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Yet another new venture and a new way to make money online, it’s called Google Business Referral Representative. Becoming Google business referral representative is easy, it requires a signup…and some time to spend to walk from a business office to a business office in the local area where you leave, ask the business holders if they would like to be submit their business name in the Google Maps, get some details such as the location of the business offices, payments that are accepted and take some photos of the business that will appear in the Google Maps.

The payout for each submitted business to the Google business center is up to $10. The good is that only in the street where you leave you can easily find 10 business holders, collecting all their informations would take you one or two hours and submitting them to the Google Business Center another hour at most, and there is $100 for you (well not exactly $100, since Google states that you will be paid UP TO $10 per business that will be submitted AND approved). Here is a quote from the Google business referral representative faq

You can earn up to $10 for each approved, verified referral you submit. This includes $2 when a business referral is approved by Google; and $8 when an approved business verifies that the information you submitted is accurate. Referrals are approved by Google based on the completeness and quality of data supplied by representatives. Businesses verify their information either by sending us a response postcard or verifying their information online.

As long as your earnings total at least $25 a month, you’ll receive a monthly check

For all required informations you might be interested to know visit the Google’s business referral representative faqs or visit the Local Business Referrals page.

It looks like this is available only in the USA for the moment, but do not hesitate to contact Local Business Referrals support staff to know more if you can do this even in your country.

Social Media was undoubtedly one of biggest talking points of 2007. Search Engine Optimisation professionals and businesses found many interesting ways to leverage traffic levels and online brand awareness through online social media sites. These sites were found to be a great way of beginning conversations with potential customers and clients but do they in fact have a negative effect upon businesses?

Social Networking can in fact have a negative effect on businesses if not used in the right way or context. One of the biggest problems with social networking is that it takes up a lot of time. Businesses have to update their profiles regularly so that visitors have fresh content to look at. If businesses have too many profiles then they could well spend large portions of their day monitoring these sites. This will have a big effect upon their productivity levels.

Businesses may also find that the time they have invested in social networking may have been wasted as they have not done enough research and planning. Some businesses just create numerous profiles and hope for the best. This is a waste of time. Think about your levels of traffic and brand awareness before and after you implemented your social networking profiles. Have you made any significant gains? To get the most out of social networking it is worthwhile creating a plan with set goals and objectives.

This plan should look at the social networks you are going to use and what message you are trying to promote. Some social networks will cater better to you and your potential customers needs. Think about the conversations you are trying to initiate with your customers. Too many conversations could confuse them and blur the message that you are trying to get across.

Although social networking can have a negative effect on businesses it is clear that if it is done right that it can be extremely beneficial. Many experiments show that content can be ranked very quickly and highly in Google as a result of social networking. Here at Just Search we suggest to our clients that they use social media plug-ins in there blogs and that they should have a clear plan before they create any profiles.

And the thread got flooded, new threads, new reports, new happy faces…and more worried ones and enthusiast to know whats the new Page Rank of their website going to be.

Thats right, more and more people are reporting that the first PageRank Update of 2008 is close to arrive, and several Google datacenter’s are updating PR for several pages, and as always the first signs are on the new websites that are passing from PR N/A to PR something, and as always the established sites that already do have PageRank are going to be the last to update.

Looks like soon we will have a new PageRank update exported and it is going to be the first of 2008 this January, even tho there was a big discussion about PageRank Yay or Nay.

Custom 404 pages are often overlooked by webmasters and search engine optimisation professionals but they can play a small part in your seo and usability efforts. For those of you who are unsure what a 404 page is, it is an error page that you are given when a web server can’t find a particular page. A standard 404 page is usually made up of a white background with the words not found in bold black text at the top of screen.

There are several reasons as to why a 404 error page would appear on your screen. The most common one is misspelt url’s. It is very easy to misspell a url especially if it is a long and complicated one. Other reasons include broken links and bad redirects. The reason is not really that important to a user but the options available to them afterwards is. Creating a custom 404 page can lead potential visitors to certain places on your website. None customised 404 pages can put potential visitors off all together as they may feel intimidated by the error message they are presented with.

When creating the custom 404 page there are several things to consider. The biggest question is where do you want the visitor to go next? It maybe worth looking at (if you use it) your Google Analytics stats to see which pages are performing best and then put links to them on the 404 page. You only want to put a few links on there as you don’t want to overload the user with too much information.

Another important factor is styling. It is a good idea to use a similar styling to the one you use for your website. So you could include the logo and same colour scheme on your custom 404 page. For navigation purposes you could also add a link to your sitemap and some styled links.

The final point I want to make is the error message itself. The wording of the error message is important because you want to let the users know that something is wrong but in a way that does not intimidate them. If you do a quick search in Google you will be able to find many examples of custom error messages. You just want to make the message as friendly as possible; many sites use the word oops.

Before you can begin building your custom 404 page you need to consider what type of web server you are using. The methods for building a custom 404 page on an IIS Server and Apache Server are completely different. Many hosting companies can help you with custom 404 pages as they have pre built ones or have them enabled on their servers. The internet is also full of how to guides. I found a really good guide on the Your Html Source website. Why not give it a try and see what a difference it makes to your website.

It has been awhile now since i could not check for backlinks through MSN search engine. It is well known that MSN search engine is the most reliable engine for displaying correct backlinks for a determinate web site.

Recently (even two weeks or so) i was trying to check backlinks for some of my sites and i was getting a blank white page (which was kinda frustrating actually, the most frustrating blank page i have ever seen). Since now, i had no clue what was going on, even tho i thought they might have disabled these advanced query syntax for their search engine. MSN has practically disabled the queries for “link:” “linkdomain:” and “inuri:”.

These functionality in fact have been abused by many automated program’s for mass usage data mining.

They were sarcastic enough and had their title on the blog set to “We are flattered, but…” stop abusing our services they mean…

MSN search engine also announced that they are working hardly to bring this feature back alive as soon as possible. Then they continued

We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.

Here is their announce on MSN’s blog

Many search engine optimisation specialists will no doubt have gone through this - a client’s website will suddenly have a huge spike in traffic and then it will fall right back down again, and the client wants to know why. This can be particularly noticeable for many websites at this time of year right after Christmas.

