Jun
26
Spurred by this joke at ABW Affiliate Forums
That’s the economic globalization of tragedy, from the far reaches of the world wide web right to the local gas station when you stop to get gas, running up to the car trying to sell you a flag because some mothers’ sons got killed fighting in a useless war someplace that serves no purpose other than to pad the pockets of “global economic interests” that the poor blokes who died would never have seen a penny of even if they had survived.
Jun
22
MSN Search June Update
Filed Under MSN Search | Leave a Comment
I thought there were some changes a couple of days ago, particularly in the way the description snippets were being displayed - and then traffic skyrocketed Monday on a site that MSN hasn’t seemed to be too fond of. It seems there has been an algo change, with an update rolled out over the weekend
Coverage here at the Search Engine Watch MSN Forum with some nice links to papers on new technology.
On a personal note, the site that got the blessings from MSN is a very close match for the target audience to a demographic that’s consistently been known to be loyal MSN users. The new rankings reflected themselves with a nice few days following the update, for that site and also for another one that’s been a dark horse that’s now got a good ranking back for one of its prime keyword phrases.
There’s been precious little written about how to rank well with MSN, it’s still Google that gets most webmaster attention so it isn’t a bad thing at all that the MSN update shook things up a little bit. It’s all been so Google-centric for so long that the others are neglected, and between the two they’re able to deliver a hefty portion of highly targeted, serious traffic.
Jun
21
The Sneakiest Scraper Sites Yet
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
Usually they scrape (aka steal) other people’s text as content for phonied up made-for-AdSense pages, but this one takes the cake. They scraped the text and when you click on what’s supposed to be the link to the sites, it’s being pulled through a script to a site of theirs
http://www.ultimatemarketingminisites.com/resources/los-angeles-web-design.html
It may be halfway justifiable if they are at least scraping and giving a link for it - ok that’s rationalizing because they can’t be stopped until the search engines decide they don’t want the swill filling their index any more - but this can’t be justified any grounds whatsoever, it’s outright theft for deceptive purposes.
Jun
20
MSN & Yahoo Search Descriptions
Filed Under Search Engines | Leave a Comment
I just checked today’s traffic at MSN for a site, and they are showing the meta keywords as the description snippet. I thought maybe it’s because there are no description metas on most of the pages of that site - but nope, I checked another site that has both and sure enough, there’s the meta keywords.
I’m not so sure all the clustering MSN seems to be doing is so good for users who are used to landing on the exact page for a particular search term. It does look neater on the search page with just the root URL showing, but I’m wondering how it will affect conversion for ecom sites if visitors have to click around to find things.
Another oddity - I checked at Yahoo to see if a new site has been indexed yet, and the index page has - with the page title repeated as the beginning of the description snippet.