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March 24, 2008

March 24, 2008

Search Headlines & Links: March 24, 2008

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 5:25 PM | Permalink

Stupid SEO Spammers

Generally, I like to write about what to do in SEO. Today, I want to write about what not to do.

Lesson #1: Don’t spam people with your SEO services.
Lesson #2: Definitely don’t spam people who write for SEW and have close relations with spam blacklist owners about your SEO services.

This morning I got an email (my tenth) from a company that hadn’t read my rules: National Positions, an “SEO” firm out of California, promising me “five times the RELEVANT traffic at a substantially reduced cost.” The site, which I’ve linked to above using a 302 redirect so as not to give out any of my link juice, said they could place my “website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN” using their “proprietary techniques” and “valuable closely held trade secrets,” without using “link farms or black hat methods.” And they charge “less than half of what other companies charge!” Awesome.

So I checked out their site, and their SEO service includes: nplogo.jpgKeyword Market Intelligence (umm…keyword research), Meta-Data Optimization (sweet), Title Optimization and a Best Practices Doc. Considering most companies give away most of that info for free, their prices must be excellent. Their “proprietary trade secrets” don’t seem to include, as far as I can tell, any blackhat techniques, so there is no need to worry about National Positions being the next Traffic Power (who cold-called me back in the day), but it’s still a rip-off. They’re charging people who know nothing about search to do nothing about search for them. And they’re advertising through pure spam methods; they contacted me via an email posted on my site that I have never used to sign up for anything.

The email came from npseocompany.org, which I already submitted to URIBL and SURBL, the major spam blacklists. Check your inbox, and report the email if you get it too.

One of the latest emails claimed that “Our services and proven strategies are all ethical.” Perhaps no one bothered to tell them SPAM is unethical—and illegal. I’ve received 10 emails from them so far, without ever opting in. According to the law, any company that "harvest[s] email addresses from Web sites or Web services…for the purpose of sending email,” as National Positions did to me, is liable for a fine up to $11,000. I opted out after the first email I received, and I continue to receive emails from them—some from Gmail accounts! The law gives 10 days to honor an opt-out, and prohibits “another entity send[ing] email on your behalf to that address.” It's been more than 30 days; that’s another $11,000.

I’m going to do all I can to make sure they get hit with those penalties—and I urge you to help me out if you get spammed too. Look out SEO Spammers—you pissed off the wrong group.

Posted by EliFeldblum at 4:48 PM | Permalink

Lifetips Escalator Pitch, SES NY 2008

Byron White, the president and founder of LifeTips, helped us launch a new feature at SES NY 2008: The Escalator Pitch. The brainchild of Kevin Heisler, the Escalator Pitch is like an elevator pitch – except the escalators at the Hilton New York moved much faster than the elevators.


Lifetips Escalator Pitch, SES NY 2008

Byron White is the president and founder of LifeTips.com. He is an active speaker at various Search Marketing conferences and co-hosts the weekly LifeTips radio show on WebMasterRadio.FM every Wednesday at 5 PM EST. Byron’s entrepreneurial success has been well documented in Inc. magazine, Adweek, The Boston Globe, The Boston Business Journal, Portfolio Magazine and numerous other publications.

Find out everything you need to know about LifeTips, a content design and development company with more than 500 freelancers, in about 30 seconds.

You can find other Escalator Pitches from SES NY 2008 on the Search Engine Strategies conference and expo channel on YouTube.

Posted by GregJarboe at 3:58 PM | Permalink

Matt McGowan in Times Square, Day 1 SES NY 2008

John Connor Mulligan of SEO-PR interviewed Matt McGowan, the Global Vice President of Marketing at Incisive Media, on the first day of SES NY 2008 – which happened to fall on Saint Patrick's Day.

The interview was conducted at Times Square, where you could see banners promoting the Search Engine Strategies conference. Matt discussed attendance at the event and some of the featured sessions – especially the social search track – that were developed by Kevin Ryan (another son of Ireland) for this show.


Matt McGowan in Times Square, Day 1 SES NY 2008

Matt McGowan oversees all marketing activities for the ClickZ Network and Search Engine Watch in addition to their respective trade show series, ClickZ Specifics and Search Engine Strategies.

