I've lost domains in the past for using a companies product in the domain names, ex buy-widget.com. Seeing as those my sites were blank at the time, I probably could have fought to keep the domains. I would still like to know - does generating a profit on a site exclude you from rights that would allow you to keep a domain?
It's interesting that someone figured out how flash could support e-commerce tracking tools. It would be far more interesting if someone actually implemented it. I doubt any company will seriously consider using flash to track. PIE's are too bleeding edge and there are too many potential problems.
I could see people buying Google drinks simply because the company has an aura of being able to accomplish the impossible. Google could package some water, dye and label it as the most healthy drink in the world and people (sadly enough) would believe it.
Built-for-adsense-sites have been becoming more and more popular over the past two years. It's refreshing to finally see google actively go after these sites:
This would be a non-issue if the Google search engine and Google Adsense program were not part of the same company. Or if the built-for-adsense website were not using Adsense. It's strange that someone would put so much work into creating these spammy sites then overlook something so obvious. You are putting your fate into the hands of Google, the judge and jury, when you rely on both Google as a search engine and Google as your ad network. I doubt wordpress would get noticed for spam if they were using another contextual ad network to monetize traffic or another form of online advertising.
First of all, the search "miserable failure" is not a keyword spammers go for...Second, searching for frequently spammed words will give you horrid results
Less we forget the point of this thread on/., the goal is to see how one SE's measures up against another, right? You want to see how SE's differ, how resiliant SE's are to spam and how different SEO techniques have different results from one SE to the next. So you find those SERPs that include spam (ex miserable failure) and you analyze the results from one SE to the next. This is not the end all be all quality test but it is certainly informative. Viagra is interesting because Y shows blog spam on the top. MSN has some heavy on the page over optimization and cloaking. G shows more authoritative results like fda.gov. In this case G wins but not until recently did G do an updated to remove some blog spam that continues to show up in Y. You can do this for any normal keyword such as those you use in your every day life but use those spammy ones (nigritude ultramarine, refinancing, phentermine, etc) and the results will be more insightful.
Ask and ye shall receive. Google voting exists on the latest toolbar. From google:
If you especially like or dislike a web page you're visiting and want to share your opinion with Google, you can vote thumbs up by clicking the happy face or thumbs down by clicking the unhappy face. These buttons can also be used to report especially useful or unsatisfactory results after searching with Google. Just click the appropriate button while you're still on the results page. This feature is currently in test mode, so you will not notice any immediate effects based on your action, other than experiencing a warm sense of satisfaction from having shared your feelings with people who really do care.
I can see this feature getting abused if it were to go live.
PageRank is not the problem. Yahoo has their own version of PageRank called Yahoo WebRank. While webrank is not available in a toolbar, it does exist in some form as a way to help prioritize results. If PageRank is responsible for anything then it's for communicating to the public a piece of the puzzle search engines use to sort results. Also - the number of links does not give you high Pagerank. Having a lot of links used to work circa 2003. Inbound links with high PR are also weightes less today than they were in the past. This is just evolution of search engines. People figure out the tricks, search engines react. Pagerank was a big problem when it carried too much weight - that's no longer the case today.
I usually test search engines by typing in popular keywords that spammers generally go after, ex:
phentermine
home loans
poker
mesothelioma
viagra
miserable failure
Then look at the sites that rank at the top. It's very easy to tell which search engines are more succeptible to manipulation. A quick look at the backlinks for sites favorably ranking in those competitive keywords tells you how that SE is doing.
Here's my opinion on the race between Google, Yahoo & MSN. Google has more sites that are authorities in the top results and Google penalizes over optimization however extreme examples of over optimization continue to show up in Google. Yahoo is a moderate success and does a fair job of filtering out spammy sites as well as authorities like wikipedia - wikipedia will always rise to the top in G but not in Y - and this is good for Y because you get more variety. MSN does an average job of filtering out blog spam but new sites are too favorably ranked and this is because MSN is new and has no recorded history of URLs. My personal preference is to use G simply because it loads the fastest in my browser... Maybe it's also worth pointing out that my company has several URLs ranked favorably in the terms listed above - looking at the change in rankings over time certainly helps give insight into which SE is better. MSN & Y are by far easier to manipulate than G but G gives the most traffic.
