I have a problem with Yahoo!. Had I not been verbally attacked by a man in a neighboring city, I wouldn't even realize this interesting issue existed. And though it benefits my clients, it really bugs me personally.

The back story in a nutshell is -- I have a client in the moving industry. A man in the same industry an hour away was having a fit that our search returns on Yahoo! were coming up at #2. (Nice for my client of course.) This competitor was sure I was cloaking or doing something illegal to get my client to that level (well actually, he accused me of putting text into the meta tags. But anyone that knows anything about SEO knows how far that would get me. And if he could read code he'd know that there are no meta tags on this site. There never have been.) When I looked at the search return he was complaining about, it read more like an ad than text on my client's website. Odd. So I looked at the page. Then I looked at various pages on the site. I also looked all through the way back machine archives. That text has never been on the page Yahoo! is linking to (or the site). Hmmmmm... A mystery.

It took, me a couple days to figure out (and some sleuthing from some brilliant SEO folks) that my client was marketed by BellSouth. And though I've put nothing in the pages, he had purchased something, as he put it, "to help with my SEO." Well, my my yes. It surely did. (He had no real clue what it was even when I told him.)

I always thought paid advertising was placed at the top and right side of the SERPs. That it was easily distinguishable from the regular organic returns. Turns out BellSouth pays an SEO company (Trafficleader). They create these little ads which become an XML feed directly to Yahoo!. Yahoo! puts them directly into the database and thus, the supposed organic return area (and of course, it's pay per click for Yahoo!). There's no way for the consumer to identify that it's basically a paid advertisment.

Am I the only person this bothers? The fact that we can work our butts off to move our clients up in the organic returns and someone else can pay Yahoo! per click for an XML feed directly in -- well, something's smelly about that. Yes, in this case, it's benefiting my client. And good for him. But meanwhile, I think it stinks. Sorry Yahoo!, bad call.

Community MX has grown over the years to the point where we will hit 1500 pieces of content tomorrow -- articles, tutorials, and extensions. The following is a list of various ways to keep track of new content and find existing content at Community MX:

Main list of CMX categories:
http://www.communitymx.com/categories.cfm

Main RSS feed
http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmxrss.cfm

Add CMX feed to Google feed reader:
http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmxrss.cfm

Full list of RSS feeds by author, category, most popular searched:
http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmx_opml.cfm

CMXTraneous blog RSS feed:
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/rss.cfm

CMXTraneous full post RSS feed:
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/fullrss.cfm

All CMXTraneous RSS feeds:
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/cmx_opml.cfm

Add CMXTraneous to Google feed reader:
http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://www.communitymx.com/blog/rss.cfm

Free Community MXtra Central application:
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=EE860

Free Community MX sidebar for Firefox:
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E0069

Free Context Help extension for Dreamweaver, including CMX search:
http://www.tom-muck.com/extensions/help/contexthelptoolbar/

Update: The calendar is a good way to see daily content (thanks Laurie):
http://www.communitymx.com/calendar.cfm

Recently, a long-time client of mine was purchasing more time for two of his four domain names. Since he didn't want to deal with it again for a while, he increased all his domains to 2008 or more. As he was waiting on the phone for the credit card to process, the person assisting him at GoDaddy made a comment about domain names and search engine optimization. He claimed that due to site's that try to make a big splash using lots of doorway pages and linking sites (that they keep for a year and then dump), Google now uses the length of time a domain is registered as one of the factors in their algorithm. (Google evidently doesn't look kindly at getting stuck with a lot of highly rated URLs that lead to defunct sites.) My client hadn't heard this before (nor had I) so he asked me to investigate.

I posed the question on Andrew Goodman's SEM 2.0 list and got some interesting replies I thought I'd share here. Remember that this information is from people in the SEO business, not from Google itself.

It seems that Google, while I wasn't looking, became a domain name registrar. This gives them access to all the Whois and registration information. With this info they can see how long you have owned a specific domain (likely, if you've owned it longer, you're more trustworthy), what other domains a spammy company may own and link together (or use for nefarious purposes), the length of time in the future you've purchased the domain for (perhaps meaning you have plans to continue with it -- not use it and drop it). One of Google's patent applications says in part:

"[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."

