If you blog, you should get the Linkify bookmarklet that Laurence Gonsalves wrote.
How does it work? It’s an easy 2 step process:
1. Drag the Linkify bookmarket to your personal toolbar.
2. Dang! There is no step 2! Sorry about that. I, um, got mixed up. There’s just one step.
Now how do you use it? Well, see the link I made to Laurence Gonsalves? To do that, I wrote the words “Laurence Gonsalves,” selected that text, and

Hey everybody, I talked about my travel plans earlier this year and wanted to give you a quick update. I’m staying at home for SES NYC 2007, still planning on taking a fair chunk of May off, and planning to hit the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference in June.
Why am I skipping SES NYC? Well, the main reason is that my inlaws are visiting, but I also want to crunch on some stuff at work and make sure that things are in good shape for me t

It’s almost not worth mentioning, but I know one website noticed this, so I’ll talk about it. Last week there was an update to how we canonicalize a small number of urls. What is “canonicalization” again? Read this previous post, or see this post by John Andrews to see all the ways that you can have the same content on urls that are technically different. Some people ask “Why don’t you just assume www.example.c

The judge in the KinderStart case granted Google’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend: The instant case has been intensively litigated for more than eleven months. Under these circumstances, the Court concludes that there is no reasonable likelihood that KinderStart will cure the defects in the SAC [second amended complaint] by further amendment. Accordingly, the motion to dismiss will be granted without leave to amend. I believe th

I’m getting ready to head to SES London 2007 soon. I hope to see lots of search folks there! My wife and father-in-law are coming too, which is practically a recipe for interesting hijinks.
I’ve been trying to get on a London sleep schedule by getting up earlier and earlier each morning, and varying my caffeine dosage

One of the common requests I hear from webmasters is “Why doesn’t Google show me most or all of my backlinks?” Well, as of today, Google’s webmaster console will now let you see your site’s backlinks. Major props to the webmaster console team for this new feature. A few things to know:
- The backlink tool doesn’t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet, but I expect the number of links that are available to grow.
- In particular, for my site I was easily able to see more than 10x more links in this new tool than the link: command gave me

The website for this year’s Superbowl stadium, www.dolphinstadium.com, was recently hacked so that visitors to that page with unpatched Windows computers downloaded a keylogger and malware that allows full backdoor control. It’s fixed now, but it’s a good idea to make sure whatever computer you use to browse is patched

Okay, I’m curious about something. When Google wrote a 17 page white paper about flaws in click fraud studies, how many people here read it from start to finish? If you didn’t get a chance to read it back then, you’re in luck. Shuman Ghosemajumder, a product manager at Google, summarizes the high-order bits in two posts, here and here

Completely independent of the recent algorithm to minimize the impact of Googlebombs, we continue to do data pushes on a near-daily basis where some people can see their rankings change:
I said to expect those (roughly monthly) updates to become more of a daily thing. That data refresh became more frequent (roughly daily instead of every 3-4 weeks or so) well over a month ago

There’s a post up on the Google webmaster blog that discusses a change to reduce the impact of Googlebombs. If you’ve never heard of a “Googlebomb,” Danny gives some in-depth Googlebomb background and context over at Search Engine Land.
Special thanks to Ryan and Kendra for putting in a little 20% time on Googlebombs.

I realized that I didn’t mention that Google Image Search got a makeover. The focus is on the thumbnails, but as you mouse over an image, you get more info. It looks like this:

If you haven’t taken image search for a spin in a while, now is a good time.
In other news, the new version of Google Groups has left beta status

I’m going to SES London 2007. I’ll be hanging at the conference (which runs Tuesday February 13th to Thursday February 15th), and I’ll do a Keynote Conversation with Chris Sherman that Wednesday.
If you’re at the conference, please come up and say hello!

