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• 

  Daily Search Forum Recap: November 14, 2008

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 10:00pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  Search Forum Recap  

  Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

• 

  Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 11/14/08: Great PubCon Keynotes, Liveblogging Dispute & Veteran's Day

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 6:30pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  Search Forum Recap  

  Guess what? The "con" part of PubCon is over and the guys are preparing to head to the pub later today. But alas, I'm back in New York -- like Barry, I took the red-eye. It's 11AM EDT (or 8AM, whatever) and I'm all confused about where I am and how I got here. But moving on...

  PubCon Keynotes Rocked
  I had the pleasure to liveblog the George Wright keynote at Pubcon. He talks about how, with a $50 budget, he made a viral phenomenon. It's pretty impressive to hear that kind of reinforcement when you have business objectives, don't you think?

  The following day, we liveblogged Satya Nadella of Microsoft. They launched Project Silk Road, an API that looks pretty promising.

  I'm Not Giving Up Liveblogging, Even if Barry Says I Should
  There's a jerk on the Internet who wanted to get attention, so he blogged that we should stop liveblogging because our reporting is inaccurate. Then he says that he's upset because he has "liveblogged erroneously." Well, sorry that you suck at liveblogging, John, but that doesn't mean you have to attack two of the greatest livebloggers this industry has ever had. Meanwhile, the blog post that this John dude wrote evoked some heavy emotions and Barry is running a poll. Should we stop liveblogging? Answer us. And if you say "yes," identify yourself with a comment on the thread so that we livebloggers can burn you in effigy.

  Why is Google Using Blog Comments--and Not Public Forums--to Communicate with Webmasters?
  Do you find it annoying when you report a problem on a blog post and Google chooses to respond on the blog and not in an "official" channel? Does it irk you that Google doesn't appear to use its own internal blogs to communicate these "bugs" or observations with the rest of the community? To some, it does. But for Google, it makes a lot of sense. Why should they worry an entire webmaster community if only some people are being impacted? What does this mean for you? Keep being active in the blogs, baby!

  Google
  Finally, after all this time, Google has finally released an SEO guide. It's a 22-page PDF with all this useful information, or so I hear (no, I didn't read it yet either). Now when is Google going to talk about linking?

  Googlebot Won't Answer Your Calls if You Ignore Him
  I have no idea why someone would block Googlebot and then realize later that this was a stupid decision and try to reinvite Googlebot back into his life. However, some guy does want to do that. How do you tell Googlebot to crawl your site again? The idea is to send signals to Google that you're interested in reigniting that flame: get more links, submit a sitemap, and whatever else you can do to call your site to Google's attention.

  YouTube Sponsored Ads Broken
  Isn't it nice when YouTube launches a new feature but it doesn't actually, erm, work? Barry tried to play with YouTube sponsored ads and got an internal error. What gives? (I think it has something to do with a Mac.)

  Deleting Your Google Sitelinks May Not Remove them from Google
  Apparently, a webmaster has discovered a bug in Google. When deleting his sitelinks, a webmaster realized that Google kept them intact. Five days later, the deleted sitelinks are still listed on the search engine. Hrm.

  Argentina Doesn't Honor Free Speech
  It sucks if you're living in Argentina and want to learn about a prominent figure. It seems that Argentina prefers censorship rather than allowing content to be discovered. Search engines were forced to comply with this legal measure, and well, I'm glad I live in America.

  Veteran's Day Comes and Goes
  With PubCon in our faces, many forgot that we celebrated Veteran's Day on Tuesday. Google forgot to honor people in the Coast Guard and eventually updated their logo. Dogpile and Yahoo joined in the fun too. Of course, so did we!

  No Video on Sunday
  Barry got a new MacBook Pro and I think he wants to play with it instead of making our video for Sunday. You'll just have to wait for him next week (sorry Sam!)

• 

  Is it Worthwhile to Buy a High PageRank Domain and 301ing it?

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 3:13pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  Search Engine Optimization  

  What happens if you want some good link juice to your domain? You may engage in the practice of buying a site and 301ing it to your old domain. In yesterday's PubCon session, we even talked about buying sites for maximum exposure and minimum risk. But the question is really: will you get juice by doing this?

  At a High Rankings Forum post, member Randy claims that Googlers say that the "trust" of the site gets reset upon a domain transfer and that you won't get the PR value. At the same time, how is Google to know that you have bought a domain for this purpose? That said, Randy says it's 50/50.

  If you have experience in this area, the comments area of this post is waiting for your insights.

  Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.
  

• 

  Do You Need Enrollment in the Google AdWords Professional Program to take the AdWords Exam?

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 3:11pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  Google AdWords  

  Google has a requirement -- at least, the site says so -- that you need to be enrolled in the Google Professional Program to be considered for the AdWords exam. But is it really required?

  AdWordsPro thinks so (but unfortunately isn't 100% sure). I think that if it says it's required, it probably is.

