To continue the indexing tests, today I am going to test just how much the search engines really respect the no follow tag. I just registered a new domain, TodayIAmGrateful.com, about an hour ago. New domain, page just went up, lets link over to it with the no follow tag and see what happens.

Today I am grateful for Google, Yahoo, and all the search engines that help me find information rapidly and effectively. Without them, I would not have a decently paying job and chance to learn about the wonders of the world at my finger tips. So cheers to you Google, Yahoo, and even MSN — today I express my gratitude.

So now I ask, will you follow that which you say you do not, or will you see my link condom and not go any further. Is this link condom really 99.9% effective or do my website and me have to worry about getting indexed?

***Update: The Googlebot has ringtonerevue. It looks like it cached the site less then 3 hours after posting this link on the blog. “This is G o o g l e’s cache of http://www.ringtonerevue.com/ as retrieved on 9 May 2007 05:03:55 GMT.” The post was set to GMT time as well “ This entry was posted on Wednesday 9. May 2007 at 03:27.”

It looks like Yahoo Slurp also got the page, just a little bit later then Google:

So there you have it. One link is enough to get a site indexed. Not that there is much content or any test of how far they will go into a site, but proof enough that all you need is one good link to get your site discovered in the search engines.***

So, this post is going to be a little bit different then the normal post. This post is to test just how long it takes Google to follow a link from a decently indexed, currently pagerank 5 blog. RingtoneRevue.com is a ringtone site I plan to develop at some point. The domain was registered on 7/9/2006 but I haven’t done anything with it. There are no links that I know of and the site wasn’t pointing to anything. A few days ago, I decided to set it live and put up a basic index.html.

So far, no visits from the Googlebot or any other bot, except for Alexa (IA Archiver) which came today. Pretty interesting, considering that I do not have the alexa toolbar installed. Lets see how long it takes for this post to trigger some Googlebot love and get a new site in the index. To that effect, a silly short paragraph will commense.

Ringtones are lots of fun. I really like listening to my special ringer. It makes lots of special musical tones that bring me joy. It is my special ring tone.

So there it is, unabashed SEO linking to a new site. Googlebot, I call thee over that way. Go forth and index my young bot friend. May you find the limited content appealing enough to add to your vast treasures of pages. I promise more will be there soon.

The Motley Fool, in typical Foolish ways, makes a bold sounding statement that Google is the worst stock for 2007, based upon the premise that increased competition from Yahoo and Microsoft, combined with a fickle online ad market, will eat into Google’s growth.  These arguments really don’t have any merit. At the moment, Yahoo and Microsoft do not offer much competition to eating into Google’s advertising profits. Here is why
1. Microsoft AdCenter Sucks -  I’m sorry, but it does. I work at a place that has a multi-million spend with the search engines and we received a lot more traffic from MSN when it was bundled with Overture. While there are many nifty graphs, there is hardly any traffic except for the major terms and loading campaigns with keywords is cumbersome at best. I don’t need a fancy interface, I need a clean and easy to use interface that lets me get going fast and receive quality customers. Oh wait, that is Google Adwords.

2.Yahoo’s Partner Network is Corrupt - Love Yahoo.com visitors. Great people, great traffic. Insurance2342.com, I-am-a-fake-domain.com — don’t like that so much. As reported in the Business Week article on click fraud, Yahoo has some serious problems with their partner network. They have artificially inflated their traffic numbers by adding bunk sites to the mix and as a result their click prices have declined and more advertisers have lost faith in their network. With Google, I’ve only seen prices go up and the traffic quality increase overall.

3. Online Advertising Dollars are Accelerating - More and more businesses are going online to find customers and search marketing is one of the best ways to do it. TV is being eaten by GooTube, as is print and other forms of media. Google is laying the foundations to be the ultimate broker of online advertising which is the only form of advertising that is still growing steadily. Tools like Google Adwords editor, buying YouTube, Demarc, and other forms of automated media creation and deployment make me think Google has something up their sleeve. Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft are showing similar sophistication or vision.

Maybe in 5 years Yahoo and Microsoft might get their act together but as it stands right now they are seriously losing out in the fight for advertising dollars and search engine share, not even counting brain drain of excellent engineers and product managers moving to the “Don’t Be Evil” camp. So for this particular one Motley Fool, I think you are being a bit Fooooooolish.

I guess we have officially entered a new age — the Wall Street Journal is feeling the blog love. Search engine watch reports that the WSJ has started to consider restructuring some of efforts to have more dynamic blogs. Half the fun is in the comments and that is what is really defining the new internet age — the breakdown between the vaunted institution and the public it served. In the mass media age there was the official arbiter of information, the might Wall Street Journal, the Times, and its like. Institution < = > Public.

