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February 26, 2007

Weekend Update

Good News For Yahoo

It looks like Panama is helping Yahoo wipe all that peanut butter off its face (Rimshot? Anyone?).

The latest comScore numbers found that Yahoo’s new ranking model has helped Y!SM increase its click through rates on ads 5 percent in the first week, and 9 percent in week two. They study also showed that Y!SM had improved their overall clicks on the site with a .5 and 1.0 point increase for weeks one and two, respectively.

Obviously, it’s too early to tell how successful Yahoo will be under the new Panama regime, but this is a good start. I think most advertisers are hoping Panama continues to do well and eventually begins to give Google a literal run for its money. Personally, I just like seeing Yahoo get some good press.

Get The Most Out Of Conference Season

There are a lot of Must Attend conferences coming up in the next few months – Elite Retreat, SES NY, Ad:Tech San Francisco, the China Search Marketing Tour, etc – and it’s important for search marketers to take advantage of every opportunity for knowledge transfer that’s offered. With that in mind, Rhea Drysdale makes her blogging debut at Search Engine Journal with 11 Networking Tips for Search Marketers, offering a great list of tips.

My favorite piece of advice offered by Rhea:

“Keep in mind that just like Britney Spears, Danny Sullivan doesn’t know who you are even if you’ve been reading his posts and viewing his family photos for months.”

Hee, so true! And this doesn’t just apply to Danny (whom I’ve never met because I’m too busy hiding behind the largest object I can find once he enters a room. He’s Danny Sullivan after all; I’m not even worthy of looking at him!), it’s applicable for everyone you’ve been quietly stalking reading online. Even if you’re 100 percent sure that Danny, Lee Odden or Andy Beal is the lone reader in your blog readership of one, go ahead and introduce yourself anyway.

Blog Talk At Performancing

There were two great posts by Performancing today. One on How To Find Your Blogging Mojo and another giving readers 11 Ways to Write When You’ve Misplaced Your Passion. I think we’re starting to see a theme by the Performancing bloggers here…

I love posts like these because we’ve all experienced bouts of blogging angst and have needed a good kick or reminder every now and then as to why we do this. A few months back I wrote about losing my voice, and while I’m still fumbling to find it, I like to think blogging is what has kept me bordering on stability. The takeaway for both posts is to find your common thread -- “the anchor and guiding light”, what motivates you to write. Amazing posts; thanks, guys.

Customer Relations

The super link-able Kathy Sierra has a great post comparing customer relationships to most marriages. Sure, you’re enthusiastic, playful and interested early on, but then the passion fizzles and you’re left bored, annoyed, and on the fast track to divorce court with a drooling baby in tow. It’s the classic bait and switch. Fun, right?

Hmm, not really. Or as Kathy would say, that’s “such a big bowl of wrong”.

Kathy reasons that companies should treat their existing customers better than the ones who have given them nothing. Ideally, I think you should treat everyone like you’re still courting them and trying to prove your awesomeness, because really, you are. Contract or not, your customer always has the option to not renew and there are always loopholes to get out of a bad situation, whether its business or otherwise.

Don’t stop sweet talking prospective clients, but don’t ignore the ones you already have either. It costs far less to retain an old customer than to go lasso yourself a new one.

Fun Finds

45n5 developed a Pre-Post GamePlan to help unknown bloggers bring attention to valuable posts.

Ze covers New York’s Winter Storm 07 in a way that perfectly encapsulates how crazy weather people get when it snows. I miss the East Coast.

Sigh. I try so hard to back Ask.com and then they use their blog for things like Know Your Road Rules With Ask.com. What? Is that show still on the air? Ask, you’re so much better than this. You’re a good search engine with great tools, an awesome blog search, an adorable messenger bag, and a heck of a lot of panache. Let your blog be great. Write about search. Not Road Rules. Not jousting.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/26/07 at 4:52 PM | Comments (1)
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Connecting Google’s Video Dots

There’s been a couple of interesting search articles surfacing today regarding Google, online video and how this may all fit together. The first article to grab my attention was yesterday’s New York Times article entitled Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them. This one featured a few puzzling statements, the most glaring being this one:

“Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England, that sells “media delivery systems” to Internet service providers. “I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent.”

I read that paragraph over a few times, sat on it for a bit, and then finally sent it Susan to make sure I wasn’t completely losing my mind. Video accounts for more than 60 percent of traffic on the Web? Would that be the crazy Web in your head? I have to assume they’re talking about bandwidth issues. That because video files are so much larger than a normal Web file, they take up more “room” in a user's search, thereby upping the amount of traffic, in comparison, that is spent on video search. Or something.

They can’t be saying what it sounds like they’re saying – that 60 percent of users’ searches are looking for video. YouTube, Google Video and the array of other upload sites may be something of a phenomenon lately, but there is no way users are conducting more video searches than they are Web, Image, News, and Blog combined. That’s ridiculous. I think CacheLogic, who happens to sell “media delivery systems”, picked some funny wording there.

But pretend this is bizarro world and they’re right. Say video search is currently sitting at 60 percent, could it ever jump to 98 percent of traffic? No. Most video search is geared towards finding what’s hot, ridiculous, and naked on the Web. Thankfully, teenage boys are not responsible for 98 percent of Web searches because I wouldn’t want to optimize that content.

After I got finished reading that NYT articles I came across a Mashable post entitled YouTube and Google Video Player In Google SERPS: This Is Evil. Though I think that sums up Pete Cashmore’s post pretty nicely, basically what happened was that Razvan Antonescu performed a search for “nightwish videos” and discovered a Google push box that included an embedded Google Video player right there in his SERP when opened. Pete thinks Google pushing their own services via a “show more” approach is “evil” as it gives Google an unfair advantage over competitors.

My opinion is split.

I don’t think its evil. As much as we hate to admit it, Google’s search results are Google’s search results. They can do whatever they want them. If they want to push Blogger, they can. If they want to push You Tube, they paid $1.65 billion to be able to do that. I don’t have to like the fact that Wikipedia ranks for every single word query under the sun; I’m not in charge of Google’s SERPs. Ranking in Google is like driving a car. It’s a privilege, not a right. And it can be taken away as soon as dad says so, along with those brief moments you spend unchained to the radiator. As a search marketer, you need to adapt to that. If may mean you have to better optimize your client’s blogs, or optimize their online video. Don’t hate Google.

Personally, I like the idea of bringing all results inside one query. You may remember my blatant jumping up and down when I heard about Ask X. In a perfect search world, I think I should be able to enter my query into one search box and be presented with all of its relevant results, regardless of format, type, preference, creed, or sex. Here’s the topic I’m interested in, you give me the results that are the most relevant. I don’t care if you pulled them from the Web, Image, News, Video or Blog results. Give me everything you’ve got and I’ll sort it out.

This approach to search makes life simpler for me and it alerts normal, non-search-obsessed users to services they may not have even known existed. Maybe one I’ll day I’ll be able to say I’m a blogger and not have to explain to people what a blog is. ("So, like, remember when you were 10 and you kept a diary about what happened in your little world that day? Yeah, it’s kind of like that except I don’t talk about cute boys, I talk about search. Actually, I guess I do talk about cute boys sometimes, but that’s not supposed to be the theme… Even though it kind of is. Forget it; I’m unemployed. Got any cash?")

Obviously, the part of this that does get my tinfoil hat buzzing is that, even though Susan would call me a whining baby, it’s troublesome, problematic and eerie when a query for “shoes” brings up a YouTube video at number two and the appropriate Wikipedia page at number five. I know I just said Google has the right to control their results and that I wanted different kinds of results on one screen, but I also want to know I can trust those results. And trusting my results mean I don’t perform a Google search for “pez dispenser” and get its Wikipedia page at number one, Google video results at number two, Google blog results at number three, a Google image at number four, etc. That’s telling me everything Google knows about Pez dispensers. That’s not what I asked for.

Is online video becoming more important to the search engines? Yes. Am I staying up at night worrying that it’s going to ruin my search results? No.

I’m not worried about Google’s push box displaying video results on my SERP because there’s a reason online video hasn’t caught on just yet. It’s because the majority of online video is asinine. I don’t do many searches for “fence plowing” (a favorite pastime on Long Island, didn’t you know), so the likelihood of a crazy YouTube video appearing first in my search results is pretty low. And if Google happens to find a relevant YouTube for me, heck, throw it in. As long as I have the option of opening or not opening that push box, Google can give me all the Google-owned video it wants.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/26/07 at 4:08 PM | Comments (1)
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February 23, 2007

A Lazy Girl’s Round Up

I was out of the office for the majority of this week so I wasn’t able to keep you (or myself) abreast of all the crazy search happenings. With that in mind, here are the headlines I hope you had time to read this week, and if not, come get educated.

• FeedBurner released a great report yesterday tallying up the market share of some of the leading RSS readers and measuring user engagement. What was really interesting is that FeedBurner went beyond simple subscriber numbers and determined engagement based on the number of times specific feeds are loaded and clicked through.

  There were lots of pretty charts and graphics but their overall finding was that Google Reader is quickly dethroning all other RSS readers and keeping users wholeheartedly engaged. That’s consistent with what we’ve been hearing in the blogosphere as well. I’ve being resistant to switching over from Bloglines to GR for so long. Should I make the change?

• MarketingVox reported an online advertising boom going on in Australia right now, with revenues surpassing $1 billion last year. That’s an impressive 62 percent jump since 2005. Paid search revenues led the way, seeing more than a 100 percent increase year over year. Have you adopted your Internet marketing strategy for your audience down under yet? With Australian pay per click gaining attention and the new emphasis on Australian local search, now’s the time to target your Aussie demographic.
• ShoeMoney had an amusing blog earlier this week exposing a new security hole in MyBlogLog that lets users search the Web as their favorite blogger. I read it and laughed, but MyBlogLog read it and banned him. MBL founder Eric Marcoullier says they didn’t ban him for exposing a flaw within MBL, but for “publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them.” I have no reason to doubt Eric, but MBL is now faced with an enormous PR problem with influential figures like Andy Beal and Michael Gray boycotting the site until Jeremy’s account is reactivated.

