Monthly Archives: November 2006

Vorgermilten – A Fake SEO Contest?

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Vorgermilten claims to be the highest paying SEO contest to date. Based on the official rules of the Vorgermilten SEO contest, all contest entries must link to OfficialAres.com displaying the following text:

I am taking part in the highest paying Search Engine Optimization Contest to date. The contest is sponsored by Ares. Ares is a free peer to peer file sharing program that let’s users download unlimited free files. Please help me win this contest by giving me a link on your site.

Where in this website, OfficialAres.com is an imitation website of AresGalaxy. Ares software is a spyware-free and adware-free peer-to-peer file sharing program that is open source. And OfficialAres.com is giving away a modified version of Ares pretending to be the latest version. And with this version comes along with its own nuisance adware.

Clearly, OfficialAres.com does not seem to be a legitimate company, although it claims to net $23,000 a month and was even selling the website on DealASite.com for $550,000. If this site makes good money, why sell it? The offer on DealAsite.com has expired already on September 22, 2006 with no buying offers. But imagine of someone did buy the site in September, and based on the Vorgermilten contest rules, the SEO contest started June 1, 2006 and ends on December 31, 2006. Who is going to continue the contest? Why sell the site in the middle of the contest? It seems the contest was created to increase the popularity of OfficialAres.com to increase its value so it may be easier to sell.

Meanwhile on the McAfee Site Advisor website, many of the Ares downloadable files from OfficialAres.com are marked as adware. According to McAfee, AresLite.exe, AresMusic.exe and AresP2P.exe are the nuisance-free software. But Ares.exe, AresGalaxy.exe and AresLite.exe are the software that contains unwanted programs which are the modified versions of the former 3 mentioned.

If the Ares software of OfficialAres.com really seems to be a fake software, many other people are saying the SEO contest is a fake as well. The Vorgermilten contest claims to be giving away $10,000 and a 1 year SEO contract to the website ranking 1st place on Google.com. Although anyway you look at it, contest sponsor OfficialAres.com is distributing the fake Ares software, but does that mean that Vorgermilten is a fake SEO contest? If his website really earns $23,000 per month, then $10,000 should not be a hard price to pay to the first place winner of the Vorgermilten SEO contest. For the competitors, it will probably be a gamble for them. Even if they get a winning spot, they are not really sure if they will get their prizes. For some SEO contest competitors, they are not giving full attention to the contest and are just going with the flow and checking where the rankings lead them without any pro-active effort in improving their rankings. If ever they go up to the winning spot, they will just consider themselves lucky if ever they do receive their prizes.

Google knows how to disregard patterns with spaces in between letters

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After taking a close look at the search terms used on how people get to my site. I noticed a word with spaces in between each letter. And I never type that way but I noticed this in my analytics software. To see how things work, I decided to test things further. So i searched on Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live ituloy angsulong but adding a space in between every character: i t u l o y a n g s u l o n g.

Notice the results below.

Ituloy AngSulong with spaces on MSN/Live

Spaced Ituloy AngSulong on MSN live

Ituloy AngSulong with spaces on Yahoo

Spaced Ituloy AngSulong on Yahoo

Ituloy AngSulong with spaces on Google

Spaced Ituloy AngSulong on Google

Google actually knows the word is a word with spaces in between each letter. Even in the area that says Did you mean: also puts it’s suggested search term with spaces in between. Pushing the observation even a little bit further, check this out, instead of have 2 spaces in between Y and A, i made it only 1 space. So every letter is only 1 space apart. And the Google results changed.

Spaced Ituloy AngSulong on Google - all 1 space

The sites prioritized are now the sites with ituloyangsulong as one word as opposed to ituloy angsulong. Now just testing how smart Google is, I tried searching with two extra spaces in between each letter. And now it looks like Yahoo and MSN/Live.

Spaced Ituloy AngSulong on Google - 2 space

So basically Google just takes out the spaces when there is a bunch of single letters with only 1 space in between. I am no search engine programmer, but that does not seem to be much of a hard patched for Yahoo and MSN/Live to implement. But I guess what is amazing about this study is, Google actually thought of implementing this. While Yahoo and MSN/Live has not.

Was this link useful? Yes or No, Google asks you

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In the middle of server problems due to hacked email contact forms of some hosting clients I have, and Thunderbird .msf file problems in rebuilding, with online client chat inquiries and complaints for server slowdown, SEO Philippines member and excellent photographer Anton Sheker kept asking me a question. He was asking me if I see the text: Was this link useful? in the Google search results. I totally had no idea what he was asking.And he was asking if it was a Firefox plugin. But I was not aware of any Firefox extension asking Was this link useful? Not even Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox had it. I was still puzzled with this Was this link useful? text, until he sent me a part of his Google organic results in a screenshot.

Was this link useful? Appearing in both organic and paid search results.

I did notice he had SEO for Firefox because of the links below the search box, so at first I thought my SEO for Firefox was not updated. But why in the world would Aaron Wall ask you if the SERPs ranking was useful? So I searched Google and I found every main SEO site talking about it.

This seemed to be old news for Adwords, where Google was asking people if the link was useful. Probably to evaluate the landing page score is known to be connected to the keyword bidding prices. But got this to appear in the organic search results, the news still seems to be relatively new.

John Battelle was able to blog about it almost a week ago, and Loren Baker reported this on Search Engine Journal just 2 days ago. I just learned about this from Anton Sheker, who happened to be wondering why he was seeing it, but for some reason, up to now, I haven’t seen any search result like this. I guess it is not yet implemented on all Google datacenters. And for some strike of bad luck, I just can’t seem to connect to any datacenter right now that has this new Google organic feedback feature.

And if people answer the question with a Yes or a No, how will this fit into the algorithm? The pagerank formula? The trustrank formula? And can SEO sabotage be done here where competitors keep answering “No” to try and influence the search results? And the company that owns the result with the question will keep answering “Yes” to influence the search results to get higher ranking? For sure, it is needed somewhere in the ranking formula otherwise they would not be asking the question: Was this link useful? But the question is how much weight is placed on the answers they get from this question? Or maybe this is just part of their blackhat filtering and flagging tools. Where a site that gets a lot of “No” answers will be checked further. Let’s see how it goes and all of us observe.