Obviously, these factors are all just a small part of the overall algorithm, but smart site owners will use every legal avenue available to slowly and consistently move up in the rankings. Mike Banks Velentine, owner of Reality SEO, made this analogy:

"To the mechanically inclined, that may mean there are 24 teeth (ranking factors) on the gear that drives the ratchet mechanism. First, you must have all the teeth (ranking factors) intact. Second, implementing improvements to those factors will provide the leverage to turn the gear enough to ratchet up a notch in ranking. The ranking factors themselves don't help individually to ratchet up ranking a notch, but full presence of each of the teeth (ranking factors) on the gear is mandatory in order to have the ability to move steadily up. When all the gears in the mechanism have all their teeth - then you can apply leverage to crank up your rankings."

If having all the ranking factors moves you from #11 to #10, that can be a big jump. Taking advantage of smart, organic ranking factors is just one small step, but it could be valuable to you or your client.

I found this to be rather odd. I have a realtor client that is finally, after I advised it over two years ago, ready to try using Google Adwords. My recommendation would have put him ahead of his competitors instead of playing catch up -- but better late than never -- I guess.

Strangely, the same day I was hooking him up with the company I recommended he use, Page Zero Media, he got a call from a sales rep at Google offering to, "Help him take his business to the next level." Huh?

Call me naive, but I had no idea Google was in the habit of contacting people directly. Thus, doubting the call, I asked my client to let me check it out more thoroughly. Of course you know what I did -- I googled the guy. ;) Sure enough, he was in the Google listings (in the Sponsored Links, no less) with a link to a page about him. He's an industry expert in real estate and local. OK, so he's real. There's even a picture.

But my goodness, does this bother anyone besides me? I mean, Google is a search engine (and of course lately, lots of other things) -- but I think of it as having more to do with algorithms and engineering than sales. Thus, we have a whole culture of consultants and agencies that create and manage campaigns as their business. The create, tweak and measure -- and many of them know their stuff. I've watched clients that didn't want to spend the money on a specialist use "a web person who can do adwords," and the campaign was a flop. All their click-through money was wasted since it didn't convert into sales.

So we now have Google doing cold calls. Are they going to create and tweak a campaign? Are they going to measure the results and advise on the copywriting and landing pages? Will they continue to optimize the account to make it more effective? Who do they favor when they're creating campaigns for several clients in the same industry competing for the top spots/click-throughs? For you as a client, is your effectiveness simply the luck of the draw based on which account rep you get? Does that decide who wins the top spot/best copy and click-throughs? Do you want to hand Google your conversion data on a silver platter? What happened to that neutral person with only your best interests and success in mind?

I'm concerned at some of the recent moves at Google. Are we creating a monster? Am I overreacting? What are your thoughts?

And to answer the question that may be going through your mind -- no, my client is not using the Google Adwords guy. We're going with Andrew Goodman's company. They rock. ;)

I don't know how many of your tried Grokker in its first permutation (it had to be downloaded and installed and didn't work well for me on the Mac at all), but I got a note this week that they've relaunched. Since all my company just left and I'm exhausted, I thought I'd have a look. I was pretty impressed with the improvements.

I suppose I should have started, for those that don't know, by answering the question, "What the heck is Grokker?" Grokker reminds me a bit of my old favorite search engine, Northern Lights. I loved Northern Lights because it categorized my search results into folders. Thus, if there was a variety of subjects my search words could apply to, I could quickly see them, click the folder for the one closest to what I was looking for and drill down from there. It's a shame they went private.

Anyway, Grokker does similar, by showing the relationships generated by your search. You can customize it, but by default, it will show you orbs and squares inside circles (which represent the sites that fall into those subject/categories), labeled with the category name. You can drill/zoom down into these and see more. Hovering shows you the details of the link you're over. If a page appears in more than one circle, when you hover over it, it will light up in the other circle as well. I realize it's late, I'm tired, and this likely isn't making any sense at all. Hey, it's a visual tool -- have a look at the features yourself.

One of the main things I like now though, is that I don't have to download it as a stand alone. I can now use it on the web. There are advantages to downloading if you decide you really love it. You can share your map with a friend and Grokker will save it more than the 14 days it's saved in the web-based version. The free-standing "for purchase" version is much more full-featured and looks like it would be great for research and serious use, but the online search is excellent for simple searches and checking Grokker out.

I found that on a Mac, since Grokker is Java-based, Safari works very smoothly (Firefox didn't seem to know I had Java). The only negatives to me are, the results are pulled from the Yahoo! Search results (that's probably fine, I just prefer Google), and I can't do a text search for something specific within my results page (since it's a Java visual). But for certain types of searches, this is very cool. If you're a visual person, or doing a good deal of research on a specific subject, you owe it to yourself to view this cool little search tool.

