Darker side of exchanging links, bad link exchange tactics deployed by some sneaky webmasters discussed here,

this is a really interesting thread in webmasterworld.com about how people use bad tactics while exchanging links, check the thread here,

webmasterworld.com/forum12/2036.htm

Bad webmaster! Bad…

Delink your links page

Bury the link to your

links page on a single page that takes about five clicks to get to

robots.txt

Run your outbounds through your cgi-bin counter script

Another interesting beta search engine toolbar released,

MSN the new player in search engine has launched its beta version of their new toolbar, Check it out here, beta.toolbar.msn.com

Features of the new MSN toolbar beta includes,

1. Find anything on your computer Documents, photos, music and more!
2. Find e-mail messages in seconds From Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express
3. Try the New MSN Search Search the web smarter and better
4. Block annoying pop-ups Surf without interruptions
5. Fill out forms online Fill out forms and web site passwords in one click

Search engine strategies conference coverage by seroundtable.com

Barry of seroundtable.com has an excellent coverage of the latest SES conference in chicago, It is very interesting to see the various discussions happening,

Please visit this site for more information on the various topics on this,

www.seroundtable.com

Mesothelioma keywords overture PPC ( pay per click bid ) reaches all time highest

mesothelioma is the highest Pay per click bid keyword that I know off, It used to go for excess of 75$ per click in overture, Now mesothelioma related keywords are going well beyond 100$, Before 2 months when I checked overture has a maximum bid limit of 100$,

No bidder can bid over 100$ for mesothelioma related keywords for Pay per click, Now it seems they changed the policy, I just checked overture bids tool for pay per click for mesothelioma and it has reached to 160$, That is one heck of a money for one click, It seems overture has released its new maximum bid limit policy and let people to increase it to 160$ 🙁

here is a screen shot of the maximum bid in overture for mesothelioma

Google launches google suggest beta- A great google addon feature

Google is testing beta version of their new wonderful product google suggest, google suggest helps people find relevant queries through a suggested search engine friendly drop down,

For example if you type google it will bring down relevant list of deep queries, for example words like google search, google suggest a site, google toolbar, google scholar etc,

it is a great product you can reach it here, google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=1

Screen shot of the new google product google suggest

Resource zone on the move, Dmoz forum taken down for maintainence,

it seems resource-zone.com the dmoz forum was taken down for maintenance, I just visited in thoughts of asking some questions but was disappointed to see the following message on their site,

Resource Zone, Extreme Tech Support, What Pisses You Off, BobSchwarz.com,
Extreme VB and the rest of the sites are moving to a new home. This is a huge
undertaking so expected time to re-opening is December 8, 2004. If any further
delays are encountered I will update this page.

An Interview with Tim Converse – Interesting discussion with Tim of yahoo search posted in yahoo search blog

An interesting interview with with Tim Converse is posted in the yahoo search blog, It is an interesting insight into yahoo search worth the read check it out here in the yahoo search blog,

ysearchblog.com

An extract from the interview,

JQ: When it comes to fighting spam, there’s all kinds of software and many

people trying to stop spam attempts. With all of us trying to detect this, is

there a way to tell the search engines about it?

A: We get a lot of that

data on our own. We have a pretty large view and we’re approaching the spam

problem from a lot of different directions. But nobody should expect to see any

sudden change in spam just yet.

Take weblog comment spam, for example. Two

things will have to happen for comment spam attempts to decrease; one is that

spamming will have to not work for search engines and the second is that comment

spammers will have to realize it. (laughs). There could be a long lag there

where, even if every search engine totally nailed them, spammers could still

operate under the belief that it worked. What we can do from the search engine

point of view is make spam not help.

How do you spell Levenshtein?

Saw an interesting posting in MSN search blog about their spelling correction system implementation into their new MSN beta search, see what have are saying,

How do you spell Levenshtein?

Doing a good job of helping Search users to

correct misspelled queries is super important for two main reasons: a) 5 billion

crawled docs and a bleeding edge ranking algorithm can’t do much if the query

isn’t spelled right and b) more than 10% of all searches are misspelled! So we

made sure our new search engine included a revamped spelling correction system

that’s much better than our old one.

To improve the speller we worked with

Silviu Cucerzan and Eric Brill from Microsoft Research’s Text Mining, Search and

Navigation Group. Silviu and Eric have developed some novel techniques for using

search query statistics and iterative transformation of query strings to improve

spell correction. Their published paper on this topic – Spelling correction as

an iterative process that exploits the collective knowledge of web users –goes

into much more detail on some of the technical thinking that inspired the

spelling correction system we built.

More here, blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2004/12/06/275899.aspx

new gaggle of Groups (update)

Official Google Blog reports on the new google groups beta, Please check what they have to say about their new google blog,

Whether your interests run to knitting or brain surgery, chances are good

other people out there share them. The new Google Groups not only helps you find

information on millions of topics; now you can actively share ideas and opinions

with others about each and every obsession of yours. And if you don’t find a

group already focused on your passion, by all means start one. Invite others to

join your group so that all interested parties can read and respond to messages,

share opinions and ideas via email or your own group’s web page. If you’re

looking for a group to join, we could definitely use some thoughtful insight (or

idle speculation) over at my space elevator group. Shannon Bauman Associate

Product Manager, Google Groups

More here ( google.com/googleblog/2004/12/new-gaggle-of-groups-update.html )

Is SEM different from SEO, An interesting discussion in forums search engine watch

An interesting thread was started in searchenginewatch forums, A poster asked what is the difference between SEO and SEM, everyone gave their opinion,

Here is my opinion on the same thread,

I agree with tomslick, SEO is part of SEM,

SEM IMO consists of,

1. SEO

2. PPC

3. PFI ( Optional )

4. Link Building

5. Affiliate SE Marketing

6. ROI and conversion tracking

7. Sponsored Search engine listing(some search engines).

8. Shopping feeds ( shopping search engines )

SEO – Search Engine Optimization, Ability to improve a site to make it relevant to Search Engine Algorithm and make the algorithm rank a site based on User queries.

Source: forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3045