Next week, I’ll be at PubCon in Vegas. Here’s how to find me.

- I get into town Tuesday afternoon. I’ll be on a 7 p.m. panel Tuesday night with other search engine reps from Yahoo!, Live, and Ask. Guy Kawasaki will be moderating.
- On Wednesday, I’ll be sitting in on sessions during the day. Google is hosting a Meet the Google Engineers reception from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. After that, I’m planning to head over to the Werewolf tournament to watch how well SEOs play that game.
- On Thursday morning, I’ll be doing a keynote question and answer session with Brett Tabke.
- On Friday, I’ll be hanging out for hours at the PubCon. My plane flies back Friday evening.

If you’re at PubCon, please walk up and introduce yourself — I’d love to meet you.

Seaqrch Engine Watch Expert Mark Jackson, a bold recommendation on top 4 Must-See SEO panels at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, citing Google, Grehan, Bailey and more:

Day 1 – Universal, Blended and Vertical Search
Day 2 – Usability and SEO
Day 3 – Personalization, User Data and Search
Day 4 - Fun with Dynamic Websites

Dynamic Web site? How's this for a dynamo panel:

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Laura Thieme, President and Founder, Bizresearch
Matt Bailey, President, SiteLogic

Fun? You got that right.

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• Facebook Alters Beacon program
  Facebook has apparently seen the light, making changes to the Beacon program to make it an opt-in program, rather than an opt-out one.
• Strategic Link Building
  Getting links from authority sites and earning trust from others in your space can pay off more than getting even a large number of other links.
• Google experimenting with Digg-like features
  A test in Google Experimental lets users influence the search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.
• SEW Experts: Local Search: Competing All Over the Map - Part 2
  While Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft battle for online mapping domination, another competitor is fortifying its position quietly off to the side.

Click to read the rest of this post...

Google continues to crack down on those text link advertising methods which don’t carry the “nofollow” attribute as a “machine-readable disclosure.” The latest move, triggered by communication between Google’s web spam team and the Google AdWords department, as Google’s Matt Cutts says, is to disallow the advertising for such PageRank-selling schemes via Google. Compare the ads for the query pr8 – i.e. “PageRank 8” – from November 18th with today.

Before:

After:

Fair or not from an outside perspective – see some previous background – this change in implementation is in accordance with Google’s existing AdWords and Webmaster guidelines. The AdWords guidelines stated “Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of ... search engine spamming,” pointing to the webmaster guidelines for further definitions of unacceptable techniques... and the webmaster help pages state “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.”

While many to most paid links marketplaces are now disappearing from ads in Google search results and sites using AdSense, there is nothing in Google’s guidelines that would disallow one to build a “nofollowed” paid links service, as this ban is only for what Google considers “PageRank-passing” ads.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s been a busy week. Some of the stuff I didn’t get a chance to talk about this week:

- It sounds like Google will participate in the 700 Mhz wireless auction. It also sounds like there are anti-collusion rules that mean that participating companies aren’t supposed discuss the auction, so I don’t expect to talk about this subject anytime soon, even on my personal blog.

- Google Reader added both recommendations and drag-and-drop. To me, these releases show how the Reader team is in tune with Reader users. When I did an informal poll of desired Google Reader features, those were the #1 and #2 most-requested features. I’m sure that the Reader team was working on these features before that poll. The recommendations feature is especially nice though. Among my recommendations are AI3, Cre8pc, and BitWorking. I used to think that I really needed drag-and-drop, but I’ve gotten used to reading my feeds without rearranging their order.

- Blogger is experimenting with allowing OpenID. I believe this is a good thing for identity across the web, but I’ll be the first to admit that OpenID hurts my head a little bit.

- Google announced that it wants to fund research to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The initiative is called RE<C (Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal). In my experience, Larry and Sergey have been interested in energy issues for a long time. Remember the solar panels? The push for more efficient power supplies? When Larry pleaded for standardized power adapters in his Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote? To be fair, it is pretty cool that phone manufacturers have decided to standardize on the micro-USB standard for charging. The announcement also caught my eye because I enjoyed reading about high-altitude wind-power production by Makani Power in Cringely’s column a few weeks ago.