  So what’s MBL to do? Utilize the MBL blog to concisely explain what happened, reach out to Jeremy, and keep the blogosphere friendly. You may been right to ban an account that was revealing data, but you don’t want to alienate your target audience. Jeremy's not a threat to MyBlogLog.

• SEO Tutorials posted a 5 part video of Matt Cutts’ keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies London. Have I mentioned how jealous I am of everyone that got to (a) be in London and (b) attend Matt’s keynote in person? Because I am. Very much so. However, Marie did a great job acting as Bruce Clay’s UK correspondent so I hope everyone enjoyed her recaps!
• Gord Hotchkiss was able to keep Marissa Mayer in one place long enough to question her about Google’s plans for personalized search. He provides a detailed recap of the interview over at Search Engine Land, and readers can view the full transcript over at Gord’s personal blog. It’s most certainly a worthwhile read, if only because we get Google’s take on this whole personalization thing.
• The New York Times had an interesting article on Wednesday about why people Flame First, Think Later on the Internet. It’s always interesting to me how people will say things about you on the Internet that they would never dream of saying to your face. As if just because you can’t see the other’s reaction means they didn’t have one and tearing them down is okay. It’s not.
• And if you’re looking for a great new media blog, 901am launched a few months ago and is doing a great job of keeping my interest. Even if I did get flamed in one of their latest blog posts. :) If you haven’t given them a shot yet, I’d highly recommend it.

So that’s it. I’m off to go get caught up on everything I missed while I was away. I’ll be back to full blogging duties on Monday. See ya then!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/23/07 at 2:06 PM | Comments (0)
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Friday Recap

I’m officially back from my Bruce Clay SEOToolSet training adventure (way smarter, I might add) and it's Friday Recap time. Can you even handle this much excitement? Huzzah!

Okay, so maybe you’re not huzzah-ing right along with me, but hopefully you’re more excited about today’s Recap than Marissa Mayer was about visiting Google China. Marissa looks like someone just beat her cocker spaniel right in front of her pretty little eyes.

The Inquirer reports that Bill Gates restricts his daughter’s computer usage to 45 minutes a day. He’s probably just trying to prevent young Phoebe from turning out as nerdy as he is. We’ve all seen that pic of Bill looking sultry on his computer desk, right? Save the girl! [Save the world? -Susan] I feared you were going to do that.

Google’s pitching in and helping Michael Gray find a new love interest. It turns out Michael is not a good match for himself, but he is a good match for Matt Cutts and Jason Calacanis. Michael, we say go with Matt. Jason Calacanis is as stable as a Digger and he’d never fully appreciate you.

Former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson wrote a touching blog post to his adoring fans, telling them exactly what he thought of them. He said, in part:

“…And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.”

Expect a special weekend blog post from yours truly about how utterly worthless I think you all are. You damn, no-good fools. Kidding. I’ll save it for Monday.

Over at InsideMicrosoft, Nathan Weinberg outlined a highly scientific way for determining which Xbox 360 DVD drive you have. Good work, Nathan.

Google Blogoscoped told us about Google Percent, an internal site for Googlers to find out how many Google employees are newer than they are. This is totally fun. I played my own version of this game during SEOToolSet training this week (in between all the hard listening, of course). Turns out I’m older than an account manager, an IT guy (sort of), a handful of SEO analysts. I’m practically an old dinosaur like Bruce. [Yeah, you don't get to count the IT guy. Or one of the analysts for that matter. --Susan] Untrue. I get to count both the IT guy and that analyst of which you speak. Their clocks have been reset. You just can’t accept that I’m no longer your worthless minion. I have BC street cred now.

Check out this frozen tidal wave. If that thing starts to thaw, I’d recommend you get the hell out of Dodge. (via Dooce)

Good Morning Silicon Valley goes way back and points to a 1996 version of those “I’m A PC/ I’m A Mac…” ads. Basically we learn that back then PC users went to Harvard Law, while Mac users sat on the steps at Berkeley contemplating the meaning of the denim jacket and the Jerry Seinfeld haircut.

Has anyone ever noticed that longhaired Larry Page looks kinda like Mac boy Justin Long? He also kind of looks like a dinosaur. I’d be careful of that.

Kind of alarming, GMSV tells us that Steve Jobs hates kindergarten teachers because it’s too hard to fire them. Yes, everyone knows how those deceitful, hug-bearing kindergarten teachers keep taking advantage of the system.

And of course, Things I Learned From BoingBoing This Week:

• Catch a cop doing something wrong and you could be charged with “stalking”. There are so (so, SO) many ways I could respond to this but I’d probably be arrested for slander. Drop me an email and we’ll talk privately!
• Here’s a visual lesson in HTML tags. My favorite is the tag for preformatted text. There’s nothing cuter than baby belly. (Not to be confused with pregnant baby belly.)
• The Chinese government imprisons and gives electric shock to people they think have become addicted to the Internet. Oh. My. God.
• I dated a boy once who was afraid to go into the ocean for fear he’d be eaten by a sea creature. I used to mock him incessantly, but it turns out he may have been right (well, about the ocean. Otherwise he was/is a total moron). Did you know there are 990lb squids in New Zealand? I suddenly have an intense desire to be landlocked.
• Spy ears: The Must Have accessory for SES New York. Not that I would ever wear these around the hotel bar. That would be wrong. [Those look expensive, get this instead! --Susan]
• Irene McGee’s apartment burned down. She’s that girl from Real World Seattle who had a very dramatic television-induced case of Lyme disease, got her stuff animal thrown in the river, and was then bitch slapped by Stephen. Tough day.
• A New Zealand cat named Extra was born with 26 toes. I can’t even imagine the trouble Jack Jack would cause with 26 toes. He’s a liability with…how many toes does a cat have again?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/23/07 at 12:40 PM | Comments (3)
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February 19, 2007

MyBlogLog Spam, Danny’s New Fight, and A Lesson from Graywolf

MyBlogLog Spam

Over at Daggle, Danny Sullivan comments on the new wave of spam over at MyBlogLog that has hit Danny, a series of other prominent SEO bloggers, and me. The spamming comes in the form of co-author requests where a blog you’ve likely never heard of asks you to accept their co-authorship request.

Obviously, they don’t care about you. They just want their blog to appear on your highly trafficked MyBlogLog profile and get your readers to think you’re somehow affiliated with a blog you’ve never heard of. I’ve received a few of them lately, mostly from non-English blogs, and I deleted them and went on my way. However, in one case, Danny, myself, and several others were added as a co-author to an unfamiliar blog even though we had never confirmed it. It just appeared on our profile as if we authorized it.

Enter in a whole new form of MyBlogLog spam. The situation made me a little uncomfortable, if only because everything seems a little more personal and encroaching when your name and persona are taken and attached to something you have no affiliation with. The MyBlogLog blog (heh) commented that “the spam hole as been plugged” and that no more spammy co-author requests should go out. That’s good to hear. I’d hate to log into MBL tomorrow and find out I’m suddenly co-authoring three new blogs. Heck, I can barely keep up with this one!

If you too have been added as a co-author, fear not. Simply go into that blog's settings and remove yourself. I did.

Danny Sullivan vs. Donna Bogatin in the Is Google Overrated debate

The open debate between Danny Sullivan and Donna Bogatin made for a great read this morning. Danny and Donna got into a lively discussion offering up opposing views on the statement “Google is overrated”. Donna took the pro, while Danny took the con.

It’s great to have intelligent champions for both sides, because before you know it you find yourself siding with both of them simultaneously. Personally, I found it interesting that while I’m more apt to agree with Donna’s point of view, I often found myself agreeing with Danny. Who knows, maybe I’m just afraid to cross SEO's great white light.

Michael Gray, SEOs Great Motivator

Michael Gray gave everyone a hearty kick in the pants this morning asking them to find their inner Jerry McGuire.

Michael writes in part:

“…if you’re going to do something do it with gusto. if you’re going to be a filthy rotten low down no good dirty spammer, then by gosh do it right! Crank up your auto-gen bots and churn and burn through domains like Sherman burned through Georgia. if you’re going to go the content route spend the time build it right, do the research, stomp all over the person who holds the spot ahead of you. They have one page you have three, they have ten pages you have thirty, don’t settle for second. Don’t whine and complain that nobody pays attention or links to you. You want links, you want attention, stand up and do something hard, do something exceptional, do something amazing, do something note worthy, do something impossible to ignore, do anything other than being a crybaby.”

There’s nothing I can say that will capture the heart and fire produced by Michael, so I’d really encourage you just to go read his post. Michael’s really good at stirring up this industry in a way that makes us want to do better and work smarter. We all need people who challenge us, and Michael Gray is one of those people. Thanks, Michael.

Programming Note

Just a note that I’ll be turning over blogging duties to Susan through Friday while I attend Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet training class. I wouldn’t want you to mistake my silence as a sign that I have been kidnapped by a bunch of Wikipedia-supporting crazies (Or that Susan locked me in her car trunk after I keyed it). See you on Friday for all the Recap goodness.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/19/07 at 5:21 PM | Comments (2)
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SES London Session Recap – Competitive Research

Guest entry from Marie Howell, Bruce Clay Europe.

Marie will be digging through her notes and posting recaps on some of her favourite sessions from the London Search Engine Strategies conference.

The Competitive Research session featured Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath who explained to the audience how he had dramatically increased the revenue of his company through organic optimisation the Web site. Allan described how competitive research is an integral part of an effective search engine optimisation strategy and made some suggestions as to how the attendees could use various (free and paid) tools to improve their own campaign. For example, in the competition research element of the Alexa Toolbar site owners can look at their direct competitors and estimate the traffic to their Web site. Dick also recommended using Shopzilla and Bizrate to research who the competitors are within their space and to identify their shop score. He suggested using the Wayback Machine to see the evolution of the competition, in addition to using Google Alerts and even ebay to search for your products.

