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August 2007

August 31, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 31, 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 11:54 PM | Permalink

Tighten the Coupling: Text Ads and Videos

As online videos and their consumption continue ramping up, we should consider this coupling as more than an afterthought. There must be ways to display text ads in a more targeted and user-friendly manner.

Almost all consumers willingly accept ads with their videos. They would rather have free access and put up with any ads. Also they are actively complaining about the length of video ads, and almost a quarter feel ads could be more relevant. All these findings reflect sentiments surveyed from January-June 2007.

According to Emily Riley, a Jupiter analyst, many consumers would prefer text versus even a shorter 15-second pre-roll video ad. She says “text ads don't interrupt the user experience as much.”

However, there's a real gap between accepting text ads and optimizing how they will get delivered -- when adjacent to videos.

-- Ad targeting will need to evolve. Semantic approaches are getting applied, but don't literally capture the whole experience. Certainly behavioral interests are also important, even when viewers are anonymous. The nature of what's appropriate for commercial purposes should come into play here.

-- Ads will need to become more dynamic. Think about what to advertise during long-form videos. Some programs stay on topic and appeal to viewer interests consistently, yet showing the same ads seems like lost opportunity. Other videos, like newscasts, vary over time and thus their ads should too.

-- Ad displays will need to change. We're all used to the flat approach to displaying ads, and that's a start. However, videos create a more dynamic experience. Should text ads be considered as something that is shown before or after videos? Or are they always about a sidebar?

Let's give our ad opportunities more careful consideration. At least we know that viewers are ready for us, the advertisers.

Posted by on 8:33 PM | Permalink

"Prom Queen: Summer Heat" – the blinkx interview

Grant Crowell interviews Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of the video search engine blinkx, on their partnership announcement today with media studio Vuguru to exclusively broadcast the Emmy-nominated video series "Prom Queen," and on the future of professional-grade, internet-only scripted and produced video content with search.

SEW: Suranga, you mentioned in blinkx's press release that the Prom Queen series is a "pioneering format" for online video which “has proven tremendously successful in the new media landscape.” What, in your opinion, has made this series most popular with online viewers? The short length? Subject matter? Professional production quality and studio backing? Or a combination of all those things?

It's a really interesting question. I don't really know, but its proven to be immensely popular. A couple things that do work is that its just really good content; it's watchable and creative, because you have professionals at every stage – writing, acting, producing – exclusively for online viewing. And I think the short length works extremely well. It's a type of “snack mentality” that you get, which also matches the structure of the blinkx home page. So I think the physical format plus the show length has been critical for making it so popular.

One smart thing that the show producers, Vuguru, did is they picked a demographic that works online. If you look at all the stats in video, there's obvious a bias towards a younger audience – high school, college – that sort of thing. The content specifically fits that demographic. Its not to say there aren't people who are middle age or older who watch video or whatever else, but rather than try to sell a smaller audience on a certain piece of content, it makes sense to go for the audience that's already there. All of those things have helped in its success.

SEW: Do you believe this will lead to a market for more exclusively Internet-scripted/produced drama? And if so, would blinkx be featuring similar pieces from this studio? Other studios?

Yes, definitely. We think there is a great audience out there for this type of content; and we think that Vuguru has tapped into it, they've done a good job with it, and we expect there to be a lot more. You can look at what's happened at a similar video site, Funny or Die – a lot of its video content there is short-form, scripted, and with a professional background. There are other video sites that do similar things as well.

Until now, a lot of the professional or semi-professional stuff has come from Silicon Valley-style companies. You've seen things like Revision3 and so on, which is great in that it taps into the tech audience very well, but it hasn't really tapped into the mainstream audience. I think the success of Prom Queen is going to lead to a lot more people paying attention to this and doing work on this area.

SEW: Will these episodes also show up concurrently on the promqueen.tv website, or does blinkx have an exclusive “first run”?

Its concurrent (running alongside promqueen.tv), so its more of a super-distribution [through the blinkx network]. The video series will now be findable through all of the usual network sites that we power along with the blinkx video search space.

SEW: What type of advertising will this content be supported by? How will it appear on the web page?

Both blinkx and Vuguru can serve our own advertising on the content. In this case, we'll be doing short pre-roll and post-roll ads. They'll be produced in various points and various campaigns during the showing. We're also going to be showing overlay ads down the road. There's a lot of interest in overlay ads from our advertisers, so we're going to be trying them out over the next couple months.

SEW: What kind of revenue-sharing program have you worked out with Vuguru?

We will be sharing revenue with Vuguru based on the number of views.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim Hedger Leaves SiteProNews

Jim Hedger has been involved in the search industry for many years. He took on the editorship of SiteProNews for Jayde-Online 12 months ago.

He announced his contract was not renewed today.

Filling those shoes is going to be tough for whoever is hired in his place. Luckily we are not losing him from the industry.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:07 PM | Permalink

Who Makes Your SEO Dream Team

Rhea Drysdale blogged her SEO Dream Team including many of the usual suspects. I know it has been done before but not recently.

So who would you pick if limited to a team of seven? Remember social networking, link building, perfect page optimization and many other factors need to be considered in our current seo tactics.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:46 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: In-House Vs. Outsourced: What Is the Best Solution?

In today's Outsourced column, "In-House vs. Outsourced: What's the Best Solution?," Chris Boggs ponders the relationship between in-house and agency search experts, asking the question, "Can't we all just get along?"

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Crafting a Social Media Strategy Around Travel

In today's Vertical Challenge column, "Crafting a Social Media Strategy Around Travel," Elisabeth Osmeloski tells travel site providers how to take advantage of social media and traveler reviews.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 30, 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 11:54 PM | Permalink

Microsoft to Update Trademark Dispute Handling in adCenter

While Microsoft's trademark policy for adCenter advertisers is not changing, the way Microsoft deals with trademark infringement accusations against advertisers will change starting on September 10, according to the adCenter Blog.

Microsoft will stop generating its lists of advertisers approved by the trademark owner who can bid on trademarked keywords, but will continue to respond to complaints from trademark owners and investigate reported trademark infringement.

Microsoft is taking a step back from its involvement in compliance, but it is not leaving it up to advertisers and trademark owners to work things out on their own. The company promises to "support trademark owners in their efforts to protect their intellectual property," promising a faster response without the extra layers to review before acting on a complaint.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:49 PM | Permalink

The Economist Examines Google

Google is hated and feared by many, as The Economist outlines, but it seems it is their moto of "Do No Evil" that gets people annoyed.

The Economist outlines the rapid growth and numerous products Google has bought or developed and suggests much of the fear and hate comes from competitors in the new spaces the search giant is getting involved in.

"Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate," The Economist opines.

In another article, The Economist notes "[i]t is rare for a company to dominate its industry while claiming not to be motivated by money. Google does. But it has yet to face a crisis."

Google's Chief Financial Officer Hal Varian is either shown to be glib or shows he is a little out of touch on average PPC costs when he says “[a]ll that money comes 50 cents at a time.”

But at least the brand has taken hold to the point that even Marge Simpson ultimately says: "And all this time I thought ‘googling yourself' meant the other thing.”

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:06 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Adds New Features To Panama

Yahoo announced new features for its paid search product and its interface, Panama, according to the Yahoo blog.

Twenty ads per ad group and the ability to view performance numbers, as well as edit, copy, delete and create new ads, tightens the user experience.

And you can now look at competitor ads if you need to get the writing started.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:10 PM | Permalink

Search engine to aid diagnoses

University of Virginia newspaper, The Cavalier reports on the development of a diagnostic search engine being used at the university hospital.

The diagnostic system is named "Isabella" after a three-year old who died from a multisystem failure following a misdiagnoses, the Cavalier reported.

The database is loaded with medical journal articles and any new diagnosis, the university newspaper stated.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:22 PM | Permalink

Searching For Sports Info? Try Enth - Just Added NFL Search

With the NFL season about to get underway, Enth.com has added NFL search on its site, SearchNewz announced today.

Enth is a source of sports statistics and even offers a tool bar that runs sports scores and fantasy results.

"Through a partnership with STATS LLC, the worlds leading sports information provider, Enth.com aggregates, filters, and sorts sports statistics based on the question you submit," SearchNewz reported.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:13 PM | Permalink

Google Adds China.com As Search Partner

Google announced it will partner with Chinese internet service provider, China.com to provide search results for the site's portal and China.com's search results.

The conversion of Chinese sites to Google reflects its growing popularity in the Asian market.

"By expanding our partnership with Google, we can further improve user satisfaction and encourage more robust growth for China.com," Xiaowei Chen, president of China.com, Forbes reported.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:50 AM | Permalink

NoFollow as an SEO Optimization Tool

Rand at SEOmoz published some great information based on questions he asked Matt Cutts. There were several interesting questions answered, but I think the biggest nugget was the suggestion that you can freely use NoFollow within your own site to control PageRank flow, including on your own internal links, without fear of it being seen as a poor quality signal by Google. The quote from Matt was as follows:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

This opens up some really interesting advanced SEO techniques. For example, do you really want to have PageRank flowing to that "Contact Us" page? Or that "About Us" page? Or a page that simply lists your clients? Now you can keep the page there for users, but tell Google that you don't want to spend any PageRank on them.

For that matter, you can do some research on your site using web analytics, and find out what pages are not providing any traffic any way, or which pages are not providing any conversions. Then you can take these pages and cut back on the PageRank flow to them, and increase the PageRank flow to the pages that matter the most.

If you have a large and complex site, this opens up some great dynamics. I suspect that this statement by Matt launched a few thousand experiments in understanding how to leverage this aspect of NoFollow.

Posted by on 11:45 AM | Permalink

More Exec Moves at Yahoo

Yahoo, which has undergone a few rounds of reorganization this year, is in the midst of more changes in its ad sales business. This time, Hilary Schneider will be tapped to head a group overseeing ad sales and publisher relationships, effectively replacing Greg Coleman as head of global sales, according to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital.

In an internal memo (posted by paidContent), Yahoo president Sue Decker describes the changes, describing a new Global Partner Solutions (GPS) division under Schneider that will have responsibility for all of Yahoo's “partners” – advertisers, agencies, resellers, publishers, ad networks, developers, or others.

Jeff Weiner, EVP of Yahoo's Network Division, will add to his responsibilities, currently including most consumer-facing assets, including search and social media sites. Weiner will regain control of many of the businesses previously under Schneider in the Local Markets and Commerce (LMC) division, including shopping, travel, autos, real estate and local. Weiner ran these businesses from 2002 to 2006 as SVP of search and marketplaces, before a previous reorg moved them under Schneider.

This reorg is not yet as big as the moves in June to oust Terry Semel, when Jerry Yang returned as CEO and Sue Decker was named president; or February's creation of three new operating groups (although much of that was undone by Semel and Decker). But since it's just about halfway through a 100-day plan by Yang to scrutinize the business, we can expect more changes to come in the next 50 days.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:08 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: The Great Link Buying Debate

In today's Link Love column, "The Great Link Buying Debate," Sage Lewis reviews the arguments for and against buying links, which was a hot topic at SES San Jose last week. Like all topics, buying credibility or exposure in any realm is never as black and white as we would all like to believe.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 29, 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 11:56 PM | Permalink

Google Dominates SES News

If you evaluate the news stories and blog posts about Search Engine Strategies, then "universal search" beat "click fraud" as the top story to come out of the conference. If you analyze all the news coverage of SES San Jose, then Wednesday's keynote speaker Marissa Mayer beat Tuesday's keynote speaker Jim Lanzone as the top newsmaker at the event.

Greg Jarboe takes a look at some of the trends spotted via news search in today's SearchDay, "News Search Analysis: SES San Jose."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:16 PM | Permalink

All's Quiet On The Eastern Front ...

Wired tattles on Scoble for twittering behind Jason's back.

Is Scoble Calacanis's Rasputin?

Will Calacanis man up and march on Mountain View?

Searchenginewatching CivilWarLand In Bad Decline
War coverage starts here.

Posted by Kevin Heisler on 4:11 PM | Permalink

Google, Yahoo! and Server Status Codes 404 and 410

The “Meet the Crawler” sessions at SES are always high on my personal “not to be missed” list. The session at San Jose was as ever interesting and informative. One take-away was that both Google and Yahoo! treat server codes 404 and 410 as though they are the same. They are not the same; otherwise there would be no need for two codes. It was apparent from the discussion during the session that these codes are so often confused and misused that it is less problematic for the search engines to treat them alike.

So, what's the difference, and what is the correct usage of each? Officially, the 4xx series of codes are used to indicate that the there is an error at the client side. This is often the result of a mistyped URL. In these instances, the server delivers the familiar 404 error. The 410 code on the other hand signals that the resource has been intentionally removed.

It is possible to trigger a 404 message by simply typing in the domain followed by random numbers and letters, such as www.mysite.com/fudsec. This behavior will not generate a 410 response. The 410 code is a code of intention, not just an error message. The server must be told to deliver the 410 code for the It is used to signal that a URL in fact existed at the server at the location requested but has been removed, stricken, eliminated, gone, don't ask for it again gone.

When Google and Yahoo! encounter a 404, they do not immediately remove the page from the index but rather will revisit multiple times before taking the drastic step of dropping the page from the index. By treating the 404 and the 410 similarly, the search engines make it more difficult to cause the accidental removal of pages. As the discussion during the Q & A at SES indicated, search marketers should be aware that delivering a 410 code will not result in more rapid removal of these pages from the search indices and will not prevent Yahoo! and Google from re-crawling the URLs.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 9:09 AM | Permalink

New Yahoo! Shortcuts Announced

Yahoo! announced the addition of 3 new enhanced shortcuts designed to aid the consumer search experience. These enable users to refine their searches more rapidly, as the shortcuts help them understand the most common options used by others. The shortcuts announced by Yahoo! are focused on NFL players, consumer electronics, and medical conditions and medications. Here are some sample searches:

  1. Tom Brady
  2. digital camera
  3. colon cancer

This is extremely similar to what we saw from Google when they launched the "Topics" functionality and the Google Coop program. Here are some sample searches for how this works with Google:

  1. Parkinson's
  2. diabetes

As you can see, the structure is very similar. Google has not placed that much emphasis on the Google Topics program, but they have continued to show the Topics links for medical searches, so presumably they have gotten good user feedback on the functionality.

Overall, it's a nice enhancement by Yahoo!

Posted by on 8:24 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Waiting for Google to Exhale

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Waiting for Google to Exhale," Kevin Ryan asks what universal search and refined paid search are really changing.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Segmenting Site Visitors to Enhance Conversions

In today's By the Numbers column, "Segmenting Site Visitors to Enhance Conversions," Eric Enge tells you how to segment your site visitors for actionable analyses that are so important for Web site success.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 28, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 11:39 PM | Permalink

Scoble Marches Mahalo Off To War

All's Quiet On The Eastern Front.

John Battelle weighs in here and escapes to the Vineyard. As for a GOOG Death By Facebook...Battelle says, might could, sort of. No dice on Techmeme-Mahalo.

Jason Calacanis is in the Catskills when he claims an F bomb drops and he doesn't mean Facebook.

After all the comments are in, Calacanis will decide whether to play Czar Alexander to Scoble's Rasputin.

Will Calacanis man up and march on Mountain View?

Or are we searchenginewatching CivilWarLand In Bad Decline?

Posted by Kevin Heisler on 11:15 PM | Permalink

Yahoo!, Now with More Local Listings

Directory Publisher R.H. Donnelley announced today that it will partner with Yahoo! to give its advertisers more substantial presence on Yahoo! Local. This is part of its "triple play" effort to gain local listings distribution in print (Dex Directories), IYP (DexKnows) and through online partners.

Analagous to the long term triple play efforts of cable providers and telecos (bundling voice, data, and video products), this works towards gaining better distribution of existing content. In this case, the content is the listings that RHD's sales force brings in through traditional yellow pages ad sales.

