As of today, 1 November 2010, a new search engine is open to the public: blekko. Regardless of what its ambitions (to be better than Google and topple them), it has a very useful treasure for internet marketers: a thorough SEo analysis of any URL or domain they have indexed.

Before I go through some of the data they share, note that they have a toolbar that allows you to "view SEO data in real time". And because they allow you to mark pages as spam to kill them completely from your search results, the toolbar has a button to do that too. Interesting way to crowdsource spam control.

Back to SEO data: To see it, you simply search for the domain name you’re interested in followed by a /domain. For example, for ekstreme.com: ekstreme.com /domain. That first page is a gold mine in its own right, as it tells you how many inbound links from how many domains. And for each domain it lists, you can dig in a bit deeper to understand that domain. This is actually the first in many tabs shown. Clicking through them you’ll see they display a few graphs (sadly, the ever useless pie charts), give crawl stats data, and duplicate content.

The crawl stats data hints at how fresh/stale their data is, and from testing a few domains I own and some of my SEO clients’ domains, it’s clear the freshness is a big issue: it’s very hit and miss, and for newer and/or smaller sites, they are lagging significantly. For example, when analyzing OCW Search, the numbers indicate they have crawled 8 pages (there are more ) and the average page length is 0kb, which is clearly wrong. They also tell you the reverse IP address and for OCW Search it’s Amazon, which is the previous host that I moved away from a couple of months ago. So take this data with a grain of salt!

The last report I want to highlight is the comparison. By default when you click on the compare tab, you will be comparing the www domain with the non-www domain. Again, for ekstreme.com: ekstreme.com /compare. This tells you who is linking to each domain which is a good rough estimate of the problem size if you are dealing with canonical URL issues. BUT, the real kicker here is that you can compare different domains, for example ekstreme.com and www.ocwsearch.com (screenshot below). This is a gold mine for market analysis.

So all in all an excellent free tool, but one that suffers from stale data – the problem for all SEO tools. My recommendation is like any other SEO tool: use it while understanding the data’s limitations.

Finally, I’d like to note that this is a genius marketing strategy on blekko’s part: getting SEOs to talk about them and use them is a great way to get early traction. Us search geeks are the very very leading edge of early adoptors, so well done on spotting this opportunity.

I’m very happy to be confirm this: I will be speaking at the Automating Twitter session at Search Engine Strategies 2010 in London on 18 February 2010.

My talk will be about analytics for social media marketing. Whenever you launch a marketing campaign, you need to measure it in detail to understand its performance. I will talk about some of the important actionable metrics you need to track, with code examples of how to track them. Other key topics covered are filtering, automation, and reporting, all of which feed into experimentation to find the most effective marketing messages.

Donna over at SEO Scoop asks an excellent question: more and more we’re seeing website attacks for SEO purposes, not more malicious intents (like stealing credit card details). Donna asks, how should we deal with this kind of attack? I’m going to hazard some suggestions.

First things first. We’re not dealing with hackers. Nosiree, we’re dealing with crackers. A hacker is a well-seasoned coder. A cracker is a hacker who exploits security holes for nefarious purposes.

With semantics out of the way, here are some suggestions:

• Googlebomb yourself: If you get attacked with, for example, the Slash One WordPress exploit, essentially you’re going to get a lot of spammy "content" pages and lots of links to them. So what happens if you use .htaccess or otherwise to redirect all request to wp-content/1/* to, say, your site’s home page? Or why not to your newly minted, specially created, [Texas holdem play online] site? Hey, you’re probably going to get a lot of traffic, so use it! Here is the code:
  RewriteEngine On

  RewriteRule wp-content/1(.*)$ http://my-new-spammy-aff-site.com [R]

  Essentially, you’ll googlebomb yourself with their links and use their traffic.