The barriers aren’t real, however, and even these aging print institutions have realized that you have to give into the wave of new media. When there is no longer one authoritative source for news, trying to wall of your content and your voice only guarantees that your voice will dimish. The Wall Street Journal still has a lot to offer, with wonderful resources for getting the right stories and getting them right. Adding in comments from educated readers and keeping the dialogue going will hopefully breed a new standard for quality reporting and debate. These institutions are still relevant, but they have to adapt to this new era if they are going to survive.
Fuller article on the Wall Street Journal’s decision.

Many out there have talked about Microsoft and their possibility of acquiring Yahoo to help compete against Google in the search and online space. Jeremy Shoemaker gave 10 reasons why they would buy yahoo but I’m not sure it is going to happen or execute well if it does.

One of the major problems is Culture Clash – Ray Ozzie is having a hard enough time as is trying to get the “service” idea to Microsoft by all reports. An organization that has survived on the desktop and their software programs is not going to quickly integrate.

Additionally, they would have to get rid of Microsoft AdCenter (which is sort of a pain to deal with) and collapse down many other products. Yahoo does have a wide network but I’m not sure it would be easy to collapse all their services and integrate it with Microsoft. Whenever I’ve had to go to Microsoft.com, I’ve always found it to be a mess, overly verbose, and confusing. You don’t tend to see a Harvard educated man suddenly speak ebonics and I feel that is what is being asked of the programmers and people at Microsoft — it goes against the entire culture they have been raised in and conditioned to think from day one to suddenly switch to an open source “Yahoo!” vibe.
Sure Microsoft has the money and the need. All the numbers might add up but the logistical and cultural issues are a nightmare and they would still not have as powerful a brand as Google.
Yahoo needs to get better and really launch Panama right and perhaps bring MSN back into the fold as a partner. Kick out the junk sites and provide the best network for advertisers to launch offers and provide a counter weight to Google. They may be down but they are not out, but they have hammer on their strong points (community) and use their user base to launch new and innovative services that can capture and keep folks in the Yahoo network. Google may have the search traffic but people still stay at places like Flickr and Myspace a lot more.

The other day SEOMOZ wrote about KeyCompete, a new service that uses scraping and a variety of ways to monitor competitor’s keywords and help a search marketer dig deeper into keyword research. Services like this are valuable because they provide another angle for real keyword data outside of the search engines tools. I know there are some similar ones from companies such as Hitwise which use log data from ISP to provide a sample of data.

The question with any of these tools is — how does one manage these keywords and classifications? It seems the problem with search marketing is not in getting the data, but in managing, structuring it, and turning it into action.

Lets say you do get all of your competitors keywords — how do you know those are even good keywords? I just read a study from Omniture (which we are taking a look at) from Jetblue and how they cut their cost by 94 percent when they really dug into their search marketing spend. Some competitors might be bleeding money and not even know it.

So while it is great to see more data, the best data is going to be the one you can easily gather yourself — how your keywords are performing and how you can better target your own landing pages, ads, etc. I’ve found that to make the biggest difference and I have more then enough work to last me a year just on what we have right now. Last I looked I have about 1.4 million to go through, and that isn’t even counting combinations.

The Google Blog recently posted about audio captchas — basically a way to have human authentication for people who cannot visually see web pages. Most blogs or other places using verification schemes tend to show a visually skewed image that a user must decode and enter in order to post a blog comment, signup for a web service, or things like that.

The purpose of all of these is to determine if the user is a human or a robot, mostly in an effort to thwart automatic attacks from spam bots or other nefarious robots. I think it is good to see alternative ways of verification emerging beyond the standard captcha. Though personally I don’t think they need to scramble audio, because I have a hard enough time hearing as it is!

In the bigger picture I think this points to the need for websites and web services requiring authentication to devise their own unique schemes. Part of what makes it efficient for a spammer to define measures to defeat captchas is that fact that everyone uses exactly the same one. If every blog had a slightly different way of doing it or expected response, it would raise the opportunity cost for spammers and increase their workload. While a user could easily decode sometihng like “What does 2+2=?” these types of things are not easily decoded by bots. You could also show a picture of a flower and ask someone to label it in English (or language of choice). Any of a number of options like these are quite simple tasks that a human can easily verify but a computer would have more difficutly handling. Food for thought.

So Google just announced they are going to release more then a trillion unique words they have grabbed from pages. As a search engine marketer and general lover of words and phrases, this is like pure gold. Check out this example for Britany Spears

I think marketers in every aspect of the search industry should check this out when it comes out. Simply being able to see the range of things people type will help to create new markets and help targeting of customer segments. The most difficult part about search engine optimization and marketing is knowing the right words to go after — having a trillion words to look through just might help a bit

I know there are many people out there looking to learn to speak more effectively and clearly. They want to be able to give that presentation to the board, impress their fellow businessfolk with their outstanding conference speech, and wow their boss with how those figures look — “way to go Jones!”