According to the press release, this will come in three flavors:

Featured Listings — Sponsored listings with guaranteed placement on the first or second search results pages for broader exposure in a specific geography or category

Enhanced Listings — Sponsored listings that offer the ability to add a detailed business description, photos, tagline and coupons to create greater online visibility for businesses and enhance their appearance within organic results

Yahoo! Maps Business Listings — Sponsored listings within the context of a map-based view

The new addition gives the sales channel another tool in its toolbelt -- one that advertisers are increasingly asking for -- for a better cross-platform product. Direct distribution on Yahoo! Local also augments the general effort at RHD towards better online distribution, similarly accelerated a year ago when it acquired LocalLaunch.

This also joins other similar deals that have been formed in the past such as that between Superpages and Google; and you can expect directories/IYPs to increasingly develop online distribution and better ad bundling efforts.

As examined in the Kelsey Group's Local Search and IYP forecast released in March, IYPs will see a greater CAGR than the aggregate local search market, because of their physical sales channel, and the ability to execute more effectively on cross platform sales strategies.

For RHD, This deal applies to the 14 state region (Western and Midwestern states), where it distributes print directories, and where its sales force roams.

Posted by Mike Boland on 7:10 PM | Permalink

Keep an Eye on Image Search

Image search is playing an increasingly important role in search engine optimization, and SEOs should develop strategies for optimizing a web site to receive this type of traffic. In today's SearchDay, "Image Search in the SEO Picture," Eric Enge looks at some of the trends and tips on image search optimization that he picked up at SES San Jose last week.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:46 PM | Permalink

Yahoo! Support for Dynamic URL Rewriting

Last week at SES, Yahoo! added support for dynamic URL rewriting. Basically, this is a new feature in Yahoo! Site Explorer, that allows you to specify parameters on your URLs that you would like the Yahoo! crawler to ignore. After years of helping people get rid of Session IDs on their URLs, this is a really great thing to see. You can read the details on Dynamic URL Rewriting by Yahoo! here.

Yahoo! has continued to push on these types of features, and so has Google. I would like to urge the search engines to collaborate on these features. Ultimately, it's the availability in all the search engines that makes them powerful. As it stands now, if I had a client with a dynamic URL parameter problem, I would have them setup the new feature in Yahoo! as a stop gap, and still be working with them to get them removed because this feature is not supported by Google.

Props to Yahoo! for adding the feature, but now I need it from Google too. There are plenty of areas in which to compete, most notably that of search quality, or in new frontier areas of search. In the area of making the webmasters job easier, I believe that all the engines will derive the most benefit by collaboration.

Posted by on 10:27 AM | Permalink

What People Reveal

What people reveal…depends on the venue. When you attend a family gathering, your discussion is surely different than among business colleagues. The updates you share at college reunions would be different than your chats with daily running buddies. Likewise, your communications on social sites seem to vary too.

Recently, Facebook announced their new ads based on your social connections. They plan to target text ads based on your expressed interests as well as what your friends find interesting.

Let's assume that other social sites adopted this approach. The targeted ads would differ by site and your unique, changing connections there. That's probably a good thing. Why?

-- Different network, different act. Let's say that my Facebook friends are within the Bay Area group, and we share local haunts. Over at MySpace, I'm parading around as a world-class alpinist and that's my declared persona.

-- Different network, specific connections. In this case, I'm sharing my Flickr photos with family. Even if my family members have interesting careers, I'm more interested in checking out their vacation and kids. I might get a kick out of looking at their bungie-jumping experience too.

-- Different network, specialized purpose. Over on LinkedIn, I'm pretty sure my first degrees are work colleagues, suppliers or customers. I don't have a really tight handle on my second degree connections, though I have managed to re-connect with old colleagues there.

If I'm expecting to see different ads because of my own interests, then that makes sense. It's almost business as usual. However if I see ads that would interest others in my different networks, would they resonate with me? Well, the jury's still out, but at least we'll be able to find out as participants -- and future advertisers -- on Facebook and other networks to follow.

Posted by on 1:37 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Tools of the Trade

In today's au Natural column, "Tools of the Trade," Mark Jackson recommends several useful tools for running an effective search engine optimization campaign.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Scaling Your Big Business Internationally

In today's Big Biz column, "Scaling Your Big Business Internationally," Aaron Shear tells you what to expect when expanding your business internationally.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 27, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 11:15 PM | Permalink

Scoble Predicts Google Death By Facebook

Notify the SEC.

Analyst blogger Robert Scoble predicts the demise of Google within four years. He boldly outlines a Future Search engine combination of Facebook-Techmeme-Mahalo technology that will spell doom for Google. The Naked Conversationalist has become the Naked Shorter.

In a video worthy of the best linkbait, Scoble predicts SEOs -- those reviled search engine marketers and search engine optimizers he hates with a passion -- will be walled out of the digital fortress.

"No SEO goddammit," he cries out. "No noise!"

Scoble's theory is powered by the search algorithm underlying Facebook: social graphed-based search, In simple terms, social search is based on the concept of six degrees of separation. We're all separated from anyone in the world by six people or less. We belong to social groups of varying sizes and different functions. In a social graph, those online connections can help people do things: make new friends, rediscover old ones, network for business purposes or share their preferences in music, film, TV, sports, shopping and other quasi-terrestrial activities.

As with any apocalyptic prediction, Scoble knows he's going to be wrong. In 2011, the Googleplex won't be the Pan Am building of Silicon Valley. As New Influencer valleygirls and gamers say, he's just wrong on so many levels.

Scoble gets one thing right, though. Facebook is a search engine.

Advertisers and marketers refer to Facebook and MySpace as “social media.” To some, they're social networks. Sure it's more web 2.0, but Facebook is a vertical search engine. As Scoble notes, the vertical is people search. What makes the search functionality different? It's driven by people, content can be proprietary, search engines can't see inside video streams.

Check out the video anyway. Scoble rises to the defense of Matt Cutts whom he feels was savaged by SEOs at Search Engine Strategies last week in San Jose.

Viewers may not be mesmerized by algorithms that weave the digital fabric of social search. However, Scoble's whiteboard explanation is a valiant attempt at explaining a complex subject to a general audience. It's fun to watch because he's so passionate about his argument.

The three part video begins with a seemingly nervous Scoble, not really sounding quite sure of himself, proclaiming the death of Google. A pro vlogger, perhaps he's having second thoughts about the accuracy of his prediction. His confidence, however, increases as he builds his anti-Google argument.

What's getting his goat?

In short, he's having a Twelve Monkeys moment. Scoble worries Google will suffer the same fate as Microsoft, unable to transform its infrastructure to compete with more nimble platforms. Scoble left Redmond after Micosoft failed to heed his warnings. Now he walks in the Valley of the shadow of Google and fears no evil.

“Finally I have something that does something better than Google,” he writes in a blog comment. Deus ex machina. Plus, if he's right, the FTC will rubber stamp the Google-Doubleclick-Performics merger.

The catch? It's not just Google's technology that created the most popular brand in the world.

Posted by Kevin Heisler on 5:01 PM | Permalink

Compete announces Best-In-Show SES 2007 Awards

Alex Patriquin has posted the winner's of the Best-In-Show 2007 SES Awards on the Compete Blog. Selected by Compete, it honors "our fellow exhibitors who impressed us with their awesome marketing genius."

(The envelope, please.)

For Best Short-Attention-Span Toy, the winner was No More Landing Pages! They gave away the classic Paddle Ball game. According to Compete, "The retro toy landed in the tchotchkes totes of SES 2007's most discriminating schwag masters."

In the category of Best Tongue-In-Cheek Giveaway, the winner was Omniture! The company handed out chocolate chip cookies for SES. "The web analytics company, which cookies visitors for tracking purposes, served up persistently tasty treats for attendees with a sweet tooth for incisive data," said the judges from Compete.

The winner in the Best Giant Gold Panhandle category was iProspect! Compete thinks, "iProspect struck it rich with a larger-than-life recreation of every search marketer's ultimate dream: a pan full of gigantic gold nuggets."

The Best “Show Me the Money” Experience award went to Adapt! According to Compete, "Adapt offered adventurous SES attendees the chance to grab thousands in search marketing promotions, if they dared to become an 'SEM-in-a-Box' by stepping into a wind chamber where discount flyers flew fast and furious."

Finally, the Best On-The-Spot LifeHack went to Jingle Networks 1-800-Free411! According to Compete, they were winners for "offering out-of-town SES attendees a free connection to local services from a bevy of translucent tangerine phones."

Now, I don't know if PricewaterhouseCoopers ensured the secrecy of the Best-In-Show 2007 SES Awards voting process. But I do think it's high time that the exhibitors at SES started to get a little more attention from the small army of online journalists and bloggers that now cover the show.

Hey, even I found some "news nuggets" on the trade show floor. But, that's an article for another day.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 4:56 PM | Permalink

Search and Offline Converge

At Search Engine Strategies in San Jose last week, ClickZ editor Matthew Nelson saw lots of evidence of the interaction between search with other media, including offline media. He shares his experiences at ClickZ News in "Search and Offline Marketing Converge at SES San Jose."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:08 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Tips for Being a Great PPC Client

In today's Search Ads column, "Tips for Being a Great PPC Client," Tony Wright tells you what it takes to be a great PPC client, getting the most out of the client-agency relationship.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 24, 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 11:49 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Changing Trademark Policy For PPC Advertising

The Microsoft adCenter announced it will be changing its trademark policy in September.

While "[t]he heart of the trademark policy is unchanged". adCenter reported, but they will not keep lists of approved affiliates etc.

They seem to be moving towards the Google model.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:41 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: A Tale of Two City Guides

In today's Vertical Challenge column, "A Tale of Two City Guides," local search expert Michael Boland reviews recent plans announced by Yahoo Local and CitySearch to enhance features and content, making local search a more competitive landscape.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Playing Dirty With PPC

In today's In-House column, "Playing Dirty With PPC," Rob Kerry gives in-house SEMs a few black hat PPC tricks, to help them keep up with competitors that choose to play dirty.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 23, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 11:59 PM | Permalink

SES San Jose Coverage

Tagged Posts & Pictures

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:51 PM | Permalink

Paid Links Discussions at San Jose

SES San Jose has come to a close. It was another memorable event. One of the more interesting impressions I have of the whole event are the various flavors of the paid links debate.

For example, Michael Gray, aka Graywolf, assured his fame by starting his presentation in one of the link related panels with a slide that said "Google is not the government". At this point, Michael was just warming up.

In another links session, one person got the microphone, and kept control of it for 20 minutes. They just would not let go of one aspect of the paid links issue. Specifically, there were insistent that one problem with Google's stance on paid links is that Mom and Pop sites might buy links without knowing that this was not something that the search engines want them to do. The person then persited in stating that they might get banned and that this might not be fair.

Let's get real folks. The person with the mic did not care about Mom and Pop sites. That person was angry. People (generally) do not get angry about what happens to other people's web sites that they never heard of.

Danny Sullivan was moderating this session, and offered up a more reasonable concern, which was that Google should find a better algorithm so that whether or not someone bought links was not at issue. It's a fine idea, and I am sure that Google will implement it as soon as they can think of a way to do so. Let me assure you, there is no one at Google who is in love with the problems related to paid links.

Fundamentally, the problem is that using uncompensated links to a given site as votes for that site represents one of the best ways to evaluate which site is the best site. No simple alternative exists for this basic algorithm. Don't get me wrong - there is tons of money being spent by all the engines to investigate alternative algorithms. The big push on personalization is a just one example of this.

At the end of the day, my crude outsider's understanding of the Google policy on paid links is this:

  1. Buying links is NOT evil.
  2. It is against their Webmaster Guidelines to buy links for purposes of influencing Page Rank and your search engine placements.
  3. As a result, buy links for traffic and branding, not for search engine ranking purposes.
  4. They reserve the right to assign no Page Rank value to any paid links they uncover.
  5. If you engage in egregious or deceptive practices, they may ban you.

Note that Yahoo! and Ask echoed similar sentiments in the session.

Posted by on 10:45 PM | Permalink

What's Your Mobile Search Strategy?

Mobile search is set to explode with the entry of the iPhone and its competitors to the market. Instead of worrying about building a WAP-enabled site, Michael Boland suggests that webmasters should get their sites ready for mobile search via mobile browsers by engaging in tried and true SEO tactics, and providing as much relevant business information as possible to internet yellow pages and local search providers. Learn more in today's SearchDay, "Mobile Search and SMEs: Stay Right Where You Are."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:40 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Training Link Developers to Become Marketing Gurus

In today's Link Love column, "Training Link Developers to Become Marketing Gurus," Justilien Gaspard continues his link training theme with a focus on training link developers to use marketing tactics.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 11:55 PM | Permalink

Can PPC Help Your Organic Rankings?

Often the question is asked "Do PPC listings affect your organic rankings?" or "Will Google apply bonus points to your organic rankings if you spend money on their paid listings?" The simple answer is no. Despite this, one of the best ways to increase your organic traffic is to start an aggressive PPC campaign.

In today's SearchDay, "Can PPC Listings Affect Organic Rankings?" Craig Paddock outlines some of the benefits a PPC campaign can bring to your organic SEO, including:

  • Generating Keyphrase Data
  • Increasing Link Popularity
  • Branding to Increase Organic Click-thru Rate

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:30 PM | Permalink

How Many Vandals?

Exactly 187,529 different organizations have made at least one anonymous Wikipedia edit. That seems like a very large number of editors who wanted to hide their changes -- but were they all vandals?

Grad student Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner recently to uncover surreptitious editors. He's certainly raised awareness of these activities, as reported by Wired and amplified by the NYTimes last Sunday. Some pretty well-known companies and even the CIA are making these edits to Wikipedia entries.

On his site, Griffith identifies three kinds of vandalism and disinformation. “Without naming names, I've found three types of common vandalism: (1) Wholesale removal of entire paragraphs of critical information; (2) White-washing -- replacing negative/neutral adjectives with positive adjectives that mean something similar; and (3) Adding negative information to a competitor's page.”

He used publicly available information, starting with Wikipedia's database dumps between early August 2007 and February 2002. He discovered over 34 million anonymous edits in that time period. Then he identified organizations based on IP addresses, using IP2Location tools.

Why does it matter? Simply put, Wikipedia attracts traffic that's interested in your organization. Craig Paddock reported that "despite its current use of no-follow tags, Wikipedia's ability to generate high-quality traffic can be equal to or better than that of most search engines."

Like any social community, organizations and their marketers should pay attention to this user-generated content and to their online reputations. However, the marketers should not be hiding in plain sight. My hope is that this “revealing” process will drive down anonymous posters. Correct things publicly, and let your customers speak for themselves too.

Posted by on 3:41 PM | Permalink

Yahoo to Offer Dynamic URL Rewriting

Yahoo is addressing the needs of site owners with dynamic URLs with new dynamic URL rewriting features in Site Explorer. The new feature lets webmasters identify the dynamic parameters in URLs that Yahoo should ignore, such as parameters that don't affect the content of a page, but that have other important uses. Yahoo can then strip the dynamic parameters in URLs and rewrite them, making crawling more efficient, and making display of URLs in search results easier to read. It can also improve a page's ranking in results, since it will counteract the dissipation of "link juice" from links to different URLs linking to the same page.

In addition, Yahoo has made improvements to its crawling and indexing systems. The changes are intended to create a fresher, more comprehensive index, while also reducing load requirements on Web sites being crawled.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:56 PM | Permalink

Some tidbits from SES San Jose

SES San Jose is now into it's third day. As always, it's a great show. There is lots of stuff happening with search and web marketing, which is the juice that drives these events. One of the most notable things is the fact that the show has evidently set an attendance record.

