Cre8tive Flow

I would like to apologize for the delay in the coming out with the Search Engine Roundtable review for the last 15 days in May. It has been a real busy month, but late is better then never. Here is the Roundtable review for May 15th through the 31st.

Lets start with Gmail related discussion, where a funny but sophisticated cartoon was draw up to illustrate the desire people have to get a Gmail invite. In fact, people were able to lookup gmail usernames and then go to the gmail swap portal to try to get their desired gmail account. Google has been busy, on the 31st they had the long awaited backlink update, Google’s AdWords department launched the AdWords Jumpstart program, and they took the time to block this nifty site named Proogle.

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 at the Search Engine Roundtable from May 1st 2004 until today the 12th.

This past week was all about the anticipated Google IPO, which we are still waiting to happen. But I tried not to discuss the financial aspects of Google and the industry, not that I am not following it. A major event occurring with Google is something known as the Sandbox Effect where new sites seem to be put on a hold before ranking well for any keyword combination. There was a bit of speculation on why this is happening, some of which is in the topic of purchasing expired domain names but that theory does not seem to be consistent with the reports at the forums. Other speculation was that these sites were seeded with Ghost PageRank, but I do not believe that to be true either. Theories are springing up daily, one thing that seems to be fairly consistent is that this hold period lasts for about 90 days.

I would first like to apologize for missing last week’s entry, I won’t make any excuses but my dog ate my notes. Hmm…Wasn’t funny.

Soon after the last update here on April 5th, Google had its own update on April 7th, which was a bit of a surprise for many. In fact, the day after, I reported on how Google can’t even control its own search engine - now that is a real shocker. Yahoo! went soul searching only to find itself as Life Engine, something which kind of scares me. That not all that scares me, ISPs began blocking GMail emails, which drummed up a lot more controversy between O’Reilly and Yahoo!, plus the US government even joined in.

The week of April 1st, or better known as April Fools Day, has put some smiles on the faces of some of the SEM enthusiasts. Rumors spread that MSN was to buy Google, but according to Andy Beal time was running out. The launch of GMail - Google’s Email Service was thought of to be a April Fool’s hoax, but we soon found out that the email service was real, it was the privacy concerns that was a laughing matter.

As part of my weekly recap of the SEM forum coverage that takes place over at the Search Engine Roundtable, I will try to summarize, in blog format, the SEM weekly events as discussed over at the roundtable in a more detailed fashion. (long sentence…good thing this is a blog).

This week at Search Engine Roundtable we covered a wide range of SEO/SEM topics. Most recently, AltaVista & AllTheWeb bid farewell to Add URL whereas, Microsoft announces it will launch its MSN search service in July. Yahoo in its attempt to catch up to Google’s popularity, has released a Beta Yahoo Toolbar with WebRank, and Google in its attempt to catch up with Yahoo’s yellow page success releases local results in main stream results.

When Peabody asked me if I would like to post a weekly entry at this blog, I was both honored and touched. Peabody, if you already do not know, is known to be one of the legendary Internet authorities of our times. So you can imagine, how excited I was to be given the opportunity to post at this blog.