Monthly Archives: March 2006

Yahoo! Answers: real knowledge, entertainment or misleading information?

I was aware of Google Answers where people can go and post any question they want and get an answer for a fee (from $2.00 to $200.00). Their answers are usually pretty smart, being given by people who are usually specialist or well aware of the field the person is asking a question about. Plus if the answer doesn’t satisfy you, the person who replies doesn’t get paid, so he or she’s better off providing a good answer.

Today I heard that Yahoo! provides something similar, called Yahoo! Answers but the system is currently free. That’s probably the reason why there’s a lot of poor quality posts, and it seems that many people go there just for fun, or to make a mock of other people.

I’ve read a few posts and I don’t think it’s the best place to get an answer to your question if it’s something very important to you. I’m not saying that you cannot find good information, I’ve found a very good anwser about SEO but many people seem to post just for fun or to get more points.

A nice list of Firefox extensions

Stephan Spencer published a nice list of his favorite plugins and extensions that he uses with Firefox. If you are a SEO, Webmaster, or just a regular Internet user, you’re just missing out if you’re not using Firefox yet. It’s still by far the most robust browser out there and the number of extensions that make your life easier is just awesome.

There’s just one extension that I would add to Stephan’s list: SEOpen, a tool which allows you to get any SEO related information with just one click, ie. Yahoo! Backlinks, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

Is Google preparing a new interface?

A few people have seen a slightly different interface while they were using Google this week.
I found this information via Ars Technica. If you want to see what the “new” interface looks like, at least the one Google’s trying right now, you can do this as explained in the article:

– 1: Go to www.google.com

– 2: In your address bar, just paste this string:

javascript:alert(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:

LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com”)

and press enter, that will set a cookie in your computer.

– 3: Do a search and check out the links on the left.

Apparently Google would like to relocate to shortcuts to images, news and results categories to the left. The green bar seems to give an idea of the number of results available in each category. They are probably willing to entice users to use other categories to ease their search.
I did a test for “country music”:

Well, not bad, but we’re still waiting for Google to show us something more Web 2.0…

Internet Explorer: Microsoft admits the “Mess Up”

“We messed up”. That’s what Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft Internet Explorer general manager said yesterday at the Mix06 conference in Vegas, while talking about the delay they took in releasing the new version of IE. Indeed, the latest version of IE was released in 2001, and nothing new has been released since, until IE 7.

According to this article from The Seattle Times, Microsoft promised to “refresh its browser technology more often in the future”. If you look at his main competitor, Mozilla, it’s true that they update their browser very often and are fixing all the bugs on a constant basis.

Bill Gates knows that they cannot lag anymore, and have to provide browsers capable of handling new kinds of pages without any problem…
“You can expect to see us moving very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities there” he said.

When your SEO company isn’t even able to spam properly

Today, I’m going to replace Matt Cutts. I was doing some research yesterday to get some information about setting up a company in Luxembourg.

With Google, with the keywords “creation entreprise luxembourg” in French (“set up company luxembourg” in English), the first listing that I find is the Luxembourg Minister of Economy and Trade…. Great, I should be able to find the best information with this site.

Well, not if the SEO company that worked for them didn’t mess up with the site. Because the CSS spam they used is currently explicitly viewable, it’s impossible to read the site.

If you look on the right bottom of all this list of links, which is inside a CSS div, you can see lots of anchor text spamming focused on the site’s keywords, but also a link with the anchor text “Référencement”, or “SEO” in English that goes to the excellent SEO company who did the job for them and added a link to themselves in the mean time. I looked into the code to find their URL, because I couldn’t click on the link… The company is referencement.com, a french SEO company that calls itself ‘A leading SEO company’ on their site…

Now, can someone tell me how you can do something like that to a client, disrespect his visitors and take so many risks?

Find a flight easily with Google

I’m going to London next week, so I was looking for a flight using Google and noticed a nice feature provided by the search engine.

It seems like Google recognizes your intention if you are typing something such as “paris london” which is obviously the query of someone who needs to travel, and displays a link that allows you to find a flight with different companies.

So with my query “paris london” in Google, the first result is a personalized feature that allows me to look for a flight directly from Google. What I have to do is enter the departing and returning dates. Then, I can choose amongst 5 reservation companies such as Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity etc.


After one click, I’m all set and just need to choose my flight. I’m just wondering how this function works, I’ve never heard about that before.

However, if I use Google.fr, Google displays a link that allows me to see the next train departures with SNCF, the french train company.

By the way, I recommend you to read the last post at SEO by the SEA, where Bill Slawsky tries to explain how vertical search works in Google.

SEM Salaries: How much are you worth?

P.J. Fusco, writer for Clickz, replied to an email sent by a reader who asked “What’s considered a typical salary range for non-management and management positions in the SEM industry?”

Because SEM is still a new industry, it’s true that there’s a lack of information regarding salaries. That often causes people to wonder if their salaries match with what other earn. Of course, salaries are mainly justified by experience but it’s a good to know the tendency in the SEM job market.

P.J. said that entry level positions tend to range from $30,000 to $45,000. With 3 to 5 years of experience, she thinks that people can earn from $50,000 to $70,000, and even up to $90,000 if you are amongst the most tenured SEOs.

Senior Management Positions are able to earn up to $120,000.

She concludes her article by saying that money isn’t the most important, but rather how much you enjoy your work. I agree, if you’re all about the money, you can make more money elsewhere, SEO/M is more about providing quality, achieving great results and is also a very exciting job and our industry is very diversified and full of fun!