Caydel’s SEO Blog

Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man - wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

• Blogging and social networks - People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.
• Branding - Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.
• Affiliate Marketers - can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list - one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

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Who would have guessed that one of the best ways to spam Yahoo would have been spamming Google?

Earlier today, Barry Schwartz posted on Search Engine Roundtable about the phenomena where Google is ranking well in the Yahoo UK SERPS for the phrase “Buy Viagra”. Sure enough, when I checked the results for myself, in the Yahoo UK SERPS, for ‘Buy Viagra’!

A little deeper research into the matter indicated quickly where the source of this is quickly apparent. Perform a quick search on Yahoo for the phrase ‘buy viagra’ while constraining the search to the Google.com domain.

The first thing you will probably notice about the 37 SERPS returned is that there are a bunch of pages written up in full of pill-spam. These notebook pages are full of non-nofollowed links pointing to further spam sites.

This is extremely ironic, considering how Google pushes the NOFOLLOW tag to be used for user-generated content. Perhaps they should look at what they are allowing people to post on their domain?

Examples:

Secondly, there are a number of attempts to gain links through Google redirects, which are indexed by Yahoo!. This generates more non-nofollowed links on the Google.com domain. Again, ironic lack of NOFOLLOW tags on Google’s part…

Examples:

Lastly, there are various other pages linked in there, such as the Zeitgeist, a CSE for viagra purchases, and a link to Google trends.

Now, I highly doubt that there are thousands of sites out there linking to Google with the anchor text ‘buy viagra’. As a result, I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that the main thing propelling Google near the top of the ‘buy viagra’ SERPS in Yahoo would be these keywords on Google’s sites.

Building off of this, I would suggest that Yahoo places an unbelievably high value on the Google.com domain. Since the fact that those keywords only appear on 37 seperate pages on the Google domain was enough to push Google.com quite high in the Yahoo.com SERPS, I suspect that if one was to load as many pages on the Google.com domain (thinking of Google Base and Google Notebook, in particular), it would be possible without too much effort to rank for competitive terms in Yahoo.

I await your thoughts on the matter!

** Hat Tip to David Naylor

So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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QuadsZilla from SEOBlackhat just announced the first SEO poker tournament. The concept is simple - everyone puts links into the pot, and the winner takes all. All the links won must point to a single site or page, but can have whatever anchor text you want.

The ante isn’t actually as steep as I expected to see; of course, to enter the tournament by offering up a link according to the following schedule:

Ante is determined by this schedule:

Page Rank 4 Site: A sitewide link for 1 Year
Page Rank 5 Site: A homepage link for 1 year
Page Rank 6 Site: A Link From a Blog Post or Page on the site with a click distance from home page 2 or less. (i.e.: Home [click1] Page with link [click2] to target site.) for 1 year
Page Rank 7+ Site: A link from a Blog Post or Page on site with a click distance from the home page of 3 or less (i.e.: Home [Click1] About [click2] Friends [click3 is link to target site]) for 1 year.

*The links cannot be “nofollow” and there can be nothing telling the search engines not to index the link (such as disallowing robots or index=none)

** The link must be visible and in the same style as the other links on the page / site.

*** No porn or Pill sites. Some other sites may be disallowed at our sole discretion.

The site you ante the link(s) from must be the same site that will receive the links if you win. That means you cannot ante links from one site and choose to receive the links on another.

There are also cash prizes for the runners-up. $5000 will be divided up between the top 10% of the losers in the tournament.

The tournament will be played on Saturday March 24th, 2007 at 9:00 PM GMT. The game will be no limit Texas Hold’em.

So, check it out.

Note: QuadsZIlla is of course using an affiliate link pointing to the poker software he intends to use… Anyone else see that coming?

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How would you like to spend an afternoon with Matt Cutts? This past summer Cutts released a series of fifteen videos answering a number of questions asked by webmasters as well as providing tips on how to get the most out of conferences etc.

