Cutts recommends taking down a parking page about a month before launching a new site.

Google web spam czar Matt Cutts just published a video in which he asks himself a question (rather than taking it from the community): should I keep a domain name parked before I launch a web site?

In short, Cutts says no.

He works in a reference to eNom’s backpack girl and then goes on to explain that Google has a filter to try to keep parked domain names out of its search results.

This filter doesn’t immediately know when a domain changes from a parked page to a “real” web site, so he recommends putting up a placeholder page 3-4 weeks before launching a site.

That placeholder page can be something as simple as “coming soon” with a few lines of text — just make sure it’s not an ad-filled parking page.

Here’s the video:

Patent covers method and systems for SEO suggestions and search engine submission.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent (pdf) to Go Daddy for “method for improving a web site’s ranking with search engines”.

U.S. patent number 8,271,488 describes a system for helping web site owners edit their web pages for better search results and then automatically submitting the sites to multiple search engines.

If some of this seems outdated, that’s because the patent application was filed in 2003.

The images in the patent show Go Daddy’s former search engine product called Traffic Blazer. The company now offers a product called search engine visibility that has similar functions.

The patent describes a method where a web site owner wants to rank for certain keywords in a search engine. The system makes suggestions to the site owner on how to edit his or her web site to rank better for these keywords, such as add the word to the title tag. It then automatically submits the sites to multiple search engines.

In another embodiment, the system would automatically edit the customer’s web page for better search engine rankings.

A number of businesses still offer search engine submission services, even though the importance of submitting a site for inclusion in search engines has decreased over the past decade. Automatically analyzing web sites and making suggestions for better search rankings is still popular, although much of the attention has shifted from what’s on the web site to external factors like who’s linking to it.

A handy guide to determine if Google is gunning for you.

Last week Google announced some changes to its algorithm that affect a whopping 12% of search results.

The target?

“low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”

While some say this is aimed at so-called “content farms”, here are the warning signs that this change is aimed at your web site(s):

- You created your web site with the click of a button (or a few buttons)

- You didn’t create any original content for your web site

- Your web site asks questions but doesn’t provide answers — and is waiting for a “user” to generate the answer for you (ahem)

- When users do answer those questions, the answers suck (ahem)

- You developed a hundred sites in a weekend

- Although your web site presents existing information in a “unique” way, hundreds of other web sites have also tried to present that same information in a “unique” way

- Your web site is a splog

- Your content is similar to that found on other web sites; you just re-write it in a different way

- Your only plan for traffic generation is search traffic

Search engine files patent application for methods of detecting link spam.

Ever since people caught on to how Google used the number of incoming links to a web site in its ranking algorithms, people have tried to game the system. From selling links to creating link farms, SEO has focused much of its attention on link building over the years. As a result, the search engines have had to counter this by trying to separate good links from bad.

Yahoo has filed a patent for discovering abnormal link structures and demoting the rank of web pages based on these abnormal incoming links.

Titled “Detection of Undesirable Web Pages”, patent application 20100094868 (pdf) was filed in October 2008 and published today.

The patent describes a statistical method of determining when links pointing to a web page have been artificially generated. The method determines a normal range of links across a number of factors, and then looks for patterns that do not conform to the natural change in links over time:

As the value of the normalized entropy metric associated with a set of inlinks referencing the destination page approaches an outer limit of an acceptable range (e.g., 0 or 1), the likelihood that the set of inlinks to the destination web page is “unnatural” increases. In other words, there exists an inference that some of the inlinks among the set have been created for the purpose of artificial promotion of the destination web page rather than based on the genuine interests from a diverse set of independent users.

Some of the factors considered include:
-IP Address of link source
-Top level domain of links
-Language of each link (e.g. English, French, German)
-Autonomous system (i.e. a networked system of computing devices)
-Anchor text of links
-PageRank of incoming links
-Link age-attenuation weightings

Of course, many search engine optimization experts already try to skirt these measures by spreading links about in more natural ways. Further, I’d be surprised if some of Yahoo’s competitors weren’t using some of these same tactics before the patent application was filed.

Phrase searches are an important metric, but have their limitations.

When domainers try to determine the popularity of keywords in their domain names, they usually find the number of phrase match results at Google. To find this, you just search with “quotes around your keywords”. That tells Google to return results with the actual phrase inside your quotes, in the actual order.

This matters for domains because order matters. Consider the domain name GameFootball.com. You could say this term has 60 million results on Google, but that’s when you search without quotes because Google doesn’t care about the order of your search terms. Using quotes, you get less than a million results, which is a better indicator of popularity of the term and therefore the domain (as compared to FootballGame.com, a much better domain).

But when it comes to search engine optimization, remember this truth: hardly anyone searches with quotes. I suspect many readers of Domain Name Wire do, but DNW readers are web savvy. The typical web surfer doesn’t even know about using quotes when searching.

Why does this matter? When you’re tracking your rankings, you should search without quotes. I was reminded of this today when reviewing analytics for one of my web sites. I was getting a lot of traffic from phrases and checked my rankings on Google using quotes. I couldn’t find my site — until I dropped the quotes and found myself in the first few positions.

So remember: searching with quotes has important uses, but most searchers don’t use them.