The key to doing this may just be speaking with a pen in your mouth (You could try a pencil, but you might get lead poisoning, and that probably won’t help your career).

Many people may think this is a bit strange, but I’m telling you, it is the super secret Ninja tip you have been looking for. How do I know? Well, I was trained in this strange world of competitive policy debate. 4 years in high school and then at Dartmouth College. I was even such a geek, I spent my summers in high school learning how to debate. But this isn’t the debate you think of. This isn’t, “I object sir, you are morally reprehensible.” No, this is speaking at the highest possible rate of velocity possible while reading lines from law reviews and books from every strange source imaginable, trying to cram as much argumentation logic into 8 and 4 minute speeches. All while yelling out code words like “turn”, “no internal link” and other strange jargon. Its quite thrilling in its own way really.

So one of the things you learn when you try to speak at a high rate of speed is that all your words blur together. It’s one big mumbling machine. This isn’t very effective when you are trying to convince the judge why we should initiate a thermonuclear high speed laser defense program to shoot down missiles from space.

So what do you do? You practice reading all these pieces of evidence while firmly grasping a pen in you mouth. You will look silly, feel silly, and sound silly, but if you do this consistently, I guarantee you will come out sounding smoother, make friends, impress members of the opposite sex, and all that sort of stuff. Well, maybe not, but you will be able to now speak with a pen in your mouth.

Sidenote: This tip doesn’t really come directly from me - - it was passed down from one Anjan Sanni (forgive me on the name if you read this Anjan, this is from phonetic memory). Anjan is one of the smartest guy’s I ever saw debate. He also won pretty much every tournament I ever saw and I am pretty sure he won the National Debate Tournament on the college level. In other words, he was a grandmaster wizard as this stuff.

See it turns out that when you have to speak with a pen in your mouth all of those muscles you rarely use suddenly have to be used. You are forced to start using those mouth muscles to articulate each of the words. You have to overcompensate in order for the words to come out correctly. Think of it like wearing weights when you go for a walk — a small amount of strain that makes walking the rest of the time easier. It pretty much works the same way. Once you get in the habit of having to articulate words around the pen, you will find that in normal speech words come out with a force and delivery you never thought possible.

So how to do it?

1. Get a Tape Recorder, or Mic Yourself and Record to the Computer: Whether you want to go old school or new school, find a way to record yourself speaking. You want to know how you sound to other people, not how your voice vibrates in your head. I started with a tape recorder but I’d probably use a computer now cause it is easier to track progress over time.
2. Find a Pen or Similar Sized Object (And Make Sure it is NonToxic): You are going to be sticking this thing in your mouth and slobbering on it, so it is good to find a pen that has a nice smoothness to it and that you cannot easily bite into the ink somehow. Any object that size will do, a pen just tends to be handy.
3. Insert Pen, Clamp Down with Teeth: You want to find some comfortable medium. If you push the pen too far in, you won’t be able to get your lips to move around it. If you have it too far out, it will pop right out when you say a word a bit too forcefully.
4. Find a good page with a range of word types and start speaking away: Simple stuff like USA Today might be a good way to start but you eventually want to get into those weird law journals where they just make up words because they feel special. Reading challenging stuff will force you to really pronounce the words and be more aware of what you are doing.
5. Record and then Listen to Your Speaking: Try doing a page or two and record it while you do it. Then go back and listen. Find where you are clear and find when you mumble. Note if it is occuring on certain sounds, like an sssss. Then go back and try again.

If you practice this for a good bit of time each night for a few weeks you will find that not only are you aware that there are far more muscles in the mouth then you knew about, but also that you are suddenly speaking a bit clearer and words seem to have a greater impact.

One of the best ways to really see the result is to pick a passage and read it before starting the experiment. Then do the training for a period of time and come back and read the passage again. Record both sessions and compare. I think you will be surprised at the difference.

Saw this via searchenginewatch that OneStat had a study that less people are using one word queries then they were last year. Um, ok, yeah? As people use search engines more they will realize one word really isn’t enough.

Though I am not sure their sample size is a good one. 2 million visitors? Some websites see that many visitors in one day.

 How about Google, Yahoo, and MSN giving us some of their numbers? I’d be much more interested in seeing a breakdown by engine.

Furthermore, how about breaking that down also by:

• Demographic
• Location
• Conversion Rate

The last one will vary by industry of course but it has been my experience that those long phrases (4 words +) are where the real gold is. THOSE are the people you want to reach, not just the ones groping in the dark in the beginning of their searching quest.