WebConnoisseur

We’ve all seen Google change their logo in recognition of holidays, but today marks the most dramatic change I’ve ever seen Google make to their homepage. Take a look at this screenshot (yes, this was Google’s actual homepage on March 29th):

Turns out it was a gesture to raise awareness for Earth Hour - a worldwide conservation effort where everyone turns off their lights at 8pm to 9pm on March 29th. Not sure if it will save much energy, though it probably serves as a visual indicator of those participating (having people turn off their TVs or computers from 8-9pm would probably conserve more energy).

I find the first paragraph comical because it is almost a direct stab at Blackle.com (a customized black version of Google which claims to have saved 536,046.240 Watt hours):

“[in regards to the one-day only black version of Google]… As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.”

Gotta love how Google tries to be different: once Google went black, it chose to go back.

It appears that Digg is finally closer to being purchased. The leading candidates are Google and Microsoft. While the final owner won’t be known for probably another month, the future of Digg is known:

If Google buys Digg, it will become Gigg.

Rather than trusting pesky humans to digg news stories, Google will implement an algorithm developed by a team of PhDs based on previous digg analytics data. The new algorithm will look something like this:

if (headline ((pro-Microsoft, -50, anti-Microsoft, +50) (“Apple”, +100) (any game title, +35)) + if (content contains (Scantily clad women, +85, -25) (“Hack”, +35, -5) (displays ads, -20)…

If Microsoft buys Digg, it will quickly become Dugg.

Dugg will be the result of the dust that quickly develops on Digg as it suddenly becomes uncool. To make matters worse, Microsoft will implement content restrictions like no Microsoft bashing, no discussions of Apple or Google, and all gaming diggs must be Microsoft-created games only. Within weeks, Dugg will be the wayback machine of the social news site once known as Digg.

Ask will build a competing product to Microsoft Dugg called “Doug” to add a human element to the archive, but you will have to search news stories with questions like, “What male celebrity is a little bitch?”

Never thought I’d see the day that Microsoft would make a bid for Yahoo. There’s so much overlap and the difficulties of becoming to big of a company just got bigger. I’m happy to see Google get stiffer competition, but I’m not sure how it will play out other than Microsoft immediately getting a larger share of search.

For the best coverage of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, hop on over to Search Engine Land.

I’ll be speaking at SEMpdx on March 10th at the Portland Zoo. Still trying to figure out if it is really a ploy to lock me up with the animals. “Oh… look at the cute SEO flicking boogars at the crowd.”

You can catch me at the links session with another Seattlite, SEOMoz’s Rebecca Kelley. You can also take a look at my Searchfest mini-interview with Todd Mintz where I answer these questions:

• 1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
• 2) If a newbie ask you to describe the importance of link-building, what would you tell them?
• 3) Do you see stocks backed by domain names as their principal assets (e.g. Marchex) as good investments short & long term?

Websites everywhere let their copyright footers go out of date, but you don’t expect it of the bigger, more sophisticated sites that could easily justify the 5 minutes it would take to create an automated solution. Especially search engines which crawl, index and rank billions upon billions of web pages with some of the most advanced technology in the world, built by some of the most sophisticated teams of researchers, PhDs, and programmers seen to man. So here it is, January 2nd, 2008 and all five of the top engines still think it is 2007:

Click on the search engine images to see if they’ve updated their site yet, then add a comment when they do so we can document which engines fix it first.

Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” Ironically, their closing stock price today was 666 to the penny. You can take a look yourself any any stock quote tool (use GOOG for the ticker symbol), or check out the Google Finance screenshot below:

I doubt it is the first time a stock closed at 666.00, but it is certainly more rare as most stocks over the past couple decades split long before they reach that number. Even gold closed at 666.00 early this year. I’m not superstitious, but I’m sure a number of investors taking a look at their stocks tonight will be a bit unsettled.

There’s been a flood of activity in the SEO community talking about PageRank drops and every assessment I’ve read continues to ignore the bigger question. Did the affected sites lose search engine ranks?

My fellow SEOs have long been preaching how Google Toolbar PageRank (PR) is fairly inaccurate and that PageRank is only one element, among hundreds, of Google’s algorithm. Then when Google dials down the PR on a number of sites our industry goes nuts. Wait a minute - didn’t we say PR isn’t that important? Maybe it really is. Or maybe it really is for a certain set of sites: those who sell links based on PR.

