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February 2007

February 28, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 28, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:52 PM | Permalink

Autobytel's MyRide.com: The Future of Automobile Search?

MyRide.com, set to debut during the second quarter of 2007, will offer consumers a comprehensive array of information related to "the automotive purchase and ownership lifecycle." Is the company that invented the automotive Internet now reinventing it? Greg Jarboe takes a look at what MyRide.com has to offer in today's SearchDay.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:46 PM | Permalink

Google Holds Testapalooza

Google held an in company conference this week, gathering techies from their various departments. They assembled "engineers from Testing, Development, User Experience, and other groups to submit conference sessions: tool presentations, tutorials, workshops, panels, and experience reports", the Google testing blog reported.

Testapalooza was a big sucess, they reported in the blog.

"The idea for Testapalooza came out of discussions about how to build a vibrant testing community here at Google. Many diverse groups work daily on quality-related activities, but each group uses different tools and has different ideas for testing an application, so it can be difficult to find out what others are doing. So we decided to put on a conference!"

"All Testapalooza sessions were video recorded (many were videoconferenced to other offices). We want to publish as many of these videos as possible, and will review them over the coming weeks to publish sessions which did not contain any confidential information. Watch this space for more information on the videos."

Posted by Frank Watson on 9:11 PM | Permalink

Clicktracks CEO Interviewed

John Marshall, the highly respected CEO of Clicktracks, and I had chance to talk about analytics recently. Clicktracks is well known for it's analytics software solution.

While many people are familiar with Google Analytics, fewer people are aware that Clicktracks offers a free analytics solution as well, known as Clicktracks Appetizer. This is a great free tool that offers a powerful set of capabilities for users who want to have their analytics software analyze their log files instead of putting Javascript on their web site (which is something that Google Analytics requires).

John talks with me about a wide range of topics that may help you get a better idea of how to make use of web analaytics as a tool in your web promotional strategy.

Posted by on 7:44 PM | Permalink

Convera Offering New Search Tools

Convera Corporation, a leading provider of search technologies for publishers, announced their launch of the Convera Publisher Control Panel. This new tool is designed to help publishers to integrate vertical search tools into their sites.

The tool provides publishers with tools to tune results for their search engines, providing a broad range of editorial capabilities that enables publishers to develop very high quality vertical search tools for their sites. In addition, the Convera Publisher Control Panel allows the publisher to see detailed traffic information enabling them to further tune their results.

Convera has been providing enterprise search solutions for the past 20 years, with organizations served including the Department of Defense, Justice and Agriculture, and the FBI.

Posted by on 7:30 PM | Permalink

Yahoo's Yang and Semel Going On the Road

The beginning of March will be busy for Terry Semel and Jerry Yang - they are going on the talk circuit as it were. A press release I received today highlights two stops these Yahoo members of the board are making.

Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) will present at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference and Thomas Weisel Partners Internet & Digital Media Conference during the week of March 5, 2007.


Morgan Stanley Technology Conference
Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO
Susan Decker, EVP, Head of Advertiser and Publisher Group and
acting Chief Financial Officer
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
12:30pm Eastern Time / 9:30am Pacific Time.

Thomas Weisel Partners Internet & Digital Media Conference
Jerry Yang, Co-Founder and Chief Yahoo
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
6:15pm Eastern Time / 3:15pm Pacific Time.

A live webcast of both presentations will be available on the Investor Relations website at http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/calendar.cfm?CalendarID=5.

Can't hurt solidify their stock which has been getting good reviews lately.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:59 PM | Permalink

Google Ad Sales Exec Exits

Patrick Keane, until recently the head of advertising sales strategy at Google, has left to become executive VP and chief marketing officer at CBS Interactive. Keane will help CBS implement systems to market and sell its content on emerging media platforms and expand the company's roster of advertisers, according to a press release. Keane joined Google four years ago, having previously been a VP and senior analyst at Jupiter Research, covering the online advertising space.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:49 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Adds NOYDIR Tag

Finally we get to undo the silly descriptions the Yahoo directory editors foisted upon us.

I mean DMOZ edits were bad, but the Yahoo ones seemed like they were written by someone composing a telegram. I have about 5 or 6 descriptions that are all of 8 words....

So we can now get Yahoo to use our carefully crafted descriptions (well that is another story). The implications of these recent moves are important.

Let's get the Yahoo statements out of the way first. They released this through their blog:

We're adding support for the Meta tag called ‘NOYDIR' that will complement the ‘NOODP' Meta tag, which we already support. If you're unfamiliar, the ‘NOODP' Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages. While we continue to pull from various sources to provide the best title and abstract for a given page in search results, we realize that webmasters may still want the ability to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory. So, as promised, we're providing support for ‘NOYDIR' which will recognize the following Meta tags on your pages:

or

For pages with this tag, we will not use Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts for your URL in web search results. This will grant webmasters the ability to participate in the Yahoo! Directory Submit program and benefit from inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory, while maintaining control over URL titles and abstracts in search. This will not have any effect on the Yahoo! Directory Search experience, which will continue to use the Yahoo! Directory and title abstract information.

We are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change, and you should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. (Other regions will roll-out in the future.) This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.

There are two MAJOR points mentioned in this information.

First, we now have the ability to have our description tags used in organic results. The ability to more directly determine how people perceive us is critical for effective marketing as well as AB testing, etc. How the choice of words in the description impact rankings can now be tested directly.

Second, and more importantly, Yahoo states there will be ranking changes from this... a strong indicator that either they will no longer use the directory listing as a major impact on ranking or the description tag is being given more importance or it had impact but the directory listing kept it in check.

Either way there are changes coming and things to play with.... you have to love this industry.

Insights, impacts or comments? Jump in!

UPDATE: The great people in the Yahoo PR Department ran down some answers to a few questions for me last night...

Will using the NOYDIR tag default organic descriptions to the onpage
description if filled out? If so how many characters wuill it be
limited to?

The NOYDIR tag will take the Yahoo! dir and title out of contention, we
could still use the ODP t&d, page t&d, anchor text etc. There are no
changes to what organic description guidelines are from before

Does using the NOYDIR tag stop any link love from the directory listing
itself?

No, the directory listing link credit will still carry.

Has Yahoo checked how this may impact other search spiders when reading
the tag?

No, we also noted this on the comments section on the blog post.

Your blog entry mentions changes coming to the organic results. Does
this mean not using the tag will lower sites or will possible more
keyword rich descriptions possibly improve some listings?

This is a regular weather update related to a new index launch without
any other implied effects...

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:49 PM | Permalink

Panama from a Big Agency Perspective

Avenue A | Razorfish put Yahoo's Panama platform through the paces this month, and has shared some data from 33 search clients in an article on its Search Marketing Trends site, "Yahoo Panama First Look."

Some highlights:

  • Search Impressions – Up an average of 5%
  • Cost Per Click – Down an average of 6%
  • Click Rate – Up an average of 10%
  • Conversion Rates – Down an average of 5%
  • Overall CPA – Up an average of 6%

The agency stresses that there is still a wide variance in data across clients, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:51 PM | Permalink

Mobile, Video Search Ads Set to Grow?

After digging deeper into the results of its "State of Search Engine Marketing 2006" report, SEMPO has revealed that a majority of respondents in the North American study said they were interested in mobile and video search, but few were willing to pay more for those ads.

That's not surprising, given human nature -- if you ask someone if they'd like to pay more or less for something, I'd assume that most would choose "less." What's more interesting is the level of interest from marketers, indicating that these ad models may be farther along than some would think.

SEMPO reports that 66 percent of respondents say they would be interested in contextually targeted advertising attached to video search results. Of those marketers, 53 percent want contextual video ads, compared to 33 percent who want contextual text ads attached to video clips. For mobile, SEMPO found that 60 percent of respondents are interested in contextually targeted ads delivered to mobile search users.

Dana Todd, president of SEMPO, says she's cautiously optimistic on the future of mobile search.

"Advertisers go where the audience is interacting. In the U.S., the fact that everybody is carrying a cell phone is less important than what they're doing with it. Right now, they're using them in rudimentary ways, for communication, and for playing games and listening to music," Todd told SEW.

Todd pointed to a recent comScore study, which found that cell phone Internet usage is an activity for the young. That study found that 29 percent of respondents in the 25-34 demographic and 23 percent of 18-24 year olds currently subscribe to a cell phone Internet service, while only 13 percent of adults over 35 do so.

"Until users find it's a useful environment, we're not going to see significant play, but there's still a market there," Todd said. "This is an area where local search has the most promise. We need to look at how users are interacting with their phones, and find a way to engage them there."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:19 AM | Permalink

SEO Is Easy...and Hard

Reduced to its simplest form, SEO is a four-step process: set some ground rules; get your site right; post some great content; and earn inbound links. Sounds easy, until you try to do it. PJ Fusco offers some tips for in-house search marketers on how to go about making it work in her latest ClickZ column, DIY SEO.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:30 AM | Permalink

Step Right Up, Start A Community Site

Maybe community sites are the next wave for entrepreneurs. Now anyone can invite their extended neighbors into a closed community and begin making money, right? We wish it were that easy.

In yesterday's WSJ, there's an interesting article (subscription required) about several niche sites that grew into something meaningful. What these sites share in common is a loyal and active user base. Otherwise, they seem quite different.

Stick To Targets:

First there's QuentinsFriends.com, a marketplace site for younger New Yorkers that's akin to Craig's List. It charges membership fees and accepts members via referrals. Next is ASmallWorld.net, which helps diplomats and other travelers find each other. It's ad-based and free but also controls invitations. Finally, MothersClick.com addresses the concerns of new parents. It's also ad-based yet open for registration.

These sites are experiencing success on a niche scale. They focus on meeting the needs of members who share similar demographics and interests. People can ask questions, make posts, or participate in transactions. Perhaps it's the small-town feel that makes these sites work.

Flash back to 2005, when we were all exploring the potential targeting opportunities for vertical search. There was even going to be a vertical search destination for left-handed dog walkers, right? Maybe not, but a large variety of vertical search destinations didn't come to pass either.

Keep Them Active:

Community sites may be targeted like search sites, but the similarity ends there. These are destinations which seek far higher levels of participation. At some point, there's enough activity to keep things interesting for active users.

Reporter David Enrich says that the main obstacle to the ongoing success of niche sites is the profit motive. The balancing act between revenue and membership growth may wipe out “the niche player aura that made the sites attractive in the first place.”

However I'm not sure that community sites are more trustworthy or successful because they're smaller. Their success may hinge on sticking to their main mission of social participation, without adding extra functionality. Another reason for success may be some rate of natural turnover and freshness among the members, which keeps the sites more vibrant.

Who knows? Maybe these communities and others like them are considered hip places by their audiences now. When other hip places open, some will stagnate or close due to diminished interest in them. We have all followed the herds before.

Posted by on 1:36 AM | Permalink

Jump On The Video Distribution Bandwagon

Right now, web publishers of all stripes are busy developing video to entertain or inform visitors. The best video content engages your visitors and encourages them to spend additional time on your site.

In the rush to develop your site, you may not have focused on other traffic opportunities for your professionally-produced video. That rich video content can provide additional revenue streams outside your own domain.

In the old world order, this is called syndication. As an intellectual property holder, you sign contracts which grant licensing rights to others. In return, these licensees pay you based on where the video is shown, audience levels, specific channels, number of plays, and time periods.

In the age of YouTube, your audience is getting used to finding videos there and across the web. Thus it makes sense to solicit help from your site visitors. Encourage them to embed your videos on their own sites, blogs and pages. With ad pre-rolls and sponsorships attached to your own videos, you'll earn incremental revenue from this extended audience.

Fortunately the barriers to hosting video have fallen lately. Since you already host video on your own site, consider extending that support when it's embedded on other sites. Check out StreamingMedia.com, one of the better resources for tips and contacts.

Why go through this effort? Dan Rayburn presents a wake-up call in Broadcasting & Cable, telling publishers they should not “risk their videos' being marketed by other media outlets like bloggers and those who can drive traffic and awareness.” Publishers are advised to control their content distribution, so they can easily adjust their advertising as well.

External distribution isn't reserved for the biggest publishers anymore. It's true that some entertainment companies have been reacting to YouTube in recent weeks and going it alone. However this is an important matter for all video producers who want to maximize traffic and revenue opportunities – wherever their video appears.

Posted by on 12:58 AM | Permalink

February 27, 2007

vFlyer and "The Year of the Widget"

Online classifieds content and distribution platform vFlyer announced a new product line that could represent a shifting direction for the company. It has come out with a line of widgets that it will offer to companies and individuals to display products or inventory on their websites or blogs.

Previously, vFlyer's main product was a "virtual flyer" that let anyone create a multimedia-rich and professional looking classified listing. Rather than being a classifieds destination, It distributed these flyers out to existing classifieds marketplaces and aggregators. Up to ten flyers are free while higher price points, including a subscription, are available for larger volume sellers such as car dealerships or real estate professionals.

This was and still is an attractive seller-centric tool in a marketplace where such a thing is lacking. But the penetration possibilities are only so great according to Oliver Muoto, vice president of business development for vFlyer. Though it's a nice tool for any business or individual to establish a relatively easy and inexpensive web presence - a microsite of sorts - it doesn't address the other portion of the marketplace that is already online.

The new widgets have this segment in mind. Anyone with a website or blog can plant these widgets on their site to display products or inventory in new ways. The widgets will likely grow in number but for now mostly include photo slide shows. Monetization of the widgets will be similar to the virtual flyers according to Muoto, in that they will be free for a certain amount of products and contain various price points for upsells to new features and higher volumes.

This should gain the most traction in the real estate and autos verticals. Here, multimedia is important due to the margins and valuable leads that have forced sellers to be more progressive with online marketing (for the most part). The need to get that coveted lead in these verticals has also made promotional tools like this more price inelastic.

Muoto believes the demand in the marketplace for new functionality that is easy and cheap to integrate to any website will make this "the year of the widget". He also hopes the buyer-centric nature of these widgets will cause them to market themselves in a viral way, as each one displays the vFlyer logo and a link to go to the site and create your own.

The widgets involve simple HTML code and come with directions on how to set them up, but this extra step to actively plant a new piece of programming on your blog or website could be an adoption barrier. If the attractiveness and need for such a tool in the auto and real estate verticals is strong enough as mentioned above, it should outweigh this adoption barrier though. Much of the product's success will hinge on this.

More details can be found in the press release.

Posted by Mike Boland on 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 27, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:34 PM | Permalink

Value of Search Rankings Explained

What is that number one organic search ranking worth? A question often asked but rarely thoughtfully answered.

Stoney deGeyter gives a very thoughtful answer to the question over at Internet Search Engine Database.

Give it a read and post an opinion here.

Posted by Frank Watson on 8:55 PM | Permalink

Gmail Domain At Risk

Seems Google's Gmail domain maybe in jeopardy. Following the English court decision against Google, the British company is coming to the United States to further challenge the search engine's ownership.

Jason Lee Miller of Web Pro News outlines the story well.

Posted by Frank Watson on 8:27 PM | Permalink

Redrum Returns to NYC: Informal Gathering of Interactive & Search Marketers

We had fun meeting those of you who showed up the last time we did this, so we're doing it again next week. Rebecca Lieb has the details on the ClickZ Blog, but the short version is that if you'll be in New York next Tuesday, March 6, and feel like stopping by for a drink with other like-minded search and interactive marketing professionals, we'll be gathering at Nolita House, at 47 E. Houston St.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:35 PM | Permalink

Should You Bring Search Marketing In-House?

A common question for any company doing search marketing is whether to bring those efforts in-house. In today's SearchDay, in-house SEM Duane Forrester takes a look at what goes into making that decision, and offers some tips on how to go about putting together a team once you decide to take the plunge.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:00 PM | Permalink

Flash and HTML Text Copies = Duplicate Content?

There is a thread going in Google Groups about Flash and Getting Indexed. This discussion focuses on techniques for providing search engines an HTML text file to chew on instead of trying to parse the flash itself.

Deepa was concerned that this might be seen as a spammy duplicate content technique by the search engines. The consensus in the discussion was that this was in fact good behavior, provided that the text content matches up with the content of the flash.

Of course, the trick part is that it's not completely natural for the text content to line up exactly with the content of a movie. They are different mediums that benefit from different treatment. So there is going to be some variance in the content due to that simple fact.

Perhaps the thing to do, if you insist on having Flash on your site, is to write an HTML page about the same topic as the Flash, and target that page at users who do not have the ability to view Flash. Write the page as if you were trying to accomplish the exact same things as you are doing with the movie.

The words may differ some, but the intent would be exactly the same.

Posted by on 1:56 PM | Permalink

Is Social Search All About Consumer Conversations

Adotas columnist Adam Broitman gives an interesting overview of effective marketing methods in social search.

His discussion of new industry catch phrases such 'consumer conversations', the 'speed of search' and 'monitoring buzz' is worth a read.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:40 PM | Permalink

SEO Mind Crime? More Anti-SEO Ignorance

UK marketing firm Warrington Web Works is the latest to declare that SEO is dead. Warrington's CEO Anthony Fallon is basing this statement on the fact that he was able to quickly rank for the entirely meaningless keyword "SEO Mind Crime." While Fallon's assertions that creating relevant content is important will not be disputed, it's been argued again and again that content alone is not enough, especially in competitive industries.

Fallon's "SEO Mind Crime" takes the example of an SEO firm that guaranteed a top ten position on Google for three years, asking £15,000 (US$29,000). As has been done many times in the past, a single example of a less-than ideal SEO contract is being held up as the norm, and tarnishing the entire industry.

I'm assuming we'll see the "SEO Mind Crime" rebuttal from the SEO community in 3...2...1...

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:34 AM | Permalink

Cramer Picks Ask and Yahoo Over Google Short Term

Google is Jim Cramer's internet darling, but for the short term he announced selling some of your Google stock and taking some of the future profits from Ask and Yahoo.

Both on his television show, Mad Money, last night and on TheStreet.com, Cramer stated Google's stock was stagnating right now (though saw it as a solid long-term play) and recommended Yahoo and Ask.

Yahoo's new PPC platform, Panama, has helped increase revenues, and Ask has a good mix of online properties and solid management, Cramer said, which make both stock worth investing in right now.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:21 AM | Permalink

Ning Launches Build-Your-Own Social Network Service

Social networking startup Ning has launched "Your Own Social Network on Ning," a customizable platform that lets users pick and choose elements to add to their hosted social networks. Ning, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, launched in October 2005 with the promise of allowing anyone to create social media apps. With this new release, the company has succeeded, according to GigaOm's Om Malik.

Services include "video aggregation, photo albums, weblogs, forums, sausages and sauerkraut," quips Malik in his review of the new service, noting that the end result is "a 15-minute Social Network."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:04 AM | Permalink

Harry Potter Learns Spell To Stop Ebay

I wonder whether Kramer still considers EBay his number one internet stock (he made this announcement on Mad Money last night) - now that Harry Potter had learned the spell needed to stop EBay selling nonauthorised electronic versions of the JK Rowling books.

Indian courts ruled that EBay must cease allowing selling of the electronic versions of the Potter books which the author has never allowed.

Posted by Frank Watson on 10:57 AM | Permalink

Forbes.com Joins Quigo's Ad Network

On the heels of its glowing review in the NY Times in which it was credited with forcing Google's hand on transparency of publisher sites, contextual ad provider Quigo announced that it has signed Forbes as a distribution partner, according to ClickZ News. The multi-year, exclusive relationship with the media giant calls for the white-label delivery of content-targeted advertising using Quigo's AdSonar Network. In recent months, the company has also struck partnerships with ESPN.com, CareerBuilder.com, the New York Daily News and others.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:47 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Adds Another Rep To Help Online Forum Communities

First there was YahooSarah - an online persona who helped forum communities with announcements and assistance with YPN and Panama?Overture issues - now we also have YahooPete.

Yahoo's involvement in online communities and social networks has grown of late and the introduction of YahooPete displays further commitment on the part of Yahoo to develop social networking.

Posted by Frank Watson on 10:37 AM | Permalink

Search Engines Are Allowed to Reject Ads

A Delaware court made it clear that search engines are allowed to reject an ad as part of their protected right of free speech, according to law professor Eric Goldman. The Langdon v. Google case was brought by an advertiser whose requests to buy political ads were allegedly rejected or ignored by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft because they attacked other candidates.

Goldman believes the precedent-setting influence of the case is limited, but it should help search engines deflect future cases filed by advertisers that go against their editorial policies.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:26 AM | Permalink

February 26, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 26, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:42 PM | Permalink

Niched Portals and Vertical Search: The Catch Phrases of 2007

Seems 2007 is going to be the year of niched portals and vertical search.

Microsoft is buying Medstory, a health information search engine, and furthering their move into niched portals and vertical search. In China they have started development on a job search engine.

Yahoo is doing the same thing: business search in China, community portals covering specific audiences like Pontiac owners, investors and health sites.

Yahoo seems to be using the portal, community model with search ads as part of the monetization. Though they are trying to develop a business search engine as their primary perspective for the Chinese market.

Yahoo has created entertainment community pages for the Oscars; car fan sites using the manufacturers as support and advertiser.

This seems to be a repeating theme in the two months so far of 2007. Let's see where this all ends up.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:56 PM | Permalink

Mobile Game Site, Hovr, Using Ads to Pay For Free Games

On a twist of the old free internet access, cell phone game provider Hovr is providing free interactive games to downlaod onto your phone in return for putting ads at the beginning and end of play.

The Hovr Promise states:
No Hidden Subscriptions
No Hidden Charges
No Spam
No Selling to Third Parties
No Telemarketing

This could be popular with the huge number of children who have cell phones. Like ringtones, kids love games for their phones. To make them interactive uses part of the popularity of the PSP - beating your friends online. Which advertisers can monetize the space will be the test.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:29 PM | Permalink

Google Mixes Videos in Organic Result

Looks like Google is experimenting with including videos in the organic results. Razvan Antonescu while searching in Google for “nightwish videos,” was served a Plusbox with a link reading “show video," in the search results right along with the textual snippet from the Google Video entry. He includes a screenshot of the results showing the video delivered right in with the serps. Plusboxes have been used previously for finance and maps. They are a good way for users to navigate to the video (or other type of) content without having to shift to the specialized engine. I was unable to replicate Razvan's results but will be on the lookout for additional instances.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 3:33 PM | Permalink

Avinash Kaushik Interview

I recently had the opportunity to conduct a phone interview of Avinash Kaushik. Avinash provides his usual clear focus on using web analytics as a tool to grow your business.

