In this issue:

·  Welcome
·  Feature Article: Consumer Search Trends 
·  Search World Highlights: New Search Engine Mojeek
·  Search World Highlights: Google to censor sensitive terms in China
·  FAQ: Doorway Pages - The German BMW Story and how this illustrates the issue of doorway pages and the need for a professional advertising company

Welcome to our February issue of webRED

In January we wrapped up 2005 with reviews of the of the Year of Search, so this month we are looking ahead at the new Search World trends for 2006, how search is shaping our everyday lives and what trends we will be noticing in consumer behaviour this year!

In Search World Highlights we will be looking at a new search engine to hit the internet world – Mojeek. We tell you how it differs from other engines and explain its advanced and personalized search options. We also cover the well publicized Google China Search issue, with an article from Reuters explaining the situation as well as Google’s view on the issue.

Our Frequently Asked Question is going to cover HTML codes – what they are, why they are important and how you can check the validity of your HTML code.

I hope everyone has a wonderful month and if there are any questions you would like answered or would like to boost your online advertising campaign, feel free to contact us.

Happy reading

Until next month
Robyn

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Featured Articles: Consumer Search Trends

Here are five trends in consumer generated content that are predicted to have a profound impact on our internet experience in 2006 and beyond:

1. Social networking comes of age
Social networking site extraordinaire “MySpace” has become the dominant social networking site for teens and young adults, as well as one of the most visited domains on the internet. Other social networking sites like “Hi5” (more popular for Kiwis) continued to gain ground last year and is expected to soar this year.

2. Wikipedia becomes the number one reference site
In June 2005, Wikipedia surpassed Dictionary.com to become the most visited reference site, and in September it even passed the New York Times in market share of visits. Wikipedia's traffic continues to climb despite questions of the accuracy of its content that can be edited by any user. Visits to Wikipedia spiked during key 2005 news events, like the London Bombings and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

3. Flickr and tagging take off
Flickr, which allows users to post, share and browse photos by user-defined tags, was purchased by Yahoo! in March 2005 and its market share of visits grew by 1,317 percent from December 2004 to December 2005. It was ranked number six among photo-sharing sites in December 2005 and the tagging is expected to keep rising throughout this year.

4. Blogs, blogs, blogs
Blogs are the new media buzzword and search engines have all made some form of investment in blog services over the past two years. Blog creation and consumption continues to grow wildly. In addition, Google has launched a blog search service and Yahoo! News has begun including blogs in its news search results.

5. Video search goes viral
Video search took off when Google launched its video search service and iTunes began selling videocasts of TV shows. Higher broadband penetration and smarter devices like video phones and video iPods mean there will be a greater demand for searchable video content this year. Video search is as much about finding amusing home video content as it is about finding television and film content, with home videos such as the two Chinese students singing the Backstreet Boys song "I Want it That Way" captivating internet audiences.

Source: iMediaConnection.com

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Search World Highlights

New Search Engine : Mojeek

Mojeek.com is a new search engine (still in beta), with an independent crawler. This newcomer in such an extremely competitive market combines simplicity with advanced search options and personalized search.

Uncluttered and advanced
Mojeek’s search page reminds one of Google’s – except it is even simpler! There is a search box and three links. One link leads to information about Mojeek, one to advanced search and one to personal search.

Advanced Search
Mojeek’s Advanced Search lets you exclude words and terms from your search results, choose how to display results, search within a specific domain and try out different algorithms to rank the results.

Personal Search
Mojeek Personal Search lets you create your own topical or personal search index. You can add and remove unlimited number of domains. With publishable links, you can also share your index and provide the service to your site’s visitors. There is an option to customize all the ranking parameters, and you can retrieve your personal search results in xml format.
 
Testing different algorithms
We have never seen a search engine that lets you choose between several algorithms (a set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a particular query). Yahoo is still testing a technology called Mindset that lets you adapt the algorithm along an axis with shopping on the one end and research on the other. Mojeek seems to aim for more.