• Use robots.txt as a defensive tool: A search engine doesn’t need to see wp-content anyway, so block it:
  User-agent: *

  Disallow: /wp-content

• It’s the keywords stupid: you just got someone dump a load of keyword-laden pages with targeted keyword links back to them. Hello? Anyone care to turn this into a keyword research tool? Here is the pseudocode for the tool:
  Do a Google search for [inurl:wp-content/1]

  Scrape the URLs from the SERPs

  Scrape the spammy URLs

  For each spammy URL, do a [link:] search

  Scrape the backlinks and extract the anchor texts

  Save the keywords along with the spammy HTML

  Write a front-end to search the database
• Report them! Figure out the IP address of the person who uploaded the spammy pages and report them. If you get trackback spam to the spammy pages, find the IP address of the trackback spammers and report them. Most SEO spammers will be using hosting services and their own computers. It is possible (although I’m guessing unlikely) they’ll be using a proper botnet.

So like pretty much in SEO, perhaps even this can be dealt with using some creativity… I’m sure there are better ways to deal with such spam, and the idea is to think about the opportunities here. Good luck!

Note: This is the first ever guest blog post on things of sorts. If you would like to guest blog here, please drop me a line with your idea or you can also email me. Since this is an experiment (I’ve asked a couple of others to guest blog too), I would love to hear your comments. If you have a favorite topic you would like to see a post on, you can also ask!

Today we have Rand from 14^th Colony talking about content promotion. Apart from formatting the post and pasting it into WordPress, the whole thing is Rand’s.

It seems every SEO blog and forum says the key to getting backlinks and rankings is to "write great content". But even the best, most insightful, unique content won’t do anything for your site if nobody reads it. What is “great content” and how do you actually get the links you want after the content is published?

Great content is unique, informative and insightful information presented in a way your intended audience will be receptive to it.

What great content is not is regurgitated information that is already on a thousand other websites. Even if you are presenting information that is common knowledge just by putting your own personal stamp on it you may have something noteworthy. And noteworthy content is what picks up links.

Tips to make "average" content noteworthy

• Package the information to match your target market. An extreme example of this is websites that translate documents from one language to another. A less extreme example is repackaging a business article for working moms – the tone of the article will be completely different making the information more valuable.
• Fill in the blanks. Professional articles in every industry assume the viewer knows all the background needed to understand their point. This just isn’t true. This post is an example of filling in a blank: how to promote articles to get links.
• Be ahead of the curve. If you put together information before anyone else does your article will be cited as the source document for all other following. An example of that is my article on Social Bookmarking that came out when that phenomenon was still pretty new. Pierre included a link referencing it to explain his article on Social Bookmarking Code.
• Make it personal. If you can show that you have been in the situation the viewer is facing and made it through you develop a bond with them. Having clear examples and illustrations also help.

And it probably goes without saying but I just have to push this point: proof read, edit, spell check, edit, read it out loud, edit, edit, edit. Spelling and grammar errors can drop the viewer’s trust in a heartbeat. Fix them ahead of time.

Getting the word out

Once you post your carefully crafted, super edited, insightful, unique article it is time to promote it.

• Tell your friends and colleagues. Send out emails to people you know. Your personal relationships are easiest to connect with and they already have a vested interest in your success.
• Ask industry leaders. Be very polite and do not attach any expectations. Industry leaders are who they are because they are busy. Often asking for criticism is the way to go as it appeals to their ego or sense of "giving back".
• Announce the article in a forum. Be sure to comply with the rules and culture of the forum. You can also highlight the article in your signature file. I have had great success with this picking up links long after the initial "buzz" wore off.
• Reference the article on your blog. If you don’t have a blog, get one. They are great vehicles for promotion. This will also get the word out through your RSS feed.
• Reference your article in blog comments. These links don’t count for the search engines because of the nofollow issue but the traffic you pick up may lead to some strong links on other sites.
• Leverage Social Media. Many social bookmarking sites use nofollow but some don’t and the exposure your article gets – even if it doesn’t hit the home page – is often enough to get you some links along the way. Don’t submit everything you write, just your best stuff, and have a friend submit the articles for you (Diggers don’t like self-promotion).
• Write a press release. Getting your article mentioned by industry newsletters and websites can be a big boon.
• Submit to directories that offer deep links. Most directories only link to the home page but some will link to any page in your website that you choose. You can do a search for [keyword +submit] or [keyword +"add url"] to find sites like these.
• Exchange links. Reciprocal linking in limited doses is ok. Just don’t get carried away.
• Offer the article for translation. If you know people in your industry that speak a different language offer to let them translate your article in exchange for a link back.
• Write smaller articles on your topic for distribution sites. If your article is about "widgets" you can expand on some details and have a new article about "the history of widgets" or "the difference between red widgets and blue widgets" or… whatever. The point is you’ve already done the research so use it to generate some smaller articles that reference your main article.

