October 2007: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

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

1) Mapping The
Southern California Fires – I’m back home (my original home) in Southern
California for vacation, and to welcome me back, the Southland is on fire. Ah,
just like old times. As I was keeping up with the news, I came across some maps
online from Google Earth, Google Maps, Virtual Earth, and elsewhere that I
thought I’d share with others.

===================

2) Billboard
Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm – I’m in the Bay Area this
week, and driving down Lombard Street, I brought the car to a halt when I saw
the two billboards above. Yes, that’s one of the Goog411 billboards for Google
Voice Search sitting on top of an Ask.com "The Algorithm" one. Sadly, there’s
doesn’t seem to be room to squeeze in ones from Yahoo and Microsoft. Want to see
them for yourself? Go down Lombard, just up from Gough. I’ve got another shot
here, as well.

===================

3)
Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
– More and more, I’ve been seeing people wondering if they’ve lost traffic on
Google because they were detected to be selling paid links. However, Google’s
generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all
Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing
PageRank. Now that’s changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize
your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it.

===================

4) Google’s
PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links? – Seems like there is a PageRank
update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Can’t
say that we were not warned about this. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling
Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over two weeks ago, and
now it appears many sites are getting hit with a drop in PageRank. Here is a
list of some sites, including major publishers, who seem to have taken a hit
overnight:

===================

5) Report: 7 Out
Of 10 Americans Experience ‘Search Engine Fatigue’ – A recent report
issued by Autobytel, based on findings from a poll of 1,001 US adults conducted
by Kelton Research, examined "The State of Search" and how automobile shoppers
interact with search engines in particular. Below I excerpt some of the general
search findings from the report. The big takeaway is in the headline above: 7
out of 10 Americans experience what the report describes as “search engine
fatigue.”

===================

6) Google Adds
Sitelinks Control To Webmaster Tools & Much More – Google has informed
us that today they are releasing a new update to Google Webmaster Central’s
tools. The new features include a way to manage your Google Sitelinks, more
historical query statistics, an extension of sitemaps to support code search, an
improved message center and a warning that may help notify you of possible
duplicate content problems.

===================

7) Did Dalai Lama
Award Cause China To Redirect Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Search Traffic To Baidu?
– Reports have been coming in that people trying to reach Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft from within China or via Chinese ISPs are being redirected to Baidu.
Some have accused Baidu of hijacking the traffic, but we think it’s likely that
China is upset with the US over the award it granted to the Dalai Lama and is
retaliating by hurting US-based search engines. Back in 2002, when China was
upset with Google, it similarly redirected traffic. From a Reuters article at
that time:

===================

8) Google Logo
Celebrates Sputnik 50th Anniversary – Fifty years ago today — October
4, 1957 — Sputnik became the world’s first artificial satellite to go into
orbit. Google is celebrating the 50th anniversary with the special logo above.
Will other search engines do the same? So far, it’s only Google among the
majors.

===================

9) Social Media
Marketing: The New SEO? – Fall is the time of year when we start to look
at where search marketing is heading. Looking at the latest search marketing
conference agendas, articles, and online news in the SEM space, it certainly
appears that social media marketing and networking are the wave of the future.
To a certain extent, they are. Social media, and social networking in
particular, create a back-and-forth conversation with your target audience,
giving you the ability to virally market your website through the "buzz" that
can be created. When something interesting, cool, or unique is being talked
about in "all the right places," it can certainly provide a boost in website
traffic.

===================

10) Google’s Tips
On How to Write a Good Meta Description – The Google Webmaster Central
Blog described what makes for a good meta description versus what makes for a
bad meta description. Meta descriptions are a special tag that you place within
the source code of your html page. They can be used by search engines for
ranking purposes as well as for being displayed within the search result pages.

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