Jonty Kelt from Double Click discussed Reverse Engineering and reinforced the need to know your competitors as well as you know your customers. He stressed that competitive research must be undertaken before search marketing is commenced so that the findings can be factored into the campaign. In an interesting and informative presentation, Jonty discussed how AdGooroo, for example, shows the competitive landscape for your industry and also suggested testing the bidding ‘savvy-ness’ of your competitors in search marketing. He left the audience with the wise words: ‘It takes the same aptitude to win in search as in any market endeavour.’

Daniel King from Hitwise concluded the panel by discussing how his company collects online data from 1,000,000 sites (by June / July of this year), which clients can use for online benchmarking and to check their own company against their competitors. The panel then took questions from the attendees on a variety of search marketing and organic issues.

Posted by Guest Author on 02/19/07 at 4:25 PM | Comments (0)
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SES London Session Recap – Converting Visitors Into Buyers

Guest entry from Marie Howell, Bruce Clay Europe.

Marie will be digging through her notes and posting recaps on some of her favourite sessions from the London Search Engine Strategies conference.

With the suave and eloquent Mike Sack hosting Wednesday’s exciting Converting Visitors Into Buyers session that featured panellists Sarah Bubb, the delightful Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink, and Google Europe’s Head of Analytics Brian Clifton, the audience knew this session would be a true highlight of the conference.

Mike put the topic into context early, by explaining the need to test and improve conversion rates from landing pages in order to attain an effective ROI. Understanding and testing the different entry points to your sites is an integral part of understanding the conversion process, he stated. Mike then introduced the first presenter, Sarah Bubb from Tamar, who emphasised the need to keep a strong focus on online marketing, especially where money is spent within this technological arena. Sarah illustrated her point with an example from the car insurance industry and showed the audience that it was essential to use analytics tools effectively. Don’t just look at how many visitors your site gets per month, instead focus on where your visitors are entering and leaving your site, the abandonment rate and the point of abandonment.

The next stage in this process is to compare your metrics with your industry’s standard. Sarah advocated an holistic approach to internet marketing and promoted a blend of both natural and sponsored listings.

In her presentation entitled ‘Conversion Follies’, Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink encouraged attendees to look at internet marketing as a traditional offline retail store and to view it as merchandising your window displays. In this clear, yet clever, analogy, Alex stated that it is important not to get overlooked in the SERPs. To stay competitive you must think about your SERP appearance as your store’s window display. She also told the audience not to assume that their sites look the same from every angle and to check out variances in search terms. She used the example of using varying keyword phrases like “London streetmap”, “London street map”, “street map London” to see how your site looks from all angles. You have to ensure that you are bringing your visitors to the right page, and not to the ‘delivery entrance’ (i.e. a non-converting page which may rank well) but to ‘check out your curb appeal’. Alex suggested watching for well-ranking targeted terms that are not generating referrals and to identify entry pages with a high abandonment rate by checking log data carefully.

Alex’s analogy continued with her suggestion of looking at internal site search as kind of sales person to help you determine what your visitors are interested in. Internal site search is one of the most valuable tools a Web site has for conversion. Alex informed the session participants that misspellings/typos are extremely common and to include them in internal site search. ISS needs to report the most popular searches, report searches for no results, report searches for those that render results but no clicks, etc.

In the Q & A session, after Brian Clifton’s promotion of the free Google Analytics program, Mike deftly encouraged and directed appropriate questions from the audience to the panel – generating some excellent comments and suggestions, including Mike’s own pearls of wisdom (like being extremely careful of promotional codes, since they can stop conversions due to grievances from potential purchasers). The Converting Visitors Into Buyers session left attendees with a serious sense of the value of watching where their money is going and flying high with the useful and practical information they had received from the excellent moderator and top quality speakers.

Posted by Guest Author on 02/19/07 at 3:52 PM | Comments (0)
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The Lisa’s Problem With Wikipedia Explained

It’s fair to say that I’ve done some mild Wikipedia bashing lately. I may have even referred to it as “devil spawn Wikipedia” on more than one occasion. And because our loyal readers like to keep us/me in check (please don’t ever stop that), it’s possible I may have received an email or comment or two suggesting that perhaps I need to adopt a puppy, enjoy a good cup coffee and generally just lighten up. They assure me that Wikipedia is not as evil as I make it out to be and perhaps I’m being just a bit, as David Temple would say, whiny. [You are. --Susan] Please take this in the nicest possible way -- I hate you.

Personally, I think you’re all wrong and you’ve been brainwashed by some Wikipedia government employee (oh yeah, they’re out there) who waved a flashing Wikipedia-is-pretty light in front of your face and took away your ability to reason. But in case I’m mistaken (which is totally different from being wrong), here are my three biggest problems with Wikipedia. You tell me if I’m just being moody. [You are. --Susan] -- I’m keying your car tonight. Just a warning.

Complaint #1: It puts non-expert information at the top of the search engine’s results page.

This bothers me tremendously. As a searcher and as a member of the search engine optimization community, it irks me when non-expert sites achieve rankings they don’t deserve. I would never label Wikipedia as spamming, but pretend Wikipedia was Joe’s Encyclopedia and it ranked for every single-word query imaginable, despite that the information being less than expert and often misleading. Would people second guess those rankings? If the same information was showing up under someone else’s label, would users be suspicious about the information they’re receiving? I don’t know the answer, but I’m curious.

The search engines are supposed to reward authoritative, expert content. Wikipedia is not a subject matter expert. On anything. It’s an open ended encyclopedia where anyone can contribute to make the article on a given topic “better” and “more accurate”. The best and worst thing about Wikipedia has always been that anyone can edit any entry. That fact may make it a fun project idea but it doesn’t lend itself to promoting quality information. If Stephen Colbert decides he’s an expert on elephants, then he’s an expert on elephants. We don’t even know for sure if Stephen Colbert can spell elephant.

There may be a high quantify of frequently updated information on the Wikipedia site, but the quality is equal to a middle school book report. Wikipedia is not the Encylopaedia Britannica.

Complaint #2: Wikipedia pushes expert information farther down the SERP.

By ranking first for everything under the sun, it pushes down information that actually is authoritative and worthy of rankings, thereby “hiding” expert information. Being a part of the search engine optimization population, I spend a good part of my day watching and reading about my colleagues' experiences working tirelessly to help sites improve their rankings. I read about their exhaustive efforts to help them author excellent content, create stronger site theme, identify effective keywords and generally going through the tiring and laborious process that is search engine optimization. I see the quality of sites they create and it’s like nails on a chalkboard when I do a search and see the annoying Wikipedia page ranking in the number one position. This is even more infuriating when I actually read through the Wiki entry and realize the information is rubbish. All of it.

We’ve heard time and time again that the search engines reward expert content. That to get high rankings you have to establish yourself as a subject matter expert. That the search engines' main goal is to provide users with the most relevant and authoritative information possible for any given topic. If that’s true, why does Wikipedia rank so well? Wikipedia does not fit into this description. There’s a difference between a lot of information and quality information.

Complaint #3: There’s a reason Wikipedia ranks so well in Google. Something fishy is going on!

I don’t for the life of me know what it is, but there’s got to be something there. I want to know what makes Wikipedia rank so well and why 40-50 percent of newly created Wikipedia pages appear in Google’s index with 100 hours of being created. Does Google index your site that fast? I doubt it.

Late last week, comScore reported Google’s Traffic to Wikipedia up 166 percent Year Over Year. Call me paranoid, but that’s worth noting and looking to it, especially when you consider it’s more traffic than it sends to its own Google Images property and to MySpace. Google and Wikipedia both claim there’s no incestual relationship, and maybe there’s not, but it sure looks funny. An explanation would be beneficial.

Why does Wikipedia rank so well? Is it because of the depth of content and the frequency of updates? LIkely. But to me all that is outweighed by the lack of quality of the content. There are plenty of blog spam rings that update continuously with scraped content. They don't receive number one Google rankings because they're quality is...not good. Same applies to Wikipedia..

The truth is, I might be more inclined to trust Wikipedia if its results weren’t constantly being thrown in my face. I’d trust that Wikipedia was an expert on cats, if they weren’t also an expert on love, bowling, SEO, rain, blogs and staplers. And by Google’s insistence that they are, it makes me second guess their search results. And I don’t want to have to do that. I’ve always trusted Google to lead me to the correct information; I’d rather not have to change that.

So those are my reasons for not trust Wikipedia? Am I whiny and being bitter? You tell me. [You are. And here's why: Wikipedia is a first stop information source. No, you shouldn't trust Wikipedia for your paper that's going to be half your grade but Wikipedia's guidelines indicate that you have to cite sources which means that you can track down the primary source and decide if it is credible. Wikipedia ranks because they have a) more content than God b) more links than Buddha and c) more frequent updates than Xenu. It hits all the Golden Points of the Google's algo. The way to take down Wikipedia is for expert sites to stop citing Wikipedia. Honestly, the Web has no one to blame but itself. --Susan]

I thought it was Google’s job to track down the primary source of information as a way to provide searchers with the most expert information?

But I’m sorry, I should have been more clear. When I asked for insight, I was asking everyone not named Susan Esparza. I already know her opinion. On everything. She makes sure of that.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/19/07 at 12:09 PM | Comments (27)
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February 16, 2007

Does Yahoo Really Care About Your Suggestions?

While you were busy sucking on candy conversation hearts on Wednesday (or was that just Susan?), Yahoo! told us It Takes Two to Tango and released the Yahoo Suggestion Board to give users a forum to offer improvement ideas, comments and vote on all the feedback left by other users on the various Yahoo channels like Food, Travel, Answers, YDN, etc.

