Author: Stan Shinn

Servers are cheap, but used servers are even cheaper. Vibrant Technologies buys, sells, leases, and repairs new and used servers and other storage and networking hardware at a 20-80% discount off manufacturer's list price. They will also buy your used hardware.

Their web site says:

All refurbished equipment is fully tested, configured and packaged to the manufacturer's standards. Leasing and short-term rentals are available. We are also interested in your trade-in and excess equipment. We'll give you top dollar for your hardware assets. Source

Their midrange server products include HP, IBM and Sun. They also provide networking and storage equipment from Kingston, Seagate, Quantum, Dataram, Clarion, Exabyte, ATL, and Phillips. Learn more at www.Vibrant.com.

Google has launched an unbranded site -- SearchMash.com -- to test experimental search features that could one day show up in google.com.

A Google spokeswoman said in an email that the site was launched recently to test possible features for the regular search engine. There's no guarantee, however, any of the features would be used. Source

I can imagine it is helpful to keep an eye on search results in this new, test search engine. If you see your ranking plummeting in SearchMash.com, you could do some research and potentially prevent SE ranking from plummeting on google.com before it happens.

Google is the only search engine that currently allows you to buy a competitor's name in paid search; this was recently upheld in court. Source

In addition to configuring the robots.txt file in the web server root directory, you can within the page specify pages which should NOT be indexed (put this within <>'s):

meta name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"

This can be helpful if you have a non-relevant page that ranks well and throws users off. For example, a disclaimer page that has many links and ranks highly, but is not something helpful to your SEO campaign.

Two great articles on optimizing your flash files for search engines:

• Optimizing Flash files for the search engines
• SEO Problems: Flash, Technical Issues

Yahoo will have an 18% share of U.S. ad revenues for 2006. In 2005, Yahoo had a 19.4% market share. Source

Google has a site (http://code.google.com/hosting) providing version control management powered by the Subversion version control system and offers project workspaces, mailing lists via group.google.com and issue tracking. Read more

11.4 percent of searchers use one-word queries, two-word queries 28.9% leads the bunch, followed by three-word queries at 27.85%, four-word queries with 17.1%, five-word with 8.25% and six-word queries with 3.7%. Source

Google Analytics Blog has announced a new Website Optimizer in limited release to AdWords advertisers:

Website Optimizer is a free tool that helps AdWords advertisers test different landing pages and determine which one drives the most conversions. A true multivariate testing tool, Website Optmizer allows you to test variations of headlines, promotional copy, and images. The tool allows you to update your site with the winning test combination and continue to experiment.

The beta launch of Website Optimizer is a limited release that is offered to AdWords advertisers on a sign-up basis. Source

This promises to be a great addition to Google's already robust toolkit for advertisers.

In testing is a new content ad system that works on a CPA (cost per action) model, as opposed to a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand) model.

The search engine has invited a number of web site owners to take part in the pilot programme that will see site owners getting extra payments if their visitors take some kind of beneficial action on the advertisers' sites - such as buying a product or requesting further information. Source

The driving force behind this new model is that CPA ads would tend to "be less susceptible to click fraud" and yield greater flexibility.