Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2008-08-01

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August 01 , 2008 As you're looking forward to the weekend, we know you're looking forward to reading this week's issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. Okay, maybe you're not quite THAT eager to read it, but we have a lot of news you'll want to know. First, though, let me tell you about the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek. If you're looking into cloud computing, or know someone who is, you'll want to check it out. It's been heralded as the newest thing when it comes to storage, but there are a few issues that need to be ironed out. Read and be warned. Now let me tell you about this week's articles. On Wednesday we ran a review of Cuil, the search engine just launched by a team of ex-Google employees. It's been receiving bad press; check our review and find out why. On Tuesday, just a day after Google Knol opened up to everyone, we noted that knols were scoring near the top of Google SERPs, and talked about why that might be happening -- as well as the more general implications for SEO. Finally, on Monday, we gave you a look at Udi Manber, one of the people in charge of Google's search algorithm, to show you how Google approaches search. Of course you'll also want to look over the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting for you this week on Tutorialized. You can learn how to create search engine friendly URLs, how to design your site specifically to attract traffic, how to do SEO for Flash, and more! While you're there, by all means check out the other great tutorials we've published on Tutorialized. Do you remember when you first took the step from doing SEO on smaller sites to your first big one? Then you'll want to check out this week's Thread. One of our forum members just made that leap, and he can use a little help. By all means, stop by the thread and add your expertise, or learn from the other members who have already commented. This week's Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, focuses on Google once again. This time, the search engine makes an effort to become more transparent about its targeting practices. So what is it doing? And is it enough? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. You will notice below that we have highlighted the Your Move Contest, brought to you by Moblin .org. Winners will be eligible to win free Mid Devices, $1000 USD, and two tickets to any open source event in the world. You can find more info about this great contest here! And last, but certainly not least, be sure to check out the fun and exciting SunQuest Chronicles: Ruby of Destiny choose your own adventure style book, brought to you by the good folks at Sun. Sign up to the Sun Developer Network and play the game for your chance to win one of seven Sun Spots! Play now! As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES A Cuil Search Engine is Born Google Knol Takes Aim at Wikipedia, Others Google`s Udi Manber Looks at Search SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail Developer Search IBM eKits Make Development eAsy! Take advantage of free e-kits from developerWorks. E-kits give you a collection of tutorials, articles, webcasts, podcasts, and demos about a particular product, task, or role. This one-stop shop of resources empowers you to maximize your enterprise investment. Learn more. IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management certification training e-kit Get free PMI training in the IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management certification training e-kit. As a member of the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) corporate council, IBM has more than 12,000 PMI-certified project managers and has been honored for its educational programs. Now, you can learn more about the difference that IBM's project management curriculum makes with six free courses based on IBM's best-practices processes and tools. Learn more.

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It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Is Yahoo music shutting down? Yes. Bonus: Jen's reaction to the Yahoo spokesperson is real. What does Juan Valdezburg think of this merger between two broadband companies? Fat Mariachi band seen trying to lose weight, cursing the goodness that is chorizo. Yakov tells us his view on the upcoming Fitty Cent game. You down with KGB? Yeah you know me! Watch the video!

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A Cuil Search Engine is Born by Terri Wells 2008-07-30 "Cuil" supposedly means "wisdom" in Gaelic. In English, pronounced "cool," it means business when it comes to Internet search. That is what its founders, nearly all ex-Google employees, want you to believe. Let us take a look at their claims and their performance to see whether it is wise to take them seriously. Cuil is the brainchild of Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Costello is an ex-IBM employee and former member of the research faculty at Stanford University, and his work at both organizations focused on search. Anna Patterson joined Google in 2004 after it bought Recall, the search engine she designed, which indexed 12 billion pages (a record at that time). At Google she handled the problem of scaling architecture - keeping up with the growth of the web. She left in 2006 to build Cuil. Power and Monier, like Patterson, boast Google on their resumes. Both dealt with issues of scale as part of their day-to-day work, like Patterson. Monier also did serious work on search at eBay and AltaVista. When founders have this kind of background, even Google has to sit up and take notice. One has to ask: how does Cuil approach search, and how is it different from the Google approach? Read A Cuil Search Engine is Born