And though the Diggers got themselves all riled up once they heard the Yahoo Suggestion Board included a voting system (because, as we all know, Digg invented voting) this seemed like a genuinely great idea by Yahoo. Give users a place to vote up the product suggestions that are important to them, let the people in charge of implementing these decisions see them, and let’s make Yahoo great for everyone. Huzzah! It was a smart way for Yahoo to gauge the popularity of user suggestions and let users know they really do value consumer input. We liked this a lot.

Until we came across David Dalka’s post yesterday.

David writes:

“I made a post on Yahoo! Suggestions - “Yahoo! E-mail - please improve the spam filters - too much spam gets through” in the hopes that it would get voted on by other people caring about the issue and that Yahoo! would respond by putting resources on correcting the issue. At mid-afternoon, the entry had 9 votes. Then I got the message below stating it was deleted.”

Why was the David’s very legitimate suggestion deleted, you ask? Yahoo said it was “not actionable”. Hear that? Improving Yahoo’s spam filters is not something Yahoo is able to act on. Perhaps that’s the problem with Yahoo! Mail in the first place.

Reading David’s post was disheartening. Either you’re serious about customer feedback or you’re not. You can’t screen which suggestions you feel are merited and which aren’t. I can see if David’s suggestion was off-the-wall crazy (“Dear Yahoo, please deliver me lunch every day at 12:45p.m. I like pizza, thanks!”), but this seems very legitimate. Plus, it sounds like it was an actual person deleted his suggestion, it’s not as if this was some automated mistake. David posted his suggestion, people voted it up, and then Yahoo killed it.

Only you can’t do that. You can’t open up a forum or a blog and then attempt to control the flow of information. It would be like us enabling blog comments only to set a velvet rope around it and handpicking who gets to play. Bad, Yahoo.

And David’s suggestion had nine votes. That’s a pretty substantial number right now. Most of the suggestions up there are hovering between 5-7 votes depending on what category you’re in. It’s obvious that users are concerned about email spam – though we didn’t need a suggestion board to tell us that – and yet Yahoo still ignored the suggestion.
Why?

Are they unable to offer any insight into Yahoo Email? Were they afraid the suggestion would turn into a breeding ground for angry comments? Did they not want others commenting on it? Is it because they’re already aware of the problem and are working really hard to fix it? Was it just an error?

I don’t know the reason behind Yahoo’s decision, but I’d like to know (any takers out there?). I’d like to know what “not actionable” means and if the Yahoo Suggestion board will be a place for users to offer any suggestion for any product or if Yahoo will try and control the conversation. Stuff like this leaves a really bad taste in user’s mouth, so I think it’s important that Yahoo speak up. I wonder if Yahoo Answers has experienced any of the same problems?

[We really don't know Yahoo's side of this past the pro forma letter. Does not actionable mean too imprecise? Is "improve spam filters" like saying "cure cancer" an undertaking too large to tackle without some kind of focus? I, for one, want to hear from a Yahoo about this. --Susan] - I’m not quite sure I agree that “improve spam filters” is comparable to “cure cancer”, but yes, a response from Yahoo regarding the meaning of not actionable would be very nice.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/16/07 at 4:36 PM | Comments (2)
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SES London Session Recap – Auditing Paid Click and Click Fraud

Guest entry from Marie Howell, Bruce Clay Europe.

Marie will be digging through her notes and posting recaps on some of her favourite sessions from the London Search Engine Strategies conference.

Jeff Rohrs was the expert moderator and the ‘host with the most’, introducing this advanced track session with flair, charisma and passion. In his introduction, he referenced his highly articulate and comprehensive paper ‘The Sausage Manifesto’ as a starting point for the session. Based on attendees’ frantic scribbling, you know that the traffic to that excellent document must have spiked dramatically later in the day.

Jeff introduced Jon Myers who discussed what click fraud and click auditing is and, as it was an advanced session, recommended sites like Search Engine Watch and NeverblueAds for more information. He discussed how Google has a four stage process to remove invalid clicks and how the user can view the results of this process within the reports available in their AdWords account.

There are a variety of different companies who deal with click auditing, and as advertisers become more aware of the potential for click fraud, the number of companies investigating it is only increasing. Jon stated that it is imperative to look at the log files and at the second tier URL to try and understand the click and conversion data. He said to particularly look out for repeating IP addresses/domains, where visitors are coming from (e.g. Asia), click spikes, etc. He told the audience that it is possible to refine this process with technology and to drill down into the data further by looking at factors like geo location, where the end user has used an open proxy, onion routers, where the DNS recorded doesn’t have a valid IP address, etc. The technology would marry this automatically with client conversion data.

Jon added that the search engines are willing to solve this before concluding that fraud detection will need to evolve and continue to develop as new products, such as mobile search, come into play.

Dr. Stephen Turner of Click Tracks discussed distinguishing poor performing ads from click fraud, and encouraged recognising false positives before the microphone passed on to Shuman Ghosenmajumder who added ‘a bit of colour’ to the previous perspectives.

Shuman gave the two types of click fraud, which are those from:

1. Competitors, trying to hurt other advertisers.
2. Affiliates, by generating false clicks on their ads.

He continued by saying that this might be via click farms recruiting ‘pay to click’ scams and software (Clickbots or Botnets – using a network of machines to create false traffic). Shuman stated categorically that Google detects fraud independent of the type of fraud. He showed how Invalid Click Reports show the number of clicks that are being marked as invalid and that Google aspires, naturally, to identify and refine out click fraud as soon as it happens.

Shuman described Google’s ‘shield’ that provides protection to the advertiser. He said that the search engines find it acceptable to have a high false positive rate and that Google will perceive many false positives as fraud and therefore not charge, even though it may actually be a genuine click. Google casts the net wide, apparently, to catch as many invalid clicks as possible and are quite happy for false positives to not be charged for.

Shuman discussed how real-time filters will come into play for a number of situations, including double clicks. Moreover, the offline analysis continues and although there is a period of time where the advertiser have been affected (and potentially not having their ads showing), a refund is given afterwards as soon as it is detected. Credits are given back to advertisers immediately. Shuman also covered reactive investigations – those investigations that are initiated by the advertisers from the logs that are submitted to Google. He says that this is a valuable feedback mechanism, although Google say this is a negligible percentage of the overall detected fraud.

Shuman also advocated using the Google Autotag, which allows users to see which clicks are being recorded by Google and which are not. This reconciles the number of log clicks and billed clicks.

Shuman concluded by saying that Google wants to hear from advertisers who believe that click fraud hasn’t been detected and that they are investing in the click quality team to improve customer experience and ensure a good ROI. So, the floodgates are officially open. Google’s investment means that there should be sufficient staff to help address advertisers’ concerns – in theory.

Ever conscious of the audience’s needs, Greg Boser set the stage by summarising the history interaction process between the search engines and the advertisers who were trying to report click fraud. He even included reference to the Clickbot Wars and competitive sabotage that was rife in 2002-3. When AdSense first came out, it was evident that detection of fraud was becoming more apparent and so the process of fraudsters using dirty proxies had been pretty much stamped out. Greg stressed how vital it is that analytics comes into play to assess potential click fraud. He recommended tracking clicks especially if they are from anonymous proxies, to check log files, cookies, etc.

Controversially, Greg (based upon extensive experience and a really tight handle on this issue) doesn’t believe the suggested 38 percent click fraud rates, He believes this figure is amplified by the click auditing companies in their efforts to capitalise on this side of the industry. A superb speaker, Greg rounded off his presentation with a few pearls of wisdom and thoughts for the future, like recommending Jeff Rohrs' ‘Sausage Manifesto’, stating that it is the ‘greatest document’ and encouraging people to track contextual advertising in addition to search. He concluded by saying that he believes strongly that ‘it is the responsibility of the search engines and not the advertisers’ to monitor and prove click fraud, and that detailed log files from the search engines should be made available to advertisers in order to facilitate reconciliation with the site log files.

The Q & A saw the eloquent Greg come head to head with Shuman based on Greg’s vast experience on the history of click fraud management by the search engines, plus the value of contextual advertising. A highly interesting session – the star of which was Greg - with some real nuggets of information magnanimously shared with the audience.

Posted by Guest Author on 02/16/07 at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)
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Friday Recap

So, have you bought your The Lisa shirt yet? If not, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Susan has already bought three, plus two mugs, and she’s trying to get me to add messenger bags and men’s boxers to the store so she can scoop those up too. I don’t know what Susan is planning to do with men’s boxers, but you know how she is. [Look, I don't ask about your hobbies, okay?--Susan] - Um, ew.

I must say, the greatest, most shocking, fascinatingly mesmerizing thing about Graywolf’s The Lisa shirt post is the realization that David Temple has somehow smuggled one of those giant child-eating rabbits into the country!

Seriously though, thanks to everyone who participated (and Nathan for coining the term!). It made for a really funny Thursday. I hear Rand was supposed to be in on the fun but he was too busy with that whole “proposal” thing. Geez, some people and their priorities.

Was I the only one who got excited on Tuesday when I found out YouTube was now streaming episodes of Gumby? I was, wasn’t it? Fine then, don’t come over and watch it with me. I don’t care.

Over at Search Engine Land, Phil Bradley shared his experience trying out the new rage of search engines which claim to be able to determine a song based on your humming. Phil quickly and expertly identified the problem with these engines:

“Of course, the first problem is, 'what exactly is a hum?' Is it actually 'hmmm hmmm hmmm', or does it include 'De da de deee dadada da' as well? Is singing allowed? For someone who likes to know about search syntax, Boolean operators and so on, these are very important questions. “

Good work, Phil!

Google Blogoscoped found a gray blob on Google Maps. What Phillip didn’t realize was the blob was actually one of those fancy optical illusions. Some people may see a blob, others see a diamond sitting on a rectangle, and others see two adjoining profiles of Big Bird. Don’t feel bad about not knowing that though, Phil. I’m practically an expert. Optical illusions were the theme of my third grade science project.

Barry Schwartz points to the coolest quasi-invention of them all – converting your ChapStick into a USB drive. Genius!

