I’m sure most of you understand the concept of a Google bomb (it should be called a search bomb because these “campaigns” effect more than Google’s index) and how they can cause humorous search results. Sometimes however, these little contextual backlink pushes associate concepts with sites you and I may find disagreeable or downright pathetic.

Such is the case with a Martin Luther King search bomb that was reported on by Phil Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped. It was revealed in his post that a Google search for King’s full name finds the harmlessly named MartinLutherKing.org site sitting high up in the rankings. However, once you take a quick scan down the index page, you discover Stormfront.org - a notorious white supremacy site - hosts the MLK site in question.

When InternetNews first reported this, the hoax site was at the top position in Google’s results. Now, thanks to an altruistic Google bomb initiated by Tim Hoffman, they now reside in the 3rd position - which is better - but still not good enough.

Because of that, I felt it prudent to contribute to this particular Google bomb, while helping the story get around to the necessary readers and bloggers who are also active linkers. If you’d like to contribute to this current bombing, please do so by linking the Dr. King’s name to either his Wikipedia entry or perhaps to his Nobel Prize biography, like so:  Martin Luther King.

Recently, I posted an entry about social media attacking - a post focusing on the AntiSocialMedia.net blog that many felt was developed solely to harass critics of Overstock.com.

Well, this is no longer a speculative issue because Judd Bagley, director of social media at the shopping site has admitted he is the administrator of the blog in question. Not surprisingly, vocal Overstock critic Gary Weiss blasted Bagley for his actions; going as far to suggest Bagley broke cyber-stalking laws by using ASM the way he did:

Only one question arises in my mind: What laws were broken? Not “were laws broken?” but “what were the laws that were broken?” The new federal cyberstalking law comes to mind, obviously, but what others? Regulation FD is another good possibility, given the ASM Lie Machine was created after Bagley became a corporate officer. (And speaking of corporate disclosure, shouldn’t Overstock file an 8-K disclosing its involvement in ASM?)

Weiss continues further, implicating Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was complicit with Bagley’s actions. Whatever the outcome, Overstock’s actions show just how powerful social media can be, even when you purposely misuse it. There’s no way the Overstock braintrust can hide from their actions - not in today’s business arena when a very active blogosphere exists.

Perhaps they could generate positive buzz (at least from the guys out there) by turning the operations aspect of the business over to spokesperson Sabine Ehrenfeld - but it’s probably too late for even that…

Hat-tip to Lou Lawes who pointed this out in our comments section.

It’s being reported around the blogosphere that DMOZ is once again accepting site submissions; a move that indicates DMOZ is trying to get back to business as usual. The controversial directory suspended the editor and submission capabilities towards the end of 2006 - a move many thought signified the end of the ODP.

However, it appears as if 2007 could very well be a bounce-back year for the directory, provided the recently restored editors actually address their site submission queue.

Unfortunately, DMOZ doesn’t really have an announcement detailing these activities but if you’d like to find out more information, check out Barry Schwartz’ post.

With the exception of Google - who provided a tastefully designed logo to commemorate today’s significance - it appears the search engine industry forgot why today is a national holiday. While Yahoo’s portal page does contain an “answer box” celebrating Martin Luther King Jr’s accomplishments, this is noticeably absent if you navigate directly to their search engine.

As for Ask.com, which is in full AskX mode, their blog reveals they have an answers section prepared for MLK but you have to initiate a search related to the man in order to activate it. Of course, MSN Search hasn’t altered their look since they launched the Live.com “redesign”. This includes holidays and other special events. It makes me wonder if they are even trying anymore.

Perhaps I’m making an issue out of nothing, but if you can acknowledge the mainstream holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, why not honor a day that actually has some historic significance - a day set aside for a man who truly wanted a better place for all people to live.

Fortunately, YouTube has a complete presentation of Dr King’s “I Have A Dream” speech (something I recommend all of you watch) and like I mentioned earlier, Google is using a simple but effective logo to acknowledge what this man fought for:

As I was looking around the blogosphere this morning, I came across a number of good search engine articles I’d like to share with you. Most of these are of the helpful, SEO variety, but the last one is just weird.

First off, there’s some news concerning Google’s spidering habits that you might find interesting - the Google spider does not necessarily pay attention to meta tags and robot.txt files; a concept that makes me a little uncomfortable. On the Digital Inspiration blog, Amit Agarwal discovered a couple of popular sites (del.icio.us and Google Finance of all sites) whose robot.txt files were being ignored.

del.icio.us’ robot.txt includes the “noarchive,nofollow,noindex” directives for all search engine bots, a request Google’s apparently ignored. As for Google Finance, file was setup to disallow agents from the /finance pages, a request that the Google bot obviously ignored (Amit reports of 44000 pages with the /finance path are in Google’s index).

Considering what we’ve just learned, if I were you, at the very least I’d check to make sure the directives of my robot.txt file is being acknowledged by Google. If they are not, try posting something about it at the Google Webmaster Help group forum.

In case you haven’t heard, some of the more effective tools that can assist non-junk link building campaigns are widgets. If you aren’t sure of what a widget is, think of the all the blog chicklets visible around the Internet. You know, those little images in the left and right columns of blogs inviting users to click here or submit this or read that.

