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SEO News Bytes June 01, 2006 - MSN adCenter labs research tools

Microsoft is putting out some cool research tools that will be a nice compliment to Google’s own keyword research tools. MSN created separate categories for different sets of tools based on:

Paid Search
Contextual Advertising
Behavior Targeting
Emerging Markets

There aren’t a lot of surprises, most of these tools exist in one form or another somewhere else, but it’s nice to have them all in one place. What’s still lacking is a keyword popularity tool, which would probably get the most mileage by users. After all keyword research without statistical data to back up popularity is pretty meaningless.

Nonetheless, the MSN addCenter put together a nice set of tools. I especially like the search funnel tool, which displays the keywords typed by users before and after a specific search query. This tool is especially useful trying to figure out what other combination of keywords you should target to bring visitors to your site which may help to increase your website’s conversion rate for your main target keywords.
Give the MSN adCenter labs a try and while you are there, give them some feedback about your experiences with their tools and you may also want to give them a hint about developing a new keyword

Guilty before proven innocent

Ok, so we are back in Google’s graces again. Mind you, it only took about 30 days to sort things out, but at the end it was not Google Big Daddy crawling issues, or our SEO Software tools violating Google’ TOS, but a simple note that probably read something like this, “trendmx.com appears to be engaged in a link co-op”. For those of you who don’t know what link co-ops are, the simple definition is; websites actively engaged in link swapping using a mostly automated central database.

It’s a lot like reciprocal linking, but with a twist. The members agree to rent out space on their website so other members’ text links can be made visible and crawlable by the search engines using server side scripts. The whole system is automated by a central link management system. Some of the well known link building co-ops are Digital Point and Link-Vault. Interestingly both of these websites have been removed from Google’s index recently, although Link-Vault still has a Google Page Rank of 6. Google’s definition and tolerance for these type of link building schemes seems to be less and less.

Needless to say we have never been involved in this type of link building and after a final review of our site, we got a stamp of approval from Google. We are clean and safe to be back in the general SERP population.

What is disturbing about the whole situation is the fact that our website was penalized in the first place. I am no conspiracy theorist, but I may have to agree with my girlfriend who thinks it was one of our competitors who filed an unsubstantiated complaint against our site with Google. Is she right, who knows, but I can’t ignore the fact women’s intuition is much better than their male counterparts. Since SEO is part science, part art and part human judgment it’s easy to understand why there is a certain element of unknown in every situation when it comes to the search engines.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, you need to come clean on any type of link building activity you have done in the past, even if you think it was white hat SEO. Remember, what you may deem as white hat SEO, may not be judged the same way by Google.

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