Search Month: April 2008 Search News, In Review

« April 2008: Search Engine Land's Most Popular Stories | Main | SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 6, 2008 »

May. 6, 2008 at 1:16pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Search Month: April 2008 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 April 2008, then a major story for various search topics along with other stories related to those topics since our last monthly newsletter through today.

==============================
Search Engine Land News
==============================

READER SURVEY RESULTS: Thank you everyone who took our reader survey. It helped us learn things like that 1/3 of you have been in search marketing for more than 5 years, 37% work in-house, 32% work for an agency, and other fun facts. You can see more of the results in our post about it.

SMX ADVANCED SELLING OUT! This June 3 & 4, our SMX Advanced conference returns again to Seattle. Last year's event sold out just before the event happened. This year, a month from the show, we've sold 75% of our capacity already. Don't wait -- if you want to go, book this week to both save on the registration and to ensure you can get a ticket.

If you're an experienced search marketer, SMX Advanced is the event for you. This intimate, cutting edge two-day event features sessions addressing issues that you won't find discussed anywhere else. Check out the agenda for the complete list, including Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques, Bot Herding Conversion Optimization: Winning After They Arrive, Buying Sites For SEO, and Give It Up! — the session where leading search marketing pros reveal their most closely–held secrets and techniques.

Along with two-day organic SEO and PPC tracks, we've added specialty programming to SMX Advanced. The SEM Business track has sessions that will help SEM business owners and managers be more successful. And, the Developer Day track will dive deep on SEM-friendly development techniques and tactics.

We're also very pleased that Microsoft's Kevin Johnson and Google's Matt Cutts will be featured presenters at SMX Advanced. See the links below for more information about their appearances and the show in general:

SMX LOCAL & MOBILE COMES IN JULY! Our show focused on local and mobile search, SMX Local & Mobile, comes to San Francisco this July 24 & 25. The full agenda is now up, so check out the range of sessions in these hot areas and register to attend!

MORE SMX SHOWS! Aside from the shows above, here are other SMX events on the calendar, for those doing forward planning:

SMX Madrid, May 20-21, 2008
SMX East, New York City, October 6-8, 2008
SMX London, Nov. 4 & 5, 2008

SMX & SEARCH ENGINE LAND SOCIAL OPTIONS! Remember, a good way to keep up on all of these events is by reading the SMX Blog. You can also socialize in a variety of ways:

Facebook SMX Group: Has links to all the official SMX events pages on Facebook. You can also meet others who have a general interest in SMX or have attended one of our events this way. There's also the Facebook SMX Fan Page. In addition, Search Engine Land has both a fan page and a group on Facebook.
LinkedIn: SMX - Member of LinkedIn? Join the SMX group there and connect with others who are interested in our conferences. We also have a Search Engine Land LinkedIn Group.
Yahoo Upcoming SMX Group: Network with others interested in SMX events, plus easily jump to the official events pages on Upcoming from here.

========================================
Top 10 Most Popular Stories: April 2008
========================================

1) Twitter Wrote This Column For Me - By now you have probably seen a bunch of talk about Twitter. And after all of this talk you might be still thinking: OK, so what the heck is Twitter really and why should I care? How is it going to help my business at the end of the day? Rather than writing this column myself, I decided to let Twitter (or more specifically, my extended Twitter network) write it for me. This is me on Twitter (feel free to add me). So let's get started... The best way to demonstrate the usefulness or power of something is to show real examples. I started this experiment at approximately 5:20 PM EST on Monday afternoon. Within 1 hour, I had over 80 different replies that answered all of my questions and more. Within 1 hour I had reached out to people from all over the world and they had reached back. It all started with this simple question: "How would you describe twitter in 140 characters or less?"

===================

2) Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results - One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced.

===================

3) Hitwise: Google Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo New Lows - Last week, Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo hit all-time lows.

===================

4) Why Mixx Hasn't Gotten The Following It Deserves - Yet - Mixx, a social media submission site, is a newcomer on the scene, so it understandably will take a while for it to catch up with older sites like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. That said, this article looks at the current state of Mixx and the potential future of its small but devoted community. This might come as a surprise, but Mixx serves approximately 500,000 unique visitors per month and is breaking their engagement record every month, even though the site is barely 6 months out of its private beta. One of the reasons for this is that so much of the activity takes place in the form of conversations (in the private groups as well as user-forums) that isn't reflected in the metrics.

