Othman Laraki, director of growth at Twitter, announced the new newsletter-type email with a post on the Twitter blog. He stated that the emails are designed similar to the “discover” tab for the recently updated iPhone and Android Twitter apps. Which of the people you follow shared a particular story will be displayed below each story, showing you who it was popular with. Also, you can see related tweets from the people you follow and tweets can be sent directly from the email.

Note that not all of the tweets in the digest email will be from people you follow. Some will be tweets that were popularly retweeted by the people you follow.

If you don’t enjoy this new Twitter feature (or are annoyed that Twitter didn’t ask your permission) there is a link at the bottom of the email that will allow you to unsubscribe. Alternatively, you can change the option in your notification settings directly on Twitter. I’ll let the emails come for a few weeks before I decide whether or not I enjoy them. Of course, if they begin putting ads into the emails, the entire feature is a no-go for me.

The Google team will review your website, campaign structure, ad text, and keywords. Here’s the best part – they promise to get back to you within 10 days with your own customized recommendations. Even if you’ve already had the team look at your campaign you can request assistance on another. For now, the service is available for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada, for campaigns in English. If you’re running AdWords go sign up. I wonder if they have a similar service for AdSense.

If your campaign isn’t chosen, there will probably be other chances, and in the meantime you can still brush up on your AdWords knowledge with the Google AdWords Retail Industry Newsletter. This issue is focused on the holidays. Here’s a fact from last year: According to the newsletter Black Friday wasn’t the biggest online shopping day in 2006. December 13 was the highest sales day with $667 million spent. December 11 and December 4 were next.

One more tip for online retailers – there’s an entire Google blog devoted to maximizing your retail AdWords campaigns. I didn’t know it until today but it’s a must-read at http://adwordsretail.blogspot.com

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Spectrum didn’t perform an outright acquisition; instead, Spectrum used $300 million to buy a majority interest.  By all accounts, that’s a favorable price, as Business.com sold for $350 million due mostly to its domain name.

In contrast, comScore suggests that the whole of The Generations Network receives 8.2 million unique visitors per month.  Also, The Generations Network claims to have over 900,000 paying subscribers, and Michael Arrington states that it earns around $150 million in revenue per year.

That’s the business side, then.  So what will this deal mean to the average Ancestry.com user?  Nothing bad, from the looks of things.  Official statements only made vague mentions of growth, market share, and new products and services, and industry experts at both the Genealogy Insider and Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter seem unconcerned by the buyout.

Look for more developments on this front, however – the move does appear to point to something bigger.

The Google AdWords Automotive Newsletter is “designed to help auto advertisers get the most out of AdWords and other Google products,” according to the search engine giant.  There will be four issues per year, and the first installment “examines several industry trends, best practices for promoting summer sales, and the benefits of Google Analytics.”

The newsletter is targeted at a fairly small group of people – those who “sell parts online, own a dealership, or host a website for car aficionados” – but as the “On the horizon” and “Get your motor running” sections prove, the online auto industry is growing fast.  (65 percent of U.S. Internet users visited a car site in January of 2006, according to that second segment, compared to just 32 percent in August of 2005.)

Also, it has often seemed like Google has a soft spot for automobiles; this may, I admit, be a form of blue car syndrome, but in the past four months, I’ve seen the company make news with BMW, Volkswagen, a robotic SUV from Stanford, and a whole bunch of Toyota Priuses.  That’s certainly more than Yahoo, Microsoft, or Ask has done.

So the Google AdWords Automotive Newsletter is a good thing, in my book, and should be helpful within a particular field.  If that field doesn’t interest you, well . . . go drive an Audi R8, and then tell me how you feel.

Conference attendees had questions, and the panel of experts had answers to match. One person spoke of big clients who were hesitant to get into social media marketing. Relaxing those fears comes with education being the key, Cameron Olthuis said. One has to let the client know that the search professional will be doing a lot of reputation management.

Greg Boser cautioned that SEOs shouldn’t expect that situation to get better with large clients. The corporate world moves slowly, with its meetings and bureaucracy, he noted.

On the strategy side, Alex Bennert recounted how her firm started a blog for a company that was more about its core business than the company itself. That client benefited from sponsoring the blog and enjoying a positive halo effect from it.

The inevitable question about getting lots of backlinks arose from the audience. Aaron Wall suggested a Google-centric strategy, by looking for key ideas for one’s topic and researching related topics on Google.

Wall said that by looking for some of those related topics that are less commercial, one could run an ad campaign in Google for keyword permutations based on those findings.

Christine Churchill said efforts that would have longevity, like web awards, could work sometimes. The idea would be for one to find things that possess a continuous link-building effect.

One tongue-in-cheek suggestion came from Todd Friesen. “The Oilman” said his firm has a lot of interns who do what they’re told. “Another thing is just to go out and buy them,” he quipped, before looking around nervously. “Where’s Cutts?” he asked.

