Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox answer questions on the Site Review Panel at Pubcon in Las Vegas.

Today, during the Interactive Site Review Session, Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, along with Vanessa Fox of NinebyBlue and Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft took thorough dives into a number of sites.

A few points in particular stood out and are worthy of coverage:

• Blocking Internet Archive may be a Negative Signal
  Matt Cutts noted that spammers very frequently block archive.org from crawling/storing their pages and few reputable sites engage in this. Thus, it’s a potential spam signal to search engines. SEO Theory has a good writeup on when and why there may be legitimate reasons to do this, but webmasters seeking to avoid scrutiny may want to take heed.
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• Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings
  Maile Ohye actually mentioned this at SMX East in New York, but Matt Cutts repeated it again today. In a nutshell – while slow page load times won’t negatively impact your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. This comes on a day when the Google Chrome blog introduced their new SPDY research project. I’m particularly happy about this news, because it’s also true that load times have a positive second-order effect on SEO. Pingomatic recently published some excellent research on load times from Akamai noting the expectations of users for faster web browsing have doubled in the past 2 years. In addition, fast loading pages are, in my opinion, considerably more likely to earn links, retweets and other forms of sharing than their slow-loading peers. This tool from Pingdom is a great place to start testing your own site.
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• It May be Easier to Walk Away from Banned Domains
  Sites that Google’s webspam team has severely penalized or banned entirely from the index can be very difficult to re-include, and thus, Matt suggested that “walking away” and “starting over” may be a more prudent strategy. In my opinion, this is largely due to link profile issues – if your site has a “spammy” link profile, it’s tough to ask an engineer to sort out the wheat from the chaffe manually (or algorithmically) and stop counting only the bad links. Thus, re-consideration requests may not be as effective a use of time as registering a new site and trying to re-build a more trusted presence.
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• Repetition of Keywords in Internal Anchor Text (particularly in footers) is Troubling
  During a specific site’s review, Matt noted that keyword usage in the anchor text of many internal links, particularly in the footer of a website, is seen as potentially manipulative. Yahoo!’s search engineers have noted this in the past and we at SEOmoz have seen specific cases where removal of keyword-stuffed internal links from a footer had immediate impacts on Google rankings (removing what appeared to be large negative ranking penalties sitewide).
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• Having Multiple Sites Targeting Subsections of the Same Niche can be Indicative of Spam
  Matt Cutts today mentioned that “having multiple sites for different areas of the same industry can be a red flag to Google.” Though Googlers have mentioned this before, today’s site review panel brought renewed attention to both Google’s ability and proclivity for carefully considering not only an individual site, but all the other sites owned by that registrant/entity/person. Given Google’s tremendous amount of data on web usage behavior, many SEOs suspect that they track beyond simply domain registration records.

To read more, check out SERoundtable.

Google announced today on its blog that it has acquired AdMob (www.admob.com), a popular mobile display ad company, for $750 million. Google has already built their own platform for AdSense on Mobile devices, but this acquisition gives Google access to AdMob’s more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications.

Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That’s what has us excited about this deal.

Though perhaps the most visible, AdMob is not the largest mobile ad network. According to an August compilation of Nielsen data by Mobile Marketer, here’s the reach of each of the top mobile ad networks (monthly unique users):

1. Millennial Media: 45.6 million
2. Yahoo!: 36.1 million
3. Google: 31.9 million
4. AOL/Platform-A’s Third Screen Media: 28.6 million
5. AdMob: 25.7 million
6. Microsoft: 25.4 million (doesn’t include the new Verizon deal)
7. Jumptap: 23.4 million
8. Quattro Wireless: 23 million

You can find more information about this acquisition at google.com/press/admob

In a debate going back a while, Google was told recently by Rupert Murdoch that he has been blocking Google from indexing its websites, essentially making them invisible to Google’s crawlers. Google doesn’t seem to mind.

Sky News political editor David Speers talks to News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch about paywalls, politics, and more. Murdoch wants to charge users for access to its news services.

This is already being done on the Wall Street Journal, with plans for other Murdoch properties to soon follow. Ultimately, Murdoch feels that Google has been stealing this news and doesn’t care if they’ll be losing traffic to their websites as the news source by blocking Google.

“The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, and steal our stories. We say they steal our stories — they just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, Ask.com … there’s a whole lot of people.”

Google chosen to respond today, telling the Telegraph that they don’t care if Murdoch wants to block its sites from being found via search and/or Google News.

A spokesman for the search giant said: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.”

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

Google’s response is essentially using tactics like robots.txt and meta tags to block its search engine from crawling the news results.

This argument isn’t over and may continue for some time. I see Google as being the chosen option by users over paid news for the foreseeable future, however, wonder how the tables will turn (or rather, how Google will evolve) if larger news sources such as CNN start to opt out of search results.