From an SEO perspective, getting clear data about what's happening on your site can be a very powerful way to focus your efforts. For example, I worked on one site that knew that they were getting half of their business from one set of pages, and drew the conclusion that they should continue to focus on the search terms that were driving the most traffic to those pages.

Using Web Analytics, I was able to show them that the most common search terms for those pages were not the terms that were driving the business. The had, in fact, been trying to improve their results on search terms that were not growing their business.

Avinash is extremely knowledgeable about using web analytics as a tool, and offers a bunch of great tips to use those tools more effectily. He also has a great blog on the topic of analytics.

Posted by on 3:00 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Acquires Medical Search Provider

The New York Times reports that Microsoft has agreed to acquire MedStory, Inc., a Foster City based start-up. MedStory has built it's own search engine focused on the medical space. They use AI methods to scan medical journals, government documents, and data available on the Internet.

This marks the next step in Microsoft's strategy to expand their presence in the health care market. Last year Microsoft acquired Azyxxi, a software system for quick display and retrieval of patient information from multiple sources including scanned documents, X-rays, M.R.I. scans and ultrasound images.

I would expect that you would see much more of this from Microsoft. It's a great area for them to focus on, as it allows them to build their overall search market share through vertical search building blocks.

Posted by on 2:35 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Finance Carries Article Calling For Semel's Replacement

Just like the advertisers who cannot filter publisher partner ads, Yahoo Finance is running an Seeking Alpha article calling for the replacement of their CEO Terry Semel.

The article details a few of the faux pas Yahoo! has made during Semel's tenure.

Not buying Google in 2002 may be the biggest, but Seeking Alpha's Plan B is a fairly detailled article of missteps made by Yahoo over the past six years.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:50 PM | Permalink

MSN Rectifies CPC Bug

Microsoft adCenter fixed the bug that boosted many people's CPC late last week, a company employee said today.

All CPC and billing errors have been corrected, according to the Microsoft employee. "The problems on the backend have been fixed and all accounts should be credited back the overcharges."

We will keep everyone posted on any further information from MSN and anyone having problems should post them in the forums so the adCenter rep can run them down.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:31 PM | Permalink

NY Times: Google Content Will Report Publishers, Allow Separate Bidding

The New York Times reported today that Google will soon allow advertisers separate bidding for individual publishing partner sites.

Citing Kim Malone, director of online sales and operations for Google AdSense, NYT stated "in the next few months, Google's advertiser reports will begin listing the sites where each ad runs, Ms. Malone said. She added that advertisers on the Google networks would soon be able to bid on contextual ads on particular Web sites rather than simply buying keywords that appeared across Google's entire network."

This change in the information Google will provide their advertisers should have a huge impact on which sites many advertisers elect to bid on.

The NYT article was outlining the transparency of small engine Quigo.com that already offers this feature. Many of the smaller engines have offered this feature for some time, but Google had never opened up to allow insights into individual publishing partners; the content program was in or out - no options.

This new change will be interesting to watch. If some of their publishers are eventually dropped due to lack of advertiser interest where they end up could be future problems for other engines.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:10 AM | Permalink

comScore Defines Panama Effects

ComScore Networks has found that Yahoo's new ranking model has increased click through rates on its ads, at least initially. The study, based on the online behavior of comScore's U.S. sample of 1 million Internet users, compared the first two weeks after the launch of the ranking model to the previous week, and found a 5-pecent lift the first week, and a 9-percent lift in CTR the second week.

ComScore also found that Yahoo's search ads are gaining ground as a percentage of total clicks. Prior to the Panama launch, ads held 10.1 percent of clicks, which increased to 10.6 percent of total click volume in the week ending February 11 and 11.1 percent in the week ending February 18.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:10 AM | Permalink

SEMPO Board Named

This year's SEMPO elections are complete, and a new board of directors for 2007 has been named:

  • Chris Boggs, Avenue A/Razorfish
  • Massimo Burgio, Global Search Interactive
  • Fionn Downhill, Elixir Systems
  • Dave Fall, DoubleClick Inc.
  • Duane Forrester, Sports Direct
  • Sara Holoubek, free agent consultant
  • Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro
  • Bill Hunt, Global Strategies International
  • Kevin Lee, Did-It
  • Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing
  • Tanya Rietze, Hewlett-Packard
  • Dana Todd, SiteLab
  • Dave Williams, 360i

The 13 board members were picked by SEMPO members from a record 37 candidates. Eight members are returning from last year: Boggs, Holoubek, Hotchkiss, Hunt, Lee, Pruitt, Todd, and Williams. The remaining five are new to the board this year. One-year terms for board members will begin in mid-March, when it will elect officers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:10 AM | Permalink

February 25, 2007

Blinkx offers a way to search the contents of Web videos

Jason Pontin of The New York Times has written a feature story about Blinkx today entitled, "Millions of videos, and now a way to search inside them." Among the interesting factoids in the article is this one: "Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England."

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 1:29 PM | Permalink

February 23, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 23, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:39 PM | Permalink

SES London Cartoon Review

Hats off once again to the Rebecca Kelly over at SeoMoz for her great cartoon of the real conference.

Good reason to get you to all the conferences - put them together as a book. Great follow up to the Super Proposal.

New York will make a great next chapter! See you there.

Posted by Frank Watson on 7:59 PM | Permalink

Skype's One-Two Punch

Skype is on a roll this week.

First its Joost online video site signed a deal with Viacom to fill the massive void left when the media giant pulled over 100,000 clips (Daily Show, Colbert Report, MTV) from YouTube. The unsatisfied demand for this content now places Joost in a nice spot.

Yesterday Skype rolled out Skype 3.1 Beta for Windows which allows users to search for local businesses and call them.

Why is this important? This is the first step in a product evolution that could take Skype beyond just being a VoIP calling platform. In other words, it's the first sign of local search that could lead to a more diversified lineup and possible ad models around pay-per-call. The new version also has a module for reading and contributing user reviews, a concept that continues to get a great deal of attention for it's value generating potential.

From a pure product standpoint, the local search capability is a nice add-on to Skype's core offering.The extra step required to go out and buy a headset or computer mic is one of the things that has kept Skype languishing somewhere between early adoption and mainstream. Aside from companies like Vonage that let you use your existing phone, this has been a challenge with VoIP adoption for a some time.

That should change however if Skype keeps doing what its doing. Given its installed base and product rollouts, it's be a company to watch. More on the new version at Sebastien Provencher's Praized Blog or directly on the Skype Blog.

Posted by Mike Boland on 5:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

EFF Backs Google Trademark Advertising Methods

Google's allowing of advertising on trademarked keywords has received the support of the civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A Federal Appelate Court will decide if Google can allow advertisers to use trademarked terms as keywords so long as they are not mentioned in the actual ads.

Similar to the case dismissed against Geico, Rescuecom continued its legal battle and went to a Federal appelate court which should reach an opinion very soon.

The EFF supports Google as they see it as a part of first amendment rights.

MediaPost reporteds that in a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week, the EFF argues that there's more at stake than just competition between business rivals. The EFF makes the case that Google's policy of allowing people to purchase trademarked names also protects free speech rights.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:01 PM | Permalink

Marchex Adds Conversion Tracking

Marchex, the company that runs Enhance Interactive and the Marchex Content Network announced it will be adding conversion tracking to its PPC advertising platform.

Marchex's new conversion tracking feature allows advertisers to easily designate and track five different types of conversions, including i) sales; ii) leads; iii) sign-ups; iv) views of key pages and v) clicks on specific links on designated pages. It also enables advertisers to better track performance by keywords and make modifications to their campaigns to improve their conversion rate and ROI, the company's press release explained.

The updated reporting tools and improvements to the user interface in the account management system (AMS) are designed to help advertisers more quickly and easily access key campaign performance data and make modifications to their campaigns. Advertisers can download reports based on account, campaign and keyword performance into Excel or .csv formats, while new time filters make it easier for advertisers to compare performance data over different time periods. Improved 'saved report' functionality makes it easier for advertisers to find the exact saved report they want, based on selected accounts, campaigns or time periods.

In addition, Marchex updated the keyword editing functionality and navigation within the AMS user interface, while expanding the results display, making it easier for advertisers with large keyword lists and several campaigns to manage multiple changes to specific keywords or advertisements.

"The combination of conversion tracking, new reporting tools and improvements to the account management system user interface will better enable our advertisers, particularly large advertisers, to optimize their performance of their campaigns and better assess their ROI on our networks," said Scott Greenberg, Marchex SVP of Advertising Services. "These are important steps in our initiative to deliver high quality traffic to our advertisers and to arm them with more of the tools and information they need to maximize and measure their campaigns."

Conversion tracking is free to Enhance Interactive and Marchex Network advertisers and enables them to view conversion data by campaign, advertisement and keyword, all available through the AMS. This includes detailed instructions on how to easily install conversion tracking.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:33 PM | Permalink

Veritas Pays $30 Million To Settle AOL Fraud Case

The SEC will receive $30 million from Veritas to settle the AOL advertising fraud case.

AOL and Veritas were found by the SEC to have inflated advertising sales numbers by as much as $20 million.

AOL paid the SEC $200 million in 2005 to settle their part of the case.

AOL paid the larger amount due to greater misconduct and larger accounting exaggerations, the SEC stated.

Veritas “artificially inflated reported revenues in connection with a $20 million round-trip transaction with America Online,” and “to produce what it believed were exceptional or ‘museum quality' financial results, Veritas systematically manipulated its financial results through 2002 by periodically recording and maintaining excess accrued liabilities or cushions in its accrual accounts,” Adotas reported.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:58 PM | Permalink

Adify To Provide Ads for Washington Post, Newsweek

Adify's "Build Your Own Network" ad platform will be used by the Washington Post and Newsweek for their online publications.

The company will provide advertisers for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive blogroll initiative.

Jeff Burkett, director of business development for WPNI, said, “This type of endeavor – combining our ad space with that of third-party publishers into new ad units – is a media industry first and we sought a partner that could remove the complexity of quickly getting it off the ground. With Adify, we started with a solid foundation and needed only to focus on our core competencies of identifying the right content for our readership and attracting advertisers.”

Larry Braitman, Co-founder and CEO of Adify, added, “In a highly fragmented media environment, established media brands like Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive have a unique opportunity to help consumers discover new, high quality third-party content that builds on the value they already deliver. By leveraging Adify's Build Your Own Network platform, these brands can extend this value and create exciting new advertising offerings, while enabling small publishers to reach new readers and advertisers.”

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:49 PM | Permalink

Is Google Gearing Up For Assault On Traditional Media?

Okay I was asked to fill out a survey from Google today. We all get them from various places, sometimes we fill them out other times we hit delete...

Today I thought okay I have a few minutes and I am glad I did. It was for a study of advertising across traditional media and hints at the tools and methods Google may be unvieling.

They gathered info on radio, tv and print ad costs, design costs, regularity of use and other fun things.

They obviously have named some of these areas and are using the survey to further develop features. The Creative Market Place seems to concentrate on design costs and ask if you would use a bid system to outsource design work to creative agencies.

The Online Ad-Creative Tool "let's you create and customize your ads yourself".

All areas surveyed asked about usage if integrated with AdWords. The pricing feelers covered creating, running and managing traditional media.

Guess Google is gearing up to really take on traditional media.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:16 PM | Permalink

Microsoft adCenter System Error Causing High CPC Jumps

Posters at the DigitalPoint forum spotted a major glitch in the MSN adCenter. I contacted my reps and they were well aware of the situation.

I was told they will not be charging the accounts these overbidded amounts. Obviously - but I was impressed with the response time and knowledge of the situation.

MSN had this info to share:

Description:

A number of customers have very high Average CPC and spend amounts in adCenter over the last 24 hours which are much above their bid amounts for keywords. This seems to be caused by a system error that we are working on fixing currently.

Status report:

This issue is being worked on by the adCenter team as top priority - No action is needed at this time

Effect/Impact on users:

Users may see high Avg CPC and spend amounts over the last 24 hours.


How long it takes to fix now will be the true litmus test.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:09 PM | Permalink

11 Guidelines for Getting Authoritative Links

This post will offer 11 guidelines for getting authoritative links. Authoritative links bring value to your web promotion strategy that far exceeds their value on the surface. There is plenty of evidence that search engines will place more value on out bound links from sites that they consider authoritative.

However, these links are much harder to get. I am talking about getting links from very high value sites, such as government sites, education sites, news sites, and other comparable sites. Note that authority does not come solely from having .gov or .edu in your domain, it comes with the nature of the sites linking to the site.

However, .gov and .edu sites tend to have more authoritative content, so more sites are likely to link to them, and this does eventually establish them as more authoritative. But, sites can be authoritative without having a .gov or .edu domain.

One great objective for many webmasters, is to make their sites authoritative. You can't do that without getting other authoritative sites to link to you. Of course, you can't get authoritative sites to link to you unless you have great content.

But this post is not about content, it's about getting authoritative links to your site. Here are the 11 guidelines:

  1. Focus on links from authoritative sites that are relevant.
  2. Be prepared for the fact that success in a campaign to get a link from an authoritative site might take many months.
  3. Be prepared for your strategies to fail more often than they succeed. If you do a really good job, perhaps 1 in 4 of your campaigns will work.
  4. Be prepared to invest in building a relationship. Your first communications with the authoritative site may not include a request for a link.
  5. It's a campaign. You need a strategy, and it may have multiple steps. Be prepared to invest in the strategy to make it work
  6. Know that they won't link to you because they want to help you make money
  7. Know that they will link to your site because your content is valuable to their users (and because they actually care about their users).
  8. Meet their needs.
  9. Study their needs. Figure out what they need, and then figure out which of their needs you can meet. One way to do this is to review things written in the past by key contacts at the site. They may have expressed a need, such as "I wish I knew how to ...", "The web needs a resource that ...", etc.
  10. Be opportunistic. Your target site may identify a need that you can address. Jump on it as quickly as you can, and then fill the need completely.
  11. Invest more in your first 2 or 3 killer links than you will in the ones that follow it. Your first authoritative link will simplify obtaining the ones that will come later, as that endorsement makes all the difference in the world.

This set of guidelines is not meant to be comprehensive, but is intended to help you think about the investment you make when you pursue an authoritative link. The more you view it like a business development process, the better off you are. Sometimes the process can go quite quickly, and that's great. And, sometimes it will be far more effort. But if you are in it for the long haul, the payoff you get in return for your effort is large.

Posted by on 10:00 AM | Permalink

Search Engine Advertisers' Wish List

In his latest ClickZ column, Kevin Lee has compiled a Search Engine Wish List -- changes that search engines could implement to make PPC search advertisers' lives easier. The first installment includes requests for ad-click tracking in Yahoo, CPC behavioral search ads in all engines, and PPC video ads. He's compiling more requests, so feel free to add yours in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:07 AM | Permalink

February 22, 2007

Yahoo! Gives 2nd SearchLight Award

So amid the restructuring Yahoo! had time to give out the second annual SearchLight awards today.

As their press release states:

The Yahoo! 2nd Annual Searchlight Award winner is Avenue A|Razorfish for their “Your Choice, Your Chase” campaign! Avenue A|Razorfish was a finalist last year at the first-ever Searchlight Awards. This year, Senior Search Account Manager Steve Capone provided solid research to show the benefits of using broad keywords to drive brand awareness for Chase. The campaign also focused on how the Chase microsite delivered the right product with the right rewards to interested customers. Avenue A|Razorfish is an interactive services firm that helps companies use the online channel as a marketing and business tool.

Not surprising since the other three spent very little time discussing how search was part of their overall campaigns.....

I voted for AvenueA/RazorFish .... they gave us search details.

The award - a spotlight similar to last year's designed by West Coast Custom (of Pimp My Ride fame) - comes with a party at the winning agency and some joint advertising with Yahoo.

The event was fun. The four finalists of 30 agencies that submitted entries included NeoSearch who ran the Sprint/Tallladega Nights promotion with a budget of $160,000 (though they only spent under $2,500 on search), Special K - the cereal that is all about weight loss and has joined the numerous companies creating niched portals at Yahoo, and Lexus LS and Team One whose clever use of the Yahoo Home Page to show the car's ability to parallel park with an intertestial that ran across the page then parked itself were all informative.

Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group, in her keynote address, gave the audience a great overview of where the search industry is and where it needs to look to the future.

Using the opening comments of VP of Yahoo Agency Development Ron Belanger's to the old Virginia Slims ad "we've come a long way, baby", Ms Desmond noted that the first 21st century marketing tool was search.

"Optimize, convert and report", Desmond explained need to be the goals of the internet marketers of the future. "Search is more than direct response", she explained, "the high tech, on demand era is here".

The most important question is "is our imagination big enough for this world," Desmond said. "Take risks," she stated and quoting Wayne Gretzsky went on to say "you will miss 100% of the shots you do not try".

Desmond told the audience to embrace innovation and change. Convert and leverage data to produce powerful keywords for search and establish holistic goals, she said.

Search and online analytics are now being used to impact car design and assembly line production, Desmond said. "Optimize and convert" and repeat the process,she told the audience, "search is more than direct reponse".

The opening address was insightful for a self admitted non-search expert.

Desmond asked her staff to describe the search industry in relation to advertsing and got some interesting responses.

Five were given. The first group saw search as a wise old sage with years of experience (guess they were new to the space). The second thought of a school age child soaking up knowledge. Third was search as a young professional - not fully matured but eager to grow.

The fourth group thought search was the Greek God Mercury - the ominipresent messenger. The final group saw search as a toddler with many stages of growth to go.

Yahoo's recognition of the importance of search is commendable. Their promotion of these awards helps agencies trying to convert the holdovers from old methods of advertising.

Search has not been pushed aside by Yahoo just yet. Here's hoping there is a third SearchLight award.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:10 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 22, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:00 PM | Permalink

Local Search Partnerships of the Day

Today saw a few notable partnership announcements in the local search space. More specifically in local online classifieds and in mobile local search.

-- First, Tellme announced this morning that it will expand its mobile voice platform to allow mobile search application developers to build products that integrate voice and visual search. Voice recognition technology developers TuVox and Viecore were also named as partners that will work on such applications.

This has the potential to bring together the ease of speaking, and of seeing results on a screen. One of the challenges in mobile search is designing compelling products, given hardware restrictions such as small keypads. So the ability to speak search queries or business lookups can be a way to sidestep this challenge and raise adoption levels.

Conversely, when results are returned, sometimes its easier to see them on a mobile screen than it is to hear them - particularly if the information can be saved on the device (rather than written down) and in turn used to dial a business or interact in other interesting ways such as getting directions or coupons.

40 million people use Tellme every month, including its voice portal and free (downloadable) beta product Tellme by Mobile. These are based on the VoiceXML 2.0 protocol that makes internet data available on mobile devices via voice applications. New "multimodal" capabilities should expand the company's overall user base, by opening the door for new partnerships to be formed and functionality to be built.

This should be a step towards bringing the company's voice search capabilities together with other mobile applications, as the enigmatic mobile local search area continues to see experimentation with new and interesting ways to appeal to consumers and build ad models.


-- Second, fresh off its partnership with Nokia last week, AdStar has partnered with classifieds aggregator Edgeio.

Edgieo will use AdStar's software to offer print advertising upsells (on behalf of newspapers) to its new classifieds listings boards marketplace, a free listings source. Basically, this becomes a channel for for newspapers to upsell print ads to anyone going to Edgio to post free listings.

As many newspaper continue to look for ways to monetize online classifieds, creating free classifieds destinations with print upsell possibilities is one way to go about it. AdStar has created another creative way that positions itself as a value-added channel for its newspaper clients to reach a larger audience of classifieds sellers. This strengthens AdStar's value proposition and its profile as a distribution source for print, online and (as of last week) mobile ads.

For Edgeio, this is an added service it can use to attract additional traffic and listings, as content aggregation is a cornerstone of its business. It gets its content from a combination of listings that people publish directly to its site; and aggregated listings scraped (by permission) from bloggers, individuals and website developers that have listings on their own sites. It currently has about 100 million listings from 162 countries.

Financial terms weren't disclosed but the AdStar integration is scheduled to be completed in the second quarter. More from the press release.

Posted by Mike Boland on 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More Ads for MySpace

Fox Interactive Media today announced that it has acquired Strategic Data Corporation (SDC) an interactive advertising technology company. This ad-serving technology will enable Fox to deliver highly-targeted graphical performance-based advertising to its network which includes MySpace. Pete Cashmore notes that this acquisition means that more graphical ads will appear on MySpace pages. Currently MySpace has an advertising deal with Google for text-based ads.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 6:05 PM | Permalink

Search Biz Lends A Hand

In the analytics area, the big search and portal businesses are lending a hand to the display ad marketplace.

It makes economic sense. Jupiter Research reports online display revenues of $5.8 billion and search market revenues of $6.5 billion during 2006.

Let's look at how we're helping marketers analyze behaviors and optimize their display ad results.

In the March issue of Business 2.0, there's an excellent overview called “The Quest for the Perfect Online Ad.” (Print edition.)

Harnessing Behaviors:

In the article, we are reminded that people only conduct searches around 5% of the time. During the remaining 95% of time online, people reveal their interests through additional browsing behaviors. While standard searches have been put to good use, these other behaviors can be harnessed more effectively.

Display advertisers can target people based on their click streams, or all the pages they are visiting across domains. If someone is looking around for cars, then advertisers can reach her in many more places.

Using Cookies:

Of course, cookies make this possible. Yahoo, AOL and MSN all set cookies to follow your (actually your computer's) surfing behaviors. Others suppliers like Tacoda and Revenue Science operate in a similar way with tags.

At Google, Gokul Rajaram says they are not applying cookies because they don't want to keep track of individual users. They rely on comScore analytics for targeting audiences overall, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

Improving Targets:

With the behaviors collected, however, it's possible to show display ads in a far more sophisticated fashion. Marketers can target audiences based on specific interests rather than on a domain basis. The audiences they are reaching don't seem to be complaining, either.

It's been several years in the making, but these analytics are finally taking off. According to Carla Hendra, co-CEO of Ogilvy North America, “Marketers now all have to understand the power of algorithms.” Since Ogilvy can target and also adjust ads quickly, she says that optimized ads perform up to 30% better than status quo.

At this juncture, behavioral and analytical power may re-ignite the display marketplace and the billions at stake. We'll be watching.

