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July 14, 2006

July 14, 2006

Lunch with Pheedo

RSSAds.jpgI had lunch today with Bill Flitter, founder and VP marketing of RSS ad network Pheedo.com. Walking up to the restaurant, I knew he'd already arrived. How? I passed his vehicle.

Posted by Pamela Parker at 8:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Sends Aspirin After AdWords Changes Causes Headache

Earlier this week, Al Scillitani posted at Marketing Pilgrim about how all the recent Google AdWords changes were giving him a headache. Today, he posted how in response, he'd been sent some acetaminophen in response from Google. I thought it was interesting enough to note in today's search headlines roundup but not that big of a deal overall. How wrong I was :) Over 3,000 Diggs later, the story's got legs. Adam Lasnik from Google's search quality team says he's the culprit. Adam's actually got nothing to do with AdWords, but the gesture was funny anyway.

Postscript: I deliberately went with aspirin (acetylsalicylate) in the headline, which is a different than acetaminophen, simply because it makes the headline sound catchier. But parents, remember, they aren't the same thing and can have serious issues if you give a child aspirin when they have a viral infection. For more about Reye's Syndrome, see this site.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:49 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Tests Redirecting Some Searches To Site Explorer & Yahoo Search Update

Yahoo is testing out redirecting some of those who conduct a link command or site command search at search.yahoo.com to the Yahoo Site Explorer tool. I reported this and just now received confirmation from Yahoo that they are testing out this solution with a "percentage of users" conducting these searches. Yahoo has always wanted to move these special searches off the main search.yahoo.com page and onto the Site Explorer front.

On other Yahoo news, Yahoo just announced a weather report stating, "we rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index."

Want to discuss the Site Explorer change in our forums, join the discussion named Yahoo operators re-directing to Site Explorer.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:44 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: July 14, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

  • Google: No, We Don't Let Click Fraud Happen
    We posted earlier about Google CEO Eric Schmidt quoted as saying click fraud was "self correcting" with an economic solution of "let it happen." Those quotes got the blogosphere buzzing. Google's now responded on its official blog in "Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no., to say that Schmidt was talking about hypothetical approaches to click fraud rather than what Google itself does. The post also links to the entire presentation, so people can watch and judge for themselves....
  • Microsoft: "Enterprise Search Is Our Business" (It's Not) & Google Can't Have It (They Don't)
    Microsoft to Google: Hands off enterprise search from News.com and a similar report from The Register both cite Microsoft Chief Operating Office Kevin Turner declaring "enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business." Gosh -- I though enterprise search was Autonomy's business, Autonomy's house. This recent Investors Business Daily article had Autonomy as the "clear leader" in enterprise search, followed by FAST, IBM and then Google. Microsoft isn't even mentioned -- not once....
  • Caffeine and Tin Foil At Windows Live Search
    What do Microsoft Interns, birthdays, caffeine and tin foil have to do with each other? Well, nothing. But at Microsoft, they have tin foiled and over caffeinated an Intern in the Windows Live Search group. Check out this picture of the Intern sitting at his desk, with his computer wrapped up in tin foil and with 99 cans of Cherry Coke. Why did they do this to that Intern?...
  • KinderStart Becomes KinderStopped In Ranking Lawsuit Against Google
    Kinderstart has lost its case over lost rankings on Google, though the company will be allowed to amend defamation claims relating to its PageRank zero score. If it does by September 29, I suspect that reattempt will go down in flames as well. But the entire case exposes vulnerabilities Google has created for itself with mixed messages over how keyword ranking and Pagerank work....
  • Many Advertisers Are Frustrated With Google's New Quality Score & Pricing
    On July 7th Jennifer Slegg reported that the new Google AdWords landing page quality score algorithm has been updated. Since then, the effects of the new algorithm have been rippling through AdWords campaigns and digging deep into the pockets of many of Google's advertisers....
  • Newspapers To Team Up With Yahoo To Create An Online Classifieds Network
    Reuters reports on a Business Week article that shows how a "loose consortium of newspaper publishers" are in discussions with Yahoo's HotJobs to build an online classifieds network. For Yahoo, this can help increase the popularity of HotJobs and for the newspapers, it can help them drive more ad dollars, but this time, online ad dollars....
  • Specialty Search Roundup #7
    Another week and another set of specialty databases and research tools that were posted on ResourceShelf during the past week or so....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:08 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 14, 2006: Judge Decides Google Can Rank Pages As It Pleases; Google Lets You Just Say No To ODP Descriptions; Microsoft An Enterprise Search Player? & More!