Also genius and from Barry -- sleep nap pods to help people catch some workday shuteye. With recent reports that midday naps can reduce heart attacks, if your boss doesn’t allow you to install one of these it means he wants you to die. We’d advise you to find new employment.

Try asking Adam Lasnik. He’s awesome at helping people find answers to their questions. Tall people everywhere thank him.

Also awesome? Heather B. Armstrong’s dog Chuck. Can your dog balance a Dora the Explorer doll on his head? We didn’t think so.

Pandia tells us the 5 Things You Have to Search For Before Your Die, which are the meaning of life, love, truth, freedom, and [how to] find yourself. I’m sorry, but if you’re searching for those online, you’re looking in the wrong place and you probably have bigger problems. Just a thought. [Besides, the answer is 42, everyone knows that. --Susan]

I don’t want to start trouble or anything, but Jason Calacanis totally just called Robert Scoble fat. Hee, love it!

Congrats to Matt Cutts who won the UK lottery as soon as he crossed over international lines! Googlers win everything.

Here’s another installment of Things I Learned From BoingBoing This Week:

• Overweight girls can’t be airline hostesses. Um, duh. How’s the plane supposed to get off the ground with a bunch of fatties on it?
• This cat can play the piano. So? My cats break vertical blinds and eat tulips. What’s your point?
• Rachael Ray explains how to open a jar. You know, in case you’ve gone your whole life without being able to do so.
• Owners of pathetic car horns can now pimp their honk, which rocks. I drive a 2004 Chevy Aveo and let me just tell you, the horn can best be compared to the one found on a 4-year-olds purple Huffy. The one with the streamers on the side and little pink basket on the front? Yeah, that one.
• Some people want to ban skinny mirrors. I bet it’s those damn skinny people too.
• Here’s a way to drop an egg four stories without breaking it. Can we get one of those for babies? That would be super awesome.
• CupcakecupcakecupcakeCUPCAKE!

And because I love each and every one of you (some more than others) here are some fun things to do if you have some spare time this weekend. Here’s looking at you, Susan. [For the last time, working counts as having plans! --Susan] - I’m so sorry your life turned out like this.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/16/07 at 1:16 PM | Comments (1)
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February 15, 2007

Search Engine Strategies, Day 3

Guest entry from Marie Howell, Bruce Clay Europe.

Marie was kind enough to act as Bruce Clay’s roving reporter during SES London. We will be posting her daily recaps throughout the day.

With day three bringing sessions on Web Analytics and Measuring Success with a struggling Rand Fishkin (who was braving a nasty cold and refused to evacuate to Paris like the other members of his team) and Sara Andersson; Site Optimisation Analysis Clinics with industry luminaries Mike Sack and Dave Naylor; and Link Baiting and Link Building sessions hosted by Chris Sherman with experts Dave Naylor (again – busy man!) and Nick Wilson, the final day of SES London was a resounding success.

The presenters were all highly accessible, offering expert knowledge to attendees. They took time during the clinics (and afterwards) to examine the optimisation of individual sites and help the audience understand the process with ‘real life’ examples. Constantly on the spot, these authorities demonstrated what even a cursory look at a Web site can reveal in terms of search engine optimisation. Naturally, this emphasised just how much information can be derived, and just how many issues can be identified, once an in-depth study is performed and keywords, coding, architecture, and navigation are all looked at in detail.

In the Site Advertising Analysis Clinics, Mike Sack covered optimising page conversion and used live examples to demonstrate what tweaks can be undertaken to a site and to a page to make the user’s experience better and increase conversions immensely. Comments from attendees later reinforced just how much they valued this opportunity to interact so closely with the speakers and expert panellists.

The final session on Link Baiting and Building with Nick Wilson and Dave Naylor was informative and beautifully presented. Nick stressed how link baiting is hard work. It requires dedication, tenacity and creativity. There are no shortcuts or easy paths to this, he stated, and emphasised the importance of keeping it clean and offering something of value. He likened it to fishing in that it is not an exact science, you must keep casting your line, and though you may not always land a fish you have to keep going until you find the ‘sweet spot’.

After of the recent to-ing and fro-ing on the topic, Bronco’s Dave Naylor posed the question as to whether link baiting is in fact a dirty word. He stressed that it is the idea to create something of value to a specific audience and that logically anything of value is not dirty. Dave referenced the blog and forum ‘spat’ between Jason Calacanis and the SEO industry in which Calacanis is aiming for ‘stink bait’ by stating that the SEO world is ‘bull’ in an effort to gain traffic to his sites.

Dave discussed different types of ethical linkbait including ‘how to’s…’, contests, breaking stories, scoops, controversy, etc. and also recommended that corporations start a blog. He reinforced the need to maintain integrity at all times and never attack anybody. He then suggested that becoming part of the community is an integral part of this and to build up credibility in your space.

With Nick’s ‘innate listen-ability’ and expertness, plus the humour, skill and verbal dexterity (plus dulcet tones) of Dave, the session was fun, lively and informative. Questions were handled deftly and in a very detailed manner with clear, practical examples. Both speakers charmed the audience – as did many others throughout the week - with their frankness, honesty and willingness to share best practice in order to inform the industry and enhance our approach to search engine optimisation and search marketing in the UK.

Posted by Guest Author on 02/15/07 at 4:44 PM | Comments (1)
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Search Engine Strategies London, Day 2

Guest entry from Marie Howell, Bruce Clay Europe.

Marie was kind enough to act as Bruce Clay’s roving reporter during SES London. We will be posting her daily recaps throughout the day.

After a very good night in Docklands where drinks were aplenty and conversation exciting, I had the opportunity of meeting for the first time with delightful people, such as Jenny Rohr and the lovely SEO Wife,

After a keynote address and interview with the famous Matt Cutts, day two’s focus was on Social Search issues ranging from using news search mediums, to blog and feed search, to video and podcasting. (Incidentally, when questioned, Matt said that the current movement within the Google index is “not an update”.) In addition to the SS vertical, other exciting sessions included Successful Site Architecture, Landing Page Testing, and Tuning and Converting Visitors into Buyers.

Social Search SEO has been one of the most innovative strands at the London conference and attendees were delighted to learn from the classy Amanda Watlington, SES veteran and expert Greg Jarboe, the highly intelligent and forward thinking Nick Wilson from Click Influence, and Katy Howell (no relation) who delivered a snappy presentation on search engine optimisation public relations.

Nick covered the topic of why blogging is so beneficial for companies. He discussed how, over last 3-4 years, there has been a massive change in the way that people use the Web and how now in order to gain targeted traffic it is essential to dive into social media. Nick delivered his perception of blogging as if in casual conversation and spoke about the importance of playing nicely within this space, highlighting the etiquette in the blogalaxy.

Amanda Watlington’s prediction of 2007 being the year of RSS sent a resounding nod through the audience. Her advice on how to create a good feed, how to syndicate content for other sites, and how to optimise a blog and/or feed was highly valuable and instructive.

Greg Jarboe discussed how the press release has only been optimisable since 2002. He presented a case study on the optimisation of press releases and how, by a happy accident, he stumbled upon some very interesting findings with the help of his intern son!

Katy Howell took the audience through the journey of moving into the potentially daunting world of the press release. Complimenting Greg’s presentation extremely well, she showed the step-by-step process of thought and action in getting your message out there and driving traffic to your site.

In the Converting Visitors into Buyers class, Mike Sack hosted with his usual flair and charisma, whilst sharing his extensive knowledge and inserting pertinent and challenging facts and questions.

Sarah Bubb, the fabulous Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink, and Brian Clifton (head analytics Europe, Google) were experts on the panel and gave some excellent examples and brilliant analogies to help the mixed audience understand the concepts being discussed. Alex’s correlation between SERPs and a window display was illuminating for the attendees. She encouraged looking at the title and ‘abstract’ that appears within the search results page as your shop’s window, the idea being that anything placed in there should be enticing and pertinent to the potential visitor.

She also encouraged thinking outside the box by not assuming that your store looks the same from every angle and to search with different orders of your keyword strings. Alex commented, “Check out your curb appeal.” To increase the potential for converting customers into buyers, Alex stressed the need to bring them in through the front door, not by the delivery entrance. The importance of internal site search was also addressed by Alex as she highlighted examples of how you can ensure that this potentially very powerful tool for conversion is utilised effectively.

.With quality information, interesting and informative experts, and frequent audience interaction, attendees went home happy with a truly incredible second day.

Posted by Guest Author on 02/15/07 at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)
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Search Engine Strategies London, Day 1

Guest entry from Marie Howell, Bruce Clay Europe.

Marie was kind enough to act as Bruce Clay’s roving reporter during SES London. We will be posting her daily recaps throughout the day.

Day 1 of SES London kicked off with a number of exciting sessions on search marketing, covering everything from keyword selection to click fraud and auditing. With high industry experts such as Greg Boser (Webguerrilla), Shuman Ghosemajumder (Google), Elizabeth Osmeloski (Search Engine Watch), Jeff Rohrs (of Sausage manifesto fame) and others.

The Organic track was the highlight of Day 1. Chris Sherman acted as the moderator and introduced industry luminaries such as Greg Boser, Mikkel deMib Svendson, Dave Naylor, Barry Lloyd (former owner of makemetop), and Rand Fishkin. (Sorry, you don’t get to catch up him with this time, Lisa!).

With panellists of such a high calibre, the audience certainly wasn’t disappointed and listened to the experts discussing various optimisation and site issues. From the angelic position of the gorgeous Rand, who championed white hat throughout, to a discussion of the ‘dark arts’ by some of the others, it was a fascinating and informative session. SEO Rockstar Greg shared stories of how white hat, organic search engine optimisation, and cleaning up sites (and then ensuring they remain clean) had benefited his corporate clients and helped them to drive vast amounts of traffic and revenue. Mikkel supported this assertion by recommending a similar approach in response to one of the audience’s questions about a particular client Web site.

