Here at Search Engine Panel, we are holding steady with a PR3 on the homepage, and some light internal PR settling on some posts. You should read this post about PageRank if you aren’t entirely sure what it is, and/or how it does/doesn’t affects rankings.

Yahoo Top 10 Overall Searches

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

Top Yahoo! Mobile Searches

1. Megan Fox
2. Mobile Games
3. Michael Jackson
4. Movies
5. Rihanna
6. Mail
7. Lady Gaga
8. NFL
9. Ringtones
10. iPhone

AOL’s top searched celebrities for 2009

1. michael jackson
2. robert pattinson
3. rihanna
4. farrah fawcett
5. kim kardashian
6. megan fox
7. jon and kate
8. miley cyrus
9. patrick swayze
10. natasha richardson

These don’t come as much of a surprise, with the unforeseen death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, and never-ending controversy surrounding Jon and Kate Gosselin.

AOL’s top “What Is…” questions of 2009

1. what is twitter
2. what is my house worth
3. what is my ip address
4. what is a short sale
5. what is gout
6. what is love
7. what is a good credit score
8. what is swine flu
9. what is skype
10. what is lupus

The housing crisis made a decent impact in 2009, with the house appraisal, short sale, and credit score queries. Also note the first “what is” question, as it appears on the following list for Ask.com.

Ask.com’s Top Overall Questions of 2009

1. How much should I weigh?
2. How do I get out of debt fast?
3. How do I get pregnant?
4. What is Twitter?
5. What is Miley Cyrus’ phone number?
6. What is the meaning of life?
7. When will the world end?
8. How long does marijuana stay in your system?
9. What are the symptoms of Swine Flu?
10. What time is it?

Again, the financial crisis in the United States and outbreak of Swine Flu make an impact here.

Top Overall Trending Topics on Bing in 2009:

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine Flu
4. Stock Market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for Clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard

What news and celebrities will make the charts in 2010? I predict that financial questions will still linger, and perhaps Tiger Woods will make the list too if the news keeps piling up. Maybe there will be a return of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton gossip, or an entirely new social media product.

The main goals are to have:

* Minimal changes are required as the website grows

* Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)

* Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)

* Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content

An effective way of making AJAX crawlable and easily indexed should in theory improve the experience of searchers, since more content (that could be more “interesting”) could be found in the index.

Here’s the official post regarding the proposal.

… part of a team of Web-savvy professionals who clog the Internet with unwanted ads and sell users’ personal information to the highest bidder.

Am I part of a team of Web-savvy professionals?

Yes. We conduct ourselves professionally with clients, peers, and use our SEO abilities in a productive manner. SEOs are also among the most web-savvy individuals, and understand the Internet much better than, oh say, a Fox News “journalist.”

Do I clog the Internet with unwanted ads?

No. In fact, with the strides in behavioural targeting, demographic targeting, and searcher trend research, SEOs and SEMs alike are able to better serve relevant ads. Moreover, the trending focus towards user experience marketing (UXM) is helping search marketers to provide greater value to web users.

Do I sell users’ personal information to the highest bidder?

No. This “journalist” just needs to be more careful with their public MySpace profile. Also, SEOs are not malicious programmers just because this “journalist” doesn’t have any virus protection software installed on their computer.

The article goes on to say,

Search Engine Optimizer

Ever wonder why “nonsense” Web sites sometimes turn up in your search results on Google or Yahoo? That’s because search engine optimizing scammers work full-time to create thousands of other Web sites that link to the spam site. For example, the creator of spamlaw.com is hoping to dupe would-be visitors to spamlaws.com, a legitimate site that bills itself as an online security resource.

In addition to not knowing anything about search engine optimization, Fox “News” has no knowledge of domain name parking, typo-traffic, or the definition of spam. I think that it’s time for their editors to come back from summer vacation and issue reparations for their libel.

So here’s my experience with advertising on Facebook.

February 2009

I decided to try a generic ad for the products I sell. It wasn’t aimed at a narrow demographic group on FB because I couldn’t figure out how to define the right kind of audience. Since the items I sell are closely involved with using the Internet, I specified the term “webmaster,” but I don’t think that really brought my ad to an audience of webmasters.

