SearchScan uses SiteAdvisor technology (by McAfee) to alert web users whenever “risky” sites appear in the Yahoo! Search results. It scans for 3 kinds of risks:

1. Browser exploits. SearchScan detects websites that install malware in the user’s computer upon visit. They are automatically removed from the search results.

2. Dangerous downloads. Websites that offer software downloads (like screensavers, games, etc.) that potentially contain viruses, adware, or spyware are tagged as risky. Yahoo’s SearchScan technology puts a prominent warning beside the website’s name in the search results. Users can still access the site if they want to.

3. Unsolicited email. Yahoo! Can now alert users when a site sends unsolicited emails and/or share email addresses and details with third parties.

Last May 5, 2008, SearchScan was automatically applied to users in the U.S., UK, Canada, Italy, France, Germany, New Zealand, Spain, and Australia. There is a choice not to use it, though — users can turn the feature off by tweaking their preferences. They may also filter out all websites with warnings from the Yahoo! Search results.

Reactions from the SEO public

Yahoo’s aim in implementing this “safer search” technology is to help users make informed decisions regarding the sites they visit. Yahoo displays prominent warnings next to the sites with potentially harmful risks, telling users if a site is safe to share information with or download files from. All sites identified by McAfee as “browser exploit” will not anymore appear in the Yahoo! Search results.

To some webmasters, this new development is a form of censorship. According to some reactions in the Yahoo! Search Blog, Yahoo seems to stand in judgment as it gives users choices by default when it should be objectively presenting relevant results. Some webmasters also fear false positives in McAfee.

Censorship or not, this means a broader scope of responsibility for SEO practitioners — from advising client-websites against usage of downloads and unsolicited emails to constant monitoring (making sure that none of our clients get flagged or banned by SearchScan). Here’s our opinion: If it helps clean up the web and make legitimate sites more prominent, then we’re all for it. SearchScan is still in the beta stages, anyway, and we’ll see more development in the coming months. Until then, we’ll keep doing what we’re good at – honest to goodness white-hat SEO.

SEO News recently published an article by Donald Nelson, enumerating 10 top no-no’s in search engine optimization. Pretty basic stuff, but the last item was interesting and worth sharing, especially since some SEO’s – particularly those who are overeager to build links — still don’t know about it. Here’s an excerpt:

You can’t get into trouble if a questionable or substandard site links to you, but according to Google, you can be penalized if you link to what they call bad neighborhoods. These are spam sites or other sites that have a bad reputation. So, don’t accept offers to link with any and all websites. Visit the proposed link partner and see if the site is ranked, as opposed to being banned, and if there are any other issues that might make it questionable. If you have doubt, then don’t.

Many of our clients come to us requesting that we build links for them. This is never an easy job – in fact, it’s one of the most time-consuming part of SEO, next only to content creation. It would be easy to fish for incoming links from low-quality websites, but of course we know better than to identify our client’s websites to bad neighborhoods. Thankfully, our Search Exchange system was already up and running by the time “linking” became the name of the game. The system lets us build better incoming and outgoing link systems for our paying clients, whose websites have seen phenomenal Page Rank improvements a few months after signing up. On top of that, we have launched Free Relevant Links, which enables us to give free, top-quality linking service to SEOs on a budget. We get hundreds of sign ups every month, and those free accounts felt drastic improvements not just in Page Rank, but also in traffic.

We’re really proud of this service, and would like to share it. If you want to see how Free Relevant Links works, just read this. It’s so easy to sign up, manage, and maintain your links. Unlike spammy free link networks that give you links from random websites that only hurt your ranking instead of improve it, Free Relevant Links only links you up with websites in your category. Every link is top-quality. Best of all, we give you complete freedom to choose what websites you want to link to.

Sign up here.