One to two weeks of solid promotion should give your article the momentum it needs. If you do another round of link-building every 6 months you can have a solid position in the search engines and consistent stream of traffic for years.

Randall McCarley has more than 10 years experience in marketing and website development and promotion. He owns 14th Colony and Linker’s Union and is a moderator at SEO Refugee.

Sophie Wegat, the brains behind Think Prospect of Melbourne, Australia, just had an article of hers published in My Business, an Australian business magazine. The article is very easy to read and explains the basics of building a website on a budget is detail. Articles like these are great for beginners in SEO and web design, and also for the professionals who would like a prop to help them explain the process to their beginner clients.

Sophie just blogged about her article linking to a PDF download: Building a Website on a Budget. Well done Sophie!

Hot off the press: the Yahoo! Search Blog announced some upcoming Slurp changes. Effective immediately, we’ll start seeing Slurp accessing pages from crawl.yahoo.net. As they phase this in, they’re also promising bot authentication like Googlebot and msnbot. Finally!

Once Slurp joins the authenticated fold, all the cloackers’ dreams would have been fulfilled. Thank yooooooooooooooooooo!

[tags]yahoo, slurp, google, msn[/tags]

If you ever needed proof that Digg is being manipulated by SEOs, this would be it. Actually read the page and squirm with the pain of innacuracy.

[tags]digg[/tags]

The river in the village a priest lived in was about to burst its banks and drown everything. A car pulled up to the church and shouted to the priest, "Father, we can squeeze you in. Hop in!" The priest replied, "No, you go my children. Save someone else. God will save me!" The water level kept rising and some people in an inflatable boat rowed to the church and shouted to the priest, "Father! Hop in! You’re going to drown!" The priest replied, "No, go save someone else. God will save me!" Now the whole town was under water. The priest made it to the roof of the church where a helicopter hovered nearby and shouted to him, "Father, grab the rope!" to which the priest replied, "No, don’t worry about me. God will save me!"

Our poor friend the priest drowns and he goes to heaven. When he met God, he asked him, "I’ve been your humble servant all my life. I helped the poor and did good deeds. Why didn’t you save me?" And God replied, "Whatever do you mean? I sent you a car, and you said no; I sent you a boat, and you refused; and when I sent you a helicopter, you still said no."

….

….

A salesman built a website. When his visitors came with their money, he said, "No! Go my customers. Buy from somewhere else…."

Are you like the priest who forces visitors away? How many customers did you inadvertently turn away today? Still think your site doesn’t need to be accessible? Think your site is usable?

Your site is broken. Even if you think it’s perfect, it can be improved. Fix it and embrace more visitors.

[tags]accessibility, usability[/tags]

I’m doing a thorough analysis of the monetization strategies on eKstreme.com and I’ve come up with a lesson and an interesting observation.

The first lesson worth repeating a 100 times for everyone: diversify your income streams. A few months ago, eKstreme.com was only supported by Google’s AdSense, and so it rode the turbulent ups and downs of it. Actually, for most of 2006, the montly earnings were going down, a trend that started in April and continued till December. This led me to look at other sources of income. The current strategy is as follows:

• AdSense is still the main ad system used, but it’s ever decreasing in earnings and the slice of the earnings it brings in. Eventually, I think it will be relegated to a backup system.
• I have an old ValueClick account that I revived. It used to be the backfill for AdSense, but now it’s being rotated in on all pages too. Also, since it’s a CPM system, it’s used on this blog and anything that gets referred from digg.com or reddit.com. That is, it monetizes high drive through traffic pages.
• Finally, I started using Text Link Ads, and the results are amazing. Again, there are fluctuations, but the peaks more the offset the downturns, and so overall, a great earner. I use TLA only some targeted pages.

What’s the point? February was a record earnings month for me, with AdSense earning about a third of the total. If I didn’t have the other income streams, the site would have earned a pathetic amount. That’s why diversity is necessary. Even better, March is panning out to be another good month, but AdSense is acting up again.