That last statement should give most of you a clue as to the first cause of search volume fluctuations - the time of year. Many businesses have seasonal demand in some way - an online golf shop will likely see an increase in traffic as we go into the spring and summer months, as the weather picks up and people are looking to maybe get a few rounds of golf in before the traditional two-week British summer is over. While another ecommerce website selling children’s toys might find the opposite - a huge increase in traffic just before Christmas as people look for all their Christmas shopping online, and a relatively quieter time through the rest of the year.

Another cause for these kind of fluctuations is current news events. Fluctuations in search volume caused by what’s going on in the news is much more noticeable, as it’s normally only short term and can be quite extreme. For example, Marketing Pilgrim how a client saw a sudden boost in traffic to their site for the term “surviving a recession”, a term they didn’t even target. It turns out that on the same day, George W. Bush had announced a “stimulus package to help us all in surviving a recession”, the term for which the client had mentioned in a year-old blog post.

If you’ve ever come across an unexplained short term boost in traffic for a particular keyphrase, it might be worth trying out the Google Trends application. Simply type in a keyword and it will show you relative search volumes for the past couple of years, mapped against any relevant news stories in the same timeframe.

It is possible to take take advantage of these short boosts - working on the layout and content, and offering options to subscribe to various parts of the site might just help some of those new visitors become repeat visitors.

When you are optimising a website you should always be looking for opportunities to get more traffic to your website. One such possibility could be Google News. Google news is a search facility of Googles that allows people to….. Search news! News appears on Google news similar to how your pages appear in the google search index. Once you have been accepted as a news source by google then their spider will come and index your news articles. The news articles on Google news are of a high standard, because of this there are strict guidelines you must follow to even apply to be considered as a news source.

In order for the Google crawler to correctly gather articles, each page that displays an article’s full text needs to have a unique URL that does not change. Google cannot include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL.
The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.
Keep in mind that Google cannot include sites for which the URL of the main page includes a date. URLs with dates in them often change on a daily or weekly basis. This prevents Google from crawling the site for new content, as Google is unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.
Google’s automated crawler is currently best able to crawl regular HTML links. Google is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript.
As you can see, a lot of sites would need to be modified to be able to qualify though if you think your news articles are worthy then you should apply to be crawlled by the google news spider. From a search engine optimisation point of view putting your sites content on google news could be a great source of traffic and links for your site. Another bonus of getting included in google news is reputation and image. If people get to your site trough google news then it gives an extreamily profesional image to your company.

It has been few days since Google Analytics presented a new version, where you could compare one site with another and see which one performs better. The fact is that, since the new Google Analytics version was presented the number of pageviews in Google AdSense and with Kontera do not match for ALL of my sites. For some sites it doesn’t even report a single visitor while AdSense reports pageviews.

I remember when they introduced the previous version they had some problems with the analytics, and it took almost a week to get it fixed and work fluently. Now again, they introduce a new version of analytics and again reports don’t really match. Some of the new features that can be seen in the new analytics version.

* Compare visits for two different months
* Compare pageviews for two different months
* Compare bounce rate for two different months
* Compare search engine organic traffic for two different months

In simple words, the new analytics gives you more informations about your site as how you performed last month and this month, you can see how slowly your website is improving in terms of traffic, the time visitors spend your site, bounce rate, new visits and the sweet part, SEO, it gives you a comparison stats of your organic traffic, the past month which keyword how much traffic drove to your site and current month how much traffic is driving to your site. All these stats that can REALLY help you analyze your site better and improve there where it lacks, a pitty tho that it seems like it still needs some improvements.

Do your stats with Analytics pageviews VS AdSense pageviews match?

What are the important factors for high ranking websites?

A well optimized website can achieve high rank in search engine by

Fast Uploading WebSites – Frequent use of images in a web page will result in greater loading time. Besides, spiders do not like graphic images because it cannot read graphic images. An alternate text called “Alt Tag” must be added on the images.
Content Rich Websites – Search engines prefers websites text based rich in content. Spider crawling to your website must find valuable and informative text with keywords relevant to the content of the web page. Web crawlers do not like overstuffing of keywords. It checks for keywords density in the web page.
Easy Navigation – The websites must be user-friendly by adding easy navigation links. A website with good navigation will help the internet user to navigate through web pages easily. The links must not confuse the users. Broken links or dead links must be avoided.
Updating Regularly – The websites must be updated frequently by adding informative content for the users.
Link Popularity – As discussed above, link popularity is one of the factors for page ranking. Search engines check for both quantity and quality of links exchanged.
Gaining high rank in a search engine by inappropriate methods is called spamming. Search engines punish a website that tries to trick its algorithm. The websites trying to abuse the rules set by the search engines are punished by ranking them lower or removing them from the index list forever.

Hidden text or link is the text made on which URL or link is given and made invisible visually by applying same color as background
Irrelevant content due to words repeated frequently and misleading.
Cloaked Page
Doorway pages
Duplication of complete site or web pages
Deceptive redirection of the page other pages or sites.
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What benefit will SEO bring to your website?

By making use search engine technology, your website can be ranked in top search results of relevant keywords. You will get benefit of targeted customers visiting your website. This will help you building up your company image and get you many business opportunities.

On late November 2007 Google AdSense made a drastic change decreasing the AdSense Click Zone on the publisher textual ads. On that change I was confident that it won’t have a big impact on the CTR as my believe was based on the fact that when users want to click somewhere they tend to hover the mouse on parts of text that distinguish from the rest of the content.

It was hard to track this on my websites as they don’t receive a HEAP of clicks, so a click less today and a click more tomorrow wasn’t actually giving me a picture of what was going on (actually, the past month, December 2007 was one of my best months with Google AdSense).

After 2 months you were bombed with this latest information with changes Google AdSense, more specifically on the Google AdSense referrals where the decision of Google AdSense team was to cut-off a huge market share from the referrals (whole continents including Europe and Australia). It was not bugging me much this decision taken by Google even tho I decided to give them a go with FireFox and Google Toolbar on this site (now removed) but what was bugging me is to realize how come a company would decide to penalize (in some sort of way) referrals of their own company. You have heard this story lately maybe on all blogs, and since the blogsphere was flooded all over with this information I decided not to blog about this (heck, same information all over you turn your eyes over).

