re: [gigaom.com...]

Wholesale site ripping has been going on for ages. Site theft is one of the top problems on the web today. It just goes to show you, that many of the “top guys”, are still newbies in our space.

more here: [webmasterworld.com...]

What a year it has been!

I hope you have a great holiday.

Merry Christmas from everyone at WebmasterWorld.

Brett

… Historical footnote: WebmasterWorld ranked 1 for the keyword webmaster today on Google. A fun warm-n-fuzzy for a 700 million results search – but that’s about all. The kw is poor performer.

We were talking about the 101 Signals of Quality Series we have started in the supporters forum. Some questions came up if we were going to ban SE Reps from the thread. I laughed and thought it newbish. Here’s why.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Today’s seo is about content, content, content, and – at best – how to arrange it. GG is the first one to give up tips on how to structure content. Both for crawlability purposes and rankings purposes. If you have fresh, quality, regularly updated content – Google and GG will be the first to support you. That is the direction SEO is going in, and that is the direction we have to follow – and lead at some point.

I guarantee you, that in this series there will be little that would make a Yahoo or Google programmer wince. We have come a long ways from the days of spam-em-if-you-got-em. There is little in the way of “blackhat” that will survive in todays engines (mainly G). The best “blackhat” tricks your are going to pull are link games aimed at the deep long tail.

Does that mean we will be pure-as-the-driven-snow? No way – our job is to generate traffic at a reasonable to low universal risk. That means getting listed – getting ranked – getting traffic – is only the first step. *ANY* SEO policy MUST focus on ROI as well as traffic acquisition. If your seo practices poison your ROI, then what is the point? You can only trick your visitors for a certain amount of time.

On the other hand, we can learn a lot of “tricks” from the search engines themselves:

• Cached pages. Every study ever done, shows that time-on-site, is the 1 criteria for long term site success.
• Text Ads. How many people click on an AdSense ad by accident? It is all about “the blend” as we call it. eg: how to trick people into not noticing that it is an advertisement.
• AdWords. Studies clearly show that the majority of search engine visitors do not know that the right side of a Google SERP is paid advertising.
• Click Tracking.

Lets be crystal clear – the G Toolbar is spyware at its finest. The cool thing is they actually get people to download it, install it, and agree to use it. I have no doubt, that the majority of people that use the toolbar in advanced mode, do NOT know that their urls are being tracked. I also believe that the majority of people that turn on “Advanced” mode, do NOT know what it is about and turn it on to be one of the cool advanced people.

BlackHats? The search engines are the original Black Hats!

… There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. – Stephen Wright

The more I hear about the AOL/Google deal, the more I think the real winner will be Yahoo.

So word comes to us via New York Times that Google is discussing graphical ad placement on Google with AOL.

[webmasterworld.com...]

If it comes to pass, will there be any reason to use Google over Yahoo ever again?

The pundits have claimed for years that it is search relevance and quality of search results that are the prime ingredients to a good search engine. Like nails on a chalk board, that claim has made the hair stand up on my neck. I have always felt that usability played an equal role in the popularity and utility of a search engine. I felt that point of view was vindicated with the arrival of Google.

Even when Google was in it’s infancy, it toyed with the goofiest SERPs the net has ever seen. Anyone remember the Search Scout? Or the fact that the green bar was actually on the SERPs? Or the myriad of other bells and goof ball whistles that Google tried back then?

It wasn’t until Google cleaned up those SERPs and went low key that they became truly popular. Even now as they try to work in Google Image searches into the main index, people notice and complain. One of the most often reported “problems” with Google that we have seen in the Google forum over the last year, has been people complaining about the image search graphics in the results.

If Yahoo and MSN were ever to figure out the low key, low impact, low spam, high reward page – Google would be in trouble.

9 Point Plan to Reinvigorate the “stuck” Yahoo Search

1. Grab a quality, short domain name. (say [av.com)...]
2. Cut deals with Mozilla, Opera, Dell, and Microsoft to get featured as a default search in their browsers and products.
3. Make the same backroom deal with Opera, that Google did. Opera will play. That mobile phone spot is the future.
4. Strip down the SERPs for just six months to nothing but the results. Yes, give up the ad inventory on av.com for 6 months.
5. Raise the relevance in the Algo to favor kw’s in Titles, Paths, and Domain names.
6. Degrade/filter/penalize/whatever any URL with a question mark in it.
7. Wait. Just wait… and let it cook. (aka, Alta Raging was right, but they didn’t let it cook).
8. Hire a PR firm to convince the higherups that search is more than just a Yahoo loss leader.
9. Listen to Tim Mayer.

… I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wakeup letter.

I invented the word SERP (Search Engine Results Page) in 2000 in a WebmasterWorld post. I have no idea which post it was, but we were having trouble with a new user understanding which page we were talking about when we said the “results page”.

It has been fun to see “SERP” grow into a main stream.

… I Xeroxed a mirror. Now I have an extra Xerox machine. – Stephen Wright

Well, it is out there now, and we are pretty excited about it.

Malcolm Gladwell will keynote our spring PubCon in Boston.

[pubcon.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

Malcolm will also hold a book signing in the expo hall directly after his keynote address.

Is it me, or does Malcolm look like he is related to Stephen Wright?

… I went to a general store, but they wouldn’t let me buy anything specific – Stephen Wright

After a lot of testing and bot busting, the current robots.txt is what was settled on. I felt exposing the code was the best way to explain it all (see the actual robots.txt above for the full story).

Testing the bots code and the security code to get it all right took a lot of time. In the end, we found:

- A surprising 21 bots that were following all the active list posts on a daily basis and downloading that content.

- About 45 trademark and other page monitoring services. The majority of those monitoring services obey robots.txt.

- 15 bots would accept cookies.

- 2 more web sites reselling WebmasterWorld content. One in China and one in the stans. both out of legal reach.

Sorry Shak – China will continue to be viewed with suspicion as long as it is still the wild-wild-west out there with few legal controls to protect content.

- about 30 people who don’t understand the concept that if you look like a bot with a spoofed agent name – you are a bot.

- Some of the worst bot running offenders? A few choice SEOs. These are the same folks that bring you click bots and scrapper sites. I think they have little respect for other peoples content. I also think they don’t appreciate just how impactful their actions can be.

- [ojr.org...]

Thanks to Yahoo and MSN for the permission to treat your bots as if they were a tough steak during the testing and coding phase. Cloaking stuff for testing went a long way to being able to figure out the right balance of settings.

… I spilled Spot remover on my dog. Now he’s gone.

As I was messing with the robots.txt for the 1000th time over the last week, I had a conversation with myself, that went something like this:

me: Self, can you publish a blog in a robots.txt file?
self: Sure you can. Robots would just ignore the commented lines.

me: What would be the point?
self: Fun and merriment. Who knows, you could find world peace in here.

me: Would people still read it?
self: Probably. If they will read blogger – they’ll read anything

me: Any downside? Any problems with a regularly updated robots.txt?
self: This is another fine SEO test you’ve gotten us into.

me: But don’t you need to enable comments?
self: Posting an article and then taking comments? Hey Dufus, it is called a FORUM – and everyone knows we already have one of those!

me: I love the idea. It has a cool retro BBS feel to it. I almost want to break out my trusty old 64, fire up a copy of Cnet BBS, and start posting some zeroday warez dude. lol!
self: I’m going to try it for awhile. Seems like fun for a change.

The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.

- bt

… How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn’t live there? – stephen wright.