And now a thought: For a while now I’ve had a deep feeling that Fridays are terrible days in AdSense. Why? It just never seems to earn as much as I do the rest of the week. So today I did an analysis for the past six months, and sure enough Friday was the worst of the working days. The difference between Saturdays and Sundays was minmal, so they’re equivalent. Surprisingly, Wednesday was the highest earning day of the week, followed by Thursday.

What does this mean? Firstly it’s interesting that different days have such wildly differing earnings. Secondly, this may be very hot data for optimizing AdSense impressions. Since Fridays are terrible, I can test new ad networks on Fridays or I can tweak the impressions to reduce AdSense impressions on some days while upping other networks. On Wednesdays, I may run an AdSense only strategy. I’ll be looking more into this, and I’ll run some tests.

One effect this will have is that the overall AdSense impressions might go down. This is tweaking the inventory at its heart, and who knows, Google’s algo might have impressions as a variable. Whatever happens, the only result I care about is higher earnings

[tags]text link ads, adsense, google, monetization[/tags]

An anonymous tipper just told me about this: Log into your Google account, make sure you have personalized search turned on and then search for [inurl:read.php? mysql] and click on the first result. You’ll get a redirector script message like the one below:

(click for full size)

How many people do you think click that link? No doubt sites are losing traffic this way.

Anyone else out there facing the same issue? Yes, many more. To find them, search for [forum inurl:read.php?]. The issue seems to be special characters (commas) in the URLs.

Check your sites folks.

Update: The referrs coming from the notice will be different from the ones if the direct search result was clicked and worked. So it will show up clearly in your log files.

A thread started today by Barry Welford of Strategic Marketing Montreal asked if Google tracks URL clicks in SERPs.

We always knew that Yahoo! sends clicks through a redirection script, and even asks that developers using its API actually use the redirection URL. Their API FAQ states this very nicely:

Q: While using the Yahoo! Search APIs, what’s the difference between a "click URL" and "display URL"?

Our services often provide two URLs for each result. The "display URL" leads directly to the site or resource in question. It’s suitable for display in an application. The "click URL" is longer and contains extra information that helps us to optimize our search services.

Please use the click URL when sending users to a site as the result of using our services. For example, <a href="$clickUrl">$displayUrl</a>

So what about Google?

We already know that GMail tracks URL clicks, and I pointed that out in my reply to Barry, so that’s one service. Digging around in the Google search results, I couldn’t find any evidence of tracking. I was using the LiveHTTPHeaders Firefox extension, and it was very clear that a click in the results was directly transfered to the target website. Javascript was turned on.

Then it occurred to me to turn on search personalization. Immediately, I found the tracking by searching for [google] and clicking on the Google Maps result. The status bar said the URL is http://maps.google.com/. The tracking headers look like this:

So that’s how it’s done: a 302 redirect using Javascript click capture. It makes sense to track clicks as a means of personalization, but that doesn’t mean personalization is all pure and holy as Google makes it out to be.

Please join the thread at Cre8asite forums.

[tags]Google, personalization[/tags]

I can’t help but think this is a bad turning point for Digg. Today, the news is buzzing that Digg removed its top users list. Why? As Kevin Rose puts it:

Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg.

Got that? After reading the full post, I can’t help but think that Digg is hiding the evidence of manipulation, not actually fixing the problem (if there is one to begin with). Removing the list and looking the other direction does nothing to stop spam. It just keeps it hidden.

In the meantime, Digg is yearning to be Google. Back in September, the official Digg blog posted a letter with this little gem:

I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story.

A spam-fighting algo change? Sounds awefully familiar. What are they saying now?

The factors and the algorithm are constantly being tweaked to reflect the diversity of the Digg audience as well as to guard against manipulative behavior.

They should have a tag line for companies that do this: "In the algos we trust". All others buy ads.

Back to Digg: basically, they’re saying "we have a spam problem so we removed the top diggers list but we don’t actually have a spam problem because our algos are great". At the same time they tell us it’s because of all the ‘bad publicity’ which makes me wonder: What are they doing? Where are they going with this?

