| LED Digest 2322: Underhanded Yahoo! Crawlers? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. January 10, 2007 Issue no. 2322 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ===== NEW ======================= --== Google Reading CSS Files ==-- ~ Nancy Cardinali "...some web masters may be penalized by black hat SEO use of their css file." ==== CONTINUING ================= ---== What is Yahoo! Slurp Doing? ==-- ~ Dave Mead "...it could be looking for microformats using the rel=tag attribute." ~ Derrick Wheeler "...you might be inadvertently linking to these URLs from a rogue page deep within your website." --== An SEO Guide - is it Possible? ==-- ~ Shaun Johnston "...I recommend a redefinition of SEO as follows..." --== Online Marketing for Classical Musicians ==-- ~ Brett Simpson "...our attention spans have dwindled to fractions of a second..." --== Linking Requests ==-- ~ William Ernest Waites "...the true value...of a link is to help visitors to your site..." ~ Tom Anson "...efforts to educate [the misinformed] have proven futile." <Moderator Comment> --== Google on Linking ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "...you have to know which links really CAN pass value." ========== NEW =================================== From: Nancy Cardinali Subject: Google now reads CSS files? Don't know how many of you read this in the 'Axandra Weekly Search Engines Facts' newsletter for this week, but seems it might be an interesting thread. The gist is Google can now read .css files and that some web masters / designers may be penalized by black hat SEO use of their css file. Silly me, I have no idea how to do that, not that I would, but it never occurred to me. Any interesting thoughts on this one? Here's the url for the newsletter: http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter246.htm#facts Nancy Cardinali ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Dave Mead Subject: Yahoo Slurp > ... I notice Yahoo! Slurp trying to get directory > lists of files... it appears that, being unable to > obtain directory file lists, the crawler now tries > to get information by sending a query string > with the request. It seems somewhat > underhanded to me. - Will Bontrager, LED Digest 2321 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1701/55/ I could be way off base but it could be looking for microformats using the rel="tag" attribute. When these are displayed they can go to //directoryname/tag. Just a thought. I'll be interested to hear the result. Dave Mead DMWebsites.com - Affordable, quality driven, standards-based web design | SEO | Consulting. -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Derrick Wheeler Subject: Yahoo Slurp Regarding Will Bontrager's post... > The directory names are not disallowed in robots.txt, > so trying to get file lists is quite okay. But when I started > seeing requests with URI "/directoryname/?N=D" I felt > a little uneasy. The query string varies - sometimes the > same directory queried with different query strings > spaced over several days... It could be that there is a webpage Slurp crawled that is linking to these URLs directly. Any ideas on who might be linking to the URLs that are being requested? Maybe a scraper site is adding query strings to the end of URLs that it links to. Not sure why they would do that. Another thing to consider is that you might be inadvertently linking to these URLs from a rogue page deep within your website. I can check this by crawling your website with our crawler, with your permission of course. I can't imagine why Yahoo! would want to add strings to your URLs and request them. Maybe it is a form of testing how servers / websites respond to requests for URLs with additional query strings as a way of learning how to filter out URLs with tracking strings. Let me know if you would like me to crawl your site to see if there are internal links to these pages. Best, Derrick Wheeler, Director, Search Marketing Senior Search Strategist Acxiom Digital www.acxiomdigital.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Shaun Johnston Subject: SEO guide > I think you can get a quick overview of a marketplace > rather quickly for free by using something like Jim Boykin's > top 10 analysis tool http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool > or something like my SEO for Firefox extension > http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html - Aaron Wall, LED Digest 2321 On looking at Jim Boykin's top 10 analysis tool, I must say my jaw dropped. So much valuable data pouring in like a river. Awe-full. The Firefox tools I had already picked up -- again, great. Thank you. About keeping things simple, I liked these New Year's resolution from Click Analytics -- ------------------ "Don't waste time gathering information that you cannot act on. Keep an eye on spending by defining your goals and constantly measuring your success. Make sure that important visitors can find what they are looking for. Think before changing things that have repeatedly been successful. Consider how you'll analyze the site before you start to build it. Listen to customers that take the time to contact you regarding problems with your site." Source: http://www.clicktracks.com/insidetrack/articles...12007 ------------------ There's detailed wisdom under each of these headings. Are I picking up a trend here -- Keep it simple, Keep your eye focused on the ball, Be goal and not data focused. I omitted from the above list their first resolution -- be open to your web analysis showing you something surprising. Perhaps that's not just the obvious truism I at first thought. At risk of pointing out how far behind everyone else I am, I recommend a redefinition of SEO as follows: 1. Review one-page summaries of SEO data, as in Aaron's page, and run one's eye over it for patterns. The skill here is pattern-recognition. 