Mikkel’s passion for search engine optimisation was evident through his eloquent monologue about SEO being a science. He stressed to the audience how search engine optimisation is difficult. It is a science which, unlike nuclear physics or rocket science, does not have manuals or books and so groundbreaking solutions evolve every day. Search engine optimisation is hard work. It requires expertise, constant training, growth, research, development, continual testing and sound methodologies. In another discussion, Mikkel equated search engine optimisation with public relations, saying it is an essential part of any marketing strategy and can result in great ROI.

An example of which was recounted by Rand when he told a captivated audience that he knew of one company who had invested approximately £1000 for a couple of hours of Mikkel’s SEO expertise, which resulted in the company’s revenue increasing by 30,000 Euros the following day. Investment in search engine optimisation is key to developing any Web site and the ROI can be incredible.

Dave Naylor made reference to Jason Calacanis’ Chicago keynote statement and subsequent “SEO is ‘rubbish’” linkbait comments (author discretion used!) He then reinforced this by expressing a personal opinion (!) before articulating very clearly and concisely to the attendees why that assertion is completely inaccurate. Using powerful arguments, persuasive language, and drawing on his extensive experience within the industry, Dave demonstrated the benefits of organic search engine optimisation using concrete examples and quality information.

Attendees were left enthralled during the question and answer period as the diverse panellists offered up their expert advice to an audience salivating over the pearls of white hat wisdom. Fun, lively and interactive: a truly excellent Organic SEO session and an incredible first day.

Posted by Guest Author on 02/15/07 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
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February 14, 2007

Searching is Lovely on Valentine’s Day

It’s Valentine’s Day and the search world is all aflutter with the love bug. Aw!

As with most holidays, everyone’s eyes were zoomed in on the logos being displayed by the various engines. And we weren’t let down.

Google’s running the yummy chocolate covered strawberry concoction seen below…

…but has taken some slack after the blogosphere accused Google of misspelling their own name. Google not-so-subtly addressed the issue in their update Strawberries are red, stems are green. Oooh, the stem is the L, I get it. Gawker tried to help Google out and redesigned their logo for them, but frankly that just left me even more confused. Is that a pickle? It looks like a pickle. What do pickles have to do with Valentine’s Day?

[If you need help figuring out the Google logo or need a visual on how to shovel snow, check out Ze.]

Ask.com, my personal engine of choice, is also showing the love with a heart-shaped search button, a home page to link to timely VDay-inspired Smart Answers and a sugary blog entry that had me letting out a not-so-silent “aww!”

Yahoo is running a Flash Valentine's Day message, as they often do, and Live.com proves once again that they’re too cool for us and is offering up no love at all.

Well, I shouldn’t say that. They did offer up some unrealistic love advice that shows forgetful males how to make quick Valentine’s Day reservations on the fly via their mobile phone. Of course, we wouldn’t actually recommend anyone try this method because any male worth the effort knows if you don’t have reservations by now, the only good that phone will do you is to help you order a pizza. And maybe help you find a cheap motel once your wife isn’t so amused by the pizza.

Search Engine Journal’s Carsten Cumbrowski got into the Valentine’s Day spirit with It’s Valentine’s Day! Yes, TODAY! offering up some shopping ideas for their more absentminded readers, and linking off to some VDay alternatives for people who think Hallmark should die. See that, Search Engine Journal thinks of everything!

The often hilarious Chris Hooley decided the best thing for a lonely SEO to do on Valentines Day was to offer himself up to the highest bidder. Chris has launched a contest called Who Wants To Date An SEO where ladies can complete for a night on the town with everyone’s favorite search student. I think Susan and Chris would make an excellent couple, don’t you? […you didn't actually nominate me, right? You do remember that I'm your boss? --Susan] Why you gotta throw out the boss card? I thought we were friends two-females-who-work-together-and-pretend-to-tolerate-one-other? Plus, if anyone could get you to lighten up (and make you less painful to deal with), it would be Chris Hooley.

Well, I think that just about completes our Valentine’s Day round-up. I hope everyone’s having a fun day and passing the love around. A big thanks to everyone who has made my day considerably sweeter. Today’s collection of charming emails, giggle-worthy-cards, and blog entries dedicated to helping me with my vertical blind dilemma have kept me smiling and laughing all day. Don’t tell anyone, but you’re all my favorite. :)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/14/07 at 3:44 PM | Comments (2)
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February 13, 2007

Google Tries to Establish My Worth As A Person

I’ve been following the discussion on the Google’s Agent Rank Patent application lately and the more I read, the more questions I have and the more it creeps me out. If you haven’t been following along, Patent King Bill Slawski covered the story at Search Engine Land on Friday, explaining the patent application as follows:

“Imagine a system that instead of ranking content on a page level, breaks those pages down and looks at smaller content items on those pages, which it associates with digital signatures. Content creators could be given reputation scores, which could influence the rankings of pages where their content appears, or which they own, edit, or endorse.”

This is quite different from the ways things currently work. Today when a user searches on Google, their query is matched based on what Bill refers to as query-dependant data (keywords) and query-independent data (site authority, links, etc). The new application signals a system where the engines won’t look at trust solely on a site level (i.e. who links to you, etc), but on a personal level as well, tying a page to a specific author.

Of course in order for that to work, Google needs to be able to identify who’s writing the content and how many authors are involved. It sounds like this will be done using some sort of digital signature capable of identifying that Bruce Clay’s BloggerX is the same BloggerX who posts at two other blogs and on the SEOblog Forums. Once in the system, if BloggerX has a Google-determined high reputation, then the content she creates will be considered more expert than content written by others, and will consequently rank higher. If BloggerX is instead a big troublemaker with little authority, then her blog posts won’t rank.

There’s also some talk that this may be targeted to a specific niche so that just because BloggerX is an expert on search engine optimization, doesn’t mean she’s an expert on fixing vertical blinds. [However, if you are an expert on fixing vertical blinds, I’d really appreciate you dropping me an email. I seem to have tweaked mine and now they are permanently and annoyingly stuck. It’s Jack Jack’s fault.]

I’ll adjust my tinfoil hat, but remember the old days when search results were based on keywords and everyone got the same results for a given query? Aren’t you kind of missing those days now? I am. I’m not comfortable with this for a myriad of reasons.

First, let’s recap some of the news stories we’ve read recently, shall we? There was the one about Google tracking all of your searches unless you opt out, the news that you now get personalized search results whether you want them or not, the rumor that your past blackhat indiscretions may be held against you in the court of search engine results, and now you’re telling me Google is going to rank my pages based on my own personal authority and worth? How much longer until my Web site gets buried solely because Google doesn’t like me. They studied my search history, decided I’m ultimately a big jerk who searches for inconsequential things (which isn’t entirely untrue), and then banned me from their index for blatant stupidity.

Second, can authority or reputation even be broken down into a quantifiable scale? What factors are going to be used to determine my worth as a blogger? And reputation according to whom? Google? The search engine optimization industry? Other bloggers? Are you telling me that every post Rebecca Kelley writes will automatically rank higher than mine simply because she’s the more popular one? Totally unfair, I say!

Third, can users opt out or “turn off” these digital signatures? What if I don’t want every blog post I write to be tied to me? What if that makes me think twice about writing about a certain topic in case it’s seen as “unpopular” and therefore not-authoritative? I wouldn’t want the Friday Recap to detract from my blogging worth.

And how about when the work day ends? The Bruce Clay blog isn’t the only blog I write at. I certainly wouldn’t want the blogs I enjoy writing in relative anonymity being tied to this one. You don’t need to know that before I started writing this entry I had Kix for breakfast, half a banana and apple juice (yes, I’m five.). Unless you do and then we can discuss that privately, preferably with law enforcement present.

I don’t understand how this is designed to help users find relevant information. The authority system Google uses now works for me. All this does is turn my search results into a boys-club-style popularity contest. The high authority inner circle will rank for everything Wikipedia style and the rest of us will be buried in obscurity.

The Web was based on a system of relative anonymity. It was what you produced that mattered, not who you are. I miss those days. I don’t want Google watching me in order to give me personalized search results and I don’t want to rank higher because Google likes me. Judging the trustworthy site of the Bruce Clay site is one thing, judging the trustworthy of me is entirely different.

[And seriously, if you know anything about vertical blinds...]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/13/07 at 5:16 PM | Comments (11)
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The Number One PPC Mistake

IgorMord had a great post over at SEOmoz yesterday entitled 17 Most Common PPC Mistakes Web Marketers Make. It’s an excellent overview of the kind of search marketing blunders we see around here every day. However, we noticed that IgorMord’s list focused the mistakes you would see in fairly established pay per click campaigns. What if you’re not ready for all that yet because you’re still stuck on identifying which keywords you’re supposed to be targeting in the first place? Then what do you do?

My curiosity and admitted lack of PPC knowledge led me to the desk of our pay per click expert Nick Guastella. At first Nick pretended he didn’t see me, but once I started throwing stress balls at his head and threatening to key his car he saw that resistance to the Lisa is futile. Eventually he agreed to talk to me, but only after I put down the letter opener.

I quickly started asking Nick some questions about identifying keywords for a PPC campaign. Basically, I was trying to get him to reveal the magic formula for predicting keyword success so that I could sell it on eBay. You can sell anything on eBay, you know.

Turns out that just like with search engine optimization, there is no magic formula for uncovering the keywords that will have the biggest impact on your pay per click campaign or predict their ROI. Bummer. Nick says even the terms voted Most Likely to Convert in high school will fail to do so if your site doesn’t deliver what the keywords or your ad promises. [Fine, I may have paraphrased that (Nick’s a talker), but you get the idea. Keywords alone won’t do it, but they are incredibly important]

So what should you do when you’re just starting out and looking for keywords?

