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October 2007

October 31, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: October 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 at 5:59 PM | Permalink

AviationWeek Launches Vertical Search Engine

If you are looking for anything to do with global aviation, aerospace, and defense industries then AviationWeek.com has just launched a search engine for you.

Bill Hartzer, writing for SearchNewz, discovered the launch information. So now I know where to go if I get work in that area.

The growth of vertical search engines has been extensive this year, but one has to ask wouldn't Google have the information regardless of the fact that they do not niche. When you have a good chunk of the web in your database it comes down to how well you can filter for the niched search queries.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 3:16 PM | Permalink

Relevance is Relative

Google is perceived by many as being "the best" search engine, returning the most relevant results. But is it really the best search engine for all applications? While some in the general public may think so, most search marketers know that relevance is relative. In today's SearchDay, "Search Quality Depends on Intention," Leapfrog Online's Steve Haar takes a look at results for some random queries across the top engines to see if one clear winner shines through.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:13 PM | Permalink

Google Adds Site Location To Webmaster Tools

Google has finally added the ability to tell them where your site is located. This much discussed topic involving domain extensions, location of hosting and other factors can finally be specified.

Vanessa Fox spotted it and posted a pic of the interface change here.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 1:38 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Quietly Making Algorithms Changes

Yahoo announced they have been making changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the past few days. Guess we were all too busy discussing the impact of recent Google changes and buying and selling links etc.

If I am reading their blog numbering system - it was their 500th post. Way to go Yahoo!

What I liked about this announcement is they called for input - the post has link to a form to submit problems or feedback - guess Google does it by reading all the blog and forum noise.

Yahoo wins this round - they avoided the "slap" effect Google's changes have caused, while still changing their algorithms.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 1:22 PM | Permalink

Do Not Track List? AOL Letting Users Opt Out of Tracking

The New York Times is reporting that AOL will allow their users to opt out of tracking. This stops the behavioral information collected about visitors activities which is used to determine which ads will be presented.

AOL had a problem with their sharing of this information a couple of years ago when their aggregated information was used to find a specific user by her online activities.

Mention of a "Do Not Track" list similar to the telemarketing "Do Not Call" list could create some interesting developments as people interpret what the do not track is supposed to mean.

If ad tracking cookies become part of this then web analytics and ROI measurements will be difficult to do.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 12:14 PM | Permalink

Google to Launch OpenSocial APIs

Shortly after losing out to Microsoft in its efforts to woo social network du jour Facebook, Google has unveiled OpenSocial, a set of common APIs to be backed by Google and an alliance of social sites including LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The strategy is meant to attract developers to an open platform, as Facebook started doing earlier this year. Google is touting the open nature of its platform, and the participation of multiple sites.

"OpenSocial will bring more powerful and pervasive social capabilities to the web because developers will be able to develop and distribute their applications more easily. Users will be able to enjoy new social features faster and in more of the websites, web applications, and social networks they use," a Google spokesperson said.

Google will create a "developer sandbox" on its Orkut network where developers can test the APIs, and will offer resources on OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Marc Andreessen, whose social media site Ning is participating, has posted some technical details on OpenSocial at his pmarca blog.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:55 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Life after SERP: A/B Split and Multivariate Testing

When searchers find your site, what will they see? If you're using A/B split tests and multivariate testing, they'll see customized results on the fly. In today's By the Numbers column, "Life after SERP: A/B Split and Multivariate Testing," Eric Enge outlines one of the best ways to improve results for your Web site. Sometimes the things that matter to users and increases conversions will surprise you.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Achieving Brand and Affiliate Harmony in Search

Forget brand vs. brand brawls in the search engines. The new UFC: Affiliate vs. brand. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Achieving Brand and Affiliate Harmony in Search," Kevin Ryan recaps last week's SES @ A4U event in London, and tells you when you have crossed the line between affiliate or brand advocate and brand adversary.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 30, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: October 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 at 4:38 PM | Permalink

Do I Hear Butterfly Wings Flapping or Sense a Google Algorithm Update?

The organic search marketer works in an environment where the rules can change at almost any time. Since change can come at any moment, search marketers must constantly be alert and listening for that first flap of a butterfly’s wing that will cause the next hurricane. We are always looking for signals of impending changes (or doom, depending on your view), constantly watching for search engine weather reports or blog posts that signal change. Our methods are almost as arcane as those who used to forecast economic change based on Alan Greenspan’s briefcase.

Then, changes happen like the recent PageRank update, and the industry watchers gather to inspect the auguries. Well, Google has confirmed one thing -- we can expect the spankings to continue. But, how how many will get slapped, how often and how hard? Will it be, just slaps on wrists for those who have been buying and selling non-Google links (unfortunately, no one will ever convince me that contextual ads are not paid links) or will the changes be broader and far-reaching.

Last week on a weekly podcast The Weekly Insight, I stated my belief that this change is but a signal of broader changes to come. Like many SEOs, including Mike Grehan, I do not put a lot of emphasis on PageRank as reported by little green bars. I do believe though that the changes being reported are a signal that more is yet to come, and I don’t just mean selective spankings or tweakings of green bars. So much for my hyper-acute listening for the flap of butterfly wings.