Microsoft recently released a research paper demonstrating how search results can be better improved by looking at a user’s surfing behavior, which is logged by a “search toolbar.” Here’s how it works: A user’s web navigation behavior – all the web pages from the first to the last one visited — is summarized to identify “search trails.” These search trails originate a query submission to the search engine, and then proceed until the user is assumed to have completed his information seek / has found the answer or page he is looking for. Trails may be from search result pages, or pages linked to the search result page by a sequence of hyperlinks that the user clicks. The end result?

Search engines are able to return “query-specific” results, making it so much easier for users to find exactly what they are looking for.

The end of spam websites?

If this technology is implemented, web spam detection algorithms will become much smarter, and web pages that exist solely to make affiliate revenue can expect to go down the drain. By logging a user’s behavior, the algorithms are able to establish “user-validated authority” — that is, a website ranks better if the user finds it useful. Users usually don’t stay or go back to non-informative pages, and the activity logs show this. Such information enables search engines to highlight websites with high visitor loyalty and give them better exposure.

Smarter search engines = Smarter SEO

Old school SEO practitioners who still rely on keyword spamming and building senseless “feeder” websites just to get incoming links should seriously consider revamping their approach. Search engines can now gauge quality, and are ready to weed out websites that have nothing to offer. It looks like people who think content is not king anymore are wrong. Quality content may not be ALL there is to SEO, but quality content is certainly indispensable now that search engines are smarter. We welcome your thoughts on the ever changing search engines and their increasing intelligence.

Our verdict

For small, obscure websites with virtually no search engine optimization efforts, high ratings from several Stumblers can mean thousands of new visitors very quickly. If you intend to fish for traffic, just make sure you have interesting content, whether it be a story or image. Stumblers can be picky.

As for link development, StumbleUpon won’t help much, though. Webmasters who think that putting an inbound link from StumbleUpon into their website is as good as getting a link from a reputable directory will surely be disappointed. Why? Because links from StumbleUpon are no-follow links, so they don’t contribute to Page Rank. Also, if a webmaster forces in a web site that isn’t worthy of being “stumbled,” that web site may get banned.

StumbleUpon is a great platform to start a viral campaign, sure, but not to start a link development campaign. Our Link Management System is a far better alternative, especially because it’s free. Check out the rankings of websites that signed up.

“We want to show people that you can work together instead of against each other and succeed!” said Robert Bibb, owner and CEO of Blackwoodproductions.com. “SEO 2.0 is not the Future, SEO 2.0 is NOW!” he said making a pun on Blackwood’s known slogan of “Finding the Future Now” If that is not enough, we will also be able to share in more traffic to our’ respectful businesses.

With Blackwood’s World class search engine optimization and streaming technologies combined with Seo game plan’s solid SEO hosting and growing technologies in word press widgets, our efforts should be enough to appease many website owners in being a one stop shop where they can get everything they need to make their e-business thrive. We plan on working together and making our clients as comfortable as they can be in setting up a successful business from beginning to end.

Welcome aboard Craig and Howard and the rest of your crew at seogameplan.com we can’t wait to see not only what we can offer each others’ clients but also how else we can help each other become the best SEO network community in the world.

While Google does not completely disclose the logic it uses to determine which sites it will assess, Aaron Wall of SEOBook says that there are certain tactics you can use to keep your site from being flagged for review in the first place. He doesn’t mention anything we don’t already do for our clients, but I thought I would enumerate them here anyway for the benefit of readers who are new to the SEO community.

But first: How does Google determine which sites to review?

Google uses algorithms to flag websites for review, specifically:

a. Websites that have seen rapid spikes in traffic from Google;

b. Websites that users tend to quickly exit from (and do not return to); and

c. Websites that get considerable traffic from Google but get only a few navigational queries.

These red flags can cause a website to be queued for human review by any of Google’s 10,000 reviewers.

Don’t get flagged

If you don’t want to be reviewed, you have to satisfy the algorithms. The key to looking like a relevant website in their eyes is to make your website look like an authority – and that means reviewing everything from your domain name to your content formatting. Thin affiliate websites are at a bigger risk of getting reviewed largely because their domain names are low-quality, and their content is sparse (sometimes even badly written).