Last night I ended up on a really interesting information (or rather report) which kinda cleared up my view on this decision Google AdSense has taken and they are decreasing revenue for affiliates for FireFox and Google pack and as John Chow says

We understand that these changes may decrease revenue for some of you? Doh! Google did add one piece of good news. They’ve decided to allow AdSense referrals from Japan and Latin America. Affiliates in Europe and the UK are still out of luck.

Aside the fact that UK is in Europe John is right, they have drastically decreased their market share. Later on reading john’s post I found out a really useful information that does give better picture on whats going on with Google adsense and referrals pay.

Markus Frind CEO of PlentyOfFish.com on January 4th reported that after the Google AdSense ClickZone modification the CTR (Click Through Rate) on plenty of fish has decreased for 60% and he feels constricted to advice advertisers how to target ads on plentyofish.com to improve the referral traffic. Those numbers (60 percent) are huge even for a site that gets 100 clicks a day, but to give you a better picture PlentyOfFish.com is a free dating website that brings a yearly income of 6-7 zeros and the only monetization method is being used is Google AdSense, so the lost in income is quiet huge.

When companies lose money they have to amortize their loss in one or another way, but before heading forward to amortizing a company needs to give a close-up look at what causes the loss and if it can recovered if the cause is something internal. When it can’t be recovered the next move is to fire 2000 employers just as Yahoo Inc is doing, or amortize the loss by dropping down the referral payouts just as Google AdSense is doing (rather than replacing the click zone to the old status). Of course this is a more deep issue than what I have described it here, I believe Google has great personal and has valuated most of the moves they can and cannot dare to do, but some times companies become so stubborn, their word is so strong, that even when they are wrong they tend not to admit that and find a different solution rather than going back to their steps.

The fact stands that something is going on, the market is having a weird bounce and the GOOG stocks are crawling and around at around $550 USD now, while just two weeks ago there were touching the $700 USD (a nice thread at DigitalPoint on GOOG stocks). And on this note I have to quote once again the evil mogul and his favorite make money online recommendation

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

even if in question is a strong company like Google. Try to spread your online income streams on different sources (including, affiliates, PPC ads, private ad sales etc.).

With all the latest pieces of technology these days, its no wonder that search engines are taking their slice of the pie. Indeed, search engines like Google and Yahoo! are now becoming more creative and interesting with new technology that they’ve decided to put to use after several years. But just when the general public becomes comfortable with one of Google’s tools or a feature of Yahoo! that they like, the search engines change on us. Certainly, though, some things for search engines have improved over the past several months, such as the advent of Google Live Maps that brings the streets of certain cities straight to your computer to view in real, live time. This technology, however, is only available for viewing certain cities for now, but could have major implications for law enforcement and safety if it is continued to be refined and improved.

But there are also some other things that are going on inside some of the major search engines that are ready to improve the way that the general consumer population performs search queries. For example, Yahoo has just announced a major tool that they will get underway for searchers of all types. Their new piece of technology that they have acquired from AltaVista called Prisma is being used to create the Yahoo search bar feature called Search Assist. Even though Yahoo search engine already has been rivaling Google search engine with it’s pre-search term help, Search Assist will provide users with the chance to look through suggested search topics and phrases that are provided by the Yahoo search engine.

Even though Yahoo search engine has already added their Search Suggest feature that includes refined search terms and suggestions for searches that include the word the user searched for, Search Assist will be totally different. For example, a search for origami might turn up a phrase like “paper folding” or something else that’s related to origami, yet does not include the same keyword. We’ll see, however, if Search Assist ends up being a popular search help or if it simply gets in the way of the average user.

Another announcement about search engines comes from the online dictionary-encyclopedia website, Wikipedia. The owner, Jimmy Wales, has announced that Wikipedia will bring out a search bar for the internet that is aimed to rival some of the major search engines on the World Wide Web, including Google search engine and MSN search engine. The open search engine will move more people towards searching with Wikia. Since this is going to be the first time that Wikia has tried a search feature for internet users, it will be using human editors so that search terms will be understandable and readable. On Wikipedia’s website there is a page that is strictly devoted to this idea of the Wikia search features. The four ideas that this search function will be based on are transparency, community, quality, and privacy.

It seems as though things are really starting to heat up with Yahoo search engine providing more search help for users and Wikia announcing that they will include an internet open-source search bar for internet users. With all of these events happening it seems that other major search engines, like Google search engine and MSN search engine, will have to step up other users’ expectations. But for now we’ll just wait and see how popular these two search engine ideas will really be!

What is Search Engine Optimization or (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is designing, developing, and optimizing a website to improve its rank in search engines. A good optimized website can be easily found by the search engines. Typically, the internet users click through websites that come in top results of search engines. There is less possibilities for your website to be visited if it is in ranked low by web crawlers. The search engine optimization not only predominantly brings your website to best search result positions, but also helps in bringing the targeted traffic to your website.

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What are search engines?

Search engines refer to the software programmed to help the internet users by searching and listing out relevant database. When the user enters a keyword in the search engine, it gives a list of websites that have keywords in their web pages.

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How do Search Engines work?

Search engines have several components, including web spider, indexing, and relevancy algorithm. The function of web spider is, a component of search engine, collecting the list of web page URLs, storing them, and indexing the keywords. The index stores the database, updates when there are changes in websites, and then retrieves the websites when keyword is entered by users.

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What are meta tags?

Meta tags are hidden tags in web pages, which can be interpreted by the search engine robots but cannot be seen by website user. These HTML tags contain keyword tag, title tag, description tag, and alt tag. These meta tags are used to describe information of the web page to the search engine robots. This helps the search engine to catalog the websites and focus on the relevant search. Sometimes, some of the words are misspelled by the users. By adding these misspelled keywords in the web page, the website can reach the user. The search engine displays the title tag and short summary of the result web page.

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History of Search Engine Optimization

In mid 1990s, search engines began listing the websites which were submitted by the webmasters. The search engines would run the spiders and collects data. These websites were then categorized according to the information in the websites. The webmasters realizing the significance of these search engines started optimizing the websites and the terminology search engine optimization was born.

