This week on SEO Chat we have three rather interesting articles and a great new News Spotlight at the bottom.

Our most recent article is on a brand new search engine Yahoo! is designing to efficiently index and search through audio files and music of all kinds. Our Tuesday article concerns Yahoo!'s long term business strategy, and how it compares to the strategies of MSN and Google, perhaps even outdoing them. On Monday we published a great article all SEOs need to read about the cost of doing SEO incorrectly. It may even provide a marketing pitch for experienced SEOs to help sell their business to clients.

Our featured thread in the forums is about a disconcerting trend of Google. Apparently the engine has been completely dropping many sites from their index. Of course, check out the forums for more user threads like this one.

Finally, just for those of you reading this newsletter, the SEO Chat News Spotlight features the Jupitermedia corporation. The company recently sold its SEO related assets to an international company.

Mike

SEO Index

Yahoo! Audio Search, a Music Pioneer?

Yahoo!’s Long-Term Strategy: Diversify

The High Price of SEO Failure

SEO Forums: Thread of The Week

SEO Chat News Spotlight

Yahoo! Audio Search, a Music Pioneer?
by Developer Shed-- 2005-08-10

How long have you waited for a professional internet search to index audio files on the internet? Well, now Yahoo! will help music related websites find their audience and help music lovers find their fix. The Y! keeps delivering new features and services to the web, determined and inspired to outdo Google. With enough luck and a little creativity, they have a shot here.

This new Yahoo! Music Search (http://audio.search.yahoo.com) is still in beta form, but is basically functional. It indexes music and sound sharing sites, so you can locate both favorite pop tunes and weird sound effects you may use for Windows noises or who knows what. There is an error reporting board for people to explain their concerns, which may be extensive. It’s clear the new service isn’t nearly a final release, but it’s still extremely unique.

Y! has beaten Google, MSN Search, and AOL to this punch. While the others may have music services, they aren’t anything like this. AOL has a music search, but that is more or less an index of iTunes. The only music sources I could find were, “Buy this album directly from AOL,” “iTunes,” and “Sheet Music.” It only serves to make Yahoo! look better. Both Google and MSN haven’t published any functional music searches yet.

Read the full article here.

Yahoo!’s Long-Term Strategy: Diversify
by Terri Wells-- 2005-08-09

Yahoo sees itself very differently from the way Google sees itself. That leads to some clear differences in the two companies' strategies. The ten-year-old Internet portal applies a lesson that Google would be wise to learn: diversification is a good thing.

If you have been following Yahoo!’s various moves for the past several months, you may be wondering what the company is up to. Certainly some of it can be chalked up to competing with rival search engine Google, such as the expansion of storage space for its free email accounts. But that doesn’t cover all of it; indeed, Yahoo seems to be getting into areas that Google has hardly touched yet, and it is going about it in a carefully-thought-out, methodical manner.

Perhaps the biggest evidence of the difference between Yahoo and Google is apparent in the way they see themselves. Google is chiefly a search engine. In its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, it describes itself as “a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information.” Yahoo, when it started out, didn’t even have its own search technology. It states in its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings that Yahoo is “a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide.” The differences may seem subtle, but they are important, because they affect each company’s entire strategy.

Read the full article here.

The High Price of SEO Failure
by Jennifer E. Sullivan -- 2005-08-08

Search engines have evolved from simple “find it” databases into complex, virtual teleporters to send a visitor exactly where he or she wants to go. Attracting new visitors to an ecommerce or other site nearly requires that it rank fairly high on searches. The trouble is that a lot of companies aren't properly informed when they consider how the search engines can work for them, and they fall victim to a number of SEO failures.

In the last few years, thousands of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies have popped up all over the internet. They charge anywhere from a few bucks to thousands of dollars, all having a different twist on how they can speed your site to the top. It’s no wonder there is so much controversy concerning hiring a professional SEO. But there are many factors that figure into whether outsourcing might be a good idea other than price. Consider the following SEO pitfalls and failures.

