Slate is reporting that former New York City mayor and Republican Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, just quit the Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) group on Facebook, but only after Slate contacted her to ask what was up.

And, surprise, she’s not talking to them about it.

A soon-to-be Harvard student, Caroline failed to mark her profile private, and the sleuths at Slate found her out. That’s too bad for her, and a bit embarrassing for Rudy. She tried to hide it at the last minute, but Slate caught a screen cap denoting her withdrawal from the Barack fan club.

This isn’t the first time a child’s social network profile has made a politician’s face red. Wonkette has a running tally of all the social networking mishaps, including the latest on one of the Bush twins and Jeb Bush, Jr. doing some interesting things with a champagne bottle. 

Yahoo Users Spell Better?

In a thread on the Cre8asite Forums, John Mueller posted the evidence.  “Looking at my logs, I noticed that an average of 5 to 6% of all visitors from Google used the spell-correction to make it to my site (this is the same across several sites, the rest of the numbers are from one site only for the last 6 months),” he writes.

“Of all my Yahoo users, only 1.8% used the spelling correction . . . which could mean that either Yahoo users know how to spell or Yahoo doesn’t correct misspellings that well, or perhaps even, that Yahoo sends users to the proper search results even if the query is misspelled,” Mueller continues.  “I wonder which one it is?”

So do I.  In that same Cre8asite thread, Bill Slawski, “rynert,” and “Mano70” posted similar statistics, and on Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz says he may add even more.  This presumably creates a fairly large sample size that spreads across several demographics; something’s definitely at work here.

Yet, having proofread this article several times (and having left the misspelled “woe” in place on purpose), I’ll leave the speculation to someone else – perhaps a Yahoo user.

Yahoo Shuttering Photos

Change comes slowly to big companies, even in the Internet industry, where nimbleness is the watchword and being slow to adapt could mean losing one’s valuable visitors to another site.

Garlinghouse accused Yahoo of suffering from inertia when his now-infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto reached the Internet. The conditions that prompted his memo could be changing at the company.

Rafe Needleman and Michael Arrington both reported on their blogs the news from Garlinghouse about Yahoo Photos. Starting today, Yahoo would begin taking steps to shut down the service and migrate users to other places.

While most in the tech world will assume it’s just a matter of switching from Yahoo Photos to Flickr, Needleman said it isn’t quite that easy:

But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn’t the right sharing site for many users of Yahoo Photos, so users will be given the option to instead move pictures to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery. This is an interesting move for Yahoo, a company geared towards serving the mass audience of online users. Flickr is a great service, but it’s the black sheep of popular photo sites — it’s got a different organizational system from most sites, it’s more open, and it attracts a more tech-adept user base.

Arrington also commented on TechCrunch about the change, as he heard about it from Garlinghouse and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield; the latter talked about the migration options for Yahoo Photos users, whether it is to Flickr or other services:

Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.” Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos.

Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.

This could signal Yahoo is continuing a consolidation strategy that would merge or eliminate some of their duplicate services, and allow them to focus on the star performers in the company. They recently integrated Upcoming with Yahoo Local’s platform.

Perhaps Delicious and Yahoo My Web are prime candidates for the next move. Both Flickr and Upcoming were Yahoo acquisitions, just like Delicious. Duplicate bookmarking services can’t be an efficient use of engineering talent.

Rather than be accused of rigging the test I’m going to grab all of the actors/actresses listed in the top actors section of the Yahoo Buzz Report. The list has been de-duped and alpha sorted, results with Wikipedia in the top ten are indicated with an *, results with Wikipedia in the top 3 are indicated with an !:

