February 2007: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

Feb 28, 2007 at 11:59pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Below are Search Engine Land's 10 most popular stories from February 2007: 1) Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools - For years, Google's link: command has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google's fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings -- which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new support allowing you to view and even download thousands of links to your site. =================== 2) Squeezing The Search Loaf: Findin [...]

Filed in: Most Popular Stories

Here’s What’s Different About Being Small

Feb 28, 2007 at 7:34pm ET by Matt McGee

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: Time. As any search marketer can tell you, there are no sh [...]

Filed in: Small Is Beautiful

Keane, Head Of Advertising Sales Strategy At Google Goes To CBS Interactive

Feb 28, 2007 at 4:15pm ET by Barry Schwartz

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. [...]

Filed in: Google: Employees

SearchCap: The Day In Search, Feb. 28, 2007

Feb 28, 2007 at 3:31pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web: From Search Engine Land: 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... 40 Percent Frustrated With Video Search I'm generally suspicious of surveys that say things you' [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Yahoo Provides NOYDIR Opt-Out Of Yahoo Directory Titles & Descriptions

Feb 28, 2007 at 2:06pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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-compil [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Microsoft: Bing SEO, SEO: Blocking Spiders, SEO: Titles & Descriptions, Yahoo: SEO

40 Percent Frustrated With Video Search

Feb 28, 2007 at 12:54pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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 [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Video Search Engines, Stats: Search Behavior

Google Maps Tailgates Yahoo, Microsoft With Real-Time Traffic Info

Feb 28, 2007 at 9:59am ET by Barry Schwartz

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: Everywhere you see an icon, that [...]

Filed in: Ask: Maps, Google: Maps & Local, Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local, Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines, Yahoo: Maps & Local

Google Buying TV Scatter Units

Feb 28, 2007 at 9:58am ET by Barry Schwartz

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 plat [...]

Filed in: Google: TV

The SEOs Doing It In-House

Feb 28, 2007 at 9:36am ET by Barry Schwartz

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. [...]

Filed in: SEM Industry: In House

Are You Putting Web Search Results at Risk with Paid Advertising?

Feb 28, 2007 at 9:23am ET by Bill Slawski

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., h [...]

Filed in: Legal: Censorship, Legal: Crawling & Indexing, Legal: Patents, Microsoft: Bing, Search & Society: General, Search Ads: General

Google Stepping Up Governmental Sales

Feb 28, 2007 at 8:56am ET by Barry Schwartz

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 c [...]

Filed in: Google: Other

Monitoring Buries At Digg

Feb 28, 2007 at 7:52am ET by Danny Sullivan

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 wel [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Digg, Search Engines: Social Search Engines, Social Media Marketing

Is Voice And Mobile Search Company TellMe For Sale?

Feb 28, 2007 at 7:09am ET by Greg Sterling

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. [...]

Filed in: Microsoft: Bing Mobile, Microsoft: Business Issues, Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines

SearchCap: The Day In Search, Feb. 27, 2007

Feb 27, 2007 at 6:08pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web: From Search Engine Land: 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:... Happy Birthday, Flickr: Web 2.0 Pioneer Turns Three On March 3rd, Flickr turns three. Flickr is in many ways the company that helpe [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Microsoft’s Ozzie Talks Of Google “Wake-Up Call,” Vertical Search Hopes

Feb 27, 2007 at 5:50pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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: Vertical search may be a place to pull ahead of Google selectively, pointing to yesterday's move in getting into health search [I agree] Google's success was a "wake-up call" for Microsoft Search as a "command line" for the internet [as John Battelle has been putting it] but not the only place where people search A reprise of the [...]

Filed in: Microsoft: Business Issues, Microsoft: General

Happy Birthday, Flickr: Web 2.0 Pioneer Turns Three

Feb 27, 2007 at 4:43pm ET by Greg Sterling

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. Indeed, Flickr has had a "cultura [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Photo & Image Search, Search Features: Tagging, Stats: History, Yahoo: Flickr

Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates

Feb 27, 2007 at 3:47pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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 [...]

Filed in: Ask: SEO, Ask: Web Search, Google: SEO, Microsoft: Bing, Microsoft: Bing SEO, SEO: Blocking Spiders, SEO: General, SEO: Titles & Descriptions, Search Features: Dates, Stats: Freshness, Yahoo: SEO, Yahoo: Site Explorer

Social Media Not Converting? Put Down The Shotgun & Use A Rifle!

Feb 27, 2007 at 10:35am ET by Cameron Olthuis

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 site [...]

Filed in: Let's Get Social, Social Media Marketing

Keyword Research Steps & Tool Update

Feb 27, 2007 at 9:41am ET by Barry Schwartz

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. [...]

Filed in: SEM Tools, SEO: General, SEO: Titles & Descriptions, SEO: Writing & Body Copy, Search Marketing: Search Term Research

Search Engines Do Not Have To Display All Ads Says Court

Feb 27, 2007 at 9:31am ET by Barry Schwartz

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." Eric Goldman said this court ruling will "help search engines in future litigation," specifically with these key points: Search engines have a First Amendment right to reje [...]

Filed in: Google: AdWords, Google: Legal, Legal: Censorship, Legal: General, Microsoft: adCenter, Search Ads: General, Yahoo: Legal, Yahoo: Search Ads

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