At least that's the rumor on the show floor, but it also looks that way based on the number of people walking around the convention center. This place is packed. In one of the sessions I sat in on, one of the speakers asked how many people were at their first SES. By my estimate about half the room raised their hands. It's an incredible testament to how the industry is growing.

One of the most interesting factoids I heard what that 15% to 16% of all searches are for images. If you haven't been looking seriously at image search, you really should think about this again. Particularly with the advent of universal search, as image results will have an increasing role in the web search results.

Speaking of universal search, one of the areas that is already pretty making great progress is the way they can key in on your location (by IP address for example) and show you relevant local results. This is another area that represents a huge opportunity for search marketers.

So many opportunities ... and so little time, but that, after all, is what makes it fun and interesting.

Posted by on 1:27 PM | Permalink

Microsoft to Offer Content Ads to All Advertisers

Microsoft's contextual ad units, previously available to a limited number of advertisers in a year-old pilot program, will soon be available to all U.S. advertisers.

Beginning August 29, all advertisers will have their ads shown in the Content Ads network of contextual ad placements on several Microsoft-owned sites, as well as partners Facebook and Digg. At launch, much of the inventory is in vertical areas like health, technology and finance. More third-party sites in those key verticals are expected to be added through partnerships in coming months. A self-service publisher sign-up similar to Google AdSense is expected to launch some time next year.

Bids for Content Ads will be set at an advertiser's current Broad Match bid for each ad group. If no Broad Match bid is present, the system will look for a Phrase Match bid, and then an Exact Match bid. In this way, the Content Ads will tend to use the lowest bid set for each group. New ad groups will include Content Ads by default, though advertisers can opt out of Content Ads at any time.

The pilot was expanded earlier this year with a new release of adCenter, and included several thousand advertisers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:12 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Public Relations Train Wrecks

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Public Relations Train Wrecks," Kevin Ryan reports in from SES on the press and search optimization controversy.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Review of "Web Analytics, An Hour a Day" by Avinash Kaushik

In today's By the Numbers column, "Review of "Web Analytics, An Hour a Day" by Avinash Kaushik," Eric Enge reviews Avinash Kaushik's basic philosophy of Web analytics as defined in his new book, which helps you learn how to view analytics the right way.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 21, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 11:08 PM | Permalink

We All Love Widgets

There's plenty of exuberance about widgets.

As website publishers, we embrace widgets for many reasons. Let's count some of the ways:

1. They help us create social functionality.
2. They cut down on development cycles.
3. They allow us to share our published content.
4. They enable us to provide more external content.
5. They let us become more dynamic and relevant.

So, how do publishers decide which widgets matter? Seems to be based on differentiation. Some publishers choose to push the envelope -- incorporating widgets that enable them to offer services unlike their competitors. In most cases, it's all about keeping up with the Joneses.

When hearing about the dizzying array of social tools, publishers have to determine if these tools really matter competitively or are merely representing a tech-wave.

Even when sold on widgets, many publishers express concern when trying to insert anything from external suppliers. Of course, these concerns emanate from control issues. What if inappropriate content or terms appear? How much branding do we need? What if the performance is slow, and the widget doesn't load properly? All are appropriate concerns -- whether the widgets are freely available or obtained by cutting deals with specialized suppliers.

As competitors seek to increase their visitors and traffic flow, there's no question that widgets enable publishers to move more quickly. No publisher can afford to specialize in all the content and sharing tools out there. It's not a perfect world, but it's pretty nice that we have all of these amazing features at our fingertips. Let's at least encourage a little risk taking out there.

Posted by on 5:50 PM | Permalink

Kevin Heisler Joins SEW as Executive Editor

We at Search Engine Watch are delighted to now be working with Kevin Heisler, who joins us this week as the site's executive editor. Kevin will be overseeing all editorial aspects of the site -- and we couldn't have hoped for someone with better qualifications or expertise in the field.

He's at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this week. If you see him, say hello - and congratulations.

Most recently, Kevin was search analyst at Jupiter Research. He's also got hands-on expertise in the industry as an executive at Did-It and 360i. Kevin's articles have been published in The Charlotte Observer, Business North Carolina magazine, The International Business Chronicle, and Dow Jones' local business newspapers, The Business Journal.

The downside? Well, he's going to be Kevin #3 around here. We've already got Kevin Newcomb as SEW's news editor, and of course, Kevin Ryan overseeing SES. Nickname suggestions greatly appreciated -- before all these Kevins start getting one another's e-mails and calls!

SEW's sister site, ClickZ, got a new executive editor this week, too!

Posted by Rebecca Lieb on 1:37 PM | Permalink

SES San Jose Coverage, Day 1

General Coverage

Session Coverage

Tagged Posts & Pictures

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 PM | Permalink

Google Maps can now be integrated using HTML

Google announced today that they have simplified the method for integrating Google Maps on to your web site. The new method allows Google Maps to be integrated using simple HTML. As a result, integrating Google Maps no longer requires a knowledge of Java Script, and you no longer need an API key to do it.

This should enable smaller site owners without programming expertise to leverage Google Maps. For example, a business could integrate dricing directions onto their site. The process now consists of 3 steps:

  1. Pull up the Google Map you want
  2. Click on the "Link to this page" link
  3. Copy and paste the resulting HTML into their site

I don't think that this is an announcement that will impact users of Google Maps that have already mastered the Java Script and Google API Key challenges, but it should enable a lot of new sites with less programming expertise to take advantage of Google Maps.

Posted by on 11:10 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Which Hat Should I Wear?

In today's au Natural column, "Which Hat Should I Wear?," Mark Jackson looks at various considerations for determining which type of SEO may be best suited for your needs.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

In today's Little Biz column, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?," Carrie Hill tells you how to build a well-focused Web site to maximize traffic and succeed in a competitive online marketplace.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 20, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 5:20 PM | Permalink

ComScore to Expand qSearch Measurement Service Beyond Traditional Search Sites

Market research provider comScore today updated its qSearch 2.0 measurement service to dramatically expand the number and kinds of properties being measured.

Besides the usual measurement of traffic to major search engines, this expansion now brings in additional measurement of the top 50 most-trafficked sites where search activity is observed. This includes many social media sites, portals, and e-commerce sites where search plays an integral role in their site or the site itself plays a role in the search landscape.

New sites being measured include eBay, Amazon, Expedia, and MySpace. qSearch will also begin counting partner search behavior, such as queries done on affiliate partners that lead to a search engine's results pages. It also will include local search sites like maps, directions, and local directory listings.

"This allows us to take a more comprehensive view of search, and report on some sites that people wouldn't consider as classic search engines," said James Lamberti, SVP of search and media at comScore. "Basically, we can track any open query data anywhere on the Web. That can include things like map searches, Internet Yellow Pages, or job searches."

The expansion to include the top 50 Web properties has another effect, according to Lamberti: it takes the onus away from comScore to determine what should be categorized as "search," he said.

The new data will be reported separately, so clients that want to consider it can include it in their reports, and those that do not want to include it can ignore it. The move opens up the market for comScore to begin providing data to new clients among the top 50 sites. It also sets comScore up to be ready to report on vertical markets for existing clients, Lamberti said.

In addition, qSearch now also includes new geographic areas, with an expansion from a U.S.-centric measurement model to a truly global one, Lamberti said. qSearch now offers individual country reporting for the U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., France, Germany, Japan, China, and Korea. Additional countries will follow.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:00 PM | Permalink

Offline Ads Surprisingly Influential to Searchers

While many search marketers understand that there is a connection between online and offline marketing, some may not understand its full extent. According to a new study by Jupiter Research and iProspect, a surprising two-thirds of searchers are led to search on a given keyword as a result of offline marketing.

Specifically, 37 percent of respondents said that in the last six months, a television ad prompted them to conduct a search on a particular company, service or slogan, while 20 percent said a magazine or newspaper ad led them online. Twenty percent said a company's store drove them online, and 17 percent were influenced to search by a radio ad. A smaller number were influenced by outdoor ads.

Only 33 percent of respondents said they had not been influenced to search by any offline media in the past six months. For daily searchers, the influence of offline media was even more apparent, with only 28 percent of searchers saying they had not been prompted to search by any offline media in the past six months.

Besides driving traffic, offline media tends to drive quality traffic. The study asked those users influenced by offline media if they had ultimately made a purchase at that site as a result, and found that 39 percent had done so.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:53 AM | Permalink

Compete Launches Pay-as-You-Go Pricing

Compete today announced the upcoming launch of a new pay-as-you-go search analytics service designed to give smaller companies access to competitive research data for a per-usage fee.

Compete Search Analytics, set to launch on September 12, will offer data on a site's keyword referrals, site referrals, and site comparisons, which will be charged for by the number of reports and results needed. Users will pay online by credit card, purchasing $2 credits, which are good for the first 50 results of a report, for example.

"If you have a Web site, you have to know how to utilize search, or else you're going to be behind in the game," Jeremy Crane, Compete's Search Expert, told SEW. "A lot of people have not had access to this kind of data. There are some keyword tools that offer query-level data, but that's not the same thing. Since about 40 percent of searches go unanswered, and don't create referrals, we take those out of the picture for marketers."

Referral data is available to larger clients from the big market research companies, but the cost can be prohibitive to small and mid-sized companies, he said.

At launch, Compete Search Analytics will not separate out referrals from organic search and search ads, but Crane expects that to be implemented in a future release. Since many consumers are not differentiating paid and organic clicks in their searches, the combined number is an accurate representation of consumer intent, he said.

"From a consumer's perspective, they're looking for search results. They don't necessarily think in terms of paid vs. organic." Crane said. "We recently surveyed our panel, and found that 20 percent of users had no idea that sponsored links were ads."

The service uses the same panel-driven data that Compete has used for custom analytics clients for six years, but will not allow the page-level reports available to custom clients, and will not include the behavioral segmentation of data or other interpretation of results which Compete offers its clients.

Later this year, Compete expects to expand the program to include features more suitable for large agencies and enterprises. A company will be able to purchase credits in bulk, and allocate them among employees or clients. An API is also planned for early in 2008, which will allow integration of the report data directly into bid management and other tools.

The service is not intended to replace the tools those larger companies and agencies are using, but rather to augment them with more data, Crane said.

Compete's data comes from about a dozen sources, including ISP data, ASP data from applications like Weatherbug, Compete's own private-label desktop apps and toolbars, and the Compete.com toolbar. Those sources include more than 2 million consumers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:49 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: The Long Tail Is Dead -- Long Live the Long Tail

In today's Search Ads column, "The Long Tail Is Dead -- Long Live the Long Tail," Tony Wright has some tips for playing the long tail in today's SEM market, given that search is not the well-kept secret it once was, and targeting the long tail is becoming harder to do.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 19, 2007

Journalists use search to research companies and trends

According to a new survey of survey of over 1,100 journalists, search engines remain the top ranked means for researching companies and trends. While Fusion PR won't publish the survey results and analysis on its Fusion Forum blog until September 10, 2007, the firm did issue a press release about the results. Among the other findings in the survey, 78% of technology journalists read blogs, 67% cite blogs in their articles, and 35% maintain their own blog.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 7:08 PM | Permalink

Is Microsoft Live Search Broken?

Is Microsoft Live Search having problems? Seems people are seeing referred traffic from some weird keyword searchs at Live search. The traffic information shows pharmacy terms being the keywords used to find various sites that would not be terms they would list for organically nor purchase through PPC.

In a Webmaster World thread this topic was started this weekend and has people wondering what is broken over at Microsoft.

Posted by Frank Watson on 9:53 AM | Permalink

AdSense Randomly Testing Ads On Publishers' Sites?

I have seen two conversations about random uncoded AdSense ads appearing on people's sites. Webmaster World is discussing new ads that appear to be adding a "more ads link" and some random text link ads to people's AdSense ads.

A thread here at SEW has found ads being randomly added to a travel blog.

I hope to find out from Google what is happening.... will ask tonight or tomorrow when I am at SES San Jose.

Posted by Frank Watson on 9:28 AM | Permalink

August 17, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 17, 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 5:12 PM | Permalink

Search Engine Accoona Looking To Go Public

Accoona has been a round for some time - a small search engine - and is now looking to launch an IPO, according to Adotas.

The company launched Exchange Place last year to try and grab traction from the Cost Per Acquisition model, when others were having click fraud problems with straight PPC.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:23 PM | Permalink

American Airlines Suing Google Over Trademark Violation

Seems American Airlines has not read about previous law suits over trademark terms as keywords. According to a report by TechDirt, they have decided to go to court and see how their lawyers fare against the well trained and precedent backed Google team.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:39 PM | Permalink

Golf Course Search Engine Helps Find Your Way Out of the Rough

A search engine to help find golf courses is a great concept. I understand the problem finding a course, especially if Tiger Woods ever played there. His popularity pushes him to the top of organics and can leave the local course out of bounds.

Cybergolfsearch.com is a good vertical search engine covering the golf industry. I see a time when many such engines exist, along side a portal or community dedicated to the particular niche.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:34 PM | Permalink

Google Explains its Wireless Dreams

Google posted to its Public Policy Blog last night to share its ambitions around the upcoming "white space" auction the FCC will hold to sell off unused TV spectrum. Google hopes to make it possible for those unused bits of radio spectrum between licensed TV channels to be freed up for development as wireless Internet access as a sort of broadband WiFi once the move to digital TV signals takes place in February 2009.

Google and others, including Dell, EarthLink, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Philips, have formed the "White Spaces Coalition," to lobby the FCC and show that it would be technically feasible to provide Internet access through this segment of spectrum without interfering with either digital television signals or wireless microphones.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:55 AM | Permalink

Google Changes Link Building Wording, Recips Could Be Okay

Seems Google has changed the wording on the link building page of Webmaster Help Center, according to thread over at Webmaster World.

It is interesting that Google is now stating that excessive reciprocal links are bad, not all recip links! The information at Google can be read here.

If this is a change in attitude I will be finding out next week. Or has this always been the case, which I tend to believe - as I have seen recip links being counted.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:49 AM | Permalink

Google, Yahoo Launch Click Fraud Resource Centers

Google has launched a new Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center to educate AdWords advertisers about the dangers of click fraud and Google's efforts to prevent it. It provides information on click fraud and invalid clicks, links to technical articles and Google policies, and links to contact Google reps.

Yahoo launched its Traffic Quality Center last week, with similar resources, but a much more finished look.

Much of the content for both sites existed before in different parts of the companies' sites, but these resource centers bring the information together in a single point. Creating the center was a condition of the click fraud lawsuit settlement made by Yahoo last year, but not for Google.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:58 AM | Permalink

The site you are buying links from is not Yahoo!

I read with particular interest Rand's post about The Art of Buying Links Under the Radar.

One of the key points Rand makes is that when you are (really) smart about buying links, that it's just like buying a directory listing from Yahoo!. Let's look at this further by looking at what the best link buyers do:

  1. They buy only from highly relevant sites
  2. They make sure that the ad is not no-followed
  3. They make sure that there are no obvious clues that it's an ad (such as the word "Sponsors" nearby)
  4. They control the anchor text for maximum impact

So far, so good. You have gotten a really great link, and you can argue, perhaps in completely good conscience, that you have purchased the link for branding and traffic.

Here is where I feel the logic starts to fall apart though.