There are plenty more videos from SES NY and London on the SES Conference & Expo channel on YouTube.

For full coverage of last week's Search Engine Strategies conference, check out SES NY 2008: Day 1 Coverage Roundup, SES NY 2008: Day 2 Coverage Roundup, SES NY 2008: Day 3 Coverage Roundup, and SES NY 2008: Day 4 Coverage Roundup on the Search Engine Strategies Blog.

Posted by GregJarboe at 3:31 PM | Permalink

Google News Unveils Two Updates to Comments Feature

Google has just made SEO-PR (that's Public Relations, not PageRank) harder and easier at the same time! Two updates have been made to the Comments feature in Google News. Comments allows people in the news to, well, comment on stories about them or their company.

Comments have to be verified by Google, which is good since we can only imagine how this service could be abused. To make that process easier, there is now a contact form in case you find yourself in the midst of your 15 minutes of fame.

Also, there is now a link to all Google Comments in the main Google News page. Once on the page featuring all of the comments, you can search the comments as long as you put your keyword with "source:google_news." You can subscribe to an RSS feed of those specific results or create a Google Alert for them.

An SEO's job is never done, and these updates to Google News Comments has made sure of it! Universal search made online reputation management an ever more important task. At least with these updates, Google News offers users an outlet for telling the flip side of the story.

Posted by Nathania at 12:24 PM | Permalink

New Google Mobile Search Feature Gives Your Thumbs a Rest

Do you dream of searching Google for local information with your mobile phone without having to use your thumbs? Soon, you may be in luck. It seems that Google is working on such a feature.

A new and curious listing in their robots.txt file prevents spiders from indexing http://www.google.com/m/lcb. Go to the site, type in a city, and you can see the top searches for that town as well as browse categories. The page won't be winning any juried art competitions anytime soon. And the results would be far more relevant if Google took into consideration your exact location, which always brings cheers and jeers depending on how freaked out you get about privacy issues.

So far, this is a bit of a slow way of doing local search, as it requires so much effort on the part of the searcher. But hey, you could just call 1-800-GOOG-411 instead.

Posted by Nathania at 11:29 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Cloud Computing with 4th Largest Supercomputer in World

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Yahoo announced an agreement today with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to support cloud computing research. At Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York last week, Yahoo Chief Scientist Andrew Tomkins previewed the future of search in his keynote address. (For a video of his keynote click here soon.) No doubt cloud computing will one day make search engine innovations possible that we can only dream of today.

CRL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd., a Mumbai, India-based industrial conglomerate, will lend one of the world's top five supercomputers to Yahoo for joint research. The CRL supercomptuter has "substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available," according to Yahoo.

The first Data-Intensive Computing Symposium held at Yahoo's campus this week will bring together leading industry and academic experts from all aspects of data-intensive distributed computing.

The symposium is part of a larger effort to explore opportunities for research and application of large-scale computing to benefit applications ranging from machine translation to genomic medicine.

So who in the world are CRL and Tata?

Tata Sons Limited--founded in 1868--could be the poster boy for The Big Switch, a brilliant book by SES keynote speaker, thought leader, and Mike Arrington BFF Nick Carr on the transformation of corporations and computing leading up to the Age of the Internet and beyond Google.


Tata Sons Limited has reinvented itself to keep pace with global changes in technology. The privately-held company, founded in 1868, provides voice and data-based business outsourcing services through one of its subsidiaries.

Tata, through its subsidiaries, provides solutions for projects in water supply and wastewater, industry, power, and chemicals; identification of land, project conceptualization, designing, construction, marketing, and management of residential and commercial complexes; financial consultancy services, financial planning, investment banking and strategy consulting services.

The company also engages in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas.

Tata companies include Tata Chemicals, Indian Hotels, Tata Motors, Tata Steel, Tata Tea, TACO, Tata Technologies, Titan Industries, and Tata Communications.

That's a lot of computing power to put in the clouds. The Yahoo/CRL effort promises to leverage CRL's expertise in high performance computing and Yahoo's technical leadership in the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project. The benefit: enables scientists to perform data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer.

