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June 23, 2005

WebmasterWorld New Orleans 2005 Quick Recap

I am heading back to New York now. Before I leave, here is a quick recap:

The full archive is categorized under the WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans section.

Tuesday - June 21, 2005
Keynote - The Search, by John Battelle
Contextual Advertising for Publishers
Local Search - Issues and Opportunities
Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines
Lead Generation & Tracking && Shopping Search - Getting Listed, Getting Traffic

Wednesday - June 22, 2005
Coffee Talk with Philip Kaplan of AdBrite and F**ked Company
Contextual Advertising Program Issues
RSS Feeds and Pod Casting
Super Session : Real World SEO - Organic Or Die?
Tech Issues : Domain Name Registration and Server/Webhosting Issues

Thursday - June 23, 2005
Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters
Linking on a Dime
Blogging for Fun and Profit
Morning Coffee with Yahoo's Tim Mayer

Update: It seems as if some people are upset with the grammar and spelling on some of these entries. Let me clarify. I did not edit, proof or even look down when typing as fast as I can to provide the details of the sessions. In the past, I once read some of my coverage, and to be honest, I was embarrassed. But the readers told me they prefer I write as quickly as possible, as opposed to making sure I write everything in proper English. I am sorry if anyone is offended by the english used in the session coverage. Outside of any conference coverage, if there are any grammar issues - that would be more upsetting to me. Again, please keep that in mind when reading this coverage.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 4:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters

This session is moderated by Brett Tabke.

Rahul Lahiri, Vice President of Search Product Management AskJeeves
No powerpoint but he is going to go through some questions and answers he has on paper.

The questions he gets is why don't we get ranked? Why is out site missing from Ask? Why is our site getting crawled too much? Why are you crawling these pages when I said no? And which tags do you support? He plugged Cre8asite Forums thread, he will answer those questions mostly.

He said when building a site, make sure you make it for your users. "Its all about content" without it, its hard to rank well. Link to good sites on the net. Make sure to have good, internal, navigation. You at where your referrals are coming from to better understand the users. For the search engine you have to have links to rank well for popular keywords. When your looking to get links, look for themed links to your site. Subject specific links weight a lot more in the Teoma world. He then explains the hubs and authorities concept with teoma. If you have a large dynamic site (variables in URL) then make sure to create a site map to link direct to those pages. He said, he into DMOZ and directories. Dont spam, dont link farm, dont use redirect gateways, mirrors and affiliate sites. He then goes over the teoma ranking technology.

Sites not getting crawled? (1) Get links, (2) If its a domain you purchased recently and it was spam site, it can be in their block list - let them know.

Crawl delay is supported, noindex is support, nofollow and nocache but not the nofollow link attribute.

Eytan Seidman, Program Manager, MSN Search Microsoft Corp.
MSN Search Timeline
- Started in 1998 with Yahoo as a partner
- In Jan 2003 they decided to invest in building its own technlogy
- July 2004 they released preview
- etc.

Today's Reality
Billions of Web links, hard to find what you need, many needs go unanswered.
The Dream
Search helps me with everything...

He then moved into a demo mode, search.msn.com. Tech glitch with the web results that came up...So he jumped to Local Beta product. He typed in Dry Cleaners, New Orleans and it brought up results.

June 2005 Release
- MSN Local Search Beta
- MSN Search Answers (basketball, baseball)
- Core Web Search Improvements (improved ranking algo, and changed the way they crawl the Web)

Features for Webmasters
- Selection
-- Most Comprehensive
-- Organic Crawl
- Protocols
-- Exclusion - Robot.txt
-- Inclusion - Submit URL (Free)

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search
He said how much he likes the WebmasterWorld conference.

Yahoo Search Vision
- Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge
- Find: Enable people to find what they are looking for
- Use: Search not for sake of searching, but to achieve a purpose
- Share: Sharing knowledge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with
- Expand: A promise of what is coming in the future (one such thing is the creative commons)

Why You need to be Included in Yahoo!
- Yahoo Gaining Market Share
- Large audience

How to Get into the Index
- Link new URL from existing page in index
- Make sure all URLs have inbound link
- Good authoritative links into site to encourage deep crawls
- Don't make the site depth too extreme (3 or 4 levels is good)
- Use the free addurl service if all else fails (http://submit/search.yahoo.com/free/request)

Yahoo Crawlers: User Agents
- Slurp (Search)
- Seeker (Shopping)
- Newscrawler
- MMCrawler
- MMAudVid

Useful Robots Commands
- No Archive & Crawl Delay
- Bandwidth Saving Ideas
- Yahoo Redirect Handing Rules

Inclusion Realities
- Paid inclusion system is an entirely different content system than the main crawl
- Any submission to the paid inclusion service will have no impact on free crawl
- If I dont renew my subscription
- We suggest inclusion submitted content to the crawler and it decides whether to include it in the index base.

He showed off MyWeb, RSS Features, and so on. He showed how many products they have been launching. He wanted to highlight Y!Q product.

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Google Inc.
Google Mission
Organize the world's info to make it universally accessible and useful.

He then recaps the past year new announcements. This year they announced; Google Maps, Google Local, Gmail storage, Video Search, Desktop, My Search History, Google Scholar/libraries, and Machine translation. Google Suggest, More & better communication (google blog), revamped webmaster pages, 10 engineers x 2 hours - 20 hours of answering questions (meet the engineers), nofollow, radical improvements on 302s, google sitemaps, update bourbon (jun05feedback@googlegroups.com), AdSense spam reports.

Pretty funny, Tim and Matt while Matt is speaking are hitting eachother. Tim said, how you handling those 302s now. ;) Matt said we just announced Google Sitemaps, a paid inclusion but for free. ;)

How Google Handles Spam Report Communication
- Site indexed
- Detection
- Corrective action
- Webmaster fixes site (google.com/support with "reinclusion request" in subject line)
- Approval

Nofollow
- Shows an example of the code
- Allow someone to say "I cant wont vouch for this link (blog comments, guestbooks, referrer pages, etc.)
- Lots of software already adopted the tag (so webmasters dont need to deal with it)
- A new, standards-compliant attribute that anyone can use to give more information about a link.

302s
- Previous heuristics were vulnerable (Given two URLs, take the one with higher PageRank)
- Problem: For a while, most hijacked URLs were penalized
-- Spam penalties caused low PR
-- No one would tell us the name of their site
- Really got strongly on the radar after WMW Las Vegas
- Many problems fixed in late 2004, most of rest fixed in March 2005
- Now we have:
-- an internal mailing list and dedicated engineering resources
-- a way to report problems google.com/support with "Canonical page" in subject
-- an engineer at the Q&A last night works on 302s
- We are open to suggestions for how to improve heuristics
- Misconception: allinurl:mydomain.com does a search for "mydomain com" in URL
- Real problem: if site:mydomain.com shows urls from other domains
- Do NOT use the URL removal tool to try to trim wrong versions of a URL
- Do pick a standard root page, and do 301 permanent redirects from variant pages to standard page
-- e.g. mydomain.com -> 301 - > www.mydomain.com
- By the way, [adsense] was a newer bug, It was only two weeks old.

Google Sitemaps
- Provides method to tell Google about URLs
- Dont let the XML scare you
- Text files work as well
- Try it out he says

Reporting AdSense Spam and Scraper Sites
- They have way to report this spam, because GoogleGuy hates this type of spam.
- He showed a funny example about this (save that for people who paid to attend - plus too long to offer)

Update Bourbon
- Algo A around May 20
- Algo B around June 3
- Algo C around June 10 (no one noticed)
- Algo A with newer data around June 16
- Algo D at June 16 (no one noticed)

feedback jun05feedback@googlegroups.com

Then he chats about future stuff; globalization, new types of data, more communication and SEO will get easier, spamming will get harder.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 3:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Linking on a Dime

This session is moderated by Todd Friesen.

Patrick Gavin, President Text Link Ads, Inc.
He will be covering the evaluation of a link. Direct Traffic; Link Popularity; and Branding are the three main factors of the value of the link.

Theme of the Linking Page
- Most value is when the link in the page contains content about your Web site.
- Some value if its about a related theme or site theme (but not direct theme)
- Less value in a link that has no theme to your site at all.

Traffic of the linking page
- Most value in sending large traffic to your site
- Less value of it sends less traffic to your site
- Rough indicator is Alexa.com
- Better indicator is visitor stats from site owner
- Best indicator is the referral data

Incoming Links to the Linking Page
- Rough indicators of this is Google PageRank
- Better indicators is the quality, relevant incoming links from topical attributes (gov, edu)
- Yahoo has best link command

Outgoing Links on the Linking Page
- Theme of the site can be picked up based on the outgoing links
- The fewer number of links on a page the better off you are (to get clicks and link pop).