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Google Knol Takes Aim at Wikipedia, Others by Terri Wells 2008-07-29 After teasing us with an unveiling seven months ago, Google finally opened up Google Knol to everybody. What does this mean? Depending on who you ask, it means higher quality content to index, the death of Wikipedia, and the rise of content thieves. It is also another step towards a Google monopoly. Keep reading for the details. If you missed the original revelation of Google Knol, you might want to check our coverage of it. That article includes a definition of what a knol is, a close look at the sample knol Google was showing off at the time, and some analysis of the likely effects on SEO. I noted at the time that knols were probably the ultimate linkbait, and that if you are an expert in your field, this was your chance to write the introductory article that everyone would turn to when they want to know about whatever it is that you do. I also noted that links in a knol might not be nofollow (unlike Wikipedia links, which are nofollowed automatically), so they certainly had potential to earn you some traffic. As it turns out, I was wrong about that last point - but links to your knol from the Google Knol home page are not nofollowed, and if your knol is featured on that page, it could mean lots of traffic. I also mentioned some potential minuses to Google Knol. One of them was user authentication; how could Google be absolutely sure that a person writing a knol really is who they say they are? The second issue was spam, in that there did not seem to be anything in place to keep a spammer from writing a knol and then using his or her friends to push it to a high ranking. Read Google Knol Takes Aim at Wikipedia, Others

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Google`s Udi Manber Looks at Search by Terri Wells 2008-07-28 If you want a well-informed perspective on where web search has been and where it is going, Udi Manber can give it to you. Currently serving as vice president in charge of search quality at Google, he recently granted a couple of interviews that offered, among other things, a rare insider look at one search engine approach to delivering answers. Manber came to Google in 2006 with an impressive resume. His past positions include stints as a computer science professor at the University of Arizona, a senior vice president at Amazon and chief scientist at Yahoo. In the 15 or so years he has worked on search, he has seen attitudes toward it change tremendously. As he explained, "When I started in academia and I said I am working on search, they looked at me and said, what do you mean you are working on search? Did you lose something?" Back in the early 1990s, the search field was divided by topic -- chemical search, legal search, medical search, and so on. And only professionals did search; you would tell someone what you wanted to find, and they would find it for you. Some of the earliest "search engines" were more like directories of information rather than something into which you could put a term and hope to get an answer that gave you what you were looking for. Read Google`s Udi Manber Looks at Search

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! Design a Site To Attract Traffic? Plan on having a professional website built for your business and need answers? Look no further. Read the tutorial. Search Engine Friendly URLs Create search engine friendly URLs easily with mod_rewrite. Read the tutorial. Confessions of an Underground Link Building Ninja Advanced link building strategies to increase your rankings.. Read the tutorial. How Search Engines Operate How do search engines and their spiders actually work? Find out. Read the tutorial. Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs using .htaccess Using .htaccess, mapping dynamic pages to static address is easy. Read the tutorial. SEO for Flash Optimization Flash is attractive, but getting spiders to see it takes effort. Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.

Check out the amazing tutorials from IBM developerWorks and see what all the buzz is about! WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Manage, govern, and share services across your organization by using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Follow the hands-on exercises to learn how to navigate the Web interface to publish, find, reuse, and update services. Building JavaScript applications with JSEclipse Using JSEclipse, JavaScript programmers now have their own Eclipse plug-in that provides many important features to aid in the development of JavaScript applications. JSEclipse gives JavaScript developers the same ease of use that Eclipse has been providing in the Java language and others for years. Learn to use this tool, while creating a colony of evolving "creatures" on your page. Learn how to install and use the Rational Asset Manager Eclipse client In this tutorial, you can learn how to install and configure the IBM Rational Asset Manager Eclipse client, explore the different views in the Asset Management perspective, learn various search techniques, work with existing assets, and submit a new asset. Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 1: Create a continuous build and integration environment Learn how to implement a build management system that uses and extends your existing automation technologies. This tutorial shows, step-by-step, how to install and configure IBM Rational Build Forge to manage builds for Jakarta Tomcat from source code. Build Web services with transport-level security using Rational Application Developer V7, Part 1: Build Web services and Web services clients Build secure Web services with transport-level security using IBM Rational Application Developer V7 and IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1. Follow this three-part series for step-by-step instructions about how to develop Web services and clients, configure HTTP basic authentication, and configure HTTP over SSL (HTTPS). This first part of the series walks you through building a Web service for a simple calculator application. You generate and test two different types of Web services clients: a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) client and a stand-alone Java client. You also handle user-defined exceptions in Web services. Test terminal-based applications with Rational Functional Tester Regression testing -- in which code is thoroughly tested to ensure that changes have not produced unexpected results -- is an important part of any development process. But many testing environments neglect the terminal-based applications that still form the backbone of many industries. In this tutorial, you'll learn how the Rational Functional Tester Extension for Terminal-Based Applications works with other Rational Functional Tester to help test terminal-based applications quickly and easily. Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 2: Automate builds for a real-world Tomcat project Learn how Rational Build Forge can extend a simple compile and package build process by adding customization and deployment capability. Go from a manual method to automating: checking for code changes; getting the latest source; compiling and packaging; customizing; copying to and restarting a deployment server; and sending e-mail notification that a new version is available. NEW! Application development for the OLPC laptop The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The XO laptop includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design and the use of GNU/Linux as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python.