I was reading Loren’s write up on a new link selling service from V7N. He points out an interesting claim from the company, which says

Contextual Links @ V7N are undetectable to search engines. Whether it be by human or algorithmic filtering, our links are impossible to detect

Okay, I’ve caught up on all but five feeds now. 90 posts on Search Engine Land in a week? Danny and friends, you’re killing me here. Two of my favorite posts that I’ve seen so far show that Google is listening to feedback:
- Jeremy Zawodny complained that his Gmail spam filter wasn’t working well

A recent post on the CIO blog got my attention:

Some website operators are complaining that Google is flagging their sites as containing malicious software when they believe their sites are harmless. ….
“We have no bad software or installs or anything that would indicate a need to ban people from viewing our site,” wrote Matt Blatchley, who works for the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Service Center, in a posting on Friday to Google Groups.

MattB, please double-check urls such as
http://sss.green bush.org/gbiss/Pricing.html
http://sss.green bush.org/gbiss/Time.html
(I split the urls to prevent accidental clicking

Okay, it’s been a while since my last infrastructure status report, so I’ll briefly cover the things that I know are going on. The executive summary is that things are relatively quiet.
The quarterly-ish PageRank export is underway. As always, don’t expect traffic or rankings to dramatically change, because these PageRank values are already incorporated into our scoring

One of the things I love about Google Reader is that they listen to feedback. But sometimes you gotta leave feedback behind and just work on fun stuff. Mihai Parparita recently posted about the new Google Reader Trends page.
Here’s what mine looks like:

That’s right, I’ve read 2000+ blog posts from 80+ feeds in the last 30 days

I’ve got a meeting at noon to talk about potential bugs in search syntax or search results, so I’m re-opening this search bug report thread for a few hours. I’ll quote the original post to mention what I’m looking for:

Well, I thought it might be a good time to collect potential bug reports (not general comments, not questions, and not spam reports)

[Note: I wrote this about five days ago, and I’m just now getting around to posting it.]
Okay, all the other search bloggers are sharing stats, so here goes. All this comes courtesy of Google Analytics. If you want to sign up and analyze your website visitors with around zero work, I highly recommend it

Hi, in case you haven’t been following along at home, I’ll give you the short catch-up info first. Blake Ross wrote a post criticizing some tips that Google recently tried. I agreed that I didn’t like the tips, primarily because the targeting was too poor (even substrings would trigger the tips)

I wanted to talk about Blake Ross’ post entitled “Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose”. I agree with much of what he says. There’s a continuum to showing tips. Toward the “hawk” side of the spectrum is the notion that a company can show whatever reasonable content they want on their own web site

Someone has been trying to contact me by leaving tons of comments on my blog for the last couple days. Sussie, I’d already seen Adam emailing around a question about your site days ago, so I knew that your site was on his radar. As far as why I pruned your comments, I have a comment policy at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guidelines-for-comments-march-24-2006/
and I have to stick to it, especially this part:

I have a limited amount of time to blog, so going forward I won’t be able to answer site-specific questions or requests

A thread on WMW started Dec. 20th asking whether there was an update, so I’m taking a break from wrapping presents for an ultra-quick answer: no, there wasn’t.
To answer in more detail, let’s review the definitions. You may want to review this post or re-watch this video (session #8 from my videos)

I’m on the 2007 program committee for AIRWeb, which is the workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval that will be held May 8th 2007, in conjunction with the WWW conference up in Banff. One big change from last year is a labeled testset that people can use for their webspam research. I’ll include the call for papers:

CALL FOR PAPERS
Third International Workshop on
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web

-and-
CALL FOR CHALLENGE SUBMISSIONS
Track I of the Web Spam Challenge 2007

==================================================================
IMPORTANT DATES
15/Feb/2007 : Deadline for research articles
30/Mar/2007 : Deadline for challenge submissions
8/May/2007 : Workshop at the WWW 2007 conference in Banff, Canada
==================================================================
Contents:
1

My wife is back in town, so expect my blog post volume to plummet as I regain a life. My family is coming in for Christmas next week as well, and (I’m just guessing here) they’ll want to talk to me and visit, not just watch me type on a laptop.
My favorite post over the last couple days is from Pandia, entitled “What we want from Google this Christmas”