Posted by amandawatlington at 3:57 PM | Permalink

Reservation Road: A Study in SEO-based Movie Promotion

As some SEW readers know, some of our experts and bloggers have taken up the challenge to implement a best practices marketing campaign for Reservation Road, a movie released October 19. Carrie Hill and Debby Richman decided to push all the search optimization buttons possible – even with a limited time frame and zero dollars. In today's SearchDay, "Reservation Road: Getting Search-Worthy in Three Days or Less," they share their results.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 3:39 PM | Permalink

Microsoft "Gatineau" Analytics in Beta

Microsoft has begun a beta test of its free Web analytics service, code-named "Project Gatineau." Invitations have gone out to some U.S. advertisers, and other U.S. advertisers can request an invitation, though the wait is long, according to Ian Thomas, project planner on Gatineau.

"If you've requested a beta invite, you'll be on the list and will receive one in due course - but remember, some people have been in the line since January, so please be patient as we ramp up users slowly; there's no need to remind us that you're waiting," Thomas writes on his blog, Lies, Damned Lies....

Thomas provides some details on initial features and reports included in Gatineau. They include demographic segmentation, custom taxonomies, funnel reports, outbound link tracking, inbound referrals, ROI reports, goal analysis, and client system reports.

Gatineau has been in alpha stage for about a year. It's based on technology developed by Canadian Web analytics provider DeepMetrix, which Microsoft acquired in May 2006.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:36 AM | Permalink

Search Engines and User Query Intent

In my recent Podcast with Bill Slawski we focused on discussing search engine ranking factors. Bill is known throughout the industry for the great work he does examining and writing about search engine patents, which he does on the SEO by the Sea blog.

One of the interesting areas we discussed was ways that search engines can determine user intent. One of the simplest of these is be looking at the search query itself. For example "buy digital camera" is a very different query from "digital camera reviews". This is the easy stuff.

The search engines can also look at query streams. For example, if the first query was for "seattle hotels", and next query is for "seafood restaurants", the chances are greater that the user is looking for seafood restaurants in and around Seattle.

Next, you can start determining a person's location dynamically. For example, if the IP address from which they are doing the query is in Boston, and they search on seafood restaurants, they may be looking for seafood restaurants in and around Boston. If the user is doing a search from a mobile device, then cell tower triangulation can be used to determine the user's location.

Of course, this can be made even more complex. For example, the user's IP address could be in Boston, and search on "seattle hotels", and then search on "seafood restaurants". So do they want a seafood restuarant in Boston or Seattle? Perhaps the best thing to do here is to show some preference to results from both cities.

There is much, much more that the search engines can do. They can look at preferences that you have specified in other products, such as language. They can see what query patterns other users followed who used similar patterns to the one the user is currently following, and try to anticipate the next query and start presenting some of those results earlier in the process.

For example, if most users who enter "digital cameras", then "sony digital cameras", and then pick a particular model number, the search engine knows that this is an indicator that they should consider highlight pages with information on that model number of camera in response to the "sony digital cameras" query. Ultimately, as more and more signals emerge, the search engines will get better and better at this.

Posted by Eric Enge at 10:54 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: eHobbies and Action Jackson: SEO Quarterly Site Review

Site reviews flesh out advice, best practices, and tips and tricks. In today's au Natural column, "eHobbies and Action Jackson: SEO Quarterly Site Review," Mark Jackson shows readers SEO in action.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: SME Brand Strategy: SEM Tactics, Tips, and Tricks, Part 2

Is building a small business brand online impossible? Not when all forms of online media are converging under search. In today's Little Biz column, "SME Brand Strategy: SEM Tactics, Tips, and Tricks, Part 2," Carrie Hill tells you what to do next once you have a memorable brand. How do you get people to notice it?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 29, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: October 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 at 6:26 PM | Permalink

Microsoft adCenter Adds Immediate Editorial Updates, Daily Spend Limits

Microsoft was busy over the weekend upgrading the features at adCenter. The editorial changes you make to ads will now go live immediately similar to Google and Yahoo, according to their blog.

You will also be able to establish daily spend limits for your campaigns - which will help tighten spends.

The Big Three seem to be getting closer and closer to being mirrors - guess that will be easier on us when Google buys Microsoft and Yahoo....

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 2:50 PM | Permalink

Old Time Spam Tactics Still Work (Sometimes)

I still see old fashioned tricks working from time to time. For example, doorway pages, or spammy hidden text. Granted that the sites I see this working for tend to be smaller sites that are competing for terms that are at best moderately competitive. I have seen it enough times that I finally sat down to think about why this might be.

My best guess is that it relates to the demands that it would place on the search engine infrastructure to try and detect even the obvious tricks on all web sites. This might mean that we are really looking at is a post-processing function of some sort that is run on selected sites or selected portions of the index. This function may even be largely driven by the spam reports that the search engines receive.

So whether or not a trick will get discovered becomes a hit or miss proposition. This fact leads to a continued use of these practices, even though they are clearly not for users, and in some cases reduce site usability. I was contacted just today by someone who found a site they were working with was using doorway pages (sorry, no link will be provided because I am not outing anyone), and it appears to be working for them.

Unfortunately for the site owner, this is likely not a situation that will continue forever. Someone who competes with them will report them once they discover it. At that time, they may pay a heavy price for their short term gains. It's just another example of how far the search industry has to go.

Posted by Eric Enge at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Fox, NBC and Others Testing Online TV With Hulu.com

Hulu is ready to start its test as an online television station - well really it is launching for limited access video feeds from its partners Fox and NBC and others and providing video content for Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Yahoo and Comcast, according to a New York Times report.