Since I am not sure about the Google Video deletion policies, I’ve taken the videos from Google Video and made local copies of them for preservation purposes. I’ve posted them below after checking Matt’s usage restrictions. Obviously, the videos here are extremely small, so click the ‘Larger Video and Transcript’ link to get, well, a larger video and the transcript.

Feel free to take these videos and embed them on your own blog!

P.S. Sometimes the videos don’t all load. If they don’t all appear, just refresh!

Matt Cutts #1: Qualities of a Good Site	Matt Cutts #2: Some SEO Myths
Length: 5 min 40 sec Larger Video and Transcript	Length: 4 min 10 sec Larger Video and Transcript
Matt Cutts #3: Optimize for Search Engines or for Users?	Matt Cutts #4: Static vs. Dynamic URLs
Length: 4 min 25 sec Larger Video and Transcript	Length: 4 min 30 sec Larger Video and Transcript
Matt Cutts #5: How to structure a site?	Matt Cutts #6: All About Supplemental Results
Length: 4 min 46 sec Larger Video and Transcript	Length: 4 min 12 sec Larger Video and Transcript
Matt Cutts #7: Does Webspam use Google Analytics?	Matt Cutts #8: Google Terminology
Length: 5 min 11 sec	Length: 4 min 40 sec
Matt Cutts #9: All about datacenters	Matt Cutts #10: Lightning Round!
Length: 4 min 36 sec Larger Video and Transcript	Length: 5 min 2 sec Larger Video and Transcript
Matt Cutts #11: Reinclusion requests	Matt Cutts #12: Tips for Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose 2006
Length: 2 min 44 sec Larger Video and Transcript	Length: 5 min 40 sec Larger Video and Transcript
Matt Cutts #13: Google Webmaster Tools	Matt Cutts #14: Recap of SES San Jose 2006
Length: 6 min 34 sec	Length: 9 min 0 sec Larger Video and Transcript
Matt Cutts #15: Data center comments
Length: 8 min 55 sec Larger Video and Transcript

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Here’s the fifteenth in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

Hey Everybody! Good to see you again!

I thought I would talk about datacenter updates, what to expect for the next few weeks in Google and stuff like that this time.

But before I do, I didn’t get to talk about fun schwag from the Search Engine Strategies conference. One of my favorites, check it out (holds up a a hat), its a white hat. Oooh! It got SEO in hidden text. Don’t say SEOs don’t have a sense of humor.

I thought this one was kind of fun (holding a picture), picture of Jake Baillie fake autograph there and here I got a real autograph. Infact I got several of them. Oh Yes. What can I do with lots of pictures of Jake Baillie? May be I can sell them and do some arbitrage or something like like that.

Anyway!

Also there was at least one British SEO, who evidently wants to keep me from doing anything productive for a long long time. Check that out (holds up a stack of three voluminous books). That’s three thousand five hundred plus pages of science fiction. Huh. Yes. The funny thing is, in Briton, these three books are published as three books and in United States, they take these three books and publish them as nine books. What does that say about British readers versus American readers? Yes, that’s what I thought. So probably I donate this to the Webspam team whoever needs some hard SEO, hard SciFi I should say.

OK! Data Center Updates.

So, There are always updates going on, you know, practically daily, if not daily, a small portion of our index is updated every day, not small portion but a pretty large fraction of our index is updated everyday as we crawl the web. We also have algorithms and data pushes that are going out on a less frequent basis.

So, for example, there was a data push on June 27th, July27th and then on August 17th. And again, its an algorithm that’s running for over 1.5 years. If you seem to be caught in that, you are more likely to be reading on an SEO board. So, you might want to think about ways that you could back your site off, think less about what the SEOs on the board are saying and how you can sort of not be optimizing quite quite as much on your site. That’s about as much as the advise I can give, I am afraid!

BigDaddy was a software infrastructure upgrade and that upgrade was finished around in February. And so it was pretty much a refresh to how we crawled the web and how we partly index the web. That’s been done for several months and things have been working quite smoothly.