Read the full article here.

For the past couple of weeks, a lot of seemingly unrelated websites have been dropped from their Google rankings. These were mostly well established and high ranking sites with experienced SEOs. This thread has been searching for any common elements between the sites or any way to fix this problem.

Cygnus:
Google Delisted sites?

Anyone else have a bunch of sites completely delisted in Google?

I'm still trying to piece together particularly why it happened -- there isn't much of a common theme among the sites other than their industry. Going from a climbing rank to "site: " yielding 0 results is a very big shift. My gut feeling is that something goofed at the Googleplex, but I need to see that it is happening to others before I can confirm this.

1EightT:
I lost a 3 year old automotive forum with over 355,000 pages indexed. Today 0 with a site: search. WTF google.

Cygnus:
Mine have been mostly older sites -- 3 years for the oldest one, 1 year for the newest [sorry, can't post these URLs] So far I've ruled out any linking issues, IP canonicalization screw-ups, and am looking to see if there was major down-time when the bots came around (which wouldn't normally result in delisted...odd).

1EightT, I recently lost an automotive domain too, but it came back with more pages than ever before indexed, even though the pages don't exist...very odd.

So, there definitely seems to be some sort of cache issue going on. At the very least I hope Google recognizes this after all the e-mails I sent for reinclusions requests.

rtchar:
I have the same problem today ... www.dogtagsonline.com This site has been on the Internet for over last seven years. This morning when I looked for the site it is completely GONE... POOF ... removed from index.

Page-Rank:0
Links:0
Pages Indexed:0

This site has been in top 5 for several years. No major changes, no links to bad neighborhood (no new links added for 30 days), an absolutely white hat, squeaky clean site! There is something definitely wrong at Google!!!

Cygnus:
This is getting to be bigger a problem than I originally suspected. So far, there isn't a common thread of everyone more or less doing the same thing (whether it be advertising programs, affiliate content, link structures, etc). It "could" be collateral damage for the scrapers, but assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that Google's definition would fall under the lines of duplicating content, I can immediately rule out 4 of the sites I manage that are completely unique.

Maybe the collateral damage is a bug in the caching system -- Google has always had the tendancy to overtweak, then scale back a bit...but this doesn't look like a tweak so much as someone spilling beer on the server.

Anyhow, the industries affected are primarily in finance (for the sites I manage).

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread here.

Jupitermedia Corporation Sells to British Company
by Developer Shed

Jupitermedia has been a big name in the search engine optimization and marketing communities. On August 2nd, the company sold its marketing tradeshows and websites, ClickZ.com and Searchenginewatch.com, to a company traded on the London stock market. Incisive Media Plc bought the sites and conferences for a scant $43 million. They plan to recover the loss and begin profiting from the purchase within a year.

Jupitermedia’s CEO, Alan Meckler, gave a couple reasons why he decided to sell those sites and conferences. He basically simplified the whole issue when he said, “Jupitermedia has evolved from being a media company with images into an image company with media.” Jupiter has purchased many image sites in the past months, and he intends to keep purchasing them. The best way to raise more money to expand the company’s media reach was to either open these sites to be traded publicly or else sell them. Meckler saw selling them to be easier and more focused on his long term goals for the company.

Incisive Media Plc is a British company primarily focused on financial business. Among their eight divisions are things such as mortgage solutions and investment management. By purchasing the Jupitermedia properties, Incisive hopes to make a smooth transition into the search marketing arena. It is also trying to solidify its position in other countries, especially the United States. The result of both of these transitions is yet to be seen.

It looks as if the employees from Clickz and Searchenginewatch are moving with the company. There shouldn’t be any major staff changes, and the outspoken ones sounded optimistic about the new company. They hope that their help will bring new possibilities to Incisive Media. The new company also plans to host more conferences each year, especially internationally. Will this bring growth and greater reach to the ClickZ network, or will this change in management be a disaster for it?

Discuss this topic in the SEO Chat forum.