Andy Beal’s recent article about click fraud is notable. Not just because he talked to Shuman Ghosemajumder, a Google program manager who works on click fraud. The more notable reason is that it led to Shuman posting on his blog to clarify and offer more info:

Our top priority is to protect advertisers, so that means not disclosing any proprietary methods which would allow click fraud perpetrators to reverse-engineer our systems

Okay, looks like I’ve got one more debunking (and fun!) blog post in me this weekend.
So many people talk all the time about SEO. Is it better to use hyphens or underscores? Is it better to separate meta tags with commas or spaces? Is it worth doing the table trick? Can the Google Toolbar cause pages to be indexed? Many of these questions work out well if you just experiment with them

Okay, that was quite a few heavy posts there. Let’s do something fun now. Loren Baker has opened nominations for the 2006 Search Blogs Awards. Here’s the votes I threw in:

* Best Search Engine Corporate Blog (owned by the search engines)
Tough one. Google Reader Blog for me.
* Best Contextual Advertising Blog
Gotta be Jensense.
* Best Search Engine Community Blog
I’m going to go with SEOmoz for this year

Presumably you saw my post about talkorigins.org, a site that was recently hacked so that the front page had spammy porn text and links. Google temporarily removed talkorigins.org from our index, but we emailed talkorigins.org to alert them that they had been hacked. We also made it possible for talkorigins.org to confirm the penalty in our Webmaster console tools

This will interest webmasters and local businesses. If someone searches for your business and we have good confidence that we know your business address, we’ll include an expandable “Plus Box” in your search result listing. If a user clicks to expand the Plus Box, they’ll see something like this:

I really like this feature because it’s useful but you don’t have to remember to go to a completely different place to look up local info

Make sure you read my previous post about this story first. Jim Hedger admits that his click-fraud story isn’t really about terrorism. In his post on Threadwatch, he said:

The story is really only tangentally [sic] about nefarious use of ad-sense or ysm dollars. The story is about advertiser alegations [sic] of massive click fraud

There’s been some claims about “Google funding pro-terrorist groups.” Normally with a story as controversial as this, I’d expect the allegation to get written up quite a bit. But that didn’t happen. Let’s dissect the spread of this story a little bit.
The first phase of the story was fascinating because other than Loren Baker, pretty much the only write-ups the first night were from WebmasterRadio (WMR) hosts:
- Shoemoney wrote a short post entitled “Accusations Of Google Funding Terrorism.” Shoemoney hosts a WMR show called Net Income.
- Greg Boser wrote a post called “Google Funding Terrorism?”

If you don’t care about pixel tracking in Google Checkout, stop reading. Otherwise, go read this post on the Google Checkout blog. The documentation on pixel tracking in Google Checkout also just went live.
People started pinging Google about this earlier this week, so I’m glad that this feature is now available

Okay, somebody claimed that Google is in bed with the CIA. I thought about debunking this one via haiku, but the 5-7-5 verse syllable structure was really constraining. Even tanka, which goes with 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables on each line was too limiting. Dax says that I should debunk using rap, but I lack the hipness, Dax-dawg

Suppose you have a friend Isaac. Isaac makes the statement: “No one will ever be able to beat me at Dance Dance Revolution, no matter how hard they try.” What would it take to prove that statement false? It would take a counterexample. If you see anyone beat Isaac at Dance Dance Revolution, you know the statement is false

It’s late, but I wanted to point out this interview with Anurag Acharya. Anurag is one those unsung heroes that made a huge difference in the early days of Google. After that, he took a break to do something that he loved, and that was Google Scholar.
Also mad props to Avichal Garg, a product manager at Google who was recently named one of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs

Last night was a Slashdot post. Right now a Digg post is hitting me hard. Of course that would happen right after I do a separate post with a bunch of images.
I’ve yanked my logo image and the post with multiple images to batten down the hatches. Let’s hope my industrial-strength hosting on pair.com holds up with the images gone..
Added: Oh, hello Techmeme, come on in and sit down. After Digg and Slashdot are done slagging the site, you’re welcome to pummel it too.

