Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

Yahoo! has launched its new tool named Site Explorer. Here’s what Yahoo itself says about it:

What is Yahoo! Site Explorer?
The Yahoo! search database contains detailed information about the structure of the web. In addition to the web pages themselves, the database stores information about links among pages, and uses that information (as well as additional algorithms) to gauge the popularity of a given page.

Site Explorer gives you access to this information so you can learn about a site. To explore a site, you submit a URL using a search box, just as you would for a normal web search. You can then click links on the results page to see detailed information.

Basically, you get to see the site pages indexed by Yahoo and the site’s inbound links. The results can also be exported into a tab-delimited file.

Yahoo also provides APIs for this new feature, which makes it more useful for applications designed for retrieving site-specific data from Yahoo. Otherwise, I haven’t seen anything really astonishing that couldn’t be achieved previously with site: and link: searches, though there have been reports that the inbound links displayed by Site Explorer are more accurate.

It is now possible to receive AdSense payments directly instead of checks. Quoting AdSense support:

What’s New - September 2005
Electronic Funds Transfer is out of beta

Electronic Funds Transfer is ready for the big-time! We’ve been working hard on our payment system, and with our thanks to the thousands of AdSense publishers who took part in our beta test, we’re now ready to bring EFT out of beta.

Publishers who have already received payments through EFT don’t need to do anything – they can continue to have their payments conveniently deposited directly into their bank accounts.

If you would like to sign up for the first time, you’ll need to enter your bank account information through your AdSense account. We’ll then make a small test deposit into that bank account – once you’ve verified the amount of this test deposit, you’ll be all set up for direct deposit. Please note that, if you signed up during the beta period but didn’t receive a payment, you’ll need to register your bank account again now and complete the verification process.

Remember, there’s no charge to receive your payments through EFT, and your AdSense payments are converted into your local currency before being deposited directly into your bank account. EFT is available to publishers with payment addresses in 16 different countries.

I have seen it some time ago but thought I’d mention it here now - it is a blog fully dedicated to this topic. The owner explores the isues of Blogger censorship in-depth and tries to collect all facts available as well as the opinions of both sides. Here it is: Censorship by Blogger.