Webmaster & Search Events

Search Engine Expert Directory

Google has more than 200,000 Servers

According to a interview with Google fellow Dean its estimated Google has more than 200,000 servers in various of its datacenter around the Globe.

"Google doesn't reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I'd estimate it's easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I'd guess it's far beyond that and growing every day. "

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9955184-7.html

Labels: Google, Webmaster News

Danny Predicts HP Search Engines for the future

Danny Sullivan the owner and operator of Searchengineland.com and a well renowned expert in Search Engine industry has predicted future Search Engines will more rely on Human editing and decision making in Search results.

According to him Human Powered Search engines will be the future

Search 1.0 back in 1996 was concentrating on Onpage factors.

Search 2.0 ( Birth of Google ) around 1998 started off as a year for offpage Optimization

Search 3.0 2007 is the year for Universal results.

In future Search 4.0 will be more about Human editing in Search results to deliver best results.

Article url is "http://searchengineland.com/080528-131813.php" and its very interesting to read. Read the article and follow the link from it to Sphinn to discuss it.

Labels: Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo index update May 2008 - Yahoo search engine algorithm and ranking update

Yahoo has made some changes to its algorithm and ranking factors. Yahoo calls its index update a weather update and Yahoo Weather updates are posted in the their Official blog by some Search Engineer.

"We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. "

Labels: search engines, Yahoo

Is TPR Penalty back - Google's Toolbar Pagerank Reduction Seem to be visible again

It seems Google's TPR penalty is back, Google around February this year brought a new type of penalty for sites that buy / Sell links. Its called the TPR penalty. In this type of penalty Google will reduce the pagerank of sites that are suspected of Buying or Selling Backlinks. It seems the penalty is back and more sites are affected.

A member has reported Pagerank reduction to his website forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=862890 here.

If you see TPR affecting your site please post here. We are doing some research on this and would love to hear feedback from others. We want to see whether TPR penalty affects only sites that Buy and Sell links or it affects innocent sites caught up inbetween. We have seen some sites loose TB PR without any link selling or buying that is why we need to ASK.

SEG

Labels: Google, pagerank, penalty, Search Engine Optimization

SEO comic strip - Incompetent webmaster whining about his rankings.

We always like legitimate complains to Search engines about spam tactics used by aggressive SEOs. But most of the complains are because of bad understanding of SEO. Some of the incompetent site owners , webmasters complain because they can't tolerate their competitors outranking them. This comedy strip is dedicated to those incompetent webmasters and SEOs. We would like to tell them just one thing keep improving your site and you will get the desired result. Complaining to search engines about your competition is not the way to GO.

search engine ranking comics posted on 28/5/2008

SEO Blog Team

Labels: Search Engine Cartoons, seo cartoons

Can links from foreign sites hurt your Google US rankings?

I have seen more and more people getting worried about their US ranking affected just because they get links from sites hosted in foreign countries. I recommend there is nothing to worry because of this.

Google ofcourse geo-targeting buy they also have ways to relate links to sites regardless of where they come from. If your site is hosted in US and have enough US backlinks i wouldn't worry about links from other sites.

Its very normal to get backlinks from other language sites especially if you run an information site. We get ton of backlinks from Japanese, swedish, german, spanish and lots and lots of other language sites still our rankings never moved. So i wouldn't worry about it. Just keep improving your site and always lookout for natural backlinks it will be a hit.

Labels: Search Engine Optimization, search engines

Viacom's threat might kill internet freedom - Youtube lawsuit

Viacom sued youtube and its owner Google for allowing copyrighted videos to be posted on their website. Viacom claims there are more than 150,000 of copyrighted videos posted in youtube and they claim a billion dollar as damages for illegal viewing of their copyrighted videos.