Posted by on 5:50 PM | Permalink

Yahoo!, Google and Bloglines Dominate Web-based RSS Reader Market

Recent discussions on changes in RSS subscriber reporting at FeedBurner as a result of Google's starting to report Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers have prompted Rick Klau at FeedBurner to post an analysis of how people are reading feeds and interacting with them.

The FeedBurner analysis is based on 604,533 feeds managed by FeedBurner on behalf of 347,000 bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers. FeedBurner notes that the service sees more than 3,000 feed reading clients on a regular basis. There is adequate data in a sample of this size to gauge the impact of the various aggregators whose subscriber data FeedBurner publishes.

Because FeedBurner provides stats on item views and clicks, the service can provide a sense of audience engagement level based on the client used. Are users of one client reading the posts more than users with a different client? Are these users clicking back to the original site in smaller or greater numbers? Rick Klau of FeedBurner addresses these issues in an extended post filled with documentation. He notes that:

Looking at engagement across the top web-based aggregators, several top readers are driving the lion's share of clicks and views back to our publishers' content.
In clicks, Yahoo! (54%) leads the pack. This is not surprising since users of Yahoo! are presented just headlines with links to the content. My Yahoo!, Google Reader/Personalized Homepage, Bloglines and Netvibes - account for 95% of all web aggregator clicks to FeedBurner publisher's content.

For views the FeedBurner sample shows that Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator and Netvibes - account for 98% of all item views. It should be noted that how an aggregator chooses to display a feed in the reader can influence the number of views recorded.

There are several conclusions can be drawn from this data. First, the Google Reader has rapidly grabbed a significant share of the market. The intricacy of the data shows that there are number of variables that must be taken into consideration in reporting feed consumption. Finally, this post just looks at users consuming feeds in Web-based aggregators. Feeds are so flexible that these readers just cover a small portion of the consumption methods available. Today readers consume content in a number of different places -- directly from the content provider's site, through a feed-reading client, within a widget, via resyndicated headlines on another site, or on a social-networking site.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 5:18 PM | Permalink

Google Launching Paid Enterprise Edition of Apps

Just have to go to the website and see.


Communicate...
Give your users Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk accounts that use your own custom domain, helping them to stay connected and work together more effectively.

Collaborate and publish...
Docs & Spreadsheets lets users share files and collaborate in real-time. The Start Page is the first place your users will look to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web.

...and get on with business.
It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to install or download, and minimal setup and maintenance. You can get up and running quickly, even if you don't have technical resources.

New! Try Google Apps Premier Edition for free through April 30th, 2007.

This is interesting as they are starting to monetise the widgets they had been giving away for free. This one was obvious as they are never going to knock the big boys off this tree so they might as well get some income now.

I wonder when they start asking for money for Google Analytics.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:21 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Launching Separate Content Advertising Platform

Update: Yahoo emailed me to say this is only being offered in Europe right now.

Yahoo is launching a separate content platform, according to the email I received earlier today.

The email states:

In the next coming months, Yahoo! Search Marketing will introduce a new serving platform for Content Match. This new platform is designed to improve listing relevance, power the Yahoo! Search Marketing Distribution Network, and improve the end-user experience.

The new Content Match platform includes an improved matching algorithm and real-time optimization that, in addition to bid, will consider additional relevancy factors like keywords, title and description to determine your listing position.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:17 PM | Permalink

Google Adds Non-search Revenue Stream

Google today launched its "Google Apps Premier Edition," a subscription-based offering of its office/productivity apps, including webmail, calendar, IM, docs and spreadsheets. It's being breathlessly touted as an assault on Microsoft, which it may be -- in five years. Right now, it's just another revenue stream for Google, which is handy to have when your investors are breathing down your neck demanding constant growth.

I suppose there's an argument that these applications fit Google's stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but I'm not so sure. That's not to say it's a bad idea, or that it won't end up being profitable for Google. It may just mean it's time to update the oft-repeated mission statement.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:09 PM | Permalink

BusinessWeek: Search Ads Getting Too Pricey

In the February/March editon BusinessWeek's SmallBiz publication, Robert Hof reports a "fallout from a new online ad rush" where commerce giants are increasingly muscling out smaller businesses from the ad pool.

Hof's article (available by subscription only) is mostly a rehashed subject on bigger chain businesses getting more into PPC search ad space, doing large-scale keyword buys, driving up prices that either push out smaller businesses that don't do research and monitor advanced search terms, and companies mulling either diverting resources to other online areas or going back to traditional.

Examples listed of small-to-medium size online retailers (around a hundred employees) with PPC busts include BabyAge, Ice.com, and eBags. Also quotes DoubleClick statistic of a 31% average price jump in the 3rd quarter of 2006 from the previous year, but does not specify if that figure relates to the entire PPC industry or just for these selected businesses. (BabyAge mentioned an 80+% increase over last year for their own 'favorite keywords.')

Hof writes that one solution for advertisers is "buying far fewer keywords and phrases," and listing specific product names that are less pricey. However, he fails to make the distinction between quantity and quality, just assuming that less keywords is the solution. Less may be better for some after seeing which keywords have the best ROI and eliminating the poorer performing ones, but there are many specific product terms that can be even more pricey than general ones, based not just on popularity but on what the PPC engines know what they are worth to entreprenuers. (Which is why even starting bidding is considerably higher for some terms than others.) Hof also fails to mention the strategy of tail-end searches, which can yield more overall traffic – when going deep enough – (and considerably better ROI) than general terms.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo! Sings The News - Will Investors Sing the Blues

Singing newscasters? Why not just buy the Naked News - or is that next?

Is something wrong at Yahoo! ? Have the patients taken over the asylum?

There have been so many changes and moves going on at Yahoo lately that you need a dance card to keep track.

Okay every company restructures - and Yahoo has done that a couple of times recently (thanks to whoever leaked the memo giving a better idea of what motivated things over the past couple of months).

Staff are being juggled, people are leaving - okay.

Yahoo is pushing search into a corner - well in the case of International (for now) it is being combined with the media sales division (sort of like how MSN has been doing it).

In China they are moving to a business search engine - so niched search seems to be getting tested. If it succeeds in Asia watch for Europe and then the US to follow suit. Hey it is about being profitable, right.... leave the egos at the door and don't screw with the stock price!

Adapting the popularity and future potential of social networking, Yahoo has started some creative niched social portals. The Pontiac users group is an interesting case study (I have an article to write about this and will post it soon). The concept is a solid one that employs many of the Web 2.0 elements.

The stock price has been up and down lately - so I think investors would love to see a little unity and direction.

Hey maybe the crooner can sign the stock prices - at least that way they sound better!!!

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:17 PM | Permalink

Google Quality Score Now Live

The quality score update to Google's ad ranking algorithm announced last week is now live, according to the Inside AdWords blog. That means that within the next four days, minimum CPC rates for all ads have now been re-calculated with the new weighting system applied for elements like historical performance of a given keyword, relevance of keyword to ad text, landing page quality, and other factors.

While all of these factors have been incorporated into the ranking system for more than a year, the new algorithm is expected to be more lenient on new ads, without historical data, while also being harsher on ads in other areas.

Advertisers were given an opportunity to preview the effects last week, when Google added a new column to the advertiser interface. Anyone who has not yet added that column should do so now, since the changes are live and affecting your campaigns.

For those seeing higher minimum bids, Google suggests, "if you notice that the minimum bid increases for a number of your keywords, you may want to consider optimizing your ad group to make it more relevant or deleting the keywords that have high minimum bids."

Soon after Google announced the upcoming changes last week, several advertisers began reporting significantly increased minimum bids on some campaigns. Google assured advertisers those problems were unrelated to the new ad ranking algorithm, and were unrelated technical glitches, which were resolved the next day.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:25 AM | Permalink

Lighten Up, Dear Video Advertiser

Given how advertisers behave on TV, maybe it's time for them to lighten up. There are risks and just rewards when advertising online, in the user-controlled world. Check out how one video newcomer addresses their concerns.

The online environment is certainly no worse than TV shows, says Veoh Networks CEO Dmitry Shapiro in a recent Ad Age interview (subscription required). Veoh is a new destination for user videos, which seeks branded advertisers who might typically hesitate to make buys.

Ad Age Digital: You're launching with Dr Pepper as an advertiser. Yet advertisers are nervous about being next to questionable user-generated content. Have you solved that problem?

Mr. Shapiro: The "being next to stuff" [excuse] I always find silly. On the web you're next to everything. I understand what people mean by being next to, but I guess I just don't believe it. Look at "Fear Factor." Their advertisers know they're going to be next to pretty nasty stuff, but they're still buying ads in it.

Of course, most video content isn't salacious or offensive. There's a plethora of stupid human and pet tricks, and much more. At this stage, the next-to-video advertisers mainly struggle with making targeted buys in an uncontrolled environment.

Our judgment? Savvy advertisers should lighten up for another reason. They still know who they're generally reaching, where they're placing ads, and how many users or visitors they've reached. All very traditional values delivered in the user-controlled world.

Posted by on 10:57 AM | Permalink

Krugle Adds Microsoft CodePlex to its Index

Krugle seems to be on a roll of late. Hot on the heels of their announcement about providing code search integrated into the Yahoo! Developer network, Krugle has now announced that they are working together with Microsoft.

In this new arrangement, Krugle has added to it's index the code from Microsoft's shared and open source initiatives. These initiatives, known as Microsoft CodePlex include more than 500 projects.

The addition of CodePlex expands upon the already rich variety of open source projects searchable by Krugle. As far as I know, no other search platform is able to search through CodePlex. Krugle also provides contextual search, so search results include reference information on the projects, and also can present source code in a context sensitve manner.

Posted by on 9:35 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 21, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:05 PM | Permalink

Local Search Gets its Mojo Working

Lately, there has been a clear trend towards more ratings and reviews in online Yellow Pages. Though letting users write reviews can sometimes be at odds with retaining paying advertisers (more on this concept at The Kelsey Group Blog), they can help online Yellow Pages build deeper content and stay competitive with search giants that continue to build out comprehensive local offerings. The benefits can also include viral marketing and stickiness that come with the creation of community and trust in peer generated content.

So in the past month alone we've seen reviews launched by Yellowpages.com and a new reviews spotlight program added to Superpages' existing reviews program.

Then today, MojoPages launched. The site combines traditional online yellow pages listing with social media features such as discussion forums and ability view and post pictures and video of local businesses.

The nature of online Yellow Pages listings make them naturally conducive to these forms of media, but the challenge MojoPages will face will be to motivate the critical mass of user participation to make this work. This has been proven challenging for local search destinations built on user generated content such as Yelp, InsiderPages and Judy's Book.

The company claims to have a "strong following of early adopters" already in place, but it will have to prove this outside of the context of a press release. The additional challenge it will face is to not only motivate reviews and recommendations like the aforementioned sites, but to rely on internet yellow pages users' yet-to-be-proven proclivities for posting - or even watching - video and pictures of businesses.

But MojoPages seems to be the first to bring together all of these elements in one place within the IYP space, so it will be interesting to see how it does. The space certainly needs experimentation and new models like this to be pushed out in order to raise adoption and awareness of the possibilities for multimedia-rich local search applications.

More can be found in the press release, Search Engine Land; and more on video and online directories from Michael Taylor at The Kelsey Group.

Posted by Mike Boland on 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sproose to show 'subject expert' information in search results

Bob Pack, CEO for Sproose, a personalized social networking search engine with user-ranked results, spent some time with me in an interview, detailing his company's plans for a 'Wiki-style subject expert social networking system' to be included in Sproose's search results pages.

"The subject expert will be able to have a Wiki-style page of information based on the topic or keyword." explains Bob. "That person will become a subject expert for that keyword or topic. Others will be able to join, write and edit about that keyword or topic. That information will be tied into web keyword search."

"For example, when you do a keyword search for ‘mustang cars' – you not only get a web index of search results; you'll get the subject expert's information, where the users in the Sproose community can contribute self-published information… That is something in the next phase of our social networking aspect more than just search, but it does allow users to contribute to the search.”

Pack plans for the new system to be rolled out over the next 90 days.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft Consumer Intention Tool Rocks!

Okay this has been covered - the various tools Microsoft has over at their lab. But I had a chance to play around with the Consumer Intention Detection Tool and I really like this one.

I does not always give you what you are expecting but then again there are times when what we think should be true sometimes isn't.

Do a search of queries and you see rental has over 98% conversion rate... while other terms like trading drop to around 50%. I think if you have a huge list of words and wanted to start with just a handful I would put them through this tool and run the ones with the best numbers.

Hey you need some criteria for the choice and this is as good as any other.

If you have some comments feel free to give me your viewpoint.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:01 PM | Permalink

Google Looks at Human Brain Algorithm

At the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference Larry Page commented , that the human brain algorithm is a simple one.

Guess Google is really pushing forward with its studies into Artifical Intelligence - so now we have to wonder if the Google future is going to be an "AI" world or a "Terminator" world.

I think it will be time to run to the mountains if they launch the first robot and it looks like California Governor Arnold.....

Imagine a robot armed just with Google tools.... today it would be more than half way to the Terminator model.... we should be keeping an eye on their future company purchases.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:22 PM | Permalink

European Countries Plan to Track Net Use

Europeans may soon find they cannot be anonymous on the web anymore.

According to News.com, Germany and other European countries are looking to make it necessary to use proper identification to establish an email or internet account. This is also expanding to cell phones - where I guess the prepaid will still have to have government id to purchase.

I know George Orwell set 1984 in an amalgamated Europe and America - but it looks like the European side is going over to the 'dark side' first.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:54 AM | Permalink

What is the Value of a Link?

WebmasterWorld has a nice thread going about the value of different types of links. The thread starts with the question "what's a link worth to you in $?". It's an excellent question, and the answers are varied.

Although it appeared to be originally focused on the price you would pay to buy a link, a surprising number of people came back and pushed back on the notion, saying that it was better to focus on developing natural links. Pageoneresults has the following comment:

I look at it from the opposite direction. How much am I willing to pay for something that my visitors are going to appreciate, utilize and possibly link to?
For me, natural links are the ones I'm after. The paid links are a moving target, here today, gone tomorrow. Usually short lived and high maintenance.

Clearly he is focused on the longer term development of his web properties. This is an important distinction to make in your web promotion strategy. If you are in a competitive space, the high value authoritative links are the ones you want and need. Chances are that you can't purchase these with advertising dollars, and even if you can, they will be too high profile to carry any value for long.

But pursuing natural links still costs money. The time and money you spend developing high quality content, and developing relationships with the sites that you are targeting for in bound links is also an expense. Would you spend 10 hours of your time over a period of 4 months to get a PR6 link from a PR8 site?

It's a great question to ponder as you think about where your link strategy is going to be focused.

Posted by on 9:11 AM | Permalink

February 20, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 20, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:45 PM | Permalink

Viacom Choose Joost Over Google

Viacom announced it is using Joost - the peer to peer platform - to distribute its content, instead of Google's YouTube.

A Joost press release stated, "Viacom will be a key content partner and will offer a full range of brands and programming for free to consumers on the innovative Joost distribution platform. Under the agreement, Viacom's divisions - MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures - will provide television and theatrical programming on the Joost platform".

Currently still in beta, "Joost will allow users to have free access to thousands of programs and channels not readily available on the Web. Through Joost, viewers can watch programming from many of Viacom's brands on their computers through a customizable platform with advanced television viewing features such as links that lead to more information or related websites based on the content; and a variety of plug-in applications, such as instant messaging, message boards, and news tickers" the company press release stated.

Founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis - the team that brought us Skype, Joost is powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.

Negotiations between Viacom and YouTube to partner in this area had been discontinued over a month ago, according to reports.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:06 PM | Permalink

What If Links Were Not Part of Search Algorithm.....

David Berkowitz over at MediaPost wrote an entertaining piece today about what would happen if inbound links were not part of a search engine's algorithm.

Great insight into the influence of the remaining factors and could be used to understand those other factors even with the links in place. Well worth a read.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:47 PM | Permalink

Ask.com Renews Deal with LookSmart

Ask.com and IAC Advertising Solutions announced today that it would renew its license with LookSmart AdCenter for Publishers through 2009. The LookSmart service provides an auction platform, algorithmic based ad server and reporting engine, as well as an API for agencies and large advertiers. Ask uses LookSmart's AdCenter product as part of its Sponsored Listings program.

The automated open-auction system allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize campaigns on Ask.com and its publisher network. Ask.com Sponsored Listings currently process more than five billion queries each month, and supports over 30,000 advertisers bidding on more than 10 million keywords.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski on 1:33 PM | Permalink

IndustryBrains Continues to Grow Vertically

Since 2002, IndustryBrains has focused their contextual advertising program on a site-specific approach, giving advertisers the option for targeting premium content sites within their vertical marketplace.

Today, Marchex, the parent company of IndustryBrains, announced partnerships with seven new content publishers in several verticals: Business & Finance, Information Technology, and Home & Living. Marchex already has over 100 vertically focused and brand-name online publishers, such as BusinessWeek Online, The Motley Fool, and the Ziff Davis online properties.

The most recent partnership deals include InvestorVillage.com, Homes and Land, CIO Index.com, and WorldGolf.com, among others.

“As the company that created the site-specific approach to contextual advertising more than five years ago, we are very pleased to build upon our leadership position by adding seven high quality online publishers to our platform since the beginning of the year,” said Erik Matlick, IndustryBrains CEO. “As 2007 progresses, we look forward to further increasing our market share while helping all of our new partners more fully realize the value of their online brands, and providing advertisers with direct access to many additional highly targeted audiences.”

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski on 1:14 PM | Permalink

Becoming a Successful Web Entrepreneur

Michael Gray put up a nice post yesterday about Finding Your Inner Jerry McGuire. Not a goal I aspire to personally, but the point of the post is that you need to take chances to get to the top of your profession, whatever it may be.

It means that you have to create an image of your own, one that pushes and promotes ideas that you are personally passionate about. While Michael is specifically addressing SEOs, his post applies to any entrepreneurial business. If you are a webmaster, know that creating a distinct site, with unique content that differentiates you from the pack is a requirement for success.

The web world is very competitive, and winning attention (and in bound links) requires that you bring something new to the table. People don't give you links for the purpose of making you money. They give you links because you offer unique and new content (or tools) that no one that they have seen has, and because they think that your site will be valuable to their users.

Don't be afraid to occupy a niche spot either. In many businesses, the niche spots can do quite well. Develop a passionate core audience and build out from there.

And be opportunistic. The best opportunity to distinguish your business may not yet have made itself known to you. But keep your eyes open, and when the right situation comes up, be ready to jump on it. Land on it with both feet, and go after it heart and soul. And if that first one does not work out, get ready to do it again when the next opportunity comes up.

Posted by on 8:32 AM | Permalink

February 19, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 19, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:37 PM | Permalink

MSN Reporter – A Digg Competitor from MSN

The LiveSide Reporter notes that MSN Reporter, in beta since October 2006, has launched in three markets -- Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. The new service is similar to digg.com and redit which allow users to vote on the news stories. The new service has reportedly attracted 500,000 and 800,000 users during its 1st and 2nd months in beta. Some articles are reported to have received up to 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments. The site is not immune from the spam problems that plague these user voting news sites, and an increasing volume of spam is reportedly now appearing on the site. Since the top four headlines from MSN Reporter will now appear on the MSN.nl homepage, more users can get involved which will make it increasingly difficult to game the system.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 5:40 PM | Permalink

Business.com to Provide WSJ PPC Advertising

Business.com has inked a deal to become the exclusive provider of pay-per-click advertising for the Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal Online search pages. This deal is a win-win for both companies and for Business.com's advertisers.

For Business.com this deal adds the largest paid subscription news site on the Web to their network of partner sites which already includes top business publications Forbes, BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, Hoovers, and Financial Times. As of the fourth quarter of 2006, WSJ Online had 811,000 subscribers worldwide. This deal will extend Business.com reach even further with business decision makers

WSJ will benefit from Business.com's sharp vertical advertising focus. Since Business.com only accepts advertisers that offer business-to-business products and services, the deal ensures business contextual relevancy for the ads delivered to the WSJ Online site.

For advertisers with business-to-business products and services, this deal increases their ability to reach with business decision makers through PPC advertising on Business.com.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 5:08 PM | Permalink

Bill Wise Leaves Did-it

Bill Wise has resigned his post as CEO of the primarily Paid Search management agency Did-it.com. Bill joined the company in 2005, coming over from Ask.com (which was at the time AskJeeves), and will be reportedly leaving due to differences in opinion as to how Did-it should move forward.

Until a new CEO is found, Co-Founder and current President Dave Pasternack will act as CEO. Not much more information is currently available, according to Media Post (subscription required) and WebProNews. Bill also posted about it at his blog.

Posted by Chris Boggs on 2:17 PM | Permalink

Google News isn't top dog in UK news search, either

Last week, my article, “Is Google News the Tail Wagging the News Search Dog?,” appeared in Search Engine Watch – just as Search Engine Strategies was getting underway in London. The article cited data showing that Yahoo News and AOL News have larger unique audiences than Google News – in the US. So, what's the story in the UK?

According to comScore Media Metrix, there were 17.3 million unique visitors to General News sites in the UK during December 2006. The #1 site in the category was BBC News, with 7.8 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2, with 3.6 million unique visitors. Google News had 2.7 million, The Sun Online had 2.6 million, Guardian.co.uk had 2.5 million, MSN News had 2.4 million, AOL News had 1.9 million, and Times Online had 1.9 million.

UK data from Nielsen//NetRatings provides a similar picture. BBC News ranked #1 in the Online Current Events and Global News Destinations category during December 2006, with 6.2 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2 with 2.6 million unique visitors. Guardian Unlimited had 2.1 million unique visitors, Times Online had 1.6 million, The Sun had 1.5 million, Google News had 1.3 million, MSN News & Weather had 1.1 million, and AOL News had 1.0 million.

When I showed this data to people in London last week, many said they were shocked by two findings.

The first was that Yahoo News, not Google News, was the top dog in UK news search.

On the other hand, very few of the people who I talked with in London seemed interested in the strong showing of MSN News or AOL News – or the fact that four of the top eight news sites are news search engines. Most of them appeared to be more concerned about who was on top.

The second shocker was the appearance of The Sun, one of Britain's “red top” tabloids, in the rankings.

Unlike the “quality” newspaper sites in the UK, the red tops feature photos of scantily clad women on Page 3 and sensational stories like the one reporting that “Brit boobs are biggest.” And, going down-market now appears to be as popular a way of building an online audience as developing distinctive journalism that readers cannot find elsewhere.