- Techdirt covered a back and forth and back regarding Google’s partnership with the University of Michigan for book scanning. If I had more time, this is something I’d like to dive into more. U of M has posted their agreement with Google if you want to dive into it more.

- Google Maps added a terrain view. That may not mean much to people living in flat areas, but if you’re from Eastern Kentucky, it’s fun to see where all the “hollers” are:

View Larger Map

- Google Maps for Mobile added the ability to locate your phone even if you don’t have GPS based on your cell tower. Also pretty sweet.

- This is older, but Google Checkout added a “Oops! Undo that purchase” option. For up to 15 minutes after a purchase, you can undo that purchase. Speaking of payment stuff, I like that PayPal started offering a service to generate a one-time MasterCard number. I’m not whether Checkout offers this, but it would be nice. And still on the subject of credit cards, I thought this was an interesting post.

- I thought Pandia’s parody of Black Hat SEO was hilarious. I need to circle back around to Pandia’s Christmas wish list and see how we did.

- If you have an iPhone and use Gmail, I really really recommend reading this overview post about how to make IMAP on an iPhone work well with Gmail.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve talked quite a lot before about buying or selling links that pass PageRank. Today I wanted to walk through a concrete example of paid posts and show why the major search engines don’t want to be affected by links within paid posts. The problem is best illustrated by a serious example: suppose you just visited your doctor and got a scary surprise: you or a member of your family have a tumor. The doctor is throwing around words like steroids, surgery, chemo, and radiosurgery. Much of what the doctor says washes over you, but you remember the word “radiosurgery” and resolve to find out more when you get home.

At home, you fire up a search engine and type “radiosurgery.” If you go to Google and search for [radiosurgery], the results give a pretty good overview of what radiosurgery is (focused radiation that targets tumors). In the first several results, you have balanced information from the International RadioSurgery Association, an overview page on Wikipedia, a great background page from RadiologyInfo, even an introductory-level essay on radiosurgery from the Mayo Clinic. If you came back from the doctor and wanted to get an overview of radiosurgery, I hope you’d find the results useful.

Now, think about how you would feel if your medical search was influenced by pages like this:

The posts themselves don’t mention it, but entries like these often turn out to be what are known as “paid posts.” That is, someone paid money in order to receive a review, and the paid review includes a link with the word “radiosurgery,” for example. There’s no disclosure inside these entries whether these posts are paid, nor do the posts use the nofollow attribute or some other mechanism so that search engines aren’t affected.

Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.

In the example above, notice that the post says “I myself had never heard of this treatment process until now.” On a subject as serious as brain tumors, it’s troubling if someone is getting paid to review and link to a site, especially if it appears that they weren’t aware of this treatment until they were paid to write about the subject. In researching this incident, we saw lots of people doing paid posts about brain tumors who admitted that they weren’t familiar with the subject beforehand. Sometimes posts were even more inaccurate:

“Is there any new medical breakthrough in the treatment of brain tumore [sic]?” If the paid poster had researched their subject more, they would have discovered that this particular treatment has been around for two decades. In fact, the promoted site mentions that one of the main reasons to use their technique is because it’s well-established, not brand-new. If someone doesn’t do enough research for a paid post to know that a treatment is well-established instead of brand-new, how can you trust their opinion about brain tumors? Here’s another post that claims this treatment technique is new:

“happy and proud to introduce the GAMMA KNIFE”? Again, this is not a new treatment technique. In fact, anyone who read the first page on the promoted site would have realized that one of the selling points of the device is that the technology is well-established. But there are more noticeable mistakes than calling the technique new when it’s actually been around for decades. Sometimes the posts don’t even get the name of the treatment right:

Notice that this post consistently refers to the “Lesksell Gamma Knife” treatment. The correct name is Leksell. I also saw one person call it the “Gama Knife” treatment, and someone else called it the “Gamma Knive” treatment. If you’re getting paid to write a review, shouldn’t you at least perform the basic research to get the product name right?

