Conducted by Gary Woods
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17:59:02 gary woods We're supposed to talk about Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi, but anything you'd like to ask is okay by me!
17:59:14 bond4870 gary, what are the implications of the takeover of Inktomi as you see it?
17:59:44 gary woods I think it'll mean that Yahoo will go back to the way they were before they started employing Google
18:00:09 gary woods As we all know at this time they've entirely sublimated their own directory and only feed Google results
18:00:42 gary woods So that means and if you're a webmaster and paying attention at all, there is absolutely no reason for you to continue to pay Yahoo $300 per year
18:01:28 gary woods I have no idea how much of a revenue stream all of us buying our way into Yahoo is, but I think it's probably pretty significant
18:02:31 gary woods I think they're going to use Inktomi to supplement their own Directory not as the primary provider
18:02:44 bond4870 Should as SEO's should we focus on yahoo followed by google ?
18:03:40 gary woods Yahoo is definitely an interesting case, but whether you concentrate on one over the other I can't really say
18:04:03 gary woods At this point Google accounts for about 50% of my traffic so they've definitely got my attention.
18:04:16 gary woods Yahoo accounts for about 20% and MSN accounts for about 20%
18:04:59 gary woods If Yahoo really does go back to feeding their directory results first it's time to really look at those descriptions you submit to them
18:05:36 gary woods At this point is anybody still submitting to Yahoo and paying the $300 per?
18:06:39 gary woods It's kind of all connected because your ranking in Google is effected by your placement in Yahoo so they feed off of each other
18:06:45 joopiter I've noticed that a few of the bigger seo firms are, and I've been wondering why...
18:07:11 gary woods I think it's partly the 800 lb gorilla waiting in the wings.
18:07:21 gary woods You don't really want to piss him off
18:07:43 gary woods Of those that said No, are any of you paying LookSmart?
18:07:52 dan Are you saying that google will be primary and Inktomi secondary provider to yahoo
18:08:05 joopiter <g>
18:08:16 mllap yes $29,95
18:08:20 gary woods My general feeling is that Yahoo will dump Google and use Inktomi as a backup to their directory
18:09:11 gary woods mllap is that $29.95 per month?
18:09:14 bond4870 was this the basic plan of yahoo all the time and only used google to set this up?
18:09:42 gary woods I'm not sure about an overall strategy.
18:09:54 mllap yes, and they give me $15.00 more
18:09:59 gary woods When Yahoo first contracted with Google, it was certainly not the Google we know today
18:10:25 bond4870 as I understand google and Inktomi are similar in operation basically
18:10:28 gary woods Google was the new kid on the block that was trying hard, so I generally feel that the deal Yahoo got was pretty good
18:10:48 gary woods That's the other really underlying thing.
18:10:59 dan that is what I thought. which means they will close the loop of being listed in yahoo through google
18:11:00 gary woods I don't think the move really changes any of my strategies
18:11:29 gary woods The algorithms appear to be very close and the people I see scoring well in Inktomi score well in Google
18:12:27 gary woods Do people have pages pointed at specific engines anymore?
18:12:39 gary woods I think that kind of strategy has gone away
18:13:15 joopiter to be replaced with ??
18:14:08 gary woods Well the thing is the results that engines throw up are such a blend of sources so the idea of having a keyword density for one engine and another Keyword Density for another I don't think really works
18:14:40 gary woods We used to talk a lot about such and such an engine likes really short pages and this other one likes really long pages
18:14:53 gary woods and I don't hear those things anymore
18:15:20 gary woods In fact all we seem to talk about these days is Link Popularity, which is important but only really part of the whole strategy
18:16:16 gary woods I'm sure we can go up and down the list of people on Google and find pages that score that have only 5 links and they show up above pages that have 100s of links
18:16:51 dan that is correct
18:17:26 bond4870 link popularity how much importance would you place on it by % in a strategy?
18:17:55 gary woods bond it may be as high as 50% but obviously I'm not really sure.