Location on Linking Page
- Most value is when its in the content of the page
- Some value is not in the content but reasonably visible
- Less value if it is barely visible
- He brings up discussion on "Block Level Link Analysis"

Spider-ability
- Search the linking page using the cache command
- You can see if the link is cached
- The frequency it is updated
- Make sure your link will be found

Anchor Text
- This is a heavy weighted variable in all major search engines
- The more characters allowed for your test the better
- Most value is the link describes what your site is about
- Less value is the link doesn't describe the site (i.e. "click here")

Theoretical Example & Review
- The most valuable link scenario is a link from a page on your theme, high level of traffic, large number of incoming links from authorities and small number of outbound on theme links.
- The less valuable link scenario is a link from a page that is unrelated to your site, low level of traffic, small number of low quality links and large number of unrelated outgoing links

In Closing...
- Buy links from a pure advertising perspective. Then look at potential traffic and link popularity benefit. Monitor traffic and track keyword movement.

Todd Malicoat (stuntduble), V.P. of Sales and Marketing We Build Pages
He starts off that you do not need to know the algorithms, you need to know about your links and their value. He explains you don't need a PR9 link to rank well for ice sculptures or three word phrases. You need to balance that effort with links distributed wide on normal PR sites. Dilute the anchor text, use some click here and web site name to emulate natural link development process. DigitalGhost form WMW forum said use the 70/30 rules (70% links to homepage and 30% deeper pages). He said its very easy to buy links and you should do it (he gave Patrick a plug there). He said a good way to get links is to start an affiliate program that allows search friendly affiliate links (make sure to use a 301 redirect for those affiliate links). He said you can also beg for links. With all of them, be creative in finding links using search engines to locate them. You can also barter for links; WeBuildPages I think does some of that. All links are not created equal. He put up the Google AdSense Heat Map and said that is a good way to look at Block Level Link Analysis. He goes through what you should check for when buying links (repeated what Patrick said pretty much) check robot.txt file, check cache, check dns information, check history of site. He lists out some tools which i didnt have time to write.

Roger Montti (martinibuster), Founder and Owner martinibuster.com
New Websites / Low PR Websites
- Leverage your own personal network (friends, your stuff and so on)
- Directories (paid and unpaid)
- Paid links
- Buy other Web sites for inbound links

Paid Links
- Quick source for spidering
- for traffic
- for link popularity

Buying Websites
- Look for Inactive Web sites
- Search for "Temporarily Down for Maintenance"
- Under-performing Web sites (search for copywrite 2002)

Directories
- Niche directories are really good
- General directories
- Don't worry about DMOZ, submit and forget it. He talked about some DMOZ editor corruption and tricks (nothing crazy).

Long Term Strategies
- Build your own backlink network
- Build your own directories
- Blog, Blog, Blog

Link Development for Competitive Topic
- Aggressive link buying
- Aggressive domain name purchases
- Aggressive automated link exchanges

Final Thoughts
- Consider outsourcing link development
- Build an attractive links page,
- Choose the appropriate strategy for your Web site.

Check in Yahoo! is there is a real back link value in a page or directory.

Todd Friesen (oilman), Owner/Founder Oilman Promotions

Jumped into Q & A now...

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 1:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Blogging for Fun and Profit

This session is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR seo-pr.com
There is a lot of misconceptions about what blogs are and he will go over it. He said a lot can be learned from the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Paul Revere road out to people he knew, and those people road out to people they knew and so on. The message spread and it totally shocked the area. He then talks about William Dawes who failed to raise the alarm in Waltham. The message was "The Regulars are coming out!" (not the red coats). Different messengers, same message, same medium. Paul sent that message to opinion leaders, whereas William sent it to random doors (they didn't know him). So if you are going to create a blog, you need to think about what effect you want. You need to be an expert in your field, and if you speak to other experts - you are set.

Over 11 million adults have created blogs, 9% of internet users - these people are not average. They are well educated, smart and well-off. Blogs post more "how to" information than new or opinion. Some people talk politics, more talk news, but most talk "how to" topics in blogs.

The reason why people read blobs is because they find the information there "extremely useful." The audience is about 32 million blog readers (11 million blogs), 25% of Internet users. The ratio is weird, but its a discussion. Its very interactive. 15 million post comments, and 6 million subscribe to RSS feeds.

There is a new model out there for marketers. More to it than awareness, interest, desire and action. Bloggers process is a bit different; knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation.

Wharton Business School had an issue that some publications had a rating system for business schools. They didn't, nor did other schools, have a way to know what the rankings would be. So they decided not to give out their data. That was a risk. So they needed to figure out who the opinion leaders are; staff, faculty, alumni, and current students. The current students were the sweet spot for this. So they put together an MBA admissions blog, where current students answer potential student's questions. The effect was lots of applications (5,622 applicants, 1,219 admitted, 825 enrolled, and 3.5 GPA did not drop). The magic was not just the blog, it was harvesting the opinion leaders.

What happens if you try to fake it, fake opinion? www.ragingcow.com, a company hired bloggers to post wonderful things about this new milk product. This fake attempt failed miserably. All they achieved was a boycott of Dr Pepper/Seven Up's Raging Cow site (number one result is the boycott site in the SERPs).

Amanda Watlington, Ph.D. APR
The 20 Secrets of Success from 70 Bloggers


  1. Not All Blogs Look Alike - she showed examples...Wow, she put up a picture of my blog, thank you.
  2. Not All Blogs Readers and Writers Are Teenagers: April 27 - 10,000,000 mark passed, lots of bloggers are using traditional media to blog topics.
  3. Most Blogs Have a Limited Audience
  4. Blogs Threaten the Media (so true; examples is h2otwon.info, ncblogs.com and toledo).
  5. Not Not All Blogs are Intended to be Media (INDIVIDUAL POLE << creation, collection, context, connection, conversation, community, collaboration >> NETWORK POLE)
  6. Most Blogs Are Conversations
  7. Blogs Are Easy to Set Up (She shows an example of Blogger)
  8. Blogs Are Not Easy to Maintain (blogs must be fed often and require discipline, blogs content must be well written, blog content must be fresh and timely, The blogger's voice must be easily heard in the content, Blogging must be a habit - not a chore)
  9. Blogs Have Got the "Google Juice"
  10. Blogs Can Make Money
  11. RSS - The Big Secret (It drives conversation)
  12. RSS - Feeds the Mix
  13. An RSS Feed is Just Another Text File
  14. Manage Your RSS Feeds
  15. RSS Readers Make Skimming Easy
  16. Search Engines Grok RSS (Yahoo News, Ask Yahoo)
  17. RSS is Not Just for Blogs
  18. Metrics for Measuring Blogs
  19. Just Do It!

Jeremy Zawodny, Technical Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc.
He said he actually started blogging on his own and then it cropped into the corporate blogs.

Why I Blog?
- I like having a voice
- It helps me connect with smart people
- It's in the Bill of Rights
- Helps me keep up with friends/family
- It is addictive
- It's fun
- The company [now] encourages it

Me vs. Yahoo Me
- I never intended this to happen
- Started writing about technology
- Mentioned Yahoo now and then
- People asked for more
- So I wrote more
- The rest is history

Why Companies Need Blogs
- Small Companies need it for exposure, community, and personal connections
- Big Companies need it to have a human voice, affecting internal change, exposure what's behind the curtains and you get feedback.

Unscientific Survey
- Last year he asked on his blog, "Does reading my blog affect your perception of Yahoo!?
- He posted a sampling of the replies, vast majority were positive, some neutral and some negative.

Surprises
- People read this stuff (people stop him in hall and ask him how is plumbing is going, because he blogged on it)
- People want to know more about Yahoo
- Co-workers read it
- Bosses, founders and CxOs read it
- Journalists too
- And competitors

Risks
- Get Fired (Mark Jen (Google) & Joyce Park (Friendster))
- Piss off Co-Workers
- Look stupid
- Become public whipping boy
- Become tech support for everyone on the Internet

It Got A Strong Reaction...
- Hello GDS, Goodbye YDS (entry on his blog)
- The world could really use Google Calendar (even though yahoo has one)
- On Google Buying Flickr (Yahoo bought them later)
- Yahoo Mail Pisses Off Google's Head PR Guy
- Feed Search vs. Web Search
- He lists a bunch more...