It was believed that meta tags influenced the position of website and brought focused traffic to the relevant web pages. Some web master started abusing meta tags by adding too many meta tags and writing irrelevant keywords. This illegitimate use of meta tags made the website to rank in search that was not related with their business. In early 2000s, the search engine started following stricter and complex method of ranking the websites. Websites having inappropriate keywords or over use of keywords were pulled down from the ranking.

The Google search engine started the concept of PageRank. The PageRank algorithm was based on the link popularity. The incoming links to a website is interpreted as a vote. Webmasters started exchanging links with other websites. Google found that some of the websites bought and sold links to other websites that were not useful to the internet user visiting their website. This made Google to follow more complex process of PageRank to list the optimized websites.

Google started keeping secret algorithm in ranking the websites. Google updates its index of websites which causes frequent shifts in page ranking and this came to be known as Google dance.

Well lets clear the air slightly on why you should add content to your website and why this is good for Search engine optimisation. It’s best explained by discussing the different parts of SEO:

On Page Work:
Firstly is the site Search engine friendly i.e. can spiders get through the site and pick up information. Secondly is there information on the site for the spiders to pick up.

Off Page Work
This is the creation of an online linking portfolio or community, this is what will help get the really competitive keywords
and gain high positions within a Search Engine.

OK so if links will dictate the majority of the position why add content? Firstly lets say that we have two sites with basically the same on page work and the same links pointing to them (Just Imagine of course there is a lot more factors) well the site which is updated more regularly will rank higher as Google will place more relevancy on this site than the stagnant site.

The other advantage of content is the abundance of long tail keywords that you can gain visitors from, but I’m talking a lot of traffic think about it you may get 10,000 visitors a month coming through your main keywords but if you add up all your long tail keywords your probably getting a further 20,000 visitors from that alone.

So ways of adding content to your site are as follows;

Add an Article Directory
News Section
Forums
Blogs
Frequently Asked Questions
So if you can add a page everyday of information each year that 365 extra pages for people to find in the search engines and it shows Google that your site is refreshed daily. Of course their are tactics to gain the best effect but I’ll talk about this another day.

It was so well scened that honestly I almost believed at what Google was saying and not what the big smart guys were telling us about Google and penalization. The big G first told us not to sell or buy links and the scene behind that (as they told us) was not to trick Google’s algorithm.

When that news came out on Matt Cutts on how to report paid links some of the big guys like Aaron Wall the author of SEO Book blogged about and did actually saw what was behind the scene why all this penalization talk.

I could honestly not believe that Google was hitting our pocket and was announcing War to all those webmasters that do make profits online by selling text links on their high PR site. I was convinced that the War was announced to those that trick their algorithm, and with tricking the algorithm I intend building backlinks in not a natural way which includes online contests where users get award prices in goods, money or books but to participate in such contests there are some rules like

* Linking to the contest page
* Commenting to the contest page
* Subscribing to their RSS

Asking for webmasters to link to your contest page and homepage is not what I would call natural linking as Google would like us to gain some links. Natural linking is that link that a webmaster you do not know has read your post, liked it and wants to share it with his readers and links to the post but you don’t ask him to do so. That is what I would call natural linking, or at least thats what Google has taught us what they call a natural link. But asking for backlinks to participate in a contest is not tricking the algorithm no?

Commenting on the contest page, bloggers love this and tend to have as much comments as possible for couple reasons. If you have a google sitemap plugin installed, each time you receive a new comment on a post of yours the blog will automatically ping the Google spider and inform that the page they previously crawled has been updated and there is a new content that needs to be crawled. The second reason why us bloggers love comments is because the get free content that increases the probabilities to be found on search engines as comments are considered content. But that is not tricking the algorithm no?

Subscribe to RSS, i am okey with this as this doesn’t have nothing to do with search engines but it does have to with other marketing aspects.
Why I don’t Believe in Google anymore

Lets rewind our memory and take a look at what has happened just few months ago. Google penalized directories and I was fine with that because most of the directories were useful site that were filling the SERPs with useless information. If you performed a search query in Google a month ago for the term “web hosting” all you would be able to find were web hosting review directories which had done a greatsearch engine optimization and were ranking very well (great SEO because most of them require linking back to them if you wanted to be submitted or paying for listing). Oh well, paying for listing..so web hosting directories had the chance to advertise in a web directory that was ranking better than them in the SERPs by paying a one year or one time flat price or if they wanted to be on the featured sites list they had to pay just a small monthly fee, unlike if they had to advertise their business through Google AdWords where they had to spend most probably a lot of money. Could this be a reason why they were hit? Most probably, but web directories like Best of The Web (apart the fact that they are quality web directories) that don’t have sidewide features sites links (instead they have category sponsorship) were not affected by this penalization. While V7N Directory got a drop in PageRank since they do have a features sites on the sidebar (a pitty tho, wonder how John Scott did not thought about this before, he is doing pretty well with listings only).

Than Google penalized the link seller, the best case I could take for this is John Chow the dot com mogul. Penalizations on John Chow went heavy, first he got penalized on SERPs and he was not only no longer ranking on the first page for the termmake money online but he wasn’t ranking nowhere in the first 3 pages even for his own name.

I bet you did saw what these type of sites (the recent pagerank horned folks, the directory owners and the link sellers) have in common, in case you didn’t it is Money. Thats right, all of these folks have web sites with high traffic and audience where one could advertise for cheaper than with AdWords and most probably receive the same benefits in traffic and conversion.
What made me blog about this

The main reason why I am blogging about this are the Google lies since the very beginning and because I was so blind to trust them. The latest case of ProBlogger which was pagerank horned as well and now has gained back its current PR6 even tho (for me) they were tricking the all so mighty Google’s algorithm with the contests (such contests as many other webmasters were running lately to gain some link love and traffic).

So it is not at all about the algorithm or what so ever, they hit our pocket because that way we can’t hit their golden pocket (AdWords). It all makes sense to me now, where I come from we say “If you hit my pocket I will hit your brain“, a pitty tho that I am the small guy and he is the Big G (it is wise not to fight with bigger guys, unless you have something strong on your hands).

