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U.S. begins crackdown on spam - Microsoft, New York sue for US$18.8-billion - Toronto company is among the targets. -
From 
George W. Bush signed legislation on Tuesday setting fines and prison terms for peddlers who use spam, after Jan. 1, 2004, to sell porn, cheap loans and virility pills. In June, Microsoft moved to curtail unsolicited e-mail by launching 15 lawsuits in the United States and Britain against companies that sent more than two billion spam messages to its customers.
A Canadian company has been caught up in a crackdown on some of the world's largest junk e-mail distributors launched in the United States yesterday by the New York State Attorney-General and Microsoft Corp.
Teslianet Inc., a Toronto-based business, is one of a number of defendants named in a US$18.8-million civil lawsuit filed by Microsoft after a six-month investigation with the New York Attorney-General's office.
Teslianet is "allegedly responsible for millions of illegal spam messages that advertised potentially offensive adult content," according to Microsoft, the world's largest software company and provider of the MSN Hotmail e-mail service.
HTML Toolbox Free Sample From
Grokker - New Desktop Search Application - FREE Trial From
Groxis is set to launch the newest version of its desktop software that can retrieve results from multiple search engines and instantly categorize them. A new tie-in for Google and an SDK are next.
Groxis Inc. on Monday will unveil an alternative way to search the Web and visualize the relationship of the query results.
Called Grokker 2, the desktop software adds new twists to traditional Web search-engine results. Rather than returning a simple list of results, Grokker groups them into various categories that are displayed in a visual map of icons, allowing users to drill down to find specific sites or content.
Search engines make you comb over page after page of results, but Grokker frees you from the page rage! Say you’re looking for a tour guide of Paris, just search for “Paris” and Grokker quickly delivers all your results organized by subject. Right away this saves you time searching.
"Danny Sullivan Explains Google Penalties From http://webproworld.com
Sparks of Controversy There was a substantial amount of controversy in the WebProWorld forums regarding what Marissa Mayer, the Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, told me at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago last week. She said, “If you dropped in rankings, go back and look at who you linked to and who’s linking to you. If any of these people are using spam techniques, they're the reason your site no longer appears on Google.”
The subject of controversy here, as you can probably guess, is whether Google really is penalizing websites based on what sites are linking to them – a factor that is often beyond the control of website owners. This is a concern because if Google uses this method to determine a site's rank then your competitors could easily sabotage your site's ranking by linking to you from spam sites.
Due to the brevity of our interview (I was literally walking Marissa to her taxi) I didn’t have a chance to ask her to clarify her statement. That's why I called Danny today.
Danny says… Danny Sullivan is editor of http://SearchEngineWatch.com and also organized and moderated the Search Engine Strategies Conference. I asked his opinion on Marissa’s comment regarding what readers should do if their sites drop significantly on Google.
“I saw that headline summary in SearchEngineGuide, if I remember correctly, and I noticed that it freaked some people out,” Danny replied. “I remember [Marissa] saying that because it sounded really significant, but I took Marissa’s comment slightly different. I think what she probably meant was not that who’s linking to you can hurt you – the reason why is because it’s very easy for you to hurt your competitors. That’s why it’s a terrible thing to use for relevancy. What I do think happened is [Google is] looking at links in a different fashion. If you’ve been in a neighborhood that’s been helping you previously, [it] might not be helping you now.”
Danny says that doesn’t necessarily mean Google is penalizing you for inbound links. It just means that those links aren’t counting as much towards your Google ranking.
Is Google getting smarter? Don’t be surprised if you notice Google getting smarter about links. “In the past, every single link was counted for something,” Danny says. “Perhaps now Google’s still looking at the links but not counting them as much. They’re perhaps not giving you as much credit as they used to.”
Won’t You Be My Google Neighbor? Danny believes Marissa’s comment was misinterpreted, and he thinks there’s another question at hand here. “I guess it comes back to: does the community have more of an influence now than in the past? I suppose so. On one hand, yes, but on the other hand, Google may simply be redefining how it determines a community and what that community is worth. [Google] has always looked at who’s linking to you… I think it’s still doing that, but it’s using a different scoring method…”
So was it all just a misunderstanding? Danny thinks so. “I honestly don’t think she’s lying,” he says, noting that Marissa is a very credible representative of Google. “Marissa is a wonderful resource. She’s really, really good, but she doesn’t deal with the webmaster side as much.”