Competition for YouTube offers Google's competitors a way to garner more traffic and possibly improve their search share, while also providing income from ads presented with the online video feeds.

The development of online television and/or the melding of the two mediums is close. How its presence will change things has yet to be determined - though Google is not letting any of these potential giant killers to get away.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 11:39 AM | Permalink

Matt Cutts Confirms Google-Slap

With all the guessing and theorizing about Google's recent PageRank update, there's now at least confirmation that the update happened, and why.

According to Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal, one of the affected sites, he received confirmation from Matt Cutts that the move was definitely targeting paid link sellers:

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

According to Andy Beard (whose site was also affected), another PageRank update is in progress.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:25 AM | Permalink

Content advertising: Search Engine content networks

One of the biggest challenges facing SEMs: making smart decisions about search engine content networks. It's often a problem they can't easily solve. Some would like to understand their choices better. Others would like to know where the industry's headed .

Marketing Sherpa thinks it's a problem too. They went looking for answers before I did. That's why we announced how we'll help marketers at the MarketingSherpa B2B conference today in San Francisco.

When a question was asked in LinkedIn who the best business bloggers are, we let marketers know there's help on the way from an exec who's educated other marketers (in-house and agency). For free. As part of the SEM/SEO community.

If you manage complex SEM campaigns -- or if you're a website publisher -- or you're hiring SEM staff, I'm sure you're looking for answers, too.

When The Wall Street Journal cited the business blog published by Clix Marketing CEO David Szetela last week, there was no question in my mind. He's the business blogger who deserves a column. A guy who already helps marketers do their jobs better.

Let him know how he can help you when Content Advertising debuts next week.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 7:19 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Search and Brand Authenticity

CMO life expectancy shrinks. Search for brand authenticity grows. In today's Search Ads column, "Search and Brand Authenticity," Matt Spiegel tries to get to the bottom of this paradox. With the need to market an authentic brand, it's time for marketing to reclaim some of its glory.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 28, 2007

Physical Addresses To Aid Online Targeting?

As online marketers, we have the luxury of reaching our targets based on what they search, browse or click on. That tells us a lot about expressed interests. By contrast, physical addresses provide information about the probability of interests.

Recently, Acxiom announced new services (WSJ article, paid access) which actively connect addresses to online ads. When their customers collect addresses online, Acxiom maps them to lifestyle codes and enables ad targeting using these codes.

Where you live speaks volumes, especially to off-line marketers without other insights. You and your neighbors share demographics, media interests and consumption patterns. For example, affluent Texan neighbors may buy parkas for their ski vacations while most citizens never think about them. (Check out your own zip code at Claritas.)

Admittedly these lifestyle code refinements can help *a little* online, but privacy risks may quickly erase the benefits. Any kind of secondary use of addresses is likely to raise concerns from end-users and privacy advocates. I believe this is a case of "we can connect the dots" but at what cost?

October 31st Update:

Regarding privacy, it’s my contention that most consumers don’t really pay much attention to how their cookies are used. Still we should expect people to step forward and identify risks, which happens whenever new marketing data's introduced. In a world where even search engines age out cookies, we are simply in a heightened state of alert.

Today, Acxiom reached us about how they protect the privacy of consumers and their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). These details are worth passing along:

* When a consumer registers on a partner site, Acxiom uses his/her address to assign a specific segmentation cluster code.
* This code contains no PII, and consumers are notified that a third-party cookie will be set.
* The cookie that is set is completely anonymous and contains the segmentation cluster code.
* There is no way for either Acxiom or advertisers to access consumers' PII through the cookies.

Also, Acxiom pointed out that they don’t redistribute addresses in any way. My “secondary use of addresses” was misleading, as I meant the segmentation cluster codes – not additional use of household information. I hope this clarifies for SEW readers.

Of course, I look forward to seeing how Acxiom and others will aid online targeting, as the posting title suggests!

Posted by debbyr at 2:09 PM | Permalink

October 26, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: October 26, 2007

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

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:47 PM | Permalink

The Impact of the Omniture - Visual Sciences Merger

Omniture, Inc. (Nasdaq: OMTR) announced yesterday that they are acquiring Visual Sciences (Nasdaq: VSCN) for a total of $394 million. Visual Sciences consists of two recently merged entities, the original Visual Sciences, and WebSideStory, the company that produced the HBX family of analytics tools.

This move follows closely on the heels of Omniture's acquisition of Offermatica, a leading web optimization company. Clearly, Omniture is moving to consolidate their position as the leading brand in this space. Visual Sciences was one of it's larger competitors. Their is a distinct synergy in the nature of the customer base, as both companies focus on large enterprise customers and high value optimization.

It will be intriguing to see how they go about integrating the product lines and the product development teams. There are many products that overlap in functionality and structure. This will be one of the more challenging parts of the acquisition for them.

Overall, I would expect this type of activity to continue, and not just from Omniture. There are too many players in the space. I will be intrigued to see who steps up in the SMB analytics space. There is plenty of room for consolidation at that level too, and companies like Omnniture and Visual Sciences are not really designed to optimally serve that market.

For search marketers, the consolidation is a good thing. We need to have a few financially stable companies to choose from, not 20. For SEO firms that server multiple clients, having to deal with a smaller set of different analytics tools will make life easier.

Posted by Eric Enge at 9:50 AM | Permalink

Strike Outs or Home Runs?

In honor of the current World Series, we looked at search capabilities delivered by the most popular sports web sites. Nearly all these sites featured stories about the latest games, so there was sufficient content to discover.