A fantastic example is the Flickr Zeitgeist widget that shows recent images from the Flickr index.These little devices can be incredibly beneficial when it comes to link building campaigns, just ask Abhilash.

The brown sugar SEO king wrote an extremely helpful post about these little suckers, complete with testimonials of just how successful they can be when it comes to link building (you can also ask Lee Odden* who helped confirm Abhilash’s thesis). If you’d like to give the widget strategy a shot, I would suggest reading his post thoroughly and follow the links he provides.

*Odden indicates his RSS button tool (yes these are considered widgets) has generated over 40000 unique backlinks alone - something I’m sure many would do a great deal for.

The feet portion of this post comes courtesy of the Yahoo Buzz blog. Apparently, the search for celebrity feet is increasing a great deal… so much so Yahoo blogged about it. An example of this behavior - searches for Kylie Minogue’s feet were up 123% yesterday. In true Yahoo Buzz fashion, they have a list of the most popular celebrity feet searches that’s topped by ex-Black-Eyed Peas singer Fergie.

I’m pretty much at a loss for words after that, so I’ll leave you with this thought - people are weird.

Yesterday, it was reported that during the acknowledged PageRank update, Digg’s score had been reduced to 0 meaning the green bar was actually white. Now it appears that Digg’s PageRank issues have been taken care because they now have the very respectable score of 8/10.

Because of the overwhelming importance of Google’s PageRank when it comes to search engine rankings and site popularity, is it reasonable to assume the Digg foundation was shaking after yesterday’s revelation? Probably not; however, it is funny to see such a popular site with a blank PageRank bar.

Google’s geek cred, which has long been established, is about to get another shot in the arm. Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novels and a host of other writings, has revealed his son is about to join the ranks of a company that was recently voted the best place to work at.

Over at his blog, Matt Cutts can hardly contain his geek excitement and rightfully so when you consider the pedigree young Gaiman will bring to Google. From the bragging rights perspective alone, Gaiman’s hiring should be seen as a bonus for Google, although the search engine has never lacked a significant buzz factor.

Gaiman’s hiring can only increase Google’s already strong social media buzz (consider how many fans of the Gaiman genre are bloggers and will undoubtedly comment about this move), while further endearing the search engine to geek crowd.

Apparently, either the current Google PageRank update or someone at Google doesn’t like Digg because the nexus for social media currently has a PageRank score of zero.

That’s right, when you navigate to Digg.com, Google’s green bar turns white (this goes for both the www. version and the non-www. version). I’ve got a screenshot if you are interested in case this gets corrected anytime soon. Although, when you consider How PageRank Works, then perhaps this wasn’t an accident at all.

Hat-tip to DazzlinDonna for pointing this out at her SEO Scoop blog.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

I thought I’d pass on this nifty little site (actually, it’s huge) that I stumbled upon over at Phil Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped site (he credited David Hetfield) called the World’s Highest Site.

What the developers have done is - through the use of CSS - create a site that measures 18.939 kilometers high (that’s 11.769 miles in American) in order to show, well, the fact that it can be done, I guess. The idea is executed quite well and if you are adventurous enough and scroll all the way to the bottom (instead of taking the elevator), you find a note explaining why they conducted this little CSS experiment.

Over at Google Blogoscoped, Lenssen revealed the CSS code used to accomplish such a tall feat:

div#whws { font-size: 100cm; height: 18939em; line-height: 1.0; }

While some of us here aren’t as impressed as others (I can’t even print Jason Miller’s reaction) I think this is a cool concept that was executed quite well. Besides, seeing yet another way the power of CSS can be exploited is always a bonus.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

The early part of the New Year has been especially kind to the mobile phone industry in terms of positive buzz - culminating with yesterday’s Apple iPhone announcement that knocked the social media side of the web off its feet. Standing at the center of this social media storm (well, perhaps not in the middle, but definitely major players) are none other than Google and Yahoo!.

During yesterday’s iPhone announcement - presented by Steve Jobs - Engadget’s coverage revealed the iPhone would very supportive of Google’s cavalcade of web applications (a Google Maps demonstration was presented during the announcement) as well as confirming a partnership with Yahoo!. Surprisingly, the iPhone is not the only device these competitors have partnered with.

According to numerous reports, both Yahoo and Google have also partnered with Samsung for the recently launched SGH-Z720 phone. Google’s partnership allows users to access three of Google’s web applications - search, Gmail, and Google Maps.

Yahoo!’s partnership calls for the phones to come preloaded with Yahoo! Go 2.0; Yahoo! oneSearch (Yahoo’s mobile web search feature); Yahoo! Mail; Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Personal Information Management. Of course, all of these services are intended to provide potential owners with a more robust user experience and considering all of the applications available, Samsung has succeeded in doing so.

Partnerships like these are good indicator of what powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo are focusing on (not solely of course): the mobile Internet. As more and more users adopt this method of Internet interaction, partnering with the mobile phone companies to provide mobile web services goes a long way towards securing a future beyond organic web search.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl