Star Date: 2005 – The future of search
April 30, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
“Computer, locate Data” would be a common enough command given to a Star Trek computer far into the future. Yet here on Earth, in the year 2005, we are coming closer to that futuristic reality. Ok, I am exaggerating somewhat, but the MSN Search Blog made mention of an ActiveWords agent for MSN Desktop Search, and curious, I went to check it out. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking at, but after viewing the demos, the first thing I thought was that this was like talking to the Star Trek computer!
Can you see the forest for the SEO trees?
April 28, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
Here is the hypothetical scenario. You have a website that is highly themed to a particular niche. As an example, suppose your site is all about kickboxing. The site itself is in a portal style, where you have lots of news stories about the latest kickboxing events, profiles of the latest kickboxing champions, reviews of the latest kickboxing styles, etc. Now let us also imagine that the favorite acronym amongst kickboxing enthusiasts is KBX (just made that up). So to be hip and cool, the acronym KBX appears numerous times on the page, but the actual word “kickboxing” rarely if ever is shown. Joe Schmo and Kyle Kicky are well-known champions and they are discussed a lot, and of course all of the kickboxing enthusiasts who see the site know what sport they participate in.
Google Adsense EFT payments – finally
April 27, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
Ever since the inception of Adsense, publishers begged for payments via direct deposit. About a month and a half ago, Google announced that they were finally going to give it a try – in beta of course. I immediately signed up for it. Today, the payment hit my bank. It was nice to wake up to find the money sitting there in my bank account. Still, it amazes me that it took Google this long to make it happen. I mean, we are talking about one of the most tech-savvy companies in the world. Yet, it took a year or more for them to move away from paper checks. It really astounds me. Oh well, better late than never I suppose. Thanks Google for finally making it happen.
Hope to see you at WMW Conference in June
April 26, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
WebmasterWorld is having its next Search Conference in New Orleans June 21-24 this year. Since it is being held near me, I could not pass up the chance to attend. This will be my first search conference ever, although I have been wanting to attend any of them for a long time. But time and budget constraints were always a problem. Not this time though! I am looking forward to attending this one and I really hope I get to meet those of you that I speak with every day over the net. I hope I also get to meet some of you that I have never spoken to before!
Major Adwords changes coming
April 25, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
Google will soon be allowing advertisers to have more options. These include targeting users by site, a new max CPM bidding option, and additional ad formats including animated image ads. Details of the enhancements are here.
Bookmark script to make Google happy
April 24, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
The latest Google patent application mentioned the use of user data such as bookmarks for help in determing ranking. In light of that, SEOs are now adding Bookmark Us scripts to their sites. While it may or may not have much of an impact on SERPs, it never hurts to remind your visitors to come again, and if it does add a little weight for SEO, even better. So, if you too would like to jump on the “old becomes new again” bookmark craze, I would suggest using the cross-browser bookmark script located here. Oh, and be sure to get your keyword phrase in there! 
URL tracking tool
April 23, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
A nice little online tool to track your site over time is UrlTrends. It is a free service that allows you to view any URLs PR, Alexa Rank, popular search terms, incoming links and more, keeping a nice history of each. Track how your site is doing over time at www.urltrends.com.
PR update sheds some light
April 22, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
After doing a little analysis from last night’s PageRank update, it is clear to me that some ranking drops over the last few months were due to a PR drop. Of course, this will not apply to everyone, but it certainly explains much of the drops I have seen in the last couple of months. One normally rock-steady site flipped from number 1 to number 2, and while that site’s PR did not drop, the competitor’s site PR did rise. The fog has lifted. 
Time to work on PR again. Excuse me, while I go do that. hehe.
Google Toolbar PageRank is updating
April 22, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
Go to http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/ to see the changes as they take place across the datacenters.
Logfiles and Google search results
April 21, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
Yesterday, I gave kudos to Yahoo! for so quickly ranking my new sites. Today, I was digging through the log files of one of those sites, and noticed something interesting. Let me give a bit of background before I tell you what I noticed though. I always target a specific keyword, rather than the most general one. For example, if I had a site about blue widgets, my target keyword would be “blue widgets” rather than just “widgets”. This makes it easier to rank well for, and the traffic is targeted. For this particular site, “widgets” would be a medium-competitive keyword, but “blue widgets” is fairly non-competitive. Ok, enough of the background. What did I discover when looking at the log files?
Google My Search History Beta
April 20, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
Following in the footsteps of A9 and others, Google has finally put out a product that allows you to view and manage your search history from any computer. It is currently in beta at www.google.com/searchhistory/login.
Yahoo! kudos
April 20, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · Comments Off
I just feel the need to give kudos to Yahoo! this morning. Recently, about two weeks ago, I put three new sites up. All three are targetting relatively non-competitive terms and all are aimed at the average Joe type of surfer. These are the kinds of sites that Yahoo! and MSN users tend to search for more than Google users do. So, although I would be happy with good Google rankings, Yahoo! and MSN are my target engines for these sites. Today, Yahoo! ranked my target phrases at either number 1 or number 2 for each of the sites.
Google finally addressing the 302 hijacking problem
April 19, 2005 by DazzlinDonna · 1 Comment
Many people have noticed that the Google site: command is no longer showing the 302 redirected urls from outside domains. This led to the question of whether Google had actually solved the hijacking problem, or whether they had simply removed the ability of webmasters to see the problem via the site: command. According to Googleguy, in this thread, the answer is still fairly unclear. The good news is that Google has finally acknowledged the problem, and is apparently doing *something* about it. Hopefully, that *something* is an actual fix, and not that of merely hiding it from the public.