After two games, we would expect to see consistently strong search results. After all, the Series is definitely newsworthy and interest levels are high among sports fanatics and more fair weather fans. The sites would need to meet their needs.

The results were surprisingly inconsistent, based on studying outputs from searching “Red Sox” (our favorite!) and the more generic “Baseball” on these sites. Here's how they performed:

* When searching for the Red Sox, who reported on the first or second game in their initial results? Home Runs for ESPN, Yahoo Sports; Base Hits for Fox Sports, CBS Sports, AOL Sports, Sports Illustrated; and Strike Out for MLB.

* When looking up Baseball, which sites produced information on this current Series? Home Run for Fox Sports; Base Hit for Sports Illustrated; and Strike Outs for Yahoo Sports, ESPN, CBS Sports, MLB, AOL Sports.

Below are additional Search Notes, for these popular sports web sites.

Search Notes:

Yahoo Sports - Somewhat larger than normal search box was located on upper right side, with both site and web options. When searching for Red Sox on the site, the first result was the relevant MLB official team link followed by decent results from AP and Reuters. Also this page displayed image results of Series players at Fenway. After entering Baseball as a search term, however, we saw that Yahoo returned one relevant result mixed with mostly irrelevant results.

ESPN - Search box was located on the upper right, and offered a site search with options for photo, video, audio, local and TV searches. Putting in the term Red Sox led to a perfect response! It first showed a recent scoreboard for the team, with more stats. Then it linked to an ESPN keyword (their term) and very specific Series coverage. The remaining results came from AP and ESPN news. When searching for Baseball, though, we didn’t see any relevant results appear for the Series. From there, we could select Major League baseball - but even those results didn't cover the Series.

Fox Sports on MSN - Search box was located on upper right, with both a site and web search. On the site, the Red Sox search brought up a key link to the team including video from the games (since Fox carried them on TV). Yet the rest of these results missed the Series and touched on general team stories, written by Fox columnists or AP. When searching Baseball, the site redirected to its MLB page rather than search results - a good move because it featured the Series and latest game news.

CBS Sports - Small search box (powered by Google) was located at the top right, with both site and web search. The term Red Sox offered up a perfect first result, which linked to a team page with appropriate AP news links and stats. However, the remaining links were quite outdated, with earlier news, message boards and community pages. The term Baseball brought up irrelevant results about fantasy baseball leagues and updates, and no Series links at all.

NFL Internet - Site stays unranked since it’s about football. The search was located on upper right, and defaulted to article results as reported by the NFL or AP. When you searched for a team, there was a nice set of team links which appeared first. There were also tabbed options to search for video and images. All results were sortable by relevance and date (also author for articles).

MLB - Ahh, back on terra firma in baseball again. That being said, the search box was quite small, almost hard to find, and powered by Sun Microsystems. The Red Sox search results were irrelevant, at the MLB site! Results were grouped by news from this year and earlier years, team news, ballpark news and shopping. Most were contributed by MLB.com writers, rather than news feeds. The Baseball search also brought forth many non-newsworthy results, from team press releases as well as content from MLB.com writers.

eBay Sports - Site stays unranked since it’s related to sports memorabilia. eBay prominently featured its search box in the upper-center of pages. Like all things eBay, you looked at memorabilia for sale and could refine by categories as well as sort by price, timing, etc. (Of course, all kinds of appropriate Red Sox and Baseball items were for sale.)

AOL Sports - Nice big search box was displayed at the top and centered, with web search as an option along with site search for images, video, news, local and more. When searching for sports, the results come from news sources. The Red Sox search produced just a few AP headlines about the second Series game. The Baseball search turned up irrelevant results, even with relevance and recency sort options. All results came from AP feed, and we're still wondering why these results were poor.

SI - Small search box was on homepage, then a more prominent search box on search and article pages thereafter. The Red Sox search was passable, producing relevant Series news in positions 4-6. We didn't know why the first three results had nothing to do with the Series. Most results came from AP, and some others from SI writers. The Baseball search provided better results, as the first six links were about the Series so far before trailing into irrelevant ones.

Turner Sports (NASCAR, PGA, etc) - Sites stay unranked since they're about racing and golf. The NASCAR search was located on the upper right, and produced stories written by NASCAR as well as video matches on the side. Results were sortable by date versus relevance. For the PGA, there didn't seem to be any search present on the site.

Posted by debbyr at 3:42 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Content Creation About Journey, Not Destination? - Part 2

You can waste a lot of time debating whether content is king. For the sake of argument, let's just all agree so we can focus on business decisions. In today's Vertical Challenge column, "Content Creation: About Journey, Not Destination? - Part 2," travel search expert Elisabeth Osmeloski discusses the pros and cons of hiring an in-house staff to transform your travel site.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2007

Omniture Buying Visual Sciences

The self implosion of the web analytics space continues as Omniture announced it will be buying Visual Sciences. Visual Sciences, bought by WebSideStory in 2006, managed to pull an "Alien" and take over the ship from the inside, when most of the executives left the company.

WebSideStory then changed its name to Visual Sciences. They may want to keep an eye on that over at Omniture.

The press release stated:

Omniture Inc. (Nasdaq: OMTR), a leading provider of online business optimization software, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Visual Sciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: VSCN) in a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $394 million.

