Tag!...you're not it!

So much uproar about the new tag it's been ridiculous. So many people talking about how this is going to make it so easy for webmasters and site owners to not give outbound links where they are due. Well, not to ruin it for you, but they already can. A javascript outbound link or a Robots.txt will do the trick currently. Yes...adding a simple tag within the "href" maybe be easier, but this isn't the first instance where you could be cheated out of a good incoming link.

In the wake of all this, NickW setup a new site, hilariously called LinkCondom, dedicated to Google's fascination of blog spam. Don't be a Skank!

Blog Spam Bust

If you are familiar with some of the dark arts of SEO, then you may be familiar with blog spam. Generally, you can post several links inside of the comments or trackback section of a post on a blog that utilizes those features. On Google's official blog, the announced a new tag that will discount the links inside of the comments, trackback, or referrer areas. This won't completely stop blog spam, as there are several applications that still allow blog spamming (not that I would know ;) ), but it's a definite push in that direction.

1 point Google
-1 Black Hat SEO's

FireFox Toolbar

Last week I finally downloaded a copy of the new Firefox browser by Mozilla. Firefox is a great update to the world of browsers. No one has been able to touch Explorer, mainly because it is included into every computer bought, but who's counting? In an area that hasn't seen much growth in capibilities, the firexfox browser is a breath of fresh air. Ahhh

Microsoft Security holding your money

It seems that when you set you Microsoft Security settings to "high", disables Google Adsense from being seen. These types of anti-ad removing tactics hurt the affiliate world. There is a thread at WebMasterWorld discussing what's going on.

MSN is Alive!
There have been talks at SearchEngineWatch forums, and convincing at that, that MSN is going to launch their new search engine to the public on Feb. 1st. MSN search will still be in Beta, but it will be hooked up to their main applications.

Google Trivia

Alan Williamson, went to a lecture given on the 11th by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google), and found out some interesting information. Here are a couple I found funny/interesting.

The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn't look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.

Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.

Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.

They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn't emailing a blackhole.

Alan gave a pretty good list. I would check out some of the other interesting Google facts he mentions, they're pretty funny.

Wisdom 2005 White Paper

MarketingSherpa, one of the largets marketing firms online, has just finished an excellent white paper .pdf. It includes 105 real-life marketing lessons which include testing e-mails tactics that work, search marketing tactics, conversions based on site design and direct mail, radio and telemarketing stories. Best part...it's free! You can download it here.

MSN search almost ready

MSN Search will be hooking up the firehose to some of their users for their beta search engine . Currently, their using the Teoma engine to give relevant query searches. If you like your organic placement within the new MSN search you may start to see spikes in traffic within the next following weeks as they are phasing in their new search engine. Still in Beta though.

YDS - Desktop search

If you have been hiding under a shell for the past few months, several players in the search arena have been trying to gain market share over desktop searching. What's great about desktop searching? Well, if you're anything like me, you have tons of e-mails, files, docs, etc... in various locations all over different hard drives on your computer. Desktop searching speeds things up and gives a helping hand in organizing your computer.



Chris Sherman, of SEW, did a nice review of the new Yahoo! Desktop feature. Also Rich Ord of iEntry, Inc. also did a commendable job critiquing.

Title this...

Fathom, a frequent poster at the Search Engine Watch forums, is conducting a study on the Title attribute. Hopefully, with the help of some of some of the other forum members, this is a very controlled test to see how much weight the search engines give on the title attribute.

What's the Title attribute? Well, here's an example: Voasi Blog

If you scroll your mouse of the Voasi Blog, some drop down text will appear uner the linked text. Some feel, in the SEO community, that several of the search engines see this as optimizing your page and as Google states they take over 100 elements to rank a page, I'm curious to see why this attribute wouldn't be relevant to good SEO maintanence.

Acrobat Reader opening quickly??

You know when you click a link and you forget to hover over it to see the URL in the bottom left corner of your screen? But of course, you accidentally click on it...and it's a .pdf file, and then half of your morning is wasted waiting for Acrobat Reader to get going.

Chris Sherman over at Search Engine Watch found this nice little plug-in to your Acrobat Reader that speeds things up quite nicely and did a critique of the plug-in as well. If your like most of the population and mainly use Acrobat Reader to read your standard "white paper" documents, then I suggest you download the plug-in and give it a whirl.