Yahoo! Slurp – Please do what Google is doing

Matt Cutts posted this on his blog, which is pretty much exactly what I remember him explaining in a session at Pubcon.  It does explain why I’m seeing less of the Googlebot at my sites recently, and I’m very happy to have it explained.  The short version (see his site for the long version) is that instead of Googlebot, Newsbot, and Mediabot (Adsense) all doing a crawl of your websites, Google will now have something called a “Crawl Caching Proxy” which will allow all of the bots to share the same information, thus reducing the number of times that Google needs to visit your site.  Thus, if Mediabot just crawled, Googlebot wouldn’t need to do it again right then.  Benefits?  The reduction in the number of times your site is crawled should save you and Google on bandwidth, and probably Google on processing power too.  I have already noticed the difference, and I used to notice the Googlehump a lot on my sites.  Have a look at this site if you want to see the Slurphump.  I have it set up so it will identify each of the major bots, as well as registered members.  Over the past few months I’ve been seeing Slurp at a ratio of ten to one over registered users.  I hope Yahoo! is working on a more efficient bot.

How to Sabotage the Competition in Wikipedia

Wikipedia editors need to be aware of some of these insidious schemes that the less ethical search engine marketers are doing.  After my last post about Wikipedia, I hope there are some editors keeping an eye on what I’m writing.  My last attempt at communicating was a bit clumsy, but I do believe I got my message across.

It’s amazing what some of these guys are coming up with, to take advantage of Wikipedia.  I saw this tip at Digitalpoint’s forum.  Dominic is explaining how to channel “link juice” when you get one of your link spams to “stick” in Wikipedia.  Do a search of Wikipedia for your selected keyword, and make internal links of that keyword back to the page where you got your spam stuck.  That increases the effect of your spam link with the search engines.

How do you use that against your competition?  According to Dominic, if your link doesn’t stick, but your competition’s did, you can sabotage them by doing the reverse; to remove all internal links within Wikipedia pointing to that page.  This would have the effect of lowering the value of the link out to the competition.

He also notes that the aspiring Wikipedia link spammer should not place Adsense on the landing page of the link.  Is there a prejudice against Adsense in among Wikipedia spam fighters?

Live.com One-ups Google Earth

This is one of the gems that I learned about at Pubcon Boston.  This is a preview of Microsoft’s Windows Live Local.  Ramez Naam did a presentation of it in the super session on Wednesday afternoon.  It’s really impressive, and seems an overwhelming amount of work must have gone into producing.  Give it a look, you can drag and drop the little car in the bottom window, to orient yourself, and get street level views.  So far it’s available for only Seattle and San Francisco, I hope more cities become available soon, Boston please!  Play around with it a bit and enjoy.

Pubcon Boston Link Building Clinic

I attended the Link Building Clinic session at Pubcon Boston 2006, Tuesday morning.  The format is that members of the audience volunteer up their websites, and the panel members (Rae Hoffman, Eric Ward, and a couple others I seem to have neglected to note down their names) do an instant analysis of their backlinks.

Somehow, I expected more in terms of positive suggestions on how to acquire good backlinks, but what it was mostly was the panel uncovering whatever questionable backlinks each site had.  Most, if not all, of the comments from the panel stuck very closely to the party line on SEO.

The worst example was probably the site that seemed to be just a well done AWS site.  The panel discovered fairly quickly that the content was almost entirely taken from Amazon, with maybe a sentence or two added from the site’s publisher.  Most of the backlinks seemed spammy, and of course it would be difficult for a thin affiliate site to acquire real quality backlinks.  Their advice was spot on, if obvious, to add more unique content.  A lot of the rest of the examples was just the panel telling people what not to do, and all very basics.
The most interesting example was from a representative from an SEO firm who has a pharmaceutical company as a client.  A real pharmaceutical, not a stupid affiliate site.  The site in question was Stalevo.com which is about Novartis Pharmaceutical’s Parkinson’s disease drug called Stalevo.  The panel made what I thought were some decent suggestions, such as trying to get linkage from places like the Michael J Fox website.  Seems that was a bit too obvious for the guy doing Stalevo’s SEO campaign, as he replied that stuff like that was what he’s already been doing.