I have a post that is sitting in the draft for a long time already which was supposed to be the follow up of the building your website thinking seo. While i was sitting next to the pool and reading a book about tips and tricks on Google search engine i thought about the post i have in draft…and i was kinda confused, but not only with what i was doing but also with what everyone else is doing or at least is trying to do.

We all speak about SEO and how SEO Optimization is done and the benefits of SEO for our business, but we have not yet spoken about the most important thing (my personal opinion). When we talk about SEO we mainly talk about SEO optimization for Google search engine, same as when we use the term Google it within a phrase (ex. Just Google it and you will find the results) we mean just perform a search query in a search engine and you will find the informations you need. The term Google is in every webmasters head, in every SEO experts head, but has anyone thought about how important is to understand how Google works before you even think about search engine ranking for SEO newbies?

Every SEO blog or web site i have read speak about techniques and guides how to rank higher in the serps, but no one has actually took the time to explain the exact functionality of that technique. All the techniques you read on seo blogs or seo forums are valid and work, starting from on site seo optmization (including title tags, description metatag, keyword metatag, header title tags, internal linking etc) way to the off site seo optimization (inbound text links, using keywords in anchor text in text links, directory submission, fresh and unique content etc) but most of those techniques you don’t even understand WHY they work and how they help us ranking higher in SERPs of Google search engine.

Thats why i have decided to temporary STOP writing about SEO techniques and concentrate more to explain how Google search engine works with the hope that it will help you to better understand all SEO techniques and to give your creativity some freedom to express and use or modify those techniques in a better way. I have created a new category named Google search engine as a sub category of the search engines category, where i will be post guides and techniques on how to use Google search engine and how to perform a search query in Google search engine. Will try to limit to the search query functions mainly and hacks, but from time to time will explain some other free features that Google offers to us.

While i was on the three days trip-vocation weird things happened. As always do, every time i am not there something happens, but this is going on since i was a kid, like i would play sick not to go in school and a classmate has brought her hot friend in our class for the day, and this time i was out there enjoying the sun…and seems like Google was hacked, or better, Google search engine had a DNS issue.

Once i got back from the trip i did actually notice some complaints on webmaster forums that Google search engine was unreachable, or was down…etc, but since those were old posts and i was skeptic to believe something was wrong but instead was something temporary i never really got interested to read further what in the hell is going on.

Today i ended up in a silly thread but some how i continue reading that thread, later on the thread there was something like “Google shutting down” Google this and Google that, which i found to be sarcasm…than, i came to a post which was linking to BBC Co. Uk. about the news that Google Video is shutting down since YouTube the site owned by Google as well is making Google Video to become useless in a certain point of view. Later on the thread there was a post about Google got hacked. I thought it was just another sarcasm but i did followed the link.

Apparently, Google did had issues that day, and as some of the Google search engine staff has mentioned or let know to those that have wrote about this, it was just a DNS issue. People that would type google.com on their browser bar they would get the page of SoGoSearch (makes you roll your eyes, doesn’t it?), other would see MSN search engine.

I did a Google search for this issue and also visited Matt Cutts blog to see if he has wrote something in regard of this, nothing, while i found this interesting post on Google got hacked topic. The GigAom owner has a nice post over there that has updated it several times, it is a good read about this issue.

Was it really a DNS issue?

Google search engine and their “webmasters entertainment tool, PageRank” created more than a buzz i would say Addiction among webmasters and their sites PageRank. This “entertainment tool” it was presented as a ranking method of votes (aka backlinks) that a site receives. The tool was than transformed into a real online business where webmasters would determine (and they still do) the value and price of a outbound link they sell from their own website.

When PageRank became well established tool to determine and control the link selling & buying business Google decided that it was the right time to take it down on those webmasters which were abusing and selling PageRank. The battle than expanded into ALL link seller and buyers that were tricking Google algorithm and what would be the best example to show that they are serious on this issue? Of course, take some of the lovely green bar, PageRank, to big sites and scare out the small fishes (or rather, speak to the small fishes).

During the announcement of the battle and the first phase when Google took hard mainly on the big guys the webmasters were already discussing about a new alternative to determine price on links they can sell. The whole discussion would expand so much on “I don’t care about PageRank”, “I don’t rely on PR” and all those type of lines.

The funny thing is that, on DigitalPoint on 28th December 2008 a thread about PageRank update was started, and noone cares about Page Rank anymore, right? Well NO folks, the thread was already 3 pages long in no time, first post was made on 12:13 am last post was made on 5:09 pm. So, in less than 5 hours the thread turned into 3 pages long, total of 56 comments (until now) and viewed 709 times, even tho the thread was full of disinformation of a guy that had a fata-morgana that had his websites PageRank updated.

Even tho the replies were mainly from people asking if the guy was dreaming or other reporting that they have checked their 7-10 sites and non had Page Rank updated, this tells that webmasters still DO rely on PageRank and are monitoring their sites, building backlinks with the only intention to increase PR and even more important, prices on link sales are still well determined by PageRank. Not only this thread, but even the one on Buy, Sell & Trade forum thread you can see a good amount of threads with title “Selling links on PR-X site” etc.

I want to shout on all those that claim they DON’T care or that they don’t rely on PageRank to stop filling others with non-sense while they are privately and regularly following forum threads with titles PR update and pagerank update. PageRank for some is a business model based on which they can determine the price of textual links they are selling and for others it is just building their ego (i’d say I am falling on this second category) as it means that a good amount of websites are linking back to you. What does PageRank mean to you?

Many search engine optimisation specialists will no doubt have gone through this - a client’s website will suddenly have a huge spike in traffic and then it will fall right back down again, and the client wants to know why. This can be particularly noticeable for many websites at this time of year right after Christmas.

That last statement should give most of you a clue as to the first cause of search volume fluctuations - the time of year. Many businesses have seasonal demand in some way - an online golf shop will likely see an increase in traffic as we go into the spring and summer months, as the weather picks up and people are looking to maybe get a few rounds of golf in before the traditional two-week British summer is over. While another ecommerce website selling children’s toys might find the opposite - a huge increase in traffic just before Christmas as people look for all their Christmas shopping online, and a relatively quieter time through the rest of the year.

