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August 31, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: August 31, 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:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Flickr #1 Photography Site In UK
    Hitwise is reporting that Flickr is the #1 photography site in the UK. This isn't really a surprise at all - what's more suprising is that it's taken a while to get there, and how it's got there. Flickr's UK market share has increased 39%, Photobucket's share decreased by 17% and Webshot's remained flat. This is apparently due good SEO and searches for soft porn using the brand name and various terms you can work out for yourself. In some respects this is worthy of nothing more than a wry smile and shrug of the shoulders. Unfortunately however, this may...
  • When Good Search Bots go Bad
    Most people realize the importance of creating a search engine friendly site, but many don't take the final step of assuring that search engine spiders or bots can fully access the site. Even worse, they fail to block bots from non-public parts of the site, or don't recognize rogue bots that are crawling a site to steal content or for other nefarious reasons. In today's SearchDay article, The Taming of the Bots, guest writer Tony Wright has coverage of a recent SES panel where search marketers and representatives from search engines offered tips on managing bots, whether their intent is...
  • Topix's Cool Year-Long News Archive
    Somewhat lost among all the search news earlier this month was Topix and its launch of an awesome year-long news archive. It's a great resource and much more than just a cool "click-o-gram" that you'll see at the top of news search pages. News search engines typically only let you go back in time for about a month. After that, new stuff flows in and the old stuff moves out. That's terrible if you want to find news articles about a particular event further back in time....
  • Ask.com Adds Emoticons Or Smiley To Smart Answers
    The Ask.com Blog posted that they have added a new Smart Answer to their suitcase, it is called an emoticon or smiley. You know they look like, :-) or ;-) or :D, you get my point. So now if you search on some of the more popular emoticon at Ask.com you will get a Smart Answer....
  • Google Uses AdWords Conversion Data To Fight AdSense Fraud?
    ShoeMoney blogged that at the Arbitrage Issues session at SES San Jose, during Q&A time, Kim Malone of Google said that the AdSense team may use AdWords conversion data to determine which sites are trying to fraud advertisers and users (often named Made for AdSense sites - MFAs)....
  • Search Engines Handle No Index Inconsistently
    Matt Cutts has a nice illustrated survey of how various major search engines deal with the meta noindex tag in Handling noindex meta tags. He finds inconsistency, with this being the summary:...
  • Keywords In URL May Help Rankings, Google's Matt Cutts Says
    The hotly debated SEO topic of, does having keywords in your file names help with your rankings, will probably start all over again. Matt Cutts of Google wrote at his blog, and I quote; Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page....
  • Understanding Digg.com
    Valleywag has an excellent Cheatsheet on What is Digg? Basically, if someone asks you what is Digg, just send them there. It describes the basics, how it works, how to break it, Digg's competitors, the recent publicity on Digg, "How Digg fits the buzzwords," oh and don't say "I got digged," I believe it is "I was dugg." Full details on Digg at Valleywag....
  • Tips On Getting Listed In Local Search Results
    Patricia Hursh wrote a ClickZ column named Four Steps Every Business Can Take to Improve Local Search Results. The article goes over the what, why and how on Local Search. In short, how does one get included in the local results you see search engines providing? She recommends that you (1) update your business listings at Amacai, infoUSA, and Acxiom, (2) submit your site to local engines such as Google Local, MSN Local, Yahoo Local, Ask Local, and TrueLocal, (3) update your Internet Yellow Page listings at YellowPages.com, Verizon SuperPages, and SwitchBoard.com, and (4) make sure to have your address...
  • Google AdSense Sued by Suspended Publisher
    Steve Bryant at eWeek reports that a woman has sued Google after she was suspended from the program for clicking on her own ads. Theresa B. Bradley filed a lawsuit against Google for $250,000 for fraud and misrepresentation, even though she admits she clicked her own ads "to verify that the advertisers were not selling competing products"....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan at August 31, 2006 3:30 PM