Search Month: September 2007 Search News, In Review

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Oct. 2, 2007 at 12:31pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Search Month: September 2007 Search News, In Review

Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It's also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories from September 2007, then a major story for various search topics along with other stories related to those topics since our last monthly newsletter through today.

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Search Engine Land News
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It's official. Sphinn (we pronounce it like "spin"), our social news and discussion site for internet marketing, is now out of beta. In less than three months, we now have a thriving community of over 3,500 people collectively voting up hot stories, submitting news items and discussions for consideration and doing a huge amount of talking within the site. Check it out! Sphinn: Our Internet Marketing News Site & Discussion Forums Leave Beta also has more news about what was involved in leaving beta.

Speaking of Sphinn, comments at Search Engine Land are now being handled through the site. This replaces the old Search Engine Land commenting system that many people wanted upgraded. The New Comment System For Search Engine Land has more about the change.

Search Engine Land's first Search Marketing Expo show focused on social media marketing, SMX Social Media, comes to New York on Oct. 16 & 17. I'm super-excited about the show, especially having the chance to stretch out with many sessions exploring how social media is, as I wrote earlier this year, an important "kissing cousin" to search marketing, something that search marketers must consider these days.

The show will cover how social media sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Answers and others provide a growing and important way to reach consumers or an audience you're after. Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp will keynote the event. The posts below have more about the event:

Like our sold-out SMX Advanced show in June, SMX Social Media is a strictly limited capacity event! So check out the entire agenda here, and don't forget to register soon to secure a seat!

Doing more forward planning? Here are additional SMX shows from Search Engine Land happening this year:

SMX Stockholm - Oct 31 - Nov 1
SMX Travel - Orlando, Nov 12-13
SMX London - Nov 15-16

Looking way ahead? SMX West will be our first three day show running Feb. 26-28, 2008. It will cover a wide-range of search marketing topics for marketers of all skill levels. It will be held in Silicon Valley, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.

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Top 10 Most Popular Stories: September 2007
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1) Google Birthday Logo: Nine Years Old - The Google home page is sporting the special logo celebrating the company's ninth birthday. But wait? Didn't Google just turn 10? Google's domain name turned 10 years old on September 15, but the company itself celebrates its incorporation date in September 1998. But when is that incorporation date: Sept. 7 or Sept. 27?

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2) Larryos, Raisin Brin, Porn Flakes & Other Google Cereals - I was at Google last month and did a double-take at the wall art up near one of the mini-kitchens. It featured familiar cereal brands morphed with Google personalities like Larry Page (Larryos) and Sergey Brin (Raisin Brin). I shot a few pictures, below, plus here's some of the backstory.

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3) Google Maps Causes US Navy To Change Its Swastika Building - You have to feel a bit sorry for the US Navy. They have a building in California that looks like a swastika from the air. But who looks at buildings from the air? Until Google Maps popularized easy access to aerial views, only the occasional bored air traveler. But thanks to Google Maps, the swastika building got known, discussed, and now is being camouflaged.

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4) Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday - The AFP has clearly been waiting for September 15, so it could trot out today's "Google is 10 years old" story. But the company itself doesn't count tomorrow as its 10th birthday. In fact, knowing exactly when Google's birthday is depends on your point of view. Some milestones to consider below, which make Google as old as 12 and as young as 9. Plus, more special Google birthday logos.

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5) Google Health's Adam Bosworth Leaves Google - I got a tip that Google vice president Adam Bosworth, who headed up the Google Health project, had left Google. Now Google has provided me with the first confirmation this is so -- Bosworth is leaving the company.

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6) Google Fight: Nokia & Apple Ads Trade Blows Over iPhone Price Cut - Bought that iPhone and now upset over the $200 price drop after it's been out only 60 days? Nokia's guessing plenty are and reaching out to them on Google via search ads. But Apple's not sitting back in the face of the Nokia ad campaign. Apple has put out its own counter ads. The ad actually came from an Apple affiliate.

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7) Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines - The SEO purist may argue why anyone would ever want to use PDF content on a website for search purposes. The reality, however, is that many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. You can optimize PDFs to get high-ranking search results. Here are some tips on the right way to do it.

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8) Facebook Opens Profiles To Tap Into Google Traffic, While Google Grabs Facebook's News Feed Idea - Google is getting a bit more like Facebook by enabling a Facebook-style news feed within its Orkut social networking site, while the king of the walled gardens Facebook acknowledges in actions (rather than words) that it really can't go it alone without search engines like Google, as it prepares to let crawlers into its public user profiles. Actually, Facebook is telling its users that existing profiles already accessible to search engines will be exposed even more. More on the moves, with lots of screenshots and explanations.

