of the results. When doing searches for URLs, 15% of users include the full domain name, including “http” and “.com”. Some other interesting searches include 3,938 searches for “Britney Spears” but only 3.279 for “God”. 1,881 searches for “Madonna” and only 165 for “Mother Teresa”. There were no searches for any modern writers. View Lee Gomes’s original article on The Wall Street Journal Online or join our Search Engine Discussion Forum to discuss search habits and other factors that affect Search Engine Optimisation.

Online privacy threat

2006-08-10T11:34:00.000Z

Two weeks ago AOL, a Google search customer, accidentally released information on 20 million keyword searches by its customers. While online marketers who’ve managed to download this keyword list are pleased to have valuable information on search habits, many are worried about the implications on online privacy. In one case a New York Times journalist tracked down Thelma Arnold. Internet user number 4417749 (assigned to protect privacy) was identified by analysing her searches of the past three months. On Wednesday, Google Inc’s CEO Eric Schmidt, stated that Google has taken all necessary measures to insure users’ personal data is protect from theft or accidental release. Schmidt has said that potential demands by governments to disclose information on users’ surfing habits is a more serious threat to online privacy than accidental release. Earlier this year Google went to court to block a request by US government for data on Google’s users. AOL apologised on Monday for the accidental release and has launched an internal probe into the matter. This data is currently circulating on the Internet, with a few people using the information to create free online keyword research tools. Have your say on online privacy with our search engine forum.

US state judge approves Google’s click fraud deal

2006-07-28T13:14:00.000Z

Google’s $90 million (R631 million) class action settlement has been approved by Judge Joe Griffin. The legal action was initially brought by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles in February 2005, and was later granted class action status. One third of the settlement (R210 million) is to be awarded to the lawyers. Advertisers accused Google of not taking adequate measures to protect them and that they were charging them for the fraudulent clicks. Google’s advertisers are charged every time a user clicks on their link in Google’s AdWords programme. Click fraud is when a malicious person, automated program or a competing company repeatedly clicks on the advertisers advert, resulting in high charges. With the rising cost of keywords coupled with click fraud, many smaller web based companies are going under or taking on more organic search engine optimisation. A few weeks ago Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google suggested that advertisers need to factor in the cost of click fraud into their ROI calculations. Google has already taken action. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety announced this week the launch of a new AdWords feature that allows advertisers to see how many clicks Google deems to be invalid. Advertisers will not be charged for these clicks and advertisers will also have clicks credited to them should a publisher be removed from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. If you have any questions or queries about this article, please leave a comment here or you can post in our SEO discussion forum.

Google’s new Accessible Search for the visually impaired

2006-07-21T07:13:00.000Z

Accessible Search is a new system of search being tested by Google. This new system makes it easier to find websites that are visually-impaired friendly. Accessible Search makes use of the existing PageRank system as well as evaluating the usability of the web site. The web site’s usability is judged on layout, design quality and labelling. An internet user who is seeing-impaired will use screen magnifiers to expand small sections of the screen at a time, making web sites with a large amount of graphics time consuming to view. Users that are blind or are severely dyslexic can use screen readers that convert the text on a website to spoken word. Often a screen reader will skip over content it feels is irrelevant which could cause problems for the user. Accessible Search makes using screen magnifiers or screen readers easier by giving priority to web site pages with the best balance of relevant data and good design. In a study done in 2001 it was found that in the USA, 8 million people had visual impairments and a further 3 million people were colour blind. This means Google’s Accessible Search can help a total of 11 million people have a more enjoyable online experience. How do you feel this could affect search engine optimisation? Join our discussion forum or read our tutorial to learn how keep your code clean.

Best link building for Search Engine Optimisation

2006-07-13T15:07:00.000Z

In this article we are going to look at best ways to earn links back to your site and what not to do. Whether you’re a website owner, webmaster or search engine optimiser (SEO), you’ll know that there is no time in your backlink campaign to accommodate annoying link partners. Don’t be one of them; it will harm you in the long run. Always keep in mind that when you request a link or link exchange, there is a real person reviewing the request. You need to keep your request polite and gracious. Especially with one-way links, you need them more than they need you and that is exactly how you should approach it. For search engine optimisation (SEO), you need to keep your backlinks relevant. When Google judges your website, the relevancy of backlinks / outgoing links will be taken into consideration. Relevancy of your links is also valuable to your target audience. If your site is about online marketing and your link is up on a pet toys site, it is very unlikely you will generate any traffic. Don’t force time limits on your prospective link partners. Demanding for your link request to be complied with in a certain time is rude and will be ignored. Consider this situation. There is a website you would like to have link to you but you don’t feel their PageRank is high enough just yet. You may only want high PageRank backlinks but the best thing to do is ask for a link before it increases. A good website’s PageRank will no doubt increase with time and when it does they’ll be pickier about who they link to. Rather develop a good relationship with them now. Another reason would be that a link should rather be judged on its relevancy rather than PageRank. If you want a reciprocal link then put an external link on your website before asking for one from theirs. E-mail them to say "I've put your link up here..." and with the same email write your html code that you would like used for your link eg: so that your prospective link partner can easily cut and paste your link and add it to his own pages. This shows good faith and that you are not just looking for many one way links. When somebody links to your website but the link does not appear exactly as you would want it, don’t demand it to be changed. If you’re insistent that it needs to change then provide them with a few options on how it should appear. But if the link could damage your search engine optimisation strategies, (e.g. offensive title in anchor text) then you have every right to complain. Avoid linking to poorly organised website directories with no clear categories. Linking to these kinds of directories will be a waste of your time. No internet user will be able to find your link and search engines won’t place much value on this link either. Choose a well organised directory as they will have a higher PageRank and users will frequent these directories more often. You will be dealing with people whatever your backlink strategy is, so remember to be careful and cooperative. To discuss linking strategies further, leave a comment here or visit our SEO Forum.