2. On the basis of those patterns, define goals and then another one-page data dump that will track just those goals. The skill here is designing and constructing that one-page data dump. It would have to include trends in historical data, as I get for ranking from Web Ceo. 3. Note a date on the calendar for looking at that dump. The skill here is to not look at the data before or after that date, just on that date, and not again until the next time. Can we give SEO a human face? Instead of boasting to clients how we continuously analyze every possible shred of data, perhaps we should be selling our talent for pattern recognition, based on experience. Maybe we should present ourselves more like doctors diagnosing than as technologists analyzing. This is how I feel I function for my clients. Can LED firm up something like this? Aaron seems to be halfway to setting up a set of tools that would allow us to set up a data-page matched to any goal to be tracked. We would help formalize the pattern-matching ability. And maybe suggest fees for such work. Cheers, Shaun Johnston -------- new post - new topic -------- [the discussion, "Online Marketing for Classical Musicians" ended at issue 2309. Brett picks it up again here with this post. -ed] ------------------- From: Brett Simpson Subject: Marketing classical music Hi David Spahr, > This video on youtube of Canon in D by > Johann Pachebel is the fourth most viewed > youtube video ever with almost 12 million views... - David Spahr, LED Digest 2309 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1405/55/ Ok, yes, maybe you could call this Classical, but I doubt it! > As far as the larger market goes... I'm not persuaded that > serious music can compete for eyeballs (or eardrums) in > sites and communities like MySpace, much less Youtube. - David Yancey, LED Digest 2308 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1403/55/ You've confirmed the point that David Yancey was talking about, the problem is you can't compete with pure Classical Music, as every kid (including college students in Korea) has to turn it into a 4/4 time rock and roll piece! Anyone serious about classical would not listen to that, or look at that video - longer than about 10 seconds. This goes way beyond popular culture, the problem is our attention spans have dwindled to fractions of a second, way to short for anyone to appreciate the emotion in a classical music piece. What's behind this 'short attention span', have a look at tv, fast moving cuts and action shots drive attention span lower. Having real communication (hopefully email counts), and slowing down increases attention span. I can tell you now, it's harder and harder to find younger people at the Symphony in my town, and it will probably be like that until someone starts learning how to apply a better method for educating children instead of 'TELEVISION' For more info see this bio on Jerry Mander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander and his book: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television Brett Simpson http://www.thedreamtime.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: William Ernest Waites Subject: Uncomfortable link request > I have recently received a request from a colleague and > it made me very uncomfortable... it made me think he is > working with some less than ethical SEO companies... > How would you suggest that I respond to this individual? - Mark Bishop, LED Digest 2320 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1696/55/ My understanding is that ANY invisible text on a page is considered by the SEs, prima facie, to be spam. So what ever might be gained by the link could be more than defeated by an invisible link. More important, the true value, in my opinion, of a link is to help visitors to your site - and inversely to the other site - locate information that might be helpful to them. Theoretically, it should have a logical relationship to the subject matter on the linked-from site. The only reason I can imagine for making a link invisible, so only spiders can read it, is because the site to be linked to contains content that you would not be comfortable sending your visitors to, for whatever reason. It is perfectly legitimate to decline a link for that or any reason. It is, after all, your site and your business and you must control its performance. William Ernest Waites Eyewriter -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Anson Subject: Linking requests I'm sure that there are many other LEDers who could answer the question better than I, but I'd like to respond to Mark Bishop's question (LED Digest 2320) about educating his colleague about SEO. And, while I clearly have a problem of being pedantic on other subjects, I think I'm on safe ground with respect to SEO. I've had associates get caught up in some worthless-to-terrible ideas about SEO in the past, and efforts to educate them have proven futile. Wherever they may acquire these ideas -- and, however bad they are -- they seem to come super-glued. They sound so great -- even vital -- that it's almost impossible to shake them. It seems to me that Mark's best option here is to express his general concern about this linking strategy to his colleague, and refer him to LED Digest and High Rankings Forum. I'm sure there are other resources out there, as well, but these two would give a great background on the subject. If Mark could find the specific topics in these resources and direct his colleague to them, that would be another plus. But, I would avoid spending much time trying to explain why this linking strategy is not good. Keep it simple, and let the "experts" reason with his colleague. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com <Moderator Comment> Here's a link to Jill Whalen's forum at High Rankings: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/ I also recommend subscribing to Jill's newsletter, the High Rankings Advisor: http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm Really good info here - Jill includes a Q & A section that can be helpful for common search engine marketing dilemmas / quandaries / problems. Here's a link to the subscribe page: http://www.highrankings.com/subscribe.htm Definitely worth your time to subscribe! -Adam -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Google linking > Going by the logic from your first point, if my golf club site had > a page about cool ring tones Tiger Woods uses and I link to > an affiliate or lead gen page... get my point? If it's on-page > content that matters then relevance doesn't ... if it's not then > it does. So which is it? - Rae Deisler, LED Digest 2317 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1686/55/ I don't see how you get to "if it's on-page content that matters then relevance doesn't". How do you expect search engines to judge relevance if not by content? But there is a difference between embedding a link to a ring-tones site on a page about golf clubs and creating content somewhere on the golf clubs site that happens to have a link pointing to a ring-tones page. If your link is not reciprocated, there is no reason to suspect it. Search engines know a certain amount of reciprocation tends to occur naturally. Where people shoot themselves in the foot is by: 1) Depending on reciprocal links 2) Depending on free article submission for links 3) Depending on free directories for links 4) Depending on forums for links 5) Depending on comment forms on blogs, guest-books, and similar content for links 6) Depending on paid links Even if a site were to implement all of these fairly common, standard, oft-suggested ideas, their days are pretty much done. That doesn't mean they don't still work in some cases. It means there are active filters the search engines use to ferret out such links and prevent them from passing value. If you're relying on these types of links for traffic, that should be okay as long as you get the traffic. If you're relying on these links to "build PageRank", you're wasting your time. Unless you intend to sell links (for which some people base prices on Toolbar PR) the Toolbar tells you nothing of value. A PR 1 site has as much chance of ranking for an expression as a PR 9 site. We all have sites that outrank Google, Yahoo!, and other high PR sites for many expressions every day. I've spent the past few weeks browsing complaint threads in forums and discussion groups. There are many, many, MANY Webmasters who have lost listings in Google, whose pages are now showing as Supplemental Results, who are confused and angry because they have lost traffic. The other day I finally saw an opportunity to ask Matt Cutts for as definitive an answer as I felt he could give on what's happening. He has been reluctant to speak at the level of detail people want him to. I asked one of the most convoluted questions of my career, giving him virtually no room for a graceful exit. Matt doesn't lie, but he won't answer a tough question if it's chasing the algorithm and he can avoid doing so. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-search-stats-for-2006/ Here is his answer (his reference to "PageRank" is to INTERNAL PageRank -- not what you see in the Toolbar): ---------------------- "Michael Martinez, I can try to talk more about things like supplemental more. Usually it's not because I'm trying to sidestep, but because I've said the high-order bits already. For example, the main thing that determines presence in the supplemental index is PageRank. Not enough links for a page to make it into the regular web index? Then it's likely to be an issue of not enough PageRank to that page. The page used to do well and now it's in the supplemental results? It could be that links that previously counted aren't as trusted anymore. For example, if someone's doing a co-op link exchange, or buying links, or reciprocal linking to excess, that's the sort of thing where those links might not be counting as much as they used to." ---------------------- What is "reciprocal linking to excess"? I don't expect him to say, but I would say that if all your links are reciprocals, that's "to excess". They have found ways to filter a LOT of links. There are many, many angry and frustrated Webmasters now. For weeks I've been telling people to get more links from the Main Index and that should help them get their pages out of the Supplemental Index. You should not need many such links. Maybe 3-5. Several other SEOs have spoken up in support of the low number. For those of you who are not operating ring-tones affiliate pages, but who instead sell golf clubs, I would say you should be able to get some good links. In my opinion, however, I don't think you'll get them from the ring-tones affiliate pages. Everyone wants to know how to get those valuable links. What I've been trying to explain to people is that first you have to know which links really CAN pass value. They will be the links that are hard to get. Think about who you would link to if you absolutely knew that linking to the wrong people would cause you to lose rankings. I mean, exaggerate, in your mind, to the point of absurdity, what the consequences of linking out undesirably would be. Under those circumstances, who would you link to? Don't think in terms of Yahoo!, CNN, and Whitehouse.gov. Think in terms of, "Well, my cousin Greg has a great guitar site but my friend George's ring-tones affiliate store is just going to have to live without my link." Your site should be every bit as trustworthy and linkworthy as the kind of sites you would recommend to anyone who would make your life miserable if you didn't give them your best, most honest recommendation. You don't have to be Picasso. You should be a legitimate artist offering your best work possible. That is the standard that tells you where to seek links. But what I tell people -- what I have done for years -- is that I link out freely without asking for reciprocation. In my opinion, if you do that enough, exercising good sense in your selections, other people will link to your site because it's a useful resource. You may need to buy some PPC ads just to bring in some visitors. But if you convert them into your supporters, they will help you. Give them a reason to become your advocates. Make their experience on your site a great one. Then you don't have to worry about whether you're tripping link filters. Michael Martinez - "Cuando Maria canta, ella canta para mi" http://www.michael-martinez.com/ http://michael-martinez.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown." - Chinese Proverb |
