FEATURE: Being The Good Client

In every industry there is a relationship dynamic between client and vendor that must be properly handled in order for there to be full success in the endeavor. Failure to communicate, understand expectations, or deliver on promises leads to a weakening of trust, faith, respect, and ultimately the relationship will die. While this is usually obvious, what should be considered here is the fact this is a two-way street. Clients themselves must be aware of how to be good clients, no matter what industry we are speaking of.

When determining the quality and relevancy of a page, most search engines compare the similarity of the content on that page to other pages on that website as well as other pages in their index. In general, search engines (especially Google) feel that duplicate content would probably not be very valuable for their users. As a result, they often penalize pages and/or sites with entirely or mostly duplicated content, making it difficult for these sites to rank well in their SERPs.

The funny thing is that in the end index size doesn't matter past a certain point.

• Yahoo announced their index now included some 20 billion documents including 19.2 billion pages, nearly doubling Google's 11.3 billion document index.
• Google raises their image index count to 2,187,212,422. Google engineers claim that they don't see how Yahoo can have 20 billion documents.
• Danny Sullivan gets fed up with the squabbles and demands that the search engines report on relevance instead. SEOs of all shapes and sizes agree.

Yahoo has SEMs up in arms this month. Here's a look at why.

• Webmaster World and SES were buzzing over the idea that Yahoo might be hand-editing SERPs.
• An update to the Yahoo Search Marketing led to a weeklong downtime, leaving advertisers locked out of their accounts, half the campaigns disabled and everyone upset.

Jupiter Media sold the Click Z network, including Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies, to Incisive Media.

Google bought wireless software company, Android and begged for a new chef. They also broke up with C|Net in response to a story on privacy using Google CEO, Eric Schmidt as an example. Resolution is yet to be had.

Search Engine Strategies rocked San Jose this month. Connections were made, parties were attended and rumors sparked like the fourth of July.

Catch up on everything you missed in the SES forum threads at SEW. Next up for SES is Chicago in December. See you there.

Bruce Clay, Inc is pleased to announce that we will be participating in eComXpo, coming up October 6-8th. This conference will save you on travel and hotel expenses because it's 100% virtual. Check it out.

Attaboys

Ask Jeeves opened their paid listing program to all advertisers and promptly lowered the number of sponsored resulted they'd be showing per page.

Matt Cutts was very excited this month when Google won the NIST challenge which focuses on machine translation.

What's the master plan behind Google Talk?

Is Yahoo really hand-editing their top searches?