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9) Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To "Legally" Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines - If there's anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it's the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It's practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I'll explain more about why you shouldn't worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it.

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10) An Untapped SEO Opportunity: Image Link Love From Wikipedia - Suppose I told you about a way to create viral links on Wikipedia without raising objections from the site's volunteers. Would I have your attention? The key is images.

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AOL
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AOL Introduces 'Platform A': Integrated Ad Targeting - AOL has moved its corporate headquarters to New York to be at the center of the U.S. ad and media universe and has introduced what it's calling "Platform A," an integrated ad buying platform and network that the company says has broader reach than any other today. Advertising.com and some of the more recent AOL acquisitions, including mobile ad network Third Screen Media and behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, are being integrated to provide an impressive array of capabilities that should rival Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. See also:

AOL Relaunches WAP Portal, Starts Broader Mobile Push

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Ask.com
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IAC Hopes More iWon Giveways Will iWin New Searchers - The iWon site has been relaunched with a new look and with the intention to give away more prizes. Barry Diller's IAC revamps iWon.com from BusinessWeek details most of the changes, which include more "games, more prizes and plans to add social networking functions." In addition, iWon will contain a search toolbar that links search traffic to Ask.com.

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Ask.com: AskCity
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Ask City Adds Embed Map Feature - First Google got embedded maps last month, and now Gary Price reports that Ask City has added an embed map feature that makes it easy to post a map or various local business directly on your web site as an image. For example, let's say I want to meet up with a bunch of my friends at a local pizza shop. I can embed a map of those local pizza shops on my blog, have my friends review them and then we can decide. See also:

Coupons Coming To AskCity

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B2B
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B2B Search Tips: Writing Killer Ads - One of the most fundamental elements of any successful B2B advertising campaign is the ad itself... The message... The copy. I've found that writing great ads really comes down to five simple principles. See also:

All I Really Need To Know About Search Marketing I Learned In Kindergarten

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Business & Revenues
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As US Economy Weakens, Ad Spend Steady Online But Drops In Traditional Media - MediaPost has two stories today that start to answer a larger question about how the Internet will fare in a weakening economy. For some time people have been speculating that if the economy hits a meaningful downturn or heads into recession, what will happen to the Internet ad spend? The question is now being answered -- so far, so good. This article discusses the financial category and that Google's share of that ad spend is holding amid the mortgage and credit crisis. See also:

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Directories
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The Great Google Directory Ban Of Sept. 2007 - Earlier this month, a discussion on our Sphinn site looked at how it seemed Google was going after directories with penalties. But was this really happening, or was it just forum noise coming out in particular from Digital Point? Today, Rand Fishkin takes a long look in the issue in What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones and decides yes, Google went after some directories. He also offers some tips on what he thinks makes a "good" directory that won't be banned. Not enough for you? Matt Cutts of Google recently offered some advice, following the concerns that have been raised. See also:

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Google: AdSense
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State of the Contextual Nation: Why New Google Won't Be Like New Coke - Google creates products that are a lot more complex than a soft drink. When all is said and done, I think the latest-generation product development protocols are going to have to lead to significant shifts in how advertisers interact with online ad platforms like AdWords. In the short term, for example, many of us have preferred “classic” Google AdWords Content Targeting to the newer Site Targeting flavor of content targeting. But that’s probably temporary. In short, sentimentality means little in the face of changing economic trends and the impatient needs of today’s sophisticated online actors. Google ain’t a soft drink. See also:

Google Formally Introduces AdSense For Mobile

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Google: AdWords
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Google: Got A "Bad" Site? Then All Your Landing Pages Might Be Poor Quality - The Inside AdWords blog has provided more detail into what makes for a low landing page quality score. Google also said they will now not pre-announce all quality score algorithm changes prior to implementation. In fact, Google details which types of sites can cause all your landing pages to be penalized. See also:

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Google: Apps
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Google Launches Presentations App & Renames "Docs & Spreadsheets" To "Google Docs" - Tonight Google launched its long-awaited presentations tool as part of the ghastly named Docs & Spreadsheets suite. But smartly the company has simultaneously changed the name of Docs & Spreadsheets simply to Google Docs. It could equally have been changed to "Google Office," however, which the presentation software now appropriately completes. See also:

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Google: Business Issues
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Senate Hearing On Google-DoubleClick & Post Office Metaphors - After all the buildup to yesterday's hearing in the US Senate on the Google-DoubleClick deal, the actual hearing itself sounded to be a bit anti-climatic. Below, a look at what was said and how it doesn't seem like it will influence the ultimate decision by the US Federal Trade Commission one way or the other. See also:

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Google: Maps & Local
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Google Adds Distance Measurement to My Maps - The Google Lat Long Blog reports that users drawing trail or hiking maps with its My Maps line tool will now get automatic distance measurements between points when they create personalized maps. This is a small but useful enhancement, one of many recent incremental improvements that Google has added to Google Maps. See also:

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Google: Mobile
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Google Buys Mobile-Social Site Zingku - Google Operating System reports (and confirms) that Google has acquired a mobile service called Zingku, which had been in private beta. Around since 2005, the service uses text messaging and picture messaging to provide a platform for (what appears to be) entertainment and events-related communication but also has commercial potential. Zingku also integrates the desktop with mobile. Below are some excerpts from copy on the company's website. See also:

Google Promoting Mobile Ads As Extension Of Desktop AdWords, Requiring Opt Out

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Google: SEO Issues
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Google's Tips On How to Write a Good Meta Description - The Google Webmaster Central Blog described what makes for a good meta description versus what makes for a bad meta description. Meta descriptions are a special tag that you place within the source code of your html page. They can be used by search engines for ranking purposes as well as for being displayed within the search result pages. See also:

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Google: Searching
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Google Trends Now Updated Hourly - The Google Blog announced today that Google Trends is now updated every hour. In the past, it was just updated monthly with the latest statistics on searches. If you want to track the latest hot trends by hour, you can subscribe to the hourly Hot Trends Atom Feed or add a Google Gadget to your iGoogle home page. See also:

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Google: Social Media
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Google To Pressure Facebook To "Free" Social Data & Planning Google Earth World? - Two things from the weekend suggest Google may be getting more serious about the social networking threat posed by Facebook. TechCrunch had news that Google is going to open up its social data information, while Google Operating System spotted a post that Google may have plans for a new social networking system based out of Google Earth. More about both, how I see it as Google taking what limited data is has as a pressure play on Facebook and some related developments, below. See also:

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Google: Video & YouTube
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Your Guide To Countries That Have Banned YouTube - With Thailand and Turkey both yet again seeking to block YouTube, we thought it would be useful to recap the growing list of countries that have objected to content on the service. We're focusing on national governments that have taken action to block content on YouTube from being accessible countrywide.

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Google: Other
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Google Unity Project To Build Submarine Cables Across Pacific Ocean - Remember that Submarine Cable Negotiator job we mentioned being available at Google last month? Turn out Google's not just negotiating for undersea cable use. It has its own "Unity" project underway to run communication cable of its own under the Pacific. Spotted via John Paczkowski, Google plans new undersea "Unity" cable across Pacific from Commsday has more about the plans. See also:

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In House
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No, Junior, You Can't Be Our SEO Team Leader (Yet) - Let's face it: sometimes politics plays a huge role in the success—or failure—of your search marketing efforts. For example, sometimes the information technology group is an obstacle and doesn't want to play nice in the sandbox. To get them on-board and ready to play with the team requires tact and professionalism not mastered by many junior level employees. Nonetheless, the junior level employee may want to become your in-house SEO leader—and will likely become an obstacle to success if they don't get their way. What do you do when you face this challenge? See also:

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Link Building
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The Day The Links Died - As hard as we work to attract, build and encourage new links to our content, many of us (like me) make silly mistakes that are often overlooked. Like many people, I usually look only at which pages from my site are sending me the most traffic, which pages are attracting new links, etc. But on a whim I decided to look at the top 100 pages for all of 2007 to date, and low and behold, look what page was sitting pretty at #93. See also:

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Local Search & Maps
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Meet The Local Search Engines - A report from today's opening panel at SMX Local & Mobile, Denver, Colorado. Huge market, huge confusion, huge challenges—that could summarize discussion on the Meet the Local Search Engines panel, consisting of some of the major players in local search—including major search engines' local search properties, an exclusively local search engine, the largest Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), and a search marketer in the local space. See also:

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Local SEM
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Local SEO For Retail Store Locators - Many companies have brick-and-mortar locations spread out across the country or around the world, and most have some type of store locator utility on their websites. In this article I'll outline a few reasons why optimized store locators are beneficial, and I'll provide a few tips on how to optimize the content for local searches and better user-experience overall. See also:

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Microsoft: adCenter
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Want That Top Ad Position On Live Search? - The adCenter blog announced that they have released a new ad ranking formula with the release of their new index and organic algorithms from last week. Microsoft has changed their formula for determining which ads are able to to achieve a top ad placement, i.e. the ad above the organic listing, or, as Microsoft calls it, the "mainline" ad. See also:

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Microsoft: Business Issues
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Microsoft Hoping aQuantive's McAndrews Can Outfox Google - With the aQuantive acquisition now done, Microsoft is moving to try and thwart Google on multiple fronts, both competitive and regulatory. On the competitive front, a number of interesting pieces appearing today in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal examine the quick ascent of Brian McAndrews, the former CEO of aQuantive, within Microsoft and his strategy "to defeat Google" for ad revenues. See also:

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Microsoft: Maps & Mobile
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Microsoft To Use Inrix Traffic Prediction Data Across Network - Microsoft, which helped develop the technology behind traffic data provider Inrix and then spun it out, has now adopted the company's services to provide traffic data and predictions across a range of Microsoft online and mobile properties including Virtual Earth and Live Local. See also:

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Microsoft: Searching
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Microsoft Introduces New Live Search Index, Adds Features In Effort To Close 'Relevancy Gap' And Improve User Experience - Microsoft is confident that the search engine it's reintroducing tonight in conjunction with its Searchification event will be a substantial improvement of the current version of Live search. An overview, focus on selected specifics, and some screenshots to illustrate the changes being introduced.

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Mobile Search
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Why I'm Bullish On Mobile Search - I am a strong believer in the future of mobile search or what I prefer to call mobile access to information. This takes into account not only what we think of search today but also audio, video, text messaging, location based info, and more. See also:

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Paid Search & Contextual
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The Anatomy Of Compelling Search Ad Copy - Ad copy is the only part of your PPC campaign that a searcher actually sees. A searcher does not see your keyword list, bids, day parting settings, or daily budget. Those precious few words that make up your ad copy are the only insight into your offer that a searcher uses to make the decision to click on your ad. Therefore, the characters that are allotted to the ad copy need to convey a message that draws attention, is simple to comprehend, and compels a searcher to click on your ad and do business with your company. See also:

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People Search
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Surveying The People Search Landscape - Can you imagine trying to sort through billions of web pages without a search engine? Inconceivable! They make it easy and fast to find information. Now how about finding one of the six billion people on the planet. Where’s the Google of people search? As it turns out, an entire industry of people search engines is ramping up. In this series, I’ll be looking at the people search engines: existing ones that are revitalizing, brand new ones that have emerged and yes, whether or not Facebook will be the one to consume them all.

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Popularity & Relevancy
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Nielsen NetRatings: August 2007 Search Share Puts Google On Top, Microsoft Holding Gains - Continuing on with this month's search popularity stats review, I'm turning now to those from Nielsen NetRatings, after having looked at Hitwise stats yesterday. Like yesterday's stats, those from NetRatings are from August 2007. They show Google on top, Yahoo fairly steady and Microsoft largely holding on to gains made in June. See also:

Hitwise: August 2007 Search Share Favors Google, Yahoo - Microsoft Drops

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Privacy
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Facebook Notification Feeds: Not So Private From Blog Search, After All - Lisa Barone posted today about being surprised to discover that some of her Facebook activities were showing up in Bloglines. How? She's friends with John Harmon, and his Facebook notifications feed was apparently submitted over there. The odd thing is, Facebook says these feeds shouldn't show up in Bloglines at all. After poking at it more, that turns out not to be the case. Below, more about what happened and how it may be impossible to fully keep a feed private, which has implications for you and your Facebook friends. See also:

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Searching
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Search In The Year 2010: Part Two - My personal dream team of search usability look at mobile, what advertising might look like on the search results page, will banner blindness rear its head on the SERP, how our interactions might change and some bold predictions for the future. See also:

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Search Marketing Industry
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New York Times' Marshall Simmonds: Poster Child Of SEO Success - Marshall Simmonds of the New York Times is, to me, the SEO of the hour right now. For an industry often mischaracterized as doing nothing but blog spamming, Marshall's work as chief search strategist to institutionalize SEO as part of the regular editorial production at the New York Times lead directly to last week's news that the paper was opening up its archives without charge, since it already gains so much free search engine traffic that leaving the archives open will mean more traffic and thus higher ad revenues. See also:

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Search Marketing Tactics
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Integrating SEO & PPC: Three Pitfalls To Avoid - Chances are, your search marketing efforts could be missing as much as 80% of your target audience. Don’t believe me? It’s true. Why? It’s fundamental. Most search marketers agree that about 70%-80% of all clicks come from the natural (organic) search results, while the other 20%-30% come from sponsored listings (PPC). Yet despite these stats, it seems that the only thing B2B marketers want to talk about lately is their PPC campaigns. See also:

