What Zango has to do with “Web 2.0″ (whatever that means) is beyond my reach: maybe their innovative use of video and social networks MySpace and Facebook?

Must be because of that cutesy logo.

Blogs (including mine) are being bombed right now with links to such pages.

I had seen Google Groups spam, but I have to admit the Notebook flavor was new to me. I think it must be related to the cracking of Google’s CAPTCHA (note how the majority of these notebooks have a blank username).

And in case you were wondering about ex-wannabe major search engine Ask: their blog is practically dead. R.I.P.

I instantly ran a search for “pscore mcpc thresh” and found zero results, which made me think those must have been internal variables leaking out of AdWords in debug mode.

Then a colleague pointed me to WebmasterWorld, where a user had posted a similar screen-shot in the Google AdWords forum.

Now, what do those variable names (and values) mean exactly?

Here’s my guess:

Pscore

The component of Google’s Quality Score influencing ad position.

mCPC

The keyword’s minimum CPC bid.

thresh

A threshold of some kind: maybe a minimum Pscore?

What do you think?

Is this what you call a meme? Oh, nevermind.

Why do you blog?

Believe it or not, it helps me get some stress off my back. Although nothing beats a good, uh, swim for that purpose.

What post are you most ashamed of?

The one you’re reading, I’m afraid.

The one you’re most proud of?

Not exactly proud about anything here, but I must say I did enjoy writing my Top 10 reasons why pay-for-performance sucks for SEO.

Now on to:

• Mr. DaveN
• Must
• You

Yesterday we accidently [sic] began including the links from the ads of Google AdSense customers.

D’OH!

SEO Dark Lord - 98%

I got two questions wrong, #20 and #22… Tricky ones, eheh.

Overall, a really well-thought out quiz: nice stuff to test your SEO knowledge and have some fun too.

Just one hint: beware of vodka-filled URLs!

I had been spotting dozens of strange organic search referers in a web site’s stats lately: extremely generic keywords, that do occur in the web site’s corpus of web pages, but for which that web site never ranked on any search engine that I know of.

Today I finally decided to check out the logs, and ran into this:

65.55.165.122 - - [02/Nov/2007:05:07:14 +0100] "GET /requested/url.html HTTP/1.0" 200 51862 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=keyword&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

It would look like a genuine Live Search referer, except that:

1. the requested URL is nowhere to be found on the referring SERP (note the unusual FORM=LIVSOP URL parameter);
   and
2. the client IP is from Redmond.

Hmm… :/

A simple Google search pointed me to the right answer: it turns out that this is a “quality check” [sic!] that the Live Search team have been doing for a while, as officially confirmed by msndude (Live Search’s rep) in this WebmasterWorld thread (msg #3442263).

Now, why the Live Search folks decided to hit web sites with fake referers is beyond me: maybe a stupid attempt to check for referer-based cloaking? I dunno. I had seen Slurp (Yahoo!’s crawler) issuing a spoofed user-agent before, but nothing nearly as sneaky and spammy as this. Many small webmasters are understandably furious about Microsoft deliberately choosing to fill their logs with junk.

The only advice I can give them is to filter out all referers having the string “FORM=LVSP” or “FORM=LIVSOP” in the URL.

A few blog references:

• Microsoft Live Search’s Strange Spam-Like Referrals Are Official Tests [Search Engine Roundtable, September 6, 2007]
• Microsoft is lying and intentionally screwing up your log files (FORM=LVSP|LIVSOP) [Exposure Online, October 9, 2007]
• Stupid msnbot FORM=LVSP and FORM=LIVSOP [Blogboing, October 10, 2007]

I wasn’t too shocked today to discover that Netscape Search (whose results are also provided by Google) has the same “bug”: Netscape Search’s robots.txt file does not disallow /search.

As a result, Netscape Search has about 40,000 of its SERPs (that is, Google’s) in Google’s index. Check it out:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Asearch.netscape.com%2Fsearch

The missing “Disallow: /search” is obviously an open door to search engine spammers (yes, some of those pages actually have good rankings).

Come on Netscape, fix that robots.txt!