I have a lot more snapshots I could show, but I hope these examples help explain my point. For this very important (potentially even life-or-death) medical topic, we saw paid reviewers admit that they knew nothing about a treatment before getting paid to post about it, or who didn’t research the subject enough to know that a treatment was decades old instead of brand-new. We saw people writing about brain tumors who didn’t even spell “tumor” correctly, and we saw people who got the name of the sponsor wrong.

If you put your user hat back on, I hope you’ll agree that you wouldn’t want a serious medical search for brain tumor treatments to be affected by inaccurate or uninformed posts. In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well. Google’s documentation for webmasters gives examples of how to do that. I believe the vast majority of our users don’t want our organic search results for something as serious as brain tumors to be affected by links in paid posts.

I hope these examples help to explain the motivation for our quality guidelines, and how those guidelines ensure a better experience for users. To read more about this subject, you can start at Google’s quality guidelines. Where you see the guideline “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank” you can click on “participate in link schemes” to get more guidance. That page specifically mentions “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank” as being against our quality guidelines, and it’s also clickable so that you can read more about buying or selling links in our HTML documentation.

(Just as a side-note: I don’t normally send my blog posts to Google’s public relations or legal folks before posting. For this entry, I did get this post approved by Google’s PR/legal department first to make sure that what I said was an accurate reflection of Google’s opinion on this subject. If you’re concerned because this is a post on my personal blog, we also did an official blog post about this issue today.)

Translate words and phrases easily with online dictionary Definr. The dictionary attempts to autocomplete your word as you type and pumps out results quickly with synonyms and antonyms (if applicable). While Definr is missing some translations, it performs very well (and fast, as promised) and has potential to become a handy alternative for the Google define search operator.

ILM 07, packed house, on stage Jason says, quote, he's one of the best SEOs." No joke. Mentions Bruce Clay as another. Congrats, Bruce. You've hit the big time. Jason has at least one SEO client on Page 1 of Google -- his Brit bulldogs Taurus and Toro's "los angeles dog trainer." Kelsey Group's Krasilovsky had a very funny, well-mannered "Kal Kan Is" on a tight F-bomb leash: Jason only dropped maybe one onstage. Good boy.

He also claimed (again) SEO industry leaders failed by allowing search engine optimization to get a "smarmy" and "spammy" SnakE Oil rep. Jason wants "good SEOs" to rebrand as "Traffic Optimizers." Why didn't we think of that?

Yo, JasonDawg, Daaaaaaamn, you represent. You could be the first T.O. of SEO.

So now Jason's got mad SEO skillz and Mahalo human search engine, no doubt Kal Kan Is: "One of us! One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble! …"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Oram in California the Inquirer, Saturday 1 December 2007. 01:33:00

$4.6 billion is a lot of wonga

IT IS OFFICIAL. Google has big money in its bank account. It will file an application to participate in the 700MHz auction on Monday, the company said in a news release. Google's application will not include any partners....

Living the Silicon Valley dream

You've really made it in Silicon Valley when two of the region's elite firms overpay you for executive services.…

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Mac OS X only: Freeware applications Wallpaper Clocks and Desktopia set time-specific wallpapers to your desktop, providing you with a fun and effective way to keep an eye on the time with attractive wallpapers. First, Wallpaper Clocks refreshes your wallpaper every minute to display the current time and (when applicable to the wallpaper) date. Alternatively, Desktopia changes your desktop wallpaper at user-defined periods for an effect similar to iGoogle's sunlight-to-moonlight themes (though you could set completely different wallpapers to remind you to change work modes or tasks). Wallpaper Clocks and Desktopia are freeware, Mac OS X only.

This week’s in-house spotlight is on Baron Ginnetti, the new Director of SEO & Content Distribution at Pronto.com. Baron’s legacy comes from his SEO efforts at Shopzilla, where he spent 2 ½ years building a large SEO team that would make most in-house SEOs salivate.