You are not dealing with Yahoo!. In fact, by definition, you are dealing with a business somewhat smaller than Yahoo!. There are several issues that result:

  1. Links might run something like $100 per month. Short money really. This makes it attractive for the buyer, but the downside is that the buyer has little hold over the seller.
  2. The person who sold you the link sold it to make money. They are probably interested in making more money. Their editorial judgment may rule the day today, but their thirst for cash may rule the day tomorrow. Suddenly, your perfect ad may be surrounded by less than perfect ads, and it becomes much, much easier, to detect.
  3. It's a volume game. It does not help much to buy a single ad. What really helps you is buying quite a number of ads. This increases your exposure to the prior point. For example, if a search engine discovers that you have been purchasing one really well disguised ad, they will begin looking at your other links. Have a lot of links that are divorced from the integral content (right rail, bottom of page, etc.)? Might not be easy for a crawler to detect, but a human may easily spot it. This is where you get into real trouble - once a human at the search engine believes that your intent was to deceive. The issue here is not what your intent actually was - but what the human reviewer believes your intent was. Keep in mind, nothing good ever comes out of a human review that you didn't request.
  4. The site may adopt a policy that causes them to label the ads as sponsored at a later date. Note that the closer the company is to truly acting on editorial judgement as a first priority, the more likely this is.

The point is that you don't know what the site you are purchasing links from today will decide to do tomorrow.

Posted by on 10:30 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Link Building for Large Corporate Sites

In today's Outsourced column, "Link Building for Large Corporate Sites," Chris Boggs gives you a quick course in advanced link building for enterprise-level SEO projects.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: This Just In, Google Recruits Local Sales Force

In today's Vertical Challenge column, "This Just In, Google Recruits Local Sales Force," Gregg Stewart gives you a heads up on Google Local Business Referrals and continues his review of local search strategies by covering underutilized local media sources.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 16, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • Optimizing your SES San Jose Schedule
    Still trying to figure out which of the 73 sessions to attend at next week's Search Engine Strategies conference? Let Greg Jarboe guide you with his optimized schedules for paid- and organic-focused search marketers.
  • Interview with Danny Sullivan
    Danny has been telling people for years that vertical search and personalization are coming, but now that they are both here he wonders "what do I tell them now?"
  • SEW Experts: Integration: Key Element of Link Building
    Sage Lewis discusses a key element of link building: integration, the process of incorporating something special into your Web site to attract linking partners.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:00 PM | Permalink

Optimizing your SES San Jose Schedule

Still trying to figure out which of the 73 sessions to attend at next week's Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference? Let Greg Jarboe guide you with his optimized schedule for paid- and organic-focused search marketers in today's SearchDay, "Schedule Optimization for SES San Jose."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:12 AM | Permalink

Interview with Danny Sullivan

Just last week I had the chance to interview Danny Sullivan. One of the topics we focused on was Universal Search and personalization, and what it means for the market.

One of the funny aspects of the conversation was that Danny indicated that he has been telling people for years that these things are coming, but now that they are both here he wonders "what do I tell them now?".

Danny has also done some poking around at Google's Universal Search, and the companion initiatives from Yahoo and Ask. So while he believes that Universal Search will have a "big, huge impact", the current state of it is a bit less compelling. My perspective is that I believe it will have a huge impact over time as well, but it does not surprise me that it's not fully baked yet.

Posted by on 9:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Integration: Key Element of Link Building

In today's Link Love column, "Integration: Key Element of Link Building ," Sage Lewis discusses a key element of link building: integration, the process of incorporating something special into your Web site to attract linking partners.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 15, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:45 PM | Permalink

Retailers Not Paying Enough Attention to SEO

A new study from Oneupweb finds that the Top 100 retailers are not paying enough attention to SEO for their Web sites. In today's SearchDay, "Retailers' SEO Efforts Found Lacking," we examine the results of the study, which finds:

  • 20 percent of retailers' sites were well-optimized
  • 20 percent of retailers' sites were moderately optimized
  • 34 percent of retailers' sites were nominally optimized
  • 26 percent of retailers' sites were not optimized at all

"A lot of big brands are relying on the strength of their name. They're not necessarily suffering now, but the market is extremely volatile, and it's not certain how much longer they can hang on just doing that," says Oneupweb's Tim Kauffold.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:27 PM | Permalink

SES Advisory Board Members Named

As we noted in June, one of the first things Kevin Ryan did when he joined Incisive Media as the new VP and global content director for Search Engine Strategies was to begin developing an advisory board for the SES conferences, consisting of individuals from the industry and beyond, to help Kevin and our programming and operations teams guide the direction of future conferences.

Today, the first group of 15 advisors has been named to the SES Advisory Board, focusing on the U.S. Search Engine Strategies events:

  • Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
  • Jeff Levick, Director, Global Industry Development and Marketing, Google
  • Gregg Stewart, Senior Vice President, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing
  • Jeff Ferguson, Director of Online Marketing, Napster
  • Randy Peterson, Search Marketing Innovation Manager, Proctor and Gamble
  • Steven Kaufman, Senior Vice President, Media Director, Digitas
  • Sandeep Aggarwal, Senior Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer & Co.
  • Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development, Yahoo Search Marketing
  • Chris Henger, Vice President, Affiliate Marketing, Performics
  • James M. Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore Networks
  • Carol Kruse, Vice President, Global Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Co.
  • Jeannie Moran, eCommerce Marketing Director, AutoNation
  • Erynn Petersen, Senior Manager, Advertising Platform Evangelism, Microsoft
  • Jocelyn Griffing, Senior Vice President, Online Media, Icon International
  • Pauline Ores, Senior Marketing Manager, Community and Collaboration Strategy, Global Small & Midmarket Business, IBM

The board includes thought leaders from leading packaged goods, automotive, entertainment and electronics brands to augment the efforts of the existing SES faculty in delivering the timeliest information on search and integrated marketing. They will meet regularly to work with event chairs and existing SES contributors to guide content for future events. The initial board members will serve for a year, after which the board may be expanded, Ryan said.

"We were looking for a balance of the old guard with new members with the potential to bring new ideas and thought processes to the show," Ryan said. "Everybody involved is highly steeped in search, and many Advisory Board members have been doing paid search or SEO for more than 10 years."

If you've got suggestions for Kevin or the SES Advisory Board, please share them in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:00 PM | Permalink

Market Motive - A new option for learning about Online Marketing

John Marshall, Michael Stebbins, and Avinash Kaushik announced today the founding of Market Motive. The company is a new venture which aims to provide a variety of online educational services focused on online marketing. Two days ago, I interviewed John Marshall about the company, it's services, and it's plans.

What you get with the service is high end written educational material, plus the ability to participate in direct Q&A with the expert staff involved in the company. And, expert staff they have. Here are some of the key players:

  • Avinash Kaushik - covering Web Analytics
  • John Marshall - covering Conversion
  • Todd Malicoat - covering SEO
  • Greg Jarboe and Jamie O'Donnell - covering online PR

The Q&A is handled through forums, but the panel of experts is signed on to provide fast and accurate responses. In addition, if you want to get the active help of these people to work with you through this online format, you can also do that as well. It's not cheap however, as the services are offered in a subscription model, with a price of $299 per month. Of course, this price looks cheap compared to a full on consulting engagement with people of this experience level.

It's an interesting twist in a market that contains so much free content out there, but I think the key difference is the interactivity with the experts, and getting your personal questions answered in a direct fashion.

Posted by on 3:23 PM | Permalink

Aaron Wall Looks Inside Mind Of Google Engineer

Using a much more educated and sarcastic spin on the New York Times article about Google's search engineers, Aaron Wall has given some insight into many of the factors Google engineers deal with.

With ThreadWatch non-active at the moment it is good to see "seobook" has not given up sharing his unique views.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:58 PM | Permalink

Yahoo! Local Gets a Facelift

Yahoo! Local today announced a redesign and series of upgrades to its site. Many of these changes represent a new effort to bring out user generated content, and to motivate users to participate in user reviews, according to Brian Gil, lead project manager of Yahoo! Local.

To augment this effort, the company has also modified its relevance engine. It will include the (hopefully) growing corpus of reviews content in its index with the intention of serving better local search results.

"We've always considered ourselves to be a social utility with a core focus on relevance and accuracy and depth of content," says Gil. "We're shifting the site design to spur more active engagement from the community, and we also modified our relevance engine to bring the best and closest results to users' [queries].

New features in particular will allow users greater access to existing reviews, such as commenting whether or not they were useful, and also put in their own two cents. This higher degree of interaction is hoped to grow the reviews content, in line with the aforementioned goal; and also expand the feedback loop and level of interaction among users.

The new site will also include a city guide tab which will represent the new face of Yahoo! Local and a new new jumping off point to local search. This will feature and delineate a few content verticals, which it would like to accentuate for both local searches and also, as mentioned above, ratings and reviews generation. These include special sections for Restaurants, Health & Beauty, and Home & Garden.

“This reflects that we are not just a dining guide or just focused specifically on arts an entertainment,” says Gil. “Of course it's a popular category and we strive to have the best content. But the types of demographics that we cater to and the types of experiences we're trying to provide go far beyond that. The focus will shift more towards homeowner demographics with a variety of different local purchasing needs.”

The redesign will also include a new "weekender" page which lists movies, events and activities that users can use to find stuff do do over the weekend, or whenever they can fit recreation into their lives. Initially this this will be geo-targeted only, but could develop according to Gil, to be personalized and behaviorally targeted to registered users.

There is also a buzz cloud, which joins many of the other new features in giving the site more web 2.0 appeal. This is likewise geo-targeted to show the most popular searches in a given community. Avatars and pictures are also included with user reviews and "MyLocal" personal profiles, similar to what Yelp has done with its successful reviews engine.

Overall there is nothing revolutionary about these enhancement, but they do represent a good evolutionary step for Yahoo! Local, which has a leading position in the local search world to protect, according to comScore data, and a legacy as one of the first online local search players.

More analysis of the social dimensions of the new Yahoo! Local to come in next week's vertical search expert column.

Posted by Mike Boland on 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Women of SEO Luncheon Monday August 20

Li Evans at Marketing Gurus is organizing a Women of Search luncheon Monday August 20 during SES. For more details and to sign up to attend visit the Marketing Gurus site.

These have been fun from what I have heard.... a little discriminatory but maybe an invite for DaveN will show him there are a lot of women in our space.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:03 AM | Permalink

SES: The Benefits of Repeat Visits

Many attendees of search industry conferences attend multiple shows a year. That's all well and good for those who are speaking at the show, or whose companies are paying for the trip. But what about those who are footing their own bills? Is it worth it for them to attend SES and other shows again and again?

According to Craig Paddock, who has attended 17 consecutive U.S. SES events, there are benefits for repeat visitors. Paddock shares his experience leaving SES New York in April in Tuesday's SearchDay, Does SES Convert for Repeat Visitors?

He points to things like new ideas from speakers and fellow attendees, tips on what not to do, new contacts (SEOs as well as search engine reps), and inspiration from immersion as tangible benefits for repeat visitors. He also notes that direct access to search engine reps can by itself be worth the price of admission.

If you're not heading to Search Engine Strategies San Jose next week, and still want to benefit from that direct access in an informal environment, you can take advantage of a post in the SEW Forums, where Frank Watson (Aussie Webmaster) has kindly offered to collect questions and get them answered by the appropriate speaker or search engine rep at the show, or at one of the parties planned around the event.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:25 AM | Permalink

Dynamic URLs and Crawlers

Matt Cutts puts up another post - this time providing a glossary of URL terms. At the end of the post he talks about the difference between static URLs and dynamic URLs, and correctly tells us: "A dynamic url is a document that requires the webserver to do some computation before returning the web document".

He also notes that many people define a dynamic URL as being one with parameters on the end of it. This is an outgrowth of the fact that many dynamic pages are generated using the parameters at indices into a database, to help the web application find the right content to display. However, parameters on the end of the URL do not necessarily mean that the page is dynamic. In addition, the lack of parameters does not necessarily mean that the page is not dynamic. These are truly separate things.

Related to this, there has long been a myth out there that search engine crawlers don't like dynamic web pages. A better way to say it is that search engine crawlers don't really like lots of parameters on URLs. For one thing, the parameters may be confused with session IDs, and if that happens your crawl is going to get all messed up.

When we sites with lots of parameters on the URL, we often urge them to remap those URLs into something that looks more folder based (e.g. ?id=1234&prodid=4321 get mapped into /auto-parts/carburetors, or something along those lines). This is easily done on Apache servers using your .htaccess file.

Dynamic web pages are perfectly fine. All that is really required is that any time you to go a given URL, your web application will serve up the same content over and over again. As long as this is the case, and your URL is clean looking, the crawler will have no problem with your dynamic web page.

Posted by on 9:27 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Google vs. the World

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Google vs. the World ," Kevin Ryan is here to tell you that privacy is dead and your future lies in everyone else's hands.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Survey-Based Customer Satisfaction Tool

In today's By the Numbers column, "Survey-Based Customer Satisfaction Tool," Eric Enge tells you about a Web-based tool that can help you learn what customers think about your site, and which areas are in need of an upgrade.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 14, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:38 PM | Permalink

AOL's Tacoda Being Sued For Patent Infringement

Modavox has claimed that Tacoda violated its patent on a “Method and System for Adding Function to a Web Page,” ClickZ reports.

"There is speculation that Tacoda's pending acquisition by AOL could have triggered the patent infringement suit. The patent is said to cover technologies that serve customized multimedia content and advertising to its users. The patent was filed for in 1999 and given to Modavox in 2003 while it was operating under the name SurfNet Media Group.

Nathaniel Bradley, CTO and chief product officer of Modavox stated, “We really focused on Tacoda a long time ago when they came out with their whole business model. Tacoda is one of many potential infringers out there. It's impossible for us to sue everybody.” Other competitors he mentioned were AlmondNet and Revenue Science," ClickZ reported.

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:23 PM | Permalink

Google Adds Malware Tool To Webmaster Central Tools

Google has added a malware tool to Webmaster Central tools, their blog reported.

"If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results," the blog states.

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:15 PM | Permalink

ClipBlast! to Automatically Index Metacafe Content

ClipBlast! through partnership with Metacafe will automatically index new video posted to Metacafe. ClipBlast!'s automatic indexing capability will provide viewers a way to view video of interest on Metacafe quickly and easily. This will expand the viewership for videographers using Metacafe. Search marketers tasked with promoting video content will find that content agreements such as this one will automatically add reach for their videos.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 2:00 PM | Permalink

National Science Foundation Funds Music Search Engine

John Batelle's blog tipped me to this one. The National Science Foundation gave just under $100,000 to the University of Charleston for the development of a music search engine that uses aesthetic similarity.

The engine has the ability to 'listen' to the music and find comparative pieces in the same genre and music style.

In and of itself that is impressive, but the cross applications are enormous for sound recognition based search.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:58 PM | Permalink

Ask Ads Shift Direction (for the Better)

Ask has been much-maligned for the choices it has made with some of its recent TV ad campaigns featuring D-lister Kato Kaelin or scantily-clad "chicks with swords" that likely offended at least half the intended audience. It also was criticized for the obscurity of the billboard campaign before it proclaiming that "The algorithm killed Jeeves," or "The algorithm is from Jersey." That campaign stirred up conversation in the industry, but not all of it was positive.

It seems that Ask.com has shifted course a bit with its latest ad, which Ask's Director of Online Information Resources Gary Price discusses at his ResourceShelf blog.

"In the past few days, Ask.com has started to air a new 30 second television commercial in the U.S. In my view, it's just what the doctor ordered. I think the new spot is simple, innovative, fresh and like the common like many other things involving Ask, illustrates that core search and IR is still core to what Ask is doing these days," writes Price.

The commercial, available for viewing online, is simple, with no words spoken, just the sounds of a user typing and clicking a mouse. It begins by asking the question, "Can your search engine do this?" It then shows the screen of a searcher using Ask.com, highlighting the various elements of the Ask3D updates made in June. The screen then reads "Or does it just do this?" and then shows a standard Google search results page with "ten blue links."

The ad does a good job of highlighting the features of Ask.com, and is sure not to offend anyone...two things that could not be said about some of its previous commercials. I still like the TV commercials that cryptically discuss "the algortithm," but a good mix of ads showing off the actual search engine can work in tandem with those ads to make a much better campaign than those of the "chicks with swords" variety.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:29 AM | Permalink

Report: Search, Content See Highest Increase in Time Spent Online

The amount of time people spend searching online has increased by 35 percent since 2003, a growth rate second only to the amount of time people spend with content online, which grew by 37 percent, according to the Online Publisher's Association's latest Internet Activity Index.