Our new site search functionality went live over the weekend, but we are continually trying to improve it. Today we added an RSS feed for search results to the page, which should be extremely useful for people with RSS readers. For example, if you are interested only in flash remoting articles, you can do a search for "flash remoting", set up your RSS reader with the search results RSS link, and every time a new article or blog entry comes out, your RSS reader will pick up the change in the RSS feed.

Our RSS feed also handles categories and authors. For a full list of RSS feeds available from Community MX, check the opml page. The RSS and OPML feeds now contain some basic XSLT transformation with styles so that if you should happen to click the link you should see a readable page rather than raw XML.

We've implemented a new search mechanism at Community MX. Anyone who has used the site search in the past knows that we had three search types: a Verity full text search, a Basic search which was a keyword search of the article titles and descriptions, and an advanced search which allowed you to narrow down searches by date or content type, and also allowed a search for all words, any words, or exact phrase.

The new search mechanism goes way beyond this. Here are some of the new features:

• The Verity full-text search is now combined with the database search. In other words, when you do a search, the full content of the site is searched, and then the results are combined with a keyword search that searches the content description, keywords, reader level, author, etc from the database.
• Search results can be title/date only or full descriptions (for simple and advanced search).
• In the Advanced search, you can now filter by author, date, category, reader level.
• You can now display more than 10 records per page (up to 100).
• You can save search preferences so that every time you do a search you will have the same settings.
• You can search within results.
• You can order results by author, date, or reader level, in Basic or Advanced mode..
• The CMXtraneous blog has become a good repository for information and tips, so the site search now searches the full content of the articles within the site as well as the knowledge base and the blog.
• Popular searches are saved and the top 10 searches can be displayed.
• Search Tips page was also updated to reflect changes.

This should enhance the user experience at Community MX and allow content to be found more easily. For example, let's say you want to find all items written by Danilo that mention JavaScript. You can now type danilo javascript in the box, and all articles, blog items, and knowledge base items that mention Danilo or were written by Danilo and mention JavaScript will be returned. If you want to find all articles that mention the Holly hack, type "holly hack" (in quotes) into the box and the search will return all articles, blog items, and knowledge base items that mention Holly hack.

We hope you find the new site search functionality useful. Please try out the search and if you find any problems or have any suggestions or comments about the new search functionality, please contact us at http://www.communitymx.com/contactsearch.cfm.

It's good for search engines and it's good for accessible beauty. If you're bored with the same old fonts, be sure to give sIFR a whirl. Mike Industries has released Release Candidate 4 -- it's getting closer to final all the time due to Mark Wubben's (yes, he's about 18) tireless work on tweaking the javascript. This time, they've disabled IE Mac (since it's so quirky) and given instructions on reenabling if you desire. There's better transparency and selector support in this version as well. They've also given us access to some cool add-ons like, preference manager and rollback (for style switchers). More info is available in The sIFR wiki. The wiki has lots of other good info, so use it or the new forums to stay apprised of the newest info.

So hurry over and download sIFR today. :)

Those of you with blogs know what a pain it can be when the spammers send their bots out to muck up your comments with links to their own sites. They know the value of a link in Google and they frankly don't care whether they're messing with the rules or messing with you -- they simply want links from anywhere to raise their search engine placement.

Maybe not anymore -- Google has an idea! A new attribute that stops the Google spiders from following a link. You can place it dynamically every time someone leaves a link in your blog. Google says:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists ... We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author's site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We're working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target.

Blog software makers are whole-heartedly jumping on the bandwagon to implement this strategy. If you've created your own blog, you may want to add this attribute in yourself. You can read all the details at The Google Blog.

The google index notification tool lets you keep track of what pages google is indexing on your site. This is a free tool, and anyone can use it. The query tool will show you which pages are being indexed. GIN will even notify you via email when google indexes a page. This is a great feature when adding a new site, and wanting to know when google indexes you. The tool is very easy to setup. All you have to do is include, or require the php script we provide you with below, into your code on your site.

I try to design the code of my pages to be very clean, with little extraneous "stuff." My goal is always to make them as accessible as possible as well as search engine friendly. And I've got it all figured out. Using text instead of images for headings and navigation allows me to be kind to both spiders and people that browse with alternative methods like screen readers. This is one of the main reasons I love sIFR. I can use creative fonts for my headings but still retain the text display in a browser. Yup, I have it all figured out.

When I put images into my pages, I use a descriptive alt attribute if it contains information that a low or non-vision person needs to have. If it's purely decorative, I use the empty alt attribute so that the screen readers will ignore it and not read the name of the file. Yup, all done... good for accessibility... did I mention I have it all figured out?

