February 2007
Feb. 28, 2007 at 11:59pm
February 2007: Search Engine Land's Most Popular Stories
Below are Search Engine Land's 10 most popular stories from February 2007:
By Danny Sullivan 
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 7:34pm
Here's What's Different About Being Small
Last week's Small is Beautiful column asked, "What's So Different About Being Small?"
The answer? Time. Money. Knowledge.
Those are the three biggest challenges a small business must overcome to achieve search marketing success, and the three things that make small business search marketing unique. Many small businesses have one or two of those, but not the third. And some small businesses don't have any of the three, making their road to search success even harder to travel.
Here's a quick look at each challenge in more detail:
By Matt McGee Permalink 3
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 4:15pm
Keane, Head Of Advertising Sales Strategy At Google Goes To CBS Interactive
CBS Interactive has named Patrick Keane their new Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. Keane was previous Google's Head Of Advertising Sales Strategy. He worked at Google for four years, where he was "responsible for developing and managing the strategic plans and relationships critical to growing Google's advertising customer base."
At CBS Interactive, Keane will help "implement systems to market and sell its content on a growing variety of emerging media platforms and expand the Company's roster of advertisers." More details at Yahoo News, TV Week and Yahoo Finance.
By Barry Schwartz Permalink 0
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 3:31pm
SearchCap: The Day In Search, Feb. 28, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 0
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 2:06pm
Yahoo Provides NOYDIR Opt-Out Of Yahoo Directory Titles & Descriptions
Yahoo! Search Support for 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags and Weather Update from the Yahoo Search Blog covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings. It also cover how Yahoo's currently doing a reindexing change that might impact rankings. More on that below, plus tips about also blocking the Open Directory information from being used for your pages and some possible conflicts with multiple robots tags.
Sometimes pages are listed in both Yahoo's crawler-based search results and within its human-compiled directory, the Yahoo Directory. In those cases, Yahoo usually replaces the title and description of a web page in the crawler-based results with the information from the Yahoo Directory. Yahoo has operated this way for as long as I can remember -- that's over a decade :)
Now this has changed. Sometimes a site owner might not want the Yahoo Directory description to be used for their page. A case in point is Tony Knowles. The Yahoo Directory lists him this way:
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 3
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 12:54pm
40 Percent Frustrated With Video Search
I'm generally suspicious of surveys that say things you'd expect them to say by the company that commissioned them. In this case, ClipBlast -- a video search site -- sends word of a survey covering frustration with video search. Still, I'll pass along some stats and the press release, for what they're worth.
The key question was "Things Liked Least About Video On The Web," asked of 1,000 Americans this month. The findings:
- 32 percent said web video had too many commercials
- 20.7 percent said difficult to find quality video productions
- 19.3 percent said difficult to find what they're looking for
- 16 percent said too chaotic, too many videos to wade through
- 12 percent said there's too much user generated content to wade through
ClipBlast is pushing a 40 percent "frustration" figure, adding together the two stats about search frustration I noted above.
The release below plays up the need to have the right video search technology. My Video Search Challenge Isn't Speech Recognition, It's Content Owner Management article from earlier this week pokes at some of the technology assumptions, suggesting the challenge is more about making sure the right commercial content can easily be found.
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 0
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See Related Stories In: Search Engines: Video Search Engines, Stats: Search Behavior
Feb. 28, 2007 at 9:59am
Google Maps Tailgates Yahoo, Microsoft With Real-Time Traffic Info
Google Maps has caught up with Yahoo and Microsoft in adding live traffic reporting for the United States to their online mapping service.
Google Operating System spotted the change today (and Google now has the official word up here). To see the traffic yourself, just go to Google Maps and click on the new "Traffic" button that you'll see in the upper right-hand corner of the map page, right before the "Map" and "Satellite" and "Hybrid" buttons.
Pushing that button will make traffic light icons show up, like this:
By Barry Schwartz Permalink 2
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See Related Stories In: Ask: Maps, Google: Maps & Local, Microsoft: Live Search Local, Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines, Yahoo: Maps & Local
Feb. 28, 2007 at 9:58am
Google Buying TV Scatter Units
Google Lays Groundwork for TV Scatter Sales Sortie at Advertising Age reports that Google is looking to hire a head of national TV sales in New York and dive into their TV ad play with "scatter inventory," ads that aren't sold well in advance.
Google has been hiring TV engineers and sales representatives for a while now, but a relatively new job opening was created for a Head of National TV Sales. This individual will be responsible for building a "world-class national TV-advertising-sales team and lead the effort to both sell television solutions and shape a next-generation advertising platform," amongst other things.
Google's reported plan is to buy "scatters," TV ad inventory that is not sold well ahead of major purchases. The nature of how the scatter inventories are priced makes this a good type for Google to enter.
By Barry Schwartz Permalink 0
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 9:36am
The SEOs Doing It In-House
The Natural Search Blog has complied a list of prominent SEOs who work within a company, in house work, rather than working for firms that specialize in SEO.
Often SEOs who work within a company do not get as much recognition as those who work at SEO firms. In fact, a common SEO stereotype is that SEOs only work for SEO firms. The list contains well over 60 names that underscore that in-house SEO continues to be a growing space.
By Barry Schwartz Permalink 1
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 9:23am
Are You Putting Web Search Results at Risk with Paid Advertising?
If you bid on keywords for a term or phrase that you rank well for in a search engine, might your organic result be filtered in some instances, when your ad appears on the same page?