Meanwhile, very few of the people who saw these findings seemed even remotely interested to hear that the BBC News is optimizing its headlines for news search engines. Most of the “lads” wanted to turn back to The Sun and re-examine Page 3.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 1:48 PM | Permalink

Google Groups Becoming a Gold Mine for SEO Information

Google Groups recently relaunched with a new look and feel. One of the most popular groups in the search engine optimization community is the Webmaster Help group. This area features literally hundreds of questions about Google's crawling methodologies, as well as Web site design and its relationship to the ability to be indexed in Google. Although not all questions are useful, and responses in any community should be taken with a grain of salt, the best thing that this group has going for it is the actual participation by Google engineers and members of Matt Cutts' team.

Just in the past few days, the topics of 301 redirects and server downtime have led bloggers to cite discussion going on at Google Groups. Barry and others commented on the 301 redirect comment by Adam Lasnik, which has actually led to more questions. Both Barry and then Loren Baker commented on Vanessa Fox's statement in a response that being "down" for a few Google crawls can lead to de-indexing.

So if you have some time to spend asking SEO and other site design questions and looking for answers, Google Groups might be one of the best "forums" out there, due to the increased chances of an actual Google person being involved. If that floats your boat.

Posted by Chris Boggs on 1:48 PM | Permalink

The 301 Redirect Headache

Moving Web pages that have been indexed by search engines to a new URL via a 301 permanent redirect can cause serious dips in traffic once the search engines discover that the old page has moved. This is a headache that must be planned for whenever anyone considers changing the addresses of their Web pages, for whatever reason.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable last week highlighted a discussion at Google Groups in which Google's Adam Lasnik claimed that it only takes them a "couple of weeks for things to smooth out."

Unfortunately, although Google seems to be able to index pages within a few weeks, the past rankings for those pages are not updated in any time close to that, especially for competitive terms, without some additional effort. The primary method to speed this process seems to be gaining links from authority sites to the new URL, in a rapid fashion. Funny because that also seems to be the way out of what some call the fictional Google Sandbox.

The "trick" often used in order to try to lessen the severity of the old pages' loss of rankings is to employ a 302 redirect instead. This causes Google to keep the listing of the previous page within its index, and often in the same position within the rankings.

Some SEO's recommend using this tactic while "building up value" of the new pages through the form of new links that lead to the new URL. Although I have personally seen this work, I would recommend using 301s right away for all pages. It is nice to do this "off-season" if you are a seasonal kind of business, but unfortunately that isn't the case for every one.

I have always hoped to find a larger sample of case studies which show that Google can perform faster than what people consistently forecast as 3 months before original rankings are regained, if ever. Unfortunately, according to our engineers, the clients we have worked with have rarely seen this rapidity in bounce-back-ability. I asked Barry who agreed that 3 months was much closer to the norm.

So will Google allow users of the Webmaster Central portal to maybe jump line when it comes to regaining lost rankings due to URL rewrite or move? Will its algorithm ever speed this process out or will it stay like this to help avoid accidentally ranking pages which have considerable content changes.

Either way, moving to new URLs is something that will cause headaches no matter what, it seems. Everyone involved with the Web site should know that before the redirects are implemented, and other means of driving traffic to the pages should be considered as a top gap. These means include, but are not limited to the use of Paid Search, traditional marketing, as well as banner placement on well-trafficked sites.

Posted by Chris Boggs on 12:14 PM | Permalink

New Logo, New Decade!

SEW%20Logo.jpg

clickzlogo.jpg


We're 10 years old!

The new logos up on The ClickZ Network and Search Engine Watch today mark a pretty enormous landmark. Both sites launched in 1997, which means we now enter our second decade of being the biggest (and please indulge a bit of immodesty -- the best) sites covering interactive advertising, marketing and search.

We're feeling celebratory, and very grateful. We're thinking of all you readers out there, both the new ones and those who have been with us for the duration. To the people who contribute to our unparalleled content, attend our shows, write in with ideas, advertise, ask, advise.

We couldn't have done it without every one of you.

So please join me in wishing a very happy anniversary to all of us. Here's to the next decade. It looks like it's going to be a great one.

Posted by Rebecca Lieb on 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google's Ajax Search API

On January 4, 2007, I spoke with Mark Lucovsky, Technical Director of Engineering at Google, about the Google's Ajax Search API. The Ajax Search API webmasters the ability to integrate Google's search capabilities in new and powerful ways into their web sites.

This API allows webmasters to tap into the following Google search properties:

  1. Web Search
  2. News Search
  3. Video Search
  4. Blog Search
  5. Local Search
  6. Google Maps
  7. Google Custom Search Engines

Webmasters can take any of these, allow their visitors to search on their site, and then present the results inline on their own site. This allows users to get search results without leaving the site they are on. Of course, for the site owner this is great for the stickiness of the site.

Google's Ajax Search API allows you to add value to your site using Google's index without losing your visitors in the process.

Posted by on 9:06 AM | Permalink

February 16, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 16, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blogsearch-related headlines from around the Web, and some final blog reports from Search Engine Strategies London:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:


Reports from SES London:


Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:47 PM | Permalink

A Step Forward For Mobile Local Search

One thing that has stood in the way of mobile local search adoption is the lack of a clear and compelling value proposition. This is partly a result of hardware restrictions; there are small screens and keypads on most cell phones and smart phones haven't reached mainstream penetration (although prices are coming down which should bode well for mobile local search).

But another major factor has been that the control exerted by carriers in the U.S. and their ability to decide what devices and platforms work on their networks (this is not the case in Europe). This has effectively stifled a lot of innovation at the application level, as explored in the recent Kelsey Group report Targeting Users: Application Level Innovation in Mobile Local Search).

Even though applications can be developed that require users to navigate to a site on the mobile web using a WAP based phone, and other more robust programs can be downloaded, both of these options require an additional step. This represents a sizable adoption barrier in an already early-adopter medium.

Therefore the few search applications that get the endorsement of carriers and are correspondingly planted "on the carrier deck" are the only ones that currently have a shot at worthwhile traction. And the carrier's filter for choosing the best mobile search products are not always the same as what the market would bear.

Enter Nokia and Motorola, which announced yesterday at the annual 3GSM World Congress that they will launch their own navigation services that don't require carrier networks. With the thought that carriers have been slow to innovate, both companies announced new GPS enabled hardware and navigation services that they will sell directly to consumers.

These navigation platforms will include, local search, directions, and the ability to download maps for any destination in the world. These services will be free, with the option to upgrade to features such as voice directions and live traffic updates. CNet has in depth coverage both announcements and some of the dynamics surrounding them.

This could be a significant move and the first shot in a battle against carriers to effectively sidestep their rule and offer compelling products that don't require cellular networks. WiFi enabled mobile phones that are able to make VoIP calls when in range a network are another example of something that could disintermediate carriers. And as municipal WiFi approaches reality, more phones like this will be offered.

Combine this with the announcements from Nokia and Motorola, and you can start to see the stars aligning for disruption to carrier dependence, and thus control. Eventually, this should in turn lead to the innovation in mobile local search, characteristic of a free market. Something like this needs to happen if Mobile Local Search is to get off the ground in the U.S, and you can start to see the wheels turning.

Posted by Mike Boland on 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Using Google Webmaster Tools to increase your link juice

Google Webmaster Tools provides a lot of great data. One of the things it will show you is 404 errors on your site. If you look at this data carefully, it can help you increase your valid in-bound links.

Of course, if you see 404 errors listed for pages that you are linking to from within your own site, you need to fix that right away. This will already help your site's overall page rank.

But the more interesting thing is when you see a 404 error for a page that someone else linked to. Most likely this occurs when someone links to your site, and then mis-spells the link (and also doesn't check it). When this happens you have people who gave you links for which you are getting no credit. Such a waste.

However, the fix is simple: Put in place a 301 redirect from the page that the person erroneously linked to, to the page they intended to link to. This is a great simple way to pick up link credit for those broken in bound links.

Posted by on 2:03 PM | Permalink

Another Look at the SEMPO Data

SEMPO research committee co-chair Kevin Lee digs deeper into the findings from the groups State of Search Engine Marketing report in his ClickZ column today.

He shares observations on findings that SEM is gaining visibility in the corporate suite, SEM is poaching budget from other marketing channels, and the industry is in disagreement than last year over pricing trends. He also says the report should be a wake-up call to SEM agencies, since more respondents are saying they'll bring SEM efforts in-house this year.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:07 PM | Permalink

Google Reportedly Buys In-Game Ad Company

Google's on-again, off-again deal to buy AdScape is apparently on again, according to Red Herring. Google will reportedly buy the in-game advertising technology provider for $23 million.

The company built a platform to sell dynamic, performance-based ads in video games, but has not announced game publishers that are using its system. Adscape launched in February 2006 with $3.2 million in funding from Atlanta's HIG Ventures.

A Wall Street Journal report puts the purchase price between $200 and $400 million, which is similar to what Microsoft reportedly paid when it acquired in-game ad provider Massive last year.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 PM | Permalink

Keep an Eye on the Traditional

Sometimes, success in search marketing rests on your ability to keep up with the latest cutting-edge tactics and outpace your competitors. But not always. Sometimes, you can find success by sticking to old-fashioned, tried-and-true marketing tactics. That's what Susan Joyce has done to build up Job-Hunt.org to become a popular destination site with links from major publishers. Eric Enge sat down with Joyce to share her story in the SearchDay article, "Job-Hunt.org: An Old-Fashioned Success Story."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:12 AM | Permalink

February 15, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 15, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, search-related headlines from around the Web, and assorted blog reports from Search Engine Strategies London:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Reports from SES London:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:08 PM | Permalink

Online Video Gets Local

ClickZ's Kate Kaye wrote an interesting article yesterday on the revenue that is flowing into local video ads on newspaper websites. Interestingly, newspapers beat out local television station websites for video ad revenues according to a recent Borrell Report.

Though the $371 million expected to be spent on local video this year only represents about 5 percent of the $7.7 billion total for all local online ads, it will be more than double the amount spent last year. $5 billion is expected by 2012, which is more than the amount currently spent on online banner ads and listings.

According to the article:

However, these small numbers represent entirely new revenue channels for local television and newspaper properties, which are competing against one another for advertisers long considered the stations' turf. In fact, newspapers are ahead in this game.

Broken down, newspaper web sites took in $81 million in local streaming video ads in last year, compared with the $32 million spent on local television web sites. In many cases the newspaper revenue came from up-sells from classifieds listings, and the biggest categories taking part in video advertising so far have been auto, real estate, health and employment. The biggest markets meanwhile have been New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Borrell predicts "there will be a lot of money made on the tens of millions of unsold pre-roll video avails across thousands of local Web sites." However it has been mostly unanimous that consumers don't like pre-roll ads. A more likable and pervasive form of online video advertising could instead be sponsored videos, over 60 seconds in length, by the likes of home improvement, health, and legal advertisers. This form factor accounted for about two thirds of online video spending last year according to the Borrell study.

The key is that the video advertising dial is moving towards local, driven by growing amounts of affordable online ad inventory. Bring in companies like Spot Runner that further put video advertising withing the grasp of small business advertisers, and this starts to get interesting. It will take some time before the paradigm shifts in the marketplace so that small business advertisers are aware of and interested in these opportunities, but this will happen.

Elsewhere in the world of online video, The New York Times reports how many radio stations, in order to gain a competitive edge, are broadcasting themselves (a la Howard Stern), on popular online video channels such as YouTube. Greg Sterling also points to a comprehensive index of the online video space by the Read/Write Web. And lastly, online video publishing and syndication network Veoh re-launched earlier this week. Lost Remote has the scoop.

Posted by Mike Boland on 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Loren Baker on the Warpath Against NoFollow

Loren Baker gets on the warpath today with this rant against the NoFollow tag. Loren lists 13 reasons why he is against it. He also backed up his rant by installing the DoFollow Plugin, a plugin that causes all comments out of your blog to have the NoFollow tag removed.

NoFollow was supposed to help clean up link spamming in the blogosphere. Well blog spamming is worse than ever. That said, it probably has met the search engine goals in the blogosphere. Blog spamming may be worse than ever for those of us who blog, but the search engines no longer need to worry about the links garnered by blog spamming having an impact on their ranking algorithms.

It's also true that the search engines have expanded the original mission of the NoFollow tag. They want people to use it whenever they sell text links to other sites. In Google's case, at least, if you are found to be selling text links and are not using NoFollow, they may simply discredit your site's ability to pass any link juice.

This latter usage of the tag is a complete bust. People object to the idea and don't want to do it, whether they be buyers, or sellers of links. It's clear that this latter application is a bust.

Posted by on 2:46 PM | Permalink

ChaCha Ad Options Explored

ChaCha's "human powered" social search platform has been discussed here from the search side when it launched in September, and again in November when the site entered beta. Today, ClickZ media buying columnist Tessa Weggert takes a look at the ad opportunities ChaCha offers in "Introducing ChaCha Search."

ChaCha offers CPC-based text links targeted by guide-defined category, of which there are more than 100 available. ChaCha has also begun showing category-targeted display ads, including 300 x 250 rich media pre-roll video units, to help searchers pass the time while their guide does the searching.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:40 PM | Permalink

Yahoo's Local Ad Options

Patricia Hursh tackles the finer points of local ad options available in Yahoo's Panama platform in her ClickZ column today, Yahoo Local Advertising Options, Post-Panama, Part 2. She presented all the options in part 1, and now goes on to offer some strategic advice on how to best use those options.

In short, Hursh recommends:

  • Geotargeted Sponsored Search campaigns for Internet-savvy local businesses, regional firms, Web-based businesses, and national chains, franchises, and dealerships.
  • Local Listings for marketers who desire a simplified approach and appreciate the flat monthly fee.
  • A combined approach that tests both options

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:26 PM | Permalink

Google Webmaster Team Clarifies Nofollow

In a post at Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz points out that Googler Adam Lasnick has been busy explaining the effects of the rel="nofollow" tag in some posts on the Webmaster Central group. In a post to the group on Tuesday, "Vanessa is confusing me ~ nofollow again...," he clarified that Google does not crawl nofollow links:

>Does Google crawl a rel="NOFOLLOW" tagged link and not give it credit,
>or does it just stop at the link and not visit that page unless it's
> found elsewhere?

As Aaron [Pratt] correctly noted, the answer is the latter :)

Google's handling of the tag was not made entirely clear when it was originally announced two years ago:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

That same murky explanation is given in the Webmaster Help Center.

Lasnick and Matt Cutts have attempted several times to clarify exactly what Googlebot does with the tag.

Cutts stated explicitly that Google does not crawl nofollow links in July 2006, in his Bot Obedience: Herding Googlebot post: "At a link level, you can add a nofollow tag on the granularity of individual links to prevent Googlebot from crawling individual links (you could also make the link redirect through a page that is forbidden by robots.txt). Bear in mind that if other pages link to a url, Googlebot may find the url through those other paths."

Lasnick stepped in again last night to further clarify the issue in another post, If rel="nofollow" is becoming the norm. He notes that "nofollow links aren't listed any differently than other links in our Webmaster Tools backlinks section," and said that nofollow links will show up in search resulsts using the "link:" operator.

Matt Cutts has posted quite a bit on the rel="nofollow" tag. He's mentioned its purpose in stopping comment spammers May 2006, and talked about its use with paid links in a post from September 2005 called Text links and PageRank:

"The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it's a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn't have to be counted as a vote by a search engine."

The tag itself has drawn much criticism for its inability to curb blog spam, as it was originally intended. Most recently, Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker is calling for an end to the nofollow tag, giving "13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck," and David Wallace at SearchRank agrees in his post, "NoFollow Tag is a Dismal Failure."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:39 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Reorg In Full Effect: Advertiser and Publisher Group Changes

Back in December, Yahoo announced a sweeping reorganization that created three new operating groups and shuffled execs to lead those groups. Now details are emerging outlining the structure of the advertiser and publisher group, led by former CFO Susan Decker.

The text of a company-wide memo sent by Decker yesterday has been published online (by TechCrunch, paidContent and others). It details the new structure of her group, which includes marketing, ad sales, and distribution partner duties.

The group will be centered around three functions:
1. Demand Channels: "focused on providing marketing solutions to our advertising customers."
This group will work with both direct sales (Direct Sales Channel) and self-service online advertisers (Online Channel). The Direct Sales Channel will be led by Greg Coleman, EVP Global Sales, with Wenda Harris Millard and David Karnstedt continuing to report to him. The Online Channel will be led by Rich Riley, who has been promoted to SVP Online Channel & Small Business Services.

2. Supply Channels: "focused on strategically selecting and serving our publishing customers."
This is where the Yahoo Publisher Network fits in. Hilary Schneider will lead the YPN organization, taking those duties from David Karnstedt, who had been doing it in addition to his direct search sales job.

3. Marketing Products: "focused on matching every advertising offer from our demand channels to the best piece of advertising inventory from our supply channels, whether that is on Yahoo or on one of our publishing partners' sites."
Decker calls this group the "'magic in the middle' that connects the two customer-centric functions described above." There are two groups within this division:
Search and Listings Marketplaces, to be led by Tim Cadogan, who has been promoted to SVP, Search and Listings Marketplaces. And Display Marketplaces, to be led by Todd Teresi, who has been named SVP, Display Marketplaces. Cadogan will be responsible for business and product strategy, marketplace design and matching, business operations and policy for products like sponsored search, domain match and the submit family of listings products. Teresi will oversee display and content match, and will take over the yield management and inventory optimization duties that had resided in the sales ops team.

A Product Management team and Engineering team will support the two Marketing Products teams. Mark Morrissey has been promoted to SVP of APG Product Management. Qi Lu, EVP, Engineering, will lead all engineering efforts.

Steve Mitgang and Lisa Morita have left Yahoo, and their teams will be divided among other newly created groups. Product management teams formerly under Mitgang will report to Morrissey, and his former product marketing teams will report to either Cadogan or Teresi. Morita's customer solutions teams will now report to Riley, and the content solutions teams will be led by Cadogan on an interim basis.

You can keep up with all the changes, or add your own, at the CogMap wiki.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:16 AM | Permalink

February 14, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 14, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, search-related headlines from around the Web, and assorted blog reports from Search Engine Strategies London:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Reports from SES London:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:05 PM | Permalink

HotFrog Brings Web 2.0. to U.K. Business Lookups

The curiously named Australian online directory HotFrog launched today in the UK.

Like its Austrailian forbearer, the site brings the buzzcloud concept (utilized most notably by social search engines such as Eurekster's Swicki and Yahoo!'s MyWeb) to directory listings. This makes a lot of sense given that online directories are category based.

The buzzcloud gives readers a quick representation of the post popular categories; and its front and center positioning gives off the immediate impression that the site is very web 2.0. (it also offers RSS feeds).

Listings are free to post and the site appears to employ a model where it collects as many listings as possible, against which it serves AdWords sponsored links. These are shown to the right and below listings within each category page.

The strategy to collect as many listings as possible is in line with its offer for any business to list itself for free. Its other proposition is that businesses can choose as many keywords as they want as meta tags for their listings. This will presumably improve SEO which is helpful to both local businesses and to HotFrog's goal of monetizing greater amounts of site traffic and gaining exposure and more content.

This tagging on the part of businesses could also allow for more effective contextual matching for sponsored links. Currently it seems like AdWords is their only form of monetization which means they will have to scale this up to a considerable degree to make any meaningful revenues. The free listing and SEO benefits are enticing but we'll have to wait and see if it gains traction among businesses in the U.K.

In terms of users, its site design is clean and uncluttered and it seems to have what it takes to gain traction in that department. It's a crowded field though, so either marketing (viral or otherwise) as a destination site or effective SEO to show up in Google SERP's will be paramount to HotFrog's success in this new market. How well businesses take the site up on its offer to tag their own listings could determine the fate of the latter.

You can check out the new UK site is here, and the press release for its launch here.

Posted by Mike Boland on 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google to Update Ad Quality Scoring

Google announced today that it will be updating its ad ranking algorithm for AdWords, and making that process a bit more transparent for advertisers.

Before the end of the month, Google plans to implement an improved quality-based bidding system, updating the current AdRank algorithm that first launched in August 2005, and has been updated consistently since then.

The last major updates came in December 2005, and again in July 2006, in the form of landing page quality scoring additions that left many advertisers upset with Google's lack of information regarding how that quality score was reached. Another ad quality update in November drew criticism for making changes in the midst of the busy holiday shopping season.

The changes this time around will not add new elements to the score, as much as change the weight that each component receives in the scoring, Nicholas Fox, senior business product manager for ad quality, told SEW.

"This is a change to the algorithm itself, updating what we call 'prediction confidence' to improve the accuracy in determining quality score in cases where we have less data," Fox said. In effect, Google is becoming more lenient with ads that it knows nothing about, but could become stricter with ads once it has gathered some data, he said.

The quality score will continue to take into account the historical performance of a given keyword, relevance of keyword to ad text, landing page quality, and other factors. The biggest change will show up for newer, or low-traffic ads, for which there is not a lot of data to come to a conclusion on the ad's quality, Fox said.

The net effect could be the re-activation of many keywords that were previously deactivated when their minimum bids had risen above the advertiser's desired cost-per-click (CPC) bid. As those minimum bids are recalculated under the new algorithm and fall below the advertiser's bid threshold, those ads will be reactivated, unless the advertiser deactivates them or lowers their bids below the new threshold. In other cases, certain ads will be treated more harshly under the new algorithm, and their minimum bids will increase.

To help advertisers prepare for the changes, Google is adding a new quality score column to the advertiser's AdWords account interface. Beginning Thursday, advertisers will be allowed to activate the new column on their accounts, and begin making plans for the new algorithm. A limited test group of advertisers began seeing this column around Christmas.

The tool will show advertisers an estimate of their ad's quality -- in general terms like "great," "ok" or "poor" -- as well as the estimated minimum bids associated with them. The scores and bid estimates will be updated at least daily, with more frequent updates in certain categories.

"Advertisers have asked us to provide more transparency into the process, and now we're able to provide that visibility," Fox said. "This is the first step of many in that direction that you'll see in the next few months."

Though Google was the first major search engine to incorporate a quality score in its ad ranking algorithm, it has since been followed by Microsoft's adCenter and Yahoo's Panama platforms, both of which include a quality metric with varying degrees of transparency.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 7:25 PM | Permalink

New Social Search Features from Eurekster

Eurekster has announced a whole new set of social features in their Swicki search platform. These new features, discussed here last week, provide substantially more wiki type functionality into their product.

