Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, and Happy Thanksgiving to
all celebrating! Barry and I will be off the blog because of the holiday, so
there will be no postings from us or a daily search headlines recap. Barry may
be back to do light postings and/or headlines on Friday, unless he takes my
advice to relax and take that day off as well! I’ll be back on Monday….
SEM
Certification & Training Courses
The move toward offering certification and training in search marketing is
accelerating. Here’s a rundown on some new courses and developments I’ve heard
of recently….
Google
Finance’s Untrusted Links & Spotting Nofollow
For several months, I’ve been using the Search Status plug-in for Firefox to
highlight links that are flagged with the nofollow attribute, a way for site
owners to say they don’t vouch for or necessarily trust a link. You see the
web in a entirely new light after discovering how often and where people are
saying “I don’t trust this.” And today, I finally noticed it happening over on
Google Finance. The image above show how Google Finance looks when links with
nofollow are highlighted in red, for the page on Google stock price. All the
news stories –…
Search
Popularity Stats, Sliced & Diced
Catch up time on search engine popularity stats. comScore and NetRatings put
out October 2006 figures this week, plus Hitwise released those earlier this
month. Google’s still tops, Yahoo still strong, Microsoft is still dropping
and Ask surpasses AOL’s search share, according to comScore. Below, the trend
from all of them over the past year, plus my long-promised
compare-and-contrast charts….
Baidu
Wins Copyright Case Against Music Companies
Melanie Colburn writes that Music Labels Lose Copyright Suit Against Baidu,
which started back when Five Music Companies Sue Baidu in September of 2005.
Baidu was previously ordered to stop these music downloads but it appears the
ruling was overturn because all Baidu is providing are links to 3rd party
sites that facilitate the music downloads, whereas Baidu does not participate
in the downloads themselves. More details at the BBC News….
Link
Exchanges Are Spam Links According To Microsoft
The other day I reported that Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link
Exchanges, where I uncovered an email sent to a Webmaster. The email stated
that a particular site was removed from the Live.com Search index because the
site was “acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites
unrelated to your site content.” The email also added that these types of
links are “spam links,” and is the reason the site was delisted from the
index….
Google
Says AdWords Not Basing Keyword Prices On Conversion Metrics
I reported this morning at SERoundtable that AdWordsAdvisor Denies Google Uses
Conversion Tracking & Analytics To Determine Minimum Bids. Yes, Google has
come out on the Internet to make it clear to everyone that Google is not using
data from their conversion tracking scripts of Google Analytics to determine
the minimum price of keywords. This was a recent rumor that began with the new
AdWords algorithm coming into play….
Social
Search Manipulation: Case Study
Niall Kennedy has one of the most thorough write-ups on why search spam exists
with his article “The Spam Farms of the Social Web.” The article explains how
he stumbled upon a spam site, researched the site to death, guesstimates on
how much money they can make and services that help you make it rank well.
This includes a look at blogs, digg, del.icio.us, other social sites, link
building tactics, directory inclusion, content writing, and more….
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