Today's search podcast covers KinderStart's loss in a lawsuit over search rankings; Google allowing webmasters to prevent Open Directory descriptions from being used for their pages; Microsoft's pot show at Google coming into Microsoft's "enterprise search space" feels weak and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • KinderStart Becomes KinderStopped In Ranking Lawsuit Against Google
    Kinderstart has lost its case over lost rankings on Google, though the company will be allowed to amend defamation claims relating to its PageRank zero score. If it does by September 29, I suspect that reattempt will go down in flames as well. But the entire case exposes vulnerabilities Google has created for itself with mixed messages over how keyword ranking and Pagerank work....
  • Interactive Review of SEOMoz's Page Strength Tool
    Rand posted information about a new tool he launched named the Page Strength Tool. It is pretty cool, and why can't it replace PageRank? :) Anyway, here is my interactive review of the tool, you can find more details about what the tool exactly measures here....
  • Counting Links At The Search Engines
    Rand has an excellent post on how to get your hands dirty by manually checking your links at the various search engines. He reviews Google's link command and how bad it is. He also reviews MSN's link command and explains how you can add modifiers to the link or linkdomain commands (i.e. exclude site A from the command). Rand then reviews the Yahoo link command, and explains that although Yahoo has Site Explorer, the "most accurate" result set still comes from search.yahoo.com. He recommends you use search.yahoo.com and then append &b=999 to the end of the URL manually. Like MSN,...
  • Google Adds Supports For NOODP Tag To Opt Out Of ODP Titles
    Singing for joy! Google has now added support for the NOODP tag that MSN initiated on May 22nd of this year. Yes, Danny asked for this back in June, and now Google has granted our wish. If you have one of those pesky titles pulled from the ODP (dmoz.org) directory, don't fret it, just add the NOODP tag. How do you do it? Just add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> to your page source. If you want to just exclude MSN use <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP"> if you just want to exclude Google use <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">....
  • More Details On Google Sitemaps Query Stats
    DaveN at ThreadWatch posted his love/hate for Google Sitemaps, but what I find to be the most interesting part is the discussion taking place in his post at his blog. Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering, from the Inside Google Sitemaps blog posted a comment at Dave's blog explaining why a the Sitemaps query stats may say you come up for a popular term even though you don't mention that term or phrase on your pages of your site....
  • Eric Schmidt Claims The PPC Model is "Self-Correcting" In Terms Of Click Fraud
    Donna Bogatin reports that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt claims that click fraud is "self-correcting." Meaning, Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen. So the "let it happen" quote, in terms of Eric Schmidt saying let click fraud happen, has been buzzing through the blogging community. Schmidt writes off...
  • Google: No, We Don't Let Click Fraud Happen
    We posted earlier about Google CEO Eric Schmidt quoted as saying click fraud was "self correcting" with an economic solution of "let it happen." Those quotes got the blogosphere buzzing. Google's now responded on its official blog in "Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no., to say that Schmidt was talking about hypothetical approaches to click fraud rather than what Google itself does. The post also links to the entire presentation, so people can watch and judge for themselves....
  • Many Advertisers Are Frustrated With Google's New Quality Score & Pricing
    On July 7th Jennifer Slegg reported that the new Google AdWords landing page quality score algorithm has been updated. Since then, the effects of the new algorithm have been rippling through AdWords campaigns and digging deep into the pockets of many of Google's advertisers....
  • Dr. Google Sends Pain Relief
  • Booby Trap, Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode 54
  • Galaxy's Child, Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode 90
  • Microsoft: "Enterprise Search Is Our Business" (It's Not) & Google Can't Have It (They Don't)
    Microsoft to Google: Hands off enterprise search from News.com and a similar report from The Register both cite Microsoft Chief Operating Office Kevin Turner declaring "enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business." Gosh -- I though enterprise search was Autonomy's business, Autonomy's house. This recent Investors Business Daily article had Autonomy as the "clear leader" in enterprise search, followed by FAST, IBM and then Google. Microsoft isn't even mentioned -- not once....
  • Newspapers To Team Up With Yahoo To Create An Online Classifieds Network
    Reuters reports on a Business Week article that shows how a "loose consortium of newspaper publishers" are in discussions with Yahoo's HotJobs to build an online classifieds network. For Yahoo, this can help increase the popularity of HotJobs and for the newspapers, it can help them drive more ad dollars, but this time, online ad dollars....
  • Windows Live Adds Search/Personalized Toggle & 34 New Markets
    Gary Price points to two Windows Live blog posts including, search/personalized toggle and now in 34 new markets. The first describes how you can now toggle between search and personalized experience. Your last selection will be remembered for your next session. The blog says that this "replaces our old 'hide' option, with a much improved experience in 'search only' mode that is faster and includes search filters." Windows Live also entered 34 new markets including;.
  • Yahoo's Livesearch Added To Firefox
    Yahoo launched Livesearch on AllTheWeb back in May. Danny has a detailed post about how it is similar to Lookahead and Google Suggest. Anyway, as we suggested on May 16th, Livesearch capabilities from Yahoo has been added to a new version of Firefox 2.0. You can download the new Firefox here and give it a try. Also you can read more at the Yahoo Search Blog, which has links to more methods of downloads....
  • Specialty Search Roundup #7
    Another week and another set of specialty databases and research tools that were posted on ResourceShelf during the past week or so....
  • Caffeine and Tin Foil At Windows Live Search
    What do Microsoft Interns, birthdays, caffeine and tin foil have to do with each other? Well, nothing. But at Microsoft, they have tin foiled and over caffeinated an Intern in the Windows Live Search group. Check out this picture of the Intern sitting at his desk, with his computer wrapped up in tin foil and with 99 cans of Cherry Coke. Why did they do this to that Intern?...
  • Here’s What Happens When You Scrape a Hacker Site, SEO BlackHat

