It certainly appears that way, at least according to a post that popped up on Barry Schwartz’s SERoundtable this morning. The post references an email appearing in the SearchEngineWatch forums that says:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Live Search

Making the offending sites one of the first documented cases of a site being suspended from a search index because of a link exchange (to my knowledge). Could Live.com’s actions be seen as a little harsh? Isn’t there a way to simply ignore undesirable links? And if they are kicking sites because of irrelevant link exchanges, shouldn’t they address their duplicate content issue?

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Consulting firm Classified Intelligence, citing the Wall Street Journal, said in a client report that several newspaper groups would start working with HotJobs, the job classifieds site owned by Yahoo!

(more…)

People across America have been waiting in lines at retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City. They all want the same thing. The coveted Sony PS3. When I say want I really, really mean it.

There is one report of a dentist from Columbus, Georgia Dr. Murry Newlin hiring 60 temporary workers to wait in line in 8-hour shifts so he can buy 15 of the gaming consoles. He planned on giving them to his grandchildren, nieces and nephews according to a report from endgadget.

His plan was foiled yesterday afternoon after people in line discovered what was happening. They complained to store manager’s and to the temp agency. The Dr. did not go through with the scheme.

There are also people who plan on selling the game console on eBay. I checked eBay for the PS3 and found the prices ranging from $1,5000 to $2,900. The game console itself sells for retail price of $500 to $600 depending on the features.

Another incident took place at a Wal-Mart in West Bend, Wisconsin. Around 50 people were in line for 10 PS3’s. The store manager has the genius idea of setting out 10 chairs and having the customers race to get to the chairs. The first 10 would be able to get the game console. The plan did not work so well. A 19-year-old man had his jaw dislocated after being pushed into a flagpole.

Locally there was an incident that occurred at Best Buy here in Lexington, KY. While a reporter was interviewing those camped out in line someone drove by and fired a BB gun in their direction. 4 people were hit including the reporter who was doing a story on the PS3 mania.

Finally my personal favorite is a woman in Mount Laurel, N.J. waiting in line for the game console while being 9 months pregnant. Julie Mosley said she was trying to ignore her contractions so she could get one of the machines for her family.

I wonder how Sony’s next big product launch will go?

Posted by Mike Sachoff

Staff Writer WebProNews

During the Interactive Site Review session at the 2007 Las Vegas PubCon, various site owners submitted their site for the panel to pick apart. The panel consisted of heavy hitters like Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Greg Boser from WebGuerrilla, and Danny Sullivan.

While some of the sites they reviewed may have been lacking in certain departments, the knowledge the panel bestowed is quite valuable for SEOers of all types. What follows is are some quotes and paraphrases that go a long way to demonstrating what it is search engines are looking for:

- each page of your site is an entry point, optimize (title tags, keyphrases) for what each page targets - Greg

- strive for quality links over quantity links - the entire panel

- if you are targeting your site geographically, get links from local entities (Chamber of Commerce, local directories)

- NO LINK EXCHANGES (don’t even bother - Matt cutts)

- unique content is important (this and link bait are the prevailing themes of the Las Vegas PubCon)

- if you can get into the top 3 of Google Local, you will be on the front page of Google’s standard search if the query is geographically based… - Danny Sullivan

- when optimizing for Google Local, navigate to the Google Local Business Center - this was suggested by Matt as a source to assist with being indexed by Google Local’s index as well as a place to claim your business, similar to Technorati’s blog claim function.

- one of the sites reviewed was a real estate site… during this portion, Greg revealed some interesting information about how this industry markets to the search industry:

the real estate industry conducts SEO much like they did in 98, it’s a bad field in reference to SEO…

and while this may not be a tip per se, it’s good information to be aware of especially if you are considering this industry…

- ditch javascript menus altogether… they are a red flag to ranking algos - Boser

- template-based sites may not rank well because they appear alike to the crawlers… - Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts both iterated this thought.

- Session IDs urls need to be blocked from crawlers because of duplicate content issues (don’t serve session ids to bots)… this was emphasized by Matt who said:

“session ids can be poison for crawlers”

- if your site sells manufactured products, don’t use manufacturer copy… use your own descriptions - this was also stated by Heather Lloyd-Martin during the effective web copy session

- there’s no good use for 302 redirects, ever - the entire panel

- blog about your product or target area, this provide so much of the original content the search engines are looking for - paraphrased from Matt Cutts

This last point plays into the whole link bait theory that was incredibly prominent during this conference (I cannot count the number of times I heard this phrase…). Keep these tips and ideas in mind when you are conducting any SEO or SEM-related process. They will serve you well.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

US District Court in Chicago dismissed a lawsuit against the Craigslist classifieds site. They had been accused of permitting discriminatory housing ads to be placed on its Chicago-local website.

More at IFN.

David Utter
Staff Writer, WebProNews

Vanessa Fox of Google and Tim Mayer announced sitemaps in an exclusive video interview with WebProNews reporter Chris Richardson.

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In an exclusive video interview with WebProNews Yahoo and Google announced a collaborative site called sitemaps.org. Tim Mayer states in the video, “This is something we are announcing tonight at around 9 PM tonight (Las Vegas) Google and Yahoo have gotten together to provide webmasters and publishers a unified way to send their content … let our search engines know about new and existing content.”

There are certain partnerships and collaborations that inspire double takes: Microsoft and Apple developing a working Windows platform for Macs and deep-fried Coca-Cola come to mind. Well, there’s another log you can add to the fire and it comes in the form of an SEO tool, courtesy of search industry giants Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

>>>>  Watch our exclusive video interview with Vanessa Fox of Google and Tim Mayer of Yahoo.