The first step of your pay per click account is discovery. You need to identify the terms that are most important to your customers. One way to discover terms is to review your site and identify keywords based on products, information or services that your site provides. Another way to identify keywords is to take a look at your log files. See what terms visitors are using to land on your site and which ones have the best search volume. Something we do for our PPC clients is to also make a note of negative keywords, or words that the client would not want to appear for. And of course, there are lots of keyword discovery tools out there to help you. Check out our SEO Newsletter article entitled Five Steps to Effective SEO Keyword Research for more info on that.

We also typically utilize Broad Matching to uncover our client's site’s long tail keywords.

For example, suppose a client chose to target the phrase “life insurance quote”. By using Broad Match it would also allow their ad to appear for longer keyword searches, such as “life insurance quote for non-smoker over 50” or “life insurance quote the wife was right”. This allows us to use fewer terms for an advertiser's account, but still get these more valuable and usually higher converting long tail terms in.

A lot of other search marketing companies recommend using Content Matching, but we’ve never seen a case where an advertiser has had a good result from this. Usually the conversion rates are well below 1 percent and have a much higher cost per conversion.

One area where Nick agreed with the post on SEOmoz was not to become obsessed with fighting for that #1 spot.

Nick told me:

“Many advertisers want to be 1-3 because they think the higher they are, the more clicks they’ll get, and more clicks always equals more sales. This isn’t the case. It is much better for advertisers to start bids low and slowly move them up to monitor keywords and identify how they perform. Putting keywords in the top three will often cause advertisers to spend a lot of money for a small amount of conversions. After they learn their lesson they lower their bids to find the optimal spot and see an immediate increase in ROI.”

Doing it right from the start will save you money in the beginning and improve your odds of success.

Another thing to keep in mind is that though traffic is good, when you’re paying for each click what you’re interested in is conversions. Figure out your site’s long and short term goals so you know the purpose of your campaign. This will help you determine what keywords you should be bidding on.

Here are some additional tips from Nick:

• Use keywords specific to your site and usually 3 keyword strings or more.
• Link keywords directly to product pages or as close as possible. People use the internet to save time if they land on a page where they cannot get what they want in three clicks you have just wasted money.
• Be as descriptive in ads as possible and do not use domain names in ads. People can see your domain below the ad if they want that information. Provide as much information as possible about your product being offered. Your PPC ad is your 30 second commercial; it has to be written to inform a searcher and compel them to click through.
• More clicks do not equal more sales. Everything out there, especially from the PPC search engines, emphasizes getting a high click-through rate. While you do want clicks to your ad, the ROI is the most important measure of success. Often we have clients with an ad that gets a lower click-through rate but higher conversions. Write so that you get qualified traffic.

And of course, a good pay per click expert knows their work is never done. Once you establish your keywords, its time to test, test some more, and then finish all that up with some more testing. To get the most out of your pay per click campaign you have to monitor your keywords to make sure they’re performing they way you expected them to. If they’re not, determine if the problem is with your terms or whether it’s a problem with your ad copy and/or landing pages.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/13/07 at 4:45 PM | Comments (1)
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Fake Blogs, Belgium and Fun Stuff

UK Makes Fake Blogging Illegal

The London Times reports that new laws taking affect in 2008 will make fake blogging illegal in the UK. The law applies to hotels, restaurants, online shops, Amazon.com reviewers, and others who often create false online identities to post glowing reviews about their products and services in the attempt to persuade others. This new law also prohibits the kind of fake blogs we’ve seen from companies like Walmart and possibly even those press release type “articles” we see on the devil spawn site Wikipedia.

The London Times commented that the change comes as part of an overhaul being done to European consumer protection laws.

Personally, I find it sad that we need a law to prevent companies from purposely misleading consumers, but it seems we do. So now we have one. Rejoice in our evilness.

Are You Over the Google/Belgium Nonsense Yet?

I know I’m not. My life would not be complete if I wasn’t able to talk about Belgium vs Google just one more time. So here it goes.

A Belgian court upheld its initial crazy verdict that Google violated the copyright of 17 Belgian newspapers after Google indexed the content and made it available in its cache. To make amends, Google will have to pay a 140-day retroactive fine of £25,000 for their failure to remove the content and any links to it. I suppose Google’s silver lining here is that the fine was reduced to £25,000 from £1 million per day since the courts restricted its findings to the cache part of the case. Only having to pay 2.5 percent of the fine means Belgium is now 97.5 percent less annoying. Huzzah!

Google plans to appeal the decision and says they have no intention of modifying the way Google News works, saying the case is public enough that if publishers have a problem, they should contact Google. And because this suit had nothing to do with money, Copiepresse said they would “consider” allowing Google to display snippets of their content for a fee. Yeah, okay. The combination of those three factors makes me think I will undoubtedly get to write about this case at least 20 more times. You wish you were me.

Why can’t people just learn how to use a robots.txt file or Meta Robots? Life would be so much simpler.

[Cue the angry emails that come every time I mention Belgium in the blog.]

Fun Finds

Send your favorite adorable, dark-haired, Friday-Recap-writing Bruce Clay blogger a special Valentine's Day card tomorrow to tell her just how much you love her. Or just send mass amounts of dark chocolate to the office with her name on it, whichever is easier for you.

Lee Odden offers up a reader poll that asks, “¬What do you do when you can’t think of something or you’re not motivated to blog?” We point to other people’s reader polls, Lee, that’s what we do. :)

Barry finds a DigitalPoint thread that shows a mockup of Google’s forthcoming Take Me To Wikipedia button. Okay, so maybe the button’s not forthcoming, but it may as well be. Death to Wikipedia! [So much bitterness, Lisa. Have another cupcake. --Susan] -- Maybe I’d be a little more chipper if your cupcakes had frosting on them. Who eats a cupcake with no frosting?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/13/07 at 4:41 PM | Comments (3)
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February 12, 2007

Weekend Update

Yahoo’s Big Deal

Yahoo announced a pretty heavy mobile ad deal that will put their mobile network in 18 countries and has already attracted big name advertisers like Pepsi, Proctor & Gamble, Hilton’s Embassy Suites, Intel, Nissan, Infiniti and others. The mobile ads will allow users to call the advertisers directly or seek out additional information.

Yahoo Senior Vice President Steve Boom said this deal is about Yahoo staking out its leadership in the emerging space on the mobile phone. I’d say; this deal has huge implications for Yahoo. Right now Yahoo has a chance to establish itself in the mobile ad market before Google saturates. So far it looks like Yahoo has all the right pieces in place -- it's scooped up the high profile advertisers, put its platform in 18 different countries around the world and its audience is already there. Good for Yahoo!

Windows Live Hotmail

Proving they really do deserve the We Create Stupid Product Names lifetime achievement award, Microsoft is prepping a relaunch of Hotmail, which will include rebranding the email app as Windows Live Hotmail. It could be worse; it was originally slated to be called Windows Live Mail. I understand Microsoft is trying to get all their apps until the Windows Live name, but I still find the whole thing amusing.

Based on what we’ve read, it sounds like the revamped Hotmail will keep users’ favorite features (check boxes for marking messages for deletion, a classic interface, etc), but will be revamped to make it faster, safer and easier to use. [I miss the interface from the Hotmail of 1998. Does anyone else remember that? When you got to pick what style you wanted?--Susan] Are you looking for like, a hand count or something?

Users may start to see glimpses of the new beta in the new few weeks. Old users will have the option of keeping their hotmail.com email address, and new users will be able to choose between a hotmail.com or a live.com address. Try and snatch lisa@live.com from me and I’ll cut you! ;)

Firefox Upgrade Makes a Google Office More Appealing

Read/WriteWeb has an interesting find, reporting that Firefox 3 will support online applications. The coolness of this cannot be overstated. This means soon I will be able to access my email/calendar/miscellaneous blog entry without actually having to be online. I’m sure this upgrade will require Google to make some changes on their end, but they’ll be quick to do it, and then once they do, huzzah!

And why will Google be so proactive about this little backend switch? Because it makes switching from Microsoft’s office suite to Google’s just a little more appealing.

Robert O’Callahan left a comment on RWW that answers my initial “what about the ads?” question:

Ads can be downloaded, stored, and served out of the cache. However, I think people are going to be online most of the time, so supporting offline mode won't cost the vendor much ad revenue; instead it will just remove an adoption barrier for the vendor's applications.

That makes sense, but does that mean fewer ads for the user if they’re constantly working from the offline version and the page is never refreshed? Seems like it. Regardless, I very much like the idea of turning my browser window into its own little operating system.

Fun Finds

Search Engine Watch says that Facebook is on the rise. If the fact that I’m finally using the Facebook account I’ve had for years and have never touched is any testament to that, then yes, Facebook is most certainly on the rise. Unfortunately for them, MySpace still holds 80 percent market share to their 8 percent.

Oilman delivers Digglets, ABCs and 123s, and makes me giggle at the same time.

Barry uncovers a Search Love Triangle that has nothing to do with me, Rand, or Mystery Guest. I know; I was surprised too.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/12/07 at 4:40 PM | Comments (0)
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Will Wikipedia Close Down? Please, I wish

It’s Monday which means it’s Clear Up Rumors From The Weekend day. (That needs a Ze Frank-style theme song.) You’re excited, aren’t you?

This weekend’s taken-out-of-context rumor was that Wikipedia would close down by June if it didn’t immediately get some funding to combat increasing server costs. Though I wished, hoped and prayed that this rumor might be true, it very obviously wasn’t.

The rumor started when some overanxious bloggers got excited and took a comment made by Wikimedia Foundation chairwoman Florence Devouard completely out of context and ran with it. During the recent Lift07 conference, Florence stated that Wikipedia currently has enough cash to pay the bills for about 3 months.

Left to their own devices, bloggers turned that comment into: Wikipedia will close down in three months if people don’t hurry up and send them some money.

See, how that’s not accurate? No one said anything about Wikipedia closing down (unfortunately), Florence just said to date they had about 3-4 months of cash already in the bank. That’s it. No scandals. Wikipedia is still boring.