  The question is: is Google really strictly enforcing this requirement? Search Engine Roundtable readers: do you know? Have any of you ever tried to register for the exam (which is paid) and had the course enrollment requirement be an obstacle?

  Let us know in the comments.

  Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

• 

  Gmail Adds Video and Voice Chat

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:56pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  Other Google Topics  

  Want to see who you're talking to over your IM? You may want to use iChat or Skype, but now, Google Talk can support voice and IM chat. You can find out more.

  For those who are dependent on Skype (and perhaps 3-5% of my friends actually use the service consistently), it's nice to know that Gmail will probably fill the void for the remaining 95-97%. Many forum members found that Skype's functionality was limited (you needed XP SP2, for example), so the Gmail solution should work pretty well.

  That said, the actual integration of these new features hasn't come without its criticisms. One person expressed his disappointment that Google has not installed a folders system and he considers that important. (I see the point and I agree that Labels alone are NOT the suitable replacement. A future Gmail Labs feature, perhaps?) Other tweaks have been requested within Gmail that would make the *mail* experience a more productive one.

  Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums

• 

  I'm Insulted But Should We Give Up Live Blogging?

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:45pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Search Engine Conferences  

  It is now 8am, I am at my desk, in my office in New York. I landed this morning at about 5:20am in Newark, NJ, after flying all night (the red eye) back from PubCon Vegas 2008. It was an exhausting three days. Between live blogging, keeping up with the forum news, writing at Search Engine Land, speaking on panels, meeting with people and search companies, running my daily business and being married - it is just exhausting.

  So, about 30 minutes ago, I notice a Sphinn thread, which links to a blog post (which I won't link to) that totally trashes our live blogging efforts. This guy calls live blogging, "useless" and "inaccurate." He goes on to say what we do is "selfish disregard for reporting integrity." To call live blogging "selfish," oh, that makes me mad. To call the 38+ conferences we've flown to, paid hotel costs, sometimes paid conference passes for, "selfish." To call the dumbing, incredibly tiring and exhausting work it is to sit there, session after session, to write down the words that come out of speakers mouths, no matter if you disagree with them or if you find them boring - or, even worse, love what they are saying, but are too consumed in typing down what they are saying to have the time to actually appreciate the words of wisdom - to call that "selfish" (long sentence, sorry, been up for over 24 hours).

  I have often wanted to stop live blogging these conferences. Why? Simply because it is extremely taxing on the individuals who do the live blogging. It seems simple, but it really is not. But I have decided to continue live blogging because most people appreciate it and many tell me they "depend" on it.

  So to read a "blogger" who has had a blog since September 30th, 2008 - yea, you got that, completely trash this effort. Well, I am totally disgusted and insulted. Not just for myself, but for all the volunteers who spend their own money and time to make this happen.

  I have been on both sides of the coin. I speak and I live blog. It is true that live bloggers might get something wrong or hear it wrong or miss important parts. That is the nature of the game. But does that mean there is no value to it?

  Danny Sullivan has often wanted people to stop live blogging and pull out the key elements of the sessions. I agree with that, 100%. But we invented live blogging in this industry, people, I think, expect it of us. If not, then I am more than happy to stop - because honestly, it would be a relief to not have that burden of responsibility. To not have to get up at 4am on a conference day to make sure to get all my work done prior to the sessions, so I can be at a session at 9am to live blog it for people who cannot make it to the session. So I would love to not have that burden.

  Hence, I leave it up to you. Please take the poll below and tell me if you want us to stop live blogging:

• 

  Ditched GoogleBot But Now Want To Make Friends Again?

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 1:07pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Google Optimization  

  I found an interesting tidbit while reading a somewhat detailed thread at Google Groups. The scenario is as follows. You have blocked Googlebot from accessing your site for a 6 month period or so. Then you want to welcome Googlebot back into your site by removing the disallow from your robots.txt file. Will Googlebot bite? If so, how long will it take?

  Yea, you ditched Googlebot and now you realize what a good friend Googlebot can be for you. So now you want to become friends with little old Googlebot again. Truth be told, the longer you ditched Googlebot, possibly the longer Googlebot will accept your renewed friendship. Just like real friends. Well, not really.

  It is just a matter of how many times Google will recheck your robots.txt file. If you blocked Googlebot in your robots.txt recently, then I would expect Googlebot to check the robots.txt more often. If it is six month or longer, than likely less frequently. It just makes sense from an efficiency standpoint on both Google's side and for your server.

  Susan Moskwa of Google has a great analogy in the thread, so let me quote her:

  I sometimes use a telephone metaphor to explain this--imagine you called someone and their answering machine said "I can't come to the phone right now, please don't call me." If you called back an hour later and got the same message, and then called back the next day and got the same message, and then called back the next week and got the same message, you'd probably call less and less frequently, assuming the response would be the same, right?

  The same is true of Googlebot; if your site consistently sends the message "Don't crawl me," we may wait longer and longer between the times when we attempt to crawl it again.

  So what can you do to encourage Googlebot to come back quicker? Send it flowers and chocolate. Just kidding! But you do want to entice Googlebot to come back. How so? Submit a Sitemap file to Google, get more links, get buzz out about your site, write more content and so on. As Susan said, "once it starts being 'active' in the online ecosystem, it'll naturally end up in search results and start ranking accordingly."

  I had fun with this post because it is pretty late now, been up really long with little sleep. In fact, I feel like I am going to fall asleep while typing this. In any event, hope you enjoyed this little tidbit, it will be posted in the AM.

  Forum discussion at Google Groups.

• 

  Google AdSense's Two Hour Reporting Outage

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 12:59pm CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Google AdSense  

  Google AdSense had a two hour outage yesterday morning causing lots of concern amongst the publisher groups.

  There are two long threads, one at Google Groups and another ad WebmasterWorld discussing the outage.

  The first report came in at 4:09am (EST) Thursday morning and at about 6:44am, first reports came in that the statistics started to populate in the AdSense reports. At 1:05pm (EST), AdsenseAdvisor and AdSensePro Jennifer wrote the same message, a minute apart, at the respective forums:

  There was a minor reporting issue for about 2 hours. This should be back to normal, and all data form that period will be restored.

  Thanks for your patience.

  Jennifer

  All looks good now.

  Forum discussion at Google Groups and another ad WebmasterWorld.

• 

  Daily Search Forum Recap: November 13, 2008

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:23am CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  Search Forum Recap  

  Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

• 

  Super Session : Search Engines and Webmasters - aka: The Search Engine Smackdown

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 2:11am CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas  

  One of our most popular PubCon sessions, this event is also known as the Search Engine Smackdown.

  Expect a "State of the Engines" address by the leading search engines of today. Yahoo, Google, Ask and Microsoft will all run down the current status, features, and fresh offerings of their respective search spaces.

  Related blog entry from a few years back:
  http://www.pubcon.com/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1156867200

  Moderator: Brett Tabke
  Speakers:
  Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
  Sean Suchter, VP, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo!
  Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

  Nathan Buggia:
  State of Live Search - what does it mean for publishers? We've talked about themes of live search - deliver best search results, simplify key tasks, and innovate in the business model.

  Best search results: it's all about relevance. We've made a lot of progress. Does a query answer your question? We've been tracking this for 4 years. In the past year, we're in the same ballpark - not exactly like Yahoo/Google but very similar. Some queries we're better on but some aren't perfect. It's about freshness of content and depth of content.

  Specific improvements: improving the crawling performance - compression and if-modified-since. We create less load on your server and do a more efficient job of crawling. If your resources are gzipped, we take less bandwidth.

  Standardization of REP rules - these are a core set of rules for robots exclusion protocol. It's easier for publishers can specify the policies for searche engines. These rules are shared. MSNbot has adopted the common set of rules: now we support regular expressions.

  We continue to invest in sitemaps. They can be hosted anywhere. There's a lot of flexibility for publishers. It also helps understand canonicalization issues.

  There's a significant increase in crawling capacity.

  We also realized that the best search results isn't about algorithmic improvements. It's also about providing tools: Webmaster Tools. We offer: troubleshooting tips. We took a list of the top issues that Live search encountered when crawling websites - 404 errors, too many parameters, blocked by robots, and unsupported content. There's reporting being provided around these and even filtering. Next week, we'll launch a new feature about malware. We scan every page and see what spawns a malicious process; those pages are flagged and cannot be clicked on in the user experience of Live search. Publishers can find their own links in the tools; they can also get a list of outbound links that are also infected.

  We also provide a lot of tools around ranking. Information is provided on Static Rank, dynamic ranking within site, backlinks, and penalties.

  There are also some issues on the community forums with a 3 day turnaround.

  Another tool launched about a year ago is the adCenter Excel Keyword Research tool. It gives you access to an API that gives you keyword data for Live search - demographic and monetization information.

  Simplify key tasks:
  - The future of relevance? We found that there are many use cases for when people come to search engines. Sometimes they're doing navigational queries. Sometimes people come to search engines and don't know what they want. These are exploratory scenarios. We provide richer media in the search results in addition to 10 blue links. Also, deeper pages may not be related to the search experience but the topic. As a publisher, there's more surface area on how to reach customers with specific content. Some of this is video, structured content (products, reviews, and more information about your website). This is expanded into Hotmail and other properties as well.

  Innovation in the business model:
  We're talking about the Cashback/adCenter scenario.