"Viacom claimed YouTube consistently allowed unauthorised copies of popular television programming and movies to be posted on its website and viewed tens of thousands of times.
It said it had identified more than 150,000 such abuses which included clips from shows such as South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV Unplugged.
The company says the infringement also included the documentary An Inconvenient Truth which had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times". "

Detailed news here

According to the document:

threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information

I agree with above Google's claim. The whole Internet is built upon sharing information with each other just because someone illegal posted a copyrighted video on a popular video hosting site it doesn't mean video site is responsible for it. If this is the case then there wont be any Forums or blogs or message boards out there. Then every site that runs a message board will have to verify each and every comment posted since some of them might be copyrighted.

Dow Jones: "When we filed this lawsuit, we not only served our own interests, we served the interests of everyone who owns copyrights they want protected."

Well i am not sure what is the interest of other copyright owners i feel Dow jones comments should be for Viacom only. Google's policy has always been don't be evil they grew up with that motto. Today they are way ahead of all other Search Engines because users are their No.1 priority. Even though Google's Search engine indexes millions of copyrighted pages and stores in their database still no-one complains since they are done what is best for Internet users.

Video sharing websites are a great way to share legitimate information across Internet. Just because someone posted some copyrighted videos its not fair to blame Youtube totally.

Well, I can give a number of reasons why Viacom is completely wrong with their lawsuit.

1. If Youtube is suppose to verify all millions of videos posted in their site they cannot run a site at all. There are so many areas where legitimate information is shared like forums, blog comments, news sites etc. If every single information needs to be verified then there won't be any good information sites on the web.

2. The word "copyright" itself will kill the way Internet works. Today anything and everything is copyrighted and its impossible to share legitimate information unless they are verified. I feel Copyright kills Internet freedom and there should be New laws for Internet information sharing which will help freedom of sharing.

3. After they faced lawsuit last year Google added automated copyright detection tool which stops some copyright videos from being uploaded. This is a very legitimate move and the best Youtube can do to prevent copyright videos. It also shows Google or Youtube don't want copyrighted videos on their sites.

4. Youtube has a very clear copyright policy on videos hosted by them. If you read the following

Commercial Content Is Copyrighted

The most common reason we take down videos for copyright infringement is that
they are direct copies of copyrighted content and the owners of the copyrighted
content have alerted us that their content is being used without their
permission. Once we become aware of an unauthorized use, we will remove the
video promptly. That is the law.
Some examples of copyrighted content
are:
TV shows
Including sitcoms, sports broadcasts, news broadcasts,
comedy shows, cartoons, dramas, etc.
Includes network and cable TV,
pay-per-view and on-demand TV
Music videos, such as the ones you might find
on music video channels
Videos of live concerts, even if you captured the
video yourself
Even if you took the video yourself, the performer controls
the right to use his/her image in a video, the songwriter owns the rights to the
song being performed, and sometimes the venue prohibits filming without
permission, so this video is likely to infringe somebody Else's rights.
Movies and movie trailers
Commercials
Slide shows that include
photos or images owned by somebody else
A Few Guiding Principles
It
doesn't matter how long or short the clip is, or exactly how it got to YouTube.
If you taped it off cable, videotaped your TV screen, or downloaded it from some
other website, it is still copyrighted, and requires the copyright owner's
permission to distribute.
It doesn't matter whether or not you give credit
to the owner/author/songwriter—it is still copyrighted.
It doesn't matter
that you are not selling the video for money—it is still copyrighted.
It
doesn't matter whether or not the video contains a copyright notice—it is still
copyrighted.
It doesn't matter whether other similar videos appear on our
site—it is still copyrighted.
It doesn't matter if you created a video made
of short clips of copyrighted content—even though you edited it together, the
content is still copyrighted.

You can see they are very clear about copyright and even provide links for copyright complains.

5. As of March there are over 3 Billion videos hosted in Youtube. Viacom claim 150,000 copyrighted videos which is only a fraction of the overall videos posted in Youtube. How can you expect youtube to check through this rubble and find copyrighted videos when its actually the user who is suppose to care about this.

6. Most of the time quality of videos posted in Youtube are very bad and they are also very short videos. I feel its not a big deal for small videos of low quality posted in youtube for viewing will kill media Business like Viacom altogether.