Here are a few simple rules to remember if you want to avoid being reviewed:

1. Build only quality content. Do you still use 10% keyword density? Then you’re setting yourself up for failure. The new acceptable standard is about 2%, which means that you should never mention a keyword more than 8 times in a 400-word page. Remember – Google’s algorithms are now very good at detecting spammy content. Unless you are an authority site by default (such as a non-profit organization, an education institution, or an official Google partner), then you should seriously consider revising your content if you don’t want to get flagged for human review.
2. Make people come back to you. Introduce a membership functionality, come up with an attention-grabbing serial article, or just be plain interesting. Only when regular readers come back to your site will Google’s algorithms think that it’s authoritative.
3. Avoid making radical changes, unless you are willing to risk being reviewed. “Radical” here means suddenly adding thousands of pages or gaining hundreds of inbound links in a very short span of time. Google’s algorithms may interpret the abrupt changes as indications of spammy activity, and you may be flagged for a review.

Here at Blackwood Productions, we make sure that our clients’ websites avoid getting reviewed. We supply them with relevant links from related websites, quality content written for actual people (not just search engines), and of course, analytic reporting that enables us to nip any problems in the bud before they get worse. We don’t have any trade secrets – we certainly stay away from gimmicks that can get our clients banned. Our only formula is QUALITY, and Google seems to appreciate that.

Robert Bibb
CEO Blackwood Productions

Now in this day and age we should know that Page Rank doesn’t mean all that much anymore. Page Rank was developed a few years ago to show webmasters what sites had the best link popularity and therefore whom they should try to link with. In effect Google was telling people if you want good ranking results in our indexes then you need links, lots of links, for that better Page Rank. What followed is what I always call the “Webmaster Links War”. You can read more here…… Carnage and Mayhem followed as webmasters were doing everything they could to gain links. From link baiting to link buying. The webmasters became so focused on links that’s all they worked on, as for content, who needed content links were AWESOME! It didn’t take too long for Google to see it’s folly in this plan as website quality quickly degraded.

Google then decided it was going to stop showing every backlink that they had indexed to sites as it was an easy way for webmasters to see who was linking to who and how many links the competition had. Therefore making sure the Link War raged on. When Google removed the feature to see every backlink that a particular site had they figured they would start to put a stop to this behavior. This although a good idea did not really help their cause.

The next step to stop the all out linking extravaganza was to put a stop to the weight that was given by Page Rank and initiated a new ranking they coined “Trust Rank”. Google didn’t make a fancy toolbar to show a site’s Trust Rank instead this is how it worked: When a human viewer loads up a particular website they must ask themselves, “Does this site look trust worthy? Would I be willing to spend my money with them?” This seemed to put the emphasis back onto the quality of the site and not just who is pointing links to it.

With that said you should understand that PR doesn’t mean everything anymore but it is still nice to look at it as if you have achieved something!

Jim Trivolette
“The SEO Doctor”
Blackwood Productions

Google has been working on this technology since it purchased Transformic three years ago. They have been attempting to solve two issues:

(1) determining which web forms are worth crawling into, and

(b) filling in the values in the forms they decide to penetrate in order to retrieve the data behind them.

Radio buttons and check boxes were easy, so the real problem was dealing with free-text inputs. They needed a technology to comprehend the semantics of that particular input box to deduce potential valid inputs. Google has since addressed these problems (obviously), and is now ready to crawl the deep, invisible web.In comes the paranoiaA number of webmasters have expressed concern. If Google can now index dynamic content returned through form input, what’s next? Will it be able to pry into private intranets, unlinked pages, and the rest of the online information that as of now is hidden (rather comfortably) from the search engine giant’s sight? Google clarifies that it will still respect robots.txt files, but is this reassurance enough?