Yahoo Blog Guidelines
- You can get sued
- You can't tell secrets
- Watch out for the press
- Be respectful
- Get your facts straight
- Provide context for arguments
- Engage in private feedback too

Subtle Things
- There is no Yahoo! logo on my blog
- I write "we" most of the time, but will write "Yahoo decided" once in a while. Usually when I disagree.

Random Stats
- Number of times someone has "the talk" 3
- Number of posts being censored 2
- Total posts 1,727
- Total number of comments 14,673
- First post on 6/20/2002

Profit
- I use Google AdSense
- I make hundreds of dollars every month
- I try not to let that influence what I write
- I get a lot of job offers
- I have way more connections with smart people

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 12:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Morning Coffee with Yahoo's Tim Mayer

This session is basically an interview and Q & A style with Tim Mayer from Yahoo! Brett gave him a very nice and warm introduction.

Brett asked what Tim thinks about the conference. Tim answered its very useful to get the feedback from the Webmasters. He said search has grown so much but new issues always arise, so this helps.

Brett asks is it your designated position to reach out or is it a team effort? Tim said part of Yahoo!'s mission is to appeal to the Webmasters as well as everyone else. It is not really in Tim's job description to reach out, its just something he has been doing a long time.

Many of the WebmasterWorld people wanted to know from Tim.

Q: How did you approach to being through so many companies, working for so many teams and so on?
A: He said part of it is the relationships he has with people. He has been part of this industry for such a long time. He has always been very passionate about search. That was one of the biggest draws about FAST versus Inktomi (since FAST was more search focuses). He keeps in touch with people. Inktomi had a goodbye dinner for him, he left on a good note - even though he went to a competitor. Then during the acquisition by Yahoo! that was good work.

Q: My Yahoo! is one of the best personal management system. That leads into personalized search, how will that be used in the index?
A: They just launched in the default engine (MyWeb) with the "Block" and "Save" links. This really creates a personalized index for everyone, people have really taken to the product and that is why they moved it to the main results. They also just launched the subscription product. He also mentioned Yahoo! Mindset, which is about a commercial and non commercial classifier (this is not the implementation they will use out of beta he said).

Q: What is the best product you launched this past year?
A: Tim said he loves MyWeb, personalized search experience, since it encompasses a lot. He also likes the media search; "image search - largest index out there", video search (which they sorted invented a method to submit videos), there is so much improvements to be made in media search - so lots of fun to be had.

Q: What is the next thing that will change relevancy over the next year? Is it personalization?
A: Tim said, personalization will give lots of signals (blocking pages, and saving pages). Link popularity has gone so far. He rather know that john Doe knows he likes these types of pages over those, user specific. Also spam fighting (detection) is a big area (blog spam is the big issue last year and now its AdSense scraping causing issues).

Q: Geo delivery is becoming big, search engines getting big into local, etc...where is yahoo going?
A: Yahoo! is going after the most popular queries. But where it will expand is where the businesses are not on the Web. Tim has a baby-sitter, how does she get on the local Web?

Q: What is the biggest product you have out there that is the most under utilized?
A: Tim said the search.yahoo.com is the most under utilized. Everyone goes to Yahoo.com and not the search page. There are lots of customization features with search.yahoo.com. The other service is the YSDN (yahoo service developer network) he encourages everyone to use it, instead of scraping the results.

Q: What is the biggest thing you are fighting out there and the biggest strength?
A: He mentioned my relevancy test and how they won and he said they are doing a good job with rankings. He said overall, discovering new content is some area where all engines can improve (finding new content).

Q: Any big plans for AltaVista and AllTheWeb?
A: He is looking for a product manager to run those two sites, so please apply for the job.

Q: Is there any difference between AV, AllTheWeb, Yahoo's indexes?
A: Tim said they are slightly different, because they tweak to make it more relevant to the user.

Q: How important is the Chinese market?
A: Asia is very important to Yahoo!, they are very big in Japan (60+% share). They have acquired 3721 in China, its a navigational service. He agrees with Shak that China will explode, but he thinks international in general will grow dramatically.

Audience Questions:
Q: Re-inclusion requests, how do we do it?
A: YSD Feedback @ Yahoo .com is the method they track it, they also have a Web form. That is sent to a team that will look at your site. They will usually get back to you. If your violating terms then its hard to respond. More then 50% of the time it is not a ban, its a technical issue. He said its great to get feedback from fellow SEOs before sending it off to a search engine representative. But they do take it seriously.

Q: Does Yahoo have plans to use the feedback they get in MyWeb for ranking purposes?
A: Tim said, if he says yes then everyone will start clicking on everyone else to block or save. He said they will look at the data and if it makes sense, they might use it. They will have to see if it will help relevancy. The main reason was to find old results, people forget how they get to places some times.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 22, 2005

Tech Issues : Domain Name Registration and Server/Webhosting Issues

This session is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

Jake Baillie was up first to give his Practical URL Rewriting presentation which I covered several times, but the other session I covered as well. Err, I am just going to link to the past coverage of this one. He said its the same slides. May 2005 - Language & Domain Name Issues or December 2004 - Redirects and Rewriting.

Jeff Libert was next up. Doh!Mains
Homeric analysis: All the good domains are taken. Why bother?
Non-Homeric Thought: Trend analysis might hold some promise and who knows who will be the first mover into that domain turf.

Homeric analysis: I need a big honkin world class generic domain for this to be worth my time and effort.
Non-Homeric Thought: What do I pay per click? Hmm...Domain cost???

Homeric analysis: This domain registration stuff is easy! The registrars are all the same.
Non-Homeric Thought: Do a little research
Ask for discounts, go to domain forums (domainstate.com and dnforum.com) and set up accounts for free, start to register a domain, and look out for things (see forums).

When it comes to domains, watch out for trademark issues. He said soon they will just sue you and really go out and put a hurt on you for registering typos of people's trademarks. They want and will send a message.

Don't let your domain names site idle and see what money makes. Do something with them, AdSense, etc.

He said long domains are bad. Dot Coms are best, but he loves the .orgs as well. He said registering nameblogs.com are good. Misspellings are good too (not trademarks). He said the trick of buying a domain name is to pick up the phone and call them. Domain forum valuations +/-, paid domain appraisals, the offer and the non-acceptance, automatic domain renewals, to lock or not to lock, set the DNS, domain addiction, hyphens are bad, make a concrete offer, not everyone wants to sell - move on, bidding wars, you mean club drop caught it.

Monte Cahn, CEO Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com

Industry Growth
- Domain registrations have increased on average of 10% each of the last 2 years
- There are now 70M domain names registered
- 66% of all domains are renewed today versus 45% in 2000-2001
- There are 450+ ICANN Accredited Registrars today
- Most if not all good previously registered names are re-registered when they expire/drop
- 67% of web sites are found through direct navigation

New Trends
- .com is not the only option...and it cant be
- sTLD's - .travel . jobs, . mobi, .xxx
- Length of domains & terms are increasing
- IDN's and Country Codes - ccTLD's
- Most names are going to landing pages or Web sites - not to dead pages

Compliance and Regulatory Issues
-Changes in ICANN Policies - Transfer Policy
- UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy) & WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) - Its Purpose
- WhoIS Accuracy - Why all the fuss?

Security & Privacy
- Domain theft prevention - lock your domains, protect and change PW, don't use commercial emails, registrar oversight
- Traffic Theft Prevention - Register all variations, extensions, misspellings, set ip and DNS properly.
- WhoIS Privacy - why is it used? What are the pros and cons.

Domain Sales and Values
- Upswing in Domain Sales and Prices - UltimateSearch sale to Marchex for $164M
- BuyDomains sells 70% to Highland Capital
- Appraisal values increasing 20%
- Real Metrics on comparable sales and new evaluation factors - PPC, LInk Popularity, Alex, Page Rank, Zone file look ups, etc.

Domain Traffic Monetization
- Domains going to PPC Landing pages and earning registrants and PPC Companies money - Advertisers are Happy.
- Domain Traffic is also going direct to advertisers
- Overture and Google - MSN Coming along with others
- Compare PPC Solutions on a domain by domain basis - do not put all your eggs in one basket

Resources & Forums
- DnJournal.com - News, articles, and recent sales
- DnForum.com & DomainState.com - domain specific forums
- TargetedTrafficForum - domain and traffic monetization
- WhoIs.SC - Historical WhoIS information
- WayBackMachine - Historical Website Info
- WebmasterRadio.FM - 8 shows each week

Ten Tips to Generate & Convert Traffic
1. Purchase industry generic & descriptive keyword domains
2. Create keyword domain sites
3. Think International
4. Cover your basics of SEO
5. Protect Your Domain Names (misspellings, TLDs)
6. Test, Test, Test
7. Create UVP (Unique Value Proposition)
8. A home page is not a landing page
9. Learn How to Monetize Your Domain name
10. Revenue Opportunities (PPC, CPA, CPM)

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 5:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Super Session : Real World SEO - Organic Or Die?

