I just read this post on the Google blog, Attention all Pearl Jam fans, and man was I surprised. It essentially says that Pearl Jam has a new video for “Life Wasted” up on Google Video. To me, this is very exciting, and it says a lot about Pearl Jam and their philosophy when it comes to putting their fans first.

I love Pearl Jam. I have been a fan since their first CD, “Ten,” came out back in 1991. It seems wierd to think that was 15 years ago. I even got to see them in concert back in 1998. Anyway, I got their new CD the week it came out, and it rules. It is so great, and it puts what is accepted as music today to shame. It looks to be a good year for this, as the Chili Peppers also released a new CD that totally rocks.

Well, this may not be very related to SEO, but I had to mention it and throw some links in as well. You can find the “Life Wasted” video here and the Official Pearl Jam site here.

Google’s Matt Cutts: The Big Interview by Mike Grehan over at ClickZ has 2 interviews with Matt Cutts. Mike Grehan asks some great questions here for Google’s resident chief spam warrior. Mike published some of what Matt had to say in the article, but I recommend downloading and listening to the full audio of both. There is some great information in there.

One of the things that Matt said in the interview that I have not heard anyone talk about is Google’s policy on IP delivery. In the interview, Matt essentially says that cloaking is against Google’s webmaster guidelines but IP delivery is not. This is something that I personally have not heard before from Google. What does all this mean exactly? Well, let’s look at what Matt is talking about.

Cloaking is defined as having a script on your web site that can differentiate between a user and a search engine bot. When the script detects a search engine bot visiting the site, it will serve content that is different than the content it would normally deliver to a user. Search engine spammers have used this technique in the past to serve pages stuffed with keywords and links created specifically for search engines, but that users would not approve of, in order to gain undeserved rankings in the search engines. This practice has long been known to seo’s as something that can get you banned from most search engines.

IP delivery is different, however. IP delivery is serving different content to the user based on the IP address of the user. Many web sites engage in this practice including Google, according to Matt. Google is saying that this practice is acceptable under their webmaster guidelines. I think this is a good thing for webmasters who may have been afraid to do this for fear of being banned in the search engines.

Update: I just found a post about this on SEO Roundtable talking about this issue last month. It turns out Matt posted a comment on his blog saying the same thing he says in his interview. Here is a quote.

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address.
Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like “users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr”. This is fine–even Google does this.

It’s when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that’s cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be “if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages.”

So IP delivery is fine, but don’t do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

What does this mean for webmasters? Well, I’m not sure how you could use this to benefit your users. But, I may post about this in the future on how you can use IP delivery to help you improve your overall user experience for your web site.

I now have 52 feeds and counting which I am reading daily in Bloglines. And I am adding more everyday. There is so much great content out there. I have to admit I love reading all these feeds, but it is becoming very time consuming! How about you? How many feeds are you reading everyday?

As you may have heard, Yahoo! announced that they are redesigning their site. While they have not replaced the current site yet, they have allowed everyone to see it. See the Yahoo! redesign at this link.

Sadly, my main complaint is that it supports IE 6 and Firefox 1.5 but not Safari. I suspect they are using a lot of Javascript and/or AJAX. Safari doesn’t support some Javascript dependent features, such as AJAX.

I actually really like the redesign. It is about time for an update. The current design is optimized for 800 x 600 screen dimensions. What more do I need to say? Actually, now that MSN Search is being replaced by Live.com and Ask recently underwent a huge makeover/rebranding, I think Google should follow suit. Who’s with me?

Well, I hope you like Yahoo’s new look. Check it out, and let me know what you think. I’m sure now that they have announced it, it should be live before too long.

I received this message while trying to access Google from work all day.

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

Did anyone else experience this or was it just me? It happend on Mac and PC across every browser I tried. As you can see from the message, it required me to type in random characters from an image to access the page. Every time I did it would let me in, then after a while I would try again and get the same message. Weird.

One thing though, I usually accessed the Google personalized homepage when I received the error, but when I went to Google.com the error persisted.

Okay, the third and final day of Boston PubCon 2006 was a bust. Here’s why. Rather and stay and go to the PubCon I decided to leave and go home. This makes it a pretty worthless day to me. I didn’t know that Thursday’s PubCon was at an actual pub 2 miles from the conference center. I debated on going and not going, and in the end I decided to just head to the airport and get ready to go home.

I scheduled a late flight home on Thursday so that I would be able to attend the last event. That was before I learned that it was not at the convention center. When I calculated how much time I needed to get to the airport and catch a 5PM flight, I realized I would only have an hour at the pub. I decided that it was not worth it, to risk having to hurry to catch my plane for an hour at the pub. It turned out to be a good decision.

When I checked out of my room and left for lunch, I checked on getting an airport shuttle at the concierge’s desk upon my return to the hotel. She said that they show up every hour on the hour. I had just missed the last one, so I would have to wait until 2PM to catch the next one. If I had gone to the pub and gotten back to the hotel after 3PM and missed the shuttle, I would have risked being late and missing the plane. So in the end, I was glad of my decision.

I am dissappointed that I had to miss it though. In the end, I don’t see how anyone trying to catch a late flight can do it and still go to the pub. I would recommend to Brett Tabke that they change this. If not, I will only plan to go the first 2 days of the conference the next time I go to a PubCon.

Alright, this post is 2 weeks late, but I have been busy since getting back from the con. The second day’s sessions were even better than the first day, I thought. So, overall I enjoyed the second day the most. Here is a rundown of the sessions.