Danny believes that Marissa knows what she’s talking about but perhaps she didn’t choose her words correctly.
What did she mean, then?
“I think what she probably meant was that who links to you counts, and yes, that’s always been the case, but who links to you doesn’t count as much as it did in the past.”
Who Gets Penalized? Is the penalty completely out of the question? Probably not. “If Google were penalizing sites for getting links, then that is a significant repercussion,” Danny says. “I have no doubt that in some cases [Google] might penalize, but the criteria would be really high.” Danny could understand a site getting penalized “if you’re running fifty websites that have no reason to exist other than linking to themselves or if [Google] sees other stuff that makes them think, ‘These links are odd! Not only should we not count these links, but we should do something to this website, period!’”
”It’s too easy to make mistakes.” But as far as the everyday link exchange, that’s innocent enough in his eyes. When it comes to link exchanges, “it’s too easy to make mistakes,” Danny says. And he believes the people who run Google understand that. After all, they are only human!
"Some" Google Answers From
Garrett French | Daily Note - An Exclusive Interview. Yesterday, I caught up with Marissa Mayer, the Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, and asked, "What should people do if their sites were totally dumped from Google?"
She replied, "If you dropped in rankings, go back and look at who you linked to and who's linking to you. If any of these people are using spam techniques, they're the reason your site no longer appears on Google."
Looking for ways to boost your Google ranking? Marissa says, "Have unique useful content. Have sitemaps. Make your site easy to reach with a text-based browser. Give your site a hierarchal structure. Have a single domain with mini-sites within, rather than having lots of sites."
Usability is a Must! Marissa says, "It's a good idea to design sites that are usable from any browser. That's something that Google may be taking into consideration - your cross-browser compatibility."
Also from WebProNews -
There's been a lot of anger and frustration since the Florida Updates. Apparently, Google understands the fact that people's businesses rely on Google results. Craig Nevill-Manning, Google's Senior Research Scientist, said, for what it's worth, "I apologize for the roller coaster. We're aware that changes in the algorithm affect people's livelihoods. We don't make changes lightly." Well, at least that's good to know.
Congress approves anti-spam legislationFrom
Congress on Monday approved the first national bill outlawing the most annoying forms of junk e-mail for cheap loans, prescription drugs and other pitches.
But critics of the bill, which President Bush is expected to sign into law this month, say it lacks the punch of stronger state legislation that it would replace. It also could endanger consumers because it authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to establish a "do-not-spam" registry, they say.
That registry, containing millions of consumer e-mail addresses, will become "an irresistible target" for spammers and hackers to crack, says Edward Naughton, a high-tech attorney.
The bill, given approval by the House Monday and the Senate last month, is considered the stiffest of a handful of federal anti-spam measures. Under the bill, e-mailers of billions of pornography and get-rich-quick schemes would face jail time and multimillion-dollar fines. Consumers could opt out of receiving spam.
Read the entire article HERE!
Scroogle & Google-Watch.org
On or about November 17, 2003, countless English-language ecommerce sites no longer appeared near the top of the rankings when their owners used the search terms that they considered most important. Four days later, I discovered that by adding a nonsense exclusion term, the links returned by Google shifted dramatically, and the results were very close to what these site owners had come to expect over the last few months.
A filter was in place, and it could be defeated by using one, or sometimes two, exclusion terms. If an exclusion term consists of characters that would never be found on a web page, then normally the addition of this excluded term to your usual terms will make little or no difference. Under normal circumstances, a search for callback service should return the same links as a search for callback service -qwzxwq because no sane web page has the term qwzxwq on the page.
By Wednesday of the following week, it was still working. I didn't expect this, and started this Scroogle site using a script that compared the top 100 results from Google with exclusion terms, against the top 100 results for the same terms, but without the exclusion. I began recording the terms entered by visitors to the site, along with the "casualty rate" for those terms. This rate is the number of links in the unfiltered top 100 that were missing from the filtered top 100.