Jim Boykin tossed some cold water on that idea. He said the days of pushing a button and getting a thousand links are over. It’s better to send a real email to a site publisher and ask for a link.

A question about finding an accurate research tool elicited an enthusiastic endorsement of Microsoft AdCenter Labs and its new keyword lab from Friesen, who called it an absolutely fantastic tool.

Boser suggested that keyword relationships tend to pan out. SEO pros should be more concerned with the relationship between words being compared. He said if one has a lot higher number than the other, the disparity is usually indicative of the situation.

Olthuis commented on a question about explaining backlinks to corporate clients, by noting that most of what comes back will be relevant to the client’s business. Friesen agreed, saying the vast majority of links will be quite targeted.

“SMX: Boundaries Of The Penalty Box”

WebProNews will have stories and videos from Danny’s inaugural Search Marketing Expo titled "SMX Advanced" in Seattle this week. Stop by our site or sign up for our free newsletter and follow the search marketing news.

One thing to do is, of course, not look like spam, yet Tim Mayer, Yahoo Search’s Vice President of Product Management, noted that there are legitimate uses for almost every technique, and that the “fine line” between spam and honest advertising will vary by industry.

Mayer went on to point listeners to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which can help people report “spammy” links.  About 79 percent of the reports Yahoo receives are genuine, he said.

Peter Linsley, Ask’s Senior Product Manager for Search, started on a related note by defining a “genuine” candidate for the penalty box.  In essence, this person would be hurting the user experience (with dead pages, for example) or gaming the search engines (through cloaking or link farms).

This “genuine” candidate would then start to see a drop in rank and a drop in traffic.  At this point, the situation could still be reversed – Linsley said search engines do look into error cases – but he considers gaming the engines to be the same as tempting fate, and warns people not to let spammers leverage their sites or abuse their comments.

Next up was Aaswath Raman, the Program Manager of Microsoft’s Live Search, and he quickly illustrated how intent and targeting can land a person in the penalty box.  Raman said that, on a popular Star Wars site, a link to StarWars.com makes sense.  A link to CheapCasinoHandbags.org does not.

Raman then supplied the address of Microsoft’s Live Search URL Submission site, just in case you feel your site has been unfairly penalized or overlooked.

Matt Cuts, head of Google’s Webspam Team, spoke last, and he gave a simple, if humorous, definition of behavior worthy of the penalty box: “If you’ve left over 10,000  guestbook comments in one hour…  you might be a spammer.”

Cutts stated that Google is always trying to beef up its webmaster guidelines, and that new quality guidelines have, in fact, been posted.  Many of the fresh rules were made in response to specific instances of spamming, and Cutts made clear that Google is “not averse to taking manual action on spam.”

If you run a “mom and pop”-type site that made a mistake, it looks like most of the major engines are willing to forgive and forget.  Intentional bad behavior – particularly if it’s on a larger scale – will send you straight to the penalty box.

Gord Hotchkiss made a few observations about personalization changing search. Personalization is an approach that Google wants people to embrace through its Web History service.

Gord thinks optimizing through personalization will be more about themes that keywords. Beneficial sites will work on understanding user behavior better to provide them more relevant results. Black hats will try to take advantage of emerging issues and create buzz sites that certain personalized searches will find.

Michael Gray pointed out something regarding Google. Although Google’s guidelines say one should not use software to increase a ranking, he thinks using Google’s Toolbar and its personalized search do that anyway.

Michael has a bit of an issue with Google. He thinks Google is using personalized search to create Google junkies of people subscribing to Google product after Google product to influence and enhance their searches.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo Search looked at the broader concepts of personalization, and talked about how Yahoo sees the concept. To them, social media is in some ways an offshoot of personalized search. However, there is the element of user trust that isn’t taken into account with that view.

“One of the big trends we see in search right now is understanding the user query better,” he said of Yahoo’s observations.

Tim also suggested that for SEO, one should be thinking about giving the search engines enough content to determine the topicality of the page. Socially influenced results are simply going to play a larger role in search, inspiring a need for better content as well.

Matt Cutts said personalization should not be a surprise to search observers, as it has been discussed for a long time now. Personalization will not be the death of SEO, either, as some believe.

If anything, he remarked, personalization changes the game a little bit.

Although Michael remarked that the Web History service is difficult to turn off in Google, Matt noted how the attribute [&pws=0] can be appended to any Google query (ex. http://www.google.com/search?q=guild+wars&pws=0) and personalized search will be off for it.

Mmm, site traffic. More of it can be attained through social media marketing, as a variety of search marketing and optimization pros attested at SMX: Advanced.

Rand Fishkin talked about differences between social media marketing and viral marketing. The key difference comes in building authority. Social media links can be a big authority boost.

He noted some examples of what’s out their in social media. The very popular Yahoo Answers has its topics place well in the SERPs for Google as well as Yahoo. A site publisher with quality content for a given category should try being active in the relevant section of Answers.