Whether the skepticism of some observers is valid or not is still debatable. They certainly bring up valid issues. With this new system, for instance, googlebots may find duplicate content that aren’t really duplicated but seem to be. Google penalizes duplicate content, so this is a major concern. Some webmasters also feel that Google, by implementing this new crawling technique, is doing what spammers do – they are inserting random/faulty text into a website’s form fields. Many webmasters may end up blocking googlebots altogether, and this defeats Google’s mission of indexing all online information there is.

On the other side of the fence, this new crawling technique may just be the right formula. Some webmasters see it as a great new development for searchers, as it will expose the deep web and give them more relevant results. Their advice to other webmasters is this: Knowing fully well that googlebot can now explore behind your HTML forms, safeguard what you need to keep out of sight. You can’t rely on just putting content that you don’t want to be indexed behind an HTML form anymore. Take measures to block it. Keep an eye on your logs, too.

Deep web and SEO

Now you might be asking – will Google’s ability to crawl through HTML forms have any effect on search engine optimization? From a purely SEO standpoint, this new development may appear insignificant at first. But look again and it just might be noteworthy. Keep in mind that the deep web is estimated to contain more than 500 times the information already visible on the web. If Google has indexed 1.4 billion web pages, then there are over 700 billion deep-web documents waiting for indexing. If just 1/8 of this turns out to be highly focused and relevant, then we stand to compete with 87 billion new content pages. This certainly seems like a brand new challenge.

Robert Bibb CEO

Blackwood Productions

A lot of people in the search engine optimization community make the most out of misspelled words, but a growing number seem to be against it, too. Their reason for disagreeing? They say it sacrifices. A site loses integrity when it is peppered by misspellings; after all, a badly written page fails to generate customer confidence. In the long run, readers lose trust in the website, and this can be catastrophic for a business trying to sell a product or service online. Still, the pro-misspelling argument is compelling. It may seem like a despicable tactic to grammar Nazis, but its effectiveness cannot be undermined. Let’s do the math. A simple search using the Wordtracker Competition Search Automation will show that some 167 people search for the phrase “SEO Visibility” per day, across major search engines. This correctly spelled version has 600+ competing pages.

Meanwhile, the misspelled version that is “SEO Visibilitly” is searched 142 times per day – less than the correct version, true, but only by 25. What’s really more interesting is the fact the competition for this misspelled word is significantly lower – there are only 7 competing pages.

So, what do you think? Is it worth it to sacrifice spelling correctness for traffic?

Ingrid Cudia
SEO columnist
Blackwood Productions

Hot on the heels of Slurp 3.0, Yahoo recently reported on April 21, 2008 another weather update calling for a few possible cloudy days for some webmasters. “Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” Yahoo said. You can read more here.

Using our client base, I have looked over the rankings of over 50 different sites in various niches that we do search engine marketing for and there is no trend to this roller coaster ride. Some sites rankings went up, others went down, some only moved a spot or two. This is pretty much normal though from what we have experienced with algorithm updates.

We knew an update would have to come pretty soon as they usually do after a software update like Slurp 3.0 because usually a major update like that messes with the original ranking system. Over the next few days we will all just have to watch and see what happens, as we know that yahoo is trying to break out of their old mold of just being an email & news server.

Web 2.0 Expo

In other news there is a Web 2.0 expo going on in San Francisco right now. For those that are going, went, or are there now it should be an exciting time. Yahoo has sent members of their team such as Ari Balogh, Yahoo! Chief Technology Officer, Neal Sample, Chief Architect of the Open Platform, and Dustin Whittle, Technical Yahoo! and symfony evangelist to speak as well as an appearance of Google’s Matt Cutts who is doing a Q&A. Matt Cutts also stated this on his blog “I’m also doing a short keynote (ten minutes) on Friday speaking about “What Google Knows About Spam.” I’m struggling with what exactly to say. On one hand, Google knows a lot about spam. On the other hand, I don’t want to disclose things that would benefit people that try to spam. I’m sure I’ll come up with something by Friday.” For those wanting more information you can go to the Web 2.0 Expo website and read more

 
Jim Trivolette
“The SEO Doctor”
Blackwood Productions