Content and communications still dominate time spent online in 2007, taking up 47 percent and 33 percent shares respectively. Commerce comes in third for time spent online with 15 percent, and search follows up with a 5 percent share. In 2003, communications trumped content by 12 percentage points, but has since dropped by 28 percent. Commerce remained the most steady, with just a 5 percent drop in time spent online.

The OPA attributes the shift to several factors, including an increase in the volume of content online, the transition of traditionally offline media activities to the Web, and continued broadband adoption. This latter factor has enabled a lift in overall time spent online –- as opposed to share of time spent -- across all four categories studied: content, search, commerce, and communications, according to ClickZ News.

The data has been collected monthly by Nielsen//NetRatings for the OPA since 2003.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:53 AM | Permalink

Portal and Search Engine Satisfaction Ratings

The American Consumer Satisfaction Index has posted new Customer Satisfaction Indices for a wide range of companies, including a number of portal/search engine companies. The results are based on surveys of consumers. Here is a sampling of the data:

Company20062007% Change
Internet Portals/Search Engines 7775-2.6
Yahoo! Inc. 76793.9
Google Inc. 8178-3.7
All Others 7875-3.8
Ask.com (IAC/InterActiveCorp) 71755.6
MSN (Microsoft Corporation) 74751.4
AOL LLC (Time Warner Inc.) 7467-9.5

A thread over at WebmasterWorld expresses shock that Yahoo could be rated higher than Google. It underscores the need to be careful about how you interpret this type of data. The survey does clearly state that the companies are all evalutated on an overall basis, so the Yahoo! numbers clearly include their portal properties, social media sites, etc.

One interesting thing to note is the jump Ask made from a score of 71 to a score of 75, a step forward of 5.6%. In fact, Ask was more highly rated than Microsoft in this survey (which grew by 1.4%).

It's also not a big surprise to see AOL bringing up the rear, although the precipitous drop of 9.5% was notable. I wonder if this was more driven by the accidental release of information with personally identifiable data, or by simple changes in the market need for a product that is just the Internet on training wheels.

Posted by on 10:53 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Understanding the Search Landscape

In today's Big Biz column, "Understanding the Search Landscape ," Aaron Shear tells you how to answer the pesky questions about search rankings from upper management.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: How to Select a Search Engine Optimization Firm

In today's au Natural column, "How to Select a Search Engine Optimization Firm," Mark Jackson points out some issues to keep in mind when selecting a vendor to handle your search engine optimization efforts.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 13, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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:

  • Microsoft Completes aQuantive Acquisition
    Microsoft has completed the acquisition of aQuantive, and has created a new Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) Group to fit it in.
  • Small Business Owners can Learn SEO
    Small business people can -- and should -- learn SEO, as illustrated by a San Diego chiropractor and Matt Cutts.
  • Google shuts down paid video clips
    It appears that Google may have acted in advance of their originally announced August 15 date and already phased out its paid program.
  • Search Engine Strategies Updates
    Search Engine Strategies San Jose is just a week away. Everyone who's ready for an intense week of immersion in the latest and greatest thinking in the search industry (not to mention the heroic levels of drinking that seems to always go along with it), raise your hand.
  • Open Those Gates Already
    How search-engine friendly are the Top 100 U.S. newspapers on the web? Not enough.
  • SEW Experts: Google's Local Search Land Grab
    Tony Wright tells you how you can help Google to digitize local search information, and help yourself in the process.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:00 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Completes aQuantive Acquisition

Microsoft has completed the acquisition of aQuantive, and has created a new Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) Group to fit it in.

According to the release, "This new business group will be responsible for building Microsoft's monetization engine to serve the advertiser and publisher community."

The APS team will have responsibility for building and marketing all ad platforms, including Atlas, DRIVEpm, MSNDR and Microsoft AdCenter. It will also house other media types, like in-game and mobile ads, and the agency arm Avenue A | Razorfish.

The APS group will be run by Brian McAndrews, CEO of aQuantive, who will report directly to Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division (PSD). That makes three groups housed under Johnson in the PSD:

  • The Online Services Group, led by Steve Berkowitz, is responsible for Microsoft's “audience” business, including the MSN.com portal, Windows Live services and Live Search. The Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions sales force lives here.
  • The Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group, led by Brian McAndrews, is responsible for building the monetization engine to serve the advertising and publishing community.
  • The Search & Advertising Platform Group, led by Satya Nadella, is focused on building search technologies and the advertising platform to support Microsoft's business and customer goals.

Yusuf Mehdi, who was named chief advertising strategist and head of the Online Business Group last year, will take on the newly formed role in PSD of senior vice president, Strategic Partnerships, where he will be focused on overseeing international mergers, acquisitions and partnerships; managing strategic accounts; and forging relationships with early stage startups and venture capital firms. Mike Galgon, an aQuantive co-founder, has been named chief advertising strategist and will report to McAndrews.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:40 AM | Permalink

Small Business Owners can Learn SEO

Matt Cutts posted on Friday a few SEO Tips for Bloggers. He starts the post by providing a variety of links to the presentation that he gave at Wordcamp 2007, including a video of the hour long talk, a transcript of the talk, and three different write-ups of the session.

One of the very cool things that came out of Matt's post (as opposed to the session at Wordcamp) was the discussion of San Diego chiropractor David Klein. David Klein attended last years Pubcon in Las Vegas, and he volunteered his site for review in one of the Site Clinic sessions. It was immediately clear that David was at a very early stage in learning SEO.

What has unfolded since then makes a great case study for small business owners. David has truly begun to learn the craft. As Matt details in his post, he has begun to understand the link bait process - he is the publisher of the transcript above, and did some very creative things with the other attendees at Wordcamp to get links from them as well.

There are three major points that emerge from all this:

  1. Small businesses can benefit from SEO. David now has made it onto the first page of Google for one of his key target terms "san diego chiropractor". My bet is that he will continue to rise in the rankings because of his other efforts.
  2. Small business people can learn SEO. Many of the basics are pretty straight forward. You aren't necessarily going to learn every aspect to start getting some benefits.
  3. Last, but not least, the value of these shows. David made a commitment by attending the show sat Pubcon, and has obviously followed through by going to other events.

Keep in mind, SES San Jose is just around the corner - it starts next Monday, August 20th.

Posted by on 11:11 AM | Permalink

Google shuts down paid video clips

Google announced that they will end their experiment with paid programming on their video search engine come August 15th. Google will instead concentrate their video monetization efforts on developing ad supported models more suited to online video, perhaps deviating from the standard static, text-based messages.

As the AP reports, "to compensate customers who will no longer be able to see the videos that they purchased, Google is providing refunds in the form of credits that can be used on its online payment service, Checkout."

Update: It appears that Google may have acted in advance of their originally announced August 15 date and already phased out its paid program. No instances of paid video clips options appear when doing a check in Google Video's Advanced Video Search feature and selecting and narrowing the selection to "Price > For Sale."

Posted by Grant Crowell on 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Search Engine Strategies Updates

As many of you know, Search Engine Strategies San Jose is just a week away. Everyone who's ready for an intense week of immersion in the latest and greatest thinking in the search industry (not to mention the heroic levels of drinking that seems to always go along with it), raise your hand. Well, I'm not ready for it either, but I'm sure I will be by next Monday.

To get a taste of what to expect next week, you can check out Daron Babin and Brandy Shapiro-Babin's Rainmaker podcast from last week on WebmasterRadio.fm. Daron and Brandy sit down with Kevin Ryan, global content director for SEW and SES, to discuss SES San Jose.

During the show next week, you can of course expect coverage from the SEW blog, WebmasterRadio.fm, and the legion of search bloggers that cover the sessions in live-blogging format. Besides the stellar coverage from Barry, Tamar and crew at Search Engine Roundtable, and The Lisa's coverage at Bruce Clay Blog, you can also expect new perspectives from Lee Odden's team at TopRank, on the Online Marketing Blog.

If you plan on covering the show on your blog, drop me a line and I'll be sure to include your coverage in our daily wrap-ups of SES news next week. In addition, you can tag all of your posts and photos with sessanjose2007, and we should be able to find it. In addition, if you're interested in covering any of the sessions for a post-show SearchDay article, get in touch and we can discuss specifics.

We're not going to be live-blogging here on the SEW blog, but we'll certainly be keeping you informed of any news, interesting tidbits, and other goings-on at the event. You can of course check out the SES San Jose 2007 Party Thread to find all the latest goings-on. The short version: Google Dance on Tuesday, Webmasterradio Search Bash on Wednesday (seems certain search engines that do not begin with "G" are balking at throwing a party this year).

In other SES news, we've announced today that Andrew Goodman, founder of SEM firm Page Zero Media, author, and all-around nice guy, has been named as chairman and host of the 2008 and 2009 SES Toronto conferences. Andrew did a fantastic job organizing this year's event, and it's great to know he'll be back to do it again for at least the next two years.

The SES team today also posted the agenda for SES @ A4U Expo, the search marketing forum that's taking place in London in October in conjunction with the Affiliates4U conference. The two-day program includes a lineup of search and affiliate marketing stalwarts.

If you just can't wait until next week (and you're still reading this), you can check out a few conference-related posts I've seen in the past week or so:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:00 AM | Permalink

Open Those Gates Already

How search-engine friendly are the Top 100 U.S. newspapers on the web? Not enough. Almost a third are are fully gated, with 26 requiring sign-ups to access all content freely and three requiring paid subscriptions (see recent Bivings study). Unfortunately, these gates typically prevent search engines from finding news too.

Of course, some papers like the NYTimes.com have organic search under control. VP Marshall Simmonds has enabled crawling of gated content, so Google and Yahoo make their pages available. When visitors arrive at paid pages like archives, they see abstracts first. Last week, there were rumors about dismantling the paid TimesSelect service. If that happens, the well-regarded columnists would have no trouble attracting more traffic and interest.

However, I'm betting that most of the remaining newspapers with sign-ups aren't up to snuff. Are they enabling search engines to crawl their content and pages? Are they creating appropriate site maps and topic indices? Not that I can easily see. Even if visitors have to log in, these newsworthy resources should be indexed and searched today.

Still I have to ask: why are so many papers requiring sign-ups anyway? That commonplace "we need to profile our visitors for advertisers" answer seems a little lame these days. Instead look at some free metrics, check out specific interests from click streams, and see what new search queries emerge. These sources seem better than self-reported, incomplete data from visitors who just want access, now.

Meanwhile, the largest online newspapers accelerate their efforts to open gates. Publishers with paid access are about to risk current revenue because they project more traffic and revenue downstream. Analyst Henry Blodget thinks it's a winner for NYTimes.com and WSJ.com to run free, if the AOL transition tells them anything. Meanwhile, Pearson continues to mull all FT.com options, in their competitive ad battle with the Journal.

Sure, these largest papers have the advantages of size, resources and online authority. They don't present an apples-to-apples comparison with the local papers. Still their recent willingness to consider risks should send a strong message to their counterparts. While the Top 100 papers have distinct challenges, they are able to attract local and thus highly valuable visitors. It's worth a little time and effort to think about search optimization.

Are any webmasters or developers reading this posting? Start by opening access to the search engines, please. Let the robots in, but make sure there's a "noarchive" metatag if you have gates. Try some site mapping, to expose more hierarchy and content to the crawlers. Check out the forums, and ask specific questions there.

The Top 100 papers are investing in so many areas, including content, video and even user-generated elements. It's the least they can do, to return to a few SEO basics: attract more visitors and spur online growth.

Posted by on 1:20 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Google's Local Search Land Grab

In today's Search Ads column, "Google's Local Search Land Grab," Tony Wright tells you how you can help Google to digitize local search information, and help yourself in the process.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 10, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 10, 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

Marchex Adds About.com Founder To Team, Buys Call-Based Ad Co.

Local search marketing company, Marchex announced the purchase of call-based advertising services company VoiceStar and the appointment of About.com co-founder and CEO Bill Day as its new Chief Media Officer.

"Local search and locally developed and oriented content will be one of the key drivers for the search market over the next five years, and Marchex is in a phenomenal position to be a leader in this category," Day, who will report directly to Marchex Chairman and CEO Russell Horowitz, told MediaPost.

Day helped found About.com - the model for local user-generated content.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:22 PM | Permalink

Matt Cutts Shares SEO Tips for Bloggers

Matt Cutts, the Google engineer and public face of the search engine's spam-fighting team, has posted some SEO tips for bloggers that he first shared in a WordCamp 2007 presentation last month.

He's posted his presentation deck, a link to a video and transcript, and links to write-ups of the sessions, so you could conceivably spend the rest of the day today just consuming Matt's words of wisdom in various forms.

He also clarifyies the reported news that underscores are now the same as dashes to Google:

If you read Stephan Spencer's write-up, he says that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn't quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn't consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you'd already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn't worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you're starting fresh, I'd still pick dashes.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:30 AM | Permalink

Microsoft's aQuantive Acquisition to Close Soon

Microsoft's intended acquisition of aQuantive moved a step closer to completion when the shareholders of aQuantive approved the acquisition yesterday, according to Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter and blogger Todd Bishop. That means the deal could close as soon as next week.

All that's left now is the hard part: figuring out how aQuantive is going to fit together with Microsoft. So far, it looks promising, according to Nick Hanauer, aQuantive's chairman. Hanauer told Bishop that he was at first worried that Microsoft might mishandle the process, but that things are now going well.

"My early fears that Microsoft would bungle the integration have vanished. Clearly they have done and are doing a spectacular job," Hanauer told Bishop. Asked what had caused his concern, he said, "Just the usual politics and ego getting in the way."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:14 AM | Permalink

Google Statement on Custom Search Blog Incident

As a follow-up to my post yesterday, about the Google Custom Search Blog being deleted as spam, I contacted Google to see if I could get any further comment from them. Sean Carlson of Google got back to me with the following statement:

Blogger's spam classifier misidentified the Custom Search Blog as spam. If a spammer gets caught by our automated classifier, the blog owner will receive notification of this identification. At the owner's request, the Blogger team will review the blog to verify that the blog in question isn't spam. In this case, the Custom Search Blog bloggers overlooked their notification, and after a period of time passed, the blog was disabled. The content wasn't deleted, but it was removed from the URL.

Even after blogs are disabled as spam, the owner can write in requesting a review for her or his blog to be restored. If the review proves that the owner's content was not in fact spam, the blog will be restored with all content. So, when we saw what happened on Tuesday -- and were well aware that our content wasn't spam -- we restored the official Google Custom Search Blog. The individual who had claimed the URL and published the blog post in reference still has his content; it's just hosted at a new URL.

I was not able to find out why the spam classifier identified the Google Custom Search Blog as spam. My guess is that Google does not want to reveal any details of their spam detection techniques.

The unfortunate lesson here is that mistakes do happen. Quality content does get flagged as spam at times. While I honestly believe that Google strives hard to do a good job of avoiding that problem, and this makes the problem happen less often, you can still get caught in the net.

The hard part of this is that most people who get caught in this net by accident won't have the access and credibility that the Google Custom Search Blog team had to get their issue addressed. There is, as Google has said, an appeal process, but you have to imagine that there are a queue of such things to get reviewed.

Posted by on 8:53 AM | Permalink

Fit or Fat -- It's Up To Your Network?

Researchers have now scientifically proven the effect of social networks -- providing hard data about how “unstated” interests are shared among participants. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, obesity can literally be spread among mutual friends.

This is solid off-line research, based on three decades of data collected from 12,000+ socially-connected people. According to the study, the spread is most likely due to the “general perception of the social norms regarding the acceptability of obesity” rather than the behavior itself. In fact, friends do not even have to live in geographic proximity to influence weight gain.