  We also have Project Silk Road that consolidates things to increase engagement (enhances the seite with Live search results/customizes 404 error pages with the error toolkit, and create rich user experience with Virtual Earth and silverlight), generate traffic (optimization of site with the tools, deep content partnerships that increase distribution, and enhanced ad format solutions), and drive insight (how your website performs and your customers. Rich site statistics, monitoring, and optimization)

  Within that, there's the Live Search API. We asked a lot of our partners about what they needed in an API. Publishers wanted to be in control of the results of the API. Now, you can reorder the results, skin results and ads to match your website or application, and filter out 300 ad providers that don't make sense (competitors, aren't good for your audience, etc.)

  The technical aspects of the API also needed to meet business needs:
  - The query limit is removed - now unlimited
  - Rich query language - site operators that you've seen in the past (e.g. site:). You can alter how dynamic ranking relevancy favors freshness, accuracy, or whatnot.
  - Many types of content - web, news, images, encarta answers, spelling. Different corpuses in the backend are now accessible.
  - Implements all standard protocols (REST, JSON, RSS, SOAP) - they can use the API any way that people develop.

  Sean Suchter:

  Yahoo is trying to get rid of the 10 blue links.

  Limited choice: three players dominate the maket. Neither site owners or searcher can exert influence, so Yahoo is trying to address it.

  Search Assist feature is being worked on to make the best possible search queries.

  Right now, Yahoo is looking to move from "to do" to "done" - getting to the answer by reducing frustration, trying to structure information from the web directly, etc.

  One example is the music player integration- "Play the web" in Yahoo Search

  He shows a SERP that shows many initiatives: rich media modules (video and headlines), deep links, and news federation.

  The other big area is about the ecosystem. We're really trying to create a community around search (think PubCon). We're trying to set up incentives for everyone - Yahoo and end users. A few ways to do that: opening search (SearchMonkey) - coming from outside in. What does this mean? Yahoo wants to move from a simple presentation to a more useful structured presentation when appropriate for the task the user is trying to accomplish (not uniformly, not for all queries, not for all users). For site owners, this helps the users get right to the answers. The traffic should increase in quality. It hasn't hurt clickthroughs to your site. It will increase loyalty and engagement.

  There is a lot of success with the SearchMonkey ecosystem. A lot of properties, including People magazine, Wikipedia, Trulia, WebMD, and more are utilizing it.

  Another innovation includes BOSS, a big initiative - build an open search service. The idea is to open the platform completely. Trying to be a principal search engine is a hard thing. You need hardware, data, and more. So the idea is to open it up completely so people can interact with the query handling and crawling and use it directly. The goal is to have high quality search experience to be relevant, comprehensive, fresh, and well-presented.

  Some examples: 4 hoursearch - it was made in 4 hours by guy who said he paid $10 for pizza and beer. It's very straightforward and a different type of search presentation. Another one is PlayerSearch which is more specialized (like SportsCenter). NewsLine is another with a cool layout of how the news are presented. Finally, Tianamo is a 4th - it presents the data in this somewhat mountain format. It's a landscape of queries and things surrounding them in a visualization.

  Matt Cutts: State of the Index.
  What has happened in 2008 and what should we expect in 2009?
  - Google Chrome is a wicked fast browser
  - Google Android is an open source operating system

  There's other stuff too - better machine translation, better voice recognition, Google Suggest, improving personalization and universal/blended search

  There were a lot of small things: 2001 search index, video and voice chat in Gmail, ability to track the flu (by finding out who is searching for the flu/cough/cold symptoms on Google!) - it's really cool.
  - Why is this interesting to webmasters? You don't have to do this with flu. You can look at Google trends in general and even check them for websites.

  Google Ad Planner slices and dices by demographic.

  Let's drill down: what have we done for the webmaster? We're taking PDFs that are images and are running OCR on them. We're crawling flash better - pulling out text of transitions of Flash files.

  2008 Webmaster Launches. Look at pinkberry.com/mobile versus redmangousa.com/ on your iPhone. Only one works. Google is working to understand these flash files that aren't showing up on your phone.

  Google has gotten better at keyword spam and gibberish. We have also provided some extra tools. For example, there's a tool that shows who is linking to you who is linking to a 404. You can also make your 404 better with 14 lines of JavaScript. This code by Google suggests pages that might be useful on that site.

  There are a few other things:
  - Adavanced segmentation of Google Analytics
  - On demand indexing for Google Custom Search Engine - Google will reindex up to 10 pages within 24 hours.
  - webmaster APIs for hosters and Gdata
  - translation gadget for your website. If you have Chinese visitors and you write in English, the site can be translated into Chinese.

  Webmaster Communication - it's huge so far. We've had 3 chats so far with 700 people dialing in on the most recent chat. We're blogging more, including more videos, and there are now blogs in different languages. If you register your site and you have malware or are caught for spam BEFORE you register, those messages will be waiting.
  - Yesterday, Google came out with a 30 page guide on SEO 101. This means Google values SEO.