In their press release, CEO Steven Marder said: “Our Swicki (search plus wiki) platform has always allowed users to contribute and collaborate just through their implicit activity; today, with the launch of these new features that allow for Q&A, voting and posting comments, we now make it really easy for users to contribute their vertical, social or local oriented expertise and really emphasize the wiki in Swicki.”

It will be interesting to see how Eurekster continues to progress. One of the big problems with social search platforms of this type is simply getting the end users who search through the resulting search engines to really see a difference. An enhanced overall level of participation in the search experience, and the ability to vote, provides unique new functionality that could scale user engagement.

Posted by on 6:16 PM | Permalink

Are You Really Analyzing Your Paid Search Campaigns?

What do you do when the needle won't move anymore -- when you can't invest another dollar in your paid search program without diminishing your returns? The answer lies in the data, according to iProspect's John Tawadros. In today's SearchDay, Tawadros takes a look beyond the basics to examine the ways true analysis can help you improve ROI of your paid search campaigns, as well as related campaigns in other channels.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:20 PM | Permalink

Avinash Kaushik Talks About Competitive Intelligence Tools

Last Friday I had a chance to put together a podcast with Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is the publisher of the Occam's Razor blog, a highly respected blog in the web analytics space. He is also the director of web analytics for a Fortune 500 company. Last but not least, Avinash will release in May his first analytics book, Web Analytics, An Hour A Day.

We talk about lots of great search and analytics tools in our discussion. For example, I really like the MSN search funnels tool that allows you to see what people search on before they search on your keyword.

Another great tool we discussed was the MSN keyword forecasting tool that allows you to forecast future search traffic on your critical keywords. One of the neat features of this tool is the way it adjusts for seasonal search volumes. As a result it provides a great way to forecast the coming months for your web business.

Posted by on 1:42 PM | Permalink

Krugle Partners with the Yahoo Developers Network

Krugle, Inc., the code search engine for developers, announced today a partnership with the Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN). This partnership will result in Krugle providing search functionality to YDN users.

Yahoo! is clearly excited about this partnership. The YDN home page, which is a blog, is announcing the partnership. You can also see the Krugle search box on the top right of their screen (which has a magnifying glass with a K, for Krugle, in it). This search box shows up throughout the pages of YDN.

Here is an excerpt from the Yahoo post:

Yes, this is the company that Robert Scoble was recently glowing about:
"I keep hearing about Krugle from developers. They tell me it rocks for looking up stuff. Need shopping cart code? Search for it on Krugle."

In May of last year, Krugle closed a Series B financing round for $6.1 million, so the company seems well poised for growth.

What makes the Krugle product different than traditional web search is that they crawl source code repositories, archives, knowledge bases, and they are able to understand the the inherent structure of the code being searched, allowing them to to offer higher quality searching for programmers.

Posted by on 1:17 PM | Permalink

Where the Influencers Roam

While getting the most buzz, “YOU” are not the only influencer out there. In addition to what's happening on social sites, let's identify where all the influencers roam. Here are sources that provide that extra punch to what's crawled, indexed and ultimately shown by the Big Engines today.

Taggers: Active taggers contribute through services like Del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr and many others. Bloggers fall into this arena too, because they actively tag their own content. Those who spend a lot of time and energy will be rewarded as big influencers. Those who are interested in specific long-tail items also can participate.

Verticals: Online publishers create their own vertical searches and bring some content expertise into the mix. These verticals often begin as destinations, and end up syndicating elsewhere too. Many well-known sites focus on Health, Sports, News, Entertainment, Autos, Employment and Shopping arenas.

Directories: Traditional publishers hire staff to create content, and then license to influential sites. Examples include InfoUSA business listings via Citysearch.com; or Columbia Encyclopedia reference from Answers.com or Infoplease.com. Trade publishers are more proprietary, such as industrial listings created by ThomasNet.com.

Guides: Some guided services also exist. About.com thrives with influential guides who present original material but also scour the web for what's interesting and appropriate in their specific topics. One might also include Wikipedia here, as openly-guided content that's edited by volunteers.

Libraries: Libraries still influence end users. Increasingly, you can remotely search your library's electronic databases and holdings. This previously hidden web of content indices and abstracts is getting exposed by suppliers. Examples include Gale's AccessMyLibrary.com and ProQuest CSA's newspaper archives from the mid-1800s.

Posted by on 11:12 AM | Permalink

Blogs & Social Media Drive Traffic and Search Rankings

ClickInfluence's Nick Wilson just spoke in a social media session at SES London, and he's posted an extended transcription of his presentation, "How Blogs and Social Media can Help Your Company gain Targeted Traffic and Better Search Engine Rankings."

It's an introductory primer on the steps companies should take to get involved in blogging and participate in social media -- not just because everyone's doing it, but because it can drive targeted traffic to their site, and have an SEO benefit from the inbound links.

He also let slip during his presentation that Performancing had been sold this week. The blogging community and tools provider had been set to be sold to PayPerPost back in December, and Wilson had plans to leave to start a new venture, but the deal was called off a week later. Since then, Wilson's partners had decided to shut everything down, but instead Wilson returned, apparently to broker this deal.

UPDATE: The buyer for Performancing is SplashPress Media, it was announced on Performancing's blog. That's the same company that recently acquired Blog Herald. SplashPress will continue operating the site as a separate division.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:08 AM | Permalink

Shopzilla Shuffles Execs, Leads Scripps' Push Online

Shopzilla announced Tuesday that its founding chairman and its president of two years will depart from the shopping search engine in the spring. William Glass, currently chief operating officer of Shopzilla, has been named president, replacing John Phelps, who has served as president of Shopzilla since shortly after it was acquired by E.W. Scripps in June 2005 for $525 million, and was its COO prior to that. Farhad Mohit, 37, Shopzilla's co-founder and chief product officer, will also depart.

Scripps, which had been primarily a newspaper company, has been struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of acquisitions like Shopzilla and U.K. vertical search site uSwitch, as well as expansion of its Web properties for TV brands like HGTV and Food Network. In 2005, the company launched a niche broadband strategy which included a distribution deal with Yahoo Search.

The print side of its business has slid so far that Scripps is rumored to be considering a sale of its newspaper properties.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 6:11 AM | Permalink

AOL Turns Up Dial on FullView Marketing

AOL launched its new FullView search interface in October, integrating Google search results with multimedia, local or other content from AOL and its partners. On Tuesday, AOL shuttered its AOL Search blog and opened up a new "Discover FullView" blog in its place. It's decidedly conversational in tone, written by Mia, a young AOLer whose stated goals are to provide FullView updates, search tips, and persuade users to try AOL Search with FullView.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:29 AM | Permalink

Google to Test CPC-based Site Targeting

Google announced plans to begin a test of CPC-based ads using the site targeting feature. Site targeting allows advertisers to choose individual sites in the content network where they want their ads to appear. Since it launched nearly two years ago, the program has used bids placed on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis. That will begin to change in March, when a limited set of U.S. advertisers will have the option of paying on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.

Google expects the CPC pricing to appeal to conversion-oriented, direct response advertisers who are focused on clicks, and track metrics such as sales, leads or sign-ups. That may get more advertisers interested in the tool, since many have tried site targeting on a CPM basis and found it lacking in ROI. Site targeting is popular with advertisers as a branding buy, when they want to get in front of the readers of a given site.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:18 AM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 13, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:39 AM | Permalink

February 13, 2007

The Tail that Wags the News Search Dog

Why does Google News get more press and blog mentions than other news search engines, when Yahoo News and AOL News have larger unique audiences? Greg Jarboe explores that question in today's SearchDay, "Is Google News the Tail Wagging the News Search Dog?"

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:04 PM | Permalink

Beyond "Technical SEO"

I've said before that I believe a lot of the recent issues with SEO (see Jason Calacanis, Dave Pasternack) might be resolved if everyone could agree on what "SEO" means.

Both Calacanis and Pasternack agree that the effects of ethical SEO are good. They also agree that things like page design and site structure are good. Most SEOs would agree with those points as well. Where they disagree is whether those additional disciplines are part of SEO.

John Andrews today wrote about this issue today in a post called "The Secret Side of SEO." Andrews differentiates technical, on-page SEO from more strategic SEO tactics, which he calls "competitive webmastering."

"'Strategic SEO' is not SEO at all, but competitive webmastering, which uses SEO tactics. The same is true for 'optimized SEM' and the newer 'social media optimization.' They are tactics, which must be executed within a plan that has goals and objectives," he writes.

He also expands on a discussion with online marketer Natasha Robinson, who was having trouble explaining to an engineer that SEO is about more than just getting more pages indexed.

"If you are still working to get your client's sites fully indexed in Google (or worse, still paying an SEO 'firm' to get all of your pages indexed), I'm sorry to hear of your continued inability to get SEO and the web. It doesn't matter so much how many of your pages are indexed, but it matters which of your pages are indexed and whether or not they are indexed such that they appear in the right SERPs for your business objectives," Andrews writes.

Andrews finishes off the post with "6 Things Your SEO Firm May Not Have Told You," which is filled with tips on what is, and is not, important to include in your SEO/competitive webmastering strategy.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:55 PM | Permalink

Search Marketing Is...

A recent thread on the Web Analytics Forum on Yahoo Groups asked members to provide an explanation for what they do that would be suitable for a 6-year-old.

Suggestions include:
Web analytics is like the speedometer on your car
Web analytics is making Web sites better
Web analytics is like being a detective, or a spy

Jason Burby takes a stab at an explanation in his ClickZ column today, "How Would You Explain Web Analytics?"

Do search marketers have a similar problem explaining their jobs? I know I've seen this discussion before, but it may be worth bringing it up again, if only to force everyone to step back and think about what they're doing in a clear, simple way.

So here's the question: How do you explain what you do to your children, nieces/nephews, or assorted acquaintances that have no idea what "SEM" or "SEO" stand for? Share your explanation in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:49 PM | Permalink

Retrevo Closes on Series B Financing

I just learned that Retrevo, the search engine for consumer electronics product information, closed a Series B venture financing round for $3.2 million dollars. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), and Alloy Ventures, a Series A investor, also participated in the round.

This puts the company in a good position to capitalize on its early success in launching their web site last September. According to Ammar Hanafi, general partner Alloy Ventures, the investment round highlights the confidence that the investors have in the Retrevo team's ability to execute.

Retrevo offers detailed information on consumer electronics products. This information can be used to research, shop for, or repair their products. In addition, the site offers a community for users to share opinions and interact. Retrevo's search results include manufacturer's information, reviews and articles, and user guides.

You can also get access to user manuals quickly and efficiently. Everything can be previewed on the site, as well, including PDF files. The search results are neatly organized in segregated sections making it fast and easy to get to what you want to see. If you are looking for consumer product information Retrevo can provide you with a great tool to get your answers fast.

Posted by on 11:55 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Searchlight Awards Show Next Week

Yahoo's second annual Searchlight Awards show rewarding creativity and innovation in search will be held next week in New York. Attendees at the event, which takes place Thursday, Feb. 22 from 2-5 p.m. at the Time Life Building, will choose a winner for the Searchlight Award from a group of finalists who will present their campaigns to a panel of industry leaders and the audience.

According to Yahoo, the award "recognizes and rewards advertising agencies that develop search marketing applications outside of the tried and true direct response mindset." Last year's winner, RPA Interactive's "Honda Element: A Different Animal" campaign, defeated three other finalists.

The event will also include a keynote address and panel on industry issues. All search marketers, in-house or agency-side, are invited to attend. Registration is required.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:41 AM | Permalink

Google News Slapped by Belgian Court

A group of Belgian newspapers on a crusade to remove all their content from news search engines has won a victory against Google, according to a Reuters report.

A Belgian court ruled on Tuesday that Google may not publish in Google News Belgium copyrighted articles from Belgian newspapers managed by Copiepresse, which brought the suit. Copiepresse is also going after Yahoo's site in France to demand it stop showing its content as well.

Google was ordered to stop showing the articles in September 2006, under threat of a potential 1 million euro per day fine, but appealed the decision, which led to this re-hearing. In November, Google settled with two publishing groups that had been in on the original lawsuit. (That post gives a history of the case, as does this FAQ on the settlement).

Today's ruling upholds the existing injunction, but reduces the potential fine to 25,000 euros per day. Content owners must also request by e-mail that their content not be indexed. Google has once again appealed the decision.

UPDATE: Google posted about the Copiepresse decision on the Google Blog, calling the judgment "clearly disappointing," and expressing the intent to appeal.

The post also points out that many publishers are happy to be included in Google News: "Today's ruling does not affect the current content of Google News, because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That's why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:18 AM | Permalink

Yahoo, Microsoft Get Mobile

Yahoo and Microsoft have each launched mobile search and advertising initiatives this week. Yahoo has introduced display advertising on its mobile-specific Web sites in 19 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. It also released a new version of its downloadable mobile client, Yahoo! Go 2.0. The new "gamma" version features the ability for consumers to search directly from maps and share oneSearch results, news articles and the service directly with friends. Zach Rodgers has the details at ClickZ News.

Microsoft launched Live Search for Mobile at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, releasing v 1.0 of its client application for Windows Mobile devices. Features include category-based local searching, maps and directions, traffic, contacts list integration and "SMS a friend."

In even more mobile news to come out of 3GSM, InfoSpace announced a partnership with FAST to bring FAST's private-label search and advertising platform to InfoSpace's carrier partners in the U.S.; and AdStar announced plans to partner with Nokia to develop a private-label mobile advertising platform.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:51 AM | Permalink

February 12, 2007

Interview of Analytics Expert, Eric T. Peterson

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Eric Peterson of the Visual Sciences Division of WebSideStory. Eric is one of the most well known and respected names in the world of web analytics.

Eric is also offering a free web analytics webinar on March 6, 2007, on behalf of the American Marketing Association and Aquent. The webinar is titled "Web Analytics Demystified: Ten Simple Strategies for Using Web Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing Efforts." This will be a great initial primer for those of you looking to get started in analytics.

In our interview, Eric points out how proper content grouping and segmentation is not robustly supported by all systems, and even if it is supported, that it's key to have a proper analyst to set it up. Many companies don't get this right in their implementations and therefore get far less value from their analytics packages.

In addition, Eric discusses the unique capabilities of the Visual Sciences product. These include on the fly visitor segmentation, which allows for powerful ad-hoc analysis capability, and multi-channel data integration, which makes it easy to look at data, such as call center data, together with your web site data.

Posted by on 5:57 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 12, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:43 PM | Permalink

Google Revamps Sitelinks

Google has apparently made some changes to the way it assigns and shows Sitelinks, the list of pages included under the search results for certain sites that have a clear directory structure. As Barry Schwartz notes in posts at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable, several sites that did not previously have Sitelinks now do, as of this weekend.

The Sitelinks were officially named in September 2006, but have been around for at least July 2005. Google explains how they work in the Webmaster Help Center.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:39 PM | Permalink

Google Webmaster Tools Loophole closed

Not to long ago, Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reported that Google's new link count tools would show the link counts for other sites tool. In other words, you could get (more) accurate link counts from Google for sites you don't own.

The way it worked is that you would get the link from for your site, which would produce a line similar to the following:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/links?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stonetemple.com%2F&hl=en

You would then take the line and edit it to change the site listed. For example:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/links?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&hl=en

But it now looks like this loophole has been closed. So clearly, Google does not want users making use of their new tool for competitive intelligence purposes. You can get the link counts for sites you verify as yours, and that's it.

Still all in all, a very powerful tool. While it's reported link counts are still less than Yahoo's totals, they are much closer than they used to be, and the ability to download your links into a spreadsheet file is really, really nice.

Posted by on 1:34 PM | Permalink

Voices of the Few

The “voices of the few” seem to be setting the social search agenda, or at least influencing what we find on social sites.

In the weekend WSJ (subscription required), an article entitled “The Wizards of Buzz” identified super-influencers across America who are contributing freely or for minimal pay.

These influencers include techies, people in the hinterlands, and devoted teens. They contribute links or bookmarks at a feverish pace.

What's clear is that many social site visitors respond to these contributions. On sites like Digg or Reddit, influencers submit items that receive many votes. At De.licio.us or Furl.net, influencers tag and bookmark many items and others respond by bookmarking what they discover.

What's less clear is whether the influencers are truly defining relevancy for the visitors, and whether visitors are missing what smaller voices are contributing as well.

Posted by on 12:30 PM | Permalink

More Sites Hitting Google's Supplemental Index?

It seems that more Web sites are ending up with pages in Google's supplemental index lately. Both Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans have posted tips to get a site out of the "Siberian work camp for Web pages," as Hagans calls it.

Of course, supplemental results are not the worst thing in the world, as Matt Cutts explained in a January infrastructure status report:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren't something to be afraid of; I've got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o' 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn't mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank.

If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they're in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I'd recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

I think going forward, you'll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher, and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.

However, if you've got sites in the supplemental results, and would rather they not be there, Hagans and Wall share some tactics to get them out.

Hagans suggests that, since Google is "interested in trusted sites that are after a whitehat, long term commitment," site owners need to show that they fit that category:

  • Give each page a unique title.
  • Give each page a unique META DESCRIPTION.
  • Make sure each page has a good amount of unique content.
  • Get some more trusted links.
  • Get some links to internal pages.

Wall suggests that the increasing banishments are the result of Google tightening down on duplicate content filters and tweaking the effect that PageRank scores have in indexing a page.

Focusing on blogs, Wall suggests:

  • Get Real Links
  • Make Longer Posts
  • Reduce Sitewide Repetitive Features
  • Don't Link at Garbage

For commercial sites, Wall suggests also adding an editorial element to the site, and enabling customer feedback and reviews to add fresh content.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:30 PM | Permalink

Taggers Hitting the Mainstream

There are enough people tagging now to (almost) call it mainstream.

In a recent Pew study, some 28% of online Americans are already tagging. What's surprising is the composition of the taggers, who don't just fit the classic “early adopter” model.

Who is tagging and ranking overall? According to Pew, taggers come from everywhere but here are the highlights:

* Broadband subscribers.
* Everyone under 50 years old.
* Minorities more than whites.
* Folks earning over $75k annually.

Web users like their tagging. They like to save, find and share their photos, news, blogs and favorite web pages.

Pew Director Lee Rainie explains the attraction quite simply: “Tagging is a kind of next-stage search phenomenon, a way to mark, store and then retrieve the content that web users have found valuable.”

Posted by on 12:25 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Builds "Brickhouse"

I missed this on Friday, but this Business Week story on Yahoo's internal program to get more agile is definitely worth a look. It's called "Brickhouse" (cue the funky bass line from the Commodores song). Last week's release of Pipes represents the first fruits of the program.

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake has been chosen to lead a team of Yahoos in their own offices in San Francisco to develop new projects and experiment within their day-to-day jobs. Many of the products that come out of Brickhouse may not carry the Yahoo brand, to allow the company to experiment a bit with edgier ideas, according to Bradley Horowitz, vice-president of Yahoo's advanced development division.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:20 AM | Permalink

A Conversation with Google's Director of Print Ads

PaidContent's Rafat Ali has posted an audio interview with Tom Phillips, director of print ads at Google, which he conducted last week at a VC event in New York. "Dealmakers Summit: My Q&A With Tom Phillips of Google" gives a good overview of the program, which Google is hoping will extend its online auction platform into offline ads, in partnership with 30 newspaper companies representing more than 500 daily newspapers.

UPDATE: I listened to the 30-minute interview (yes, you're welcome), and found some interesting highlights:

Google just completed an alpha test with about 100 advertisers on 66 major daily newspapers. Phillips said a beta is planned sometime in the spring.

He said that newspapers in the test were all happy to accept the auction-based offers for unused ad space. He said that newspapers have proved to be more suitable to Google's plans, at least in the short term, as the frequency of ad exposures is important.

On the topic of Google as a friend or enemy to print publishers, Phillips said Google is most certainly a friend:

"I do believe that Google is a friend to the media industry at large," Phillips said. "We are not a content provider. We help consumers find information. And we help advertisers find their customers. That's our job. Our natural position is as friend. And yet, because of the growth of the company and our reaching into lots of different domains, we feel threatening to the world."

"There were some things we did over the course of a few years that were not all that media-savvy, that got us into some hot water," he added.

For newspapers, Google is structuring the program so as not to step on the toes of the newspapers' own sales efforts, such as by selling quarter-page or smaller ad units:

"We really want to bring our advertisers into this medium, and we don't want to go head-to-head with the newspapers' negotiated deals with their primary franchises. There are two places we don't play. One is where the newspapers are already selling national advertising, and that tends to be full-page, and tends to be dictated position in the newspaper, which our system doesn't accommodate. The other is in local, and it's often confused. ... Google's sweet spot is national advertisers: big, medium and small. Those are the advertisers we're trying to bring into newspapers. Those medium and small businesses that are selling to a national audience have no access to newspapers in the U.S. and the newspapers have no access to them. There's absolutely no controversy in us bringing those advertisers to the newspapers. They tend to be advertisers that are going to buy partial pages on an opportunistic basis, and that's the kind of inventory that we most often open up."

Google plans to bring tools for targeting, marketing and measurement to the print product as well, and so expects to move to a similar skew toward agency sales, as it has with its search ads.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:47 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Outlines Keys to PPC Success: Test, Test, Test

On the Yahoo Search Marketing blog, Michael Egan, senior director of content solutions, gives a run-down of the ad testing features available in Panama, and suggests that ad testing is a "must do."

In his post, His post, "Improving Ad Quality, Part II," Egan writes:

It's hard to argue that Tiger Woods is pretty darn good at what he does. But even he is not perfect. Imagine if he were allowed to hit four balls each time and then choose the shot that worked the best. Scary good.

We're giving you that opportunity with our new ad testing feature In concept, it's like giving Tiger multiple shots from which to choose the best lie. Ad Testing is a “must do” if you are really trying to improve the quality of your ads.

Ad testing will work with as few as two ads in an ad group, or as many as 20. Without ad optimization, multiple ads are rotated relatively evenly. Once ad optimization is turned on, the system begins to learn which ad performs better, based on click-through-rate (CTR) normalized by position across all keywords in an ad group, and will begin to show that ad more frequently.

Egan suggests a testing strategy that takes into account four main factors:


  • Differentiate yourself -- Talk about the 3 C's: Customer, Competition and Company

  • Focus -- Don't try to test everything at once. Concentrate on specific characteristics of your ads and test those characteristics.