Consider The Underlying Influences:

Which, of course, made me consider the underlying influences among our online communities. With all of the intense socializing people are now doing online, should we be more careful about selecting our buddies -- even if it's not face-to face? Could our intense online social networking lead to “catching” interests, attributes or behaviors? Leaving aside our political correctness, do we care if these common interests are considered desirable or undesirable?

Well if our behaviors are any indicator, we aren't consciously thinking about our participation and are joining up because everyone else is too! Social destinations continue to boom (comScore, June 2007 vs. 2006), including over 70% growth for MySpace and some 270% for Facebook. The daily visits to each grew in a similar fashion. Even with other places to socialize, these stats alone illustrate that online communications are happening, period.

With the possibility of behaviors transferring implicitly between friends, perhaps the attraction comes from deeper connections which are made too. For example, Joe's travels to France could attract others who share interests in European travel or in 18th century French antiques. And, by the way, one of his friends truly relishes Spanish cuisine. Some of these interests may become known by Joe, and he eventually tries paella.

Target Based On Connections:

Why does this matter? Well, people are definitely connecting in ways perhaps unexpected by advertisers. It is your challenge to gain a larger and more complete picture of the segments and communities that actually exist out there. I'm advocating for all advertisers to experiment and actively learn from the social networks, rather than merely dip your toes into the water.

Realize that many of your current consumers are part of the social crowds, whether you are doing anything or not. Your product (or brand) promoters and detractors will be among them, and their collective explicit interests may signal implicit ones that actually matter to you. By signing up for social networks, you should be able to browse or search some of this topical feedback online.

Think more like a sociologist, about consumption and sharing of your product. Then consider some action based on direct as well as adjacent targets. There are plenty of ways to advertise to the networkers, from participating as a "persona" on social sites to making more traditional buys.

I'm pleased there's analytic proof -- in the off-line world no less -- that clearly shows social networks aren't only about explicit interests. Let's think more broadly as marketers reaching the right people in the right places. We should stop being overly cautious media buyers here, spending on keywords and controlled content silos alone. The networks have too many interests to ignore.

More from SEW here: Blending Advertising and Social Networking and Ready To Advertise In Social Networks?

Posted by on 2:01 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Don't Be An SEO Alien

In today's In-House column, "Don't Be An SEO Alien," Rob Kerry has some practical advice for in-house SEOs, and it doesn't have to do with following Best Practices.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Choosing Partnerships for Your Video Search Marketing

In today's Vertical Challenge column, "Choosing Partnerships for Your Video Search Marketing," Grant Crowell tells you how to select and work with a professional video production partner as well as the importance of choosing a video host for displaying your videos.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 9, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 6:30 PM | Permalink

Marchex to Acquire Pay-per-Call Provider

Marchex announced plans to acquire pay-per-call provider VoiceStar, which it hopes to use to bring call-based ad services to its direct-navigation network.

In June, Marchex launched more than 100,000 local and vertical Web sites, each with unique content that includes yellow pages listings, user-generated and expert ratings and reviews, and of course plenty of ads from Marchex's ad network.

"We have distribution. That's half of it," Marchex Chief Strategy Officer Peter Christothoulou told ClickZ. The platform is ready to integrate pay-per-call with its dashboard and offer local marketers the option to pay for online leads resulting in a phone call, which many small businesses find more valuable, he said.

The deal is reportedly worth $20 million, plus $8 million in additional investments through 2008.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 6:08 PM | Permalink

Should I keep My Yahoo Stock? When Terry Semel Sells $4 Million

Apparently former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel needs money or thinks the company stock will fall lower. He exercised options on over 180,000 shares Monday and Tuesday and walked off with a cool $4 million dollars.

Well minus the cost of the option.

UPDATE: I have a thousand shares so maybe I am biased.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:53 PM | Permalink

Sina Announces Google Partnership Deal

Sina, the Chinese portal, announced details of their partnership with Google to provide search and advertising for them, a VNUnet.com report stated.

"Under the deal Sina will carry Google's Chinese search service and advertising, and the companies will share the revenue generated. Sina does not expect to see significant revenue from the partnership before the fourth quarter", it was reported.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:47 PM | Permalink

Google Ranking Comments By Subjects of News Stories

This is new and news. Google is allowing the subjects of news articles to have their comments ranked in with the news items they are being written about. I noticed this today and have seen a number of stories on it - though no Google comments appended.

The Associated Press has a detailed story.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:42 PM | Permalink

Former Google Answers Researcher Discusses Demise

A former GAR (Google Answers Researcher) gives his opinion on why Google dropped the project.

The article is definitely worth a read. "[I]t seemed clear to the GARs that Google Answers failed precisely because it was increasingly a non-priority for those who had developed it, and they were putting their attention elsewhere," the report suggests.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:19 PM | Permalink

Implications of Google's New Bid Calculations

Maybe I am having an off week, but Google's announced changes to the PPC cost calculations seem a little like a magic show and the expected audience is novice search advertisers.

Their FAQ about the coming changes started my apprehension. I always was under the assumption that your Max CPC was factored in to the calculation. I remember being given a lesson about 4 years ago about Max CPC x CTR = eCPC which was then used to order the rankings and the prices were determined from there.

Okay then they added the Quality Score which included values for landing pages and criteria of the information in the ads themselves (keyword insertion seeming to be one of them).

Google states "The core components of the top ad placement formula will remain price and quality. However, we are improving the way we factor price into the formula. We're also adjusting the way your actual cost-per-click (CPC) is determined for ads in top spots. As always, only ads that meet our stringent quality requirements will be eligible to appear in top spots"

No longer will the CTR impact the eCPC.... The max bid is not stand alone like Overture but is impacted now by Quality Score as opposed to CTR. Does this mean they have no faith in the quality of the decisions made by their users - the CTR?

"[I]f you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC," Google seems to be greedily stating.

So does the Quality Score now include CTR? Will keyword insertion now be a major factor? Who makes the human evaluation? The users and click backs are counted? Or is Google Analytics being used? Or some form of behavioral response?

Or is an effort to have more long tail terms being exact matched the reason?

"We anticipate that most of your ads will continue to perform as they have in the past. In some cases, you may see that ads previously shown alongside search results are now shown in top spots, and vice versa. As a result, you may see a change in the average number of clicks and average CPCs for impacted ads," they state.

Is this just in case it does not work properly?

One wonders whatever happened to if it is not broke don't fix it.

Please let me know what you think.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:33 PM | Permalink

Google Makes Changes to Ads Quality Calculation

AdWords advertisers whose ads are on the cusp of earning the top spot on Google's search results pages may soon find it easier to break through, in some circumstances. Google is planning on rolling out a change in the way it calculates the ad placement for a given keyword.

Currently, ads are scored based on their "Quality Score" and the actual cost-per-click (CPC) an advertiser pays as a result of auction pressure from other advertisers. This process, which was updated in February, calculates an ad's quality based on the historical performance of a given keyword, relevance of keyword to ad text, landing page quality, and other factors.

According to Nicholas Fox, group business product manager for ad quality at Google, the Quality Score will continue to be weighted more heavily in the calculation, but the change will come in the CPC Google uses in the formula. Instead of using the auction-driven CPC, Google will soon begin to use the advertiser's maximum bid CPC to determine which ad will be shown in the top spot.

The motivation behind this is to allow Google to consider more ads for the top spot, and at the same time be more restrictive in which ad will end up there. It will also give advertisers more control and predictability, he said.

The change will be most noticeable with ads on the cusp of the top spot, with the same or similar Quality Score as the top ad. It will especially impact ads on less competitive keywords that don't create enough auction pressure to drive the actual CPC up enough to allow the second-place ad to overtake the top spot. Advertisers will be charged the minimum CPC required to displace the top ad, up to their maximum bid, Fox said.

The change will not allow sites that Google determines to be of low quality to take the top spot, Fox said. "For some ads with a low Quality Score, there will be no level of bid that will allow them to get the top spot," he said.

Fox advises advertisers not to make changes until the changes roll out in the next few weeks, and they see what the effects are on their ads. He suggests advertisers make sure their bid reflects the maximum amount they are willing to pay, and that they keep an eye on the metrics in their AdWords interface. Once the effects are clear, advertisers can experiment with raising or lowering their bids, he said.

Think this will be a good or bad thing for advertisers? Frank Watson doesn't think so, as he writes that "Google's announced changes to the PPC cost calculations seem a little like a magic show and the expected audience is novice search advertisers."

Share your thoughts in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:32 PM | Permalink

Implications of Google Custom Search Blog Deletion

Boy this is frightening. Yesterday Google Blogoscoped reported about the Google Custom Search blog being hacked. After this was discovered, Google sent an update to Philipp Lenssen (who runs Google Blogoscoped) that said the following:

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we're taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn't happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

It's frightening because it shows you how fragile Spam detection algorithms are. How could this happen that the blog was accidentally flagged as spam? The people working on this blog work at Google! I am willing to stipulate that they were not deliberately trying to game Blogger in any fashion, or for that matter the Google search engine.

As someone that focuses a lot of energy on building web site traffic by organic means, and as a blogger, I have to admit that I am very concerned about this. It's a real eye opener. Like many of you, I have read the various forums out there filled with people complaining about how they have been mistreated by Google's search engine.

They complain about how they have a great site, and have been banned from the index, or hit by some algorithmic penalty. I have also helped such sites emerge from such penalties, and get a fresh new lease on life. I always feel bad for these people because it's a crummy feeling to hvae your investment get flushed down the toilet.

However, nearly all the time when I get the chance to look more closely at the situation there appear to be reasons why the problem could be happening. Up until now, I had hoped that it was possible to have a gold standard approach that was immune to the risk of such things. I guess I was wrong. If Blogger can flag a product of Google as spam, then there are few places that are truly safe.

I would really like to see a statement from Google as to why the Google Custom Search blog was classified as spam in the first place. If I hear anything I will update this post with that info.

Posted by on 10:38 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Reverse Engineering Linking Patterns to Create Link Equity

In today's Link Love column, "Reverse Engineering Linking Patterns to Create Link Equity," Justilien Gaspard tells you how to get quality links from trusted sites in a round about manner, creating trusted linking neighborhoods.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Hearst to Acquire Social Shopping Site Kaboodle

Newspaper and magazine giant Hearst Corp. has agreed to acquire social shopping site Kaboodle. It will fit into the Hearst Interactive Media and Hearst Magazines Digital Media units.

"Kaboodle is a natural overlap for Hearst Magazines," Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines, said in a statement. "We think Kaboodle has terrific potential for many of our brands, especially in the fashion, beauty and consumer technology categories. Our readers will be able to find the products featured in our magazines, shop electronically with their friends and get their feedback. It's another means for making sure our readers stay engaged in today's saturated media landscape."

Kaboodle combines shopping search with social media, with several sharing tools added last year. It connects people with similar tastes, and lets users create and join groups. Kaboodle launched its public beta in 2006 and reportedly has more than 2 million unique monthly visitors.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:19 AM | Permalink

Spock Launches Today

The long awaited public unveiling of Spock, the people search engine, takes place today. According to company representatives, they already have 1.5 billion people indexed. I did a brief review of Spock back on June 29th.

One of the neat things about Spock is that as a vertical search engine, it operates in a single context. Terms like "boxer" lists famous boxers, or "baseball" lists famous baseball players. Concpetually, this will help you narrow down on people you are looking for more quickly, especially when you don't know the exact name of the person you are looking for.

Users can tag your name with labels. For instance, one beta user recently tagged me with "Search Engine Watch". These labels help define what searches you will appear for. In addition, people can claim their profiles, which then provides them with the ability to edit your own information. For example, you can uploade a photo. The service also already has anti-spam mechanisms built-in, although it will be interesting to see how these stand the test of time.

Overall, it's a cool looking service, worthy of checking out.

Posted by on 9:28 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Yellow Pages and Search

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Yellow Pages and Search," Kevin Ryan explains that yellow pages directories and search engines are hopelessly intertwined as directories feed search queries and search queries feed directories. A new spin on the old book might just connect the dots.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: SEO Site Design Improves User Experience and Site Performance

In today's By the Numbers column, "SEO Site Design Improves User Experience and Site Performance," Eric Enge shows you the value of improving the user experience by implementing SEO in your site design while testing design elements with analytics.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 7, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:23 PM | Permalink

Others Join YouTube, Google Copyright Lawsuit

Viacom has company now that other companies have joined the lawsuit against Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, Reuters reported.

"The new parties include the National Music Publishers' Association, which is the largest U.S. music publishing trade association, the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football League Association and author Daniel Quinn," Reuters stated.

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:13 PM | Permalink

Bill Slawski Uncovers Possible Barter System Patent At Microsoft

Bill Slawski, of SEO By the Sea, has posted more patent applications. This time Microsoft has applied for a bunch, including Bill Gates himself on one.

The patents cover click fraud as well as what could be the groundwork for a barter system between publishers and advertisers. Great reading as per usual Bill.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:27 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Signs Deal With Reality Programming Company

Yes it is Rocket Science - at least that is the name of the reality programming company Yahoo just signed a production deal with, according to AdWeek.com

This contract and a couple of others Yahoo has signed recently reflects the importance the company is placing on developing their portal's content and presence.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:20 AM | Permalink

Google Hiring Independents To Collect Business Info For Maps

The Google Local Business Referral Program is an initiative to gather contact, business hours and other information on businesses for listings in Google Maps - where Google is using independent contractors to gather their information. Basically they are paying $10 a confirmed listing.

The information gathering job requires people to sign up for it through their Google accounts and to have access to a digital camera to take a photograph of the business. At $10 an entry organized people could be making $30 plus dollars an hour - great salary for people in lower cost of living communities.

Posted by Frank Watson on 10:56 AM | Permalink

Online Advertising to Surpass Newspaper Advertising by 2011

The Financial Times reports that the 2007 annual research report on the media sector by media analysts Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) forecasts online advertising will surpass newspaper advertising by 2011. With a projected annual growth rate of than 21 per cent per year, online advertising is expected to reach $62bn in 2011, making it bigger than newspaper advertising, which is expected to total $60bn in 2011.

The move to online advertising is not just a U.S. phenomenon. The shift in advertising spending away from traditional media to online and digital media is global. Some forecasters expect online spending in the UK and Sweden to overtake newspaper advertising as early as this year.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 9:22 AM | Permalink

Google Indexing Near Real Time

Matt Cutts updates us late last night about how quickly Google updates its index. He relates a bit of the history of indexing speed, and then provides some examples to show that Google is now doing "Minty Fresh Indexing". The gist of this is that for some site's documents can show up in minutes instead of days.

Matt goes on to provide a couple of examples, one of which uses Rich Skrenta's blog to show that a blog post he had been reading made it into the Google index in less than 1 hour after it was posted. I have seen some of this behavior as well.

This direction is consistent with a conversation I had with Google's Peter Norvig when I was at Google last. Peter said that Google believes the ultimate goal would be to index the content you are creating as you are creating it. Not to worry, I am not talking about big brother monitoring of your inner thoughts here, but pretty much real time indexing.

It's impressive to me that a polling based system, i.e. a system that required the crawlers to go and find the changed content rather than being notified about new content, can have such a real time response. It will be interesting to see how this interacts with the need to fight spam and dealing with sites that have not established any level of trust.

Of course, this is a discussion of indexing, and not ranking. In the case of the Rich Skrenta blog, the example Matt provided showed that the snippet for the blog was updated for the latest post. That's completely appropriate for content on sites such as a blog, where the latest snippet is what a user would want to see. The site and the content in particular will still need to do other things before it will be highly ranked for competitive search terms that the site did not rank for previously (such as get lots of links).

