More from Search Engine Land: Page 3

Content

Yahoo May Buy MySpace For 25% Stock Swap

News Corp explores swap of MySpace site for Yahoo! stake from the Times Of London reports that News Corp is interested in handing over MySpace to Yahoo in exchange for 25% of Yahoo’s stock. Such a deal would value MySpace, the very popular social networking and video site, at about $12 billion. But at the […]

Google

Google Acquires Zenter, Online Presentation Software Company

Google has announced that they have acquired Zenter, an online presentation software company. The acquisition will enable them to add presentation software to their Google Docs & Spreadsheets offering. In mid-April, Google purchased Marratech, a video conferencing company and purchased Tonic, a company that built software for presentation creation and document conversion. One would think […]

SEO

How To Structure An In-House SEO Team

Why are businesses so persistent about handling search in-house? There are many good reasons for centralizing both natural and paid search in a large organization. We’ll be talking about natural search in this article. Web site optimization for natural search visibility, commonly referred to as SEO, touches every aspect of your site and organization, with […]

SEO

Yahoo Go Comes Out Of Beta With Big Global Push

Yahoo Go 2.0 and related mobile oneSearch offerings are coming out of beta this Friday and going into “general availability” in the U.S. While consumers pay no attention to these distinctions — alpha, beta, gamma and so on — it signals Yahoo’s confidence in the product. Simultaneously, nation-specific versions of Go will be released in […]

Google Maps

Google Maps Adds User Generated Reviews

The Google Lat Long Blog announced that Google Maps now allows for user-generated reviews. We covered in the past that Google had reviews from third-party sources, but now Google allows any logged-in user to add reviews for any business listing, similar to how it recently allowed maps to gain user data.

Analytics & conversion

How To Test A Home Page For Conversion Effectiveness

Conversion rate improvement, for many of us, is as much a part of the overall process of optimizing a paid search campaign as, say, “off-page factors” are to SEO. Recall the holistic view taken in last month’s column, Your Paid Search Performance Is Relative. I spoke about the potential for widening the gap between your […]

Google Ads

Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tips

David Naylor has an excellent explanation of some of the advanced ways to use dynamic keyword insertion within Google AdWords. Dynamic keyword insertion, also known as DKI, allows advertisers to specify if they would like the search query to be shown in their ad text for keywords that match their ads. For example, if I […]

Apple

Google Press Day 2007 Q&A With CEO Eric Schmidt

As part of today’s Google International Press Day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is doing Q&A with journalists. Here’s a live blogging highlight of what was said, which covered a range of issues from privacy, censorship, whether Google is too big and scary and more.

LinkedIn

$5 Million Domain Sale For SEO.com

DotSause.com reports SEO.com has been sold to WashingtonVC for $5 million. The new domain will be for an SEO company led by Dave Bascom, who currently runs an SEO company named Web Targeted and blog named Search Trends.

Google

Google Gets Internet Content License In China

Google Gets Preliminary Chinese Approval from the Wall Street Journal reports that Google China has received initial regulatory approval from China to provide content on Google.cn. Last year, Google did not have their own license. Instead, they had to use the same ICP license as Ganji.com, as reported over at Forbes.com.

Paid social

Is Your Content Worthy For Social Media Users?

Although many of you Search Engine Land readers are sophisticated when it comes to social media, the majority of the people out there are not. Most people aren’t too familiar with social sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us or even Digg and they don’t know if their content is “worthy” of these websites or not. Here are […]

Content

Search Illustrated: Factors Contributing To Rankings

Early information retrieval systems were fairly simple—they attempted to understand search terms and then provide matching documents where those terms were found. These “on-page” clues were paramount in the ranking of documents in search results. With the advent of the web, additional “signals” arose, giving rise to additional “off-page” factors that were combined with on-page […]

Google

Live From Google Press Day 2007

Google is holding its first press day outside the United States today. The "big" expected announcement has already happened, the addition of country-specific versions of YouTube. Tony Ruscoe, aside from kindly befriending me at the press dinner last night, is live blogging the conference here at Google Blogoscoped. I’ll pop-up and post short stories or […]

Content

YouTube Gains Country-Specific Sites, New Partnerships

YouTube, until now a single site serving a worldwide audience, now has gained country-specific versions for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. For the initial launch, the sites have been translated into each country’s language and have gained localized home pages. Over time, YouTube-owner Google promises to make […]

Google

eBay Ads Still Off Google: How Much eBay Traffic & Google Cash Lost?