Tara takes a new search engine out for a test drive. She does the search [wii] on zoo.com, the new kid-friendly search engine from InfoSpace. Check out the results:

Did you spot the sponsored link? Look at result #5. See the “Sponsored by: www.walmart.com/”? That’s right, result #5 in the search results is an ad

If you’ve never read my blog before, welcome. I’m the head of the webspam team at Google. And I have a blog for days just like this.
Okay, first off you should go read this post. It’s entitled “Me Against Google” and the author is unhappy that talkorigins.org was nowhere to be found in Google for the last 5-6 days

I won’t be at SES Chicago this coming week (brrr it will be cold, so bundle up). But many, many other Googlers will be there. On Monday, there’s a Google-sponsored session that will cover multiple products:
Drive traffic to your site with Google
Looking for ways to improve traffic to your site? Perhaps you’re interested in knowing what the top drivers are to your site? Or how Google sees your site? Maybe you’re looking for ways to add additional content or functionality to your site? If these sound like questions you’ve asked, come learn what Google has to offer

Destory Malware gives a State of the Splogosphere update:
In the six months since my last piece, the percentage of blogs that are splogs is on the decline and major blogging platforms (Blogspot) have done a great job of cleaning up their act. A big congratulations go to Technorati and Google blog search, which has considerably improved their splog detection.
Early splogosphere growth occurred on hosted blogging platforms, like Blogspot

Google has decided to shut down Google Answers. In my personal opinion, this was the right call. Products from years ago often need overhauls and rewrites or else the underlying code grows stagnant, and the Answers code launched in 2002. And even if a product runs with very little resources, it’s still a tiny bit of a distraction

A couple months ago Google gave a way to do Googlebot verification. Basically, it involves two steps: a reverse DNS lookup followed by a forward DNS lookup. Now Microsoft has implemented the same DNS policies, so you can use the same method to verify MSNBot.
Good for them. Who will be next to implement this open method to authenticate search engine bots: Yahoo!, Ask, or Exalead? Place your bets.

I woke up early on Thursday and was at the convention center by 8am to check on my backpack and laptop. It was still tucked away under a table, untouched. Whew! I hunkered down in the speaker room and started working on my slides. (I hate seeing the same presentations over and over again at conferences, so I always try to make a new presentation for each show.)
By 9am, I was still really behind, so I decided to skip Danny’s keynote and kept chugging

Once I got to Vegas, I headed to my hotel. I really like the Renaissance Hotel (I don’t gamble, so I like that the Renaissance doesn’t have any gambling), and it’s close to the convention center, but they were sold out, so I got a room at New York New York. After dropping off my bags, I headed to the convention center.
I have to say, it was awesome to see so many webmasters in one place

One thing I like to do for the Super Session talk is discuss what’s new since the last conference (in this case, Pubcon Boston was in April, I think). I normally spend an hour making a list of things Google has released or updated. Lazyweb, why don’t you help me? I know my top 2-3 favorite things, but what are yours? What changes, features or products has Google rolled out in 2006 that you enjoyed?

Someone asked about this, so here’s a quick one. It’s fine to run your website off your home DSL, as long as you configure your webserver correctly. This is an extension of the “virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP doesn’t matter” idea. As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn’t really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds.

Someone recently suggested that a link sent to a Gmail account equals one link on one page. Also not true in any way.

I hear that there was recently a discussion on a NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) email list about virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP addresses. They were commenting on the misconception that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRanks of those sites

I was feeling grumpy, so I wrote a snarky review of Compete. Question: should I post it? Sometimes it’s fun to let loose with a rant. On the other hand, when I listen to the SearchCast lately, I wish Danny would rant less. Sometimes it seems like Danny is one of the few people in the search industry that stays above ranting, and you hate to lose that, you know?
Anyway, I’ll let the comments decide whether to post the write-up on Compete.
Update: the vote is overwhelmingly to post