This super session is moderated by Brett Tabke. On the panel are some big names in search including; Mike Grehan, Daron Babin, Bruce Clay and Todd Friesen (now works for Range Online Media!!!!). He says many of the panelist did both the blackhat and whitehat stuff. This is an open forum, but before hand they will talk each for two minutes.

Mike Grehan, chief executive officer Smart Interactive Ltd.
He said he just had a conversation with Yahoo!'s chief scientist (cant spell his name), he was talking about bandwidth usage on some search sites. He was explaining what the search engines know about the SEOs and end user galaxy. You would be amazed at what the search engines know about the end user. The future of search looks pretty interesting.

Bruce Clay, President Bruce Clay, LLC
He is more concerned with the SEO side of things, a well rounded SEO project. He doesn't focus just on links, just on server, just on content - he does it all or nothing. His focus is on improving the quality of Web sites. Its not the job of an SEO to make a pig fly but rather making an eagle soar. We are working with things not under our control and doing what we can with them.

Daron Babin, CEO NewGen Broadcasting
Daron is more practicle. He looks at user intent, and says half of his clients are morons. Education is a large part of SEO, but also reeducating yourself, search is constantly changing. Its a reactive business. It requires proactive thought to look at what end user intent and not what ones brand is. Daron is an "intent" guy. He said times he will deploy cloaking when his client won't let the design go.

Todd Friesen, Range Online Media
He has two philosophies, (1) his past about brut force SEO, where he didn't want to put in effort in content, etc. "Push button marketing" where you link spam blogs, etc. Entirely game the current search environment. Burn domains, bogus whois. (2) Now his philosophy is shifting more to white-hat, even when he was in the affiliate business. He started actually building more content and more web sites. So now he is working with fortune 500s and he has to be more careful. Fortune 500s have lots of links. What he finds with them is that these fortune 500 sites are no search engine friendly and not easy to update. They work around on how to "fix" these content management systems. Current philosophy is working with the search engines on their client behalf. They will help you out.

Time for open forum part...

Q: LSI and the effect it will have in the future?
A: Daron said he thinks its huge. He said the one thing the dark arts do is drive better search. Search engines plug the loopholes (spam). LSI has been something the coming of contextual relevance. He said it has force guys like Todd to put a white-hat on.
Mike responds that LSI is a method for an engine to deal with words that have two or three meanings. It is very difficult to optimize around LSI. It is not a ranking method. (Perfect Mike! but I hope the audience got it)
Bruce said his thought on LSI has been in his mind for a long long time. We need to figure out how we use other words on the page to help the search engine understand what you are talking about. Our job as an SEO is help people understand what the page is about.
Todd says he has not seen LSI implemented today.
Mike said; Susan Dumais lead scientist at MSN, she is a leader in this area for a long time now.
Daron said Mike is right, LSI has been around for a while, LookSmart discussed it.
Bruce adds that it also helps you rank for words related to that page and not just that phrase.

Q: What is the key differences between optimizing between Yahoo! and Google?
A: Bruce answers that if you see different results on a search engine you can say that half is right and half is wrong. He then brings up Yahoo! Mindset to explain user intent on a search. He said Google leans to research engine (in his opinion) and Yahoo leans to shopping end. He said Google and Yahoo! handle links differently.
Mike said Google outright prefers .gov sites. Google and Yahoo! results are pretty similar, they differ on more niche sites.
Daron said he sees in the PPC (porn pill and casino) arena that you typically have several different approaches with Google then Yahoo!. Yahoo! is easier he said. He said its all about risk tolerance and intent. He said Text-Link-Ads.com is the last standing company in this area, because of the way they market.

Q: Reinclusion and the difference between Google and Yahoo!
A: Todd said to get a second look from Yahoo! use paid inclusion, SiteMatch.

Q: The scrapes are becoming a big issue for him. Is there a way to stop these scrapers? And he gets links from these scraper sites and its bad. He is worried about stolen content and links from bad sites.
A: Todd; You really can't do much to stop them, they will work around anything you do to try to stop them. He said do not publish full RSS feeds (I do but let the scrapers take it).

Q: How do you use RSS?
A: Daron said he loves RSS, he said he just was on the RSS Panel where he podcasts his WebmasterRadio.FM. he recaps some of the SEOing of the RSS feeds, see that session. He said he doesn't see much future in RSS Search spamming.
Mike said for original material, RSS is great to build links.

Q: Google has authority to rank information resources sites well. What is the best way to become an information resource?
A: Mike said by a .gov. He said its difficult.
Bruce said he uses information words "how to", "tips", "information", etc. "Buy Now", "Add to Cart" those shopping words go into graphics. He said the size of the page isnt really that important, but big is good.
Mike adds that search engines us a taxonomy to figure out user intent (informational, transactional, and navigational search queries).

Q: The recent Google patent, talk about it?
A: Mike said that Google is good at making smoke screens (since Matt Cutt's name is on it). TrustRank is is about seasoning, must look natural.
Daron said its a bit "iffy" still. An other example is the "nofollow attribute" which is not well thought out. Mike quickly adds, yea, look at PageRank.

Q: Thoughts on domain name registration?
A: Daron said he wouldnt be surprised.
Bruce said he auto-renews one year at a time. He thinks Google looks at the time you register first. Google also looks at the whois information. If you have 100+ sites under the same registrar whois, and they are linked together, be careful.

Q: Brett asks what is your current thinking on linking?
A: Mike said its the most important area right now.
Todd agreed.
Daron agreed and then goes into making affiliate programs search engine friendly and gives you linkage.
Bruce adds the value of the link outside of search rankings (branding).

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 3:54 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

RSS Feeds and Pod Casting

This session is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

Amanda Watlington, Ph.D. APR

She started off saying she wants to talk more about podcasting, saying podcasting is not just a fad. She showed slides of figures to prove it is not a fad. Feedster is managing about 6,000 podcasts (podcasts with more then 5 subscribers are included in this study). She explains that podcasting is not just radio. A Detroit band named The Transfer is using it. Sunspot is an other band that is using it to promote. Product promotion is an other use of podcasting, Henkel used it to promote its duck tape. Audio books, EarthCore launched on March 24, with weekly episodes, after 5 weeks over 1,400 RSS feed subscribers. Audio Obit, blog of death is written for obituaries. E-learning is using it as well, some schools provide lectures for download. Social networking is into podcasting as well, "SparkCasting". Audio Guides, PodGuides.net - for travelers. Business applications are using it (competitive intelligence, analyst briefings, corporate breaking news).

Where is the money in podcasting? Money in content, ads, production, publishing, hosting, promotion, searching, catching, and listening.

Success is about imagination and implementation. She shows examples of sites using it...She explains how its important to give multiple avenues to locate the podcasts on the topics you offer (through podcast landing pages, linked through related articles and side navigation - hope I got that right).

Recommendations:
- Focus on Findalibilty
- Use a separate RSS feed
- Include keyword rich wrappers
- Submit to podcast directories
- Provide solid content

She just released a new book named Business Blogs.

Daron Babin, CEO NewGen Broadcasting
He is going to talk to us about podcasting from the radio perspective. He said it has been a learning process of what we need, on demand. Podcasting he explains is not new, its been around for a while. Archives of MP3s have been around since 1997. Being able to form and hand them off in an organized fashion is the new part. For WebmasterRadio.FM it was first about broadcasting and then they got feedback that the listeners wanted to listen to it when it is convenient to them. They put 1 to 1.5 hour shows into one podcast, because that is what his listeners want. But for many, short podcasts are best. As soon as he added podcasting they made mistakes. They had to quantify the listeners to the advertisers. On average I have X podcasts getting listened to X times. FeedBurner he said is great at managing those feeds and provides great stats. He said it is very worth the fees. He said podcasting is in such great demand, that it "blew his socks off". A particular program had an average reach during the live broadcast, then they launched the podcast and that show is getting pounded really hard. Bandwidth consumption jumped a 160X before podcasting. Pitfalls; (1) track your feeds, (2) be prepared for bandwidth issues. Podcast.net, podcast pickle, podcasting news, pod feed. You need to set up pinging, to ping all podcasting directories, so the directories know about it. Keep files at 128 bit rate, its average right now.

Daron then ends with the basic principles of SEOing podcast feeds (titles, anchor text, descriptions). Use good audio gear. Excellent job, no notes, no presentation.