The first ever Hadoop Summit (sponsored by Yahoo! and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), funded by the National Science Foundation), brings together Hadoop developer and user communities to discuss current projects and future directions of the cloud computing environment.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:15 AM | Permalink

Is Twitter the New Google Alternative?

When searchers can't find something on Google, they might turn to another search engine like Yahoo, Windows Live or Ask. Or they might turn to one of the growing answers sites.

But lately, more and more people are turning to Twitter.

Yes, Twitter.

Brian Clark, author of the popular Copyblogger.com, turned to Twitter when searching for software recently. "I'd been looking for a photo editor, and Google wasn't really giving me what I need. [I'm] not sure any other search engine would have either."

Clark was looking for was direction on which product to choose. "What I needed was a personal recommendation, either from someone I knew and trusted, or by consensus from multiple people."

He's not alone. Lisa Creech Bledsoe, director at Calvert Creative, a social media consulting firm, has been using Twitter for both business and personal use. She's finding that Twitter offers her something that the search engines can't: human interaction.

"Because I deliberately cultivated a Twitter community of my industry peers, I knew they could give me the answer quickly. I can also 'refine' my 'search' on Twitter because I'm talking to actual people, as opposed to posing questions to an algorithm," said Bledsoe

Human feedback is what Wendy Piersall needed recently when launching the process of rebranding her site, eMoms at Home. Her reader base had expanded beyond moms, and she wanted her site to reflect that.

"I just needed real input from real people, which obviously Google can't provide like that," said Piersall. "It was more important to determine what our readers thought of this word -- that's when I turned to Twitter."

Twitter has certainly not replaced Google. Instead, Piersall finds that the two complement each other. When Piersall was looking for a new word that reaches her audience, she needed to research what was already out there. "I certainly first Googled it to determine how [a] word is already being used by other companies/sites."

Lisa Creech Bledsoe shares that sentiment. "Searching for the right information isn't necessarily an 'either/or' situation (either I use either Google or Twitter), it's sometimes a 'both/and.'"

But where are Yahoo, MSN, AOL or Ask in this discussion? A recent comScore report showed that Google has increased its dominance over the search landscape. And that is reflected in Bledsoe's search behavior. "I use Twitter for search and for business reasons all the time now, and I go to all four major search engines when I'm doing research for my clients, but interestingly, I rarely use Yahoo, MSN, or Ask.com for personal use."

Some of the major search engines are expected to begin adding more social media elements to their sites. Until then, Twitter and other social sites, may well be on their way to being the Google alternative.

Posted by Nathania at 8:38 AM | Permalink

Google's Demo Targeting: No Panacea

Last week, Google announced its full demo targeting offering. They also provided a limited list of sites where you can buy ads today based on demographics, including notables like MySpace, YouTube, Fotolog and others. On the surface, it’s worth a try by advertisers who want to reach or exclude, say, 18-24 year-olds.

It’s not a targeting panacea. First, demographics are error prone, and only as reliable as what people submitted when they signed up for services. Second, we know that age is a common factor but not the only one. The targets are expressing many interests and behaviors, yet Google can’t easily leverage them on social or multimedia sites.

Where does this leave contextual ads? Since Google targets contextual ads based on page content and semantics, this is a difficult problem to solve with sparse text. Demographics represent a refinement, given these challenges. Google will need to keep developing other approaches or workarounds for social or multimedia pages, to improve monetization.

Anyway, let's keep an open mind about demographic targeting. Targeted buys represent a balancing act, between cost/acquisition and overall acquisition volume. Advertisers will be able to refine their buys on these social sites now -- and then judge results for themselves.

Posted by debbyr at 3:46 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Non-Text Contextual Ads: Quality Score and Bidding Strategy

Running banner ad campaigns on Google's content networks requires different thinking than text ad campaigns -- thinking that's surprisingly counter-intuitive. There's no way for a content-matching algorithm to judge the relevancy of an ad group to a landing page, when there's no text in the ad copy. In today's Content Advertising column, "Non-Text Contextual Ads: Quality Score and Bidding Strategy," David Szetela outlines a bidding strategy for "buying CTR" as a way to possibly influence minimum bid price and ad rank for non-text ad groups.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

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