New Orleans PubCon Dates Announced

WebmasterWorld's 2005 PubCon (aka World Search Conference #8) in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 21, 22, 23 (with mega PubCon Friday June 24).

I am considering driving there, because I want to visit some friends in Austin, Texas and its only 3 hours out of the way.

Official site: http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference

Combatting Update Allegra's Symptoms

One of my sites felt the pinch of the Allegra Update.

It went from #3 to #6-11, depending on the datacenter.

The site template is 3 1/2 years old, and has a few design flaws - namely the main navigation are images instead of text. When the site was designed, ALT tags still were given the same weight as text, so it didn't seem like a problem at the time.

However, the site is losing out on one of the most powerful weapons in the SEO arsenal: internal anchor text links.

Just as an experiment, I added an anchor Guide To $Widgets linking to home page at the footer of all the pages on the site (about 470 pages).

That was about 8 days ago. Google has been recrawling all these pages and caching them with the new link to the home page.

Results? This morning the site bumped up to #5, the highest it has been since the Allegra update began.

Your mileage may vary, but it's food for thought.

MSN's New Search Is Safe For Work (Unfortunately)

A friend pointed out in an email that the new MSN has set up some pretty strict adult filters.

Even if you set your search to unfiltered, the content of the adult serps is, well, limp.

Try, just for fun, searching MSN for "sex stories" (screen cap below).



You'll notice that Microsoft.net is in 6th place for that search.

Interesting that Microsoft.net stays in 6th no matter what you set your adult filter preferences to when searching for "sex stories". Why? You'll have to ask Bill Gates.

But this SERP had just about the "raciest" sites in the adult term searches I attempted, however it has been fairly amusing to see the sites that managed to slip past the adult filters.

I see MS Search being flooded with Altavista 1999 style porn spam in the very near future. Average Joe will search for Mother Teresa, and the #1 site will have adult content, cloaked so that MSN won't detect it.

Of course, it is Microsoft's choice to block adult sites - but they are finding their way into the index anyhow, and somehow, that seems to reflect more poorly on MSN Search than if they simply made sure that porn stayed in porn serps, and not in searches for "Mother Teresa".

New MSN Search - SEO Tips

Around the first of February MSN flipped the switch to use their own proprietary search results on the MSN web properties. Ironically, Google came out with the Allegra Update and Yahoo rolled out their own (as yet unnamed) update shortly thereafter.

What this meant, at least in the referrer logs of some of my sites, is that MSN is the new hero for traffic.

But what kind of traffic is it bringing me? Let's take a look of some of the more amusing keyword search strings from my Feb 1-17 2005 logs.

14 women facials
15 "asians"
24 gay asians
27 gay facials

What the heck are these terms doing in my logs? Well the New MSN Search decided to send me a little adult traffic, probably because of my post about A9.com's Adult Image Problem

I know, I know - this is more worthy of gnome de plum's Blog O'Sex than a blog on SEO News.

But what do these search strings tell us about MSN Search?

Well, right away it looks like a little on page content, might be all you need to get MSN to like your site, along with some links from some authority sites. Not necessarily on theme authority sites, just plain old quality sites.

As it turns out, my little story about A9.com and their "image problem" got linked to from Research Buzz, and a number of other sites, as a result. Their articles were about adult images, and linked to my site... see where this is going.

Other than that, nothing really special to report about the New MSN Search, except that a number of my sites that got "spanked" by Google for being naughty are just crazy in love at MSN.

Viva Microsoft.

Google Algo Update - Some Analysis

Wow. Been really busy dealing with the aftermath of Google Update "Allegra" (as coined by Webmaster World).

SERPs are still banging around, a site in one SERP that I monitor has been ping ponging between 5,6 and 9.

The most common complaint seems to be sites that are no longer ranking for their own domain name - ie, widgetmasters.com is no longer in #1 position for widgetmasters.

This seems to be related to anchor text. During the November 2003 update (aka "Florida"), I was able to salvage a punished site by adding about 15% of its links with "generic" anchor text - ie "click here to learn more" instead of "buy widgets".

Lots and lots of "white hat" sites get links with their own domain names as the anchor text. Now some of them are "disappeared". Seems like an obvious connection.

What's the fix? Get more links - business as usual - but concentrate on varying your anchor text. Consider changing your home page anchor text links (if you have them) from widgetmasters.com to "WidgetMasters.com - Masters in Widgetry" or whatever - shake it up a bit.

If you haven't put links to your home page with "helpful" anchor text, give it a shot - can't make things much worse. :)

Good luck, and remember there are other search engines.