Google Operating System noticed Google has added a new search option named “page preview.” If you go to Google, search on something and click on “show options,” you can then look towards the button on the left hand side and click on “page previews.” For example, here is a view of a search for apple with page preview selected.

Related:
Preview Google’s Search Results
Google Introduces Page Preview Thumbnails in the Search Results

Source:
http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-page-preview-to-search-options-29039

Want to win 6 months of TeleNav GPS service for free? TeleNav has offered up two 6-month freebies on any mobile device with any carrier if you win. To join the contest, check out everything below.

General rules:

1. **Only for US readers**
2. Contest Starts June 13th 2009 and Ends July 15th 2009
3. Each entrants will get one unique number. The list of all the entrants will be posted at the end of the contest period
4. Two winners will get a 6 month GPS navigator service
5. The winner will be selected using Random.Org and announced here with a specific blog post

Check out the blog contest and enter to win!

Read more About Blog Contests online.

Related Information:

With the various TLDs (top level domains) available today, there’s hardly a shortage of domain names available to consumers and businesses. Or is there?

The .com TLD is has always been the king of domain name extensions. The first search we often check to see if our wanted domain name is available is the .com, then likely .net, .org, .info and anything else (probably in that order).

With that, is there any reasonable expectation that we might consider reviving the .com TLD by opening it up to accepting characters other than A-Z and numbers? Introducing symbols into the domain structure would completely open the various extensions for availability again.

We already have clever domains attempting to push the limit of XXX.com

• del.icio.us
• bubbl.us

But imagine if we could take it a step further and do this:

www.p0dca$t.com

I can’t wait for this functionality, and it may actually never come. Does anyone else share the same desires for this as I do?

Few companies take the time to monitor and review their reputation online and actually respond to the complaints and praises their consumers put out there. They responded within 48 hours of the posting online and handled it beautifully.

I rip on Rackspace specifically because I genuinely care for the brand. If I didn’t care, I would leave and find another vendor. I can think of few companies better-poised to take on the challenge of cloud computing better than Rackspace.

In fact, maybe this is where the disconnect is for consumers right now. Not just with Rackspace, but with all vendors claiming to operate their business on cloud architecture. We call it many things, but the common term is “cloud computing”. Are the public’s assumptions in flawless uptime incorrect in that it’s a “distributed processing” model instead.

Cloud technology has already proven itself as a good model for handling larger scale processing for people that need it. Companies like Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) and Rackspace’s new Cloud Servers platform based on Slicehost’s backend are perfect for this need and you can scale up as needed within minutes. This was only a dream a couple of years ago.

That said, is the public incorrect in equating services like Cloud Sites to Rackspace’s multi-rack load balancing solutions? Such a solution still has a point of failure, although small. The chances of an outage under such a system with two high end servers, each in separate racks with a load balancer in place are incredibly low, in fact, near non-existent. We haven’t seen stability like that on any level with Mosso, Amazon S3 or Media Temple the best of my recollection.

Working on an application today, I noticed errors posting to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system was spitting back read-only errors. Upon investigation, I noticed it was their service that had the issue and not my application.

The status page Rackspace has put up for Cloud Files has up confirms there’s an issue with the service today. I contacted support and they confirmed that “the backend is experiencing no problems” and that “this was simply an unanticipated load on the system so we’re adding more hardware to handle the increased traffic”.

My thoughts are consistent with my other posts. The entire point of “cloud” is that your data’s receiving the highest level of uptime possible out there. This hasn’t been proven yet. I’m shocked that the response was that of “we didn’t know about the load we would receive”. This service’s sole existence is so that your data can be under heavy load. That’s why we choose a cloud service over a single point of failure.

Instead, Rackspace has in effect created their own single point of failure. They took a service out of  “beta” prior to scaling their systems up to speed to handle “live” traffic. With the media attention they’ve been attempting to drum up against competitor Amazon (AMZN), a wise business owner would be ready to handle a surge of usage traffic upon the successful launch of a competing product.  You don’t launch a system, and then say: “Whoops. We  got our  competition’s business. Time to scale up”. By then you’re positioned to lose those new clients back to your competitor again.

I’ve said it before. I’m a huge fan of Rackspace as a brand, their technical support ideals and values, etc. But these types of performance issues are amaturish for a company of their age and place in this world. They’re a tech leader in their space and better than this.

Their speeds may be twice that of Amazon S3, but I think Amazon has a more stable service. All of the big ones have been hit at one time or another, that’s not the complaint. I have been using Rackspace’s Cloud Sites service for 6+ months and it’s had many issues with their supposedly stable cloud. Every time I think a vendor has nailed it, something like this goes and happens to have me questioning “cloud” and what it means again.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ve made it yet. At best my data is safe. But uptime isn’t something I’d bet my life savings on if you’re shopping for it on Cloud. It’s overpriced data storage and has never proven itself to be as “stable” as any of my cPanel linux builds to this day.