7. Some people suggest effective verification system like asking for Credit Card details to post videos. Well i know so many people who are not willing to post their CC information for legitimate online buying how can you expect them to give their CC details just for uploading videos this is a bit too much and anything like this will stop legitimate users from enjoying the freedom of Internet.

Viacom should withdraw their lawsuit to avoid humiliation in court, i feel there wont be anything legitimate against Youtube or Google which will prove Viacom's claim. If Viacom ever win this lawsuit which looks highly unlikely the way the whole Internet works will change and everyone will start suing each other which will be a disaster for Internet.

Lets all stand behind Youtube and Google and wish them success with their defence. Youtube should come out clear from this for the welfare of Internet.

Search Engine Genie

Labels: Google, search engines

Joomla hacking problem reported - a warning message

A poster in webworkshop forum posted this

"I have uncovered some malicious activity on my website which seems to be based around a Joomla/server vulnerability. I am still analysing the extent of the problem but here is what I have found so far. After performing a backlink check on my website I noticed a lot of links coming into the website with an anchor text of "F". Many of these websites seem to be genuine businesses (whether they actually are or not is still being debated), however the link itself was hidden in a mass of hidden links only visible by disabling CSS. When I say a mass of links I am taking 100s. After further investigation I found the cause of the problem, a script file called phpgw.php. Somehow the server has been hacked and the file called phpgw.php had been placed in a folder called "images/stories". From what I can see this script pulls in the template file for the website and modifies the code to contain the spam links. The story continues....I pulled up the access logs for the website and there was only one reference to the phpgw file from the IP address 212.62.97.20, a Saudi Arabian company who seem to be known for content spamming and malicious linking, see the following URL: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/i_b387d0cd6f471d4ce6e0535228689b7d Whether this is a server issue or a Joomla issue is still un clarified (I assume it's a bit of both) but I warn Joomla users to disable CSS, check for spammy links, and check the server for the phpgw.php file. I'm still looking into the situation so I'll update you all if I find out anything else. "

This looks like an issue that needs immediate attention since link injection is not only bad for your site but very bad for SEO. If Google crawls your site and find links to spammy websites it will ban your site temporarily or in rare cases permanently out of their index. We had a client face the same problem where his site was hacked and he got the following email from Google

"
Dear site owner or webmaster of ***********,
While we were
indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using
techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. This appears to be because
your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party
gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times,
they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in
our index.
The following is some example hidden text we found at
****************

*
*
*
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some of your webpages from our search results.

The mail from Google was actually longer which is cut short here. Matt cutts webspam head also posted an entry in his blog on how to help hacked sites https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/helping-hacked-sites/

You can see from matt's post that Google is not happy with hacked website with malicious and spam links. I warn everyone who use vulnerable content management systems like Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla etc to patch all possible vulnerabilities.

If you are using wordpress i recommend downloading the latest version https://wordpress.org/download/ and installing on your server

For Drupal too latest version works.

For joomla if you find installing the latest version all over a bit difficult i recommend just patching all the loopholes using their security extensions here http://extensions.joomla.org/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=listcats&cat_id=1802&Itemid=35

Have a safe site Google and every search engines love sites that are user friendly and safe for browsing.

Labels: Goog, Google

Google Advisor site diagnostics tool - Google's free tool

Google now offers diagnostics report for a site for example

For our Site Searchenginegenie.com Google says the following
www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://searchenginegenie.com

Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for searchenginegenie.com/

What is the current listing status for searchenginegenie.com/?
This site is not listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 2 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/10/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, searchenginegenie.com/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Well though the report sounds great for our site i am not sure how much i can believe Google on this.
I did the same search for serials.ws a popular crack download site. This site has f**ked up my system couple of times just for downloading some useless cracks. I am not sure how Google gives the following certification.

Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for serials.ws/
What is the current listing status for serials.ws/?
This site is not listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 1310 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/26/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, serials.ws/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Well no malicious stuff on this site according to Google? that's very weird since this site is very popular for malicious downloads. Don't have a hint on what criteria Google judges the quality of a site.

