SEO Junkie

I just came across a WMW thread titled Datacenter Watch: June 5, 2006 that rustybrick pointed out on his blog. This 25-page thread has been tracking the SERPs at various datacenters since June 5th. According to the thread, Google SERPs seem to be moving back and forth. Plus many “sandboxed” sites are getting out of Sandbox.

As far as I’m concerned, lots of spam and MFA sites have been appearing in Google which are mostly now replaced with authority sites at the top positions. Google has strengthened some of its filters and much emphasis seems to be on topical links.

Sounds like they are coming to a major update soon?

Detecting a fake PR is fairly simple. If you think that a particular site is showing a fake PR, then simply take a look at its cache version on Google.

For example, http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php is showing a PR6 and you want to confirm whether they are showing a fake PR or not.

To do so, you go to Google and run the cache: command as follows:

cache:http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php

OR

http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache%3Awww.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php

Either way, you will see the cache of http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/. That means that the site in question is most probably faking its PR6.

In addition, they are either doing a 301 / 302 redirect to http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ directly or using cloaking.

To find out whether it is doing a 301 / 302 redirect, you have to look at its HTTP Header. Go to http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php and type in http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php and press Submit button. You will see the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Date => Wed, 07 Jun 2006 11:01:35 GMT
Server => Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2
X-Powered-By => PHP/4.4.1RC2-dev
Vary => Host
Connection => close
Content-Type => text/html

It shows that the site is NOT doing a 301 / 302 redirect since the HTTP Status code it is returning is 200 OK. So, it is doing the redirect via Cloaking. It is only redirecting the GoogleBot to http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ with either a 301 or 302 Status code on the basis of its IP address or User Agent field.

It is an indicator that http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php is faking a PR6.

I just came across a WMW thread named AdWords to Receive New Feature: Ad Scheduling, where eWhisper, one of WMW moderators pointed out that Google would release a new feature called “Ad Schedualing” in June this year.

According to the thread:

Ad Scheduling is Google’s word for ‘Day Parting’.

This is a feature where one can list the time of day and days of the week they wish their ads to run. Google will automatically start and stop the ads based upon advertiser settings.

In addition, the advertiser will be able to change Max CPCs based upon time considerations and it would definitely be one of those ‘wow’ offerings as eWhisper said.

According to the news, Ask.com is wading into the blogosphere after Google, Ice Rocket, Sphere, Technorati and Yahoo.

On Thursday, the Oakland, Calif.-based search site plans to add a Blogs & Feeds tab to its Internet search tools menu and to more thoroughly integrate its search engine with its online news aggregation site, Bloglines.

Daniel Read, Ask.com’s VP of consumer products and user experience said:

The reason we’re getting into blog search is it’s the fastest growing content type on the Web.

Ask Blogs & Feeds Search lets users query three different categories:

1. blog posts,
2. RSS feeds, and
3. a selection of around 7,000 news sources

Also, it allows queries to be sorted using additional criteria including date, popularity, or a combination of the two. This can be particularly useful for locating recent blog posts.

Ask Blogs & Feeds Search relies on another measure of collective wisdom to identify relevant blog posts–the subscription data submitted by the hundreds of thousands of Bloglines users.

Via CNET comes news that Google has launched its first mashup - a map-based Web site with information about earth-friendly locations in five of the U.S.’s top travel destinations.

 According to Luanne Calvert, creative director at Google:

The site, at maps.google.com/green, features information on and video tours of spots in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Orlando, Fla., as well as tips for “traveling green” during the summer using Google Maps.

 She further explained:

By “green” Google means “things that are earth friendly,” That includes “restaurants that are about sustainable living” and “a car service in New York that only uses (gas-electric hybrid) Prius vehicles,”

They will certainly get more and more people to use Google Maps to get around this summer.

This tool crawls your entire site and then analyzes all your pages for duplicate content. It shows similarity percentage among all pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in major search engines and consequently they can penalize your site for duplicate content.

The higher the similarity, the more likely that you will zapped by them

Below is its screenshot and I think the tool doesn’t require any how-to as it is quite simple.

Download Site Wide Duplicate Content Analyzer (2.29 MB)

If you have any comment, questions or anything else, please let me know.

P.S – This tool is NOT intended for large websites and has a lot that can be improved.

UPDATE (8/05/2006)

This tool is NOT working at the moment as the Web-based PHP script that used to compare the % of duplicate content among pages for it has been disabled by the host since it was causing a high load on the server. It won’t work till I get a dedicated server of my own to host it and update this tool. Thanks!

UPDATE (5/26/2006)

I just updated the tool and fixed “Overflow” errors and the like. I think that it can be used for small to mid-sized websites now.

If you want to tell me your suggestions or experience problems using Duplicate Content Analyzer or have found a bug, please feel free to write to sufyaaan AT gmail DOT com.

Channel 4 News posted a video of Q&A session with Larry Page & Eric Schmidt. Larry Page, one of Google’s founders answered questions from the press.

The answer - artificial intelligence - with search engines so powerful they would understand “everything in the world”. It’s the dream of Larry Page - one of Google’s founders and now a multi-billionaire.

RustyBrick also blogged about the Q&A session with the Google “heads of state”

They talk about how artificial intelligence will change the future of search. They also discuss the “do no evil” but yet Google does evil in China, which Google responded to that the US government also does the same thing, which was replied to that it wasn’t a good response. They also talk about privacy, specifically with gmail and discuss how the tradeoff of convenience and privacy must be the right balance.

Also, there is an interesting thread titled Larry Page sets out his Vision at WMW that is worth a read.

Again, Aaron Wall comes up with an excellent interview of Kim Krause Berg. Kim is a popular and well respected usability expert who is the owner of Cre8pc.com, Cre8asiteForums.com and co-founder of Cre8asite Webmaster Resources Directory.

She is also the first person who has ever offered blog usability review services.

If you are a usability junkie, then it IS a must read for you.

Today, RustyBrick wrote about a WMW thread titled Yahoo - Where to Start with Link SEO. The thread is focused on how to build links that Yahoo! would find important.

He further pointed out:

I’ll summarize some of the points, but the thread is worth a read…

Get ODP/Dmoz links
Get related directory links
Trade links with related but not competing businesses
Send out articles for other sites to syndicate (include links in them back to you)
Use Yahoo!’s Site Explorer Tool
Link bait!
Get on the good side of bloggers
KEY: Try to get the attention of local media

Now, don’t these all work at also Google & MSN? Or maybe not…

That’s very true. It is a known fact today that some of the links that works wonder in one search engine may not be as important in the eyes of the other. For example; site wide links still helps in achieving top rankings in MSN Search but Google discount them and they are useless.

I just read about Google to have released an AJAX framework to enable software developers to build AJAX-enabled applications using Java language with GWT (Google Web Toolkit).

According to them:

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

This is bound to become popular soon, as it promises to make AJAX available to the masses.