Protect your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign from click fraud

2006-07-10T13:58:00.000Z

With the competition for keywords increasing daily, keywords in internet advertising are becoming very expensive. Click bots can rack up quite a hefty bill for online advertisers and this can destroy smaller online companies. Recently a company made a click fraud tracking site that checks if a clicker has flash plugins or JavaScript enabled. If these two features that most browsers have are not enabled, then the clicker is most likely a clickbot. People who used this tool noticed that up to 30% of click was from “browsers” without flash or JavaScript enabled. Since many Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts are written in JavaScript, a click on one from a browser without JavaScript enabled would be a clear indication of a click bot. Not surprisingly, Google has reportedly banned the click fraud detection product in the adwords system. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, argues that click fraud should be seen as a “cost of doing business” and the “perfect economic solution” is to “let it happen”. At Stanford University in March 2006, Schmidt discussed how Google’s PPC advertising is “self correcting”. Basically this means that advertisers will eventually pay less for keywords when they realise too many fraudulent clicks are being made. This analysis suggests that advertisers need to factor in the cost of click fraud into their ROI calculations. Schmidt does however state that Google engineers do try to get ahead of click fraud because it can cause problems before the advertiser sees it. You can try out this click fraud tracking site for yourself. Remember that it is in BETA. If you have any questions or queries about this article, please leave a comment here or you can post in our search engine forum.

Content writing for your website's audience

2006-07-07T15:03:00.000Z

Content writing can be one of the most difficult parts of search engine marketing. You need to write to please both the search engines and your website’s audience. A good Search Engine Marketer (SEM) will understand his or her target audience. A great way to understand your targets audience’s nature, you can conduct online market research. Doing thorough research can bring valuable information such as the keywords that you as an SEM needs to be targeting. When writing your content these keywords need to be weaved into it while still focusing on the purpose on the content. When it comes to content writing the first thing you need to keep in mind is that your audience needs to be drawn in. The content needs to be interesting, descriptive and it needs to lead the audience to a purchase decision. How your content is written can affect how your website appears in relation to its competition. To search engines such as Google, the content of your website is very important. You can no longer just pummel your content with one specific keyword to try fooling search engines into listing your website higher in its rankings. Many search engines now search your copy for relevancy, making their results more valuable to users. Another useful byproduct of writing quality content for visitors is that if they like it, they will link to it. This will result in the page (and the site) climbing even higher in the search engines' rankings. In the end it is your website visitors that you should write for and not the search engines. Search engines are looking to please their users and so should you. If you have any questions or queries about this article, please leave a comment here or you can post in our search engine forum.

Backlink Analyzer 2.0 Released

2006-07-05T12:38:00.000Z

SEO book have released a new version of Backlink Analyzer. This tool, which is free, includes some great new features. Some of these features include PageRank, age and the IP address of the site linking to you. The type of link, whether it is reciprocal or one way. Whether the link is a nofollow link. And what page in your site the link is pointing to. Now these are excellent features all rolled into one tool. You can even order the list by any of these by simply double clicking on the category name. You have a choice of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AllTheWeb to pull link data from. The results are exportable HTML or to an XLS table. Unfortunately there are a few downsides to the tool. If you use Norton anti-virus or an equivalent, it may block the Backlink Analyzer. The PageRank is of the site’s home page and not necessarily the page that is linking to you. And in many cases the link text is “not found”. Despite these few bugs, the Backlink Analyzer 2.0 is a great tool. This tool is fast and simple to use, making analyzing your backlinks incredibly simple. To download Backlink Analyzer 2.0, visit Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. If you have any questions or queries about this article, please leave a comment here or you can post in our search engine forum

MSN – Get your site indexed

2006-07-03T13:21:00.000Z

Many search engine optimisers don’t consider MSN when contemplating their search engine promotion, usually only looking at optimising their sites for Google. But MSN is one of the top three search engines alongside Google and Yahoo!. Another reason not to ignore MSN is that it updates faster than Google of Yahoo!, allowing you to use MSN to test your results. Before looking at getting your site indexed, you need to make sure it is well optimised. For tips on optimisation, have a look at our tutorial. You can also visit Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Tips. Firstly you need to check is MSN has already indexed you site. You can do this by typing “site:domain.com” into MSN’s search bar. If you receive no results then your site has not been indexed by MSN. There is and easy way to get MSN to crawl your site. When you search MSN to check if you site is indexed (as above “site:domain.com”), if your site isn’t indexed MSN will show the following message: “If you cannot find a page that you know exists, send the address to us.” If you click on that link, it will take you to: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=SUNO. Here you can submit your site directly to the MSN spider. Another way to be indexed is to go directly to http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm. Once you have submitted your site via either of these two methods, you do not need to resubmit. If you have any questions or queries about this article, please leave a comment here or you can post in our search engine forum.