Right on queue, here is an interview with Digg’s current Top Digger (as of removing the list) and his take on things. He asks a very probing question:

What keeps people voluntarily contributing even when the slightest bit of reward is taken away?

Exactly. Digg has set itself on a self-destruction course now, but it’s still easy to fix that. The least they can do is reinstate the Top Diggers list. The best they can do is recode their very trusty algos that rank the top diggers. Otherwise, this is the most pointless move by Digg.

[tags]digg[/tags]

I was catching up with some news and came across Aaron Wall’s post about Lateral Thinking Skills which led me to another post about Lateral Vs Traditional SEO. Aaron’s post reminded us of Edward DeBono, who wrote a book called Six Thinking Hats. DeBono’s hats are now a standard framework for creative – "lateral" thinking which you should be using for your SEO and general webmaster work.

The hats are really just a means to force you to think about the different aspects of a problem. They are colored hats, with the color being symbolic for the approach/aspect you’re thinking about now. Think of them as the modes of attacking a problem.

So what are the six hats?

• The White Hat, symbolizing facts and hard data. For example, we state that our conversion rate is low. We state that the number of users is dropping. What we’re stating here is mostly the question we’re trying to answer. Why is the conversion rate so low? Why are visitors not coming or not returning?
• The Red Hat, symbolizing emotions. Here we start making hypotheses about what’s going on, but only on an emotional level. Continuing with our examples, our conversion rate is low because we’re not connecting to the needs of the visitors. For our decreasing traffic, perhaps our visitors do not feel part of a community. This will be important if you run a forum or a very social Web 2.0 site.
• The Black Hat, which is the color of a judge’s robe. Think negatively and critically here. Perhaps our sever is overloaded or the sales page takes too long to load. Our low conversion rate could be to bad targeting, perhaps we’re using the wrong keywords. Our visitors are leaving because there are bullies in our community. Again, we state facts and implications of our original question, but as suggestions for potential answers.
• The Yellow Hat, where we talk about sunny, happy, positive things. Hey, we’re converting badly but at least it’s not costing us much. Too many conversions mean we’ll need a much bigger tech support group. Perhaps the drop in traffic means we’re left with the most loyal and vocal user base. A smaller community is easier to manage. The point here is to think of the good things coming out of your problem, but try to find an angle that you can exploit.
• The Green Hat, where you let your mind roam wide and free in endless pastures looking for solutions. Here is when you relax and explicitely think about solutions, ideally using a creative idea generation technique. What happens if you ask your dwindling community to redesign your site? What can we do differently? MUST we use these keywords? Are our moderators part of the problem?

  One technique that I love is the random word association technique. While thinking about your problem, flip through a dictionary and randomly pick out a word. Now try to incorporate that word into your thinking. By forcing yourself (your brain) to create unexpected links, you’re more likely to find a creative solutions. The whole point here is to create a new association. There are many more techniques and you have to explore a few to decide which one works best for you. The search engines are your friends

• Finally, the Blue Hat, your sky-high big-picture view of the problem. What did we learn? What can we do? Where do we go from here? Write up a little summary of this exercise. Engage with those who you think are part of the problem or are potentially part of the solutions.

So this is it in a nutshell. The examples I used are simple and do not do justice to the framework, but you get the idea. Try it out. You just may come up with something special!

Bonus two hats: for fun

• The Propeller Hats are the techies who think the best technical solution wins. They moan when we talk about website usability.
• The Tinfoil Hats are those that believe that Google is evil.

People outside the USA smell, otherwise, a lot of online retailers and other websites would treat them the same as USA customers. That is, with some respect.

The idea is very simple: a lot of websites mistreat their international audience. Over at Cre8, John Müller started a thread called 10 Complaints From An International Shopper. His number 1 gripe?

Tell me up front if you don’t want me as a customer.

Search, shop, pay — and sorry! we only send to the continental US + Canada! Duh, I should have known (if you would have told me ANYWHERE on the web site). Worst offenders are the small shops that let you order, send you a confirmation and then email you later to tell you that they don’t sell internationally. A simple link with “International shipping information” or even a text “no international shipments” would suffice.

The thread follows on with more complaints. I pitch in with discount vouchers, naming big companies that make this same mistake, namely Google, Yahoo, and MSN with their PPC vouchers.

But what really prompted this post: Microsoft recently started a website for people to test drive the about-to-be released Windows Vista. It said, it needed IE 6.0 or better (naturally), so I fired up IE, gave them an email address, installed the Active X control, and with uncontrollable excitement, I clicked through and found the first feature that had a "test drive" button… and got the following error:

The message in text:

Thank you for your interest in the Windows Vista Business test drive.

This trial program is available in limited geographies and languages,
and you are currently located outside of the available area.

Please check http://www.windowsvista.com for other Windows Vista
information and experiences that may be available to you.

Digging into the Javascript, the error message is triggered if a code is not US or CA – i.e., USA or Canada.

So my question is: Why didn’t they tell me this before I went through the sign up process?

While doing the talk show, I mentioned the starter SEO tool I posted as my 1000th post at Cre8. Well it’s here. Enjoy

I also mentioned Magpie RSS which is a great RSS parser. Another one is SimplePie.

Other resources you really should know about:

• SEO Refugee forums. They tie with Cre8 as my favorite forums.
• Yahoo! Developer Network. Yahoo!’s central website for all things Yahoo! API.

This Friday, the 19^th, at 4PM Pacific time, midnight GMT (lucky me), I’m on live on an eMarketingTalkShow talkshow. I’ll be talking about Web 2.0, what it is, how you can get into it, and where it’s going. I’ll be pointing out the marketing and programming opportunities as I go along.

Full details, including listening in details, are on the talk’s home page. An mp3 downloadable version will be available after the show. And for those of you who’ve never seen a photo of me (that most people online), now you can.

So again, Friday, 19 Jan, midnight GMT. Tune in!

There is a bug feature in Google Analytics so that it doesn’t report dynamic referring URLs in full, meaning you usually get referers looking like /forums/viewtopic.php instead of the URL of the actual forum thread. Solution? Reuben Yau has come up with a Google Analytics hack to fix this problem. It uses a very simple feature (yes, not a bug) in Analytics, and the results are proper analytics.

Interestingly, Google already knows about this problem. One blog post hints at this:

This will take you to a new data table that shows you the rest of the referring URL — not including any dynamic query parameters (anything after a question mark, for instance).

So, why do we have to resort to such hacks? I’m glad we have a solution now, but it really should be fixed by Google.

If you have any questions or ideas, join the thread over at SEO Refugee.

read more | digg story

A recent SEO Refugee thread brought up the subject of whether Google (and the SE bots in general) check CSS files. Testing that is easy: download your log files and search for all requests to the CSS file(s) coming from Googlebot. I usually get a few hits every time I do this (every couple of months or so), but on closer inspection, the hits have always been from a spoofed user agent string, where some clown browses the web pretending to be Googlebot. This is easy enough to accomplish, for example, using Firefox and the user agent switcher extension.

Just now, I decided to check again, and one hit actually did come from a Googlebot IP address. The exact line from the log file is:

66.249.72.52 – - [24/Oct/2006:17:17:35 -0500] “GET /global/x.css HTTP/1.1″ 200 8382 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

Sure enough, the requesting IP address really does belong to the Google IP block. Also notice that there is no HTTP referer header set, as you’d expect. As far as I am aware, this is the first time anyone has spotted Googlebot requesting a CSS file.

Digging deeper, I tried to find more requests to CSS files. The one requested (x.css) is the main CSS file for ekstreme.com. There is another stylesheet for the Socializer. I couldn’t find any Googlebot requests for that. I also checked my other sites, and I couldn’t find any requests there either. In short, this is the only CSS file request by Googlebot I could find.

Incidentally, that same Googlebot requested just over 3000 pages from eKstreme.com that day.

What does this mean? If Google is now interested in CSS files, could it be also interesting in discovering hidden text? That would be interesting

So can you please check your logs? I’m sure eKstreme.com is not special enough to be the only site whose CSS file got crawled. This is how I check my logs: I use grep (Windows users get Unix Utils) with the following command:

grep -F "x.css" logfile.txt > css-hits.txt

This picks up all requests to the CSS file. Make sure you replace ‘x.css’ with your CSS file’s name! Next, we fish out all hits that mention Google. To avoid any case sensitivity issues, we simply search for ‘oogle’:

grep -F "oogle" css-hits.txt > oogle-css.txt

Now open up oogle-css.txt and look at each hit individually. You’ll usually have a few dozen so it won’t be that hard. For any hits claiming to be Googlebot, check the IP address to see if it is part of Google’s IP block or not.

If you find something, please comment below or contact me.

UPDATE: A few updates and reactions from around the web:

• First off, SEO Scoop‘s Donna gave some background to the story about how this was alluded to at Pubcon Vegas. Thanks for the mention Donna!
• Barry over at SE Roundtable mentioned this story too (thanks!) and also linked to more references about other reports like this one. Read them all, especially the ones from last month.
• A question asked by many people was whether the directory where the CSS file resides is blocked by robots.txt. No, it’s not.
• Two lively forum threads are debating this story, one at Cre8 and one at SEO Refugee. Come join the fun!
• Interestingly, Michael Martinez mentioned in the SEO Refugee thread and in the SE Roundtable comments that he’s seen this kind of behavior before – i.e., Google requesting CSS and JS files. So I decided to check…
• External Javascript files were downloaded too! In total, I saw 71 requests to the various JS files used on eKstreme.com from Google IP addresses identifying themselves as GoogleBot. Twenty of the 71 hits came from 66.249.72.72. The first hit 5 September 2006 and the last 7 November 2006. An excerpt from the log file:
  

  66.249.72.100 – - [05/Sep/2006:13:31:50 -0500] “GET /socializer/socializer.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 228 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

  66.249.72.34 – - [06/Sep/2006:00:01:22 -0500] “GET /tracker/ajaxlinktracker.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 14212 “-” “‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’”

  66.249.72.234 – - [07/Sep/2006:00:47:29 -0500] “GET /socializer/socializer.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 228 “-” “‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’”

  66.249.72.234 – - [07/Sep/2006:00:48:05 -0500] “GET /tracker/ajaxlinktracker.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 14212 “-” “‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’”

  66.249.72.234 – - [07/Sep/2006:01:01:33 -0500] “GET /socializer/socializer.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 228 “-” “‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’”

  66.249.72.234 – - [07/Sep/2006:01:10:55 -0500] “GET /tracker/ajaxlinktracker.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 14212 “-” “‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’”

  66.249.72.234 – - [07/Sep/2006:18:11:49 -0500] “GET /socializer/socializer.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 228 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

  66.249.72.234 – - [08/Sep/2006:12:31:13 -0500] “GET /tracker/ajaxlinktracker.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 14212 “-” “‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’”

• I’ve talked before about Google indexing more types of files, including ZIP file and exe files (see Binary Data in SERPs) and I’ve even spotted what appears to be a Javascript link recognized as a backlink. All in all, this could be a trend of Googlebot getting ‘smarter’.

[tags]Google, Googlebot, CSS[/tags]

When a search engine bot retrieves a page, it identifies itself using a user agent string. However, this is easy to spoof, and so now MSN and Google have a good fool-proof way to identify their bots: you take the requesting IP address identifying itself as MSNBot or Googlebot and do a reverse DNS lookup on it to give a hostname. Then you check the IP address associated with that hostname and it should match the requesting IP address. Very simple, and now I’ve written a tutorial giving the PHP code for search engine bot authentication.

Hat tips: MSN Live Search Blog, Google Webmaster Central Blog, Matt.

Threads around the web are popping up with reports that Google is currently updating the backlinks it reports. While looking through the new backlinks, I found what appears to be a Javascript link showing up using the link: search operator on Google on one of the datacenters (DCs).

The DC search in question is gfe-jc.google.com, and the interesting result is the third one (see screen shot below).

Looking at the cached copy’s source code (the same as the current copy as far as I can tell), search for ‘ekstreme.com’ and you’ll see this:

<a href="javascript:location.href=&#39;http://ekstreme.com…..

This is a Javascript link embedded into a link tag, and is the only occurance of anything related to ‘eksterme.com’.

Significance? As far as I know, this is the first time Google could be recognizing JS-based links.

[tags]Google, backlinks[/tags]