Looking at the below graph, you’ll see that up until about 5 weeks ago, traffic to FriendFeed, Twitter,and Pownce was relatively consistent, respectively. However, the last 5 weeks has shown a HUGE traffic spike for FriendFeed, and I’m quite sure it’s because of the constant downtime at Twitter.
I’m sure Summize traffic boom will continue for some following months, until users adopt a stable fast follower of Twitter (FriendFeed):
US FireFox 3 downloads just crossed the 1 million mark with total worldwide download count at 2.81m.
Update: Over 5m WW downloads with over 2m from the USA.
View the download counter here.
Live Search has launched xRank blogger. They “count Live Search web searches” then rank them based on the queries.
According to Live Search, here are the top 5 bloggers:
| 1 |  |
Perez Hilton |
| 2 |  |
Michelle Malkin |
| 3 |  |
Jerry Baker |
| 4 |  |
Hugh Hewitt |
| 5 |  |
Jerry Brown |
Google, Yahoo, and Live have all teamed up to establish a standard for robots.txt. Live says it beautifully,
While most search engines already comply with the REP, this is the first time the three major search engines have come together to detail how we actually implement the protocol. This effort makes it easier for webmasters to know how REP directives will be handled by search providers.
You can read the documentation here.
As many of you know, I’m at SMX: Advanced this week and here’s a quick summary of day 1. I’ll be doing some light live Twittering at: http://twitter.com/drigotti
Keynote - Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsoft:
Kevin focused on how Microsoft is going to tackle some of the verticals - especially consumer search, like product reviews and cashback.
Money For What? Search Marketing Payment Models:
Really interesting from an SEM Company perspective to watch this. Focused on pay based on ad spend and pay per performance, though also noted hourly and pay per project. Heard arguments from all angles and, but like us, most agreed pay based on ad spend was the best route to go for PPC companies. Expect us to start listing our prices and better information on the website soon.
Bot Herding:
Main takeaway was that site owners should “no follow” sites that don’t matter, like privacy policy, TOS, etc so pagerank stays on sites that do matter. Matt Cutts says Google won’t punish for any use of “no follow” and said go ahead, though if you’re doing this you didn’t plan the structure of your website out correctly.
Buying Sites For SEO:
Very insightful and it gave us some new ideas for link building. Buy old sites and expired domains, 301 to main site, collect link love.
Yahoo! announced Tuesday that it’s updating the algorithm. While specifics weren’t mentioned, most speculation is that there will be less reliance on social sites. We’ll see.
Here is the announcement in full:
We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.
To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.
Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search
I’ll be attending SMX Advanced in Seattle this year. Who else is going?
Search Engine Journal has a great post on the updated Yahoo! crawler. The meaty part of the post says:
First, Slurp 3.0 will start crawling from smaller set of IP addresses, although still within crawl.yahoo.net.domain. Reverse DNS checks will still continue working. For webmasters who use IP-based recognition for identifying Yahoo crawlers, Yahoo advises to move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp to avoid getting dropped by the Yahoo Slurp 3.0 crawlers.
Second, Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 will now publish a new user-agent – “Yahoo!Slurp 3.0”. Although existing robots.txt directives for “Slurp” or “Yahoo! Slurp” will continue working, directives for “Slurp 2.0” would not work anymore. So, Yahoo suggests that webmasters use the shorter version of the User-agent which is simply – Slurp.
Effective next week, Yahoo’s quality score will change. Marketing Pilgrim says,
automatic 10¢ minimum bid will be discontinued. Minimum bids will vary rather than be set. Instead higher quality ads will start paying less per click. If your ad is low quality your minimum bid will be higher. So you can’t buy your way to the top, you have to earn it - with clicks and a valuable landing page.
Yesterday we upgraded our somewhat sluggish MacBooks for new MacBook Pros with 4 GB of memory and Leopard. I absolutely love Apple stores; the checkout was literally less than 5 minutes and was all done wirelessly via handheld device. Little things, like not having to stand in line to check out, is what separates Apple from the rest.
RSS feeds.