[Aishwarya Rai] !
[Alec Baldwin] !
[Angelina Jolie] !
[Angie Harmon] !
[Carmen Electra] !
[Drew Barrymore] !
[Elizabeth Hurley] !
[Eva Longoria] !
[Goldie Hawn] !
[Halle Berry] !
[Hilary Duff] !
[Hugh Grant] !
[Jaimee Foxworth] !
[Jamie-lynn Discala] !
[Jennifer Aniston] !
[Jennifer Lopez] !
[Jessica Alba] !
[Jessica Biel] !
[Kelly Ripa] !
[Kerry Washington] !
[Kristanna Loken] *
[Linda Hamilton] !
[Lindsay Lohan] !
[Lucy Liu] !
[Pamela Anderson] *
[Richard Gere] !
[Rosie Perez] !
[Sarah Silverman] !
[Scarlett Johansson] !
[Shawnee Smith] !
[Shilpa Shetty] !
[Tobey Maguire] !
[Tori Spelling] !
[Yasmine Bleeth] !

So out of 35 of the most popular actors searched on the web last week Wikipedia has top 10 listings on all 35. More impressive is that they have a top 3 listing on 33 out of 35 listings. Most were number 2 with the odd #1 or #3 thrown in. If you bothered to click through you might have noticed that IMDB was #1 for most of the listings, and you’re wondering why I’m not complaining about that. Let’s cruise on over to the top overall searches for the same time period. Again list has been de-duped and alpha sorted * for Wikipedia top ten ! for Wikipedia top 3. To make it even more apparent I’ll remove any of the people listed in the top actors list as well:

[Akon] !
[American Idol] !
[Avril Lavigne] !
[Beyonce Knowles] !
[Britney Spears] !
[Chris Daughtry] !
[Christie Brinkley] !
[Dancing Bush]
[Democratic Presidential Debate 2007]
[Department Of Defense] !
[Elvis On American Idol]
[Hi-5]
[Internal Revenue Service] *
[Kelly Clarkson] !
[Lost] !
[Mark Twain] !
[Mike Penner]
[Milka Duno] !
[Naruto] !
[NBA] *
[New England Journal Of Medicine] *
[Prime Numbers] !
[Prince Harry] !
[Pussycat Dolls] !
[Regis Philbin] !
[Rocky Mountain News]
[Rosie O’Donnell] !
[RuneScape] !
[Sea Otters] !
[Spider-Man 3] *
[T-Pain] !
[WWE] !

Out of 32 possible terms Wikipedia had top 10 listings on 27. Out of 27 possible terms Wikipedia had top 3 listings for 22. These aren’t ordinary terms either, they are high volume search terms. Ok some people are saying that’s Yahoo list not Google’s, so why didn’t you use the Google Zeitgeist? Well as has already been demonstrated Google lies on the Google Zeitgeist so let’s leave the Pinocchio of search sitting in the corner. Next we’ll look at the terms that didn’t have Wikipedia listings int he SERP’s:

[Dancing Bush] – that’s news, people were really looking for DancingBush.com, not enough time for it to be in Wikipedia yet and be authority scored yet.

[Democratic Presidential Debate 2007] – that’s a news item again.

[Elvis On American Idol] – It was Elvis theme week on American Idol and Celene Dion sang with Elvis, so again news.

[Hi-5] – This one surprised me HI-5 is a transplant Australian kids band and has a Wikipedia page so go figure.

[Mike Penner] – Mike is sports writer who announced he’s having a sex change operation, so again news.

[Rocky Mountain News] – I have no idea why people are looking for this, nothing jumped out at me, drop something in the comments if you know.

What conclusions can we draw, wikipedia’s, not a good source for recent news, so you won’t find those types of items there. What else changed, IMDB.com dropped out of all of the searches except [Spider-Man 3] which is a movie. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work, IMDB is a topical authority, they dominate in their area of expertise and not in any other area.

What’s the problem with with Wikipedia, well in a word wikiality (how funny is it that Wikipedia has a #2 listing for [wikiality] further proving my point). Anyone with a computer can edit Wikipedia, and we rely on the least common denominator of mob intelligence to determine accuracy. That wasn’t entirely true, you can actually win an editing war if you are willing to expend large amounts of time defending your fiefdom of personal edits, I just have better things to do with my time.