My company uses PostgreSQL and are pretty happy with the performance. The only problem we had was in November when the Google spider went crazy and hit us a few million times a day for a few weeks. After a few hours of optimization, the sites were running smooth. A few years ago we had to come up with a db platform and we were a small company. We could use oracle but it's all around expensive. Oracle software, support, licensing, and engineers are expensive. Mysql's transaction support was too bleeding edge at the time. What I like most about postgresql is the transition from oracle to postgresql is smooth and most our engineers come from an oracle environment. Plus postgresql has adequate transactions support, subselects and functions...and it's free.
(In defense of Google, their spider did not intentionally go crazy - we have distributed webservers on seperate IPs so the spider can't tell if it's pounding one particular site. However Google only spidered more pages as a publicity stunt before MSN search was released so maybe they are to blame...)
As bad as this industry may be, the companies involved are doing very well. Gratis Networks, Netblue(yfdirect/yourfreedvds.com), and theuseful.com are all growing business with millions in revenue each month. With all the available money and the fact that a sucker is born every minute, these type of free offers are not going away anytime soon. What I fail to understand is how companies like netflix, ebay, and credit cards continue to pay for lousy inctivized customers.
Ugh. It used to be all Google all the time but those days passed long ago. I recommend looking into Y & MSN because there is a lot of untapped potential. Plus you need diversity. Having done SEO for years you get to appreciate competition by having multiple search engines. Times are great when say, you rank #1 for phentermine in Y! and all their distribution partners. However it hurts when you drop in the SERPs on everything at once - this happened to my company with phentermine and it's definitely stressful to have to get back up. Having MSN, Y! & G adds a lot of stability.
This article doesn't even mention Google yet people in this thread believe SEO only applies to Google. There are three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.
I can't see this as a good thing.
1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines.
3. The recent nofollow tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.
It should be noted that Yahoo has already been fighting Google on this front - Overture, owned by Yahoo!, has been running an Ad-Sense like program for a while.
Overture has been running an AdSense like program long before AdSense was around. Overture began prior to 2001. Google AdSense began March 2003. Yahoo purchased Overture in Oct 2003.
Here's Google -AdWords -AdSense -search appliances -Google News - generates no revenue -Gmail - generates no revenue -Google Labs - generates no revenue, includes sets, maps, video, suggest, answers, sms
Here's Yahoo and all these things generate revenue -Overture ContentMatch -Overture Paid Search -Auctions -Mail -Travel -Personals -Re al Estate -Finance -Autos -Music -Fantasy Sports -DSL -etc
If anyone needs to catch up, it's Google. For all Google's technological greatness, they are extremely dependent on AdSense in order to survive. MSN is coming out with contextual advertising. Yahoo already has Overture and will be releasing Yahoo's version of an AdSense competitor. AdSense was a surprising success for Google that put them in the leagues with the big boys but that's still one product. Google needs to pull another rabbit out of the hat if they expect to keep up with Yahoo.
My favorite part is in the movie is where they finish meeting with a VC and talk about their IPO. On the way to the hotel from the meeting with a VC they discuss going public and getting rich...and at this point they do not have a staff, a product or even 1 sale. Here they are talking about how pitching their company on the open market and it doesn't even exist yet! priceless
Having to go to a VC is not always a good thing. Picture getting a home loan only your bank owns a percentage of whatever you make (or lose) and your loan officer sleeps in the bedroom while you sleep on the couch.
>This is OBVIOUSLY a criteria Google can never meet. For them to recommend it to others is one thing, but how are they supposed to write ANYTHING with that criteria in mind?.
That sounds like an excuse to me for...keyword stuffing and cloaking.
This is going to end up being a difference of opinion but I would say google IS keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing certainly applies if you were to repeat refinancing 100 times in the title of your HTML page. Doing it a few times, while not such an extreme, still falls under the definition of keyword stuffing. Google's guidelines state "Would I do this if search engines didn't exist" and the answer is obviously no - you would not cloak a set of keywords in your title tag. If keywords are being cloaked in your title tag then they exist as 'keyword stuffing' within your title tag.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not really but wouldn't it be ironic if they did?
I've lost domains in the past for using a companies product in the domain names, ex buy-widget.com. Seeing as those my sites were blank at the time, I probably could have fought to keep the domains. I would still like to know - does generating a profit on a site exclude you from rights that would allow you to keep a domain?
Another good article on using flash for tracking:
i cleID=160400749
http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?art
It's interesting that someone figured out how flash could support e-commerce tracking tools. It would be far more interesting if someone actually implemented it. I doubt any company will seriously consider using flash to track. PIE's are too bleeding edge and there are too many potential problems.
