More on Google & Belgium Court Case

Great artilce from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061127-123545

Google Being Sued - It's not what you think!

Google is quickly becoming the next punching bag on the street. When they were small and a private company most people just took them for granted.

Since they went public, Google has had their fair share of people suing them and with acquisition of Utube.com, you cam bet there will be more. However, I saw this article from "Yahoo News" http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061123/ap_on_hi_te/google_vs_newspapers_4 and thought that this must be a first. Google being sued for including someone’s content in their search engine (Copiepresse a French language newspaper in Belgium).

After all, it's the job of an SEO like myself is to get companies content in Google and not to exclude it. Of course, this court case specifically takes issue with Google News (news.google.com) and that they took content without permission.

Perhaps I've been in this came for too long, but search engines always assumed they had permission unless you told them otherwise. Isn't that what the robots.txt file is for?

In this instance, Google quickly responded and removed the offending content, but the lawsuit is still there. I'm sure Google is taking all this in stride.

It does beg the question; if legal challenges like this become successful does it mean the end of search engines as we know them? For now, I'll concentrate on getting my clients content up there and ranking well. After all, the more organizations that decided not have their content included, the better my chances are of ranking well.

Xenu Link Sleuth Updated

OK I missed this some how, but one of my favourite tools for web development and SEO work Xenu Link Checker was updated last month. A new version of Xenu Link Checker 1.2i was released October 16, 2006.

I love this tool first from a web development stand point as it allows me to quickly test a large site for broken links. I've yet to find a better tool.

From an SEO stand point, I use it much the same way, but this time as a bot/spider emulation. It allows me to view the sites linking architecture (site architecture) backwards. If there is a specific page that I'm trying to get ranked high in the search engines, then I run Xenu and make sure, first the page gets found. Secondly I can reference all pages that link to the page. I can then evaluate if the page needs more internal links or perhaps to be relocated within the sites architecture.

Either way this is an extremely useful tool for the SEO & Web Developer tool box.

A download of Xenu can be obtained at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

IE 7 Automatic Rollout Has Started

Yes, Microsoft has started the automatic roll-out of IE7. While IE 7 has been available as download now for several weeks, they have started pushing the upgrade via the OS automatic update utility as of late last week. Their plan is to have the roll-out completed within 3 months. I personally think this is a bit ambitious, but the reality is that by the end of Q1 2007 the majority of IE users will have been upgraded to version 7.

What does this mean to you? If you haven't done so, start testing your web site(s) and any web based applications to ensure they work with IE 7. If not, time to start fixing them before the clients start calling.

For more information on the rollout, read the following article from Yahoo News http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20061113/tc_pcworld/127851

A Good Web Conference in Canada?

One of my biggest complaints is that rarely do good quality web conferences come to Canada. Not even when our dollar was valued at 65 cents US, did the big US conference come here.

There were a few exceptions most notably Search Engine Strategy which now has an annual event here in Toronto. I've been fortunate enough to attend all three and even speak at the last two.

Well I'm proud to say it looks like an excellent web conference is coming to Canada. This February 6-10 in Vancouver and new conference called "Web Directions North" is coming. From what I've learned, this or a similar version of this conference was run annually in Australia and they've decided to bring it to North America. Of course if you're going to have a conference in Canada in February Vancouver is an excellent choice.

I don't normally plug conferences that I'm not speaking at, but I'll make an exception for this one. First off, there list of speakers is excellent. As well two people who I'm very found of and have had met at other conferences are speaking there. So if you've never had the chance to hear either of these two world renowned speaker Molly Holzschlag (Molly.com) and Kelly Goto (Gotomobile), and you'll be in the Vancouver area in February, I strongly suggest taking in this conference. In my opinion, just listing to these two Divas of the web world, you'll get your moneys worth.

If you do go to Web Directions North, please let me know you what you thought of it. Unfortunately, my schedule these days most likely won't provide me the luxury of attending this conference.

WebTrends & IE 7 Fix Works!!!

I followed the instructions from WebTrends and found only one item that didn't go as expected. Step 4, didn't completely stop every WebTrends service. So I did that task manually by accessing the Administration services list.

The whole process took about 5 minutes.

Take note, IE 7 hidd the SmartView Icon. I spent more time looking for it then doing this fix.

Let me know if you try that and it works. It was hidden on my installation to the right of the home button which was postion to the far right. I finally simply expanded this tool bar and lo and behold there was the SmartView icon.

All tests proved positive.

WebTrends & IE7 Fix Available

WebTrends has just released a hot fix for the problems that Internet Explorer was causing. These WebTrends fixes mean IE7 is now a supported browser and also include a fix so you can use the WebTrends SmartView plug-in for IE 6 and with IE 7.

For those using WebTrends on Demand, WebTrends has already installed WebTrends version 8.0b which includes the support of IE7, but not the fix for SmartView. The good news about these hot fix is that WebTrends has decided not to wait until they make version 8.0b available to the general public and instead issued the hot fixes.

I just got these links directly from WebTrends and haven't had the chance to test them. However, WebTrends assures me they will work.

So here is the links to the fixes:
SmartView - ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80a/IE7/SmartViewUpdater.exe
WebTends - ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80a/IE7/8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip

Be sure to follow these instuctions
1) Log in to WebTrends as an administrator.
2) Select Service Health under Administration | Monitoring.
3) Click the Shut Down System button.

4) After the system is shut down, extract the 8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip into your installation directory (e.g. "C:\Program Files\WebTrends"), overwriting existing files.

4a) If WebTrends is installed in a Distributed Architecture you will need to overwrite the files on each system WebTrends is installed in.

5) After this completes, start the WebTrends system database, if stopped (for example, the "WebTrends - MySQL" service in a MySQL environment)

6) Next, launch SmartViewUpdater.exe. After the installation completes, your WebTrends server will have an updated version of the SmartView in the component repository.

7) After the files have been overwritten and the SmartViewUpdater install completes, start the WebTrends system. To start the system, run “SystemShutdown.exe mode=start” from the command line when in \modules\analysis under the installation directory.

The next time users run SmartView from an updated server, they will be informed that a newer version is available and asked to upgrade. Once they select "Upgrade" the new SmartView client will be downloaded and installed over their previous version. The new version includes support for both Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Good luck and please post a response if these WebTrends fixes for IE 7 work for you.