Labels: Google, Search Engine Marketing, Spam

Is this a manual review - webmasterworld member points Google employee visit

A webmasterworld member sees a visit from Mountain view Google's IP checking site: search for his sub domain. If you don't know what a site: search is its used to check the pages indexed by Google for that particular domain.

For example site:www.searchenginegenie.com will reveal all pages indexed for searchenginegenie.com , this is the regular method used in Google.

Kidder says : "I just noticed a Mountain View IP running a fairly specific site: query on one of our subdomains. I checked the IP and it came up as Google. Does this sound like a manual review? "

Tedster Google forum Administrator replies a Yes. Since he is a veteran in this industry we can believe his words. I feel manual visits from Google is just normal especially for a webmaster site like ours since we do write articles on Google and use tools that are using Google to deliver results.

Labels: Google

Hilarious image of yahoo's bragging on Petabyte database

Yahoo's bragging about their new improvement in database size of their petabyte database. Its a very cute image designed by our designer with great inside knowledge in SEO,

Yahoo's petabyte database cartoon

Labels: Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo

Search Engine / SEO events visit us to know the happenings in SEO industry

We are proud to announce the launch of Search Engine events calendar where you can find out all the latest happenings in search engine and SEO industry. This is a completely free service, please feel free to submit your events here and we will be proud to add it to our calendar totally for a free. Plus you will get a free backlink to your Events page from our site at no extra cost. Your event will not be deleted for 6 months even after the event is over,
Check out the currently updated events here,

https://www.searchenginegenie.com/search-events/month.php

Labels: search engines, Search Events

Delicious IE extension a useful tool for IE / Delicious users

Internet explorer delicious users now have a new reason to smile. Del.icio.us has released a very neat extension for IE with some useful features.

IE features.
Near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista

From the day Yahoo acquired Del.icio.s this social bookmarking site has some sparkling features. Though i prefer Digg over delicious i feel delicious stands out better than Digg in features like this.

Way to Go,

SEG

Labels: social bookmarking, Yahoo

Yahoo's Petabyte index - Bigger is not always better

Yahoo breaches the petabyte mark. Yahoo's VP for data Mr.Wagan announced that yahoo has crossed the petabyte mark of the Search Index. Google in 2005 announced their data is 3 times more than Yahoo's but after that they went into silence and started discussing on search quality.

Now Yahoo has bragged again that they now have the capacity to store 10s of petabytes of data and is ready for the coming future.

For anyone who don't know what a Petabyte is it 1024 Terabytes and 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes.

To tell in simple terms imagine you have an image on your website that is 50 KB then yahoo has data equivalent of 20,000,000,000 images that you have on your site. Or the current data cluster of Yahoo data equivalent of 20 billion 50 KB images.

Though yahoo claim to have a huge index i am sure Google will have much bigger index than Yahoo. I feel due to the competition between these two rivals soon we might expect an announcement from Google about their index capabilities.

Labels: Google, Yahoo

Google opens up more with their secrets

Google's Vice president in Engineering for Search Quality Mr .Udi Manber opens up more with the inner working on Search Quality with Google. He vaguely explains the inner working on Google and the various methods they use to rank a website in Google. Some of the highlighted points of his posts are the way he describes about factors that are used to return a document relevant to the query.

1. Pagerank: PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
Pagerank as per Udi Manber is still in use though not the way it used to be primary factor but now just part of a bigger algorithm.

2. Ability to Handle phrases: As per Mr.Manber Google's ability to handle phrases play an important role when it comes to ranking a webpage. The better the algorithm understands the phrase better the results will be.

3. synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes - Google sees synonyms spelling errors and other factors to return relevant results. ( Diacritics - A mark, such as the cedilla of façade or the acute accent of resumé, added to a letter to indicate a special phonetic value or distinguish words that are otherwise graphically identical. )

4. query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today)

5. time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time) - I have seen this more and more with Google in recent days for some keywords Google wants to rank new documents immediately and over few days the document drops out of Google's index only to return later in a position Google decides best for its users.

6. personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

"we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January"
I feel this is where the testing is not done throughly because for lot of high quality sites inner pages are showing grey bar in Google toolbar pagerank display. Its very ambiguous what Google thinks about these pages are they not worth for Google anymore? Are they penalized in any way? Do they needs to be fixed in some way?

Google has left us guessing with this particular change IMHO.

Thanks anyway for Mr.Udi to give an excellent writeup we are very happy to see this,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html

Labels: Google

Google's radar - An image portraying Google's stance on spammers

A wonderful presentation of what Google feels about Search engine spammers. This image shows some of the spam tactics that are in Google's Radar. We all know Google mostly knows all the major spam tactics used in black hat SEO industry. This image is a good example of it.

Labels: Search Engine Cartoons, seo cartoons

Plagiarism - Issue with plagiarism by a webmasterworld member

A webmaster world members shows his concerns with paraphrasing of his contents by an authority site.

He says
"My wife and I have a merchant site that we've worked very hard on since 2004. We created it to sell our unique niche product. We have done a lot of research and my wife has written a lot of unique content. We are proud of what we have accomplished.
Life took a detour and for the past year and a half, we've pretty much let the site run on autopilot (have not added any new content or product or kept up with the industry). Fortunately, our site and reputation have not been damaged, and we have sold out of almost all of our merchandise.
We've recently begun working on the site again. An authority site has sprung up in our industry and is beating us in Google. Many of our articles have been devalued in Google. I started studying this new authority site and have discovered that much of it is a paraphrasing of our content. I've tried the Google quoted search and cannot turn anything up, but on manual searches of this and our site, there is not doubt they have copied our stuff.
I have a few questions about what I can do about this...
1. Is this Plagiarism?
2. Is there an easier way to detect this without having to manually finding it all myself?
3. Instead of, or in addition to following the traditional steps to getting the content removed, I'd like to post screenshots of my content and the plagiarized site to discredit them. I'm really upset about this. What are your thoughts? "

This thread has some very good replies from industry experts its worth the read.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/content_copywriting/3653270.htm

Labels: Search Engine Marketing

tnx.net banned from Google

tnx.net is banned from Google for violating Google's guidelines. If you see their site tnx.net you can see they are selling text links without nofollow and selling Pagerank links which are against Google's guidelines. Their site is banned from Google obviously but to avoid looking like a banned site they blocked Googlebot from their site

their robots.txt ( tnx.net/robots.txt ) reads

Useragent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Well they not only like to violate Google's guidelines they will also teach you how to hide links using their Spam tool,

forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=526547

The tool promotion page in Digital point forum reads

"Have you ever thought of WHY Google wants to scare you from buying links? Because it works great, when done with care, of course! In the previous thread "How to Rank N1 in Google for a Highly Competitive Keyword - Revealed" I spoke of some tips which will definitely help to stay away of Google's radars when buying links. Backlink building has to be done with great care - not to get penalized. 2 main points are: moderate link placement speed and a variety of link anchors to make links look natural. When over 100 new links pointing to one page appear in several days, all with same anchors (which is unnatural) - Google will most likely notice you and the pages you were promoting may disappear from SERPs for 1 month. This automated "too many links at once" filter is intended to keep you away from buying links, but it's very easy to avoid this filter! "

Already we know text-link-ads.com run by patrick gavin was banned now we have an other link broker under Google's radar go down.

If people think link brokers are the solution i recommend don't take that page. Instead find ways to improve your site and attract links.

Labels: pagerank, penalty, Spam

A cartoon on Search Engines Love fresh Content

search engines love fresh content Google Yahoo MSN

A good cartoon designed by our designer to portrait the Love search engines have on fresh contents. Its a very good cartoon i hope you enjoy it as i enjoyed it.

We are adding cartoons twice a week, this is the 2nd cartoon of this week you will see the next Search Engine related cartoon on Monday,

For more cartoons please visit

https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm

https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-1.html

https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-2.html

Labels: Search Engine Cartoons, seo cartoons

MSN's ridiculous search results - when do they improve?