At present, you can choose between five algorithms – default, 1, 2, 3, and 4. If the categories had been descriptive, for instance information, shopping, education or travel, this would have been a truly interesting feature.

More to come
There are plans to build into the personal search the ability to adjust and set your own ranking parameters, as almost all are adjustable at the time of each search.

This feature would also benefit site owners and webmasters wishing to implement site searches and multiple domain searches, using their own customized ranking parameters, a feature which, to our knowledge, no other engine offers.

Source: BBC

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Google to sensor sensitive terms in China

As you may have heard by now, Google has agreed to block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing in return for access to the world's second highest Internet market.

The voluntary concessions laid out on Tuesday by Google, which is launching a China-based search site as it officially enters the market, would parallel similar self-censorship already practised there by most multinationals and domestic players.

Homegrown giants like Sohu.com Inc. and Baidu.com Inc., along with China sites operated by Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft, all routinely block searches on politically sensitive terms such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement and Taiwan independence.

“In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn in response to local law, regulation or policy," Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel, said in a statement:

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."

Google, known for its "Don't do evil" mantra, is developing its China approach as it seeks to strike a balance between the freedom of information it champions and the censorship demanded by Beijing, which controls access to China's 111 million Internet users. The company added that at least for now, it will stay away from e-mail and blogging in China, which have been the source of recent controversies after Beijing demanded information on an e-mail user from Yahoo, and Microsoft pulled down a politically sensitive posting from its China-based blog service.

Google said it will also stay away from chat rooms, another popular form of expression over the Internet.

Source: Reuters.co.uk

On the flip side of the coin, this is Google’s view on the China search issue (written by Google’s Blog editor):

“There has been controversy about our new Google News China edition, specifically regarding which news sources we include. For users inside the People's Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country.

This was a difficult decision for Google, and we would like to share the factors we considered before taking this course of action.

Google is committed to providing easy access to as much information as possible. For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it's clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this.

For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC -- if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely resu! lt in Google News being blocked altogether in China.

We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all. It was a difficult tradeoff for us to make, but the one we felt ultimately serves the best interests of our users located in China”

Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

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This Month’s FAQ

This month’s Q & A discusses doorway pages – what they are, a recent news example and why this calls for the need of a professional internet marketing company.

Question:
What is a doorway page? Why is it a bad optimisation strategy for my website?

Answer:
A doorway page is a web page stuffed full of keywords that the site feels a need to be optimized for; however, as opposed to real pages, this doorway is only displayed to the Googlebot (Google’s webpage crawler). A doorway page immediately redirects human visitors to another site upon visit.

As you may have heard in the media, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. At this time, www.bmw.de has a PageRank of 0. The reason for the ban is because the BMW websites have been caught employing that dirty SEO technique of doorway pages.
 
While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value - zero. This penalty is a good example of what can happen when you employ black hat search engine optimisers who use doorway pages or create deceptive or misleading content on your behalf. Going through with these dodgy techniques or going against Google’s webmaster guidelines could have your! site removed entirely from Google’s index.

In a nut-shell, Google’s guidelines go back to one of our single philosophies: optimiser’s should optimize for humans, not machines, because the search engines don’t like to be cheated. The irony here is that BMW.de is now a highly inaccessible site right from the front-page: a JavaScript-only navigation prevents access by certain browsers, browser settings or media (such as handheld browsers), and it also prevents search bots from effectively crawling the site.

This story just stresses one of our values here at Optymise: we employ proper techniques that helps a website sell itself with quality, substantial content, rather than covering up smaller errors with even bigger ones (such as BMW Germany)!

Source: SEO Logic

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We hope you enjoyed webRED this month. If there are any topics or questions you’d particularly like us to cover or answer, why not CONTACT US and tell us.

All views expressed are those of Optymise Ltd and articles/ features are written by Optymise staff unless otherwise stated.