The ad began running in February, after a brief wait for Facebook to approve it. The first couple of days, it was shown to about 700 people per day but got no clicks. The numbers dwindled to about 300 on the third day, and 200 on the fourth.

Finally, on the fifth day, I got a click, and my numbers rose to 600+ views on that day, more than 1,300 the next (when I got another click). After that, it dwindled back to the 200-300 range, except that each time I got a click, the numbers jumped into the high hundreds for a few days.

After a couple of weeks with no more clicks, daily views dropped well below 100. Some days in April, there were fewer than 10. To this date, that ad has gotten about 20,000 views but only 5 clicks (at a cost of roughly 50 cents each). So it’s been a cheap way to get the ad onscreen, but hasn’t generated worthwhile returns.

May 2009

In May, I started a different campaign for a subset of the products I was marketing. I specified an age and education range, but no keywords.

This one opened with much bigger numbers: on the first day, I had 30,000 views and 6 clicks (at $.65 each). I wanted to make some changes to the ad, but discovered that you can’t do that - you have to start a new ad instead. So I paused the existing ad and made a slightly altered version of it. (Again, I had to wait for official approval before it began running.)

The new version opened with a bang on day one: 70,000 views. However, probably since it got only 11 clicks ($.66 each) and hence was generating too little revenue for Facebook, those numbers immediately crashed. During the next six days, I got anywhere from 15 to 41 views a day, and no clicks.

I also noticed that Facebook’s “suggested bid” for my ad has been raised. At the start, it was around 60-70 cents - now, it’s $1.90-$2.35. With so few clicks, I have to pay them more for each one to make it worth their while. The same thing happened when I tried some ads on Google AdWords. Their suggested bids kept going higher and higher, until they exceeded my comfort level, so my ads there are basically defunct.

Anyway, I guess my Facebook ad views will remain at a slow trickle unless I get clicks and/or raise my per-click bid. I guess some people do well advertising there, but I wouldn’t quit my day job just yet (if I had one).

The Differences

The first thing you may notice is an overall rebranding of the search engine’s elements. For example, its travel vertical has gone from “Farecast” to “Bing Travel.” But apart from a makeover, an easier name to remember, and some renaming of its sections, does Bing actually provide a better search experience? Surprisingly, yes.

To illustrate this, we will summon the almighty power of Miley Cyrus. Using the search query “miley cyrus” produces the following result in Bing (click to enlarge).

Along the left-hand side you will notice that Bing understands the nature of the search, and offers related suggestions for fine-tuning your query and helping you find whatever it is you’re interested in.

The main search area is where Bing really starts to shine. Universal (federated) search results appear with pictures, video, etc. This is not something new, and both of Bing’s competitors (Google and Yahoo) have blended search listings too. However, Bing’s organized layout and navigation of these results are superior in my opinion. The proximity of the News, Images, Videos, and Biography links in Bing is far more effective than how Google places them at the very top of its SERPs.

Good Popups?

And the most impressive aspect of Bing, is the pop-up system that appears upon hovering each listing. This would be the box on the far right in the screenshot above. These popups display more snippets and links from the page, giving you a better idea of what’s on the other side of a potential click-through. The content in the popups also loads remarkably fast.

In today’s post, we will voice both sides of the debate and provide a link should you decide to adhere to these web standards.

The Opposing Viewpoint

There are many reasons as to why W3C validation isn’t actively pursued by the general webmaster population. It often requires skill that most web designers don’t have as they usually only focus on what’s “on the outside,” and clients are largely unaware that web standards even exist.

As for the SEO side of things, bots are generally smart enough to compensate for flawed code and crawl poorly-constructed websites, albeit with some difficulty. Moreover, there are plenty of websites that do not validate yet still have high rankings and search traffic.

Benefits of Valid Source Code

To infer that having invalid source code would help bring in traffic would be incorrect though. In fact, bots love semantic code and are more likely to crawl and index your pages faster and more frequently. This is important to keep in mind, as most sites are constantly updated and you will want your fresh content to be indexed sooner rather than later.

In addition to making life easier for bots, passing W3C validation will also make things easier for web developers. Source code with good semantic markup allows web developers to understand what’s going on, what’s needed, and what they can take out. The processes of debugging and updating instantly become more effortless.