As a SEO company we regularly monitor top search engines and the quality of Search results provided by them. Of the top 3 Search Engines ( Google, Yahoo , MSN ) MSN has the most ridiculous search results. Believe it or not their search results have never improved in Quality for the past 2 years. We say this not because our sites and client sites are not ranking in their search. In fact we have much better ranking in MSN than Yahoo and Google. Our frustration is towards sites that rank in places that never should be.

Still there is lot of spam in MSN results sites which uses excessive cross linking , excessive paid links, keyword stuffing all work well with MSN results. If you see yahoo especially with the latest update their results are almost competing with Google results. Their relevancy has improved a lot but MSN is still lagging behind very badly.

Their Geo targeting goes crazy when i search for generic phrases like car transport , auto transport etc. When i search from Indian Office i see results of sites in Australia, UK, India, US all mixed. I feel this is poor geo targeting.

I seriously want MSN to improve their search results its nowhere near the quality of Google. OK enough of ranting back to Job,

SEG

Labels: Microsoft, MSN Live Search

Sanford wallace AKA Spamford wallace awarded 234$ million fine for spamming

Well people in online marketing industry for a long time should be knowing the long term spammer and one of the worst email spammer of all time Sanford Wallace. His company cyber promotions started in 1991 is one of the foremost email spamming company. He closed his company due to lawsuits and public pressure and now is resorted to spamming through more sophisticated methods.

Wikipedia has lot more information on this spammer . Well Now he is faced by a lawsuit by myspace for spamming their members using fake IDs. Now a civic court has ruled against him and he should pay 234$ million as fine to myspace for abusing their services. Well i am sure he is not going to pay this anyway i dont think first of all he has any where near that money to pay. I am sure this is just a warning lawsuit from Myspace to everyone trying to spam their users. Wallace was previously asked to pay FTC more than 4 million dollars as fine which he never paid http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0423142/WallaceFinalJudgment.pdf now i am sure for the type of low life he lives he will never pay the 234 million.

Spamford wallace runs his personally blog probably started very recently here "http://sanfordwallace.com/wordpress/?p=5". I am not sure whether its his personal blog ( no way to authenticate ) but seeing from the postings it seems its the real sanford wallace.

The thread about recently lawsuit really attracted me.

his post

"$234 million dollar judgment
I just read that a court awarded MySpace a $234 million dollar judgment against me. That's pretty amazing since I haven't even been served in this case since the preliminary injunction about a year ago. Regardless, the check's in the mail.
"

and his replies

admin Says:
Good demonstration of how some people base their thoughts on erroneous information. #1 The poster doesn't understand the meaning of a civil judgment. #2 The poster clearly feels I send crap in his or her inbox even though I haven't sent a mass commercial email in over 10 years.

admin Says:
"Innocent until proven guilty" does not apply to civil actions. And I am still waiting to be served. And I haven't been hiding either. The whole case was one big PR move.

admin Says:
There's a big difference between crying "its not my fault" and "they won a $234 million dollar judgment without even serving the defendant." I'm not asking you to care about me. I'm asking you to care about what happens when a huge corporation and the gov't have a common interest.

I personally want all the email spammers to go to hell or serve Capital punishment they are just a disgrace to internet and Internet freedom

Labels: social bookmarking, Spam

May 2008 Google update and SERP changes

Google has been into ever flux for a long time. Some webmaster world members are discussing a possible update in Google in May. I have seen some changes happen to our sites and client sites so definitely something is cooking up with Google results.

Go to webmaster world for discussion more on Google may 2008 update

Labels: Google update

Yahoo Mcafee join hands to pick out spammers in search results

Yahoo has tied hands with Mcafee to pick spammers from search results and warn innocent searches from potential problem they might face visiting a website. If you see the following screen shot

You can see the warning display from Yahoo search results. The site featuring in search seem to be an email spammer. Emails submitted to that site are added to some bulk email lists and results in 1000s of spam to those email IDs. Now Yahoo includes a warning to remove these potential spammers. The note says "Use caution in providing your email address. It may result in unsolicited or spammy emails" The site featuring here is carbonneutral.com a potential email spammer according to Yahoo and Mcafee.

