Search Engine Tigers

Yes, there’s now a mobile phone application to allow you to find the nearest, cleanest toilet to your current location.  I don’t think that there’s really anything more I can say about this, except that I hope that you don’t hurt your eyes by rolling them like I did when I read about this.  

Marchex has announced that today it will be launching over 100,000 new websites, totaling over 1 billion pages of content. These websites are both targeted at local searches (i.e. denverautorepair.com, 90210.com, etc), as well as specific verticals (locksmiths.com). Rather than aiming for a central portal on one domain, similar to an IYP site such as SuperPages, Marchex is hoping that these thousands of sites will each be relevant enough to pull searchers in as they’re discovered through the SERPs. However, one thing that you will notice if you go to these individual sites is that they have a very similar look and feel (which you would expect with 100,000 pages being launched at once), and that they all link, in some way, to myzip.com, which can show the exact same information as the individual pages.

Looking at their robots.txt, you can see that they are basically shutting the crawlers out of everything on myzip.com

User-agent: *

Disallow: /-/home/

Disallow: /-/results/

Disallow: /-/detail/

Disallow: /-/about/

Disallow: /-/terms/

Disallow: /-/privacy/

Disallow: /-/guidelines/

In fact, the only page that I found on myzip.com that could be crawled was the portal page (http://www.myzip.com/-/portal/?p=Portal&). So maybe this is because they’re only having those 100,000 individual sites crawled? After all, they’d get some benefit from the urls right? Well, here’s the robots.txt for denverautorepair.com

User-agent: *

Disallow: /-/results/

Disallow: /-/detail/

Disallow: /-/about/

Disallow: /-/terms/

Disallow: /-/privacy/

Disallow: /-/guidelines/

Aha! A difference! They’re not blocking the /-/home directory on this site. So what is there? All of the unique content? Well… not quite, it’s the same content on each page in that directory, but the sponsored listings are different…

Marchex is looking to distinguish itself in scale and quality from the so-called “domain parking” industry that often prey on accidental visitors to their sites by serving up low-quality advertising links on random pages
From the Reuters article

…such as serving up ads for buying homes in Florida on a page about Denver car repair???

Now while it’s true that this is a relevance quirk on Yahoo’s side, (I reached this page by clicking on the “See sponsored links for: Florida” crawlable link on the site, which is populated by Yahoo), the fact still remains that Marchex is allowing these pages to be indexed . Of course houses in Florida on a Denver page isn’t the most fun example, so how about this crawlable page on locksmiths.com stuffed full of Carmen Electra ads, because when you need a locksmith, you obviously need something to take your mind off being locked out of your house / car…

Admittedly, this is a small sample that I’ve looked at, but it does look a little strange if they’re trying to distance themselves from the domain parking sites, yet the only pages they’re having crawled are those with different ad sets, especially when those ad sets may not be related to the content of the page. It could be that they’ve not yet ‘launched’ these sites fully, and the robots.txt files may be changing, so I’ll check back tomorrow and see if they’re still the same or not, but still…

**update – 2 days later – Looking at the robots.txt  files for denverautorepair.com and locksmiths.com, I don’t see any change, so it looks like this is how they intend it to be. 

Yes, given the nice words that I received from the attendees of the last VA SEM meetup, and the fact that a few other people have been asking for details on the next one, I, and Debra, have gone ahead and set up the next meeting. It will be held on Saturday July 21st at 11.30 am at the Union Street Public House in Alexandria, VA. (703) 548-1785. If you can attend, please head over to the VA SEM meetup site and register / rsvp so that I can have a count ahead of time.  It’s been said that there will be three or so attendees from the Philly SEM group popping down for guest appearances…

Opening up my email this morning I saw an email from meetup.com with the title “There’s a new Search Engine Optimization meetup group in your area”.  Intrigued, given that I run the Virginia SEM meetup group, I opened the email to find…

Yes, Meetup must think that all SEOs are lonely single people, so it naturally assumes that any singles meetup group must apply to anyone involved in such a geeky topic.

Mayhap their algorithm needs a slight tweak.     

As a meetup.com meetup organizer, I get promotional emails from the service, and I received a rather interesting one yesterday. Apparently Starbucks has realized that a service that had over 54,000 meetings in the month of May alone needs places to hold those meetings. So they’ve rolled out a pilot program in VA, DC & MD, whereby you can find a local Starbucks to host your meeting. It’s obvious what Starbucks gets out of it, but what does the meeting get out of it?