I should have gone to the Domain Names session.

Calacanis: Wikipedia “on the verge of coming apart”

Though his post was about Digg, really, I found interesting some comments he made about Wikipedia.  His point in general was about how these social sites can face very serious issues, because of their inherent nature.  When people take advantage of social sites to advance their own agenda, it perverts the site’s reason for being.

According to Calacanis, Wikipedia “becoming a field day for flammers, haters, stalkers, and freaks.”  And “The whole thing is on the verge of coming apart. It’s total chaos.”  I doubt it’s really going to come apart, but it’s glaringly obvious that tighter editorial control is a necessity.

Thanks Jim Boykin

I attended Webmasterworld’s Pubcon conference Tuesday and Wednesday.  I attended as many of the sessions as I could, including all the ones on link building.  The presentation by Jim Boykin was head and shoulders above the rest.  Jim specifically asked us not to blog about what he said, so I’m not going to go into specifics.

All the other presentations, in that session as well as in others, were very much more general and more focused on what not to do with your link building campaign.  Jim’s presentation was very focused, and he gave concrete examples of a method that he uses for link building.

If you ever have an opportunity to attend a conference where Jim is presenting, be sure to schedule yourself to be there to see him.  If you’re looking for a firm that does link building too, you should consider giving him your business.

Enough with the ****osphere words

If I hear another word with the suffex ‘osphere’ (aka blogosphere), I’m going to puke.  Blogosphere is enough.

Pubcon Boston in the AM

Yea, perhaps I’ll drag myself into the city in time to see the 9AM keynote by Malcolm Gladwell.  I’m not sure exactly what he has to add to the whole thing.  I did read his book, The Tipping Point, a while back.  Frankly, I feel it’s a bit obsolete now, but the general gist of the book is good.  Just not sure exactly what he can tell a room full of Internet marketers.

Sessions.   I’m thinking I’ll hit the Affiliate Microsites and Niche Marketing session first.  I’m not too familiar with the guys that are speaking, but the topic seems a good fit for me.  The second session I don’t have much of a strong choice, they all seem a bit too introductory.  I’m leaning toward the Link Building Clinic, because I can always stay interested when the topic is link building.  The Domain Names seemed a bit interesting too, but when I saw that the description includes “from the simple act of registering a domain” I figured I might be soundly sleeping by the time they got to any information i might find useful.

I’ll be looking forward to the  Luncheon Session to listen to Matt and the other Googlers talking about whatever.  Onto the afternoon session, there’s some good choices there but I think I’ll go with the Organic Search Forum.  I’ll probably hang around in the exhibit hall for a bit after that, try to meet some people.  Maybe hang out at the Super Session for a bit, then try to get home before my kid’s bedtime.

Some other bloggers that have posted about the Boston Pubcon.  Shoemoney  Jim Boykin  Any others?

Whois.sc now Domaintools.com useful for website traders

I’ve been using Whois.sc for ages now, it’s always been a useful reference.  A few days back, the site was down for a bit then came back up as Domaintools.com.  Other than it being a pain to type double the number of letters to get to the site, it’s a great improvement.  There are several things added that make it a useful tool for people investigating a domain or website.

Here’s their report on Sitepoint.com, for example.   There’s a live link to the site, along with a recent screen capture of the home page, which Whois.sc already had.  But, we find down below features such as the meta description and keywords, and Alexa info.  Even better, there’s a link to a report that will show all of the site’s listings in the DMOZ.  I like that feature best.  There’s a similar report for Yahoo! directory listings, which I also like a lot.

We also find information about the server, where the site is hosted, and where the domain is registered.  At the end are all the details you’d expect to find in a standard Whois search.  Who owns the domain.  There are a few other things I haven’t mentioned, that require membership to access.  Altogether, it’s a great resource and I’m certainly updating my bookmark.

Child Prostitution Ads on Google

According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google is profiting from child prostitution.  That’s about as low as it gets.  No, it IS as low as it gets.  I don’t even want to look at the results pages their linking to, to see if the ads still appear, but SE Roundtable is a highly respected source and if they say the ads are there, then I believe it.

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