  • Iterate -- Don't treat ad testing as a one-time effort.

  • Isolate -- There are likely a small handful of keywords that drive a majority of the value you achieve from your search marketing efforts.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:37 AM | Permalink

February 9, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 9, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Facebook on the Rise

Social networking success story Facebook came up with a one-two punch of announcements over the past two days, as it looks to boost its social networking capabilities and become a legitimate competitor to dominant market share leader MySpace.

On Wednesday, Facebook partnered with Comcast to distribute a new online video series called Facebook Diaries. Facebook gets distribution and exposure for its new video efforts while Comcast gains content to bring web traffic to its site Ziddio.com and the ability to tap into a younger demographic among Facebook's 16 million users.

Then yesterday, the company announced a new partnership with online jobs site Jobster. This brings Facebook the added dimension of job hunting to its existing social networking mix, while Jobster gets a much needed boost in distribution and exposure. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has a nice summary of Jobster's recent history, which includes an AOL-like dissmantling of the subscription wall to make way for an ad model.

The two young companies could be powerful together, and their union is reminiscent of MySpace's partnership with SimplyHired, which yielded MySpace Jobs. Given that a major chunk of Facebook's user base remains college-aged (it started as a high school and college social networking site as explained below), it could represent interesting targeting opportunities for job posting and other advertising to that demographic set.

The fusion of social networking and career building is also interesting, in that it could be competetive with sites like LinkedIn, which has formed a niche where these media collide. Jobser's free job posting model (explained in the TechCrunch article mentioned above) could also become a considerable threat to the Monsters, CarreerBuilders and HotJobss of the world, now that the company has vaulted its market position and exposure.

And speaking of threats, Facebook itself is nipping at the heels of MySpace. After gaining considerable traction with high school and college students - the site first required a .edu email address to join - the company released access to the general public in September. Its traffic then went up 16 percent in October and has been rising steadily ever since.

It has a long way to go to reach MySpace's nearly 80 percent market share in the social networking space (Facebook comes in second with about 8 percent), but anecdotal evidence suggests that many teens and twenty-somethings are flocking to Facebook. Or to use the vernacular, MySpace is "so 2005".

Ironic that the same viral marketing and herd mentality that built MySpace's massive user base could be its undoing. If this happens, it will take a while. Regardless, Facebook is on a tear and will be a company to watch closely.

Posted by Mike Boland on 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Hoping Smiles Are Contagious

Google has just started a "send us your smile" campaign. They are moving one of their offices and want to wall paper the new office walls with pictures of Google advertisers.

A nice sentiment but after a while staring at those smiling faces on the walls has to get a little much... I want to visit that office after 6 months and would wager a few of the pics have been graffittied... true smiling can be contagious but in your face smiles can be annoying after a while.

Give us any thoughts here.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:22 PM | Permalink

A Newcomer's Guide to SES?

Rob Kerry, aka evilgreenmonkey, has put together a guide for newbies to search industry events. "The Search Conference Groupie" details the eight categories of attendees:

  • The Celebrity
  • The Wannabe Celebrity
  • The Breadwinner
  • The Wanker
  • The Suit
  • The Traditionalist
  • The Newbie
  • The Search Conference Groupie

This is a must-read for anyone who's heading to their first search industry event, and rather amusing for anyone who's been around to see these various characters. So if you're on your way to SES London next week, or plan on attending another conference soon, give it a read and see where you fit in.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:08 PM | Permalink

Building Your Own Search Engine

Over at WebmasterWorld Tedster references an interesting short paper about creating your own search engine by Googler Anna Lynn Patterson. This document makes for a good read.

The paper was published in April of 2004 when she was a student at Stanford University. She is also the person whose name appears on the recent Google patent application titled Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system.

Basically, she breaks it down into hard drive space, having lots of servers, and CPU power. Anna's document is a good initial primer, but there is another aspect of building a search engine that deserves some emphasis.

The search engine companies have built the largest networks of servers the world has ever known. When I think of Google's core technology assets, I don't think about search engine algorithms, I think about massively deployed server networks operating in close harmony.

Posted by on 10:46 AM | Permalink

Is Google Radio Sinking? DMarc Founders Depart

The founders of DMarc are leaving Google. That's the scoop from paidContent's Rafat Ali, who reports that brothers Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the company's founders, resigned amid tension over Google's approach to radio ad sales.

The Steelbergs joined Google when their automated radio ad placement company was acquired by Google a year ago for $102 million in cash plus the possibility of further payouts totaling up to $1.13 billion. If Valleywag's rumors are correct, the founders are now unlikely to see more than $200 million in earn-outs.

A Google spokesperson told Ali, "Google is committed to the audio business. We will continue to gather feedback during the Audio Ads beta test, and are happy with the progress to date."

edit: giving proper credit to paidContent, which had the scoop on this yesterday.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:10 AM | Permalink

Has Powerset Found Its Edge?

Semantic search startup Powerset has apparently licensed some natural language search technology developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley, according to VentureBeat. Powerset's CTO, Ron Kaplan, is a former PARC scientist.

In an interview, Kaplan said he didn't believe Google took natural language seriously enough. “Deep analysis is not what they're doing. Their orientation is toward shallow relevance, and they do it well.” Powerset, however, “is much deeper, much more exciting. It really is the whole kit and caboodle.” While natural language has been a vexing problem for decades, Kaplan said he believes it is ready for prime-time.

Chief executive Barney Pell approached Kaplan in Sept. 2005, and convinced Kaplan to help make a prototype search engine. Over time, Pell negotiated with Kaplan to bring his entire PARC research unit to bear on the problem.

Powerset's license of PARC's technology covers the broad areas of consumer search and published content. In return, Powerset will pay PARC a royalty fee, which is capped at an undisclosed level, and other compensation to PARC for the employment of its researchers on the Powerset project. PARC also gets an equity stake in Powerset. Powerset has the right to offer jobs to the PARC employees, if it wants.

The San Francisco-based search company is currently "operating in semi-stealth mode," according to its site. It has not yet released a publicly available product. Danny wrote about the history of natural language search when Powerset began announcing its plans.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:03 AM | Permalink

February 8, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 8, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • Jason Calacanis Hates SEOs, But Loves What SEOs Do
    The fundamental problem here is the definition of SEO. Calacanis extols the value of clean page design, great content, and solid Web design. Guess what? So does every reputable SEO firm.
  • SEMPO Releases North American Search Report
    SEMPO has released its latest "State of Search Engine Marketing 2006" report.
  • Don't take the (link) bait
    At its core, marketing your web site is about building trust, building a good reputation, and effective marketing techniques. The term "bait" makes the whole thing sound like a game, when marketing your web site needs to be serious business.
  • New Search Ad Management Tools Launched
    New search ad management platforms from ChannelAdvisor and iProspect launched this week.
  • Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixing Tool
    Yahoo has unveiled a new data manipulation/mashup platform called Yahoo Pipes, "a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment."
  • Video Advertising Gets Local
    If you bring in targeting capabilities and content volumes possible with IPTV and Web-delivered video, a compounding factor could be more favorable economies and a "long tail" effect of available ad inventory.
  • Lycos Jumps Into the Social Mix
    Lycos MIX, a new bookmarking tool, lets users pull video clips from a variety of different sources across the Web.
  • Welcome New SEW Bloggers
    A warm welcome to our two new Search Engine Watch blog correspondents, Eric Enge and Grant Crowell.
  • Miva Cutting Work Force By 20%
    Miva announced today it has a restructuring plan that calls for a 20% reduction in its workforce.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:32 PM | Permalink

New Search Ad Management Tools Launched

Two new search ad management platforms launched this week. One, from ChannelAdvisor, focuses on the needs of online retailers. The other, from iProspect, takes channels that were previously optimized in isolation and now manages them as a whole.

ChannelAdvisor has launched a new search advertising management tool that lets online retailers manage multiple paid search campaigns from one interface. According to ClickZ News, the SearchAdvisor product consolidates all bidding, optimization and ad template considerations into a single interface, for campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com.

SearchAdvisor allows marketers to manage keywords on a product or sales margin basis, upload campaigns in bulk, track landing page performance and get multi-channel reports. Campaigns on each engine are managed independently, based on the marketer's goals for each. This will often result in different bid prices based on the relative profitability of Google vs. Yahoo.

From iProspect, the latest update to the iSEBA bidding engine now optimizes a client's spend across multiple shopping engine feeds and Yahoo's Search Submit Pro paid inclusion program. While each of these channels, as well as paid search and contextual ads, could previously be optimized on their own, the change now is that these first two channels can now be managed across all channels. Eventually, other channels will be added into the global optimization service.

"We've taken this functionality, what's happening in the algorithm, and can now apply it to anything. It's now an asset management platform," said John Tawadros, VP of client services and technology at iProspect. "We're rolling out with paid inclusion and shopping feeds, but it can be used to optimize anything -- banners, ContentMatch, NexTag or anything else."

The technology optimizes the overall paid inclusion/shopping engine budget across multiple feeds, monitors the results, and automatically turns individual listings within each feed on and off based on their effectiveness at achieving the desired campaign objective relative to all the other listings in all of the feeds. In this way, more budget resources are automatically allocated to listings that produce superior search engine marketing results.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:05 PM | Permalink

Video Advertising Gets Local

The New York Times reports today on a few new video ad creation and placement providers. We've known about Spot Runner for a while, but it seems the idea is spawning a handful of new providers.

It's clear that one of the advantages of Spot Runner and others is to bring television advertising within the grasp of the majority of small businesses (for which it has traditionally been cost prohibitive). But it's also notable how this can also help national advertisers more efficiently reach local audiences.

If you bring in targeting capabilities and content volumes possible with IPTV and web delivered video, a compounding factor could be more favorable economies and a long tail effect of available ad inventory (similar to what online search did for small business and local advertising). All together, these factors bode well for small business advertisers and their ability play in the video advertising sandbox.

B&C meanwhile reports that local television revenues are up 41%. This is mostly due to growth in advertising and more small businesses in auto and real estate verticals coming around to the idea of television advertising. It will be interesting to see if this is an augmentation to, or replacement of, these businesses' traditional newspaper and Yellow Pages ad spends.

On a more national level, eMarketer reports on an Accenture study that shows the growing interest among advertising executives for IPTV advertising and its targeting possibilities.

There is a lot of potential for transforming the local and national television advertising landscape if you look at how all these factors could converge over the next few years. Teleco IPTV rollouts, the fate of net neutrality, consumer adoption of online video, and small business adoption of video advertising, are all vital factors. We'll continue to watch closely.

Posted by Mike Boland on 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jason Calacanis Hates SEOs, But Loves What SEOs Do

Jason Calacanis is back stirring the pot and bad-mouthing the SEO industry. As he did during his SES Chicago keynote, Calacanis is once again sharing his belief that "SEO is bull$#!t," and that all that is necessary to rank in search engines is to "make a clean page, good content—that should be enough."

This time, on his blog, Calacanis took offense to a video of a social media optimization firm, which Muhammed Saleem highlighted on his Pronet Advertising blog as the reason why social media sites hate SEOs, or at least their perception of SEOs.

Danny Sullivan has already made an attempt to explain things to Calacanis in his post, "Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason," but I wanted to add our voice to the mix as well.

SEO, like any other industry, is going to have people enter it with the specific goal of taking advantage of client ignorance and making a quick buck. It happens everywhere. To say that that type of shady character is typical of the vast majority of ethical, hard-working practitioners is irresponsible for a person in Jason's position.

Jason took umbrage to the video, which is not surprising, since that was the point of Saleem's post. He pointed it out as an example of the shady side of the business, which encourages worst practices, and gives everyone else a bad name. "The Digg community doesn't have an irrational vendetta against SEO-related sites, it's just that people like the gentleman in the video above, cause the community to generalize about SEOs and thus label all of them has having the same mentality and using the same tactics," Saleem writes.

Aside from the differences between SEO and SMO (social media optimization), which is another discussion altogether, Jason is misguided when he writes, "There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don't consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means 'gaming the system' to 90% of us. Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you're gonna do just fine in the rankings."

The fundamental problem here is the definition of SEO. Calacanis extols the value of clean page design, great content, and solid Web design. Guess what? So does every reputable SEO firm. Those are all elements of a successful SEO strategy. There are many Web design firms out there without a clue about designing a page in a way that makes the quality content on the site most easily indexable to search engines. That's SEO. There are, of course, many designers out there who have those skills, and I'd bet that they themselves define those skills as SEO skills, and market them to their clients in that way.

The same fundamentally flawed definition is at least partially at the root of the whole "Rocket Science" debate. Interestingly, Mr. Pasternack weighs in at Calacanis' site, to give support to a kindred soul, but also to question the statistics behind his comment that "90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:31 PM | Permalink

Don't take the (link) bait

Actually, I don't have a strong objection to link bait. I do have a strong objection to the term, and its unfortunate connotations. The whole notion of baiting someone is not positive. And if you buy into the term, it becomes tempting to buy into bad ideas.

At its core, marketing your web site is about building trust, building a good reputation, and effective marketing techniques. The term "bait" makes the whole thing sound like a game, when marketing your web site needs to be serious business.

The term link baiting reminds me of that old phrase (that I also hated) "link popularity". Ugh. These terms make you think that the game is to get large numbers of links, and it's simply not true. Some of the strategies for getting large numbers of links are not all they are cracked up to be. It's great to get thousands of links from your day in the sunshine on Digg, but you still need to answer the question about whether or not they are relevant links that help your rankings.

It reminds me of a post I saw long ago on Greg Boser's blog about Amish Go Karts and Mini-Bike Furniture. In this post, Greg explains that the domain amishfurnitureandcrafts.com was resolving to the same IP address as gokartsusa.com (note that this is no longer the case).

Greg went on to provide some demonstrations of the wierd search terms that Go Karts USA was ranking for, terms such as Amish Go Karts, and Mini-Bike Furniture (note that this also is no longer the case).

But the point of the story is that links need to be relevant to really help you compete on search terms that you want to rank for. You need to focus on getting solid, high quality links to your site. This doesn't mean that Digg (or Reddit, or ...) can't help you. Just make sure that your link baiting scheme will bring you good relevant links.

And don't think of it as baiting someone, or setting a trap, or whatever. Think of it as building a serious business by offering something of value that tons of people are going to want to link to.

Posted by on 2:05 PM | Permalink

Lycos Jumps Into the Social Mix

With the launch of Lycos MIX (http://mix.lycos.com), a new bookmarking tool, Lycos users can pull video clips from a variety of different sources across the web (YouTube, MySpace,Yahoo Video, and others) into one playlist, creating a community around shared interests and topics.

Within the MIX interface, users can add new videos, rate and comment on all the videos within a given playlist. Playlists can be made private or kept public, and the owner of a content mix can approve or discard video additions.

Lycos Mix works for both PC and MAC users, and browsers including IE, Windows, Safari and Firefox support Lycos MIX.

More notes from the release:

“Lycos MIX continues the evolution of community and video with a true Web 2.0 collaborative, contributory and interactive social viewing experience,” said Brian Kalinowski, chief operating officer for Lycos, Inc. “Unlike social networking sites, each MIX is a collection of video clips where users socialize around content, not individual people or profiles, creating combinations of lasting content to share with others. With Lycos MIX, users can create an amalgamation of video content where others participate by viewing, commenting and adding more clips.”

Other unique functionality includes a “MIX It” bookmarklet feature, allowing users to quickly and easily add videos from other sites to their MIXES without cutting or pasting URL's. Robust permanent comment and rating system features also allow users to rate MIXES, as opposed to individual pieces of video content.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski on 12:38 PM | Permalink

Welcome New SEW Bloggers

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to our two new Search Engine Watch blog correspondents, Eric Enge and Grant Crowell. Both names are likely familiar to our readers, since both gentlemen have written articles for SearchDay, and have been around the SES circuit for years.

Eric Enge is president of Stone Temple Consulting, located near Boston. He will focus on issues like link building, Web analytics, and vertical search. He is also a co-founder of Moving Traffic, the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide. You've also likely seen some of our posts linking to interviews on his excellent Stone Temple Blog.

Grant Crowell is CEO and creative director of Grantastic Designs, a full-service SEM and design firm outside of Chicago. He has an extensive professional graphics background, along with years of professional experience in the fields of public relations and publications, including private enterprise, state government projects, and non-profit organizations. Grant will share some blogging duties on multimedia and search with Amanda Watlington, and also focus on other general search topics.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:11 PM | Permalink

Miva Cutting Work Force By 20%

Miva announced today it has a restructuring plan that calls for a 20% reduction in its workforce. The company that evolved from the merger of FindWhat and ESpotting a couple of years ago expects to complete layoffs by May 2007, according to an Adotas report today.

Miva CEO Peter Corrao said the work force reductions are "fundamental to achieving our turnaround goal for stabilizing cash and returning to positive operating margins."

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:48 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixing Tool

Yahoo has unveiled a new data manipulation/mashup platform called Yahoo Pipes (although they seem to be currently clogged). According to Yahoo, "Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line."

This is beyond my capacity to properly explain at the moment, and I have tons of more search-related things to cover today, so I'll leave this one to others who know what they're talking about:

  • For starters, check Techmeme and you'll see everyone that has weighed in thus far.
  • Tim O'Reilly breathlessly calls it a "milestone in the history of the Internet," and says he's been waiting ten years for something like this.
  • Yahoo developer Jeremy Zawodny says "Yahoo Pipes is one of a very small set of completely amazing on-line data manipulation and data mashup environments that can really change the way we work with on-line data sources."
  • Google's Matt Cutts thinks it's "a really neat idea."
  • Six Apart's Anil Dash compares it to some other tools in the category
  • Niall Kennedy gives a review, and includes some potential implications for publishers.

We'll circle back once the brouhaha dies down, and the Pipes site is available, to let you know how this will affect you as a search marketer.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:41 AM | Permalink

SEMPO Releases North American Search Report

North American advertisers spent $9.4 billion on SEM in 2006, with $8 billion, or 86 percent of that going to paid search, and $1.1 billion, or 12 percent of overall spending to SEO. Those are the latest numbers from SEMPO's "The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006" report, released today.

We dig deeper into the results in today's SearchDay, but here are the top-line trends from the report:

  • More than 76 percent of respondents take part in organic SEO activities, and 71 percent do paid search
  • Participation in paid inclusion dipped to 20 percent, from 40 percent of respondents in 2005
  • Both branding and direct sales continue to be top goals (both around 57 percent), but more are now measuring success of branding efforts in addition to direct response metrics, instead of trying to justify branding success with DR metrics
  • SEM is poaching budget from other marketing channels -- especially from offline
  • More companies are bringing some or all of their SEM efforts (paid and organic) in-house

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:16 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 7, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • Think Like a Search Engineer
    Understanding the way search engineers think can help you decide whether or not a new idea is worth trying. Knowing when you are taking risks, or making the decision to avoid them, can help scale your search engine marketing strategy to new heights.
  • Will Splinter Communities Work?
    Web publishers are scrambling to provide their own outlets for user-generated content. This could be interesting to search marketers, especially if we're able to reach bloggers or amateur video makers within more defined and splintered communities.
  • What Personalization Means to SEOs
    Has the reliance on rankings held back search marketers and their clients from doing some more advanced marketing?
  • Google Clarifies Some Webmaster Guidelines
    Google has made some minor changes to its Webmaster guidelines, which appear to be aimed at clarifying policies rather than substantially changing them.
  • Diller Sings Praises of SEO
    Speaking at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York today, IAC's Barry Diller grumbled about a lot of things, but not SEO.
  • Yahoo Adds Narrow Search Builder Template
    Yahoo today made some design enhancements to its Search Builder custom search engine.
  • Rand Fishkin, the SUPER Man
    Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz comes clean with a super secret... he was "that guy" who wanted to propose to his girlfriend during a Super Bowl commercial. She said yes.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:27 PM | Permalink

Want to Succeed in SEO? Think Like a Search Engineer

Understanding the way search engineers think can help you decide whether or not a new idea is worth trying. Knowing when you are taking risks, or making the decision to avoid them, can help scale your search engine marketing strategy to new heights. Eric Enge assumes the role of search engineer in today's SearchDay.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:00 PM | Permalink

Diller Sings Praises of SEO

Speaking at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York today, IAC's Barry Diller poked user-generated content, stated his designs on the "short tail," and dissed social networking. Zach Rodgers has the details at ClickZ

One thing Diller does like is SEO. He called his in-house SEO practitioners "resident geniuses," and said SEO's contribution to IAC's traffic acquisition efforts can't be understated. Diller claims that when an SEO expert transferred from Expedia to Citysearch, the site's unique user count jumped from six million to over 20 million per month "without spending a nickel. That's great value."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:34 PM | Permalink

Google Clarifies Some Webmaster Guidelines

Google has made some minor changes to its Webmaster guidelines, which appear to be aimed at clarifying policies rather than substantially changing them. The changes, as spotted by Philipp Lenssen, include a change in emphasis on the result of violating quality guidelines from removal from Google's index to a site's removal or being "otherwise penalized." Another change adds language to clarify that links are not the only element of PageRank, and removal of a phrase saying ranking of sites is completely automated.

In the comments on Lenssen's post, Google's Matt Cutts weighs in with a personal opinion that this is the result of a clean-up: "I wouldn't characterize this as a policy change. Some folks (including me) have been taking a fresh look at our web documentation to see if anything can be misunderstood. We'd like to minimize the chance for misinterpretation of any help documentation. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar small changes throughout our documentation to clarify various points," Cutts wrote.

In addition, Google spokesperson Victoria Grand told SEW: "Our policies are the same today as they were yesterday and before we made this change. We are just clarifying our documentation to prevent potential misunderstandings."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:14 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Adds Narrow Search Builder Template

Yahoo today made some design enhancements to its Search Builder custom search engine. In response to criticism from bloggers about the options available for a small search box, Yahoo has rolled out a "super-narrow" option, just 192 pixels wide. Yahoo has also redesigned the Search Builder home page, adding featured sites that have implemented the tool.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:38 PM | Permalink

What Personalization Means to SEOs

In his ClickZ column today, Intrapromote's Eric Dafforn takes a look at the effects of Google's roll-out of personalized search results. We discussed the move on the SEW Blog on Friday.

Dafforn admits that as an SEO professional, he shares concerns of no longer having universal control over the Google results page. But he also thinks the reliance on rankings has held back search marketers and their clients from doing some more advanced marketing. He lists off several events that were predicted to change the face of search, and became the norm.