There will be some innocent occurrences of this where sites may get flagged for sending unsolicited email whereas the people who reported the email as spam had actually elected to receive it. But this is rare most of the time email spammers are spammers regardless of whether they are guilty or Not.

Labels: Spam, Yahoo

SEO Fight - Shoemoney , Greg, Graywolf , Ian , Taylor

A nice image portraying current fight whether SEO is here to stay or No future for SEO. Our designer did a pretty good job on designing a nice cartoon on this event

Enjoy the image and feel free to comment

For more Search Engine related Humour images and cartoons visit https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm
https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-1.html
https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-2.html
Feel free to keep visiting our mail SEO blog and SEO cartoons page we will be updating latest events as cartoons twice every week,

Good Luck
SEG Team,

Labels: Search Engine Optimization, seo cartoons

Google images are a great source of traffic

We get ton of traffic from Google images. Optimizing for Google images should be part of a good SEO strategy since Google images has good potential to send quality targeted traffic. People who search for particular product / image will like to see the image of the product to judge their ideas. A good product with good images will result in Good conversion.

There are some sites that feature their image in first page of Google regular results. If those images are featuring for some important terms like Mouse . I am sure sites that sells mouse will get the maximum benefit.

You can read more about optimizing for Google Images right from the mouth of a Google image search quality engineer here

Labels: Google, google images

Google now offers Hindi translations in their Translator

Google had been providing a translation platform for various languages for a long period of time. Now they offer Hindi to English and English to Hindi translation. Its an amazing improvement hope Google moves into other leading indian languages too

English to Hindi https://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=enhiHindi to English https://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=hien

Labels: Google

Visit our SEO and search engine cartoons section

We have a section dedicated to search engine cartoons and SEO related comic pages. These are interesting pages which shows trends in Search Engine Optimization industry as well as hot topics in search engine industry. I am sure its a very interesting thing to check it out. I hope you enjoy it if yes please leave feedback which will help us improve and enhance more of those topics.

thanks,
SEG

Labels: seo cartoons

Jill whalen and the nitty gritty of copywriting cartoon

Jill Whalen, most of the people in SEO industry will know Jill and her in-famous High Rankings forum. Jill is famous for her good copywriting skills and SEO skills. She has written lot of Newsletters and some of them are very famous ones.

Here is Jill Whalen ready to Teach copywriting in her class.

Labels: search engines, seo cartoons

Microsoft's Lost Love with Yahoo - A Contemporary version

We all know Microsoft has walked away from Yahoo's bid for 43 Billion dollars. Our Graphics team has beautifully portrayed on this recent issue. Enjoy the images.

Kamesh is a dedicated graphics designer for Search Engine Genie and has completed lot of projects for us.

Labels: Microsoft, seo cartoons, Yahoo

Random text / Rotating text is it good for Search Engines?

I am sure you would have wondered whether showing random text to search engines are a good index and whether it helps in search engine benefit.

As fas as i know i don't see any special search engine benefit for this i have seen many blogs that are updated few times a day so mostly the search engines don't see the content they saw today the next day. Ofcourse this page can also be considered showing random text but search engines love those blogs since they are constantly updated.

So random contents as long as it is done for Good reasons will be good for search engines. I recommend not to abuse it since there are people who use methods like Cloaking where one type of content is showed to the search engines and an other type of content is showed to the users. Also remember the random contents are unique contents instead of contents syndicated through feeds. When you are using feeds to show random contents i am sure the same content is already shown up in a different site so there won't be any benefit from it.

Labels: Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

What will you ask a SEO firm

There is a discussion going on highrankings forum about questions that needs to be asked to a SEO firm . People keep asking this questions and i have already covered about this in my previous postings here. The SEO thread starter asks what is the best question to be asked.

Well there are 1000s of SEOs who call them companies, 1000s of SEO teams who call them companies. So what makes a good SEO company well first research what is the expertise of the company how many employees they have, how many work full time in SEO etc.

