Six or so months ago, it used be easier to get on the homepage of Digg. Lately, sites have been having problems. Most of these troubled sites are usually about online marketing or other business-related topics. It seems that users are burying these stories for no apparent reason. A buried story dies with no chance of reaching the home page and gaining a lot of traffic and attention. Based on monitoring and reading comments that users leave on Digg, here are some of the reasons these users are burying stories: Domain: Many Digg users don't like marketing or SEO sites. If you have a domain [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Search Engines: Digg | Social Media Marketing

Neil Patel created a new flash game named Search Engine Smackdown. The players consist of Larry & Sergey of Google, Jerry & David of Yahoo and Bill & Paul of Microsoft. You pick one player you would like to represent and then you can compete against the other players. You are asked a series of questions, if you get it wrong - then you get smacked. You win by getting the answers correct; you lose by getting the answers wrong. If you get three answers correct, in a row, then you use a special move to attack the opponent. Pretty cool stuff from Neil. Update: Just noticed Danny is the ref [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | SEM Industry: Community

Yahoo has been getting good press (often at Google's expense) for its wide release of oneSearch, a mix of structured and unstructured data in search results intended to deliver "answers" rather than links. Last night Yahoo made several more mobile announcements. Danny covered them here earlier today. Google, appearing to respond to oneSearch and other competitive challenges, has upgraded its WAP-based search to incorporate more data and information into results. There also appear to be some interesting personalization features. Here's the Google Blog describing the changes. You can test it ou [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Mobile

Call me Mr. Rain On The Parade, but after reading an interview in The Guardian with Google product manager of crawl services Dan Crow, I can't help but feel people are going to come away with the mistaken idea that Google will magically make their Flash content suddenly more accessible to Google's crawlers. That ain't going to happen. Interview: Google's Dan Crow is the article, and in it, we're told: If we hit a web page with a Flash movie on it, we just extract the text out of it and index that text. But a Flash movie is much richer than that. So one of the projects I'm working on is t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO: Flash

Hello! My name is Alan Rimm-Kaufman. I'm honored to be contributing a monthly column on paid search for Search Engine Land. The column will appear the third Tuesday of each month. My focus will be strategy, economics, and multi-channel. About me: I run a paid search agency based in Charlottesville, Virginia. We serve about 100 clients, mostly B2C retailers. 25 employees. We manage bids using proprietary software based on portfolio optimization and statistical clustering theory. Prior, I was Marketing VP at Crutchfield, a $250 million direct retailer of consumer electronics. I did [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: Branding

Guide On HowTo Get Your Business Listed On Major Local Search Engines, Yellow Pages Sites and Social Local Networks from LocalType.com is a very comprehensive rundown to almost 50 places where you can submit your business for local inclusion. It is broken into three categories: local search engines such as Yahoo Local, Google Maps and Ask City; Yellow Page sites such as SuperPages.com, YellowBook and InfoSpace; Local Social Networking sites such as Yelp.com, YellowBot and InsiderPages. Hat tip to Small Business SEM. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

The wisdom of orkut from the Official Google Blog covers how Google's social networking site Orkut now allows people to post polls. No big deal? Perhaps not. But it also makes me wonder if it's a first step toward trying to give Orkut an answer search roll for Google. Yahoo Answers -- where a community provides answers to each other -- continues to gain steam. Yahoo recently added social networking features to Yahoo Answers, and LinkedIn added LinkedIn Answers to its own social networking service back in January. Google had its own Google Answers service, of course. That was a fee-based [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Orkut | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Yahoo has launched a new Yahoo Mobile Publisher Services site designed to offer one-stop shopping for publishers that want to get mobile content into Yahoo in various ways. In particular, the services offered will be: Yahoo Mobile Ad Network: Will put ads out through Yahoo's mobile network. Includes display ads, sponsored links and oddly, "video or in-game placements."   Yahoo Mobile Content Engine: A special search engine designed to carry mobile-specific material, which will power the Yahoo oneSearch service.   Yahoo Mobile Media Directory: A directory of mobile conte [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: Mobile Search | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: Search Ads