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:51 PM | Permalink

Search Forums Roundup: July 14, 2006

Today's SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links to this week's hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Open Letter to Google Regarding Changes to The Ad Words Program - Analytics Analysis For Search Marketers - MySpace - Highest Traffic Site on Web - Google Search Finds Widespread Malicious Code, and more.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:49 PM | Permalink

A Lengthy "Sneak Peek"

scannerdarkly.jpgNow, I've heard of giving viewers an online taste of offline content, but a 24-minute-long preview? Yup, that's what the "A Scanner Darkly" (Keanu Reeves' latest futuristic flick) marketers are doing, distributing an exclusive 24-minute-long preview to the gaming audience via IGN.com. The site is also offering video interviews with the actors and director.

Initially, I thought it was crazy to offer this big a bite of the new movie, but 24 minutes is really just long enough to get you through "act 1" where things start to get exciting, in your typical feature film. With that in mind, this seems like a good call. (Though I might have gone more wide to YouTube, etc.) Interestingly, they're having to age-restrict the preview since it's "R" rated.

Posted by Pamela Parker at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google: No, We Don't Let Click Fraud Happen

We posted earlier about Google CEO Eric Schmidt quoted as saying click fraud was "self correcting" with an economic solution of "let it happen." Those quotes got the blogosphere buzzing. Google's now responded on its official blog in "Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no., to say that Schmidt was talking about hypothetical approaches to click fraud rather than what Google itself does. The post also links to the entire presentation, so people can watch and judge for themselves.

Postscript: I've had a chance to listen to the key part now (it begins at 31 minutes, 11 seconds into the video), and the context is important. Schmidt was specifically asked if there was an economic solution to click fraud, as opposed to a technological one.

The "great fun" comment he makes about click fraud for Google's engineers comes at 32:39 and is part of him saying immediately before this that Google "worries about [click fraud] a lot" and the fun is trying to say ahead of the challenge.

Then at 32:45, he says:

Let's imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google, and it were rampant. Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So over some amount of time, the system is in fact self correcting. In fact, that there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen. But because it is a bad thing, and because we don't like it and because it does, at least for the short term, create some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try and detect it and eliminate it.

Postscript 2: Donna Bogatin in Challenge to Google's Eric and Shuman: Be real men, don't selectively hide the 'world's information' pushes back at Google suggesting things weren't in context in her original post.