Here are some valid questions you can ask.

What is the most competitive keyword your company has ranked and how long it has stayed or is staying in Google top 10 rankings?

Can you explain some of the methods you use to gain ranking for our sites, is there something against search engine guidelines?

Give us some of your clients who are doing great in search engines, getting maximum traffic with good ROI and is with you for more than 2 years?

What is your client retention rate and success rate in search engine rankings?

What is success when it comes to search rankings?

I can imagine more but these will be on my top priority list

Labels: Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

subdomain or own domain blogs which one is better?

Many have questions whether sub domain blogs on blog service providers or blogs hosted on www yourdomain com is better.

As an expert in this first for more than 5 years ill tell you both don't have any difference. whether its *.blogspot.com , *.blogsome.com or *.wordpress.com there are no visible differences. As long as your blog has good back links and the feed URLs are facilitated to ping regularly your blog will be indexed regularly. Use some blog software like feedburner which helps in automated pinging from Google blog search and other blog searches. If you are into Google blog search you can be sure of that you will be included into Google search results too. Search Engines love fresh contents make sure you provide the crawlers as much fresh contents as possible.

I recommend you submit your feed URL to Google Blog ping service http://blogsearch.google.com/ping I am sure it will help,

Labels: blogger, Google

Matt cutts on web spam in recent web 2.0 Conference Oreilly

Here you can find some tips about combating spam from Google's Matt Cutts head of Google's Webspam team and an engineer who's been working on the problem for eight years. During a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo Matt Cutts explained about countering Web spam as-

"Spammers are human," Cutts said. "You have the power to raise their blood
pressure. Make them spend more time and effort...If spammer gets frustrated,
he's more likely to look for someone easier." How? Forthwith, some tips for
those who manage their own or others' Web sites. • Use captcha systems to make
sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math
puzzle--what's 2 + 2?--but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify
kitten photos. One blogger merely requires people to type the word "orange" into
a field. "The vast majority of bots will never do that," Cutts said. •
Reconfigure software settings after you've installed it. A little modification
of various settings will throw bots off the scent. "If you can off the beaten
path, away from default software installations, you'll save yourself a ton of
grief," he said. • Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For
example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others
are with transactions with that person. • Don't be afraid of legitimate
purveyors of search-engine optimization services. "SEO is not spam. Google does
not hate SEO," Cutts said. "There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who
can help you out." Registering your Web site at Google's Webmaster Central site
can help find bogus search-engine optimization tricks others may use on your
site, such as keywords written in white text on white backgrounds, he added.

Speech by Matt Cutts was very information he did say white hat SEO companies are definitely recommended and its not difficult to find a good SEO company. He recommends comment authentication since there are a lot of blog spam lurking out there. Mattcutts has been a major link between webmasters and Google.

Labels: Google, Mattcutts

Higher traffic from Yahoo after latest yahoo update.

We are experiencing quite a significant amount of increase in traffic from yahoo search engine after yahoo made an update before 10 days. Yahoo Search Engine recently updated their algorithm and this made lot of sites shuffle in their rankings. Some sites lost rankings some gained we gained very good ranking for our site and now yahoo accounts for about 15% compared to Google. We probably got good boost in Yahoo Search Rankings. We used to get only 3 or 4% of traffic from Yahoo now it has increased significantly

We are happy that yahoo still have a good market share in search

Labels: Yahoo

Slow Crawling experienced by few webmasterworld members

Some webmasterworld members have reported slow crawling from Googlebot on their sites. When you check this thread you can see that many have posted data showing slow browsing from Googlebot. From the sites we monitor we don't see much changes to Googlebot crawling some of the sites which are actively updated Googlebot is regular in gobbling up pages. Some sites which are not updated often see a bit lesser browsing other than that things look very normal to me.
I probably feel this could be caused by drop in backlinks to sites or Google devaluing some links. Google is very active in devaluing links recently. I recommend webmasters to keep a check on their backlinks and see if they are devalued.

Labels: Google, Google update

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