Well, for a start they’re going to give you reserved seating for your party, that’s a huge one, especially if you’re meeting in a busy location. They also state that they’re going to give your meeting extra promotion, and give you support. While that may just mean that they write your meeting up on a whiteboard behind the counter, it’s still something.

If you run a meetup in the VA, DC, MD area, all you have to do is email starbucks at meetup.com and you may have one of the meeting setup headaches taken care of for you.

One last item on moving this blog from Blogger to Wordpress.  Everything went fairly smoothly, apart from that hiccup over the RSS feed.  I made sure to set the posting parameters in WordPress to mimic the structure of Blogger, and assumed that would be enough.  Nope.  While they were in the same format, the WordPress posts use every word in the title of the post in the url.  Blogger posts only use a subset of the title to generate their urls (and in fact, remove all stop words such as ‘the’ from the urls).  Subsequently, the majority of my old posts that had been indexed, suddenly started showing up in my Google Webmaster reports with 404 errors.  A quick set of 301 mappings from the old urls to the new urls fixed those issues, and my old urls now nicely forward to the new ones.

Why does it matter?  Well, when you have posts in a blog, or pages on a website that have generated links and a nice amount of page rank, you don’t want to throw it all away and start afresh, which is basically what you’d be doing if you didn’t take advantage of the capability provided by 301 redirects.

Don’t do what I did, map out the changes before-hand, and set up the redirects as soon as the new pages go live, and if you do it right, no-one will ever notice the change.

One of the best ways to plug your blog is to go away from it. Go and comment on other people’s blogs, or better yet, go and write for their blog. You may think that you want to keep all of the great content for your own blog, but what good does that do you if you don’t have people reading it? Put it on another blog, and if people like it, they’ll follow you to yours.

So am I following my own advice?

Well, over the last few months, I’ve commented frequently on different blogs and forums, and I’ve put out some content for others.

SearchEngineLand

SEOmoz

MarketingPilgrim

RBDRodeo (ok, this one is actually my work blog, but still, it’s getting content out there under my name on a different platform, to a slightly different audience)

Has it helped this blog? Well, it’s pulled some people over here, not as many as I would maybe like, but yes it’s helped. So if you want to improve your blog, go off and help someone else improve theirs.

If you have a Dell machine, and use the default Dell branded Google search, you may think that you’re getting the same search as if you were going straight to Google.com.  That doesn’t appear to be the case.  I’ve tried using both to see if they match, and there does appear to be a distinct difference in the organic search results across the board.  Now it could be that it’s just a matter of hitting different data centers and seeing different results, but it could be more than that.  Here’s an example of the results for a search on this domain name on both.  Note the 3rd result shown is different in both…

I just wanted to thank Steve, Ryan, Jacob and Paul for attending the first meeting of the VA SEM meetup group, as well as Alliance-Link for sponsoring the food & drink (despite Debra not being able to make it this time). I think that it went well, and we had some good discussions on a variety of SEM topics, as well as some decent pizza. Unfortunately Steve left before we got the group photo, but we’ll get him in there next time.

One feature of my feed reader – bloglines – that I’ve been using over the last six or so months, is the ability to mark a post as new, and retain it for either more in depth reading at a later date, or purely as a reference. So now that it’s been over 6 months, and it’s telling me that I have 67 posts marked as new, what do I have stored up there? Well, what I’m doing now is going through them, and those that really stand out as posts that made me say “hey this is great, I’m going to need this”, I’m going to list here. So stand by for a variety of great posts on different SEM topics.

6 Free Analytics packages (10e20)

Why Corporations truly need to blog (Marketing Pilgrim)

List of Search Marketing Conferences (Cartoon Barry)

The Enormous list of SEO Forums (CornwallSEO)

10 Cool things to do with the new Google Analytics (Google Blogoscoped)

7 signs to run screaming from an SEO consultant (SmallBusinessHub)

Using Google Website Optimizer (The Lonely Marketer)

Firefox extensions for Bloggers (ProBlogger)

9 Steps for getting authoritative links (SearchEngineWatch)

How to misuse Google Analytics (Seth Godin’s Blog)

Two new SEO tools I’ve bookmarked (SmallbusinessSEM)

10 Ways to make your small SEO firm look big (SoloSEO)

SEO playbook – Welcome to the rabbit hole Alice (Stuntdubl)

Top 17 niche social media sites (TropicalSEO)

So, as you can see, all 67 didn’t make this list, but the above are posts that are really worth a read, and if you read them when they first came out, maybe it’s not a bad idea to go back and re-read them.