The combination of Omniture and Visual Sciences creates a company with substantial scale and resources to deliver industry leading products and services that address the rapidly expanding online business optimization market. The combined company will be able to accelerate investments, meet a wider set of customer needs through a richer solution set and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets.

“With the tremendous growth opportunities we see in the online optimization market, we believe that in addition to being financially accretive to our shareholders, this is a strategic investment that will drive increased value for customers and partners,” said Josh James, CEO and co-founder of Omniture. “We are facing a very significant opportunity defined by the rapid growth of online advertising and online business in general. This acquisition enables Omniture to accelerate our investments in advanced solutions that drive customer success as well as create further opportunities to cross-sell our growing portfolio of products to a combined customer base of more than 4,000 customers.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Visual Sciences shareholders will receive $2.39 in cash per share and a fixed exchange ratio of 0.49 shares of Omniture stock for each Visual Sciences share, on a fully diluted basis. Based upon Omniture’s closing price on Wednesday, October 24, 2007, this yields a total consideration of $18.04 per share. Upon the close of the transaction, Visual Sciences stockholders will own approximately 13.7 percent of the combined company on a pro forma basis.

“Omniture is a leader in online business optimization, and absolutely the right company to leverage our technology and resources for the benefit of the industry. The combined company will provide our customers with a richer solution set, faster innovation and greater access to unique industry and business expertise,” said Jim MacIntyre, CEO of Visual Sciences. “We look forward to bringing these two great teams together.”

The acquisition, which is expected to close in early to mid 2008, is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval of stockholders of both companies and regulatory approvals. The transaction will be accounted for under purchase accounting rules.

Due to the absence at this time of estimates of the acquisition-related restructuring costs and the allocation of the purchase price between goodwill, in-process R&D, other intangibles and equity-based compensation expenses related to SFAS 123R, Omniture is currently unable to provide GAAP estimates on future earnings.

The transaction is currently expected to be accretive to earnings immediately after closing on a non-GAAP basis. Due to purchase accounting, the company’s target of accretive to earnings on a non-GAAP basis assumes no adverse impact from the loss of deferred revenue following the close.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 5:25 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: October 25, 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 at 5:21 PM | Permalink

Google Meets the Financial Press

Google held an all-day briefing for financial analysts and press yesterday at the Googleplex. If you're so inclined to listen to the five sessions yourself, you can listen to the webcast.

If you're looking for the high points, you can find some thorough coverage at Barron's blog, Tech Trader Daily:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:38 PM | Permalink

Size Matters in Social Media

While many social media marketers focus on the big social sites, there can be hidden treasure in "micro communities." In today's SearchDay, "Bigger Not Always Better in Social Media," Eric Enge discusses the benefits of these smaller, vertically focused sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:35 PM | Permalink

A look into the purpose of Google's "PageRank update"

A lot of blogs have been talking about a PageRank update in progress, but if you look under the covers, it really looks like a manually applied update to a set of sites that are being punished. While the majority of these look like they have been selling links, some of the affected sites do not appear to be selling links. You can see a listing of many sites that were affected here on SEOmoz.

There are reports from a couple of the affected sites, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable that their traffic has not been affected in any way. Bearing in mind that the PageRank display in the Google toolbar is always out of date, losses in ranking and traffic from Google rankings adjustments would normally occur before a visible toolbar update.

It may be that the purpose of these updates is to make it more difficult for link sellers and link buyers to place a value on a link purchase. The Google tool bar PageRank has been one of the most common ways of measuring a site's value in link sales situations. Perhaps the theory is that obscuring what the tool bar would normally show will affect the text link market.

If this is all that Google intends to do to these sites, I don't think it will meet their objectives. Links can get a value placed on them by a variety of other means. However, I would be very cautious about being complacent about this. Google has demonstrated in the past a willingness to send a warning shot across the bow before taking greater action. For example, many people have seen 30 day penalties (removal from the index) applied to their web site, only to bounce back.

When I discussed this with Matt Cutts, he made it clear that Google uses this approach to provide warnings to webmasters to repent their sins and repair the problems that Google detected. Perhaps this is more of the same. It may be that web sites who continue to leave their paid links up will then be subjected to a greater penalty, such as removal, or a rankings drop comparable to the PageRank drop. Only time will tell us how this will unfold.

As a final note on this update, I have looked over a large number of pages that should have some visiable PageRank when Google next does a general update. For example, this interview with Rajat Mukherjee is listed in the webmaster tools account for the Stone Temple web site as having the highest PageRank for the site for the month of August.

Yet it still shows no PageRank. I have done similar checks on dozens of other pages across various sites that should have had some PageRank changes if this was a general update. No change was visible on these pages. As a result, I believe we are looking at an update that was applied on a manual basis to a set of web sites, and most likely, this was just a warning to those sites.

Posted by Eric Enge at 10:17 AM | Permalink

Judy's Book to be Sold or Shuttered

Local search pioneer Judy's Book is folding to investor pressure and closing its doors, according to CEO Andy Sack:

After 3+ years, our management team and board of directors has decided to scale back our operations at Judy's Book and seek a strategic acquiror.
As a CEO, I know this is the right thing to do for our investors. But as an entrepreneur it's disappointing to stop chasing an idea just when it's beginning to take root in the popular consciousness.

Judy's Book launched in 2005 as a local reviews site, and transitioned in the summer of 2006 to a hub for local shopping deals and coupons.