Jeremy Zawodny, Technical Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc.
RSS Feeds and Search

Why RSS? Traffic
- RSS is the ultimate opt in.
- Readers fetch content frequently
- Syndicate summaries and send clicks back to your site
- Add to My Yahoo! button increases subscriber base
- More and more starting to subscribe

Why RSS? Ranking
- Bloggers love RSS feeds
- There are a lot of active bloggers
- They link to sites they like
- they do this every day
- quality links help ranking
- Theres a lot of automatic linking going on.

Online Aggregators
- Bloglines
- My Yahoo

RSS Search
- Technorati
- Feedster
- Bloglines
- PubSub

My comments: FYI - RSS search is very useful, but I have seen spamming of these engines grown daily, making it almost unusable.

Feed Finders and Directories
- My Yahoo
- Syndic8
- Hundreds of others

My Yahoo Content Directory
- Cute directory,

Web Search Results
- Yahoo highlights sites that have RSS results

RSS Soon to be Baked In
- Built in Browsers
- Built in the Mail Clients

Pings & the FeedMesh
- RSS Pinging makes the Web active
- Updates coming in real time
- RSS based search vs. web search

What Can You Do Today
- Good Content
- Provide Feeds and Ping
- Add Them to Directories
- Use The Add to My Yahoo Button
- Read the Publishers Guide to RSS
- Use the RSS auto-discovery link

Yahoo!'s Role
- One Top Shipping Feeds
-- Aggregation
-- Publishing
-- Pings
-- Discovery
-- Search

Garrett Rooney, Software Engineer Bloglines

He shows off bloglines, IMO, one of the best blog readers available.

Audience Benefits
- Consumers: Provides manageable access to new dynamic content, Web based, free.
- Publishers: solutions for building, sustaining and measuring audience, percents distributed of denial of service attacks from desktop readers
- Advertisers: new web ad venue, rick historical targeting info

Consumer Adoption
- 27% of people in US who are online read blogs, 12% post comments and 7% create
- 5% use RSS aggregators
- Evenly divided male/female
- 70% of blog creators/readers are online for 5+ years

Bloglines Evolution
- Focus is on increasing the adoption of the service by mainstream consumers
- Free, personalized news in any language
- Where does it go from here?
-- World Class Blog search
-- Multimedia content
-- Functional RSS feeds for more than just news
-- Richer blogging tools
-- More sharing and social networking features

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 1:27 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Contextual Advertising Program Issues

This session is moderated by Brett Tabke.

Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager, Google Adsense Google Inc.

The Internet Ecosystem
There are advertisers, publishers, and users. The program needs to respect all three parts of the ecosystem.

Drive monetization with targeted ads
Google is committed to helping you achieve the best end to end monetization solution through world-class technology. There is AdSense for content and AdSense for Search.

AdSense for Content
He skimmed over AdSense features, they use targeting methods, click feedback, comprehensive base of advertisers, maximizing revenue by displaying relevant ads, they are global (17 languages), and support all business categories. It uses similiar technology from the organic site but slightly tailored.

AdSense for Search
There is publisher and user benefit. It provides quality search for your users and gives the publisher a way to make money. It is very easy to do.

Site Targeting: New Targeting & Bidding Option
Advertisers specify sites where trhey want to appear, sophisticated site tool pinpoint the right sites, MaxCPM bids (no reservations - its not a fixed model its a max model - so they are pooled with CPC and CPM), site-targeted ads and keyword-targeted ads compete in same auction "May the best ad win".

Link Units
He explains link topics and not ads in the link ads, when someone clicks on the topics, it takes you to ads on the topic. Complementary to other unites, users select the ads they want by user involvement, they are compact enough and uses the same contextual matching technology.

AdSense for Feeds
Goal is to monetize feeds with relevant text ads, highly targeted audiences, increasing traffic and high quality syndicated content. They target based off the entry text not just the title, so its very relevant. The ad serves up in a gif and not html. Ads are displayed in real time. Publisher creates content, users subscribe to feed, advertisers compensate publisher, and revenue from ads allows publisher to grow. :)

Jay Sears, Vice President, Business Development and Publisher Relations ContextWeb

He first goes over the company information, which I am sure you can get from their site.

Contextual Flavors
- Technology or Manual? >> Scalable? Page level technology?
- Real time or Delayed? >> new or some inventory?
- Keywords? Categories? or Both? >> targeted?
- Site-specific or other? >> sales conflict?
- Collects user data or not >> privacy issues?

The ContextWeb Difference
- Real Time Indexing; Dynamic URLs require R.O.C.K., ContextAds is real time, this creates new targeted inventory, older spiders dont work right.
- Categories & Keywords; keywords alone are meaningless. They use both keywords and categories in context to one an other.
- Optimization; it looks at CPM, performance of ad, the keyword, category, creative and publishers.
- Auto Bid System; marketplace determines the minimum CPC, advertiser sets the max CPC and not all clicks are the same value to the advertiser.

Contextual CTR Slide
The increase in "lift" in CTR for contextual ads is 4 - 6 times.

He then wrapped up with a live demo.

Doug Perlson, Chief Operating Officer Kanoodle

Who We Are
- Founded 1999 in NY
- Profitable, 95 Employees
- Team innovated content contextual ads
- Launched ContextTarget in 01/04
- Laucnhed BehaviorTarget on July 7, 2004
- Launched LocalTarget on Sept. 6, 2004
- Launched BrightAds on Sept 20, 2004
- The AVIS of Sponsored Links

Content Requires a Separate Solution
Targeting by keyword on content pages has limitations, like ContextWeb said, you need more. Keyword is binary, Ignores context of page/section, and content sites include pages from broad home pages to smaller niche pages.

The Kanoodle Difference
- The first company to offer advertisers separate solutions for search and content pages
- Several advertise products - more publisher solutions

BrightAds Different
- More control and greater options, greater relevancy, ability to monetize RSS feeds, and easy payment options (including paypal). He came out and said Google kicks his A@# for niche target contextual matching but they are improving.

Publisher Demand Control
- Bright Ads Offers four products (content, RSS, Pops, Cookies)

BrightAds Content
- First sponsored links provider to map by topic
- Utilizes combination of editorial mapping and page scan technology
- Great network of partners
- Flexibility
- Human Element
- Revenue per Click method
- etc...

BrightAds RSS
He shows an example in Bloglines

BrightAds Pop
Skips over it, because everyone hates pop up ads.

BrightAds Future
- Expanding to thousands of topics in summer 05
- Already robust ads
- etc.

Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and SVP, Product Management Quigo, Inc.

Company Info
- Founded April 2000
- HQ is NY with 75 employees
- Funding 12M
- Technologies licensed by eBay, Yahoo and Lycos
- Two products - AdSonar and FeedPoint

What is AdSonar
Contextual ad marketplace, etc.... Its all algorithmic, yada yada.

What makes AdSonar Different?
- Fully branded interface offered to premium publishers
- They encourage to create and maintain advertisers relationship and offer private label solutions
- Separate bidding on premium publishers (so advertisers can bid privately - very cool)

Unlocking Value for Premium Publishers
Brands lose value on CPC in a "blind network" as opposed to this network.

Topic Based Bidding
- The marketplace is topic based and not keyword based.

PageMatch
- PageMatch allows bidding on specific pages with high volume traffic.
- You can bid differently for each page.

Automated Topic Suggestion
- Takes a lot of the guest work out of the advertisers hand.

Average CPC is 65 cents, AdSonar is for smaller publishers too, and they are more active in travel, autos, local, health, etc.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Coffee Talk with Philip Kaplan of AdBrite and F**ked Company

This is the morning session, the only session taking place between the 9:00 - 9:45 slot; to just chat.

He introduces Philip Kaplan and how much he is interviewed and his past. Philip talks about mobog.com and how people are constantly posting pictures none stop. He admit it has gone completely to the gutter, with nude pictures constantly being posted. FC.com was started in April 2000 with cold fusion. He did some Web development in the past. But for the most part, he had people come to him with huge budgets and he built sites for them. He built some BBS software after outgrowing the open source or paid stuff he did. Before he had his own business he worked for an other company, think for new ideas, inc. A customer needed a super simple form on his web site and he said it would be a $150 for the form. He told his boss the price and his boss said we should charge $2,000. Then his boss gave it to the sales guy who added an other zero to it, so now it was $20,000 for a 10 minute form. He then built Avon.com for 1.5 million or so. He then decided to do this on his own, since there was a lot of money to make.