Why am I complaining, isn’t Wikipedia free and non commercial? Have you visited techcrunch and learned that Wikipedia has removed the no follow from links to their new commercial project wikia. Starting to see a problem yet? Who do you think is going to be the number one traffic referrer for Wikia … Wikipedia. Kinda gives them an unfair advantage getting all that free traffic from Google doesn’t it? What’s really going on is Google is willingly allowing Wikipedia to be a doorway page to funnel traffic to Wikia, not a bad set up to be on the other side of the cash register for eh?

How do we fix this problem, Google has to admit that Wikipedia really isn’t an authority for anything. Sure some of the information there is good, but I can’t tell you how many facts in the past 3 weeks I found that were omitted, misinterpreted, or just plain wrong. What you think I should do my part and fix them? Know what I’m not on Wikipedia or wikias payroll so why should I help them out? Adding no follow and taking away the value of the links removed the invisible currency and payment that existed. So now I have to guess and determine if I am going to get enough traffic from them before somebody who doesn’t have to qualify their level of expertise comes along and decides they don’t like my edit for whatever reason and just removes it. Wow sure sounds like a website that should be dominating the SERP’s don’t you think?

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Google Responds To AdWords Scam Kerfuffle

Google’s bread-and-butter paid search ads had a whiff of acrid spoilage to them after a nasty criminal attack using AdWords accounts became public knowledge.

Criminals used AdWords to direct web browsers through a third party website that attempted to infect the PC. The attack would take advantage of a flaw in Internet Explorer to drop a backdoor and a post-logger onto PCs; the malware specifically looked for credentials for 100 banking sites, according to Exploit Prevention Labs.

Google’s Inside AdWords blog has a new post available, with the company’s response to this egregious abuse of its product. They identified and shut down AdWords accounts linked to these attacks, and are continuing to monitor the situation.

“We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware in both our ad network and in our search results,” the post said. “We have manual and automated processes in place to detect and enforce these policies, and products such as Google Toolbar that actively seek out and alert users when they access malicious or suspicious sites.”

It doesn’t look like the processes worked. Exploit Prevention Labs began noticing the criminal AdWords placements on April 10, a full two weeks before Google deactivated the offending accounts. Those ads likely ran for a period of time before Exploit Prevention Labs picked up on them.

Google also gave the usual security advice to people about securing their systems with up to date virus protection, and changing complex passwords regularly. Good advice, but it’s also a deflection from the broader trust issue that people will have with paid search ads now.

Searchers were making very innocuous queries on Google that turned up these malevolent AdWords ads. These were searches that turned up phony ads for the Better Business Bureau and Cars.com, neither of which tend to be associated with the less than prurient sites (as in adult) usually associated with drive-by infections.

The situation is also going to make people who have been hit with attacks like these, without having visited any unusual sites, to wonder if this is how their systems got nailed with a nasty Trojan. This isn’t the first time criminals have tried to abuse AdWords, judging by Google’s stated practice of looking for this behavior.

It’s going to take more than a blog post to engender ongoing trust in paid search ads. Good luck with that.

The concept is to capture the searchers who enter incorrectly spelled words into the search engine’s interface search box. The theory is based on creating the wrong spelling, and placing it deliberately on your blog or static website. Theoretically, the pseudo-word will rank at the top of the Google search results, and receive a bonus visitor.

I do not share this SEO opinion; nor do I recommend spelling words incorrectly on a website or blog. The practice does more harm than good. It should be avoided by website owners and bloggers who want to establish a reputation for trustworthiness and professionalism.

The reasons provided by some SEO professionals for utilizing, what could be euphimistically called alternative spellings, are usually presented with good intentions. Of course, as with so many other well intended ideas, the practice doesn’t match the theory. In fact, the very reasons for using misspelled words in the first place, are the reasons I don’t recommend them at all. They do much more damage to a website than can be countered by any perceived benefits.