I could see people buying Google drinks simply because the company has an aura of being able to accomplish the impossible. Google could package some water, dye and label it as the most healthy drink in the world and people (sadly enough) would believe it.
Built-for-adsense-sites have been becoming more and more popular over the past two years. It's refreshing to finally see google actively go after these sites:
built for adsense sites
This would be a non-issue if the Google search engine and Google Adsense program were not part of the same company. Or if the built-for-adsense website were not using Adsense. It's strange that someone would put so much work into creating these spammy sites then overlook something so obvious. You are putting your fate into the hands of Google, the judge and jury, when you rely on both Google as a search engine and Google as your ad network. I doubt wordpress would get noticed for spam if they were using another contextual ad network to monetize traffic or another form of online advertising.
First of all, the search "miserable failure" is not a keyword spammers go for...Second, searching for frequently spammed words will give you horrid results
/., the goal is to see how one SE's measures up against another, right? You want to see how SE's differ, how resiliant SE's are to spam and how different SEO techniques have different results from one SE to the next. So you find those SERPs that include spam (ex miserable failure) and you analyze the results from one SE to the next. This is not the end all be all quality test but it is certainly informative. Viagra is interesting because Y shows blog spam on the top. MSN has some heavy on the page over optimization and cloaking. G shows more authoritative results like fda.gov. In this case G wins but not until recently did G do an updated to remove some blog spam that continues to show up in Y. You can do this for any normal keyword such as those you use in your every day life but use those spammy ones (nigritude ultramarine, refinancing, phentermine, etc) and the results will be more insightful.
Less we forget the point of this thread on
Ask and ye shall receive. Google voting exists on the latest toolbar. From google:
If you especially like or dislike a web page you're visiting and want to share your opinion with Google, you can vote thumbs up by clicking the happy face or thumbs down by clicking the unhappy face. These buttons can also be used to report especially useful or unsatisfactory results after searching with Google. Just click the appropriate button while you're still on the results page. This feature is currently in test mode, so you will not notice any immediate effects based on your action, other than experiencing a warm sense of satisfaction from having shared your feelings with people who really do care.
I can see this feature getting abused if it were to go live.
PageRank is not the problem. Yahoo has their own version of PageRank called Yahoo WebRank. While webrank is not available in a toolbar, it does exist in some form as a way to help prioritize results. If PageRank is responsible for anything then it's for communicating to the public a piece of the puzzle search engines use to sort results. Also - the number of links does not give you high Pagerank. Having a lot of links used to work circa 2003. Inbound links with high PR are also weightes less today than they were in the past. This is just evolution of search engines. People figure out the tricks, search engines react. Pagerank was a big problem when it carried too much weight - that's no longer the case today.
I usually test search engines by typing in popular keywords that spammers generally go after, ex:
phentermine
home loans
poker
mesothelioma
viagra
miserable failure
Then look at the sites that rank at the top. It's very easy to tell which search engines are more succeptible to manipulation. A quick look at the backlinks for sites favorably ranking in those competitive keywords tells you how that SE is doing.
Here's my opinion on the race between Google, Yahoo & MSN. Google has more sites that are authorities in the top results and Google penalizes over optimization however extreme examples of over optimization continue to show up in Google. Yahoo is a moderate success and does a fair job of filtering out spammy sites as well as authorities like wikipedia - wikipedia will always rise to the top in G but not in Y - and this is good for Y because you get more variety. MSN does an average job of filtering out blog spam but new sites are too favorably ranked and this is because MSN is new and has no recorded history of URLs. My personal preference is to use G simply because it loads the fastest in my browser... Maybe it's also worth pointing out that my company has several URLs ranked favorably in the terms listed above - looking at the change in rankings over time certainly helps give insight into which SE is better. MSN & Y are by far easier to manipulate than G but G gives the most traffic.
If slashdot were owned by a Google employee then that would explain why 20% of the stories that run on /. are about Google.
/bye karma
>Hasbro should pay Jared, not sue him
Actually Jared should lease the name Scrable from Hasbro then charge his users to cover that fee...at least that's how the real world works.
Having the domain name e-scrabble.com was just asking for trouble...
In case of a slashdotting, here's a mirror of OurMedia on the wayback machine:o rg
/ironic
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ourmedia.
