MSN will now notify you, when given your contact information, about which pages MSN thinks are the most important on your site as well as a yes/no if they think you are spamming. If yes you can go through a process to find out how and why. This is a nice feature to get some professional search engine feedback about your website and SEO tactics. If only Google provided this information; Hint Hint! You should check this out and all the other features available in both MSN and Google Webmaster tools. There is always something available that you will find valuable.

Have your Adsense referral earnings been a bit sluggish lately? Well, there’s a good reason for this…Google Adsense has placed a temporary restriction on referral earnings while Google checks the validity of click and referral data generated from Adsense ads. Google has not commented on when the validation period will end, but stated that publisher’s earnings will return to normal once they have passed validation. [more…]

Matt Cutts is in charge of the Webspam team at Google. His Blog is extremely popular in the webmaster and search engine optimization world. In many of his Blog posts and interviews there are always interesting tidbits of information that are revealed that only someone that worked for Google would know. Any insight into the secretive intricacies of Google’s algorithm is always great information and Matt Cutts is everyones primary source.

Matt Cutts was recently interviewed in California. During this interview he was asked about Robot.txt and Page Rank for pages that aren’t allowed to be crawled by Google. What was interesting in the interview was when he mentioned “you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.” A page that isn’t indexed within Google because of a Robot.txt file or NoFollow tag still carries Page Rank and outbound links on that page will still carry weight in internal and external cross-linking. Another situation he mentioned that was important for this scenario is if your website had multiple pages of similar or duplicate content, you could NoIndex the pages you don’t want Google to index but the links going into and coming out of those pages will still carry Page Rank.

The important thing to consider here is that the pages on your website create a web of Page Rank. The home page of your website passes link juice throughout your website. The path of your internal pages from the home page is extremely important from an SEO perspective. You want to make sure that your most important pages get the most link juice that can be obtained. There is always an optimal way to cross link your website and the above information may change some of the intricacies involved in choosing the optimal cross linking structure.

Is This Ethical? Microsoft AKA MSN Live Search is partnering with another search marketing firm, The Search Agency which will offer SEO and Paid Search Marketing services. Microsoft is the parent company of aQuantive, which owns Avenue A Razorfish a major paid search company. [more…]

Over the past few months I have started to notice a trend with Google. They seem to be testing out strange results at select IP addresses on specific terms. I call this the “Google Scramble”. The strange thing is that many of the results are just completely irrelevant. I believe Google periodically performs limited testing on high traffic terms that seems to be about tracking the users clicks to see if they are satisfied with the new results compared to the old results.

Luckily, once Google is done with there testing the final result is of the high quality that we expect from Google. Since most people do not leave the first page, Google may be testing deeper listings that seem to have picked up an abnormal amount of clicks for their placement by moving them to the first page. By putting them on the first page of the results Google can then see how the users interact with them. If the result is clicked on and the user does not return to Google for some time Google may give this URL a boost in it’s “normal” index. But without this testing Google would never have enough click through data on these results to make sound adjustments.