Posted by on 8:51 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: The Site Map: Gateway to Optimization

In today's au Natural column, "The Site Map: Gateway to Optimization," Mark Jackson reviews a vital piece of on-site optimization, for both users and spiders.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Don't Be a Local Yokel II – Enhancing Your Yahoo Local Listing

In today's Little Biz column, "Don't Be a Local Yokel II – Enhancing Your Yahoo Local Listing," Carrie Hill tells you how to enhance your local listings in Yahoo! Local to bring more traffic to your site.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 6, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 5:27 PM | Permalink

Is an Ask-Microsoft Partnership on the Horizon?

Ask.com and parent IAC have been cozying up to Microsoft lately, leading to the question of what will become of the current 5-year-old partnership Ask.com has with Google once it comes up for renewal at the end of the year.

The most recent tie-up only unofficially involves Microsoft and Google. It's a deal that IAC made with aQuantive to serve ads on several of its properties, leaving DoubleClick the dust. For those of you confused about the Microsoft-Google angle, remember that Microsoft is in the process of acquiring aQuantive, and Google is in the midst of acquiring DoubleClick. Hence, IAC left future Google for future Microsoft.

Last month, Microsoft's Office Live added Ask Sponsored Listings to its adManager service. A week later, Microsoft and Ask teamed up to present a united front in the fight for user privacy, intimating at the same time that Google was not as concerned with privacy as they are. And of course, the two are linked by the common bonds of Steve Berkowitz, who left Ask.com in 2006 to head Microsoft's search efforts.

IAC's Barry Diller was rumored to be considering a change of ad partner when the original deal expired in 2005, but a 2-year extension was agreed upon by both parties. Diller has been coy lately when asked about future plans. During an investor call last week, Diller said:

As it relates to building our very long association with Google which expires on December 31, we are in a position we had hoped we would be when we originally got into this and purchased this Ask company, which is that we have interesting discussions from the three ad networks. That interest level is good enough for us to believe that whatever happens with this we're going to be in a very good position in ‘08 for our ad businesses.

Ask has also been hard at work improving its own ad capabilities. It expanded its Ask Sponsored Listings product last fall, and is in the process of launching a contextual ad network across its own IAC-owned sites and third-party sites.

Think these clues are leading up to an Ask.com-Microsoft partnership? Share your thoughts in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:22 PM | Permalink

Beating Google at the Hiring Game

Google's strengths may also be its weaknesses, according to the Forbes article "How To Beat Google To Tech Talent." Google is seen by many as the ultimate employer, and Google has developed a lengthy hiring process to make sure it gets the "best of the best" talent.

A recruiter shares with Forbes some ways that Google's high standards and lengthy hiring process can actually be seen as vulnerabilities to be exploited by other companies trying to hire the limited talent available:

  • Google's consensus-driven hiring process is slow. Act quickly and give limited-time job offers.
  • Google has high academic standards. Target students outside the top tier or those from non-elite schools.
  • Google's consensus-driven approach introduces the potential for one person to sink a candidate. Target socially awkward but brilliant engineers.
  • Google stockholders reacted negatively to its recent hiring binge. Expect their pace to slow.
  • Google stock shot high since its IPO, but may be leveling out. Give new hires an opportunity to share in your potential growth.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:38 PM | Permalink

Search Marketing in Brazil: Report from SES Latino

santiago.jpgI recently conducted an interview with Marcelo Sant'Iago the Director of Business Development of MídiaClick, a performance-based marketing agency from São Paulo, Brazil and a conference speaker at Search Engine Strategies Latino on the sessions, Search Landscape: US Hispanics & Latin Americans and Translate Or Create: Strategies For Those With English-Language Sites. Marcelo shares his experience and advice for search marketers to penetrate the Brazilian market, which today holds the largest internet population of any single country in Latin America.

For some background, Marcelo was the President of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Brasil between 2002-2006, and now is Chairman of the Advisory Board. He also serves as board member for Fédération Internationale des Associations de Multimédia. Sant'Iago blogs about interactive media and search engine marketing at www.poucas-e-boas.com, is one of the regional editors of Multilingual Search blog, writes monthly for Caderno Propaganda & Marketing newspaper, Webinsider.com.br and has articles and interviews published in Brazil and abroad.

SEW: Brazil has the highest amount of Internet users of any Latin America country. What do you attribute that to?

Well, first of all we are more than 186 million people. In the last 10 years, since the web was available for everyone, telecom companies were privatized. That helped to increase the number of fixed telephone lines, mobile phones and broadband connections. Also, inflation is under control for some years now, and more people can buy computers, even though we still have high interest rates.

Still, less than 20% of the population has internet access (33 million users according to Ibope NetRatings), and a large part of low income Brazilians will not have access to Internet in foreseeable future, keeping Broadcast TV as the key medium for major industry segments (CPG, Food, Retail).

But internet advertising is growing year after year: Q1 2007 growth was 32% compared to 2006. And that's without search numbers, so everyone is very optimistic. According to NetRatings we lead the world in online time spent averaging 20 hours a month. Also, there's a high penetration/usage of Internet among the upper and middle class, meaning that even with less than 20% overall penetration among the entire population, people with purchase power are online. This is a key target audience for majority of business and Brazilian behavior is favorable to new technologies, such as videos, social networks, and instant messaging.

SEW: Is there any data on the total penetration of Brazilians who use Search?

Actually not many people in Brazil know, but yes. Brazilian Internet Steering Committee has a survey about internet usage with very interesting numbers. 75% of users have search as main activity online. Main searched categories are goods and services, entertainment, jobs, health, and travel. The full survey is available (in Portuguese and English).

SEW: Do many US-based Brazilians frequent Brazilian based sites?

I have to say yes, since you won't find many websites with content about Brazil in English. On the other side, many Brazilians are visiting US-based websites for content, such as music, international news, webmail, blogs. That is a good opportunity for advertising that most Brazilian agencies and marketers are not aware of.

SEW: Is there the same importance for US businesses to target Portuguese-speaking Latin Americans as there is with Spanish speakers?

Definitely! Brazil is one of the 9 countries where Google recently launched local versions of YouTube and the first having Yahoo's Panama rolled out in Latin America. Why? Because it is a fast growing market, with highest purchase power when compared to Latin-american Spanish speaking countries; and, of course, we have more internet users, despite the still low penetration when compared to some other countries.

Here are some numbers to back that up: in 2006 online advertising in Mexico accounted for US$80 million, Argentina US$50 million and Brazil US$180 million; and Q1 2007 growth was 32%. And e-commerce in Brazil reached US$114 billion in 2006 (36.4% B2B;12.7% B2C), 82% growth when compared to 2005.

SEW: What advice would you give for US businesses who are looking to market to Brazillians, but do not have a physical business location in Brazil?

1. Use search engines to reach the customers.
2. Localize (not only translate) your ads into Portuguese.
3. Develop a good landing page strategy: create a Portuguese version before considering have all your website translated.
4. Forget PayPal, and provide multiple payment systems including creditcards, and boleto (a local bank invoicing system).
5. If you planning to sell goods, sending the purchases by mail; then watch out for high taxes and duties.

SEW: How do Google, Yahoo, and MSN compare with offering regional-based search advertising services for Brazil?

Google is far more advanced. I'm handling regional campaigns with them since 2004. Yahoo's Panama is now up and running in Brazil, and we are all excited with the new capabilities. MSN is still under Yahoo Search Marketing flagship, so I think AdCenter won't be around shortly.

SEW: How do Latin America-based search advertising companies like Directa and Performa compare?

They have a big inventory not only for CPC, but CPA deals as well, and that is interesting to a performance agency like MídiaClick. But our experience shows that SERPs always provide better conversions than contextual solutions. And I personally do not believe in-text advertising is effective.

On the nutshell, I think they're an excellent option to add on our search campaigns and a fast way to reach Spanish speaking audiences within Latin America.

But, there is a bias, since Directa and Performa are part of a group which also owns a SEM Agency. But, if Google now owns Performics and Microsoft owns Atlas and Avenue/A, that shouldn't bother me, right?

Directa and Performa recently merged as part of DirectaClick.FOX. What affect will that have for LatinAmerica based search advertising?

The fact is: Brazil is the only Portuguese speaking country, so language is one of the barriers keeping Latin-american companies out of our market. That is why you won't find a publisher, vendor or agency from Argentina, Mexico, Chile or any other other country playing a lead role in Brazil. Even though, there are several companies based out of Miami telling US venture capital firms about their leadership in the region. What leadership, if you don't have a strong presence in the leading market?

Let's take SES Latino as an example: during one of the panels, a speaker listed what he said to be the most important community websites within Latin America. Even a website from Costa Rica was on his list, but none from Brazil! But Orkut, Google's social network (witch is the #1 website in Brazil), accounts for 60 million unique users/month, and the vast majority of them are Brazilians. Some of those countries don't even have 60 million internet users, total.

I think Brazilian companies are so busy doing business locally that they often forget regional opportunities. But I have to be fair: Spanish is a barrier for many brazilian executives, not to mention English. That means not everyone would be able to succeed regionally and probably aware of that, they keep its focus in Brazil alone, a much bigger market than several Latin-american countries combined.

Regarding to DirectaClick.Fox, they are a great company. We're willing to do business with them and I admire Damián Voltes for his accomplishments, but this merge will not change Brazilian online market landscape, at least in the short term.

On a regional perspective, I believe Google will maintain its search dominance thanks not only to its performance, but brand awareness as well. But on the agency side, AgênciaClick, the leading interactive agency in Brazil and one of most awarded in international ad festivals around the globe, was acquired early this year by ISOBAR (part of Aegis Group and owner of Carat and iProspect) for US$31 million and have already started its regional expansion. That might change the regional landscape very quickly.

SEW: UOL Busca is supposed to be extremely popular in Brazil. Can you provide some background information on this portal site? What are some features with this portal that might not be typical of a portal site like a Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask?

UOL is one of the top ISPs and top destinations in Brazil, and was the first major portal launched in Brazil. That gives it a lot of credibility among local users. They are a public company, and all of their info is available (in English) here.
They also provide exclusive content from national and foreign media companies.

UOL Search is not a search engine per se: it's a feature of UOL portal, the first major horizontal portal in Brazil (they are around for more than 10 years). That's why I wouldn't compare him to Google or Ask. UOL was part of Yahoo's content network in Brazil, and just recently shifted to Google's. You can read all the details online.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo Continues Search Suggestions Rollout

Yahoo has been on a search refinement kick lately, which continued on Friday with the release of Search Suggest for Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

"We really believe that Search Suggestions improves your search experience. By automatically giving you suggestions based on what you've typed (as you're typing), you can get to what you're looking for faster," writes Yahoo Toolbar product manager Hua Ai on the Yahoo Search Blog. "We're driving to push it out to all your favorite search boxes."

Yahoo added the pre-search Search Suggest feature to its Web search on Yahoo.com last month, which had been available in the Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox since March. In July, Yahoo also released Search Assist, a new Web search refinement tool.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:39 PM | Permalink

Rebecca Lieb Interview

Last week I had the opportunity to our very own interview Rebecca Lieb. Rebecca is the Editor in Chief for the Clickz network, which includes Search Engine Watch. We talked about how Search Engine Watch is evolving, and we also talked about the changing world of online media. For those of you who are wondering, readership and subscriptions to Search Engine Watch have been growing steadily over the past year, Partly because search is becoming more and more mainstream.

We talked a bit about how advertising has had some great successes in Second Life. Out of that discussion emerged a great point about media campaigns in general. For example, Starwood Hotels had great success with their marketing trial of the Aloft series of hotels in Second Life. This was a new series of hotels that they were thinking of creating, and they were looking for market feedback. They got a ton of useful information.

But equally important to the long term success of the campaign, Starwood knew that they had to have an end of life plan for the campaign. Once the trials were done, they donated the properties they have acquired to a non-profit organization that was active in Second Life. By doing this, they did not leave behind an abandoned property within Second Life.

Sadly, many other brands have done this, test marketed ideas, and then left behind abandoned properties on the Second Life landscape, artifacts that simple sit there and damage the brand of the company that put them up. Doesn't sound like the goal of your typical ad campaign does it?

Starwood understood their audience, and their medium. Understanding their audience got them some great feedback, and also succeeded in enhancing their brand image. Understanding the medium caused them to do a much better job in understanding what to do at the end of their campaign.

Posted by on 11:47 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Microsoft adCenter Could Win the Search Battle

In today's Search Ads column, "Microsoft adCenter Could Win the Search Battle," Tony Wright explains why he thinks Microsoft adCenter can win the search wars -- if it can scale the audience.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 5, 2007

Yahoo To Air Presidential Debate

Yahoo announced it will host an online only Presidential debate Sept. 12 with PBS's Charlie Rose as the host, the UK Register reported.

People will be able to submit video questions similar to those used on YouTube and CNN recently. This debate will only be broadcast online.

Posted by Frank Watson on 8:06 AM | Permalink

NBC Dateline Tries To Infiltrate Hacker Convention

NBC's Dateline attempt to infiltrate DefCon in Las Vegas this weekend has been discovered by the convention organisers.

"Defcon staff and security were informed that NBC Dateline was sending five people with undercover cameras to film attendees. According to Priest, a member of the Defcon security team, the reporters would try to get hackers to admit to crimes on camera and then confront Defcon's founder Jeff Moss about running a convention that facilitates criminal activities," TG Daily reported.

"Determined to find the reporters, Defcon attendees have created an informal game called “Spot the Dateline” which is modeled after the “Spot the Fed” game, a staple of Defcon conventions. In Spot the Fed, attendees can win T-Shirts for spotting federal agents and bringing them up to the podium," TG noted.

Posted by Frank Watson on 7:48 AM | Permalink

Hacks In Gmail Disclosed At Black Hat Convention

The Black Hat convention In Las Vegas disclosed vunerabilities in Gmail and other cookie based email programs. Hackers detailled the hijacking of a gmail session.

The information was presented at the 15th annual DefCon convention in Las Vegas this weekend.

Posted by Frank Watson on 7:31 AM | Permalink

AdWords Editor 4.0 Released With New Features

Google announced Friday the release of AdWords Editor 4.0. This version has a number of new features and many upgrades to the existing features.

New features include the ability to edit mobile ads, specific campaign editing, setting negatives and more.

Posted by Frank Watson on 7:02 AM | Permalink

August 3, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 3, 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 5:00 PM | Permalink

Congress To Investigate Yahoo's Role In China Arrest

The Associated Press reported House Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos ordered an investigation after documents were released that raised questions about what Yahoo knew when it shared information with authorities about a Chinese journalist.

Shi Tao, the journalist was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sending an email about Chinese media restrictions, the AP reported.

Lantos said that "covering up such a despicable practice when Congress seeks an explanation is a serious offense," the AP reported.

Jim Cullinan, a Yahoo spokesman, expressed disappointment to the AP that Lantos "is rushing to judgment on this issue, because the facts will support Yahoo's testimony to Congress."

"To do business with China's more than 100 million Internet users, U.S. tech companies must satisfy a government that fiercely polices Internet content. Filters block objectionable foreign Web sites; regulations ban what the Chinese consider subversive and pornographic content and require service providers to enforce censorship," the AP noted.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:31 PM | Permalink

Google Algo Change Hurting Larger Sites

Seems recent changes at Google have impacted some of the larger established players on the web. Answers.com have said they have seen a 28% drop in traffic following the update over the past week, according to a number of sources.

Some forum posts and blogs suggest this is a downplay of big content sites, as well as a downgrade of sites for keyword density. It will be interesting to see if sites such as Wikipedia are swept up by this.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:20 PM | Permalink

Bye Bye Supplemental

Sometimes I wonder if we obsess too much about things like the supplemental index. Predictably, the Google post announcing that the supplemental label is gone has predictable resulted in a firestorm of commentary. Here are some posts on the topic from Danny, Barry, and Lisa Barone.