Another cause for these kind of fluctuations is current news events. Fluctuations in search volume caused by what’s going on in the news is much more noticeable, as it’s normally only short term and can be quite extreme. For example, Marketing Pilgrim how a client saw a sudden boost in traffic to their site for the term “surviving a recession”, a term they didn’t even target. It turns out that on the same day, George W. Bush had announced a “stimulus package to help us all in surviving a recession”, the term for which the client had mentioned in a year-old blog post.

If you’ve ever come across an unexplained short term boost in traffic for a particular keyphrase, it might be worth trying out the Google Trends application. Simply type in a keyword and it will show you relative search volumes for the past couple of years, mapped against any relevant news stories in the same timeframe.

It is possible to take take advantage of these short boosts - working on the layout and content, and offering options to subscribe to various parts of the site might just help some of those new visitors become repeat visitors.

Ok this surprised me when I saw on the forums (and it is 3 threads long), a website has gained PR10 and even the owner of the website is kinda shocked about all this as he is not aware what in the heck is happening.

One thing is for sure, thats not his real Page Rank because:

Emm, owner of the forum is shocked? - which means he is not aware of all this and how come it has happened, and means he has never gained that much link. Think about it, Google.com has PR10 while Yahoo.com has PR9
Searching for the site on Google shows 2 pages (ok let me correct myself, those are two different sites resulting as inner page or that contain the full sites URL (but they don’t))
It shows the site has nearly 5 million backlinks (and the owner is shocked remember? which means he has never built that much links, nor the site is aged long enough and been active to obtain that much backlinks from sites like adobe.com or google.nl)
So whats going on?
Well nothing, or the owner is trying a linkbait attempt (since all pagerank lookup tools show it as fake PR10) or there is a glitch in the PageRank toolbar exporter.

How could this be done?
It is simple, if you have a domain name and you have it redirected to a high PR website before and during the PageRank update, when the PR will be exported it will most likely assign PR to the “redirecting” domain, or rather it will mirror to the redirected domain the PageRank which is assigned to the real website. In simple words, yours is going to be just a fake PageRank and not a valid one.

Well if this is linkbait, than I would say this is a honest guy no? Because a dishonest guy would rush and sell PR10 links for a good price and make some quick bucks before Google does detects this and assigns the real PageRank to the site and not mirroring a different PageRank.

Google`s beaten them both separately for the best part of a decade but can the search engine giant take them on if the merger goes through? And what does it hold for Internet Marketing but more importantly, search engine optimization?

If you haven`t heard Microsoft has made a bid proposed to be worth $44.6 billion in cash and stock for number two in the search engine stakes, Yahoo. Opening up a corporate struggle to choose what exactly to keep and what to get rid of. Both companies have been behind Google with the services they offer, choosing in some cases to buy other online companies and adopt or rebrand new services into their own image. Either developed in house or acquired the three companies have essentially produced a set of services that are identical when it comes to Internet Marketing. Obviously the main ones the Natural Search team here at JS concentrate on are the search engine services.

Now when it comes to NSEO (Natural search engine optimisation) I always tend to say to my clients, “Well what we do concentrates on Google and we tend to find that Yahoo and Microsoft follow suit afterwards”. The main question for us is, is that going to change? My opinion is that I hope so. For one thing it`ll keep us a little more on our toes when it comes to the lesser two. Another thing is if they decide to merge the search services it`ll possibly give a lesser search engine the opportunity to step up and compete.

What do I think will happen if the bid is accepted? I hope that Microsoft`s Live Search gets dropped and Yahoo Search gets a rebrand. What I think will happen is that Live Search will just end up using Yahoo`s engine but will keep its front end. Much like what AOL and Virgin Media do with Google. Similarly I think Yahoo will be given a rebrand not that dissimilar to ours when we merged with GetUpdated and had to include their logo within ours.
From JS`s point of view I don`t much think that any merger will have an effect on how we do what we do. The main fundamentals of SEO, and to some extent paid advertising, are the same across the three companies.

Links
Site structure
Content
We won`t need to change how we deliver these services but maybe the quantities(links) and coverage(site structure and content) will have to be looked at.
In any way it sure looks to be both an exciting and worrying time over at Microsoft and Yahoo. Will the merge be the answer to combating Google`s might? I`m sure the same question could be proposed to Benito Mussolini regarding WWII if he were still alive that is.

What is Search Engine Optimization or (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is designing, developing, and optimizing a website to improve its rank in search engines. A good optimized website can be easily found by the search engines. Typically, the internet users click through websites that come in top results of search engines. There is less possibilities for your website to be visited if it is in ranked low by web crawlers. The search engine optimization not only predominantly brings your website to best search result positions, but also helps in bringing the targeted traffic to your website.

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What are search engines?

Search engines refer to the software programmed to help the internet users by searching and listing out relevant database. When the user enters a keyword in the search engine, it gives a list of websites that have keywords in their web pages.

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How do Search Engines work?

Search engines have several components, including web spider, indexing, and relevancy algorithm. The function of web spider is, a component of search engine, collecting the list of web page URLs, storing them, and indexing the keywords. The index stores the database, updates when there are changes in websites, and then retrieves the websites when keyword is entered by users.

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What are meta tags?

Meta tags are hidden tags in web pages, which can be interpreted by the search engine robots but cannot be seen by website user. These HTML tags contain keyword tag, title tag, description tag, and alt tag. These meta tags are used to describe information of the web page to the search engine robots. This helps the search engine to catalog the websites and focus on the relevant search. Sometimes, some of the words are misspelled by the users. By adding these misspelled keywords in the web page, the website can reach the user. The search engine displays the title tag and short summary of the result web page.

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History of Search Engine Optimization

In mid 1990s, search engines began listing the websites which were submitted by the webmasters. The search engines would run the spiders and collects data. These websites were then categorized according to the information in the websites. The webmasters realizing the significance of these search engines started optimizing the websites and the terminology search engine optimization was born.