Comments from photo sharing site Flickr don’t place a nofollow attribute on their outbound links. As for blog search site Technorati, site publishers should definitely tag their content to take advantage of its recently updated properties.

Viral media, especially when video sharing site YouTube is in the conversation (and virtually defines it) can boost search rankings and site traffic thanks to the growing fan base. Other viral sites that can push a flood of traffic include Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and NewsVine for those who reach the “top of the vine.”

Neil Patel chatted about the rules for social sites: don’t pay for votes; don’t create multiple accounts for voting purposes; and don’t submit illegal content.

He put those tenets to the test on one such social media site, creating 30 accounts from his IP address while submitting illegal content and paying for votes. The result: he was banned within hours.

In Patel’s experience, the young and frequently chippy audience for many of these social media sites can be a problem. A site publisher who participates in the community, and submits comments and content of value, can build a valuable social brand in turn.

Seeking social media superpower requires intelligent, focused effort. The rewards for that work can be, well, super.

The Search Marketing Expo opened in Seattle with a Q&A session with Google’s Matt Cutts; it seems Matt came back from his vacation with mischief on his mind.

WebProNews will have stories and videos from Danny’s inaugural Search Marketing Expo titled "SMX Advanced" in Seattle this week. Stop by our site or sign up for our free newsletter and follow the search marketing news.

"Sorry Mr Burns, but I don't go in for these backdoor shenanigans. Sure I'm flattered, maybe even a little curious, but the answer is no!" - - Homer really misunderstands where Springfield's richest man is going with the labor negotiations.

There are plenty of talented search marketing pros and noteworthy Googlers out there who attend and participate in shows like Search Marketing Expo. Matt is a little different, having his own groupies ("Cuttlets") and drawing a crowd that follows him and chatters away during his walks around the conference center.

He sat still, occasionally, for the SMX Advanced audience during his question and answer session. During some playful banter with Danny, who thinks Matt deserves a better title than ‘software engineer’ ("What a joke," Danny said of that generic moniker), the talk turned to workplace apparel.

Matt described Google’s code as "basically, you have to wear clothes." He then challenged the nattily attired Danny to go casual, with the audience supporting the request. Danny obliged, but no Full Monty from him, instead just tossing enough laundry aside to end up in a t-shirt and shorts.

Ah the madcap conference life.

Being a question and answer session with Matt providing the answers, the audience tore its attention away from their host to pepper Google’s unlikely rock star with questions.

He cleared up an issue with supplemental listings, a place where webmasters hate to have their pages reside in Google. Matt said that with more links to those pages will come a move to the main index: "It’s that simple."

"It’s true that we do parse pages differently and index pages differently in the supplemental index," said Matt. "You can still absolutely be found for popular words but the phrase handling is somewhat different in the supplemental index."

When asked about geotargeting, and how much confidence Google has in knowing where someone is, Matt estimated Google would have a "pretty good guess" more than 90 percent of the time.

Another questioner wanted some clarity from Matt about Google’s guidelines, in asking why they are so nondescript. Matt answered that Google wanted to start with a concept of the minimal principles people needed to follow.

"I’m thinking it’s about time to have those guidelines updated," he said.

Someone had to ask about paid links of course, and that hot button topic came up with someone asking if paid links would be the death of the algorithm.

While Google isn’t averse to manual intervention to manage the situation, they do consider link buying as being beyond their guidelines. "If people want to do that, more power to them, but at Google we are going to act to preserve the best results," said Matt.

Some people have noticed search result pages turning up in Google’s SERPs, which seems to be a no-no. Google will trim them out, but it’s more of a rule of thumb than a hard and fast policy governing that activity, according to Matt.

Wikipedia’s near-omnipresence in Google’s SERPs also came up in a question, as someone asked why Google might be ‘breaking up’ with them. Danny wryly commented, "I think Matt wanted to tell them privately first."

Matt cited Wikipedia as a source that regular users like a lot, but it isn’t always the best result for a query. "We are aware of that," he said, "and the algorithm is always evolving to try to reflect that fact."

“titel” is “title” in German for you spell check enthusiasts.

Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.

• Keywords in the title tag
• Targeted keywords in the body tag
• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.
• Using keywords in bold or strong tags – slight effect
• Keywords in image file names
• Keywords in image alt attributes
• Keyword in the domain name – although, using domain names as link text may explain this
• Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.)
• PageRank
• Inbound links – The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

Additional notes:

• Keywords in the file name don’t seem to have a positive effect
• The file size doesn’t seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.

SEOmoz has also published two surveys of search marketers on their opinions of what on page elements and off page factors are most influential for search engine rankings. Here is version two. I was invited to participate in that survey/study but declined.

I would not personally bank on either study by themselves but rather a combination of both with an emphasis on personal experience, trial/error and real world data analysis. There simply is no substitute for real world insights, practical experience and data.

It is important when using such information with search engine optimization projects to consider them a guide, not as rules. Algorithm chasing puts all your eggs in one basket and is not a sustainable strategy.

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