Baron and I both started our new ‘gigs on the same day and I had the chance to sit down with him a few weeks later to talk about the job search, what we learned about building a team and more. In particular, I was interested in learning about his link building team and tips he has for starting up a highly successful link building initiative. I’m happy to report he gave up the goods.

It’s a lengthy interview, but has a few excellent nuggets. Here are the highlights:

Baron’s food-for-thought before accepting a job: Is the company “looking for the level of input that will permit an SEO to contribute to the product in terms of business model and UEX”? This is the best piece of job search advice I’ve heard yet. Too often an SEO goes in-house and feels that their hands are tied. Sometimes you feel like you’re one person pushing the Titanic, it’s tough and best if you have other people willing to get out of the boat and push along with you.

Baron’s pitch for setting link building expectations: Get everyone on the same page with an interesting spin on link building: “you aren’t going to build links,” instead you are going to “develop content and features that will attract links, and to build online relationships with complementary businesses and content providers” It’s a great way to spin link building, because in the end this is what is actually needed to pull it off and you need execs to understand this useful content needs to be written and added to your website.

Best take-away: Baron gives insights on structuring your link building strategy and headcount. The full interview’s a lengthy read, but the questions about link building are the best take-away.

On the Q&A…

Jessica: You were with Shopzilla for over 2 1/2 years, what made you make the shift to IAC to work on Pronto.com? What are you most excited about in your new position?

Baron: During my second year at Shopzilla, I had the opportunity to lead an SEO seminar for other Scripps properties at their Promax (BDA) event. Participating in this event was a career eye-opener for me because I was presenting SEO to an organization of television broadcast professionals. They helped me see that I was eager to expand my participation in SEO, not only in scale, and not only as a craft in which it could be implemented, but the way it’s perceived. SEO is one of the most puzzle-like and yet sensible mediums I’ve worked with. At the same time I started to sense that I didn’t want to whittle away on web sites practicing SEO with a pen-knife as we know it today. There are amazing changes going on in the space, but the “Search Engine” portion of the acronym “SEO” was pushing me into a single media channel focus. I was feeling a nudge to consider my career beyond Search Engines, maybe to multi-channel optimization that resolves at a Search Engine. So as I stood there talking about SEO for broadcast news web-sites I started to envision a flow of audiences moving from one media channel to another. I suppose it’s the same as going to movie because you saw the ad in a magazine except it was coupled with absolute immediacy. At the time I was seeing some maturation in Web 2.0, and the incremental release of Universal Search (a mixed SE result set w/images, videos, blogs and news.) So here were opportunities to diversify SEO via expanded channel exposure today, be it blogs, social tagging, user generated reviews or even that your local TV news broadcast is serving a parallel web experience. The inspiration to me (tomorrow) was that SEO could become about optimizing multi-medium traffic flow.I would have to say a job shift began rumbling there. (more…)

After months of speculation and whispers, Google confirmed on Friday their plans to submit a bid for wireless spectrum to be auctioned by the Federal Communications Commission early next year. Just what they plan to do with it, however, has yet to be revealed.

Google mentioned in the statement that their application to bid on the wireless spectrum does not include any partners, but did not say whether they have intentions to construct and operate a wireless network on their own. Speculation has ranged from Google making its own wireless phone, to developing an operating system that other device makers could use. However, even though Google is intending to bid alone, the possibility of later assembling a coalition still remains if Google wins the bidding. (more…)

The state of neutrality for the wireless Net in the United States was woeful. We had inspiring entrepreneurs at Google building game-changing products and some users were not able to get their hands on those apps. It bummed me out. Thankfully, I wasn't the only person at Google who felt that way. Turns out, a lot of people at Google cared deeply about these issues. So we built a humbling team of like-minded folks to explore what we could do to make the wireless industry more open. (...) Our mission is ambitious, but clear: do what it takes to inspire or create a mobile ecosystem in the United States that will allow user choice to flourish and level the playing field for new applications and devices. (...)