It was believed that meta tags influenced the position of website and brought focused traffic to the relevant web pages. Some web master started abusing meta tags by adding too many meta tags and writing irrelevant keywords. This illegitimate use of meta tags made the website to rank in search that was not related with their business. In early 2000s, the search engine started following stricter and complex method of ranking the websites. Websites having inappropriate keywords or over use of keywords were pulled down from the ranking.

The Google search engine started the concept of PageRank. The PageRank algorithm was based on the link popularity. The incoming links to a website is interpreted as a vote. Webmasters started exchanging links with other websites. Google found that some of the websites bought and sold links to other websites that were not useful to the internet user visiting their website. This made Google to follow more complex process of PageRank to list the optimized websites.

Google started keeping secret algorithm in ranking the websites. Google updates its index of websites which causes frequent shifts in page ranking and this came to be known as Google dance.

When implementing search engine optimisation one thing that can harm your efforts is duplicate content, Blogs are particularly prone to having duplicate content, A lot of the time a person has a blog to keep people informed on certain topic areas. For instance the just search blog keeps people informed about search engine optimisation amongst other things. We could bring you information we find on other websites and use some content from that site and show it you here as a quote. Even if it is a quote it is still duplicate content.

One thing some blogging software provides for you is the ability to add text to your blog using the “blockquote” tag, this gives you the opportunity to add the URL of the website you have quoted the text from. This is a great feature but I feel some people could be falling fowl to using this and thinking they have referenced the original text so this is ok. Well from a human point of view you are right. You’re not passing any others content as your own. Googlebot however sees it different, all Google will see is the duplicate content.

I did a little research into the “blockquote” tag and what Googles official stance is on it. Currently they do not have any stance on it! A lot of people suggested that Google should use this tag and if they have used it correctly and cited the original site then as long as quoted text doesn’t take up too much of your page then Google should not see the quote as duplicate text but quoted text.

This is currently not the case but Google changes all the time so let’s wait and see.

Google`s beaten them both separately for the best part of a decade but can the search engine giant take them on if the merger goes through? And what does it hold for Internet Marketing but more importantly, search engine optimization?

If you haven`t heard Microsoft has made a bid proposed to be worth $44.6 billion in cash and stock for number two in the search engine stakes, Yahoo. Opening up a corporate struggle to choose what exactly to keep and what to get rid of. Both companies have been behind Google with the services they offer, choosing in some cases to buy other online companies and adopt or rebrand new services into their own image. Either developed in house or acquired the three companies have essentially produced a set of services that are identical when it comes to Internet Marketing. Obviously the main ones the Natural Search team here at JS concentrate on are the search engine services.

Now when it comes to NSEO (Natural search engine optimisation) I always tend to say to my clients, “Well what we do concentrates on Google and we tend to find that Yahoo and Microsoft follow suit afterwards”. The main question for us is, is that going to change? My opinion is that I hope so. For one thing it`ll keep us a little more on our toes when it comes to the lesser two. Another thing is if they decide to merge the search services it`ll possibly give a lesser search engine the opportunity to step up and compete.

What do I think will happen if the bid is accepted? I hope that Microsoft`s Live Search gets dropped and Yahoo Search gets a rebrand. What I think will happen is that Live Search will just end up using Yahoo`s engine but will keep its front end. Much like what AOL and Virgin Media do with Google. Similarly I think Yahoo will be given a rebrand not that dissimilar to ours when we merged with GetUpdated and had to include their logo within ours.
From JS`s point of view I don`t much think that any merger will have an effect on how we do what we do. The main fundamentals of SEO, and to some extent paid advertising, are the same across the three companies.

Links
Site structure
Content
We won`t need to change how we deliver these services but maybe the quantities(links) and coverage(site structure and content) will have to be looked at.
In any way it sure looks to be both an exciting and worrying time over at Microsoft and Yahoo. Will the merge be the answer to combating Google`s might? I`m sure the same question could be proposed to Benito Mussolini regarding WWII if he were still alive that is.

When you are optimising a website you should always be looking for opportunities to get more traffic to your website. One such possibility could be Google News. Google news is a search facility of Googles that allows people to….. Search news! News appears on Google news similar to how your pages appear in the google search index. Once you have been accepted as a news source by google then their spider will come and index your news articles. The news articles on Google news are of a high standard, because of this there are strict guidelines you must follow to even apply to be considered as a news source.

In order for the Google crawler to correctly gather articles, each page that displays an article’s full text needs to have a unique URL that does not change. Google cannot include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL.
The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.
Keep in mind that Google cannot include sites for which the URL of the main page includes a date. URLs with dates in them often change on a daily or weekly basis. This prevents Google from crawling the site for new content, as Google is unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.
Google’s automated crawler is currently best able to crawl regular HTML links. Google is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript.
As you can see, a lot of sites would need to be modified to be able to qualify though if you think your news articles are worthy then you should apply to be crawlled by the google news spider. From a search engine optimisation point of view putting your sites content on google news could be a great source of traffic and links for your site. Another bonus of getting included in google news is reputation and image. If people get to your site trough google news then it gives an extreamily profesional image to your company.

Social Media was undoubtedly one of biggest talking points of 2007. Search Engine Optimisation professionals and businesses found many interesting ways to leverage traffic levels and online brand awareness through online social media sites. These sites were found to be a great way of beginning conversations with potential customers and clients but do they in fact have a negative effect upon businesses?

Social Networking can in fact have a negative effect on businesses if not used in the right way or context. One of the biggest problems with social networking is that it takes up a lot of time. Businesses have to update their profiles regularly so that visitors have fresh content to look at. If businesses have too many profiles then they could well spend large portions of their day monitoring these sites. This will have a big effect upon their productivity levels.

Businesses may also find that the time they have invested in social networking may have been wasted as they have not done enough research and planning. Some businesses just create numerous profiles and hope for the best. This is a waste of time. Think about your levels of traffic and brand awareness before and after you implemented your social networking profiles. Have you made any significant gains? To get the most out of social networking it is worthwhile creating a plan with set goals and objectives.

This plan should look at the social networks you are going to use and what message you are trying to promote. Some social networks will cater better to you and your potential customers needs. Think about the conversations you are trying to initiate with your customers. Too many conversations could confuse them and blur the message that you are trying to get across.

