Google Caught Cloaking, More NYC SES Review

You say Potato, I say Cloaktato:
Google caught cloaking?

More SES Coverage:
from the man with yellow shoes.

Tim then brings up a remarkable new tagging system that Yahoo! is proposing and would like to see the other engines support. It's a method to specify the separate content blocks of a page, so the search engines don't need to conduct block-level analysis in their algorithms. The tags look like this:

<div class="content-public"> </div> - indicating the content is publicly created and not monitored by the site owner
<div class="content-nav"> </div> - indicating that this is internal navigation content for the site
<div class="content-default"> </div> - indicating that this is the primary content area of the page
Tim notes that these tags can also be applied to link attributes.

Link Building

Matt Cutts say that just because a link is shown in the link command doesn't mean it carries any weight at all

Greg Boser on Advanced Link Building

Greg calls the sandbox, the "litter box" and suggests that websites that stick out as being over-optimized will generally fall into the trap. He says that in order to bypass it, he simply builds a subdomain on an existing and well-ranking site, then 301 re-directs to the new URL. He warns against getting too granular for subdomains and says to try to use a general domain rather than a specifically themed site.

ROI Testing is a new bid management / ROI tracker tool in beta test created by MakeMeTop.

Conferences & Consuming Media: Too Much?

So right now I am up at 8 am on a Monday from the night before. I came back from SES NYC Thursday night and just got done catching up with my 100 or so blogs and half dozen or so forums I track.

While looking through blogs I noticed that I just missed the Online Social Networks conference.

Last night I just bought my ticket and Friday I will be flying out to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest interactive festival. While surfing further I noticed an overlap with O'reilly Emerging Technology conference.

From April 11-12 there is the Search Engine Meeting

From April 25-27 there is Ad Tech

From May 27th - 29th there is ThreadWatch. While there you may want to stay by for SES London on June 1st & 2nd.

From June 21th-24th there is WebmasteWorld

From June 23-25 there is Gnomedex

From August 2nd-5th there is SES San Jose

I was joking with a friend and we figured that there were about 30 conferences you should go to each year, and it seems like soon that will be the reality.

I think some people have traded in their regular jobs to be traveling salesmen / lead generation / speakers at various conferences. I can't see myself ever trying to be too much of a salesman (or a public speaker), but the conferences sure are fun and there are a ton of them.

Someone should write an ebook about working (or optimizing the output from) the conference scene ;)

What conferences do you like?

PPC Price Bubble, New Link Exchange Network, More SEO Tools

There is no PPC pricing bubble

New link exchange network. seems like a hybrid between the Digital Point's COOP link exchange network and some other link exchange sites.
What link exchange software or programs do you find useful?

More free webmaster tools. Google Dance tool and others.

ACCOONA Search Engine Review

ACCOONA gave away a car at the NYC SES show and since then I have seen multiple forum owners complain about them spamming their forums.

Even if they were not the ones doing it, the complete lack of participation in those conversations is a bad thing for their search engine.

Not to mention that the ads are in the left rail and when I clicked an organic search result link in the right rail it went through Overture. At least I had a good laugh when I saw clicking on a link to my other site sent me to this one and cost me 50 cents.

Whether or not you actively participate in communities if you are above radar people will find a way to create hate threads about you. People tend to look much more credible when they show up than when they ignore them.

You gotta wonder if the $30,000 they spent on the car and booth would have been better spent actively participating in their marketplace. Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts do.

Yahoo! Updates

Yahoo! Directory UK now free to submit to.
The Yahoo! directory now also has RSS feeds.
Yahoo! contextual ads to come? Three ways Yahoo! can beat Google in this market are transparent revenue sharing, legitimate parner quality standards, and using XML and the like to make their ad service more publisher friendly.