In that light, I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to recognize the sea change that occurred in the US wireless industry yesterday [November 27]. As the largest wireless carrier in the country, Verizon Wireless announced that they would soon allow customers the option of bringing their own device to and accessing their own applications on the Verizon network. (...) While Verizon by no means committed to the full openness principles for which Google has been advocating, and substantial risk remains in exactly how they choose to implement their ideas, I do think we need to recognize this as a very positive step forward. (...) There is a lot of work to do still, and the issues of openness and user choice in wireless are far from resolved. However, we have all come a very long way and it is clear that the good guys are building momentum.

First, Jessamyn West spotted a Google experiment and posted a screen shot on Flickr entitled, "Google becoming Digg?" Then, Haochi Chen of Googlified posted an item about the "Google Digg-Style Experiment." So, what's up?

Click to read the rest of this post...

Markus Renschler sent this in: “We bought a new external hard disk (WD MyBook). What I was completely fascinated by is the fact it’s not only compatible with Vista, XP, MacOS and USB2.0, but, according to the package, with Google as well.” [Thanks Markus!]

Update: Dan Elkayam in the comments argues, “The Google logo’s there because the My Book hard drives ship with Google software.” (If so, it’s merely placed in an unfortunate way.) [Thanks Dan!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Quote 1 source, quote 2 source, image source.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

I still hear from people who get confused by solicitations in the mail. Here’s an example one:

At first glance, this semi-official looking letter seems to require bill payment for some sort of “annual website search engine listing.” But if you read the fine print at the bottom, you’ll see:

This is not a bill. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer.

In other words, feel free to throw this letter in the trash. If you want to submit a url to Google, there are at least a couple ways to do it, for free:

- Google offers a free “add url” form where you can submit your domain name.
- You can make a Sitemap (a list of urls for your site) and submit it for free as well. Start here. There’s a lot of other free, useful tools from Google there too.

When you get a letter like this in the mail, whether it’s about your web site or your domain name, read the fine print carefully.

I’ve been following a case in Denmark where a cloaking company has been making a couple interesting claims. First, they claim that if a “brand-name” company cloaks, Google won’t remove the brand-name domain. That’s simply not true; if we believe that a company is abusing Google’s index by cloaking, we certainly do reserve the right to remove that company’s domains from our index. Next, the cloaking company claims that their method of cloaking is undetectable. I’ve written about “undetectable webspam” before. In that case, the “undetectable spam” could be found with a single Google query.

So let’s go back to this Danish company’s assertion that its cloaking is “undetectable.” Here’s an example claim on the English version of their page:

The claim is that “search engines cannot find out who is behind cloaking.” The Danish version of this page is slightly different:

One colleague at Google translated the final sentence from Danish as “However, as you can read below, they don’t stand a chance at figuring out who’s behind the solution, and thus cannot punish anyone for it.”

My colleague Brian White checked this claim out and very quickly found this hilarious page:

Here’s another error page:

That’s right, someone hasn’t configured their “undetectable” cloaking script correctly. The errors that the script is spewing out give absolute file paths and much more info. Digging into the details mentioned in the error messages quickly leads you to more domains. So much for that cloaking being undetectable. By the way, this cloaking script has been producing highly noticeable errors like this for almost two months.

So here’s a few takeaways:
- If you’re going to claim that your webspam is “undetectable” then try to avoid spewing error messages that give lots of information about your domains.
- Also, you might want to avoid internal names like “CLOAKING_LINK_BUILDING” or “CLOAKING_RSS_Reader.php”. It tends to be a bit of a giveaway, and you never know when those names will get accidentally exposed.

More generally, if someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users. That’s a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not “undetectable.” For cloaking to be completely “undetectable,” it would have to be like that Steven Wright joke: “Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates.” And a cloaking script that gave users and Googlebot exactly duplicate pages would be a bit pointless.