  2009 Blackhat trends:
  - jeevesretirement.com was bought by Ask.com. Ask forgot to renew it. Jeevesretirement.com was bought by porno people. People grab expired domain names and take advantage.
  - Illegal hacking will become more common.
  - Blackhat moves toward the outright illegal - DNS subdomain hijacking. Without getting DNS resolvers update, it can be hacked. Do we want to do stuff that gets people in jail?

  Conclusions - blackhat SEOs will continue to veer toward the outright illegal, SEOs need to decide risk tolerance, Google will keep communicating efforts with webmasters, and Google will provide tools to help webmasters
  

• 

  Forums and Communities : Building, Management, and Optimization

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 1:25am CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas  

  Moderator: Brett Tabke
  Speakers:
  Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
  Lawrence Coburn, President, RateItAll, Inc.
  Roger B. Dooley, VP of Online Community Development, Hobsons U.S.
  Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com

  
  Chris Tolles of Topix begins:

  Topix is a local news aggregator. Turned it into a community around news. 40,000 local forums, 150,000 comments a day. Only provider of ZIP code local news on the web. Largest local forum provider on the web. Participation from people in over 20,000 US localities monthly. 15 million uniques a month. Roughly the same traffic as Digg.

  Two equally big problems
  1) Getting participation
  2) Dealing with it - running and managing it is a huge nightmare

  Product management 101:

  How do you build a community? Provide something people want to use. Build around the people you know. Build around what you know.
  Build something no one else has. ODP was the first directory powered by people.

  Has to be easy to use, easy to find. Obvious keyword optimization problems. Building a strategy for being found. Topix optimizes for news. Must be easy to understand. Some communities are not clear what the focus is. Easy to see the unique value. Are you another site talking about Toyotas? What is your unique value? Ease of participation. Maximizing engagement. Let people participate without registration. Make it easy for people to come back. Give them a reason to come back. Facebook is amazing that 15% of users come back daily. Let the audience virally build your business. Passion about your product / service is key.

  Dealing with participation: Your users are all trying to "get you". Everyone on there is insane! Look for the attack on the system. A community is just another system. Assume people are out to get you. What's the experience like if they get your voicemail? Phone calls at 2am? Look for these issues, and build it to deal with this. Have functionality to deal with complaints. Ways of managing and moderating what potential problems are before they happen. Have to take a long view on things. Building tools and functionality with expected issues that will happen.

  Security is policy. Topix powers the forums for a Hartford newspaper. Had an incident where someone was hit by a car. Lots of racist talk. Was there a policy on this? No. Hard to do anything with a community unless you've built a policy/rules and stick with it. Need policies! The efficiency of the organization depends on it.

  Don't go down! If it's growing, it let it go down. Tech matters - have a solid setup. Think about the technology you use. Look at your growth. Look at other sites and look at their solutions. That's why Friendster probably went down.

  Do as little as possible. If providing internet community services for free, limit your cost. If you are charging, people have expected value. Down drown in costs! But don't abandon your community.

  Killing posts - need a balance. Have a policy, and enforce it.

  Brett Tabke:

  Talks about Steve Job's famous commencement address at Stanford. Main point is that you cannot connect the dots going forward, but can do it backwards. Brett is going to connect the dots in this presentation, of where he started, and where is today.

  -WMW started in 1999. Before that, was SearchEngineWorld in 1997.
  -Forum on ISP in 1996.
  -Before that worked at Gateway 2000.
  -In 85-89 was on BBSes.
  -In 80's programmed in assembly. Very community oriented, all about speed.
  -First BBS community went on in 1984.
  -First computer was in 1976. First program was on a Commodore PET
  -First computer owned was a Commodore 64 in college.
  '
  Grew up in the 60's - big Stark Trek fan. Dealt with social and cultural issues. If you run a forum, you must be culturally sensitive and must be PC. Built first search engine - JoeFarmer.com - an agriculture and farm search engine in '96. Went to lots of user groups, trade shows for Gateway.

  Today, WMW focus is unique, easy to use. Required registration. No free email address registrations. Designed so that your words go high above the fold. Want members to feel important. Success = member on site time - member posts. More about relationships than content. Avoid visual distractions - visual noise. Avoided social networking stuff - but starting to add a few things this year. For WMW its all about the trust and long term relationship. Been the same site for 10 years. Standing on policy, even if meant losing friends. Subscription vs. advertisement model. Don't care about raw page views, clicks, or membership sign ups. Concern is quality, secondary is converting users to subscribers. Now, biggest day ever for WMW was 200,000 uniques and 1 million PV's during Florida update.

  US accounts for about 46% of WMW. Big challenges are the spammers, link droppers, name droppers. #1 problem = rogue spiders and bots from cable modem ISP's.

  One-offs - 4 days offline in 2005. Results? Uniques went up 15% and stayed up 15%.

  Some problems in the blogosphere flat wrong about WMW and the bot issues.

