In the past week since launching their new sponsored listings I’ve seen many forum posts inquiring about results, and any experience with that program, however, today I noticed some people posting about their experience in the past week:

I have been live since monday as well, and I am quite happy with the results. It is currently 4.1% of my traffic and 4.3% of convertions. I just wish they had more users/traffic.

Barry points out a forum thread referencing the list of publishers / sources for MSNBC’s Newsbot.

It seems like it is fairly easy to get included in this list, just submit your news source and wait.

Backlink analisys tools often provide a wealth of information about sites and their linking strategies. Problem is that most quality tools cost $$ and some people are either broke or a bit sketchy spending money on such tools (as I’ve been). However, this weekend, Aaron has launched his own Backlink Analisys Tool but this time it is FREE!

He later explained that he actually bought the tool at a “beta” stage for and have worked with the developers to improve fit his vision (which he estimates to cost 5 figures). Bottom line is a fast and efficient tool that (in my opinion) is much better than any equivalent piece of software that charges $$. Thanks Aaron!!

Anyways, if you have any comments you are encouraged to comment on the post linked above.

Great post by Matt Cutts of Google named SEO Mistakes: sneaky JavaScript warns SEO’s and webmasters in general of using javascript redirects in doorway / spam pages.

This time he gives a great example of a site which created dozens of auto generated content pages that not only make no sense, but even redirects to the homepage using javascript.

He sums it up and says:

So let’s recap the high-risk techniques that I would recommend avoiding:

• Don’t use programs that automatically generate doorway pages.
• It especially looks bad if the doorway pages are gibberish.
• It really especially looks bad if the content you use is scraped content.
• If you’re considering scraping content, doing it in the SEO industries is one of the worst places to do it.
• If you scrape SEO content and end up scraping a couple spam pages, you may
  get noticed even more because someone is investigating the other spam pages.

and then:

• If you make lots of pages, don’t put JavaScript redirects on all of them.
• If
  you’re doing JavaScript redirects, don’t obfuscate the code–it just
  makes people think that you’re doing things after lots of deliberate
  consideration.
• If you do obfuscate code, ask yourself: can a
  regular person still look at this code and tell what it’s doing without
  even knowing JavaScript?

It is now official, WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference will be held in Las Vegas.
They have also launched a new website for show information, speakers and times at http://www.pubcon.com/.

Dates: November 15-17, 2005
City: Las Vegas Nevada
Location: Las Vegas Convention Center
Keynote Speaker : Robert Cringely

As a long time Las Vegas resident, I am looking forward to this show, I got into this field right after the last show here, and never had the time to travel to one of those. I will be reporting everything everything from the show here on this blog.

Source: SERoundable who had been doing a phenomenal job covering the last shows in Las Vegas 2004 as well as New Orleans 2005.

So, as soon as I got done reviewing the latest ideas to fight blog spam, I get this post in my reader titled Blogger takes the lazy option on spam blogs: new “flag” option.

Apparently, Blogger has added an option to “Flag Blogs as Objectionable“. That is,

The next time your reading a blogspot.com hosted blog that’s been recently created (it only applies to new blogs), you can know tell Google if you don’t like it and if they get enough complaints they’ll either “delist” the blog from the “Next blog” option found at the top of blogspot hosted blogs, or if they deem its really serious, god help us, they might even ban it. So basically get enough people together to target a site you don’t like on Blogger now and Google will help make sure no one gets to see it…that’s right, because they’ve also included “politically incorrect, potential hurtful, or just plain gross” in the criteria, but chances are if you’ve got a spam blog you’ll be totally unaffected.

Possible problems?

• The feature applies only to blogs created from now; all preexisting blogs are immune, even spam blogs.
• The guidelines for objecting are too loose—nonexistent, really.
• It’s all too easy for a gang to attack any blog for any reason and log multiple “objectionable” complaints.
• The feature does nothing to directly address spam blogs.

A new idea to fight spam blogs is catching some momentum. It initially started by Mark Cuban and took a turn when SomewhatFrank decided to put together a site for people to report blog spam.

How much is this going to help? I don’t know. Consider the amount of spam blogs on the net, even if several thousands will be reported it may make it impossible to monetize. I would also like to know where are these results going to go? On the other hand IceRocket’s proposal to eliminate free blog provider from it’s index is not the best idea either as some use these services legitimately.

It shouldn’t be overly complicated to create an algorithm that will eliminate such blogs based on wording (spam blogs tend to post similar information), time since last post (old blogs that haven’t been updated can be a source fr comment spam), etc. Bottom line, they can create such algo that can be even tougher on these sites, and if some legit blogs get excluded they can request reinclusion, same way search engines currently fight spam.

A couple of weeks ago Google had registered the domains GoogleMovieReviews.com and GoogleShowtime.com (along with the .net, .org & .info of these domains), and starts a long line of speculations regarding the purpose behind it.

Are standalone movie info sites being built to go head-to-head with AOL’s Moviefone? Will Google partner with other services or begin their own ticket service? What about Yahoo? Might online ticketing be another revenue stream for G? Will Google eventually go up against IAC’s Ticketmaster for a piece of the lucrative online ticketing market? When will Gogle and Yahoo begin placing local advertising on movie showtimes results pages? Ads for local resturants, bars, etc. would sure seem to make sense.

Is this really the reason? I don’t know. I tend to go with the notion that they had done it only to protect the domains and themselves from paying much higher prices in case these domains get snatched by someone else. I especially like this notion considering the fact that they are already movie showtimes as well as movie reviewes, and while some are already using this service, it would make no sense to make people switch to the new sites for the same info.

Gotta love this, if you search Google for hypocrite and see what you find.

I could not find that word even once on that page besides the domain name. And, we already know that domain names have no affect over ranking.

Considering the fact that Google has a copy of the current page cached and therefore it is aware of it, all I can think of is backlinks and anchor text.

Added: Looking up the backlinks count this page shows over 500,000 backlinks. Pretty powerful…

According to SERoundTable, and following several posts on WMW Google Adwords price changes is out, however, it seems as if Google is rolling the change slowly.

Apparently some people have started seeing these message on their interface:

We’ve simplified our keyword status system. Your keywords will now either be active (triggering ads) or inactive (not triggering ads). Quality remains the most important factor in your keywords’ performance. Each keyword will now have a minimum bid that is based on the quality of your keyword and ad text. If your maximum CPC doesn’t meet this minimum bid, your keyword will be listed as inactive.

What you should do differently:
If a keyword is listed as inactive, improve its quality through optimization, delete it, or raise that keyword’s maximum CPC to the minimum bid indicated. (Raising the bid will re-activate the keyword.) If your keyword is active, you don’t need to do anything.

This simplify the idea for newbies but I keep on wondering how this price floor is going to affect advertisers, cost, and Google’s own revenue. I can guarantee that it is not going to lower Google’s revenue, but these days of ASK launching their own sponsored listings program, and MSN with it’s own similar program, why would one go and raise its’ prices?