18:18:35 gary woods It's one of those things that I spend a significant amount of time on, but I also work on putting together interesting pages that other people link to of spiders will pick up
18:19:51 gary woods I think that the difference between the No. 1 and No. 20 page in a search is pretty tiny, and that anything you can do to help your pages is significant
18:20:16 gary woods The Planet Ocean book used to talk about the 1% difference
18:20:46 bond4870 how do you see yahoo & google viewing link popularity in 2003
18:21:01 gary woods One of the engines used to have a ranking as to how relevant to a search term a particular site was and the top 20 we're all at 99%
18:21:45 gary woods I think it's still very important and as I said I spend a significant amount of time doing it. I added two links just before I came to the chat room
18:22:05 gary woods But it's important on a couple of different levels.
18:22:31 gary woods If you're continuing to add pages, and the pages you have continue to get updated your site appears to be a site that is continuing to evolve
18:22:58 gary woods We all know there are site that haven't changed since they first appeared. So the fact that you're continuing to grow and change is significant
18:23:22 gary woods Also, it is important that other people think you're important enough to link to.
18:24:03 gary woods How much time to all of you spend on soliciting Reciprocal Links from people?
18:24:32 bond4870 not enough I confess
18:24:51 dan may be 5 a week
18:25:11 bond4870 your comments today will spur us on though
18:25:58 gary woods Lately my cup has definitely runneth over. A company called Advanced Access put me in their newsletter as a place that Realtors could solicit links and I've had hundreds in the past month
18:26:35 gary woods My general approach to that kind of solicitation is first I determine whether it's really just a link farm in which case I decline
18:26:47 gary woods But if they're not I always link to them and solicit their linking back
18:26:58 gary woods If they don't link to me in two weeks I solicit them again
18:27:17 gary woods And if they still don't they're gone. I takes me about 1 minute to put a link up and about 10 seconds to take it down!
18:27:43 gary woods So far I haven't looked particularly at Google Page rank
18:28:15 gary woods Even if a page has only a 1 I still post it, hoping that they'll get it together and increase their ranking
18:28:56 gary woods I think that Link Popularity has taken me from about a 6 on Google to solid No. 1s on all my searches
18:29:37 gary woods How many of you do Pay for Inclusion with Inktomi?
18:29:56 kkraft not me, haven't needed to
18:30:03 gary woods and will you do more if Inktomi rankings are reflected in Yahoo
18:30:18 gary woods That's great Kristal, so you're in Inktomi, and score well with Hot Bot
18:30:37 gary woods Do any of you use Robot Manager?
18:30:38 bond4870 gary what is your second focus after link popularity?
18:30:40 kkraft yes, I'm an old timer I think that helped
18:31:03 gary woods My second focus is still really my first focus which is creating interesting pages
18:31:15 gary woods I still think that's the most important think about all of this
18:31:35 gary woods If you create interesting pages that meet people's needs they will find you
18:31:48 dan I used to. But I read some where that robot manager is not liked by google
18:32:06 gary woods Obviously it's still important to look at your title, your description and placement of keywords within the text
18:33:08 gary woods I'm not sure how Google would care about Robot Manager. All Robot Manager does is help you to create robots.txt files and lets you see what spiders have visited your site and what they saw when they were there
18:33:23 gary woods The real program I think Google has issue with is OptiLink
18:33:38 gary woods and I really think the issue there is use of server time for Google.
18:34:21 gary woods I went over my Robots Manager logs and saw that when Google shows up it goes very, very deep into the site picking up everything in the place.
18:34:35 gary woods Inktomi is very similar but not quite as deep.
18:34:57 gary woods All the Web on the other hand while showing up often, doesn't really seem to go very deeply at all
18:35:28 gary woods What Robot Manager really showed me was the reason Google is number 1. They spider the most pages and deliver the best results
18:36:04 gary woods Does everybody use robots.txt files?
18:36:19 gary woods I think they can be very useful
18:36:28 dan yes
18:37:09 bond4870 no
18:37:35 gary woods What do you use robots.txt for?
18:37:39 bond4870 we will go down the track though
18:38:05 gary woods I've kept them out of specific client files, my web stats and my images files.
