SEO work is difficult on dialup

I am on vacation for a few days, and I assumed I would be able to get a wireless hookup, but I was wrong. Dialup is my only choice, and I had forgotten how painfully difficult it is to work at such speeds. My family is happy about it because I have essentially decided work is impossible under these conditions and have resigned myself to actually vacationing on my vacation. So, I will not be scooping the SEO news for a few days. Sure hope I do not miss anything exciting.

MSN ad – New MSN.com home page preview

MSN now has an ad on its home page that advertises the new MSN.com, claiming to be Fast. Clear. Easy. You can view the preview of the new page with its features at http://specials.msn.com/homepagetour/default.html. The main features are:
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Google AdWords API now in beta

The anticipated release of the Google AdWords API is now a reality. To begin using the API, all you have to do is sign up. You can get all the information on it at www.google.com/apis/adwords. For SEOs who offer AdWords management to their clients, this would enable you to create custom reports, develop tools to more easily manage accounts, add a new campaign, automate ad creation, estimate traffic for a keyword, and anything else you can think of that would make AdWords management easier. Sample code in various languages is available to help you get started. You are assigned a quota of the number of operations that can be performed per month. Your API quota is determined by the number of clients you manage and your total account spend, and is recalculated daily. Use of the API is currently free, but Google reserves the right to charge for it in the future. For more information, the API FAQ can be found at www.google.com/support/adwordsapi.

Fight back against site hijackers

As I have reported before, Google is enabling the process of having your site rankings destroyed by hijackers and content thieves. To date, Google has done very little, if anything, to stop this from happening. Over time, we have learned that it is up to us to fight this SEO battle. Lori’s Web Design has a very good web page outlining the problems and what you can do if you are caught in them. Go to www.loriswebs.com/hijacking_web_pages.html for detailed information about this growing threat to your search engine rankings.

SEO maintenance – check those links

I spent my morning going through all of the outbound links on an old, established site checking for sites that no longer exist and sites that have been banned. Because this is an older site, it has no automated process built in for checking these things. Because it is such a time-consuming process to check each link, I have put it off for far too long. There were numerous instances of bad links, which I promptly deleted. There were even a couple of links to sites that look as though they may have been banned from Google. Linking to those sites could result in a penalty to me for linking to “bad neighborhoods”. Those links got deleted quickly! As tedious as manual link-checking can be, it is important to remember to keep up with it as often as possible. Otherwise, you may be linking to sites that were once ok, but are now non-existant or banned.

Search – reaching out to video

Google rolled out a beta service to search TV programming yesterday, and Yahoo added a tab on its home page leading to its video search engine. Google’s TV search allows users to search for a term to find the TV shows in which it was mentioned, which includes a still image of the video and closed-captioning text of that segment of the program. Users cannot yet watch a clip of the video. You can see it in action at http://video.google.com.

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Testing Kanoodle Brightads

Having been a Google Adsense publisher for about a year now, I decided it was time try a competitor. So I applied to Kanoodle, and was approved last night. Kanoodle Brightads has a couple of advantages that are immediately obvious. I get to choose what category of ads I want to show. This prevents odd mistargeted ads from showing up on a page, as Adsense can be prone to do on occasion. In addition, Kanoodle is up front about its share of the bucks (50%). The ads themselves are basically just like Adsense ads, with the same customizable format. Since I have only just started with Brightads, it is too soon to tell how it will compare to Adsense in the long run, but I will be sure to keep you updated once I have some hard data.

Proof the sandbox exists – See it in action

US Netizen noted today that adding the -nonsensewords to the end of a search query results in the ability to see where your sandboxed site would rank if it were not sandboxed. An example query would be:

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SEO Kit – A new SEO resource site

A new SEO resource site has emerged called SEO Kit. It bills itself as “information from around the SEO Community” At the moment, it includes SEO tools, articles, its own directory, a list of powerful directories, and links to various SEO related resources. It is still in its infancy, but knowing the creator, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it grow pretty rapidly. Keep an eye on this one.

Log file analyzer – Bothunter

Jocelyn, a friend from both SEO Chat and SEO Guy forums, has created a log file analyzer called Bothunter. It is a good tool for digging through your log files and finding all the nuggets of information that you need to know, such as which bots came to your site and what they did once they got there, which search engines are sending traffic to you, and for which keywords, and much more. If your stats program is not giving you the information you need, see if Bothunter works for you.

My Yahoo! as a desktop ticker

Yahoo! has just released (re-released, actually) a desktop ticker that displays in your task bar. This ticker pulls information from your My Yahoo! page to display news, RSS feeds, Yahoo! mail, and anything else you have added to your My Yahoo! page as content. I don’t know if I’m crazy about such things, but it is yet another way that the search engines are trying to make users stick with their brand. It seems like each day brings some kind of new announcement from the search engines touting a new feature, or a new application, or a new partnership. 2005 is definitely the year of the search engine wars!

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AOL looking to do search right

Innovation is not always necessary to create a good product. Sometimes, all it takes is the right combination of existing products to create a new outstanding product. That is what AOL is looking to do, and from what it sounds like, they just might succeed. They will be taking the best pieces of what other search engines are doing, and combining them all into one. As Inside Google says, AOL will have “Google results, Yahoo focus, Vivisimo clustering, Copernic desktop search, Jeeves-style answers, saved search history.” Rather than recreating the wheel, AOL will be partnering with various companies to provide this new search format. They will be doing one thing on their own, however, that is interesting to note. John Battelle explains “they have 60 full time employees creating edited ’snapshots’ which respond to what AOL Search chief Gerry Campbell says are 20% of all queries. That’s 2.5 million snapshots preloaded, so when you type in a popular query, you get an ‘answer, not just a list of results.’”

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Where is your traffic coming from now?

It appears that MSN has come very close to fully moving all of its search queries over to the new MSN beta. While that in itself is interesting, what interests me more is the affect that has on traffic to my sites. I have not yet had time to look at the logs of all my sites, but from the handful I have checked today, the average jump in MSN referrer traffic is huge. Generally, the traffic from MSN has gone from approximately 7% to 33%. That is massive. If you haven’t checked your log files yet, you might want to now.

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