Archive: February, 2008

Tune into Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm tomorrow at 2PM (eastern) or 11AM (pacific) to hear three of Metamend’s finest discuss content optimization.

As part of a ten part series we’re doing on SEO on Webcology and at WebProNews, tomorrow’s episode and accompanying article cover the details and challenges of working with web page content as an SEO.

Joining me and co-host Dave Davies will be Metamend’s head SEO, Jade Carter and SEO Specialist Alex Hlinski. If you can’t make it for the live-broadcast you can grab a copy of the podcast from the Webcology page at WebmasterRadio.fm/

Metamend SEO specialist Colin Cochrane posted an interesting find on his blog Saturday. While collecting materials for work on one of his personal sites, Colin attempted to extract material he had previously bookmarked at del.icio.us. Using a Firefox add-on that had its User-Agent set to Googlebot, Colin searched for the specific file he wanted but instead was greeted with a 404-error page.

After running through the list of mistakes he might have made and eliminating each of them, he remembered he had reset the User-Agent to Googlebot when researching if another site was cloaking or not. In other words, the search he was conducting on del.icio.us looked as if it was being performed by Googlebot.

After resetting the User-Agent to default and resubmitting his search-query, del.icio.us delivered the results Colin originally expected. Puzzled by the experience, Colin checked the robots.txt files in the del.icio.us source code and found it was disallowing bots from all major search engines, including that of its owner, Yahoo.

“Puzzled by this, I took a look at del.icio.us’ robots.txt and found that it was disallowing Googlebot, Slurp, Teoma, and msnbot for the following:

Disallow: /inbox
Disallow: /subscriptions
Disallow: /network
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /post
Disallow: /login
Disallow: /rss

A conglomeration of four large American newspaper companies is forming to sell advertising space on the Internet sites of newspapers those companies own. It is estimated that the total advertising audience could reach over 50 million unique visitors each month.

The new advertising company, quadrantONE, will receive a portion of online ad-space on sites owned by The Tribune Company, Hearst Newspapers, the Gannet Company, and The New York Times Company. Three well known newspapers included in the advertising conglom are: The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and the Houston Chronical. There are several smaller, more localized papers included as well.

The basic idea seems to revolve around a one-call ad center based in Chicago that will automatically feed online advertising to each newspaper property, an important efficiency not reached by other online news ad-schemes such as Yahoo’s newspaper consortium, the Newspaper National Network, or the New Century Network of the late 1990’s.

Sensing an opening and trying to recoup massive advertising losses, the introduction of quadrantONE into the online advertising market by the biggest US publishers further demonstrates an inherent weakness in that marketplace. Currently, online advertising is dominated by Google AdWords with Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN’s adCenter running far behind.

We hate it when our successful friends get the shorter end of the stick. Yahoo is shedding some serious talent. Among that talent is a good friend of mine and one of the stars in the SEO community.

Know anyone looking for THE In-House SEO expert? Jessica Bowman, widely considered the úber-expert on In-House SEO, was laid off from Yahoo on Monday.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a few days until Jessica made an official announcement herself. She dropped the news this morning at her SEM / SEO In-house Blog saying,

“As you know by now, life at Yahoo! wasn’t pleasant this week and I’m happy to report that that their in-house SEO program is now so good, that I was laid off!

I knew that my job would be done when an in-house evangelist wasn’t needed anymore. On the way out I got hugs from engineers… it was a job well done.“

Jessica was hired by Yahoo earlier this year to plan, promote and execute SEO techniques on various Yahoo properties. According to other sources I have in Yahoo, she did an amazing job but her position was not considered “bare-bones essential” for the continued operation of the company. (Ever wonder why a search engine might need a SEO?)