While search engines prefer validated sites for crawling reasons, they also know that validation is a rare achievement. W3C validity might not have as much of an SEO impact as a .edu backlink, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if search engines are endowing authority to validated pages with a multiplier effect.

Furthermore, W3C validity may begin playing a larger role in search algorithms, as the Internet is continually subjected to an onslaught of new sloppy sites. Validation is also key for compatibility across different browsers, and for emerging technologies like the mobile web.

Validating Your Source Code

It’s easy to check whether or not your code is valid with the help of free online validators, such as the W3C Markup Validation Service.

(Aside: A PageRank update occurred a couple of days ago.)

Instead, it looks like Google is now using JavaScript for click tracking. While the links on the SERPs themselves don’t initially have referrer data attached to the strings, Google is adding this information via JavaScript to the client (searcher) side, prior to submitting the GET request. This is illustrated by simply right-clicking on a listing when browsing with Firefox.

Using SEP as an Example

For example, when googling “search engine panel” and hovering your mouse cursor over the title, the status bar displays:

http://www.searchenginepanel.com

However, if you right-click the title, the status bar changes due to the JavaScript and indicates that link would have been

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.searchenginepanel.com%2F&ei=dEkcStu7GJeUMbbtgJ0P&usg=AFQjCNF0Zr2cXPC0u8ERGvImJfqPBcDLyQ&sig2=2ZisPOVloHBWHATy00-WiQ

Why The Change?

Why would Google implement such a change? After all, some users do not have JavaScript enabled (albeit a small percentage of them), meaning that less referrer data would be obtained.

Well, in addition to the obvious web analytics applications for gathering such information, I believe that the search powerhouse also puts a strong emphasis on accuracy. It’s a principal factor for its dominance over other search engines, and there is a belief that clicks within the natural search results play a role in ranking.

This isn’t that much of a stretch, as click-throughs already play a role in AdWords quality scores and paid search results.

By the end of that post, and we had concluded that digging into web analytics data can play a major part in helping us understand what the user wants. Part of determining the impact of your site/company/brand on the Internet can be accomplished by investigating the marks that you have left (directly or indirectly) on the Blogosphere.

Searching Through Blogs

The two predominant blog search engines are Technorati and Google Blog Search. Both of these free services allow you to search through blogs to find those that mention a specific subject. Micro-blogging sites may also have their own internal search engine, such as Twitter Search.

For example, using your company name as the search query would list blogs that are talking about your company. Visit these blogs and read the relevant posts. Many of them will often explicitly say what they like or don’t like about you, and this is the information you should keep in mind when catering your website to the user experience.

Checking For Bookmarks

Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Diigo (formerly Furl.net) will also have their own internal search engines. These are particularly useful in finding out which of your individual web pages users have liked.

How do they do it?

Well, CF monitors and tracks traffic for over 300 advertising networks, and billions of click-throughs from the top search engines and foremost publishers.

Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics:

Our new platform helps customers pinpoint and increase the flow of highly-convertible traffic in real-time, which ultimately improves the results of their online campaigns.

New features to the platform include:

Click Forensics Site Score – sources of traffic are tagged with individual Click Forensics Site Scores that rank visitors based on their propensity to convert. This allows ad networks to more effectively filter and route traffic for highest monetization and provide the best ROI for online advertisers.

Adaptive Intelligence – to accommodate varying traffic profiles among different ad networks, advertisers, and publishers, the new engine provides the capability to adjust rules and thresholds to produce traffic quality scores that better reflect propensity to convert for each specific client. For example, an ad network that caters to retailers in Asia might have very different traffic patterns than a B2B ad network in North America.

Machine Learning – the traffic scoring engine also employs new machine learning capabilities that allow it to adapt and tune itself in real-time to detect new sources of good and bad traffic as they emerge. Filtering decisions can be made instantly based on traffic quality thresholds set by clients.

Enhanced Anomaly Detection – more granular click anomaly detection features can distinguish new complex click types – machine or human – even from the same computer. This includes increasingly popular malicious Javascript programs that execute upon a page view or site visit. In addition, volume and spike anomalies can be more easily identified to protect from stealth attacks, such as those resulting from botnet activation.