The first morning session was the Super Bloggers of Search with Matt Cutts, Rob Scoble and Jeremy Zawodny. The panel was asked to talk first about the future of blogging and then about corporate blogging. One thing I noticed is that the panelists mentioned Bloglines and Technorati several times. I use those services rarely, but I think that says a lot about their popularity and significance.

Matt Cutts talked about how, for him, blogging helps make you more transparent and allows for good feedback. Jeremy Zawodny said that feedback comes through e-mail as well as blog comments, so not all of it is seen by the public. He talked about how blogging about Google Finance and Yahoo Finance allowed him an opportunity to meet with the new head of Yahoo Finance and talk about new plans for the service.

The bloggers were asked which platform they use, and it was interesting to note that none of them use their own companies’ blogging platforms. Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble both use Wordpress. Matt said that he uses it over Blogger because of the ability to use categories with Wordpress. Overall, it was a very interesting session.

Next, I went to the Public Relations session, which was also very interesting. The panelists were Lee Odden, Lawrence Coburn, Robin Liss and David McInnis. I think Odden and McInnis had the most interesting presentations. Odden basically outlined his companies strategy for using online PR for his clients. David McInnis works for PRWeb and talked about the services current features as well as some new ones they added recently. One thing that Odden and McInnis both said was that you should issue at least one press release a month. This is because the news search engines run on a 28 day cycle, so they drop press releases after 28 days.

The third session of the day was another Link Building session. Panelists were Mike Grehan, Jim Boykin, Bill Hartzer and Eric Ward. Jim Boykin gave a presentation about how his company will go about building links for his clients. It was very interesting, but he asked bloggers in the room not to post the information publicly. Overall, it was a very good session, but it was kind of an overview of stuff I already knew.

One thing I heard several speakers say is be careful about linking between sites on the same IP address. Search engines will look at that as an attempt to cheat the system because those sites are usually owned or run by the same company.

Eric Ward gave the best presentation here. He said that he builds links without the search engines in mind. Eric asked the question if there were no search engines, would you still want that link? To me, that is a very important idea to keep in mind when building links. Many of the speakers repeated the idea that is the quality of the link that matters, not the quantity. Another thing that Eric said was that you should try to get links from different top level domains. This means that instead of getting links from only .com’s, they should be from other sources as well, such as .gov’s and .edu’s. Overall, it was a very informative session.

After lunch, we had 2 more sessions. The first one was on Paid Links: Risks vs. Rewards. Todd Malicoat, Patrick Gavin, Philip Kaplan and Roger Montti all gave presentations. I was disappointed overall in this session. I went to the session because I wanted to know about risks of buying links. There wasn’t a lot of information on that. They mainly talked about buying links.

Todd Malicoat and Patrick Gavin gave the best presentations on buying links. Kaplan talked about his company, AdBrite, rather than repeat what the other panelists said. When he tried to go to his companies site, however, it was down, so his presentation was pretty much useless. But, it is worth noting that AdBrite sells ads, and I believe they are an ad network. They do not link to sites directly, instead they use a redirect link. Also, advertisers can get full stats for every site they advertise on, as opposed to Google, which does not release any stats about which sites their ads appear on.

Roger Montti, aka martinibuster, did not really present on paid links either, but rather talked about link building in general. He did offer a few tips. First, was use high quality content to generate links, which is pretty much a given, but has gained a lot attention lately as “link baiting.” Another tip Roger gave was to buy links for new sites to get them started building traffic. This made a lot of sense to me. He also said that when buying links or building links, you can use banner ads instead of just text links. I would add that you must have keywords on the alt text and use a direct link. Roger also recommended using partner link deals, which is similar to reciprocal linking, I guess.

The last session of the day was Search Engines & Webmasters aka “Search Engine Smackdown.” This session was very informative and entertaining. The panel consisted of Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Rahul Lahiri (I believe) from Ask.com and a rep from MSN who had a foreign name I didn’t catch.

The first rep to speak was from Ask. He said that they were very focused on the user experience. He also gave some SEO tips for Ask. He said same subject links are important and that visual relevance was important. I assume by visual relevance he means the results that the users sees that makes them want to click on it, i.e. the title tag, description and url. Some of the things they don’t recommend using are hidden redirects, artificial links, hidden links and misspelled anchor text. Also, he said to help the crawler, don’t use session id’s or cookies and provide http last modified headers. Additionally, custom 404’s should send a 404 signal back to the search engine.

Matt Cutts talked about Google Calendar a little bit. He mentioned that Google Calendar imports RSS, which I thought was important. Matt indicated Google is refreshing supplemental results so those should be updating. He talked about bigdaddy and said that all the datacenters are showing it now. Bigdaddy was a software infrastructure upgrade to crawling and indexing. Matt said along with bigdaddy we should see fresher indexing, smarter crawling and a new Googlebot.

Tim Mayer said that Yahoo recommends that pages be index friendly with unique content. He explained that Yahoo Seeker, which some people were apparently confused about, is the shopping crawler. Tim talked about several new features at Yahoo, such as local and navigational active abstracts, my web 2.0 beta and Yahoo mindset. Yahoo mindset is a search result relevancy slider that toggles between shopping vs. research results.

The Microsoft rep pretty much just gave a live demo of Live.com, which was probably for the best. It is a really cool new search engine, which makes use of a lot of AJAX. One of the coolest things was the local search. This is similar to Google maps but in Boston and Seattle they have street level views on the maps. This was really cool to see. It also has search macros and rss feeds.

In the Q and A, Ask said that different sites have different indexing times. Matt Cutts stressed that Google sees a dash as a separator and an underscore as a combiner. Also, when asked about China censorship, Matt said Google’s ultimate decision was to provide a disclaimer in the results where a search result had been removed due to government censorship. Overall, this was a very entertaining and informative session.