The “experiment” continues. It appears that eBay ads on Google are still nowhere to be found, consistent with what eBay spokespeople said last week — that the company would continue its AdWords fast for an indefinite period. As one example, the quintessential eBay search for “collectibles” reveals a top organic link but no paid eBay […]

SEO

Yahoo’s CEO, Terry Semel, To Be Replaced By Jerry Yang

The Wall Street Journal reported that Terry Semel has stepped down as Yahoo’s CEO. The new CEO is Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang. With this change, Susan Decker, former executive vice president and head of Advertiser and Publisher Group, is now president. Semel told the Wall Street Journal, "As we discussed my future goals and plans, […]

Content

A Portrait Of The Perfect Link Builder

If you had the chance to hire a full-time employee to engage in content publicity and link building, what type of person would you look for? What sorts of skills would you want? What personal traits would you value? As companies realize that content publicity and link building must be a core part of online […]

SEO

Vivisimo’s Clusty The Latest to Mobilize

Vivisimo has launched Clusty Mobile. As explained in the release: Clusty Mobile simplifies mobile Web searching…organizing search results by relevant topics and categories rather than pages and pages of search results…[also] Clusty Mobile optimizes all Websites clicked on for mobile viewing.

Display

Video Display Ads A ‘Strategic Threat’ To Google?

Gary Price points us to a recent IDC online ad forecast that says search will lose some of its appeal as display (specifically video) ads become more popular and prevalent online. The release identifies this anticipated shift as a “strategic challenge” to Google. While that characterization is attention getting, the reality is not as dramatic.

Content

YouTube Remixer & YouTube Mobile Go Live

The YouTube Blog announced that they have launched YouTube Remixer, a Web-based editing tool created by Adobe to edit your videos and mix them with other videos. Hat tip to Gary on this, plus you can see detailed screen captures at Techcrunch. Gizmodo reports YouTube Mobile going live at https://m.youtube.com/. You can browse and search […]

Paid social

Thoof: Digg Meets Wikipedia Community News Site Coming

Another Attempt to Match Readers and Relevant News from the New York Times reports on a new social Digg-like site with an element of Wikipedia to it named Thoof. The main attraction with Thoof, which is beta invite only now, is that it will tailor the news based on your interests and not just based […]

SEO

Microsoft Launches New & Improved MSN Mobile

At one point Microsoft appeared to be backing away from the MSN brand in favor of “Live.” That no longer seems to be the case. Today the company launched a new mobile portal, signaling what would appear to be a new commitment to the MSN brand, with Live as the subsidiary search brand. The look […]

Google

Google Launches Public Policy Blog

Google has been doing more and more over the past few years to actively influence public policy issues (such as on net neutrality or recently, US immigration) as well becoming more of a potential public policy target (such as on privacy last week). As part of its outreach, the company has now launched the Google […]

Content

Some Q&A On Recent Google Video & YouTube Changes

When Google launched Google Universal Search, we saw changes in how Google dealt with video in regular result and in Google Video. Yesterday brought more changes. Danny and I had several follow-up questions related to these. Google representative Gabriel Stricker spent the time with me answer some of them. The answers below are not quotes, […]

Apple

iPhone’s Perceived Usability Contributing To Massive Consumer Demand

iPhone skeptics take note: The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that the iPhone has sparked massive consumer interest and may enable AT&T to capture other carriers’ customers. According to an M:Metrics survey cited in the article: Two-thirds of mobile-phone users who are interested in purchasing the iPhone aren’t AT&T customers but would be willing […]

Content

Google Talks About YouTube Video ID Tool

The Google Blog has posted about the video copyright identification tool the company is developing. They reference the Reuters article we mentioned in our YouTube Ready To Test “Fingerprinting” Video Tool. The Google post also gives us more insight into the technology and process of how this will potentially work. It appears that copyright holders […]

SEO

Local Mobile Search Provider 1-800-Free411 Touts Patent Against Rivals

USAToday writes about a recently awarded patent obtained by Jingle Networks, which operates the 1-800-Free411 ad-supported directory assistance service. After conducting several searches at the USPTO and elsewhere I was unable to find a copy of the patent itself. However, according to the article: Jingle’s patent, which it bought from inventor Scott Wolmuth, is for […]

SEO

Yahoo Finance’s GM, Peggy White, Leaves

Yahoo Finance GM departs from News.com has confirmation that Peggy White, Yahoo Finance’s general manager, has left the company. News of her departure came out via an internal mail posted as a comment in response to Dark Days for Terry Semel, a Conde Nast Portfolio article looking at the company’s management woes

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