He predicts that the change will force marketers to think more about end users: "Corny as it might sound, designing sites for users has never been more important for search marketers than it is today, if for no other reason than the single algorithm you're chasing now will soon be 500 million little ones."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:20 AM | Permalink

Rand Fishkin, the SUPER Man

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz comes clean with a super secret... he was "that guy" who wanted to propose to his girlfriend during a SuperBowl commercial. Yes folks, the blogger behind MySuperProposal.com was in fact Rand Fishkin, and with a lot of help from Joseph Morin, CEO & Founder of Storybids.com, they almost pulled off the best play of Superbowl XLI. And it probably would have had the most talked/blogged about Superbowl commercial of 2007.

When the inital plans to raise money for a commerical slot or find an advertiser to sponsor the proposal fell through, CBS almost stepped up to the plate to air the 15 second proposal for FREE, based on the viral buzz the MySuperProposal blog had created. By the halftime show, (hello, who would have preferred to see this over Prince?) Rand knew it wasn't going to happen during the big game. So Plan B followed: air this simple spot locally during his long time girlfriend's favorite TV show, Veronica Mars, and drop the clip on iFilm.com, followed by a torturous wait for Geraldine's response.

Watch Rand's Video Proposal Now:

So that's not the end of the story, of course - here's the video of Geraldine's exciting reaction, which was also posted on iFilm.com, two hours after the proposal clip:

Danny Sullivan & I also discussed the impending proposal, earlier in the day on the Daily Searchcast, where you may catch me *nearly* letting some of the secret slip!

In addition to the details on MySuperProposal, SeattlePI.comhas much of the local scoop and backstory on how the project evolved, and I'm sure the SEO blogosphere is going to buzzing about this, but let me (and the team at SEW) be the first to say:

Congratulations, Geraldine & Rand!

Posted by on 1:49 AM | Permalink

Will Splinter Communities Work?

Web publishers are scrambling to provide their own outlets for user-generated content.

This could be interesting to search marketers, especially if we're able to reach bloggers or amateur video makers within more defined and splintered communities.

So far, larger branders have taken the plunge. MTV invested in a company called TagWorld. Now it can produce social networking sites a la My Space, complete with audio/video sharing and chatting too.

You know the world is changing when even the Gray Lady says she'll start accepting user-generated video because it's cheaper that way. NY Times executive Nicholas Ascheim said there would be an announcement in March, as reported in Red Herring.

Whether well-known brands or not, online publishers always seek other reasons to grow their destination traffic. Sites where there's plenty of dynamic content and sharing should do best with new user-generated sources.

If sites already attract visitors for specific purposes, like passions or repetitive tasks, then there's an even better chance these visitors might stay a while longer and use other features too.

We don't think splintered communities are a sure thing, but might present an efficient buying opportunity if they do survive.

Posted by on 1:48 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 6, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:29 PM | Permalink

Mywaves Adds Personalized Mobile Video Search

Video delivered to your phone, based on keyword search, is the essence of the new mywaves offering. Today mywaves announced the addition of a personalized search feature for its mobile video services. This free service offers users content directly to their mobile phones, sourced from many of the Web's top video sites, including Comedy Central, VH1, YouTube, Google, and CNN.

The new feature allows users to specify a search phrase that alerts mywaves of their interest. The service automatically delivers relevant videos to users' mobile phones and will send a text messages when new content is found. For those wanting to stay absolutely on top of the newest video content available, this adds a new dimension.

Mywaves currently is averaging 40,000 new sign-ups a week. The explosion of applications for viewing and transmitting video content makes it even more important for video content creators and search marketers to learn how to make their videos easier to find on the Web.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 7:19 PM | Permalink

All The Code – New Search Engine for Programmers

The announcement in TechCrunch about the launch of All The Code prompted a deeper dive into this highly specialized type of vertical search.

All The Code at this time is a source code search engine for the Java language only. Plans are in the works to add more languages later. All The Code has no mechanism for submission of code. This too is promised for the future. It looks like there is a lot of development still to do. According to the engine's FAQ a relevancy algorithm that takes into consideration the code and its frequency of use differentiates All The Code from the other code source engines.

This new entrant will have to run against some formidable competition that has a running head start, most notably Google, Krugle and Koders. In October 2006, Google launched Google Code which is a searchable repository of publicly accessible code gathered from across the Internet. The archive includes code in a number of different languages and results can be filtered by language.

Koders' CEO Darren Rush in November 2006 told WebProNews that Koders does not rely on public domain code, like Google Code, and is now transitioning beyond the code on the web, into more closed environments, to serve the needs of all developers from open source and enterprise.

In October, Ken Krugler, posting in the Krugle blog noted that:

the single biggest task that all code engines face is that the code itself represents an implementation of an algorithm, some functionality, business logic, whatever - but it's hard to derive the intent from (most) function and variable names
.

It remains to be seen how this challenge will be met, and all of the code engines appear to have their work cut out for them. Today a coder's best bet is to use multiple engines to try and find code that will meet the task.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 7:01 PM | Permalink

What's Serendipity?

When you find a “story you wouldn't have normally read,” that's called serendipity in the newspaper world. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry explained that serendipity is alive and well at online newspapers too.

Fry points to most popular or most emailed stories as inspirational sources. In the Wall Street Journal, he admires how everyone votes for these listings. (See Fry's WSJ column, subscription required.)

Popularity features are interesting, but reflect where articles appear in the first place. When an article is placed on the homepage, for example, there's a higher likelihood this exposure influences clicks and results.

Most viewed-type lists are democratic, since they reflect the "votes" from everyone visiting the site. However visitors aren't literally part of a single community or interest group.

Wouldn't it be nicer to have visitors share interests, rather than simply contribute to overall popularity contests? Then everyone could browse, search and find things related to their own interests.

It seems to me that serendipity should be different for everyone -- almost as varied as snowflakes.

Posted by on 1:10 PM | Permalink

Super Bowl Advertisers Missed Opportunities

I know, I could use all sorts of football metaphors here, but I'll skip that to get to the story. Reprise Media published its third annual Super Bowl Scorecard yesterday, looking at how TV advertisers integrated search into their media plan.

The short answer: most of them did some search marketing, but very few did enough.

Reprise discusses the results on their SearchViews blog, and I've posted more on it in a story at ClickZ News.

Our own Chris Boggs did his own assessment of the “URL visibility factor” of the ads in the SEW blog yesterday, and will talk about the organic results of Super Bowl advertisers in today's SearchDay.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:13 PM | Permalink

Niched or Vertical Approach Popular in Chinese Search

The allure of 1.3 billion people has many international corporations adapting their marketing and product offerings to the Chinese market. The search industry seems to be following the same direction.

In the last 30 days, both Yahoo! and MSN have announced vertical initiatives into the Chinese market. Interestingly, though China is a Communist country, both service Chinese business interests.

MSN is launching a job search service - funny I always thought in Communist countries the government told you what your job was. Yahoo China, last month, announced its intention to develop as a business search engine for the China market.

Guess the capitalists of the world are being won over to the profits available from Communist customers.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:16 AM | Permalink

Google Enhances Its "Link:" Command at Webmaster Central

As Kevin Newcomb mentioned yesterday, Danny Sullivan had an outstanding write-up yesterday about Google's enhancement of its "Link:" operator which allows researchers to discover many of the links that Google has indexed as pointing to a particular URL: Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools.

Google will allow users of its Webmaster Central tools to see more thorough reports of inbound links as measured to domains and even particular pages. More information is also available at the Webmaster Central blog.

This underscores the importance of working with Google by signing up with Webmaster Central. Not only will it help to get important pages of a Web site indexed, but it will also assist webmasters in conducting important competitor analysis. In the past, many researchers have almost completely ignored the Google "Link:" command, or operator, since it is known that Google does not display all of the links it knows about. Others have continued to use it, thinking that the ones that Google shows "must be more valuable" than others.

This has in fact been an often discussed topic at the Search Engine Watch Forums, where a sticky thread discusses the topic of the difference in inbound link reporting at various engines, and reveals that the current link discovery tool of consensus choice is the one found at Yahoo! Site Explorer. Although it is unlikely that those many converts will now abandon Yahoo! to use only the Google enhanced version, this news has made many webmasters and search engine optimization specialists happy.

(Begin editorial) Our engineers at Avenue A | Razorfish love to use the Webmaster Central tools, but, believe it or not, sometimes have problems with getting clients to approve the use, since it requires verification code to be placed on the Web site. Perhaps if Google would be more open about sharing its information without requiring this code, it would get a better reputation with some marketers that feel that they require too much "inside information." Google has done a great job in helping webmasters with their Web sites, but still needs to improve its relationship and willingness to work with agencies and other SEO companies, in the opinion of some. (/end editorial)

Posted by Chris Boggs on 11:13 AM | Permalink

Take the Jupiter/ClickZ Search Marketing Survey

JupiterResearch and the ClickZ Network, which includes Search Engine Watch, are now conducting our semi-annual Search Marketing 2007 executive survey. All search marketers are invited to participate in this short, 25-question survey, in exchange for a copy of the aggregated survey results, and a chance to win a $50 gift certificate from Amazon.com.

Jupiter has been running the survey every six months since 2003. The goal is to explore the ways businesses are using search marketing, and provide a clearer picture of what strategies search marketers are pursuing, what features and tools are most important to them and where marketers are spending their search dollars.

Individual responses are strictly confidential, and are only used in aggregate and anonymous form. Only one response is accepted from a company. Surveys should be completed this week, by February 9. Please spare a few minutes to take the survey today.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:12 AM | Permalink

Linkbait Rules As Linkbait -- Masterful

Oh what a recursive world we live in. Andy Hagans has successfully baited links from several search marketing blogs with his Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing. (doh! now he's got me doing it too!)

He's a tricky one, that fella. He lures us in with some self-deprecating anti-linkbait talk, like "Is anyone else sick of link baiting yet? I sure am." Then he proceeds to write more than 3,000 words on the topic. The man is a master-baiter.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:38 AM | Permalink

IAC Reports Q4 Results

Ask.com parent IAC reported $1.8 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, up 8 percent over the prior year, and $6.3 billion in revenue for the full year, up 15.9 percent. Adjusted net income rose 21.4 percent for the quarter to $211.6 million, and came in at $533.0 million for the year, up 13.3 percent.

Media & Advertising results include IAC Search & Media (including Ask.com, Ask.com UK, Fun Web Products, and network properties), Citysearch and Evite. Revenue in this unit rose 46 percent in the quarter to $159.8 million.

Proprietary traffic in the Media & Advertising unit rose by 64.8 percent, and now constitutes 55.5 percent of all traffic. Traffic to syndicated network sites also rose, by 35.2 percent, and now makes up 44.5 percent of overall traffic.

More details are available at ClickZ News.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:29 AM | Permalink

Video Search Updates

Video search providers Searchforvideo and blinkx today made improvements to their video search platforms.

Searchforvideo debuted a new Web site that now sorts content by content provider, making it easier to find clips from a given service, such as iFilm, Heavy.com, AOL Video, Roo, and MSN Video. The search engine has been steadily adding content providers to its index, and this move makes those partnerships more prominent, and makes the searchforvideo.com more of a destination site.

Blinkx has added video content from Internet TV provider Veoh Networks. Veoh offers content from major entertainment studios and television networks, as well as independent video producers and enthusiasts. Blinkx has announced several such content partnerships in recent months. Deals have been made with professional content providers like QVC UK, Broadband Sports, World Fashion Channel, Rolling Stone and Boston.com, as well as with user-generated content sites like YouAreTV, VMix, and vpod.tv.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:14 AM | Permalink

Eurekster Adds Community Features

Personalized/social search provider Eurekster has launched several new community-based features to its swicki platform. The new tools enable users to ask and answer questions within their communities, and those results will be added into search results conducted by other users through the swicki. More details at ClickZ.

A Eurekster swicki uses index data from Yahoo, Ask, Feedster, and other specialized search engines. It adds value with behavioral re-ranking and collaborative filtering, to create results that are more relevant to a given community. It previously did this through implicit factors, using click stream analysis to analyze user behavior, which is reflected in search results and the "buzz cloud," a display of recently searched keywords weighted by popularity.

The new features add explicit factors to the mix, engaging users to come in and contribute their expertise in a Yahoo Answers-type of way. Users can also write their own answer into the search results, which will be displayed once they are approved by the swicki owner.

Eurekster has also launched a swicki Ads service, which allows advertisers to buy ads on multiple swickis individually. Later this year, Eurekster will add a channel-based capability for advertisers to make category-based buys across similar groups of swickis.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:56 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 5, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • Super Bowl Ads – Where's the URL?
    There have been some good reviews of this year's always-anticipated Super Bowl ad crop, but the “URL visibility factor” did not rank so well.
  • Yahoo Ad Ranking System Now Live
    Today's the day, as any search marketer not living under a rock for the past few months knows. Yahoo's flipping the switch on its new ad ranking model, so that bid price is no longer the sole factor in determining ad positions.
  • Stone Temple Interview with Jim Sterne
    The Web analytics luminary shares his tips for new marketers, rules for success, and thoughts on the state of the industry.
  • Krillion Joins the Online Shopping Space
    Today, Krillion launched with a focus on local search for big box retailers. More specifically, it is going after buyers for "considered purchase" items.
  • Graywolf Owns Local Search This Week
    Michael Gray, aka Graywolf, plans to post 20 interviews with local search marketers this week.
  • Nielsen to Acquire Remaining Shares of NetRatings
    The Nielsen Company, formerly VNU, plans to acquire the remaining interest in NetRatings for about $327 million. Nielsen has owned 60 percent of the company since 1998.
  • FAST AdMomentum: Private-Label Contextual Advertising
    FAST launched a private-label contextual advertising platform for online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers, offering a way to monetize traffic to their sites.
  • European Telecoms Giants Planning Mobile Search Engine?
    According to a U.K. newspaper report this weekend, a consortium of European providers are teaming up to build a mobile-phone search engine.
  • Google Adds Link Tools
    Google's Webmaster Tools now include in-depth reporting of inbound links to a user's site. The tool gives verified site owners a much more complete look at links than the existing link: operator.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:55 PM | Permalink

Google Adds Link Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools now include in-depth reporting of inbound links to a user's site, announced today on the Webmaster Central blog. The tool gives verified site owners a much more complete look at links than the existing link: operator does. Link data is divided by internal and external links, both to a home page or to specific pages on a site. Google still does not tell everything it knows, according to the poster, Peeyush: "Google knows about more links than the total we show, but the overall fraction of links we show is much, much larger than the link: command currently offers."

Danny Sullivan took a look at how the tool compares to the link: operator for his site.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:51 PM | Permalink

Krillion Joins the Online Shopping Space

The local online shopping space is quickly crowding up. Given the vast majority of online product research that ends in offline purchases (about 75 percent according to comScore), we've seen a few companies develop over the last 18 months in order to lead and track offline conversions.

NearbyNow launched last summer to provide product and retailer information for malls and shopping centers. StepUp Commerce meanwhile continues to attract an impressive amount of small business advertisers that wish to put their product and inventory information online. StepUp's acquisition by Intuit in September will position it to distribute this capability (along with Google AdWords) across Intuit's massive installed base of QuickBooks users (including 3.7 million small businesses). Finally, ShopLocal works with big box retailers to bring their circular information (product sales, availability and pricing) online.

Today, Krillion launched with a similar focus on this big box segment. More specifically, it is going after buyers for "considered purchase" items. According to co-founder and CEO Joel Toledano, this includes products that are more than $500 which, because of their size and price, are more likely to be bought locally.

"These tend to be larger bulky items that are bought in a physical store because they might be a touch and feel purchase such as a flat screen TV, or something that you want to talk to a salesperson about,” says Toledano. The company will start with an emphasis in the $18 billion home appliances category, but will eventually grow into other categories that similarly include large ticket items, such as consumer electronics.

One of Krillion's silver bullets will be its proprietary crawling technology that brings in raw product data, combined with its integration of this data into a series of search results pages that correspond to the many combinations of specific products, brands, categories and 40,000 US local areas. After doing this for the past 6 months, the company at launch has more than 275 million product and location results pages.

"This focuses on the ready to buy local customer who has done their research, is at the end of the buying cycle and is now essentially putting their hand up when their doing their query and saying 'here's what I'm looking for, here's where I am, just tell me who carries it'," says Toledano. "Think of it as the yellow pages meets Shopping.com"

Instead of considering itself a destination site for local shopping, Krillion will push content out using SEO so that these individual product results pages can be found in Google organic results for local product queries.

“There are only a half dozen brands like eBay and Amazon.com where people actually go to the URL bar and type it in," said Toledano. Beyond those, whether its Shopping.com or Shopzilla, consumers on a broad swath simply don't know those brands. They type in the product or retailer in a Google Yahoo! search box.”

The company will also integrate targeted ads throughout these specific product pages including links to complimentary products such as accessories or items that are part of corresponding appliance sets.

Given the many permutations of location and specific products, some will be more obscure than others and recieve more traffic than others. Regardless, the targeted nature of these searches, and their positioning near the end of the buying cycle for high consideration items, will make the ad space more valuable.

“To an advertiser, there is a great deal of value in the targeted nature of this," says Toledano. They don't have to do shotgun broad brush approach to advertise on a general category such as the term ‘digital camera', where they are lumped in with many other advertisers.”

This could be attractive to big box advertisers, and offer more of a granular local product search than is currently offered by ShopLocal and others. Gaining traffic and communicating its value to consumers could be its biggest challenge at the onset, but given that it will piggyback on the already existing brand affinity and traffic of Google, this could be easier for Krillion.

Its success here will therefore come down to its ability to execute successful SEO tactics throughout its hundreds of millions of product result pages.

Posted by Mike Boland on 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Graywolf Owns Local Search This Week

Michael Gray, aka Graywolf, is out to corner the market on local search content this week. He's posted the first four of an expected 20 interviews with local search marketers, collected in his post, "Local Search Tips, Tricks & Secrets."

Today's interviewees include Aaron Wall, Dean Bloomfield, Bill Slawski and Scott Smith. Throughout the week, Gray plans to release interviews with George Kepnick, Rich Skrenta, RC Jordan, Matt McGee, Rae Hoffman, Justilien Gaspard, Merrick Lozano, Carolyn Shelby, Greg Hartnett, Brad Geddes, Mike Belasco, Lyndon Antcliff, Jeremy Schoemaker, John Andrews, Rebecca Kelley, and Lee Odden.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:32 PM | Permalink

FAST AdMomentum: Private-Label Contextual Advertising

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) today launched AdMomentum, a private-label contextual advertising platform. The product targets online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers, offering a way to monetize traffic to their sites.

The platform offers publishers the ability to sell ads either locally or nationally; provide a self-service environment for their advertisers; and pick from multiple ranking algorithms and customer interfaces to meet the needs of both their audiences and advertisers.

I haven't had a chance to dig deep on the platform yet, but it appears similar to offerings from Quigo, or Marchex's IndustryBrains. Miva and ValueClick are among other PPC providers that have customized implementations for larger advertisers, but do not have a mass-market private label program.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:11 PM | Permalink

European Telecoms Giants Planning Mobile Search Engine?

According to a report in the U.K. newspaper Telegraph this weekend, a consortium of European providers are teaming up to build a mobile-phone search engine to rival the big three. The Telegraph reports that Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Cingular are among the companies in talks on the plan at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.

A UK executive at one of the companies involved is quoted as saying, "There is a big play in mobile search that we need to be part of, and we are exploring those options at a very high level."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:53 PM | Permalink

Stone Temple Interview with Jim Sterne

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting continues his string of search-related interviews, this time in a conversation with Web analytics luminary Jim Sterne. Sterne is one of the most respected names in the Web analytics field, president of Target Marketing, president of the Web Analytics Association, producer of the worldwide Emetrics Summits, frequent SES speaker ... and an all-around great guy, to boot.

He offers some sage advice for new sites: "The very most important thing that any company needs to do is, answer the question, 'why do you have a Web site?' And by that, I mean, 'how do you define success?'"

He suggests marketers "figure out what constitutes success, determine which metrics will reveal whether or not they are getting closer or further away from success, and then start getting involved in continuous improvement."

He follows that with a word to those sites when they implement Web analytics for the first time: "Whatever you do, don't believe the first reports that come out of it. You are not going to have implemented it correctly."

The entire interview is well worth a read.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:52 AM | Permalink

Nielsen to Acquire Remaining Shares of NetRatings

The Nielsen Company, formerly VNU, announced plans to acquire the remaining interest in NetRatings. Nielsen currently owns 60 percent of the company, which it bought in 1998. It will pay about $327 million to buy the remaining shares. NetRatings' board has approved the move. The merger is expected to be completed in the second quarter.

Hopefully, this will mean I will never again have to use "//" anywhere other than in a URL, as in "Nielsen//NetRatings." If only we could convince Avenue A|Razorfish to do the same.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:34 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Ad Ranking System Now Live

Today's the day, as any search marketer not living under a rock for the past few months knows. Yahoo's flipping the switch on its new ad ranking model, so that bid price is no longer the sole factor in determining ad positions. The new ad quality algorithm makes Yahoo more Googley, which they say will improve overall ad quality, and critics say will make Yahoo more money by forcing advertisers to overpay.

The truth, as always, is likely found somewhere in the middle. If all goes well, the new algorithm will improve ad quality, by making it harder for low-quality sites that are engaging in arbitrage to rank well. (That's not to say there are not quality sites that add value that are engaged in arbitrage -- I'm talking about the "made for AdSense" sites that are not adding anything but a middleman). In the short-term, it will also annoy many marketers that have grown used to having a purely bid-based alternative to Google.

The first part of Yahoo's Panama roll-out, the management interface, has raised some concerns with advertisers. You can see discussion of that in the SEW forums, here and here, for starters. There are numerous horror stories of mangled campaigns, inept or unhelpful support staff, and quirky interface elements.

The new ranking model is bound to bring out a whole new round of concerns and complaints. Yahoo gives advertisers some tips on its Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, which we've also talked about here.

You can bet that Yahoo is crossing fingers, praying, rubbing rabbits' feet, and doing anything else possible in hopes this comes off without a hitch. It's a central piece of their business, after all. According to a New York Times story, Yahoo execs are huddled together in a "war room" as we speak, monitoring today's events.

We'd love to hear about your experience, your complaints, and any tips for your peers in the SEW forum.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:59 AM | Permalink

Super Bowl Ads – Where's the URL?