  3 rules of damage control 1) release early- tell your story. 2) release often - retell your story 3) tell the truth - never compound the problem. You can never correct and error that goes corrected and unchallenged.

  Speed is key: When worked on a Commodore 64 speed was everything. WMW is consistently the fastest forum on the web.

  Roger Dooley:

  CollegeConfidential.com = A topical community - 1.7 million visits last month.

  Why community? Nueromarketing - the intersection between brain science and marketing. Measurement of brain activity. Behavioral science. It's important because 95% of our behavior is subconscious. People need help and communities solve that. People looking for answers. Some communities are purely social.

  Community participation. Why do people spend so much time helping others? Why answer questions? Why moderate? Human brain is programmed for altruism. We get a little reward for helping others. Helping makes you "hot". Members of the opposite sex rank helping others as a key desire.

  Typical member cycle: Typically people start by needing help. Stumbled on the site perhaps on Google or through a friend. Then people start interacting. The same folks realize they can help others. Not everyone makes it that far, but very typical. With new arrivals - welcome if possible. Dumb questions are OK. Flaming is not away to build a strong community.

  Long term members - recognize contributions, posting latitude, moderator status. Most important to community success.

  Moderators - many thing of as TOS enforcers. In reality, they should be helpful, patient, tolerant, accepting.

  Recruiting mods - long history in community. Mature behavior. Friendly, welcoming.

  Rewarding volunteers - they are very important. Social norms vs. market norms. Market norms are doing a job for pay. Why do mods mod? They enjoy the community. Want to give something back. Experiments have shown that volunteers can be more productive.

  Good rewards are anything that recognizes contributions.

  Community death: Reasons for failure - emphasis on technology vs. members. Use of inexperienced community managers. Measuring the wrong metrics.

  Last up is Lawrence Coburn, talking about "The social media river".

  Definition: "A constantly updating news feed of content that be tuned and customized the by the user".

  In the mid 90's there was the BBS. Mid 90's came the forum and message board. Still here to stay. 1999's blogs were the new format for growing communities. Then the profile via Friendster and Myspace became dominant for discovering content. The big leap forward was the concept of the river - don't have to go anywhere to find your content. Facebook was the big revolution in 2006. Aggregating friends activity. Twitter came along and took the concept of the river, and let people do it from any device. SMS, IM, etc. Reduced the concept to one single question. Friendfeed is the river for multiple sites - getting lots of buzz. Aggregates all the communities together.

  Why the river works? Content comes to you. It's always fresh. You have control of what happens in the river. Relevant to you, and can adapt to changing tastes.

  There are 3 primary sources of content:

  1) People - you choose to follow people and see what they are up to.
  2) Media type - photos, app activity, video, status updates. Total control. On Facebook, you can tune your feed - to get more relationship info, etc.
  3) Topic - not subscribing to a person, but a topic. Want to hear all posts about social media for example.

  River monetization - trying to find an ad format that works. Problem is making it relevant. Some revolutionary concepts emerging. Google doesn't have a format for this yet.

  The river and widgets. This concept is a threat to widgets, because sidebar is becoming a distraction. Widgets need to find a way to get into the content.

  Search vs. the river: MSN live is being revamped to go into the river. Yahoo! is working on this as well - called Yahoo! OS. If you are marketer, publisher, content provider - need to get it into the river.

  Read more at sexywidget.com.

  Live coverage provided by Avi A. Wilensky of Promediacorp, a Manhattan based online marketing agency.

• 

  The Wonderful World of Widgets

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 12:54am CET by rustybrick

  Tags:  WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas  

  Moderator: Jake Baillie

  Speakers:
  Lawrence Coburn, President, RateItAll, Inc.
  Peter Adams, President, Matchpoint
  Patrick Sexton, Search Engine Marketing Manager, We Build Pages
  Will Price, CEO, Widgetbox
  Peter Yared, CEO, iWidgets!

  
  Description: With the Web 2.0 revolution, we have seen more and more sites offering widgets in all shapes and forms. Now, several years later, this session will examine how online publishers can take advantage of this trend to gain more distribution.

  Session Notes:

  First up is Lawrence Coburn...

  Lawrence runs a blog called SexyWidget.com. He is going to talk about API strategies.

  The four pillars of distributed web strategies:
  1) Widgets but they are only downloaded one at a time
  2) Toolbar extensions but the download is a barrier to success.
  3) Platform Apps on Facebook, MySpace, etc actually a bit of a down turn in this sector
  4) API like Yahoo Maps, Amazon AWS. This allow batch or mass distribution

  He likes to think of APIs and widgets on steroids. It helps expand your footprint. Google rolled out the maps, got millions of downloads and now added ads to it for a great revenue model.

  APIs can be used for branding, new business models, and internal content distribution.

  Case Study: Netflix
  Every single actor, movie, description, etc is available. Publishers are free to use this data as long as they use proper attribution. This is used to drive new subscribers to Netflix.