There was also a complete refresh or update of our supplementary results index infrastructure. That happened a couple of months after BigDaddy, So it is been done for a month or two and it was a complete rewrite. So the indexing infrastructure is different than our main indexing infrastructure. So, you expect to see few more issues whenever we roll that out. We saw, you know, more small, off the beaten path stuff, like minus or exclusion terms where you use the minus sign, the no index meta tag, stuff like that. And the way that the supplementary results worked with the main index, you would often see site:results estimates that were too high.

There was at least one incident where there was a spammer that some people thought had 5 billion pages and whenever I looked into it, the total number of pages that their biggest domain had under 50000 pages. So they have been adding up these site:estimates and ending up with a really big number, that was just way, way off.

So, one nice thing is we have another software infrastructure update, which improves quality as the main aspect but it also improves our site: result estimates as well. Its just sort of like a side benefit. I know that, that is not at all data centers in the sense that it can run in some experimental modes, but its not fully on at every data center. And, they were shooting for the end of the summer to have it live every where, but again, that’s a hope, not a promise. So, if things need more testing, they will work for longer to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And if everything goes great,then they might roll it out faster. But, that is a really nice infrastructure. Its just a side benefit that site: result estimates get more accurate.

Its kind of interesting, let me talk about it for a minute, because I saw at least one guy who had said, you know, “what happened with site: result estimates on Google” and he was comparing two completely different data center IP addresses and they were different and he was worried about that. And yet, he had exactly one page in Yahoo, he had no pages in Ask. If you look at his link page, there were a ton of links to pharmacy sites, not just one pharmacy site, but a lot of pharmacy sites.

And so, I would say, your time, your focus, is better spent looking at your server logs, asking how to improve the quality of your own site and not worrying about something like site: results estimates.

So let me drill down some reasons, why that’s true.

Number one. They are estimates. We don’t claim that they are exact. In fact, if you look at them they are only exact to three significant digits. And we do that to give people an idea of how many results there are from a ’site:’ query. But, we don’t claim that that’s a 100% precise.

And truthfully, I didn’t consider it very high priority. There was recently a change that was pushed out that made the plain old results estimates much more accurate for unigram or single word queries. And I spent about half hour with the guy who did the change. And he even asked me, “well do you think its worth working on making the results estimates for site: more accurate?”.

And this was like 5,6 months ago,may be eve more. At that time I said, “No!pretty much nobody pays attention to those. You know, they look at their server logs, its not really a high priority”. And its gotten to be where more people are asking about these things and I am sure we will pay more attention to it.

But, in general I would spend more time worrying about good content on your site, looking at your server logs to find out niches where you can make new pages and make things that are more relevant.

And you know, the whole notion of watching data centers is going to get harder and harder for individuals going forward, because number one we have so much stuff launching in various ways. I have seen weekly once launchings where there are double digit number of things, and these are things that are under the hood. So, strictly quality. They are not changing the UI or anything like that. And so, if you are not making a specific search in Russian or Chinese, you might not notice the difference. But it goes to show that we are always going to be rolling out different things and at different data centers you might have slightly different data.

The other reason why its not worth watching data centers is because there is an entire set of ip addresses and if you are a super-dooper gung-ho SEO, you’ll know, you know, oh, 72.2.14.whatever. But that IP address will typically go, to one data center. But that’s not a gaurantee. If that one data center comes out of rotation, we are going to do something else to it, we are going to actually change the hardware infrastructure. and everything I have been talking about so far is software infrastructure. So if you take that datacenter out of rotation for some reason, that ip address will then point to a completely different data center. So, the currency, the ability to really compare changes and talk to a fellow data center watcher and say, “What do you see at 72.2.14.whatever” is really pretty limited.

So I would definitely encourage you to spend more time worrying about you know, the results you rank for, increasing the quality of your content, looking for high quality people that you think should be linking to you and may not even know about it and stuff like that.