Although social networking can have a negative effect on businesses it is clear that if it is done right that it can be extremely beneficial. Many experiments show that content can be ranked very quickly and highly in Google as a result of social networking. Here at Just Search we suggest to our clients that they use social media plug-ins in there blogs and that they should have a clear plan before they create any profiles.

This is something that has happened to me recently while I was working on the new design of xhtmlcoding.com, I was in research for some fonts (even tho I love to keep the textual part of the design, including logo, clean and plain text, but if something can be really attractive why not?). The truth is that a blogger (which I won’t mention his blog or his name) that I occasionally read and had it on RSS feed reader blogged about about a “fonts website” and the fact that it has some really cool fonts.

It was apparent that it was a paid review for fawnt.com (it really doesn’t deserve a link), but since I was already working on the design I thought it would be nice to see if there are some cool free fonts that I might like. Despite the weird name the site has I clicked on the link and landed on their first page. The overall design was pleasant and in the main page it had a scrolling window with fonts and examples, so far so good.

The list was short (list of the most clicked 55 fonts), but when surfing for fonts you definitively won’t end up looking at the first page of the fonts but you continue lurking to see what next can be seen. Clicking on their more fonts page I ended in a page full of fonts…and thats when the nightmare starts.

The fonts page of the site fawnt.com started to slowly load and together with the page load a heap of iframes started to load at the bottom of their page, and together with those iframes worms and trojans started to load (Thank you Avast, i Lub ya) and my antivirus Avast alarm got turned on and blocked all the connections and me closed the fawnt.com site and unsubscribed from the guys RSS feed for unethical way of making money blogging (and thats what he deserved honestly).

Later on I decided to report this site on Google and get it removed from the Google index and save many users to get infected from this site before they reach the first page on Google SERPs for “free fonts” (currently they are at page 9 but heading toward). Well surprise surprise, the Google spam report page has the next options to chose for reporting a spam site

Hidden text or links
Misleading or repeated words
Page does not match Google’s description
Cloaked page
Deceptive redirects
Doorway pages
Duplicate site or pages
Other (specify)
These options made me think, does Google want to keep their index clean and provide safe sites and better search engine experience for Google users or they just want to fight SEO folks? All the options regard Search Engine Optimization and specific SEO misbehavior techniques, and at least at the bottom of the list there is a option “Other (specify)”.

Another search query I performed was looking for a more specific article on Google fighting virus spreading sites and mainly the search was heading to the Google’s Webspam head, Matt Cutts blog. Well all results were heading toward the report of paid links, cloaking sites and everything that is really SEO oriented rather than “safe browsing” experience, it makes me think that SEO’s are more harmful for the web than virus/worm spreaders.

This left me with a strange taste in my mouth, but given the Other (specify) option I could still report the site, but where should I report this bad taste in my mouth?

After the previous posts about Google Search Engine where I tried to explain how you can perform a search query with Google search engine to obtain the most relevant results and save time during the search for your interested product or information by performing a exact match keyphrase research in closed quotes or manipulating the search engine boolean operators and the combination of the both examples.

Today i decided to explain how you can perform a search by using synonyms that search engines (mainly Google search engine) recognize and how can you make a research for a product that will fit your price-range budged.
Synonyms and Google Search Engine

Often happens that we do not receive the results that we performed a search for in the search engines because the keyword or the keyphrase we used did not represent exactly what we were searching for.

By using Google’s search engine Synonym operator, character ~ (tilde) before the synonym (abbreviation) will tell Google search engine to show on the SERPs results of pages containing that synonym as well as sites that use the entire word for the given synonym.

Lets take an example, if we perform a search query for keyword ape with Google search engine we will find in the SERPs results of pages that have the word “ape” in the content or in the domain name, but if we add the tilde character before the word ape as ~ape in the SERPs we will have results of pages that contain the word ape, monkey, chimpanzee, gorilla etc. which will help use to find faster the desired page.

note: using abbr HTML attribute to describe the acronym can many times help your page in the SERPs
Numeric interval

To find results on numeric values interval (dates, value, dimension, price range etc) is one of the hardest things to find with search engines if you don’t know how to use the numeric interval operator command. By using the numeric interval operator we can perform a perfect search query and give us exact results we want.

Lets presume you have a budged of $50-100 dollars to spend monthly on seo service and you want to find a seo company that will provide you seo services within that price range. If you perform a search query like seo service $50 to $100 month you will find results about pages that contain the words seo, service, $50, $100 which could be a good result for us but not good enough. Using the numeric interval operator we can get richer results on the SERPs, lets see in action the numeric interval operator.

seo service $50..100 month

Do you notice the two dot’s between the $50 and the 100 numbers? Thats the numeric interval operator, and if we perform a search query in that way we will have results about pages that provide seo service for $50, $51, $59, $99 or $100 month, it will include all the prices from $50 to $100. We need to indicate the monetary sign (in this case dollars $) only once to tell Google search engine that we want results aboutSEO companies that offer SEO services and charge in U.S. dollars.

It was announced, we were warned, the penalties took action on some sites, but that was not enough to convince us, or simply it was a not a smart move for many webmasters since it was going to kill their online business.

We see our websites dance in the SERPs of Google search engine and we keep wondering if its our SEO techniques in question or what? No, seems like there is a Google Algorithm update on going and hence this dancing through the SERPs of our website for the targeted keywords.

My guess is that the new algo is constantly being rolled out for testing, then rolled back and tweaked. And that the new algo is majoring on identifying paid links.

The next on the penalization list of Google search engine seems to be the Web Directories which lately (since a day or two) have blatantly dropped in SERPs of Google even for their branding name.

Questions asked to the most friendly (my opinion) Google Engineer, Matt Cutts in regard to the penalization of web directories and the Matts answers.

Mike asks:

Firstly, why have many web directories fallen out of the first few pages of google for their own name? “aviva directory” “alive directory”. These are established sites and have lost rankings all over the place. My site is included in this, that why i am asking.

Matt Cutts answers:

Here’s what I’ve said about directories recently:

“Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of
the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
_
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

I have to agree with Matt Cutts on this, sometimes i feel like there are more web directories instead of blogs. But we still do have quality web directories to which we can get listings if we want to get some exposure on the web.