The collaboration I’m referring to is the launch of Sitemaps.org, a webmaster protocol that is attempting to introduce a web standard for these documents. Essentially, the program is a group acceptance of the Sitemaps service introduced by Google. Yahoo and MSN jumping on board in such a vocal manner emphasizes this. In fact, the three engines unifying like this the most important aspect of Sitemaps launch.

I first learned about this unification at the 2006 Las Vegas PubCon, thanks to a video interview with Googleb’s Vanessa Fox and Yahoo’s Tim Mayer. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the room and discovered these were my interview subjects. To say I was expecting big news is an understatement and I was not disappointed.

This unified Sitemaps launch functions much like Google’s does. The site’s introductory paragraph says as much:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The protocol page has the necessary information for creating a functional Sitemap and in true Google and Yahoo fashion; there is a robust FAQ page to answer questions for things like submitting the file when developed.
The importance of this “partnership” can’t be understated. A quote from the Live Search blog emphasizes the significance of this collaboration:

So, why are we excited to work on this? Because by agreeing on a standard, we can provide site owners with one simple way to share information with every search engine. You just publish a sitemap, and every engine is instantly able to read and use the data to more effectively index your site.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews

MySpace is involved in controversy once again. This time it has to do with 30 inmates on death row in Texas. They have had MySpace pages created for them by friends and family.

The inmates do not have Internet access so they communicate with friends and family through letters, which are then posted on their MySpace page. Their family or friends then return any correspondence sent to their pages to the inmates.

Andy Kahan director of the crime victims office in Houston strongly disagrees with this practice. In an e-mail to MySpace Kahan wrote, “”Is it within your policy to allow the glorification of killers by giving them a platform to influence young minds?” Kahan wrote. “Are there specific guidelines within MySpace that would prohibit giving convicted felons a platform for all the world to see?”

I understand his concern but isn’t this more of a state or federal issue than a MySpace issue? Last time I checked MySpace was not one of the 3 branches of government.

Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said,” We cannot police what a person who is not in our custody puts on a Web site on behalf of an inmate”

By calling attention to the issue maybe Mr.Kahan is attempting to lobby support for legislation to prevent prisoner profiles being posted on MySpace. That would be a tricky constitutional issue.

I don’t see MySpace changing their policy. With 125,632,282 million users they would never be able to police that amount of profiles.

Posted by Mike Sachoff

Staff Writer

Valleywag looks a lot different today. Nick Douglas has departed the site, and Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton will be the fill-in until they find a replacement.

Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go. But, to helm the site, we’re now looking for someone with, ideally, some background in reporting. An old-media career, useful in the sparkling new world of blogs. Who would have thought?

Nick Douglas has been a lot of fun to read. I’m looking forward to seeing where he turns up; Dave Winer said it will be as a video star somewhere.

Meanwhile, Denton seems to suggest that the personal attention paid to Silicon Valley’s notables may have been a little too personal.

I suspect we’re going to tone down the personal coverage of civilians, because they haven’t done anything to seek out attention, and their personal lives aren’t that interesting.

Anyone care to bet that Nick Douglas’ stories about Eric Schmidt’s marriage had something to do with this move?

posted by David Utter

Most of you know the importance of links when it comes to respectable search engine rankings. You need one to get the other. However, how do you go about attracting these prospective linkers? If you talk to the search engine gurus, one thing they tell is produce content others will want to link to.

Another name for this type of content is link bait and thanks to Andy Beal, we now have a guideline telling us how to make content attractive enough to garner links. The way this list came about was through some consulting Andy did for a real estate website. The siteowners took the information and formulated it into a helpful link bait guide, which I will highlight below. Before I do that, I would like to point out a quote from Bruce Clay that provides the perfect definition for link bait, courtesy of the aforementioned guide:

Link Bait is more or less anything you create anywhere on the Web that inspires other people to link to it. They can link to it via a Web page, a blog, social bookmark site, tagging site, e-zine, newsletter, IM, email or any other method that tells others about the bait.

As you can see, it doesn’t really matter where the links come from, just as long you get them. Of course, some in bound links may be disregarded by the various search algorithms, but you shouldn’t be penalized even if unsavory characters link to your site. Now for some link bait pointers. The article indicates there are four hooks “link baiters” should be masters at:

1. NEWS
Learning and expanding what we know is what drives the perpetual exploration on the Internet. Make your site a reliable source for news-seekers.

2. CONTRARY
A contrary hook can be slightly trickier, but when you can pull it off, your site will benefit immensely. The hook revolves around the contradiction of something done or said by someone else in your field. Don’t be afraid to start a debate about a contested hot topic.

3. ATTACK
The attack hook is linked directly to the contrary hook addressed above. Attack, however, takes the contradiction one step further, and ultimately lives up to its name.

4. RESOURCE
A resource hook lives up to its name and leaves little to the imagination.

The article goes on to list 21 tips and tricks that, if applied correctly, should improve you sites “linkability”. Some of these highlights include:

1. Don’t Self-Indulge
Although it may be tempting to place other advertisements on your home page and other high-traffic areas – DON’T. Avoid the temptation, and it will undoubtedly make your site more link-worthy.

3. Become a Blogging Aficionado
Post quality content frequently and consistently. This is how you develop a following…

7. Reach a Nationwide Audience
You may be tempted to focus all of the attention on your site to your local prospective clients. Do not, however, discount the benefits of writing for a national audience.

14. Real World Relationships
Develop real relationships with your peers when you have the opportunity. At conferences and training sessions, meet as many people as possible, and begin communicating with them on a regular basis. Then, take a good look at their site. If it’s something you want to be associated with, link to it.

Those are just an example of the tips the article provides. There are a number of simple adjustments (not really an adjustment per se, more of a awareness) that, if followed, can make a big difference in your site’s search ranking, something most of us are dying to improve.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog