The weekly recap takes me the longest to write, but I appreciate this part the most. I am able to take a look back at the past week or two and categorize my posts into a concise post. It is just amazing how much takes place over a week or two in this industry. So let's take a look back from May 1st 2004 until today the 12th.The most interesting event is something that was named the sandbox effect where Google seems to be putting new sites on hold from ranking well. Alan Webb posted an excellent optimization related article named SEO to the limit, which might help you climb out of that box. In other SEO related topics, we discussed the meaning of duplicate content, how misspellings and synonyms can be used, the pros and cons of CSS, the real use or nonuse of Flash, and the top 5 optimization tactics to avoid.
Gmail was a very hot topic these past weeks, so hot that people were selling Gmail invites on eBay. I recently received an invite, no I did not pay for one on eBay. Soon after Google offered invites to its AdWords customers. Gmail and all those privacy concerns got me thinking about how I think Google should start an instant messaging service with ads, maybe they should call it gIM. The Google IPO, which we discussed a lot about in the past recap, provided us with a lot of information on Google's AdSense revenue distribution. There are so many sites making nice money with their AdSense accounts, but is that a good thing?
What I do think is a good thing is that Google added the ability for Ad images to be displayed in AdSense ads. Some more good ideas by Google include personalized search, indexing ISO formats and Flash files, and launching the Google Blog. Do you think it would be a good idea if Google enforced Web standards or even counts links on link pages?
Moving on to other search engine activity, lets discuss some Yahoo! Yahoo! added local search to main results and updated their white pages layout. We carefully reviewed Yahoo's referrer URL and we looked at a Yahoo! search on steriods. On the Microsoft front, it looks like MSN is a copycat whereas AskJeeves is is strolling on forward.
We discussed a lot more topics these past two weeks, so feel free to check out the May archives for the full list of topics covered this month. Thank you for reading and speak to you all soon.