From the list of the sites affected, it appears the PR drops targeted mostly sites that sell links or were strongly interconnected with these sites. For all we know, it is simply a simple visual adjustment - a very effective tactic to hit link sellers where it hurts most, but without hurting innocent sites in the cross-fire. Though an innocent site might be concerned that their PR dropped, if their SERP ranks haven’t changed then it doesn’t really affect them because they aren’t selling links based off their PR.

So among the list of site that have been affected by the PR dial-down, regardless as to whether they sell links or not, I must ask: have any actually seen SERP rank drops?

For example: Search Engine Guide is reported to have dropped from a PR 7 to a PR 4, but when I do a Google search for “search engine,” I see them ranked #8 (ironically, Google doesn’t even rank itself on page 1).

If you work at, or have been tracking keyword ranks for any of the following affected sites, please report whether or not you have seen actual drops in rank:

Washington Post (PR7 to PR5)
Forbes (PR7 to PR5)
Seattle Times (PR6 to PR4)
Charlotte Observer (PR6 to PR4)
Sun Times (PR7 to PR5)
San Francisco Chronicle (PR7 to PR5)
New Scientist (PR7 to PR5)
Engadget (PR7 to PR5)
Copy Blogger (PR6 to PR4)
AutoBlog (PR6 to PR4)
problogger.net (PR6 to PR4)
www.tuaw.com (PR6 to PR4)
www.seroundtable.com (PR7 to PR4)
www.searchengineguide.com (PR7 to PR4)
www.searchenginejournal.com (PR7 to PR4)
www.johnchow.com (PR6 to PR4)
andybeard.eu (PR5 to PR3)
www.blogherald.com (PR6 to PR4)
(or other sites affected)

I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ve been a bit out of the SEO world this past month (vacation, filming, and upcoming announcement. I recently took the SEOmoz SEO quiz, which was kind of fun since I haven’t taken an SEO quiz in such a long time. I don’t agree 100% with all the answers and felt there are better questions to test someone’s SEO knowledge, but found it to be the best SEO quiz I’ve seen to date.

I guess I did pretty well:


SEO RockStar - 175%

Try out the quiz yourself.

Found some interesting nuggets when I decided to narrow in on Google referrer data (as reported by Omniture) from one particular high volume keyword.

The word was “lasagna” and when I dug into the Google data, I noticed some interesting things. Google shares the following data in the referrer URL. I compare each search type to the standard “lasagna” search in google (without quotes) to protect the actual traffic volume for the high-ranked website.

Google Searcher Keyword Variations:

Standard lasagna search: 100%
(this is the search I base the rest of the data on)

lasagna misspelled & clicked on google did you mean link: 74%
(this was much higher than I anticipated - people probably ignored the “g” in lasagna).

Lasagna search: 8%
(I guess some people figure capitalizing the first letter will get them better results)

lasagna_ : 4%
(the underscore denotes a space after the search term - I guess some people can’t help but drop their thumbs down on that nice big spacebar)

Google Searcher Behaviors and Platforms:

lasagna search, but clicked search button: 40%
(looks like most people hit enter, but some take the time to click the search button)

standard lasagna search via Firefox: 19%
(firefox users continue to grow and Google likes tracking them)

standard lasagna search via iGoogle: 6%
(looks like some people are using iGoogle as their homepage)

Google Non-U.S. Data

UK standard lasagna search: 9.5%
Google UK misspelled did you mean correction: 34.4%
Google UK lasagna search, but clicked search button: 2.5%
Looks like our friends from the UK need to work on spelling. Misspelled version is 4 times more common than the correct spelling!

Google Canada standard lasagna search: 23.6%
Google Canada misspelled did you mean correction: 15.1%
Google Canada lasagna search, but clicked search button: 8.2%
Our friends from Canada are a little less mousey (hit enter instead) and slightly better spellers than Americans.

We can’t draw too many conclusions from this data, but it does highlight some of the data you can get from looking at your referrer data more closely. I invite you to spot check a couple terms that you rank for and share your findings in the comments.

For those attending the DomainRoundTable conference in Seattle, be sure introduce yourself (throw your name in the comments and I’ll keep an eye out for you). I’ll be speaking in the SEO sessions. I’m excited to attend because I think domainers & SEOs could gain & learn a lot from each other.

The combination of a domainer’s assets with the skills of an SEO could be very lucrative for both parties. Why settle for $1,000 of ad revenue a month in direct type-in traffic, when you could build an SEO-friendly content site that will eventually pull in $1,000,000 a month?

Jay has been listing many of the very interesting domains that will be auctioned off on the domaintools blog.