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Getting your first big SEO project can be scary, even if you've done well with smaller ones. In this week's thread, a forum member in just this situation asks for help. Be sure to stop by the thread and share your expertise. Pointers on new seo adventure tatt2dgeek First of all like to say thanks for the creators of this forum. I have visited here many times for tips but I just recently registered and this is my first thread. Anyway... I am fairly new (newbie) to SEO and have only worked on a couple of small sites and did a mighty fine job. But I have recently taken on a task of attempting to optimize a very large site at [URL removed]. When I was contacted by them they informed that they had a strong top 10 listing in Google until about a month ago. I am not the slickest of SEO engineers and cannot quite locate what may have caused their home page to drop off. I have managed to get them back up on the likes of yahoo and ask. They have also vanished off MSN. Feel free to take a gander at the site and any pointers would be greatly appreciated. I am currently working on restructuring link pages and inbound links. Thanks in advance. Panasall Are they paying you strictly for SEO or to make their site work better? I would have a look at their Google Analytics and see what their bounce rate is like as well as how long the average visit is. I would also check their conversion goals and see what % of visitors make a purchase. To me the site looks very amateurish which I am sure is hurting their conversion rate. This would also make others in the industry less likely to link to the site naturally. In my mind a big part of the SEO they are missing out on is their site looks like it was made 5 - 10 years ago. This gives a lower quality impression which hurts their conversion rate and link popularity. Emerson Double check the site for spam as listed in the Google webmaster quality guidelines. Looks like a spam related problem. Make sure you are checking it correctly, and inform in this forum your problems in checking so that we can assist. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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Google Gets More Transparent We've known for some time that Google customizes its searches, but we haven't been able to see how that effects search results. That's about to change. According to an official Google blog entry by Rachel Garb, Google product manager, the search engine is rolling out a new feature over the next few days that will show users how their results have been changed. Users will begin to see a message in the upper right corner of their search results page that indicates how their results have been customized ("Customized for San Francisco metro area US," for example). Along with the message, Google includes a link you can click for more information on how the results have been customized. The search engine uses three criteria to customize results: Location. Google uses your computer's IP address to figure out your approximate city location. You can give Google a different location by signing into or creating a Google account and providing a city or street address. Recent searches. These help provide a context for your query. From Google's description, it sounds like it uses a session-limited cookie to keep track of your queries, since "the information is removed from your browser [after a limited time] and disappears immediately if you close your browser," according to Garb. Web History. Google uses this if you are signed in and have Web History enabled. Garb also noted that you're in complete control of your Web History; you can remove specific items, pause the service, and sign out of your Google Account if you don't want a search personalized based on your history. Here are a couple of points of interest about the page that explains your search customization details. The "recent searches" customization explains what keywords were taken into account in this search. The Web History customization includes links that let you manage your Web History and remove it from your Google Account. Perhaps most interesting of all, the page includes a link to what your search would look like without any customization. This is a great start, but as Saul Hansell, writing for the New York Times, observed, it would be great to know where else Google is using this information about users. "It would be great if Google, and other Web companies, offered similar disclosure for data-based advertising," he noted. "I'd like to be able to see what data was used in deciding to show an ad to me and who will get what information if I click on it." Hansell may be in the minority, but I don't doubt that advertisers would love to know this information as well.

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