Postscript 3 by Barry: Google has added a link back to Donna's original article this weekend. See the link at the top of Google's blog post in blue underlined, "quoting."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:13 AM | Permalink

Microsoft: "Enterprise Search Is Our Business" (It's Not) & Google Can't Have It (They Don't)

Microsoft to Google: Hands off enterprise search from News.com and a similar report from The Register both cite Microsoft Chief Operating Office Kevin Turner declaring "enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business."

Gosh -- I though enterprise search was Autonomy's business, Autonomy's house. This recent Investors Business Daily article had Autonomy as the "clear leader" in enterprise search, followed by FAST, IBM and then Google. Microsoft isn't even mentioned -- not once.

Other reports (InformationWeek, InternetWeek) talk about Turner saying Microsoft is strong in the enterprise space overall. Sure. But enterprise search as Microsoft's business? And Google's trying to take it? That doesn't wash.

Google's been providing a dedicated enterprise search product, the Google Search Appliance, since 2002. They also offered hosted site search solutions from before that. Enterprise search isn't something Google's suddenly decided to do, just because Microsoft is doing it. The same is true for other companies that fall under Turner's ire:

Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our plate, because that is what they are intending to do.

In reality, Microsoft seems to have no serious enterprise search house at the moment, and if anyone's trying to grab food off the plate, it pretty much sounds like it's Microsoft doing the grabbing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:36 AM | Permalink

Caffeine and Tin Foil At Windows Live Search

What do Microsoft Interns, birthdays, caffeine and tin foil have to do with each other? Well, nothing. But at Microsoft, they have tin foiled and over caffeinated an Intern in the Windows Live Search group. Check out this picture of the Intern sitting at his desk, with his computer wrapped up in tin foil and with 99 cans of Cherry Coke. Why did they do this to that Intern?

They didn't want me to do any work on birthday, so they unplugged my computer and its many peripherals and wrapped them in foil along with pretty much everything else in my office. The soda cans I did to myself (thanks Microsoft for free soda) but the Dixie-cups full of diluted Cherry Coke were part of the "upgrade."

And you thought only Google and Yahoo had fun with search. I guess Bill can get down with it also.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:50 AM | Permalink

KinderStart Becomes KinderStopped In Ranking Lawsuit Against Google

Kinderstart has lost its case over lost rankings on Google, though the company will be allowed to amend defamation claims relating to its PageRank zero score. If it does by September 29, I suspect that reattempt will go down in flames as well. But the entire case exposes vulnerabilities Google has created for itself with mixed messages over how keyword ranking and Pagerank work.

Google Sued Over Site Penalty By KinderStart.com covers the case being filed back in March and provides a link to the actual suit. It was heard in court earlier this month, and you can review the transcript and analysis of that hearing.

Judge dismisses suit over Google ranking from News.com covers yesterday's ruling, where the claims against Google were dismissed. The judge gave leave for KinderStart to revise on some claims, apparently in particular on the idea that KinderStart was defamed by being dropped to a PageRank of zero as reported by the Google Toolbar.

KinderStart now apparently hopes it can enlist other PR0 sites to file a class action lawsuit against Google (info is supposed to be here, but site is currently down). The KinderStart attorney said:

"The decision suggests that, if properly alleged, Google may be defaming a whole class of Web sites sacked with a '0' PageRank," he wrote in a statement. "If plaintiffs show Google manually tampered with even a single Web site's PageRank, Google's entire claim of 'objectivity' of search results and rankings could collapse."

Sure. Fire away with that class action suit. Two class action suits over click fraud, where defendants have real monetary claims arising out of actual contacts with the major search engines, have netted around $60 million for advertisers for over four years worth of advertising activity. Assuming a somewhat nebulous defamation claim won, I can't imagine the settlement would be for much.

Keep in mind that by default, the PageRank meter is still not turned on, to my knowledge. Toolbar users have to specifically enable it. I've never seen any stats or breakdowns on who uses the PR meter, but that seems to be mainly site owners concerned about SEO, rather than typical web surfers.

Still, the case highlights a Google vulnerability. Google has argued in this case that ranking is subjective, an opinion that it offers about web sites. But go to its technology page, and you get this:

PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google's technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

So what is it, objective or subjective, or argue what's most convenient, as John Battelle raised earlier. The answer to me gets confused by Google's outdated information online plus confusion between PageRank and ranking.

Ranking, or keyword ranking, is where a site appears in response to a keyword search. It's supposed to be an objective decision made by using a computer algorithm to sort through factors, though not said is how some of those factors might have subjective decisions made over them.

PageRank is a numeric score that counts how important a page is based on analyzing the links pointing to it. It is one of many factors that Google uses to decide where a page should appear when you do a keyword search. In other words, PageRank is part of what determines keyword ranking, but it's not the only factor, nor is it the same as keyword ranking.

But doesn't Google say that pages with a higher PageRank appear at the top of the search results. Yes, and it says this incorrectly. That's right, Google's statement on this is flat out wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong. WRONG.

Am I clear enough? But how can I say Google's official information is wrong? First, I can demonstrate it, as I've done before. Try this tool. Here's a search for cars. Notice how the movie Cars is ranked second. The home page for the site listed is a PR5, putting it above several pages ranking below it with a higher PR score. Got Firefox? Try Aaron Wall's new tool that makes seeing this type of thing even easier. End Of Demonstration.

Google has tons of things they've said publicly that get outdated like this or aren't explained properly by those charged to write up copy. In particular, Google has allowed PageRank to be a synonymous term to mean how a site ranks. You can see how this makes life confusing by the first paragraph in the News.com story about the case:

KinderStart, a directory and search engine for information related to children, sued Google in March after it fell to a "zero" ranking in the Google index.

Actually, I believe that two different things happened. KinderStart:

  • No longer had good keyword rankings, not in the first page of results, but perhaps still buried further down unless it was banned completely. And if it was banned completely, that's not a "zero" rank but instead just called a ban.
     
  • Probably had a penalty put on it manually that produced a zero score in the PageRank meter.

The judge does not seem to be saying Google defamed the site through a lower keyword ranking. But he does seem to suggest that the PageRank score in the Google Toolbar meter might have that issue. From Eric Goldberg's nice write-up on the case (and he has a copy of the ruling there, as well):

Google’s statement as to whether a particular website is “worth your time” necessarily reflects its subjective judgment as to what factors make a website important. Viewed in this way, a PageRank reflects Google’s opinion. However, it is possible a PageRank reasonably could be interpreted as a factual statement insofar as it purports to tell a user “how Google’s algorithms assess the importance of the page you’re viewing.” This interpretation would be bolstered by evidence supporting Google’s alleged representations that PageRank is “objective,” and that a reasonable person thus might understand Google’s display of a ‘0’ PageRank for Kinderstart.com to be a statement that ‘0’ is the (unmodified) output of Google’s algorithm. If it could be shown, as Kinderstart alleges, that Google is changing that output by manual intervention, then such a statement might be provably false.

I'm actually surprised the judge doesn't seem to know that Google does indeed change that output by manual intervention. That's what the entire SearchKing case was about. First some background on that:

The case involved another US District Court judge ruling that yes, Google had manipulated the PageRank score showing for SearchKing and that it had a constitutionally protected right to do so, to offer its opinion this way.

Of course, the ruling confuses PageRank and keyword ranking as I've explained above often happens:

PageRanks are opinions -- opinions of the significance of particular Web sites as they correspond to a search query.

Still, since the case was indeed focused about the PageRank meter, I suspect we're safe in knowing this was about PageRank scores getting protected status. And what the KinderStart case now tells us is that Google (and other search engines) also have the right to do keyword rankings however they like.

We'll see if the PageRank scores get challenged again. Certainly Google could short-circuit this by dropping the scores and the meter altogether (please do it). As explained, few people to my knowledge use them, and plenty of site owners are tired of newbie search marketers obsessing over them. PageRank was mainly a marketing tactic for Google that's long since been blowing up in its face.

If the meter doesn't go away, certainly Google needs to take a harder look at what it says about both the Google Toolbar and keyword rankings if it doesn't want to be vulnerable in future court cases (plus just be consistent with the public).

For example, what's a site owner told about a PR0 score:

A page may be assigned a rank of zero if Google crawls very few sites that link to it. Additionally, pages recently added to the Google index may also show a PageRank score of zero because they haven't been crawled by Googlebot yet and haven't been ranked. A page's PageRank score may increase naturally with subsequent crawls, so this shouldn't be a cause for concern. To learn more about PageRank, please see http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

There's no mention of the fact that you might have a PR0 score because Google has manually intervened to reduce it. And as for what it tells the general public:

Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar's PageRank™ display to tell you how Google's algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing.