  Case Study: RateItAll
  Rolling out all content including ratings, reviews, etc. Using API to pull content back to home base. Using APi to spread brand, driver referrals, etc.

  There are all sorts of business models for API launches. From free to pay per API call. You will need to decide what model meets your business goals.

  Challenges and risks: limited number of developers, scaling, dupe content issues, fuel competitors, legal issues such as redistribution rights.

  API resources include Mashery, Platform D, Swordfish and SexyWidget.com.

  Next up is Patrick Sexton...

  What are widgets? They are what is left when you remove all the headers, footers, sidebars and "phoophy stuff". For example just the YouTube video player.

  Why use widgets?

  Interaction. People must be pleased by what you are doing. Whether it movies, chat or even business applications.

  Making money. Selling products, ad revenue and making things more efficient.

  Traffic. Direct traffic is very important traffic (anything that does not come from a search engine). Widgets are not spread via search engines. They are spread by people. It is relativly easy to get ranked in major widget directories for keyword phrases.

  SEO. Traffic and exposure can be big. Word of mouth communities will link to you. However his view on links is that links do not have credit cards, people do. Caution: your links need to be relevant!

  Patrick believes in a cross platform approach to spreading your widgets. Your widgets should be tailored to the audience who will use it and the platform supporting it.

  Put your widget in every widget directory possible. They will be found. Warning: viral installers do not not post your widget or brand in the directory. iGoogle has over 100 million users and most brands are not even listed.

  Third presenter is Will Price...

  Widgetbox is the #1 web widget provider with over 78 million uniques and 600 million widget views.

  Web publishers are trying to reach new readers or visitors. They need to develop innovative content syndication programs. Widgets are ideal for this. Most sites offer content that can easily tranlate into a widget. RSS feeds, images, videos, slideshows, etc are all easy concepts to turn into a widget.

  Widgets can be viral is you create galleries, use the invite feature or as feed updates on the social sites.

  Next up is Peter Yared...

  His first claim is that people are not going to websites any more. He gave a dozen example of major sites where the traffic is flat or decreasing. People are spending all of their time on social sites such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc. So the new model is to put your content where the users are!

  There has been a big move from just widgets to SOCIAL widgets. People like to interact with engaging, social widgets. Polls or other actionable widgets are very powerful right now. Think of widgets as a great tool to reach your fans.

  Rich media (video & widgets) is by far the fastest growing ad spend. Widget creation can now be a drag and drop creation process, so the entry process is pretty easy.

  Last speaker of the last session of the day is Peter Adams!

  Advertising is an essential ingredient of any content web site or strategy. Widgets can help you do that.

  Widgets can generate income via the widget itself being an ad, an ad can be embedded in the widget, or the ads can be initiated by the widget. If you think about it, even the Google Adsense ads are just widgets. Now all the major players, like Amazon, AllPosters, eBay offer widgets through their affiliate programs.

  There are also some in-page examples such as Snap that display an ad widget when you roll over an incontent text link.

  Peter warns that you need to make widgets a seemless part of your user experience, not an appendage. So you need to be able to customize, customize, customize.

  
  These session notes were written by Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures a link building services and website publicity company. Please excuse any typos or grammar issues, the session notes are written live and meant to be posted as soon as the session is over.

• 

  Community Hacking - 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 12:50am CET by Tamar Weinberg

  Tags:  WebmasterWorld PubCon 2008 Las Vegas  

  Link-baiting is a topic that makes some people snicker when they hear it. However, the complexities and subtleties are a fascinating combination of clever copywriting and strategic placement. Did you know that there are 12 types of links? Moreover, there are eight types of link bait to get those 12 types of links? That means there are 96 different strategies to get links. This session will look at the eight and the twelve.

  Moderator: Andy Beal
  Speakers:
  Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
  Ian Ring, Application Developer, IGLOO Inc.
  Bill Hartzer, Search Engine Optimization Manager, Vizion Interactive
  Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOMoz

  Bill Hartzer:

  Link baiting specific sectors: target a group in your sector/topic, tell them what they want and what they need to know. Point out the industry problem (e.g. my funniest PPC mistake)
  - search for "keyword" at search engine. Find companies biddibng on word "keyword." Copy the list of keywords from the spreadsheet, paste into PPC program.

  Target sites that link out - research those sites. Blogstorm tracker, Technorati, and more are good tools.

  Find linkbait that worked. Don't always reinvent the wheel. Research your topic in social media, find URLs that have gone popular, create a unique twist for similar linkbait, write an update to the previous article (link to the previous with new developments), watch for press releases in your industy for studies, research, and other news. Set up Google and Yahoo alerts for news.

  News works well as linkbait: be able to respond to breaking news (set up a blog or page ready for the article). Post quickly. Submit to social sites. Go back and edit/update Add pictures/photos/logos/screen captures. This strategy helps you get the market share of links and is good for organic search.

