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This it the home of the archives of Above The Fold, my search engine marketing newsletter.

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Above The Fold Articles

Article Archives

ABOVE the FOLD Vol. 3 issue 3.

sections:

tool of the week *** book of the week ***what would you like ***around the web: Google Algorithm Shift *** random

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Around the Web (news):

***Freebies***

First person who emails me with "Free SEO Book" gets a copy of my ebook free of charge.

*** / end freebies ***

Google Algorithm Shift:

Google did an update in early February which caused many sites to no longer rank for their official site names.

Some have stated that they thought Latent Semantic Indexing was used on links while others still believe it is technically impossible. Whether or not they did that I still think it is important to understand the general concept of LSI and what it does.

A few common problems amongst sites which fell were: inadequatley mixed anchor text, low deep link ratios (few other sites linking into their deeper pages relative to the # of links pointing at the home page), and many sitewide inbound links.

This was also seen more often on sites where their official names were well aligned with their keywords, as that also consolidates anchor text variations.

 

Yahoo! launches contextual search product:
http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/start.html#web

 

AdWords Impression Spam:
costs competing advertisers time and money by spamming their keyword impressions.
http://www.stopscum.com/archives/adwords_impression_spam_will_cost_you_a_bundle.html
AdWords API:
http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/

 

NYT Bought About.com:
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=7676790

 

AOL Local Search:
http://local.aol.com/

 

Ask Jeeves bought Bloglines:
http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000397.html

 

Google Toolbar:
version 3.0 launched.
http://toolbar.google.com/T3/
which apparently has an AutoLink feature that has upset many webmasters.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050224-120931

 

Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/

 

New SEO / Search Blogs:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-view.php?blogid=17
http://spaces.msn.com/members/search-science/
http://blog.ask.com/

 

Movie Tickets:
Amazon and Google to start selling movie tickets.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tickets24feb24,0,3968982.story?coll=la-home-business
Google launches movies search.
http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/02/google-movies-now-playing.html

 

Search Conferences:

WebmasterWorld World of Search New Orleans was just announced. It will occur on June 21-24.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/

This upcoming week is SES NYC. If you go there and run into me say hi :)
http://www.jupiterevents.com/sew/winter05/

AirWEB
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/

Did-It Seminars:
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/1/emw202037.htm

SEW Forums is also to have unofficial gatherings.
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4103&page=2

South by Southwest - not search related, more tech related, but sounds cool
http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/

 

New Affiliate Program:
I started a new affiliate program for my e-book. free $20 credit for joining.
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000683.shtml

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Tool(s) of the Week / Month / Year(s):

Roboform: tool makes repetitive form filling tasks such as directory registration easy. http://www.roboform.com/

Make sure you still mix up your descriptions and anchor text.

Microsoft Search Result Clustering Toolbar: I forgot to mention this in our last issue but an assute AboveTheFold reader reminded me of the errors in my ways ;) http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Microsoft_Research_SRC_Toolbar/1105979254/1

ThreadWatch link analysis tool. Still under development. sounds like it could be cool and it is free.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1494

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Monthly Media:

Ask Jeeves Interview:
Mike Grehan interviews Jim Lanzone & Apostolos Gerasoulis
http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Feb05/apostolos.html

Information Retrieval & Text Mining docs
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~schuetze/ws2004ir/webir1/webir1.pdf
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~schuetze/ws2004ir/webir3/img0.html
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~schuetze/ws2004ir/

Patrick Gavin's free link renting guide
http://www.text-link-ads.com/link-buying-guide.pdf

Malcolm Gladwell audio clip
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail419.html

John Battelle interviewed
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-02-02-n90.html

Why horizontal integration is better than vertical integration http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/02/att_lessons_fro.html

Google investor day slides and audio
http://investor.google.com/webcast.html

Interview with a link spammer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/31/link_spamer_interview/

Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes
http://www.icestormcity.com/rumble/king.html

tips on how to be a consultant
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

abridged philosophy
http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/

Global Consciousness Project
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
not new but sounds interesting.

Articles I wrote since last newsletter:

http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/seo-vacuum.htm

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Feedback from last newsletter:

"You speak of the RSS feeds and blogs quite a bit but I’m not quite sure where to get started on one of these for my new site. So, I would like to see a newsletter edition with RSS software, set up, smart sites (examples), etc. There’s my 2 cents worth. Have a great day!"

I am not a god of RSS by any means, but basically what RSS is is a way to extract and distribute information.

Many content management systems (such as most blogs) automatically create an RSS feed that updates as you make new posts.

Some people grab feeds from sites (such as news sites or related blogs) to add relevant fresh content to their sites. This content is typically updated on intervals of every 15 minutes or every hour or so.

RSS in an of itself is just the structured data and does not have a format that will display on sites. To format someone elses feed and display it on your website you need to use a tool such as http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/ or FeedForAll or http://p3k.org/rss/?setup=true.

Additionally some people use bots to grab it and make static content pages from the feeds (sometimes thouands or tens of thousands of them). Many people are curious as to the legal limitations and fair usage so lots of stuff on that front are still up to date (for more reference on the legal side see http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1106).

Using RSS to generate static content pages can be done in eloquent useful ways and is more often done in shoddy ways. A well known software product that does this is RSS Equalizer. http://rssequalizer.com/

To me its a publishers opinions and style that add value to a site, but if you know how to get link popularity cheap then those thousands of pages which are created from various RSS feeds will eventually be able to rank for lots of random search terms, especially in engines such as MSN and Yahoo!. Some people may get angry knowing that you are monetizing their writing without attributing it to them or giving them a cut if you automatically create thousands of pages based on their work.

Some blog tracking systems and aggregators make life easier by allowing you to constantly monitor many data channels. I try to keep up with SEO news and news related to search engines. I subscribe to feeds from over 100 various news sites and blogs. I believe NickW from ThreadWatch subscribes to about 300 feeds.

A couple extremely popular web based products to read your RSS subscriptions are Bloglines and My Yahoo!. Both are free. Currently it seems as though Bloglines does not have much of a business model behind it but is the #1 feed reader on the market in terms of usage.

Some other popular RSS newsreaders are Amphetadesk, Straw, Netnewswire, Sharpreader, Feed Demon, Firefox Sage, and a whole bunch of others.

RSS makes it easier to access data by allowing you to quickly sort and sift through data compiled from many interesting channels. Many RSS readers give you an update when new news has occured and thus you can know about news rather quickly without constantly manually tracking websites.

Hopefully that is an ok answer?

What Would You Like

This newsletter will only be good if I can offer what you are interested in. Please send your SEO questions or any ideas you have for things I should put in here.
mailto:aaron@search-marketing.info

If you like this newsletter, site, or my other site please
consider linking :)
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Random happening of the Week:

Jon Stewart on blogs
http://homepage.mac.com/onegoodmove/movies/ds021605bloggers.html

Flying Gonzo stunt game
http://muppets.go.com/games/muppets-flyinggonzo.html

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