Turf Wars: How Aggregator Search Results Can Affect Your Brand

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SEO / Natural / Unpaid Search
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Avoiding Clueless-Is As Clueless-Does SEO - Sometimes I think SEOs have lost the plot. Not all SEOs, mind you, but many, especially the newbies. It’s like they don’t understand the reason for doing the SEO things that they know they need to do. I think many walk around with a checklist of SEO-type duties and set off to do them, yet they have no clue as to why. See also:

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Security
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Yahoo's Right Media Serves Up Trojan Ads For Three Weeks - Yahoo feeds Trojan-laced ads to MySpace and PhotoBucket users from The Register reports that Yahoo's newly acquired Right Media served up ads with Trojan viruses for three weeks during the month of August. The flash ads reportedly contained a file that installed a Trojan back door on vulnerable Windows machines running Internet Explorer. The ads ran on MySpace, PhotoBucket, TheSun.co.uk, Bebo.com and UltimateGuitar.com. See also:

Google Presentations Security Issue Leaked Email Addresses

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Small Business
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The Power Of Branding For Small Business, Part One - More and more I'm discovering the necessity of helping our customers brand themselves in the search sphere. In the past, we often felt that some clients just didn't need to be branded in the search results. Maybe because they were smaller clients or didn't have a nationally recognized name. But then how do companies become nationally recognized names? You got it. Branding. See also:

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Social Media
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The New Digg & What It Means For SEO - Last week Chris Winfield did a great job reviewing the new Digg. Today, I want to discuss how the changes affect SEOs. We all want to get on the homepage of Digg because it can bring in thousands of links, but the recent changes made it both easier and harder to get stories promoted. Here's an overview of the changes and what they mean for SEO. See also:

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Video & Image Search
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Search People In Video From Reuters - Reuters have launched a new video/people search engine powered by Viewdle, and I've been playing around with it. While it has some drawbacks (currently it's only possible to search through 612 hours of footage held by Reuters), it has a lot of features that I like.

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Wikipedia
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Is Wikipedia's Community Editing Model About To Die? - Gary Price picked up on a major change coming to the German Wikipedia, where only "trusted editors" will be able to make instant changes to the online community-driven encyclopedia. This change is coming to the German Wikipedia later this year, and it may follow suit on the English version of Wikipedia as well as other versions of Wikipedia. See also:

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Yahoo: Business Issues
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WSJ: After Considering It, Yahoo Declines To Outsource Paid Search Business To Google - According to an article in the Wall Street Journal today, discussing the "no sacred cows" pledge by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, the company actively considered -- and decided against -- what some institutional shareholders are calling for: outsourcing its paid search advertising business to Google (or Microsoft). See also:

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Yahoo: Local
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Yahoo Local Now Features "User Denigrated Content" - After exploring Yahoo's Mapspam, I started investigating Yahoo's end user local reporting features more fully. I may have underestimated Yahoo's features to deal with spam (and to abet it). The new Yahoo Local is making a strong attempt at encouraging user input and content about local businesses with reviews, soliciting and actually reading end user suggestions for improvements and even allowing users to add business level details to specific records. See also:

Mapspam Now Appearing On Yahoo Local

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Yahoo: Paid Search
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Yahoo Launching "Blocked Domains" Feature For Advertisers - As expected, Yahoo has just informed me that they will be launching a new advertiser feature named "Blocked Domains" this month. Blocked Domains will allow Yahoo advertisers to block their ads from showing on up to 250 domains within the Yahoo Publisher Network and distribution network. See also:

Yahoo Nabs Bebo Display Ad Deal

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Yahoo: Searching
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Yahoo Upgrades Search Experience, Launches 'Search Assist' & Multimedia Content In Results - Most of the pieces have been sneaking out over the past month or so. But today Yahoo is formally announcing a range of search upgrades, more Shortcuts, integration of video and photos directly in search results and Search Assist. See also:

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Yahoo: SEO
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Yahoo Search Updating Index & Algorithm - We have been noticing reports from several sources of a Yahoo Search index and algorithm update.

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Yahoo: Other
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Flickr Testing Ad Placements? - I spotted an image that Herr Herrner from Germany uploaded, that shows Flickr is testing ad placements on their site. Here is an ad he spotted directly under the search box. I personally do not see any ads on Flickr at the moment.

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Fun, Weird Stuff & Other Things
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Your Guide To The Google Jet - It's now confirmed that NASA has granted Google's cofounders landing rights for their private jet at Moffett Field. That's a NASA-run airport practically next door to Google, now making the founders the envy of other Silicon Valley execs who could only dream of the same. With the news out, it seemed a good time to revisit what's known about that Google Jet. See also:

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