Again, it's more than just the algorithms being involved. Human are making decisions that impact that score, as well.

In short, Google is continuing to make statements that PageRank is objective to the public, but in two court cases now, it has said the scores are subjective. One case as supported its right to make subjective cases. The other has supported a defendants right to challenge if those subjective opinions are fair or defamatory. We'll see what happens next.

Finally, the entire human intervention thing with PageRank scores brings back the issue of Google long saying there's no human intervention in keyword ranking, such as they used to say about censorship:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand.

And similar to what they still say here:

Sites' positions in our search results are determined automatically based on a number of factors, which are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html. We don't manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.

As I've written before, Google does indeed hand manipulate results, but not in the sense of trying to reorder them. Instead, it manually intervenes in terms of banning some sites or putting overall ranking penalties on them. There's even been updated attempts to help site owners know when they've been banned through the Google Sitemaps program.

Overall, Google's got plenty of mixed messages out there that don't help on the PR front and potentially leave it vulnerable on the legal front, as this case has shown.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:48 AM | Permalink

Many Advertisers Are Frustrated With Google's New Quality Score & Pricing

On July 7th Jennifer Slegg reported that the new Google AdWords landing page quality score algorithm has been updated. Since then, the effects of the new algorithm have been rippling through AdWords campaigns and digging deep into the pockets of many of Google's advertisers.

Chris Boggs at the Search Engine Roundtable reported many of the discussions taking place at the various webmaster forums on the Internet. But one thread we felt was important to highlight was from WebmasterWorld.

The thread is named Open letter to Google Regarding Changes to The Ad Words Program. Written by Mark A. Libbert, Attorney At Law, explains how even-though he spends over $300,000 per year with Google, his Google representatives are treating him like an unwanted customer. The issue is with the minimum bids rising, after two solid years of high quality ads, with a 26% click through rate on some! He explains that the core of the issue is the bid prices rising but what makes things worse is that, "your [Google] employees have been uninformed and left in the dark about these major changes to your program, and perhaps more importantly your paying customers have been left in the dark as well."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

Newspapers To Team Up With Yahoo To Create An Online Classifieds Network

Reuters reports on a Business Week article that shows how a "loose consortium of newspaper publishers" are in discussions with Yahoo's HotJobs to build an online classifieds network. For Yahoo, this can help increase the popularity of HotJobs and for the newspapers, it can help them drive more ad dollars, but this time, online ad dollars.

Quote from the Business Week article that shows the importance on the newspaper side;

Newspaper companies would build a network within what is one of the Web's top destinations and win a crucial concession in today's search-engine economy: getting a cut of the ads sold around search results of their content. It's a sore spot for publishers that this doesn't happen now.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:25 AM | Permalink

Specialty Search Roundup #7

Another week and another set of specialty databases and research tools that were posted on ResourceShelf during the past week or so.

  • Art Museums: A Collection of Searchable Databases This is the first in a series (more soon) of posts that review databases from some of the great art museums around the world. In all cases these databases offer searchable access to part or all of these museums collections while offering you the chance to search using a variety of criteria.
  • UKís Resource Discovery Network Now Known as Intute Yesterday, I posted about the new NOODP tag from Google. While DMOZ/ODP doesn't have the same stature that it once did. However, researchers shouldn't forget the value of non-commercial/searchable/general purpose web directories where quality of the underlying resources trumps overall size. Intute is an excellent example of this. Be ready to spend some time here. Also, make sure to look at the Virtual Training Suite and Internet Detective, two of Intute's many parts.
  • New Look for The Gateway to Educational Materials Database Primarily cosmetic changes but it's a good excuse to make a mention of it. If you're looking for high quality materials for educational purposes this database is a "must" bookmark. It's also worth pointing out that "The Gateway" is powered by faceted search technology from Siderean. Bow, this same technology will soon be available from the Librarians' Internet Index, another essential non-commercial/searchable/general purpose web directory.
  • Database: A Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory "While not comprehensive, this inventory gives the public the best available look at the 200+ nanotechnology-based consumer products currently on the market. Prior to this inventory, the figure most often cited by the U.S. government was that approximately 80 consumer products containing nanomaterials were being sold. Please feel free to explore the inventory by browsing the products, or perform an advanced search."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:07 AM | Permalink

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