There have been some good reviews of this year's always-anticipated Super Bowl ad crop, but this article will identify the “URL visibility factor” for the ads, based on the use of the Web address of their Web site within the commercial, spoken or displayed. For any that did not get to watch the commercials, a fairly good introduction and review can be found at Ad Age (Video Link). Also, CBS promised ads on a special Super Bowl Ads page at their Sportsline domain.

According to Reuters, a fair sample of this year's Super Bowl television advertisements actually caused fear or anxiety on the part of some test subjects at the University of California. This makes sense, as there was a lot of violence, and even field mice were being tortured at some point during the game.

Tomorrow's Search Day will provide an “SEO Review” for those ads that did provide URLs.

URL No-Shows

There was a fairly surprising list of no-shows when it came to URLs. Coca-Cola was the most obvious, as they purchased quite a few spots which were entertaining, but never mentioned their domain. I guess they probably figured people are smart enough to find Cocacola.com…that subject will be further discussed in the Search Day SEO Review article. Overall, however, I think Coca-Cola did a good job counteracting what could have been Pepsi dominance, in a general marketing sense.

Other “no-domainers” included Bud Light, Schick and the “Drive” movie (?). It was surprising the movie ad didn't lead to a link, especially since a search this morning of Google Movies and a variety of news searches couldn't find a movie with the word “Drive” in it. It is possible that I missed the title, but now I can't even remember the movie name. A URL would have cured that problem, at least for me. Oh well, if they had a Super Bowl ad I'll probably see it again soon, unless they blew their whole budget.

The first PNC Bank commercial actually showed someone online doing their business banking, and failed to mention or show a URL at any point during the ad. Missed that one! However, in a subsequent ad either late in the game or just after, they showed the pnc.com/leadingtheway address. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette talks about the launch of the campaign and describes some of the commercials. Looks like they need some link building quickly, as that article ranks first for “PNC leading the way” currently at Google. Kudos to PNC, however, for hosting the page on their Web site instead of farming it off to a new domain which is an SEO-no-no if you want your main site to benefit from the buzz. Again, more SEO talk later.

The biggest URL omission, in my opinion, was Revlon's ad for the “Not fade Away” tour being performed by Cheryl Crowe, while her official colorist is supposed to be seething. I am seething because they have a decent idea that just begs for viral marketing of a Web site. It looks like notfadeaway.com is taken already and being used by a community that hopes to remember lost heroes and tragedies. I wouldn't go there and try to buy that away, however the community seems small and some money may help them decide to use another URL. I was actually surprised to not find a Grateful Dead fan site there.

So Revlon is launching this “Not Fade Away” tour and maybe people would remember to go to Revlon.com to look for information. Too bad for them, as the home page currently doesn't show any mention of it, let alone a link to a section of the Web site. So I assumed if I drilled down to the hair color page, I would be presented with more information? Wrong again. It is disappointing that Revlon would go this far to create am online buzz-worthy campaign with Cheryl Crowe and not release a Web site to go along with it. (added: looks like there is a page setup on a subdomain here. Might be nice to link to it from somewhere)

URL ... But No Call to Action

For those that did display and/or mention URLs, not all actually encouraged the viewers to visit the site. A few ads were primarily designed for that purpose, such as Pepsi's contest, which sponsored the halftime show and was hosted at Superbowl.com/Pepsi, and the obvious GoDaddy.com, Geico.com, Careerbuilder.com. CBS did a decent job of promoting two primary domains, including Superbowl.com as well as CBS.sportsline.com. In fact, they utilized a nice method of placing the links directly above the score given to viewers just before going into commercial breaks. These were done on a rotating basis, and not all scoreboards included a URL above them.

Speaking of CBS, it seemed like they really “poured it on” for their shows. Either it was just me or there were a lot more commercials for CBS shows than I had seen in past Super Bowls. Perhaps they didn't get their entire inventory sold? It was very unfortunate not to see a wedding proposal in just one of those dozens of spots, which they could have shown and may have gained some new fans. For the full story on that see mysuperproposal.com.

URL ... But Unreadable

Many of the ads that did show URLs displayed them in either a very small font or in an otherwise unmemorable manner. This may be because traditional advertisers have targeted those of us that look for domains as being likely to notice it. Or, if I was cynical, it could be that traditional agencies want to keep the focus on other marketing instead of driving interest to the Web site.

Either way, the following advertisers kept their domains small, and most of them did not have the announcer mention them: Honda, FedEx, Comcast (which should probably be driving as many links to as many pages as possible using the anchor text “Comcast customer service,” if the hope to ever get rid of the YouTube result for that search), Coca Cola (as mentioned), GM, and eTrade.

To me, eTrade made the cardinal sin of thinking everyone knew it was eTrade.com. They do pretty well at Google for the search eTrade, and the majority of their target market has probably heard of them or will assume, but if you are spending 2+ million dollars driving people to a Web site, you would think that you should at least mention the URL somewhere.

URL ... Done Right

The big winner in my opinion from a URL visibility standpoint was King Pharmaceuticals which led people to beatyourrisk.com, literally with a thud as the heart figure is thrown into the wall. The longer version of the ad that aired first even had a double showing of the wall with the URL on it, although it was cut out in the shorter version. I would have kept it in both versions, since the goal is obviously to drive traffic to that site. I may also even throw a link to the commercial up on the Beat Your Risk domain.

The other URLs that did gain a mention will be analyzed in tomorrow's Search Day for SEO value. By the way, congratulations to Peyton Manning, Tony Dungy, and the Indianapolis Colts on winning Super Bowl 41, which was in fact quite entertaining for the most part. Of course had Vinatieri hit that field goal at the end of the first half I would have won that quarter's office pool. The good news is that Tony went for it and gave the ball back at the end of the game, preserving my 4th quarter pool victory.

Posted by Chris Boggs on 9:33 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 2, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • More Users to See Personalized Google Results
    Google has just increased the prominence of its personalization tools, including its personalized homepage and personalized search options. Beginning today, they will be turned on by default for all new users with a Google account, and some personalization options will be auto-enabled for users with existing accounts.
  • Google Shares Tips on Addressing Click Quality Concerns
    Google Click Quality team member Julian puts a kinder, gentler face on the mystery team by sharing a bit about what his job entails, and talking about some of the more common advertiser concerns.
  • Search Seen as Most Effective by Marketers
    According to the latest study from eMarketer, paid search ads were reported as the most effective tactic by 49 percent of marketers, and SEO jumped up from 33 percent to 45 percent in 2006.
  • A New Local Search Product From Yahoo
    Yahoo is testing a new local search product in Bangalore and New Delhi. Known as OurCity, it is a city guide-like product that brings together a bunch of Yahoo social media products like Del.icio.us, Upcoming, and Flickr.
  • Yahoo Gives Tips To Improve Quality Score
    In advance of Monday's implementation of its new ranking algorithm, Yahoo is sharing tips with advertisers to create ads that will work well in the new system.
  • KeywordDiscovery offers free search term suggestion tool
    Trellian follows Wordtracker's lead in offering a free version of their popular keyword research tools to fill the gap left by a faltering free tool from Yahoo.
  • MTV Networks Demands YouTube & Google Remove Unauthorized Videos
    MTVNetworks and its parent company Viacom issued a "takedown order" to Google demanding the removal of its protected content from YouTube.
  • MTV/YouTube Spat Growing for Months?
    Even before Google bought YouTube, there were rumblings of secret deals with content owners to create rev-share deals to avoid this kind of legal action. Apparently Viacom was not one of the providers that reached an acceptable agreement.
  • ComScore, FM Team Up for Analytics Research
    ComScore Networks has teamed up with John Battelle's Federated Media (FM) Publishing for a research and development initiative to come up with a way to measure audiences of blogs and community-driven sites.
  • Affiliates and PPC
    Are affiliates the cause of high PPC search ad costs for merchants? Many merchants are taking steps to prevent affiliate arbitrage.
  • blinkx Launches Video Widget for Integrating Video Into Websites
    Right now this is a neat feature for enhancing blogs and Web sites with video content, but it sure looks and feels like a base for offering contextual advertising for video.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:56 PM | Permalink

More Users to See Personalized Google Results

Google has just increased the prominence of its personalization tools, including its personalized homepage and personalized search options. Beginning today, personalization tools will be turned on by default for all new users with a Google account, and many personalization options will be auto-enabled for users with existing accounts.

In a Google Blog post today, Google's Sep Kamvar, engineering lead for personalization, and Marissa Mayer, VP search & user experience, explained that all signed-in users will now begin seeing personalized search results.

"Our goal with these types of technologies is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you having to do any extra work," they wrote.

Previously, users were made aware that the results were personal results, and could turn off that feature by clicking on a link. Now, users are still made aware that results are personalized, but there's no link to change that. Instead, users need to log out of their Google Account to do so.

Danny Sullivan has done a very thorough analysis of the implementation of the new personalization tools, and the potentially huge effect on search engine marketers, in his post, "Google Ramps Up Personalized Search."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:33 PM | Permalink

Google Shares Tips on Addressing Click Quality Concerns

At the Inside AdWords blog, Google invites Click Quality team member Julian to put a kinder, gentler face on the team that many have complained is inaccessible by mortal advertisers. He shares a bit about what his job entails, and points out some of the more common concerns that usually turn out not to be click fraud, and steps to take to investigate suspicious clicks.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:32 PM | Permalink

Search Seen as Most Effective by Marketers

According to the latest study from eMarketer, a survey of online marketers that attended ad:tech and readers of Marketing Sherpa were asked what marketing tactics worked for them in 2006, and what they planned on doing for 2007.

Paid search ads were reported as the most effective tactic by 49 percent of respondents. That's down from 52 percent response last year, but still tops the list. House-list e-mail marketing came in second at 47 percent for both years. Search engine optimization (SEO) showed the biggest jump in reported effectiveness in 2006, moving up from 33 percent to 45 percent in 2006.

Paid search was also picked as a least effective tactic by just 9 percent of respondents, and SEO by 11 percent of respondents. The top "worst performing" tactics named were rented e-mail lists, at 56 percent, followed by pop-ups at 45 percent and e-mail newsletter ads at 42 percent.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:09 PM | Permalink

ComScore, FM Team Up for Analytics Research

ComScore Networks has teamed up with John Battelle's Federated Media (FM) Publishing for a research and development initiative to come up with a way to measure audiences of blogs and community-driven sites. As part of the research, comScore will build a database using a customized weighting and projection system, which is intended to more accurately measure audience size and demographics that have previously been available from comScore only for larger sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:07 PM | Permalink

A New Local Search Product From Yahoo!

Om Malik over at GigaOm has discovered that Yahoo is testing a new local search product in Bangalore and New Delhi. Known as OurCity, it is a city guide-like product that brings together a bunch of Yahoo social media products like Del.icio.us, Upcoming, and Flickr. It is also meant to aggregate geographically relevant news, blogs, and info from Wikipedia.

This could be an intriguing local product given the geographic relevance of a range of content formats. Bringing more information and multimedia to specific geographies is an interesting area of local online media and is being done by PlaceBlogger (blogs), and TurnHere (video).

But for this to work, there will be a lot required of users and the jury is still out on the sustainability and scalability of the "folksonomy" strategy, being pushed strongly by Yahoo throughout its product line.

The benefit of course is a cost-effective way to acquire and index content and present it in new and interesting ways that have social relevance to users. For example, something that is already being done to some degree with Flickr is the geotagging of photos so that map mashups can be created that overlay photo links on maps.

Hillary Schneider gave an interesting example of this in her Keynote at the NAA show that showed a cross-country road trip plotted out on a map via picture links that pepper the route taken from Chicago to Los Angeles.

The question is, will there be enough users that will play ball, in order to have the critical mass of content and user engagement to build comprehensive social search products. Yahoo certainly thinks so.

Some evidence of user proclivities in this area was recently released in a Pew Internet and American Life Project study. It found that 28 percent of Internet users have tagged or categorized content such as photos, or blog posts. It also found that "on a typical day online," 7 percent of internet users participate in the tagging of content.

So it is being done, but is this enough? It's an interesting bet Yahoo is making and it will have a big effect on the company's success metrics and search market share over the next few years. We shall see.

UPDATE: Yahoo has posted about "Our City" on the Yahoo Developer Network blog, where they reveal that the project came out of Yahoo's Bangalore Hack Day developer event.

Posted by Mike Boland on 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo Gives Tips To Improve Quality Score

Yahoo is trying to help people prepare for the addition of their Quality Score filter that will launch on Feb. 5th. I received an email giving tips which also had links to more details at the Yahoo Search Marketing help area.

Below are some handy tips to improve your quality score.

Tips to Prepare for the New Ranking Model (New Sponsored Search)

On February 5, 2007, we will be launching a new ranking model in the U.S. that will determine an ad's rank in search results based on bid amount and ad quality. To help you take advantage of our new ranking model, we've highlighted the key changes and then provide you with important steps.

Following are the key changes:

* An ad's rank will be determined by both bid amount and ad quality.
* Ads with higher quality can deliver a lower cost per click and/or may receive better placement on the results page relative to lower quality ads.
* Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads.

To take advantage of the new ranking model, you should:

* Include keywords in your ad (use our Insert Keyword feature).

Research indicates that the perceived quality is higher in ads where the keyword is included within the title and description.

You can use the insert keyword feature to dynamically insert the keyword into your title and/or description
* Choose keywords for each ad group carefully.

Grouping keywords into relevant ad groups makes it easier to:
o Craft ads that are more specific and relevant to your keywords.
o Test different landing pages—and potentially increase conversion rates.

For example, if you were selling electronic products, you would want to place keywords related to “camera”, “video games” and “DVD players” into separate ad groups.

In addition, advertisers may consider grouping individual or smaller groups of similar keywords to get a better read on their quality index. Remember, your quality index score is based on combinations of your ads and all your keywords with the ad group.

Learn more about the new account structure.
* Use ad testing.

Ad testing enables you to rotate different ads to learn which one attracts the most customers to your site. You can determine which message, offer or incentive is most effective and relevant — then you can potentially improve your rank in search results by displaying that ad.

Ad optimization is automatically set “ON” within your account so that better performing ads (based on click-through rate) are served more frequently. You can also choose to turn it “OFF” within your ad group settings.
* Use our Excluded Keyword feature to help optimize your Advanced match type ads.

If you use the Advanced match type distribution tactic, and to help maximize the relevancy of your listings to search users, make sure you take advantage of Excluded Keywords, which are words or phrases that prevent an ad from matching a search query.
* Review your current bids and set a campaign budget to meet your business goals.

We strongly recommend that you confirm your bids to ensure that you are comfortable with possibly paying close to the bid amount for each keyword. As always, we recommend that you set your bids to meet your business goals.

See our FAQs for more information.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:41 AM | Permalink

blinkx Launches Video Widget for Integrating Video Into Websites

blinkx which uses speech-to-text transcription to index online video content, now has available a new widget "blinkx it" that will allow a user to embed code to display video streams in a blog or website. This new widget allows users to add contextually relevant video to almost any page. Code and configurations are available for Blogger and Xanga, as well as instructions for how to add Blinkx it to most sites.

With the widget in place, “blinkx it” will retrieve results based on the text it finds on the URL. If the website changes, “blinkx it” will retrieve the most relevant results for the new page. By embedding the “blinkx it” widget on a blog template “blinkx it” will automatically generate a list of related videos for every blog post. The widget works by reading the text of each individual post and finding videos that are about the same topic. For example if you blog about the Super Bowl “blinkx it” will find and display videos relating to it. Change topic to gardening in the next post and so too will the videos offered for that post.

Right now this is a neat feature for enhancing blogs and web sites with video content, but this sure looks and feels like a base for offering contextual advertising for video.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 11:19 AM | Permalink

MTV Networks Demands YouTube & Google Remove Unauthorized Videos

A Viacom spokesperson called me a few minutes ago, breaking this news, and sending along an official statement. Today, MTVNetworks and its parent company Viacom, are issuing an ultimatium to Google/YouTube: remove unauthorized content or else...

MTVNetworks/Viacom says that over 100,000 unauthorized clips of its video content – representing 1.2 billion video streams - appearing within Google and YouTube, must be removed immediately from its site.

The recent talk of adding short video ads ahead of content on YouTube may have been the last straw for MTV and Viacom, who clearly did not want Google to profit from showing unauthorized clips.

After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users. Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video. YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it. The recent addition of YouTube-served content to Google Video Search simply compounds this issue. Virtually every other distributor has acknowledged the fair value of entertainment content and has taken deliberate steps to concluding agreements with content providers.

We have great respect for and loyalty to our audiences. We host more than 130 authorized web sites where millions of fans visit and interact with our content. Our internet portfolio has more visitors than any other entertainment company and we are always seeking distribution relationships to ensure that any of our products and services are easily accessible on every platform.

Our hope is that YouTube and Google will support a fair and authorized distribution model that allows consumers to continue to enjoy our very popular content now and in the future.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski on 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MTV/YouTube Spat Growing for Months?

Viacom's decision to issue a takedown notice to Google demanding the removal of all of its protected content from YouTube is not really a surprising move. Just this summer, Viacom teamed up with Google to promote its MTV Networks content on Google Video, in part to counteract the widespread use of its content on Youtube. MTV was the content provider in a test that wrapped video ads around its content on AdSense sites.

Even before Google bought YouTube, there were rumblings of secret deals with content owners to create rev-share deals to avoid this kind of legal action. Apparently Viacom was not one of the providers that reached an acceptable agreement.

Viacom was allegedly in talks late last year with Fox and NBC Universal to create a YouTube rival, but dropped out of those talks in December.

This legal action is also happening -- perhaps not coincidentally -- at the same time that Google is discussing ad options on YouTube. Another factor may be that Viacom is itself developing an ad-supported, user-generated video platform with ViTrue, talentload.tv.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:29 AM | Permalink

KeywordDiscovery offers free search term suggestion tool

Trellian's KeywordDiscovery.com is offering a free search term suggestion tool. Type in a seed keyword and the free tool generates the top 100 keywords from data complied and collected from more than 180 search engines worldwide.

Why is Trellian offering a free search term suggestion tool? Its web site says, "For many years the Overture Keyword Suggestion was the only free, publicly available keyword research tool. Now, due to its recent outages we are pleased to offer an alternative."

That's fast response.

The Webmaster World forums didn't start discussing the Overture Keyword Tool not responding until a week ago, on Friday, January 26. On Tuesday, January 30, YahooSarah confirmed that the responsiveness of YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture's Keyword Selector Tool- KST) "is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear."

She added, "We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year."

Rustybrick (aka Barry Schwartz) picked up the story on Wednesday, January 31 -- which was the same day that I reported that Wordtracker launches free keyword suggestion tool in the Search Engine Watch Blog.

Yesterday, February 1, I got an email from Trellian President David Warmuz about KeywordDiscovery's free search term suggestion tool. But I was on the road and didn't get the email until late last night.

So, things do move fast in the search industry. In less than a week, everything we knew about free search term suggestion tools has changed. This is just the latest example of why we need to check in every day to make sure we haven't missed something.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 9:06 AM | Permalink

Affiliates and PPC

Are affiliates the cause of high PPC search ad costs for merchants? In his latest ClickZ column, Kevin Lee discusses the tactics merchants are taking to prevent affiliate arbitrage.

According to Lee, merchants have been cracking down by placing significant restrictions on affiliates' bidding activities. He thinks it's imperative for merchants to police their affiliates' actions in the paid search arena, since "opening the door even a crack may encourage creative cheaters."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:27 AM | Permalink

February 1, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: Feb. 1, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:10 PM | Permalink

A Look at the Next Generation of Search?

I stopped by the AlwaysOn Media conference in New York yesterday, to check out a "next-generation search" session and a panel on keyword advertising. Today's SearchDay looks at the five companies chosen to present in the "CEO Showcase" session in search: Collarity, Eurekster, Mercora, Nexidia, and ZoomInfo.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:41 PM | Permalink

SuperPages.com Combines Local Search with Social Networking

SuperPages.com today launched a Reviewer of the Week program. The intent of this program is to add the trust garnered from social networking and reviews to their local content. Here is how it will work. Registered users will compete with one another to write the most reviews of local businesses in their local area. Each Wednesday, the user posting the most reviews will be identified as the Reviewer of the Week and featured on the home page of SuperPages.com. By adding this competitive twist, SuperPages expects to get more writers and reviewers to generate content. SuperPages.com already has more than 324,000 reviews and listings with consumer-provided content.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 2:14 PM | Permalink

Miva Gets Vertical

Miva has added a vertical offering to its pay-per-click ad network. The Miva Precision Network, launched this week in the U.S. and U.K., promises narrower distribution and delivery of vertical-specific leads.

At launch, the network will span 18 sectors in the U.S.: adult, apparel, automotive, dating, education, electronics, entertainment, finance, health, insurance, mobile, office supplies, pharmaceutical, professional services, real estate, sports/recreation, technology and travel. In the U.K. the network will include 5 sectors: automotive, finance, gambling, health/beauty and recruitment.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:55 PM | Permalink

Google Refutes Click Fraud Numbers, Once Again

In response to the latest click fraud report from Click Forensics, Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder has responded in a two part post on his personal blog.

"On a basic level, these numbers are much higher than what we see at Google, and are not at all representative of the actual statistics of our network," he writes.

He goes on to outline problems with the methodology behind the reports from Click Forensics and others, most seriously the practice of counting page views as clicks, and the fact that even fraudulent clicks that Google detects and removes before the advertiser is charged are counted in click fraud reports.

"The key point here is not that their numbers are 'too high.' The point is that their data collection methods are inherently flawed and any resemblance their numbers could have to reality would be coincidental," Ghosemajumder writes.

He brings up many of the same points he mentioned when he spoke with me about the "Sausage Manifesto" last month (more from Shuman here). It's mission to debunk click fraud reports stepped up in March 2006 after SES NY, and went into full force at SES San Jose in August, when it released a white paper called "How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports" to specifically address what it calls flaws in the methodology of click fraud auditors like Click Forensics.

Google's Matt Cutts adds his take, with pretty pictures, on his blog.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:31 AM | Permalink

A Look at Yahoo's Local Ad Options

In her latest ClickZ column, Patricia Hursh digs into Yahoo's local search advertising options, post-Panama. She explores Local Sponsored Search, Sponsored Search, Local Basic Listings, Local Enhanced Listings, and Local Featured Listings.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:13 AM | Permalink

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