February 2007: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

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

1) Google Releases
New Link Reporting Tools – For years, Google’s link: command has
deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of
Google’s fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate
rankings — which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of
backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new
support allowing you to view and even download thousands of links to your site.

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2) Squeezing The
Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates – A
reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his
listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where
search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site
owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to
"squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here’s a search
engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I’ll also cover how we’ve sadly
lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years.

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3) Netvibes: Will
Google Remain ‘The Start Page For The Internet’? – Google has been
dubbed the "start page for the Internet." But a "post-search" future may
indeed be coming. I don’t mean to imply that search will ever be obsolete; it
won’t. What I mean to suggest is that reliance on search and time spent with
search may diminish as RSS feeds and other structured content delivery
mechanisms are adopted by users. Enter Netvibes.

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4) Why The SEO
Folks Were Mad At You, Jason – Jason Calacanis is riled up about SEO
today, telling the world that "90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil
salesman" and still confused over why the "SEO folks" were mad at him when he
said "SEO is bull" during our keynote conversation at SES Chicago last December.
I love Jason. I really do — he says what he thinks, with passion and clearly
deeply cares about things. And I’ve enjoyed some of the arguments we’ve had via
instant messaging on this topic recently. But Jason — and a lot of other people
— need some more education about the myths and misperceptions of SEO. So let
this open letter do both.

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5)
Google Ramps Up
Personalized Search – Google is stepping up the push into personalized
search results. A new change announced today should cause many more people to
take up the service. In turn, the growth of personalized search should have a
dramatic impact on search marketers as the days of "same results, all around"
eventually come to an end. For searchers, the change means needing to be more
careful about when you sign-up to use a Google service, if you’re concerned
about having your search history recorded.

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6) 3
Ranking Survival Tips For Google’s New Personalized Results –
Personalized search at Google is now the default and none too easy to escape
from either through opt-out. This means that every search result you click,
every link you bookmark, every RSS feed you subscribe to using Google services
can be used to improve your personal search results. For search marketers, it
means new skills and techniques are needed to achieve search visibility.

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7) Diggers Can’t
Handle The Truth (About SEO) – It’s been a busy day, with me trying to
provide some more balance and education about search engine optimization in
today’s "Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason" article. About two hours ago,
I noticed it drew the attention of those on Digg. It jumped to the Tech News
popular page, in fact. And about 30 minutes after that, it was gone. Gone?
Flagged as spam by some, which seems to be a euphemism for some on Digg to mean
"I just don’t like a story that I didn’t bother to read." Let’s see some of the
ignorance and absurdity, shall we?

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8) Google AdWords
Quality Score Has Major Bug – There is a bug that makes good performing
ads prices spike through the roof with Google AdWords. Many are seeing high
quality ads and keywords hit with incredibly high CPC prices overnight. Google
replied to several advertisers telling them they are aware of the "temporary
issue" and "they are working to resolve it as soon as possible."

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9) Wikipedia
Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites – Impressive. Scanning the latest top
web sites rankings from comScore for January 2007 , Wikipedia sites are
highlighted for just entering the top ten most visited. OK, technically —
they’re in the top ten for having the most unique visitors. In December 2006,
Wikipedia sites were ranked 13th of all US web properties, with 39 million
unique visitors.

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10) Google
Customized Search Engines to Harness The Wisdom of Experts? – Back in
October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were
enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself
why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site
owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that
came out yesterday at the US Patent Office…

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