I belong to a great SEO list, and due to a couple questions going on with a site, I needed to verify some SEO knowledge. While getting into dialogues with the SEO experts there, I'm told that I must put my keywords into my alt attributes. The most important one up to three times in the first few images. NOOOO! Imagine what the people using screen readers will hear -- Blathering keyword ridden yada!

How do I balance the need to be kind to all surfers with the need to be kind to the spiders? Must I choose one or the other? Can I not have a fully accessible to humans site that the spiders also adore? I certainly do not have it all figured out.

Though Search Engine Optimization isn't one of my favorite things to do (gurls just wanna write code!), I do basic optimization for select clients. Of course, this forces me to keep up with the latest news from the Engines to do a good job. Recently, I ran across the Search Visibility Report. SVR is a blog that shows me all the search engine blogs at a glance. So instead of visiting Google, Yahoo! and other blogs one by one, I can simply hit the SVR site (using the Sage extension in Firefox -- my personal favorite), and instantly see what's been said today. Very cool!

In case you haven't yet heard, in the latest "sue the search engine" saga, a judge has ruled that Google is not at fault in allowing AdWords customers to bid on trademarked terms. The jury is still out on whether those same terms can be used in text ads, and if they are wrongly used, whether the advertiser or Google is liable. You can read about it in the Seattle Times.

At the same time the litigation was brought against Google, Overture (a Yahoo! subsidiary) was also sued. Overture decide to settle out of court. Thank goodness Google didn't. What precedent would that have set?

So what will this do for your clients? Will any of them benefit or be hurt by the ruling? If you manage AdWords campaigns, will you be changing their structure? Read more about it in The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog.

Let's say your company or client has decided to allot advertising dollars to banner advertising and/or paid placement. You sign up with Google for the Adsense program and find yourself with quite a bill but very little useful traffic. Perhaps you're not advertising poorly -- you may be a victim of click fraud.

According to ZDNet's article, Google has just filed the first civil case against alleged perpetrators of click fraud.

"The fraud is perpetrated in both automated and human ways. The most common method is the use of online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links that are displayed on Web sites or listed in search queries. A growing alternative employs low-cost workers who are hired in China, India and other countries to click on text links and other ads. A third form of fraud takes place when employees of companies click on rivals' ads to deplete their marketing budgets and skew search results."

It's about time. Making money by cheating others out of theirs is no different, in my opinion, than stealing it from their bank account. So what if it's on the web? It's still money... cold hard-earned cash. And it's wrong. Maybe people will think twice with litigation starting. Or not.

Did you know that you can narrow your Google search down to a specific site?

In the Google textbox, type the domain name of the site, prefaced by site: and then type your search phrase.

For example, say you've been reading one of our many articles on CSS hacks and want to find eveything we've ever published on css hacks. One way is to use our search page. But an alternative is to use Google. Type this into the Google search textbox:

site:www.communitymx.com css hack

Screaming we run from spyware... adware... those pesky programs that slither in like worms and quietly take over our computers turning them into compost (well, they do if you're on a PC). Some auto-pop Explorer windows onto your desktop when you're not surfing... they put links for adult and pharmacy sites, gambling and shopping directly into your bookmarks. They turn your home page into an ad-popping automaton. And please, do have fun getting rid of it.

The interesting news is that many companies, large and small, are using it to advertise. In fact, a large client of an acquaintance uses Gator/Claria and they say the performance is superior to just about anything they've tried so far. The presentations given by Gator/Claria are said to be impressive and the data they collect is very valuable to advertisers. Gator/Claria claims there are over 40 Million installed users (how many were voluntary?).

Google came out with a policy statement of guidelines and principles about adware that they hope will help foster discussion as well as get others to follow suit. These include transparency, disclosure and simplicity of removal. Well, that would be a start wouldn't it? Personally, I can't stand the stuff. Being predominantely a Mac user with a PC testing box (running XP), I have found it to be extremely time-consuming and annoying to deal with. Especially with kids that go to gaming and guitar sites on a regular basis.

I have a few questions. How valuable is this stuff really? Does America actually click on the bookmarks or pop ups? If so, do they not realize it's coming from scumware or do they not care? Has anyone seen evidence or studies that the traffic or clicks actually turn into conversions? If America wises up and actually learns to clean their computers off (instead of calling me, the web professional who uses a Mac to do it), will adware stats that show this to be valuable incline or decline? Do some of your clients advertise with these companies and find it fruitful? I would love answers to these questions -- however anecdotal. What are you finding "out there."

Can they really make money, long-term, by trying to fool people?