It's time once again for another issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. Welcome back. Our most recent article examines the repercussions of the Google death penalty briefly suffered by Ricoh's and BMW's German sites. Apparently Google is really starting to crack down; who will be next? On Tuesday, we discussed how to use content and links to attract more (and more loyal) visitors to your site. Finally, we started the week by taking another look at the hazards of Google's China censorship. Could U.S. national security be at stake?

Our Thread of the Week takes a look at Google sitemaps. Will they help or harm your site? Google says they should not harm your site, but at least one forum member claims he had a different experience. Check the thread yourself and share your views!

Our SEO Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, covers PreFound.com. This community-based search engine is actually offering to pay its human searchers as an incentive to improve the quality of its service. What model will search engines try next?

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

SEO Index

Beware the Google Death Penalty

Give Your Site Visitors Something to Talk About

Google Censors China Search: A Dangerous Game

 News You Can't Use

 SEO Thread of The Week

 SEO Chat News Spotlight

Introducing Tech News by Developer Shed. News you can't use.

It's edgy, it's irreverent, it's all about technology. It's news you can't use, and you won't want to miss! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions:

	What's the going price of a Microsoft bug? Are you tracking your yield of girlfriend ownership? Will they try to patent a photon torpedo next? Where is a spaceport going to be built? Watch the video!

Beware the Google Death Penalty
by Terri Wells -- 2006-02-22

Google recently sentenced the German websites for BMW and Ricoh to removal from their indexes, aka the "Google Death Penalty." Both sites made it back into the Google index in about three days. But what were their crimes? Why did they happen? And how can we avoid having our own sites face the death penalty?

Early in February 2006, Google watchers and the SEO community were taken somewhat by surprise by a blog entry from Matt Cutts. For those who might not know, this Google engineer has developed quite a following by writing about search engine optimization in addition to the usual blog topics. In an earlier entry, Cutts had stated that Google would begin paying more attention to search engine spam originating from countries other than the U.S., and in languages other than English. On February 5, he reported in his blog that the search engine giant had turned word into deed.

Google removed the German website for carmaker BMW from its index, as well as the German website for camera maker Ricoh. While the delisting lasted for only three days, it sent mild shivers through the SEO community. Even news outlets that don’t normally show much interest in covering the topic chimed in with their surprise. As was widely pointed out, BMW and Ricoh are the highest profile companies to date to suffer the “Google death penalty.” Exactly what happened?

Read Beware the Google Death Penalty

Give Your Site Visitors Something to Talk About
by Terri Wells -- 2006-02-21

In a previous article titled “Does Your Website Have What Your Visitors Want?” I discussed a number of the things you need to keep in mind when building your website to attract visitors and convince them to stay. I placed a lot of emphasis on the usability and design of your site, because of how strongly those factors affect a visitor’s experience. This article discusses the two remaining areas I wanted to cover: content and links.

Why does your website deserve to be listed at the top of the search engine results page (SERPs), above all the others in your field? If you can’t answer that question clearly, you don’t deserve that ranking. If you answer that question with all the ways you have optimized your keywords for the search engines, there’s a good chance you’re missing the point. Search engines are for people who are searching for something, and your site should cater to those people as well. While many Web surfers shop online, most are looking for one thing: information.

Content is still king online; not just content, but high quality content. If your content is good enough, people will naturally link to it, and that link system operates as a voting system with the major search engines. Great content = lots of links = high rankings in the SERPs. So, to rank high in the SERPs, you have to think about what your visitors want and need.

Read Give Your Site Visitors Something to Talk About

Google Censors China Search: A Dangerous Game
by Peyton McCullough -- 2006-02-20

The United States of America is engaged in a fight to spread freedom and democracy. Two notable examples of this are Iraq and Afghanistan, where over a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are deployed. However, this struggle has many more fronts. With Google as the next one, what impacts do we face?

A Dangerous Game

This is not a regional struggle, it's a global one. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money go into this effort, but are American business—who, undoubtedly, profit from America's political and economic structure—undermining this effort?

In January, Google followed Yahoo! and MSN into the Middle Kingdom, hoping to gain a piece of the nation's pie, which consists of around a hundred million Internet users. Google opened Chinese versions of its services, claiming that major service problems had previously made it nearly inaccessible to China's population.

Read Google Censors China Search: A Dangerous Game

G Sitemap - Beneficial or Not?

Is posting a google sitemap beneficial or not?

We have released new pages, all with new url's, so the old pages are getting the traffic, but we want the new ones to get the traffic, 301 redirects are quite frankly impossible with the amount of pages we have (500,000+).

All our traffic comes from Google, so if it's not beneficial we won't post a new sitemap.

What are the thoughts?!?

I'd definitely set up a sitemap. The larger your site, the more beneficial it is, but I'd say in your case it is definitely worthwhile.

We set-up a sitemap before, and it seemed like it had a detrimental effect. Has anyone else experienced this?

So far using the sitemaps feature has helped a lot for some of my larger sites... finally some of my old pages are de-indexed, all my new stuff is listed and I've discovered some errors which have helped me clean up a lot of silly mistakes (404 headers etc) as a direct result of the "errors" listed in the sitemaps info.

I have nothing but good things to say about it.

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

PreFound Offers “Get Paid to Search” Model

Kentucky-based PreFound.com looks set to take the Web 2.0 revolution a step further. Like Del.ici.ous, recently purchased by Yahoo!, the community-oriented search engine depends on users who sign up to contribute links that they find to the site. The company recently announced plans to pay users for their contributions.

The system could almost become self supporting, given the way it appears to be set up. PreFound said it would pay 100 percent of the revenue that Google AdSense pays to the site for the contextual ads displayed on the pages. The full payout will only go to topic experts who offer “organized, relevant Groups of sites sorted by topic and sub-topic, making them very usable to people interested in the topic.” The company refers to these people as “Featured Finders.”

PreFound is hoping that the money will offer their other Finders incentive to improve their pages so they might qualify to become Featured Finders and get paid to search. In some ways, it sounds like a cross between Del.ici.ous and About.com. Indeed, PreFound allows users who choose to share links to import them from other sites, such as Del.ici.ous, which can save some duplication of effort.

To use the site simply for search, you do not need to sign up or share any links. If you aren’t happy with your results, never fear; a search box automatically pops up that lets you do the same search on Google with a single click. Entering my favorite vaguely obscure search turned up a Group devoted to the subject, which in this case consisted of links that included books, forums, and other online information on the topic.

I don’t have the space to go into full detail about what PreFound offers, but it’s definitely worth a look. It’s particularly interesting to me that they’re riding on the shirttails of Google’s AdSense program. I hesitate to say that Google is funding its rival, because the two work so differently. Google is using algorithms, while PreFound is trying to operate completely with human indexing. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Will we see web surfers turn searching into a full-time paid occupation?

Advertising - If you wish to advertise in our newsletter, please contact us.

Unsubscribe - If you don't want to receive our emails, please unsubscribe.