Actually, I do understand the reason why people liked having the information. It was a way of measuring where a site was in Google's eyes. If the work you are doing as an SEO was making the number go down, you knew you were making progress. Having a form of measurement is very useful.

But, you really don't need a supplemental label to identify a poor quality page. It's a page that's thin on original content, and/or without a lot in the way of link juice (note that you should scale this latter factor in relationship to the overall authority of the site on which the page resides). When you are an SEO, and you encounter these types of pages, you then need to determine how large a percentage of the site is made up of these poor quality pages. If the percentage is large - 10% or more (perhaps even 5%), then Houston, we have a problem.

You are going to need to work on the problem, regardless of how it's labelled. A large number of poor quality pages is always a problem. However, if you want some ideas on how to see if a page is in supplemental, check out Jim Boykin's post on the topic.

In the meantime, my suggestion to Google is that the Webmaster Tools team look at implementing some way for webmasters to see within Webmaster Tools those pages that they are assigning a low quality score to. That way SEOs get the kind of tool that they crave, and Google doesn't have to carry around the supplemental index bogey any more too. Better still, this will help SEOs focus on reducing the number of poor quality pages on the web, something I suspect that Google wants. Sounds like a win-win, doesn't it?

Posted by on 1:05 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Travel Search: Up Close and Personal

In today's Vertical Challenge column, "Travel Search: Up Close and Personal," SES Travel Edition organizer Elisabeth Osmeloski gives you an update on trends in the travel search industry.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: SEM Support Tools for Enterprise-Level Projects

In today's Outsourced column, "SEM Support Tools for Enterprise-Level Projects," Chris Boggs tells you about the latest SEO tools for enterprise-level projects and diagnostic tools that provide site-specific SEO recommendations.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 2, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:13 PM | Permalink

Commission Junction Offering Search Marketing Services

UPDATE: I had a phone conversion with Brett Shearing, Business Development Manager at Commission Junction, who told me the search marketing services will only be offered to their vendors. UPDATE

Seems affiliate marketing giant Commission Junction wants to start offering search marketing services, according to an email I received today.

It states they have been offering this to an exclusive group of advertisers for the past three years.

Very interesting... it almost seems too good to be true. A service that has the affiliate programs for you to sell and will take charge of the selling process too.... hmmm. The ultimate turnkey operation - pick a product and then tell them how much you want to make and they cut you a check!

Obviously not that simple but somehow it seems weird. The email is below:

I would like to have 2 minutes of your time to introduce Commission Junction's, CJ Search Group. You may not be aware, but CJ has been providing Search Engine Marketing Services to an exclusive group of Advertisers for the last 3 years. We are now expanding this offering to allow all advertisers to take advantage of our Best in Class approach to Search Engine Marketing.

Over the last three years, we have developed a Best in Class Search Engine Marketing Methodology, built one of the industry most sophisticated Bid Management Platforms (in fact our tracking components are used by eBay), and assembled the brightest team of Search Engine Marketers in the industry. We are experts in Paid Search, Paid Inclusion, SEO and Shopping Portals.

We offer the following benefits to our clients:

- Aggressive Paid Search (Pay Per Click) Optimization. We are experts in increasing ROAS, driving volume and optimizing for maximum efficiencies.
- Ability to gain no 1 ranking's naturally through SEO for highly competitive terms.
- A sophisticated Bid Management platform able to optimize effectively for CTR and bid price and ROAS, not just bid price and ROAS.
- A true understand of the interdependence of Affiliate marketing and Search Engine Marketing. We are the industry leaders in working Search and Affiliates to maximize ROAS.
- A dedicated customer focused team. We seek to understand your business objectives, provide effective communication and deliver superior results.
- Ability to track multiple cookie conversions. This includes search retargeting.
- Performance based pricing model. We are rewarded for increasing ROAS, not by increasing spend.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:30 PM | Permalink

LookSmart Loses CEO Hills

The Australian IT reported that LookSmart's CEO David Hills resigned effective today, but will continue in an advisor capacity until a replacement is chosen.

Mr Hills was appointed chief executive of LookSmart in October 2004 as the company attempted to chart its way back to profitability following the disastrous loss of key customer Microsoft.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:57 PM | Permalink

Cross Linking Between Sites

In a post today on the Google Webmaster Central blog, Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur of the Search Quality Team wrote a post titled Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts. For the most part, the information covers some basic info, such as how server location affects Google's perception of the site (i.e. if you have a .co.uk domain, or an IP address based in Enlgand, you are more likely to be thought as a site suitable for an English sudience).

However, it was interesting to read the comments on cross linking between sites. Shashi commented on this, and took a traditionalist Google view that you need to evaluate this from the point of view of the quality of the user experience. Here is what he had to say:

Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user's perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business -- e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense -- the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn't provide value, and I would not recommend it.

The implication is clear, that linking between unrelated sites, even if you own them both, is not something that Google would recommend. Would this lower your rankings? Shashi did not comment on that issue, and nor would I expect him to. Practically speaking, I think it would be hard for Google to place a negative weight on such a factor.

However, I would still pay heed to this advice. Creating a quality user experience can only help you in the long run. It's also really useful to understand the inner motivations and thoughts that drive the Google engineering mind. A quality end user experience is king. Whether or not Google has figured out how to measure that today, directly of indirectly, is not the only issue webmasters should be thinking about. Understanding where they want to go with valuing web sites in the long term is at least as important.

Posted by on 2:41 PM | Permalink

Camoflage Your PPC Ads From Competitors

EngineReady has shared a great tip about camoflaging your ppc ads from your competitors in a recent article.

Finding out where your competitors are headquartered and using geotargeting to lower your ad positions in their area shows them a different hand than the one you are actually playing.

Thanks guys I liked that one!

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:03 PM | Permalink

Google's New Behavioral Targeting For AdWords Reviewed

UPDATE: Seems Google does not want to be associated with the term behavioral targeting. Google's VP of product management and advertising and also the one with the famous garage, Susan Wojcicki said the company will not use behavioral targeting.


Zachary Rodgers over at ClickZ has written a good overview of the recent addition of behavioral targeting by Google AdWords.

This new feature is using previous searches to fine tune what ads are presented to the searcher.

Behavioral targeting has had mixed opinions. Avinash Kaushik, who blogs on analytics at Occam's Razor, sums up the method as: "Right thing to the Right person at the Right time.."

Rodgers interviewed Nick Fox, the Google group business product manager for ads quality, and learned that Google is looking at previous search behavior of a user and combining previous action with current ads. Mixing tennis searches with vacation searches to provide tennis vacations was used as an example (though not a confirmed BT search).

Using BT in the search industry is not exactly new. John Battelle had recognized its potential when he termed the phrase "database of intentions".

Another noted web analyst, Anil Batra, called for Google to add behavioral marketing earlier this year. Seems the idea has been popular.

The issue of privacy is the major force against gathering and using behavioral marketing, though to me it is more who pays for the information. The initial people advertising in a space help the engines capture user behavior without the benefits.

It is a Catch-22 - this is something that is here and not likely to be driven back. Thus, I wish Google would get a deeper knowledge of the real way to use behavioral targeting.

Nick Fox states: "We're not doing things like trying to profile the user to find out if the user is a man or a woman or a 45-year-old or a 25-year-old," he said. "In the context of search it doesn't seem that powerful, and we haven't seen any evidence that it will be that powerful."

When I read this I got chills. In our financial space 80% of our clients are male between the ages of 30 and 50. I would love to get a larger share of those impressions and leave the rest to those who think Nick is correct.

Want to add your thoughts?

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:58 PM | Permalink

The Gphone and Mobile Local Search

The Wall Street Journal reports today that we could be getting closer to the realization of the long-rumored Google phone. This could happen in one (or both) of two ways for Google: partner or build.

Partnering has been Google's angle into mobile search and services thus far, but it has only allowed it to push through watered down versions of its products such as Gmail for mobile and Maps for mobile. Having its own device would allow it to position itself more predominantly on the home screen, and build applications that are more compelling than carriers have been willing or able to do themselves.

Even if it has its own device however, partnering would require the perennial challenge of working with carriers who are famously unwilling to cede control over every facet of their network and every device that runs on it. Talks so far have only resulted in Verizon scoffing at the search revenue share that Google is asking for in prospective mobile search advertising.

Gphone and iPhone: Catalysts for Change?

This defeatist position on the part of U.S. carriers has been the number one detriment to mobile local search innovation and application development. But the web browsing capabilities of the iPhone could finally be the avenue by which search application developers can sidestep the carrier control over the home screens of devices that run on their networks.

A phone from Google could do the same, if the company pushes its weight around enough, to appeal to carriers with an enticement of brand appeal and revenue boosting possibilities for data consumption, amidst hyper competition and falling revenues in the mobile voice arena. This is similar to how Apple got in bed with AT&T.

The iPhone will soon become compelling enough that other carriers will have to adopt (post-AT&T 2 year contract), despite worries over enabling a device that has wi-fi capability, an elegant browsing experience and other things that could allow consumers to sidestep consumption of carrier voice packets (wi-fi enabled VoIP is one concern here).

The same thing will happen with a prospective Google phone; carriers will come around out of necessity to compete. Give it time.

Go it Alone?

Google's other possible direction is to go out and buy it's own wireless spectrum - something it has indicated it would like to do at an upcoming government auction for a swath of open spectrum. This would take years to build and cost billions (I heard Google has some money though); and could land Google in a position, like the carriers, where it is forced to protect a massive investment.

On the bright side, this would essentially make Google its own carrier, with a direct channel to offer consumers all of the things that it has wanted to for years. In the meantime, partnering with carriers is still possible. Carriers will try, unsuccessfully, to block Google's overall forays into the mobile environment, but it will eventually enable it by partnering with the company out of short term competitive necessity.

Either way, we can finally expect to see meaningful innovation in the mobile local search arena. The Gphone itself is rumored to be free to consumers and completely ad supported, which could invoke a welcome sea change in the mobile telecom world.

Combine this with the iPhone's effect on stimulating mobile local search innovation and application development; and pervasive mobile local search and location based services could be here before we know it.

Posted by Mike Boland on 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hug the Reservations

If you listen to some of the Travel Search competitors, then you might come to this same conclusion too. The prime opportunities are "hugging" or driving demand for travel reservations. It's just passé to be deeply rooted in travel infrastructure, transactions and payment systems. Instead, there's more growth in travel advertising these days.

How do these search specialists approach the travel vertical? They gather comprehensive results, and often mix in a little social functionality and content for good measure. They also produce open and unconstrained results, unburdened by package offerings or other legacy services.

SideStep's priority is "to find the best deal or best reservation to meet your needs,” explains Sam Shank, VP/GM of TravelPost. That translates into expansion from search to itinerary planning, based on its TP acquisition last fall. “Getting people to contribute [reviews] is very, very hard,” says Shank, and apparently worth the effort.

Even the traditional travel agencies are grappling with new upstream offerings. Ashley Randall, Product Manager of TripAdvisor, took pains to distance her company from parent Expedia at last week's SES-Travel gathering. She was asked for advice regarding social networks and reflected on what makes her service strong – empowering her members and remembering what you're good at. My sense is that TA's all about additional traffic, too.

Perhaps the most interesting perspective came from Drew Patterson, who's VP of Marketing at Kayak. When I asked him to compare his company to SideStep, he provided a search metaphor: Kayak is streamlined search, more like Google; SideStep is about social media and community, more like Yahoo. At least their respective offerings are clearly differentiated here.

While it may be a very competitive marketplace, the players seem more genteel and respectful than I expected. They have different priorities, see a vast marketplace, and clearly understand there's no monopoly in travel search. While Kayak, SideStep, Mobissimo, Farecast and others compete directly through their travel search engines, their approaches seem pretty different – and there's some room for all of them.

So beyond the obvious consumer demand and cool search technology, what's motivating all these Travel Search entrants? It's all about the advertising, in an extremely attractive commercial environment. Check out these conversion stats, as ticked off by Patterson: 12-17% for air travel; 8-10% for car rentals; and 4-8% for hotels. So maybe hugging the reservations is more than a friendly gesture!

Posted by on 3:38 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Understanding the Definition of Link Building

In today's Link Love column, "Understanding the Definition of Link Building," Sage Lewis gives you his definition of link building, and by understanding that definition, you can create a link-building campaign that is truly effective.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: August 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 11:10 PM | Permalink

New Yahoo! comScore Study on Shopping Behavior

The Yahoo! comScore study released this week reaffirms that shoppers who pre-shop products on the Web in fact purchase more at off-line stores. The study, which was designed to identify whether of search and display advertising had an impact on in-store sales was conducted during April 2006 to January 2007. This large study involved a sample of more than 175,000 comScore panelists and five major retailers including major national department stores, a major apparel retailer and a major supplier of office products. The study used behaviorally and demographically similar panels to compare the purchasing behavior of those exposed to online advertising with the behavior of those who were not exposed.

The results showed that consumers exposed to online advertising tend to research or ‘pre-shop' products online prior to purchase. This behavior ultimately leads to increased in-store sales. The study also found that ‘pre-shoppers' spend an average of 41 percent more in-store when compared to consumers not exposed to online advertising.

To those familiar with current retail shopping behaviors or tracking the growth of online retailing will not find these findings surprising. Although online sales continue to grow, they remain just a fraction of in-store retail sales; however, exposure to online advertising has increased dramatically. Logically, exposure to this volume of advertising has to have an impact, but the impact's dimensions were not spelled out previously.

The Yahoo! and comScore study showed that:

Exposure to online advertising resulted in increased consumer engagement resulting in consumers viewing an average of six more pages during the period in which they were researching compared to those not exposed to advertising.

Incremental sales occur off-line with almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising taking place in-store:

Consumers exposed to online advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one dollar spent online.

Integrated search and display campaigns create maximum impact leading to deeper consumer engagement and increased sales.

As the use of the Web and familiarity with search advertising has grown, search and online display ads are fulfilling a demand generation function similar to what used to occur with other media. For search marketers this study presents a strong case for using search ads in combination with display campaigns. The study also strongly highlights the need for more thorough online to offline results tracking so that demand generation is accurately sourced and the lift in store sales generated by these online efforts can be quantified and their value accurately assessed.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 12:25 PM | Permalink

What Else Can You Do to Get Indexed?

SEOs pay a lot of attention to issues like duplicate content, link building, and link structure. But they might want to think more about proper Web development methodology. In today's SearchDay, "How to Get More Pages into Google's Index," Jonathan Hochman shares his recent discussion with Dan Crow, product manager for the crawl infrastructure group at Google.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:08 AM | Permalink

11 Cool Things with HBX Analytics

Visual Sciences' HBX Analytics has been around on the scene for a long time. In a discussion with Ali Behnam from Visual Sciences professional services, I got his help in scoping out 11 Cool Things You Can Do With HBX Analytics. Here is a summary of the major headlines:

  1. Active Viewing / Site Overlay
  2. Customizable Dashboards
  3. Navigate the Funnel
  4. Capture Attribute Data
  5. Filter on Conversion Types
  6. Active Segmentation
  7. Custom Metrics
  8. Campaign Attributes
  9. Report Builder
  10. Active Dashboard to Model What If Scenarios
  11. Leverage Powerful APIs

The article will give you some ideas as to how these powerful capabilities can be applied to your business.

Posted by on 10:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Taking Off at SES Travel Edition

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Taking Off at SES Travel Edition," Kevin Ryan returns from the recent SES Travel event in Seattle with carry on, sage advice.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: The Impact of Comparison Shopping Sites on E-Commerce Sales

In today's By the Numbers column, "The Impact of Comparison Shopping Sites on E-Commerce Sales," Eric Enge discusses comparison-shopping sites, and their impact on buying decisions, resulting in shorter conversion times.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 AM | Permalink

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