Reuben Yau

I’m using Scratchback. You’ll probably see the widget on the right with the links that say Get In My Top Spots. Those are the text links that you can buy for just one dollar.

The last person to buy a text link automatically goes to the top of the list. Right now the widget is set to show five links, but if the inventory gets filled I can increase the number of links, up to a maximum of 20.

This widget displays prominently on all pages of this blog. Most of my visitors are webmasters and SEOs who are interested in Google Analytics and search engine optimization.

So now’s the time to dig behind the couch cushions, scrape those dimes and nickels together and buy a text link for $1.00.

Note that these links use nofollow so Google won’t drop my PageRank :D

I don’t usually take much notice of Live search traffic to this blog because they usually don’t drive much if any traffic at all. But I decided to look today and noticed a few weird entries in Google Analytics. I had a bunch of referring keywords from live.com with 1 visit, 2 page views and 0 time on site. Click on the thumbnail to see the full size image:

When you see patterns like that, you have to assume that it’s a bot that’s hitting your site. I downloaded my logs for the past week and took a look. To my surprise there were entries like this:

65.55.165.26 - -
[29/Sep/2007:12:12:45 -0400]
"GET /black-people-on-ebay-again/ HTTP/1.0"
200 25905 www.reubenyau.com
"http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=people&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" "-"

If you’re not used to reading raw logs, the important items here are the IP address in the first line and the referrer in the 5th line.

Using whois.arin.net you can see that the IP address belongs to Microsoft:

OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US

OrgTechHandle: MSFTP-ARIN
OrgTechName: MSFT-POC
OrgTechPhone: +1-425-882-8080
OrgTechEmail: iprrms@microsoft.com

This type of behavior is certainly not in the spirit of the internet and something that’s definitely quite annoying.

So why is Microsoft referrer spamming me? I start searching on forums and I start finding that I’m not the only one being targeted here.

http://ekstreme.com/thingsofsorts/blogging/yell-if-microsofts-livecom-spammed-you-too

http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/3424476.htm

http://www.seo-scoop.com/2007/11/13/past-time-for-msn-to-pony-up-to-the-real-truth-about-referrer-spam/

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2007/11/13/microsoft-needs-to-quit-fucking-with-my-adsense-scripts/

So as it turns out, msndude from webmasterworld apologizes and basically says “don’t worry, be happy - and btw, if you block it, you might get banned”. Here’s the actual quote:

The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on
addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

HUH? Excuse me? You have a bot that’s not exactly being very nice but I’m not allowed to block it? What kind of practice is that? I don’t run a spammy MFA site. I don’t do anything shady, so why should I have to sit here and have my stats polluted for absolutely nothing in return. If Live was sending me traffic I could perhaps turn a blind eye, but considering that they’ve been on a pretty good downward trend recently, you’d think that they’d want to do a better job of appeasing webmasters. Here’s their traffic over the past few months according to quantcast:

As of tonight it’s being blocked. I really don’t want to play this game, but this type of behavior should not be tolerated by webmasters.

Google webmaster tools was updated on Thursday with some new features. The one that caught my eye was Sitelinks located under Dashboard > Links > Sitelinks. Here’s a screenshot showing the new feature, see if you can spot where I think another updated is needed.

Hint: Hmmm… looks like the developer didn’t have English as his first language.

Ok, I’ll stop poking fun, on to some proper stuff:

From the blog post:

Selecting pages to appear as sitelinks is a completely automated process. Our algorithms parse the structure and content of websites and identify pages that provide fast navigation and relevant information for the user’s query…… occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users.

1) If Google has not yet crawled the entire site, it’s choosing the sitelinks based on partial data.

2) How does Google define “fast navigation”? Is it referencing the time spent downloading a page? The number of clicks to that page, which is deemed to be relevant to the users’ query? Or perhaps this was just worded in a strange way and what it really means is that by providing the sitelinks they’re providing a faster way for users to get to the relevant information on my site from the SERP.

3) I like that I can exclude a page, but why can’t I add pages as sitelinks? This would be much more useful for webmasters and users, since site owners will most likely know where their traffic goes and more to the point, where they really want to drive traffic.

4) If pages become outdated, it also stands to reason that there may be some new pages which are more valuable, but haven’t been automatically chosen to become sitelinks. (Yet another Google algo to look into…)

5) If pages that are listed as sitelinks become unavailable, I’d hope that Google will automatically remove the sitelinks.

6) Since Google only displays 4 sitelinks in the SERPs but offers a bigger list in GWT, it would be nice to see some examples of queries that bring up different combinations of sitelinks.

7) The anchor text of the sitelinks uses the first 25 characters of the title tag of the page it’s linking to. I’d like to be able to edit that link text to make it more useful for users and ensure some of the links aren’t truncated.

This brings on an interesting point, is it worth optimizing the title tags of pages that are listed in sitelinks? Would it make any difference? All of the ones I’ve seen are pretty accurate and don’t need adjusting.

I was reading Bruce Clay’s September Newsletter and came across a couple of inaccuracies in Jim Sterne’s web analytics article, specifically this part:

Google won’t report on downloads of files like PDF’s, jpg’s of Flash. You want to know about server error messages? You have to look to the pay-to-play vendors.