  Linkbaiting Techniques: problogger.net - tools, quizzes, contests, be first, scoops, expose, awards, lists, humor, make someone famous, create belonging/community, design, rants, controvesy, attack, shock, research and statts, give something away, resourcefulness, cool factors

  Social media, linkbait, and search are all coming together. Create new linkbait on your site consistently. Participation is key - daily voting, commenting, and submitting.
  Linkbait + social media = market share of links and getting noticed
  If you get links when being noticed, you'll be successful in organic search.

  Jane Copland:

  Everyone can publish content online. It's low cost, high visibility, and easily digestible content.
  Blogs imitate familiar old media - the banner, the sidebar, and the lead article. Their success is partly a result of the familiar nature.

  Different types of blogged content achieve different results: shes shows illustration for some sites that have 2500+ digs with 27 external links. One had 900 diggs and 131 external links. It varies.

  These multiple types of blogged linkworthy content exists as:
  - "The Gimmick" - it helps to be drunk
  - Light content lists - footer post - it's easy
  - The OMG ticket (URLs ending in 0 - see on seomoz.org) - it's harder, and it doesn't help to be drunk
  - Heavier content lists - it doesn't help to be drunk
  - In-depth articles and case studies - which shouldn't be launched on a blog.
  It's not a good idea to decide which type you're working with before you start writing.

  It's never a good idea to launch viral content that isn't in a visible area.

  SEOmoz has rewritten blog posts and 301d past links over to the new page.

  Enable comments, because sometimes your readers are more interesting than you are.
  - However, disabling comments have its place where comments are inappropriate.

  Link building achieves 3 main goals:
  * it adheres to traditional ways that content is distributed
  * it invites interaction
  * it's easy to spread becasue people can subscribe to blogs.

  Todd Malicoat: awareness, sales, and revenue

  Quick Digg primer: a lot of people read Digg and they have the power to put links to your site. You can either get a consultant or build up your own account.
  - Get an optimal name - alpha sort organization
  - Adding the right friends - they digg upcoming a lot, submit a lot, digg your stories. But don't do more than 5-10 a day. You'll want to reevaluate your friends.
  - Find good stories quickly
  - Submit good stories and ask for help

  Some linkbait will bomb!

  Have a friend submit your story.

  Linkbaiting hooks: attack, humor, contrarian, news, resource, etc.

  When you launch, if it doesn't bomb and it hits Digg's frontpage, you don't want your server to melt. Cache your content, host images on another host, search for the Digg/slashdot effect (and fix your server). Email friends and allies. Use sites as "jump off" points for other sites.

  Don't have 25 social media buttons on the bottom of your blog post.

  Reddit is similar to Digg - gives you less traffic but it's valuable.
  StumbleUpon has a toolbar and brings traffic.

  Ian Ring: Optimizing Conversion using Genetics
  CSS styling can affect the clickability of links. Testing and optimization will increase your site's reevenue. Do you know if your current stylesheet is eleiciting optimzal user behavior?

  Optimization algorithms: trial and errots, multivariate testing, hill climbing, simulated annealing (e.g. making the font size bigger, smaller, incrementally changing things until optimized), genetic algorithms

  Introduction to genetic algiorthms - some are more optiized for environments.
  - Metaphor: the page is the ecosystem, the page elements are living organizsms, a hyperlink is a species, a well-adapted organism thrives in its ecosystem. A healthy ecosystem is comprised of fit organisms.

  How do you do it? Survival of the fittest.
  - What is fitness? It's anything you can measure: clicks, purchases, subscriptions, sales leads, registration - these are all measures of fitness.
  - Fitness is easy to measure. It's the number of times something good happens.

  In biology, chromosomes affect fitness. Brown eyes are better optimized than blue/green eyes. On your website, you probably want to optimize for brown eyes.
  - The chromosome that determines this is the CSS stylesheet.

  CSS is a link's DNA: it could be an image, a graph, a link.
  You may have 3 bits for a font size or 24 bits - if you're testing another interface element, you may have another set of genes - hue/saturation/etc. Properties of CSS stylesheets can be turned into a binary string that can be stored, manipulated, and moved back into a CSS stylesheet.

  CSS can be expressed as a binary string:
  A chromosome is a string of 1s and 0s. Define the genome: it's the map of placement of the genes that appear in a chromosome. You'll need a table to assign positions of the DNA to the genes in the CSS.

  Create a template: inject genetic values into the template. You need functions to transalte binary chromosomes into CSS. Replace variables in the template with values from the DNA.

  onPageLoad(): choose an organism; convert into CSS; if user clicks, increase organism's fitness. Increment organism's age. Do this until the end. After that, it's time to mate, spawn, and die.

  Genetic variance via mutation and crossover: flip from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.

  You need a lot of things - databases, web pages, server side languages, and more!

  Conclusion: unpredictable successes, continuous optimization, and no maintenance.