SEO theory: Incorrect spellings

The reasons for misspelling words on websites seem reasonable on the surface. In fact, some boosts in traffic can be measured as a direct result of the intentional errors. As with many statistics, the visitor traffic log can be a misleading metric if used improperly. In the case of spelling errors, the visitor traffic might not be of any value at all. It might even be harmful to your company reputation.

Let’s examine why incorrect spellings are given such serious consideration as search engine tools.

It’s well known that people type wrong letters when making a search query in Google. Instead of the standard and expected spelling, letters are often reversed in a transposition error, letters omitted entirely, frequently misspelled words, or letters adjacent on the keyboard are substituted by mistake. The theory holds that these are searchers who could be captured by way of the spelling error. Instead of losing those people to other sites, say these experts, they arrive at your site from ranking highly for the spelling mistake.

Problems with SEO by spelling mistakes

Misspellings no longer have the value that is often attributed to them. The major search engines, when confronted by a spelling error, will offer an alternative word. Very often, their offered choice is usually the word spelled as nature intended; in effect, negating any alleged value attributed to the spelling oops. Instead of a click to the rearranged letter site, the visitor visits a website or blog where spelling is treated with more care.

Visitors clicking on a link to a site with incorrectly spelled words are not likely to be impressed with the site in general. While they may have entered the wrong letters in the search box, they do expect to visit a site where attention is given to detail. Perusing a web page, with words spelled in various disguises, is unlikely to generate faith in the company’s products and services. While the visitor traffic logs might record an arrival, the exit may be quick and accompanied by a vow never to return in this lifetime.

Visitors who do arrive via incorrectly spelled words will experience the same disdain for what appears to be a sloppily proofread site. Instead of converting to customers and clients, the visitor will simply click their mouse to a competitor with a more professional appearance. Bad spelling does not generate customer goodwill and confidence. Indeed, the effect is usually the opposite.

Good SEO is also good visitor experience

Proper SEO practice is not only about high search engine rankings and visitor traffic counts. Those elements are important, but they are not the entire story in and of themselves. A well designed site is also attractive, looks professional and trustworthy, and results in conversions from visitor to real life customer and client.

Instead of worrying about losing potential visitor traffic due to misspelled word searches, concentrate on improving your site. Add fresh informative content that will rank well for other keyword phrases entirely. Attract search engine traffic for the right reasons and your online business will achieve success. You will also build a solid reputation for professionalism, and for attention to the needs of the customer.

Good sites sell, and good website owners can spell.

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Bookmark WebProNews:

Wayne Hurlbert provides insigtful information about marketing, promotions, search engine optimization and public relations for websites and business blogs on the popular Blog Business World.

Check out Blog Business World for yourself.

Try this:

“”I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg! The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.”"

This lead me to thinking about misspellings in general, how it affects Long Tail of Search marketing and where it might be best put to use.

I’ve seen all manner of techniques, none of which i’ve ever tried, to target misspellings by Search marketers over the last few years. They include:

* Meta keywords with misspelled words in
* Titles and alt attributes on images
* Pages dedicated to “common misspellings”
* Hidden text on pages

There are probably a ton more, please point out any that i’ve missed.

User Generated Content

One of, if not the, best way to leverage the long tail of misspelled search terms is user generated content. Blogs and Forums all lend themselves nicely to this. The very nature of the fast paced mediums and their looser style provide ample opportunity for both the author (i speel things wrong all the time and am usually to rushed to correct anything not immediately obvious) and the reply posts to make all kinds of natural errors.

Your users make the same mistakes searchers do
Naturally, searchers make the same mistakes that a sites users do. So those mistakes typed into Yahoo or MSN will be reflected on your page. The nice thing being that even if you only allow visitors to comment or ask questions on your pages, you get the misspellings, but it doesn’t look unprofessional on your part – provided the user generated content is clearly seperated from your sales copy, everyone’s a winner right?