===================

5) A Small Business Marketing Success Story: John Tuggle, Guitar Teacher - A small business can have millions of dollars in revenue and dozens of employees ... or it can be a one-man-band, turning passion into a living. This month's small business marketing success story is about the latter. Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going to play gigs and be a studio engineer.

===================

6) Google Gets Whois Answers In Search Results - Looks like Google's gained a new direct answer service, whois information for domains. Enter a query like whois searchengineland.com, and you'll be told when the domain was registered and expires, along with a link to more information from the Domain Tools site. Here's a screenshot:

===================

7) Link Development Tool Shortcuts For Firefox - A few weeks back I did a post on my blog about creating Firefox quick search bookmarks. I was surprised at how well received it was, though I think people were most pleased with the fact that I had created a download of a very small selection of the large list of SEO related Firefox quick searches that I use.

===================

8) "Previous Query" Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results - Yesterday (technically still today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how Australia is to get StreetView mapping, Google testing how well Yahoo monetizes, how Orkut might have to be replaced in the US, and other topics.

===================

9) Tools For Engaging In Social Media - We all know Social Media Marketing can be pretty time consuming. There are numerous social media communities, each requiring you to sign up, make a profile, and participate, in order to have any success with them. So it is only natural that you would like to have some helpful tools to short cut the process wherever possible. Below we will go through each of the major social communities that I use and outline some of the best tools to help you manage and maintain your accounts.

===================

10) How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly - For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It's a tough situation, but there are ways to implement Flash and still provide something for the crawlers to chew on.

============================
B2B
============================

Leveraging PR To End The B2B Content Development Struggle - One of the biggest challenges B2B clients grapple with is content creation. Developing material that is fresh, relevant, and keeps users coming back—while also being SEO-friendly—can be difficult. This is a problem. Fortunately though, there’s an easy and effective solution. And it’s closer than you might think. See also:

============================
Business & Revenues
============================

AOL Acquires Sphere & Creates Search Interface For iPhone - Sphere, software that connects contextually relevant content to your content, has been purchased by AOL. See also:

============================
Google: AdSense
============================

Google Sued For Undesired AdSense Inclusion - Google is being sued by a man represented by a law firm that has successfully sued Google several times in the past. The firm is Kabateck Brown Kellner and the man is David Almeida, a local businessman from Massachusetts who claims that Google's sign up process for AdWords wrongly conceals that advertiser text ads will run on AdSense content partner sites unless they affirmatively opt out. See also:

Google AdSense Ads May Become More Behaviorally Targeted

============================
Google: AdWords
============================

Google Showing Ranking Scores On AdWords? - This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that several webmasters began noticing three values being displayed under some AdWords ads that might reveal some details on how Google may rank AdWords ads. The scores include the "Pscore," "mCPC," and "thresh." Danny and I took guesses at what each might mean and the mCPC seems likely to be the minimum cost-per-click for the ad. Thresh might refer to a threshold score for if or where the ad displays, while the Pscore might be a Google quality score metric of some sort - we guess. See also:

============================
Google: Analytics
============================

Google Website Optimizer Steps Out Of The AdWords Box: Open To All Users & Urchin 6.0 Comes Out Of Beta - Google has announced that AdWords is no longer a requirement for Website Optimizer. In fact, you can now go to google.com/websiteoptimizer and register for free to use Website Optimizer, even if you do not have an AdWords account. Now, you can use Website Optimizer to not just A/B test your AdWords landing pages, but also test your Yahoo landing pages, your banner landing pages, and different elements throughout your web site to improve conversions and desired actions from your users.

============================
Google: Business Issues
============================

Google Beats Forecasts With 30% Increase In Profit - Google has done it again -- they announced impressive earnings, beating forecasts and showing a 30% increase in profit from the previous first quarter results. See also:

============================
Google: Employees
============================

Google Loses PR Chief Elliot Schrage To Facebook - It's going to be harder for Google to spin they haven't lost the mojo to Facebook with news of the latest exec to depart the Big G -- that being chief spinmaster Ellliot Schrage bailing from being vice president of global communications at Google to become VP of communications and public policy at Facebook. See also:

============================
Google: Maps & Local
============================

Google Adds Street Views To Step-By-Step Driving Directions - The Google LatLong Blog announced that you can now see street views turn-by-turn (when available) when you are seeking out driving directions via Google Maps. For example, when driving from the Empire State Building to Times Square, you can see that Google has street views available for every turn. A camera icon next to each step of the directions is available to click on. Clicking on the camera shows you Street View imagery for that turn. See also:

============================
Google: Mobile
============================

Google News Comes To iPhone, Plus It Goes Global With Interface - The Google News Blog announced that they have launched a special interface for the iPhone. See also:

Google Image Ads: Display Ads For Mobile

============================
Google: News
============================

Google News Makes Quotes More Discoverable - The Google News Blog announced that they will now display quotes within articles when they think your query and the content warrants it. For example, a search on Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, returns a quote at the top of the Google News search page. See also:

Related Searches Comes To Google News

============================
Google: SEO Issues
============================

Sitelinks On A Google Minus 60 Result: What Does It Mean? - Last week, I covered an interesting observation at a Google Groups thread, where some individuals noticed Google Sitelinks showing up for a site in the 60th position. At the end of the thread, I noted that Googler JohnMu told the webmaster that he may want to join the -60 penalty thread for more help. Yesterday, the Smackdown blog picked it up and called this a warning shot from Google. He used this message from JohnMu to explain that the -60 penalty is indeed a manual Google penalty. See also:

============================
Google: Searching
============================

Google Testing Showing Google Product Images In Search Results? - The image above shows how Google seems to be testing placing product images in place of the Google Product shopping bag on the web search results. See also:

============================
Google: YouTube
============================

YouTube Adds "Discovery" Stats & Updates Page Design; Barry's Search Video Podcast - YouTube has announced the addition of a new statistic that can be found in your video "YouTube Insights" section named "Discovery." Discovery is basically a report showing you how people discovered and viewed your video, a form of referral reporting. In addition, as TechCrunch reports, YouTube has redesigned their video page. See also:

============================
Google: Other
============================

Gain Access To Google's Infrastructure With Google App Engine - Last night, at Campfire One, Google launched an Amazon S3/EC2-like product named Google App Engine. For non-techies, Google App Engine will allow you to host your web sites and applications on their infrastructure. Not only that, this service will automatically grow in resources and capacity, as your application or web site requires. If you launch a web site and it spikes in traffic from being mentioned on Oprah, Google App Engine (and products like it) will automatically scale up to provide more server resources to handle that traffic and usage. See also:

============================
In House SEM
============================

Interviewing In-House SEO Candidates - With many in-house SEM teams ramping up, and in-house efforts in general growing, I thought it might be useful to scope out the basics for an SEO-centric interview. See also:

============================
Link Building
============================

Your Site's Manifest Linking Destiny - One of the challenges link builders face is pursuing links that will differentiate one site from competing sites in a way that still produces a natural ILP (inbound link profile). Backlink forensics is a method I use to see who already links to who, and part of that process, perhaps the most important part, is determining why. See also:

============================
Local Search & Maps
============================

Top Causes Of Errors In Online Mapping Systems - Two years ago, my brother was getting married, and he had asked me to help design his invitations and the maps showing how to get from the church to the restaurant where we were holding the rehearsal dinner. Despite being very careful, I ended up making an incorrect map, sending a caravan of cars containing tired, grumpy wedding participants off to the wrong place, and my brother was ready to kill me. My experience in getting an erroneous map from the web isn't all that uncommon, and most avid internet users have been tripped up at some point by errors found in online mapping systems. So, why do these mapping errors happen so frequently? See also:

============================
Local SEM
============================

Yelp For Business: New Tools Allowing Local Businesses To Speak For Themselves & More - As the phenomenon of local business ratings and reviews becomes more "institutionalized" and important, efforts are popping up to help businesses cope and/or take advantage of the trend. Merchant Circle is one business in the local space that has positioned itself as a platform for SMB "reputation management" as well as marketing. Local search provider Yelp has now added tools that make it easier for local businesses to communicate with reviewers and to gain perspective on activity on their profiles. See also:

Use Universal Search to Leapfrog Local Rankings

============================
Microsoft: Microhoo!
============================

Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsoft's $5 Billion Mistake? - If Microsoft's walkaway from the Yahoo deal is indeed a ploy to save $5 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have proven himself pennywise and pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to finally make Microsoft a serious rival to Google. For a bit more, he may have destroyed Microsoft's chance to get there. See also:

============================
Microsoft: Mobile
============================

New Microsoft Live Maps Roll Out With A Boatload Of Upgrades - A new version of Microsoft's Live Search Maps has rolled out (after yesterday's major traffic and routing upgrade). There's an enormous range of feature and functionality upgrades, which are explained in some detail on the Virtual Earth blog. There's also a discussion at CNET. At a crude level, what it means is that Live Maps is now more visually rich and more "social" with third-party content. See also:

============================
Microsoft: News
============================

More On Microsoft Live Search News - Earlier we reported about the new Microsoft Live Search News being launched. The Official Live Search blog has posted about the revamp. Below are are more details about the service and how it works. See also:

============================
Microsoft: Search
============================

Microsoft Live Search Adds More Images, Multimap, Find My Location, & Celebrity Rank - Live Search has informed us that they have made a few enhancements to the search engine. The enhancements include an expanded image search index, a new integrated mapping experience with Multimap, a location-based mobile search feature to "find me," and more content for the celebrities and books sections. See also:

============================
Paid Search & Contextual
============================

Secrets Of Paid Search Success From 1930s Direct Mail Wizards - If you buy search ads to drive sales, you are a direct response advertiser. Welcome, today's short column is for you. If you buy search to increase awareness of your brand, you're a brand advertiser. Sorry, but this column is for the direct response gang, us red-headed step-kids of the advertising world. Save us a canapé from the awards banquet; we'll be back at the office with our spreadsheets. Just us direct response folks? OK, here's today's suggestion: we search marketers can learn a lot from the direct mail wizards. Putting it more crudely: if Claude Hopkins were alive, his Google campaigns would kick ass. See also:

============================
Privacy
============================

Microsoft Proposes Comprehensive Framework To Protect Consumer Privacy - Microsoft has added its input to that of a host of other stakeholders in the growing debate over consumer privacy, online ad targeting, and potential US (and local) government regulation. See also:

============================
Popularity
============================

Ratings Service Faceoff: Search Share Compared, June 2007 To March 2008 - I've now compiled the latest search popularity stats from Hitwise, Compete, comScore, and Nielsen Online. That means it's time to put them all together once again, to see what a "panel" of ratings services agree on -- and don't agree on -- in terms of search engine popularity. See also:

============================
Searching
============================

WWW2008: Search Research Paper Roundup - A variety of interesting research papers on search have come out of WWW2008, the 17th International World Wide Web Conference. Some I've blogged already. Below is a rundown on those and some other papers that may be of interest. For the attention-challenged, I've also included my now patented "Twitter" summary for some of the interesting or more accessible papers, to tell you the highlights. See also:

============================
Search Marketing Industry
============================

SMX Social: Just What Did Calacanis Say About SEO & More Recaps - At our SMX Social Media Marketing conference this week, we had a great panel on the future of human powered search. Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Jimmy Wales of Wikia Search, and Steven Marder of Eurekster all took part. Jason had some remarks on SEO that set off the usual wave of upset. But as I commented to those who weren't at the panel, by the end of Q&A, Jason -- along with Jimmy Wales and Seven Marder -- were agreeing about the usefulness of SEO. It's all down to the definitions. See also:

============================
Search Marketing Tactics
============================

iProspect: Blended Search Resulting In More Clicks On News, Images, And Video - Search marketing firm iProspect has released a study (conducted by JupiterResearch) that shows users are responding to the various specialized content types within search results and are more engaged with them than they are the vertical search silos the search engine have historically offered. See also:

============================
SEO / Natural / Unpaid Search
============================

Diagnosing The SEO Health Of Your Website - Is your website sick? In many ways, SEO consultants are like doctors, only instead of analyzing your personal health symptoms, we analyze the overall health of your website. Once we diagnose what the problems are, we can provide a "cure" that will make the website perform better. In all cases, a sick website is leaving money on the table. See also:

============================
Small Business
============================

A Small Business Marketing Success Story: John Tuggle, Guitar Teacher - A small business can have millions of dollars in revenue and dozens of employees ... or it can be a one-man-band, turning passion into a living. This month's small business marketing success story is about the latter. Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. See also:

Video SEO Can Give Small Businesses An Edge

============================
Social Media
============================

Facebook Adds Lexicon And "Friend Feed" Style Outside Activity Alerts - Facebook hasn't yet added web search but it is allowing users to import content from third-party sites. Users are now permitted to import stories and content (into their mini-feeds) from a handful of sites: Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us to start with, Digg and others to come. The intention is to enable people to do more on Facebook, without having to go "outside." In addition, Facebook has launched what it calls "Lexicon," a successor to the shuttered Pulse. Lexicon is like the Yahoo Buzz Index or Google Trends/Zeitgeist in a way. See also:

============================
Trademark Issues
============================

US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don't Matter - A court has ruled that the META keywords tag is "immaterial." Goldman said this is the first time the courts ruled based on knowledge of how the META keywords impact search rank, as opposed to past cases such as National American Medical vs Axiom, where a court ruled Meta Tags Can Constitute Infringement. See also:

============================
Video Search
============================

Video SEO Can Give Small Businesses An Edge - Many of us in the online video advertising space have been encouraging small businesses to deploy video to stand out in search results and level the playing field with larger competitors. Some colleagues and I have been working with select clients to test, learn, test again, and learn again from placing video in search and other distribution points. The early learnings have been interesting and reinforced some tips outlined further below. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Business Issues
============================

Yahoo Q1: 9 Percent Growth Overall, 19 Percent In US Segment, International Down 11 Percent - Yahoo just released Q1 earnings. Here's the top-line: Revenues were $1,818 million for the first quarter of 2008, a 9 percent increase compared to $1,672 million for the same period of 2007. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Local
============================

Yahoo Search Circle Allows Users To Easily Expand & Narrow Results On Map - Yahoo just announced that it has added a nifty tool to Local (called "search circle") that allows uses to alter the geographic scope of results by expanding or narrowing a circle on the map. The circle can also be dragged to a particular area easily, allowing for more efficient neighborhood search (screenshots below and on the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog). See also:

Yahoo Adds Much More Imagery To Maps

============================
Yahoo: Paid Search
============================

What Yahoo's New Minimum Bid Means To You - Yahoo recently announced that they are moving away from a $0.10 fixed minimum CPC to a variable minimum bid. However, there are some differences in how Yahoo calculates minimum bids compared to AdWords. These differences are important to note as you switch between these PPC engines so that each account is properly optimized for each engine according to how the bids are calculated. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Paid Search, Google Ads
============================

Confirmed: Yahoo To Test Google AdSense For Search Ads - Yahoo has confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that it will be testing Google's paid search ads alongside its own for the next two weeks and involving no more than 3 percent of Yahoo's search pages in the United States. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Searching
============================

Yahoo Adds SearchScan Alerts to "Risky" Search Results - Yahoo Search has begun a partnership with McAfee, Inc. to provide SearchScan, which uses McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to flag URLs it deems "risky" in the search results. Results are flagged with the type of danger below the title. This new feature is primarily aimed at preventing spyware and other malicious software from being downloaded on searchers' computers as well as at preventing searchers from falling victim to sites that employ spammy email tactics. The Yahoo Search Blog provides more information. Below, more details on what types of pages are flagged and how site owners can dispute incorrect flagging. See also:

Flickr Launches Video; It's Not A YouTube Clone

============================
Yahoo: SEO
============================

Yahoo Updates Crawler: Introduces Yahoo Slurp 3.0 - Yahoo has announced the launch of their new crawler, Yahoo! Slurp 3.0. 3.0 is slowly being pushed out over the course of the "next several weeks," including "some infrastructure updates," Yahoo said. I suspect the recent changes we reported with the Yahoo Search Tax Day update is related to the "infrastructure updates." The new spider will contain the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives, but will be named "Slurp 3.0" as opposed to "Slurp 2.0." Yahoo notifies us to expect two changes. See also:

============================
Fun, Weird Stuff & Other Things
============================

Cinco Doh! Mayo: Ask.com Spells Cinco de Mayo Wrong - If you take a look at the Ask.com home page, you might notice a glaring typo on the Cinco de Mayo theme. Ask has spelled 'De' as "Do.' However, if you click through, Ask.com does link the result to the correct spelling. See also:

Like The Story? Vote For It On Yahoo Buzz!

Subscribe To Our Search Feed!

Share & Bookmark This Story!

By Danny Sullivan Permalink Jump To Comments See Related Stories In: Search Month

Reader Comments

Save the date for:
• SMX Local & Mobile - San Francisco, CA (July 24-25) See the agenda, and register now!
• SMX Sao Paolo - Brazil - (Aug. 7-8)
• SMX China - September 23 & 24
• SMX Stockholm - September 23 & 24
• SMX East - NYC - (Oct. 6-8) Registration is now open.
• SMX London - November 4 & 5