I just want to give people a little bit of update on where we were on various infrastructure and the fact of the matter is that we are always going to be working on improving our infrastructure, so you can never guarantee a ranking or a number 1 for any given term, you know, because, if we find out that we think we can improve quality by changing our algorithms or data or infrastructure or anything else, we are going to make that change.

So the best SEOs in my experience are the ones that can adapt and they would say, “Ok, if this is the way the algorithms look right now to me, and if I want to make a good site that will do well in search engines, this is the direction I want to head in next.” And if you work on these sort of skills, then you don’t have to worry about being up at 3:00 AM and talking on a forum about “What does this data center look like to you?, Did they change a whole lot” and stuff like that.

So that’s the approach that I recommend.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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Here’s the fourteenth in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

OK Everybody! I am back. I am mostly over my cold and my wife is somewhere else tonight. So I get to make a video. Muhahahaha…

So, I thought I will give you a recap from my point of view of Search Engine Strategies and sort of cover some of the high-order bits and stuff that I thought was pretty neat.

A lot of people are curious about the industry news. What did the Search Engines announce, or what happened during the week.

So, Yahoo announced Sitebuilder, which is something that lets you do a free custom search engine for your own site, Google has something that’s sort of related to that but we rolled out several years ago. So Yahoo for now looks like they have a slightly nicer custom site search, thats free.

They also rolled out authentication in Site Explorer. So one thing you’ll notice is, you can now prove that you own a site in site explorer and presumably you will be able to do more stuff down the road.

They also turned off the ability to do site: and a domain on Yahoo. So a lot of people missed that during the conference. Its now a forced redirect to Yahoo’s http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. So, you’ll have to login if you want to do a site: search on Yahoo now. You might be able to do a ‘-a’, ‘-the’ to get around that. But it’s pretty clear that they want to shunt most of the people doing the SEO kind of research to that one site and leave the main site for the regular searchers.

So, what did Google announce? Well, we rebranded and renamed Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools and there is new Google Webmaster Blog, the Sitemaps blog has been renamed. So lot of stuff has been reorganised, so its all in one spot, and one place you can go to.

There was also the refresh of the supplemental results, which is kind of nice. People who were complaining about results being from about 2005, I believe, by the end of the month will have those new fresher supplemental results out everywhere. But the supplemental results are basically, mostly in the April, May, June, July time frame, The earliest drop I know of is in February, so I know a lot of people are happy with the refresh of the supplemental results.

We also released a click fraud report. Kind of interesting. The auditing paid clicks session was a kind of barn burner. Guess what, you had to be there. Lot of fun. If you don’t want to read the 17 page report, I would just read the appendix, where they sort of talk about mathematically impossible things and give some concrete examples. But it is a pretty interesting report, if you want to read it.

Microsoft didn’t really announce much and I actually support that. I don’t think Search Engines should try to roll stuff on a conference schedule, because then all the events get squashed into one and you sort of get lost in the noise. So I think its a not a bad idea to roll stuff out when its ready and not worry so much about launching during a conference, trying to get a big boost because of the press. So, all other search engines, including Google, don’t launch anything during the conferences. make life more mellow for everybody.

Probably the biggest industry news that happened was inadvertent. And that was because AOL accidentally, well semi-accidentally, leaked queries for hundreds of thousands of users and million of queries and stuff like that. It was done in good faith, the researchers wanted to provide data to people to learn more about how people search with search engines. But it took about a day before people realized now that it can be tied to individual searchers and stuff like that. So, people have probably heard the follout from that over the last couple of weeks, so I don’t need to talk about that.

It was an interesting conference because I got to meet a few people for the first time. I got to meet Loren Baker, Jason Dowdle, Shawn Hogan, Jim Hedger, Steve Bryant from eWeek. I enjoyed meeting everybody there. I enjoyed talking to a lot of people, from the lady from Netshops to the guy that I shared lunch with. It was a lot of fun as far as lot of talking to webmasters. People over there that I didn’t get to talk to but I would have really liked to talk to, Lisa Barone, I don’t know how to say it, from Bruce Clay, it sounds like Melanie Colburnfrom John Batelle’s Blog, Andy Beal, didn’t get to talk to him this time, hopefully next time, and Donna Bogatin was there, sent a couple reports in but I never got to talk to her.