Although full-time employees will be let go, Sack told ClickZ News that he has gotten at least six inquiries from potential buyers, so the site may not be quite dead yet. It won't be easy for the acquirer, he adds. "There's no question that doing something local on the Internet is really friggin hard," he said.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:11 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Solving the Link Building Puzzle: Do or Die, Part 2

When link building is a life-or-death choice, don't take unnecessary risks. In today's Link Love column, "Solving the Link Building Puzzle: Do or Die, Part 2," Sage Lewis helps you analyze four different options for paid links.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 24, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: October 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 at 6:11 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Invests $240 Million In Facebook

Seems Microsoft is continuing its push at Facebook. Last year, Microsoft became the banner ad supplier for Facebook in the United States. Today they purchased a 1.6 percent stake in the company for $240 million - making the whole company worth $15 billion - and announced they will now handle distributing banner advertising for Facebook outside of the United States, the New York Times reported.

If Facebook were to add a web search box into their interface the search number could well grow Microsoft's percentage of searches significantly.

UPDATE: For more on the story, see Microsoft Named Exclusive Advertising Partner for Facebook on ClickZ News, or one of the hundreds of accounts on Techmeme.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 5:21 PM | Permalink

Page Rank Drops For Popular Digg Sites

Andy Beard reports that following the recent paid link hunt, Google seems to be cleansing their database of sites popular in Digg.....

While these sites seemed to have just had a significant amount of their PR dropped, the impact on SERP positions for their keywords has to have been effected as well.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 5:01 PM | Permalink

Developing an In-House Training Plan

Most companies know they need to do search engine optimization (SEO), so they assign the task to one of their employees who they think can "get it." Unfortunately many of the employees do not how to execute properly, and end up frustrated. It is a lose-lose situation.

In today's SearchDay, "Developing a Training Plan for In-House SEO," Melanie Mitchell shares some insights into training she's learned as VP of SEO/SEM at AOL.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:00 PM | Permalink

Google Offering Online Seminars For Website Optimizer

Google announced yesterday that it will be offering online seminars about their new Website Optimizer program. The first two seminars are scheduled for next week.

The Introduction To Website Optimizer will be given Tuesday October 30 and registration can be done here.

The second on Creating and Launching Experiments will be held Thursday November 1 and can be registered for here.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 4:41 PM | Permalink

AdSense Reporting Problems

A number of forums have noted that Google's AdSense reporting is having problems. Yesterday webmasters were noticing discrepancies in basic impression numbers between AdSense and their log files.

The problems appear to be tied to the Custom Channels statistics, according to most comments.

A comment in Google Groups by a Google employee indicated it had nothing to do with the announced changes to AdSense yesterday. "Our engineers and product
team are aware of this aggregate vs. channels reporting discrepancy.
They're working as quickly as they can to fix the issue, and I'll let
you know as soon as I find out more.

FYI - This is unrelated to the announced product change from the blog
yesterday (that feature hasn't launched yet)".


Anyone seeing the same thing in their accounts can discuss it here.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 12:13 PM | Permalink

Some Loose Connections -- Dave Weinberger Featured Speaker at ClickZ Interactive Marketing Excellence Awards

This evening Dave Weinberger author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute for Internet and Society will be a featured speaker at the ClickZ Awards being held at Gotham Hall in New York City. I am seriously looking forward to this gala event and was struck by several coincidences -- loose connections so to speak.

Dave Weinberger is very generous with his time and has been a regular attendee (as regular as a very busy schedule allows) at Harvard’s Berkman Thursday Blog Group. This group, which has been meeting for several years, gathers on Thursday evenings to discuss a wide range of blogging-related topics. I try to attend regularly, for the conversation is lively and thought-provoking.

In April 2006, I issued an invitation to attend the Thursday meeting during a speech on blogging at a conference in Boston. Taking me up on the invitation was fellow SES speaker Dixon Jones of Receptional in the UK. Dave Weinberger was in attendance and prompted a very stimulating conversation when he asked why he should give search optimizers any credibility whatsoever, given the premise that the search marketer was out to subvert the publics' perception by manipulating search results. We gave him lots to consider, recapped nicely by Dixon.

Now here is the coincidence and some loose connections – Weinberger will be in New York at ClickZ, Watlington will be in NYC at ClickZ, and Dixon will be conducting a Link and Reputation Workshop for ClickZ’s sister event at SES @ a4uexpo in the UK.

Posted by amandawatlington at 11:47 AM | Permalink

Get It Right Now by Reading "Do It Wrong Quickly"

Do It Wrong Quickly
Mike Moran's Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules (ISBN-13: 9780132255967) recently published by IBM Press is a must read for search marketers wanting to play larger more challenging roles in the organizations they work with or in. This book would also make a nice holiday gift to give clients suffering from “analysis paralysis” or “acute planning disorder,” for reading it may help relieve these two common marketing maladies.

This volume goes beyond search marketing and addresses the broader realm of the changed world of online marketing. Grounded in search with lots of search examples, it provides a clear roadmap for navigating in the new marketing paradigm where marketing is a conversation with the customer, and where we as marketers must learn to listen, interpret the data and make rapid course corrections.

Now is not the time for marketers to dither around waiting to get the plan just right. Mike puts that notion to rest rapidly. Now is the time for joining the conversation and learning from the experience.

Readers familiar with Moran's previous book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site (ISBN -13: 9780131852921), published in July 2005, will find this new volume just as easy to read and comprehend. As I was told many years ago by a very wise professor, don't equate easy-to-read with lack of insight. This book has both.

