Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 31st, 2005 in SEO Tips
MSGraph has posted a link to one of the most important documents ever to hit the SEO world (in my opinion). Read this document (which is a patent application by Google) and be prepared to say OMG, WTF, and every other exclamation of amazement you can dream up. I don’t want to spoil this for anyone, so all I will say is this… Want proof that the sandbox exists? Want an explanation of it directly from Google? Read it NOW.
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 31st, 2005 in Search Engine News
Google released its annual report. It reads very similar to the report filed before its IPO. It is long, but it is worth at least skimming over. What strikes me most about it (as the pre-IPO report did as well) is how much of it focuses on the myriad ways Google could fail. Have you noticed that the bulk of the report details all of the possible things that could happen to cause Google to shrivel up and die? Ok, I don’t normally read annual reports, so maybe all of them have the same tone of pending doom and gloom.…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 30th, 2005 in Other (NonSEO) Tools
If you are an Adsense publisher, and would like to see your earnings without having to log into the site, there is now a sweet little tool that resides in your taskbar called Syssense. It keeps your current Google AdSense information in the Windows system tray, and you can have it check at various intervals (from every minute if you ae an Adsense obsessive) to every 5 hours. You can choose to have it display a tray tooltip which includes any of the following information: date, page impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate, effective CPM, your earnings, predicted earnings, and last updated.…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 29th, 2005 in Search Engine News
Scary thought of the day… Google is buying Urchin, a major web analytics software product, and this worries me. Not only do I envision Big Brother looking at my web stats, but I can visualize Google being able to make ranking decisions based on those stats. If your site sees a lot of visitors leave after 3 seconds of looking at the home page, will Google decide to rank your site lower? Of course, I have no idea what Google will actually use Urchin for, but the possibilities of what they COULD use it for is what scares me. Paranoid?…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 28th, 2005 in SEO Tools
WeBuildPages has created another nice tool, which analyzes backlinks by C-class. It takes about three minutes to run, but it gives a nice backlinks report, which includes, number of unique domain names, number of unique IP addresses, number of unique C classes, the ratio of unique domain names to number of backlinks, ratio of unique IP addresses to number of backlinks, and ratio of unique C classes to number of backlinks. Use the tool at www.webuildpages.com/cclass/index.php.
Just to clarify, an IP is divided into 4 octets. An example IP would be 192.100.101.254. The first set of numbers would be the A…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 27th, 2005 in General

May the Easter bunny bring you great rankings in all the search engines (especially Google)!
Happy Easter, all you SEO’ers!
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 26th, 2005 in SEO Theories
Egol, moderator at SEOChat, gave me some homework to do - post on Sites That Defy Gravity. These are sites that for no apparent reason, do not drop to the bottom of the rankings, even though from all appearances, they should not be ranking well for their terms - but they are. My personal belief is that these sites have at least one ultra-powerful backlink (perhaps more), that is as yet undiscovered when one is evaluating the reasons. I know when I evaluate a site’s ranking, I rarely spend the time it would take to look at every known backlink.…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 25th, 2005 in SEO Tips
Someone has posted a daily log of PR changes to several sites. This log is interesting only in the fact that you can see, at a glance, the periods when PR changes have taken place. Notice that in some instances, the PR update is not across the board, which we see evidence of from time to time on forums, where someone posts that PR is updating for them, but no one else sees an update. Scan through the the log here and look for the red blocks, which indicate a change in PageRank. This log will not change in your life…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 24th, 2005 in SEO Tools
Shawn from DigitalPoint rocks! He has added the ability to track keyword rankings and backlinks for both MSN and Yahoo! to his already famous FREE DigitalPoint Keyword and Backlink Tracker. The perfect SEO tool has just exceeded perfection! If you are already using the tool (you are, right?), then login and click on Edit Preferences. From there, you can grab the PHP script that you need to upload to any PHP-enabled server. Put the url where you’ve got the script into your preferences, and voila, you are ready to track! Well, ok, not quite ready. Now, you need to go…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 23rd, 2005 in SEO Theories
For a couple of months now, Google has been using several different algorighms across its datacenters. I have seen up to 5, but most often, it was running 2 or 3. In the last few days, it seems to have settled into 2 algos, with one having taken the lead spot in most datacenters. I have seen this lead-spot-taking several times in the last two months, with another algo reclaiming the lead a few days later, so that may happen again soon. But the question remains, Why is Google using different algorithms? Is it just a test, to see which…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 22nd, 2005 in SEO Tips
It has been nearly a year since I started a particular site (11 months). I spent enormous amounts of time on the site, both on on-page and off-page optimization. This site has received backlinks from almost every site listed in the top 20 for its keyword phrase, as well as links from tons of other related sites. Nearly all of its backlinks are related, in fact. Yet, the site remained relegated to the beyond 1000 mark in the SERPs. Until this week. This week, it has been popping up on different datacenters on page 6 of the serps. Ranking at…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 21st, 2005 in Search Engine News
So, the search game rolls on with yet more upcoming acquisitions taking place. IAC, owner of properties such as Expedia and Match.com, is close to an agreement to buy Ask Jeeves for $2 Billion. The deal is not yet finalized and may still go south, but an announcement may come within hours, according to the New York Times.
Yahoo! has already stated that they have come to an agreement to buy Flickr. Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny, in this post, says “there are many parts of Yahoo that will be Flickrized in the coming months” and “just think about how we could Flickrize…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on March 20th, 2005 in SEO Theories
A month ago, I began testing seo techniques, and the first test was to see if simply adding content to a site that I had previously ignored would cause any change in rankings. Result: No changes in rank. I am not surprised by the result, but it is always nice to verify one’s thoughts. As I explained in the previous post, I will be testing only on-page factors, so now I will move on to the next test. This time, I will be changing the content to make better use of Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) and just generally overhauling the…