Well Google Analytics may not give you those reports out of the box, but it’s not too difficult to put these two solutions together:

1) Tracking files downloaded from your site:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=27242

Caveat - this method only reports on people clicking links on your website which are tagged with this code. If someone remotely links to a file on your site, none of the javascript web analytics packages will report on that traffic.

2) Tracking 404 error pages:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2006/09/tip-tracking-404-pages.html

This could also be used to create error pages and tracking for 5XX errors.

And on a side note, for those of you who use Wordpress, here’s a handy way to create a custom 404 page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_an_Error_404_Page

If you have your Google Analytics code in a footer include file, you could create a second include and call it from the 404.php.

If you’re going to try to promote a search conference, the worst possible way to promote it is to comment spam a blogger in the SEM community. Since I have math comment protection they had to have at least made some effort to fill out the form manually (unless there’s a workaround I didn’t know about).

The event talks about meeting gurus and learning the ins and outs of search engine marketing from the top experts. Do they think that comment spamming their event is an acceptable practice? Were they trying to get me to attend? I certainly never buy anything from a spammer (to discourage the practice).

What would you think if SMX or pubcon started comment spamming?

I’m going to hold this comment in my askimet bucket for now in case I decide to want to contact them or name them publically.

I used to write about my Volkswagen Beetle on this site before I turned this into an SEM blog at the end of 06. Interestingly enough, within the past few weeks Google decided to change the results for the search query [related:www.reubenyau.com]

Not long after I changed the content to a completely different topic, I had a couple of posts (1, 2) go popular on digg which generated many topical backlinks. Shortly after that the posts started to rank for much broader terms, especially the Analytics post and today it’s still generating backlinks and good traffic. My Wordpress post was also quoted by Matt Cutts in his ppt presentation at Wordcamp this year.

I’m shooting off on a tangent here, so bare with me. Google indexes .ppt files and can display them in HTML for convenience (I love that feature) , although the written out URL within the presentation doesn’t count as a backlink, according to Google webmaster tools. I often wonder if one day search engines will also count written out URLs as backlinks, even if they aren’t coded as a hyperlink.

I’m pretty sure that the related: query results returned are just a snapshot in time, similar to the PageRank value given in the Toolbar. I’m also wondering if, just like the link: command, the results are somewhat cropped.

Well… at least my touchgraph results are a little more contextually relevant now.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a position at ECNext. I will be responsible for the SEO of some very large websites including Manta, AccessMyLibrary, Goliath and approx 40 other sites. Each contain many millions of pages so optimizing them is going to be fun and very rewarding. These sites have huge growth potential and I’m excited to be working alongside some very bright individuals.

Large scale website optimization is very different to regular SEO, although many of the same principals still apply. As time goes by, I hope to post about some of these issues here.

I’ve very much enjoyed working for Pittsburgh Internet Consulting and helping the company grow, but unfortunately this was an opportunity too good to miss. I wish them all the best in future, they’re a solid whitehat shop with a top notch crew.

This move also means that I will have to give up the badges for my Google AdWords Professional Qualification and the recent Microsoft adExcellence program, since they’re tied more to the client, than the person who took the test.

This also happens to be my one thousandth post on SEOrefugee, since my blog posts are also syndicated to the forum via RSS.

Over the next couple of weeks posts are going to be scarce as I wrap up things in Pittsburgh and move the family out to Columbus, OH.

David Naylor recently reported that the new Microsoft AdCenter accreditation program will be named Microsoft adExcellence. Searchengineland reported that it’s going to be available later this year, however, I was able to join the pilot program running from June 29th to July 20th. The testing is done online by prometric.com, just like the Google AdWords Professional qualification. You’re tested on your knowledge of pay per click marketing and specifically Microsoft AdCenter features, functionality and policies. The test contains 50 questions and is scheduled to last an hour, although I completed mine in about 30 minutes.

I believe I am one of the first people to have completed and passed the test, so I’m able to proudly display this new badge.

I’m not as brave as Robert Scoble to post my cell on this blog, but Grandcentral provides users (and myself) with a nice alternative. I decided to participate in the beta for Grandcentral and signed up just prior to the Google acquisition. It has a range of really neat features such as:

• Choose a unique Grandcentral number which you can choose to publish or not
• Different ring tones for different groups of contacts
• Different announcements
• Access voicemail through a web interface
• Choose which phone (cell, home, office, etc) you want to receive inbound calls
• Set up rules for groups of users so they can or cannot call certain phones
• Ability to screen calls by sending them all to voicemail
• SPAM filter to automatically block or screen calls
• Email/SMS notification of new voicemails
• *@grandcentral.com email forwarding
• Webcall button so people can call you from your website

Here’s a video demonstrating some of the features by the founders:

The beta program has now moved to invitation only although I started with 5 invites, I now only have 3 left. If you’d like an invite, give me a nice, juicy (that’ll appear in technorati) link and send me a quick message. How’s that for linkbait? ;-)

Hey Michael, here’s a nice meaty question you can get your chops around for your blank blog post :)

During your recent podcast with Jason Calacanis he asked if it was you that started the the negative campaign against him. So much these days is talked about reputation management from the standpoint of defending a company, but there’s not much info about the other side. So, if you were to start a negative PR campaign, or were trying to combat a reputation management campaign, what would you do?