Do It Wrong Quickly, just like Search Engine Marketing, Inc is packed with practical advice illustrated with numerous examples delivered with a generous dollop of humor. For example, in describing speeding up the process of getting it right through rapid testing, Mike suggests: “So how do you find your prince faster? By finding more frogs and kissing them faster and faster.” He then goes on to offer suggestions for how to find more frogs and improve, well you can guess the rest.

For those who want the details, the book is in three parts with nine discrete chapters, each with a nice summary so that if you put the book down to go back to doing it quickly, you can easily find your place and context. Here is an outline of what is between the covers.

Part 1: That Newfangled Marketing
Chapter 1: They're Doing Wonderful Things with Computers
Chapter 2: New Wine in Old Bottles
Chapter 3: Marketing Is a Conversation

Part 2: That Newfangled Direct Marketing
Chapter 4: Going Over to the Dark Side
Chapter 5: The New Customer Relations
Chapter 6: Customers Vote with Their Mice

Part 3: That Newfangled You
Chapter 7: This Doesn't Work for Me
Chapter 8: This Won't Work Where I Work
Chapter 9: This Stuff Changes Too Fast

If you want to hear Mike speak about this new book, he will be on tour doing a number of speaking engagements across the country. He has posted his schedule on booktour.com.

For most authors the completion of a single book is a personal tour de force. Completing two comprehensive books in two years is positively Herculean. Bravo!

Posted by amandawatlington at 11:15 AM | Permalink

Google, Nielsen Establish Strategic Relationship

Google and the Nielsen Company announced the establishment of a multi-year relationship starting with gathering demographic data for the Google TV Ads.

Google will combine Nielsen demographic data with the aggregated set-top box data it is already using, giving advertisers more targeting capabilities. Data derived from Nielsen's TV ratings panels will provide Google's TV Ads advertisers with the demographic composition of the audience.

Google and Nielsen also promise future plans to work together to measure online and offline media.

"As we continue to expand our TV advertising program, it is important that we provide advertisers and agencies with data that will help them reach their target demographic with the right ad," Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, said in a statement. "Working closely with Nielsen, the industry leader, improves our measurement capabilities by adding a demographic layer on top of existing set-top box data. We're pleased that Nielsen is working with us in this endeavor."

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 10:36 AM | Permalink

Large Scale Link Building

Got a site with tens of thousands of pages? Chasing a lot of long tail terms? If you do, you are probably already aware that this means you need a lot more links than a smaller site, and you need to get deep links as well. In fact, it's likely that you need tens of thousands of links. You also need to obtain some really high quality links to boot.

This means that the rules of the game are quite different for you, and the only way you are going to win is through achieving some serious visibility. You also need to plan for a much higher level of investment in your web promotion strategy than smaller sites. It also goes without saying that the great majority of those pages need to contain interesting and different unique content. Assembling this horde of great content is by itself a hard task, but not the subject of this post.

To win at this game, you need to get to a place where your visibility produces links for you. Here are a few ways that can be done:

  1. Main Stream Media: Become the darling of one or more major publications, such as Newsweek, Time Magazine, or any other of these larger magazines. Of course, focus on the major publications that are related to your space. How do you reach these people? The old fashioned way, and perhaps still the best way, is to use a PR agency to help you. Making headway with writers and editors are major publications is best achieved by leveraging trusted relationships. However, social media campaigns as outlined below, can help you get some visibility in these circles as well.

  2. Blogs: Here the goals is to reach the major influencers among the bloggers (you could say the same about main stream media above). These are people who reach a large audience of people relevant to your product or service. Developing a relationship with them is exactly like a business development process. You need to earn their trust. You can try to do this directly, or, once again, there are many PR agencies that have trusted relationships with significant portions of the blogoshpere.

  3. Social media: This has been one of the hottest areas in web marketing for a while. Sites like Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us can deliver a lot of traffic and links. But there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, or social media sites out there. Many of these are targeted sites, and finding ones relevant to your site or business would be a great thing to do.

    Getting to the home page of Digg can net you hundreds, or even thousands of links. So this can help with the volume game in a limited sort of way. It's limited because all the links go to one page, and ultimately, you want thousands of deep links to pages all over your site. So once again, it's a visibility game that you playing here. You need to reach the influencers, in main stream media, and in the blogoshpere, and a smart social media strategy can help you do that.

    One last point about social media is that you can't just write and article that is good enough to make a social media site's home page. It also has to be good enough that an influencer will be interested in linking to it. This is a somewhat higher bar. The best social media strategies depend on content that is good enough for both purposes.

  4. Facebook Applications, Widgets, and/or Gadgets: This is a relatively new hot area. A successful Facebook Ap/Widget/Gadget (referred to as a "Widget" from here on out) can achieve an awesome level of visibility. Many people are able to get their Widget installed by millions of people. That's impressive.

    What makes the best type of widget is the subject of a long post all it's own, but for purposes of obtaining links, the visibility by itself is very helpful. A really good widget design could draw content from pages all over your large site, and expose that content to a huge audience. Used this way, it can help with drawing links to the deep pages on your site.

Even while you are doing all these great things to get lots of links, you also need to focus direct attention on getting very high value links. These are the sites that are potentially treated by the search engines as authority sites, and you need links from them to win. This is also a business development type effort, where you build a relationship with a major influencer, and get them to link to you.