Other things that happened, it was actually a conference in which there is a lot of changes that happened. It sounds like Andy Beal is moving to a different spot. Mike Grehan is moving to a different spot.

This is one of my favorites, nobody else I think noticed this but Jeffrey McManus who is Yahoo search developer or something like that or an API guy. He left Yahoo. If you are not familiar with the name, he is the guy who said that Google Maps API smelt like wet burnt dog hair or something like that. So, he is no longer at Yahoo. I think he is consulting now. So, if you want to get good consulting, I am sure you can talk to Jeffrey McManus.

Kanoodle, something happened with them. They moved to ‘SeeVast’ or something like that. And at first I thought it was something like a name change, but evidently, they have something with Moniker or Moniker’s naming page stuff. I didn’t get to talk to Monte or Erik of Moniker and find out what knoodle is upto. But, that’s kind of interesting.

Probably the biggest change, that I thought was entertaining was Niall Kennedy left Microsoft, which was kind of funny moment because it started out that we were going to have search engine blogger round table, and I think Robert Scoble was scheduled to be on the panel and he left Microsoft. And so, Niall Kennedy was scheduled to take his spot. And then he announced that he was going to leave Microsoft, and he was leaving like three days after this panel.

So there was atleast one point where I was looking at Niall and somebody from Microsoft talking. I couldn’t get what they were saying but I was imagining the Microsoft PR guy going, “You are going to be cool, alright?” and Niall like, “Yes, yes I am going to be cool.” And he was. He did a great job. he told a really funny story about international soccer and how you can avoid incidents by thinking about the impact of your words. So, it was a lot of fun being on a panel with him along with Gary Price and Jeremy Zawodney.

Other fun moments. I missed, I can’t believe this, I missed Danny Sullivan in lederhosen. He lost a bet with Thomas Bindle and there are pictures all over the web. Just Do a Google search or some other image search you should be able to find Danny Sullivan in lederhosen.

I got to talk to a lot of metrics companies and grill them about various things. I still got a few posts to talk about metrics.

Picking brains of webmasters, of course, they picked my brain a little bit. Its always good to talk to web masters, I enjoyed that a lot.

It was fun to meet some Cuttlets. So, Jessica and Audry from an SEO down in LA. It was really nice to meet you. Lyndsay, it was nice to meet you as well. Didn’t make my wife jealous at all. No sir. No marital problems there, I’ll tell you. But it was a lot of fun meeting a ton of people, including a couple of Cuttlets.

I got a killer cold, which I am now over, so that pretty good.

And there was one heart stopping moment where Danny was talking to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. He did a Q&A on the third day of the conference. And Sergey showed up at SES back in 99 or 2000 and he said something like, there is no such thing as search engine spam. Which, back then was basically true because Google was using pagerank and links and anchor text in ways that nobody ever thought of before and it was very hard to spam Google and nobody worked on it, because Google was really small.

But that quote haunted Google or atleast webspam for a while. “There is no such thing as spam”, said Sergey. So there was one moment when Danny Sullivan asked Eric Schmidt. He said, “Oh all this link stuff, people are always going to be trying to abuse it. Do you want to just go ahead and say now that everything is OK, there is no such thing as spam, you can do whatever you want”. He didn’t say exactly like that, but I still have this heart stopping moment. I was like “Eric, say the right thing, say the right thing..”. And he did a fantastic job, heart attack avoided. ..It was really a neat affair there and talk about the importance of web masters and communication and stuff like that.

So, it was a lot of fun. it was a good conference. I am going to be out of conferences until may be WebmasterWorld, Las Vegas in November. So, I am looking forward to some quiet time at home and just working on spam and stuff like that. But it was a lot of fun and if I got to meet you at the conference, I am glad I did. and if I did not, I hope I meet you in a future conference.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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