18:38:37 gary woods It's not that I really don't want them to see them, I'd just rather a spider spent their time on my site looking at something other than my images
18:38:55 dan well, some of the robots do not obey the rules
18:39:17 gary woods There's no question about that.
18:40:00 dan I understand that robot manager does a better job that the text file
18:40:11 gary woods One of the big reasons I think to use robots.txt is that seems to be the first thing they look for when they show up at your site
18:40:49 gary woods Looking at my logs sometimes that's all they look at
18:40:53 gary woods AllTheWeb for examples shows up a lot, but half the time it only looks at the robots.txt and leaves
18:41:16 gary woods If you use robots.txt it's vital that you do the format correctly
18:41:42 gary woods I had a time where I was trying to keep spiders out of a particular directory and ended up barring them from the entire site
18:41:50 dan what is the correct format?
18:41:58 gary woods That's why if you're going to use a robots.txt be very, very careful!!
18:43:22 gary woods If you'd like I'll email any of you the correct format for a robots.txt file My email is gandlwoods
18:43:36 bond4870 back to google and yahoo. how do you see google impacting on the market
18:44:04 gary woods You know I've haven't really looked at that. Could you give everybody a synopsis of google?
18:45:26 gary woods Does anybody have any opinions on google?
18:46:04 bond4870 as I understand which is little it is a pay per click site operation.
18:46:50 gary woods Okay to expand on that, has anybody used Google AdWords, and what do you think about them?
18:47:54 gary woods Is anybody using Google AdWords either for yourself of your clients?
18:48:33 bond4870 no
18:48:49 joopiter I have used it for two separate clients- one was Christmas season before last, and one was last Christmas season
18:48:49 gary woods Is the reason that you're scoring well enough with Google?
18:49:09 gary woods joopiter did you have a good response from the Adwords?
18:50:07 bond4870 for our clients we seem to score well without AdWords
18:50:24 joopiter reasonable response. The second one was ill-timed and a bit of a last ditch to promote a new site before Christmas, but the first one that was better timed was ok. They were both very small, exploratory efforts
18:51:16 gary woods It would be interesting to see statistics on how much consumers click on AdWords versus the results that a search engine serves up
18:51:23 joopiter investment was pretty small, return was prob. break-even on the first one, and really nothing on the second (but as I said, it was really too late to do it)
18:51:46 gary woods Do you think it's something you would recommend for a client in the future?
18:52:20 gary woods Do you also use Overture as part of your client strategy?
18:52:32 joopiter I would say it would depend upon the need (diplomatic answer) - if there were time for proper seo, I'd say not.
18:52:57 joopiter but I can see uses for it
18:54:05 gary woods When I made Overture buys I used a separate domain that I never submitted. My results were not very good and I didn't think it was a reasonable return on investment
18:54:43 joopiter I agree with that - I could never get any results at all with Overture
18:54:56 gary woods To bring it back to the original questions. If Yahoo started serving up Inktomi results instead of Google results would it change anything in the way you run your sites?
18:55:19 gary woods Would you redo your site in any way?
18:55:34 mllap
18:55:51 gary woods Uh oh, it looks like they're heading towards the exits!!!
18:55:56 dan May be, I don't think so.
18:56:09 gary woods If you did it dan, what would you do differently?
18:56:41 dan depends what the new requirements would be
18:56:55 gary woods Yes it's definitely a moving target.
18:57:19 gary woods When Robin was out here in Santa Barbara last week we were talking about how cool it was in the old days of '95~
18:57:47 gary woods In those days you could submit to Infoseek and see your page posted within hours and decide whether what you did was working or not
18:58:03 joopiter I'm just discussing that with someone else right now...
18:58:08 gary woods These days if you make a change it seems like 90 days if you're lucky to see any difference
18:58:26 joopiter I was saying I don't' ever remember even worrying about how we were placed, the web was so small back then...
18:59:21 katja Gary, for example- one of the websites that I am promoting scores #1 in Google under "miami real estate" and it is only I believe #23 in MSN and only a little better in hot bot
18:59:24 gary woods The only thing in life that is really certain is change!