He started an obituaries site for dying companies, which recorded obituaries and its incredibly popular. Brett asked him if he felt guilty about it? He said no way. There are many creative ways to make sites make money. That is how he started F*ckedCompany.com and charged a fee to post stuff ($75). $75 came from his cable bill, so he reasoned if he had one subscriber, his cable bill is paid for.

The owner of WebLogsInc came up with an idea to take all press releases and mined financial data from those press releases. He made a ton of money selling this data (which most people trash, I do) to wall street companies.

He said he never did SEO his whole life. He said Google and other search engines does a good job ranking good quality sites, like his. He said, my advice, build quality useful site. He said he drove traffic to his site by making up hotmail addresses and posted into some sites where people were pro for this company and he went in there and posted a link to his site (acting like its not his site). We see this all the times in forums, that is how a lot of buzz starts. Brett said, so your a forum spammer.

Brett asked why did people find out so late that the boom was going to happen? Philip said why did it happen in the first place. He said some people made a lot of money during this boom.

How did AdBright start? He said he was running F*ckedCompany and he wanted to build up advertising but nothing worked right. Ad the same time people were emailing him wanting to advertise on his site. He didn't have a way to manage this. So he couldn't find a company to do it. So he built it just for F*ckedCompany only. So he has "Your Ad Here" that took you to a shopping cart. The first day he sold out and he raised his prices. He said other sites can use it so he turned it into AdBright. September 2004 he realized it had potential, he decided to get some funding for AdBright. So he went out and bought a booth, which the airline lost and he had to build his own (kinda funny since he 4 million in funding).

F*ckedCompany originally used a shared hosting company site and they called him and moved him to a dedicated. The site is pretty old school, its a whole mix of technology (flat files, cfm, php, perl, etc.) Its now on 3 boxes and he said its all a mess. He said his boxes are all rusted and nasty. He said AdBright is done right with 60 severs all uniform (PHP, MySQL, Apache). AdBright has two datacenters, 100MB per second.

Q: Do you see competitors coming?
A: Like anyone they have seen lots of copycats. AdBright users are all gun-ho about AdBright. So AdBright customers send marketing materials of other AdBright competitors to him. He said what they do is a lot like AdSense (they were before AdSense). But here you manage all ads, who advertises on your site, you set pricing and so on. Google and AdBright are moving towards each other in technology perspective.

Q: Are you getting into branding ads (now mostly text links)?
A: Yes, they are going to do this. In fact, AdBright started with banners. The whole idea is it is a tool for the publishers. But if the publishers wanted popups, they would facilitate it. Within a month or two you can see banner ads.

Q: Shaq asked if Philip thinks we are going to see a boom number two?
A: Its a bit different now then it was then. He said in the past it was a powerpoint that got funded. But now people who get funded are those that have real working products. But also, look at AdWords people were paying up to $150 per keyword, and that will bubble but its a little bubble.

Q: How many clients have right now and what type of accounting solution do you have.
A: The homepage of AdBright tells you in real time. They tried to make AdBright very transparent compared to how Google does it. "Serving 131,800,601 daily pageviews on 4,834 sites" at the time I write this. Probably 20,000 advertisers on the network. The accounting system is home grown, and its integrated in QuickBooks (cool).

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 21, 2005

Lead Generation & Tracking && Shopping Search - Getting Listed, Getting Traffic

Last minute they decided to combine the two sessions. Search reps couldn't make it and a speaker from the Lead Generation session couldn't make it last minute.

Gregory Markel from InfuseCreation.com
Keywords & Ad Copy: The larger your keyword base, the better chance you have to lower your overall CPC/CPA. Include all variants of the keyword. Don't be fooled by your "common sense" in keyword selection.
Keyword Tracking: Basic tracking variables are search engine, keyword, clicks and conversions. Also try to track individual keyword, ROIs and so on. 3rd party tools include; Google and Overture's free tools, Atlas One Point, Did-It, and KeywordMax.
Ad Copy: The quality of ad copy is one of the most critical in this chain. He showed an example of bad PPC copy; all lower case, body text is missing "trigger words", the URL doesnt reinforce keywords. Then compared it to a very good ad, basically the opposite of the bad one. Tip # 1; watch competition ads for several days to see patterns and consistency. Tip # 2; write a specific ad for each keyword phrase you target. Tip # 3; test for multiple ad copy. Tip # 4 monitor CTR for each ad. Tip # 5 check competition ads. Tip #6 Common sense does not always work. Test and go by the numbers and not your subjective opinion.
Landing Page: Landing page types include; single static pages commonly have the lowest conversion rate. Do not send all your ads to one landing page, be creative and spend more time on it. An other type is a micro-site which have higher conversion rates because they have be developed top statically or dynamically tailor those pages to the keyword phrase. An other way to boost conversion rates is to do A/B testing. The final method he listed was to do Multivariable testing, your also testing the elements of the design, form, functionality of this page (you test each component statistically). Conversion expectations should be realistic, most people have a conversion rate below 1% but can be between 1 and 2%. Generally, he sees anything lower then 3% is too low and have achieved as high as 36% conversion rates. Page economy is important, you must extract all non essentials from the page and deliver that message in that area (less = more). All important elements/messaging must be above the folder. Page must load quickly. Test pages on all browsers, use viral campaigns (email a friend), do not be verbose, test with and without an incentive, include an 800 when possible. Measure visitor event behavior and adjust to it often.
Tuning: You want your client to tell you the maximum they are willing to spend to get that lead. That number will be used as a ceiling for your CPC. Qualitative campaign tuning elements must be done often (keyword conversions, ad copy tuning, search engines, landing page tuning and so on).
Beyond: He then showed some very advanced campaigns. Tracking SEM leads online for offline sales. Leads generated in almost "real time" to live call centers, classified as "cold", "warm", or "hot." Dynamic site content changes triggered via 'what/ifs' based on lead behavior resulting in same session sales.

Cheryle Pingel from Range Search Marketing
She said she is basically going to explain why she is upset with the search shopping engines but explains that they are making progress. She showed a screen shot of Yahoo!'s homepage in 1999 where they were promoting the Yahoo! Shopping network and then showed Yahoo! today, difference, the promotion of Yahoo! Shopping is much less. Back then they took a percentage of sales and now they don't. Google in 1999, simple search page and now Google with a Froogle tab (says "Smart Shopping" on Froogle). What is smart shopping, what we have now is not smart shopping (I agree). For a laugh, she was acting out her reaction to something and used the S word (and apologized, but no one was insulted at this geekfest). She then shows MSN in the old days with a shopping link, and today they announced integration with Price Grabber. She said no one is using Shopping portals, its all about integration with Web search. Now MSN shopping link is not even above the fold. She talks about the new MSN Search Shopping blog and complained that when she added a comment, it didn't add the comment. If the shopping search portals are not the way to go (if, if) where is there to go? She brings up a site named Daily Candy which is a fun local shop site. She then brings up Amazon.com and shows how Amazon personalizes things for her at the site. Back to Yahoo! Shopping, and explains that its not just about money spent, she does a search on "sheets" and see the Overture ads at the top above the shopping results (cannibalization). MSN Shopping, she said she gives them props, because they make it pretty and has the "emotion of buying" in the design. She then brings up Yahoo! Mindset (the slider thing), she shows how it works. She then brings up Froogle. Then she shows some shopping search feed export files with optimized names. She said its true 30% that if you "optimize" the title, it will rank you higher. She said, spending more money typically makes more money. She feels the beginning is near for shopping search engines.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 8:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines

Brett Tabke is moderating this session, named Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines . I have expectations that this might shade towards the side of black hat writing. But I am not too sure about that expectation, we will see...maybe I am hopeful. He introduces the folks, Ted as the best designer out there and Jen as the foremost expert in AdSense.

Ted Ulle - Partner The MEWS Group
How do you put together a complete package so your content doesn't get lost in the way. How to avoid the "frankin site." Work flow must support your priorities. Your business goals must be number one; must look simple & seamless to the end user (which works for both the user and the search bot). So simplicity has to be your discipline. Work flow; (1) Web strategy (SEO - keyword design process) he explains he gets annoyed when a client brings a completed site to him and asks him to "SEO it" (I know, I know...), (2) Content (3) Backend & Metrics (4) Information Architecture (5) Menu & Content (2nd round), your menu is content (6) Graphic Design, now talk to a graphic designer (7) Final Web Edit in HTML. Make sure to document each decision.