My company uses PostgreSQL and are pretty happy with the performance. The only problem we had was in November when the Google spider went crazy and hit us a few million times a day for a few weeks. After a few hours of optimization, the sites were running smooth. A few years ago we had to come up with a db platform and we were a small company. We could use oracle but it's all around expensive. Oracle software, support, licensing, and engineers are expensive. Mysql's transaction support was too bleeding edge at the time. What I like most about postgresql is the transition from oracle to postgresql is smooth and most our engineers come from an oracle environment. Plus postgresql has adequate transactions support, subselects and functions...and it's free.
(In defense of Google, their spider did not intentionally go crazy - we have distributed webservers on seperate IPs so the spider can't tell if it's pounding one particular site. However Google only spidered more pages as a publicity stunt before MSN search was released so maybe they are to blame...)
As bad as this industry may be, the companies involved are doing very well. Gratis Networks, Netblue(yfdirect/yourfreedvds.com), and theuseful.com are all growing business with millions in revenue each month. With all the available money and the fact that a sucker is born every minute, these type of free offers are not going away anytime soon. What I fail to understand is how companies like netflix, ebay, and credit cards continue to pay for lousy inctivized customers.
Google is all that matters.
Ugh. It used to be all Google all the time but those days passed long ago. I recommend looking into Y & MSN because there is a lot of untapped potential. Plus you need diversity. Having done SEO for years you get to appreciate competition by having multiple search engines. Times are great when say, you rank #1 for phentermine in Y! and all their distribution partners. However it hurts when you drop in the SERPs on everything at once - this happened to my company with phentermine and it's definitely stressful to have to get back up. Having MSN, Y! & G adds a lot of stability.
This article doesn't even mention Google yet people in this thread believe SEO only applies to Google. There are three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.
forgot to add:
4. This will encourage opportunists to use blog spamming as an effective way to optimize for search engines.
However anyone that has been paying attention to blog spam knows the nigritude ultramarine contest already exposed this hole to the masses long ago.
I can't see this as a good thing.
1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines.
3. The recent nofollow tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.
It should be noted that Yahoo has already been fighting Google on this front - Overture, owned by Yahoo!, has been running an Ad-Sense like program for a while.
Overture has been running an AdSense like program long before AdSense was around. Overture began prior to 2001. Google AdSense began March 2003. Yahoo purchased Overture in Oct 2003.
Innovate? Someone should tell that to Google.
e al Estate
Here's Google
-AdWords
-AdSense
-search appliances
-Google News - generates no revenue
-Gmail - generates no revenue
-Google Labs - generates no revenue, includes sets, maps, video, suggest, answers, sms
Here's Yahoo and all these things generate revenue
-Overture ContentMatch
-Overture Paid Search
-Auctions
-Mail
-Travel
-Personals
-R
-Finance
-Autos
-Music
-Fantasy Sports
-DSL
-etc
If anyone needs to catch up, it's Google. For all Google's technological greatness, they are extremely dependent on AdSense in order to survive. MSN is coming out with contextual advertising. Yahoo already has Overture and will be releasing Yahoo's version of an AdSense competitor. AdSense was a surprising success for Google that put them in the leagues with the big boys but that's still one product. Google needs to pull another rabbit out of the hat if they expect to keep up with Yahoo.
My favorite part is in the movie is where they finish meeting with a VC and talk about their IPO. On the way to the hotel from the meeting with a VC they discuss going public and getting rich...and at this point they do not have a staff, a product or even 1 sale. Here they are talking about how pitching their company on the open market and it doesn't even exist yet! priceless
Having to go to a VC is not always a good thing. Picture getting a home loan only your bank owns a percentage of whatever you make (or lose) and your loan officer sleeps in the bedroom while you sleep on the couch.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail - Abraham H. Maslow
>This is OBVIOUSLY a criteria Google can never meet. For them to recommend it to others is one thing, but how are they supposed to write ANYTHING with that criteria in mind? .
That sounds like an excuse to me for...keyword stuffing and cloaking.
This is going to end up being a difference of opinion but I would say google IS keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing certainly applies if you were to repeat refinancing 100 times in the title of your HTML page. Doing it a few times, while not such an extreme, still falls under the definition of keyword stuffing. Google's guidelines state "Would I do this if search engines didn't exist" and the answer is obviously no - you would not cloak a set of keywords in your title tag. If keywords are being cloaked in your title tag then they exist as 'keyword stuffing' within your title tag.