Ultimately, if you have unique, great content, the search engines will be a help as well. As you start getting basic rankings in search engines people will begin to find you there. Then the content can do the selling for you, and help you get great deep links too.

The key is to find a balance of the types of strategies outlined above that will net you the high volume links, the influencer links, and the authoritative links. Once you have this process humming, you should be in good shape.

Posted by Eric Enge at 10:13 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Raising Search Standards and the Compliance Bar

New IAB/DMA standards will change the way interactive agencies, SEMcos, and solo search practitioners do business. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Raising Search Standards and the Compliance Bar," Kevin Ryan explains why you need to know what a SEMco is and how your business will change.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Data Segmentation: Web Site Analytics for PPC

Web site analytics is one of the foundations of search marketing. In today's By the Numbers column, "Data Segmentation: Web Site Analytics for PPC," Eric Enge shows you how to segment data and act on it, rather than stare at charts and graphs.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 23, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: October 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 at 6:03 PM | Permalink

New CBS/Medio Mobile Search Deal: The Start of a Revolution?

CBS Mobile is teaming up with Medio Systems to add mobile search capabilities and search advertising opportunities to CBS Mobile sites. Is this "the shot heard round the world" of mobile search? In today's SearchDay, "Will the Revolution in Mobile Search be Televised?," Greg Jarboe argues that this signals the opening salvo in a revolutionary war to deliver easy-to-access mobile content to a growing mobile Internet audience. It's also the launch of an ad-supported search solution that is optimized for the mobile experience.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:22 PM | Permalink

Keyword Specific Domains Grabbing Google Real Estate

The ability for a keyword specific domain name to have Google site links at the bottom of their - what now seems default - top listing is creating an interesting real estate bonanza for the people holding such domains. Add a reduction in the cost of clicks for that term since the domain contains the keyword and that increases the Quality Score, and top position for paid search can be added to further push competitors off the page.

Aaron Wall wrote a detailed piece on this issue today with pics and everything. Makes you want to bid a little higher for those domain names. His reference to Frank Schilling's article on domain values adds even more reasons to grab up domains wherever you can.

Between the extra space for top ranking - and the traffic just the number one spot brings, the lowered QS, and the typed in traffic it is a winning combination.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 3:27 PM | Permalink

Mozilla Should Be Renamed Googzilla or GoogleFox

Mozilla released their income numbers recently and it seems 85% of their income is from the partnership with Google, according to ZDnet.

In 2006 they made $66.8 million, up from $52.9 million in 2005 - and 85% of that came from Google. "As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google," wrote Mitchell Baker in her blog following the financial release.

With expenses below $20 million, Mozilla has a lot of left over cash compliments of the search giant. They increased their assets to $74 million, about $22 million over 2005 numbers.

It is hard to see the two companies parting ways any time soon. Google gets a great deal of traffic from the arrangement.

The Mozilla Project seems to be cashing in on the Google alliance.... name change anyone?

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 1:00 PM | Permalink

AdSense To Launch Ability To Change Displayed Ads From Interface

Today's Inside AdSense blog announces the ability to make changes from the interface that will impact ads already coded on your pages. No more make the changes at the interface and then change the code on the pages.

While some elements can be done if you know the code without using the AdSense interface, you still need to make the on page changes which can at times be more difficult.

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 12:45 PM | Permalink

Google Sheds Light on Ad Quality Score

Ever since Google implemented Quality Score as a criteria for AdWords ad placement, advertisers have been clamoring for more transparency into how Google calculates the score.

In the "good old days," an advertiser could boost an ad's ranking just by bidding more. Now, Google and other search engines incorporate a quality score, which takes into account elements like historical performance of a given keyword, relevance of keyword to ad text, landing page quality, and other factors.

While Google is not eliminating the black box that is the quality score algorithm, it is pulling back the curtain a bit with a new Keyword Analysis page in the AdWords console.

The page will offer advertisers clues about why a keyword is not triggering an ad, and rate the quality score as "Great," "OK," or "Poor." It will also dig deeper and show how the different components that factor into quality score are performing.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:18 PM | Permalink

Google Now Using Own Translation Software

Google has replaced the Systran software it had been using on its Google Translate service with its own translation software, according to Ionut Alex Chitu at Google Operating System.

Google had been using its own translation system for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian translations, but now uses it for all 25 languages it translates.

The difference between Google's system and other systems is the use of statistical learning techniques to massive amounts of text, rather than building a complex rules-based approach, according to the Google Translate FAQ.

"Google's approach works better for some languages and worse for others, but at least Google can expand to other languages without having to know them and manually create models for each one," Chitu writes.

At Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen compares Google Translation to Systran and a human translation of a German paragraph into English, and vice-versa. "I couldn’t see a clear winner yet (though I get the feeling Google’s results are slightly superior), but a lot of garbage results on both ends," he writes.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:53 AM | Permalink

Search Strategy: Best Practices

"Any search for information no matter how 'high' or 'low' the purpose--whether it is baseball statistics or philosophy--is valid because it is a search for truth."

The New York Times Guide To Reference Materials: Revised Edition
-- copyright 1971, 1985 by Mona McCormack

A lot has changed in the past 21 years since the NYT reference guide was published and last updated (1986). The above quote? Taken verbatim from:

Search Strategy: Chapter 1

What's changed the most? Search Strategy.

What hasn't changed:

All searches are a search for truth.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:20 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: SEO versus Branding: Clash of the Titanic Egos

SEOs, mee