Web Strategy - SEO
- Mine your Market's Language. Look at forums, emails, keyword neighborhoods (LSI - he explains that LSI is out there (my comments: not too sure if LSI term should be used here...) and you do not need to stuff the keywords in there, the engines will figure it out based on your "universe around your keyphrase"). He said you can now, more then ever before, write for the users and have confidence the search engines will pick it up properly (my comments: I like that).
- Research the Market's Concerns
- Build a Process - Not a Product

Content
Skiing is a high control approach, which is like pick your phrase and force it to rank.
Surfing is when you use shifts in environments, which is when your write your content, watch logs, and tweak for phrases that already bring traffic.

Backend Choices
Not by Default - there are choices, this is technical bedrock, check server headers/mime types, don't put everything on index.php? (2,000 pages all in one index.php).

Build In the Metrics
Already know the business goals, define the key metrics, and logs are almost never enough for tracking purposes and then build in what you need right here.

Information Architecture
Learn something about this field from Information Architecture for the Small Site and Putting Information Architecture into Practice.

Menu & Navigation
Menus are Content (make it descriptive). Tell a story of the site in your navigation (it can work well). Single Words or Longer Phrases all work. Too many equivalent choices is the same as no choice

Graphic Design
Only now and not before the other steps do the graphic design. IA and menus in place, graphics must not drive the process. designer must respect the medium. Work with the designer.

Final Web Edit
This is not a time to be timid, content interacts with layout, ask for outside opinions (couple of people outside). Really get someone who really knows CSS, you can kill good content with bad layout and boost content with good layout.

Showing off works against your business; typical culprits are graphic designers, server side spaghetti, client side features, print mindset and IT folks writing copy (email messages, error messages and so on). Accidents will happen, despite all your planning things will need to be reworked. He then concludes very elegantly.

Jennifer Slegg - President JenSense
Jen is going to talk about Duplicate Content. Duplicate content is when your original article can be found on more than a single page on the internet, it will go into the supplemental index (one of them will). Google finds new version of the article (people who took your content) and places your original content in the supplemental index. To find stolen content, take snippet of the middle of the article or so and paste it into Google with quotes around it, and then presto. Copyscape.com helps you find duplicate content, there are some third party tools that can alert you if one of your selected articles were stolen. What can you do to remove stolen content? Take screen shots, then send a cease & desist to site owner, send a DMCA notice to search engines or send a DMCA to hosting company. She then describes each one in detail (i'll take a little break here). Interesting, Google sends all DMCAs reported to them to chillingeffects.org. The infringer can file a counter complaint to get back in. If this happens, use archive.org to prove date for when the site has been there.

Heather Lloyd-Martin - Director of Search Strategies WebSourced, Inc.
She was unable to make it here today. She is a great speaker and its a real shame for the audience.

Q & A:
Q: How did you do an LSI analysis?
A: Ted said from a site named Theme-Master.com for a fee. But he said you don't have to be that heavy, just go to top ranking pages and look at content and write down nouns used on those pages.

Q: What percentage triggers a duplicate content filter?
A: Jen answers that it was a low percentage of duplication (50% or so) about two years ago, then it let up and now its low again. But the percentage is really unknown.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 4:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Local Search - Issues and Opportunities

Stephanie Leffler, the CEO of Monster.com is moding up this session. Behind the scenes, Jake Baillie is up first because he has to run to an other session taking place (at the same time) to speak on both panels (iron man of search speaking).

Jack Baillie - TrueLocal
Local search issues from the True Local perspective. TrueLocal history was up first, their mission is to drive offline sales online, TrueLocal has 30,000 unique queries per day and TrueLocal is tiny. Regular users are sick of results from main search engines (all that spam). Technical issues; use local hosting, have a spider-able address on your site, have a store locator on your site, put your catalog online, get listed in shopping engines, data providers (d&b, infousa, etc.). Average word count per search is 1.8 (after entering in location), most popular category is restaurants and top feature request is up to date data. Most popular cats; restaurants, dentists, apartments, golf courses, kitchen cabinets, furniture, gyms, tax help, movie theaters, dry cleaners, government offices and construction. Most popular location, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, San Diego, NY, San Diego, etc. Biggest challenges, fresh data (closed businesses), determining user intent (local user or traveler (65% are travelers)), differentiation from our competitors, approximate matching, categorization and synonyms. Local search advertising considerations; online ads local do better, IYP vs Local Search vs Directories, pay per call vs pay per click vs sponsorship (click fraud issues and patent issues with ppc), many times - its cheaper, an advertisement for restaurants in 60603 is getting about 10,000 impressions per month.

Justin Sanger - LocalLaunch
Separating Local Search Issues:
- Local Search Targeting
Local search belongs in everyone of these sessions (local web site development (50%+ local businesses do not have Web sites), local PPC (geo ip), local SEO (geo keyword), local authority identification and internet yellow pages (IYP). Basically, he is tired of people saying local search is new, it is not new.

- Small Business Adoption
There is opportunity; 60% of SMEs conduct 75% of their business from customers within a 50-mile radius, 22 million small and medium sized businesses, $22 billion spent on local ads, $15 billion in yellow pages, 46% of their ad budget on yellow pages and only 3% on Internet. The difficulty; SMEs have on average $5,000 per year to spend on marketing, complexity of paid search products, product bundling necessities (my comment: make it easier, remember Yahoo!'s free Web site and local listing?), and lack of established local search engine sales channels (product simplification aggregators and agency support).

- Local Search Segmentation
Why Segment Locally? Google Local & Yahoo Local is where you see it, unique environments for local. 20 - 35%+ of all search has local intent, local search requires unique results sets, different drill down requirements, approximately 90% of search conversions occur offline. Local search data is coming from offline content (D&B, InfoUSA, etc), internet content (web page contact us pages, etc.), and user content (registered with engine). Local Search needs to display business profiles (structured data), user reviews, proximity scoring, business ratings, and mapping features. He then brings up a Yahoo! Local result, and its great and you must look at your local results (my comment: Yahoo! does an excellent job with this). He said you should go in there and rate the business with five stars (I did that and reported it to Yahoo!).

- Innovation and Pure Plays
Social networking, life management, pay per call, mobile are all methods of to innovate your business to do well in local.

- Local by Locals
Is there room in the marketplace? Yes. Search engines by nature are horizontal. Vertical coverage is achievable by local businesses, unlike major search engines. Local media, like newspapers have an advantage.

John De Vitis - MSN Search
He is the product unit manager at MSN Local Search. They launched MSN Search on Feb. 1, when they first did this, they introduced this "Near Me" button on the search box, allowing to provide more relevant results. Today they are happy to announce their local search offering that looks a lot like Google Local (sorry), it shows a listing in directory style ordered in proximity, with maps on the right (with more filtering options and satellite views). Next for Local is to integrate MSN Earth with local. MSN Search Strategy; (1) Better Answers, Faster, (2) Broader Selection, (3) Integrated User Experience, (4) Platform for Innovation.

Ryan Massie - Ask Jeeves
What is local search? 10 - 15% Ask.com searches have local modifiers, More than just business listings (its maps, web, weather, movie), local impact. Challenge 1 is understanding user intent and challenge 2 is delivering the right results (volume, and freshness/comprehensivness). Understanding Intent is what he explains next by showing a keyword search for "Atlanta Bread Company". Ask brings up ways to help the searcher figure out; they bring up a local vertical box at the top and then the web results and further more they have "related searches" on the right side. Ask gets content from CitySearch with line listings, ratings and reviews. CitySearch is the content, infousa for line listings, google adwords for web search ad pages. Opportunities to improve local search through better content (structuring web content), search (intent), social and personal qualities of local search (craigslist, wikis, and personalization).

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 1:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Contextual Advertising for Publishers

Roger Montti (martinibuster) was up first to talk about AdSense Integration. He broke up the different types of Web sites that have AdSense on them. When is an AdSense optimized site created to induce clicks versus presenting relevant content? He shows an example of a blog with AdSense outside on bottom left. He said if you move it to the middle, it will increase CTR. What is relevant information? On average bounce rates are up to 50%. AdSense Ads are content too, well, kinda... You need to treat them as blocks of content, integrate your ads using the same blending you would to other content, and monetize the 30 - 50% who bounce away without alienating visitors who are there for your content. Tips: Use the same color background and text and think of your ads as part of your content but don't overdue it. He said he is experimenting using CSS to embed AdSense to float AdSense ads to any area of the page, he noticed a 13% CTR on those.