A newly granted Microsoft patent is the first I recall seeing which discusses such a possible interaction based upon the appearance of paid listings and Web search listings for the same page (URL) on a single search engine results page. The patent, Systems and methods for removing duplicate search engine results, explores filtering organic results when there's more than one URL pointing to the same page (i.e., http://www.example.com, http://www.example.com/home.html) on a search results page. It adds the possibility of removing a Web search listing from a search results page when there's also a paid listing pointing to the same page.
Keep in mind that just because there's a patent for this process doesn't mean that it is happening. I described some aspects of this process in more detail at SEO by the Sea, but I wanted to put this question out there for the Search Engine Land community. I know I've seen results pages that show an ad for a page, and a Web search result for the same page. Have you seen any instances where a Web result might have been filtered out because of an ad for the same page?
By Bill Slawski Permalink 9
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See Related Stories In: Legal: Censorship, Legal: Crawling & Indexing, Legal: Patents, Microsoft: Live Search, Search & Society: General, Search Ads: General
Feb. 28, 2007 at 8:56am
Google Stepping Up Governmental Sales
Google Searches For Government Work by the Washington Post has details on Google's current and future government sales operations. Yesterday, Google started a two-day sales event aimed at the U.S. government. The event reportedly brought in "200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members."
Rob Painter, director of the Google Earth federal effort, said "We're really in the beginning stages," of their government sales initiatives. In fact, Google began selling products directly to the government about three years ago. Their current government sales and engineering force consists of 10 people right now, but they plan on doubling that by years end. Currently, governmental agencies use an enhanced version of Google Earth. Google hopes to also sell three additional products to the government, including; "enhanced versions of Google Earth; search engines that can be used internally by agencies; and a new suite of e-mail, document and spreadsheet products."
By Barry Schwartz Permalink 0
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Feb. 28, 2007 at 7:52am
Monitoring Buries At Digg
Earlier this month, I wrote a long article looking at how some people at Digg might bury stories just because they disliked the topic rather than the story content itself. Indeed, many doing buries might not have read the article. Worse, they might use the bury reason of "spam" rather than more appropriate options. Unfortunately, there's no easy way at Digg to see who has done a bury over a long period of time. However, The Bury Brigade Exists, and Here's My Proof from Pronet Advertising describes a new technique you can try to monitor things, and I'll add some tweaks to that as well.
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 0
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See Related Stories In: Search Engines: Digg, Search Engines: Social Search Engines, Social Media Marketing
Feb. 28, 2007 at 7:09am
Is Voice And Mobile Search Company TellMe For Sale?
TechCrunch speculates that voice services and mobile local search provider TellMe is going to be sold to Microsoft. Right now this is unconfirmed rumor. But it would be a very interesting acquisition for Microsoft, and addition to their mobile local search/voice assets, if true.
I've written more about this on my blog. And here's previous coverage of TellMe at Search Engine Land.
By Greg Sterling Permalink 0
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Feb. 27, 2007 at 6:08pm
SearchCap: The Day In Search, Feb. 27, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 0
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Feb. 27, 2007 at 5:50pm
Microsoft's Ozzie Talks Of Google "Wake-Up Call," Vertical Search Hopes
Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, spoke today about trying to beat Google during a Goldman Sachs investors conference. Various reports cover his comments relating to the Big G, Google, as well as search in general. Among them:
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 0
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Feb. 27, 2007 at 4:43pm
Happy Birthday, Flickr: Web 2.0 Pioneer Turns Three
On March 3rd, Flickr turns three. Flickr is in many ways the company that helped define "Web 2.0" and was its poster child for quite some time. And Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, in March, 2005, after only a year in existence and, even then, a longish courtship was one of the best consumer moves Yahoo's made in the past couple years.
Flickr and the community mindset it brought along, not to mention tagging, have been widely integrated across numerous Yahoo properties. Here's the Business 2.0 article, "The Flickrization of Yahoo" that appeared in late 2005.
By Greg Sterling Permalink 1
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Feb. 27, 2007 at 3:47pm
Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates
A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to "squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here's a search engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I'll also cover how we've sadly lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years. But that's not all! Read now and you'll even get a free at-a-glance table explaining how dates are displayed. Read now -- web server operators are standing by!
By Danny Sullivan Permalink 3
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Feb. 27, 2007 at 10:35am
Social Media Not Converting? Put Down The Shotgun & Use A Rifle!
One
of the most frequently asked question I get about
social media marketing is "Should we try and market to all
social media sites or just focus on certain ones?"
There are a couple ways to answer that question, and it really depends on a lot of factors. In my opinion, it makes more sense to focus your efforts in a few places for a couple of different reasons. At the same time, if you have a super broad topic, it can make sense to try and cover them all.
So there isn't exactly a cookie cutter answer to the question, but there are a few reasons why I like to focus on certain sites.
By Cameron Olthuis Permalink 5
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Feb. 27, 2007 at 9:41am
Keyword Research Steps & Tool Update
Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research by Lisa Barone shares some of the basic steps to take when it comes to keyword research, which is the cornerstone of SEO. Complimentary to Lisa's article is an updated tool by SEO Book named New Keyword List Cleaner Tool.
By Barry Schwartz Permalink 0
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See Related Stories In: SEM Tools, SEO: General, SEO: Titles & Descriptions, SEO: Writing & Body Copy, Search Marketing: Search Term Research
Feb. 27, 2007 at 9:31am
Search Engines Do Not Have To Display All Ads Says Court
Eric Goldberg summarizes a court decision in Langdon v. Google (PDF) showing a court deciding how search engines do not have to display all ads. Langdon took Google to court to force Google to display ads that "attacked people." Reportedly, Langdon is a complainer or griper and he wanted to use search ads to air his complaints. The court ruled in favor of Google, "calling some of his claims "specious" and "frivolous."