Folksonomies
Folksonomies work even better – and not just for misspellings. Think of all those different ways of saying the same thing! If you’re tagging content, and using the tag in the url of the page and, also displaying user generated content on that page, you have everything – if you’re unsure what folksonomies are then get yer head outta that bucket and read: Tags & Folksonomies – What are they, and why should you care? it’s good stuff even if i do say so myself, and will get you up to speed.

Thinking out loud…

I enjoy posts like this. Im neither a journalist nor a researcher so i’m afforded the great luxury of just “thinking out loud” without needing particularly to present facts, figures and citations. I would like to see any good links that you have bookmarked though, and to hear of any other ways to take advantages of misspelled words and synonyms.

So, tell us about your experiences, findings, research or just air a few thoughts on the subject…

Nick Wilson is the publisher and founder of Threadwatch.org.

Threadwatch is a group blog, or forum if you prefer, focusing on Marketing and Related Technologies – News and discussion for those that make their living on the WWW – Register here to participate.

A blog post by Oliver Hurst-Hiller, MSN Search Program Manager, explains:

“Doing a good job of helping Search users to correct misspelled queries is super important for two main reasons: a) 5 billion crawled docs and a bleeding edge ranking algorithm can’t do much if the query isn’t spelled right and b) more than 10% of all searches are misspelled! So we made sure our new search engine included a revamped spelling correction system that’s much better than our old one.

To improve the speller we worked with Silviu Cucerzan and Eric Brill from Microsoft Research’s Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group. Silviu and Eric have developed some novel techniques for using search query statistics and iterative transformation of query strings to improve spell correction. Their published paper on this topic – Spelling correction as an iterative process that exploits the collective knowledge of web users -goes into much more detail on some of the technical thinking that inspired the spelling correction system we built.”

He continues …

“Despite being a significant improvement for MSN Search users, the new spelling correction system is still far from perfect. Looking through user feedback, there are still a few areas in which we have room for improvement. For example, we often suggest corrections for correctly spelled names, and we are seeing this a lot during our beta phase since many users query their own name to evaluate our new search engine.

An accurate search spelling correction system is essential to helping users find the information they’re looking for. So in the coming months we’ll be working to increase the accuracy of the spelling correction system. We’ll also be expanding the system to include many more languages, since the English and German-speaking users of our search engine aren’t the only imperfect spellers on the planet. “

Rich Ord is the CEO of iEntry, Inc. which publishes over 200 websites and email newsletters.

Rich also publishes his blog WebProBlog which focuses on internet business and marketing trends.

But here there is one issue I would particularly like to raise: their URL.

Given that they have the Chinese character for ‘spirit’ on their home page, the name of the site is obviously based on an appeal to the ‘spirit’ of karate. The character for spirit is found in Japanese words like ‘Yamato-damashii’ (‘Japanese spirit’). The hallmarks of the Japanese spirit are a masculine valour, honour, and refusal to be defeated. By using a Japanese word they assumedly hope to associate themselves with the mystique of the Orient.

The problem is that they’ve got it wrong! The character they show on the home page is only read ‘-damashii’ in combination with other words, as in the example ‘Yamato-damashii’. The normal reading is ‘tamashii’.

What is worse, they’ve left the second ‘i’ off the end of ‘-damashii’. That gives a completely different meaning — ‘damashi’ in Japanese means ‘deceit’ or ‘deception’. This is not a particularly inviting name for a Japanese-related site. Quite frankly, it makes them look like amateurs trying to pass off as Oriental cool but failing to do so. Given that their market is probably as unsophisticated as they are, this may not matter. But it certainly detracts from the attractiveness of their site for anyone who has a passing knowledge of Japanese.

Greg Pringle

Peer reviewers volunteer their time and effort to help other site owners with their websites. Please take time to visit this reviewer’s site and say that you think what they’re doing is valuable to the web business community. If you’d like your site reviewed, send an email to editors@ientry.com.