Jennifer Slegg from JenSense (aka JenStar) was up next to talk about increasing your AdSense earnings with testing. She says it is one of the easiest ways to increase your earnings is by testing. Testing variations of colors, placement, ad unit sizes and more can make a difference in your earnings. There is a sweet spot on one site that might not be a sweet spot on the same site (different content or template can dictate the sweet spot), so you must test. What can testing do for you? (1) Increase earnings, (2) you can apply what you learn and (3) it will help on other sites. Tools for testing AdSense, office google tools (custom channels, url channels), AdSense Preview Tool and The only way to get specific earnings data is from Google's Official Tools. Third party tools; know what specific ads are being clicks on, what page they are located on and what IP clicked. Get CTR color data on a title, description, URL, border and background level, does not have any earnings data, and download .csv data from control panel and graph earning trends. Start your testing, keep track of those results, timing is everything, avoid holiday weeks in the country of your primary traffic. She goes over the pros and cons of Custom and URL channels (she prefers custom channels for doing testing). What Should you Test? Ad Unit colors; test border-less techniques, size and placement, above the fold, right column placement even above fold is the worse place to put it. Final thoughts, test on regular basis, try all variables, keep track of those changes.

Venkat Kolluri Chitika was next up, he will be giving the inside story from the contextual ad company perspective. There are online publishers and online audience, and there are lots of merchants/advertisers with products and services (connecting them the right way and at right time is important). How do you turn page views into profits? First they need to turn the content, keywords, topics and categories into "Currency Tokens" to be used for the ad program. How do they do this? (1) They need a really good, real time spidering system to extract the content. (2) Text mining to quickly identify the meat of the content on the page. (3) Info extraction (currency tokens), (4) ad selection (maximize revenue) and (5)feedback loop. The challenges and how online publishers can help the contextual ad providers? They love spider friendly pages, iframes confuse the spiders, spiders are text hungry (give them text). Text minding, they are primary english focused, structure of pages (titles, headings, etc.), Information extraction (currency token), did you say Spears or Brittany Spears? Stick to one topic so they can figure it out. Advertising is not a one way street. Customer is the king, demand more flexibility and control. Browsers or clickers or shoppers (so experiment with multiple models (CPM, CPC, CPA). Advertising vs. Product Merchandising (you need to test these).

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 11:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Keynote - The Search, by John Battelle

Brett Tabke started off with an introduction to the conference. He explains that they re-scoped all the sessions and discussed some of the popular ones coming up. Next WMW conference will be in Las Vegas, Nov 15 - 17 and Pub Conference 9 will be in London in September 30th, one day only. He then introduced John Battelle (damn famous search blog, ran Wired, and wrote The Search (to be out soon)). He said John is the man who knows where our industry is going. He then brought up the reason why WMW doesn't link to blogs and he said John's blog is the exception to the rule.

John Battelle thanked Brett for the warm introduction. He describes who he is, with a who is this guy slide. Schooled at Berkeley, helped to found Wired, then started HotWired (remember that), he thinks he started first banner ad model with prodigy, then he left Wired and went to the Industry Standard (thestandard.com) (my all time favorite magazine until it closed), he then spent 6 million dollars on a CRM system that reversed engineered AdWords (before AdWords was around), he then went back to Berkeley after thestandard "blew up". At Berkeley he did lots of research on search and saw that Google and Overture were ripping it up (not blowing up), and he describes how his new book "The Search" talks about that. He then talks about his blog, Searchblog (100,000 readers). He then started a conference named Web 2.0 (lots of discussion on that like 6 months ago). He then brought up boingboing.com (most popular blog in the world) and described how he mad money from it for them. He then announced his brand new company FM company.

Web 2.0: He describes the version1 of the net versus the version 2 of the net (lose money versus make money). The rise of Web 2.0; Mod-late 90s, we thought whomever one the browser war wont he internet, but its not that, its more about the content services. Web is a robust development platform. The architecture of participation; businesses are leveraging user-generated content & the force of many to create advantage and value. HE says that innovation is in "Assembly", i.e. Dell, Feedster, etc. Lightweight business models are in and smart. He describes "the power of the tail"; where he says they should change the name of this "meet the google engineers" to "the google engineers meet the tail." He said "Search Rules", its the driver of Web 2.0, search heralds the new Web OS, its a cultural point, a new reality for all forms of business and artifact of a new culture and its just the beginning. He shows some money slides on why search rules (cant type that fast). He shows slides of the "length of the query" and as you have a long query, the higher the CTR is (the tail of CTR). There is much more usage of the Internet then ad dollars in Internet (huge potential growth). New media was not that new he says. He realizes now that in the past, they were using old model publishing (print) in a new medium (Web). Search blew this old model up; he describes "intent before content." He said publishers are just realizing this now and they are freaking out. Ad models are shifting to intent. We have search, RSS, blogging are all redefining the model. The rise of the "point to" economy. He asks, "what about branding?" The reaction of mainstream media business is to save the old model, they fight search and what makes it work (they call Google a killer). He describes how his new company will help other companies work with the new media. He feels the blog is a publication, it innovates in assembly, its low cost, good blogger is a good editor/filter, deep-linked and conversational, author is a leader in community, for now, mainly non commercial, there is a direct relationship between author and audience (so true). Blogs are for real, he showed some stats (10+ million blogs, 35 million readers in 2004, people are clearly reading). John's theory of publication is that there are three elements to a great publication; publisher, marketer, and audience. He describes that the marketer adds to the publication (some ads are so sweet and tells you the health in the market). He believes the best publications are those that use the communication between these three. The reality is that the publisher and the marketer are talking direct. The audience is there, out there, the authors talk somewhat to the authors and the authors somewhat talk to the publisher. But the marketer is out of the loop, its not balanced. Blogs have a great convo going between author and audience, but its missing the marketer (except for the AdSense). He said we can do better, he said AdSense doesn't really work (its only keyword based and not marketing driven). What that means is the marketer needs to be smarter then a keyword algorithm search. The problem is there are too many blogs, how do you stay focused. AdBright, WeblogsInc, and FMPublishing are solving this issue. These companies connect the blogs to the marketing aspect they are missing. Basically he will bundle these blogs together, in marketing terms. He then sums up.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 20, 2005

WebmasterWorld Conference Coverage Starting Tomorrow

As many of you know, the WebmasterWorld Conference is taking place tomorrow through the end of the week. I have set up a category for this specific conference named WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans. I hope to provide almost real time coverage of the sessions I attend (depending on wifi access / Internet access).

I have not looked at the session offerings yet, if you want me to attend a specific session, feel free to request so below. Forum coverage will be light this week, I know Ben will do his best, but this week will be mostly WebmasterWorld Conference coverage.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 8:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 26, 2005

10 Google Engineers at WebmasterWorld's Conference

Brett Tabke is doing an outstanding job driving up the buzz on the upcoming WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans Conference.

(1) He recently secured John Battelle to keynote the event.

(2) He named the most recent Google Update, Bourbon

(3) And now he secured ~10 Google Engineers to answer your questions, specific to Google.

In an unprecedented move, Google is sending a team of engineers to support WebmasterWorld’s World Search Conference, being held in June 21-24, 2005. Conference delegates can get involved in roundtable sessions with the Google engineers on specific subjects of interest. In addition, the event will feature an invitation-only cocktail party where conference delegates can meet the engineers on specific subjects of interest and relevance.
posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 4:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 9, 2005

WebmasterWorld Conference New Orleans - June 21

Brett Tabke was able to secure John Battelle as the keynote speaker for the WebmasterWorld Conference, pretty big news. I will be providing our coverage of the conference, I have booked my stay at the hotel at hotels.com for less then what they were offering at the "group rate". In addition, there is forum discussion on this conference at WebmasterWorld. More information about the conference itself at WebmasterWorld Conference page.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 1:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

April 10, 2005

WebmasterWorld Search Conference - New Orleans

Last week I received the promotion card for the WebmasterWorld Search Conference, taking place in New Orleans. The dates are set for June 21 - 24, 2005. I hope to be able to provide our patented search engine conference coverage. Here is the front cover (downsized) of the nice post card I received in the mail last week.

wmw-conf-low.jpg
posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 11:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

February 25, 2005

WebmasterWorld Conference - New Orleans June 21-24 Announced

Announced just yesterday, Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, a forum that gets lots of coverage over here, will be holding its next conference in New Orleans on that dates of June 21-24. I made a new category for this conference, I think I will be able to attend like the WebmasterWorld Las Vegas 2004 Conference and provide detailed coverage.

Nick Wilson said there are rumors that the Vegas conference lost money. Others believe that it is just rumors and nothing more. Who cares? The WebmasterWorld conference is a great conference. If they lost money last time, then they will learn from it and move on. All businesses lose money on one thing or an other. Learn and move on.

The official forum thread can be found at WebmasterWorld, hope to see you there.

posted rustybrick in WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans at 8:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)












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