Regardless of what she actually said, the rumor mill went into overdrive about Wikipedia’s supposed cash crisis, how to solve it, and if there would be some sort of revolt if Wikipedia was ever extinguished. (Oh, and then because no one was looking at him, Robert Scoble complained about how TechMeme handling the linking to this story. Yeah, I don’t know why either.)

As for the cash crisis, it doesn’t look like Wikpedia has one. Its chairwoman seems confident that Wikipedia has enough money to sustain itself for quite awhile, saying plans were being made for what Wikipedia would do in 2009. And if that’s not good enough, Li Evans did some great digging and uncovered some Wikipedia financial documents which prove the situation is less-than-dire.

But what if it was? Would users support a for-profit version of the online encyclopedia complete with advertising? Of course they would, and should Wikipedia opt to do that (which they won’t), the potential for a high yearly profit is there.

HiMojo.com took a look at Wikipedia’ traffic, potential for advertising, crunched some numbers and ultimately decided that Wikipedia could earn $2.8 million per month off display and banner advertising. Subtract from that employee salaries, server costs, sushi lunches, and whatever they’re paying Google to rank so highly (kidding!), and Wikipedia is left with a yearly profit of $35 million. That would certainly pay for some servers.

Why wouldn’t Wikipedia put ads on its pages? Because Wikipedia was founded on creating an unbiased point of view that anyone can contribute to. Slapping ads on your site would detract from that and I don’t think Jimmy Wales would opt for it.

That being said, I do think Wikipedia will have some trouble in the next 12 months, but because they’re alienating people, not because they’re running out of cash. Over at Marketing Pilgrim, Any Beal asked ?

Nope.

I would 100 percent not mind seeing Wikipedia ride off into the sunset. Like DMOZ, Wikipedia may still exist in a year, but I’d be surprised if it had the same bite it used to. I think Wikipedia has written its own swan song by alientating and angering those who have made it successful. It’s also completely infuriating to see Wikipedia ranking in the top three for every possible search query and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that. As resentment builds, links will stop coming, rankings will deteriorate, and we get our SERPs back.

[Wow, all this rage. I'm just going to be over here waving my tiny Wikipedia flag. Just because it's got an undeserved place in the SERPs doesn't mean that it's not the most entertaining site since the Virtual Bubblewrap site.--Susan] -- I…I don’t even know how to respond to that. But at least I know why you were clicking so furiously a moment ago. Working hard, I see.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/12/07 at 12:45 PM | Comments (7)
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February 9, 2007

Search Headlines

WebProNews Weighs In On The Sullivan/Digg Match

There’s been a lot of talk regarding Danny’s open letter blog post to Jason Calacanis, but the situation got even more intense once Danny’s post was Dugg and the SEO-hating community over at Digg got their hands on it. As you can imagine, they pretty much attacked him, especially once he jumped in and tried to explain to them that they are morons politely explain his point of view.

WebProNews had a great post today that entitled Daring Danny
Duels with Diggers (alliteration is hot!) that breaks down exactly what happened at Digg and what Danny should have done differently to help “win over” some of the angry Diggers, as if that was even possible. My favorite part is Mike McDonald’s suggestion that Danny try to speak their language while addressing them. Mike says Danny lost when he went in using terms like “relevant” and “conversion” instead of just responding:

“OMFG!1!1 that is teh ghey! SEO hax are teh k1llz0rs, n00bs! Your’e all just pist cuz your moms pron fell off teh yahoos. You shuld be kicked off teh internets1!eleventy!1!!”

Hee! I heart Mike McDonald. [I'd like to take a second to endorse Mike's seven-year-old's choice for president. Mario/Luigi '08! --Susan] I have no idea what you’re talking about but, YES! (I think)

The Digg comment thread is worth reading, if only because it shows how intolerant Digg is of anything smelling like SEO. Plus, it’s always fun to read angry sentences that start out with “you people”. My father does that, usually pointing a finger at you at the same time.

Vodafone uploads YouTube onto UK Cell phones

Vodafone subscribers aren’t just getting access to MySpace mobile on their cell phones, they’re also getting YouTube. Huzzah! She’ll like deny this, but Susan couldn’t be more excited. [So this is what the death of society looks like…-Susan]

According to CNET, YouTube mobile users will be able to view selected YouTube videos, forward their favorite links to friends and upload their own videos from their phone. My question is why on earth would you want to do this? I mean, I’m all for advancing technology and making life more convenient, but this seems a little nutty. Are you really that addicted to YouTube that you can’t wait until you get home to see some poorly shot video featuring an overweight 18-year-old karaoking to his favorite Hillary Duff song?

If you are, YouTube Mobile will able available through the Vodafone Live Web portal sometime later this year.

Spam More Expensive Than You Thought

David Utter says according to Postini’s annual communications intelligence report, the volume of spam rose 147 percent in 2006, with 94 percent of email in December being reported as spam. Sweet Jesus!

Based on those stats, the Royal Pingdom blog made their best guess as to how much money businesses in the United States are losing as a result of spam.

“According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average hourly salary is $18.21. Based on that, one minute of a worker’s time is worth just over $0.30. This means that for every minute lost for those 86 million workers, $26.1 million goes down the drain. In one year, 260 work days, that amounts to almost $6.8 billion.”

That’s kind of ridiculous. And as the Pingdom blog noted, that’s only money lost due to time. It doesn’t include things like security issues, productively losses or those really important emails that get eaten by your spam filters and you never ever see them.

Fun Finds

Chris Hooley received an interesting offer to sell one of his Web sites and is seeking advice over what he should do at his blog. Go share your opinion and help a kid out. I’m withholding my two cents in fear that I will be held responsible should something go terribly wrong. Best of luck, Chris. :)

Search Market Pro outlines the varying levels of The Search Conference Groupie. Can anyone tell me what level I fall into? I can’t figure it out.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/ 9/07 at 5:26 PM | Comments (1)
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Friday Recap

I’ve been breaking into giggle fits all day, so let’s just get to it.

First, for your enjoyment, a wonderful cartoon featuring Bill Gates. Sometimes I really don’t know what I would do if bLaugh wasn’t there to help me start the day.

Hee, thanks, guys.

This week marked my one year anniversary with Bruce Clay. In that time, I’ve learned that Susan’s childhood was filled with viewings of The Never Ending Story, the Princess Bride and other “cult classics” that I’ve never seen and often haven’t even heard of. [Seriously, it's like she didn't have a TV or something. It's appalling. --Susan] My childhood, on the other hand, was filled with a never ending supply of Super Mario Brothers, which makes this totally awesome. My all-time favorite wasn’t included in the list, but really, is there ever a bad rendition of that theme song? I don’t think so.

Google has been suffering some power outages lately, but none as crippling as when a Google pen flatlined on the Ask.com team. Sadness. The Ask.com blog reported “considerable inconvenience and loss of data” as a result of the mishap. You could almost feel their anguish.

However, don’t feel too bad for them. Gray Hat News uncovered the truth behind the Google pen mishap and found the pen’s death was caused by an error on Ask.com’s side, not Google’s. I guess Ask is too busy throwing out Smart Answers to RTFM. (You can look up that acronym on your own). And there’s no word why the Ask.com team was using a Google pen to begin with. Does Ask have pens? I’ll have to ask Barry Schwartz. He gets all the good Ask.com schwag.

Gray Hat News also gave us The Women’s Guide to Spamming Personalised Search. Get going, ladies. With Valentine's Day just around the corner, the only way to prevent your man from screwing it up is for you to adjust his lame search results.

A terrifying new survey finds that 81 percent of Digg users say that Digg is their primary source of new Web content. Say what? No wonder these people are crazy. They never leave their village.

This kid proves that mailing a letter with coins attached instead of a stamp will actually get it delivered. The $.05 tip may or may not be optional. I’ll have to try it out when I mail my taxes. [I offered to help her e-file but apparently this is bizarro world because I'm advocating technology and she's going old school. --Susan]

Speaking of tips, Google Blogoscoped told us all about the Google Terra Bite Café where patrons can “pay whatever [they] feel like”. As someone with zero disposable income, free food is almost enough reason to move to Kirkland. I wonder if the café also works on a bartering system. Like, you give me a cheeseburger and I’ll give you my RJ Pez dispenser. It’s not cash but it is in primo condition. (Note: Pez and packaging not included in the offer.)

Also from Google Blogoscoped, a test to determine how you know Google has crossed the line. My favorite is that “Google news are so fully personalized, you’re always making the frontpage”. Heh.

Valleywag puts our mind at ease. Have no fear crazy leaf-eating people, Google’s PB&J contains M&M’s but no meat. You’re safe for another meal.

Barry Schwartz and his wife discuss the goal behind the Internet Marketers of New York get-togethers and ultimately conclude that Barry has founded an organization about eating and drinking. Heh, I want to be best friends with Barry’s wife.

Greg Sterling had the scoop about some awesome Google Maps stickers appearing in London business windows. I totally want one. The question now is who do I know who could perhaps steal one for me? Marie, check your email!

The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had a great I Hate Macs rant this week, which said in part:

“If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that “says something” about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

This may turn out to be a permanent addition to the Friday Recap, but here’s a list of things I learned from BoingBoing this week:

• Did you now you could open a Mazda with a tennis ball? That’s awesome. It makes for a much smaller mess than using a sledgehammer.
• Steve Ballmer shops at IKEA
• Snail slobber makes people prettier. Um, I’ll stay moderately attractive and slobber free, thank you.
• Sometimes chocolate chip cookies are very scary. Please don’t ever attempt to taint my love for the chocolate chip cookie again. A girl's gotta have something.
• My oral fixation just got more dangerous.
• A Malay woman got on the wrong bus and was lost for 25-years. That right there represents my biggest fear upon moving to California. Do you know how scary 10-lane highways are? [Significantly less scary than public transportation! --Susan] I beg to differ, the T is an excellent form of transportation and will take you anywhere in the city for a buck! You’re from California. You know nothing about public transportation.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/ 9/07 at 2:05 PM | Comments (7)
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