18:59:53 gary woods Okay ktja, how are you doing with MSN?
19:00:10 gary woods and are you in the Yahoo directory?
19:00:12 katja if yahoo really changes the strategy- what would you do in my place- Google ranking is too good to do any serious changes but Yahoo is also very important...
19:00:34 gary woods The Yahoo directory is an island unto itself.
19:00:36 katja #1 Yahoo, same Google (of course), #23 MSN
19:00:40 gary woods Are you in the directory
19:00:57 katja yes, but I don't know the ranking there
19:01:23 gary woods Well again, Yahoo is serving up Google responses. When you run Web Position Gold how do you do in the Yahoo Directory
19:02:00 gary woods Okay, how are you doing with your Link Popularity?
19:02:33 gary woods I'm sorry, what does 5 relate to?
19:02:53 katja google toolbar: 5
19:03:12 gary woods 5 is good, I don't think I've ever seen a Real Estate site above 5
19:03:27 gary woods Are you in ODP, and are you in LookSmart?
19:03:30 katja I guess I need to pay more attention to Yahoo Directory- but- you can really influence ranking
19:03:42 katja influence the ranking there, right?
19:04:00 gary woods It's all such a blended result that you're getting today
19:04:01 katja ODP yes, Looksmart yes
19:04:09 gary woods Every results influences every other results
19:04:29 gary woods I'm sorry are you in the Yahoo directory?
19:04:45 katja yes, but I don't know the ranking
19:04:53 journey About Inktomi--Since Internet Explorer defaults to MSN search when you make one teeny typo in the URL, I think getting listed there is important
19:05:03 gary woods Are you happy with the description and title in Yahoo?
19:06:08 katja not really- I requested a change but they didn't listen
19:06:09 gary woods I think MSN is very important, as I mentioned I get about 20% of my traffic from MSN. What was interesting to me is when I didn't enrolled in Looks mart's pay per click program I went from #1 to #419:06:25 gary woods That's why I advocate using LookSmart
19:06:41 gary woods Are you paying Yahoo?
19:07:08 dan Can you changes the description in yahoo with out paying?
19:07:36 gary woods I would suggest that you think about making a name change for your Miami site to something Great Miami Real Estate.
19:08:01 gary woods Make the change with Network Solutions so that Yahoo can see the site is owned by Great Miami Real Estate
19:08:10 dan I am not a paying customer of yahoo
19:08:11 katja I did pay to Yahoo when I submitted- a few months ago
19:08:24 gary woods You really can't great anywhere with Yahoo without paying
19:08:39 gary woods The $300 is pretty small potatoes for a Real Estate company
19:08:51 gary woods They spend more than that on one week's ads
19:09:23 gary woods katja I would look at changing the name with Network Solutions and then requesting a change with Yahoo
19:09:37 katja This is a good idea
19:09:39 gary woods Make your title keyword rich and your description to support
19:10:22 gary woods If that doesn't work I would suggest that your clienta new site with miami-real-estate.org or something like that with a company identification to match
19:10:29 katja I really like this Google-Yahoo alliance. I always get good results with Google
19:10:56 gary woods Google is the best because they spider deeper than anybody and bring back relevant search results
19:11:16 gary woods It was a real eyer to look at what spiders were searching
19:11:40 dan Can I change my description with yahoo with out being a pay customer
19:11:45 gary woods Most spiders show up and look at a few links and move one. Google looks at EVERYTHING!!!!
19:12:12 gary woods dan trying to change anything with Yahoo without paying is really not an option.
19:12:30 dan ok
19:12:31 gary woods I spent over a year submitting every two months asking for a changes and never was really happy
19:12:57 gary woods Yahoo made small change, but was never really responsive
19:13:27 gary woods Once I paid the $300 it became and employee employer relation and they were very helpful
19:13:57 gary woods The only thing I can suggest would be to point out other people in the category and say to them, look at their description, could you do that for me??
19:15:43 gary woods I greatly appreciate you all coming this evening and staying as long as you did. Again ,if you have any questions for me please don't hesitate to writ e me at gandlwoods

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