March 2007: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

Below are
Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular
stories from March 2007:

1)
Google Now Reporting
Anchor Text Phrases – Hurray! Finally, you can get a report from
Google of the top anchor text phrases used when people link to your site.
Google Webmaster Central has just announced the new feature. But didn’t Google
already report anchor text data? Yes, but only keywords, not phrases. Keywords
are mostly useless junk food data. Phrases are datalicious, tasty and helpful.
Below, a detailed and illustrated look at what a difference a phrase makes and
how to claim your own.

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2) Google Warning
Against Letting Your Search Results Get Indexed – The days of doing a
Google search that brings up results leading to search results from other
sites are heading for a close. Matt Cutts, in his Search Results In Search
Results post today, points out a change to Google’s guidelines that shows a
crackdown on this type of material may begin. More about what I’m talking
about below, plus the question of whether Google should do the same with paid
listings. Over time, more and more pages seem to show up in Google search
results that are merely lists of search results from those sites. To
illustrate this, consider a search for dvd players:

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3) Dissecting
Microsoft Slams At Google As Copyright Infringer – Last October,
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer gave us a taste of how Microsoft was going to
position Google as a copyright leech. Today, Microsoft launched a full-out
assault on the company. Google deserves some of this, no doubt. But the idea
as Microsoft as some altruistic copyright savior deserves some critical
analysis, as well. Below, I’ll dissect Microsoft’s slams against Google,
pointing out where they can be redirected back at Microsoft itself. But
overall, I remain in agreement that Google should shift book search to an
opt-in basis when dealing with copyrighted works.

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4) The Duplicate
Content Penalty Myth – One thing that has plagued the SEO industry for
years has been a lack of consistency when it comes to SEO terms and
definitions. One of the most prevalent misnomers being bandied about is the
phrase "duplicate content penalty." I’m here to tell you that there is no such
thing as a search engine penalty for duplicate content. At least not the way
many people believe there is. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that the
search engines like and appreciate duplicate content — they don’t. But they
don’t specifically penalize websites that happen to have some duplicate
content. Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the
Web. It’s nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some dupe content for
whatever reason, you don’t have to lose sleep every night worrying about the
wrath of the Google gods. They’re not going to shoot lightning bolts at your
site from the sky, nor are they going to banish your entire website from ever
showing up when someone searches for what you offer. The duplicate content
probably won’t show up in searches, but that’s not the same thing as a
penalty. Let me explain.

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5) Google’s Matt
Cutts on Personalization and the Future of SEO – Last week I talked
with Google’s Marissa Mayer about the user side of personalization. This week
I had the chance to sit down with Matt Cutts at the Googleplex and asked him
what the impact of personalization will be on the SEO community. One thing
that was interesting in the Marissa Mayer interview was finding out just how
much impact personalization would have for most of us in our Google search
experience. The fact is, right now, personalization won’t make that much of a
difference in many of our searches.

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6) Google: Click
Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks – Finally, we have a click fraud rate from
Google itself: less than 0.02 percent of all clicks slip past its filters and
are caught after advertisers request reviews. That low figure is sure to bring
out the critics who will disagree. Below, more about how Google comes up with
the figure plus some click fraud fighting initiatives it plans to implement
later this year.

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7) The 5 Secrets
PPC Agencies Don’t Want You to Know – Nearly three-fourths of
companies that outsource their pay-per-click search marketing to agencies are
dissatisfied with their results, and only 21 percent are completely satisfied,
according to a Jupiter Research published late last year. What causes this
dissatisfaction, especially for B2B marketers? There are five factors at work:

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8) Digg’s Kevin
Rose Fails To Stop The Bury Brigade – After a week of questions about
Digg’s "Bury Brigade," Digg founder Kevin Rose has come in with some public
comments about the system and the "alleged" brigade. Unfortunately, they’re
just comments — not solutions to protect Digg from the actual brigade I
myself can see. More about that in the article below, plus how buries work and
can be misused.

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9) Google Launches
Pay Per Action Ads – Google announced a limited U.S. only beta for a
new service they are calling Pay Per Action ads. Google Pay Per Action will
allow advertisers to create ads that cost only when a desired action is
triggered. The advertiser sets the price per action; for example, an
advertiser can decide to pay $5 per lead acquisition, as opposed to paying per
click or per impression. These Pay Per Action ads are available to a limited
number of AdSense publishers. Publishers will be able to select which Pay Per
Action ads they would like to display on their content sites. A publisher
accepted into the beta can choose to display all pay per action ads, or select
to show keyword specific ads or select a specific ad from a specific
advertiser. To do so, the publisher will have to login to their AdSense
accounts, go to the referrals section and select other referrals from the
options.

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10) UFO Crawler: The
Truth Is Out There & Searchable – IBM and Yahoo teamed up to bring to
you UFOCrawler, a search engine that is about finding sources on "UFO
Sightings, time travel, conspiracy theories and anomalies." For example, a
search on area 51 returns 7,904 sources, unfortunately some of the results do
not look all that great. It is important to note that all the other tabbed
searches (i..e Web Images Video Audio Directory Local News) take you to Yahoo,
the Enterprise tab takes you to UFOCrawler results. This is powered by IBM
OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise and brought to you by the Anomalies
Network.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our
Most
Popular Stories page.