It’s been several days that I’ve been looking for some archived pages of one of my sites on Wayback machine archive, but with no success… In all attempts, I’ve been getting the error message:

Sorry, we can’t find the archived version of this page. The URL has been archived but not indexed. Try another request or click here to search for all pages on threadwatch.org/
See the FAQs for more info and help, or contact us.

I am not sure why this comes up, but it does the same for many popular sites (tested at dates October 19th, October 31st, November 15th, and November 28th with the same results).

In December, they finally updated their archive for the first 4 months of 2005, but now it seems as if many of the updates are gone. Go figure…

Jim Boykin of We Build Pages is offering a free admission pass to WMW here in Las Vegas. All you need to do, is go to his blog and leave a nice comment with your reasoning for getting the ticket (considering you can attend offcourse…).

The show is Nov. 15th through the 17th and these tickets normally run $549 in advance, and $899 at the door.

A while back I had high hopes for attending the show, especially since I am here in Las Vegas, and normally cannot travel much. I did, however, had to give up on the idea due to $$ problems. So, even I left a comment, and maybe I’ll even win…

For a while now Martha Stewart had an SEO on her “Apprentice” TV show. Well, his apprenticeship trip had gotten to an end today, when he got FIRED…

Anyways, a thread on WMW mentions this guy and claims that in this guy’s closing sales pitch for this job, “he mentioned that Martha’s site was nowhere in the SEs for “recipes”, and if he took over the internet division, he would fix it.”

[Found via SERoundtable]

Google has introduced this week a new feature which enabled users to tag and comment any webpage in their ‘My search history’ page. This feature which has been around elsewhere for a while now, can allow them later to apply tagging patterns into real search results.

While some may think that tagging your own pages can be a good seo technique, you will need many many accounts with natural search patterns in order to allow such search spam to take place. This begs the question, should you take the time to open so many accounts and develop the search patterns on them or should you use the same time to create a better site that will get the tagging regardless?

My pick is the latter, what is yours?

This funny cartoon was mentioned on the SEW’s blog,

It comes courtesy of the South Park gang (unofficial, of course). Basically, someone (those responsible for the page) are not very happy with Google juggernaut. You decide.

Another Google editorial cartoon was posted this morning in the NYT. Any search features missing?

Aaron, of SEOBook, has a great interview with Matt Cutts, of Google. The interview goed into several different subjects, and makes a great read.

Q: What are the biggest SEO related changes you can forecast for the upcoming year?

A: If you’re doing whitehat SEO, the same principles will apply going forward: make a great site (e.g. that provides a useful service or relevant information) and think of creative ways for people to find out about it. But spamming attempts in six months or a year from now will not be the same, just as spam attempts today are quite different from a year or 15 months ago. I think the lifetime of off-topic spam in search engines will continue to drop.

For those of you who don’t know Seth Godin is a leading marketing (guru?), writer and speaker in the area of marketing and the Internet.

He had recently published a new eBook covering “how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively” and is now giving it away for free. More about the eBook.

The first part can be downloaded from here (pdf), and the second part should be available soon.

Nice backlink anchor text analyzing tool from Jim of WeBuildPages.

As simple as it goes, this powerful tool seems to use the Yahoo! API, takes the url and works the magic.

The tool is in it’s first version, and more information can be found here.

Threadwatch has spotted this announcement by Coupons Inc which intends to offer their coupons in a contextual placement program starting this week.

Contextual placement involves scanning host Web pages for keywords, and linking them to related content. While several online networks offer contextual ad placements, most notably Google’s AdSense, Concordance is the first such execution designed specifically to deliver coupons and promotions. Instead of trying to distract the consumer, Concordance links to offers on relevant products when the consumer is most likely to want them. For instance, Concordance will scan an article on children’s nutrition with a section on healthy cereal, and create links to consumer-printed coupons for whole-grain and trans-fat free cereals. Consumers can then print the coupons and redeem them at local retailers. Offers delivered via Concordance utilize Coupons, Inc.’s time-tested technology and services, including secure coupons, consumer registration, viral marketing, and consumer affairs options.

Barry points to 5 Cre8asite threads created by the admin Bill Slawski and cover 5 recent search patents recently registered.

Threads Cover:

- Variable personalization of search results (Google)
- Google Help with Advertising Creatives (Google)
- Yahoo! Color Graphing and Personalization (Yahoo)
- Inverse searches and User Annotations (Yahoo)
- Assigning textual ads based on article history (MSN)