Am I the only one out there that feels this way? I’m not mad. I’m disappointed.

It’s inevitable that a web host is going to experience downtime at some point. There’s little in the way of inexpensive options that will deliver true redundancy that wins over all possible failure paths a data center can experience in keeping a website or application online 24/7/365.

However, Mosso has claimed to have accomplished this feat for the past two years. For the most part, this has been true. I’ve pinged and tested websites hosted with Mosso, finding that while they are not necessarily the fastest host out there, I’ve chosen them to be able to withstand nearly any load we can throw at it.

But issues like today I am at a loss for words for. It’s nothing new either. I’ve called in, fully understanding that there’s an issue they’re experiencing, and simply need an “estimated time of resolution”. I’m not asking for anything definitive, but the generic run-around that I typically get reminds me of experiences from early web hosts (who shall be nameless for the time being). This is not typical Rackspace behavior and I think should be treated differently. You don’t put the reseller of your services on the back burner and play the silent game. It sets a bad precedent for your reputation handling customers.

The post from today in the Mosso status area.

So obviously I’m concerned about where Mosso is headed. I was quite literally about to rant about how amazed I am at their Cloud Files offering, however, it’s hard to praise and rant on the same day most of our websites are down. We pay a premium price for shared hosting which is supposed to be redundant enough that these types of embarrasing outages are 

I love the Rackspace brand, company, people, services…everything about it. But Mosso’s starting to test my patience and I’m beginning to doubt if their Cloud Sites service will ever be truly stable and ready for prime time. To compare, I have had a single processor server without issues live at The Planet for nearly a year and a half, not once down. If my little server beats out Mosso’s uptime hands down, why pay the extra buck for a service that hasn’t proven itself?

I’ve ranted about the “cloud” idea for a while in relation to Media Temple and Amazon S3. This post wasn’t originally intended to be a Mosso bashing. I’m a huge Rackspace fan. But they’re not proving themselves bulletproof in terms of uptime so far. Many issues have arisen, and I’m not sold on them as the most stable option for my hosting needs.

Bruce Runyan is the chief uptime officer for Mosso. I’d be interested to get a public statement posted here explaining why things like this happen when the idea behind this type of hosting is so that this doesn’t happen in the first place. To simply avoid calling clients that actually noticed the outage and not provide helpful information other than “We’re working on it” isn’t the answer paying clients are looking for.

So let’s extend this to other hosting situations beyond just Mosso with a few questions.

1. Are you with a host that doesn’t give the full picture?
2. How have you experienced uptime with them?
3. Is uptime or load processing more important?
4. Has the “cloud” idea disappointed you?
5. When will we finally be ready to trust it?

For the record, I’ve been overall blown away with SliceHost (although not Rackspace’s original idea), whome Rackspace aquired recently, and their uptime. I haven’t experienced a single issue with them and I was picky as hell when I contacted the owners out of skepticism a month ago. SliceHost technology will soon become Rackspace’s Cloud Servers offering.

Other related information:
Mosso.com – Information Thread on WebHostingTalk
Rackspace appoints chief uptime officer at Mosso

Recently the United States Postal Service announced that it was considering cutting another delivery day from six down to 5 days per week. This would enable the USPS to maintain staff associated to a more reasonable delivery schedule.

With the widespread use of email and online streaming becoming common use, will this affect businesses in the U.S. severely in this dark economic time? Services like Netflix and Blockbuster run services that rely primarily on the U.S. mail system in order to reach its subscribers and deliver new content. With one less day available for delivery, this could potentially drive the costs of doing business up for these services, translating to higher subscription fees for the consumer.

Or would it? I question whether services like this would be affected as heavily with the new streaming options with iTunes and Netflix. Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and the new Blu-ray and DVD players have cutting edge support for streaming movies and television episodes from these services. Will this ultimately replace the need for the mailed discs when a subscriber could just pull up a movie on-demand…without waiting for something via postal mail?

The streaming services will have lower overhead in the end for the business leasing the content, getting rid of the need for warehouses full of discs, postage fees and lost or damaged discs. The cost of doing business actually goes down by leaving the postal service model.

The next consideration is alienating your subscribers who cannot afford or do not qualify for high speed internet service yet. Not everybody has high speed access yet and that may put people off. So would the loss of another day really hurt these services? Will it annoy the subscribers? Would the ability to pay a slightly higher rate on postage be worth it?

Other news:
USPS asks for 5-day delivery, office closings
USPS 5-Day Delivery Week Could Hurt E-Commerce
USPS Wants Flexibility to Move to 5-Day Delivery Week