Since I've been absent a while (sorry Danny, Chris, and Barry), thought I should first catch everyone up on management changes at the shopping comparison engines. Here's the rundown: Shopzilla: President John Phelps and Chief Product Officer Farhad Mohit have left the company. COO Bill Glass has taken over as president. Here's the press release. Shopping.com: CMO Mike Aufricht, VP Internet Marketing & Business Intelligence Rob Goldman, CTO and Co-Founder Amir Ashkenazi, and Vice President, Global Operations and U.S. Merchant Operations Deana Bergquist have left the company. Here's a look [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: General | Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web: From Search Engine Land: Logo Bomb: Google Maps Returns Anti-Microsoft Logo For Microsoft Listing Garett Rogers at Googling Google has reported that a search on Google Maps for microsoft has returned an anti-Microsoft image within the Microsoft listing, as shown to the left. The image was originally on a Yelp.com page and automatically inserted into the Google Maps result. It appears to now... Getting Link Love From Google Custom Search Engines I've written previously about Googl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

I've written previously about Google Custom Search Engines.  These vertical Googlettes let anyone create a search engine with results based on Google's index, with an added layer of human editorial selection. Put more simply, you create a Google CSE; you select the sites you want in it, and then you let anyone search your CSE from your site. New Google CSEs appear almost daily. You can see examples at Google here, and there's even a directory of them being maintained here. Google CSEs offer a couple link building opportunities, one of which might be described as affinity link [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Custom Search Engine | Link Building: General | Link Week | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines

Neil Patel challenged Jason Calacanis, who said last month that SEO is bull, that SEO can improve traffic to his site. Jason accepted the challenge and the early results have now been posted. Neil shows that by making "white hat" recommendation, he has increased Jason's search traffic by 21 percent. Note that Neil also said that so far, only 10 percent of his recommendations have been implemented. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEM Industry: General | SEO: General

In January, Google announced a contest in which US and Canadian students were invited to generate their college campuses in 3D, using Google Sketchup. A few individuals or teams whose works are judged to be the best will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View for a special workshop with 3D modelling experts in the company and tour of the Googleplex campus. All submissions belong to Google of course, making it yet another innovative approach to exploiting the power of user-generated content to build out features through relatively simple/cheap incentives, similar in some respects to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Maps & Local | Local Search

UK yellow pages publisher and local search purveyor, Yell.com announced that it launched PPC ads on its site as well as targeted banner inventory. Yell owns U.S. yellow pages publisher Yellow Book USA. One of the more innovative print yellow pages publishers, Yell also offers mobile, enhanced mapping, vertical guides and e-commerce. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: Outside USA

Garett Rogers at Googling Google has reported that a search on Google Maps for microsoft has returned an anti-Microsoft image within the Microsoft listing, as shown to the left. The image was originally on a Yelp.com page and automatically inserted into the Google Maps result. It appears to now have been removed, but Garett has a screen capture showing it was there just a day or so ago. So how did this happen? Barry Schwartz and I dived in to explore more. It appears that Google runs a special geographically-targeted image search behind the scenes and tries to find images on pages that mat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Maps & Local

Google canvasses for political ads at the LA Times reports that Google gave a seminar at the annual conference for political consultants and internet activists run by George Washington University. The seminar, "Making the Most of Google in 2008," saw Google advising how groups can use Google services to promote their agendas. On the panel were Googlers Derek Kuhl, David Alpert and Steve Grove. They showed off how to use Google Alerts, AdWords, Analytics, AdSense and so on. They also discussed YouTube and how that can impact an election. There were some basic SEO principles that were review [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: Marketing | Google: SEO | Google: YouTube & Video

The Microsoft Live.com link command operator is currently offline and has been offline since yesterday morning. Kevin Gibbons reported yesterday that a link:http://www.msn.com returns a blank page. I [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO

ZipLocal is a new, consolidated "Web 2.0" local search destination growing out of a number of earlier local search sites including Zip411.net and redToronto.com, among them. Here's an example results page for "Sushi , Toronto." The site has many Ajax features and offers send to mobile, as well as the capacity to email listed businesses. It is also using technology from Urban Mapping to improve search results. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

It appears we have more sightings of Google experimenting with additional navigational link placement ideas. These are links that let you reach various Google search services beyond web search. On Friday, we reported about navigational links appearing at the top of on the Google home page. Later, Google Blogoscoped added that they are also testing the same concept on the internal search pages. Next, the PPC Blog spotted Google testing the same navigational links in a box directly above the sponsored results. Here is one image showing all the various tests: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: User Interface

Yahoo Removes Category (Directory) Links From Under Search Results at Search Engine Roundtable reports that Yahoo has removed the links from the individual search listings to the Yahoo Directory. In the past, if a page had a listing in the Yahoo Directory, that directory listing would be shown as part of the page's listing in web search results. Here is a before and after that illustrates this: Before: After: This seems to be a pretty big move from Yahoo. This is just one more step in the direction of folding the once very popular Yahoo Directory. Postscript: Search Engine Watch has c [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: User Interface