It's a mess. Google's integrity is on the line. If they keep this up, all their dreams of riches from stock options will vanish. Who's in charge at the Googleplex anyway? There isn't much time.
Google Watch - A look at how Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy policies are undermining the Web.
December
Search Engine News From
www.searchengine-news.com
Google - This past month showed us the mother-of-all-changes at Google in many ways. If you didn't get knocked out or lose position on your important keywords, count your blessings because a great many commercial web sites did! ...and incurred serious loss of traffic in the process.
Some time toward the end of October a problem developed between GoDaddy and Google's spider. For some reason it appears a change at GoDaddy blocked the Googlebot spider – resulting in sites being hosted by GoDaddy to be dropped from the Google index. Many people moved their sites to another hosting company and were reindexed within days.
Overture - NBC introduced a new search engine for their NBC.com and BravoTV.com sites which contains Overture listings at the top of the page.
Overture caves in and rejects pharmacy ads - Due to lobbying from the pharmacy industry trade groups and major clients, Overture has shut down advertisements related to online pharmacies and quit selling ads for those keywords.
Inktomi - No changes this month.
AltaVista - Now recent changes for AltaVista.
Fast / Lycos - Lycos has dumped Overture due to a contract dispute and replaced the content with ads from competitor Google. They've also accused Overture of breaching the services agreement made between them.
MSN - MSN has launched an automated news service starting with the UK, France, Spain and Italy. The new service is called MSN NewsBot.
ODP - there has been some house cleaning. We are pleased to announced that a number of our new sites submitted as far back as six months ago are now in the directory.
LookSmart - Adds Article Search
Yahoo - Many are breathlessly anticipating that December might just be the month that Yahoo finally switches over to Inktomi. Others, of course, don't want to see it happen. Yahoo has been testing on and off but, as of the end of November they have yet to switch to Inktomi for their search results.
"Website Copywriting For Search Engine Optimization" From
iNeedHits.com
Search engines will always give great importance to the quality of keywords on your website when deciding on its relevance to searchers. For this reason, webmasters will try to fit as many keywords on their page as possible, usually at the expense of readable website copy. But it is possible to optimise your site for your chosen keywords, while still having informative, easy-to-read text on your pages.
The first step is to have a headline that explains some of the benefits of your products. For example a hire car company could include the phrases, ‘affordable prices’ and ‘wide range of vehicles’ into their headline. This is far more likely to convince customers to read the whole page, rather than a simple sentence that includes your company and product names.
Many business websites will provide an index of their products and then list the features of each product. A better technique is to include the benefits of each product feature so that the customer understands how owning your particular product will improve their life. Customers will also have a better chance of finding your website in the future if they search for your brand name in combination with a product benefit that you have listed on your site.
Now that your website has well written copy that will inform and excite your customers, don’t forget to make sure that your website is in the search engines by submitting it properly.
"20 Great  Secrets" From
Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web (see www.pcmag.com/searchengines). But most people don't use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google's index, it's still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.
1. Syntax Search Tricks
2. Intitle
3. Intext
4. Link
5. Site
6. Calculator Feature
7. Spelling
8. Phone Number Lookup
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9. Google Groups
10. Google Alert
11. Google Labs
12. Google API (application programming interface)
13. Search Within a Timeframe
To read the entire article, click HERE!
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"7 Top SEO Myths" From
1. - Meta tags - At the beginning of the Internet, meta tags were originally incorporated in a site as an attempt to better assist webmasters. They were also included to help search engines discover what their site was all about. Well, as one might expect, it didn't take very long that some people found a way to short-circuit the system as it were.
We are not saying it's not worth the extra time it takes to add them in any site. After all, it only takes a few minutes to write them in the first place. Additionally, Inktomi still gives a small importance to meta tags, although there is always a possibility that that it could somehow change in the near future.
2. - Multiple domain names - ...
3. - Doorway and gateway pages - ...
4. - Resubmitting every week or every month - ...
5. - Web optimization experts are too expensive - ...
6. - We can optimize our site ourselves in house - ...
7. - Search engines are not as good as other media - ... Read the rest of the article HERE!
336-408-9075
Rich@RichsWebDesign.com
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