----------------------------------------------------------------- SearchReturn Discussion List "Understanding Internet Search Technology" ----------------------------------------------------------------- Moderator: Published by: Detlef Johnson SearchReturn http://www.searchreturn.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- March 7, 2006 SearchReturn Issue #043 ----------------------------------------------------------------- SEND POSTS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Refer a friend: http://www.searchreturn.com/subscribe.shtml ----------------------------------------------------------------- .....IN THIS DIGEST..... // -- FEATURED POST -- // "AOL Art" ~ Jennifer Laycock // -- CONFERENCE RECAP -- // "Day One" "Day Two" "Day Three" "Day Four" ----------------------------------------------------------------- // -- FEATURED POST -- // ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> AOL ART "How many folks out there made modern art with their AOL mailers?" From: Jennifer Laycock If you put a CD in the microwave for a few seconds, the skin sort of cracks and you get this awesome lightening effect (on the surface of the CD, not in the microwave). Hanging up a couple dozen of those in a dorm room makes for interesting décor. Ahh the things you learn in college with unlimited AOL CD's at your disposal. Jennifer Laycock Editor-in-Chief (and once bored college student) Search Engine Guide ----------------------------------------------------------------- // -- CONFERENCE RECAP -- // ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Day One Vertical Creep Into Regular Search Results Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior Podcast Search Business To Business Tactics The primary take away from the first panel on vertical creep was just how much the search user experience is changing with these results. Gord Hotchkiss presented heat maps showing the difference in search user behavior when Google Onebox or Yahoo! Shortcuts (and quicklinks) or MSN vertical matches are inserted. It is important to notice how adaptive this has become from a time when matching news headlines were inserted roughshod into every query in Altavista and FAST. They may have pioneered, but now only when certain conditions are met will the SERPs get populated with vertical matches. Look for image, news, local and shopping results and many other vertical matches in the future. The targeting panel seemed an overt attempt to sell search marketers on the idea that better targeting can lead to increases in revenue. MSN came out strong showing how they are trying to innovate in the search advertising space in this way. They refused to provide specifics regarding their data except to say it comes from Passport profiles and Experian. This means they have only few numbers and income level is assumed based on where users live. It's guesstimation that roughly targets correctly. Look for AlmondNet to further capitalize on its idea of post search behavior targeting with their multi-site cookie network targeting possibilities. The podcast search panel wasn't very crowded with attendees. That will probably slowly change as more multimedia search becomes business critical. Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio warned about exploding costs the more popular shows become. Also you must consider technical challenges for delivering the media without dropping users. Monetizing was a subject that showed just how bleeding edge podcasting is, although it remains just a nice code wrapper for allowing better discovery of audio files. For an example of how important this growth area is, the Barry Diller keynote audio is now available, you can already find it in most major search engines and other services including iTunes. http://media.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/audio/2006/SC022706.mp3 The business to business panel showed how this segment of search marketing is starting to look a lot like just plain ordinary search marketing. There are vertical business and industry search engines that may deserve individual representation. We would welcome news ideas rather than copying the major engines as there remains little in the way of innovations from this space. Certainly, business to business search marketing requires specific tactics that mean thinking outside the box. Business- minded search users behave very differently than consumers. Christopher Grady from Merak Communications illustrated a strong point showing the sheer number of terms his best clients use to find his site through search marketing. Seven and nine term queries brought him some of his best clients. Another interesting thing, he discussed the lead time he had against competitors for his keywords since they neglected to adopt search. Since he sells software, he was able to cleverly soak up marketshare because the software upgrade timeline was the only touchpoint his competitors were using to communicate to clients. By the time an upgrade was due, it was typically a year or two too late. This shows just how important search should be to business-to-business firms. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Day Two Fun With Dynamic Sites Search Algorithm Research & Patents Blog & Feed Search SEO Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines We missed Mikkel on this panel, (though Detlef did a really bad impersonation attempt), everyone clapped when they learned Mikkel and Pernille were having a new baby! The remainder of the panel went through the motions delivering specifics about what should be avoided. The audience participation is more where the rubber meets the road, making this panel a must see. No, search engines do not use JavaScipt interpretters to process pages, so your JavaScript menus may be problematic. Yes, if the full path in the reference is used within JavaScript, search engines can read it. Whether they follow it or not is entirely at the discretion of each major engine and how they intend to crawl - not rank. These links do not typically count towards credit for rankings. No matter whether the full path is there, the link container is not properly formed when the reference is found in JavaScript. Jon Glick worked originally at Altavista. When they were bought by Overture then Yahoo!, Jon successfully made the transition and spoke at SES on behalf of Yahoo! several times. He now works with product shop and review site Become. Jon always puts things very clearly when talking about search algorithms. He may offer more material nuggets than anyone, a lot more than Matt Cutts. He was the one that originally presented the redirect rules slide now in wide distribution. This time around, he warned that some of the things people use can help search engines find spam more easily. An example of this was the smiley face on the original Google Toolbar that quickly clued Google into simple-minded spammers who tried to abuse it with their sites. The SEO for blogs and optimizing feed panel dovetailed nicely into the meet the blog and feed search engines. In the SEO panel, the environment was shown to be vacant of marketers and a veritable opportunity right now for early adopters. There are either those that don't optimize, which was characterized as populating containers and using keywords in fields, or there are spammers that auto-generate the things. The search engine panel quickly broke down once again into discussion regarding how the spam is picking up, and what a problem it is. It is a problem that may be more difficult than other major search spam in that these engines need to deliver content in as close to real-time as possible. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Day Three Linking Strategies Buying & Selling Links Search Engine Q&A On Links Day three was big linking day. In the morning we had our linking strategies panel that went beyond the basics. Ideas were flowing, including starting something interesting that gets a buzz, (like the way JibJab became famous overnight), to something less ambitious but still cool enough to win Macromedia's Flash site of the day. Eric has lists of these sites that you can get valuable links from, the kind of links that bring traffic in their own right. The day continued into buying and selling links which is obviously a highly charged issue. We made sure to characterize this as having a deteriorating affect on the Web, by degrading the underlying meaning and value inherent in the original hypertext concept at the core of the Web. The search engines mentioned that link farms are easy to detect once they're on to them. The link structure no longer looks ordinary and instead appears to look like a "rat's nest" of interlinking. Tim Mayer of Yahoo! missed this panel, as he was also attending the birth of a new child. Tim will usually talk frankly with the audience. Stepping up to the plate was Ramez Naam of MSN who made clear there are other huge algorithm determinations made that go into ranking, and the value of link analysis has considerably dropped. Google also confirmed this by stating there are probably as many as seven primary factors that determine rankings at Google. The complexity of their search algorithms has been noted as having over one-hundred total factors, and linking is one of the big seven. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Day Four This quiet day for us started with a bang. The organic listings forum is one of the favorites because there are no presentations, only audience interaction. During this panel, nothing is left out and we talk openly about anything the audience brings up. In this case, the subject of cloaking took up more time than in recent times. This may be because Google is taking greater action against European spam now, and David Naylor from the UK was on the panel. David is a colorful speaker, and he first joked that when Google stock is dipping, they need to shake up the SERPs and lower rankings to force more AdWords. This kind of quip is not unusual for David (or on this panel). Particularly animated, David went on to say something dangerous. On the subject of cloaking, he mentioned copying your competitors and then inserting a few additional instances of keywords to beat them in the rankings. DR Peck (Green Flash) said that very same thing from the stage at the first SES in San Francisco 1999. A great takedown by Greg Boser, (including tying iProspect to Green Flash), was cause for Green Flash to be permanently eliminated from the search industry. They were voted off the island. History in SEO has these interesting stories rarely talked about anymore. This incident made the news, but Google wasn't on the radar yet, and mainstream media was neglectful of us until after then. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stay Tuned. 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