The Washington Post is reporting that a recent update by Microsoft is now scanning people’s machines to see if they have valid license, and reporting back to Microsoft, all without user intervention.

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Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to take his “Question Time” online with a unique twist. He answered question from 10 members of the public through an MSN video conference on the subjects of Africa and the climate change. While the subjects might not be too interesting, I think it’s cool to see leaders of countries stepping beyond the boundries of tradition and testing newer technology. It shows, however minor, progressive technological thinking in the leadership of the country… and that’s what caught my interest.

http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/news.php?id=82648

I just realized that when the search engines read car-wallpapers.net, the homepage has plenty of content to hit on, but each subpage looks nearly identical. The filenames of the pages are different (for different Makes), however the SE-readable content (non-images) is just a bunch of random resolutions. Then when you actually view the wallpaper, there’s slight differences in the filenames, but overall, most of the text is the same. Granted the pictures are different everywhere, but I’m afraid of being penalized by a search engine because of this setup.

In my effort to diversify the subpage content, I added the original filesize to the view-wallpaper page. While this page has very little text to start with, adding another nearly-random number will mix it up a bit. The main search engine optimization upgrade I made though was to the browse pages (by make and by tag). It’s a bit more server CPU intensive, but I think it’s worth it. At the bottom of each browse page, it has a tag-dump of all the tags attached to all the wallpapers shown (that page only). This is great for search engines to pick up on because if the server name is car-wallpapers.net and the filename is browse-bmw.html, having text content with keywords like “wallpaper”, “e36″, “m3″, etc. will direct the exact traffic we’re looking for to us. It creates a dynamic (though tagging) search engine landing spot that sets us apart from the non-tag-enabled wallpaper galleries (the rest of the internet). For example, if someone searches for “e34 wallpaper” on Google, looking for just that, we are the ONLY wallpaper gallery that return a valid result. Actually, by that search United Bimmer’s e34 forum is returned on the first page as well, which shows how SEO fine-tuned our forum is also, haha, but I digress. Most wallpaper galleries are setup to land search queries on the car make name (Subaru, BMW, Nissan, Ferrari, etc), and on rare occasion, you find them narrowing the pages down by model (M3, 350Z, etc), but with our innovating tagging system, we can narrow it down to every single detail… and now that our tags are integrated with the browse pages, this creates even more possibilities.

While car-wallpapers.net is still not very deep in Google, it’s doing great in other search engines. And the fact that it’s actually surfacing at all (especially Google, known for it’s rigorous website acceptance levels), is quite impressive. Also, car-wallpapers.net has only been online for a little over one week, but is already receiving about 300 unique hits a day, with no advertising beyond a post in a few forums a week ago, and no backlinks besides the United Bimmer homepage (PR2, not to impressive).

And on another note, but the same topic, hot-car-sites.com is dominating MSN results. While Google strongly dislikes that site, look at some of it’s MSN search query result placements:

#1 - hot car sites
#1 - hot car
#1 - hot car topsite
#1 - car topsite
#1 - car topsites
#1 - car rankings
#2 - car sites
#3 - top modified cars

Considering the site has been up for only a few weeks, that’s very impressive. Granted those are not the most popular search queries, but it’s definitely a start. All three sites (UB, car-wallpapers, and hot-car-sites) are also all hosted on different IP addresses, so the interlinking between them should be beneficial on the search engine front.

Another small search engine tweak I made today was on the United Bimmer homepage. I found the top-downloaded BMW wallpapers changed fairly infrequently, so I changed it to display random BMW wallpapers instead. This accomplishes two objectives. First of all it further diversifies the United Bimmer homepage. No one wants to see the same content (especially graphical like that) static for long periods of time (which is why we eliminated the old rarely-updated homepage). By mixing up the wallpapers, someone may see an image that catches their eye one day and download it. The second objective of the switch is for that of SEO. When Google crawls the car-wallpaper.net homepage, it’s already pinging the most-downloaded images fairly constantly. To do the same from the UB homepage would bleed more PR to a select part of the site (only those 4-5 pages) and hurt the overall e-stickiness. By showing random samplings of BMW wallpapers from the more-frequently-crawled UB homepage, it exposes more of the insides and guts of car-wallpapers.net to the search engines, increasing the exposure of landing points. While those few pages might not return as often, it’s a quantity over quality focus with a site of this dimension. In time, the entire site as a whole will increase in importance, rather than just a select few parts. This is better in the long run.

Now the only thing I have left to do is wait, which isn’t very fun. hah

I found this hilarious. In an interview with CNN Money, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer was asked if he owns an iPod. He replied: “No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children–in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.”

I wonder if that’s how Microsoft handles their small business division. To get companies to BUY less-stable software, they brainwash them, haha.