October 18th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor

Google has launched a new Chinese language version of YouTube for the Taiwanese market, YouTube.com.tw

YouTube this week launched a Chinese language site for Hong Kong, and has recently launched locally targeted versions of the site in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.K.

The Associated Press reports, YouTube has partnered with four Taiwanese media partners for the launch : China Television Co., Sanlih E-Television Co., Lion Travel Service Co. and Taiwan Broadcasting System.

There have been reports of China NetCom, one of the primary ISP’s of China, redirecting Chinese search traffic to Baidu, a domestically owned search engine; and some theories as to why.

My guess is that while Google and other companies are surrounding China with Chinese language versions of their search and media offerings for Taiwan and Hong Kong, [Mainand] China is making sure that their internal search users are not exposed to Anti-PRC messages from Taiwan or content from the more liberal Hong Kong.

October 18th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor

Even though Wikipedia uses a NoFollow attribute on their external links, if you spam Wikipedia results, your site can end up in a penalty in both Google and Yahoo search engines. That is, according to Search Marketer and Wikipedia volunteer Jonathan Hochman.

In a recent article in Forbes which covered the Wikipedia discussion at SMX Social, Hochman told Forbes.com’s Andy Greenberg:

Wikipedia keeps a ’spammer blacklist’ and shares it with several search engines… Domains that appear on the list often lose valuable search engine traffic.

I have not heard of this before, nor had John Carcutt who informed me of this quote from Mr. Hochman.

Have any other readers witnessed or heard of this penalty?

It seems that the sharing of spam information on Wikipedia should be somewhat irrelevant to search engines, especially with the use of NoFollow.

• And how does one make the Wikipedia Blacklist?
• What constitutes one as a spammer to Wikipedia?
• Via automated spamming of external links, spamming of resources, or my editing of Wikipedia content?

The rest of the article is pretty amazing, especially:

Comedy Central’s director of enterprise marketing, Don Steele, Wikipedia has been a godsend. One of the network’s shows, South Park, has spawned more than 250 Wikipedia pages.’Wikipedia is one of the largest traffic drivers to ComedyCentral.com’

But what about this Wikipedia, Yahoo and Google spammer blacklist?

October 18th, 2007 by Arnold Zafra

Google’s Webmaster Tools’ top search queries just got better with the expansion of its time coverage, top query percentage and search data upload via CSV format.

From the previous 7 days historical data reporting of search queries, the webmasters tools now reports historical search data as far back as six months ago. This means you’ll get a pretty view of which keywords gives significant amount of hits and page visits to your sites. You can see snapshots of top search queries on a monthly, bimonthly or quarterly basis. Unfortunately, the system might be having some bug though as top search queries for my personal blog is not showing any statistics yet.

Another improvement of the top search queries is the inclusion of top query percentages. Each query is ranked in relation to the other top ranking queries. Previously, webmaster tools just ranks query results and click and did not analyze each query in relation to the other top queries.

And lastly, you can now download this top query data in to CSV format just like the other useful webmaster data.

These three enhancements of the Google webmaster tools’ reporting system would indeed be very useful for SEO work, as it gives valuable information regarding relevance of keywords used in your blogs or websites and whether those keywords are actually driving traffic to your sites/blogs.